Joe Ollinger
FOR STELLAN
1
In the middle of a pursuit, it’s easy not to think about what I’m chasing. Remembering it, reminding myself how it all works and why, connecting all the dots that add up to a picture of a society that needs someone to do what I do—that’s the hard part. That comes later. Right now, I am focused. I need to be as inescapable as the harsh realities that put me here. I’ve followed the busboy since he left the restaurant, first from a distance on my quickbike, then another three blocks on foot, into this crumbling, stripped-bare tenement in the Dust Pit. He’s glanced back at me twice. He sees me, sees my blue-and-black Collections Agent uniform. I’m closing in on him as he enters the stairwell, and the tension is palpable in his stiff, quick pace, in the sweat stains on his white shirt, in how tightly he’s gripping the to-go bag he’s carrying. So far he’s been smart enough not to break into a run. I should have stopped him sooner, but I wanted to see where he was going. He’s gone far enough.
Peeking into the stairwell, I don’t see an ambush, just the busboy’s feet hitting the stairs fast and light. I bolt after him.
By the sixth floor I’m closing in. At the seventh, he throws open the door for the hallway. And then I’m on him.
I lean a shoulder in and hammer him into the wall. He deflates and falls in a crumple, but he’s still clutching the to-go bag, trying to keep it and its precious contents away from me as he struggles to squirm free. I hit him with a deliberate but hard right elbow to the nose. There’s a crack, and his nostrils are smeared with blood. The fight goes out of him. I whip a zip-cuff out of a pouch on my belt, slip one end over his wrist and the other over the door handle, and pull them tight.
Suddenly he’s not a fleeing criminal any longer, just another poor, malnourished kid who took a bad risk. Rising to my feet, I snatch the to-go bag away, open it up, and look inside. Just what I expected. The restaurant’s manager was right. The busboy was stealing.
Inside the bag are little gray bones. Probably from chickens, or maybe ducks.
Money.
The Brink Commerce Board’s Collections Agency is the governmental entity responsible for recycling calcium and putting it back into the currency supply. Trade and charity never got around to fixing this rock’s biggest problem, and over a hundred years after calcium was made Brink’s official currency, it is still the legal tender. Like any legal tender, it’s what makes the world go ’round.
I work for the Agency in Oasis City, the larger of the two main settlements on the planet. Eighty-five percent of the thirteen million people who call themselves Brinkers live here, packed densely around a rare and increasingly insufficient underground freshwater source.
A relatively young colony, Brink has been trying to reestablish some identity for the last few decades, since it’s no longer the far edge of the frontier. It has been almost two hundred years since the invention of faster-than-light travel, and in that time, humanity has established a permanent presence on twenty-five worlds. Of those, Brink is far from the easiest to live on. Its gravity is close to Earth-normal, its temperature is consistent in the equatorial zone, it is tectonically stable, and it doesn’t have the solar radiation problems some worlds have, but it’s short on water, short on benign flora and fauna, and fatally short on calcium. Now that it no longer benefits from the novelty of being at the edge of settled space, it’s like a “last chance for gas” station on one of Earth’s old, long highways—a staging area, a waypoint to more promising, more hospitable worlds, like Farraway and Resolve and the unexplored systems closer to the galactic core.
I don’t usually come in from the field until the end of my shift, but I’ve got an afternoon meeting scheduled, which is convenient because my recovery from the busboy was big enough that I don’t want to risk someone trying to steal the safebox off my quickbike.
The scanner recognizes me, and I step through the secure side doors into Dispatch. It’s not busy this time of day. Only a few Agents are here right now, and most of the Dispatch crew looks to be out to lunch.
Myra spots me, and I walk over to her and drop my safebox on her desk.
“Hey, Taryn.”
“How we doing, Myra?”
“Ehh, been worse.” She shrugs. She’s a sweet girl, a few years younger than me, short-haired and slim, ever-alert, and somehow still not cynical after a few years with the Agency. Maybe because she’s never worked the field. She lifts my safebox. “What we got here?”
“Meat remains,” I answer. “The usual.”
“Anyone put up a fight?”
I avoided pulling my gun so that I could avoid reporting the incident. The busboy—Ali Silva was his name—could be useful as an off-the-books informant. He could lead me to his buyer if I play it slow and let him off easy. So I don’t hesitate before I answer Myra, “Nah.”
“Want to watch me coffin it?”
“Always. Wouldn’t miss the chance to chat you up.” I flash a smile. Myra has had a bit of a crush on me since we met, and I admit I’ve played a bit flirty with her at times, even after I told her I’m not into other women. It’s nice to be reminded that I’m attractive. I’ve got a good tan on the face, but I don’t wear any makeup other than semi-permanent lip pigments, which are only slightly darker and glossier than my natural tone. I’m in great shape—hell, I should be, I’m on my feet all day—but I’m lean, only curvy in the hips. My Collections Agent uniform fits me snugly, and its armor padding is less than a centimeter thick, but its plain blue-and-black color is less than flattering, and my mid-length, dark brown hair is almost always a wind-blown mess.
“Don’t get a girl’s hopes up,” Myra jokes. She punches in some data at her terminal, then picks up my safebox. “Come on back.”
The few other Agents and Dispatchers ignore us as I follow her past the other desks to the thick metal door in the far wall. The weevil locker is the most secure spot in the building, lined in reinforced metal and smothered by security cameras to protect the valuable materials within. The auto-lock reads Myra’s ID, and she puts her thumb on the scanner. The door slides open.
An electronic voice announces us as we step through. “Ling, Myra Savoy. Dare, Taryn Corrine.”
The door snaps shut, and I breathe in the musty air of the weevil locker. It’s warm and heavy, regulated at a constant thirty-one Celsius and eighty percent humidity. The room is large but cramped, filled with floor-to-ceiling rows of deposit chambers. The ones near the entrance are the largest, about three meters by two, and they are all marked with a “Restricted Access” logo indicating that human remains are inside. Those recoveries are housed separately to respect the “dignity” of the bodies as they are broken down. A few of them look to be in use, as usual. The rest of the chambers, though, are a meter on each side, and are each labeled with the ID and image of a Collections Agent on a little electronic display. We make our way to one of them near the back of the locker, two up from the floor. Mine.
“Taryn Dare, badge number seventy-seven,” Myra says, “Here we are.” The locking interface reads her face and ID as she selects my chamber from the menu and presses her thumb to the scanner. A barely audible click issues as it unlocks.
She bends down and slides the chamber open, revealing the container within: clear walls, the top perforated with tiny air holes. Inside, hundreds of the little black insects called chalk weevils pick over the pile of refuse and garbage I’ve brought in over the past few weeks. Specks of white powder litter the chamber, the compacted calcium carbonate the weevils were engineered to extract from organic matter. Eventually they’ll eat through everything in the chamber with their incredibly powerful trifold jaws, leaving nothing but that white powder and their own little six-legged corpses. The calcium will be weighed and refined, and five percent will credit to my paycheck.