Steph Bennion: Hollow Moon

Fenris looked at her oddly. “I wanted to test if you recognised the boy, which clearly you do. Your reaction to the clone is curious. I was under the impression that the residents of this asteroid were, dare I say it, a little backward?”

“I am training to be an astro-engineer and a pilot like my father!” retorted Ravana, deeply offended. Now she knew she was looking at an android she recognised the perfect symmetry of features that separated machines from flesh-and-blood humans. “I’ve never seen a cyberclone in real life before. Not that they are real life, if you know what I mean. It’s an amazing piece of work.”

She fell silent as she caught Fenris’ expression. His inadvertent insult was partly true, for a fair few of the long-term residents of the Dandridge Cole needed no encouragement to shun technological luxuries and were perfectly happy to live like simple farming folk.

“Your father is a pilot?” asked Fenris. “With his own ship?”

Ravana nodded. “The Platypus ,” she said proudly, having chosen the name herself. “He’s flown in all five systems. Now I’m older he lets me go with him.”

“Ah yes,” Fenris mused. “The delivery man. But we are getting off the point. The Raja is missing. There are signs of a forced entry to his chambers and the mark of a rebel faction has been found on the wall by his window. My men are even now scouring the palace grounds and beyond, but as yet there is no sign of either the Raja or his abductors.”

Ravana glanced towards the clone standing silently at Fenris’ side. She recalled that months ago her father had made a large and rather mysterious delivery to the palace, which had included what he thought were two cyberclones in their coffin-like crates. The boy’s blank stare was more than a little disconcerting and when it became clear that its presence was stifling conversation, Fenris signalled for it to leave.

“I saw two men,” Ravana began, as the cyberclone closed the door. She was pleased to see that her electric cat had somehow found its way into the palace and homed in on her, slinking furtively between the legs of the cyberclone as it left. Speaking hesitantly, but reassured by the comforting weight of the cat clambering up onto her lap, she related how she had come to be in the palace grounds and what she had seen whilst hidden in the bushes. Fenris remained stony-faced as she related how the men and their captive escaped in the Astromole, but raised a surprised eyebrow when Ravana described how she had plugged the hole with the ornamental elephant. When she finished her tale, he was looking at her in a new light, her mud-splattered clothes now telling a very different story.

“Two men, you say?” he asked. “Wearing spacesuits?”

Ravana nodded. “They didn’t have their helmets with them, though.”

“And they escaped into a hole in the ground,” Fenris murmured. “My men have tried to move the statue but it appears to be stuck fast.”

“There must be a vacuum on the other side,” Ravana told him. “At first I thought they had bored a hole right through to the other side, but…” She tailed off, for something had been puzzling her about that particular incident.

“But what?”

“There’s a lot of rock between us and space and the machine wasn’t moving that fast,” she said. “The wind started rushing through far too soon after it left. Plus, the hole was already there before the machine disappeared inside.”

“It is a mystery,” Fenris admitted. Ravana wondered if he was thinking of the spacesuits the men were wearing, which to her suggested the kidnappers and the Raja were no longer on the Dandridge Cole . “Alas, your observations would mean nothing to my men and I myself have limited knowledge of the strange geography of this hollow moon.”

He looked expectantly at Ravana, though she was not sure why and for several long moments neither spoke. On her lap, her cat suddenly belched and regurgitated the head and a mass of slimy rubber tubes that had once belonged to the gull. Electric cat vomit did not mix well with dried evil-smelling mud.

“Professor Wak may be able to help,” suggested Ravana, eager to break the silence.

“Professor who?” Fenris sounded irritated.

“He has his quarters near ours at Dockside,” she told him. Professor Wak, the father of her friend Zotz, was the scientist in charge of keeping life-support and other systems of the Dandridge Cole in full working order and was a familiar sight within the hollow moon. She had assumed from Fenris’ educated manner that he knew as much about their world as she did, but now wondered if the restrictions the Maharani placed upon her household were more severe than she imagined. “He teaches my physics and engineering classes. He knows the hollow moon like the back of his hand.”

“Is that so?”

Ravana nodded, inwardly cringing at her use of that particular metaphor. Professor Wak was notoriously absent-minded and had an artificial left hand as a result of losing a glove whilst helping with repairs outside the main airlock. In space, thanks to the wonders of helmet intercoms, everyone had heard him scream. She had learned many new and interesting expletives that day.

Fenris put a hand to his earpiece again, then looked thoughtful. “I need to confer with the Maharani,” he told her, standing up as he spoke. “If you would care to wait here a little longer, I will arrange for someone to take you back to your father.”

“There’s no need,” Ravana interjected. “I can make my own way back.”

Fenris glanced down at the holovid screen in the case before him. Curious, Ravana leaned closer and her eyes went wide as she caught a glimpse of a haggard and twisted face, heavy with anger, staring out from within. Somehow, she knew the watcher on the screen was contemplating the consequences of her tale. Fenris bore the look of someone chastised and who had just been given orders to put it right.

“Please,” Fenris implored softly, closing the lid of his case. “I insist.”

The Maharani’s private transport was an aged lunar-class personnel carrier, the barrel-shaped hull of which had been modified with polished wooden side panels, a luxurious velvet-trimmed interior and a roof pennant displaying the royal crest. The transport’s six wheels were each as tall as Ravana herself and were shod with large hoops of spring wire, for this was a vehicle designed for bounding across the rocks of airless moons and not one ideally suited to carrying exiled royalty through the bowels of a colony ship.

Ravana sat between Fenris and the driver in the cockpit at the front of the vehicle. A palace servant had given her a clean set of overalls to wear, which were already starting to tear under the restless claws of the cat sprawled across her lap. The Maharani rode in the main passenger compartment behind, barely visible through the heavy gauze screen that separated the cockpit from the rest of the vehicle. Her attendants had done their utmost to keep the Maharani hidden from view and Ravana had caught just the briefest glimpse of a petite figure swathed in a traditional Indian saree of red and gold.

The transport bustled through the palace gates at a brisk running pace, its wire wheels absorbing the worst of the bumps as it bounced along the rough concrete tracks that passed for roads within the hollow moon. Before long they reached Petit Havre, one of four tiny hamlets that together housed the four-hundred strong population of the Dandridge Cole . This was the French quarter, a tight-knit farming community who when not working the fields seemed to spend all day sitting outside the café in the village square, drinking coffee and freely engaging in conversation with anyone who happened to pass by. The gaily-painted houses were built of stone and looked as old as the hollow moon itself. Today, the appearance of the Maharani’s transport was creating quite a stir.