10,000 Bones

by Joe Ollinger

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, New York 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Joe Ollinger

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  Book design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates.

  First Diversion Books edition February 2019.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63576-056-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-055-2

  LSIDB/1902

  FOR STELLAN

  1

  In the middle of a pursuit, it’s easy not to think about what I’m chasing. Remembering it, reminding myself how it all works and why, connecting all the dots that add up to a picture of a society that needs someone to do what I do—that’s the hard part. That comes later. Right now, I am focused. I need to be as inescapable as the harsh realities that put me here. I’ve followed the busboy since he left the restaurant, first from a distance on my quickbike, then another three blocks on foot, into this crumbling, stripped-bare tenement in the Dust Pit. He’s glanced back at me twice. He sees me, sees my blue-and-black Collections Agent uniform. I’m closing in on him as he enters the stairwell, and the tension is palpable in his stiff, quick pace, in the sweat stains on his white shirt, in how tightly he’s gripping the to-go bag he’s carrying. So far he’s been smart enough not to break into a run. I should have stopped him sooner, but I wanted to see where he was going. He’s gone far enough.

  Peeking into the stairwell, I don’t see an ambush, just the busboy’s feet hitting the stairs fast and light. I bolt after him.

  By the sixth floor I’m closing in. At the seventh, he throws open the door for the hallway. And then I’m on him.

  I lean a shoulder in and hammer him into the wall. He deflates and falls in a crumple, but he’s still clutching the to-go bag, trying to keep it and its precious contents away from me as he struggles to squirm free. I hit him with a deliberate but hard right elbow to the nose. There’s a crack, and his nostrils are smeared with blood. The fight goes out of him. I whip a zip-cuff out of a pouch on my belt, slip one end over his wrist and the other over the door handle, and pull them tight.

  Suddenly he’s not a fleeing criminal any longer, just another poor, malnourished kid who took a bad risk. Rising to my feet, I snatch the to-go bag away, open it up, and look inside. Just what I expected. The restaurant’s manager was right. The busboy was stealing.

  Inside the bag are little gray bones. Probably from chickens, or maybe ducks.

  Money.

  The Brink Commerce Board’s Collections Agency is the governmental entity responsible for recycling calcium and putting it back into the currency supply. Trade and charity never got around to fixing this rock’s biggest problem, and over a hundred years after calcium was made Brink’s official currency, it is still the legal tender. Like any legal tender, it’s what makes the world go ’round.

  I work for the Agency in Oasis City, the larger of the two main settlements on the planet. Eighty-five percent of the thirteen million people who call themselves Brinkers live here, packed densely around a rare and increasingly insufficient underground freshwater source.

  A relatively young colony, Brink has been trying to reestablish some identity for the last few decades, since it’s no longer the far edge of the frontier. It has been almost two hundred years since the invention of faster-than-light travel, and in that time, humanity has established a permanent presence on twenty-five worlds. Of those, Brink is far from the easiest to live on. Its gravity is close to Earth-normal, its temperature is consistent in the equatorial zone, it is tectonically stable, and it doesn’t have the solar radiation problems some worlds have, but it’s short on water, short on benign flora and fauna, and fatally short on calcium. Now that it no longer benefits from the novelty of being at the edge of settled space, it’s like a “last chance for gas” station on one of Earth’s old, long highways—a staging area, a waypoint to more promising, more hospitable worlds, like Farraway and Resolve and the unexplored systems closer to the galactic core.

  I don’t usually come in from the field until the end of my shift, but I’ve got an afternoon meeting scheduled, which is convenient because my recovery from the busboy was big enough that I don’t want to risk someone trying to steal the safebox off my quickbike.

  The scanner recognizes me, and I step through the secure side doors into Dispatch. It’s not busy this time of day. Only a few Agents are here right now, and most of the Dispatch crew looks to be out to lunch.

  Myra spots me, and I walk over to her and drop my safebox on her desk.

  “Hey, Taryn.”

  “How we doing, Myra?”

  “Ehh, been worse.” She shrugs. She’s a sweet girl, a few years younger than me, short-haired and slim, ever-alert, and somehow still not cynical after a few years with the Agency. Maybe because she’s never worked the field. She lifts my safebox. “What we got here?”

  “Meat remains,” I answer. “The usual.”

  “Anyone put up a fight?”

  I avoided pulling my gun so that I could avoid reporting the incident. The busboy—Ali Silva was his name—could be useful as an off-the-books informant. He could lead me to his buyer if I play it slow and let him off easy. So I don’t hesitate before I answer Myra, “Nah.”

  “Want to watch me coffin it?”

  “Always. Wouldn’t miss the chance to chat you up.” I flash a smile. Myra has had a bit of a crush on me since we met, and I admit I’ve played a bit flirty with her at times, even after I told her I’m not into other women. It’s nice to be reminded that I’m attractive. I’ve got a good tan on the face, but I don’t wear any makeup other than semi-permanent lip pigments, which are only slightly darker and glossier than my natural tone. I’m in great shape—hell, I should be, I’m on my feet all day—but I’m lean, only curvy in the hips. My Collections Agent uniform fits me snugly, and its armor padding is less than a centimeter thick, but its plain blue-and-black color is less than flattering, and my mid-length, dark brown hair is almost always a wind-blown mess.

  “Don’t get a girl’s hopes up,” Myra jokes. She punches in some data at her terminal, then picks up my safebox. “Come on back.”

  The few other Agents and Dispatchers ignore us as I follow her past the other desks to the thick metal door in the far wall. The weevil locker is the most secure spot in the building, lined in reinforced metal and smothered by security cameras to protect the valuable materials within. The auto-lock reads Myra’s ID, and she puts her thumb on the scanner. The door slides open.

  An electronic voice announces us as we step through. “Ling, Myra Savoy. Dare, Taryn Corrine.”

  The door snaps shut, and I breathe in the musty air of the weevil locker. It’s warm and heavy, regulated at a constant thirty-one Celsius and eighty percent humidity. The room is large but cramped, filled with floor-to-ceiling rows of deposit chambers. The ones near the entrance are the largest, about three meters by two, and they are all marked with a “Restricted Access” logo indicating that human remains are inside. Those recoveries are housed separately to respect the “dignity” of the bodies as they are broken down. A few of them look to be in use, as usual. The rest of the chambers, though, are a meter on each side, and are each labeled with the ID and image of a Collect
ions Agent on a little electronic display. We make our way to one of them near the back of the locker, two up from the floor. Mine.

  “Taryn Dare, badge number seventy-seven,” Myra says, “Here we are.” The locking interface reads her face and ID as she selects my chamber from the menu and presses her thumb to the scanner. A barely audible click issues as it unlocks.

  She bends down and slides the chamber open, revealing the container within: clear walls, the top perforated with tiny air holes. Inside, hundreds of the little black insects called chalk weevils pick over the pile of refuse and garbage I’ve brought in over the past few weeks. Specks of white powder litter the chamber, the compacted calcium carbonate the weevils were engineered to extract from organic matter. Eventually they’ll eat through everything in the chamber with their incredibly powerful trifold jaws, leaving nothing but that white powder and their own little six-legged corpses. The calcium will be weighed and refined, and five percent will credit to my paycheck.

  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 scribb
les 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.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the stuff gets logged and goes in a drawer with my name on it, where the chalk weevils eat it—chalk weevils, those are—”

  “Genetically modified arthropod with a gland that gathers calcium and secretes it as calcium carbonate. I used to work at SCAPE, the company that makes them.”

  “You said to indulge you.”

  “I think the word I used was ‘humor.’”

  “Uh-huh. Anyway. The weevils work, periodically the box gets sifted, the dead weevils are incinerated, and the calcium is extracted, processed, and reintroduced into the currency supply.”

  “And you’re paid on commission.”

  “Right. Five percent.” Which means I’m losing money right now. Wishing I had something to give this guy so I could wrap this up and get back to my shift, I lean forward, trying to show him that I’m leveling with him. “Look, attrition is inevitable. A guy eats a chicken, decides to grind down the bones and powder his potatoes with them. An old lady dies, the family sells the body on the black market and reports her missing instead of dead. People piss, and for healthy people, there are molecules of calcium in that piss. There’s a thousand little things every day.”