Read Ship Who Searched for Free Online

Institute cafeteria! No wonder they didn’t survive—the food probably bored them to death!”
    Pota rose and gathered up their plates and cups, stowing them neatly in the dishwasher. “Well, enjoy your lessons, pumpkin. We’ll see you at lunch.”
    She smiled, hugged them both goodbye before they suited up, then went off to the schoolroom.

    That afternoon, once lessons were done, she took down her own pressure-suit from the rack beside the airlock inner door. Her suit was designed a little differently from her parents’, with accordion folds at wrists and elbows, ankles and knees, and at the waist, to allow for the growth-spurts of a child. This was a brand new suit, for she had been about to outgrow the last one just before they went out on this dig. She liked it a lot better than the old one; the manufacturer of the last one had some kind of stupid idea that a child’s suit should have cavorting flowers with smiling faces all over it. She had been ashamed to have anyone but her parents see her in the awful thing. She thought it made her look like a little clown.
    It had come second-hand from a child on a Class Three dig—like most of the things that the Cades got. Evaluation digs simply didn’t have that high a priority when it came to getting anything other than the bare essentials. But Tia’d had the bright idea when her birthday came around to ask her parents’ superiors at the Institute for a new pressure-suit. And when it came out that she was imitating her parents, by creating her own little dig-site, she had so tickled them that they actually sent her one. Brand new, good for three or four years at least, and the only difference between it and a grown-up suit was that hers had extra helmet lights and a com that couldn’t be turned off, a locator-beacon that was always on, and bright fluorescent stripes on the helmet and down the arms and legs. A small price to pay for dignity.
    The flowered suit had gone back to the Institute, to be endured by some other unfortunate child.
    And the price to be paid for her relative freedom to roam was waiting in the airlock. A wagon, child-sized and modified from the pull-wagon many children had as toys—but this one had powered crawler-tracks and was loaded with an auxiliary power unit and air-pack and full face-mask. If her suit failed, she had been drilled in what to do so many times she could easily have saved herself when asleep. One , take a deep breath and pop the helmet. Two , pull the mask on, making sure the seals around her face were secure. Three , turn on the air and Four , plug into the APU, which would keep the suit heat up with the helmet off. Then walk—slowly, carefully, to the airlock, towing the wagon behind. There was no reason why she should suffer anything worse than a bit of frostbite.
    It had never happened. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t. Tia had no intention of becoming a tragic tale in the newsbytes. Tragic tales were all very well in drama and history, but they were not what one wanted in real life.
    So the wagon went with her, inconvenient as it was.
    The filters in this suit were good ones; the last suit had always smelled a little musty, but the air in this one was fresh and clean. She trotted over the uneven surface, towing the cart behind, kicking up little puffs of dust and sand. Everything out here was very sharp-edged and clear; red and yellow desert, reddish-purple mountains, dark blue sky. The sun, Sigma Marinara, hung right above her head, so all the shadows were tiny pools of dark black at the bases of things. She hadn’t been out to her “site” for several weeks, not since the last time Mum and Dad had asked her to stay away. That had been right at the beginning, when they first got here and uncovered enough to prove it was an EsKay site. Since that time there had been a couple of sandstorms, and Tia was a bit apprehensive that her “dig” had gotten buried. Unlike her parents’ dig, she did not have force-shields