Eleven

“Babs! Quit poking that!”

“What? Is it important?”

“Kind of.”

She was seated on the control panel, curiously looking around the interior of the cockpit. Right now she was fiddling with three switches in the ceiling – Krystof had no idea what they did, but it was probably bad news to play with them. He looked for some way to climb up after her, but he decided he didn't want to risk it – chances were he'd step on far more important buttons himself in the process.

“Babs, seriously... come down from there, okay?”

“Fine.”

With an agile leap, the athletic woman landed so close to Krystof that he almost fell over, flinching backwards. Babs smiled. “So, where are we going, exactly?”

“Darren does most of the navigating, but I know it's somewhere in Winterspace. That's why we need you... and why we would have needed Danielle and Kendra, too.”

“Winterspace, huh? I was in Winterspace during my advanced combat training. We only did planetfall once, but I caught some kind of sickness... had fever dreams for a month. It's a nasty place, even if you avoid landing anywhere.”

Krystof found himself relaxing a little. Babs was, despite her sometimes-strange behavior, experienced and reliable in these kinds of situations. It was easy to forget about her military training.

“We won't be making planetfall anywhere but Christmas Planet, hopefully. What's there to worry about if we stay flying?”

“In Winterspace? Well, you've got nasty asteroid belts, cosmic snow, unpredictable slipstreams, and radioactive stellar winds.” Babs said with a nasty grin. “And then there's the Snowmen, of course.”

“Snowmen? D'you think our ship could handle a Snowman attack?”

“One attack? Probably. We'll have to count with more, though.”

Darren poked his head into the room. “We're ready for take-off. You sure you wanna do this, Babs?”

A sardonic smile came over the womans' lips. “Yeah, well. No-one lives forever.”