After Earth: A Perfect Beast (30 page)

“Sit down, Winton,” the Primus warned him.

Instead, Winton ripped off his augur robes, exposing his simple street clothes. As he did so, he stared deep into the Primus’s eyes, which the Primus found more than a little disconcerting.

“You know,” said Winton, “I can see it. You have no more faith than I do anymore, just a greater taste for hypocrisy.” He dropped the robe to the floor. “If you think I’m going to go around from home to home trying to foster faith in the hearts of credulous individuals rather than tell them the truth—that we’re all doomed and damned—then you are insane. I am going to spend what may well be our last days providing emotional support and comfort to my wife and son. What you do with that time, I honestly don’t care.”

“Winton,” said Theresa, reaching out to him. “The Primus merely—”

But seconds later he was gone.

There was a deathly silence in the sanctum for long moments. All eyes were on the Primus, waiting to see what he would say.

As if Winton had never spoken, the Primus said, “Theresa, be so good as to work with Augur Parkin.” He nodded toward the stocky augur off to the side. “Put together a schedule. I want this visitation program implemented immediately.”

“Of course,” said Theresa, ever the most willing of Rostropovich’s flock, ever the most devoted to the augury and all it stood for.

The Primus bowed to the augurs, and they responded in kind. This was the traditional way of indicating that the meeting was over. As they filed out of the sanctum, the Primus turned his back to them. He didn’t want them to see that he was inwardly shaking with rage and mortification.

How dare he? How dare Winton speak to me that way!

But he knew his anger was misplaced, or at least the reason for it was. He wasn’t angry because Winton had addressed him in such a defiant manner. He was angry because it was as if Winton had ripped open the top of his head and exposed the thoughts in his head to public scrutiny. It made the Primus feel as if he had no safe place, not even in his own mind.

He abruptly became aware that someone was standing behind him. He turned and saw Theresa looking up at him. “I believe I’ve given you your assignment,” he said.

She averted her eyes and spoke so softly that he had to strain to hear her. “I wanted to thank you for providing a place for Marta here.”

“You’re quite welcome,” he said.

There had been no place to put Ranger Marta Lemov after her condition stabilized. After all, the medicenter needed her bed for those requiring immediate treatment and the Rangers’ infirmaries were full of the maimed and the dying.

Marta had expressed the desire to be taken home, but that had become problematic when the doctors learned that she had no one to care for her there. “You need someone to attend to you,” they had told her. “Otherwise …”

She had made it clear, in extremely florid style, that she didn’t give a damn about “otherwise.”

Theresa had brought the situation to the Primus’s attention, and the Primus had promised her that he would attend to it. What was more, he had been as good as his word. At one point, Marta had drifted into a deep sleep, even though she had no idea why. When she came to, she discovered that she’d been relocated.

Technically she’d had no reason to complain; her new facilities were far superior to where she’d been. Instead of being crammed into a single overlarge room with
dozens of moaning patients, she had her own room in the Citadel. Small, to be sure, but very private.

Yet when she’d awakened and seen Theresa standing there, watching her with an assured and happy smile, she had let out a string of invective that had mortified the augur. So much so, in fact, that Theresa had not returned to Marta’s room since that first encounter.

Or so the Primus had heard.

Now Theresa was standing there thanking him for providing Marta with a room. But it was clear to the Primus that there was something else on Theresa’s mind, and he gave her leave to speak about it. No reason not to. Considering the rank disobedience that one augur had displayed this day, it seemed a wise course of action to reward those who had acted more reasonably.

“Go ahead,” he prodded.

“I … I was hoping you could speak to Marta.”

“Ranger Lemov? I rather thought that you were going to be attending to her. She is your family’s friend, after all.”

“But part of your flock as well. One who is severely grieving and won’t listen to me. I was hoping that perhaps you could reach her in a manner that I’m unable to. She …” Theresa hesitated. “She also grieves the loss of her Ranger friends. She’s convinced that those who have survived are helpless in the face of the Ursa.”

She’s not the only one who feels that way
. With superb self-control, the Primus kept that sentiment carefully buried. “And you believe that I can somehow convince her otherwise?”

“I think,” Theresa said with total conviction, “that there is nothing you cannot do, Primus, when it comes to matters of faith.”

Oh, you poor, sad, pathetic wretch …

“Of course,” said the Primus. “I’ll see to it.”

*   *   *

As it turned out, Conner was right about Wilkins’s mistake.

Two hours into their patrol, he and his squad encountered an Ursa on O’Hara Street, not far from the jewelry store where Blodge had bought his girlfriend a necklace. The thing wheeled and roared and attacked them as soon as it spotted them; probably it had been denied a meal for too long.

Conner’s squad spread out across the thoroughfare just the way it was supposed to, surrounding the Ursa and then battering it with pulser bursts from all sides. But that wasn’t all they did. They also yelled at the tops of their lungs, yelled like banshees—exactly as Conner had planned it. The creature’s head tossed this way and that, fixing on one target after another. Its teeth gnashed.

And all the while, Conner looked for his opening.

It was the same thing he had done to Lucas in the war games—invite his enemy to focus on something else and then hit that enemy from behind. When he saw his chance, he didn’t hesitate. He got a running start, leaped onto the Ursa’s back, and took his shot.

Please
, he thought,
let this work
.

Not just because his own life depended on it but because they needed a shred of hope. Until that point, it had all gone the Ursa’s way. The Rangers needed to turn that around.

At the last moment, the Ursa’s head swiveled, and Conner found himself looking down its maw. He fired at it point-blank, just as his aunt had fired at the monster that killed her, just as he had fired the last time he had faced one of the creatures.

As Conner rolled off the monster’s back because he knew better now than to hang on any longer than was absolutely necessary, he thought it again:
Please
.

Then he hit the ground, and rolled to his feet, and
took aim again in case he hadn’t accomplished what he had hoped to accomplish.

But he had. The Ursa was folding before his eyes, its legs giving out beneath it. A moment later it hit the ground. Then Conner’s teammates approached it and poured on a barrage of pulser fire to finish it off.

But not all of them.

Even as Conner fired at the Ursa, celebrating his success, he noticed that two members of his squad were stretched out on the ground. The one lying face up with her chest torn open to the bone was McKinnon. The other one, whose head had been torn half off his body, was Bashar.

They had yelled like everyone else, distracting the Ursa, because that was what Wilkins’s squad had
failed
to do. The Prime Commander had been so focused on taking advantage of the creature’s olfactory blind spot that she had forgotten that it had other senses.

A sense of hearing, for instance. The kind that would allow it to detect someone sneaking up on it from behind even if it couldn’t smell that someone. The kind that had discerned Norman’s approach while her squad mates watched silently, holding their collective breath.

But if an Ursa’s sense of hearing was confused as well, Conner’s plan could work. And it had. And because of that, the cadets had won. They had eliminated one of the monsters that had been slaughtering their people and, more important, confirmed that there was a way to eliminate others.

But
, Conner asked himself as he gazed at McKinnon and Bashar and would continue to ask in the days that followed,
at what price?

The first place Conner headed for after he turned over the Ursa’s corpse to a
real
Ranger squad was Tariq Lennon’s office in the command center.

It was bad enough that he had defied Lennon’s decision. He wasn’t going to add insult to injury by making the man come looking for him. He was going to give himself up.

When Conner had taken out his squad of cadets against the Ursa, he hadn’t harbored any illusions. He had fully expected that he would pay for his transgression eventually and that those who had followed him into battle would do the same.

In his mind, it had been a done deal. No getting off the hook, no way out, regardless of the results.

So here I am
, he thought.

There was a cadet sitting at Lennon’s desk, his back to Conner, peering at the commander’s monitor.
A cadet
, Conner thought. Not even one of the more
experienced
cadets but a guy so new that Conner didn’t recognize him.

“Be with you in a second, sir,” said the cadet, his voice high and frazzled, so intent on the monitor that he held a hand up instead of turning around.

Conner stood there for a few seconds before the guy put his hand down and turned to face him.

“What can I do for you, s—?” he started to say. Then he seemed to realize that Conner was a cadet just as he
was, because he simply repeated, “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for Commander Lennon,” said Conner.

“He’s not here right now,” the cadet said. “Sorry.”

“When will he be back?”

“He wasn’t very clear about that.” The cadet made a face that suggested discomfort. “To be perfectly honest, I haven’t heard from him in several hours.”

So there was no guarantee he’d be back at all
, Conner thought grimly.

“I know,” the cadet said, wiping perspiration from his forehead, “it’s crazy. A guy who signed up a few days ago running Commander Lennon’s office. If someone had told me last Sunday that I’d be sitting here in this chair, dispatching emergency response teams …”

“Well,” Conner said, “if you do hear from the commander, let him know that Conner Raige is back. And so is my squad.”

The cadet looked puzzled. “
Your
squad?”

“I know,” said Conner, “crazy.” And he turned to leave.

“Wait,” the cadet said. “Did you say your name was Raige …?”

Normally, Conner would have stayed and endured the expressions of admiration for his family, admiration that he himself hadn’t earned. But at the moment he was too tired to be polite.

So all he said was, “Thanks, Cadet. I’ll be in the barracks.”

He could have gone to see Hātu
r
i in Wilkins’s office—or rather what had been Wilkins’s office—but Hātu
r
i had to be busy with more important matters. If he wanted to punish Conner and the others, he could do so any time he wanted.

As Conner emerged from the command center, Lucas and the others were waiting for him. “What happened?” Lucas asked.

“Nothing,” Conner said. “Nothing at all. Lennon’s in
the field, so there’s no one to take us to task for what we did.”

“So … that’s it?” Blodge asked, looking as drained as Conner had ever seen him. “We get away scot-free?”

“At least for now,” Conner said, pulling off his headgear and running his fingers through his thick, sweaty thatch of hair.

None of them seemed unhappy about the outcome, temporary though it might be. But then, they had plenty to be unhappy about already. They had lost two of their fellow cadets, after all.

Objectively speaking, their mission had been a success. But if this was success, Conner didn’t know how much more of it he could take.

Marta moaned softly when she saw the Primus himself approaching her. This had Theresa’s fingerprints all over it.
“What?”
she said curtly.

The Primus didn’t seem the slightest bit put out by her attitude. “I’m told you have a great deal on your mind.”

“I’ve been listening to the news.”

He gestured around them. “This is a place of peace. There are no intrusions from outside. No screens. There is no news here to interfere with your contemplation …”

Marta shook her head. “If that’s what you think, Primus, then you don’t know people very well. There’s more to news than what shows up on screens or wends its way through the ether. There’s what people say as they come in and out of this place. They keep talking about Gash. That’s all anyone talks about.”

“Gash—?” The Primus shook his head in confusion.

“Gash.” Marta did nothing to mask her annoyance, as if she could not believe that the Primus could possibly be this clueless. “Gash, the biggest, most dangerous Ursa of all. The body count that one Ursa alone is racking
up is beyond anything we could possibly have been ready for.”

“And people speak of this?”

“Hell, your own people speak of this. Your augurs speak to one another in hushed whispers so as not to catch your ear or disturb worshippers. Don’t you know the hearts of your own people, Primus?”

The Primus sidestepped the question. Instead he said, “I know
your
heart, Ranger. I know there is a darkness in it that goes beyond grief. It partakes also of … guilt. You believe there is something you could have done to keep your friend Torrance Raige alive.”

Marta winced. “And you’re going to tell me that’s not so, are you? You’re going to tell me I’m free of blame even though you were sitting here in your blessed Citadel at the time, not within ten kilometers of us?”

The woman’s tone was insulting, calculatedly so. And the Primus had borne enough insults for one day from Augur Winton.