After Earth: A Perfect Beast (13 page)

That seemed to pacify her. A little, at any rate.

Just then, Vander Meer spotted something on her right middle finger: a new ring, one he tried to identify but couldn’t.

“Where’d that come from?” he asked his daughter.

“Class. I told you.”

“No, the ring,” he said, pointing.

Elena blushed. “It’s a Claddagh ring.”

“A what?”

“It’s ancient Irish. A symbol of … lasting friendship.” The blush deepened.

“Where’d you get it?” he asked.

“From a friend.”

“What friend might that be?”

His daughter hesitated, twisting the ring around her finger. Thrilled that he’d managed to change the subject, Vander Meer didn’t rush her. Finally, she got out one word—one name.

“Derrick.”

“Have I met this Derrick?”

“Pop, he’s been in my classes since we were five,” she said, clearly exasperated.

“Which one is he? The blond one?”

“That’s Pavel.”

“The redhead?”

“Eric? Or Clive?”

“I guess neither. Okay, so who or what is this Derrick?”

“He’s the black-haired guy who always sits near me in class because our names fall one after the other.”

“Derrick …?”

“Ungar.”

“Derrick Ungar. Do I know his parents?”

“No, but they know you. And like me, they don’t approve of the way you’re attacking our leaders. They say you’re disrespecting the system.”

Here we go again
, thought Vander Meer.

“The system is hypocritical,” he said, patiently and not for the first time. His distaste for the colony’s judges was another hallmark of his show, one that he hadn’t revisited in a while. “It’s difficult to give it less respect than it deserves.”

“That’s not what Derrick’s parents say. They say the system is as good as the people who run it.”

“Elena, sweet pea, it’s never that cut-and-dried. There are shades of gray, nuances that need to be explored.”

“Don’t you mean exploited?” Michael asked as he walked into the room.

“Ganging up on your father?” Vander Meer asked his son.

“Just joining the conversation,” the boy said. “I thought you were in a listening mood.”

“Apparently I’m not the only one.”

“I heard you talking from the other room,” Michael said. “It was hard not to.”

“So,” Vander Meer said, trying to change the subject again, “what’s your take on Elena and this Derrick?”

The boy glanced at his sister. “Ungar’s okay, I guess. He can’t throw worth a damn, but he’s good at defense.”

“Michael …!” Elena whined.

“I’m kidding.” He turned to his father again. “Besides, I’m not letting Dad off the hook so easily.”

“You just push too hard,” Elena told her father.

“That’s right,” Michael said. “You need to ease up.”

Vander Meer had to chuckle. It was the first time he’d experienced the singular delight of his son actually telling him what to do.

“I’ll have you know,” he said, “that people
love
me. What makes you right and them wrong?”

“You and the Primus have them so stirred up, they can’t think for themselves,” said Michael.

“When did you become a sociologist?” Vander Meer asked.

The good news was he had smart kids. The bad news was he had smart kids. They were formulating interesting and thoughtful arguments, but they were irritating him as well. Pride and anger fought for control of his tongue.

“I’m not,” Michael said. “But I don’t have to be to see what you’re up to.”

“That’s right,” Elena agreed.

Suddenly, Vander Meer had a yen to take a walk.

Conner sat in the command center’s satellite data room, a surprisingly small enclosure with thirty or so large holographic screens, each one displaying information fed by one of the colony’s vast orbital array of signal receivers. He could hear his father saying, “Every cadet has to stand satellite duty some time or another.”

He could still see the look on Frank Raige’s face outside the command center, and it still stung to hear his dad say what he’d said, though not quite as much as when it first happened. But Conner was still determined not to say anything out of line.

Not to say anything
at all
if he could help it.

He read the last line of data on one screen, then moved on to the next one in the methodical sequence recommended to him by the bleary-eyed female engineer who had sat in his seat the night before.

Conner could hear his mother, too, adding, “You’ve got to pay your dues.”

His parents had made those remarks in a restaurant the day before he entered cadet training, at a special dinner in his honor attended by his aunt Bonita and his uncle Torrance. But Conner hadn’t understood why they felt compelled to mention satellite duty when there were so many other aspects of his training they could have brought up.

Only a few minutes into his shift, he understood.

There were thirty screens, after all. He probably could have glanced at each of them and been done with it. Certainly, no one would have known. But Conner wasn’t like that. If Lennon had given him a job, he was going to do it.

Especially if Trey Vander Meer had pressured the Prime Commander into shifting the primary responsibility for monitoring satellite data to the Savant’s engineers. The Rangers would take only one two-hour shift a day now: this one.

All the more reason for Conner to pay the utmost attention every minute of his shift. If the Rangers were going to get only one peek at the data each day, it was more important than ever that that peek be a thorough one.

Not that he was surprised that none of the screens he had studied had anything alarming on them. The colony would have need of the Rangers one day, but he didn’t necessarily think
today
would be that day.

Fortunately, the system was a simple one to understand. Each satellite had a set of dimensions programmed into it that approximated the size of the Skrel craft from the aliens’ first attack five hundred years earlier. If an object entering the atmosphere of Nova Prime came anywhere near those dimensions, the satellite would transmit an alarm to Ranger facilities throughout the colony.

If the object was smaller, the satellite in question would simply record the passage of the object and add
the data to its logs. Anything that size would burn up in the atmosphere, anyway.

The second thing every cadet had to know was that a given satellite monitored only a section of the atmosphere, with very little overlap between satellites. Therefore, a meteorite that was observed by one satellite probably wouldn’t be observed by another, and in no case would it be observed by more than two satellites.

Simple
, Conner mused.

But whoever was on monitor duty wasn’t supposed to wait for an alarm. He or she was supposed to be alert for anything. Otherwise, why involve a human being in the process at all?

So Conner did his job, tedious as it was.

It wasn’t until he came to the twenty-sixth screen that he noticed something unusual. Or, at least, something he thought was unusual: The screen didn’t show anything entering the atmosphere of Nova Prime. Of course, that was a good thing. But it seemed strange for the screen not to have recorded anything, not even a little debris. He made a note of it in his report file, then moved on to the next screen and discovered that one didn’t have any entry data, either.
Well
, he thought,
that’s a coincidence
.

The twenty-eighth screen had a record of some debris, as did the one after it and the one after that. But not screens 26 and 27. Just for the heck of it, Conner checked the data from the previous shift. Both screens showed small amounts of debris entering the atmosphere over time. But not now. He ran a diagnostic on screens 26 and 27. They were working perfectly in all respects, just not showing any entry objects.

Conner sat back in his chair and massaged his chin. It was probably nothing, but just for the heck of it he went back to see when those screens had last shown any debris.

He leaned forward.

Seventeen minutes and twenty-two seconds before
the end of the previous shift, both screens had stopped showing any incoming material. Seventeen minutes and twenty-two seconds exactly.

Before that, both of them had registered small amounts of debris. Then, at exactly the same time, they had stopped. And neither of them had shown anything since that time.

Can’t be
, Conner thought.

He ran another diagnostic just to make sure he hadn’t screwed up the first one. It didn’t turn up any problems. The screens were fine.

I’ve got to tell Lennon
,
Conner thought
.

No
, said a voice inside him.
Remember what you told Dad? You were going to keep your mouth shut
.

So much for that promise
.

Conner lingered at the console only long enough to log out, his fingers flying over the command pads. Then he was out of his seat and heading for the door.

Conner had been watching Lennon go over the satellite data on his data pad for the last five minutes. It hadn’t been easy for the cadet to remain quiet, but he wanted Lennon to be able to concentrate, to appreciate the potential magnitude of the threat. Unfortunately, Lennon was the guy he had mouthed off to not so long before. But Conner had known he would have to face him eventually.

Besides, he had no choice in the matter. If he was right about the data, there wasn’t any time to waste.

Finally, Lennon looked up. “So you think … what?” he asked of Conner. “That we’re being invaded by someone?”

He said it as if it were a joke. As if the colony had never before been attacked by a species from another planet.

“I don’t know, sir,” Conner said, “but something’s going on. That much is obvious.”

Lennon smiled. “It’s not obvious to
me
, Cadet. I’ll grant you that the data deserves further study. But let’s not forget that these data receivers malfunction from time to time.”

“I ran a diagnostic, sir.”

“The diagnostics malfunction, too,” Lennon said. “Trust me; I’ve seen them do it on a dozen different occasions.”

“Sir, it still warrants a—”

“An all-points alert? Let me tell you something,
Cadet.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “There are people out there who have put us under a microscope, and those people are just waiting for us to do something stupid. Because as soon as we do, they’re going to point to it and say, ‘You see? Those Rangers are a bunch of Chicken Littles crying that the sky is falling. We can do fine without them.’

“Now, it may be that those satellites stopped receiving data for some nefarious reason. But my gut is telling me that it’s nothing of the sort—that in fact, it’s nothing more than a harmless coincidence. Worthy of investigation? Sure. But if we panic and declare a state of emergency and we’re wrong—that could be the end of the Rangers. And I’ll be damned if I’m the guy that brings that end about.”

“But sir,” Conner said, “what good are the Rangers if we can’t do the job we’re supposed to do?”

“That’s a good question,” Lennon said. “Here’s another one: What will this colony do without the Rangers when a
real
danger rears its head?”

But what if this is a real danger?

That was what Conner was going to ask. It was right there on the tip of his tongue. But in the end he held back. He could see by Lennon’s expression that it wasn’t going to do him any good.

“Thanks for your vigilance, Cadet,” Lennon said. “You’re dismissed.”

It took all of Conner’s willpower to say, “Yes, sir,” and return to his post.

Frank Raige was just taking his flier up for a routine bounce when his comm board lit up and he heard an urgent voice over his intercom: “Something’s falling out of the sky! No—there’s more of them—eight altogether! Forty thousand cubits apiece, best I can make it out! Doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before! Repeat—”

Frank didn’t need to hear any more. Harl Jones had as much airtime as Frank did. If he was sounding the alarm, it wasn’t for nothing.

But … falling out of the sky?
Eight of them?
It had been hundreds of years since anyone had had cause to say that. For all the Rangers’ talk about invaders, no one really expected to get a report like that.

Yet there it is
.

Just then, Frank’s communicator pulsed. He glanced at the readout and saw that it was Conner calling. But the veteran had no time to answer. He took note of the coordinates his colleague had sent, applied max thrust, and felt himself slammed back into his seat. The world—city, mountains, desert, everything—went by in a blur.

Moments later, he eyeballed what Jones was talking about. They were only a few kilometers outside Nova City, out on the flats. Big, gray, insect-looking things.
Skrel?
he speculated, recognizing how closely they resembled the aliens’ ships the last time they had appeared over Nova Prime.

A flier—Harl’s, apparently—was circling the vessels, no doubt in an attempt to get more data.
And taking a chance
, Frank thought. He didn’t see anything on the ships that looked like a weapons array, but it was hard to tell.

Frank got on his intercom. “Back up, back up!” He transmitted the coordinates for good measure even though Harl had done that already. Then he went in for a closer look.

The vessels looked sturdy if not particularly aerodynamic. They weren’t as gray as he had thought; there was an iridescent streak running through the material of their hulls, rainbow-colored like oil in sunlight. And they had plenty of nooks and crannies, enough to conceal whatever its makers had wanted to conceal.

Were they full of Skrel? An invasion force—or part of one? And were there other vessels like it dropping from the heavens elsewhere on Nova Prime?

Back at headquarters, Wilkins would have been apprised of the situation by now. She would be asking herself the same questions—and coming up with the same answer Frank had come up with:
Don’t know
.

At least not yet.

Half a minute later, another couple of fliers joined them. Within the minute, there were a half dozen of them altogether. By then the vessels were only a few hundred feet from the ground.