After Earth: A Perfect Beast

by Peter David Michael Jan Friedman Robert Greenberger

  Conner thought she was kidding. He hoped she was kidding. But the longer she looked at him, the more certain he was that she was dead serious.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said a third time.

  But in his mind, he was reeling. A formal battle plan? By noon? Is she out of her mind?

  “Good,” said Wilkins. “And by the way … I know your family’s a distinguished one. But we have to make our own legacies in life. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Conner said, though that sounded even harder than living up to his family name.

  “You’re dismissed, Cadet Raige.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  As Conner left the command center, he was already wrapping his head around the magnitude of the task. If I stay up all night, I can finish it on time. At least I think I can.

  He would have loved to get a decent night’s sleep after spending most of the day broiling in the desert. Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, he thought bitterly.

  Worse, he had a feeling that Wilkins was setting a precedent. Was he going to have to write a battle plan every time he led a team? That would be hell. What he had always liked about the Rangers was having a chance to act without thinking.

  “Hey, Raige!”

  Conner turned and shaded his eyes against the brazen sunlight. His pal Blodge was jogging his way, raising little puffs of dust from the red ground.

  “Hey,” Conner said in return.

  Blodge, whose real name was Raul Blodgett, was a big guy with a round face and a brush of red hair. He had signed on as a cadet the same day Conner had, had gone through all the exercises Conner had. Except Blodge was one of the more popular guys in his barracks. People just naturally warmed to him the same way they didn’t just naturally warm to Conner.

  “Everything all right?” Blodge asked. “I mean, you won the exercise, right? At least that’s how it looked to us poor jerks on the Blue team. Looking at that face, I’d think you were the one who lost.”

  Conner grunted. “That all depends on how you look at it.”

  “You kicked Red’s butts, right? And Kincaid’s butt in particular. How else can you look at it?”

  “Wilkins wants me to write a detailed battle plan explaining how we did it.”

  Blodge’s face puckered with sympathy. “Ouch. Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah,” said Conner, “so am I.”

  The day Frank Raige flew his first Kelsey flier was the day he found out who he was.

  On the ground, he had always been a little impatient with himself, a little fidgety. As hard as he worked, he always felt he could work harder, make himself into something better.

  In the air, he was something better.

  “How’s she feel, Captain?” his flier technician, Smitty, asked over the craft’s intercom.

  Like the wind, Frank thought. The flier, a long black dart, was running perfectly. But what he said was, “Like she’s going to fall apart any minute. You get rid of those mechanics of yours and tell them it was my idea.”

  “Meaning: They’re doing a great job, keep up the good work,” said Smitty, who had become familiar with Frank’s antics over the decade they had worked together. “Got it, sir.”

  Frank looked down at the desert below him. It sprawled, all gold and rust glinting in the light of first sun. To his left, hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to the north, the land rose and took on a coat of rich green fir forest. To his right, it stretched south to the unseen Thermopoulos Sea. It was a beautiful world. At times like these, he was grateful to the pioneers who had steered humanity to Nova Prime instead of somewhere else.

  “Planning on getting back soon?” asked Smitty. “Laura’s asking when I’m going to be home.”

  “I’m coming about as we speak,” Frank told him.

  He had a habit of getting carried away when he was in the air. He didn’t want to apologize to Smitty’s wife yet again for keeping her husband at work an hour after his shift was supposed to have ended.

  As Frank banked, the land below him seemed to tilt and spin about. The flier responded perfectly, adjusting for the wind without a hitch. It was a pleasure to test something so well designed. But Frank wasn’t going to be any more forthcoming with his praise when he spoke to his engineers than when he spoke to his mechanics. If he did, they probably would faint dead away.

  As the outskirts of Nova Prime City slid toward him, he could see the research center where his wife, Rebecca, would be bent over her microscope, seeking a cure for Ressler’s Disease, one of the more vicious bacterial mutations humanity had encountered since it had landed on Nova Prime. He could also see the red-clay obelisk erected as a monument to the four hundred thousand colonists who had survived the long, hard passage through space.

  And he could identify the barracks where his son, Conner, was probably stretched out on his bunk, catching up on shut-eye after taking part in the Prime Commander’s war games. Frank knew what that was like, having participated in the games when he was a cadet.

  All he wanted in life was down there in Nova Prime City. As much as he loved flying, he loved returning to his family even more.

  “Got a visual on you, Captain,” Smitty reported. “All clear for landing.”

  “Roger that,” Frank said.

  The flier landed as smoothly as it handled in the air. In moments, it had coasted to a halt. Frank turned off his flight systems one by one. Then he removed his harness and opened the hatch. Immediately, he felt the hot, dry air of the desert wash over him. Some people preferred air-conditioning, but Frank liked the heat.

  Smitty came running over with a comm unit in his hand.

  “What’s up?” Frank asked.

  Smitty handed him the communicator. “It’s Prime Commander Wilkins, sir. She called as you were landing.”

  He put the comm unit to his ear. “Yes, ma’am. Raige here.”

  “At ease, Frank. It’s just the two of us.”

  He grew concerned. If this wasn’t an official call … “Everything all right?”

  “You mean, is Conner all right?”

  “Well … yeah.”

  “That’s why I called, Frank. I’ve got good news.”

  He exhaled a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “That’s the kind I want to hear.”

  “We just finished our war games, though we’re going to reprise them in a week’s time—an object lesson. But I’m happy to tell you that Conner distinguished himself even if no one else did. Hell, he pretty much carried the day for Green Squad all on his own.”

  Frank felt his throat tighten up. Though he was beef jerky on the outside, he’d always been a softy when it came to his family. “That’s great. What did he do?”

  After Wilkins filled him in, she added, “I told you he’s been having some trouble finding himself. After this I expect he’ll find his rhythm.”

  “I sure hope so. You didn’t pat him on the back too hard, I expect.”

  “You know me better than that,” said Wilkins. “He’s in the study center now trying to pull together a battle plan based on what he did purely out of instinct.”

  Frank smiled to himself. “Good. Can’t hurt to make him think. And the other cadets won’t see him gloating.”

  “Or getting too many kudos from the brass. Nobody likes a teacher’s pet—especially when the teacher’s a Prime Commander.”

  He understood the reference. Wilkins herself had been a cadet deserving of that kind of recognition. But the Prime Commander at the time—Frank’s father, Joshua Raige—had been wise enough not to praise Wilkins too much in public.

  “I’m happy to see the lesson rubbed off,” Frank said.

  “Your dad didn’t give you too much recognition, either.”

  “How would that have looked?” Frank asked. “The only thing worse than being the teacher’s pet is being the teacher’s son.”

  “He knew what he was doing, all right,” Wilkins said. “I miss the old goat.”

  Frank nodded to himself. “
So do I.”

  As much as he liked shooting the bull with Wilkins, he knew she had a lot on her plate. The last thing he wanted to do was distract her from her work even if they were old friends.

  “I appreciate the report,” he said. “But right now I ought to—”

  “Hang on a moment, Frank. I know I’ve asked you this before, but I could sure use you at the top. Elias will be retiring soon, as you know, and as far as I’m concerned, a Prime Commander can’t have enough Raiges on her staff.”

  He was flattered, as always, but he needed a promotion like Nova Prime needed another desert. He had joined the Rangers to be a flier, not a desk jockey.

  “It’s getting a little hard to hear you,” he said. “Must be a sunspot or something.”

  “Don’t give me that,” said Wilkins. “If you’re too scared to move up the ranks, just say so.”

  Frank chuckled. “That’s me, ma’am, shaking in my britches. You have a good day, now. Call me any time with news like that.”

  “I hope to. Wilkins out.”

  * * *

  Damn, Conner thought as he sat in the stillness of the cadet study center with the second sun dropping toward the horizon. He sighed and tapped his forefinger on the desk next to his keypad. Then he thought it again: Damn.

  Wilkins probably hadn’t thought she was asking very much from him. After all, a lot of war game maneuvers were plotted out before they were executed. But Conner hadn’t done that—far from it. In fact, his Greens had been on the razor’s edge of losing the game until he came up with a new approach on the fly.

  Right from the start, Lucas had led his Reds as if they were a pack of hungry wolves. They had forced Conner’s team to retreat not once but three times. They had gotten the Greens to split up into pockets of resistance, each one cut off from its comrades, and then they had eliminated the pockets one by one.

  Of course, Conner should have recognized such an approach in advance. He had known that Lucas had to be first all the time, even if it was just on the line to get into the mess hall, and didn’t care who he had to push out of his way. Hell, everyone knew that.

  So it wasn’t so hard to anticipate that that was how Lucas would command his forces. With aggression. And as a tactic, it had come close to working. The Greens were down to five cadets, hounded as a group by Lucas’s greater numbers, when it finally occurred to Conner to turn Lucas’s aggressiveness against him.

  It had been no more complicated than that. Just turn it against him. That was what Conner had told himself.

  How could the Greens do that? For the most part, by continuing to do what they were doing already—retreating. That was the trap. But to spring it, one of the Greens would have to get behind the Reds and pick them off from the rear.

  Because once you’re behind somebody, the advantage is all yours.

  But it was easier said than done. Lucas’s cadets had been smart enough to fan out from one side of the valley to the other. The Greens would find it hard as hell to sneak around them.

  That was why Conner had decided he wouldn’t take that route.

  He would have gone above them, except there weren’t more than a couple of trees in the area, and the ones that existed weren’t sturdy enough to hold his weight—and even if he had been lucky enough to find one that could, it wouldn’t have had enough foliage to hide him from sight.

  Forced to discard the options of going around or over Lucas’s cadets, Conner pursued the only other course of action open to him: going under them.

  The idea had sounded dumb at first, even to Conner. The Greens didn’t have time to stop and dig a hole—not with the Reds just a few minutes behind them. But there were holes that had been dug long before the exercise started if one knew where to look.

  And Conner knew.

  After all, he had been obsessed with the planet’s animal life since he was a little kid. If it ran, crawled, climbed, flew, or swam, he had long ago become an expert on it. And what kind of expert wouldn’t have known that kangaroo rats dig deep, far-ranging burrows underground?

  Back on Earth, before the ships took off with genetic samples of every creature that could be collected, kangaroo rats had been small—about a foot long, including the tail. But on Nova Prime, with the help of geneticists, they were bigger and stronger. Conner was grateful for the change. Without it, he might never have been able to find a burrow when he needed one. After collapsing it with a few stabs of a fallen branch, he had concealed himself with a few heaping handfuls of dirt and debris while the other Greens continued to retreat.

  There was a tense moment when Lucas’s cadets marched through, their eyes trained ahead when they would have done much better at that point if they had looked down. One of them came within a meter of Conner, nearly stepping on his hand.

  Then they were gone, and he was free to go after them one at a time. With a little luck, he had thought at the time, he could get a few of them before they caught on to what he was doing. As it turned out, he had more than a little luck.

  He had enough to even the odds before Lucas or any of the other Reds realized what he was doing. And by that time, it was too late for them. Their opponents doubled back suddenly, surprising them, and Conner continued to harass them from behind.

  But to break it down on paper, move by move? It wouldn’t have any meaning. After all, it wasn’t the moves that had won the day for the Greens. It was the way they were executed.

  How do you chart that? Conner thought. If anything, it was Lucas’s strategy the Prime Commander should have asked for. Now, that was something Conner could chart—and wouldn’t mind doing so now that he had managed to find a way around it. He sat back in his chair and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

  In a few hours, his fellow cadets would be enjoying a day off. Blodge had said he was going to spend it hiking in the mountains, with his girlfriend, no doubt. Gold had signed up to go hang gliding. Mphalele had tickets for a concert in Chen Valley …

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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 necessa
ry.

  “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.