Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap (9 page)

“Does this look okay?”

Naked Guy stared at me but didn’t
answer. Judging by his mass of hair and general nudity he was not a person very
concerned with appearance.

I left the warehouse in my cap with
my autocannon ready.

Some nearby soldiers turned to me
briefly and then resumed their positions. Though they were all wearing full
helmets so they could have been sticking their tongues out for all I knew.

Walking down the street I noticed
on the tops of buildings there were soldiers with long weapons. Perhaps sniper
rifles? Perhaps ones that could kill people on my front doorstep? They were too
far to see clearly.

It was obvious no one was going to
drive me home so I headed for the nearest train.

I must have passed a thousand
soldiers, numerous cars, and APCs. Massive trucks also crisscrossed the streets
picking up or delivering goods—or who knows, just driving around for fun. They
certainly had the money to burn.

They all had the same corporate
colors as the car Naked Guy had picked me up in: yellow with numerous thin red
vertical stripes on the right side. I made note to avoid shooting at that
pattern.

Eight years ago if someone had told
me this was the situation I would be in, with a few million credits in the
balance, I would have thought them insane.

When I reached the elevated train,
I saw it had been disconnected. The route stopped well outside of this corporate-controlled
zone and there were soldiers standing around to make sure no one bypassed it.

Garm’s group controlled the trains.
So as much as she said she had nothing to do with the corporations, she was
facilitating their operations. Of course if she didn’t cooperate, they would
find someone who would. Her people might know all the ins and outs of
Belvaille, but even I could learn how to run the trains for two million
credits.

And that reminded me. Despite being
bulletproof and carrying a weapon of lots of destruction, I still felt uneasy with
so much cash in my pockets. I stopped and deposited the token into my tele. It
would make accessing it more difficult later, because it had to transfer off-station,
but it was just an accident waiting to happen.

I confirmed the transfer about ten
times and stood there in the street refreshing and acknowledging.

I finally exited corporate land and
was able to take a train back to my place.

As I walked up to my apartment I
stopped short, noticing something different.

In addition to Toby, Byo’lene’s
corpse, and a toilet, there were two Gandrine sitting on my front stairs.

“Come on,” I said to myself.

I stood a careful distance from the
immobile creatures.

“Hi,” I said. “How you guys doing?”

Nothing. No sign they were living.

“I feel like we haven’t been
properly introduced,” I said. “My name is Hank. I live here. What brings you
two by?”

I couldn’t even tell where they
were looking—if they were looking at anything.

“Do you want me to bring you guys
something to eat or drink? I’m not…I don’t know what you guys consume.”

Silence.

“Have you met Toby? That’s the dead
guy on the left. And Byo’lene is the dead woman on the right.”

I was getting angry. This was my
block. And my house. Who were they to muscle in?

“And this is my toilet,” I
continued. “And now it’s on your head. Or I assume that’s your head.”

I balanced my toilet on one of them
and thought that was pretty clever.

“Maybe I’ll use it since you guys
don’t seem to mind.”

A grinding noise arose from the
pair and to my shock I realized they were standing up. The toilet fell off and
the two
very
large rock organisms slowly began to face me.

“Cool! It’s cool! My mistake!” I
held up my hands in supplication and quickly backed into my apartment.

When I went back outside later, the
Gandrine were still there, staring at the apartment building across the street.

I walked well around them to the
train.

At Ioshiyn’s I popped in to see
about my clothes. I was running out of things to wear and didn’t want to do
laundry.

“Hank, I got some good news,” Ioshiyn
said, smiling.

He went to the side and pulled out
a box. He opened it and held up for me a part of my pants, but cut about in
half at the knee.

“Tada,” he said.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

“They were torn to pieces, I
couldn’t fix them. But I just cut the legs off and hemmed the bottom. They’re
shorts now.”

“Shorts? When have you ever seen me
wear shorts?”

“You got good-looking legs, you
should show them off.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I’m guessing. You’re a big
guy. Women like seeing legs. Besides, these pants were tailored for you. It
would be a shame to throw them away. You’re not going to find anything that
fits you off the shelf. Trust me, it’s the latest style.”

I looked over Ioshiyn in his dirty
shirt and trousers.

“These are my work clothes,” he
said, seeing my glance. “But I design for the northeast snobs all the time.”

I took a pair, skeptical.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing
to my skullcap.

“Oh. Some hat I have to wear.”

“It matches,” Ioshiyn held up a
pair of shorts to my cap. “Try it on, you’ll see.”

I went to the small changing room
and took off my pants and put on some shorts. My knees felt very breezy. I
stepped out and did high-steps.

“See? A lot of movement, right?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I don’t feel
like I’m about to rip my pants.”

I really did feel more mobile. Not
like I was a pale sister or anything, but not bad.

“Put on the gun,” Ioshiyn said,
with a discerning eye.

I strapped on my autocannon.

“Now strike a pose. Look mad.”

I did so.

“Hmm. I know the finishing touch!”

He pulled out a pair of boots from
under the counter. They were big and metallic and he had to carry them with
both hands. They had three large buckles on the front but the bottom part was
metal and the top part was synth.

“Those don’t look comfortable. What
happened to my old boots?”

“Garbage. Look, the inside is fur,”
he said, tilting it up. “The outside is hinged steel. The sole is two inches of
rubber and a tacky plastic. Not even you can wear these down.”

“How much do they cost?” I asked,
as he bolted one onto my foot. It slipped on surprisingly easy, as it was like
a door opening and you put your foot in and closed the door.

“Two hundred. That’s a friend
price. And twenty-five for the shorts. If you bought them new it would be three
times that if you could find any that fit.”

I clunked around in the boots.

“These aren’t very flexible,” I
said.

“That’s why you destroy normal
boots, because they let you slide all around and you wreck them.”

“Okay,” I said, not feeling like
shopping anymore. “Don’t you think I should paint them black to match my
shorts?”

“No, leave them metal. They match
your gun and those cables on your vest.”

As I was paying up, I looked again
in the back and saw the corporate uniforms.

“Hey, Ioshiyn. Which corporation
has a yellow pattern with red lines running down like this?” I wanted to
confirm what the Naked Guy had told me.

“I don’t know their names.”

“How can you not know?”

“Heh, I was just paid by a third
party contractor on Tlevd-o 33 for a corporate order.”

I shrugged.

“I had to look it up too. It’s a
planet on the other side of the galaxy. And when I billed the same corporation
for a shortfall, it was sent to a completely different planet five states
away.”

“How can anyone keep track of all
that?”

“I don’t think they do. Not one
person, anyway. They all just know enough to get what needs to be done right in
front of them. And it somehow fits together to make this massive corporation.”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“Nah, think about it. You and I can
only see what is in this room right now. But outside there is a whole city
we’re a part of. Even if we can’t see it.”

“Remember when there were just
bosses and gangs underneath them?” I asked wistfully.

“Sure. But I also remember doing a
job for 200 credits and this happening,” he said, pointing to his mutilated
face. “I just got a corporate requisition for undergarments and I stand to make
75,000 credits on it.”

So this was it, you played nice
with the corporations, you made it big. If you stood in their way, you got cut
down.

Now I had to go find some people to
help me do the cutting.

I was in my kitchen eating some
rations, which were very old-timey space station food. You would think with all
these new people here, and two new Portals added, Belvaille would have a lot
more cuisine options than it had in the past. But for whatever reason, we had
less.

My front door rang and I walked
over to scan who it was. I never scanned the door normally, I just opened it.
But with the way things were lately, even I was becoming paranoid.

It was Rendrae outside.

I opened the door and went back to
the kitchen.

“I didn’t believe the rumors,” he
said, after entering. “But you really do have two Gandrine sitting on your
front steps. And dead bodies. Did you kill them or did the Gandrine? Are they
your bodyguards or something?”

“What do you care if they are?” I
asked, eating my food.

“It’s news!”

“Since when have you cared about
news?”

Rendrae, normally thick-skinned,
looked stung.

“I’m not happy with the way things
went. But the corporations didn’t give me a choice.”

“Why are you here?” I asked, not
really caring about his excuses.

“What are you so uppity about? I
heard you’re working for the corporations too.”

He was right. And it was indicative
of how good his news sources were that he could know it so quickly.

Still, I grumbled, as I didn’t really
have any better response.

Rendrae slid a piece of paper to
me, all the while looking around my cramped kitchen, as if someone were going
to spring out of one my drawers.

I read it: “I witnessed a corporation
fight in the North a few weeks ago at 9
^th
and Scope Block. These are
two—”

He suddenly snatched the paper from
me and set it on fire.

“Hey! I hadn’t finished reading
it,” I said.

Rendrae sighed.

“Do you read at a primary school
level or something? You had plenty of time.”

“I’m eating too,” I said defensively.

Rendrae bent over and whispered to
me, cupping his hand by my head.

“I can’t even hear you,” I
complained.

Rendrae straightened then put both
hands around my ear as if he were pouring toxic words into my head and didn’t
want them to spill.

“I saw two corporations fighting in
the North a few weeks ago by the Navy telescopes. I counted over a hundred on
both sides. For all the hardware and vehicles, they hardly did any damage to
each other. But as soon as some people—Navy Intelligence people—came from the
telescope installations, stray shots went up and they were killed. These are
highly-trained corporate soldiers who can’t seem to hit one another. Yet
‘innocent bystanders’ are shot as soon as they step within a block of the conflict.”

“Are you saying it was a staged
fight?”

Rendrae shushed me, flapping his
hands.

“What, this is my apartment,
Rendrae.”

“Have you looked outside your door?
This does not strike me as the safest place in the galaxy.”

So I motioned for him to lean in
and I whispered.

“A general at the Jam was concerned
that the telescopes were going to be damaged by all the fighting. Give me more
information,” I said. “How many soldiers did you see fall?”

“A couple,” Rendrae whispered.

“Out of two hundred people?” That
seemed impossible. Even the drunkest, most incompetent gang members could shoot
better than that. “How long were they fighting?”

“I don’t know, I saw maybe five
minutes, I wasn’t there from the start.”

“And how long did it take for the
Navy workers to be shot?”

“Instantly. One minute there was
nothing being fired that direction, the next minute five people hit the ground
and there were sparks and ricochets all around them.”

That settles that.

“If this is true, it seems pretty
obvious they were trying to kill them. But why would corporations kill Navy
personnel? The telescopes are for spying on other empires.”

“That’s what Naval Intelligence
says…”

“That’s what Garm says, too. And I
trust her, even if you don’t. Do you think the corporations could be working
together?”

“I don’t know. The corporations I
saw were Alomium Stellar and Shipping Transport Services Galaxal.”

“Those names mean nothing to me,” I
said.

“Alomium uniforms are blue with
like three yellow crowns on a red circular field. STSG uniforms are brown with white
triangles.”

They sounded vaguely familiar.

“So you going to research this?” I
asked, liking the return of the investigative journalist.

“No. I’m telling you so you can
investigate.”

“I’m not a reporter!”

“And I can’t carry gigantic guns or
convince Gandrine to guard my front door.”

I needed fifty guys.

My big concerns were finding
quality people and finding quality people who didn’t work for the club we were
about to attack.

I could pay them twenty grand each
and equip them with five grand of hardware. That left me with 750,000 profit
for doing a job which might only take one night. Which might only take one
hour.

If I did this five times a month
for a year I would have almost exactly the same amount of money that I had
earned, and subsequently lost, over a century and a half as a gang fixer.

I was pretty much ready to say the
corporations were alright. If they ever got a little weasel-y with me, I could
go buy myself a moon somewhere and settle down.

“What?” Garm answered her tele.

“How many corporations are on the
Governing Council?” I asked her.

“Thirty-eight. Why?”

“Thirty-eight? I thought there were
like twelve or something.”

“Nope, there’s a lot.”

“Do you know the names of them
all?”

“Not off the top of my head. What
do you want to know, Hank?”

“When you guys sit down for
meetings, do the corporations work together?”

“What’s that even mean?”

“Are they like working in concert
or do they backstab each other and have rivalries? Like the gangs did.”

“First off, we don’t meet. There’s
not some giant table where a bunch of corporations all sit down. None of those
people are even on Belvaille.”

“How do they get anything done?”

“We’re at the edge of the galaxy in
the least-populated state in the Colmarian Confederation. Belvaille is just a
manufacturing and shipping point to them. They don’t need executives here. If
something comes up I just ask them and wait for a response.”

“Okay, when you ask them, do they
work together?”

“Depends. If it’s something that
helps them all, like increasing the port size or electrical grid, sure. If it’s
something that only helps one of them, they fight about it and argue.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“What are you digging for?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m trying
to figure out the corporations. The only things I know are gangs and the
military.”

“They’re a little like both. They
don’t have the egos of gangs but they’re also not as efficient. They’re a lot
more efficient than the military but they’re not nearly as influential. If the
Navy tells us to do something, we do it, no one argues. Not even the
corporations.”

“Can you think of any reason why
they would want to attack the telescopes?”

Garm pondered that.

“No. If we ever piss off the Navy
enough, they’ll simply tear up the Independent Protectorate contract and take
us over, then the corporations will lose all their investments. Is there
something I should know?”

“Nah. Been talking to Rendrae. But
what he said doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Rendrae is a has-been. He’s on the
take from the corporations spreading propaganda. I’m not sure which ones he
works for, might be different each week. So you need to take his information
with skepticism. That’s his meal ticket.”

“He used to be a good reporter.”

“We all used to be a lot of things,
Hank. Times change.”