“My name is Fenris,” he said, by way of an introduction. He spoke perfect English, with an accent suggesting he was of Terran Eastern European origin. His brusque manner was that of someone who was clearly not having a good day. “I am the Maharani’s chief of staff and head of security here at the palace.”
“My name is Ravana,” she said hesitantly. “Is this about…?”
“Ravana,” mused Fenris, interrupting. “An unusual name, I must say. The Maharani does not take kindly to trespassers,” he said sternly, side-stepping her unfinished question. “Yet we mean you no harm. I trust my men have not mistreated you.”
Ravana saw he was looking at the scar on her face and turned away, discomforted yet also puzzled by how calm he seemed considering what had just happened. Fenris saw her unease and beckoned to her to take a seat by the desk, then dismissed the guards.
He sat down in the chair opposite. She watched his hand momentarily go to the book, a grey leather-bound volume inscribed with the word Isa-Sastra, as if seeking reassurance. Reaching for his case, he opened the lid and turned it slightly to hide its contents from Ravana’s sight. Nevertheless, she caught a glimpse of what looked like a small holovid screen and at the top of the lid there was a small hole, now facing towards her, which she suspected was a camera lens.
“The guards are good men but not great at conversation,” he said. Ravana smiled nervously, then thought better of it when she saw that Fenris’ own expression remained entirely humourless. “Regrettably, they were a little slow to react to the rather unpleasant incident we had here today. Maybe you saw something of it yourself?”
Ravana nodded and was just about to launch into her story when Fenris put a finger to his lips, then cocked his head slightly as if listening to something. She noticed he wore a small earpiece, adding weight to her suspicions that he was recording their conversation. Suddenly rising from his seat, he walked to the door and beckoned to someone beyond.
The youth who stepped into the room moments later, dressed in a long green robe that reached to the floor, was instantly recognisable as the boy Ravana had seen being carried off by the two spacesuit-clad men.
“It can’t be!” she exclaimed. “You were taken away in the Astromole. I saw you!”
The boy bowed deeply. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, miss.”
Ravana stared at him. The voice was perfectly modulated and strangely emotionless.
“Ravana, this is Raja Surya,” Fenris told her. “The Raja is the Maharani’s only child and the sole heir to the royal seat of Yuanshi.”
Ravana looked confused. “But…”
“Actually, I have misled you,” Fenris confided. “This is the Raja’s clone.”
“What?”
The boy bowed again. “I am Cyberclone Surya,” he said. “Here to serve in his place.”
“A cyberclone?” Ravana was dumbstruck. Momentarily forgetting what she had seen outside, she looked closer. The boy’s expression had an odd inscrutable smoothness that reminded her of the humanoid test pilot robots she had once seen at Lan-Tlanto spaceport. “I thought the Maharani had forbidden all advanced technology,” she said wonderingly. “You can’t get much more advanced than a cyberclone.”
Fenris looked at her oddly. “I wanted to test if you recognised the boy, which clearly you do. Your reaction to the clone is curious. I was under the impression that the residents of this asteroid were, dare I say it, a little backward?”
“I am training to be an astro-engineer and a pilot like my father!” retorted Ravana, deeply offended. Now she knew she was looking at an android she recognised the perfect symmetry of features that separated machines from flesh-and-blood humans. “I’ve never seen a cyberclone in real life before. Not that they are real life, if you know what I mean. It’s an amazing piece of work.”
She fell silent as she caught Fenris’ expression. His inadvertent insult was partly true, for a fair few of the long-term residents of the Dandridge Cole needed no encouragement to shun technological luxuries and were perfectly happy to live like simple farming folk.
“Your father is a pilot?” asked Fenris. “With his own ship?”
Ravana nodded. “The Platypus,” she said proudly, having chosen the name herself. “He’s flown in all five systems. Now I’m older he lets me go with him.”
“Ah yes,” Fenris mused. “The delivery man. But we are getting off the point. The Raja is missing. There are signs of a forced entry to his chambers and the mark of a rebel faction has been found on the wall by his window. My men are even now scouring the palace grounds and beyond, but as yet there is no sign of either the Raja or his abductors.”
Ravana glanced towards the clone standing silently at Fenris’ side. She recalled that months ago her father had made a large and rather mysterious delivery to the palace, which had included what he thought were two cyberclones in their coffin-like crates. The boy’s blank stare was more than a little disconcerting and when it became clear that its presence was stifling conversation, Fenris signalled for it to leave.
“I saw two men,” Ravana began, as the cyberclone closed the door. She was pleased to see that her electric cat had somehow found its way into the palace and homed in on her, slinking furtively between the legs of the cyberclone as it left. Speaking hesitantly, but reassured by the comforting weight of the cat clambering up onto her lap, she related how she had come to be in the palace grounds and what she had seen whilst hidden in the bushes. Fenris remained stony-faced as she related how the men and their captive escaped in the Astromole, but raised a surprised eyebrow when Ravana described how she had plugged the hole with the ornamental elephant. When she finished her tale, he was looking at her in a new light, her mud-splattered clothes now telling a very different story.
“Two men, you say?” he asked. “Wearing spacesuits?”
Ravana nodded. “They didn’t have their helmets with them, though.”
“And they escaped into a hole in the ground,” Fenris murmured. “My men have tried to move the statue but it appears to be stuck fast.”
“There must be a vacuum on the other side,” Ravana told him. “At first I thought they had bored a hole right through to the other side, but…” She tailed off, for something had been puzzling her about that particular incident.
“But what?”
“There’s a lot of rock between us and space and the machine wasn’t moving that fast,” she said. “The wind started rushing through far too soon after it left. Plus, the hole was already there before the machine disappeared inside.”
“It is a mystery,” Fenris admitted. Ravana wondered if he was thinking of the spacesuits the men were wearing, which to her suggested the kidnappers and the Raja were no longer on the Dandridge Cole. “Alas, your observations would mean nothing to my men and I myself have limited knowledge of the strange geography of this hollow moon.”
He looked expectantly at Ravana, though she was not sure why and for several long moments neither spoke. On her lap, her cat suddenly belched and regurgitated the head and a mass of slimy rubber tubes that had once belonged to the gull. Electric cat vomit did not mix well with dried evil-smelling mud.
“Professor Wak may be able to help,” suggested Ravana, eager to break the silence.
“Professor who?” Fenris sounded irritated.
“He has his quarters near ours at Dockside,” she told him. Professor Wak, the father of her friend Zotz, was the scientist in charge of keeping life-support and other systems of the Dandridge Cole in full working order and was a familiar sight within the hollow moon. She had assumed from Fenris’ educated manner that he knew as much about their world as she did, but now wondered if the restrictions the Maharani placed upon her household were more severe than she imagined. “He teaches my physics and engineering classes. He knows the hollow moon like the back of his hand.”
“Is that so?”
Ravana nodded, inwardly cringing at her use of that particular metaphor. Professor Wak was notoriously absent
-minded and had an artificial left hand as a result of losing a glove whilst helping with repairs outside the main airlock. In space, thanks to the wonders of helmet intercoms, everyone had heard him scream. She had learned many new and interesting expletives that day.
Fenris put a hand to his earpiece again, then looked thoughtful. “I need to confer with the Maharani,” he told her, standing up as he spoke. “If you would care to wait here a little longer, I will arrange for someone to take you back to your father.”
“There’s no need,” Ravana interjected. “I can make my own way back.”
Fenris glanced down at the holovid screen in the case before him. Curious, Ravana leaned closer and her eyes went wide as she caught a glimpse of a haggard and twisted face, heavy with anger, staring out from within. Somehow, she knew the watcher on the screen was contemplating the consequences of her tale. Fenris bore the look of someone chastised and who had just been given orders to put it right.
“Please,” Fenris implored softly, closing the lid of his case. “I insist.”
*
The Maharani’s private transport was an aged lunar-class personnel carrier, the barrel-shaped hull of which had been modified with polished wooden side panels, a luxurious velvet-trimmed interior and a roof pennant displaying the royal crest. The transport’s six wheels were each as tall as Ravana herself and were shod with large hoops of spring wire, for this was a vehicle designed for bounding across the rocks of airless moons and not one ideally suited to carrying exiled royalty through the bowels of a colony ship.
Ravana sat between Fenris and the driver in the cockpit at the front of the vehicle. A palace servant had given her a clean set of overalls to wear, which were already starting to tear under the restless claws of the cat sprawled across her lap. The Maharani rode in the main passenger compartment behind, barely visible through the heavy gauze screen that separated the cockpit from the rest of the vehicle. Her attendants had done their utmost to keep the Maharani hidden from view and Ravana had caught just the briefest glimpse of a petite figure swathed in a traditional Indian saree of red and gold.
The transport bustled through the palace gates at a brisk running pace, its wire wheels absorbing the worst of the bumps as it bounced along the rough concrete tracks that passed for roads within the hollow moon. Before long they reached Petit Havre, one of four tiny hamlets that together housed the four-hundred strong population of the Dandridge Cole. This was the French quarter, a tight-knit farming community who when not working the fields seemed to spend all day sitting outside the café in the village square, drinking coffee and freely engaging in conversation with anyone who happened to pass by. The gaily-painted houses were built of stone and looked as old as the hollow moon itself. Today, the appearance of the Maharani’s transport was creating quite a stir.
“This thing must be thirty years old,” Ravana remarked, looking around the cockpit.
“This is the vehicle in which the Maharani, the Raja and those loyal to her made our escape, almost ten years ago,” Fenris told her. “We loaded it with supplies, commandeered a ship and left our world to its fate.”
“What were you escaping from?”
“Those who wanted the riches of Yuanshi for themselves,” Fenris replied bitterly. “The Maharaja, Surya’s father, had been murdered by those who did not see a place for the Raja’s family or the Dhusarian Church in their own plans.”
Ravana remembered little of the troubles on the distant moon, but knew she too had ended up in the Barnard’s Star system because her father’s ship had been hijacked in a similar fashion. Her father had dropped the odd cryptic remark hinting that the incident that had left his wife dead and a young Ravana scarred for life had also been a result of the ongoing civil war, but it was not something he ever really talked about.
Her thoughts were interrupted by her pet going into an electronic choking fit. As she held it in her arms, the cat sat up, arched its back and then coughed up a jumbled mess of wires, half an electric motor and a wad of plastic feathers.
“Bad kitty,” scolded Ravana. “That will teach you to eat that poor defenceless bird.”
Fenris looked annoyed. “Does it do that a lot?”
“It never used to,” Ravana admitted. “Unfortunately, over the last few weeks it has started to eat the strangest things. Electrical items, mainly.”
The transport by now had left Petit Havre behind. Through the windscreen Ravana saw they were approaching the halfway point and about to pass the base of one of the three huge pylons that held the sun in the centre of the cavern. Near the bottom of the pylon was parked a familiar blue hovertruck and it occurred to Ravana that the distant figure standing scratching his head at the base of the pylon may well be Professor Wak himself, for her father had mentioned that Wak was currently looking into a puzzling power drain affecting the hollow moon’s systems. Dusk was upon them and squinting upwards she saw the artificial sun starting to fade into darkness. The cycle of night and day within the Dandridge Cole was synchronised to Terran cycles, not that many of the hollow moon’s inhabitants remembered days and nights on Earth. The local calendar had also been maintained to mirror that of its home planet, so much so that the local date and time was exactly the same as European Central Time back on Earth.
During the day it was markedly warmer in this region of the hollow moon and it was no surprise that the hamlet here was home to Spanish, Greek and Italian families, who had given the area a distinct Mediterranean air. Here, the bubbling stream that ran the length of the hollow moon had been widened into a shallow lake, around which picturesque stone houses had been built, most with sun terraces. Of all the villages, this was Ravana’s favourite and she had spent many a sunny day swimming in the warm waters of the lake, though her weak arm left her with a tendency to swim in circles.
Ahead lay a patchwork quilt of farmland and irrigation ditches, the vast concave fields of wheat overshadowed only by the elevated track of one of the three monorail trains that ran the length of the cavern. The sheep, cattle and wallabies roaming distant pasture were descended from animals born on Earth, though selective breeding and the low pseudo-gravity had created freakish-looking beasts twice the size of their Terran ancestors. Ravana had once spent an entertaining few hours at the lakeside watching a kangaroo being rescued from where it had crashed through a second-storey window of a house.
The next nearest settlement lay on the other side of the cavern and so was actually above them as the transport continued along the road. This was the sprawling hamlet that was home mainly to families of German and Eastern European origin. As Ravana looked up through the windscreen she could already see distant lights shining through the windows of the houses far above, which once the sunlight had completely faded would continue to sparkle like stars in the night. Even this late in the day there were a few people in birdsuits gliding high near the zero-gravity point, mingling with the real birds flocking home to their roosts. Soon the air would be empty save for the flittering shadows of the bats and flying foxes. Curiously enough, one of the distant soaring figures now gliding home had chosen a bat-like design for their own distinctive scarlet birdsuit.
Ahead, the great circular wall at the end of the hollow moon grew nearer. Here was the community of Dockside, an unruly mishmash of brick, stone, wood and even sheet-steel architecture all crammed tight against the cliff face, stretching right around for over three kilometres to completely encircle the hollow moon. Dockside was populated almost entirely by the engineers, scientists and their families who supported the fragile economy of the Dandridge Cole by trading black-market goods and engineering services with the many unofficial colonists in the Barnard’s Star system and beyond.
“Home sweet home,” Ravana murmured.
Right on cue, a beep from her wristpad alerted her to a new message from her father, who was asking why she had not turned up to her music class that afternoon. She had genuinely forgotten about her cornet lesson and did not know how her father would react to her a
rriving back in such style. She only hoped he would not be angry with her for straying into the palace grounds.
The road they were on ran diagonally across open farmland, which created the illusion that the end of the cavern was slowly rotating to meet their approach. The building ahead was one of two maintenance bays for the small fleet of spacecraft that served the Dandridge Cole. Half a kilometre above, in the centre of the cliff, was the huge circular steel door of the main airlock. Ravana had never known this to be opened; instead, there were elevators inside the two maintenance bays to take ships up through the cliff and into the airlock chamber. A group of Dockside residents had congregated outside the workshop entrance to watch as the Maharani’s transport drew near.
“There appears to be quite a reception for us,” Fenris observed irritably.
The transport pulled to a halt a short distance from the gathered crowd. Fenris opened the hatch beside where he sat and motioned to Ravana to follow him outside. As she stepped to the ground, she saw her father making his way to the front, his familiar bushy beard and shiny bald head as welcome a sight as his broad smile. Ignoring Fenris, Ravana ran over and hugged him tightly, letting the familiar smell of grease and hydraulic fluid from her father’s overalls fill her nostrils. Next to him stood the tousled and ginger-haired Zotz, his pale face streaked with dirt, who had slipped through the small crowd to join them. He wore a long bathrobe, underneath which Ravana was convinced she glimpsed the elasticated body of a birdsuit. As usual, his shoe laces were undone.
“Sorry about your robot bird, Zotz,” Ravana apologised, seeing a remote-control unit dangling from his hand.
Zotz grinned. “That’s okay,” he said shyly. “I hope it helped.”
Hollow Moon Page 3