Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap Read online

  “They’re cool,” I said sarcastically, and the guys laughed.

  But those soldiers were the new us. The guys who had slowly taken all our jobs. There was a point when Belvaille was a city of gangs and gangsters and criminals but now it was a city of corporations.

  Cad, Balday-yow, myself, we were relics. Old school toughs who didn’t know how to do anything else.

  There was still work for us, as there were still bars and casinos and rackets that hadn’t been taken over by the corporations yet. But their numbers were dwindling.

  Sassy was asleep on the ground and I was leaning up against the doorway resting my feet. Cad and Balday-yow were arguing over which glocken players had the most potential.

  A soldier approached the door, which was unusual. Corporate lackeys never came to the casino. They had their own restaurants, bars, sleeping quarters. The city was practically demarcated by the different corporate regions of control.

  “Identification please,” I stated woodenly, after standing up straight.

  The soldier then ran past us into the casino.

  We doormen all exchanged surprised looks and laughed.

  “What, does he think we won’t follow him?” Cad asked.

  “I guess he wants to try and sneak a free round of gambling,” Balday-yow said.

  “I’ll get him,” I grumbled, as I headed inside.

  He shouldn’t be hard to find. He was the only person wearing a helmet. I suppose I should keep better track of the corporations. They all wear different patterns and colors, but to me they were all the same. I’ve never worked for them and they’ve never asked.

  As I headed deeper into the casino there was suddenly an enormous explosion that knocked me flat on my back!

  My head was ringing and my vision blurred. After a while, I managed to get back on my feet and clear my senses.

  Belvaille might be the dumpiest space station in the most pathetic empire in the galaxy, but the buildings were meant to last. Almost every building’s exterior walls were two feet thick of steel alloy. The interior walls were generally much thinner, but still considerable.

  The bomb had not damaged the roof that I could see, but the entire inside of the casino was gutted.

  I did not hear any moans but I saw casualties. In fact, I was reasonably sure that nearly everyone who had been in the main room was no longer living.

  I stared at the destruction completely dumbstruck.

  Why would anyone do this?

  “Building on fire!” I heard someone behind me shout.

  I turned around and still sitting there, unmoved, were the Gandrine. I looked at them for what seemed like minutes, not sure if one had spoken, or I had just imagined it. Finally, the other one spoke:

  “Yes!”

  CHAPTER 2

  I walked home considerably depressed.

  The corpse was still on my stairs. Somehow I had expected it to be gone. But I dealt with enough death today and I wasn’t looking for any more.

  I went inside my apartment and turned off my tele so no one could call me.

  My apartment was spacious for my needs. I had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, one bath. I didn’t have a lot of stuff even though I had lived on Belvaille longer than nearly anyone. Almost a century and a half at this point.

  I sat on my sofa and stared blankly at the dull silver wall in front of me.

  I didn’t have a lot of money, maybe six months of savings. There was a time when I had been a multimillionaire. That used to be a lot of money. Now I bet Belvaille had multi-billionaires.

  Belvaille was located at the very edge of the Colmarian Confederation and very nearly the edge of the galaxy. Over a few centuries the station had become a backwater hideout for unsavory types on account of us being so far away.

  But seven years ago some idiot had negotiated a deal with the Navy to turn Belvaille into an Independent Protectorate overseen by the Colmarian Confederation.

  That idiot was me.

  All the things that had once been illegal and ignored because of our vast distance and irrelevance, consequently became legal. I thought this change was going to be a boon for the criminal gangs that had long made their homes on Belvaille.

  I suppose it was, but not for those of us who lived here.

  When everyone learned that you could now manufacture, ship, buy, sell, goods and services that were illegal in the Colmarian Confederation, legally from this space station, there was a huge influx of people hoping to capitalize on our unique situation.

  The number of turf wars increased dramatically and things got really bloody. I sat out the drama for a few years by selling one of my prized possessions to a collector and living off the proceeds.

  When we thought everything had finally settled down, the corporations came. A big gang might have once had a hundred or so people working for it. But these corporations had millions of employees all over the galaxy.

  Some of those employees were soldiers they sent to Belvaille. They probably had university degrees in Ballistic Weapon Application and Proper Posture. They were a whole different breed.

  The smart gang bosses quickly sold out or took subservient roles. The ones who didn’t were absolutely crushed in the most efficient means possible.

  Because not even murder was illegal on Belvaille anymore.

  We technically had a government, but it was run by the corporations. And they weren’t about to arrest themselves.

  The scales had changed so dramatically so quickly and it was impossible to go back. No one had openly blamed me for the changes, but I blamed myself.

  The very boundaries of Belvaille had even changed. The corporations ran out of manufacturing space on the station so they brought maybe twenty or so gigantic freighters out here and anchored them to Belvaille with long cables, thus making them “part” of our city. You couldn’t walk to them of course, but they were apparently cranking out illegal goods.

  At some point, I wondered if Belvaille would look like a fat spider sitting on a vast web of attached facilities.

  Before all these changes took place I was once a highly sought-after bagman, fixer, and gang negotiator. Now I was lucky to be a doorman. And even that was over. I just let my employer, and his business, get destroyed by a bomb while I worked as security. That’s not exactly an endorsement for my efficiency.

  I felt terrible for all the people who had died tonight, but on the other hand, what could I have done? I wasn’t fast enough to have stopped that guy before he ran in. Even if I had my gun out and immediately shot him, his armor probably would have deflected it.

  And the guy killed himself with that bomb! This was just a whole other type of warfare than what I was used to.

  Gang fights in the past could get dirty. People died all the time. I’ve killed more people than I’d like to admit. But there was still decorum to it. Even a sense of camaraderie. Because we all knew we were roughly the same kind of people: lower class garbage not welcome in Colmarian Confederation proper.

  Due to corporations trying to consolidate their power and protect their investments, there were tanks driving on the streets of Belvaille. Tanks!

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t compete with corporations, my skin was stronger than any body armor they had. It was that I didn’t want to.

  I always heard about old people not being able to hack it at some point. And I’d seen that often in my line of work. The thugs with white hair stopped being thugs and became bartenders or apprenticed with counterfeiters or smugglers. Too many stab wounds or gunshots and you had to find a new line of work.

  But I had never really heard about hitting a certain age and not wanting to hack it. I didn’t want to join a corporation and stand around in the back of trucks or guard some manufacturing plant. Punch my timecard and take my orders from a nameless entity ten thousand light years away.

  I used to want to know about all the latest guns and locks and gimmicks and who worked for which gang. Now I really didn’t give a damn.


  Was I just antiquated? Or had the game changed too much for my comfort zone?

  Many of my old friends had left Belvaille or had been killed in the conflicts over the last years. The only reason I was still here and alive was because I was too stupid or stubborn to leave and I was bulletproof. If Cad or Balday-yow had gone inside instead of me when that bomb went off they would have died along with everyone else.

  But my mutation wasn’t going to save me forever. Bullets and bombs were one thing but if a tank wanted me dead, I wasn’t going to have much say in the matter.

  I turned on my tele and saw I had no messages. It was just instinct for me to turn it off when I didn’t want to be bothered. But there was no one left to bother me. A bomb blew up a casino and it was no big deal.

  I called Garm.

  Garm was a young woman who had once worked for the Colmarian Navy and been the official Adjunct Overwatch of the station, and thus kind of like our mayor. She was one of the few people who kept her position of influence despite all the adjustments.

  She organized the various facilities groups into one union and became their leader. So if you needed water, electricity, sewage treatment, or simply not to get sucked out into space, you had to deal with her. She basically had a monopoly for life on a space station, which was an awful good monopoly to possess when you live on a space station.

  She was an extremely attractive woman, though a bit hyperactive because her mutation caused her to never sleep. She had short-cropped black hair and a muscular build.

  I had dated her for a few months some years ago, but it just didn’t work out. We had professionally worked together for too long and I always thought of her as Garm and not a lady I was dating. We were also both way too headstrong.

  I still had fantasies about her now and then. But only like once or five times a week.

  “What?” she answered on the tele.

  “Did you hear about the Yeolenz Flame?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I told Xominion he should put up safety doors, but he wanted to keep the traffic going. Did the Gandrine do anything?”

  “You know, I think they’re still sitting there. I hadn’t thought about it. They did actually notice the building was on fire though.”

  “Prodigies, I tell you. Hey, are you alright?” she asked, looking concerned on the tele screen.

  “Oh, yeah, I mean it knocked me down and dazed me for a while, but I didn’t get injured.”

  “I know that. I saw you fight a Dredel Led robot clear across the city. A little bomb isn’t going to hurt you. But…you know, are you okay?”

  “Sure. Though I might have to hit you up for a job. I can like haul stuff, if you don’t mind it being moved slowly.”

  “Hold off on that,” she said. “Hey, I need to run to a meeting. And don’t worry about things, something else might come along.”

  She gave me a wink and hung up.

  CHAPTER 3

  The next day, I washed and shaved and dressed. I went into my living room to put on my jacket so I could go out and get something to eat. Right in front of my doorway, two strange women were facing me.

  They had absolutely pale skin. Almost pure white. They both had giant manes of silver hair that poofed-up and whose ends practically touched my dirty floor.

  They were both athletic without being bulky. I could tell because they wore almost no clothes. They had on what appeared to be metal armor that only covered the tops of their shoulders, their forearms, and knees. It was ornate and polished. They wore bras that seemed to be of a similar design and didn’t look especially comfortable. One wore a bikini bottom while the other had a long loincloth that hung down to her ankles and was highly decorative. They both had on spikey boots that went up to their knees and they had black synth collars around their necks.

  “Uh, hello,” I said, quite surprised to find nearly-naked pale women in my apartment.

  “Are you named Hank?” one of them asked in a thick accent.

  I was still looking them over so I took a moment to respond.

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  With that, one of them drew two wickedly-curved daggers from her belt and the other drew a short sword with a serrated blade.

  I didn’t even have a moment to say anything before they attacked. All I saw was one do a cartwheel and as I watched that, dumbfounded, the other stabbed me in the neck.

  “What are—gack!”

  As I tried to respond to the first slice, one woman stabbed me in the mouth. The blade actually poked the back of my throat.

  I tried to push it out, but they just bounced and flipped away. One then jumped against my wall and did a somersault and stabbed me on top of the head while the other woman ducked beneath me and got me under my armpit as I was flailing helplessly.

  They were moving so quickly I could barely follow. They used their long hair to mask their movements, as it hung in the air or whipped around they would strike.

  I reached for my shotgun but not only was it knocked away, they cut off my entire holster.

  I started swinging wildly and it was like trying to hit a fly with a tree. I wasn’t even connecting with the air they left behind.

  I got stabbed in the ankles, the groin, my navel, my eyes. Finally I felt a dagger go up my rear end and I realized I had to get out of here.

  Blades weren’t likely to kill me, but they just might cause some damage I’d rather not have. Covering my face and ears, I tried to make my way deeper into my house.

  They sliced up one of my boots and it fell off instantly. They cut me between my toes and I felt a knife go under one of my fingernails. I was bleeding now, not badly, but enough to be concerned. A bomb hadn’t even caused me to bleed and these two had managed it with some silverware.

  I finally made it into my bathroom and turned on the light as a matter of habit. I then got down on one knee and leaned against the fixtures.

  I ripped my toilet up and water sprayed everywhere.

  I held my toilet like a club with my right hand and faced them.

  “Come on, you spinny bitches!” I shouted.

  Yeah, they could flip around and dance off the walls in my living room, but there was no space for that in my bathroom. I was too slow to catch them with my hands, but I couldn’t miss by swinging a toilet in these confines.

  The two of them stayed outside with their blades ready. One was crouched impossibly low to the ground while the other held her two daggers, arms wide.

  I don’t know if they paused because they were wondering if they could fight me on the wet tiles of my bathroom, or because they were grossed-out by how seldom I cleaned my toilet.

  They both stood up straight and made some very quick, non-verbal communication with each other and sheathed their weapons.

  “We would like to hire you,” a pale woman said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  One of them threw a token into the bathroom. I recoiled at first, wondering if it was some kind of weapon. But I knew tokens. There were 20,000 credits on it. In my doorman job I was paid that about every three months.

  “We will pay you 10,000 a week plus expenses. That is a retainer.”

  I figured these ladies were assassins. But who would want to assassinate me? I wasn’t important anymore.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked warily. I still held my toilet at the ready.

  “We need you to find someone.” The two women alternated speaking. Even their voices were similar.

  “Why did you guys attack me?”

  “We had to make sure what Garm said about you was true,” she stated simply.

  “Garm?” I dropped my toilet. “Did she tell you about my mutations?”

  “Yes.”

  I was going to have to have a talk with her. Maybe this was what she meant about see what comes up, when I had asked her about a job.

  “Who do you want found? I don’t know as many people as I once did.”

  One of the women activated her tele and I saw I had a
message. I looked at the image they sent me, though I kept one eye on them in case it was a trick. The portrait looked exactly like them.

  “Who is this, your sister?”

  “Do you mean biologically speaking?”

  “No, I mean did you all go to the same sorority,” I answered sarcastically, but they didn’t get the joke. “It won’t be hard finding her if she looks like this.”

  “She will almost certainly be disguised,” one said.

  “Well then it will be very hard to find someone that doesn’t look like you. Because that’s basically everyone.”

  “We know within a week the date of her arrival.”

  “Oh.” I thought about that. I knew some people at the port and I could get video records of everyone who checked in. And she had to eat and sleep somewhere. “I might be able to find her. But I need more money. You all made me break my bathroom. And I’m a bit upset you attacked me.”

  I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and my clothes were practically diced off. I had blood flecks in my eyes and nose and mouth and ears. They sure did a number on me, I looked like hell.

  The two women again “spoke” briefly to each other with hand gestures.

  I then saw on my tele they had beamed my account an extra 5000 credits. I wouldn’t say I trusted them, but I was a lot more trusting.

  “So who are you guys?” I asked.

  “We are merely tourists. We will leave once you have located our companion and she returns with us.”

  Yeah, tourists, I can see that. Because Belvaille was so picturesque.

  “Okay, I’ll take the job,” I said. “Tele me all the information you have on her and I’ll get to work on it tomorrow.”

  We stood there, neither side moving. Water was spraying all over me and the pale women were watching me absently.

  “You can leave now,” I said from the safety of my bathroom.

  They turned and walked back to the living room.

  I tried to put my toilet back in place, but it was busted pretty bad. I washed my hands and then washed my face. How did they get daggers in all those spots while I was moving? But they’re about as much tourists as I was a flower girl at a lesbian wedding.