Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

“I have never seen that man before in my life!”

“Are you sure?” asked the other officer. “We have ways of…”

“I am not a frigging murderer!”

Nyx paused. “I believe you,” he said at last. “Look at you! You’re shaking like a leaf just thinking about it. As it happens, the crew met their untimely end long before you showed up, so as theories go it doesn’t really work.”

“They’re dead?” asked Momus, regarding Nyx warily. “All of them?”

“We can only vouch for the few we found.”

“You haven’t found all of them?”

“Sorry,” said Nyx. “I meant for the bits of crew we found. Mostly on the walls.”

“Crapping hell,” murmured Momus.

“Exactly,” replied the blond sergeant. “Someone came here, attacked the crew and then took off with their ship, leaving this half-eaten body behind. Who knows what…”

“Half-eaten body?” cried Momus, interrupting. “You mean that man lying under the sheet has been… well, eaten?”

“Half-eaten,” corrected Nyx. “Arms and legs, mainly.”

“That’s frigging gross.”

“And it definitely wasn’t you?” asked Nyx, smiling slyly.

“I’m no cannibal!” Momus cried. He wondered why he was being told the gory details and decided Nyx just wanted to see him squirm. “Who did this? Where are they now?”

“The stolen ship was found abandoned in Woden orbit,” the sergeant said. “But…”

“It’s of no concern,” Nyx said swiftly. He fixed Momus with a steely stare. “Trust me when I say that what you have seen here is for your eyes only. This is a delicate situation. We do not want our operation here and in Tau Ceti influenced by outside conjecture.”

“What operation? You said we were to destroy all…”

“Shut up!” snapped Nyx.

Momus pretended he had not heard the blond officer’s slip and nodded sagely. “I saw nothing,” he confirmed. “No blood, no body, nothing.”

“I would hate to have to censor you by more permanent means,” added Nyx.

Momus gulped as the officer mimed cutting his throat. “I saw less than nothing,” he said hurriedly. “A black hole is a frigging supernova next to what I saw here.”

Nyx smiled. He made as if to turn away and then paused. “One last thing,” he said. “If you’re from the Dandridge Cole , are you one of those scummy, low-life refugees who have come to Newbrum and taken all our jobs?”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” retorted Momus. “The answer is no.”

“In that case, I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Have a nice trip.”

“I’m free to go?”

“You’re a rubbish pilot,” Nyx told him. “But you’ll keep your mouth shut. If I was a betting man I would stake your life on that.”

Zotz soon discovered that while Ravana’s electric pet did not take well to zero gravity, its AI unit liked being controlled from afar even less. In the end he came up with a method whereby he would transmit a list of possible places to explore, safe in the knowledge that the cat would reject every single one and go somewhere else. It had somehow already left the Indra and despondently clung to a handrail in the passageway outside. Persuading the cat to jump to the floor and grip the steel mesh floor with its diamond-tipped claws was one thing. Getting it to go where he wanted was something else entirely.

Endymion’s hack however worked like a dream. The view through Zotz’s VR headset, as seen by the electric pet just a fraction of a second ago, was a cat’s-eye aspect of the flexible walkway that linked the docking pontoon to the huge mysterious cylinder. Ahead was an open hatchway, beyond which was darkness. He set the VR console to record, sent a message to the cat ordering it back to the Indra , then grinned as the pet promptly ignored the request and began to claw its way towards the hatch.

“Stupid Jones,” he murmured.

A faint growl came over the speakers. Zotz froze, then sighed with relief when he saw his microphone was switched to mute after all. An angry electric cat was not a pretty sight.

Something in the darkness ahead excited the cat and urged it to scramble forward. The view through Zotz’s VR headset changed from colour to monochrome in shades of green as the pet’s electric vision automatically switched from visible light to infra-red. Moments later, the cat clawed over the sill of the hatchway and was inside.

The steel lattice floor at the pet’s feet slowly resolved into a balcony looking out upon the curved walls of the cylindrical hull. Looming out of the gloom in the centre of the vast chamber was the large spherical casing of a nuclear fusion reactor, surrounded by a network of pipes and electrical systems. Everything in sight was caked in mould or fungus. Vine-like growths grew up every walkway, ladder and steel beam, all somewhat reminiscent of the tendrils infesting the cargo bay of the Platypus .

The cat clambered to the top of a flight of steps and peered down. Zotz gazed in awe at the chaotic mishmash of refuse, console parts and weird green globules drifting in zero gravity. Heavy equipment swayed at the end of cables fixed to the reactor. Twelve sinister vats gaped like giant glass seed pods, each standing firm before the reactor and evidently bolted to the floor. An uncontrollable shiver ran down Zotz’s spine.

“The cyberclones!” he murmured.

The huge silver cylinder lashed to Sky Cleaver ’s docking pontoon was the missing engine room of the Dandridge Cole , ejected into space with Taranis and his newly-born creations inside. Zotz still had horrible dreams about his own role in the tense confrontation between Ravana, a double-crossing agent called Fenris and the mad priest himself. Fenris had been killed by the cyberclones and Taranis incapacitated after having his spider-walker chair sabotaged by the teeth and claws of a certain electric cat. Yet the eyes of the very same pet now revealed no trace of Taranis, Fenris or the dreadful clones, living or dead.

Zotz had long felt uneasy over his part in their fate. Now he was unsure which was the greater mystery: how the engine room came to be moored at Thunor, or where its reluctant occupants had gone. It was the latter that worried him most.

“Jones,” he murmured. “I think we’ve seen enough.”

He sent an order to return to the Indra . This time, the cat did not disobey.

The thought that there was a ship full of cannibals somewhere out in space did little to ease Momus’ nerves as the Indra headed back to the Dandridge Cole . Refuelling the tanker had taken an agonisingly long time, during which he and a strangely subdued cat had kept themselves to the Indra ’s flight deck with the airlock securely closed. The image left lodged in his brain by Nyx and his fellow officer turned every streak of rust on Sky Cleaver ’s walls into a splash of blood, every creak of the superstructure into the scrape of a butcher’s knife and every touch of hydraulic hose into a brush of a discarded severed limb. He could see himself having nightmares for months to come.

Once clear of Thunor orbit, he recorded a holovid message to Quirinus and sent it on its way. A two-way conversation was impossible this far from the hollow moon, but despite his promise to Nyx not to say anything it felt good to burden someone with his experience. When Wak’s reply came a couple of hours later, interrupting his enjoyment of the fifties’ clatterstomp blasting from the Indra ’s cabin speakers, Momus was miffed to discover that the others on the Dandridge Cole already seemed to know about the salvaged engine unit and what it may have contained. Now he felt like a sacrificial lamb that against the odds had lived to bleat again.