Lunar Descent by Allen Steele Page B

her back as she asked the question, wrapping her arms behind her and letting her head tip back, feeling her breasts stretch against her washed-out Royals sweatshirt. A standard modeling pose, remembered from the old days, but it felt good. A sexy stretch; the grand old dames at the Ford Agency would have been proud. If she had done this outside the privacy of the lab, at least seventy-five guys in Descartes—not counting the small handful of gays—would have been driven apeshit.
    But not Monk. The only deliberately celibate man on the Moon was sitting right here in her lab. Butch spied on Lew Walker out of the corner of her eye; his expression was totally neutral. Butch Peterson could have jumped up on her workbench and started a striptease, and Monk would have warned her that she might fall off and bruise herself … or dismissively turned to look out the window and started playing with his beads again. Her stretch didn’t do a thing for him. He nodded his close-cropped head. “Tea sounds good.”
    She let out her breath and dropped her arms. “Thanks, Lew,” she murmured gratefully.
    He blinked. “What for?”
    â€œNever mind.” Butch walked over to the plastic flask mounted above an electric burner. Their combined daily drinking-water ration was collected in the flask; she picked it up and examined the scale. “Only about a liter left. Want it now or later?”
    Monk thought about it. “Now. Just make it a small cup. Use this morning’s tea bag, please. No sense in letting it go to waste.”
    â€œOne secondhand cup of tea coming up.” She dropped two moist, leftover tea bags in their respective drinking mugs—his had the seal of the University of Massachusetts stamped on the enamel, hers bore the Cosmopolitan logo—and switched on the burner. As the precious water began to boil, Butch turned and leaned against the bench, folding her arms across her chest. “It’s about the new general manager, isn’t it?”
    The beads clicked between his fingers. “Sort of, but not quite …” He shook his head. Click . “I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t have a good feeling about this meeting.” Click-click . “I don’t know any more than you do about Riddell, but Skycorp couldn’t have picked a worse time to install a new GM. There’s a lot of ill feeling toward the company right now.”
    Butch pulled her long hair back behind her neck and reached for a hairband on her desk. “If you’re expecting me to sympathize with Huntsville, you haven’t been paying much attention lately to current events. I’ve been swamped since the purge, and I don’t believe a word Arnie Moss or Ken Crespin says about a new science team.”
    â€œWhy don’t you?”
    â€œC’mon. The writing’s on the wall. Basic science is the bottom priority now. The only reason they kept me around is because the legal department couldn’t find a way to wriggle out of the joint-operating agreement with LPI.”
    Walker slowly nodded. “Uh-huh … and that’s what’s scaring me. Have you checked the newsfeeds lately?”
    She shook her head, and he continued. “I looked at the Wall Street Journal on-line edition yesterday.…”
    â€œYou reading the Wall Street Journal ?”
    He shrugged. “If you want to keep up on the news, you have to read everything. Even if it doesn’t have a crossword puzzle.” He smiled briefly. “Anyway, there was a small item yesterday about some sort of agreement being hammered out between Skycorp and Uchu-Hiko. Nobody seems to know what’s going on. Or if they do, they’re not talking about it.”
    Peterson shrugged. “The Korean project? That’s old news.”
    Click . “No, it can’t be just the Korea powersat.” Click . “It’s something else again.”
    Peterson frowned as