To her surprise, the creature pointed a spindly finger towards a bright star to the left of Orion, itself a constellation of stars so distant it looked much the same from every sky in the five systems. The star to which the grey pointed was not one Ravana could put a name to, but seemed too bright to be Epsilon Eridani, where the Dhusarian Church traditionally placed the mythical home of the greys.
“Thraak thraak.”
“You’re a lot smarter than you let on,” Ravana murmured.
She thought of her very first encounter with Nana on Yuanshi. Ravana had been just six years old at the time and unaware Taranis had people following her as she played in the woods, nor that they too had found the spacecraft wreckage and the injured grey hiding in a cave. For years she doubted her own memory, then at a traumatic reunion just months ago in the engine room of the Dandridge Cole had been forced to abandon the caged Nana yet again to save herself and her friends. It seemed fate had given her a second chance.
“Thraak,” Nana said sadly.
“I’m sure that was very profound,” mused Ravana, then wrinkled her nose in disgust as the smell of alien flatulence reached her nostrils. “Or maybe not.”
Nana looked sheepishly on as Ravana vigorously waved a hand to dispel the odour. As she waited for the vehicle’s air scrubbers to do their work, she switched the cabin lights on low, glanced across the console and noticed the navigation computer no longer flashed its warning. A few taps on the touch-screen display produced the welcome news that it had finally managed to link to Falsafah’s sole satellite.
Ravana quickly became absorbed in the newly-updated navigation charts. The dome containing the strange clinic and its cyberclone monks now sported the highly-unoriginal name of ‘Falsafah Beta’. When she opened the accompanying data file, she was intrigued to find it described as an abandoned research station belonging to the United States of America. A thousand kilometres to the north-west was another outpost, this time with no name nor data file, adding yet another mystery to the pile.
The satellite pin-pointed their own position, some three hundred kilometres due west of the dome. This sounded quite a distance until she saw that Arallu Depot, the airstrip and supply base near the archaeology expedition, was some six thousand kilometres away on the other side of a scary range of mountains.
The Arab Nations and European Space Agencies led the exploration and settlement of the Tau Ceti system. However, the administration of Falsafah was contracted to the Que Qiao Corporation, whose agents Ravana was keen to avoid. As for contacting the archaeology expedition, the transport’s communicator was a short-range device and its display made it clear only the Dhusarians’ dome was within range.
Notwithstanding their predicament, it was another piece of seemingly innocuous information that settled uneasily upon her mind. The satellite had reset the console’s time and date display to Universal Standard Time. Without her wristpad, which Ravana assumed had been confiscated by the nurses, she had long ago lost track of the passing days. The display revealed she had been away from the dig longer than she thought. Two weeks had passed since her fateful visit to meet the supply ship at Arallu Depot. The archaeology team would now be on their way back from meeting the returned Sir Bedivere and with a sinking heart she realised her father would have waited in vain for her promised follow-up call.
“Rats,” she muttered.
“Thraak thraak?”
“No, it’s not looking good at all.”
A noise behind drew their attention to Artorius and Stripy, who were both now awake and staggering bleary-eyed around the dimly-lit cabin. The young grey also wore cut-off overalls, but for some reason had them on back-to-front. Ravana watched as Artorius helped himself to another packet of rations without offering one to anyone else.
“Fwack!” exclaimed Stripy, holding out a hand and looking indignant.
“Yes, I know.” Ravana sighed. “No manners at all.”
“Do you understand them?” Artorius asked, spitting food as he spoke.
“Not a screech,” she admitted, then remembered something the boy had said back at the clinic. “Can you? You told me the nurses made you ask them questions.”
“I can give you the translation program,” offered Artorius. “We can link implants.”
Ravana opened her mouth to object, ever cautious whenever the subject of implants arose, then realised he had gone ahead anyway. A new image popped into her mind, one that for a moment looked like a chess piece for a knight but instead quickly transformed into an hour glass. She wondered what her own implant icon looked like inside Artorius’ head.
“All I see is a timer,” Ravana told him. “Filled with yet more sand,” she added in a mutter, gazing at the endless dark desert outside the window. Just for a moment she thought she saw a distant silver shape and two tiny yellow eyes glowing in the darkness of the dunes. She shook her head and dismissed it as a figment of her stressed imagination.
“It’s coming!” Artorius said grumpily.
Ravana waited, somewhat hypnotised by the animated hour glass. Artorius looked cross and screwed up his eyes in fierce concentration.
“Still waiting,” she told him.
“Why isn’t it working?” complained Artorius.
“Have you tried switching it off and on again?”
“My implant?”
“No, your brain,” snapped Ravana, feeling a headache coming on. “Artorius, we need to talk. Last night I was angry, tired and desperate to get out of that creepy place and I’m not sure I did the right thing bringing you with me. What did the clones want with you?”
“Clones?” Artorius looked puzzled.
“The monks. Brother Simha and Dhanus.”
“I saw two men in cloaks but the nurses kept me away from them.”
“Why were you locked up like that?” she asked. Her irritation was not helped by the hour-glass symbol still hovering in her mind. “Where are your parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Eaten by a dinosaur.”
“Don’t joke about something like that!” scolded Ravana. She gave him a reproving look, but his expression was both sad and serious.
“It’s the truth!” he protested. “A robot Tyrannosaurus Rex.”
“What?” she asked, then bit her lip. “Oh, I see. Was that on Avalon?”
Artorius nodded glumly and went back to shovelling food into his mouth. Avalon was a terraformed moon of the gas giant Thule in the Alpha Centauri system. It was home to a variety of hit holovid shows, first and foremost being the long-running Gods of Avalon, in which third-rate celebrities took part in bizarre challenges in a land populated by cybernetic gods and monsters controlled by the votes of a vengeful audience. Ravana recalled that a spin-off show Quest for Fire had a prehistoric theme and stories often hit the news of ground crews being attacked by malfunctioning robots. The Alpha Centauri system had no government as such and the Avalon Broadcasting Corporation was a prime example of what happened when a big media company was given a free rein to chase ratings as it pleased.
“You should have the translator now,” said Artorius, interrupting her thoughts.
The animated hour glass in her thoughts had gone. Ravana brought up the implant control menu in her mind’s eye and saw a new icon in the shape of a pair of grey lips outlined in red. She gave the image a mental prod and the outline became green.
“Hey, Stripy,” Ravana said. She gave the young grey a friendly tap. “Say something.”
“Fwack?”
She had expected a literal audio translation, but instead her implant reacted to the grey’s utterance by flashing a series of vague images through her thoughts that suggested less poking and more food was the order of the day. Ravana looked at Artorius in awe.