Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap (11 page)

“I can’t keep going on dates with
you,” I said to Bronze Badel Bardel, as we sat in a bar drinking.

“It’s not a date. I want you to
meet my old lady,” he said, “since you’re my best friend on Belvaille.”

That was kind of depressing.

“I already met Qindol,” I said. “I
don’t think she liked me.”

“Who?”

“The girl at my place. That’s her,
right?”

He honestly seemed to have no idea.

“Whose friend got shot.” Could he
really not remember her?

“Oh, no, it’s not her,” he waved it
away. “You’ll like her. I hope you will. Everyone I talked to knows you. You
fight aliens and whatnot.”

“I just have a lot of work to do
right now,” I said. Bronze was super nice and enthusiastic, but I just didn’t want
to sour his date and be a third wheel.

“You have any work I could do?”

“Bronze, you got to know…I’m kind
of a sleaze.”

“Nah, man. You’re great.”

“Most of the stuff I do nowadays
involves hurting people. Or killing people.”

“Hey, I might not be as strong as
you or have a big ol’ gun, but I can throw a punch.”

I looked at him with sad eyes.
Bronze shouldn’t be on Belvaille. The people here were already lost. No one
ever left here a better person. Never. Bronze was either going to have to adapt
or get chewed-up. And I just hated for either to happen.

“Here she comes,” he said.

I turned and my jaw hit the table.

Garm walked up wearing high heels,
a dress, her hair done up, jewelry—even earrings—and make-up.

I hadn’t seen Garm wear any of that
stuff. She looked like a bazillion credits.

She saw me and she looked equally
stunned.

Bronze jumped up.

“Garm, this is my good pal Hank.
Hank, this is Garm.”

Silence.

Garm sat down woodenly at our
table. Bronze was to my left and prattled on about things at his usual high
speed. I felt my face burning as I looked at Garm and she did her best not to
look at me.

I just couldn’t believe it.

I was really, really pissed.

When I dated Garm she was just
Garm. Not that there was anything wrong with that. But Bronze shows up and in a
week he’s turned her into Miss Sex-Bod-Hot-Face. What the hell?

I was shaking my head at it all.
Some guys just got that. I never thought Garm could be flipped. And I could
tell she knew it, because she looked embarrassed. I’d known her for decades and
at this point. I was pretty certain she had a medical condition that prevented
her from wearing dresses. Like she would literally die if she put one on.

And Bronze? I liked the guy, sure,
but he was all flash. He lived in Deadsouth. He washed dishes—when he was
lucky. Garm was only interested in the richest of the rich. She even looked
down on me. Yet here they were together.

I wasn’t jealous. I mean, maybe a
tiny bit. But I wasn’t so petty as that. I know Garm had been with people since
she was with me, I wished her the best. But this? I was sure if I had given
Garm a million credits to put on some sexy clothes she would have told me to
shove it.

What little faith I possessed, had
been taken down a notch.

I just couldn’t handle this. I put
my hands under the table and ripped it from its moorings so I could stand.

“Got to go to the bathroom,” I
blurted, as I hastened away.

I had gone through eighty-five
names from the passenger list at this point. They were not difficult to find
since they were brand new to the station and not trying to hide.

I also recruited everyone I needed
for the corporate job, equipped them, and was just waiting for a window of
opportunity.

I decided to go out partying to
blow off some steam. Maybe I would run into the other pale sister twirling a
disintegrator.

I was not a real party person. I
liked to hang out at the occasional casino, go to bars, spend an inordinate
amount of time at the Belvaille Gentleman’s Club, and frequent enough
restaurants that they often had a table—and reinforced chair—specifically for
me.

Belvaille had three blocks called
The Strip. That was its official name. It was five blocks north of City Hall
and the hippest place on the station. All the really popular clubs were there,
live music, comedy shows, edgy restaurants. Basically anything that was new,
youth-based, and imported red hot from the rest of the Colmarian Confederation.

At night you could not drive a car
down the streets because the people overflowed the sidewalks. It was just
complete craziness.

Belvaille was a serious place.
Deadly serious. And that wasn’t lost on folks. Those who weren’t bulletproof
knew they might die at any time of any day. The Strip was a release valve for
them.

A defiant, loud, raucous
celebration of life while it lasted.

I came up to it in my metal shoes
with my autocannon and silly hat and felt immediately out of place.

Everyone was joyous, yelling to
strangers, hugging, making out, and running from club to club as if they were
on fire and the next establishment was an extinguisher retailer.

Even the streets themselves looked
different because every inch of every building was covered in graffiti. People
doing their best to leave a permanent mark when they knew very well how
fleeting this life could be.

Colored street lamps provided
unique illumination. Not disco or flashing, just colored lights. I think this
was the only place on Belvaille that didn’t rely on the lighting from the
latticework.

Looking at all these people running
around I couldn’t tell if they were drunk or drugged or just youthful—maybe
some combination. When I was a doorman, if I saw people acting like this I
wouldn’t have let them inside. But that was a casino and you were expected to
behave a certain way.

“Hey!” A woman screamed at me and
grabbed hold of my arm. She said something else and I couldn’t hear her.

“What?”

She was talking to me excitedly and
I couldn’t hear any of it. The Strip was just too loud. Or I was too deaf.

She held my arm and had her head
against my shoulder as we walked down the street together. I couldn’t tell if I
knew her. Stupid lights. Everyone looks the same under a blue filter.

She was a medium height woman with
blonde hair and dressed in black synth strips that crisscrossed her body
strategically. She had a black synth miniskirt on and had to take very fast
baby steps to get around.

I definitely saw people doing drugs
and drinking. It was unusual to me to see that in an open street. It felt
almost like Deadsouth except people were happy. Maybe The Strip was what Deadsouth
started out as.

We were walking languidly, just
people-watching. The woman attached to me was bumping around and unsteady.
Because of her weaving I kept checking to make sure I didn’t step on her feet.
These metal clogs and my weight on those little open-toed shoes were going to
be painful.

“Where are we going?” she asked me
finally.

“I don’t know. I was just walking.”

She laughed at that hysterically,
covering her face with both hands. She reached up to put her arm around me and
pulled back, confused.

“What’s that?”

“That’s my autocannon.” I turned to
show her.

“What’s it do?” she asked.

“It’s a gun. It shoots ten miles.”

“It’s really big. Is it true what
they say about big guns?” She poked her finger at me seductively, and I felt I
should be flirting, but those skills atrophied decades ago.

“It has a lot of recoil,” I
confessed.

She giggled and continued walking.
I took a few steps and caught up.

“We should go into a club,” I said.

“I want a Rodye,” she said.

I kicked that word around in my
head and had never heard it before. I knew she was younger than me, a lot
younger. And I knew this wasn’t my scene. She could be talking about a drug, a
drink, a candy, a cybernetic modification. I had no idea. I didn’t say
anything.

“Let’s go to your place,” she said
suddenly.

“Okay.”

On the train ride back I got a
better view of her without colored lights. She was pretty, had good bone
structure and great skin. It’s funny, at my age, when people look good, you
have to really be taking care of yourself. But at her age, you have to really
go out of your way to be ugly.

I can vaguely remember myself at
that age, and I was good-looking. I don’t mean that to show off, either. I was
good-looking because I was young. Because I hadn’t been stressed-out yet.
Hadn’t been shot in the face a hundred times. Hadn’t lived off the dubious
nutritional value of space station food.

I was about middle-aged now. Not
that there was a set mark for that. I could live for another hundred years or
two hundred years. Or because of my mutation, die tomorrow. Who knew?

I wasn’t excited about taking this
woman home—whose name I had forgotten to ask and now it was too late. Maybe a
hundred years ago I would have been excited. Now it was just another thing to
stress out about.

I had gone to The Strip to try and
purge my thoughts from all the things I had to do, but I’m not one of the
people that can do that easily. Maybe that’s why I was a good gang negotiator.

I was always on the job.

Sitting here on the train with a
cute blonde in my lap I was still piecing together how I would attack the
Ulzaker-Ses club.

There was going to be people in it
no matter what time I attacked.

Unless there weren’t!

“Hey,” I said.

“What?” The blonde brightened,
seeing as I had been a big lump the whole time.

“Nothing. I just thought of a way…”
and I looked at her. “Thought what a sexy woman you were. Are.”

“Aww,” she said. And put her head
back on my shoulder.

At my stop we began walking to my
home. I’m not sure if she had been under the influence and my sober attitude had
sobered her, she was naturally coming down, or she found me dull. But in any
case she was a lot less bubbly.

So about my front steps. How was I
going to do this?

“Want to play a game?” I asked her.

“What kind?” she said, perking up.

“I want to see if I can carry you
all the way in. But you have to close your eyes.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she warned,
as if she weighed even half as much as my autocannon. “How far away do you
live?”

“Close. Come on, climb up.”

I picked her up easily in my arms.
In fact, she was a nice counterbalance to my gun.

She laughed joyfully as I jiggled
her around.

“Cover your eyes,” I said.

She did so, dutifully. Not asking
how it related to being carried.

The Gandrine were still there.

“Keep those eyes closed,” I
taunted.

“I am!”

I walked past my two gargoyles and
then approached Toby and Byo’lene. I turned to the side so I could see where I
was walking better. I didn’t want to step on the corpses. If I dropped the
woman at that point, things might become very bad when she opened her eyes.

Suddenly I heard a
chok
from
in front of me.

I looked down and the woman I was
carrying had a circular wound in her chest. Right over her heart.

Her hands, which had been pressed
tight against her eyes, dropped flaccidly down. Her mouth which had been fixed
in a smile, relaxed. Her eyes went glassy.

I placed her on the ground and put
my hand above her eye, blocking the latticework light and removed it, to see if
her pupils reacted. They did not. Turning her, I saw an exit wound clear
through her back.

Staying hunched down, I got behind
the Gandrine for cover.

“Come on, I didn’t even know her!”
I yelled to the street.

I looked back at the growing pile
of corpses at my front door. It was clear they weren’t trying to shoot me. But
why shoot strangers?

It’s like someone really wanted me
to become antisocial.

“Everything looks good?” I asked
Cad the following night.

“Yeah, it’s quiet. No one on the
whole block,” he said.

My big brainstorm was to bribe
Garm’s people. Of course I had to give 25K to Garm and sprinkle about half that
among her techs. Then they cut off the electrical grid to the Ulzaker-Ses club
and the surrounding block.

For the first few hours I knew they
would be in a panic, trying to get the juice restored. Get their customers to
stay put. At the third hour, they would chalk it up to Belvaille incompetence
and not bother.

We would attack on hour four of the
brown-out.

Hopefully there would be no
customers, no security, no nothing.

We were all currently in a vacant
building just by the train line in the northwest going over last minute
planning.

I felt like a real gang boss. And I
wasn’t very comfortable with that. I had been a sergeant many times. The leader
of an operation. The head goon.

But I was paying everyone here and
it showed. They held the door for me. They pulled out chairs. They stood a
respectable five feet away even if they had to rudely push the guy behind them
to make space.

“Listen up, everyone, Hank’s about
to talk,” Balday-yow yelled to the assembled troops.

All you could hear was the creaking
of equipment.

I stood over a little table with a
map on it. My men crowded around it listening. I had picked what I felt were
solid guys, so no one was daydreaming or drinking or otherwise goofing off.

There was a real tension in the
air. They knew they were getting a lot of money for a very short period of
time, so this potentially could be dangerous. It was fifty guys who knew that
when they stepped out the door they may have twenty minutes to live.

“First off, if you got something to
say, tell your captain and he tells me. We can’t have fifty guys yelling. Cad
is going to set up a perimeter with his men outside and keep us posted if
anything comes. If they bring in reinforcements, you got to hold them off until
we can get outside and back you up.”

“Right,” Cad said. He had Sassy
with him as I wanted his ears and nose.

“The rest of us are going in. It
will be dark, with just the emergency lights. Fan out immediately across the
floor. Stay behind cover and stay low. Anyone there who isn’t part of our
team…”

And I looked around at the men.

“Dies.”

They all exchanged looks. There was
a lot of deep breaths and widening of eyes.

I felt that order had to be given.
If they left a skeleton crew of security we had to take them out fast before
they called in their thirty friends and it became a real bloodbath.

“Once the club is secure, I’ll set
the charges and everyone gets out. When
everyone
is out and away from
the building, the job is officially over. Then you go home.”

“Hank, can we ask who this is for?”
a young guy piped. He had been a referral.

Some of the older, more experienced
thugs, tsked, and elbowed him, and gave him hard looks. I ignored him.

“That’s it. You know your groups.
Everyone to the train.”

The captains started screaming at
their respective men, whipping them forward.

I took a gamble putting us all on
the same train. Yeah. Fifty guys in body armor carrying all the assorted
shotguns, pistols, rifles, and submachine guns that Delovoa could scrounge on
short notice. No, nothing’s going on, why do you ask?

I could have asked the corporation
to borrow an APC but I didn’t know anyone who could drive them and I didn’t
want to use corporation resources. This was an old school gang affair as far as
I was concerned.

The train was powered all the way
to three blocks from the club and then we had to get out—the power outage
affected it as well. We moved double-time down the street, hugging the
sidewalk. I wanted to get into the shadows of the brown-out as soon as
possible.

When we got there, it was dead silent.
All the businesses were shuttered and empty.

It wasn’t a very busy street to
begin with and four hours of darkness meant there was no reason to be here at
all.

Unless you wanted to firebomb a
building.

Cad’s men took up their defensive
positions.

Two of my guys began cracking the
locks while the rest of us waited impatiently.

It took longer than I wished, but
they got the doors open.

I went in first. If anyone was
meant to draw fire it was me.

It was nearly impossible to see
inside. I waited for guys to filter in behind me and disperse themselves, and then
I turned on my flashlight.

Well, it was a club. Lots of
tables. Chairs. Bars. Dance platforms.

Some of the other men turned on
their flashlights too. Keeping cover behind furniture and whatever else they
could find, we slowly moved forward.

We were all maybe fifteen feet
inside when the shooting started.

Dozens of automatic weapons
appeared all across the club in every corner, behind every object, some just a
few feet from where my guys were advancing.

Everyone on my side began unloading
as well. It was a full-on firefight.

The light from the muzzle flashes
was more disorienting than a strobe light. I think because the shots were so
irregularly spaced that your pupils had just enough time to widen to the dark
before they were shrunk tiny by another barrage.

I couldn’t get a bead on where
everyone was. I couldn’t even tell who was on whose side. I’m not sure anyone
knew.

It was just they were vaguely over
there and we were vaguely over here.

I saw guys going down. Heard moans
in between the incredibly loud firing.

We were outgunned, that much was
obvious. I hadn’t equipped the guys with assault rifles because not everyone
was good with them and I didn’t think we would be fighting a war inside a club.
My men with pistols and shotguns and long rifles had no chance trading fire in
the dark with enemies who seemed largely to have automatic weapons.

One of my team, who had been
apparently hiding behind me, fell to the ground gripping his leg. I felt I had
to try and turn this around or we were going to lose.

“Eat suck,
suckface!” I warned.

The shooting
slowed substantially. Both sides had people who knew me. Or knew of me. And
they knew what it meant when I said that. A lot of guys were taking the
opportunity to get into cover or flee upstairs.

I pulled my
autocannon in place. Thought about it for a moment and loaded a canister shell.
I had no idea what it would do inside a building.

I leaned into
the gun like Delovoa said and fired.

Kachooom!

There was that
five-foot fireball. The speed of light was a lot faster than the recoil of the
gun and I briefly saw and comprehended: destruction.

Then I was
promptly hurled backwards however many feet and landed like a turtle upside
down.

I was dazed
from the blast and blinded by its light. But I rolled to my side and managed to
get to my feet.

I reloaded
another canister round and blinked my eyes to try and get my sight back.

My ears were
ringing and I enjoyed the pleasant novelty of not being shot at.

I saw a
flashlight near my feet and picked it up.

The club looked
like someone had taken every piece of furniture and put it into a giant blender
and then poured out that massive pile of debris against the far wall.

There were men down everywhere.
Mine. Theirs.

“Hank,” I heard Cad yell on my open
tele. “Some corporation is here. They got vehicles, and guys, and they’re
shooting up everyone!”

I took in as much air as I could
and yelled to the club.

“Hold your fire! Everyone! It is
over. If you exit the building now, we will not fire on you! You have my word
on that. If you are in this club in three minutes, you will be burned alive!
Those are your two options. Help the wounded out. But get out now!”

I set up some of the flashlights on
the ground to see what I was doing.

People stumbled past. I couldn’t
see what they were wearing or who they worked for. I really didn’t care.

I took from my backpack the charges
that Delovoa had given me and placed them around the club. He told me they
leaked a dense, highly flammable gas that was slightly lighter than air, so it
would permeate the club. He assured me that when all five went off, the
building would contain nothing but ash.

“Hank,” someone said. I looked by
the door and it was a guy in armor, holding his bleeding side. He was not one
of my men.

“Yeah?”

“Did you set your bombs?”

“Yeah, why?”

He grabbed hold of the doors and
pulled them shut. I heard them lock. They were security doors and would be just
as hard to open from the inside as the outside.

“Sore loser!”

I thought about the floor plans for
this building but the lower entrances would also be sealed. And they would now
be filled with flammable gas.

I began to run towards the stairs.
I got maybe five feet and reached down and ripped off my metal shoes, I
couldn’t afford to trip in them. I continued up the stairs.

At the first landing I saw about a
half-dozen of the defenders waiting. They all turned their guns on me.

“Don’t you smell that? We’re all
about to be bacon! Come on.”

I continued up the stairs and I
heard the men following me. After two more flights of stairs they passed by,
not worried so much about being shot in the back as being incinerated.

The charges ignited and we could
feel the heat. But the gas hadn’t penetrated this far up. I was glad Delovoa
had miscalculated—or exaggerated. Still, everything in the building was going
to burn and we were going to run out of air even if we weren’t cooked in this
metal oven.

We got to the top of the stairs and
the roof access, but the door was locked.

The guys were banging on it and
kicking it and punching in random numbers trying to guess the combination. I
knew that door and didn’t think I could force it open.

“Back up,” I said.

Not everyone did, until I got my
autocannon out and pointed it at the door.

I ejected the canister round and
put in an armor piercing shell. I pushed the group back some but no one was
willing to go down the stairs closer to a fire that was raging upwards.

“Everyone lean against me,” I said.

“What?”

“Push against me or I’ll knock us
all down a flight of stairs and probably break half your bones.”

They pushed.

I aimed as best I could at the lock
connected to the wall. I then closed my eyes, put down my head, and pulled the
trigger.

Kachooom!

Firing the gun on the narrow
stairwell caused a terrible shockwave. It felt like someone had opened my skull
and hit me directly on the brain with a hammer. I could hear nothing. I had no
orientation.

I tried to shake the cobwebs from
my head. I looked up and saw the door had been blasted open.

The guys were in bad shape. I might
have taken the brunt of an autocannon being fired in close quarters, but I was
a lot more able to take it.

I dragged them to their feet by
their armor or their necks. Two were unconscious and I had the other guys carry
them.

We got onto the roof and into the sweet
sweet air.

I walked to the edge of the
building and looked down.

There must have been three APCs and
countless soldiers. They were just everywhere. In my tele, I ordered a full
retreat.

Some of the guys from the stairs
came by to watch. I wasn’t worried about them trying to push me off the roof because
they couldn’t if they wanted to.

“Is that your corporation?” I asked
one.

“Ours? You think we work with them?
Why do you think we have so many guards? They’ve been trying to beat us for
months.”

It wasn’t Colmarian United Supply. The
APC had spotlights and I could vaguely see the pattern on their vehicles was
green and white diamonds with some writing I couldn’t make out. Probably
something like, “Where the Customer Comes First.”

The thing I wanted to know was how
did this other corporation know we were here?