Free Hollow Moon by Steph Bennion

Ascension and so it was that she decided to call it a day.
    A few hours later they were back at the skybus station,
waiting for the next flight back to Newbrum. Philyra was once again glued to
her wristpad and periodically issued gasps of delight or groans of derision as
she caught up on the missed hours of holovid celebrity news and the latest
happenings in Gods of Avalon . Endymion,
never a great conversationalist at the best of times, was immersed in his own
device as he returned to the mystery of the last flight of the Nellie
Chapman . Bored, Bellona turned to her own
wristpad and upon reconnecting to the net she sighed, finding she had a paltry
two messages waiting. One was from her mother asking her to make sure Endymion
behaved himself. The other was a rude message from Maia, a girl who played
clarinet in the Bradbury Heights band, complete with a short holovid of her and
her fellow band members mocking their Newbrum rivals.
    The skybus to Newbrum that arrived shortly afterwards
looked old enough to merit its own plinth in a transport museum, but soon they
were hurtling back across the desert and down into the vast equatorial
depression towards the distant Tatrill Sea. As the thin grey coastline came
into view, Bellona was reminded of the scientist’s hologram and the image of
the planetoid slamming into the side of Ascension. It was difficult to imagine
a collision of that magnitude, one which could create a basin five thousand
kilometres wide and forge the deep cracks of the Eden Ravines. Bellona tried to
imagine a planetoid falling on Maia’s head, wiping the smug smile from her
face.
    “Look!” she exclaimed. “A terraformer!”
    Endymion and Philyra glanced through the window to where
she pointed. Out in the desert sat a monstrous mechanical pyramid of steel,
crawling slowly upon huge tracks as it spewed a cocktail of greenhouse gases
into the air. Large-scale terraforming had been abandoned on Ascension more
than twenty years ago but there were still a few projects ongoing that were
trying to make the atmosphere a little less deadly to humans.
    “Fascinating,” murmured Philyra, her gaze already back at
her wristpad.
    “There’s not enough of them,” Endymion opined glumly. “At
this rate, it’ll take a million years before we can live outside the dome.”
    “That’s what I like about you,” said Miss Clymene.
“Always looking to the future.”
    “A friend of mine once hacked into a supply depot and
reprogrammed their systems so that a delivery meant for the fish market went
instead to a terraformer,” Endymion told her. “The next time it snowed, the ski
slopes at Kirchel ended up knee-deep in prawns.”
    “You do talk rubbish,” retorted Bellona. “You know you
don’t have any friends.”
    Ahead, the main dome of the city of Newbrum, an immense
blister of glass and steel squatting defiantly upon the shores of the Tatrill
Sea, had finally appeared upon the horizon. Outside the skybus the grey desert
was giving way to scrubland, where tougher versions of the alien shrubs seen in
the Eden Ravines mingled with hardy specimens introduced from the tundra
regions of Earth. The introduced flora was adding a little oxygen to the air,
but apart from at the bottom of the Ravines the atmosphere of Ascension was
still prone to turning blue the face of anyone foolish enough to venture
outside not dressed for the occasion. A few obstinate alpine animals brought to
Ascension by Australian genetic engineers nevertheless had managed to adapt to
the thin atmosphere to scratch out a meagre existence on the coastal plains. It
remained however that anyone wishing to see anything larger than a wombat would
not find it beyond the huge, radiation-proof conservatories, where the
descendants of Earth-born livestock grazed the artificial meadows of the
coastal covered farms.
    The domed city grew nearer and now they could see
individual dots of light from the windows of the various buildings within. The
main dome was