The Ship Who Searched

"So they say, AH-One-Oh-Three-Three," Beta replied impersonally. "I'll convey your selection to the Academy and have CenCom log in your flight plan and advise you when to be ready to lift immediately."

With that, she logged off. But before Tia could feel slighted or annoyed with her, the CenCom operator came back on.

"AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, congratulations!" he said, his formerly impersonal voice warming with friendliness. "I just wanted you to know before we got all tangled up in official things that the operators here all think you picked a fine brawn. Me, especially."

Tia was dumbfounded. "Why, thank you," she managed. "But why?"

The operator chuckled. "Oh, we handle all the cadets' training-flights. Some of them are real pains in the orifice, but Alex always has a good word and he never gripes when we have to put him in a holding pattern. And, well, that Donning character tried to get me in trouble over a near-miss when he ignored what I told him and came in anyway. Alex was in the pattern behind him, he saw and heard it all. He didn't have to log a report in my defense, but he did, and it kept me from getting demoted."

"Oh," Tia replied. Now, that was interesting. Witnesses to near misses weren't required to come forward with logs of the incident, and in fact, no one would have thought badly of Alex if he hadn't. His action might even have earned him some trouble with Donning.

"Anyway, congratulations again. You won't regret your choice," the operator said. "And, stand by for compressed data transmission."

As her orders and flight-plan came over the comlink, Tia felt oddly pleased and justified. Beta did not like her choice of brawns. The CenCom operators did.

Good recommendations, both.

She began her pre-flight check with rising spirits, and it seemed to her that even Ted was smiling. Just a little. All right Universe, brace yourself. Here we come!

CHAPTER FOUR

"All right, Tia-my-love, explain what's going on here, in words of one syllable," Alex said plaintively, when Tia got finished with tracing the maze of orders and counter-orders that had interrupted their routine round of deliveries to tiny two to four-person Exploratory digs. "Who's on first?"

"And What's on second," she replied absentmindedly. Just before leaving she'd gotten a datahedron on old Terran slang phrases and their derivation; toying with the idea of producing that popular-science article. If it got published on enough nets, it might well earn her a tidy little bit of credit, and no amount of credit, however small, was to be scorned. But one unexpected side-effect of scanning it was that she tended to respond with the punch lines of jokes so old they were mummified.

Though now, at least, she knew what the CenCom operator had meant by "hang onto your bustle" and that business about the wicked witch who'd had a house dropped on her sister.

"What?" Alex responded, perplexed. "No, never mind. I don't want to know. Just tell me whose orders we're supposed to be following. I got lost back there in the fifth or sixth dispatch."

"I've got it all straight now, and it's dual-duty," she replied. "Institute, with backup from Central, although they were countermanding each other in the first four or five sets of instructions. One of the Excavation digs hasn't been checking in. Went from their regular schedule to nothing, not even a chirp."

"You don't sound worried," Alex pointed out.

"Well, I am, and I'm not," she replied, already calculating the quickest route through hyperspace, and mentally cursing the fact that they didn't have Singularity Drive. But then again, there wasn't a Singularity point anywhere near where they wanted to go. So the drive wasn't the miracle of instantaneous transportation some people claimed it was. Hmm, and some brainships too, naming no names. All very well if there were Singularity points littering the stellarscape like stars in the Core, but out here, at this end of the galactic arm, stars were close, but points were few and far between. One reason why the Institute hadn't opted for a more expensive ship. "If it were an Exploratory dig like my, like we've been trotting supplies and mail to, I would worry a lot. They're horribly vulnerable. And an Evaluation dig is just as subject to disaster, since the maximum they can have is twenty people. But a Class Three, Alex, this one had a complement of two hundred! That's more that enough people to hold off any trouble!"

"Class Three Excavation sites get a lot of graduate students, don't they?" Alex said, while she locked things down in her holds for takeoff with help from the servos. Pity the cargo handlers hadn't had time to stow things properly.

"Exactly. They provide most of the coolie labor when there aren't any natives to provide a work force, that's why the Class Three digs have essentially the same setup as a military base. Most of the personnel are young, strong, and they get the best of the equipment This one has," she quickly checked her briefing "one hundred seventy-eight people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. That's plenty to set up perimeter guards."

Alex's fingers raced across the keypads in front of him, calling up data to her screens. "Hmm. No really nasty native beasties. Area declared safe. And, my. Fully armed, are we?" He glanced over at the column. "I had no idea archeologists were such dangerous beings! They never told me that back in secondary school!"

"Grrr," she responded. She flashed a close-up of the bared fangs of a dog on one of the screens he wasn't using. In the past several weeks she and Alex had spent a lot of time talking, getting to know each other. By virtue of her seven years spent mobile, she was a great deal more like a softperson than any of her classmates, and Alex was fun to be around. Neither of them particularly minded the standard issue beiges of her interior; what he had done, during the time spent in FTL, was to copy the minimalist style of his sensei's home, taking a large brush and some pure black and red enamel, and copying one or two Zen ideographs on the walls that seemed barest. She thought they looked very handsome, and quietly elegant

Of course, his cabin was a mess, but she didn't have to look in there, and she avoided doing so as much as possible.

In turn, he expressed delight over her 'sparkling personality'. No matter what the counselors said, she had long ago decided that she had feelings and emotions and had no guilt over showing them to those she trusted. Alex had risen in estimation from 'partner' to 'trusted' in the past few weeks; he had a lively sense of humor and enjoyed teasing her. She enjoyed teasing right back.

"Pull in your fangs, wench," he said. "I realize that the only reason they get those arms is because there are no sentients down there. So, what's on the list of Things That Get Well-Armed Archeologists? I have the sinking feeling there were a lot of things they didn't tell me about archeology back in secondary school!"

"Seriously? It's a short list, but a nasty one." She sobered. "Lock yourself in; I'm going to lift, and fast. Things are likely to rattle around." With drives engaged, she pulled away from her launch cradle, acknowledged Traffic Control and continued her conversation, all at once. "Artifact thieves are high on that list. If you've got a big dig, you can bet that there are things being found that are going to be worth a lot to collectors. They'll come in, blast the base, land, kill everyone left over that gets in their way, grab the loot and lift, all within hours." Which was why the hidey was so far from our dome, and why Mum and Dad told me to get in it and stay in it if trouble came. "But normally they work an area, and normally they don't show up anyplace where Central has a lot of patrols. There haven't been any thieves in that area, and it is heavily patrolled."

"So, what's next on the list?" Alex asked, one screen dedicated to the stats on the dig, his own hands busy with post-lift chores that some brawns would have left to their brains. Double-checking to make sure all the servos had put themselves away, for instance. Keeping an eye on the weight-and-balance in the holds. Just another example, she thought happily, of what a good partner he was.

She was clear of the cradle and about to clear local airspace. Nearing time to accelerate 'like a scalded cat'. Now that's a phrase that's still useful. "Next on the list is something we don't even have to consider, and that's a native uprising."

"Hmm, so I see." His eyes went from the secondary screen where the data on the dig was posted and back to the primary. "No living native sophonts on the continent. But I can see how it could be the Zulu wars all over again."

He nodded, acknowledging her logic, and she was grateful to his self-education in history.

"Precisely," she replied. "Throw enough warm bodies at the barricades, and any defense will go down. In a native uprising, there are generally hordes of fervent fanatics willing to die in the cause and go straight to Paradise. Accelerating, Alex."

He gave her a thumbs-up, and she threw him into his seat. He merely raised an eyebrow at her column and kept typing. "There must be several different variations on that theme. Let's see, you could have your Desecration of Holy Site Uprising, your Theft of Ancient Treasures Uprising, your Palace Coup Uprising, your Local Peasant Revolution Uprising. Uh-huh. I can see it. And when you've overrun the base, it's time to line everyone up as examples of alien exploitation. Five executioners, no waiting."

"They normally don't kill except by accident, actually, or in the heat of the moment," she told him. "Most native sophonts are bright enough to realize that two hundred of Central Systems' citizens, a whole herd of their finest minds and their dependents, make a much better bargaining chip as hostages than they do as casualties."

"Not much comfort to those killed in the heat of the moment," he countered. "So, what's the next culprit on the list?"

"The third, last, and most common," she said, a bit grimly, and making no effort to control her voice-output "Disease."

"Whoa, wait a minute. I thought that these sites were declared free of hazard!" He stopped typing and paled a little, as well he might. Plague was the bane of the Courier Service existence. More than half the time of every CS ship was spent in ferrying vaccines across known space, and for every disease that was eradicated, three more sprang up out of nowhere. Nor were the brawns immune to the local plagues that just might choose to start at the moment they planeted. "I thought all these sites were sprayed down to a fare-thee-well before they let anyone move in!"

"Yes, but that's the one I'm seriously concerned about." And not just because it was a bug that got me. "That, my dear Alex, is what they don't tell you bright-eyed young students when you consider a career in archeology. The number one killer of xeno-archeologists is disease."

"Viruses and proto-viruses are sneaky sons-of-singularities; they can hibernate in tombs for centuries, millennia, even in airless conditions." She flashed up some Institute statistics; the kind they didn't show the general public. There was a thirty percent chance that a xeno-archeologist would be permanently disabled by disease during his career; a twenty percent chance that he would die. And a one hundred percent chance that he would be seriously ill, requiring hospitalization, from something caught on a dig, at some point in his life.

"So the bug hibernates. Then when the intrepid explorer pops the top off," Alex looked as grim as she felt. "Right Gotcha." She laughed, but it had a very flat sound. "Well, sometimes it's been known to be fortuitous. The Cades actually met when they were recovering from Henderson's Chorea, ah, or so their biographies in Who's Who say. There could be worse things than having the Institute cover your tropic vacation."

"But mostly it isn't" His voice was as flat as her laugh had been.

"Ye-es. One of my close friends is Doctor Kennet on the Pride of Albion. He's gotten to be a specialist in diseases that get archeologists. He's seen a lot of nasty variations over the years, including some really odd opportunistic bugs that are not only short-lived after exposure to air, but require a developing nervous system in order to set up housekeeping."

"Developing? Oh, I got it. A kid, or a fetus, provided it could cross the placental barrier." He shivered, and his expression was very troubled. "Brr, that's a really nasty one."

"Verily, White Knight." She decided not to elaborate on it. Maybe later. To let him know I'm not only out for fortune and glory. "I just wanted you to be prepared when we got there, which we will in, four days, sixteen hours, and thirty-five minutes. Not bad, for an old-fashioned FTL drive, I'd say." She'd eliminated the precise measurements that some of the other shell-persons used with their brawns in the first week, except when she was speaking to another shell-person, of course. Alex didn't need that kind of precision, most of the time; when he did, he asked her for it. She had worried at first that she might be getting sloppy.

No, I'm just accommodating myself to his world. I don't mind. And when he needs precision, he lets me know in advance.

"Well, let me see if I can think of some non-lethal reasons for the dig losing communications." He grinned. "How about, 'the dinosaur ate my transmitter'?"

"Cute." Now that their acceleration had smoothed and they were out of the atmosphere, she sent servos snooping into his cabin, as was her habit whenever a week or so went by, and he was at his station, giving her non-invasive access. "Alex, don't you ever pick up your clothes?"

"Sometimes. Not when I'm sent hauling my behind up the stairs with my tail on fire and a directive from CS ordering me to report back to my ship immediately." He shrugged, completely unrepentant. "I wouldn't even have changed my clothes if that officious b- "

"Alex," she warned. "I'm recording, I have to. Regulations." Ever since the debacle involving the Nyota Five, all central cabin functions were recorded, whenever there was a softperson, even if only a brawn, present. That was regulation even on AI drones. The regs had been written for AI drones, in fact; and CS administration had decided that there was no reason to rewrite them for brainships, and every reason why they shouldn't. This way no one could claim 'discrimination', or worse, 'entrapment'.

"If that officious bully hadn't insisted I change to uniform before lifting." He shook his head. "As if wearing a uniform was going to make any difference in how well you handled the lift. Which was, as always, excellent."

"Thank you." She debated chiding him on his untidy nature and decided against it. It hadn't made any difference before, it probably wouldn't now. She just had the servos pick up the tunic and trousers, wincing at the ultra-neon purple that was currently in vogue, and deposited them in the laundry receptacle.

And I'll probably have to put them away when they're clean, too. No wonder they wanted him to change. Hmm. Wonder if I dare 'lose' them? Or have a dreadful accident that dyes them a nice sober plum?

That was a thought to tuck away for later. "Getting back to the dinosaur, com equipment breaks, and even a Class Three dig can end up with old equipment. If the only fellow on the dig qualified to fix it happens to be laid up with broken bones, in case you hadn't noticed, archeologists fall down shafts and off cliffs a lot, or double-pneumonia."

"Good point." He finished his 'housekeeping chores' with a flourish and settled back in his chair. "Say, Tia, they're all professorial types. Do they ever just get so excited they forget to transmit?"

"Brace yourself for FTL." The transition to FTL was nowhere near as distressing to softpersons as the dive into a Singularity, but it required some warning. Alex gripped the arms of the seat, and closed his eyes, as she made the jump into hyperspace.

She never experienced more than a brief shiver, like ducking into a freezing-cold shower, but Alex always looked a little green during transition. Fortunately, he had no trouble in hyper itself.

And if I can ever afford a Singularity Drive, his records say he takes those transitions pretty well.

Well, right now, that was little more than a dream. She picked up the conversation where it had left off. "That has happened on Class One digs and even Class Two, but usually somebody realizes the report hasn't been made after a while when you're dealing with a big dig. Besides, logging reports constitutes publication, and grad students need all the publication they can get. Still, if they just uncovered the equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb, they might all be so excited, and busy documenting finds and putting them into safe storage, that they've forgotten the rest of the universe exists."

He swallowed hard, controlling his nausea. It generally seemed to take his stomach a couple of minutes to settle down. Maybe the reason it doesn't hit me is because there's no sensory nerves to my stomach anymore.

But that only brought back unpleasant memories; she ruthlessly shunted the thought aside.

"So." he said finally, as his color began to return. "Tell me why you aren't in a panic because they haven't answered."

"Artifact thieves would probably have been spotted, there aren't any natives to revolt, and disease usually takes long enough to set in that somebody would have called for help," she said. "And that's why CS wasn't particularly worried, and why they kept countermanding the Institute's orders. But either this expedition has been out of touch for so long that even they think there's something wrong, or they've got some information they didn't give us. So we're going in."

"And we find out when we get there," Alex finished; and there wasn't a trace of a smile anywhere on his face.

Tia brought them out of hyper with a deft touch that rattled Alex's insides as little as possible. Once in orbit, she sent down a signal that should activate the team's transmitter if there was anything there to activate. As she had told Alex several days ago, com systems broke. She was fully expecting to get no echo back.

Instead, -

You are linked to Excavation Team Que-Zee-Five-Five-Seven. The beacon's automatic response came instantly, in electronic mode. Then came the open carrier wave.

"Alex, I think we have a problem," she said, carefully.

"Echo?" He tensed.

"Full echo." She sent the recognition signal that would turn on landing assistance beacons and alert the AI that there was someone Upstairs, the AI was supposed to open the voice-channel in the absence of humans capable of handling the com. The AI came online immediately, transmitting a ready to receive instructions signal.

"Worse, they've got full com. I just got the AI go-signal."

She blipped a compressed several megabytes of instructions to give her control of all external and internal recording devices, override any programs installed since the base was established, and give her control of all sensory devices still working.

"Get the AI to give me some pictures," he said, all business. "If it can."

"Coming up, ah, external cam three, this is right outside the mess hall and, oh, shells and back!"

"I'll second that," Alex replied, just as grimly.

The camera showed them, somewhat fuzzily, a scene that was anything but a pretty sight.

There were bodies lying in plain view of the camera; from the lack of movement they could not be live bodies. They seemed to be lying where they fell, and there was no sign of violence on them. Tia switched to the next camera the AI offered; a view inside the mess hall. Here, if anything, things were worse. Equipment and furniture lay toppled. More bodies were strewn about the room.

A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in her shell held her in thrall. Fear, horror, helplessness. Her own private nightmares.

Tia exerted control over her internal chemistry with an effort; told herself that this could not be the disease that had struck her. These people were taken down right where they stood or sat.

She started to switch to another view, when Alex leaned forward suddenly.

"Tia, wait a minute."

Obediently, she held the screen, sharpening the focus as well as the equipment, the four-second lag to orbit, and atmospheric interference would allow. She couldn't look at it herself.

"There's no food," he said, finally. "Look, there's plates and things all over the place, but there's not a scrap of food anywhere."

"Scavengers?" she suggested. "Or whatever, whatever killed them? But there are no signs of an invasion, an attack from, outside."

He shook his head. "I don't know. Let's try another camera."

This one was outside the supply building and this was where they found their first survivors.

If that's what you can call them. Tia absorbed the incoming signal, too horrified to turn her attention away. There was a trio of folk within camera range: one adolescent, one young man, and one older woman. They paid no attention to each other, nor to the bodies at their feet, nor to their surroundings. The adolescent sat in the dirt of the compound, stared at a piece of brightly colored scrap paper in front of him, and rocked, back and forth. There was no sound pickup on these cameras, so there was no indication that he was doing anything other than rocking in silence, but Tia had the strange impression that he was humming tunelessly.

The young man stood two feet from a fence and shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, swaying, as if he wanted to get past the fence and had no idea how. And the older woman paced in an endless circle.

All three of them were filthy, dressed in clothes that were dirt-caked and covered with stains. Their faces were dirt-streaked, eyes vacant; their hair straggled into their eyes in ratty tangles. Tia was just grateful that the cameras were not equipped to transmit odor.

"Tia, get me another camera, please," Alex whispered, after a long moment.

Camera after camera showed the same view; either of bodies lying in the dust, or of bodies and a few survivors, aimlessly wandering. Only one showed anyone doing anything different; one young woman had found an emergency ration pouch and torn it open. She was single-mindedly stuffing the ration-cubes into her mouth with both hands, like...

"Like an animal," Alex supplied in a whisper. "She's eating like an animal."

Tia forced herself to be dispassionate. "Not like an animal," she corrected. "At least, not a healthy one." She analyzed the view as if she were dealing with an alien species. "No, she acts like an animal that's been brain-damaged, or maybe a drug addict that's been on something so long there isn't much left of his higher functions."

This wasn't 'her' disease. It was something else. Deadly, but not what had struck her down. What she felt was not exactly relief, but she was able to detach herself from the situation, to distance herself a little.

You knew, sooner or later, you'd see a plague. This one is a horror, but you knew this would happen.

"Zombies," Alex whispered, as another of the survivors plodded past without so much as a glance at the woman eating, who had given up eating with her hands and had shoved her face right down into the torn-open ration pouch.

"You've seen too many bad holos," she replied absently, sending the AI a high-speed string of instructions. She had to find out when this happened, and how long these people had been like this.

It was too bad that the cameras weren't set to record, because that would have told her a lot. How quickly the disease, for a plague of some kind would have had an incubation time, had set in, and what the initial symptoms were. Instead, all she had to go on were the dig's records, and when they had stopped making them.

"Alex, the last recorded entry into the AI's database was at about oh-two-hundred, local time, a week and a half ago," she said. "It was one of the graduate students logging in pottery shards. Then, nothing. No record of illness, nothing in the med records, no one even using a voice-activator to ask the AI for help. The mess hall computer programmed the synthesizer to produce food for a few meals, then something broke the synthesizer."

"One of them," Alex hazarded. "Probably."

She looked for anything else in the database and found nothing. "That's about all there is. The AI has been keeping things going, but there's been no interaction with it. So forget what I said about diseases taking several days to set in. It looks like this one infected and affected everyone on the base between, oh, some time during the night, and dawn." If she'd had a head, she would have shaken it. "I can't imagine how something like that could happen to everyone at the same time without someone at least blurting a few words to a voice pickup!"

"Unless... Tia, what if they had to be asleep? I mean, there's things that happen during sleep, neuro transmitters that initiate dream-sleep." Alex looked up from the screen, with lines of strain around his eyes. "If they had to be asleep to catch this thing."

"Or if the first symptom was sleep..." She couldn't help herself; she wanted to shiver with fear. "Alex, I have to set down there. You can't do anything for those people from up here."

"No argument" He strapped himself in. "Okay, lady. Get us down as fast as you can. There's one thing I have to do, quick, before we lose any more."

She broke orbit with a sudden acceleration that threw him into the back of his seat; he didn't bat an eye. His voice got a little more strained, but that was all.

"I'll have to put on a pressure-suit and get into the supplies; put out food and pans of water. They're starving and dehydrated. Spirits of space only know what they've been eating and drinking all this time. Could be a lot of them died of dysentery, or from eating or drinking something that wasn't food." He was thinking out loud; waiting for Tia to put in her own thoughts, or warn him if he was planning to do something really stupid. "No matter what else we do, I have to do that"

"Open up emergency ration bags and leave pans of the cubes all over the compound," she suggested, as her outer skin heated up to a glowing red as she hit the upper atmosphere. "Do the same with the water. Like you were feeding animals."

"I am feeding animals," he said, and his voice and face were bleak. "I have to keep telling myself that. Or I'll do something really, really stupid. You get a line established to Kleinman Base, ASAP"

"Already in the works." A hyperwave comlink that far wasn't the easiest thing to establish and hold.

But that was why she was a brainship, not an AI drone.

"Hang on," she said, as she hit the first of the turbulence. "It's going to be a bumpy burn down!"

The camera and external mike on Alex's helmet gave her a much clearer view of the survivors than Tia really wanted. Of the complement of two hundred at this base, no more than fifty survived, most of them between the ages of fifteen and thirty.

They avoided Alex entirely, hiding whenever they saw him, but they came out to huddle around the pans of food and water he put out, stuffing food into their faces with both hands. Alex had gotten three of the bodies he'd found in their beds into die med-center, and the diagnosis was the same in all three cases; complete systemic collapse, which might have been stroke. The rest, the ones that had not simply dropped in their tracks, had died of dysentery and dehydration. Of the casualties, it looked as if half of the dead had keeled over with this collapse, all of them the oldest members of the team.

After the third, Alex called a halt to it; instead he loaded the bodies into the base freezer. Someone else would have to come get them and deal with them. Tia had recorded his efforts, but could not bring herself to actually watch the incoming video.

He completed his grisly work and returned to caring for the living. "Tia, as near as I can guess, this thing hits people in one of two ways. Either you get a stroke or something and die, or you turn into, that." She saw whatever he was looking at by virtue of the fact that the helmet-camera was mounted right over his forehead. And 'that' was something that had once been a human boy, scrambling away out of sight.

"That seems like a good enough assumption for now," she agreed. "Can you tell what happened with the food situation? Are they so far gone that they can't remember how to get into basic supplies?"

"That's about it," he agreed, wearily. "Believe it or not, they can't even remember how to pop ration packs. They seem to have a vague memory of where the food was stored, but they never even tried to open the door to the supply warehouse." He trudged across the compound to one of the pans he had set out. It was already empty, without even crumbs. He poured ration-cubes into it from a bag he carried under his arm. She caught furtive movement at the edge of the camera-view; presumably the survivors were waiting for him to go away so that they could empty the pan again. "When they found the emergency pouches they tore them open, like that woman we watched. But a lot of times, they don't even seem to realize that the pouch has food in it."

"There's two kinds of victims; the first lot, who got hit and died in their sleep or on the way to breakfast," he continued, making his way to the next pan. "Then the rest of them died of dehydration and dysentery because they were eating half-rotten food."

"Those would go hand-in-hand, here," she replied. "With nothing to stop the liquid loss through dysentery, dehydration comes on pretty quickly."

"That's what I figured." He paused to fill another pan. "There'd be more of them dead, of exposure and hypothermia, except that the temperature doesn't drop below twenty Celsius at night, or get above thirty in the daytime. Shirtsleeve weather. Tia, see when this balmy weather pattern started, would you?"

"Right." He must have had an idea, and it didn't take her more than a moment to interrogate the Al. "About a week before the last contact. Does that sound as suspicious to you as it does to me?"

"Yeah. Maybe something hatched." Alex scanned the area for her, and she noted that there were a fair number of insects in the air.

But native insects wouldn't bite humans, or would they? "Or sprouted. This could be a violent allergic reaction, or some other kind of interaction with a mold spore or pollen." Farfetched, but not entirely impossible.

"But why wouldn't the Class One team have uncovered it?" he countered, filling another pan with ration-cubes. "Kibble," the brawns called it. The basic foodstuff of the Central System worlds; the monotonous ration-bars handed out by the PTA to client-planets cut up into bite-sized pieces. Tia had never eaten it; her parents had always insisted on real meals, but she had been told that while it looked, smelled, and tasted reasonable, its very sameness would drive you over the edge if you had to eat it for very long. But every base had emergency pouches of the stuff cached all over, and huge bags stockpiled in the warehouse, in case something happened to the food-synthesizers.

Those pouches must have been what kept the survivors going, until they ran out of pouches that were easy to find.

The dig records were, fortunately, quite dear. "Got the answer to your question. Class One dig was here for winter, only. They found what they needed to upgrade to Class Three within a couple of days of digging. They really hit a big find in the first test trench, and the Institute pushed the upgrade through to take advantage of the good weather coming."

"And initial Survey teams don't live here, they live on their ships." Alex had a little more life in his voice.

"They were only here in the fall," she said. "There's never been a human here during spring and summer."

"Tia, you put that together with an onset of this thing after dark, and what do you get?"

"An insect vector?" she hazarded. "Nocturnal? I must admit that the pattern for venomous and biting insects is to appear after sunset"

"Sounds right to me. As soon as I get done filling the pans again, I'm going to go grab some bedding from one of the victims' beds, seal it in a crate, and freeze it Maybe it's something like a flea. Can you see if there's anything in the AI med records about a rash of insect bites?"

"Can do," she responded, glad to finally have something, anything, concrete to do.

The sun was near the horizon when Alex finished boxing his selection of bedding and sealing it in a freezer container. He came back out again after loading the container into one of Tia's empty holds. She saw to the sealing of the hold, while he went back out to try and catch one of the Zombies, a name he had tagged the survivors with over her protests.

She finally established the comlink while he was still out in the compound, fruitlessly chasing one after another of the survivors and getting nowhere. He was weighted down with his pressure-suit; they were weighted down by nothing at all and had the impetus of fear. He seemed to terrify them, and they did not connect the arrival of food in the pans with him, for some reason.

"They act like I'm some kind of monster," he panted, leaning over to brace himself on his knees while he caught his breath. "Since they don't have that reaction to each other, it has to be this suit that they're afraid of. Maybe I should..."

"Stay in the suit," she said, fiercely. "You make one move to take that suit off, and I'll sleepygas you!"

"Oh, Tia." he protested.

"I'm not joking." She continued her conversation with the base brain in rapid, highly compressed databursts with horribly long pauses for the information to transmit across hyperspace. "You stay in that suit! We don't know what caused all this."

Her tirade was interrupted by a dreadful howling and the external camera bounced as Alex moved violently. At first she thought that something awful had happened to Alex, but then she realized that the sound came from his external suit mike, and that the movement of the camera had been caused by his own violent start of surprise.

"What the..." he blurted, then recovered. "Hang on, Tia. I need to see what this is, but it doesn't sound like an attack or anything."

"Be careful," she urged fearfully. "Please."

But he showed no signs of foolhardy bravery; in fact, as the howling continued under the scarlet light of the descending sun, he sprinted from one bit of cover to another like a seasoned guerrilla-fighter.

"Fifty meters," Tia warned, taking her measurement from the strength of the howls. "They have to be on the other side of this building."

"Thanks." He literally crept on all fours to the edge of the building and peeked around the corner.

Tia saw exactly what he did, so she understood his sharp intake of breath.

She couldn't count them, for they milled about too much, but she had the impression that every survivor in the compound had crowded into the corner of the fence nearest the sunset. Those right at the fence clung to it as they howled their despair to the sun; the rest clung to the backs of those in front of them and did the same.

Their faces were contorted with the first emotion Tia had seen them display.

Fear.

"They're scared, Tia," Alex whispered, his voice thick with emotions that Tia couldn't decipher. "They're afraid. I think they're afraid that the sun isn't going to come back."

That might have been the case, but Tia couldn't help but wonder if their fear was due to something else entirely. Could they have a dim memory that something terrible had happened to them in the hours of darkness, something that took away their friends and changed their lives into a living hell? Was that why they howled and sobbed with fear?

When the last of the light had gone, they fell suddenly silent, then, like scurrying insects, they dropped to all fours and scuttled away, into whatever each, in the darkness of his or her mind, deemed to be shelter. In a moment, they were gone. All of them.

There was a strangled sob from Alex. And Tia shook within her shell, racked by too many emotions to effectively sort out

"You have two problems."

Tia knew the name to put to the feeling she got when her next transmission from the base was not from some anonymous CS doctor but from Doctor Kenny.

Relief. Real, honest, relief.

It flooded her, making her relax, dealing her mind. Although she could not speak directly with him, if there was anyone who could help them pull this off, it would be Doctor Kenny. She settled all of her concentration on the incoming transmission.

"You'll have to catch the survivors and keep them alive, and you'll have to keep them from contaminating your brawn. After that, we can deal with symptoms and the rest."

All right, that made sense.

"We went at this analyzing your subjects' behavior. You were right in saying that they act in a very similar fashion to brain-damaged simians."

This was an audio-only transmission; the video portion of the signal was being used to carry a wealth of technical data. Tia wished she could see Doctor Kenny's face, but she heard the warmth and encouragement in his voice with no problem.

"We've compiled all the data available on any experiments where the subjects' behavior matched your survivors," Doctor Kenny continued. "Scan it and see if anything is relevant. Tia, I can't stress this enough. No matter what you think caused this disease, don't let Alex get out of that suit. I can't possibly say this too many times. Now that he's gone out there, he's got a contaminated surface. I want you to ask him to stay in the suit, sleep in the suit, eat through the suit-ports, use the suit-facilities. I would prefer that he stayed out in the compound or in your airlock even to sleep, every time he goes in and out of the suit, in and out of your lock, we have a chance for decontamination to fail. I know you understand me."

Only too well, she thought, grimly, remembering all that time in isolation.

"Now, we've come up with a general plan for you," Doctor Kenny continued. "We don't think that you'll be able to catch the survivors, given the way they're avoiding Alex. So you're going to have to trap them. My experts think you'll be able to rig drop-traps for them, using packing crates with field generators across the front and rations for bait. The technical specs are on the video-track, but I think you have the general idea. The big thing will be not to frighten the rest each time you trap one."

Doctor Kenny's voice echoed hollowly in the empty cabin; she damped the sound so that it didn't sound so lonely.

"We want one, two at most, per crate. We're afraid that, bunched together, they might hurt each other, fight over food. They're damaged, and we just don't know how aggressive they might get. That's why we want you to pack them in the hold in the crates. Once you get them trapped, we want you to put enough food and water in each crate to last the four days to base, and Tia, at that point, leave them there. Don't do anything with them. Leave them alone. I trust you to exercise your good sense and not give in to any temptation to intervene in their condition."

Doctor Kenny sighed, gustily. "We bandied around the idea of tranking them, but they have to eat and drink; four days knocked out might kill them. You don't have the facilities to cold-sleep fifty people. So, box them, hope the box matches their ideas of a good place to hide, leave them with food and water and shove them in the hold. That's it for now, Tia. Transmit everything you have, and we'll have answers for you as soon as we're able. These double-bounce comlinks aren't as fast as we'd like, but they beat the alternative. Our thoughts are with you."

The transmission ended, leaving her only with the carrier-wave.

Now what? Tell Alex the bad news, I guess. And calculate how many packing crates I can pack into my holds.

"Alex?" she called. "Are you having any luck tracking down where the survivors are?"

"I've turned on all the exterior lights," Alex said. "I hoped that I'd be able to lure some of them out into the open, but it's no good." She activated his helmet-camera and watched his gloved hand typing override orders into the keyboard of the main AI console. Override orders had to be put in by hand, with a specific set of override codes, no matter how minor the change was. That was to keep someone from taking over an AI with a shout or two. "Right now I'm giving myself full access to everything. I may not need it, but who knows?"

"I've got our first set of orders," she told him. "Do you want to hear them?"

"Sure." Typing in a pressure-suit was no easy task, and Tia did not envy him. It took incredible patience to manage a normal keyboard in those stiff gloves.

She retransmitted Doctor Kenny's message and waited patiently for his response when she finished.

"So I have to stay in the suit." He sighed gustily, "Oh, well. It could be worse, I suppose. It could be two weeks to base, instead of four days." He typed the last few characters with a flourish and was rewarded by the 'Full Access, Voice Commands accepted' legend. "No choice, right? Look, Tia, I know you're going to be lonely, but if I have to stay in this suit, I might just as well sleep out here."

"But," she protested, "what if they decide you're an enemy or something?"

"What, the Zombies?" He snorted. "Tia, right now they're all crammed into some of the darnedest nooks and crannies you ever saw in your life. I couldn't pry them out of there with a forklift. I know where they all are, but I'd have to break bones to get them. Their bones. They're terrified, even with all the floodlights on. No, they aren't going to come after me in the dark."

"All right," she agreed reluctantly. She knew he was right; he'd be much more comfortable out there. There was certainly more room available to him there.

"I'll be closer to the Zombies," he said wearily, "and I can barricade myself in one of the offices, get enough bedding from stores to make a reasonable nest I'll plug the suit in to keep everything charged up, and you can monitor the mike and camera. I snore."

"I know," she said, in a weak attempt to tease him.

"You would." He turned, and the camera tracked what he was seeing. "Look, I'm here in the site supervisor's office. There's even a real nice couch in here and..." He leaned down and fiddled with the underside of the piece of furniture. "Ah hah. As I thought. There's a real bed in the couch. Bet the old man liked to sneak naps. Look."He panned around the office. "No windows. One door. A full-access terminal. I'll be fine."

"All right, I believe you." She thought, quickly. "Ill look over those plans for traps and transmit them to the AI, and I'11 find out where everything you'll need is stored. You can start collecting the team tomorrow."

What's left of them, she thought sadly. What isn't already stored in the freezer.

"See what you can do about adding some sleepygas to the equation," he suggested, yawning under his breath. "If we can knock them out once they're in the boxes, rather than trapping them with field generators, that should solve the problem of frightening the others."

That was a good suggestion. A much better one than Doctor Kenny's. If she had enough gas...

But wait; this was a fully-stocked station. There might be another option. Crime did exist wherever there were people, and mental breakdowns. Sometimes it was necessary to immobilize someone for his protection and the protection of others.

She interrogated the AI and discovered that, indeed, there were several special low-power needlers in the arms locker. And with them, full clips of anesthetic needles.

"Alex," she said, slowly, "how good a shot are you?"

"When this is over, I'm requisitioning an ethological tagging kit," she said fiercely, as Alex crouched on the roof of the mess hall and waited for his subject's hunger to overcome her timidity. She hesitated, just in front of the crate. She smelled the food, and she wanted it, but she was afraid to go inside after it. She swayed from side to side, like one of the first three survivors they'd seen; that swaying seemed to be the outward sign of inner conflict.

"Why?" he asked. The woman stopped swaying and was creeping, cautiously, into the crate. Alex wanted her to be all the way inside before he darted her, both to prevent the rest from seeing her collapse and to avoid having to haul her about and perhaps hurt her.

"Because they have full bio-monitor contact-buttons in them," she replied. "Skin adhesive ones. They're normally put inside ears, or on a shaved patch."

After a bit more consultation with Kleinman Base and Doctor Kenny, darting the survivors had been given full approval, and since they were going to be out, a modification in the setup had been arranged for. There would be shredded paper bedding in the crates as well as food and water, and each victim would wear a contact button glued to the spine between the shoulder blades with surgical adhesive. With judicious programming, a minimal amount of medical information could come from that; heart rate, respiration, skin temperature. Tia had reprogrammed the buttons; now it was her brawn's turn to live up to his pride.

"I sure never thought my marksmanship would ever be an asset," he said absently. The woman had only a foot or so to go.

"I never thought I was going to be packing my hold with canned archeologists." The packing crates would fit, but only if they were stacked two deep. Alex had already set up the site machine shop servos to drill air holes in all of the crates, and there would be an unbreakable bio-luminescent lightstick in each. They were rated for a week of use. Hopefully that much light would be enough to keep their captives from panicking.

"That's a good girl," Alex crooned to the reluctant Zombie. "Good girl. Smell the nice food? It's really good food. You're hungry, aren't you?" The woman took the last few steps in a rush and fell on the dish of ration-cubes. Alex darted her in the same moment.

The trank took effect within seconds, and she didn't even seem to realize that she'd been struck. She simply dropped over on her side, asleep.

Alex left the needler up on the roof where he'd rigged a sniper-post with a tripod to hold the gun steady. He trotted down the access steps to the first floor and hurried to get out where he could be seen before someone else smelled the food and came after it. As he burst out into the dusty courtyard, a hint of movement at the edge of the camera-field told Tia there was another Zombie lurking out there.

After many protests, she had begun calling the survivors 'Zombies', too. It helped to think of them as something other than humans. She admitted to Doctor Kenny that without that distancing it was hard to keep working without strong feelings getting in the way of efficiency.

"That's all right, Tia," he soothed on his next transmission. "Even I have to stop thinking of my patients as people and start thinking of them as 'cases' or 'case studies' sometimes. That's the nature of this business, and we'll both do what we have to in order to get as many of these people back alive as we can."

She would have liked to ask him if he'd ever thought of her as a 'case study', but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that he probably had. But then, look what he had done for her.

No, calling these poor people 'Zombies' wasn't going to hurt them, and it would keep her concentrating on what to do for them, and not on them.

Alex had been boxing Zombies all morning, and now he had it down to a system. Wheeling out of the warehouse, under the control of the Al, came a small parade of servos laden with the supplies that would keep the woman, hopefully, alive and healthy in her crate for the next five or six days. A bag of finely shredded paper, to make a thick nest on the bottom of the box. A whole bag of ration-cubes. A big squeeze bottle of water. A tiny chemical toilet, on the off-chance she would remember how to use it. The bio-luminescent lightstick. Inside of fifteen minutes, Alex had his setup. The big bottle of water was strapped to one wall, the straps glue-bonded in place, the bottle bonded to the straps. The toilet was bonded to the floor in the corner of the six foot by six foot crate. The bag of ration-cubes was opened at the top, and strapped and bonded into the opposite corner. Paper was laid in a soft bed over the entire floor, and the unconscious woman rolled onto it, with the contact-button glued to her back. Lastly, the bio-luminescent tube was activated and glue-bonded to the roof of the crate, the side brought up and fastened in place, and the crate was ready for the loader.

That was Tia's job; she brought the servo-forklift in from the warehouse under her control rather than the AI's. Alex did not trust the AI to have the same fine control that Tia did. The lift bore the now-anonymous crate up her ramp, and she stored it with the rest, piled not two but three high and locked in place. Each crate was precisely eight inches from the ones next to it, to allow for proper ventilation on four sides. There were twelve crates in the hold now. They hoped to have twelve more before nightfall. If all went well.

Thirty minutes for each capture.

They couldn't have done it if not for Tia's multitasking abilities and all the servos under her control. Right now, a set of servos were setting up crates all over the compound, near the hiding places of the Zombies. The Zombies seemed just as frightened of the servos as they were of Alex in his suit By running the servos all over the compound, they managed to send every one of the Zombies into hiding. They ran servos around each hiding place until they were ready to move to that area for darting and capture. By now, the Zombies were getting hungry, which was all to the good, so far as Alex and Tia were concerned. One trap was being baited now, and Alex was on his way to the hidden sniper position above it. Meanwhile, the rest of the servos were patrolling the compound except in the area of that baited crate, keeping the Zombies pinned down.

A second hair-raising moment had occurred at dawn, bringing Alex up out of his bed with a scream of his own. The Zombies had gathered to greet the rising sun with another chorus of howls, although this time they seemed more, well, not joyous, but certainly there was no fear in the Zombie faces.

Once the first servo appeared, and frightened the Zombies into hiding again, the final key to their capture plan was in place.

They would catch as many of the Zombies as possible during the daylight hours. Alex had marked their favorite hiding places last night, and by now those patrolling servos had those that were not occupied blocked off. More crates would be left very near those blocked-off hiding holes. Would they be attractive enough for more of the Zombies to hide in them? Alex thought so. Tia hoped he was right, for every Zombie cowering in a crate meant one more they could dart and pack up. One more they would not have to catch tomorrow.

One less half-hour spent here. If they could keep up the pace. If the Zombies didn't get harder to catch.

Alex kept up a running dialogue with her, and she sensed that he was as frightened and lonely as she was, but was determined not to show it. He revealed a lot, over the course of the day; she built up a mental picture of a young man who had been just different enough that while he was mildly popular, or at least, not unpopular, he had few close friends. The only one who he really spoke about was someone called Jon. The chess and games player he had mentioned before. He spent a lot of time with Jon, who had helped him with his lessons when he was younger, so Tia assumed that Jon must have been older than Alex. Older or not, Jon had been, and still was, a friend. There was no mistaking the warmth in Alex's voice when he talked about Jon; no mistaking the pleasure he felt when he talked about the message of congratulation Jon had sent when he graduated from the academy.

Or the laughter he'd gotten from the set of 'brawn jokes' Jon had sent when Tia picked Alex as her partner.

Well, Doctor Kenny, Anna, and Lars were my friends, and still are. Sometimes age doesn't make much of a difference.

"Hey, Alex?" she called. He was waiting for another of the timid Zombies to give in to hunger. The clock was running.

"What?"

"What do you call a brawn who can count past ten?"

"I don't know," he said good-naturedly. "What?"

"Barefoot'"

He made a rude noise, then sighted and pulled the trigger. One down, how many more to go?

They had fifty-two Zombies packed in the hold, and one casualty. One of the Zombies had not survived the darting; Alex had gone into acute depression over that death, and it had taken Tia more than an hour to talk him out of it. She didn't dare tell him then what those contact-buttons revealed; some of their passengers weren't thriving well. The heart rates were up, probably with fear, and she heard whimpering and wailing in the hold whenever there was no one else in it but the Zombies. The moment any of the servos or Alex entered the hold, the captives went utterly silent. Out of fear, Tia suspected.

The last Zombie was in the hold; the hold was sealed, and Tia had brought the temperature up to skin-heat. The ventilators were at full-strength. Alex had just entered the main cabin.

And he was reaching for his helmet-release.

"Don't crack your suit," she snapped. How could she have forgotten to tell him? Had she? Or had she told him, and he had forgotten?

"What?" he said. Then, "Oh, decom it. I forgot!"

She restrained herself from saying what she wanted to. "Doctor Kenny said you have to stay in the suit. Remember? He thinks that the chance we might have missed something in decontamination is too much to discount. He doesn't want you to crack your suit until you're at the base. All right?"

"What if something goes wrong for the Zombies?" he asked, quietly. "Tia, there isn't enough room in that hold for me to climb around in the suit."

"We'll worry about that if it happens," she replied firmly. "Right now, the important thing is for you to get strapped down, because their best chance is to get to Base as quickly as possible, and I'm going to leave scorch-marks on the ozone layer getting there."

He took the unsubtle hint and strapped himself in; Tia was better than her word, making a tail-standing takeoff and squirting out of the atmosphere with a blithe disregard for fuel consumption. The Zombies were going to have to deal with the constant acceleration to hyper as best they could. At least she knew that they were all sitting or lying down, because the crates simply weren't big enough for them to stand.

She had been relaying symptoms, observed and recorded, back to Doctor Kenny and the med staff at Kleinman Base all along. She had known that they weren't going to get a lot of answers, but every bit of data was valuable, and getting it there ahead of the victims was a plus.

But now that they were on the way, they were on their own, without the resources of the abandoned dig or the base they were en route to. The med staff might have answers, but they likely would not have the equipment to implement them.

Alex couldn't move while she was accelerating, but once they made the jump to FTL, he unsnapped his restraints and headed for the stairs.

"Where are you going?" she asked, nervously.

"The hold. I'm in my suit. There's nothing down there that can get me through the suit."

Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there. "You can't do anything for them in the crates," she said. "You know that."

He turned toward her column. "What are you hiding from me?"

"N-nothing," she said. But she didn't say it firmly enough.

He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.

"Tia, what's going on down there?" he demanded. "They weren't like this before we took off, were they?"

"I think..." She hesitated. "Alex, I'm not a doctor!"

"You've got a medical library. You've been talking to the doctors. What do you think?"

"I think, they aren't taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that some kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for, for things that you know should be there, but aren't. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it, identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that's out of commission," She felt horribly helpless. "I think for them it's like being in Singularity."

"For four days?" he shouted, hurting her sensors. "I'm going down there."

"And do what?" she snapped back. "What are you going to do for them? They're afraid of you in that suit!"

"Then I'll,"

"You do, and I'll gas the ship," she said instantly. "I mean that, Alex! You put one finger on a release and I'll gas the whole ship!"

He sat back down, collapsing into his chair. "What can we do?" he said weakly. "There has to be something."

"We've got some medical supplies," she pointed out "A couple of them can be adapted to add to the air supply down there. Help me, Alex. Help me find something we can do for them. Without you cracking your suit."

I'll try," he said, unhappily. But his fingers were already on the keyboard, typing in commands to the med library, and not sneaking towards his suit-releases. She blanked for a microsecond with relief.

Then went to work.

Three more times there were signs of crisis in the hold. Three more times she had to threaten him to keep him from diving in and trying to save one of the Zombies by risking his own life. They lost one more, to a combination of anti-viral agent and watered-down sleepygas that they hoped would act as a tranquilizer rather than an anesthetic. Zombie number twenty seven might have been allergic to one or the other, although there was no such indication in his med records; his contact-button gave all the symptoms of allergic shock before he died.

Alex stopped talking to her for four hours after that. Twenty-seven had been in the bottom rank, and a shot of adrenaline would have brought him out, if it had been allergic shock. But his crate was also buried deep in the stacks, and Alex would have had to peel the whole suit off to get to him. Which Tia wouldn't permit. They had no way of knowing if this was really an allergic reaction, or if it was another development of the Zombie Bug. Twenty-seven had been an older man, showing some of the worst symptoms.

Although Alex wasn't talking to her, Tia kept talking, at him, until he finally gave in. Just as well. His silence had her convinced that he was going to ask for a transfer, and that he hated her, if a shell-person could be in tears, she was near that state when he finally answered.

"You're right," was all he said. "Tia, you were right. There are fifty more people there depending on both of us, and if I got sick, that's the mobile half of the team out." And he sighed. But it was enough. Things went back to normal for them. Just in time for the transition to norm space.

Kleinman Base kept them in orbit, sending a full decontamination team to fetch Alex as well as the Zombies, leaving Tia all alone for about an hour. It was a very lonely hour.

But then another decontamination team came aboard, and when they left again, two days later, there was nothing left of her original fittings. She had been fogged, gassed, stripped, polished, and refitted in that time. All that was left, besides the electronic components, were the ideographs painted on the walls. It still looked the same, however, because everything was replaced with the same standard-issue, psychologically approved beige.

Only then was she permitted to de-orbit and land at Kleinman Base so that the decontamination team could leave.

No sooner had the decontamination team left, when there was a welcome hail at the airlock.

"Tia! Permission to come aboard, ma'am!"

She activated her lock so quickly that it must have flown open in his face, and brought him up in the lift rather than waiting for him to climb the stairs. He sauntered in sans pressure-suit, gave her column a jaunty salute, and put down his bags.

"I have good news and better news," he said, flinging himself into his chair. "Which do you want to hear first?"

"The good news," she replied promptly, and did not scold him for putting his feet up on the console.

"The good news is all personal. I have been granted a clean bill of health, and so have you. In addition, since the decontamination team so rudely destroyed my clothing and anything else that they couldn't be sure of, I have just been having a glorious spending-spree down there at the Base, using a GS unlimited credit account!"

Tia groaned, picturing more neon-purple, or worse. "Don't open the bags, or they'll think I've had a radiation leak."

He mock-pouted. "My dear lady, your taste is somewhere back in the last decade."

"Never mind my taste," she said. "What's the better news?"

"Our patients are on their way to full recovery." At her exclamation, he held up a cautionary hand. "It's going to take them several months, maybe even a year. Here's the story, and the reason why they stripped you of everything that could be considered a fabric. Access your Terran entomology, if you would. Call up something called a 'dust mite' and another something called a 'sand flea.'"

Puzzled, she did so, laying the pictures side by side on the central screen.

"As we guessed, this was indeed a virus, with an insect vector. The culprit was something like a sand flea, which, you will note, has a taste for warm-blooded critters. But it was about the size of a dust mite. The fardling things don't hatch until the temperature is right, the days are long enough, and there's been a rainstorm. Once they hatch, the only thing that kills them is really intense insecticide or freezing cold for several weeks. They live in the dust, like sand fleas. Those archeologists had been tracking in dust ever since the rainstorm, and since there'd been no sign of any problems, they hadn't been very careful about their decontamination protocols. The bugs all hatched within an hour, or so the entomologists think. They bit everything in sight, since they always wake up hungry. But, here's the catch, since they were so small, they didn't leave a bite mark, so there was nothing to show that anyone had been bitten." He nodded at the screen. "Every one of the little beggars carries the virus. It's like E. coli, the human bacillus, living in their guts the way it does in ours."

"I assume that everyone got bitten about the same time?" she hazarded.

"Exactly," he said. "Which meant that everyone came down with the virus within hours of each other. Mostly, purely by coincidence, in their sleep. The virus itself invokes allergic shock in most people it infects. Which can look a lot like a stroke, under the right circumstances."

"So we didn't," She stopped herself before she went any further, but he finished the statement for her.

"No, we didn't kill anyone. It was the Zombie Bug. And the best news of all is that the Zombie state is caused by interference with the production of neurotransmitters. Clean out the virus, and eventually everyone gets back to normal."

"Oh Alex," she said, and he interrupted her.

"A little more excellent news. First, that we get a bonus for this one. And second, my very dear, you saved my life."

"I did?" she replied, dumbfounded.

"If I had cracked my suit even once, the bugs would have gotten in. They were everywhere, in your carpet, the upholstery; either they got in the first time we cracked the lock, or the standard decontamination didn't wash them all off the suit or kill them. And I am one of those seventy-five percent of the population so violently allergic to them that..." He let her fill in the rest.

"Alex, I'd rather have you as my brawn than all the bonuses in the world," she said, after a long pause.

"Good," he said, rising, and patting her column gently. "I feel the same way."

Before the moment could get maudlin, he cleared his throat, and continued. "Now the bad news. We're so far behind on our deliveries that they want us out of here yesterday. So, are you ready to fly, bright lady?"

She laughed. "Strap on your chair, hotshot. Let's show 'em how to burn on out of here!"

CHAPTER FIVE

"Well, Tia," Doctor Kenny said genially, from his vantage point in front of her main screen. "I have to say that it's a lot more fun talking to you face-to-column than by messages or double-bounce comlink. Waiting for four hours for the punchline to a joke is a bit much."

He faced her column, not the screen, showing the same courtesy Alex always did. Alex was not aboard at the moment; he was down on the base spending his bonus while Tia was in the refit docks in orbit. But since the Pride of Albion was so close, Doctor Kenny had decided that he couldn't resist making a visit to his most successful patient.

The new version of his chair had been perfected, and he was wearing it now. The platform and seat hid the main power-supply, a shiny exoskeleton covered his legs up to his waist, and Tia thought he looked like some kind of ancient warrior-king on a throne.

"Most of my classmates don't get the point of jokes," she said, with a chuckle. "They just don't seem to have much of a sense of humor. I have to share them with you softies."

"Most of your classmates are as stiff as AIs," he countered. "Don't worry, they'll loosen up in a decade or two. That's what Lars tells me, anyway. He says that living around softies will contaminate even the most rule-bound shell-person. So, how's life with a partner? As I recall, that was one of your worst worries, that you'd end up with a double-debt like Moira for playing brawn-basketball."

"I really like Alex, Kenny." she said slowly. "Especially after the Zombie Bug run. I hate to admit this, but, I even like him more than you, or Anna, or Lars. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about when you called the other day. I really trust your judgment."

He nodded, sagely. "And since I'm not in the brainbrawn program, I am not bound by regs to report you when you tell me how much you are attracted to your brawn." He sent an ironic wink toward her column.

She let herself relax a little. "Something like that," she admitted. "Kenny, I just don't know what to think. He's sloppy, he's forgetful, he's a little impulsive. He has the worst taste in clothes, and I'd rather have him as a partner than anyone else in the galaxy. I'd rather talk to him than my classmates, and being classmates is supposed to be the strongest bond a shell-person can have!" Supposed to be, that was the trick, wasn't it? There was very little in her life that had happened the way it was supposed to. At this point, she should have been entering advanced studies under the auspices of the Institute, not working for it. She should have been a softie, not a shell-person.

But you didn't deal with life by dwelling on what 'should' have happened. You handled it by making the best out of what had happened.

"Well, Tia, you spent the first seven of your most formative years as a softperson," Kenny pointed out gently. His next words echoed her own earlier thoughts. "You never thought you'd wind up in a shell, where your classmates never knew anything but their shells and their teachers. Just like when a chick hatches, what it imprints on is what it's going to fall in love with."

"I, I didn't say I was in love," she stammered, suddenly alarmed.

Kenny held his peace. He simply stared at her column with a look she remembered all too well. The one that said she wasn't entirely telling the truth, and he knew it.

"Well, maybe a little," she admitted, in a very soft voice. "But-it's not like I was another softie-"

"You can love a friend, you know," Kenny pointed out. "That's been acknowledged for centuries, even among stuffy shell-person Counselors. Remember your Greek philosophers. They felt there were three kinds of love, and only one of them had anything to do with the body. Eros, filios, and agape."

"Sexual, brotherly, and religious," she translated, feeling a little better. "Well, okay. Filios, then."

"Lars translates them as 'love involving the body', love involving the mind', and 'love involving the soul'. That's even more apt in your case," Kenny said comfortably. "Both filios and agape apply here."

"I guess you're right," she said, feeling sheepish.

"Tia, my dear," Kenny said, without a hint of patronization, "there is nothing wrong with saying that you love your brawn, the first words you transmitted to me from your new shell, in case you've forgotten, were 'Doctor Kenny, I love you.' Frankly, I'm a lot happier hearing this from you than something 'appropriate'."

"Like what?" she asked curiously.

"Hmm. Like this." He raised his voice an octave. "Well, Doctor Kennet," he said primly, "I'm quite pleased with the performance of my brawn Alexander. I believe we can work well together. Our teamwork was quite acceptable on this last assignment."

"You sound like Kari, exactly like Kari." She laughed. "Yes, but imagine trying to have this conversation with one of my BB Counselors!"

He screwed up his face and flung up his hands. "Oh, horrors}" he exclaimed, his expression matching the outrage in his voice. "How could you confess to feeling anything? AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, I am going to have to report you for instability!"

"Precisely," she replied, sobering. "Sometimes I think they just want us to be superior sorts of AIs. Self-aware and self-motivating, but someone get out a scalpel and excise the feeling part before you pop them in their shells."

"There's a fine line they have to tread, dear," he told her, just as soberly. "Your classmates lack something you had, the physical nurturing of a parent. They never touched anything; they've never known anything but a very artificial environment. They don't really understand emotions, because they've never been allowed to experience them or even see them near at hand. I don't think there's any question in my mind what that means, when they first come out into the real world of us softies. It means they literally enter a world as foreign and incomprehensible as any alien culture. In some ways, it would be better if they all entered professions where they never had to deal with humans one-on-one."

"Then why?" She picked her words with care. "Why don't they put adults into shells?"

"Because adults, even children, often can't adapt to the fact that their bodies don't work anymore, and that, as you pointed out yourself, they will never have that human touch again." He sighed. "I've seen plenty of that in my time, too. You are an exception, my love. But you always have been special. Outstandingly flexible, adaptable." He sat back in his chair and thought; she didn't interrupt him. "Tia, there are things that I don't agree with in the way the shell-person training program is run. But you're out of the training area now and into the real world. You'll find that even the Counselors can have an entirely different attitude out here. They're ready to accept what works, not just what's in the rule books."

She paused a moment before replying. "Kenny, what do I do if, things creep over into eros? I mean, I'm not going to crack my column or anything, but..."

"Helva," Kenny said succinctly. "Think of Helva. She and her brawn had a romance that still has power over the rest of known space. If it happens, Tia, let it happen. If it doesn't, don't mourn over it. Enjoy the fact that your brawn is your very best friend; that's the way it's supposed to be, after all. I have faith in your sense and sensibility; I always have. You'll be fine." He coughed a little. "As it, ah, happens, I have a bit of fellow-feeling for you. Anna and I have gotten to be something of an item,"

"Really?" She didn't even try to modulate the glee out of her voice. "It's about time! What did she do, tip your chair over to slow you down and seduce you on the spot?"

"That's just about word for word what Lars said," Kenny replied, blushing furiously. "Except that he added a few other pointed remarks."

"I can imagine." She giggled. Lars was over two centuries old, and he had seen a great deal in that time. Every kind of drama a sentient was capable of, in fact, he was the chief overseer of one of the largest hospital stations in Central Systems. If there was ever a place for life-and-death drama, a hospital station was it, as holo-makers across the galaxy knew. From the smallest incident to the gravest, Lars had witnessed, and sometimes participated in, all of it.

He had been in charge of the Pride of Albion since it was built. He had been built into it. He would never leave, and never wanted to. Cynical, brilliant" number="with an unexpectedly kind heart. That was Lars.

He could be the gentlest person, soft or shell, that Tia had ever met. Though he never missed an opportunity to jab one of his softperson colleagues with his sharp wit.

"But Kenny." She hesitated, eaten alive with curiosity, but unsure how far she could push, "Kenny, how nosy can I be about you and Anna?"

"Tia, I know everything there is to know about you, from your normal heart rate to the exact composition of the chemicals in your blood when you're under stress. My doctor knows the same about me. We're both used to being poked and prodded." he paused "and you are my very dear friend. If there is something you are really curious about, please, go ahead and ask." His eyes twinkled. "But don't expect me to tell you about the birds and the bees."

"You're, when we first met, you called yourself a 'medico on the half-shell'. You're half machine. How does Anna feel about that?" If she could have blushed, she would have, she felt so intrusive.

He didn't seem to feel that she was intruding, however. "Hmm, good questions. The answer, my dear, is one that I am afraid can't apply to you. I'm only 'half machine' when I'm strapped in. When I'm not in my chair, I'm, an imperfect, but entirely human creature. "He smiled.

"So it's like comparing rocks to bonbons." That was something she hadn't anticipated. "Or water to sheet metal."

"Good comparisons. You're not the first to ask these questions, by the way. So don't think you're unique in being curious." He stretched and grinned. "Anna and I are doing a lot of, hmm, personal-relations counseling of my other handicapped patients."

"At least I'm not some kind of, would-be voyeur." That was nice to know.

"You, however, were and are in an entirely different boat than my other patients," he warned. "What applies to them does not apply to you." He shook his head. "I'm going to give this to you straight and without softening. You have no working nerves, sensory or motor control, below your neck. And from what I've seen, there was some further damage to the autonomic system as well before we stabilized you.

What with the mods they made to you when you went into the shell, you're dependent on life-support now. I don't think you could survive outside your shell. I know you wouldn't be happy."

"Oh. All right" In a way, she was both disappointed and relieved. Relieved that it was one more factor she wouldn't have to consider in her ongoing partnership. Disappointed, well, not that much. She hadn't really thought there would ever be any way to reverse the path that had brought her into her column.

"I did bring some records of the things I've been working on to show you, devices that are helping out some of our involuntary amputees. I thought you'd be interested, just on an academic basis." He slipped a datahedron into her reader, and she brought up the display on her central screen. "This young lady was a professional dancer. She was trapped under several tons of masonry after an earthquake. By the time medics got to her, the entire limb had suffered celldeath. There was no saving it"

The video portion of the clip showed a lovely young lady in leotards and tights trying out what looked like a normal leg, except that it moved very stiffly.

"The problem with the artificial limbs we've been giving amputees is that while we've fixed most of the weight and movement problems, they're still completely useless for someone like a dancer, who relies on sensory input to tell her whether or not her foot is in the right position." Kenny smiled fondly as he watched the girl on the screen. "That's Lila within a few minutes of having the leg installed. At the hip, may I add. The next clip will be three weeks later, then three months."

The screen flickered as Tia found her attention absorbed by the girl. Now she was working out in what were obviously ballet exercises, and doing very well, so for as Tia could tell. Then the screen flickered a third time.

And the girl was on stage, partnered in some kind of classic ballet piece, and if Tia had not known her left leg was cyborged, she would never have guessed it

"Here's a speed-keyer who lost his hand," Kenny continued, but he turned towards the column. "Between my work and Moto-Prosthetics, we've beaten the sensory input problem, Tia," he said proudly. "Lila tells me she's changed the choreography so that she can perform some of the more difficult moves on her left foot instead of her right. The left won't get toe blisters or broken foot-bones, the tendons won't tear, the knee won't give, and the ankle has no chance of buckling. The only difference that she can see between the cyborged leg and the natural one is that the cyborg is a little heavier, not enough to make any difference to her if she can change the choreography, and it's a lot sturdier."

A few more of Doctor Kenny’s patients came up on the screen, but neither of them were paying attention,

"There have to be some problems," Tia said, finally. "I mean, nothing is perfect"

"We don't have full duplication of sensory input In Lila's case, we have it in the entire foot and the ankle and knee-joints, and we've pretty much ignored the stretches of leg in between. Weight is the other problem. The more sensory nerves we duplicate, the higher the weight. A ten-kilo hand is going to give someone a lot of trouble, for instance." Kenny shifted a little in his chair. "But all of this is coming straight out of what's going on in the Lab Schools, Tia! And most of it is from the brainship program. The same thing that gives you sensory input from the ships' systems are what became the sensory linkups for those artificial limbs."

"That's wonderful!" Tia said, very pleased for him. "You're quite something, Doctor Kennet!"

"Oh, there's a lot more to be done," he said modestly. "I haven't heard any of Lila's fellow dancers clamoring to have double-amputations and new legs installed. She has her problems, and there's some pain involved, even after healing is completed. In a way, it's a good thing for us that our first leg installation was for a dancer, because Lila was used to living with pain, all dancers are. And it's very expensive; she was lucky, because the insurance company involved judged that compensating her for a lost, very lucrative, career was more expensive than an artificial limb. Although, given the life expectancy of you shell-persons, and compare it to those of us still in our designed-by-genetics containers, well, I can foresee a day when we'll all have our brains tucked into minishells when the old envelope starts to decay, and instead of deciding what clothes we want to wear, we have to decide what body to put on."

"Oh, I don't think it'll come to that, really," Tla said decisively. "For one thing, if it's expensive for one limb, a whole body would be impossible."

"It is that," Kenny agreed. "But to tell you the truth, right now the problem besides expense isn't technical. We could put the fully-functioning body together, and do it today. It's actually easier to do that than just one limb. Oh, by that, I mean one with full sensory inputs."

He didn't say anything, but he winked, and grinned wickedly. "And by 'full sensory input', I mean exactly what you're thinking, you naughty young lady."

"Me?" she said, with completely feigned indignation. "I have no idea what you're talking about! I am as innocent as, as,"

"As I am," Kenny said. "You were the one who was asking about me and Anna."

She remained silent, pretending dignity. He continued to grin, and she knew he wasn't fooled in the least.

"Well, anyway, the problem is having a life-support system for a naked brain." He shrugged. "Can't quite manage that, putting a whole body into a life-support shell is still the only way to deal with trauma like yours. And we can't fit that into a human-sized body."

"Oh, you could make us great big bodies and create a whole race of giants," she joked. "That should actually be easier, from what you've told me."

He cast his eyes upwards, surprising her somewhat with his sudden flare of exasperation. "Believe it or not, there's a fellow who wants to do something like that, for the holos. He wants to create giant full-sensory bodies of, oh, dinosaurs, monsters, whatever. Hire a shell-person actor, and use the whole setup in his epics."

"No!" she exclaimed.

"I swear," he said, placing his hand over his heart. "True, every word of it. And believe it or not, he has the money. Holostars make more than you do, my love. I think the next time some brain wants to retire from active ship-service, especially one that's bought out his contract, this fellow just might tempt them into the holos."

"Amazing. Virtual headshaking here." She thought for a moment. "What would the chances be of creating a life-sized body with some kind of brainstem link to the shell?"

"Like a radio?" he hazarded. "Hmm. Good question. A real problem; there is a lot of information carried by these nerves. You'd need separated channels for everything, but, well, the effective range would be very, very short, otherwise you run the risk of signal breakup. That turned out to be the problem with this rig," he finished, nodding at his armored legs." It has to stay in the same room with me, otherwise, Greek frieze time."

She laughed.

"Anyway, the whole rig would probably cost as much as a brainship, so it's not exactly practical," he concluded. "Not even for me, and they pay me very well."

Not exactly practical for me, either, she thought, and dismissed the whole idea. Practical, for a brainship, meant buying out her contract. After all, if she wanted to be free to join the Institute as an active researcher and go chasing the EsKays on her own, she was going to have to buy herself out.

"Well, money, that's the other reason I wanted to talk to you," she said.

"And the bane of the BB program rears its ugly head," he intoned, and grinned. "Oh, they're going to hate you. You're just like all the rest of the really good ones. You want to buy that contract out, don't you?"

"I don't think there are too many CS ships that don't really plan on doing it someday," she countered. "We're people, not AI drones. We like to have a choice of where we go. So, do you have any ideas of how I can start raising my credit balance? Moira has kind of cornered the market on spotting possible new sites from orbit and entry."

"Gave her the idea, did you?" Kenny shook his finger at you. "Don't you know you should never give ideas away to the competition?"

"She wasn't competition, then," Tia pointed out

"Well, you have a modest bonus from the Zombie Bug run, right?" he said, scratching his eyebrow as he thought "What about investing it?"

"In what?" she countered. "I don't know anything about investing money."

"Operating on my own modest success in putting my own money into Moto-Prosthetics, and not in paper stock, my dear, but in shares in the company itself, if you use your own knowledge to choose where to invest, the results can be substantial." He tapped his fingers on the side of his chair. "It's not insider trading, if you're thinking that I would consider putting your money where your interest and expertise is."

"Virtual headshaking," she replied. "I have no idea what you're getting at. What do I know?"

"Look, "he said, leaning forward, his eyes bright with intensity. "The one thing an archeologist is always cognizant of is the long term, especially long-term patterns. And the one thing that most often trips up the sophonts of any race is that they are not thinking in the long term. Look for what a friend of mine called 'disasters waiting to happen', and invest in the companies that will be helping to recover from that disaster."

"Well, that sounds good in theory," she said doubtfully. "But in practice? How am I going to find situations like that? I'm only one person, and I've already got a job."

"Tia, you have the computing power of an entire brainship at your disposal," Kenny told her firmly. "And you have access to Institute records for every inhabited planet that also holds ruins. Use both. Look for problems the ancients had, then see if they'll happen again at current colonies."

Well, nothing sprung immediately to mind, but it would while away some time. And Kenny had a point

He glanced at his wrist-chrono. "Well, my shuttle should be hailing you right about-"

"Now," she finished. "It's about to dock, four slots from me, to your right as you exit the lock. Thanks for coming, Kenny."

He directed his Chair to the lift. "Thank you for having me, Tia. As always, it's been a pleasure."

He turned to look back over his shoulder as he reached the lift, and grinned. "By the way, don't bother to check my med records. Anna has never complained about my performance yet."

If she could have blushed...

While Alex spent his time with some of his old classmates, presumably living up to what he had told her was the class motto, 'The Party Never Ends', she dove headlong into Institute records. The Institute gave her free, no-charge access to anything she wanted; perhaps because they counted her as a kind of member-researcher, perhaps because of her part in the Zombie Bug rescue, or perhaps because brainship access was one hole in their access system they'd never plugged because they never thought of it. Normally they charged for every record downloaded from the main archives. It didn't matter to her; there was plenty there to look into.

But first, her own peculiar quest. She caught up on everything having to do with the old EsKay investigations in fairly short order. There wasn't much of anything new from existing digs, so she checked to see what Pota and Braddon were doing, then went on to postings on brand new EsKay finds.

It was there that she came across something quite by accident.

It was actually rather amusing, when it came down to it. It was the report from a Class Two dig, from the group taking over a site that had initially gotten a lot of excitement from the Exploration team. They had reported it as an EsKay site. The First ever to be uncovered on a non-Marslike world. And an EsKay Evaluation team was sent post-haste.

It turned out to be a case of misidentification; not EsKays at all, but another race entirely, the Megalt Tresepts, one of nowhere near as much interest to the Institute. Virtually everything was known about the Megalts; they had sent out FTL ships in the far distant past, and some of the colonies they had established still existed. Some of their artifacts looked like EsKay work, and if there was no notion that the Megalts had been in the neighborhood, it was fairly easy to make the mistake.

The world was surprisingly Terran. Which would have made an EsKay site all the more valuable if it really had been there.

Although it was not an EsKay site after all, Tia continued reading the report out of curiosity. Largo Draconis was an odd little planet, with an eccentric orbit that made for one really miserable decade every century or so. Other than that, it was quite habitable; really pleasant, in fact, with two growing seasons in every year. The current settlements were ready for that dismal decade, according to the report, but also according to the report, the Megalts had been, too.

Yet the Megalt sites had been abandoned, completely. Not typical of the logical, systematic race.

During the first year of that wretched ten years, every Megalt settlement on the planet (all two of them) had been abandoned. And not because they ran out of food, either, which was her first thought. They had stockpiled more than enough to carry them through, even with no harvests at all.

No; not because the settlers ran out of food, but because the native rodents did.

Curious about what had happened, the Evaluation team had found the settlement records, which outlined the entire story, inscribed on the thin metal sheets the Megalts used for their permanent hardcopy storage. The settlements had been abandoned so quickly that no one had bothered to find and take them.

It was a good thing the Megalts used metal for their records; nothing else would have survived what had happened to the settlement. The rodents had swarmed both colonies; a trickle at first, hardly more than a nuisance. But then, out of nowhere, a swarm, a flood, a torrent of rodents had poured down over the settlement. They overwhelmed the protections in place, electric fences, and literally ate their way into the buildings. Nothing had stopped them. Killing them in hordes had done nothing. They merely ate the bodies and kept moving in.

The evidence all pointed to a periodic change in the rodents' digestive systems that enabled them to eat anything with a cellulose or petrochemical base, up to and including plastic.

The report concluded with the Evaluation team's final words on the attitude of the current government of Largo Draconis, in a personal note that had been attached to the report.

"Fred: I am just glad we are getting out of here. We told the Settlement Governor about all this, and they're ignoring us. They think that just because I'm an archeologist, I have my nose so firmly in the past that I have no grasp on the present. They told me in the governor's office that their ward-off fields should be more than enough to hold off the rats. Not a chance. We're talking about a feeding frenzy here, furry locusts, and I don't think they're going to give a ward-off field a second thought I'm telling you, Fred, these people are going to be in trouble in a year. The Megalts threw in the towel, and they weren't anywhere near as backward as the governor thinks they were. Maybe this wonder ward-off field of his will keep the rats off, but I don't think so. And I don't want to find out that he was wrong by waking up under a blanket of rats. They didn't eat the Megalts, but they ate their clothes. I don't fancy piling into a shuttle with my derriere bared to the gentle breezes, which by that time should be, oh, around fifty kilometers per hour, and minus twenty Celsius. So I may even beat this report home. Keep the beer cold and the fireplace warm for me."

Well. If ever there was something that matched what Doctor Kenny had suggested, this was it

Just to be certain, she checked several other sources, not for the veracity of the report, but to see just how prepared the colony was for the 'rats' as well as the worsening weather.

Everything she found bore out what the unknown writer had told 'Fred'. Ward-off generators were standard issue, not heavy-duty. Warehouses had metal doors, and many had plastic or wooden siding. Homes were made of native stone and well-insulated against the cold, but had plastic or wooden doors. Food had been stockpiled, but what would the colonists do when the 'rats' ate through the warehouse sides to get at the stockpiled rations? The colony had been depending on food grown on-planet for the past twenty years. There were no provisions for importing food and no synthesizers of any real size. They had protein farms, but what if the 'rats' got into them and ate the yeast-stock along with everything else? What would they do when the stockpiled food was gone? Or if they managed to save the food, what would they do when, as Fred had suggested, the 'rats' ate through their doors and made a meal off their clothing, their blankets, their furniture.

So much for official records. Was there anyone on-planet that could pull these people out of their disaster?

It took a full day of searching business-directories before she had her answer. An on-planet manufacturer of specialized protection equipment, including heavy duty ward-off and protection-field generators, could provide protection once the planetary governor admitted there was a problem. Governmental resources might not be able to pay for all the protection the colonists needed, but over eighty percent of the inhabitants carried hazard insurance, and the insurance companies should pay for protection for their clients.

That was half of the answer. The other half?

Another firm with multi-planet outlets, and a load of old-fashioned synthesizers in a warehouse within shipping distance. They didn't produce much in the way of variety, but load them up with raw materials, carbon from coal or oil, minerals, protein from yeast and fiber from other vat-grown products, and you had something basic to eat, or wear, or make into furnishings.

She set her scheme in motion. But not through Beta, her supervisor, but through Lars and his.

Before Alex returned, she had made all the arrangements; and she had included carefully worded letters to the two companies she had chosen, plus all of the publicly available records. She tried to convey a warning without sounding like some kind of crazed hysteric.

Of course, the fact that she was investing in their firms should at least convey the idea that she was an hysteric with money.

If they had any sense, they would be able to put the story together for themselves from the records, and they would believe her. Hopefully, they would be ready.

She transmitted the last of the messages, just as Alex arrived at her airlock.

"Permission to come aboard, ma'am," he called cheerfully, as she opened the lock for him. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and when he burst into the main cabin, she told herself that fashions would surely change, soon. He was dressed in a chrome yellow tunic with neon-red piping, and neon-red trousers with chrome-yellow piping. Both bright enough to hurt the eyes and dazzle the pickups, and she was grateful she could turn down the intensity of her visual receptors.

"How was your reunion?" she asked, once his clothes weren't blinding her.

"There weren't more than a half dozen of them," he told her, continuing through the hall and down to his own cabin. He pitched both his bags on his bed, and returned. "We just missed Chria by a hair. But we had a good time."

"I'm surprised you didn't come back with a hangover." He widened his eyes with surprise. "Not me! I'm the Academy designated driver, or at any rate, I make sure people get on the right shuttles. Never touch the stuff, myself, or almost never. Clogs the synapses." Tia felt irrationally pleased to hear that "So, did you miss me? I missed you. Did you have enough to do?" He flung himself down in his chair and put his feet up on the console." I hope you didn't spend all your time reading Institute papers."

"Oh," she replied lightly, "I found a few other things to occupy my time."

The comlink was live, and Alex was on his very best behavior, including a fresh, and only marginally rumpled, uniform. He sat quietly in his chair, the very picture of a sober Academy graduate and responsible CS brawn.

Tia reflected that it was just as well she'd bullied him into that uniform. The transmission was shared by Professor Barton Glasov y Verona-Gras, head of the Institute, and a gray-haired, dark-tunicked man the professor identified as Central Systems Sector Administrator Joshua Elliot-Rosen y Sinor. Very high in administration. And just now, very concerned about something, although he hid his concern well. Alex had snapped to a kind of seated 'attention' the moment his face appeared on the screen.

"Alexander, Hypatia, we're going to be sending you a long file of stills and holos," Professor Barton began. "But for now, the object you see here on my desk is representative of our problem."

The 'object' in question was a perfectly lovely little vase. The style was distinctive; skewed, but with a very sensuous sinuousity, as if someone had fused Art Nouveau with Salvador Dali. It seemed, as nearly as Tia could tell from the transmission, to be made of multiple layers of opalescent glass or ceramic.

It also had the patina that only something that has been buried for a very long time achieves. Or something with a chemically faked patina. But would the professor himself have called them if all he was worried about were fake antiquities? Not likely.

The only problem with the vase, if it was a genuine artifact, was that it did not match the style of any known artifact in any of Tia's files.

"You know that smuggling and site-robbing has always been a big problem for us," Professor Barton continued. "It's very frustrating to come on a site and find it's already been looted. But this, this is doubly frustrating. Because, as I'm sure Hypatia has already realized, the style of this piece does not match that of any known civilization."

"A few weeks ago, hundreds of artifacts in this style flooded the black market," Sinor said smoothly. "Analysis showed them to be quite ancient, this piece for instance was made some time when Ramses the Second was Pharaoh."

The professor was not wringing his hands, but his distress was fairly obvious. "There are hundreds of these objects!" he blurted. "Everything from cups to votive offerings, from jewelry to statuary! We not only don't know where they've come from, but we don't even know any thing about the people that made them!"

"Most of the objects are not as well-preserved as this one, of course," Sinor continued, sitting with that incredible stillness that only a professional politician or actor achieves. "But besides being incredibly valuable, and not incidentally, funneling money into the criminal subculture, there is something else rather distressing associated with these artifacts."

Tia knew what it had to be as soon as the words were out of the man's mouth. Plague.

"Plague," he said solemnly. "So far, this has not been a fatal disease, at least, not to the folk who bought these little trinkets. They have private physicians and in-house medicomps, obviously."

High families, Tia surmised. So the High Families are mixed up in this.

"The objects really aren't dangerous, once they've been through proper decontam procedures," the professor added hastily. "But whoever is digging these things up isn't even bothering with a run under the U V gun. He's just cleaning them up."

Tia winced inwardly, and saw Alex wince. To tell an archeologist that a smuggler had 'cleaned up' an artifact, was like telling a coin collector that his nephew Joey had gotten out the wire brush and shined up his collection for him.

"Cleaning them up, putting them in cases, and selling them." Professor Barton sighed. "I have no idea why his helpers aren't coming down with this. Maybe they're immune. Whatever the reason, the receivers of these pieces are, they are not happy about it, and they want something done."

His expression told Tia more than his words did. The High Families who had bought artifacts, they must have known were smuggled and possibly stolen, and some members of their circle, had gotten sick. And because the Institute was the official organization in charge of ancient relics, they expected the Institute to find the smuggler and deal with him.

Not that any of them would tell us how and where they found out about these treasures. Nor would they ever admit that they knew they were gray market, if not black. And if they'd stop buying smuggled artifacts, they wouldn't get sick.

But none of that meant anything when it came to the High Families, of course. They were too wealthy and too powerful to ever find themselves dealing with such simple concepts as cause and effect.

Hmm. Except once in a great while, like now, when it rises up and bites them.

"In spite of the threat of disease associated with these pieces, they are still in very high demand," Sinor said.

Because someone in the High families spread the word that you'd better run the thing through decontamination after you buy it, so you can have your pretty without penalty. But there was something wrong with this story. Something that didn't quite fit. But she couldn't figure out what it was.

Meanwhile, the transmission continued. "But I don't have to tell either of you how dangerous it is to have these things out there," Professor Barton added. "It's fairly obvious that the smugglers are not taking even the barest of precautions with the artifacts. It becomes increasingly likely with every piece sold at a high price that someone will steal one, or find out where the source is, or take one to a disadvantaged area to sell it"

A slum, you mean, Professor. Was he putting too much emphasis on this?

Tia decided to show that both she and her brawn were paying attention. "I can see what could happen then, gentlemen," she countered. "Disease spreads very quickly in areas of that sort, and what might not be particularly dangerous for someone of means will kill the impoverished."

And then we have a full-scale epidemic and a panic on our hands. But he had to know how she felt about this. He knew who she was. There weren't too many 'Hypatias' in the world, and he had been the immediate boss of Pota and Braddon's superior. He had to know the story. He was probably trading on it.

"Precisely, Hypatia," said Sinor, in an eerie 'answer' to her own thoughts.

"I hope you aren't planning on using us as smuggler hunters," Alex replied, slowly. "I couldn't pass as High Family in a million years, so I couldn't be in on the purchasing end. And we aren't allowed to be armed. I know I don't want to take on the smuggling end without a locker full of artillery! In other words, gentlemen, 'we ain't stupid, we ain't expendable, and we ain't goin'." But this was all sounding a little too pat, a little too contrived. If Sinor told them that they weren't expected to catch the smugglers themselves...

"No." Sinor said soothingly, and a little too hastily. "No, we have some teams in the Enforcement Division going at both ends. However, it is entirely possible that the source for these artifacts is someone, or rather, several someones, working on Exploration or Evaluation teams. Since the artifacts showed up in this sector first, it is logical to assume that they originate here."

Too smooth. Too pat. This is just a story. But why?

"So you want us to keep our eyes peeled when we make our deliveries," Alex filled in.

"You two are uniquely suited," Professor Barton pointed out "You both have backgrounds in archeology. Hypatia, you know how digs work, intimately. Once you know how to identify these artifacts, if you see even a hint of them, shards, perhaps, or broken bits of jewelry, you'll know what they are and where they came from."

"We can do that," Tia replied, carefully. "We can be a little snoopy, I think, without arousing any suspicions."

"Good. That was what we needed," Professor Barton sounded very relieved. "I suppose I don't need to add that there is a bonus in this for you."

"I can live with a bonus," Alex responded cheerfully.

The two VIPs signed off, and Alex turned immediately to Tla.

"Did that sound as phony to you as it did to me?" he demanded.

"Well, the objects they want are certainly real enough," she replied, playing back her internal recording of the conversation and analyzing every word. "But whether they really are artifacts is another question. There's definitely more going on than they're willing to tell us."

Alex leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. "Are these things financing espionage or insurrection?" he hazarded. "Or buying weapons?"

She stopped her recording; there was something about the artifact that bothered her. She enhanced the picture and threw it up on the screen.

"What's wrong with this?" she demanded. Alex leaned forward to have a look.

"Is that a hole bored in the base?" he said. "Bored in, then patched over?"

"Could be." She enhanced her picture again. "Does it seem to you that the base is awfully thick?"

"Could be," he replied. "You know... we have only their word that these are 'alien artifacts'. What if they are nothing of the sort?"

"They wouldn't be worth much of anything then, unless..."

The answer came to her so quickly that it brought its own fireworks display with it. "Got it!" she exclaimed, and quickly accessed the Institute library for a certain old news program.

She remembered this one from her own childhood; both for the fact that it had been an ingenious way to smuggle and because Pota had caught her watching it, realized what the story was about, and shut it off. But not before Tia had gotten the gist of it.

One of the Institute archeologists had been subverted by a major drug-smuggler who wanted a way to get his supply to Central. In another case where there were small digs on the same planets as colonies, the archeologist had himself become addicted to the mood altering drug called 'Paradise', and had made himself open to blackmail.

The blackmail came from the supplier-producer himself. Out there in the fringe, it was easy enough to hide his smuggled supplies in ordinary shipments of agri-goods, but the nearer one got to civilization, the harder it became. Publicly available transport was out of the question.

But there were other shipments going straight to the heart of civilization. Shipments that were so innocent, and so fragile, they never saw a custom's inspector. Such as... Institute artifacts.

So the drug-dealer molded his product in the likeness of pottery shards. And the archeologist on-site made sure they got packed like any other artifacts and shipped, although they were never cataloged. Once the shipment arrived at the Institute, a worker inside the receiving area would set the crates with particular marks aside and leave them on the loading dock overnight. They would, of course, disappear, but since they had never been cataloged, they were never missed.

The only reason the archeologist in question had been caught was because an overzealous graduate student had cataloged the phony shards, and when they came up missing at the Institute, the police became involved.

Tia ran the news clip for Alex, who watched it attentively. "What do you think?" she asked, when it was over.

"I think our friend in the dull blue-striped tunic had a strangely fit look about him. The look that says 'police' to yours truly." Alex nodded. "I think you're right. I think someone is trying the artifact-switch again, except that this time they're coming in on the black market."

She did a quick access to the nets, and began searching for a politician named Sinor. She found one, but he did not match the man she had seen on the transmission.

"The trick is probably that if someone sees a crate full of smuggled glassware, they don't think of drugs." Tia felt very smug over her deduction, and her identification of Sinor as a ringer. Of course, there was no way of knowing if her guess was right or wrong, but still. "The worst that is likely to happen to an artifact-smuggler is a fine and a slap on the wrist. They aren't taken very seriously, even though there's serious money in it and the smugglers may have killed to get them."

"That's assuming inspectors even find the artifacts. So where were we supposed to fit in to all this?" Alex ran his hand through his hair. "Do they think we're going to find this guy?"

"I think that they think he's working with one of the small-dig people again. By the way, you were right about Sinor. Or rather, the Sinor we saw is not the one of record." Another thought occurred to her. "You know, their story may very well have been genuine. There's not a lot of room in jewelry to hide drugs. Whoever is doing this may have started by smuggling out the artifacts, freelance, got tangled up with some crime syndicate, and now he's been forced to deal the fake, drug-carrying artifacts along with the real ones."

"Now that makes sense!" Alex exclaimed. "That fits all the parameters. Do we still play along?"

"Ye-es," she replied slowly. "But in a severely limited sense, I'd say. We aren't trained in law enforcement, and we don't carry weapons. If we see something, we report it, and get the heck out"

"Sounds good to me, lady," Alex replied, with patent relief. "I'm not a coward, but I'm not stupid. And I didn't sign up with the BB program to get ventilated by some low-down punk. If I wanted to do that, all I have to do is stroll into certain neighborhoods and flash some glitter. Tia, why all that nonsense about plague?"

"Partially to hook us in, I think," she said, after a moment. "They know we were the team that got the Zombie Bug, we'll feel strongly about plague. And partially to keep us from touching these objects. If we don't mess with them, we won't know about the drug link."

He made a sound of disgust. "You'd think they'd have trusted us with the real story. I'm half tempted to blow this whole thing off, just because they didn't. I won't," he added hastily, "but I'm tempted."

He began warming up the boards, preparatory to taking off. Tia opened a channel to traffic control, but while she did so, she was silently wondering if there was even more to the story than she had guessed.

There was something bothering Alex, and as they continued on their rounds, he tried to put his finger on it. It was only after he replayed the recorded transmission of Professor Barton and the bogus 'Sinor' that he realized what it was.

Tia had known that Professor Barton was genuine, without checking. And Barton had said things that indicated he knew who she was.

Alex had never really wondered about her background. He'd always assumed that she was just like every other shell-person he'd ever known; popped into her shell at birth, because of fatal birth-defects, with parents who rather would forget she had ever been born. Who were just as pleased that she was someone else's problem.

What was it that the professor had said, though? 'You both have backgrounds in archeology. Hypatia, you know how digs work, intimately.'

From everything that Jon Chernov had said, the shell-person program was so learning-intensive that there was no time for hobbies. A shell-person only acquired hobbies after he got out in the real world and had leisure time for them. The Lab Schools' program was so intensive that even play was scheduled and games were choreographed, planned, and taught just like classes. There was no room to foster an 'interest' in archeology. And it was not on the normal course curriculum.

The only way you knew how digs worked 'intimately' was to work on them yourself. Or be the child of archeologists who kept you on-site with them. That was when it hit him; something Tia had said. The Cades met while they were recovering from Henderson's Chorea. That kind of information would not be the sort of thing someone who made a hobby of archeology would know. Details of archeologists' lives were of interest only to people who knew them.

Under cover of running a search on EsKay digs, he pulled up the information on the personnel, backtracking to the last EsKay dig the Cades had been on.

And there it was. C-121: Active personnel, Braddon Maartens-Cade, Pota Andropolous-Cade. Dependent, Hypatia Cade, age seven.

Hypatia Cade; evacuated to station-hospital Pride of Albion by MedService AI-drone. Victim of some unknown disease. Braddon and Pota put in isolation. Hypatia never heard from again. Perhaps she died, but that wasn't likely.

There could not be very many girls named 'Hypatia' in the galaxy. The odds of two of them being evacuated to the same hospital-ship were tiny; the odds that his Tia's best friend, Doctor Kennet Uhura-Sorg, who was chief of Neurology and Neurosurgery, would have been the same doctor in charge of that other Tia's case were so minuscule he wasn't prepared to try to calculate them.

He replaced the file and logged off the boards feeling as if he had just been hit in the back of the head with a board. Oh, spirits of space. When she took me as brawn, I made a toast to our partnership "may it be as long and fruitful as the Cades’." Oh, decom it. I'm surprised she didn't bounce me out the airlock right then and there.

"Tia," he said carefully into the silent cabin. "I, uh, I'd like to apologize-"

"So, you found me out, did you?" To his surprise and profound relief, she sounded amused. "Yes, I'm Hypatia Cade. I'd thought about telling you, but then I was afraid you'd feel really badly about verbally falling over your own feet. You do realize that you can't access any data without my being aware of it, don't you?"

"Well, heck, and I thought I was being so sneaky." He managed a weak grin. "I thought I'd really been covering my tracks well enough that you wouldn't notice. I, uh, really am sorry if I made you feel badly."

"Oh, Alex, it would only have been tacky and tasteless or stupid and insensitive, if you'd done it on purpose." She laughed; he'd come to like her laugh, it was a deep, rich one. He'd often told her BB jokes just so he could hear it. "So it's neither; it's just one of those things. I assume that you're curious now. What is it you want to know about me?"

"Everything!" he blurted, and then flushed with embarrassment. "Unless you'd rather not talk about it."

"Alex, I don't mind at all! I had a very happy childhood, and frankly, it will be a lot more comfortable being able to talk about Mum and Dad, or with Mum and Dad, without trying to hide them from you." She giggled this time, instead of laughing. "Sometimes I felt as if I was trying to hide a secret lover, only in reverse!"

"So you still stay in contact with your parents?" Alex was fascinated; this went against everything he'd been told about shell-persons, either at the academy or directly from Jon Chernov. Shell-persons didn't have families; their supervisors and their classmates were their families.

"Of course I still stay in contact with them. I'm their biggest fan. If archeologists can have fans." Her center screen came up; on it was a shot of Pota and Braddon, proudly displaying an ornate set of body-armor. "Here's something from their latest letter; they just uncovered the armory, and what they found is going to set the scholastic world on its collective ears. That's iron plates you see on Bronze Age armor."

"No." He stared in fascination, and not just at the armor. At Pota and Braddon, smiling and waving like any other parents for their child. Pota pointed to something on the armor, while Braddon's mouth moved, explaining something. Tia had the sound off, and the definition wasn't good enough for Alex to lip-read.

"That's not my real interest though," she continued. "I was telling you the truth. I'm after the EsKay homeworld, but I want it because I want to find the bug that got me." The two side-screens came up, both with older pictures. "Before you ask, dear, there I am. The one on the right is my seventh birthday party, the one on the left, as you can see, is a picture of me with Theodore Bear and Moira's brawn Tomas. Ted was a present from both of them." She paused for a moment "just checking. Yes, that's the last good picture that was taken of me. The rest are all in the hospital, and I wouldn't inflict them on anyone but a neurologist."

Alex studied the two pictures, each of which showed the same bright-eyed, elfin child. An incredibly pretty child, dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a thin, delicate face and a smile that wouldn't stop. "How did you get into the shell-person program?" he asked. "I thought they didn't take anyone after the age of one!"

"They didn't, until me," she replied. "That was Doctor Kenny's doing, and Lars, the systems manager for the hospital; they were convinced that I was flexible enough to make the transition, since I was intelligent enough to understand what had happened to me, and what it meant. Which was," she added, "complete life-support. No mobility."

He shuddered. "I can see why you wouldn't want that to happen to anyone else ever again."

"Precisely." She blanked the screens before he had a chance to study the pictures further. "After I turned out so well, Lab Schools started considering older children on a case-by-case basis. They've taken three, so far, but none as old as me."

"Well, my lady, as remarkable as you are now, you must have been just as remarkable a child," he told her, meaning every word.

"Flatterer," she said, but she sounded pleased.

"I mean it," he insisted. "I interviewed with two other ships, you know. None of them had your personality. I was looking for someone like Jon Chernov; they were more like AI drones."

"You've mentioned Jon before," she replied, puzzled. "Just what does he have to do with us?"

"Didn't I tell you?" he blurted, then hit himself in the forehead with his hand. "Decom it, I didn't! Jon's a shell-person too; he was the supervisor and systems manager on the research station where my parents worked!"

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "So that's why,"

"Why what?"

"Why you treat me like you do, facing my column, asking permission to come aboard, asking me what kind of music I want in the main cabin."

"Oh, you bet!" he said with a grin. "Jon made darn sure I had good shell-soft manners before he let me go off to the Academy. He'd have verbally blistered my hide if I ever forgot you're here, and that you're the part of the team that can't go off to her own cabin to be alone."

"Tell me about him," she urged.

He had to think hard to remember the first time he ever started talking to Jon. "I think I first realized that he was around when I was about three, maybe two. My folks are chemtechs at one of the Lily-Baer research stations. There weren't a lot of kids around at the time, because it was a new station and most of the personnel were unattached. There weren't a lot of facilities for kids, and I guess what must have happened was that Jon volunteered to sort of baby sit while my parents were at work. Wasn't that hard. Basically all he had to do was make sure that the door to my room stayed locked except when he sent in servos to feed me and so forth. But I guess I kind of fascinated him, and he started talking to me, telling me stories, then directing the servos in playing with me." He laughed. "For a while my folks thought I was going through the 'invisible friend' stage. Then they got worried, because I didn't grow out of it, and were going to send me to a headshrinker. That was when Jon interrupted while they were trying to make the appointment and told them that he was the invisible friend."

Tia laughed. "You already knew that Moira and I have known each other for a long time, well, she was the CS ship that always serviced my folks' digs, that was how I got to know her."

"Gets you used to having a friend that you can't see, but can talk to," he agreed. "Well, once I started preschool, Jon lost interest for a while, until I started learning to play chess. He is quite a player himself; when he saw that I was beating the computer regularly, he remembered who I was and stepped in, right in the middle of a game. I was winning until he took over," he recalled, still a little aggrieved.

"What can I say?" she asked rhetorically.

"I suppose I shouldn't complain. He became my best friend. He was the one that encouraged my interest in archeology and when it became obvious my parents weren't going to be able to afford all the university courses that would take, he helped get me into the Academy. Did you know that a recommendation from a shell-person counts twice as much as a recommendation from anyone but a PTA and up?"

"No, I didn't!" She sounded surprised and amused. "Evidently they trust our judgment."

"Well, you've heard his messages. He's probably as pleased with how things turned out as I am." He spread his hands wide. "And that's all there is to know about me."

"Hardly," she retorted dryly. "But it does clear up a few mysteries."

When Alex hit his bunk that night, he found he was having a hard time getting to sleep. He'd always thought of Tia as a person, but now he had a face to put with the name.

Jon Chernov had shown him, once, what Jon would have looked like if he could have survived outside the shell. Alex had known that it was going to be hideous, and had managed not to shudder or turn away, but it had taken a major effort of will. After that it had just been easier not to put a face with the voice. There were completely nonhuman races that looked more human than poor Jon.

But Tia had been a captivatingly pretty child. She would have grown up into a stunning adult. Shoot, inside that shell, she probably looked like a doll. A stimulating, lifeless adult, like a puppet with no strings; a sex-companion android with no hookups. He had no desire to crack her column; he was not the sort to be attracted by anything lifeless. Feelie-porn had given him the creeps, and his one adolescent try with a sex-droid had sent him away feeling dirty and used.

But it made the tragedy of what had happened to her all the more poignant Jon's defects were such that it was a relief for everyone that he was in the shell. Tia, though...

But she was happy. She was as happy as any of his classmates in the Academy. So where was the tragedy? Only in his mind. Only in his mind...

CHAPTER SIX

Alex would have been perfectly happy if the past twelve hours had never happened.

He and Tia returned to Diogenes Base after an uneventful trip expecting to be sent out on another series of message-runs, only to learn that on this run, they would be carrying passengers. Those passengers were on the way from Central and the Institute by way of commercial liner and would not arrive for another couple of days.

That had given him a window of opportunity for a little shore leave, in a base-town that catered to some fairly heavy space-going traffic, and he had taken it.

Now he was sorry he had... oh, not for any serious reasons. He hadn't gotten drunk, or mugged, or into trouble. No, he'd only made a fool out of himself.

Only.

He'd gone out looking for company in the spaceport section, hanging around in the pubs and food-bars. He'd gotten more than one invitation, too, but the one he had followed up on was from a dark-haired, blue eyed, elfin little creature with an infectious laugh and a nonstop smile. 'Bet' was her name, and she was a fourth-generation spacer, following in her family's footloose tradition.

He hadn't wondered what had prompted his choice, hadn't even wondered why he had so deviated from his normal 'type' of brown-haired, brown-eyed and athletic. He and the girl, who it turned out was the crew chief of an AI-freighter, had a good time together. They hit a show, had some dinner, and by mutual agreement, wound up in the same hotel room.

He still hadn't thought about his choice of company; then came the moment of revelation.

When, in the midst of intimacy, he called her Tia.

He could have died, right then and there. Fortunately the young lady was understanding; Bet just giggled, called him 'Giorgi' back, and they went on from there. And when they parted, she kissed him, and told him that his 'Tia' was a lucky wench, and to give her Bet's regards.

Thank the spirits of space he didn't have to tell her the truth. All she'd seen was the CS uniform and the spacer habits and speech patterns; he could have been anything. She certainly wasn't thinking 'brawn' when she had picked him up, and he hadn't told her what he did for the Courier Service.

Instead of going straight back to the ship, he dawdled; visited a multi-virtual amusement park, and took five of the wildest adventures it offered. It took all five to wash the embarrassment of his slip out of his recent memory, to put it into perspective.

But nothing would erase the meaning of what he had done. And it was just his good fortune, and Tia's, that his partner hadn't known who Tia was. Brawns had undergone Counseling for a lot less. CS had a nasty reputation for dealing with slips like that one. They wouldn't risk one of their precious shell-persons in the hands of someone who might become so obsessed with her that he would try to get at the physical body.

He returned to the docks in a decidedly mixed state of mind, and with no ideas at all about what, if anything, he could do about it.

Tia greeted her brawn cheerfully as soon as he came aboard, but she left him alone for a little while he got himself organized, or as organized as Alex ever got.

"I've got the passenger roster," she said, once he'd stowed his gear. "Want to see them, see what we're getting for the next couple of weeks?"

"Sure," Alex replied, perking up visibly. He had looked tired when he came in; Tia reckoned shrewdly that he had been celebrating his shore leave a little too heavily. He wasn't suffering from a hangover, but it looked to her as if he'd done his two-day pass to the max, squeezing twenty-two hours of fun into every twenty-four hour period. He dropped down into his chair and she brought up her screens for him.

"Here's our team leader, Doctor Izak Hollister-Aspen." The Evaluation team leader was an elderly man; a quad-doc, as thin as a grass stem, clean-shaven, silver-haired, and so frail-looking. Tia was half-afraid he might break in the first high wind. "He's got four doctorates, he's published twelve books and about two hundred papers, and he's been head of twenty-odd teams already. He also seems to have a pretty good sense of humor. Listen."

She let the file-fragment run. "I must admit," Aspen said, in a cracked and quavery voice, "there are any number of my colleagues who would say that I should sit behind my desk and let younger bodies take over this dig. Well," he continued, cracking a smile. "I am going to do something like that. I'm going to sit behind my desk in my dome, and let the younger bodies of my team members take over the digging. Seems to me that's close enough to count."

Alex chuckled. "I like him already. I was afraid this trip was going to be a bore."

"Not likely, with him around. Well, this is our second-in-command, double-doc Siegfried Haakon-Fritz. And if this lad had been in charge, I think it might have been a truly dismal trip." She brought up the image of Fritz, who was a square-jawed, steely-eyed, stern-faced monument. He could have been used as the model for any ortho-Communist memorial statue to The Glorious Worker In Service To The State. Or maybe the Self-Righteous In Search Of A Convert. There was nothing like humor anywhere in the man's expression. It looked to her as if his head might crack in half if he ever smiled. "This is all I have, five minutes of silent watching. He didn't say a word. But maybe he doesn't believe in talking when it's being recorded."

"Why not?" Alex asked curiously. "Is he paranoid about being recorded or something?"

"He's a Practical Darwinist," she told him.

"Oh, brother," Alex replied with disgust The Practical Darwinists had their own sort of notoriety, and Tia was frankly surprised to find one in the Institute at all. They were generally concentrated in the soft sciences, when they were in the sciences at all. Personally, Tia did not consider political science to be particularly scientific.

"His political background is kind of dubious," she continued, "but since there's nothing anyone can hang on him, it simply says in the file that his politics have not always been those of the Institute. That's bureaucratic double-talk for someone they would rather not trust, but have no reason to keep them out of positions of authority."

"Got you." Alec nodded. "So, we'll just not mention politics around him, and we'll make sure it's one of the forbidden subjects in the main cabin. Who's next?"

"These are our post-docs; they have their hard science doctorates, and now they're working on their archeology doctorates." She split her center screen and installed them both on it at once. "On the right, Les Dimand-Taylor, human; on the right, Treel rish-Yr nahLeert, Rayanthan. Treel is female. Les has a Bio Doc, and Treel Xenology."

"Hmm, for Treel wouldn't Xenology be the study of humans?" Alex pointed out. Les was a very intense fellow, thin, heavily tanned, very fit-looking, but with haunted eyes. Treel's base-type seemed to be cold-weather mammalian, as she had a pelt of very fine, dense brown fur that extended down onto her cheekbones. Her round, black eyes stared directly into the lens, seeing everything, and giving the viewer the impression that she was cataloging it all.

"No audio on the post-docs, just static file pictures," she continued. "They're attached to Aspen."

"Not to Old Stone Face?" Alex asked. "Never mind. Any grad student or post-doc he'd have would be a clonal copy of himself. I can't imagine any other type staying with him for long."

"And here are our grad students." Again she split the screen. "Still working on the first doctorate. Both male. Aldon Reese-Tambuto, human; and Fred, from Dushayne."

"Fred?" Alex spluttered. Understandably. The Dushaynese could not possibly have looked less human; he had a square, flat head, literally. Flat on top, flat face, flattened sides. He was bright green and had no mouth, just a tiny hole below his nostril slits. Dushaynese were vegetarian to an extreme; on their homeworld they lived on tree sap and fruit juice. Out in the larger galaxy they did very well on sucrose-water and other liquids. They had, as a whole, very good senses of humor.

"Fred?" Alex repeated.

"Fred," she said firmly. "Very few humans would be able to reproduce his real name. His vocal organ is a vibrating membrane in the top of his head. He does human speech just fine, but we can't manage his." She blanked her screens. "I'll spare you their speeches; they are very eager, very typical young grad students and this will be their first dig."

"Save me." Alex moaned.

"Be nice," she said firmly. "Don't disillusion them. Let the next two years take care of that."

He waved his hands vigorously. "Far be it from me to let them know what gruesome fate awaits them. What was the chance of death on a dig? Twenty percent? And there's six of them?"

The chance of catching something non-fatal is a lot higher," she pointed out "Actually, the honor of being the fatality usually goes to the post-docs or the second-in-command; they're the ones doing the major explorations when a dig hits something like a tomb. The grad students usually are put to sifting sand and cataloging pottery shards."

Alex didn't get a chance to respond to that, for the first members of the team arrived at the lock at that moment, and he went down the lift to welcome them aboard, while Tia directed the servos in storing most of their baggage in the one remaining empty hold. As they came up the lift, both the young 'men' were chattering away at high speed, with Alex in the middle, nodding sagely from time to time and clearly not catching more than half of what they said. Tia decided to rescue him.

"Welcome aboard, Fred, Aldon," she said, cutting through the chatter with her own, higher-pitched voice.

Silence, as both the grad students looked around for the speaker.

Fred caught on first, and while his face remained completely without expression, he had already learned the knack of displaying human-type emotions with his voice. "My word!" he exclaimed with delight, "you are a brainship, are you not, dear lady?"

As a final incongruity, he had adopted a clipped British accent to go along with his voice.

"Precisely, sir," she replied. "AH One-Oh-Three-Three at your service, so to speak."

"Wow," Aldon responded, dearly awestruck. "We get to ride in a brainship? They've actually put us on a brainship? Wow, PTAs don't even get rides from brainships! I've never even seen a brainship before. Uh, hi, what's your real name?" He turned slowly, trying to figure out which way to face.

"Hypatia, Tia for short," she replied, tickled by the young beings' responses. "Don't worry about where to look, just assume I'm the whole ship. I am, you know. I even have eyes in your quarters," she chuckled at Aldon's flush of embarrassment, "but don't worry, I won't use them. Your complete privacy is important to us."

"I can show you the cabins, and you can pick the ones you want," Alex offered. "They're all the same; I'm just reserving the one nearest the main cabin for Doctor Hollister-Aspen."

"Stellar!" Aldon enthused. "Wow, this is better than the liner coming in! I had to share a cabin with Fred and two other guys."

"Quite correct," Fred seconded. "I enjoyed Aldon's company, but the other two were, dare I say, spoiled young reprobates? High Family affectations without the style, the connections, or the Family. Deadly bores, I assure you, and a spot of privacy will be welcome. Shall we, then?"

The two grad students were unpacking their carryon baggage when the two post-docs arrived, this time singly. Treel arrived first, accepted the greetings with the calm, intense demeanor of a Zen Master, and took the first cabin she was offered.

Les Dimand-Taylor was another case altogether. It was obvious to Tia the moment he came aboard, without the automatic salute he made to her column, that he was ex-military. He confirmed her assumption as soon as Alex offered him a cabin.

"Anything will do, old man," he said, with a kind of nervous cheer. "Better than barracks, that's for sure. Unless, Lady Tia, you don't have anything that makes an unexpected noise in the middle of the night, do you? I'm," he laughed a little shakily, "I'm afraid I'm just a little twitchy about noises when I'm asleep. What they euphemistically call 'unfortunate experiences'. I'll keep my door locked so I don't disturb anyone but-"

"Give him the cabin next to Treel, Alex," she said firmly. "Doctor Dimand-Taylor,"

"Les, my dear," he replied, with a thin smile. "Les to you and your colleagues, always. Pulled me out of a tight spot, one of you BB teams did. Besides, when people hear my title they tend to start telling me about their backs and innards. Hate to have to tell them that I'd only care about their backs if the too, too solid flesh had been melted off the bones for the past thousand years or so."

"Les, then," she said. "I assume you know Treel?"

"Very well. A kind and considerate lady. If you have her assigned as my neighbor, she's so quiet I never know she's there." He seemed relieved that Tia didn't press him for details on the 'tight spot' he'd been in.

"That cabin and hers are buried in the sound-proofing around the holds," Tia told him. "You shouldn't hear anything, and I can generate white-noise for you at night, if you'd like."

He relaxed visibly. "That would be charming of you, thanks awfully. My superior, Doc Aspen, told the others about my little eccentricities, so they know not to startle me. So we should be fine."

He went about his unpacking, and Alex returned to the main cabin.

"Commando," Tia said succinctly.

"That in his records?" Alex asked. "I'm surprised they left that there. Not saying where, though, are they?"

"If you know where to look and what to look at, the fact that he was a commando is in his records," she told her brawn. "But where, that's not in the Institute file. It's probably logged somewhere. Remember not to walk quietly, my dear."

"Since I'd rather not get karate-chopped across the throat, that sounds like a good idea." He thought for a moment and went off to his cabin, returning with what looked like a bracelet with a bell on it. "These things went into fashion a couple of months ago, and I bought one, but I didn't like it." He bent over to fasten it around his boot. "There. Now he'll hear me coming, in case I forget to stamp." The bell was not a loud one, but it was definitely producing an audible sound.

"Good idea, ah, here's the Man himself. Alex, he's going to need some help."

Alex hurried down to the lift area and gave Doctor Aspen a hand with his luggage. There wasn't much of it, but Doctor Aspen was not capable of carrying much for long. Tia wondered what could have possessed the Institute to permit this man to go out into the field again.

She found out, once he was aboard. His staff immediately clustered around him, fired with enthusiasm, as soon as he was settled in his cabin. He asked permission of Tia and Alex to move the convocation into the main cabin and use one of her screens.

"Certainly," Tia answered, when Alex deferred to her. She was quite charmed by Doctor Aspen, who called her 'my lady', and accorded to her all the attention and politeness he gave his students and underlings.

As they moved into main room, Doctor Aspen turned toward her column. "I am told that you have some interest and education in archeology, my lady Tia," he said, as he settled into a seat near one of the side screens. "And you, too, Alex. Please, since you'll be on-site with us, feel free to participate. And if you know something we should, or notice something we miss, feel free to contribute."

Alex was obviously surprised; Tia wasn't She had gleaned some of this from the records. Aspen's students stayed with him, went to enormous lengths to go on-site with him, went on to careers of their own full of warm praise for their mentor. Aspen was evidently that rarest of birds, the exceptional, inspirational teacher who was also a solid researcher and scientist

Within moments, Aspen had drawn them all into his charmed circle, calling up the first team's records, drawing his students, and even Alex, into making observations. Tia kept a sharp eye out for the missing member of the party, however, for she had the feeling that Haakon-Fritz had deliberately timed his entrance to coincide with the gathering of Aspen's students. Tia figured that he wanted an excuse to feel slighted. She wasn't going to give it to him.

She could, and did, hook herself into the spaceport surveillance system, and she spotted Haakon-Fritz coming long before he was in range of her own sensors. Plenty of time to interrupt the animated discussion with a subtle, "Gentlebeings, Doctar Haakon-Fritz is crossing the tarmac."

Treel and Les exchanged a wordless look, but said nothing. Aspen simply smiled, and rose from his chair, as Tia froze the recording they had been watching. Alex hurried down the stairs to intercept Haakon-Fritz at the lift.

So instead of being greeted by the backs of those deep in discussion, the man found himself greeted by the Courier Service brawn, met at the top of the lift by the rest of his party, and given an especially hearty greeting by his superior.

His expression did not change so much as a hair, but Tia had the distinct feeling that he was disgruntled. "Welcome aboard, Doctor Haakon-Fritz," Tia said, as he shook hands briefly with the other members of his party. "We have a choice of five cabins for you, if you'd..."

"If you have more than one cabin available," Haakon-Fritz interrupted rudely, speaking not to Tia, who he ignored, but to Alex, "I would like to see them all before I make a choice."

Tia knew Alex well enough by now to know that he was angry, but he covered it beautifully. "Certainty; Professor," he said, giving Haakon-Fritz the lesser of his titles. "If you'll follow me." He led the way back into the cabin section, leaving Haakon-Fritz to carry his own bags.

Treel made a little growl that sounded like disgust; Fred rolled his eyes, which was the closest he could come to a facial expression. "My word," Fred said, his voice ripe with surprise. "That was certainly rude!"

"He ees a Practical Darweeneest," Treel replied, with a curl to her lip. "Your pardon, seer," she said to Aspen. I know that you feel he ees a good scienteest, but I am glad he ees not the one in charge."

Fred was still baffled. "Practical Darwinist?" he said. "Does someone want to explain to a baffled young veggie just what that might be and why he was so rude to Lady Tia?"

Les took up the gauntlet with a sigh. "A Practical Darwinist is one who believes that Darwin's Law applies to everything. If someone is in an accident, they shouldn't be helped, if an earthquake levels a city, no aid should be sent, if a plague breaks out, only the currently healthy should be inoculated; the victims should be isolated and live or die as the case may be."

Fred's uneasy glance toward her column made Tia decide to spare Les the embarrassment of stating the obvious. "And as you have doubtless surmised, the fanatical Practical Darwinists find the existence of shell-persons to be horribly offensive. They won't even acknowledge that we exist, given the option."

Professor Aspen shook his head sadly. "A brilliant scientist, but tragically flawed by fanaticism," he said, as he took his seat again. "Which is why he has gotten as far as he will ever go. He had a chance, was given a solo Exploration dig, and refused to consider any evidence that did not support his own peculiar partyline. Now he is left to be the chief clerk of digs like ours." He looked soberly into the faces of his four students. "Let this be a lesson to you, gentlebeings. Never let fanatic devotion blind you to truth."

"Or, in other words," Tia put in blithely, "the problem with a fanatic is that their brains turn to tofu and they accept nothing as truth except what conforms to their ideas. What makes them dangerous is not that they'll die to prove their truth, but that they'll let you die, or take you with them, to prove it"

"Well put, my lady." Doctor Aspen turned his attention back to the screen. "Now since I know from past experience that Haakon-Fritz will spend the time until takeoff sulking in his cabin, shall we continue with our discussion?"

The Exploration team had left the site in good shape; equipment stowed, domes inflated but sealed, open trenches covered to protect them. The Evaluation team erected two new living domes and a second laboratory dome in short order, and settled down to their work.

Everything seemed to be under control; now that the team was on-site, even the sulky Haakon-Fritz fell to and took on his share of the duties. There would seem to have been no need for AH One-Oh-Three-Three to remain on-planet when they could have been making the rounds of 'their' established digs.

But that was not what regulations called for, and both Tia and Alex knew why, even if the members of the team didn't. Regulations for a CS ship attached to Institute duty hid a carefully concealed second agenda, when the ship placed a new Exploration or Evaluation team.

Archeological teams were put together with great care; not only because of the limited number of personnel, but because of their isolation. They were going to be in danger from any number of things, all of the hazards that Tia had listed to Alex on their first mission. There was no point in exposing them to danger from within.

So the prospective members of a given team were probed, tested, and Psyched to a fair-thee-well, both for individual stability and for interactive stability with the rest of the team. Still, mistakes could be made, and had been in the past. Sometimes those mistakes had led to a murder, or at least, an attempted murder.

When a psychological problem surfaced, it was usually right at the beginning of the stint, after the initial settling in period was over, and once a routine had been established and the stresses of the dig started to take their toll. About that time, if something was going to go wrong, it did. The team had several weeks in cramped quarters in transit to establish interpersonal relations; ideal conditions for cabin fever. Ideal conditions for stress to surface, and that stress could lead to severe interpersonal problems.

So regulations were that the courier, whether BB or fully-manned, was to manufacture some excuse to stay for several days, with the ship personnel staying inside and out of sight, but with the site being fully monitored from inside the ship. The things they were to look for were obvious personality conflicts, new behavioral quirks, or old ones going from 'quirk' to 'psychosis'. Making sure there was nothing that might give rise to a midnight axe murder. It would not have been the first time that someone snapped under stress.

Alex was most worried about Les, muttering things about post-trauma syndrome and the fragility of combat veterans. Tia had her own picks for trouble, if trouble came. Either Fred or Aldon, for neither one of them had ever been on-site in a small dig before, and until he went to the Institute, Aldon had never even been off-planet. Despite his unpleasantness to her, Haakon-Fritz was brilliant and capable, and he had been on several digs before without any trouble surfacing. And now that they were all on-site, while he was distant, he was also completely cooperative, and his behavior in no way differed from his behavior on previous digs. There was no indication that he was likely to take his fanatic beliefs into his professional life. Fred and Aldon had only been part of a crew of hundreds with an Excavation team, where there were more people to interact with, fewer chances for personality stress, and no real trials to face but the day to day boredom of repetitive work.

For the first couple of days, everything seemed to be just fine, not only as far as the personnel were concerned, but as far as the conditions. Both Tia and Alex breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon by half.

For that night, the winter rains began. Tia had been sifting through some of the records she'd copied at the base, looking for another potential investment prospect like Largo Draconis. It was late; very late, the site was quiet and dark, and Alex had called it a night. He was in his cabin, just about at the dreaming stage, and Tia was considering shutting down for her mandated three hours of DeepSleep, when the storm struck.

'Struck' was the operative word, for a wall of wind and rain hit her skin hard enough to rattle her for a moment, and that was followed by a blast of lightning and thunder that shook Alex out of bed.

"What?" he yelped, coming up out of sleep with a shout "How? Who?" He shook his head to clear it, as another peal of thunder made Tia's walls vibrate. "What's going on?" he asked, as Tia sank landing-spikes from her feet into the ground beneath her, to stabilize her position. "Are we under attack or something?"

"No, it's a storm, Alex," she replied absently, making certain that everything was locked down and all her servos were inside. "One incredible thunderstorm, I've never experienced anything like it!"

She turned on her external cameras and fed them to her screens so he could watch, while she made certain that she was well-insulated against lightning strikes and that all was still well at the site. Alex wandered out into the main cabin and sat in his chair, awestruck by the display of raw power going on around them,

Multiple lightning strikes were going on all around them; not only was the area as bright as day, it was often brighter. Thunder boomed continuously, the wind howled, and sheets, no, entire linen closets of rain pounded the ground, not only baffling any attempt at a visual scan of the site, but destroying any hope of any other kind of check. With this much lightning in the air, there was no point even in trying a radio call.

"What's happening down at the site?" Alex asked anxiously.

"No way of telling," she said reluctantly. "The Exploration team went through these rains once already, so I guess we can assume that the site itself isn't going to wash away, or float away. For the rest, the domes are insulated against lightning, but who knows what's likely to happen to the equipment? Especially in all this lightning."

Her words proved only too prophetic; for although the rain lasted less than an hour, the deluge marked a forty-degree drop in temperature, and the effects of the lightning were permanent.

When the storm cleared, the news from the site was bad. Lightning had not only struck the ward-off field generator, it had slagged it There was nothing left but a melted pile of plasteel and duraloy. Tia didn't see how one strike could have done that much damage; the generator must have been hit over and over. The backup was corroded beyond any repair, though Haakon-Fritz and Les labored over it for most of the night Too many parts had been ruined, probably while it sat in its crate through who-knew-how-many transfers. Never once uncrated and checked, and now Doctor Aspen's team paid the price for that neglect.

Tia consulted with Doctor Aspen in person the next morning. There was little sign of the damage from where they sat, but the results were undeniable. No ward-off generator. No protection from native fauna, from insectoids to the big canids. And if the huge grazers, the size of moose, were to become aggressive, there would be no way to keep them out of the camp. Ordinary fences would not hold against a herd of determined grazers; the last team had proved that.

"I don't have a spare in the holds," Tia told the team leader. "I don't have even half the parts you need for the corroded generator. There were no storms like the one last night mentioned in the records of the previous team, but we should assume there are going to be more. How many of them can you handle? Winter is coming on, and I can't predict what the native animals are going to do. Do you want to pull the team out?"

Doctor Aspen pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I can't think of any reason why we should, my lady," he replied. "The only exterior equipment that had no protection was the ward-off generator. The first team stayed here without incident all winter, there's nothing large enough to be a real threat to us, so far as I can tell. We'll have a few insects, perhaps, until first hard frost. I imagine those jackal-like beasts will lurk about and make a nuisance of themselves. But they're hardly a threat."

Alex, feet up on the console as usual, agreed with the archeologist. "I don't see any big threat here, either. Unless lightning takes out something a lot more vital."

Tia didn't like it, but she didn't challenge them, either. "If that's the way you want it," she agreed. "But we'll stay until the rains are over, just in case."

Stay they did; but that was the first and the last of the major storms. After the single, spectacular downpour, the rains came gently, between midnight and dawn, with hardly a peal of thunder to wake Alex. She had to conclude that the first storm had been a freak occurrence, something no one could have predicted, and lost a little of her ire over the lack of warning from the previous team. But that still didn't excuse the corroded generator.

Still, the weather stayed cold, and the rain left coatings of ice on everything. It would be gone by midmorning, but the difficulty in walking around the site meant that the team changed their working hours, beginning around ten-hundred and finishing about twenty-two-hundred. Despite his recorded disclaimer, Doctor Aspen insisted on working alongside his students, and no one, not even Haakon-Fritz, wanted him to risk a fell on the ice.

Meanwhile, Tia made note of a disturbing development. The sudden cold had sent most of the small game and pest animals into hiding or hibernation. That left the normally solitary jackal-dogs without their usual prey, and in what appeared to be seasonal behavior, they began to pack up for the winter, so that they could take down the larger grazers.

The disturbing part was that a very large pack began lurking around the camp. Now Tia regretted her choice of landing areas. The site was between her and the camp; that was all very well, especially for observing the team at work, but the dogs were lurking in the hills around the camp. And with no ward-off generator to keep them out of it.

She mentioned her worry to Alex, who pointed out that the beasts always scattered at any sign of aggression on the part of a human. She mentioned it again to Doctor Aspen, who said the animals were probably just looking for something to scavenge and would leave them alone once they realized there was nothing to eat there.

She never had a chance to mention it again.

With two moons, both in different phases, the nights were never dark unless it was raining. But the floodlights at the site made certain that the darkness was driven away. And lately, the nights were never silent either; the pack of jackal-dogs wailed from the moment the sun went down to the moment the rains began. Tia quickly became an expert on what those howls meant; the yipping social-howl, the long, drawn-out rally-cry, and most ominous, the deep-chested hunting call. She was able to tell, just by the sounds, where they were, whether they were in pursuit, and when the quarry had won the chase, or lost it.

Tia wasn't too happy about them; the pack numbered about sixty now, and they weren't looking too prosperous. Evidently the activity at the site had driven away the larger grazers they normally preyed on; that had the effect of making all the smaller packs join up into one mega-pack, so there was always some food, but none of them got very much of it They weren't at the bony stage yet, but there was a certain desperate gauntness about them. The grazers they did chase were escaping five times out of six, and they weren't getting in more than two hunts in a night

Should I suggest that the team feed them? Perhaps take a grav-sled and go shoot something and drag it in once every couple of days? But would that cause problems later? That would be giving the pack the habit of dependence on humans, and that wouldn't be good. Could they lure the pack into another territory that way, though? Or would feeding them make them lose their fear of humans? She couldn't quite make up her mind about that, but the few glimpses she'd had of the pack before sunset had put her in mind of certain Russian folktales, troikas in the snow, horses foaming with panic, and wolves snapping at the runners. Meanwhile, the pack got a little closer each night before they faded into the darkness.

At least it was just about time for the team to break off for the night Once they were in their domes, they'd be safe.

As if in answer to her thought, the huge lights pivoted up and away from the site, as they were programmed to do, lighting a clear path for the team from the site to the camp. When everyone was safely in the domes, Les would turn them off remotely. So far, the lights alone had kept the jackal-dogs at bay. They lurked just outside the path carved by the lights, but would not venture inside.

As if to answer that thought, the pack howled just as the First of the team members emerged from the covered excavation area. It sounded awfully close. Tia ran a quick infrared scan. The pack was awfully close, right on the top of the hill to the right of the site!

The beasts stared down at the team, and the leader howled again. There was no mistaking that how], not when all the rest answered it. It was the hunt-call. Quarry sighted; time to begin the chase.

And the leader was staring right at the archeologists. The team stared back, sensing that there was something different tonight. No one stirred; not archeologists, nor jackal-dogs. The beasts' eyes glared red in the darkness, reflection from the work lights, but no less disturbing for having a known scientific explanation.

"Alex," she said tightly. "Front and center. We have a situation." He emerged from his cabin as if shot from a gun, took one look at the screen, and pelted for the hold where they kept the HA grav-sled.

Then the pack poured down the hillside in a furry avalanche.

Haakon-Fritz took off like a world-class sprinter, leaving the rest behind. For all the attention that he paid them, the rest of his team might just as well have not existed.

Shell crack! Aspen can't run.

But Les and Treel were not about to leave Aspen to become the a la carte special; as if they had rehearsed the move, they each grabbed one arm and literally picked him up off his feet between them and started running. Fred and Aldon grabbed shovels to act as some kind of flank-guard. With the jackal-dogs closing on them with every passing moment, the entire group pelted off for the shelters.

They were barely a quarter of the way there, with the jackals halfway down the hill and gaining momentum, when Haakon-Fritz reached the nearest shelter. He hit the side of the dome with a crash and pawed the door open. He flung himself inside.

And slammed it shut; the red light coming on over the frame indicating that he had locked it.

"Alex!" Tia cried in anguish, as the jackal-dogs bore down upon their prey. "Alex, do something!" She had never felt so horribly helpless.

Grav-sleds made no noise, but they had hedraplayers and powerful speakers, meant both to entertain their drivers and to broadcast prerecorded messages on the fly. A blast of raucous hard-wire shatter-rock blared out from beneath her, she got her underbelly cameras on just as Alex peeled out in the sled at top speed, music screaming at top volume.

The unfamiliar shrieks and howls behind them startled the pack for a moment, and they hesitated, then came to a dead halt, peering over their shoulders.

The rock music was so unlike anything they had ever heard before that they didn't know how to react; Alex plowed straight through the middle of them and they shied away to either side.

He was never going to be able to make a pickup on the five still running for their lives without the pack being on all of them, but while he was on the move with music caterwauling, the jackal-dogs hesitated to attack him. And while he was harassing them, their attention was on him, not on their quarry.

That must have been what he had figured in the first place, that he would startle them enough to give the rest of the team a chance to get to safety inside that second dome. While the archeologists ignored what was going on behind them and kept right on to the second shelter, Alex kept making dives at the pack, scattering them when he could, keeping the sled between them and the team. It was tricky flying, stunt-flying with a grav-sled, pulling crazy maneuvers less than a meter from the ground. Not a lot of margin for error.

He cornered wildly; rocking the sled up on one side, skewing it over in flat spins, feinting at the pack leader and gunning away before the beast had a chance to jump into the sled. Over the sound of the wild music, the warning signals and overrides screamed objection for what Alex was doing. Alex challenged the jackal-dogs with the only weapon he had; the sled. Tia longed for her ethological pack; still not approved for the Institute ships. With a stun-needler, they could have at least knocked some of the pack out.

The animals assumed that the attack was meant to drive them off or kill them. They must have been hungrier than any of them had guessed, for when nothing happened to hurt or kill any of the pack, they began making attempts to mob the sled, and they seemed to be trying to think of ways to pull it down.

Tia knew why, then, in a flash of insight Alex had just gone from 'fellow predator' to 'prey'; the jackal-dogs were used to grazer-bulls charging them aggressively to try to drive them away. Alex was imitating the behavior of the bulls, though he did not know it, and in better times, the pack probably would have responded by moving to easier prey. But these were lean times, and any imitation of prey behavior meant they would try to catch and kill what was taunting them.

Alex was now in real danger.

But Alex was a better flyer than Tia had ever thought; he kept the sled just out of reach of a strong jump, kept it moving in unpredictable turns and spins.

Then, one of the biggest beasts in the pack leapt, and landed, feet scrabbling on the back bumper of the sled.

"Alex!" Tla shrieked again. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw his danger.

He sent the sled into a spin; the sled's protection overrides objected strenuously, whining as they fought him. The jackal-dog fought, too, hind-claws skidding against the duraloy of the bumper. Alex watched desperately over his shoulder as the beast's claws found a hold, and it began hauling itself over the bumper toward him.

In what was either a burst of inspiration or insanity, he jammed on the braking motors. The sled stopped dead in mid-spin, flinging him sideways against his safety-belts.

And flinging the jackal-dog off the back of the sled entirely, sending it flying into the pack, and tumbling at least a dozen of them nose-over-tail.

At that moment the team reached the second dome.

The flash of light as they opened the door told Alex they were safe, and he no longer had to make a target of himself. Alex burned air back towards Tia; she dropped open a cargo-bay, activated restraint-fields and hoped he'd be able to brake in time to keep from hitting the back wall. At the speed he was coming, the restraint-fields, meant to keep the sled from banging around too much in rough flight, wouldn't do much.

He didn't even slow down as he hit the bay door, which she slammed down behind him. Instead, he killed the power and skidded to a halt on the sled's belly in a shower of sparks. The sled skewed sideways and crashed into the back wall, but between Alex's own maneuver and the restraint-fields, the impact wasn't bad enough to do more than dent her hold-wall. Once again, Alex was hurled sideways against his seat-belts. There were a half-dozen impacts on the cargo door, indicating the leaders of the pack hitting it, unable to stop.

He sat there for a moment, then sagged over the steering wheel, breathing heavily. Nothing on Tia's pickups made her think he was hurt, so she waited for him to catch his breath.

When his breathing slowed, and he looked up, she focused on his face. He was flushed, but showed no shock, and no sign of pain.

"Well," she said, keeping her voice calm and light, "you certainly know how to make an entrance."

He blinked, then leaned back in his seat, and began laughing.

It was no laughing matter the next day, when Haakon-Fritz emerged from his shelter and was confronted by the remainder of his team. He had no choice; Tia had threatened to hole his dome if he didn't, giving the beasts a way inside. It was an empty threat, but he didn't know that; like any other fanatic Practical Darwinist, he had never bothered to learn the capabilities of brainships.

Les took charge of him before he had a chance to say anything; using some kind of commando-tactics to get a hold on the man that immobilized him, then frogmarching him into the ship.

By common consent, everyone else waited until Les and Tia had secured Haakon-Fritz in one of her cabins, with access to what was going on in the main cabin, but no way of interrupting the proceedings. Any time he started in on one of his speeches, she could cut him off and he'd be preaching to the bare walls.

As the others gathered in the cabin, Doctor Aspen looking particularly shaken and worn, Tia prepared to give them the news. It wasn't completely bad... but they weren't going to like part of it

"We aren't pulling you out," she said, "although we've got that authority. We understand your concern about leaving this dig and losing essentially two years, and we share it."

As she watched four of the five faces register their mix of relief and anticipation, she wished she could give them unmixed orders.

"That's the good news," Alex said, before anyone could respond. "Here's the bad news. In order to stay here, we're going to order you to stay in your domes until the next courier shows up with your new generator and parts for the old one. We ordered one for you when the old one slagged; the courier should arrive in about a month or two with the new one."

"But-" Doctor Aspen started to object

"Doctor, it's that, or we pull you right this moment," Tia said firmly. "We will not leave you with those canids on the prowl unless you, each of you, pledge us that. You didn't see how those beasts attacked Alex in his sled. They have no fear of humans now, and they're hungry. They'll attack you without hesitation, and I wouldn't bet on them waiting until dark to do it."

"What's better?" Alex asked shrewdly. "Lose two months of work, or two years?"

With a sigh, Doctor Aspen gave his word, as did the rest, although Fred and Aldon did so with visible relief.

"If they'd just supply us with damned guns..." Les muttered under his breath.

"There are sophonts on the other continent. I didn't make the rules, Les," Tia replied, and he flushed. "I didn't make them, but I will enforce them. And by the letter of those rules, I should be ordering you to pack right now."

"Speaking of packing" number="" Alex picked up the cue. "We need you to bundle Haakon-Fritz's things and stow them in the hold. He's coming back with us."

Now Les made no attempt to hide his pleasure, but Doctor Aspen looked troubled. "I don't see any reason, "he began.

"Sorry, Doctor, but we do," Alex interrupted. "Haakon-Fritz finally broke the rules. It's pretty obvious to both of us that he attempted to turn his politics into reality."

In his cabin, the subject of discussion got over his shock and began a shouted tirade. As she had threatened, Tia cut him off, but she kept the recorders going. At the moment, they couldn't prove what had been on the man's mind when he locked his colleagues out. With any luck, his own words might condemn him.

"Doctor, no matter what his motivations were, he abandoned us," Les said firmly. "One more fighter might have made a difference to the pack, and the fact remains that when he reached shelter, instead of doing anything helpful, he ran inside and locked the door. The former might only have been cowardice, but the latter is criminal."

"That's probably the way the Board of Inquiry will see it," Tia agreed. "We'll see to it that he has justice, but he can't be permitted to endanger anyone else's life this way again."

After a bit more argument, Doctor Aspen agreed.

The team left the shelter of the ship, gathered what they could from the dig, and returned to the domes. Well before sunset, Les and Fred returned with a gravsled laden with Haakon-Fritz' belongings stowed in crates, and by the rattling they were making, the goods hadn't been stowed any too carefully.

Tia didn't intend to expend too much effort in stowing the crates either.

"You'll keep everyone in the domes for us, won't you?" Tia asked Les anxiously. "You're the one I'm really counting on. I don't trust Doctor Aspen's common sense to hold his curiosity at bay for too long."

"You read him right there, dear lady," Les replied, tossing the last of the crates off the sled for the servo to pick up, "But the rest of us have already agreed. Treel was the most likely hold-out, but even she agrees with you on your reading of the way those jackal-dogs were acting."

"What will happen to the unfortunate Haakon-Fritz?" Fred asked curiously.

"That's going to depend on the board," she told him, "I've got a recording of him ranting in his cabin about survival and obsolescence, and pretty much spouting the extremist version of the Practical Darwinism party line. That isn't going to help him any, but how much of it is admissible, I don't know."

"Probably none of it to a court," Les admitted after thought. "But the board won't like it."

"All of it's been sent on ahead," she told him. "He’ll probably be met by police, even if, ultimately, there's nothing he can be charged with."

"At the very least, after this little debacle, he'll be dropped from the list of possible workers for anything less than a Class Three dig," Fred observed cheerfully. "They'll take away his seniority, if they have any sense, and demote him back to general worker. He'll spend the rest of his life with us undergrads, sorting pot-shards."

"Assuming he can find anyone who is willing to take a chance on him," Alex responded. "Which I would make no bets on."

He patted Tia's side. "Just be grateful you're not having to go back with us," he concluded. "If you thought the trip out was bad with Haakon-Fritz sulking, imagine what it's going to be like returning."

CHAPTER SEVEN

There was a message waiting for Tia when they returned to the main base at Central, with Doctor Haakon-Fritz still confined to quarters. A completely mysterious message. Just the words, "Call this number," a voice-line number for somewhere in the L-5 colonies, and an ID-code she recognized as being from Lars.

Now what was Lars up to?

Puzzled, she left the message in storage until Alex completed the complicated transfer of their not-quite prisoner, and accompanied him and duplicate copies of the records involving him down to the surface. Only then, when she was alone, did she make the call.

"Friesner, Sherman, Stirling and Huff," said a secretary on the first ring. There was no delay, so Tia assumed that the office was somewhere in one of the half-dozen stations or L-5 colonies nearby. "Investment brokers."

"I was told to call this number," Tia said cautiously. "I, my name is Hypatia Cade..." She hesitated as she almost gave her ship-numbers instead of her name.

"Ah, Miz Cade, of course," the secretary said, sounding pleased. "We've been waiting for you to call. Let me explain the mystery; Friesner, Sherman, Stirling and Huff specialize in investments for shell-persons like yourself. A Mister Lars Mendoza at Pride of Albion opened an account for you here to manage the investments you had already made. If you'll hold, I'll see if one of the partners is free..."

Tia hated to be put on hold, but it wasn't for more than a microsecond. "Miz Cade," said a hearty-sounding male voice, "I'm Lee Stirling; I'm your broker if you want to keep me on, and I have good news for you. Your investments at Largo Draconis have done very well. Probably much better than you expected."

"I don't know about that," she replied, letting a little humor leak through. "My expectations were pretty high." There was something about that voice that sounded familiar, but she couldn't identify it. Was it an accent, or rather, lack of one?

"But did you expect to triple your total investment?" Lee Stirling countered. "Your little seed money grew into quite the mighty oak tree while you were gone!"

"Uh." she said, taken so much by surprise that she didn't know what to say. "What do you mean by total investment?"

"Oh, your companies split their bonds two times while you were gone; you had the option of cash or bonds, and we judged you wanted the bonds, at least while the value was still increasing." Stirling was trying to sound matter-of-fact, but couldn't keep a trace of gloating out of his voice. "Those bonds are now worth three times what they were after the last split."

"Split?" she said faintly. "I, uh, really don't know what that means. I'm" number="new at this."

Patiently Stirling walked her through exactly what had happened to her investment "Now the question you have in front of you is whether you want to sell out now, while the value of the bond is still increasing, or whether you want to wait."

"What's happening on Largo Draconis?" she asked. After all, her investment had been based on what was going to happen in the real world, not the strange and unpredictable universe of the stock market And from the little she had seen, the universe of the stock market seemed to have very little to do with 'real' reality.

"I thought you'd ask that. Your companies have pretty much saturated their market," Stirling told her. "The situation has stabilized, just short of disaster, thanks to them. The bond prices are going up, but a lot more slowly. I think they're going to flatten out fairly soon. I'd get out, if I were you."

"Do it," she said flatly. "I'd like you to put everything I earned into Moto-Prosthetics, preferred stock, with voting rights. Hold onto the seed money until I contact you.

"Taking care of it now, there. All logged in, Hypatia. I'm looking forward to seeing what you're going to invest in next." Stirling sounded quite satisfied. "I hope you'll stay with us. We're a new firm, but we're solid, we have a lot of experience, and we intend to service our clients with integrity. Miz Friesner was formerly a senior partner in Weisskopf, Dixon, Friesner and Jacobs, and the rest of us were her handpicked proteges. She's our token softie."

"Token, Oh! You're all-"

"Shell-persons, right, all except Miz Friesner. Oh, we all worked on the stock, bond, and commodity exchanges, but as systems managers. We couldn't do any investments while we were systems managers, but Miz Friesner agreed to join us when we bought out our contracts." Stirling chuckled. "We've been planning this for a long time. Now we're relying on grapevine communications within the shell-net for those like us who want to invest, for whatever reasons, and would rather not go through either their Counselors, their Supervisors, or their Advocates." He sent her a complicated burst of emoticons conveying a combination of disgust, weariness, annoyance, and impatience. "We are adults, after all. We can think for ourselves. Just because we're rooted to one spot or one structure, it doesn't follow that all of us need keepers."

She sent back a burst that mirrored his, with the addition of amusement. "Some of us do, but not anyone who's been out in the world for more than fifty years or so, I wouldn't think. Well, I'll tell a couple of friends of mine about you, that's for certain."

"Word of mouth, as I said." Stirling laughed. "I have to tell you, after that phenomenal start, we're all very interested in your next investment choice."

I'll have it in a couple of days at most," she promised, and signed off.

Well, now it was certainly time to start digging for that second choice, and she couldn't hope to happen on it the way she had the last time.

This time, it was going to take a combination of stupidity on someone's part, and her own computational power. So she concentrated on sorting out those colonies that had been in existence for less than a hundred years. It was probably fair to assume that anything repetitive that she would be able to take advantage of would have to take place within that kind of cycle.

That narrowed the field quite a bit, but it meant that she was going to have to concentrate her search by categories. Floods were the first things that came to mind, so she called up geological and climatological records on all of her candidates and ran a search for flood patterns.

Meanwhile she and Alex were also dealing with the authorities on the Haakon-Fritz case, which looked likely to put the Practical Darwinists out of business, at least with the general public, and the Institute in regards to resupply. Tia was determined not to leave port this time without that ethological tagging kit. Alex was tired of dealing with each crisis barehanded.

He demanded a supply of firearms, locked up until authorized if necessary, but he wanted to have something to enforce his decisions or to defend himself and others.

"What if Haakon-Fritz had gone berserk?" he asked. "What if those canids had been more aggressive?"

Courier Services was agreeable, but the Institute was fighting him; their long-time policy of absolute pacifism was in direct conflict with any such demand. The ban was clear; on any site where there were nearby sophonts with an Iron Age civilization or above, and 'nearby' meant on the same continent, absolutely no arms were to be permitted in association with any Institute personnel, not even those under contract. And since the couriers hit at least one dig on every run that came under the ban, they were not allowed any weaponry at any time. Tia backed her brawn, and she was lobbying with CS and the Lab Schools to help. After all, her well-being was partially dependent on his. The Institute, on the other hand, was balking because there were those who would take the presence of even small arms on board the courier in the worst possible interpretation.

Tia could see their point, but Institute couriers were the only ones not carrying some kind of hand weaponry. They were likely at any time to run into smugglers, who absolutely would be armed. If CS made a ruling on the subject, there would be no way the Institute could get around it

Meanwhile, on the subject of Haakon-Fritz, things were definitely heating up. The recordings of his Olympic sprint to shelter had somehow gotten leaked to the media, fortunately, long after Tia had locked down her copies, along with the following recording of Alex's heroic dash to the rescue via grav-sled. Alex was a minor celebrity for a day, but he successfully avoided the media, and they soon grew tired of his self-deprecating attitude, and his refusal to make himself photogenic. Haakon-Fritz did not avoid the media, he sought them out, and he became everyone's favorite villain. The Institute could not keep the incident quiet.

The Practical Darwinists came to their proponent's rescue, and only made things worse with their public statements of support and their rhetoric. People did not care to hear that they were weaklings, failures, and ought to be done away with for the good of the race. It began to look as if there was going to be a public trial, no matter how hard the Institute tried to avoid one.

It was on the eve of that trial that Tia finally found her next investment project. In the Azteca system, the third planet, predictably Terran, known as Quetzecoatl.

Interstellar Teleson, one of the major communications firms in their quadrant with cross-contracts and reciprocal agreements across known space, had just relocated their sector corporate headquarters on Quetzecoatl. The location had a great deal to be said for it, central, in the middle of a stable continental plate, good climate. That, however, was not why they had relocated there.

It was one of those secretly negotiated High Family contracts, and Tia had no doubt that there was a lot more at stake than just the area. Someone owed someone else a favor, or else someone wanted something else kept quiet, and this was the price.

She was doubly sure when the location came up red flagged on her geological search. According to the survey records, that lovely, flat plain was a flood basin. Quetzecoatl did not have the kind of eccentric orbit that Largo Draconis did. Just a little tilt. One that didn't affect anyone in the major settlements at all. But once every hundred years, that tilt angled the north pole into the solar plane for a bit longer than usual. The glaciers would start to melt. The plain below wouldn't exactly 'flood' or at least, not all at once. It would just get very, very soggy, slowly, then, when the spring rains came, the water would rise over the course of a week or two. Eventually the entire plain would be under about two inches of water, and would remain that way for about three years, gradually drying again for the fourth as the glaciers in the north grew.

But Interstellar Teleson's Corporate Standards dictated that the most sensitive records and delicate instruments, and all their computer equipment, be installed permanently in sub-basements no less than four stories below surface level, to avoid any possibility of damage. Corporate Standards had been set to guard against human interference, not nature's. Corporate Standards evidently did not consider nature to be important.

Whoever was in charge of this project apparently completely disregarded the geological survey. Engineers complained about seepage and warned of flooding; the reaction was to order extra sump pumps. Sump pumps were keeping the sub-basements tolerably dry now, but Tia guessed that they were going constantly just to keep up with ordinary groundwater. They were not going to handle the flood.

Especially not when flood waters were seeping in through the ground floor walls and creeping over the doorsills.

According to the meteorological data, the glaciers were melting, and the spring rains were only a couple of months away.

Meanwhile, half a continent away, there was a disaster recovery firm that specialized in data and equipment recovery. They advertised that they could duplicate an existing system in a month, and recover data from devices that had been immersed in saltwater for over a year, or through major fires with extensive smoke damage. Interstellar Teleson was going to need them, and they didn't even know it. Besides, Tia liked the name. Whoever these people were, they had one heck of a sense of humor.