I could see him looking at me in a whole new way, and I puffed up a little with pride. When I asked about the pod again, he offered to show me.
Stepping toward the pod, I paused to guess. “Is it an Ursa?” When he nodded, I asked, “A dead one?” He shook his head, and my eyes widened. Rayna had said something about them catching a live Ursa, but I hadn’t really believed her. These monsters were almost impossible to capture alive. But studying the live ones was probably our best shot at figuring out how to finally defeat them.
“This is one of three we caught,” the Security Chief explained. “We keep all three on Iphitos, away from the civilian population. This one we call Viper. She’s the biggest and meanest.”
Then he issued a challenge, one I couldn’t resist. “You want to see if you can ghost?”
I noticed that all of the other Rangers were watching us now. “The pod is biostructural organic armor. She’s strapped and suspended in a gel inside there.” The chief nodded toward the pod.
Fascination and fear battled inside me as the Security Chief kept talking. He said a lot of stuff, but I’m pretty good at remembering, especially when it’s about the Ursa. “All you need to do is step over that red line around the pod. The gel doesn’t allow smells at certain distances, but at that distance, it can smell you.”
I stared at the red line around the crate, gathering my courage. “You’re not scared, are you?” asked the Security Chief. A few of the others snickered, and that was it for me. I couldn’t let anyone say they’d seen the Commander General’s son chicken out.
“I’m not scared of anything,” I announced, keeping my voice strong and steady.
The men shouted, “Uhh rahh!”—the Ranger war cry—in support.
“Don’t worry,” the chief said, grinning. “Even if she imprints on you, she’s locked up tight.”
I nodded. No backing down now. But the idea of it imprinting on me gave me the chills. Once an Ursa imprints on you, it will hunt you down until you’re dead—or it is.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the son of the OG is going to try to ghost,” the Security Chief called out. “Place your bets.”
A few Rangers sitting in the corner actually exchanged money. I wondered which ones had bet on me. Then I wondered if anyone bet on the Ursa.
I stalked around to the rear of the organic pod. Holes in the pod’s outer shell revealed the gel inside, but that was all. “I don’t see anything,” I told them.
“Active camouflage. Photosensitive skin cells change color and texture to match its surroundings,” the chief explained. “It only uncamouflages so it can frighten you. So you release more pheromones.”
I guess I should’ve known that from watching it attack Senshi, and from all the studies we’ve done on Ursa. I knew they could go invisible, but I’d never really thought about why they revealed themselves. Makes sense, though. They need our fear to track us, so the more fear they can cause, the better for them. They really are designed to be the perfect human-killing machines.
As I crept closer, the chief added, “Ghosting is when you don’t have a trace of fear in you. Good luck doing that.”
“To ghost, you must be so free from fear that you become invisible to the Ursa,” the Security Chief continued. “Fear is territorial in your heart. It refuses to share space with any other virtues. You must force fear from your heart and replace it with any other virtue. It could be love or happiness or faith, but the virtue is specific to the individual and comes from the deepest part of that person.”
I knew those words well. My dad wrote that, to explain how he ghosts. The Security Chief recited it, but I could’ve too. I’ve pored over that manual so many times, trying to learn its secrets—about being a Ranger, sure, but also whatever it might tell me about my dad. But the passage on ghosting doesn’t really explain much. You can either ghost or you can’t—it’s not something you learn. And my dad simply has no fear.
Which meant, neither should I. That was enough to hurtle me over the red line.
“Try to control your breathing,” the chief instructed me. “Your blood is filling with adrenaline right now, whether you know it or not. Your heart’s beating faster. The pores on your skin are opening up and secreting pheromones into the air, an imperceptible amount seeping into the molecular structure of the gel.”
I stood about a meter from the pod, eyes wide, waiting. But there was nothing, and at first, I thought it couldn’t sense me. I was just starting to think I had ghosted on my first try when the pod began to shake violently. Through one of the holes, I saw the sickly white skin of the creature as it uncamouflaged. I jumped back as the monster screamed, the same horrible sound I remembered from the day Senshi died.
The Rangers laughed, but their laughter was cut short. Tearing my gaze away from the pod, I saw them all standing at attention, cutlasses at their sides, facing my father. I suddenly couldn’t believe I had done something like this and thought he wouldn’t catch me.
“Kitai, back in your seat now,” he ordered. At first, I thought he had come for me, but then he turned to the security detail. “Rangers, go to Red Con One.”
The Security Chief told them to secure all cargo, and they hurried to lock down anything they could. While they worked, my dad led me back to my seat. He didn’t seem as furious as I would have expected. I guess he had bigger things to worry about than me right then.
He told me to put on my lifesuit. I struggled to pull on the suit that all Rangers wear—I’d never worn one before, for one thing, and I felt weird getting dressed right in the middle of the ship. I managed to wiggle my way into the slippery material, hoping I hadn’t put it on backward or anything. I tried to ask my dad what was happening, but he didn’t answer. He just ordered me to get into full harness. While he headed for the cockpit, I sat strapped in my seat with no idea what was happening. I watched Rangers securing the cabin, shouting out things like “Left rear secure!” “Cargo hull check!” and “Right zero locked.” I only knew what some of that meant. Peering out the window into the darkness beyond, I tried not to let the fear swallow me.
Or the guilt. I had no idea what was wrong, but could it have something to do with me waking the Ursa? Maybe the ship wasn’t made to withstand the kind of violent thrashing that the giant beast had done when it caught my scent? Okay, that didn’t make sense, not for a ship made to travel through space, but the timing of all this made me feel like I was being punished somehow, for stepping out of line.
And then I felt the impact. I saw wave after wave of asteroids strike the ship, tossing it around like it was a toy. I grabbed onto my seat as the entire ship shook. Muscles tensed, I braced myself. This was so much bigger than me, so much worse than I had imagined, that the guilt disappeared, replaced by pure survival instinct.
Alarms sounded throughout the ship as bigger and bigger asteroids pounded against the hull. We tipped dangerously from side to side and I gripped my seat even harder, feeling its edges bite into my palms.
“Caution. Critical hull damage,” blared the voice of the onboard computer. “Caution. Main power failure.”
All I could do was sit there, like my dad told me to, hoping that everything would be okay and trying not to completely freak out.
Something big hit the tail of the ship. Hard. It swung around wildly, knocking the breath out of me. Before I could recover, something bigger hit us even harder, shaking the whole ship again. I was starting to hyperventilate. It took everything I had not to unsnap my harness and run after my father. I wanted to feel like I was doing something. I hadn’t felt this helpless since that day with Senshi: a little kid hiding while an Ursa tore through our apartment, my sister trying and failing to defeat it. I hunkered down in my seat while the captain tried and failed to keep asteroids from ripping our ship to pieces. Both times, I did nothing—except follow orders.