He could hear Kitai’s voice as he ran. “Five mikes out.” His voice was stronger now, more confident. “Who wasn’t advanced to Ranger? Who was it? Watch him go. Watch him go.”
Cypher stared, on the verge of losing consciousness. His eyes closed, opened, fluttered closed again. A memory came to him…
He was on a Ranger ship. It was dark. Someone was yelling, “Five mikes out!”
It was a drop captain. Cypher couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he recalled being one of the Rangers waiting in the ship. He remembered, too, the piece of smart fabric in his hands. On the fabric was a face. Senshi’s face. She was sitting at a table with a birthday cake in front of her. There were nineteen candles on the cake. Faia and Kitai, who was only eight at the time, looked on from the background.
Senshi held up the cake. “Dad,” she said, “you help me.”
“No,” he told her as he sat among his fellow Rangers, “you go ahead. You blow.”
“Come on, Dad,” Senshi insisted with a grin. “Blow.”
Cypher looked around at the other Rangers. They were watching him, making him self-conscious. “Now,” he told Senshi, “you know there’s no way I can actually do that from here.”
“No,” she said, full of faith, “I think you can.”
Cypher sighed and addressed his wife. “Faia, why don’t you step in here and help the girl?”
Faia came into the frame of the smart fabric and said, “You can do it.”
“I know you can,” Senshi added.
Cypher shot a glance over his shoulder. A Ranger was sitting there, stone-faced. Cypher turned back to the cake and Senshi’s expectant face. Resigned to his fate, he leaned forward quickly and blew. As if by magic, the candles went out.
Suddenly Kitai leaned into the frame, laughing. It was he who had blown out the candles. Faia was laughing, too. So was Senshi. Cypher basked in the laughter. He smiled. “Happy nineteenth birthday, Senshi.”
Just then, an alarm went off in the ship. The other Rangers turned to Cypher.
“I have to go,” he told Senshi.
He tapped the piece of smart fabric, and it turned off. Sometimes it unsettled him, seeing his family vanish with one flick of his finger. All that he knew, gone in a flash. Then he tucked it away. All the Rangers in the ship stood, strapped on their gear, and looked to Cypher. The back of the ship began to open. Cypher stared at it. “Rangers,” he called out, “in formation! Move!”
They moved.
“Hot spot one arrival,” came a voice.
Cypher blinked away the memory and checked his son’s camera. It showed him that Kitai had reached a geothermal node that was elevated from the landscape around it. Steam rose from the ground. Fallen trees were overgrown with moss. There was decay everywhere, the product of the place’s warm, wet air.
“H-plus-forty-eight minutes!” Kitai announced, an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice.
Outside the geothermal zone, the forest was going into a deep, rapid freeze. Every tree in the vicinity was developing a thick skin of ice.
Kitai began to cough. “Sir,” he said, seemingly hoping for a response from his father, “I made it. I’m here.”
Ignoring his own condition, he checked his son’s vital signs. They scrolled in front of him. “Make sure you have everything,” he instructed Kitai. “Take your next inhaler. Your oxygen extraction is bottoming.”
Dutifully, Kitai opened the med-kit. His father had gotten him this far. The last thing he was going to do was diverge from Cypher’s instructions.
We’re doing all right, Kitai thought. Spacing out the oxygen. Had a little setback before, but I’ll be calmer next time, smarter. Then he saw something bad—very bad. Of the five oxygen vials left to him, two were broken. Quickly, he closed the case, hiding its contents from Cypher’s view.
I don’t have enough breathing fluid, he thought. What am I going to do? How am I going to reach the tail section and the beacon if I don’t have enough to breathe?
“Use the next dose of breathing fluid,” Cypher said.
Kitai strained not to cough. “I’m good, Dad. I don’t need it right now.”
Cypher watched his son, knowing that he was lying but refusing to berate him for it. “Okay,” he said.
Finally Kitai coughed a deep cough, his chest making a hollow wheezing sound. He was starving for oxygen, no question about it. Still Cypher said nothing. He just watched and waited even though his son’s struggles gradually were getting worse. Kitai’s coughs became more brutal, driving home the sad but inescapable fact that human beings no longer could breathe the air of their homeworld.
To make things worse, the cockpit’s medical computer displayed a graphic: ARTERIAL SHUNT 70% EFFECTIVE. Cypher was still getting blood, getting oxygen, but not as much as he had gotten before. Why?
Then he saw it on the holographic readout: His self-administered shunt was slipping on the ragged end, where the fit hadn’t been perfect. Blood was escaping from it, running down to the floor. The medical computer advised him to commence transfusion. It told him he needed four units of O-positive.
But all he cared about, all he could hear, was Kitai’s deep, racking coughs. All he could see was the pain on Kitai’s face as he fought for air. It was a tough lesson, but one Kitai had to learn: Listen to your father.
x
Kitai dragged in breath after breath, each more difficult than the last. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. If he went without breathing for another minute, he would pass out. And that might be a disaster from which he couldn’t come back. Finally, reluctantly, he administered the second vial of breathing fluid.
Instantly, he could feel the oxygen spread throughout his body, meeting his needs. His breathing slowed. His strength came back to him.
“Second dose of breathing fluid complete,” he said. “Over.”
“Count off remaining so you can keep track,” his father said. “Over.”
Kitai hated the idea of lying to his father. However, he had no choice. He couldn’t take a chance on Cypher pulling the plug on the mission, especially when it was their only hope.
His face flushed with shame, Kitai replied, “Four vials remain, sir.”
Just then, a pack of wolves slinked past him, seeking a warm spot against the frigid cold. A couple of deer lay down to go to sleep. Bison crowded in, side by side with jade-eyed tigers. Everyone had sought the same refuge. Even insects, Kitai thought. During the day, they might be bitter enemies, but at night, when their world froze over, they enjoyed a kind of truce.
Otherwise, none of them would survive.
Kitai saw a bunch of monkeys with bioluminescent eyes staring at him. He couldn’t help staring back. Suddenly the sky opened up and unleashed a mighty downpour. Kitai ducked back into the musty hollow of a huge rotting tree, but it didn’t keep him very dry.
Right in front of him, a bee struggled to free itself from a spiderweb. The more it moved, the more it sent a signal to the spider that had made the web. Suddenly, a spider bigger than Kitai’s fist showed up and rushed down to claim the bee. But the bee wasn’t defenseless. As the spider approached, it tried to sting its captor. Kitai watched the struggle, caught up in it. Lightning flashed as the bee tried to free itself, but to no avail. The spider just hung there, waiting. Finally, the bee got too tired to buzz its wings. But instead of moving in for the kill, the spider backed up. It looked confused.
Kitai supposed the spider couldn’t find the bee unless it moved and sent a vibration through the strands of the web. The spider began testing each thread for its tension until it came upon the thread on which the bee was trapped. Suddenly, the spider made another charge. The bee flailed wildly, trying to escape from the thread that was holding it down. Meanwhile, the spider came in low, its venomous fangs visible.