Hollow Moon (15 page)

“Sorry about that,” he said to the robot. “Still, it
keeps you in work.”

He pressed the control to close the carriage door and
quickly headed back across the concourse. He had almost reached the row of
vending machines near the exit when a sudden loud metallic voice from behind
startled him into a stumbling halt.

“Is this your bag, sir?” rasped the maintenance robot.

Inari stared at the rucksack swaying gently from the
claws at the end of two of the robot’s eight spindly arms. On platform four, he
saw that the carriage door he had carefully closed behind him was wide open.

“Put that back!” he growled.

“Is this your bag, sir?” repeated the robot, trundling
closer.

“Yes. No!” snapped Inari. “I don’t want it! Put it back
on the train!”

Now starting to panic, he shuffled towards the exit. To
his dismay, the robot followed, the swinging rucksack becoming ever more
ominous with every squeaky turn of wheels. Inari reached forward to grab the
pack, then thought the better of it and instead ran out of the station and
across the street. As his feet pounded through the puddles he could still hear
the rasping voice following him with its ever-insistent demands to claim his
luggage.

Inari leapt through the door of the church and dashed to
where Namtar sat hunched beneath one of the church’s telepathy transmitters,
his fingers in his ears. Inari’s wild gestures and babbled words did not get
through to him even after Namtar had extracted his digits and it was not until
the maintenance robot rolled into the church, still holding the primed
rucksack, that his colleague truly appreciated the gravity of the situation.

“Is this your bag, sir?”

“Quick!” Namtar yelled. “Get out of here!”

As one, Inari and Namtar sprinted for the door, the robot
close behind them. Namtar slammed the door shut before the robot could catch up
and they managed to cover a hundred metres in record time before a deafening
explosion shook the street, throwing them to the ground.

Lifting his head, Inari peered over his shoulder into the
cloud of dust billowing up the street, then shielded his eyes as flaming bits
of church began to fall with the rain. The building had been completely
destroyed, leaving nothing but a rubble-strewn crater and four smoking lumps of
rubber where the wheels of the unsuspecting robot had trundled their last. As
he picked himself up from the ground, the wail of distant sirens drifted across
the night.

“Whoops,” he muttered. Beside him, his colleague wearily
climbed to his feet.

“All in all, well up to your usual standards,” Namtar
remarked. “I would not want to be in your shoes when Taranis hears you’ve blown
up one of his churches!”

At breakfast the next morning, Hanuman and Ganesa were
the first to take their seats in the banqueting hall and thus pleasantly
surprised to find that Inari had not yet decimated the prepared morning feast.
News of the failed attack had not gone down well with Kartikeya, who was
reportedly furious that Namtar and Inari had managed to botch what should have
been a straightforward assignment in such spectacular fashion.

“What do you make of the young Raja?” asked Hanuman,
between sips of orange juice. “Seems a shame a young boy like that is mixing
with Kartikeya’s ruffians.”

“I blame his mother,” said Ganesa. She tucked a length of
dark hair behind an ear and reached for another bread roll. “It would be just
like the Maharani to sanction the kidnap herself in some weird plot to return
to Ayodhya. I heard she can be quite devious at times.”

“You think so?” asked Hanuman, surprised. “I thought it
was all Kartikeya’s idea.”

They were interrupted by the arrival of Yaksha, followed
by a sleepy-looking Surya still dressed in his nightclothes. Yaksha seemed
strangely subdued and as she picked at the fruit salad Ganesa had laid out for
her it was clear her mind was elsewhere.

“How are you settling in, Raja?” asked Ganesa. “Did you
sleep okay?”

Surya nodded. “The holovid in my room is amazing!” he
told her. Grabbing a bread roll, he proceeded to split it with his knife and
pile it high with strawberry preserve. “It’s like magic the way I can change
channels and do everything with my mind.”

“You obviously learn quickly,” Ganesa replied. She too
had an implant but had never fully got to grips with its potential. Everyone
else at Kubera had been born before childhood implantation became mandatory and
now refused to have one as an act of defiance. Some even believed the rumours
that Que Qiao could use them to read people’s minds.

“Did you hear about Namtar and Inari?” Hanuman asked
Yaksha.

Yaksha smiled. “I did. Kartikeya is not a happy man.”

“What happened?” asked Surya.

“They took their special brand of terrorism to Ayodhya,”
Ganesa told him. “No one was hurt and there’s one less church in town. I
thought that was rather a good result myself.”

“You’re not supposed to say things like that!” said
Hanuman, adopting a mock scolding tone. “These people pay us good money to fly
them around.”

“Aren’t you all on the same side?” asked Surya,
thoroughly confused. “I thought Kartikeya was your leader.”

“We don’t take sides,” replied Hanuman. “We only take
cash. Preferably in advance.”

A hush fell upon the table. From across the palace, the
distant sound of an extremely irate Kartikeya shouting at Namtar and Inari
drifted quietly through the air.

“Do you know a girl named Ravana?” Yaksha suddenly asked,
turning to Surya.

Surya looked at her in surprise. “Ravana isn’t a girl’s
name,” he pointed out.

Hanuman regarded Yaksha oddly. “Why do you ask?”

“I heard the name recently,” she said. “As the Raja says,
Ravana is not usually a name someone would choose for a daughter, yet years ago
I did know of a child who had been given that name for a very strange reason. I
wondered whether it was indeed the same girl.”

“Ravana was the ten-headed demon king,” Surya declared.

“A lot of people have names from mythology,” mused
Ganesa. “It seems to be a growing trend as we delve deeper into the galaxy.
Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“Fascinating,” retorted Hanuman, faking a yawn.

“I am pleased you know something of the legends of our
homeland back on Earth,” Yaksha said to Surya. “The priest Taranis was also
fond of the old stories and once gave the name Ravana to the unborn son of a
good friend of mine. He predicted that the boy would be a great warrior, who
would see Lanka join forces with Ayodhya and free Yuanshi from Que Qiao rule.
My friend wanted no part of this and had secret medical treatment early in the
pregnancy so that her child would be born a girl. Yet she was so scared of
Taranis that she still let the priest name her newborn Ravana.”

“Taranis must have found out eventually,” remarked
Hanuman.

“Not until Aranya Pass,” Yaksha told him. “Ravana was
injured in the attack and her unusual name was commented upon by hospital
staff. Taranis was reportedly furious, but soon after disappeared in mysterious
circumstances and was presumed dead for years.”

“Why did you ask me if I knew Ravana?” asked Surya. The
infamous battle of Aranya Pass, a botched and bloody attack early in the civil
war that saw royalist rebels fire upon an unarmed medical supplies convoy, was
one he knew from history lessons.

“Do you know her?” inquired Yaksha.

Surya shook his head. “My mother doesn’t let me get out
much,” he confessed.

“Ravana’s father was a pilot and it was his ship that was
commandeered when you and your mother fled Yuanshi following the death of your
father,” she told him. “Ravana too may have ended up at that asteroid you have
called home for the past nine years.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Ganesa.

“Because she is a sneaky, devious woman who listens to
private conversations when she should be minding her own business!” roared
Kartikeya, suddenly appearing at the door.

Yaksha went deathly pale. “I was just telling the boy of
his history, no more.”

“Did you mention that this girl Ravana was a witness to
the Raja’s kidnap?”

“Kidnap?” retorted Yaksha. “Yesterday you were talking of
liberation.”

“Silence!” snapped Kartikeya. He approached the table and
glared at Yaksha. “Your indiscretion will be the death of you, mark my words.”

“Your words are something for which I do not care,”
Yaksha remarked coolly.

“Maybe not,” retorted Kartikeya. “Yet careless talk is
dangerous. You’d better pray to the greys it does not prove to be the undoing
of this girl Ravana also!”

RAVANA PEERED into the narrow space between the curved
hull and the carousel housing and cautiously felt along the bundle of cables
that ran along the inner spine of the
Platypus
. The spherical mass of the combined fusion plant and extra-dimensional
drive at her back left little room for manoeuvre. The ladder upon which she
stood, though bolted to the cargo bay wall, seemed a lot more wobbly in the
gravity of the hollow moon than when in flight.

When the ship first came into her father’s possession it had
been no more than a lowly interplanetary freighter. Quirinus saw the ship’s
potential from the start and the fitting of an ED drive had been but the first
of a series of modifications towards creating a vessel ideal for clandestine
voyages between star systems. The most recent addition was the carousel
habitation module, a cylindrical cabin that spun upon its axis like a miniature
version of the hollow moon, transplanted from a larger passenger cruiser to
provide an area of artificial gravity during long flights. The downside was
that when it came to repairs, the various alterations and necessary extra fuel
tanks had left the
Platypus
with far too
many nooks and crannies to make maintaining the ship easy.

Reaching into the gap, Ravana’s hand at first found
nothing amiss, but then she felt the squishy tendrils of the strange,
plant-like growth they had recently noticed invading the inner recesses of the
ship. She gave the tendril an experimental tug but it clung firm. Withdrawing
her hand, she lowered herself down the ladder to the halfway point, slipped
into the carousel hub crawl tunnel, then shuffled quickly past the hatch
leading to the carousel interior and onwards to the short ladder at the end.
Moments later, she emerged breathlessly up onto the flight deck, where her
father was busy peering into the dark recesses behind the main console, an open
tool box at his feet. True to form, her electric cat was fast asleep on the
co-pilot’s chair. Upon hearing her enter, Quirinus turned and gave her a weary
smile.

“Did you see anything?” he asked.

“They’ve reached as far as the ED drive,” Ravana told
him. “I can feel them along the main run of cables. I wonder what they are?”

“All the stems we’ve found lead back to the AI unit,”
reflected Quirinus, meaning the artificial intelligence core processor at the
heart of the ship’s flight and life-support systems. “Zotz reckons he has seen
something like it before and has gone back to his father’s workshop to have a
look.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous?”

“Hard to tell. They don’t seem to be affecting anything,”
Quirinus admitted, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “I’ve run the AI unit’s
diagnostic programme twice already and searched the net for any mention of it
in maintenance bulletins, but found nothing helpful.” He pressed a switch on
the console. “Ship, report status.”

“All flight and life-support systems are functioning
normally,” said the synthesized female voice. “There is superficial damage to
the starboard tailfin, a small leak in the flight-deck air-conditioning unit,
the light is not working in the toilet cubicle, the…”

“Stick to the important stuff!” Quirinus interrupted
testily. “Nothing’s wrong, see?”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Ravana.

“Yes and no. If there was a fault it would give us
something to look for.”

Ravana lowered her sleeping cat to the floor and sat down
in her co-pilot’s seat. The ship was berthed in the shuttle bay at Dockside.
All she could see through the flight-deck windows, beyond the beak-like sonic
shield generator that formed the nose of the aptly-named
Platypus
, was the graffiti-riddled concrete of the hangar
walls.

“I wonder why she didn’t invite me?” she asked suddenly.

“Who?”

“The Maharani. We brought those people back from
Ascension so she could talk to them in person, but it was me who saw the men
take the Raja away.”

“That woman is trouble,” Quirinus retorted, returning his
attention to the console. “My advice is to stay clear and not get involved. It
will only end in tears.”

“All they did was find that spaceship,” Ravana mumbled,
swinging her legs in a sulk. “Anyone could have done that.”

“The ship was here and we never saw it,” he pointed out.
“Wak’s had a robot probe scanning the surface of the asteroid since yesterday
looking for the other side of that hole you saw but as far as I know has found
nothing.”

Ravana did not reply. Behind her words was the
frustration of someone rapidly outgrowing all that life on the hollow moon
could offer her. Her father had hoped that co-piloting the
Platypus
would offer a respite, but their trip to Newbrum had
awakened her to the reality that Ascension was not just a place to trade but
also a world of cities where people felt part of the interstellar spread of
humanity. In contrast, the inhabitants of the
Dandridge Cole
were outcasts who used the hollow asteroid to hide
from civilisation. She wondered if this was what her father wanted for his
daughter.