After Earth

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first corpse he had hauled that way since the crash. But it’s the last. His back was sore from the effort since each of the bodies he had dragged had outweighed him, but he wasn’t complaining.

  It could have been worse. It could have been me that died in the crash.

  When he reached an open hatch, he stopped. Clouds of cold white vapor rose from the opening. A sign beside it read “NITRO STORAGE CONTAINER.”

  They were Rangers, the navigator and the others. It was only right that their bodies be preserved. That way, when someone from Nova Prime found the ship—or this part of it, anyway—the dead could be transported back to the world of their birth and given a decent burial. Not to mention the fact that a decomposing corpse could attract predators and maybe even an Ursa.

  As gently as he could, Kitai deposited the navigator into the container below. The man looked more like a statue than someone who had been alive not too long ago. With a shiver of revulsion, Kitai swung the hatch door closed.

  And what about me and Dad? he wondered. If we don’t make it, who will preserve our bodies? Again he shuddered.

  Supplies, he thought, putting the hatch and all thoughts of its contents behind him. Forget the bodies. Got to get supplies.

  Little by little, he lugged everything he found back to the cockpit, where Cypher was waiting for him. Before long, he had built up a considerable pile. That was a good thing, he supposed.

  The bloodstain on Cypher’s leg was a bad one, and it was spreading. Worse, it was dripping onto the floor. Kitai had noticed it earlier—he couldn’t help it—though his father had seemed to want to distract him from the sight.

  “That’s it,” Kitai said, placing a med-kit and Cypher’s personal kit bag beside the pile. He was mentally and physically drained, more so than he had realized when he’d been busy collecting everything. How long had it been since the crash? He had no idea, no idea at all.

  His mind was even more tired than his body. The things he had seen in the last few hours, the things he had done … he wanted to forget them, pretend they had never happened. But they had. His father’s injuries, for instance. They weren’t going to go away. They were real. And Kitai wondered if he would have to deal with them.

  “I need you to focus right now,” Cypher said, bringing Kitai out of his reverie. “Assets?”

  One shell-shocked teenager. One badly damaged Prime Commander, Kitai thought.

  “Cadet?” Cypher said calmly. “I need an accounting of our assets.”

  Kitai struggled to focus. He looked to the pile of supplies in front of him, aware that his father was studying every nuance of his body language: every facial twitch, every stutter, everything. After all, that was what he did. It was what made him who he was.

  “Four bodies,” Kitai reported. “I put them in the nitro compartment. Radio nonoperational.” That had been a disappointment, of course. “Four Ranger packs. Cabin pressure stable.” What else? Oh, yeah … “Five—no, six cutlasses. One emergency med-kit. And I got your bag from the troop bay.”

  Was that it? He thought it was. Not that it seemed to matter to his father. Cypher had turned away before Kitai had finished his list and begun manipulating the cockpit controls. Suddenly, a holographic image of a landscape rose over the console. It was formed by thousands of wavy lines. And there was a marker blinking on the holographic landscape.

  Cypher stared at the blinking marker, his expression grim, for a long time. Finally, he turned to Kitai and said, “Hand me the med-kit. Ranger pack.”

  Kitai didn’t know why his father needed those things, but he moved to comply. Picking up the med-kit and the Ranger pack, he gave them to Cypher, who placed them in his lap. Then he took his son’s wrist, turned it over, and activated the naviband on Kitai’s lifesuit.

  Instantly, lines of data crawled around the naviband, creating what looked like a holographic bracelet. Kitai had never seen a naviband do such a thing before.

  At the same time, the monitor to Cypher’s right filled with a cascade of numbers and graphs, all of which matched those on Kitai’s naviband. It took Kitai a moment to realize what his father was doing: syncing the band with the cockpit’s computers.

  But why? Kitai felt panic creeping back into his bones.

  “Cadet,” Cypher said, “center yourself.”

  Kitai did so. Slowly, he became calm again. Cypher seemed satisfied. Sitting back, he looked into Kitai’s eyes, and Kitai looked back. The weight of their predicament hung between them, a shared burden.

  Then Cypher began to speak. “The emergency beacon you brought me will fire a distress signal deep into space.”

  Kitai nodded. But it seemed to him that his father was speaking to himself as much as to his son, trying to cut through the haze of his pain by thinking out loud.

  “But it’s damaged,” Cypher said.

  “There is another one in the tail section of our ship.”

  Kitai’s heart fell. The tail section was gone, and more than likely, the beacon was gone, too. But Cypher didn’t seem daunted by what he had learned. If anything, he seemed intrigued.

  As Kitai watched, his father manipulated the controls and altered the holographic landscape. In the grainy computerized image, Kitai could make out mountain ranges, rivers, valleys, forests, deserts, small storm patterns, animals, birds, and so on.

  Cypher pointed to the screen. “This is us here. I can’t get an accurate reading, but the tail is somewhere in this area, approximately one hundred kilometers from here.” He glanced at his son. “We need that beacon.”

  Kitai considered what his father was saying. One hundred kilometers …

  “Kitai,” Cypher said in measured tones, “my legs are broken. One very badly. You are going to retrieve that beacon or we are going to die. Do you understand?”

  Kitai nodded his head. “Yes.” He felt tears welling in his eyes and wiped them away and awaited his orders.

  Cypher opened a small black medical case marked UNIVERSAL AIR FILTRATION GEL—EMERGENCY USE ONLY. Inside, there were six vials sitting side by side.

  “You have air filtration inhalers,” said Cypher. He removed one of the vials. “You need to take one now. The fluid will coat your lungs, increase your oxygen extraction, and allow you to breathe comfortably in the atmosphere.”

  Cypher demonstrated how to use the inhaler. Kitai watched carefully. Then he placed the vial to his lips, pressed the release, and inhaled deeply. He had expected the air in the vial to be tasteless at best, but it wasn’t. It was sweet, like the air in the mountains back on Nova Prime just before first sun.

  “You have six vials,” Cypher said. “At your weight, that should be twenty to twenty-four hours each. That’s more than enough.”

  Next, Cypher helped Kitai with his naviband. A digital map appeared as a hologram above Kitai’s wrist.

  “Your lifesuit and backpack are equipped with digital and virtual imaging,” Cypher noted. “So I will be able to see everything you see and what you don’t see.”

  Kitai took comfort from that more than from anything else. Equipment was great; it was reassuring. But knowing that his father would have access to everything he saw was ten times more reassuring.

  Cypher picked up the Ranger pack and placed it on Kitai’s back. Then he turned his son around so that his backpack camera was facing Cypher. Turning so that he could access his console, he tapped a control, and a monitor in front of Kitai came alive. Kitai could see Cypher’s face on the screen, its eyes looking into him the way his father’s real eyes did.

  On the monitor, Cypher said, “I will guide you.” He tapped the same control to shut down the monitor. Then he turned Kitai around to face him.

  “It will be like I’m right there.” He looked Kitai up and down for a moment. Then he said, “Take my cutlass.”

  He picked it up and held it out to his son. Kitai looked at it, a little stunned. It was his father’s cutlass. The one he had used to fight and kill Ursa, the one that ne
ver left his side.

  And he was handing it over to Kitai.

  That, more than anything else, brought home the gravity of the situation. If Cypher was entrusting his son with his most prized possession, it was because he wanted to give Kitai every advantage he could.

  “Go on,” Cypher said, “take it. C-40. The full twenty-two configurations.”

  Not just the ones Kitai had used as a cadet—pike and hook and blade and so on—but every possible cutlass form the Savant’s engineers could come up with. Only the most skilled and experienced Rangers were given the C-40. And now, despite his fledgling skills and his utter lack of experience, he had one, too.

  Kitai felt the weight of the cutlass in his hands. It was heavier than the ones he had practiced with as a cadet. It even looked big.

  He looked up at his father. Cypher could have comforted him. But true to form, he went in the other direction, underscoring the magnitude of Kitai’s task.

  “This is not training,” he said. “The threats you will be facing are real. Every single decision you make will be life or death. This is a class 1 quarantined planet. Everything on this planet has evolved to kill humans.” A beat. “Do you know where we are?”

  Where? Nowhere near home, that was for sure. Nowhere near the planet of Kitai’s birth.

  “No, sir,” the cadet said.

  Cypher frowned. “This is Earth, Kitai.”

  Earth? As in the world that gave birth to humanity but faltered under the lash of humanity’s abuse? That Earth?

  Kitai often had wondered what it would be like to walk the surface of the world his distant ancestors had walked. Lots of kids had wondered about that. Now he would have the chance. But there was a danger beyond the ones his father had outlined, one that had been in the back of Kitai’s mind.

  “The Ursa?” he asked.

  Saying the words out loud made them seem even worse, made it seem as if the creature were right outside. Kitai saw his father’s eyes narrow.

  “There are three possibilities,” Cypher said. “The first and most likely is that it died in the crash. The second and less likely is that it is injured very badly and still contained.”

  Kitai would have signed up for either one. He would have done so in a heartbeat.

  “And the third and least likely,” Cypher concluded, “is that it is out.”

  The words hung in the air between Kitai and his father. Cypher had said that was the least likely scenario, but he hadn’t ruled it out completely. He couldn’t.

  “We will proceed,” Cypher continued, “in anticipation of the worst-case scenario. Every movement will be under protocol: escape and evade. If he’s out there, I will see him long before he gets anywhere near you.”

  Kitai nodded. Escape and evade. What else was he going to do? Fight the Ursa on his own?

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Cypher said. “Do everything I say and we will survive.”

  And that was it. There was nothing left to say. For a moment, Kitai and his father just looked at each other. The cadet looked down at his cutlass, felt the weight of his pack on his back. He was a Ranger, outwardly at least, and he had a mission to carry out. But he wasn’t just a Ranger, and the man with the broken legs sitting in front of him wasn’t just his commanding officer.

  Surprising himself, Kitai wrapped his father in a hug.

  He could barely get his arms around his father’s broad shoulders, but it didn’t matter. Kitai hugged him hard and for a long time. And Cypher hugged him back. After all, it might be the last time they had a chance to do it.

  Finally Kitai’s father said, “Time’s wasting. And we’ve got a lot to do.”

  Kitai let go of Cypher. Then he stood up and snapped his cutlass onto the magnetic plate on his backpack.

  He took a last look at his father, managed a weak military turn, and left the cockpit. In a way, it was the scariest thing he had ever done.

  But in another way, a way he hadn’t expected, it was exciting.

  vi

  Kitai stood in the little gangway between two air lock doors. Outside the outer door, the ice was melting as the warmth of the sun’s first rays started penetrating the darkness.

  Just one sun, Kitai thought. Weird.

  He turned over his wrist, activating his naviband and its many holographic layers, and said, “Can you hear me, Dad? Over.”

  There was the briefest of pauses. Then Cypher’s voice came through clear and crisp: “Copy.”

  Good, Kitai thought.

  There was so much he didn’t know about this place. He looked around warily. So much. And from what his father had said, all of it was deadly. Experimentally, he tapped a combination on the handle of his cutlass. Instantly, one end transformed itself into a large curved blade—a blade that, if not for the protection afforded Kitai by his lifesuit, would have cut a nice gash in his arm.

  Idiot, he thought, shaken by the near miss. Until you know what you’re doing, don’t do it. He retracted the blade end of the cutlass and tapped in a different pattern, one with which he was more familiar. In the next breath, the cutlass’s fiber ends extended outward until the weapon was a couple of meters long.

  That’s better, he thought.

  Taking a deep breath, he exited the torn end of the ship into a rocky ravine. A moment later, the hatch door closed behind him. As he jumped down to the ground, he saw more Rangers—dead like all the others—hanging from the straps of their seats. Kitai sighed. He thought he had seen the last of the corpses. The sight of so much death made his heart pound again.

  “Kitai,” his father’s voice said, “take a knee.”

  Kitai knelt as he was told.

  “I want you to take your time,” said his father. “Acclimate yourself to the environment. Root yourself in this present moment. Tell me any- and everything. No matter how inconsequential it may seem. Everything you see, hear, smell, how you feel. Over.”

  Kitai could see daylight above, past the walls of the ravine. He was breathing heavily. “My body feels heavier.”

  “Very good,” Cypher said. “The gravitational pull on this planet is slightly different than at home.”

  Beat by beat, Kitai grew calm. He appraised the distance to the top of the ravine walls. “It’s about sixty meters to the top.”

  “Okay,” Cypher said. “Get going.”

  “Roger,” Kitai said.

  Cautiously, Kitai began to climb, paying close attention to each placement of his hand or foot. This wasn’t any different from standard rock-climbing walls back home, he realized, and he had climbed those rocks a thousand times.

  It wasn’t long before he reached the top. As he found purchase for his left hand, he felt something tickle. His right. When he looked to see what it was, he found a huge multicolored tarantula sitting on his hand.

  “Aahhhhh!” he yelled, unable to control himself, and flung the creature from his hand. But in doing so, he lost his balance and slid a meter down the side of the ravine before catching himself. He looked down and shook his head. It could have been worse.

  “What happened?” his father asked over their communication link.

  Kitai took a deep breath and regained his grip. “You didn’t see that? I thought—”

  “What’s your SitRep? Your vitals spiked. I say again—what is your situation report? What happened?”

  “No change,” Kitai said, a little embarrassed. “I slipped. I’m good to go.” Then, to make it sound plausible: “There’s condensation on the stones. I’m fine.”

  That seemed to appease Cypher. In any case, he didn’t demand any more information. Kitai continued his ascent until he reached the top of the ravine. Even before he pulled himself out, he saw the glorious confusion of colors in the eastern sky. Purple, orange, fuchsia. He had never seen anything like it. Back on Nova Prime, there were sunsets, but they were mainly crimson and gold. These colors were new to him.

  Mesmerized by them, he emerged onto what appeared to be an elevated plateau. He shaded
his eyes. This sun was bigger than the ones he could see from the surface of his homeworld. Was there another one right behind it? Or was it on its own?

  Funny … he had studied Earth but couldn’t remember something as simple as how many moons it had. Then again, he would have considered that a pretty useless piece of information. When would he ever get a chance to use it?

  Yeah, he thought. When?

  All around him, plants and animals were waking up. He could hear the melodic morning calls of eagles majestically soaring overhead. Off in the distance, maybe a kilometer away, hundreds of buffalo roamed the plain. Well, they resembled the buffalo back home, but these seemed larger, bulkier in front. So much life. Kitai wasn’t used to it. Back on Nova Prime, he had grown up in the desert. This was noisy, full of smells, full of shapes and colors he had never imagined. The spectacle took his breath away.

  Abruptly, Cypher’s voice came through Kitai’s naviband: “There’s an escarpment where two Earth continents collided. Looks like it could be a waterfall. It’s at about forty-five kilometers. We’ll call that our midway checkpoint.”

  Kitai absorbed the information. Back on Nova Prime, forty-five kilometers wasn’t so much. A day’s run for the colony’s best long-distance athletes.

  “There’s no way you can return after that point,” Cypher advised him soberly. “We’ll assess rations and reevaluate when you get there. But let’s break it into sections.”

  A moment later, Kitai’s naviband produced a new hologram, one that his father must have generated. It was a map with an icon for Kitai and a large grouping of trees to the north of him. As Kitai watched, a line appeared and connected him to the trees.

  “First leg,” Cypher said, “is twenty kilometers to the mouth of the north forest. Let’s take it easy. Set chronometer for 180 minutes. Over.”

  “One hundred eighty minutes?” Kitai said. “That’s not right. I can do 10K in fifty minutes. You’ll see.”

  Kitai began a light jog. That was all it would take, after all.

  “I might even do it in under forty minutes,” he said. “Over.”

  He listened for a response from his father, but he didn’t get one. Concerned, Kitai slowed down.