10,000 Bones

by Joe Ollinger

  He nods, nonplussed. “Our studies account for all that, and a shortfall of six to ten percent is still unexplained.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what the big deal is. More calcium in the supply means inflation, right?”

  “That’s true. And too much too fast could be detrimental. But it is a big deal. A very big deal. I’m an economist by training, and trust me, a deflationary pressure of that size can wreak havoc on jobs and investment. Growth is not always good, but on a world that’s supposed to be expanding, money needs to move.”

  The experts seem to think he’s right, from what I’ve read and from what I’ve seen on the news, and I’m not educated well enough on the subject to argue with him about it. There’s no denying that millions of people—probably more than half the population—aren’t getting enough calcium. I see that every day. In the hypocalcemic bruises on poor kids, in the advertisements for dental shops trading bad teeth for fake ones, in the prosthetic limbs of workers who broke bones and decided to sell them rather than heal them. “I’m not an economist,” I tell the auditor, “I just find the lost dust that makes money.”

  “A charming turn of phrase.”

  I’m starting to dislike this guy even more than I expected. “Is there anything else? We done here?”

  He purses his lips, stifling annoyance. “Sure. You can go. I’ll follow up with my contact information. Thanks for your time.”

  I leave the room and go back downstairs to Dispatch. I press my thumb to the lock on the secure doors, and the doors slide open for me. Myra is still at her desk, absorbed in something that looks tedious.

  “Hey.”

  She looks up, startled. “Out already? How was it?”

  “Pointless. Got anything for me?”

  She glances at the little clock widget in the corner of her monitor. “What, like three hours until your shift is done?”

  “I need to make those units, Myra. You know I’m saving.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “Hey, you want to have a drink with me after work? I’m off at eighteen hundred.”

  She half smiles expectantly, and I can see a bit of nervousness in her eyes. Turning her down is not as awkward as it used to be. I’ve explained myself before. “Myra. Girl. You’ve got to quit it with this stuff. I don’t want to get tied down. And anyway, you know I’m not into—”

  “I know,” she cuts me off. “Trust me, I’ve given up hope. A couple coworkers can’t shoot the dust over a drink?”

  Changing the subject, I nod toward her terminal. “What’s up on Dispatch?”

  She navigates out of the spreadsheet she’s been poring over and opens up the menu of leads. Noticing something, she pauses. “There’s a potential big haul on here,” she says. “It might take some work and some time, but I know you want the units, so—”

  “What’s the job?”

  She flashes an ironic grin. “How many bones in the human body?”

  The old joke. The literal answer is 206, but here on Brink the question has a grim second answer. Ten currency units to a gram of calcium, a thousand grams to a kilo, about a kilo in a grown man’s body. Ten thousand bones. Human remains cases always dredge up things I hate dealing with, but I suppress my feelings about them, knowing that it will be a big payday if it plays out. “No shit?” I ask Myra. “We got a body?”

  “This looks more like five thousand, actually. It’s a little girl.”

  A chill runs down my spine. “Live or dead?”

  “A corpse.” As unaware of my sensitivity to human recovery cases as the rest of the Agency is, she corrects herself. “Likely corpse. Reported by a public school principal. Kid hasn’t shown up in a while, evidently. You want it?”

  I grimace. Even without my personal issues, nabbing this type of unit is never pleasant. The temptation to go to a black market buyer for that much currency is too great; people are known to kill for less. But even with the guy who called it in taking a piece of my cut, it’s too much CU to turn down. I need the money.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I want it.”

  “You sure? It checks enough boxes that I could hand it off to the heavies.”

  “Those bastards get all the big gun work.” It’s true. Anything with organized crime or potential armed resistance, they’re usually sent in. But I’ve decided I want this job. “Send me the coordinates.”

  “Done. You love me, or what?”

  I brush aside her jokey little flirt. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “We doing that drink?”

  “Tell you what, if I’m off by nineteen hundred, you’re on.”

  I can feel Myra’s eyes fixed on my ass again as I turn and walk out the door. Times like this I’m glad she’s into me.

  I rev my ride’s engine and drive out of the lot. Traffic courses through dust-swept streets beneath the tall, closely packed buildings of glass and metal and cement. I weave between the cars and trucks and quickbikes. My Combine M 130, a single-rider four-wheeler with a dynamically adjustable axle size, is the smallest vehicle issued to Collections Agents. I like the maneuverability. My job requires a lot of manual driving, both for pursuits and for investigations like this one, off the city road grid. Auto-drive won’t let you move dangerously enough to catch someone driving an illegal, hacked ride, and Brink’s satellite network is pretty useless for navigating a vehicle around rocks and plant life.

  As I leave Oasis City’s dense, commercial downtown, cruising into the sprawling northern outskirts of blocky, cheaply built factories and warehouses and processing centers, a shuttle rises over the rooftops, taking off from the spaceport on the far east side of town. It leaves a thin trail of steam behind, a hanging thread of white touched with gold from the yellow-red rays of the afternoon sun. I can never stop myself from watching when they launch. I long to be on one of those shuttles, out into orbit, onto one of the interstellar ships, and away from this world. As the glowing point disappears into the pale blue high above the red-hued horizon, I remind myself that the day when I can afford that is closer than ever. It’s why I work so hard.

  At the city border, the pavement ends unceremoniously, giving way to flat-graded, tight-packed dirt road, distinguishable from the rest of the dusty, orange-brown landscape only by the absence of larger-sized rocks. The driving gets bumpy. As I pass the last few rickety shacks at the far edges of Oasis City, the alkali dust whips across my goggles, stinging my nose as I accelerate out onto the dry, red plains. The sky is open in front of me now, a great blue expanse hemmed by the harsh, high, jagged mountains that surround the Oasis Basin. The colony started in this valley because it’s less prone to extreme weather than the rest of the planet, and it’s the only spot naturally flat enough to build on, having been leveled by the impact of a meteorite half a million years ago.

  The soil in the flats is dry and powdery, strewn with rocks ranging in size from pebbles to monolithic wind-worn boulders jutting up from the earth. Sparse vegetation whisks by, most of it thin and wiry, some of it heavy with leathery green and dark-red leaves, punctuated here and there with squat, thick blush cacti and their tangled, spiny limbs. In school they teach you that three colors of photosynthetic chemical evolved in this ecology and that most native plants carry the red type in addition to green chlorophyll, while the plants in the oceans generally carry green or blue or both.

  The structures of civilization fall behind me, and for several minutes I move at top speed over the flats until I spot the place up ahead in the wastelands, nestled among some low rocks at the foot of steep, silvery hills. A mine. Platinum, probably, or helium.

  I park my ride in front and step off, removing my goggles and hanging them on the handlebars as I survey the homestead. A midsized, mostly underground house, the roof poking just above the caked earth, a couple of beat-up vehicles parked in an open garage, and an underground warehouse of unknown size. No other buildings for kilometers around. The wind whistles across the rocks, but otherwise all is quiet. I bite my lip
at the thought of how ugly things could get here and consider calling in backup. This could be a job for the heavies. But splitting my commission up even further does not appeal to me, so I walk to the front door and ring the bell.

  My hand hovers over my sidearm as minutes pass and no one answers. I can probably break the door down if I have to, but deciding to check the other buildings first, I go to the entrance of the warehouse and try the controls. To my surprise, the door slides open. I dart aside instinctively, taking cover against the wall, but no attack comes.

  Hand on the grip of my pistol in its holster, I lean into the doorway, cautious. “Hello?” I call. “Is anyone there?”

  Nothing. Just the whistling of the plains winds.

  I draw my weapon and step into the building. A steep ramp takes me underground onto the floor of the warehouse. Maybe twenty meters square, walls lined with stacked platinum bricks. From the stockpile I guess that the proprietor is waiting for the exchange rate to improve, hoping he can get more calcium per kilo of metal. Good luck with that.

  I walk to the door on the far wall. Suspecting some kind of trap, I put my ear to it but hear no signs of life, so I try the controls and the door opens. I find myself facing dense machinery, floor-to-ceiling, packed tight, some of it running with a faint but steady hum. I hesitate to enter the maze of metal and piping, apprehensive of an ambush.

  “Hello?” I call. “Collections Agency.”

  No response.

  Screw it. Holding my sidearm upright, tight to my body, I slip into the room. The air is hot and still. Checking to my right and left at each turn, I make my way between the dinged-up metalworks. “Anyone there?” I repeat, my voice reverberating off the irregular surfaces.

  The clanking sound of metal striking metal disrupts the quiet. A dropped tool, or something hard hitting one of the machines. I pause. “I heard that.” I announce, adding, “You surprise me, I start shooting.”

  I move forward deliberately. As I climb over a stack of tubing, something flies out from behind one of the machines and clatters against some pipes. I raise my gun but take my finger off the trigger when I see that it’s just a wrench, tossed aside by someone near the back wall.

  “Stay where you are, lady,” a man shouts. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “I’m a Collections Agent, here on official business. Obstruction of this investigation is a felony. I have no intention of harming anyone, and I promise that it will be for your benefit to come out and talk with me.” Lines I’ve used often.

  “Nothing here to collect,” says the man.

  “Then you can come out and talk.” Receiving no response, I add, “I got a report of a possible death.”

  “Busy back here,” he says. “Come back later.”

  I’ve been working this job long enough to know that this guy has something to hide. I bite my lip, left with no choice but to do things the hard way.

  Alert, I snake through the tight walkway between the machines, sweat beading on my temples and running down my face. Stepping under a mess of cooling lattice, I find myself near the room’s rear wall, and I finally see the man, an old miner in shabby, worn-out clothing streaked with dirt and oil, kneeling next to a piece of equipment, fastening something to it with a power drill. He looks up at me, and I see fear in his eyes. His back is hunched, and on one of his forearms is the telltale purplish mottling of hypocalcemia. Not a case that will kill him soon, but it marks him with the look of poverty and desperation.

  “I told you, you got no business here,” he says, “I’ve got work to tending.”

  I raise my firearm emphatically. “Stand up, old man. You need to get in your head that this is serious.”

  Begrudgingly he climbs to his feet. “Got nothing to say.” His words are deliberate, spoken with a lisp because of his lack of teeth. He probably sold them, maybe couldn’t afford a fake set.

  “Plenty of platinum here, old man. Why not buy yourself some teeth?”

  “Waiting for my ship to come in.”

  The poor, optimistic bastard probably thinks the Commerce Board is going to negotiate higher import quotas and get the other colonies to loosen their restrictions on calcium exports to Brink. It’s all over the news cycle like it is every year around this time, but nothing ever really changes.

  “Your ship could be a long time coming.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m a Collections Agent, and this is a collection. Obstruction is a felony punishable by a fine you probably can’t afford to pay, or in the alternative, death, but I have no intention of harming you. I promise that it will be for your benefit to come out and talk.” I take a few steps toward him, sizing him up. He doesn’t look like he’s armed. “I need to search every building on the premises before I can leave.”

  “Collections?” he scoffs, going back to his work, “Look at my skin.”

  “What about it?”

  “Should be obvious I got nothing to collect.”

  “You’ve got a motive to withhold, is what you’ve got.”

  “Withhold what?”

  “There’s been a report of a possible death.”

  He stops working again but does not turn to face me. After a moment’s pause he says, “You can come back later. I’ve got work to tending.”

  “No. I can’t,” I reply, dropping the cordial tone. “Now.”

  I can hear the clinking and shuffling of the old man working, ignoring me. The narrow pathway between us is strewn with pipes and wires, and the old man might be baiting me into a trap. But I’ve got little choice. Sidearm held tight to my torso, I make my way toward him. When I get to the corner he’s working behind, I step out and train my gun on him.

  “You gonna shoot?” he taunts, refusing to budge, “Shoot.”

  I fire into the ceiling. The old man flinches and cowers as dust cascades down.

  “Watch it!” he snaps, “You could damage my equipment.”

  Maybe I’ve found a button to push, a motivation to make him cooperate. “I imagine repairs would set you back,” I chide. “Your family too, I bet, even with you gone.”

  He sneers, resenting me and what I represent. I stare back coldly, unable to judge him for hating me so. But he relents. “I take you through the house, you leave?” he asks, “No more questions?”

  “If I don’t find anything.” A lie. I can’t let this case drop without some explanation of where the body went. Not on something as big as a human cadaver.

  “Fine then,” he says, “Come along.”

  His knees crack, and he grimaces, clutching his lower back as he stands up. He navigates the blocky jungle of equipment with surprising ease. Keeping my weapon ready in case the old codger tries to spring anything on me, I struggle to follow behind him, bumping my head and elbows against the metalworks.

  He waits for me at the exit, then leads me across the warehouse floor and up the steep ramp to the surface. The rolling winds scathe me as I follow him out the door and across the baked alkali field. Arriving at the house, he holds the door open for me.

  “Thanks,” I say, trying to avoid antagonizing him despite the weapon in my hand, “but you first.”

  With a resentful shrug, he steps inside, and I stay behind him as he leads me into the two-room home. The ceilings are low, the walls claustrophobically tight. A thin layer of dust covers the floor and the worn, beat-up furniture.

  The old man hobbles into a corner in the kitchen area. “Nothing, see?”

  The place is a dusty mess, but nothing sticks out as criminal. Of course, if this man has sold that dead body to a black market buyer already, the only likely evidence would be calcium tabs, and those would not be sitting out in the open. I search through the refrigerator and kitchen drawers but find nothing suspicious. I check quickly under the shabby furniture, then go to the door to the other room.

  Cautiously I open it. I keep cover behind the wall as I sweep the room with my gun, but I see no threats.
Only three small beds, one against each wall, and a couple of dressers. I step into the room and pull the dresser drawers open, rifling through each. I should go slower, search more thoroughly, but I don’t like this place. My work takes me to the slums and run-down tenements and shanties of Oasis City literally every day, and this place is nowhere near the most frightening of them, but I’m on edge. I know it’s probably just my own hang-ups about this type of job, nagging at the frayed edges of my subconscious, but something feels wrong here.

  The drawers yield nothing but tattered clothing of various sizes. I leave them and turn to the beds, checking underneath each, and under the mattresses and sheets, leaving each undone as I move on to the next. As I pull aside the blankets on the last one, I gasp, stunned.

  On it lies a little girl.

  2

  Maybe six or seven years old, she’s curled up on her side in a fetal position, shivering and sweating, one of her legs twitching. Her brown hair is dull and thin, her cheeks sunken. She has no teeth, her bones are frail and brittle, and her ankles and forearms show the mottled purplish spots of a calcium deficiency. One of her knees is red and swollen, as though broken. She’s clearly alive but very sick.

  I holster my gun and touch her delicately on the shoulder, and she shudders and flails at me, a snap reflex. “Shh,” I whisper, trying to calm her even though my own heart is racing, “It’s all right.”

  But I’m sure it’s not all right. Something’s wrong with her, something more than hypocalcemia. I could call in an investigative medic, run the girl through some tests and maybe get her some help. She won’t get calcium for free, but if she’s suffering from some other medical condition, the crew might treat it. In the end, I doubt it will matter.

  I look around the room, not quite knowing what I’m looking for. As I kneel down and peer under the girl’s bed, however, I see something.

  Syringes.

  They’re empty, scattered about on the floor. I reach under the bed and pick one up, careful to avoid the needle. A single-dose unit, empty. Not government issued—black market stuff for sure. Thin, gold metallic stripes line it—probably a branding mark. Underground dealers sometimes use such insignia, usually to build market trust in their products’ authenticity and set themselves apart from the many sellers pushing fake or watered-down calcium gluconate or chloride.