Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “Why wouldn’t they chip him?” Okey asked.

  Akagi shrugged, absorbing the data packet that base had distributed through the commNet.

  Gerhardt’s final memories had been gruesome, but she had seen worse. The data was crucial, though, and forensics would be poring over every detail in the days to come. Still, she couldn’t help but feel frustrated.

  The poachers had been smart. They’d worn masks, goggles, gloves, long sleeve shirts, and pants. There were no visible markings other than their dark skin flashing in between the breaks of clothing.

  “They wanted us to know,” she said eventually. “They were bragging to us. Showing us how smart they are.”

  Gerhardt had been alive when they ripped his arm off, a sight that sent a shiver of revulsion deep through her core. His screams would haunt her dreams for a long while, she knew. The limb, like her own legs, was hardwired into the body’s nervous system, allowing for electrical transmission of movement commands, a fusion of metal and flesh and bone.

  When those monsters tore Gerhardt apart, he had felt every fucking inch of himself getting ripped apart.

  Not until after they’d ripped his belly open and crippled him did they finally take their axes to his face.

  “We’ll set up camp here,” she said. She dropped her rucksack, glad to be free of its weight.

  They had been walking for hours, patrolling their quadrant of the reservation on foot. The circuitous path would bring them back to base in three days if they kept a steady pace and ran into no trouble.

  Okey put his thumb and forefinger between his lips and fired off a shrill, piercing whistle to call Dashi back. The dog had run ahead of them, picking up some kind of scent but making no fuss about it. Tracking spoor, probably.

  She built her tent quickly, then set up Okey’s while he went about building a small fire. He needed to eat real food, unlike Akagi, who had little interest in canned goods and MREs.

  Sitting on the ground, her legs stretched out before her, she decided to have one of the nutrient-rich candies. The vitals app on her retinal display showed a spike in burned calories, and her empty stomach was starting to whine.

  She chewed slowly, scoping the horizon and keeping an eye out for approaching animals. She doubted any of the big cats would get close, but it was still worth keeping a good lookout for them.

  Okey ate a can of beans, and each of them enjoyed the quiet. They were comfortable enough with one another to not need small talk and, not for the first time, she found herself intensely grateful for that.

  Digging around in her backpack again, she found a small peanut butter cup and opened the recycled paper packaging. The corners of her jaw tingled in anticipation as she brought the treat to her lips and bit down, the spike in endorphins making her head spin. She didn’t need the snack, but savored it nonetheless. What was better than chocolate and peanut butter? Sex, maybe, she thought ruefully, digging a small depression into the soil with her heel.

  Laughing felt wrong, but she couldn’t help herself. Eyes shut, she saw Gerhardt dying, and that only made her laughing feel more horrendous, spurring it into a near uproar. Tears ran down her face, but she couldn’t tell if they were from joy or sorrow anymore. Eventually the laughter slowed to a stop and Okey was staring at her like she was a mad woman possessed. And maybe she was.

  “I’m turning in,” she told him, crawling into her tent and curling up beside her smart rifle.

  The marketing gurus in the public sector had hailed DRMR for being an incredible breakthrough in memory retention. Never forget. Always remember. But remembering was a brutal, double-edged sword. Sometimes the brain forgot things to protect itself, but not hers, and as a result Akagi remembered far more than she wanted.

  When she closed her eyes, all she could see were muscles and wires and nerves stretching and snapping, metal snagging on skin and ripping it apart, staining the earth dark. She clenched her eyes shut, willing the images to disappear, but they refused to leave. Instead, they merely changed.

  She saw her legs lying in the sand, the stumps of her thighs bleeding profusely, rich black smoke swirling around her and carrying the screams of the wounded and dying. She tried to look away, but couldn’t. Those legs weren’t hers. They couldn’t be. She felt oddly detached from all of it, as if it were happening to somebody else, even as her blood pumped out of her, draining onto Syrian soil.

  She saw the ruined and blackened remains of Syrian children lying in rubble from drones she had interfaced with and piloted over civilian centers, dropping payload after payload after payload to pay the debts of war with the lives of too many innocents. Marketplaces, infrastructure, warehouses, homes, palaces, whatever the latest target-rich environment Command & Control deemed hostile. Emotionless and efficient, letting the machines do the dirty work until she and her squadron hit the ground hard for clean-up duty, killing whoever resisted or looked threatening.

  How much of her life could be measured in blood—hers, or others—spilled by her own hands?

  There were too many thoughts, too many memories that she wished she could blot out. Forget them, erase them, purge them. Instead, they haunted her and drained her, slowly bleeding out into a discomfited sleep.

  ***

  The bellowing of a lion’s roar woke Akagi in the early morning hours.

  The beast carried on for a solid minute, if not longer, but it was a noise she had grown to love. The sound was one of vibrant life, loud and proud, and for a brief time she forgot about her pain. It helped to refresh and reorient her. To remind her why she fought, and to remind her that there was a larger world outside of her own problems.

  Shoving herself out of her sleeping bag, she stabbed her toes into the ground and planted her palms on the earth. Every morning she started with a routine of planks, pushups, crunches, and squats. Hitting the gym was impossible in the wilds of the reservation, so she relied on body-weight resistance training to keep her muscles active. By the time she was finished, her sweat stained the soil and her thick arms bulged nicely from the increased blood flow. Her short hair was wet from the exertion, and she used her fingers to spike it.

  Another candy rehydrated her and replenished the spent calories.

  After dressing, she broke down her rifle for cleaning, then reassembled it and went about breaking down the camp while Okey ate a strange looking white goop from a can. Synth protein, she knew, fiber rich, loaded with vitamins and minerals. Like her candies, but far less appetizing.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  Okey held her eyes for a moment, studying her, then shrugged. “Just checking. Long walk ahead of us today.”

  He set the can down for Dashi, but the dog wasn’t quite that desperate for food.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked.

  “No,” Okey said, but the lie was plain.

  Once, he had asked her if she knew she screamed in her sleep. She said she didn’t, and that had been the end of it. He’d never brought it up again, but often asked how she had slept the night before. Eventually it had become a bit of a game in which both lied to the other. If her nocturnal distress had made him any the worse for wear, he was at least good at hiding it.

  Before setting out on the trail, both rangers checked in with Central Command. Six hours had elapsed between Gerhardt’s last check-in and the discovery of his body and the mauled rhinoceros. Although long stretches of radio silence were often the norm, in hindsight it felt inexcusable. Now all field rangers were checking in hourly, just to let Command know they were still alive out there.

  “Let’s a get move on,” Okey said, whistling for Dashi to follow.

  Akagi wished she knew how to whistle like that. She could whistle well enough with only her lips, but adding fingers to the mix was a clumsy affair that usually ended with nothing but wet digits.

  With the dog following closely beside his master, they walked in silence. Akagi was once again glad for the lack of small talk and spent
her time reviewing the daily stats. The info was nothing more than a depressing countdown toward extinction, the bold red header at the top a crystallizing reminder of their preservation mission.

  It read simply: BLACK RHINO - EXTINCT.

  Beneath that was a list of the remaining animals in Kruger National Park and the remaining figures, along with a plus or minus difference in historical trends. Scrolling down the list, she saw that the tiger population was down by one, which, statistically, was not all that surprising. For every tiger cub that was born, three adults were murdered by poachers.

  In the white rhinos column there was a red −2 from yesterday’s known losses. There were more kills than births, and the two rangers were attempting to pick up the trail of a local herd.

  White rhinos were gentle giants. Their unaggressive nature made them particularly vulnerable to poachers, and while they had learned to be wary of humans, it did them little good.

  During her time at the park, Akagi had noticed that the animals were keen observers of the human condition. They knew which humans, like the rangers, were there to protect and guard them, and which ones were there to hurt them. On more than one occasion, leopards had strolled through her campsite, completely at ease and utterly nonthreatening. If not for the night vision apps on her optics, she never would have seen them. The leopards crisscrossed the rangers’ own tracks to a remarkable extent, very often routinely circling their camps. To a degree, she even felt like she was one of their pack. Her and the animals, they were simpatico.

  “Here,” Okey said, pointing at spoor.

  The three-toed ungulate impressions were barely visible, but Okey had a good eye. Despite how heavy the animals were, they were incredibly graceful and left only the faintest of marks in the hard-packed dirt. Akagi had to adjust the contrast in her optics to resolve the details more plainly. There were, in fact, multiple impressions. And as with nearly every rhino track they found, there was an uncomfortable number of boot impressions in the soil as well.

  “Akagi to base,” she sent across the commNet. “We’re on the trail of a herd, northernmost quadrant.”

  “Roger, Akagi. Backup is en route.”

  “Copy, base.”

  Akagi scanned the fields, cursing. Her eyes went right to left, softly focused, not straining to see any anomalies but to absorb them, looking everywhere.

  The region they patrolled was prohibited to all but park rangers and staff, and less than a mile from the borders of Zimbabwe. That country, and Mozambique, were home to a number of the poaching syndicates that were responsible for decimating the park’s population. Extradition laws were utterly pathetic, though, and there was little in the way of legal avenues to combat them directly. This made the rangers a responsive police force far too often, rather than a proactive offensive measure.

  Her forensic algo dissected the footprints, calculating depth and moisture differentials between the animal and human steps, and the heat of the rhino dung left on the trail. “Rhinos came through here about an hour ago, and the boot prints followed about a half hour later. We're about forty minutes behind them."

  Okey nodded, tight-lipped, his fists balling at his sides. Adrenaline spiked through Akagi as she set off to follow the spoor, following the broken mopane, hoping this was finally it. That this was the break they needed to end some of the brutality, to save at least one of these creatures. One of these rhinos. Her herd.

  The rhino had probably realized they were being followed by people that meant them harm. They’d gotten shy, and probably more than a bit worried, and worked their way deeper into the maze of mopane trees and surrounding brush.

  Overhead, the sky was overcast, a deep gray much like the hide of the animal the rangers were seeking. For two hours, Akagi and Okey walked through the brush, single file, looking for signs of the rhinos and their following poachers, looking for flattened grass, footprints, dung, any indication that they were on the right trails.

  The poachers were far less cautious while treading upon the earth. They found plenty of boot prints, and even a few cigarettes. Seeing the spent butts gave Akagi an idea, and she took a deep breath, running the stink of nicotine and burnt additives through the scrubbers lining her nasal passageways, interfacing the data output with her visual overlays. A grid-like map dropped across her retinas, and each inhalation was processed to pick up on the scent of scorched chemicals, giving her a predicative analysis of where the poachers had stepped next.

  She couldn’t help but grin at herself, thinking she’d just one-upped Dashi in the bloodhound category.

  After an hour she lost the scent as the chain smoker called it quits. Another hour passed before she caught sight of several large gray rocks deep in the bush, nearly lost among the grass and trees. She let out a small hiss to get Okey’s attention, and pointed one finger toward them. He nodded, scratching Dashi beneath his collar.

  Akagi took a knee, keeping her rifle ready, and ran the optic thermals. The rhinos were dead ahead, so where the hell were the poachers?

  She scanned right to left, not focusing on any one thing in particular, waiting for the scene to reveal itself to her. The landscape was splayed before her in monochrome, with the hot-blooded rhinos standing before her in large, bright, cleanly defined white shapes.

  A drop of rain splashed against her arm, quickly building into a torrential downpour. Still scanning, she crouch-walked through the brush, disturbing pockets of bugs, which swarmed around her head and buzzed irritatingly in her ears.

  Okey followed behind her, also scanning the terrain, but without any sort of ocular modifications she doubted he could see very much. She opened a commNet channel and pushed a simple thought to his receiver. “Anything?”

  “No,” was his brief reply.

  The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she stopped, standing stock still. She kept her focus soft, slowly panning her head and waiting for the anomalies to make themselves visible. Over the years, she had learned to trust her instincts, and something was very, very wrong.

  Poachers were here. They had to be.

  She took in a slow, deep breath and let out a long, slow exhale.

  There. It was one of them.

  The poacher gave off no heat signal at all, but she caught sight of the killer’s negative impression as the downpour defined his shape. Sometimes the key wasn’t to look for what was there, but what wasn’t. Now she knew why finding these bastards was so difficult.

  Son of a bitch. “They’ve got chameleonwear,” she said.

  Naturally the poachers would be better equipped than the rangers, always one step ahead. The syndicates they worked for traded in an ever-limited commodity, and could thus afford better equipment and resources than the shrinking budget allocated to the parks could buy.

  Not for the first time, she cursed the constraints of law enforcement that the rangers worked within. There was no shoot-first policy here, their rules of engagement defined only by self-defense.

  She opened a new channel to base and said, “I’ve got eyes on target. Where’s that backup?”

  “En route, Akagi. Twelve minutes.”

  Shit. She wasn’t sure they had twelve minutes. Wasn’t sure how many more tangos were out here, hunting her as she hunted them. The only thing she knew for certain was that there was definitely more than one.

  The dry, hungry earth was soaking up the rain and quickly turning it into shallow mud, obscuring boot treads and hoof prints alike. Her black t-shirt was sodden and plastered to her skin, the shemagh sopping wet and heavy across her neck.

  She surveyed the ground again, crouch walking to the left to get behind the solitary target she’d identified. She held out her palm toward Okey, telling him to stay put with Dashi. If their prey didn’t know the rangers were present, she didn’t want to send the dog out as a warning.

  Although her heart was racing and her nerves were jangling, she fought to keep her breathing under control.

  Smooth and steady. Pace yourself.

&n
bsp; Thunder exploded across the sky, wind rustling the sodden grass around her. The hair on her arms stood on end, goose pimples breaking out across her exposed skin. A brilliant flash of lightning momentarily blinded her and as she blinked to clear her vision there was an explosive burst of movement beside her as something heavy crashed into her.

  She tumbled beneath the invisible weight, her cheek slicing open beneath something razor sharp.

  Gunfire rang through the air and she heard Okey scream briefly in pain.

  Dashi was off his leash, bolting straight ahead toward a figure that only he could sense.

  Fingers grasped her throat tightly, cutting off her air, the press of warm metal cutting deeper into her cheek and sliding down her face. She screamed, got an arm up between her and her attacker, grabbed his wrist, and fought to get her face out from beneath the cutting press of his cloaked knife.

  The earth shook as the rhinos bolted, running furiously away from the sudden commotion.

  Holding her attacker off with one hand, she reached for the blade along her thigh with her free hand. Her face burned from the lack of oxygen and black speckles appeared in her vision. The blade cleared its scabbard and she drove it into the air, where she thought the man’s head would be, and was rewarded with a satisfying bony crunch, saw a splash of blood.

  He toppled to the side, dead weight.

  Okey was on a knee, firing his automatic rifle, but at what she had no idea.

  Dashi was down, whining and panting heavily.

  She found her smart rifle in the brush, grabbed ahold of its stock and pulled it toward her. The gun was loaded with smart, muscle-wire ammunition, and she hoped like hell that the rounds could outsmart the chameleonwear.

  Taking a knee, she unfolded the rifle’s onboard view screen and scanned for the now-familiar man-shaped absences in the rain, firing when she thought she had a lock on a target.