After Nick had slept, gone for a swim, cleaned up and eaten breakfast, Nick started the tedious process of going through ingredients lists and trying to figure out how much element 90 he needed to build various things. How many of those ingots of element 90 do I have to get?

  Nick had stumbled across a way to get Petra to troubleshoot his plans. He just started listing out all the steps, and asked Petra to do them. If she started the first step, he just aborted the command, but if she didn't, he could usually coax out the reason eventually. Well, not always...but he could usually come up with a workaround that Petra didn't object to.

  When he started listing out the steps in his mining plan, Petra announced, “Error.”

  Nick paused. “What kind of error?”

  “Nick takes damage.”

  “I'm going to hurt myself? How?”

  “Not understood.”

  “Stop error.”

  “Not understood.”

  Nick sighed and started removing steps in the plan one at a time to see where Petra was choking. It was a pain, but eventually he hit the spot: Petra didn't want to print out ingots of element 90.

  “You can't carry it all in your stomach, Petra, we need like eleven ingots of the stuff.” Each ingot was 420 units, whatever a “unit” was for element 90. One ingot was the amount Petra could hold in whatever she used for a gut before she couldn't absorb any more.

  Nick tried a bunch of ways to convince Petra to accept the plan to stack up ingots. It turned out she objected the same way to most of the other high number elements, too.

  At some point, he realized that the elements he was going after were radioactive, and it would be unhealthy for him to ride around in Rockhunter with a stack of them behind his seat. That's what Petra was going on about. That still left the problem of what to do about it, though.

  I wish I knew which element lead was. Nick was pretty sure that lead blocked radiation. He became totally sure once he remembered that lead blocked kryptonite. That must be what they based it on.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Nick got frustrated and had to take a few breaks, but eventually, he hit on a way to get Petra to do what was needed: she was willing to print out a quarter of an ingot. When he tried to stack them up in simulation, though, the ingots didn't identify as element 90. They were labeled as partly element 90, partly element 82, and partly iron, with a little bit of carbon in there for some reason.

  Nick had Petra print out a sample of element 82. It looked just like iron, but felt a bit heavier. Nick got an sample of iron to make sure. He frowned when he realized that the samples looked exactly alike. Nick made a closer examination of Petra's plan for printing it out.

  It turned out that they looked identical because they were identical; the element 82 was wrapped in a thin layer of iron. Petra doesn't want me touching lead either, huh? Wait, isn't lead poisoning...no, that's just slang for getting shot, right?

  Petra had a design for the ingots of radioactive elements. Nick had gotten an objection because he assumed that he wanted pure ingots, like he did for other elements. When he let Petra do it her way, the radioactive material was going to be printed out surrounded by lead in a fat ingot, wrapped in a thin layer of iron. In fact, something like 90% of the ingot was lead, which meant that Nick needed somewhere over a hundred of these fatter ingots. It was still a reasonable amount of space inside Rockhunter, so he approved the plan. He made sure to load up a bunch of iron-wrapped lead ingots, so that they would have enough shielding material to build the radioactive ingots out of.

  The communicators were taking a while to print out. Nick debated whether to finish those first, or go prospecting for radioactives. The aliens weren't going anywhere, hopefully, but then again, neither were the rocks. He decided to deal with the communicators first. His only hesitation was worrying that the aliens might make him too busy with other things to get around to mining the heavy elements he needed to advance Petra's abilities. But if things with the aliens were urgent for some reason, then going off and prospecting first would be bad.

  “You have a message.”

  Nick straightened up, surprised for a moment, then said, “Accept the call.”

  The aliens were back, even though it had not been seven local days. It was the same time, about 85 minutes after the Death Star set. He listened to the transmission.

  “Wa...oo...fee...fowa...fi...Wa...oo...fee...fowa...fi...”

  Nick was about to respond, when he remembered that he didn't want to give away his location. The aliens also said the same things in alienese that they had the previous two times.

  “I hate to leave you hanging, guys, but I'll be back soon,” Nick muttered.

  A few minutes later, Petra reported that the first of the video communicators was ready. Nick thought about that, and considered how much time it would take to print the other one, and how long it would take to pay the aliens another visit. He paused the second print.

  “You know what? Fuck it. I'm going back there. We can start talking after the second one gets done printing.” Nick started loading up Rockhunter with everything he could think of. It was time for a trade mission.