Critical Dawn (The Critical Series Book 1)

by Wearmouth

  “Okay,” Maria said, pulling a wheeled office chair closer so that she could rest and still get a good view out of the window.

  Charlie got himself comfortable, brought the scope to his eye, and checked his distances. All seemed good. He just had to wait. Even if the hunter came at them from the shadows, there was still a ten-foot section of open space it’d have to cross. Hopefully, they’d spot it before it got to that section and gave him time to aim.

  They sat in silence for five minutes. Sweat beaded on Charlie’s forehead. He knew Denver would have the part by now and be on his way back. As though he had conjured him with his very mind, Maria excitedly said, “Den’s there, look.”

  With an alien weapon in his hands, he came out of a side street, looking to either side, always on alert. “You keep watching him,” Charlie said, not loving this at all.

  His fears were born of good instinct. As Denver stepped further out into the open, forty feet behind him the shadows shifted, and the hunter slid out of his position. The bastard was probably there the whole time. Charlie couldn’t quite get a good aim on him. A fallen wall obscured his vision, but he could see the shadows moving now that the noon sun had dipped lower to the west, lengthening the shadows across the sidewalk.

  “Oh God, he’s going to see him,” Maria said, tracking Denver’s movements.

  “Just wait,” Charlie said.

  “We have to warn him.” She placed the monocular down on the desk and approached the window. Charlie pushed her out of the way and took the Barrett to the next window across to get a better angle. That did the trick. He could see the hunter edge out from behind a half-yard-thick fallen wall.

  Maria moaned as she got to her feet. “What the hell do you think you’re—”

  “Shut up,” Charlie said, glaring at her. She took a step back but kept her eyes on Denver as he came further down the street.

  On its knees, the alien raised the rifle and brought its scope to its eye. The glow of the screen illuminated its transparent visor, revealing the tough, leathery skin of its face and a glowing amber eye. This was definitely not a run-of-the-mill croatoan. But even with its fancy tech, Charlie doubted it could withstand a .50 cal round.

  “Denver, run!” Maria said from the window, shouting at the top of her voice. Den looked up then behind him and dashed to the side. Charlie was about to yell at her, but when he looked back, the alien had come further out of the shadows. It had heard Maria. It pointed the rifle up at Charlie. They locked eyes, and Charlie pulled the trigger before launching himself to the side.

  Both rifles exploded. The alien’s shot rocked the walls of the Quaternary building. A chunk of masonry flew away from the window frame, narrowly missing Charlie’s face.

  “You’ve hit him,” Maria said, now standing further back but still watching through the monocular sight.

  Charlie took a risk and lifted his rifle to peer through the scope. He saw the hunter crawl away, clutching its right leg. He was surprised that the leg wasn’t severed, but the alien armor was damaged, and its suit took on a lighter color. Yellow blood stained the ground.

  “It’s wounded,” Charlie said. “But I don’t know how long we’ll have. We need to leave. Now.”

  He grabbed the rifle and Maria’s arm and headed back down the stairs.

  Mike and Mai pulled Denver into the basement and locked the door behind him. They all rushed into the workshop area. Breathless, with sweat pouring from him, Denver shrugged off his backpack. They all looked at him expectantly.

  “Well?” Charlie said, “Did you get it?”

  “What do you think, old man?” Den said between panted breaths. Pip joined him by his side. He knelt down and made a fuss of the dog. “I ain’t just a pretty face, am I, girl?”

  “No,” Maria said, before realizing he was talking to the dog. She turned away to hide her embarrassment.

  “Oh,” Mai said, lifting out a disc-shaped object from Den’s pack. “What’s this? Looks alien, of course.”

  “Bomb,” Denver said. “I used it to take out the anti-grav engine of that bastard’s ship. You just press …” Denver reached out and grabbed Mai’s wrist to stop her from touching the small screen. “Jesus, Mai. That’s what activates it.”

  Mike lifted the second one. “I’ll have to make some safeties for you. Wouldn’t want it going off by mistake. But as nice as these are, what about the magnet?”

  Denver fished out a box with a Ford label stamped on it and handed it over. “These?”

  “Holy crap, Den, there’s half a dozen here.”

  “I think there might be more there,” Den said. “I saw boxes everywhere and grabbed the first one I saw. I wanted to get back before … Well, before we all got killed by that thing out there.”

  “What is it?” Mai asked. “A soldier?”

  “Worse,” Charlie said. “I don’t know what it is. One of the croatoans’ experiments perhaps, some other alien imported from God knows where. But it took a .50 cal to the leg and was still alive, still moving. We’ve got to clear out right now before the bastard tracks the way in.”

  “On it,” Mike said, heading to one of his over-filled desks. Mai joined him. Together, they opened the case of the bomb and started to install the part.

  Maria sat down on a plastic chair and wiped tears from her eyes. “I can’t believe what happened to Ethan. One minute he was right there by me, the next …”

  Denver knelt down by her, held her hands within his. “I know it’s hard,” he said. “It’s a shock. It’s difficult and brutal, and it hurts. But right now, we have to remember him and everyone else that died at the aliens’ hands. We have to remember them and go on because what we intend to do will honor them. We can’t lose focus on that. We can grieve later. Take the pain, but don’t let it consume you, okay? You’re with us; you’re one of us. We’ll stick together.”

  Maria looked down at Denver, her face blemished with dirt, the tears tracking the stains down her cheeks. “You were so brave,” she said, “to go off like that. How can I be that brave? I’m so scared. It feels like danger waits in every shadow. I’m not sure I can go on.”

  “It’s understandable,” Denver said. “This is all new to you, but believe me, as dangerous as this seems, it’s like a vacation to how it was. We have to put all this into perspective and carry on. If not, then what else is there?”

  “Waiting to die,” Maria said.

  “And I’m not one for waiting,” Denver said, flashing her a smile. “So what say you come with us and let be what will be? Let’s do this, bring down that mother ship, strike back at these bastards, and show them that they’ve underestimated us.”

  Maria wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. “I guess we have no real option. Count me in.”

  She stood and hugged Denver.

  Charlie smiled and turned away to prepare their exit. On the other side of the basement was a fire exit that led across the street. Mike and a few others who had sadly passed on had dug a tunnel further through until they came out into the subway system. Although flooded, the water level wasn’t so high that they couldn’t get an inflatable raft in there.

  In emergencies, they’d used it a few times before. If they followed the right route, they could get through enough of the train system to get clear of Manhattan. They kept a smaller raft stored in the basement. The other dinghy was too large.

  Now their load was lighter, they could squeeze onto the raft and get out. It’d be tight, but it was better than risking going over ground. All the shooting would have stirred up other survivors lurking in the city.

  “Hey, Chuck, it’s ready,” Mike said, calling out from the other end of the tunnel.

  Charlie walked back to find them standing around the device. Mai had a satisfied look on her face. “Your boy done good,” she said, winking at Denv
er. “It works perfectly. But here’s the thing. You’ll have one shot at this. Once activated by using the touchscreen here, there’s no going back. If it malfunctions for whatever reason, the regulating magnet will be fried, and no offense, you won’t have the expertise to wire in another in time and figure out what’s wrong.”

  “Understood,” Charlie said.

  Denver’s forehead wrinkled. “It doesn’t sound very … solid. I mean, it’s a huge risk going up there. If it doesn’t go off, it’ll be for nothing.”

  “That’s my worry, son. We’ve talked about this already. It’s my time. I’m going up there. I trust that it’ll work. You’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Wait,” Maria said. “So what you’re saying is this is a complete suicide mission? There’s absolutely no way you’re coming back if it works or not?”

  “We all have to make a sacrifice,” Charlie said, “and this is mine. Okay, that’s enough of the philosophy. Let’s have less chat and more action. Mike, prep the bomb and make it safe for travel. We’ve got to go. I suggest you get Mai out of here too.”

  “Will do, Chuck,” Mike said. “And don’t worry about us. We’ve got transport waiting for us.”

  Mike placed the bomb inside a plastic flight case and made sure it was clipped tightly shut. He handed it to Charlie with his left hand and extended his right. Charlie took it and shook it firmly. “I’ll miss you, you crazy old bastard,” Charlie said, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.

  “And you too, you reckless fool. One of these days, you’ll get yourself killed.”

  “One of these days. But not today.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Augustus pulled the cannula from his body after the last of the root compound had flowed into his bloodstream. With a sigh of satisfaction, he sat back on his human-leather recliner.

  The cool, white-blue lights of the mother ship made his skin look pale and diseased, but he knew he was never in better health. Every nerve tingled and every hair stood on end as the root compound did its magic in repairing any aging cells.

  He took this shot a few days early, having caught a bug from one of the cattle-scum down on the surface. Probably from Gregor, he thought. That reckless fool mixed with people without any concern for his health. Gregor was a walking, talking disease factory. Like they all were.

  After all this time, human beings were still barely better than pigs and cows. Even the livestock had the same herding instinct as cows. Still, they made for a good, nutritious food supply while the root took hold. And for now, the second crop appeared to be perfect. More perfect than many of the planets the croatoans had terraformed.

  Though he had been in and out of stasis since his last day as Roman Emperor Valens, he wasn’t one to dwell much on the past. Especially given it was so long ago. But stasis within a croatoan pod had the effect of compressing time. That fateful day during the Battle of Adrianople, the ninth of August, 378 AD, was still clear. The Goths, led by the maggot, Fritigern, defeated his Roman army and set about the destruction of the Roman Empire as it was known. He, Emperor Valens, removed his habit and disappeared into a village, escaping as nothing more than a battle-wounded peasant.

  For five long days, he’d wandered through the woods of Thracia until he’d managed to seek voyage across to Greece.

  Augustus closed his eyes, the fatigue of post-root injection making him tired. Though it was nothing like the fatigue of his escape; this was more of a spaced-out bliss. His body rejuvenated, growing young and vital again.

  His senses sharpened during this state. The soft, cyclical vibrations of the mother ship’s engines synchronized with his heartbeats so that he was one with the ship, a part of the larger system, a part of the Croatoan Empire.

  An empire that made his Roman Empire look like a backwater village.

  That revelation came to him within days of settling in Greece. The croatoans never did explain how they knew who he was, but one night, while he was working alone on a fishing jangada, hauling in the evening’s nets, he was approached on the beach. At first, he thought he was sick, hallucinating.

  The first impression he got of the croatoan was that of a large, helmeted turtle, standing on two reverse-joined legs in a strange suit. The eyes were large and held intelligence within them, but the overriding feeling he got was that it was ancient.

  For two weeks, the croatoan would visit him during the night, talking to him in broken Greek, but enough for Augustus, or Valens as he was then, to understand. The promises seemed unreal to begin with: eternity, a life without pain, which appealed greatly due to the wounds he’d suffered at the hands of the Goths.

  Even back then, he required the wearing of a leather mask or a deep-brimmed hat to hide the disfigurement. When he saw the creature’s pod, he knew the promises were real, that they had substance. He thought the Romans were advanced in their use of materials and technology, but the stasis pod, half-buried within a deep cave, told him that humanity hadn’t even started yet.

  And then came the first taste of the root. Within the pod, a system of root compound within a slow-feed drip ensured that the aliens could live indefinitely once in a stasis mode. It was like a voluntary coma but one that with some thought could be come out of at will or at specified times.

  For the first time in decades, he felt young and powerful again. The compound stitched his wounds, made him stronger. Even his thoughts sped up. It brought him out of the self-imposed prison where he’d placed himself, and now he could see the world of opportunity in front of him. He had a chance to build a new empire, to rule again, but this time without the limits of humanity and politics.

  Hagellen, the croatoan that approached Augustus, explained many historical incidents of how the aliens had intervened or taken candidates to work with them when the Earth’s conditions were right.

  When Hagellen said that he’d be in stasis for more than fifteen hundred years, the period of time needed to make the Earth’s ecological balance suitable for growing the root, Augustus laughed, but Hagellen had shown him relics from the Egyptians and further back still.

  It’d be like waking from a dream, Hagellen said. Within the stasis pod, the compound would keep him alive, compress time, so that when he woke and the croatoans rose from deep within the Earth, it would feel like no time at all.

  And he was right.

  Augustus sat up as the tingling sensation began to wear off. The compound was almost finished with him for this month. He shook his head. The memories of being Valens dissipated. It was always strange how this procedure would send him back to his former life. But despite the time-compression, it was a long a time ago. He wasn’t that cowardly emperor any longer.

  He was Lord Augustus. Earth’s first post-alien leader. Or at least he soon would be.

  “On screen,” he said, leaning his elbows against the glass desk in his office. They’d decorated it to look like a Roman court. This part of the ship, one of the lowest levels, was designed to support him as a human, but soon, he wouldn’t need a special atmosphere to suit him. Soon, he’d have the procedure that would make him more croatoan than human, and he would take his rightful place at the top of Earth’s new hierarchy.

  The wide screen, embedded into the curved white walls of his office, switched on and glowed the familiar blue briefly before it patched into the communications network. Thousands of smaller squares in a grid showed him all the channels to the farms down on the surface.

  “Message to all farms,” he said, and waited for each square to gain a white border to indicate the communication connection established. The screen beeped after a few moments, confirming the connection.

  Within each square, he saw the faces of the farm workers looking at him expectantly, the requisite level of fear in their eyes. It made him smile beneath his mask. As Valens and now Augustus, he could always draw that level
of fear from his fellow humans, though he wasn’t so conceited to believe it was at him directly.

  No, it was due to his position. He’d always known that. It was why he’d ducked out of the battle of Adrianople. It was clear the Goths would win. He’d seen the winds of change and knew the Romans’ time was up. He would no longer have the position to instill that fear, so he left to cast fear upon the fish in Greece.

  Some men would feel they took a step down, but not Augustus. Even back then, he knew the order of things. Dominion over fish was no different than dominion over man.

  “Farmhands, this is Lord Augustus; we’re coming to a new stage of our development, and you are placed at the forefront of this transformation. Your actions next will determine not only your individual fate but also the fate of humankind. Fear not; your action is a simple one. I want you all to activate the pressurization protocols on all breeding facilities. The time has come to seal those precious breeding units from the harm of the atmosphere.”

  As though perfectly orchestrated, he saw three thousand pairs of eyes widen in fear and realization. By pressurizing the breeding facilities, it was clear that all those outside of the buildings would perish when the atmosphere changed. But they knew better than to question him.

  “Atmospheric metrics are being downloaded to your systems now,” Augustus added. “Once complete, activate the protocols. As for yourselves, I want to thank you personally for your work and tireless dedication. Without you, humanity would not be able to continue. Your sacrifice has ensured the continuing survival of our noble race.

  “Each and every one of you will be remembered in the records. I will see to it personally. In its current state, Earth has but a few more days left. Say your goodbyes and perform any last rituals you need. The end has come. Thank you, and good luck in the journey of your afterlife.”

  One by one, the individual video links to the farms glowed yellow as the data packs downloaded. The ones that turned green indicated they had activated the pressurization process, sealing off the breeding facilities and, so doing, sealing their own fates.