SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

He hugged me close for a long moment. “Thank you. Thank you so much, sweetheart. I’m so proud of you. I can’t even express it.”

“You don’t have to. You’re here. That’s more than enough for me.”

He pulled away and looked at me in earnest. “Where’s Mum? Is she here?”

I smiled, imagining her joy. “She’s not expecting this. I didn’t want to get her hopes up.” I video-called her on my mobile and made sure she was sitting down before I passed the phone to Daddy.

“Hi, love,” he said. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Mum’s end, and then nothing for a long moment, and then crying.

I took Mark aside to give them some privacy. He and I both needed rest; I could see he wanted to get home.

“I’m in your debt, Mark. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

He shook his head with a smile. “You don’t owe me anything. The chance to see him up close, to work on him, to actually meet someone like him in person…I should be thanking you .”

I felt the last shred of tension leave me. He was referring to Daddy as a real person. The way I’d always seen him. I somehow knew then that Mark wasn’t about to turn my lifelong secret to his advantage.

I took his hand. “Thank you. For everything.”

“He’s your dad. I’m sure you’d have done the same if it had been my old man lying on the table.” He looked down at the floor. “I wish I had that chance. My dad died five years ago. Go make up for lost time with yours.”

Before I could say anything, he gently nudged me in Daddy’s direction and picked up his things to leave.

“Any time you want to sit and talk with him, I’m sure he’d be happy to,” I called after him.

He just turned and smiled at me, one friend to another.

Originally published by Analog magazine, November 2015.

Surrounded by foes, Zoe raised her weapon on high, bringing it crashing down, slaughtering a dozen enemies in one blow.

No, Zoe Rhodes was not a killer robot with concussion hammer fists, or a Mayan warrior with spear and atlatl.

She was a fifth generation Australian sweet corn farmer, with farmer’s tan to prove it. Her weapon was a square-headed shovel. And her quarry was the riot of ants, swarming and pooling at her feet.

“Bloody stinkin’ ants!” she screamed.

Her voice boomed over the rows of corn. Hers was a modest but smooth-running factory farm. Computers monitored the phosphate and saline. GPS helped plot efficient paths for harvesting. Her corn was healthy, the leaftips green, the silks dry and brown.

And into her orderly, pastoral domain trampled multi-legged chaos.

Ants!

Zoe stood between the stalks, feet shoulder-width apart. She inhaled deeply, clenching the shovel’s D-handle. Then she slammed down the blade, letting out another war cry.

“Not! On! My! Farm!”

Her strike left a square dent in the soil, studded with a dozen dead ants.

Victory!

She was grinning like a shot fox, but only for a moment. Like water re-filling a footprint on the beach, ants flowed back into the shovel print.

The ants carried on their business, ignoring the crushed bodies of compatriots, ignoring the killing thing falling from the sky, ignoring Zoe’s war cries.

She cursed, picked up her sore ego, and slammed the shovel down again and again, crushing dozens and dozens more.

“You can’t kill them all!” a voice called from across the field. “At least, not like that!”

Two figures were approaching, a medium-sized man and a large, tall woman.

The oddest thing about them was their footgear. Zoe had tucked her jeans into her socks, but she was covered with ants. These two wore boots like white Santa Claus boots, topped with a thick fur cuff. The ants couldn’t make it north of the fur. So they walked without swatting themselves.

Clearly, they knew what they were doing.

The man held out his hand. “Hey there, I’m Dr. Todd McDaniels, myrmecologist.”

“G’day, mate,” Zoe said, shaking his hand with a very strong grip. “Welcome to Oz. You’re that ant scientist they sent from America?”

“Yup,” Todd said. “And this is Shyla Lethbridge, an entomology grad student at Adelaide.”

“You can call me ‘Shorty,’” the tall girl said, without a hint of irony.

“G’day.”

“G’day.”

“I’ve traveled all around the world fighting ants,” Todd said, mighty chuffed with himself. “From Lebanon to the Euphrates to the setting of the sun…And I was just in Mexico City. Really crowded subways, everything and everyone covered with ants.”

“So what did you do?” Zoe asked.

“Oh, we got them with a designer myrmicide,” Todd said. “A phenylpyrazole derivative, laced with—-”

“That won’t work here!” Zoe protested. “This is a farm, mate! No unauthorized pesticides!”

“So for you,” Todd said, “I’ve got something special. No insecticides. No residues.”

“Right-oh!” Zoe said. “Then let’s get crackin’!”

“In a moment!” Todd bent down. “First, study the enemy…” From his jacket, he pulled a small clear plastic vial with a built-in mag lens.

He caught an ant scout and dissected her with his mind. Reddish head and thorax. Black gaster, with flashes of purple and green. Only one petiole segment in front of the abdomen, which terminated in a slit without a stinger. His mind flipped through the catalog of eleven thousand known ant species. The shapes of the eyes and mouthparts confirmed his analysis.

After only ten seconds, he had completed the biologist’s most foundational but most complex task: species identification.

Proudly, he announced, “This is a subspecies of Iridomyrmex purpureus. ”

Shorty and Zoe shrugged.

“Common meat ants.”

A strange expression passed over Zoe’s face, which Todd read as a mix of relief and disappointment.

The disappointment, Todd figured, was that they would not be defeating a more deadly foe. Australians, he had discovered, had a strange pride in surviving in a land where everything was trying to kill you—from crocodiles to snakes to giant spiders.

These weren’t fire ants, or jack jumpers, which leap from the ground to bite you in the backside. No, just common ants. Yes, they would beat them. But where was the glory in that?

“You know, I’ve been killing ants all day.”

Todd and Shorty shook their heads.

“An ant hill is like an iceberg,” Shorty said. “Most of it’s underneath, where it can’t be seen. A queen might pump out a hundred eggs a day. And a colony might have half a dozen queens.”

Todd added, “No matter how many you kill, they’ll just make more ants.”

Todd and Shorty nodded at each other.

“Then let’s get started!”

In the verge, the grass strip between road and field, Todd picked an ant hill for the first test. This subspecies made a cone-shaped mound, about a foot wide and half a foot wide. It was reinforced with mud made of dirt and ant spit, hardened in the sun. The area immediately around it was cleared. Ants had killed the grass by injecting formic acid, then chopped up the bits and carried them away.

Todd re-parked the truck, which Shorty called a ute, closer to the mound. Together, they unloaded a generator, a hot water tank, and several aluminum lances, each about five feet long.

“We’ll be killing the ants with boiling hot water.” Todd handed Zoe a stopwatch. “This is very important. When I say so, count off, every ten, fifteen seconds. What we’re gonna do, we have to do within a minute, or we fail.”