Artorius fell silent, his face creased in annoyance.
“Artorius?”
“I’m not going!” he retorted.
Ravana gave him a stern look. “It’s the only sensible thing to do,” she said.
“No!” he cried. “Please don’t take me there. I hate them!”
She was quite taken aback at how upset he looked. Whatever it was the nurses had put him through at the dome had obviously left its mark. The greys shifted uneasily upon the bench, sensing the tension.
“There is another option,” she suggested hesitantly. “As I said, there’s a base a couple of days drive from here. We may find supplies, but it could just as well be an abandoned settlement or an unmanned research station.”
“I want to go there,” declared Artorius, his face brightening.
Ravana paused. “On one condition,” she added. “If we have no luck finding supplies, we turn around and head to the Dhusarians’ dome. Agreed?”
“Thraak.”
“Fwack.”
“Artorius?”
“I guess so,” he mumbled.
“Excellent!” said Ravana. “We have a plan!”
Now they were moving again Ravana immersed herself in the journey. The vehicle’s automatic pilot still would not engage, but she was happy to drive the transport manually, comforted by the feeling of being in control. They were a long way from the only road and she had to constantly peer ahead into the dark and concentrate on picking a safe route through the rocks and shifting sands. Behind her, Artorius was teaching Stripy a game which largely involved slapping each other. Nana looked on like an elderly aunt.
“Hey,” called Ravana, beckoning to the older grey. “Tell me about your home world.”
“Thraak?”
“Of course I’m interested!”
“Thraak thraak.”
“Yes, well up until now it has not been a good time!” retorted Ravana. “That star you pointed to earlier? I looked at the charts and I’m sure it was Procyon. I happen to know that no large planets have been found in that system.”
“Thraak thraak,” said Nana. “Thraak thraak thraak.”
“I didn’t understand a word of that. Can I have a clue?”
“Thraak thraak!”
“A moon, planet, space station?” asked Ravana. “How many syllables?”
“Thraak!”
“Fwack fwack,” added Stripy. The grey waved its arms in a bizarre mime.
“Is that some sort of vegetable? Or mineral?”
“Fwack fwack fwack!”
“Thraak thraak!”
Ravana shook her head irritably. The images generated by the translator made no sense and her thoughts reeled beneath the weight of a jungle-like entity writhing on the edge of her comprehension. In part she was reminded of the twisting light show of an extra-dimensional jump, the split-second visual rollercoaster that once witnessed from an interstellar spacecraft remained engraved upon a mind forever. The picture conjured up by Nana’s utterances felt more organic but somehow unconstrained by time or space.
“Weird,” she muttered and glanced to Artorius. “What did you make of that?”
“A tree in space,” he said solemnly.
“Really?” she remarked, bemused. “As good a description as any, I suppose.”
With a sigh, she returned her attention to the dunes ahead. The desert was far from uniform, for occasionally they would dip into a shallow valley and the sand would give way to rocky cliffs. As she looked now, the headlamps fell upon the first of a series of black stunted columns that rose from the dunes like rotten teeth. Artorius came to slouch in the seat next to her, bored of the slapping game.
“A fossilised forest,” Ravana told him. “Millions of years ago this was all trees.”
“No way!” exclaimed Artorius. Leaning forward, he stared through the windscreen into the dark valley. “What happened to it all?”
“Destroyed by global warming,” she said. “Falsafah is strange in that the other planets occasionally flip it into a new orbit. Astronomers think it used to be closer to Tau Ceti than Aram, where it overheated and became locked inside a layer of acid clouds, much like Venus in the Solar System. It’s cooled down a lot since but the air is still very poisonous.”
“How do you know?” he asked, eyeing her suspiciously.
“I read up on it before I came,” she said. “I came to do archaeology, remember.”
“Are you digging for aliens?” he asked cautiously.
“Yes,” Ravana said solemnly. “Or what’s left of them.”
“Wow.”
“Satellite surveys keep finding formations in the desert that don’t look natural,” she told him. “It seems incredible looking at Falsafah now, but the professor leading our dig reckons that before it turned to desert it was a lot like Earth, with cities and everything.”
Artorius gave her an incredulous open-mouthed stare, his face a picture of disbelief. Ravana knew how he felt. Despite all she had seen at the excavation, she found it hard to imagine that life of any kind had once existed on such a desolate world, never mind an ancient alien civilisation. Falsafah’s counter planet of Aram on the opposite side of Tau Ceti was a lot more Earth-like, complete with abundant yet primitive native flora and fauna, but the Arab and European missions to colonise Aram had started just thirty years ago.
She was distracted by the scanner display, which had again picked up a signal at the edge of its range. The red square marking their unseen pursuer had last appeared to the east but now lay ahead to the north, directly in their path. Her fear rose when a second glance a few moments later showed the square had crept noticeably closer.
“Someone’s on to us,” she told Artorius, tapping the scanner screen.
“Thraak thraak?” asked Nana, behind them.
“How am I supposed to know?” retorted Ravana. “No one’s tried to make contact.”
Artorius peered at the screen. The transport gave an abrupt jolt as its wheels hit a rock and Ravana muttered a curse under her breath. The terrain outside was becoming more rugged and the dunes were littered with outcrops of sinister-looking boulders.
“I’ve changed course,” Ravana explained. The transport rocked again. “Our friend ahead is blocking the best route through this area. It may get a little rough.”
“The red square is coming closer,” Artorius said fearfully.
Ravana glanced at the display. Their transport came to the top of a rise and they saw a distant flashing light, with a faint glow of red and green navigation lights either side.
“Green to our left,” she muttered. “It’s coming straight for us.”
She switched on the transceiver but was again rewarded with nothing more than hiss. Ravana wondered whether it was her who was being paranoid and unfriendly, but as her hand moved to the ‘transmit’ switch she paused, though more because she did not know who else might be monitoring the channel. On a whim, she accessed her cranium implant and mentally prodded the symbol for its inbuilt communicator, but her headcom too was silent.
“Have they come to get us?” asked Artorius, his voice wavering.
Ravana, peering warily into the dark, did not reply. The bleak landscape rose towards a rocky plateau to the west and the difficult terrain offered a chance to slow their pursuer. She resolutely turned the steering wheel and the transport began to climb away from the distant lights, wheels scrabbling wildly amidst a cascade of loose rock.