Over the next three days he’d worked hard to finish off his responsibilities for his regular job, a task that fully occupied the first day. After that he was free to spend the transit following up on Aru’s investigation of their destination.
Unsurprisingly, it was tough for Aru to find information on the motives of the original colonists, people who’d lived thousands of years in the past. Records were scarce, and those that did exist painted a picture of a hardy and determined group who’d inhabited a single colony site for at least several generations.
The pirates were somewhat easier to get data on. There were far more records to retrieve, largely culled from the files of various militaries that had operated over the centuries, and most ended with the assertion that the pirates’ occupation of the ancient colony site had been ended, mostly by force.
That left gaps though. A casual browsing of the records left the impression that there was nothing special going on, that the colony had simply failed long ago and pirates had moved in time and again and been wiped out by military action. A more careful analysis showed showed several sizable pirate occupations that ended abruptly, with nothing to say why.
None of the records Aru had produced gave any insight into why the location remained unsettled these last several centuries, either, after so many thousands of years of attempts to claim it.
Corwin poured over the reports, taking notes on the weak areas and compiling a list of more in-depth inquiries, giving each new avenue to Aru. Aru was cut off from the galactic data-stream while they were in transit, so he stored the requests.
Finally they neared their time of exit from transit. “Aru, nothing in the dossier specified a time limit on this task. Think we can afford an extra day or two to research?”
Aru sent his text-only reply to a screen in Corwin’s quarters. “I expect they’d prefer that you did.”
“Yup, my thoughts too. Give me what you’ve got on those queries as soon as you can then.