“Your captain wanted you to buy us a drink?” said the man, not understanding despite being more sober than Kohl. Could well have been all the way sober as Kohl figured things.
“That’s not it,” said Kohl. “Captain’s gone. This is for damage to the bar.”
The man gave a glance over to the booth where Nate had been, said something that sounded like shit, and tried to push past Kohl towards the exit. Kohl put an arm against the man’s chest and gave a gentle push. The man stumbled back against the bar, knocking into the woman, spilling her drink again. She really should put that thing down.
Joni gave Kohl a last, angry glare, then slammed her hand under the bar. There was a rattle, and metal shutters slid down over the top of the bar, locking her in. The lights in the bar came up, causing Kohl to squint, which was why the man’s fist caught him in the side of the face. It wasn’t that he was drunk — he might still have worn a fist to the face, but he would have seen the damn thing coming.
That’s how he landed on his back, staring at the ceiling, those damn bright lights above him. The woman was saying something to the man, using words like move and backup and kill him, which were all the wrong words for a bar fight. And the man was pulling out some kind of communicator, a slick little thing that had black ops written all over it. It wasn’t that it was slick and black, it was that green lazed out of it, falling in quick raindrops of colored light over the interior of the bar. It made Kohl laugh.
They both paused and looked down at Kohl. He pushed himself up on an elbow, held up a hand to forestall being punched in the face a second time, then levered himself to his feet. Pointed at the communicator. “That’s not very discrete,” he said.
The man looked at the communicator, then at his fist, no doubt wondering at it’s lack of effect. “I—”
“Because,” said Kohl, “it’s got black ops written all over it, little toy like that. What’s it doing, taking our pictures and getting backup?”
“That’s the size of it,” said the woman.
Kohl turned his neck to the left, then the right, rewarded with a series of pops. “Last time I was in a situation like this, the backup wanted to kill everyone.”
“They—” said the man.
“I don’t care,” said Kohl.
“You don’t?” said the man.
“No,” said Kohl. “You do what you need to, right? Right? I’m here as a, what would you call it, a delaying tactic. Also, I owe you one.” With that, he slammed his fist into the side of the man’s face. The guy tumbled back against the bar, kind of loose in the limbs like he wasn’t piloting anymore, which turned out to be the case as he slumped to the floor. The woman looked at this, then smashed her glass against the bar, holding up the broken stem, and trying to stab Kohl in the face with it.
That’d be why she kept holding that damn drink, thought Kohl. He caught her arm, the broken stem spinning out across the bar, and he punched her in the face for good measure. She hit the deck right next to her partner.
Kohl was about to give himself a virtual pat on the back for a job well done when two things happened.
First, someone hit him in the back with a chair. This was supposed to hit Kohl in the back of the head, but misjudged timing or the second thing skewed the aim and all it did was hurt, but a lot, dropping him to one knee amidst the woman’s spilled drink and shards from her broken glass.
Second, a bunch of other assholes burst in the front of the bar, and fired into the room. The person who’d hit Kohl in the back with a chair — turned out, it was the first asshole with the rivet in his head — got caught in a fusillade of plasma. The plasma picked him up, tossed the body across the room, and what landed was in pieces and on fire.
So it was good, in a way, that Kohl had been hit in the back and dropped like a dress on prom night, not that he’d been to a prom, but he’d heard stories. Because being dropped meant he hadn’t turned into human-shaped charcoal, and it gave him a moment of quiet, or quieter, reflection on the floor of the bar as what looked and sounded like a small-scale war broke out. Spacers were drawing down on the newcomers and firing back, and all that was fine, but one thing was bothering Kohl.
Joni.
Because she was behind some shutters and the wood paneling of the bar, rated for broken glass and bad language, not blaster fire, and if she was back there then bad things could happen to her. Kohl wasn’t troubled on a day to day basis by his conscience, but she’d tried to warn him, or at least it had felt like that, and people who warned you were worth keeping on team.
“Joni!” he yelled. “Joni, you alive back there?”
“Fuck you, October Kohl!” she screamed back at him, her voice sounding like it was coming from the same floor-level height he was at. Tricky to tell, but it was a good start.
“Later!” said Kohl. “Joni, I’ll come in there and get you out.” He unclipped the strap over the top of his blaster, pulled the weapon out, and pointed it up. Not at the shutters, because that was too high to climb right now, but the let’s-call-it-wood next to his head. And after a moment’s reflection, a little to the right. He pulled the trigger, a bright stab of plasma punching a hole through the paneling of the bar. He fired a couple more times, figuring that because he wasn’t firing at the front of the bar he wasn’t drawing much attention, because in his experience soldiers — if that’s what they were — liked to shoot at people shooting at them. Everything else scanned in at a lower priority. It was the kind of oversight that killed more soldiers than was necessary.
He scrabbled over broken pieces of veneer and ceramicrete and melted plastic, crawling behind the bar. Joni helped him through, then tried to hit him in the face. She made a poor job with the first swing, because of the angle, and a better job with the second swing. Joni was looking like she wanted to go for a third, so Kohl held up a hand, wincing. “Two seems fair.”
“God dammit Kohl,” said Joni. “I said no.”
“How was I supposed to know they were some kind of secret black ops assholes with secret black ops backup?” he said, then ducked as plasma fire burned a hole through the shutters above them and incinerated top-shelf liquor in a haze of steam.
“I knew,” she said. “I knew, Kohl.”
“Yeah,” said Kohl, after a moment. “Sorry. Captain’s orders.”
“Fuck Nate,” said Joni, but with no real urgency.
“Back door,” he said, pleased he wasn’t slurring so much. It could also have been the sharp sound of plasma weapons being discharged that covered it up; either way was fine. “Back door.”
She nodded, moving on all fours through broken pieces of the bar, her glowing green hair lighting the way. Kohl got a view of her rear, which was a nice rear as these things went, which made him wonder if he was sobering up like he thought. He followed her as she pushed through a door, into a kitchen area, empty of people. Kohl got himself up into a low crouch and pointed at a door on the far side of the room. “That it?”
“That’s it,” said Joni. She moved towards it.
Kohl grabbed her arm. “Not so fast,” he said.
She shook him off. “October Kohl, if you touch me again—”
“There will be five guys out there wanting to kill you,” he said, hoping that would explain things enough in the heat of the moment.
Kohl lead the way across the kitchen, still keeping low. The crackle of plasma discharge was becoming intermittent from behind them, which meant someone was winning, or both sides were just running out of people to keep pulling triggers. Kohl readied his blaster, got to the door, stood up, kicked it open, and shot the man standing there in the middle of the chest. The man spun back, smoke pouring from the hole in his chest, and Kohl turned to the left and shot the man standing there too. He spun to the right, and fired twice more into the woman standing there.