“What’s it going to be today?”
The girl that walks up next to our table with an empty tray in one hand and a towel in the other looks to be all of sixteen years old. She’s wearing beige overalls and a thermal vest that’s a particularly vivid shade of purple.
“Bring us two Shockfrosts, Allie,” Sergeant Fallon says. “My friend here hasn’t tried one yet.”
“Got it,” Allie says. She takes a small handheld scanner off her belt. Sergeant Fallon pulls her dog tags out from underneath her uniform tunic and holds them out for Allie, who scans them with a quick and practiced motion. Then Allie wipes down the table perfunctorily and walks off toward the bar.
“Payment system?” I ask, and nod at the dog tags. Sergeant Fallon nods.
“They keep track of who buys what. Normally they run accounts every month when they get a data link via courier. With the network closed, they’re probably sitting on two or three months’ worth right now. I don’t think timely accounting matters much at the moment anyway.”
“This is what you’ve been doing? Trying out all the watering holes in this place and running your government account dry?”
“I wish,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Most of my time I’ve been too busy trying to figure out how to keep two battalions’ worth of bored grunts from killing themselves or each other. Flight ops are cut back because of the weather, so we haven’t been able to keep up with the rotation. We were going to cycle the platoons at the terraformers through New Longyearbyen every other week, but the puddle jumpers can’t fly in this kind of weather. It’s a miracle anyone can live in this place at all. We are a hardy species.”
“Not as hardy as the Lankies,” I say.
“They’re just bigger and stronger. But you don’t see them trying to colonize places like this. They go for the real estate we’ve already prepared for them.”
“That’s true,” I admit. “Maybe that makes them smarter, too.”
“I can’t argue much with that point of view right now,” Sergeant Fallon says. She leans back in her chair with a little sigh and stretches out her prosthetic leg underneath the table. “Five years with that thing a part of me, and it still feels like a foreign object at the end of a long day.”
Allie returns with our drinks, squat polyplast tumblers full of a light blue liquid. She puts the glasses in front of us with a curt smile and walks off again.
I pick up my glass and smell the contents. “God. It smells like someone dropped sweetener into a pint of aviation fuel.”
“Tastes a bit like that, too.” Sergeant Fallon smiles. “Watch this.”
She takes a lighter out of the arm pocket of her fatigues, turns it on, and holds the little hissing gas flame to the surface of her drink. Blue flames crackle into life. She watches the alcohol fire for a moment and then extinguishes it by putting her hand on top of the tumbler to cut off the oxygen. Then she picks up the glass and takes a long sip.
“You just want to let it heat up the top layer, but not burn long enough to use up too much alcohol,” she says. “It’s a delicate balance.”
She hands me the lighter, and I do like she did. The drink doesn’t taste quite as potent as it smells, but I can feel the burn of the alcohol all the way down into my stomach. It tastes of mint and licorice and a few other things I can’t identify. All in all, there’s a surprising variety of flavor, considering this stuff was probably distilled in a back room down here and aged for days instead of years.
“Not bad,” I say.
“Damn straight it ain’t. Just don’t have more than one, or you won’t be able to remember how to latch your battle armor for the next day or two.”
She looks past me and raises an eyebrow. I hear steps behind me and turn to see the three SI troopers walking over to us from the other side of the room. By their tense postures and grim facial expressions, I doubt they’re coming our way to make a social call. I turn my chair around so I can face the three troopers as they stop in front of our table.
“I think you’d do us all a favor if you and your boys just stayed over there, Master Sergeant,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We have no need for company.”
“You’re the Earthside hero who ran the show for that little mutiny,” the SI master sergeant says. His companions are both staff sergeants. All of them have master drop badges and various other infantry credentials on their smocks.
“You have it all wrong, Master Sergeant. What we did wasn’t a mutiny. What you guys did was attempted robbery.”
The SI sergeant balls his fists and flexes his jaw. “That drop on the admin center, we lost four guys from my unit, you rubble-humping riot cop. One of them was a first sergeant I’ve dropped with for ten years. You owe me way more than just some asshole commentary. Legal or not, that wasn’t for you to decide. But you never should have ordered your people to fire on their own troops.”
“They didn’t fire on their own troops,” Sergeant Fallon replies. “They fired on some jacked-up space monkeys taking illegal orders from a warmed-up one-star reservist. And don’t you fucking start talking about who owes whom ’less you want a list of my casualties to answer for.”
“Homeworld Defense,” the SI master sergeant replies, pronouncing the words like he’s describing an unappetizing medical condition. “Those weren’t casualties, Sarge. Those were property damage.”
I don’t see her telegraphing the move at all, but Sergeant Fallon’s artificial leg shoots out from underneath the table and takes the SI sergeant down at the ankles. He falls sideways with a yelp, and I push my chair backward and scramble to my feet quickly. The SI master sergeant’s head hits the edge of the plastic table and takes it down with him, along with our drinks. The other two SI troopers launch themselves at us, and the brawl is on.
My opponent is half a head shorter than I am but looks much more fit than I feel right now. I take advantage of my slightly longer reach and jab him in the face with a quickly thrown left straight, which rocks his head back a little but doesn’t slow him down. He hauls off with his right hand and hits my own right fist, which I’d put in front of my face to block his punch, and I end up punching myself in the lip with my own hand. Then we’re too close for punches. He grabs me by the tunic and tries to head-butt me. I turn my head slightly and pull my chin to my chest to make his blow land somewhere other than my face. Then I pull back my right leg and knee my opponent as hard as I can. I was aiming for his groin, but due to our height difference, I hit his abdomen instead. He doubles over without letting go of my uniform. I knee him again in the same spot, and he lets go and stumbles back.