A sample from the story 'The Flying Ykloa of Sivnoze', where a girl goes on a trip of a lifetime:
Linherta was so excited, that she couldn’t sit still. She had waited all year long for this trip, and could hardly wait for their ship to touch down on Sivnoze. She knew it was not easy to get slots, even if you could pay for it. The waiting list had been very long, but here they finally were. Her father was snoozing in his seat, and her chattering and frequent nudging had not even made him stir. She only half listened to her mother explain the workings of the ship, and the complicated flight path they had taken from their home planet of Lorihaux.
Sivnoze, as planets go, was rather unremarkable. A lump of rock with a barely breathable atmosphere, it had almost no resources left. Its minerals had been mined almost to extinction, and the mines had closed down long ago. It had seen its heyday as an outpost, a few centuries ago, but as new intergalactic routes were developed, Sivnoze was bypassed altogether, and its fortunes had gradually declined. It was only in the past few decades that its economy had improved, as the tourism industry on Sivnoze had flourished. People from across the galaxy, and even outside it, came in droves, to catch a glimpse of the fabled flying Ykloa of Sivnoze.
The planet loomed as an uninviting dark, grey mass in the ship’s viewscreens. Intermittent pools of bright light could be seen on the surface, where the spaceports were located. After what seemed like an interminable wait to Linherta, but was in reality only a few minutes, the ship was given permission to land. It dipped gracefully from its orbit towards their designated port, and slowed down to a hover above it. There was no activity above ground, but as the ship commenced its hover, two huge panels below it slid apart to let it in, and the ship settled on a pad inside a gigantic cavern, and the panels slid closed again.
Most of the passengers on their ship were tourists, like Linherta and her parents. The few who were not, were employees or contractors employed by the tourism industry. They disembarked, and the tourists were transported by pods, to the staging area for the Ykloa sighting tours, that was nearest their port of arrival. The whole planet was a network of tunnels under the surface, that were vestiges of the planet’s mining past. They had now been widened, to accommodate the transportation needs of the huge inflow of tourists, and the few thousand residents of Sivnoze that were needed to run the planet. The gigantic caverns that were required to accommodate the ships had also been blasted out of rock.
The Ykloa had been native to Sivnoze, and were not known to have existed anywhere else, in the known universe. They were fabled beasts of yore, as per the promotional literature that Linherta had learnt almost by heart. They were non-carbon based life forms, and extremely swift, not only on land, but also in the air. They could fly very fast, even enough to outrun most human ships. So much so, that not one Yklo had been captured alive, over the hundreds of years that humans had inhabited Sivnoze. Only a few had ever even been sighted, and whatever had been learnt about them, had been from the few dead ones that had been found from time to time.