Hollow Moon (4 page)

Ravana looked confused. “But…”

“Actually, I have misled you,” Fenris confided. “This is
the Raja’s clone.”

“What?”

The boy bowed again. “I am Cyberclone Surya,” he said.
“Here to serve in his place.”

“A cyberclone?” Ravana was dumbstruck. Momentarily
forgetting what she had seen outside, she looked closer. The boy’s expression
had an odd inscrutable smoothness that reminded her of the humanoid test pilot
robots she had once seen at Lan-Tlanto spaceport. “I thought the Maharani had
forbidden all advanced technology,” she said wonderingly. “You can’t get much
more advanced than a cyberclone.”

Fenris looked at her oddly. “I wanted to test if you
recognised the boy, which clearly you do. Your reaction to the clone is
curious. I was under the impression that the residents of this asteroid were,
dare I say it, a little backward?”

“I am training to be an astro-engineer and a pilot like
my father!” retorted Ravana, deeply offended. Now she knew she was looking at
an android she recognised the perfect symmetry of features that separated
machines from flesh-and-blood humans. “I’ve never seen a cyberclone in real
life before. Not that they are real life, if you know what I mean. It’s an
amazing piece of work.”

She fell silent as she caught Fenris’ expression. His
inadvertent insult was partly true, for a fair few of the long-term residents
of the
Dandridge Cole
needed no
encouragement to shun technological luxuries and were perfectly happy to live
like simple farming folk.

“Your father is a pilot?” asked Fenris. “With his own
ship?”

Ravana nodded. “The
Platypus
,” she said proudly, having chosen the name herself.
“He’s flown in all five systems. Now I’m older he lets me go with him.”

“Ah yes,” Fenris mused. “The delivery man. But we are
getting off the point. The Raja is missing. There are signs of a forced entry
to his chambers and the mark of a rebel faction has been found on the wall by
his window. My men are even now scouring the palace grounds and beyond, but as
yet there is no sign of either the Raja or his abductors.”

Ravana glanced towards the clone standing silently at
Fenris’ side. She recalled that months ago her father had made a large and
rather mysterious delivery to the palace, which had included what he thought
were two cyberclones in their coffin-like crates. The boy’s blank stare was
more than a little disconcerting and when it became clear that its presence was
stifling conversation, Fenris signalled for it to leave.

“I saw two men,” Ravana began, as the cyberclone closed
the door. She was pleased to see that her electric cat had somehow found its
way into the palace and homed in on her, slinking furtively between the legs of
the cyberclone as it left. Speaking hesitantly, but reassured by the comforting
weight of the cat clambering up onto her lap, she related how she had come to
be in the palace grounds and what she had seen whilst hidden in the bushes.
Fenris remained stony-faced as she related how the men and their captive
escaped in the Astromole, but raised a surprised eyebrow when Ravana described
how she had plugged the hole with the ornamental elephant. When she finished
her tale, he was looking at her in a new light, her mud-splattered clothes now
telling a very different story.

“Two men, you say?” he asked. “Wearing spacesuits?”

Ravana nodded. “They didn’t have their helmets with them,
though.”

“And they escaped into a hole in the ground,” Fenris
murmured. “My men have tried to move the statue but it appears to be stuck
fast.”

“There must be a vacuum on the other side,” Ravana told
him. “At first I thought they had bored a hole right through to the other side,
but…” She tailed off, for something had been puzzling her about that
particular incident.

“But what?”

“There’s a lot of rock between us and space and the
machine wasn’t moving that fast,” she said. “The wind started rushing through
far too soon after it left. Plus, the hole was already there before the machine
disappeared inside.”

“It is a mystery,” Fenris admitted. Ravana wondered if he
was thinking of the spacesuits the men were wearing, which to her suggested the
kidnappers and the Raja were no longer on the
Dandridge Cole
. “Alas, your observations would mean nothing to my
men and I myself have limited knowledge of the strange geography of this hollow
moon.”

He looked expectantly at Ravana, though she was not sure
why and for several long moments neither spoke. On her lap, her cat suddenly
belched and regurgitated the head and a mass of slimy rubber tubes that had
once belonged to the gull. Electric cat vomit did not mix well with dried
evil-smelling mud.

“Professor Wak may be able to help,” suggested Ravana,
eager to break the silence.

“Professor who?” Fenris sounded irritated.

“He has his quarters near ours at Dockside,” she told
him. Professor Wak, the father of her friend Zotz, was the scientist in charge
of keeping life-support and other systems of the
Dandridge Cole
in full working order and was a familiar sight within
the hollow moon. She had assumed from Fenris’ educated manner that he knew as
much about their world as she did, but now wondered if the restrictions the
Maharani placed upon her household were more severe than she imagined. “He
teaches my physics and engineering classes. He knows the hollow moon like the
back of his hand.”

“Is that so?”

Ravana nodded, inwardly cringing at her use of that
particular metaphor. Professor Wak was notoriously absent-minded and had an
artificial left hand as a result of losing a glove whilst helping with repairs
outside the main airlock. In space, thanks to the wonders of helmet intercoms,
everyone had heard him scream. She had learned many new and interesting
expletives that day.

Fenris put a hand to his earpiece again, then looked
thoughtful. “I need to confer with the Maharani,” he told her, standing up as
he spoke. “If you would care to wait here a little longer, I will arrange for
someone to take you back to your father.”

“There’s no need,” Ravana interjected. “I can make my own
way back.”

Fenris glanced down at the holovid screen in the case
before him. Curious, Ravana leaned closer and her eyes went wide as she caught
a glimpse of a haggard and twisted face, heavy with anger, staring out from
within. Somehow, she knew the watcher on the screen was contemplating the
consequences of her tale. Fenris bore the look of someone chastised and who had
just been given orders to put it right.

“Please,” Fenris implored softly, closing the lid of his
case. “I insist.”

The Maharani’s private transport was an aged lunar-class
personnel carrier, the barrel-shaped hull of which had been modified with
polished wooden side panels, a luxurious velvet-trimmed interior and a roof
pennant displaying the royal crest. The transport’s six wheels were each as
tall as Ravana herself and were shod with large hoops of spring wire, for this
was a vehicle designed for bounding across the rocks of airless moons and not
one ideally suited to carrying exiled royalty through the bowels of a colony
ship.

Ravana sat between Fenris and the driver in the cockpit
at the front of the vehicle. A palace servant had given her a clean set of
overalls to wear, which were already starting to tear under the restless claws
of the cat sprawled across her lap. The Maharani rode in the main passenger
compartment behind, barely visible through the heavy gauze screen that
separated the cockpit from the rest of the vehicle. Her attendants had done
their utmost to keep the Maharani hidden from view and Ravana had caught just
the briefest glimpse of a petite figure swathed in a traditional Indian saree
of red and gold.

The transport bustled through the palace gates at a brisk
running pace, its wire wheels absorbing the worst of the bumps as it bounced
along the rough concrete tracks that passed for roads within the hollow moon.
Before long they reached Petit Havre, one of four tiny hamlets that together
housed the four-hundred strong population of the
Dandridge Cole
. This was the French quarter, a tight-knit farming
community who when not working the fields seemed to spend all day sitting
outside the café in the village square, drinking coffee and freely engaging in
conversation with anyone who happened to pass by. The gaily-painted houses were
built of stone and looked as old as the hollow moon itself. Today, the
appearance of the Maharani’s transport was creating quite a stir.

“This thing must be thirty years old,” Ravana remarked,
looking around the cockpit.

“This is the vehicle in which the Maharani, the Raja and
those loyal to her made our escape, almost ten years ago,” Fenris told her. “We
loaded it with supplies, commandeered a ship and left our world to its fate.”

“What were you escaping from?”

“Those who wanted the riches of Yuanshi for themselves,”
Fenris replied bitterly. “The Maharaja, Surya’s father, had been murdered by
those who did not see a place for the Raja’s family or the Dhusarian Church in
their own plans.”

Ravana remembered little of the troubles on the distant
moon, but knew she too had ended up in the Barnard’s Star system because her
father’s ship had been hijacked in a similar fashion. Her father had dropped
the odd cryptic remark hinting that the incident that had left his wife dead
and a young Ravana scarred for life had also been a result of the ongoing civil
war, but it was not something he ever really talked about.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her pet going into an
electronic choking fit. As she held it in her arms, the cat sat up, arched its
back and then coughed up a jumbled mess of wires, half an electric motor and a
wad of plastic feathers.

“Bad kitty,” scolded Ravana. “That will teach you to eat
that poor defenceless bird.”

Fenris looked annoyed. “Does it do that a lot?”

“It never used to,” Ravana admitted. “Unfortunately, over
the last few weeks it has started to eat the strangest things. Electrical
items, mainly.”

The transport by now had left Petit Havre behind. Through
the windscreen Ravana saw they were approaching the halfway point and about to
pass the base of one of the three huge pylons that held the sun in the centre
of the cavern. Near the bottom of the pylon was parked a familiar blue
hovertruck and it occurred to Ravana that the distant figure standing
scratching his head at the base of the pylon may well be Professor Wak himself,
for her father had mentioned that Wak was currently looking into a puzzling
power drain affecting the hollow moon’s systems. Dusk was upon them and
squinting upwards she saw the artificial sun starting to fade into darkness.
The cycle of night and day within the
Dandridge Cole
was synchronised to Terran cycles, not that many of
the hollow moon’s inhabitants remembered days and nights on Earth. The local
calendar had also been maintained to mirror that of its home planet, so much so
that the local date and time was exactly the same as European Central Time back
on Earth.

During the day it was markedly warmer in this region of
the hollow moon and it was no surprise that the hamlet here was home to
Spanish, Greek and Italian families, who had given the area a distinct
Mediterranean air. Here, the bubbling stream that ran the length of the hollow
moon had been widened into a shallow lake, around which picturesque stone
houses had been built, most with sun terraces. Of all the villages, this was
Ravana’s favourite and she had spent many a sunny day swimming in the warm
waters of the lake, though her weak arm left her with a tendency to swim in
circles.

Ahead lay a patchwork quilt of farmland and irrigation
ditches, the vast concave fields of wheat overshadowed only by the elevated track
of one of the three monorail trains that ran the length of the cavern. The
sheep, cattle and wallabies roaming distant pasture were descended from animals
born on Earth, though selective breeding and the low pseudo-gravity had created
freakish-looking beasts twice the size of their Terran ancestors. Ravana had
once spent an entertaining few hours at the lakeside watching a kangaroo being
rescued from where it had crashed through a second-storey window of a house.

The next nearest settlement lay on the other side of the
cavern and so was actually above them as the transport continued along the
road. This was the sprawling hamlet that was home mainly to families of German
and Eastern European origin. As Ravana looked up through the windscreen she
could already see distant lights shining through the windows of the houses far
above, which once the sunlight had completely faded would continue to sparkle
like stars in the night. Even this late in the day there were a few people in
birdsuits gliding high near the zero-gravity point, mingling with the real
birds flocking home to their roosts. Soon the air would be empty save for the
flittering shadows of the bats and flying foxes. Curiously enough, one of the
distant soaring figures now gliding home had chosen a bat-like design for their
own distinctive scarlet birdsuit.

Ahead, the great circular wall at the end of the hollow
moon grew nearer. Here was the community of Dockside, an unruly mishmash of
brick, stone, wood and even sheet-steel architecture all crammed tight against
the cliff face, stretching right around for over three kilometres to completely
encircle the hollow moon. Dockside was populated almost entirely by the
engineers, scientists and their families who supported the fragile economy of
the
Dandridge Cole
by trading
black-market goods and engineering services with the many unofficial colonists
in the Barnard’s Star system and beyond.