Off Rock Read online

  Dangling there in near zero gravity, Jimmy thought about that for a while.

  For about a half hour, actually.

  Goddamn… a real life.

  True, with the potential consequences it was balls-out loony to even toy with such an idea. For the better part of his life Jimmy had at least tried to play by the rules, but this much gold with the extended market evaluations—it might make it possible for him to forge a whole new existence.

  A raft of possibilities tantalized.

  Could he actually live out his days in relative leisure?

  Perhaps he should take just enough to retool his credentials and get work in some other field that could afford him a decent, quiet lifestyle. Jimmy imagined canny maneuvers of frugal nuance. Maybe he could invest the gold’s value into something tangible, like one of those fancy new Peruvian grotto-condos along the peaks of the Cordillera Real that they’d been advertising like crazy on the imported media streams. Yeah, all that cool neo-classical, white faux-marble… that might be sweet. Perhaps Jimmy could find work as a bartender and roast out his days serving frilly cocktails poolside with a view of Lake Titicaca. Maybe he could even find a well-scrubbed girl and finally settle down.

  “Specialist Vik? This is Azoick Surface Operational Command Center. We’re noticing a heart rate uptick on your biometrics. Can you elaborate on this, over?”

  The woman’s voice over the comm link jerked Jimmy right out of his fantasies.

  Leela.

  “Specialist Vik, I repeat, this is ASOCC. Please respond, over.”

  Jimmy rubbed the heel of his glove over the yellowish smear in the shaft wall. He’d the presence of mind not to immediately convey what he was seeing over the comm. It was weird, but prior to setting out hours before he hadn’t seen Leela Pendergast’s name on the work-cycle roster. Dimly, Jimmy wondered what happened to his usual supervisor, Dickerson.

  “Dickerson? Is that you? Man, your voice has changed.”

  “Bonehead,” Leela replied tersely. “This is JSC Pendergast. Senior Surface Coordinator Dickerson seems to have come down with the flu, over.”

  Jimmy kept wiping away at the gold. “Oh, in that case, please convey to SSC Dickerson my best wishes for a speedy recovery. Since I know you’re all about formalities, JSC Pendergast, this is Specialist Vik on site in Shaft Fifty-Seven. I’m having some difficulty with my drill power, over.”

  At twenty-eight, Leelawati “Leela” Pendergast (or Pain-in-the-Ass as she was sometimes referred to out of earshot) was a petite, freckle-peppered brunette who happened to be Jimmy’s former flame. Love’s labor’s lost, the two had broken up a couple of months before and since the breakup their working rapport was what pop psychologists might label as delicate. To avoid contention on the job, Leela and Jimmy agreed not to overlap their work shifts whenever possible. Naturally he didn’t like to talk about it, but whenever Jimmy was pressed for the reasons why he and Leela had split up he explained that they’d dissimilar ideas about where their relationship was heading. A pat answer and perhaps intolerably clichéd, but the essence of it was true. Leela had more expectative designs, and reprehensibly Jimmy claimed he did not. It wasn’t his finest hour as a human being, but he’d been the one who put the kibosh on things.

  Staunchly industrious and resolute, Leela Pendergast was seven years younger than Jimmy and had come up through the Azoick ranks. Despite her rather diminutive size, Leela had made her bones as a surface specialist, but then later steamrolled her way into jockeying a knuckleboom loader. With a chancy eighteen to twenty percent casualty rate, operating a knuckleboom loader was perilous work. However, unlike most of the other operators Leela stuck with it because she knew getting a knuckleboom master-rating would reflect well on her higher aspirations. She parlayed her attention to detail and nerve into a Junior Surface Coordinator position.

  Over the comm link, Jimmy endured a sluice of crackling static and then a sardonic huff. “Difficulty with your drill power, huh? I’d say that’s a pretty common ailment for an old gravel-crusher like you. Can you clarify the nature of the issue for ASOCC?”

  Jimmy pocketed his needle scraper. “Switching to auxiliary power. Hang on just a sec.”

  Hell, the last thing he needed was hassling from his ex-squeeze. Jimmy tugged his portable drill from his tool belt and toggled the trigger twice close to his helmet so Leela could hear the whir. He seated the drill back in its holster.

  “Portable drill power is now good, ASOCC. Recommencing hardware inlay work, over.”

  “Acknowledged. So, are you feeling up to snuff, Specialist Vik?”

  Jimmy brushed the surface of the pocket and retrieved his needle scraper again.

  “I’m sorry, ASOCC, could you repeat that?”

  “ASOCC is concerned about your physical status, over.”

  “Just the power issue, but we’re good now, thanks.”

  There was a momentary pause before Leela continued. “Well, I must say it is kind of odd. I’ve got your biometrics here tracked back and there’s nothing, just routine sixty-eight BPM and then it was like somebody goosed you with an icicle. By the way, you’re out of water and your O2 draw is kind of heavy too.”

  Jimmy took a second to compose himself. “How’re my readings now?”

  “Better,” Leela answered. “Obviously the H2O and oxygen losses can’t be helped, but your BPM looks like it’s leveling off. Come to think of it, I never bothered to ask you: Do you have a history of heart trouble in your family, Specialist Vik?”

  “Uh, that’s a negative, ASOCC.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe you’re just under the weather—again.”

  Huh?

  How the hell did Leela know he was hungover? Damn, Jimmy wondered if his heart rate was jack-rabbiting again. He told himself to just chill out.

  “Moons are devoid of weather,” he offered. “So ASOCC’s assessment of Specialist Vik is also a negative at this time.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “See, this is what happens. Certain individuals get bumped up over us lowly peons and sitting behind a cushy desk all the time they forget what it’s like to actually bust their butts for a living. Specialist Vik is attributing heart rate flux to too much hard work.”

  The overwrought and deliberate emptiness over the comm link was something to savor.

  “Is that an attempt at humor, Specialist Vik?”

  “Not at all, ASOCC.”

  “Yeah, well, I suppose there are always health concerns with someone of your age.”

  Jimmy was thankful that, due to recent tightfisted Azoick cutbacks, his spacesuit was not equipped with a live bodycam. With his left hand he held up his middle finger and kept scraping away at the yellowish smudge with his right.

  Hell hath no fury…

  Leela continued, “Incidentally, be advised: We’re getting some significant emission interference with the communication relays at this time, so count this as your hourly check-in.

  Finish up whatever you’re doing and return to base via tram in thirty as scheduled, over.”

  “Copy that.”

  Jimmy turned the comm link’s volume all the way up and waited until he was certain that Leela had moved on to rattle someone else’s cage. Only when he heard her exquisitely bitching out some dolts in processing control about a poorly reset sorter did he feel he was well and in the clear. After drifting up and down and scratching for a few more minutes, Jimmy then came to an abrupt decision. The decision felt terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, one of those rare, crystalline moments when one straddles the rails of fate, a massive leap into the unknown.

  Jimmy craned his head up and doused his suit lights. Like an inverted telescope, the sudden blackness of the shaft’s chasm soared upward and the entire frozen cyclorama of stars and distant planets shined down upon him.

  Long ago, he had gotten over his awe of deep space. But given the surging quandaries of their humdrum lives he knew when most people back home or on Mars did contemplate the ruth
less absurdity of the greater cosmos, more often than not, and no matter what transcendent shield they stubbornly clung to, the universe scared people shitless. Call it what you will—existential paradox; celestial sucker punch in the abstract—the soul-crushing, never-ending void really put one’s inconsequentiality into perspective. Hey, he wasn’t a party-pooper. Jimmy would be the last one to tell you that there wasn’t any divine plan. But, honestly, he knew the universe was indifferent to your plight. You say plane of immanence? Get real. The universe was just one gigantic brutal fact. It didn’t care about your troubles, about whether your missing schnauzer came home or whether you lived or died, and it certainly didn’t give a damn about what you stole.

  Drawing his Miyakawa X8700 laser cutter from a second spot on his tool belt and picturing the gold pocket as a big, soft slab of yellow cake, Jimmy Vik leaned in and began to cut.

  2. BOSS LADY BOOGIE

  Ninety minutes later Leela Pendergast found Jimmy in one of the grimy cylinder showers in the ASOCC central locker room. Jimmy was just preparing himself for a long overdue shave when he sensed Leela’s eyes boring into the back of his head like a couple of laser cutters.

  “So, what’s the status on Fifty-Seven?”

  Jimmy sighed. Tilting his chin upward into the chemically purified mist, he allowed the water’s lukewarm spray to soften his whiskers as he slid a palm beneath a dispenser attached to the wall. The dispenser splorted out a dollop of dense body soap and he rubbed it all over his face. A diehard fan of antiquities, Jimmy was a straight razor guy and his blade was a gift from his late father. German-made, the razor was probably the only thing he had left of the old man save for his chromosomic amalgam. Angling the blade at twenty degrees like he was taught, Jimmy stretched his skin tight and stroked downward.

  “What do you mean, the status?” he said.

  Leela rapped her knuckles on the shower stall’s housing. “The inlay hardware, genius. How far along are you? Lay it out for me so I can adjust the closeout schedule and finish up Dickerson’s logs. We’re looking at, what? Half a shift before we can consider it primed?”

  “More like four,” Jimmy answered.

  “Four?”

  “Yeah, it’s all flaky down there, you know? It’s like every third screwbolt I sink there’s a crack or chink of some kind and I have to start all over again. That’s why the juice in my portable drill kept petering out. It’s like taking two steps forward and one step back. Pretty frustrating.”

  Jimmy flipped the excess soap from his razor. Working quickly, he shaved the rest of the lather off his face and cranked the shower’s controls counterclockwise for a refreshing rinse. He then killed the flow, folded his razor, and wiped his eyes. Shying away from giving Leela the full pendulous frontal, Jimmy stepped into a drying stall to his right and sensors detected his height and weight. Noisy, compressed air blasted his lanky frame. He plucked his black boxer shorts from a nearby hook and tugged them on.

  Leela squinted. “Did you try spacing the hardware out?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Yeah, of course I tried spacing the hardware out.”

  “And still the screwbolts aren’t holding?”

  Jimmy traipsed to his open locker to retrieve the rest of his clothes. He stashed his straight razor in his Dopp kit, pulled on a threadbare thermal T-shirt, and stepped into one of his long-sleeved, canary-colored jumpers, the one that had nearly all his past mission patches on the sleeves and back. The mission patch for Kardashev 7-A station covered one of the last available spaces on his right shoulder—a shrunken, stitched image of the massive Azoick station. A symbiotic cluster of five interlocking multi-decked, geodesic vertical takeoff and landing structures, the Azoick station was collectively referred to as “the spiders.” Each “spider” was independent, linked by multiple passageways and corridors. There was ASOCC operations, material processing, life support and gravity production systems, and shipping and storage. The last spider was the smallest of the bunch and elbowed out almost as a tumorous afterthought: residential. In addition to staff quarters, the residential spider housed the station’s canteen and a woefully outdated medical deck. Post rock-reap, all five connected VTOL structures would retract their legs and lift off simultaneously from K7-A’s surface for retrieval and eventual repurposing. Instead of personnel names (which were too many, seeing that operative populations fluctuated in around two hundred), the circumference of the Azoick mission patch bore the company’s trademarked logo—an arrow-in-midflight with a blowhard tagline in Latin, the deadest of languages:

  RELIQUUM HODIE USURPAMUS™

  Claiming the Future Today

  Jimmy slumped. “Cripes, what do you want me to say here, Leela? This isn’t, like, my first rodeo, you know. I’ve been at this a lot longer than you, and I think I know how long a job is going to take. I’m a professional.”

  “Oh, I know you’re a professional,” Leela replied, hooking her fingers. “But what I really want to hear is that Shaft Fifty-Seven is ready for demo and final seal. No one at the other shaft sites seemed to have problems with flaking. And extending the completion forecast to four shifts? I’m sorry, but I just can’t have it. Fifty-Seven is the last site to be finished before everything’s done.”

  Jimmy rolled his shoulders. Man, maybe it was a side effect of downing too many pints nearly two-dozen hours ago, but his back had been aching a hell of a lot lately. Maybe it was just dehydration. He made a mental note to drink some water with extra electrolytes when he got the chance. He zipped up his jumper. “Hey, can I ask you something, Leela?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you like them so much?”

  “Like who?”

  “Azoick,” said Jimmy. “I mean, really, what the hell have they ever done for you, huh? Oh, sure, they gave you a nice promotion, a small bump in currency units and shares. But, seriously, the last time I checked there are over twenty exploration licenses and proprietary claims in this sector alone. I mean, do you really think Azoick cares about all your dotted I’s and crossed T’s?”

  “You trying to be cute?”

  “Hell, I thought I was trying to be vivid. Anyway, the company is used to closeouts running long. You really need to lighten up and let people do their jobs.”

  Fists balled on her hips, Leela wormed her head from side to side. “Gee, Jimmy, I didn’t know we were going to have a good cry or I would’ve brought along my hanky.”

  Jimmy stared at her. Even in her tooled cherry-colored cowboy boots, Leela was at least a foot and a half shorter than him and he needed to step back a bit to fully take her in. Once again, her brown eyes caught him a little off guard. Although the two of them were no longer an item, he’d be damned if the way she was looking at him right now didn’t turn him on. Leela always looked pretty hot when she was all fired up and cracking the crop, and right then she had him cornered. All around them, dozens of men and women milled about in various states of undress while high along the surrounding locker room walls several VDT screens played prepackaged, outdated media streams. Most in the locker room seemed to be watching a playback recording of the Catatumbo Fire and Iberian Front football match. Like a colony of wasps, the players flitted to-and-fro on the pitch. Jimmy vaguely wondered if any rugby highlights would soon be on.

  “Listen,” he offered, “make it four shifts and I promise you Fifty-Seven will be good to go.”

  Leela shook her head and added a melodious lilt to her voice. “Well, I suppose I could always assign the work detail to someone else…”

  Jimmy’s stomach iced. At once he regretted not covering up or disguising the gold pocket back in the shaft and cursed himself for being so careless. Leela’s suggestion of someone else taking up the inlay detail was not something he’d counted on. With the pocket exposed as it was, if someone else took over the assignment it would be a lock they’d notice the gold vein and find a sizeable chunk of it missing. Jimmy adopted an air of nonchalan
ce.

  “Like who?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking maybe one of those two Chinese brothers could handle it.”

  Jimmy drew back. “Those guys? Good luck with that, hon. Those two are colossal blockheads.”

  “That may be,” Leela said, “but combined, those two colossal blockheads are also half your rate.”

  “Oh, sure, but take a peek at their files. The real reason those Chinese guys are half my rate is because they’ve botched routine work like inlays before. Hell, you know as well as I do that those two got kicked from the Athena Cupala project back on Europa because they blanked on procedure and nearly wiped out an engineering crew along with some scouts looking to get their supersymmetry service badges. Just because they keep to themselves and you can’t understand a word of Jianghuai Mandarin doesn’t mean they’re going to get it done any faster or safer. Look, Leela, I’ve got this. I gave you what I thought was a fair estimate. Four shifts and I swear to you Fifty-Seven will be ready for blow and closure. And don’t give me that compromising the schedule crap. Everybody here knows you pad your timelines.”

  Leela’s face flushed. “I do not pad my timelines.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Wipe that grin off your face, Jimmy, or I swear to God I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? Put it down in my file? Nice. Real nice. Another itty-bitty Azoick star for you.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Wow, you used to find me charming.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Jimmy faked a long shiver and snapped his Dopp kit closed. “Sheesh, why’re you so uptight about all this, huh? Have you even checked with Dickerson? Dickerson is my usual supervisor and he’s got seniority. Dickerson never gets worked up over shift extensions.”

  “I told you. Dickerson has the flu. The latest is he’s blowing ballast from both ends so now I have to cover his workload on top of my own. God, Jimmy, four shifts to complete a standard demolition inlay? That’s a crock and you know it. I mean, who do you think you are?”