After Earth: A Perfect Beast (3 page)

“No killer instinct?” he says.

The irony is there to be seen by all. The creature is practically out of its mind with fury. It slams repeatedly against the walls of its confinement, bites at the air. Its claws rake across the clear surface, making high-pitched screeching sounds that prompt a number of Krezateen to cover their ears.

His voice soaring above the unabated howling of the frustrated creature—for it is unable to tear its perceived target apart—the Chancellor calls out, “You may now display your puissance, Warlord!”

“What’s going on?” Knahs demanded.

“All I did,” says the Chancellor, “is pump a small whiff of Vermin into the creature’s cage. After all, such is the species it is designed to hunt and destroy—Vermin, not Krezateen. But if you are determined to demonstrate your prowess as a warrior, we wouldn’t
think of shaming you with an inferior adversary. So I offer to spray you with the Vermin’s essence—just a bit of it. Thus exposed, you can take your place in the pit without worrying that you will be wasting your time.”

There is clear satisfaction in the voice of the Chancellor and also an unmistakable hint of challenge. “This is what you want,” he presses, “is it not?”

All attention is now on the Warlord. The only other sound in the meeting area is the roaring of the creature.

Only his cowardice will save him, the
Minister thinks smugly to the Chancellor.
The question is: How will he rationalize it?

Not much of a question at all, actually
, thinks the Chancellor back at his nest mate.

“You,” the Warlord says, “are insane if you think I am going to allow residue of the Vermin to be put upon my person. I will not have the gods abominate me so that you can provide a demonstration for your … freak.”

And there it is
, thinks the Chancellor smugly. Aloud he says, “This freak is the answer to our problem.”

“Our problem,” calls out one of the religious faction leaders, “is that the gods feel that our civilization is going in the wrong direction! They feel we have not been devout enough! That is why they allow the Vermin on the Holy World in the first place: to express their anger with us. And your answer is to introduce yet another life-form upon Zantenor? The moment they set claw upon Zantenor, they will be unclean! And since we sent them, we will be unclean as well!”

“Then we are damned either way!” the Minister calls out. “What would you have us do? Restrict our efforts to futile barrages and the occasional prayer?”

“The gods will show us the way!” comes another voice from the religious quarter. “We should wait—”

Enraged at such closed-mindedness, the Chancellor for a moment loses his patience. His voice thunders through the vastness of the gathering.
“The gods gave us brains to think! Resourcefulness to invent and explore!
The will of the gods resides within each and every one of us. If we refuse to take advantage of the resources the gods provide us, that is the true insult!”

It is an argument that, as far as the High Minister is concerned, is irrefutable. That should be the end of it.

Instead it is only the beginning.

For years it goes on. For years, a debate that for a time seems as if it will crack the entirety of Krezateen society apart. Ultimately the decision comes on one raucous day after a debate that lasts nineteen straight hours. It is decided that the Unclean—as the creatures have come to be known simply through repeated use of the adjective—will be unleashed upon the sacred world in order to annihilate the Vermin.

The High Chancellor remains furious over one compromise that he has to make. To him, the most devastating aspect of the creatures is that they will propagate themselves. He has labored long and hard to make them as fertile as possible. Their desire to procreate will be second only to their compulsion to hunt and consume Vermin. But the religious factions simply will not bend: The notion of something crafted by the Krezateen breeding on the Holy World is to them simply too much of an abomination.

Most frustratingly, even the High Minister refuses to support his nest brother. “The creatures are intended to have a specific purpose,” he says. “They are to rid the Holy World of an unholy life-form. But if they breed as quickly as you propose, then once the Vermin are gone, the home of the gods will be overrun by monsters of our own making. Can you guarantee that the gods will perceive that as any better a situation?”

“I would not presume to guess one way or the other how the gods would react to anything,” says the High Chancellor.

So it was that he and his team had to reconfigure the
creatures so that they would be genderless and incapable of breeding. Of course, what will happen through the hand of nature once the creatures are unleashed upon the land, even the High Chancellor cannot predict. But he, at least, will have done all that he can. The rest struggles in the claws of the gods.

The High Chancellor could easily do without the absurd festivities that have been crafted to celebrate the launch.
That
he considers something of an affront to the gods. The High Chancellor has always believed himself to be an austere individual, and he considers the launch a solemn occasion. For the first time in a long time, the Krezateen are taking a positive step to take back their Holy World. Why saddle the event with gaudiness?

No reason. No reason at all. But they do it anyway
.

Yet another compromise that he has lost.

Well … at least he will be along on the journey to monitor firsthand the effectiveness of the creatures (he never uses the term
unclean
in his musings. The term offends him even if he has learned to tolerate it).

Are you almost here, nest brother?
The sound of the High Minister’s voice echoes in his head. The High Chancellor assures him that he has nearly arrived as he moves through the elevated maze of roads that constitutes much of the surface of the Homeworld. One of the roiling rivers of lava upon Homeworld’s surface surges far beneath him. Heat billows up like a fist. He ignores it. He has bigger things to worry about.

He has almost reached the launch site. The vessel that will carry them to Zantenor is not, of course, there. It is in orbit around the Homeworld. Instead, there is an array of shuttles that will lift off and carry the High Chancellor and the High Minister to the transport vessel. It is a standard-issue pilgrimage ship, capable of transporting two hundred Krezateen in one trip. However, this crew load will be far less: only the High Chancellor and the High Minister and a complement of scientists to observe how the creatures perform against
the Vermin. If things go the way the Chancellor is hoping, they will return home with reports of success.

Sure enough, there are the shuttles, placed on a huge round platform. He and the Minister embrace quickly, patting each other on the back. “We are accomplishing great things today,” says the Minister. “It could not have been accomplished without you.”

“You are absolutely right,” the Chancellor replies.

There are speeches then. Speeches and blessings and endless prayers. The heads of seemingly endless factions step forward one at a time, each trying to outdo the other in his religious fervor. The Chancellor finds it bleakly amusing considering how many of them had offered protest and resistance when the project was announced. Obviously they have come around. It has been the Chancellor’s experience that that is often the case: Massive resistance to new ideas is followed by an eventual embracing of them.

After what seems far too long a time, the shuttles are on their way. They arc gracefully skyward toward the ship that is waiting for them.

The creatures have been loaded aboard. They are safely secured, in suspended animation, inside a smaller vessel—a drop ship—within the larger ship’s hold. Once they get within range of Zantenor, the drop ship will descend upon the holy planet and its contents will be unleashed upon the unsuspecting Vermin.

The High Chancellor, the High Minister, and the rest of the crew likewise will be slumbering for the duration of the trip, which will require eighteen years to complete. The ship’s automated systems will revive them once they are within range of Zantenor. And then …

… and only then …

… will it be possible for them to recapture the approval of the gods.

Minutes later, the shuttle delivers them to the pilgrimage vessel. The High Chancellor and High Minister enter. Excitement is beginning to pound within the Chancellor’s chest cavities. He has never had the honor
of making a pilgrimage, and his time has been running out. Long-lived he may be, but even he and his nest brother will not last forever, and he might not live long enough to be part of the next pilgrimage.

So instead he is part of not a pilgrimage but a great scientific adventure. What does it matter, the pretext? He will be traveling within range of the planet of the gods, and he may actually oversee its liberation from the Vermin. Is that not a prospect to be—?

A chill suddenly strikes his spine. He sees by the Minister’s reaction that he is responding likewise.

The Warlord and his soldiers are standing there within the ship to greet them. “Welcome aboard, Honored Ones,” Knahs says with what he no doubt considers to be some sort of suavity.

“What are you doing here?” the High Minister asks him fiercely.

The Chancellor is equally outraged. “This is a scientific mission.”

“This is a battle. A battle that is part of a much larger war,” the Warlord informs them. “If a military situation presents itself, it will be the job of my soldiers and me to be prepared for it. Furthermore”—he smiles maliciously—“we wish to make certain that the results you present to our people are accurate representations of what actually transpires on the Holy World.”

“This is intolerable,” declares the High Chancellor.

“Very well,” says the Warlord with an indifferent shrug. “You are free not to tolerate it. The shuttle can readily take you back to Homeworld.” He gestures toward the entranceway through which the Chancellor has just come.

The High Minister trembles with indignation, but once more the Chancellor speaks to him in a soothing manner.

Let him have this small triumph, brother. The greater triumph will be ours, and he will ultimately destroy himself. I know his kind
.

We both do
, agrees the High Minister, not without effort.

The Chancellor just hopes that he is correct. And he also hopes that, considering all that is being done to placate the gods, the gods will make it worth their while.

“Think they’re getting tired of eating dirt?” asked Meredith Wilkins, Prime Commander of the United Ranger Corps of the planet Nova Prime.

“It builds character,” said Commander Elias Hātu
r
i, her right-hand man. He took a noisy bite of his Nova Prime apple, which had been grown from the seeds humankind had brought with it from Earth.

“The grit’s good for their digestion,” added Commander Bonita Raige, a short woman with close-cropped blond hair except for a white patch in the back from a field injury. She had been advising the Prime Commander for years but had joined Wilkins’s staff only recently.

On several screens before them, three color-coded squads of armed Ranger cadets were scrambling across a craggy red stretch of desert, each one trying to obtain a strategic advantage without being seen by its opponents. The squads had started out with a dozen cadets apiece in this mock battle, but they all had felt the toll of one skirmish after another.

There were no real injuries, of course. Just a color change in a light-sensitive disk worn on the back when it was hit by an adversary’s laser beam. Anyone so tagged had been forced to leave the game.

Blue Squad had taken the worst of it. Led by Erdmann, the most experienced of the cadets, the squad
nonetheless had gotten caught in a most costly ambush. Erdmann had only two subordinates left.

Green Squad hadn’t fared much better. It had sustained seven casualties, including Cheng, its mission leader. Earlier in the day, Cheng had made a heroic sacrifice that allowed her squad mates to escape. Wilkins didn’t hold out much hope for the five remaining Reds. In her experience, squads didn’t last long once they lost their leader.

Red Squad, at this point, had to be the odds-on favorite to win the exercise. It still had nine cadets to its name thanks to the canny leadership of Lucas Kincaid, a lean, strong kid with aquiline features. Wilkins had had her eye on Kincaid ever since he’d signed on. The kid had a knack for getting others to follow him and buy into his strategies, which were always calculated to eliminate his opponents.

So far Kincaid had done just that. With Blue on the run, victims of his most recent assault, Kincaid was turning his attention back to Green. Unfortunately for its chances, Green had retreated into a deep, high-walled valley.

As Wilkins watched, Kincaid took advantage of Green’s error by following them in. First he fanned his cadets out on either side of him, filling the narrow confines of the valley. Then he marched them in pursuit of Green on the double. At this rate, they would catch up with the Green Squad in no time, and Red’s nine-wide formation would prevent any of the enemy from escaping their net.

“What do you think?” she asked her commanders.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Raige said.

“Has all along,” observed Hātu
r
i, who was big and barrel-chested. He tossed his apple core into a waste aperture in the wall. “Then again, he’s a Kincaid. He didn’t exactly come from nowhere.”

The name Kincaid, Wilkins reflected, had been an important one in the four-hundred-year history of humankind on Nova Prime. Kincaids had been key figures
in the Rangers, in the science corps led by the Savant, and even in the religious order led by the Primus. It was good to see that young Lucas had inherited the best of his family’s genes.

Wilkins turned to Raige. “You have a nephew in the games, don’t you, Bonita?”

Raige shot a look at the Prime Commander. “You know I do.”