she promised herself. She would take a quick peek and try not to see too much—just to be sure that Rive and Y’lla were all right.
Walking as quietly as she could in her thick boots, Penny made her way towards the front of the ship. It was harder to be quiet than usual because every noise she made seemed to echo in the sudden silence. She couldn’t even hear any breathing sounds coming from her shipmates. What in the world was going on?
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.