After Earth: A Perfect Beast

by Peter David Michael Jan Friedman Robert Greenberger

  Just Norris’s hand, lying at the base of a couple of rocks. His naviband was flashing red, indicating that it was still functioning.

  No way. No way in hell did the Ursa plant that here to lure us. Impossible. It … My God, it must have swallowed Norris whole. Almost whole. I can see it now, the serration ending just above the wrist. It just scooped him up, swallowed him, and, as Norris tried to climb out, clamped its jaws shut. Any screams would have been muffled.

  All this went through Torrance’s mind in a second. His gaze swept the plateau. There was nothing there. The Ursa was gone.

  No—it’s here, he thought. He heard its growl, chilling him to the bone.

  “It’s here!” he called out.

  A moment later the monster bounded into view. It seemed to hesitate for a moment, apparently trying to decide who to attack first.

  “Fire!” Torrance yelled.

  Pulser blasts rained down on the Ursa, but they weren’t seriously hurting it. They were, at most, annoying the crap out of it. No surprise there.

  Suddenly he saw, to his horror, that Marta was advancing, trying to get closer. Hoping, no doubt, that a closer shot would have a greater impact.

  “Fall back, Ranger!” Torrance shouted. “Fall back!” He never stopped firing as he grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her away from the creature.

  The Ursa’s head snapped around. Its nonexistent eyes settled on him. It roared. It charged.

  In an effort to draw it off from the others, Torrance ran along the edge of the plateau, all the while continuing to fire. The Ursa’s head swiveled to track him, turning it away from the rest of the Rangers. They converged on it as one, pouring on a barrage from all directions. The Ursa felt the concentrated firepower and, still facing Torrance, roared in pain.

  Its mouth was wide open, and Torrance took aim. Let’s see how invulnerable these bastards are on the inside, he thought.

  But before he could fire, it swiped at him. He leaped backward quickly enough to avoid the worst of the blow, but it still sent him flying.

  He somersaulted in midair and prepared to land on his feet. But when he tried to plant them, he saw there was nothing beneath him—nothing but empty air.

  The Ursa had knocked Torrance clear off the plateau. Below him was a fall of several hundred feet to the ground. The only thing that went through his head was, This is how I die? This? How incredibly stupid.

  Then he plummeted. He heard a scream—Marta’s, not his own.

  Marta watched Torrance plunge to his death, and her mind shut down. Heedless of her own danger, heedless of anything except the need to put down this monster, she advanced on it with a continuous barrage. She knew no fear. She knew nothing but pure unadulterated fury.

  “Die, you son of a bitch!” she screamed.

  The Ursa whirled and roared, its foul breath washing over her. She continued to fire, hoping she would stop it despite everything she knew about it, but it didn’t stop. It coiled and sprang.

  A blast from overhead with far greater power than anything the handheld pulsers were packing ripped through the air and struck the Ursa broadside. It was the Ranger skimmer, diving down in an attack pattern that had enabled it to strike the Ursa in midleap. The impact was so fierce that it sent the Ursa flying sideways toward a wall of rock.

  Unfortunately, Marta was between the Ursa and the wall of rock.

  She tried to move, but everything was happening too fast, and the Ursa crashed into her with horrifying impact. The Ursa didn’t appear to notice that it had crushed anyone, which wasn’t surprising. The thing’s hide was so thick that it was shrugging off pulser blasts at point-blank range, and so there was certainly no reason for it to be aware it had crashed into a person.

  The skimmer dive-bombed toward the Ursa, continuing to fire. Marta sank to the ground, barely hanging on to consciousness, her arms and legs splayed in angles that shouldn’t have been possible.

  The Ursa didn’t seem to be aware of her. Instead, it was focused entirely on the skimmer that was coming toward it. The creature might not have had any eyes, but the pounding from the heavy-duty pulser cannons was serving as a guide, and the noise of the skimmer was more than enough to cement the Ursa’s ability to track it.

  With a howl of fury, the Ursa leaped for the skimmer. The skimmer pilot made a quick course adjustment, but the boxy vehicle wasn’t a Kelsey flier. It was designed for transport, not battle. The cannons had been a recent add-on, an attempt to convert the skimmer into a fighting vehicle. It wasn’t designed to make swift aerial maneuvers, and that lack of ability cost it.

  The Ursa landed on the front of the skimmer, just above where its cannons were mounted. Its back legs scrambled, and its talons found purchase. It shoved its way onto the top of the skimmer and started both clawing at and pounding on the top. The skimmer canted sideways and then performed a barrel roll to try to shake the monster off. The maneuver did no good at all. The creature’s talons were sunk right into the hull of the skimmer; the Ursa wasn’t going anywhere.

  There was no way for the Rangers on the ground to fire on the monster, not without doing damage to the skimmer. From what Marta could see as she flitted in and out of consciousness, it seemed certain that the skimmer would be the only thing that would be damaged by the pulser blasts, since the Ursa had been more or less shrugging off everything they had to throw at it.

  Suddenly, the skimmer straightened out and hurtled past the Rangers on the plateau. It was moving so quickly that it was only a matter of seconds before the vehicle and the Ursa were far from sight. Even in the ocean of pain that threatened to overwhelm her, Marta couldn’t help noticing that the pilot had flown in the exact opposite direction from Nova City.

  Good, she thought. Then she passed out.

  Cecilia Ruiz remembered the superb target range to which she’d had access back when she was a Ranger. Electronic targets had enabled her to determine down to the centimeter how precise she had been in her aim. She had always taken pride in the fact that she was in the top 3 percent when it came to accuracy.

  She was as far from those glory days as she could possibly be. Now she was standing in a field behind her house, although field might have been far too generous a word. Field summoned images of vast swaths of green. This field had a few patches of brown scrub, but that was about it.

  Holding a rock in the palm of her hand, Cecilia walked to the central post of a wire fence that wrapped around the border of her family’s meager property. She couldn’t even remember at this point why Xander had erected the stupid fence in the first place. Something to occupy him, she thought. Something to keep him busy.

  It wasn’t bad enough that he’d been out of work since the Ursa arrived. Truth be told, they hadn’t been doing so well even before then, but at least they’d put food in their kids’ mouths, and there had been the prospect of Xander getting a job in the new energy plant made necessary by the growth of Nova City and its population.

  Now there wasn’t even that.

  Then Xander had been injured in that food riot. He hadn’t even been one of the guys trying to attack the Rangers who were guarding the place; he had far too much respect for the Corps and the job they were trying to do. He’d just been in town looking for work and wound up getting trampled when Ranger aerial reinforcements sent the crowd running.

  His leg had been twisted so badly that his hip had popped out of the ball socket, yet he had managed to make it back home. When Cecilia had found him lying at the threshold of their house, mangled and battered, she’d been filled with such outrage that she wanted to find a random crowd and open fire. She’d dragged him in and popped the leg back into place, eliciting a scream that she would never forget. Their son and daughter, John and Abby, age six and four, respectively, sobbed when they heard their father in such agony. Now he was on crutches and feeling more useless than ever …

  Cecilia pushed all that from her mind. Instead she counted back thirty paces, took aim at the rock, and tried to steady her han
d. She reached around with her left hand and gripped her right wrist, trying to prevent it from trembling. She was only partly successful. Instead of stilling her trembling right hand, all it did was leave her left hand shaking.

  Nevertheless she did everything she was supposed to do. She aimed as best she could, took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and fired.

  The first silver-blue pulse blast sailed to the right by at least six inches. She tried to readjust, and the second missed by even more. The third struck the fence and knocked it over, sending the rock tumbling to the ground.

  “Fantastic,” she muttered. Once upon a time she would have been able to shoot the rock off the fence from twice the distance she was standing at now. For a moment anger flashed, and she just wanted to throw the pulser down and stalk away. But that wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

  And she most definitely had things that required accomplishing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lyla Kincaid took a breath and let it out. Then she watched the holographic screen floating in front of her go live with an image of the Savant’s deputy.

  “Good morning,” said Vincenzo.

  “Good morning,” Lyla replied.

  “I wish I had time for pleasantries,” Vincenzo said, “but I don’t. Your research has been in the area of hearing augmentation, correct?”

  “Yes,” said Lyla.

  She transmitted the file that contained the results of her efforts to translate her research into a weapon. Then she watched the woman scan it. She didn’t look very enthusiastic.

  “It amplifies sound to create a … well, a louder sound,” Lyla said. “I thought if the Ursa had eardrums …”

  It was a pretty poor effort—the engineer was aware of that. But then, she had started with a sound amplifier, for God’s sake. People put them in their ears.

  Vincenzo was frowning as she looked up at her. “This is the best you could do?”

  “With what I was working on,” Lyla said a little defensively, “yes. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t see a whole lot of potential in that approach.”

  “It wasn’t your job to make that judgment. Your job was to find an application that would help us fight the Ursa.”

  “I know,” Lyla said. “Which is why I eventually put that technology aside and went to work on another one. More specifically, the one my ancestor Jack Kincaid came up with.”

  Vincenzo’s frown deepened. “You mean F.E.N.I.X. tech?”

  “Yes.”

  “We talked about that in the briefing. F.E.N.I.X. tech was a helpful approach when we were dealing with aerial attacks. But the Ursa are a different kind of problem.”

  Lyla leaned forward. “Of course they are. But if we adapt F.E.N.I.X. tech the way I indicate here, I think it can be as effective a solution today as it was in Jack Kincaid’s time.”

  And she sent Vincenzo the file with her other plans in it.

  For a moment, Lyla thought the woman would reject the design out of hand. But she didn’t. She took the time to go over it. And she kept on going over it, her brow crinkling, long after Lyla would have thought she’d stop.

  Finally she asked, “What do you think?”

  Still examining the design, Vincenzo shook her head. “I don’t think it will work.”

  Lyla felt her throat tighten. After all the work she had put in, she wanted to protest. But she couldn’t. It was the Savant’s deputy.

  However, there were lives at stake, her brother’s among them. She ventured to ask, “Is there a flaw?”

  “There are a few of them,” Vincenzo told her.

  A few?

  “First off,” said Vincenzo, “the shielding is insufficient to protect the user from the nuclear reaction. We don’t want Rangers succumbing to radiation sickness the first time they take one of these things into the field. On the other hand, adequate shielding would make the weapon too heavy to carry, much less to wield.

  “Second, you’re limited by the speed of human reaction time. In projectile form, F.E.N.I.X.-tech adaptations follow preset patterns; in hand-to-hand combat, the rate of adaptation would depend on the commands of the Rangers. And by the time they input those commands, they would be Ursa meat.

  “Third,” Vincenzo continued without missing a beat, “you need more superconductors for something this size. Otherwise, the quantum field is too unpredictable and the device will blow up in your face.”

  Lyla didn’t think so. But then, she wasn’t the one whose decision mattered.

  “But the real question,” said Vincenzo, “is whether a hand-to-hand weapon is the answer. I mean, how close do we want to get to these monsters?”

  “The problem,” Lyla explained, “is that the Ursa are on top of us before we know it. How close we get usually isn’t up to us.”

  The Savant’s deputy seemed to absorb the information. “I wish we didn’t have limited resources,” she said at last. “Unfortunately, we’ve got to be careful where we place our chips. We can’t spread ourselves too thin.”

  The engineer swallowed her disappointment. She thought she had come up with something worthwhile. Obviously, Vincenzo felt otherwise. But Lyla wasn’t going to give up on her idea. It could still do the job, she thought. She could still give the Rangers the weapon they needed. She had already resolved to disobey the Savant’s deputy and pursue her concept on her own when Vincenzo said, “Work on it.”

  Lyla looked at her. “Work on it?”

  “Yes. Let me know when you’ve addressed my concerns.”

  The engineer smiled, though it was mostly inside. “I will. Thank you. Absolutely.”

  “No thanks necessary,” said Vincenzo, and her image vanished from the holographic screen.

  Lyla felt a surge of triumph. Yes! she thought.

  But she had a hell of a lot of work ahead of her. If she couldn’t take care of the problems Vincenzo had noted, her great idea would amount to exactly nothing.

  * * *

  “Cece? What the hell?”

  Cecilia thought she’d been quiet as she’d rummaged around the small warehouse in the back. It wasn’t actually a warehouse; that was a term left over from an earlier time. It was simply a storage area where they kept most of the tools they used for building.

  Building a life together. That’s what we’ve been building, really. And I’ve got to do something to maintain it …

  She turned to face Xander, a machete in her hand. There were spots of rust on it, but it was solidly constructed and still had some life in it. Xander was standing there, leaning on his crutches. He seemed unable to process what he was seeing. His straight brown hair hung down in front of his face, and he flipped his head to one side to clear his vision. “You’re not serious about this.”

  She had a tool pack lying on the floor. There was a hammer, a screwdriver, a length of rope, a handful of nails. She had a few items of practical equipment such as binoculars. Also a meager supply of dried foods that weren’t especially tasty but would suffice and a small clear bag of what were clearly energy pills. A bottle of water was dangling from her left hip; her pulser was on her right. Briskly she closed the bag and slid the machete into a loop on the bag’s side. “We’ve been over this …”

  “I didn’t think you were serious,” Xander said. “I just thought you were thinking out loud.”

  “I don’t have time for thinking out loud. None of us does. I have to take action.”

  “Cece”—he was the only one who ever called her that—“Vander Meer is nuts. He’s an opportunistic blowhard. It’s completely insane to stake the future of our family on—”

  “We don’t have a future.” The words had torn out of her, and she closed her eyes, fighting to regain her calm. When she was sure she had, she opened her eyes and saw the look of hurt on his face. She brushed it off. There was no time for hurt feelings. “Our family is foundering, Xander,” Cecilia told him. “It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you. I love you. But we need credits—and besides, this isn’t about Vander
Meer. It’s … it’s something else.”

  “Something risky.”

  She sighed. “No more risky than starving to death. That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”

  “Like everybody else,” he said in frustration.

  She shook her head. “Let them starve, then. I’m not going to let that happen to us.”

  “But what about the Ursa? People say we’re not going to survive them, that they’re unstoppable no matter what we do or what we throw at them. That’s what you hear everyplace.”

  “Then you need to start listening to other people and other places.”

  “But what if it’s true?” There was desperation in his voice. “Shouldn’t we be spending our last days as a family?”

  “You mean huddling all together, crouched in a corner, waiting for an Ursa to come crashing in and eat us all? Is that what you want for us, Xander?”

  “Cece—”

  “Do you really want the last thing our children see to be their parents being devoured, knowing that they’re next? Knowing that we failed in the simplest, most fundamental job of a parent: protect our children?”

  “Cece, listen—”

  “Stop calling me Cece! I’m not twelve!”

  She headed toward the door, and Xander moved to block her. She stopped and stared at him incredulously. “Seriously? All I have to do is knock one of your crutches out from under you. You’ll be flat on your face. Now please, honey, step aside before you hurt yourself.”

  Xander clearly didn’t know how to respond. After a few moments, he hobbled aside, and Cecilia moved past him. “What do you suggest I tell the kids?” he asked.

  She paused, her back to him so that he didn’t see her closing her eyes in pain over the prospect of the children being informed of her absence. “Tell them,” she said steadily, “that Mommy will be back as soon as she can.”

  “And if you don’t come back?”

  This time she did turn to face him, and she said heatedly, “You know, you could show just a glimmer of support. I’m doing this for us, Xander. For our family.”