Hollow Moon (6 page)

As she spoke, the skybus lurched slightly, then the
high-pitched whine of the turbines slid into a gentle decrescendo as the
vehicle began to lose speed and drop towards the rail below. Moments later,
there was a solid clunk as the telescopic arm pulled the skybus down onto the
monorail trolley. They were no longer flying.

Outside the window the desert stretched to the horizon,
yet ahead they could now see a break in the endless grey monotony. Indeed, a
break is exactly what it was, for here the monorail track passed close to the
edge of a huge crack in the desert floor, which was just the start of a vast
network of deep crevices that radiated for hundreds of kilometres across the surface
of the planet and down through several kilometres of rock.

“We are now approaching Eden Ravines,” came the calm and
measured voice of the automatic pilot. “Please mind the gap.”

“That’s a big gap,” muttered Bellona. The edge of the
Ravines was close.

The skybus slid to a halt beside the barrel-shaped
building of corrugated steel that served as the station. Clutching their
emergency life-support masks, Philyra, Bellona, Endymion and Miss Clymene moved
to the door and waited for the station’s airlock tube to extend and dock with
the skybus. After what seemed an age, the airlock warning light switched from
red to green. The door slid open a fraction, then jammed.

Miss Clymene sighed. “Does nothing on this planet work
properly?”

She gave the door a kick, which responded with a horrible
grinding noise and slid open a fraction. The four travellers bustled into the
chamber before the door could change its mind. The airlock snapped shut at
their heels and then shuddered in the blast of turbines as the skybus accelerated
away from the retracting tube. Several anxious moments passed before the
airlock tube jolted home with a metallic clang.

The exit door before them slid open and as one they
hurried through into the reception room beyond. Bellona saw Miss Clymene glancing
at the airlock maintenance log next to the door and shudder. The girl peered
over her shoulder and saw the last entry was by an engineer she knew had
returned to Earth three years ago.

“What’s up, miss?” asked Philyra. Their tutor wore a
perturbed expression.

“Nothing to worry about,” said Miss Clymene, brightly.
Bellona caught her glance. A lesson on the dangers of poorly-maintained
airlocks on a planet with a mostly poisonous atmosphere was the last thing any
of them wanted right now. “This way!”

The station was a single long hall with the airlock at
one end and a second set of doors leading to a lift at the other. The curved
walls and roof were punctuated by a series of small portholes through which
little could be seen, though enough to suggest that the station was right on
the edge of the ravine itself and even overhanging it a little at the far end.
At various places upon the wall hung touch-sensitive electronic screens, of
which just three were operational. One was running a holovid advertisement for
a new production of the play
Waiting for Goddard
, showing an excerpt where two old women were arguing and pointing at
something unseen in the sky. The remaining working screens flickered with a
lazy silent slideshow of awestruck tourists walking through a dark forest, but
the glass was so badly scratched it was difficult to make out details. Bellona
touched the controls of the nearest screen but nothing happened. Realising she
was alone, she looked up and saw Miss Clymene and the others waiting for her at
the doors of the lift, which now stood open.

“Bellona!” exclaimed Miss Clymene. “Are you coming?”

Leaving the screen, Bellona skipped across the hall
towards the lift. Miss Clymene handed her a hooded cloak of a dull grey colour,
which when she took it turned out to be surprisingly heavy.

“Keep this safe,” her tutor told her. “If you hear a
solar flare warning, put it on as quickly as you can and pull the hood tight.”

“What does the warning sound like?” asked Bellona.

“No idea!” replied Miss Clymene briskly. “I’m sure we’ll
know it when we hear it.”

Bellona solemnly regarded the cloak in her hands as she
and her fellow students were bustled into the lift. She knew that Newbrum dome
and other buildings had radiation shields, for Barnard’s Star was not as stable
as it looked, but it had never occurred to her that they would need to take
extra precautions out here. Once they were all safely inside, Miss Clymene
indicated to Endymion to press the button marked ‘down’.

Philyra screamed. Before Bellona knew what to expect, the
lift dropped through the floor of the station and moments later they were
hurtling down the rocky cliff towards the bottom of the ravine six kilometres
below.

The subterranean landscape of the Eden Ravines was unlike
anything Bellona and Philyra had ever seen before. It was an eerie jungle of
purple and black; a twisted confusion of trees and plants so strange to the
human eye that their first reaction was one of fear. Tall black spires sheathed
in velvet-like scales forced their way between fat stems sprouting huge
circular leaves of indigo. Spiny fronds of purple erupted from the myriad of
bushes and shrubs that clung to every available piece of ground and rocky
ledge, the dark foliage punctuated with blobs of yellow and white which were
tiny flowers and fruits. The cliff itself was covered in what looked like dark
green moss but which was probably nothing of the kind. A thin cool mist hung in
the air, glowing faintly pink in the sunlight filtering down into the ravine,
adding a further sense of unreality to the scene. The weird vista was all the
proof needed that Ascension was indeed an alien world.

The lift had travelled down the side of the cliff and
come to a halt out in the open on the floor of the ravine. Seeing that there was
nothing but open air on the other side of the doors, Bellona and Philyra
instinctively put on their emergency life-support masks, their nervousness
compounded when Endymion and Miss Clymene did not follow suit.

The lift doors opened. Bellona watched anxiously as her
brother stepped out of the lift onto the floor of the ravine. Endymion took a
few bounding paces, then stopped and slowly turned to face the occupants of the
lift, his face twisted in terror. Suddenly, with a terrible choking cry, he
fell to his knees, his hands up around his neck.

“Help me!” he cried, wheezing painfully. “I can’t
breath!”

Bellona shrieked. Philyra looked on in horror, her hands
clasped to her face mask.

Miss Clymene walked calmly out of the lift and approached
Endymion, who was now writhing around the floor in convulsions. She too was not
wearing her face mask, but contrary to Bellona’s and Philyra’s expectations she
did not keel over to join Endymion on the ground.

“Get up, Endymion,” she said wearily. “You’re not fooling
anyone. I can see now why you never get picked for the school’s theatre group.
I’ve never seen such bad acting.”

Endymion stopped moving and sheepishly climbed to his
feet.

“Sorry miss,” he mumbled.

“Endymion!” snapped Bellona. “You pig!”

Her brother grinned. “The air’s fine,” he admitted.
“Honest!”

Philyra looked far from convinced. Bellona slowly stepped
through the open lift doors and walked to where Miss Clymene and Endymion were
waiting. Cautiously, she lifted her own face mask and took an experimental sniff.
Much to her relief, her subsequent gasp of surprise was exactly that and not a
desperate wheeze of asphyxiation. Behind her, Philyra took off her own mask.

“Amazing,” Bellona murmured. “I can breath!”

“Yuck,” muttered Philyra. “It smells like the school
toilets.”

Bellona smiled. The air was damp and had an odd coppery
smell. Yet it was still an incredible sensation to be in the open on Ascension
and not need an oxygen mask.

“The Eden Ravines are truly amazing,” declared Miss
Clymene. “But you’ll learn more about this wonder of nature later on, when we
get to the scientific research station. It’s a couple of kilometres walk from
here, so… What do you want, Endymion?”

Looking guilty, Endymion held his hand in the air.

“I left my lunch on the skybus,” he confessed.

“You’re an idiot,” Miss Clymene told him. “It looks like
you’ll have to starve. Please don’t eat anything growing in the Ravines. Alien
biology makes your bowels do the most unpleasant things! Death by vomiting and
diarrhoea is not a good way to go.”

Without waiting for a response, she started down a narrow
track leading away from the lift, off into the dark moist jungle. Bellona
wasted no time in falling into step behind her, Philyra somewhat reluctantly
following behind. Endymion paused to hungrily examine a large purple fruit
hanging from a nearby black stem. Bellona glanced back just in time to see the
fruit split open to reveal what looked like teeth.

“Weird,” Endymion muttered.

Bellona frowned. Eating poisonous plants was one thing,
but it was rather more worrying to think that some of the plants were not so
worried about eating them.

The research station was a small habitation module
roughly five metres by ten that judging by appearances had been in the Eden
Ravines some years. It was owned by a large pharmaceutical company based at
Bradbury Heights that was looking into interesting alien compounds for possible
use in new medical treatments; a company that was more interested in making
nice profits for its directors than in providing pleasant living arrangements
for its field staff. The metal skin of the module, once pale grey, was badly
discoloured by a strange purple fungus that covered much of the outside
surface.

Inside, the laboratory and scientists’ living quarters
were a picture of organised chaos, with no real separation of the two.
Half-eaten meals rested on work benches next to test tubes of biological
samples, along with trays of blue slime, holovid scanning microscopes and a
glass tank containing an insect-like creature that looked like a cross between
a grasshopper and a small dachshund.

A scientist in shabby white overalls stood at a hologram
projection bench, on the other side of which stood Miss Clymene, Endymion,
Bellona and Philyra. The scientist was pointing to the football-sized image
hovering above the bench, which was a scale projection of a nondescript brown
planet turning slowly anticlockwise upon its axis. As they watched, a smaller
planetoid appeared next to it on a collision course.

“This occurred more than a billion years ago,” the
scientist was saying. “However, the Barnard’s Star system is at least ten
billion years old so the planets, including Ascension, had long ago formed and
cooled from molten rock. It is thought this planetoid may have been a moon of one
of the outer gas planets that had broken free from an unstable orbit.”

The visitors watched as the holographic planetoid smashed
into the side of the larger world. The projection shimmered as the impact sent
ripples across the surface and a blanket of virtual dust into the atmosphere.
Moments later, the animated debris settled and now the planet looked more like
the Ascension they knew. The impact had left its mark not only in the vast
equatorial depression that became the Tatrill Sea, but also in the gargantuan
network of canyons and cracks through the planet’s crust that gradually
metamorphosed into the Eden Ravines. What was more, Ascension had come out of
the collision rotating clockwise. Endymion stared at the hologram, his mouth
hanging open in a most unattractive fashion.

“Are you on egg?” the scientist asked, frowning at
Endymion’s expression.

“No!” retorted Endymion, offended.

“Apparently, he’s always like this,” Miss Clymene added.

Endymion gestured towards the hologram. “That is so
cool.”

“In a way,” the scientist agreed. “The planetoid impact
threw up a lot of dust and triggered large-scale volcanic activity, blocking
out the sun.”

“So where did all the weird plants come from?” asked
Bellona.

“It’s likely there was micro-biological life already present
in the rocks, similar to what has been found on Mars,” he replied. “The ravines
along the equator receive plenty of sunlight and are deep enough to trap water
and a thick layer of air, thus creating an ideal environment for complex life
to evolve. It’s worth remembering that before the collision it is believed the
planet was tidally-locked and thus quite inhospitable.”

“Tidally what?” remarked Miss Clymene. “I teach music,”
she added, by way of an explanation. “Astrophysics is not one of my strengths,
I’m afraid. Ask me how to group quavers in six-eight time and I’m your woman.”

“Quite,” muttered the scientist. “To explain, Ascension
orbits Barnard’s Star so closely its rotation should have been slowed by
gravity long ago, leaving it spinning just once every orbit to thus always keep
the same side of the planet facing towards the sun. You can see the same effect
with moons as they orbit their primaries. Ingui and Geat have become
tidally-locked around Woden, for example.”

Philyra and Bellona looked blank.

“Or like Luna around Earth?” the scientist suggested.

Philyra shrugged. “Never been to Earth,” she admitted.

“Well, like the Tianzun moons of Shennong. Lingbao,
Yuanshi, Daode?”

“Ah!” said Bellona. “We have been studying Epsilon
Eridani.”

“We’re going to Daode in a few days,” Philyra added.

“Whatever. The point is that the impact hit Ascension so
hard it changed the planet’s spin,” the scientist continued. “They say love
makes the world go round, but on Ascension it was a kiss from a prehistoric
planetoid!”