“Got it. Hold tight for the forensics team.” Before I clear the call, she asks, “Hey, you want to get that drink? Sounds like you need it.”
It’s not what I want to be thinking about right now, but I don’t have the energy to blow her off. “Sure,” I answer, “I could probably use one. I’ll call you when forensics lets me leave. See you, Myra.”
I clear the call and put my phone away, shielding my eyes from a gust of wind as a rumble rolls through the air. In the spaceport, behind the high fence and across the tarmac, plumes of white cloud burst forth from beneath a launching shuttle. The reaction drive burns hot, a gleaming bright shining blade of fire piercing the plume of steam billowing out over the launchpad. The exhaust narrows to a white wisp behind the ship as it crawls upward, ripping itself free from the heavy bonds of this world’s gravity, hurtling itself toward the sky.
Even hundreds of meters away, I can feel the radiated warmth from the engine; I can smell the too-clean tinge of ozone mixed with water vapor. I have never seen a launch from so close, and I know that when this day is over, I will be a few thousand bones closer to buying my way to some better world, some place not so brutal.
But somehow that dream has never felt further away.
3
The Jupitero is a little bar on the third floor of an office building in the commercial part of Oasis City, between the spaceport and downtown. It’s one of those neo-escapist places that were in vogue a few years back, windowless, with minimalist, translucent furniture and no light fixtures. The floors and ceilings and walls are all big video screens, displaying images taken from the upper atmosphere of some gas giant, attempting to create the effect that the furniture, bar, and patrons of the place are floating in thick channels of swirling yellow and red. The monitors join seamlessly, and the images never flicker or loop, but the illusion is disrupted by the fact that everything hangs on the same level. Things don’t float like that, and it looks weird to the eye. Maybe the designer should have raised or lowered parts of the floor.
It may not be the most elegant setting, but I admit it’s got a calming effect. Sipping my drink at a quiet table in the corner of the mostly empty bar, the things I did and saw today finally feel like they happened in the past. Recent, but not immediate, not imminently threatening.
Myra comes over, carrying a martini, and sits down across from me. Unlike me, she changed out of her work clothes before she came here, and she looks nice in a plaid skirt and sleeveless top that shows off her tanned, fit arms and the matching 22nd-century-inspired geometric tattoos on her biceps. Her black hair is up in a curled braid, and I think she’s wearing more makeup than usual. I hope she doesn’t think this is a date.
“This place is laid back,” I say, making conversation. “A little cheesy, but I’m into it.”
“Yeah, it’s my go-to,” she responds, cheery. “They make a pretty authentic martini.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve had it.” She holds up her glass. “I’m drinking one right now.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” Like most living human beings, Myra’s never been to Earth. The recipe for combining gin and vermouth and olives hasn’t changed in the decades since humankind began interstellar colonization, but soil, sun, water, air, and ecology vary greatly from planet to planet, and without tasting the original, how can one really know if juniper and star anise and grapes grown in hydroponics here on Brink taste “right?”
Myra rolls her eyes. “People who have had the real thing say this is close.”
“Hey, as long as it tastes good to you.”
“And it gets you drunk.”
I raise my glass to that. “Agreed.”
We sip our beverages for a quiet moment, and Myra smiles. “You look good, Tar.”
“Please,” I scoff, “I look like someone just dragged me across the desert.”
“Yeah, hot as hell.”
I don’t have the energy for this. “Myra, this is not a—”
“I know. I can’t tell you that you look good?”
“I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
The silence is awkward now. The events of the day rise again to the surface of my mind, pulling me back to that world of hopelessness and misery. This world. A world I will leave as soon as I can afford to.
“Hey,” Myra says, snapping me out of it, “you all right?”
“Yeah.” I try to put on a smile. “Fine.”
Her brow furrows with concern. “What happened out there, Taryn?”
I shrug flippantly. “I’ll de-brief with the Captain tomorrow. You can read the file, if you want.”
“Come on. Seven stiffs in two locations, gotta be a hell of a story. You know if one of the heavies pulled that, he’d be in here bragging loud about it.”
“That’s true.” I can’t help but chuckle before I let out a sigh, giving in. Maybe telling the story will be cathartic or something. “I go into the house, and I find that little girl. She looked bad. Pale, shivering, her breath wheezy. Before I could even get a word out of her, her grandfather came in, attacked me. I had to kill him. Shot him right in front of her. The girl had some black-market calcium, said she got it from a doctor near the spaceport. Turns out the doctor was running some kind of black-market buy or sell operation. His assistant pulled a rifle. I shot him dead. The doctor tried to bribe me, but it ended up in a confrontation, and I shot him down, too.” I take a deep breath, remembering that bare, nightmarish glimpse inside the body bag, feeling the darkness welling up inside me. All this reminds me of how my dad died, and that’s a story I’ve kept hidden all my life. A story no one at the Agency can ever know. “It’s so, so fucked, Myra. I think this sick bastard was distributing tainted calcium syringes and bagging the bodies.”
“Tainted with what?”
She searches for eye contact, but I avoid it. “Can’t say for sure.”
“The way you said that makes me think you have a guess.”
I relent. “Chalk weevil eggs.”
She starts to say something but stops as the shock of my answer sets in. “What?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How do you know?”
“I… ” I’ve been called a tough bitch, and I’ve been called heartless, and I’m sure there’s some truth to both of those characterizations, but thinking back to what I saw today makes my stomach clamp up. “I opened one of the body bags.”
Myra deflates, her jaw slack, her eyes wide. “Jesus, Tar. I’m… I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “We’ll see what the doctors say.”
Myra’s shock and horror give way to curiosity. “How could it have happened?”
“Who knows?” I don’t. To say that weevil cultures are hard to come by would be an extreme understatement. They are tightly controlled and secured, and they cannot be bred without expensive, specialized machinery. “I intend to follow up on it.”
Myra nods, and as we sit in silence for a few minutes, I stare into my drink, wondering if the vodka on Farraway or Earth or Ryland tastes the same. Sometimes I see imported food or drink products from those worlds for sale—a liter of real bourbon from Kentucky for a small fortune, a bottle of real Bordeaux for a large one. I admit they pique my curiosity sometimes, tempting me with the unattainable excess of luxury, or maybe by the allure of leaving Brink. But the prices are always exorbitant, and I’ll never save enough to pay the rising cost of an interstellar ticket if I spend my money on frivolous things like that.
Sensing my descent into brooding, Myra speaks up. “Cheer up, Tar. You pulled in what, four thousand bones today?”