Hollow Moon by Steph Bennion Page A

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 thought 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