Chapter 22
LAYLA HUDDLED under her duvet with a flashlight, pouring through personal notes from the last few years. She needed irrefutable evidence before going to Gregor with her findings. Something to join up the dots.
She cursed under her breath as she read her last two diaries. Self-indulgent, whiny and lacking solid information. With the benefit of hindsight and clear focus, it felt like she was reading extracts from her college days. The Layla that thought the world was against her, living like a hermit in her student apartment, studying the very thing she purposely avoided.
Her notebooks weren’t much better. A lot of hurried scrawls about the livestock condition, available food and observed human-human and human-croatoan interactions. Clouds surrounding the notes, filled with written ideas about how to improve things. Nothing about the noticeable rise in humidity, increasingly amber skies or the greasy film that was starting to coat the region’s foliage. She kicked herself for not paying attention to the bigger picture.
Layla checked her watch. Three in the morning. The only thing for it was a clandestine trip to the chocolate factory. She slid open a window next to her bed and listened.
Distant clanking came from the meat processing warehouses. Nothing unusual, the automated machines ran around the clock. Layla had only been inside those buildings on a single occasion. That was enough. She narrowly avoided throwing up.
An owl hooted.
She gently rattled open the flimsy trailer door and crept past Gregor’s office. Light streamed through gaps in the blinds. She heard raised voices coming from inside. Probably the talk of the good old days with Marek after a few drinks.
Layla glanced into the clear navy starred sky. The mother ship was more revealing during the hours of darkness. It must’ve been hundreds of miles away, but still appeared large, vivid. A bright strip ran across its center.
Pouring in and out of the strip, minute specks of light headed to and from earth, shuttles on their supply runs. Hundreds of them like worker bees, probably landing at different farms around the world in other time-zones.
The moon looked like a scarred apricot; as it had done for a while. She’d seen it that color before when on vacation in Sydney. A bushfire took hold in the Blue Mountains, smoke scattering the rays of light from Earth’s natural satellite.
Layla knew the croatoans were terraforming, but avoided the inconvenient truth. The requests to update land conversion and the experiment on the paddock brought it into sharper focus. Survival instincts that motivated her to work on the farm were now pushing her in the opposite direction.
Monitors faintly glowed through the frosted glass of the chocolate factory door. Vlad was probably watching them at the far end of the building. Nothing in the immediate vicinity suggested the presence of surveyors.
The square was quiet. No signs of any outdoor alien activity.
She slowly twisted the handle. Slipped through the gap and closed the door behind her. Vlad slumped over the desk in front of the bank of monitors. Probably getting a snatch of sleep. It wasn’t a huge issue to doze on shift. The harvester alerts sounded like the grating buzz of an old electronic alarm clock.
Ambient light was sufficient enough for Layla not to use her flashlight. She crept around the empty surveyors’ table to a walled off area on the left hand side.
Croatoans usually carried their equipment and charts there before leaving. The space was used by the alien with the red rimmed helmet visor. It usually sat, surrounded by three of their little computers. Layla watched the alien enter the chocolate factory two weeks ago. The devices sprang into life when the croatoan touched them. She hoped it would be that simple. Just like their tablet devices.
All three trapezium shaped computers were folded open. Layla took a deep breath and touched a central pad with a silver outline on the first.
The screen filled with bright electric blue background. A black square in the middle streamed unrecognizable light green digits. Layla swished her finger across the pad. Nothing happened.
She touched the middle computer. The screen burst into life and split into four sections. Each showing a different graphic. Top right was a bizarre picture of planet earth, the bottom three quarters of the globe was orange tinted. It span around, showing hundreds of black dots across the continents, probably farms. Top left was a graph, some kind of measurement, impossible to read.
The bottom two pictures showed North America. One she recognized as the land they’d farmed, colored in red. It wasn’t a surprise that the croatoans were also tracking progress, she expected that. The final picture had a shaded in area of previously untouched land, to the north of their location. She guessed it covered a hundred square miles.
Layla focused on the last image, and wondered if she was looking at the tipping point for the required atmospheric change. It looked too small.
She touched the last computer. It flashed awake.
The display looked like a timeline. Thirty tasks in alien language. Twenty-eight struck through. Whatever they were doing, it looked close to completion.
None of the information was as compelling as the experiment. Collectively, it all led to the same logical conclusion.
Something gripped Layla’s shoulder.
She flinched. Turned.
Igor smiled, his face bathed in a blue glow from the computers. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Layla put her hand to chest and felt her rapidly drumming heart. She let out a deep breath. “Jesus. I thought you were…”
His right arm was behind his back. He never failed to look shifty and dangerous.
“Thought I was an alien?” Igor said. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” She glanced to his side. “What have you got there?”
Igor stepped toward her. “Things are going to change around here. You need to make sure your colors are nailed to the right mast.”
GREGOR POURED a whiskey into a shot glass, slammed it onto the table, and pushed it across to Ben. The dog from the harvester had earned it.
“Drink. It’ll put hairs on your chest,” Gregor said.
Ben frowned and twisted the glass. “What is it?”
“The water of life. Now drink. Do not insult me.”
Ben the dog held the contents of the glass in his cheeks, and swallowed with a single exaggerated gulp. He screwed up his face, squeezed his neck, and coughed.
Marek, who stood beside Ben, roared with laughter. “Looks like he enjoyed it.”
“You do realize what’s going to happen if I find out you’re lying?” Gregor said. He swiped a finger across his own throat.
“Why would I lie? It’s been a nightmare since he attacked our harvester.”
Gregor held up the necklace and gazed at the bead. “Jackson pretended to be my friend when I first arrived. It was all an act. He was gathering information for his assaults. He risks all our lives.”
Marek pointed at the dog. “What are we going to do with him?”
“I’m with you guys. You can trust me,” Ben said.
Gregor stared at the dog, mulling over three options. Ben quickly broke eye contact, and looked down at his empty glass.
They couldn’t return him to the Operations Compartment of the repaired harvester. This dog had seen the outside world. He could easily open his mouth during a moment of weakness and compromise the whole crew. The second option was to turn him into silver trays of slop. It seemed like a waste.
“I’m going to reward you,” Gregor said. “Because of the information you provided, you can have a job on the farm. Be under no illusion; what I give, I can take away with a bullet. Do you understand?”