HARD LUCK HANK
SCREW THE GALAXY
by
Steven Campbell
Cover Art by Tariq Raheem
Back Art by Revo Yanson
http://www.belvaille.com
All images and content Copyright © 2013 Steven Campbell
All rights reserved.
This is dedicated to my parents, the teachers that “got” me, and the many writers who helped and inspired me over the years.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lewis and Judy Campbell, Michelle Walker, Stan Berezovsky, Sharifah Williams, Andreas Gustafsson, Christopher Smyth, Amanda Layton, Kim Turner, Ronald Richter
MAP OF THE GALAXY
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
MAP OF THE GALAXY
CHAPTER 1
The space station Belvaille was not the most corrupt city in the galaxy, but we liked to think we were in the top five.
My job here was as a negotiator and general purpose goon. At the moment I was running late for an assignment to help settle a business disagreement. If I arrived too late, the interested parties would take it upon themselves to resolve their differences and things might get a bit gory.
I currently stood at the edge of the elevated railway. The train, in typical Belvaille fashion, had broken down and left me stranded. I was in the warehouse district by the space port. There were squat, metal, box-like buildings packed tightly all around me. Like a very unimaginative architect had gone mild when designing our city.
It was a five-block walk to the nearest stairs or a fifty-foot plunge straight down to the gray metal sidewalk.
I jumped.
After a lazy mid-air somersault, I landed approximately on my head. My guns flew from my holsters and I tumbled on the ground a good ten feet.
“Ow,” I said to no one in particular, rubbing my neck.
I sluggishly got to my feet and examined my clothes, finding my roll had torn a hole in my three-quarter length synth jacket. Not only that, but I noticed a bunch of small holes in the back of my pants. Where did those come from? I didn’t think the fall could have caused them. Had I been walking around all day like this and no one said anything?
I recovered my four-barreled shotgun and my plasma pistol and looked around to see if anyone had noticed my ungraceful descent. Someone had.
“Did you just dive headfirst from the train tracks?” Garm asked, astonished. She had been standing in the street under the rails and must have seen my head plant.
“I meant to land on my feet.” I secured my guns back in their holsters under each arm, the shotgun bulging out closer to my waist.
“I wish I had your mutation,” she said wistfully, walking closer. “I heard the train stopped so I came to see if you were stuck. Figures you’d just throw yourself off a five-story platform.”
Garm wore her usual decorative military attire, heavy pistol on her thigh and dark sunglasses. She was young, had that nervous energy young people have. I think “enthusiasm” is what they refer to it as. She was only about eighty-five years old and I’d known her for the last twenty or so she’d been on the space station. She wore her black hair short and straight like a knife. There wasn’t a round surface on her, she was all edges, like she was made out of triangles. If she wasn’t so intimidating she would be extremely attractive.
Garm ran Belvaille. I believe her official title was Adjunct Overwatch, but everyone just called her by name. She was the senior liaison with the Colmarian Confederation’s armed forces, which ostensibly governed our city.
“I don’t get you,” Garm stated.
“What’s not to get?” I asked.
“You’ve been here on Belvaille longer than anyone, right?”
“No way. You know Chepless, the lady who runs that noodle shop in the southeast? She’s been here way longer. And Orgono Dultz, that guy with metal legs who works on the sewers? He was here before Belvaille even opened. Working on the sewers.”
“Yeah, but how long you been here? How many years?”
“About a hundred.”
“Right, so a lot longer than nearly anyone.”
“So?”
“And you’re mixed up in just about every scam that comes by. You’re practically my employee.”
“What’s your point?”
“How are you so poor?”
“Who says I’m poor?”
“I can see your underwear,” she said, indicating my pants.
I turned around from where I had been re-clasping my boots.
“What are you doing looking at my butt?”
“I’m not looking at your butt. I’m looking at your tatty clothes. You look like a vagrant.”
“So what’s this job, anyway?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“It’s not far from here. We need to hurry. Follow me.”
We started jogging. Or she jogged and I did my best.
“What are you doing?” she asked, in mid-stride.
“You’ve never seen me run before?”
“You’re running? You look like a fat kid with flat feet trying to dance.”
I grumbled, but it was true. I was a class-four mutant. Most people, if they were anything, were class one or two. My body was dense, very difficult to hurt, which was how I could jump off trains and not suffer a scratch. In fact, I was pretty much bulletproof. They told me if I was made out of solid steel, I would weigh less than I do now, so it’s all weird stuff. Unfortunately my muscles didn’t keep up with my size. I wasn’t weak, but I was underpowered for my mass. I liked to think I had torque instead of speed, but that was probably me being generous.
I could also heal very fast. The government had done testing when they first classified me and they sliced off the tip of my pinky. It grew back after a few months, but felt stiff for years after. I kept thinking what jerks they were for doing that since they didn’t actually know if it would regrow. But our government was not known for its competence.
Garm was also a mutant. I think she didn’t need to sleep. Or didn’t sleep much. Maybe that’s why she was all hyper. You find a lot of Colmarians go into lines of work where they can take advantage of their mutations.
Garm ran a crooked space station and never took her eyes off it.
I was a punching bag.
“Well, I finally know your weakness. If I ever get in a fight with you, I’ll just run away.” Garm had started jogging backwards to rub it in.
&nbs
p; The fact she had picked me up personally for this particular job was unusual—not that we never dealt with each other, but she could have sent one of her soldiers. It told me she was personally invested in this deal. I didn’t ask her about it because I knew she wouldn’t tell me.
Garm and I had a great relationship. She always lied to me and I always lied to her. But each of us knew the other was lying.
CHAPTER 2
I had to stop and catch my breath and Garm took the opportunity to fill me in.
“A delivery to the space station has come and there’s a dispute over payment. You should expect everyone to be armed and unhappy. The merchandise is for Zadeck,” she said.
Colmarian dialect was the galactic standard and this was something we were rightly proud of. Seeing as like 99.99% of the known species were within our empire, it only made sense to use our language. That said, Colmarians had widely varying accents. The joke being that if you asked two Colmarians directions to the same location and followed them both, you would continually run in a figure eight. It took me a second to register the name because of Garm’s particular pronunciation, but then I got it.
Zadeck wasn’t a big crime boss. He ran one whole block in the northeast. It was where all the truly upscale restaurants and clubs resided. He catered to those wealthy refugees on the space station who wanted the finer things.
“What’s the shipment?” I asked.
“Booze.”
“Really?” That struck me as an unusual product for Zadeck. But a man’s allowed to diversify, I suppose. “How much are we talking?”
Garm looked off in the distance as she answered in a small voice.
“1.3 million.”
I blinked. That was an outrageous sum for consumables. Very rarely, the station would require some major components to be shipped over and those might run over a million credits, but the idea of food or even alcohol costing that much was incredible.
“Just booze?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
I guess it made sense that Garm was involved. This was probably a shipment for a sizeable chunk of the bars and clubs in the city. Or they were trying to corner the market and be the sole supplier for a year or so. But a scary idea came to me:
“How much am I authorized to cut the price?” I hazarded. This was a polite way of me asking if they had the money.
“Hank, I’m counting on you to get that shipment unloaded and delivered. Talk to Zadeck when you’re done and settle up.
Garm left, saying we would speak later. I headed for the warehouse to earn my paycheck.
There’s a reason people hire me. It’s not because I’m a genius. Or an expert marksman. Or because of my stunning good looks. No, it’s because I actually listen. I take in both sides of every disagreement, evaluate their interests, squeeze as much as is equitable from everyone, and make the fairest deal possible.
Also, I’m hired because when things go wrong around Belvaille there’s a high probability it ends in violence. But because of my mutation, I’m resistant to most weapons, so people know they can’t just shoot their way out if I’m around, they actually need to stop and talk. And that’s good for everyone in the long run.
I’m not bragging when I say there wasn’t one Colmarian on Belvaille I was truly afraid of. Sure, Garm could have me dragged to the port and thrown into space, but we were friends—sort of.
The warehouse had one door for loading and one for pedestrians. I could vaguely hear yelling within, which was better than gunfire. Sounded like a lot of voices.
I knocked on the door and the shouting ceased. There was a pause and then someone answered from behind the door.
“Who’s there?”
“Hank.”
The door opened and I saw Rooltrego Denke, his mouth slightly ajar. He took my hand and shook it vigorously, as if he were suffocating and my arm dispensed oxygen with every pump.
“Hank. Hank. Man, it’s good to see you. We got a real problem here.”
I followed him in. There were about two dozen men inside, clearly squared off. The building was of large enough proportions that it could receive goods directly from spaceships docked at the port. Mechanical movers were laden with crates that had obviously just been unloaded. The boxes were still packaged for zero gravity.
Half the men looked happy to see me and welcomed me as graciously as hoodlums could. They were definitely Zadeck’s guys, as he had a dress code for his people. Except for their numerous scars and generally vicious demeanor, they looked like wealthy art patrons.
I knew most of them or was introduced. I made a point of saying their names to myself mentally after I met them to try and remember. Makes people feel good when you know their names.
The other dozen men were from the ship. Some were wearing their undergear from spacesuits. You could tell they weren’t from around here. Belvaille wasn’t exactly up with the latest styles and a bunch of these guys had on those embedded, glowing tattoos. To me it was like wearing a neon sign, but whatever.
“I’m Captain Ulsaker, who the void are you?” one of them asked. His outfit was somewhat better than the others, using bright golds and blues and whites that hadn’t yet been dirtied from use. He had a few medals on his chest he’d probably bought from a store, as they didn’t match the uniform or each other. These were all working men, covered in grease and grime.
“I’m Hank. I’m here to help.”
The men looked even more wary.
“Zadeck hasn’t paid. When they pay, they get the shipment, nothing to discuss.”
“Where’d you guys come from?” I asked, hoping to steer the conversation to a less tense destination for a moment.
“It’s none of your damn business,” Captain Ulsaker answered.
The Colmarian Confederation was a vast, vast empire with a truly insane amount of cultural idioms, not to mention appearances. It was quite simple to accidentally be rude because you didn’t know someone’s culture, though it was also a Colmarian trait to forgive such lapses.
But this guy was trying to piss me off.
I could respect their frustration. They’d spent at least a month in space. They haul this stuff out here and all of a sudden they’re greeted with a big fat nothing.
“Tell them to give us our credits and we’ll be on our way,” the Captain reiterated.
“Zadeck already transferred the credits. We weren’t instructed to pay anything,” Rooltrego said.
“I’m getting tired of this runaround. I knew we shouldn’t have come to Belvaille. This damn space station is so far away it wasn’t even on our navigation.”
“We do that to keep out the riffraff,” I said. But he didn’t get the joke. Or didn’t think it was funny.
There were a million citizens currently on Belvaille. The overwhelming majority were involved in illegal activities or were wanted as criminals. Everyone knew it, but as long as we didn’t make too much noise and the right bribes went to the right people, the government didn’t care.
That’s how Belvaille originally became what it was. Being so remote, fugitives fled here to avoid prosecution. After a while, so many villains in one place naturally formed their own unique society.
“Do you guys work alone or do you have a boss?” I asked the Captain.
“Look, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care. Our business is with them, not you.”
“Hey, this is Hank,” Rooltrego said. “He works for everyone here.” There were some agreements from Zadeck’s men.
“Well he doesn’t work for us and we didn’t invite him. This whole deal is starting to stink!”
The Captain took out a submachine gun and his crew also drew weapons. A few of Zadeck’s men had pistols, but for the most part I could see they were unarmed. They backed away or got closer to cover.
Lots of time in deep space can do this to you. I didn’t blame them and frankly it very well might have been a double-cross, I just didn’t know
. But that wasn’t really my concern right now.
When someone pulls a weapon, I like to evaluate just how likely they are to use it. These guys wanted to get paid. They had nothing to gain by getting in a gun battle. They certainly wouldn’t be able to leave port if they did. So unless they were suicidal, this was just a bluff. More a display of how upset they were becoming. Still, they didn’t have a good grasp of the situation.
“First off, I’m a level-four mutant. That GJ303 and Lam26 and Super Dooli can’t hurt me,” I said honestly, appraising their armaments. Then I reached inside my right holster with my offhand for my plasma pistol.
“Still, if you really want to fight,” I began, “I have this thing I’m fond of saying.”
I flipped the pistol’s power on and a mesmerizing green glow burst from both sides of the weapon; it hurt the eyes, but you were still drawn to it. There was also a kind of hum that vibrated some deep organ in your chest—I’m sure medical technicians had a word for it.
“Eat suck, suckface,” I said in my most tough-guy voice.
The crew’s mouths hung open dumbly, their eyes wide and fixated on the green glow from my pistol.
The only thing Colmarians found more frightening than effective government was Ontakians: the race that had designed my very special plasma pistol.
An almost mythical species at this point, Ontakians had only occupied a single planet. Long story short, we came to them and said, “Hi, welcome to the Colmarian Confederation.” They said, “No, thanks.” We said, “No, seriously,” and invaded them. Our 50,000 species versus their one. And they beat us like a drum. We finally amassed our navy around their planet and bombarded it until it broke apart.
Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy Page 1
