After Earth: A Perfect Beast (35 page)

But whoever was asked to keep the second one at bay
would be taking a huge risk. He couldn’t ask anyone in his charge to face that kind of jeopardy.

That was why he would take on that assignment himself.

“Everybody,” he barked into his comm gear, “we’ve got two targets now. Lucas is going to lead the assault on Target One, our original objective. I’m going to engage Target Two, slow it down.”

“Not without help,” said Blodge, loyal as ever.

“That’s an order,” Conner insisted.

Then the time for talk was past because Target Two was bearing down on them, gathering speed as it came. Conner pelted forward a half dozen steps to meet it before it reached the rest of the squad.

Having watched hours of bloody combat footage, none of which ended happily, he knew the Ursa would try to pounce on him. It was a successful tactic when its prey was running away, which almost invariably had been the case. But Conner knew better than to run away.

He slowed down for just a fraction of a second to make the monster think he was going to retreat. Then he ran at it even faster so that when the Ursa sprang, he was able to dive in below it, twist his body around until he was facing upward, and take a rip out of its belly.

He had hoped that the damage would be enough to disable the creature, maybe even kill it. But it only made the Ursa more ferocious.

No sooner did it land on the ground with nothing to show for its attack than it whirled and launched itself at Conner a second time.

And a second time he sprinted forward to dive underneath the thing. Except this time when he twisted and used his cutlass to cut a furrow in the Ursa’s underside, the wound he made was deeper, deep enough to release a spray of thick black ichor.

I hit something important
, Conner thought as he got his feet beneath him.
An artery or its equivalent
.

But he knew better than to become overconfident.
The Ursa was still moving, still baring its teeth at him, still every bit as deadly as before.

But it no longer seemed as eager to spring at him. It was advancing on him slowly instead, its shoulders and haunches close to the ground, as if it had learned the error of its ways.

Conner had no choice but to back off, matching the Ursa’s pace. Switching to a pike, which offered him more length, he poked at the creature. It roared and tossed its head but didn’t stop padding toward him.

Suddenly it reached out and swiped at him with one of its paws. Conner saw that he had miscalculated, allowed the thing to get too close. To keep from getting raked by the Ursa’s talons, he had to fling his arms up and backpedal like crazy.

As it was, the thing sliced the front of his uniform to ribbons and came within a hair of shredding his chest as well.

Still, he would have been all right if the road behind him hadn’t been so full of debris. As he retreated, his eyes fixed squarely on the Ursa, he felt his heel catch on something heavy. Before he knew it, he was going down, sprawling unceremoniously on his back.

The Ursa didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the fact.

Conner hugged the cutlass to him, careful not to stab himself with its pike, and rolled as hard as he could to the left. A fraction of a second later the Ursa’s paw came down in the place he had vacated, ripping up the ground.

Scrambling to his feet, Conner went quarterstaff. Then he held his cutlass up in both hands to ward off the Ursa’s next blow, because he
knew
there would be a next blow. The cutlass took the full impact of the creature’s attack, exactly as it was designed to do.

But unlike his weapon, Conner wasn’t made of super-strong metal alloys. As much as he hated to admit it, he was only human. When the Ursa’s paw hit his quarterstaff, it ripped it out of his hands.

Leaving him completely and utterly defenseless. The
monster seemed to know it, too. With renewed fury, it flung itself at him.

Conner managed to dodge its rush and watch it crash into the wall behind him. Without respite, the Ursa attacked again. And again Conner threw himself out of the way.

But as he got to his feet, he knew he was a dead man. The Ursa was too fast, too strong, and Conner’s muscles were burning, his breath coming in huge searing gasps.

He wasn’t going to win this fight. All he could do was prolong the inevitable.

As he thought that, the Ursa rounded on him and opened its maw, and out of it came a great and terrible rumbling. It seemed to be saying,
You thought you could stand against me? You’re meat, nothing more. You’re what I rend with my talons and grind between my teeth
.

Conner bit down on his fear. The Ursa might kill him, it might tear him apart, but it wasn’t going to make him beg for mercy—not even in the privacy of his own mind.

Suddenly, the Ursa lowered its head and charged him. Conner braced himself, ready to try to throw himself out of harm’s way one more time if he could.

But before the monster could reach him, something happened—something long and bright, glinting in the light of the suns and burying itself in the back of the Ursa’s neck.

Forgetting about Conner, the creature spun and looked for the source of its pain. Conner looked, too, and found it in the form of an empty-handed Raul Blodgett. Nor was he alone. Six other Rangers were trailing behind him, their cutlasses held aloft, the black blood of a dead Ursa spattered across their uniforms.

The dead Ursa in question was stretched across the street behind them, motionless, nothing more than a pale lump of alien flesh.

But the live Ursa, the one Blodge had wounded with
his cutlass, was starting after him. Conner couldn’t let that happen.

“Hey!” he yelled, picking up a chunk of debris and flinging it at the creature. “I’m still here!”

The debris hit the Ursa in the back of its head. Enraged, it turned on Conner again. He started to fall back, wondering if he had paid for Blodge’s life with his own.

Then another silver shaft hit the monster and stuck in its back. And when it whirled, a third one lodged in its face, just above its maw.

The creature writhed and rolled and swiped at the third shaft but couldn’t get it out. In the meantime, Conner’s squad went blade and started hacking at the Ursa from behind.

The Ursa roared, turned, and snapped at its tormentors. But they weren’t there anymore. They had spread out on either side of the thing and were wreaking havoc on it.

Little by little, the Ursa succumbed. First it crashed to its knees. Then it dropped its head. By the time Lucas drove his blade into its neck, it was all but done.

As the monster breathed its last, Conner looked into the faces of his squad. He saw pride there and hope. They’d done what they’d set out to do.

Now others could do the same.

Marta Lemov experimentally moved her new wheelchair back and forth. Her one good hand rested on the small switch that maneuvered the wheelchair, and she used it as deftly as she could. Nevertheless, she still kept miscalculating and banging into walls in her small room. Marta was impatient under the best of circumstances, and these were hardly the best.

She heard a knock at the door and with a sigh of frustration turned to see Theresa standing there.

“I should have known,” Marta said, thumping the
wheelchair with her fist. “When I woke up and this thing was just sitting here, I should have known you were responsible for it.”

“I see you got into it all by yourself. You could have asked for help, you know.”

“I prefer doing things on my own.”

“That’s the difference between us, I suppose. You never ask for help, and as an augur I do nothing
but
ask for it.”

“Yeah? And who did you ask for help with
this
thing?”

“Him.” Theresa chucked a thumb toward the door. “Or, more accurately,
them
.”

Marta glanced with only mild interest toward the door, but when two men entered, she actually gasped in surprise.

One was Donovan Flint, the Savant. He nodded toward the wheelchair and said calmly, “Don’t let the learning curve deter you, Ranger. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

What had he done, build the chair himself? But Marta figured she could ask that question later. At the moment, her attention was focused on the man
next
to Flint. Her reflex to stand to attention was so ingrained that she automatically tried to get up out of the chair. “General Hātu
r
i,” she said. Then she quickly corrected herself. “I mean Prime Commander Hātu
r
i.”

“Let’s stick with Commander,” said Hātu
r
i. “And please, sit back down. We don’t need you injuring yourself even further.”

Marta did as she was instructed. Hātu
r
i seemed slightly amused. “You seem surprised to see me, Ranger.”

“With all respect, sir, I’m a grunt. But you … I mean, after the death of Prime Commander Wilkins, you’ve had so much dumped on you. I just figured that you had far more important things to do than visit me.”

“Nothing’s more important than my people. And Savant Flint feels the same way. That’s why he put this chair together for you.”

So he
did
build it
.

“Thanks,” she told Flint. “But—”

“But why did we bother?” Hātu
r
i asked. He glanced at Flint, who nodded in confirmation of something Marta could only guess at. “Well, as it turns out, we can use your help.”

“My help?” It was hard for Marta not to laugh. “Commander, I’m in a wheelchair. A fine wheelchair,” she acknowledged in Flint’s direction, “but a wheelchair nevertheless.”

“Yes. And you’re going to need it to get around,” said Hātu
r
i.

“Around where?”

There was momentary silence as if the three of them hadn’t decided who was going to broach the subject. It was Theresa who finally took a step forward and said, “I proposed to the Primus that the augury embark on a program where we bring comfort and reassurance directly to the people of Nova City.”

“You mean like … what? House calls?”

“That’s exactly right,” Theresa replied. “They seem reluctant to come to us, so I thought we should go to them. And at first the Primus agreed to it. He declared it to be an excellent idea. And then, shortly afterward, he suddenly canceled the program. The ostensible reason was that he had decided it was simply too dangerous out there for us.”

“Yeah, well,” said Marta, who was not the least bit surprised, “I never thought I’d say this, but the Primus is one hundred percent right.”

“Still,” Hātu
r
i said, “Augur Raige’s idea is a good one. But with the Primus missing, there’s no one to approve it. And therefore no augur to carry it out.”

“All right,” said Marta, who was still feeling as if she had walked into the middle of a play. She sensed that she was supposed to have some sort of function here, but she couldn’t imagine what it was. “But I’m still uncertain what bearing this has on me.”

“It’s about faith,” Flint told her.

“I thought you were a man of science,” Marta said.

“There are all manners of faith, Ranger. I have faith in our ability to survive and overcome. I have faith that through our science and in our force of arms we will triumph. Many, though, need something more than that. They feel they have to place their faith in something greater than themselves. And frankly, anything that will keep the people calm and confident in the proposition that we will conquer these monsters rather than giving up and sliding into total anarchy—”

“Which simply makes
our
job harder,” put in the commander.

Flint continued, “—is the kind of faith we need to triumph over our current circumstances. That, Ranger, is where we’d like you to come in.”

“Meaning—?”

“The augurs need guidance,” Theresa said. “They are on the whole decent and caring individuals. And they excel at doing what they are told. But without strong leadership, they find themselves uncertain and afraid.”

“So
you
take control,” Marta told Theresa.

The augur shook her head firmly. “I am one of them. They will not respond to me, nor will they obey my commands, in the way that we would want them to.”

“That, Ranger,” Hātu
r
i explained, “is why we need
you
. I am giving you the field promotion of Commander, effective immediately. Your assignment is to work with Augur Raige here to implement the door-to-door visitation plan she developed. You will oversee the augurs and coordinate their activities with a squad of Rangers who will escort them.”

“And when the Primus surfaces?”

“As he will,” Theresa said with unflinching faith in him despite everything.

“I will have a chat with him at that time,” Hātu
r
i said. “We’re walking a delicate line,
Commander
,” he continued, putting a delicate emphasis on Marta’s new title. “The last thing we need is for the Primus’s lack of faith to go public. You understand?”

“You mean you’re worried that if people have seen that the Primus himself has lost faith, it may seem pointless for anyone else to maintain theirs.”

“Exactly right, Commander,” said Hātu
r
i. “The only question is: Are you up for this endeavor?”

Marta remembered how recently it had been that she’d felt nothing but contempt for the Primus. Now she actually felt sorry for him. “Am I being given a choice, General?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then I’m up for it.”

The general snapped off a salute, and she returned it even though it was with the wrong hand. “And General …” she said.

“Yes, Commander?”

“Thank you,” she said in a voice both formal and sincere, “for giving me a purpose again.”

“We all have a purpose, Commander. Every so often, though, we lose sight of it. So just consider this a vision adjustment.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Conner sat in the same chair from which he had watched his aunt Bonita die under the talons of an Ursa and watched Lyla do the same thing.

He wanted to turn away. He wanted to scream, hit something, cry. But he didn’t. He sat there and watched the satellite feed.