“Thraak,” Nana confirmed solemnly. “Thraak thraak.”
“Fwack fwack,” added Stripy.
Tears gathered in Ravana’s eyes. She did not need her implant translator to tell her that the greys had come to say goodbye. It was then she saw Jones, her childhood electric pet she had once called Fluffy, snug and content in Stripy’s arms. Her first reaction was a sharp pang of panic at the thought of having her erratic mechanical companion of ten years taken away. Yet behind this was the acceptance it was time to break this last link with childhood. Ravana had not felt the same way about the cat since seeing the infestation of tendrils within and would not miss the reminder of what the silver lines in her own scars might really be. The beautiful expression upon Stripy’s face told her the moment was right for her furry electric friend to start an adventure all of its own.
“Goodbye, my friends,” she said sadly. “Take good care of Jones for me.”
Artorius started crying. “I don’t want them to go!”
The cyberclones moved to stand either side of Jizo, near the dead spider on the far side of the churning pool. Ravana thought the nurse looked far too smug for her own good.
“zz-thee-booyy-iis-thee-oonee-zz,” declared Dhanus. “zz-thee-oold-oonees-haavee-doonee-hiis-biiddiing-zz. zz-iit-iis-tiimee-too-weelcoomee-oouur-saaviioouurs-zz!”
“zz-beeliieeveers-uuniitee-aas-oonee-zz!” Simha cried fiercely.
“Thraak thraak!” retorted Nana.
The grey reached out and placed a tender hand upon Ravana’s arm. Before the girl could respond, Nana and Stripy turned and hastened across the tongue-like walkway to the cocoon. Her mind whirling, Ravana watched them clamber through the oval opening and settle into what looked like seats. Her eyes widened as the skin of the strange cocoon became a web of glowing threads, brought to life by the presence of the greys.
Athene stomped towards the oval opening and glowered. Jizo turned her perturbed grimace from the greys and issued a hushed command to the cyberclones. Simha and Dhanus immediately came towards Ravana and Artorius from opposite sides of the pool, their sinister silhouettes moving like phantoms before the accelerating blue blur of the rods. Ravana caught Kedesh’s expression and knew the woman was equally at a loss as to what Nana, Stripy or the Dhusarians planned to do next. The greys’ earlier warning made it clear they could not remain within the circle but Ravana felt trapped.
“This doesn’t feel right,” growled Jizo. “Your grey friends should not be here!”
The clones stepped nearer. Ravana saw the watcher moping near the cocoon and the fateful lines of the Isa-Sastra popped into her head.
“Don’t you see?” she remarked, suddenly inspired. She gave the nurse her best earnest look. “All around us, paw-prints of the gods!”
“How the hell did you work that out?” asked Kedesh, taken aback.
“She knows nothing!” spat Athene. “This is no game for mortals!”
Ravana cast a wary eye at Kedesh. She had not forgotten the mention of watchers in the so-called prophecy and wondered if her improvised distraction had hit upon a fundamental truth. The speeding rods told her to leave the theological debate for later. Stripy and Nana sat busily waving their arms around inside the cocoon, the cat on the younger grey’s lap. Ravana imagined them in an aircraft cockpit, setting controls for departure.
“The watchers are stirring!” she declared. Her father stared opened-mouthed at his daughter’s defiant display. “Their paw-prints have led us to this place. They are here!”
With a dramatic flourish, Ravana pointed to the cat just visible through the cocoon’s oval door. Her former pet looked up and gave a plaintive meow.
There was a timeless pause. An incredulous Jizo approached the edge of the pool and stared at the greys and their adopted electric pet. Ravana bundled Artorius towards the edge of the circle and peered into the groove left by the moving rods. The crevasse was narrow but deep and easily capable of breaking a misplaced ankle. The rods zoomed past so rapidly they made whooshing sounds as each went by. They were almost out of time.
“Behold!” cried Ravana, as Jizo turned back. “The greys have been chosen to serve!”
“The cat?” Jizo gave a drunken suspicious leer. “A watcher?”
Kedesh caught the glint in Ravana’s eye. “Oh, yes. That’s a watcher all right.”
Stripy picked up the cat and looked it in the face. “Fwack fwack!”
“What?” shrieked Athene. “That mangy bag of wires is nothing like me!”
“That rubbish about alien cat gods is real?” asked Quirinus.
“Rubbish?” The enraged look of disgust upon the watcher’s face was almost comical, not that anyone else but Ravana and Kedesh could see it. “How dare you!”
The cyberclone monks turned to the cocoon and raised their hands to the greys. Ravana flinched as a wave of pain crashed through her head. To her surprise, the torrent of sensations bleeding from her implant carried a fear not entirely her own. The electric pet, whose AI chip contained brain cells cloned from those harvested from greys, had been there at the birth of Taranis’ disciples, who in turn had recognised the fragment of alien within. Yet the two now before her accepted her bluff. Incredibly, they were scared of her cat.
“zz-paawn-too-waatcheers-aand-maasteers-zz,” cried Dhanus, looking at Stripy.
“zz-waatcheers-too-hiistooryy-stiir-zz!” Simha screeched.
“zz-paaw-priints-oof-thee-goods-zz!” rasped Dhanus.
“No it’s not!” cried Athene, exasperated. “It’s just a silly children’s toy!”
The floor of the chamber shook again and Ravana grabbed Artorius in alarm. Beneath their feet, the ground was softening into quicksand. Kedesh hurriedly drew her pistol, limped to the whirling rods and with a sudden leap was through a gap and out of the circle. Before either Lilith or Dagan could move, Kedesh had them in her sights and was ordering them to drop their own guns. Artorius tugged Ravana’s arm and reached out to the greys.
“Nana and Stripy!” he wailed. “Don’t leave me!”
“Get out of there!” called Kedesh. “Now!”
“zz-waatcheers-aand-maasteers-zz!” cried Dhanus. “zz-thee-tiimee-iis-neeaar-zz!”
Quirinus scooped Artorius into his arms and lunged towards the rods. The boy barely had time for a surprised yelp before they were through to the other side. Ravana tried to follow, but her boots had sunk into the floor and she found herself trapped. Jizo plucked herself free from the soft ground and lurched unsteadily towards her.
“What’s the matter?” sneered Jizo. “Trapped like a fly in a spider’s web?”
“Stay away from me!” Ravana yelled.
The cocoon’s walkway tongue snapped back, the oval squeezed shut and the bobbing heads of the greys were lost from sight. Jizo lunged to grab one of the spindly legs and stumbled upon the quivering ground. Within the rods, the floor was liquefying and puffing spurts of gas like tiny volcanoes. The pool continued to churn, only now its dark contents were being dragged around by the rods into the beginnings of a whirlpool.
Athene watched Ravana’s panic-stricken struggles with glee. In a blink of an eye, the watcher metamorphosed into an owl-shaped blur and fluttered to the top of the cocoon, where she once again took human form, looking more like a deranged goddess than ever. The rods spun ever faster, filling the air with a loud eerie humming. Ravana realised Athene had finally revealed herself to all. Every stare of amazement in the chamber was turned her way.
“You win today!” cried Athene. “But the game is not over!”
“Where the hell did she come from?” cried Quirinus, beyond the whirling rods.
“It doesn’t matter!” Ravana snapped. “I’m stuck! Get me out of here!”
Kedesh immediately leapt back through the rods and came to her side. Ravana felt an arm pulling at her waist, then she was free and being dragged past the whirring columns. As she picked herself up from the floor at Artorius’ and Quirinus’ feet, she saw her father had retrieved
the agents’ stolen guns and had them trained upon a cowering Lilith and Dagan.
“Ravana!” Quirinus exclaimed. “Are you okay?”
“Just about,” she said, wincing. She had fallen on her weak arm. “Kedesh, thank you.”
“I owed you one,” Kedesh replied. “That was a particularly sticky wicket.”
An anguished scream drew their attention back to the spinning rods. Jizo stood within, her arm and forehead covered in blood from where she tried to follow but misjudged the leap. The clones resumed their chants and paced within the circular blue glow. Above, the ethereal spectre of the watcher loomed large through the gaps of the whizzing rods.
“You have no idea what you have unleashed!” Athene cried. “Your masters awake!”
Something strange was happening to the chamber floor within the circle. The ground sank into a funnel, drawing the cocoon into the centre. Jizo and the clones scrabbled for a foothold at the edge, perilously close to the speeding rods. Artorius clutched Ravana’s hand and with his other gave a wave of wounded digits.
“Goodbye Stripy,” he said sadly. There were tears in his eyes. “Goodbye Nana.”
Ravana gasped. The funnel suddenly opened upon the mind-twisting spectacle of a negative universe. Tiny dark stars lay strewn across blindingly-white space in a reality-warping vision of infinity. The circle had become a doorway, a sublime classical portico into a grand corridor of inverse space-time, incomparable to the fleeting ragged wormhole of an ED drive. The chamber basked in the light of alien suns, at the centre of which sat the greys’ mysterious chariot, its spindly legs gripping the mouth of the funnel like the runners of a sleigh. It was alien engineering beyond comprehension and truly beautiful to behold.
“My word,” whispered Kedesh. “It’s full of stars! Err... black ones.”
“An extra-dimensional egg,” Quirinus murmured. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
The spinning rods became a tornado-like frenzy. The cryogenic capsule toppled and with the dead spider was promptly sucked into oblivion. The cocoon remained a few more moments, then dropped silently through the inverse starry whirlpool and into the void.
“Nana and Stripy!” shrieked Artorius. “Where have they gone?”
“Home,” said Ravana. She looked at Nana’s strange gift, which despite everything was still in her hand. “I hope they know where they’re going.”
* * *
The light within the portal began to fade. The rods continued to whirl, beyond which the faint outlines of Jizo and the two clones were still visible, perched precariously at the edge of the vortex. Lilith and Dagan solemnly drew near Ravana, Quirinus, Kedesh and Artorius, all temporarily united by shock. Fearful murmurs came from the others huddled in the archway behind them. Ravana’s headache pounded as fiercely as ever.
“I saw a woman,” Dagan whispered. “Sitting on top of that thing!”
“Brothers Dhanus and Simha,” said Lilith. “Can we get them out of there?”
“What about your fellow nurse?” sneered Kedesh. “She caused all this.”
“Stuff Jizo,” Lilith retorted. “Mad drunken psycho.”
“Stuff them all,” growled Quirinus. “I’ve had enough craziness for one day.”
“Look!” Ravana cried, pointing. “There’s something coming back up!”
A dark shape rose from the glowing vortex. At first Ravana thought it was the return of the cocoon, then a shiver ran down her spine as a huge black bulk hauled itself from the funnel on long hairy legs. Behind it followed another, then another. Anguish surged through her implant, sending her reeling before she even heard the cyberclones’ shrieks. She opened her mouth to scream, but Jizo got there first with a wild banshee wail.
“Weavers!” hissed Kedesh.
“What the hell...?” murmured Quirinus.
“Ashtapadas,” moaned Ravana, holding her head. “Why did it have to be spiders?”
The monster arachnids clambered from the portal to the edge of the spinning rods. Jizo leapt frantically from one set of snapping jaws to another, tried to jump through a gap in the moving rods and was thrown to the floor. The cyberclone monks raised their hands and shrieked again. Ravana winced under their barrage of concentrated pulses of anger, which felt like they were trying to ward off the invaders by thought alone. The chamber quickly filled with the chattering of mandibles, punctuated by sharp cracks as creatures fell against the whirling rods and were catapulted back across the vortex in a tangle of legs.
Ravana stared mesmerised at the ever-increasing tumbling mass of spiders. Her fear turned to horror at the sight of Jizo under attack. The nurse’s screams of terror mingled with the defiant screeches of Simha and Dhanus, then with one last searing spike of anguish the pain in Ravana’s head was gone. A glimpse of Jizo and the cyberclones prone upon the floor, overrun by snapping jaws and trampling limbs, gave way to the grotesque spectacle of a pair of spiders scrabbling over them to wrap their twitching bodies in silk.
The scene of thrashing legs and pulsating bodies gradually became clearer through the blue-tinged blur of the rods. The funnel of the alien portal was closing, the whirring circle slowing to a halt. Ravana felt a cold shudder of dread.
“The rods,” she said in alarm. “They’re stopping!”
“I don’t like this,” sobbed Artorius.
“Giant spiders,” growled Quirinus. “Any chance they’re friendly?”
An arachnid suddenly burst from the writhing mass, ricocheted off a moving rod and to their horror flew through into the chamber beyond. The spider untangled its legs and with scything jaws made straight for the frozen and stupefied Dagan. Quirinus whirled towards the approaching creature, raised the guns in his hands and let loose a volley of shots. The spider’s head exploded, splattering blood to the floor.
Ravana grimaced. The decapitated corpse slid onwards and she leapt away with a shriek. The arachnid was clad in what looked like armour, similar to that of the dead spider once embedded in the floor. Lilith ran to the arch and beckoned wildly to the robot sentry.
“Battlebot! Release the prisoners and defend our retreat!” she cried, then turned to the frightened onlookers in the archway. “Everyone, run for your lives!”
A tremor shook the chamber and with a loud groan all twelve of the rods promptly stopped dead. A split second later, a cascade of monster spiders fell through the gaps amidst a flurry of legs and surged towards a terrified Ravana and companions. The floodlights cast gigantic scuttling shadows upon the glistening walls and shone upon a galaxy of glinting eyes. The macabre chattering of mandibles was deafening.
“Run!” Kedesh cried to Ravana. “Get the hell out of here!”
Lilith was already dragging a dazed Dagan away. Ravana stuffed the green globe into a pocket, grabbed Artorius and dashed towards the screaming voices at the arch. Quirinus and Kedesh began to fire upon the advancing horde and the loud retort of plasma fire echoed around the chamber. The military android joined the fray and with rapid rifle fire decapitated three arachnids in a matter of seconds. The advance of the spiders barely slowed.
Ahead, Ininna and Yima were frantically urging the panic-stricken Xuthus, Urania and scarlet-haired Hestia away into the tunnels, closely followed by the more resolute Philyra and Fornax. Ravana found Govannon waiting for her beyond the arch, where she wasted no time bundling Artorius into his arms before scooting across the passageway to collect the plasma cannon. The cricket bat was nearby but her slate was nowhere to be seen.
“Get him to safety,” Ravana urged Govannon. She hefted the cannon to her shoulder, thumbed the power switch and smiled grimly as the implant-controlled targeting cross-hairs appeared in her virtual eye line. “Philyra can lead you back to our ship.”
“Spiders!” wailed Artorius. “They took Stripy and Nana!”
“Don’t dawdle,” urged Govannon. “We’ve already lost one archaeologist on this trip.”
Despite everything, Ravana grinned. “You call this archaeology?”
Gova
nnon gave a wry smile, hoisted Artorius onto his back and with a hand on his hat slipped away into the flickering green light of the tunnel. Lilith and a terror-stricken Dagan hurried after them, leaving Quirinus, Kedesh and the android still shooting at the skittering spiders. Ravana ran back into the chamber and lined up the cannon to take a shot at a cluster of arachnids near the three twitching bundles of silk. The creatures were relentless, yet there was something about their advance that reminded her of holovid news footage of street battles between royalists and Que Qiao back on her native Yuanshi. Around thirty arachnids had come through the portal and barely a quarter had fallen to gunfire.
“Ravana!” yelled Quirinus. “Get back!”
“Knock them for six!” cried Kedesh.
Ravana fired. A streak of white light leapt across the chamber and suddenly the air was thick with smoke and chunks of black flesh. She looked for a new target and saw a large spider at one of the rods, prodding its mouth parts against the faint indentations that had last seen Stripy’s nimble fingers. Another tremor struck the chamber, then the rods jolted back into life and started to circle the central dark pool once more.
“They’re reopening the portal!” cried Ravana.
“There’s more on the way?” Her father’s face was a picture of dismay.
Ravana, Quirinus and Kedesh looked at one another, turned and raced for the archway. They had barely entered the labyrinth when the staccato rifle retorts from the android back in the chamber fell ominously silent. The echoes of their pounding footsteps were soon joined by the eerie chatter of mandibles and scuffle of feet that quickly grew louder. Ravana risked a glance over her shoulder and to her horror saw the first of the pursuing spiders barely ten metres behind. She paused, aimed the cannon and fired her last remaining plasma bolt at the arachnid’s bulbous head. Her grin upon seeing the resultant smear upon the wall soon faded when three more spiders appeared at the end of the tunnel.
Paw-Prints Of The Gods Page 38
