The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“Look,” Angel repeated. “We better—”

Margulies pushed him casually inside and followed. “You were going to get me a drink,” she said as she closed the door behind them. “Stop dicking around, hey?”

“Yeah, I …” he said. This must have been the first time in quite a long while that he’d been straight enough to appreciate the reality of his existence. His shoulders slumped as he looked at the fetid ruin around him.

The back and one leg of a chair protruded from a pile of garments. Margulies lifted the chair and shook it, then kicked the filthy clothing aside to make room for her to sit down. “When we last talked,” she said in a casual tone, “you were talking about buying a tract of land where you grew up.”

“Aw, fuck it, Missie, I’m no farmer,” Angel said. He seated himself on the edge of the bunk and met her eyes for the first time since they came upstairs. “I left here when I was fifteen. Engine wiper on a starship, then I did some soldiering on Wellbegone. Got in with the Slammers, then the FDF. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said I was going to raise gage. I think I just wanted to be fifteen again.”

He bent and groped first beneath the bunk, then within the bedding proper. He came up with a bottle. It was unlabeled. The ten centimeters’ depth of fluid within had a pinkish tinge.

“Ah …” Angel said. “Do you really want a drink? I don’t have glasses.”

“No problem,” Margulies said, taking the bottle from him. The liquor was harsh. The pink color suggested flavoring, but the only taste she noticed was that of raw alcohol. She returned the bottle, wiping her lips with the back of her free hand.

“Or there’s gage, of course,” Angel offered with false perkiness.

“Naw, not for me,” Margulies said. “But you used to prefer it to booze, didn’t you?”

Angel got up and rested his hands on the window ledge. The glass was painted black and reflected the light of the single fixture overhead.

“I really stepped on my dick, Mary,” he whispered to the glass. “I went out, I looked at land, and it all came back to me, starving and scrabbling and bored, bored to fucking tears all the time I was a kid. That was why I left. And it’s worse now, the syndicates take twice the bite they did when I left.”

He turned and looked at his former lieutenant again. “And I looked around the security troops and I thought, these clowns, they’re not fit to be recruits to the Slammers.”

“You got that right,” Margulies murmured. Her mouth was oily with the liquor’s aftertaste.

“So I hired on, with the Lurias because my old village, it belonged to L’Escorial,” Angel continued. “Not that it mattered. I thought I could make something out of them, give them some discipline. That’d make it better for everybody, you see that, don’t you El-Tee? The farmers too, if it was just paying for protection they had to worry about. Via, what place doesn’t have taxes?”

“You can’t turn the lot out there into soldiers,” Margulies said. “Any more than you can build a gun out of cat turds.”

“Don’t I know it,” Angel whispered. He looked at the bottle in his hand, then drank greedily from it. His Adam’s apple throbbed with three swallows, four, before he set the liquor down again.

“I tried, El-Tee,” he whispered to the bottle. “But they wouldn’t listen. I’d have had to shoot a couple of them to get their attention and Via, the rest would’ve greased me the next night. You’ve got to sleep sometime, and there wasn’t anybody but me.”

He looked up at her. She nodded, agreement without empathy. Angel had chosen, just as surely as the constant low-level pain in Margulies’ rebuilt leg reflected choices she had made.

“The gage stopped working,” Angel said. “I was using too much. The first dose would put me to sleep. My skin was crawling, I’d scratch myself bloody.”

He swallowed. “So I switched to booze and that, you know, that helped some. And I found that mixed gage didn’t put me to sleep the way the pure stuff did, so sometimes I used that.”

“Refinery tailings are poison,” Margulies said harshly. “The best you’re going to do is grind down the nerve sheaths so that you’re a spastic for the rest of your life. Or you’ll go blind. Or you’ll fry your brain and sit around drooling. Think your new buddies are going to want to change your diapers, Angel?”

“I know all that!” he shouted. “I said it was just a time or two with tailings, didn’t I?”

He hadn’t, and if he had said that, it would have been a lie. It was amazing that Angel had managed the effort of will required to get straight when he learned that an FDF survey team was on Cantilucca, but it was vanishingly improbable that he would be able to maintain that state for more than a few hours.

Angel sat heavily on the bed, clutching the liquor bottle to him as if it were the only warmth in a world of ice. “Look, El-Tee,” he said to the wall, “I just want you to know I’ve got it under control now. I’m fine, and in a day or two I’ll have all my gear strac. I just want you to know that.”