After Earth: A Perfect Beast (6 page)

Conner stopped that train of thought. Only officers made up battle plans. If Wilkins had asked what she’d asked, she must have thought Conner was officer material. He wondered what his uncle Torrance would say to that. He wondered what his aunt Bonita would say. And his father …

Frank Raige had never told his son he had to become a Ranger. But the day Conner had signed up, he had seen his father smile as he’d never smiled before. His
father had never said he was proud because that wasn’t his way.

But he
had
been proud.

In the days and weeks that followed, Conner hadn’t given his father or anyone else a lot to be proud about. He’d shown up at the wrong places at the wrong times. He’d overslept a morning drill. He’d even gotten into a fight with another cadet over something so trivial that he couldn’t remember what it was.

So if Conner had to sacrifice a little sleep or forgo a day off, he would do that. He would do whatever it took to make his family proud of him. Even if it didn’t make the least bit of sense to him.

With a sigh, he started typing.
If I don’t stop to eat anything
, he thought,
I might be finished by noon, after all
.

Trey Vander Meer cleared his throat and signaled to his engineer. Then he spoke, basking in the sound of his honey-smooth voice as it filled the broadcast studio.

“Hello, Nova Prime. This is Trey Vander Meer, looking out for your interests when no one else will. Today’s conversation is about the semiannual Ranger cadet training exercise known as the war games.

“In case you didn’t know, the first round of games are over—though there will be another round, a punishment of sorts. Either way, who cares, right? What does a Ranger exercise have to do with you and me? Quite a bit, actually. You see, with the first of the war games behind us, we’re one step closer to minting a whole new class of Rangers, swelling the ranks of what is undeniably the most bloated organization on the planet. That’s right, you heard me—bloated, as in swollen. Puffed up. Bigger than necessary.

“Friends, we didn’t need the Rangers we had already. Now we’re on our way to having even more of them thanks to a rather costly set of exercises. In fact, only the Rangers’ Prime Commander Wilkins knows exactly how costly because she’s not sharing that information with you and me—the people who happen to pay her salary in case any of you may have forgotten.

“But this, as they used to say back on Earth before the Exodus, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Rangers consume a tremendous amount of our colony’s resources to manufacture weapons, maintain barracks,
produce and clean uniforms, keep their aircraft aloft, and so on. They also operate an increasingly sophisticated command center that we seem to be rebuilding—excuse me,
upgrading
—every few years. Our valuable resources would be better spent addressing the problems caused by the drought, from which we’re still recovering in so many ways.

“I know the Skrel are out there somewhere in the vastness of the universe. I know they gave us some good licks when they showed up before—and if you’ve listened to this program in the past, you know that no one honors the casualties of those attacks more than I do. But for the last couple of hundred years we have strengthened our defenses against airborne threats. We have honed our F.E.N.I.X. tech. We have what seems like a million satellites scanning the stars. In my opinion, these are all good and proper uses of what we have. But honestly, can anyone out there even begin to tell me why we need so many Rangers?

“I don’t want to hear that we’re worried about the Skrel. They got their noses bloodied twice; they’d be crazy to come after us a third time. And our unmanned probes—one every week, it seems—haven’t turned up any evidence of other intelligent life. So why do we keep pouring credits into the Rangers? Why do we need to build faster and faster aircraft? It may appear that our resources here on Nova Prime are unlimited, but I assure you that they’re not.

“I don’t have to remind you that we already ruined
one
world by mismanaging her ecosystem, by raiding her pantry until it was bare. We cannot afford to let that happen again. We as a species cannot do to Nova Prime what we did to Earth. I, for one, will not permit it.

“As a society, we need to have this dialogue, my friends. We need to reexamine our priorities. The Prime Commander must listen to the will of the people for a change rather than the will of the military yes men with whom she surrounds herself. She may think we’ll stop
asking for this, but we won’t. We’ll keep asking until we put our colony back on the forward-looking track it deserves.

“Think about it, Nova Prime. I know I will.”

The red light on the wall in front of him flickered off, and Vander Meer sat back in his chair. Ken Pham, the show’s producer, came out from behind his control panel and sat down beside the radio host, who dabbed at the sweat on his brow with one of the blue polka-dot handkerchiefs he’d gotten as a birthday present from his wife.

“Nice job,” Pham said. “You nailed it on the first take.”

“Don’t I always?” asked Vander Meer.

“Actually, no.”

Vander Meer chuckled. “Well, then,
almost
always. The show will hit at the usual time?”

“Right on schedule,” Pham assured him.

“No editing?” Vander Meer had been displeased in the past when Pham or some other producer took liberties by omitting some of his material.

“Not today,” said Pham.

“I am agog,” Vander Meer said.

He unfolded himself from his chair. He had always been tall and reasonably slender, but lately he had developed a paunch that he blamed on weak stomach muscles. The truth was that he liked to eat, particularly in the colony’s finer restaurants, but didn’t like to exercise a great deal. And it wasn’t only his middle that was giving way. His hair had started to thin as well, spurring him lately to massage in ointments to stimulate follicle growth. Still, it was a race to see which would win out: the advance of his regrowing hair or the recession of his natural hairline.

Vander Meer hated aging. He hated looking at the jowls he had to shave each morning. He hated the constant reminders from his family to stop at seconds, not thirds at dinner. He would have given anything to have
the metabolism he had enjoyed when he’d first begun broadcasting twenty years earlier.

It was then that he had made a name for himself as a journalist, covering the secession battle between Nova Prime City and New Earth City. That was back in 553 AE. His reportage on the conflict gained colony-wide attention, and he rose through the ranks until he was finally invited to become a commentator, for which he used his field experience to reflect on social trends. But one trend in particular had caught his eye.

Over the years, Vander Meer had noticed how cavalierly the Rangers conducted their business not only before the secession fight but afterward. He had seen how they took their funding for granted, as if they were entitled to it by virtue of the work they had done in the distant past.

The Rangers irked him for reasons he couldn’t even explain—maybe because he once had wanted to be a Ranger himself but never had gotten to the point where he was physically fit enough. But more and more, judiciously so that he wasn’t simply dismissed as a crank, he had ramped up his criticism of the Corps and its place in society until he could lambaste them as he had today.
Let’s see what they have to say about Trey Vander Meer now
, he thought.

The show over, Pham got up and touched several pressure-sensitive controls on the studio wall. At the same time, the lighting dimmed and systems switched over to standby.

“You know what I’d like to do?” asked Vander Meer, toying with a thought.

“What’s that?” asked Pham.

“Get Wilkins on the program with me. People would tune in then; I can tell you that.”

Pham considered the idea for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Excellent,” Vander Meer said. “Let me know how it goes, will you?”

“Sure. And let
me
know if you hear about anything good to read.” Pham held up an electronic tablet that he carried with him wherever he went. “Seems there’s a dearth of good things to read these days.”

“It’s a deal,” said Vander Meer. “Now, home for lunch. Family awaits.”

Leaving the studio, he entered the hot, dry air that was the hallmark of Nova Prime. The survivors of a dying Earth had settled in this spot in the foothills of red-clay mountains because it offered protection from the weather and had rivers for the colony’s water needs. There had been cooler areas on the planet’s surface, but settling them would have meant cutting down trees or otherwise tampering with the planet’s ecology, and that was something humankind would never do again.

So they had settled
this
area, and things had worked out rather well. Except for the heat, of course. And the dust. And the occasional severe thunderstorm.

Vander Meer’s home was only a couple of kilometers from the studio in an exclusive, newly constructed enclave made up of just seven residential structures. Most of the better parts of Nova City were older, some dating back as far as the arrival on Nova Prime, and were tucked into the foothills of the mountains.

This one was the exception. But Vander Meer didn’t mind. His neighbors were all doctors, teachers, or artists, and ideas seemed to flow freely and easily in their little pocket of the colony. He loved that about the place. After all, he was nothing if not an intellectual.

And yet, since he had begun inserting more controversy into his broadcasts, his neighbors had begun looking at him differently. Or rather, some of them had. Others agreed with him, of course. Those were the ones who shook his hand when he saw them, or slapped him on the back, or made encouraging remarks. He was striking a chord, no doubt. And if he could get Wilkins on the program, it would resonate even louder throughout the colony.

Still salivating over that possibility, Vander Meer arrived
home. It was a modest structure in which he lived, the same red color as the desert and just big enough for him, his wife, and his three children—although he expected that it would feel larger when his oldest began classes in New Earth City in a few months’ time. Maybe then there might be some peace under his roof.

“Did you do it?” his son Skipper asked as Vander Meer crossed the threshold. Skipper was only six, but he had absorbed his father’s antipathy for the Rangers.

“Do what?” asked Vander Meer as he picked the boy up in his arms. “Take the Rangers down a peg?”

“Tear them apart, Dad. That’s what you said you would do—tear them apart!”

Vander Meer smiled. “I didn’t
say
I would tear them apart, son.”

“Yes, you did,” said Vander Meer’s older son, Michael, who had shown up in the hallway behind Skipper. “That’s
exactly
what you said.”

Michael, who was eighteen, had enjoyed a growth spurt lately and was now even taller than his father, a fact that made Vander Meer uncomfortable, especially since they often took opposite sides of an argument. For instance, Michael didn’t think the Rangers should have their budget pared down. He thought they still served an important purpose in the colony. The conflict between father and oldest child had made life at home increasingly difficult. Fortunately, Skipper was there to balance things out.

“Okay,” the boy said impatiently, tugging on Vander Meer’s shirtfront, “so what did you say in your broadcast?”

“That the Rangers are a burden we should no longer have to bear,” Vander Meer said, looking at Michael.

The teenager rolled his eyes. “Great. I can’t believe you’re my father.”

“Michael’s fighting with Dad again,” Skipper called into the kitchen, where his mother was preparing lunch.

“We’re not fighting,” Vander Meer said, putting Skipper down on the floor. “We’re just talking.”

He watched Michael retreat to the family room, where the boy plunked himself down on the couch and activated a holographic game. He wore his light brown hair long and pulled back in a braid that was held together with a decorative clasp carved from stone. He also had taken to sporting a shamrock-shaped ear cuff made of a metallic alloy in accordance with the latest Celtic fashion.

Was I ever like that?
Vander Meer asked himself. He didn’t think so.

Moving on, he entered the kitchen, where his wife was tossing a salad. He moved close to her, pushed aside a lock of blond hair, and whispered in her ear, “Save me, Natasha.”

“Sorry,” she said, “you’re on your own.”

Natasha, a good-looking woman for her age, was more than Vander Meer deserved, and he was the first to say so. He prayed she would never come to her senses.

“As usual,” he said good-naturedly, and helped her bring lunch to the table.

Skipper pulled a chair out and sat down eagerly. Lunch was his favorite meal, after all. A moment later, Michael joined them.

Vander Meer noted that the table was set for four and wondered where his daughter might be. “Elena’s at …?” he asked.

“Dance,” said his wife.

He remembered now. “Right. Dance.”

Briefly, they said grace. Then Natasha doled out the gazpacho while Vander Meer sliced the bread and the boys took salad from the bowl in the middle of the table.

“So what does the afternoon hold for you?” Vander Meer asked his wife.

“I have to finish the quarterly review,” she said.

“Do you have to go back to the office for that?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “I can do it here at home.” She buttered
her bread, broke off a piece, and popped it into her mouth.

Skipper, by contrast, ripped a piece in half and slathered it with butter.

“There’s more to the meal than bread,” Vander Meer reminded the boy.

“Right, Dad,” said Skipper, talking around the bread in his mouth.

Natasha concealed a smile behind her hand. Vander Meer saw it and shared it with her. Then, seeing that Michael was staring off into space, he asked, “What about you, Number One Son?”

Michael glanced up at him. “I need to finish picking up school supplies. Then I’m getting together with Olivia.”