After Earth (19 page)

This time the weapon did what he intended it to do: separate into two parts. The fibers flattened out at the ends, making two distinct batons. Kitai swung his new weapons in every direction, figuring that would drive the creatures back. But it didn’t. They began charging and jumping backward, mimicking Kitai’s moves. Before long, they were picking up sticks and clubs from the forest floor and using them to mimic the two ends of the cutlass.

“To your rear, cadet! Out to your rear!”

Through his gathering malaise, Kitai recognized the voice as his father’s. He looked behind him and saw that there was indeed an opening. Using it, he escaped the circle of baboons and took off into the forest. But the creatures gave chase.

Kitai was feeling faint, but he couldn’t let them catch him. He slashed and darted his way through the forest, trying to shake the creatures from his trail. Still, it seemed to him they were getting closer.

No, he thought, redoubling his effort. Instead of running around the rocks he encountered, he ran over them and launched himself over long stretches. He began putting more distance between himself and his pursuers.

But they switched tactics, too. They took to the trees.
And up there, among the thick, plentiful branches that blocked the sunlight, they were in their element.

He glanced back over his shoulder: The creatures were gaining on him again. They began snatching branches and large pinecones from the trees and hurling them at Kitai. And they were growing in number. If there were six of them before, there had to be fifty now, all swinging and jumping from branch to branch, throwing whatever they could find at him.

Suddenly, Kitai felt something hit him in the middle of his back hard enough to send him flying forward. But he didn’t dare go down or they would have him, and so he let his fall turn into a forward roll and came up running again. No sooner was he on his feet than he heard his father’s voice.

“Cross the river, cadet! I repeat, cross the river!”

What river?
Kitai asked himself. Then he saw it up ahead. It wasn’t
just
a river. It was a torrent punctuated with gouts of leaping white water.
It’s going to be hard as hell to get across
, Kitai thought.

Then he realized:
That’s the point
.

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the baboon creatures advancing through the trees. He took just long enough to secure his cutlass to his back before he dived headlong into the roiling water. As he swam, he saw the surface of the river explode with a relentless barrage of tree branches. But none of them reached him.

Unfortunately, he had to come up for air. When he did, the creatures unleashed another volley. But Kitai dipped down deeply enough into the water to avoid this one, too. Finally, he reached the other shore. Wading out of the water as quickly as he could, he cast a single glance back to see if anything was coming at him. Nothing was. Then he continued his frantic flight.

“Cadet,” said his father, “they are no longer in pursuit.”

But Kitai didn’t register his father’s words. He barely noticed that his lifesuit was its normal rust color again.

“I say again, they are not following you. Over.”

Kitai kept sprinting. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t
dare
.

“Cadet, you are not being followed! Kitai, you are running from nothing!”

There was a clearing up ahead. As Kitai reached it, he pulled his cutlass off his back and held it out in front of him. Then he made a 360-degree turn, prepared to fight anything in his vicinity.

“Put my damn cutlass away,” his father said. “Take a knee, cadet.”

Kitai forced himself to obey. But he still searched the edges of the clearing, looking for evidence of the baboons.

Cypher regarded the image of his son on his probe monitor. Kitai was wide-eyed, hyperventilating, frantic. The general
had
to get him to calm down.

Cypher rubbed his eyes. He was tired and getting more so. But he wasn’t going to let fatigue stop him. Suddenly he heard a beeping sound.
Kitai’s vital signs …
He checked the readout.

“Kitai,” he said, “I need you to do a physical assessment. I’m showing rapid blood contamination. Are you cut?”

His son didn’t respond. He looked shell-shocked, not at all like a Ranger cadet. Hell, he seemed like a child. And his lifesuit was fading to white.
Not good
, Cypher thought.

“Kitai,” he said sternly, “I need you to do a physical evaluation. Are you bleeding? Over.”

Slowly, ever so slowly, Kitai regained control of himself. Responding to his father’s command, he began to check his body. Of course, the evaluation required him to stand up, but when he tried to do so, he looked unsteady.

Off balance
, Cypher thought. “Kitai?”

“I’m dizzy,” said the cadet.

“Check yourself!” Cypher insisted.

Kitai looked at his hands. On the back of his left hand there was something Cypher couldn’t make out at first.
Then he zoomed in and saw what it was: some kind of leech. Or, rather, what leeches might have evolved into.

Repulsed by the sight of it, Kitai tore it off. But in doing so, he tore his skin. Instantly, a livid rash blossomed across the damaged skin.
It can’t be allowed to spread
, Cypher thought. It had to be tended to immediately.

As calmly as he could, he said, “Your med-kit, Kitai.”

His son snatched his pack off his back and fumbled around blindly in the med-kit. He looked worried. After all, he could see the rash, too. Kitai started to sway.

“I can’t stand up …” Still, he managed to open the med-kit.

In a clear, measured voice, Cypher said, “You have to administer the antitoxin in sequence. Inject yourself with the clear liquid first. Do it now.”

Kitai took the first hypodermic from the med-kit and popped off the protective cap. His hands were trembling.

“Dad,” he said, ignoring his father’s earlier admonitions to call him General or sir, “I can’t see.”

Cypher wanted to help his son, to administer the drugs himself. But he couldn’t. He was sitting in the cockpit of a ruined ship, his legs broken, and Kitai was too far away.

“The poison is affecting your nervous system,” he said instead. “Relax. Stay even.”

Kitai fumbled with the needle—not once but twice. He stopped, looked up, looked around, his eyes dilated and swelling shut. Cypher could see his son’s panic deepening. The veins of Kitai’s hand began turning black.

“Dad,” he pleaded, “please come help me. I can’t see! Please come help me!”

“Stay even,” Cypher said. “Inject yourself directly into the heart with the first stage now!”

Kitai took a deep breath, struggling to remove the top of his lifesuit. He couldn’t control his fingers, which he couldn’t see, and they shook from fear. He was running
out of time and needed to do this quickly no matter how sick he felt. As he exposed his chest to the warm sun, it was hot to the touch and slick with sweat. He shook with increasing violence and just had to inject the antitoxin. It sounded so simple, but he was shaking so hard. Finally, he gritted his teeth so hard that they hurt, grimaced, and finally stuck himself with the hypodermic squarely in the chest. Then he pressed the plunger.

“Now the second stage,” Cypher said. “Hurry.”

“Your left,” Cypher told him. “To your left!”

Finally, Kitai’s fingers seemed to find the second hypodermic. But by then, his eyes were swollen closed. His hands shaking, he removed the protective cap on the hypodermic. Then he stuck himself with it. But he couldn’t press the plunger. His thumb looked like it was too swollen to move.

“I can’t feel my hands!” Kitai groaned. “I can’t—”

Suddenly, his eyes rolled back in his head. His eyes flickered. He fell to his knees, on the verge of losing consciousness.

Cypher got an idea. “Press it into the ground! Kitai, roll over on it and press it into the ground!”

For a moment, he didn’t know if his son had heard him. Then, with a final effort, Kitai threw himself forward. The plunger on the hypodermic pressed against the ground as he slumped over. After that, his limp body lay motionless.

But had he pressed the plunger? Had the hypodermic released its payload into Kitai?

Cypher watched the holographic monitor.
Come on
, he thought.
Work, damn it
.

Then, ever so slowly, Kitai’s blood contamination levels began to change, to decrease slowly. The red beeping lights turned to yellow, signaling the gradual return of his vital signs to normal. Cypher sat back, relieved. “Great work, cadet. Now you’re going to have to lie there.”

Of course, Kitai couldn’t hear him. He was unconscious.
But Cypher kept talking as if his son were still awake because it felt better than talking to himself.

“The parasite that stung you,” he said, “has a paralyzing agent in its venom. You’re just going to have to lie there for a little bit while the antitoxin does its job.”

Cypher glanced at the feed from Kitai’s backpack camera. It captured the grotesque doughiness of his badly swollen face. A single tear rolled from the corner of his misshapen eye. For Cypher, it was an excruciating experience. There was nothing he could do to help his son.
Nothing
. He thrived on control, insisted on control, but in this situation control eluded him.

Compared with the forest in which Kitai had collapsed, he looked pitifully small. And the sun, Cypher noticed, was starting to slip past its apex. Cypher glanced at his timer. It would take a while for the contents of the hypodermic to do their job, but Kitai didn’t have forever.

As the sun dropped in the sky, approaching the horizon, the temperature began to drop as well. Cypher didn’t like it. He could see plants withdrawing into themselves, closing up to conserve heat in anticipation of what would be a brutal nighttime chill.

But Kitai couldn’t close up. He couldn’t protect himself. And Cypher couldn’t protect him, either. He could see that his son’s face was getting better. The swelling was gone. But he still lay unconscious, his eyes closed, his lifesuit pale.

“Kitai,” Cypher said.

No response. A gentle dusting of frost began to form on and around Kitai’s weakened frame. Cypher wanted to wake him, needed to wake him. He could hear the wind howling around his son, see the edges of the furled leaves flutter ferociously.

“Kitai,” he said again, “it’s time to get up.”

But Kitai’s eyes remained closed.

Please
, Cypher thought, looking at his son’s beautiful
face. He prayed for anything, anything at all. A muscle twitch. A flicker of life.

“Kitai,” he said more forcefully, “I want you to blink your eyes.”

Suddenly, Cypher heard something over his comm link. It was faint, shallow, but there was no mistaking it. Kitai was breathing.
Breathing
.

It was a start. But there wasn’t much time left. A tiny hint of ice showed up on the cadet’s left eyebrow.

“Son,” Cypher said, deeply concerned, “I need you to please blink your eyes.”

Slowly, ever so slightly, Kitai did as he was asked. In a raspy voice, he said, “Hey, Dad.”

He was looking directly into his backpack camera as he spoke. Cypher stared at the monitors and the bio-readings and exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

“That sucked,” Kitai said. Looking a little unsteady, he got to his feet and began gathering his gear.

“That is correct,” Cypher stated, always seeing things for what they were. “The temperature is dropping five degrees every ten minutes,” he added, emphasizing the urgency of the situation. “You’ve got twelve kilometers to the hot spot.”

Cypher checked Kitai’s vitals. They were stable. As he watched, his son gathered his gear and got ready to go.

Reassuming his general mode, Cypher said, “Let’s see that ‘ten kilometers in fifty minutes’ that you spoke about earlier, cadet.”

Kitai set his naviband and turned to the north. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said, but in a voice that betrayed how weak he must have felt from his ordeal. Still, he set out at a sprint over the rugged terrain ahead of him. All around him, there were signs of the deep freeze that would accompany the onset of darkness. Animals were scrambling underground. It began to snow, lightly for now.

“SitRep?” Cypher said.

“Ten mikes out,” his son reported. “Good. All good.”

Out there, maybe
, Cypher thought.

Inside the cockpit, it wasn’t good at all. The words
arterial shunt
stared back at Cypher from the med screen. He pulled a long, narrow piece of tubing from the med-kit, then took out a thin surgical knife, leaving it positioned over his left thigh. Next he ripped open the side of his uniform pants, exposing the side of his leg. He could see the nasty gash there that was leaking all the blood. The holographic screen behind him displayed his arteries and veins. One blood vessel had been severed.

Cypher cast a quick glance at Kitai’s camera view. It showed the cadet pelting through a snowy landscape that was getting snowier all the time. Kitai was doing all he could to enable them to survive. It was up to Cypher to do the same. Without fanfare, he plunged the thin surgical knife into the side of his leg.

It hurt like
hell
. There was nothing Cypher wanted more than to slip the knife back out again. But he didn’t. Instead, he cut through the flesh of his leg, using the readout on the holographic display to guide him as he sought the end of the severed artery.

Finally, he pulled the knife out. But only for a moment. Then he drove the knife into his leg again, this time higher up on his thigh. Again the knife cut through tough muscle tissue until it reached the other severed end of his artery.

Only then did he withdraw the knife for good. By then he was shaking uncontrollably. He stared at a point in the distance and regained his composure for a moment. At the rate he was losing blood, he couldn’t afford any more than that. Jaw clenched against the pain, he inserted the tubing into one of the incisions in his leg. He could see its progress on the holographic image behind him. As he fed the tubing into his leg, it slid toward the artery and then into it. As Cypher
watched, the artery closed around the end of the tubing.