for them. The Lab Schools' program was so intensive that even play was scheduled and games were choreographed, planned, and taught just like classes. There was no room to foster an 'interest' in archeology. And it was not on the normal course curriculum.
The only way you knew how digs worked 'intimately' was to work on them yourself. Or be the child of archeologists who kept you on-site with them. That was when it hit him; something Tia had said. The Cades met while they were recovering from Henderson's Chorea. That kind of information would not be the sort of thing someone who made a hobby of archeology would know. Details of archeologists' lives were of interest only to people who knew them.
Under cover of running a search on EsKay digs, he pulled up the information on the personnel, backtracking to the last EsKay dig the Cades had been on.
And there it was. C-121: Active personnel, Braddon Maartens-Cade, Pota Andropolous-Cade. Dependent, Hypatia Cade, age seven.
Hypatia Cade; evacuated to station-hospital Pride of Albion by MedService AI-drone. Victim of some unknown disease. Braddon and Pota put in isolation. Hypatia never heard from again. Perhaps she died, but that wasn't likely.
There could not be very many girls named 'Hypatia' in the galaxy. The odds of two of them being evacuated to the same hospital-ship were tiny; the odds that his Tia's best friend, Doctor Kennet Uhura-Sorg, who was chief of Neurology and Neurosurgery, would have been the same doctor in charge of that other Tia's case were so minuscule he wasn't prepared to try to calculate them.
He replaced the file and logged off the boards feeling as if he had just been hit in the back of the head with a board. Oh, spirits of space. When she took me as brawn, I made a toast to our partnership 'may it be as long and fruitful as the Cades’.' Oh, decom it. I'm surprised she didn't bounce me out the airlock right then and there.
'Tia,' he said carefully into the silent cabin. 'I, uh, I'd like to apologize-'
'So, you found me out, did you?' To his surprise and profound relief, she sounded amused. 'Yes, I'm Hypatia Cade. I'd thought about telling you, but then I was afraid you'd feel really badly about verbally falling over your own feet. You do realize that you can't access any data without my being aware of it, don't you?'
'Well, heck, and I thought I was being so sneaky.' He managed a weak grin. 'I thought I'd really been covering my tracks well enough that you wouldn't notice. I, uh, really am sorry if I made you feel badly.'
'Oh, Alex, it would only have been tacky and tasteless or stupid and insensitive, if you'd done it on purpose.' She laughed; he'd come to like her laugh, it was a deep, rich one. He'd often told her BB jokes just so he could hear it. 'So it's neither; it's just one of those things. I assume that you're curious now. What is it you want to know about me?'
'Everything!' he blurted, and then flushed with embarrassment. 'Unless you'd rather not talk about it.'
'Alex, I don't mind at all! I had a very happy childhood, and frankly, it will be a lot more comfortable being able to talk about Mum and Dad, or with Mum and Dad, without trying to hide them from you.' She giggled this time, instead of laughing. 'Sometimes I felt as if I was trying to hide a secret lover, only in reverse!'
'So you still stay in contact with your parents?' Alex was fascinated; this went against everything he'd been told about shell-persons, either at the academy or directly from Jon Chernov. Shell-persons didn't have families; their supervisors and their classmates were their families.
'Of course I still stay in contact with them. I'm their biggest fan. If archeologists can have fans.' Her center screen came up; on it was a shot of Pota and Braddon, proudly displaying an ornate set of body-armor. 'Here's something from their latest letter; they just uncovered the armory, and what they found is going to set the scholastic world on its collective ears. That's iron plates you see on Bronze Age armor.'
'No.' He stared in fascination, and not just at the armor. At Pota and Braddon, smiling and waving like any other parents for their child. Pota pointed to something on the armor, while Braddon's mouth moved, explaining something. Tia had the sound off, and the definition wasn't good enough for Alex to lip-read.
'That's not my real interest though,' she continued. 'I was telling you the truth. I'm after the EsKay homeworld, but I want it because I want to find the bug that got me.' The two side-screens came up, both with older pictures. 'Before you ask, dear, there I am. The one on the right is my seventh birthday party, the one on the left, as you can see, is a picture of me with Theodore Bear and Moira's brawn Tomas. Ted was a present from both of them.' She paused for a moment 'just checking. Yes, that's the last good picture that was taken of me. The rest are all in the hospital, and I wouldn't inflict them on anyone but a neurologist.'
Alex studied the two pictures, each of which showed the same bright-eyed, elfin child. An incredibly pretty child, dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a thin, delicate face and a smile that wouldn't stop. 'How did you get into the shell-person program?' he asked. 'I thought they didn't take anyone after the age of one!'
'They didn't, until me,' she replied. 'That was Doctor Kenny's doing, and Lars, the systems manager for the hospital; they were convinced that I was flexible enough to make the transition, since I was intelligent enough to understand what had happened to me, and what it meant. Which was,' she added, 'complete life-support. No mobility.'
He shuddered. 'I can see why you wouldn't want that to happen to anyone else ever again.'
