The tall man sitting opposite, who like Surya was held into his seat by a harness to stop him drifting away in the zero gravity, was captivated too by the view of the distant planet. The man had previously admitted that his own feelings were born more of relief that the end of what had been a busy week was near.
“Shennong, the divine farmer,” the man said. “A Chinese name, but one somehow appropriate. The gardens of Yuanshi and Daode have indeed proved bountiful to the intrepid adventurers who have made these distant moons their home.”
Surya stared at him. “Do you always talk like that?”
“Namtar does like his fancy words,” retorted the fat man, who sat by himself on the other side of the cabin. “He acts all swish but he’s no better than scum like me.”
“If I am scum, I am merely guilty by association,” replied Namtar. “It is regrettable that circumstances have forced me to associate with miscreants of your ilk, my dear Inari. Rest assured that once I have taken my rightful place in the brave new world we are building on Yuanshi, standing shoulder to shoulder with my fellow elite, no one will call me scum.”
Inari gave a derisive snort. “You’ll always be scum to me.”
Surya looked away and smiled. Barely two Terran days had passed since he had been rudely awakened from his afternoon nap and taken bound and gagged from his cosy rooms at the palace. Namtar and Inari had been a little heavy-handed during his kidnap and there was no denying that he had been scared, especially after they had bundled him out of the strange burrowing machine into another cramped vehicle, which had then shot out of a tunnel to present him with a mind-bending vision of the hollow moon spinning through space. After that his senses had been in overdrive as he sought to comprehend their fiery descent towards a small brown planet, the brief sojourn on a strange jungle world to meet another waiting spacecraft, then another hasty departure away into the void of space.
Through all this, it quickly became clear that Namtar and Inari had no intention of hurting him and indeed often treated him with a politeness verging on reverence. Notwithstanding the shock of the abduction, Surya was getting to like being away from his mother’s stifling influence. The scariest part of the journey since had been the stomach-churning leap, lasting mere nanoseconds, which had taken them through extra-dimensional space to Shennong, sixteen light years away.
“Fourth planet of Epsilon Eridani and first of its three gas giants,” Surya murmured. “Given to Indian settlers by a Chinese nation grateful for our help in colonising the star system. I have studied my homeland,” he said, addressing Namtar. “What was never explained to me was why Shennong and its moons kept their Chinese names.”
“Space traffic control throughout the system is firmly in the hands of the Chinese authorities on Taotie,” Namtar replied. He referred to Epsilon Eridani’s second planet, the first ever discovered outside the Solar System with an Earth-like biosphere and one which had been claimed exclusively by Chinese colonists. “All local navigation and survey data comes from Yao Chi city and it would be a gross incivility to start changing names.”
“If it were up to me, I would give Yuanshi an Indian name,” declared Surya.
“Our Chinese friends may take offence at such a suggestion,” Namtar said darkly.
“And when the people of Taotie get offended, other people get hurt,” muttered Inari. “Steer clear of the Chinese, I would.”
“I’m sure they feel the same way about you,” Namtar countered.
They were interrupted by the arrival of a third man, who entered from the flight deck ahead by pulling himself along a ceiling handrail, perfectly at ease in the zero gravity. He was a young Indian, his mop of unruly hair and two-day growth of stubble framing a confident gaze and knowing smile. Hanuman was the owner and pilot of the Sun Wukong, the Chinese-built ex-military transport ship in green and black camouflage livery that had collected Surya, Namtar and Inari from the Eden Ravines and delivered them to the Epsilon Eridani system. To avoid detection they had maintained a ground-hugging flight path deep in the Ravines for over an hour and Surya had been impressed by the way Hanuman piloted the spacecraft through the maze of deep canyons. At the moment it was his co-pilot Ganesa who was at the controls. She too was Indian and for want of a better offer had flown with Hanuman for many years.
The Sun Wukong was essentially a broad flying wing, the angular hull of which was mostly taken up by fuel tanks and a cargo bay big enough to take three armoured ground transports and a platoon of troops. The ship was of an old design and when the time came for it to be taken out of service and auctioned off it had been stripped of its military hardware and weaponry. However, over the years Hanuman had gradually equipped it once again with a formidable array of defence systems. The one thing he had not managed to improve was the passenger compartment, which like that of most military craft was cramped with a tiny kitchen area and a very unpleasant zero-gravity bathroom and toilet.
“We’ve just had the all-clear from Lanka spaceport,” he said, addressing Namtar. “We should be down on Yuanshi within the hour. I’ve also had an interesting conversation with Ayodhya space-traffic controllers who think we’re gun runners,” he added casually. “They’ve launched a gunship, which given the chance will undoubtedly try to blast us into tiny bits.”
“So why aren’t you at the controls?” Namtar asked, regarding him quizzically.
“I trust Ganesa implicitly,” Hanuman told him. “Besides, I must have done something to annoy the computer as it’s only responding to her at the moment.”
Namtar gave him a weary look. “Anything else I should know?”
“It’s raining hard in Lanka. The terraforming crews disintegrated another ice asteroid into the atmosphere last week.”
“Typical,” muttered Namtar. A gunship was one thing, but Surya saw he was far less impressed by the prospect of bad weather. “Do you perchance have a hat I may borrow?”
*
Lanka spaceport turned out to be not much more than a rain-drenched landing strip next to a small terminal building and a bomb-damaged warehouse. The long civil war on Yuanshi between the followers of the exiled royal family and the Que Qiao Corporation had taken its toll and Lanka had been heavily scarred by the long royalist campaign to secure the city as their own.
Que Qiao was the driving force behind the colonisation of the Epsilon Eridani system and the huge terraforming projects on Yuanshi and Daode. Despite its Chinese name, the corporation was very much a multi-national affair. On Daode the Indian colonists had accepted the security of a Que Qiao administration with the same lackadaisical political vigour the Chinese had shown on Taotie. The people of Yuanshi had not been so compliant; after declaring their intention to self-govern, the Indian settlers instead adopted an archaic system of government under the rule of a Maharaja where older traditions shaped the law. Yet Yuanshi had many riches that both the Maharaja and Que Qiao were keen to exploit and the political battle for control had long since escalated into civil war, inflamed by a heady mix of religious tensions and the heavy-handed attitude of the corporation. The Maharani and her son went into exile following the assassination of the Maharaja. The sumptuous palace that had been theirs in the old royalist capital of Ayodhya, on the other side of the moon’s main continent, became Que Qiao’s headquarters on Yuanshi.
Raja Surya, the Maharaja’s son and heir, was coming home. The descent from orbit turned out to be uneventful, notwithstanding the colourful and quite obscene language exchanged between Hanuman and the commander of the corporation gunship sent to intercept the Sun Wukong. Any flights in or out of the rebel stronghold at Lanka were automatically deemed an act of war but the gunship never got close; Hanuman and Ganesa knew full well how difficult it was for two craft to rendezvous at high altitudes, especially when one was actively fleeing the other.
With Ganesa at the helm the Sun Wukong made a textbook landing and trundled to a halt at the end of the runway. A small aircar, a box-like craft with large windows and stubby wings,
waited with its four turbines running ready for take-off. Hanuman and Ganesa were to stay behind on the ship and so it was left to Namtar and Inari to lead Surya out through the torrential rain towards the waiting vehicle.
Night was falling and the damp air was breathable but cold, made more so by the chill wind driving the storm. As Inari swung the aircar door shut behind them, a distant muffled explosion reached their ears and moments later Surya saw a faint glow of orange silhouetting a distant part of the city. He could already feel a headache coming on.
“Missile attacks,” Inari told him, scowling. “Que Qiao likes to keep us on our toes.”
Namtar nodded to the young woman sitting silently in the pilot’s seat at the front. With a deafening roar of turbines, the aircar soared into the sky and headed across the city. The roads below were deserted and as Surya gazed through the window he could see dark bomb craters and crumbling buildings everywhere, interspersed with occasional pockets of light from where even amidst the ruins life went on. Then they were past the battle zone and flying over an unruly conurbation of brightly-lit mansion blocks, squat factory units and high-rise offices intersected by streets bustling with traffic. The city lived behind a thick mass of buildings crowding against a huge circular wall, which itself was all that remained of the dome that once protected Lanka from the hostile environment of a pre-terraformed Yuanshi.
“Wow,” murmured Surya.
“The historic city of Lanka,” said Namtar, peering over the Raja’s shoulder. “The apron of the old dome has been built up and fortified, as you can see. The city wall is little defence against missile attacks, but Kartikeya believes it brings certain psychological benefits. It makes people feel more secure.”
“Who is Kartikeya?” asked Surya.
“Commander Kartikeya leads the fight against Que Qiao here on Yuanshi,” Namtar told him. “You have the honour of being his guest here in Lanka.”
“Is he winning the war?” asked Surya, still looking down at the city.
“Nobody wins wars,” Namtar opined. “Generals plan battles to be swift and decisive. When they are not, the aim is to end the conflict less defeated than your opponent.”
“He means no, we’re not winning,” retorted Inari.
The aircar started to descend towards a large square building, situated on the edge of a circular park that had once lain beneath the highest point of the old city dome. The park was bordered by a wide road and from this a number of broad boulevards stretched away to the city wall like the spokes of a wheel. As they approached, the building resolved into a mansion house topped by four domed towers, built from blocks of gold-tinted opaque glass in a style that reminded Surya of his mother’s palace of exile within the hollow moon.
The four main blocks of the mansion were built around a square courtyard, which was open to the elements. Guided by the ever-silent pilot, the aircar dropped out of the darkening sky and moments later touched down upon the small landing pad in the middle of the courtyard. The whine of the turbines wound down into silence, to be replaced by the splattering staccato of rain upon the aircar’s roof.
Reaching over, Namtar pushed open the door.
“Welcome to the Crystal Palace of Kubera,” he said to Surya. An attendant rushed across the courtyard towards them, holding a large umbrella. “Your destiny awaits.”
*
Raja Surya gazed around the room, impressed. The bedroom was enormous and luxuriously furnished with solid wooden furniture, wall tapestries and a carpet that caressed his bare feet and tickled his toes. The four-poster bed, adorned with dark curtains embroidered with intricate swirling patterns, was twice the size of anything he had slept in before. After the rain and the cold outside, the room was pleasantly warm and the lower gravity of Yuanshi compared to that of the hollow moon made him feel as light as a feather. His headache was worse than ever.
“This is my room?” he asked in disbelief. “It’s huge!”
The elderly Indian woman who stood beside him smiled. She was dressed in a traditional pale blue saree, which looked slightly incongruous alongside the touch-screen slate she held in her hand. She placed a reassuring hand upon his shoulder.
“Surya, you have said that in each of the rooms I have shown you,” she said lightly. “The entire suite is yours and the servants will tend to your needs. I have however taken the liberty of instructing the staff not to enter the master bedroom unless so ordered. Everyone deserves a little privacy now and again, whatever their place in the household.”
“Thank you, Yaksha,” murmured Surya, awestruck. Back at his mother’s palace, nowhere was safe from the prying eyes of Fenris, who professed to serve the Maharani first and foremost. Here in Lanka it was beginning to dawn upon him that Yaksha, the head of the household at the Palace of Kubera, was here to serve him. The thought filled his young mind with unexpected delight.
“I see the headaches have started,” said Yaksha. Surya winced again as the ache in his skull became insistent. “Your implant is awakening to the palace network and you may feel some discomfort for a while, but it will pass. You may find it useful to run the calibration programme on the holovid unit. In the meantime, I will leave you to rest.”
As she turned to depart, Namtar appeared at the doorway, looking unusually grumpy. The Sun Wukong had landed barely an hour ago, yet to his dismay Inari had already volunteered them both for a new assignment. Inari was the ideal recruit to the rebels’ cause, for he was easily talked into doing the most foolhardy missions, usually when Namtar was out of earshot. Namtar himself had a keen sense of self-preservation and to date had brought himself and Inari back from several escapades that had made a martyr of others.
“I have a message from Kartikeya to the young Raja,” he said, addressing Yaksha. “He would be greatly honoured if the Raja would consent to joining him and his guests at dinner this evening in the grand hall.”
“Still using ten words when one will do, my little Thesaurus Rex?” teased Yaksha.
“What time is dinner?” asked Surya, still musing over what Yaksha had said about an implant. Apart from an unsatisfying zero-gravity food pack given to him by Ganesa aboard the Sun Wukong he had not eaten since leaving the hollow moon. “Is it soon?”
“Eight o’clock, Raja,” replied Namtar. “It is half-past six now.”
“You will find a change of clothes in your room,” said Yaksha, addressing Surya. “Namtar or I will come and collect you before eight o’clock. In the meantime, I will arrange for some light refreshments to be brought to your study.”
“Thank you,” replied Surya, slightly bemused. Declining the invitation to dinner did not appear to be an option, but his rumbling stomach had already spoken for him.
Namtar replied with a curt nod and departed, followed shortly afterwards by Yaksha who closed the door quietly behind her. A hush descended upon the room, one broken only by the murmur of voices from the lower floors. Feeling a little at a loss, Surya sat down upon the edge of the bed, his mind whirling. His headache was subsiding and on reflection he should have guessed it was from his cranium implant, which his mother had explained was in his head for reasons he still did not fully understand.
For the first time since his arrival he wished there was a way he could hear a familiar voice. Surya owned a wristpad, for the Maharani’s disapproval of technology had not been total, but it had been confiscated during the short flight on the Nellie Chapman. The only other net device he had seen was the holovid receiver in the next room, though Yaksha had told him that access was restricted to a select hundred or so local entertainment channels broadcast from Ayodhya.
Surya walked into the holovid room and paused before the large screen. This was a true three-dimensional display; a glass box two metres wide, a metre high and another metre deep, which he knew once switched on would produce laser-projected images that looked real enough to be touched. After pacing the room several times looking for and failing to find anything vaguely resembling a remote control, he threw himself in
to a chair and glared at the screen in disgust, willing it to explode on the spot.
Without warning, a loud rumble filled the room and Surya stared in stunned amazement as the glass box suddenly filled with an image of a mountain belching glowing lava and sickly yellow smoke. In the top corner of the holovid screen hovered the words ‘Celestial Geographic’. Above the noise, a voice was talking about the sulphur volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io.
“Amazing!” he exclaimed.
As he watched, the image shifted to show a close-up of two spacesuit-clad figures standing at what was hopefully a safe distance from the volcano. Ignoring the commentary, Surya left his chair and cautiously sidled around the glass box. The three-dimensional effect was so good that from behind the screen all he could see was the back of the spacemen’s helmets, though it seemed their view of the camera crew had been edited out.
He thought more about what Yaksha had said about an implant and it occurred to him that the holovid unit had somehow reacted to an image in his mind, a thought reinforced when he became aware of a strange square symbol in the corner of his mind’s eye. Implant technology was not something he had come across at the hollow moon. Standing in front of the screen once more, he tried to visualise a sliding motion, hoping this was the way to change channels. A sudden swishing noise behind him made him jump and turning around he saw the curtains at the window had opened to reveal the darkness outside.
“Whoops,” he murmured.
He returned his attention to the holovid and tried to imagine what he may be getting for dinner. Much to his delight, the holovid switched to a cookery channel, which made him feel even more hungry. Remembering Yaksha’s advice, he found and ran the implant calibration programme, then experimented a while with different mental images until he could call up at will any number of channels showing everything from soap operas to foreign films, though the holovid was strangely silent when he tried to access a search engine or visualise anything to do with music.
Hollow Moon Page 9
