by Joe Ollinger
Music plays for a few seconds before someone picks up.
“Agent Dare,” says Kearns, “I’m pleased you called. It would be great to get something further from you for my report—”
“I need to see you right away,” I cut him off, wondering if he really thought I changed my mind about helping him for no reason.
“Sure,” he answers, “I can have my secretary set it up.”
He still doesn’t get it, and I have to restrain myself from getting mad at him. “I need your help with an investigation.” Hoping he’ll get the hint, I add, “It’s relevant to your work, as well.”
“Oh,” he says, pausing like he’s wondering what I’ve got. “Come to my office. I’ll meet you in the lobby in thirty minutes.”
The Commerce Board building is one of the oldest and most eye-catching structures on the planet. Right in the center of the government district in downtown Oasis City, its curved outer walls of silvery metal are polished to a mirror finish, making it a beacon of reflected sun orange during the day, a multicolored pendant at night. It was built during Brink’s big boom period, around eighty years ago, when this was the edge of the frontier and ships pushing farther out desperately needed heavy metals and food and service, back when the Board had some trade leverage on the governments of other worlds, before the calcium supply got choked up.
The building hasn’t changed, but its surroundings have. I’ve heard old folks say that before the skyscrapers went up around it, you literally couldn’t look at the Commerce Board building in midday because it bounced back too much of the harsh light of our sun. Whether or not that’s true, it’s mostly hidden in shadow now, tucked between taller, more modern, more utilitarian buildings. And just as the surroundings have changed, so has the Commerce Board’s perceived role. People used to look to it as a protector, an advocate for prosperity. But at some point, for reasons no one quite agrees on, the Board lost some of its grip, and the deals it brokered grew less and less favorable. As a result, public opinion about it has ebbed to a grudging acknowledgment that we still need the Board, if only because no one has figured out a better way and for fear of the catastrophic things that might happen without it.
If you ask me, which no one ever does, the privileged bureaucrats on the Board are an easy scapegoat, but our problems are not all their fault. Each year the calcium quota goes up—it’s the per capita quota that goes down. It’s a population problem, and a problem inherent in settling a planet with freakishly low supplies of a vital mineral.
I pull into the auto-valet and surrender control of my ride, and as it cruises off to park itself in the underground racks, I walk to the building’s front entrance, through the chambered airlock-style doors, and into the lobby. I’ve been in this building once before, but the opulence is still a bit jarring. It’s a huge space with an incredibly high, soaring, curved ceiling, a floor of smooth metal tile, and several triangular columns of embossed metal stretching between the two. High on the wall above the crescent-shaped reception desk are the seal of the world government of Brink and the Commerce Board logo. The first is comprised of an image of our planet lined at the top by a rising sun, which also outlines our two moons. The other is an outline of the Commerce Board building itself, overlaid abstractly on a stylized hand reaching upward. The flags of the foreign governments recognized by our world hang in an array below these logos, lower and smaller than Brink’s own flag of twin off-white moons rising over a curved horizon of orange into a sky of red.
I pause for a second, lost in the vast lobby as men and women in suits pass by in a hurry, half of them talking loudly into phones or earpieces. It’s so strikingly different in here than it is outside, one has to wonder if these people have lost touch.
“Agent Dare!”
I turn to see Brady Kearns walking briskly toward me from one of the banks of elevators. His brown hair is neatly parted, and he’s wearing a crisply pressed suit with a subtle checkered pattern, a style supposedly in fashion on Earth right now, or at least as of a year and a half ago when the comm signals coming through the relays were sent. The auditor smiles politely as he approaches, extending a hand in greeting. As I shake his hand, I can’t help but be distracted for a second by the whiteness of his teeth.
“What can I do for you, Agent?”
He’s a little too friendly, in a weirdly distant way that makes me distrust him. Nonetheless I answer, “I think I may have stumbled on a big source of attrition.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“I will, but this is not a something for nothing situation, Kearns. I help you with your investigation, you help me with mine.”
He frowns. “Withholding information from an auditor is a crime, Agent.”
“Yeah, I don’t have any information for you anyway. Nothing to withhold.” I turn around and walk away, bluffing as best I can. “Goodbye, Mr. Kearns.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait.” He scurries up beside me, and I stop with fake reluctance. “You didn’t tell me what kind of help you need.”
“You didn’t ask.”
I take another step toward the exit, but he slips ahead, cutting me off. “I’m asking now. Where is this leak you may or may not have a lead on?”
I hold back a smile. “SCAPE.”
6
The Shipping Consortium for Aerospace and Planetary Exploration was established on Earth more than two hundred years ago as a joint venture between six major multinational corporations. Over time it grew into an empire occupying more than half of the market in interstellar space travel, shipping, manufacturing, logistics, housing, support, and security. It operates outside the scope of any one government and fields its own military forces. It owns a third of the ships that pass through this system, and it built half of the other two thirds. It owns the Orbital, the space station circling Brink that acts as a waypoint to stellar and interstellar travel. And, of course, it created chalk weevils.
The company has an entire wing at the spaceport, a compound of secured buildings, equipment, and personnel. Kearns pulled some strings with his former employer after I told him some minimal information about a possible weevil leak, and here we are. I pull up behind his car as he waits at the side entrance, a fortified gate in the high fence guarded by patrolling drones and security guards armed with automatic rifles and Space Port Security badges on the shoulders of their armored uniforms. As cars and bikes zip past on Safelydown Boulevard behind me, the guard on the outside of the fence approaches, and Kearns rolls down his window. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but the guard offers a small scanner, and Brady presses his thumb to it. The guard waits for the result to turn up on the heads-up display in his helmet, then waves Kearns forward. As the gate slides open for him, I ease ahead. The guard’s facemask is reflective and covers his whole face, but I can tell that he’s sizing me up by the subtle movements of his head as he approaches.
“You’re with Auditor Kearns?” The voice is tinny, unnaturally crisp coming through the little speaker piece on the helmet.
“That’s right.”
He stoops forward a little, as though trying to look me in the eye. “I’ll need an ID from you as well.”
I hesitate for a second, worried that Captain Knowles or IA will learn that I’ve been here. But I’ve got little choice. I’m not getting inside the fence without giving ID, so I press my thumb to the surface.
The guard waits a second, then steps back. “Thank you, Agent Dare.” He salutes and steps aside as the gate slides open, and I drive slowly into the compound, past the guards inside the gate, to Kearns’s car, which has stopped in front of a small but highly secured warehouse. I park beside it and get off, removing my driving goggles and hanging them on the handlebars of my ride as the noises of the spaceport mill together. The hazy red hues of the jagged horizon seem far off, pressed low beneath the pale blue of the early afternoon sky. As drones hover through the air in randomized patterns, SCAPE Security men stand at attention at the entrance to the building, arm
ed with auto-rifles and dressed in armor-padded matte-black uniforms, the yellow-and-white company logo emblazoned across their left arms. The launchpad is just a few hundred meters away down a broad pathway lined by blocky, unadorned two- and three-story buildings. Vehicles move to and from it, preparing it for the day’s next launch. Kearns ignores them as he approaches, squinting in the sun as several of the SCAPE Security men come marching up toward him.
“Mr. Kearns,” one of them says. I can’t tell which one is talking because they’re all wearing full-face tactical helmets and visors, and the voice is muffled and metallic coming through the speaker piece. “Right this way.”
The guards pull an about-face in unison, and Kearns and I follow them to the building’s front entrance. The door slides slowly upward, revealing that it’s about a third of a meter thick and built of reinforced, latticed metal. It opens to a single room with thick walls, also of reinforced metal. Inside is only a massive robotic cart—really more like a vault on wheels—and an old man in a suit, sitting in a relaxed pose on a foldable chair, drinking coffee from a little white mug. It takes my eyes a second to adjust against the harsh light of the sun hanging high above the building’s roof, but after a moment his features come into focus. Elderly but well-groomed, immaculately dressed in a pair of light gray check pattern slacks, a crisp French-cuffed shirt, and a dark gray vest with broken yellow pinstripes, he has a narrow face and features, alert blue eyes, and thin gray hair parted neatly to the side. His name is Aaron Greenman, and he is SCAPE’s Chairman for Operations on Brink. He is well known for his philanthropy, his involvement in politics, his patronage of the arts. But mostly, he is known for being the richest man on this planet.
“Good day,” he says, rising to his feet. “Please. Come in.”
Hesitantly I follow Kearns into the building, escorted by the heavily armed guards. The door rolls shut behind us. “Mr. Greenman,” I say, trying not to act too surprised, “I wasn’t expecting the chairman himself.”
Kearns steps forward and shakes the rich man’s hand as if they’ve met before. “Mr. Greenman, this is Agent Taryn Dare. She’s the one who alerted me to the . . . potential issues.”
The rich man holds his head high as he offers his hand, and I reluctantly shake it. He’s thin, and I can feel the bones in his fingers, but his grip is surprisingly strong. “I take your investigation seriously, so I thought I’d give you the tour of the intake facility myself.” He motions to his guards. “Gentlemen, if you would?”
One of them carries a small case forward, places it on the floor in front of us, and opens it. A screen extends upward from it and flattens out, then plays video images of automated machines working in a sterile lab. I recognize the footage as chalk weevil fabrication.
“As I am sure you’re aware,” says Greenman, “all chalk weevil eggs in existence originate at our fabrication facility on the Orbital. The fully automated process involves the synthesis of DNA strands, the implantation of those strands into microscopic Bon Fleur pygmy fly eggs, and the secure packaging of the final product.”
The video shows a brick of eggs—a fine, densely packed, dark powder—compacted by a machine and wrapped in airtight foil, then stamped with a hologram and barcode.
“The room,” Greenman continues, “is isolated, similar to the one we’re currently standing in. It is covered by surveillance cameras that run ceaselessly. Brady, I trust you’ve given her the footage we supplied you?”
As I glance around the room at the cameras bolted to the walls just above our heads, the auditor answers, “I got the files this morning and will pass them on.”
Was he really planning to? Would he have even mentioned those files if Greenman hadn’t mentioned them? He still might not send them. His motives are still uncertain to me, but I’m fairly sure that my investigation is not a high priority for him.
The video cuts to an image of an automated robotic arm loading the foil-wrapped bricks into a mechanized cart of the same type as the one sitting in the middle of this room as two security guards watch. Could one of those guards have gamed the system somehow, rigged the video, swapped out some of the bricks? It seems possible, at first, but if it was done on a large enough scale, Collections would notice weevils failing to hatch. And if one of the guards succeeded at stealing a brick or two, he would have to somehow get it off the Orbital and planetside to get any money for it. A system of defense satellites guards Brink from unauthorized landings just like any other settled world. Those two men are probably not the culprits.
On the screen, the loader finishes, and the cart automatically closes its own hatch, then rolls forward. The guards march along with it, keeping their distance, and the cart rolls up a ramp and into a small shuttle marked with the yellow-and-white SCAPE logo. The guards close the door.
“The bricks are then transported on automated carts over a distance of only twelve meters,” Greenman says as the video cuts away to an external image of a docking bay on the Orbital. It opens, and the unmanned shuttle launches from it. “They are loaded directly on a SCAPE shuttle, which comes straight to the landing pad you saw on your way in, which is incidentally one hundred fourteen meters away. We’d like it closer, but spaceport regulations wouldn’t allow it.”
The screen goes to security camera footage of guards escorting the cart as it unloads itself from the shuttle and rolls across the tarmac toward the storage cell we’re standing in. Heisting the product at this stage would be difficult. Probably impossible.
“The bricks are then moved here,” says Greenman, indicating the cart, “into this secured storage bay where they remain until they are taken to the Collections Agency Headquarters.”
“How do they get there?”
“I’m sure you’ve seen them deliver the bricks to the weevil locker at Collections,” Greenman answers.
“I have. But I don’t get to see the whole process.”
“Would you like to field this one, Brady?” Turning to Kearns, Greenman sips from his cup of coffee and smiles, a kindly smile that makes him seem like someone’s grandfather. Maybe he is, I don’t know. I also don’t know why he wants the auditor to answer the question. Each minute of this meeting reminds me that there’s a lot going on here, and too much I’m not aware of.
Kearns nods, humble and matter of fact. “The bricks are transported only once a month,” he says, “in these same carts, suspended on mass-sensitive alarm systems, in heavily guarded armored trucks. There’s a Commerce Board official on each one who oversees the feeding of the bricks into the weevil vault system.” He adds, “I did a study and audit of the system when I was at SCAPE. It earned me a promotion.”
Is Kearns still beholden to the Consortium somehow? I wonder if Greenman brought this up on purpose. What’s his game? Maybe I’m overthinking this, maybe he just figured Kearns had mentioned it. Why didn’t he mention it?
In any case, this last step in the process, the move from the spaceport to the Collections Agency, seems like the most likely spot for a leak. It’s a good place to start, at least.
Greenman motions to his guards, and they retract the video monitor back into its case, close it, and step aside. “The eggs never leave sight of a security camera,” Greenman says, “and the only time two or more security personnel aren’t watching them is in transit from the orbital to landing, where they’re sealed in cargo with no life support.” He takes the final sip from his little ceramic mug, then holds it aloofly out to his side, letting one of his bodyguards take it.
I look around the room again, trying to think like a criminal, searching in vain for a viable way to pilfer a brick of cultures here. Serious impediments bar the way at every stage. “This is, as you say, airtight,” I muse, walking slowly around the cart, scrutinizing it. I can feel Greenman watching me as Kearns stands silently near the door, hands in his pockets and a blank expression on his face. Finishing my circle of the cart no wiser than when I started, I cross my arms and face the Chairman again. “H
as there ever been an issue with someone illegally manufacturing weevil cultures?”
“We’re not aware of any.”
“You’d think someone would try.”
“For one thing,” Greenman responds, “the process is secret and would take a high level of scientific expertise to reverse engineer. And for another, a manufacturing operation would require a minimum initial investment of at least ten million currency units, and if you’ve got funds of that magnitude already, why bother?”
“What about one of your competitor companies?”
“Another company would have no legal method for importing the weevils to Brink. The Orbital and defense satellites would catch it.”
Of course they would. Brink has the most thorough clearinghouse system of any inhabited planet except for Earth. The idea of a system of space stations monitoring shipping and travel was originally created as a method for screening imported items to prevent unforeseen dangers like contagious diseases or invasive species, but in our system, it’s taken on a role more focused on customs enforcement. Our economy is reliant on shipping and transit, and so the Commerce Board helps foreign governments enforce their treaties, all of which put limits on the importation of calcium. The clearinghouse is one tool they use to that end. The people and technology hounding out those imports would catch unauthorized weevil cultures as well.
“You guys thought of everything, huh?”
“I certainly hope so,” the Chairman says.
“With due respect, Mr. Greenman, your cooperation goes a bit beyond what I expected.”
“That sounds like a compliment.”
“Maybe it is.” I can’t read Kearns, who is still standing silently by the door. “But maybe you’re trying a little too hard to show me your clean hands.”
Greenman smiles coolly. “Neither this company nor any of its officers would run that kind of risk for so little,” he says. “You know, I’d like you to see the scale on which SCAPE works. Why don’t you come out to my ranch tomorrow night? I’m throwing a little ‘thing’ for charity, and I’d be thrilled if you both could make it. Black tie, twenty-hundred. Guest list gratis for you two.” He motions toward the exit, and the two guards snap to attention, stepping past him as the door slides open, letting in the harsh orange-yellow light of day. Wondering which one of them controlled it, I briefly consider asking about access, but decide against it and instead walk out onto the pavement beside Kearns, where the dry breeze rolls across the tarmac.