After Earth

by Peter David

  Unless, of course, Cade had paid attention when Kayembe had tried the same opening gambit on Nava, on whom it had worked. Anticipating it, Cade jumped high enough to avoid the stroke but not as high as Kayembe might have expected.

  Then he planted the end of his cutlass in the ground and, using the weapon like a vaulting pole, kicked Kayembe in the face.

  The big man staggered, but not far enough to step out of the circle—which was why Cade bent, thrust his cutlass between Kayembe’s legs, and pushed. Already off balance, Cade’s adversary couldn’t stay upright. He toppled like a tree, raising a cloud of dust where he landed.

  But he didn’t stay down for long. In a heartbeat, he was back up, reaching for Cade’s throat. It took Nava and two other members of the squad to hold Kayembe back, and it looked like even that wouldn’t be enough until Tolentino intervened.

  “Atten-shun!” she snapped.

  The squad straightened, though Kayembe still glared at Cade as if he wanted to kill him.

  Tolentino eyed Cade, then Kayembe, then Cade again. “Kayembe,” she said, “do I need to remind you of the punishment for Rangers who go after their squad mates?”

  Kayembe’s mouth twisted. “No, ma’am.”

  “Good.” Her gaze hardened. “Not that I entirely blame you. I distinctly said no one was to strike an opponent other than with a cutlass. Did you hear me say that, Zabaldo?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” came the reply.

  “How about you, Ericcson?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Nava.

  “And yet Bellamy seems to have missed that instruction. Pity. It’s costing him the championship of our little tournament—and a couple of hours of his free time this afternoon, which he’ll spend doing everyone’s laundry.”

  Cade was going to protest. After all, the Ursa didn’t play by the rules. Why should I?

  But in the end, he thought better of it. He wasn’t going to change Tolentino’s mind, so what was the point?

  * * *

  Later on, Cade had the mess hall all to himself. But then, no one else had spent a couple of hours doing his squad’s laundry.

  He was just lifting the first bite to his mouth when he heard someone come in. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he saw that it was Nava.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

  “Hope you like the smell of laundry detergent,” he said, glad for the company though he wouldn’t have admitted it.

  Nava sat down across the table from him. “Very inventive, what you did this morning.”

  Cade shrugged. “Tolentino didn’t seem to think so.”

  “She did say no body-to-body contact.”

  “That’s not the way it works in the real world.” He gestured expansively, including the entire mess hall. “Only in this one.”

  “But this is where you’re training. And if we maim each other here, there won’t be anybody left to protect the colony.”

  “I come from a different place, that’s all. You said it yourself. I didn’t aspire to be a Ranger all my life.”

  Nava nodded. “I heard you were involved with the black market.”

  “I had to be involved with something. I had to survive.”

  “What about your family? They thought that was all right?”

  “I didn’t have a family. My mother died when I was five. My father … I never had the pleasure.”

  Nava’s expression softened. “How did you live?”

  “After Mom’s death, I started running errands. Guys would pay me to take messages back and forth for them. They figured the Rangers wouldn’t arrest a kid. As I got older, they gave me more to do. Things just evolved from there.”

  “Must have been rough.”

  “I didn’t look at it that way. I mean, I had nothing to compare it to. I figured everybody had to look out for themselves, not just me.”

  “No one gave you a hand? Ever?” Nava sounded incredulous.

  “People offered me help now and then, sure, but they always had an angle. They were really trying to help themselves. And if I trusted them, if I did the things they suggested … let’s just say I wouldn’t have lasted very long.”

  “You’re a Ranger now. You can put that behind you.”

  Cade shook his head. “It’s not that easy. I’m not used to trusting people, doing what they say just because they’ve got an officer’s insignia on their shoulder.”

  “So following orders isn’t your strong suit.”

  He chuckled. “Like you didn’t come to that conclusion on your own.”

  “People change, Cade.”

  “Not everybody.”

  She put her hand on top of his, but only for a moment. “We need you too much—need your talent too much—for me to let you talk that way. You’re a gift. And we’ll do whatever we can to hang on to it.”

  He looked Nava in the eye. As much as he wanted to trust her, he couldn’t help wondering if she had an angle, too. “Nobody’s ever called me a gift before.”

  Nava smiled. “There’s a first time for everything.”

  On Cade’s fifth day of training, he ran afoul of his pal Kayembe again. It wasn’t as if he intended to tick the guy off. It just happened.

  Their squad was up in the San Francisco mountain range on maneuvers. After all, Ursa liked to hole up in remote places sometimes, especially the mountainous kind. And when they did, it was up to the Rangers to flush them out.

  Cade and Kayembe were paired off, searching a high canyon, moving from strong sunlight to shadow and back again. They were supposed to rendezvous with the rest of their squad at a specified point.

  Unless they found something. But they wouldn’t. It was just a maneuver. A hike, really. Just so they would know their places in case they did have to hunt down an Ursa someday.

  Kayembe didn’t talk. Not to Cade at least. If the big man had been paired with someone else, it would have been different. But he had nothing to say to Cade.

  After twenty kliks or so, Cade noticed something shiny in the wall of the canyon. Squinting at it, he saw that it was a plaque. Out here? In the mountains?

  He moved closer to get a better look at it, stood there, and shaded his eyes. “In commemoration of Conner Raige’s victory over the Ursa known as Gash,” it said.

  “Who’s Conner Raige?” he asked Kayembe.

  The big man glanced at him, narrow-eyed. “Prime Commander. Long time ago. Let’s move.”

  But Cade wasn’t ready yet. He looked around at the red-clay mountains, trying to imagine somebody—some Raige—slashing away at an Ursa in the narrow confines of the canyon.

  “I said let’s move,” Kayembe insisted.

  Cade ignored his partner. After all, this was Ranger stuff. Ranger history. Maybe if he knew more about it, more about Conner Raige, he could figure out what he himself was missing.

  “Must have been a big deal,” he thought out loud, “if the guy got himself a plaque for killing a—”

  Suddenly, Cade noticed a point of bright red light on the chest of Kayembe’s uniform. At the same time, the big man cursed and pointed to Cade. Following the gesture, Cade realized there was a point of red light on his chest as well.

  “What the hell …?” he said.

  Kayembe spit out a curse, his eyes full of anger. “We’ve been tagged, you idiot.”

  “Tagged?” Cade asked.

  He had no idea what his partner was talking about. But Kayembe’s expression told him it wasn’t good.

  It was Tolentino who had tagged them, it turned out—with a laser beam from a vantage point higher up the mountain. Rangers weren’t supposed to stop and read plaques, apparently.

  “You lose focus, you die,” Tolentino told Cade and Kayembe afterward, when the squad had reassembled. “How does it feel being dead, gentlemen?”

  The penalty? A two-hour run in the desert the next morning. Full packs, no stopping, not even for a drink. Cade wasn’t happy about it. Kayembe was even less so.

  When they got back to th
e barracks, the others were waiting for them, smiles on their faces and taunts on their tongues. They seemed to think it was funny. Despite all the pain he had been in that morning, Cade might have found some humor in the situation as well.

  But Kayembe felt otherwise. Pointing a long, thick finger at Cade, he growled, “I don’t care if you can ghost. I’d rather have somebody else—anybody else—watching my back than a screw-up like you.”

  Cade could feel the others’ eyes on him. They didn’t say anything, but they didn’t have to. They felt the same way Kayembe did.

  A screw-up.

  It hurt—more than Cade wanted to admit, even to himself. After all, he wanted to show them he could be a Ranger, too. But he wasn’t going to say anything in his defense.

  Why should he? They had all had it in for him from the beginning. Even Tolentino.

  I’m a screw-up? he thought, glaring back at Kayembe. Well, screw you.

  But he didn’t say it out loud—not when he had so much to lose. He just kept his mouth shut and walked out.

  It was raining when Cade got to the place on D’Agostino Road.

  He stood across the street from it, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket, his collar turned up against the weather. He could see an orange light through the dirty windows, feel the beat of music in his bones if he concentrated hard enough.

  The place was called Regina’s. No one knew why. If it had been owned by a woman named Regina at one time, she had faded from memory long ago.

  Cade remembered the first time he’d been inside. He had been twelve. He had walked in with guys he worked for, guys who were regulars in the place. Nobody questioned his being there, not even when he ordered a drink he clearly couldn’t handle or when they had to throw him on a cot in the back because he’d passed out.

  He thought he heard a peal of laughter across the street, muted by walls and distance. It didn’t take much for people to laugh in Regina’s, he recalled. Pretty much anything got them going.

  Of course, it could have changed since he’d been there last. But he doubted it. It had been only a few weeks—the night before the Rangers arrested him, in fact.

  Cade knew everybody in Regina’s, knew every face. He’d had good times with them. He wanted to have those times again.

  But he hadn’t made the trip just to join the party. He had received a request on his personal comm unit from an unidentified friend. Except he knew from the choice of words who the friend was. The only thing he didn’t know was why that friend had asked Cade to meet him at Regina’s.

  But he would find out soon enough.

  Regina’s was exactly how Cade remembered it—loud and crowded, redolent with alcohol and sweat, and something sweet he had never been able to identify. He found Andropov sitting at a table in the back, flanked by a couple of his men. New ones, of course, to replace the ones Andropov had lost in the raid on the warehouse.

  “I’m pleased you could make it, my friend,” Andropov said. He got up and extended his hand, which was large and meaty.

  Cade clasped it. “I wish I could say it was easy. The Rangers are everywhere.” And though Velan hadn’t given Cade any formal restrictions, he might not have taken kindly to the idea of Cade visiting one of his old haunts.

  He sat down opposite his mentor. Andropov looked the same. But then he had gotten away that day in the warehouse. He hadn’t been running in the desert with a full pack on his back.

  “Drink?” asked Andropov.

  Cade shook his head. “No thanks.” The last thing he wanted to do was return to his barracks with liquor on his breath.

  Andropov grunted. “You’re not holding it against me, I hope, that I escaped the Rangers without you?”

  Cade shook his head. “Not at all. It was every man for himself.”

  “I’m glad you understand.”

  “You said you had something to discuss with me.”

  Andropov nodded. “So I do. Something that I discovered. Because, as you know, I have contacts in the courts.”

  Cade knew, all right. When he was a boy, he had delivered things to people. One of them had been a court clerk.

  “It’s good news,” Andropov continued. He put his elbows on the table and learned forward. “A week from now, the charges against you will all have been dropped.”

  Dropped? Cade thought.

  “You look surprised,” said Andropov. “Me, too. I figured you would have to prove yourself as a Ranger first. But your superiors appear to be a trusting lot. They began petitioning the court to clear your record the day you joined them.”

  Dropped, Cade repeated inwardly.

  “So you don’t have to stay with them,” Andropov told him. “You can leave a week from now, free and clear. Which brings me to my proposal …”

  Andropov described a shipment for which he needed a customer. But Cade wasn’t listening to the details. All he could think about was that he could leave the Rangers in a week, and how sweet that would be.

  “What do you think?” Andropov asked.

  “I’m in,” Cade told him. After all, he would need some credits when he got out.

  “Excellent,” Andropov said. “You were lucky for me, my friend. I think you can be lucky that way again.”

  Maybe the man was right. Maybe my luck is coming back.

  Cade got back to his barracks an hour and a half after he had left, flushed with the prospect of getting his old life back. Who needs the Rangers? he asked himself.

  They had been on his case since the minute he showed up. Tolentino especially. He’d seen it at the ravine that first day. He’d seen it after he disabled the construct. He’d seen it after he beat Kayembe in the tournament, and again in the San Franciscos when he saw the plaque.

  They hadn’t given him an inch. And he had taken whatever abuse they wanted to throw at him because he didn’t want to go to prison. But soon he wouldn’t have to worry about that.

  Cade imagined himself walking up to Tolentino and shoving his uniform in her face. Maybe even decking Kayembe before he left. Yeah. He would do all that and more.

  He was thinking about that, thinking hard, when he heard yelling from inside the barracks. One of the voices was Nava’s.

  A real Ranger would probably have entered the barracks without a second thought. But Cade wasn’t a real Ranger. He was a street kid at heart, a criminal, so he didn’t walk in. He went to a place where the fabric walls of the barracks came together and peeked inside.

  Just in time to see Nava kick Kayembe’s cutlass, which had been propped against his bunk, halfway across the barracks.

  Kayembe glared at her. “Are you nuts?”

  “Cut him a break,” Nava snapped. She turned to Zabaldo. “You, too.”

  “I haven’t said a thing to him,” Zabaldo protested.

  “That’s the problem. It’s like he doesn’t exist.”

  “What’s it to you?” Bentzen asked.

  “He’s a Ranger,” Nava said.

  Kayembe sneered bitterly. “Not a real Ranger.”

  They’re talking about me, Cade realized.

  “Says who?” Nava demanded. “You?”

  “He didn’t earn it,” Kayembe said. “You know that.”

  “Since when do they ask you to decide who’s earned what?”

  Kayembe poked himself in the chest with his thumb. “I went through the selection process. I busted my hump.” He looked around. “We all did.”

  “That’s great,” Nava said. “And why did you do it?”

  Kayembe looked confused. “To become a Ranger.”

  “To fight Ursa,” Bentzen said, who seemed to have a better grasp of where Nava was going with this.

  “To fight Ursa? Well,” Nava said, “that’s a coincidence, because that’s why Bellamy’s here, too. He wants to fight Ursa as much as we do. He wants to make a difference. Who are we to tell him he can’t?

  “Especially if he can ghost. You know what that would mean to us? How many Ursa we’ll be able to
take off the board with a guy like that? Or do you like losing your friends and having not a damned thing to show for it?”

  That seemed to shut them up.

  “If they’re right about Cade,” Nava continued, “the Ursa can’t see him. But we can. So stop pretending he’s not here, because he’s one of us. One of us.”

  No one objected. Not because they had gained respect for Cade, because as far as he could tell, they didn’t have any to begin with. It was because of how they felt about Nava.

  And how Nava felt about him.

  Cade was touched. Hell, no one had ever stood up for him that way before.

  But what if his ghosting turned out to be a fluke—a one-time thing, as Velan had put it? What if he wasn’t the difference maker Nava hoped he was?

  How hard would she fight for him then?

  That night, Cade’s squad was assigned crowd-control duty at the East Side Arena, a huge, ivory-colored amphitheater open to the stars.

  The occasion was a concert for kids who had lost loved ones to the Ursa. Cade had never heard of the performers, but they were loud and quirky and perfectly suited to their youthful audience if the applause they got was any indication.

  Cade and Nava had been stationed on the curved walkway just behind the nosebleed seats. In the Arena’s early days, a couple of mischievous spectators had gone over the rail and tried to climb down the facade, only to fall to their deaths. Since then, it had become the Rangers’ job to watch the walkway.

  Nava smiled. “If I’d known they used Rangers here,” she said, “I’d have tried out even earlier.”

  “We’re not just here to enjoy the music,” Cade reminded her.

  Tolentino had made him paranoid. He was sure that if he lost focus for even a second, she would find out about it.

  Nava shrugged. “Who’s enjoying the music?”

  “Then what?” Cade asked.

  Nava looked around. “The way the place lights up the night. The way the air smells, like some kind of perfume. It’s nice.”

  He slid her a look. “Really?”

  “Uh huh. And it’s even nicer being up here rather than down there.”

  “If you say so,” he said.

  Suddenly, he realized that her eyes had locked with his. What’s more, he found it hard to turn away.