Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

“Taranis had an implant,” she mused. “I think that’s how I could sense his presence, just like I could with the cyberclones. He was able to do things I didn’t think was possible. A friend of mine had a birdsuit with inbuilt artificial muscles and Taranis was able to take control of it and use it against him. It scared the life out of all of us!”

“You too have that power!” Kedesh remarked. She answered Ravana’s look of surprise with a wry grin. “Special-forces implants can use what they call ‘back doors’ in AI chips, whether or not the chip has a proper implant interface or not.”

Ravana thought about this. “When I was on Yuanshi recently I found there were all sorts of locks and things I could operate, which others with standard implants couldn’t even see,” she said. “It was the same with the doors at the Dhusarians’ dome. But those put proper images into my mind that I could mentally press, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s a little-known fact that almost all security devices made by Que Qiao have secret overrides that can be remotely operated by agents with special-forces implants,” said Kedesh. “But I’m talking about something quite different. There’s this chap on Avalon who was a Que Qiao agent before he double-crossed them and went on the run. He’s well known for bowling the odd googly during Gods of Avalon . He plays a blinder with his implant to take control of whatever he likes; props, robots, terraforming machines, anything. The authorities don’t have a chance of getting near him without risking a nasty incident live on holovid.”

“Was he the one who pretended to be wizard Merlin?” Artorius piped up. Kedesh glanced over her shoulder and smiled, unaware the boy had been listening.

Ravana frowned. “You’re both making this up.”

“Not at all!” said Kedesh. “Next time you’re on Avalon, ask around.”

Artorius went back to his slapping game with Stripy. Ravana thought about when she had used her implant in the rescue of her father from Sumitra Palace; breaching security had been a simple matter of pressing mental switches just as Kedesh described. However, the first time she had experienced the power of her implant had been before she even knew it was there. An accident left her dangling on a rope inside a sealed vertical shaft, but somehow she had been able to visualise a nearby airlock control and flex the image in her mind.

“I think I know what you mean,” she said slowly. “There was this time…”

She tailed off, distracted by a flashing red symbol on the scanner console screen that faded almost as soon as it appeared. Startled, Ravana peered through the windscreen and to her surprise saw a windowless concrete bunker nestling in a crevice on the edge of the valley floor. The headlamps briefly raised a glint from the solar panel array upon the roof, then the bunker slipped past back into the gloom. The narrowing valley became a canyon. They passed close to a rocky outcrop and noticed for the first time how the cliff edges were covered in pale, wispy threads. Puzzled, Ravana looked ahead and stiffened as a dark shape scuttled across the ground ahead at the edge of their headlight beams.

“I don’t like the look of this,” muttered Kedesh. “I’ll try infra-red.”

She tapped at the console to change the scanner mode, reached to the holovid display and switched on the infra-red cameras. The screen lit up in a ghastly shade of green.

Ravana gasped in horror. The valley ahead crawled with huge, eight-legged creatures that were the stuff of nightmares. Infra-red revealed the glistening shine of bulbous carapaces, the glint of multiple eyes and stilt-like hairy legs of creatures that had no right standing as tall as they did. Below the holovid screen, the scanner in its new mode was suddenly alive with countless red blobs, all congregating upon the transport.

“Ashtapadas,” Ravana whispered. “Hundreds of them!”

Artorius and the greys came forward to look. Ravana almost jumped out of her skin when the boy promptly shrieked in her ear.

“Giant spiders!” he yelled, pointing. “They’re everywhere!”

“Thraak!”

“Fwack fwack!”

“Please!” shouted Kedesh. “Calm down, all of you!”

“How can they be here?” wailed Ravana, terrified. “The air’s poisonous!”

“But perfectly safe for cats with yellow eyes?” suggested Kedesh.

Ravana glared at her. Kedesh shoved the speed control lever forward and the transport leapt forward as if its tail was on fire. Ravana shrieked and fell back in her seat. Through the windows, the web-strewn walls of the canyon became a blur. A huge black shape, the size of a cow but with a confusing contortion of legs, suddenly loomed large in the headlamps. There was a thump and the transport battered the hideous creature aside.

“Is that your plan?” cried Ravana. “Ram our way out?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I’m frightened,” moaned Artorius. “I hate spiders.”

“Join the club,” muttered Ravana. She pulled Artorius onto her lap and held him tight, more for her own reassurance than the boy’s own.

“Atmospheric sensors show unusually high oxygen levels outside,” Kedesh remarked wryly, raising her voice above the harsh whine of the transport’s stressed engine. “We may have stumbled into some sort of genetic-engineering experiment. Or maybe they’re cyberclones or machines and not really alive at all.”

Ravana shrieked again. A spider with legs splayed a metre either side dropped from nowhere and splattered heavily across the transport’s windscreen. Artorius whimpered and clutched her ever tighter. The impact left the windscreen smeared with mangled spindly limbs, ragged chunks of spider carapace and blood.

“My mistake,” said Kedesh. She switched on the windscreen wipers. “They are real live creatures after all. Well, except that one.”

The windscreen cleared just in time for them to see another spider hit the side of the transport and spin away into the shadows. The canyon walls either side were thickly shrouded with webs, down which a torrent of black shapes cascaded to the valley floor. Two large spiders scuttled before them and were promptly crushed beneath the transport’s wheels, but as the vehicle bounced over the crumpled bodies there came an ominous thud, followed by a series of mechanical clunks. The powerful purr of the engine suddenly changed into a growl both coarse and laboured. The clanking became insistent and Ravana’s blood ran cold when she realised the transport was starting to slow down.

“This is not good,” Kedesh said. She had gone very pale.

“Make them go away!” cried Artorius.

“Fwack!”

“Thraak thraak!” added Nana.

“I’m sure we’re quite safe inside here,” Kedesh reassured them.

A spider, some three metres high, crashed down the valley wall in a flurry of legs. Before they could steer clear, the creature hit them squarely above the port-side front wheel with a force that made the transport lurch. Ravana screamed as a giant eye loomed large in the window to her left, then again when she saw the crack in the glass and the large dent in the panel below. A warning buzzer sounded and red lights on the console began to flash.

“We’re going to be battered to death!” cried Ravana.

“Unless the air poisons us first,” Kedesh said, speaking far too casually. She silenced the buzzer and stared hard at the console. “That last impact cracked the hull. Life-support is holding for now but we’re using up oxygen reserves fast. There should be an emergency sealant kit and masks in the locker at your feet.”

Ravana looked to where the woman pointed, yanked open the locker door and found a rack of survival masks with tiny oxygen cylinders attached. She quickly handed a mask each to Artorius, Kedesh and the greys, took one for herself and reached for what she thought was a sealant canister, only to find herself holding a stubby-barrelled plasma pistol. Ravana caught Kedesh’s frown and hurriedly returned the gun, found the canister and pointed the nozzle at the crack in the window at her side. A quick pull on the trigger resulted in a satisfying slurping noise and a sticky smear of sealant upon the crack.