Hollow Moon (8 page)

In the floor a few steps away was an open trapdoor with
an airlock control panel above. Curious, he looked down and saw it led into a
narrow chamber with a ladder fixed to the wall, descending to the Astromole
docked in the cradle below. The open hatch of the digging machine was
illuminated from within and Endymion was just on the point of climbing down to
have a look when he heard Bellona calling his name.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, sticking his head through the
hatchway.

“We should go!” shouted Bellona.

With a shrug of assent, Endymion stepped out of the
hatch, put a foot upon the top rung of the ladder and paused. Away from the
Nellie
Chapman
, on the far side of the clearing,
he could see a second area of scorched soil, complete with a distinctive set of
marks that he instantly recognised as those left by the landing gear of another
and much larger spacecraft.

“Another ship?” he murmured to himself. “Very strange.”

“Endymion!” Bellona called again.

He took a couple steps down the ladder, then glanced back
through the hatch, reluctant to leave. It was then his eyes fell upon a small
orange cylinder, about as thick as his arm, hidden beneath the console. In the
centre was a small digital display and he watched as the number upon it counted
down second by second.

“Ten, nine,” murmured Endymion. “Eight, seven…”

His hands and feet were scrambling down the rungs long
before his brain had decided what it was he actually saw. By the time he slid
down the final metres of the ladder, his panic was in full swing and he hit the
ground like a coiled spring.

“Quick!” he yelled to Bellona and Philyra, sprinting
towards them. “Run!”

Seeing the girls hesitate, he grabbed their hands and
pulled them after him, leaping across the uneven ground as fast as his legs
could carry him. Ignoring their screams of protest, he dragged them back to the
jungle path and pulled them down into the undergrowth.

“Get off me!” Philyra shrieked.

“What the hell are you doing?” cried Bellona.

“Keep your heads down!” Endymion yelled.

Seven seconds after his hasty exit through the hatch,
there was a sudden deafening bang. A huge explosion ripped through the
spacecraft, tearing it apart and sending the upper part of the hull careering
into the air. Moments later, fiery debris began to rain down, setting fire to
the surrounding undergrowth and the tops of nearby trees. Endymion, Bellona and
Philyra cautiously raised their heads and looked towards the smouldering
remains of the spacecraft. The
Nellie Chapman
was no more.

“Wow,” murmured Philyra, then gulped. A broken landing
strut was embedded in the ground barely a metre from where she lay.

Despite everything, Endymion grinned. Bellona gave him a
shove.

“Philyra did tell you not to press any buttons,” she
retorted.

Incredibly, the sound of a spacecraft exploding a
kilometre away failed to wake Miss Clymene, who when they returned to camp was
still asleep and safely tucked up inside the darkened dome. Bellona and Philyra
were terrified of what she might do should she wake and learn of their
impromptu jungle trek and so quietly followed suit. Endymion stayed awake a
little longer, calmly munching upon the zero-gravity rations he had found
aboard the
Nellie Chapman
as he tried to
make sense of the data obtained from the ship’s computer. The mining ship’s
last flight remained a puzzle; before it returned to Ascension, the vessel had
ventured into deep space, far away from the asteroid belt and nowhere near any
of the other major planets of the Barnard’s Star system.

It was a mystery that would have to wait. The scientists
at the research station were exobiologists, not astrophysicists and their
limited network did not hold the information he sought. Admitting defeat,
Endymion eventually joined the others in sleep.

MAHARANI UMA did not repeat her visit to Dockside but her
plea for help struck a chord. The
Dandridge Cole
’s sensor arrays had tracked the kidnappers’ spacecraft to Ascension,
yet nearly two days had passed since Raja Surya’s disappearance and discrete
enquiries to Newbrum and the black-market haven of Lan-Tlanto had so far drawn
a blank. Fenris had been back to Dockside several times since the Maharani’s
visit and now approached Quirinus and Ravana, who were in one of the hangar
workshops getting ready to refit an auxiliary life-support module removed from
the
Platypus
for repair.

“Can you smell something?” Quirinus asked Ravana. “Oh
look, it’s Fenris.”

Ravana giggled. Her father had confided to her that
although he was happy to help the Maharani and speak to his contacts on
Ascension, he had no intention of being nice to Fenris.

“The Maharani wishes for you to take me to Newbrum,”
Fenris said urgently, looking flustered. “She is keen for me to speak directly
with Administrator Verdandi. Are the repairs to your ship complete?”

“The
Platypus
is
available for hire, if that’s what you mean,” Quirinus told him. “I hope you’ve
got deep pockets. I don’t go to Newbrum without a very good reason.”

“Ever the mercenary,” Fenris murmured. “Money is no
object, as you know.”

“In that case, you’ve got yourself a ship!” said
Quirinus. “We’ll be ready to depart in an hour or so. Ravana, do you fancy a
trip to Ascension?”

Ravana nodded and grinned. “Do I get to be co-pilot
again?”

She watched as Fenris stomped away to find somewhere
quiet to sulk. She got the impression he was not so keen on taking the trip and
could not help wondering why.

Bellona unzipped the door of the darkened dome and gazed
out at another dim red day. High above the Eden Ravines, the sun had started to
edge towards the eastern horizon but otherwise had barely moved at all. Behind
her, she could hear two totally different musical alarms clashing dissonantly
as Endymion’s and Philyra’s wristpads tried their best to rouse their owners
from dreams made strange by the jungle’s alien murmurs.

Miss Clymene acted cordially enough at breakfast, but
there was a certain coolness to her manner that suggested she was not entirely
unaware of her students’ jungle adventure. Endymion, Bellona and Philyra had
not stopped to talk on their hurried trek back through the alien forest and the
girls were still waiting for an opportunity to ask Endymion about what he had
seen inside the abandoned mining ship.

Upon their return to the research station, Miss Clymene
was informed that her friend had been called away on urgent business. The
scientist she spoke to was reluctant to elaborate but eventually revealed that
there had been a security alert and research station staff had been told to suspend
all duties pending the arrival of a government official from Newbrum. Miss
Clymene made some comment about the wheels of bureaucracy moving notoriously
slowly on Ascension and so it was that she decided to call it a day.

A few hours later they were back at the skybus station,
waiting for the next flight back to Newbrum. Philyra was once again glued to
her wristpad and periodically issued gasps of delight or groans of derision as
she caught up on the missed hours of holovid celebrity news and the latest
happenings in
Gods of Avalon
. Endymion,
never a great conversationalist at the best of times, was immersed in his own
device as he returned to the mystery of the last flight of the
Nellie
Chapman
. Bored, Bellona turned to her own
wristpad and upon reconnecting to the net she sighed, finding she had a paltry
two messages waiting. One was from her mother asking her to make sure Endymion
behaved himself. The other was a rude message from Maia, a girl who played
clarinet in the Bradbury Heights band, complete with a short holovid of her and
her fellow band members mocking their Newbrum rivals.

The skybus to Newbrum that arrived shortly afterwards
looked old enough to merit its own plinth in a transport museum, but soon they
were hurtling back across the desert and down into the vast equatorial
depression towards the distant Tatrill Sea. As the thin grey coastline came
into view, Bellona was reminded of the scientist’s hologram and the image of
the planetoid slamming into the side of Ascension. It was difficult to imagine
a collision of that magnitude, one which could create a basin five thousand
kilometres wide and forge the deep cracks of the Eden Ravines. Bellona tried to
imagine a planetoid falling on Maia’s head, wiping the smug smile from her
face.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “A terraformer!”

Endymion and Philyra glanced through the window to where
she pointed. Out in the desert sat a monstrous mechanical pyramid of steel,
crawling slowly upon huge tracks as it spewed a cocktail of greenhouse gases
into the air. Large-scale terraforming had been abandoned on Ascension more
than twenty years ago but there were still a few projects ongoing that were
trying to make the atmosphere a little less deadly to humans.

“Fascinating,” murmured Philyra, her gaze already back at
her wristpad.

“There’s not enough of them,” Endymion opined glumly. “At
this rate, it’ll take a million years before we can live outside the dome.”

“That’s what I like about you,” said Miss Clymene.
“Always looking to the future.”

“A friend of mine once hacked into a supply depot and
reprogrammed their systems so that a delivery meant for the fish market went
instead to a terraformer,” Endymion told her. “The next time it snowed, the ski
slopes at Kirchel ended up knee-deep in prawns.”

“You do talk rubbish,” retorted Bellona. “You know you
don’t have any friends.”

Ahead, the main dome of the city of Newbrum, an immense
blister of glass and steel squatting defiantly upon the shores of the Tatrill
Sea, had finally appeared upon the horizon. Outside the skybus the grey desert
was giving way to scrubland, where tougher versions of the alien shrubs seen in
the Eden Ravines mingled with hardy specimens introduced from the tundra
regions of Earth. The introduced flora was adding a little oxygen to the air,
but apart from at the bottom of the Ravines the atmosphere of Ascension was
still prone to turning blue the face of anyone foolish enough to venture
outside not dressed for the occasion. A few obstinate alpine animals brought to
Ascension by Australian genetic engineers nevertheless had managed to adapt to
the thin atmosphere to scratch out a meagre existence on the coastal plains. It
remained however that anyone wishing to see anything larger than a wombat would
not find it beyond the huge, radiation-proof conservatories, where the
descendants of Earth-born livestock grazed the artificial meadows of the
coastal covered farms.

The domed city grew nearer and now they could see
individual dots of light from the windows of the various buildings within. The
main dome was essentially a giant greenhouse, built to trap the weak heat of
the sun and sealed to maintain a breathable atmosphere for its residents. The
skybus approached Newbrum from the west; a smaller dome to the south, made of
reinforced concrete rather than glass, housed the city’s life-support plant,
while a similar dome to the north served as the spaceport terminal. Beyond the
city to the east lay the choppy grey waters of the Tatrill Sea.

“We are now approaching New Birmingham,” announced the
automatic pilot. Its use of the old name of the city confirmed Miss Clymene’s
earlier voiced suspicion that obsolete skybuses were being put back into
service. “Change here for interplanetary and interstellar spaceport services,
national skybus services and for flying boat services from Aston Pier.”

The skybus was slowing and dropping to the monorail track
below. Newbrum station was in the north dome and the track passed close enough
to the main city dome for them to see the unruly collection of concrete and
steel buildings within. On the far side of the spaceport was the salvage yard
where old space vehicles were dismantled for recycling; like all planets
orbiting ancient red dwarf stars, Ascension was seriously short of
metal-bearing rocks. The skybus gave a jolt as it settled upon its rail, the
turbines now working to kill its speed as it approached the giant airlock doors
sliding open ahead. Moments later they were inside, speeding through a long
concrete tunnel into the heart of the concrete dome. A second set of airlock
doors closed behind them and with a final screech of brakes the skybus finally
rolled to a halt next to a long platform. They were home.

“We have arrived at New Birmingham, where this service
terminates,” the automatic pilot proclaimed cheerfully. “All change, please.”

“Are you absolutely sure there’s nothing available?”
asked Miss Clymene. She was talking to the ticket office clerk at the spaceport
departure lounge, a stern-faced woman who clearly thought she had better places
to be. Behind Miss Clymene, Endymion, Bellona and Philyra stood idly by,
looking bored. “It doesn’t have to be direct to Daode. I’m sure we could get a
connecting shuttle from Taotie.”

“The
Fenghuang III
has been booked by private charter,” the clerk told her, sounding weary. “Once
that leaves orbit, the next ship to Epsilon Eridani is in three weeks time.”

“Wonderful,” muttered Miss Clymene. Bradbury Heights
originally had offered her class some seats on the flight, but then just two
days ago had changed their minds on the grounds they now needed to make room
for a hamper of speciality cheeses. Miss Clymene decided to try a different
tack. “How about the Solar System?” she suggested. “If we can get to Earth or
Mars we can pick up a flight to Epsilon Eridani from there.”