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, armed 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.”