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

by Anthology

  Each bullet could update its position sixty times a second, allowing for precision tracking of each hostile while still in flight. She’d even seen data from a fired round that had made a 90-degree hairpin turn around a wall to effect a kill shot to an enemy skull from two miles away.

  But not against the advanced cloaking shell of chameleonwear. FLIR systems were utterly useless. Still, she could hope to get lucky, or at the very least, give these fuckers something to think about.

  “Status, Okey?”

  “Still here.”

  She risked a quick look back at him and saw a spreading crimson stain against the shoulder of his green shirt.

  More thunder sang out above, a steady concussion, a rumbling roar that was growing louder. Closer?

  Not thunder.

  A helicopter flew over, a gunman strapped in and leaning out the open side, taking aim.

  Not at the poachers, though. And not at her, nor Okey.

  A pit opened in her stomach, bile crashing against her innards and up her throat.

  Gunfire split open the air above, and she saw the tracer rounds cut through the sky.

  Her rifle turned, finger on the trigger, aiming for the helicopter and—

  Okey screamed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him fall backward, his rifle shooting rounds uselessly into the air in a violently dangerous arc.

  Rain shifted across a man-shaped object to her right, and she fired, fired, fired. The bullets found their target, and the hidden body stuttered and jived as he died. She found another as dirt exploded in front of her, as bullets whipped past her, as a burning sear tore open her bicep, but she didn’t care. She kept firing, realizing that the poachers were flanking her, closing in on her, boxing her in.

  She refused to put her back to them as she pushed deeper into the bush, putting distance between them.

  “Okey,” she thought-pushed across the comm. “C’mon, buddy, you still with me?”

  No answer.

  “Damnit, Okey, snap to. I need you here, pal.”

  She fired again, quickly looking back over her shoulder for cover. There was an anthill nearby, a massive construct twice as tall as her and three times as round. The wide base could provide her with shelter, and if needed she could even climb the sandy ridges and hide behind the thick pillar that jutted into the sky as the hill tapered upward.

  She caught a hazy flash of movement in her peripheral and turned automatically, firing toward a murky, ill-defined target. Blood blasted into the air, and a faint glimmer of satisfaction bubbled through her.

  She kept low to the earth, hoping the tall brush and driving rain obscured her, the enemy chasing her with hails of ammunition.

  Her sensors registered the impact of several rounds hammering the meaty Kevlar lining of one thigh, the damage negligible.

  Tucking behind the anthill, she took another deep breath, working to calm herself. Her vitals were spiked clear across the board and she just wanted to run and keep on running. That was not an option, though, and she had to tamp down on that flight reflex or else she was dead.

  For a moment, she wondered at their munitions load out. The poachers were equipped with chameleonwear, but not smart ammunition. It seemed like a half-assed approach to her, but she supposed you didn’t exactly need muscle-wire bullets to kill a rhino in the wide open expanse. Also, the poachers were nothing more than the low men on the totem pole.

  To the syndicates they worked for, the poachers were a meagre expense and easily replaceable. Maybe the chameleonwear was a simple and easy way of protecting their investment, but they had little reason to go overboard. A gun and machete was all a poacher really needed to get their job done, and anything else was a waste of resources.

  More ammo pounded away at the anthill, slowly shredding her cover. The ants fled their cells, pouring out of the structure, flooding across her, crawling over her skin. She compressed her lips into a tight line, swallowing the scream that boiled inside her. She twisted around her cover, firing blindly, the old pray-and-spray method of combat.

  “Base, I need that backup! Okey is down. Hostiles are cloaked.”

  “Roger, Akagi. Thirty more seconds.”

  Fuck!

  She fired until the clip ran dry, then ejected the magazine, reloaded, and fired again.

  C’mon, you fuckers. C’mon!

  A growing rumble neared, and then a Jeep plowed through the brush. Six rangers bailed out of the open cabin, taking shelter behind the vehicle and firing across the plain.

  With the arrival of new friendlies catching the poachers by surprise, she was able to more easily identify the hostiles. She lined up a headshot and pressed the trigger, seeking out her next target before the first had even fallen.

  She caught a rapid flurry of movement as the poachers disengaged and ran. She lost them in the brush as the park swallowed them.

  Her bladed feet carried her to the Jeep quickly, and she ordered two of the men to come with her, guiding them in the direction the helicopter had flown and where the rhinos had fled.

  Twenty minutes later, they found the animals.

  A teenage male lumbered down the trail, his steps halting and wary, body sagging. Blood poured from its mouth and nostrils. The whole top half of his face was gone, his head cleaved apart, his eyes missing. The upper half of its flank was riddled with seeping bullet holes.

  Akagi strode toward the rhino and did the only thing she could. She raised her rifle and ended his misery, tears streaming down her face. She swiped them away with the back of her hand and ordered the men back into the jeep, intent on finding the other three rhinos.

  The adults were able to run about thirty miles per hour, but the poachers hadn’t given them the chance to make it very far. Of the three, Akagi and her team of rangers were only able to find one other, a female, off the trail and in the brush, dead and butchered.

  She wondered if this female had been the mutilated male’s mate, and hoped that maybe the two were able to find a measure of peace after their lives had been so brutally ended.

  Another dead ranger. Two more dead rhinos. Another day, and another increase in the kill counts.

  She seethed the entire ride back, hands shaking in anger, her mechanized legs bouncing on the rounded curve of her feet to burn off the anxiety.

  ***

  The rangers were heloed back to base camp at Skukuza, to a squat khaki-colored building with an array of old, outdated antennas encircling the structure. The flight took little more than an hour, but being forced to sit still for even that long did nothing to calm Akagi, nor did it ease her nerves.

  The adrenaline come-down was exhausting, but still she needed to move. Strapped into a bucket seat made her feel like a prisoner in her own body, and she felt the overwhelming urge to run as far and as fast as her cybernetic limbs could carry her. She was both utterly drained and completely restless.

  Before the helo had even settled on hard ground she was shoving her way out the door. A second helo containing a single captured poacher had arrived already, and she bounded toward the interrogation chamber.

  Biographical data flooded her left retina, and she quickly surveyed the information. The poacher was a scrawny, stick-limbed teenager named Alamayehu Tamele. His hair was shorn close to his scalp, and thin tufts of patchy hair dotted his face in a poor imitation of a beard. With sallow cheeks and sunken eyes, he hardly looked like a killer now that he was stripped of his chameleonwear and his weaponry.

  She steadied herself before entering the chamber and kept her voice calm and even as she said, “I want to know who you work for.”

  Tamele smirked and shook his head.

  “It’s clear you’re employed by a syndicate. Which one?”

  He sat still, sucking on a hind tooth, pulling his thin cheeks ever deeper into his mouth. He crossed his arms over his chest, his legs splayed forward and feet crossed at the ankle.

  Tamele knew the game too well. He’d been arrested before, once by the Kruger rangers,
even. The history of charges that scrolled across her vision all carried the same denotation of (dismissed) beside each offense. Poaching (dismissed), animal abuse (dismissed), attempted murder (dismissed). Dozens of instances on record, which meant there were plenty of other times he hadn’t been caught. Whoever he worked for carried enough weight and influence to skirt the courts and buy off the prosecutors. He didn’t have to answer to anything because he knew he only had to ride it out and that in all likelihood, he’d be back on the streets within twenty-four hours.

  She gripped the crown of his skull in her hand and twisted his head, getting a look behind his ear. Sure enough, he was ported, the upgrades probably supplied by his mysterious benefactor.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted.

  Akagi smirked. It was her turn to stonewall him. She fished loose a coil of wire and jammed the male connector into the small slot embedded in the hollow of his ear.

  “I do not consent to this!”

  “I don’t give a fuck.”

  “This is illegal. I want my lawyer!”

  From her pocket she took a DRMR pad and plugged it in to the opposite end of wire.

  “You cannot do this,” he protested.

  Akagi sat on the corner of the table and waited for him to meet her eyes. “You should know that I’m technically not a park ranger. I’m British SAS and am serving here strictly on a consultancy basis. I am not an arresting officer, I am not pressing charges against you for your assault on me, and I am certainly not questioning you or even formally conducting an interrogation. In fact, the registry worms I am embedding in the station’s security feeds will confirm that I was never even here. And if there is any blowback, I’ll just disappear. So, much like you, I don’t particularly give a fuck about the laws ‘round here.”

  She scrolled through the pad, pretending to look for a particular app, giving him a moment to reconsider. Tamele stayed buttoned up while her finger hovered, but she caught sight of a slight tremor in the corner of his jaw.

  “Now, let’s see how good your security is.”

  She tapped on the icon, initializing a mnemonic assault cascade of amplifying intensity. His brow furrowed in pain as he slammed his palms against either side of his skull, his groans slowly progressing to screams. The cascade was designed to root out, attack, and destroy any security enhancements that protected his cerebral mesh from forced intrusion. The strong-arm hack triggered a number of mem mines, lighting up the pain receptors in his brain while severing the biomechanic weaves lacing his cerebrum. After ten minutes, his breathing had grown ragged, his body soaked in sweat, and his mind was entirely open to her.

  His countermeasures were a joke, but she realized he had little need for sophistication. Or rather, his employers had little need for hardware-based security. The data he carried around in his mind was of little consequence with so much of South Africa’s judicial system bought and paid for. Tamele might one day wind up in prison, maybe even soon, but those above him lived far above the reach of the law, so cushioned in money were they. Judges and prosecutors were bought in blood, the country’s legal measures as dead as Okey.

  A wave of neural drones infiltrated Tamele’s limbic system, harvesting local memory roots and capturing stored data, offloading digital copies of his memories to her pad. She spent forty minutes brute force hacking his personal history and downloading everything. By the time she finished, his eyes were screwed tightly shut and tears streamed down his face.

  He’d have a migraine for days, but unlike her partner, and unlike Gerhardt and the rhinos killed in his wake, he’d live. She couldn’t help but think that was a shame.

  ***

  As Akagi dived into Tamele’s mnemonic recordings, she refused to feel sorry for him. He had made his choices.

  His family, though…her heart went out to them. Guerilla forces had raided the village Tamele called home and slaughtered people in the streets. His mother had been caught in the gunfire, sprinting to safety too slowly. Tamele had watched his mother brought down in a hail of automatic weapons fire, and Akagi felt the wave of anguish wash through her as the DRMR recording fed her brain the awful, replicated chemical and sensory reactions. She felt what Tamele had felt, saw what he had seen.

  Hundreds of memories pierced her mind, and she watched as her (his) sister, Zyeredzi, grew thinner over the months that followed, her body emaciated from the lack of resources, the loss of income and security her mother had provided them. The siblings lived in a very small dwelling, with only a single bed to share. Akagi felt the frail, skeletal form in her arms as she (he) held her.

  Tamele needed to work. He needed money. They needed food. His first kill had been difficult. Although there had been several hunters in his village, before the guerilla forces had attacked and captured or killed them, he had not been one of them. Guilt leaked through the DRMR feed as Tamele cut through the wire fences surrounding Kruger Park, invading the land with a trio of other men, a gun—surprisingly heavy—strapped across his chest. Thoughts of Zyeredzi and the loud groans her stomach made in the middle of the night. Hoping for meat, something, anything, to keep them alive for one more day.

  Akagi skipped over the rest. She didn’t need to see the savagery of his kill. She’d seen enough of that over the years, the results of these butchers and their damnable choices.

  Aggravated, she disconnected from the DRMR and set up an automated search protocol, scrubbing the mems with a forensic app. This would yield names she could research, locations, data, all without having to comb through the mems manually. Something she should have done in the first place.

  Never should have played the damn things, she chided herself. She wanted so badly to keep on loathing Tamele, but found herself frustrated instead, angry at only herself.

  She fell to the ground, letting her open palms hit the flat wooden floor, and began cycling through a routine of push-ups and crunches, letting the building sweat ease her troubled mind while she attended to keeping what was left of her flesh, blood, and muscle healthy.

  Her face burned beneath the gauze padding, the skin itchy from the adhesive keeping her wounds closed.

  After an hour, a notification popped up in the corner of her vision. The forensic work-up was finished. She sat on the floor, her slick back sticking to the messy bedsheets that hung off the mattress, and reviewed the results.

  There were a number of names that she was able to research, cross reference, and eliminate. Most of them poachers. Good data, but not what she was looking for.

  Tamele was too much the low man on the totem pole, but that did not make him invaluable. He had been involved, observant. He had heard things, seen people, come in contact with them, if only for the briefest of moments and perhaps without deliberation. But there was information to harvest and examine.

  It took several hours to pore through the data and research the findings. In the end, it was time well spent.

  Slowly, she stood and sat at the small table attached to the far wall. She broke down her rifle for cleaning. Once that was finished and reassembled, she methodically reloaded the magazines with smart ammo, sliding the bullets in one at a time.

  She worked the sling over her head so that the rifle hung across her body.

  Her room held no valuables, no personal belongings. She lived a Spartan existence at the park, most of her time spent outdoors and in the field. When she closed the door behind her, she knew she would not be returning to Skukuza.

  Her mission was to protect the animals, to preserve all that remained. Tamele’s memories had made it clear that this was not a mission that could be done within the park, so far removed from the real culprits.

  She realized that it was time for her to return to the world, to walk among mankind once more. Her war could not be fought from within the reservation, not if it were to be won.

  She had a name. Karl Jubber. That name had given her a location. That location would be the new front in her war.

  Akagi found her little-used ca
r in the lot outside the base and drove. Kruger National Park was soon lost in the distance, and she disconnected herself from their data feeds for now.

  A new kill count had begun.

  ***

  Akagi spent much of the following week hidden in the woods separating a secluded Cape Town mansion from civilization. A chameleonwear suit kept her blended with the surroundings, while the smart rifle was disguised in a similar wrapping.

  She had used her time collecting as much information on Karl Jubber as possible. When she caught sight of him for the first time, her dislike for the man was instantaneous.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, close-cropped black hair. Always wearing board shorts and a designer t-shirt one size too small. The short sleeves pulled taut around his biceps, showing off the South African Special Forces tattoo of a Commando knife within a laurel wreath. He carried himself with an ostentatious sense of self-importance, surrounded by a bevy of personal guardians. Every night he made his way into the heart of Cape Town, secreted away in one of four rugged and heavily modified SUVs to take part in the city’s night life. He often returned home with a score of women to continue the after-hours party. His social media accounts were littered with his idiot mems and drunken selfies as he sat among his naked, drugged-out conquests, always with the same wry smirk.

  The photos and mnemonic recordings were utterly distasteful, but they had given her insight about the Clifton mansion’s layout. The home was at least as large as Jubber’s ego, but far more sedate. The interior was Spartan and white, with plenty of windows. The view across Clifton 3rd Beach and the Atlantic Ocean beyond was to die for. Jubber’s heavily-guarded palace was a stone’s throw from the water, but given the heavy foot traffic along the shores and the wide-open expanse of beachfront, she had quickly ruled that out as a point of ingress. She felt much more comfortable in the thick profusion of trees and foliage that hid the villa from Victoria Road and its neighbors.

  There were a handful of guards watching the gated access road, and another handful that acted as Jubber’s personal protection detail. Roving security toured the house, and she had followed their route from the thick greenery on either side of the home, watching as they stood guard on the oceanfront deck. Some of the men had dogs, which she refused to kill.