Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) (8 page)

The blue lights on the prism flickered. It slowly descended, attempted to rise again for a moment but fell almost immediately.

Charlie rolled into the temple and ducked left. He glanced across to Denver and Layla, raised his rifle and fired.

Denver stood for a better view. The scion had landed in a space at the center of the temple.

A blue beam shot from the machine and focused on his visor. Denver squinted when it moved from one of his eyes to the other. He ducked back down again, guessing the thing was taking aim at his face. Charlie advanced forward and fired repeatedly.

Electric snaps echoed around the walls. The temple fell silent. A thin veil of smoke filled the air.

“I think I’ve done it,” Charlie said.

Edging out into an aisle, Denver noticed all the lights on the prism were out. It sat there like an inanimate object, but that wouldn’t be enough for him to drop his guard. He moved to Charlie’s side while keeping the scion machine in his sights.

Layla followed, her short shallow breathing audible through the intercom. Denver turned back. “Are you all right?”

She smiled and touched the arm of his suit. “I’ll be okay.”

Feeling his face flush, he looked away. “Better check to see if we really killed that thing.”

“Cover me,” Charlie said. He took slow deliberate steps toward the prism while maintaining his aim, and kicked it. It didn’t move. “I don’t think we’ll be getting any more trouble from this one.”

“You should’ve seen it,” Denver said. “Lasers and bolts all over the place.”

“If the mech’s a bigger, badder version of this,” Layla said. “I’d say the tredeyans have got their hands full.”

She knelt next to the prism and clanked the back of her gauntlet against its glossy sloped side. Denver didn’t want to touch it. He wanted to get away from it, in case it exploded into pieces.

Charlie shook his head. “There’s some crazy shit going down here. I don’t see how—”

Footsteps thudded up the steps. Denver twisted to the entrance and prepared to fire.

Vingo’s helmet appeared through the door and he looked around. “Is everybody okay?”

“We are, no thanks to you,” Denver said. “Where did you go?”

“I guarded outside to make sure no clusps took advantage of our plight. The rifle fire might have attracted many.”

“Bullshit,” Charlie said. “You weren’t bothered about them stalking us a while ago. You bottled it.”

Denver suspected Vingo saved them in the caverns to be his bodyguards on his quest to get back to his own village through a war zone. As soon as the shooting started, he disappeared like a fart in the wind. It wasn’t a problem. They suited each other’s needs. At least they knew he couldn’t be relied on when the shit hit the fan.

Vingo approached the prism, tapped his forearm pad and scanned it over the top of the machine. “It’s a worker drone. You’ve corrupted the collective.”

“Which means?” Layla said.

“When acting remotely, like this one, they have to assemble their own core power for movement and communications. If you damage the artificial intelligence controlling this, you can irreversibly corrupt them.”

“Remotely from what?” Charlie said. “The prism in the sky? Is that ship a huge version of the thing we just killed?”

“No. They don’t assemble to anywhere near that size. The croatoans told us that the scion build ships with labor and materials from other planets.”

“Do the other planets give them full access to their systems and records?” Layla said.

“Yes, and now they peacefully trade with the scion.”

“Why couldn’t you do that? Seems odd that you choose potential destruction over a new overlord.”

“The croatoans won’t allow us because we have links to their systems. Optax, for example, a mining planet, is independent. They have formidable ground defenses to protect themselves and set up a safe zone around their planet. If a ship enters without its weapons disarmed, it’s the last action it will take.”

“Do the scion have any of your humans working for them?” Charlie said.

“Not to my knowledge, but it’s possible. They may have taken them from other planets.”

“When we have time to spare,” Layla said. “I’d like to know more about how you managed the humans, the numbers and where they are.”

“I can give you information, but some things are beyond tredeyan knowledge.”

Layla was bound to ask that question some point, but this was the wrong time to be going down a rat-hole.

“Forget about that for now,” Denver said. “Let’s move the prism out of here. We need to stay focused on the current situation.”

“He’s right,” Charlie said. “What if a couple of its angry brothers and sisters turn up?”

“Moving it into the forest should be good enough for the moment,” Vingo said. “I expected a fighter to hit the temple, but it looks like we destroyed it in time.”

“We?” Charlie asked.

Denver picked up the object the prism was working on when they first entered the temple, a shiny black open case. Inside it, dull gray components were attached to a transparent circuit board. Colored lines interconnected each one to other parts. “What’s this?”

“It’s a transceiver,” Vingo said. “They place them to have full planetary coverage for their ground force.”

Charlie raised his left gauntlet above it and clenched his fist. “I suppose we better smash it up.”

“No need. It’s incomplete.”

Denver heard quiet clicking between Charlie’s and Vingo’s words. He went to raise a finger to his lips, but his gauntlet bounced off his visor. Layla smiled at him, until she read his serious expression.

He thought his action was a mix of natural instinct and a reflection on just how good the suits were. In Tredeya’s atmosphere, he moved better with the suit on and had gotten used to it during the last couple of hours. Regardless of the reason, he recognized the distinct noise of a croatoan in close proximity.

“Keep quiet for a minute,” Denver said.

The group paused to listen. It was more of a silent flapping noise than a conversational croatoan click. The type Denver only heard when up close and dirty during a fight.

Layla pointed at a waist-high wooden door to their left.

Vingo, true to form, took a step back. Charlie put his gauntlet behind his back and ushered him forward. “You better speak to whoever is behind that door, because the only talking I usually do to croatoans is with my rifle.”

“It’s a small storeroom that’s been empty for years.”

“Something’s in there. Go on.”

Without wanting to take any chances after the experience with the hunter in the caverns, Denver gestured Layla behind a bench and aimed over it. Hagellan may have helped them, but he couldn’t speak for the rest of their damned empire. It would be naïve to think that bringing down a mother ship and destroying their jump gate would go unnoticed.

Charlie knelt to the side of Vingo. He shuffled toward the door and called out in gargled croaks without a response. He tried a few raspy clicks. The door creaked open.

A croatoan the size of a typical six-foot guard, wearing a blue robe, sat curled up in the small space. A silver tube ran around the center of its head, covering the nostril holes. No doubt a hi-tech breathing apparatus. It clicked a long response to Vingo.

Vingo replied and the croatoan crawled out of its cramped hiding place.

“What did it say?” Denver said.

“She asked if she was in danger, and says she hid here when the scion probe approached the temple.”

Charlie scoffed. “She? That creature?”

Vingo turned to face him. “Please don’t be disrespectful.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you think you are the special race and the rest of us are just creatures?”

“I never said that.”

“Male and female genders are not uncommon in the universe. Many are a lot more advanced than Earth, and nearly all have different—”

“They invaded our planet,” Denver said, not being able to resist cutting in at the apparent lecture. “We didn’t want to personalize them during our fight. They were our enemy. Simple as that.”

The croatoan clicked behind Vingo. He turned and listened.

“She says we can stay here for as long as we want,” Vingo said.

“Don’t you need to get to your village?” Layla said.

“The sun rises in less than a unit. We can rest here and wait for nightfall.”

Denver stood and walked over to Vingo, thinking it was time to get things straight between them. “What’s your real story?”

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“I think you do. That’s why you saved us, isn’t it, to provide protection on your way home? We’re nothing but your bloody meat shields!”

“We have common goals. You’re free to leave and go where you wish if your association with me is so difficult.”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “We both want to survive, but the difference is we can’t get home.”

“A possibility exists if you help me,” Vingo said.

“I’m not sure I believe you,” Denver said.

“Believe what you want. I don’t have anything to lose by not showing you a way back to Earth.”

Layla gasped through the intercom. Denver glanced back. Her open-mouthed expression curled into a smile. He wanted to feel the same excitement but couldn’t. The more time he spent with Vingo, the less he trusted him.

CHAPTER NINE

Maria slumped against the small table and inhaled the black coffee, hoping the bitter scent would chase away the clone memories of her forebear.

Ever since she had those first flashbacks to the Roanoke era, her dreams and thoughts had been invaded by flashes of the terrible things the croatoan invaders had performed on her… well, self.

She looked up at the window in the small Freetown office. Dawn had just broken, bathing the landscape in a warm yellow glow that wasn’t quite strong enough to banish the cold gray of a frosty autumnal morning. The coffee burned her mouth and throat, but she didn’t care; pain was a reminder that although she was a clone she still had feelings—still had her own life.

Outside of the converted office building that Freetown used as a break room, voices and footsteps belonging to both humans and croatoans echoed through the corridor.

They were all getting ready to depart Freetown and join Unity.

Like her clone mother, it seemed Maria had to leave the only place she had considered home for some promised colony of safety. But she had seen the way of life in Unity and it wasn’t all roses and hugs.

But then without Layla and Denver, what did she have to stay around for?

The others within Freetown seemed to go about their business as though nothing had happened, as though their sacrifice was just some small thing to acknowledge and then move on.

The very fact that any of them were able to wake up and breathe should have highlighted that their sacrifice had been worth it and had brought them freedom and life. And yet, all anyone could talk about was what role they would fill in Unity.

Maria, though, had other ideas.

She wasn’t going to go to Unity. She couldn’t face confronting more of her clones. If her residual memories of her original self were anything to go by, she didn’t want to have to talk about them with the others—assuming they had the same vivid dreams about being captured and experimented on by croatoan scientists.

What if Maria was the only one?

What would that mean?

She downed the rest of the coffee. The hot liquid burned her throat and stomach, making her gasp. After a while the pain diminished, as it always did. She stood and approached the window, pressing her palms against it.

One of the harvesters stood just across the square. The thing was huge and bulky, but strangely comforting. She had spent all her formative years there working with her crew, thinking they were doing some noble deed for all of humankind. A generation ship built to take colonists to some faraway planet was a cruel delusion perpetrated by the croatoans.

In some weird way, she was actually more croatoan than human—at least in her mind. They had created her, imprinted the knowledge they had wanted her to know to carry out a specific role.

Did they also program her mind to look back on those times, look onto that harvester with a sense of sadness and longing? Ever since Charlie and Denver had ‘freed’ her from its confines she had never felt settled.

She didn’t belong in this world; she knew that.

She was an accident, a mistake. One of those small things that even the calculating croatoan council didn’t account for, or even if they did, they didn’t care about the results.

So what now? she thought. If Unity wasn’t to be her next location and Freetown was deserted, where should she go? What should she do?

Perhaps that was a question all humans had, she wondered, thinking about children and teenagers, especially those in Unity. If they weren’t pushed into something by their elders or guided by their parents, how would they know what to do with their lives?

What was the purpose of being alive? At least on the harvester she had a role. So what if it was a lie. Isn’t all of reality a lie?

The door to the break room opened. A man—a clone of Ben—entered.

Maria had renamed him Jason on account of being unable to see him as the real Ben… or at least her version of the Ben clone. He had taken to the name willingly when Layla and the others reintegrated him to Freetown after they had freed him from an abandoned harvester.

“How do you do it?” Maria asked, turning to face him.

Jason smiled at her and zipped up his farm-issue suit. The collar was frayed and tatty and the front was stained with orange smudges: spills from the root juice some of the Freetowners had started to make.

“Be so devilishly handsome, you mean?”

Yeah, that was Jason. Ben was more reserved.

Although she missed Ben, Jason was still a likeable person. Since she returned to Freetown she’d spent most of her time with Jason, talking about Tredeya, the croatoans, and what it all meant.

“Hell knows,” Jason had said in response to those questions. He knew he was a clone and knew he didn’t have the answers but seemed quite content to continue to exist without knowing.