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