The Horse’s Night Out
Some of the best advice may be found at a warhorse’s drinking hole.
The three young women, their bodies inked in the fashion of the asteroid shipyards, approach the seated man, burdened with years. Fresh off the system shuttle to Sans Merci, hitting the bars ahead of the next day’s big opening of the annual recruitment fair of the Imperial Marines, they talk loud and bold, buoyed by booze.
“Hey, oldtimer, wake up and dry the spittle off your chin,” the foxy-haired lithe package of spunkiness says to the man with the patched machine legs and signals to the bar.
“We have credits enough to keep you drunk all night! So start telling us how it is out there, fighting the Heretic Colonies.”
The man considers for a while, then smiles, a sea of wrinkles arising from his ravaged face.
He speaks of gleaming destroyers pulsating through hyperspace, mythical descents into fiery maelstroms of pan-planetary battles, the clash and dazzle of millions of drones and missiles and men clad in impenetrable suits of armour dealing death to retreating enemies.
But as the night progresses, he speaks of the corpses of fallen comrades processed into shipfood, lost limbs replaced with nanotek appendages that burn with each movement, and the swelling death by boiling in the vacuum of ruptured starships.
As his voice fails, the redhead pulls out a knife.
“Return our money, or I will cut off your lying lips, you decrepit fraudster! What you have spun is of no value to us!”
The old man’s holottoo of a Marine Colonel that had activated turns a deeper burgundy as he watches the decent one with sad eyes drag her two saffron-skinned sidekicks away.
He sighs.
“Oh, sweet girls, value you did receive. A life you will retain, with a dullness a human deserves.”
In memory of Mika Waltari.
This text was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2023 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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