That includes both the story and the recipe for the drink, which is only separated from reality by local color and one ingredient. The recipe is found in the body of the story below.
Please enjoy--the story, drink, or both--"Sweet Regret"
...
“Hey champ, how’s business?”
I
raised an eyebrow. A girl with a marksman rifle and a safari outfit sat at the
bar and smiled at me. Her age and sanguine appearance suggested a field
researcher from a graduate school off-planet, maybe even as far off as Earth’s
solar system. Not unusual. Frontier worlds like Nephila attracted lots of
geologists, biologists, and botanists, and the local wildlife swiftly turned
visitors pro-gun. What really surprised me was that she didn’t try to flirt a
free drink out of me. She was genuinely friendly.
“Better
than expected for a backwater planet,” I replied. “All thanks to the new
Tartarus pit mine they opened. I’m not the only source of entertainment, but
I’m the most convenient, and a pretty good value.”
“I
can see that.”
She looked over
her shoulder. Tartarus Mining employees and their security contractors were
laughing, swearing, spilling beer, and putting new holes in the wall left of
the dartboard. They were rough, crude, and sometimes violent, but many tipped
well, and the others were bad at math.
“So what’ll you
have?” I said.
She scanned the
bottles behind me, mouth slightly open like she was just restraining herself
from licking her lips. Her eyes darted to me. They were blue, flecked with
hazel, warmth, and something that put me on edge.
“Can you make a
Sweet Regret?”
A lump formed in
my throat. She had said it with enough innocence, without raising her voice,
but a group of the security contractors shifted and stared at her, their
conversation forgotten. She might as well have ordered an Irish Car Bomb in
Dublin.
“Now, why would
a…nice girl like you want such a harsh drink?”
“I like old bitter
tasting things, they make me feel sophisticated.” That unnamed thing shimmered
in her eyes again. “Besides, life is harsh.”
“Miss, you really
shouldn’t—”
She placed fifty
Apollo ore notes on the bar. “That’s not including the price of the drinks.
Make yourself one too, you look like you need to relax.”
Without looking at
the other patrons, I pocketed the money and set about making the drinks. The
Tartarus employees wouldn’t begrudge me two of the damn things for this much money.
If the girl wanted free cosmetic surgery by rifle butt, that was her business.
Two ounces
Pandoran bourbon, one ounce Campari, two dashes klixen honey, fill the rest of
the glass with Nephilian lotus nectar. The girl folded her arms on the bar and
rested her chin on them, watching the liquor and mixers run over the ice,
filling her glass. She kept staring into her glass as I made my own drink,
contemplating the drink with a sad resigned smile usually reserved for professional
alcoholics.
I finished pouring
the second drink. Her eyes rolled up to meet mine.
“Drink with me.”
She sat up and
raised her glass.
“To innocent
souls,” she said. She stared me down until I moved to drink from my glass, then
tipped her own.
The bourbon and
campari were bitter, but conventional. Then came the klixen honey, diabetically
sweet at the other end of the taste spectrum. The lotus nectar brought it all
to a head, changing the drink from an odd local cocktail, to a wave of emotional
force. In my mind, piano chords from the second half of ‘Layla’ played over
images of every mistake I ever made, especially the willful ones. I had plenty
of whiskey, a gun under the bar. After closing time, I could go upstairs, soak
in the bath—
“Hoo boy!” a voice
said.
I snapped out of
my reverie. The girl was rubbing her eyes, but they were dry when she pulled
away her hands.
“It’s been a
while. I forgot how much a trip anything with lotus is. I’m surprised they
haven’t made the stuff illegal.” She drank deep from the glass, then set it
down. Her cheeks flushed red.
“You must have
some good stories if you can make one this well.”
I started to make
some excuse, anything to change the topic, but a loud ‘clunk‘ came from the
door. One of the Tartarus men had barred the door, setting into motion the
exact chain of events I feared would happen. The mercenaries and miners stood,
blocking every exit from the bar. The few non-corporation patrons had
unsurprisingly drank and dashed. Their ad hoc leader, a big fucker with a
scarred face, and a round mark on his hand that looked like the result of an
acid coated railroad spike growled at my patron.
“Bug lover.”
The girl smirked,
swirling her glass and watching the last of the drink flow around the ice. “Is
that really the best you inbred apes can do? I guess so. Real insults take
brains for them to sting.”
“There’ll be
plenty of those to go around if you keep running your mouth.” He looked at me and
held out his hand. “Barkeep, your keys.”
I began to stammer
a reply, but the girl cut me off.
“Give him what he
wants buddy, then sit down and finish your drink.”
I fished out my
keys and tossed them to the big fucker, who locked the chains on the door.
“Lock everything,” he said, handing them off to another merc. He looked back at
the girl, still facing the bar.
“Now, you get one
chance to explain whatever misunderstanding we’re having. Most people know you
don’t talk about silk-shitters around—“
“The Rachnos?” she
finished her drink.
“The what?”
She looked up at
me and shook her glass. “Just bourbon this time.” I filled the glass and she
continued: “I shouldn’t be surprised. Thousands of years from now, when man’s
spread across the galaxy contracts and someone more advanced starts
exterminating us, they won’t call us humans, they’ll just call us those squishy
pink things.”
“How did so many
damn hippies get to this planet?”
The girl laughed
and spun on her stool to face them. “I came with you, good sir,” she said,
jabbing a finger at him. “I helped you guys. We were told the native species
needed to be kept at bay, and as an entomologist I was thrilled to travel the
stars and blaze a trail in my field, even if it meant my pay came from
inventing a better roach trap. For a while, I was happy to follow orders, happy
to observe and dissect new things.
“But I started
seeing clues I missed. I saw the most advanced social invertebrate in the
history of human biological study, but it wasn’t just cooperation and pack
hunting: They used guerilla tactics. You saw that too; why else would something
with that much predatory cunning leave so many patrol members wounded, or kill
inside our camps without feeding?”
The leader
glowered at the girl, but the others looked unsettled. No matter which side you
chose, there was no denying that the Rachnos had a gift for cultivating terror.
The girl drained
half the bourbon in the glass. “After recruiting a linguist, and after much
observation, I figured out how to convey that we just wanted to talk. We were
taken to a hive deep in the jungle, and we saw…” Her voice grew hoarse. “They
were primitive in many ways, but they had agriculture, architecture,
culture—their medicine was far in advance of a race of their technological
sophistication. The things we could have learned…”
“What a load of
shit,” the big man said. He held up his hand, showing the round scar. “One of
those bastards ruined my hand, no weapons, just bit me. What could we have
learned from that?“
Her gaze fell to
the floor. “We’ll never know, will we? Imagine my surprise during the only
peace talk, when I learned that the Tartarus executives knew most of this. Just
like when settlers swept across the Great Plains on Earth, the party line of
‘dig, dig, dig’, led to the corollary of ‘Exterminate the brutes’. Why broker
and barter when you can steal?” Her eyes rolled up to lock with the leader’s.
“You guys know the rest of the story, don’t you Hank?”
The
big fucker growled. “Who are you?”
“You
shouldn’t recognize me, I wasn’t on your radar when I worked for Tartarus, and
I was far away when I gave you that gouge on your right cheek.”
Hank
looked at the rifle, then back to her. “Harcheck.”
“You
do know me.” She finished the
bourbon, then stood and leaned against the bar. “I guess you’ve read my little
file then. I’ve read yours too. It’s no accident you’ve lead every psychopathic
incursion against sympathizers on Nephila. The apartment building in St. Louis.
The university library in Nebraska. Boulder, Colorado. Coming to a border world
with pesky natives was really your only viable career move, huh?”
“Coward,”
he said, ignoring Harcheck. ”Maybe if you hadn’t hid so far away, you could’ve stopped
what I did to your friends. Both kinds. Buggers are a lot more fun, I’ve found.
That one hive queen from the eastern ridge?”
Hank made a sound
somewhere between a hiss, a screech, and a growl. Harcheck’s eyes narrowed.
“Good, I said that
right! See, the bugs are a lot more fun because there are more parts. It’s more
satisfying to burn someone’s eyes out when you have more than two to play with.”
The glass smashed
straight into Hank’s face. Harcheck screamed and tackled Hank, driving her
fists into his face and throat. Two of the mercenaries pulled her off him,
while the biggest of the miners socked her in the gut. I moved to reach under
the bar, when I heard a ‘click’ and a “Don’t”. I held my hands up and backed up
until I was pressed against my shelves, my eyes fixed on the gun barrel.
So this is how I die: Torture porn, then a
bullet in the head.
Everything moved
in slow motion and my vision swam. The commotion over, the group gathered
around a table. Two of them pinned Harcheck to it, while Hank struck her, once
in the gut, once in the face. He drew a knife with a serrated six-inch blade.
“I’ll start with
your tongue, Erin. Any last words to make our hearts bleed?”
“Not really,” she
said. “I’d worry more about your stomachs.”
On cue, three of
the men began to vomit a mixture of beer and half-digested meat, discolored by
blood. I realized things weren’t processing in slow motion, they were actually moving
slower, and I was suffering from more than shock.
Hank turned,
gaping at one of them and Erin seized her moment. She yanked one wrist free,
took the gun off the belt of the man holding her other wrist, and shot him in
the face. She rolled off the table and fired three shots into Hank, two into the
other man who had held her down. Everything else was cleanup, killing those
that hadn’t already died.
I sprawled over
the bar, my head feverish and my stomach cramped, watching as Erin approached
Hank. She crouched over him. With a quick thrust, she pinned his good hand to
the floor with his own knife. He croaked, unable to speak.
“Fun fact: The
‘Sweet Regret’ isn’t just a sympathizer’s drink. The human body metabolizes the
ingredients into the only effective antidote for high doses of Rachnosi venom.
You can tough through some envenomations without it, but when you do something
like gas a bar with enough evaporated venom to kill two bull elephants, it’s
not optional. Enjoy vomiting your esophageal lining.”
As Hank lay dying
on the floor, Erin walked over and sat across from me. She reached to my right,
and came back with the remnants of my drink. She tipped the glass to my lips.
“I told you to
finish your drink.”
