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)
You could be trapped here forever.
This last thought galvanized her into action. She yanked the arm of her affected hand backwards with all her might. To her relief, the hand began to work again at once but the fact that the invisible time bubble was so close to her freaked Penny out. It was expanding quickly, like poison gas she couldn’t see—she had to get away from it before it caught her!
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.