Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

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.