Peter David - After Earth

“Kitai,” he said again, “it’s time to get up.”

But Kitai’s eyes remained closed.

Please , Cypher thought, looking at his son’s beautiful face. He prayed for anything, anything at all. A muscle twitch. A flicker of life.

“Kitai,” he said more forcefully, “I want you to blink your eyes.”

Suddenly, Cypher heard something over his comm link. It was faint, shallow, but there was no mistaking it. Kitai was breathing. Breathing .

It was a start. But there wasn’t much time left. A tiny hint of ice showed up on the cadet’s left eyebrow.

“Son,” Cypher said, deeply concerned, “I need you to please blink your eyes.”

Slowly, ever so slightly, Kitai did as he was asked. In a raspy voice, he said, “Hey, Dad.”

He was looking directly into his backpack camera as he spoke. Cypher stared at the monitors and the bio-readings and exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

“That sucked,” Kitai said. Looking a little unsteady, he got to his feet and began gathering his gear.

“That is correct,” Cypher stated, always seeing things for what they were. “The temperature is dropping five degrees every ten minutes,” he added, emphasizing the urgency of the situation. “You’ve got twelve kilometers to the hot spot.”

Cypher checked Kitai’s vitals. They were stable. As he watched, his son gathered his gear and got ready to go.

Reassuming his general mode, Cypher said, “Let’s see that ‘ten kilometers in fifty minutes’ that you spoke about earlier, cadet.”

Kitai set his naviband and turned to the north. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said, but in a voice that betrayed how weak he must have felt from his ordeal. Still, he set out at a sprint over the rugged terrain ahead of him. All around him, there were signs of the deep freeze that would accompany the onset of darkness. Animals were scrambling underground. It began to snow, lightly for now.

“SitRep?” Cypher said.

“Ten mikes out,” his son reported. “Good. All good.”

Out there, maybe , Cypher thought.

Inside the cockpit, it wasn’t good at all. The words arterial shunt stared back at Cypher from the med screen. He pulled a long, narrow piece of tubing from the med-kit, then took out a thin surgical knife, leaving it positioned over his left thigh. Next he ripped open the side of his uniform pants, exposing the side of his leg. He could see the nasty gash there that was leaking all the blood. The holographic screen behind him displayed his arteries and veins. One blood vessel had been severed.

Cypher cast a quick glance at Kitai’s camera view. It showed the cadet pelting through a snowy landscape that was getting snowier all the time. Kitai was doing all he could to enable them to survive. It was up to Cypher to do the same. Without fanfare, he plunged the thin surgical knife into the side of his leg.

It hurt like hell . There was nothing Cypher wanted more than to slip the knife back out again. But he didn’t. Instead, he cut through the flesh of his leg, using the readout on the holographic display to guide him as he sought the end of the severed artery.

Finally, he pulled the knife out. But only for a moment. Then he drove the knife into his leg again, this time higher up on his thigh. Again the knife cut through tough muscle tissue until it reached the other severed end of his artery.

Only then did he withdraw the knife for good. By then he was shaking uncontrollably. He stared at a point in the distance and regained his composure for a moment. At the rate he was losing blood, he couldn’t afford any more than that. Jaw clenched against the pain, he inserted the tubing into one of the incisions in his leg. He could see its progress on the holographic image behind him. As he fed the tubing into his leg, it slid toward the artery and then into it. As Cypher watched, the artery closed around the end of the tubing.

Cypher felt something feathery touch his cheek. It took him a moment to realize that it was a tear. He wasn’t a robot after all. He could feel pain like anyone else. He just couldn’t give in to it.

With shaking hands, he inserted the piece of tubing into the second incision. Again using the holographic display for guidance, he slipped the tube into the ragged end of the severed artery. This time the fit was less perfect. Cypher wiggled it, almost passing out from pain. His readout told him that the arterial shunt was 87 percent effective. Looking down, he saw that blood was flowing through the piece of tubing sticking out from his leg. He had repaired the damage, at least temporarily. It was good enough for the time being.

Cypher leaned his head back against the loader, focused on the screen showing his son’s point of view, and struggled to remain conscious despite everything he had been through.

He could hear Kitai’s voice as he ran. “Five mikes out.” His voice was stronger now, more confident. “Who wasn’t advanced to Ranger? Who was it? Watch him go. Watch him go.”

Cypher stared, on the verge of losing consciousness. His eyes closed, opened, fluttered closed again. A memory came to him…

He was on a Ranger ship. It was dark. Someone was yelling, “Five mikes out!”

It was a drop captain. Cypher couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he recalled being one of the Rangers waiting in the ship. He remembered, too, the piece of smart fabric in his hands. On the fabric was a face. Senshi’s face. She was sitting at a table with a birthday cake in front of her. There were nineteen candles on the cake. Faia and Kitai, who was only eight at the time, looked on from the background.

Senshi held up the cake. “Dad,” she said, “you help me.”

“No,” he told her as he sat among his fellow Rangers, “you go ahead. You blow.”

“Come on, Dad,” Senshi insisted with a grin. “Blow.”

Cypher looked around at the other Rangers. They were watching him, making him self-conscious. “Now,” he told Senshi, “you know there’s no way I can actually do that from here.”

“No,” she said, full of faith, “I think you can.”

Cypher sighed and addressed his wife. “Faia, why don’t you step in here and help the girl?”

Faia came into the frame of the smart fabric and said, “You can do it.”

“I know you can,” Senshi added.

Cypher shot a glance over his shoulder. A Ranger was sitting there, stone-faced. Cypher turned back to the cake and Senshi’s expectant face. Resigned to his fate, he leaned forward quickly and blew. As if by magic, the candles went out.

Suddenly Kitai leaned into the frame, laughing. It was he who had blown out the candles. Faia was laughing, too. So was Senshi. Cypher basked in the laughter. He smiled. “Happy nineteenth birthday, Senshi.”

Just then, an alarm went off in the ship. The other Rangers turned to Cypher.

“I have to go,” he told Senshi.

He tapped the piece of smart fabric, and it turned off. Sometimes it unsettled him, seeing his family vanish with one flick of his finger. All that he knew, gone in a flash. Then he tucked it away. All the Rangers in the ship stood, strapped on their gear, and looked to Cypher. The back of the ship began to open. Cypher stared at it. “Rangers,” he called out, “in formation! Move!”

They moved.

“Hot spot one arrival,” came a voice.

Cypher blinked away the memory and checked his son’s camera. It showed him that Kitai had reached a geothermal node that was elevated from the landscape around it. Steam rose from the ground. Fallen trees were overgrown with moss. There was decay everywhere, the product of the place’s warm, wet air.

“H-plus-forty-eight minutes!” Kitai announced, an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice.