Paw-Prints Of The Gods

by Steph Bennion

  She still had a million questions to put to Artorius, not to mention the greys, but had awoken from her slumber feeling distinctly grubby. She could not remember the last time she had a bath, her hair felt disgusting and she was very conscious of how bad she smelt. During her earlier trip to the toilet she discovered the transport had a shower cubicle and she was looking forward to a long soak.

  “Where are you going?” asked Artorius, as she retreated to the end of the cabin.

  “I need to wash that place out of my hair,” she replied. “Then we talk.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Ravana felt refreshed and ready to face the world once more. She took great pleasure in discarding the clinic’s green smock into the waste disposal unit and now wore a pair of the tatty but clean overalls and a pair of boots she had found in the locker, her damp hair wrapped in a towel from the shower room. She persuaded Artorius to use the shower in turn, during which she took the opportunity to study the navigation charts further over a bite to eat as she tried to come up with a plan of action.

  The scanner had once again picked up a signal on the edge of its range. The satellite identified it as belonging to some sort of vehicle, though whoever rode inside appeared to be in no hurry to come closer. Switching on the transport’s short-range communicator gave only the hiss of static, adding to the overall sense of isolation.

  Once Artorius finished in the shower, Ravana gathered them together in the rear of the transport, herself on the opposite bench seat to the others. Artorius looked quite comical in a pair of adult-sized overalls with the sleeves and legs rolled up.

  “We have enough fuel to take us a good way round the planet,” she began. “There’s also sufficient oxygen aboard to maintain life support for at least two weeks. However, the food situation is not good. We have plenty of water, but only enough ration packs for two, maybe four days if we’re careful. That’s Earth days,” she clarified.

  “Fwack fwack!”

  “Where are we going?” Artorius asked. “Are you taking me home?”

  “I will do my best to get you somewhere safe,” she reassured him. “But the only place I know is the excavation. Even if we ran non-stop, it would take five or six days to get there. The satellite chart shows another outpost two days north-west of here, but I have no idea if it is still in use, or if we can expect to find supplies there. Assuming we agree we don’t want to risk starving to death in the desert, we seem to have just one option.”

  “Thraak?”

  “We go back to the dome. We break in, grab supplies and then head for the dig.”

  “No way!” cried Artorius. “I am not going back there!”

  “We don’t have a lot of choice! Besides, you still haven’t told me why you were kept locked up like that. For all I know I might be harbouring a ten-year-old criminal mastermind!”

  “I’m eight,” the boy retorted.

  “So what’s your story?”

  “The nurses said I was evil,” Artorius said sullenly. “They tried to teach me about the greys and their church but I kept getting it wrong. They said I was supposed to be king of a game but I was not behaving like one.”

  “What?” Ravana stared at him. “That’s no way to talk to a little boy!”

  “Thraak,” agreed Nana.

  “I played with Nana and Stripy and talked to them so the translator could be made better,” Artorius said stubbornly. “The nurses said I was special because Nana and Stripy liked me but I was also very bad because I asked too many questions. They said the greys would one day save everyone and the people of their church were the chosen ones.”

  “Fwack?” asked Stripy.

  The boy scratched his head. “I don’t know,” he replied. He looked confused, as if the question had never occurred to him before. “I think they chose themselves.”

  “But it’s good to ask questions,” Ravana protested. “That’s how you learn things.”

  “They said everything I need to know is in their book.”

  Ravana sighed. Her previous dealings with the Dhusarian Church had not left a good impression. Artorius’ curious remark about being a king also rested uneasily upon her mind. The priest Taranis had once said something very similar to herself.

  “Why did they think you were a king?” she asked.

  “There’s a rhyme they made me learn,” Artorius replied, then unexpectedly began to recite a verse in a high-pitched halting monotone:

  “Reborn beneath twin suns,

  orphaned child of Sol,

  pawn to watchers and weavers,

  king by the great game.”

  “I think you need to look up the definition of ‘rhyme’,” mused Ravana, though her mind was elsewhere. “Those lines are from the Dhusarian Isa-Sastra. I wonder...”

  Artorius looked at her oddly. “Why were you there?”

  “At the dome?” she asked and sighed. “I was at Arallu Depot with the others, getting ready to travel back to the dig. I’d just spoken to my father, then went to fetch a drink and was surprised to find someone else at the depot with us. Everything after that is pretty much a blank. The medication the nurses gave me did strange things to my memory.”

  “Did they also give you that yucky scar?”

  “No!” Ravana retorted, defensively touching her cheek.

  “Thraak,” Nana said sadly. “Thraak thraak.”

  Ravana shuddered. Her implant had brought up a fleeting vision of the twelve clones standing around the fallen Fenris. Artorius looked at her with a most curious and almost awe-struck expression. She wondered what his own translator had shown when there were no relevant memories for it to draw upon inside the boy’s head.

  “Lizard men!” he murmured.

  “Half-human, half-alien cyberclones,” she corrected. “I saw them being born. Maybe that’s what they wanted me to forget.”

  “Fwack fwack?”

  “I don’t know why. Everyone in Newbrum must know the story by now so it can’t be to keep their existence a secret. Besides, I’d never have known they were here if they hadn’t whisked me away to their lair. None of it makes any sense.”

  “They looked horrible,” Artorius muttered.

  “Fwack,” agreed Stripy. “Fwack fwack fwack!”

  “You’re getting very chatty,” remarked Ravana. “Anyway, we’re getting off the point. We need to make a move. I don’t really want to return to that place, but can’t think of any realistic alternative. We’ll sneak in, steal loads of food and then head for Arallu. With any luck we’ll be on our way again before they realise we’re back. What do you think?”

  Artorius fell silent, his face creased in annoyance.

  “Artorius?”

  “I’m not going!” he retorted.

  Ravana gave him a stern look. “It’s the only sensible thing to do,” she said.

  “No!” he cried. “Please don’t take me there. I hate them!”

  She was quite taken aback at how upset he looked. Whatever it was the nurses had put him through at the dome had obviously left its mark. The greys shifted uneasily upon the bench, sensing the tension.

  “There is another option,” she suggested hesitantly. “As I said, there’s a base a couple of days drive from here. We may find supplies, but it could just as well be an abandoned settlement or an unmanned research station.”

  “I want to go there,” declared Artorius, his face brightening.

  Ravana paused. “On one condition,” she added. “If we have no luck finding supplies, we turn around and head to the Dhusarians’ dome. Agreed?”

  “Thraak.”

  “Fwack.”

  “Artorius?”

  “I guess so,” he mumbled.

  “Excellent!” said Ravana. “We have a plan!”

  * * *

  Now they were moving again Ravana immersed herself in the journey. The vehicle’s automatic pilot still would not engage, but she was happy to drive the transport manually, comforted by the feeling of being in control. They we
re a long way from the only road and she had to constantly peer ahead into the dark and concentrate on picking a safe route through the rocks and shifting sands. Behind her, Artorius was teaching Stripy a game which largely involved slapping each other. Nana looked on like an elderly aunt.

  “Hey,” called Ravana, beckoning to the older grey. “Tell me about your home world.”

  “Thraak?”

  “Of course I’m interested!”

  “Thraak thraak.”

  “Yes, well up until now it has not been a good time!” retorted Ravana. “That star you pointed to earlier? I looked at the charts and I’m sure it was Procyon. I happen to know that no large planets have been found in that system.”

  “Thraak thraak,” said Nana. “Thraak thraak thraak.”

  “I didn’t understand a word of that. Can I have a clue?”

  “Thraak thraak!”

  “A moon, planet, space station?” asked Ravana. “How many syllables?”

  “Thraak!”

  “Fwack fwack,” added Stripy. The grey waved its arms in a bizarre mime.

  “Is that some sort of vegetable? Or mineral?”

  “Fwack fwack fwack!”

  “Thraak thraak!”

  Ravana shook her head irritably. The images generated by the translator made no sense and her thoughts reeled beneath the weight of a jungle-like entity writhing on the edge of her comprehension. In part she was reminded of the twisting light show of an extra-dimensional jump, the split-second visual rollercoaster that once witnessed from an interstellar spacecraft remained engraved upon a mind forever. The picture conjured up by Nana’s utterances felt more organic but somehow unconstrained by time or space.

  “Weird,” she muttered and glanced to Artorius. “What did you make of that?”

  “A tree in space,” he said solemnly.

  “Really?” she remarked, bemused. “As good a description as any, I suppose.”

  With a sigh, she returned her attention to the dunes ahead. The desert was far from uniform, for occasionally they would dip into a shallow valley and the sand would give way to rocky cliffs. As she looked now, the headlamps fell upon the first of a series of black stunted columns that rose from the dunes like rotten teeth. Artorius came to slouch in the seat next to her, bored of the slapping game.

  “A fossilised forest,” Ravana told him. “Millions of years ago this was all trees.”

  “No way!” exclaimed Artorius. Leaning forward, he stared through the windscreen into the dark valley. “What happened to it all?”

  “Destroyed by global warming,” she said. “Falsafah is strange in that the other planets occasionally flip it into a new orbit. Astronomers think it used to be closer to Tau Ceti than Aram, where it overheated and became locked inside a layer of acid clouds, much like Venus in the Solar System. It’s cooled down a lot since but the air is still very poisonous.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, eyeing her suspiciously.

  “I read up on it before I came,” she said. “I came to do archaeology, remember.”

  “Are you digging for aliens?” he asked cautiously.

  “Yes,” Ravana said solemnly. “Or what’s left of them.”

  “Wow.”

  “Satellite surveys keep finding formations in the desert that don’t look natural,” she told him. “It seems incredible looking at Falsafah now, but the professor leading our dig reckons that before it turned to desert it was a lot like Earth, with cities and everything.”

  Artorius gave her an incredulous open-mouthed stare, his face a picture of disbelief. Ravana knew how he felt. Despite all she had seen at the excavation, she found it hard to imagine that life of any kind had once existed on such a desolate world, never mind an ancient alien civilisation. Falsafah’s counter planet of Aram on the opposite side of Tau Ceti was a lot more Earth-like, complete with abundant yet primitive native flora and fauna, but the Arab and European missions to colonise Aram had started just thirty years ago.

  She was distracted by the scanner display, which had again picked up a signal at the edge of its range. The red square marking their unseen pursuer had last appeared to the east but now lay ahead to the north, directly in their path. Her fear rose when a second glance a few moments later showed the square had crept noticeably closer.

  “Someone’s on to us,” she told Artorius, tapping the scanner screen.

  “Thraak thraak?” asked Nana, behind them.

  “How am I supposed to know?” retorted Ravana. “No one’s tried to make contact.”

  Artorius peered at the screen. The transport gave an abrupt jolt as its wheels hit a rock and Ravana muttered a curse under her breath. The terrain outside was becoming more rugged and the dunes were littered with outcrops of sinister-looking boulders.

  “I’ve changed course,” Ravana explained. The transport rocked again. “Our friend ahead is blocking the best route through this area. It may get a little rough.”

  “The red square is coming closer,” Artorius said fearfully.

  Ravana glanced at the display. Their transport came to the top of a rise and they saw a distant flashing light, with a faint glow of red and green navigation lights either side.

  “Green to our left,” she muttered. “It’s coming straight for us.”

  She switched on the transceiver but was again rewarded with nothing more than hiss. Ravana wondered whether it was her who was being paranoid and unfriendly, but as her hand moved to the ‘transmit’ switch she paused, though more because she did not know who else might be monitoring the channel. On a whim, she accessed her cranium implant and mentally prodded the symbol for its inbuilt communicator, but her headcom too was silent.

  “Have they come to get us?” asked Artorius, his voice wavering.

  Ravana, peering warily into the dark, did not reply. The bleak landscape rose towards a rocky plateau to the west and the difficult terrain offered a chance to slow their pursuer. She resolutely turned the steering wheel and the transport began to climb away from the distant lights, wheels scrabbling wildly amidst a cascade of loose rock.

  The transport shuddered over the top of a ridge and the ground fell away into a void. Ravana screamed, hit the brakes a split second too late and then stared in horror as their vehicle tilted with an agonising slowness over the edge, swinging headlamp beams down into the black shadows of an impact crater. Artorius shrieked, fell from his seat and was promptly pummelled by the greys skidding down the sloping floor to land on top of him. An ominous creaking grew more insistent as the rear wheels lifted from the ground, pulled by the weight of the nose of the transport hanging over the edge of the crater.

  “Fwack!”

  “We’re going over!” yelled Ravana.

  The transport gave an almighty groan and slowly slid down the slope. Rock clawed into the belly of the hull, bringing forth a dreadful grating that mingled with their screams. Moments later, the vehicle crunched into the crater floor and everything went dark.

  The base of the rocky pit loomed large through the windscreen. The emergency lights came on, flooding the cabin with a dim red glow. Ravana released a sigh of relief and relaxed her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. Near her feet she heard a groan.

  “The crater wasn’t that deep,” she murmured in relief. “Is everyone okay?”

  “Stripy fell on my head,” complained Artorius. “Where are we?”

  “Stuck in a hole,” she told him. “It could be worse.”

  A sudden beeping noise filled the cabin, one that immediately raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The sound did not come from the blank lifeless screens of the console. Ravana heaved herself from her seat and clambered up the sloping floor of the passenger compartment, trying to find the source of the noise. It did not take her long.

  “My mistake,” she said gloomily, as she peered at a control panel next to the airlock. “It is worse. Life support has failed. I think my detour just killed everyone aboard.”

  “What?!” shrieked Artorius.
“I don’t want to die!”

  “Thraak!”

  “Fwack fwack!”

  “Quick! Search the lockers,” she urged. “There has to be emergency oxygen masks somewhere. I’m going to call for help.”

  “Call who?” cried Artorius. He had gone as white as a sheet.

  “Who do you think?”

  Ravana dropped back into the driver’s seat and tried to switch on the communicator, but the console was completely dead. Undeterred, she activated her headcom and switched off the privacy settings to send an unrestricted public call to all within range. In the cabin behind, Artorius and the greys were frantically emptying every locker they could find and a constant stream of ration packets slid down the floor.

  “Mayday, mayday!” cried Ravana. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Artorius jump as his own implant picked up her broadcast. “Can anyone hear me? This is an emergency!”

  There was no reply. Yet she was sure she heard something faint in the background, as if someone was listening and debating whether to remain silent or not.

  “Hello?” she called. “Is there anybody out there?”

  “There’s no masks!” wailed Artorius. His voice shrilled with panic.

  Ravana felt disorientated, her pulse raced and she had a blinding headache. With a sinking heart, she realised the transport’s hull had been breached. The cabin pressure was dropping fast, allowing Falsafah’s poisonous air to seep in from outside.

  “Help!” she cried again. “We’re running out of air! We need help now!”

  There was a pause, then a woman’s voice broke through her thoughts.

  “I’m so sorry,” the voice said sadly. “It is not my place to intervene.”

  “What!?” exclaimed Ravana. “Mayday! Help, please!”

  She heard no more. It took all her remaining strength to climb to where Artorius and the greys were huddled near the airlock door. In the dim light she could see Artorius’ flushed skin. Nana fumbled near the airlock controls, while Stripy lay still.