The Cold Star Sky

Short Story by Craig DeLancey

A human engineer has to help an extremely obnoxious alien rescue some other aliens on a gas giant. It turns out there is a sea of buckyballs or something and the alien ship has been covered by a layer of them that seem to be self-agglutinating. The reasoning that leads to the solution is good, in the Heinlein "surprising yet obvious" sense. I particularly like the ending with the alien trying to take credit. At some points the writing dragged the story down like the alien ship, but overall it was pretty good, and the aliens were so obnoxious I wanted to punch them in the face, so caricature-ization achieved! The solution and the ending definitely made it worthwhile, although a lot could have been improved on: 3 out of 5.