Critical Path (The Critical Series Book2) (2 page)

Going limp, she turned her head and clenched her jaw, “Okay,” she said with a whisper, waiting.

Through her side vision she saw him grin with satisfaction. He let go of her arms and started to unbutton his gray farm-issue shirt.

Taking the opportunity, she twisted her body to the side and pushed him away with her freed arms.

He fell back onto the bed in a heap.

Thrashing, she kicked out to get loose from the sheets, but he was already on her, laughing, enjoying her struggles.

Just as he grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back to the bed, a knock came from the door.

A young man burst in and shouted, “They’re dead! They’re all dead!”

CHAPTER TWO

The midday sun beat down on Gregor, warming his head and shoulders amid the breeze generated by the momentum of the hover-bike.

Luckily for him, when the croatoans abandoned the farm and headed north, they did so in such a rush they left a number of their vehicles behind within the human-controlled warehouses.

For the first time in a few weeks, the sky was clear of clouds. Even the familiar orange hue gave way to bright blue skies. A quicksilver flash of memory bubbled up, providing him with a picture of his homeland. He was a child then, standing atop an old crane. He had climbed it in order to gain membership to the gang he would later go on to lead and turn into the biggest crime syndicate in Armenian history.

When he arrived home, his father belted him across the back of the legs. One of the dockers who knew his father—everyone in that old town knew Vladimir Miralos, an infamous drunk and washed-up street thug—tipped him off to his son’s stupid display of bravery and daring.

Vladimir needn’t have required an excuse.

Gregor’s very presence was enough to incur his father’s wrath.

But the fucker was dead and buried now, by Gregor’s own hands. Only so much belting a child will take before he cuts his father’s throat in his sleep.

The whine of the hover-bike’s engine and the touch of Maria’s hands on his hips pulled him back to the current day, and he found himself cheered by the exhilaration of the ride and the prospect of some interesting news from Denver and Layla.

Even after the two-and-a-half-hour journey from Freetown, he felt refreshed. They’d apparently found something that would give everyone renewed focus.

A new threat.

Good. They needed a threat. Everyone had got too lazy, too organized.

They thought they could make a quick change of things, but Gregor knew better. Like any conflict, attrition often won the war.

Besides, he couldn’t stand all the fucking politics and nicey-nicey bullshit.

For too long he found himself bored.

Especially since Layla had taken over proceedings.

But then what did he care anyway? The bitch could do what she wanted; he had someone else to occupy his attentions now. A fitter, younger, more naïve model who wasn’t some damned anthropological expert.

This one didn’t have an answer for everything and would be easier to bring on side. He just needed a little more time with her.

With Denver realizing he had a pair of balls and taking a fancy to Layla, poor little Maria was left abandoned and in need of a friend—a special friend.

Gregor pushed the throttle to three-quarters. The engines whined with power, blasting the hover-bike northwards over the trees. Below him, giant snakes of charred earth cut an east-west trajectory where once harvesters roamed. They had dug it up, burned it all.

A pair of lonely, empty harvesters sat in the middle of a track of blackened ground. One of them had its tracks missing. The people from Freetown and other farms stripped the vehicle for parts.

Charlie’s old friend Mike paid particular attention to this task as he passed on his engineering knowledge to some of the younger farmhands.

God knows what the old fossil was planning to build now. In his seventies, Mike still acted like a fool. He was one of the few who never really took the root. His fault. The old bastard would be dead soon.

Gregor was in his mid-fifties, but with the root, he felt and looked like he was in his early forties. Other drives and motivations, however, were from a much younger man, and he needed those attended to at some point.

With that thought in mind, he nudged the hover-bike so that it pitched violently a few degrees. Maria’s hands grabbed tighter around his waist. Her thighs press against his legs and her body against his back.

A good start.

“Hold steady,” Maria shouted into the wind. “I nearly fell. Are you trying to kill me?”

Looking over his shoulder, he gave her a grin. “I would never try that with you, my darling girl. You just hold tight in case we hit a little turbulence, eh?”

“There’s no turbulence this low, asshole.”

Gregor laughed as he turned back to the controls and pushed the throttle all the way while also bringing the bike lower so that the underside skimmed the branches and leaves of the tallest redwoods.

“How about now?” he said, wobbling the bike side to side, making Maria scream and squeeze him tighter. “That’s the spirit,” he said before raising the bike clear of the trees.

“You’ll kill us both with stunts like that,” Maria screamed.

Chuckling to himself, he looked down as something caught his attention.

He noticed three groups of approximately a dozen ex-cattle. Men and women bred to feed the croatoans.

Layla had created an education program to turn them back into ‘valued members of society.’ Gregor doubted its effectiveness.

Many of them were born simple. Even without the learned cattle-like behavior, he didn’t think they had the brainpower to comprehend language and appropriate behavior, but then this was right up Layla’s street.

The bitch got wet thinking about all the good she could do with these poor stupid creatures, but he knew it was all crap. She wasn’t doing this for their welfare; she was doing it for her own ego and guilty conscience.

Working with Augustus, she was one of humanity’s betrayers. She helped set up the organization for the farms, including the usage of human cattle, not to mention the breeding programs she oversaw and all the ‘efficiencies’ she delivered.

At least Gregor was honest in his views. He didn’t much care for the cattle people and thought they were probably better off dead. They weren’t going to have much of a life.

A Freetown scientist working under Layla’s direction tried to encourage them to forage. He held up a number of berries and edible plants and showed them how to pick them, but most stared back slack-jawed, unable to comprehend him.

Gregor banked the bike to the left as he saw the first farm tower. The main facility lay further on, hidden by the trees. He used the series of observation towers on each corner of the facility to navigate his way in.

“Hold on,” he said over his shoulder, winking at Maria. “It’s going to get a little… rough.”

“Take it easy. No need to be reckless.”

“No need, but it’s more fun!”

Maria screamed something, but her words were snatched away by the rush of the wind in his ears as he dove the bike, pointing its nose through a narrow gap in the treetops.

Branches scratched against the fenders on the side of the bike, but he powered on through, digging his feet into the cups. Maria’s weight slid against him, pushing him further into the bike’s controls.

With a heavy pull, he raised the nose as they flew down between two blocky, flat-roofed buildings. He piloted the bike beneath a gantry, ducking even though he had plenty of space.

A couple of women in the alley dove to the floor, making him laugh out loud.

“Slow down!” Maria screamed, her words barely audible.

Exiting the alley, he took the bike across a paved courtyard.

Someone had planted trees and flowers in various containers and built a set of benches that lined the outside. The placed looked like a damned Zen garden.

Not caring for that, he braked hard and turned the controls, sliding out the back of the bike until it came to a stop while knocking over some of the flower containers.

He took a slap to the back. “You arrogant bastard,” Maria said. “Jenny planted those.”

Maria got off and wobbled on unsteady legs. Gregor just smiled up at her. “Oh, first name terms with the cattle idiots now, eh? How very… Layla of you.”

“That may be so, but at least I’m not an uncaring douche bag.”

With that, she turned on her heel and headed for the double glass doors set into the front of a two-level-high building—the main compartment of the farm complex. Stepping off the bike and ignoring the smashed wooden container and the dead flower crushed underfoot, he strode forward after Maria, admiring the view of her ass as he went.

He liked that she had a spark within her.

In his experience, those girls performed the best.

Perhaps once he had dealt with whatever this news was, he’d get her high on his new root-mix and see if he couldn’t bring out some of that fire in her belly.

***

Inside, the complex was bright and clean with that croatoan off-white color on the walls. The plastic-coated wooden floor made Gregor’s shoes clack and squeak as he followed Maria through a wide, deserted reception.

Two uniformed women came out from a door to the left.

“Ladies,” Gregor said, tipping his head in greeting.

They mumbled something and dropped their heads as they took a wide berth around him and out the front doors. Stuck-up bitches. Yet more of Layla’s anthropology team.

It seemed like she was breeding a whole generation of humorless men and women. Soon, the damned planet wouldn’t be worth saving.

Bright sunshine shone through the clear ceiling panels of the passage that led to the main conference room—the location he had been summoned to.

Sitting crossed-legged, Layla leaned into Denver beside her on the beige couch and whispered something. The two conniving swines looked up at him with a distasteful expression—not that that bothered Gregor; he was proud of being distasteful to stuck-up people like them.

If being honest meant he had to be the bad guy, so be it.

When he crossed the threshold, he noticed Maria sitting on a stool by a wooden bar, her back pressed against its edge. She looked to the other side of the room where a large screen hung from the white wall.

There was something else more important standing there, looking on from by the side of that young kid Khan.

A damned alien.

But this one was different. It didn’t wear the helmet and visor that provided them with enriched air, but instead wore a smaller apparatus that fit around its neck, feeding tubes from a small tank into its throat, presumably providing a supply of the root-based gas they mixed with oxygen in order to breathe.

Gregor crouched to one knee and, in a single flowing movement, pulled the pistol from his hip holster and raised it toward the croatoan.

He noted, in a blink of an eye, that it appeared wounded: one of its eyes swelled like a tennis ball, and dark charring burns covered the chest plate of his armor.

Denver launched himself off the couch, screaming, “No!”

Bracing for impact, Gregor squeezed off a shot before Denver landed a stiff right jab to Gregor’s jaw, knocking him to the ground.

The shot went wide, just missing Khan’s right ear.

The boy screamed in shock.

The impact against the floor winded Gregor. He dropped the pistol from his hand and tried to punch Denver in the ribs, but the taller, heavier man had already straddled him and grabbed his throat, squeezing his windpipe.

Denver lifted his right fist high, ready to bring it down.

Gregor didn’t resist. He just smiled at the kid, waiting for him to prove that he had balls like his old man. “Go on, then,” he mocked as he waggled his jaw from side to side. The kid had a decent jab on him; he’d give him that.

“Stop,” came a voice from the edge of the room.

It wasn’t human.

“Stop… fighting.”

Raspy, heavy with bass, and punctuated with weird clicking could mean only one thing. Twisting his head and looking over, Gregor saw the damned alien move closer and place his gnarled hand on Denver’s shoulder.

“No,” it said, shaking its head.

“The damn things speak English now?” Gregor said as Denver reluctantly removed himself and stood back.

The alien loomed over Gregor and extended its hand. “No harm,” it wheezed.

Gregor slapped it away and rolled over onto his front. He got to his feet and rubbed his jaw as he swayed on unsteady feet. Looking at the overly amused Layla, he asked, “What the hell’s going on here?”

“Please, Gregor, take a seat. We’ve something to show you,” Khan said, running a hand through his dark, short hair. He scratched at his black scruff on his cheeks and stared at Gregor with those strangely intense and wild dark eyes of his. Although of a similar age to Denver, being born during the ice age, Gregor noticed an old soul in him.

A tracker and a bit of a wild man, he appealed to Gregor’s sense of self-sufficiency. He even liked how awkward he appeared in this setup.

Whereas Layla and now Maria and Denver were happy writing reports and organizing projects, Khan looked like the kind of guy who was happier stalking prey in the woods.

Tipping his head to the young man, Gregor turned and walked up to the bar, pulled out a stool, and sat down next to Maria. She didn’t look at him—no one did. All eyes, including his, were on the alien.

“So what do we call it?” Gregor said.

“Her,” Khan replied. “She’s called Venrick, and she was head of croatoan operations in Eastern Farm Twenty. She joined the group when they headed north.”

Venrick nodded her large turtle-like head and blinked her good eye.

Although a croatoan speaking English was new to Gregor, he’d quickly got over the initial shock. It wasn’t entirely surprising. Before the shit hit the fan, Augustus had instigated a new language-learning system. The plan was to teach both croatoans and humans a new combined language based on English.

“Venrick and the others left to follow a distress signal a week after the escape pods landed,” Khan added. “I saw various groups of them firsthand as they headed across the border into Ontario. But when they passed Lake Simcoe, they only got a few kilometers before… well, perhaps you’d like to show your video, Venrick?”