Sylvan shook his head.
“There is much we don’t know. The Eye is so ancient it is only spoken of in our oldest scrolls in the temple on First World. We think that’s why the Goddess sent the vision to Nadiah—she’s one of the few people who have studied the ancient writings and would know what they meant.”
“I see.” Penny nodded. She didn’t say anything about the Goddess or Commander Sylvan’s belief that his niece had been given a vision or a prophecy or whatever. As a scientist, of course, Penny didn’t believe in such things. But she knew better than to trivialize anyone else’s religion.
She also didn’t believe that an ancient stone artifact could suddenly come to life. Again, that was the kind of thing that happened in the movies—not on a real-life archeological dig. But she would keep that opinion to herself, out of respect.
“All right, Sylvan, if you’re done with the briefing, I still have to get Penny fitted in her warm-skin,” Kat said. “After that, I’ll bring her to the Docking Bay myself. Lock is making dinner tonight and Deep is watching the boys so it’s not a problem.”
Sylvan nodded.
“Thank you, Kat. I’ll see the two of you later then.”
He shut the door and Kat turned to Penny.
“All right now, let’s get you into your warm-skin—you’re going to need it on Yown Beta.”
She sent Penny behind the folding screen in the corner of her office and handed her a black jumpsuit which seemed to be made of extremely thin, strong, stretchy silk.
Penny struggled into it and was aghast at how tightly it clung to her more-than-generous curves.
“Kat!” she protested, stepping out from behind the screen. “I can’t wear this! It’s skin-tight. I look like a plus-sized Cat Woman from the Batman movies.”
“You know, you kind of do.” Kat stood back with a finger tapping against her cheek, looking Penny over thoughtfully. “You want me to sew some cute little pointed ears on the top of the hood?”
“No!” Penny exclaimed. “I want you to give me something bigger to wear. Something that will cover my, er, obvious defects.”
“There’s nothing defective about you,” Kat said sternly. “You’re an Elite—a woman the Goddess has blessed with generous curves. And if you’d agree to go on a date with those two Twin Kindred I offered to set you up with, you’d see that being plus-sized is a good thing.”
She put a hand on her own ample hip and cocked an eyebrow at Penny, as though to drive home her point.
“Thanks, Kat, but you know I’m married to my work,” Penny protested. “And just because you feel comfortable flaunting your curves doesn’t mean I want to flaunt mine!”
“Look, doll, I didn’t make the suit tight to show you off—it has to be skin tight to keep you warm,” Kat explained. “This is a very special fabric, woven from gownglass spider silk—it holds in your natural body heat and multiplies it when conditions get colder. It’s going to keep you toasty warm even in the frozen waste lands of Yown Beta. Without it, you’ll be a Penny-sicle the minute you step foot outside your shuttle.”
“Oh…” Penny looked down at the shiny silk suit clinging to her curves. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s okay,” Kat assured her. “You don’t have to put it on until you’re just about to land on Yown Beta, so the only people who will see you in it are Rive and Y’lla. And you know they don’t care—they only have eyes for each other.”
“Well…all right.” Peggy nodded grudgingly. “I guess if it’s the only way to stay warm…”
“It is,” Kat promised her. “Now take it off so I can pack it and we can get you going to the Docking Bay. Adventure awaits!”
Three
“So the reason we had to fold space outside the Yown Solar System and fly in manually is because the whole area is riddled with temporal anomalies?” Penny asked Commander Rive, the lead archeologist on their dig just a few hours earlier.
Rive was a tall, blond Blood Kindred with pale blue eyes and his wife, Y’lla, was too. In fact, they looked more like twins than husband and wife, Penny privately thought. But though the two of them had exhibited a cool demeanor when she’d first met them on the Mother Ship, they had warmed up considerably on the week-long trip as they flew towards Yown Beta.
Now Penny was on friendly terms with the couple, which eased her mind. She’d been on several digs where the expedition crew didn’t get along and she knew from experience that could be a very uncomfortable situation.
But Rive and Y’lla were as passionate about archeology as she was. They had been exchanging stories of various expeditions as they got to know each other and they showed as much interest in her digs—even though they had been limited to Earth—as Penny had for their interstellar expeditions.
“Temporal anomalies. Exactly.” Commander Rive was sitting in the pilot’s chair, flying the shuttle with one eye on the instruments—one of which was an anomaly sensor. “You can’t detect them until you’re right up on them—which means that if you folded space too close to the system, you might end up in the middle of one.”
“How big are they?” Penny asked, fascinated. “And what would happen if you did? Landed in the middle of one, I mean?”
“They vary in size,” Rive said. “They can be as small as your fist or as big as a small moon. They drift in random patterns through the entire Yown system.”
“And if you landed in the middle of one, time would either speed up or slow down until the anomaly drifted past or rather through you,” Y’lla said, coming to sit beside her husband.
Their long-range shuttle had a specially modified pilot’s chair to make this possible. Penny herself was in the passenger’s seat. She watched as the tall, blonde Kindred woman wound an arm around her tall blond husband’s waist, snuggled close, and kissed him on the cheek.
At first Penny had thought these kinds of displays of public affection were to warn her away from Rive. But she had come to understand that it was just the Kindred way. Despite being married—or “joined” as the Kindred called it—for over ten years, Rive and Y’lla simply couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Which was why they always had to be near one another, even when one of them was piloting the ship.
“So time speeds up or slows down until the anomaly passes?” she asked the two of them. “How long does it take to pass?”
Y’lla shrugged her slim shoulders.
“Could be a few seconds…or a few years. There’s really no way of knowing since the anomalies move at different rates of speed and they seem to be completely random in their movements. There really is no way to track or map them.”
“But we’ve been traveling through the Yown System towards Yown Beta for a week and your anomaly proximity sensor hasn’t gone off once,” Penny pointed out.
It was actually rather disappointing, she thought. She’d been fascinated to learn that there was an entire solar system riddled with pockets of slowed down or sped up time, like holes in Swiss cheese. It was the whole reason they were piloting in manually instead of folding space to get directly to their target. It would have been nice to actually see or maybe even experience one of the strange temporal anomalies. Just for a minute or two, anyway.