MIKE RUSHED through the workshop to join Mai. He dumped the burned-out parts of the weapon onto the workbench. Aimee and Ryan were on his heels and entered the room before he even had time to settle.
“I need a progress report,” she said. “Augustus’ troops are coming onto our flank; they’ve already broken through the woods.”
“Don’t you think we’re working as fast as we can? And I don’t know if you noticed, or cared, but I lost a friend today!”
Mai dropped her head and whispered something before lifting her head to look at Mike. She had tears in hers. “It’s our fault Gib’s dead,” Mai said with a soft voice.
“No, it wasn’t,” Mike said, rounding on Aimee and jabbing a finger at her with his good arm. “It’s yours. You push and push and push, not caring about how difficult this task is, how little time we had. If you just got off our backs and let us work, we could have figured it out.”
Ryan stepped forward between Mike and Aimee. But Mike just leaned back against the workbench. It was just his anger at his own failure and of losing Gib that came out with his accusations.
Aimee’s face was glistening with sweat. He knew she didn’t have it easy either, being the one at the top. The people of Unity looked to her for direction and right now things were going as wrong as they possibly could.
“I’m sorry,” Mike finally said, bringing the volume of his voice down. He rubbed his face with his hand. “I tried, I really did. I wanted the weapon to work as much as you did, but we just didn’t have enough time to test—”
“And you still don’t,” Aimee said, raising her eyebrows and giving an expression of beseeching hope. “But we do need you, we need your device to work… and as soon as possible. I’m not sure how long we can hold them off.”
A scared young woman, one of the Maria clones, entered the chamber. “Aimee, they’re at the woods; what do we do? The troops are waiting for your orders. The long rangers are preparing to keep the bikes at bay and our own riders are heading out to pick them off at the edges, but they’ll swarm us.”
Aimee’s eye twitched as she clutched her fist and shook her head. “I should have killed that bastard when I had the chance,” she muttered, then to the clone, “Tell the defense team to prepare to engage. We need to bog them down, buy some time.”
The clone’s face paled as she understood the implication.
Mike felt the pressure increase on his shoulders and Mai gasped at Aimee’s orders. It would mean that human and croatoans alike would die to buy them time. The longer they took, the more would perish.
“This isn’t fair,” Mike said. “You can’t put their deaths on us!”
“He’s right,” Mai added. “You can’t send those poor people out there to get slaughtered. What if we can’t fix the weapon? Then what?”
Aimee composed herself, her face growing hard and cold. “Then we all die. We need that weapon and as fast as possible. And yes, people will die all the time you’re figuring it out, but that’s the way it’s got to be. If you want Unity to stand, then you need to get it working. You know we don’t have the numbers or the weapons to hold on. Now let’s not waste any time. Get to work.”
Before Mike had a chance to say anything else, Aimee, along with Ryan and the clone, left the chamber, Aimee’s words still echoing around the space.
Mai leaned forward on the workbench and grabbed the burned-out device. She picked up a pair of pliers with her hand that visibly shook. Mike sat next to her and sorted through the pile of spares and parts strewn about the place.
“We can do it,” Mike said, reaching out to grip his soul mate by the shoulder.
“I… don’t think I…”
“There must be a way,” he said. “Let’s replace the transformer and see where I went wrong.”
“We,” Mai said. “It’s always we. Help me with this,” Mai said, prizing the burned fragments of the transformer from the chassis. “Ignore everything else, my love. It’s just you and me in our workshop, working together. We can do this.”
For the next fifteen minutes, in a tense silence before the storm, they worked together as a team, rebuilding the device. Along the way, Mike had spotted a few errors from before and fixed them. They were simple and he doubted they were the cause of the malfunction.
The part Gib was working on wasn’t grounded properly in the circuit, causing a potentially dangerous feedback loop. That error had been compounded by his own mistake of not matching the transformer and the transmitter’s power.
Mai soldered in some components to equalize the distribution. Mike also decided to use a transmitter from a different radio system, one that handled a wider range of frequencies. He hoped that by going wider, and including a component to sweep across the range, that they’d cover all their bases. It meant lower power overall, and it was a safer bet it would work. But the cost would be less range.
Aimee staggered into the cavern, her face pinched and tight with stress.
“We need that thing now!”
“We’re going as fast as we can,” Mike said.
“It’s not fast enough, dammit!”
Mike noticed the sweat from Mai’s forehead drip to the workbench and her hands now shaking violently. “Leave us to it,” Mike snapped.
“No,” Aimee replied, stepping toward the workbench. “I can’t leave without it. Tell me, what’s the issue, when will it be ready?”
Mai’s hand suddenly became still and she dropped the device to the bench’s surface. She clutched her chest and looked round at Mike with wide eyes full of fear. She struggled to take a breath as she stood up from her stool. She reached out a hand to Mike, but her body tensed and she collapsed before Mike could reach for her.
Mai hit the ground, her right hand clutching her left arm, her face taking on a gray pallor.
Mike pushed Aimee out of the way, kicked the stool across the workshop and fell to Mai’s side.
“Mai!” he screamed.
Chapter 27
CHARLIE SAT with his back against the smooth dirt wall of the makeshift shelter beneath the overhanging tree. The river snaked down the yellow grass valley to a shimmering light blue lake. A rock formation towered over the opposite end, surrounded by undulating hills with clusters of small metallic buildings on each.
Vingo sat to Charlie’s right. He gazed toward the small settlements and fiddled with his arm-pad. Denver and Layla lay flat on their backs behind them, catching up with some well-deserved rest.
Charlie’s limbs ached and he felt every inch his age. He sipped water from his refilled system and waited for the mashed root he slipped inside the container to take effect. Within a minute his extremities tingled and the lactic-acid pain in his limbs eased.
The only positive he could take from the croatoan invasion of Earth, besides Denver, was the root. It allowed him to carry on the fight for nearly three decades. It still didn’t buy a single one of them a shred of gratitude. It would be like forgiving the Nazis for wearing smart Hugo Boss uniforms.
A rectangular black shuttle rose from a valley toward the west. It carried out a half rotation and headed for the atmosphere, in the opposite direction of the black prism, leaving a double vapor trail in its wake.
Charlie couldn’t see the main scion ship from their position under the tree, but it was impossible not to feel its presence as bolts continued to pepper Tredeya’s surface, even though the war was already won.
Vingo’s helmet twisted as he followed the shuttle’s trajectory. A scion fighter zipped over a mountain, its engine roaring in the sky. It fired a missile. A small bright blue dot streaked through the air and exploded on impact. Burning pieces of debris shot from the shuttle.