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
