Hollow Moon by Steph Bennion Page B

training?”
    “Something like that,” Endymion lied.
    The man peered at the chart on the screen. “You’ve got it
showing planetary bodies only,” he pointed out. “Try changing the settings to
include navigation beacons.”
    Endymion ran the appropriate command and a series of red
crosses appeared upon the screen, each one of which marked the position of the
various signal beacons and satellites that warned pilots of potential
navigation hazards in the system. One such symbol had appeared at his entered
coordinates.
    “A radiation warning beacon,” Endymion noted, looking at
the code next to the cross.
    “Why would anyone travel into a radiation area?” asked
Bellona.
    Endymion had forgotten his sister was watching. The main
display offered no further information, so he used the touch-screen menu to
bring up the navigation database and entered the beacon reference number. The
result just left him more confused than ever.
    “ Dandridge Cole ,”
he read. “Funny name for an asteroid.”
    “An asteroid?” asked Bellona.
    “The Dandridge Cole ?”
exclaimed the man at the next desk.
    “Have you heard of it?” asked Endymion, bemused by the
man’s sudden excitement.
    “It’s almost the stuff of legend!” the man said. His eyes
shone with excitement. “The Dandridge Cole is the original colony ship that brought settlers from Earth to Ascension more
than a century ago. It was thought to have been abandoned and left to drift
away, but it turns out it remained in orbit around Barnard’s Star. The weird
thing is I’d never given the story a second thought until today,” he said,
dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You see, when Administrator
Verdandi turned up earlier, it was to announce that we’re expecting visitors
from the Dandridge Cole !”
    “Visitors?” Bellona sounded wary. “Who?”
    “Aliens,” replied Endymion flatly.
    “There’s no such thing as aliens,” Bellona retorted.
    “What else can live on an asteroid?”
    “They don’t live on the asteroid, they live inside it,”
the man told her.
    “Inside?” Endymion was intrigued.
    “The Dandridge Cole and
its sister ship the Robert Goddard were
asteroids that had been hollowed out and fitted with life support and huge
fusion engines,” the man explained. “They could reach speeds approaching a
fifth of that of light, but even then they were expected to take more than
fifty Terran years to get to Barnard’s Star. During the journey, the crew and
colonists would live out their lives inside the asteroid, waiting until they or
their descendants reached their new home.”
    “Fifty years!” exclaimed Bellona.
    The man smiled. “Twenty years into their voyage, the
Chinese perfected the extra-dimensional drive and suddenly we had spacecraft
that could do the same trip in days. By the time the people of the Dandridge
Cole arrived at Ascension, they were
greeted by Commonwealth engineers hard at work building Newbrum. Many of those
from the colony ship hated their new home so much they caught the first flight
back to Earth.”
    “Why didn’t someone send a ship to meet them halfway?”
asked Bellona.
    “You can’t jump into interstellar space,” Endymion told
her. “An ED drive needs the gravity well of the target star to work properly.
But what happened to the other ship?” he asked the man. “The Robert
whatitsname.”
    “No one knows. Have you never seen Waiting for Goddard ?”
    Endymion and Bellona shook their heads.
    “The Robert Goddard disappeared in very mysterious circumstances,” he told them. “To be honest, the
play doesn’t explain a thing and is a lot of nonsense if you ask me. The
Administrator will tell you it is a biographical, philosophical,
psychoanalytical and religious masterpiece, but it is her mother who is
currently starring in the revival at the Newbrum Palladium so I assume she’s
biased.”
    “If the Dandridge Cole was abandoned, who are the visitors?” asked Endymion. He still