Dockside Bar

Fragment from the early bit of Fallen From Stars, may or may not be used

After the briefing, they were dismissed. They left the barracks deck and headed for the Bazaar. Most of them were loud and crude, but Nikolao was thoughtful.

“Let’s go to Celice’s,” Mercutio said.

There was a soldierly agreement, and they threaded through the foot traffic of the little shops and eateries to a bar with guttering LED lights outside and in and white and red LEDs of a woman’s hips and torso, shaking left, shaking right, shaking left—

“Hey, MI!” the girls called out, and they shimmied over from the tables where they’d be lounging and gossiping because it was hardly after 14:00, and nothing was going on at Celice’s. Celice herself bustled over, silks and scarves all over, clapping her hands and pointing to sort out the girls evenly among the militia. “Who’s buying the first round?” she said, and Mercutio slapped blue bills on the table and called it. The servers ran out trays, their breasts ghostly visible behind the black-lighted transparent fabric and their serial numbers on their left inner forearms visible like electric white fire.

One of the girls coiled up catlike on Nikolao’s lap and he gave her a fistful of obols. “Sit there and look pretty,” he said. “You can have a bit of this drink.”

“Thank you, Sir,” she said, slipping them into her shorts, and she clung to him like a broken mast in a heavy sea, gripping his cuirass, the brass-colored collar on her neck shining like three different kinds of fire in the bar lights and her electric-silver hair pouring down his chest.

“Whatcha think?” Mercutio said.

“About what?”

“Boy-o, about the mission, are you daft?”

“Ah,” Nikolao mused. “Never done a board ’em before. The briefing doc read dangerous.”

“There’s some risk,” Mercutio agreed. “I’ve done a board ’em. Couple men died.”

“What led to it?”

“Mutiny,” Mercutio said. “A captain got real unpopular, and then they found a heavy metals lode on some rock, and they space him for his share. A sad accident report gets sent in. Then one of them drops a line on their scheme, and I was on the nearest cutter. We chased them to the Odysseus smelter, dunno where they thought they would get away from us. We matched speed, rammed them, grappled, blew their hatch, and went in. First two of us, they cut apart with mining drills before we cleared the deck with our carbines.”

“You were on that one? Nikolao whistled. “Read about it. What happened next?”

“We killed them all.”

Nikolao grunted. “Even the snitch?”

“Who could tell who it was? Easier this way. Besides, they’d tried fancy maneuvers at the last second and crippled us, so we were all coming aboard. We didn’t need the crowding.”

“That I hadn’t heard.”

“Not everything gets out.”

Nikolao kept his face carefully neutral and looked into his drink before passing it to the whore in his lap.

“So what do you think? How will this … ship respond?”

“Hard to say.” Mercutio’s black-haired girl was slithering all over him and nibbling his neck. “Depends on a lot of things, wouldn’t you say?—Ain’t you friendly.”

“Yes, Sir, I can get friendlier.”

“You’ll need to in a bit.”

“Oh, I will, Sir.”

“You think they’ll fight?”

“Listen, here’s the thing, Nikoĉjo. We don’t even know if anyone’s aboard. That’s a robot voice doing all that babble, and that argues against there being a crew, dontcha think? Last time, if you read your briefer and listened to the col-com, they had an empty habitat and nothing but a market list for us to fill once we had off their electronics and fancywares. We probably sent a team on it then, same’s they’re doing now. I’ll bet a month’s blue that the ship habitat’s as empty as this girl’s head.” He lightly rapped her skull and she giggled. “Toffs are just antsy now. Student riots make them think the sky is falling. They’re what d’ye call it— ‘risk averse.’ Get this shut down, get the students to stop shouting, and it’ll all ease up.”

Nikolao idly stroked the clone’s silvery hair as she judiciously sipped his drink. She nestled closer and closed her eyes.

“Still,” Mercutio said, “it’s not a safe job. You have to match speed, pull in, hope for no sudden maneuvers, and punch out the hatch. We’re lucky if we get through without injuries. If their deck is hot—well!—no telling what will happen.”

“Comforting.”

Mercutio laughed. “Hey, it beats foot patrols in some no-name outpost without even a good bar, or watching lambdas in the mines. When they riot, you know it!”

“So I hear.”

“If you die on this, at least you get to die doing something fun.”

“Well, there you go,” Nikolao said distantly.

He found himself, later, passing the silver-haired girl a few folded single drachms and stepping out of Celice’s before 15:00, walking the Bazaar’s curving deck, the path ahead always arching upward. He found his feet leading him to First Crossways and stood looking out the wide observation window at the planet below. From his perspective, the planet rotated slower than once a minute, allowing him to stand on the deck at 1 g force on the Station’s Outer Ring. The world loomed, gray and brown with hints of blue and green and masses of white clouds. He guessed it didn’t look much different than when the first human ships slipped into orbit over nine hundred years before. Maybe a little more green here and there, but from orbit … it wouldn’t be easy to tell. Hanging out in the void, rotating with the planet but disorientingly pottering along their slow paths, several spacecraft moved outbound into the system or into the docking core.

He stared closely at Iphigenia. If he waited long enough, the sea would emerge, and maybe he’d catch a glimpse of places he’d grown up in. Or maybe it would be cloudy. Or maybe he wouldn’t pick Calypso out along the coast. Nothing looked right from twenty-four hundred kilometers up.

“Hey, MI,” someone said.

He looked around. “Hello, Miss,” he said.

It was the owner of the flatbread stand at the corner of the observation deck. She leaned out on her wooden counter and gave him a nod. “Whatcha see, MI?”

He looked at the window, fouled with sticky handprints, and shrugged. “Home, I guess. Somewhere.”

“Yah? I see you come by,” she said. “Not much with your unit.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever been here with them.” He left the window, hands shoved deep in his cuirass. “Don’t think I ever bought anything here either.”

“No, you’ve not,” she agreed. She was older than him, maybe twice his age, with work-worn hands. “What can I get you?”

“You just want a sale,” he said with a chuckle.

“Tcha, yes. What, you thought I wanted to step out with you?”

“I wouldn’t insult you. What do you like?”

“You want the lamb.”

“I’ll take the lamb.”

She laid slices of lamb across the soft, hot bread, dribbled in the spiced red sauce, and folded it over and tucked it in a piece of paper. “There. Ten obols.”

“Temes, but things are expensive.”

“Lamb comes from planetside, Mist’ MI. Just like everything else. You not used to that yet?”

He scooted ten blue-plated silver coins across to her and took the paper. “Ah,” he said, after swallowing a bite. “That’s good.”

“You want a limonado?”

“Can I afford it?”

‘You got two more obols?”

He clicked them down. “This your place, or you have a patron?”

“Nice way of asking if I’m a freedwoman.”

“Well.”

“Yah, I’ve got a patron. I’ve been up here a long time. How can you tell?”

“Just a hunch.”

“A good one. I was one of the old Station-Manager’s girls. He’s retired out, got me this place. He lives planetside and gets a quarter of my profits.”

“Two and a half obols goes farther down there than here.”

“You think my profit’s ten obols? You’re a fool.”

“How do you think I got in militia?”

“Conscript?”

He raised his left hand and pulled down his sleeve. She nodded at the brass ring on his wrist and handed him the paper cup of limonado. “I feel bad for you boys.”

“Well, don’t. Most of us deserve it.”

“You deserved it?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t socially valuable. Ever think of going back down?”

She shook her head. “Down there? That’s the place that sent me up here. It’s a rough world that takes a girl from her mum, puts brass on her neck, and sticks her in a launcher, never to see her again, yah?”

“Yah.”

She wiped her counter. “So what’s with the ship?”

He cleared his palette with the limonado. “What ship?” he said, swallowing.

“Isn’t that the same with all of you? What ship? The only ship anyone talks about. The starship.”

“They don’t pay me to know things,” he said, “they don’t pay me to think. They pay me to do what I’m told and not talk about it.”

She stopped her wiping. “MIs are usually chattier.”

“Find a chattier one. Celice’s has got ten more just like me in it if you can pry them away from the girls.”

“I’ve spent too much time in places like Celice’s,” she said shortly.

“Thought you were the Station-Manager’s girl.”

“That was after.”

“Sorry.”

“Not half as much as me. What is it then, armed up? Full of trade goods? What do you think?”

“I think,” he said, “Intelligence would like nothing better than to trip me up with someone asking me innocent questions. I’m unpopular.”

“That’s pretty rude, MI,” she said, eyes narrowing. “Do I look like someone your lot would use to trip a man up with?”

“Miss—” he said, glancing up at her flickering signboard, “Miss Reŝmi, I’ve got three years in on a very hard job, and I don’t want to get more years for breaking regs. They’d be happy to drop a few drachms if someone could get me to open my mouth, whether they paid it to a janitor, a supply-warrant, my mum—or a manumitted peona—just for a few words of gossip. I like your food, Miss,” he gestured with the quarter-eaten lamb flatbread. “I’ll come back again if you’ll let me.”

“I won’t turn away trade,” she said, tossing the wet rag in a sink and putting her back to him.

“All right, Miss,” he said. “Good day.”

He continued down the Bazaar, his boots lightly thumping the decking, chewing and feeling bleak. He drank the last of the limonado and crumbled the cup into an organics hopper. “Aye, fuck my life,” he said to no one in particular and kept walking the decking, on and up, at a horizon that never came, that he never could see.