Peter David - After Earth

Again he yells: “Get out!”

With obvious reluctance, they follow his order. The Ursa turns to go after them, but Jon won’t let it. He stoops to pick up Tseng’s cutlass and, without breaking stride, leaps onto the creature’s back. Then he drives the point of the cutlass into the center of the Ursa’s soft spot.

The creature whirls, no doubt intending to confront its attacker. But Jon is still on its back. He transforms his cutlass into a blade, cutting up the Ursa inside. Then he turns it back into a pike and into a blade again.

With each transformation the cutlass does more damage, weakening the beast a little more. Finally, Jon pulls his weapon out of the Ursa and drives it home again, even deeper than before.

It’s a mortal blow.

Making a gurgling sound in its throat, the creature whirls, rears, and tears at the air with its forepaws. Jon slips off it and presses his back against the wall, then slides away so that the Ursa doesn’t kill him with its death throes.

In what seems like an attempt to dislodge the cutlasses, the monster slams itself against a wall. But it only succeeds in driving the weapons in deeper.

The Ursa goes wild. It spins, crashes into one wall and then the other, screams in its agony.

Jon doesn’t know what a complete human being, someone still in touch with his emotions, would see in the Ursa at this point. A menace that has to be finished before it can kill again? A beast that needs to be put out of its misery?

A moment later, the question becomes moot. The Ursa takes one more long, lurching stride. Then it falls over on its side, shudders, and dies.

A gout of venom spills from its mouth and pools in a slowly widening circle, viciously eating the floor beneath it, hissing and raising twists of black, oily smoke. Then even the smoke and the hissing stop.

It’s over .

Jon has never been so close to a dead Ursa. As it lies there, inert, he comes to a realization: He has something in common with the creature. The Ursa is a biological machine, engineered to carry out one purpose and one purpose only: to kill. And so is he.

So is he .

Jon looks around for Doctor Gold. She’s gone. Somehow he’s not surprised.

He takes stock of himself. A couple of his ribs are broken, and half his face is bloody from a cut over his eye. Otherwise he’s unscathed.

But his victory means nothing to him. Victory, defeat… they are simply events in a featureless series of events, strung together one after the other, all of them meaningless.

Then Jon hears something and realizes he’s not alone. At first he thinks the workers have come back for some reason. However, the sounds are too loud, too heavy. There are other Ursa in the station.

More than one , he thinks.

Even if they can’t detect him, it’ll be difficult for him to finish them all off. Not that he cares what they do to the Rangers or the workers or other Novans. But Doctor Gold seemed to care.

Which is why, holding his side, Jon makes his way to the power chamber.

On the way, he passes Tseng. Her eyes stare up at him. They don’t look any different than they did a few moments earlier. But there’s a trickle of bright red blood from the corner of her mouth that tells Jon she’s dead.

He continues to the chamber. Its door is open, the workers having left it that way. Jon moves to its control console and slides his fingertips along its black command strips one by one, increasing the pressure of the station’s magnetic fields on its plasma supply.

Just then, the Ursa shed their camouflage. Jon was right. There are three of them.

They don’t know he’s there. They also don’t know what he is planning.

A blinking red danger light comes on, causing every surface around Jon to strobe with its lurid reflection. He continues to increase the pressure. A voice, echoing throughout the enclosure, warns him that conditions in the facility are reaching a critical level—one that will result in its destruction.

Jon isn’t daunted in the least. In fact, destruction is precisely the outcome he has in mind.

In the golden light of morning, the air mercifully cool on his skin, Cypher Raige walks through the debris field that was, until the events of the day before, the site of the North Side Power Relay Facility.

Raige has spoken at length with the survivors of Blackburn’s squad. They have all said the same thing, that both Blackburn and the Ursa were destroyed in the explosion.

The magnitude of the blast seems to support their observation. There are chunks of ceramic composite—pieces of the relay facility—hundreds of meters from the building’s footprint. Nothing exposed to such a massive release of energy can have survived.

Raige frowns. And yet…

The Savant’s forensic team has discovered bits of flesh containing Ursa DNA. Plenty of them, in fact. It’s no less than what Raige expected.

But as many scientists as the Savant has put on the job, not one has been able to turn up a sign of human DNA.

It’s puzzling, to say the least. And Raige doesn’t like puzzles. Especially when they have such a profound effect on his colony’s prospects for survival.

He considered approving four surgical procedures along the lines of Blackburn’s. However, given the mysterious circumstances of Blackburn’s demise, he will have to put those procedures on hold.

A shame , he thinks, but he has no choice. Until he knows more about Blackburn’s death, he can’t allow another Ranger to undergo amygdala surgery.

It’s a bitter development, as bitter as the smell of ashes in Raige’s nostrils. He’d had high hopes for Nizamani’s program.

Such high hopes .

The second sun is beginning to melt into the western horizon, its race run, and every rock and grain of sand in the desert is touched with fire. The San Francisco Mountains in the north seethe as if made of lava. A much smaller, more distant chain in the south writhes in what seems like agony.

From Jon’s vantage point on a high bluff, he sees for miles in every direction. What he doesn’t see—doesn’t wish to see—is any part of Nova City.

That is why he has made the trek out here. To be alone in the desert, far from his fellow human beings. Far from their striving and their purposes and their emotions.

If he had stopped before reaching this point, someone might have found him and tried to persuade him to go back. But not now. He is beyond their reach, beyond their help. He is exactly where he meant to be.

It has taken him days to reach this bluff. On the first day, he became thirsty and then hungry. On the second, his hunger and thirst got worse. On the third, it was difficult for him to go on.

But he went on anyway.

A normal man would have balked at the idea of walking into the desert without food or water. A normal man would have done whatever he needed to do to survive.

Jon has no needs. No needs at all.

He only has preferences. He prefers to escape the way others look at him. He is tired of explaining his lack of motivation to them. Not that he blames them. He was their hope, after all. But he’s become something else, something more like the Ursa he was supposed to destroy. They have to accept the fact that their hope was misplaced.

So he has come to this place to be alone, to let nature— his nature—run its course. To let the desert claim him in its own good time.

Does he wish he had never become a Ghost? Never undergone the operation that gave him the ability to go undetected by the Ursa at the cost of his humanity?

Certainly, his life would have been different. He knows that, thinks about it. But he doesn’t feel any regret regarding his decision.