After Earth: A Perfect Beast (38 page)

Conner saw what his friend was talking about. “And I’ve stood up to them. But you think somebody else won’t be able to.”

“Even Wilkins was having a hard time with this stuff, and she was hard as rocks. She had to give in on the budget, right? All that stuff about cutting back; it was destroying the Rangers, making us an afterthought.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What do you think will happen if you get killed out there? You think people are going to take it easy on your replacement? Someone will try to bury us all over again.

“And this time,” Blodge continued, “there’ll be no one to fill the breach. Hātu
r
i, maybe, but he’s already as
much as said he’d make a lousy Prime Commander. Kincaid? He’s a bigger hothead than you are. They’d be no match for someone who knew how to work public opinion.”

“True,” Conner conceded. “But then,
I’m
not ready to take on someone like that, either.”

Blodge looked shocked. “What are you talking about? You’ve got the public eating out of your hand.”

“Sure, because our campaign against the Ursa has been a success. People are grateful. They think the Rangers are heroes. But what happens when the Ursa are all gone? People have short memories. They’ll forget what the Rangers did for them. They’ll start to feel cocky. And they’ll listen when Rostropovich or someone else starts talking again about cutting our funding.”

“All the more reason to have you around to remind them.”

“Me?” Conner laughed. “I’m eighteen. Why would they listen to me?”

“Without you we would never have gotten rid of the Ursa. We’d be hiding in our houses, waiting for the creatures to kill us.”

“
You
know what role I’ve played in this, and so do the other Rangers. But who knows outside of the Corps? Not many. The Savant, sure, but he’s not going to pin any medals on me. So really, what am I? Just an eighteen-year-old who did a good job filling in for his superior. A Raige? That’s nice. Always did like those Raiges.”

Blodge held his hands out, seeking understanding. “What are you saying?”

“That I’m expendable like anyone else.” He thought about Lyla. “And that I’ve got no choice.”

Blodge looked at him for a while. Then he said, “Guess I’ll see you before you go, then.”

“I’m counting on it,” said Conner.

He waited until his friend left. Then he went back to packing his salt tablets.

Desert sunsets were beautiful, Conner thought as he hummed across an expanse of red-clay flat on his skipjack in the last rays of second sun. In fact, he couldn’t imagine anything
more
beautiful.

When he was little, he and his family had gone out from Nova City and camped out in the desert, finding themselves in the embrace of the land. They had made fires and huddled around them against the evening chill, and Conner’s mother had sung funny songs.

It seemed like a long time ago.

But then, the Ursa had changed so many things. Now Conner meant to change them back.

Gash was more than a predator engineered to destroy, if the Savant had it right. It had become a symbol of death and misery and despair, no doubt exactly what the Skrel had intended when they had sent the Ursa to Nova Prime. Humanity wouldn’t be free of its nightmare until that symbol was destroyed.

I’m coming for you
,
Conner thought
.

There had been reports of an Ursa—a big one, bigger than any of the others—heading out that way. It had to be Gash. It was the only one of its kind still unaccounted for, the only one that had escaped the scrutiny of the Savant’s scientists.

Of course, it might take a while for Conner to find him. That was all right. He wasn’t in a hurry. In the cities, people rushed back and forth.
But not out here in the desert
.

In the desert, you took your time.

*   *   *

A few hours after full dark, Conner landed the skipjack and laid out his bedroll. Then he set up a ring of monitors around him that would wake him if anything got close.

Considering the reputation of the monster that shared the desert with him, he might have had a hard time sleeping. But he slept soundly and without dreams.

After all, he cherished simplicity. The Primus made his life complicated. So did Vander Meer. So did the intricacies of a hundred Ranger personalities that he had to fuse into one purpose.

But hunting Gash? What could be simpler than that?

In the morning, Conner ate and drank and took a salt tablet. Then he stood up bare-chested in the cool, still air and checked his cutlass. He turned the weapon in his hand, and it glistened in the soft pink light of first sun, long and slender like its namesake. Long and slender and deadly.

Sliding and tapping, he turned its business end into a blade that shone in the pristine light of first sun. Then a pike. Then a hook. And so on.

Lyla was a genius
. She was also beautiful, as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, but as soon as the thought entered his head, he thrust it away. He couldn’t be thinking about Lyla now. He had to focus on the task at hand.

On the Ursa. And on the cutlass he would use to destroy it.

It was light, so light that he felt it was part of his hand. Perfectly balanced for optimum maneuverability.

Of course, there was that
one
slide-and-tap combination he had to be careful of, the one that activated the scythe function. The one that would cause the cutlass
to fly apart in a million directions, his own included.

Lyla had
agonized
over that failing. That one failing out of everything she had accomplished in engineering the cutlass. If he hadn’t gotten involved, the Savant wouldn’t have let the cutlass out of Lyla’s lab.

But it wasn’t a failing. It was an
asset
. Yang was the one who had pointed that out to him. And if Conner got the chance, he was going to use it to good advantage.

No
, he thought, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead.
Not if. When
.

It was almost midday when Conner came in sight of another chain of mountains, smaller than the one into which Nova City had been built. It was called the San Franciscos after a chain back on Earth that was also rust-colored, though the one on Earth apparently had been bigger and more impressive.

He didn’t know why Gash would have ranged so far from Nova City if the Ursa was engineered to attack human beings. However, there was plenty of game in the San Franciscos. Maybe Gash, unlike the rest of his kind, had more of a yen for other kinds of prey.

Not all humans were alike. Maybe the same went for Ursa.

As Conner closed the distance between himself and the San Franciscos, something occurred to him. Something grim and a little frightening.

If he died on this mission, the Raige bloodline would come to an end. After all, Grandpa Joshua had died when Conner was twelve, and he’d had only one grandchild—Conner himself. Uncle Torrance—for reasons Conner never had learned—had not had any children, and Aunt Theresa didn’t seem likely to have any, either. She had celebrated her fiftieth birthday recently, and as far as Conner could remember, she had never had a boyfriend, much less a husband. She had always
been too devoted to her faith to think about romance, even before she became an augur—or so his dad had told him.

Of course, Conner had plenty of cousins on his mom’s side of the family. Rebecca Raige had been born one of four sisters, and each of them had given birth to at least a couple of children. But none of them were Raiges. They couldn’t carry on the name.

That leaves just me
, Conner thought.
And if I make one mistake, one wrong move …

He shook his head.
A world without Raiges
. It was unimaginable. All those sacrifices over the long history of humanity on Nova Prime, all those acts of heroism … gone. Not completely, of course, but nobody would attend to the family history the way the Raiges themselves had.

Was he the first Raige who had ever faced such a possibility? He wished he knew. Of course, it was too late to go back through the family archives and find out. He could do that only after he returned to the colony.

If he survived.

No
, he thought.
I can’t let myself think that way. The Ranger who worries about being beaten is already beaten
.

A Raige had said that, he recalled with a smile. Carter Raige, who had become Prime Commander hundreds of years earlier. He was talking about the Skrel and how as a child he had gone looking for one of the alien ships without regard for his own life.

In the end he found the ship and gave the Savant of that time a chance to figure out how its shields worked. And the colony survived. All because one little boy had the guts to take a chance.

The Ranger who worries about being beaten is already beaten
. It was good advice. He would do well to remember it rather than fret about his family coming to an end.

Conner leaned into the wind on his skipjack. The air was warm and dry on his face.
Soon
, he thought.

He didn’t have any way of knowing for sure, but he could feel it in his gut.
Soon
.

Late in the afternoon, with first sun dropping down in the sky, Conner reached the San Franciscos. He heard the wind howl through the smooth red rock formations, hooting as if it were amused. But then, it had never before seen what it would see if Conner was right about Gash’s having holed up there.

The problem was that the mountains were rife with overhangs that obstructed his view. He wouldn’t be able to find Gash unless he got off the skipjack and continued his search on foot.

He would be a lot more vulnerable on the ground. But then, the same thing went for the Ursa. After all, the mountain passages were narrow. It would be difficult for Gash to maneuver.

With all that in mind, Conner landed the skipjack on a shelf of rock. Then he took his cutlass in hand, climbed down from the shelf, and found a cleft that wound its way through the range.

First sun dropped out of sight as he negotiated the cleft. Then second sun followed it. And no sign of Gash.

Conner was eager to confront the monster, but he didn’t want to do it while he was sleeping. If he didn’t find Gash soon, he knew, he would have to double back to his skipjack, which had his sleeping gear and his perimeter monitors, and resume the search in the morning.

But he still had half an hour at least. He stopped for a moment, just long enough to pull a drink of water from his canteen.
Maybe I’ll get lucky
.

Suddenly, Conner realized something with terrible clarity. He wasn’t the hunter anymore. He was the
hunted
.

Whirling just in time, he caught sight of the Ursa as it emerged from the cover of some rocks. It was huge, pale, with thickly muscled limbs and curved talons
the size of Conner’s head—easily the biggest, most fearsome-looking Ursa he had ever seen.

There was a livid scar across half its face, or what passed for a face. The scar that gave it its name.

As the monster loomed against the sky, its maw wide, its claws extended, it let loose a roar that Conner could feel in his bones. Then it bunched itself and launched itself at him.

It was faster than he’d expected, faster than any of the other Ursa he had seen. Conner flung himself to one side, careful to maintain his grip on his cutlass.

A claw tore open the front of his uniform and scored the flesh underneath, setting Conner’s chest on fire. But it didn’t kill him. He rolled to his feet, his cutlass at the ready.

It was a good thing, too, because the Ursa had already landed and was turning in his direction.

It didn’t have the same range of senses that humans did. The Savant’s people had established that fact. But it knew there was prey within reach. Conner was certain of that.
Dead
certain.

He was certain also of what he wanted to do. Trusting in his ability to manipulate the cutlass, he did it.

As Gash came at him a second time, Conner summoned a blade and slashed at the creature. The move drew a black splash of blood from one of its forelegs.

Just as important, Conner ducked back beneath an overhang before Gash could return the favor. But he was out again a moment later, pressing his attack before the monster could whirl in the tight space afforded it.

He called up one function after the other so quickly that Gash had all it could do to adapt. First the spear. Then the mace. Then the hook. Then the blade again.

But the Ursa avoided them, every one of them, as if it knew they were coming, as if it had a crude animal sense of what Conner would do and when he would do it. Of course, that was impossible. It was just a beast, wasn’t it?

You’ve just got to be faster
, Conner told himself.

He gritted his teeth and attacked with redoubled speed, not just with single blows but also with combinations, coming at the creature from every angle he could manage. It didn’t seem to make a difference. Gash was a step ahead of him. Conner began to see how this Ursa had earned its reputation as the most deadly of its kind on Nova Prime.

Doesn’t matter
, Conner thought.

His muscles screamed. Sweat fell from his forehead, found its way down the sides of his face, and dripped from his chin. Lean and fit as he was, he felt his throat burn like a furnace as he pulled in breath after hot salty breath.

Because he wasn’t just fighting the Ursa. He was fighting the desert as well. And of course fighting
himself
.

Every part of him wanted to stop, to give up, to go home. But he couldn’t do that.
Wouldn’t
do that.

Except little by little, Gash was forcing Conner to retreat. And with each step backward, he was less protected by the rock formations around him. With each bit of ground he yielded, he emerged onto a flat plateau where the Ursa had a decided advantage.

He tried to take the offensive again, to push Gash back into the cleft. But he couldn’t. He was faltering, his arms and legs growing leaden despite his determination to destroy the creature. And the more he faltered, the closer he came to the edge of the plateau.