After Earth

by Peter David

  It simply advances.

  Jon can hear the breathing of his Rangers, quick and shallow behind him. They’re not like him. They’re disciplined, but they’re afraid.

  But what they do and how they feel are all but irrelevant. This mission isn’t about them. It’s about him.

  As Jon stands there and watches, the Ursa proceeds the length of the hallway—slowly, fluidly, despite its angular alien anatomy. It doesn’t pause to look into other classrooms. It heads right for the one occupied by the Rangers.

  Jon steps out into the hallway, placing himself in the beast’s path.

  With its increasing proximity, Jon can see the smart metal woven into its hide. It’s what makes the Ursa so difficult to kill even when a Ranger gets in a good stroke with a cutlass. A death blow can be made only in the creature’s unshielded spots above and below—nowhere else.

  Suddenly the Ursa roars, its voice like rocks cracking in half. Jon can feel the sound in his bones. It moves closer, still closer, until it’s almost close enough to touch.

  A sour metallic stench issues from its gullet, like that of human blood but more powerful. It’s the smell of its venom, an oily black substance capable of eating through flesh, bone, and even metal.

  Nonetheless, Jon stands his ground.

  If the Ursa detects his presence, it’ll make short work of him. It’ll tear him apart as it tore the children apart.

  Such an outcome would be a source of disappointment to Jon’s medical team as well as to the Prime Commander. It would refute the idea that fear can’t be surgically eliminated after all.

  Yet that’s an outcome Jon may have to face.

  Suddenly, the Ursa gathers itself and leaps. Jon brings up his cutlass, knowing what little help it will be at such close range.

  But it’s not Jon the Ursa is attacking. It sails past him through the door of the classroom, its target one of the Rangers behind him.

  He looks back in time to see the creature pounce on Saturria or, rather, on the spot Saturria occupied until a fraction of a second ago. Saturria himself rolls across the floor, his reflexes saving him.

  But they won’t save him a second time. Jon can see that as the Ursa rounds on the Ranger. It’s imprinted on him, Jon thinks. It’ll stay after him until it kills him.

  Jon’s job as squad leader is to keep that from happening.

  Tseng configures the blade of her cutlass into a pike and tries to spear the Ursa, but her point glances off the smart metal in its hide. Still, she draws the creature’s attention.

  It’s all the distraction Jon needs. Pelting across the room, he leaps onto the Ursa’s back and drives his cutlass deep into the creature’s soft spot.

  It’s a small target, an easy target to miss, but he hits it dead on. The Ursa bellows and tries to flip him off its back, but Jon hangs on. He taps his fingers in the required sequence and transforms his cutlass into a blade. Then he turns it inside the creature, tearing its insides apart.

  In a spasm of pain, the Ursa finally does wrench Jon loose, sending him crashing into a wall with stunning force. But the damage to the creature has been done. It won’t survive much longer.

  Knowing that an Ursa can kill even in its death throes, Jon directs his squad to leave the room one by one. Then he joins them outside in the hallway.

  Through the transparent pane in the classroom door, he sees the Ursa writhe in agony, smashing walls and cabinets and windows. It’s only after several minutes have gone by that it collapses and lies still.

  Jon hears a cheer go up among his squad mates. He understands why. They’re alive and the Ursa is dead.

  The mission couldn’t have gone any better.

  Jakande and Tseng and Saturria pat one another on the back. The others do the same thing. But no one pats Jon.

  “I’m pleased,” Raige says.

  Jon looks at the Prime Commander across the man’s desk. “Because I was able to ghost when the time came.”

  “That’s right. We’ve been working for centuries trying to figure out how to beat these things, and we’ve finally got the answer. It’s one thing to find a Ghost once in a while, usually by accident, and another to be able to make one any time we want. That tips the odds.”

  Jon knows something about odds. They are reducible to numbers, to ratios, which are a lot easier for him to grasp than hopes and dreams.

  “It does,” he agrees.

  “And you did that,” says Raige, “because you had the courage to take a chance no one had taken before.”

  Jon is familiar with the facts. What’s more, he has a sense of what the Prime Commander is trying to do: instill a feeling of pride in him.

  However, he doesn’t feel any pride.

  “We’ve got other volunteers who’ve been waiting in the wings,” Raige says, “hoping to get the same chance you did. But we didn’t want to contact them until we made sure the procedure had the desired effect. Now that we know it does …”

  “You’ll operate on them as well,” Jon says.

  Raige nods.

  Jon wonders if the Prime Commander will ask him to speak with the volunteers. He doesn’t think so. After seeing his lack of emotion, they may not wish to have the operation after all.

  But he doesn’t say what he’s thinking.

  The other Rangers in Jon’s squad spend a lot of time together. He notices that. They talk, they engage in laughter, they spar in the barracks.

  Jon isn’t inclined to take part in such behavior. He remains separate from the others. He does the things he has been trained to do—work out his body and inspect his cutlass—and very little else.

  When he eats, he eats alone. And he doesn’t linger in the mess hall. He remains there only long enough to take nourishment and then leaves.

  Once he saw a woman with blond hair walking ahead of him in the hallway and jogged to catch up with her. She turned around and looked at him with eyes that weren’t green. Eyes that weren’t Doctor Gold’s.

  Doctor Nizamani asks Jon how he’s getting along with his squad mates. Jon tells him the truth.

  Doctor Nizamani says, “The squad has been together for more than a year. You’re the newcomer. Give it time.”

  But as time goes on, Jon doesn’t interact any more with his fellow Rangers. If anything, he interacts with them even less. So little, in fact, that he doesn’t think it would be troubling to him if they had died in the Ursa attack.

  Maybe he would have grieved for them before his operation. But not now.

  Questions come to mind with increasing frequency, questions Jon finds difficult to answer. One is why he should kill Ursa.

  They present a threat to humanity, true. But he’s no longer human as far as he can tell, so why act on humanity’s behalf? What makes the Ursa any less worthy of survival than the colonists they hunt?

  Jon has no answer.

  Days after Jon’s first mission, he and his squad are dispatched to a power station on the North Side of the city where an Ursa has attacked the workers.

  From all indications, the Ursa is still inside. So are the workers, who got off a single truncated distress call, though it’s not clear if they’re still alive.

  The power station is a massive orange-colored mound designed to blend in with the red earth of the desert. Even before Jon disembarks from the Ranger transport that has brought him to the scene, he sees the ragged hole in the exterior wall where the Ursa crashed through it.

  He starts for it even as his squad hops off the transport behind him. There’s really no reason for him to wait for them. At this point, they’re just a burden to him.

  Jon picks his way through the rubble created by the Ursa’s entry. Inside the power station it’s cool and quiet except for a low hum. If there’s an Ursa present, it’s not making a ruckus.

  That suggests two possibilities. One is that the creature already has caught its prey. The other is that it’s detected the approach of Jon’s squad and camouflaged itself in order to stalk it.

 
; Jon taps his cutlass and watches its metal fibers form the pike configuration. His favorite. The one he consistently finds most useful.

  He recalls the layout of the station, which he studied on the way over. The facility has two main access corridors that run perpendicular to each other, crossing in the middle, where the power chamber is situated.

  There are doors along the corridors. The workers may be hiding behind them, he thinks. Or their remains may be lying somewhere. He doesn’t see any evidence of bloodshed in the corridor. But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a big place.

  He approaches the power chamber, senses alert, cutlass at the ready. The chamber, which is made of a blue-gray ceramic material, houses an apparatus that uses magnetic fields to generate energy-rich plasma, which then is pumped into a complex web of underground conduits.

  The chamber has a small window on each corridor. Jon isn’t focused on it, and so it’s a surprise when he notices movement through the window.

  One of the workers, he thinks. A male. He’s still too far away to tell if the worker’s injured.

  At the same time, the worker seems to see Jon. He beckons to someone inside the chamber, someone Jon can’t see. A moment later, two other workers crowd the window.

  A scenario begins to unfold in Jon’s mind as he advances. The workers took shelter in the chamber. It kept them safe. But they can’t leave for fear of the creature.

  Jon holds his hands out, the empty one palm up. He’s learned that this gesture poses a question. In this case, the question is: Where’s the Ursa?

  The workers return the gesture, signifying that they don’t know. Yet they have line-of-sight access to all parts of the station. So the creature has camouflaged itself. This is valuable information.

  They’re now on even footing, Jon and the Ursa. Neither can be seen by the other.

  Unfortunately, the creature won’t reveal itself until it’s about to pounce. With the workers constrained to remain in the power chamber, they won’t become prey. That leaves only one other possibility.

  Jon turns to his squad mates, who are coming up behind him. He points to the one nearest to him, Tseng, and says: “You and I will scout ahead. The rest of you remain here.”

  Jon doesn’t know if Tseng understands what he has in mind. Either way, she doesn’t hesitate. She moves down the hallway with him, her cutlass a pike like his.

  The Ursa could be anywhere. They watch carefully for a sign of it. However, they reach the power chamber without getting such a sign.

  The chamber is encircled by a strip of open floor about fifteen feet wide. It’s enough space to hold an Ursa who could be monitoring its prey, smelling their fear through the air vents in the chamber.

  Waiting for them to emerge.

  It no longer has to do so, Jon reflects. If it’s here, or anywhere in this vicinity, I’ve given it another option.

  He’s barely completed the thought when a huge form seems to materialize out of thin air. It’s a blur of pale hide and smart metal blue, and it strikes Tseng before either she or Jon can make a move.

  Tseng goes flying backward and skids across the floor. She finally stops thirty feet away.

  She’s already dead, her chest caved in by the impact, by the time the Ursa lumbers after her. But she’s served her purpose. She’s brought the beast out of hiding.

  Jon’s squad mates go after it. They weave a web of silver with their cutlasses. But there’s not much room for them to operate in the corridor, not nearly enough for them to surround the Ursa as they’ve been trained to do.

  Jon watches as the creature swipes at Saturria and tears his arm off. The others come forward to cover him while Jakande applies a tourniquet.

  Jon looks at the cutlass in his hand. He might be able to kill the Ursa with it. But he feels no desire to do so.

  His fellow Rangers are in mortal danger, but that fact doesn’t faze him in the least. He isn’t human anymore. The Primus was right about that—he sees that now. He has as much in common with Tseng or Saturria or Jakande as he does with his cutlass. In other words, nothing.

  Then he realizes that someone’s standing behind him. Turning, he sees that it’s Doctor Gold. She’s wearing the same white lab coat that she wore at the medical center, a lock of her hair tucked behind her ear, her eyes the same pale green.

  The other doctors insisted that she wasn’t real, that she was a figment of his imagination. But she looks real, as real as any of the Rangers who followed him there.

  “Doctor Gold,” he says. “What are you—?”

  “Jon,” she replies, her voice tight and urgent yet just as musical as he remembers, “you’ve got to help these people. You’ve got to kill the Ursa.”

  “Why?” he asks.

  Her brow puckers. “Because I’m asking you to.”

  It isn’t much of a reason. But because it’s Doctor Gold who’s asking, Jon accepts it.

  The Ursa is completely unaware of him. He capitalizes on that fact, taking a run at it and eyeing the one vulnerable spot on the creature’s back.

  He misses it on purpose.

  But he comes close enough to make the creature shriek with pain and rage—to hobble it, slow it down, and force it to address the invisible threat behind it rather than the visible prey before it.

  It jerks him off its back, sending him crashing into the wall. Something snaps in his side, but he manages to scramble to his feet.

  “Get out!” he yells despite the pressure in his side. “And take the workers with you!” He turns and gestures for the workers in the power chamber to leave it and run.

  They do as he asks, falling over one another to get out of the chamber and down the corridor. But the Rangers hesitate. They have their duty, after all.

  Again he yells: “Get out!”

  With obvious reluctance, they follow his order. The Ursa turns to go after them, but Jon won’t let it. He stoops to pick up Tseng’s cutlass and, without breaking stride, leaps onto the creature’s back. Then he drives the point of the cutlass into the center of the Ursa’s soft spot.

  The creature whirls, no doubt intending to confront its attacker. But Jon is still on its back. He transforms his cutlass into a blade, cutting up the Ursa inside. Then he turns it back into a pike and into a blade again.

  With each transformation the cutlass does more damage, weakening the beast a little more. Finally, Jon pulls his weapon out of the Ursa and drives it home again, even deeper than before.

  It’s a mortal blow.

  Making a gurgling sound in its throat, the creature whirls, rears, and tears at the air with its forepaws. Jon slips off it and presses his back against the wall, then slides away so that the Ursa doesn’t kill him with its death throes.

  In what seems like an attempt to dislodge the cutlasses, the monster slams itself against a wall. But it only succeeds in driving the weapons in deeper.

  The Ursa goes wild. It spins, crashes into one wall and then the other, screams in its agony.

  Jon doesn’t know what a complete human being, someone still in touch with his emotions, would see in the Ursa at this point. A menace that has to be finished before it can kill again? A beast that needs to be put out of its misery?

  A moment later, the question becomes moot. The Ursa takes one more long, lurching stride. Then it falls over on its side, shudders, and dies.

  A gout of venom spills from its mouth and pools in a slowly widening circle, viciously eating the floor beneath it, hissing and raising twists of black, oily smoke. Then even the smoke and the hissing stop.

  It’s over.

  Jon has never been so close to a dead Ursa. As it lies there, inert, he comes to a realization: He has something in common with the creature. The Ursa is a biological machine, engineered to carry out one purpose and one purpose only: to kill. And so is he.

  So is he.

  Jon looks around for Doctor Gold. She’s gone. Somehow he’s not surprised.

  He takes stock of himself. A couple of his ribs are b
roken, and half his face is bloody from a cut over his eye. Otherwise he’s unscathed.

  But his victory means nothing to him. Victory, defeat … they are simply events in a featureless series of events, strung together one after the other, all of them meaningless.

  Then Jon hears something and realizes he’s not alone. At first he thinks the workers have come back for some reason. However, the sounds are too loud, too heavy. There are other Ursa in the station.

  More than one, he thinks.

  Even if they can’t detect him, it’ll be difficult for him to finish them all off. Not that he cares what they do to the Rangers or the workers or other Novans. But Doctor Gold seemed to care.

  Which is why, holding his side, Jon makes his way to the power chamber.

  On the way, he passes Tseng. Her eyes stare up at him. They don’t look any different than they did a few moments earlier. But there’s a trickle of bright red blood from the corner of her mouth that tells Jon she’s dead.

  He continues to the chamber. Its door is open, the workers having left it that way. Jon moves to its control console and slides his fingertips along its black command strips one by one, increasing the pressure of the station’s magnetic fields on its plasma supply.

  Just then, the Ursa shed their camouflage. Jon was right. There are three of them.

  They don’t know he’s there. They also don’t know what he is planning.

  A blinking red danger light comes on, causing every surface around Jon to strobe with its lurid reflection. He continues to increase the pressure. A voice, echoing throughout the enclosure, warns him that conditions in the facility are reaching a critical level—one that will result in its destruction.

  Jon isn’t daunted in the least. In fact, destruction is precisely the outcome he has in mind.

  In the golden light of morning, the air mercifully cool on his skin, Cypher Raige walks through the debris field that was, until the events of the day before, the site of the North Side Power Relay Facility.