Up Against It - M. J. Locke [13]
The commissioner said, “Then you’re right. I am.”
Sean stared. He had been here before. After a long and honorable career, he had been dishonorably discharged, during the Gene Purges, for disobeying orders. But those had been stupid orders. Evil ones. These weren’t. Jane Navio was a chrome-assed bitch, damn her. But she was right.
“Reassign the warehouse team to the neutralizer brigade,” she repeated. “Now.” And he did.
* * *
Geoff remembered the biker chatter in his headset. He recalled dodging other riders, dragging nets filled with neutralization bladders, dropping them, watching them crash onto the shrinking mound of ice, while Moriarty’s engineer Shelley gave targeting and pickup instructions—then landing, waiting while technicians loaded up their nets, and taking off again. But everything blurred together in a jumble of events.
He did remember one pass in detail. He and Amaya went in low enough that the net dragged the top of the ice. They dodged ice crags and sudden spurts of superheated gas to drop the packet into a crevice deep in the ice’s center. He caught a glimpse: the boiling ice looked like lava in a cauldron. Then they veered upward amid towering gas columns.
Another team veered into their nets as they rose, and Geoff got yanked off his bike. He spun wry—the stars, the flares of the other bikers’ rockets, Phocaea’s surface, all tumbled past. He had no idea where his bike was, or where Amaya was. He feared he’d plow into Phocaea’s surface, but after a moment he realized he’d been thrown upward, out of Phocaea orbit. His breath slowed. Numb calm fell over him. He breathed in and out. Dots of fog appeared and vanished on his faceplate.
Amaya was back there, somewhere, circling back around for him. He was sure of it. But for a moment he thought it might be good if nobody had noticed, and he could just float away, off into the Big Empty.
Then she radioed him that she was approaching. She shot a net that snared him. Geoff grabbed at it, climbed along it to her bike, and mounted behind her. She fired her rockets and took him back around to his own bike. Neither spoke a word.
As he mounted his bike, she finally asked, “You OK?”
“Yeah.”
It was hard to believe that only a half hour ago he had been so excited about his bug-turd art project. He had thought he was such hot shit. Now it all felt like a waste of time. He shook it off. Don’t think. Just do.
* * *
Half an hour after they started, Shelley gave the all-clear. By the time the reporters and their cameras had started showing up, most of the bikers were down, gathering near their hangar, checking their equipment. Geoff coasted to a stop and launched himself off his bike. He ached. He could smell his own sour stink, and though slimed in sweat, he was shivering. Dully, he wondered if his climate controls were malfunctioning. He shuffled clumsily over to the crater lip, near where he and Carl had been standing less than an hour before, and leaned over, hands on his thighs.
When he straightened, the mist in the crater was clearing. The pale sun rose low over the horizon in the southwest, and cast long shadows across the still steaming wreckage. The stars faded from view. The crater floor was covered in a graphite slick, with neatly spaced blocks on top in yellow, red, and an assortment of metallic hues. In the crater’s middle was a lump of dirty ice about half the size of what they had had before the delivery. A couple weeks’ worth, maybe. No more.
Amaya came up next to him; he recognized the stickers on her suit sleeve. He could not see her face well. But he knew what she was thinking. “There’s always other shipments coming Down,” he said. “My mom says Commissioner Navio is a genius at making the ice last. We’ll get more in soon. It’ll be OK.”
“Yeah,” she said.
Shelley alighted next to them, and slapped Geoff and Amaya on the back. “You all saved us. Good work.” She bounded off toward the warehouses. By then, Kamal and Ian had found them.
“Aren’t you going to talk to the reporters?” Kamal