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.
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Unexpected Rain
JASON LaPIER
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Jason LaPier 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015.
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Jason LaPier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-810859-5
Version: 2015-03-25
For my grandfathers.
Table of Contents
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 didnât 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 wasnât even night on the planetâs 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 Barnardâs 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, didnât question much of anything; they took the life doled out to them by their authorities and passively accepted it â 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 didnât 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 â that was the job â but the reality of it was that they didnât 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 heâd 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, theyâd have to just call a tech anyway.
When it came down to it, Kaneâs job nearly in its entirety consisted of hitting a single button that started the scrub-botsâ 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 todayâs 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 couldnât bear to live without capitalism and a so-called free market, that arena where money can teeter-totter endlessly between producers and consumers.
