by Neil Clarke
She swung north, to check up on the stationary elephant before she started her chip work. It was a long flight, clear to the northwestern boundary of the Preserve, within sight of the monorail. The old cow was down after all, on her side in the shade of a thin copse of trees. She raised her head as Tahira skimmed over, ears erect, trunk curled as she got her forefeet under her, tried to heave herself to her feet. Two aunties had stayed with her and as she collapsed into the dust once more, they hurried up, stroking her with their trunks, watching Tahira warily as she landed the skimmer and approached cautiously. The dust beneath the old cow’s hindquarters had turned to mud from her urine. No sign of defecation. A blockage? Perhaps she had eaten something that damaged her gastrointestinal system. Her temperature was slightly elevated and when Tahira zoomed in with her glasses, sure enough the cow’s membranes looked pale. No sign of any external trauma. Natural causes. She selected the diagnosis, uploaded visuals to the cow’s file, and set it to alert her when vitals fell to imminent death levels. She would return to make a more complete diagnosis then. For the record.
She caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye as she removed her glasses. Bear? Sure enough, when she slipped them back on, a green ring haloed the bushes where she had seen the movement and the ID appeared. One of the short-faced bears, another of the engineers’ triumphant recreations. They were drawn by death. One of the aunties blew noisily and rushed the bushes, trunk high. The bear retreated, growling, circled around to windward. Tahira retreated to her skimmer, although the bear was focused on the dying cow. Unlikely that the aunties would allow it to hasten the old cow’s end.
Natural causes, she thought as she lifted to swing eastward again. You could label the girl’s death as natural causes. To the lions it had been a natural end. The monorail was curving along the white arch of track on its first run of the morning. In a few moments the tourists would surely spot the cow and the questions would start pouring into Admin from the passengers. All the tourist monorails carried a direct link to Preserve Administration. Tahira set the skimmer on auto, homing on the ID of the bison herd she needed to chip, and quickly edited out an image of the cow and her aunties from the old cow’s ID file. She selected one of her taken in the past, with her last calf, set her link to record and smiled for the tourists. Quickly, in a warm and positive tone, she explained the situation, that the cow was dying of natural causes, the aunties were attending her, and that this (insert mother and calf image here) was part of the natural cycle of life and death, that the old cow’s flesh would nourish wild dog cubs (she called up a file, inserted a recent shot of three pups playing) and the scavenger population. She uploaded the video file to Administration and texted Amy Shen, the head of PR, to expect questions about the dying cow and offer this Special Message from the Manager. Amy would run the file through her editing software to smooth out any rough edges and in a few minutes, when the worried texts came in, the tourists would have her reassuring explanation.
Maybe she should have made one for the dead girl? Tahira kicked the skimmer to full speed, ducked down behind the wind screen as they streaked across the foothills of the mountains.
It took her the rest of the day to chip the bison calves and stalk a litter of wild dog pups old enough for chips. Half grown, they were skittish, full of hormones and already squabbling with the ranking alphas. But she finally got good shots, and planted a chip in a solid muscle mass. The new ID files opened and she recorded the pertinent data. Now the pups and the calves were part of the database. Their deaths would have meaning, value, would contribute to the slowly growing mass of information about this stable environment.
What had the girl’s death contributed?
A meal for the lions, she thought. At a price.
It was getting dark. She texted Jen that she was going to stay out and check on the lion pride before she came in. Told him to go home, activate Security when he left, she’d see him tomorrow. She knew where the pride would be, didn’t need to check her link. It was too early yet for them to head down to the river. She grounded the skimmer, ate an energy bar from her bag, drank some water, and used her link to access the Preserve database and check on the animals.
Nothing out of the ordinary. No Security alerts, nothing but the normal rhythms of day ending and night beginning. Shift change, she thought as she stuffed the wrapper into her pocket and capped her water bottle. Time. It was fully dark now, the Milky Way a white shimmer across the star spangled sky. She stared up at it. Different sky than the one over the refugee camp. Maybe it wasn’t, but it looked different. She frowned, bothered suddenly that she didn’t know if the constellations had been the same in that girlhood sky, or if memory had warped the images in her mind. It bothered her a lot. Frowning she lifted the skimmer, donned her glasses set to night-vision, and went looking for the lion pride. She flew low, skimming above the brush, weaving around the trees. Someone watching for her might think she was checking on the wildlife, scanning chips. She dipped south so that she’d meet the pride on their way down to the river.
Red blossomed at the top of her glasses’ heads-up visual field. Perimeter violation? Tahira’s stomach clenched. Why an alert this time? She crouched behind the windscreen as she dropped lower, weaving through the tops of the trees. A map flashed into existence now, red dots marking the path of the intruder as he activated the sensors scattered across the Preserve. Tahira watched another red icon blossom on the screen map. He was heading for the place where the girl had died and the steady progress suggested that he wasn’t trying very hard to hide and certainly wasn’t using hackware.
No. This was just some fool who chose tonight to violate the Perimeter. An idiot. A thrill seeker. Furious she circled south to come in straight behind the intruder, slowed the skimmer to its limit, weaving through the brush now, twigs whispering against the skimmer’s flanks, clawing at her legs. She was briefly thankful for her tough, suncloth pants that resisted the thorns. She followed the trespasser’s path on her map. He should be about a hundred yards ahead, almost at the site where the girl had died.
Something slammed into her, an invisible fist that loosened her grasp on the skimmer’s nav bar and tossed her sideways out of the seat. The skimmer compensated as soon as her hand left the bar, shying sideways to stay underneath her, slowing and settling automatically. She clutched at the bar to take control again, but her right arm didn’t work and before she could process that, shift to her left hand, the skimmer grounded gently. For a moment, Tahira stared at the bar, then realized that her sleeve was wet, warm liquid was dripping steadily onto her pants and the dusty ground beside the skimmer. Dark. Blood. Her head spun briefly and she swallowed dry nausea.
What do you think you’re going to do? She heard Shawn’s furious voice in her head. Not much. She climbed off the skimmer, her knees suddenly shaky.
“I don’t want to kill you.” The hard, cold voice came from the tall hawthorn scrub that edged the grassy area where the skimmer had come down. “But you’re not going to get in my way. You can yell for help as soon as I’m done here.”
“Did you bring another one to die?” Tahira faced the voice. She was still wearing her glasses, but they didn’t register an ID. No surprise. Anyone doing this would have had his ID chip removed long ago, would use temporary, fake chips. “How much do you get for these? And what do the girls think? That this is just another porn shoot, this time out in the dust? She didn’t expect the lions.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” A figure emerged from the concealing hawthorn. Tall. Dressed in chameleon-fabric so that his silhouette was hard to make out. The projectile rifle, night-scoped, ugly, and efficient looking wasn’t hard to make out at all. Something about the voice was wrong, nagged at her, but her head was full of sticky glue and she couldn’t think of what it was.
“I asked you a question.” The voice grated at her ears.
“You’re the one who’s making the snuff vids, recording the girls as they run into the ol
d lioness’s pride and die.” She would have spat the words, but that sense of wrong was building in her head.
The figure stepped forward suddenly and before Tahira’s gone-fuzzy reflexes could kick in, had shoved Tahira back against the skimmer, her back arched under the pressure of the trespasser’s body, her good arm bent behind her. She blinked into pale gray eyes in a hard, weathered face framed by cropped-short gray-white hair. Sucked in a breath that was half pain, half surprise.
A woman.
“Shawn said it might be a she.” She laughed, drunk on the pain that had begun to throb in her right shoulder and side, burning like a growing fire, radiating through her flesh.
“Yeah, I’m a she. That was my daughter your lions ate. You folks don’t care, but I do.” Her breath blasted Tahira’s face. “They’re going to pay for that tonight.”
“Your daughter?” Tahira blinked, trying to focus her eyes. “That’s why your hackware is so poor? You just walked in here to shoot lions? You don’t care if we catch you?”
“I don’t care one bit.” The cold pale eyes bored into hers. “If you hadn’t decided to hang out and protect them, I wouldn’t have had to shoot you. I figured you folks trust your software instead of using your eyes. I know how tracking software works . . . It’s pretty easy to fool if you know how.” She laughed and the sound was like glass breaking. “I was a wild-meat hunter for the black market—when there was still wild meat to hunt. I know all about tracking software. Maybe the people who babble about karmic balance are right, eh?” The shattered laugh came again. “After all the animals I killed, one of them killed my daughter. But the score is going to end in my favor.”
“You fool.” Tahira twisted her hand free, planted it against the woman’s chest and shoved. Her strength surprised both of them and the woman stumbled back a step. “You’ve ruined this night. You’ve ruined my chance to catch the one who killed your daughter and the girl he killed before her. You and your misguided revenge. He’s not going to come back, not after he realizes people were here waiting for him. Damn you.”
“What the crap are you talking about?”
“I’m not talking any crap.” Tahira closed her eyes. Game over, she thought. “How do you even know that your daughter was the girl who was killed here? We haven’t identified the DNA yet.”
“I found the image on the web.” The woman’s voice grated, harsh as stone. “I was looking for her, used a video search engine, uploaded a bunch of recent pictures of her. And the engine found a match. With lions.” She spat. “One of your tourists videoed it. Her running. The lions after her.” She spat again. “And you people just stood around.”
“No one stood around. I saw that video.” Tahira stood still as the gun muzzle lifted, fixed on her chest.
“The media said she sneaked in. I figured she was showing off to prove something . . . because I used to run around in the African wastelands for the meat collectors. She was such a city kid.” For a moment her voice wavered. Then it went cold again. “You want to tell me your version?”
“You didn’t look back to check the source of that image match, did you? If you want to go check it, you’ll find it’s a teaser for a very expensive, password-only, porn site. I think your daughter believed she was making a porn vid. Right until the end.” Tahira pulled out her link, watched the gun muzzle lift and steady. Touched up the video file from the Security eye, passed it over.
The woman took it, poised, the gun ready. Yes, Tahira thought. She had the body language of one who expected attack. She remembered that body posture all too well. The woman stepped back, out of range, looked at the link with one eye on Tahira. Then her posture stiffened and the link held her full attention.
I could kill her now, Tahira thought. Our children are our greatest weakness. She waited, watching the sky, straining her ears to hear any whisper of a silenced skimmer. The woman must be reviewing the clip over and over again. Finally she looked up, pocketed the link. The gun muzzle had sunk to rest on the ground and she didn’t lift it.
“What’s your stake in this?” Her voice was steady. “You came out here to put your life on the line for a damn lion?”
“No . . . and yes.” Tahira closed her eyes again, briefly, summoning the will to push the grinding pain in her shoulder down deeper inside her. “The lioness . . . the old one, the one that killed your daughter . . . was wild caught. There are no more lions to catch. These are being changed, their genes altered to make them what we want . . . the Pleistocene American Lion. The world that the lioness came from is gone. My world. Your world, too, I think.” She pulled her lips back from her teeth. “She is innocent of murder the way your rifle is innocent of murder, even if you point it at me and pull the trigger. You and I . . . ” Her lips stretched tighter. “We are not innocent of our daughters’ murders.” She watched the gun muzzle jerk upward, tensed for one second as it wavered, drifted lower. “My elder daughter did what your daughter did.” The entire Preserve seemed to be holding its breath. Even the insects had hushed. “I knew what she was doing and pretended I did not. She had no future, there was no aid, everyone was hungry. I took the flour and oil she brought home and I did not ask where the money came from.” She did not look away from the pale oval of the woman’s face. “They made a video of her death. I got someone to find it for me eventually. To buy it. Her death was a commodity, for sale on the market. As is your daughter’s.” She waited for the gun to come up but it did not.
“My younger daughter was six.” She said the words flatly, without inflection. “I sold her to the World Council Forces so that she would not have to do what her sister did. They call it sponsoring, but when you do that, you relinquish all rights to that child. Later, I paid a lot of money to find out where she was and when she was fourteen, I saw her. On a training mission, doing crowd control. She looked at me.” Tahira took a deep breath. “She did not know me. By then, I had been lucky, had found a job with the North American Pleistocene Preserve and my superiors found that I was . . . talented. That was many years ago. My daughter is past middle age now.” She glanced up as a tiny chime sounded from the skimmer. “That is our lioness and her pride.” She took a deep breath. “This is a delicately balanced trap.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I think it’s too late.” She sighed. “He will certainly be scanning the ground for any human-sized life signatures, in case this is the trap he expects and I have brought the police.”
“He won’t see me.” The woman laughed her broken-glass laugh. “Illegal technology is always a step ahead of legal. Your motion detectors saw me, but you wouldn’t have picked me up on your scan.”
“He has inside help and so he might have access to our entire security network.” She shrugged. “I do not think that is likely since only I have complete access to it, but it is possible.”
“In that case we’re screwed.” The woman shrugged, her expression unreadable in the dark. “What do I do?”
“I want him on the ground.” Tahira closed her eyes as the world wavered. “He thinks I’m a witness and he needs to make sure I’m dead. I have a first aid kit behind the seat.” Cold sweat bathed her face, prickling under her arms. “It has a touch menu. Select stimulant, human, emergency, and get two patches.” She struggled to hang onto consciousness, eyes closed, nausea wringing her stomach. The woman brushed against her, fumbling behind the seat. A moment later cool fingers seized her wrist, pushed her sleeve up and Tahira felt the sting of the stim patch on the inside of her elbow.
“That’s going to make you bleed more.”
“I know.” Tahira straightened as energy washed through her, banishing the nausea, brightening the shadows. “Can’t be helped.” She touched the first aid menu, selected one small and one medium blood-stop patch. “Help me with the shirt.” She winced as the woman opened the front, pulled the fabric down over her shoulder and arm. “Cover the entire wound, use the small one on the entry . . . ”
“I know how to use a patch.�
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Tahira sighed as the woman smoothed the patches over the ruin of the entry and exit wounds. The fast-acting local quickly numbed the grinding pain, reduced it to a low-level throb that she could shut out for now.
“You guys carry a hospital on these things.”
“We permit a few extreme hikers.” Tahira drew a slow breath, let it out, judging the strength of the remaining pain. “We are preoccupied with death.” She bared her teeth at the woman. “You sold vids of your kills along with your illegal meat, didn’t you?”
The woman didn’t answer, but of course, she did. Tahira straightened. That was the lure of what would otherwise be no different from a farm or vat raised steak. If you couldn’t pull the trigger yourself, you could still watch it die. “You hide,” she said. “I’m going to move the skimmer ahead of the pride, ground it again. He’s going to come down and look for me.”
“He’s going to drop a grenade on you and leave.” The woman sounded contemptuous.
“Oh no.” Tahira grinned. “Like you, I’m wearing a chameleon field. And I also have a small device that a clever grad student hacked up—it generates the thermal effect of a 150-pound antelope. He was studying night hunting, trying to determine the importance of scent, thermal detection, sound, and sight in predator species. Our killer should think it’s me.” She shrugged. “He has been very careful not to leave any traces. I suspect that if I did not patrol as regularly as I do, we would never have known that anyone was killed here.” Another few hours, and only the scrap of fabric would have marked that kill site. “One of us needs to kill him.” She lifted her hand. “I would prefer that the lions do it.”
“How do you know they can?”
Tahira shrugged her good shoulder. “I will make it possible. If they do not, you or I will do it.” She pulled the highly illegal gun from her waistband, was impressed that the woman didn’t flinch.
“You could have shot me. While I was looking at the vid.” For a moment, she was silent. “I like you.” Her teeth flashed briefly. “You would have made a good meat hunter.”