Off Rock

by Kieran Shea

  “Oh, don’t be such a donkey. It’ll only take some minor reprogramming of the final destination on one of the tender holds.”

  “But, sir, my clearance hasn’t been updated for those sort of adjustments.”

  “Not a problem,” said Jock. “You see, I already updated your clearance grade a short time ago. You know the smaller quarantine holds?”

  “The ones they pack the plutonic unidentified samples in?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been thinking it over, and one of the smaller quarantine holds will be perfect for this little venture. K7-A has had more than a few unidentified kernels pulled from its guts, so what I need is for you to remove the existing samples and load my friend’s materials in their place.”

  Zaafer’s eyes jittered. “But—”

  “It’s daring, I know.”

  “No, the quarantine holds. I’ll need to wear a hazmat suit, sir.”

  “Also not an issue. Just so happens I’ve got one right here in your size.”

  “Oh.”

  Jock slid his eyes to the bag of candy in Zaafer’s arms. “Son, remember what I just said about tendering an advance? The second bag of goodies I have for you when the job is complete is positively teeming with Mookoomarsh Bars and Super Sour Waddlee Wees.”

  Zaafer licked his lips. Standing there, the boy’s deep jones for confectionery was something to observe. Jock imagined if he had a cup handy, he could practically fill it with the amount of drool about to spill past Zaafer’s lips.

  Zaafer said softly, “Oh, well, if you say my clearance has been updated, I suppose I can, well… I suppose I can find a way to make it happen.”

  Jock handed over the hazmat suit. “Good boy.”

  Zaafer shook the shiny silver suit and looked at its attached hood. Jock could see that the boy was already busy parsing what he’d have to do to misplace the quarantine hold samples, but it was also clear Zaafer was laboring even harder over selecting his next words.

  “I know I shouldn’t ask a lot of questions, Mr. Roscoe, but me doing this switch—when will all this need to take place?”

  “The Adamant is the last freighter scheduled to arrive and it should acquire its primary orbit in a few hours. Once the Adamant’s tenders descend, they’ll be docked in the armadillo bays for at least twenty-four hours. The plan is for my friend to drive a crawler into the maintenance area and on the crawler there’ll be a package. A case, actually. You’ll just take the case, make the exchange, and update the destination inputs per these coordinates.” Jock handed Zaafer a slip of paper.

  “But what about the existing samples?” Zaafer asked.

  Jock held up a finger. “Ah, before you begin I want you to put a request in for an automated hover bin. No one pays attention to AHBs and those bins are preprogrammed to purge their contents in the fragmite incinerators on regular hourly clocks. Just slide the existing plutonic sample case into the hover bin, throw some trash on top to make it look legit and off she’ll go. You’ll leave my friend’s case in place of the missing sample case and presto! No one will be the wiser.”

  Zaafer’s eyes shifted up to the ceiling. “But, um—”

  “But what?”

  “But what about the imaging drone, sir?”

  Jock glanced up briefly and made a show of being disturbed. “Damn, I hadn’t thought about that blasted thing.”

  “Yes, Mr. Roscoe, don’t you see? If things don’t go well, the imaging drone could record me doing the switch. By no means am I saying your idea is flawed, but later on if something goes wrong, someone from the company is bound to look at those files. I don’t want to get into any trouble.”

  Jock knew he could easily adjust the sweep pattern again, but he needed to keep Zaafer unaware of his capacity to tinker with the drone’s cycles. Hanging some dramatic fire, Jock paced a bit and stamped a foot to express his frustration. “Oh monkey pus, this is a wrinkle I didn’t even consider. What can we do? Do you have any ideas?”

  “Well,” Zaafer said sheepishly. “I think a distraction could help.”

  “A distraction? How do you mean?”

  “Well, sir, a commotion or something. If timed right, a distractive event could draw the imaging drone’s attention.”

  “Why, that’s brilliant, son!”

  Zaafer smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Okay,” Jock said. “I’ll handle setting up all that. Don’t worry. I’ll make it loud so you know just what it’ll be. But when the time comes just work fast and be ready with the radiation suit and the AHB so you can make the switch when my friend brings the crawler back, all right?”

  “You got it, Mr. Roscoe.”

  Jock grinned and swung an arm around Zaafer’s shoulders. “Oh, where would I be without you, boy? Enjoy that candy now, you hear?”

  8. OF SNIDE AND INDUSTRY

  Reclined on a lackluster boulder, Leela Pendergast tittered as Jimmy slipped off her cherry-red cowboy boots.

  Jimmy thought Leela looked great. Nix that. Jimmy thought she looked amazing. In addition to her boots, Leela wore a stunning dark blue and white polka-dot bikini, and planting her hands behind her like a vintage pin-up, she posed as if she were dangling her firm, brown legs off the edge of a bed.

  Arranging her boots beside him, Jimmy was at once confused by the thick, pressurized gloves covering his hands. As if on long dolly zoom, his focus cinematically retreated and the foggy condensation on the inside of his helmet visor gave him a start. Looking back to Leela, Jimmy screamed without sound as she drifted up and off the boulder. As he lunged for her ankle, an improbable buzz of insects hummed on Jimmy’s wrist.

  Jimmy shut off his wristband alarm and sat up. Man, some dream. Not the most off-the-wall hypnopompic jaunt to Neverland he’d ever had, but still—Leela Pendergast hadn’t manifested in his subconscious for a while now. She certainly never made an appearance decked out in a frisky polka-dot bikini. Groggily, Jimmy tried to remember if he’d ever seen Leela in a bathing suit. A jog bra and sporty compression shorts, yeah, and a frilly black slip and matching panties she kept around for special occasions, but a bikini? Never.

  Lolling on his bunk, Jimmy strained to pull together the last waning threads of his dream for meaning, but soon all the eidetic strength of the images melted away. He rubbed his face. After Jock had departed hours earlier, he’d been so keyed up about the plan to steal the gold he could barely keep still. Jock had pointed out that his getting some sleep before his back-to-back was an imperative, but all of his efforts at rest proved to be unsuccessful. Dozing, scratching his scalp, turning his pillow over and over to find a cool spot—nothing seemed to work. Jimmy took a thirsty draw from a water bottle he kept in a cubby under his bunk and wondered how much rest he’d actually got. Dull aches from head to toe told him not much at all.

  His next priority was clear though.

  Coffee.

  Dressed and teeth brushed, he grabbed his rucksack, locked up his quarters, and made a mental list of what he needed to do next as he took the rubberized ramps and ladders upstairs to the residential spider’s canteen.

  Unlike during the earlier taco service, when he entered the canteen he found it wasn’t all aswarm with carousing inebriates. Naturally, there were a few early birds like him pulling their tattered faculties together, but he counted only eight or ten Azoick employees milling about at most. Jimmy kept to himself. He navigated his way to the self-service area. Selecting a pre-split plain bagel from a tray, he slipped the slices into a coil conveyor and proceeded to hunt in the adjacent bowls for a tube of raspberry jam. There were honey-flavored protein cups, oily cubes of imitation butter, and for the strong palate aficionados concentrated yeast packets, but not a tube of raspberry jam was to be found in the bunch.

  Disappointed, Jimmy crammed the toasted, sandwiched bagel sections into his mouth and filled an extra-large paper cup with coffee from one of the dispenser urns. After checking the readout on his wristband, he sealed a plastic lid to his cup and took a tentative taste. Well
, at least the coffee was hot and he was ahead of schedule. He’d an hour’s worth of grace time to get out to the ASOCC spider before his shift. Mixing chewed sections of bagel with coffee to soften the dough, he picked up a few energy bars for his back-to-back, stuffed them in his rucksack, and headed off to find Jock Roscoe.

  From their prior dealings, Jimmy knew where Jock’s quarters were down on deck three. To save himself some time, Jimmy elected to use a bypass chute and a few minutes later halted in front of Jock’s hatch. Festooned with blue koala-shaped party lights, the entrance bore a slotted nameplate with Jock’s name and Azoick ID number. Doctored with black marker ink, the doodle on the letter J was sharpened to a point to resemble a devil’s tail.

  Jimmy knocked twice and a minute later the lock snapped. If it was possible, when the door drew inward Jock looked even smaller in his shabby thermal T-shirt and sagging purple and black tiger-striped briefs—a bleary Rip-Van-Winkle apparition of hammered shit. Jock’s face squeezed as a pungent pong of cloacal gases and sweated-out alcohol found Jimmy’s nose.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “Sorry to wake you, but I’m on in an hour,” said Jimmy. “I need that gizmo thing we talked about.”

  Jock mashed a thumb into one of his bloodshot eyes and coughed. It was glaringly apparent his mind was elsewhere, someplace bad. “What gizmo thing?”

  “C’mon, Jock…”

  A hip scratch. “Oh, right. Right, right, I forgot.” After a look left and right down the corridor, Jock stepped aside. “Get your bones in here, bushy tail.”

  Jimmy slid past him and entered the quarters. Jock’s personal space was slightly bigger than Jimmy’s repurposed utility room down below, and presented what amounted to a world-class, cluttered reflection of the man’s derelict appetites. Lit by a kitschy, purple lava lamp, Jock’s lair was packed with so many crates, spoiled canteen food cartons, and unspecified trash there was scant room to move or even to sit down. Given the ripe odors, Jimmy made a point to breathe strictly through his open mouth.

  Jock sealed the hatch and when Jimmy turned sideways to allow enough room for him to squeeze past, he started sifting through the piles like a half-crazed magpie hunting for a burnished bead. While Jock searched, Jimmy set down his empty coffee cup and continued to take in the dimly lit surroundings. Next to Jock’s unmade bunk a busty life-sized standup cardboard cutout of Miss Jupiter 2772 smiled at him in a negligée, and at what passed for a desk he observed a large flesh-toned image of noodles on an activated workstation screen. With a quick double-take between the screen and Miss Jupiter, Jimmy realized that the lambent, flesh-tone image on the workstation screen wasn’t noodles at all but a plaited knot of naked, leggy ladies going to town. Some sticky orgy in progress. It might have been a media freeze-frame or a screen-saver but either way, given Jock’s profound depravities, the smutty image and cardboard cutout were hardly a shock. Crossing around the room’s obstacles, Jock blundered up to him and slapped a large device into Jimmy’s hand.

  “There. Best scrambler available. Text only. Sub-space frequency is all set on channel three. Not that it matters, but it has a range of ten thousand kilometers and a gyro-powered battery, so if you’re feeling all anxious, shake it once in a while to ease your mind. Now, do me a favor and—” Jock heaved sideways and retched a stream of yellowy puke.

  “Damn,” Jimmy said, “you finished off all of that Scotch?”

  Jock muttered. “Don’t remind me.”

  Jimmy pressed the power switch on top of the scrambler. On a minute oval display screen near the crown of the device a readout in digitized green indicated channel three was all set and ready to go. Turning the scrambler off, Jimmy spoke quickly as Jock gathered himself.

  “Okay, I’m going to work as fast as I can to set the rest of the demolition inlays first. There’s at least a hundred and seventy meters left between the pocket and the surface opening of the shaft so if I work fast, I should be able to knock the inlays out in six or seven hours, tops. Once she’s on post I’m sure Leela will have a major hemorrhage when she realizes I’ve taken one of the crawlers and a long drill without asking, but don’t worry, I’ll take care of her. Once she’s cool I’ll then check in with you using the scrambler, so be ready. After I finish the inlays I’ll concentrate strictly on extraction and then transfer it to the empty drill case.”

  Jock bobbed his head lethargically.

  Jimmy went on. “I’ve been thinking it over and it’s going to be a mother and a half to finish the regular work, but I’m ready. So, um, where’s yours?”

  “Where’s my what?”

  “Your scrambler.”

  Jock pawed his greasy forehead. “S’round here some place…”

  “Shouldn’t we, like, do a test?”

  “What for?”

  “Well, once I’m out there I don’t want to be dicking around in the blind.”

  Jock scoffed. “In the blind. Don’t be such a priss.”

  “I’m not being a priss.”

  “Yes, you are. Priss, priss, priss—”

  “C’mon, man. I just want us to be tight.”

  Jock stifled a contemptuous belch and once more an eggish smell crawled up Jimmy’s nose like a vile phantom.

  “On top of my present crap-tastic state,” Jock said, “I can’t believe you’re talking to me like this again. What, you think my gear is all bodgy? Sure, maybe I shouldn’t have drunk all that fancy grog of yours, but don’t you think I haven’t already been busy making arrangements?”

  “Okay, but shouldn’t we have a special code with these scramblers or something?”

  Jock sneered reproachfully. “If someone gets curious it’s a lock, they’ll think any message we share will be some weird communication echo. Codes? These suckers are equipped with souped-up, ultramodern octo-encryption. If some busybody like your ex-best poke happens to tap in—which is nearly impossible, mind you—both scramblers will fry out quick. And, trust me, if that happens, you better drop yours because both of these devices have fail-safe self-destruct charges.”

  Jimmy looked at the scrambler in his hand. “For real?”

  “I’m positive it won’t happen, but if it does, a default mechanism will release an acid charge inside both scramblers, and they’ll disintegrate in about thirty seconds. Stuff will burn right through your spacesuit.”

  Jimmy pondered the possible fatal outcome. He was glad to hear about the fail-safe measures, but he still had some questions.

  “So how will I know you’re trying to contact me?”

  “Vibrations, mate. Yeah, I know it’s antiquated, but believe it or not antiquated works.”

  “But if our communications get compromised, is there, like, an alarm on it or something before the acid charges release?”

  “Sure. The vibrations will go berserk. Just make sure you keep yours handy. Should fit right on your work belt. See? It’s got a snappy little clip right on the back. Don’t go setting it aside.”

  “Swell. Then what?”

  “What when?”

  “If the scramblers get compromised.”

  “I guess we regroup.”

  Jimmy nearly shouted. “Regroup? Are you out of your mind? I’m telling you, there’s no way I’ll be able to get another chance at using a long drill or a crawler. Leela would never allow it. And getting all that gold out without those things—this can’t be done otherwise.”

  “Then you best pray no one will be snooping,” Jock said. “But hey, the odds of anyone picking up the sub-space frequency are minuscule, right? There’s nothing to worry about. Look, I know I seem a little worse for wear right now, but remember—you’re the one who approached me about this, not the other way around. This clambake is on, so don’t go pussying out on me. Just do what you need to do and ping me when you’re out there. Later, when you’re all set to come back, just drive the crawler over to vehicle maintenance and I’ll have somebody take it from there.”

  Jimmy undid a cargo pocket on his jump
er and slid the scrambler inside. Jock was rambling so quickly he almost didn’t catch it. Jimmy paused and snapped his fingers.

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “You just said you’ll have somebody take it from there. I thought it was just you and me on this, Jock.”

  “It still is.”

  “So who’s this somebody?”

  “All right, you know a young Pakistani technician goes by the name Zaafer?”

  “Zaafer Daavi?”

  “Yeah, he’ll meet you. And not to worry, he’s already been taken care of.”

  “So Zaafer doesn’t know anything about the gold?”

  “Of course not. All that emaciated geek knows is there’ll be a case. That boy knows better than to be a stickybeak.”

  Jimmy didn’t like it. He knew someone would be involved and people along the way would need to be greased—he had agreed to it—but Jock being slow to mention Zaafer immediately, that was disconcerting.

  “So what happens after I drop off the case?”

  “Zaafer will transfer it to one of the tenders’ quarantine holds and reprogram the final destination coordinates. He’ll dump the existing quarantine samples he removes into an automated hover bin and then he’ll eighty-six the samples into the fragmite incinerators.”

  “So you have this all doped out.”

  “Yeah. It’s in the bag.”

  “Mind telling me which one?”

  “What, which incinerator?”

  Again, the evasiveness. Jimmy frowned and looked at Jock askance. “No, which armadillo bay.”

  “God, you don’t trust me at all, do you?”

  “Any trust I’ve got is wearing pretty thin right now. So far, all you’ve told me is that we divvy up the stash in Hong Kong, but you haven’t been too specific about much else.”

  “Hey, I’m not trying to screw you over, Jimmy.”

  “Yeah, but if we get delayed or if we can’t swing a shuttle connection back to Earth together post-skip, I don’t even know how to contact this so-called dragon lady you talked about. Listen, I’m not saying you’d go so far as to stab me in the back, but now Zaafer is in the mix. You two might be planning to—”