Steph Bennion - Hollow Moon

Verdandi was a hard-headed politician with a razor-sharp mind and one of the few people of whom Endymion was genuinely wary. She was not only the head of the spaceport but also of Newbrum city itself, yet with a population of barely three thousand under her jurisdiction she was the last to pretend it was a position of great influence or power. It was unusual to find her at spaceport control and Endymion thought he detected an air of muted anticipation amongst the people in the control room. Subdued, he led Bellona and Philyra to a spare desk overlooking the inside of the dome and the shuttle in the hangar below.

“You’re scared of her,” Philyra observed.

“Aren’t we all,” murmured the man at the next desk. He looked up at Endymion and winked. “Here to make the tea, Endymion? Or perhaps sweep up a little?”

Bellona laughed. “They make you sweep the floor?”

Endymion stuck his tongue out at her. “Actually, I sweep the runway,” he said. “They let me drive this huge truck with massive brooms attached. It’s great fun.”

He sat down at the desk and switched on the vacant terminal. Philyra had found herself an empty chair to slump into and was newly-engrossed in the latest celebrity news on her wristpad. Bellona stood at Endymion’s shoulder and watched the screen as he called up an interplanetary navigation chart for the Barnard’s Star system.

“Are you still thinking of that spaceship we found in the Ravines?” she asked.

Endymion nodded. Using his wristpad, he retrieved the data taken from the Nellie Chapman ’s flight computer and entered a set of coordinates into the chart’s search facility. Once he was satisfied he had entered the correct numbers, he pressed the ‘enter’ key.

“Weird,” he murmured.

The result brought up a region of empty space beyond the orbit of Thunor, the second of the system’s three gas giants and fourth-closest planet to Barnard’s Star. He smiled when he saw that the rocky world second-closest to the sun was on the chart as Frigg, the name given to Ascension when the system was first surveyed, but later changed following the arrival of humourless puritanical colonists.

“Having problems?” asked the man at the next desk.

“Just trying to make sense of a flight path,” replied Endymion.

“Is this part of your training?”

“Something like that,” Endymion lied.

The man peered at the chart on the screen. “You’ve got it showing planetary bodies only,” he pointed out. “Try changing the settings to include navigation beacons.”

Endymion ran the appropriate command and a series of red crosses appeared upon the screen, each one of which marked the position of the various signal beacons and satellites that warned pilots of potential navigation hazards in the system. One such symbol had appeared at his entered coordinates.

“A radiation warning beacon,” Endymion noted, looking at the code next to the cross.

“Why would anyone travel into a radiation area?” asked Bellona.

Endymion had forgotten his sister was watching. The main display offered no further information, so he used the touch-screen menu to bring up the navigation database and entered the beacon reference number. The result just left him more confused than ever.

“ Dandridge Cole ,” he read. “Funny name for an asteroid.”

“An asteroid?” asked Bellona.

“The Dandridge Cole ?” exclaimed the man at the next desk.

“Have you heard of it?” asked Endymion, bemused by the man’s sudden excitement.

“It’s almost the stuff of legend!” the man said. His eyes shone with excitement. “The Dandridge Cole is the original colony ship that brought settlers from Earth to Ascension more than a century ago. It was thought to have been abandoned and left to drift away, but it turns out it remained in orbit around Barnard’s Star. The weird thing is I’d never given the story a second thought until today,” he said, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You see, when Administrator Verdandi turned up earlier, it was to announce that we’re expecting visitors from the Dandridge Cole !”

“Visitors?” Bellona sounded wary. “Who?”

“Aliens,” replied Endymion flatly.

“There’s no such thing as aliens,” Bellona retorted.

“What else can live on an asteroid?”

“They don’t live on the asteroid, they live inside it,” the man told her.

“Inside?” Endymion was intrigued.

“The Dandridge Cole and its sister ship the Robert Goddard were asteroids that had been hollowed out and fitted with life support and huge fusion engines,” the man explained. “They could reach speeds approaching a fifth of that of light, but even then they were expected to take more than fifty Terran years to get to Barnard’s Star. During the journey, the crew and colonists would live out their lives inside the asteroid, waiting until they or their descendants reached their new home.”

“Fifty years!” exclaimed Bellona.

The man smiled. “Twenty years into their voyage, the Chinese perfected the extra-dimensional drive and suddenly we had spacecraft that could do the same trip in days. By the time the people of the Dandridge Cole arrived at Ascension, they were greeted by Commonwealth engineers hard at work building Newbrum. Many of those from the colony ship hated their new home so much they caught the first flight back to Earth.”

“Why didn’t someone send a ship to meet them halfway?” asked Bellona.

“You can’t jump into interstellar space,” Endymion told her. “An ED drive needs the gravity well of the target star to work properly. But what happened to the other ship?” he asked the man. “The Robert whatitsname.”

“No one knows. Have you never seen Waiting for Goddard ?”

Endymion and Bellona shook their heads.

“The Robert Goddard disappeared in very mysterious circumstances,” he told them. “To be honest, the play doesn’t explain a thing and is a lot of nonsense if you ask me. The Administrator will tell you it is a biographical, philosophical, psychoanalytical and religious masterpiece, but it is her mother who is currently starring in the revival at the Newbrum Palladium so I assume she’s biased.”

“If the Dandridge Cole was abandoned, who are the visitors?” asked Endymion. He still could not imagine what interest the crew of the Nellie Chapman had in a lonely asteroid, even one as odd as a century-old colony ship.

“The stories tell of people who refused to leave the colony ship and live there still,” the man said. There was a note of awe in his voice as if he had already decided the tale was true. “On the other hand, you’ve just proved that it’s still on the charts so anyone with a bit of initiative could have found it and taken up residence if they wanted to.”

“What’s going on?” asked Philyra, appearing next to Bellona, having been told to move from her perch by a spaceport worker returning from her lunch break. “I heard someone say a ship was coming in.”

“Aliens,” said Endymion. He glanced at Bellona and winked.

Bellona nodded. “Horribly mutated by radiation into flesh-eating zombies.”

“Yuck,” muttered Philyra. She glanced at the screen in front of Endymion and laughed. “ Dandridge Cole ! I never really believed that story of colony ships.”

“What?” exclaimed Endymion. Her casual acknowledgement of what he saw as a great mystery was a little disconcerting. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“ Weird Universe reviewed Waiting for Goddard a few weeks ago,” she countered, referring to the off-beat entertainment news show. “The cast said it was based on a true story but I thought they were making it all up. A hollow moon indeed!”