I lean against it, and she looks up from her monitor to face me. “How’d it go?”
“I’m good.”
She nods, impressed. “Cleared for immediate duty?”
“Yep.”
“You always beat it, don’t you?”
I do have a stellar track record with shootings. I’ve probably pulled my gun more often than any other agent in this office, but I’ve never been suspended more than a week for it. “I only shoot when I’m forced to.”
“You only shoot scumbags.”
“There happens to be a lot of overlap, in terms of scumbags forcing me to shoot them.”
“Either way,” Myra says, “I’m glad it worked out.” She turns back to her monitor, clicking through alerts and assignments. “I’ve got a couple of little things for your afternoon, if you want them.”
I lean a little closer over the desk, keeping my voice quiet. “What I want is the lab report from yesterday.”
She tenses up visibly, seemingly aware that I shouldn’t be asking about it. “It’s not all in yet.”
“Do we know how that doctor got his hands on weevil cultures?”
“I can’t help you, Taryn.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think you should be asking about this stuff.”
“Did someone order you not to give me the info?”
She hesitates. “No.”
“Then why not?”
Evidently unable to come up with a convincing reason, she says, “Fine.” Working through the evidence database, she takes a minute or so to find what she’s looking for. “Let’s see… It says here the medical evidence was destroyed to prevent the compromise of restricted materials… That’s the eggs… Internal Affairs is checking for leaks here in the agency… That’s about it.”
Only the two main Collections Agency Offices—this one, and Drillville, thousands of miles away—have access to chalk weevil cultures. So the leak must be a Collections employee or someone with the manufacturer, an interstellar mega-conglomerate called the Shipping Consortium for Astronautics and Planetary Exploration, or SCAPE for short. Evidently IA is looking for leaks within the Agency, which is to be expected, but I was hoping for specifics on whatever outside investigation they’re doing. “No notes about SCAPE?”
Myra shrugs. “I doubt they would let an employee walk out the door with their product.”
“Not like the Agency would be okay with it, either.”
Myra bites her lip, as though she didn’t realize that Collections is the most likely alternative answer. “True.”
“Can you get me any dirt on the doctor? Financial records, rap sheets, anything. On the victims, too.”
She clicks through again and shakes her head. “I’ll have most of it for you tonight. The IA report will be done in a day or two.”
I hate waiting, but I guess I can live with a couple of days. Hopefully the money will lead me to the leak. Lost in thought, I turn to leave, but then I realize I’m being rude and ungrateful and stop myself. “Hey, Myra,” I say. “I’m sorry about last night. It was a rough day.”
She chuckles it off with a wave of her hand, trying to act cool. “Whatever,” she says, “I get it. But you’re buying next time.”
I flash her a grin. “Sounds fair.”
As I turn to leave again, she stops me. “Don’t you need an assignment?”
“Not today,” I answer, “I want to do some poking around.”
I walk away, brushing past a few sweaty agents coming in from the field as I step through the sliding metal doors. It’s a warm day, and the air is still. Walking out into the lot, I pull out my phone and dial. I don’t have a lot of leads on the stolen weevils, but it occurs to me that I’ve recently met someone who might.
“Commerce Board,” answers a female voice. “Auditor’s office.”
I didn’t expect to get a secretary. “Brady Kearns, please.”
“Let me see if Mr. Kearns is available—”
“My name is Taryn Dare, I’m a Collections Agent. Tell him it’s urgent.”
“Please hold.”
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.