Hollow Moon (20 page)

The figure gave a proud salute. “I am The Flying Fox!” he
declared. Ravana smiled at his attempt to project his pre-pubescent voice in a
way that fitted the heroic facade. “I have rescued Jones the cat from extreme
danger!”

“Where were you when my life was in danger?”

“You were in danger?” exclaimed The Flying Fox,
concerned.

“Ostara passed out and accidentally shut me and the
professor inside the airlock,” Ravana told him. “I think you may have banged
your head,” she added to Ostara.

“You don’t say,” mumbled Ostara, rubbing her head. “Sorry
for fainting and all that.”

Behind the birdsuit-clad figure, Ravana saw Endymion,
Bellona and Philyra arrive at the door to the maintenance shed, followed
moments later by an out-of-breath Miss Clymene. The sheer energy of Endymion’s
excited burst through the doorway was enough to make the masked hero jump in
alarm.

“Who are you?” Endymion asked him, ignoring Ravana and
Ostara. “We saw you flying above the palace! That is such a cool birdsuit.”

“This is The Flying Squirrel,” Ostara declared, smirking.
“Sorry, Fox.”

“Saviour of electric cats,” added Ravana.

“At your service,” The Flying Fox announced. He bowed
gracefully to Ravana, not noticing that her cat was now licking a wall power
socket. “I am here to both serve and protect you, wherever and whenever danger
threatens. Do not fear, for The Flying Fox will always be near!”

“What’s going on up there?” Wak suddenly cried, calling
up from inside the airlock chamber. Finding he could not fly the hovertruck
one-handed, he had tried to climb the ladder to see what all the fuss was about
but found his attempt frustrated by his flattened hand’s inability to grip the
rungs. “This is a restricted area!”

“I must fly,” The Flying Fox told Ravana. “I shall
return!”

The masked figure stepped forward, took Ravana’s gloved
hand in his own and kissed it gently. Before she had a chance to respond, he
spun upon his heels and slipped through the door and out of sight, leaving
Ravana somewhat nonplussed.

“How sweet!” said Ostara. “Your very own guardian angel!”

Ravana turned away, embarrassed.

“Why was he wearing a mask?” asked Miss Clymene.

“Perhaps he was on his way to a fancy-dress party,”
quipped Philyra.

“A real-life superhero!” Bellona exclaimed. “This place
has everything!”

“He isn’t exactly a super…” began Ostara.

Ravana nudged her to be quiet. “He is if he wants to be,”
she said softly. There was a note of respect in her voice, for she had been
somewhat moved by the strange encounter.

“Hello?” called Wak. “Is anyone listening to me?”

Ravana moved to the edge of the airlock and looked down.
The professor had removed his helmet and stood on the back of the parked
hovertruck, trying in vain to see what was going on in the shed above. Ravana
was acutely aware of Endymion and Bellona peering over her shoulder.

“The people from Newbrum are here,” she called down. “The
ones who found the kidnappers’ ship on Ascension.”

“Excellent!” cried Wak. The mystery of how Ravana had
opened the airlock and then closed it again seemed to have gone clean from his
mind. “Bring them down!”

Bellona looked down into the airlock, then at Ravana’s
spacesuit. “Is it safe?”

Ravana hesitated. “I’d be lying if I said it was,” she
admitted.

Endymion had already collected a suit from the rack.
“I’ll come with you!”

“With me?” remarked Ravana.

She had not intended going back into the airlock after
what just happened, not least because the now-fading rush of adrenaline had
left behind a very painful ache in her arm. She looked at the nervous
expressions of Miss Clymene, Philyra and Bellona, then sighed. She was the only
one already dressed for the occasion. Ostara crept behind the safety fence and
peered down into the airlock.

“What made that big hole?” she asked woozily, still
holding her head. She pointed to the kidnappers’ tunnel. “Burrowing wallabies?
A mass migration of earthworms?”

“She’s your investigator?” asked Endymion wonderingly.

“Shut up and suit up,” Ravana told him. “Don’t forget
your helmet.”

Clambering down the ladder in the clumsy orange emergency
suit was not made any easier with Endymion following her and threatening to
tread on her gloves with every step. Professor Wak, once again wearing his
helmet, was waiting at the bottom of the ladder. As soon as they were down he
bustled them across to the large hole hacked into the side of the airlock
chamber.

Ravana peered into the kidnappers’ lair. Beyond the
initial wider section, the tunnel sloped down for a short distance before
curving back up towards the inner surface of the hollow moon. The roughly-cut
passage was not in total darkness, for now the elephant had toppled from its
perch a faint glimmer of light filtered through the hole in the palace
courtyard, illuminating the jammed wreckage of the wooden cart.

“Look,” came Wak’s voice into their helmets. He pointed
to a large circular burn mark upon the lower airlock doors. “The kidnappers
brought their ship up the shaft from outside, closed the airlock door behind
them and parked the ship on top of the doors. See those food cans?” he
continued, pointing to a cluster of tins nestling behind the net fixed to the
tunnel wall. “They must have been here a while.”

Endymion was gesturing wildly and mouthing something, but
neither Ravana nor Wak could hear a word he was saying until Ravana signalled
to him to turn on his helmet intercom.

“The Astromole!” Endymion’s voice crackled excitedly.
“That’s how the tunnel was dug. An Astromole can burrow through anything.”

“I know that!” retorted Ravana. “I saw the whole thing.”

The professor regarded Endymion curiously. “Who are you,
boy?”

“Endymion,” he replied meekly. “I saw the
Nellie
Chapman
in the Ravines.”

“Ah! The Eden Ravines!” exclaimed Wak. “The only place on
Ascension where a ship-to-ship transfer can be done without spacesuits!”

Endymion considered this. “I never thought of that,” he
admitted.

“What type of ship?” asked the professor. “Lunar class?
With a winch?”

Endymion nodded. “It was an asteroid miner.”

“Was?” asked Ravana. “What happened to it?”

Endymion looked sheepish. “It err… sort of exploded.”

“Tricky manoeuvre, flying into a vertical shaft in the
side of a spinning asteroid,” mused Wak. “Firing an anchor and tether into the
rock next to the shaft entrance would do the trick, though. The winch could
haul the ship down to a point where a quick blast of thrusters could be used to
counteract the centrifugal forces and power it up the shaft.”

“How did they open the airlock?” asked Ravana.

“Bypassed the circuits,” Wak replied. “The grey box you
saw attached to the control panel is no doubt some sort of remote trigger. When
it was time to leave, they simply opened the airlock door beneath the ship and
the spin of the
Dandridge Cole
sent them
flying out of the shaft and into space like a bullet from a gun.”

“Leaving the door open in the process,” murmured Ravana.

“Your quick thinking saved us there,” noted Wak. It was
the first time he had acknowledged what she had done in the palace garden and
about as close to a compliment as she could expect from him. “The kidnappers
were reckless in the extreme.”

Endymion stepped into the tunnel and looked at the mess
the kidnappers had left behind. The tent had done well to survive the mini
tornado that had swept through the tunnel, as had the extremely-smelly portable
latrine wedged inside a nearby alcove. Ravana wondered where all the excavated
rock had gone, then saw the ring of spoil around the edge of the airlock and
guessed it had been piled around the parked
Nellie Chapman
and then sucked into space when the ship went on its
way.

Endymion was drawn to the sturdy net fixed to the tunnel
wall. Amongst the empty food containers, a biochemical lighting rig and other
items, Ravana saw his attention go to a small box-shaped device with a short
aerial protruding from the top. The instrument panel on the side of the device
had been deliberately smashed, presumably with the heavy hammer wedged in the
webbing nearby. She watched as Endymion reached beneath the net and pulled it
free.

“Get everything on the truck,” Wak told him. “Ostara
wants her evidence and I do not want to be in this airlock any longer than we
have to. I’m sure Ravana would agree.”

“All of it?” asked Ravana. Stepping past Endymion, she
found the tent’s switch panel and pressed the button to activate the closing
action. The canvas abruptly twisted and snapped shut, leaving a neat triangular
package staked upon the tunnel floor.

“Every last thing,” the professor confirmed. He looked up
and waved his good hand to attract Ostara’s attention.

“Yes?” she called, speaking into her wristpad.

“Call Quirinus,” said Wak. “It’s time we paid Maharani
Uma a visit.”

The monorail car trundled sedately along its rail above
the lake shore, heading towards Petit Havre. Within the
Dandridge Cole
there was little call for high-speed travel; the
monorail could barely achieve twenty kilometres per hour but even then a
journey from one end of the hollow moon to the other took no more than fifteen
minutes. The asteroid’s three monorail systems were each as old as the colony
ship itself and the carbon-fibre panelling and fake chrome fittings looked
positively archaic compared to the vat-grown bioplastics and exotic alloys of
the
Platypus
. The monorail did
not run to a schedule like the skybus service on Ascension, but instead the
driverless eight-seat carriage acted like a horizontal elevator service,
controlled by selecting from a row of buttons, one for each station.

Quirinus and Zotz had this particular monorail car to
themselves. Zotz wore his cadet jacket, which was covered in tiny circular
badges displaying his merit awards. The
Dandridge Cole
cadet scheme was championed by the Symposium, a
select group of philosophers who occasionally met to discuss matters other
societies left to governments. They had introduced the scheme as a way of
encouraging the younger generation to learn new skills and out of a possible
hundred and forty-eight awards Zotz had gained all but one; that he had
singularly failed to master the art of tying a decent knot had long ago become
a running joke amongst his contemporaries. Zotz held Quirinus’ slate in his
hand, totally engrossed in the pages of engineering data, photographs and
schematics that made up the lengthy communication received by Quirinus barely
an hour ago.

“So the strange growth infecting the
Platypus
is called Woomerberg Syndrome?” Zotz asked,
wonderingly. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“An old friend of mine has a custom spacecruiser workshop
on Asgard,” replied Quirinus, grinning as Zotz’s expression became one of awe.
“I was getting nowhere with what I found on the net so I gave my friend a call
and he sent me all this information on the
Woomerberg
.”

Asgard, a large moon orbiting the gas giant Thule in the
Alpha Centauri system, was an anarchic colony of smugglers, black-market
traders and data hackers, who were supported by an ever-growing community of
inventors and engineers known fondly as ‘rocket-heads’. Their presence had been
cautiously welcomed by the holovid corporation on the neighbouring moon of Avalon
as they brought with them a rough-and-ready element to life that had been the
inspiration for
Rocket Queens of Valhalla
and
many more hit holovid programmes.

Zotz looked back at the report on the screen of the
slate. The
Woomerberg
was a prototype
interstellar cruiser, built in the workshops of Valhalla spaceport on Asgard,
which had a new type of extra-dimensional drive with double the range of
anything else currently flying the five systems. In their attempt to upgrade
the ship’s flight systems, engineers had injected the organic brain of the AI
unit with an illegal growth hormone, causing the unit to sprout tendrils
throughout the ship in exactly the same way Quirinus and Ravana had noted on
the
Platypus
. After finding the
tendrils were benign, the engineers left them in place and to date had flown
dozens of test flights without noticing any problems. On the contrary, once the
growth reached every nook and cranny of the ship, the AI unit performed far
beyond all expectations, though did become a bit too conceited as a result. The
Valhalla engineers had never repeated the experiment, but there had been one or
two cases in the Epsilon Eridani system where similar growths had been noticed
on other ships, a condition now known amongst experimental engineers as
Woomerberg Syndrome.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” Zotz
admitted. “But this didn’t happen on the
Woomerberg
until they injected the hormone. How did it happen on
the
Platypus
?”

“That’s the strange bit,” mused Quirinus. “I took the
tendril cutting to one of the biochemists, who recognised the DNA structure as
soon as she slipped it into the scanner. It’s very distinctive, apparently; but
stranger still is they told me your father had already found traces of
something similar building up inside the air filters at the life-support plant.
They’re not sure what it is, but it’s not native to the
Dandridge Cole
.”

“The
Platypus
is
infecting the hollow moon?”