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?” whispered Namtar 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 any 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 somehow 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.
High above, sitting on the ledge of the cave, Ravana knew she should be heading home but found her gaze reluctant to leave the distant mysterious spacemen. All of a sudden she heard the flutter of wings and felt the furry lump in her lap twitch nervously. 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 she suspected 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 bird’s squawk had a definite metallic ring. It eyed the electric cat warily, making Ravana wonder just how much assistance a robot gull could hope to provide.
“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 did not move. Its blank mechanical gaze 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 still enough to make falling down the cliff an extremely painful experience, if not terminal. Even the pleasant sensation of weighing less in the cave than at ground level had lost its appeal, for it meant going back down the cliff and into higher gravity was much harder than climbing up. The descent could 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.
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.