The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (58 page)

“Did you bring another one to die?” Tahira faced the voice. She was still wearing her glasses, but they didn’t register an ID. No surprise. Anyone doing this would have had his ID chip removed long ago, would use temporary, fake chips. “How much do you get for these? And what do the girls think? That this is just another porn shoot, this time out in the dust? She didn’t expect the lions.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” A figure emerged from the concealing hawthorn. Tall. Dressed in chameleon-fabric so that his silhouette was hard to make out. The projectile rifle, night-scoped, ugly and efficient looking wasn’t hard to make out at all. Something about the voice was wrong, nagged at her, but her head was full of sticky glue and she couldn’t think of what it was.

“I asked you a question.” The voice grated at her ears.

“You’re the one who’s making the snuff vids, recording the girls as they run into the old lioness’s pride and die.” She would have spat the words, but that sense of wrong was building in her head.

The figure stepped forward suddenly and before Tahira’s gone-fuzzy reflexes could kick in, had shoved Tahira back against the skimmer, her back arched under the pressure of the trespasser’s body, her good arm bent behind her. She blinked into pale gray eyes in a hard, weathered face framed by cropped-short gray-white hair. Sucked in a breath that was half pain, half surprise.

A woman.

“Shawn said it might be a she.” She laughed, drunk on the pain that had begun to throb in her right shoulder and side, burning like a growing fire, radiating through her flesh.

“Yeah, I’m a she. That was my daughter your lions ate. You folks don’t care, but I do.” Her breath blasted Tahira’s face. “They’re going to pay for that tonight.”

“Your daughter?” Tahira blinked, trying to focus her eyes. “That’s why your hackware is so poor? You just walked in here to shoot lions? You don’t care if we catch you?”

“I don’t care one bit.” The cold pale eyes bored into hers. “If you hadn’t decided to hang out and protect them, I wouldn’t have had to shoot you. I figured you folks trust your software instead of using your eyes. I know how tracking software works. . . . It’s pretty easy to fool if you know how.” She laughed and the sound was like glass breaking. “I was a wild-meat hunter for the black market – when there was still wild meat to hunt. I know all about tracking software. Maybe the people who babble about karmic balance are right, eh?” The shattered laugh came again. “After all the animals I killed, one of them killed my daughter. But the score is going to end in my favor.”

“You fool.” Tahira twisted her hand free, planted it against the woman’s chest and shoved. Her strength surprised both of them and the woman stumbled back a step. “You’ve ruined this night. You’ve ruined my chance to catch the one who killed your daughter and the girl he killed before her. You and your misguided revenge. He’s not going to come back, not after he realizes people were here waiting for him. Damn you.”

“What the crap are you talking about?”

“I’m not talking any crap.” Tahira closed her eyes. Game over, she thought. “How do you even know that your daughter was the girl who was killed here? We haven’t identified the DNA yet.”

“I found the image on the web.” The woman’s voice grated, harsh as stone. “I was looking for her, used a video search engine, uploaded a bunch of recent pictures of her. And the engine found a match. With lions.” She spat. “One of your tourists videoed it. Her running. The lions after her.” She spat again. “And you people just stood around.”

“No one stood around. I saw that video.” Tahira stood still as the gun muzzle lifted, fixed on her chest.

“The media said she sneaked in. I figured she was showing off to prove something . . . because I used to run around in the African wastelands for the meat collectors. She was such a city kid.” For a moment her voice wavered. Then it went cold again. “You want to tell me your version?”

“You didn’t look back to check the source of that image match, did you? If you want to go check it, you’ll find it’s a teaser for a very expensive, password-only, porn site. I think your daughter believed she was making a porn vid. Right until the end.” Tahira pulled out her link, watched the gun muzzle lift and steady. Touched up the video file from the Security eye, passed it over.

The woman took it, poised, the gun ready. Yes, Tahira thought. She had the body language of one who expected attack. She remembered that body posture all too well. The woman stepped back, out of range, looked at the link with one eye on Tahira. Then her posture stiffened and the link held her full attention.

I could kill her now, Tahira thought. Our children are our greatest weakness. She waited, watching the sky, straining her ears to hear any whisper of a silenced skimmer. The woman must be reviewing the clip over and over again. Finally she looked up, pocketed the link. The gun muzzle had sunk to rest on the ground and she didn’t lift it.

“What’s your stake in this?” Her voice was steady. “You came out here to put your life on the line for a damn lion?”

“No . . . and yes.” Tahira closed her eyes again, briefly, summoning the will to push the grinding pain in her shoulder down deeper inside her. “The lioness . . . the old one, the one that killed your daughter . . . was wild caught. There are no more lions to catch. These are being changed, their genes altered to make them what we want . . . the Pleistocene American Lion. The world that the lioness came from is gone. My world. Your world, too, I think.” She pulled her lips back from her teeth. “She is innocent of murder the way your rifle is innocent of murder, even if you point it at me and pull the trigger. You and I . . .” Her lips stretched tighter. “We are not innocent of our daughters’ murders.” She watched the gun muzzle jerk upward, tensed for one second as it wavered, drifted lower. “My elder daughter did what your daughter did.” The entire Preserve seemed to be holding its breath. Even the insects had hushed. “I knew what she was doing and pretended I did not. She had no future, there was no aid, everyone was hungry. I took the flour and oil she brought home and I did not ask where the money came from.” She did not look away from the pale oval of the woman’s face. “They made a video of her death. I got someone to find it for me eventually. To buy it. Her death was a commodity, for sale on the market. As is your daughter’s.” She waited for the gun to come up but it did not.

“My younger daughter was six.” She said the words flatly, without inflection. “I sold her to the World Council Forces so that she would not have to do what her sister did. They call it sponsoring, but when you do that, you relinquish all rights to that child. Later, I paid a lot of money to find out where she was and when she was fourteen, I saw her. On a training mission, doing crowd control. She looked at me.” Tahira took a deep breath. “She did not know me. By then, I had been lucky, had found a job with the North American Pleistocene Preserve and my superiors found that I was . . . talented. That was many years ago. My daughter is past middle age now.” She glanced up as a tiny chime sounded from the skimmer. “That is our lioness and her pride.” She took a deep breath. “This is a delicately balanced trap.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I think it’s too late.” She sighed. “He will certainly be scanning the ground for any human-sized life signatures, in case this is the trap he expects and I have brought the police.”

“He won’t see me.” The woman laughed her broken-glass laugh. “Illegal technology is always a step ahead of legal. Your motion detectors saw me, but you wouldn’t have picked me up on your scan.”

“He has inside help and so he might have access to our entire security network.” She shrugged. “I do not think that is likely since only I have complete access to it, but it is possible.”

“In that case we’re screwed.” The woman shrugged, her expression unreadable in the dark. “What do I do?”

“I want him on the ground.” Tahira closed her eyes as the world wavered. “He thinks I’m a witness and he needs to make sure I’m dead. I have a first aid kit behind the seat.” Cold sweat bathed her face, prickling under her arms. “It has a touch menu. Select stimulant, human, emergency, and get two patches.” She struggled to hang onto consciousness, eyes closed, nausea wringing her stomach. The woman brushed against her, fumbling behind the seat. A moment later cool fingers seized her wrist, pushed her sleeve up and Tahira felt the sting of the stim patch on the inside of her elbow.

“That’s going to make you bleed more.”

“I know.” Tahira straightened as energy washed through her, banishing the nausea, brightening the shadows. “Can’t be helped.” She touched the first aid menu, selected one small and one medium blood-stop patch. “Help me with the shirt.” She winced as the woman opened the front, pulled the fabric down over her shoulder and arm. “Cover the entire wound, use the small one on the entry . . .”

“I know how to use a patch.”

Tahira sighed as the woman smoothed the patches over the ruin of the entry and exit wounds. The fast-acting local quickly numbed the grinding pain, reduced it to a low-level throb that she could shut out for now.

“You guys carry a hospital on these things.”

“We permit a few extreme hikers.” Tahira drew a slow breath, let it out, judging the strength of the remaining pain. “We are preoccupied with death.” She bared her teeth at the woman. “You sold vids of your kills along with your illegal meat, didn’t you?”

The woman didn’t answer, but of course, she did. Tahira straightened. That was the lure of what would otherwise be no different from a farm or vat raised steak. If you couldn’t pull the trigger yourself, you could still watch it die. “You hide,” she said. “I’m going to move the skimmer ahead of the pride, ground it again. He’s going to come down and look for me.”

“He’s going to drop a grenade on you and leave.” The woman sounded contemptuous.

“Oh no.” Tahira grinned. “Like you, I’m wearing a chameleon field. And I also have a small device that a clever grad student hacked up – it generates the thermal effect of a 150 pound antelope. He was studying night hunting, trying to determine the importance of scent, thermal detection, sound, and sight in predator species. Our killer should think it’s me.” She shrugged. “He has been very careful not to leave any traces. I suspect that if I did not patrol as regularly as I do, we would never have known that anyone was killed here.” Another few hours, and only the scrap of fabric would have marked that kill site. “One of us needs to kill him.” She lifted her hand. “I would prefer that the lions do it.”

“How do you know they can?”

Tahira shrugged her good shoulder. “I will make it possible. If they do not, you or I will do it.” She pulled the highly illegal gun from her waistband, was impressed that the woman didn’t flinch.

“You could have shot me. While I was looking at the vid.” For a moment, she was silent. “I like you.” Her teeth flashed briefly. “You would have made a good meat hunter.”

“I think not.” Tahira stretched her lips back from her teeth. “But I am not sure we are so different. You know to stay downwind from the pride? They’re hunting.”

“I know.”

“I need my link.” Tahira held out her hand. The woman glanced at it, shrugged, handed it over. Tahira nodded and climbed onto the skimmer, hoping he showed before the stim patch ran out. She wasn’t sure she could tolerate a second dose. At least the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Lifting, she drifted ahead of the pride, watching her enviro-panel, reading wind, calculating distance and scent drift. Set the skimmer gently down, half hidden by hawthorn scrub. Just hidden enough, she hoped, to make him think that he might have missed her last time, when he dropped the girl. The meat-hunter’s daughter.

Glancing at her watch, she planted the thick disk of the bio-signature generator in a clump of hawthorn, and hiked downwind, zooming in on the spot with her glasses. She had keyed the link to the lioness’s ID, figured she had about fifteen minutes before she’d need to return and move the skimmer. The lions knew her scent, so hopefully her presence wouldn’t disturb their regular hunting routine.

Five minutes left. She started to get to her feet to relieve her thigh muscles, when she caught the faintest whisper of disturbed air, like the wings of an owl. She froze, eyes fixed on the landscape beyond the grounded skimmer. A vague shape of matte black blocked her view of grass and shrubs. A military shadow field, of course.

She didn’t see him get out of the shadowed skimmer, but of course, he would also be using a chameleon field. Sure enough, a clump of sun dried grass winked out for a moment, then reappeared. He knew where she was – or where he thought she was. He was being cautious.

She had not prayed to any gods for a long time. Not since she had handed over her young daughter to the World Council Force sponsorship coordinator. Gods were like lions, they belonged to the old world. But now she bent her head, prayed that those old, dying gods would gather wind, scent, instinct and make one thing right in the old way.

He did not fear the lions. She could see it in his preoccupied focus on the clump of brush where she had hidden the generator. They were just park amusements, useful as a movie prop, able to kill a helpless and unarmed girl. Not a threat to him. He had a gun, after all. She bared her teeth at his hubris. It would please the old gods.

The lioness charged in a rush of motion where no motion had existed. The man spun, hand coming up. Light flared and the lioness tumbled, regained her feet in an instant and with a leap, her front feet hit his shoulders, knocking him flat, her claws digging in to hold him. He had time for a choked cry before her jaws closed on his throat. A second lioness charged in, taking him by the thigh. Dust rose, white in her night-vision, as he thrashed, strangling slowly. The lion grunts and chesty growls were the only sound. The other members of the pride had circled in, tearing his belly open before he had quite died.

Tahira started as something moved beside her. The meat hunter squatted silently next to her, her posture intent, not speaking. A loop of intestine gleamed wetly. He had stopped struggling, had finally died. The lioness who had taken him stood up, bit at his dead shoulder and shook her head heavily. She walked a few steps away from the feeding pride, snarled as one of the males took a step toward her, lashed out at him. Her strike was weak, wobbly, and her hindquarters swayed as she staggered away from the others.