Critical Path

“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.

“It’s good, no?” Evangeline said, returning Mike’s smile as she moved a stray lock of hair from her face.

“It is,” Mike responded, looking down at the gun in his hand. “It’s perfect. With some further testing and some improvements, I think we could roll this out to everyone—especially to those in the farms in the south who are dealing with those scumbag aliens.”

“If only we had these earlier, we could have maybe stopped—”

Mike stepped forward to her and placed the pistol on the large heavy desk in a rare empty spot. “Listen,” he said, cutting off her words. “There was nothing anyone could have done. They came too quickly. They had planned it for thousands of years as we were evolving—they saw it all: the technology, the rise and fall of empires and cultures, our wars, and our complete and utter failure to ever learn from our mistakes. That’s how they got us so quickly.”

Evangeline looked away, hiding her embarrassment as her cheeks reddened. He didn’t mean to embarrass her; she wasn’t even alive when it all happened, and she had no real concept of what it was like. None of these kids do, and Mike had to remind himself of that before he went off on one.