by Joe Ollinger
Deep breaths, in and out. Slowly I open my eyes, squinting against the dry breeze. When I feel stable enough, I pull out my phone and dial Dispatch.
“Tar?” Myra’s voice, scratchy from the jammer’s interference. “I was about twenty seconds from sending in the heavies.”
“Myra, I—”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” It feels like a lie. “You hear back from that medical team?”
A pause on the other end, then, “They’re still working.”
I close my eyes, fearful for the little girl from the mine. “Keep me updated.”
“What’s your status?”
“All clear. I need a forensics team and a truck.”
“A truck? What have you got?”
“Corpses. Six. Human.”
“Six stiffs? Damn, what happened out there?”
“It’s bad, Myra.” I turn away from the wind, which is getting cold as dusk sweeps in across the mountains. “Just . . . just send the truck.”
“Got it. Hold tight for the forensics team.” Before I clear the call, she asks, “Hey, you want to get that drink? Sounds like you need it.”
It’s not what I want to be thinking about right now, but I don’t have the energy to blow her off. “Sure,” I answer, “I could probably use one. I’ll call you when forensics lets me leave. See you, Myra.”
I clear the call and put my phone away, shielding my eyes from a gust of wind as a rumble rolls through the air. In the spaceport, behind the high fence and across the tarmac, plumes of white cloud burst forth from beneath a launching shuttle. The reaction drive burns hot, a gleaming bright shining blade of fire piercing the plume of steam billowing out over the launchpad. The exhaust narrows to a white wisp behind the ship as it crawls upward, ripping itself free from the heavy bonds of this world’s gravity, hurtling itself toward the sky.
Even hundreds of meters away, I can feel the radiated warmth from the engine; I can smell the too-clean tinge of ozone mixed with water vapor. I have never seen a launch from so close, and I know that when this day is over, I will be a few thousand bones closer to buying my way to some better world, some place not so brutal.
But somehow that dream has never felt further away.
3
The Jupitero is a little bar on the third floor of an office building in the commercial part of Oasis City, between the spaceport and downtown. It’s one of those neo-escapist places that were in vogue a few years back, windowless, with minimalist, translucent furniture and no light fixtures. The floors and ceilings and walls are all big video screens, displaying images taken from the upper atmosphere of some gas giant, attempting to create the effect that the furniture, bar, and patrons of the place are floating in thick channels of swirling yellow and red. The monitors join seamlessly, and the images never flicker or loop, but the illusion is disrupted by the fact that everything hangs on the same level. Things don’t float like that, and it looks weird to the eye. Maybe the designer should have raised or lowered parts of the floor.
It may not be the most elegant setting, but I admit it’s got a calming effect. Sipping my drink at a quiet table in the corner of the mostly empty bar, the things I did and saw today finally feel like they happened in the past. Recent, but not immediate, not imminently threatening.
Myra comes over, carrying a martini, and sits down across from me. Unlike me, she changed out of her work clothes before she came here, and she looks nice in a plaid skirt and sleeveless top that shows off her tanned, fit arms and the matching 22nd-century-inspired geometric tattoos on her biceps. Her black hair is up in a curled braid, and I think she’s wearing more makeup than usual. I hope she doesn’t think this is a date.
“This place is laid back,” I say, making conversation. “A little cheesy, but I’m into it.”
“Yeah, it’s my go-to,” she responds, cheery. “They make a pretty authentic martini.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve had it.” She holds up her glass. “I’m drinking one right now.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” Like most living human beings, Myra’s never been to Earth. The recipe for combining gin and vermouth and olives hasn’t changed in the decades since humankind began interstellar colonization, but soil, sun, water, air, and ecology vary greatly from planet to planet, and without tasting the original, how can one really know if juniper and star anise and grapes grown in hydroponics here on Brink taste “right?”
Myra rolls her eyes. “People who have had the real thing say this is close.”
“Hey, as long as it tastes good to you.”
“And it gets you drunk.”
I raise my glass to that. “Agreed.”
We sip our beverages for a quiet moment, and Myra smiles. “You look good, Tar.”
“Please,” I scoff, “I look like someone just dragged me across the desert.”
“Yeah, hot as hell.”
I don’t have the energy for this. “Myra, this is not a—”
“I know. I can’t tell you that you look good?”
“I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
The silence is awkward now. The events of the day rise again to the surface of my mind, pulling me back to that world of hopelessness and misery. This world. A world I will leave as soon as I can afford to.
“Hey,” Myra says, snapping me out of it, “you all right?”
“Yeah.” I try to put on a smile. “Fine.”
Her brow furrows with concern. “What happened out there, Taryn?”
I shrug flippantly. “I’ll de-brief with the Captain tomorrow. You can read the file, if you want.”
“Come on. Seven stiffs in two locations, gotta be a hell of a story. You know if one of the heavies pulled that, he’d be in here bragging loud about it.”
“That’s true.” I can’t help but chuckle before I let out a sigh, giving in. Maybe telling the story will be cathartic or something. “I go into the house, and I find that little girl. She looked bad. Pale, shivering, her breath wheezy. Before I could even get a word out of her, her grandfather came in, attacked me. I had to kill him. Shot him right in front of her. The girl had some black-market calcium, said she got it from a doctor near the spaceport. Turns out the doctor was running some kind of black-market buy or sell operation. His assistant pulled a rifle. I shot him dead. The doctor tried to bribe me, but it ended up in a confrontation, and I shot him down, too.” I take a deep breath, remembering that bare, nightmarish glimpse inside the body bag, feeling the darkness welling up inside me. All this reminds me of how my dad died, and that’s a story I’ve kept hidden all my life. A story no one at the Agency can ever know. “It’s so, so fucked, Myra. I think this sick bastard was distributing tainted calcium syringes and bagging the bodies.”
“Tainted with what?”
She searches for eye contact, but I avoid it. “Can’t say for sure.”
“The way you said that makes me think you have a guess.”
I relent. “Chalk weevil eggs.”
She starts to say something but stops as the shock of my answer sets in. “What?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How do you know?”
“I . . . ” I’ve been called a tough bitch, and I’ve been called heartless, and I’m sure there’s some truth to both of those characterizations, but thinking back to what I saw today makes my stomach clamp up. “I opened one of the body bags.”
Myra deflates, her jaw slack, her eyes wide. “Jesus, Tar. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “We’ll see what the doctors say.”
Myra’s shock and horror give way to curiosity. “How could it have happened?”
“Who knows?” I don’t. To say that weevil cultures are hard to come by would be an extreme understatement. They are tightly controlled and secured, and they cannot be bred without expensive, specialized machinery. “I intend to follow up on it.
”
Myra nods, and as we sit in silence for a few minutes, I stare into my drink, wondering if the vodka on Farraway or Earth or Ryland tastes the same. Sometimes I see imported food or drink products from those worlds for sale—a liter of real bourbon from Kentucky for a small fortune, a bottle of real Bordeaux for a large one. I admit they pique my curiosity sometimes, tempting me with the unattainable excess of luxury, or maybe by the allure of leaving Brink. But the prices are always exorbitant, and I’ll never save enough to pay the rising cost of an interstellar ticket if I spend my money on frivolous things like that.
Sensing my descent into brooding, Myra speaks up. “Cheer up, Tar. You pulled in what, four thousand bones today?”
“We’ll see when it’s weighed.”
“A little bit closer to your dream.”
Myra likes me, in more ways than one, and I know that she doesn’t want me to leave. It’s hard not to hurt her feelings about it. “Prices on passage off Brink go up every day.”
“How close are you?”
“About two years’ pay after today’s haul. One year if it’s a good year.”
“You could retire in ten years at the rate you’re saving. Who knows what Brink will be like then?”
“Who knows what Ryland or Mars or Earth will be like, either?”
“Exactly.” She adds, “Millions on Earth would kill to be here now.”
I’ve heard the argument before, and it’s true. Earth is overcrowded, underfed, and constantly plagued with warfare. The irony is that no one actually suffering from those problems can afford to leave. Just like here. “Isn’t that funny?” I say, “Our grandparents were all millionaires, and three or four generations later we’re killing each other over little bits of calcium.”
“My grandpa used to describe how crowded Earth is.”
“My mom never talked about it.”
Brink is a relatively young colony, and so nearly everyone here has a parent or grandparent from off-world. All of them were settlers looking to make their mark on a new world, and all of them had at least enough money to pay for the flight. Myra’s grandparents came from Earth itself, as did my mother. And father.
“The way he used to sit and just look at the open desert,” Myra remembers, “it made me think that maybe we really are closer to free. You know?”
“Maybe we are. We’re not under constant surveillance, there’s no licensing board for reproduction, and we’ve still got a lot of open land. The planet’s less seismic than others, and the weather’s pretty mild. But there’s a price. Things are desperate here. We both know it.”
“You and I are doing fine.”
Not in a mood to argue anymore, I down the rest of my drink and stand up, pulling on my jacket. “I want to go check on that little girl.” I pull a couple of cash tabs out of my pocket and place them on the table. “Thanks for the drink, Myra. Sorry I’m not better company.”
The little girl from the mine was taken to Bray Hospital, a care center on the poorer side of the city with a reputation for being overcrowded and understaffed. The desert night air is cold by the time I get there, and the sky overhead is a dark purple polluted with the lights of Oasis City. There’s no auto-valet at the underfunded facility, so I find a space in the packed parking structure, get off my ride, and walk between the old, beat-up vehicles of varying sizes and makes until I reach the entrance.
The scratched and scuffed glass doors open into a huge waiting area packed wall-to-wall with hundreds of the city’s poor and miserable, the dirty and desperate. Around three quarters of them are clearly hypocalcemic. They must know by now that no one gets free calcium, but I doubt they expect it anyway—they’re here for painkillers. What a waste of resources. The smell is offensive, and I try not to breathe too deep as I make my way to the reception desk, where a tired, irritated clerk greets me by looking up from her terminal.
“I’m looking for a patient who was brought into emergency by Collections earlier today.”
Seeing my blue-and-blacks, she doesn’t bother asking for ID. “Name?”
“Jessi Rodgers.”
She searches through her terminal, then without looking up again tells me, “She’s in room 537A. Elevators are down the hall.”
“Thanks.”
I push past the huddling, desperate, probably dying people calling for attention from the staff and go down the hallway to the row of elevators. I push the up button, and as I wait, a team of nurses rushes by, shouting and pushing a bed with a bleeding, unconscious patient on it. Probably an armed robbery gone bad.
The doors open, and I board the elevator by myself and take it to floor five. Gurneys line the walls, patients on nearly all of them, many moaning or complaining or cursing at no one in particular, ignored by the nurses and the occasional doctor rushing about their work. I walk until I find room 537A, which is little more than a big, open floor with maybe two dozen patients lying in care beds divided by rolling curtains. Before I can start searching for Jessi Rodgers among them, I’m approached by a doctor with thin, wavy hair and dark skin.
“Excuse me,” he says, “I don’t suppose you’re looking for a patient that was brought in by Collections earlier today?”
“I am,” I answer, hoping he’s not going to tell me she’s dead already. “Is she here?”
“Yes, she is. I’m Doctor Araya. I’m on call from Brink Planetary.”
“BPU?” Hearing that he’s from the largest and most prestigious academic institution on the planet is a bit of a relief. Jessi Rodgers must be getting good care for some reason. “Can I ask why?”
“This is the first documented case of chalk weevil parasitism in a living human patient. It’s of significant academic value.” As though aware that he’s coming off detached and cold, he inquires in a concerned whisper, “Are you the one who brought the girl in?”
“I’m the one that found her.” Anxious, I ask, “Can I see her?”
“Of course. But I think she’s sleeping.”
The doctor leads me between the curtains, and through the gaps in the fabric I catch glimpses of other patients. Some look fine but are hooked up to IVs, some look like they’re about to die. One is in traction, casts on both legs. The poor bastard will probably never recover; if he had that kind of calcium to his name he’d be in a better hospital. The doctor finally gets to a bed near the far end of the room where he draws the frayed beige curtain aside just slightly. Lying there is the girl from the mine, IVs in her arm. Her skin is pale, and her breath is weak and shallow as she sleeps, strangely peaceful in spite of her frailty. She does not wake, and I nod to the doctor, signaling that I’d like to let her rest. He draws the curtain closed again and walks with me out of the room.
When I’m sure we’re out of earshot, I ask, “How is she doing?” I truly don’t know why I care. I make a point not to get invested in the lives of people I encounter during my work. That well is deep enough to swallow up all my time and money if I let sympathy get hold of me, deep enough to entangle me in my own psychological scars.
“She’s on antiparasitics,” says the doctor. “So far that has been successful, but she’s suffered some serious internal damage already. I’m of the opinion that she needs a corrective lung surgery.”
“And she can’t afford it.”
The doctor frowns. “The government will do a forced sale of her family’s assets, but that’s not expected to cover the cost.”
“She gonna live?”
He hesitates. “Yes, though I don’t know for how long. She’s going to have some breathing problems.”
“She’ll go up for adoption,” I reason, half-heartedly, “or become a ward of the state. It’ll be taken care of.”
Apparently sensing that I don’t really want to get involved, the doctor backs away a step. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought perhaps you wanted to help. Thank you for your concern.”
He turns and walks off before I can respond to this little half
insult, and I’m left with nothing to say and no one to say it to. The noise of the hospital drones on around me, the moans and rasps of patients mixing with the shouts and chatter of the tired, callous staff and the hum and drone of aging medical equipment. I shouldn’t have come here. There’s a sore spot in me that I refused to admit I had, and now that I’ve poked at it, it won’t be easy to forget.
4
The quiet of my apartment is a welcome relief. Located on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise just outside downtown, it’s isolated from the dirtiness and noise outside. I always keep the window darkened to shut out the not-so-aesthetically pleasing view, which is comprised almost entirely of the dust-battered side of another high-rise. My unit is tiny and cramped and furnished only with a combo bed and a kitchen block that doubles as a table, but it feels safe and predictable, and it’s the only home I’ll know until I leave this world. The lights come on at half brightness as I enter. The audio system begins playing instrumental music at low volume. The big monitor on the wall comes on, displaying the time, a ticker of my unread messages, a reminder to take my calcium dosage for the month, and recent prices on interstellar tickets compared with the amount in my bank account. I programmed it to do that when I come in, unless I’m with someone, which I never am. Every day I get closer, and the reminder serves as a motivation to live cheaply and work hard. The most affordable flight off-world—a coach-class, no freight ticket to Penitance—is running fifty-two thousand seven hundred currency units right now, while my savings account at SCAPE Finance and Credit currently contains forty-one thousand one hundred four point one four units.
Trying to occupy myself with my simple nighttime rituals, I strip, toss my uniform in the auto-washer, and step into the shower chamber. Splashing a burst just long enough to cover me, I scrub down with soap and a cloth and then turn the faucet back on and quickly finish. Water is pricey these days, and though I can’t help but indulge in the luxury of keeping clean on a daily basis, I’ve mastered the art of minimizing my bathing time. Stepping out, I dry myself off, put my hair up, and fall into bed, staring up at the smooth white lining of the ceiling. The thoughts, the bad thoughts, the memories come creeping in again, invading the edges of my mind.