The Honour of the Knights, Stephen J. Sweeney [reading women .txt] 📗

a new job round about now,” Dodds said.

“Dude, how much you 'ad?” asked the first man.

“Too much already, by the looks of things,” the second man said. “Clearly can't hold his drink.”

“Oh, I can,” Enrique defended himself. “I'm not that drunk.”

“Okay, so what's our names again?” the first man said.

Enrique paused for a moment. Dodds watched him thinking, stealing a glance at Chaz who was taking a relaxing swig from his beer bottle.

“Tell you what,” Enrique said. “Why don't I just call you Crew Cut, Tubby, Irish and Shy Boy.”

The four men exchanged incensed looks.

“Well, you can't say they're not accurate,” Enrique slurred a little.

“Oi,” began Tubby, glaring. “My name's Ian.”

Dodds reached out and put a hand on Enrique's shoulder. “No harm, boys,” he said, giving his friend's shoulder a little squeeze to stop him saying any more. “Just some friendly nicknames, that's all.”

“And besides, I've lost weight recently,” Ian grumbled.

“Where did you get Irish from? The whiskey?” the one Enrique had christened said.

“Your accent,” Enrique said.

“My accent?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Scottish, you cretin! I'm a McLeod!” the man growled.

“What should we call you two, then?” Crew said.

“Hey, wait, I know these two,” McLeod interrupted. “You're Simon Dodds and Enrique Todd: The Odd Brothers.” A quizzical look crossed the faces of his three companions. McLeod elaborated, “These guys were pretty much inseparable at flight school. Never used to be far from one another. We ended up calling them the Odd Brothers because they were so much like family.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Dodds said, holding up his hand as if to brush away the conversation and the embarrassing memories that it evoked.

“Weren't you dating that girl, Esther or something? The one who thought the sun shone out of her arse?”

“Estelle. Yeah, that one,” Dodds admitted, seeing McLeod look around briefly in the direction of the woman sat at a table by herself. “But, no we're not seeing each other any more. She said she didn't have time for me and wanted to focus on her career.”

“Shame,” McLeod observed.

“Why is she like that? So self absorbed, I mean,” Crew asked.

“She wants to make something of herself,” Dodds started.

“Yeah, that's obvious,” Crew scoffed.

“No, that's not what I mean. She doesn't come from a particularly well-off family,” Dodds said. “She was born on one of colonies on Tilli; so you know how it is out there. They never had a lot of money and had to get by mostly on state benefits. Her parents worked whenever they could find it, but again, you've heard how it is there. She quit school early so that she could try and help bring in some cash, but it didn't make a whole lot of difference. They couldn't even up sticks: they couldn't afford to settle down anywhere else, let alone afford the cost of transport in the first place. So, she joined the Navy to prove to her family and herself that she was worth more than all of that. She sends most of the money she earns home to them.”

“Ah,” McLeod said.

“Hmmmm,” Dodds added. Whilst he was aware that he had just dished out a great deal of very personal information about a friend to a group of men he didn't know, he was only trying to defend the Estelle that he knew better than others.

“Still,” McLeod said, glancing back over to Estelle, who was taking a glass from Kelly, “Shame to have let that one go.”

“Oh, she's been known to change her mind from time to time,” Enrique said, with a grin.

“Well, at least until the next morning,” Dodds finished. He then wagged a finger at McLeod. “Getting back to things: Yeah, I sort of remember you now, too. Been a long time; nice to see you again.”

“Yeah, you too,” McLeod said. “Drink this.” He thrust a whiskey glass, half-filled with the neat liquor, toward Dodds.

Dodds withdrew and directed it towards Enrique. “You came up with the names.”

Enrique reluctantly took the glass and downed it in one, coughing a couple of times before handing it back. “After this round, I will be passing the dealing over to my good friend Dodds here,” he drawled, scooping his beer off the table and knocking back a good amount of the contents. “I really hate whiskey,” he said to Dodds.

“Aw, God no, come on,” Ian said.

At first, Dodds thought that the man was upset that he was not going to get a chance to see Enrique make a speckle of himself. He then saw that the eyes of the four opposite him were looking, not at Enrique, but to his left.

Sitting next to Enrique were a couple whose public display of affection for one another was beginning to encroach far too much on the poker game and everyone's enjoyment. When the male half of the couple had asked if he could sit on the end of the couch, none had expected that his companion was then going to be sitting on him for the rest of the evening – although, from Dodds' angle, sitting on him might not have been the best way to describe the way the woman had been clambering all over the man for the last fifteen minutes.

“Guys, guys! Seriously, Romeo, get a room!” Enrique scowled at them.

“And you're the guy to ask about that, are you?” the man answered him, managing to wrench his lips away from those of his eager companion. “Don't suppose you've noticed, but there's little in the way of privacy around here, them not giving us private quarters like that lot up on the orbital.”

“No, I hadn't noticed actually,” Enrique said. “But I think you'll find there are a few spare mattresses in the south block storage room. Shouldn't be too cold in there, neither.”

Dodds found himself impressed at both his friend's knowledge of Mandelah's logistical offerings and the fact that the tip seemed to do the trick. The man whispered to the woman he was with for a moment, before the pair got up. He clapped Enrique on the shoulder a couple of times as they left. Dodds watched them go, his attention straying to the two women seated on tall stools, at a just as tall round table, chuckling to one another.

Estelle was looking particularly cheery tonight. It was nice to see her this way, especially after the disappointment she had suffered following the termination of their involvement in the ATAF project. She glanced at the men sitting around the low table and, catching his eye, smiled at Dodds. He smiled back, then returned his attention back to the game at hand.

“So, why'd you boys join the Navy, then?” Crew asked as they picked up the cards Enrique had dealt and scrutinised them.

“Well,” Dodds began, seeing the group's gaze fall on him. “I didn't want to do the whole nine to five thing, just didn't interest me. I wanted to get out there and see and do things, find a bit of adventure. Wanted to feel like I was a bit more than some cog in a big old machine, that could work just as well without me. So, at the end of the day it was either this or spend my life looking after apples.”

He watched their impassive expressions for a moment and then saw Ian's face split into a grin.

“Ahhhh,” Ian said, with a chuckle. “So, you wanted to join the Navy and become a hero!”

“No,” Dodds said, sitting back up.

“Yeah, you did,” Ian began to laugh. “You thought that if you joined the Navy, you'd get to blow stuff up, go on daring missions, earn tons of medals and get to sleep with lots of beautiful women.”

“No, I just wanted to do something different, you know – give something back to the Confederacy; be a part of something special,” Dodds said.

“See,” Crew interrupted. “You did want to be a hero.”

All four men were laughing at Dodds. He turned toward Enrique and Chaz, seeking support, but saw that they too were enjoying the roast; Enrique shaking his head, Chaz wearing a thin smile.

Sure, I did want to be a hero, once, Dodds thought to himself. But I'm back here for different reasons now.

“What about you?” Crew turned his attention to Enrique, who shielded his cards in case there was some ploy against him. Dodds looked around at his friend, curious as to how Enrique might answer the question. Few outside the Knights' small group were aware of Enrique's back story. Dodds was not even sure if Enrique had ever told Chaz.

When he was eight years old, Enrique and his family had been returning from celebrating his older brother's tenth birthday. They had been in a car travelling along a motorway, when his father had noticed a truck on the other side of the road driving erratically. Enrique's father had taken precautions, deciding to slow and switch lanes. Just as he had done so, the truck had swerved, crashing through the central reservation and tipping onto its side, careening towards them. The rear of the truck had clipped their car and sent it tumbling, at speed, up the roadside embankment. It came to rest back on the road, leaving a trail of broken and crumpled chassis parts and shattered glass behind it.

Emergency services had been quick to arrive at the scene. His mother, older brother and little sister were pulled from the wreckage of their car, but had been pronounced dead at the scene. Along with his father, Enrique had been air-lifted to the nearest hospital. Despite all the efforts of the emergency teams, his father had died en route, owing to massive internal bleeding. Enrique had survived with a broken arm.

He was raised by his grandfather, an ex-military and spiritual man, who never failed to impress upon him the fact that someone was looking out for him and that he had survived the crash for a reason. Enrique took the words to heart and, spurred on by his grandfather, had signed up for the Navy, in order to protect others and do his best to save lives and keep the peace.

It was not, however, a story that he would often tell.

“Figured the Navy was something I would enjoy,” Enrique said with a shrug. “And I was no good at anything else.”

“Sounds like that should have been your reason,” Ian said, laughing once again at Dodds.

“You?” Crew looked at Chaz. So did Dodds and Enrique, more intrigued than the man asking the questions.

“I used to fly interplanetary shuttles and landers,” Chaz said dismissively. “After nearly ten years of doing that, I wanted to see and do something more. The police force didn't interest me: too much corruption. So I applied to the Navy. So far, I've been stationed in more than ten different star systems over the past eight years and learned to fly over half a dozen different starfighters.”

“Oh, okay,” Crew said. There was no sarcasm from Ian or McLeod over the explanation; Chaz, for some reason, didn't seem to warrant it.

Chaz took a slow pull from his bottle, saying nothing else.

“Girlfriend, wife, kids?” McLeod said, rolling his hand around.

“None to speak of,” Chaz said after considerable pause.

“He's like your mate,” Enrique supplied, nodding at the fourth man of the group, who had contributed little to the conversation. “Man of few words.”

The other three went on to explain their reasons for joining up, how Crew's parents disagreed with his career choice because he was basically being granted a license to murder. He argued he was being trained to protect and that the need to take a life was a wholly real and necessary part of that duty. His parents had asked if he ever raised a thought for the people in the ships he gunned down. Ian chipped in and said that to him the enemy were faceless anyway, and may as well be robots. He commented that no-one thought about who they may have just killed when they destroyed their fighter. It didn't matter to them that it may have been someone's only child, a mother, a father of two, a brother or sister. At the end of the day, they were the enemy and that was all that mattered.

“Getting a bit deep,” Dodds said as the group lapsed into silence, a sombre bubble seeming to have enclosed the group. The cheerful mood was threatening to abandon them.

“I think I'm sobering up,” Enrique said.

“Yes, let's play,” McLeod pushed aside a couple of cards. “Deal me two more.”

Enrique leaned forward to the little table the deck rested on and, after making a bit of a mess of the pile, managed to hand the man two more cards.

“Hey, no really, do you know what I've been hearing lately?”

Dodds looked up from his cards for the source of the voice and realised it belonged to the man who had