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office, that he preferred a regular schedule, no surprises, and took his coffee with a sweetener. That was all true, actually. Although I have to confess we had a brief romantic fling years ago. But he was nevergoing to commit to marriage, and I wanted him as a friend rather than a lover anyhow. So there you are.
    He was about average height, brown hair, dark brown eyes, and he looked out of place in a pressure suit. Or in an ancient outstation, drifting down dark corridors, with a lamp in one hand and a laser cutter in the other.
    He was reasonable, quiet, and he thought well of himself. He had never liked starships. In the early years, when we were using the old jump engines, he used to get sick every time we made the transition into or out of Armstrong space. He was interested primarily in number one. Liked making money, liked wielding influence, enjoyed being invited to the right parties. But at heart he was a good guy. He’d take care of a stray cat, always kept his word, and watched out for his friends. I should add that he was a reasonable boss. If occasionally erratic.
    We needed the cutters because the hatches, both inside and out, were nonfunctional, so we had to slice our way through a lot of them. My job was to do the slicing and pack any salable objects. His was to point out the stuff we’d take back.
    But after three days wandering around the station we had virtually nothing to show for it.
    He’d figured out the location of the place from clues left in Shenji archives. Just finding this outpost of Shenji culture would have considerable public relations value, but it wasn’t going to bring a cascade of wealth, which was what he’d expected.
    His good humor began to drain. As we fished pieces and bits, knobs and filters and chunks of dishware and broken glass and shoes and timers out of the debris, he took to sighing, and I’m sure inside the helmet he was shaking his head.
    I’d seen him like that before. What happens is that he begins to talk about the historical value of the artifacts and what a loss it is to the human race to find them in such terrible condition. He becomes a great humanitarian when things go wrong.
    The original plan had been to set up a base inside the station, but Alex wondered whether it was worth the effort. So every evening when we got tired, or bored, wandering around the place, we returned to the Belle-Marie for dinner. And then we looked at whatever we’d salvaged. It was a depressing time, and when I told him that maybe we should just close up shop and head home, he replied that I was giving up too easily.
    On the sixth day, when we were getting ready to pack it in, we found a chamber with odd damage. It appeared to be a conference room. It contained a table that could have seated about ten, and gray mottled bulkheads, one of which might once have been a display screen. The screen was smashed. Not smashed because objects were getting rolled around the room, because nothing was moving in there with much force. But smashed the way it would be if someone had taken a hammer to it.
    The table and chairs and some gunk that might once have been fabric were working their way across the overhead. The only thing that held us upright was our grip shoes, and I should tell you that standing there watching everything move around the room tended to make your head spin.
    â€œVandals,” Alex decided, standing in front of the wall screen. He hated vandals. “Damn their hides.”
    â€œIt happened a long time ago,” I said.
    â€œDoesn’t matter.”
    The next room might have been a VR chamber. We checked the equipment, which was locked in place, and in fact everything in that room was secured, and the door had been closed, so it was in decent condition. Not that the equipment would work, of course. But it looked good. And I could see Alex brighten, mentally tagging some of the gear for shipment home.
    Then we found more signs of vandals, more