Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

“What are you doing here?” hissed Fornax. “And what’s with the hair?”

“Who are you?” asked the woman. “This is a restricted area!”

“I’m Sister Selene from Newbrum Church,” said Philyra and held out her hand. “I see you’ve already met Sister Gabriel, who’s visiting us from the United States.”

Fornax caught on quickly. She gave the Indian woman a suitably haughty expression and was most annoyed when it was ignored. The woman looked at Philyra’s offered hand as if debating whether the girl’s wristpad was worth stealing.

“That’s right!” Fornax declared defiantly. “I am Sister, err… Gabriel, sent from the Dhusarian Church of California with special instructions to report back on our operations on Falsafah. These are interesting times, do you not agree?”

The woman was not convinced. “Stay there while I check,” she said coldly.

She took a few steps back, tapped the screen of her own wristpad and entered into an urgent hushed conversation. Fornax pulled Philyra aside and shook her head in irritation.

“I told you to go home,” she murmured. “This is too risky for you to be involved!”

“My mum said it’s okay for me to come with you,” Philyra whispered in return. Fornax frowned and wondered whether the girl had mentioned to her parents that being the reporter’s assistant might involve a trip to Tau Ceti. “You need me! My friend Bellona told me all about her weird Dhusarian friends and I can help us get on that ship.”

“You’re mad,” Fornax told her.

The woman finished her wristpad conversation and noisily cleared her throat to attract their attention. She wore the disappointed look of an arsonist who had applied for a job in the fire brigade without checking to see what it actually involved.

“We have never heard of a Sister Gabriel,” the woman said slowly, eyeing Fornax carefully, then shifted her stare to Philyra. “But they described Selene to me and it seems to be you. We’ve received the holovid file of some book you asked us to take to Falsafah. They didn’t say you were to deliver it personally.”

“Change of plan,” Philyra said swiftly. Fornax saw her expression and guessed the girl had struck lucky with her chosen disguise. She wondered whether to panic at the thought of being asked about a book of which she had no knowledge. “I met Forn… err, Sister Gabriel at the spaceport and so decided to accompany her to Tau Ceti. She’s just arrived and hasn’t had time to report to the Church, you see. I thought I’d brief her during the flight.”

“That’s very good,” murmured Fornax, impressed.

The woman gave them one last stare, then with a shrug of her shoulders stepped aside and waved towards the door of the waiting spacecraft.

“Welcome aboard,” she said. “We depart for Falsafah in one hour.”

Ostara peered from the tent at the street outside. Behind her, Endymion had managed to lift the heavy concrete lid in the road and stared cautiously into the chamber below. Ostara felt foolish enough to be wearing tatty overalls and a bright yellow hard hat, hiding in a square orange tent in the middle of Broad Street whilst she and Endymion pretended to be engineers, but now they had a new worry to contend with. She darted back inside.

“Nyx!” she hissed. “He’s coming over!”

“I don’t think he knows me,” said Endymion. “You hide in the tunnel.”

Ostara gave the newly-exposed hole a wary look. “Down there?”

“Yes! And be quiet!”

She dropped to the floor, swung her legs into the opening and shimmied down the ladder into the shadows. Moments later, the tent flap was pulled aside by a policeman’s half-clenched hand and a shaft of red daylight dispelled the gloom. Ostara caught a glimpse of the newcomer’s face and shivered. Nyx was not in uniform but nevertheless still carried the look of a law-enforcement officer not easily impressed.

“What’s all this?” he asked gruffly. “I didn’t know we had works scheduled.”

“Emergency repairs,” Endymion told him. “A minor leak, that’s all.”

Nyx’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have a permit?”

“Of course,” Endymion retorted.

They had expected this question. Ostara heard a rustling as Endymion went to his bag and withdrew a certificate that an hour ago had taken pride of place upon her office wall. She watched him hand it to Nyx, who studied it carefully.

“This says ‘Private Investigator Licence’,” the officer observed.

“It’s a sewage system inspection permit,” Endymion pointed out. “Ignore the ‘private investigator’ bit; some joker in Verdandi’s office did that. It is signed by the Administrator.”

“Investigating the dregs of society, eh?”

Endymion grinned. “Something like that.”

Ostara could tell Nyx smelt a rat. The odour wafting up from her hiding place was a lot more real and hopefully enough to persuade him to go away. After an overly-long pause, Nyx handed back the certificate, gave a curt nod to Endymion and eased his tall frame from the tent. Endymion stared after him for a few moments and then gave a sigh of relief.

“That was close,” he murmured.

“Has he gone?” Ostara called. Her voice echoed eerily in the tunnel.

Endymion fastened the flap closed and came to the edge of the hole. Ostara stood at the bottom of the ladder some three metres below, with a boot either side of the sluggish stream of effluent running along the floor. She was not happy to have discovered that there was a genuine leak after all. Newbrum’s water and power systems were supposed to be sealed and the service tunnels kept dry.

“All clear,” Endymion confirmed.

“This place smells terrible,” she complained. “Can we get a move on?”

Endymion collected his bag and joined her at the bottom of the ladder. The unlit tunnel ran east to west along the length of Broad Street, with smaller passageways splitting off to the north and south at regular intervals. There was barely enough room even for the diminutive Ostara to stand upright, while the pipes and cable conduits attached to the walls on either side made the walkway narrow. The hard hats procured by Endymion had tiny lamps upon the brim, but once away from the opening to the street the light they emitted did little to make the tunnel feel less claustrophobic.

They had gone just a few metres when Endymion directed Ostara to a smaller tunnel to the south. The smell was worse than ever; a large pipe had cracked where it curved around the corner, leaking raw sewage. Hands over their noses, Endymion and Ostara stepped over the pool of fetid brown sludge and slipped into the side passage. The beams of their hard-hat lamps revealed the low tunnel was mercifully short. Ahead they saw a circular hatch, next to which various pipes and cables disappeared through the surrounding wall.

“With any luck, this door is our way into the building,” said Endymion.

“I’d settle for anywhere with fresh air,” muttered Ostara.

Endymion produced a crank handle from inside his flight suit, slotted it into a hole in the hatch and turned it until they both heard the clunk as locking bolts withdrew. When he caught Ostara’s quizzical expression, he adopted such a guilty look she did not have the heart to ask him how he came to possess such a useful tool.

He pulled open the hatch and they scrambled through the opening into the cramped basement beyond. The lights were on, revealing water treatment units, electrical distribution boxes and other apparatus for the building above. A door on the far side led them to a room filled with sacks of rubbish, the delicate odour of rat faeces and a blood-smeared freezer cabinet that smelt of raw meat. A faint murmur of voices came from the corridor beyond.