Paw-Prints Of The Gods (4 page)

Brother Simha, the
monk with lions upon his sash, nodded to his companion sat at his
side, then leaned forward to level the blank stare of his hood at
Ravana.

“zz-raavaanaa-zz,” he
hissed, his voice cold and unwelcoming.
“zz-wee-aaree-moost-coonceerneed-aaboouut-yyoouur-meemooryy-zz.”

“zz-yyoouu-aaree-noot-weell-zz,” rasped Brother Dhanus, who wore
the customary archers on his sash.
“zz-teell-uus-aaboouut-thee-booook-theen-yyoouu-caan-reest-zz.”

Ravana stared back,
her fear growing by the minute. “What book?”

The formless shapes in
her mind reverberated with angry spikes as each monk spoke. The
thought of what she may have done to generate such dreadful
passions terrified her. Their hatred bore down on her, threatening
to swamp her with fear and drive her into insanity. She was on the
verge of tipping past the point she could take no more, when a
tremor passed through their linked minds, a flicker of
apprehension. A sudden realisation hit her with all the force of
poorly-maintained rocket booster.

“Those tablets,” she
gasped. “You’re using selective mind wipes! There’s something you
want me to remember. But there’s more you want me to forget!”

“zz-yyoouur-miind-muust-bee-freeeed-zz,” said Brother Simha, his
voice grating painfully upon Ravana’s ears.
“zz-yoouu-muust-beeliieevee-zz.”

“zz-aall-thaat-iis-paart-dooees-beeloong-zz!” cried Dhanus.

Ravana stared at the
monks in disbelief, wide-eyed with terror as she finally remembered
the dreadful encounter with the mad priest Taranis in the
Dandridge Cole
. She and her friends had witnessed the
dreadful unveiling of the half-human, half-alien cyberclones the
priest called his disciples, created to spread the word of the
Dhusarian Church throughout the five systems. The twelve clones had
turned upon Fenris, Taranis’ accomplice, reaching out with their
hands to destroy his mind in a moment of pure rapture. Brother
Dhanus’ words were exactly what the twelve had chanted as their
victim fell lifeless to the floor. Now she saw both the monks
sported the spindly six-fingered hands of the alien clones.

“Oh my word,” she
murmured. “You killed Fenris!”

She did not know how
it could be, but seated before her were two of Taranis’ creations.
As if to confirm the terrible truth, both monks raised their hands
to their heads and carefully pulled back their hoods. Now they
revealed the merciless mask-like grimaces etched upon their faces
and the grey, lizard-like skin stretched tight across their skulls.
Ravana did what anyone else would have done in the circumstances
and shrieked.

“zz-uunbeeliieeveer-zz!” screeched Dhanus.
“zz-buut-yyoouu-wiill-beeliieevee-zz!”

“zz-iin-yyoouur-heeaad-bee-iit-zz!” declared Simha.

Ravana screamed again
and fell backwards off her chair, landing sprawled upon her hands
and knees. She scrambled across the floor towards the door and was
brought up short by two pairs of legs blocking her path. Lilith
stood in the open doorway, wearing an expression that captured her
bewilderment at the revelation of what lay beneath the monks’
hoods. Jizo, stood beside her, looked oddly unfazed.

“We, err... heard a
scream,” stammered Lilith. “Is this a bad moment?”

“Yes!” cried Ravana.
“Very bad! Get me out of here!”

“What scared you,
little runt?” Jizo sneered.

“zz-thee-paatiieent-iis-noot-weell-zz,” rasped Simha, making Lilith
jump.
“zz-shee-haas-miisleed-yyoouu-aand-reefuuseed-treeaatmeent-zz.”

Jizo gave Ravana a
disapproving stare. “Is that so?”

“They’re alien
cyberclones!” cried Ravana. “Created by Taranis!”

“Taranis is dead,”
Lilith declared. “You killed him.”

“What?!”

“zz-taakee-heer-aawaayy-zz!” Dhanus ordered.
“zz-doo-noot-faaiill-uus-zz!”

Lilith nervously
bobbed her head in reply. Her face betrayed her shock at seeing the
monks unveiled. Jizo stood defiant, radiating a smug superior air.
Lilith quickly recovered and with Jizo, grabbed Ravana’s arms and
dragged her backwards through the door.

They did not stop
until they reached her room at the end of the corridor. Lilith went
to fetch the usual medication and the look in the nurse’s eye upon
her return was enough to tell Ravana that this time there would be
no pretending. Lilith pressed the tablets directly into the girl’s
mouth and stood glaring until she was sure the medication had been
swallowed.

Jizo grinned and
pulled a wriggling rat from her pocket. Ravana yelped and retreated
in horror as the nurse did a grotesque mime of a pterosaur
attacking its victim.

“Lizard men,” Jizo
declared, staring thoughtfully into the rat’s face. She pulled her
flask from a pocket and took a swig. “I told you it was something
to do with dinosaurs.”

* * *

As soon as the nurses
had gone, Ravana rolled out of bed and rammed her finger down her
throat, already feeling a lightness in her head as the tablets got
to work. Moments later she was on her hands and knees, trying to
vomit as quietly as possible and glaring at the metal box under her
mattress with justified paranoia. When she felt she had thrown up
what she could of the undigested tablets, she reached beneath the
bed and yanked the electrical cables from the box in a shower of
sparks. The flickering shapes in her mind abruptly resolved into
clearly-defined symbols, created by her cranium implant as it
reached out and connected with whatever remote circuits it could
find. Her mind had been messed with in more ways than one.
Exhausted, she slumped against the wall, sobbing quietly.

“Why me?” she moaned.
Her headache was worse than ever. “What have I done?”

Lilith’s accusation
reawakened the guilt Ravana had bottled up over the fate of Priest
Taranis, the father of the Dhusarian Church. The shock of seeing
two of Taranis’ creations sent her mind into turmoil and her
memories flooded back. The priest and his alien-human cyberclones
had been blasted into space, cast adrift when her friend Zotz
tricked the
Dandridge Cole
’s safety systems into jettisoning
the engine room and the priest’s secret laboratory into the void,
deep in the Barnard’s Star system. Ravana and her friends abandoned
the hollow moon shortly afterwards, for Taranis’ meddling and the
crash of the
Platypus
had left the tiny world with badly
compromised life-support systems.

Taranis’ clones had
threatened their lives and left Fenris dead. After the euphoria of
their escape, Ravana had nevertheless been haunted by the thought
that she had been wrong to encourage Zotz to do what he did. Prior
to the incident, the priest had been presumed dead for years. An
inquest into what happened that fateful day was shelved and quietly
forgotten. If Lilith’s revelation was true, Ravana and her friends
had got away with murder.

Ravana found a new
home on Ascension, gained a place at Newbrum University and tried
to get on with her life. Yet she was also a thief; she had taken
Taranis’
Isa-Sastra
, a book that ultimately led her to join
a student archaeology expedition in the Tau Ceti system during the
summer break. What was missing from her memory was how she had
apparently ended back on Daode, a virtual prisoner of the Dhusarian
Church, in the company of two of Taranis’ surviving disciples. It
was a mystery she was more than willing to leave behind.

“It’s time this
patient was discharged,” she murmured.

Her cranium implant
had already identified the remote control for the lock on the door
to her room. All children born in the Epsilon Eridani system were
implanted at a young age by order of the governing Que Qiao
Corporation; Taranis and his attempts to meddle with her destiny
many years ago had left Ravana with an unregistered
special-services device with far greater capabilities than was
usual. As she listened for any sound of movement in the corridor
beyond, she heard a murmur from the room next door and felt guilty
for not remembering Artorius. Moving to the wall, she put an ear to
the flaking paint and listened.

“Artorius?” she
whispered. “Can you hear me?”

There was a rustle of
sheets, a soft patter of feet and a faint thud as someone dropped
to the floor on the other side of the wall.

“Ravana?”

“Yes, it’s me. Are you
okay?”

“I want to go home,”
the voice declared.

“Me too,” admitted
Ravana. “I’m leaving tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to come
with me?”

“Can I bring Nana and
Stripy?”

“Who?” Ravana rolled
her eyes in despair. “This is an escape, not a group outing!”

She heard a shuffling
noise and guessed the boy had moved from the wall. She crept to the
door and pressed the control, but as expected the mechanism
remained locked. She considered the implant image that represented
the lock, a plain red square centred upon a stylised key, then
carefully gave it a mental prod. With a soft clunk, the symbol
changed from red to green. Ravana tentatively reached for the
control again. This time, the door opened.

“Piece of cake,” she
murmured.

The darkened corridor
beyond was empty. Ravana pressed the wall-mounted release button to
unlock the room next to hers and pushed open the door. Artorius sat
on the floor next to his bed, looking downcast. Seeing her enter,
he smiled and gave a little wave.

Ravana offered the boy
her hand. “Coming?”

Artorius nodded and
took her hand without a word. Ravana quickly led him into the
corridor and down towards the interview room, which now she thought
about it was the limit of her geographic knowledge of the hospice.
Her implant detected security cameras, but no alarms sounded and
any red symbols quickly became green, just as when she broke into
Que Qiao’s headquarters on Yuanshi to rescue her father. Upon
reaching the door she sought, she was annoyed to find Artorius
trying to pull her further along the corridor.

“This is the way out!”
she whispered urgently. “There’s a window leading outside.”

“We need to go down
here!” the boy protested stubbornly.

“But...” Ravana began,
then saw Artorius’ expression. “Okay, have it your way. Don’t blame
me if we run into angry lizard monks!”

Artorius led her to a
set of double doors at the end of the corridor. These too were
locked and this time the wall panel demanded a security code, but
Ravana was able to override the control with her implant as easily
as before. The door unlocked with a clunk.

“How did you do that?”
asked an awestruck Artorius.

“Magic,” she said.

He wriggled past and
pushed open the doors. Lights flickered on in the room ahead.
Ravana’s nose wrinkled in disgust as she caught the musty metallic
odour of raw meat.

“Oh my word,” she
murmured.

The space before her
was crammed with racks of cages, medical apparatus, work benches
and all sort of paraphernalia ideally suited to a mad scientist’s
laboratory. The windowless chamber was not large and the chaotic
jumble of equipment left little room for manoeuvre. When Ravana saw
the empty cages and flecks of blood upon the floor, a tremor ran
down her spine. It reminded her of the secret animal-testing
laboratory she and her friends had stumbled upon on Yuanshi some
months before.

“What is this place?”
she asked.

“This way!” cried
Artorius, pulling her forward.

Not all the cages were
empty. When Ravana saw the final large enclosure, her heart leapt
and her head filled with so many different emotions. The caged
creatures were the size of small apes, humanoid yet lizard-like
with grey hairless skin and mournful almond-shaped eyes peering
from an inverted triangular face. Spindly fingers clung
despondently to the bars of the cage as they lifted their gazes
towards their visitors.

Ravana was one of the
few people ever to get close to the greys, the near-mythical aliens
of Epsilon Eridani. Incredibly, she recognised one of the creatures
now before her. The older-looking grey had distinctive blue
markings on its skin that had stayed in her mind ever since a
strange encounter in her childhood. Taranis later captured the same
creature and awarded it the dubious honour of being the mother to
his hybrid cyberclones. The grey was present at the birth of the
priest’s disciples on the
Dandridge Cole
, but despite
Ravana’s efforts had been condemned to the same fate as Taranis and
his creations. Yet at least two of the clones had survived. So it
seemed had their unwilling mother.

“Pretty cool aliens,
eh?” remarked Artorius. The younger of the two greys, which wore
faint zebra-like red stripes upon its back, was reaching through
the bars towards the young boy, its lips twitching in what looked
like a smile.

“Greys,” she
corrected, cautiously approaching the cage. “We’re the aliens
here.”

The elder grey
recognised her. The creature reached through the bars and placed a
six-fingered hand upon her arm, just like at their last fateful
encounter. Ravana began to suspect they were far more intelligent
than she had previously given them credit for.

“Thraak thraak!” the
grey yelped gently, momentarily startling her. The noise that
erupted from the creature’s mouth was like two bursts of
static.

“Nana knows you,” said
Artorius, impressed.

“It’s a long story,”
she admitted. “You can understand them?”

“The angry nurses make
me ask them things.”

His reply opened up
far too many questions but Ravana knew this was not the time for a
discussion on clandestine scientific research. She had tried and
failed to save the older grey from Taranis once before. She would
not fail again.

“They’re coming with
us,” she reassured Artorius. “Is it just these two?”