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.
At last, though, she could run no more. Heart pounding and the breath tearing in her throat, Penny stopped and bent over, hands on her knees. She panted for a while, trying to get her breath back, and was finally able to straighten up and look around.
She found herself outside the docking bay in a long metal corridor that appeared to stretch on forever without a break. The long hallway was empty. No, not just empty, Penny saw as she looked around—it was deserted.
There were signs that the vast hallway had at one time been inhabited. Lining the walls on either side, were abandoned kiosks and stores. They were mostly just empty shelves now, but here and there she saw a few items—an abandoned scarf, an old boot, a dusty package of some kind of snack food in a vacu-sealed bag…
But there was no sign of any living people—no sign of anything living at all.
It reminded Penny of an empty airport terminal—one that had been abandoned for years.
She looked around, her heart pounding in her chest. What had happened here? Had the entire station been subject to some kind of cataclysmic event that killed everyone off? Or had everyone left at once, abandoning the huge spaceport to float empty and alone through space, like a silent ghost ship?
“Stop it!” she muttered aloud to herself but the echoes of her own voice spooked her almost as much as the empty corridors. In another minute she was going to take off running again, trying to get away from the silence that seemed to press like cotton on her ears.
Before she could completely lose it, Penny stopped and took a deep breath.
Penelope Amanda Wainright, she lectured herself sternly—and silently since her own voice sounded so spooky and hollow in the empty corridors. Get hold of yourself right now! You’ve been in scary situations before—remember the time you got lost in Cairo during your first dig in Egypt? That was a dangerous place too, but you got out of it alive and unharmed and you’ll get out of this too. Now, consider your options.
Well, option number one was to go back to the ship and hope the bubble passed through it and left silently the way it had come, allowing time inside the shuttle to go back to normal.
But that didn’t seem like a very good option to Penny. Y’lla had said the bubbles could pass in seconds or take years to move on. What would she live on if it took months or years for the anomaly to pass? And how could she be sure it wouldn’t engulf her while she waited?
She supposed she could try to gather enough stray objects to keep throwing ahead of her and see if any of them got frozen in mid-air, the way the fork had back in the corridor of the ship, but it just didn’t seem like a workable solution. After all, she couldn’t stand outside the shuttle tossing objects at it constantly for however long it took for the time-bubble to move on. If it took too long, she could starve to death waiting!
“Well, what’s the other option, then?” Penny murmured to herself, making sure to keep her voice low so it wouldn’t echo in that spooky way that had freaked her out before.
If she couldn’t go back, she would have to go on ahead. That meant walking down the long, empty metal corridor, lit only by the dull, flickering overhead glows and devoid of any life. Maybe somewhere she could find someone who would help her—or some way to make an interstellar call and contact the Mother Ship. At the very least she wouldn’t just be sitting there, waiting for the slow-time bubble to get her.
It was a grim and scary choice but Penny didn’t see any other option—she started walking.
Eight
Hours later Penny was still trudging along the same metal corridor with her boots making the dull thump, thump, thump with every step.
At first, the sound had bothered her, the way it echoed in the empty space. She’d taken the boots off and tied the strings together to hang them around her neck for a time as she shuffled down the corridor silently in her sock feet.
But she’d found that the boots got very heavy after awhile and her feet got cold. In fact, the entire corridor was cold—it felt like a winter’s day back on Earth and Penny could see her breath puffing out in front of her.
Luckily, the warm-skin kept her toasty, just as Kat had promised it would. Penny pulled her hands inside the long, tight sleeves and tugged the hood over her head, leaving only her face visible. So though the tip of her nose felt numb, the rest of her was pretty comfortable.
Well, except for her feet. She stopped and put the boots back on and kept plodding.
After a while, her stomach began to growl. It had been a long time since breakfast—a reconstituted food cube which had yielded scrambled eggs, hot buttered toast with jelly, and crisp bacon. The memory made her mouth water uselessly.
Penny didn’t know how long she’d been walking because the chronometer on her wrist seemed to have been affected by the slow-time bubble, when her hand had gotten engulfed by it. It had stopped and though she shook it and tapped it, the chronometer wouldn’t start again.
But though her watch was broken, her stomach wasn’t. It informed her that it was well past lunch time and almost time for dinner or “Last Meal” as the Kindred called it. She thought longingly of the dusty pack of snack food she’d seen at the start of her strange journey—why hadn’t she grabbed it when she had the chance?
Sure, it was old and doubtless way out of date, but it had been vacu-sealed which meant the contents—whatever they had been—were probably still good. Or at least edible. And there was nothing to eat here, in the empty corridor. Nothing but dust and a few discarded items here or there.
Penny was just beginning to wonder if she ought to go back for the dusty snack bag even though it was far behind her, when her eyes fell on a welcome sight.
Up ahead, in an abandoned storefront, she saw a full shelf—and the items it was filled with all appeared to be edible.
Putting on a
burst of speed, Penny reached the empty store and stared eagerly at the shelf at the front. It was filled with colorful bags of the same kind of snack mix she’d seen earlier as well as some vacu-sealed packets of energy-jelly and even something that looked like either a candy bar or a jerky stick. Either one would be welcome to her empty stomach.
Best of all, none of the items looked compromised. None of them was even dusty. They sat there on the empty shelf, as colorful and bright as the day they’d been made, calling to her to come and try their delicious contents.
Penny looked around for a storekeeper—could it be that this one store in all the empty corridor was still open for business? But no—the rest of it was silent and deserted. There was nothing but a pile of old clothes lying in a heap in the corner. The items on the shelf appeared to be free for the taking.
Stomach growling, Penny reached for the candy bar or jerky stick. But just before her fingertips brushed it a screechy voice said in her ear,
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dearie. Oh my, no—I certainly wouldn’t.”
Nine
“What?” Penny jerked her hand back and whirled around.
Standing right behind her was a little old woman. She had on a baggy brown dress that seemed to have a hundred pockets sewed all over the front and sides of it. From the pockets, various items protruded. Penny had no idea what any of the items were, but she didn’t take much time to study them because there was something much stranger than her dress about the little old woman.
She had a second head.
It was much smaller than normal and it perched like a wrinkled peach directly on top of her first head or main head in a nest of curly brownish-gray hair. At least, Penny assumed it was the old woman’s main head because when she spoke again, that was the head she used.
“I said I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dearie. Nobody steals from a Keeper and gets away with it, no they don’t,” the old woman said.
“No-no! No-no!” squeaked the top head, opening and shutting its bright little eyes rapidly.
“A…a Keeper?” Penny asked uncertainly. “What are you talking about? What’s that?”
“Looky here,” the old woman said and the wrinkled peach head on top said,
“Looky-looky! Looky-looky!”
Penny tried not to be distracted by the odd second head and instead watched what the old woman was doing.
She reached into one of her many pockets and pulled out something that looked like a bit of scrap metal. Leaning into the store, she threw the metal directly into the middle of the pile of discarded clothes Penny had noticed earlier when she was looking to see if there was a shopkeeper of some kind.
Immediately, the pile of clothes exploded outward and a huge, green, spider-like thing—as big as a Doberman pincher—came rushing at them. It scrambled up the shelf with horrible speed and came to rest at the top of it, balancing its fat, hairy body on several long, thick legs—each one of which was tipped with a chitinous claw.
Penny shrieked and stumbled backwards, landing on her behind in her haste to escape. She scrambled to her feet and started to run but the old woman was suddenly blocking her path.
“No, no, dearie,” she said calmly. “Don’t you worry—a Keeper won’t leave its store, no it won’t. Not unless you take from it. Of course,” she went on, going to stand not three feet from the menacing spider-thing which was still balancing on the top of the shelf and staring at Penny with eight bulbous eyes. “Of course, if you’d stolen one of the Keeper’s lures, then it would have chased you down and had you for its dinner, so it would.”
“It…it would?” Penny couldn’t believe the old woman was standing so close to the huge, hairy Keeper without being attacked. But the spider-thing just sat there on the top of the shelf, swaying from side to side, and hissing faintly through its jagged mandibles.
“Why, a‘course it would!” the old woman said.
“A’course! A’course!” squeaked her second head, opening and shutting its eyes.
“Hush, you.” The old woman swatted the little head gently, which only made it open and close its eyes more rapidly. “My twin,” she said to Penny, who was watching the display uncertainly. “She’s a pain in m’rump, so she is, but I’m stuck with her, ‘ent I?”
“Um…” Penny wasn’t sure if this was a rhetorical question or not.
“Yes, I am.” The old woman sighed. “Stuck with her is old Granny Two-two.”
“Granny Two-two?” Penny asked.
“Why sure, dearie—that’s what they call me. Granny Two-two. And what might your name be?”
“Oh, I’m Penelope Wainright,” Penny said. “Uh, but people call me Penny.”
“Penny it is then.” Granny Two-two nodded. “Well, Penny, it seems you don’t know much of what you’re doing around here. Either that or you thought you could outrun a Keeper.”
Penny glanced again at the hairy green spider as big as a large dog and shuddered.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, I never thought that. I’ve never seen a, uh, Keeper before.”
“Never seen a Keeper before? Why then, you must not have been aboard Hell’s Gate very long,” Granny Two-two remarked.
“No, I haven’t,” Penny confessed. “In fact, we just docked here a few hours ago to make repairs to our ship.”
“We? Our?” Granny Two-two squinted at her with both heads. “I don’t see but one of you, child. Unless you’ve got a twin hidden on you somewhere?” she asked.
“Twin! Twin!” the second head shouted at the top of its squeaky voice, staring at Penny with renewed interest.
“No, I don’t, honestly. I don’t have a, uh, twin,” Penny said hastily. “I was talking about my shipmates. But unfortunately they got caught in a temporal anomaly. I mean, I think they did, anyway. They seem frozen in time and they’re just stuck there.”
“I see.” Granny Two-two nodded, apparently unsurprised to hear this. “And where did you dock, child?”
“Back that way—at the end of the station.” Penny pointed down the long metal corridor, back the way she’d come.
Granny Two-two shook her head and clucked her tongue.
“Well, no wonder you got stuck in a time-suck if you docked down there! Why, nobody’s used that end of Hell’s Gate for the past thirty cycles at least, ‘cause the sucks are so bad.”
“Time-suck! Time-suck!” her second head crowed.
“Hush, you.” Granny Two-two swatted at it again. “The wonder of it is,” she went on, talking to Penny. “That you got out at all. Most folks get stuck in a suck the minute they try to dock and then that’s the end of them, don’t you know.”
“No, I didn’t know or we never would have docked there,” Penny said. “Please, can you help me? My, uh, friends got stuck in kind of an awkward position and the part of the ship they’re in is where the communications devices and viewscreen are. Is there any way to get them free from the, uh, time-suck?”
“’Fraid not, dearie.” Granny Two-two shook her head and the second head shouted,
“Not! Not!”
“Not unless you can move as fast as a quick-loris, anyway,” Granny Two-two went on, after swatting at the second head again.
“A quick-loris? What’s that?” Penny asked.
“Come with me, dearie, and I’ll show you.” Turning, the old woman stamped off down the corridor in the direction Penny had been heading in the first place.
There didn’t seem to be anything else she could do but go with the old lady. So, with a final sidelong glance at the Keeper, which was still faintly hissing, Penny followed Granny Two-two down the hall.
Ten
Penny had been wondering how the old woman had snuck up on her when the corridor was so completely empty, but she soon had her answer. Granny Two-two only walked a few steps up the vast hallway before scuttling behind an abandoned kiosk.
Following close behind, Penny saw her disappear into what appeared to be a large ventilation shaft. It was lit
from within by a dull green glow that seemed to come from a kind of moss that grew along it walls.
The shaft just barely brushed the curly gray hair at the top of Granny two-two’s second head, but Penny had to duck to go into it. Though she was only 5’3, being around the little old lady made her feel positively tall.
Granny Two-two went at a quick pace, shuffling along the square ventilation shaft with surprising speed. After a moment the shaft branched and she took the right branch without hesitation and kept going. It branched again and she went left. And on and on they went until Penny was thoroughly lost.
It suddenly occurred to her that Granny Two-two might be leading her to her doom. But if that was so, why would she have saved Penny from the awful Keeper? Anyway, at this point she was committed to following the old lady—there was no possibility of finding her way back on her own. And there was nothing but the vast empty corridor, even if she could.
Reluctantly, Penny kept going.
She was just beginning to wonder when they were ever going to stop when Granny Two-two turned left again and popped suddenly out into the open.
“Careful now,” Granny Two-two said as Penny followed her out of the shaft. “This suck’s been stable for a long time but you never can tell with sucks—gotta take a caution with them.”
“Take a caution! Take a caution!” her second head agreed, blinking at Penny.
Looking around, Penny saw that they were standing on the perimeter of a huge room—as big as an airplane hangar. The room was filled with people and they seemed to be having some kind of a party—at least if the fancy clothing and the people caught in the act of what she assumed was dancing was any indication.
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