The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (66 page)

Tahira liked her for that.

With a sigh, Tahira grounded the skimmer to text a quick report on her find to her boss. Then she shut off the link before he could reply and swung the skimmer northward to find the big antelope herd.

The sun was dipping toward the horizon by the time she returned to Admin. Only the solar farm beyond the low, ochre buildings, row upon row of collectors following the sun, spelled ‘tech.’ The earth-brick buildings might have been built by some primitive peoples, blending gently into the summer prairie. Tech was pretty much invisible now – except in the dry lands where the ranked mirrors of the solar farms and the wind towers had supplanted juniper and sage. But nobody went out there. Her village would have suited this landscape, she thought. Huts decaying slowly into the shriveling desert that had once fed lions and antelope and people. Tahira set the skimmer down hard and fast on the small landing pad behind the building. The trickle of water down the central interior water wall washed a breath of moist cool and greenery-scent over her as she entered, tempting her to strip, shower, and sit in the pool. She ached after her full day on the skimmer. Once upon a time, she had not ached. It was time to make another appointment at the geri clinic. Or perhaps not. Every cycle had a natural end. Well, perhaps that was no longer true. Tahira sighed at the angry blink of the red priority icon above the holo deck.

She ignored it and instead seated herself on her working cushion, doing full lotus for concentration. Called up Security. Some eye somewhere must have seen the girl last night. She started a search for predator-prey movement, narrowed the profile to a human’s mass. No point in watching rodents and coy-dogs. That got her lions, antelope, bison calves. A headache blossomed behind her eyes as the images flickered through her field.

Then . . . there she was. Shadowy, slender, her arms, neck, face, legs stark white in the night-eye recording, that black shirt that would be torn and bloodied revealing a deep cleavage and breasts that were small enough to be natural, not sculpted. Tahira’s eyes narrowed. Short shorts, sexy clothes, nothing you’d wear into the thorny scrub of the Preserve. Sandals, so she had lost them, running. No blood on that white skin. She hadn’t waded through the hawthorn then. How old? Sixteen? No, she decided. Less. Maybe fourteen. That was how old her daughter had been, last time she had seen her. Tahira tasted blood, realized she was biting her lip. She watched the girl wince, bend a slender leg to rub at something – thorn or bite. She looked lost. Pissed. Stood-up by a date pissed.

Then, her expression changed from lost-and-angry to startled. Then frightened. She looked around and for an instant her eyes seemed to meet Tahira’s. Accusingly.

Like an antelope, she turned and bolted, running through the grass and thorns. One of the sandals flew off, a twinkle of motion on the screen.

“Don’t run.” Tahira said it out loud.

In the holo field the girl kept running and in a second vanished from the eye’s sweep.

Tahira found herself standing. Muttered a curse. She skimmed to the next eye, which should have picked up the girl’s panicked flight and probably the kill, since it covered that sector.

It showed her grass, scrub, the scurry of a small rodent, the silent float of an owl. The small dying shriek of the rodent made her flinch, then she skimmed back through that eye’s sequence.

Nothing. She slowed the segment, watched the owl creep across the scene. Frowned. Seed heads bowed the grass. This species had finished seeding weeks ago and the seed heads had shattered, spilling their ripe seeds.

She copied and filed both sequences and had the station AI code them for search identification. Then she set the AI searching the Preserve’s security base for an exact match to the quiet scene recorded by the second eye. Within a minute, a 99% match popped up in her holo field. Side by side, two owls floated and twin shrieks split the quiet. She checked the properties. Yep. The scene had been recorded five weeks ago, on a quiet night with . . . she checked . . . no Security alerts, not even a native antelope bumping the Perimeter fence.

For several moments, she frowned at the now-frozen images, then blanked them. This time, she directed her AI to match the visual image of the girl running, but she directed it to search the web, excluding only the Preserve data files.

That search was going to take some time.

With a sigh, she emailed the video of the girl and the twin owl sequences to her boss, then reached into the holo field to touch the angry, blinking priority icon.

It took five full minutes for Carlo to appear. Which meant he was probably in bed. With someone. He had just spent a week at a body-spa and he was probably trying out the upgrades. Tahira braced herself as Carlo’s face and torso appeared in the field, yes, wrapped in a silken robe, his usually-perfect hair tousled. “About time.” His eyes narrowed. “Where were you? I called you as soon as I got your report but your link didn’t answer.”

“Checking the range.”

“You have software to do that.”

“The software didn’t find her. I did.”

“Has the media gotten hold of this?” Carlo looked over his shoulder, back to her, lowered his voice. “I assume not, or my interface would have picked it up and alerted me.” His dark eyes snapped. “All right. This time, you need to find out how the trespasser got in. And why Security failed to alert you. Again. Meanwhile, you will euthanize the lions involved. As insurance against media clamor. We will have done all we could do.”

“It’s not the lions’ fault.” Tahira shook her head. “The girl was meant to run into them. She was dropped right in front of them.”

“What do you mean she was dropped?” He ran a hand through his head. “Make sense, Tahira, will you?”

“She was dropped.” Tahira bit the words off. “By a skimmer, helicopter. Something. She was in sandals. Bedroom type. I just emailed you the Security clip that did pick her up. And the clip that was used to replace most of the visuals.”

He stared at her. “That’s unbelievable.” He chopped her words aside with the flat of his hand. “Do you know how much it would cost to do that kind of hack job? Worry about the Perimeter security. Something is down. The lion euthanasia shows the public that we’re doing a good job of dealing with this. The US media will howl if they get hold of this. You know how they feel about the Preserve.”

Yes, she knew.

“I can sacrifice you or I can sacrifice a lion or two. You decide, Tahira.” Carlo’s eyes narrowed. “And before you say anything, you’re a hell of a lot more valuable to me than the lions, they’re breeding just fine. Besides, as soon as the genetics geeks get their Panthera leo atrox phenotype we won’t use African lions anymore anyway. So let’s just call it moot and drop it.” He glanced over his shoulder again and his mouth tightened briefly. Turned back to Tahira. “I am ordering you to euthanize a lion that killed this person. Make sure you get a DNA match so we can prove it, and I’ll leave it to you to get the right one. I’ll let you claim it was a rogue animal and make it plausible.”

He was giving her a lot. Carlo could have demanded the whole pride – the media would press for it. He could have fired her. “Can we talk about how this girl got in here? She was a girl, Carlo. Dressed for a hot date. Go take a look at that clip I sent you. She did not hike in from the Perimeter. I think that’s a bit more important than pleasing the media.”

“No, it’s not.” Carlo cut her off with another chop of his aristocratic hand. “If we’re lucky, nobody will pick it up. Make sure you secure those video files. The administrative contract for the Preserve comes up for renewal in one month. The US will push hard to take it over, as usual. If you want a job a month from now, you’d better hope the World Council thinks we’re doing a good job here and doesn’t award the contract somewhere else.” The holo field blanked.

Tahira stared into the opalescent shimmer.

He was right. The vast Preserve, the huge central section of the US that had been restored to its Pleistocene ecology, including megafauna and the species that had inhabited this land millions of years ago, was part of a giant experiment in ecological climate control. And genetic engineering. And a huge tourist draw, which the US did like. A lot of countries were uneasy about it, seeing a threat to their own grasslands and dwindling wildlands as the growing Gaiist movement used carbon credit leverage to pressure for more preservation. Too much media outcry and the US might garner enough support to end the Preserve and take over control of the huge area again, never mind the carbon credits they’d then owe. It was a matter of national pride, she thought sourly. That had always transcended logic.

She made herself a pot of very black tea and began to go through the security records for the past twenty four hours, searching for human-sized mass or any sign of a small-craft landing. As the sun cleared the horizon, she finally shut down her station and stumbled off to her small room behind the water wall, sprawling sweaty and fully clothed across her bed.

No airspace invasion, no vehicles, nobody on foot. Maybe the girl had teleported in. She laughed sourly. Sure.

Just like the last one.

“Tahira? Hey, Tahira, are you okay?”

Jen’s voice. Tahira blinked crusted eyes, swimming up from a deep pool of sleep and dreams she couldn’t remember but that had stalked her like lions. “Late night.” She realized that she had spoken in Sotho, switched to English. “Sorry. I just need some tea.” She sat up, stiff and sticky in her dirty clothes, rubbed her eyes.

“I already made you some.” Jen stood in the doorway, nervous, a mug in one hand. “When you didn’t hear me come in I figured you really needed tea.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Tahira got up, glad that she hadn’t stripped last night and took the mug. “I appreciate it.” She gave him a smile because this too-earnest graduate student had tried to climb into her bed a week ago, never mind the age difference. And her ‘no thanks’ had apparently bruised him. She swallowed a stinging gulp of the strong-enough tea, gave Jen a nod of approval. Usually, he made it too weak.

“You got official mail.” Jen stood just outside the door, as if a strand of Perimeter fencing blocked it, his beaded and braided, silver-white hair – stark contrast to his tawny skin and intended to be sexy – swinging forward around his face with his nod. “Security seal. Looks important.”

“Yeah.” Tahira drank more tea. The official execution orders. “We had another trespasser last night.”

“You’re kidding.” Jen’s eyes got round. “No, you’re not. Another . . . another kill? What are we going to do about it?”

She brushed past him, angry because two plus two was a simple equation. But guilt stabbed her. He had brought strong tea. And he didn’t really understand the Preserve politics. She paused, looked back and shrugged. “I’ll have to kill one of the lions of course. Even though it wasn’t really their fault.”

The information didn’t move him, but why should it? He was a graduate student, studying the symbiosis of lions and one of the predatory wasp species. Esoteric stuff. A study that provided a comfortable living and yielded information. Lions were just the food providers for his wasps, who laid their eggs in the larvae of a biting fly that pestered the lions. And the wasps were just a day job, a means to an income. He’d study whatever he was paid to study. She sighed. “Come have some breakfast with me, eh? I found a fresh guinea hen nest yesterday.”

She softboiled the small, tan eggs and they ate them together as she listened to him prattle on about his wasp collecting, larvae counts, population fluctuations. When he left on his skimmer, with his collecting nets, sample bags, and a stunner, Tahira stripped and scrubbed herself clean of last night’s sweat and the smell of violent death. She stripped the bed, tossed the dirty sheets into the sonic cleaner, and padded barefoot, in a clean shift, to the lab refrigerator where she had stored the trespasser’s bones. The bag containing the black shirt lay on the floor beside the refrigerator. She picked it up, smoothed out the torn and blood-stiffened fabric within its plastic shroud. Why did you come here? She spoke silently to the girl’s spirit. The lioness’s killing was innocent. My killing of the lioness will not be innocent and it will be my burden not yours. Anger burned through her. “Your death was not innocent,” she said aloud. “You brought it with you and left it like poison on innocent ground.”

But her own words sounded hollow and that image nagged at her . . . the ‘where’s my date?’ body language, that single, decorative sandal tumbling through the air, bright against the stark night-vision landscape. Dropping the shirt, she took out the bag with the vertebrae and hair and got to work.

The first thing she did was file a full report to the local Sheriffs Department. That meant the media would have the news within the hour. The Sheriff’s security leaked like a sieve. Next, she started the DNA scan. She was only required to run a minimal ID scan, but she did a full analysis. The longer she spent on this easily-rationalized task, the longer she could put off the euthanasia. By noon, her back ached from standing and the building’s major-domo announced Deputy Malthers. Shawn. He always handled Preserve issues. She sent the data to her personal workspace and shut down the lab, retreating into the main room and the cool breath of water-wall. “Come in.” She admitted him and he sighed in the cool air, removing his hat, half moons of sweat darkening the tan sun-cloth of his uniform.

“Tahira.” He nodded, his weathered face closed and cautious. “You had an intruder, huh?” Another one, his eyes accused. “Supposedly your fence is tight. Do I have to worry about lions in the hotel lobbies?”