Peter David: After Earth

That stung. No doubt, she had meant it to. Cade wanted to hurt her back but he couldn’t—not if he wanted to stay out of jail.

“Got it?” Tolentino asked.

He nodded coldly. “Got it.”

“Got it, what ?”

“Got it, ma’am .”

“You’d better,” she said. “Because I’m not clearing you for field duty until you do.”

If Cade’s first day was bad, his second was worse.

Tolentino put him through one grueling drill after another, matching him up against his squad mates singly and in pairs. His speed and agility were second to nobody’s, so he didn’t have a problem keeping up physically. But when it came to things like strategy and teamwork, it was clear he had a lot to learn.

Even to him.

In one exercise, Tolentino drew a circle in the dirt with her cutlass. Then her Rangers had to stand inside it and, using their own cutlasses as quarterstaffs, knock their opponents out of the circle. They were given padding for their heads, ankles, and hands, but not enough to keep a solid whack from drawing blood.

In round 1, Cade beat a fair-haired woman named Bentzen, sweeping her legs out from under her. In round 2, he drove the end of his cutlass into the chest of a guy named Zabaldo.

That put him in the final round. He would face Kayembe, a monster of a man with a weightlifter’s chest and thighs the size of Cade’s torso. Kayembe had reached the final by besting Tolentino in the second round, so he wasn’t just big—he was crafty.

Kayembe smiled when Cade stepped into the circle against him. “Looks like you and me, Ghost Man.”

“Figure that out all by yourself?” Cade asked.

His opponent’s smile faded. “I was going to go easy on you. Now…” His voice trailed off suggestively.

“Don’t do me any favors.”

“Commander Velan did you the favor,” Kayembe said. “It’s up to me to show him how wrong he was.”

“Assuming you can ,” said Cade.

If he hadn’t backed down in the back alleys of Nova City, he wasn’t going to do so for the likes of Kayembe. Not even if he was one of the biggest human beings he had ever seen.

Tolentino held her hand up between them. “Ready?”

Cade and his adversary said “Ready” at the same time.

“Go,” Tolentino said, dropping her hand.

Kayembe began by striking at Cade’s feet. Not a bad approach , Cade had to concede. Even if he kept himself from falling, he would be off balance when he came down.

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.