Off Rock
Page 12
Jock looked over his shoulder and noted the IV hung around Miss Jupiter had wilted. After carefully removing the catheter needle, he swabbed the puncture in his arm with a couple of crumpled tissues. Then he traipsed to his bathroom, squirted some cologne on his face and armpits, and got dressed.
Bah, it could be all conjecture at this point anyway, Jock thought. The gold wasn’t actually secured and in hand just yet.
Perhaps Leela Pendergast had already put the scrap on things.
14. SCRAMBLIN’ RAMBLIN’
As he completed the seventh demolition inlay, the scrambler on Jimmy’s spacesuit hummed. After holstering his portable drill and unhooking the scrambler from his waist, Jimmy stared at a flashing green prompt on the device’s oval screen.
: status?
Okay, Jimmy thought. Jock had said to keep things brief, but he hadn’t specified whether they should use standard operative responses or Q-codes, so how was he supposed to reply? Jock was insistent no one would pick up on the sub-space frequency, yet at the same time Jimmy didn’t want to give anything away. He poked in a message and then tapped the SEND key.
: all +.
Jock responded quickly.
: xclnt.
Jimmy killed the link, secured the scrambler back to his belt, and began attaching the next demolition inlay. Since smoothing things over with Leela it’d been slow going down the shaft, so to pass the time he tried picturing his new life back home with a wide-open future. Lots and lots of teasing images. Jimmy saw himself slicing long laps in that condo pool near the monomictic shores of Lake Titicaca and wading out at the shallow end to bake in the morning sun like a fat reptile. He pictured unhassled idle time, enjoying all those things he’d never gotten around to—buying nicer clothes, actual art, and stuff he never could afford. Strangely, though, after a while Leela kept appearing in Jimmy’s reveries. Damn, if all this ended up with him being caught, what would Leela even say? There was no question she would be disappointed in him and pissed off. Seismic eruptions would have more restraint. He held out a modicum of hope that if he were arrested, Leela would be terrified of what would happen to him. The terrors of medical experiments and incarceration, such things weighed against her disillusionment and heartache felt trivial somehow. Yeah, he and Leela weren’t together anymore, but both of Jimmy’s parents were dead. Despite her agitations, he recognized that deep down Leela still cared for him. He had to admit he too still had unresolved feelings for Leela. Maybe letting her go had been a mistake. If he was caught, letting her down would likely be the hardest thing Jimmy would have to bear.
Hours before, when Jock had asked him if Leela was in on the gold situation, the suggestion had seemed preposterous, but now it had Jimmy wondering. Was it so hard to picture? No, Leela didn’t have a dishonest bone in her body. She was a straight shooter. A pure gem and one of the good ones, or so many said. Still, it was amusing to think about. While her pedantic qualities could drive just about anyone up a fucking wall, Leela’s dogged devotion to fussy detail would have made her a terrific partner—a perfect Bonnie to Jimmy’s Clyde.
People always took smug satisfaction in their touted principles, but in Jimmy’s mind all that always seemed like a bunch of hooey. True, maybe he was being cynical, but anybody with a lick of sense knew the game was rigged. Go ahead, lay a sack of potential millions on a table and see just how long the so-called lofty morals held out.
As promised, Jimmy kept up with all his ASOCC hourly check-ins. Working faster than he normally would he also made sure to keep an eye on his exertions, but Leela didn’t mention anything out of the ordinary so he figured that was something. Finally, he finished all the required inlays and reached the outcropping near the gold pocket. Resting next to the case, Jimmy let his spacesuit’s wicking mechanisms siphon off his accrued sweat as he thumbed out another message to Jock on the scrambler.
: @honeypot.
Jock replied a few seconds later, a series of colons and right parentheses—five smiley faces all in a row.
Man, Jimmy thought.
What a dork.
15. SOME BLACK-FEATHERED NEWS
Several hours later in ASOCC, Leela was almost through her and all of Dickerson’s unfinished tasks when the Azoick envoy aboard the Adamant requested a Priority B conference. Nearly everyone of the management team getting ready to knock off their work cycles simultaneously let out long groans.
Really? A Priority B conference?
This had better be good.
They all sat back down at their consoles as the message from the Adamant appeared on their screens. A man of Persian descent and somewhat obvious epicene flair stepped into the live feed and as closed translations slid beneath his visage, he spoke cheerfully.
[AZOICK VESSEL ADAMANT - 67230]
[REF. PB CONF. – SHALAD, Y. - 3.23.2778GMT]
[-START MESSAGE-]
“Kardashev 7-A station, this is Azoick envoy Yaser Shalad, and I hope this communication finds you well.
[BREAK]
As you know, not long ago per OST the Adamant secured its operative orbit. While this is exceptionally good news that we are at last ready for final cargo transfers, the captain of the Adamant has conveyed to me a matter of some note.”
[BREAK]
“Shortly after dropping out of our skip and crossing into your sector, the Adamant’s sensors detected a distress signal during its routine negative-parabolic trajectory sweeps of the skip corridor. Signal origin has been confirmed—an unmanned expeditionary vessel of the Omega Class identified as the De Silento, operated by Enlai Universal, weighing in at an estimated seventy-one metric tons. A long-range image capture of the De Silento is attached to this message, along with a recording of the signal, so please open both of these files for review now.”
[BREAK]
“The De Silento’s distress signal does not specify the nature of its current problem. However, given the less than solicitous relations between our two competitive companies and the fact that the De Silento is unmanned, it is my responsibility as the Azoick envoy to inform you that this situation is not a matter of concern.”
[BREAK]
“In due course, perhaps our company’s solicitors will request further information from Enlai Universal vis-à-vis possible assistance and/or future salvage once the Adamant makes its skip back, but, to be candid, given the contested claim realignments in the sector, coupled with Enlai Universal’s failed proxy fight with our company three years ago, the distressed Omega-Class’s troubles should be considered our gain. A providential black swan, so to speak.”
[BREAK]
“This concludes this message. On behalf of Azoick, the captain and the crew of the Adamant, congratulations on completing your extended mission to Kardashev 7-A.”
[AZOICK VESSEL ADAMANT - 67230]
[REF. PB CONF. SHALAD, Y. 3.23.2778GMT
[END MESSAGE-]
With the swipe of a finger, Leela moved the contents of the dispatch and the attached files to her pending screen and enlarged and scoured the long-range image capture. On initial perusal, the limpet-textured fuselage of the De Silento appeared normal, so Leela accessed secondary images of similar Omega-Class craft and laid these images over the LRIC. Funny how the skills you learned playing concentration games as a child never failed to come in handy later in life. One of these things is not like the other. After flopping the LRIC ninety degrees and comparing it against the specs of two nearly identical Omega-Class vessels, the nature of the problem became apparent. A whole propulsion booster on the De Silento’s starboard side appeared to be missing, with visible spavined scarring near its stern. It might be a fixable problem, but Leela understood that without staff aboard to address the issue the De Silento was pretty much screwed.
Before closing the files, she logged her analysis and included some additional observations for the record. Pushing back in her chair, she counted down from ten, waiting on the ever-predictable, quasi-allegiant grousing from her ASOCC colleagues.
Someone else chimed in. “Hey, what’s a black swan anyway?”
Leela sighed. “In fiscal jargon, black swans describe measurable pluses coming out of perceived significant negatives. Most militaries use the term to describe an extremely unlikely event.”
This was met with lots of well-impressed oohs and ahhs, and then a moment later someone else let fly some pejorative sarcasm. “Hey now, check out the smarty pants. Black quackery aside, what I want to know is: is this really the best LRIC the Adamant can give us? Shit, that Omega-Class looks pretty buttoned-up to me.”
“Enlarge the image and flop it ninety degrees,” Leela said.
“What?”
“I said flop it ninety degrees and bump up res to four hundred percent. Crosscheck the LRIC against available Omega-Class specs and then do a pull back and overlay comparison. Oh, hell, I’ll just forward the analysis.”
Leela waited for her chronically obtuse colleagues to catch up and when they did she heard delighted snickers.
“Yeah,” she explained, “right there. Looks like a whole propulsion booster is gone. There must’ve been an explosion or something before it dropped out of their skip. Systems defaults probably instigated a complete shutdown.”
Leela rose and consulted with the rest of the team in ASOCC. After some speculation on what might have happened with the De Silento, the consensus was that Enlai Universal had a major problem on their hands, but so what? It wasn’t theirs. If the Azoick envoy elected to do a Priority B conference and was dropping smack about black swans, then too bad for Enlai Universal. An all too common story. You could have the best technology at your beck and call, but it never negated the fact that in deep space you were on your own. So when something went wrong, it usually happened spectacularly. After some more discussion it was agreed that since Leela had identified the problem she ought to be the one to draft a bulletin for the rest of the personnel on station. In all likelihood the bulletin would be ignored, but Leela acquiesced to the task only because her mind was elsewhere.
16. JOCK ON THE CLOCK
Ensconced in his crescent-shaped console, itself encysted in a tall, thick-glassed platform kiosk at the hub of the shipping hangar, Jock Roscoe gave off the overall impression of an ascetic stylite. Camouflaged behind the eerie, bluish aquarium-like glow of projected data screens, he surreptitiously glanced at Jimmy’s message on the buzzing scrambler resting to his right thigh.
: 0.10 complete.
Ah-ha. It looked like Jimmy was ten percent of the way done with the extraction. It was fantastic news and immediately Jock’s thoughts tracked back to his outstanding issues with The Chimeric Circle.
Those animals, them and their unappeasable reach. Jock wondered if he hadn’t been such a dipstick, would he still be doing all this?
The source of Jock’s woes with The CC had been a sure thing that turned out to be anything but. A football club wager with odds locked in at fifty-to-one. Jock had secured inside information that a goaltender on one of the clubs was looking to throw the match because he had foolishly made a bargain to cover an immense medical bill. While football club professionals were outrageously salaried, like a Trojan horse a crippling virus had afflicted the goaltender’s extended family back in his birthplace of Cabo Verde. The virus was nearly impossible to cure (not without evacuation to premier medical care facilities) and, as was typical of someone coming from impoverished means, the goaltender hadn’t been careful with his compensations or his marital fidelities (six divorces in eight years). The goaltender was desperate. The governing bodies of the Greater Africa Alliance, European Confederacy, and elsewhere had blockaded the small island to ensure the contagion was contained, so on top of expensive medical treatment the goaltender needed to hire a team of mercenaries to extricate his family, and the staggering costs had him in a bind.
Confident that the fix was in, Jock leveraged nearly three-quarters of his savings on the wager. However, in the fury of play the goaltender’s muscle memory spoiled everything. As the final seconds of the match ticked down, he blocked a freakish kick by the opposing team and that was, as they say, that. Jock couldn’t have cared less when later he heard the goaltender had committed suicide by hanging himself from a streetlamp outside the stadium. The Chimeric Circle had Jock dead to rights, and they expected him to pay up.
So now, even if The CC purportedly did have someone on station keeping tabs on him, with things so far going according to plan Jock believed it was nearly auf Wiedersehen and sayonara to all his troubles.
Jock typed in his approval of Jimmy’s update and then hit SEND.
Now it was time for a little schedule tweaking on Jock’s end.
Using Zaafer’s Azoick identification number and password, Jock immediately accessed the timetables for surface crawler maintenance and deliberated what exactly, if any future scrutinizing came to pass, would appear routine. Jock supposed he could move up a seal inspection on the crawler Jimmy took, as seal inspections on crawlers happened all the time. As he modified the timetable and appropriate data, Jock made certain to pepper in some of Zaafer’s painfully repentant syntax and some bad spelling to make things look good.
MAINTENANCE AMMENDMENT: Plenty complant w/Crawler 4’s forward operationl seels. Regret overhaul of seels recomended. Est. labor time ½ hr., befor vehickle reuse. Deeply sorry for trouble. Daavi Z.- 3.23.2778GMT
Too bad Jock couldn’t work a few more “sorrys” in there.
As it was hashed out, once Jimmy returned the crawler to base he’d drive it right into the maintenance area for the final transfer of the gold in the drill case. By the time Jimmy completed his back-to-back, the Adamant would be locked into one of the SPO’s greater orbital patterns and most of the tenders would have already descended to the shipping hangar’s armadillo bays. Once the tenders were docked and loading had commenced, Jock would wait an appropriate amount of time and then implement the diversion.
Zaafer could take it from there.
17. WHAT NOW, NOW WHAT?
Strenuous hours later, Jimmy pulled the drill case inside, yanked the crawler’s aft hatch closed, and engaged the rear compartment’s atmospheric seals. After sliding sideways onto one of the two padded banquettes, he looked upward, caught his breath, and waited for the rear compartment to pressurize. When the whirling aerosol blast of decontamination vapors abated, an indicator light opposite him finally switched from red “thumbs down” pictogram to green “thumbs up” with a sprightly C-sharp note.
Jimmy removed his helmet and gloves and threw them to the floor with disgust. Squeezing his temples with the heels of his hands, he screamed until his lungs burned.
“This is soooooo fuuuuuucked!”
Within the first half hour of his cutting into the shaft pocket, the larger promise of a significant gold seam proved to be a bust. At first Jimmy thought he’d made an error and speculated that maybe he wasn’t cutting at the correct angle or wasn’t even at the proper spot. There was limited visibility below the surface and, yes, if he was disorientated it wouldn’t be the first time, but he double-checked his orientation and depth. There was no question he was in the right place and for that first few minutes he’d extracted hunks of the gold out of the shaft wall as easily as if he was drawing out supple pats of butter. But then nothing.
Of course, hitting a void in a mineral deposit wasn’t all that uncommon. After all, moons and SPOs weren’t some neatly layered tub of Neapolitan ice cream. Disturbingly, though, the more Jimmy pruned away at the surrounding rock the more the void grew. And soon he was cutting into absolute zilch.
Jimmy wanted to scream, but with Leela keeping an eye on him he knew he couldn’t. Holy hell, how could he have misestimated the size and depth of the pocket? Did he simply imagine it altogether? Bearing down, he cut deeper for another hour until the muscles in his arms stung, but no matter what
he tried, no matter how much loose rock Jimmy pulled away or even how much he increased the laser cutter’s power, the fact was undeniable. He was unequivocally and majestically boned.
No wonder the trace scans had missed the shallow anomaly.
Oh man…
Jimmy felt like a world-class boob. So much for his grand plans to check out of the mining life, so much for the Cordillera Real grottos and kicking it poolside with the lovely señoritas along the filtered, lapping shores of Lake Titicaca. Brother, kiss all that goodbye.
Prudently, Jimmy had not directly communicated the devastating developments back to Jock at base. Holstering the laser cutter instead, he’d quickly examined the small amount of gold he’d already placed inside the anchored drill case. All in all, an eyeball estimate of what he’d extracted if you trimmed the excess clinging rock and adjusted for weight was maybe three and a half rough kilos at the most. Halved down the middle as agreed and at estimated market evaluation it was still a respectable score, but it certainly wasn’t anyone’s idea of a fortune. Well, maybe a small fortune for one of them. Before Jimmy told him there might be fifty kilos’ worth in the shaft, Jock was fairly put out by the consequences of a capital one corporate offense, so he wondered if Jock would be down for all this chicanery if the payday was whittled down to a ridiculous nub. Not likely. He had his debts to The Chimeric Circle to consider.
Jimmy then speculated on Jock’s earlier evasiveness regarding which armadillo bay was going to be used, his failure to mention Zaafer, and the supposed scribbled-down coordinates in Hong Kong. Between their first discussion and when he’d picked up the scrambler, his partner’s bearing had shifted significantly, so vein bust notwithstanding, Jimmy started to wonder if Jock was already hustling him. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise him in the least that he was being bamboozled. He’d laid a lot of foolish faith on the line with Jock.