Finally she heard them in the outer lock, and her heart began to beat faster. Suddenly she was no longer so certain that she had done the right thing. What if they were angry that she dissected the first two artifacts? What if she had done the wrong thing in moving them?
The 'what ifs' piled up in her head as she waited for the lock to cycle.
Finally the inner door hissed, and Braddon and Pota came through, already pulling off their helmets and continuing a high-speed conversation that must have begun back at the dig.
'but the matrix is all wrong for it to be a food preparation area, '
'yes, yes,' Pota replied impatiently,' but what about the integument, '
'Mum!' Tia said, running up to them and tugging it her mother's elbow. 'I've found something!'
'Hello, pumpkin, that's very nice,' her mother replied absently, hugging her, and going right on with her conversation. Her intense expression showed that she was thinking while she spoke, and her eyes never wandered from her husband's face, and as for Braddon, the rest of the world simply did not exist.
'Mum!' Tia persisted. 'I've found an artifact!'
'In a moment, dear,' Pota replied. 'But what about, '
'MUM!' Tia shouted, disobeying every rule of not interrupting grown-ups in desperation, knowing from all the signs that she would never get their attention otherwise. Conversations like this one could go on for hours. 'I've found an artifact!'
Both her parents stopped their argument in midsentence and stared at her. Silence enveloped the room; an ominous silence. Tia gulped nervously.
'Tia,' Braddon finally said, disapproval creeping into his voice. 'Your mother and I are in the middle of a very important conversation. This is not the time for pretend.'
'Dad, it's not pretend!' she said insistently, pointing to her plastic box. 'It's not! I found an artifact, and there's more.'
Pota raised an eyebrow at her husband and shrugged. Braddon picked up the box, carelessly, and Tia winced as the first lump inside visibly disintegrated more.
'I am going to respect your intelligence and integrity enough to assume that you think you found an artifact,' Braddon replied, prying the lid from the container. 'But Tia, you know better than to,'
He glanced down inside, and his eyebrows arched upward in the greatest show of surprise that Tia had ever seen him make.
'I told you,' Tia could not resist saying, triumphantly.
'so they took the big lights out to the trench, and the extra field-generators,' she told Ted E. Bear after she'd been put to bed for the night. 'They were out there for hours, and they let me wait up to hear what it was. And it was, I did find a garbage dump! A big one, too! Mum made a special call to the Institute, 'cause this is the first really big EsKay dump anybody's ever found.'
She hugged Ted closer, basking in the warmth of Pota's praise, a warmth that still lingered and made he fed happy right down to her toes. 'You did everything exactly right with the equipment you had,' Pota had told her. 'I've had undergraduates that didn't do a 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 recited dutifully.
'Well,' Pota had replied, sitting on the edge of he 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
