Free Dark Space by Jasper T. Scott Page B

examine the contents of the card more privately than a holo reader would allow. That implant had come in handy over the years. It was essentially a small computer which fed data straight to his brain.
    As he searched the document, Ethan heard someone shout out behind him, “Hey, Skidmark, aren’t you going to let me buy you that drink?”
    Ethan mentally closed his link to the data card and turned to face Gina. She walked up to him with a sarcastic smile. “I like to pay my debts. Who knows, maybe I’ll even give you tips to help you lure some unsuspecting sclut to your quarters for the night.”
    “Really? You’d do that for me? I’m touched, Gina.”
    Her expression became exasperated and she stopped a half a dozen feet away from him. “No, you depraved pervert. Just a drink. Come on.” Not bothering to insist further, she turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come.
    Ethan hesitated, considering her offer for a moment before deciding to follow her. He broke into a light jog to catch up, and then he flashed Gina a winning smile. She rolled her eyes and looked away.
    He supposed it couldn’t hurt to mingle a bit. After all, he’d need to gather some information about the Valiant in order to properly sabotage it. The people to talk to in order to glean that information would almost certainly be pilots and engineers, all of whom he would find inside the ship’s rec halls.
    They reached the rec hall they’d passed earlier called “The Basement,” and Ethan stepped up to the control panel to key the door open. The door swished aside to reveal a large, darkly-lit room with a ceiling full of uncovered pipes. The walls were filled with floor to ceiling holoscreens and dark gray furniture was arrayed before them. Small knots of pilots were lounging there, drinking and playing games. A long, elliptical bar counter stood in the center of the room, and on the other side of that, Ethan glimpsed a padded arena where a group of pilots were busy battling each other with small, remote-controlled assault mechs while dozens of others looked on and cheered for their favorites to win. Ethan followed Gina up to the bar, and they sat down together.
    Gina raised a hand to call the bartender over. “Egrit!” The bartender turned and nodded to her. He was a scary-looking man with a bald head, multiple glowing blue and red tattoos on his arms and face, and a few spiky subcutaneous piercings in his knuckles. Ethan felt like he’d met a dozen men just like Egrit during his time on Etaris.
    “Yea?” Egrit asked.
    “Two black mavericks,” Gina said, and offered her upturned wrist to the man. He grabbed her wrist none too gently and passed a wand over it before turning to a cooler behind him and pulling out two frosty transpiranium bottles filled with bubbling black beer. Black mavericks were brewed from heavily fermented Forlissan Black Grass and Chorlisean Wheat. The result was a meal in a bottle that could knock you out cold if you weren’t used to it. Ethan wondered that they were even allowed to serve such potent drinks to pilots, but he supposed that they weren’t on the active duty roster, so it didn’t matter much.
    Gina raised her beer and held it out to Ethan for a toast. “To another day among the living.”
    Ethan raised his own beer and clinked his bottle with hers. “To not being dead,” he replied and took a sip of his Maverick. He reveled in the strong, bittersweet flavor of the beer. It had been a long time since he’d had the sols to afford more than water. When he set his beer down, he noticed that Gina hadn’t taken a sip of hers yet. She was frozen with the bottle halfway to her lips, staring at him with eyebrows raised and a look of utter perplexity on her face.
    “What?” Ethan asked.
    She nodded to his left hand which was still clamped around his bottle of beer. “Since when do you wear a wedding ring, Adan?”
    Chapter 9
     

    E than couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to put