Steph Bennion - Hollow Moon

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 Endymion. 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.”