Paw-Prints Of The Gods (13 page)

“Oh,” he said, faking
a weary nonchalance. “Little Miss Mirage is back to haunt me.”

“You ignored my
warning.”

“Call me
old-fashioned, but I tend to dismiss advice given to me by random
cat women in dark tunnels,” he retorted. He glanced again at his
face-mask display, wondering whether it was a lack of oxygen
causing him to hallucinate. “As for opening my mind to the
impossible, I assume my head must be a tad crowded right now if
you’re already in there.”

“That’s the trouble
with you humans,” she said and sighed. “Always putting your faith
in the wrong thing. Back in the old days you had proper places of
worship and would beseech us to walk the Earth. You think this is a
temple? It’s no more than a morgue.”

“This alien, err...
thing is buried with a human cryogenic survival capsule,” Cadmus
said cautiously. “As I recall, the Americans experimented with them
in the first half of the twenty-second century, before we had ships
with ED drives. Yet this tomb is a hundred thousand years old.
Would my dear mirage care to comment?”

“Not really, no.”

“Time travel!”
exclaimed Cadmus. “The Americans invented a time machine!”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”
she snapped. “You humans have enough trouble getting from one day
to the next.”

Cadmus looked at the
capsule and knew this was why his Que Qiao paymasters had sent him
to Falsafah. Forgetting the cat woman, the egg-shaped cocoon and
even the scary spider, he stepped closer to look. His boots kicked
up a cloud of dust and for an instant he spotted a thin red line
hovering above the ground, stretching from one side of the chamber
to the other. Startled, he swept the lantern beam across the room
and saw a small orange cylinder next to the entrance archway,
fastened to the wall with a thoroughly-modern metal clamp. He was
certain the amber warning light it flashed had not been visible
before.

“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
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.