Angles of Attack (5 page)

“That’s some grade-A shit weather,” I say to her. “Shuttle got delayed three hours waiting for a break in the storm.”

“This isn’t a storm,” she says. “This is fucking balmy. You can actually see ahead for more than ten meters. Everything has moved underground. And I mean everything. The whole town. Did you know they have a whole damn recreation district underground?”

“No, I did not know that.”

“They call it the Ellipse. Come on, stow your new toys, and I’ll take you down to the bar. They have a thing called a Shockfrost cocktail. I don’t know what’s in it, but it will make you think you can arm-wrestle a Lanky.”

The Ellipse is an underground concourse that makes a loop underneath a large chunk of New Svalbard. Sergeant Fallon leads me around like a tour guide. All the bunker-like houses on the surface have secondary subterranean exits that lead to neighborhood tunnels, and all of those tunnels converge on the Ellipse. In the winter months, when nobody can spend much time on the surface in hundred-knot polar winds, life moves underground on New Svalbard.

The tunnel that makes up the Ellipse is twenty meters or more in diameter. I always wondered where the settlers of New Svalbard have their shops and pubs and where social life happens, and now I have my answer. Colonial economies are rough and basic, much like the black markets in the PRC back home, and a lot about the Ellipse and its warrens of shops and vendor stalls reminds me of life back home before I joined the service.

“You going to tell me about the drop with our new pals, or what?” Sergeant Fallon asks as we stride down the concourse, which has many more colonists milling around on it than I’ve ever seen on the surface streets here in New Longyearbyen. The locals are ice miners, hydroponic farmers, engineers, aviation service crews, and their families. Occasionally, we pass HD troopers from our newly minted New Svalbard Territorial Army, who give us respectful nods or salute Sergeant Fallon outright. Regardless of prior rank structures, we are both part of the small group who was in charge of the mutiny a few weeks ago, when Sergeant Fallon and her exiled Homeworld Defense troopers refused to follow orders to seize colonial assets. The resulting battle with the hardheaded elements of the Spaceborne Infantry cost us nearly forty casualties on both sides, along with several aviation assets we could ill afford to write off, not with so few humans in the Fomalhaut system, most of them dug into a moon with very few military assets of its own.

“Best drop I’ve ever done, really,” I say. “By-the-book planetary assault, few casualties, all mission goals accomplished. You should have been there. Could have gotten some trigger time against the Lankies in. Those Russian marines do not fuck around, let me tell you.”

“Oh, I have no doubt. I met a few of them at Dalian during that lovely proxy battle we fought with the SRA. ’Course, they were in sterile uniforms back then. Svalbard Accords and all.”

I don’t know a lot of Sergeant Fallon’s service history before I met her five years ago in the Territorial Army’s 365th Autonomous Infantry Battalion, but I do know from my former squad mates that the Battle of Dalian was where she earned her Medal of Honor. I know it was a police action that went south and filled a lot of TA body bags, but the official history is fuzzy on the details, which probably means that we technically or brazenly violated a treaty or three.

“You have to tell me about that one of these days,” I say.

Sergeant Fallon just smirks. “Andrew, the level of alcohol I need to drink to start telling details about Dalian pretty much guarantees that I won’t be able to recall those details. Speaking of alcohol . . . here we are. Welcome to On the Rocks.”

She points to a shop front that takes up about twenty meters of the tunnel wall up ahead on our right.  In most other settings, the fake blown-glass windows and the obviously resin-molded knobby tree trunks that decorate the front of the establishment would be tacky, but down here it’s a welcome splash of colorful kitsch in a place where most everything else is the color of ice and grimy concrete.

“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.”

“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.”