The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (57 page)

“I’m going to get a warrant for your arrest.” He ignored the proffered glass.

“On what grounds?” She raised an eyebrow. “I suspect your boss will not agree with you. It will be hard enough to deal with the media when they get hold of the tourists’ mistaken statements. It will be much worse if you have arrested the manager of the Preserve and then have to release her. Your boss is very conscious of his media image.”

“I’m staying here tonight.” He glared at her.

“Be my guest.” She shrugged. “I told you, I’m going to bed.”

“Good.” He stretched out on the sofa, his jaw set.

She turned her back on him and activated her holo-field. Checked the Preserve first. Minor Perimeter alerts only – a couple of licensed backcountry backpackers who had retreated when they triggered the broadcast security announcement, a small herd of pronghorn that moved off when the repulsion field activated, broadcasting an unpleasant sonic pulse that discouraged most wildlife and the occasional lost livestock. Nothing else. Red icons signaled stationary chips – indicating that a bearer hadn’t moved for twelve hours. That usually represented death or serious injury. She checked the IDs . . . all prey species except for one elephant from the northernmost herd. An old female, but not so old that she should be dying yet. The elephants and the larger predators had been implanted with biometric chips. Tahira checked it, found signs of physical distress, but no clear diagnosis. She transferred the ID to her link. She’d fly over in the morning and check on it, on her rounds to chip new births. See what had happened.

Her AI search of the Security video of the running girl had turned up a match. 89 per cent. Tahira drew a deep breath, touched the green icon. A merchant site. Models? A naked woman lounged suggestively on a grizzly’s hide, caressing the dead, snarling face, tongue-tip peeking pink from lush, crimson lips. The secure interface requested a user ID and password. And a credit card. The entry fee made her purse her lips. She flagged the link, emailed it.

Malthers was peering at his link, his feet propped on the arm of the sofa. He looked up as she shut down her field. “What if the person who dropped her was a woman?” His eyes were hard.

She shrugged. “You are too tall for that sofa. Would you like me to inflate the guest bed?”

“No, thank you.” He went back to his link. “I don’t plan on sleeping.”

“While you are up, then, maybe you can see what’s for sale on the video sex markets. I just sent you a link that you might . . . find interesting. I don’t have the bud get to access it.” She turned and went into her room. When she woke briefly in the middle of the night, the light in the main room was still on and he was sitting on the sofa, hunched over his link.

She slept without dreaming, after that, and when she woke, he was gone.

The door seal sighed as it released and Jen strode in, bringing a smell of hot noon-time dust and heat, a hint of lion and sex. “Hey, how was your tour last night? Did they do a fancy spread?” He came up behind her, dropped his collecting bag onto the tiles with a small thump. “What’s with the reporters outside? The newsfeeds were full of the killing this morning. You were a witness? To the girl’s death?” His sandy brows arched over his pale eyes. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I know I didn’t.” Tahira waved her hand through the field and the numbers and icons, the map of this girl’s history written in molecules, winked out. “Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

“You haven’t opened your secure email from the boss yet.”

“I know what it says.” She sighed.

“Tahira . . .” His hands came to rest lightly on her shoulders. “I work with the lions, too. I can do this euthanasia for you. You don’t have to. Just give me the chip ID.”

His hands offered comfort not sex. She let her shoulders relax a bit beneath the warmth and acknowledged the small heat of desire between her legs. He was very pretty. He would try hard to please her in bed. Her shiver of anticipation made her . . . sad. She was old enough to be his grandmother. The flesh had its own morality. She sighed, and his hands slid from her shoulders as she rose. “I appreciate your offer.” She smiled for him. “But it is my duty. It is my failing that the girl was able to be here.”

“That’s not true.” He shook his head, frowning. “She bought hackware good enough to get through the Perimeter sensors. It’s happened before. Remember those rich kids that came in here with a rifle? Right after I started working here? The ones who thought they were going to kill an elephant? That’s not your responsibility – that’s the responsibility of the company that contracts security to the Preserve.”

“That’s not what happened.” Tahira blanked the icons with a wave of her hand. “This is not like those teenage poachers with their utterly inadequate rifles. I knew they were there.”

“So her hackware was better, that’s all.” Jen shrugged. “Come on, Tahira. Nobody is blaming you . . . except you.”

“I doubt that is true.” She turned to meet his pale eyes. “Her mother? A lover? Who is mourning her? She was a girl, Jen, even if nobody claimed her as missing. The poor don’t bother. You know that no one will really look. You know where they have gone.” She turned away from the blue incomprehension of his eyes. “But they are blaming me. Besides, she was not rich enough to afford that level of hackware.”

He shook his head and heaved a sigh for her to hear. She ignored it as she ran through the surveillance program, suppressing a twinge of guilt because she hadn’t yet checked on the stationary elephant cow. Everything was fine, although the main horse herd was pushing into the grazing territory of the old mare’s small, splinter herd. This was a dry year and the grass was poor. She’d have to let them get pushed off their riverside pasture. That would weaken this year’s crop of still-nursing foals, and increase the kill rate by the northern pride. If another dry spring followed, she thought, the small herd would probably end up being absorbed back into the larger group. The old mare wouldn’t survive that merger.

The guide reports were routine. No problems, no accidents on any of the daily motorized tours currently winding through the Preserve and only a sprained ankle from one of the self-guided backpacking treks that were in progress. The hiker had been handled by a contracted first aid skimmer and planned to continue the trek in an augmented cast, having signed a health waver. Tahira checked the location of the various lion prides and elephant groups to make sure that the guides would provide visual contact for the guests. Four were lion treks and one was an elephant trek. But all their guides were experienced and they could find the chip signatures with their own software. They were all on target to give the paying hikers the thrill of a live sighting. Routine day. She retinaed the report, packed a few necessary items into her field bag, then left Jen to his microscope and took the skimmer out into the Preserve.

Shawn had not gotten his warrant, but then she had known he would fail.

She swung north, to check up on the stationary elephant before she started her chip work. It was a long flight, clear to the northwestern boundary of the Preserve, within sight of the monorail. The old cow was down after all, on her side in the shade of a thin copse of trees. She raised her head as Tahira skimmed over, ears erect, trunk curled as she got her forefeet under her, tried to heave herself to her feet. Two aunties had stayed with her and as she collapsed into the dust once more, they hurried up, stroking her with their trunks, watching Tahira warily as she landed the skimmer and approached cautiously. The dust beneath the old cow’s hindquarters had turned to mud from her urine. No sign of defecation. A blockage? Perhaps she had eaten something that damaged her gastrointestinal system. Her temperature was slightly elevated and when Tahira zoomed in with her glasses, sure enough the cow’s membranes looked pale. No sign of any external trauma. Natural Causes. She selected the diagnosis, uploaded visuals to the cow’s file, and set it to alert her when vitals fell to imminent death levels. She would return to make a more complete diagnosis then. For the record.

She caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye as she removed her glasses. Bear? Sure enough, when she slipped them back on, a green ring haloed the bushes where she had seen the movement and the ID appeared. One of the Short Faced bears, another of the engineers’ triumphant recreations. They were drawn by death. One of the aunties blew noisily and rushed the bushes, trunk high. The bear retreated, growling, circled around to windward. Tahira retreated to her skimmer, although the bear was focused on the dying cow. Unlikely that the aunties would allow it to hasten the old cow’s end.

Natural causes, she thought as she lifted to swing eastward again. You could label the girl’s death as natural causes. To the lions it had been a natural end. The monorail was curving along the white arch of track on its first run of the morning. In a few moments the tourists would surely spot the cow and the questions would start pouring into Admin from the passengers. All the tourist monorails carried a direct link to Preserve Administration. Tahira set the skimmer on auto, homing on the ID of the bison herd she needed to chip, and quickly edited out an image of the cow and her aunties from the old cow’s ID file. She selected one of her taken in the past, with her last calf, set her link to record and smiled for the tourists. Quickly, in a warm and positive tone, she explained the situation, that the cow was dying of natural causes, the aunties were attending her, and that this (insert mother and calf image here) was part of the natural cycle of life and death, that the old cow’s flesh would nourish wild dog cubs (she called up a file, inserted a recent shot of three pups playing) and the scavenger population. She uploaded the video file to Administration and texted Amy Shen, the head of PR, to expect questions about the dying cow and offer this Special Message from the Manager. Amy would run the file through her editing software to smooth out any rough edges and in a few minutes, when the worried texts came in, the tourists would have her reassuring explanation.

Maybe she should have made one for the dead girl? Tahira kicked the skimmer to full speed, ducked down behind the wind screen as they streaked across the foothills of the mountains.

It took her the rest of the day to chip the bison calves and stalk a litter of wild dog pups old enough for chips. Half grown, they were skittish, full of hormones and already squabbling with the ranking alphas. But she finally got good shots, and planted a chip in a solid muscle mass. The new ID files opened and she recorded the pertinent data. Now the pups and the calves were part of the database. Their deaths would have meaning, value, would contribute to the slowly growing mass of information about this stable environment.

What had the girl’s death contributed?

A meal for the lions, she thought. At a price.

It was getting dark. She texted Jen that she was going to stay out and check on the lion pride before she came in. Told him to go home, activate Security when he left, she’d see him tomorrow. She knew where the pride would be, didn’t need to check her link. It was too early yet for them to head down to the river. She grounded the skimmer, ate an energy bar from her bag, drank some water, and used her link to access the Preserve database and check on the animals.

Nothing out of the ordinary. No Security alerts, nothing but the normal rhythms of day ending and night beginning. Shift change, she thought as she stuffed the wrapper into her pocket and capped her water bottle. Time. It was fully dark now, the Milky Way a white shimmer across the star spangled sky. She stared up at it. Different sky than the one over the refugee camp. Maybe it wasn’t, but it looked different. She frowned, bothered suddenly that she didn’t know if the constellations had been the same in that girlhood sky, or if memory had warped the images in her mind. It bothered her a lot. Frowning she lifted the skimmer, donned her glasses set tonight vision, and went looking for the lion pride. She flew low, skimming above the brush, weaving around the trees. Someone watching for her might think she was checking on the wildlife, scanning chips. She dipped south so that she’d meet the pride on their way down to the river.

Red blossomed at the top of her glasses’ heads-up visual field. Perimeter violation? Tahira’s stomach clenched. Why an alert this time? She crouched behind the windscreen as she dropped lower, weaving through the tops of the trees. A map flashed into existence now, red dots marking the path of the intruder as he activated the sensors scattered across the Preserve. Tahira watched another red icon blossom on the screen map. He was heading for the place where the girl had died and the steady progress suggested that he wasn’t trying very hard to hide and certainly wasn’t using hackware.

No. This was just some fool who chose tonight to violate the Perimeter. An idiot. A thrill seeker. Furious she circled south to come in straight behind the intruder, slowed the skimmer to its limit, weaving through the brush now, twigs whispering against the skimmer’s flanks, clawing at her legs. She was briefly thankful for her tough, suncloth pants that resisted the thorns. She followed the trespasser’s path on her map. He should be about a hundred yards ahead, almost at the site where the girl had died.

Something slammed into her, an invisible fist that loosened her grasp on the skimmer’s nav bar and tossed her sideways out of the seat. The skimmer compensated as soon as her hand left the bar, shying sideways to stay underneath her, slowing and settling automatically. She clutched at the bar to take control again, but her right arm didn’t work and before she could process that, shift to her left hand, the skimmer grounded gently. For a moment, Tahira stared at the bar, then realized that her sleeve was wet, warm liquid was dripping steadily onto her pants and the dusty ground beside the skimmer. Dark. Blood. Her head spun briefly and she swallowed dry nausea.

What do you think you’re going to do? She heard Shawn’s furious voice in her head. Not much. She climbed off the skimmer, her knees suddenly shaky.

“I don’t want to kill you.” The hard, cold voice came from the tall hawthorn scrub that edged the grassy area where the skimmer had come down. “But you’re not going to get in my way. You can yell for help as soon as I’m done here.”