“It’s all the voices,” the big man joked.
Dred scanned the room, her green eyes keen. “Right then. Hands in the air, all in favor of a suicide assault on Abaddon.”
What the hell. Jael put his hand in the air.
Ike and Wills left theirs down. But Einar and Tam swung them up. The princess in chains considered for a few seconds, then lifted her own, though her vote hadn’t been necessary for a majority.
She pushed to her feet in an obvious dismissal. “It’s decided. We cast our lot in with Silence, Mary have mercy on our souls.”
“Since when?” Einar muttered.
To Jael’s surprise, the big man offered him a hand up. He took it and followed him out of Dred’s quarters. They dropped their dishes in the galley, where a thin man glared at the addition to the washing-up pile. Jael wondered if they had even rudimentary housekeeping chores in other territories. From the look of Entropy, though, he guessed not. It was a wonder Silence’s people didn’t die of disease or food poisoning.
They probably do, and she calls it Death’s lottery.
He felt odd, adrift, as if he needed to go talk to Dred, but she’d made it clear she was done with the lot of them. The big man slung an arm around his shoulders unexpectedly, which made Jael think he had been drinking, but Einar didn’t smell of booze. But apparently that was his intention, as he dragged Jael over to the barman, who gave out liquor chits. Though it was impossible to prohibit drinking, Dred made sure not to send men out on patrol if they had been.
“We’ve earned a few rounds,” Einar said.
Jael couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a proper bar, so he sat down beside the big man and accepted a glass with amber liquid in it. “Does this come from the Kitchen-mate?”
“No. The men would riot if there was no grog when the thing breaks down.”
“That’s . . . impressive.”
Einar laughed. “Dred knows how to keep her men happy.”
The obvious truth of that rubbed him raw. To cover his misplaced anger, he downed the glass in one swallow. There was no point in mentioning that he was physically incapable of getting drunk. His metabolism was simply too efficient. If Jael imbibed enough to poison a normal man, it just left him mildly buzzed for half an hour or so. But he didn’t plan on telling Einar that.
They drank steadily, companionably, for an hour. The big man grew ever more loquacious, and by the time he had six glasses in him, his arm was a permanent weight around Jael’s shoulders, and he was calling everybody over who would listen to introduce them to his new best mate. The other Queenslanders were used to this, obviously. They indulged Einar even if they already knew Jael.
One convict looked like he wanted to start something with the big man worse for the drink, but Jael aimed a sharp look at him. “I’ve got his back. Sure you want this weight?”
Men almost never took him seriously. It was the damned pretty face, but in here, when you had no scars to speak of, it likely seemed scarier than Einar’s ravaged mug. You have to ask yourself, why can’t anybody leave a mark on him? Apparently deciding the answer was more frightening than he could deal with, the convict hurried off with a muttered excuse about being due on patrol.
Einar wasn’t as drunk as he’d been pretending, though, as he watched the inmate go, thoughtful. “What is it about you, mate?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” That was a lie, the first of many, probably.
“You do. And you told Dred. I can tell by the way she watches you.”
“I suppose she’ll put the word out if she wants people to know.”
“Do you?”
Jael shrugged. He didn’t, really, but since when had anyone given a frag about his wishes? “If you want to swap stories, we can. You tell me yours, first.”
“All right,” the big man said unexpectedly. “What’re you asking? About my pretty face, or what I did to get locked up in here?”
“Either. But mostly the latter,” he was forced to admit.
Don’t bond with him, a cautious inner voice ordered. It’ll be harder to sell him out if you need to. Not if. When. But it didn’t stop him from paying full attention when the man signaled for another glass and downed it in a single swallow, as if he needed liquid courage.
“I was a soldier, if you couldn’t have guessed. Away a lot. I wasn’t the best, or I wouldn’t look like this.” His self-deprecating tone made Jael want to dismiss the scars, but they weren’t trivial, and the man had earned them. Whether they were pretty or not was beside the point. Einar went on, “I had a wife. And . . . I loved her, more than anything.”
The man clenched the lip of the table, his knuckles turning white. Even the booze didn’t seem to be enough to dull the memories. Comfort fell completely outside his purview, so he only raised a brow in silent expectation. Damn, I knew any story that ends here has a painful trajectory.
“One day, I came home from deployment to find my beloved wife six months pregnant.” The brow bisected by a scar went up, and Einar’s expression was ironic. “Problem was, I hadn’t been home in nine months.”
“Shit,” Jael said.
“I’d always had a temper though I never laid hands on her until that day. I . . .” The big man shrugged. “Lost my mind. There are no excuses. When I came back to myself, she was dead. I strangled her. Killed the unborn babe.”
“Not to cast doubts on your story, but that doesn’t seem extreme enough to land you in here.”
The big man showed his teeth in what couldn’t remotely be called a smile. “That’s because I wasn’t done. I found out who had been screwing my wife, and I killed him. He had friends. I killed them, too. Then his brothers came after me, and—”
“Now we’re getting to the necessary body count. I get the gist.”
“To revenge,” Einar said, lifting his glass.
“I’ll drink to that.”
Jael wasn’t ready to tell his own story to anyone but Dred, but fortunately, he didn’t have to. A few minutes later, Einar passed out, his head on the table. The other men cast disbelieving looks, obviously comparing his size to the big man and wondering how he’d managed that. Jael just offered a cocky smile and strolled out of the hall. If he was lucky, he could put in a few hours in the hydroponics garden before the next emergency.
23
Feverish Preparations
“Hold the base still,” Wills ordered.