Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck

by Steven Campbell

  “No. Not even any small space guns. But really, unless they are in a battlecruiser or some such, they aren’t going to hurt this city. The shield can withstand the impact from a comet.”

  “Really? A comet? Like a two mile wide chunk of ice flying through space?”

  That was impressive.

  “No,” he sniffed, sipping at his wine.

  “Then why did you say it could?”

  “Because this conversation is boring. And, you know, we’re a city. They can maybe wreck the port and some of the outside structure, but the city is already pretty trashed, so who cares?”

  He seemed unconcerned.

  “Could they destroy the Portals? The Olmarr Republic wants to get rid of them all.”

  “That just proves my theory that the more people you gather together, the dumber everyone gets. That was what happened to the Colmarian Confederation. They had like ninety percent of the galaxy under one government and the intelligence of a mollusk.”

  “Great speech, but back to my question. Could they destroy the Portals?”

  “No, Portals are extremely hardy. They survive in deep space for thousands of years, subjected to micro-particles and meteors and extreme temperatures and radiation, not to mention giant ships occasionally bumping into them.”

  “I seem to recall Naked Guy shutting down some of Ginland’s Portals,” I said.

  “That was a billion year old guy who started a galactic civil war attacking the cheapest Portals in the most remote state in the empire. And he still only temporarily disabled them. Anyone else would have to go inside the superstructure to truly damage any of these Portals. And then my robots would kill them.”

  “Your what?” I asked, shocked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You have robots? After all we went through fighting them. You created robots?”

  I couldn’t believe Delovoa.

  “How do you think I fix the Portals?”

  I didn’t answer, knowing he would make me feel stupid.

  “Come on, stupid, take a guess. Have you ever seen me put on a space helmet? Go out and physically fix one of the Portals?” He flapped his arms as if he were gliding through the cosmos. “My robots repair them. But they’ll also kill anyone who steps inside since no one is supposed to be there. I was worried about people stealing parts. You can’t exactly buy Portal equipment anymore.”

  “So you built killer robots?”

  “They’re only killer if you invade a Portal. And it sounds like it was a good thing I created them. Anyone going inside would run into my ZR4, ZR5, and ZR7 series models.”

  “Are those related to ZR3, the robot that practically destroyed this station?”

  “Of course not,” Delovoa said, his three eyes all looking in different directions.

  I knew I shouldn’t ask but:

  “What about ZR6?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I changed the subject, because he was probably right.

  “Parts are falling off the latticework,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he confirmed.

  “And one of the trains exploded.”

  He nodded, lips pursed.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Well, what? Do you need me to give you an Obvious Award? Do you think I have a spare train sitting in my kitchen next to my anti-battlecruiser laser? Even if I did have a train somewhere, we’d never get it back on the tracks. None of those machines exist. Maybe one does somewhere in the galaxy, but you’ll never find it, and you’ll certainly never ship it here.”

  “You’re just a bucket of positive energy. You should run for Governor.”

  “No way, you’ll have me assassinated.”

  “Ho ho ho. Did you make a new voting machine yet?”

  “You’re worried about the election? How many people are going to vote during an insurrection?”

  “So what have you been doing? Sitting in here eating and drinking as the city literally falls apart?” I asked, exasperated.

  “I have a way to find 19-10,” he said casually.

  “You already have one. That scanner thing. I gave it to MTB.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t work. I was just tired of listening to you.”

  I stood up, about to throttle this three-eyed goon.

  “Calm down,” he said.

  “So what is this device? A magic whistle?” I asked.

  “No, it’s so simple I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before. Except that it was too simple. We have the greatest detectors in the known galaxy: the telescopes.”

  I wasn’t ready for that.

  “Can they even be turned to face us?”

  “Sure. They can scan and transmit in 360 degrees. They just weren’t designed to look at something this nearby. I want to make sure I don’t irradiate everyone.”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Is this going to kill us all?”

  “Oh, you’ll be fine. You got dragged from a train and didn’t even get a scratch.”

  “Not just me. The city.”

  “It would be one way to quell the rioting…”

  “Don’t joke. You can’t mess this up. No Delovoa half-assed attempts.”

  “No need to be rude,” he pouted.

  “Hey,” I said, thinking. “Could the telescopes be used to shoot space ships?”

  “No. If they were close enough and the ships had thin enough hulls, I could maybe make the people onboard sterile. But that’s not much use unless you’re worried about generations of attackers.”

  Ah, well.

  “So think about doing the telescope thing. But be sure you have it perfect. And don’t do it without my consent,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m not leaving here to go to the telescopes without a thousand Kommilaire guarding me. Not with a riot going on.”

  “Well, don’t hold your farts waiting on a thousand Stair Boys. The most we’ve ever recruited is about four hundred.”

  “And you complain that I just sit around doing nothing?”

  CHAPTER 52

  I couldn’t stop the Totki from sticking spears in the Order or the Olmarr from chainsawing the Totki.

  But I could talk to the gangs. I understood gangs. They were a rational bunch of people. Smelly, but rational.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with it? You used to be just a hired thug in your day and you’ve become Supreme Kommilaire,” Lisedt said. “I’m now Queen Lisedt, Mistress of Belvaille.”

  At least gangs came up with good titles. Lisedt was the woman I had saved from her two partners not long ago. The winds had shifted substantially and she found herself with a gang that was on the winning side. They were winning enough that she felt a coronation was appropriate.

  “No one is going to accept that. No one has ever ‘ruled’ Belvaille.”

  “What about Garm?” she challenged.

  “Except her. Garm still rules Belvaille. But she’s not a gang. She owns the dump.”

  “Says who? I don’t see her.” Lisedt crossed her arms.

  We were in one of Lisedt’s clubs. She had about thirty guys with weapons protecting her. Some were bandaged and beaten from the ongoing fights.

  “I can’t see…protons, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” I said, frustrated.

  “What’s a protons?”

  “What would a queen even do?” I said, trying to tackle this from another angle.

  “Rule Belvaille,” she said haughtily.

  “What’s that mean, though? What do you do about crime and the feral kids and electricity and shipping and the telescopes and trials?”

  “Fix them,” she said.

  I asked the Kommilaire for an Inventory.

  It’s when they go out and get the names and businesses of all the gangs operating and their relationships and locations. To the best of their abilities.

  Long ago I knew all the gang bosses and most of the criminals in the entire city. But now there were f
ar too many. There could be ten gangs operating in one block easily.

  While it was a pretty chaotic time to get an Inventory, I wanted to see if I could get in front of some of the gangs and maybe slow things down or speed them up. At least make it less volatile.

  I had to pay Rendrae a significant amount of money to fill in the details since he had so many contacts. He knew what was going on more than anyone. Everyone knew Rendrae and knew he was unbiased.

  Maybe his image had been slightly tarnished with his news reports on Judge Naeb and such, but he was still the least stinky turd in the outhouse.

  “Let me show you how I see things,” Dimi-Vim said.

  He was the furry man who had been one of Lisedt’s partners. Now he was wearing fancy clothes and had trimmed all his hair and looked quite respectable.

  Rendrae notified me that Dimi-Vim had something I might want to check out.

  We were on the ground floor of one of his clubs. The club was still going on because he didn’t want to lose revenue, but it meant we had to shout. And my hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be.

  “What?” I asked, for the tenth time.

  “Look!”

  Dimi-Vim unfurled a gigantic map on four tables that had been pushed together. It showed his section of the city, all color-coded with markers and pins and symbols.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s cool. Where did you get this?”

  “I made it,” he said proudly.

  This would be a great starting point for our Inventory. I don’t know why I never thought of using maps before. We just used paper and talked about it. Sometimes we had rough sketches, but Dimi-Vim had the whole topology of the city here.

  “Hey, make me a copy of this.”

  “No,” he said, trying to cover the enormous map with two hands. “This is my competitive advantage.”

  “I’m not in business against you,” I said.

  “You are, kind of. I mean you aren’t in business with us.”

  “It’s not like you can only be one or the other. This will help out my team.”

  “Why would I want to help you guys? You’re police.”

  “Please, what?” I asked.

  “Po-lice!” He yelled over the music.

  “It’s not like I’m arresting you. I’m here to try and help you.”

  “Then tell me what the other gangs are doing.”

  I shrugged.

  “Lisedt wants to be a queen,” I said.

  “She’s crazy, no one cares about her.”

  “I’m just trying to negotiate what you all want. Besides, I could just take that map.”

  “Hank, you came here under a white banner,” one of his men said.

  “What?” I didn’t hear him.

  “White banner. Banner. White. You can’t take it,” all his men yelled.

  “Right. I wouldn’t take it. But I’m saying I could.”

  “Yeah, but we know you won’t. So it’s not a threat,” Dimi-Vim said.

  “No, I’m not threatening you. I’m…” What was I saying? All this yelling was confusing me. I think I had a residual concussion from my train trip as well. “Let me just have a copy of the map. I won’t give it to anyone else.”

  “A hundred thousand thumbs,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? Is that like a thumb per proton?”

  “What’s a proton?”

  “It’s a…I don’t know. Something Delovoa told me once.”

  “Delovoa?” he asked, looking around anxiously.

  “You Kommilaire don’t have maps?” one of his men asked.

  “We have maps, just not gang maps. Like maps of sewers and the latticework and trains and power grid. But I want to make a map of the whole city for gangs.”

  “How about, I give you this, if you give me your whole map when you’re done?” Dimi-Vim said.

  “How is that a fair trade? You only have maybe three percent of the map filled and it’s just you.”

  “So?” he puffed.

  I was about to explain the basics of comparable trading when I thought about it: maybe it was a good idea if all the gangs had the map. If they knew where the boundaries were. If those boundaries were formalized. I wouldn’t have to show them all the details, just territories. We had never had that on Belvaille. It had just been via understanding—that often became misunderstood.

  They were blabbering at me some more, but I was suddenly thinking about this grand scheme. I could give gang licenses per block. I could sanction gang wars and buyouts. If I had a map I could do all this. It would be like the Boards, except bloodier.

  “Hey, give me that,” I said.

  “What? No. White banner. White banner,” he argued.

  “I got an idea. It will help you out, I swear. I’ll give you the full copy when I’m done, like you said.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “Why would I lie?” I asked.

  “No one knows why you do anything, Hank,” he sulked.

  It wasn’t as easy as I thought to make a consolidated map.

  No one wanted to tell me what they were doing until I told them what I was doing. And even then they didn’t want to tell me.

  Then there were people who simply didn’t fit into normal boundaries.

  Such as the guys who had been bribing Judge Naeb: Wiessstauch and his compatriots. They didn’t have any territory per se. They sold political influence.

  And there were all kinds of deals and half-deals and partnerships. Someone would own a dock operation but another guy would own half the dock workers and another guy would own the other half and another guy would own the equipment and some lady would own the shipping containers.

  If I color-coded just one block it looked like someone knifed a rainbow in the stomach and its guts spilled out on the page. It was so complicated you couldn’t make sense of it.

  And that was just one block!

  I wasn’t sure if I was being naïve or idealistic. I mean, it was a strange concept to apply to a bunch of killers and crooks.

  On one hand Belvaille was all chaos and freedom. But the most basic concept of all these criminals was a gang. That’s organization. If you went up the chain far enough things got organized. They had to, or nothing would get done.

  But our station was fragile. One guy, Zadeck, had been stepped on by a Therezian and it turned into a station-wide gang war. If I had formal treaties and heirs to territories, that wouldn’t happen. But how was I going to bring it about?

  It was time for some soup.

  CHAPTER 53

  There was a dusty, dirty, dilapidated soup restaurant far to the northeast. It was in a wealthy area of the city, but the little soup shop was far from attractive.

  Whoever owned it apparently hated selling soup, because it was only open a few hours a day and those hours changed regularly. I couldn’t tell you how many times I had walked there, only to find it closed. Finally, I stopped going.

  The soup wasn’t even that good. There was one cook, one waiter, and they seemed to dislike people almost as much as soup.

  But the restaurant was owned by a man named Tamshius qua-Froyeled.

  Tamshius had been the most powerful gang boss for perhaps a century. No other gang leader had held influence for as long as he did. He had been a lieutenant from the very founding of the city. He was established by the time I moved to the station and I was here shortly after Belvaille opened.

  Now, Tamshius was long since retired and aged beyond reckoning.

  He was about half the size he had been in his youth and hunched over as if his silk robe weighed a thousand pounds.

  I had sent my Stair Boys to camp out here for a week to find a time when the restaurant was open. It was now three in the morning.

  “We close soon,” the waiter said, as I entered.

  I looked to the Kommilaire who was waiting for me.

  “They just opened thirty minutes ago when I radioed you, Boss,” he said.

  “Close soo
n,” the waiter repeated defiantly.

  Tamshius was in the corner, sleeping. His robe matched the frayed wallpaper and he was so thin and insubstantial you had to know he was there to see him.

  I approached the old man.

  “Tamshius. Tamshius?” I said.

  He blinked his large eyes, sleepily. His eyes were probably his largest organs at this point. Everything else had shriveled to near-nothingness.

  Tamshius was one reason I was scared of retirement. He had been a significant player for so long. I always thought of him as a force to be reckoned with. Then he retired, half-heartedly served soup, and wasted away. I was probably the only person who knew Tamshius still existed.

  “Hank,” he said, cracking a feeble smile.

  “I need your advice,” I implored.

  “Would you like some soup?”

  “I—yeah, sure.”

  I don’t know how, but the waiter suddenly appeared and literally threw a bowl of soup at me from maybe five feet away. It landed on the table beside me, half of its contents sloshing onto the tabletop. The waiter left, his customer service completed.

  I took the bowl and it was barely enough to wet my tongue.

  “Have a seat,” Tamshius said, but I knew his rickety booths couldn’t support me.

  “I’m fine. Tamshius, I have a situation—” I started.

  “Or a solution,” he said, holding up a bony finger.

  “Right,” I began uneasily. “Or a solution.”

  “What may I help you with, my friend?”

  “The gangs,” I began. “There’s too many. I want to organize them on a map. To show who is doing what and where their territory is. Who has what deals. A line of succession. Make everything formal and keep people from fighting—so easily.”

  “You’re talking about the Athletic Club,” he said. The Belvaille Athletic Club was one of the precursors of the Athletic Gentleman’s Club. It had been where all the gang bosses congregated.

  “Well, I want something more official. Like you could look at a map and see. Kind of a chart.”

  “That’s what the Athletic Club was. Do you know why everyone joined that club?”

  “Because it was exclusive. And plush.”

  “Because if we didn’t, we would have gone out of business. That’s where the deals were made. Alliances brokered. Buying and selling done.”