Off Rock

by Kieran Shea

  Indeed, it felt good to be such a valuable asset to Mr. Roscoe, but this time the arrangement seemed atypical. They’d never bothered using a quarantine hold on a tender before, and wearing a hazmat suit? That in and of itself was disquieting. Zaafer had three distant cousins who’d succumbed to severe radiation poisoning back in Karachi after the Valtoon asteroid tsunamis, and the haunting recollections of their excruciating ends were still fresh in his memory. Still, the risk of whatever Mr. Roscoe was up to couldn’t equal the lure of a giant batch of Mookoomarsh Bars.

  Back home, Zaafer’s kindly mother used to have a saying: as men grow older their flaws and worst longings always show. His mother certainly would never approve of his associating with someone so perverse and profane as Mr. Roscoe, and briefly Zaafer wondered what was becoming of him. Although many on station liked to make fun and say he was stupid and naïve, Zaafer took pride in knowing he was neither. He implicitly understood that exchanging and destroying company property was wrong, but had Mr. Roscoe ever let him down or got him in trouble? No, not once. Mr. Roscoe protected him. He always made sure he had enough plausible deniability to avoid implication. Zaafer resolved that it might be best just to keep his mind on what he’d been asked to do and not dwell on questions, as questioning Mr. Roscoe always had the potential of rolling back on him.

  Jock Roscoe had an insufferable temper and could get downright sadistic when he grew angry. One time when Zaafer asked too many questions regarding one of their erstwhile arrangements, he even backed out on paying him their agreed-upon compensation to teach him a lesson.

  Two jumbo boxes of Whiplash Pogoes.

  It was such a dear price to pay.

  Banned and nearly eradicated for their nougats’ latent toxicities, Whiplash Pogoes were even harder to come by than Mookoomarsh Bars. Zaafer had never tasted one, but allegedly the forbidden candy induced psychoactive visions that lingered for hours after consumption. Even as he’d begged for forgiveness, Mr. Roscoe decided it was high time to show Zaafer which side his rancid taftan was buttered on. After doing an elaborate tap dance on the jumbo boxes of Whiplash Pogoes, Mr. Roscoe cleared out the entire lot via an airlock.

  Taking a solemn page from his religious convictions, Zaafer deemed that perhaps this time the correct course of action was to take a higher road and merely empathize. With his being in debt to The Chimeric Circle, Mr. Roscoe had to be under some terrible pressure, and while he’d been reeking of demon liquor earlier, Zaafer was happy to see him in chipper spirits. As large as this mysterious load of his friend’s was, it had to be something that offered Mr. Roscoe some level of relief.

  But good gracious… fifty kilos? Fifty kilos of what?

  Right now for your protection it’s probably best if you don’t know all the nitty-gritty specifics.

  Right.

  Whatever the material in question was, when Zaafer accepted the bag of candy Mr. Roscoe had presented a fairly ingenious plan. With his clearance updated and a hazmat suit it’d only be a minor inconvenience for Zaafer to arrange a swap-out on a tender. And with a well-timed diversion, the imaging drone issue would be no issue at all.

  Zaafer stuck a hand in his pocket and caressed the smooth rectangular edges of a carton of Choco-Crunchy Gobblerz. Giving the carton a thoughtful shake, he whistled a short, happy tune and got to work.

  11. TEAMWORK (*SIGH*)

  Post workout, Piper Kollár changed into a form-hugging red bodysuit with a modish, black weskit and then met her solar parasol team in one of ASOCC’s padded low-ceilinged conference rooms.

  The conference room was a cramped, inauspicious affair and stank vaguely of dirty socks. Like almost every other nook, passageway, and deck on the Kardashev 7-A station, every last centimeter of the room and its bolted-down polyethylene furniture was covered with a film of soft, dunnish dust. Mining operations… no matter what cleansers were used, everything on station seemed to be soiled with grime somehow. Piper shivered at the thought of it, but wondered just how pure the processed air circulating on the station actually was.

  In baggy, blue canvas coveralls, the two other members of her freelance team, Østerby and Stormkast, arrived late and looked pretty rough. After their getting-to-know-each-other session in the canteen, Piper had left Østerby and Stormkast to their inebriations, and their present states were hardly a shock. For all their tough talk and scruff the two men were lightweights, as bad as teetotalers.

  Piper had never worked with either man before, but the two’s dossiers filled out a reasonable picture of expertise. With long stints on the Saturn belts, each labored intensely to present the bored look of an old pro who’d seen it all before. At first, back at the Neptune Pact Orbital, when they were being prepped for extended stasis out to Kardashev 7-A, Piper had ignored Østerby and Stormkast completely, but now after their time in the canteen she’d a feeling they at least were growing to like her. True, perhaps it was only for the way she filled out her red bodysuit, but Piper was used to that. She gestured at a three-dimensional rotating representation of Kardashev 7-A floating just above the raised plinth in the center of the table, and the two men slipped into their chairs and she began.

  “Okay,” Piper said, “we’ll be setting our mooring pylons, here and here and here, so on this shift I want us to focus solely on deep prep. Router dry runs, hardware setups and breakdowns, and definitely remote ignition checks. A through Z and top to bottom. Management has allocated an area for our staging work in the central shipping hangar. Sorry, but I’ve been informed we’ll be using the new diamond-caliper cables on this gig. I know, I know… there’ve been glitches with the new d-c cables, so take your time and check the schematics. Both of you have limited clearance to access Azoick mainframe simulators on site, so run your analytics as outlined in the spec brief. Once our deep prep is tight we should be able to run the first series of drills before we cycle off in a few hours.”

  Østerby looked at Stormkast. Both men wiggled in their chairs.

  Stormkast asked, “So when’s the final demo? I didn’t see a schedule anywhere in the spec brief, so is there any hurry on all this monkey business?”

  Piper pulled up an overlay of the mining sites on the SPO. “The red Xs indicate which mining areas are completed for closure at this juncture. As you can see, it’s nearly primed, laid out in the customary grid pattern. Some sloppy Swiss cheese evidently, but all said and done I think they’ll be commencing their blows soon. I know what you’re thinking: we all know how that goes. But remember—we get paid by the hour. They want us to sit around on our butts, that’s their problem. Post-demo, when Kardashev 7-A is all set, we’ll use a crawler to moor the pylons and launch the parasols remotely after the final station liftoff. Any questions?”

  Thankfully Stormkast and Østerby had none and pushed to their feet. God, Piper thought as she looked at them, they both must practice those unimpressed stares in the mirror for hours.

  “Great,” she said. “As I mentioned, our gear is out in the shipping hangar. I’ll meet you in twenty and we’ll go from there. Consider yourselves dismissed.”

  After a couple of mock salutes, Østerby and Stormkast lumbered out of the conference room.

  Piper scowled. She seriously didn’t like anyone playing loose with the act of saluting, least of all a couple of knuckle-shufflers who according to their files never served a day in their lives and thought they were something close to hard. She waited until the two were long gone before she shut down the projected image of Kardashev 7-A and unscrewed a bottle of water.

  Earlier, in her quarters and after her workout with that woman who’d been involved with Roscoe’s pal, Piper reviewed her orders from The Chimeric Circle. Before her departure her contacts regrettably informed her that efforts were still under way to extract payment from Roscoe’s accounts back home, and while they believed his liquidation would likely be a go, they were still giving Roscoe the benefit of the doubt. As the last Mandelbrot skip transport was leaving, time was of the essence, unfortuna
tely, and there was no way to verify their collection efforts had been successful before Piper was prepped and entered her skip stasis. The crux of it was, once the station was repurposed it was destined for a planetoid, not planned for parasol study, and thus Piper would have no further cover job work. Making the long trip would be a real disappointment if The CC called off the hit on Roscoe. Piper agreed to both her assignments only because waxing Roscoe would get her and her fiancé on a stable financial footing.

  The Chimeric Circle explained that final approval for taking out Roscoe would be imbedded in a prepackaged paid-for political advertisement that Piper could review on her personal workstation. While not exactly a priority, to keep workers happy and reasonably up to date, the latest media and distractive amusements were the last things to be loaded into a transport’s mainframes, Piper’s included. At first she found the chosen mode of confirming the kill order a tad cornball, but then she warmed to The CC’s twisted, secretive logic. Way out in space no one really paid any attention to the prepackaged marketing drivel bombarding them from home, let alone political ads. With the six-month skip out, by the time any media was consumed the pressing issues of the day back home were outdated anyway. And, honestly, did people’s votes even count anymore? No matter. The CC instructed Piper to look for nuanced facial fluctuations in the political ads’ subjects to detect the go/cancel message, raging histrionics by a candidate in particular. The more animated the movements the more likely there would be an imbedded message. It was a pain in the neck sifting through all the ads, but a flashy advertisement from the European Confederacy’s lunar bases appeared promising. Using her own contraband processing chit and linking a synchronous cipher-translator to the ad’s elaborate backend code, Piper scanned the long cascades until she noticed a useless hitch. Converted, the message read:

  >target dismissal verified<

  Hello, gondola ceremony and happy honeymoon.

  Piper wished she could share the good news with her fiancé, but for now she simply had to slog along with her cover work until she arranged for Roscoe’s death and grabbed a skip transport back. Oh, well. After having her ass handed to her day after day back on Earth in the PAL, she reminded herself to consider the mechanics of her job a restful blessing. With the contract killing compensation coupled with the pay for her parasol work, it looked like her new life with her future husband was going to commence in splendid fashion.

  After gathering her paperwork, Piper took a moment and fished out her necklace. She looked at her ring and considered stroking the triskelion amulet to activate the message imbedded by her fiancé. Part of the gift was a required meaningful exchange. If she activated the message, the memory inside the amulet would be erased, and as agreed she would eventually fill the memory with her own love note and hand it back to her lover for him to wear. It was trite and nostalgic, and she wasn’t ready to come up with something to say. But with Roscoe’s eradication a go, Piper felt a full-color thermal holographic of her fiancé would give her some focus.

  She tweaked the amulet and a cone of soft light glimmered out from the triskelion designs. Her fiancé spoke softly, with that husky growl she adored.

  “Hey, baby… this is for you. Yeah, I know it’s going to be tough out there being apart, but you’ve been through worse, right? Anyway, I’m counting the minutes, hours, and days until your return. Go get ’em and all my love, always.”

  A hokey message, but still it made her smile. Piper tucked the necklace back under her collar and with a spring in her step she headed off to the shipping hangar to rendezvous with Østerby and Stormkast.

  12. JAUNTIN’ JIMMY

  Jostling to and fro in the frigid oxygen-enriched cockpit, Jimmy shifted gears on the crawler and listened to the toothy hum of the vehicle’s tracks beneath the scooped bench.

  Back at ASOCC’s equipment stores, things had gone much easier than he’d anticipated. Turned out no one said boo about him packing the extra-large long drill, or even asked why he was taking one of the crawlers parked outside ASOCC instead of catching one of the usual surface trams. Commonly, surface trams delivered specialists to their designated work areas, and Jimmy attributed the lack of concern to either general boredom or to crashing the gate at a party. Act like you know what you’re doing and before you know it you’re as good as, well, gold.

  Altogether the bumpy trip out to the Kappa Quadrant from base chewed up about a half hour. Navigating the augered directional beacons and pre-carved ruts, Jimmy kept the vehicle’s speed swift and steady, and his stomach was in knots. He thought about the work ahead. The commitment to stealing the gold was surreally realer than real now and there was no turning back.

  You can do this.

  Glancing at his helmet and rucksack on the bench next to him, Jimmy thought about what his vitals were reading back at ASOCC. There hadn’t been a word from Leela yet, which was good, so he took a few deep, purgative breaths and concentrated on driving.

  He took a slight bend behind a jagged, pyramidal butte and out onto a low plain, and soon the talus-strewn opening of shaft site Fifty-Seven appeared in the crawler’s forward headlamps.

  Under a trio of expendable tower lights, a large anchored sandwich-board marker stood with five-seven on each of its opposing faces. Parking close to the trio of towers and marker, Jimmy engaged the stability thrusters and neutralized the crawler’s controls.

  To save on oxygen and extended battery stores and to avoid accidents, it was standard practice to equalize both the cockpit and the rear compartments on the crawler simultaneously. The crawler was a relatively new model and Jimmy hadn’t piloted any crawler in some time, so he pulled a binder from beneath the bench and flipped through the rest of the proper procedures. In minutes everything looked good, so he ran additional checks on his spacesuit and helmet. There were automated safeguards for everything, but edgy as he was he knew even a minor slip-up and he could kiss his ass goodbye. The squashing, merciless threat of space and a few thousand swings in temperature necessitated caution. When all his readings appeared good, Jimmy secured his helmet and glanced at the synced readout on the inside of his visor. Suit stores and auxiliary life processors gave him an immutable exposure window of fifteen hours before he’d have to return to the crawler in order to restock.

  Jimmy gripped the scrambler in one glove and finished flicking a series of switches on the forward console with the other. There was a barely audible hum before equalization was confirmed with a green light and a ping.

  After climbing out the crawler’s cockpit, he sealed an outside lever counterclockwise on the forward hatch and bounced around back to retrieve the long drill from the rear compartment. When he released the lock and opened the hatch, other than the long drill’s case the insides of the aft compartment contained two angled banquettes above which a host of supplies were stored in wall-secured cages. He removed the long drill from its case, shoveled out the memory foam, and laid the long drill on top of the foam to keep it secured. Being in marginal gravity, it was always a nuisance to keep things from floating off. After hauling out the emptied case, Jimmy retrieved a satchel full of demolition inlays from one of the wall-secured cages. Minutes later he descended into the tenebrous maw of Fifty-Seven and activated his suit lights.

  Inside the shaft, affixing the inlays from the top areas down a hundred and seventy meters to where the gold pocket waited was the call, because if Leela thought something seemed off and insisted on sending out someone else to see what he was doing, his less than honorable intentions wouldn’t be immediately evident. Jimmy’s fear, though, was if someone did get sent out and checked the rear compartment on the crawler first and found the drill without its case, they might call him out on it. He guessed if that happened he’d have to come up with some excuse.

  Navigating his way down to a ledge near where he’d found the pocket, Jimmy secured the large case to an outcropping with two heavy straps and proceeded to slowly hand-over-hand his way back up the shaft. He was well into setting his s
econd demolition inlay up near the shaft opening when the comm link inside his helmet crackled.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  Oh boy… here we go.

  In his mind’s eye he pictured Leela’s little ears growing hot. With her passing on the sugar and going straight for the salt Jimmy assumed there wasn’t anyone else on duty yet back at ASOCC.

  “This is Specialist Vik, on-site in Fifty-Seven, ASOCC.”

  “No shit, doofus. Please clarify why you’ve taken a crawler unauthorized, over.”

  Jimmy paused. He’d thought about this. He’d imagined what he would say, how he would say it, what buttons he could push with Leela, all in an effort to make sure what he was doing appeared truly reasonable. Not overly partial to lying, Jimmy was, however, a decent card player and fairly skilled at the bluff. Keep it short and sweet, he told himself. Short and sweet, but not too sweet. Project poise and keep your cool. Be professional.

  “ASOCC, Specialist Vik has given the timeline discussed earlier with management some thought. At present demolition inlays are being attached in reverse sequence.”

  Leela responded tersely. “I repeat, crawler use was not authorized.”

  “Can I at least explain?”

  “Oh, this should be a pip.”

  “The crawler was necessary to pack a long drill. The screwbolts that were finicky before are now holding, over.”

  “Say again. Did you just say you took a long drill too?”

  “The flaking,” Jimmy clarified. “I thought a long drill could free up the troublesome layers I told you about, and it’s working. I’m positive I can finish up the inlays with an extended shift, back-to-back protocol. The way things are going it might not even take that long. How’s that for a tidy completion forecast?”