Hollow Moon

by Steph Bennion

  “Where are we going?” asked Bellona.

  “We? I’m going to drop by work,” he told his sister, coming to a standstill. His latest job was as an apprentice ground crew operative at space-traffic control, which more often than not involved making tea for everyone else. “I don’t know where you’re going.”

  “Can’t we come with you?” asked Philyra. “I’m bored.”

  Endymion gave a non-committal shrug and carried on walking, Bellona and Philyra trotting behind him. Soon they were passing through the main departure lounge, where around two dozen people were waiting to board a flight to CSS Stellarbridge, Ascension’s orbital space dock. The small delta-winged shuttle was visible through the window, parked in the hangar outside the lounge but still within the spaceport dome. Ghostly monochrome advertising holograms drifted through the room on a wave of banal chatter as each tried to sell upgraded hotel bookings and last-minute insurance to the travellers. Endymion glanced at the waiting crowd and then groaned, recognising them as students and tutors from the academy at Bradbury Heights. As he and the girls hurried past, three of the students left the group and stood in their path, blocking their way.

  “Xuthus!” murmured Philyra, fluttering her eyelashes at the boy in front.

  “Whoopee,” muttered Bellona. The girl beside him was Maia.

  Xuthus, Maia and the boy with them all wore distinctive black and gold flight suits, no doubt bought especially for the trip to Daode. The spray-tanned American families who lived in Bradbury Heights all had some connection with the large pharmaceutical companies based there and as such benefited from the high salaries paid. Unfortunately, there were always those who revelled in displaying their wealth. Endymion scowled.

  “Clear off, Xuthus,” he growled. “I’ve seen enough slimy bugs in the Ravines today without needing to look at you too.”

  Xuthus gave a hollow laugh. “Well, if it isn’t the mighty players of Newbrum,” he said scornfully. “The entire band, in fact. All three of you.”

  “It’s not size that matters,” retorted Endymion. “It’s what you do with it. At least, that’s what your girlfriend told me.”

  “Whatever,” snapped Xuthus.

  “It’s a shame you couldn’t come on our flight,” said the other boy, a short and rather rotund figure, who addressed Endymion with mock sympathy. “We’re on the Fenghuang III, a proper interstellar cruiser with separate cabins and everything.”

  “I’ve heard of that ship,” said Philyra. “The captain is a pirate who dumps his passengers into the nearest black hole if they don’t laugh at his jokes. Oh, don’t worry, Lodus,” she added, as the boy looked worried. “There isn’t a black hole in the universe big enough to throw you into.”

  “Did you get my message?” asked Maia, leering at Bellona.

  Bellona gave her a withering look. Endymion heard her mutter something about a freak falling planetoid dislodging Maia’s smug smile, or perhaps even doing it herself.

  “Maia, my dear,” Bellona said sweetly. “You really should get a new wristpad. The holovid you sent me did not do justice to your beauty.”

  “Really?” Maia tossed her immaculate blond coiffure, genuinely flattered.

  Bellona nodded. “Close up you’re far more ugly.”

  “Girls! Calm down!” cried Endymion, as Maia leapt angrily towards Bellona. Behind him, Philyra winked at Lodus, then giggled. The boy responded with a grin. “Put your claws away! See, even Lodus can see it was just a joke!”

  “Were you laughing at me?” Maia asked fiercely, turning on Lodus.

  Lodus shook his head, suddenly very nervous. “Me? No. Never!”

  “Yes you were!”

  “I was laughing with you, not at you.”

  Endymion gave Bellona a nudge. “I think it’s time we left,” he whispered.

  Leaving Xuthus to deal with the squabbling Maia and Lodus, Endymion led Bellona and Philyra towards the sliding doors at the far side of the departure lounge. He was almost at the exit when he paused, then a mischievous grin crept upon his face as his eyes fell upon a touch-screen terminal on a nearby wall. After quickly checking to make sure there were no spaceport personnel about, Endymion retrieved a short cable from his pocket and connected his wristpad to the terminal.

  “Xuthus is quite cute,” said Philyra dreamily. “For a Bradbury Heights boy.”

  “I’d like to shove his violin where the sun doesn’t shine,” Endymion muttered. There was a rebellious glint in his eye. His fingers were a blur upon his wristpad.

  “What are you doing?” asked Bellona. On the wall-mounted screen, the holovid advert for rock-climbing tours of Mars’ Olympus Mons changed to a floor plan of the spaceport. She looked down at his wristpad. “Oh no,” she murmured. “You wouldn’t.”

  A hissing of running water suddenly filled the air, a sound quickly drowned by loud screams from the departure lounge behind. Moments later they saw Maia run past, her blond hair now extremely bedraggled and dripping wet. More of the Bradbury Heights party followed to escape the sudden downpour inside the lounge. As Endymion, Bellona and Philyra watched, a spaceport security guard ran past them into the fray, getting soaked in the process. Philyra was helpless with laughter, leaving Endymion to grab the dumbstruck Bellona and hustle them away through the doors. The grin on his face grew wider by the minute.

  “That was fun!” he exclaimed.

  “What did you do?” asked Philyra, once they were out of sight of the guard.

  “I set off the sprinklers!” Endymion said gleefully. “I thought I’d dampen their spirits a little. Give them a proper send off.”

  “You are awful,” Bellona told him. Her brother caught her secret smile, as if she regretted not getting a picture of Maia running past with her expensive hairdo ruined.

  “How did you manage that?” Philyra inquired. Endymion could tell she was trying not to sound impressed. Her wristpad was no different to his own.

  “I have a whole load of hackware hidden on the servermoon,” he told her, coming to a halt before the door to a lift. Ascension’s servermoon, a kilometre-wide orbiting data satellite, not only provided Newbrum with all the data storage it would ever need but also an extra-dimensional transceiver array linked to servermoons in other star systems.

  Endymion led them into the lift, swiped his security pass across a reader on the control panel and pressed the top button. The lift shook badly on its short journey to the second floor but soon they were piling out into a large, circular room in which half a dozen people were working in front of computer terminals with large screens. Windows rose on all sides, half of which looked inside the dome to give a birds-eye view of the spaceport hangar. The rest provided a panoramic vista of the main runway and coastal plains to the north.

  “Gosh,” murmured Bellona. “Nice view.”

  “Spaceport control,” Endymion announced. “This is where I work.”

  “Endymion Ezenduka! Have you being setting off the fire sprinklers again?”

  Startled, Endymion saw a tall, middle-aged English woman bear down upon him with a disapproving stare. From the blonde hair fixed in a bun down to her highly-polished boots, she cut an imposing figure in her corporate suit of navy skirt and jacket. She was clearly not pleased to see Endymion, but not many people were.

  “Administrator Verdandi,” stuttered Endymion. “I didn’t expect…”

  “Thought you’d give your friends a quick tour while the boss was away?” suggested Verdandi, sternly. “I am here on official business, so please try and behave.”

  Endymion stared meekly at the floor. “Of course, Administrator.”

  Verdandi was a hard-headed politician with a razor-sharp mind and one of the few people of whom Endymion was genuinely wary. She was not only the head of the spaceport but also of Newbrum city itself, yet with a population of barely three thousand under her jurisdiction she was the last to pretend it was a position of great influence or power. It was unusual to find her at spaceport control and Endymion thou
ght he detected an air of muted anticipation amongst the people in the control room. Subdued, he led Bellona and Philyra to a spare desk overlooking the inside of the dome and the shuttle in the hangar below.

  “You’re scared of her,” Philyra observed.

  “Aren’t we all,” murmured the man at the next desk. He looked up at Endymion and winked. “Here to make the tea, Endymion? Or perhaps sweep up a little?”

  Bellona laughed. “They make you sweep the floor?”

  Endymion stuck his tongue out at her. “Actually, I sweep the runway,” he said. “They let me drive this huge truck with massive brooms attached. It’s great fun.”

  He sat down at the desk and switched on the vacant terminal. Philyra had found herself an empty chair to slump into and was newly-engrossed in the latest celebrity news on her wristpad. Bellona stood at Endymion’s shoulder and watched the screen as he called up an interplanetary navigation chart for the Barnard’s Star system.

  “Are you still thinking of that spaceship we found in the Ravines?” she asked.

  Endymion nodded. Using his wristpad, he retrieved the data taken from the Nellie Chapman’s flight computer and entered a set of coordinates into the chart’s search facility. Once he was satisfied he had entered the correct numbers, he pressed the ‘enter’ key.

  “Weird,” he murmured.

  The result brought up a region of empty space beyond the orbit of Thunor, the second of the system’s three gas giants and fourth-closest planet to Barnard’s Star. He smiled when he saw that the rocky world second-closest to the sun was on the chart as Frigg, the name given to Ascension when the system was first surveyed, but later changed following the arrival of humourless puritanical colonists.

  “Having problems?” asked the man at the next desk.

  “Just trying to make sense of a flight path,” replied Endymion.

  “Is this part of your training?”

  “Something like that,” Endymion lied.

  The man peered at the chart on the screen. “You’ve got it showing planetary bodies only,” he pointed out. “Try changing the settings to include navigation beacons.”

  Endymion ran the appropriate command and a series of red crosses appeared upon the screen, each one of which marked the position of the various signal beacons and satellites that warned pilots of potential navigation hazards in the system. One such symbol had appeared at his entered coordinates.

  “A radiation warning beacon,” Endymion noted, looking at the code next to the cross.

  “Why would anyone travel into a radiation area?” asked Bellona.

  Endymion had forgotten his sister was watching. The main display offered no further information, so he used the touch-screen menu to bring up the navigation database and entered the beacon reference number. The result just left him more confused than ever.

  “Dandridge Cole,” he read. “Funny name for an asteroid.”

  “An asteroid?” asked Bellona.

  “The Dandridge Cole?” exclaimed the man at the next desk.

  “Have you heard of it?” asked Endymion, bemused by the man’s sudden excitement.

  “It’s almost the stuff of legend!” the man said. His eyes shone with excitement. “The Dandridge Cole is the original colony ship that brought settlers from Earth to Ascension more than a century ago. It was thought to have been abandoned and left to drift away, but it turns out it remained in orbit around Barnard’s Star. The weird thing is I’d never given the story a second thought until today,” he said, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You see, when Administrator Verdandi turned up earlier, it was to announce that we’re expecting visitors from the Dandridge Cole!”

  “Visitors?” Bellona sounded wary. “Who?”

  “Aliens,” replied Endymion flatly.

  “There’s no such thing as aliens,” Bellona retorted.

  “What else can live on an asteroid?”

  “They don’t live on the asteroid, they live inside it,” the man told her.

  “Inside?” Endymion was intrigued.

  “The Dandridge Cole and its sister ship the Robert Goddard were asteroids that had been hollowed out and fitted with life support and huge fusion engines,” the man explained. “They could reach speeds approaching a fifth of that of light, but even then they were expected to take more than fifty Terran years to get to Barnard’s Star. During the journey, the crew and colonists would live out their lives inside the asteroid, waiting until they or their descendants reached their new home.”

  “Fifty years!” exclaimed Bellona.

  The man smiled. “Twenty years into their voyage, the Chinese perfected the extra-dimensional drive and suddenly we had spacecraft that could do the same trip in days. By the time the people of the Dandridge Cole arrived at Ascension, they were greeted by Commonwealth engineers hard at work building Newbrum. Many of those from the colony ship hated their new home so much they caught the first flight back to Earth.”

  “Why didn’t someone send a ship to meet them halfway?” asked Bellona.

  “You can’t jump into interstellar space,” Endymion told her. “An ED drive needs the gravity well of the target star to work properly. But what happened to the other ship?” he asked the man. “The Robert whatitsname.”

  “No one knows. Have you never seen Waiting for Goddard?”

  Endymion and Bellona shook their heads.

  “The Robert Goddard disappeared in very mysterious circumstances,” he told them. “To be honest, the play doesn’t explain a thing and is a lot of nonsense if you ask me. The Administrator will tell you it is a biographical, philosophical, psychoanalytical and religious masterpiece, but it is her mother who is currently starring in the revival at the Newbrum Palladium so I assume she’s biased.”

  “If the Dandridge Cole was abandoned, who are the visitors?” asked Endymion. He still could not imagine what interest the crew of the Nellie Chapman had in a lonely asteroid, even one as odd as a century-old colony ship.

  “The stories tell of people who refused to leave the colony ship and live there still,” the man said. There was a note of awe in his voice as if he had already decided the tale was true. “On the other hand, you’ve just proved that it’s still on the charts so anyone with a bit of initiative could have found it and taken up residence if they wanted to.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Philyra, appearing next to Bellona, having been told to move from her perch by a spaceport worker returning from her lunch break. “I heard someone say a ship was coming in.”

  “Aliens,” said Endymion. He glanced at Bellona and winked.

  Bellona nodded. “Horribly mutated by radiation into flesh-eating zombies.”

  “Yuck,” muttered Philyra. She glanced at the screen in front of Endymion and laughed. “Dandridge Cole! I never really believed that story of colony ships.”

  “What?” exclaimed Endymion. Her casual acknowledgement of what he saw as a great mystery was a little disconcerting. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Weird Universe reviewed Waiting for Goddard a few weeks ago,” she countered, referring to the off-beat entertainment news show. “The cast said it was based on a true story but I thought they were making it all up. A hollow moon indeed!”

  “Administrator!” called one of the workers. “We have radio contact.”

  Verdandi walked to a window overlooking the runway and stared into the distance. Apart from the odd wispy cloud, the dusky purple sky was empty.

  “Put it on loudspeaker, please,” she instructed. “Endymion!”

  Endymion jumped. “Yes, Administrator?”

  “Take your friends and leave,” she said, still facing the window. “I don’t want you here when our visitors arrive.”

  Endymion’s face fell. The loudspeaker in the centre of the room crackled into life.

  “This is Captain Quirinus of freighter Platypus calling Newbrum spaceport control. Can you hear me, spaceport control? Over.”

  “Platypu
s?” remarked Philyra. “What an odd name.”

  “Still here, Endymion?” Verdandi said impatiently.

  Endymion reluctantly stood up to leave, then a thought struck him. “Is this about what was found at the Eden Ravines?” he asked slyly. “I may know something about that.”

  Verdandi faced Endymion squarely and gave him a cold stare.

  “You never cease to amaze me,” she snapped. “Stay there and be quiet!”

  Endymion grinned and went to stand by the window. The operator seated near where Verdandi herself stood reached to his console and flicked a switch.

  “This is Newbrum control calling, err… Platypus. Are you receiving me? Over.”

  “Receiving you loud and clear,” replied the pilot. “We’re on our final approach, heading due west on a controlled glide.”

  “Warning,” a synthesized female voice calmly interrupted, speaking from the Platypus. “Forward starboard undercarriage malfunction.”

  “Ignore her,” said Quirinus. “Are we clear to land? Over.”

  The operator looked up at Verdandi, who nodded.

  “You are clear to land, Platypus,” he confirmed. “Are you having problems? Over.”

  “We should be okay,” called Quirinus. The pilot was struggling to make himself heard above the swelling background static. “We’re coming in a lot faster than I would have liked. We’re leaking coolant from the brakes; the ailerons are also a little stiff from possible dust contamination. The AI also thinks we have a problem with the landing gear but I’m sure we’ll cope!” There followed a muffled conversation in the background. “Ravana said I should mention that we’ve run out of chocolate biscuits. Over.”

  The operator nodded, not that Quirinus could see him. “Runway one is clear. That’s the big one,” he added hastily, just to avoid any confusion. “Over.”

  “Here they come,” said Verdandi, looking out of the window.