Peter David: After Earth

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.”