Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(10)
“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.
Next to me, the third SI trooper is already on the ground, holding his nose. The master sergeant who led the attack is just now getting back to his feet, and I look on as Sergeant Fallon very deliberately cocks her leg and kicks the SI master sergeant in the small of the back. He shouts out in pain and falls backward.
There’s a loud and sharp whistle from the door. We all turn to see Chief Constable Guest, the moon’s top law-enforcement officer, standing in the doorway and holding the door open with one hand. The barrel-chested constable looks only very slightly less solid than the heavy steel door or the foot-thick concrete wall next to him. His other hand is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his gun holster and the stun stick on his belt, and his sour expression makes it clear that he is currently thinking about deploying one or the other. He assesses the situation for a few seconds and then points at the SI troopers.