After Earth: A Perfect Beast Read Online Free PDF Page A

trace the emergency beacon woven into Conner’s uniform.
    “You worried?” asked Wilkins.
    Raige shook her head. “No.” Though she might have been, just a little.
    “Then,” said the Prime Commander, sitting back in her chair, “let’s see how this plays out.”
    The more Wilkins watched, the more she wondered. Then she saw Conner appear as if by magic, and she stopped wondering. The cadet had come out of the ground behind Red Squad, where nobody—including Red, apparently—had expected him, and he began picking off the Red cadets one by one.
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” Hātu r i said.
    Wilkins was watching Conner execute what might have been the cleverest and most audacious maneuver she had ever seen in a war game. Before it was over, Kincaid and all the rest of his Red Squad cadets had been hit with beams from Green Squad’s practice pulsers. A screen to the Prime Commander’s right flashed nine names, one after the other, denoting that the Reds were no longer live participants in the exercise.
    When the show was over, Wilkins smiled and said,“That was pretty damn impressive. And he wasn’t even the leader of record.”
    “It’s in the blood,” Bonita Raige said, keeping a straight face though her heart was bursting with pride.
    The Prime Commander nodded approvingly. “Apparently so. Quite a nephew you’ve got there.”
    Conner Raige hadn’t had such a good day in a long time.
    He acknowledged that fact, if only to himself, as he led his team between two of the metal spires that supported the rust-colored fabric structure of his cadet barracks. Once under the smart fabric roof, he felt the temperature drop and was grateful. It was a relief to get out of the fiery suns of Nova Prime, which he had been forced to endure for the last several hours.
    Conner wasn’t just hot. He was tired, bone-tired, as tired as he had ever been before. But it was a
good
tired. His headgear, tucked securely under one arm, usually felt like a burden to him. But today it was a tangible reminder of what he and his Green team had accomplished.
    He could still see the looks on the faces of the Reds as they whirled about, having come to the realization—too late—that there was someone lurking behind them. Looks of surprise. Looks of embarrassment. Looks that said it wasn’t fair for them to lose the competition at the last moment when they had been winning it all along.
    Conner would hang on to that memory for a while. That much was certain. After all, it wasn’t often he did something he could be proud of.
    That was one of the problems with being born into a family of legends. Everything he did was measured against what other Raiges had done, all the way back hundreds of years to the time of the Exodus from Earth. No one in the colony ever came out and told him that, but they didn’t have to. He could see it in their eyes.
    That’s pretty good, they would be thinking, but not as good as what your great-great-grandfather did. Or your grandmother on your dad’s side.
    Or your father
.
    Conner’s bunk was at the far end of the barracks, one of several dozen beds arranged in perfectly neat, uncluttered rows and columns. When he reached it, he hung his headgear on a hook protruding from his bedpost. Then he swung himself around the post and plopped himself down on the mattress.
    All around him, he could hear members of his Green team doing the same. It felt good to lie down as he watched the barracks roof undulate under the press of an afternoon wind. He closed his eyes, and again he saw the faces of the Red team.
    And he found himself smiling.
    It felt funny, as if the muscles in his face weren’t used to it. But then, smiling wasn’t something Conner did a whole lot these days. In fact, it was something he probably hadn’t done at all since he had become a cadet. But he was doing it now. And why not? He had earned it, hadn’t he?
    Damned right
, he thought.
    Naturally, he wasn’t going to say that out loud. He