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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
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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
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