“Well, well, well.” A sneering voice slashed through the conversation; Bienefelt and everyone else talking stopped dead. Heads turned. The speaker was a man a few centimeters shorter than Bienefelt, with close-cropped white-blond hair and a heavily muscled body struggling to break out of clothes two sizes too small. Seven more spacers, all big enough and ugly enough to cause a lot of grief, flanked him. Michael grimaced. He had seen enough bar brawls to recognize trouble, and Snow White and his seven overgeneered-far from small-dwarves were trouble, alcohol-fueled trouble.
“So what have we here?” the man said. “The fearless crew of the Reckless, eh? Still trying to work out how many spacers your goddamned skipper killed? Maybe we should teach the little bastard”-Snow White jabbed a wavering finger at Michael-“which I think is you, sir, how to obey orders. Waddya reckon, team?”
A low snarl of approval greeted Snow White’s suggestion, the Seven Dwarves swaying forward. Michael commed the bar manager to get the shore patrol fast. He stood up. “I don’t know who you guys are, and I don’t much care. So just go. That’s a direct order, and I’m comming you my ID to make sure you know who I am.”
“Oh, we know who you are,” Snow White sneered.
“Do yourselves a favor and leave,” Michael said. “Now!”
He might have been talking to himself. Snow White refused to move.
“Tell you what, sir,” Bienefelt said, standing up, mashing a fist the size of a small ham into the palm of her left hand, “I’ve got a better idea. Leave the bastards to me. I’ll move them along.”
“No!” Michael snapped, “and that’s an order, Matti.” His voice softened. “I won’t see you disrated for scum like these. Please. Just sit down”-reluctantly, Bienefelt took her seat, her face like thunder-“and you lot, go and we’ll forget what’s happened.”
“Forget it? Forget it, after what you did? What’s the matter, frightened?” Snow White taunted. “Is that why you turned and ran, you dreadnought pissants? It is; it damn well is. That’s why you left so many good spacers and ships to die, you cowardly sacks of shit.”
“Take that back,” Bienefelt hissed, her voice pure menace as she stood up.
Michael swore. If the patrol did not turn up soon, blood would flow. Ferreira and Sedova were on their feet; Michael waved them back down. Things were bad enough without commissioned officers getting involved.
“Take it back?” Snow White’s finger stabbed Bienefelt in the chest again and again and again. “Make me, you cowardly … gutless … dog turd.”
“You should not have done that, my friend,” Bienefelt said gently, only centimeters from Snow White’s alcohol-flushed face. “You really should not have done that.”
Something deep inside Snow White snapped; he and the Seven Dwarves made the mistake of throwing the first punches. In an instant, chairs went back and the crew of the Reckless roared to their feet, standing toe to toe with their adversaries. The bar became a shambles of swinging arms, bodies crashing to the ground, tables, chairs, and glasses going in all directions. Michael stepped back, one hand firmly locked onto Ferreira’s collar, her restraint visibly crumbling in the face of the enormous temptation to give one of the dwarves a damn good kicking, the other signaling Sedova to stay seated. Spacer attacking spacer was bad enough; spacer attacking officer was a hundred times worse, an offense guaranteed to bring a long stretch in a Fleet prison, capped off by a dishonorable discharge. A well-deserved punishment, true, but better avoided if humanly possible, a lesson ground into Michael and every other cadet at Space Fleet College; spacers were expensive commodities, after all.
Egged on by raucous shouts of encouragement from the ring of bystanders, the fight ebbed and flowed across the bar, but the dwarves’ greater mass proved no match for the raw fury of Reckless’s crew. Michael tried not to cheer while he watched, happy to see Snow White looking distinctly the worse for wear as Bienefelt’s huge fists battered his face to a bloody pulp.
The shore patrol arrived in force. With ruthless, practiced efficiency, they waded in and transformed the melee into a neat row of plasticuffed, stun-shot bodies in an impressively short span of time. Michael chuckled when Bienefelt twisted her head to one side to shoot him a triumphant smile, seemingly untroubled by the blood-streaked damage to her face.
The young lieutenant in charge of the patrol waved him over. “This lot yours?” he said.
“Some of them. Not all. Don’t know who they were, but they wanted a fight, they started a fight, so it’s a fight we gave them.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the patrol officer said wearily.
“Luckily, that’s what my neuronics recordings will show.”
“They all say that. One of my guys will take your statement. Who’s this?”
“Junior Lieutenant Ferreira, my XO. Sorry, my ex-XO.”
The patrol officer shook his head despairingly. “A joker. That’s all I want. I’ll need your statement, too, Ferreira. And you are?”
“Junior Lieutenant Sedova.”
“Ditto.” The patrol officer turned to survey the wreckage. “At least the officers had the common sense not to join in, which is more than I can say for this lot.”
“My guys were provoked,” Michael said, “and they sure as hell did not start it.”
“That’s mitigation,” the patrol officer said, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s not justification, and you know it.”
Michael nodded. The man was right; he did know it, but it was hard not to feel proud of the fierce loyalty and commitment the Reckless’s crew had shown. Not that loyalty and commitment would help much when the matter came to trial.
Giving his statement to the shore patrol, along with the records his neuronics had made of the incident, took an age, and it was almost midnight before Michael made it back to his cabin. The impersonal box-one of hundreds of identical cabins making up the transit officers’ quarters-was as uninviting as ever. With a groan, he toppled onto his bunk, doing his best to ignore the anger and resentment that still simmered inside him. He knew one thing for sure. Whatever humanspace lacked, it was not assholes, something Snow White and his seven pea-brained sidekicks proved. Sons of bitches, he swore silently. He hoped the provost marshal would throw the book at them; they deserved it.
Out of habit, he flicked on the holovid. When it lit up, he wished he had not; World News was running its breaking news segment, the ticker tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen with the words “Fleet Hero in Bar Brawl-Provost Marshal to Lay Charges.”
“For chrissakes,” Michael shouted, frustrated beyond belief. “The fucking bastards.”
He did not have to watch the story to know how World News would spin it. He had been on the receiving end often enough to know exactly how they would lay it out: heavy on the fight-no doubt using recordings helpfully provided by one or more of the bar’s patrons-but light on who had started it. With careful editing and without ever saying so, they would leave the viewer with two impressions: first, that he had been in the thick of the fight, fists swinging with the best of them, and second-picking up the idea sown by the ticker tape-that he had been charged. If they were feeling creative, they probably would find a way to blame him for starting it.
World News did that sort of thing all the time, and they were extremely good at it, which was why they were so popular and profitable. Worse, any corrections his lawyers forced out of them would be buried in a quick one-liner at the end of the news a week later, by which time millions of Feds would know-as certain fact-that he had been charged with brawling, their opinions immune to any evidence to the contrary.
Michael understood none of it. For some reason, he was well and truly in their sights, and presumably, he would stay there until they got bored with him or a bigger sucker came along. He would talk to Mitesh in the morning. Despite the fact that his agent was just another AI-generated avatar, he had a way of getting things into perspective.