Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

“I’ve had undergraduates that didn’t do as well as you did, pumpkin! You remember what I told you, when you asked me about why I wanted to find garbage?”
    “That we learn more from sentients’ garbage than from anything other than their literature,” she’d recited dutifully.
    “Well,” Pota had replied, sitting on the edge of her bed and touching her nose with one finger, playfully. “You, my curious little chick, have just upgraded this site from a Class One to a Class Three with four hours of work! That’s more than Braddon and I have ever done!”
    “Does that mean that we’ll be leaving?” she’d asked in confusion.
    “Eventually,” Pota told her, a certain gloating glee in her voice. “But it takes time to put together a Class Three team, and we happen to be right here. Your father and I will be making gigabytes of important discoveries before the team gets here to replace us. And with that much already invested—they may not replace us!”
    Tia had shaken her head, confused.
    Pota had hugged her. “What I mean, pumpkin, is that there is a very good chance that we’ll stay on here—as the dig supervisors! An instant promotion from Class One supervisor to Class Three supervisor! There’ll be better equipment, a better dome to live in—you’ll have some playmates—couriers will be by every week instead of every few months—not to mention the raises in pay and status! All the papers on this site will go out under our names! And all because you were my clever, bright, careful little girl, who knew what she saw and knew when to stop playing!”
    “Mum and Dad are really, really happy,” she told Ted, thinking about the glow of joy that had been on both their faces when they finished the expensive link to the nearest Institute supervisor. “I think we did a good thing. I think maybe you brought us luck, Ted.” She yawned. “Except about the other kids coming. But we don’t have to play with them if we don’t want to, do we?”
    Ted agreed silently, and she hugged him again. “I’d rather talk to you, anyway,” she told him. “You never say anything dumb. Dad says that if you can’t say something intelligent, you shouldn’t say anything; and Mum says that people who know when to shut up are the smartest people of all, so I guess you must be pretty smart. Right?”
    But she never got a chance to find out if Ted agreed with that statement, because at that point she fell right asleep.

    Over the course of the next few days, it became evident that this was not just an ordinary garbage dump; this was one containing scientific or medical debris. That raised the status of the site from “important” to “priceless,” and Pota and Braddon took to spending every waking moment either at the site or preserving and examining their finds, making copious notes, and any number of speculations. They hardly ever saw Tia anymore; they had changed their schedule so that they were awake long before she was and came in long after she went to bed.
    Pota apologized—via a holo that she had left to play for Tia as soon as she came in to breakfast this morning.
    “Pumpkin,” her image said, while Tia sipped her juice. “I hope you can understand why we’re doing this. The more we find out before the team gets sent out, the more we make ourselves essential to the dig, the better our chances for that promotion.” Pota’s image ran a hand through her hair; to Tia’s critical eyes, she looked very tired, and a bit frazzled, but fairly satisfied. “It won’t be more than a few weeks, I promise. Then things will go back to normal. Better than normal, in fact. I promise that we’ll have a Family Day before the team gets here, all right? So start thinking what you’d like to do.”
    Well, that would be stellar! Tia knew exactly what she wanted to do—she wanted to go out to the mountains on the big sled, and she wanted to drive it herself on the way.
    “So forgive us, all right? We don’t love you