Paw-Prints Of The Gods Read online

  “Crap!” Cadmus cursed.

  “Booby trap!” cried the woman, grinning. “Humans are so horrible to one another!”

  With a surprising turn of speed, Cadmus leaped across the chamber towards the arch but reached it moments too late. The cylinder exploded with a roar and a blinding puff of smoke, punctuated by the cascading clatter of masonry torn from the wall. A shower of glass bricks crashed down and instantly pinned him to the floor.

  “Help me!” he gasped. He tried to move, but his oxygen mask had been ripped from his face by the explosion and his struggles were becoming weaker by the second.

  “I did tell you that some things are best left buried,” murmured the woman.

  Lying in pain, Cadmus’ eyes grew wide as she walked to where he lay and calmly regarded his smashed and dying body, trapped beneath the tumble of rubble. After one last disparaging frown, the woman vanished before his eyes in a cat-shaped blur. Cadmus’ stare of terror froze like the breath upon his lips and he saw no more.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  The deserts of Falsafah

  [Chapter Three] [Contents] [Chapter Five]

  RED DUNES stretched as far as the eye could see. The black gravel road, the only evidence of humanity disturbing the bleak landscape, had long been left behind somewhere beyond the horizon as the stolen transport ploughed through shifting sands from one dry valley to the next. The air was hazy with dust from the ferociously-fast winds that whipped the sands into new shapes, lending an ethereal quality to the pale pink sky.

  The occupants of the transport were safely sealed away from the cold and poisonous atmosphere outside, which had too little oxygen and far too much carbon dioxide for humans to survive outside unaided. Yet the unforgiving air buffeting the vehicle was almost as dense as that of Earth and Ravana had switched on the exterior microphones to flood the cabin with the eerie high-pitched hiss of the desert winds. Falsafah was as barren a planet she had ever seen, with a bleak natural beauty all of its own.

  “I don’t like that noise,” grumbled Artorius, screwing up his face. “It’s horrible.”

  Ravana pulled herself out of her reverie, deactivated the audio sensors and looked at the scanner display for any signs of pursuers. They had left the road and turned into the uncharted desert after the scanner picked up another transport hot on their trail. There had been a third signal hovering on the very edge of the scanner’s range for hours, one Ravana was convinced belonged to someone or something watching them but being very discrete about it. She had planned to keep moving until sunset, but Falsafah days were almost twice as long as those of Earth and she was desperately in need of some rest. When she tried to engage the transport’s automatic pilot, the navigation computer flashed a message telling her of its failure to locate some satellite and refused to do anything useful.

  “We’re going to stop for a bit,” she said wearily. “I can’t drive anymore.”

  She brought the transport to a halt in a dip between two dunes, pulled the gear lever into the ‘park’ position and switched off the engine. The roar of the hydrogen plant had dropped to a murmur once free of the dome airlock, but the sudden absence of even this noise now they were out in the desert was startling. With a sigh of relief, Ravana stretched her aching arms and turned in her seat to see three expectant faces staring back at her.

  “I’m hungry,” Artorius declared, looking glum.

  “Thraak,” croaked Nana, seemingly in agreement.

  “Fwack,” added Stripy. A spindly finger scratched what passed for a nose.

  “Did you look in the lockers like I told you to?” Ravana asked Artorius impatiently.

  The boy responded with a sullen stare. He had barely spoken during their travels and too many mysteries remained. Exasperated, Ravana clambered out of the driver’s seat and winced in the aching pull of gravity. She desperately wanted to sleep, but like her companions needed to eat. She was annoyed Artorius had made no effort to help.

  Ravana gingerly made her way into the main passenger cabin and opened the nearest overhead locker. Her heart sank when she saw it was empty, even more so when the next one proved likewise. Dejected, she turned to the third and was relieved to find it contained a box of emergency rations, enough to feed herself and Artorius for a couple of days. Continuing her search, she checked the lockers on the other side of the cabin and found more food packs, a variety of drink cartons, a basic medical kit, blankets and a bundle of tatty overalls.

  “Beef with noodles,” she said, handing a ration package and carton to Artorius.

  He snatched it from her without so much as a word of thanks, greedily tore away the wrapper to activate the heating elements and scuttled into a corner to eat the now-steaming dish. Ravana became aware of two pairs of huge eyes staring at her and frowned. She had no idea what the greys ate.

  “Don’t give them meat,” Artorius mumbled through mouthfuls of food, seemingly reading her mind. “It makes them be sick.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” remarked Ravana. She examined the labels on the rations. “Mushroom risotto?” she suggested to the watching creatures. “Either that or some sort of nut roast. As usual, there’s not much choice for us vegetarians.”

  The two greys cautiously shuffled forward and took one each of the offered packets, ripped off the covers and stared mournfully into what was inside.

  “Fwack fwack?”

  “Thraak.”

  The greys swapped rations and began to eat, fingering the heated morsels into their mouths with much more delicacy than the frantically-shovelling Artorius. It was the first time Ravana had studied them properly and she was struck by their human-like movements and mannerisms. The greys were remarkably ape-like, albeit with the curious scaly skin that looked more like that of a lizard, with a stocky build and loose limbs that reminded her of an orang-utan. The Dhusarian Church’s cult-like worship of alien gods unsettled many people and most mocked the cliché of humanoid grey aliens. Experts in exobiology, such as those on Ascension studying the exotic flora and fauna in the Eden Ravines, also dismissed sightings of greys on the sensible grounds it was highly unlikely for a complex and intelligent alien life-form to have developed away from Earth yet still on a similar evolutionary path. Sitting before Ravana was living proof the experts were wrong.

  She selected a mushroom risotto for herself, then frowned when she saw how few vegetarian dishes were left amongst the meat-dominated rations. Her legs throbbed and it was with some relief that she sat down to eat. The food tasted rubbery and had an odd smell she could not quite place, yet nevertheless was the best meal she had eaten in ages.

  The ration pack restored Ravana’s spirits but did little for her weariness. She yawned every other mouthful and could barely keep her eyes open, her thoughts now on the long narrow bench and foam cushion just waiting to serve as a bed. Once she finished eating, she pulled a blanket from the locker, fashioned a pillow from the overalls and the transformation was complete.

  “I need to get some sleep,” she told Artorius. His disapproving stare followed as she settled down upon the makeshift bunk. “You should rest, too.”

  “I’m not tired,” he protested.

  His words fell on deaf ears. Ravana’s eyes closed even before her head touched the pillow and moments later she was fast asleep.

  * * *

  Ravana awoke to darkness. For several frightened moments she was convinced she was back in her room at the clinic, then saw the star-spangled night through the windscreen and remembered where she was. Moving quietly, she slipped from under the blanket and stifled a curse as her bare feet found the broken remains of a dish on the floor. The jarring memory of the shattered flower pot quickly gave way to the realisation that Artorius must have clumsily rifled through the cupboards whilst she was asleep. As she knelt to pick up the pieces, she found herself smiling at the memory of Doctor Jones complaining that the one thing the Falsafah dig lacked was bits of broken pot.

  Her mind felt rested and
her tranquilised memories had returned in full. Her dreams brought back the real reason she had come to Falsafah, but for the moment she wanted to keep it to herself. Artorius lay asleep on the other bench with Stripy curled at his feet. For a moment Ravana could not see Nana, then saw the creature’s squat silhouette in the cockpit.

  After a brief visit to the transport’s tiny toilet cubicle, she headed up front and sat next to the grey. Nana wore an old pair of overalls with the legs and sleeves torn away. It had not occurred to Ravana before now that the greys did not like being unclothed.

  The grey’s gaze was upon the dark world outside. The sun that was Tau Ceti had set during Ravana’s slumber and the night sky glittered with the distant jewels of the universe.

  “So which one is yours?” she whispered, not expecting an answer.

  To her surprise, the creature pointed a spindly finger towards a bright star to the left of Orion, itself a constellation of stars so distant it looked much the same from every sky in the five systems. The star to which the grey pointed was not one Ravana could put a name to, but seemed too bright to be Epsilon Eridani, where the Dhusarian Church traditionally placed the mythical home of the greys.

  “Thraak thraak.”

  “You’re a lot smarter than you let on,” Ravana murmured.

  She thought of her very first encounter with Nana on Yuanshi. Ravana had been just six years old at the time and unaware Taranis had people following her as she played in the woods, nor that they too had found the spacecraft wreckage and the injured grey hiding in a cave. For years she doubted her own memory, then at a traumatic reunion just months ago in the engine room of the Dandridge Cole had been forced to abandon the caged Nana yet again to save herself and her friends. It seemed fate had given her a second chance.

  “Thraak,” Nana said sadly.

  “I’m sure that was very profound,” mused Ravana, then wrinkled her nose in disgust as the smell of alien flatulence reached her nostrils. “Or maybe not.”

  Nana looked sheepishly on as Ravana vigorously waved a hand to dispel the odour. As she waited for the vehicle’s air scrubbers to do their work, she switched the cabin lights on low, glanced across the console and noticed the navigation computer no longer flashed its warning. A few taps on the touch-screen display produced the welcome news that it had finally managed to link to Falsafah’s sole satellite.

  Ravana quickly became absorbed in the newly-updated navigation charts. The dome containing the strange clinic and its cyberclone monks now sported the highly-unoriginal name of ‘Falsafah Beta’. When she opened the accompanying data file, she was intrigued to find it described as an abandoned research station belonging to the United States of America. A thousand kilometres to the north-west was another outpost, this time with no name nor data file, adding yet another mystery to the pile.

  The satellite pin-pointed their own position, some three hundred kilometres due west of the dome. This sounded quite a distance until she saw that Arallu Depot, the airstrip and supply base near the archaeology expedition, was some six thousand kilometres away on the other side of a scary range of mountains.

  The Arab Nations and European Space Agencies led the exploration and settlement of the Tau Ceti system. However, the administration of Falsafah was contracted to the Que Qiao Corporation, whose agents Ravana was keen to avoid. As for contacting the archaeology expedition, the transport’s communicator was a short-range device and its display made it clear only the Dhusarians’ dome was within range.

  Notwithstanding their predicament, it was another piece of seemingly innocuous information that settled uneasily upon her mind. The satellite had reset the console’s time and date display to Universal Standard Time. Without her wristpad, which Ravana assumed had been confiscated by the nurses, she had long ago lost track of the passing days. The display revealed she had been away from the dig longer than she thought. Two weeks had passed since her fateful visit to meet the supply ship at Arallu Depot. The archaeology team would now be on their way back from meeting the returned Sir Bedivere and with a sinking heart she realised her father would have waited in vain for her promised follow-up call.

  “Rats,” she muttered.

  “Thraak thraak?”

  “No, it’s not looking good at all.”

  A noise behind drew their attention to Artorius and Stripy, who were both now awake and staggering bleary-eyed around the dimly-lit cabin. The young grey also wore cut-off overalls, but for some reason had them on back-to-front. Ravana watched as Artorius helped himself to another packet of rations without offering one to anyone else.

  “Fwack!” exclaimed Stripy, holding out a hand and looking indignant.

  “Yes, I know.” Ravana sighed. “No manners at all.”

  “Do you understand them?” Artorius asked, spitting food as he spoke.

  “Not a screech,” she admitted, then remembered something the boy had said back at the clinic. “Can you? You told me the nurses made you ask them questions.”

  “I can give you the translation program,” offered Artorius. “We can link implants.”

  Ravana opened her mouth to object, ever cautious whenever the subject of implants arose, then realised he had gone ahead anyway. A new image popped into her mind, one that for a moment looked like a chess piece for a knight but instead quickly transformed into an hour glass. She wondered what her own implant icon looked like inside Artorius’ head.

  “All I see is a timer,” Ravana told him. “Filled with yet more sand,” she added in a mutter, gazing at the endless dark desert outside the window. Just for a moment she thought she saw a distant silver shape and two tiny yellow eyes glowing in the darkness of the dunes. She shook her head and dismissed it as a figment of her stressed imagination.

  “It’s coming!” Artorius said grumpily.

  Ravana waited, somewhat hypnotised by the animated hour glass. Artorius looked cross and screwed up his eyes in fierce concentration.

  “Still waiting,” she told him.

  “Why isn’t it working?” complained Artorius.

  “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”

  “My implant?”

  “No, your brain,” snapped Ravana, feeling a headache coming on. “Artorius, we need to talk. Last night I was angry, tired and desperate to get out of that creepy place and I’m not sure I did the right thing bringing you with me. What did the clones want with you?”

  “Clones?” Artorius looked puzzled.

  “The monks. Brother Simha and Dhanus.”

  “I saw two men in cloaks but the nurses kept me away from them.”

  “Why were you locked up like that?” she asked. Her irritation was not helped by the hour-glass symbol still hovering in her mind. “Where are your parents?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Eaten by a dinosaur.”

  “Don’t joke about something like that!” scolded Ravana. She gave him a reproving look, but his expression was both sad and serious.

  “It’s the truth!” he protested. “A robot Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

  “What?” she asked, then bit her lip. “Oh, I see. Was that on Avalon?”

  Artorius nodded glumly and went back to shovelling food into his mouth. Avalon was a terraformed moon of the gas giant Thule in the Alpha Centauri system. It was home to a variety of hit holovid shows, first and foremost being the long-running Gods of Avalon, in which third-rate celebrities took part in bizarre challenges in a land populated by cybernetic gods and monsters controlled by the votes of a vengeful audience. Ravana recalled that a spin-off show Quest for Fire had a prehistoric theme and stories often hit the news of ground crews being attacked by malfunctioning robots. The Alpha Centauri system had no government as such and the Avalon Broadcasting Corporation was a prime example of what happened when a big media company was given a free rein to chase ratings as it pleased.

  “You should have the translator now,” said Artorius, interrupting her thoughts.

&
nbsp; The animated hour glass in her thoughts had gone. Ravana brought up the implant control menu in her mind’s eye and saw a new icon in the shape of a pair of grey lips outlined in red. She gave the image a mental prod and the outline became green.

  “Hey, Stripy,” Ravana said. She gave the young grey a friendly tap. “Say something.”

  “Fwack?”

  She had expected a literal audio translation, but instead her implant reacted to the grey’s utterance by flashing a series of vague images through her thoughts that suggested less poking and more food was the order of the day. Ravana looked at Artorius in awe.

  “Wow,” she murmured. “That’s incredible!”

  “Fwack fwack!”

  “How did anyone manage to come up with something like this?”

  Artorius shrugged, not seeming to care.

  “But I could understand them! Stripy wants something to eat!”

  “Thraak thraak,” added Nana.

  “And Nana hates mushrooms!”

  “Thraak thraak!” Nana repeated firmly.

  “Well, if you don’t like them, it’ll have to be the nut roast again.”

  The images created by the implant translator left Ravana feeling dizzy. The greys were more human-like by the minute and she was having to constantly revise her preconceptions of the mysterious creatures. Still somewhat dazed following the translator revelation, she turned up the interior lights and left her seat to fetch a selection of rations from the overhead locker. Artorius finished eating and hopped into the vacated driver’s chair to examine for himself the navigation computer display. It was not lost on Ravana that he still had not told her why he had been at the dome, locked in a cell.

  “Breakfast,” she said, handing a couple of ration packs to Nana and Stripy.