After Earth: A Perfect Beast (17 page)

Bonita glanced at the home the Ursa had broken into. Was it Vander Meer’s? She gritted her teeth. It looked like whoever was inside would be way past help—hers or anyone else’s. Nonetheless, she had to try.

“Danuta, you’re with me,” she snapped to a woman with thick red hair twisted into a braid. “Yang, you’ll stay here with your patient. Bolt, Kromo, Carceras—evacuate the other houses.” There were six of them left in the development. “Get people to the shelter on Buckingham.”

Normally, she wouldn’t have risked prying people out of their homes. But if there was one thing they had discovered, it was that the Ursa were quick learners. Once this one realized there was food inside these structures, it wouldn’t leave the area until it had emptied every last one of them.

The Rangers acknowledged Bonita and spilled from the vehicle to follow her orders. As she swung around the house to get a better look at the Ursa, she wished she had a weapon in her hands that could put the thing down. After all, it would be an easy target as long as its attention was focused on its prey. But their pulsers weren’t going to kill it; squads of her fellow Rangers had learned that the hard way. The best they could do, even at a dozen feet, was keep the Ursa off balance.

Moving past the corner of the house, Bonita caught sight of the beast just as it shoveled a bloody limb into its fanged maw. It made some wet crunching sounds, and blood dripped carelessly down its chest.

Bonita could feel her gorge rising, and she swallowed it back.
No time to puke. Not now
.

Behind her, her team was banging on doors and shouting orders. She could hear the footfalls of people as they emerged from their homes and responded to the Rangers’ authority. They, at least, might be safe from the Ursa’s predation. Meanwhile, the thing wasn’t raising its head. It was as if it hadn’t noticed Bonita or Danuta. Bonita kept moving, her goal to take a position
behind it. Then she could look into the house through the hole the Ursa had made and get an idea if there was anybody left inside to save.

With every step she took, she imagined the Ursa turning and charging at her. But it didn’t. It was too busy feeding. Finally, Bonita was directly behind the creature. Looking past it, she couldn’t see anyone who hadn’t already been ripped apart. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone hidden in there, someone praying that the monster would finally go away.

“Orders?” breathed Danuta.

Bonita cast a glance over her shoulder. As long as the thing didn’t delve any deeper into the house, it made sense to wait and give her Rangers time to get the neighbors as far away as possible. So she waited.

But all the while, she couldn’t help thinking she had a chance to take the thing out. After all, it hadn’t reacted to her presence behind it. What if she were to take the offensive and get as close as she could and hit it with everything she had? Would her pulser do any more damage at close range?

Even before the neighbors were gone, Bonita had made her decision and communicated it to Danuta via hand signals. When the last of them vanished from sight, escorted by Bolt, Kromo, and Carceras, she began counting to fifty. Fortunately, the Ursa went on feeding, undisturbed by her presence behind it.

And it kept on feeding after she reached fifty and began advancing on it, pulser in hand, covered by Danuta. Her heart was pounding so hard that she couldn’t believe the Ursa didn’t hear it, her breath quick and uneven in her throat. She forced herself to calm down, to concentrate on the task at hand.

Step by step, Bonita came up on the creature. And it didn’t move. It was as if she were in its blind spot, though it didn’t make sense that a beast without eyesight could have a blind spot—did it?

She would leave that question to the Savant’s people.
Her job was to do as much damage as she could to the monster before it went after anyone else.

She was ten feet away. Eight. So close now that she could almost reach out and touch the Ursa’s hindquarters. Six. Four. As quietly as she could, she took aim at the back of the thing’s head …

And heard the scream.

She didn’t turn to see which neighbor it was whom her people had missed. It had to be a neighbor, she was certain, because none of her Rangers would scream that way. Therefore, she didn’t turn, because it wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know.

But the Ursa did.

Bonita found herself looking directly into its maw, a dark hole full of pointed teeth from which bloody flesh and gristle hung in tatters. And in that moment she knew the monster was looking back at her, realizing—if it hadn’t already—that she was close enough to be a threat.

Fire!

Even as the command exploded in Bonita’s brain, she depressed the trigger mechanism on her pulser and a bolt of fusion force buried itself in the Ursa’s face—carving out a bloody gash every bit as deep as it was wide.

A moment later, Bonita realized she was lying on the ground, pinned under the creature’s weight. But she was alive.

She couldn’t breathe with the Ursa on top of her. It was suffocating her, crushing the life out of her. But at least for the moment she was alive.

As for the Ursa … she couldn’t tell. She felt something hit it from the side, then a second time, and a third. Finally the thing began to stir. It was alive. And the impacts Bonita had felt? They had to be Danuta burying burst after burst in the creature.

Bonita had only one chance—to slip out from under the thing as it went after Danuta. But as the Ursa rose, it planted one of its massive forepaws on her face. Then,
as if it were no more than an afterthought, it used the other forepaw to gut her like a fish.

As Bonita lay dying, she tried to yell to Danuta to get away while she still could. But there was too much blood gurgling up into her mouth, choking her, making it impossible for her to utter a sound. So all she could do was think it:
Danuta—run!

Wilkins was reviewing telemetry in the command center when she overheard Hātu
r
i speaking to someone over a voice line. He didn’t sound happy. In fact, he sounded positively grim.

Who?
was the question that came to mind. Not
What?
Field casualties had become as common as sand fleas, as common as skipjacks on the western flats. These days, the only question was
Who?

As she moved closer to Hātu
r
i to find out more, he cast a glance in her direction. His eyes were red and wet. It shook Wilkins to see him that way, to see Hātu
r
i, a rock of a man, caught in the grip of such emotion.

The Prime Commander waited until Hātu
r
i had ended his conversation. Then she asked the question.

His voice was husky with mourning. “It’s Commander Raige, ma’am.”

It felt like a physical blow. Wilkins grabbed the back of her chair to steady herself. After all, she was the one who had sent Bonita into battle despite her injury. She was the one who had put her friend in harm’s way.

But she’d had no choice. Bonita was a good Ranger. She had been needed in the field. And she’d asked, for heaven’s sake. She’d
asked
.

Hātu
r
i gave her the rest of the report. Danuta had died as well. But most of the people they were trying to save had reached a shelter. Their mission had been a
success, as much as any mission could be a success these days.

The Ursa had claimed four civilian casualties. It was still alive, still seeking prey.
Hardly a surprise
.

Wilkins absorbed the news. As it spread from Ranger to Ranger, a hush descended over the command center.

“Get me Torrance Raige,” she told Hātu
r
i. “I’ll be in my office.”

She knew Torrance was in an infirmary, recovering from the injuries he had sustained the other day. The damage wasn’t bad. He’d be sidelined for a week. But Wilkins had a feeling he’d want back into the field sooner than that when he heard what she had to tell him.

Conner was just getting ready to go out on another food-gathering detail when Wilkins appeared at the entrance to his barracks.

What’s she doing here?
the cadet wondered. The Prime Commander didn’t just show up in the barracks unannounced. Something was up.

Wilkins didn’t say anything. She just scanned the barracks, obviously looking for something—or someone. As Conner watched, he wondered who it was. He was still wondering when the Prime Commander’s eyes found him …

And stopped.

Conner felt his throat constrict. The look in Wilkins’s eyes … it was the same one she’d had when she’d told Chen about his mother the day before. Even before Wilkins crossed the room and took hold of his shoulder, he knew what she was going to tell him. He just didn’t know which member of his family she would name.

“Ma’am?” he said, trying hard not to let his voice crack.

“I have bad news, son. Your aunt Bonita …”

Wilkins didn’t have to say any more. “Yes, ma’am. I understand. Thank you, ma’am.”

Wilkins looked at him a moment longer, her brow creasing. She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. She just smiled sadly, turned, and left Conner standing there.

With his grief.

Lyla Kincaid considered the device she had made in her lab a month earlier. An eternity ago, or so it seemed. After all, that was before the Ursa had landed on Nova Prime. The device was tiny, half the size of her fingernail. She tossed it in the air and caught it.
Light, too
. It was also durable, made of materials that were built to last.

And it helped people hear when nothing else would.

The scientists of Nova Prime had made remarkable strides in medicine since the Arrival hundreds of years earlier. For instance, back on Earth, people had had to put up with hearing impairments, some of them congenital, some the result of injury, and some inflicted by disease.

Not anymore. In most cases, the causes of the impairments had been eliminated. In the rest, the Savant’s engineers had invented devices to address the problem. That was where Lyla’s work came in.

The device she held in her hand was designed to be surgically implanted in the inner ear, where it would effectively take the place of an eardrum. Without it, certain individuals would be unable to hear. With it, they could hear perfectly.

Like Pietro
. A good thing by all accounts.

But there was nothing revolutionary about it.
Nothing revolutionary at all. It just works a little better than the model before it, which worked a little better than the model before that, and so on.
But the Savant had asked
Lyla—like all her fellow engineers—to come up with a tactical application.

“A
tactical
application,” she repeated to herself, and laughed at the idea.

Were the Ursa vulnerable to certain sounds the way human beings were? Did the creatures even
hear
in the first place? Despite the best efforts of those who had observed the beasts, there was no conclusive evidence either way.

Lyla frowned at her device. It was nothing like Jack Kincaid’s concept for the F.E.N.I.X. projectile system he had introduced hundreds of years earlier. A projectile that used magnetic fields to transform itself into a number of different shapes, one after the other. Now,
that
was an innovation.

Yet the concept originally was shot down by the Savant of that era, who, ironically enough, happened to be a Kincaid as well. In fact, Bree Kincaid, a brilliant woman in her own right, was the very
first
Savant. Like everyone else at the time, Bree had grown up with fusion-burst tech. She had come to depend on it. When it didn’t work against the Skrel, her first thought was to find a way to improve it, not to chuck it out the window in favor of something new and untested.

Of course, there was another reason Bree Kincaid took the conservative approach. The office of Savant was so new that the people still didn’t know what to make of it. One wrong move, Bree had noted in her journal—which had become required reading for engineers ever since—and the colony might have decided to get rid of the Savant. That would have been a blow to scientific progress from which the people might never have recovered.

To avoid such a disaster, Bree had decided to build methodically on what had come before and in that way gain the colony’s trust. The last thing she wanted to do was make the people think they had entrusted the office of Savant to a rebel.

So she tossed her cousin Jack’s idea on the trash heap.
It was only after the Rangers had gotten hold of a Skrel vessel and determined the nature of its shielding, which could withstand fusion-burst blasts no matter how much the colonists amped them up, that the Savant gave in to her cousin and allowed him to try out his F.E.N.I.X. system.

From the beginning, it worked like a charm. One by one, the Skrel ships were destroyed. And from then on, Jack Kincaid’s F.E.N.I.X. system became the preferred defense option on Nova Prime.

But now they had a problem that they’d never had before, and neither F.E.N.I.X. nor fusion burst was proving useful in stopping the Ursa. The Savant, unlike Bree Kincaid before her, had asked them to look for answers in a wide variety of research projects.
That was to his credit
, Lyla thought.

She didn’t think the project she was working on would be very helpful. However, she had a feeling that something else might. It wouldn’t hurt to pursue that option as well—to take the idea just starting to take shape in her head and see where it might lead her.

After all, you never know
.

Trey Vander Meer sat in the shelter on Buckingham Street with Yang, a Ranger with a smooth scalp and cheekbones so prominent that they looked like they could cut glass.

“You don’t have to leave?” the commentator asked.

Yang shook his head slowly from side to side. “I’m here as long as you need me.”

“That’s kind of you,” Vander Meer said. “Very kind.”

His brain felt sluggish as he tried to process what had happened earlier that day. He had walked out the door a proud husband and father. Now he was bereft of his family, alone in the world. The Rangers had responded. They had saved his neighbors and—he thought, though he wasn’t sure—hurt the creature that killed his family.