“I don’t like it. I could throw a grenade,” I offered.
“I don’t know what they are securing the a-drive with, maybe nothing. But you don’t want to go tossing explosives around a disintegrator. If it gets damaged it would be bad,” Delovoa said.
“How bad?”
“Actually, I have no clue. It could be good for all I know. It could make you grow younger and have baby soft skin. But I’m guessing an exploding a-drive core is bad.”
“Besides, I’ll be there,” Garm said. “I don’t want any grenades going off around me.”
“Can you fight both of them?” I asked.
“I’m going to try.”
“Is the core lethal by itself?”
“Eventually, sure,” Delovoa said. “But it killed their partner, so the Quadrad probably know enough not to wear it as a nose ring. Its danger falls off very quickly with distance. At thirty feet away you would not experience any adverse effects.”
I looked at Garm.
“So you want me to go to this fight empty-handed?”
“It may not seem like much but having you clomp around after them will throw off their whole attack and defense routines.”
“Should you and I work out some routines?”
“Yeah. Don’t step on me.”
CHAPTER 72
It was a risk getting to the dock. The Navy arriving and attacking, along with the citizens rioting, had made the corporation start protecting their turf.
Garm scouted blocks ahead and I followed behind. I also carried all her equipment. I felt very secondary in this mission.
“Are they going to fire missiles at us if we leave in a shuttle? They blew up a battleship.”
“No,” Garm said. “The weapons they used on the Portals and Navy ships are too big to hit us. Besides, there are shuttles and repair craft all over Belvaille. We won’t look out of the ordinary.”
Garm knew the basics about shuttle flight. Particularly automatic pilot. I was already feeling emasculated on this trip so I had resolved not to throw up in the shuttle.
I managed to last a few minutes but seeing the spinning freighter and Belvaille and everything else, I lost my lunch. Why did they even put windows in spaceships? It was such a lousy design.
“Gah!” Garm said. “Clean that up.”
It didn’t take us long to dock at the freighter. It seemed pretty huge, but I wasn’t out in space often and everything seemed pretty huge.
Garm got all her equipment ready.
I finished vacuuming up my sick.
“Are you ready?” she asked me.
“To walk after them? I think so.”
When we disembarked our shuttle, we were back under artificial gravity as we entered the freighter’s decontamination chamber.
“This is a big ship. How are we going to find them?” I asked.
The door opened and the pale sisters stood in front of us waiting, with weapons out.
If the sisters had been expecting wussy corporate soldiers, the Navy, or us, I couldn’t tell. They immediately attacked and all I saw was flashes of hair and skin.
I sighed and stuck my arms out straight in front of me.
“Rar!” I yelled halfheartedly.
Our fight took place in a hallway to the bridge of the ship. It was only about ten feet wide, but plenty long. It was almost impossible to tell what was going on. I merely walked in circles clenching and unclenching my fingers in the ridiculous attempt to catch hold of something.
I couldn’t even anticipate where they were going.
Everyone was a lot more vocal than they were the first time they fought in my apartment. Lots of grunts and screams and snarls. It seemed clear to all involved that the loser was going to die.
After some time, there were discarded and broken weapons all over the ground. I assumed Garm brought most of them.
I walked forward and a pale sister smacked into the wall right in front of me. I tried to grab her, her eyes went wide, and she cartwheeled away.
Hey, maybe I was helping a bit.
Everyone was slowing down. They were cut and bruised and pummeled. The possibility of me catching one was real. Well, as opposed to impossible.
“Hank, stay in the middle,” Garm said.
Alright.
I got in the middle of the fight as best I could and when it moved, I followed.
It gave me a chance to rest up. Not that I was flipping off walls or anything, but even moving my head to try and keep up with these damn women was tiring.
“Hank!” Garm yelled.
“Yeah?”
I heard Garm grunt and a pale sister flew at me and hit me square in the stomach and fell to her knees. I think she must have been thrown or kicked as she didn’t land gracefully at all.
It was all I could do to reach down and grab her by the shoulders before she could get away.
I hauled her to her feet and then past, lifting her into the air. Her hair was probably the heaviest thing on her.
“Kill her!” Garm yelled.
Kill her? I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. A foot or fist or something hit me in the face, but it did nothing. It’s not that I’m a very moral person. And these are hardly defenseless women. And they weren’t my employers anymore since that job was done.
“Hank!” Garm yelled.
Was it a pretty bias? Was I having difficulty because they were so attractive? If they were ugly pale sisters would I just bear hug her to death? Was I that shallow?
I turned the pale sister around so she faced me. She was awful pretty.
She hissed and stuck her metal-coated thumbnails into my eyeballs.
“Ack!”
It wasn’t going to kill me, but it wasn’t pleasant. More to the point, it reminded me who I was dealing with.
I had her by the shoulders and squeezed. I felt both her collarbones snap under my fingers. I squeezed more until she went limp with pain. I dropped her to the ground.
I heard a blood-curdling scream and the remaining pale sister launched an attack at me.
“Hank, look out!” Garm yelled, worried.
Fists, kicks, elbows, palms hit me in a blur. All I could think was: this was bad. I’ve got one of the best assassins in the galaxy beating on me and if I closed my eyes I wouldn’t have noticed. I couldn’t feel a thing. It couldn’t be healthy that my skin was so thick. She had lost her weapons so she was no threat to me at all.
I just stood there taking it. I felt warmness in my nose and realized she must have jammed her finger up there.
I hummed to myself as she continued to work me over. She was so mad about what I did to her sister, she let Garm blindside her. I didn’t see exactly what Garm did because it was too swift, but I heard a crack and the pale sister screamed in agony and crumpled to the ground clutching her leg.
There was a gang legend that taking certain drugs could make you unstoppable. And that even a bullet to the heart wouldn’t down you. But we’re just machines. You break the machine and it doesn’t matter how angry you are, how crazy you are, or what drugs you got in your system. If your leg was broken, it’s broken.
Garm delivered a dozen more blows to the prostrate woman.
“Whoa,” I said.
Garm was bleeding and exhausted. She went over to the pale sister I had injured, picking up a shattered blade on the way.
The pale sister looked defiant as the blade was pressed against her throat.
CHAPTER 73
Tanks!
There were an awful lot of tanks inside the freighter’s hold. Hundreds of them. They were stacked on top of each other, bumper to bumper—assuming tanks had bumpers.
There was an immense parking system that kept them all apart, made possible by the fact that the artificial gravity was lessened in the hold. Even I could jump around like a caffeinated puppy.
“Where is the disintegrator?” Garm asked the pale sister.
I was carrying the woman so she didn’t try and run. Her shoulders might be hu
rt, but her legs weren’t.
The woman flashed some info to Garm in their Quadrad dialogue.
“They were going to drive a tank through the Portal, so one of the closer ones, I would guess.”
“How did you know they were going to do that?” Garm asked suspiciously.
I shrugged. I wasn’t able to give away Tamshius’s secret after all the gonging and candles.
We found the Portal in the hold. It was relatively small compared to the one on Belvaille. They were only bringing tanks through here, not Therezians. The sister indicated which tank to check.
I couldn’t fit inside so I let Garm do it while I played in low gravity, jumping around while holding on to a scowling Quadrad.
“Weeee.”
After some time, Garm came out with a metal box.
“Is this it?” she asked me. “It’s warm.”
The box was not the a-drive, but it might be inside. I traded with Garm. She guarded the sister and I moved away with the box, which I opened.
“That’s it,” I said. I couldn’t feel it was warm. I could be wearing a-drive curlers in my hair and not know it. But I recognized the device.
“Who brought through all these tanks, you think? The Gandrine?” Garm asked.
“Not sure. I’m more interested in where they’re going.”
“Where are they going?” Garm asked the sister, who didn’t answer.
I closed up the box and we headed out. We went to the deck of the ship and brought the two pale sisters. Garm tied them down.
After about forty-five minutes of Garm negotiating with the Quadrad, she turned to me.
“Okay, untie them.”
“What? Why?”
“I have a new agreement.”
I looked at the women, who were battered and appeared exceedingly angry.
“You sure?”
“Yes. Now let’s go. We have to return to Belvaille.”
It was a hell of an awkward trip back, sandwiched between two pale sisters.
CHAPTER 74
“I figured it out,” Delovoa said.
“About time.”
Since we had recovered the device, the Navy had conducted another raid on the corporation and a raid on the Portal.
There wasn’t much Navy left.
However, there were over a hundred Therezians walking around all of western Belvaille. I had to move apartments again, because I was afraid a giant was going to sit on my building while I was sleeping.
Seriously. I had passed one apartment complex and couldn’t figure out why the roof had two depressions in it until I realized those were left from butt cheeks.
“So tell me how I can use it.” I said.
Delovoa, still in his protective gear, beamed instructions to my tele.
“This is twenty-five pages long! I can’t just point and shoot it?”
“Does it look like a gun? It’s not even lab-safe. This was the very first prototype to confirm the theory.”
I skimmed through the instructions.
“Don’t skim them, either,” Delovoa said. “If you want to use it, and don’t want to lose your arm, you have to do everything there in the order listed.”
I had been hoping I could go in, take a shot at Naked Guy, leave, and do the same to the Gandrine. But this was like a whole process. I suspected he would notice me trying to disintegrate him over four hours.
“So you’re sure this will work?” I asked.
“No, I’m not sure. I didn’t test it and I didn’t invent it.”
“Why didn’t you test it?”
“Because it’s an a-drive core, twisted so that it actually destroys matter. I want to be in a different solar system when that goes off.”
“Can you get me all this stuff?” I asked, indicating the parts list for the experiment.
“Yeah. But what are you going to use it on?”
“I have an idea.”
I was carrying my autocannon, newly-refurbished, the General’s plasma pistol, and a backpack full of equipment which included the disintegrator.
I was extremely well-armed.
I was also wearing a diaper on my head.
There was no telling if the diaper would get me past the corporate security forces. I had my autocannon ready in case it didn’t.
Approaching the first checkpoint, I spotted an APC along with a pillbox full of soldiers.
It was like I was invisible to them.
I made it to the warehouse where I had last seen Naked Guy. He was not there. It had been a simplistic hope that he would be. I began wandering around the corporation territory. But it was highly improbable I would find him randomly.
After a full day, I gave up and went to visit Garm in the hospital, who was still recovering from sparring with the pale sisters. It was nice for a change to be on this end of things.
“Did you find your naked man?” she asked.
She looked a lot worse now than when we were at the freighter. The bruises had started to bruise. I mean, she looked really bad. She had like three fractures, numerous sprains, and some internal injuries. Those sisters had worked her over good. I felt sorry for her.
“No, I have no idea where he is.”
“He’s probably hiding.”
“I don’t think he’s hiding. I don’t think he cares in the slightest.”
“You have to find him. Delovoa said we’ve had ten more Therezians come through in the last day alone.”
“I’ll do it, you get better. Is there anything you want?”
I tried to pat her shoulder.
“Ow,” she complained. “No. Where is the a-drive by the way?”
“My backpack,” I said, motioning to it.
“You brought a device leaking radiation and antiprotons into a hospital?”
I had wrapped it in tin foil, a sock, and put it in a plastic box that had once contained a nice bottle of wine, but I guess I should have dropped it off at my apartment first. The container the sisters had it in had fallen apart, apparently destroyed by the a-drive.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said quickly. “If I’m not dead.”
I headed to the east part of the city.
I moved past tanks and soldiers into the section that housed the giant telescopes the Navy had once used. My hope was that if he was really doing something galactic, he would need to use the telescopes to put his plan together. He had forced all the Intelligence folks out for a reason, and it wasn’t because they were military, they were just technicians who operated the machinery.
One by one I searched the buildings.
There were scores of structures associated with the telescopes. Since everyone was gone, the buildings were dark.
But I came to one that had lights on. I wasn’t sure if it was simply because they had been forced to leave so quickly or maybe looters had been there.
As I walked through the halls, I could hear the light tapping of fingers on controls.
“Hi,” I said to the Naked Guy.
He didn’t answer, and seemed engrossed in his work.
“Whatcha’ doing?” I asked conversationally, still carrying my autocannon and other assorted weaponry.
“I believe we have already concluded that there is nothing more to be said between us.”
Half a dozen soldiers made their presence known. I noticed they were armed with…large weapons. I didn’t know the types because they were military in nature.
“I can kill you,” I said.
Naked Guy looked up, casually.
I put down my autocannon and took off my backpack.
“I’ve got a disintegrator from the Navy. Stolen from the Navy. It’s based on a-drive technology. It can kill you.”
“Do you think that frightens me?” he asked.
“No. I’m asking if you want me to try.”
There was a long pause and I was waiting for rockets and shells to hit me. Finally Naked Guy stood up.
“You may try,” he said.
I opened th
e backpack and poured out the considerable contents.
“Right. You need to put this metallic cream all over your body.”
I handed him two large tubes of paste.
I began setting up the tripod and looking at the instructions.
“Actually, there’s too much electrical interference in this room. Is there like a conference room or something? I need fifteen feet.”
I followed Naked Guy wordlessly down the hall, clutching my supplies.
The soldiers trailed us.
In the conference room I took the chairs out and put the tables against the wall as Naked Guy put conducting cream on himself.
“Bottoms of your feet and scalp too,” I said. “I’m not sure about your beard and hair, but better to be safe.”
I went back to setting things up. It was horrendously complicated.
I had to wake up Delovoa and get assistance from him via tele.
“It should go in his mouth,” he said.
I had a metal ball with lots of wires attached.
Naked Guy took it and put it in his mouth without a word. He held two other cables in his hands and I connected four more to his body with clamps.
I had to do all kinds of calculations based on the angle of the device, the humidity, temperature, distance to target.
“It’s not working,” I said nervously to Delovoa, as Naked Guy stood there with his black eyes, waiting to be disintegrated.
“Is there a lapse code?”
“Where do I find that?”
“On the console.”
I squinted at the tiny screen.
“438296724.”
“Give me a minute to calculate what that means.”
“Do you have instructions you didn’t give me?” I asked.
“You wanted it simple.”
I covered up my tele a moment and spoke pleasantly to Naked Guy.
“You’re being really patient. Hopefully we’ll have this done in a bit. New technology. You know how it is. Heh.”
I whispered to Delovoa.
“This is a tense situation. Hurry up.”
“Why don’t you try repowering the device?”
“How do I even know if it’s powered on?”
“Is it warm or hot?”
“I can’t tell. You know how my skin is.”
Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap Page 27
