Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

snatched up his towel. There wasn't an option. No matter what the colonel said, he didn't have a choice. If he walked away, he was dead. The Agency would take him, scrag his box, and throw him down a deep, dark hole. There was no way out but forward, so he fought on.
"Hey, Princess!" Hill called out. "You owe me a drink."
Firenze dropped the towel and glanced up. Hill knelt across from him, a grin plastered on his face as he tucked the flaps of his shirt back under his belt. Firenze stared, confused, and tried to sort out what he'd heard.
Hill explained, "Normally, I don't let people smack my balls around until they buy me a drink. I'll make an exception on the timeline, but not on the events. You owe me one." Behind him, Kawalski cackled.
Firenze shook his head. "No, no, I really..."
Kawalski cut him off and demanded, "You gonna leave him hanging like that?"
Firenze tried to find the door, but it was behind the two soldiers.
Kawalski added, "What I'm trying to say is: tomorrow's a rest day, we're going to the bar, and we'll see you there."
Firenze asked, "There's a bar in this shithole?"
"Scooch won't leave home without it." Hill said. "It's just for rest days, but it's solid."
"It'll get you drunk." Kawalski offered. "So it works."
Firenze froze. He'd planned on tuning his counter-intrusion kit based on a couple of tweaks Lauren had suggested. He opened his mouth to demur, but Hill wouldn't allow it.
"Don't bitch out, Princess." Hill said. "You can cuddle your box tomorrow."
Kawalski snorted and said, "I bet you've got some real sick shit on there, don't you? You gonna share?"
"That's not- I'm not-" Firenze tried to protest. He looked for another exit, but instead, he saw Clausen. The mountain of a man leaned against the doorframe, nonchalantly updating his tablet and completely blocking egress. The sergeant worked diligently, whistling as he flicked the touch screen to and fro. As if prodded, the sergeant glanced up and met Firenze's gaze, smiled, and went back to work. Firenze got the message.
This was yet another place where he didn't have a choice in whether he got hosed, just in how he reacted. Fantastic.
Firenze turned back to Hill, smiled broadly, and lied, "Sounds like fun."
"Hell yeah!" Hill said. "But, clean up, first. We can't have you getting nerd-stink on everything. It might scare off the ladies." He wiggled his eyebrows at Kawalski in a grotesque pantomime of seduction. Her reply was to shove him off the mat.
She ordered, "Twenty-one hundred, be there."
That, as they say, was that.
Half an hour later, Firenze found himself at the Kessinwey "bar": an industrial pit barely salvaged to a liveable condition. The bartop was a deactivated conveyor, the freezers were coolant units from a dead assembly line, the dartboards were hung from control panels, and the billiards were holoprojected on flipped-over drive baseboards. The tables were workbenches. The seats were scrounged from cockpits and cabins. Clausen called it 'workable', Hill called it 'classy', and Firenze was terrified of dying from accidentally drinking coolant. Rutman had brewed his beer inside god-knows-what, and when Firenze asked how he'd seen to sanitation, the man had just laughed and assured him, 'no one's gone blind, yet'.
The beer was a bit strong, with an aftertaste that clung to the roof of his mouth. Rutman called it "Turbo Ale" but wouldn't give any more information. Still, the second drink went down smoother than the first, and the third was almost palatable. After a glass, he stopped worrying about running back to his room. After a couple, he was nearly sociable.
Not that he did much talking. Most of the time was spent swapping stories, ones known so well that any of five people could tell it, with call-outs and in-jokes so dense he had to keep notes. He'd thought he'd had some good stories from dronetown and school. He'd planned on trying to tell one, but by the time Hill got to "-and when you see the mortar teams running, you don't ask questions." Firenze knew that he was horribly outgunned. That was fine, though, because he'd nearly fallen out of his chair laughing.
For a few moments, he could almost forget that he was sitting in a desolate hole, preparing to die. Almost.
Hill continued, his face flushed and hand-waves growing ever-less-precise, "-so there we were, trying to extract this sumbitch, and we've gotta bug a vertol ride. Now, we're tired, we're ragged, and this VIP is about a hundred kilos over the bird's weight limit. So we're standing inside, chucking gear out the hatches while the Path is shooting up the place, and the captain keeps asking me, 'Corporal! Is this bird underweight yet?' We're down two seats and the entire fire-suppression system before we're off the ground.
"Now, we get a couple klicks out of the city, and zoom, a fuckin' hyvel smacks the left turbine. Boom. We're doing loop-de-loops over the jungle, and shit's flyin' out the doors like its a fire-sale. The damn thing breaks up, and the part I'm strapped to stays with the engine. The interesting thing, Princess, is that the V-30 keeps its fuel inside these nifty little sealing containers, and most of the systems run themselves. The damn bird can fly itself home without half its fuselage." Hill leaned forward, slurred his words as he motioned around. He'd been hitting the drinks a little harder than most.
Devallo, one of the combat engineers, cut in, "What that means is, right now, Reaper and the VIP are strapped into a part of the plane that is flying itself. Except it's got no control, and it's doing a terminal ballet over the deep jungle."
"Right!" Hill agreed. "And the damned Pathies won't stop shooting at us. We crash-land forty klicks from bumfuq, and have to march through the nastiest jungle on earth just to get back to the extraction point. Did I mention that the Path was still shooting at us?"
Firenze agreed. "About