Critical Path

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?”