Sweet Starfire

ship and whatever was inside was alien to Stanza Nine.”
    “I know it was,” Cidra said stubbornly. “There’s something wrong about it, I keep telling you.”
    “It will take a full-scale scientific investigation to find out the truth. Perhaps another intelligent species developed on this planet.”
    “No.”
    He waved the quartzflash around inside the ship. “You can’t be sure of that, Cidra.”
    “Severance, please come away from there. After what I saw of those eggs, we’ve got to assume that the ship is dangerous. Maybe it’s protected the way the eggs were.”
    “Just a minute. I want to get a closer look at this stuff. Doesn’t look like this metal has had the corrosion damage most metal gets on Renaissance.” He whistled soundlessly between his teeth, his eyes gleaming with barely suppressed excitement. “We’ve got to be able to find this ship again.” Severance punched a code into the directional indicator. “Between this thing and the safehold, I’m going to make enough credit to launch Severance Pay, Ltd. in a big way.”
    “Is that all you can think about? Selling this information? You’ve got a one-track mind, Teague Severance! This is the find of the century, ultimately maybe far more significant than the safehold. And all you can talk about is how much you’ll get when you sell the location.”
    “Yeah, well, a man has to keep his eye on the main chance.” He edged closer, shining the flash around the edge of the jagged metal. Suddenly they heard a sharp hiss, and something with a long tail and four short legs leapt from the darkness. Severance ducked, and the disturbed inhabitant of the ship disappeared into the trees.
    “What was that?” Cidra took a deep breath.
    “A roacher. They like caves. That one must have thought he’d found a really nifty home when he came across this thing.” He wrinkled his nose as he leaned forward again. “What a stench. The roacher’s been living here a while.”
    Cidra stepped closer, caught a whiff of the rancid odor, and nearly choked. “Are you going inside that ship?”
    “I just want to take a quick look around.”
    “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Severance.”
    “I’ll be just a minute.” He stepped over the jagged edge. “Stay here in the opening where I can keep an eye on you.”
    Reluctantly she moved closer, aware of a deep curiosity that was at war with her instinct to put as much distance as possible between herself and the ship. The ramifications of the discovery were endless. She could certainly understand Severance’s fascination with it. But Cidra didn’t like the feel of the whole thing any more than she had liked the feel she’d gotten from the eggs.
    The quartzflash moved around inside the ship, falling on banks of alien machinery that stood silent and blank. There was a lounge that might have been a seat or a bed for a body the size of a man, but it was shaped oddly. Cidra had a passing mental image of one of the blue monsters, grown to the size of a man, lying on that lounge, and she shuddered. The creatures from the eggs were bad enough when they were hatch-lings; she didn’t want to imagine what the adult version looked like.
    “Look at this, Cidra.” Severance shone the light along the surface of a long, sealed case. It was made of the same black metal as the hull of the ship, but the top was fashioned of a clear material, perhaps a hard plastic. There were scratch marks on the clear portion, as if something hungry had tried to get inside. Whatever it was had not succeeded in prying open the case.
    “What do you think it is?” Cidra asked. “Some kind of storage facility probably. I can’t see what’s inside. The cover looks clear, but it’s not when I shine the light down through it. Too much dirt and grit caked on it. Maybe I can get it open.”
    “Don’t, Severance. It looks too much like a coffin. Let’s leave it for an exploration company that’s got equipment and time. We don’t have either right now.”
    He paused as if a part of him realized the truth of what she was saying, but Cidra saw his eyes drift back to the long case. She realized that getting him out of the ship wasn’t going to be easy. She remembered all too clearly how stubbornly he had insisted on fetching the egg from the safehold. Cidra decided to try a drastic approach to breaking the spell the ship seemed to have on him.
    “I’ll just be another minute or so, Cidra.” He ran his hand along the line on