Paw-Prints Of The Gods

by Steph Bennion

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Valley of the spiders

  [Chapter Seven] [Contents] [Chapter Nine]

  THE BLACK GRAVEL ROAD ran straight as an arrow across the bleak desert sands. Almost a whole Terran day had passed since Kedesh’s encounter with the police, since when the view unravelling before the transport’s windscreen had remained an endless strip of road through a sea of red dunes. Yet over the last few hours the distant backdrop of rugged peaks had grown ever more imposing, below which they saw the first glimpse of the squat cluster of buildings at the abandoned landing strip. Another long day on Falsafah was coming to an end and the dramatic pink sunset ahead, as the yellow orb of Tau Ceti sank inexorably below the distant mountains, was one of the most spectacular things Ravana had seen. Artorius, standing behind the cockpit seats, was less than impressed.

  “Are we there yet?” he asked grumpily. “We’ve been driving for ages.”

  “Use your eyes!” snapped Kedesh. Ravana suspected she was not used to having company when travelling, though Artorius was trying everyone’s patience. “We’ll be at the airstrip soon enough and from there it’s a short run to the station. Once we’re there we’ll be able to stock up on food and get some rest.”

  “Rest?” asked Ravana, doubtfully. “I’d rather keep moving.”

  She and Kedesh were taking it in turns to drive the transport. The vehicle theoretically could drive itself, but earlier Kedesh had demonstrated how the transport would slow to a crawl when using its automatic guidance system, for it did not get on well with Falsafah’s lone navigation satellite. Ravana was currently at the controls and had hoped Kedesh shared her desire to get to Arallu as soon as possible. She glanced at Kedesh beside her, then at Artorius and the dozing greys in the cabin behind. All looked weary and in need of a break.

  “There’s no road beyond the depot and the mountain pass is not well mapped,” said Kedesh. “I for one would like to get a proper night’s sleep and maybe stretch my legs before second innings. The next few days will not be...”

  She stared at the scanner, her sentence unfinished, then frowned and started to tap at the external camera controls. Ravana looked at the console screen and immediately drew back the drive control lever to bring the transport to a halt. The visual display showed a flying-wing spacecraft, with distinctive engine nacelles unique to ships with vertical take-off and landing capability, parked on the runway at the airstrip complex ahead.

  “Why have we stopped?” complained Artorius. His voice came unexpectedly loud in the tense silence, waking the greys from their slumber. “Are we there?”

  “No,” murmured Ravana. “But someone is.”

  “That’s a Que Qiao police cruiser,” Kedesh said wearily. “I checked the satellite scan earlier and Ininna’s and Yima’s ship was at the Dhusarians’ airstrip, not here. When they went off in the other direction, they must have gone back to their ship and used it to get here ahead of us. We should never have let them leave before we did.”

  “You wanted a cup of tea before going anywhere,” Ravana pointed out. “What now?”

  “If they’re paying attention to their own scanner, they know we’re here,” Kedesh replied. “I guess they’re waiting for us to declare.”

  Ravana looked questioningly at Kedesh. The woman brought up a map of the local terrain on the navigation console and began to study it carefully. Nana came next to Artorius and together they peered over Kedesh’s shoulder. Stripy stood behind them, the grey’s spindly fingers rubbing large tired eyes in a disturbingly human way.

  “Thraak?” exclaimed Nana.

  “Please don’t do that right in my ear,” grumbled Kedesh.

  Ravana leaned towards the console and looked for where they were on the map. A few kilometres north of their present position, an area of close-knit contours showed a winding valley that ran parallel to the road from the airstrip to its attendant outpost in the north-west. As she looked through the windscreen to match their surroundings with what was on the map, she caught a flash of silver and for a split second saw an indistinct shape with two yellow eyes staring at her from on top of a nearby rock, then it was gone.

  “Weird,” she muttered.

  “What’s weird?” asked Kedesh. She spoke so sharply that Ravana wondered if she had seen the same thing.

  “I thought I saw something out there,” Ravana said weakly. “But it can’t have been.”

  “Can’t have been what?”

  Ravana blushed. “It looked like a cat. A tabby, no less.”

  Artorius snorted with derision. “Ravana’s gone mental!” he announced.

  Kedesh gave her an odd look. “A cat, you say?”

  “I must be imagining things,” said Ravana with a sigh. “I keep seeing these yellow eyes out in the desert. Perhaps I need to lie down for a while.”

  “I’ll take over shortly,” Kedesh said gently. “What about the map?”

  Ravana stared at the navigation console and tried to put all thoughts of a furry desert phantom from her mind. Using her finger, she drew the woman’s attention to the contoured region she had identified earlier.

  “What about there?” she suggested. “The road we want goes along the top of that ridge. If you want to avoid that ship, we may be able to drive through the valley below. It looks quite deep, which may stop their scanner picking us up.”

  “Hmm,” murmured Kedesh. “I wonder why that area is shaded grey?”

  “Fwack fwack?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s a secret village of aliens.”

  “Maybe it’s a bad idea,” Ravana said hastily.

  “I haven’t got a better one,” Kedesh admitted. “As you said, anything that may cause us to drop off their radar for a while is worth a try. We should make a move before they start to wonder why we’ve stopped. I’d like to get to the depot by nightfall.”

  Ravana nodded. She urged the transport into motion and soon they had left the road behind and were bounding across the rock-strewn desert towards the parched rolling dunes. As she drove, she became aware of Kedesh’s stern glances and was left with the uncomfortable feeling she should have kept her weird visions to herself.

  * * *

  Agent Yima was bored. He wanted to fly straight to the Arallu Wastes to see what the archaeologists were up to, but his colleague Ininna was determined to keep an eye on Kedesh for a little while longer. Hence they were here, sat in their ship at an abandoned airstrip, watching the red blob on the scanner that was Kedesh’s transport as it sat unmoving on the road a few kilometres away. The cabin of the Alf-Sana Booma, the angular flying wing they used to flit around Falsafah, was cramped and in need of a good airing if they ever got back to Aram. Their own transport was secure in the cargo bay behind them.

  “Is she still there?” asked Ininna, with barely a glance at the scanner.

  Yima looked at the console. “No, she’s moving again,” he informed her. “North, into the hills. I would have gone south and followed the old coastal plain to the pass.”

  “You’re assuming she’s alone. If she has taken on passengers as we suspect, she may be looking to top-up supplies.”

  “Yes, but the only depot around here is... that place,” murmured Yima and shivered. “You wouldn’t get me near there, no matter how desperate.”

  “That’s if she manages to avoid running into those things in the valley,” said Ininna and smiled. “Don’t look at me like that! You’ve heard the stories.”

  Yima looked glum. “Do we stick around in case we’re wanted?”

  Ininna shook her head. “We’ve warned her off enough times. We’ll come back in a day or so and see if there’s anything left to interrogate. If she does make it through the dunes in one piece, there’s more surprises waiting for her at the dome.”

  * * *

  Following Kedesh’s directions, Ravana drove north. The dunes became hills and soon the transport rolled through what may have once been a river valley, but which was now no more tha
n a barren, dusty rift in the bleak landscape. The encroaching uplands soon blocked the dwindling light of dusk and by the time Ravana came to swap places with Kedesh they were using the transport’s headlamps to light the way. Artorius and Stripy were in the passenger compartment, keeping themselves amused with the slapping game, while Nana caught forty winks on a nearby bunk. After settling into the co-pilot’s chair, Ravana waited until the transport was under way once more before presenting Kedesh with a question that had been troubling her for a while.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Who are you working for?”

  “Didn’t I say?” Kedesh’s look of innocence was not entirely convincing.

  “No, you didn’t. You gave us some rubbish about being an eccentric adventurer with an odd interest in Taranis,” Ravana reminded her. “You have a transport but no ship, so how did you get here? Falsafah is not the sort of place where anyone can just drop by.”

  “Who do you think I am?”

  “A secret agent,” Ravana declared. “Working for Que Qiao. That’s why the police officer said something about it not being your jurisdiction.”

  “You heard that from inside the washroom? Ininna does have a big mouth.”

  “The corporation is doing horrible things on Yuanshi,” Ravana said bitterly. “It’s not just the war; myself and some friends broke into a secret plantation and saw the cruel things its scientists are doing to the greys. Every time I look at Nana and Stripy I’m reminded of that. It’s worse now I know how clever they are. And to cover it up people are made to believe greys are a myth, invented by the Dhusarians, or that they’re just the alien equivalent of monkeys or apes. Looking after these two has really opened my eyes.”

  “You’re looking after them?” Kedesh raised a surprised eyebrow, as if to say she thought it was the other way around. “So if the corporation experimented on dumb animals, rather than clever aliens, that would be alright?”

  “I’m saying that if you are with Que Qiao then I don’t want to know you.”

  “Even after I gave you a lift? That’s a tad harsh.”

  “Well?” asked Ravana. “Are you?”

  “A spy?” Kedesh laughed. “No more than you, by the sound of it.”

  “I am not a spy!” retorted Ravana, increasingly maddened that the woman seemed incapable of answering a straight question. “What brought you to Falsafah?”

  “I could ask you the same question. You say you’re a student archaeologist, but doing digs on faraway planets is very much a hobby for the rich. Universities expect students to pay their way. You don’t strike me as being particularly wealthy.”

  “A teacher helped me apply for a bursary,” explained Ravana, annoyed that Kedesh had changed the subject yet again. “Well, ex-teacher. The trauma of the flight back from the peace conference was too much for her and she’s taken extended leave to catch up on her Saint John Ambulance training, or something.”

  “Fine body of people,” Kedesh said approvingly.

  Ravana watched as the woman returned her attention to the way ahead, then sighed in exasperation when it became clear Kedesh was not about to say anything more.

  “You’ve ducked my question yet again!” she complained.

  Kedesh frowned. Frustrated, Ravana gave her a pleading look.

  “As you say, I am on the trail of Taranis,” the woman said carefully. “Coincidentally, I too was recently out in the field on Yuanshi, trying to catch a bit of intelligence. I went undercover as a technical support officer at the royalist headquarters in Lanka. It was easy to eavesdrop on holovid conversations and it didn’t take me long to work out that Taranis was somewhere in the Barnard’s Star system. Shortly afterwards, the story broke of his and your own involvement in the peace conference plot and the trail went dead.”

  “Just like Taranis himself,” said Ravana, though she did not sound sure.

  “I’ll be happier when I’ve confirmed that for myself,” Kedesh remarked. “Last time he disappeared, he turned up at the Dhusarians’ secret hideaway here on Falsafah, so I was sent to keep an eye on the ball. The arrival of those so-called monks knocked me for six.”

  “So you are a spy,” remarked Ravana, but her thoughts were elsewhere. “Cyberclones can’t think very well for themselves and have to be told what to do. The two I saw have been given names from the Hindu zodiac, which sounds like something Taranis might do. But if he was alive and at their dome controlling them I think I’d know. This may sound silly, but the last time we met I could feel his anger through my implant. That of the clones, too.”

  Kedesh looked intrigued. “You mean like telepathy?”

  “Like in science-fiction stories?” Ravana managed a weak smile. “No, nothing like that. It was far more vague, as if I was sensing emotions rather than thoughts.”

  “Cyberclones are part machine,” mused Kedesh. “They may give off signals or weird alien pheromones your implant can somehow detect. Speaking of implants, I’m stumped as to why Artorius has one. Didn’t he say he’s from Avalon? I though it was only the Que Qiao administration in Epsilon Eridani that allows childhood implantation.”

  “Allows? Insists, more like,” Ravana retorted. “I did wonder whether Artorius is another victim of a fake destiny, in that Taranis planned to use him to make the Falsafah prophecy in the Isa-Sastra come true in a way he could control.”

  “Although Artorius doesn’t have a special-forces implant like you do,” Kedesh pointed out. She smiled at Ravana’s startled expression. “Yes, I checked. Weirdly enough, he seems to sport an implant of the type the American government developed for their space exploration programme, not a Que Qiao one. Very odd.”

  Ravana pursed her lip and fell silent. Back in Newbrum, a morbid fascination had led her to study implant technology. The discovery that the devices quickly became embedded, using nanotechnology to exude tiny filaments across a host’s brain, made her feel sick for weeks. She wondered if Kedesh’s own implant was anything out of the ordinary.

  “Taranis had an implant,” she mused. “I think that’s how I could sense his presence, just like I could with the cyberclones. He was able to do things I didn’t think was possible. A friend of mine had a birdsuit with inbuilt artificial muscles and Taranis was able to take control of it and use it against him. It scared the life out of all of us!”

  “You too have that power!” Kedesh remarked. She answered Ravana’s look of surprise with a wry grin. “Special-forces implants can use what they call ‘back doors’ in AI chips, whether or not the chip has a proper implant interface or not.”

  Ravana thought about this. “When I was on Yuanshi recently I found there were all sorts of locks and things I could operate, which others with standard implants couldn’t even see,” she said. “It was the same with the doors at the Dhusarians’ dome. But those put proper images into my mind that I could mentally press, if you know what I mean.”

  “It’s a little-known fact that almost all security devices made by Que Qiao have secret overrides that can be remotely operated by agents with special-forces implants,” said Kedesh. “But I’m talking about something quite different. There’s this chap on Avalon who was a Que Qiao agent before he double-crossed them and went on the run. He’s well known for bowling the odd googly during Gods of Avalon. He plays a blinder with his implant to take control of whatever he likes; props, robots, terraforming machines, anything. The authorities don’t have a chance of getting near him without risking a nasty incident live on holovid.”

  “Was he the one who pretended to be wizard Merlin?” Artorius piped up. Kedesh glanced over her shoulder and smiled, unaware the boy had been listening.

  Ravana frowned. “You’re both making this up.”

  “Not at all!” said Kedesh. “Next time you’re on Avalon, ask around.”

  Artorius went back to his slapping game with Stripy. Ravana thought about when she had used her implant in the rescue of her father from Sumitra Palace; breaching security had been a simple matter of pressing mental
switches just as Kedesh described. However, the first time she had experienced the power of her implant had been before she even knew it was there. An accident left her dangling on a rope inside a sealed vertical shaft, but somehow she had been able to visualise a nearby airlock control and flex the image in her mind.

  “I think I know what you mean,” she said slowly. “There was this time...”

  She tailed off, distracted by a flashing red symbol on the scanner console screen that faded almost as soon as it appeared. Startled, Ravana peered through the windscreen and to her surprise saw a windowless concrete bunker nestling in a crevice on the edge of the valley floor. The headlamps briefly raised a glint from the solar panel array upon the roof, then the bunker slipped past back into the gloom. The narrowing valley became a canyon. They passed close to a rocky outcrop and noticed for the first time how the cliff edges were covered in pale, wispy threads. Puzzled, Ravana looked ahead and stiffened as a dark shape scuttled across the ground ahead at the edge of their headlight beams.

  “I don’t like the look of this,” muttered Kedesh. “I’ll try infra-red.”

  She tapped at the console to change the scanner mode, reached to the holovid display and switched on the infra-red cameras. The screen lit up in a ghastly shade of green.

  Ravana gasped in horror. The valley ahead crawled with huge, eight-legged creatures that were the stuff of nightmares. Infra-red revealed the glistening shine of bulbous carapaces, the glint of multiple eyes and stilt-like hairy legs of creatures that had no right standing as tall as they did. Below the holovid screen, the scanner in its new mode was suddenly alive with countless red blobs, all congregating upon the transport.

  “Ashtapadas,” Ravana whispered. “Hundreds of them!”

  Artorius and the greys came forward to look. Ravana almost jumped out of her skin when the boy promptly shrieked in her ear.