Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap (3 page)

I stepped
outside the next morning and saw the corpse. I kept forgetting he was there. I
looked at him closer.

Yup, still
dead.

I felt I should
give him a name seeing as he was my neighbor. And since I didn’t want to go
digging through his corpse-y clothes hoping he had some identification.

Toby.

“Morning,
Toby,” I said good-naturedly. “Keep an eye on things, will you?”

After an
uneventful train ride I visited my tailor, Ioshiyn.

He had once
been an enforcer and thug like me, but got half his face blown off in a fight
and wisely called it quits. Now he had a shop and made clothes. Had a few
assistants and seemed to be doing pretty well.

“Hank,” he said
with a slight lisp due to his missing face, “what can I do for you?”

I placed my
huge bag of pants on the table.

“Can you fix
the legs on these? Since I lost my job I don’t have to worry about Sassy
chewing them up anymore and I guess I should repair them.”

“Who’s Sassy?”

“That’s Cad’s Mallute.
Big chewy thing,” I said, pointing my fingers downward to indicate fangs. “I
don’t know why, but he always used to attack my right leg. Maybe it smelled
like food.”

Ioshiyn looked
at the torn clothes.

“Some of these
are too far gone to sew up. But we can replace the leg. It might be cheaper to
buy a new pair, though.”

“How about
this?” I said, placing the pieces of my boot that the pale woman had cut on his
counter.

“How’d you do
that? Stick your foot into a thresher?”

“Long story.”

Ioshiyn looked
it over but from his half-expression, the prognosis didn’t seem good.

“I can put it
back together, but it won’t be nearly as strong as it was. Not with this
material. I know you need durable boots. It might come apart again when you’re
walking.”

I was trying to
save more money and didn’t want to keep buying stuff. Technically I didn’t
really need boots to protect my feet, but I needed them for traction. Walking
barefoot on Belvaille’s metal surfaces gave me almost no grip.

“What kind of
boots do you recommend for me? Cheaper is better.”

“Take a look at
this,” Ioshiyn said, motioning me to follow him in back.

We went past
racks of hanging clothes and his assistants stitching and pressing outfits.

Ioshiyn opened
a pressurized container that hissed when it was cracked. He took from it a dark
weave of fabric and handed it to me.

It was
incredibly rough but very flexible.

“Try and tear
it,” Ioshiyn said.

I twisted it
and pulled, but it didn’t respond.

“What is it,
some new kind of synth?” I asked.

“Therezian
hair,” Ioshiyn said proudly.

“Wallow’s
hair?”

“No, not
Wallow. I don’t know who. This is just one hair that they cut and wove into a
fabric. This stuff will last forever.”

“How much does
it cost?” I asked, curious.

“I could make
you some boots from it for about ten grand.”

I handed it
back.

“What part of
‘cheaper’ didn’t you understand?”

“I was just
showing off,” Ioshiyn said, as he carefully replaced the fabric. “I know how
often you destroy boots being as heavy as you are. Eventually they would pay
for themselves. Think of it, just one pair for the rest of your life. Only replace
the insoles as they wore out.”

“I can’t afford
them.” Then I got to thinking about it. “How do they get hair from a Therezian?
Do they just hang around waiting for it to fall off?”

“I don’t know.
Zadeck probably knows. Maybe Wallow sheds and he sells the hair. I should ask
him.”

Zadeck was
Wallow’s…boss, for lack of a better word. Therezians tended to attach
themselves to someone even though they were individually about as
self-sufficient as a species could be. Zadeck was just a sissy little Colmarian
who owned a ritzy shopping block in the northeast. Wallow was the protector of
the block, allowing the wealthy citizens of Belvaille more security than in the
rest of the station. Not even the corporations dared step foot in there
unannounced. A tank meant nothing to Wallow.

As I was about
to return to the front of the store, I noticed a bunch of colored suits hanging
on the wall.

“You make
uniforms for the corporations?” I asked.

Ioshiyn seemed
guilty.

“Yeah. They
have their own tailors but I make the basic designs. They do all the
alterations. It’s work.”

“You don’t have
to apologize. Money is money. How many corporations are there?”

“I’ve
done…whew, maybe fifteen different designs? About ten are regulars.”

“Ten
corporations,” I said, marveling. “Seems like more. Do you make their armor
too?”

“Oh, no, just
clothes.”

“Damn, I was
going to ask you what weapons would be good vs. their armor.”

“Heh. I don’t
know. But I can tell you their clothes are really constrictive. Full body
suits.”

That just
reinforced the idea I was never going to be working for a corporation. Being
forced to walk around in a sleeping bag…

“So what do you
want me to do with your pants and boots?” Ioshiyn asked.

“Fix what you
can, but if it’s going to cost more than new, obviously don’t try.”

“Okay.”

“I guess I’ll
go barefoot for a while,” I said.

“You don’t have
any shoes at all?”

“Oh, I got
shoes, but I hate shoes. If I pivot on my foot I always tear them at the
seams.”

“I’m telling
you, Therezian hair is the way to go,” Ioshiyn tempted.

“Maybe I’ll
climb up Wallow and go harvesting when he’s asleep.”

The plumber
squatted in my bathroom, banging and beeping on his various tools.

“So can you fix
it?” I asked.

“I don’t think
so,” he said. “By the way, do you know you have a dead body outside?”

“Yeah. Why
can’t you fix it?”

“Because when
you sat on this you twisted the pipes clean out of the wall.”

“I didn’t break
it by sitting on it,” I said, annoyed.

“It’s none of
my business. Why don’t you use one of the toilets upstairs? This whole building
is empty, right?”

“Because this
is my apartment. I want my bathroom fixed. And I don’t want to walk upstairs
every time I have to pee. I don’t walk up stairs very well either.”

“Pee in the
shower,” the plumber offered helpfully. “Or move to one of the apartments in
the next building. Then you can still be on the ground floor.”

“Then I’ll be
that much farther from the train. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been in
this apartment?”

“Long enough to
bust a metal toilet clean from the wall.” He saw my reaction. “Look, Hank, I’m
not trying to annoy you. Those pipes are all crooked. I don’t have the tools to
cut them out and even if I straightened them they wouldn’t be sealed and your
wall would leak.”

I stood there
irked. I would have to charge the pale ladies more for this. Speaking of which:

“Hey, have you
seen this woman?” I showed the tele picture to the plumber.

“I wish.” He
kept staring at the image long after he had acknowledged not seeing her. I
finally had to pull my tele from his hands.

“Is there
anyone who can fix my wall?” I asked.

“I’m sure the
tools are around, I just don’t have them. It’s not a one man job to cut through
these buildings, you know. Why don’t you just put your toilet outside on the
street? I mean you have this whole block to yourself, don’t you? I’d sure like
to be able to come home and just have my crapper be waiting for me on the
sidewalk.”

“That’s gross,
man.”

He looked back
at me.

“You got a dead
body not five steps from your front door. Are you really worried about the property
value?”

Toby hadn’t
changed much since I first saw him.

There were no
rats or insects or much in the way of viruses or rampant bacteria on Belvaille.
Most of that stuff was killed at quarantine and through ongoing sterilization.

The Colmarian
Confederation had something like 50,000 species in it and countless inhabited
planets. Couple that with space travel between them all and if we didn’t have
good quarantine, our empire would have self-exterminated ages ago.

So Toby would
lay here until I got rid of him as it would take forever to decompose. He
didn’t even smell that bad. I knew plenty of live people who stank a hell of a
lot worse.

He wouldn’t fit
in my trash can and the nearest dumpster was in corporation territory. I tried
to stay out of those areas because there was constant fighting between corporations—which
also made it a bad place to be walking around with a corpse on your shoulder.

I would work it
out later.

I went to visit
my friend Delovoa. He and I had been through a lot together in the past.

Delovoa was a big-brained
scientist who sold technology to anyone who wanted technology. Even the
corporations used him because Belvaille was still far away. We had three
Portals leading to Belvaille. But our population wasn’t large enough for it to
be profitable to ship many specialty goods here.

The Navy
controlled the Portals as they were insanely expensive pieces of hardware to
manufacture and only empires could do it. Theoretically, ships could have their
own a-drives which would in essence allow them to portal on their own, but only
military vessels had them.

I had wondered
how much the Navy would leave us alone once we became an Independent
Protectorate, but they had mostly kept to their word. They leased from us a
huge set of telescopes they used to eavesdrop on the rest of the galaxy, but
other than that, they weren’t much of a presence here.

The Portals,
however, were another matter. Sure, Belvaille was independent. Fat lot of good
it will do you, though. If you want to go to the next system you need to use a
Portal. And to approach the Portals you have to pass the Jam: about a half
dozen Navy cruisers and a battleship.

They charge a
toll to use the Portals. I heard for a large freighter the fee can be almost a
million credits! That would be enough to buy a whole freighter—and not a bad
one.

Belvaille going
independent was the most profitable thing that ever happened in terms of the
Colmarian Confederation, because they never made a single credit off us before.

I buzzed
Delovoa’s door and waited. He had about the most secure home on the station
because he also sold, and designed, automated security systems and he wasn’t
going to skimp on himself.

After a while
he finally opened the door.

“Hank! Long
time,” he said, shaking my hand.

Delovoa had
three eyes that blinked and looked independently of one another, which could
take some getting used to. I usually just picked one and made eye contact with
that. His head was somewhat of an upside-down pear shape and he was bald. He
was a thin man and tended to wear lab clothes.

His insatiable
curiosity had been a cause of problems in the past, but I bought most of my
goods from him because he did excellent work. Delovoa’s place was massive. It
was one of the few buildings that had a belowground space, which was where he
kept most of his wares and did his tinkering.

“Do you make
the body armor for the corporations?” I asked, as we walked through his
basement.

“No, they do
their own things like that.”

“Ioshiyn makes
all their uniforms.”

“I highly doubt
it,” Delovoa said dismissively.

“He does, I saw
them hanging there. Like twenty different corporations.”

Delovoa’s three
brows furrowed.

“How many
people does he have working for him?”

“Just a couple
that I saw,” I said.

“And just that
one shop?”

“He’s not a
franchise.”

This seemed
like some mystery to Delovoa. But I think he was annoyed that someone was
getting corporation business besides him. Not that he made clothes.

“Where are your
shoes?” he said, finally noticing I was barefoot.

“I’m going to
try and get them repaired. That’s why I was at Ioshiyn’s. But I’m here because I
need a new gun,” I said.

“I don’t
believe it, are you finally retiring your shotgun?” Delovoa asked, his eyes
staccato blinking.

“I’d like to
keep it, but I need something better. More power, smaller, maybe more bullets,
and better accuracy.”

“That’s not
really possible, Hank. But let me show you something. I was designing a gun
just for you as a matter of fact. I was going to give it to you on Thad Elon’s
Day.”

There were
maybe a dozen Creation Myths for the Colmarian Confederation. Different regions
believed different people or groups were responsible for the formation of our
empire. No one knew for sure. Thad Elon was one of the more popular
mythologies. Some people thought of him as a hero, other regions did nothing
but use cuss words all day in commemoration. It really depended on whether you
felt the Colmarian Confederation was an outrage or merely inept. There wasn’t a
whole lot of middle ground.

In Delovoa’s
basement we went past row after row of weapons and security systems and
anti-security systems. I felt myself growing more excited.

“Here you go,”
Delovoa smiled, spreading his arms magnanimously.

On the table in
front of us was a seven-foot weapon of some kind. It had an absurdly long
barrel surrounded by a metal cooling sleeve, a drum magazine underneath, two
metal bars sticking out on the side—I think one was for your forehand—and a
very bulky mechanism at the rear. It had no stock and the rear grip stuck out
to the right side and instead of a trigger for your finger, it was long enough
that you could put your whole hand on it. It was vastly bigger than
Balday-yow’s machine gun.

“What the hell
is that?” I asked.

“It’s an
autocannon,” Delovoa said proudly. “They’re usually mounted on vehicles.”

“I’m not a
vehicle,” I reminded him.

“This is what
you wanted. It’s stronger—a lot stronger. It’s not smaller but—”

“No kidding
it’s not smaller,” I interrupted.

I reached down
and took hold of it where I thought my hands should go and tried to lift it. It
didn’t move. I figured it was bolted to the table for testing, until it rolled
a bit.

“Holy crap, how
heavy is this thing?”

“About 300
pounds. Without ammo.”

“What?” I took
out my shotgun. “This weighs about seven pounds. With ammo!”

“The shotgun
era is over. Unless you’re going to shoot random citizens, that gun is no good.
The autocannon is perfect for you. It’s just like your old plasma pistol.”

“My plasma
pistol was even lighter than my shotgun,” I disagreed.

“But you scared
people with it. You didn’t even have to shoot it. That,” he said, pointing to
the autocannon, “will scare people.”

“Yeah, it
scares me too. I can’t carry that around, I’ll break my arms.”

“Hank, I made
this for you. You’re the only person on the station who could use it.”
Delovoa’s eyes were wide and he was enthusiastic. “You control it with your
weight, not your strength. It’s mounted on vehicles not because of their
engines, but because they’re heavy and can handle the recoil. You could too.
Straps attach to a metal-and-synth vest and the crossbar goes against your hip,
so the weight is distributed across your body. You’d be an organic tank!”

“So what does
it do?” I asked, slightly succumbing to his zeal.

“It shoots
these,” he said, and reached into a metal box behind him and pulled out a one
foot shell.

“You’re
kidding. I’m not looking to invade a planet,” I said.

“This is an
armor piercing round. Remember those Dredel Led you fought—by hand? You fire
this: boom. End of fight.”

I took hold of
the shell. It alone weighed nearly as much as my shotgun. I had once gotten in
a battle with some angry robots from another empire. I had no effective means
of fighting them other than my plasma pistol, which was now destroyed. I took
quite a beating from them.

“It can punch a
hole through the weak side of a tank and has an effective range of four miles,”
Delovoa continued.

“Four miles? I
can’t even see four miles. What’s the point of that?”

“I didn’t say
you could see four miles. I’m saying that if it’s pitch black and you can’t see
your hand in front of your face this thing will shoot four miles. So know
what’s in front of you. Actually, that’s just its effective range. It would
probably go twice that distance.”

“So if I’m
standing at City Hall I can shoot someone loading at the port?” This gun was
losing more of its appeal.

“It also shoots
these,” Delovoa said quickly, and pulled out another shell about the same size,
but had a different tip and was painted red. “That’s a high-explosive round.
Actually, you probably shouldn’t use those. But it shoots these too.”

He quickly
handed me another shell that looked like a gigantic shotgun shell because it
had a flat end.

“That’s a
canister round. It works similar to your shotgun in concept.”

“Really?” That
interested me. I really liked my shotgun because I wasn’t very fast and
couldn’t aim that well. It let me shoot in the general direction of someone and
still hit.

“Yeah. Your
shotgun shoots two ounces of steel pellets at about 1500 feet per second. The
canister rounds shoot about two pounds of tungsten ball bearings at around 2800
feet per second.”

“What does all
that mean? Like if I shot someone wearing body armor, what would happen?”

“Let’s put it
this way. If you stood in the middle of the street and fired, everything in
front of you within maybe two blocks would die.”

I shook my head
vigorously as I tried to comprehend that.

“When am I ever
going to want to do that, Delovoa?”

“You don’t have
to,” Delovoa implored. He really wanted me to like his gun. “People will see
that weapon and run. And you can use any of the other shell types. Though you
probably shouldn’t use the high-explosive. I have the magazine set so you can
manually switch between shell types. It holds two of each.”

“So what’s the
high-explosive do?”

“It shoots like
the armor piercing, except when it hits something it explodes.”

“So like a
grenade launcher?”

“Well, like
three or four grenade launchers.”

I shook my head
again.

“You know we
live in a city, right? On a space station.”

“Hank, none of
these rounds, not even the armor piercing, will penetrate walls. So the fact it
can shoot four miles—or eight miles—doesn’t matter much because you’ll hit a
building before then.”

I was still
really skeptical. Most importantly because I wasn’t sure if I could lug this
thing around. I didn’t think it would be very intimidating if I was dragging it.

“Delovoa, I
just don’t want to be one of those guys who carry some stupid big gun because
he’s insecure. I just want a more powerful version of what I have.”

“Well I want to
be princess of Eultar’ra 7,” he answered.

“Huh?”

“Hank, I’m
basically giving you your plasma pistol back. Look at that. There is no one who
won’t be afraid of that gun. I doubt you’d ever have to shoot it.”

“What would it
do to Wallow?” I asked.

“Wallow?”
Delovoa seemed to think about this for a bit. “I guess he’d notice being shot.
But I doubt it would bother him.”

He saw my
disappointed reaction.

“Hank, Wallow
is basically you only five times bigger, twenty times stronger, and twenty
times harder to hurt. Therezians can actually survive being in space—for a
little while.”

“So how much
does this mess cost? I just lost my job.”

Delovoa looked
a bit embarrassed.

“Well, I mean,
it’s free. I figure I owe you, for, you know.”

I could do
free, unwieldy or not.

“Thanks. I
appreciate that. I’m not promising I’ll use it. But I’ll give it a try.”

“Don’t thank me
too much. I’m charging for the ammunition. Which costs a fortune.”