Darren Wearmouth - Critical Path

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.