Paw-Prints Of The Gods (15 page)

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 were 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.

“Forgive me,” Ravana
whispered. The voice in her head was forgotten as she pulled
Artorius close. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

She fell to the floor
beside him, each convulsing breath more shallow than the last.
Finally, there was nothing more to do than close her tear-soaked
eyes.

* * *

[Chapter Four
]
[
Contents
] [
Chapter Six
]

FELICITY FORNAX, the
latest young and fiercely-ambitious recruit to the
Weird
Universe
team of roving reporters, sat on the edge of her hotel
room bed and scowled at the flickering images on the holovid unit
in the corner of the room. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s
Five Systems News
was reporting on the archaeological dig
from its studios on Aram, which despite being on the other side of
the star system from Falsafah was still a lot closer to the action
than most other news crews had managed to get.
Weird
Universe
, the quirky arts and entertainment news programme, was
a show with big ideas but an embarrassingly-small budget. Hence
Fornax was here, in a tatty suite on the third floor of the
laughingly-named Paradise Hotel in Newbrum, tasked with putting
together a piece on the Bradbury Heights University archaeology
department, instead of at some well-appointed campsite in the
Arallu Wastes reporting on the excavation itself.

The University however
was being strangely tight-lipped. Meanwhile, the Dhusarian Church
had released a baffling statement protesting heavily against the
sacrilegious looting of holy relics, with a warning that activists
would do their best to sabotage the expedition. Yet there was
another story, one of secret flights from Falsafah to Ascension and
of alien artefacts on the local black market. Fornax would much
rather be in the Tau Ceti system, reporting on possibly the biggest
story of all time, but if she could not be there then she would
take whatever scoop came her way. The discovery that her
enhanced-reality network visor did not work in Newbrum just meant
that her research would have to be done the old-fashioned way.

Feeling hungry, Fornax
pulled her dressing gown tighter and pushed a length of black hair
out of her eyes. She had a bottle of wine cooling in the sink and
was just contemplating ordering room service when there was a quiet
knock at her door.

“Who is it?” she
called. She was not expecting guests.

“My name is Philyra,”
came the muffled voice of a teenage girl. “Can I talk to you?”

“Apparently so,”
Fornax murmured, getting up from the bed.

The room was so small
it was only two steps to the door. A peep through the spy hole
revealed the skinny and pallid features of a dark-haired girl,
dressed in a cheap summer frock of metallic blue. Her visitor
looked harmless enough and Fornax opened the door.

“Hi!” said Philyra.
The girl gave a bright smile. “Miss Fornax? Could I interview you
for our school magazine? We don’t often get holovid stars in
town.”