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

idiot.”
    “No,” Blodge said, sitting down beside him, “you’re not. You stood up for what you believed.”
    “To my commanding officer!”
    “Maybe he’ll respect you for it.”
    Conner shook his head. “Did you see the look on his face? That wasn’t respect. Anger, maybe. Disgust. But definitely not respect.”
    “Listen,” Blodge said, “whatever it was, he’ll forget about it. He didn’t get to be the officer in charge of cadets by holding grudges against them.”
    Conner glanced at him. “How do you know that?”
    Blodge reddened. “I just … I mean … all right, I don’t. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? He would have to be an evenhanded guy for him to rise that high in the Rangers.”
    It did make sense. But that didn’t mean it was true.
    Conner sighed. He finally had made some headway with Wilkins. He finally had begun to distinguish himself the way a Raige would be expected to. And now … this.
    “Thanks for trying to cheer me up,” he told his friend.
Even if it’s not working very well
.
    “Hey,” said Blodge, “what are friends for?”
    As he crossed the barracks to return to his bunk, Conner heard a roll of laughter. He traced it to Lucas and a half dozen cadets who’d gathered around him.
    They’re laughing at
me, Conner thought.
    The funny thing—the
really
funny thing—was that he and Lucas had been friends at one time. In fact, when they were five or six, they were best friends—even pricked their fingers so they could become blood brothers. No one had told them that the Raiges and the Kincaids hadn’t traditionally gotten along. Not even Conner’s dad, who was otherwise big on history lessons. No one had said, “Hey, Conner, stay away from that kid. His ancestors have been our rivals for the last six hundred years.”
    So Conner looked for Lucas whenever he went to the playground near his house, and Lucas looked for him, and they shared many an adventure together in the jumble of red rocks nearby. More often than not, they pretended that they had crash-landed on an alien world and had to survive in its hostile environment until help came.
    They played cageball. They played football. They decided that Conner was better at one and Lucas at the other, though Conner couldn’t remember anymore who was better at what. Then, like a lot of kids, they drifted apart. Conner wasn’t even sure when it happened. He just found himself playing with new friends and saw that Lucas was doing the same, and before Conner knew it they were like strangers.
    Those who knew them in those days assumed their family histories finally had come between them. But that wasn’t the reason Conner and Lucas stopped being pals. In fact, Conner hadn’t even known about their families’ rivalry at the time.
    Anyway, when Conner was eleven, Lucas and his family moved to a house on the other side of the colony,and Conner didn’t see much of him after that. Or, given the way kids’ faces change as they mature, maybe he had seen Lucas after all and didn’t know it. He didn’t even recognize Lucas on their first day of cadet training, not until the roll was called and Lucas’s name came up. At that point, Conner wasn’t harboring any ill will toward Lucas. Just a certain curiosity.
    But ill will had entered the equation pretty quickly. And Conner couldn’t imagine it going away anytime soon.
    Contrary to what people liked to say, Frank Raige wasn’t always on duty. Sometimes he was lounging, watching a replay of the scholastic football championship from the night before.
    Not that he was as rabid a fan as his sister-in-law Bonita. She was what he called “off the charts.” But like anyone else, he sometimes liked to just relax.
    He was just watching the first half of the game come to a close when the comm unit beeped. He answered the way he always did, on the job or off: “Raige.”
    “It’s Meredith,” said the voice on the other end.
    Even in her most casual moments, the Prime