by Steph Bennion
HOLLOW MOON is a story of the future, a time when human ingenuity has bridged the vast cosmos and many millions have staked their claims where distant suns burn fierce in the sky...
RAVANA REACHED for the next hand-hold and pulled herself higher, annoyed beyond belief at how easily she had once again let her wayward electric cat lure her into an idiotic predicament. The cliff was scarily high; below her was a ten-storey drop to a rocky shelf left by a previous collapse, which itself formed the top of a nasty slope of rubble that tumbled a further three hundred metres to the ground. Her right leg was doubled up with her knee against her chest, the toe of her boot wedged in a crevice just centimetres wide. Her other foot was at full stretch and precariously poised upon a narrow ledge that seemed to be the last decent foothold to the shallow cave above.
“Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow,” she muttered tunelessly, inadvertently adding her father’s Australian twang to the Indian tones inherited from her mother. It was an odd combination at the best of times, which this definitely was not. “Why didn’t he buy me a bow-wow? I’ve got a stupid cat, that’s acting like a...”
She cursed as her foot slipped and sent a cascade of rock fragments rattling down the cliff. Trying not to panic, Ravana forced herself higher. She gave a brief grimace of triumph as her head finally appeared above the floor of the cave.
Something small and furry slunk from the rocky shadows and greeted her with a pathetic meow. Ravana blew out of the corner of her mouth to dislodge an annoying strand of hair and glared at the cat with ill-concealed contempt.
“Electric pets are not supposed to lure their humans into risking life and limb!” she scolded, feeling a headache coming on. “What do you say to that, cat?”
The black bundle of fur looked at her and meowed again. With one last determined effort, Ravana heaved herself into the shallow cave and sat back against the cliff wall, breathing heavily. She was no athlete and her slim body was not used to this sort of strenuous exercise. Her sweat felt clammy upon the scar on the side of her face and her weak right arm ached badly. Trembling, the cat jumped onto her lap, its pitiful whining subsiding as she stroked its fake fur. It was impossible to stay mad at it for long, even if Ravana did often wish the cat had an ‘off’ switch. Yet even electric pets had rights these days.
She had first discovered the shallow cave just weeks before; or rather, her cat had found it after a previous solo wander cross-country. This was the second time it had homed in on this almost inaccessible cliff-side perch. Whatever it was that lured her cat to this place was also making it act very oddly. She had never seen her pet so agitated.
The cave was roughly a third of the way up the huge, partially collapsed cliff face at the end of the inside-out world that was the colony starship Dandridge Cole. From this high vantage point the whole interior of the hollow moon lay before her. It was a world hewn deep inside a spinning asteroid: a vast cylindrical chamber five kilometres long and a kilometre wide, where the fields and trees and stone buildings clung limpet-like to the curving rocky walls. The position of the sun was the strangest thing of all, for at this height she was almost level with the tiny yet immensely bright golden globe that sat suspended between three radial pylons at the centre of the long cavern. The air was clear and looking down she could see the tops of the trees dotting nearby grazing land, a view that became increasingly dizzy as she followed the foot of the cliff with her gaze until finally she was staring straight up. Directly above her, nestled against the cliff face on the far side, was the Maharani’s palace, a place strictly off-limits to people like herself.
Ravana’s gaze lingered upon the distant palace. Her perspective shifted and now she was looking down upon the house and gardens, to where a movement in the grounds had caught her eye. Two figures were making their way towards the main building; even from this distance, she was struck by the curious way they moved. With a start, she realised they were wearing what looked like lightweight spacesuits, albeit without helmets. This was unusual enough within the hollow moon but more so there. It was said that the Maharani had exiled herself from the modern world for good and looked down upon the space-age trappings of the twenty-third century as she would something nasty on the sole of her shoe.
Ravana frowned, wondering how her own life had ended up like this, where watching two distant strangers had become the height of excitement and adventure.
“Two spacemen,” she told her purring cat. “I wonder what they’re doing? And why am I asking you? You only care about leading me astray!”
* * *
Unaware they were being watched, the two spacesuit-clad figures continued their furtive progress through the palace grounds. Their faces were pale and haggard, betraying a world-weariness echoed by their patched grey survival suits.
Inari, the shorter and fatter of the two, moved with a clumsy and hesitant air of bemusement. He was aware his slow progress annoyed his colleague, who had crept ahead through the secluded gardens with a sly, cat-like confidence, only to double back again upon finding Inari had fallen behind. The palace ahead was an impressive building of carved stone, wooden verandas and domed turrets. Inari stopped to stare, though it was something else entirely that captivated his attention.
“Hey, Namtar!” he called. He gave a noisy sniff, wiped his nose with a hand and used his sticky digits to tap the taller man on the shoulder. “Funny, huh?”
With a sigh, Namtar turned to look at what his accomplice had found so amusing. One of the Maharani’s gardeners, unhappy with his lot, had planted the flower beds so that a rude word was spelt out in scarlet blooms.
“My dear Inari, could you please keep your feeble utterances to a minimum?” Namtar hissed irritably. Like his colleague he spoke English, albeit with a cultured Russian accent rather than Inari’s coarse Greek tones. Neither man sounded entirely trustworthy. “It would greatly aid our illicit enterprise if you could endeavour to concentrate what few brain cells you own upon the task in hand!”
“Just looking,” Inari mumbled. “This place is weird.”
“It is as comfortable as any burrow could hope to be,” said Namtar, urging Inari forward. “Perhaps you do not recall the squalid conditions we tolerated in Lanka before the dome was removed. That this strange hollow moon has succeeded as an independent colony more than makes up for superficial shortcomings, though I admit as a place of exile it is a somewhat eccentric choice, given the Maharani’s rather exuberant tastes.”
Inari frowned as he deciphered the lengthy sentence, wondering which bit he was expected to comment on. “I thought this was a Commonwealth system,” he said at last.
“This rock has fortuitously escaped the attentions of the government on Ascension,” Namtar told him. “Breathe this air, my friend, for it is the same sweet taste of freedom we are fighting for on Yuanshi! Today, you and I bring liberation one step closer.”
“Smells funny to me,” Inari observed, wrinkling his nose. “If you ask me, living on all these different worlds is making people loopy.”
“Colonising the five systems has not changed humanity one iota,” Namtar snapped tartly. “It merely brought us new lands to fight over, new populations to enslave and new arenas in which to spread the same old lies and deceit.”
“Speak for yourself!” Inari snorted.
“I do,” Namtar replied coolly.
* * *
Ravana knew she should be heading home. Sitting on the cave ledge high above the palace, her gaze was reluctant to leave the mysterious distant spacemen. She heard the flutter of wings and felt the furry lump in her lap twitch. Startled, she turned to see a large white gull staring at her from where it had landed on the far side of the cave. Its wings rested stiffly at its side and there was something unnatural about the way its head moved. There were real birds which flew the skies of the hollow moon but this was not one of them.
“Go away!” she said, waving a hand irritably.
The gull regarded her solemnly. “I am friend! Require assistance?”
The squawk had a definite metallic ring. Ravana wondered just how much assistance a robot gull could hope to provide. The bird turned to warily eye her electric cat.
“Are you spying on me?” she demanded defensively. “I am sixteen, you know. I don’t need my father’s permission every time I leave Dockside.”
The gull replied with a blank mechanical gaze that did little to help Ravana’s growing unease. Spacemen and talking birds aside, she had got herself into a tricky situation. What passed for gravity within the hollow moon, the result of the centrifugal force generated by the Dandridge Cole spinning on its axis, was barely half that of Earth but enough to make falling down the cliff an extremely painful, if not terminal experience. The pleasant sensation of feeling her weight ebb away as she climbed had lost its appeal, for it meant going back down the cliff and into higher gravity was much harder than climbing up. The descent would only get more complicated with an irritable cat.
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.
Ravana wondered if it was some sort of automated surveillance device. Robot guards were not in the habit of declaring friendship. A new thought popped into her mind.
“A flying 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 was 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 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 avatar 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 jetpack?” she suggested, hopefully.
“Jetpack 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. It dawned on her that the carved footholds must have originally spanned the entire diameter of the cliff, right across the end of the cavern, only 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 seemingly concluded the cave had one electric creature too many and was flexing its talons ready to pounce.
“I’m not allowed to enter the palace grounds,” she said doubtfully, 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. “Well, so they say.”
The gull was otherwise engaged, trying to avoid the attentions of her cat. Ravana was suddenly intrigued, not only by the prospect of discovering 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 the ground was a bonus. Being arrested by the Maharani’s palace 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 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 collection of 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, seeping away into a large mould-covered crack in the cave wall. Unperturbed, her electric cat had cornered the damaged bird, growling with a mechanical vigour not unlike the waste disposal unit in the communal kitchens back home.
“Reboot me!” burbled the gull.
“Bad kitty!” scolded Ravana. Feeling guilty, she reached for the gull and tried in vain to wedge its head back into position. “Sorry about that, Zotz.”
With a resigned sigh, she separated her cat from the mutilated gull. Ravana scooped her pet under an arm and went to where the stone steps passed the cave entrance. Taking a deep breath, she gingerly began a one-handed ascent of the cliff.
It was more like climbing a ladder than negotiating a flight of stairs, but even with a wriggling fur ball of 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 finally weightless.
Ravana had been in free-fall before on space flights, but floating above the concave countryside of the hollow moon was a whole new experience. Wedging her boots in the gap between two steps, she found she could float horizontally outwards from the cliff. The tiny sun was now above, with the distant trees and houses rising on all sides, layered around the inside of a vast cylinder of rock. The change in orientation was made yet more disconcerting when she spied the distant shapes of people as they moved within 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 on its axis as it drifted around Barnard’s Star. Her cat, not liking zero gravity at all, showed its annoyance with a flex of diamond-tipped talons, pretty to look at but extremely sharp. Ravana was just pulling herself back towards the steps when her electric pet, mistaking the cliff for a floor, dug its claws into her arm and made a sudden leap for freedom.
“Ow!” cried Ravana, caught by surprise.
The cat released an electric howl, bounced off the stone steps and flew back towards her face with claws outstretched. In a panic, she raised her hands and twisted away, then yelped as her feet slipped from where they were wedged. Ravana tried desperately to hook a foot back under a step but it was too late. Her pet landed on her shoulder with a heavy jolt. To her horror, the momentum of the cat’s leap suddenly had them reeling away from the cliff.
Ravana shrieked. With another strangled cry, she frantically thrashed her arms as if trying to save herself from drowning. Her pet, driven by 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 drawing 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. She looked up and to her amazement saw the mangled remains of Zotz’s sentry gull hovering above her. The whole centre section of the bird’s body spun horizontally so that its outstretched wings acted as helicopter blades, with tail feathers whirling as a control rotor. Above the humming aerofoils, the bird’s head hung skewed from its broken neck. Its beady electronic eyes glowed defiantly.
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 the cat with a vengeance. They were already drifting rapidly past another cliff-side cave in an accelerating 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 was pulling them down in a curve towards a copse of weeping willows. Ravana stared in terror as the gull finally broke free, shooting away like a missile into a 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 a hitherto-unnoticed garden 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 had also encouraged freakishly tall trees to grow just where she needed them to cushion her fall. 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. Ravana 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.”
Suddenly, she froze. The space-suited figures were just metres away, lurking near the palace on the far side of a small lawn. There was no way they had not seen her.
* * *
“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Inari.
Startled, he stumbled to a halt and scanned his surroundings for the source of the disturbance. He and Namtar had reached a manicured stretch of grass beyond the trees and arrived at a secluded 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 sound like that!”
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 relish the opportunity 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. May we proceed with the task in hand without further ado?”
“Could be a wart hog,” Inari said sullenly. “They make strange noises.”
“Takes one to know one, my fat friend. Our entry, 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 opening 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 from the pond as quietly as she could. She wondered why the spacesuit-clad strangers had failed to spot her, then realised that being covered in mud was excellent camouflage for hiding in a garden. Neither man was 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 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 and trotted 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. They had someone with them, a dark-haired Indian boy dressed in matching tunic and trousers of expensive 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 on the wall next to the window. He and his comrade 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!” grumbled the fat man, clearly out of breath. “Your tracker device tried to lead us back to the garden!”
“A mere technical glitch, no more,” his colleague said dismissively. “The path of faith has not led us astray and we have collected who we sought.”
Still struggling, the boy somehow loosened his gag and suddenly screamed.
“Help!” he cried in terror. “I’m being kidnapped!”
“Be quiet!” hissed the taller man. Halting, he nonchalantly cuffed the boy around the head and refastened the gag, then hooked 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. When I hit people they usually calm 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 surrounding the palace grounds. Her headache was gone, as if the pain had been a needle suddenly plucked free from her brain, yet she was left with a less-than-steely resolve to spring into action. There was no way she could tackle the two men alone, but she was determined to find out what they were up to before she went for help.
“Don’t be a scaredy-cat!” she muttered. “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 yellow cylinder as high as a man and three times as long. One end tapered to a cone of bright silver, the other was flat with a recessed hatch. A series of horizontal spiked tracks ran along its rusty hull; between two of these, faded black letters spelt out the legend, ‘ASTROMOLE’.
Ahead, the men had reached the machine. Ravana scurried towards them, keeping low behind an ornate garden shrubbery until she was as close as she dared. Her heart pounding, she peered around the edge of a convenient bush. The kidnappers were bundling their captive through the open hatch of the machine.
The taller man paused to look around the palace grounds, then followed his comrade and the boy inside. The hatch clanged shut behind them. 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 mechanical roar, the Astromole jerked into motion and began to crawl across the ground, cone-end forwards, propelled by the spiked tracks clattering along the side of its cylindrical hull. Startled, Ravana emerged 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. Not knowing what else to do, she started in pursuit of the disappearing vehicle.
The courtyard lay between the blank stares of moss-covered stone elephants, one at each corner and standing three metres high. All four faced a 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. Still following, 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 in surprise.
She had never seen anything like it 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 descended from sight, leaving nothing but the rubble-strewn courtyard in its wake.
Ravana emerged from behind the cart and hesitantly approached the edge of the pit. Awestruck, she peered inside and caught a glimpse of the rear of the Astromole, slipping into the gloom of the curving tunnel. It fitted its burrow so neatly she realised the vehicle must have cut the shaft earlier to get into the palace grounds in the first place. Now very scared, she backed away from the pit. 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, it was the right thing to do.
Ravana took a few steps towards the house and paused. The hush that had descended felt unnatural, making her more nervous than ever. As if to reassure herself she had not imagined it, she glanced back at 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 more than a gentle breeze.
The wind quickly gathered strength. Startled, she saw a flurry of leaves, twigs and other garden detritus being drawn towards the hole in the centre of the courtyard. Her panic rising, she scrambled back to her refuge behind the wagon and watched wide-eyed as the debris swirled ever faster into the ragged pit like water down a drain. The wind grew more ferocious still. Now 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 rocky shell of the asteroid colony ship had been breached. The hollow moon’s air was being sucked 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 one of its wheels. As the canvas rose, she spied a coil of rope lying in the back. Ravana yelped as a disturbed huntsman spider dropped from the canvas onto her sleeve, scuttled down her arm and ran for cover. Cursing, she made a grab for the rope before a plan had fully formed in her head.
Rope in hand, she 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 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, its canvas flapping like a kite sailing a storm. The rope tightened and the wagon shuddered to a halt at the edge of the pit. Buffeted by the wind, Ravana tried to crawl to the edge of the courtyard and safety, but to her horror her fingers could not grip the paving slabs. Slowly but surely, as the air was sucked away, she was being dragged backwards across the ground towards the gaping hole.
The rushing air was heavy with grit that seared painfully against her skin. Ravana closed her eyes and waited for the final gust that would send her flying down the shaft to her doom. The wailing of the wind was deafening. 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 and was instantly sucked into the pit, dragging the huge statue behind. 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 itself 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 shifted its electric gaze 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, wedged comically in the hole in the middle of the ruined paving with its legs in the air. The other pointed a handgun in her direction.
“I expected a better reception than this,” Ravana remarked wearily. “After all, it’s not every day someone gets to save the world with an elephant.”
* * *
[End of excerpt from the novel HOLLOW MOON.]
What is the secret of the hollow moon? Join intrepid young heroine Ravana O'Brien in a fast-paced and witty science-fiction mystery of interstellar intrigue. As the dark priest of destiny returns from the dead, Ravana and friends find themselves on an incredible planet-hopping adventure into the shady world of politics, music and rebellion!
