After Earth (43 page)

A scenario begins to unfold in Jon’s mind as he advances.
The workers took shelter in the chamber. It kept them safe. But they can’t leave for fear of the creature
.

Jon holds his hands out, the empty one palm up. He’s learned that this gesture poses a question. In this case, the question is: Where’s the Ursa?

The workers return the gesture, signifying that they don’t know. Yet they have line-of-sight access to all parts of the station. So the creature has camouflaged itself. This is valuable information.

They’re now on even footing, Jon and the Ursa. Neither can be seen by the other.

Unfortunately, the creature won’t reveal itself until it’s about to pounce. With the workers constrained to remain in the power chamber, they won’t become prey. That leaves only one other possibility.

Jon turns to his squad mates, who are coming up behind him. He points to the one nearest to him, Tseng, and says: “You and I will scout ahead. The rest of you remain here.”

Jon doesn’t know if Tseng understands what he has in mind. Either way, she doesn’t hesitate. She moves down the hallway with him, her cutlass a pike like his.

The Ursa could be anywhere. They watch carefully for a sign of it. However, they reach the power chamber without getting such a sign.

The chamber is encircled by a strip of open floor about fifteen feet wide. It’s enough space to hold an Ursa who could be monitoring its prey, smelling their fear through the air vents in the chamber.

Waiting for them to emerge.

It no longer has to do so
, Jon reflects.
If it’s here, or anywhere in this vicinity, I’ve given it another option
.

He’s barely completed the thought when a huge form seems to materialize out of thin air. It’s a blur of pale hide and smart metal blue, and it strikes Tseng before either she or Jon can make a move.

Tseng goes flying backward and skids across the floor. She finally stops thirty feet away.

She’s already dead, her chest caved in by the impact, by the time the Ursa lumbers after her. But she’s served her purpose. She’s brought the beast out of hiding.

Jon’s squad mates go after it. They weave a web of silver with their cutlasses. But there’s not much room for them to operate in the corridor, not nearly enough for them to surround the Ursa as they’ve been trained to do.

Jon watches as the creature swipes at Saturria and
tears his arm off. The others come forward to cover him while Jakande applies a tourniquet.

Jon looks at the cutlass in his hand. He might be able to kill the Ursa with it. But he feels no desire to do so.

His fellow Rangers are in mortal danger, but that fact doesn’t faze him in the least. He isn’t human anymore. The Primus was right about that—he sees that now. He has as much in common with Tseng or Saturria or Jakande as he does with his cutlass. In other words,
nothing
.

Then he realizes that someone’s standing behind him. Turning, he sees that it’s Doctor Gold. She’s wearing the same white lab coat that she wore at the medical center, a lock of her hair tucked behind her ear, her eyes the same pale green.

The other doctors insisted that she wasn’t real, that she was a figment of his imagination. But she
looks
real, as real as any of the Rangers who followed him there.

“Doctor Gold,” he says. “What are you—?”

“Jon,” she replies, her voice tight and urgent yet just as musical as he remembers, “you’ve got to help these people. You’ve got to kill the Ursa.”

“Why?” he asks.

Her brow puckers. “Because I’m
asking
you to.”

It isn’t much of a reason. But because it’s Doctor Gold who’s asking, Jon accepts it.

The Ursa is completely unaware of him. He capitalizes on that fact, taking a run at it and eyeing the one vulnerable spot on the creature’s back.

He misses it on purpose.

But he comes close enough to make the creature shriek with pain and rage—to hobble it, slow it down, and force it to address the invisible threat behind it rather than the visible prey before it.

It jerks him off its back, sending him crashing into the wall. Something snaps in his side, but he manages to scramble to his feet.

“Get out!” he yells despite the pressure in his side. “And take the workers with you!” He turns and gestures
for the workers in the power chamber to leave it and run.

They do as he asks, falling over one another to get out of the chamber and down the corridor. But the Rangers hesitate. They have their duty, after all.

Again he yells: “Get out!”

With obvious reluctance, they follow his order. The Ursa turns to go after them, but Jon won’t let it. He stoops to pick up Tseng’s cutlass and, without breaking stride, leaps onto the creature’s back. Then he drives the point of the cutlass into the center of the Ursa’s soft spot.

The creature whirls, no doubt intending to confront its attacker. But Jon is still on its back. He transforms his cutlass into a blade, cutting up the Ursa inside. Then he turns it back into a pike and into a blade again.

With each transformation the cutlass does more damage, weakening the beast a little more. Finally, Jon pulls his weapon out of the Ursa and drives it home again, even deeper than before.

It’s a mortal blow.

Making a gurgling sound in its throat, the creature whirls, rears, and tears at the air with its forepaws. Jon slips off it and presses his back against the wall, then slides away so that the Ursa doesn’t kill him with its death throes.

In what seems like an attempt to dislodge the cutlasses, the monster slams itself against a wall. But it only succeeds in driving the weapons in deeper.

The Ursa goes wild. It spins, crashes into one wall and then the other, screams in its agony.

Jon doesn’t know what a complete human being, someone still in touch with his emotions, would see in the Ursa at this point. A menace that has to be finished before it can kill again? A beast that needs to be put out of its misery?

A moment later, the question becomes moot. The Ursa takes one more long, lurching stride. Then it falls over on its side, shudders, and dies.

A gout of venom spills from its mouth and pools in a slowly widening circle, viciously eating the floor beneath it, hissing and raising twists of black, oily smoke. Then even the smoke and the hissing stop.

It’s over
.

Jon has never been so close to a dead Ursa. As it lies there, inert, he comes to a realization: He has something in common with the creature. The Ursa is a biological machine, engineered to carry out one purpose and one purpose only: to kill. And so is he.

So is he
.

Jon looks around for Doctor Gold. She’s gone. Somehow he’s not surprised.

He takes stock of himself. A couple of his ribs are broken, and half his face is bloody from a cut over his eye. Otherwise he’s unscathed.

But his victory means nothing to him. Victory, defeat … they are simply events in a featureless series of events, strung together one after the other, all of them meaningless.

Then Jon hears something and realizes he’s not alone. At first he thinks the workers have come back for some reason. However, the sounds are too loud, too heavy. There are other Ursa in the station.

More than one
, he thinks.

Even if they can’t detect him, it’ll be difficult for him to finish them all off. Not that he cares what they do to the Rangers or the workers or other Novans. But
Doctor Gold
seemed to care.

Which is why, holding his side, Jon makes his way to the power chamber.

On the way, he passes Tseng. Her eyes stare up at him. They don’t look any different than they did a few moments earlier. But there’s a trickle of bright red blood from the corner of her mouth that tells Jon she’s dead.

He continues to the chamber. Its door is open, the workers having left it that way. Jon moves to its control console and slides his fingertips along its black command
strips one by one, increasing the pressure of the station’s magnetic fields on its plasma supply.

Just then, the Ursa shed their camouflage. Jon was right. There are three of them.

They don’t know he’s there. They also don’t know what he is planning.

A blinking red danger light comes on, causing every surface around Jon to strobe with its lurid reflection. He continues to increase the pressure. A voice, echoing throughout the enclosure, warns him that conditions in the facility are reaching a critical level—one that will result in its destruction.

Jon isn’t daunted in the least. In fact, destruction is precisely the outcome he has in mind.

In the golden light of morning, the air mercifully cool on his skin, Cypher Raige walks through the debris field that was, until the events of the day before, the site of the North Side Power Relay Facility.

Raige has spoken at length with the survivors of Blackburn’s squad. They have all said the same thing, that both Blackburn and the Ursa were destroyed in the explosion.

The magnitude of the blast seems to support their observation. There are chunks of ceramic composite—pieces of the relay facility—hundreds of meters from the building’s footprint. Nothing exposed to such a massive release of energy can have survived.

Raige frowns.
And yet …

The Savant’s forensic team has discovered bits of flesh containing Ursa DNA. Plenty of them, in fact. It’s no less than what Raige expected.

But as many scientists as the Savant has put on the job, not one has been able to turn up a sign of
human
DNA.

It’s puzzling, to say the least. And Raige doesn’t like
puzzles. Especially when they have such a profound effect on his colony’s prospects for survival.

He considered approving four surgical procedures along the lines of Blackburn’s. However, given the mysterious circumstances of Blackburn’s demise, he will have to put those procedures on hold.

A shame
, he thinks, but he has no choice. Until he knows more about Blackburn’s death, he can’t allow another Ranger to undergo amygdala surgery.

It’s a bitter development, as bitter as the smell of ashes in Raige’s nostrils. He’d had high hopes for Nizamani’s program.

Such high hopes
.

The second sun is beginning to melt into the western horizon, its race run, and every rock and grain of sand in the desert is touched with fire. The San Francisco Mountains in the north seethe as if made of lava. A much smaller, more distant chain in the south writhes in what seems like agony.

From Jon’s vantage point on a high bluff, he sees for miles in every direction. What he doesn’t see—doesn’t
wish
to see—is any part of Nova City.

That is why he has made the trek out here. To be alone in the desert, far from his fellow human beings. Far from their striving and their purposes and their emotions.

If he had stopped before reaching this point, someone might have found him and tried to persuade him to go back. But not now. He is beyond their reach, beyond their help. He is exactly where he meant to be.

It has taken him days to reach this bluff. On the first day, he became thirsty and then hungry. On the second, his hunger and thirst got worse. On the third, it was difficult for him to go on.

But he went on anyway.

A normal man would have balked at the idea of walking
into the desert without food or water. A normal man would have done whatever he needed to do to survive.

Jon has no needs. No needs at all.

He only has preferences. He prefers to escape the way others look at him. He is tired of explaining his lack of motivation to them. Not that he blames them. He was their hope, after all. But he’s become something else, something more like the Ursa he was supposed to destroy. They have to accept the fact that their hope was misplaced.

So he has come to this place to be alone, to let nature—
his
nature—run its course. To let the desert claim him in its own good time.

Does he wish he had never become a Ghost? Never undergone the operation that gave him the ability to go undetected by the Ursa at the cost of his humanity?

Certainly, his life would have been different. He knows that, thinks about it. But he doesn’t feel any regret regarding his decision.

He doesn’t feel
anything
.

And in the fiery stillness of the desert, under a perfect blue dome of sky, he waits. For what?

For something that might not appear. After all, he can’t control his life, not even the last bit left to him. Even as he searches for it in the great, dark expanse, he knows he may be denied it.

The sky turns black. The stars come out. He falls over on his side, too weak to sit up. But somehow, he finds the strength to right himself.

Then he sees something off in the distance.

A tiny figure, limned in starlight. A feminine one in a white lab coat. It’s an odd garment to wear in the desert.

As the figure gets closer, he recognizes the blond hair. It tosses in the breeze, obscuring the figure’s face. But only for a moment.

Then he sees it clearly and knows it’s
her
.

Again he falls over on his side, and the ground is cool
under his cheek. But this time he can’t push himself up no matter how hard he tries.

“It’s all right,” she says, her voice as soft as the wind. She sits down beside him. “Don’t get up on my account.”

“I didn’t know if you would come,” he says.

“Yes, you did. I told you I wouldn’t abandon you.”

He realizes that she’s right. He knew. He knew all along.

She looks up at the stars. A tiny piece of their light is reflected in her eyes. “It’s beautiful here.”

“Is it?” he asks.

“I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.”

She puts her hand over his. It’s warm with life, much warmer than his hand. There was a time when he would have loved that touch, or so he believes.

“How long can you stay?” he asks.

“As long as you need me,” she says.

Jon waits for her to look away, as his training has taught him.

She never does.