Mitchell panned the rifle across the landscape until the lion was in its crosshair, aglow with the green tone of night vision. He never tired of watching them sleep, their powerful chests rising and descending with each breath. Motion in the bottom right of his view made him pan down; one of the cubs was stretching, its paw stabbing the sky.

Enough sight seeing, he thought. Time to get to work.

Mitchell swung his gun left a few degrees and landed his sight perfectly on a small patch of trees and brush. Slowing his breath to steady his aim, Mitchell observed the patch of green for any movement. It was the perfect cover for poachers, and the closest patch of dense foliage to the pride.

Mitchell’s com beeped to life and Noah’s voice was in his ear. “You have anything?”

“Nothing yet. I’ve got eyes on the closest patch of green opposite the pride.” The subcutaneous mic triggered with the slightest whisper. It was five year old commercial tech, as was almost everything they had. The poachers had military tech. When it came down to it that was the problem. Well, Mitchell and Noah’s problem at least. The geopolitics was somebody else’s headache.

“Did you hear about Jonas at the Beta Site?” Noah was a talker, which didn’t suit Mitchell but he tolerated it in the name of workplace harmony.

“No.”

“They caught a team of four trying to breach the shield wall last night. It was pure luck, too; they’d left for patrol fifteen minutes early and caught the bastards with their pants down. They had Mark IV stealth suits in their kit.”

Mitchell cursed under his breath but the mic picked it up. He quickly moved a finger to trigger a touchpad on the rifle’s grip, switching his sight to infrared. “What is it?” asked Noah.

“You mention this now and not during the shift briefing? Mark IVs are invisible to night vision and infrared!”

Noah’s curse erupted in Mitchell’s ear but he remained focused on the patch of green; there was too much at stake to be distracted now. Mitchell silently cursed Noah for not mentioning the stealth suits earlier. He cursed the poachers and their seemingly limitless resources. He cursed the Mark IVs and the military scientists that made them. He cursed whoever sold the damned things to the poachers, and he cursed himself for not knowing about the incident at the Beta Site; as team lead he should have kept a closer eye on the daily updates.

None of that mattered now. Mark IVs were invisible to all conventional detection systems. They possessed all the visible light cloaking abilities of Mark IIIs with the addition of a radiative heat management system that masked the wearer’s infrared signature. Detection of a Mark IV via night vision from over ten meters away was near impossible, but the heat masking wasn’t perfect. If the shooter wasn’t already in position then they still had a chance of seeing a slight heat blur if he moved too fast.

At least that’s what Mitchell had read online.

He scanned the patch of green and the empty plain around it for any thermal blur. If he saw anything it would be fleeting but he knew he’d have to take the shot. Human life was cheap, worth a lot less than the cats in this pride. Black Market price for a whole lion was well over 500 million Yuan, enough to give a whole band of poachers the good life. Still, seemed cheap to bring a species to extinction.

The com beeped to life again. “Sector Four, this is Control, please respond.” Mitchell recognized Colonel Mandela’s voice, though he sounded more exhausted than usual.

“Mitchell, Sector Four. Go ahead, Colonel.”

There was a pause. “Be advised we picked up a departing exhaust flare outside the dome by Sector Two. It was poachers. In and out without us seeing. They… they got one of the rhinos.”

Mitchell let his head fall from the scope and into his arm. There was no need to keep looking now. Poachers wouldn’t launch two ops in one dome in one night, not if they sped off fast enough to register an exhaust flare on the sensor net.

“Which one?” Noah’s voice quivered as he asked.

“I’m sorry guys, it was Bertha.”

So that’s it then, thought Mitchell. The last female rhino in existence. He gazed across the plain at the lions; two females and four males, the entire species barely visible in the night. No matter how strong they made the dome around the reservation they just couldn’t keep out the poison and death man had delivered upon his home.

Mitchell switched off his com unit; it was unprofessional to cry on the job.

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Doktor Andy

Scientist, Sci-Fi fan, comic book junkie, intellectual adventurer, eccentric recluse. Andy blogs about geekery for www.Sidekickcast.com and writes fiction for anyone that will read it. You can find him on Twitter @DoktorAndy

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