After Earth: A Perfect Beast (33 page)

Ah
, Hātu
r
i thought. “With all due respect, why would I do
that
?”

“Because with all the casualties we have suffered in our struggles with the Ursa, you are the highest-ranking Ranger left to us. Not the overly ambitious, full-of-himself cadet who stands in charge now but
you
. It’s not Conner Raige’s place to make decisions when it comes to the defense of our beloved colony—it’s yours.”

Hātu
r
i chuckled. “I’m sorry, Primus, but I made the only decision I had to. And I didn’t do it lightly, if that’s what you’re thinking. I brought to bear every bit of experience I had under my belt, every bit of wisdom I’d ever learned from any Ranger I’d ever served under. It all pointed in one direction and one direction only, which is why I gave Conner Raige my full support.”

The Primus shook his head disapprovingly. “Do you know what you’re doing, my son? You’re making a mockery of the position of Prime Commander and every courageous, dedicated soul who has ever held it.”

“Maybe so,” Hātu
r
i allowed. “But I’d be mocking them even more if I were to claim the job knowing I’m not the best man for it.”

“You’re too modest by far. You have the respect of the other Rangers. I know you do; I took the trouble to ask around.”

In other words, Hātu
r
i reflected, he’d been poking around where he didn’t belong. “Now, that was kind of you, Primus, especially when you’ve got your hands full keeping up the people’s morale. I’d hate for somebody to do something desperate because his spiritual leader was polling Rangers instead of providing comfort.”

The Primus’s eyes narrowed. “Now,” he said, his voice taking on an edge, “it’s not just the Prime Commanders you’re mocking.”

“My apologies,” said Hātu
r
i, “if it sounded that way.” But the truth was that he
meant
it to sound that way, and they both knew it.

“I thought I might find a willing ear here,” the Primus said. “I see that I was mistaken.”

Before Hātu
r
i could respond, he left.

Hātu
r
i had friends who would be appalled if they found out how he had spoken to the Primus. That was all right with him. If they had the right to embrace the truth as the Primus saw it, he had an equal right to think the Primus was full of horse manure.

And low-grade horse manure at that.

Conner looked out at the assembled Rangers. There were more than a hundred of them standing in the empty theater, which was the only place that could hold all of them without exposing them to the Ursa.

Most of them were cadets.

Except they didn’t look like cadets anymore—not after they’d been out hunting Ursa over the last few days, employing the tactic Conner had tested in the field. They looked like Rangers.

It was evident in their posture, in the cast of their eyes.
Definitely Rangers
.

But with every Ursa they had taken down, there were fewer and fewer of them. They couldn’t afford to play a numbers game any longer. And if Lyla’s weapon was the godsend Conner thought it was, they wouldn’t have to.

“Listen up,” he said, his voice sounding big in the theater.

The Rangers listened.

“I’ve got something to show you,” Conner said. “Something that’s going to help us in our fight against the Ursa.”

It had been a long time since anyone had introduced a new weapon to the Corps. Hundreds of years, in fact.
Conner wondered how the Prime Commander at the time had felt as he showed
that
weapon off.

His name was Patrick Wulf. Conner had looked it up. He was a mild-mannered man for a Prime Commander, a peacekeeper at a time when the colony desperately needed one. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot more that was known about him.

Had Wulf been a Raige like his immediate predecessor—or, for that matter, like his successor—Conner would have known his cap size, his favorite color, and how he liked his coffee. After all, Conner’s dad had known every detail about every Raige back to the launch of the arks from Earth, or so it had always seemed.

Then, too, the Skrel had been a problem, albeit a different kind. All they had attacked with were ships, and little ones at that, although they were pretty frightening to a colony that had never run into even a hint of alien life before.

Until the colonists came up with the weapon they needed, they saw a lot of misery, a lot of destruction. They were desperate for an answer. But then, as now, there had been some controversy over what that answer might be.

Was Wulf’s announcement met with cheers or skepticism? Did he find support right away, or did it take time for people to get used to what he was proposing?

Conner had no way of knowing and therefore no precedent to learn from. In effect, he was on his own. He picked up the cutlass prototype from the table beside him and turned the weapon over in his hands. It looked so simple, so unassuming, not like a weapon at all. But the fate of Nova Prime rode on it.

He hoped the other Rangers looked at it the way he did.

“Up until now,” he said, “they’ve had the advantage. But this is the day we start to turn things around.” He produced the cutlass and held it out for them to see. “With this.”

The cadets eyed the device with curiosity. Except for
Lucas, Blodge, and a couple of others, of course. They had seen it before.

“What is it?” asked a Ranger named Bolt, who had served under Conner’s aunt Bonita.

“It’s called a cutlass,” Conner said, “and it’s designed specifically with the Ursa in mind. In other words, for close quarters.”

“Thank heaven,” said another Ranger, a fellow named Yang.

“It’s about time,” someone else said.

“How does it fire?” Bolt asked.

“It doesn’t,” Conner told him. “It makes use of F.E.N.I.X. tech to change its shape.”

He performed the requisite slide and tap, and the cutlass morphed in his hand, becoming a double-ended blade. Then he carried out another maneuver, and it transformed itself into a mace. The others looked on, mesmerized.

“So it’s not just one weapon,” Conner continued, “it’s a number of them, and in any given encounter an Ursa won’t know which one it’s going to get.”

“Interesting,” said Ditkowsky.

“There’s just one glitch,” Conner said, and he told them what it was.

“You’re kidding,” said Erdmann, probably speaking for every Ranger in the place.

“I’m not,” Conner told him. “But don’t worry. It’s easy to avoid.”

“What if we don’t
want
to avoid it?” Yang asked.

Conner hadn’t anticipated such a reaction.
But I should have
. “What do you mean?”

Yang shrugged. “One for one? That’s not bad, considering how many people each of these monsters has killed already.”

“You’re talking about suicide,” said Lucas.

“Damned right,” Yang said, his eyes like steel.

“No,” Conner said firmly, putting an end to the idea. “That’s
not
an option, especially when we’ve got so many other possibilities available to us in the cutlass.”

Yang nodded, though he looked reluctant to give in. “Whatever you say, sir.”

“All right, then,” Conner said. “Watch closely.” And, re-creating the rest of the demonstration Lyla had given him, he showed the others how to operate a cutlass.

As Conner lay in his bunk, going over his battle plan, he got the feeling that something was wrong.

Then he realized what it was. There was always a sound in the cadet barracks. A cough, a laugh, a whispered bit of gossip. Sometimes even a warning to cut out all the other sounds, with a promise of the measures that would be taken if the warning wasn’t heeded.

But not now
. It was perfectly quiet. Like a tomb.

Conner thought he knew why.

He had been so focused on preparing his squad for the logistics of the battle, he had lost sight of something else, something just as important if not more so.

They were scared.

None of them was likely to admit it, not even on pain of death, but it seemed to him that they
were
. After all, with the dawn they would move out into the embattled streets of Nova City, and they would face the stuff of their nightmares.

It was a natural response, nothing to be ashamed of. But if they had been more experienced, they would have known what to do with their fear, how to turn it into motivation.

Conner’s cadets didn’t know that trick. For them, fear was a burden, a weight that might drag them down when they needed most to move freely.

He had to do something about that or he wasn’t much of a leader. But what could he do? Give them years of training and experience overnight?

Then it came to him.

He went into the command center, into Wilkins’s office, and fabricated something. Eight somethings, in fact, since he had determined through his studies of the Ursa that eight was the maximal number of Rangers in a squad. Then he returned to the barracks and one by one woke up the members of his team.

“I want to talk with you,” he said after they had joined him outside. He turned to Blodge and asked, “Who are you?”

His friend smiled at him. “Are you kidding?”

“I asked you a question, Cadet.”

Blodge’s smile faded. “I’m Raul Blodgett, Blue Squad.”

Conner shook his head. “No. From now until we come back tomorrow with a dead Ursa, you’re Sam Dardanopoulos.”

Blodge looked confused. “Sorry,” he said, “but I don’t know—”

“Sam Dardanopoulos was a baker on the North Side,” said Conner. “He had a wife, two daughters, and six grandchildren and a reputation for making the best galaktoboureko in the colony. That is, until he went out to raid his bakery for food three nights ago and an Ursa caught him.”

He had Blodge’s attention. And not just Blodgett’s but that of the rest of his squad.
Good
, he thought.
It’s working
.

He took a translucent piece of plastic out of his pocket and handed it to Blodge. It bore the likeness of Sam Dardanopoulos.

“Sam couldn’t do anything about what happened to him,” Conner told his friend, “but
you
can. You can be Sam’s eyes and ears and the hands he used to make those delicious custards. He couldn’t do anything about the Ursa, but
you
can.”

The look in Blodge’s eye said that he understood now. He nodded and put the piece of plastic in his pocket.

Conner turned to Lucas Kincaid. “Who are you?”

Kincaid’s lip curled. “I think you’re about to tell me.”

“You’re Amaya Nakamura. She lived on the South Side with her parents and her two brothers. She was six years old, on her way to a shelter, when she was attacked by an Ursa. Three children died that evening. Amaya was one of them.”

He handed Lucas a plastic card with Amaya’s likeness on it. “Who are you?”

“I’m Amaya Nakamura,” Lucas said, as if he had been saying it all his life. “Amaya Nakamura.” He put the card in his pocket.

Conner then turned to Gold. “Who are you, Cadet?”

“I
was
Danny Gold,” he said.

“Maybe so,” Conner said, “but now you’re Archie Banuelos. A week ago, Archie was driving a building supply truck to a medicenter that had been the site of an Ursa attack. When he saw a bunch of construction workers trapped by an Ursa, he tried to use his truck like a battering ram. The Ursa survived the impact. Archie didn’t.” He handed Gold a plastic card. “Who are you?”

“I’m Archie Banuelos,” came the reply.

Conner nodded. “Damned right.”

Ditkowsky became Tonia Malley. Augustover became Randall Butterfield. Erdmann became Kalman Ben Jacob. Cheng became Mustafa Ryder.

“What about you?” Lucas asked Conner. “What’s your name?”

“Frank Raige,” said Conner. “I’m Frank Raige.”

“Hell of a coincidence,” Lucas commented, “you having the same last name and all.” He smiled a tight smile. “And a hell of a name to live up to.”

Conner was thankful for the kind words from a guy he once had considered his enemy, but all he said was, “Don’t worry. I’ll live up to it.”

As he stood in the cadets’ midst and looked around, Conner saw that they were different. They didn’t look scared. After all, they weren’t fighting for themselves anymore. They were fighting for someone else, which was really the way it had been all along.

And there was no longer any need for them to worry about dying: The pieces of plastic in their pockets were proof they were already dead.

Ever since Lyla’s cutlass had become the focus of Conner Raige’s attention, she’d had an escort to and from her lab and, more recently, to and from the factory where the cutlasses were being manufactured.

His name was Bolt. He didn’t talk much in her estimation, but he seemed to know what he was doing.

Either way, Lyla had felt guilty about having him. After all, Rangers were needed in so many other places, especially seasoned Rangers like Bolt. However, she understood the need for Conner to protect her. She held the fate of the colony in her hands. Wasn’t that how he had put it? “The fate of the colony …”

Someone like that had to be preserved at all costs.

Except now Lyla was done making the cutlasses. She could go back home and contact the Savant and see what project she might work on next. Even if the cutlasses worked, and there was no guarantee that they would, there had to be plenty for an engineer to do at a time like this.

Lyla was wondering what it might be when she caught a glimpse of someone walking toward her from the other direction. It was rare to see anyone else on the street, and so she took more than a little notice. But really, it would have been hard for her to miss someone as prominent as the Primus of the entire planet.

He was wearing a majestic navy-blue robe that looked like it had been cut from the night sky, a stark contrast to the plain brown robes and rusty uniforms of the augurs and Rangers who surrounded him. In all, there had to be eight or ten people in the Primus’s entourage.

It made her feel a little better about having Bolt with her.