In the briefcase, there was a beautiful, round lens and a clear plastic vial. The vial held the crystalline shards from a shattered lens, counterpart to the one unblemished. The shards were bloodied by injured hands hurriedly scraping them from the floor and off the dead assailant’s left boot. The fragments were suspended in a shock-absorbent, matrix-linked cocktail  solution to keep them from weathering down in transport. The briefcase was encased in an autonomous, pressurized, temperature-controlled mechanical unit, a robot, in order to keep the millions of remaining memory retinal cells alive and unlysed inside the lenses. The robot was guarded by plainclothes personnel aboard a cargo transport.
The owner of the lenses and everyone downtown were alive until yesterday. Their corpses burned up along with any evidence when the habitable core of Worldsphere 2 ruptured and re-entered the atmosphere. The incident became headline news and the orbital corridor was closed off; all ships on approach were told to divert and hold while those leaving were commandeered by the police. No one noticed the robot boosting away in the explosion.
Six hours ago, the victims’ identities were released. The media elevated a handful of them to international attention: famous pop stars, politicians, CEOs. One name stood out in particular: the Senate leader Wade Barram-Gilmore, who was on a trip with his entourage to preside over a treaty signing. The treaty was his brainchild in all but name, a culmination of his machinations during negotiations spanning months. It was designed to carve up the orbital space and slice the moon, below a certain latitude, into big uneven slices advantageous for his nation. Of course, he had sprinkled in a few provisions for lobbying corporations that would only add to his estate over the years.
The lenses had been his. One of the marvelous, interdisciplinary pieces of engineering designed to replace his failing vision, aid his ailing memory, extend his life beyond its tenuous, natural timespan. The cells within the lens, recombinant with hundreds of engineered genes and interfaced with the microscopic matrices of metal wafers, had recorded the odor of gunpowder, burning oxygen in the conference room’s sterile, immaculate atmosphere, the shockwaves emanating from bullet impacts to his chest, left shoulder, lower stomach, and of course, the identities of the attackers as their refracted image flashed onto the lenses.
The personnel on the transport knew the importance of their mission. Isolated from major airwaves, they could only guess at the political fallout. The lenses could prove crucial in what would happen, perhaps even preventing a war from breaking out.
Unbeknownst to them, clandestine eyes were affixed to their vessel, and they took aim.