"Don't even get me started with that shit..." Magda grumbled.
Elena smirked because, despite all of this, the Oceanic had seen days infinitely worse than this one. She remembered how it was on the day that the casino went under eleven years ago, when she was still a teenager. Boys and girls half her age could be found on the tables with syringes and tissues full of white powder, and the same drunks who now fought in the cage were to be found passed out in the toilets. It was here that the Conglomerate felt compelled to intervene in the former casino's sorry state, if only to preserve Port Royal's image as a resort for affluent businesspeople. The response was to turn the entirety of District Four, itself falling into ruin for want of adequate management, into somewhere to dump the less desirable folk of the port. The end result was a slum the size of a city block – with the Casino Oceanic as its beating, cholesterol addled heart in dire need of a transplant.
The bartender at the centre of the establishment was a stout young man, most likely no older than twenty five, with a black tuxedo suit and bow tie to contrast his wavy purple hair and glimmering orange cybernetic eyes. As he cleaned out a beer glass, two pairs of mechanical arms jutted out of his back, sorting other glasses, bottles, tankards and other assorted drinking vessels behind him. The young lad's smile was an island of jollity in a depressive ocean of depravity and sorrow, even in the face of some six bar patrons, one of whom was rambling incoherently before tumbling from his stool.
"Good evening, Miss White," the bartender addressed Elena in a gently robotic voice, before turning to: "Guten Abend, Frau Morgenstern."
"Fuck the pleasantries, Winston," Magda growled. "Get me the usual – Bock und Würstchen."
"Of course," the tender was unmoved by Magda's decidedly foul mood. "Will it be the usual for you as well?"
"That it will, Winston," Elena stated in a calmer demeanour, before turning to her friend. "Go on, Mags – why the sour lemons?"
"Stress," Magda answered.
"After the fighting?" asked Elena. "I thought you enjoyed killing."
"I do," said Magda, "when there's a point to it."
"Clearing your head?" Elena reminded.
At that point Winston the bartender arrived, with beer and a synth-meat sausage for Magda, and a screwdriver cocktail for Elena. Behind them, an unpleasantly sinister looking droid with visible circuits, burning red optic sensors and a small bow tie of its own picked up the unconscious drunk at the foot of the bar. Lifting him into a fireman's carry, the robot conveyed the man towards the casino front doors.
"And yet I still can't help but wonder what it is we're doing all this for," Magda continued to grumble.
"This is the first good fight you've had in months," said Elena. "But then, stress does have an unfortunate habit of turning people into beasts."
"I just wish we'd get more recognition for our efforts."
"You want a Kewpie doll for doing your job?" Elena asked, the last few words of her query composing a half-laugh.
"No, but some thanks from those useless fuckwits on the board would be nice!" Magda growled. "Instead we get lumped with those losers who were busy shitting themselves and chastised for incompetence by Sub-Assistant Director Steve What's-his-name, chairman of the Select Committee of Who-gives-a-fuck!"
She tore away a chunk of sausage with her teeth before washing the meat down with a drink from her mug of beer.
"Y'know, it's funny how faceless Arschlöcher can poke fun at people protecting them and call them useless when they'd all be dead were it not for us," said Magda.
"Welcome to the strange world of capitalist democracy, where a person has the constitutionally enshrined right to behave like a cunt!" Elena raised her glass.
"Capitalist democracy is just a bad fucking joke," Magda continued her rant. "Bright kids with great ideas made to work like slaves rather than pursue their dreams, forced to enrich some other bastard's life on pain of their own hideous death by starvation. Peoples' savings robbed thanks to the decisions of dickbags who benefit from an economy literally geared entirely around guesswork. Too many luxuries but not enough necessities in a political economic system hell-bent on eating itself. Yet people write a cross on a piece of paper, put it into a little box every few years and somehow that alone is enough to maintain the delusion of liberty."
"I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say it's surely better than what you Martians have been saddled with," Elena proceeded. "A government that operates on repression and fear, but little else."
"Bah..." Magda grumbled. "Democrats and dictators are both the same breed of prick. The difference is that in a dictatorship, at least you'll be told upfront: 'Law's just the word of whoever has the biggest guns, or the most'. That's why I respect the majority of my compatriots. They tell it how it is. They make no illusions about their desire to use you to further their war machine. I can respect someone who can match money to mouth, even if I wanna strangle the Autarch and every fucking general at his side with their own wretched guts!"
Elena's eyes narrowed with brief consideration of the statement in Magda's embittered rant, before turning back to her.
"So if you were to give a toddler a rifle," she asked, "would that make his word law?"
"If he were unchallenged?" Magda stated. "Afraid so."
"Well then," Elena shrugged. "But enough about politics. I don't care for that bollocks."
"Why's that?" queried Magda.
"Because all politics is, is two camps of dickheads arguing with each other over things that don't really matter to Joe or Jane Public," said Elena. "That's how the rich bastards win. Our own morals are used to turn us against each other."
"Morals are what keep us together," Magda protested.
"Morals, usually somebody else's, are what get people killed," Elena grumbled as she took a swig from her glass. "Can you really say they're your morals if you're just parroting what great men have already said before you? And I say 'great' men in the loosest of terms. Many of these great men just happened to make it big 'cause they stated the fucking obvious."
"That would be the pirate in you speaking, then," Magda remarked.
"And the pissed off Mars-born fortune seeker turned miner turned glorified corporate babysitter speaking in you," Elena finished the remainder of her tipple with an almighty gulp.
"There's fuck all glorious about it," Magda complained, "except the battles against the bad guys."
"Why the hell did you come here, Mags?" Elena spoke with a smirk.
"Because I was young and stupid and full of bullshit ideas without reason to back them up!" Magda pronounced, taking another chunk out of her sausage.
At which point Elena was reminded of something she had intended to ask Magda. She then rotated her head clockwise to face Magda like a turret. "You said you enjoy killing people because it clears your head."
"Mhm."
Her voice then grew low and her ice blue eyes narrowed like gunsights. "You want to know why I enjoy killing people?"
"I'm guessing it's not because you don't want to get old," Magda reasoned.
"It's because I do want to grow old," said Elena. "I've heard others in my former line of work say there's no fun in growing old unless you've got too much money. Better to die young than grow old, when you can't walk, eat or shit properly in a neglected care home in some village dump. But my dad always told me that it doesn't matter how rich you are, how many women you fuck, how many men you rule over – only two things last forever! Glory and satisfaction! One is how people remember you, the second is how you remember yourself before you die."
She turned away from Magda to gaze up at the ceiling. "What I want more than anything else in the whole damn solar system is to be able to sit down on my deathbed and tell myself before everything goes black, 'I've done everything I've ever wanted to do, I've gotten everything I've ever wanted and everybody will remember me for it'. Only then will I be more than happy to rot six feet under the surface of some steaming shitpile of a planet."
"Problem is, though..." She turned back to Magda, a huge grin sprouting across her face. "Desire is a thirsty little bastard. Give him booze, and he'll thrive like rats on the battlefield. Give him drugs and he'll be even worse. When you get that far you'll never be able to shut him up."
"So if you had three hundred thousand dollars, you'd go for that Revitalite thing..." Magda reasoned.
"Of course I damn well would! How is that even a question?!" Elena slammed her empty glass on the table. "Better than having the only testament to your existence be a carved rock marking where you're buried!
"Winston!" she cheered, turning to face the barkeep: "It ... It's getting really fucking depressing in here! Put on a nice space shanty! Get some bread and ... and circuses for the rabble!"
~
Meanwhile...
Elsewhere, in District Two, another man's evening would be spent in a manner greatly different to his two subordinates.
District Two was the primary residential zone for the affluent inhabitants of Port Royal. Meanwhile the ordinary rank and file of the Occator Conglomerate packing the mines would reside within pressurised barracks outside of their workplaces, or within the hermetic confines of the fourth district. Most of the domiciles here were holiday homes for the packs of wealthy tourists who would make the administrative city their first port of call on round-trips across Ceres. This would go without mentioning the fabulous mansions at the centre beyond a gated community, where board members, prominent shareholders and other esteemed guests of the megacorporation would live their everyday lives. The other dwellers of District Two, among them lower executives, line managers and corporate security officers, were afforded more simple homes, yet an observer could nevertheless pick out the distinct sense of modest luxury that came with, for instance, the Californian suburb. Perhaps the only true difference between the neighbourhoods of America's west coast and Port Royal's second district were the sporadic metal pillars towering to a height of fifty metres; the purpose of these immense posts was to support the metal frames holding the quartz glass roof shield protecting the district and its inhabitants from the fury of outer space.
The assigned Frost family residence was a two-storey house crafted from white painted mooncrete, with a gable roof coloured terracotta and outfitted with solar panels. The front lawn was kept trimmed on a regular basis by the patriarch himself, as was the back garden, with a swimming pool out back. The garage, built separately to the house itself, contained a small hovercar, one of the few luxuries that Frost afforded himself. Most of the rest were brought into the house on the wages of his son Jason, who worked as a mechanic for one of the solar system's biggest logistics corporations. Hermod Interplanetary Logistics was, as far as Frost could recall, an interesting entity for Jason to have chosen to work for. Secretly however, the captain suspected that his son had heard about the various 'kickbacks' the company's staff were rumoured to get from moonlighting as smugglers and a taxi service for agents on both sides of the grand heliopolitical argument that transpired amidst Core Space.
Ed Frost considered this as slumped slumped in the living room armchair, a half-empty glass of whiskey in his right hand. The holovision was mentioning something about an interstellar ship, before proceeding to yammer about a certain silver haired terrorist, under whose distant command her minions had tried to assault Port Royal's city hall earlier today. If the jaded paramilitary captain were to be honest, there was something alluring about that youthful, dead-white face, those amethyst eyes, shimmering platinum armour, and the hood and cape painted imperial purple and joined together by a golden chain.
Ed had heard some of Annaroza Sokolova's speeches, usually in Martian state propaganda; she had been some high-profile general before going 'crusading' throughout the Belt and Frontier Space that lay just beyond it. He huffed at his younger, more libertine side trying its hardest to resurface from the distant past, at which moment he could appreciate why so many disillusioned Belters and pirates alike would want to follow her. If he were younger, he may well have done the same, if just to see what wonders lay under all that power armour. If only the politicians back in his native Great Britain could have had such an allure. How anybody could follow some crusty old fart who blathered about tightening belts and bickered with another, even crustier old fart about stupid, pointless nonsense eluded his mind. There was nothing heroic about stating the obvious, nor about parroting what had already been stated by far greater men in the past.
"Hey, Dad?"
Ed hadn't even heard Jason come in through the door; a short boy with his mother's raven black hair and his father's steel face.
"Hm?"
"Is Ryan ever coming back?"
Ed's eyes immediately closed and his hands locked onto the arms of the chair in a veritable choke-hold. There was nothing that he hated more than being reminded of what he did to his eldest son, his greatest regret. Even killing was preferable to having to explain this to his younger son...
"If I knew that, son, I'd be the greatest scientist alive," Ed growled a response, transfixed upon one of the family pictures on the wall. The old captain himself, a fourteen year-old Jason, and Ryan aged nineteen, with his dog Boris. Ryan himself had the same black hair as his younger brother, but his flowed down to his shoulders, and the same luminescent green eyes as the mother he and his father so doted upon. Life was so much happier before she died...
"I didn't mean to..." Jason apologised, having realised what mentioning Ryan did to his father.
"Don't worry about it," Ed brushed him aside, finishing his glass of whiskey in the meantime. "I know you miss him. I do too."
Suddenly he leapt out of his seat, turning off the holovision. The rambling newscaster vanished back into the orb-topped pillar on the far side of the living room as if scattering like a cockroach.
"Now, I believe I promised you I'd take you to see the new Devastators film," Ed turned to Jason with a kind expression. "Have you had your tea?"
"Yeah, had a sandwich at work," answered Jason.
"A sandwich?" Ed raised an eyebrow "So you don't want a pizza?"
"Wow, of course I want a pizza!" Jason's eyes lit up at once.
"Where'd you want to go – Pizzaverse or Shashlik Kingdom?" Ed asked.
"Uh..." Jason looked confused. "They don't sell pizza at Shash..."
"I know, I'm just messing with you!" Ed chuckled. "Get out of those overalls and into something decent."
As Jason rushed off upstairs, Ed took a moment to think to himself. Devastators. A series of war films set during the last great conflict between Earth and Mars, the Second Interplanetary War – the first such war being how Earth referred to the conflict known to the Martians as their Great Revolutionary War. A woefully inaccurate showcase of what the titular Terran commandos undertook during some of the battles in which he himself had fought; Frost possessed no recollection of any 'Justice Brothers' who blew up the dreadnoughts at Deimos Shipyard, for example. Nevertheless, such silly films were a welcome escape from the frenetic reality of what happened that day.
His vision became distant and discordant as memories of explosions and dying screams cut through his psyche.
~
Wednesday, 20 April.
The passage of time transmuted seven o'clock at night into half two in the morning. Closing time at Casino Oceanic. From the front doors of the establishment stumbled Elena White, only just about able to keep her footing as her tired face absorbed the neon-lit surroundings. She was followed by Magda Morgenstern, who blundered forth into the late night and struck one of the lampposts with a thud. Elena, only more sober by a tight margin, helped her up before she could fall to the floor.
As they wandered down the street on their way home, Elena's apelike facial expression betrayed that she was thinking hard about some tough problem. Even the distraction of a taxi rushing by served little to dissuade her thoughtful, concentrated look. In Magda's mind, floating as it was in ethanol and fermented grains, Elena was deliberat
ely waiting for her to enquire about whatever it was that was bothering her so. It was almost as if the query was too trivial to ask herself, yet so profoundly baffling to her mind that it had to be asked nevertheless.
"H... Hey, Mags."
The lengthy silence now broken, Magda directed an exhausted, stupid gaze in Elena's general direction. "Vhat?"
"You said that law's the wire ... uh, word of whoever's got the biggest guns," said Elena.
"Or the most, ja," Magda affirmed.
"So ... so if you were to give a toddler a plasma cannon, and hand a BB gun to a soldier in power armour – uh, then who gets to rule?" asked Elena.
"Th... Zat depends," said Magda.
"On what?" enquired Elena.
"On whoever..." Magda had to swallow a deluge of vomit mid-statement. "On whoever gives up zeir veapon first."
"If you were to give a toddler a cannon, I... I'm fairly sure he wouldn't know how to use the bloody thing," Elena said in a doubtful tone.
"Then the job of ze child iz to make sure Herr Soldat doezn't know that," Magda informed her. "Sun Tzu wrote an entire book about that. He said... 'deception is ze fundament of all varfare'."
"So it could be argued that the basis of all law isn't so much firepower as psychology," Elena reasoned.
"Th... das ist correct, Fräulein," Magda confirmed. "Even if a lawman doezn't know how to use ... his gun, the fact that he has one means the unarmed masses won't try and pull any horse-shit viz him. It's called ... uh, a deterrent. It is ze basiz of nuke... nuclear strategy. Whoever has ze biggest and-or the most guns makes ze laws."
"So ... how come the military hasn't come to rule every country?" asked Elena.
"Zey operate on behalf of die Regierung," said Magda, before remembering that Elena only spoke rudimentary German. "On behalf... on behalf of the government, sorry."
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