Up Against It - M. J. Locke [28]
“Yes,” he said. “Bizarre.”
Her expression didn’t change as she continued to scroll through the reports, but he could tell she was viewing her own numbers. Her thumbs were in the crapper: her popularity had dropped through the floor—though, not surprisingly, her eyes were thicker than ever. Clearly, “Stroiders” viewers were blaming her. She switched off the console.
“Good thing they can’t dole out bad-sammies.”
“True.” Sammies were the counts that mattered: the confidence of the people of Phocaea. Xuan had viewed her sammy cache earlier on the “Stroiders” wavesite. To his relief, she had plenty of good-sammies, and the numbers were holding steady. Phocaeans, at least, were not jumping to conclusions about her performance. Yet.
“I don’t give a damn about the ratings,” she told him. “I’m all right.”
He put his arms around her from behind, and she laid her head against him. “Sorry I was cranky about the meds.”
“You’re forgiven.” He planted a kiss on her neck. She turned and put her arms around him, and they kissed. The moment lasted.
“Foot rub?” she said hopefully.
“I’ll go you one better. Full-body treatment.”
“Oooh.”
“Food first, though. I’ll wager you haven’t eaten all day.” Even as he said it, Jane’s stomach growled noisily.
“You’re on. Er, is Ferdy around?” Ferdy was the miner they were putting up. Xuan shook his head. “Gone for several days, he said. Maybe for good this time.”
“Oh ree-e-a-lly?”
“Reee-e-a-lly.” Xuan leered.
“Mmmm.” Jane gripped his hips with her foothands and pulled him close, massaging his sore back muscles with her nimble toes. Xuan loved her foothands. The couple drifted to the floor in a meandering tumble for some prehensile snuggling.
A timer went off in the kitchen. “Damn.” She nuzzled his neck.
“You won’t regret the wait.” He disentangled himself. “Dinner in ten.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll make some calls.”
* * *
Whatever Xuan was cooking, it smelled fantastic. The aroma made it hard for Jane to concentrate. She worked virtually—met with her managers and peers, reviewed emergency measures to get the storage hangars and tanks up again and the distribution schedules back in order, and probed the life-support systems to see whether they had recovered. Then she left messages for her political allies: shoring up her support and fending off the predators.
A call came in. It was her old mentor, Chikuma Funaki. Jane pulled on her favorite pair of sweats and then activated her waveface.
Funaki was tiny, not much more than a meter and a half tall, and thin, with skin soft and wrinkled as crumpled tissue. Her eyes were the color of hot chocolate, and her hair was space-black, run through with streaks of white, which she piled atop her head and pinned there with jeweled sticks. She wore the basic stroider tunic and leggings. An attendant stood beside her, whom she dismissed with a nod.
Jane smiled. “Sensei! I’m so glad you called.”
Chikuma was a hundred sixty, perhaps older. A First Waver, she had moved to Phocaea at the age of sixteen. Jane had heard she was a mail-order bride back in the days when Phocaeans were a few thousand Japanese and North American miners, clinging to the asteroid’s surface in their rickety domes, awash in radiation. After her husband had been killed in a mining accident, Funaki had taken over her husband’s small business, and had fought, finessed, and extorted her way to success. Among the bankers of Sky Street, a network of mostly Japanese investment houses and securities and commodities traders, Chikuma was now supreme matriarch. She could be rather awful, if you got between her and something important that she wanted. But she and Jane had always gotten along,