Steph Bennion: Hollow Moon

“Bad kitty!” Ravana said reprovingly. Feeling guilty, she gingerly reached for the gull and tried to wedge its head back into position, but to no avail. “Sorry about that, Zotz.”

With a resigned sigh, she decided it was time to head home. Separating her cat from the remains of the gull, she scooped her pet under an arm, stepped up to the cliff and gingerly began a one-handed ascent of the stone steps.

It was more like climbing a ladder than negotiating a flight of stairs, but even with a wriggling ball of fur-wrapped electronics to contend with it was easier than she anticipated. The pseudo-gravity of the hollow moon lessened with every step and soon she was almost flying up the cliff, the mystery of the spacemen forgotten. After a particularly vigorous leap, Ravana found herself drifting to a halt in mid air, an arm’s length from the rock face. She had reached the exact centre of the cliff, on the imaginary axis upon which the hollow moon spun. She was weightless.

Ravana had been in free-fall many times before but floating above the concave countryside of the hollow moon was a whole new experience. With her feet wedged in the gap between two steps she found she could float horizontally outwards from the cliff. The tiny sun was now above her, with the distant trees and houses rising around her on all sides, stuck to the surface of a vast cylinder wall. This change in orientation was made yet more disconcerting when she spied the distant shapes of people as they moved about the Dandridge Cole , looking like slow-motion ants scurrying around a huge drainpipe.

As an experiment she put herself into a slow spin and tried to visualise the asteroid rotating upon its axis as it drifted around Barnard’s Star, much to the annoyance of the cat under her arm, which did not like zero gravity at all and wriggled more than ever. Ravana was just pulling herself back towards the stone steps when her cat, mistaking the cliff face for a floor, dug its claws into her arm and made a sudden leap for freedom.

“Ow!” cried Ravana, caught by surprise. Her pet’s diamond-tipped talons were pretty to look at but extremely sharp.

The cat gave an anguished howl, bounced off the stone steps and back towards Ravana’s face, claws outstretched. In a panic, she raised her hands and tried to twist away, then yelped as her feet slipped from where they were wedged. Her floundering pet landed heavily on her shoulder. She tried desperately to hook a foot back under the step but it was too late. A split second later, the momentum of the cat’s ill-timed leap sent them both reeling away from the cliff.

Ravana gave another strangled cry and frantically thrashed her arms as if trying to save herself from drowning. Her pet, driven by its self-preservation circuits, scrambled down her body and dug its claws into her thigh. Just when Ravana thought things could not get any worse, she saw the steps start to slip by and realised the flying cat had knocked them beyond the zero-gravity point. Slowly but surely, centrifugal forces were taking them back to the ground.

“Blasted cat!” she screamed.

“Require assistance?” came a cracked voice.

With a surprised yelp, Ravana stopped trying to swim in thin air, looked up and to her amazement saw the mangled remains of Zotz’s sentry gull hovering above them. The whole centre section of the bird’s body spun horizontally so that its outstretched wings acted as helicopter blades, leaving tail feathers free to whirl as a control rotor. Above the humming blades the bird’s head hung skewed from its broken neck. Its beady electronic eyes glowed with a defiant light.

In different circumstances Ravana would have been fascinated by what she recognised as one of Zotz’s typically bizarre designs. Now she just screamed and made a panic-stricken grab for the gull’s legs. The spin of the hollow moon had gripped her and her cat with a vengeance. Soon they were accelerating past another cliff-side cave in a descent that was fast becoming a plummet towards the palace. Above her, the gull’s wings whirred frantically as it fought in vain to stay airborne. There was little the mechanical bird could do.

“Help me!” screamed Ravana.

The cliff became a blur. The Coriolis effect of the spinning world pulled them down in a curve towards a copse of weeping willows. Ravana stared in terror as the gull finally broke free to shoot away like a missile into the flower bed, creating a sad punctuation mark that somehow made the rude horticulture even more obscene. With a final, anguished shriek, she plunged through the leafy canopy, her arms flailing wildly in a desperate attempt to break her fall. Moments later she ricocheted off a branch towards the centre of a hitherto-unnoticed pond and splash-landed with a loud squelch. The small pool, it transpired, consisted almost entirely of evil-smelling mud.

Ravana slowly lifted herself out of the mire, her hands clutching what was left of the gull’s spindly legs. For a while she could do nothing but stand trembling knee-deep in the pond. The hollow moon’s low pseudo-gravity had saved her from serious injury; not only had it kept her from falling too fast, but it had also encouraged freakishly tall trees to grow just where she needed them to cushion her fall. As it was, she was battered, bruised and covered from head to toe in grey slime but otherwise amazingly unhurt, though her headache had returned worse than ever. She assumed the large blob of mud clinging to her leg was her cat.

“Excitement and adventure,” she muttered. “I should be careful what I wish for.”

“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Inari.

Puzzled, he stumbled to a halt and slowly scanned his surroundings for the source of the disturbance. He and Namtar had reached the far side of the lawn beyond the cover of the trees and arrived at a secluded open veranda at the side of the palace, out of sight of the main entrance.

“To what do you refer?” snapped Namtar.

Inari frowned, having been reprimanded several times already for his lack of haste. “Didn’t you hear it?” he asked. “There was a scream, then a splash.”

“I dare say it was nothing more than a duck.”

“What planet are you from? Ducks don’t make that much noise!”

Namtar clouted Inari across the head with the scanner device in his hand.

“Does it matter what it was?” he replied impatiently. “Much as I would like to stand here and debate what hypothetical exotic fauna may or may not reside in this antique habitat, the palace guard will not be distracted for long and we have a job to do. So without further ado, may we proceed with the task in hand?”

“Could be a wart hog,” Inari said sullenly. “They make strange noises.”

“Takes one to know one, my friend. The window, if you please?”

Namtar pointed to a nearby sash window below the low veranda roof. Inari mumbled something underneath his breath, unhooked a lever from his belt and moved across to attack the wooden frame. After more muttering and a fair bit of grunting, there was a sound of splintering wood and the window was open.

“There you go,” he said to Namtar. The room beyond was in darkness.

“After you,” insisted Namtar, eyeing the window warily.

Inari shrugged, grabbed hold of the window frame and pulled himself inside. Namtar quickly followed, albeit more carefully than his clumsy spacesuit-clad comrade ahead.

The men disappeared from view. Ravana tossed aside what was left of the gull and waded out of the pond as quietly as she could. She briefly wondered why the men had failed to spot her, then realised that being covered in mud was excellent camouflage for hiding in a garden. Neither were anyone she knew from the hollow moon. The space agency shoulder patch upon their spacesuits too was unfamiliar, though she recognised the national flag of India in the corner of the design.