After Earth: A Perfect Beast (4 page)

His name was Conner. Unfortunately, he hadn’t distinguished himself the way the Kincaid boy had—far from it. But he hadn’t been eliminated from the game, either.

“Maybe he has a little promise after all,” Wilkins allowed.

That would be good, considering the Raiges had been around since the exodus from Earth as well. In fact, the very first Prime Commander had been a member of the Raige clan, and the family was still well represented in the Rangers—not only by Bonita but also by her husband, Torrance, and her brother, Frank, Conner’s father.

Some of the colony’s best times had taken place when the Raiges and the Kincaids were acknowledged rivals, vying to see who could contribute the most to the Rangers. Not that Wilkins expected that sort of thing to happen on her watch. To that point, Lucas Kincaid had demonstrated pretty clearly that he
had
no rivals.

“Red’s going to win this,” Hātu
r
i concluded.

“Let’s see if Green has any idea of what’s going on,” Wilkins said, bringing up a view of the valley that seemed likely to include the Green Squad.

Unfortunately, Wilkins’s video feed was blocked by some of the projections on the valley walls. She manipulated the controls on the panel in front of her, trying to get a better angle. Finally, she found one that wasn’t obscured.

“There they are,” Hātu
r
i said, pointing to what was left of Green Squad.

Wilkins nodded. “And they have no inkling that Red is narrowing the gap.” It was disappointing. These were
supposed to be seasoned cadets. They were supposed to know what they were doing at that point.

Then Raige said, “I only count four of them.”

The Prime Commander counted. “Four,” she echoed. “Who’s missing?”

It only took her a moment to figure it out. “Your nephew, Bonita.” Conner Raige was nowhere to be seen.

“Where is he?” asked Hātu
r
i. He turned to Wilkins. “With your permission?”

“Go ahead,” she said.

Hātu
r
i ran through every view they had of the valley. Conner Raige wasn’t on any of them.

“Want me to check his transponder?” Bonita Raige asked, her fingers hovering over a control panel. A tap would trace the emergency beacon woven into Conner’s uniform.

“You worried?” asked Wilkins.

Raige shook her head. “No.” Though she might have been, just a little.

“Then,” said the Prime Commander, sitting back in her chair, “let’s see how this plays out.”

The more Wilkins watched, the more she wondered. Then she saw Conner appear as if by magic, and she stopped wondering. The cadet had come out of the ground behind Red Squad, where nobody—including Red, apparently—had expected him, and he began picking off the Red cadets one by one.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hātu
r
i said.

Wilkins was watching Conner execute what might have been the cleverest and most audacious maneuver she had ever seen in a war game. Before it was over, Kincaid and all the rest of his Red Squad cadets had been hit with beams from Green Squad’s practice pulsers. A screen to the Prime Commander’s right flashed nine names, one after the other, denoting that the Reds were no longer live participants in the exercise.

When the show was over, Wilkins smiled and said,
“That was pretty damn impressive. And he wasn’t even the leader of record.”

“It’s in the blood,” Bonita Raige said, keeping a straight face though her heart was bursting with pride.

The Prime Commander nodded approvingly. “Apparently so. Quite a nephew you’ve got there.”

Conner Raige hadn’t had such a good day in a long time.

He acknowledged that fact, if only to himself, as he led his team between two of the metal spires that supported the rust-colored fabric structure of his cadet barracks. Once under the smart fabric roof, he felt the temperature drop and was grateful. It was a relief to get out of the fiery suns of Nova Prime, which he had been forced to endure for the last several hours.

Conner wasn’t just hot. He was tired, bone-tired, as tired as he had ever been before. But it was a
good
tired. His headgear, tucked securely under one arm, usually felt like a burden to him. But today it was a tangible reminder of what he and his Green team had accomplished.

He could still see the looks on the faces of the Reds as they whirled about, having come to the realization—too late—that there was someone lurking behind them. Looks of surprise. Looks of embarrassment. Looks that said it wasn’t fair for them to lose the competition at the last moment when they had been winning it all along.

Conner would hang on to that memory for a while. That much was certain. After all, it wasn’t often he did something he could be proud of.

That was one of the problems with being born into a family of legends. Everything he did was measured against what other Raiges had done, all the way back hundreds of years to the time of the Exodus from Earth. No one in the colony ever came out and told him that, but they didn’t have to. He could see it in their eyes.

That’s pretty good, they would be thinking, but not as good as what your great-great-grandfather did. Or your grandmother on your dad’s side.

Or your father
.

Conner’s bunk was at the far end of the barracks, one of several dozen beds arranged in perfectly neat, uncluttered rows and columns. When he reached it, he hung his headgear on a hook protruding from his bedpost. Then he swung himself around the post and plopped himself down on the mattress.

All around him, he could hear members of his Green team doing the same. It felt good to lie down as he watched the barracks roof undulate under the press of an afternoon wind. He closed his eyes, and again he saw the faces of the Red team.

And he found himself smiling.

It felt funny, as if the muscles in his face weren’t used to it. But then, smiling wasn’t something Conner did a whole lot these days. In fact, it was something he probably hadn’t done at all since he had become a cadet. But he was doing it now. And why not? He had earned it, hadn’t he?

Damned right
, he thought.

Naturally, he wasn’t going to say that out loud. He wasn’t going to say anything that could be considered a taunt of Red Squad. But a private little grin? He could certainly be permitted that.

Just then, Conner heard someone whisper something. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was a familiar one. Opening his eyes and turning in the direction of the whisper, he saw two of his Green teammates. One was a guy named Augustover. The other was a woman named Ditkowsky.

They were frowning at him. Just for a moment, of course. Then they went about their business.

Not that he hadn’t seen them shoot him disapproving looks before. And it wasn’t just Augustover and Ditkowsky who had done so. At one time or another, a lot of other cadets had done the same thing.

Conner didn’t get it.

If one of
them
had turned around a war game and transformed defeat into victory, he would have patted that cadet on the back and congratulated the hell out of him. He would have sung his praises. But no one was congratulating Conner.

He sighed and allowed himself to fall back against his mattress.
What the hell …?
He had understood the attitude of the other cadets when he first arrived, especially after he screwed up not just one time but a couple. His dad had told him that new cadets were treated like garbage, that they had to prove themselves before they got any respect.

But what he had done that morning in the desert should have made up for the screwups. It should have more than made up for them.

So why are they still giving me the stink eye?
he wondered.

He had the answer, and it was a bitter one, before he had even finished asking himself the question:
Because I’m a Raige, even more so here than in the rest of the colony. Because no matter how hard I try to be a Ranger, no matter what I accomplish, nothing will ever be good enough
.

The hell with them, then
, he thought.
The hell with all of them
. He would do what he had to do on his own, without their approval.

As he thought that, he heard a murmur run through the barracks. Curious, Conner picked up his head and saw the tall, gray-haired figure of Prime Commander Wilkins negotiating a path through the barracks.

Suddenly, every cadet in the place was standing at attention, Conner among them. He wanted to sneak a peek at Wilkins’s expression, maybe get a sense of what she was doing there, but he couldn’t. He had to look straight ahead.

There were a few moments when all he could hear were the clacks of Wilkins’s heels on the hardwood
floor beneath them. Then the Prime Commander said, “At ease.”

Conner relaxed and turned his head. Unfortunately, Wilkins’s iron features didn’t give much away. But then, that was always the case.

“I just spent several hours watching you cadets compete out there,” she said. “You deserve feedback and you deserve it now, while everything that happened is fresh in your minds.”

Conner wouldn’t have minded getting that feedback later, after he had gotten some rest, and he was sure his fellow cadets felt the same way. But no one said so. After all, it was the Prime Commander.

“In some ways,” Wilkins said, “you acquitted yourselves well. But not in
all
ways. All three teams made costly mistakes. In the context of a war game, you have a chance to learn from those mistakes and make improvements. But when you’ve completed your training and become Rangers—and as you know, that won’t be the outcome for everybody in this barracks—you won’t have the luxury of making mistakes. Because if you screw up as a Ranger, you’ll pay with your life or the lives of your squad mates.”

She looked around the barracks. “Keep that in mind as you prepare for the next round of the war games, which will commence exactly one week from today.”

The cadets were absolutely silent in the wake of the announcement, but Conner could hear their groans in his head nonetheless. They weren’t supposed to have engaged in war games again for six months. A week between games wasn’t much at all. It was almost nothing.

He couldn’t remember any other cadet class having that kind of burden placed on it.
So why us?

He wondered if it had anything to do with the criticisms he had heard were being leveled against the Rangers lately. Not from anyone in particular, but an undercurrent of them. The other cadets had noticed. And if
they
had noticed, it was a good bet that Wilkins had, too.

If the Rangers were under fire, Wilkins might be thinking, they had to be more careful than ever not to make mistakes. Hence the new round of games so soon after the last one.

“Any questions?” asked the Prime Commander. There weren’t any. “Then you’re dismissed.”

Everyone went about his or her business. In most cases, that meant hitting their bunks again. Certainly it did in Conner’s case. But he had barely gotten comfortable before he saw that Wilkins hadn’t left the barracks. In fact, she was standing right over him, eyeing him without expression.

“Cadet Raige,” she said, “you are not dismissed. Walk with me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Conner, swinging his legs out of bed. He got up to follow Wilkins, the eyes of the other cadets on him.
What the hell have I done wrong now?
he thought.

The Rangers’ ruddy sandstone command center, which housed the Prime Commander’s office, looked like just another piece of the desert landscape. It was in the middle of the Ranger compound, past the other cadet barracks, the mess hall, and the armory.

Wilkins didn’t say a thing to Conner until they reached her office and went inside, and even then all she told him was, “Close the door.”

He did as he was told. Then he waited for his superior to take a seat behind her desk.

Finally, she looked up at him and said, “Cadet Raige.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, so curious that it hurt.

“That,” she said, “was quite a spectacle out there this morning. One of the few bright spots, in fact, in what was frankly a mostly unimpressive war game.”

Conner bit back a smile as hard as he could. It was one thing to look pleased with himself in the barracks and another to do so in the Prime Commander’s office. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Where did you come up with that strategy?”

Strategy?
The word implied that he had thought in advance about what he had done. But he hadn’t thought about it at all.

“I just went with my gut,” he said.

The Prime Commander’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Your gut?” She didn’t look satisfied.

“I just knew what it would take to lure Red Squad
into a trap,” Conner ventured, hoping it would sit better with Wilkins. “And I did it.”

But Wilkins’s expression didn’t change. “You just
knew
.”

He tried a different approach, one he thought she would want to hear. “I come from a long line of Rangers, ma’am. My dad, Frank Raige … I believe you know him.”

“I do,” she confirmed.

“And there’s my uncle Torrance and my aunt Bonita. And everyone else in our family that’s served with the Rangers for the last six hundred years. I guess some of what they know rubbed off on me, um, a little.”

“And that’s your explanation?” Wilkins asked.

Obviously she didn’t like that one, either. She was looking for something else, but he didn’t know what. “Yes, ma’am,” was all he could say.

“Well,” said the Prime Commander, “you’re a superior tactician, Cadet Raige. That much is clear. But you’ll never get a chance to put your abilities to work on behalf of the colony until you can articulate the thinking behind your tactical choices. At least not as long as I’m in charge. Because what may seem like blind instinct to you is actually an application of intellect. It’s that intellect I’m interested in, and it’s what you should be interested in as well.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Conner said again, though he didn’t necessarily agree with the intellect part. To him, instinct was more important than intellect. In fact, instinct was the number one quality that made someone a good Ranger.