Steph Bennion - Hollow Moon

“Taranis must have found out eventually,” remarked Hanuman.

“Not until Aranya Pass,” Yaksha told him. “Ravana was injured in the attack and her unusual name was commented upon by hospital staff. Taranis was reportedly furious, but soon after disappeared in mysterious circumstances and was presumed dead for years.”

“Why did you ask me if I knew Ravana?” asked Surya. The infamous battle of Aranya Pass, a botched and bloody attack early in the civil war that saw royalist rebels fire upon an unarmed medical supplies convoy, was one he knew from history lessons.

“Do you know her?” inquired Yaksha.

Surya shook his head. “My mother doesn’t let me get out much,” he confessed.

“Ravana’s father was a pilot and it was his ship that was commandeered when you and your mother fled Yuanshi following the death of your father,” she told him. “Ravana too may have ended up at that asteroid you have called home for the past nine years.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Ganesa.

“Because she is a sneaky, devious woman who listens to private conversations when she should be minding her own business!” roared Kartikeya, suddenly appearing at the door.

Yaksha went deathly pale. “I was just telling the boy of his history, no more.”

“Did you mention that this girl Ravana was a witness to the Raja’s kidnap?”

“Kidnap?” retorted Yaksha. “Yesterday you were talking of liberation.”

“Silence!” snapped Kartikeya. He approached the table and glared at Yaksha. “Your indiscretion will be the death of you, mark my words.”

“Your words are something for which I do not care,” Yaksha remarked coolly.

“Maybe not,” retorted Kartikeya. “Yet careless talk is dangerous. You’d better pray to the greys it does not prove to be the undoing of this girl Ravana also!”

RAVANA PEERED into the narrow space between the curved hull and the carousel housing and cautiously felt along the bundle of cables that ran along the inner spine of the Platypus . The spherical mass of the combined fusion plant and extra-dimensional drive at her back left little room for manoeuvre. The ladder upon which she stood, though bolted to the cargo bay wall, seemed a lot more wobbly in the gravity of the hollow moon than when in flight.

When the ship first came into her father’s possession it had been no more than a lowly interplanetary freighter. Quirinus saw the ship’s potential from the start and the fitting of an ED drive had been but the first of a series of modifications towards creating a vessel ideal for clandestine voyages between star systems. The most recent addition was the carousel habitation module, a cylindrical cabin that spun upon its axis like a miniature version of the hollow moon, transplanted from a larger passenger cruiser to provide an area of artificial gravity during long flights. The downside was that when it came to repairs, the various alterations and necessary extra fuel tanks had left the Platypus with far too many nooks and crannies to make maintaining the ship easy.

Reaching into the gap, Ravana’s hand at first found nothing amiss, but then she felt the squishy tendrils of the strange, plant-like growth they had recently noticed invading the inner recesses of the ship. She gave the tendril an experimental tug but it clung firm. Withdrawing her hand, she lowered herself down the ladder to the halfway point, slipped into the carousel hub crawl tunnel, then shuffled quickly past the hatch leading to the carousel interior and onwards to the short ladder at the end. Moments later, she emerged breathlessly up onto the flight deck, where her father was busy peering into the dark recesses behind the main console, an open tool box at his feet. True to form, her electric cat was fast asleep on the co-pilot’s chair. Upon hearing her enter, Quirinus turned and gave her a weary smile.

“Did you see anything?” he asked.

“They’ve reached as far as the ED drive,” Ravana told him. “I can feel them along the main run of cables. I wonder what they are?”

“All the stems we’ve found lead back to the AI unit,” reflected Quirinus, meaning the artificial intelligence core processor at the heart of the ship’s flight and life-support systems. “Zotz reckons he has seen something like it before and has gone back to his father’s workshop to have a look.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous?”

“Hard to tell. They don’t seem to be affecting anything,” Quirinus admitted, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “I’ve run the AI unit’s diagnostic programme twice already and searched the net for any mention of it in maintenance bulletins, but found nothing helpful.” He pressed a switch on the console. “Ship, report status.”

“All flight and life-support systems are functioning normally,” said the synthesized female voice. “There is superficial damage to the starboard tailfin, a small leak in the flight-deck air-conditioning unit, the light is not working in the toilet cubicle, the…”

“Stick to the important stuff!” Quirinus interrupted testily. “Nothing’s wrong, see?”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Ravana.

“Yes and no. If there was a fault it would give us something to look for.”

Ravana lowered her sleeping cat to the floor and sat down in her co-pilot’s seat. The ship was berthed in the shuttle bay at Dockside. All she could see through the flight-deck windows, beyond the beak-like sonic shield generator that formed the nose of the aptly-named Platypus , was the graffiti-riddled concrete of the hangar walls.

“I wonder why she didn’t invite me?” she asked suddenly.

“Who?”

“The Maharani. We brought those people back from Ascension so she could talk to them in person, but it was me who saw the men take the Raja away.”

“That woman is trouble,” Quirinus retorted, returning his attention to the console. “My advice is to stay clear and not get involved. It will only end in tears.”

“All they did was find that spaceship,” Ravana mumbled, swinging her legs in a sulk. “Anyone could have done that.”

“The ship was here and we never saw it,” he pointed out. “Wak’s had a robot probe scanning the surface of the asteroid since yesterday looking for the other side of that hole you saw but as far as I know has found nothing.”

Ravana did not reply. Behind her words was the frustration of someone rapidly outgrowing all that life on the hollow moon could offer her. Her father had hoped that co-piloting the Platypus would offer a respite, but their trip to Newbrum had awakened her to the reality that Ascension was not just a place to trade but also a world of cities where people felt part of the interstellar spread of humanity. In contrast, the inhabitants of the Dandridge Cole were outcasts who used the hollow asteroid to hide from civilisation. She wondered if this was what her father wanted for his daughter.

“We need to talk about your future,” Quirinus said suddenly, surprising Ravana. It was as if he had read her mind. “I think it would do you good to see more of the five systems. How do you feel about leaving to study in Newbrum or Bradbury Heights? Or further afield even,” he added. “There’s a fantastic engineering academy in Hellas.”

“Go to university on Mars?” Ravana’s dark eyes shone. “Or maybe even Earth!”

“If you don’t mind carrying twice your weight around, why not!” Quirinus smiled. “You complained about your aches and pains for months after we came to live here and the hollow moon’s gravity is only a bit more than that on Yuanshi.”

“Don’t you want me to stay here and help you crew the Platypus ?”