Darren Wearmouth - Critical Path

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.