“While Yown Beta is a frozen waste land, Yown Alpha is supposed to be a tropical paradise,” Y’lla added. “But it’s pretty much uninhabited because a lot of the vegetation is poisonous—both to touch and to eat.”
“Oh, too bad,” Penny remarked. “It sounded like a nice place to visit until you said that.”
“It’s not our destination anyway,” Rive said, shrugging. “And speaking of Yown Beta, we’re not far from it now. We should be making orbit in less than an hour.”
“Oh! Penelope, you and I had better go put on our warm-skins,” Y’lla said. “We’re going to need them down there!”
They left the control area and went to the back of the ship. As she dressed, Penny felt an excited flock of butterflies taking off in her stomach. Finally, after crawling through space for a week to get to it, they had reached their destination. Now the real adventure could finally begin!
But she had just finished getting into her skin-tight suit and the big snow boots that went with it, when the entire ship jerked like a plane going through a pocket of turbulence. Except, there wasn’t supposed to be any turbulence in space—was there?
“Oh!” Penny gasped as she fell and nearly bumped her head on the bed in the small cabin she’d been assigned aboard the shuttle. She managed to get her hand up in time to save herself but it was still a scary moment. She stayed on her knees for a moment, waiting to see if everything was all right.
Just as she was starting to catch her breath, a blaring alarm sounded throughout the ship and the overhead lights started flashing.
“Oh my God, what now?”
Penny put a hand to her racing heart and struggled to her feet. She lurched out of her cabin as the ship bucked again, like a horse with a bee under its saddle, and found that Y’lla was already out in the main corridor.
“Y’lla!” she exclaimed. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know!” Y’lla was already running up to the front of the ship. Penny followed her and found Rive fighting with the steering yoke.
“Something’s gone wrong with the propulsion system!” he yelled over the alarm, as Y’lla and Penny skidded to a halt. “We’re never going to reach Yown Beta like this. I’ll have to pull in to the nearest spaceport first for repairs.”
“But the only one near us is Hell’s Gate!” Y’lla protested. “That’s a dangerous station, Rive!”
“Can’t be helped,” he shouted, frowning at the instruments. “It’s either that or we go adrift.”
That didn’t sound good to Penny, though going to the one space station in the whole solar system she had been specifically warned against didn’t sound good either.
Still, what choice did they have? Like it or not, they were on their way to Hell’s Gate.
Four
They made it to the Hell’s Gate Station—a huge conglomeration of metal structures with many different designs—just in time.
The parts of the station looked like they had been welded together in a half-ass fashion as different people decided to add onto the weird structure. Penny thought the whole thing must be ten miles long—at least it looked that big as they approached it.
Like a weird, bulbous skyscraper made up of lots of different parts laid on its side, she thought.
But of course, there were no gravity constraints in space so if you wanted to build big, you could.
Rive fought the bucking ship all the way but finally managed a fairly smooth landing at the far end of the station in the docking area. Penny breathed a sigh of relief when he at last was able to turn off the thrusters and the alarm stopped blaring. The overhead lights stopped flashing too, thank goodness!
“Whew…” The big Kindred wiped a hand over his brow. “That was a close one.”
“I could feel how worried you were through our link.” Now that he was done fighting with the controls, Y’lla went to her husband and wrapped herself around him once more.
Rive comforted his wife and took comfort himself in her warm embrace. Maybe a little too much comfort.
“Mmm, you look amazing in that warm-skin, darling,” Penny heard him murmur to Y’lla, who was also wearing the skin-tight, black silk outfit—it looked sleek and sexy on her, due to her tall, slender build. “And you feel amazing too,” he added, his big hands starting to roam over his wife’s body.
“A-hem,” Penny cleared her throat loudly and pointedly. There was only so much of this canoodling she could stand—especially when they were in such a dire situation!
“Oh, sorry.” Rive and Y’lla pulled apart for a moment.
“What’s wrong with the ship?” Penny asked, before they could start up again.
Rive frowned thoughtfully.
“Well, I can’t be sure but it felt like the propulsion system threw a rod.”
“Is that bad?” Penny asked.
“It’s not good,” Rive admitted. “But I have a repair kit on board and a parts printer as well, in case we need to manufacture any spare parts.”
“So you think you can fix it yourself, darling?” Y’lla asked him anxiously.
“With a little help from you two,” Rive said. “It’s a big job but with three sets of hands, we should be able to handle it.”
“So we won’t have to go into the spaceport at all, then?” Penny asked uncertainly.
“I don’t think so,” Rive said cautiously. “Commander Sylvan was careful to make sure we had everything we’d need to survive in case of an emergency. That’s why he insisted we bring the parts printer with us.”
“And we’ve got plenty of food cubes, you know,” Y’lla added. “So we should be able to stay right here in the shuttle while we get everything fixed and then continue on our mission to Yown Beta.”
Penny felt a surge of relief mixed with possibly just the tiniest smidge of regret. She had never been off Earth before and she could tell just by looking at the Hell’s Gate structure that it must have been built by many different alien cultures over hundreds of years. It was an archeologist’s dream come true.
But of course, she reminded herself, it wouldn’t be safe to go explore the massive structure at all. Far better to stay safe aboard the shuttle until they could get it fixed and then go on with the mission as planned. Still, she couldn’t quite squelch the little voice in the back of her head that wished it could go exploring.
It was the same little voice that had led her to get lost in some underground caves she and her cousins wandered into in Kentucky when she was a kid. The same voice that had urged her to spend time in the Peace Corps in her gap year before college. The same voice that had led her into archeology in the first place and to jump at the chance for this interstellar mission before she even knew what it was about.
Penny supposed that little voice—that impulse she felt to see and try and do new things—was the thirst for adventure. It was the main reason she could never imagine settling down and having kids. Even if she had been tall and thin like Y’lla instead of on the short side with too much “junk in the trunk” and had a hundred guys after her, she still would have wanted to go exploring instead of having a “normal” life.