Off Rock

by Kieran Shea

  Ladies first… oh sure.

  It was time for ass-show.

  Piper took each rung slowly, and like a weasel prowling after a savory pot roast, Jock trailed behind her. It was a climb of nearly ten meters and when Piper reached an oval hatch with a crank arm she turned her head and studied a rectangular sign affixed to the duct’s wall.

  ASOCC – OBSERVATIONAL CHAMBER

  (Capacity 2–4 persons)

  Shield retraction duration 0:20 min, max. Exposure longer than 0:20 min can result in significant Azoick property damage and possible employee injury.

  “Use that crank,” Jock called up.

  “Is the bubble equalized?”

  “Of course. Just turn that handle counterclockwise and the hatch in front of you will pop free.”

  Piper did as Jock instructed and the oval hatch opened with a gentle, mechanized click. She pushed upward with one hand and then crawled inside next to the levered-open hatch. Getting to her feet, Piper saw that the observational bubble was small, no bigger than a round walk-in closet, and suffused with orange safety lighting. There was an operational panel on a supportive cambering beam. Looking up, she perceived a thick metallic plate covering a canopy of dense pressurized glass in two halves. The supportive cambering beam cut straight down the middle of the bubble canopy.

  Jock pushed the portable CPU across the floor and pulled himself inside the chamber. Catching his breath, he gestured to the operational panel and then stood. “They keep the shields on when this little gem isn’t in use,” he explained.

  Piper rubbed her hands together and flexed her fingers. “Kind of frigid up here, don’t you think?”

  “Sensors take a moment or two to warm up. Just turn that knob there on the left and the heat will adjust. You’ll see.”

  Piper did as Jock suggested and a whirring hum commenced as the shields retracted like the jaws of a great whale. The orange safety lighting switched to a bright circumference illumination with just enough strength to permit a view outside. Piper took in the incalculable frogspawn of stars. A welcome blow of warming air flowed up from vents in the floor and fluttered her blonde locks.

  “Cosmic,” Piper said.

  “See? Nice and quiet. And private as all get out too.”

  Not looking down, Piper thought about the duct and the ladder the two of them had just climbed. The levered-open oval entry was under a meter wide and might end up being a little fiddly, but the drop to the deck below seemed like just the ticket. People fall all the time in the workplace, and any post-mortem analysis would show that Jock was completely sauced, so now was as good a time as any. Moving across the chamber and stepping behind him, Piper crossed and wrapped her arms around his neck. It took a split second for Jock to realize the gravity of the prehensile maneuver.

  “What are you doing?”

  Piper locked off her arms and squeezed. “Greetings from The Chimeric Circle, cheesedick.”

  Jock clawed at her forearms. He tried reaching behind him to grab hold of her hair, but Piper leaned back and buried a knee in his spine. Jock convulsed, his face darkening with constricted blood.

  “HhlgkIcccanrrrncannnn—”

  “Can’t breathe? Well gee, that’s the entire point, isn’t it?”

  Paper-thin rattling. “Noocannpaayouuiiivvvffgggggot—”

  “You’ve got what?”

  “Ggggggoolmppff…”

  Piper eased up slightly. “Last words, deadbeat. Make it count.”

  “GOLD!”

  Piper paused.

  What the hell? Did he just say what I think he said?

  Did he say gold?

  No, it was some kind of a trick. Piper had seen plenty of desperation with enemy prisoners during her time in the PAL, and any lowlife under lethal duress was likely to say anything. One time she saw an old woman with half the skin flayed from her legs offer up her grandsons to be castrated if Piper and her squad of engineers would just stop torturing her. She’d seen battle-hardened extremists wilt like beaten wheat during enhanced interrogations, and she once watched a hardcore cleric forswear his superstitions to avoid being set on fire. But gold—that was another cup of soup altogether. After all, Kardashev 7-A was a mining operation. What if the wiggling sack of shit wasn’t feeding her a line? Operating at a loss, The CC would be thrilled to recover any sort of financial windfall. And if what Roscoe was saying was true, The CC might even elect to increase Piper’s liquidation bonus. Then again, what if she got a hold of this purported gold and The CC never knew anything about it? Big risk, true, and if The Chimeric Circle found out, she’d probably find herself targeted for erasure as well. The thing was, Piper was a subcontractor. Azoick had no jurisdiction over her team or their parasol equipment. If the gold Roscoe was talking about was even a minor amount, would it be so hard to disguise it with the rest of their parasol gear? It was worth considering either way. Piper elected to let the unctuous twerp speak.

  “What gold?” she demanded.

  Jock thrashed. Breaking her hold on him and spinning him around, Piper threw him into the dome’s glass siege-engine style—POCK!—and Jock slithered to the floor in a heap. Grabbing him by the collar of his dingy jumper, she smashed his face into the glass three times until his upper lip split and his teeth cracked. Jock’s eye pinwheeled, and Piper threw him down on his back. Dropping onto his chest, she beat his skull against the deck.

  “I! Asked! You! A! Question! What! Gold?!”

  Battered and bewildered, Jock attempted to throw a mediocre cross, but Piper knocked his arm away easily. She banged his head on the deck twice more and then, reaching down between his legs, she gripped his privates. Jock shrieked, and Piper clamped a palm over his ruined mouth to quell him.

  “Scream again and I swear I will squash this infected fruit of yours into paste.”

  “Mmmph!”

  Piper removed her hand.

  “Please!” Jock gibbered and drooled. “I’ll pay you! I’ll pay, I’ll pay, I’ll pay!”

  “Forget about what you owe The CC, a-hole. Tell me about the gold.”

  Lips quivering, Jock turned his head and spewed up a gluey sluice of gin-reeking barf. Specks of detached teeth plinked onto the deck.

  “You have three seconds to reply, Roscoe. One… two—”

  “Please!” Jock cried. “Jsssststop, all right? There’s… there’s this load I’m getting off rock. It’s… it’s on one of the tenders. No one, nobody knows about it.”

  “What do you mean nobody knows about it?”

  “Azoick. It’s totally off the books. All of it, it’s headed back to Earth. Secured transit in a quarantine hold. Nobody—God—nobody knows!”

  “How much?”

  “F-f-fifty…”

  “Fifty what? Fifty grams?”

  “No, fifty kilos!”

  No way.

  “Bullshit,” Piper hissed. “Where did a scumbucket like you get his paws on fifty kilos of gold? You’re no bit-head.”

  “Somebody else found it. They needed me and my connections to move it.”

  “I thought you just said nobody knows. Who found it?”

  “Jimmy. Jimmy Vik.”

  Leela’s ex-boyfriend in the sweet black leathers.

  Man, Piper thought, talk about your fucking serendipity.

  Despite the repellent stench of his puke, she leaned closer to Jock’s face. “Does Vik know where the gold is headed?”

  “Not exactly. Jimmy thinks it’s headed for the skyport in Hong Kong, but I had the destination on the tender’s quarantine hold altered. And I told him the tender was docked in Armadillo Bay H. It’s not.”

  “So you lied to him,” Piper said as she squeezed his testicles tighter, “which makes me think you’re not above lying to me.”

  “Gah! I bloody well am not! The CC, you—you all can fuckin’ have it! You can have everything! I swear, just let go of me!”

  Piper let go of his crotch and wrapped both of her hands around his throat. “Which armadillo bay,
then? Where’s the gold really going? What are the coordinates?”

  “Whaaa?”

  Piper dug her thumbs into his windpipe. “Tender, armadillo bay, coordinates…”

  “Uglkkmhpp—”

  A few more head pounds.

  Gurgling, Jock made one last effort to wrestle out from beneath her, so Piper jacked three quick jabs into his ruined face. Instantly, she realized that her punching him was a bad move as she’d put a little too much mustard into it. Jock slackened beneath her like a dead eel.

  Piper wrung his neck. “Answer me, damn it!”

  Jock’s eyes rolled white.

  40. A CHANGE OF PLANS

  Oh fiddly-fucking-sticks, Piper thought.

  After slapping Jock’s cheeks several times to rouse him from his stupor, she discovered it was no use. The noxious turd was knocked cold and the intel on the gold was now inaccessible.

  Piper sat back on Jock’s legs and took a few calming breaths. She was debating what to do next when a rapid series of sparks lit up the observational bubble’s canopy.

  She looked up to locate the source, but the scintillating streaks of phosphorescence that had drawn her interest vanished in the blackness above. Huh. It could have been anything, one of a thousand different stellar phenomena. What really mattered right now was the gold, and who knew when Roscoe was going to come around. He was effectively useless to her now.

  Getting up and grabbing his ankles, Piper fed Jock head-first through the open hatch. Without catching any of the rungs in the access duct, his body dropped like a side of beef and his skull met the deck below with a squishy crack.

  Piper grabbed her portable CPU. She hit the switch on the cambering beam to close the canopy metal shields and started climbing down.

  41. PLAN B—JIMMY

  Jimmy knew he would never survive prison.

  Good ol’ Donnie couldn’t.

  Good ol’ Donnie got his throat slit on his first day inside, and that was after medical experiments.

  What chance did Jimmy have?

  None at all.

  Since technically he was no longer an Azoick employee, Jimmy speculated that the zeal with which he would be prosecuted for the theft of the gold would be far, far worse than he could have possibly imagined now that Leela was onto him. With her destroying the gold sample he’d shown her, he didn’t know exactly how she sussed it all out, but she was as smart as they came and his big idea to tug on her tail had totally backfired. Now the tiny lioness, in all her persnickety glory, was licking her foam-flecked chops.

  He had to get his rucksack out of his strongbox and get rid of the gold.

  Like, pronto.

  Sprinting toward ASOCC, Jimmy threw a quick look over his shoulder. While he couldn’t see her, he could tell by the rapid pounding of feet behind him that Leela was no more than two hundred meters back.

  Leela shouted, “Jimmy, wait!”

  Man alive, that girl could run.

  Jimmy hung a left and two corridors up quickly made another right. He was now in the residential spider. If he could just put some distance between himself and Leela, maybe he could lose her between decks and lock her off. Jimmy’s mind ran through his options. He could still hear Leela gaining on him and for a brief second he hoped she was assuming he was having some kind of nervous breakdown. Workers lost their mental strings all the time on mining operations, and now he was what? Trying to run and hide like a little boy caught up and overwhelmed by his disgrace? It seemed plausible. Would assuming she thought he’d lost his marbles be all that far of a stretch? No, Jimmy couldn’t chance it. He had to get to his strongbox and chuck the gold into the fragmite incinerators. New life be damned.

  He took a bypass ladder up.

  Rung! Rung! Rung!

  Rung! Rung! Rung! Rung! Rung! Rung!

  Rolling out of the bypass onto deck three, Jimmy spied the shores of deliverance in the form of an over-saddled automated hover bin idling nearby. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Pushing the hover bin toward the bypass ladder access, he killed its power switch and with a flat thump the bin dropped to the deck right above the bypass opening. Large, rectangular, and immobile, the bin effectively trapped Leela like a mouse corked off in a pipe.

  Jimmy heard Leela’s muffled cries and pounds beneath the AHB, but there was no time for reconciliation or reassessment and an unavoidable whirlwind of regrets swirled through him as he ran, leapt, and cut through the station’s passages. He felt like such a failure. He should have come clean on the gold vein being a bust. True, he’d his doubts about that sneaky son of a bitch Jock, but unwisely Jimmy had thought he could finagle his own deception or call Jock on it after he saw Zaafer load the drill case dupe onto the tender in Armadillo Bay X. Shit, he should have never dreamed he could get away with something like this or even solicited a partnership with Jock in the first place. And now, not only had he gotten himself fired, not only had he deliberately hurt the only person who actually cared about him, but now Jimmy had an enormous three and a half kilo problem on his hands to get rid of.

  Reaching the peripheral corridors of ASOCC, he charged through the central locker room and took a bisecting, diagonal passage that cut through the equipment stores out to the airlock vestibules. The third marked vestibule was connected to the Adamant’s transfer module parked on the pad. Working the controls, Jimmy released the secured airlock and entered the attached gangway that linked to the module. The portal was strafed with fringe lights like an illusion tunnel, and Jimmy scrambled his way up the gangway. He released the lever on the linking airlock hatch at the far end and just inside the module, right behind the cockpit and extra passenger seats, there was a caged locker.

  Jimmy threw two latches, slid his strongbox out, and punched in his ten-digit code.

  Then, hoisting his rucksack over one shoulder, he turned around and hauled ass.

  He started parsing out the fastest way to reach the fragmite incinerators to get rid of the gold without running into Leela. He was nearly clear of ASOCC and passing the caged ladder that led to the observational bubble when a crunching, wet thud made him stop. Just off to his right, like a lopsided doll, was Jock Roscoe. Upside down, Jock’s head was split open and his neck was bent at a gruesome, fatal angle. Punched free from its socket, one of his lifeless eyes ogled Jimmy like a novelty gumball, and he scarcely had a moment to process the situation when Piper Kollár dropped from the laddered duct carrying a portable CPU.

  “Oh, what a pleasant surprise,” said Piper. “Just the man I was looking for.”

  42. THE CORKED MOUSE

  Leela pounded on the underside of the AHB.

  “Jimmy? Listen to me, we can fix this.”

  No response.

  “Jimmy, can you hear me?”

  More pounds and slaps.

  “Jimmy, I promise. Nothing will happen to you, okay? Just move this thing and we’ll sort everything out, I swear. I know this is not you. This all has to be some mistake. I can help you, Jimmy, and I want to, so just move this thing out of the way so we can talk.”

  Still no response.

  “GODDAMN YOU, JIMMY!”

  43. A LITTLE CHAT

  Piper seized one of Jimmy’s arms brusquely. “We need to talk.”

  Jimmy stared at Jock’s smashed skull and then back at Piper.

  “Holyshhhhh—”

  Piper jerked him forward. “Oh, him,” she said dismissively. “Forget that loser. He’s no longer part of the big picture. You, on the other hand, handsome, totally are. You see, I’m all about the shining dawn at this point. Atomic number seventy-nine and the aurum to be precise.”

  “The what?”

  “The gold.”

  Jimmy tried to pull away. “You’re joking.”

  “Mmm, don’t think so.”

  “What gold?”

  Piper pinched Jimmy’s elbow and his whole arm twanged as she crushed a cluster of nerves. “I’m former Pan-American Legion, meathead. If I wanted to, do you know how many way
s I could kill you right now?”

  “Listen,” Jimmy said quickly, “I haven’t the vaguest idea of what you’re talking about.”

  Piper hurled him into the wall and backhanded his face with the CPU. She hit him with the device twice more, once from the left and once from the right. Dropping the CPU before he could recover, Piper grabbed Jimmy’s leathers and headbutted his nose three times in quick succession. The consecutive blasts were all-consuming, like someone had repeatedly jabbed a garden spade into the center of Jimmy’s face. Blood and snot poured from his nostrils. Piper leapt back into a ready stance as Jimmy bent over and lowered his rucksack.

  “Look,” she said, bouncing hither and yon, “we really should do this civil and polite, because if I go full-bore on you, I’m going to hurt you real bad. So, what do you say? I’ll give you a moment to think about it. But just so you know, make no mistake. If you try to run, I will catch you, and when I do I will break both of your shins and bend them until your skin splits.”

  Jimmy stared. He considered charging her waist, but then he fully realized with whom he was dealing. Pan-American Legion? Screw that. Piper Kollár may have been rocking some dangerous curves, but she was a trained killer and totally out of his league. “You, you’re the one from The Chimeric Circle, aren’t you?”

  Piper raised an eyebrow. Moving fast, she grabbed Jimmy’s throat with her right hand and slammed him back into the wall.

  “And where’d you hear that?”

  “Jock mentioned someone connected with The CC might be on station.”

  “So Roscoe knew it was me?”

  “I don’t know. All Jock said was there was a rumor.”

  Piper steadied her grip. “Huh. No matter. Seeing that you and the late Mr. Roscoe were all buddy-buddy, let’s stick with the matter at hand.”

  Jimmy started to speak but stopped himself. His brain was a tempest of questions. If Jock told this freak about the gold, did he throw said freak off the scent by lying to her as well? The drill case of rocks… the one Zaafer loaded into the tender in Bay X… Jock had no idea Jimmy was aware of his pulling a double-cross. Piper obviously killed him, and that gutless weasel, if he’d been tortured, he probably sang like the proverbial canary to save his own hide.