Ravana caught her expression, which clearly betrayed her lack of trust in Fenris and as such echoed her own feelings. She knew Ostara had yet to make her mark as an investigator, but with a ship full of strangers she hoped her father would think it would be good for them to have a friend aboard.
“You are more than welcome,” Quirinus told her. Fenris pulled a face.
“The moon of Daode,” breathed Ravana excitedly. “Epsilon Eridani, here I come!”
Chapter Seven
Voyage to Epsilon Eridani
INSIDE A SPACECRAFT it was never totally quiet, for there was always the murmur and hiss of life-support systems, the whirr of actuators and the occasional beep of control panels to disturb the eternal silence of space. Yet out in the inky depths of the Barnard’s Star system, somewhere between the orbits of Woden and Thunor, the hush that fell upon the Platypus as the plasma ion thrusters shut down was both deep and heavily pregnant with anticipation.
Suddenly, a banshee wail erupted from the ED drive. Its cosmic spinning wheel grabbed the membrane of reality, jabbed its spindle, twisted the void into a kaleidoscopic spiral and smoothly stabbed a hole in the space-time continuum. For a split nanosecond the Platypus was no more than a fleeting thread of quanta sixteen light years long. Then the multi-dimensional roller-coaster was over, almost before it began, leaving those aboard nursing fractured memories of an imploded universe and indescribable feelings of nausea. Out across the star-spangled void, the light of a new sun shone through the cabin windows.
“Extra-dimensional navigation complete,” intoned the Platypus’ onboard computer. “Interplanetary plasma drive and automatic pilot engaged. Estimated time to Daode orbit is twenty-five hours, thirty-seven minutes.”
“Welcome to the Epsilon Eridani system,” Quirinus muttered gloomily, earning a strange look from Ostara. Ahead, the view through the window shifted as the automatic pilot aligned the beak-like nose of the ship with the faint brown disc that was Shennong.
“I feel sick,” moaned Zotz. “Is it always like that?”
“Pretty much,” Ravana confirmed, giving him a mischievous grin. Ostara and Zotz had joined her father and herself on the flight deck for the manoeuvre. Their sickly yet stunned expressions reminded her of how she had felt the first few times she had experienced an extra-dimensional leap. “Is this really your first jump?”
Zotz nodded. Unlike Ravana, he had lived his whole life on the Dandridge Cole and to her knowledge had never ventured further than Lan-Tlanto with his father. He was transfixed by the distant yellow sun, which was startlingly bright despite being muted by the polarisation of the flight-deck windows. Ravana too was captivated, but for a different reason. She was coming home.
The four seats on the flight deck were in a staggered row, with the middle two pilot chairs positioned further forward within a nest of flight controls. Quirinus was seated centre starboard between his daughter and Zotz. Ostara had claimed the port-side seat on the far side of where Ravana was now releasing herself from the co-pilot’s chair.
“Shall I check on the others?” Ravana asked chirpily. She always felt more alive and cheerful when aboard the Platypus, for she much preferred the private realm of the ship to the communal reality of the hollow moon. Even when they carried passengers.
“I’ll come with you,” murmured Ostara, looking pale. Unlike Zotz, she was no stranger to interstellar travel but that did not mean she had got used to it.
Unbuckling her seatbelt, Ostara gently wriggled free of the chair and let herself drift in the zero gravity up to the grab handles by the ceiling docking hatch. Ravana’s movements were far more confident and with one graceful backwards flip she was out of her seat, across the cabin and above the entrance hatch, floating poised and ready to enter the crawl tunnel.
“Show off,” muttered Ostara.
“Coming, Zotz?” asked Ravana.
He managed a weak smile. “I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”
Ravana grinned. With a fish-like spurt of speed, she twisted in the air and pulled herself through the hatch.
In deep space the carousel was set to spin once every ten seconds and the crawl tunnel now rotated about her like a rolling barrel. The only handhold, in a recess next to the open hatch to the carousel itself, revolved with the rest of the tunnel. This made entering the spinning compartment a little easier, especially given that Ravana had long ago learned the hard way that it was vital to enter feet first. There was a good reason why the inside of the tunnel and hatchway were padded; nevertheless, she still earned herself a few new bruises by the time she managed to get her feet inside and onto the top of the carousel ladder.
Ravana pulled herself through the hatch into the brightly-lit space beyond, feeling the faint centrifugal pull of the spinning cabin become more insistent as she descended the rungs. Once clear of the hatch, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Fenris, Endymion and Philyra sat stiffly upon the couch in the living quarters below, still stunned after the extra-dimensional jump. Miss Clymene and Bellona were up to her right, standing at the small kitchenette. Ravana gave them a little wave, slid down the ladder and landed lightly upon the floor.
The passenger carousel was essentially a drum three metres wide and seven metres in diameter, which when spinning generated a feeling of gravity upon the inside wall in exactly the same way as the spin of the hollow moon. The small size of the carousel meant that the pseudo-gravity was barely a third of that of the Dandridge Cole and no more than the gravity an astronaut would feel on the surface of Luna, Earth’s moon. Like the hollow moon, the floor of the carousel extended all the way around so that the ceiling above where she stood was also the floor of the sleeping area on the far side. When she had the carousel to herself Ravana loved to leap along the endless curving surface and imagine that her pounding feet were somehow powering the Platypus through space.
Fenris regarded her grimly. “Are we there yet?”
“We’re in the Epsilon Eridani system,” Ravana confirmed. Above her, Ostara was trying to negotiate the entrance hatch and not having much luck. “Everyone okay?”
“Am I allowed to throw up?” asked Philyra, looking pale. “I feel terrible.”
“That’s what being zapped through a wormhole does to you,” remarked Endymion.
“Actually, it’s the Higgs resonator that makes people feel sick,” Ravana told him. “It aligns the quantum states of every single particle in the ship so we can slip through the wormhole. Extra-dimensional engineering is mind-boggling stuff.”
Ostara reached the bottom of the ladder and stood beside Ravana, returning Fenris’ rather rude glare with a grimace made somewhat lopsided by the dizzy experience of moving in or out of the moving carousel. Without saying another word, Fenris rose from the couch, grabbed hold of the ladder and hauled himself up and out of sight.
“Yuck,” muttered Ostara, as soon as Fenris had gone. “He gives me the creeps.”
“Never mind him,” said Ravana, looking around the cabin. “Has anyone seen my cat?” Her electric pet had a hard time comprehending zero gravity so she tended to leave it in the carousel whilst the Platypus was in flight.
“I’m sure it was here when we took off,” said Bellona, noticing as she spoke that a door to one of the overhead lockers in the kitchenette area was slightly ajar. No sooner had she put a hand to the door when a furry shape leapt out onto her head and off again across the cabin, a manoeuvre aided considerably by the low pseudo-gravity of the carousel. Philyra, who had been engrossed in her wristpad, suddenly screamed as the cat fell lightly into her lap, its diamond-tipped claws outstretched.