Paw-Prints Of The Gods (20 page)

“Me? I’m just a
filthy-rich, eccentric adventurer,” the woman said briskly. “You’re
with the archaeologists? Found anything exciting at Arallu?”

“Dead aliens,”
Artorius intoned. Keeping to his seat, he mimed a mummified corpse
walking out of a tomb, his arms outstretched above the table.

“How fascinating!”
remarked Kedesh. “Ravana, are you not having cake?”

Ravana caught her odd
expression, opened her mouth to reply, then hesitantly took a
slice. Artorius had not waited to be invited and had already wolfed
down three portions. Ravana munched thoughtfully upon the fruit
cake and found it surprisingly good.

“A rich adventurer?”
she asked, looking at Kedesh. “I don’t believe you.”

“A roving researcher
for
The Amateur Astronaut’s Guide to the Five Systems
?”

“Thraak thraak!”

“She said astronaut,
not hitch-hiker,” Artorius told Nana.

“Does it matter who I
am?” Kedesh said testily. “I saved your lives! I gave you tea and
cake! I’d much rather talk about what you’re doing here, so far
away from home.”

“It matters a lot.”
Ravana took another sip of tea, unwilling to satisfy the woman’s
interest in the excavation until she had some answers herself. “We
only have your word that you’re not in league with the nutcases in
that dome. How do you know my name?”

Kedesh looked
momentarily flustered. “Artorius told me,” she said at last.

“Did I?” Artorius
looked surprised.

Ravana raised a
surprised eyebrow. “No, I don’t think you did.”

“My mistake,” Kedesh
admitted. “Let’s just say I have a special interest in making sure
we’re not left on the back foot by groups such as the Dhusarian
Church. Anyone who delves into the life of the priest Taranis will
soon come across the name of Ravana O’Brien. Is that not so, my
would-be demon king of Yuanshi?”

Ravana shuddered.
Taranis was one name she was unlikely ever to forget.

“Demon king?” asked
Artorius. He looked at Ravana in awe.

“Ravana is the
legendary demon king from the Ramayana,” Ravana said, sighing.
“Taranis gave me the name before I was born and arranged for me to
have a special-forces implant, all as part of a prophecy he
invented to win supreme power on Yuanshi. Then my mother rebelled
and had treatment to make sure she would have a girl rather than a
boy. The Dhusarians do not recognise women as being capable of
holding power,” she explained, seeing Artorius look puzzled.
“Taranis’ stupid war killed my mother, left me scarred for life and
drove father and I into exile. I’m now nothing more than an outcast
with a stupid boy’s name and hardware in my head I still don’t
fully understand.”

“Ravana doesn’t sound
like a boy’s name,” Artorius said hesitantly.

“It does if you’re
Hindu!” she retorted. “The school bullies reminded me every day.
Father found he couldn’t change official records, so made a point
of correcting those who pronounced ‘Ravana’ the Indian way instead
of how he thought it should be,” she said, emphasising the long
vowel of the second ‘a’ in her name. “He’s Australian.”

“It would be like
Christians naming their daughter ‘Satan’,” Kedesh told Artorius and
smiled at his look of disgust. “Why not change it unofficially?”
she asked Ravana. “Though I appreciate it is hard to cast aside a
birth name and put on fresh whites.”

“I did think about
it,” she admitted. “But once we left Yuanshi for the
Dandridge
Cole
it no longer seemed important. The folk there saw it as
just one more exotic foreign name. Then Taranis turned up and
dragged up the past in front of my friends.”

“Who’s Taranis?” asked
Artorius, who had slyly reached for another piece of cake.

“A misguided but
charismatic priest who brought about the Dhusarian Church,” said
Kedesh. “Half man, half machine and totally insane. I’ve been
pursuing him for some time.”

“Half machine?”
Artorius’ eyes went wide.

“He has this spider
walker contraption to move him around, only it has somehow become
part of him,” Ravana explained. She eyed Kedesh cautiously. “I
heard he was dead. And that I killed him.”

Kedesh smiled. “You? I
didn’t have you down as the murderous type.”

“Taranis hurt my
friends and had us all really scared,” Ravana said bitterly. She
shifted uneasily in her seat, for the priest’s alleged death
remained an uncomfortable subject. “He was too strong to fight, so
we set him and his monsters adrift in deep space. I encouraged Zotz
to do it, which makes me just as guilty as if I had pulled the
trigger on a gun!”

“Thraak thraak!”
interjected Nana.

“I left you to die
with him,” Ravana pointed out. “That makes it worse.”

“Your witness appears
to think you acted in self-defence.” Kedesh seemed quite taken
aback by Ravana’s outburst. “Besides, are you really sure Taranis
is dead?”

“Are you saying he’s
alive and on Falsafah?”

“I’m not sure. There’s
a trail of sorts that leads to Tau Ceti, so I thought it was worth
keeping an eye on the Dhusarians’ dome,” said Kedesh. “Did you know
Taranis used it as a base many years ago, after he disappeared from
Yuanshi? Anyway, there was something about the manner of your
departure from the dome that seemed suspicious so I followed. It
wasn’t until I saw you face to face that I realised who you were,”
she added, making as if to touch Ravana’s disfigured cheek. “An
Indian girl with such distinctive scars, escaping a Dhusarian
compound? It had to be you.”

“What about me?” asked
Artorius.

“What about you?” the
woman retorted. “I have no idea who you are.”

“How about the greys?”
asked Ravana.

“That depends,” she
said and looked at Nana. “Are you the unfortunate mother?”

“Thraak,” Nana intoned
sadly. “Thraak thraak.”

“You know about the
cyberclones?” asked Ravana, surprised.

“Why else do you think
I was watching the dome? A disturbing development, even by
Dhusarian standards. It rather bowled me over.”

“I never saw them,”
Artorius said irritably.

“They’re the monks I
told you about,” said Ravana.

“Thraak!”

“Fwack fwack,” added
Stripy.

“No, we didn’t think
you were the father,” said Kedesh. “I’m sure you are just
friends.”

“Fwack fwack
fwack!”

“Somehow, I can’t see
how hiding in some child’s wardrobe and wearing disguises is
relevant. Even if it does involving flying bicycles.”

“On Yuanshi?” Now it
was Ravana’s turn to look confused.

“They told me that
story,” Artorius remarked. “They were on some moon but got left
behind. Nana was injured and captured first, then Stripy was picked
up later.”

“I always knew they
were more intelligent than people would ever admit,” Ravana said
slowly. “And that’s the people who accept them as real. But I
thought their ship had crashed. When I first saw Nana, many years
ago, I remember seeing wreckage.”

“Your little grey
friends are smarter than you could ever possibly imagine,” said
Kedesh. “But can we get back to the current state of play? For
starters, why are the damned Dhusarians so interested in you?”

“I have no idea!”
retorted Ravana, quite put out by the look Kedesh gave her.

“Really?”

“Sorry, but I’m not
sure if I can trust you,” said Ravana. The expression on Kedesh’s
face turned to one of hurt. “I’ve had my mind messed with once
already on this planet.”

“The Dhusarians are
not overly fond of me either,” Kedesh reassured her. “How about if
we proceed on the basis of my enemy’s enemy is my friend?”

“In my experience it’s
never that simple!”

“Do you want to tell
me about it?”

Ravana sighed. “The
Book of the Greys,” she said. “When we confronted Taranis on the
Dandridge Cole
, I took his
Isa-Sastra
. It’s the
original, the one the Dhusarians claim was given to a prophet
called Betty Hill three hundred years ago.”

“Thraak thraak,” added
Nana.

“Yes, I know it was
you who wanted me to take it.”

Kedesh looked at
Ravana. “And?”

“The book contains a
passage on whatever it is buried out there in the Arallu Wastes,”
said Ravana. “Taranis seemed to think it was very important.”

“Buried treasure?”
suggested Artorius.

“Fwack fwack!”

“And it intrigued you
enough to join the Bradbury Heights dig to see it for yourself,”
Kedesh observed, eyeing Ravana carefully. “But there’s more to it
than that, isn’t there?”

It was not a question.
Ravana took a thoughtful sip of tea and wondered, not for the first
time, just how much their mysterious rescuer really did know.

“We had started to
uncover what Professor Cadmus thought was an alien temple,” she
told Kedesh. “He was very excited about a long sequence of
hieroglyphs we found engraved on the remains of a glass archway. I
didn’t tell anyone that I’d found an exact match in alien script in
the
Isa-Sastra
, in the section Taranis believed was a
prophecy.”

“So you think there’s
something at Arallu the Dhusarians want for themselves?”

“All I know is someone
once told me that Taranis would not let anyone else see the
original
Isa-Sastra
,” Ravana said. “I wondered if the
Dhusarians are worried that I’ll reveal this connection between the
Arallu hieroglyphs and the supposed prophecy.”

“Where is the book
now?” asked Kedesh.

“Not on Falsafah. I
have a scanned copy on my slate back at the dig, though.”

“Even more reason to
reunite you with your fellow archaeologists as soon as possible,”
mused Kedesh. “Were you carrying enough supplies to get that
far?”

“No,” admitted Ravana.
“We were hoping to pick up more food at a settlement the map showed
a couple of days from here.”

“I know it,” Kedesh
replied. “I’m pretty sure it’s abandoned, but standard practice is
to leave some stuff behind in case of emergencies. I don’t have
enough rations aboard to sustain the four of us all the way to
Arallu, so we’ll stick to your plan. It’ll be good to drop by
Morrigan’s Bar,” she added wistfully. “There’s something about this
endless desert that makes me crave a long, cool schooner of lager.
They serve it ice-cold in Arallu.”

“You’re taking us to
the dig?” asked Ravana, surprised.

“You have intrigued
me, Ravana,” Kedesh said and picked up the one piece of cake
Artorius had left unmolested. “There’s something out there the
Dhusarians want to keep secret. That’s enough for me!”

* * *

Kedesh’s transport was
more powerful than the one Ravana and Artorius had stolen from the
dome and in no time at all they had left the crash site behind, the
vehicle bouncing defiantly across the rocky desert, heading
north-west as if fleeing the breaking dawn. The transport’s
navigational computer held large-scale geographical studies of
Falsafah and with Kedesh busy at the controls, Ravana whiled away
the time examining the terrain between them and the distant Arallu
Wastes. Despite her reservations, they were aiming for the gravel
road, which ran north from the Dhusarians’ dome for a few hundred
kilometres and then curved west to a small landing strip Kedesh
believed was used to fly in supplies. From there, the road
continued a thousand kilometres west along the equator to another
tiny airstrip recorded as disused. The unnamed settlement Ravana
noted earlier was a short distance north from there, along with the
hope they would find what they needed by way of food. The road ran
no further and the following five thousand kilometres to Arallu
were across a range of mountains that looked a daunting prospect
for anything on wheels.

“We should hit the
road far enough west of the Dhusarians’ airstrip that we won’t be
spotted,” Kedesh reassured her. “Until then, it’ll be cross-country
driving for the next five or six hours. We should pick up pace
after that.”

“Fine by me,” replied
Ravana. She was glad to be on the move again.

Artorius and the greys
sat quietly in the cabin behind, strangely subdued. Ravana took a
break from studying maps and idly scrutinised the disfigured skin
of her right forearm. As a child on Yuanshi, she had been caught in
a bomb blast during a skirmish between Que Qiao agents and royalist
rebels. The scars had been there for as long as she could remember,
yet the last few months had seen a change, for the faint silver
tracings she had first noticed upon her face in the mirror had now
also appeared amidst the scar tissue of her weakened right arm.
When she caught Kedesh giving her an inquisitive look, Ravana
pulled down her sleeve and stared resolutely through the
windscreen.

“Is everything okay?”
the woman asked.

“Not really,” Ravana
said with a sigh. “But I live in hope.”

A few hours into their
journey, when Artorius had crept into a bunk to take his third nap
of the day, Kedesh returned to the subject of Taranis. The greys
sat perched on the edge of the bunk behind Kedesh and Ravana in the
cockpit, comically swaying with the motion of the transport as it
swept on over the dunes. It had been playing on Ravana’s mind as to
why Kedesh was so unfazed by the presence of the greys. The
existence of intelligent aliens was a long way from being
officially acknowledged. Governments across the five systems held
the line that the legendary greys of Epsilon Eridani were figments
of the deluded; alternatively, that they were an invention of the
Dhusarians, which to many amounted to the same thing. Ravana did
not have Kedesh down as either and her casual acceptance was
puzzling.

“Tell me about the
book,” said Kedesh. “The
Isa-Sastra
. Is it genuine?”

“It’s a fascinating
thing,” Ravana told her, wondering how much to reveal. “When I
first heard the story of how extraterrestrials supposedly brought
it to Earth I found it difficult to take seriously. But it’s
certainly in no script I’d seen before coming to the dig. What’s
interesting is that the way it is written makes it possible to
interpret the basics from scratch, even with no cultural or
linguistic references to work with.”