Title:
Unexpected Rain
In a domed city on a planet orbiting Barnard's Star, a recently hired maintenance man named Kane has just committed murder.
Minutes later, the airlocks on the neighbourhood block are opened and the murderer is asphyxiated along with thirty-one innocent residents.
Jax, the lowly dome operator on duty at the time, is accused of mass homicide and faced with a mound of impossible evidence against him.
His only ally is Runstom, the rogue police officer charged with transporting him to a secure off-world facility. The pair must risk everything to prove Jax didn’t commit the atrocity and uncover the truth before they both wind up dead.
For More Information
Book Excerpt:
Author: Jason LaPier
Publisher: HarperCollins (HarperVoyager)
Pages: 350
Genre: SciFi
Format: Paperback/Kindle/Nook
In a domed city on a planet orbiting Barnard's Star, a recently hired maintenance man named Kane has just committed murder.
Minutes later, the airlocks on the neighbourhood block are opened and the murderer is asphyxiated along with thirty-one innocent residents.
Jax, the lowly dome operator on duty at the time, is accused of mass homicide and faced with a mound of impossible evidence against him.
His only ally is Runstom, the rogue police officer charged with transporting him to a secure off-world facility. The pair must risk everything to prove Jax didn’t commit the atrocity and uncover the truth before they both wind up dead.
For More Information
- Unexpected Rain is
available at Amazon.
- Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
- Read an excerpt here.
- Discuss this book at PUYB
Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
Book Excerpt:
Kane stepped out of the
house, gently closing the door behind him. The operator had dialed up a
gorgeous evening in the sub-dome block. Stars were out. The constellations were
clear and familiar; Orion, the bears, and all that nonsense. There was a low,
ambient light on the street, a bit red in color, but it didn’t come from the
tiny, flickering flames of the decorative street lamps, nor did it cause enough
light pollution to obscure the view of the Milky Way.
Of course, Kane knew the
stars were all wrong. It wasn’t even night on the planet’s surface. When people
started leaving Earth and building domes on any rock with the right gravity,
orbiting a star within a few sleepy decades of the Sol system, they set them up
with twenty-four-hour-day cycles, weather, mild seasons, and all the minor
natural comforts and annoyances that Earthlings were used to.
In block 23-D of a sub-dome
called Gretel, near the primary dome called Blue Haven, just off the equator of
the fourth planet from Barnard’s Star, it was the middle of the night. All the
residents were fast asleep, happy to comply with the artificial temporal
configuration. Domers, in general, didn’t question much of anything; they took
the life doled out to them by their authorities and passively accepted it –
were even grateful for it.
Kane had been a maintenance
guy since Monday, and so by walking the streets in the middle of the
make-believe night, he didn’t set off any alarms for the operator on duty. The
job was a joke. The actual cleaning and maintenance of domes and sub-domes was
handled by small armies of scrub-bots. The dog-sized, multi-legged, mobile
vacuum-slash-scouring brushes did all the work during designated sleeping
hours, rotating from one block to the next. Kane was supposed to be keeping the
little bastards running – that was the job – but the reality of it was that
they didn’t need any help. During orientation, it was explained to him that
once in a while, one of them might get some bit of debris jammed up inside a
leg joint, at which point he’d have to run through a troubleshooting script
that ended with a call to a technician. Most of the veteran maintenance staff
skipped the first five steps of the script, because nine times out of ten,
they’d have to just call a tech anyway.
When it came down to it,
Kane’s job nearly in its entirety consisted of hitting a single button that
started the scrub-bots’ cleaning routine. As he walked through the fake night,
he thought about the faceless operator sitting in front of a console somewhere,
tweaking the temperature and humidity. The job of a block operator was only
slightly less menial than his own, and not much more difficult. A few more
buttons and a few more routines. This went for most jobs in a dome; most people
were just button pushers. In a dome, that was the only way to keep everyone
employed. It was more or less an artificial economy. Some people liked to say
that with today’s technology, the whole human race could be kept alive by a
handful of engineers, and that everyone else could just kick back and relax.
But people never could shake that sense of accomplishment that earning an
actual paycheck gives them, the way that a bank statement justifies their lives
and measures their worth. They just couldn’t bear to live without capitalism
and a so-called free market, that arena where money can teeter-totter endlessly
between producers and consumers.
Kane stopped walking. His
instincts told him to take in his surroundings, to look, to listen, to smell.
The perfect avenue he stood in the middle of was devoid of both life and
refuse, and the ambient light lit every empty nook and corner. The only sounds
he could hear were the whirring machinations of scrub-bots somewhere in the
distance. The entire sub-dome was always clean, and smelled almost like
nothing. When he took a deep breath, there was that hidden edge, that sugary,
candy-like smell of artificial air. The kind of smell so distant that it caused
him to sniff harder in an attempt to pin down its origins, which was, of
course, a fruitless endeavor. He thought about the block’s operator watching a
grid, the blip of some maintenance guy just pulsing in place on the street. He
snorted and itched his nose, then started walking toward the garden once more.
Instead of monitoring a
robotic cleaning crew, an operator monitored the Life Support system of a block
and the residents in it. There were no cameras (no doubt to give domers a false
sense of privacy), but the operator got to see a readout of the vital
statistics of everyone in their block. At that moment, the readout of one of
the resident’s vitals should be spiking. Kane quickly strode away from the
avenue and headed diagonally across the block, aiming to cut through the
central garden toward the exit.
Nightmares on any scale were
unusual in domers, but not unheard of. The elevated blood-pressure and rate of
respiration of a resident would likely be noted by the operator, but would not
be an immediate cause for alarm. Kane wiped the blood from the long, spear-like
prod used for unjamming scrub-bot legs with a cleaning rag and stuck the tool
through a loop on his belt. He stuffed the rag into a waste receptacle on the
street and it was sucked off into a network of tubes that snaked beneath the
sub-dome and converged at an incinerator somewhere.
There had been a struggle,
of course, but Kane was a professional and his target was over the hill. The
actual kill was probably the easiest part of the entire job. It’d taken months
for Kane to track the man down, hopping from planet to moon to dome. Digging
deep to exhume any trace, any footprint, any contact the target had made and
subsequently erased since his disappearance almost a year ago. Not that Kane
was annoyed or frustrated by the difficulty of the hunt. If anything, he was
invigorated by it. And all the sweeter when he discovered the target had come
to the domes. That he had assured himself that all tracks were covered, that he
was safe to hide in plain sight, to start a new life. To retire in a sub-dome.
Dome life afforded a level of safety so extreme that Kane doubted any domers
even knew what fear was, not truly.
But his target had known
fear. It had registered on his face and in his pleas when Kane broke through
the thin shell of dome security and sullied the perfect little domicile with
his unwelcome presence. Kane had first silenced the begging and the attempts at
negotiation by taking a small appliance from the kitchen and fracturing the
jaw. Trapped, cornered, and seeing his fate, the target resisted as best he
could, but Kane was faster, stronger, and sharper. His specialty was making
weapons out of innocuous objects, and thus the sub-dome home was an armory.
He’d left the man beaten and
broken in his living room after inflicting a deep wound in his abdomen with the
cleaning tool, plunging through several vital organs. The target wouldn’t die
right away, but he wouldn’t live through the night. Eventually his vitals would
calm down as the internal bleeding caused him to lose consciousness and the
operator on duty would assume the resident’s nightmare was over. By the time
those vitals dropped to critical levels, he’d be beyond the point that
emergency medical care could help him.
Kane reached the edge of the
garden and heard an odd sound – that almost animal-like whining howl, the
complaint of metal being forced to bend and flex in an unnatural way. A brisk
breeze brushed his skin and caused the vegetables and flowers in front of him
to lightly sway in their plots. He stopped and looked about, trying to identify
the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from every direction at once.
When it got louder, he
realized it was coming from above. The breeze grew alarmingly strong and within
seconds, the swaying plants were uprooted and swirling about in the wind. He
snapped his head back and looked up toward the sound. A red ball of piercingly
bright light tore open the night sky, washing out the nearby stars.
It was the light of
Barnard’s Star, what the locals would call the Sun if they didn’t use
artificial sunlight instead. It was the morning light.
There was a crack in the
dome.
Kane had been in and out of
space enough to know the dangers of explosive decompression, and he looked
desperately around for something to grab. He took a few long strides toward a
four-meter-tall air purifier node, a thin, metal-painted-white, tree-like
structure protruding from the edge of the garden. His jumpsuit flapped against
his limbs as if it were trying to strip itself away as he ran, arms
outstretched.
He managed to grab a branch
of the aluminum tree, but the hole in the sky continued to grow and the suck of
the upward wind was too strong. With a rush, he was lifted off his feet and
turned upside down, hanging helplessly from the metal branch, his body dancing
in the air like a kite in a strong wind. The tree slowly bent its arms upward,
allowing him to inch higher into the sky. He could see the seams of the air
purifier coming apart in slow motion, and he desperately pulled at the branch
that was his lifeline, putting one hand over the other, trying to reach the
base of the tree.
He could barely hear the pop
of the branch coming away from the trunk with the rush of wind in his ears, and
then he was airborne, the thin aluminum stick still clutched in his hands.
Kane closed his eyes and let
go of the branch, allowing himself to tumble in the wind while the bright
morning sun showed red through his eyelids. It was pretty much like falling,
except up instead of down.
About the Author
Born
and raised in upstate New York Portland ,
Oregon
His
latest book is the space age noir murder mystery, Unexpected
Rain.
For
More Information
- Visit Jason LaPier’s website.
- Connect with Jason on Facebook and Twitter.
- Find out more about Jason
at Goodreads.
- Contact Jason.
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