Myra places my safebox upside down into the snap-tight mechanism at the top of the chamber, then slides the lid open. The chicken bones spill out, joining the rest of the detritus inside. Myra taps the top of the box, making sure it’s empty, then slides the mechanism closed, removes the box, and hands it back to me.
“Dare, Taryn Corrine. Four point one four kilograms added,” the voice of the computer announces, “Add eggs, approve?”
“Approve,” Myra says, pressing her thumb to the locking interface scanner.
“Dare, Taryn Corrine. One-half milligram chalk weevil cultures. Dispensed by Ling, Myra Savoy.”
A powder of nearly microscopic eggs is dispensed through a tube in the chamber. It’s all carefully measured and highly secure, even though the bugs are all sterile and would therefore be of limited value on the black market.
I bend down to watch the adult weevils go about their work. Their compound eyes emotionless, they tirelessly gnaw through the materials I’ve recovered over the past few weeks. “Get it, little ones. Make me that money.”
“Satisfied?” Myra teases.
“Very.”
“You know, most Agents just trust that I’ll put their hauls in the right place. The locker’s completely covered with surveillance cameras.”
Of course it is. Locks, measuring systems, cameras—the security here is replete. There’s probably hundreds of kilograms of unrefined calcium in here at any given time, not to mention the weevils. It all adds up to millions of CU. “For some reason I like seeing it myself,” I answer. “So thanks for indulging me.”
Myra chuckles. “Done?”
“Yeah, done.”
Carrying my safebox under my arm, I follow her to the door, and it slides open for us. The computer notes our exit. “Dare, Taryn Corrine. Ling, Myra Savoy. Exiting.”
Myra strolls back toward her desk. “All right, Tar, let’s see what we’ve got for the rest of your afternoon.”
The big advantage of having a Dispatcher sweet on you is getting the first word about available leads, but sadly, I can’t take one just now.
“Actually,” I tell her, “I’ve got my meeting scheduled with that Commerce Board auditor.”
“The suit?” she asks. “We had a talk a couple days back. Actually more like an inquisition than a talk.”
I groan. “You saying my afternoon is shot?”
She tilts her head noncommittally. “He’s been grilling everybody with weevil locker access, but he hasn’t been taking too long with most of the field personnel, so hopefully you’ll be out of there quick.”
“That’s good to hear, I guess.”
“I’ll have something queued up for you in case you’ve got time left on your shift afterward.”
I flash her a grateful smile. “Thanks, Myra.”
She sits back down and does some work at her terminal. I catch her glancing at my ass as I exit, and she looks away, embarrassed, as the secure doors close behind me. I suppress a flattered smile as I continue through the hallways, passing some admin staff who work in the building. I take an elevator up to the offices and find the conference room the auditor has been using.
I knock on the door. It opens a second later, and a guy in a well-tailored gray suit and tie greets me. Mid-thirties, narrow chin, lean cheeks, sandy brown hair parted to the left, he looks more like a business executive than a bureaucrat. He checks his tablet, then gives me a diplomatic but slightly-too-broad smile and an enthusiastic handshake. The glimpse I catch of his teeth makes me wonder if they’re real. “Agent Dare? Brady Kearns.”
“Hi. Taryn’s fine.”
“Taryn, then.”
He shows me into the little office. A few screens are set up on the table in a haphazard array. “Please, have a seat,” he says. We both do, and he continues, “I’ll get right into it. As you may have been told, I’m an auditor for the Commerce Board, and I’ve recently been assigned to the general audit with the goal of explaining systemic shortfalls in currency supplies.” He pauses as though expecting me to have questions already.
“Sure. I get it. More comes in than goes out every year.” I shrug. They do this every year, and it never comes up with anything. “Attrition.”
“That’s right. I don’t think I need to explain why it’s a problem. The economy is bad, people are starving out there, dying of hypocalcemia. Currency shortfalls are a contributing factor.”
It’s true, of course. Earth and its older, wealthier colonies have Brink pinned in a corner with restrictive shipping quotas. When settlers landed here a hundred and six years ago, they found a world inexplicably missing certain elements from the periodic table, including one that happens to be vital to human life. Inflation and unstable economies were rampant on the older worlds during those early days of the colony, and so, because of calcium’s natural scarcity here and the need for a recycling and distribution system, Brink’s government declared it the official currency of the planet and established the Commerce Board to oversee its importation, conservation, and distribution. The twentieth element on the periodic table had all the characteristics of currency already: it was limited, durable, portable, divisible to the nanogram, completely uniform, and desired by every Brink citizen. People were already hoarding it. The Commerce Board’s decision to regulate and distribute the mineral in the form of cash chips just made the recycling process more efficient.
The Board negotiates import quotas and exchange rates with other colonized worlds, runs the deposit program for foods containing indigestible calcium, and oversees forced collections, which is what I do, fighting against black market forces that threaten to undermine the efficiency of the system. For a while, those measures were effective enough, and the Board brought enough calcium to Brink to sustain a boom period in which the planet served as a gateway to newer, more distant worlds. But over the past few decades, the supply has dwindled as a result of collusion between other governments, even as our population has continued to grow. Our planet still serves as a convenient waypoint for travel between the older planets and the frontier, and reliance on imported calcium keeps interstellar shipping costs low. It’s beneficial for multi-stellar business interests, beneficial for Earth and its governments, and maybe beneficial for humanity as a whole, but for us it means an unavoidable currency scarcity.
The auditor is staring at me blankly. “Tell me what I can do to help,” I tell him, trying to mask my impatience.
He nods, leaning forward. “Sure. What we’re looking for are holes in the system. Anything that could result in a leak of calcium. Could be big, or could be small things that add up. Can you think of anything like that?”
I’m not as stupid as he thinks I am, but it’s not worth my time to show him that. “No,” I answer simply, “not really. I’m a Collections Agent. All my work is pretty thoroughly accounted for.”
“The Commerce Board accounts thoroughly for everything it takes in, forced or not.”
“Right.”
He scribbles some notes on his tablet with an index finger. “Can you describe your work to me?”
“You really need me to?”
“Humor me.”
I fidget in my chair, anxious to get out of this pointless meeting. “Fine,” I answer, going into the little speech I’ve given before to travelers from other worlds who for whatever reason didn’t know how the system works. “When you buy anything with indigestible calcium in it—usually food with bones, that kind of thing—you pay a deposit to the Commerce Board. Most people take the return on deposit because it’s illegal to traffic calcium and because the Board can pay a competitive rate due to the efficiency of the weevil process. But some people don’t bother, or they think they can get more money on the black market, or they want to sell stolen food waste or chemical byproduct or even human remains, and so Collections Agents are responsible for going out and recovering the stuff so that we don’t lose currency to attrition.”