Up Against It - M. J. Locke [5]
He swung up onto his rocketbike and started the engine.
She leaned her chin on her forearms, braced against the handlebars. “I thought it’d just be a good joke. But it got me to thinking. I get way more attention dressing like a sex sapient than I do for anything I actually do that means anything. It just pisses me off. And then Ian…” she sighed. “He just doesn’t get it. I told him what I’m telling you now, and he says he wants me to dress like that all the time. Butt floss, pushup bra, and all. Like all I am is girl-meat.” She sighed again. “I wish he cared about more than how big my boobs are and whether he’ll ever get the booty prize.”
Geoff nodded with a rueful sigh. Ian’s brains did go out his ears sometimes. Especially when his chinpo was involved. Geoff gave it fifty-fifty odds that Amaya would get tired of waiting before he figured her out.
2
Geoff stepped out onto the commuter pad with his bike. One 25 Phocaea day lasted about ten hours, and the sun was below the horizon right now. (Not that anybody cared; Phocaeans used a twenty-four-hour day, like most stroiders.) But the lights blazing on the disassembler warehouses made it hard for his eyes to dark-adapt. He tweaked his light filter settings—if you wanted a good harvest, you needed your night vision—and fumbled his way toward Amaya and the others, who were pushing their bikes toward the launch ramps. Then his big brother, Carl, radioed him and waved. Geoff sent his buddies on, left his bike on the pad, and bounded over to Carl.
By the time he got there, he could see well enough to note that Carl wore a pony bottle and one of the cheap, bulky, standard-issue suits they provided at the disassembler and storage warehouses. Which meant he’d sneaked out to watch the delivery. Geoff was surprised. This was about the only misdemeanor Geoff had ever known him to commit.
“Hey. What are you doing off work?”
“Hey! You nearly missed it.” Carl gestured into the inky sky, at the vast ice mountain that loomed overhead.
“I was busy.”
Carl eyed him suspiciously, but Geoff knew his brother couldn’t see his expression very well through their visors, and didn’t elaborate. Carl hadn’t heard about the bug-turd skeletons yet. But he would, and would freak if he learned Geoff had been responsible.
“Hurry!” Carl said, and set off. Geoff bounded after him, to the rim of the crater—leaping high in the low gravity, for the sheer joy of it—over to where the last of 25 Phocaea’s remaining ice stores were.
It made Geoff’s neck hairs bristle, how much ice filled the sky. The ice was a deep blue green, with swirls of ruddy umber and streaks and lumps of dirt. Mostly methane. A rich take. Water ice was good—necessary, in fact, to replenish their air and water stores and provide raw hydrogen for the fusion plant—but methane ice was much more important. Kuiper objects always had plenty of water, and methane was needed for the bugs that made the air they breathed, the food they ate, the hydrogen feed for their power plant, and everything else.
The tugs’ rockets flamed at the ice mountain’s edges, slowing its approach, but it was still moving fast enough that he could not believe they would get it stopped in time to keep from knocking this asteroid right out of orbit. It didn’t take a lot of mass to shove 25 Phocaea around—it was only seventy-five kilometers across.
The mountain grew and grew, and grew—till the brothers scrambled back reflexively. But as always, by the time the pilots blew the nets off, the ice mountain was moving no faster than a snail crawl. The ice touched down right in the crater’s center. The cheers of his buddies and the other rocketbikers rang in Geoff’s headset as the inverted crags of the mountain’s belly touched the crater floor. The ground began to tremble and buck and the brothers flailed their arms, trying not to lose their balance.
Geoff whooped. “We’ll make a fortune! Best ice harvest ever!”
There was a rule: what came back down belonged