The Second Sphere

I sat in the cramped office that I shared with Rosie, staring out at the tops of the skyscrapers, which rolled as far as the eye could see, pondering the snafu I’d gotten myself into. Cody was reliable. He’d given me at least a dozen bombing plots, and a lot more intel about GR plants in the government and at Laslow. This mistake wasn’t from him.

Cody was a small fry. The information he dropped in my lap was from somewhere up the GR hierarchy, probably sanctioned by someone with clout, who thought strategically about how to keep the Laslow Corporation, and any other Intelligence organization for that matter, certain that they had the bad guys when they were really swinging wildly.

Up to this point, our arrests because of Cody’s information kept Bryant happy, and it helped keep the Laslow Corporation flush with TSG cash. Our war against the Green Revolution was a pleasant game that made a lot of people rich, filled with public relations opportunities. But ultimately we did little to stop the violence.

I didn’t like the idea of revealing Cody. We had a good thing going. It was a fair exchange. I wanted to keep Cody exactly where he was. If I could leapfrog him to get to the next level, I’d have something to show Bryant and get him out of my business until the next crisis came along.

As I pondered a life without Love, Rosalinda Flores, my partner in all matters intelligence stumbled in the room. At one time, she was a pretty transfer with long, blonde hair, sparkling green eyes, a thin build, and a nice wide smile. But now she was a fiend, with weathered, droopy skin and hungry eyes. Love had her completely.

Rosie set a black bag the size of a small house on the table in front of her and took a seat without uttering a greeting. She flicked her hair behind her ears then glanced up. Our eyes met. The whites were tinged with red; the pupils were wide and black. Even that junkie appearance compelled me to imagine a different relationship with her. But as suddenly as those old feelings appeared, they were gone. My chip brought back the memory that her real name was Roscoe Flores. She was an ex-Marine who, two hundred years ago, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and was brick-shithouse-solid.

Back on earth, she was one of Laslow’s top people, a shooting star. Company founder Ed Laslow once promised her the Lunar Chief of Intelligence job. Once we came to the moon, however, we got ourselves into the Love scene, and fell into the transition mire, from which we never extracted ourselves. Rosie was worse off than I was, though. She had no restraint, unable to go more than a few hours without a dose.

“You look like you had a rough one,” I said. She cast her gaze past me, toward the window and the constructed moon.

“Fifteen minutes at the Source,” she muttered. She twirled around and eyed her reflection in the window. “So, we hear anything yet about what’s going on in New Mumbai?” she asked.

I told her about Bryant’s suspicions and my intention to get Cody to pass along the person giving him information, as well as our imminent meeting with Lance Heittman.

“Great,” she finally said. “I’m getting some coffee. I’ll meet you in the conference room,” she said before she left.

Despite the lingering effects of the Love I dosed outside of Cody’s apartment, I felt a good fidget coming on. The world was off, and I wasn’t sure that any amount of programmed fix could do anything about it. I worried about Rosie, but I knew that I couldn’t say anything to her. For me to give advice about addiction would be completely absurd. Both of us knew it.

I left our office, went down the hall, and into the conference room. A map of Mars was on the link-up, the sight of the bombing in New Mumbai blown up on the side. The blast radius was about a tenth of a kilometer across, stretching near the arena.

Rosie came in and flopped down across from me without saying a word. I saw that she still held her Love drive. I cleared my throat and motioned toward her hand. She didn’t say a word, but cast a look to melt granite.

“Sorry for expressing interest,” I said, just as Bryant came into the room.

“Orion’s gotten you up to speed?” he asked as he sat. Rosie nodded.

“Listen,” he said, “this is going to be a tough day. I don’t want to feed any conspiracy theories that Lance Heittman or anyone else in the New Washington office might have. He’s going to wonder why we wasted his staff’s time on this. I want to handle any problems we had with intelligence gathering internally. So just let me do the talking with Lance, okay? We don’t know anything about a distraction. We were just doing our best. If he asks direct questions, feel free to answer them with that slant in mind; otherwise, just shut up.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Fine with me,” Rosie said.

Suddenly an image appeared before us, interrupting Bryant. A man with dirty blond hair and a set of steel gray eyes blinked at us. Bryant raised his hand in greeting.

“Bryant, good to see you,” the man said.

“Lance,” Bryant said, nodding.

“Rosie, Orion,” Lance Heittmann grumbled. The head of intelligence at the Laslow Corporate office in New Washington, Mars was disheveled, to say the least. His eyes betrayed his lack of rejuvenation; the stain along the collar of his white shirt indicated an accident with coffee enhancement probably occurred in the recent past. He never looked like this.

Lance ran through the number of initial dead and length of time to decontaminate the area.

“So, the real question is, how did we let this slip?” he asked. I remained as still as I possibly could.

“How’d this happen?” He asked again. The question hung in the air, waiting for someone to answer.

Bryant was placid in his chair, blinking occasionally, but showing no sign that what Lance said moved him. He waited for Lance to continue, since we all knew that there was no satisfying answer at the moment, and to pretend that there was seemed ridiculous.

“Did you find anything in your investigation that would even hint of something like this happening?” Lance asked for the third time.

Bryant shook his head.

“If we’d found anything that predicted what would happen last night or was of any value concerning what happened in New Mumbai at all, we would’ve already shared it. All of our preliminary reports are in your hands.”

“Is that a no?” Lance asked.

“I know that you want answers right now. We all do. But we honestly don’t have any. Our analysts are reviewing our investigation from the last few months to see what, if anything, we missed,” Bryant said.

Bryant went on. “We’re not interested in playing games here. We don’t mind taking the heat for anything we did wrong, but I don’t want the people who work for me to feel any worse than they already do.”

Lance’s face contorted, and it seemed as though he wanted to reach through the link-up and slap Bryant in the face. “You want me to worry about your feelings? What about the families of the people who were killed?”

“Lance, that’s not what I’m saying,” Bryant said.

“We owe those people an explanation about why we were unable to prevent this. I’m not interested in assigning blame for it’s own sake. I want us to find the truth.”

“Lance, I completely understand. It’s just--”

“You’ve got a TSG auditor who’s going to see you this afternoon to begin a review of your investigation.” He said it as though he wanted to stab Bryant in the eye.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s standard procedure, Orion,” Lance said. “I recommended that they begin immediately.”

I thought for a moment about what an audit might mean. Any report would likely detail what was already known and make excuses for our failure, which the Three Spheres Government and Laslow would then use to show that they weren’t responsible for what happened. They couldn’t blame me for trusting a well-regarded mole who’d given plenty of good intel over the years, could they? I hoped the answer was no. Still, I didn’t like a hint of being the scapegoat.

“We’re going up to meet with Quincy right after we get off with you,” Bryant said. “I’m sure he’ll brief us on the visit.”

“Good,” Lance said.

“I guess we’ll talk to you later?” Bryant asked.

“I’m sure we’ll have a briefing sometime this afternoon,” Lance said.

“Always a pleasure,” Bryant said as he disconnected the signal.

“This is bad,” Rosie droned.

“An audit?” I said. “I don’t want TSG coming in here, poking around, getting information on our GR moles.”

“What do you want to do about it, Orion?” Bryant asked. “You want to tell them that they can’t have information on where we’re getting our intelligence?”

“I’m just saying that I don’t like it, boss.”

A beep came from the panel in front of him, and a beautiful woman with long eyelashes and full lips appeared on the link-up.

“Mr. Valek, I just want to remind you of your meeting with Mr. Laslow,” she said.

“We’ll be up there in a minute,” Bryant said just before the image disappeared. “Let’s go see how much worse things can get.”