The show cuts back in. A glamorous drama set in the top floors of a famous luxury arcology in a place called Ventura, California, it follows the lives of several wealthy and extremely good-looking characters struggling for control of a divided drug company. The first season had me hooked, and a plot twist just happened at the end of the first episode of the second season, but right now it’s not holding my interest. I keep dwelling on the possibility of some conspiracy behind Marvin Chan’s weevils and that Knowles might be complicit in it, or at least taking his cues from someone who is. Does he want me off the case because I’m gunning for the payoff too hard?
Be sensible, Taryn. He’s just following protocol. You’re a loose fucking cannon, and you know it.
The tight walls of my tiny apartment are starting to irritate me. I’d open a window, but the view would be worse, nothing visible but the dirty, dark gray lattice-brick of the building across the street. A heavy was posted outside my door. I wonder if he’s still there. He obviously wasn’t happy about being here, maybe he’s off on an unauthorized break. I wonder when they change shifts. I wonder when Knowles will let me go back to work. I wonder if I’ll be questioned about the prints I left on that proximity detonator. I shouldn’t have searched the body of that courier without gloves.
Maybe I should get drunk. At least it would pass the time. I get up and stretch, unable to extend my arms all the way because of the low ceiling. As I step toward the fridge, a chime rings and the monitor flashes “Door: Brady Kearns.” Changing direction, I hit the control, opening it.
Sure enough, the Commerce Board auditor stands there in the hallway, next to the heavy on guard. He’s changed clothes since I last saw him, now dressed in trim slacks with a horizontal pleat and a cling-fasten shirt that makes him look like a traveler from one of the inner worlds.
“Kearns. What are you doing here?”
“Brady’s fine,” he says, smirking. “I pulled some strings.”
“Strings?”
He holds out an open hand, offering me a familiar object. My badge. “I need your help, Taryn.”
“Agent Dare is fine. What do you want help with?”
“I need your resources,” he says, “and your skills. Hell, I need someone to tell me where to start.”
“Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look, Kearns. You came to the right place.”
The Chartered Finance and Credit Company of the Shipping Consortium for Aerospace and Planetary Exploration—the SCAPE Bank, as people tend to call it—sits on the near side of the SCAPE complex adjacent to the spaceport, the entrance driveway open to Safelydown Boulevard. Covering nearly a square kilometer, the Central Branch is huge, a stone and aluminum monolith seemingly carved as a testament to the infallibility and power of the galaxy’s largest space travel company. It’s the only portion of SCAPE land open to the general public. As Kearns drives between the huge if not particularly tall industrial buildings, I feel hesitant. Over my uniform I’m wearing an unassuming civilian outfit of outdoor-casual khaki wind pants and a jacket, which makes me feel more vulnerable for some reason, even though I’ve still got the light ballistic protection of my gear underneath. To shield my face, I pull on a pair of blocky, mirrored sungoggles and a khaki storm cap, a useful and currently in-fashion hat with the brim angled down on the front and sides to keep sand and dust away from the eyes.
Kearns’s car pulls to a stop in the loop in front of the building, and I get out and walk to the front entrance, keeping my distance from the other customers coming and going. Passing through one set of auto-flip doors, I enter the grand, modern lobby—a vast, cool, open space. Load-bearing cylindrical pillars of smooth aluminum connect floors of polished hard gray stone and arched ceilings of carved stone with metal moldings. Finding a vacant automated teller among the bank of them along one of the walls, I order a withdrawal of a big chunk of my account. Doing it makes me nervous, but in the following days I may need to become a shadow, and that means turning off my phone and its debiting software and minimizing my paper trail. I may need a lot of hard money.
The machine dispenses the units with a mechanical hum and a series of metallic clicks, dropping the fat hundred-unit chips in the pan in three neat little interlocking stacks of ten. The “big tabs” have a nice look to them, thicker than other denominations, the hard, fluid-filled bubbles covering their entire surface area. As I gather them up and stuff them into a zippered pocket, I marvel at how half a year’s pay, half the calcium value of a grown human being, can feel so small. Dust and liquid inside some cheap plastic.
I walk across the lobby and exit through the auto-flip doors, feeling the bright, hot light of late afternoon for only a few seconds before I’m back in Kearns’s car.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He drives manually, pulling in behind some other cars exiting the lot. “So what’s our first step?”
“I need more info from Collections. Frank Soto flew for the company that makes the weevil eggs. He saw Marvin Chan once, not long before Chan hired Sales. Maybe those are coincidences, but I’m starting with him.”
Kearns nods, understanding. “So where to?”
“I need to see my Dispatcher.” I’ve got paperwork for her to turn in for me, and we set up a meeting at a place she would know without me having to identify it too explicitly. “She’s meeting me at The NewLanding.”
A pedestrians-only street in the middle of uptown, lined thick on both sides with shops and clubs and bars and restaurants stacked four or five or six high, all brightly lit in many colors, The NewLanding is the hip epicenter of nightlife on Brink, a playground for Oasis City’s wealthy and those who like to pretend they’re part of that group. At night it bustles with foot traffic, but it’s busy even now, an hour or so before the end of the workday, with idle rich doing midday shopping, getting their hair done, having happy hour drinks at the clubs. I’m sitting on one of the glass block benches surrounding the sand fountain at the north end, facing away from the red sun which hangs heavy above the skyline, bathing uptown in warm orange light cut with long, angular shadows.
I watch the sand cascade in the fountain, fine bright white powder pouring by the kiloliters over angled slabs of channeled gray stone cut in the rough, blocky shape of a hand reaching upward. It’s a tourist attraction, unique to Brink, built because it was cheaper to make a grand fountain that could flow sand through it than keep one filled with a liquid. It commemorates the spot of the New Landing itself, where a group of six ships arrived from Earth with badly needed supplies, saving the colony from extinction in its early days.
I feel vulnerable without my gun or phone, the latter of which I shut off and left in Kearns’s car, and I get the sense that I’m sticking out here. I don’t look like a tourist, and I don’t look rich enough to belong here otherwise. I like to look good, but I don’t wear civilian clothes often enough to spend much on them, and although the goggles and storm cap shield most of my face from plain view, the outdoor-casual outfit I’m wearing is lower-end and noticeably out of style. I remind myself that this is as safe a spot as any for a meeting. There are a lot people here, there can be no ingress or egress other than on foot, and security cameras cover nearly every millimeter of the area. Plenty of buildings would provide a clear sniper shot at me, but that would require knowing that I’m here and getting someone armed and into position before I move.