Hollow Moon Read online

  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.

  “Find him easy, you said!” remarked the fat man, clearly out of breath. “Your tracker device tried to lead us back into the garden!”

  “A mere technical glitch, no more,” his colleague said dismissively. “The path of faith has not led us astray and we have found what we came for.”

  Still struggling, the boy somehow loosened his gag and suddenly screamed.

  “Help!” he cried in terror. “I’m being kidnapped!”

  “Be quiet!” The taller man brought them to
a pause so he could nonchalantly cuff the boy around the head and refasten the gag, before hooking his hands once more under the boy’s wriggling shoulders. “Children just do not know how to behave in polite company.”

  “He’s a right fidget. Can I knock him on the head to calm him down?”

  “We have been tasked to return our cargo in pristine condition. I fear our own deliverance into sanctity may be withheld if we deliver damaged goods.”

  “I’d only hit him gentle, like.”

  “I sincerely doubt you truly appreciate the meaning of the word ‘gentle’.”

  “Yes I do,” retorted the fat man. “My mum bought me a dictionary for my birthday and I’ve read as far as ‘halibut’. Go on, ask me what a halibut is.”

  The men moved on and the response was lost to Ravana’s ears. Alarmed at their treatment of the young boy, she watched nervously from her hiding place as they headed towards the wall that surrounded the palace grounds. Her headache was gone, as if the pain had been a needle suddenly plucked free from her brain, but she was left with a less-than-steely resolve to spring into action. Ravana knew there was no way she could tackle the two men alone but was determined to find out what they were up to before she went for help.

  “Don’t be a scaredy-cat!” she muttered to herself. “No offence,” she added, seeing her electric pet look up from its systematic destruction of a pretty display of blooms.

  Keeping herself hidden, she crept nearer and saw that between the men and the wall was a very strange object indeed. It was some sort of vehicle; a horizontal cylinder as high as a man and three times as long, one end of which tapered to a cone of bright silver, the other end flat with a recessed hatch. A series of horizontal spiked tracks ran along its rusty yellow hull at regular intervals and between two of these, faded black letters spelt out the legend ‘ASTROMOLE’. Ahead, the men had reached the machine and she scurried towards them, darting through the undergrowth until she was as close as she dared.

  Her heart pounding, she peered around the edge of a convenient bush. Beyond, the kidnappers were bundling their captive into the open hatch of the machine. The taller man paused to look around the palace grounds before following his colleague and the boy inside, the hatch clanging shut behind him. There was a muffled shout, then the door swung open again and he leapt out again, his face creased in disgust.

  “You vile man!” he cried, fanning a hand frantically before his nose. “That truly is the height of bad manners, especially in such an enclosed space! What have you been eating?”

  After a few moments of frenetic waving, he climbed back inside and pulled the hatch closed once more. With a great clattering noise, the Astromole jerked into motion and started to trundle across the ground, cone-end forwards, propelled by the spiked tracks clattering along the side of the cylinder. Startled, Ravana crawled from behind the bush and watched as the machine moved slowly towards a small statue-lined courtyard near the main gates. There was no sign of the palace guard or anyone else whom she could alert. She quickly came to a decision and started in pursuit of the disappearing vehicle.

  The courtyard was watched by the blank stares of moss-covered stone elephants, one at each corner standing three metres high. All four faced the large ragged hole torn through the central paving. It was towards this hole the rusty yellow machine now headed, its nose cone spinning like a high-speed drill. Close behind, Ravana retreated to hide behind an empty wooden cart at the edge of the courtyard. She looked out again just as the Astromole reached the edge of the pit and tipped itself into the hole.

  “They’re digging their way out!” she murmured.

  She had never seen anything like it before in her life. The machine tilted further, then began to sink into the ground, the whirring tracks throwing chunks of rock into the air behind. In a matter of seconds it had disappeared from sight, leaving nothing but a rubble-strewn courtyard in its wake.

  Awestruck, Ravana emerged from behind the cart and hesitantly approached the edge of the pit. Peering into the gloom, she caught a glimpse of the rear of the Astromole, slipping into the darkness of the curving tunnel. It fitted its burrow so neatly she realised the vehicle must have cut the shaft itself earlier to get into the palace grounds in the first place. Now very scared, she backed away from the edge. The machine had made so much noise she was sure the Maharani’s guards should have been alerted by now, but there was still no one else in sight. Although apprehensive about approaching the palace, she knew it was the right thing to do.

  Ravana took a few steps towards the house and paused. The hush that had descended upon the scene felt unnatural, making her more nervous than ever. As if to reassure herself she had not imagined it, she glanced back towards the shattered courtyard, then shivered as a sudden chill wind swept through the grounds. The climate within the hollow moon was carefully controlled and it was rare to feel anything much more than a gentle breeze.

  The wind quickly gathered strength. Startled, she saw that a flurry of leaves, twigs and other garden detritus were all being drawn towards the hole in the centre of the courtyard. In a panic, she scrambled back to her refuge behind the wagon and watched wide-eyed as the debris swirled ever faster around the ragged pit like water down a drain. The wind grew more ferocious still until the branches of the nearby trees too were bending towards the hole, creaking with an agonising sense of foreboding.

  Ravana stared at the pit. It seemed incredible, yet she knew what was happening. Somehow, the hollow moon had been breached and its air was being sucked out into space before her very eyes.

  The canvas fastened across the back of the cart rose like a sail in the wind, jolting the wagon forward against the wooden chock holding its wheel. As the canvas rose, she spied a coil of rope lying in the back, then screamed as a disturbed huntsman spider dropped from the canvas onto her arm, scuttled down her sleeve and ran for cover. Ravana cursed and made a grab for the rope before her plan had fully formed in her head.

  Rope in hand, she quickly secured one end to a sturdy part of the cart, then scrambled across to loop the other around the neck of the nearest stone elephant, tying it tight. By now it was becoming difficult to stand upright in the blasting wind. Crawling back to the wagon, she kicked away the wheel chock, reached for the lever next to the driver’s seat and released the brake.

  The cart leapt across the courtyard with its canvas flapping like a kite before a storm. The rope tightened and the wagon shuddered to a halt on the edge of the pit. Buffeted by the wind, Ravana tried to crawl to the edge of the courtyard and safety, but she could not get a grip upon the paving slabs and slowly but surely found herself being dragged across the ground towards the gaping hole behind her.

  The rushing air was filled with grit that seared painfully against her skin. Ravana closed her eyes and waited for the final blast that would send her flying down the shaft to her doom. The wailing of the wind was deafening, yet through her mounting terror she still found time to curse her electric cat for landing her in this mess in the first place.

  Just when she thought her plan had failed, she heard the sound of grating stone as the nearby elephant began to topple from its plinth. On the other end of the rope, the cart leapt forward once more and was instantly sucked into the pit, dragging the huge statue behind it. Ravana, her eyes tightly closed, sadly missed the awesome spectacle of several tonnes of stone elephant flying across the courtyard as if it weighed no more than a feather. The statue flew towards the pit and then, with an almighty crunch, jammed neatly into the hole.

  Suddenly, the wind was no more, leaving nothing but the distant wail of a siren to break the silence. Ravana cautiously opened her eyes. Standing before where she lay was her cat, looking suspiciously clean and holding the remains of the sentry gull in its mouth.

  “After today, you are definitely grounded,” she muttered. She sat up and started pulling leaves from her hair. “Your recharging privileges have been revoked.”

  The cat looked at her oddly and shifted its electric ga
ze to the source of the shadow over her shoulder. Ravana wearily climbed to her feet and turned to see two Indian men standing at the edge of the courtyard, both dressed in the dark suits of the palace guard. One was looking despondently at the stone elephant, which now lay wedged in the hole in the middle of the ruined paving with its legs in the air. The other pointed a gun in her direction.

  “I expected a better reception than this,” Ravana said wearily. “After all, it’s not every day someone gets to save the world with an elephant.”

  *

  The guards took Ravana through the palace grounds to the guard house, a squat and utilitarian building attached to the palace itself by a short open-sided veranda. There they led her into a small, sparsely-furnished room and stood silently over her for what seemed an age. When she tried to tell the guards what she had witnessed in the grounds she was steadfastly ignored, though was given a bowl of perfumed water and a soft towel to wash the mud from her hands and face.

  The open door at the far end of the veranda offered a tantalising glimpse of the elaborate yet old-fashioned decor of the palace, which in Ravana’s eyes was well suited to a household under the rule of a woman who used the archaic Indian title of Maharani. No one knew much about the palace’s reclusive inhabitants. It was rumoured that the Maharani’s staff were forbidden to speak of the outside world or mix with the other residents of the Dandridge Cole. The only thing Ravana knew for certain was that the Maharani and the rest of the royal household were fellow exiles from the Epsilon Eridani system who had come to the hollow moon around the same time as Ravana and her father, back when Ravana herself had been just seven years old.

  Finally, a third man entered. He was tall and pale-skinned, with dark hair and a neatly-trimmed goatee beard. He wore a smart uniform in green with gold piping and by the way the first two guards silently deferred to him Ravana guessed he was their superior. Initially ignoring her, the newcomer placed the small flat case and the antique paper-leafed book he carried upon a desk by the window and only then turned to greet Ravana.