ROOKER, BY LAIRD LONGIt was a dive off B Street. A dingy, dirty bar filled with sweaty, stinking men yelling and laughing and swearing, drinking copiously. Where there’s water, there’s booze.
Voltumus had plenty of water, deep beneath its sun-seared surface. Thanks to an ancient Ice Age that had long ago melted into the planet’s cracks and crevices. And now Voltumus had plenty of ‘drips’, the roughnecks shipped out from Earth to drill and pipe and tank the cool, crystal-clear water, barge it back to an increasingly parched home planet. Watertown was the center of it all, a boomtown in the middle of a vast and desolate nowhere, a rugged oasis.
My drip was crowded up against the brass-railed bar that ran the length of one side of the stifling room. He was shoulder-to-shoulder with other br
