Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(9)
“This,” Sergeant Fallon says, “is the best bar in New Longyearbyen. And believe me, I’ve had lots of time to try them all while you were gone playing Superhero Space Commando.”
The interior of the place carries on the design cues from the outside. There’s no wood on New Svalbard, so the furniture is sturdy polymer molded to look like it has been carved from weathered driftwood. There are fake tree trunks on the walls, and the spaces between them have been adorned with murals by an artist long on enthusiasm and short on talent. It sort of looks like it’s supposed to resemble a medieval tavern, and it falls well short of achieving that goal, but after weeks of looking at steel bulkheads and nonslip flooring, the visual clutter is a welcome distraction.
“I didn’t know you drank,” I say to Sergeant Fallon when we sit down to claim one of the little round plastic tables in the back of the place.
“I do,” she says. “Just not the shitty soy beer they serve back in the RecFacs. That stuff tastes like carbonated piss. I like a good black-market whisky. Real beer, too, but that stuff is too expensive for my pay grade.”
“Never had any,” I reply. “Just the stuff they sell back home in the PRC. Purple Haze, Orange Crush, Blue Angel.” I chuckle at the memory of my first forays into intoxication when I was a teenager. “Positively awful shit. Flavored with the fruity juice powder from the BNA packets, to cover up the taste from whatever piping they used to distill it. Still tasted like battery acid, just like fruit-flavored battery acid.”
“Not too long before you joined us at Shughart in the 365th, we had a drop into the ’burbs somewhere in Kentucky,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Near the Lexington metroplex. Way out in the gentrified area. Some hood rats jacked a hydrobus and drove out from PRC Lexington to stir some shit and redistribute themselves some wealth. Small drop, just a platoon, to help out the local cops. We flushed the hood rats out of one of the real-currency food stores. They’d eaten as much as they could and got piss drunk, and then they trashed the rest.”
She looks over at the fake stained-glass windows that also adorn the interior walls, and her voice trails off as she recalls the memory.
“The middle-class ’burbers, they know how to live. When we had the last of the hood rats hog-tied and packed up for transport to the detention center, I had a look around for leftovers. They had a back stockroom, secured like a damn bank vault. I cracked the lock to check for stragglers, and there was this stash of high-dollar luxury goods in there. For extra-special customers with deep pockets, I’m guessing. Saw a bottle that said ‘Single Malt’ on it, liberated it, and took it back to Shughart in one of my empty mag pouches.”
Sergeant Fallon looks at me, and her expression turns very slightly dreamy for a moment. “You’ve never had anything like that in your life, Andrew. Proper single malt Scotch, from actual Scotland. Not made from soy or recycled piss or whatever. Aged in a fucking wood barrel for fourteen years, then sat on a shelf in some middle-class asshole’s private stash for a few more. So simple and clean, and so complex at the same time. All that work and time, just for someone to sip slowly and enjoy. Pure decadence.”
“Did you share any with the rest of the squad?” I ask.
“No, I didn’t. I kept it all for myself. Took me a month to finish that bottle. And I have no regrets.”
I grin at this casual admission of a court-martial-level offense. Truth is, it doesn’t seem that bad anymore, not after what happened since we arrived in the Fomalhaut system a few weeks ago. We’ve done far more subversive stuff since then, and a stolen bottle of liquor barely makes a dent the ledger now, even if that bottle probably cost more than I made in my first nine months in the military.
The bar isn’t very busy. There are a few locals sitting at tables and chatting, mostly ice miners and engineers clad in blue overalls, waterproof adaptive nanofiber jackets hanging over chair backs. There’s music playing at moderate volume, some ancient K-pop tunes that were already oldies when I was in public grade school.
“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.”