Hollow Moon (22 page)

“I would be only too happy to provide the necessary
finances,” added the Maharani. “Fuel, accommodation; everything you need. I may
be in exile but I still have many influential friends on both Yuanshi and
Daode.”

“I’m sure you do,” muttered Ostara.

“Quirinus has already made his feelings clear,” retorted
Fenris. “He will not take us.”

“You know as well as anyone that I vowed never to return
to Yuanshi,” Quirinus said, regarding the Maharani carefully. His gaze fell
upon Ravana, who did not hide her excitement at the prospect of an adventure
away from home. “However, despite all I’ve said, something has come up and I
have some personal business to take care of in Epsilon Eridani. If he is happy
to travel with the band, your man can accompany us to Daode.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Ravana.

“That is wonderful!” agreed Miss Clymene. “I can’t wait
to tell my students!”

“In that case, I’m coming with you,” declared Ostara.

“No, you are not!” retorted Fenris.

“I need to continue my investigations,” she told him,
eyeing him coolly.

Ravana caught her expression, which clearly betrayed her
lack of trust in Fenris and as such echoed her own feelings. She knew Ostara
had yet to make her mark as an investigator, but with a ship full of strangers
she hoped her father would think it would be good for them to have a friend
aboard.

“You are more than welcome,” Quirinus told her. Fenris
pulled a face.

“The moon of Daode,” breathed Ravana excitedly. “Epsilon
Eridani, here I come!”

INSIDE A SPACECRAFT it was never totally quiet, for there
was always the murmur and hiss of life-support systems, the whirr of actuators
and the occasional beep of control panels to disturb the eternal silence of
space. Yet out in the inky depths of the Barnard’s Star system, somewhere
between the orbits of Woden and Thunor, the hush that fell upon the
Platypus
as the plasma ion thrusters shut down was both deep
and heavily pregnant with anticipation.

Suddenly, a banshee wail erupted from the ED drive. Its
cosmic spinning wheel grabbed the membrane of reality, jabbed its spindle,
twisted the void into a kaleidoscopic spiral and smoothly stabbed a hole in the
space-time continuum. For a split nanosecond the
Platypus
was no more than a fleeting thread of quanta sixteen
light years long. Then the multi-dimensional roller-coaster was over, almost
before it began, leaving those aboard nursing fractured memories of an imploded
universe and indescribable feelings of nausea. Out across the star-spangled
void, the light of a new sun shone through the cabin windows.

“Extra-dimensional navigation complete,” intoned the
Platypus
’ onboard computer. “Interplanetary plasma drive and automatic
pilot engaged. Estimated time to Daode orbit is twenty-five hours, thirty-seven
minutes.”

“Welcome to the Epsilon Eridani system,” Quirinus
muttered gloomily, earning a strange look from Ostara. Ahead, the view through
the window shifted as the automatic pilot aligned the beak-like nose of the
ship with the faint brown disc that was Shennong.

“I feel sick,” moaned Zotz. “Is it always like that?”

“Pretty much,” Ravana confirmed, giving him a mischievous
grin. Ostara and Zotz had joined her father and herself on the flight deck for
the manoeuvre. Their sickly yet stunned expressions reminded her of how she had
felt the first few times she had experienced an extra-dimensional leap. “Is
this really your first jump?”

Zotz nodded. Unlike Ravana, he had lived his whole life
on the
Dandridge Cole
and to her
knowledge had never ventured further than Lan-Tlanto with his father. He was
transfixed by the distant yellow sun, which was startlingly bright despite
being muted by the polarisation of the flight-deck windows. Ravana too was
captivated, but for a different reason. She was coming home.

The four seats on the flight deck were in a staggered
row, with the middle two pilot chairs positioned further forward within a nest
of flight controls. Quirinus was seated centre starboard between his daughter
and Zotz. Ostara had claimed the port-side seat on the far side of where Ravana
was now releasing herself from the co-pilot’s chair.

“Shall I check on the others?” Ravana asked chirpily. She
always felt more alive and cheerful when aboard the
Platypus
, for she much preferred the private realm of the
ship to the communal reality of the hollow moon. Even when they carried
passengers.

“I’ll come with you,” murmured Ostara, looking pale.
Unlike Zotz, she was no stranger to interstellar travel but that did not mean
she had got used to it.

Unbuckling her seatbelt, Ostara gently wriggled free of
the chair and let herself drift in the zero gravity up to the grab handles by
the ceiling docking hatch. Ravana’s movements were far more confident and with
one graceful backwards flip she was out of her seat, across the cabin and above
the entrance hatch, floating poised and ready to enter the crawl tunnel.

“Show off,” muttered Ostara.

“Coming, Zotz?” asked Ravana.

He managed a weak smile. “I think I’ll stay here a bit
longer.”

Ravana grinned. With a fish-like spurt of speed, she
twisted in the air and pulled herself through the hatch.

In deep space the carousel was set to spin once every ten
seconds and the crawl tunnel now rotated about her like a rolling barrel. The
only handhold, in a recess next to the open hatch to the carousel itself,
revolved with the rest of the tunnel. This made entering the spinning
compartment a little easier, especially given that Ravana had long ago learned
the hard way that it was vital to enter feet first. There was a good reason why
the inside of the tunnel and hatchway were padded; nevertheless, she still
earned herself a few new bruises by the time she managed to get her feet inside
and onto the top of the carousel ladder.

Ravana pulled herself through the hatch into the
brightly-lit space beyond, feeling the faint centrifugal pull of the spinning
cabin become more insistent as she descended the rungs. Once clear of the
hatch, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Fenris, Endymion and Philyra sat
stiffly upon the couch in the living quarters below, still stunned after the
extra-dimensional jump. Miss Clymene and Bellona were up to her right, standing
at the small kitchenette. Ravana gave them a little wave, slid down the ladder
and landed lightly upon the floor.

The passenger carousel was essentially a drum three
metres wide and seven metres in diameter, which when spinning generated a
feeling of gravity upon the inside wall in exactly the same way as the spin of
the hollow moon. The small size of the carousel meant that the pseudo-gravity
was barely a third of that of the
Dandridge Cole
and no more than the gravity an astronaut would feel on the surface of
Luna, Earth’s moon. Like the hollow moon, the floor of the carousel extended
all the way around so that the ceiling above where she stood was also the floor
of the sleeping area on the far side. When she had the carousel to herself
Ravana loved to leap along the endless curving surface and imagine that her
pounding feet were somehow powering the
Platypus
through space.

Fenris regarded her grimly. “Are we there yet?”

“We’re in the Epsilon Eridani system,” Ravana confirmed.
Above her, Ostara was trying to negotiate the entrance hatch and not having
much luck. “Everyone okay?”

“Am I allowed to throw up?” asked Philyra, looking pale.
“I feel terrible.”

“That’s what being zapped through a wormhole does to
you,” remarked Endymion.

“Actually, it’s the Higgs resonator that makes people
feel sick,” Ravana told him. “It aligns the quantum states of every single
particle in the ship so we can slip through the wormhole. Extra-dimensional
engineering is mind-boggling stuff.”

Ostara reached the bottom of the ladder and stood beside
Ravana, returning Fenris’ rather rude glare with a grimace made somewhat
lopsided by the dizzy experience of moving in or out of the moving carousel.
Without saying another word, Fenris rose from the couch, grabbed hold of the
ladder and hauled himself up and out of sight.

“Yuck,” muttered Ostara, as soon as Fenris had gone. “He
gives me the creeps.”

“Never mind him,” said Ravana, looking around the cabin.
“Has anyone seen my cat?” Her electric pet had a hard time comprehending zero
gravity so she tended to leave it in the carousel whilst the
Platypus
was in flight.

“I’m sure it was here when we took off,” said Bellona,
noticing as she spoke that a door to one of the overhead lockers in the
kitchenette area was slightly ajar. No sooner had she put a hand to the door
when a furry shape leapt out onto her head and off again across the cabin, a
manoeuvre aided considerably by the low pseudo-gravity of the carousel.
Philyra, who had been engrossed in her wristpad, suddenly screamed as the cat
fell lightly into her lap, its diamond-tipped claws outstretched.

“There’s my little fluff ball!” exclaimed Ravana,
scooping the wriggling bundle into her arms. “I hope you haven’t been eating
the cutlery again.”

“Fluff ball?” muttered Philyra, rubbing her arms. “Bag of
nails, more like.”

“Do you know how long it will be before we arrive at
Daode?” asked Miss Clymene. “It would be good if we had time for a rehearsal
aboard the ship.”

“We’re still a day away from Daode orbit,” said Ravana.

“A rehearsal?” remarked Bellona, looking around the
cramped cabin. “Here?”

“We can use the cargo bay,” Ravana suggested. “There’s a
bit more room in there, though there’s no gravity outside the carousel.”

“A free-fall band practice?” mused Endymion. “Cool!”

Fenris’ arrival on the flight deck cut short a somewhat
bizarre conversation between Quirinus and Zotz on the best and worst things
about zero gravity, a discussion prompted by an innocent question from Zotz
about the
Platypus
’ toilet facility,
which he had been dismayed to learn was a basic vacuum unit in a tiny cubicle in
the cargo bay. Zotz took Fenris’ arrival as a cue to go and find Ravana,
darting with ease around the older man. Fenris clumsily pulled himself into the
cabin in the manner of someone who grimly tolerated rather than enjoyed
weightlessness. Quirinus got the impression there was not much that Fenris did
enjoy and regarded his visitor with suspicion.

“The flight deck is off-limits to passengers,” Quirinus
informed him. “Please leave.”

“I need to put in a holovid call to Ayodhya,” Fenris said
smoothly.

“That’s out of the question,” Quirinus replied coldly.
The ED drive of the
Platypus
, like that
of all such equipped ships, was also able to send and receive packets of
compressed data and thus act as an interstellar transceiver array. “I need to
keep the channel open to Taotie space traffic control.”

“I’m afraid I must insist.”

“Insist all you like but it isn’t going to happen,”
retorted Quirinus. “Ship! Restrict access to all systems to registered crew
only.”

“Security protocol confirmed,” the dispossessed voice
replied. “My duty is to serve.”

Quirinus gave the console an odd look. The AI unit had
been behaving a little oddly just lately and he had noticed it departing from
standard audio scripts on more than one occasion. He suspected this developing
eccentricity was linked to the strange tendrils, one of which he could now see
poking out of a gap in the console.

Fenris glared at Quirinus. “It would not do for you to
make things difficult for me,” he warned him. “I have some very powerful
friends in Epsilon Eridani.”

“Is that a threat?” asked Quirinus, smiling sweetly.
“Because if it is, you may just find yourself waking up outside the airlock
before we even make planet-fall. Remember that.”

Fenris opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of
it and moodily retreated back through the hatch. Quirinus kept an eye on him as
he left, somewhat concerned.

The loud bellowing rasp shook the eardrums of everyone
present. Endymion sailed backwards across the cargo bay, propelled by the
raucous blast of air from his trombone’s bell. A huge smile rose either side of
his trombone’s mouthpiece as he ricocheted off the oxygen tanks on the far
side.

“Endymion!” scolded Miss Clymene. “Stop that!”

His grin wider than ever, Endymion lowered the instrument
from his lips.

“I never knew trombone could be so much fun!” he
exclaimed.

“You’re an idiot,” Philyra told him.

Ravana smiled, then returned to the search for her cornet
case amongst the piles of luggage strapped down at the end of the cargo bay.
Zotz had already untangled what passed for knots sealing his own travelling bag
and various items of clothing and strange gadgets drifted around him, including
his prized Swiss Army penknife with laser cutter blades. Unable to see what she
was looking for, Ravana pulled herself across to the other side of the mound of
luggage and uttered a cry of surprise.

“Look at this!” she exclaimed.

Zotz came over and stared at the coffin-sized box
half-hidden beneath a sheet. The lid of the black metal container was open and
within it lay Surya’s cyberclone, its eyes closed as if asleep. On the side of
the casket was a small control panel, upon which a row of green lights flashed
slowly in sequence. Ravana followed the power cable that ran from the box and
found it had been connected to the ship’s internal power supply.