“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.