“Okay,” Mallory said after a long pause. “Okay, you can speak freely. How would you like to see this handled?”
Abbey let out a sigh of relief, clearly glad that Mallory had chosen not to cut him off at the knees, which she would have totally been within her rights to do. “We get back in the ship, button her up, then send for reinforcements and remain on station until they arrive.”
It didn’t sound like an unreasonable plan. There was no one here to save, so immediate action wasn’t required. Proceeding cautiously made every bit of sense. Indeed, there was no reason not to do so.
She nodded.
Immediately Abbey headed back to the ship, Sutton following right behind him. Mallory brought up the rear, keeping a wary eye on their surroundings. If there was one thing that was certain about Ursa, it was that just because you didn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t around.
The ship was sitting there waiting for them, perched on its landing struts.
Abbey was walking up the ramp; on his approach, the hatch irised open. Sutton was right behind him, and that was when Mallory noticed that the shuttle was sitting lower on its struts than it had been before.
She put it together in a heartbeat.
“Fall back!”
she shouted.
Too late. The Ursa, perched atop the shuttle, its weight responsible for the craft’s visible sagging, shimmered into view and roared. Abbey and Sutton froze in place, fear pumping through them. Within the darkness of the world that the Ursa inhabited, the terror that they radiated would be akin to a lighthouse beacon. The Ursa swept its right claw around and Abbey’s head went flying, blood fountaining from his shoulders. Abbey collapsed, his cutlass slipping from lifeless fingers. Sutton instantly stepped back, bringing his cutlass around, and he slashed at the Ursa. The Ursa vaulted over him and, while in midair, lashed out with its talon. The claw slammed through Sutton’s back and out his chest. The sight of his innards spilling out transfixed him. The Ursa landed on the ground near the ship, sending Sutton’s body tumbling off its ramp.
All of it had happened within barely five seconds, and the entire time Mallory stood there, bolted to the ground, eyes wide.
The Ursa pivoted, sweeping the rest of the area. Mallory stumbled backward, but her shifting center of gravity, courtesy of her expanding belly, threw her balance off ever so slightly … just enough to cause her to fall to the ground with a gasp.
The Ursa’s head snapped around. Blind it may have been, but its hearing was sharp, and instantly it perceived her presence.
As it turned to face her, she spotted a long scar running along its side, right where she had cut into an Ursa months ago. The same one? Not definitive, but entirely possible.
It advanced upon her, its claws clacking on the arid ground. It knew where she was generally; it just needed her to exude the level of fear it required to zero in on her.
She saw her fellow Rangers cut to pieces, their bodies scattered, and she imagined herself meeting a similar, horrid fate …
… and she clamped down on her fear. She tossed it aside like it was someone else’s problem. She squared her shoulders, faced the Ursa, and thought nothing of its presence. It became little to her, insignificant. It was as if she had disconnected her mind from her body.
The Ursa stopped where it was. It visibly sniffed the air, but it was designed for perceiving endorphins. Other aromas simply blended together into one indistinguishable mass of olfactory input.
Mallory began to circle it. She bent at her knees, providing her more balance, and her feet moved across the ground noiselessly. Her cutlass was at the ready.
Suddenly the Ursa’s head whipped around and it was “looking” right at her. She froze, certain that it somehow had zeroed in on her. She waited, her legs flexed, prepared to leap to either side to avoid the creature’s inevitable charge.
Then it continued to sniff at the air and kept on turning.
It didn’t see me. It doesn’t know I was right in front of it
.
She had her cutlass ready. Quietly she separated it into two staves with a vicious curved hook at either end. If the creature kept moving in the same direction, it would present its back to her within seconds and she could make her assault. She had it all planned in her head: She would leap forward onto the creature’, securing her position with one of the staves buried in its back. She would then bury the other end squarely into the Ursa’s head, driving the blade into its brain.
This one is for you, Jan
, she thought.
And the baby kicked.
For the first time.
Very hard.
She had felt faint fluttering in previous days, but nothing like this. A definitive, literal gut punch as if the infant had decided that this was absolutely the perfect time to announce its presence to the world.
Mallory cried out in surprise and shock. Her mind and body reconnected, and one thought galvanized both of them:
I have to save my baby
.
Instantly the Ursa spun and locked onto her.
Mallory turned and ran, slamming the two halves of her cutlass back together as
she did so. The Ursa’s roar nearly paralyzed her, but she kept on running.
The Ursa covered the distance between the two of them in one leap, and the only thing that saved her was that she swung her cutlass up and back over her shoulder, blindly, praying.
She got lucky. The blade cut into the Ursa’s right foot, severing tendons. The creature toppled over, screeching in fury. It thrashed about, trying to lunge toward her but instead falling forward onto its face.
It’s a wounded animal. There’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal
. With that thought slamming through her, she ran like hell, hoping to put as much distance as she could between herself and the Ursa before the creature managed to adjust to its injured foot and come in pursuit. Her heart pounded, all thoughts of ghosting gone from her mind. The primal human fight-or-flight instinct had taken over and she could think of nothing but getting away.
There was only one place that she could get to that would provide her any sort of shelter: the shuttle that had brought them here. She cut sharply to the right and sprinted as fast as she could toward the landing point. It may well have been that she was imagining it, but she had never felt so fat, so slow, so clumsy as she did right then.
The shuttle was there, waiting for her, the door still open. And then she sensed, rather than saw, the Ursa coming after her from off to the right. She was closer but it was faster, and it was coming directly toward her on an intercept course.
Mallory drew more speed from somewhere and, with the door just ahead of her, charged through it. She pivoted and slammed the “
CLOSE
” button on the wall. The door irised shut just as the Ursa got to it. It slammed into the door at top speed, and the shuttle rocked violently. But the door remained closed, leaving the Ursa stuck outside.
She scrambled forward toward the helm controls to try to lift off the shuttle. And then the Ursa was right there at the front observation window, and it slammed forward with far more strength than she would have thought possible. It struck the observation
window straight-on once, twice; the third time, cracks ribboned through the window like a spiderweb. Before Mallory could fully bring the engines online, its claw smashed the front window to bits. Mallory fell back, shielding her face from the flying glass, and hit the floor of the shuttle at the far end.
The Ursa brought its injured leg forward, sweeping it back and forth and clearing out the rest of the glass that was impeding its entrance. The space, however, wasn’t quite wide enough to allow it easy access. That didn’t deter it, though. With Mallory mere feet away from it, it shoved its maw forward. It was a tight squeeze at first, but the monster began to slowly, unstoppably, push its huge head through, like some sick perversion of a human birth.
This is it
, she thought frantically, her confidence in her ability to ghost so shaken that the notion of fearlessness seemed nothing more than a pipe dream at that moment.
This is everything I was afraid would happen. I’m going to die. My baby is going to die. For everything that Jan and I accomplished during our lifetimes, we might as well never have lived at all. I’ve completely failed
.
The Ursa was unable to roar; its jaws were clamped shut thanks to the narrowness of the entrance it was trying to push through. But it was growling furiously between its compressed jaws.
Crouched at the far end of the shuttle, she reached down and slid her hand under her uniform top onto her bare belly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
And then she felt another movement in her stomach. Not a kick this time. Instead it was pushing back against her open palm.
She couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to her as if it was the baby’s own hand flat against hers.
And in her mind, it was as if the baby was saying to her comfortingly,
Don’t be afraid. I have faith in you
.
For the first time, she perceived the child in a way she hadn’t before. She saw it
not as a liability or a drawback. She didn’t see it as something that was going to drain away her resolve or impede her development as a person, a Ranger, or a Ghost.
Instead she saw her unborn child as a strength. An asset to her life, not a liability.
She also became convinced, for the first time, that it was a girl. A bond had been created between mother and daughter, a connection at a fundamental level that she had never experienced before.
The Ursa’s massive head thrust through and it let out a furious, bone-rattling roar. It waited for the expected unleashing of fear pheromones that would serve to draw it directly toward its prey.
Nothing.
The creature bellowed once more and again waited for some manner of response that it could utilize as a draw to the human.
Still nothing.
The human was gone.
The Ursa couldn’t fathom how that was possible. It sensed that the room was an enclosure, and there had been a human there. Yet now there wasn’t.
It reached out with all the senses it had at its disposal.
And it was still straining to find its target when the blade of the cutlass was driven straight through the top of its head by a woman who was standing no more than six inches from it and yet was undetectable.
Mallory McGuiness resisted the temptation to cry out in triumph. Instead, with ruthless efficiency, she yanked out the cutlass and then stabbed downward once more. She was holding one of the staves. The blade punched through with a sound like a knife being driven into a melon. Even as that happened, she slid the edge of the other blade under the Ursa’s chin, opening up the veins in its throat. It bled all over the inside of the shuttle, so much so that within seconds a pool of liquid ran an inch deep around her boots.
The Ursa trembled violently, and the entire shuttle shook as if it were in the throes of an earthquake.
And then it fell silent.
Dead.
Mallory’s baby kicked. Again.
The alarm sounded through Nova Prime City. Children walking home from school froze upon hearing its shriek. They knew it all too well: An Ursa had been spotted within the confines of the city.
And then they saw it, barreling toward them. It had shimmered into existence a short distance away, and the children cried out in terror.
It noticed them, but before it could lock on, a woman hurtled in from the side.
“Found you!”
She was holding a bladed weapon, and she lashed out with confidence. The Ursa danced away, the children forgotten.
Other Rangers were coming up from behind. The woman called out with authority, “Left and right flanks! Surround it and drive it out of the city! Then we’ll dispatch it!”
The Rangers moved with practiced efficiency. It took them only seconds to send the Ursa running on the path that would take it away from any civilians.
And then the woman, who was clearly in charge, paused just long enough to toss off a quick salute to the kids before she led her fellow Rangers in pursuit of the Ursa.
“She saluted at us!” one of the boys said.
A little girl said proudly, “Nuh-unh. She was saluting at me. That was my mom.”
“Get out!” said one child, and another said, “Janny, are you kidding?”
“Nope. She’s one of the seven Ghosts.”
There were impressed murmurs from the other kids. “How’d she learn not to be afraid of anything?”
“I asked her that once.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said I taught her,” said Janny. And she smiled her father’s smile.