Steph Bennion - Hollow Moon

“Who is Kartikeya?” asked Surya.

“Commander Kartikeya leads the fight against Que Qiao here on Yuanshi,” Namtar told him. “You have the honour of being his guest here in Lanka.”

“Is he winning the war?” asked Surya, still looking down at the city.

“Nobody wins wars,” Namtar opined. “Generals plan battles to be swift and decisive. When they are not, the aim is to end the conflict less defeated than your opponent.”

“He means no, we’re not winning,” retorted Inari.

The aircar started to descend towards a large square building, situated on the edge of a circular park that had once lain beneath the highest point of the old city dome. The park was bordered by a wide road and from this a number of broad boulevards stretched away to the city wall like the spokes of a wheel. As they approached, the building resolved into a mansion house topped by four domed towers, built from blocks of gold-tinted opaque glass in a style that reminded Surya of his mother’s palace of exile within the hollow moon.

The four main blocks of the mansion were built around a square courtyard, which was open to the elements. Guided by the ever-silent pilot, the aircar dropped out of the darkening sky and moments later touched down upon the small landing pad in the middle of the courtyard. The whine of the turbines wound down into silence, to be replaced by the splattering staccato of rain upon the aircar’s roof.

Reaching over, Namtar pushed open the door.

“Welcome to the Crystal Palace of Kubera,” he said to Surya. An attendant rushed across the courtyard towards them, holding a large umbrella. “Your destiny awaits.”

Raja Surya gazed around the room, impressed. The bedroom was enormous and luxuriously furnished with solid wooden furniture, wall tapestries and a carpet that caressed his bare feet and tickled his toes. The four-poster bed, adorned with dark curtains embroidered with intricate swirling patterns, was twice the size of anything he had slept in before. After the rain and the cold outside, the room was pleasantly warm and the lower gravity of Yuanshi compared to that of the hollow moon made him feel as light as a feather. His headache was worse than ever.

“This is my room?” he asked in disbelief. “It’s huge!”

The elderly Indian woman who stood beside him smiled. She was dressed in a traditional pale blue saree, which looked slightly incongruous alongside the touch-screen slate she held in her hand. She placed a reassuring hand upon his shoulder.

“Surya, you have said that in each of the rooms I have shown you,” she said lightly. “The entire suite is yours and the servants will tend to your needs. I have however taken the liberty of instructing the staff not to enter the master bedroom unless so ordered. Everyone deserves a little privacy now and again, whatever their place in the household.”

“Thank you, Yaksha,” murmured Surya, awestruck. Back at his mother’s palace, nowhere was safe from the prying eyes of Fenris, who professed to serve the Maharani first and foremost. Here in Lanka it was beginning to dawn upon him that Yaksha, the head of the household at the Palace of Kubera, was here to serve him. The thought filled his young mind with unexpected delight.

“I see the headaches have started,” said Yaksha. Surya winced again as the ache in his skull became insistent. “Your implant is awakening to the palace network and you may feel some discomfort for a while, but it will pass. You may find it useful to run the calibration programme on the holovid unit. In the meantime, I will leave you to rest.”

As she turned to depart, Namtar appeared at the doorway, looking unusually grumpy. The Sun Wukong had landed barely an hour ago, yet to his dismay Inari had already volunteered them both for a new assignment. Inari was the ideal recruit to the rebels’ cause, for he was easily talked into doing the most foolhardy missions, usually when Namtar was out of earshot. Namtar himself had a keen sense of self-preservation and to date had brought himself and Inari back from several escapades that had made a martyr of others.

“I have a message from Kartikeya to the young Raja,” he said, addressing Yaksha. “He would be greatly honoured if the Raja would consent to joining him and his guests at dinner this evening in the grand hall.”

“Still using ten words when one will do, my little Thesaurus Rex?” teased Yaksha.

“What time is dinner?” asked Surya, still musing over what Yaksha had said about an implant. Apart from an unsatisfying zero-gravity food pack given to him by Ganesa aboard the Sun Wukong he had not eaten since leaving the hollow moon. “Is it soon?”

“Eight o’clock, Raja,” replied Namtar. “It is half-past six now.”

“You will find a change of clothes in your room,” said Yaksha, addressing Surya. “Namtar or I will come and collect you before eight o’clock. In the meantime, I will arrange for some light refreshments to be brought to your study.”

“Thank you,” replied Surya, slightly bemused. Declining the invitation to dinner did not appear to be an option, but his rumbling stomach had already spoken for him.

Namtar replied with a curt nod and departed, followed shortly afterwards by Yaksha who closed the door quietly behind her. A hush descended upon the room, one broken only by the murmur of voices from the lower floors. Feeling a little at a loss, Surya sat down upon the edge of the bed, his mind whirling. His headache was subsiding and on reflection he should have guessed it was from his cranium implant, which his mother had explained was in his head for reasons he still did not fully understand.

For the first time since his arrival he wished there was a way he could hear a familiar voice. Surya owned a wristpad, for the Maharani’s disapproval of technology had not been total, but it had been confiscated during the short flight on the Nellie Chapman . The only other net device he had seen was the holovid receiver in the next room, though Yaksha had told him that access was restricted to a select hundred or so local entertainment channels broadcast from Ayodhya.

Surya walked into the holovid room and paused before the large screen. This was a true three-dimensional display; a glass box two metres wide, a metre high and another metre deep, which he knew once switched on would produce laser-projected images that looked real enough to be touched. After pacing the room several times looking for and failing to find anything vaguely resembling a remote control, he threw himself into a chair and glared at the screen in disgust, willing it to explode on the spot.

Without warning, a loud rumble filled the room and Surya stared in stunned amazement as the glass box suddenly filled with an image of a mountain belching glowing lava and sickly yellow smoke. In the top corner of the holovid screen hovered the words ‘Celestial Geographic’. Above the noise, a voice was talking about the sulphur volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io.

“Amazing!” he exclaimed.

As he watched, the image shifted to show a close-up of two spacesuit-clad figures standing at what was hopefully a safe distance from the volcano. Ignoring the commentary, Surya left his chair and cautiously sidled around the glass box. The three-dimensional effect was so good that from behind the screen all he could see was the back of the spacemen’s helmets, though it seemed their view of the camera crew had been edited out.

He thought more about what Yaksha had said about an implant and it occurred to him that the holovid unit had somehow reacted to an image in his mind, a thought reinforced when he became aware of a strange square symbol in the corner of his mind’s eye. Implant technology was not something he had come across at the hollow moon. Standing in front of the screen once more, he tried to visualise a sliding motion, hoping this was the way to change channels. A sudden swishing noise behind him made him jump and turning around he saw the curtains at the window had opened to reveal the darkness outside.