Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy (29 page)

There was a huge line of Navy vessels waiting
to dock but our little shuttle snuck past the mega-craft and I got back to my
beloved Belvaille.

For a whole thirty minutes, I felt like a real
badass. I was literally in command of the entire city. All the true Navy
hotshots had returned to space to prepare for the Boranjame. I had tens of
thousands of troops at my disposal.

After my brief flush of excitement being a real
boss, it got damn tired. I had Navy guys questioning me about things of which I
had no clue and every crime boss or flunky was calling me for favors.

I ordered that Rendrae be brought to me, and he
was, kicking and screaming. I told him to start up
The News
again as we
needed it.

“You’re not cut out for a revolutionary,
Rendrae. You’re a reporter,” I explained.

“Editor-in-chief and publisher,” he corrected.

“People need to know what’s going on and I
can’t answer every tele from a quarter-million people on the station.”

“I’ll do it if you designate me the official
information source of Belvaille.”

Considering he never had a competitor in all
the years he published:

“Absolutely, I can’t think of a better
authority,” I said.

Garm tracked me down somehow, as I was
constantly moving to try and shake off all the responsibility. The guards
around me didn’t like her. She was still “the traitor.”

She saw my scarred face.

“And I didn’t think you could get any uglier.”

“I like them, they add character.”

“Yeah, character was totally what you were
missing before,” she sniffed.

“What happened to Wallow?” I asked, wondering
if I had fared better than he.

“Few broken bones I think. The medical ships
were much too small for him. He’s got his leg propped on a house in the south,”
she explained. “Zadeck’s men are mostly looking after him and being reimbursed
by the Navy.”

“Zadeck is still alive?” I’d just assumed he
was dead when Wallow got co-opted by the Navy.

“He’s very much alive. No one knows all the
details of how he lost Wallow. But he’s a completely new person. Playing nice
with everyone.”

“I bet. Without his muscle, he’s not much.”

“He still has the richest block in the city.
That’s a lot of influential friends,” she countered.

“I guess,” I said begrudgingly. “Wouldn’t it be
kind of funny if the Boranjame didn’t show up? All this work for nothing. Not
that I’d be complaining.”

“There’s a ton of chatter on the telescopes.
More than we’ve ever seen. But enough small talk, you have a lot of decisions
to make, Oberhoffman.” She hauled out a folder with what looked like hundreds
of forms.

I gazed at the stack of work and my heart sank.

“I quit,” I said seriously. I had been thinking
of the best way to do that all day. I established a Governing Council. Garm,
some of the bosses, some Naval officers, merchants, and a few chief engineers
who kept Belvaille afloat.

I basically gave them all the decision-making
power and I went back to being Hank, though with a really cool uniform.

With my new freedom I stopped by to see Jyen
and Jyonal. Jyen was as worried as ever, practically trembling.

“You need to work on how you handle stress,” I
said once I had stepped inside.

“I was so worried about you. I’m worried about
all of us.” Her eyes were lucid. You could be swallowed by them.

However, before that could happen, Jyonal came
in looking like he had just woken up.

“Hank. Great to see you,” he said, shaking my
hand. “Sorry about trapping you with the Dredel Led, it was the only thing I
could think of.”

“No problem, it worked.”

“He’s been feeling guilty for weeks,” Jyen
explained.

“You guys want to eat?” I said to prove there
were no hard feelings. They were good, if very troublesome, kids.

I awoke in my apartment later that night to
sirens and screaming. I staggered outside to see what the commotion was.

I grabbed a soldier running by.

“Are the ships ready?” I asked him, assuming
the Boranjame had finally made an appearance.

“We’re evacuating now, sir,” he said quickly
and rushed off.

Huh? I meant were they attacking.

Back inside as I dressed, I tried contacting
anyone I knew on the big ships. The Wardian, General, anyone above me. No one
responded.

I got a tele from Garm.

“The Boranjame,” I said.

“I know,” she replied. “It’s a royal
world-ship.”

Garm, Delovoa, and I were in one of the
telescope buildings looking at data I didn’t understand. Even the normally calm
operators were tense and sweating.

“See this,” Delovoa said, pointing at abstract
numbers and swirling magnetic patterns. “That’s them.”

“So what’s that mean?” I asked.

“It will take them a while to get here
depending on how quickly they travel. It can’t be very fast just because of its
mass,” he said.

“Can the Navy destroy it?”

“Hank, technically we’re in a wide orbit around
that ship. If it gets much closer, its gravity alone will tear us apart.”

“Dreadnoughts are designed to destroy planets,
right?” I begged.

“It’s not a planet, Hank. It’s a spaceship. An
armed one. If the Navy is smart, they’ll run,” Garm said.

“What will that solve?” I fired back.

“Them being blown up,” she said simply.

I didn’t have real access to the top-secret
Navy intel, but I could tap into some officer tele channels because of my rank.
In their haste and panic, they weren’t very cautious with messages.

The Navy was indeed fleeing. It became pretty
obvious as all the remaining soldiers disembarked. They abandoned everything
they couldn’t carry in their hands.

They were all gone in a little over two days.

Not only were they leaving Belvaille to its
destruction, but the entire state of Ginland that housed it. Who knows how many
billions of people. Once folks learned we were not being evacuated, there was
panic and more than a handful of deaths.

We didn’t receive official word until the fleet
was underway. Basically the gist was they were in combat mode and couldn’t risk
the rest of the Colmarian Confederation by taking time to rescue all us
civilians. And they expected to be in battle shortly anyway.

It was as cutthroat a sentiment as I’d ever
heard in all my years on Belvaille. And just like that, the Navy was gone.
Every ship except maybe a few dozen shuttles and some frigates with mechanical
problems they left behind.

For the Boranjame world-ship to use its a-drive
deeper into Colmarian space, it had to reach the unique area around the Portal.
Delovoa calculated that when it was finally close enough to be able to
activate, Belvaille would actually be within the diameter of the ship. So even
if we survived its gravity, which we wouldn’t, it would physically run into us.
And that’s assuming it didn’t blast the station out of the way first.

Freighters had been languishing around the
station for months, but people couldn’t be put in cargo holds, they’d die in
transit. We figured only a few thousand people at the most could be evacuated
from the station using every ship we had. Because of that, we decided to not
even try, lest open conflict broke out for those precious seats. The dock was
closed.

Jyonal knew a world-ship was coming before the
rest of us did when the Navy tried to kidnap him before they left. That didn’t
turn out so well for the poor souls who failed to realize what he was capable
of.

But as strong as he was:

“I can’t hurt that thing,” Jyonal told us.
“It’s too far away, I can only affect stuff I can see. Besides, it’s a planet.”

We had all gathered at City Hall. With Delovoa,
Garm, and many of the bosses on the steps addressing the crowd. Seemed like
every person in Belvaille was there. Old, rich, poor, children. The streets
were crammed with folks looking for a miracle, as they were well aware of what
was in store for us all.

Garm stood up to begin. She spoke into a
microphone.

“Does anyone have any ideas?” she started with
confidence.

“If we get out of the way of the ship, won’t it
just leave us alone?” I asked. “We’re pretty small.”

“That’s a good point,” Delovoa stated. “If they
are after resources, they’d expend more trying to deal with us than they could
ever recoup.”

An old-timer who ran systems spoke up quietly.

“Belvaille can move. In addition to its
stabilizers it has real engines, but they haven’t been turned on in fifty years
at least. And it’s not fast. It’s a space station,” he explained.

“The Boranjame aren’t fast either,” Delovoa
said.

“Those engines don’t work,” another old-timer,
clearly involved with the same work, replied. They began to argue about it.

“Can’t we take the Portal? I know there’s some
ships here,” one person asked.

“Not enough time and not nearly enough ships,”
I said.

“Can’t we send a ship to them and talk? Work
out an agreement?” a boss naïvely asked.

“That’s a world-ship. That means somewhere on
board is a member of the royal family. Anything that gets remotely near it will
get scanned down and destroyed,” Garm replied.

“Delfiblinium can’t be scanned,” I blurted.

“Hank, that square of delfiblinium you have
won’t do anything to a world-ship,” Delovoa cautioned.

“You got some delfiblinium?” one of the bosses
asked me with respect.

“We have as much as we could possibly need.”
And I looked towards Jyonal.

Most of the station was trying to get the
engines going and get us fit for travel.

Jyonal was at the dock with Jyen creating as
much delfiblinium as he could.

And I was getting the bad news from Delovoa and
Garm.

“We can’t just stick it in a shuttle,” Garm
said. “They would detect the shuttle even if they didn’t scan the metal.”

“Why does it have to be a shuttle? Tie it
together with a rope and push it out,” I said.

“The real problem is how do we detonate it?”
Delovoa asked.

“I thought it was super explosive.”

“It is, but not to start. It’s an ultra-complex
alloy with very specific requirements to trigger it.”

“Can you make a detonation device?” Garm asked.

“Yes, if I had more time, but it’d need a very
strong transmitter and power source as well as the ability to track the
Boranjame ship. The problem is any large electronics will be scanned. They’ll
see it and shoot it to be safe. Their range is much further than the radius of
any explosion we create.”

“They can block any remote electronic signals,”
Garm said. “The Navy jammed our teles with just a dreadnought, so I assume a
world-ship can do more.”

I took a deep breath.

“Give me the detonator and I’ll go,” I said.

They looked at me. If they weren’t convinced I
was an idiot before, they were now.

“That doesn’t make any sense. What will that
provide?” Garm said dismissively.

“They can’t scan me,” I stated. “No one can.
That’s why medical instruments never work even when they’re shoved up my butt
and how my distant relatives managed to fight on the Ontakian home world for
decades.”

The pair eyed me curiously—and maybe with a
little unease thinking about the butt-thing.

“I can explode the metal however close you want
me to be,” I said.

“There’s got to be some other way,” Garm
argued.

Delovoa was thinking.

“If we put him in a spacesuit, fashion some
irregular metal hull to store the delfiblinium, they’ll just think it’s part of
the debris that Belvaille has dumped over the decades. They wouldn’t shoot it
just because. That might give it more velocity than it already had and
potentially make it dangerous,” he said.

“No.” Garm was adamant. “Can’t you rig some
kind of smart trigger? Why does he have to go?”

“The more scannable components we put out
there, the more likely it is to be destroyed. I can make a simple physical
detonator, some gas canisters so he can steer it, and…a window for him to see
out of,” he added quietly, realizing what he was saying.

“The question is will it be enough to destroy
that ship?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Delovoa said. “If this entire space station
were made out of delfiblinium it wouldn’t be enough.”

“Then forget it,” I said.

“But it will still do damage, Hank,” he added.
“And it IS a royal vessel. They aren’t going to hang around if delfiblinium
starts exploding around them.” He looked to Garm for confirmation and her sad
eyes seemed to agree.

“How close would I have to be?” I asked.

“Just before you collide with it would be
best,” Delovoa said sagely.

I stood at the dock dressed in my insanely
clunky spacesuit looking at the scrap heap that I’d ride like a missile to my
doom.

“That looks safe,” I said.

It was about as big as my apartment, had odd,
jutting pieces of metal to make it scan like natural debris, and it was
chock-full of delfiblinium.

There were thousands of people crammed nearby
to see me off. The mood was somber. Funereal. Not sure what they were all so
upset about, it’s not like they were about to commit suicide.

I had been pumped full of slow-release vitamins
and salts and whatever else they could think of for the long trip. Although the
“ship” was sealed, there was no air inside to reduce any chance of it being
scanned, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to eat or drink.

Delovoa came over with last-minute
instructions.

“There are windows in it. I made marks for you
to judge how fast you’re going based on the size of the world-ship. You have
three jets to help you maneuver, but don’t waste them; you can only make small
course corrections. When you get close, the world-ship is going to take up the
whole window and you’re going to have to guess. It’s important you don’t
detonate too early.”

He handed me a small device. It was a metal
cylinder maybe six inches in length. It looked somewhat like the flame-tube I
had purchased from him before.

“Flip the cap off and press this. That’s it,”
he said.

“And you’re sure delfiblinium can’t be
scanned?” I asked.

“Well, technically anything can be scanned,” he
said simply.

“What? Why are you telling me this now?”

“It’s just so unlikely. It’s about the rarest
substance in the galaxy. There’s no reason to ever scan for it.”

“That’s a planet. How do you know they don’t
have a million people doing nothing but scanning for delfiblinium and
level-four mutants hurtling towards them?”

“I don’t,” he said like a jerk. “But it’s a
little late to go back to the drawing board.”

Which was certainly true. Even if this was the
longest of long shots. Our engineers couldn’t get Belvaille started for the
simple reason that the engines had been removed and sold almost half a century
ago. Funny thing, I think I was part of that deal.

“It’s going to take you anywhere from two to
four days to reach their ship, depending on how fast they move,” he continued.

“Is this stuff you pumped in me going to keep
me alive that long? Four days? I can’t go four hours without eating.”

“Do you know how to meditate?” someone in the
audience asked, and if I had seen who it was, I would have shot him.

Yeah, I was carrying my shotgun. My only
possession I wanted to die with. I would have kept my plasma pistol if it
hadn’t blown up. I knew what kind of mission this was. A few hours before I
suited up, I beamed an anonymous donation to the Ginland glocken team, The
Reskin Sleepers, who have a 138-year unbroken losing streak. It was my entire
life savings of almost 45 million credits. Maybe those losers will finally win
a game—if Ginland isn’t destroyed.

“Just try and be focused,” Delovoa said. “Get
as much sleep as you can early. As you get closer you’ll need to stay awake.
Try and feel the gravity. And avoid going to the bathroom.”

“What? I can’t pee for four days? What do you
think I am?” I asked.

“I mean, you can,” he seemed to think to
himself. “But you’ll be soggy.”

With that, he shook my hand and went to make
the last preparations on my coffin.

I turned to the assembled crowd. They seemed to
be expecting a speech. I cleared my throat.

“My name is Hank. As of seven months ago, I
have been on this space station for 132 years. I’ve watched it transform this
way and that way. People come and go. I’ve worked for many of you. Against many
of you. I’ve…killed more people than I can count, not always for good reasons.
Of that, I am not proud. I’ve settled your fights, fixed your business deals,
done your dirty work, and generally done what I was told. And I’d like to say
that all you immature bastards can kiss my ass.”

There was very little reaction to my talk. One
guy screamed, “Woo!”

Garm approached me. She seemed unsure of
herself for the first time ever. She didn’t look me in the eye.

There was a pause and Jyen ran up past Garm and
kissed me on the mouth, knocking her teeth into mine. She was crying.

“Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said, her
nose running.

“Alright, alright, if Hank kisses everyone he’s
ever known it’ll take a month,” Garm said, tugging me away from Jyen. We headed
away towards the ship.

“Can’t wait to get rid of me?” I asked her.

“Why didn’t we ever get together?” she
responded quietly. But there was no accusatory undertone.

“I think,” I began, “I just didn’t want you as
an ex-girlfriend.”

She didn’t answer as I ducked inside the ship.
I turned back to see her at the entrance.

“Garm, if you manage to survive this, I want
you to go on. Living,” I said sincerely.

She gave me a strange look.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Delovoa strapped me in, attached the detonator
to the stockpile of metal, and then fastened it to the wall beside me. He put
on my helmet and checked all the manual systems and backup systems. I looked
like I was in an iron lung. They closed off my area of the port and made final
preparations.

Given my last experiences in shuttles and how
long I would have to be in here, I truly hoped I didn’t throw up in my suit.

I didn’t ask how they propelled my ship. I
figured I didn’t want to know. I was sure that after a point it was strictly
momentum. There were was no sense of acceleration past the very beginning of
the trip.

You’d think there would be a lot of things to
ponder in the void of space. Out here alone with myself.

But mostly it was death.

Being surrounded by countless tons of
delfiblinium in a primitive raft of a spaceship on my way to blow myself up
might have had something to do with my morbid disposition.

I admitted I was afraid. I guess afraid of
dying. I wasn’t much on big thoughts, but I knew I hadn’t lived the best of
lives. Maybe this final act was a way to get a bit of redemption, for what it
was worth.

I woke up to an odd feeling. My back was wet. I
guessed I was sweating. As I cleared the cobwebs from my mind, I realized that
didn’t make any sense. Any liquids would just roll around in my suit. Then I
noticed my arms were no longer floating. I had weight.

I looked back through the window and saw solid
red. An orange-red mass. It filled all the windows simultaneously.

“Holy crap,” I breathed.

I tried to focus my eyes. I was likely
travelling at tens of thousands of miles an hour. Or who knows?

I grabbed the plunger and clicked it open.

I needed details. What was I looking at? How
close was I? It was impossible to tell. My heart was going crazy in panic, my
thumb on the trigger. I had never felt so much adrenaline, I could hardly
think.

“Don’t waste it. Don’t die for nothing.”

Then I saw structures. Squares and rectangles
created by hand, as they were too uniform to be natural. But were they
buildings? Cities? There were no clouds or atmosphere, I had no perspective.

There were more. Whole clusters of them. A
whole world of them. But I couldn’t tell their scale. I realized I had to do
it. I still couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t want to risk pancaking into them.

“Eat suck, suckface.”

I clicked the plunger and nothing immediately
happened. I looked at boxes that contained the alloy, expecting some glowing
chain reaction, but it was just sitting there.

I clicked the plunger repeatedly, pushed in the
cord at the bottom to make sure it was secure. Nothing.

“No!” I screamed.