After Earth: A Perfect Beast by Peter David Michael Jan Friedman Robert Greenberger Read Free Book Online Page A

about the semiannual Ranger cadet training exercise known as the war games.
    “In case you didn’t know, the first round of games are over—though there will be another round, a punishment of sorts. Either way, who cares, right? What does a Ranger exercise have to do with you and me? Quite a bit, actually. You see, with the first of the war games behind us, we’re one step closer to minting a whole new class of Rangers, swelling the ranks of what is undeniably the most bloated organization on the planet. That’s right, you heard me—bloated, as in swollen. Puffed up. Bigger than necessary.
    “Friends, we didn’t need the Rangers we had already. Now we’re on our way to having even more of them thanks to a rather costly set of exercises. In fact, only the Rangers’ Prime Commander Wilkins knows exactly how costly because she’s not sharing that information with you and me—the people who happen to pay her salary in case any of you may have forgotten.
    “But this, as they used to say back on Earth before the Exodus, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Rangers consume a tremendous amount of our colony’s resources to manufacture weapons, maintain barracks,produce and clean uniforms, keep their aircraft aloft, and so on. They also operate an increasingly sophisticated command center that we seem to be rebuilding—excuse me,
upgrading
—every few years. Our valuable resources would be better spent addressing the problems caused by the drought, from which we’re still recovering in so many ways.
    “I know the Skrel are out there somewhere in the vastness of the universe. I know they gave us some good licks when they showed up before—and if you’ve listened to this program in the past, you know that no one honors the casualties of those attacks more than I do. But for the last couple of hundred years we have strengthened our defenses against airborne threats. We have honed our F.E.N.I.X. tech. We have what seems like a million satellites scanning the stars. In my opinion, these are all good and proper uses of what we have. But honestly, can anyone out there even begin to tell me why we need so many Rangers?
    “I don’t want to hear that we’re worried about the Skrel. They got their noses bloodied twice; they’d be crazy to come after us a third time. And our unmanned probes—one every week, it seems—haven’t turned up any evidence of other intelligent life. So why do we keep pouring credits into the Rangers? Why do we need to build faster and faster aircraft? It may appear that our resources here on Nova Prime are unlimited, but I assure you that they’re not.
    “I don’t have to remind you that we already ruined
one
world by mismanaging her ecosystem, by raiding her pantry until it was bare. We cannot afford to let that happen again. We as a species cannot do to Nova Prime what we did to Earth. I, for one, will not permit it.
    “As a society, we need to have this dialogue, my friends. We need to reexamine our priorities. The Prime Commander must listen to the will of the people for a change rather than the will of the military yes men with whom she surrounds herself. She may think we’ll stopasking for this, but we won’t. We’ll keep asking until we put our colony back on the forward-looking track it deserves.
    “Think about it, Nova Prime. I know I will.”
    The red light on the wall in front of him flickered off, and Vander Meer sat back in his chair. Ken Pham, the show’s producer, came out from behind his control panel and sat down beside the radio host, who dabbed at the sweat on his brow with one of the blue polka-dot handkerchiefs he’d gotten as a birthday present from his wife.
    “Nice job,” Pham said. “You nailed it on the first take.”
    “Don’t I always?” asked Vander Meer.
    “Actually, no.”
    Vander Meer chuckled. “Well, then,
almost
always. The show will hit at the usual time?”
    “Right on schedule,” Pham assured him.
    “No editing?” Vander Meer had been