Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
“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—”