Critical Path

Charlie’s thrust rammed Gregor’s sword into the side of his own head. He snarled and dropped to one knee. Blood ran from a deep cut on the side of his head. The crowd roared.

The sword fell out of Gregor’s shaking hand. He squinted at Charlie through bloodshot eyes. “Don’t entertain them. Finish it.”

For a brief moment, Charlie felt sorry for him. Those thoughts were quickly pushed aside by an image of Pippa’s cold body in that cave.

“This is for Pippa,” Charlie said.

He tightened his grip, lunged forward, and thrust the blade through Gregor’s chest.

Gregor gasped and stared into Charlie’s eyes. A thick stream of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

Charlie pulled the blade free and crouched in front of him. “Why did you do it, Gregor?”

“I’m… glad it was… you,” he said in a quiet voice.

Charlie frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He coughed, blood rolling down his chin. “Didn’t want it to be those…”

“It was you. I know it. You didn’t say those things to avoid being killed by an alien.” But Charlie saw the truth in Gregor’s eyes and knew then that he hadn’t killed Pippa. All this was just to get him to be the one to end his life.

Gregor smiled, blood glistening in the cracks of his rotten teeth. His eyes glazed over, and he lifelessly slumped to his side.

Charlie looked up to the silenced crowd and roared with anguish.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Mike wiped sweat from his face and tightened the restraining bolt with one last push on the wrench. He leaned up, squinting with the pain in his ankle and back.

To quote Danny Glover, he was most definitely getting too old for this shit.

Despite the warm evening sun outside, the light didn’t filter this deep into Hagellan’s craft.

Low blue lights glowed from small strips overhead. This area, the engine management control room, was barely a hundred square feet.

With the company of two of the small engineers and their equipment to fit the parts, the room soon became difficult to maneuver within.

Behind him, the two aliens were busy diagnosing the electrical system. Through broken English they had explained that the new parts they had recovered from the mother ship needed calibrating to work with this craft’s different capacity requirements.

Although he couldn’t access the engines directly, Mike had seen parts of it through the conduits and access panels while replacing the damaged parts. The aliens weren’t too keen on explaining their tech and avoided most of his questions, but he made out that the power source was some kind of antimatter material.

To him, and most of humanity, that was one of the Holy Grails of power supply, yet despite being within his grasp, he had no opportunity to study it further. But then, he thought about the mother ship. If this craft did work and Hagellan and the others left, he’d decided he would go back to the shipwreck and do some more technological archeology.

Aside from the power supply, he had ascertained the engine was fitted with a hyperdrive component allowing it to ‘jump.’ Although he was told this was only small distances, their idea of small was vastly different to his own.

The planet with the jump gate was still over ten light-years away. Or three parsecs. Given that using a regular nuclear-fuelled power source would take approximately twenty thousand years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, the location of this planet was over twice the distance.

Given the size of the craft, just twenty meters long and shaped like a dart, the antimatter power source must have an incredible power-to-size ratio.

This would give them just one jump, however.

And as far as he could understand the alien’s explanation, the engine created a temporary quantum bridge allowing almost instantaneous travel through the field of quantum-entangled particles to the planet.

They would effectively be travelling through time.

Which, of course, made him realize that if they were to return in the same manner, they would actually return before they set off. The paradox itched at the back of his mind. Somehow the aliens had found a way to counter this. Perhaps the quantum bridge somehow avoided the time issue by doing something with dimensions.

Whatever the case, he’d have plenty of time to research this once this mission was up and running.

“We go, now,” one of the engineers said, lifting up its tablet-like device and heading for the ladder that led up out of the maintenance room. “All fixed.”

“Are you sure?” Mike asked.

The alien blinked and held up the tablet to show him a set of graphs. “Acceptable tolerances. New parts calibrated.”

“That’s good to hear,” Mike said. “What now?”

“Test flight.”

* * *

Mike hid his revulsion of Hagellan as the elder alien shuffled his mass into the open bridge by climbing up the ladder. The alien leader sat in the large chair situated in the center of the bridge and brought together the straps.