After Earth

by Peter David

  Unfortunately, he had to come up for air. When he did, the creatures unleashed another volley. But Kitai dipped down deeply enough into the water to avoid this one, too. Finally, he reached the other shore. Wading out of the water as quickly as he could, he cast a single glance back to see if anything was coming at him. Nothing was. Then he continued his frantic flight.

  “Cadet,” said his father, “they are no longer in pursuit.”

  But Kitai didn’t register his father’s words. He barely noticed that his lifesuit was its normal rust color again.

  “I say again, they are not following you. Over.”

  Kitai kept sprinting. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t dare.

  “Cadet, you are not being followed! Kitai, you are running from nothing!”

  There was a clearing up ahead. As Kitai reached it, he pulled his cutlass off his back and held it out in front of him. Then he made a 360-degree turn, prepared to fight anything in his vicinity.

  “Put my damn cutlass away,” his father said. “Take a knee, cadet.”

  Kitai forced himself to obey. But he still searched the edges of the clearing, looking for evidence of the baboons.

  Cypher regarded the image of his son on his probe monitor. Kitai was wide-eyed, hyperventilating, frantic. The general had to get him to calm down.

  Cypher rubbed his eyes. He was tired and getting more so. But he wasn’t going to let fatigue stop him. Suddenly he heard a beeping sound. Kitai’s vital signs … He checked the readout.

  “Kitai,” he said, “I need you to do a physical assessment. I’m showing rapid blood contamination. Are you cut?”

  His son didn’t respond. He looked shell-shocked, not at all like a Ranger cadet. Hell, he seemed like a child. And his lifesuit was fading to white. Not good, Cypher thought.

  “Kitai,” he said sternly, “I need you to do a physical evaluation. Are you bleeding? Over.”

  Slowly, ever so slowly, Kitai regained control of himself. Responding to his father’s command, he began to check his body. Of course, the evaluation required him to stand up, but when he tried to do so, he looked unsteady.

  Off balance, Cypher thought. “Kitai?”

  “I’m dizzy,” said the cadet.

  “Check yourself!” Cypher insisted.

  Kitai looked at his hands. On the back of his left hand there was something Cypher couldn’t make out at first. Then he zoomed in and saw what it was: some kind of leech. Or, rather, what leeches might have evolved into.

  Repulsed by the sight of it, Kitai tore it off. But in doing so, he tore his skin. Instantly, a livid rash blossomed across the damaged skin. It can’t be allowed to spread, Cypher thought. It had to be tended to immediately.

  As calmly as he could, he said, “Your med-kit, Kitai.”

  His son snatched his pack off his back and fumbled around blindly in the med-kit. He looked worried. After all, he could see the rash, too. Kitai started to sway.

  “I can’t stand up …” Still, he managed to open the med-kit.

  In a clear, measured voice, Cypher said, “You have to administer the antitoxin in sequence. Inject yourself with the clear liquid first. Do it now.”

  Kitai took the first hypodermic from the med-kit and popped off the protective cap. His hands were trembling.

  “Dad,” he said, ignoring his father’s earlier admonitions to call him General or sir, “I can’t see.”

  Cypher wanted to help his son, to administer the drugs himself. But he couldn’t. He was sitting in the cockpit of a ruined ship, his legs broken, and Kitai was too far away.

  “The poison is affecting your nervous system,” he said instead. “Relax. Stay even.”

  Kitai fumbled with the needle—not once but twice. He stopped, looked up, looked around, his eyes dilated and swelling shut. Cypher could see his son’s panic deepening. The veins of Kitai’s hand began turning black.

  “Dad,” he pleaded, “please come help me. I can’t see! Please come help me!”

  “Stay even,” Cypher said. “Inject yourself directly into the heart with the first stage now!”

  Kitai took a deep breath, struggling to remove the top of his lifesuit. He couldn’t control his fingers, which he couldn’t see, and they shook from fear. He was running out of time and needed to do this quickly no matter how sick he felt. As he exposed his chest to the warm sun, it was hot to the touch and slick with sweat. He shook with increasing violence and just had to inject the antitoxin. It sounded so simple, but he was shaking so hard. Finally, he gritted his teeth so hard that they hurt, grimaced, and finally stuck himself with the hypodermic squarely in the chest. Then he pressed the plunger.

  “Now the second stage,” Cypher said. “Hurry.”

  “Your left,” Cypher told him. “To your left!”

  Finally, Kitai’s fingers seemed to find the second hypodermic. But by then, his eyes were swollen closed. His hands shaking, he removed the protective cap on the hypodermic. Then he stuck himself with it. But he couldn’t press the plunger. His thumb looked like it was too swollen to move.

  “I can’t feel my hands!” Kitai groaned. “I can’t—”

  Suddenly, his eyes rolled back in his head. His eyes flickered. He fell to his knees, on the verge of losing consciousness.

  Cypher got an idea. “Press it into the ground! Kitai, roll over on it and press it into the ground!”

  For a moment, he didn’t know if his son had heard him. Then, with a final effort, Kitai threw himself forward. The plunger on the hypodermic pressed against the ground as he slumped over. After that, his limp body lay motionless.

  But had he pressed the plunger? Had the hypodermic released its payload into Kitai?

  Cypher watched the holographic monitor. Come on, he thought. Work, damn it.

  Then, ever so slowly, Kitai’s blood contamination levels began to change, to decrease slowly. The red beeping lights turned to yellow, signaling the gradual return of his vital signs to normal. Cypher sat back, relieved. “Great work, cadet. Now you’re going to have to lie there.”

  Of course, Kitai couldn’t hear him. He was unconscious. But Cypher kept talking as if his son were still awake because it felt better than talking to himself.

  “The parasite that stung you,” he said, “has a paralyzing agent in its venom. You’re just going to have to lie there for a little bit while the antitoxin does its job.”

  Cypher glanced at the feed from Kitai’s backpack camera. It captured the grotesque doughiness of his badly swollen face. A single tear rolled from the corner of his misshapen eye. For Cypher, it was an excruciating experience. There was nothing he could do to help his son. Nothing. He thrived on control, insisted on control, but in this situation control eluded him.

  Compared with the forest in which Kitai had collapsed, he looked pitifully small. And the sun, Cypher noticed, was starting to slip past its apex. Cypher glanced at his timer. It would take a while for the contents of the hypodermic to do their job, but Kitai didn’t have forever.

  As the sun dropped in the sky, approaching the horizon, the temperature began to drop as well. Cypher didn’t like it. He could see plants withdrawing into themselves, closing up to conserve heat in anticipation of what would be a brutal nighttime chill.

  But Kitai couldn’t close up. He couldn’t protect himself. And Cypher couldn’t protect him, either. He could see that his son’s face was getting better. The swelling was gone. But he still lay unconscious, his eyes closed, his lifesuit pale.

  “Kitai,” Cypher said.

  No response. A gentle dusting of frost began to form on and around Kitai’s weakened frame. Cypher wanted to wake him, needed to wake him. He could hear the wind howling around his son, see the edges of the furled leaves flutter ferociously.

  “Kitai,” he said again, “it’s time to get up.”

  But Kitai’s eyes remained closed.

  Please, Cypher thought, looking at his son’s beautiful face. He prayed for anything, anything at all. A muscle twitch. A flicker of
life.

  “Kitai,” he said more forcefully, “I want you to blink your eyes.”

  Suddenly, Cypher heard something over his comm link. It was faint, shallow, but there was no mistaking it. Kitai was breathing. Breathing.

  It was a start. But there wasn’t much time left. A tiny hint of ice showed up on the cadet’s left eyebrow.

  “Son,” Cypher said, deeply concerned, “I need you to please blink your eyes.”

  Slowly, ever so slightly, Kitai did as he was asked. In a raspy voice, he said, “Hey, Dad.”

  He was looking directly into his backpack camera as he spoke. Cypher stared at the monitors and the bio-readings and exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

  “That sucked,” Kitai said. Looking a little unsteady, he got to his feet and began gathering his gear.

  “That is correct,” Cypher stated, always seeing things for what they were. “The temperature is dropping five degrees every ten minutes,” he added, emphasizing the urgency of the situation. “You’ve got twelve kilometers to the hot spot.”

  Cypher checked Kitai’s vitals. They were stable. As he watched, his son gathered his gear and got ready to go.

  Reassuming his general mode, Cypher said, “Let’s see that ‘ten kilometers in fifty minutes’ that you spoke about earlier, cadet.”

  Kitai set his naviband and turned to the north. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said, but in a voice that betrayed how weak he must have felt from his ordeal. Still, he set out at a sprint over the rugged terrain ahead of him. All around him, there were signs of the deep freeze that would accompany the onset of darkness. Animals were scrambling underground. It began to snow, lightly for now.

  “SitRep?” Cypher said.

  “Ten mikes out,” his son reported. “Good. All good.”

  Out there, maybe, Cypher thought.

  ix

  Inside the cockpit, it wasn’t good at all. The words arterial shunt stared back at Cypher from the med screen. He pulled a long, narrow piece of tubing from the med-kit, then took out a thin surgical knife, leaving it positioned over his left thigh. Next he ripped open the side of his uniform pants, exposing the side of his leg. He could see the nasty gash there that was leaking all the blood. The holographic screen behind him displayed his arteries and veins. One blood vessel had been severed.

  Cypher cast a quick glance at Kitai’s camera view. It showed the cadet pelting through a snowy landscape that was getting snowier all the time. Kitai was doing all he could to enable them to survive. It was up to Cypher to do the same. Without fanfare, he plunged the thin surgical knife into the side of his leg.

  It hurt like hell. There was nothing Cypher wanted more than to slip the knife back out again. But he didn’t. Instead, he cut through the flesh of his leg, using the readout on the holographic display to guide him as he sought the end of the severed artery.

  Finally, he pulled the knife out. But only for a moment. Then he drove the knife into his leg again, this time higher up on his thigh. Again the knife cut through tough muscle tissue until it reached the other severed end of his artery.

  Only then did he withdraw the knife for good. By then he was shaking uncontrollably. He stared at a point in the distance and regained his composure for a moment. At the rate he was losing blood, he couldn’t afford any more than that. Jaw clenched against the pain, he inserted the tubing into one of the incisions in his leg. He could see its progress on the holographic image behind him. As he fed the tubing into his leg, it slid toward the artery and then into it. As Cypher watched, the artery closed around the end of the tubing.

  Cypher felt something feathery touch his cheek. It took him a moment to realize that it was a tear. He wasn’t a robot after all. He could feel pain like anyone else. He just couldn’t give in to it.

  With shaking hands, he inserted the piece of tubing into the second incision. Again using the holographic display for guidance, he slipped the tube into the ragged end of the severed artery. This time the fit was less perfect. Cypher wiggled it, almost passing out from pain. His readout told him that the arterial shunt was 87 percent effective. Looking down, he saw that blood was flowing through the piece of tubing sticking out from his leg. He had repaired the damage, at least temporarily. It was good enough for the time being.

  Cypher leaned his head back against the loader, focused on the screen showing his son’s point of view, and struggled to remain conscious despite everything he had been through.

  He could hear Kitai’s voice as he ran. “Five mikes out.” His voice was stronger now, more confident. “Who wasn’t advanced to Ranger? Who was it? Watch him go. Watch him go.”

  Cypher stared, on the verge of losing consciousness. His eyes closed, opened, fluttered closed again. A memory came to him …

  He was on a Ranger ship. It was dark. Someone was yelling, “Five mikes out!”

  It was a drop captain. Cypher couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he recalled being one of the Rangers waiting in the ship. He remembered, too, the piece of smart fabric in his hands. On the fabric was a face. Senshi’s face. She was sitting at a table with a birthday cake in front of her. There were nineteen candles on the cake. Faia and Kitai, who was only eight at the time, looked on from the background.

  Senshi held up the cake. “Dad,” she said, “you help me.”

  “No,” he told her as he sat among his fellow Rangers, “you go ahead. You blow.”

  “Come on, Dad,” Senshi insisted with a grin. “Blow.”

  Cypher looked around at the other Rangers. They were watching him, making him self-conscious. “Now,” he told Senshi, “you know there’s no way I can actually do that from here.”

  “No,” she said, full of faith, “I think you can.”

  Cypher sighed and addressed his wife. “Faia, why don’t you step in here and help the girl?”

  Faia came into the frame of the smart fabric and said, “You can do it.”

  “I know you can,” Senshi added.

  Cypher shot a glance over his shoulder. A Ranger was sitting there, stone-faced. Cypher turned back to the cake and Senshi’s expectant face. Resigned to his fate, he leaned forward quickly and blew. As if by magic, the candles went out.

  Suddenly Kitai leaned into the frame, laughing. It was he who had blown out the candles. Faia was laughing, too. So was Senshi. Cypher basked in the laughter. He smiled. “Happy nineteenth birthday, Senshi.”

  Just then, an alarm went off in the ship. The other Rangers turned to Cypher.

  “I have to go,” he told Senshi.

  He tapped the piece of smart fabric, and it turned off. Sometimes it unsettled him, seeing his family vanish with one flick of his finger. All that he knew, gone in a flash. Then he tucked it away. All the Rangers in the ship stood, strapped on their gear, and looked to Cypher. The back of the ship began to open. Cypher stared at it. “Rangers,” he called out, “in formation! Move!”

  They moved.

  “Hot spot one arrival,” came a voice.

  Cypher blinked away the memory and checked his son’s camera. It showed him that Kitai had reached a geothermal node that was elevated from the landscape around it. Steam rose from the ground. Fallen trees were overgrown with moss. There was decay everywhere, the product of the place’s warm, wet air.

  “H-plus-forty-eight minutes!” Kitai announced, an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice.

  Outside the geothermal zone, the forest was going into a deep, rapid freeze. Every tree in the vicinity was developing a thick skin of ice.

  Kitai began to cough. “Sir,” he said, seemingly hoping for a response from his father, “I made it. I’m here.”

  Ignoring his own condition, he checked his son’s vital signs. They scrolled in front of him. “Make sure you have everything,” he instructed Kitai. “Take your next inhaler. Your oxygen extraction is bottoming.”

  Dutifully, Kitai opened the med-kit. His father had gotten him this far. The last thing he was going to do was diverge from Cypher’s i
nstructions.

  We’re doing all right, Kitai thought. Spacing out the oxygen. Had a little setback before, but I’ll be calmer next time, smarter. Then he saw something bad—very bad. Of the five oxygen vials left to him, two were broken. Quickly, he closed the case, hiding its contents from Cypher’s view.

  I don’t have enough breathing fluid, he thought. What am I going to do? How am I going to reach the tail section and the beacon if I don’t have enough to breathe?

  “Use the next dose of breathing fluid,” Cypher said.

  Kitai strained not to cough. “I’m good, Dad. I don’t need it right now.”

  Cypher watched his son, knowing that he was lying but refusing to berate him for it. “Okay,” he said.

  Finally Kitai coughed a deep cough, his chest making a hollow wheezing sound. He was starving for oxygen, no question about it. Still Cypher said nothing. He just watched and waited even though his son’s struggles gradually were getting worse. Kitai’s coughs became more brutal, driving home the sad but inescapable fact that human beings no longer could breathe the air of their homeworld.

  To make things worse, the cockpit’s medical computer displayed a graphic: ARTERIAL SHUNT 70% EFFECTIVE. Cypher was still getting blood, getting oxygen, but not as much as he had gotten before. Why?

  Then he saw it on the holographic readout: His self-administered shunt was slipping on the ragged end, where the fit hadn’t been perfect. Blood was escaping from it, running down to the floor. The medical computer advised him to commence transfusion. It told him he needed four units of O-positive.

  But all he cared about, all he could hear, was Kitai’s deep, racking coughs. All he could see was the pain on Kitai’s face as he fought for air. It was a tough lesson, but one Kitai had to learn: Listen to your father.

  x

  Kitai dragged in breath after breath, each more difficult than the last. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. If he went without breathing for another minute, he would pass out. And that might be a disaster from which he couldn’t come back. Finally, reluctantly, he administered the second vial of breathing fluid.