Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy (2 page)

“I have your word on that?” I could see he was
uneasy, but it was a better option than being shot with an Ontakian weapon by a
pant-less mutant.

“Yup.” I went over and shook his hand. I liked
shaking hands. My mitts felt like rocks and it was an extra means of
intimidating people.

“Okay, guys. Move this stuff,” I indicated to
Zadeck’s men. Some restlessness remained, as the crew still had their weapons.
I tried to defuse it further by approaching one of the guys holding a gun.

“That’s a Dooli?” I asked him. “How’s it
shoot?”

“What? Oh, yeah it is. It’s fine, doesn’t kick
that much but it doesn’t sit right in the hand. Pretty narrow.” Crooks loved to
talk weapons. It was how they bonded.

“Is that really an Ontakian pistol?” he asked
quietly.

“Yup.”

“Can I see it?”

“Nope.”

When the sailors finally departed for their
hotel and the many sins Belvaille had to offer, I returned to my apartment to
get some new clothes.

Had I just washed them too much? My pants, that
is. Was that why they had holes and came apart when I got pulled from under the
crate? I tried to remember when I bought them, but drew a blank. The days and
decades tended to blur on Belvaille.

The streets were quiet, with very few people
about. It was still considered morning by Belvaille standards and the city
tended to wake up late. This was fortunate for me since I was still relatively
unclothed.

The whole space station was an exact square,
fifteen miles by fifteen miles, with trains bisecting it regularly. Some
extremely wealthy gang bosses owned cars, but there wasn’t much use for them
except as status symbols.

The buildings varied from one to ten stories
tall, the shortest being things like warehouses and maintenance facilities, the
tallest being residential complexes. All of them were dull silver unless
painted and boringly square in design to maximize real estate.

The city itself was open air. Or open space.
There was a latticework of supports high above the city that controlled lighting
and air and whatever else goes on up there. The whole station was of course
protected by a shield, to keep those pesky meteors away and our atmosphere in
place.

I stumbled into my apartment and looked for
something to drink. I just wanted juice, something cold.

My place wasn’t fancy and was on the ground
floor to save me walking. There were five rooms and a bathroom. My only
decorations were scraps of junk and weapons and laundry. The furniture had been
replaced as fights necessitated, and what remained was scorched and torn. I had
taken up a cornucopia of hobbies and inevitably given them up after a few
months. There were rusty instruments, barely begun paintings, puzzles, blocks
of somewhat chiseled metal, and many other things scattered around my rooms.

The doorbell rang and I thought about whether
or not to answer. After a moment I threw open the door and outside was a petite
woman with vibrant blue skin, a tiny nose, and incredibly long, floppy ears
that hung halfway down her ample chest. She was dressed in what I assumed to be
a fashionable outfit because it looked weird. It was plastic weave and cords,
but spun and twisted as if it were based on a design that had once been cloth
in some ancestral past. It accentuated her attractive figure while not showing
much skin. She wore white gloves and had tall boots that disappeared under her
dress. In fact all of her body was covered except her neck and face. Her age
was hard to tell, but she looked extremely young, maybe barely in her twenties.

“Er, hello,” I said.

“Are you the one they call ‘Hank’?” she asked
in a lilting accent.

“Yeah, that’s me. What can I do for you?”

She seemed suddenly very excited and clasped
her hands together in front of herself like she was a little girl and I was
certain to give her presents.

“Could I come inside?” she asked.

I hesitated. Bringing a stranger into my home
didn’t scare me, but I kind of felt like relaxing at this point. And while this
woman was cute in a gigantic ear kind of way, and it might be a job she was
offering, something told me it was going to be a hassle not worth the time.

“Sure,” I said finally, holding open the door.

She entered and stared around my apartment with
what I thought was a sense of wonder. But then I realized it was confusion.

“You are the one in
The News
they call
‘Hank’?”

There was only one newspaper on Belvaille.
The
News
. “The Twenty Most Influential” quarterly list it published was about
the closest thing we had to being designated royalty. For the last eighteen
years I had placed #21 with an asterisk.

“Yes.”

She looked around my apartment some more. It
wasn’t big. Or clean. Or free from smashed bullets on the walls or the residue
from fires. It did not look like the home of the 21
^st
most
influential person who lived on a crime lord’s space station.

As she continued to scan, I found myself
growing more self-conscious. Would it kill me to fix the place up?

Then she looked at me. My torn jacket. My
smudges caused from dropped shipping crates. The fact I was standing in my
underwear. I could see her earlier enthusiasm retreating.

Most times I met people I either went to their
place, we met at some restaurant, or if they came to my apartment they were the
kind of guys that didn’t care if there were dirty clothes on the floor. Hell,
they didn’t care if there were dirty corpses on the floor.

“Let me go change real quick,” I said, suddenly
feeling prudish.

I hurried to my bedroom and grabbed the first
pair of pants I saw and put them on.

“What can I do for you?” I asked after
returning.

“My brother and I are new to the space station.
We came from the state of Lagles Prima. It wasn’t easy getting here.”

I was vaguely aware of the name. It was
practically the other side of the galaxy. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would
travel so far to reach our humble state of Ginland, let alone our far more
humble space station.

Belvaille had been constructed some 300 years
ago back when every empire believed their prestige was dependent on how much
territory they could claim. It was meant to be a stepping stone for the great
Colmarian Confederation to expand outward across the galaxy.

But then I think we realized that the great
Colmarian Confederation wasn’t that great and we had a lot of trouble managing
the space we already owned. So they shut down all the Portals leading to
Belvaille except one and about 95% of the population left.

“I may be interested in hiring you, if you are
available,” she continued.

“For what?” I asked.

“Forgive me, but I must be certain you are the
correct person. You are a mutant, right?”

“Yes.”

“And what are your abilities?”

“I’m hard to hurt.”

“Excellent,” she said, seemingly overjoyed. “So
what if a destroyer was to hit you?”

You know how you get on different threads of a
conversation and your brain conjures up images trying to fill the gaps? I
didn’t know what she meant by “destroyer” and I was thinking it might be some
brand of firearm I didn’t know.

“What’s a destroyer?” I asked.

“A ship.”

I cocked my head.

“No. I am, my body is, difficult to injure.
Bullets and bolts will hit me, but I will be fine.”

“Right. So what if a destroyer’s cannons shot
you?”

“A destroyer,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“Like a Colmarian Navy ship?”

“Yes,” she said brightly, happy I finally
understood her ludicrous question.

“So like, you’re asking what would happen if I was
maybe, swimming around in space, minding my own business—”

“The reason doesn’t matter.”

“Right, sure,” I said to this lunatic. “And
this destroyer turned its cannons on me and fired. You’re asking what would
happen?”

“Exactly,” she said with deep contentment, as
if she were being totally reasonable.

“Well, I’m not a physicist.”

“You don’t have to be precise. Just what do you
think?”

“I’d explode and be smeared all over the
galaxy,” I said tersely.

“Oh,” she said, and looked greatly
disappointed.

“Wait, you said a destroyer, right? Those ships
that hold thousands of people? That guard the Portals and chase down smugglers
and such?” I was still wondering if we were talking about the same thing. She
couldn’t honestly expect anyone to survive personally being attacked by a
military vessel. That was nonsense. No mutant of any level could do that.
Mutations were generally small things like being able to rotate your eyeballs
360 degrees, and many times they weren’t even helpful.

“Yes. And you’re positive that would happen?”

“Well…no, I’m not positive. I’ve never actually
put on a spacesuit and gone out and punched a destroyer. Didn’t seem like a
smart play.”

“So you don’t really know?”

I didn’t want to lie to her and who knows,
maybe she had a destroyer chasing her all the way to Belvaille and her idea was
to fling me at it.

“I guess technically I don’t know. But I’m
pretty certain I’m not going to win a fight with any military vessel.”

“What mutant level are you?”

“I’m a level four.”

She shook her head in surprise, her ears
twirling around her face like braids.

“Level four, that’s it?”

I was really over this conversation. I
sometimes had jobs requested by the more run-of-the-mill citizens of the
station, but it often seemed to turn into stuff like this. They just didn’t
know what they wanted, how, or how much. And that’s fine, they were in
different lines of work. I mean I can’t tell someone how to fix a coolant
module, and the folks that work on it would probably think I was an idiot if I
tried to make any suggestions.

“Yup, I’m just a little old level four.”

“Are you sure?” she asked skeptically.

“That’s what they told me.”

“And when was that?”

“When they first classified me. I don’t know,
maybe 160 years ago?”

“Oh,” the woman said again, thinking. “And you
haven’t been tested since then?”

“No,” I said, instinctively flexing my pinky
that had long ago been chopped.

“Hmm,” she said, scrutinizing me. “I would like
to give you some money to purchase some drugs for me.”

Ugh! I can’t believe I listened to all this just
so she can try and get high.

“I don’t really do that. But there are plenty
of people who I’m sure will be happy to sell to you.”

She ignored me and pulled from her glove a
folded piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a list with a truly fantastic
amount of drugs on it. Not enough to go into business, but certainly more than
enough for personal use.

“I want you to get these. Or as many as you
can. I will pay you 10,000 if you can get them to me in 48 hours and 20,000 if
you can get them to me in 24 hours.”

Those numbers made me reevaluate the list. I’m
not a prima donna. Odd jobs are what I do. And I can help out a nice blue lady
now and then.

“This stuff is pretty expensive,” I said. “If
you’re new to Belvaille you have to realize that only a few dozen drugs are
actually manufactured here. The rest have to be smuggled in and there’s just
not a big market for a lot of these.”

She handed me a token for 40,000 credits.

Tokens weren’t used much anymore in the rest of
Colmarian space I’ve heard, most transactions being tele-to-tele or straight to
banks, but Belvaille was sentimental about anonymous, portable tokens.

“Will this be enough?”

I looked over the list for real this time,
doing some calculations. I wasn’t a big drug expert, never really got the appeal.
I figured she gave me more than enough to cover most of the list, and a few of
the drugs wouldn’t be available at any price, they just weren’t here. She
probably gave 10K too much, which I considered a good sign of faith. Even if
she tried to screw me over, I had a solid cushion to make sure I got paid.

“Okay, I can do this. What’s your name and
where do I reach you?”

“I’ll come back tomorrow if that’s okay?”

Wasn’t she a polite little drug addict?

“Well, I come and go a lot. I actually don’t
spend much time here. You can tele me, though.” I gave her my number. Hey,
anyone who gives me forty grand is a new personal friend.

“My name is Jyen,” she said, offering her
gloved hand.

I awkwardly shook her tiny hand with three of
my fingers.

“I’m hoping this shouldn’t take too much time
to gather.”

“Thank you for your assistance, Hank. May I
call you ‘Hank’?”

I briefly thought of what else she could call
me, but I didn’t come up with anything funny.

“Sure.”

I showed her out and closed the door. Hot damn.
Old Hank’s luck was definitely taking a turn for the better.