Critical Path

A tense hush descended among the group as Mike fell quiet after hearing the news. It was so much to take in; not because of it being surprising—nothing really surprised him anymore, but the fact they had come so far and Charlie had done so well to survive that he was not committed to this one-way trip to God knows where.

“He’s a brave boy,” Mai said, her face neutral.

She had come to love Charlie almost like a son, having never had a child of her own. When he took the bomb and took out the aliens, Mike had consoled her for weeks. With the news that he survived the event, she had brightened immeasurably, and now this.

“So what exactly happens now?” Mike asked.

“Let’s go inside to your lab,” Layla said, “where we can talk privately. We need to start making plans.”

Mike didn’t like the grim expression on her face. It never meant anything good.

“And we’ve got something to show you that might be of interest to Charlie if he’s going to one of their worlds,” Mai said.

Mike opened the door and held it open as Mai, Maria, and Layla headed inside. Mike ignored the nervous feeling in his guts.

* * *

Mike cleared some space in his and Mai’s lab and pulled a pair of stools out from beneath his workbench. The bench’s surface was littered with parts, mechanical and electrical, and numerous sheets of paper with his notes scrawled on with scratchy biros. Of all the stationary to have survived the apocalypse, it had to be crappy gel biros. What he would do for a decent, working fountain pen…

The computer screen was covered in dust. Mai must have noticed Maria’s and Layla’s expressions and grabbed a rag to wipe it clean. One of the solid state drives from the harvester lay by the side of the screen, a convoluted set of cables connecting the two devices. The drive itself resembled a power brick—solid, black and incased in the alien polymer material.

“Before we get to the details of Charlie and Denver’s new mission,” Mike said, “I think you ought to see this. It might prove useful, or at least help prepare them for what they might encounter on the alien world.”

“Where did you get this?” Maria asked.

Mai pointed out the window to the harvester. “It’s an older model than we usually find. The system was easier to hack into. We’ve found all kinds of information.”

“Like what?” Layla said, leaning forward as Mike fussed with the cables.

“It appears that this particular harvester has quite the travel history,” Mai said. “From the data we managed to pull, we found at least a dozen unique locations. I can’t tell what or where they are, as they use a croatoan system of identification, but one thing that is clear is that most of those locations are from planets in our solar system.”

“We were hoping you could help us decode the identification system,” Mike said to Layla. While she worked at the farm with Gregor, she had picked up a good amount of the croatoan language and writing. “But that can wait, for now. Let’s watch a movie.”

Mike finished connecting the drive and the screen. Using his custom-made operating system, he entered a series of commands that would decode and play the film clips he and Mai had taken off the drive earlier.

“Sorry we don’t have any popcorn,” Mai said as she switched off the lights and joined the others, sitting on a free stool. Mike finished his setup and sat beside Mai as the first video clip played.

It was from the external camera situated on the front of the harvester. Mike and Mai hadn’t yet been able to transpose the audio tracks, so in silence they watched a trembling image as the harvester ploughed through a dirt track.

At first, it would be easy to think it was taken on Earth, but as the video continued to play, Mike watched Layla and Maria lean closer to the screen and their eyes widen as they saw it for the first time: three moons in the sky. In a triangular pattern, they dominated the horizon.

Each moon was a different size; the one closest to the planet had clear markings on it.

“A base of some kind,” Mai added.

“We zoomed in and noticed a regularity to the shapes. It seems like some large infrastructure was built there. Given the scale and shape, they resemble the design cues of the farm facilities, making us believe that that particular moon is host to a considerable croatoan infrastructure.”

The two women nodded and remained silent as they continued to watch the footage.

From the edge of the frame, shadows shifted at the line of large alien vegetation. Almost prehistoric-looking palms stood what must have been hundreds of feet tall. Their trunks sprouted numerous spiked woody branches. The shadows continued to shift as the camera began to pan the horizon, finally coming to a stop on the left side of the frame.

It zoomed in and held steady, the harvester apparently having stopped. From within the tall, alien trees, a group of five figures exited.

Maria and Layla gasped.