Critical Path (The Critical Series Book2) (31 page)

Charlie scowled at him. “I always knew it. You piece of shit.”

The internal gate creaked open and two men ran out. One aimed at Gregor; the other reached within five yards of Charlie. “You need to come with me.”

“Tell your boss that all bets are off unless she lets me do this.”

The guard jerked his rifle toward the gate. “Get moving or I shoot.”

Charlie groaned. “If you shoot, you’ll end up in here fighting a turtle. I’m too important to your boss.”

“Move your ass. Now.”

“No,” Charlie said and firmly waved him away.

The guard glanced up at Aimee and returned through the gate. A hushed silence filled the arena, only punctuated with an occasional cough or click.

He eyeballed Gregor again. Blood crusted the gangster’s light blue shirt, and he winced with every movement. They must have given him a beating in the cells, and he would also be starved of root.

“About time you showed balls again,” Gregor said.

Charlie narrowed his eyes. “You bastard.”

He remembered Pippa running into their office, bursting with excitement about finding a strange blue bead. Nothing would take the smile off her face. He thought he would spend the rest of his life with her. Gregor took her away.

“Very well,” Aimee called down. “You have your wish, but don’t be surprised if we shoot him.”

A guard next to her threw down a broadsword. It spun in the air and landed in the dirt with a thump, close to Charlie’s boots. He picked it up in a two-handed grip and raised it in front of his chest. The thing felt heavy but manageable, especially against a man in Gregor’s state.

Gregor screwed up his face and held his sword above his head. “Come on, then.”

Charlie growled, ran at him and swung. Gregor brought his sword forward to fend off the blow, and their blades clanked together. Charlie pulled back for another swing. Gregor staggered back and clutched his thigh.

Seeing Charlie advance, he raised his sword in a one-handed grip to deflect the blow again. That wouldn’t be good enough this time.

Charlie’s thrust rammed Gregor’s sword into the side of his own head. He snarled and dropped to one knee. Blood ran from a deep cut on the side of his head. The crowd roared.

The sword fell out of Gregor’s shaking hand. He squinted at Charlie through bloodshot eyes. “Don’t entertain them. Finish it.”

For a brief moment, Charlie felt sorry for him. Those thoughts were quickly pushed aside by an image of Pippa’s cold body in that cave.

“This is for Pippa,” Charlie said.

He tightened his grip, lunged forward, and thrust the blade through Gregor’s chest.

Gregor gasped and stared into Charlie’s eyes. A thick stream of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

Charlie pulled the blade free and crouched in front of him. “Why did you do it, Gregor?”

“I’m… glad it was… you,” he said in a quiet voice.

Charlie frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He coughed, blood rolling down his chin. “Didn’t want it to be those…”

“It was you. I know it. You didn’t say those things to avoid being killed by an alien.” But Charlie saw the truth in Gregor’s eyes and knew then that he hadn’t killed Pippa. All this was just to get him to be the one to end his life.

Gregor smiled, blood glistening in the cracks of his rotten teeth. His eyes glazed over, and he lifelessly slumped to his side.

Charlie looked up to the silenced crowd and roared with anguish.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Mike wiped sweat from his face and tightened the restraining bolt with one last push on the wrench. He leaned up, squinting with the pain in his ankle and back.

To quote Danny Glover, he was most definitely getting too old for this shit.

Despite the warm evening sun outside, the light didn’t filter this deep into Hagellan’s craft.

Low blue lights glowed from small strips overhead. This area, the engine management control room, was barely a hundred square feet.

With the company of two of the small engineers and their equipment to fit the parts, the room soon became difficult to maneuver within.

Behind him, the two aliens were busy diagnosing the electrical system. Through broken English they had explained that the new parts they had recovered from the mother ship needed calibrating to work with this craft’s different capacity requirements.

Although he couldn’t access the engines directly, Mike had seen parts of it through the conduits and access panels while replacing the damaged parts. The aliens weren’t too keen on explaining their tech and avoided most of his questions, but he made out that the power source was some kind of antimatter material.

To him, and most of humanity, that was one of the Holy Grails of power supply, yet despite being within his grasp, he had no opportunity to study it further. But then, he thought about the mother ship. If this craft did work and Hagellan and the others left, he’d decided he would go back to the shipwreck and do some more technological archeology.

Aside from the power supply, he had ascertained the engine was fitted with a hyperdrive component allowing it to ‘jump.’ Although he was told this was only small distances, their idea of small was vastly different to his own.

The planet with the jump gate was still over ten light-years away. Or three parsecs. Given that using a regular nuclear-fuelled power source would take approximately twenty thousand years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, the location of this planet was over twice the distance.

Given the size of the craft, just twenty meters long and shaped like a dart, the antimatter power source must have an incredible power-to-size ratio.

This would give them just one jump, however.

And as far as he could understand the alien’s explanation, the engine created a temporary quantum bridge allowing almost instantaneous travel through the field of quantum-entangled particles to the planet.

They would effectively be travelling through time.

Which, of course, made him realize that if they were to return in the same manner, they would actually return before they set off. The paradox itched at the back of his mind. Somehow the aliens had found a way to counter this. Perhaps the quantum bridge somehow avoided the time issue by doing something with dimensions.

Whatever the case, he’d have plenty of time to research this once this mission was up and running.

“We go, now,” one of the engineers said, lifting up its tablet-like device and heading for the ladder that led up out of the maintenance room. “All fixed.”

“Are you sure?” Mike asked.

The alien blinked and held up the tablet to show him a set of graphs. “Acceptable tolerances. New parts calibrated.”

“That’s good to hear,” Mike said. “What now?”

“Test flight.”

***

Mike hid his revulsion of Hagellan as the elder alien shuffled his mass into the open bridge by climbing up the ladder. The alien leader sat in the large chair situated in the center of the bridge and brought together the straps.

Mike was in a seat next him and facing upwards as though he were lying on his back due to the craft’s upright position within the earth, the nose of it pointing up at an eighty-degree angle. Behind him, strapped into a pair of upright stools, the two engineering aliens gripped their tablets.

Hagellan turned to face Mike, wearing an expression Mike thought was mirth. “Ready, human?” Hagellan said.

“As I’ll ever be. Though I don’t know why you insisted on me being here. I don’t know your tech or how to fly this thing.”

“Consider it a gift,” Hagellan said. “A free demonstration of our technology.”

“Right.” Mike didn’t know if he was being sincere or mocking him. “There’s just one question I have, this planet, Tredeya, what’s the atmosphere like? Also, how are Charlie, Denver, and Layla to breathe on the way there?”

“We have full atmospheric simulations on this craft,” he said. “And air tanks to last six months for four humans. The atmosphere on the planet is close to that of Earth’s, so that like my kind here, humans will only need a small apparatus to modify the air. They won’t be the first humans we have taken to Tredeya.”

Mike wanted to know a little more about that revelation, but Hagellan clicked at the engineers, and the conversation was over.

A central podium rose out of the floor in front of Hagellan, and overhead blue strip lights switched on, bathing the bridge in cool blue light.

A rumble flowed through the ship and up through Mike’s legs and arms that clutched at the seat. Mike was never a fan of flying on commercial aircraft, much less an antimatter-powered quantum alien ship.

Still, a part of him, his unending curiosity, reached beyond the primal fear that prickled at the back of his neck and the cold sinking feeling in his guts. He had to remind himself that he was in a position that no other human before had been in.

Putting aside his feelings of the aliens for a moment and focusing on the small details, Mike determined he’d record as much as possible for Charlie and Denver’s benefit.

The rumble continued to shudder through the hull. A high-pitched whine, coming from somewhere deep in the ship, joined the low bass notes. Together, these two tones combined to form the soundtrack of an alien propulsion system that made the hairs on Mike’s arms stand on end and goose bumps break out on his skin.

Hagellan ran his gnarled hand over the podium.

A holographic control cube popped up and displayed a series of alien glyphs and symbols that Mike didn’t recognize.

“What are you doing?” Mike asked.

“Sending the jump gate a message,” Hagellan said, his voice low and rumbling, the sound of which matched the warble of the engine.

“What kind of message?”

“Docking procedure. To ensure it hasn’t been compromised yet.”

“How long will it take to get a response?”

“Thirty of your human minutes. Via the tachyon transmitter.”

Hagellan reverted his attention to the holocube and manipulated the symbols before pressing what Mike considered as a kind of send button. The cube flashed once, and the display changed, showing a 3D landscape, presumably of the surrounding area.

The two aliens behind Mike chattered something, and a five-meter or so wraparound screen at the front of the bridge switched on, showing an ultra-high-definition image of the sky.

After further manipulation of the holocube, the image split into three. The central panel displayed a frontal view, and the two on either side displayed the view from port and starboard. Hagellan adjusted the magnification and grunted. He brought both of his hands to the holocube, hovering his palms over its surface like some kind of alien magician.

And then they were moving.

Slowly at first, the craft easing up from its buried position. Dirt and rubble clattered down the sides of the dart-shaped ship as it continued to rise, inch by inch.

“Well?” Mike said, raising his voice over the sound. “All’s working well with the new parts?”

“You’ve done well,” Hagellan said with a nodding gesture.

He manipulated the controls, and the ship shuddered as though some kind of secondary engine kicked in. It rose faster now, and through the screens, Mike saw the township of Unity slink away, the horizon dropping below the view so that the pink and orange evening sky filled the displays.

His guts flip-flopped, reminding him of days at the carnival as a teenager, experiencing rides that would have never passed health and safety checks. But that was part of the thrill. They knew they were dangerous, but the thrill was too much to ignore.

Despite his feelings about the aliens and this mission as a whole, a smile spread across his face. First because of a job done well, and second because this was just so damned awesome. He was flying in a bona fide alien ship.

The ship leveled off to a horizontal position. An altimeter on the screen indicated they were three hundred meters off the ground, clear of trees or obstacles.

Hagellan made a sharp thrusting maneuver with his hands.

And the craft shot forward like a bullet from a gun.

Mike’s body compressed with the sudden change in g-force. He gritted his jaw and clutched the arms of his chair until his knuckles were white. It felt like someone was trying to push his organs out through his back.

And it kept speeding up until Mike grunted with pain.

Hagellan looked over, his massively muscled neck coping with the force as though it wasn’t there. The look in its eye sent a chill up Mike’s spine and reminded him once more that these creatures were just so utterly alien. It looked at Mike as though he was an experimental mouse.

Mike’s eyes grew wide, and blood dripped from his nose. He gurgled, trying to form words to tell the bastard creature to slow down. A sharp pain in his brain started out as a small ball behind his forehead, and soon black and red shapes appeared in his vision.

When he thought he was about to pass out, Hagellan turned away and eased back on the throttle to a slow coast. Mike slumped forward in his chair and instantly vomited and coughed up blood.

“Your species is weak,” Hagellan said, but with no tone of accusation, rather an objective observation.

Mike wiped his mouth and nose and waited a moment to compose himself. He breathed hard for a minute until his heart stopped trying to claw its way out of his chest. When the adrenaline wore off, he looked up wearily to Hagellan.

“You bastard. You brought me here to test me like some goddamned lab rat.”

“We needed to know for sure. You survived. This bodes well.”

“And if I didn’t?”

Hagellan didn’t respond and turned away.

Mike looked up at the screens. Outside he saw vast tracks of ocean.

“Where are we? How fast did we just travel?”

“We travelled five hundred and fifty-three of your human miles in five of your seconds. Now we return.”

“Wait,” Mike said, shocked at the numbers and wanting to prepare himself, but it was too late. Hagellan flipped the craft nose over tail and barrel rolled on its axis until they were pointing the other way, almost as if defying the laws of momentum.