Instantly, lines of data crawled around the naviband, creating what looked like a holographic bracelet. Kitai had never seen a naviband do such a thing before.
At the same time, the monitor to Cypher’s right filled with a cascade of numbers and graphs, all of which matched those on Kitai’s naviband. It took Kitai a moment to realize what his father was doing: syncing the band with the cockpit’s computers.
But why? Kitai felt panic creeping back into his bones.
“Cadet,” Cypher said, “center yourself.”
Kitai did so. Slowly, he became calm again. Cypher seemed satisfied. Sitting back, he looked into Kitai’s eyes, and Kitai looked back. The weight of their predicament hung between them, a shared burden.
Then Cypher began to speak. “The emergency beacon you brought me will fire a distress signal deep into space.”
Kitai nodded. But it seemed to him that his father was speaking to himself as much as to his son, trying to cut through the haze of his pain by thinking out loud.
“But it’s damaged,” Cypher said.
“There is another one in the tail section of our ship.”
Kitai’s heart fell. The tail section was gone, and more than likely, the beacon was gone, too. But Cypher didn’t seem daunted by what he had learned. If anything, he seemed intrigued.
As Kitai watched, his father manipulated the controls and altered the holographic landscape. In the grainy computerized image, Kitai could make out mountain ranges, rivers, valleys, forests, deserts, small storm patterns, animals, birds, and so on.
Cypher pointed to the screen. “This is us here. I can’t get an accurate reading, but the tail is somewhere in this area, approximately one hundred kilometers from here.” He glanced at his son. “We need that beacon.”
Kitai considered what his father was saying. One hundred kilometers…
“Kitai,” Cypher said in measured tones, “my legs are broken. One very badly. You are going to retrieve that beacon or we are going to die. Do you understand?”
Kitai nodded his head. “Yes.” He felt tears welling in his eyes and wiped them away and awaited his orders.
Cypher opened a small black medical case marked UNIVERSAL AIR FILTRATION GEL—EMERGENCY USE ONLY. Inside, there were six vials sitting side by side.
“You have air filtration inhalers,” said Cypher. He removed one of the vials. “You need to take one now. The fluid will coat your lungs, increase your oxygen extraction, and allow you to breathe comfortably in the atmosphere.”
Cypher demonstrated how to use the inhaler. Kitai watched carefully. Then he placed the vial to his lips, pressed the release, and inhaled deeply. He had expected the air in the vial to be tasteless at best, but it wasn’t. It was sweet, like the air in the mountains back on Nova Prime just before first sun.
“You have six vials,” Cypher said. “At your weight, that should be twenty to twenty-four hours each. That’s more than enough.”
Next, Cypher helped Kitai with his naviband. A digital map appeared as a hologram above Kitai’s wrist.
“Your lifesuit and backpack are equipped with digital and virtual imaging,” Cypher noted. “So I will be able to see everything you see and what you don’t see.”
Kitai took comfort from that more than from anything else. Equipment was great; it was reassuring. But knowing that his father would have access to everything he saw was ten times more reassuring.
Cypher picked up the Ranger pack and placed it on Kitai’s back. Then he turned his son around so that his backpack camera was facing Cypher. Turning so that he could access his console, he tapped a control, and a monitor in front of Kitai came alive. Kitai could see Cypher’s face on the screen, its eyes looking into him the way his father’s real eyes did.
On the monitor, Cypher said, “I will guide you.” He tapped the same control to shut down the monitor. Then he turned Kitai around to face him.
“It will be like I’m right there.” He looked Kitai up and down for a moment. Then he said, “Take my cutlass.”
He picked it up and held it out to his son. Kitai looked at it, a little stunned. It was his father’s cutlass. The one he had used to fight and kill Ursa, the one that never left his side.
And he was handing it over to Kitai.
That, more than anything else, brought home the gravity of the situation. If Cypher was entrusting his son with his most prized possession, it was because he wanted to give Kitai every advantage he could.
“Go on,” Cypher said, “take it. C-40. The full twenty-two configurations.”
Not just the ones Kitai had used as a cadet—pike and hook and blade and so on—but every possible cutlass form the Savant’s engineers could come up with. Only the most skilled and experienced Rangers were given the C-40. And now, despite his fledgling skills and his utter lack of experience, he had one, too.
Kitai felt the weight of the cutlass in his hands. It was heavier than the ones he had practiced with as a cadet. It even looked big.
He looked up at his father. Cypher could have comforted him. But true to form, he went in the other direction, underscoring the magnitude of Kitai’s task.
“This is not training,” he said. “The threats you will be facing are real. Every single decision you make will be life or death. This is a class 1 quarantined planet. Everything on this planet has evolved to kill humans.” A beat. “Do you know where we are?”
Where? Nowhere near home, that was for sure. Nowhere near the planet of Kitai’s birth.
“No, sir,” the cadet said.
Cypher frowned. “This is Earth, Kitai.”
Earth? As in the world that gave birth to humanity but faltered under the lash of humanity’s abuse? That Earth?
Kitai often had wondered what it would be like to walk the surface of the world his distant ancestors had walked. Lots of kids had wondered about that. Now he would have the chance. But there was a danger beyond the ones his father had outlined, one that had been in the back of Kitai’s mind.
“The Ursa?” he asked.
Saying the words out loud made them seem even worse, made it seem as if the creature were right outside. Kitai saw his father’s eyes narrow.
“There are three possibilities,” Cypher said. “The first and most likely is that it died in the crash. The second and less likely is that it is injured very badly and still contained.”
Kitai would have signed up for either one. He would have done so in a heartbeat.
“And the third and least likely,” Cypher concluded, “is that it is out.”
The words hung in the air between Kitai and his father. Cypher had said that was the least likely scenario, but he hadn’t ruled it out completely. He couldn’t.
“We will proceed,” Cypher continued, “in anticipation of the worst-case scenario. Every movement will be under protococlass="underline" escape and evade. If he’s out there, I will see him long before he gets anywhere near you.”
Kitai nodded. Escape and evade. What else was he going to do? Fight the Ursa on his own?
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Cypher said. “Do everything I say and we will survive.”
And that was it. There was nothing left to say. For a moment, Kitai and his father just looked at each other. The cadet looked down at his cutlass, felt the weight of his pack on his back. He was a Ranger, outwardly at least, and he had a mission to carry out. But he wasn’t just a Ranger, and the man with the broken legs sitting in front of him wasn’t just his commanding officer.