“Well, I won’t tell your mom if you don’t,” murmured Sam. “Up to you, Marius.”
Marius didn’t hesitate. “Sure.”
“It’ll be fine,” Xander said. “They’ve probably got rules against serving their kind up there, too, but I’m pretty certain we’ll see at least Boss in Callahan’s before the night is over. So, like I said. Tonight, we make our own rules. C’mon.”
One of Simon’s guys was hovering in the penthouse elevator lobby as the doors opened and Xander and his companions stepped out of the elevator. Many of them had worked security for years, and they knew very well who Sam Dutton was. The duty guard flexed his hand in a gesture that spoke eloquently of his ambivalence.
“Er, Mr. Dutton… Sam…”
“They’re with me, Elliot,” Xander said. “It’s fine.”
“Er, Andie Mae is…”
“We’ll sort that out,” Xander said, with considerably more confidence than he actually felt. But he seemed to be committed to doing dangerous things tonight, and this was just one more — and so he soldiered on. “Don’t worry. Look, you want to call Simon…?”
“I guess not,” Elliot said, still looking uneasy. “Um, if you need anything…”
“I won’t start a brawl, Elliot,” Sam said, sounding amused. “At least not unless she hits me first. But I think we can probably all be civil for a couple of hours.”
Callahan’s was full but not crowded as they walked into the bar. The lights had been dimmed, but the place was awash with the light from a Moon so close and so huge in the sky beyond the wall of Callahan’s picture windows.
“It’s a cash bar tonight,” Xander said, so irrationally moved by that sight that he felt inexplicably generous towards all the world, “but the first round’s on me. What’ll you guys have?”
“Aren’t you supposed to have free booze?” Sam said, carefully avoiding a direct reference to the replicators which the androids had provided. “You know, courtesy of our… hosts?”
“The guy at the bar is still on the clock — and free booze kicks in only if stuff runs out,” Xander said. “There’s no reason to stiff the hotel on this gig.”
“In that case, scotch, single malt, straight,” Sam said. “Marius…?”
“I, er… Mom never minds if I have a sip of wine sometimes…”
“Make it white wine,” Sam said. “He’ll be twenty one in a few short years, we’ll just call this a little retroactive.”
“I’ll get the drinks,” Xander said.
He dived into the crowd by the bar, and Sam and Marius drifted off in the other direction, towards the hypnotic Moon.
“Wow,” Marius said, his eyes wide. “Just… wow. I mean, I looked at pictures of this. NASA has maps on their site, and there are places on the web where you can literally crawl across the entire face of the Moon, and click on every crater, and get all kinds of information, but this is… this is…”
“It’s so cool, isn’t it?” Libby sidled up to them, a glass in her hand. “Hi, Sam. Has Andie Mae seen you yet? How did you get in here?”
“Xander invited us,” Sam said, his eyes wary. He was not exactly at his ease, in the company of the crew who had ousted him — many of whom he himself had trained into positions of responsibility.
Libby laughed. “So Xander and I are both being subversive, then. I asked Liam up.”
Liam, Andie Mae’s repudiated partner in the ConCom revolution, stepped up behind Libby, lifting his own glass in half salute. “Sam.”
“Liam,” Sam said, nodding acknowledgment.
“It feels like I’ve never seen it before, you know,” Liam said, his eyes back on the Moon. “And yet I have. I know exactly where Apollo 11 landed — there, right at that weird shape, there at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility….”
“And Apollo 15,” Marius said. “Up there, on the ridge. Right between Serenity and the Sea of Rains.”
“Ah, but who can point me to where Apollo 13 landed?” Sam murmured.
Liam turned his head sharply. “Thirteen never…” he began, but Sam was laughing quietly and lifted a hand in a gesture of surrender.
“Peace, children, peace,” he said. “Truth of it is, none of you were even born when all of these birds were flying up here. You might have seen it but you never felt it, not real time. We of the last millennium, we who were young once when the Moon was still made of green cheese, to us, it was the true adventure… to you, it’s a story, a movie, Tom Hanks in space…”
“Did you actually watch it? Live? The first landing?” Liam asked.
“Yes,” Sam said, “and I did not understand what I was seeing, I was only a child. It was amazing, because it was unreal, because — well — in the end I suppose it was a story for all of us. A fairy tale of our time. And no, I can’t believe I’m seeing it either. This just feels — unreal — like someone is about to scream ‘Cut!” and the scenery is all going to come down, and they’ll switch off all the lights that are making this glow in here tonight… and they’ll, I don’t know, take us round the back somewhere into a back lot where they filmed the Moon landing all along, like all the conspiracy buffs say…”
“I liked the mystery of it all,” Libby said, staring at the huge Moon with a sad expression.
“Everyone’s excited,” Liam said to Libby. “You sound… bummed out.”
“I am kind of bummed out,” Libby said, cradling her drink. “I mean, just the other day, I was just sitting there, you know, on a beach, in the moonlight, and it was the most romantic thing, sitting there with a guy in that light, and now… now I’ll look up, and I’ll see this, remember this, and it’s magnificent but the romance is shot. I have half a mind to have a good talk with the androids when they come up — they don’t have a romantic bone in their body…”
“In practical terms, they don’t have any kind of bone in their body,” Marius said awkwardly.
Libby rolled her eyes.
But it was hard to keep one’s attention focused on anything but the thing that filled their sky, and Marius suddenly flung out an arm, pointing to the white orb.
“Tycho!” he yelped. “That’s Tycho Crater! And where’s Clavius?”
“Underneath it,” Xander said, having materialized behind them barely balancing three drinks. Sam relieved him of his own Scotch and of Marius’s glass of wine, passing the latter to its recipient, and then stared at the remaining item in Xander’s hand.
“What,” Sam said, “in the name of everything holy… is that?”
“They’re making up new cocktails on the fly up there and giving them weird — ass names,” Xander said with a grin. “I’m pretty sure they’re all unique creations, no two exactly alike. This one… I didn’t dare ask what went into it, but they tell me its name is ‘Origin of Species: Metallica’ — for obvious reasons. ”
“It looks like liquid mercury,” Sam said. “Are you sure they aren’t trying to kill you?”
“It’s not that bad, actually,” Xander said. “Trust me. You haven’t tried the Romulan ale. This is highly superior.”
Sam’s eyebrow went up. “The Romulan ale?” he queried. “Isn’t that… pure synthahol, as it were? Who’s pocketing the change from this?”
“Oh, the Romulan ale they’re giving out free,” Xander said with a grin. “Not sure that’s such a great idea, but people can’t resist trying it. I don’t think anyone is ever going back for seconds, it’s kind of weird. And that whole thing… was my fault. And the replicator’s. I’m surprised the poor thing didn’t blow a gasket when I asked it for one. But it tried its best, I guess. The cocktail I’m not so sure about, up here, is the other one they were making when they were done with mine — they announced it was called ‘24th Century Moonshine’. And it looked like it would lay out a T.rex without half trying.”