Hollow Moon (16 page)

“We need to talk about your future,” Quirinus said
suddenly, surprising Ravana. It was as if he had read her mind. “I think it
would do you good to see more of the five systems. How do you feel about
leaving to study in Newbrum or Bradbury Heights? Or further afield even,” he
added. “There’s a fantastic engineering academy in Hellas.”

“Go to university on Mars?” Ravana’s dark eyes shone. “Or
maybe even Earth!”

“If you don’t mind carrying twice your weight around, why
not!” Quirinus smiled. “You complained about your aches and pains for months
after we came to live here and the hollow moon’s gravity is only a bit more
than that on Yuanshi.”

“Don’t you want me to stay here and help you crew the
Platypus
?”

“You’re old enough now to think about making plans of
your own.”

“Yes, but to leave here,” murmured Ravana. “To leave
you…?”

“My life is not your life,” Quirinus told her. “You have
your own future to think of.”

They were interrupted by the sound of hands and feet scampering
along the crawl tunnel. Moments later, Zotz’s ginger mop bobbed through the
hatch to herald his arrival at the flight deck, his progress hampered by the
bundle of cloth he held in his hands. While Ravana and her father still wore
the flight suits they had donned for the trip to Newbrum, Zotz wore one of his
father’s laboratory coats with the sleeves rolled back. It was clearly too big
for him, but what drew Ravana’s eye was that he seemed to be once again wearing
part of a birdsuit beneath, though she could not recall ever seeing him fly.
Zotz was a strange boy who took after his Canadian father in many ways. His
mother was away on family business in Welsh Patagonia and Ravana knew he was
missing her dearly, not that he would ever admit it.

“I’ve found it!” Zotz declared. He dropped what he held
to the floor. Ravana’s cat awoke with a start and went to sniff cautiously at
the smelly bundle.

“That was quick,” remarked Quirinus.

“He can move like lightning when he wants to,” said
Ravana, smiling. “He reminds me of the big bats you see flitting through the
trees by the lake.”

“The flying foxes?” Zotz grinned. “They are pretty cool.”

He carefully peeled back the layers of cloth to reveal
the untidy ball of wires and components within, then stood back in triumph.
Ravana got up from her chair and regarded the mangled mess with some
bemusement.

“What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?” she
asked.

“It’s the AI circuit from a toy spider my dad gave me
years ago,” said Zotz. “It was made in Peng Lai, Taotie. I took it apart to
have a look at its brain.”

“A toy spider?” Ravana shuddered. “I can’t think of
anything worse.”

Zotz drew their attention to a small metal capsule, no
more than three centimetres square, at the centre of the nest of cables. The
lid of the capsule had been crudely prised free and inside they could see a
blob of what looked like green mould.

Quirinus peered at the circuit. “So you have a
destructive streak. Don’t all boys?”

“The organic AI chip,” Zotz said irritably, pointing at the
blob. “See? It’s all squidgy, just like the weird growth infecting your ship.”

“My ship is not infected!” retorted Quirinus.

“It does look similar,” Ravana admitted. “Is it really
organic? Alive, I mean.”

“Not exactly,” said Zotz. “It’s a cluster of vat-grown
brain cells on a semiconductor base. These chips are a lot cheaper than quantum
processors but are smart enough to control simple things like AI toys, food
molecularisors and the like.”

“And the
Platypus
?”
asked Quirinus thoughtfully, glancing towards the console.

“Where was the ship built?” asked Zotz. “Dad told me this
sort of technology is common in the Epsilon Eridani system.”

“She came from the Lan-Tlanto shipyards,” Quirinus told
him, giving the console an affectionate pat. “That was back when they actually
built spacecraft on Ascension. However, she’s had a whole load of repairs and
upgrades over the years and I think the AI unit did come from an old
Taotie-class interstellar tug that had been broken up for spares. We took the
ED drive from the same ship, as I recall.”

“So the
Platypus
AI
unit is also a green blobby thing?” asked Ravana, wonderingly.

Quirinus plucked a screwdriver from the tool box. “Let’s
see, shall we?”

Turning to the console, he reached into the mass of
wiring behind the facia and pulled the green tendrils away from where they were
wrapped around the metal case of the AI unit, a box half a metre square and
almost the same in depth. The screws securing the cover came free easily and
moments later he was gazing intently into the unit’s metal skull.

“Odd,” he said at last. “Very odd indeed.”

Leaving the cat to eat the dismantled remains of the toy
spider, Ravana and Zotz peered over Quirinus’ shoulders to look for themselves.
The AI’s metal case was filled by a spherical green mass that had a texture not
unlike that of a plant, yet with brown streaks that looked eerily like veins.
Like the writhing snakes upon the head of Medusa, a dozen or more thick stems
sprouted out of the AI brain and on through the cable outlet, before splitting
into the tendrils they had seen reaching throughout the ship. The swollen
central green pod had grown across the surrounding circuit boards, swamping the
row of data sockets where the ship’s wiring loom connected with the AI unit.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” asked Ravana.

“Err, no,” Quirinus admitted. “Definitely not.”

“The brain has grown tentacles!” Zotz gasped in awe.

Quirinus put down the screwdriver and took a small pair
of cutters from the top of the tool box. He reached behind the console again,
positioned the blades around a small tendril offshoot, then squeezed the
cutters closed.

Ravana suddenly screamed and fell to the floor, holding
her head in her hands. At the same instant, her cat let loose an unholy
electronic shriek and leapt away down the hatch as if its tail was on fire. Startled,
Quirinus dropped the cutters. Zotz knelt beside her, a look of panic etched
across his young features. Ravana felt sick and ready to faint, as if all the
blood had suddenly rushed from her head.

“Ravana!” cried Quirinus. “Are you okay?”

“What happened?” asked Zotz, looking quite pale himself.

Ravana slowly lowered her hands. “I’m… I’m not sure,”
she murmured. She stared wide-eyed at the fallen cutters, beside which lay the
piece of severed tendril. “I felt the pain. It was as if the cutters were
biting into my own flesh!”

“What?” exclaimed Quirinus. “I don’t understand.”

“How could you feel it?” asked Zotz.

“The pain,” Ravana protested weakly. “I felt the pain of
the ship.”

“Amazing,” murmured Miss Clymene, quite taken aback at
the view. The ornamental pagoda in the palace garden in which they stood was on
a slight rise, offering an unique vista of the whole of the hollow moon.
“Totally amazing.”

“Freaky,” remarked Philyra, looking up from her wristpad.

Bellona had to agree. The long cavern was on a scale
somewhat reminiscent of the huge canyons of the Eden Ravines, but seeing the
ground on either side curve up and above them like it did was extremely
disconcerting, especially when the landscape and its people high above somehow
gave the impression they were looking both up and down at the same time. Of
everything they had seen of the hollow moon so far, the only thing that seemed
normal was the pseudo-gravity, which they learned deliberately mimicked that of
Ascension in order to acclimatise the original colonists of the
Dandridge
Cole
.

Only Endymion seemed underwhelmed by the experience. He
had expected to find the asteroid crammed full of inbred and radiation-mutated
recluses, kept alive by antiquated technology and eager to welcome the
travellers from Newbrum as their saviours. Instead, the few residents they had
met were perfectly normal people who were if anything slightly annoyed that
strangers had been invited into their close-knit community.

“It’s different,” he conceded. “A lot of space. The new
bio-dome at Bradbury Heights has parks and trees but it’s nowhere near as big
as this.”

“But there’s no sky,” murmured Bellona. “Nowhere to look
up and see the stars.”

A silence descended upon the pagoda as each contemplated
the view before them.

“These people are living in a cave,” remarked Philyra.

“One flying through space,” Endymion pointed out.

“But a cave nonetheless,” mused Miss Clymene. “It is a
little weird.”

“The freighter that brought us here was odd too,” said
Endymion. “A real mongrel. Everywhere I looked there were bits from other ships
that had been modified to fit. I’ve never known a spacecraft that small to have
a centrifugal passenger cabin.”

“The girl with the scar on her face was flying it part of
the way,” said Bellona with a tinge of jealousy. “She can’t be much older than
me.”

“It’s a shame the pilot is so dead against going to
Epsilon Eridani,” said Miss Clymene and sighed. Somewhat optimistically she and
her students had come prepared for a week-long trip to Daode, even going so far
as to say their farewells to friends and family on Ascension, but after
broaching the subject to Quirinus during their flight to the
Dandridge Cole
she was not hopeful. “For a moment I thought we’d
found us a ship. The man Fenris was very interested in the peace conference and
wished us all the best in the competition.”

“If we ever get there,” murmured Philyra gloomily.

“Don’t give up hope!” exclaimed Miss Clymene. “I have a
feeling the people of this strange world brought us here for a reason.”

“They did mention an invite to dinner,” Bellona reminded
her.

“Perhaps we’re the main course,” said Endymion. “They may
all be cannibals.”

He grinned. Philyra and Bellona had gone wide-eyed in
fright.

Maharani Uma settled into the velvet cushions of her
chair and regarded the object upon the table before her with suspicion. Fenris
stood at her side, momentarily distracted by the faint sound of voices coming
from the palace gardens outside the window. Professor Wak was close to finding
the other end of the tunnel the Raja’s kidnappers had used in their escape and
had brought a couple of maintenance robots to the courtyard, though as yet they
had only succeeded in breaking the trunk off the stone elephant plugging the
hole.

Their visitors from Newbrum had been encouraged to walk
the grounds ahead of dinner. The Maharani had an important call to make and was
not in the mood for exchanging social pleasantries.

Upon the table was a small flat case, the lid of which was
open so that the Maharani could directly face the holovid screen concealed
within. The
Dandridge Cole
boasted its
own low-power extra-dimensional transceiver array, liberated from the disused
emergency communications centre at Lan-Tlanto, which provided the hollow moon
with a link to the Ascension servermoon and thus the interstellar network. The
screen relayed the image of a neatly-dressed bureaucrat with pale skin, dark
thinning hair and clean-shaven features. The man’s sumptuous surroundings
reflected that despite his innocuous appearance, he was one of the most
powerful people in the Epsilon Eridani system. The Maharani was rather annoyed
to see that the man was in fact sitting at the desk that used to be hers in her
old home, the Palace of Sumitra in Ayodhya.

“How dare he use my office!” she hissed to Fenris. “The
cheek of the man!”

Fenris leant forward and addressed her in a low voice.
“He can hear you, Maharani.”

“Indeed I can,” said the man on the screen, his Eastern
European tones not unlike Fenris’ own. He allowed himself a small triumphant
smile. “To what do I owe this honour, my exiled queen? It is good to see that
you have not entirely abandoned the modern world.”

“I have no time for pleasantries, Jaggarneth,” snapped
the Maharani. “What have you done with my son? What sort of game are you and
your Que Qiao minions playing this time?”

Jaggarneth’s smile faded. “Are you accusing me, the
governor of Yuanshi, of kidnap? This relationship is a three-way orbit and I do
not take kindly to slander.”

“I was told you had news,” retorted the Maharani. “If not
about my son, then what?”

“I have made enquiries on your behalf,” Jaggarneth told
her. His manner had softened in recognition of the Maharani’s genuine concern.
“My sources suggest the young Raja has been taken by terrorist agents working
for Kartikeya and is being held in Lanka, possibly in an attempt to derail the
peace conference. You may rest assured that Que Qiao in Ayodhya are giving it
one hundred and ten per cent to bring your son to safety.”

“I am sorry I accused you so,” said the Maharani, a
little subdued. “My son means everything to me. It was fated that he would one
day return to Yuanshi, but not like this.”

“Your desire to see an end to your exile is well known,”
Jaggarneth acknowledged. “Though should I choose to turn my telescope to new
worlds, my superiors remain far from convinced that my successor should be the
deposed prince and his regent.”

The Maharani glanced at Fenris. “This man is starting to
annoy me.”

“I heard that!” retorted Jaggarneth. Fenris smirked.

“Whatever,” snapped the Maharani. “As for your
‘telescope’, my sources tell me you’ve had your eye on the governorship of
Daode for some time.”