by Peter David
It wasn’t every day Commander Rafe Velan of the United Ranger Corps paid a visit to a lowly black marketer.
“Bellamy,” Velan said, his voice deep and resonant. It echoed in the cell.
“That’s right,” Cade replied cautiously.
He had seen Velan on news broadcasts since he was a kid, it seemed. He felt like he knew the guy. But there was a world of difference between them.
Cade’s mind raced. Velan wasn’t there to shoot the breeze. He wants names, I bet. And he thinks I’ll be freer with them if it’s a commander doing the asking.
Except it wasn’t going to work. Cade was a lot of things, but a snitch wasn’t one of them.
“Listen,” he said, “thanks for the visit and all, but—”
“I’ll make this short,” Velan said, interrupting him without apology. “I’ve got a proposition for you. You can rot here in prison for the next eight years, which is the sentence you’ll likely receive, or you can do your colony a favor.”
Cade smiled. “A favor …?”
“Yes. You can help us eliminate the Ursa.”
It took Cade a moment to figure out why Velan would want his services in that regard. But before this went any further, he figured he ought to set the record straight. After all, Velan would find out on his own soon enough. “I haven’t exactly earned a reputation for honesty, but I should tell you that what I did in the warehouse—”
“Is exhibit a rare talent. Our psych people think you’ve lived on the edge for so long, fending for yourself, you just don’t react to danger the way other people do. Fear has been replaced with survival instinct. Whatever the reason, it’s a talent we need if we’re ever going to get rid of the Ursa.”
“What I meant to say,” Cade pressed, “is I don’t know how I did it. Or, for that matter, how to do it again.”
Velan shrugged. “We believe your lack of fear enabled you to remain invisible to the Ursa—to ghost. It’s possible it was a one-time thing, and equally possible that the next time you confront an Ursa, it will tear you apart. But it’s also possible that you’ll do exactly what you did before, with or without the knowledge of how it happened.”
“You really think so?”
“Would I be standing here if I didn’t?”
Cade considered the proposition. “So it’s a crap-shoot.”
“Ultimately, the question is whether you’ve got the stomach for a little gamble.”
Cade chuckled to himself. A gamble? “Now you’re talking my language.”
Cade had barely sat down on his bunk in the cadet barracks before he found a woman looming over him, a rawboned woman with dark skin and thick copper-colored hair. He gathered from her rust-brown uniform and the insignia on her shoulder that she was a squad leader. His squad leader if the way she was glowering at him was any indication.
He got to his feet. That was how they did it in the Rangers, wasn’t it? They stood whenever a superior office was in the room.
“You’re Bellamy,” she said in a voice like iron. It wasn’t a question.
Nonetheless, he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Tolentino. You’re mine now.”
Cade couldn’t help smiling a little.
“Something funny?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Was just thinking that this gig might not be too bad, after all—”
“Get dressed,” she said, obviously not amused. “We’re training at the ravine in twelve minutes. Past the command center, on the left. If you’re late, you’ll be cleaning boots the rest of the day. And just so you know, those boots can get pretty rank.” She seemed to enjoy telling him that. “By the way, the ravine’s a good ten minutes away. I’d get started if I were you.”
Then she left him sitting there.
Screw her, he thought, watching her go. He glanced at the neatly folded uniform on the bunk beside him. She thinks I’m going to jump just because she’s got more muscles than I do?
Really?
Of course, there was the little matter of jail time.
As it turned out, it didn’t take long to pull on a uniform and a pair of boots. Not long at all.
Cade stood on the dusty red dirt flat, shaded his eyes from the glare of Nova Prime’s twin suns, and considered the shiny metal structure bridging the ravine up ahead of him. It was like a child’s set of monkey bars except that the bars, which were held in place by magnetic forces, could reconfigure at any moment.
As he had learned moments earlier, they could rotate, pivot, elevate, or descend. They could cluster together or spread apart. And there was no way for Cade to know in advance which position they would take.
The ravine was ten meters wide and six meters deep, which meant a drop would be painful if not quite deadly. To get through the monkey bars and reach the flat beyond it, Cade would have to adapt. He wasn’t worried. He’d been adapting all his life.
“Ready?” Tolentino asked.
She held up a slim black personal access device. With it, she could stop the bars from moving if safety demanded. But from what Cade had heard about the exercise, safety never demanded.
“Ready,” said Cade, his voice all but lost among six other responses. His fellow cadets were lined up on either side of him, crouching to get a better jump.
After all, the first three to get over the ravine would watch the other four try a second time in the rising desert heat. And the last two in that second group would spend the afternoon cleaning everyone else’s ordnance. So there was an incentive to do well.
Not that Cade needed one. He liked challenges, always had. And this was an opportunity to show the cadets he was as good as they were even though they had been training far longer than he had.
“Go!” Tolentino barked.
The seven cadets took off as one, pelting across the few dozen meters that separated them from the ravine. It took Cade only a couple of seconds to find out he was the fastest of them.
But then, he’d spent his life running from the law.
As he approached the ravine, he lifted his knees and expanded his stride. If he didn’t leave the ground until he absolutely had to, he would minimize the amount of time he spent among the monkey bars.
Three, two, one, he thought. Now jump!
By waiting as long as he had, Cade was able to bypass the first rank of bars. But as he reached between them for a bar in the second rank, it rotated from horizontal to vertical. He managed to grab it anyway, but it slipped through his fingers.
No! he thought as he began to plummet into the ravine.
Fortunately, there was another layer of bars below the first one. Throwing a hand out, Cade hooked one with the tips of his outstretched fingers. And somehow he held on, wrenching his shoulder as he swung back and forth like a pendulum.
His fellow cadets, who had been more conservative in their approach to the ravine, blotted out the suns as they swung from bar to bar overhead. Bitterly, Cade acknowledged that he had outsmarted himself.
Twisting about, he latched on to a bar that put him back on the right path. Then he began handing himself across the ravine, his arms straining hard with the effort.
But as the wall of the ravine loomed ahead, he confronted the fact that he still had to climb back to the top layer. His first impulse was to try to swing himself up and hook a bar with his foot, but he was no trapeze artist. Then another tactic occurred to him.
He waited until he reached the wall. Then he kicked hard, hit the inclined surface, and sprang back as hard as he could. The angle of the wall and the force he exerted propelled him high enough to grab a bar in the upper layer.
From there he swung back and forth and finally, pushing himself to his limits, wrestled himself over the lip of the ravine.
As he got his feet beneath him, he saw that a few of the cadets had already begun sprinting for the finish line. Ignoring the fire in his arms and legs, Cade took off after them.
Two of them beat him. He edged the third one by half a stride.
Didn’t win … but I didn’t lose, either, he quipped to himself.
As the rest of the pack caught up, Cade drank in a deep breath, pointed to the two who had finished ahead of him, and said, “Nice run.”
They glanced his way but didn’t say anything in return. Cade wondered why.
“You trying to make me look bad?” someone asked from behind him.
Cade turned and saw the cadet he had edged out.
She had dirty blond hair and almond-shaped eyes, in fact, the nicest eyes he’d seen in a long time. And a thin white thread of scar that ran from the corner of her mouth to her jawline.
“Ericcson,” she said, using the back of her hand to wipe the sweat from her forehead. “Nava Ericcson.”
“Cade—”
“Yeah, I know. The Ghost in training.”
He smiled. “I guess my rep’s preceded me.”
From the other side of the ravine, Tolentino called out the names of the first three finishers, Cade among them. “Everyone else will be crossing over again in five,” she said.
Nava turned to Cade. “So can you do it?”
“What? Ghost?” He shrugged. “I did it once.”
“That’s once more than anyone else I know.”
The two cadets who had finished ahead of them walked by. They didn’t say anything. They just looked at Cade.
“What’s with them?” he asked.
“They resent you,” Nava said.
“Resent me? For what?”
They were the ones who had grown up with mothers and fathers, for God’s sake. They were the ones who’d had it easy in life.
“They’ve wanted to be Rangers since they were old enough to crawl. They dedicated themselves to that idea. They studied. They trained. And they dealt with the anxiety of knowing that despite all their studies and their training, they still might not make it.
“But you didn’t have to worry about any of that. Velan just waved his magic wand and fast-tracked you through Ranger training. At least, that’s how it looks to them.”
“Is that how it looks to you?”
“I don’t want to join the Rangers so I can strut around in a uniform the color of month-old pumpkin pie. I want to join so I can fight Ursa. Maybe even, in my craziest dreams, end the threat of them altogether. If you can help us do that, I don’t care how you wound up here.”
If, he thought. That was the question, wasn’t it?
In the heat of the afternoon weeks later, Cade’s squad had to respond to a simulated Ursa attack.
The idea was Prime Commander Cypher Raige’s, according to Nava. He had set up a couple of city streets out in the desert, or at least what looked like city streets. The buildings were real but empty and unpopulated.
And as a squad patrolled them, a mechanical construct would be released from an unannounced point of entry.
The construct was designed to resemble an Ursa, move like an Ursa, react to counterattacks like an Ursa. Except, of course, it spewed black dye instead of venom, left red marks instead of wounds where it struck with its talons, and didn’t eat its prey on those occasions when it won the encounter.
Tolentino led the squad down the street as she had done in the past. But now Cade was part of it. He had graduated from his accelerated training program, one of eight Rangers moving slowly and deliberately, four on one side of the street and four on the other, cutlasses in hand.
He eyed the windows on either side of him, the doors, the intersection up ahead. Others were keeping an eye on the street behind him. That was the way it worked. They were a team.
Cade had never depended on others to do his work for him, but he cooperated. He wasn’t in the black market anymore, after all. He was a Ranger, as hard as that was to believe.
As luck would have it, he was the one who saw the thing first. It was on the rooftop across the street, hardly visible from his angle on the ground. But he had spotted his share of Rangers over the years, and they weren’t nearly as big as a mock Ursa.
Exactly as Cade had been instructed, he touched the navi-band on his arm to alert the others. But as he did so, the simulated creature leaped. A moment later, it landed in the middle of the street.
Dutifully, Cade awaited Tolentino’s orders. “Surround it,” she barked. “Don’t let it get away.”
Standard procedure. Cade took up his position. His squad mates took up theirs. The beast focused on one of them—a stocky guy named Smithee—and went after him.
Cade was on the opposite side of the circle. Seeing his chance, he broke into a run. When he reached the construct, he leaped up onto its back and drove his cutlass into its soft spot.
He saw the spot light up in red even before he fell to the ground. Construct killed, he thought. Mission accomplished.
As he got to his feet and dusted himself off, he was pretty pleased with himself. Nava smiled at him and shook her head, no doubt more than a little impressed.
But truthfully, it had been easy.
Easier, in fact, than climbing up the construct’s back to retrieve his cutlass. The first time he did it, he slipped and fell back and landed on his butt.
Everybody laughed. That was all right. Let them. They know who put away the Ursa.
He tried again. This time he recovered his cutlass. Then he fell on his butt.
Tolentino hadn’t said anything to Cade about his “kill” as the squad awaited transportation back to the Ranger barracks. But as the ocher-colored transport appeared over the desert, the squad leader tapped Cade on the shoulder and said, “Join me.”
Cade walked with her, grinning, pleased with the fact that he’d distinguished himself on day 1. No doubt, Tolentino wanted to compliment him on the work he’d put in.
And who was he to argue with her? I’ve been busting my butt. I deserve some recognition.
When they were a few dozen meters apart from the rest of the squad, Tolentino stopped and turned to him. “At ease,” she said.
Cade stood at ease.
“You know why I singled you out?” she asked. “Why we’re talking here, apart from the others?”
He didn’t want to seem immodest. “No, ma’am.”
“It’s because I’m disappointed in your performance.”
Disappointed …? It took a moment for the word to sink in. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “I’ve done everything you wanted from me—done it better than anyone in the squad.”
Tolentino’s gaze was hard, unyielding. “Not the way I look at it. I gave you an order to surround the Ursa. You diverged from that order.”
“I saw an opportunity,” he argued. “I took advantage of it.”
“And put the rest of your team in danger. No one got killed this time, but next time it won’t be an exercise. It’ll be real.”
“I thought the whole point of my being a Ghost—”
“You ghosted,” said Tolentino. “I know. Once. But neither one of us is a hundred percent sure you can do it again. Right?”
He clenched his teeth, refusing to give Tolentino the satisfaction of a reply.
Her eyes narrowed. “I asked you a question, Ranger.”
Crap. “Right.”
“And until we know for sure that you can do the things the rest of us can’t, let’s focus on teaching you to do the things we can—like staying alive, and making sure the others in your squad do the same.”
Cade resented the remark. Was it his job to worry about his squad mates or to kill the construct?
“And by the way,” Tolentino added, “when you made a fool of yourself climbing up to get your cutlass back? Your squad mates weren’t laughing with you. They were laughing at you.”
That stung. No doubt, she had meant it to. Cade wanted to hurt her back but he couldn’t—not if he wanted to stay out of jail.
“Got it?” Tolentino asked.
He nodded coldly. “Got it.”
“Got it, what?”
“Got it, ma’am.”
“You’d better,” she said. “
Because I’m not clearing you for field duty until you do.”
If Cade’s first day was bad, his second was worse.
Tolentino put him through one grueling drill after another, matching him up against his squad mates singly and in pairs. His speed and agility were second to nobody’s, so he didn’t have a problem keeping up physically. But when it came to things like strategy and teamwork, it was clear he had a lot to learn.
Even to him.
In one exercise, Tolentino drew a circle in the dirt with her cutlass. Then her Rangers had to stand inside it and, using their own cutlasses as quarterstaffs, knock their opponents out of the circle. They were given padding for their heads, ankles, and hands, but not enough to keep a solid whack from drawing blood.
In round 1, Cade beat a fair-haired woman named Bentzen, sweeping her legs out from under her. In round 2, he drove the end of his cutlass into the chest of a guy named Zabaldo.
That put him in the final round. He would face Kayembe, a monster of a man with a weightlifter’s chest and thighs the size of Cade’s torso. Kayembe had reached the final by besting Tolentino in the second round, so he wasn’t just big—he was crafty.
Kayembe smiled when Cade stepped into the circle against him. “Looks like you and me, Ghost Man.”
“Figure that out all by yourself?” Cade asked.
His opponent’s smile faded. “I was going to go easy on you. Now …” His voice trailed off suggestively.
“Don’t do me any favors.”
“Commander Velan did you the favor,” Kayembe said. “It’s up to me to show him how wrong he was.”
“Assuming you can,” said Cade.
If he hadn’t backed down in the back alleys of Nova City, he wasn’t going to do so for the likes of Kayembe. Not even if he was one of the biggest human beings he had ever seen.
Tolentino held her hand up between them. “Ready?”
Cade and his adversary said “Ready” at the same time.
“Go,” Tolentino said, dropping her hand.
Kayembe began by striking at Cade’s feet. Not a bad approach, Cade had to concede. Even if he kept himself from falling, he would be off balance when he came down.
