Protector

Cutter’s voice burst jarringly from a speaker. “Nick? The Blue Ox wants to take off.”

“Fine,” said Nick.

“Okay. But I notice they aren’t armed.”

“They’ve got a fusion drive, don’t they? And oversized attitude jets to aim it. If they need more than that we’ve got a war on our hands.” Nick clicked off.

And sat wondering. Was he right? Even an H-bomb would be less effective as a weapon than the directed exhaust of a fusion drive. And an H-bomb was an obvious weapon, an insult to a peace-loving Outsider. Still…

Nick went back to Bre

John Fitzgerald Bre

Suit design: The Mado

Twenty years ago he’d worked with a crew mining molten tin on Mercury. Mercury was rich with valuable nonferrous elements, though the sun’s magnetic field made special ships necessary; a solar storm could pick up a metal ship and drop it miles away. Bre

Why had he let the Outsider catch him?

Hell, Nick would have done the same. The Outsider was here in the system; somebody had to meet him. Runrung would have been an admission that Bre

His family wouldn’t have stopped him. They were Belters; they could take care of themselves.

But I wish he’d run, Nick thought. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on his desk.

Bre

It had been a hairy, scary ride. The Outsider had jumped into space with a balloonful of Bre

He remembered the alien touching a flat-nosed tool to the hull, then pulling them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. The alien had unzipped the balloon, turned and jumped and vanished through the wall while Bre

The air tasted like the cabin air, though the peculiar scent was much stronger. Bre

He began to look around him.

The light was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, as roomy as the lifesystem of his singleship. On his right were a number of squarish crates whose material was almost wood, certainly a plant of some kind. To his left, a massive rectangular solid with a lid, almost like a big deep freeze. Above and around him, the curved wall.

So he’d been right. This was a cargo hold. But half of the space in this teardrop-shaped hold was still locked off from him.

And all through the air, a peculiar scent, like an unfamiliar perfume. The smell in the lifesystem had been an animal smell, the smell of the Outsider. This was different.

Below him, behind a net of coarse weave, were things that looked like yellow roots. They occupied most of what Bre

The smell became hugely more intense. He’d never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it.

They still looked like pale yellow roots: a cross between a sweet potato and a peeled piece of the root of a small tree. They were squat and wide and fibrous, pointed at one end and knife-flattened at the other. Bre

He’d had breakfast just before the Outsider pulled alongside. Yet, with no warning grumblings in his belly, suddenly he was ravenously hungry. His lips ski

Suppose he did get one out? What then?

EAT IT! His mouth ran saliva.

It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant that an alien species probably saw as food. He should be thinking of a way out of here!

Yet his fingers were still tearing at the net. Bre

What would he do for food?

He had to get out of here.

The plastic bag. He fielded it from the air and examined it. He found out how to seal and unseal it — from the outside. Wonderful. Wait — yes! He could turn the bag inside out, seal it from the inside. Then what?

He couldn’t move around in that plastic bag. No hands. Even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a backpac. He couldn’t get through the wall anyway.

He had to distract his stomach somehow.

So. Why were the contents of this hold so valuable?

How could they be worth more than the pilot, who was needed to get them to where they were going?

Might as well see what else is here.

The rectangular solid was a glossy, temperatureless material. Bre

The box was filled with seeds, large seeds like almonds, frozen in a matrix of frost, bitterly cold. He wrenched one loose with numbing fingers. The air about him was turning the color of cigarette smoke when he closed the lid.

He put the seed in his mouth, warmed it with saliva. It had no taste; it was merely cold, and then not even that. He spit it out.

So. Green light and strange, rich-smelling air. But not too thin, not too strange; and the light was cool and refreshing.

If Bre

Bre

Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Plastic? It looked and felt like a strong commercial sandwich wrap gone crinkly with age. What was inside felt like fine dust packed nearly solid. It was dark through the plastic.