Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) (21 page)

Denver shot Charlie a suspicious glance. Charlie also found it hard to believe a word he said. Vingo’s ever-evolving story made sure of that.

Layla steered off the coast and cruised up the side of a hill. Grass swayed beneath them as they powered to the top. The catamaran must have had an altitude sensor because it always maintained a steady height of five meters above the ground.

“Nearly there,” Vingo said and leaned forward in anticipation.

The catamaran swept over the brow and headed down. A square space had been cleared at the bottom. In the middle sat a charred skeleton of a ship. Layla slowed as they reached it and they gently bumped against the dirt.

Vingo jumped off and hobbled toward it. He gazed at two burned corpses on the ground and rubbed his hand along the twisted frame.

“Doesn’t look like a village to me,” Denver said.

“I take it that’s his escape screwed?” Layla said.

Charlie hopped off the side, pleased to have power-assisted movement in the heavy atmosphere again. He approached Vingo while surveying the scene.

The forty-meter remains listed into a large crater by the side of it. Most likely a direct hit from the scion prism. Charlie spotted two more twisted figures in the blackened internal wreckage.

“Where’s your village?” Charlie said.

Vingo slowly turned and dropped a burned piece of debris. “There is no village.”

Taking a deep breath, Charlie fought the urge to punch him in the face. Right from the start, up until the cave, Vingo claimed it as his motivation and played them along. The bargain he was attempting to strike with the Amalgam didn’t seem a bad thing to hide, it sounded like he was trying to look after his people. Now the people didn’t actually exist, it changed everything.

Charlie stepped toward him.

“Get back. Now,” Denver shouted, piercing Charlie’s ear.

A dark shadow crept over the makeshift landing strip. A twenty-meter-high croatoan war mech, with thick robotic legs, a sleek black angular body in proportion and a cannon on each side, stood on the opposite hill. A laser shot from the top of it and swept across the ground between Charlie, Vingo and the catamaran.

“Why the fuck is that shooting at us?” Charlie yelled. “I thought you and the turtles were tight?”

Vingo ran past him and into the catamaran, firing up the engines. “I’m a traitor, remember; they don’t take kindly to that behavior. Are you coming or staying?”

Charlie, Denver, and Layla jumped into the moving catamaran as Vingo swung it around and headed back down toward the sea as cannon fire flew over their heads.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The cold afternoon air, wafting through an open window, made the skin on Mike’s exposed arms goose bump. He shivered and moaned as he moved up from his chair, pushing up with his good arm, the other now in a sling after Mai had removed the bullet and treated the wound with the now-familiar root poultice.

He checked his watch; it was four hours since the advanced party of croatoans had attacked. The pain in his elbow still throbbed when he tried to move his arm. The painkilling properties of the root, along with a supply of codeine Unity had salvaged from a nearby hospital, had given him enough pain suppression. He wanted to get on with the job at hand.

Mai entered the small room at the rear of Aimee’s residence. When Mike fell from his wounds, they brought him here to treat him while Unity’s defense force destroyed the advance attackers.

“Any news?” Mike said. He was waiting for Aimee’s response to his failure.

“Khan and Baliska returned from their scouting,” Mai said, sitting beside him on the bed and placing the palm of her hand against his shoulder with light tenderness.

“What did they say?”

“Augustus’ forces are less than an hour away.”

“And the radio weapon?” Mike asked, resisting a painful cringe at the answer. He felt bad for leaving Mai to deal with his failure. He had assured Aimee and the others at Unity that they would have the radio weapon working in time and staked his reputation on it—which now lay in tatters, like Unity’s chances of survival.

“I tried to diagnose what went wrong, but it all seems fine to me. The connections are solid, the power source is perfectly fine, and the dish responds to other stimulation.”

Mike used his free hand to scratch his nose. “Okay… it’s got to be something simple, then. The design makes sense, the parts are good, and the wiring as you say is fine, so what could it be? Must be a bug in a part somewhere in the chain. We need to start right from the beginning…” He sighed at the thought.

“There isn’t time,” Mai said. “Aimee is working with Ryan and the others to get fighters into defensive positions. Khan and Baliska managed to take out a couple of Augustus’ scouts, but… I think this might be it.” Mai dropped her head onto his shoulder and wrapped her arm around his neck.

“Damn it, Mai, we’ve survived worse than this. I’m not giving up now. Think of what Charlie, Denver, and Layla have done for us. We can’t just stand back and let this place go down, least of all to someone like Augustus.”

He hugged her back with his good arm, wincing as he reached round. He kissed her on the head and stood up from the bed, swaying slightly, still groggy from his wound and the medication. “I’ve an idea,” he said. “I need your help, though, to get back up to the platform.”

***

With Mai and Gib’s help, Mike got to the top of the town and clambered up to the platform in order to inspect the hardware again. The sun was dipping down behind the pines to the west of their position, casting long shadows across the clearing and lush root field.

It wouldn’t stay lush for long, though, not once the battle commenced. The orange field would soon be red. He just hoped most of it would belong to Augustus and his cobbled-together army.

“Okay,” Mike said, shuffling down to the small square device, multimeter in hand. “Gib, you reconnect the power supply, and Mai, my love, can you check the readings in the dish.”

Both nodded and moved into position as Mike prized the lid off the device showing the alien transformer inside. It looked like an old cotton reel but made of a highly magnetic material that generated a seemingly impossible amount of wattage for such a small device.

From that, the charge powered the microwave transmitter.

Mike switched on the device and like before got the green light. He checked the contacts and made sure the energy was flowing through the device. “We’re all good here,” Gib said, monitoring a tablet connected to the croatoan batteries.

“Here too,” Mai said. “I’m getting a current.”

“Right,” Mike said, kneeling closer and sighing as his back clicked. He switched on the flashlight attached to a band around his head to illuminate the insides of the device in the ever-dwindling daylight.

With the sun down, the wind seemed to increase, bringing with it a chill that whined and whistled through the tree branches, each baleful note making Mike think of the hover-bikes. He kept looking back across the field to make sure there weren’t actually a group of bikes about to bear down on him.

The image from earlier blazed bright in his mind. He closed his eyes and steadied himself with his good hand.

“Are you okay, love?” Mai asked, bending to him and placing her hand on his shoulder.

Mike forced a smile. “I’m fine, just a bit tired from the drugs.”

He knew Mai wouldn’t believe that; the root was a potent stimulant and would give him all the energy and alertness he needed. But what it wouldn’t do was erase memories or the fear of being a sitting duck while the croatoan hover-bike riders bore down on him.

“I think I can make some modifications,” he said, looking back at the device. The power coupling from the transformer to the microwave transmitter was set to allow only a certain amount of power through, so as not to overload the individual parts. He thought that perhaps if he opened the gate all the way to let the full load in, that could help push enough power into the transmitter, and thus into the dish.

Explaining his strategy to Gib and Mai, they both nodded and agreed that it sounded like a sensible option. With time running out and no other obvious fix, Mike got to work disassembling the coupling so as to readjust its settings.

“The Unity defense personnel are really digging in,” Mai said from her position just above Mike. The sounds of hover-bikes, some old harvesters and marching feet conjured their own image as sweat started to break out on his forehead.

“Mai, I can’t do this one-handed. Can you remove the coupling for me while I handle the wiring?”

“Sure.”

Like a thousand times before, they both got to work, their hands agile and seemingly working of their own accord, supplementing each other’s skills rather than getting in the way. It always made him smile how in-sync they were, but today he couldn’t find the energy to smile as the time clicked down.

As he adjusted the coupling, he took a look around, seeing Unity preparing for Augustus’ onslaught. The thought of the battle brought back lots of old memories of when the croatoans first came out of the ground.

The sheer indifference with which they slaughtered anything that moved made him feel sick, as it usually did. How ironic, he thought, that here he was, helping to defend a city made up of more croatoans than humans, and beside him, one of them, Gib, was lending a hand.

“That should do it,” Mike said, adjusting the throughput capacity of the coupling. “Help me reinstall it and we can give it another test. How’s the battery capacity, Gib? Did my first test take much out?”

The croatoan engineer consulted his tablet and shook his head, a gesture he had learned from the humans in Unity. “Not much. Plenty for at least three more full capacity…” He couldn’t find the words and mimed it with throwing his arms out toward the woods.

“Bursts?” Mai prompted, getting an affirmative from the small alien.

“With any luck, that’s all we need,” Mike said, finally standing up and stretching his old, sore back. During his fall he had landed on his spine heavily, bruising most of his back and left ribs.

The radio around Mai’s neck crackled with Aimee’s voice. “How are you guys doing up there? Any good news? Over.”

“We think we might have found a solution,” Mai said. “We’re just putting it back together and preparing for another test.”

“Make it quick,” Aimee said. “We’ve spotted two shuttles and a dozen hover-bikes on the horizon. They’ll be here any moment. We really need this weapon of yours up and running if we’re to have any chance.”

Mike closed his eyes at the sound of the desperation and panic in Aimee’s voice. He didn’t blame her. For years they had lived here in peace without any outside involvement, and now they were perhaps just hours away from extinction. He knew exactly how that felt and wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemies… human enemies at least. The croatoans could burn in hell for all he cared.

He snapped the lid to the device back on and reconnected the cables to the power source and the dish. He flicked the first switch and got the green light again telling him it was all connected and ready to go.

“Right, let’s give this another run, shall we?” Mike said, hovering his trembling fingers over the switch.

At first nothing happened when he flicked the switch. Mai and Gib stood at the rear of the platform, watching on. Mike stepped back and traced his mind through the process, wondering if he had forgotten to connect something.

Gib stepped forward to stand beside him. “Problem?” he asked.

The red LED light on the device turned green. Before Mike could move him out of the way, the lid on the device blew clear of the chassis and the transformer glowed red, then exploded.

The burst of fire and electrical power struck the batteries, igniting them until one of them exploded too. Gib screamed, clutching his face as he fell back. Mike dived out of the way, dragging Mai to the base of the platform as he expected the rest of the batteries to go up.

But after a few long seconds, there were no more explosions, just the acrid stench of cooked electronics and boiled battery acid.

Gib lay motionless on the platform floor. His face was badly burned and the skin around his neck and shoulder bubbled. His breathing apparatus had stopped working and he lay still, his chest no longer rising and falling.

Crawling over to him, Mike checked his pulse… and didn’t find one.

Gib was dead… as was the device.

“Everything all right up there? Over,” Aimee said over the radio.

With a shaking hand, Mike took the radio from a shell-shocked Mai and replied, “No, we’re not okay… I don’t think we’ll ever be okay.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

With the sun starting to rise behind them, the light cracking over the top of the hill, a dark shadow split the yellow line as the monstrous croatoan mech breached the horizon and made its way over the hill.

Vingo hissed a string of what Denver assumed were expletives given the tone in which they were given. The tredeyan looked over his shoulder and veered the catamaran across the rocky shoreline, the engines kicking up a spray of pebbles and shells behind in its wake.

“It’s going to shoot,” Denver said. “Do something!”

Vingo gunned the catamaran to maximum power and arced around the edge of the shoreline, sending up a rooster tail of white water spray. Denver slipped into Charlie and Layla on the bench seat, but they all held on as Vingo’s driving became increasingly more erratic.

The first blast from the mech boomed and a fraction later a fountain of water exploded just behind and to the right of them; the waves from the blast sprayed up and over the catamaran, drenching them.

“That was too fucking close,” Charlie said. “You really must have done something bad to piss the croatoans off.”

“Explain later… if we survive,” Vingo said, pulling back on the controls so that the craft increased to its maximum height of ten meters off the ground. They flew over a copse of trees that lurched toward the water like great animals bending down to drink.

Denver spotted a number of slithering, dark shapes beneath the shadowed canopy. Their forms slipped into the sea, rippling its surface. Vingo turned toward the sun and dropped the altitude until they were obscured from the mech’s view by the trees.