Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years

  HARD LUCK HANK

  Delovoa & Early Years

  by

  Steven Campbell

  http://www.belvaille.com

  Cover Art by Konstantinos Skenteridis

  All images and content Copyright © 2014 Steven Campbell

  All rights reserved.

  HOW ORGANA DULTZ LOST HIS LEGS

  MY FIRST MURDER

  BELVAILLE GENTLEMAN’S CLUB

  THE TIME I DIED

  ADJUNCT OVERWATCH

  HOW DELOVOA GOT HIS BRAINS

  DELOVOA’S SCHOOLING

  THE DEATH OF FREDDIE

  ZR3, A BRIDGE TOO FAR

  DESERT HOSPITALITY

  DR. DELOVOA

  HOME SWEET HOME

  HOW ORGANA DULTZ LOST HIS LEGS

  Belvaille was created by a huge construction team.

  People and companies who knew how to manufacture buildings and roads and electrical grids and every other thing that went into a space station. When they were done, they left and the people to maintain those systems came and took over.

  Organa Dultz was part of the construction team. He helped build the sewers of Belvaille. But unlike everyone else, he stayed to maintain them.

  So he was, in essence, Belvaille’s first citizen.

  It was appropriate that the first citizen of Belvaille had responsibilities encompassing poop and pee.

  I came to Belvaille a few years after it was officially open. It was the most remote place I could find and I hoped no one would bother me here.

  Organa Dultz was my boss.

  The sewers, despite their technological sophistication, still had a lot of grunt work involved.

  And that’s where I came in. I unstuck blocked pipes; I monitored usage and routed the flow; I performed minor fixes; and I carried equipment. I carried lots of equipment. That was probably the bulk of my job, pushing carts full of materials under the surface of Belvaille.

  The only time I was above ground was after my work day was over.

  Everything was difficult on a space station. Keeping your air circulating. Keeping your gravity in place. But the sewage needs of a city in space were no less difficult.

  The waste was truly waste and there was no room to store it on the station.

  It was frozen and jettisoned at speed from the western end of Belvaille so it wouldn’t interfere with ships at the port in the east or disrupt use of the telescopes in the north.

  I was told it was frozen first because if it stayed liquid, once exposed to space it would behave strangely, including crystalizing all over the tubes and side of the station and it would be hell to get off. The idea was to make it so many meteors which could be safely launched away.

  But ships still had to be aware of their trajectory, called the ‘Golden Road,’ or else they might run into great blocks of frozen sewage while they were exploring.

  Belvaille was, originally, designed to be the base for further expansion across the galaxy.

  Intrepid space pioneers and adventurers lived on Belvaille. They had charters from the Colmarian Confederation to colonize and mine and explore and reap all the rewards that could be reaped from the vast riches of space.

  None of the buccaneers and explorers had made any money other than what the Colmarian Confederation paid them. Belvaille was too far away from anything. Unless new Portals were created into deeper space, which wasn’t going to happen, Belvaille was completely isolated.

  All these wild explorers who were getting money from the government had nothing to actually do. It would take tens of thousands of years to reach any planets from Belvaille and there were no asteroids anyone could find.

  People spent a lot of time sitting around getting drunk, and gambling, and going to clubs. Word got out across the empire that there was money to be made and criminals came to make it.

  What had started out as a bright city of exploration at the edge of the galaxy quickly became a corrupt city of vice.

  I kept pushing poop.

  “Hank, where’s that pump?” Organa Dultz called on my tele.

  “Coming.”

  “And bring three respirators. We got some fractures.”

  Organa Dultz was a short man, maybe five feet tall, stocky and muscular. I cursed him for his body, because the entire sewer system was his height. Every minute of my work day I was spent hunched over.

  I was pretty agile and I didn’t get tired easily and I was of course strong. So despite lacking any training whatsoever, I was a good sewer technician.

  I stood with Organa Dultz and another guy, up to our ankles in dirty water, trying to fix some pipes.

  For all his knowledge of sewer systems, and it honestly did seem vast, Belvaille’s poop-works were constantly failing. I wasn’t sure if that was normal or we were a special case or it had been designed poorly.

  “Put a patch on that. No, weld it.”

  “I can’t see the break,” I said.

  “Here,” Organa Dultz said, pushing me aside.

  One. Two. Three. And it was done. It was so fast I didn’t even see how he did it.

  He fixed the other breaks, we pumped out the water, and the system was whole for another day.

  We had special showers in our offices we could use to hose down and decontaminate.

  I had long ago gotten used to the smell. But when we went out together after work, we usually had our own section to ourselves.

  “What’s glocken?” I asked, responding to his previous question, as we sat drinking in a bar.

  “You’re kidding. You don’t know what glocken is?” Organa Dultz asked, shocked.

  My other co-workers at our table shook their heads disapprovingly.

  “It’s only the most skill-based sport in all of sports! There are two balls and sometimes three. You can kick the ball. You can roll the ball. You can throw the ball. And if the third ball is out, you can bump the ball with the other ball. There’s twelve men on defense and nine on offense, unless they chaos it, and then there’s thirteen on defense and eleven on offense—which is when the third ball comes out. Some teams will go full defense and win by sacrifice power moves. Some are all kicker offense teams—hard to pull off, but nearly impossible to stop. The throwers are usually big guys, kind of with builds like you. In fact, I’m amazed no one approached you about playing. Rollers are short and fast, all leg muscle. That’s what I played in school.”

  “Huh,” I said, downing my drink to mask my confusion.

  “Ginland has a team, the Reskin Sleepers. They haven’t won a game yet, but they just traded for some real powerhouse throwers. They got a deep bench and a good coaching staff. Their odds are through the roof. I’m going to make a killing.”

  “Odds?” I asked.

  Organa Dultz almost spit out his beer.

  “You don’t gamble either?”

  “No. Never had the chance, I guess.”

  He pulled me to my feet and we started looking around the bar. Or he did as he dragged me along.

  “Tamshius! Hey, Tamshius,” Organa Dultz called.

  The man in question was a thin, foreign-looking fellow with a thick mane of black hair standing straight up. He dressed hip in a long synth trenchcoat and wore a wrap-around mouth guard which was all the rage now. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

  “How’s your static?” Tamshius asked.

  “What are the odds on the Reskin Raiders?”

  Tamshius clicked his tele a few times.

  “Five-to-one against. Two point spread. You fishing?”

  “I want a hundred on them getting first throw, two hundred on them scoring first, and three hundred on them blocking first kick.”
>
  “You got it. Is that all?”

  “Yeah. Anyone else betting on them?”

  “No. You guys need to portal out, you’re stinking up my space.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow to collect,” Organa Dultz warned.

  “You do that.”

  As we walked away, Organa Dultz explained things.

  “We can double our salaries by doing this. You should have bet with me.”

  “Really?” I asked. We weren’t paid very much. Or at least I wasn’t. “How do you know who to bet on?”

  “Don’t take the even money. You’ll never get anywhere that way. Those are sucker bets. Go for the long shots. You won’t hit every time but when you do, wham!”

  “Cool,” I was already seeing myself in nice clothes, eating nice food, with a pretty girlfriend.

  “Hank, bring up that sluice mix,” Organa Dultz said on the tele.

  “On it.”

  I stood up and grew lightheaded. I hadn’t eaten in two days. I had lost all my money gambling, following Organa Dultz’s lead.

  I was going to be kicked out of my apartment soon if I kept this up. Not to mention starve.

  I pushed the cart and when I was done, my arms and legs were screaming.

  “You’re dragging today. Did you go drinking last night or something?”

  “No. Just tired I guess.”

  “Reskin Sleepers again tonight. What do you want me to put you down for with Tamshius? I’m meeting him at lunch.”

  “I…I don’t think I’m betting today,” I said.

  “What? The odds are like 12-to-one! A hundred credits and you walk away with 1,200. Think about that,” he said.

  “They’ve never won. They never score,” I said. I wanted to believe. I wanted 1,200 credits. But I wanted to eat, too.

  “They can’t go on like this forever. If you don’t stick with it, all that money you bet is lost for good. You need to double down now. They will loan you the money if you haven’t got it. It’s not like you don’t have a job. I can vouch for you.”

  “No, thanks. I just don’t understand the game well enough.”

  “Yeah, it’s complicated. Did you read those rules I teled you?”

  “I did, but it didn’t help. It’s like 600 pages.”

  “Only concern yourself with New Version IV. That’s what Ginland plays. There are some regions that are on III and a few on Old Version VII, but the Sleepers don’t play them much and I can tell you when they do.”

  “I think I’ll just watch you for a bit until I get the hang of it.”

  I could see he really wanted to convince me. He was a preacher in the Reskin Sleepers religion and he feared for my everlasting soul.

  “It’s your loss and I hate to see you leave money on the table like that. It’s not like we’re going to get rich working down here.”

  “Yeah. How about, just tell me when they win and I’ll jump in.”

  “You got it!” Organa Dultz beamed.

  I opened my first savings account at this point and put in forty-eight credits. I was pretty proud of that. I had my own bank account. I was like officially a person with financial dealings. Not just some stinky guy living in the sewers of a worthless space station.

  Organa Dultz got more and more elaborate with his handicapping. He had methods of betting that were so complex the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy would be dumbfounded.

  But he never talked to me about the results.

  I don’t know if it was because the Reskin Sleepers weren’t winning or he was upset I had rejected gambling with him.

  Our relationship had grown chillier, however, and I had some concerns he might fire me.

  It was five years after the creation of Belvaille when the checks from the Confederation stopped coming.

  The focus of the government, ever in flux, no longer considered exploration very sexy or worthwhile.

  The people who had been getting regular money from the government to “explore” suddenly found themselves unemployed.

  The station emptied almost immediately.

  But there were still criminals, still people maintaining the station, as well as a skeleton crew of Colmarian Navy.

  With a whole city at their disposal, the criminals kicked into overdrive. They couldn’t rely on the empire for money anymore so they started making their own. Smuggling, drugs, counterfeiting, black market, anything you could possibly imagine.

  And with no real police here, more and more fugitives began arriving for the simple convenience of hiding from the authorities. You had to be a truly bad person for them to come all the way out to Belvaille to apprehend you.

  Organa Dultz almost never spoke to me except to relay orders. He used to feel like my mentor, now he never taught me anything. He put me on the night shift and he worked days. Everyone else was fired.

  I worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, all manual labor.

  Those were tough times for me and I became addicted to a drug: coffee. I drank a lot of coffee. I bet I was personally responsible for half the sewage output of Belvaille, which kept me in a job.

  It was a strange, vicious circle.

  When you spend so much of your time in one place, that place becomes your home. And when that home was a sewer with a low ceiling, you become a pretty odd fellow.

  I kept my eyes out for other work, but my resume was limited to pushing around carts full of sewage equipment. I had no skills at all.

  This was my first time living away from home and I had ended up here and ended up doing this. I might have gone back if I wasn’t so damn embarrassed—and if I wasn’t hiding out in my own right.

  The whole glitzy crime world that was springing up on Belvaille was a wild and exciting arena, but it didn’t impress me much. In a way I felt like a doctor: no matter what jewelry you had on or what sports coat or what elegant gown, I knew all the gross stuff that was inside you.

  But hell, I was a troglodyte who lived in the sewers. It’s not like I could throw stones.

  I worked. I ate. I drank coffee. I went back to my apartment and slept.

  And I showered an awful lot.

  I was sleeping when my tele rang.

  It was Organa Dultz.

  “Hello?” I answered blearily.

  “Hank,” you awake?

  “Uh…”

  “Sorry to bother you. I’m in big trouble.”

  Adrenaline kicked in. I assumed he was stuck in the sewers or had been hurt.

  “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  “I’m heading to the sewers. I’m going to hide in Junction C,” he explained.

  “Hide? What? Why?”

  “I’m…I owe a lot of money.”

  “Owe? To who?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Just meet me there. Okay?”

  “All right, I’ll be there.”

  “Junction C.”

  “Junction C,” I repeated.

  I got up and started getting dressed. As I was on the train, I thought about this.

  What was I going to do? More importantly, what did he expect me to do? I had like two hundred credits in the bank.

  At the main sewer office I suited up in my usual rubber waders and gloves.

  I bent over and began the walk to Junction C.

  As I was going, I was feeling worse and worse about this. Organa Dultz hadn’t spoken to me in a familiar way in months. As soon as he was in trouble he was my pal? What if this goes bad for me?

  There were a lot of shady people on Belvaille now. I didn’t want to piss off the wrong folks.

  My walking became slower as I reached Junction C. Not because of any danger, but because I was considering turning back.

  What did I owe Organa Dultz?

  He was my boss. I did my work for him and that was that. If I was in trouble would he help me? I don’t know. But he did give me a job, with no credentials whatsoever. And he did keep me on when layoffs came.

  Then I heard Organa Dultz scream!

  I ra
n forward as fast as I could while still keeping my head down.

  Junction C housed one of the freezing units. The sewage was frozen here and then transferred to the tubes for expulsion into space. The area was about thirty feet wide, fifty feet long, and had a ceiling ten feet above.

  Organa Dultz was up to his thighs in a block of waste that was being frozen!

  I saw Tamshius watching casually from a safe distance.

  I ran over and got behind Organa Dultz. He was below me in a metal tub filled with a mostly solid, frozen block. His lips were blue and his face pale. His eyes couldn’t see or if they could, he didn’t show any signs of recognition.

  I bent down and grabbed him under the arms to try and lift him out before he was frozen completely.

  It took several minutes to freeze each tub as they were massive. He had probably been dropped in once the freezing began which was why he was only up to his thighs instead of sinking all the way over his head.

  “Let him be, skark,” Tamshius sneered the insult.

  I ignored him and pulled Organa Dultz. It was like he was in quicksand. I feared his legs would completely separate from his body if I pulled too hard.

  Organa Dultz reached back with an arm and grabbed hold around my neck, proving he was still alive and wanted to remain that way.

  I managed to drag him out and lay him on the ground next to the tub. I didn’t have anything to put on him and I was sure if I used the emergency showers that would be even worse.

  “Your funeral, kid,” I heard from behind me.

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” I said, after being shot.

  I looked at Tamshius holding his pistol. His eyes were huge.

  “Why did you say ‘Ow’?” He asked.

  “Because it hurt!”

  “Yeah, but why aren’t you dead?”

  “Because I’m bulletproof.”

  Blam!

  “Ow!”

  I stood up and took a step toward Tamshius, ready to shove that gun down his throat.

  He dropped it immediately and put his hands up.

  “Sorry! How are you bulletproof?”

  “I just am.”

  I picked up Organa Dultz and put him on my back. I needed to get him to a hospital, fast. I headed back the way I came.