Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap (27 page)

Tamshius had a vault. The biggest,
meanest, most secure vault I had ever seen. It took him twenty minutes to open it.

I was expecting some loot or
magical talismans but inside it was filled with complicated technical
equipment.

“With this, I can record tele
communications.”

“No way! You can hack teles?”

“Only messages sent.”

“That’s incredible. How does it
work?”

“I did not invent it of course. I
understand that messages are like ripples in a pond. If they bounce and return,
they can be decoded. But not all messages do that.”

“So you have every tele ever sent?”

“Only this vicinity. And only for a
short time period.”

I couldn’t believe this. He was
plucking our most sacred transmissions out of the air. People had been trying
that for ages. I wonder if that’s what Naked Guy had done when he knew I spoke
to the Navy.

“If I send a tele right now to
someone, you could record it?”

“It may be possible. It would have
to bounce enough times. It can take days or weeks or never.”

No wonder he knew Garm’s plans. He
had been listening to her.

“Would you have any transmissions
from the Quadrad?”

“Only if the accursed women made
any and they were recorded. But as I said, I only store a limited duration.”

“Can you look?”

“I require their names and any
other information on them you can provide.”

I realized I didn’t know their
names.

I stepped out of the vault to call
Garm.

Figures. They had pretty, flowery,
girly names. Either their parents didn’t know their little girls would grow
into assassins or the Quadrad were ironic jerks.

I gave them to Tamshius and saw he
began using the equipment himself. This struck me as incredible that a boss of
his stature, not to mention age, was doing grunt technical work. That told me
this machine was a secret even to his closest advisors. They must view him as an
oracle with all the information he mysteriously knew.

I looked at the screens for a bit,
but it was all commands and programs and nonsense.

There was only one seat inside the
vault so I rested on the floor.

As hours passed I realized that
this was one of the most valuable things on Belvaille. Just think, you could
take this machine to Ank, the financial capital of the galaxy, and make
infinite money. And here I was sitting on the floor because my knees hurt and I
didn’t want to bother learning anything new.

“They sent one message.”

I used the vault door frame to
stand and went over.

Only the audio was available.

They said they had the device and
were awaiting instructions on how to reprogram the Portal. They were going to
drive a tank through so they would be protected. They were on one of the
freighters.

It was sent two days ago to an
undetermined recipient off-station.

“What should I use to fight the
Quadrad?” I asked Delovoa.

“Your hands,” Garm answered.

We were in Delovoa’s basement,
working out a plan.

“I’ll never catch them!”

“You’re not supposed to. I’ll be
fighting them.”

“What’s the point of me blundering
around?” I asked.

“They have to keep moving because
if you do catch them, you can break them in half. You’re just a distraction.”

“Delovoa should come too. He could
help,” I said.

“They’ll just kill him.”

“No, thanks,” Delovoa said, after hearing
that.

“I’ll get a shotgun then,” I said.

“They’ll take it from you and use
it on me, or just destroy it. Hank, you’re of no value in this fight other than
what I said.”

“I don’t like it. I could throw a
grenade,” I offered.

“I don’t know what they are securing
the a-drive with, maybe nothing. But you don’t want to go tossing explosives
around a disintegrator. If it gets damaged it would be bad,” Delovoa said.

“How bad?”

“Actually, I have no clue. It could
be good for all I know. It could make you grow younger and have baby soft skin.
But I’m guessing an exploding a-drive core is bad.”

“Besides, I’ll be there,” Garm
said. “I don’t want any grenades going off around me.”

“Can you fight both of them?” I
asked.

“I’m going to try.”

“Is the core lethal by itself?”

“Eventually, sure,” Delovoa said.
“But it killed their partner, so the Quadrad probably know enough not to wear
it as a nose ring. Its danger falls off very quickly with distance. At thirty
feet away you would not experience any adverse effects.”

I looked at Garm.

“So you want me to go to this fight
empty-handed?”

“It may not seem like much but
having you clomp around after them will throw off their whole attack and
defense routines.”

“Should you and I work out some
routines?”

“Yeah. Don’t step on me.”

It was a risk getting to the dock.
The Navy arriving and attacking, along with the citizens rioting, had made the
corporation start protecting their turf.

Garm scouted blocks ahead and I
followed behind. I also carried all her equipment. I felt very secondary in
this mission.

“Are they going to fire missiles at
us if we leave in a shuttle? They blew up a battleship.”

“No,” Garm said. “The weapons they
used on the Portals and Navy ships are too big to hit us. Besides, there are
shuttles and repair craft all over Belvaille. We won’t look out of the
ordinary.”

Garm knew the basics about shuttle
flight. Particularly automatic pilot. I was already feeling emasculated on this
trip so I had resolved not to throw up in the shuttle.

I managed to last a few minutes but
seeing the spinning freighter and Belvaille and everything else, I lost my
lunch. Why did they even put windows in spaceships? It was such a lousy design.

“Gah!” Garm said. “Clean that up.”

It didn’t take us long to dock at
the freighter. It seemed pretty huge, but I wasn’t out in space often and
everything seemed pretty huge.

Garm got all her equipment ready.

I finished vacuuming up my sick.

“Are you ready?” she asked me.

“To walk after them? I think so.”

When we disembarked our shuttle, we
were back under artificial gravity as we entered the freighter’s
decontamination chamber.

“This is a big ship. How are we
going to find them?” I asked.

The door opened and the pale sisters
stood in front of us waiting, with weapons out.

If the sisters had been expecting
wussy corporate soldiers, the Navy, or us, I couldn’t tell. They immediately
attacked and all I saw was flashes of hair and skin.

I sighed and stuck my arms out
straight in front of me.

“Rar!” I yelled halfheartedly.

Our fight took place in a hallway
to the bridge of the ship. It was only about ten feet wide, but plenty long. It
was almost impossible to tell what was going on. I merely walked in circles
clenching and unclenching my fingers in the ridiculous attempt to catch hold of
something.

I couldn’t even anticipate where
they were going.

Everyone was a lot more vocal than
they were the first time they fought in my apartment. Lots of grunts and
screams and snarls. It seemed clear to all involved that the loser was going to
die.

After some time, there were
discarded and broken weapons all over the ground. I assumed Garm brought most
of them.

I walked forward and a pale sister
smacked into the wall right in front of me. I tried to grab her, her eyes went
wide, and she cartwheeled away.

Hey, maybe I was helping a bit.

Everyone was slowing down. They
were cut and bruised and pummeled. The possibility of me catching one was real.
Well, as opposed to impossible.

“Hank, stay in the middle,” Garm
said.

Alright.

I got in the middle of the fight as
best I could and when it moved, I followed.

It gave me a chance to rest up. Not
that I was flipping off walls or anything, but even moving my head to try and
keep up with these damn women was tiring.

“Hank!” Garm yelled.

“Yeah?”

I heard Garm grunt and a pale
sister flew at me and hit me square in the stomach and fell to her knees. I
think she must have been thrown or kicked as she didn’t land gracefully at all.

It was all I could do to reach down
and grab her by the shoulders before she could get away.

I hauled her to her feet and then
past, lifting her into the air. Her hair was probably the heaviest thing on
her.

“Kill her!” Garm yelled.

Kill her? I wasn’t sure how I felt
about that. A foot or fist or something hit me in the face, but it did nothing.
It’s not that I’m a very moral person. And these are hardly defenseless women.
And they weren’t my employers anymore since that job was done.

“Hank!” Garm yelled.

Was it a pretty bias? Was I having
difficulty because they were so attractive? If they were ugly pale sisters
would I just bear hug her to death? Was I that shallow?

I turned the pale sister around so
she faced me. She was awful pretty.

She hissed and stuck her
metal-coated thumbnails into my eyeballs.

“Ack!”

It wasn’t going to kill me, but it
wasn’t pleasant. More to the point, it reminded me who I was dealing with.

I had her by the shoulders and squeezed.
I felt both her collarbones snap under my fingers. I squeezed more until she
went limp with pain. I dropped her to the ground.

I heard a blood-curdling scream and
the remaining pale sister launched an attack at me.

“Hank, look out!” Garm yelled,
worried.

Fists, kicks, elbows, palms hit me
in a blur. All I could think was: this was bad. I’ve got one of the best
assassins in the galaxy beating on me and if I closed my eyes I wouldn’t have
noticed. I couldn’t feel a thing. It couldn’t be healthy that my skin was so
thick. She had lost her weapons so she was no threat to me at all.

I just stood there taking it. I
felt warmness in my nose and realized she must have jammed her finger up there.

I hummed to myself as she continued
to work me over. She was so mad about what I did to her sister, she let Garm
blindside her. I didn’t see exactly what Garm did because it was too swift, but
I heard a crack and the pale sister screamed in agony and crumpled to the
ground clutching her leg.

There was a gang legend that taking
certain drugs could make you unstoppable. And that even a bullet to the heart wouldn’t
down you. But we’re just machines. You break the machine and it doesn’t matter
how angry you are, how crazy you are, or what drugs you got in your system. If
your leg was broken, it’s broken.

Garm delivered a dozen more blows
to the prostrate woman.

“Whoa,” I said.

Garm was bleeding and exhausted.
She went over to the pale sister I had injured, picking up a shattered blade on
the way.

The pale sister looked defiant as
the blade was pressed against her throat.

Tanks!

There were an awful lot of tanks
inside the freighter’s hold. Hundreds of them. They were stacked on top of each
other, bumper to bumper—assuming tanks had bumpers.

There was an immense parking system
that kept them all apart, made possible by the fact that the artificial gravity
was lessened in the hold. Even I could jump around like a caffeinated puppy.

“Where is the disintegrator?” Garm
asked the pale sister.

I was carrying the woman so she
didn’t try and run. Her shoulders might be hurt, but her legs weren’t.

The woman flashed some info to Garm
in their Quadrad dialogue.

“They were going to drive a tank
through the Portal, so one of the closer ones, I would guess.”

“How did you know they were going
to do that?” Garm asked suspiciously.

I shrugged. I wasn’t able to give
away Tamshius’s secret after all the gonging and candles.

We found the Portal in the hold. It
was relatively small compared to the one on Belvaille. They were only bringing
tanks through here, not Therezians. The sister indicated which tank to check.

I couldn’t fit inside so I let Garm
do it while I played in low gravity, jumping around while holding on to a
scowling Quadrad.

“Weeee.”

After some time, Garm came out with
a metal box.

“Is this it?” she asked me. “It’s
warm.”

The box was not the a-drive, but it
might be inside. I traded with Garm. She guarded the sister and I moved away
with the box, which I opened.

“That’s it,” I said. I couldn’t
feel it was warm. I could be wearing a-drive curlers in my hair and not know
it. But I recognized the device.

“Who brought through all these
tanks, you think? The Gandrine?” Garm asked.

“Not sure. I’m more interested in
where they’re going.”

“Where are they going?” Garm asked
the sister, who didn’t answer.

I closed up the box and we headed
out. We went to the deck of the ship and brought the two pale sisters. Garm
tied them down.

After about forty-five minutes of Garm
negotiating with the Quadrad, she turned to me.

“Okay, untie them.”

“What? Why?”

“I have a new agreement.”

I looked at the women, who were
battered and appeared exceedingly angry.

“You sure?”

“Yes. Now let’s go. We have to
return to Belvaille.”

It was a hell of an awkward trip
back, sandwiched between two pale sisters.

“I figured it out,” Delovoa said.

“About time.”

Since we had recovered the device,
the Navy had conducted another raid on the corporation and a raid on the
Portal.

There wasn’t much Navy left.

However, there were over a hundred
Therezians walking around all of western Belvaille. I had to move apartments
again, because I was afraid a giant was going to sit on my building while I was
sleeping.

Seriously. I had passed one
apartment complex and couldn’t figure out why the roof had two depressions in
it until I realized those were left from butt cheeks.

“So tell me how I can use it.” I
said.

Delovoa, still in his protective
gear, beamed instructions to my tele.

“This is twenty-five pages long! I
can’t just point and shoot it?”

“Does it look like a gun? It’s not
even lab-safe. This was the very first prototype to confirm the theory.”

I skimmed through the instructions.

“Don’t skim them, either,” Delovoa
said. “If you want to use it, and don’t want to lose your arm, you have to do
everything there in the order listed.”

I had been hoping I could go in,
take a shot at Naked Guy, leave, and do the same to the Gandrine. But this was
like a whole process. I suspected he would notice me trying to disintegrate him
over four hours.

“So you’re sure this will work?” I
asked.

“No, I’m not sure. I didn’t test it
and I didn’t invent it.”

“Why didn’t you test it?”

“Because it’s an a-drive core,
twisted so that it actually destroys matter. I want to be in a different solar
system when that goes off.”

“Can you get me all this stuff?” I
asked, indicating the parts list for the experiment.

“Yeah. But what are you going to
use it on?”

“I have an idea.”

I was carrying my autocannon,
newly-refurbished, the General’s plasma pistol, and a backpack full of
equipment which included the disintegrator.

I was extremely well-armed.

I was also wearing a diaper on my
head.

There was no telling if the diaper
would get me past the corporate security forces. I had my autocannon ready in
case it didn’t.

Approaching the first checkpoint, I
spotted an APC along with a pillbox full of soldiers.

It was like I was invisible to
them.

I made it to the warehouse where I
had last seen Naked Guy. He was not there. It had been a simplistic hope that
he would be. I began wandering around the corporation territory. But it was
highly improbable I would find him randomly.

After a full day, I gave up and
went to visit Garm in the hospital, who was still recovering from sparring with
the pale sisters. It was nice for a change to be on this end of things.

“Did you find your naked man?” she
asked.

She looked a lot worse now than
when we were at the freighter. The bruises had started to bruise. I mean, she
looked really bad. She had like three fractures, numerous sprains, and some
internal injuries. Those sisters had worked her over good. I felt sorry for
her.

“No, I have no idea where he is.”

“He’s probably hiding.”

“I don’t think he’s hiding. I don’t
think he cares in the slightest.”

“You have to find him. Delovoa said
we’ve had ten more Therezians come through in the last day alone.”

“I’ll do it, you get better. Is
there anything you want?”

I tried to pat her shoulder.

“Ow,” she complained. “No. Where is
the a-drive by the way?”

“My backpack,” I said, motioning to
it.

“You brought a device leaking
radiation and antiprotons into a hospital?”

I had wrapped it in tin foil, a
sock, and put it in a plastic box that had once contained a nice bottle of
wine, but I guess I should have dropped it off at my apartment first. The container
the sisters had it in had fallen apart, apparently destroyed by the a-drive.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said
quickly. “If I’m not dead.”

I headed to the east part of the
city.

I moved past tanks and soldiers
into the section that housed the giant telescopes the Navy had once used. My
hope was that if he was really doing something galactic, he would need to use
the telescopes to put his plan together. He had forced all the Intelligence
folks out for a reason, and it wasn’t because they were military, they were
just technicians who operated the machinery.

One by one I searched the
buildings.

There were scores of structures
associated with the telescopes. Since everyone was gone, the buildings were
dark.

But I came to one that had lights
on. I wasn’t sure if it was simply because they had been forced to leave so
quickly or maybe looters had been there.

As I walked through the halls, I
could hear the light tapping of fingers on controls.

“Hi,” I said to the Naked Guy.

He didn’t answer, and seemed
engrossed in his work.

“Whatcha’ doing?” I asked
conversationally, still carrying my autocannon and other assorted weaponry.

“I believe we have already
concluded that there is nothing more to be said between us.”

Half a dozen soldiers made their
presence known. I noticed they were armed with…large weapons. I didn’t know the
types because they were military in nature.

“I can kill you,” I said.

Naked Guy looked up, casually.

I put down my autocannon and took
off my backpack.

“I’ve got a disintegrator from the
Navy. Stolen from the Navy. It’s based on a-drive technology. It can kill you.”

“Do you think that frightens me?”
he asked.

“No. I’m asking if you want me to
try.”

There was a long pause and I was
waiting for rockets and shells to hit me. Finally Naked Guy stood up.

“You may try,” he said.

I opened the backpack and poured
out the considerable contents.

“Right. You need to put this metallic
cream all over your body.”

I handed him two large tubes of
paste.

I began setting up the tripod and
looking at the instructions.

“Actually, there’s too much electrical
interference in this room. Is there like a conference room or something? I need
fifteen feet.”

I followed Naked Guy wordlessly
down the hall, clutching my supplies.

The soldiers trailed us.

In the conference room I took the
chairs out and put the tables against the wall as Naked Guy put conducting
cream on himself.

“Bottoms of your feet and scalp
too,” I said. “I’m not sure about your beard and hair, but better to be safe.”

I went back to setting things up.
It was horrendously complicated.

I had to wake up Delovoa and get
assistance from him via tele.

“It should go in his mouth,” he
said.

I had a metal ball with lots of
wires attached.

Naked Guy took it and put it in his
mouth without a word. He held two other cables in his hands and I connected
four more to his body with clamps.

I had to do all kinds of
calculations based on the angle of the device, the humidity, temperature,
distance to target.

“It’s not working,” I said
nervously to Delovoa, as Naked Guy stood there with his black eyes, waiting to
be disintegrated.

“Is there a lapse code?”

“Where do I find that?”

“On the console.”

I squinted at the tiny screen.

“438296724.”

“Give me a minute to calculate what
that means.”

“Do you have instructions you
didn’t give me?” I asked.

“You wanted it simple.”

I covered up my tele a moment and
spoke pleasantly to Naked Guy.

“You’re being really patient.
Hopefully we’ll have this done in a bit. New technology. You know how it is.
Heh.”

I whispered to Delovoa.

“This is a tense situation. Hurry
up.”

“Why don’t you try repowering the
device?”

“How do I even know if it’s powered
on?”

“Is it warm or hot?”

“I can’t tell. You know how my skin
is.”

“Put your tele near it.”

I put my tele near the device and
the screen suddenly warped and cut off.

“Ahh!”

I backed away and tried to restore
my tele.

“Hello? Delovoa?”

I went back to the device, smiled
at Naked Guy, tried desperately to remember any of the instructions which were
recorded on my nonfunctioning tele.

Delovoa had created a flimsy
control panel with a tiny screen and a dozen buttons, none of which were
labeled. I pressed buttons erratically, checking my tele now and then.

The chances of me getting out of
here alive were growing very small.

As I was standing away from the
device, tapping my tele against the wall, I saw a bright light from behind me.

I turned around and immediately
fell on my face.

“What?” I asked. I had been pulled
forward. All the soldiers in the room were in a pile in the center of the
floor, trying to untangle themselves.

I looked up and Naked Guy was the
only one of us still on his feet. The cables that had been attached to him had
completely disappeared. The white cream that had been on his body was gone.

He held his hand in front of his
face.

“What a cruel, cruel joke,” he said
with the only bit of emotion I had ever heard him utter.

His hand looked like it was
smoking. Then I saw it on his torso. Was he on fire? Or smoldering?

As I watched, he began to dissolve.
Like a cube of colored sugar dropped into water.

In mere moments he was completely
gone!

“It worked,” I said mostly to
myself.

But the soldiers heard it too. And
with Naked Guy gone, they no longer seemed to care I was wearing a diaper.