Critical Path (The Critical Series Book2)

CRITICAL PATH

BY
WEARMOUTH & BARNES

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This edition published in 2014 by WBP

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. The rights of the authors of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our cover designer, Jason Gurley, and our editors, Aaron Sikes and Pauline Nolet. Also, as ever, thank you to everyone who agreed to read an early copy and give us your thoughts. Collectively, you’ve all helped make this a better book.

Thank you!

CHAPTER ONE

Sacrifice isn’t the end of something; it’s the beginning. Denver knew this before his father, Charlie, gave up his life to bring down the two alien ships. But Denver wasn’t so naïve to believe that the work was done.

On the contrary, the real challenge was still ahead of them.

He wiped sweat from his brow. The salty liquid made his tanned forearm shine in the morning sun. It was no more than 0800. Charlie had taught him how to tell the time from the sun’s position when he was just a child. Over the years, he’d built up an almost unnatural ability to know it instinctively, analyzing the length and direction of shadows.

He stood in a dappled clearing five kilometers north of their new base—Freetown, a repurposed croatoan farm that remained inactivated due to it being farther north than their terraforming operation. The shadows from the crumbled remnants of a wooden hunting shack covered the damp, loamy ground.

Mildew glistened like a silver mist across the tips of the long grass. The place had a fresh scent to it. Since they destroyed most of the root growth, the orange tint to the atmosphere became less visible.

Earth seemed to be healing itself, returning to normal.

Wildlife grew in number—rabbits, squirrels, deer, and varied birds were now more visible and less sickly than before. Despite that, Denver knew it would take years for the damage of the root to the ecosystem to be fully repaired.

The cold dampness seeped into the fabric toes of his boots where the gaffer tape covering had come away during the trek. Thorns had snagged at his boots and jeans as he, Layla, and their new friend, Khan, parked their appropriated hover-bikes and descended on foot further into the woods in search of a downed escape pod.

Layla stood five yards in front of him.

She wore the now-familiar farm outfit: a form-fitting gray and blue cotton one-piece with a zip running at an angle from her right shoulder to her left hip. Her shadow stretched westward, covering a dark, scorched section of earth.

A cool breeze made her ponytail sway and the small hairs on the back of her slender neck shimmer. Despite her real age being somewhere in the fifties, she looked no older than mid-thirties, the root consumption keeping her young, as it did Gregor and Charlie.

Layla lowered to her haunches and inspected the scar in the earth, created by a fallen escape pod.

The scar cut a ridge into the ground some three meters wide and over a dozen long. The interesting feature, however, wasn’t the scar; it was the complete lack of pod. Someone, or something, had taken it away.

While they waited on Khan, a young tracker who had made his home in Freetown before they had re-established it as a base, Denver couldn’t help but think about Layla.

Being at a crash site of one of the pods wasn’t enough to distract his thoughts away from her completely as she made notes on a tablet device—a leftover piece of equipment they had learned to work and reprogram for their own uses.

The aliens on the various farms abandoned their duties and their influence over the human population shortly after the ships crashed to Earth. Denver suspected that when the pods landed they must have sent out a signal across the croatoans’ network.

Within days the aliens left the farms in a great migration to the north.

Since that time, Layla had led a diplomatic program of integration, bringing dozens of farms together, working towards one goal: reuniting humanity into a force that could not only defend themselves and live freely, but also thrive.

From the south, the croatoans still held a great number of farms, and the humans from the northern facilities would often have to defend against them.

The aliens were losing, however, their attacks coming less frequently.

The ‘cattle’ were educated and trained. The men and women subjugated by Augustus and the croatoan council to run the farms were now setting up communications and developing real farms, growing vegetables and more importantly—destroying the vast tracks of root so that the ground wouldn’t be poisoned any longer.

Where Gregor tried to use aggression and intimidation to reunite the various workers, Layla’s use of empathy and understanding brought quicker results.

She’d become their de facto leader almost by accident. Something that didn’t sit well with Gregor, but then he always was an instigator.

“It can’t be far,” Layla said, turning to face him. The golden light of morning reflected off her face, making her eyes glint. 

Denver caught himself staring and looked away before casually glancing back as though he too was inspecting the crash site. “Khan’s a good tracker. I’m sure we’ll find it.”

“The implication of it being moved probably suggests that who or whatever was inside is now out in the open.”

“Or already dead,” Denver added, although a part of him hoped that wasn’t the case. He wanted to do that personally. He wouldn’t be happy until every last turtle-looking alien no longer set foot on Earth.

“Perhaps. Though I’m not so sure. One thing I’ve learned is that those at the top of their hierarchy have an uncanny skill in surviving. They’ve been here on this planet for so many thousands of years, waiting, in the ground… I won’t rest until I see them dead with my own eyes.”

Denver readjusted his backpack and shuffled the alien hunter rifle to his left shoulder. “You’re starting to sound like me.” His cheeks warmed with a blush, which made him feel even more ridiculous.

Although out in the wild, he was afraid of nothing and could comfortably survive in almost any conditions, conquering his feelings towards women was something Charlie had never taught him.

“I don’t think that’s such a bad thing,” Layla said with a smile. “Could be worse. I could end up sounding like Gregor.”

“And we can definitely do without that.”

“One’s bad enough, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“You look better like that, by the way,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The beard, or lack of it.”

One of the men from Eastern Farm Twenty, now renamed to Freetown, had given Denver a cutthroat razor and showed him how to use it.

It was the first time in his adulthood that he was clean-shaven. All the time he ran around with his dad, he’d kept a beard and only trimmed it with a knife when it got too long.

“Thanks,” Denver said, giving her an awkward smile.

He broke eye contact, unsure how to react with the way she was looking at him as though he were one of her subjects of study. He brought his thoughts back to this clearing, noticing how the trees to the south of it were damaged, their branches snapped and their trunks leaning over, wrenched from the ground.

On a tip-off from Khan they had learned of this crash site.

Gregor, being his belligerent self, refused to come, preferring to stay back at one of the facilities with Maria, whose new role was to help reorientate the men and women whom the aliens used for cattle and… food.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what Gregor’s motivations were.

Beyond the clearing, a shadow shifted.

A pair of rabbits dashed through the long grass, their khaki-coloured ears flattening against their heads. They hopped over thick redwood roots and disappeared into burrows at the edge of the dilapidated shack.

The wooden posts that made up the stanchions were rotten and jagged, the surface colonized by an empire of white and gray fungus. 

For a brief few seconds, Denver shifted his weight to his toes with anticipation. He pursed his lips, readying to whistle for Pip, his dog, but he rocked back on his heels as the realization dawned on him that no, this wasn’t Pip.

She had run off shortly after Charlie had sacrificed himself, and Denver had never forgiven himself for not being able to find her.

The shadow and movement, he knew, was something bigger than a dog. 

He crouched to a knee and brought up the rifle, placing the butt into the crook of his shoulder and bringing the sights to his left eye.

Layla had already dashed to the side behind a broken trunk and shot him a glance.

With the movement of a shrub and the twang of a broken branch, a figure moved into the clearing, with another closely following behind.

***

He was there—again. This was the third day Maria had felt the bed sink and her body rock inwards to the new weight. The weight created by Gregor.

She clutched the edge of the sheet and tried to pull it up to her chin, but it wouldn’t budge.

Gregor’s hot breath warmed her back, making her whole body shiver with repulsion. She closed her eyes and stifled a scream. She didn’t want to antagonize him. She’d seen and heard a lot of stories about what he’d done to people who got in his way. Despite that, she couldn’t just give in.

Although growing up on the harvester and not knowing a great deal about human reproduction, she was aware of how it worked. They were forbidden to sleep with one another on the ‘generation ship,’ and since she came out into the wider world, she had kept herself away from the increasingly hungry gaze of Gregor.

It didn’t help that Denver had started to spend more time with Layla. With him around, Gregor stayed away. She suspected the latter had a certain fear, or at the very least, trepidation, of the former.

Denver cut an imposing figure with his height, and since the croatoans left to go north and they all started to settle into a decent lifestyle, his previously wiry, skinny frame had bulked out.

Something Gregor clearly envied.

Realizing that he wouldn’t go away, Maria turned around to face him. The bastard was leering at her with a predatory look in his eyes. The bile rose in her stomach at the thought of him touching her.

She kept the sheet tight against her body.

Luckily, the temperature during the night had dropped and she’d put on her uniform for extra warmth, not wanting to waste the energy of firing up the heating generators.

“You’re in my room,” Maria said, trying to make a point without instigating an outburst. “I’d prefer it if you knocked first.”

“We’re all friends here, aren’t we?” Gregor said, leaning his head on an elbow as he stretched out on her bed as though it were his. “Denver and Layla are off on a jolly jaunt. I thought you and I could… well, start the day off in traditional fashion.”

Backing away as much as she could given the tautness of the sheet, she had no other option but to play into his quite obvious trap.

Even though she was new to the world at large, she’d spent the last month at Freetown conversing with other men and women from the other farms who had come here to help get the place up and running. She had learned quickly and picked up a lot of information of how society was before the alien uprising.

She also learned just what kind of man Gregor was.

“And what exactly is this traditional fashion?” she asked, already knowing the likely answer.

Gregor leaned in, grinning, exposing his rotten teeth. His gums had started to recede and turn black at the edges ever since he started to chew the root as though it were a gourmet food. “Back in our day, the elder male—that would be me—was charged with making an adult of the younger women, especially if they were from out of town. It was a popular mating ritual. Since you’re effectively from out of town, being stuck in the harvester all your life, and given you’re younger than me, it’s kind of up to me to bring you into adulthood.”

“No,” she said, tensing. “I’m sure the tradition means a lot to you and your people, but I don’t observe that. I don’t think it would be appropriate to—”

Gregor sat up and grabbed her by the arms. He flung his leg over her waist and sat down on her, pressing her into the bed, pinning her arms to her side. “Now, now,” he said. “No need to be polite around me. We’re all friends here, and friends stay close.”

“You’ve been chewing too much root again. Get off me!” She struggled, but the frenzy in his eyes extended to his determination to dominate her. She tried to kick out and unbalance him, but he just rode her like one of the men she’d seen on a video daring to ride a bull.