Critical Path (The Critical Series Book2) (14 page)

Even diluting it and keeping it to a few drops a day, they’d got through it quicker than they realized, but then Mike rationalized it away, thinking that due to his insistence on not taking the root and thus ageing like a normal human, that he’d likely meet his end before he would take the last sip of rum.

He still believed that despite being down to just three bottles.

It was now a turtle racing a tortoise: rum or life, which would run out first?

Not being the sort to dwell on such matters, he took a deep gulp of the tea and exhaled with satisfaction as the hot soothing drink warmed his belly. The clock on the wall of his office ticked and tocked, reminding him that his lunch break would soon be over and he’d have to return to the job at hand.

Not that his students were paying much attention today. The news of Charlie’s possible survival had quickly got around soon after Layla, Denver, and the others had left. It sent a ripple of excitement and distraction throughout the facility.

Mike couldn’t blame them. Charlie was a legend, living or not, for what he had done. Even Mike and Mai were treated like some kind of rebellion heroes, when all they did was solve an engineering problem.

Watching the time run down, signaling the end of his break, he fussed with the myriad piles of paper towering over his desk and floor. Bits of croatoan technology pulled from the wreckages of hover-bikes and harvesters littered the office, turning it into some kind of alien scrap yard, yet for all the criticism he received because of his so-called chaotic ways, he knew where everything was and could get to it in an instant.

That’s just how he and Mai liked to work.

Everything everywhere and available.

No mucking about hunting through drawers and cabinets, or moving from one room to another like his students preferred. They’d been brought up on the farm under the croatoan idea of organization and knew nothing better—until now—but getting them to change their ways was proving harder than either he or Mai first realized. Their minds weren’t so malleable anymore, and it took them a great deal of time to teach them about human engineering history and what could or couldn’t be done with materials and technology at hand.

Most of them weren’t even born before the apocalypse, so they had no real idea about large-scale infrastructure, architecture, bridge building, or smaller stuff like vehicle design and engine mechanics.

Still, some were brighter than others and had shown promise—especially with the alien tech. It felt odd to him that they were more comfortable working on that than they were human technology.

The door to his office flew open, sending the piles of paper flying, sheets flapping about the densely packed room like large confetti.

“Come in,” Mike said, not hiding the sarcasm.

“Mr. Strauss, I—”

“Evangeline, how many times? Call me Mike. What’s up? You look flustered.”

The woman, in her late twenties, wore her blonde hair down to her shoulders. It flew in all directions, obscuring her soft Italian features. The collar to her white lab coat was up, and the tails flapped around her jeans. Perspiration covered her forehead and she panted as if she had been running.

“Come quick,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you. It worked!”

“The bead?” Mike asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, your idea was right.”

Of course it was right. He’d only been working on it since the day dear Pippa brought it into the office all those years ago.

***

Mike strode across the workshop and closed down the bulletproof glass door of the six-foot-tall cabinet and locked the latch.

Within the cabinet, sitting on a single shelf, was one of the croatoan blue beads. When the aliens had deserted the farms to go north, they had made sure that all the humans left behind had their beads removed.

Not only did it keep them same from any potential hidden alien threat, but it also gave Mike, Evangeline, and the others plenty of samples to test his theories. It had taken two weeks of trial and error and tweaking of his prototype, but if what his assistant said was true, they had finally got it right.

“Okay, stand back,” Mike said to Evangeline, bringing her to the rear of the room where the workbenches lined the walls. They were some twenty feet away from what he called the bomb cabinet. The glass of which showed hundreds of scratches and abrasions from his various experiments over the weeks.

It was designed to withhold the blast of half a pound of C4 so would be more than enough protection for this experiment.

“I did as you suggested,” Evangeline said, handing him the pistol as she took it out of a box on the workbench. Much like Mike’s personal office, the surface of the bench was overflowing with tools and parts. “The croatoan battery is wired to your specification, but I stripped away some of the damping material.”

“Huh,” Mike said as he weighed the pistol in his hand, admiring her work. The weapon itself resembled the familiar triangular, matte-black alien pistol, but with a few extra modifications. At the end of the barrel, a six-inch-diameter dish focused a highly charged, low-frequency wave generated from a modified croatoan energy cell. Using an amplification circuit that Mike and Mai had spent the last few decades perfecting, the beam focused on the resonant frequencies of the beads.

He originally got the idea after dismantling one of their tracking devices. The circuitry would generate a low-powered beam that would fire in a wide arc, searching for a return response from the tracking bead. But without sufficient power, his weapon couldn’t work.

There was one benefit of having people like Evangeline, just twenty-seven years old, brought up on the croatoan farm and working with their engineers: she knew about their power cells.

On the side of the pistol, a dial indicated three settings. Evangeline had set it to full power, which would dump the charge in the power cell within just a few seconds. Not ideal, but if the effect worked, it was something they could probably work on and improve the efficiency of the power transfer.

The grip of the pistol bulged to fit his palm where they had modified the original gun’s chassis to accommodate the larger cell. Wires ran from the grip, along the barrel, and finally into the contacts of the tiny dish. Four thin rods extended to join at a point three inches beyond the dish. This aiming arrangement would help focus the beam.

Mike would have preferred to have it arc like the alien tracking device, but to send a strong enough signal they had to really focus it down. Again, it was just a matter of working on developing a more powerful energy source.

He raised the pistol, stretching out his arms to aim it at the bead behind the glass. “Okay,” Mike said. “Stand back. I’m firing in one, two, three…”

The pull on the trigger activated the power dump, sending the full energy allocation through its circuitry and then through the focusing rods. For a second nothing seemed to happen beyond the wires glowing and the pistol grip growing hot with the sudden discharge.

But then a cloud of dark smoke billowed thickly behind the glass. Mike kept the trigger pressed, draining the last dregs of the battery.

The bead exploded with a loud crack, making Mike jump. The glass window shuddered with the impact, and fragments of the bead smashed against the surface, adding to the network of chips, scratches and gouges.

A smile crept on to Mike’s lips as he waited a few moments before moving forward to investigate. Once satisfied that the effects of the weapon were done, he opened the latch on the window, opening it a crack. The heady stench of smoke came out. It mixed with a metallic oily smell: the melted remnants of the alien tech. Pieces of blue bead littered the cabinet on all sides. Nothing of the bead remained intact.

Turning to Evangeline, he widened his smile and fought the urge to rush to her and hug her close with the satisfaction of a successful test. He and Mai had worked on this for so long now. He couldn’t wait to share the good news with her when she returned from her tutoring duties.

“It’s good, no?” Evangeline said, returning Mike’s smile as she moved a stray lock of hair from her face.

“It is,” Mike responded, looking down at the gun in his hand. “It’s perfect. With some further testing and some improvements, I think we could roll this out to everyone—especially to those in the farms in the south who are dealing with those scumbag aliens.”

“If only we had these earlier, we could have maybe stopped—”

Mike stepped forward to her and placed the pistol on the large heavy desk in a rare empty spot. “Listen,” he said, cutting off her words. “There was nothing anyone could have done. They came too quickly. They had planned it for thousands of years as we were evolving—they saw it all: the technology, the rise and fall of empires and cultures, our wars, and our complete and utter failure to ever learn from our mistakes. That’s how they got us so quickly.”

Evangeline looked away, hiding her embarrassment as her cheeks reddened. He didn’t mean to embarrass her; she wasn’t even alive when it all happened, and she had no real concept of what it was like. None of these kids do, and Mike had to remind himself of that before he went off on one.

There was simply no way they could truly understand. It would be like modern civilization trying to understand how ancient cultures worked. Sure, we had artifacts and artworks that depicted how things were, and even some documented material, but we would never truly know. There was too much distance.

And this was the case now.

“No one really talks about it. How it happened, I mean. You talk of learning from mistakes, is there something we, right now, can learn from what happened when the aliens took over? What if they try it again? How can we be sure there aren’t more of them in the Earth’s crust waiting to come up for a second attempt? And if they do, can we stop them—maybe this is a start?” She pointed to the gun.

Mike nodded as he thought of his response. He didn’t believe there were any more still underground. With the way Charlie had brought down the two ships, he would have expected the aliens to have mounted a retaliatory attack by now.

“We don’t talk about it because there’s so few of us left, and not many people want to know. But to your other question, yes, these guns will help—to a degree. With the ability to overload the beads they all carry inside of them, we’ll be able to pop their heads like an overripe melon, but if they come at us in great numbers, we’ll need something else. These are really good for one-to-one. We need something bigger.”

Looking sheepish, Evangeline fidgeted from one foot to the other and avoided his gaze before eventually saying, “I… erm… was in your office earlier looking for some parts when I… found your designs. For the bomb. Do you really think it’s possible?”

At first, Mike wanted to explode at the intrusion of his privacy, but the hopeful look on her face reminded him of when he first met Mai during the ice age. Evangeline had that same infectious curiosity—something that proved rare among the post-apoc-born people.

Patting her hand, Mike said, “My sweet girl, if I didn’t think it possible, I wouldn’t still be here working today. But we’re not at that level yet. We need more parts, more tech, and to learn the alien science. It will come in time, and that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? I need people like you to carry on with my ideas long after I’ve bitten the dust.”

The young engineer blushed fully as her shoulders eased with relief. “I’ll do my best,” she said. “In the meantime, will you tell me how it all happened—the attack, I mean. How they managed to overwhelm us in such a short amount of time.”

This is what Mike wanted to hear. Hardly any of her generation truly wanted to know, being so wrapped up in their time in the sun that they didn’t want to look back into the shadows of time. If he were to have a successor, then yes, Evangeline would need to know everything—but not today.

An unmistakable rumble from one of the gigantic harvesters made the walls vibrate and the tools rattle on their hooks. Mike moved to the window that overlooked the courtyard. “It’ll have to wait for now,” he said. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new project.”

The harvester stopped, taking up almost the entire courtyard and blocking out the sun. A door a few levels up opened and the tiny figure of Mai, dressed in her usual gray overalls, stepped out onto the ladders. She descended slowly, step by step, as her three-person crew followed behind. When she touched down on the gravel, she turned to the facility and saw Mike standing at the window.

She had a wide grin on her face as she waved at him.

He knew she had found something interesting, he could see it in her very body language as she quickly scampered across the courtyard to the facility’s entrance. Mike turned and left the workshop, eager to find out what Mai had found. Evangeline followed closely behind.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Maria accepted a cup of tea from Khan and blew the steam away. The sweet scent of herbs and plants cleared her head and made her shiver. Gooseflesh rippled on her bare arms. She clutched the cup tighter, resting her elbows on her knees and leaning forward closer to the campfire.

Khan and Layla sat opposite. They checked through the contents of the gear, making sure their weapons were in place and all other supplies were appropriately stored away.

“I’m not sure we should leave just yet,” Maria said. “We should wait for Gregor to return before making any plans.”

“We’re not making plans,” Khan said, giving her a kind smile. “Just making sure we can move quickly if we need to. Everything will be all right.”

Maria sipped her hot tea. She tried to be optimistic these days, but since they’d found the pods and now these aliens, it felt like she was right back there at day one again when she and the others first left the harvester—or generation ship as they had thought of it. That sense of panic, fear and confusion remained in the past, but essences of it started to flutter about the edges of her consciousness like the hiding of a lie. Not having any programed tasks to carry out or a schedule that she had to stick to like before bred a horrible feeling of being lost.