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Traders Risk, by Roger Dee
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Title: Traders Risk
Author: Roger Dee
Illustrator: Martin
Release Date: October 20, 2007 [EBook #23103]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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TRADERS RISK
By ROGER DEE
Keeping this cargo meant death--to jettison it meant to make flotsam and jetsam of a world!
Illustrated by MARTIN
The Ciriimian ship was passing in hyperdrive through a classic three-body system, comprising in this case a fiercely white sun circled by a fainter companion and a single planet that swung in precise balance, when the Canthorian Zid broke out of its cage in the specimen hold.
Of the ship's social quartet, Chafis One and Two were asleep at the moment, dreaming wistful dreams of conical Ciriimian cities spearing up to a soft and plum-colored sky. The Zid raged into their communal rest cell, smashed them down from their gimbaled sleeping perches and, with the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could wake enough to teleport to safety.
Chafis Three and Four, on psi shift in the forward control cubicle, might have fallen as easily if the mental screamings of their fellows had not warned them in time