Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

“Why all the cricket stuff?” Ravana asked, breaking her moody silence.

“What?” Kedesh looked surprised at her question. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m half Indian, half Australian. Do you really think I’ve never come across anyone using cricketing terms before?”

“Fair point.” Kedesh waved the pot of rice again and beckoned to Ravana to join her at the table. “Do you play?”

“My father tried to teach me a couple of summers ago. I wasn’t very good.”

“I played a little for Kent back in the seventies. It’s hard to get a game these days with me always on the move, but I keep the old bat around just in case.”

“The shin pads came in handy,” mused Ravana, thinking back to Kedesh’s fracas against the spiders. “You are a very unusual person.”

“Thraak,” agreed Nana.

Ravana took the offered rice and settled down to eat. The smell of food managed what the tremor failed to achieve and a hungry, bleary-eyed Artorius was soon awake and demanding to be fed. The raid on the Falsafah Alpha storeroom had given them a much better selection of meals, but that did not stop Artorius turning his nose up at everything an increasingly-annoyed Ravana presented to him.

After breakfast and customary tea and slice of cake, Kedesh gathered them together in the cockpit and brought up the latest map on the navigation console. Ravana made for the driver’s seat and settled behind the controls with a weary sigh. The transport’s systems had been hard at work interrogating the satellite and she saw the geographic chart held much more detail than before. The broad-topped peak ahead now had a name.

“Hursag Asag,” read Artorius, squinting at the screen. “What does what mean?”

“Demon Mountain?” suggested Kedesh.

“Fwack!”

“My thoughts exactly,” muttered Ravana.

“Well, it won’t be easy,” Kedesh admitted. She ran a finger along a contour that skirted the edge of a mottled dark patch to the north of the mountain’s caldera. “This side of the peak has a gentler slope so I suggest we head that way. I wish we knew what that dark area is. It seems unusually flat for a volcanic feature.”

“Then let’s get going,” said Ravana. She turned from the screen and switched on the drive systems. “I see no reason to hang around here a minute longer.”

“Don’t you want to have a shower and get changed?” asked Kedesh, perturbed.

Artorius pulled a face. “Smelly Ravana.”

Ravana stared at her ghost-like reflection in the windscreen. Her face was sallow and haggard, her hair looked like a rat’s nest, her bones were starting to ache again and she felt itchy after a hot and uncomfortable night, but she was too tired to care. All she could think about was Doctor Jones, Xuthus and the frail outpost of civilisation in the Arallu Wastes, two days away on the other side of the mountains. Everything else that had happened did not matter. She just wanted to go home.

“You do what you like,” she said and shoved the gear lever into ‘drive’.

Over the next few hours the terrain became progressively steeper. The route identified by Kedesh led them up the shallow valley of an ancient lava channel that over millennia had filled with wind-blown sand, creating a scarlet desiccated glacier. Ravana still felt low and was glad to be on the move, but her lack of sleep eventually began to take its toll and when the time came to hand over driving duties to Kedesh she did so with relief. During Ravana’s spell at the wheel, Nana sat quietly in the co-pilot’s seat, solemnly studying the navigation console. Ravana had not seen either of the greys try to operate onboard equipment before and had been surprised to see Nana flicking through the various applications with remarkable fluency.

Leaving Kedesh with Nana in the cockpit, Ravana took her growing melancholy into the passenger compartment and slunk into a corner to watch Artorius and Stripy entertain themselves with yet another variation of the slapping game. After a while, the young grey broke away, came to where she sat huddled upon the bunk and gently placed a six-fingered hand upon her knee. It was such a touching gesture that Ravana managed a smile.

“Fwack?” asked Stripy.

“A little bit,” she admitted. “But I’m fine, really.”

“Why are you sad?” asked Artorius, with a distinct lack of sympathy.

Ravana sighed. “I can’t stop thinking about what we did to Taranis,” she said. “It must have been a horrible way to die. I hated him and Fenris for what they did to my father. I made Zotz force the ejection of the engine room. I am a dreadful person.”

“I hate the nurses,” Artorius said solemnly. “They were horrible to me.”

“Fwack,” added Stripy. “Fwack fwack!”

“I killed a man. That was wrong.”

“Are you quite sure he’s dead?” asked Kedesh, glancing over her shoulder. “Two of his creations survived. You saw them yourself.”

“Nurse Lilith said he was dead,” Ravana pointed out. “She accused me of murder.”

“People lie,” said Kedesh.

The transport jolted over a rock and she returned her attention to the path ahead. Ravana frowned and wondered if there was wisdom in the woman’s words, yet the thought Taranis could still be alive was no more reassuring. She decided to change the subject.

“It’s strange we’re not being followed,” she mused, addressing Kedesh. “A transport chased us from the dome, but since you rescued us we haven’t seen anyone apart from those Que Qiao agents.”

“I’m sure we’re being tracked,” replied Kedesh. “The satellite, remember?”

“The Dhusarians went to a lot of trouble to keep us hidden away,” Ravana reminded her. “I thought they’d try harder than this to get us back.”

“It’s their innings. You’re stuck on Falsafah until they pull the stumps.”

“We’re lucky this planet hasn’t killed us by now,” said Ravana, unconvinced. “Perhaps they don’t care if we live or die.”

“Fwack!”

“I agree,” remarked Kedesh. “That is a gloomy thought.”

“I don’t want to die,” Artorius mumbled.

“I’m sorry.” Ravana reached forward and gave him a hug. “Everything is going to be fine. The nurses at the dome were horrible but they obviously thought you were a very special little boy. Do you recall anything else of the rhyme you were taught? Something about a great game, paw-prints of the gods?”

The boy solemnly scratched his cheek and shook his head.

“I’ll try hard to remember,” he said sullenly. “Is it important?”

“I think you’ve been dragged into another of Taranis’ stupid prophecies. That could be why the Dhusarians brought you to Falsafah just as we’re digging up whatever it is we found,” said Ravana. A new thought occurred to her. “You never said how long you were in that dreadful place. Can you remember?”

“It was a long time,” Artorius said in a small voice.

“Are we talking days?” asked Kedesh, who was listening. “Months, years?”

“I don’t know,” the boy moaned. He looked close to tears.

“It doesn’t matter.” Ravana gave him another hug. “How did you get there?”

Artorius rubbed his nose and frowned. “There was a black spaceship,” he said. “Me and the nurses got on at Camelot. It went into space and then did an ED jump and flew to a big red planet. We landed in the desert and we got in the transport where there were two men in cloaks and then drove to the dome where Nana and Stripy lived.”

“Thraak thraak,” Nana interjected, looking up from the console.

“Those men were cyberclones,” Ravana told Artorius. “Brother Simha and Dhanus, who I told you about. So you knew we were on Falsafah all that time?”