Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years

by Steven Campbell

“Oh, no. That’s what you will need to evaluate. Some rivers will need multiple bridges. Some, none at all.”

  Delovoa really wished he had set more people on fire and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. He could easily spend the rest of his life constructing bridges on a planet he had never heard about.

  Delovoa had to sell all his gear and end all his experiments since he didn’t know how long he would be away.

  He was upset that he may never create the perfect glow-in-the-dark pet, which he hoped would secure his fortune. All he had done thus far was radiate the hell out of a lot of lab rats, most of which escaped and caused the shutdown of a major city because…it was filled with radioactive rats. But they did glow.

  It took him three months of space travel to reach Thremostilly.

  Delovoa felt the Lord of the Interior was not especially happy to see him, which didn’t bode well. It was arranged that Delovoa would take a tour of the continent to learn its needs and operation.

  After a month of this and studying copious documents on the infrastructure of Thremostilly, it became clear to Delovoa that they didn’t really need bridges.

  It’s not as if all these rivers suddenly sprang up when the planet joined the Confederation. They had tens of thousands of high quality bridges. A worldwide fleet of ships and barges and ferries. If there was ever a planet that was not inconvenienced by an overabundance of rivers it was Thremostilly.

  Delovoa wasn’t sure if some bureaucrat had visited and been like, “wow, they have a lot of rivers,” and that turned into an action item for his department. Or, more likely, the planet had simply wanted money and couldn’t just say they wanted money, so they said money for bridges, not expecting that the Confederation would actually send an army of engineers to build them.

  Delovoa prepared a report for the Senior Drainage Director and he made sure not to half-ass it like he usually did. He used all the lingo and semantics of the government as well as providing solid evidence to back up his assessment that it was a waste of time for him to be here.

  It took six months to get a response.

  He was given a budget of 113 billion credits to build bridges.

  It seemed that a member of the Colmarian Congress had made this part of the entire Confederation budget. Nothing ever got done in the Colmarian Congress. Hell, they couldn’t even agree on how many Congressmen there were and their committees.

  For this project to be inserted and approved meant that it would get done. None of his superiors in the Department of Plumbing and Lighting, not even the Master Plumber, could overrule the Congress.

  Delovoa was stuck. He could quit, he supposed.

  “You would be arrested for dereliction of duty and desertion,” the Director responded.

  “What? Why?”

  “You do know you’re in the Navy, right? You signed at least fifty contracts.”

  Delovoa hadn’t really paid much attention. Yes, I guess it made sense in retrospect. He wore a uniform. Everyone saluted and said “sir” or “ma’am” a lot. He kind of always thought he worked alongside the Navy. Or around them.

  He resolved to read things before he signed them in the future.

  “You still have fourteen years of service required. Let’s get some bridges on that planet!” The Director hung up.

  Bridges? Where the crap would Delovoa put them? There was already a bridge just about anywhere you could want one.

  Wait a minute. He had a budget. And almost no oversight. If he spent the money and sent progress reports of a sufficiently obscure nature, no one would know or care what he was doing.

  The way he chose to see it, he basically had an infinite budget to do his own experiments!

  He hired the best minds in the galaxy—or at least in the Colmarian Confederation, which was a pretty important distinction. His team was quite happy to be given almost complete autonomy to build whatever amazing things their imaginations could conjure. It was up to Delovoa to smush it all together and make a cohesive project.

  Delovoa decided they would all work on a universal construction vehicle. After all, something had to build the bridges.

  The first iteration was called ZR1. The ZR stood for Zolin Roxtelian, the Lord of the Interior for the planet, and the guy Delovoa had to bribe to send back good progress reports so the Navy didn’t suddenly show up and arrest them all for misappropriation of funds.

  He had some of the best metallurgical engineers designing entirely new alloys. He had scientists creating power plants that were capable of providing electricity for entire countries. Delovoa himself worked on the vehicle’s mechanical drive.

  When completed, ZR1 looked like a 1,800-foot monster. It had shovels and blades and drills and torches and missiles. The missiles were added in a bit of overzealousness.

  When they turned it on, the heat of the engine melted the entire vehicle as well as the building it was constructed in, and the surrounding terrain in a quarter mile radius.

  Delovoa then scheduled a slight detour in the project plan so they could try and extinguish the molten ball, which had dammed two rivers and was releasing a torrent of radioactive steam.

  They finally gave up and simply paid for all the families downwind to relocate.

  But Delovoa learned from that experience that he needed his teams to be more aligned.

  ZR2 was designed to be aerial, thus bypassing the need for complicated ground maneuvering abilities.

  It was so large and powerful that it would be able to lift an entire two-mile suspension bridge and put it into place all within an hour. The key was not having traditional rocket thrusters.

  Delovoa had hired some of the best Portal scientists and they came up with a system that could reduce the effective mass of ZR2, thus making it possible to float with minimal upward propulsion.

  The enormous structure was itself the size of several bridges and required a dozen pilots and operators all across it to maintain its stability.

  When it was activated for the first time, it flew skyward so fast that it disintegrated in the atmosphere in a quarter second. The hypervelocity shockwaves and debris and sonic booms devastated a wide area—as well as killed all those on board.

  Despite pumping tens of billions of credits into the economy, Delovoa and his team were wearing their welcome very thin indeed on Thremostilly.

  Delovoa was working in his lab some months later when it was attacked by an angry mob and he was dragged out into the street. He survived an impromptu firing squad only through the timely intervention of the local military—the police having sided with the mob.

  It was at that point Delovoa decided he needed a new approach to his designs. Before, the motto had been, “whatever’s cool.” Now it became, “whatever won’t get me killed.”

  He decided they needed to go smaller.

  ZR3 would be a robot.

  Some of the best elements from the previous work was borrowed and improved upon. The metallic skin of ZR3 was nearly indestructible. The power plant, despite its small size, could operate for scores of years without charge or change. Most interestingly, the whole robot could shift its mass upwards or downwards, allowing it to push or pull tens of tons if needed or walk over nearly any surface no matter how unstable. This gravitonic field also made it immune to being scanned.

  Delovoa had one of the foremost forensic linguists join the team to add a bit of esoteric depth to the project. The man created the definitive history of the ancient Colmarian dialect. He also programmed ZR3 to respond to and understand that language—which at the time seemed like a perfectly eccentric idea.

  ZR3 took hundreds of engineers and scientists over three years to build. They were all several miles away when they powered it on for the first time remotely.

  It was eight feet tall, four feet wide, and three feet deep. Its arms and legs were huge, column-like things and it had no hands, since it was designed to be fitted into other tools such as shovels or picks which could be swapped-out as needed. It had no head, just a sens
or hole in its chest which resembled a large eye. Its gleaming white paint was even cutting-edge in that it was virtually resistant to wear.

  ZR3 was amazing!

  It did everything they had intended and more. There was nearly nothing it couldn’t lift, move, pull, or push, over any terrain under any conditions.

  The Lord of the Interior was quite impressed with ZR3. Having given bogus progress reports to the Colmarian Confederation for so long, Zolin Roxtelian was more than happy to give a full and detailed report on ZR3, believing it could have significant use across the empire—and hoping he could profit from helping foster its invention.

  But Zolin Roxtelian, being new to the Colmarian Confederation, had not grown up with its idiosyncrasies and fears.

  While Delovoa was officially free from the restraints of the Tech Laws, he would never be allowed to build a robot of ZR3’s capabilities. It was too reminiscent of the nightmare robotic species, the Dredel Led, who had been the Confederation’s enemy for millennia. Delovoa had worked on artificial intelligence in the past, but it had been under the direct auspices of the Colmarian military.

  Even though ZR3 was not sentient whatsoever and was nothing more than a glorified construction device, it so frightened the Confederation that a squadron of Navy ships was immediately dispatched to arrest all involved with the project and to destroy ZR3.

  The Colmarian Confederation Navy, being the great supporters of procedure and paperwork that they were, promptly notified Delovoa of his status as a suspected criminal facing the death penalty for excessive violation of the Tech Laws, misallocation of resources, failure to file income taxes for the last thirty years, and treason.

  Delovoa thanked the Navy for their correspondence and promptly fled the solar system with the deactivated ZR3.

  DESERT HOSPITALITY

  Delovoa needed to get out of the area, but he had no money and he had a lot of things to move, including a very large robot He wasn’t going to leave it for the Navy to destroy.

  The Colmarian Confederation was an enormous empire. So it was quite easy to go undetected as long as you weren’t too ostentatious or flagrant.

  Delovoa bounced from planet to planet for a while, doing odd jobs.

  “Your kind aren’t welcome here,” the hooded man said.

  Delovoa was at a distant outpost in the middle of the desert. He only had several small suitcases and ZR3 under a tarp. Because of ZR3’s gravitational motor, Delovoa could pull it around by himself.

  “I only need a place to sleep for a few months,” Delovoa begged.

  “I said leave!”

  The man powered on his gun. Bright yellow light was emitted from the weapon that hurt your eyes and a deep rumble erupted from it which got your teeth chattering.

  The Ontakians were not friends of the Colmarian Confederation after the Ontakian War had destroyed their home world.

  “Cool, an Ontakian plasma rifle! Look, I’m hiding from the Navy as well. And I can work for my stay.”

  “What can you possibly provide us, Colmarian?”

  “I can manufacture you some more plasma weapons.”

  The Ontakian man raised an eyebrow.

  The Ontakians had lost nearly everything in the war. Most of their scientists were gone and they were a dying species with dying technology.

  But after six months, Delovoa turned the outpost of Undin-Dairo into the Ontokian’s rebirth. They sent out word of what was happening and thousands of Ontakians visited the outpost over the duration.

  In exchange for money and protection and a chance to work on highly illegal technology, Delovoa tinkered with their plasma weapons. He didn’t entirely understand the Ontakian designs, but he understood enough to repair and upgrade them.

  The Ontakians, ever fearful of being exterminated completely, would not stay long and quickly took their new equipment and dispersed back across the galaxy.

  Delovoa was finally getting bored of hanging out with the perpetually angry Ontakians, who were about as much fun as any race whose sole purpose was to exterminate his species.

  Besides, Delovoa was worried he might be found. With so many Ontakians coming and going all the time, the Navy might stumble on him by accident in their efforts to snuff out the last of the troublemakers.

  “Well, guys, I think I should be going now. I think this has been a mutually-beneficial relationship.”

  And it had been. But the Ontakians wished it to continue, so they simply refused Delovoa to leave. Delovoa couldn’t overpower his captors, and he didn’t speak a word of ancient Colmarian, so he couldn’t use ZR3—a design decision he now deeply regretted.

  He was essentially chained to his workstation and forced to build plasma weapons. He had enough guards on him that he couldn’t overpower them even if he took one of the guns for himself.

  This went on for months, and Delovoa, in a fit of passive aggressive angst, started putting flaws in the Ontakian gadgets.

  He had to make the first few shots work, because they always tested them. But he made the guns intermittently power down or even explode. The hope was he could kill some of them down the road once the Ontakians tried to use the weapons in real combat situations.

  He made hundreds of such devices.

  However, he realized his time was limited. At some point word would come back that he was creating defective equipment and he would face the wrath of the Ontakians. And they weren’t too friendly when they were unwrathed.

  They had confiscated his tele so he couldn’t contact anyone for help. And he couldn’t even watch tele shows.

  He just ate, slept, and built plasma weapons.

  When Delovoa complained about his lack of stimulation, his Ontakian captors beat him silly. But he took a page from Freddie in being obstinate. He figured the Ontakians wanted his designs more than they wanted to punch his face—though only just.

  “I just want a book to read. That’s it,” Delovoa pleaded.

  “We aren’t going to give you your tele.”

  “Fine. Then give me it in paper. I don’t care. I’m just going crazy staring at sand and plasma fuel cells.”

  The Ontakian glared at him. As usual.

  “What book do you want to read?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I don’t know. Some history. Or language. Or history of language. How about, “The Birth and Transformation of Ancient Colmarian by O.O. Onoston?”

  Delovoa did his best to hide his nervousness.

  “We’ll see,” the Ontakian said.

  Delovoa continued to work as usual, but he was really starting to worry about being discovered as a saboteur.

  One day, his captor dropped a book on his lab table.

  “Here,” he said with disgust.

  It was indeed his former linguist’s book!

  Delovoa was not sure how ZR3 had been programmed. Did it really speak ancient Colmarian? It was basically just a really expensive tractor. If Delovoa told ZR3 to “kill” his captors, would it know what that meant? Or would Delovoa have to run around behind it yelling “left, right, forward ten feet?” Because he didn’t think that was going to be very effective.

  As Delovoa was flipping through the extremely large book with extremely small type, several more Ontakians entered looking angrier than usual.

  “He has been deliberately putting flaws in our weaponry! We lost seven brothers because their rifles exploded!”

  Seven. Cool.

  But all the Ontakians glared at Delovoa and walked toward him.

  Delovoa held up his finger to pause for a moment.

  “Um. Gelent Beldon’es Meyarodon Anosh Nesosh G’Denot.”

  ZR3 had remained in Delovoa’s lab collecting dust. The Ontakians had assumed it was some stupid Colmarian decoration because of its insignificant weight.

  But O.O. Onoston, the ancient Colmarian linguist, was nothing if not thorough. ZR3 not only had a basic understanding of ancient Colmarian it could be considered the second most proficient speaker, or at least listener, next to
the author himself.

  When Delovoa had instructed ZR3 to destroy everything except Delovoa, the robot had no difficulty translating that into suitable action.

  ZR3 activated its gravitonic field and shifted its weight to be about ten tons, stomped forward, and killed the Ontakian guards in less than a few seconds.

  But language wasn’t exactly a binary system. It had whole shadows of meaning and context. Which makes it a horrible choice to program a giant construction—or destruction—robot with.

  ZR3 stomped around the settlement for the next three days literally demolishing everything. If it wasn’t pancake-flat, ZR3 pounded on it until it was.

  Delovoa’s tele had been pulverized and he had lost the dictionary in his attempt to escape the building that collapsed around his ears.

  Later, when Delovoa would kick through the rubble trying to find anything of value, thus stirring up debris into a non-destroyed state, ZR3 would immediately hurry over and smash it back down.

  ZR3’s attention even encompassed lizards and insects, whose squashed remains provided Delovoa some sustenance.

  Ontakian ships were still visiting the outpost whereupon the occupants were quickly killed and their vehicles transformed into large metal sheets of paper by ZR3.

  Delovoa managed to get water by building small condensers, the below-ground pits not triggering ZR3’s fury.

  Delovoa would occasionally find pages from O.O. Onoston’s tome, but the infuriatingly thorough linguist had hundreds of pages on words for farm implements and vegetation and astral constellations, which didn’t help Delovoa turn off the robot.

  Delovoa wasn’t sure how long he lasted in that state, anything he tried to use as a calendar was visible enough that ZR3 crushed it or it was consumed by the desert. A dozen Ontakian ships had been flattened. But they clearly were not visiting any longer.

  Maybe ZR3 and Delovoa had done what the entire Colmarian Confederation couldn’t and wiped out the Ontakian species through a series of booby-trapped pistols and unwelcome parties.

  Delovoa only remained at the site because he hoped he could eventually find some components small enough and unobtrusive enough that he could use them to rescue himself. He was surrounded by an entire high technology building complex and numerous space ships. They were just extremely well-guarded and two-dimensional.