Well, Hitomi hadn't gotten herself killed after all...     ------     Chapter 16            "Barkcloth," Laura repeated wonderingly, looking at the green sheet which was slowly coming apart under repeated handling. "A beginning to it, I think, yes," Caroline said. "The Polynesians made something like this, called tapa. We'll have to do some experiments, but… I think Hitomi might have found us something really important." Hitomi looked very proud. Laura bent down. "But you also could [ Continue reading... ]

  They had just had an unexpected and utterly bizarre disaster...     ------     Chapter 10                  Laura stared in uncomprehending shock. Bobbing ever so slightly, the vast wall of dark, wet stone still loomed up less than a kilometer distant. The piece that had fallen from it—a solid mass the size of a skyscraper—should have been towering over them even nearer. There was no possible way that the lagoon before them could have been two hundred meters deep, no, not even a tenth of [ Continue reading... ]

  Well, since this book has more chapters, you can tell they made a "good landing" in the technical sense...   ------     Chapter 8     Despite the sledgehammer impacts, the cabin of LS-5 remained cheerfully, invariably lit as the world spun, and now, as the ship quivered to stillness, they stayed on, as though nothing had happened. Laura could see that Sakura, at least, was unharmed; her seat had locked properly and the girl's one arm was visible, white-knuckled with tension. Hitomi's [ Continue reading... ]

  They were in the new solar system hoping to find a world...     ------     Chapter 6             Akira's arms hugged Laura tightly for a moment. "Are you all right?" "I think so," she answered on the same channel. One good thing about having private comm channels was that you could have a private conversation even in the middle of a not-too-large cabin. "But my God, Akira." Even after four days it was still hard to grasp what had happened, and only now that they had successfully reached that [ Continue reading... ]

So, it was just one more drill in a series of drills...     ------     Chapter 2            Laura smiled as she dropped through the entry hatch to see that her husband, Akira, had just finished strapping Hitomi into her crash seat. The seven-year-old was behaving very well, clutching her winged-wolf plush and pretending it was flying back and forth in front of her, but otherwise sitting still. "You made good time," she said, giving Hitomi's inexplicably blonde hair a ruffle and kissing Akira on the cheek as [ Continue reading... ]