Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

“Look!” she cried, pointing. “They’re coming through the dome!”

Ravana gasped in horror. A spider was wriggling through a hole in the dome’s inflatable wall, its powerful jaws masticating upon shreds of ripped fabric. The poisonous air of Falsafah did not seem to be slowing it down. Momus glanced up and went pale.

“What the bloody crapping hell is that frigging eight-legged freak?”

“Ship!” yelled Ravana. “Start the engines, maximum reverse thrust!”

“Brakes released,” said Quirinus. “I’m extending the wings now.”

The Platypus shuddered into life with a roar of thrusters and backed away from the dome. More spiders were forcing their way through the dome’s sagging wall. Kedesh tore her eyes from the scene, turned to the crawl tunnel and cursed as a couple of the AI’s tendrils dropped from a conduit and slapped her in the face. She gave Quirinus a startled stare, wedged her cannon and cricket bat under another thick tendril, grabbed the cryogenic capsule cartridge and hurriedly slipped away to the cargo bay to find a seat.

“Main engines running using onboard oxygen,” the AI confirmed.

“Ravana, can you handle take-off?” asked Quirinus. “The boosters aren’t wired into the AI, so I need to run some manual calculations on when to fire them.”

“What about me?” retorted Momus. “The pilot you hired?”

“I know exactly when to fire you,” Quirinus muttered. Zotz grinned.

Ravana nodded anxiously. She switched to forward thrust, pulled the rudder across and the beak-like nose of the Platypus swung away from the archaeologists’ domes onto the runway. Several tense moments passed before the ship reached the end of the airstrip and turned once more for its take-off run. Ravana’s implant link to the AI was live and she mentally scanned the various read-outs for alerts. The hull sensors made it feel as if the spacecraft’s wings were trembling in sympathy with her own nerves rather than on the breeze. Quirinus pressed a switch to activate the ship’s intercom.

“Ready for take off,” he announced. His amplified voice echoed back through the crawl tunnel. “Anyone not strapped into a seat is about to get very bruised.”

“Ship,” said Ravana. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Your wish is my command,” said the AI. “Commencing full thrust now.”

The main engines roared and the Platypus surged down the runway. They were close to take-off speed when a huge arachnid suddenly scurried across the airstrip ahead. Ravana gritted her teeth, hauled back on the aileron control and the spacecraft lifted just as a loud thud came from below. Her hands firm upon the controls, she used her implant to switch on the rear-view camera. The display rewarded her with an image of the mangled remains of a spider spread across the runway. More importantly, they were in the air.

“That was close,” she murmured and flexed her throbbing arm. “Too close.”

“Cool,” murmured Zotz, looking pale.

“Good work,” Quirinus agreed, glancing from where he tapped busily at a console. “We need to persuade Verdandi to give you a pilot’s licence. It doesn’t seem fair that the law makes you wait until you’re eighteen.”

Momus stared at her. “You haven’t got a frigging licence?”

Ravana grinned. “Out here, who cares?”

“How about the police ship behind us?” suggested Zotz.

The rear-view display showed a flying-wing spacecraft hot on their tail. Ravana accessed her implant and brought up the ship’s location beacon data.

“The Alf-Sana Booma ,” she said. “It must be the Que Qiao agents’ ship.”

“Forget them,” said Quirinus. “We need to fire the boosters at ten kilometres. It’s more marginal than I hoped, but I never expected to have this many people aboard.”

“What if they don’t bloody fire?” asked Momus.

Quirinus ignored him and instead looked questioningly at Ravana.

“Altitude is five kilometres and climbing,” she said, after a lengthy pause. “We’re on the maximum rate of ascent but still some way off escape velocity.”

The violent shuddering of the ship began to ease as they climbed ever higher through the thinning upper atmosphere. She watched her father’s hand go to the control panel for the trio of rockets fixed to the hull, fully aware that what they were about to attempt was risky in the extreme. The Mars-class Platypus was not designed to break free of a planet with the gravity of Falsafah. If anything went wrong, the only place they could go was down; most likely in a jumble of burning wreckage.

“Eight kilometres,” she said. “I’m bringing in the wings. Ship, how are we doing?”

“Atmospheric ascent is steady and holding,” responded the AI.

The Alf-Sana Booma shot into view above them at the head of four blazing spears of thrust. It was a more powerful ship and would have no problem making orbit. An unexpected pang of jealousy made Ravana feel quite defensive about the ageing Platypus , which had been a part of her life as long as she could remember. She gave the console a soothing pat.

“Ten kilometres on my mark,” she said. “Five, four, three, two…”

Quirinus thumbed the switch. Ravana felt a surge of relief as all three boosters fired, instantly shoving her back in her seat to a rumble she felt through the vibrating hull rather than heard. Startled shrieks drifted from the carousel and cargo bay, which were promptly drowned by a sudden chorus of alarms from the console. The ship was being pushed past its design limits for atmospheric flight and the AI did not like it one bit.

Momus reached to the console and silenced the alarms. Through the windscreen, the curvature of the planet below was becoming more pronounced, wreathed in atmospheric haze below a pink Falsafah sky darkening to black. Ravana, her hands drenched in sweat upon the controls, concentrated on completing their course into orbit. Her headache had returned, this time on the grounds it felt like her eyeballs were rattling inside her skull.

After what seemed an age, the boosters cut out and the shaking of the ship eased. The stillness that descended upon the flight deck was sudden and sweet, broken only by the gentle murmur of the main engines. Ravana leaned back in her chair and sighed with relief.

“Orbital insertion complete,” the ship informed them. Ravana thought the AI sounded surprised it was not delivering a more doom-laden missive. “That was a most exhilarating experience. Main engines powering down. Interplanetary plasma drive on standby.”

Quirinus stretched wearily and batted away a stray tendril floating up from the console. The fading look of panic upon his face spoke volumes.

“Piece of cake,” he remarked. “Next stop, Barnard’s Star.”

“Cake?” Ravana smiled and thought of the greys. “I gave the last of it to Nana.”

Her face fell when she saw the angular blip on the scanner screen. The Alf-Sana Booma , ahead in a higher orbit, was dropping back down and coming their way.

The Alf-Sana Booma loomed large through the windscreen. It had not taken the Que Qiao officers long to bring their ship alongside the Platypus and issue their demands to come aboard. The flying wing approached from above, belly-side up, spraying jets of gas as it moved to dock its roof airlock with that of the aged freighter. Ravana and Quirinus both knew the Platypus could not outrun the police flyer, but figured they had nothing to hide. That did not stop Kedesh looking worried.

Several anxious minutes later, there was a clunk and the two ships docked. Quirinus asked Momus to watch over Lilith and Dagan in the carousel until they found out what the agents wanted, but left the ship’s intercom switched on so everyone could hear. Fornax and Philyra stayed with the Dhusarians, eager to question them for Fornax’s coveted scoop. Being in orbit meant there was no real gravity within either ship, but with Artorius and Govannon joining Quirinus, Ravana and Kedesh on the flight deck, plus Zotz, Xuthus, Hestia and Urania all scrabbling for space to watch from the crawl tunnel, being able to float did little to ease an uncomfortably crowded situation as they waited for their visitors to arrive.