When she got to the front part of the ship, she edged her head around the corner to see into the cockpit. Rive and Y’lla were there, all right and just as Penny had feared, they were right in the middle of making love. But they weren’t moving—not even to breathe.
In fact, the two of them appeared to be frozen in time.
Six
Penny put a hand to her mouth to stifle a scream—not that her shipmates would have heard it. Both of them were completely motionless and frozen in the middle of their intimate act.
She took a step forward and looked at them more closely. Rive was sitting in the pilot’s seat with his trousers down around his ankles but at least he was still dressed from the top up. Y’lla, on the other hand, had taken off her warm-skin completely and was buck-naked in her husband’s lap.
The tall blonde Kindred woman was facing her husband, straddling his hips. Clearly his shaft was buried inside her and she was riding him enthusiastically.
But the two of them had been frozen right in the middle of the act. Y’lla’s long blonde hair was flying out behind her in a wave that was suspended in mid-air and Rive’s mouth was open in a moan as he gripped his wife’s hips and thrust up into her. They appeared to be staring into each other’s eyes soulfully as they pounded away at each other—but neither one was moving an inch.
Penny stared at the shocking scene, trying to make heads or tails of it. What was happening to her shipmates? Why had they been frozen?
In fact, everything in the cockpit seemed frozen—all except for the digital chronometer furthest from the pilot’s chair. It was the main timekeeper of the ship, which all of their wrist chronometers were synchronized to. It was located on the wall, above Penny’s head and as she looked at it, she saw that it was still steadily ticking off the seconds and minutes and hours.
Except as she watched, the seconds stopped ticking by. The time had read 8:24:36. But as Penny watched, the 36 refused to turn into 37. She kept watching, glancing at the chronometer on her wrist and saw, after a minute had passed, that the 24 hadn’t turned to a 25 either.
It was as though time had suddenly stopped.
The thought froze Penny in her tracks and she remembered the conversation she’d had with Rive and Y’lla all about temporal anomalies. Could it be that her shipmates were stuck in a time pocket? Could an anomaly be passing through the ship like a giant, invisible bubble of slowed-down time?
At least, Penny assumed it was a slow-time bubble because neither Rive nor Y’lla appeared to have aged any. They both looked to be the exact same age as they had been just a few minutes before when she’d left them to go take a shower.
If her theory was true, she was in deep trouble. The controls to the ship and the communications system were both within the area affected by the time bubble. And if she tried to go into the cockpit to use either of those parts of the ship, Penny would probably be caught in the slow-time area too.
But how could she be sure her hypothesis about what was happening was correct?
To test her theory, Penny ran and got a fork from the food-prep area. Making sure she was standing at least two meters back from the cockpit, she threw the fork towards the front of the ship.
The fork flew the first meter and a half…and then stopped in mid-air, a good half meter shy of the cockpit entryway. Penny’s eyes widened as she saw where it was, frozen in mid-flight.
“But…I was just standing there,” she whispered to herself, looking at the position of the fork and measuring the distance from it to the cockpit. “Not even a minute ago!”
Then she remembered how the chronometer on the wall above her head had stopped while she was watching it. And then the fork she’d thrown had frozen even further down the corridor.
There was only one conclusion she could draw from these two events and it made Penny shiver.
The slow-time bubble was growing—expanding further into the ship—and she was right in its path.
Just as she had this thought, a strand of her long, chestnut hair, which had gotten loose from the bun at the nape of her neck, tickled her face. Penny reached up instinctively to swipe it away but as her hand moved upward from her waist to her face, it froze suddenly in the air right in front of her.
Penny stared in horror at her frozen hand. It didn’t feel any different but when she tried to move it, it refused to obey her. She couldn’t wiggle her fingers—couldn’t even twitch them. It was as though her hand had suddenly become disconnected from the rest of her body, even though it was still attached.
It is disconnected, whispered a little voice in her head. It’s in a different time than the rest of you. And if you don’t get out of here, Penny, you’re going to be stuck the same way Rive and Y’lla are. And who knows if anyone will ever find you, or even if they do, if they’ll be able to save you? After all, how do you save someone from a temporal anomaly?
You could be trapped here forever.
This last thought galvanized her into action. She yanked the arm of her affected hand backwards with all her might. To her relief, the hand began to work again at once but the fact that the invisible time bubble was so close to her freaked Penny out. It was expanding quickly, like poison gas she couldn’t see—she had to get away from it before it caught her!
Her eyes darted to the side door of the shuttle. It was on the corridor, aft of the cockpit, and it was located just a few feet behind her. Could she get to it before the time bubble enveloped and froze her?
Penny didn’t know but she was about to find out.
Seven
Normally Penny would have taken plenty of supplies and armed herself to the teeth before setting off into a strange spaceport which was known to be dangerous—especially for a woman alone. But there was no time to grab any of the food cubes in the well stocked cupboard or one of the blasters kept in the emergency locker. There wasn’t time to do anything but dive for the door and pray she would make it out in time…literally.
Penny raced for the door, threw the latch, and shoved the door open.
Only it wouldn’t open all the way. Halfway through its arc, the metal door froze in place and wouldn’t budge an inch further.
She knew what that meant—it was trapped in the slow-time bubble too!
Taking a deep breath, she squeezed out the narrow opening and jumped to the metal floor below from the high shuttle opening. The landing jarred her from head to foot—her teeth clicked together hard and the bones in her hips and knees protested the harsh landing.
But Penny knew she couldn’t waste time resting. She moved warily and quickly away from the long-range shuttle, backing away from the cockpit end of it, where she knew the temporal anomaly was.
Luckily, Rive had parked in the docking bay in such a way that the nose of the ship was towards the far end of the Hell’s Gate station. If he hadn’t, Penny would have been stuck in an ever-shrinking bubble of normal time, waiting for the slow-time bubble to engulf her.
But as it was, she was able to back away in the direction of the main part of the long station. After a moment, she turned and fled.
Penny wasn’t sure how far she ran. The docking bay they had landed in was almost empty, with only a few ships parked in the vast, open area and no people in sight. Her heavy boots, meant for the snowy climate of Yown Beta, echoed on the metal floor plates with a dull, empty sounding thud, thud, thud, and she met no one at all as she fled from the time bubble engulfing the long-range shuttle.