Paw-Prints Of The Gods (29 page)

“Endymion’s room is
worse than this, the messy pig,” Bellona muttered.

“Oh, have you burgled
my place as well?”

“No, I haven’t!”

“So what are you doing
here?” he asked angrily. When Bellona did not reply, he tightened
his grip upon her arm, causing her to wince.

“Endymion!” scolded
Ostara. “Let go of your sister! You’re hurting her!”

Endymion mumbled
something under his breath and released Bellona’s arm. With a
glare, she immediately shuffled away to the end of the bed, keeping
her arms firmly crossed. Ostara had never seen the two of them
squabble like this before, but remembered all too well how her own
elder brothers had bullied her when she was young. Endymion
retreated to the doorway, leaned against the open door and gave his
sister a questioning glare. Bellona dropped her gaze to the floor
and sighed.

“Ravana stole a book,”
she said at last. “I was sent to find it and bring it back.”

Ostara’s eyes
narrowed. “What book?”

“The one she took from
Taranis.” Bellona’s expression suggested she had decided that
honesty, if not the best policy, was easier than inventing a
convincing lie. “The
Isa-Sastra
.”

“The Book of the
Greys?” Endymion frowned. “Who sent you?”

“Shouldn’t I be asking
the questions?” asked Ostara. “I am the detective here.”

Endymion gave a
dismissive wave of his hand. “Be my guest.”

Ostara looked at
Bellona, who tried not to smirk. Ostara’s distracting performance
as the
Dandridge Cole
’s security officer during their last
adventure had been somewhat erratic.

“Well?” the woman
demanded. “Who sent you? People from your church?”

“A girl named Selene,”
Bellona confirmed. “She said I would be rewarded.”

“That’s nice for you,”
muttered Endymion.

“I’d forgotten about
that book.” Ostara looked thoughtful. “Is it valuable?”

“Maybe,” Bellona said
warily.

“Well, Ravana doesn’t
have it anymore,” retorted Endymion. “Verdandi ordered it to be
confiscated as evidence when there was talk of an investigation
into your crackpot church. I have no idea where it is now.”

Bellona glared and
stuck her tongue out at him, but otherwise looked downcast.

“You seem remarkably
well-informed on the subject,” observed Ostara.

“I helped Ravana make
a copy before she...” Endymion started, then bit his lip.

“There’s a copy?”
exclaimed Bellona, brightening.

Endymion quickly shook
his head and turned to avoid her excited stare.

“Where is it?” asked
Bellona. “I know! I bet you used the scanners at school.”

“No, I didn’t!”

“A copy?” asked
Ostara. “Why would she want that old thing?”

“Ravana probably has
it on her slate,” reasoned Bellona. “But you hide all your
programming stuff on the servermoon! I bet you kept a backup
file!”

“Lies!” cried
Endymion, but his guilty expression gave him away.

“Your secret is safe
with me,” Bellona said solemnly.

“Drat,” muttered
Endymion. “Anyway, you’re the one who broke into Quirinus’ cabin. I
could report you to spaceport security!”

“And say what? That
you caught me looking for stolen church property, which you had
secretly copied using school equipment and dodgy hackware?”

“I helped raise the
funds to buy that equipment!” argued Endymion.

“You set up an illegal
holobooth scam,” Bellona reminded him. “You rigged the school’s
network so any telesales AIs that called would be put through to a
premium-rate answering service.”

Endymion scowled.
Ostara grinned, having heard the story before from Ravana. He had
been severely reprimanded at the time, but the school head later
confessed to not being sure whether to expel him or award him an
honorary degree in business studies. Bellona slid from the bunk
without another word and with one last glare pushed her way past
her brother, slipped through the doorway and was gone. Endymion
watched her go and sighed.

“I told you that
church was a bad influence,” he grumbled.

“Is that book
important?” Ostara moved to the door to see where Bellona had gone,
but was distracted by the sight of the café owner walking towards
their table with their order. She blushed as her stomach rumbled
again.

“Maybe,” Endymion said
thoughtfully. He glanced towards the holovid unit on the wall.
“There might be something about it in that BBC report you
mentioned.”

Ostara looked hungrily
towards the food awaiting them at the table.

“It can wait,” she
said. “Detective work is no fun on an empty stomach.”

* * *

Fornax arranged to
meet Philyra at noon, but it was a good ten minutes past the hour
before the young girl finally arrived. The section of Hockley
Market between Queensway and the dome wall was a hive of activity
and possibly the most dirty, noisy and frantic place in Newbrum,
with an incredible array of goods constantly being shunted between
vehicles, storage sheds, shops and stalls. Many of the male workers
nevertheless still found time to stand and leer as she stood at the
roadside, feeling lost and alone. When Philyra finally appeared,
fiddling with her wristpad as she walked, Fornax almost hugged her
in relief. She was touched to see the girl wearing a similar tunic
and leggings outfit to herself, even down to styling her hair the
same way. Fornax smiled, pleased that she had made a lasting
impression upon her young apprentice reporter.

Philyra looked up from
the screen of her wristpad and gave her a critical look. “You
shouldn’t try to copy my style,” she complained, instantly
dampening the woman’s revived spirits. “It doesn’t look right on
you at all.”

Fornax gave Philyra a
suitably withering smile. “What are you watching?” she asked. The
girl’s wristpad screen was alive with flickering holovid
images.

“
Gods of
Avalon
,” she replied and lowered her wrist. “The contestants
get dumber by the week. Some guy fell off a rope bridge into a
river, tried to fight off robot piranhas with an electric lance and
electrocuted himself.”

“Charming,” muttered
Fornax, who was not a fan of the show. “Couldn’t we have met
somewhere else?” she asked and winced as a nearby stack of crates
toppled and crashed to the floor. “As in anywhere else but here?
This place is giving me a headache.”

“You wanted to know
about black market stuff,” Philyra said. “I asked Endymion and he
told me about this guy at the spaceport who does a bit of trading
on the side. He wouldn’t give me the man’s name but did tell me
where to find him.”

“Sounds promising,”
said Fornax. “Where do we find this mysterious stranger?”

Philyra pointed to a
nearby shop, which had a large sign above the grime-covered window
inscribed with the legend: ‘OUTER LIMITS EMPORIUM’. As if to
confirm the shop’s dubious credentials, the nearby street security
cameras had at some point been a victim of targeted arson and were
now not much more than congealed lumps of metal and plastic.

As Fornax and Philyra
approached the door, they were surprised by the appearance of
Ostara and Endymion, who had chosen that moment to exit the very
same shop. Endymion, who carried a small and new-looking holovid
unit of a design not usually seen in Newbrum, greeted them with his
usual easy-going grin. Ostara glared at Fornax as if the reporter
had just kicked a lame puppy across the street.

“Who do we have here?”
sneered Fornax. “The great detective, no less!”

“Still looking for
your scoop?” Ostara asked, mirroring her mocking tone.

“Are you still totally
clueless?” retorted the reporter.

Endymion rolled his
eyes and gave Ostara an impatient nudge with the holovid unit in
his hands. Ostara shot Fornax a final wounded look and led Endymion
away through the bustling market and out of sight. Fornax scowled,
then glanced across to Philyra, who stood with hands on hips and a
look of weary irritation upon her face.

“Coming?” asked
Philyra.

The inside of the shop
was exactly what Fornax expected. Almost every square centimetre of
floor space was taken up by a bizarre mix of cheap furniture,
obsolete electrical equipment, dusty storage boxes and a dormant
electric sheep. A couple of clothes racks displayed a shabby
collection of out-of-date fashions in the far corner.

A narrow walkway wound
through erratic stacks of merchandise to a small serving counter
towards the back. There was a rail hanging at head height above the
counter, upon which Fornax was bemused to see a ragged green parrot
stalking up and down, eyeing them with interest. It looked like it
had been in a fight with an electric fan and in places the feathers
had fallen away to reveal the tarnished robot skeleton beneath. The
proprietor was nowhere in sight, but faint sounds of activity and
recorded music could be heard from a nearby half-open door. The
ceiling light panels were off and the red daylight spilling through
the door and dust-smeared window did little to dispel the
gloom.

“This place is a tip,”
remarked Fornax. “Look at this stuff! What use is it to
anyone?”

“We use what we can
get,” Philyra said indignantly. “Most of us can’t afford to import
fancy new things from Earth or wherever. We don’t have the big
robot factories that make all the nice stuff you’re obviously so
used to.”

“But look at it!
Voice-activated sofas are so twenty-second century.”

Philyra looked at her
in scorn. Fornax smiled, glanced towards the door at the back of
the shop, then walked to the counter and began to examine the odd
bits of rock displayed on a tray. The electric parrot shuffled
along its perch and fixed her with a beady-eyed stare.

“Hey, mister parrot,”
greeted Fornax. She plucked a lump of rock from the tray and
examined it closely in an attempt to avoid the bird’s piercing
gaze. “Are these fossils?”

The parrot cocked its
head to one side and gave a metallic squawk.

“For sale!” it
declared. “One credit!”

Philyra came to join
Fornax and picked up another piece of rock. The dark-coloured
sample contained an unmistakeable yet unidentifiable fragment of
some long-dead creature. Fossils were rarely found on Ascension,
but that was largely because geologists generally thought there
were far more interesting planets to explore. Fornax knew little of
the bleak landscape outside the dome but there was something about
the colouring of these particular rocks that to her suggested they
had come from a lot further afield.

“I’m guessing these
aren’t local,” she remarked. “Where were they dug up?”

“Imported especially
for you from Tau Ceti,” the parrot declared. “Genuine alien
artefacts! Bones of the mysterious greys. One credit!”

“One credit for an
authentic alien fossil?” Fornax frowned, disappointed that these
particular alien artefacts were not what she expected. Now she
thought about it, she was not sure what she had hoped to find.

“How much for a
pencil?” asked Philyra. She had quickly become bored with looking
at lumps of rock and had found a pot of archaic writing implements
on a nearby desk.

“One credit!”

Fornax held up a
fossil. “Are these from Falsafah?”

“One credit for a
pencil?” Philyra laughed. “I could buy a laser stylus for
that.”

“Alien artefact, one
credit!” the parrot confirmed. “Pencil, one credit!”

“So a lump of rock,
painstakingly identified and carefully extracted as an important
extra-terrestrial relic,” said Fornax, “no doubt by a skilled
archaeologist working under very trying conditions, then flown
fifteen light years across the galaxy to this very shop, is deemed
comparable in value to a wooden writing stick?”

The parrot paused, as
if to consider the logic of her question. “One credit!”

“They must be really
good pencils,” muttered Philyra.

“Is the owner of the
shop here?” asked Fornax, impatiently.

The parrot did not
reply. Fornax became aware of a sudden silence beyond the door to
whatever lay at the rear of the emporium and began to suspect it
was no coincidence they had found no one here. The reporter was a
stranger in town, which would immediately ring alarm bells for
anyone who thought nothing of sabotaging security cameras. She
realised then that her direct approach had been wrong.

With a sigh, she
glanced down at the display of fossils, looking for inspiration. It
was then she saw that the tray was actually the lid of a storage
box, of a similar size and shape to the smaller shipping containers
used for interplanetary cargo. After glancing at both doors to make
sure they were not about to be disturbed, she lifted the tray and
peered beneath to see if there were any markings on what would be
the top of the box lid, taking care not to spill its contents.
Fornax smiled and lowered the tray back onto the counter.

“We should go,” she
declared. “There’s nothing to see here.”

“Genuine alien
artefacts!” the parrot protested. “One credit!”

“No thanks,” said
Fornax. “These are not the finds I am looking for.”

Philyra looked puzzled
by the odd tone to her voice. Fornax gave a cryptic smile, turned
from the counter and walked briskly to the door. The reporter could
almost hear the sigh of relief from whoever it was hiding in the
room beyond.

“What now?” asked
Philyra, as they stepped back out onto the street.

“The spaceport,”
declared Fornax. “We have a ship to find.”

* * *

Bellona sat quietly in
Circle Park, resting upon the soft grass with her back against the
trunk of an anaemic conifer, her slate on her lap. As expected,
Endymion had added untold layers of encryption to his personal
network account and she was unable to confirm her assertion that he
had a secret copy of Taranis’
Isa-Sastra
, but figured Nyx
could use his influence as a police officer to locate it easily
enough. She had sent a message to Selene with her news, who had
replied to say she would meet Bellona at the park.