This place was better than the trailer at the last location, but he thought it was time for an upgrade. He wanted the top job of global director, currently taken by Mr. Augustus. Gregor knew that asshole lived in luxury.
The front door rattled against the jam three times.
“Enter,” Gregor shouted.
Alex, his temporary second-in-command, opened the door and entered the room, stopping short of the desk. She fidgeted with a drawstring at the bottom of her yellow waterproof jacket, and wiped a thin covering of sweat off her brow.
“Good morning, Gregor—”
“Cut the shit. What have you come to tell me?” Gregor half closed his eyes, looking Alex up and down. Thirty years ago, Alex could light up a room with her rich dark brown wavy hair and glamorous features. Today she looked old, concerned, her graying hair in a tight ponytail. “Spit it out.”
“Harvester five. It’s down.”
Gregor shifted in his chair. “Down? Down how?”
“We’ve lost contact with the driver and guard. It happened during a resource switch.”
“Do the croatoans know?”
“They’re on the way. I contacted a mobile unit to intercept.”
Gregor slammed his fist on the desk. “Send out our croatoan team. If it’s the little wasp, I want him dead. Even if they get a sniff of him, bomb the whole area. I don’t care. The harvesters will just have to work longer and harder.”
He hoped he’d seen the last of the little wasp. Someone who had already taken out two of his harvesters in a similar manner: Land mines, coupled with a direct assault. This might be the third time in five months, denting Gregor’s statistics, making him appear out of control.
The croatoans didn’t seem bothered up to now. They claimed it was mild resistance compared to other planets.
Their patience would only stretch so far before snapping.
“They might not like it. They only came in from patrol an hour ago.” Alex said.
Gregor slammed his fist on the desk again, knocking the plate off. Alex winced as it smashed on the floor. “They’re attached to this facility and will do what I say. Send them. Now.”
“I’ll get right to it,” Alex said.
“Where’s Layla?”
Out of all the humans attached to the operation, Layla had a level of competence that Gregor admired. If something was happening, he wanted her there.
“I think she’s already gone out to investigate.”
“I can always replace you with Layla, Alex. Send you back to the farm?”
Alex backed away from the desk, turned, and stumbled out of the door.
Gregor doubted Alex’s abilities, but with the business with Marek, she’d taken over as Gregor’s second-in-command two days ago. Marek had been Gregor’s friend since childhood, growing up in Yerevan. They stole together, fought together, graduated into the same gang until they came to run it. Alex was just a junior member when the shit hit the fan in 2014.
Everything was fine, Gregor thought, until Marek went missing for twenty-four hours, then turned up on the edge of camp, semi-conscious, tied to a tree. A plank was hung around his body, with ‘Fifth Columnist’ painted across it in bright red letters. Two of his fingers had been snapped backwards, and he’d taken a beating. The little wasp, that fuckstain Charlie Jackson who fancied himself as some kind of vigilante hero, he had interrogated and beat Gregor’s lifelong friend for information.
Gregor slipped into a pair of jeans, pulled on a brown woolly sweater and fastened his steel toe-capped boots. They were always useful when delivering kicks to the farm animals or his junior staff. He clipped on a hip holster and inserted his pistol.
The door rattled three times again.
“What?” Gregor shouted, not even trying to hide his annoyance.
Alex half opened the door. “A shuttle’s coming. Just thought I’d—”
Gregor could already hear the humming engines growing increasingly louder as a shuttle descended toward camp. The mother ship turned up in 2025, near the end of the ice age.
It always held a faint white presence when the sky was clear, hanging up there like a specter or a spiritual portent, but then what did Gregor have with spirits? He knew there was no god the day the earth was taken from them by the croatoans.
Fuck ‘em, he thought. Just play the game, survive, climb the ladder. That’s all there was left now. No point in fighting them, humanity had already lost too much.
Gregor retrieved a plastic tortoise shell comb from his back pocket and smoothed his thick black hair into a side parting. Shoving Alex out of the way, he stepped outside into the bright sunshine, bathing the camp.
SIX PINK RINGS appeared over the camp. The humming took on a sharper edge as the shuttle plunged through the troposphere, its cobalt outline becoming visible against the sky’s blue-orange surroundings.
Ever since the croatoans started harvesting the earth for their root, the orange dust floated up into the atmosphere, gave the sky a strange permanent tan.
Gregor stood by the landing zone at the back of the farm surrounded by trees. Solar powered markers ran around the edge of the two hundred yard square strip. It had already been turned into scorched earth from repeated take-offs and landings: a regular twice-daily occurrence for the last three months, usually for the transportation of croatoans. But never this early in the morning.
Alex stood by his side. “What do you think they want?”
“It’s obvious. They’re going to complain about the harvester. We’re going to need a sacrificial lamb.”
“Do you want me to dress a human from the paddock?”
He drummed his fingers on his chin. “No, bring me Igor.”
“Igor?”
“You heard me.”
Igor, it had been reported to Gregor, thought he knew better on how the facility should be run. Additionally, Igor had been seen fraternizing with the camp’s allocation of croatoan scouts and engineers.
They weren’t supposed to mix. Gregor suspected the worm was up to something. Igor had been one of the few to survive the ice age along with Gregor and his fellow gang members. Used to run a small protection racket in Moscow, fancied himself as some crime lord.
Gregor had ways of dealing with competition. It was dog-eat-dog these days, after all.
The shuttle steadied a hundred yards above. Its pink circles took on a darker glow for the final descent. The ground rumbled. Gregor pulled the woolly sweater over his nose and mouth and shielded his eyes.
Dust and burnt grass showered him as the shuttle gracefully dropped and bounced softly to a halt.
He was always struck with how bland these craft looked. Nothing as exciting as what he’d seen on TV, but a lot more deadly. Two years ago somebody fired on one from the ground. The response from the pulse cannon mounted on the roof was devastating.
Although, violence was rarely the croatoan way.
That was more Gregor’s domain. As the human resource officer on the ground, he had to maintain discipline with the local team and livestock.
A door on the side of the shuttle punched open and slid to one side with an electric groan, followed by a graphite-colored ramp extending onto the ground. Through the darkness, a human male strode out in a long purple robe, flanked by two croatoans in their gray armored suits, carrying black rifles.
Mr. Augustus. The human-croatoan chief liaison. The only human to have visited the mother ship, and the only human to have visited with, and worked directly with, the alien hierarchy.
Augustus thought he was some sort of king. Strutting around dressed like a fool, treating everyone with lofty derision. He wore a creepy mask to hide his facial features. Gregor thought it was an attempt to intimidate or for Augustus to make himself appear alien.