“So someone else is looking for it?” Penny asked. Was she getting herself in a hostile Indiana Jones-type situation here, where several different scientists were vying to be the first to find the same valuable artifact?
“We’re not sure,” Sylvan said honestly. “It could just be that the Fox’ens are about to move to the part of Yown Beta where the Eye is hidden and we don’t want them to discover it before we do.”
“They’re the people who are living on Yown Beta now, but they’re not indigenous to it, right?” Penny asked.
“Exactly. I don’t think anyone could be indigenous to Yown Beta—it’s a frozen waste land that makes my own home world of Tranq Prime look temperate,” Sylvan said dryly. “But the Fox’ens seem to be particularly well suited to cold-weather systems.”
“They have a natural fur coat and they’re uniquely suited to freezing temperatures,” Kat said. “I think they look kind of like those cute Artic foxes you always see on nature documentaries.” She shrugged. “Well, if Artic foxes were six and a half feet tall, anyway.”
“They’ve been living on the large Southern continent of Yown Beta for three centuries,” Sylvan explained. “But recently they’ve had a population explosion and now they’re starting to colonize the smaller, Northern continent, where the Eye of Ten’gu is hidden. Your goal will be to get to Yown Beta without being seen by the Fox’ens, take the Eye, and be gone before they even know you’re there.”
“I see.” Penny nodded thoughtfully. So it was an Indiana Jones kind of situation—which never happened in real life archeology. The reality of a modern dig was much less eventful than the movies. But their dig on Yown Beta would doubtless be more exciting than any Earthbound expedition. She couldn’t wait to get started!
“Whatever you do, once you get the Eye, you must keep it away from direct sunlight,” Sylvan said, frowning. “I have already told this to Commander Rive and his wife, Y’lla, but I must tell you as well. Nadiah said that the vision she received was very clear on that point—the Eye of Ten’gu must not be exposed to any kind of natural light. It must not be allowed to ‘awaken’.”
“Awaken?” Penny stared at him blankly. “I mean, it’s a stone artifact, right? How in the world could it awaken?”
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.
“Well, even though there are a lot of anomalies, they’re spaced pretty widely apart,” Y’lla said. “So the chances of running into one are actually quite slim.”
“It’s like the fictional science movies you humans make on Earth,” Rive said.
“You mean science fiction?” Penny asked, grinning.
“Yes, that.” He nodded. “Anyway, I have seen many of them and one of their worst inaccuracies is the way they portray asteroid fields. All of the human filmmakers seem to assume that the asteroids in any given field are all clumped together—like burra berries in a good shungu pie.”
“Whereas actually, they can be spaced so far apart you could fly through the entire asteroid field and never even see one—let alone a big clump of them,” Y’lla said, continuing her husband’s thought.
“Exactly, my love.” Rive gave her an affectionate smile and nuzzled her neck. Y’lla nuzzled him back and it appeared they were in danger of heading into a full-blown snuggle session.
Penny cleared her throat, to remind them of her presence. It was something she had learned to do early because the pair of them seemed on the verge of having passionate sex at any given moment.
“Just remind us you’re there, dear,” Y’lla had told her, on the first day of their journey when she and Rive had started making out in the middle of a conversation the three of them had been having. “We’re just really close because of our soul-bond. Well that and the fact that we don’t have any children. We do want some—but we’re not finished exploring the universe yet.”
Penny couldn’t help being a little envious of such a close connection—she’d certainly never experienced anything like it in the few relationships she’d had. Her last serious boyfriend, Garret, certainly hadn’t been nearly as affectionate as Rive was with Y’lla.
But she had written it off as a Kindred thing—something that simply wasn’t attainable for her, even if she had found the right guy—which she certainly wasn’t going to be doing in the middle of an interstellar dig.
She cleared her throat again, louder this time, and Rive and Y’lla pulled apart.
“Sorry, Penelope,” Commander Rive said, clearing his throat. “Er…what were we talking about?”
“The way temporal anomalies are spaced so widely apart that we’ll probably never run into one,” Penny reminded him. “Which makes me wonder again why we didn’t just fold space to right outside the orbit of Yown Beta instead of taking a week to fly to it. Not that spending time with you guys isn’t great,” she added quickly. “But it just seems like if there’s hardly any chance of hitting a time pocket—”
“Actually, the odds of landing in or near an anomaly while folding space into the Yown System have been calculated at four million to one,” Y’lla said.
“But that’s less than the odds of getting struck by lightning back on Earth,” Penny protested. “It’s even less than the odds of winning the lottery! So why not risk it?”
“You wouldn’t ask that if you’d ever seen someone who was trapped in a temporal anomaly,” Rive said seriously. “Because even though the odds are against it, it does happen.” He looked at his wife. “Remember Duk’las?”
“Oh yes—the poor male!” She shook her head sadly and buried her head in Rive’s broad shoulder. He stroked her hair comfortingly and kissed her cheek.
“Who was Duk’las and what happened to him?” Penny asked quickly, before the two of them could start going at it again. Honestly, they were really nice people but it was kind of annoying how quickly they forgot someone else was in the room and went into love-making mode!
“Oh, he was a young man we met on our travels—one of our guides on a previous expedition,” Rivas explained.
“His people were humanoid,” Y’lla added. “In fact, he looked like he could have come from Earth—well, except for his bright yellow eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human with yellow eyes. Have you, my darling?” she asked Rivas.
He shook his head.
“No. But other than that, he looked like a healthy young man when we first met him.”
“But then, when we saw him a year later, he had changed completely,” Y’lla said. “The poor dear had long gray hair and his lovely yellow eyes were nearly brown with age. His body was twisted and his hands were just arthritic claws. Oh, it’s almost too awful to talk about!” She buried her head in Rive’s shoulder again.
“He went through an anomaly?” Penny guessed.
“Yes—he went through a quick-time one.” Rive nodded, being careful not to dislodge his wife who was curled against him.
“It aged him eighty years in a second!” Y’lla said, looking up. “He was little more than a boy when we first met him and an old man, near death, the next time we met.”
“That’s awful.” Penny had to admit she felt shaken by the story. “But what happens if you end up in a, uh, slow-time anomaly?”
“Well, it depends on how slow it is. It might make your hour last a day or your day last a week or your week last a whole solar year,” Rive said thoughtfully. “I had heard of something like that happening to another traveler who was unfortunate enough to fly through a slow-time pocket. He said it felt like he was trapped in one spot for years and in fact, he was. When the anomaly finally passed through his ship—or his ship passed through it, whichever you like—he found out that twenty solar years had gone by on his home planet.”
“All his children were grown up and his mate had joined with someone else, thinking he was dead.” Y’lla shivered. “Just imagine—how awful!”
“Being stuck in one place for years or losing your entire family?” Penny asked. “Though I guess both would be pretty terrible.”
“Exactly. Which is why we’re so careful about our approach to Yown Beta,” Rive remarked. “No matter how low the odds are, we don’t want to risk flying through any anomalies.”
“I understand now.” Penny nodded. “Thank you for explaining it to me.”
“No problem, Penelope.” Rive and Y’lla both smiled at her. “We know how primitive Earth technology is and that your people haven’t had a chance to get much interstellar experience yet,” Y’lla said.
“Which is one reason I was so eager to go on this mission,” Penny said, smiling at them, though Y’lla’s words about Earth tech being “primitive” were a bit galling. Though she supposed it was true if you compared Earth tech to the Kindred’s advanced science.
“Well, we’re glad to have you,” Y’lla remarked. “Especially with your expertise in dealing w
ith stone artifacts. Why, you know—”
“There it is—Yown Beta!” Rive interrupted his wife, pointing excitedly at a gray speck on the viewscreen.
“Really?” Penny squinted at the screen. “What’s that one, then?” she asked, pointing at another, greenish speck far from the gray one.
“Oh, that’s Yown Alpha,” Rive explained. “Yown Beta’s sister planet. They have almost the exact same mass and composition but they’re located at opposite ends of the habitable zone for this solar system.”
“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.
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