Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Ken Liu

  Three figures appeared from behind the central cabin, two of them bulletsponges to judge by their sloping, muscular bulk—bodyguards densely layered with their own vat-grown muscle-tissue, grafted onto frames that made even the merc behind Anxo look diminutive. Client-slaved to ensure nothing but the most self-sacrificing of service, their extortionate fees paid directly to nominated relatives ahead of termination pay-off of one kind or another.

  That client was more than a full head shorter, could vanish behind them at a moment’s notice. He was young, twenties, with an athlete’s build, dressed in a charcoal-sheen suit totally inappropriate for the heavy moisture of the cloud forest. Although, now he thought about it, Anxo noticed that the air in the clearing was noticeably—well, clearer.

  A steady, comfortable breeze drifting towards him from the buildings. They appeared to be the typical prefab-refab structures that comprised ranger stations, but instead of perching on bamboo stilts these woodchip walls had oddly heavy foundations: thick syncrete, sinking into the ground as though they went very much deeper than would be necessary, or even helpful.

  Ideal for constructing something below ground, though. And the overhanging cabin roofs would obscure all sight of them from anything—drone, plane, satellite—passing over the clearing.

  Whatever else had happened here, whatever they had done to his jaguar, Anxo realised that he’d walked into something major. Nothing like this was permitted on Monteverde, nor any other of Costa Rica’s protected ecological zones. This smelled like illegal research.

  When they stopped, the two trios separated by five or six meters, Anxo had a perfectly good view of the well-dressed man’s face, which didn’t bode well for his own longevity. He looked vaguely familiar, the way the close relative of a celebrity might, but Anxo couldn’t place him.

  The man signalled one of his bulletsponges. “Tell Dr. Reider, everything that can fit goes, emergency speed.” He spoke Portuguese, except— “Tell the research team to prioritise samples A through G in order, but lock everything down when they go back for D.”

  The bodyguard trotted towards the furthest cabin without a word, and the man gave Anxo a thin smile. “Good afternoon,” he continued, in unaccented English. “I am not pleased to have an uninvited guest, though I must grudgingly admire the fact that you have found us here at all.

  “I understand that your employers no doubt demand confidentiality of the utmost degree, but in exchange for total compliance with all my imminent questions, an unparalleled legal team will go to work on your contract, neutralising any and all binding clauses. I can assure you of complete freedom from liability in the future.

  “I’m also certain a person of your capabilities could be extremely useful to my organisation, and might anticipate significant rewards for being so. As you have discovered for yourself, we do seek out exemplary staff.” The young man indicated Anxo’s captors, who were maintaining a strategic position behind him. “Or perhaps you would enjoy an extended vacation, all costs absorbed. Either can be arranged.”

  He withdrew a palmpad from his jacket, swept a finger across it, then looked up expectantly. “You have, therefore, no reason not to spare yourself an unpleasant end to the day. I will consider a truthful answer now an acceptance of terms: what is your name, and who do you work for?”

  Anxo could have provided that information, but he suspected it wouldn’t be considered a satisfactory response. The man was corporate—and a Brazilian, to judge by his Portuguese, though that didn’t mean his employer was—and he assumed Anxo to be the same. Claiming to work for GEO would sound like a cover story. But telling an actual lie would only buy him a matter of minutes before it was confirmed as such.

  Brazilian. Anxo frowned. The man looked a little like the founder of RdS BioPharma, but he was about forty years too young to even be the son, and current CEO, Jeferson Roche da Silva. There was no younger family, at least none that Anxo had ever read of. And he had read everything he could, of course.

  The man sighed at Anxo’s continued silence. “Very well. Any voluntary last words at all?”

  Anxo found he had to ask. “Did you kill it?”

  The man studied him for a moment, then said, “Yes.”

  Anxo’s pulse began throbbing in his temples. He tried to swallow, his throat dragging against itself like textured rubber, breath sucked through flaring nostrils. He was suddenly filled with body memory, sensations he’d not felt since Africa. Urges he’d thought well behind him, but which were suddenly welcome.

  The augs who had brought him in tensed, but their owner shook his head. “Be calm, I haven’t killed anything. I can only presume that you’re either a hunter or a… whatever the opposite of hunter is. In this case, ‘a coincidence’.” He cocked his head to one side. “But, if not my operation here, I wonder if you would tell me what you were looking for, exactly.”

  Anxo’s teeth locked together—there was nothing that would force that information from him, let them try. But at the same time he wondered, Could he be telling the truth? Could the jaguar be alive?

  “It doesn’t matter,” the man said, “one reason is as problematic as another. I suppose someone is aware of your presence, at least up until you found your way to the edge of the suppression field. There’s always someone watching, isn’t there? So now we’re going to have to move on.”

  An expression of angry distaste tugged at the smooth features, aging the youthful face significantly. Anxo almost shook his head in disbelief. Not possible, surely…

  “We were doing something vital here,” the man said, “something to benefit the world, even if we didn’t have permission. You’ve cost me a great deal today. More than you can imagine, most likely. So I suppose I should have said, I’ve not killed anything yet.”

  “BioPharma killed plenty, Mr. Roche,” Anxo said in Portuguese, suspicion confirmed in the way Roche’s face slackened back into its young, handsome mask—a fairly spectacular bit of rejuvenation on a man past sixty. “You’re not going to get the chance to do to Costa Rica what you did back home.”

  Roche studied him coldly, then grunted. “Well, as you say, I’m familiar with unfortunate wastage.” He jerked his head at the two mercs who had brought Anxo in. “Take our guest to number one, leave him inside when you’re done,” he said, then turned and stalked towards the cabins, his second bodyguard eclipsing him from view.

  “Last cabin on the right, now,” said the sniper, her voice rumble-screeching, and Anxo obeyed, her close-combat partner falling in behind.

  It was a matter of thirty metres to the cabins. Not much time and space for planning in—unless the person doing the planning was loaded with military-grade augmentation and skipped the decommissioning ceremony when he walked away from the service.

  For just a moment, Anxo allowed the old familiar feeling Roche had provoked to spool up a little, his nervous system pinging, steps seeming to slow as his perception started to speed—then he dialled down again, well aware that if either of the augs escorting him were running fast as well the subtle effects upon his gait would become increasingly noticeable.

  To his left he saw the bulletsponge follow his client out of sight between the other cabins, and in their place one thought took hold: If that really was Jeferson Roche da Silva, then maybe even the loss of a jaguar had to take second place to capturing the man responsible for the Brazilian ecocide. Maybe.

  They came around the side of the final cabin, and that strangely even breeze Anxo had noticed earlier picked up slightly. As he stepped into the other side of the clearing, he found the source: a smoothly bulky helicopter, low-friction rotors maintaining near-silent rest rotation under power from a solar cell deployed above them, ready for the main engine to boost them to takeoff-speed at a second’s notice.

  Roche was approaching the chopper, his bulletsponge falling back to observe Anxo’s final march. A woman in laboratory whites stood in its gaping cargo bay, checking off sealed crates loaded onto racks that telescoped their loads inside
as she pressed them one by one. Roche beckoned to her, and as she joined him the bulletsponge moved to the bay, initiated its closing mechanism. The woman—did Roche say 'Doctor Rider'?—seemed surprised, then agitated.

  “Get in there,” the sniper barked. Her partner pushed Anxo towards the three short steps to the cabin entrance, which the other bulletsponge was descending, circling wide as Anxo climbed them and stepped inside, the male merc right behind him.

  His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dimness after the unobstructed sunlight of the clearing. No ranger cabin, not by a long shot. It looked more like a clean-lab, bare plastic walls and floor tiles, a few computers—and in one wall a pressure-sealed metal door, practically an airlock. Two new faces were crowding its window: young men in lab coats, slapping their palms against the other side and frantically shouting, making not a sound. Not a good sign.

  Anxo turned and through the cabin entrance caught a glimpse of one bulletsponge bundling the doctor onto the chopper after Roche, the other thundering towards them—then a big hand clamped down on Anxo’s shoulder, the merc pushing him to his knees. Time running out.

  The sniper climbed the steps and blocked his view, weapon at the ready, coming through the doorway—and her aim shifted as she came inside the frame.

  Anxo jacked his nervous system to its maximum capacity—and the world slowed.

  He wrenched his wrists apart, and the smart-plastic cuffs viciously tightened in response to the sudden force, crushing the skin—directly across the sub-dermal ceramic razors nestled within his wrists. They split their artificial cartilage sheathes, broke the skin of his wrists and sliced through the cuffs, his hands swinging free in a dreamy spray of bloody droplets.

  Above her ocular implant, the sniper’s eyebrows pulled taut with surprise.

  He wrapped his right arm around the back of the merc’s knee and wrenched the blade back—heard the popping of ligaments and hamstring—felt the man’s weight bear down on his shoulder as his balance went and he started to tip like a felled tree.

  The sniper’s gun began to rise.

  Anxo twisted, breaking the merc’s grip on him and striking out with the rigid fingers of his left hand—deep under the chin—the windpipe cracked and flattened—then even as the falling man’s eyes widened in pain and shock, Anxo swung behind his bulk, falling with him, their pace steadily building as his nervous system scaled back the intensity to avoid burning out.

  A series of drawn out roars filled the cabin and a hot line tore between Anxo’s arm and chest, then he and the merc hit the deck and he made himself as small as possible while bullets smacked into his human shield—and he found his tranq rifle, its cut strap knotted through the merc’s belt, right in front of his face.

  He levered the gun up against the pull of the strap, pointed it over the dying man’s hip at the doorway and pulled the trigger, aiming blind—his senses were still hyped enough for him to see the dart emerge, blurred, accelerating. Gone.

  There was an aching pause, no more bullet impacts. He peeked over the merc’s body, slow as the rising sun.

  The sniper aug was down.

  Anxo dialled back to normal and reclaimed his rifle, chambered another dart—three left, assuming. He glanced down at the merc, didn’t wince at the sight, then crept around to the left side of the doorway, pressing himself against the wall as he peered out.

  Only seconds had passed, but the chopper’s rotors were invisible at full speed, landing gear flexing as it left the ground. The second bulletsponge filled its still open door, obscuring all view of those inside as he climbed on board. Anxo settled his gun upon his knee and fired. The giant man sagged, dropped backwards into thin air, landing badly even for a mountain of hyper-dense muscle, the chopper lurching at the sudden loss of weight.

  And Anxo had a clear view—past the shocked, turning faces in the passenger compartment—past Roche’s face, staring back at him in fury—into the cabin. At the pilot.

  One chance, to cut short their escape, and maybe catch the man who killed the last tree in Brazil.

  He blipped his perceptions once more, slowed the erratic swinging of the chopper to a comprehensible drift, aimed, fired.

  The dart dwindled into a black point, leaping the gap to the chopper. Anxo could track it, zeroing in on the pilot’s undefended neck. His aim was true. And then he was forced to watch as Roche slowly moved into its path, his arms rising, spread wide in a desperate attempt to block the shot.

  Desperate. Successful.

  Anxo’s perceptions accelerated again as Roche slumped through the open door, but hands—the doctor’s, the other massive bodyguard’s—gripped him, dragged him back even as the chopper veered upwards, through the break in the canopy, away across the trees, was gone.

  Anxo sighed and stood, scanning for threats, finding none. The fallen bodyguard was an unmoving mound in the clearing, the sniper aug likewise at his feet. He looked around the cabin again, the only movement the blood seeping from her bullet-riddled partner.

  He looked through the window in the pressure door. The two scientists sat on the floor beside a ladder-hatch leading downwards, their body language despondent. He tried the handle but found it locked. One of the men inside looked up, but this time didn’t even try to shout, just waved a hand as if to ward him away.

  “How do I open?” Anxo mouthed, exaggerated, choosing English.

  The man pointed past him, a look of resignation on his face. Anxo turned. On the computer screen, double digits falling in red. He looked back. Trapped inside, the scientist mimed exploding hands, then turned away, crying.

  Anxo fled, gun gripped in one hand. He sprinted between the cabins, back towards the tree line where he’d been marched in, through air grown still in the helicopter’s absence.

  In his mind, the numbers counted down.

  He crossed into shadow, between the first trees, feet flying over the even ground, his sole thought of the weak, shallow stream he had jumped across before his capture, the one they’d followed this way.

  The air was heavy around him again.

  And then it was all light.

  Sky: the last thing you expect to see when lying on the cloud forest floor.

  Anxo blinked, rolled onto his front and pushed himself to his feet. His ears were ringing, his skull tight with a pressure headache, but he was in one piece. Well, except for the bullet scoring along his left ribs and bicep. He checked his rifle, found it good, wondered if he’d ever see his pack again. Or the…

  It was hard to keep a wave of depression from washing over him. The one thing he was here to protect, gone. And the other prize escaped.

  Around him the forest was pushed flat, the clearing freshly extended sixty metres in diameter. The trees nearer the site—correction, where the site had been—were shredded, their trunks rising barely a metre before offering only a mess of toothpick splinters. Further out, whole trees had toppled against those still standing, suspended by the canopy’s tangle, their roots half exposed. He’d been lucky to be on the edge of it, lucky to have seen the stream, its trench just deep enough that he could prostrate himself below the blast wave. Lucky.

  He headed towards the epicentre. What he found waiting for him was… effective. Whatever Roche had used to cover his tracks here had done the job and then some. The heart of the clearing was a bowl crater, the ground burned black and cracked by exposure to a brief but fearsome heat, the remnant of which he could feel through his boot soles. The nearest trees were smouldering stumps. Nothing remained of the underground facility, or of the bodies.

  Anxo squatted, arms across his knees to check the wounds outside both wrists, and only then saw a ragged tear through the protective sleeve of his tracker. He peeled it back, anticipating the worst—irreparable damage, forcing him to hike out to the nearest community and hope they had some means of contacting GEO—but it was seemingly intact, if non-responsive.

  Except this complex was gone. And their suppression field?

  He dug his th
umb tip under the computer’s edge, found the hard-reset and felt it click against his nail. A dead moment, then he smiled with relief as the tactile skinscreen vibrated familiar boot-up patterns against his arm.

  He began mentally composing an emergency signal message, forcing himself to catalogue the mess he was going to have to report on: his loss of the jaguar, of course; but also the unbelievable sighting of Roche da Silva, here to do who only knows what; engaging in combat with unidentified corporate mercs; an explosion in the heart of one of Costa Rica’s priceless reserves—

  He broke off as the skinscreen began pulsing again. It was a rhythm that triggered an instinctive response in him even before his mind caught up—his body hair tingling, standing on end, the breath catching in his throat—and then the skinmap displayed, zeroing in on…

  …the jaguar.

  A grin swept over his face as the data confirmed it moving at normal walking speed, perhaps five kilometres away, heading southward. He stood and circled the crater, kicking up a cloud of sooty particles that clung to his trousers and boots.

  The jaguar had led him into the zone of the suppression field, but even if it had left the area of effect before the action started there was no way for him to know when his own system was disrupted and shut itself down. Now, of course, whatever had suppressed the tracker’s signal was as gone as the facility it had disguised.

  As he picked his way through the mess of trees at the far edge of the clearing, Anxo began signalling GEO, requesting a drone fly-by to deliver a secure voice-com system (and a replacement for his vaporised backpack and supplies—shame about the biscuits) so he could provide a preliminary debrief, update them on the events of the last twenty-four hours.

  When they heard who he’d seen no doubt they’d want to bring him in, if only to see if he’d gone completely crazy. Jeferson Roche da Silva, the Jungle Killer, alive after all.