I’m back now. I needed a break after that last recording. Reliving that day always destroys me. I probably shouldn’t have even gotten into all that, not when there’s so much else going on. But that’s what’s pretty much always on my mind.
Anyway. Night had fallen while I was lost in my memories, and still my dad didn’t move. I was trying to decide what to do next when his eyes finally opened.
My dad calmly surveyed his surroundings. Seeing me breathing without my mask, he removed his own.
He told me to stand up and evaluate my condition. I rolled my wrists, flexed my elbows, rotated my shoulders and neck. I leaned side to side, front to back, squatted up and down, testing my knees and legs. Even though it didn’t seem like the most urgent thing to deal with right now, knowing that I was good to go made me feel better.
My dad gave me a once-over to confirm that I was okay. With that done, he told me to make sure the Ursa was contained.
That’s when I realized he hadn’t seen the rear of the ship rip off. Voice shaking, I told him the news. “It’s gone. The whole back of the ship is gone.”
“Rangers! Count off!” my dad shouted, his voice booming through the main cabin. But its echoes were met with total silence. A coughing fit overtook him, but when he recovered, he repeated his order.
“Most of them were in the back when the tail broke off,” I told him. It felt strange, knowing more about what had happened than my dad did, even for a minute.
Dad tried to pull himself to his feet, but I could see right away that his legs couldn’t hold him up. He cried out, collapsing back to the floor. I saw him struggling to stay focused despite the pain. It only took a moment before he was back in control. “The cockpit is directly above us. Go. Now.”
I didn’t want to leave him. Not when he was so badly hurt, not when he had only just come back to me. I slowly got to my feet, but then I stood there just staring at him.
“Go, Kitai,” he insisted, and I nodded. I headed up toward the cockpit. With each step, I felt more and more certain that my dad would save us. He was, after all, the greatest hero Nova Prime had ever known. Maybe that sounds like bragging. But I always thought, it’s not bragging if it’s true. It would take more than a spaceship crash to take him out.
I drew in a sharp breath when I entered the cockpit. Both the pilot and the navigator were still in their chairs, but they’d been crushed beneath a structural beam. I had to lean over them to see the control board. Emergency lights flashed everywhere. I glanced into the open avionics system just off the cockpit and saw that most of the equipment there was still lit up. At least not everything was destroyed.
“Go to the control board.” My dad’s voice came from the bottom of the stairwell. “In front of the left seat. Top row, fourth from the right. Activate Exterior Motion Sensors.”
I reached for the panel, but my hands were shaking too hard to activate the screen. I clamped them together to stop them, drawing in deep breaths. Trying again, I found the screen for the exterior motion sensors. I hit a button and Motion Sensors Activated appeared on the screen.
“Check,” I called down to my dad.
Next he told me where to find the emergency beacon and what it would look like. “We need it to send a distress signal,” he explained. “Bring it to me.”
The thought of activating a beacon and having the Rangers come save us, wherever we might have landed, made me feel instantly lighter. We weren’t trapped here. I would find the signal, press a button, and just wait for our rescuers. Then we’d go home.
But when I got to the communication rack, I saw the damage. I found the emergency beacon, but the bottom of it was crushed. I carried it back down the ladder to show it to my dad, hoping that the part that was broken wasn’t the part that mattered.
My dad inspected the damage, then switched the beacon on. Its activity light stayed off. He detached its mangled lower section, and I thought he might be able to fix it. But after a few minutes, he shook his head. The beacon was useless.
I knew it would still be okay, though—he was the Commander General, and he would come up with a solution. I could actually see him thinking, rapidly concocting and rejecting ideas until he reached a decision.
“We need to get me into the cockpit,” he announced. “There’s a cargo loader at the rear.”
I spotted the flat hydraulic machine on a cargo elevator by the ship’s front bow. A small ramp ran from the loader to the floor. When I hit a button, the ramp started moving like a conveyor belt. My dad braced his arms at his sides, and I lifted his leg onto the belt. When he winced, I paused, realizing he was in more pain than he was letting on but of course he wouldn’t tell me how bad it was. The loader started dragging him up, and I hurried to lift his other leg onto it. With some maneuvering, he was able to get his upper body onto the conveyor belt himself.
When he reached the top of the loader, I saw that blood from his legs streaked the ramp. His blood was on my hands too, from where I had grasped his legs to move them. I could see that he was injured, of course, but those bright red streaks really brought it home. Cypher Raige was not invincible. He was a man like any other. And that meant he could be broken.
But that didn’t mean he would stop. I pressed a button and the cargo elevator began to rise. I craned my head back so I could keep my eyes on him.
“Inventory up. Full assets. Now,” Dad called down. I paused, noticing that the windows outside were crusted with ice. I didn’t find that encouraging. But I couldn’t keep my dad waiting while I worried about the weather, so I climbed up after him.
It only took me a second to realize that I was going to have to move the pilot and the navigator so my dad could get to the controls. Bracing myself, I dragged the navigator out of his seat and over to a hatch in the floor labeled Nitro Storage Container. It was awful, clutching his cold arm, hefting his dead weight, but I couldn’t let myself stop. I hadn’t known this man, but I felt grief wash over me at the thought that he would never again fly, or smile, or see his family. But my responsibility now was to the two of us who had survived. I needed to get the bodies into the nitro container to avoid attracting whatever predators were on this planet. I popped open the hatch and pushed the navigator into the container, quickly closing it behind him. I wanted to break down right then, but there was no time. I had to move the pilot too.
Shaking, I turned to see my dad sitting in the navigator’s seat. He had transferred himself from the loader to the chair and now sat upright with his left leg propped on the console beside him. Since he was settled in at the control center, I took a minute to get ahold of myself. Sinking to the floor, I tried not to remember the heft of those bodies, tried not to think about who they had been, and who they had left behind. I rocked slowly back and forth, trying to calm my mind. And there in front of me was my dad, bleeding but completely in control. Maybe I really wasn’t like him at all.
Dad placed his palm on a terminal to activate the cockpit computers. They burst to life, and I felt a flicker of hope. A hologram flashed the words Identity Verified: General Cypher Raige, and the computers booted up. Although the console in front of the pilot’s seat was completely destroyed, the holographic display in front of my dad spit out initial readings, apparently fully functional.
He ran through the various systems, and the computer announced, Main cabin breach. Self-sealing in progress, and, Transport ship: condition critical.
“General Cypher Raige,” he said, glancing at the cockpit recorder to confirm that it was capturing his words. “Crash-landed.”
Even though the reports were all bad, watching him go through the standard checks helped me calm down. If he could keep doing his job, I figured I could too. So I got to my feet and went looking for whatever supplies I could find. We would need them.
I managed to accumulate a decent pile. A med kit and my dad’s kit bag were the best finds. But now the scavenging was done, and I was at a loss again.
“I need you to focus right now,” my dad told me. “Assets?”
“Four bodies. I put them in the nitro compartment.” Not exactly an asset, but it seemed like an important part of my report. “Radio nonoperational. Four Ranger packs. Cabin pressure stable. One emergency med kit. And I got your bag from the troop bay.” I could feel him watching me, assessing my every word and movement. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for, exactly, but it seemed safe to assume I wouldn’t measure up.
But he just flipped through a few screens until a holographic image of a landscape appeared over the control console. Tons of wavy lines showed the contour of the land, with a blinking light in the midst of it.
As Dad stared at the image, I saw his mouth tighten, uncertainty flashing for the first time in his eyes. Then he drew in a deep breath, and he was the Commander General once more. Whatever he had decided, I knew I would have to obey. “Hand me the med kit and Ranger pack,” he ordered.
I retrieved both and handed them to him. He grabbed my wrist and activated the naviband on my lifesuit. Data from the band appeared in layers around my wrist, like a holographic bracelet. I stared at it, amazed. I had always known I would get a naviband when I made Ranger, but I’d never seen one close up. It was even cooler than I could’ve imagined.
The monitor beside my dad filled with numbers and graphs that matched the ones surrounding my wrist. I realized that he was syncing me with the cockpit computers, but I still didn’t know why.
“Cadet. Center yourself,” he said, and I used the breathing techniques and mental exercises we had learned at the academy to calm myself as much as I could. I knew he was checking my heart rate to monitor my anxiety level.
My dad sat back and stared at me intently. We both knew how much trouble we were in. We both knew only he could hope to get us out of it. And we both knew he wasn’t going anywhere without medical attention.
“The emergency beacon you brought me will fire a distress signal deep into space,” he told me, and I nodded. “But it’s damaged.”
He ran a scan for a spare beacon. “There is another one, in the tail section of our ship.”
But I’d told him the tail was gone, so what good would that do us? When he pulled up the holographic landscape again, I picked out mountain ranges, valleys, forests, and deserts, all represented on the display. Storm patterns and moving animals also showed up on the sensors. My dad pointed to a blinking circle. “This is us here. I can’t get an accurate reading, but the tail is somewhere in this area, approximately one hundred kilometers from our location.” He pointed to a dark section of the landscape where the sensors weren’t picking up much. Another blinking dot marked the tail there, but without the details around it, it wasn’t much help.
“We need that beacon,” he said, and that was when I finally understood. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I tried to swipe them away—too late. I saw that he had seen. But he spoke with kindness, like the father I longed for, not the Commander General I had come to expect. “Kitai, both my legs are broken. One very badly. You are going to retrieve that beacon or we are going to die. Do you understand?”
I could only nod. If that was what I had to do, I would try my best. But for the first time since I became a Cadet, I doubted my abilities. I saw tears welling in his eyes too, and hid my shock. I simply wiped my eyes and awaited my orders.
Dad opened a small black case from the med kit marked Universal Air Filtration Gel—Emergency Use Only. Six vials were lined up inside.
“You have air filtration inhalers,” he explained, holding up a vial. “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.” He showed me how to use the inhaler, and I repeated his movements, bringing the vial to my lips, pressing the release, and drawing in a deep breath.
“You have six vials. At your weight, that should be twenty to twenty-four hours each. That’s more than enough.” He pressed a button on my naviband, and a holographic map appeared again. “Your lifesuit and backpack are equipped with digital and virtual imaging,” he explained. “So I will be able to see everything you see, and what you don’t see.” After helping me into the Ranger backpack, he activated my rear-facing backpack camera, then tapped a control on the console so the feed appeared on the monitor in front of me. The monitor showed his face as he promised, “I will guide you.”
Then he shut the monitor down, and I turned to face him. “It will be like I’m right there with you,” he said. I nodded, but I’m sure I looked unconvinced. Having my dad watch my back would be great, but he wouldn’t be able to help me fight off anything that might be out there, and I wasn’t used to fighting alone. Then he offered me the best tool he had. “Take my cutlass.”
He held it out, but I just stared at it in awe. General Cypher Raige’s cutlass, the most advanced one ever made. “Go on. Take it. It’s the C-40. The full twenty-two configurations.” If I had passed my Ranger exam, I would’ve only gotten a C-10—like my sister’s. Only advanced Rangers were cleared to access that many weaponry options. His cutlass could transform into basically any weapon I could imagine.
I accepted his cutlass, noticing how big it looked in my thirteen-year-old hands, how much heavier it felt than any of the others I had held. I locked eyes with my father, not ready to turn away. We both knew this might be the last time we ever saw each other. The knowledge made me wish even more that we hadn’t spent so much of my childhood apart. But there was no point in thinking about that now. All I could do was complete my mission so we could both have a second chance.
“This is not training,” Dad reminded me, as if I weren’t completely aware. “The threats you will be facing are real. Every single decision you make will be life or death. This is a Class-One Quarantined planet. Everything on this planet has evolved to kill humans.” I looked at him in surprise, and he asked, “Do you know where we are?”
“No, sir,” I replied.
“This is Earth, Kitai.”
But how could we have ended up back here, when humans hadn’t been near Earth since we left it over one thousand years ago? Out of everywhere in the whole universe, why did we have to land on the one planet that had turned on us and nearly killed us all? It seemed like a cruel joke.
The worst part, though, was knowing that the Ursa was out there somewhere. I shivered at the thought of it waiting for me. It had my scent, after all. I was the human it would hunt to the death, if it had survived the crash, if it had escaped. “The Ursa?” I said, and my dad understood exactly how terrified I was.
Cool as ever, my dad replied, “There are three possibilities. The first and most likely is that it died in the crash.” I nodded, comforted by his words. He continued, “The second and less likely is that it is injured very badly and still contained. And the third and least likely is that it is out.” He spoke with a calm certainty that steadied me, but I knew better than to simply hope for the best. My dad gave voice to that thought too. “We will proceed, however, in anticipation of the worst-case scenario. Every movement will be under protocol: escape and evade. If it is out there, I will see it long before it gets anywhere near you. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Do everything that I say and we will survive.”
I rushed forward and wrapped my dad in a hug. His shoulders were so broad, I could barely get my arms around them, but it didn’t matter. He hugged me back, for what seemed like forever. This was the hug I had hoped for back at our apartment. Too bad it took almost dying to bring us closer.
Finally he said, “Time’s wasting. And we’ve got a lot to do.” I forced myself to pull away, doing my best to stand up straight and strong as I snapped my cutlass onto my backpack. “I estimate H plus four days to reach the tail,” he told me. “Use your naviband. Stay on the trajectory I’ve plotted. The temperatures on this planet fluctuate dramatically daily and most of the planet freezes over at night. There are hot spots, geothermal nodes between here and the tail, that will keep you warm during the freeze-over. You must reach one of these nodes each evening before nightfall.”
I gave him one last look before I managed a weak military pivot and left the cockpit.