Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap

by Steven Campbell

  “They could have had other transports or trucks parked a few blocks away.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “But that was seriously at least a hundred soldiers. Maybe two hundred. That wasn’t a coincidence them driving around with that many guys and all piling out. That was like a military operation.” He shook his head remembering.

  “So what are you going to do after you heal up?” I asked.

  “Get the hell off this station!”

  CHAPTER 28

  I came home and the Gandrine were gone. Small miracle. But the pile of bodies was still there. I called up Garm as I went inside.

  “Hey, are you killing my dates?” I asked her.

  She hung up.

  I called her back.

  “What?” she asked, annoyed.

  “I’m serious. Are you killing my dates?”

  “Your dates? Like people you’re dating?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Physically murdering them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would I care enough to do that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Someone is killing your dates?”

  “I literally got a morgue outside my door,” I said.

  “You know, someone was telling me about that. I also heard about your fight at the club. People are…really scared of you right now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because they think you’ve gone crazy, massacring people and leaving the bodies everywhere.”

  I was about to say, “no I’m not,” but I did kill people at the club.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said, grasping for at least some denial.

  “I believe you. Who were you dating?”

  “Hah! You do care,” I pounced.

  “Care about what?”

  “You said ‘how would you care enough to do it,’ but if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t ask who I was dating.”

  “I’m just making conversation.”

  “Right. And you’re the queen of small talk.”

  “What did happen? I heard like a hundred people died. That’s…a lot, Hank.”

  “I’m not sure how it happened. I’d ask them, but everyone who knew anything got killed. This corporation came out of nowhere and began attacking.”

  “Which one?”

  “Fifteen Stars Holding Authority. Do you know it?”

  “I know of it. It owns one of the freighters.”

  “The what?”

  “One of the ships that’s hooked to Belvaille.”

  “What do they manufacture?”

  “How should I know?” she complained.

  “Well, what services do they use?”

  “Electricity, water, air, gravity. Same as anyone else. I don’t nose around what any of the corporations do.”

  “I thought it was your business to know all this stuff.”

  And I saw from the tele screen she was uneasy.

  “Not with these guys. You work for them and if you try and reach beyond that…well, we got enough evidence of what they do.”

  “So how’s Bronze?” I asked.

  I saw her blush. Garm blush!

  “Fine,” she said quickly, looking away.

  “You guys sleep with each other yet?”

  She looked back to the screen, brow furrowed, mouth open in anger.

  I hung up.

  CHAPTER 29

  On the train I noticed people were not sitting near me. Or looking towards me. Normally I would at least get a few salutations. That’s fine. I could get more work done.

  I rang Delovoa’s door.

  His face came on the display.

  “Hank, come in,” he said.

  The door unlocked and I walked inside.

  “Hello?” He wasn’t around.

  I moved to the basement. As I was on the ramp down, I looked over and saw Delovoa standing beside a work table. A nude man was lying on top of the table.

  “I knew it!” I yelled, covering my eyes. What was it with naked guys lately?

  “Hank,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Come down.”

  “No way, weirdo.” I pawed around with my hand to try and find the railing to get out of the basement.

  “Hank, it’s okay. He’s dead.”

  “Oh, yeah. That makes it great.”

  “This is one of the soldiers you killed,” he said.

  And I paused, my hand still covering my face.

  “Why do you have a soldier I killed?”

  “Come down, I’m not going to yell all this up to you.”

  I removed my hand and walked down the ramp to the lower basement.

  “I swear, about half the time I come here I see something I wish I hadn’t seen.”

  I stopped nearish Delovoa but not so near. My eyes were on the ceiling.

  “So is this one of the bodies from the club fight?”

  “No. From the APC you destroyed.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you carry this body all the way here?”

  “No. I dragged it.”

  “This city is so screwed up,” I said, thinking about all the people who must have seen Delovoa dragging a dead body for twenty or more blocks and didn’t care. “What did he die of, anyway?”

  “Heat and concussion from when the armor piercing shot burrowed through the plates of the vehicle. Which is why his skin is charred in spots.”

  “Lovely.”

  “But this guy was really dumb,” Delovoa stated.

  “Well, he worked for a corporation.”

  “No, look.”

  Delovoa took out an x-ray and held it up to the light for me to see.

  “What am I looking at here?”

  “This is his brain.”

  “I’m not a doctor, Delovoa.”

  “You can see he’s missing half his brain, can’t you?” Delovoa asked, annoyed. He highlighted it with his finger. “This is his skull. This part is his brain. This is all empty.”

  “Maybe the autocannon did that?”

  “It’s not going to melt his brain—half of it. He had on his body armor, including a helmet.”

  “So he wasn’t very smart. I’ve worked with a lot of people like that.”

  “Now look at his DNA.”

  Delovoa began to drag out some equipment from under the table and get it all situated.

  “Okay,” he said, once it was all connected. “This is trying to match his DNA and mine.”

  The machines hummed and whirred and spat out a bunch of colored numbers onto a screen which were meaningless to me.

  “He and I are a 23.2% match,” Delovoa said.

  “So you aren’t related?” I asked blandly.

  “Hank, even the weirdest Colmarians are still Colmarians. We all share at least half our DNA. And often it’s up to 99%. I have more in common with a tree than I do with this guy.”

  He saw from my face that I wasn’t getting it.

  “Look, I have some blood from someone onstation that I’ll match to mine.”

  “Delovoa, you’re starting to really freak me out. Why do you have someone’s blood and all this DNA equipment?”

  “I do paternity tests on the side.”

  “Really? Like for who?”

  “That’s confidential,” he replied sternly. Then he leaned in to me and whispered, “Hrelix and Veolbos.”

  “Oh, that’s his baby for sure,” I said certainly.

  Delovoa smiled broadly and nodded at me.

  “This is Hrelix’s blood. And she comes from the other side of the galaxy.”

  The machines went at it again and popped out a result.

  “There, an 83.6% match. And I’m a mutant male nothing like her.”

  “You’re staring at me like this should be some huge information, but I don’t understand.”

  “Hank, it’s not possible for us to match this little. He shouldn’t even be functioning biological life. At least not
one that looks like that.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t functioning. Maybe he was already dead in the APC.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The DNA would still be the same. The autocannon didn’t blast apart his genetic makeup.”

  “So what does it mean then?”

  “We have a lot of DNA that we don’t use. That is kind of…legacy, from when we evolved. It’s still there but it doesn’t do anything. So what is happening is that he and I are matching on the big stuff. Like how to create cells and proteins and organs and muscles and whatever. But he doesn’t have any of the material we no longer use.”

  Delovoa stared at me with his three eyes popped.

  I shrugged, waiting for him to continue. Or at least talk simpler.

  “Hank, he never evolved.”

  “Wait, what? So is he sick?”

  Delovoa’s head drooped.

  “Ugh. Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean you have to guess. He’s not sick. I mean, he’s dead. But he wasn’t sick. I think he was created in a lab.”

  “Like this one?” I asked, wondering if Delovoa was creating soldiers.

  “No, not like this one. I build guns and security systems. I’m an engineer. You would need vast resources to create him.”

  “But why? I don’t get it. What does taking out his brain and DNA do?”

  “I don’t think they took them out, they never put them in. He has exactly what he needs to do his job. As much brain as he needs to work.”

  “So someone built him? Like a machine? Is that even possible?”

  “I think so,” Delovoa said, after sucking in some air. “We had done it in our past. I remember reading about it. It’s illegal.”

  “Why illegal? Though, just about everything is illegal in the Colmarian Confederation.”

  “This isn’t just our law. This is galactic treaty. Everyone agreed to it.”

  “What’s the big deal? He’s stupid, right?”

  “You know how many procedures we have at quarantine to prevent outbreaks from all the different planets? Well, all our races have coexisted for, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of years. Our genetic material is all spliced and combined together. But this guy has DNA that’s completely foreign. If he sneezed it might wipe out a planet’s population.”

  “So he is sick!” I said, backing away.

  “Well…” and Delovoa looked at him and also backed away.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have come down here,” I said, heading for the ramp.

  Delovoa was following slower.

  “Oh, get me some autocannon ammo first.”

  Upstairs I had all of Delovoa’s ammunition. A case of each shell type. We sat in his kitchen and talked.

  “Where are your shoes?” Delovoa asked, as if that was the most important thing.

  “Never mind. How did you know to drag that guy here and do those tests?”

  “I grabbed him because I thought he was going to be loaded with technology I could steal. But there was nothing at all. He didn’t even have a tele or a radio. That made me really suspicious.”

  “I know people who don’t have teles. I don’t x-ray their brains and take their blood.”

  “It was some of the stuff you said and just how they behave in general. We never see them. Ever. They always wear visors—tinted visors, on a station that doesn’t orbit a star and has controlled lighting. You said they get all their uniforms at the same place for all the corporations. They work together and have perfect coordination.

  “So you’re saying it’s not just that one guy?”

  “Oh, no. I think it’s all of them. Or a lot of them.”

  “What if they all sneeze?” I asked, panicked.

  “I…” Delovoa sighed. “That wasn’t literally what I meant. The station has ongoing sterilization. If you injected some of his blood it would probably be really bad.”

  “Why the hell would I inject a corpse’s blood, you sicko?”

  “You wouldn’t. I’m just saying if you did,” he stated, as if that was completely logical.

  “Do you think it’s just the soldiers or everyone in the corporation?”

  “No, I think it’s just the soldiers and maybe only some of them. What I guess is that they are kind of programmed to do a task. Like it’s their instinct. Which is why they don’t need teles and can still coordinate so well. But while you might be able to make a generic soldier like that, I couldn’t think you would be able to fill every job in a corporation. They have thousands of different occupations. I can’t see why you would want to.”

  “That’s what I keep coming back to. Guys with guns are really cheap. Why would you need to build soldiers? How much would it cost to make that guy?”

  “Oh. A lot,” Delovoa said.

  “A hundred credits? A million?”

  “I have no idea, really. It’s not something anyone does.”

  “Yeah, because there’s no reason. You could just hire thugs on Belvaille. We might not be single-minded, but we won’t kill you if we fart.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Over the last week I had successfully found everyone from the passenger list except three women. One I could immediately cross off because no amount of disguises would make her that old and large. The ship had to scan everyone who boarded and they would notice an inflatable body suit.

  The other two women were listed as “courtesans” for occupation. I didn’t know if that was a nice word for prostitute since I couldn’t really think of any courty stuff you could do on Belvaille.

  I looked at the records of the women closely. Either of them could be the pale sister.

  As I walked to my apartment, I saw the Gandrine were back. They had been gone for a few days and I had hoped they had gotten bored of my stairs.

  “Afternoon, everyone,” I said, walking past them.

  Inside there was the terrible racket of grinding metal.

  I peeked into my bathroom to see how the plumbers were doing.

  One of the men, face covered with a protective mask, saw me and anxiously tapped the other plumber working the metal saw that was currently digging into my wall.

  They turned off the machine, took off their masks, and stood facing me with a look of apprehension.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

  “Great! Great, Hank. We should be finished in about three hours at the most,” one said.

  “So you’ll be able to get my toilet back in?”

  “Yeah, no problem. We’ll even reinforce it so it will be less likely to slide out from under you again.”

  “It didn’t…alright, fine. How much will all this cost?”

  The plumbers looked at each other worriedly.

  “We figured, for all the good stuff you done for Belvaille,” one began.

  “We’d do it for free,” the other finished.

  “Look. Guys. I know there’s some stuff outside my apartment. But I didn’t have anything to do with that.” My voice rose at the end of the sentence like I was about to say what really happened. But then I realized if I told them it would sound stupid. So I just stood there.

  They waited for me to continue. But seeing that I didn’t, they quickly filled the void.

  “Oh, totally!” One plumber said. “That’s what I was telling him.”

  “We both said it,” the other agreed. “We figured…” And he didn’t have anything to add either. Like three corpses magically appeared and two Gandrine randomly chose my house to sit in front of.

  “Right. So I’ll leave you guys to it,” I said.

  Courtesans.

  I didn’t know any courtesans. Of course it was just something they wrote on their ingress statement. The other Quadrad had called themselves tourists, so it wasn’t the most accurate of forms.

  I sat in a restaurant waiting for the best definition of a courtesan I knew.

  Tejj-jo was the most beautiful woman on the station, at least in my estimation. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. She had been
the moll, doll, mistress of maybe a half-dozen gang bosses and other luminaries over the years.

  To me, she was far too attractive.

  Everyone had their type. What they find to be dating material. And there’s damn little you can do about it. I liked cute and pretty. But Tejj-jo really was beautiful. She looked like artwork. And while that’s great and all to look at, I had as much desire to touch or kiss her as I did any artwork.

  It was 4:48pm and she was supposed to meet me here at 4:00.

  I was a bit surprised she had agreed to meet me with so little convincing. Our last talk hadn’t been especially smooth.

  She finally came in the door at 4:57, which I guess was just enough that she could say she wasn’t an hour late.

  She had extremely long auburn hair, which was one of her trademarks. Though instead of any kind of styling, it fell like water from her head without a single ripple. She had a great body that was not fully concealed under her fur coat. She was tall, taller than I was, and walked like you imagined artwork would walk.

  Everyone in the restaurant watched her enter.

  She approached my table, saw me, and immediately started laughing hysterically.

  I looked around, wiped my face—as I had eaten while I was waiting—but she kept on going.

  People were starting to notice and looked at me to see what was so amusing. Even her laugh was attractive.

  “What?” I asked.

  But she just kept going. She was holding her stomach at this point and she had tears rolling down her face. At first I thought she might be mocking me or pretending, but no one could fake laughing like that.

  I drummed my fingers on the table waiting for her to stop.

  She finally approached, not to sit, but to rest against the table.

  “So how are you doing?” I asked.

  And that kicked the laughing up another notch. She was about to cause herself internal bleeding any moment.

  After what seemed like hours, with the restaurant all gawking, she managed to point at me.

  “This?” I said, following her finger. “It’s a helmet.”

  She exploded! She fell to her knees laughing at my cap. I was still wearing it because I didn’t want any monster soldiers to attack me and so far it had worked.