Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years

by Steven Campbell

  “Why would he listen to you?” I asked.

  “I’m still an employee of the Navy in the Department of Plumbing and Lighting. I do a lot of work for them.”

  This struck me as unlikely. Not only did the Navy not have “employees,” but I couldn’t see them having one as kooky as Delovoa in a department with such an absurd name. What did he possibly know about plumbing?

  Delovoa put a cap on it by immediately throwing up on the carpet in his living room. When he finished retching he stood up straight and looked at me as if nothing had happened.

  “So, do you want me to put in a good word for you?” he asked.

  “What…exactly are you going to say?” I asked, worried that the Navy might suddenly try and kill me after Delovoa mentioned what a great guy I was.

  “What do you want me to tell them?”

  “That I’d like to talk to him. The Adjunct Overwatch.”

  “Sure. I have to go see him anyway.”

  “What are you seeing him about?” I asked.

  “I’m giving him a demonstration on a product he requisitioned.”

  “Some plumbing or lighting?”

  “No, it’s a nerve toxin aerosol.”

  I dragged Delovoa to Sonidara’s office, which was in the back of a warehouse.

  The office was stacked with paintings and sculptures and holograms and glyphs. It was all so much junk waiting to be shipped. You couldn’t take a step without tripping over a ten thousand year old figurine—and it didn’t matter if you did, because there were five exact copies right next to it.

  “Tell her what you told me,” I demanded of Delovoa.

  “Stop tugging,” he said, trying to get his sleeve free from my grip and failing. “The Navy came to me with a requisition.”

  Sonidara shrugged. You could tell she was put off by Delovoa.

  “What’s the requisition for?” I prompted.

  “Nerve toxin.”

  “What’s that?” Sonidara asked, more interested.

  “It’s a—” Delovoa started.

  “If you breathe it, it kills you. If you don’t have a mask or antidote,” I said. I had heard Delovoa already try and explain it and didn’t want him to try again.

  Sonidara seemed to think about this.

  “And what’s your concern, Hank?”

  “The Navy doesn’t need nerve toxins. They got guns. They got ships. They got soldiers. Every time the Knuckle Squads shake someone down, they ask name and job. They’re collecting information on everyone.”

  “How does your toxin fit in?” she asked Delovoa.

  “Well, I only have a small amount now. But theoretically it could be distributed via the latticework.”

  “And what would that do?” Sonidara queried, annoyed she had to keep asking him.

  “Well, there’d be massive toxicological damage to the population’s nervous systems,” Delovoa said flatly.

  “What do you mean by that?” Sonidara asked.

  “Everyone. The entire city would die!” I said.

  Sonidara’s eyes went wide.

  “Why would you even build something like that?”

  “I’m not done yet,” Delovoa said, irritated.

  “But why would you make something that would kill everyone in the city?” Sonidara snapped.

  “Technically it wouldn’t kill everyone. I’ve taken the antidote,” Delovoa said, and he rolled up his left sleeve to show his arm, as if we could see an injection mark or something. “And there’s probably a number of Colmarians who are so mutated they wouldn’t be affected. But other than that, it would kill most everybody.”

  Sonidara stared at me, her mouth open. This was clearly not the type of interaction that normally took place on Belvaille—or anywhere, really.

  I wasn’t especially keen on breaking bread with a man who was at least contemplating exterminating all life on my city.

  Two years ago I had negotiated a peace treaty between Bora Nodal and Pleistane. Their blood feud had gone on for years after Pleistane had murdered Bora Nodal’s son. Everyone said it would never get settled until one or both were dead. But I worked and got them to sign an armistice. It was the pinnacle of my career so far.

  But Adjunct Overwatch Monhsendary was not a gang boss pissed off about another gang boss. He was an official. If he murdered everyone, presumably he had a reason and he had authorization.

  There was no emotion there. There was no profit. There was no status. I couldn’t negotiate with that.

  At least, not like any negotiation I had done in the past.

  “What do you think the most important thing about this city is?” Adjunct Overwatch Monhsendary asked me.

  I was sitting in his office on the tenth floor of City Hall.

  I hated conversations like this. They had the illusion of being interactive, but he had no interest in what I had to say. Coming here was a mistake.

  “Trees?” I said, deadpan.

  “No,” he replied instantly. Then he looked at my face to see if I was mocking him or being sarcastic. I maintained a stony disinterest.

  Monhsendary was military to the millionth degree. He wore medals and pins and ribbons. If fabric wrinkles came within twenty feet of him, they probably died in shock at how well maintained his uniform was. His hair was white and perfectly level. You could use the top of his head to adjust laser beams. He wasn’t a handsome man but he wasn’t ugly. He took as many vitamins and had the proper diet and did the exact amount of exercise he was supposed to do according to whatever Navy manual he had shoved up his ass.

  “No,” Monhsendary continued, “the most important thing on this city is the port.”

  “The port? Why? We’re at the edge of the galaxy,” I said.

  “Are we?” he asked.

  “Uh…yeah. I mean, I’m not a cartographer, but I’ve seen a map. We’re way out here. The only tele stations we get are beamed months late. It’s hard to gamble on sports because half the teams are disbanded by the time we place bets.”

  “The port was built for much larger operations than they are currently being used for,” he said, ignoring me.

  “Well, that’s great. We’d love for Belvaille to go back to being an exploration city. We have all kinds of entertainment and could support a huge population.”

  “This should be a Navy installation.”

  “Alright,” I said, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter what kind of ships dock, I guess. Everyone has to eat and drink and relax, right?”

  I don’t think Monhsendary was capable of physically bending. He probably slept standing up, leaning against a wall. But he almost imperceptibly inclined toward me.

  “You all need to leave the city.”

  Okay. So I knew what he wanted. This was, as they say, the starting bid for negotiations. But what would my counteroffer be? Half of us leave?

  “Um. It’s a big city. And it’s really boring here without us. I mean, it’s boring here with us, so I can’t imagine a city with just Navy people. I think we can all share.”

  “I am aware of what goes on in this city,” he said, letting the words hang there.

  “You are?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Thievery and fornication!”

  He dropped it like an anvil, like they were the worst words in the Colmarian language, which had something like ten trillion zillion words. Did he really not know Belvaille? He had been here for months now.

  “Um. Yes. I’ve heard that,” I said.

  “Do you think the Navy requires such things?”

  Man, if he was pissed about sex and thieves, I hated to think what he’d do when he learned the city had slave prostitutes who were illegally surgically-altered and under perpetual narcotic influence.

  “No, probably not. But we also have restaurants and hotels and clubs and all sorts of things.”

  If we could get the Navy back in here, I don’t think all that many people would care about turning their criminal operations back to legitimate ones. Money was money—as
long as they left us alone.

  “Everyone needs to leave this station except essential personnel, who are required to stay. Go tell your thieving compatriots.”

  I could tell by the way he said it that there was no room for compromise and there was precious little room for me to get out of here before he had a king-sized Knuckle Squad work me over.

  I nodded and withdrew.

  “He wants us all to leave?” Tamshius asked, confused.

  “Yeah. He seemed concerned that people have sex on Belvaille. And rob each other. He was rather prudish for a sadist, actually,” I said.

  We were back at Sonidara’s office. Leeny was here as well and he had asked that Tamshius come. I didn’t want to invite a ton of bosses again. They could never agree on anything and half of them weren’t even on speaking terms. The drama, not to mention the logistics, just became difficult with so many prima donnas.

  “So you didn’t manage to change his views at all?” Leeny asked.

  “I think this is his personality, unfortunately. I can’t coerce him to change his opinion on…fornication.”

  “On what?” Sonidara asked.

  “Never mind.”

  “Do you think he’d use nerve toxin on us?” Tamshius asked.

  I reflected a moment.

  “It doesn’t strike me that he would. I don’t know the guy well, obviously. And that’s something you want to be pretty sure about. When the gas comes raining down, you don’t want to be like ‘woops, I misjudged him.’”

  “We could kill Delovoa. That would stop him from getting any toxin,” Tamshius said.

  “Delovoa is helpful—sometimes,” I said. “Besides, it’s not this specific thing that’s the issue. It’s the fact he might do it at all. If it’s not nerve toxin, it could just as well be something else, Delovoa or not.”

  “I agree,” Leeny said.

  “I think we need to remove Monhsendary,” Sonidara stated, thumbing a fertility statue on her desk.

  “How?” I asked.

  “How do you kill anyone? A gun will work,” Tamshius said.

  “They’ll gas us for sure if we blow the brains out of an Adjunct Overwatch,” Leeny added.

  “We could hire an assassin,” Sonidara offered.

  The rest of us groaned.

  Belvaille was a violent place. But it was…family violence. Violence with character. As low as we were, we still considered ourselves miles above assassins.

  “You get those people here and they’ll never leave,” Leeny said.

  “Yeah, you guys think of your next gang war once assassins are in play. Think of how things would change—and not for the better,” I said.

  Assassins tend to make negotiators superfluous, so that was another reason I didn’t want them here.

  “So then what do we do?” Sonidara asked.

  “It seems to me they sent Monhsendary to Belvaille for a reason. Either the Colmarian Navy thinks this city is useful or he personally does. In either case, that is a dangerous belief in terms of Belvaille’s continued survival. We need to make them think this station is as lousy as they used to think it was,” I said.

  “We’re all ears,” Tamshius said.

  “I think the Adjunct Overwatch should have an accident. A big, spectacular, Belvaille-really-sucks accident.”

  Leeny, Tamshius, and I exited the warehouse with the goal of working out the details later, after speaking to some of the other bosses and getting the required resources.

  “Get on the ground!” A guard screamed.

  There were three of them across the street with guns drawn. They had clearly been waiting for us because two were crouched and aiming. They must have followed someone to the meeting.

  “If they arrest me and check my record, I’m in a lot of trouble,” Leeny whispered.

  “I as well,” Tamshius agreed.

  I sighed.

  “Fine. But you two will owe me after this. Run when they start shooting,” I said.

  “What?” Leeny asked, alarmed.

  I took a few steps toward the soldiers.

  “Do you all still love your mothers? Even after they did that to you?” I said, indicating their bodies.

  “Stop there!” A guard yelled.

  “I’m not sure what you used to make yourself so stupid, but congratulations on its success,” I said.

  The soldiers were clearly confused. Didn’t they have guns?

  “Get on the ground now!”

  I walked forward.

  “You all are so stupid when you were children I bet you were scared of the light.”

  The soldiers actually exchanged glances at that.

  “We will fire if you continue,” a guard warned, though he didn’t shout it.

  “Does your ass ever get jealous of how much crap comes out your mouth?” I asked.

  They fired.

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  I convulsed as if I had been semi-mortally wounded. I heard Tamshius and Leeny running away behind me. I lurched forward a few more steps.

  “What’s the difference between a Therezian penis and a joke? Your mother can’t take a joke.”

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  “Argh!” I exclaimed with lousy thespian skills.

  Two more steps.

  “You look like lobotomy patients—”

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  “Whose faces caught on fire—”

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  “And someone tried to put them out with a rusty chainsaw.”

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  I was directly in front of the soldiers now and they seemed quite unsure what to do. I checked to see that Leeny and Tamshius were nowhere in sight.

  I stood up straight, no longer pretending to be grievously injured.

  “Hey, no hard feelings guys.”

  “Drown him?” Delovoa asked.

  “In what? His kitchen sink?” I answered.

  “Poison?”

  “That’s hardly indication that the city is in trouble.”

  “An explosion?”

  “If we blow up a building, they’ll shut down all of Belvaille and make us leave. How about Suffocation?” I asked.

  “That might work, but I can’t see how we could just suffocate Monhsendary. If we sabotage the city’s air system it could kill quite a few people,” Delovoa said.

  “Assassin?”

  “I thought you said you were against those. And what’s that have to do with proving the city is dangerous?”

  “Electrocution?” I asked.

  “Hmm. That’s pretty good. Lots of ways to get fried in a metal city.”

  “Do you think it would stop the Navy from building here?” I asked.

  “No. Electrical problems aren’t uncommon. We’re a space station. They’ll just chalk it up to a malfunction. If we killed a dozen soldiers then they’d probably assume it was murder.”

  After the shooting at Sonidara’s, Knuckle Squads quadrupled their efforts. They were going after gang bosses now and even grabbing people in their homes while they were sleeping.

  The real problem was stopping retaliation. Monhsendary was under the impression that the worst Belvaille had to offer was kleptomaniac sex addicts. In reality, we had some tens of thousands of armed, violent criminals who would have no problem murdering every last Navy soldier in the city.

  It was only the repercussions we feared.

  “So then how can we do it?” I asked Delovoa. “How can we get rid of Monhsendary and simultaneously make Belvaille look bad, but not so bad they hammer us out of existence?”

  Delovoa had given the demonstration on the nerve toxin and Monhsendary had approved mass-production. So far, Delovoa hadn’t manufactured any more. At some point, however, the Adjunct Overwatch was going to demand it.

  “What did he say exactly?” Delovoa asked.

  “That they were going to use the port and turn the station into a Navy city and we all had to leave.”

  “Well then it’s obvious,” Delov
oa said.

  I had to keep an eye on the Adjunct Overwatch but I couldn’t have people standing around City Hall. The Knuckle Squads would get them.

  I thought about using children, who seemed to be immune from getting beat up for the most part, but kids weren’t extremely dependable and I’d feel like a jerk.

  Bullabar was a mutant who fit the role perfectly. He looked like he was about four years old though he was something like eighty. He had originally fled to Belvaille for running all kinds of scams based on his appearance. Who didn’t trust an infant?

  So every day Bullabar “played” on the sidewalk across City Hall and reported on their activities.

  After some months of nothing, the gang bosses were getting anxious because they were having trouble restraining their men, who really wanted to put the screws on the Navy at this point. Not to mention the bosses didn’t like getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and kicked in the face.

  When the Adjunct Overwatch paid a personal visit to Delovoa, demanding to know the progress on the nerve toxin, I knew we had to push ahead.

  I had the appropriate facilities people file reports with City Hall. The Navy loved reports. And while Belvaille engineers weren’t very efficient or proficient, they knew how to cover their asses. So it wasn’t uncommon for them to submit reports indicating there were problems in the city’s infrastructure. That way if anything broke spectacularly, they could point to the reports and do their best to avoid getting fired for incompetence or thrown in jail for manslaughter.

  “I can’t fake a military tele,” Delovoa said flatly.

  “What? I thought you said you had top secret clearance and you worked in the Department of Pots and Pans or whatever!” I demanded.

  “I do. That doesn’t mean I can hack a tele. No one can do that. I could send him a tele message just like anyone else.”

  “That’s not the point. We only have a short time left. Were you asleep during this whole plan that we’ve been going over for months?”

  “Not asleep, just resting my eyes.”

  I wanted to hit him, but I needed him. That was a cushy job being smart. You could be as big a prick as you wanted and no one could do anything to you.