Endymion was gesturing wildly and mouthing something, but neither Ravana nor Wak could hear a word he was saying until Ravana signalled to him to turn on his helmet intercom.
“The Astromole!” Endymion’s voice crackled excitedly. “That’s how the tunnel was dug. An Astromole can burrow through anything.”
“I know that!” retorted Ravana. “I saw the whole thing.”
The professor regarded Endymion curiously. “Who are you, boy?”
“Endymion,” he replied meekly. “I saw the Nellie Chapman in the Ravines.”
“Ah! The Eden Ravines!” exclaimed Wak. “The only place on Ascension where a ship-to-ship transfer can be done without spacesuits!”
Endymion considered this. “I never thought of that,” he admitted.
“What type of ship?” asked the professor. “Lunar class? With a winch?”
Endymion nodded. “It was an asteroid miner.”
“Was?” asked Ravana. “What happened to it?”
Endymion looked sheepish. “It err… sort of exploded.”
“Tricky manoeuvre, flying into a vertical shaft in the side of a spinning asteroid,” mused Wak. “Firing an anchor and tether into the rock next to the shaft entrance would do the trick, though. The winch could haul the ship down to a point where a quick blast of thrusters could be used to counteract the centrifugal forces and power it up the shaft.”
“How did they open the airlock?” asked Ravana.
“Bypassed the circuits,” Wak replied. “The grey box you saw attached to the control panel is no doubt some sort of remote trigger. When it was time to leave, they simply opened the airlock door beneath the ship and the spin of the Dandridge Cole sent them flying out of the shaft and into space like a bullet from a gun.”
“Leaving the door open in the process,” murmured Ravana.
“Your quick thinking saved us there,” noted Wak. It was the first time he had acknowledged what she had done in the palace garden and about as close to a compliment as she could expect from him. “The kidnappers were reckless in the extreme.”
Endymion stepped into the tunnel and looked at the mess the kidnappers had left behind. The tent had done well to survive the mini tornado that had swept through the tunnel, as had the extremely-smelly portable latrine wedged inside a nearby alcove. Ravana wondered where all the excavated rock had gone, then saw the ring of spoil around the edge of the airlock and guessed it had been piled around the parked Nellie Chapman and then sucked into space when the ship went on its way.
Endymion was drawn to the sturdy net fixed to the tunnel wall. Amongst the empty food containers, a biochemical lighting rig and other items, Ravana saw his attention go to a small box-shaped device with a short aerial protruding from the top. The instrument panel on the side of the device had been deliberately smashed, presumably with the heavy hammer wedged in the webbing nearby. She watched as Endymion reached beneath the net and pulled it free.
“Get everything on the truck,” Wak told him. “Ostara wants her evidence and I do not want to be in this airlock any longer than we have to. I’m sure Ravana would agree.”
“All of it?” asked Ravana. Stepping past Endymion, she found the tent’s switch panel and pressed the button to activate the closing action. The canvas abruptly twisted and snapped shut, leaving a neat triangular package staked upon the tunnel floor.
“Every last thing,” the professor confirmed. He looked up and waved his good hand to attract Ostara’s attention.
“Yes?” she called, speaking into her wristpad.
“Call Quirinus,” said Wak. “It’s time we paid Maharani Uma a visit.”
The monorail car trundled sedately along its rail above the lake shore, heading towards Petit Havre. Within the Dandridge Cole there was little call for high-speed travel; the monorail could barely achieve twenty kilometres per hour but even then a journey from one end of the hollow moon to the other took no more than fifteen minutes. The asteroid’s three monorail systems were each as old as the colony ship itself and the carbon-fibre panelling and fake chrome fittings looked positively archaic compared to the vat-grown bioplastics and exotic alloys of the Platypus. The monorail did not run to a schedule like the skybus service on Ascension, but instead the driverless eight-seat carriage acted like a horizontal elevator service, controlled by selecting from a row of buttons, one for each station.
Quirinus and Zotz had this particular monorail car to themselves. Zotz wore his cadet jacket, which was covered in tiny circular badges displaying his merit awards. The Dandridge Cole cadet scheme was championed by the Symposium, a select group of philosophers who occasionally met to discuss matters other societies left to governments. They had introduced the scheme as a way of encouraging the younger generation to learn new skills and out of a possible hundred and forty-eight awards Zotz had gained all but one; that he had singularly failed to master the art of tying a decent knot had long ago become a running joke amongst his contemporaries. Zotz held Quirinus’ slate in his hand, totally engrossed in the pages of engineering data, photographs and schematics that made up the lengthy communication received by Quirinus barely an hour ago.
“So the strange growth infecting the Platypus is called Woomerberg Syndrome?” Zotz asked, wonderingly. “Where did you get this stuff?”
“An old friend of mine has a custom spacecruiser workshop on Asgard,” replied Quirinus, grinning as Zotz’s expression became one of awe. “I was getting nowhere with what I found on the net so I gave my friend a call and he sent me all this information on the Woomerberg.”
Asgard, a large moon orbiting the gas giant Thule in the Alpha Centauri system, was an anarchic colony of smugglers, black-market traders and data hackers, who were supported by an ever-growing community of inventors and engineers known fondly as ‘rocket-heads’. Their presence had been cautiously welcomed by the holovid corporation on the neighbouring moon of Avalon as they brought with them a rough-and-ready element to life that had been the inspiration for Rocket Queens of Valhalla and many more hit holovid programmes.
Zotz looked back at the report on the screen of the slate. The Woomerberg was a prototype interstellar cruiser, built in the workshops of Valhalla spaceport on Asgard, which had a new type of extra-dimensional drive with double the range of anything else currently flying the five systems. In their attempt to upgrade the ship’s flight systems, engineers had injected the organic brain of the AI unit with an illegal growth hormone, causing the unit to sprout tendrils throughout the ship in exactly the same way Quirinus and Ravana had noted on the Platypus. After finding the tendrils were benign, the engineers left them in place and to date had flown dozens of test flights without noticing any problems. On the contrary, once the growth reached every nook and cranny of the ship, the AI unit performed far beyond all expectations, though did become a bit too conceited as a result. The Valhalla engineers had never repeated the experiment, but there had been one or two cases in the Epsilon Eridani system where similar growths had been noticed on other ships, a condition now known amongst experimental engineers as Woomerberg Syndrome.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” Zotz admitted. “But this didn’t happen on the Woomerberg until they injected the hormone. How did it happen on the Platypus?”