Read After Earth: A Perfect Beast for Free Online Page B

said.
    “Your dad didn’t give
you
too much recognition, either.”
    “How would that have looked?” Frank asked. “The only thing worse than being the teacher’s pet is being the teacher’s son.”
    “He knew what he was doing, all right,” Wilkins said. “I miss the old goat.”
    Frank nodded to himself. “So do I.”
    As much as he liked shooting the bull with Wilkins, he knew she had a lot on her plate. The last thing he wanted to do was distract her from her work even if they
were
old friends.
    “I appreciate the report,” he said. “But right now I ought to—”
    “Hang on a moment, Frank. I know I’ve asked you this before, but I could sure use you at the top. Elias will be retiring soon, as you know, and as far as I’m concerned, a Prime Commander can’t have enough Raiges on her staff.”
    He was flattered, as always, but he needed a promotion like Nova Prime needed another desert. He had joined the Rangers to be a flier, not a desk jockey.
    “It’s getting a little hard to hear you,” he said. “Must be a sunspot or something.”
    “Don’t give me that,” said Wilkins. “If you’re too scared to move up the ranks, just say so.”
    Frank chuckled. “That’s me, ma’am, shaking in my britches. You have a good day, now. Call me any time with news like that.”
    “I hope to. Wilkins out.”
    *   *   *
    Damn
, Conner thought as he sat in the stillness of the cadet study center with the second sun dropping toward the horizon. He sighed and tapped his forefinger on the desk next to his keypad. Then he thought it again:
Damn
.
    Wilkins probably hadn’t thought she was asking very much from him. After all, a lot of war game maneuvers were plotted out
before
they were executed. But Conner hadn’t done that—far from it. In fact, his Greens had been on the razor’s edge of losing the game until he came up with a new approach on the fly.
    Right from the start, Lucas had led his Reds as if they were a pack of hungry wolves. They had forced Conner’s team to retreat not once but three times. They had gotten the Greens to split up into pockets of resistance, each one cut off from its comrades, and then they had eliminated the pockets one by one.
    Of course, Conner should have recognized such an approach in advance. He had known that Lucas had to be first all the time, even if it was just on the line to get into the mess hall, and didn’t care who he had to push out of his way. Hell, everyone knew that.
    So it wasn’t so hard to anticipate that that was how Lucas would command his forces. With aggression. And as a tactic, it had come close to working. The Greens were down to five cadets, hounded as a group by Lucas’s greater numbers, when it finally occurred to Conner to turn Lucas’s aggressiveness against him.
    It had been no more complicated than that.
Just turn it against him
. That was what Conner had told himself.
    How could the Greens do that? For the most part, by continuing to do what they were doing already—retreating. That was the trap. But to spring it, one of the Greens would have to get behind the Reds and pick them off from the rear.
    Because once you’re behind somebody, the advantage is all yours
.
    But it was easier said than done. Lucas’s cadets had been smart enough to fan out from one side of the valley to the other. The Greens would find it hard as hell to sneak around them.
    That was why Conner had decided he wouldn’t take that route.
    He would have gone
above
them, except there weren’t more than a couple of trees in the area, and the ones that existed weren’t sturdy enough to hold his weight—and even if he had been lucky enough to find one that could, it wouldn’t have had enough foliage to hide him from sight.
    Forced to discard the options of going around or over Lucas’s cadets, Conner pursued the only other course of action open to him: going under them.
    The idea had sounded dumb at first, even to Conner. The Greens didn’t have time to stop