Andre Norton - Postmarked the Stars

Ali picked up one of the smashed containers. “Can’t promise anything, but it’s worth trying. At least we can’t share the LB with them loose or in boxes either. That stink’s enough to send one’s stomach into space. How long will they stay under?”

Dane did not want to touch the unconscious things, and he had no way of judging. The only answer was that one of them would have to stay on guard while the other two worked.

“There’s another problem,” Rip said, and it was not the kind of thought to add brightness to their day. “That thing that smashed in here might have acquired a taste for pseudo lathsmer. If it trails or hunts by scent, it might follow to the LB. Do we want that?”

That made sense, Dane thought. His first solution had been to get the creatures back to the craft and build the heated pen right outside. But did they need to do that?

Ali responded to the same idea. “We could set up a nasty jolt for anything that did come hunting,” he offered. “Stotz gave me a tool kit when we left, and we can run a wire from the ship and set up a force field—”

Dane was willing to trust to Ali. Anyone who held a cadet’s berth under Johan Stotz knew his business, and it would not be the first time that a Free Trader crew improvised. Half their wandering life depended upon imaginative thinking when confronted by a crisis.

So that long day was spent in hard labor—Ali providing the information and technical knowledge they must have, Rip and Dane giving untrained labor. They straightened out the three containers the strange hunter had mauled and two others whose tabs reported the contents dead, throwing the misshapen embryos those had held into a pit and rolling stones over them, well away from where they proposed to build the pen.

In the end they had a somewhat lopsided-looking structure that should be large enough to house the three still sleeping creatures, and this fitted about the brach cage stripped of all its contents. Ali rigged his force field, warning them that they were thus exhausting the power of the LB.

The brachs appeared perfectly content to be transferred to the fourth hammock in the cabin. In fact, they slept away much of the day, and Dane wondered if they were, in the natural state, nocturnal, reminding himself to be sure to dog down the hatch door that night just in case they took a fancy to wander.

They did not leave the dragon pen by the rest of the containers. Those they restacked and recovered with many more stones. In the bargain, Ali cut down three fairly good-sized trees and dragged them so that their thick upper branches met and tangled about the cache.

The pen they set closer to the LB, using the saw to clear the underbrush not only around the site they chose but also in a cutting back to the LB, so they were given a clear path to it, should need arise.

Dane had no idea as to what food the mutants would eat. Judging by their teeth, they might be carnivores. So his offering was a panful of squeezed out E-rations, which he left for the creatures when they awakened from the stunner-induced sleep. If they ever did—for it seemed to him that their day-long sleep was ominous, though it made their own task that much easier.

Ali rigged an alarm to awaken them if the pen was approached during the night. They were all almost too tired to eat as they settled in their hammocks for the night. Dane checked the door before he went to his. There had been stirring among the brachs, but he had left out food and water. He only hoped that if they did go roaming, they would be considerate enough to avoid waking the human members of the crew, but there was a small nagging worry in his mind, as a hint of toothache might come and go before a final explosion of pain in the jaw. The brachs had been too quiet, too cooperative during the day. He wondered if they were laying plans of their own.

The fact that it was freezing cold out might deter them from exploration, even if they could master the locking system set up on the hatch door. He did not believe they would really venture out. He was so tired that even the prick of worry could not keep him awake.

Cold—bitter, bone-reaching cold. He was buried in the glacier looking down into the emerald lake, but the cold was a part of him. He must move, must break the film of ice, gain his freedom—or else he would slide, still in the core of a block, to be lost forever in green water depths. He must break loose. He made a mighty effort.

Under him the block swung and shook. It was giving away—he was falling into the lake! He must get free—

The jar of landing on the deck of the LB, the hammock twisted over him, brought Dane awake. He was shivering still with the cold of his dream. But it wasn’t from his dream! Cold air did sweep over him. He scrambled to his hands and knees, and in the very subdued light of a single rod over the controls, he saw the hatch door partly open and heard the moan of the wind outside.

The brachs! He shut the hatch first and then turned to the hammock where they had bedded down the aliens. As he expected, that was empty. Only the pile of bedding from their cage lay there, though he wasted a moment to pull that aside, hoping to find them cuddled under it.

He still had that in his hand when the buzz of the warning Ali had rigged sounded loudly through the LB.

If the hunter had sniffed them out, the brachs could not only be in the freezing cold but helpless before that menace!

Dane grabbed his thermo jacket even as he saw Rip and Ali begin to pull out of their hammocks.

“The brachs are gone,” he told them tersely, “and the cage alarm is on.” He need not have added that, with its buzz punishing their ears in that confined space.

He picked up a hand beamer and snapped it to the fore of his belt, leaving his hands free. The brachs rather than the dragons must be their first concern. Outside the LB it was as cold as he had feared. By his timer it was well past midnight, into the early morning hours. The low ray of his beamer—for he kept it to the low cycle—picked up marks in the frost, not well defined, but which he thought were brach tracks. He could only hope that the thick wall of brush had kept them to the path for a swift escape.

Dane heard the hatch clang shut and knew that the others must be on his heels, but he tried to walk as noiselessly has he could and with what speed the night, the low light, and the rough ground would allow. Luckily they did not have too far to go, always supposing that the brachs had been entrapped in the force field Ali had set by the dragon cage.

Though Dane might be going carefully, there was something ahead that sought no such progress. The thud of the same ponderous tread they had earlier heard was loud.

So the hunter had come back in search of the embryos. Now, as Dane half hesitated, holding his stunner at full charge but ignorant of what protection it would be against an alien life form, he heard a cry—shrill, rising in ululation of fear. And though he had not heard a brach scream before, he was very sure that had come from one of their throats.

Dane snapped the beamer to full and ran, the magnetic plates on his boot soles waking a hollow echo on the frozen ground. It was only seconds before he burst into the clearing they had made for the cage.

Around it blazed the haze of the force field. Within that tenuous defense crouched the brachs. One of the kits lay on the ground, its brother or sister huddled against it, while, with their heads down to present nose horns to the enemy, the two adults stood guard.

It was a pitiful guard, for that which confronted them might have smashed both into bloody paste with a single swipe of one of its six limbs. It reared high, bracing itself back so that its rounded abdomen touched the ground, four limbs serving as a ship’s cradle to anchor it there, while it swung its smaller torso and its long front arms back and forth before the force screen.