"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."