Angles of Attack Read Online Free PDF Page B

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