Off Rock Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from Kieran Shea and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. The Gleam Unforeseen

  2. Boss Lady Boogie

  3. The Distance, Persistence, and Insistence

  4. Blue Eyes, Scrutinize

  5. Allusion Collusion

  6. The Pitch and the Pact

  7. The Candy Man Can

  8. Of Snide and Industry

  9. The Sweaty Bettys

  10. The Minion, Ineffectual

  11. Teamwork (*Sigh*)

  12. Jauntin’ Jimmy

  13. Top Up, Homunculus

  14. Scramblin’ Ramblin’

  15. Some Black-Feathered News

  16. Jock on the Clock

  17. What Now, Now What?

  18. Baiting the Trap

  19. Spoon Man

  20. News for the Horde

  21. Made, Moves, Make

  22. The Canteen Scene

  23. The Sweet Payoff

  24. Oh Boy (Continued…)

  25. Easy One Down

  26. Meany-While (Intermezzo)

  27. Pink Slip

  28. The Blows/A Basho Moment

  29. Getting The J-O-B Done

  30. The Bottom Gotten

  31. Sham-A-Scam-A-Ding-Dong

  32. Party Time, Excellent

  33. Primed To A-Go-Go

  34. Confrontation

  35. Dancin’ Fool

  36. Blindsided

  37. Many Out of Uno

  38. Yikes

  39. Schmooze and Lose

  40. A Change of Plans

  41. Plan B—Jimmy

  42. The Corked Mouse

  43. A Little Chat

  44. Red Light

  45. Collision Course, Part Un—the Fire Ships

  46. Following the Piper

  47. Self-Promotion

  48. Blackout Code Zulu—OMG

  49. The Hard Suck

  50. Blowing A Hole

  51. Upload

  52. Done For

  53. Evasive Leela-Action

  54. Oh, Denouement—Oh, Sweet Denouement

  55. Naptime Over, ’Fess Up

  56. Judgment at the NPO

  57. Afterclap

  58. Backsliding Back Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  OFF ROCK

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM

  KIERAN SHEA AND TITAN BOOKS

  Koko Takes a Holiday

  Koko the Mighty

  Koko Uncaged (April 2018)

  KIERAN SHEA

  OFF ROCK

  TITAN BOOKS

  Off Rock

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785653384

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785653391

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: April 2017

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kieran Shea. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers.

  Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

  To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website:

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  THIS ONE IS FOR DOC.

  “A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars —billions upon billions of stars.”

  CARL SAGAN

  “OK, boys—let’s go make a withdrawal.”

  JOHN DILLINGER

  PROLOGUE

  To begin with, hypersonic atmospheric re-entry at a forty-five degree angle was supposed to be about holding down your lunch, not fighting for your life.

  But there Jimmy Vik was.

  Fighting.

  For his fucking life.

  As the inner-system transport shuttle Sultana bellied past the Kármán Line of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the sweeping drag of 1600-plus Celsius compression hellfire scored past its ludicrously thick, silicate windows. While the blistering cacophony outside couldn’t be heard within, the penetrating reverberations grew louder and louder still until a deafening roar drowned out almost every other sound: the shimmying squeaks, the pressurized squeals, the whimpering moans of the other twenty-six passengers jackhammering up and down in their cheap ergonomic seats.

  Oddly enough, most of these passengers hardly noticed Jimmy and the muscle-bound goon whom he met on the Neptune Pact Orbital duking it out in the center aisle. Not exactly a shocker, really. Scrunched-shut eyes and foxhole prayers on atmospheric re-entry? Despite conventional assurances, the routines of commercial space travel in the twenty-eighth century had pretty much iced whatever was left of the life insurance industry.

  Often Jimmy Vik wondered why the engineering brains who pioneered long-distance space travel didn’t just figure out a way to keep passengers returning to Earth fully sedated until their hot little heels were back on the planet. Sure, the phony bureaucratic orbital-trade interdictions and dutiable commodity inspections, all the lip-service decontamination protocols, and the messy process of filing passengers’ complaints, but—c’mon. It’d been three hundred and fifty years since the first successful Mandelbrot skips to the h-Class mesoplanetary expanses. If the whole wearisome, ducks-and-drakes affair had been properly upgraded from some half-baked carnival ride, given his circumstances, Jimmy might have even stood a chance.

  Once more the goon sprung at Jimmy with the feral, unrelenting release of a jungle cat. Doing his best boxer’s weave, bobbing from side to side, the sad fact was Jimmy’s movements were wholly comical in the increasing onslaught of turbulence. Like a hoisted safe slashed free from its tackle, the goon’s gloved knuckles connected with Jimmy’s opaque bubble visor with such force that his whole body nearly hinged backward at the hips. Thankfully the polycarbonate visor didn’t give or split, but still—such was his attacker’s power.

  Son of a—

  A stiff jolt pitched Jimmy and the goon end over end in a brawling embrace, and crashing into the rear area of the cabin Jimmy’s attacker quickly seized the advantage. A crippling barrage of blows—explosive shots, relentless and tight.

  Right-left! Left-right!

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  Jimmy lost count, but on what was likely the eighth punch his entire left side ruptured apart in a crackling streak of fireworks. While functional, shuttle passenger spacesuits weren’t exactly robust in the body armor department and instantly Jimmy sensed something skeletal had gone south. Definitely a rib. Maybe two. Unable to slow down his breathing, each draft of air felt like he was pulling a gust of molten glass into his lungs. Jimmy tucked in his elbows and despaired.

  Usually he could hold his own when it came to brawling, but as vicious as his assailant was Jimmy realized a few more
good shots to his sides and he’d be all but finished. He pictured his insides anatomically—organs pulped and oozing like so much spastic, living shish kebab.

  Skewer of ruptured spleen take your fancy?

  Coming right up.

  The galloping, superheated snarl outside the shuttle’s fuselage built to an earsplitting pitch and, regardless of the sophisticated insulations, the temperature inside the Sultana spiked. Sweat flashed down Jimmy’s face and tears of frustration welled in his eyes. Time slowed, and the oncoming horror of drowning in his own blood became so real Jimmy wondered if he’d be conscious when he met his end.

  Truth was, Jimmy had had his close shaves with death before. Certainly a bunch of near misses as a surface specialist for the interstellar mining companies, and definitely that time he contracted food poisoning from the pillow crab hollandaise on Panus-28, but even before that—way back when he was just a scab-kneed rugby rat running around Vancouver’s waterfront slums—the flirty, black scrim of death always seemed to find him.

  One time, despite his late parents’ never-ending warnings, Jimmy slipped from a pile of rubble while horsing around the scrap heaps above the city’s seawalls and only by sheer, dumb luck did he survive. Like a scabbard, a piece of corroded steel had been pried loose from its fittings and as Jimmy fell past, the rusty hook of metal snatched him out of the air by his belt. Then too, hanging by the thin strip of buckled canvas around his waist, did Jimmy perceive time’s salient, slow spell as the Grim Reaper loomed close. Even now he distinctly recalled, hanging fifteen meters above the harbor shallows, thinking that if the fall to the rocks didn’t kill him, the toxic swill flooding the Strait of Georgia certainly would. Fortunately for him, though, that afternoon Jimmy had been with some of his rugby friends. Scrumming up as a team, his rough-and-tumble peers quickly came to his aid and hauled him up like an anchor.

  God, what Jimmy wouldn’t give for a few of his old rugby friends now.

  But Jimmy Vik didn’t have any friends. Not anymore. Then again… maybe it’s best not to get ahead of ourselves.

  1. THE GLEAM UNFORESEEN

  Roughly twelve months earlier in the Kappa Quadrant on a Cyclopean-Class moon known as Kardashev 7-A, Jimmy Vik was busy planting the initial hardware for a controlled mineshaft demolition and idly considering the merits of offing himself.

  Soloing in small planetoid mineshafts made you ponder all sorts of odd things. Deliberately sabotaging your own spacesuit, inexplicably releasing an airlock… strange, meaningless snippets of bizarre android porn. Still nursing the tragic resonances of a hangover, and dehydrated, Jimmy pushed these dark introspections aside and tried to focus on the work at hand. Being seven hours into his shift, he was cold and way past cranky. Anyone would be hard pressed to argue against it: solo rigging demolition inlays for mineshaft closure just plain sucked.

  But then Jimmy found the pocket.

  At first he thought—no way. No freakin’ way—he had to be seeing things. Jimmy knew that raw fatigue, isolation, and a lame nitro-oxygen mix in your auxiliary O2 processing stores could sometimes do that to you, mess with your head. But the more he examined the crammed deposit directly in front of him the more the smudged, dense, yellowish gunk looked like the real deal.

  Gold.

  Jimmy checked the elapsed time reverse-projected on his helmet visor. Unless there was a significant emergency like a cave-in or equipment malfunction, he wasn’t supposed to check back in with Azoick Surface Operations Command Center until the top of the hour. Jimmy was just one of dozens of surface specialists doing any number of assorted final tasks on the small planetary object’s sandblasted surface, and unless you were a long way off from station (some shift assignments required temporary camps away from base or the use of tram delivery circuits), check-ins more often than not were just primal grunts over the comm link to acknowledge that you were still on task. Since Fifty-Seven was just under two kilometers from base, the shaft wasn’t considered to be a high observatory locale, so there was no reason to go off all half-cocked about what he’d found—at least not yet.

  Jimmy holstered the portable drill he’d been using to mount his inlays. Taking a needle scraper from a flapped pouch on his spacesuit, he scratched away at the loose shale around the imbedded mass and flecks of dust swirled outward like blown cinders from a long-dead campfire. Working steadily, in no amount of time he was able to clear a good patch for closer study. His pulse raced. Sandwiched between two soft layers of gazillion-year-old silicate, the pocket was a corker—a peanut-shaped vertical scar as thick and as long as his thigh.

  Extensive bore analytics, trace maps, and secondary diameter scans of the SPO’s contours indicated that the majority of ore and precious metals on Kardashev 7-A had been stripped out already. Azoick’s extended twenty-six-month expedition to the moon had gone over schedule by eight weeks, and the remaining two hundred-plus service personnel were there strictly for regolith sifting and final site closures. Like most major mining concerns, when defining final parameters for its spoliating missions Azoick concentrated its efforts on planetary areas that held the greatest potential for yield. Deep space operations were expensive, but on balance a well-targeted mission stringently managed could offset expenditures with its yield. So far, Kardashev 7-A’s bounty had been about average. Some larger veins of iron, nickel, precious cobalt, with sporadic pockets of osmium and scattered yet-to-be-identified materials. It was weird, but very little gold, if any, had been found. So what Jimmy was looking at was incredible. The gold pocket must have slipped past every single one of Azoick’s scanners somehow.

  By contract, employees were required to report all deposit anomalies no matter what the size—precious metals in particular. At the helm of a publicly traded company with multi-world reach, the top muckety-mucks at Azoick certainly weren’t stupid. The echelon calling the shots knew all too well the temptations for workers to take even minor amounts of precious materials were an unfortunate downward corollary to the industry and, as such, dire penalties were enforced across the board for theft infractions—including long-term incarceration and sometimes medical experiments, depending on the value of the pilfered materials and the circumstances.

  At thirty-five, Jimmy was still reasonably fit, but for some time he’d been feeling burned out and far riper than his years. He dreaded putting a finger on the specifics of his general malaise, but often he lay awake during his sleep cycles ruminating that maybe, just maybe, he’d frivolously wasted the better part of his life.

  Grievously Jimmy theorized that perhaps he’d made a tactical error when he dropped out of school at seventeen. While clever and inquisitive, he had at the time found the dogged regimentation of his poorly funded provincial school back home in Vancouver stifling. His teachers felt he was bright enough, but being bright enough Jimmy was also able to recognize the whole education system was designed not to teach but to impart a sort of addled, confused resignation. It didn’t help that his school was of a pious bent and offered little in the way of training its students to think independently. When he announced to his mother and father that he’d had enough and up and quit they totally freaked out. How, his parents demanded, could he, their only son, expect to survive? Jimmy argued he could learn more on his own, and when he further informed his parents that he’d passed the advanced physical and mental assessments for long-term, interstellar trade work, it was as if he’d smashed their hearts into a thousand pieces.

  In almost two decades since, Jimmy had broken his back for deep-space mining companies, and if someone pulled together a list of all the outfits he’d worked for there’d hardly be one left out. Nation-state conglomerates like Telesto Energy Solutions, Iset-Belyayvev Metalurgical, and Consolidated Ruthenium, and much later the bigger independent corporations like Dyno Excavation, Lo-Bo Core LLP, and now Azoick. After all that time making shareholders and backslapping company fat cats rich, Jimmy now questioned if he had anything to show for it. Creaky knees and a double arthroplasty for two nearly
annihilated rotator cuffs? A pitiful health pension and paltry savings account that could easily be snuffed out by the next financial downturn? With his being in space for years at a stretch with plenty of idle time between skip deployments, it was no wonder that most of two decades had slipped past Jimmy in a hazy, dull blur.

  It hadn’t been all bad, though. When he first started out in mining, Jimmy really loved the freebooting lifestyle. It beat the mother-loving pants off grinding out his days in some low-wage service job back home in Vancouver, and the allure of distant space travel promised a degree of excitement. Like most glamorous appeals, however, with time working space turned out to be as zestless and prosaic as anything else. Still, the work was physically demanding, and Jimmy liked that. Working as a roughneck made him relish playing hard even more when he rotated back to Earth or Mars between deployments. But, alas, after a time, even those high-spirited shenanigans grew stale. Inevitably one day you rolled out of bed and discovered the whole aggregate of your life had shifted. Obsolescence was bearing down on you with a capital O and you started second-guessing yourself. Jimmy likened it to that old story about the frog in the pot of water, or perhaps a cruel, mixed-up game of musical chairs. He tried hard not to dwell on his growing disjunctive unease, and attempted to blot it out with distractions, intoxications, medications, and the like, but the idea that he’d foolishly turned down a blind alley plagued him to no end. Even if he survived a few more calendar flips without significant injury, with their increasingly stringent physical evaluations Azoick might crunch the numbers and soon assess him as a liability, and then where would he be? A gray-temple washout on a fragile financial scaffold with nothing but a deep, black crevasse of nothing yawning below? Damn.

  But now luck, Lady Luck in her glorious rhinestone stilettos, eye shadow, and creamy “Come here, big boy” smile was serving up a hot goblet of possibility.

  What if he could get some of the gold back to Earth undetected? Maybe it wasn’t too late for him to turn the rest of his life around after all.