by Dan Moren
“He got himself bruised up this time, ma’am, but next time …” The police officer let out a breath, worrying at the hat in his hands. “Well, it’s going to be a whole lot worse if there is a next time.”
Eamon, for his part, hadn’t been particularly apologetic, even after their father, sooty and sweaty from a long day, had gotten home. The two of them had gone at it in the room that Eamon and Eli shared, so Eli had retreated into Meghann’s room where the two of them had crawled under the bed and shared stories of far-off worlds and heroic spacemen.
Eli had no doubt his father would have dearly liked to give his older son a good thumping, but Eamon had already started to grow into his not inconsiderable adult frame, and what he lacked in the calloused hands of experience he more than made up for in sheer youth and vigor.
But starting then, there had been a motivation in Eamon—a fire behind his fury. It wasn’t about crime or random acts of violence, it was about something far more damning: ideology.
A chime sounded, breaking Eli’s reverie. “Highland and Fifth,” announced the androgynous synthetic voice. The stop would let him off a short walk from the address that Fielding’s man had given him. So, he could go and report in to Fielding that he’d found … exactly nothing. And no luck finding Eamon meant that he was that much further from seeing his sister.
Eli sighed. Something told him Fielding wasn’t going to be impressed by his having thrown up his hands at the first sign of an obstacle. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. A drink would hit the spot right about now.
A drink.
Neurons, long since rusted from disuse, fired suddenly, reigniting memories that had likewise been submerged for almost a decade. A smoky room. The taste of whisky. The loud clamor of thick Caledonian accents all around him as he followed Eamon up to the bar.
And more than a few tartan-patterned armbands, scarves, and even the odd kilt or two among the crowd.
The bus picked up speed again and he suddenly realized that he had missed his stop. No big deal, really—he could always get off at the next one.
Or not. Just a few stops farther and he could transfer to a bus that would take him down to Leith, Raleigh City’s port district. Not the best place to be wandering around at night, perhaps, though the muggers and other petty criminals didn’t really venture down to those parts—which was just as well, since the police didn’t walk that particular beat either.
Instead it was patrolled by roving packs of young folks wearing those same plaid armbands and rebuffing the unwise few who ventured into their territory with threat and intimidation—and, occasionally, with far less gentle means.
Safe passage could, of course, be assured with the right greetings. And lucky for Eli, those words were never changed. They were handed down from generation to generation, because once you were in the Tartans, you were always in the Tartans.
“Oi,” said a sharp voice in the darkness. It associated itself with a shadow that slid away from the larger and equally murky mass of a nearby building and strode in Eli’s direction.
With a gulp, Eli forced down the acid that was rising in his stomach. What if they’d changed the password? A little voice in his head reminded him that they never changed the password, but that first voice didn’t exactly seem too interested in the finer points of logic. What if they’d made an exception after he’d left and joined the Illyricans?
“Fàilte, a charaid. Dè nì mì dhut?” said the voice.
Eli cleared his throat and let the familiar, alien-sounding words roll off his tongue, just as they had in his youth. He hoped his pronunciation wasn’t too rusty.
“Mas olc am fitheach, chan fheàrr a chomann.”
While he knew more or less what the words meant, he didn’t really speak the language—though there were those on Caledonia who did. Like even the most casual of gang members, Eli had simply memorized the few turns of phrase and ritual expressions that all in the Tartans were expected to know so that they could keep up the pretense of holding on to their deep cultural heritage. It was a sham, mostly, but it was an important sham, especially for those that really believed in it.
To Eli’s relief, the shadow didn’t hesitate and the traditional response came at once.
“Is binn guth an t-eòin far na rugadh e. You are welcome, a bhràthair.”
Eli nodded in the direction of the shadow, which had once again slipped away to glom onto the building that it had presumably been leaning against. A loud whistle from the shadow—incoming, all clear—was echoed in turn by a fainter whistle of acknowledgement from down the block.
Jamming his hands in his pockets, Eli walked down the street and tried to control his nerves. At least the night air, which was a bit on the chilly side, gave him a reasonable excuse to shiver.
As if darkness and cold weren’t enough, a fog was coming in off the water, sketching the few street lights that dotted the area in impressionist blurs. Despite that, it was easy enough for Eli to find his way to the Pig and Thistle—even after ten years, he thought he could probably still do the route blindfolded.
If there were other Tartans tracking his progress, he caught no sign of them. But as long as the old rules were in play, he wouldn’t expect any problems—he’d been cleared by the sentry, so there ought to be no further challenges.
The Pig and Thistle itself stood on the very edge of the water, the two only separated by about twenty paces of pavement. The harbor was still pretty deep here—deep enough to lose a body in—and cold enough that most people left to tread water in it would give up their secrets easily enough.
Exclusive and dangerous though its clientele was, the pub looked almost quaint and touristy from the outside. A wooden plank hung above the door, painted simply with the establishment’s two namesakes: a pink cartoonish pig squealing in a field full of the prickly purple flowers. Warm, bright lights gleamed through the steamy window panes, giving off a diffuse, almost homey glow.
Eli walked toward the bar then froze as he saw the two burly men standing at the door, hands clasped in front of them. He’d never known there to be security at the pub’s door before—what would you need them for, anyway? It was a neighborhood bar, not a trendy nightclub with a line around the block. That same worrywart part of him suggested that maybe he should just keep on walking, but the rational side counter-argued that he didn’t have much of a choice. Besides, the passphrase had worked. Things couldn’t have changed that much.
Squaring his shoulders, he walked straight up to the door, nodding off-handedly at the guards and reached for the handle.
A meaty hand slowly but firmly reached out and seized his wrist with a grip that would have left fingerprints pressed into an iron bar.
“Evening,” said the hand’s owner, the beefy gentleman to Eli’s right. “Can we help you?” Eli frowned at the accent, which was neither the dockhand-influenced cadence of Leith nor the Upham towers brogue. It was something else, more … sophisticated. Downtown Central, maybe?
“Uh, hi,” said Eli, his voice cracking only slightly. “Mas olc am—”
The man cut him off. “None of that malarkey, pal.”
“Easy there,” said the second man, who spoke, to Eli’s relief, in the familiar tones of born-and-bred Upham.
Over the years, Eli had lost a lot of his native accent, in part from being surrounded by peers whose own speech veered more toward the flat, inexpressive Illyrican Standard. But he’d mostly dropped it by choice while at the academy when he’d desperately wanted to cut his ties with his homeworld and be taken seriously by his comrades and commanders alike. Now he found himself slipping it on for size, just like the comfortable, broken-in boots on his feet.
“Just here for a drink, lads,” he said as cheerfully as he could manage, lending a subtle roll to the R’s, stretching the “uh” of “just” into more of an “oo,” and stressing the short “a” of “lads” for the whole package. “You wouldn’t begrudge a brother a nip on a cold night, would you?”
With that, Eli’s hand was free. He shook it out and grinned, teeth clenched, to show no hard feelings, even though he was pretty sure that the cops could have identified the man from the fingerprints pressed into his arm.
The second man reached over and pulled the door open for him; the raucous noise of the crowd spilled into the quiet dockside evening. Eli gave a friendly nod and walked into the pub.
Nothing had changed.
Eli felt reasonably certain that the planetary health and safety codes had been updated since he’d left home, but if so, then the Pig and Thistle had ignored them all. That didn’t exactly surprise him—MacKenzie, the bar’s owner, might be a loudmouth and a braggart, but he knew how to throw some weight around. Years ago he’d gotten the government to declare the Pig and Thistle a historical landmark, according it all sort of legal protections and, more importantly, allowing him to avoid keeping up with pesky rules and regulations. Which explained not only how the Pig and Thistle could serve alcohol late into the wee hours, when the rest of Raleigh City’s bars had long since closed up shop, but also how it was pretty much the only public establishment on the planet that still allowed people to smoke. Eli’s lungs made their protest known with a fit of coughing.
The clientele, however, had changed quite a bit. There were a lot of younger faces—or just plain young faces, to Eli’s mind. Some of the older folks had clearly passed on. Old man Kitano’s stool was vacant, he noted with a pang of regret. The ancient fellow had been a fixture at the bar for Eli’s entire youth, right up until he’d left for the academy. Nobody seemed to know where he’d come from or exactly what his connection with the Tartans was—it was rumored he’d been a hitman back in the colonization days—but he’d sat in the same corner seat every night for years, drinking pint after pint and barely saying two words strung together.
The face behind the bar was unfamiliar too—or at least, Eli thought it was until the man smiled broadly, and Eli recognized the gap-toothed grin of MacKenzie’s oldest son, William. About Eli’s age, he’d lost his two front teeth in a brawl with the rival Campbell boys—a fight that he’d won, despite the bat to the face that had left him dentally impaired. He’d grown up and filled out, going from gangly youth to broad-shouldered man, but now that Eli knew what to look for he could see the trace of the broken nose and the scar near the right eyebrow left by the same encounter.
Suddenly, it was like he’d never left.
He found himself wondering how different he must look after ten years away and whether anyone would even recognize him. Eamon would, he was sure of that, but he didn’t feel as certain about the rest of his acquaintances. Nor was he sure that was a bad thing, given the circumstances under which he’d left.
That train of thought was abruptly derailed as Eli felt himself collide with another, smaller figure. He put up a hand automatically to steady himself and felt it make contact with a decidedly non-masculine body part. His cheeks flushed red as he looked down to find a short woman staring at his hand, a somewhat flummoxed look on her face.
“Christ,” he said, snatching his hand back as though he’d pulled out a hot pan without an oven mitt. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “It was an—”
“Accident?” said the woman, her eyebrows arched. She straightened her shirt—a nice, green top that did flattering things to her … Eli hastily brought his eyes back up to her face. Her face was rounded and freckled, framed by red curls that verged on copper.
“Yes,” said Eli, groping for words this time instead of anatomy. “My mind was, er, elsewhere.”
“How flattering,” said the woman dryly.
Eli scratched his head, at a loss. “Look,” he said hastily, “let me buy you a drink.”
“Funny,” said the woman, “most blokes go in the other order.”
Eli offered a weak grin. “It’s been a while since my last visit to the Pig and Thistle, but I’m pretty sure that if you accidentally cop a feel, you’re obligated to apologize to the lady in some way. You don’t even have to drink it with me,” he added, watching the protest form on her lips.
The woman’s expression turned grudgingly accepting. “Fair enough,” she said. “But don’t expect this to work every time.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” promised Eli, his hands raised in defense.
They fought their way through the press of the crowd, Eli only taking one inadvertent elbow to the ribs and narrowly dodging a slosh of beer. He eyed the woman sidelong; she reminded him a bit of Maggie O’Hara, his former squadron mate—Maggie with the light red hair, as they’d called her back at the academy. The thought awoke a subtle leaden thud in his heartbeat: like so many of his other classmates, she’d died at the Battle of Sabaea. He hadn’t thought of her in years. And if the freshness of her death was not what it had once been, it was still present, like the echo of a bad toothache.
Eli waved for the bartender’s attention, mentally running over the details of his story for when William MacKenzie inevitably recognized him: he’d served five years in the Illyrican Navy, had been stationed at the Illyrican colony on Archangelsk. A boring five years in homeworld defense, never even a shot at real combat. Sabaea? No, he’d never even been near the place, much less involved in the invasion. His term had ended just recently and he’d decided to come home and mend fences with his brother. By the way, he hadn’t seen Eamon lately, had he?
William ambled over, his gap-toothed smile broad. “Gwen, love,” he rumbled at the woman. “The usual?”
“Aye,” said the woman.
“Make that two,” said Eli, holding up a pair of fingers. “On me.” The bartender’s eyes didn’t even venture near Eli’s face, but he nodded and strolled off. Eli stared after him, puzzled. Then again, William had never been the most observant of boys, he reflected. If he had been, maybe he would have seen that bat coming.
The red-haired girl—Gwen, it seemed—leaned against the bar. “Not that I want to encourage conversation with deviants, but I haven’t seen you around here before.” Her brown eyes looked neutral, but there was a faint narrowing at their edges.
“It’s been a while. I used to spend a lot of time here when I was younger.”
“Oh? So where have you been, then?”
Eli bit his tongue. Giving his Illyrican history as an explanation for finding Eamon was one thing, but telling a cute girl—the first cute girl, his quickening pulse reminded him, who’d spoken an entire sentence to him in the past five years, give or take—that it wasn’t so long ago he’d been wearing a crimson uniform was a quick way to end a conversation.
“Away … off-world. I’ve been traveling.”
“Really?” Her wariness gave way to genuine curiosity. “Anywhere interesting?”
Yes, I lived in a closet at an arctic station on a world cut off from the rest of civilization for five years. Great sightseeing, little bit chilly in the winter. He hedged his bets. “I was doing some work on Archangelsk, mainly.”
“Ah. Nice place?”
“Not really.”
William chose that moment to return, setting down two shot glasses of pale gold liquid. “Here you go, dearie,” he said to Gwen. “Two Saltyres.”
“Thanks, Will,” said Gwen. Eli mumbled his own thanks in addition, fumbling through the pile of chits in his pocket. He tossed a twenty-mark piece on the bar, which William palmed before slipping away again.
“So, I take it this is your first time home in a while?”
“Nine years.”
Gwen whistled, impressed, and raised her glass. “Welcome home then. Slàinte.”
The burning of the spirit cascading down his throat brought tears to his eyes, and not just because it was one step shy of moonshine. It was pungent and flavorful and tasted not a little bit like the vaguely metallic dust that was everywhere on the planet. For nine years, Eli had not
missed a single thing from his homeworld: the heat, the dirt, the violence, the anger.
But he’d missed this.
Somehow the master distillers of Saltyre’s had perfectly captured the spirit of Eli’s homeworld and everything that went into its founding, its subsequent occupation, and the ensuing resistance. It brought back memories of watching his first baseball game with his father, who had always kept a flask of Saltyre’s in his pocket; of his first brawl with the Tartans; even of the first time he had gotten laid. Which, truth be told, he owed largely to a bottle of ten-year-old Saltyre’s he’d nicked from his dad’s private stash.
It was a lot for one liquor to hold, and he savored the taste.
When he opened his eyes—he hadn’t even realized they’d been closed—he found Gwen staring at him, her expression amused. “You look like you needed that.”
“Aye,” he said with feeling, turning the shot glass over in his hands. He smiled to himself.
With a grin, Gwen hopped up on her tippy toes and flagged down William, waving two fingers that he acknowledged with an off-hand nod. She turned back toward Eli, her smile finally turning authentic.
“So what brings you back to the old dirtball …” she trailed off and laughed. “I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Eli.”
“Eli,” she said, nodding. “I’m Gwen, in case you missed that loudmouth MacKenzie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Gwen.” He felt more relaxed already. This wasn’t so hard, talking to women. He’d known how to do it once upon a time, and it was probably like riding a bike, right? The turn of phrase sent him down other avenues far more risqué.
“Ahem?” said Gwen, giving him a nudge.
Eli coughed hurriedly, hoping she hadn’t noticed the somewhat glassy-eyed expression on his face. That’d been the Saltyre’s talking, anyway.