After Earth: A Perfect Beast (26 page)

The people were on the job. It was just a matter of time before they erased the Ursa from the face of the planet. Just a matter of time …

The air had become positively stale as Cecilia Ruiz sat there on the edge of Nova City’s outlands. She’d been walking for two days and thus far had encountered nothing untoward. But at least she wasn’t feeling overtaxed. Her body hadn’t betrayed her; she was in as good shape as she had been nine years ago.
Not bad for having had two kids
, she thought proudly.

She was armed with two pieces of electronic equipment that she prayed would give her the edge she needed in tracking down an Ursa.

First was her old naviband.

Technically, she should not have had it. It was a piece of equipment that was supposed to be turned in when one left the Corps. But Cecilia had had a long-standing and very positive relationship with the quartermaster, and so when he had asked for the return of her band, which performed the function of communications as well as navigation, she had just given him a look of carefully crafted chagrin and told him that tragically, she’d lost it. He’d simply studied her, his face deadpan, and then said, “If it turns up, bring it back.”

If he had wanted, he could have used the band’s tracking function to find it. But out of kindness he hadn’t.

Cecilia hadn’t done anything inappropriate with it since then. It was just that every so often she liked to find a nice private spot, turn on the link, and listen to
the cross chat of various Rangers. It made her feel ever so slightly as if she still belonged, even if she could only listen in from afar and live vicariously through the Rangers’ communications.

The second piece of equipment was an electronic map. It was displayed on a small pad, and she was using it as a point of configuration to see if there was any rhyme or reason to the manner in which the Ursa were making their presence known. Thus far, she had been unable to find any kind of pattern. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or frustrated by this. The frustration would stem from the fact that the random nature of their movements made it impossible to determine where they might strike next. But it was something of a relief because it meant that the monsters weren’t intelligent enough to form a coherent plan of attack. Animals that could strategize were certainly the last thing anyone needed.

Cecilia studied the glowing dots that indicated all the places the Ursa had struck recently. She noticed that there was one area, about fifty kliks north of her current location, that seemed to be without any sort of reported Ursa sighting. “Seems as good a place as any to look around,” she muttered, and so north it was.

She continued to run through her head what she had discerned about the creatures during her one brief encounter with one. Its behavior didn’t make sense to her. It had had her dead to rights, attacking her from behind. She’d been oblivious to its presence. But it had gone right past her and attacked the gunman.

Why?

Well, there were only two explanations. The first was that it actually had discerned the shooter as the greater threat. He had a weapon in his hand while she was weaponless, and so from a strategic point of view, it made sense to incapacitate him before her. The second explanation was that it simply hadn’t seen her. What better reason to bypass her than if it didn’t know she was there?

No eyes. The fact that it has no eyes must be the clue.
Perhaps it’s telepathic somehow. Or maybe it has some sort of built-in radar. Or it could be that it’s able to detect heat signatures and it’s following those. It could even be something as simple as smell: that our scents draw it to us. If only I knew which of those it was, I might be able to exploit it as a weakness and defeat it.

The problem was that she didn’t have a lot of latitude for experimentation. She could come at the Ursa with an attack designed to target a weakness that it might or might not have. Judging by the creature’s track record, she wouldn’t get a second chance.

Cecilia continued to negotiate terrain that at certain points was jagged and challenging. One would have thought the Northern Plains, which she was currently making her way across, would have been nice and flat. Not so: There were plenty of ups and downs and several places where the land was so uneven that she nearly fell. That could well have been catastrophic. If she’d injured her ankle, she would have been alone and vulnerable in the middle of nowhere. It was an unsettling realization.

Maybe if you’d given this any damn thought ahead of time, you’d have had the brains to remain at home. Was Xander right? Is this all about me and nothing to do with trying to help my family?

She tried to push those concerns away, but they dogged her as she continued her trek.

The suns continued their circuit across the sky. At the hottest point of the day, she found shelter inside an empty cave, but not before she took the precaution of firing in a few pulser shots to make sure there was nothing hiding within it. Only then did she crawl in and remain there until the heat was less blistering. The entire time she remained at the ready, sitting toward the mouth of the cave with her pulser resting on her lap.

She speculated about how wonderful it would be if an Ursa went slinking past below while she was sitting in the mouth of the cave. She’d be able to send a steady stream of pulse blasts at the monster before it even knew what had hit it. With luck, a lot more than the
Rangers in the city had had, she would be able to kill the thing without putting herself at risk.

Without any luck, it looks up, sees me, and I’m dead
.

Cecilia was becoming frustrated with herself. This was not the attitude a Ranger displayed in contemplation of battle. This was the sort of negative thinking that got one killed.

She pulled her binoculars from her pack and surveyed the area. As she panned across the uneven terrain, she suddenly swung the binoculars back and zoomed in on something she hadn’t noticed before. It appeared to be a mining colony. She vaguely remembered hearing about such an endeavor out here but couldn’t recall much in the way of details beyond that.

Cecilia decided to head in that direction, which seemed as good an idea as any. Perhaps they would be able to tell her something. Perhaps they’d seen something.

Perhaps they’re all dead
.

She growled angrily at herself.
Again! Again with the negative thinking. Stop it. Not everything is a worst-case scenario
.

Mentally scolding herself the entire way, she set out for the colony.

Back in the days before humankind left Earth, there was a city called Newcastle in the middle of a big coal-producing region in a country called England. Newcastle needed lots of things, but coal wasn’t one of them, and so when people wanted to describe an utterly useless activity, they said it was like bringing coals to Newcastle.

That was how Frank Raige felt as he plied the air over Nova City in his flier and, in fact, how he had felt every day since the Skrel ship had crashed outside Nova City and unleashed its plague on humanity.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have the option of doing anything else.

He had suggested to the Prime Commander more than once that he would be more useful leading ground patrols, but she wouldn’t go for his suggestion. She had insisted that he was doing his fellow citizens a service by looking out for Ursa in the streets and that he was saving lives by continuing to fly. But it sure didn’t feel like he was saving lives.

What it felt like was gratitude on Wilkins’s part for the good turn his father had done for her. That had been Frank’s theory until she told him she was going to let Conner go on a mission.

Until then, the boy had taken part in civilian evacs and little else. But a ground mission was serious business, and if Wilkins would let Conner go on one, she wasn’t operating out of gratitude to the Raige family after all. Maybe, he had to allow, she really believed that Frank’s flying over the city was accomplishing something.

An opinion he didn’t share. “Coals to Newcastle,” he grumbled.

He would have gone on grumbling except for what he saw on a rooftop coming up on his right. Banking and slowing down as much as he could without losing altitude, he peered over the side of his flier and spotted a bunch of kids—six or seven of them; it was hard to tell—waving their arms at him as if they, too, wanted to take flight.

What the hell were kids doing outside when there were Ursa roaming the streets? It wouldn’t be any big deal for one of the creatures to bound up onto the roof and make short work of the youngsters.

But he couldn’t yell at them from where he was. He would have to contact Hātu
r
i and get some orders relayed to the nearest ground patrol.

Frank already had opened a channel to Hātu
r
i’s office when he saw the reason the kids were up on the rooftop. An Ursa was slinking alongside a building with a human
body in its maw. And as Frank flew past, he could see that a wall of the building had been broken in. Instantly, he reconstructed what had happened. The Ursa had gotten into the place, and one or more of the adults had tried to stop it while the kids escaped to the roof.

It didn’t matter if he was right. All that mattered was that the Ursa was following the half dozen kids and that before long it would consume them as it already had begun to consume the adult.

Unless Frank did something about it.

Banking sharply, he came back at the creature with his flier’s pulsers spitting silver-blue destruction. It didn’t stop the Ursa. It got its attention.

That had been Frank’s purpose all along. The Ursa tossed its head and roared at him and maybe would have gone after him if he hadn’t been out of reach. As it was, it resumed its pursuit of the kids.

Unfortunately, they had about reached the end of the roof, and there was no way they could leap over to the next one—not across the width of a whole street. All the Ursa had to do was leap up and take them. Frank couldn’t let that happen. But what could he do? He couldn’t scoop the kids up, and he couldn’t stop the creature with his fusion-burst fire.

That left him one option.

Banking again, he came around for another pass—just in time to see the Ursa do what he had feared it would do. With a push of its powerful back paws, it propelled itself onto the roof, the human corpse still in its mouth.

The kids crowded the edge of the roof, screaming. But if they jumped, it would be to their deaths. In no hurry, the Ursa advanced on them.

Frank knew what would happen to him if he carried out his plan. He did it anyway.

As the Ursa gathered itself to do to the kids what it had done to its first victim, Frank aimed his flier at it. Then he plowed into it at full speed.

The thing was heavier than it looked but not so heavy
that the impact didn’t sweep it off the rooftop. Frank braced himself for the crash that he knew would follow as he and his flier hit the ground, a crash he couldn’t reasonably expect to survive.

But as he fell along with the Ursa, the creature hugged the flier to its pale, sinuous breast. And as luck would have it, the Ursa took the brunt of the fall.

Still, the collision with the ground nearly snapped Frank’s neck. Too dazed to move, he watched the Ursa shove the flier off it, get to its feet, and toss its head. Up close, it was even more alien, more terrifying. Frank tried to get out of the flier, but he couldn’t. Its cockpit hatch was jammed, no doubt a result of the fall.

The Ursa tilted its eyeless head as it approached him and roared so loudly that he thought his eardrums would burst. Then it smashed the cockpit, driving shards of shattered plastishield into his face and arms and chest. Consumed by pain and barely able to move, Frank had no illusions about what the thing meant to do with him. Its maw opened, and it smelled worse than the worst rotting meat Frank had ever had the misfortune to smell.

But he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Pulling out his pulser, he set it for maximum force and fired directly into the creature’s maw. But nothing happened. The weapon didn’t discharge.

Frank looked at his pulser.
Must have been damaged in the fall
. It figured.

Then the thing came at him a second time, and this attack was more successful. Before Frank knew it, the Ursa’s talons had ripped his chest open. He was spurting blood like a fountain.

I’m done
, he had time to think.

His only consolation was the knowledge that he might have saved the kids from the same fate.

Conner stood in Prime Commander Wilkins’s office. Commander Hātu
r
i loomed over Wilkins’s desk, looking too big for it by half.

His words fell like hammer blows: “I didn’t think it was fair for you to wait until Prime Commander Wilkins came back.”

Conner nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Your father was a brave man, Conner. He didn’t go without a fight.”

Dad …

Conner nodded, feeling his eyes fill with tears. “Yes, sir.”

“When we notified your aunt Theresa, she said she would hold a memorial service. Not just for your father but for your uncle and aunt as well.”

Conner drew a ragged breath. His mom was strong. She had known there might be a day like this.

Later, he would sit with her and they would grieve together. But for now, she would want him to help the colony. His dad would have done the same thing if their positions were reversed.

“My place is with my squad,” he told Hātu
r
i.

The Commander’s brow knit. “Permission to remain with your squad is denied. We need you, but we need you with a clear head. Go home. Clear it. Then come back to us.”

“Sir—”

“That’s an order, Cadet.” Hātu
r
i’s tone left no room for disagreement.

“As you wish, sir,” said Conner.

It was only when Cecilia drew close enough to the mining colony to see the razorbeaks pinwheeling in the air that she realized her most dire imaginings were far more than just worst-case fantasies.

The razorbeaks were analogous to Earth birds called vultures. However, their skin was far more leathery, and their wings, more bat-shaped than birdlike, were about six feet long from tip to tip. On seeing them for the first time, Novans had named them for the obvious reason that their beaks were exceptionally sharp. They rarely attacked humans, or at least healthy humans. But when they did, they could be nasty, even dangerous.