Hollow Moon (2 page)

Her headache was getting worse. Ignoring the stare of the
electric bird, she lifted her pet from her lap, rose to her feet and peered
over the cave ledge. She was not looking forward to the climb back down. She
had done it before and lived to tell the tale, but that did not stop her
inwardly cursing her cat for making her have to do it again.

“Require assistance?” the gull asked again.

The bird seemed to have picked up on her concerns. Its
presence was disconcerting and Ravana wondered if it was some sort of automated
surveillance device, which worryingly suggested she had entered a restricted
area. However, such sentries were not in the habit of declaring friendship. A
new thought popped into her mind.

“A flying robot sentinel,” she mused. “Zotz? Is that
you?”

“Affirmative!” the gull confirmed. “Bird syntax limited.
Require assistance?”

Ravana smiled. Fifteen-year-old Zotz was the only friend
she had close to her own age in Dockside and a wizard at building gadgets. She
knew he had a crush on her and could imagine him putting together something
like this gull to follow her around. It was a sweet thing to do, but also a
little weird.

“It’s nice of you to offer,” Ravana admitted, looking
down at the vertical obstacle course between her and the ground below. “But
unless your feathered friend has a ladder tucked under its wing I don’t think
you can.”

The gull, or Zotz, considered this. “Ladder not found in
inventory.”

“A jet pack?” she suggested, hopefully.

“Jet pack not fou…”

“Yeah, yeah, I guessed,” said Ravana. She wondered
whether to ask it about the strange spacemen. Her cat had evidently decided the
winged robot was worth further investigation and was licking its lips. “All I
want is an easy way off this cliff.”

“Proceed upwards to ground,” the bird told her.

“I want to go down, not up! Have you flipped your
diodes?”

It was not easy for a robot bird to look disdainful but
the gull somehow managed it. Puzzled, Ravana looked up at the landscape curving
high above her head. It was then she noticed a rough flight of steps cut into
the cliff, leading up from the palace gardens; steps that therefore from her
perspective led down towards her cave. Looking closer, she realised the crude
footholds must have originally spanned the entire diameter of the cliff, right
across the end of the cavern, but a rock slide had taken away the section below
where she now stood. The vertical flight reached the ground on the opposite
side of the hollow moon to where she had parked the monocycle, but she was
ready to accept a long walk in exchange for an easy descent. Meanwhile, her wayward
pet had evidently decided the cave had one electric creature too many and was
flexing its talons ready to pounce.

“Isn’t it forbidden to enter the palace grounds?” she
asked, not that this would stop her. The constraints of the hollow moon were
frustrating and her solitary wanderings to counter boredom became longer by the
day.

The gull was busy trying to avoid the attentions of her
cat and did not reply. Ravana knew of the palace guard, yet the thought of
entering forbidden territory had a certain allure. She was suddenly intrigued,
not only by the prospect of finding out where the mysterious spacemen had come
from, but also of experiencing the zone of zero gravity she knew she would find
less than two hundred metres up from where she perched. Having proper steps to
follow back to ground level was a bonus. Being arrested by the Maharani’s guards
when she got there less so. On the plus side, her headache had eased a little.

A strangled squawk made her jump in alarm. She looked
around just in time to see her pet claw a chunk out of the gull’s scrawny neck,
leaving the poor bird’s head hanging loosely from an extraordinary variety of
brightly-coloured wires and tubes. For a machine, the gull was surprisingly
messy inside. Green hydraulic fluid bubbled from its neck and pooled upon the
floor, where it seeped into a large mould-covered crack in the cave wall.
Unperturbed, her electric cat cornered the damaged bird as it tried to escape,
growling with a mechanical vigour not unlike the waste disposal unit in the
communal kitchens back home.

“Reboot me!” burbled the gull.

“Bad kitty!” Ravana said reprovingly. Feeling guilty, she
gingerly reached for the gull and tried to wedge its head back into position,
but to no avail. “Sorry about that, Zotz.”

With a resigned sigh, she decided it was time to head
home. Separating her cat from the remains of the gull, she scooped her pet
under an arm, stepped up to the cliff and gingerly began a one-handed ascent of
the stone steps.

It was more like climbing a ladder than negotiating a
flight of stairs, but even with a wriggling ball of fur-wrapped electronics to
contend with it was easier than she anticipated. The pseudo-gravity of the
hollow moon lessened with every step and soon she was almost flying up the
cliff, the mystery of the spacemen forgotten. After a particularly vigorous
leap, Ravana found herself drifting to a halt in mid air, an arm’s length from
the rock face. She had reached the exact centre of the cliff, on the imaginary
axis upon which the hollow moon spun. She was weightless.

Ravana had been in free-fall many times before but
floating above the concave countryside of the hollow moon was a whole new
experience. With her feet wedged in the gap between two steps she found she
could float horizontally outwards from the cliff. The tiny sun was now above
her, with the distant trees and houses rising around her on all sides, stuck to
the surface of a vast cylinder wall. This change in orientation was made yet
more disconcerting when she spied the distant shapes of people as they moved
about the
Dandridge Cole
, looking like
slow-motion ants scurrying around a huge drainpipe.

As an experiment she put herself into a slow spin and
tried to visualise the asteroid rotating upon its axis as it drifted around
Barnard’s Star, much to the annoyance of the cat under her arm, which did not
like zero gravity at all and wriggled more than ever. Ravana was just pulling herself
back towards the stone steps when her cat, mistaking the cliff face for a
floor, dug its claws into her arm and made a sudden leap for freedom.

“Ow!” cried Ravana, caught by surprise. Her pet’s diamond-tipped
talons were pretty to look at but extremely sharp.

The cat gave an anguished howl, bounced off the stone
steps and back towards Ravana’s face, claws outstretched. In a panic, she
raised her hands and tried to twist away, then yelped as her feet slipped from
where they were wedged. Her floundering pet landed heavily on her shoulder. She
tried desperately to hook a foot back under the step but it was too late. A
split second later, the momentum of the cat’s ill-timed leap sent them both
reeling away from the cliff.

Ravana gave another strangled cry and frantically
thrashed her arms as if trying to save herself from drowning. Her pet, driven
by its self-preservation circuits, scrambled down her body and dug its claws
into her thigh. Just when Ravana thought things could not get any worse, she
saw the steps start to slip by and realised the flying cat had knocked them
beyond the zero-gravity point. Slowly but surely, centrifugal forces were
taking them back to the ground.

“Blasted cat!” she screamed.

“Require assistance?” came a cracked voice.

With a surprised yelp, Ravana stopped trying to swim in
thin air, looked up and to her amazement saw the mangled remains of Zotz’s
sentry gull hovering above them. The whole centre section of the bird’s body
spun horizontally so that its outstretched wings acted as helicopter blades,
leaving tail feathers free to whirl as a control rotor. Above the humming
blades the bird’s head hung skewed from its broken neck. Its beady electronic
eyes glowed with a defiant light.

In different circumstances Ravana would have been
fascinated by what she recognised as one of Zotz’s typically bizarre designs. Now
she just screamed and made a panic-stricken grab for the gull’s legs. The spin
of the hollow moon had gripped her and her cat with a vengeance. Soon they were
accelerating past another cliff-side cave in a descent that was fast becoming a
plummet towards the palace. Above her, the gull’s wings whirred frantically as
it fought in vain to stay airborne. There was little the mechanical bird could
do.

“Help me!” screamed Ravana.

The cliff became a blur. The Coriolis effect of the
spinning world pulled them down in a curve towards a copse of weeping willows.
Ravana stared in terror as the gull finally broke free to shoot away like a missile
into the flower bed, creating a sad punctuation mark that somehow made the rude
horticulture even more obscene. With a final, anguished shriek, she plunged
through the leafy canopy, her arms flailing wildly in a desperate attempt to
break her fall. Moments later she ricocheted off a branch towards the centre of
a hitherto-unnoticed pond and splash-landed with a loud squelch. The small
pool, it transpired, consisted almost entirely of evil-smelling mud.

Ravana slowly lifted herself out of the mire, her hands
clutching what was left of the gull’s spindly legs. For a while she could do
nothing but stand trembling knee-deep in the pond. The hollow moon’s low
pseudo-gravity had saved her from serious injury; not only had it kept her from
falling too fast, but it had also encouraged freakishly tall trees to grow just
where she needed them to cushion her fall. As it was, she was battered, bruised
and covered from head to toe in grey slime but otherwise amazingly unhurt,
though her headache had returned worse than ever. She assumed the large blob of
mud clinging to her leg was her cat.

“Excitement and adventure,” she muttered. “I should be
careful what I wish for.”

“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Inari.

Puzzled, he stumbled to a halt and slowly scanned his
surroundings for the source of the disturbance. He and Namtar had reached the
far side of the lawn beyond the cover of the trees and arrived at a secluded
open veranda at the side of the palace, out of sight of the main entrance.

“To what do you refer?” snapped Namtar.

Inari frowned, having been reprimanded several times
already for his lack of haste. “Didn’t you hear it?” he asked. “There was a
scream, then a splash.”

“I dare say it was nothing more than a duck.”

“What planet are you from? Ducks don’t make that much
noise!”

Namtar clouted Inari across the head with the scanner
device in his hand.

“Does it matter what it was?” he replied impatiently.
“Much as I would like to stand here and debate what hypothetical exotic fauna
may or may not reside in this antique habitat, the palace guard will not be
distracted for long and we have a job to do. So without further ado, may we
proceed with the task in hand?”

“Could be a wart hog,” Inari said sullenly. “They make
strange noises.”

“Takes one to know one, my friend. The window, if you
please?”

Namtar pointed to a nearby sash window below the low
veranda roof. Inari mumbled something underneath his breath, unhooked a lever
from his belt and moved across to attack the wooden frame. After more muttering
and a fair bit of grunting, there was a sound of splintering wood and the
window was open.

“There you go,” he said to Namtar. The room beyond was in
darkness.

“After you,” insisted Namtar, eyeing the window warily.

Inari shrugged, grabbed hold of the window frame and
pulled himself inside. Namtar quickly followed, albeit more carefully than his
clumsy spacesuit-clad comrade ahead.

The men disappeared from view. Ravana tossed aside what
was left of the gull and waded out of the pond as quietly as she could. She
briefly wondered why the men had failed to spot her, then realised that being
covered in mud was excellent camouflage for hiding in a garden. Neither were
anyone she knew from the hollow moon. The space agency shoulder patch upon
their spacesuits too was unfamiliar, though she recognised the national flag of
India in the corner of the design.

“Burglars!” murmured Ravana, intrigued despite her
thudding headache.

She scraped the mud away from the touch-screen of her
wristpad and activated the communicator, wondering what the protocol was for
one trespasser reporting on others. Her dilemma was resolved when she saw the
network symbol flashing, indicating there was something nearby interfering with
the signal. She was on her own.

There was a soft thud as her cat let go of her leg and
dropped to the ground. Deep in thought, Ravana reached to stroke its fur,
looked at the walking mud ball and changed her mind. The cat responded with a
belch before trotting away towards the nearby flower beds. Ravana suspected a
real cat would have at least tried to clean itself before going for a stroll.

It was then she heard a distant yell, a cry for help. It
was the voice of a child.

The two men reappeared at the window, but now they had
someone else with them, a dark-haired Indian boy dressed in matching tunic and
trousers of expensive-looking fabric. The boy was struggling to escape the
men’s grip and to her horror Ravana saw he had a gag across his mouth and his
ankles and wrists were bound with cords. Startled, she watched as the tall man
produced something from his pocket and spray-painted a symbol upon the wall
next to the window. He and his colleague then quickly moved away from the
palace, carrying their frantically-squirming burden between them. Their voices
came across loud and clear.