Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark (Analog, September-October 2020) has an overly long and discursive start that sees Luis watch a dove die while he waits outside Medellín airport in Columbia. The body of the dove is subsequently disposed of by a woman using nanotech.
The rest of the story suffers from the same long-windedness as it goes on to tell the story of Luis and his partner Elena’s attempt to stabilize a over-mined and potentially hazardous mountain (also using, I think, nanotech). However, there have been problems elsewhere in the world with this technology:
Luis took a second to process the metaphor.
He knew that among the Embera-Katio animalism connected three realms of existence, with serpents and other critters of the soil sometimes taking mythopoetic revenge upon mankind by dragging sinners to the lands below. Rarely, though, did others refer similarly to the Six-Cities incident: twelve days when hacked nanotech, the likes of which had been developed to process rare-earth metals with greater ease, devoured cities whole—people, pets, cars, buildings—while the rest of each affected country scrambled to contain the spread. Japan. Indonesia. Benin. Colombia. Madagascar. France. The UN Accord against private access to whole bodies of nanotech research had come swiftly, with only the U.S. and Bangladesh holding out in the initial rush of militarized search-and-seizure, at least until scares hit them in turn. (A prank, as it turned out, in the midwestern U.S.—but near enough the home of an online celebrity that the famed musician had rallied his fan base through social media: enough, for once, to turn the political tide.) p. 115
Luis later goes out to talk to a holdout on the mountain, an old man called Bidø. The man tells him about a piece of rogue nanotech that killed an ocelot, and he also says that he wants to die on the mountain.
There are other events that occur, and these include, variously: the discovery of the bones of a baby near one of the probe holes; continued funding problems for the project; the disappearance of a young worker and his girlfriend; the arrival of the Feds when illegal nanotech (or somesuch) is discovered on the mountain, etc. etc. Matters are eventually wrapped up (spoiler) when the couple are found on the mountain with Bidø, and we discover there is a family connection. The girl is pregnant, so Bidø finds a new lease of life and agrees to leave.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got some of this detail wrong (especially about whether Luis and Elena are using nanotech or another technology to stabilise the mountain) because the story, although well enough written on a sentence and paragraph level, just has too much ephemeral detail and no sense of tension or pacing—so it is very easy to become bored and tune out. And even when the story does come together at the end it seems to be as much a family soap opera as science fiction.
A short story buried in a very long novelette.
* (Mediocre). 14,800 words.