Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (41 page)

When MTB and Valia told the gang lords
that there was a chance their Confederation might come crumbling down because
the inventor of it was about to be torn to pieces by a horde of surly
foreigners, they all threw aside their differences and jumped to my aid.

They’d be damned if they were going to
lose money on this deal.

The basic premise of the Confederation
had worked! The members recognized a threat to the greater organization and
responded. It meant their fates were now intertwined and they weren’t just
looking out for their own gangs. The importance of that was hard to overstate.

Devus Sorsha poked and prodded and
needled me scarcely less than the Totki had, but eventually I began to heal.

The Royal Wing was empty. The Sublime
Order of Transcendence was back to being an overblown group-help organization
for those with poor fashion sense. The Totki were all but obliterated and held
in racial contempt by most of the station.

The Olmarr Republic was headless and
rudderless. I knew they still existed and would try to get a foothold with the
disenfranchised and downtrodden whenever it was convenient. But at least for
the moment they weren’t a major player.

There was still Garm, however.

Behind all these groups, in the shadows
somewhere, she was pulling strings and making plays. Rendrae had always
preached against her and I had chalked it up to hyperbole. I guess I still had
a soft spot for her.

It was hard to deny that City Hall
wasn’t working in the best interests of Belvaille, however.

I didn’t know what those interests were,
but I was going to find out.

I wasn’t at full strength. I probably
wasn’t at half strength.

It had taken me three weeks to recover
from the Totki, and in that time I had at least two more minor heart attacks.

“I really appreciate this!” I yelled up
to the sky.

Wallow walked ahead of me impassively.

Anyone in the street, near the street,
in view of the street, left hastily.

We came to the blocks that housed City
Hall. The thirty-foot walls were beyond my ability to breech, but I hoped
Wallow might help.

The walls were about half his height but
five feet thick.

He came to the first one, looked it over
for a good while, placed his hands here and there, and then:

Crack!

He ripped a section of the wall straight
up and tossed it to the side as if it were a rolled-up doormat.

I saw machine guns and cannon fire erupt
from other walls and bunkers and Wallow didn’t even notice them.

He walked through the opening and tore
holes through the remaining walls.

Finally, he must have seen a bunker
firing at him and he backhanded it, smashing the reinforced steel to nothing.
The other gunners wisely silenced their attacks.

At the base of City Hall, Wallow pushed
his hand through the first floor and swirled his wrist around so that he might
make an opening for me—even though a door was already there.

All of this he did in about five
minutes.

He walked back to me, nodded, and
continued onward. Hopefully he was returning to his resting spot in the
northeast.

I was thankful I had been feeding him
all this time.

My full contingent of Kommilaire waited
some blocks away. I didn’t think they would be of any use, but I wanted them to
witness whatever the outcome might be.

I walked into the gap Wallow created and
Garm’s people filed out to stop my progress.

“Halt!” One said.

“I want to talk to Garm.”

“She isn’t seeing anyone.”

“You have gaping holes in your walls and
I have the biggest army on the station,” I said, pointing back to my Kommilaire.
“She’s going to talk to me one way or another.”

Some of the officers excused themselves
to confer.

After a while they returned.

“You may go up, but you have to remove
all your weapons.”

“I can’t walk up stairs and I doubt your
elevator can support me.”

“The freight elevator can.”

“Alright.”

I got their help taking off all my
weapons. They wanted everything gone. My hooks. My cables. My magnet. My food.
My tools.

“What’s this?” one asked, holding up a
large pouch and tube connected to my waist.

“That’s kind of a colostomy bag. Most
toilets can’t support me and my colon hasn’t aged well, so I either go on the
floor or use that.”

They let me keep it.

We used the door instead of the hole
left by Wallow. I looked up to see if the building was bent or otherwise
unsound, but it appeared intact.

I hadn’t been inside City Hall in
decades. It was dark. Sanitized. Lifeless. A control center without a lick of
elegance.

Garm used to have so many carpets they
were in layers on her floor. She used to have paintings on her ceiling because
she ran out of space on the walls.

If this was her new style, she had truly
changed.

The elevator was glacial and I could
hear the cables and pulleys crying out in pain as it tried to lift me. I had a
lot of time to think as I went up to the tenth floor, alone. I’d been thinking
about the same thing for three weeks, ever since I knew this encounter had to
happen.

I was born a mutant. My parents were
mutants. Their parents were mutants. They all fought, and died, for the
military. Everyone expected me to fight, and die, for the Colmarian Navy as
well. I said forget that, and ran off to the furthest place I could find.

This city.

I didn’t get an education other than
from Belvaille. I was out here with a bunch of criminals at the edge of the
galaxy. How could it not make me who I was?

But I was different now. Maybe not Jolly
Sunshine, but I was the Supreme Kommilaire! If you had told me I was going to
be a police chief a century ago I would have never believed you. I came here to
escape that life.

Garm always had a choice. She had a
great job as Adjunct Overwatch. She could have called in military support for
Belvaille any time she wanted and cleaned up the city—like I was trying to do
now.

Instead, she turned a bad situation
worse.

The previous city administrators at
least tried to maintain some sense of order. Garm took a cut of all the dirty
deals. They flourished under her. The gangs, the gang wars, anything illegal.

Maybe that was okay when we were a
little space station on the ass of the biggest failure of an empire in the
known universe, but now we had to turn a corner. The galaxy was in ruins, we
couldn’t treat Belvaille like it was our personal playground, here for us to
plunder at any cost. Garm had to understand that.

Or Garm had to go.

The elevator door opened and Garm stood
directly in front of me!

She wore her black hair short and sharp
as always. Her body was as muscular and tight as ever. Her eyes were alert and
twinkled. She was dressed in her old Adjunct Overwatch outfit with military
insignias.

She had not aged a day since I last saw
her.

I stood there dumbfounded.

How was that possible? Everyone I knew
from those early years was hardly recognizable today. You’d need a geneticist
to tell I was the same person as I was seventy-eight years ago.

But there she stood, not the least bit different
than I had remembered her.

“Hank, it’s good to see you,” she said,
smiling. “Come in.”

I stepped inside, unable to take my eyes
off her. She held my arm like we were going on a stroll.

“Sorry I haven’t seen you in a while,”
she said. “I haven’t really seen anyone.”

“Except those rich people,” I said,
snapping back to reality.

“They serve their purposes. How have you
been?”

“I’ve been terrible! What do you mean,
‘how have I been’?” I asked, annoyed.

“You’ve been doing a great job with the
city.”

“We’re not all dead, if that’s what you
mean.”

“Hank,” she said, turning her beautiful
face toward mine, “why are you here?”

I took a deep breath.

“I need to know what you’re doing with Belvaille.”

“Nothing at all.”

“That’s not true, you talk to those
wealthy people, invite them over. And you hired my Kommilaire or the feral kids
or both.”

“I did that just to maintain the
markets,” she said without hesitation, completely unruffled.

“You worked with the judges, skewing
verdicts. You created your absurd list of candidates for the election. And—” I
wanted to see how she reacted. “You hired a famous assassin to presumably kill
a lot of the city leaders.”

She never lost her smile. Not a twitch.

“Hank, I never usurped your authority.”

“What authority? You were doing
everything!”

“It was necessary to remove the
impediments to true market forces. Belvaille can now function as the absolute
center of a galactic commerce hub. The markets must prevail.”

I stood looking at her for some time.

I then gazed around the tenth floor. I
had been so amazed by her appearance, I hadn’t bothered to look.

It was almost entirely one room, massive
in dimensions. It was circular, of course, since the tower itself was a
cylinder.

There were some chairs and a couch, both
homey and almost humble. There were some thin, cheap rugs placed on the floor
haphazardly, not even aligned with one another, producing an almost broken
mirror effect.

Some dusty plants and mismatched tables
were here and there.

Garm still stood smiling, confident.

“I’m not sure if this is something you
would answer,” I said, “but are you a clone?”

She didn’t move. Didn’t respond.

After some time I took a step to the
right and her head followed, with the same expression, but she didn’t speak.

“We’re sorry for the deception, Supreme
Kommilaire,” I heard a familiar voice chime.

Two Ank walked toward me from some far
off compartment at the edge of the room.

“What’s going on?” I yelled.

“It is much as you have ascertained. We
were not aware you had learned so much.”

“We shouldn’t be surprised, however,”
another said. It was difficult to tell which spoke since they had identical
voices and were still some distance away.

“I don’t understand.” I said.

They stopped about thirty feet back,
presumably because they were scared of me wringing their necks.

“We Ank have always maintained our
neutrality. It was part of our racial makeup to not take sides.”

“But after the Colmarian civil war, we
realized we had been short-sighted. Part of maintaining our business interests
meant we had to take a more active hand in policy.”

“The Colmarian Confederation no longer
exists. Incalculable resources were destroyed in the process. We could not let
that happen again.”

“Why clone Garm?” I asked.

“Because she had decision-making powers.
It was a small matter at first to bribe or otherwise influence her. Belvaille
had long been run that way. But when she became reluctant to embrace our
initiatives, we had to change tactics.”

“By cloning her?”

“First we abducted her and issued orders
on her behalf. But yes, eventually.”

“Why didn’t you clone me? Wait, am I a
clone?” I worried existentially.

“We needed your expertise in handling
the city’s more unruly inhabitants.”

“And you turned out to be a truly
excellent official. We mean that sincerely. Your Confederation is a colossal
achievement because it removes decision making from the people.”

“People are what doomed the Colmarian
Confederation,” one said, “we are pleased you saw the futility in giving them
any real power.

I was aghast.

“That’s not what the Confederation is!
I’m not trying to take away their voices at all. I didn’t expect to run it. I
expected to set it up and die, and then
they
would run it.”

“You destroyed the Totki and Olmarr
Republic and Sublime Order of Transcendence. You had to have fathomed the
instability they engendered.”

“We had tried to infiltrate those
organizations in our own ways, but yours were so much more direct. And
permanent.”

“Belvaille will be the center of the
galaxy. The other Ank Reserves have agreed. We will institute a new economy
which will make war not only obsolete, but impossible. Every life will have a
value. A definable, numerical value.”