“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 with 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.
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.
