Hollow Moon (44 page)

“His eyes,” Bellona said quietly. “We need the
autosurgeon to save his eyesight.”

Fighting back her tears, Ravana took hold of her father’s
hand and clutched it tightly. The pain and anguish she had suffered the last
few days had become unbearable. At the forefront of her thoughts was that
Fenris was to blame. Everything bad that had happened to her father; his
arrest, his imprisonment, the bomb on the
Platypus
; Fenris had been there. She did not care for the
bigger picture, that of Taranis and Kartikeya and their grand schemes for some
far-flung moon, for it was Fenris alone who had personally caused so much
grief. It was Fenris who was going to have to pay for what he had done.

“I love you, father,” she whispered. “We will make you
well again. I promise.”

Ravana looked up at the solemn faces of Miss Clymene,
Endymion, Philyra and Bellona, suddenly feeling lost and alone in a room full
of strangers.

“Fenris will not take away my family,” she said. “He will
not get away with this.”

The hovertruck sped through the gloomy void of the hollow
moon, its headlamps picking out one deserted scene after another as it followed
the monorail track to Petit Havre. All four of its passengers were squashed and
securely strapped into the front bench seat, for Ravana had made it clear she
was in no mood for taking things slowly.

They had left Dockside barely ten minutes ago and stopped
just once to collect Ravana’s errant cat from near the lake, but already the
hovertruck was surging past one of the central pylons that supported the
mangled artificial sun. The bright lights of the
Sun Wukong
could be seen overhead, though as yet Ravana had
heard no word from Hanuman and Ganesa on whether they had been successful in
pulling the
Platypus
free.

“Do you always drive this fast?” Ostara yelled to Ravana,
raising her voice against the oncoming rush of wind. The hovertruck’s open
cabin was not designed for rapid flight.

“I did warn you!” Ravana shouted back. The headlamp beams
momentarily fell upon a stray mob of confused wallabies, causing them to bound
away in fright into a nearby coppice. “Anyway, eighty kilometres an hour is not
that fast.”

Zotz nervously clutched the cat on his lap and squeezed
his knees to hold firm the bag on the floor between his legs. Beside him, Surya
stared captivated by the strange landscape that had lain ignored beyond the
palace grounds all these years. Ostara thought it a pity that his first proper
look at the interior of the
Dandridge Cole
would
possibly also be his last.

Five minutes later, the hovertruck shot over the
perimeter wall of the palace gardens and touched down on the edge of a small
courtyard. Ravana looked momentarily bemused to see that they had landed next
to the fallen stone statue of an elephant, for the incident with the Astromole
seemed a lifetime ago. Ostara almost fell off the truck in her haste to get
back onto solid ground, though Surya was no less relieved to follow.

“You’re doing all you can for him,” she reassured Ravana,
seeing the girl’s anxious face. “Just try not to drop the generator on the way
back.”

“I’ll do my best,” replied Ravana, managing a smile. “And
you be careful. Fenris is a sly one.”

Ostara grinned, then quickly led Surya away from the
hovertruck towards the palace, leaving Ravana and Zotz to depart in a cloud of
dust behind them. Ahead, the entire palace was in darkness, yet she saw the
double doors within the nearby porch were already open, revealing an ink-black
interior. Reaching the entrance, Ostara watched as Surya cautiously stepped
over the threshold and peered into the murky silence beyond. There was not a
soul in sight.

“It looks like they did all leave on the
Indra
after all,” whispered Ostara.

“Why are you whispering?” asked Surya, his own voice
hushed.

“I have no idea. Why are you?”

“I don’t like the dark,” he confessed. “I never knew home
could be so creepy.”

“Is this a good time to mention that I forgot to bring a
torch?”

Surya grinned. “I have one in my room,” he said. “Follow
me.”

The corridor floors were bathed in dim red light as the
last few watts from back-up fuel cells illuminated the way to emergency exits.
Surya could have found his way with his eyes closed and hastened Ostara through
a maze of passages to his own private quarters.

The Raja’s room was in near darkness. Surya went straight
to his bed and knelt to look beneath, whereupon Ostara heard him mumble
something about his things being disturbed in his absence and a box having been
moved. He quickly found his torch and personal slate. Ostara pondered on the
realisation that until a few days ago, the most adventurous thing the Raja had
probably ever done was secretly read under the sheets long after he was
supposed to be asleep. The torch was fully charged and Surya switched it on in
lantern mode.

“This is your room?” asked Ostara, blinking in the sudden
rush of illumination. “This is bigger than my entire living quarters and my
office combined!”

The furnishings reminded her of the elaborate staterooms
at Kubera, while the bed alone looked large enough to sleep six. She never
imagined there was anything as grand on the
Dandridge Cole
. Surya turned away, embarrassed.

“Sorry,” Ostara said. “It’s very nice. What’s that
thing?”

“No idea,” Surya remarked. He had pulled a box from under
the bed whilst getting his torch. “It appeared from nowhere about a month ago.
I meant to ask my mother about it, but then accidentally dropped it and I think
I broke it. I’m pretty sure the box didn’t rattle before.”

“Clumsy boy! Can you show me Fenris’ room?”

Surya nodded. Back in the hallway, he pointed to the far
end of the passage to where a door stood ajar. A faint light glimmered through
the gap from the room beyond.

“There,” he told her. “His door isn’t usually left
unlocked like that though.”

Ostara crept to the door and peered through the gap,
listening anxiously for any sound of movement within. Hearing nothing, she
gingerly pushed the door open and braced herself for a surprise attack that
never came. It quickly became apparent the room was deserted. Feeling a little
more confident, she stepped through the door and paused.

“What on Frigg…?” she murmured.

The room was similar to Surya’s, though not so lavishly
decorated. The sight that had caught her attention was a huge ragged hole in
the wall, presumably one that had once been hidden by the wardrobe that now
stood pushed to one side. This part of the palace evidently backed onto the
cliff, for the hole was the start of a long tunnel, bored up through the rock
of the asteroid itself and lit by a series of lamps hung upon the rough-hewn wall.

“A secret passage!” exclaimed Surya. “I wonder where it
goes?”

Ostara grimaced. “I bet I can guess.”

Even with her cat’s anxious meows guiding the way, Ravana
was worried she would not be able to find the cliff-side cave in the dark, but
as it happened she had no problems. The cave Wak had directed them to was
indeed the same one she had climbed to on the day of Surya’s kidnap. Wak’s
engineers, having found as she did that the original stone steps had vanished
in a rock slide, had erected a sturdy scaffold up the side of the cliff. What
was more, at the top of the scaffold by the entrance to the cave, a platform
had been built to serve as a convenient landing pad for the hovertruck.

The scaffold tower gave a metallic groan as the
hovertruck settled to a rest, but appeared to be in no danger of collapsing.
Ravana and Zotz quickly disembarked and stepped gingerly towards the cave
entrance, her electric cat having gaily bounded ahead. Ravana left the
hovertruck’s headlamps switched on to illuminate the scene and they could see
where the rear wall of the cave had been partially demolished to reveal a dark,
concrete-lined passageway beyond.

The cave floor was littered with huge lumps of rubble.
The engineers’ work had at some point caused a further rock slide, which had
collapsed on top of some apparatus on the far side of the rocky ledge.

“No!” cried Ravana. She hurried to the buried equipment.

Startled, Zotz followed. The reason for her concern was
clear. The rock fall had come down on top of the generator and a particularly
large boulder had ruptured the fuel tank, rendering it useless. Ravana sank to
her knees in despair. Her cat, leaping out of her way, scurried across the
rubble-strewn floor towards the hole at the back of the cave.

“I’ve failed,” sobbed Ravana. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Why is nothing going right?”

“You weren’t to know the generator would be broken,” Zotz
consoled her. “You’ve done all you can and so much more!”

“But it wasn’t enough!” she retorted. Zotz looked quite
taken aback by the vehemence of her words. “What do we do now? And where’s
blasted Jones got to?”

“Into the tunnel,” Zotz replied meekly. “Shall I go and
get it?”

When Ravana did not reply, Zotz fetched his bag from the
hovertruck, withdrew a torch and went to peer into the dark space beyond the
broken cave wall, wobbling slightly in the reduced gravity. A stale breeze
wafted from the tunnel, the walls of which were covered in a strange purple
mould. Inside, Ravana’s cat sniffed at a patch of slime beneath a sign that read:
‘ACCESS TUNNEL B’. Further along, Zotz was surprised to see a strange vehicle
on rails that looked like a smaller roofless version of the hollow moon’s
monorail cars, looking incredibly old and thick with dust. The beam of the
torch revealed the tunnel was free from rock falls as far as the eye could see.
Switching off the torch, Zotz returned to where Ravana sat hunched and moping
with her knees below her chin.

“There is something we could try,” he said cautiously.

Ravana looked up and regarded him wearily.

“The tunnel seems clear,” Zotz continued. “We could go
down and see if we can find the reactor. Whatever’s draining the power may be
something really simple to fix.”

“Don’t you think Wak’s engineers have already tried
that?”

“They hadn’t finished unblocking the entrance,” Zotz
pointed out. “It’s my guess they were called away before they had a chance to
look, but I think the hole is big enough for us to squeeze through.”

“That tunnel is four kilometres long,” she reminded him.
“That’s quite a walk.”

“We may not need to walk,” he replied cryptically.

“What about the mad priest? Ostara is convinced Taranis
is hiding back there.”

Ravana felt weary and reluctant to commit to more
adventures. The pilot’s daughter just wanted to be back at her father’s side, but
Zotz’s words had found their mark. Ravana, the trainee engineer, understood
that if they could do something to save the
Dandridge Cole
they should. Her unspoken fear was that she did not
want to face Fenris again. Her gaze met Zotz’s own, then fell upon the bag at
the boy’s feet.

“We do this together,” she said. “The Flying Fox will
always be near, eh?”

Zotz blinked in mock surprise. “I don’t know what you
mean!”

“I can see part of your birdsuit sticking out of your
bag!”

“Never seen it before in my life,” he retorted. “I wonder
how it got in there?”

“Zotz!” cried Ravana.

Zotz looked crestfallen. “It was supposed to be a
secret,” he mumbled. “I wanted to be your hero, to look out for you, but I know
you never saw me that way. So I invented him.”

“The Flying Fox?”

“You said I reminded you of the flying foxes by the lake
and I took it from there.”

“You have always been there when I needed a friend,”
Ravana said gently. “Now it’s time for you to lead the way. I’ve had my turn at
being heroic and it’s worn me out.”

Zotz nodded, picked up his bag and shuffled to the edge
of the cave.

“Can you turn around?” he asked nervously. “I won’t be
long.”

Ravana solemnly climbed to her feet, retreated to the far
side of the cave and politely turned her back. Moments later she heard faint
grunts and the squeak of tight fabric as the unseen superhero struggled into
his one-piece birdsuit, followed by a sudden metallic clang when a jet pack
slipped from a clumsy grip and fell to the floor. In the hush that followed,
she heard a myriad of whirrs and clicks as electronic catches pulled the
ensemble together, then a loud hiss reached her ears and the cave began to fill
with white smoke.

Unable to avert her gaze any longer, Ravana turned and
regarded the defiant figure now before her. The masked birdman stood with
scarlet wings outstretched, half-concealed by the smoke billowing from his
backpack. The artificial muscles of his suit rippled convincingly and for a
moment she found herself going quite weak at the knees.

“The Flying Fox at your service!” he declared. “It is
time to save this world!”

The aged railcar rocketed down the tunnel, propelled by
the flaring jet pack of the birdman at the rear, himself heroically battling to
stop himself falling onto the rails below. Ravana and her cat, crouched low
upon a seat before him, peered nervously over the front of the carriage as it
recklessly clattered along the ancient railroad. She tried not to think of all
the things that could go wrong on a hundred-year-old vehicle pushed to its
limits and several anxious minutes went by before the end of the tunnel finally
appeared in the gloom. The railcar had no power to any circuits so it was
fortunate that the emergency brake was a simple mechanical lever. Nevertheless,
it took the combined effort of both Ravana and The Flying Fox to bring the
carriage to a halt, which they did mere metres from the end of the track.