by Gwynn White
8
Elephant March
Suddenly, other voices filtered into the tent. The men, a mix of field rangers and contractors, led by the PH’s right-hand-man Bongani, were talking outside.
The music from their Ukhozi FM radio program was unexpectedly interrupted by a news broadcast, and over Jake’s intonation of coordinates, I could make out the radio broadcaster saying something about a cubewano. But my earpiece didn’t translate it quite right. It sounded like this—kyu-bee-wan-oh.
It was a word that should have registered, but it didn’t. The rangers seemed to be repeating it, not quite understanding, either, what it meant.
I turned back my attention to Jake’s computer. On one of the screens, scimitar tusks raised and lowered in an elephant march.
9
Birds of Prey
There she is!”
I was shaken back into the moment, as the team crowded around the table. Jake enlarged one of the frames to fill most of the computer screen, shrinking the others to the periphery of the main window. He selected the silhouette in the middle, dialed up the magnification, and the animal enlarged to fill up the frame. There she was.
Amahle.
“About twenty-four miles out, grid eleven-nine.”
She was magnificent.
She was close to three-and-a-half meters in length, and one-and-a-half meters high. One-and-a-half thousand kilograms of beauty. Her two horns curved up, the larger front one long and lean, maybe the length of my arm. It tapered slowly to a point, curved like a scimitar.
She was nibbling on a shrub, using her hooked, prehensile upper lip to grasp the leaves and twigs as she fed. As she looked around, her ears flickered.
A flicker of movement in the corner of the computer caught my eye, in a frame different from the one we were focusing on.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Jake keyed in a command and brought up a split-screen view of Amahle and the screen I just pointed out. On the right-hand a view of dry terrain emerged, and you could see dark silhouettes moving against the landscape, deliberate and fast—not zebra or wildebeest.
Men. Two of them.
Now something else came into view at the edge of the screen, behind the two men—an all-terrain vehicle.
Even at this magnification, I could see what the two in front are carrying—AK-47 selective-fire assault rifles. One of them held a box, his firearm slung over his shoulder. He started waving at the others. He pointed up in the sky, toward our camera—he’d seen our drone. Another man lifted up a rifle, let loose a clip, and our screen went blank.
“Jou bliksem!” Caspar muttered. “How far are they from Amahle?”
John checked his coordinates. “Five miles.”
Caspar yelled out “Bongani! Arm the men and get them on the trucks! I’m going on the spinner.”
“Yebo!” Bongani ran out of the tent.
Caspar started to follow but was stopped by Walter. “It’s my hunt,” the real estate developer said.
Caspar sighed. “You’re with me. Dr. Malema, you too. But listen to me,” he growled at Walter. “You do exactly as I tell you or it is all over.”
Up over one shoulder, I slung my CIRCE backpack, emblazoned with the Canadian flag, and motioned to Jake. We moved outside, where Bongani was busy getting the men into the trucks. Most of them were holding what looked like bolt-action Lee-Enfield .303s. I winced. No match for the poachers’ firepower. The laughing and banter that had been going on earlier had stopped, replaced by a stone-faced muttering and anticipation.
Caspar was strapping Walter into the rear of a four-seater spinner. The vet took the other rear seat as Caspar jumped in next to the pilot. There was a rising whir as the spinner’s gyro revved up, and they were airborne.
Jake bundled his tracking computer and comm-devices under one arm and jumped into one of the jeeps with the man from Chester. I climbed in the back and strap in. We revved up, following the dust trail of the trucks.
I could hear Caspar shouting over the noise of the spinner engines, as we followed on Jake’s audio feed.
“Bongani,” he barked, “You take the men and try to cut off the poachers, form a line between them and Amahle. I’m going to take the spinner and make directly for the rhino, drive her in the other direction, away from them. If they get through we fall back and keep the wall between them and the rhino.”
His spinner was closing in on Amahle fast, but the poachers were closer, and it was a tight race between the two. We were moving quickly too, zooming past the landscape and the vistas of animals. They were better armed, but there were more of us, and we had more vehicles and equipment. Something else was bothering me, not just the imminent danger that Amahle was in, not just the prospect of getting in the middle of a firefight between AK-47s and Lee-Enfields. It was something I couldn’t shake, something from the quick view we had of the intruders back in the tent.
Jake got his computer open, yelling into his comm to confirm with Caspar’s pilot the positions of the targets. He’d re-directed a couple of new drones to fly toward the last known location of the poachers. They flew at a higher altitude, trying to figure in on their vector. Meanwhile, he steadied his view on Amahle, keeping her in sight.
“Two miles!” I heard Caspar’s voice over the comm. They were almost there, almost within sight of her. The objective was to fly closer, dodging the trees and flying a few meters above Amahle.
Unaware of everything that was happening within a few miles of her, the rhino was still browsing through the vegetation, her lips in a cyclical chewing motion, ears twitching.
All of a sudden, Amahle reared up in alarm, dropping the twigs in her mouth, circling back at something I can’t see, something that has stricken her from the sky.
Suddenly I realized what had been bothering me about the poachers. One of them hadn’t been holding his rifle. He was holding something else—a box. Radio? Scanner?
It hit me. A remote control box.
“Caspar!” I yelled into the comm. “They’ve got drones!”
“What?!”
“Drones,” I said. “Weaponized.”
Just as I said that, Amahle circled again. There was no sound, but her head was back and her mouth was open, straining. In the back of my mind I heard her bellowing as a tracer of bullets hit her from an enemy she could barely see. She began to run.
“Oh my God,” Mark was saying.
Jake spoke directly to the spinner. “She’s been shot! She’s bolted, headed west, away from you.” Of all the goddamn luck—right toward the poachers.
“Bongani,” Caspar called, “What’s happening?”
And suddenly there was the sound of gunfire bursts on the comm, the thuka-thuka-thuka of fully-automatic fire interspersed with the single crack of bolt-actions. It was the trucks, but where were they?
“Faster!” I shouted to the driver, even though we were already racing. I felt for my sidearm, something they issued me for use only in emergencies, although, what that was going to do for us in the face of the firepower we’ve heard, I had no idea.
Amahle was still running.
“We’re hit!” It was Caspar, and on the comm I could hear the spinner’s engine whining in the background, Walter yelling something unintelligible, and suddenly I saw the spinner in the distance, in real life, fifty feet in the air, careening out of control, spiraling as if one of its gyros was suddenly out of commission.
Then it dropped, straight down.
We clambered out of the jeep and pulled the four from the spinner’s wreckage. Still alive.
“Go, go!” Mark said to me. He pulled the med kit from the jeep, and was kneeling beside Walter, whose head was bleeding. “I’ll stay with them, you stay with Amahle.”
We hesitated only a moment, then ran for the jeep.
Jake took the wheel, so I grabbed his computer and slid into the passenger’s seat. I got my bearings from the screen, and pointed. “That way.”
The rhino was half a
mile away now, slowing down but still running. I re-directed another cluster of our drones in the direction of Amahle, while the one we’d already trained on her continued to keep a lock on.
From the picture I could see a stain on her upper back, dark and moist, spreading from a cluster of what must have been wounds from the drone attack. She was running, but every so often she winced, as if the unseen enemy drone let rain another barrage of fire on her from the air.
A quarter mile away.
Three of our drones had Amahle in their sights now, but more importantly, one of their cameras caught something else—the enemy drone.
“Got you.”
Jake glanced at me, then back at the trail.
I locked in the coordinates of the enemy to my three drones, and vector them in.
“What are you doing?” Jake yelled.
“I’m cluster-bombing the bastard.”
Amahle was in sight now, and Jake was following her dust trail. On the video screen, her legs seemed to be following a lopsided gait as she ran.
I made out the intruder drone following her, six rotors spinning and its weaponized payload swiveling beneath. It was unaware of my drones coming in, cameras focused on their prey.
I glanced at my screen. Almost there—closer—closer—
Two of my drones narrowly miss the intruder, but the third scored a direct hit—
THWOOM!
The two drones smashed into each other, breaking up into hundreds of individual shards of metal, plastic, and glass.
Amahle slowed to a walk, as if sensing that her tormentor was no longer following her. But the fuse which drove her forward seemed to fail her; she staggered, her legs not able to keep her completely vertical. She fell onto her side, breathing heavily.
We were about thirty meters from her now. It was not good. We had to get to her soon if she was to survive. What we needed was help. We needed to get her on one of our trucks, get her back to the station, to medical attention.
And just as I thought that, there was the smoke from a vehicle pulling up. My hopes rose.
But it wasn’t one of our trucks, it was an all-terrain vehicle. And when it stopped, and someone stepped out, it wasn’t Bongani, or any one of our men.
He was tall and lanky, and an AK-47 was slung over his shoulder, swinging slightly.
Two others stepped out of the vehicle, and motioned their rifles at us to stop, to get out of the jeep. We did. They yelled at us to raise our hands, drop all weapons, and I threw my sidearm to the ground.
“Geen wapens nie!” I shouted. No weapons.
It didn’t matter. They fired.
Hit, bleeding, I fell to the ground. Cheek pressed to the soil, arms stretched out, I watched as Lanky stepped up to Amahle, kicked a front leg.
Amahle coughed, raised her head.
The image of Kitani swam into my vision, and my ears fill with Mother, Mother—
Lanky pointed his rifle to the rhino’s skull, and fired.
10
Black Rhino, Night, No Stars
I remembered my mother’s voice calling my name once in winter, when I was fifteen. I remembered her arms underneath me while I was still half asleep, helping me up out of bed.
“Come on,” she said to me. “There’s a fire, we have to go.”
Suddenly I was wide awake, running with her hand in mine, but I was confused. There weren’t any flames around us, and wasn’t any smoke.
When we went outside, there was my brother Paul, still in pajamas but with his down jacket on, on the front lawn.
My mother settled me beside him, put a jacket on me, and we all held hands.
Across the street and two houses down was where ten-year-old Maria, another girl in my neighborhood, lived; I didn’t know her very well, but I saw her with her mother waiting at the bus stop everyday when my father drove me to school. They lived in a two-story turn-of-the-century wood-framed home, and it was burning.
There was an ambulance outside, and two fire engines, and firemen with a hose watering down the first level of the house, but flames were still flickering out of the windows of the second story.
A woman in front of the house, was wailing and wringing her hands like it was the end of the world.
I thought, Where’s Dad? My heart stuttered a beat… and suddenly there he was, coming out of the burning house with a bundle in his arms.
He collapsed on the ground beside and the bundle tumbled open. It was Maria, and we all ran to them, the firemen, the crying woman, my mother, my brother and me.
Later I found out that my father had run to the home right after the fire department had been called, to see if he could help. He’d broken a window and ran inside to find the woman’s daughter who was still upstairs, carried her past fire downstairs to safety.
I remembered the firemen gently pulling me away, and my father on the ground, and his back, and arms, and everything above his chest burned from wrapping the child and shielding her from the fire.
On his arm, the intricate tattoo was obscured by his burned flesh, but I could still read part of it:
ARDUA
As I grew up I dreamed about it, that marred tattoo, and I would wake up thinking: No stars. No stars.
I remembered my mother clapping her hand over my mouth to stop me screaming, and how my father looked up before he lost consciousness, looked at me, and grimaced a smile, to show he was okay when he wasn’t.
“You do what you have to do,” he said to me.
I remembered the sparks from the fire, sputtering out through smoke from the burning roof, like fireworks.
You do what you have to do.
The ATV’s dust trail disappeared in the distance.
I got up, one of my legs nearly useless, bleeding. Jake had ripped his shirt and was tying it around his bleeding arm. We both stumbled to Amahle. Jake let out an anguished cry, and I started crying.
The rhino was lying on her side, legs stretched stiffly out from her body. Her massive body, clad in its natural armor—so imposing, so noble, so regal in life—was splattered with mud and blood. And her head, so grotesquely disfigured without its scimitar horn, lolled back into the soil, eyes vacant, unaware of its own desecration.
Jake was back at the jeep, yelling into the radio, but only Mark answered, back at the downed spinner. There wouldn’t be any help. Not until it’s too late.
Ardua.
I dragged myself to the back of the jeep to get my pack, and slung it to the downed rhino. If I had to do this, I had to do it quickly, while she was still alive. I couldn’t think of paperwork or protocol, not at a time like this.
I knelt beside Amahle. There was blood everywhere, from the wounds on her body, around the hacked remainder of her horn. I was covered in it, her blood mingling with my own.
No stars. No stars.
From my CIRCE pack I prepared a collection kit. I was shaking as I caressed Amahle’s cheek, then I pried open her mouth. With a scalpel and tweezers, I took a tiny piece of her tongue, about the size of a grain of rice. I tried with all my strength to keep the sample steady, and finally deposited it into a collection vial filled with a cryoprotective solution. I sealed and labeled the vial, and inserted it into the portable cooling unit in the pack.
Jake was beside me now. “Mark got through to base camp,” he said. “They’re coming. We’ll be fine.”
I shook my head, clenched my lips, and repeated the process for other samples, back-up measures, from other parts of her—gums, soft skin, hide, abdominal section.
Finally, after a few moments, I was done. I fell to the ground, embracing Amahle, and I wept.
Part III
Merlin
For Immediate Broadcast M4 60 74
Impact Simulation Identifies Possible Global Events
In support of the United Earth Force’s Interplanetary Defense Coordination Committee (IDCC), engineers and scientists are putting together three-dimensional models and utilizing one of the UEF’s most powerful hyper-computer
s to produce simulations of hypothetical compact impact scenarios.
The results from these studies will help first responders and other emergency services identify and make decisions on how best to react to comet impact related events. This research will be shared with international agencies who develop response plans for potential damage to infrastructure, as well as for public warnings, assessment of evacuation times, and other similar options for the benefit of the public.
High-resolution simulations of impacts involving primary and secondary comet masses, covering a comprehensive range of mass sizes, compositions, and velocities, were run on the Fischer hyper-computer using UEF’s Archimedes3D modeling software by experts from the IDCC along with researchers from the Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
The team ran large-scale simulations of the Chekhov asteroid event, which impacted the Russian city in the twenty-first century, causing widespread damage of building infrastructure and injuring several thousand people.
These large-scale simulations were run on the Fischer system with a view to producing a number of impact scenarios in a time period that is orders of magnitude faster than other current three-dimensional numerical modeling systems used for analysis. The Archimedes3D system allowed the UEF and Ames team to model the detailed fluid flow that occur during the melting and vaporization of the body in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the concomitant effects on a terrestrial impact.
11
Gazelles
Cubewano. A passing word from a newscast on South African radio, just before the world ended for one eastern black rhino. A small, passing, unimportant part of that day.
The reserve sent out a recovery operation that evening, gathering up the dead and the injured. I heard it again in a segment on the evening news that day, lying in a recovery room in the health unit attached to the game reserve.