After Earth: A Perfect Beast (28 page)

“How can we honor their memories? By remaining strong in the face of the alien scourge. By not giving up no matter how hopeless the situation may seem at times. By hanging on to our faith in the midst of adversity because our faith will see us through, as it has so many times since we set foot on Nova Prime.

“Neither Frank nor Torrance nor Bonita can carry on the fight any longer, may their souls rest in peace. But we can. And we will.”

Conner nodded. He would carry on the fight. But it would be harder than before, much harder. After all, he had lost more than his father. He had lost his father’s wisdom, his father’s way of looking at the world.

He had been happy to become a cadet, to take on the same responsibility that his father, his uncle, and his aunt had taken on before him. But in the back of his mind, he had known that he could fall back on their experience and expertise, that he had a safety net if he ever needed one. Now the safety net was gone.

It was just him out there, all alone, to stand or fall. And if he fell, it wouldn’t just be a cadet named Conner who screwed up. It would be Conner
Raige
.

Whatever he did would reflect on the whole Raige tradition, starting with the first of his ancestors who had put on the rust-colored uniform of the Rangers back on Earth. It was a big burden for an eighteen-year-old to shoulder.

Not that he had a choice. He was who he was, and he would be who he would be.

When the service was over, Aunt Theresa came down and hugged them—every one of them who had come to the service. Then Conner and his mother went to the
door, where a squad of Rangers was waiting for them with a couple of ground vehicles.

“Conner,” said his mother.

It had been a long time since they had spoken, and it seemed even longer than that. Like everyone else, Rebecca Raige had a few extra lines in her face.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“I’m fine,” he said, all the while knowing she would see through his denial. Then he added: “I gave Prime Commander Wilkins an idea. I’m hoping it works. But—”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

Conner nodded.

His mother studied him for a moment. Then she asked, “Do you remember what Dad used to tell you when you played cageball?”

When I played cageball …?
“No.”

“Come on—when you were a little boy? And your team was trying to hang on to a lead?”

Then Conner
did
remember. “The rhythm thing.”

His mother nodded. “Every game has a rhythm. In some games, you build up a big lead. You feel like you’re going to win going away.”

“Then the other team comes back. It comes back with a
vengeance
. And when that happens, you’re on your heels. You forget how you ever built up a lead. You feel like you’ve got no chance.”

He could see Frank Raige towering over him. He could feel the weight of his father’s hand on his bony young shoulder.

“When that happens, all you can do is hold on,” said his mother. “Just hold on and do your best. Because if you do, the other team will eventually run out of fuel. The tide will turn your way again. And in the end, you’ll come out on top.”

Conner shook his head. “It’s not a game, Mom. People are dying, Rangers especially.”

“You know your father. You think he was talking about a game?”

Actually, Conner
had
thought that.

“Conner, everything he did, everything he said, was to prepare you for life. Of course, he didn’t know the Ursa were going to descend on us. How could he? But he knew there would be challenges ahead, and he wanted you to be ready for them—or at least as ready as you could possibly be.”

Conner nodded. That sounded like his father, all right.

“We built a civilization here,” said his mother. “We got ourselves a nice big lead. Now the Skrel and the Ursa are trying to take it away from us. They’re charging hard. We’re on our heels. It feels like we can’t win, like we never had that lead in the first place.

“But we didn’t get to where we are by not being good, by not being tough and resourceful and determined. We can beat the Ursa, Conner. We can beat
anything
. We just have to hold on and do our best until the tide turns back in our favor.”

The words were coming out of his mother’s mouth, but Conner could hear his father saying them. And if he were there, he would have. Conner was sure of it.

“So all I’ve got to do is hold on,” he said.

“That,” said his mother, wiping a tear from her eye, “and forget about dribbling with your right hand. You know how lousy you are at dribbling with your right hand.”

He couldn’t help smiling. “Thanks, Mom.”

She pulled his head down with both hands and kissed him on the forehead. “Don’t thank me. Thank your father.”

Prime Commander Wilkins might have been the leader of her squad, but she wasn’t its most important member. Not by a long shot.

That distinction went to Rita Norman, the gold medalist in the long jump at the last Asimov Games, who also happened to be a veteran Ranger. Norman’s job was to do what Conner Raige had done when his squad took down that Ursa: get as close as she could to the creature and blast it from behind.

Wilkins was just one of the nine Rangers whose job it would be to distract the Ursa while Norman did the real work. It was just as well. Wilkins had been a pretty good athlete in her day, but that day was long past.

Now she prided herself more on being a tactician. As such, she had picked nine of the coolest, most disciplined, and most battle-ready Rangers she could find. And she had picked herself to lead them because she was cool and disciplined as well.

Not because she had been outmaneuvered by the Primus into looking like a fool on Trey Vander Meer’s broadcast and as a result been forced to give up the Rangers’ satellite monitoring function. Not because the engineer on that critical shift had failed to detect what the Skrel had done to their satellites. Not because Wilkins had something to prove, especially to herself, after she had failed her Rangers and her colony.

No, that had nothing to do with it. She had elected to lead the mission because she was the best leader she
could find even if she had to keep telling herself that to make herself feel certain of it.

After all, there was a lot riding on this mission.
I want everything to go right
, she thought as she checked the fusion chamber in her pulser for perhaps the sixth time since she’d left the Ranger barracks.
Everything
.

She had barely looked up again, satisfied that her pulser was in perfect working order, when she saw the monster show up down the street. It was huge, alien, its maw a black hole surrounded by rings of jagged teeth. The holovids didn’t do it justice.

For a fraction of a second, as the Ursa rumbled and tossed its head and started in their direction, Wilkins felt a spurt of panic. Then she reminded herself who she was and why she was there, and she was able to tuck away the panic in a place where she didn’t have to deal with it.

She was, after all, the Prime Commander of the Rangers.

“Positions,” she snapped into the receiver in her comm gear. Her Rangers responded smartly, spreading themselves across the width of the street. Norman was on one end of the formation, where she would try to slip by the monster and get behind it.

As it stalked them, remaining in the middle of the street, that was exactly what Norman did.

Wilkins nodded to herself.
So far, so good
.

“Hold your fire until I give the word,” she said, amazed at how calm she sounded.

They all held their fire.

She waited until the Ursa had advanced to the point where it was surrounded by them. “Now,” said Wilkins.

As one, they began blasting away at their target. The Ursa halted in its tracks, turned this way and that, and made a ripping sound in its throat. Obviously it didn’t like being scalded by pulser fire from every direction.
Or rather
, Wilkins thought as she watched Norman crouch the way she had at the Asimov Games,
nearly every direction
.

“Maintain fire,” Wilkins said.

Everyone except Norman maintained his or her fire. Norman, pulser in hand, took a breath, shot forward, raised her head, and leaped.

Wilkins held her breath as she watched.
A great jump. No—a perfect jump
.

But the Ursa didn’t remain distracted by Wilkins and the other Rangers. It whirled before Norman could get off a shot—and before Wilkins’s horrified eyes tore Norman out of the air with a sweep of its razor-sharp talons.

By the time Norman hit the ground, she was a mess of blood and bone and not much else. But the creature didn’t stop to satisfy its hunger with whatever meat still clung to Norman’s bones.

Instead, it continued to advance into the midst of Wilkins and her Rangers. The Prime Commander felt her teeth grate.
That’s all right
, she thought;
it’s not over
.

But in her heart, she knew it was as over as it could get.

Gash regards the creatures converging on it—or at least regards them as clearly as its sightlessness permits
.

It stops a moment to remove the grime that has collected on its paw. It licks it experimentally. It always licks experimentally. It never knows exactly what it is that it’s going to be stepping on. The liquid is warm, although that warmth is quickly fading. There is a faint taste of something: salt, perhaps
.

The creatures—the smell things—are advancing. They are coming together as one and in that action perhaps believe that they are capable of triumphing over Gash
.

They are wrong
.

One of them comes up behind Gash, but Gash is
aware of it. Gash whirls and smashes the smell thing out of the air with a sweep of its taloned paw. Then, as the smell thing shrieks, Gash tears the smell thing apart.

Gash keeps going, assailing two more simultaneously. It stretches its body, ripping apart one smell thing while sinking its teeth into the other. More of the blood taste floods through Gash, energizing it, bringing it to new and more enthusiastic life
.

Then Gash lets out a roar. It is an ear-splitting transcendent noise, and for just a moment all the smell things freeze. Then Gash is everywhere, bounding back and forth. The smell things try to take aim at Gash, but they fail. Gash is here, then it is there, then it is elsewhere. Their energy beams spear the air but are unable to spear Gash
.

Thirty seconds. That is all the time it takes—not that Gash is timing it—to rip apart all save one of them
.

Gash turns to face the sole surviving smell thing. It fires at Gash, and this time it strikes its target
.

Gash staggers a little, and it fires again. And again. It annoys Gash, this barrage. It reminds Gash of the other time a smell thing fired at it and left Gash with a scar over its maw. Gash does not like the feel of its scar, and it certainly does not want another
.

The smell thing—a female it, it seems—probably thinks it has Gash at a disadvantage. But there is only one smell thing. With no others to distract Gash, no noise to turn Gash’s concentration elsewhere, Gash knows exactly what to do
.

Suddenly Gash breaks right. The smell thing swivels her gun to continue firing, but she is too slow, for Gash’s move was a fake. Gash cuts back left, leaps toward her. She tries to bring her gun around to strike Gash again, but it is too late. Gash’s vault carries it over her shot, and Gash lands on her. Gash’s claw wraps around her weapon, and Gash shreds it
.

Then Gash shreds her
.

Gash first slices through something thin and metal. A nameplate—Wilkins—but, to Gash, all it is is an impediment to the viscera beneath. Then Gash continues tearing away at her, and she struggles for as many seconds as she can before she stops moving.

The smell thing is dead
.

Gash eats her slowly. Gash wants the satisfaction of eating to last, and it does, until Gash loses interest and leaves the smell thing’s half-eaten corpse behind
.

Gash has other things to do with its time
.

Conner had just come back from a shelter on the South Side, where he and a squad of cadets under Yang had delivered a pitifully small supply of food and water rations, when he saw the crowd gathered around the entrance to the command center.

Wilkins
, he thought excitedly.

Instead of retreating to his barracks and getting out of the suns, he headed for the crowd, picking up his pace little by little until he was almost running at the end. Carceras, a Ranger who had fought alongside Conner’s aunt Bonita, was the first face the cadet recognized. He put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “What’s going on?”

Good news
, he thought.
Give me good news
.

But when Carceras turned to look back at him, there was anything but good news written on his face. “The Prime Commander,” he said flatly. “She’s dead.”

Conner felt a pit open in his stomach. “Wilkins …?”

Carceras nodded soberly. “Wilkins. She and her squad encountered an Ursa down by the Citadel. It got her and two others. The rest were lucky to get away with their lives.”

Those were the wrong words. “Wilkins,” Conner echoed, unable to accept what he’d heard, unable to make it real.

“Yes,” said Carceras, a note of annoyance in his voice. “You all right? You don’t look so good.”

Conner muttered something, then walked away on legs he could barely trust to carry him.
Wilkins. Dead
. And it was his fault.
His
.

His plan had failed.
But how?
he asked himself.
How?

It was late. The stars were out in full force.

But Conner wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. He sat there in his chair at the cadet study center, staring at the satellite feed of Wilkins’s battle with the Ursa, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.