After Earth: A Perfect Beast (7 page)

“Ah, the fair and enchanting Olivia,” Vander Meer said with a smile.

“Even
she
agrees with Dad about the Rangers,” Skipper said.

“She does not,” said Michael, shooting a glance at his brother. “She doesn’t even listen to him.”

“That’s a lie,” Skipper said, his voice rising in both pitch and volume. “She told me she did.”

“She was just being nice,” said Michael.

“Funny,” Vander Meer said. “I thought everyone listened to my commentaries.”

“Actually, that’s not the case,” Natasha said.

Vander Meer pressed his hand to his chest as if he had been stabbed. “You, my dear, wound me.”

“You, my dear,” said his wife, “can get carried away sometimes. Remember, last year you took Flint to task for his water purification project.”

“Didn’t I make sense?” Vander Meer asked.

“Of course you did. And you got him to appoint a committee.”

“Which I watched closely.”

“Which approved the project.”

“At least I kept Flint honest,” Vander Meer said.

Natasha turned to Michael. “Skipping dinner or bringing her here?”

“Skipping,” said Michael. He turned to his father, his face reddening. “And I’ll keep on skipping till Dad realizes how wrong he is. The Rangers keep the peace. They have to stay state of the art. I don’t understand your problem with them, I really don’t.”

Vander Meer let his son finish, desperate not to let this be another ruined meal. He wanted to respect Michael’s point of view.
At least he has one
, he thought. Too often, Vander Meer felt, the younger generation was self-absorbed and apathetic. So he held his tongue and waited until Michael took a mouthful of soup.

Then he said, “When you can discuss this with me without our blood pressures rising, we’ll talk.”

Michael grunted. “Sure we will.”

Vander Meer frowned.
Patience
, he thought.
He’ll come around … eventually
.

Elias Hātu
r
i barged into Meredith Wilkins’s office and bellowed, “I want to get my hands around his neck! Just for a minute!”

The Prime Commander knew exactly what he was talking about. She had just finished listening to Vander Meer’s commentary on the Rangers, in which he had pretty much challenged her to defend her position. It felt to her as if the temperature in the room had risen in the last few minutes. Forcing herself to remain calm, she turned off her monitor and leaned back in her chair. No doubt, other journalists would be calling to find out her reaction, and she wasn’t entirely sure yet how she wanted to handle this.

“Well?” said Hātu
r
i.

She held up a hand. “Calm down, Elias. There will be no strangling on my watch.” She rose and walked over to a side table where a pitcher of cool water suddenly looked very inviting. “Besides,” she said as she poured, “I want that privilege when the matter is settled.”

“How can this be settled? You know what he’s like.
He’s done this before. He’s just going to beat you up until he gets his way.”

“Or he gets himself swatted,” she said.

Hātu
r
i slumped into a chair. “And how are we going to do that?”

Wilkins sat down again as well. “I have to think about it.”

But she didn’t have the luxury of thinking for long. The media wouldn’t allow it. Times like these, she was thankful she never had married or had children. There were some burdens she felt more comfortable carrying alone.

An adjutant knocked politely on the door, which was still open.

“Come in,” Wilkins said.

“Ma’am,” said the adjutant, “there’s a gentleman named Ken Pham outside to see you. He says he produces Trey Vander Meer’s program.”

Wilkins and Hātu
r
i exchanged surprised glances. Then she said, “Send him in, please.”

Pham entered in a freshly pressed suit with his shirt open at the collar. Wilkins had met him before, though she would be damned if she could remember the circumstances.

“How can I help you, Mr. Pham?”

“I need a good novel to read, to be honest,” he said.

“That’s a little beyond our purview,” she said evenly.

“Did you happen to hear Mr. Vander Meer’s commentary today?” Pham asked.

“Sure did. Come to collect my resignation?”

He chuckled politely, appearing unperturbed by the barb. “No, but I am here to ask about a follow-up.”

“You want a rebuttal?”

“Sure, if you have one. But I’d prefer to invite you to appear on the show. Let’s air both sides of the discussion and let the people make up their minds.”

Wilkins paused to consider the offer. Rather than let Vander Meer beat the drums on this for days or weeks, a public discussion might actually bring the controversy
to a quicker close, preferably with the Rangers coming out on top.

She considered the matter from all angles, trying to sniff out a trap. She couldn’t find one. “When?”

“As soon as possible,” said Pham. “What’s your schedule look like?”

“I’m busy every moment of the day, seven days a week,” she said. “After all, I’m the Prime Commander of the Rangers, and the Rangers have a lot to do, contrary to what you may have heard in your studio. But I’ll do my best to make some time.”

“That would be great,” Pham said. “I’ll wait to hear from you.” And he left just as Wilkins’s adjutant appeared at her door again.

“Yes?” she said.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but Cadet Raige is here to see you. He says—”

The Prime Commander didn’t let him finish. “Let him in.”

A moment later, Conner Raige walked in with a tablet in his hand. He looked bleary-eyed. But then, he would have been up all night if he’d finished the task she set for him.

He handed her the tablet. “As you asked, ma’am.”

She nodded. “Thank you, Cadet Raige. Get yourself some sleep. You look awful.”

Raige nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

“And don’t pay any attention to Trey Vander Meer,” she said, though she was really just venting her frustration. “His latest commentary is decidedly
not
conducive to a good sleep.”

The cadet looked at her, obviously lost. “Ma’am?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Dismissed.”

Wilkins waited until Raige was out of earshot. Then she picked up the tablet he had given her, considered it for a moment, and turned to Hātu
r
i. “Well, Commander, it looks like it’s
my
turn to draw up a battle plan.”

Conner hadn’t known what the Prime Commander was talking about when she mentioned Trey Vander Meer. But he rectified that as soon as he returned to his barracks.

Wilkins was right. Vander Meer’s commentary wasn’t conducive to a good sleep at all, at least not if it was a Ranger who was listening to him. And, Conner discovered as he played the commentary on one of the data stations set up in the center of the barracks, Vander Meer had tacked on a bonus commentary for net viewers.

“Things change,” he said in a honeyed voice laced with an unmistakable arrogance, “often without our realizing it. And when they do that, we have to change, too. We have to live in the present, my friends, not in the past.

“We used to try to cure illnesses by bleeding people with leeches. We don’t do that anymore. We used to think it was all right to pollute Earth’s atmosphere. We learned our lesson. Now we’re spending a disproportionate amount of our colony’s resources on the Rangers.”

His teeth grinding, Conner forced himself to continue listening.

“Even though we haven’t had a problem with the Skrel for hundreds of years, even though we have enough early-warning satellites to build our own moon, even though crime is at an all-time low. Need I go on?”

“Hey,” said a familiar voice behind Conner’s back, “shouldn’t you be asleep?”

Conner turned and looked back at his pal Blodge. “And shouldn’t you be hiking in the mountains?”

“I was. Then Julie twisted her ankle—nothing terrible but annoying enough for us to head back. What are you watching?”

Conner scowled. “Vander Meer.”

Blodge chuckled sympathetically. “Right. That guy.”

“I don’t get it. How can anyone think the Rangers are obsolete?”

Blodge dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “Don’t listen to him, Conner. He’s out of his mind.”

“What if someone had decided the Rangers were obsolete before the
first
Skrel attack? Where would we be then?”

“He’s just making noise, man.”

“But people
listen
to his noise,” said Conner. “They think he’s got a point.”

“Who cares what people think? It’s not like there’s anything we can do about it.”

“We can speak up. Maybe that’s not much, but it’s something. We can make it clear to people the Rangers are still needed.”

Blodge smiled. “Sure … if anybody asks us.”

Unfortunately, Vander Meer’s was the voice everybody wanted to listen to. Conner shook his head. Couldn’t they see how dangerous his advice was?

He wondered what his dad thought of Vander Meer. He would make a point of asking him the next time they spoke, but he had a feeling he already knew. Frank Raige took pride in being a Ranger, in coming from a long line of Rangers.

He wouldn’t have much use for a know-nothing loudmouth like Vander Meer.

Prime Commander Wilkins was usually the first of the colony’s three leaders to attend their monthly tripartite
meeting. This time, an unexpected demand for her attention made her the last one.

As she entered the conference room, she saw Primus Leonard Rostropovich and Savant Donovan Flint sit up abruptly in their chairs. People did that when they’d been caught at something, she noted.

“Starting a conspiracy?” she asked.

Flint, a slender man with thinning blond hair and an even blonder mustache, laughed, albeit a little nervously. “You caught us, Commander. We were going to scheme behind your back to redesign those rusty brown uniforms you Rangers insist on wearing.”

“They’re a tradition,” Wilkins said. “The first Rangers to set foot on Nova Prime wore them, and we’ll keep on wearing them as long as there are Rangers. But that’s not what you two were whispering about.”

The Primus, an austere individual with a sharp widow’s peak and a prominent hawklike nose, sighed. “Very well. We were trying to spare your feelings, but if you insist.” He smoothed the front of his brocaded brown robe, a fancier version of what his augurs wore. “You’ve heard Trey Vander Meer’s latest broadcast?”

Wilkins stiffened. “I have. And I’m addressing it.”

“In what way, if I may ask?” said the Primus.

“I’m appearing on his program to … discuss it with him.”

Rostropovich frowned. “Not the tack I would have taken.”

“I meet problems head-on,” said the Prime Commander. “I am, after all, a Ranger.”

The Savant and the Primus exchanged glances. “But you’re not just a Ranger,” Flint said. “You’re also a member of this world’s governing body. So whatever you do as chief of the Rangers reflects on our offices as well.”

“And you think I’ll reflect on us poorly?” Wilkins asked.

“To be blunt,” said the Primus, “and I know you would want us to be so, you have already done so.”

“By accepting his invitation?” asked the Prime Commander.

Rostropovich nodded. “Precisely.”

“All I want to do is present the facts,” Wilkins said. “That’ll end his little rant once and for all.”

“I think you underestimate Mr. Vander Meer,” the Primus said. “He’s become quite the popular commentator. His rhetoric may leave something to be desired, I’ll grant you that. But he does seem to tap into what’s on people’s minds.”

“And if he twists your words just right,” said Flint, “we could be facing a bigger problem than we had before.”

“Quite a bit of confidence you’ve got in me,” Wilkins said. “I’m flattered.”

“You’re on Vander Meer’s turf,” Flint reminded her. “He knows it better than you do. As a strategist, you know how much of an advantage that gives him.”

The Prime Commander scowled. “What would you have me do? Not show up? That won’t look very good, either.”

“That’s what we were talking about,” said the Primus. Again, she saw the exchange of glances. “It would be more difficult for Vander Meer to come out on top if all three of us were to attend his program.”

“All three …?” Wilkins said.

Flint leaned forward in his chair. “It’ll be a lot harder to make you look like a wastrel if we all weigh in on the Rangers. You know, talk about how valuable they’ve been over the years.”

The Prime Commander hesitated. Flint had a point. And although her ego told her that she could—and should—handle Vander Meer on her own, it wasn’t about her. It was about the Rangers.

“You see the value of what we’re proposing?” asked the Primus.

Wilkins nodded. “Thank you.”

“No need,” Rostropovich said. “I’m certain that you would do the same for me were our positions reversed.”

The Prime Commander wasn’t so sure about that. Nonetheless she said, “Naturally.”

Conner had just come back from a five-klik run with Red Squad. Cheng was back in the leader’s position, showing him that Wilkins hadn’t completely changed her mind about him yet. He heard Lucas Kincaid having a heated discussion with Danny Gold. Gold, a tall, thin fellow, was one of the few cadets besides Blodge who hung out with Conner now and then, and so Conner felt himself on Gold’s side even before he knew what the conversation was about.

“Really?” Lucas said. “Name one.”

“There’s the black market,” Gold said.

“Right. And is that why you signed up to be a Ranger? So you could bust a bunch of kids?”

“Of course not,” Gold said. “But—”

“But that’s what you would be doing,” said Lucas, doing what he always did—going for the jugular—on the battlefield or anywhere. “The guys who run those warehouses are no older than your little sister.”

“What they’re doing is illegal.”

“So stop them. But do they need Rangers to do it? That’s the question.”

“What about aliens?” asked Gold.

Lucas turned to him. “What about them?”

“We were attacked once. It can happen again.”