Up Against It - M. J. Locke [186]
They clung to the grips of his stretcher, looking at each other. Shall I wait? she wanted to ask. Will you come back to me? Or should I start mourning you now?
“I’ll wait to leave,” he said, “till after you go.”
But she was not sure now if she was leaving Phocaea. She was not sure of anything. She shook her head sharply. “No. Go. Now. As soon as you can. The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll return.”
She waited with him at the emergency room while they ran diagnostics and treated his injuries. They eventually declared him fit to go.
At the surface lifts he grabbed her arms in a painful grip, and gave her a long, wordless kiss.
Jane left him there and shoved off across the Hub. Her body held two memories at that moment, of his grip on her arms and his salty sweat on her lips. They would have to be enough.
30
Four days later, Geoff sat alone in one of Parliament’s antechambers. The couch’s overstuffed cushions threatened to swallow him alive. There were giant, ugly plants in the corners, with big flowers that stank. The pink swell of newly grown flesh showed on his exposed left forearm and his ankle. The new skin didn’t have hair yet. (He and Ian had compared skin. Just like a baby’s ass! Yep! Doof. Chinpo-head.) His left side itched unbearably and he squirmed. He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass of one of the dark pictures on the wall, and sighed. He shifted and tugged at the too-short sleeves of his suit, tried to smooth out his hair.
With the sale of the ice, he and his buddies had become four of the wealthiest individuals in the asteroid belt. But he didn’t feel wealthy or cool or powerful. He felt like a dork.
They had told him to wait here till he was called. He was anxious to be up top. They would be bringing Ouroboros in soon, with or without him, and he was damned if he was going to miss that.
The public hearing was displayed on the wall. One politician after another—most of whom he’d never even heard of—seemed to have something to say about what had happened over the past few days, though not a one of them, as best he could tell, had had a thing to do with any of it.
To make things even more complicated, he had gotten a cryptic note from Vivian. She had somehow wrangled a berth on Sisyphus, which was about to depart, and had asked him to meet her at the city-to-surface lifts at 10:30 a.m. It was past 9:30. The note had given him another damn erection. Even just thinking about it right now made him stiff. He was not sure he could make it in time. He was not even sure he wanted to, despite his body’s reaction.
Jane Navio entered. Geoff shifted uncomfortably. “Are you going to testify?”
“Yes. They’re having a hard time figuring out what to do with me, I’m afraid. Where are your friends?”
“They all testified yesterday, right at the end of the day. They made us sit there all day, and then I had to go home without testifying.”
“One of the prerogatives of power is to make everyone wait on your convenience.” She jerked a thumb at the screen showing the hearings. “Do you mind if I turn that down?”
He shook his head, and she tweaked something inwave. The sounds of the hearing diminished to a mumble. She dropped into a seat next to him. She seemed at ease, if a tad wistful, and unconcerned about wrinkling the grey silk suit she wore. She curled her legs under her, gripped her calves with foothands gloved in brown suede, draped her arms over the couch back, and smiled at him. “So nice to be warm again, don’t you think? When does the big ice shipment come in?”
The university had sent a team of geologists out to confirm the find the day before. Joey Spud’s old tapped-out claim housed a staggering eighty-seven gigatons: enough ice to last Phocaea forever, basically. Old Joey Spud would go down as history’s biggest hoarder.
“Today,” he replied. “The big ships are bringing it down in a while.” Phocaea had never seen such a huge shipment before, nor one as dirty. The technical challenges had been immense.
“There’ll be a ceremony up top,” he told Jane. “We’re going to do a harvest