Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck

by Steven Campbell

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I talk to you a moment over here?”

  It was such an odd request, I handed Hong back his pike and walked with her. I had to lean down because she whispered.

  “If you want to get out of this while still saving face, there is one guy carrying a Boli .44 on the inside of his jacket.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “He’s four to the right of Hong and one back. Has a white scarf.”

  I looked, couldn’t see him in the dark, then turned back to Valia.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it. Not everyone is as blind as you.”

  I stood up and returned to Hong, taking my precious time.

  Hong was about to launch into another rant, but I walked past him without making eye contact. I approached the one Valia had fingered, the crowd having no choice but to part for me and my girth.

  The man seemed unsure what to do.

  I put my left hand on his shoulder, firmly anchoring him to the spot, and then opened his jacket.

  I turned around to Hong holding up the .44 pistol.

  “What’s this?” I demanded. “You just told me, told the Supreme Kommilaire, that there were no guns here.”

  “Probably don’t work,” Hong said weakly.

  “You sure?”

  I pointed it at Hong. It was far too small for my hand, I couldn’t begin to fit my finger on the trigger, let alone cock it. But it made a good impression.

  Twenty spears tips were pointed at me.

  I laughed.

  “You going to poke me with your sticks? Where you getting these guys, Hong?”

  Hong made some quick motions to his men and said something in Totki and they lowered their weapons.

  “Take him,” I said to my Stair Boys, indicating the guy I had just searched.

  Three of the Kommilaire moved forward to secure him. I noticed Valia had enough wisdom and restraint not to take part in the arrest.

  “I’ll be letting him out in…a week,” I said. “Unless you want me to search the rest of you.”

  They were silent.

  “You are all going home, now, right?” I asked the Totki.

  “Now? Yes. We go home. But only for now,” Hong said.

  http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/hong.gif

  CHAPTER 7

  The next day I travelled with my Kommilaire across the city.

  There were some roadblocks of refuse along the way we had to take down. Not sure what they were for, maybe gangs trying to demarcate their territory, maybe a really big trash monster taking a crap. Didn’t matter, it was in the way, and there was no one else to move it.

  We eventually came to an entire block devoted to one man. He was the most powerful person on Belvaille. He was perhaps the most powerful man alive—though admittedly I didn’t get around much, or at all, so I wasn’t exactly an authority on the galaxy’s power rankings.

  The whole block, both sides, were his buildings.

  I had my own block named after me: “Hank Block.” But I only owned one building. Most of the other buildings were apartments for the Kommilaire or wealthy individuals who wanted to feel safe. Or catch a glimpse of my sexy body.

  At the entrance to this block—which didn’t have a name, because it didn’t need one—there were full-on concrete emplacements with manned machine guns, chainguns, and even cannons.

  If Belvaille ever did fall into chaos, it would still have a tough time penetrating into here. More likely, even at the height of its insanity, it would still have the sense to leave this man alone.

  I had to present my credentials before the guard unlocked and opened the massive gate that barred entrance to the street. The Kommilaire had to wait outside.

  I walked to the building to meet his majesty. Guns from adjacent buildings tracked my movements.

  After a series of lengthy security measures, I was finally admitted inside.

  A young, incredibly athletic man, wearing billowing pink pants, stepped out to meet me. His hair was long and curly.

  “And who are you?” he asked with a sneer.

  At this, another figure appeared behind him, wearing a tattered blue robe and slippers. He was very old and frail. His head was peculiar in that it looked like an upside down, wrinkled pear, with no hair. He had three misaligned eyes that blinked and looked independently of one another.

  It was obvious he had no teeth and his lips had collapsed inward to fill the space. His hands and feet looked gigantic on his emaciated frame, which was visible because part of his robe was open.

  “Shoo! Shoo!” Delovoa said to the golden-haired twink, slapping at him rudely.

  The younger man hurried away, pouting.

  “Hank,” Delovoa smiled his gummy smile, “great to see you.”

  Delovoa was a mutant like me, though his mutation no longer functioned. I think at one point he could create external heat a few inches from his body. Handy if you needed to solder something, but otherwise useless. That was a level-one mutation. I was level four.

  The scale for mutations went up to ten, theoretically. I had met one level-ten mutant in my life, Jyonal. He could make anything he thought of happen as long as he could imagine it, and as long as he was high on drugs. Jyonal had even made himself a new body when he was trying to hide from the authorities. He was a dangerous guy to have around.

  Delovoa was the last of the great engineers and inventors—at least in this region of space.

  Without him the Portals would stop working and the countless improvements he had made to Belvaille’s infrastructure would fail.

  Belvaille was never designed to house as many people as it currently did. It was only through Delovoa’s continual jury-rigging that we weren’t all suffocating in a massive cloud of carbon dioxide, were capable of recycling our waste, and able to refuel and repair space ships.

  He was a god on Belvaille and it was a death sentence to even joke about harming him. He didn’t pay for all this security constantly monitoring his safety, the city did.

  And it did so gladly.

  His very name was synonymous with brilliance and eccentricity. People quoted and misquoted him often. The only ruling in a trial that could trump an official opinion from Delovoa was another official opinion from Delovoa. Like if he said something had to be done for the safety of the city, it was done. Period.

  We sat in one of his spacious living rooms. Despite him having vast wealth, he was relatively humble. There were gadgets and parts and wires all over the place. Toys and projects he was currently tinkering with.

  He and I had gone through a lot together.

  He had a special chair for me to sit in. It was tall and kind of slanted and I could just lean into it without it crumbling.

  Delovoa sat on a big cushion and his bony knees stuck out.

  “What brings you here, Hank?”

  Why was I here?

  “Do you ever wonder why we do it, Delovoa?”

  “Ah, a bitch-session,” he said, his three eyes popping.

  He grabbed a little bell from the table and rang it angrily, as if he hated it.

  “Boy! Boy!”

  A young man, different from the first, came hurrying in. He was muscular and bare from the waist up.

  “Sir, you called?”

  “Not you, the pretty one. Oh, never mind. Bring a bottle of Kozk and two glasses. And ice. And…” he turned to me, “I’m sure you want food, right?”

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “Food. Something tasty. Bring a lot. Hank eats everything. Go!”

  The young man darted away.

  “Do what, now?” he asked me.

  “Any of this. Remember the Naked Guy?”

  “Who?”

  “The Naked Guy. Come on, the guy.”

  “I know a lot of…oh the Naked Guy. The person who practically destroyed the entire galaxy. Yes, he’s tough to forget.”

  “Well, he was like billions of years old. And he just…despised everything. Sa
w how pointless it all was and how everyone just repeated all the same mistakes forever. I go riding out every day and I see the same thing. I’m not close to a billion years old, but I can see that people just don’t learn. Don’t want to learn.”

  “How is this news?” Delovoa asked.

  The young man ran back in with a bottle and glasses.

  “I said Kozk. This isn’t even alcohol. Kozk!”

  Delovoa threw the bottle at him, but the young man was too fast and Delovoa threw like an old lady with bad depth perception because of his three eyes.

  “Sorry. Yes. People are stupid. You can’t teach a triangle pi. I’ve had dozens of apprentices—” he started.

  “Is that what you call them?”

  He continued as if I had said nothing. His snarkiness was on a whole other level I couldn’t touch.

  “But none of them got anywhere. They’re either too old to learn new things or too young to understand. It’s not like I can teach feral kids advanced technology. The war wiped us out.”

  “It’s the same with me. I’m trying to teach the Kommilaire but it feels like they’re just going through the motions. Like they’re mimicking what I do without knowing why. I might be wrong half the time, but I at least know my objectives.”

  “Well, you’re certainly popular. I get my people to tear down those damn loudspeakers blaring your trials, but someone puts them right back up.”

  “That’s not just me. People like hearing the other programs too. I only do about a trial a week. But I just wonder, what’s going to happen in the future. What’s our legacy? What happens when you and I are gone?”

  Delovoa smiled.

  “I can tell you exactly. This station dies. The Portals in this system die and then eventually all of them across the galaxy. Then I suspect some thousands of years of Dark Ages where there are no empires. When the furthest any race can reach is its current solar system. Until science and technology and economies grow enough that they can make contact again.”

  “Wow. You’re a downer.”

  “It’s not going to happen overnight. It will likely take some hundreds of years after we’re gone. But it will happen. We’re already seeing it now. Belvaille isn’t exactly the height of civilization. And remember, we’re the center of the galaxy. We are the height of civilization.”

  “So do you think when all the races meet back up again, they’ll do it different? Somehow better?”

  He laughed.

  “Why would they? How would they know or care what we did?”

  “Then Naked Guy was right. We’re just going to repeat all our mistakes forever,” I said.

  “If he really was billions of years old, then he must have seen this dozens of times at different scales. Maybe this was the biggest collapse. Maybe not. Maybe there was some prior society that spanned galaxies and then it turned to hell.”

  “So why am I getting up every day and literally killing myself trying to keep this all together?” I asked.

  “What else are you going to do, retire? When are you going to admit that you enjoy your job? You just like complaining even more.”

  http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/delovoa.gif

  CHAPTER 8

  Ouch, my brain.

  I bet whoever invented alcohol totally regretted it the next day.

  The previous night had been spent drinking with Delovoa. Not sure how many bottles I had gone through, but my mouth was pasty and my eyes were dry and I felt tired.

  I was too old to drink like that anymore. I would feel bad for two days, probably. It so wasn’t worth it.

  Being an old mutant was a drag. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t appreciate food. There was so little for me to physically enjoy in life now.

  Sex? Not many women wanted to romp with a seven ton guy.

  I was very unattractive. I knew that.

  I prided myself on being self-aware. I knew my weaknesses. I knew my strengths. I just didn’t go trumpeting them because no one cared, and if you did, you came across like an ass.

  I twisted on my bed and grabbed hold of the reinforced railings. I got to my feet and felt three times worse.

  I stumbled into my bathroom and drank from the faucet a good long time and splashed water in my face. My nose was dry I was so dehydrated.

  I stood in front of my toilet trying to go. I probably had a two hundred pound prostate gland and going to the bathroom wasn’t always an easy task.

  To try and relax I thought of the Ginland Glocken team, which I still considered my home team even though they were on the other side of the galaxy. The sport of glocken hadn’t stopped, though away games were rare now.

  Ginland’s Reskin Sleepers hadn’t won a single game in their history. Their losing streak had outlasted the very empire they were created in. Talk about folk legends.

  I heard my radio going off in the other room.

  Took a few minutes longer, but I managed to empty my bladder.

  “Yeah?” I answered the radio.

  “Look outside,” MTB said on the other end.

  I walked over to my front door and opened it.

  There were thousands of people in the street!

  It wasn’t violent that I could see. Wasn’t a war or gang fight. So I closed the door and decided to change. I found I didn’t have as much powers of persuasion talking to people while in my underwear.

  After I got all my equipment secured and drank a lot of water, I headed out.

  “What are you doing on my lawn?” I said to anyone who could hear me.

  They were chanting, clapping, disorganized. They carried banners and signs. They seemed upset.

  They saw me come out of my door and a hundred voices accused me at once, making it impossible to tell what they were saying.

  “Whoa. Whoa. What’s going on?”

  A bold man in dingy clothes walked up to me with a pamphlet.

  I tried to focus, holding it a bit further away because of the small type.

  It said that each Kommilaire got paid 150,000 thumbs a year salary and that we had given ourselves a 25% raise. It also went over a list of perks and bonuses that were extreme in their largesse.

  I had been around forgeries for centuries. Real forgeries. This was a professional attempt to look unprofessional. It was fake.

  This wasn’t printed by some concerned citizens in a rented workshop. It was on durable material with excellent presentation. Some real printers who knew their craft made it.

  What’s more, it mentioned things like banking rates and lend-leasing and utilities and obscure concepts that simply weren’t known by the public and certainly not known enough to print and be pissed off about.

  The details were all fabrications, of course. But I didn’t have any of this in writing. I didn’t keep a stack of ledgers I could wave around and go, “See? This is all untrue.”

  I noticed I wasn’t directly mentioned anywhere. Though as Supreme Kommilaire, presumably I had something to do with it.

  I looked up and could see some of my Kommilaire looking out from their apartments. They didn’t want to step into this fray. Or maybe they were, according to the pamphlet, too overpaid and pampered to care.

  I moved into the mob, wondering how I could disperse them. I couldn’t just start shooting people. They cleared a space as I walked. They weren’t so upset that they were ready to throw themselves under my feet and get mashed.

  They didn’t even seem to be mad at me. They were yelling at the buildings. Buildings which they knew housed a lot of the Kommilaire.

  But their yelling was making my hangover worse.

  Suddenly the shouts turned to screams and the street cleared like an umbrella had been raised in a heavy downpour. Not that I’d ever used an umbrella. Or been in a heavy downpour.

  “Hank!” A masculine voice yelled.

  I turned and saw the source of the commotion.

  A man stood maybe a hundred yards from me. He was a big, grizzled guy. He wore tactical body armor covered in wild tribal mark
ings. He carried a four-stack missile launcher on his shoulder. I could tell it was old military because it was black and boxy and unsexy…and because it said “Colmarian Navy” on the side.

  Some of my Kommilaire had exited their apartments at this. I spoke into my radio.

  “Everyone stay back.”

  The crowd was tense. Their protest banners were limp in their hands.

  I waited.

  But nothing else was forthcoming.

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  “I’m Eshthus-Beuldarion from Polgia-Moshtha-Urmia-Rezdunta!” He said, stomping his feet at each accented syllable.

  I actually laughed. I guess there were some simple things in life I could still enjoy.

  “Was that supposed to be dramatic?” I called back to him.

  “Prepare to die and draw your weapon!”

  Odd way of phrasing it.

  Let’s see, he was about a hundred yards off. I looked at my assortment of guns. I hadn’t used this bolt action in a while. I wasn’t very good with it though. I had cut off the rear of the stock to make it smaller.

  I couldn’t remember if it was cocked and loaded. Come to think of it, that was a pretty bad thing to not know, being Supreme Kommilaire and all.

  I took the rifle off its hook, held the foregrip with my left hand and I tried to pull back the bolt with my right and I not only ripped it from the rifle, but I bent the chamber and split the stock. It basically fell apart in my hands. I looked down at it.

  At least it hadn’t been loaded. So I didn’t feel so bad about that.

  Whatshisface-from-wherever took that opportunity to set his weapon, got down on one knee to brace himself, and fired.

  I got hit in the chest with a missile!

  “Dammit!” I yelled.

  I’m not sure what kind of missile it was that hit me, but it wasn’t an anti-Hank missile. It hadn’t even budged me. Compared to a heart attack it was like a fly landing on my ear. My hangover was worse, however.

  When the smoke cleared I saw all the guns on my chest were destroyed. That had been like a decade’s worth of top-quality firearms! I had some pistols that escaped destruction, and I reached for one of those. I needed to get closer, though, so I began walking forward.

  “We need to help him,” I heard Valia say from the sidelines.