Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

“A shrine, perchance?” he mused. The angular depths of the chamber swallowed all noise, reinforcing the aura of desolation. The idea that a multi-legged giant egg represented a strange alien deity lodged uneasily in his mind.

Curious, he stepped down the slope and into the vault. To his alarm the ground was not solid and quivered beneath his weight as if it were a sheet of stretched rubber. Cadmus cautiously circled the rods and swung his light towards another indistinct shape lying in the shadows beyond. When his eyes fell upon the dark bulbous body and tangle of limbs, an uncontrollable shiver ran down his spine and he gave a little yelp of fright.

“How gross!” he murmured.

Half-submerged in the floor were the remains of a huge spider, with a body a metre long and a tangle of legs that must once have stood nearly three metres tall. The carcass was a tarnished maroon colour, which to his surprise was sheathed in what looked like plates of armour. Cadmus was perturbed by the suggestion that the arachnid had somehow sunk into the floor and he backed away, not daring to take his eyes from the horrible sight.

There was something else behind the weird ancient cocoon. Cadmus stepped past the dead giant spider to get a better look and gasped in disbelief. In the shadows beyond lay a rounded capsule, about the size and shape of a human coffin. The faded emblem upon the white casing was the stars and stripes of the United States of America.

“But that’s impossible!” he muttered.

“Impossible?” came a familiar mocking voice. “Can you not open your heart and mind to the possibility of what you see here?”

The woman leaned casually against one of the upright rods, examining her black-lacquered fingernails with a tiger-like grace. Cadmus had to admit he had a hell of a vivid imagination when it came to creating this particular delusion.

“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.

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.