[▲] Irwin City, Luna
Half a pint in Nim decided that Guinness wasn't quite her idea of what beer should have tasted like. When she mentioned it out loud the bartender gave her an incredulous look and the explanation, "Guinness isn't beer, kid—it's a food group."
This had garnered a laugh out of everyone who had heard it, including the Captain, who had finished his first pint in almost the same manner as Karda had downed his. It was strange to be sitting next to the commander of her ship and chatting with him like he was just another friendly face at a bar. Not too long ago he had been chewing her out for bypassing security protocols to execute intricate shipwide pranks like a father furious over his child's immature behavior in front of important company. Granted no actual father had legal authority to space their children for disobeying house rules, which was, now that she thought about it, probably why it was so utterly weird to be laughing about the whole thing a year later with the man who could have pressed the button.
Still, she had to admit, it was the kind of atmosphere she enjoyed being in. Except for the cigarette smoke. That she could do without.
Apparently the Captain was going to see his son who worked at Leonov Medical Station, a large private facility situated at the L1 point between Luna and Terra Core. Doctor Michael was a civilian medical researcher (though the way the Captain talked about him he was the most brilliant medical mind born in the last two centuries) and had not been speaking much with his father since his parents divorced. She didn't pry; it was odd enough to be talking about family with her Captain and he didn't seem too keen on relating all the details anyway. Both she and Karda would be reeling from the revelation that their Captain had once been a married family man as soon as the alcohol buzz wore off. The carefully constructed cadet theory that he was assigned to the Heinlein as a disciplinary measure after getting caught sleeping with an admiral's wife had just been blown out the airlock.
From what Nim had seen happy military marriages like the ones her parents shared were pretty rare; that her mother and father also shared a love for wandering deep space was probably why they had been married nearly forty years without separating once. Her sister Lyall was the kind of woman with a man in every port to sate every itch, but she was married to the Agamemnon and her crew and that had always been pretty clear. Her brother Aries had almost tried the marriage thing, then found his fiancee was pretty much like his older sister insofar as faithfulness went and swore it off after the classic "fiancee's in the rack with the best man" discovery. Truth be told he never seemed all that broken up about dumping the slut, either, and Nim had never liked her to begin with.
It wasn't too long after Captain Michael had finished his second beer and Nim had managed to make it halfway through her first that the age-old rivalry between the Navy and the Vanguard reared its beastly head and killed the camaraderie.
"This is a Vanguard bar," announced a male voice from the direction of the door. "Ain't no leathernecks or tubers allowed in here."
Michael glanced over his shoulder, then pushed aside his empty mug and settled his tab with the bartender. Thinking twice, he handed the man four times what their beers and been worth as he stood up. Dropping a surprisingly weathered hand on Nim's shoulder he said, "Don't break anything that belongs to the bar."
Blinking in surprise she stared at him for a moment. "Uh... sir?"
He flashed her a sly and shockingly mischievous grin, one that she would have expected to see on another cadet and not the captain of her ship. "You're a Marine in the Navy now, MacNamara. Stand with your flight."
Excusing himself he settled his cap back onto his head and walked out of the bar, delivering an icy-eyed glare at the lone PV that dared to block his exit which caused the man to melt as though he had been thrown into the path of a solar flare. Once he was gone Karda leaned forward on the counter and exhaled as though someone had just loosened a vice from around his chest.
"Wow. I thought he'd bust me for sure there."
"Nah," said Nim with a nonchalant shrug. "Space pirate baby face, remember? You're too cute to get angry at!"
"I hate you," he muttered.
"Hey, you ginger bitch! Look at me when I'm talkin' to you!"
Having no idea what a ginger was, but still fairly certain she was the person the man was shouting at, Nim stood up and realized that the PV's chin was roughly even with her forehead—and she was the spacer standard 1.8 meters tall. From the door he hadn't seemed all that big but she guessed he had been stooping and now stood puffing out his chest like a toad to make himself look bigger. He also reeked of sweat for some odd reason. Irwin City was kept at a permanent fifteen degrees Celsius. Nim had been born in space and even she was finding it a bit chilly.
She glanced to her side and saw that Calli and Leo had covertly abandoned the booth where they had been chatting and were hovering in the back near where the remainder of the PV's cadre stood waiting to see what would happen. Wondering if Leo would give her the riot act for beating someone up again she realized that he had his eyes trained on the stocky fellow with the sergeant patch on the shoulder of his gray jumpsuit. It suddenly dawned on her that he was actually intending to fight.
“I said, jarhead, this is a Vanguard bar,” the PV repeated, glaring down at her with the look of a high and mighty lord. “Take your baby boy toy, the gene reject, and the camel-humper over there and ship out.”
“Hey Karda,” said Nim, glancing over at the Abrams pilot, “the baby navy guy thinks you're the baby.”
“So I heard.” He gave her a devious grin as he swiveled around on his stool to face the irate man. “I say we find out who ends up crying for mommy first.”
Nim smiled blithely at the PV. “Wanna give up and go home? Pretty sure this ain't going to turn out all that shiny for you.”
The PV's face exploded into a brilliant crimson shade as he pulled back his fist and roared, “Fuck that!”
Having kept an eye on his fists she easily dodged the first strike he laid out, an almost comical right hook that a blind man could have seen coming. She levered her knee up and smashed his groin, waiting until he had doubled over just far enough before savagely boxing his ears. The PV hit the ground screaming in pain and she moved on to the next opponent, catching a fist to the face before she had a chance to counter the move.
The lights in the room swirled for a moment into a puddle of blue and green neon, then she noticed that Karda had leaped over the first man's body and was engaging in a lighting-fast duel of fists and feet with the PV that had blindsided her. She left him to his battle and looked for the next target of opportunity, finding it in two newly arrived Vanguards who were just walking in the door looking for what she presumed to be their squadmates. Seeing one of their own laid low on the floor they leaped into action, the thicker of the two headed straight for her.
She immediately reacted by using the one move that she had managed to feint Zee with twice. Pretending to catch her foot on the floor, she stumbled forward and caught herself on both arms, noticing the feet of the PV shuffle to a halt right in front of her fingertips. Immediately she folded her arms inwards and pushed off with her legs, bringing her heels up over her head to slam solidly against the Vanguard's chest and knock him flat on the ground. She continued to roll up and over him, making a point to stomp her heel into his gut as she went. The entire maneuver was ridiculously easy in the low Lunar gravity, not at all like it was on the practice mat at whatever their trainer decided the "heavy" setting would be for that day.
Sliding across the bar floor and popping back up to stand she preempted even more Vanguard reinforcements from arriving by latching onto the wild-west type batwing doors and throwing them forward with all her strength, clipping the two new arrivals across their chins and knocking them senseless. She was about to announce her victory when pain exploded across her back and sent her sprawling to the floor along with a rain of splinters and a few intact chair legs.
Coughing and gasping for air, she flipped over onto her backside and kicked out the knees of the Vanguard that had cracked her with the stool, making him yelp in pain at almost the exact same moment Calli slung her arm around his neck and hauled him straight to the ground in a vicious headlock and proceeded to introduce his forehead to the checkered tile floor. Content that he was now unconscious she pulled Nim back to her feet and the two squared around to face the six other PV's that had extricated themselves from the pool hall on the other side of the bar to join the brawl.
An ear-piercing and sustained whistle put a halt to the rest of their combat exercises as the Lunar police in their reflective white stripes swarmed the bar and started slapping cuffs on everyone bleeding and conscious. As the lot of them were filed unceremoniously out of the bar at shockpoint she quickly assessed the injuries her squadmates had received. Out of all of them Leo had barely a scratch to show for his efforts, though there was quite a few splotches of blood on his shirt and fists that did not belong to him and a pair of grown, gurgling men on the floor in his wake. Karda had a soon-to-be black eye and Calli had a cut across her forehead that would have annoyed anyone that actually relied on their eyes to see. Nim had a fat lip but she knew the worst of it would come tomorrow when the real pain of having been hammered across the back with a bar stool set in.
Truth was she was more interested in what shape the bruise would turn out to be than the fact she had just had an antique wooden chair shattered across her spine.
“Hey, Leo,” said Nim as they were piled into the back of the security van to be shipped off to the local police station, “worth it?”
“Absolutely,” he replied with a devious grin more rare than ice on Mercury. "Absolutely."