After Earth (48 page)

He waited until he was sure it would try to rake him with its claws or spew its venom at him. And then he waited some more. But the Ursa didn’t go after him.

At the last possible moment, he threw himself out of harm’s way, and the thing went past him.

I’m invisible to it!
he thought.
I’m goddamned invisible!

But Kayembe was still at risk. Nava and Bentzen closed with the Ursa to try to slow it down and give Kayembe a chance. But there was only one guy who could save the big man, and that was Cade.

The Ghost
.

He didn’t owe Kayembe a thing. But he owed
himself
something. He owed himself the look on his teammates’ faces when they saw what he could do, and maybe regretted the way they had treated him.

He still wasn’t an expert with his cutlass, but he was good enough. The Ursa had two soft spots. One was underneath, a big target but difficult to reach. The other was on its back.

With that in mind, Cade configured his cutlass into a spear, got a running start, and leaped onto the beast’s back. Then, before it could shake him off, he drove the point of his weapon into the Ursa’s soft spot.

Or at least what he
thought
was its soft spot.

It was hard to aim with the thing moving so quickly beneath him, and hard to know whether he had hit the right spot. But his luck held. The spear didn’t hit a piece of smart metal.

It dug in a good half meter, as far as he could have hoped.

Then
the Ursa shook him off.

But it didn’t matter. By the time Cade stopped rolling, he could see that the creature had begun to stagger, his cutlass sticking up out of its back like a toothpick in a big ugly hors d’oeuvre.

Fall
, he thought.

It fell. And shuddered. And then stopped moving altogether.

Cade grinned as he got to his feet. And he continued to grin as he climbed up onto the Ursa and pulled his cutlass out of it. It came loose with a soft, slithering sound.

He wiped the cutlass clean on the Ursa’s dark, gloopy hide. Then he climbed down and returned the weapon to its cylindrical, undifferentiated shape.

Luck is on my side again
, he thought. He could do anything he wanted. He could bait an Ursa, for God’s sake, and get away unscathed.

Cade stood over the monster and pounded himself on the chest with his fist.
Who’s the man now?

And the irony was that he hadn’t broken a single rule. He had done
exactly
what Tolentino had asked him to do.

But even as he congratulated himself on his victory, he saw that his fellow Rangers were gathering farther down the street.
Why?
he wondered.
The Ursa is over here
.

Then he saw that someone was lying on the ground, and he ran over to join them.
Not Kayembe
, he thought. The thing never caught up to Kayembe; Cade had seen to that.

Then who …?

He didn’t see her until he had joined the knot of Rangers, didn’t see that it was
Nava
stretched out on the ground. She was lying face up, eyes closed, one arm twisted behind her back. Caught by the dying Ursa’s flailing claws.

No …

Cade’s knees got weak. His cutlass fell from his fingers. He pushed his way past the others and dropped to his knees beside her.

“Nava?” he moaned.

There was blood on her face.
Lots
of blood. He grabbed her shoulder and shook her. “Nava!”

Somebody pulled him back, but he slipped free and fell to Nava’s side again. Bentzen ran a mag-scan the length of her body.

“She’s alive!” Cade growled. “She’s
got
to be!”

Then he saw Bentzen shoot Tolentino a glance and shake her head. Cade’s throat closed with grief. Tears squeezed out of his eyes.

“No!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “No!”

But he couldn’t deny it enough to make Nava breathe, to make her live again, to make her open her eyes. Nobody could.

Cade didn’t sleep that night. He kept thinking about Nava lying there in the street in Old Town, her face covered with blood. Her eyes—those beautiful eyes—closed forever.

Because of
him
.

He had finally begun to drowse off when he felt someone shaking him. It was Tolentino.

“Commander Velan wants to speak with you,” she said.

Velan?
Cade got out of his bunk and pulled on his uniform, all the while wondering what the commander wanted with him.

First sun was just creeping over the horizon when Cade entered Velan’s office. Velan’s adjutant waved him in.

“Bellamy,” Velan, said as Cade entered. “Close the door.”

Cade did as he was told. Then he stood at attention.

“You’re probably wondering why I called you here,” Velan said. “The answer’s a simple one. I wanted to know when you’re planning to leave.”

Cade swallowed. “Sir?”

“We’re not idiots, Bellamy. There’s a leak every now and then, which is what allowed your friend Andropov to find out when the charges against you would be
dropped. But we’ve got informants as well, which is why we were able to arrest Andropov last night—and, incidentally, find out what he had told you.

“Mind you, it wasn’t a secret that we’d be dropping the charges. I would have told you that myself if you’d asked me.” Velan sat back in his chair. “You’re a free man, Bellamy. There’s no prison sentence hanging over your head. You can go.”

Then he turned away to examine the graphics on a holographic display at his side, as if Cade no longer existed. Because in the commander’s world, he didn’t.

I’ve got what I wanted
, Cade thought. So why was he still standing there? Why wasn’t he halfway out the door?

“I want to stay, sir,” he said, the words sounding like they were coming out of someone else’s mouth.

“Stay?” Velan echoed, something like annoyance in his voice. He cast a sideways glance at Cade. “What makes you think that’s still an option?”

“Why … wouldn’t it be, sir?”

“Leaving aside the question of what you planned to do and whom you planned to do it with, I have to look at how you performed as a Ranger. According to your company leader, you’re not particularly suited to what we expect in the Corps. Self-reliance may be a positive trait when you’re running illegal goods on the black market, but we prefer our Rangers to work together, as a team.”

“But … you said you needed
Ghosts
.…”

“We do, in the worst way. But only if they can work within the Ranger framework—which you, apparently, can’t do. I’m not placing the blame for this on you, Bellamy. If anything, it was my mistake trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

And he returned his attention to the hologram.

Cade had been dismissed. But he wasn’t leaving. After a while, Velan noticed that. “Is there something else?”

“There is, sir. I’d like to remain a Ranger.”

The commander shook his head. “I’m afraid the decision’s already been made.”

“I’ve got unfinished business with the Ursa, sir.” Cade felt a surge of resentment. “You don’t want me to be a Ranger? Fine. I’ll go out and hunt them on my own.”

“That’s against the law.”

“The law never stopped me before, sir.”

A muscle rippled in Velan’s jaw. “Why so adamant about staying, Bellamy? You couldn’t stand being a Ranger, according to Andropov.”

“I’ve changed my mind, sir. Nava Ericcson … She died while I was thinking about
me
. About what I could do.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Bellamy. Ericcson’s death wasn’t your fault.”

“But I could have prevented it. She stood up for me, sir. Trusted me.” Cade’s throat began to ache. “You don’t find trust everywhere. You don’t find people who care about you. That’s a gift—like my knack for surviving, like my being able to ghost.
A gift
. And when someone gives you one of those, you don’t give it back. Not if you’ve got half a brain, you don’t.”

“And you think you’ve got half a brain?” Velan asked him.

Cade straightened. “I do now, sir.”

Velan looked at him for a long time. Then he sighed. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’ll let you try it again—with a different squad. Understand, it’ll be a whole new start.”

Cade nodded. “Thank you, sir. You won’t regret it.”

“But this is
it
, Bellamy. If you can’t hack it
this
time, you’re done. You understand?”

“I do, sir.”

Velan eyed him a moment longer. Then he said, “Dismissed.”

Cade left the office. Then he crossed the compound in the direction of the barracks, determined not to screw up a second time.

*   *   *

Cade’s new squad didn’t contain a single veteran except for his company leader, a lean, bearded man named Gwynn. No one else had more than a couple of months of Ranger service under his or her belt.

They were reminders of how helpless he had felt as he watched Nava die. How completely and utterly helpless. For all his ghosting ability, he hadn’t been able to do a thing to save her. He had been so concerned with leaving the Rangers, he ended up losing the one person he cared about.

And yet there he was again, facing the possibility of a terrible loss. People were depending on him, putting their lives in his hands. And as far as he could tell, not one of them had faced a live Ursa before.

Cade trained with them as he had trained with Nava’s squad. No—even harder. But he didn’t learn their names.

After all, there was a Nava among them. He didn’t know which of them it would be, but the odds were good that one of them would die under the claws of an Ursa. And what would it be like for him to see that—to see another human being get torn apart because he couldn’t kill the monster soon enough?

Cade remembered something his mother had told him just before she passed away. Insanity, she had said, quoting someone from way back, maybe even somebody from Earth, was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So maybe he was insane. But he was going to do everything in his power to keep what happened to Nava from happening again. His mother’s death hadn’t affected anyone but him, but Nava’s death would be different. It would
mean
something.

Cade didn’t demand perfection just from himself. He demanded it of his teammates as well. He hounded them without respite, without consideration for the way
they felt about him. He kept after them even when Gwynn didn’t seem inclined to do so.

Clearly, they didn’t like it. A few of them barked back at him. One guy in particular, a big red-haired guy almost the size of Kayembe, looked ready to go after him after Cade chewed him out on the far side of the ravine.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” the guy demanded.

When Cade didn’t answer, the guy took a swing at him. Cade ducked and planted his fist in the guy’s belly. And when the guy doubled over, Cade cut him down with a blow to the side of the head.

Gwynn could have disciplined him, but he didn’t say a thing. He just called out the names of the Rangers who would be negotiating the ravine course a second time, as if nothing had happened.

Then came the squad’s first training exercise with the mechanical Ursa, out on the streets built in the desert. Everyone followed Gwynn’s orders, but it wasn’t Gwynn they kept glancing at to see if they were doing everything right. It was Cade.

And he was fine with that.

He
wanted
them to know he was watching. He
wanted
them to know they couldn’t get away with anything less than their best.

It was after he had plunged his cutlass into the construct’s back, as he was drawing it out again, that he caught a glimpse of a shadow passing over the squad. The kind of shadow an Ursa would make if it were leaping from roof to roof, even if it were otherwise camouflaged.

He wanted to yell, but instead he touched his naviband and said, “Ursa!” Then he leaped off the back of the mechanical construct.

A moment later, the creature appeared in the middle of the street.

“Surround it,” Gwynn barked, exactly as he was supposed to.

They fanned out, four Rangers to each side of the street. But Cade’s assignment was different from anyone else’s. As a Ghost, he was supposed to find a soft spot and go for the kill.

He was looking for an opening, confident that he wouldn’t be seen by the beast until it was too late, when the Ursa suddenly went after Gwynn. He had gotten too close, Cade realized. But then, corralling one of the beasts wasn’t an exact science. It was easy to make a mistake.

Gwynn managed to activate his cutlass’s blade configuration in time to deal the Ursa a slash to the face, but that didn’t stop the creature. It smashed into the squad leader with bone-rattling force, sending him flying backward into the base of an ersatz building.

Cade had the opening he had been looking for. While the Ursa was busy with Gwynn, he would be able to land on it and plunge his cutlass into the soft spot on its back.

But Gwynn would be mauled first.

He knew that with the same certainty with which he knew his own name. And he couldn’t let it happen. He had seen Nava spill her blood on the ground, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to another of his teammates.

So Cade leaped onto the thing’s back and used his cutlass to vault over it.

He twisted in midair and came down between the Ursa and Gwynn. The monster didn’t see him, of course. He could have gotten out of the way at the last moment and remained utterly unscathed.

But that wasn’t his plan.

Going hook with his cutlass, he buried its business end in the Ursa’s mouth. Then he yanked it to the side for all he was worth.

The move pulled the Ursa off its course, keeping it from sinking its teeth into Gwynn. However, it also forced Cade to take the brunt of its charge. He twisted
his body at the last moment to try to avoid the impact—but he couldn’t.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground not far from Gwynn, the metallic taste of blood thick in his mouth. He had taken a beating. But he was still alive, still able to think, still able to find his cutlass in the dirt.