After Earth: A Perfect Beast (15 page)

As Frank watched, his stomach tightening so much that it hurt, one of the creatures ran right into a knot of confused colonists. Before any of them knew what had hit them, the thing cut a swath through them with its foreclaws, sending bodies flying into the buildings on either side.

Some of the people got out in time. But the others … Frank’s jaw clenched at the sight of how badly the creature’s victims had been ripped apart. It clenched even harder when he saw the beast shove its maw into the bloody remains.

An infestation had been unleashed in Nova City. An infestation the likes of which no one had ever seen before.

And there was nothing Frank Raige could do about it.

*   *   *

Bonita Raige hadn’t been in the field in what felt like forever, and so she didn’t feel fear at the prospect of facing the creatures from the stars. Instead, she experienced a weird sense of lightness, almost like elation.

Having made it to the city’s South Armory in no time flat, she was part of a mob of Rangers, each one grabbing a set of body armor, pulsers, and comm gear. Once she had slipped on everything she needed, she paused for only one thing.

Tapping the appropriate studs on her wristband, she called her husband and left a message. “Torrance,” she said, “I’m back! Wilkins is sending me into the field!”

She could imagine Torrance’s response:
“You want me to be happy she’s sending you into action? Are you nuts? Is she nuts?”

He would be concerned about her injury, of course. All it would take was one good shot to her head and Torrance would be a widower. And that was the way he would look at it, maybe even the very words he would choose.

But Bonita was a good squad leader. And the colony needed her.

Torrance would have asked her to think it through, to reconsider. But if she did that, the alien creatures would be in the center of town feasting on the people she was supposed to protect. So no, she couldn’t think it through. She had to act.

Bonita wished she could tell him that everything would be all right and know that for sure. But she was a Ranger. The first thing they had told her when she was a cadet was that nothing was for certain.

Nothing
.

Conner and his fellow cadets stood on either side of the shelter doors, covering the street with their pulser rifles, while a steady flow of their fellow citizens filed into the sanctuary.

“Easy,” said the Ranger in charge of their squad, a thickset woman named Eckersley. “No need to trample anybody. We’re here to protect you.”

But Conner had heard the reports. The creatures couldn’t be stopped with just a fusion burst. Hell, no one knew if they could be stopped at all.

Skrel
, he thought.

It was hard to believe, even for the guy who had gotten the first whiff of them. But the squad of engineers dispatched by the Savant to inspect the wreckage of the alien ship confirmed it. They found the same insignia on the side of the vessel that their ancestors had seen on the Skrel ships that had descended on the colony hundreds of years earlier.

Smaller, yes. Harder to identify from a distance. But definitely the same insignia.

The Skrel were back. Except this time they weren’t attacking with ships. They had gone a different route.

Conner had heard stories …

No
, he thought, driving them from his head. There was no time for speculation, no time for fear. There was only the task at hand.

He was a Ranger, and he had a job to do.

*   *   *

Wilkins saw Hātu
r
i enter her command headquarters with an older man, a fellow with a thick head of gray hair pushed back from a broad forehead. He wore a white lab coat with the Savant’s emblem sewn on the right breast.

“Commander Wilkins,” Hātu
r
i said, “this is Jean-Pierre Rambaldi, on loan from the Savant. He’s a
zoologist
.”

“At your service, Commander,” Rambaldi said in a cultured voice.

Wilkins couldn’t help glancing at the holographic screens around her, all of them showing her Rangers in action. Some were chasing the beasts; some were tending to the wounded. Some were covering the dead with fabric. The death count was rising way too quickly. She needed to know more about the enemy, and from what the Savant had told her, Rambaldi was their best bet in that regard.

“So,” Wilkins said, “what do you know about the beasts so far?”

“Keep in mind,” said Rambaldi, “that I’ve only seen as much as you have, Prime Commander. I’ve not had the chance to examine one of the creatures firsthand. I would need a corpse to obtain more definitive answers.”

“I get that,” Wilkins said. “Tell me what you know.”

Rambaldi nodded. “First of all, they’re sightless.”

Wilkins was surprised. They had done what they’d done without
eyes
? “How do you know?”

“We’ve yet to identify sight organs in any of the magnifications we’ve studied. Such organs, you see, would have to be in plain sight in order to be useful. And none are.”

It made sense. “So how do they track us?”

“They seem to be driven primarily by sense of smell.
Certainly not the first species we’ve encountered that depends heavily on the olfactory sense. But don’t assume that their sense of smell, or any other sense, works the way ours does. These are alien creatures. Even that which seems familiar about them may be wildly
un
familiar.”

“They’re also impervious to pulser blasts, from what we’ve seen.”

“Yes, though we’re not sure how. After all, pulsers pack quite a punch. Again, if I had a carcass to dissect …”

“What else?” Wilkins asked.

“The talons on the creatures’ limbs appear to be composed of a form of keratin, not unlike our own fingernails. But those talons are exceedingly sharp and exceedingly hard. Unbreakable for all intents and purposes.”

Wilkins nodded.

“They’re quick, too,” Rambaldi observed.

The Prime Commander grunted. “Tell me about it. We’ve clocked them at almost eighty kliks an hour.”

“Upward of eighty-five, actually. Slower when they try to maintain a steady speed for a longer period of time, but not much. Seventy, perhaps.”

“Okay, so we can’t outrun them,” Wilkins noted.

“They don’t tire, either. We’ve not seen them pause for rest. No sooner do they consume one kill than they begin seeking another. Based on that information, I would say they have very aggressive metabolisms. They convert their sustenance into energy much more quickly than anything we have seen before.”

“Don’t they have to sleep sometime?” Wilkins asked.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” said the zoologist, “but we haven’t seen it.”

“Any guesses as to how strong they are?”

“Strong enough to leap several meters at a time in any direction.”

Wilkins nodded. That fit with what she had observed. Unfortunately, she had yet to hear anything she could put to good use.

“I know,” Rambaldi said. “It’s frustrating. But they have weaknesses, I assure you. We just have to identify them.”

The Prime Commander’s attention was drawn to the holograms again. She watched one creature lope away from a human body it had picked clean. It moved easily, fluidly, not pausing once to sniff the air. If it depended on its sense of smell, it did so with confidence.

“We’ve been speculating,” Hātu
r
i said, interjecting, “as to whether these monsters are the Skrel themselves or some other species. What do you think?”

“Based on what we’ve seen of the Skrel craft—I’m speaking of their first attack, of course—these creatures are probably too big to be members of the same species.” He lowered his voice as if he were talking to himself. “They remind me of an alien version of the
Ursus arctos horribilis
.”

“What did you say?” Wilkins asked.

Rambaldi smiled a grim smile. “That’s the formal name for the grizzly bear. Something about the creatures’ gait, their size … reminds me of
Ursus arctos horribilis
.”

“Doesn’t matter what we call them,” Wilkins said. “What matters is that we find a way to stop them.”

Bonita could take care of herself
.

Torrance Raige fixed on that truth as he led his squad of six seasoned Rangers through the most densely populated residential section of Nova Prime City. The doors there were all closed, the windows boarded up with everything from plastic to sheet metal. Since dawn, when his patrol had begun, he had spotted just a few people hurrying here and there for supplies. Not that there were any food markets open. They all had closed as soon as word got out about the Ursa. Torrance grunted. Some scientist had come up with the name only the day before,
but that was what everyone was calling the creatures—
Ursa
.

It seemed to him that the word
Ursa
should describe just one of the beasts, but the scientist used it to describe all of them.
Leave it to an egghead to complicate things
, Torrance thought.

He hoped people’s pantries were better stocked than his own. Neither he nor his wife had been much for shopping trips. One of them had always brought something home on the way back from work. Now there was no place to go for food. The city had an eerie quiet to it, a bizarre and unsettling emptiness. If Torrance hadn’t had access to Ranger supply depots, he didn’t know
what
he would have done.

Gone to Frank’s place, maybe. Or Theresa’s
. For someone who lived alone, Theresa always seemed to have a lot of food on hand.

First sun was halfway up the sky, rapidly warming the air, and they still hadn’t sighted any Ursa. At first, Frank and his fliers had made it fairly easy to keep track of the things, for all the good it had done. But after their initial feeding spree, they had been harder to locate. It was as if they knew they were being watched from above and had found places to hide from that surveillance.

So they can be anywhere
, Torrance thought.
Anywhere at all
.

An intersection loomed ahead. Torrance gestured for two of his Rangers to check it out. He and the others stopped in their tracks. Valley and Abalo, both third-year Rangers, moved ahead and secured the crossroads. Only after they looked around and signaled the all-clear did Torrance and the others advance.

Valley and Abalo remained there until their squad mates had negotiated the intersection. Then they rejoined the group.

It was the procedure they had followed ever since they had left their barracks. Tedious, without a doubt. But
they weren’t in a hurry. They had the luxury of being careful, which was always preferable to being dead.

On Torrance’s left, Mayweather and Morales tugged on window coverings to make sure they were secure.
Not that it’ll matter if the Ursa really go to tearing at them
. But as far as they had heard, none of the creatures had tried to pry the humans out of their homes.
At least not yet
.

Then again, there had been plenty of humans around to hunt in the beginning. Now, with so few of them around, the Ursa might change their tactics.

“Good here,” Mayweather reported.

Torrance nodded. Then he turned to Rios and Le Clos on his right side. “Same here,” said Le Clos.

Torrance was about to nod again when something told him to look not left or right but
up
.

Suddenly a shadow passed over him, and he discharged his weapon at it. The long, pale form absorbed the flash of fusion-burst fire but seemed unperturbed by it. Then the thing was among them, reaching for Torrance with a razor-taloned paw.

He had a moment to see its face, if it could be called a face. No eyes, just as they had been told. Just a gaping black mouth ringed by a double row of sharp bone-white teeth. Words popped into Torrance’s head:
quick but not agile
. Testing the theory, he dived to his right, rolled, and came up mercifully unscathed.

By then, his squad had begun blasting at the Ursa from six different directions, each one careful not to get caught in line with anyone else’s energy bolts. The monster writhed under the barrage, clearly annoyed by it, maybe even hurt a little. Rios must have thought so because he tried to move in a little closer to increase the intensity of his beam.
Too close
, Torrance thought. He had already opened his mouth to order Rios back when the Ursa lashed out and disemboweled the Ranger with a sweep of its talons.

God
, thought Torrance.

His stomach churned at the sight of Rios lying there,
his insides spilled out on the ground in a red ruin, but he couldn’t allow himself to be slowed down. He still had five Rangers to keep alive. “Maintain your positions!” he roared. “Don’t let up!”

However, considering there were now only five Rangers left alive to fire at the thing, they had
already
let up. The Ursa snapped its head from side to side as if looking for another target, another human it could rip in half. Its legs bent as if it were gathering itself.

“It’s going to spring!” Torrance bellowed.

The only question was in which direction. It was answered a moment later as the monster went for Torrance. As before, he hurled himself out of the way. But this time he didn’t get away as completely as he had the first time. He felt a fiery pain deep in his thigh, ripping through flesh and muscle, dragging a groan out of him. As he rolled to a stop, he raised his weapon, pain and all. But the Ursa didn’t seem interested in pursuing Torrance. Free of the ring of silver-blue fire that had surrounded it, it scooped up a mouthful of Rios’s remains and bounded away.

“Pursue?” asked Valley.

“No,” Torrance said.
Not with the squad diminished
. “Stay here. Just send a comm report on ahead.”

“Yes, sir,” said Valley, and activated her naviband.

As the Ursa turned a corner and disappeared, Torrance took stock of his squad mates. They were all pale, all sweaty with fear and revulsion. And it wasn’t just from the way the thing looked or smelled or what it had done to poor Rios.

It was the alien-ness of it. It was the feeling that it had come from somewhere humankind had never known, both literally and figuratively.