Steph Bennion - Hollow Moon

Zotz nervously clutched the cat on his lap and squeezed his knees to hold firm the bag on the floor between his legs. Beside him, Surya stared captivated by the strange landscape that had lain ignored beyond the palace grounds all these years. Ostara thought it a pity that his first proper look at the interior of the Dandridge Cole would possibly also be his last.

Five minutes later, the hovertruck shot over the perimeter wall of the palace gardens and touched down on the edge of a small courtyard. Ravana looked momentarily bemused to see that they had landed next to the fallen stone statue of an elephant, for the incident with the Astromole seemed a lifetime ago. Ostara almost fell off the truck in her haste to get back onto solid ground, though Surya was no less relieved to follow.

“You’re doing all you can for him,” she reassured Ravana, seeing the girl’s anxious face. “Just try not to drop the generator on the way back.”

“I’ll do my best,” replied Ravana, managing a smile. “And you be careful. Fenris is a sly one.”

Ostara grinned, then quickly led Surya away from the hovertruck towards the palace, leaving Ravana and Zotz to depart in a cloud of dust behind them. Ahead, the entire palace was in darkness, yet she saw the double doors within the nearby porch were already open, revealing an ink-black interior. Reaching the entrance, Ostara watched as Surya cautiously stepped over the threshold and peered into the murky silence beyond. There was not a soul in sight.

“It looks like they did all leave on the Indra after all,” whispered Ostara.

“Why are you whispering?” asked Surya, his own voice hushed.

“I have no idea. Why are you?”

“I don’t like the dark,” he confessed. “I never knew home could be so creepy.”

“Is this a good time to mention that I forgot to bring a torch?”

Surya grinned. “I have one in my room,” he said. “Follow me.”

The corridor floors were bathed in dim red light as the last few watts from back-up fuel cells illuminated the way to emergency exits. Surya could have found his way with his eyes closed and hastened Ostara through a maze of passages to his own private quarters.

The Raja’s room was in near darkness. Surya went straight to his bed and knelt to look beneath, whereupon Ostara heard him mumble something about his things being disturbed in his absence and a box having been moved. He quickly found his torch and personal slate. Ostara pondered on the realisation that until a few days ago, the most adventurous thing the Raja had probably ever done was secretly read under the sheets long after he was supposed to be asleep. The torch was fully charged and Surya switched it on in lantern mode.

“This is your room?” asked Ostara, blinking in the sudden rush of illumination. “This is bigger than my entire living quarters and my office combined!”

The furnishings reminded her of the elaborate staterooms at Kubera, while the bed alone looked large enough to sleep six. She never imagined there was anything as grand on the Dandridge Cole . Surya turned away, embarrassed.

“Sorry,” Ostara said. “It’s very nice. What’s that thing?”

“No idea,” Surya remarked. He had pulled a box from under the bed whilst getting his torch. “It appeared from nowhere about a month ago. I meant to ask my mother about it, but then accidentally dropped it and I think I broke it. I’m pretty sure the box didn’t rattle before.”

“Clumsy boy! Can you show me Fenris’ room?”

Surya nodded. Back in the hallway, he pointed to the far end of the passage to where a door stood ajar. A faint light glimmered through the gap from the room beyond.

“There,” he told her. “His door isn’t usually left unlocked like that though.”

Ostara crept to the door and peered through the gap, listening anxiously for any sound of movement within. Hearing nothing, she gingerly pushed the door open and braced herself for a surprise attack that never came. It quickly became apparent the room was deserted. Feeling a little more confident, she stepped through the door and paused.

“What on Frigg…?” she murmured.

The room was similar to Surya’s, though not so lavishly decorated. The sight that had caught her attention was a huge ragged hole in the wall, presumably one that had once been hidden by the wardrobe that now stood pushed to one side. This part of the palace evidently backed onto the cliff, for the hole was the start of a long tunnel, bored up through the rock of the asteroid itself and lit by a series of lamps hung upon the rough-hewn wall.

“A secret passage!” exclaimed Surya. “I wonder where it goes?”

Ostara grimaced. “I bet I can guess.”

Even with her cat’s anxious meows guiding the way, Ravana was worried she would not be able to find the cliff-side cave in the dark, but as it happened she had no problems. The cave Wak had directed them to was indeed the same one she had climbed to on the day of Surya’s kidnap. Wak’s engineers, having found as she did that the original stone steps had vanished in a rock slide, had erected a sturdy scaffold up the side of the cliff. What was more, at the top of the scaffold by the entrance to the cave, a platform had been built to serve as a convenient landing pad for the hovertruck.

The scaffold tower gave a metallic groan as the hovertruck settled to a rest, but appeared to be in no danger of collapsing. Ravana and Zotz quickly disembarked and stepped gingerly towards the cave entrance, her electric cat having gaily bounded ahead. Ravana left the hovertruck’s headlamps switched on to illuminate the scene and they could see where the rear wall of the cave had been partially demolished to reveal a dark, concrete-lined passageway beyond.

The cave floor was littered with huge lumps of rubble. The engineers’ work had at some point caused a further rock slide, which had collapsed on top of some apparatus on the far side of the rocky ledge.

“No!” cried Ravana. She hurried to the buried equipment.

Startled, Zotz followed. The reason for her concern was clear. The rock fall had come down on top of the generator and a particularly large boulder had ruptured the fuel tank, rendering it useless. Ravana sank to her knees in despair. Her cat, leaping out of her way, scurried across the rubble-strewn floor towards the hole at the back of the cave.

“I’ve failed,” sobbed Ravana. Tears welled in her eyes. “Why is nothing going right?”

“You weren’t to know the generator would be broken,” Zotz consoled her. “You’ve done all you can and so much more!”

“But it wasn’t enough!” she retorted. Zotz looked quite taken aback by the vehemence of her words. “What do we do now? And where’s blasted Jones got to?”

“Into the tunnel,” Zotz replied meekly. “Shall I go and get it?”

When Ravana did not reply, Zotz fetched his bag from the hovertruck, withdrew a torch and went to peer into the dark space beyond the broken cave wall, wobbling slightly in the reduced gravity. A stale breeze wafted from the tunnel, the walls of which were covered in a strange purple mould. Inside, Ravana’s cat sniffed at a patch of slime beneath a sign that read: ‘ACCESS TUNNEL B’. Further along, Zotz was surprised to see a strange vehicle on rails that looked like a smaller roofless version of the hollow moon’s monorail cars, looking incredibly old and thick with dust. The beam of the torch revealed the tunnel was free from rock falls as far as the eye could see. Switching off the torch, Zotz returned to where Ravana sat hunched and moping with her knees below her chin.

“There is something we could try,” he said cautiously.

Ravana looked up and regarded him wearily.