Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap (29 page)

I was awoken by my stomach. Old
reliable.

Surveying the damage, my body had
managed to snap itself back into place at least partially, and I had avoided
getting stuck between the toes of any Therezians.

All in all, things looked up.

But
looking
up, I saw lots
of Therezians grazing around.

Getting our platoon of soldiers
past them had been a major issue, which was why we had taken the latticework,
but now I just had to sneak by alone.

I crawled over to the half-corpse
of the Gandrine and used its rocky body to pull myself up.

My arms were sore, but a lot
better. I walked on the sides of my feet because that hurt less. My ribs were
clearly broken and my breathing anguished.

I walked over to one of the spent
parachutes in the middle of the road. Turning the fabric inside-out, I felt it
was a pretty close match to the universal gray-silver color of Belvaille’s
buildings and sidewalks.

I tore the parachute with my hands.
It was sturdy stuff, I had to rip it with my teeth to get it going.

I put the shroud over me and stood
next to buildings as I inched along the sidewalks. Most of the Therezians
seemed to be about fifty feet tall and almost never looked down. From that
height, I hoped I would be camouflaged. But knowing my luck they all had
telescopic vision and could smell broken bones.

When a Therezian got too close I
stopped moving.

I was almost stepped on several
times but I think that was due to them not looking, or caring, where they
walked. I may have stopped a galactic civil war, but sooner rather than later,
this whole city was going to get trampled. As strong as Belvaille’s buildings
were, maybe a quarter of them in this area were twisted scraps of metal due to
some Therezian brushing past.

It was with great relief when I
finally reached a train station the Therezians hadn’t inadvertently destroyed
and I could get the hell out of there by means other than tiptoeing.

I checked myself directly into the
hospital.

They told me Garm had left earlier
that day. Which sucked, I was hoping for a bunkmate for once.

“You have a sunburn,” Garm said.

Delovoa, Garm, and the General were
all visiting me as I recovered.

“I do? Oh, probably from the plasma
pistol.”

“The Portal is neutralized?” the
General asked.

“And the Gandrine,” I confirmed.

“Still have the clones,” Delovoa
reminded. “They’re back to shooting each other and blowing up bars.”

“Did you get the device?” I asked
the General.

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” he sneered.

I wasn’t sure if he was trying to
get out of paying me or didn’t want to talk about it in front of Delovoa and
Garm—even though they both knew all about it. I didn’t care, frankly.

“So how do we get rid of the
soldiers and Therezians?” I asked.

“You have already requested aid
from the Colmarian Confederation. We have sent emergency communications but it
will take some time to gather a response team,” the General said.

“Are we supposed to let them destroy
our infrastructure until then?” Garm demanded.

“What can we do about it?” I asked
her.

She seemed mad that I was “siding”
with the General.

“What about the freighters, those
are probably all filled with weapons of some sort,” Delovoa said.

“You avoided paying importation
fees on them. They will be reclaimed,” the General declared.

“Just a minute,” Garm shouted, “you
know as well as I do that those contents are worth billions of credits. It
wasn’t our oversight they got here, it was yours. I think we should be
reimbursed for their value.”

The General was incensed that the
traitor, former Adjunct Overwatch, dared to address him directly.

“How about we work something out?”
I suggested. “Like determine fair market value and we offer a…half-off
discount?”

“Thirty percent,” Garm countered.

“Ninety,” the General said.

“We need to move everyone,” Delovoa
said. “We don’t have the means of fighting Therezians and corporations. We have
to get out of their way until the Navy gets here.”

The General and Garm were still haggling
over rates.

I was getting hungry and tired
listening to these people.

“Mrah mrah. I need to get some
sleep. Can I get feeding tubes hooked up?”

Everyone looked at me, seeming to
remember I was a great hero. Or at least here.

“We’ll come back later. And I’ll
post guards outside,” Garm said. “You did good.”

“I know,” I said. “You still look
terrible.”

“Not everyone heals as fast as you,
fatty.”

She gave me a light slap on the
cheek which I heard but didn’t feel. She also leaned over and kissed my broken
nose, which I also didn’t feel.

But I smelled her.

I drifted to sleep with her
fragrance of orchids and pain.

Aaooooggaaa!

I almost fell out of my bed. What a
terrible alarm clock. As my mind chased away my slumber I realized:

“I know that sound.”

That was the city-wide catastrophic
warning system.

Belvaille was a space station.
Other than the surface of a star or a black hole there was no more inhospitable
place to put a city than deep space. Every second of every day the environment
was trying to kill us.

There were a dozen or more
absolutely vital systems whose failure meant instant death for every occupant of
the entire city.

So every five years, no matter what
gang fights were going on, or what drama was cooking, we all took a temporary
break and did a few days of emergency tests. And everyone, without exception,
took part.

Space stations failed. They were
not a perfect science. And while the number of people who died every year from
common sickness in the Colmarian Confederation greatly dwarfed the death toll
from space station disasters, that wasn’t reassuring if you lived on one.

Moreover, Belvaille was at the very
edge of the Colmarian Confederation. Even with working Portals it took rescue
ships weeks at the earliest to receive word and respond—when your lifespan was
measured in seconds in case of an accident.

Aaooooggaaa!

They had not bothered to put me in
hospital clothes so I carefully turned myself on the bed. I didn’t want to fall
flat on the floor and not be able to get up. I put my legs over and pushed
myself off, landing well enough that I could stand.

I hustled to the hospital exit and
saw the city in a panic. This wasn’t a test.

There were 150 shelters across the
city. Places you were supposed to take refuge in case of one of these events.
They housed emergency supplies and power and air.

On the street I saw hundreds of
citizens running in terror, screaming.

I knew the closest shelter was City
Hall, but you had to navigate stairs to get to it and I was too slow on them.
Also, everyone would try and go there and it might not hold them.

I decided to head slightly
northwest.

Aaooooggaaa!

I ran down the street and people
flew past me like I was standing still.

“Run, Hank!” Someone shouted.

“The latticework is shutting down!”
Another yelled.

Huff huff huff.

“Run! Get to the shelter!” Another
said.

The streets were thinning. Old
people, women carrying their children, and me, were the last bit left.

“Hank, run!” Someone said, as they
shot by.

“Shut up!” I replied, getting tired
of people thinking I wasn’t actually running. Like I was too cool to panic or
something.

Aaooooggaaa!

It was just me on the street now. I
looked up and the lights were fading on the latticework.

With no one around, the only sounds
were my feet tromping along in between sirens. I found it actually helped if I
didn’t pump my arms. I couldn’t swing them fast enough or in rhythm to my feet and
they just threw me off balance.

My lungs were burning and my legs
were burning and my feet hurt. I still had quite a ways to go. Why hadn’t I
gone to City Hall? I could have rolled down the stairs.

The lights were almost completely
out now.

I took a step and flew like five
feet in the air! I windmilled my arms and landed, thankfully, on my knees.

The artificial gravity was failing.

I got up and kept going.

Life can kind of suck sometimes.
Especially when you’re getting older and your universe was changing and your
place in it was getting less and less valuable and Therezians and soldiers had
taken over your home.

But by damn, I wanted to live!

Aaooooahhhh.

The siren died with croak. Even it
was failing.

I had just a few blocks to go.

I passed a cross street and spotted
two Therezians standing practically back-to-back looking up at the latticework.

They noticed they were about to
die. They didn’t seem to care.

I saw the shelter.

The door was still open. It was
about ten feet wide to accommodate a doomed city. People were at the entrance
calling to me and waving.

“Come on!”

“Hurry!”

I saw the door was sliding shut.

If that door closes, I’m dead. But
if it closes and I get caught in it, everyone inside will die as well as me. There
was no such thing as
partial
shelter on a space station.

It was going to be close. The
people had moved away from the door and they were no longer urging me onward.

If I was selfless and the champion
I wanted to be, I would stop now. I would trade my life for theirs.

But screw that noise.

The door was nearly shut and I did
the most improbable, useless thing I could do.

I jumped towards it.

I don’t know if gravity cut out
then or I suddenly learned how to jump, but I sailed through the air. My head
passed the door and I realized, “I’m not going to make it.”

A pessimist to the end.

I slammed into four people who had
been waiting on the other side and the door closed behind me. I had safely made
it inside.

I heard them gurgle and groan
underneath me.

“Get off!” They complained.

“I can’t,” I said, back in
artificial gravity.

It took everyone in the shelter to
pull me off the poor people I crushed. They were not happy, but their injuries
weren’t life-threatening.

The lighting was dim in here.
Designed to last weeks. You couldn’t even see the floor.

Everyone was silent. Not even
crying. It was like we held our breaths, either waiting for what would happen
next, or afraid to use our precious oxygen.

We took stock of our supplies.
Everything seemed to be there.

I had guessed right in that this
shelter was well under capacity. There were less than two hundred people here.
But I ate a lot.

People who had taken the training
more seriously knew all the steps. They contacted the other shelters, confirmed
statuses, conditions, and emergency messages were sent. While messages had
already been sent to the Colmarian Navy, these were going to rescue services
within the state of Ginland itself and they would be a lot faster responding.

Hopefully.

Some of the technicians in other
shelters said we were completely losing power on the station. The reason was
unknown.

As we settled in for the long haul
and the adrenaline was wearing off, I felt a familiar sensation.

A tremendous force pulled on me
almost like a hand had grabbed hold of my stomach and was trying to yank it out
of my mouth. I fell to my knees and nearly fainted.

Drooling on the ground, I slowly
rose to a sitting position.

People began screaming.

“What was that?” a person asked.

“Someone give me your tele!” I
yelled.

No one answered, so I simply
grabbed the guy next to me and squeezed.

“Give me your tele!”

He gave it.

I called Delovoa and Garm. Please
be alive. Please be there.

Delovoa answered.

“Hello, this is Delovoa.”

“Hey, it’s me,” I said.

Garm answered once she saw Delovoa
was on the line. Then saw me too.

“What was that?” she asked.

“That was a Portal,” I said.

“All the Portals are disabled and
Belvaille is way too large to fit through one,” Garm said.

“It wasn’t a Portal,” Delovoa gasped.
“It was an a-drive! The corporation must have installed an a-drive on Belvaille.
They moved the whole city!”

“The shield just collapsed,” Garm
said.

We were expecting to have to
weather inside our shelters for weeks at the least.

It was only a handful of hours
before we were in widespread tele communication. Not with the Navy, but with
nearby ships.

The Colmarian Confederation had
five capital planets, with a sixth one disputed. Belvaille had been transported
to the solar system Ceredus.

The system was adjacent to one of
the capitals, Capital 3. It was so named even though it was the second capital.
One of the previous capitals decided it no longer wanted the designation or
responsibility.

Ceredus had the most Portals of any
system in the Colmarian Confederation. It was almost exactly in the center of
the empire.

I had assumed killing Naked Guy,
destroying the Portal, and the Gandrine, would stop his schemes to start a
civil war. But it did nothing of the sort.

We only knew a small piece of what
was planned and nothing about how it was to be implemented.

Naked Guy had said he was going to give
these weapons to warring groups within the Colmarian Confederation. And so he
did.

But not by sending out transport
ships loaded with goods, but by taking all of Belvaille and transporting it,
along with the attached freighters.

When the shield and gravity were
deactivated, the Therezians were free from the confines of the station. Space,
while death for a Colmarian, did not pose the same danger for the giants. They
could survive unprotected in outer space for hours. But they didn’t need that
long because they were picked up by waiting ships—other corporate vessels that
Naked Guy had prepared months or years in advance.

The freighters full of weapons were
split off and separated, their goods transferred to other craft.

The ships then used the vast array
of Portals in Ceredus to spread out instantly across the empire.

The Navy, who was only regionally
aware of a disturbance in the distant state of Ginland, was not prepared for an
entire space station to a-drive in, unload its cargo, and split in a thousand
different directions.

No space station had ever portaled
before, let alone a-drived. Besides, there was nothing they could have done.
They didn’t know what they saw was the catalyst for a galactic civil war.

I had failed.

The immortal Naked Guy had known us
and what our responses would be. He had given the exact push needed to get
racial, religious, and political conflicts to finally erupt.

He chose his targets perfectly.

Within weeks there were battles
raging all over the empire.

We were a Confederation that had
always been tenuously held together. But those ties were coming apart fast.

Belvaille had just been a small
piece of the puzzle. He needed somewhere to stockpile those weapons out of Navy
view and jurisdiction. And he still had his agents everywhere. The corporations
continued to exist, even if their chairman had been disintegrated.

Killing him had done nothing other
than granting him his greatest wish.

Belvaille itself had survived. We
had to wait in our shelters for a week while they repaired the ruptured
latticework, which had been disengaged to access the Therezians.

Approximately one thousand civilians
died when the systems shut down. They hadn’t made it to the shelters in time,
or had thought it was a drill, or had no clue what was going on, or were too
drunk or drugged to notice.

All the
corporate soldiers died as well, but no one cared about them.

Belvaille was
not at the edge of the galaxy anymore. It was smack in the center of a
Confederation at war.