Steph Bennion: Hollow Moon

“This thing must be thirty years old,” Ravana remarked, looking around the cockpit.

“This is the vehicle in which the Maharani, the Raja and those loyal to her made our escape, almost ten years ago,” Fenris told her. “We loaded it with supplies, commandeered a ship and left our world to its fate.”

“What were you escaping from?”

“Those who wanted the riches of Yuanshi for themselves,” Fenris replied bitterly. “The Maharaja, Surya’s father, had been murdered by those who did not see a place for the Raja’s family or the Dhusarian Church in their own plans.”

Ravana remembered little of the troubles on the distant moon, but knew she too had ended up in the Barnard’s Star system because her father’s ship had been hijacked in a similar fashion. Her father had dropped the odd cryptic remark hinting that the incident that had left his wife dead and a young Ravana scarred for life had also been a result of the ongoing civil war, but it was not something he ever really talked about.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her pet going into an electronic choking fit. As she held it in her arms, the cat sat up, arched its back and then coughed up a jumbled mess of wires, half an electric motor and a wad of plastic feathers.

“Bad kitty,” scolded Ravana. “That will teach you to eat that poor defenceless bird.”

Fenris looked annoyed. “Does it do that a lot?”

“It never used to,” Ravana admitted. “Unfortunately, over the last few weeks it has started to eat the strangest things. Electrical items, mainly.”

The transport by now had left Petit Havre behind. Through the windscreen Ravana saw they were approaching the halfway point and about to pass the base of one of the three huge pylons that held the sun in the centre of the cavern. Near the bottom of the pylon was parked a familiar blue hovertruck and it occurred to Ravana that the distant figure standing scratching his head at the base of the pylon may well be Professor Wak himself, for her father had mentioned that Wak was currently looking into a puzzling power drain affecting the hollow moon’s systems. Dusk was upon them and squinting upwards she saw the artificial sun starting to fade into darkness. The cycle of night and day within the Dandridge Cole was synchronised to Terran cycles, not that many of the hollow moon’s inhabitants remembered days and nights on Earth. The local calendar had also been maintained to mirror that of its home planet, so much so that the local date and time was exactly the same as European Central Time back on Earth.

During the day it was markedly warmer in this region of the hollow moon and it was no surprise that the hamlet here was home to Spanish, Greek and Italian families, who had given the area a distinct Mediterranean air. Here, the bubbling stream that ran the length of the hollow moon had been widened into a shallow lake, around which picturesque stone houses had been built, most with sun terraces. Of all the villages, this was Ravana’s favourite and she had spent many a sunny day swimming in the warm waters of the lake, though her weak arm left her with a tendency to swim in circles.

Ahead lay a patchwork quilt of farmland and irrigation ditches, the vast concave fields of wheat overshadowed only by the elevated track of one of the three monorail trains that ran the length of the cavern. The sheep, cattle and wallabies roaming distant pasture were descended from animals born on Earth, though selective breeding and the low pseudo-gravity had created freakish-looking beasts twice the size of their Terran ancestors. Ravana had once spent an entertaining few hours at the lakeside watching a kangaroo being rescued from where it had crashed through a second-storey window of a house.

The next nearest settlement lay on the other side of the cavern and so was actually above them as the transport continued along the road. This was the sprawling hamlet that was home mainly to families of German and Eastern European origin. As Ravana looked up through the windscreen she could already see distant lights shining through the windows of the houses far above, which once the sunlight had completely faded would continue to sparkle like stars in the night. Even this late in the day there were a few people in birdsuits gliding high near the zero-gravity point, mingling with the real birds flocking home to their roosts. Soon the air would be empty save for the flittering shadows of the bats and flying foxes. Curiously enough, one of the distant soaring figures now gliding home had chosen a bat-like design for their own distinctive scarlet birdsuit.

Ahead, the great circular wall at the end of the hollow moon grew nearer. Here was the community of Dockside, an unruly mishmash of brick, stone, wood and even sheet-steel architecture all crammed tight against the cliff face, stretching right around for over three kilometres to completely encircle the hollow moon. Dockside was populated almost entirely by the engineers, scientists and their families who supported the fragile economy of the Dandridge Cole by trading black-market goods and engineering services with the many unofficial colonists in the Barnard’s Star system and beyond.

“Home sweet home,” Ravana murmured.

Right on cue, a beep from her wristpad alerted her to a new message from her father, who was asking why she had not turned up to her music class that afternoon. She had genuinely forgotten about her cornet lesson and did not know how her father would react to her arriving back in such style. She only hoped he would not be angry with her for straying into the palace grounds.

The road they were on ran diagonally across open farmland, which created the illusion that the end of the cavern was slowly rotating to meet their approach. The building ahead was one of two maintenance bays for the small fleet of spacecraft that served the Dandridge Cole . Half a kilometre above, in the centre of the cliff, was the huge circular steel door of the main airlock. Ravana had never known this to be opened; instead, there were elevators inside the two maintenance bays to take ships up through the cliff and into the airlock chamber. A group of Dockside residents had congregated outside the workshop entrance to watch as the Maharani’s transport drew near.

“There appears to be quite a reception for us,” Fenris observed irritably.

The transport pulled to a halt a short distance from the gathered crowd. Fenris opened the hatch beside where he sat and motioned to Ravana to follow him outside. As she stepped to the ground, she saw her father making his way to the front, his familiar bushy beard and shiny bald head as welcome a sight as his broad smile. Ignoring Fenris, Ravana ran over and hugged him tightly, letting the familiar smell of grease and hydraulic fluid from her father’s overalls fill her nostrils. Next to him stood the tousled and ginger-haired Zotz, his pale face streaked with dirt, who had slipped through the small crowd to join them. He wore a long bathrobe, underneath which Ravana was convinced she glimpsed the elasticated body of a birdsuit. As usual, his shoe laces were undone.

“Sorry about your robot bird, Zotz,” Ravana apologised, seeing a remote-control unit dangling from his hand.

Zotz grinned. “That’s okay,” he said shyly. “I hope it helped.”

“Ravana!” exclaimed her father. His distinctive Australian drawl sliced through the murmurs of those around him. “Who have you brought back with you?”

The Maharani stepped out of the personnel carrier as he spoke. A faint tinkle of jewellery accompanied her; she was liberally decked in a number of gold bangles and had completed her outfit with a chain headpiece displaying a red stone in the centre of her forehead. She moved with a grace that was the antithesis of the usual bounding walk most people adopted in the low pseudo-gravity of the hollow moon, then turned and took small but purposeful steps towards where Ravana and her father stood. The Maharani was flanked by two female attendants who were also dressed in sarees, albeit of a plainer design. As Fenris himself stepped forward, the Maharani put out a hand to stop him, making it clear he was not wanted. Her gaze had not once left that of Ravana’s father.