“Where were you when my life was in danger?”
“You were in danger?” exclaimed The Flying Fox, concerned.
“Ostara passed out and accidentally shut me and the professor inside the airlock,” Ravana told him. “I think you may have banged your head,” she added to Ostara.
“You don’t say,” mumbled Ostara, rubbing her head. “Sorry for fainting and all that.”
Behind the birdsuit-clad figure, Ravana saw Endymion, Bellona and Philyra arrive at the door to the maintenance shed, followed moments later by an out-of-breath Miss Clymene. The sheer energy of Endymion’s excited burst through the doorway was enough to make the masked hero jump in alarm.
“Who are you?” Endymion asked him, ignoring Ravana and Ostara. “We saw you flying above the palace! That is such a cool birdsuit.”
“This is The Flying Squirrel,” Ostara declared, smirking. “Sorry, Fox.”
“Saviour of electric cats,” added Ravana.
“At your service,” The Flying Fox announced. He bowed gracefully to Ravana, not noticing that her cat was now licking a wall power socket. “I am here to both serve and protect you, wherever and whenever danger threatens. Do not fear, for The Flying Fox will always be near!”
“What’s going on up there?” Wak suddenly cried, calling up from inside the airlock chamber. Finding he could not fly the hovertruck one-handed, he had tried to climb the ladder to see what all the fuss was about but found his attempt frustrated by his flattened hand’s inability to grip the rungs. “This is a restricted area!”
“I must fly,” The Flying Fox told Ravana. “I shall return!”
The masked figure stepped forward, took Ravana’s gloved hand in his own and kissed it gently. Before she had a chance to respond, he spun upon his heels and slipped through the door and out of sight, leaving Ravana somewhat nonplussed.
“How sweet!” said Ostara. “Your very own guardian angel!”
Ravana turned away, embarrassed.
“Why was he wearing a mask?” asked Miss Clymene.
“Perhaps he was on his way to a fancy-dress party,” quipped Philyra.
“A real-life superhero!” Bellona exclaimed. “This place has everything!”
“He isn’t exactly a super…” began Ostara.
Ravana nudged her to be quiet. “He is if he wants to be,” she said softly. There was a note of respect in her voice, for she had been somewhat moved by the strange encounter.
“Hello?” called Wak. “Is anyone listening to me?”
Ravana moved to the edge of the airlock and looked down. The professor had removed his helmet and stood on the back of the parked hovertruck, trying in vain to see what was going on in the shed above. Ravana was acutely aware of Endymion and Bellona peering over her shoulder.
“The people from Newbrum are here,” she called down. “The ones who found the kidnappers’ ship on Ascension.”
“Excellent!” cried Wak. The mystery of how Ravana had opened the airlock and then closed it again seemed to have gone clean from his mind. “Bring them down!”
Bellona looked down into the airlock, then at Ravana’s spacesuit. “Is it safe?”
Ravana hesitated. “I’d be lying if I said it was,” she admitted.
Endymion had already collected a suit from the rack. “I’ll come with you!”
“With me?” remarked Ravana.
She had not intended going back into the airlock after what just happened, not least because the now-fading rush of adrenaline had left behind a very painful ache in her arm. She looked at the nervous expressions of Miss Clymene, Philyra and Bellona, then sighed. She was the only one already dressed for the occasion. Ostara crept behind the safety fence and peered down into the airlock.
“What made that big hole?” she asked woozily, still holding her head. She pointed to the kidnappers’ tunnel. “Burrowing wallabies? A mass migration of earthworms?”
“She’s your investigator?” asked Endymion wonderingly.
“Shut up and suit up,” Ravana told him. “Don’t forget your helmet.”
Clambering down the ladder in the clumsy orange emergency suit was not made any easier with Endymion following her and threatening to tread on her gloves with every step. Professor Wak, once again wearing his helmet, was waiting at the bottom of the ladder. As soon as they were down he bustled them across to the large hole hacked into the side of the airlock chamber.
Ravana peered into the kidnappers’ lair. Beyond the initial wider section, the tunnel sloped down for a short distance before curving back up towards the inner surface of the hollow moon. The roughly-cut passage was not in total darkness, for now the elephant had toppled from its perch a faint glimmer of light filtered through the hole in the palace courtyard, illuminating the jammed wreckage of the wooden cart.
“Look,” came Wak’s voice into their helmets. He pointed to a large circular burn mark upon the lower airlock doors. “The kidnappers brought their ship up the shaft from outside, closed the airlock door behind them and parked the ship on top of the doors. See those food cans?” he continued, pointing to a cluster of tins nestling behind the net fixed to the tunnel wall. “They must have been here a while.”
Endymion was gesturing wildly and mouthing something, but neither Ravana nor Wak could hear a word he was saying until Ravana signalled to him to turn on his helmet intercom.
“The Astromole!” Endymion’s voice crackled excitedly. “That’s how the tunnel was dug. An Astromole can burrow through anything.”
“I know that!” retorted Ravana. “I saw the whole thing.”
The professor regarded Endymion curiously. “Who are you, boy?”
“Endymion,” he replied meekly. “I saw the Nellie Chapman in the Ravines.”
“Ah! The Eden Ravines!” exclaimed Wak. “The only place on Ascension where a ship-to-ship transfer can be done without spacesuits!”
Endymion considered this. “I never thought of that,” he admitted.
“What type of ship?” asked the professor. “Lunar class? With a winch?”
Endymion nodded. “It was an asteroid miner.”
“Was?” asked Ravana. “What happened to it?”
Endymion looked sheepish. “It err… sort of exploded.”
“Tricky manoeuvre, flying into a vertical shaft in the side of a spinning asteroid,” mused Wak. “Firing an anchor and tether into the rock next to the shaft entrance would do the trick, though. The winch could haul the ship down to a point where a quick blast of thrusters could be used to counteract the centrifugal forces and power it up the shaft.”
“How did they open the airlock?” asked Ravana.
“Bypassed the circuits,” Wak replied. “The grey box you saw attached to the control panel is no doubt some sort of remote trigger. When it was time to leave, they simply opened the airlock door beneath the ship and the spin of the Dandridge Cole sent them flying out of the shaft and into space like a bullet from a gun.”
“Leaving the door open in the process,” murmured Ravana.
“Your quick thinking saved us there,” noted Wak. It was the first time he had acknowledged what she had done in the palace garden and about as close to a compliment as she could expect from him. “The kidnappers were reckless in the extreme.”
Endymion stepped into the tunnel and looked at the mess the kidnappers had left behind. The tent had done well to survive the mini tornado that had swept through the tunnel, as had the extremely-smelly portable latrine wedged inside a nearby alcove. Ravana wondered where all the excavated rock had gone, then saw the ring of spoil around the edge of the airlock and guessed it had been piled around the parked Nellie Chapman and then sucked into space when the ship went on its way.
Endymion was drawn to the sturdy net fixed to the tunnel wall. Amongst the empty food containers, a biochemical lighting rig and other items, Ravana saw his attention go to a small box-shaped device with a short aerial protruding from the top. The instrument panel on the side of the device had b
een deliberately smashed, presumably with the heavy hammer wedged in the webbing nearby. She watched as Endymion reached beneath the net and pulled it free.
“Get everything on the truck,” Wak told him. “Ostara wants her evidence and I do not want to be in this airlock any longer than we have to. I’m sure Ravana would agree.”
“All of it?” asked Ravana. Stepping past Endymion, she found the tent’s switch panel and pressed the button to activate the closing action. The canvas abruptly twisted and snapped shut, leaving a neat triangular package staked upon the tunnel floor.
“Every last thing,” the professor confirmed. He looked up and waved his good hand to attract Ostara’s attention.
“Yes?” she called, speaking into her wristpad.
“Call Quirinus,” said Wak. “It’s time we paid Maharani Uma a visit.”
*
The monorail car trundled sedately along its rail above the lake shore, heading towards Petit Havre. Within the Dandridge Cole there was little call for high-speed travel; the monorail could barely achieve twenty kilometres per hour but even then a journey from one end of the hollow moon to the other took no more than fifteen minutes. The asteroid’s three monorail systems were each as old as the colony ship itself and the carbon-fibre panelling and fake chrome fittings looked positively archaic compared to the vat-grown bioplastics and exotic alloys of the Platypus. The monorail did not run to a schedule like the skybus service on Ascension, but instead the driverless eight-seat carriage acted like a horizontal elevator service, controlled by selecting from a row of buttons, one for each station.
Quirinus and Zotz had this particular monorail car to themselves. Zotz wore his cadet jacket, which was covered in tiny circular badges displaying his merit awards. The Dandridge Cole cadet scheme was championed by the Symposium, a select group of philosophers who occasionally met to discuss matters other societies left to governments. They had introduced the scheme as a way of encouraging the younger generation to learn new skills and out of a possible hundred and forty-eight awards Zotz had gained all but one; that he had singularly failed to master the art of tying a decent knot had long ago become a running joke amongst his contemporaries. Zotz held Quirinus’ slate in his hand, totally engrossed in the pages of engineering data, photographs and schematics that made up the lengthy communication received by Quirinus barely an hour ago.
“So the strange growth infecting the Platypus is called Woomerberg Syndrome?” Zotz asked, wonderingly. “Where did you get this stuff?”
“An old friend of mine has a custom spacecruiser workshop on Asgard,” replied Quirinus, grinning as Zotz’s expression became one of awe. “I was getting nowhere with what I found on the net so I gave my friend a call and he sent me all this information on the Woomerberg.”
Asgard, a large moon orbiting the gas giant Thule in the Alpha Centauri system, was an anarchic colony of smugglers, black-market traders and data hackers, who were supported by an ever-growing community of inventors and engineers known fondly as ‘rocket-heads’. Their presence had been cautiously welcomed by the holovid corporation on the neighbouring moon of Avalon as they brought with them a rough-and-ready element to life that had been the inspiration for Rocket Queens of Valhalla and many more hit holovid programmes.
Zotz looked back at the report on the screen of the slate. The Woomerberg was a prototype interstellar cruiser, built in the workshops of Valhalla spaceport on Asgard, which had a new type of extra-dimensional drive with double the range of anything else currently flying the five systems. In their attempt to upgrade the ship’s flight systems, engineers had injected the organic brain of the AI unit with an illegal growth hormone, causing the unit to sprout tendrils throughout the ship in exactly the same way Quirinus and Ravana had noted on the Platypus. After finding the tendrils were benign, the engineers left them in place and to date had flown dozens of test flights without noticing any problems. On the contrary, once the growth reached every nook and cranny of the ship, the AI unit performed far beyond all expectations, though did become a bit too conceited as a result. The Valhalla engineers had never repeated the experiment, but there had been one or two cases in the Epsilon Eridani system where similar growths had been noticed on other ships, a condition now known amongst experimental engineers as Woomerberg Syndrome.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” Zotz admitted. “But this didn’t happen on the Woomerberg until they injected the hormone. How did it happen on the Platypus?”
“That’s the strange bit,” mused Quirinus. “I took the tendril cutting to one of the biochemists, who recognised the DNA structure as soon as she slipped it into the scanner. It’s very distinctive, apparently; but stranger still is they told me your father had already found traces of something similar building up inside the air filters at the life-support plant. They’re not sure what it is, but it’s not native to the Dandridge Cole.”
“The Platypus is infecting the hollow moon?”
“Or vice versa,” Quirinus replied. “It’s hard to tell.”
Zotz turned to the window and watched as the curved countryside of the hollow moon slowly passed by. They had left the lake behind and the end of the line at Petit Havre was just a few minutes away.
“What about Ravana?” he asked carefully. His voice betrayed a tiny nervous tremor. “Why did she scream like that?”
Quirinus did not reply for a while. Taking his slate from Zotz, he pressed the power button in the corner and switched it off. Zotz caught his expression and it was clear that Ravana’s father too shared the boy’s unspoken concerns.
“I don’t know,” Quirinus said eventually. “You like Ravana a lot, don’t you?”
“She is my friend,” Zotz answered simply.
“That teacher wants me to take her students to Epsilon Eridani,” Quirinus told him. “Perhaps we should go; Ravana and I. They have good doctors on Daode.”
Zotz looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Me neither,” Quirinus admitted. “Maybe we need to find someone who does.”
*
Ravana’s cat had once again wandered off towards the cliff behind the palace, but at least this time she did manage to catch up with her electric pet before it started scrambling up the three-hundred-metre tumble of scree below the cave. At Ostara’s insistence, Ravana reluctantly invited Endymion, Bellona and Philyra to join her, leaving Professor Wak, Miss Clymene and Ostara herself at the maintenance shed to await the arrival of her father. Ravana knew Ostara was trying to encourage new friendships, but did not find it easy to be sociable at the best of times. Endymion seemed friendly enough, but the way Philyra and Bellona kept looking at her disfigured arm and face made Ravana feel very self-conscious.
“Nice cat,” remarked Endymion, as she lifted her pet into her arms. The cat had stayed away from the palace grounds and had instead scampered diagonally towards the cliff through a stretch of common pasture land, frightening a mob of wallabies in the process. “You don’t see many electric pets on Ascension. Does it have a name?”
“Fluffy?” suggested Ravana, embarrassed. “That was the name I gave it when I was little. It doesn’t actually take any notice of what I call it, so now it’s just ‘cat’. It was a birthday present when I was six, back on Yuanshi,” she added. “Zotz calls it Jones.”
“What made you come to this place?” asked Philyra, with a tinge of disdain.
“What’s wrong with the hollow moon?” retorted Ravana defensively.
As she spoke, a shiver fell upon them and for a brief moment the shadows around them faded, just as they might on a planet such as Earth or Taotie whenever the sun passed behind a cloud. Within an artificial environment such as the hollow moon or the dome of Newbrum city, it was not something that should happen. Startled, Ravana lifted her gaze towards the artificial sun and for a moment she was convinced it glowed less brightly. As long as she could remember it had never faltered before.
“Is it supposed to do that?” asked Endy
mion. He had seen the same thing.
Ravana shook her head slowly. “Not in the middle of the day,” she murmured, somewhat disturbed. “Professor Wak did say there was something strange happening with the Dandridge Cole’s power supply.”
“Newbrum’s just as bad,” said Philyra. “Everything you touch is falling apart.”
“Yes, but this place looks so much older!” Bellona exclaimed. “The houses in that village we came through are really quaint. It feels like we’ve gone back in time.”
“Father says the hollow moon is at least a hundred years old,” Ravana told her, still puzzling over the faltering sun. “I like the old-fashioned way we live here, especially how we work together and share everything like they did in the early colonies. Father says it’s the only way a place like this can keep going.”
“You share everything?” asked Bellona, surprised. “What about money?”
“Dockside has an account we use for trading, but no one has any for themselves. Except the Maharani, of course; they say she brought lots with her when she fled Yuanshi. Everyone who lives here is provided with food and shelter so there is no need for it.”
“I suppose if there’s no money, there’s no crime,” Endymion reasoned.
“There is still a bit of crime,” Ravana admitted. “Ostara was investigating a robbery at the biology laboratories before she started looking into the kidnap of the Raja. On the whole though it seems to work well. Everyone has to contribute a bit of their time to help where needed. I do three days a week in the fields. I’m training to be an engineer.”
Philyra raised a surprised eyebrow. “You work for nothing?”
“What use is money here?” asked Ravana, puzzled. “Where would I spend it?”
“On Ascension, you have to work to buy food and clothes and stuff,” Endymion told her. “If I didn’t get paid I wouldn’t want to work for nothing. I’d rather do nothing!”
“You don’t do anything at work anyway,” Bellona pointed out.
“What would happen if you couldn’t find a job?” Ravana asked Endymion, smiling mischievously. “Would you be left hungry and naked?”
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