Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap

by Steven Campbell

  “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.

  CHAPTER 17

  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 9th 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.r />
  “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.”

  CHAPTER 18

  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 weasely 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.”

  CHAPTER 19

  I went back to City Hall to review checkin records. It might be the lowest paying of my jobs, but it was easy to make headway. I was nearing the end of the time window for when the Quadrad sister supposedly arrived when I spotted something odd.

  “Hey.”

  For five minutes all the videos were blank.

  I called in Buddl.

  “What’s wrong with your system, there’s a big gap here on all the videos.”

  He sat down and checked it too.

  “That’s not possible,” he said astutely.

  “Then it’s a miracle. Your main feed must have been scrambled or something.”

  “But that’s the point. Each one of the cameras is independent and feeds to a different bank. One might go out, but never all of them. Not sure if you know, but some years ago Belvaille was invaded by Dredel Led at checkin.”

  “Yes. I’m aware.”

  “Oh, right. But we increased security after that. If this happened, it would trip alarms for all the guards.”

  “Could the guards have been bribed?”

  “That’s twenty people who are on random schedules. Not even counting the people at City Hall. Did you check quarantine records too?”

  We pulled those tapes to cross-reference the ships that would correspond to that gap at checkin. The data was also missing from there.

  “That’s not possible,” he said again.

  These pale ladies were good. No wonder Garm didn’t want them skipping around. Not that they were exactly on a leash.

  “Can I get the ship manifests that would correspond to these points at checkin and quarantine?”

  “I can get you the passenger manifests, but not what was shipped. But it could be up to thousands of people. It depends on how many ships came in at that time.”

  “That’s fine.”

  I figure with the list, I could then search for all those people. By process of elimination, the person I didn’t find would be the pale sister. And I would have a name, description, and other information from the ship’s record.

  “Is it possible a person could be shipped as cargo?”

  “No. Even animals have to be put into a passenger manifest. If it’s not, it won’t be protected and when the ship portals, it would be killed. That’s why good beer tells you how many times it’s portaled before it gets to you on the container.”

  “Really? I never saw that. You learn something new every month,” I said, wondering how long I’d been drinking bad-tasting beer and didn’t know it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Now I had to see a man about a gun.

  “Hey, Hank. What are you wearing?” Delovoa asked as he opened the door.

  “It’s a helmet.”

  He stared at it.

  “It’s fancy. Is that the new style?”

  “I don’t know. I just have to wear it for a job.”

  “And you’re wearing shorts and new shoes. This is like a whole wardrobe switch.”

  “Eh, you got to stay hip,” I said. “And women like to see men’s legs just like we do.”

  “They look comfortable.”

  “They are,” I said, demonstrating by lifting my legs.

  “So what you been up to?” he asked.

  “Working. I got a bunch of new jobs. I’m working for the corporations now, too.”

  “I figured it would only be a matter of time. They got a lot of money to throw around. Might as well grab some.”

  “I’m trying to figure them out, but they’re complicated.”

  “What’s complicated?”

  I told him about Rendrae’s story and the corps fighting by the telescopes.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Delovoa said, biting his lip in thought.

  “That’s not what I came here for, though. Your autocannon nearly killed me firing it.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “I—wait, how did you hear? I was the only one there.”

  “No, I don’t mean someone told me, I literally heard it. That gun isn’t exactly quiet. Did you say the suckerface thing before you used it?”

  “Suckface. Maybe. But when I shot, it flu
ng me like twenty feet in the air and I landed on my face.”

  “It couldn’t possibly do that.”

  “Maybe not twenty feet, but a lot. And it spun me like a top.”

  “How did you hold it?”

  I showed him.

  “No, you need to get your legs down and lean into it. Keep your center of gravity low,” he said, stretching down like he was about to do the splits.

  “I can’t do that,” I complained. “Especially during a fight. I’m not that flexible. Can you make the gun a bit smaller?”

  Delovoa threw his arms up.

  “It’s not a recipe where you can just add more or less sugar. It is what it is. Everything about that cannon is designed to work a certain way. It was hard enough to make it manual. Even if I cut down on the charge, the ballistics would get all wonky and it would lose tremendous accuracy.”

  “Accuracy? I can’t even aim. It doesn’t have a sight for me to look over.”

  “Hank, if you put your head above that barrel to look down a sight the cannon would flip up and hit you in the face. And that might be enough to hurt even you. You need to keep your bulk behind the recoil.”

  “Alright. I need another armor piercing shell.”

  “Sure,” he said, about to head into his basement.

  “And I need fifty guns and fifty sets of adjustable body armor.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Anything illegal I could possibly want could be found at the Belvaille Gentleman’s Club. I looked around for people on my short list I wanted to recruit.

  Wait. Why should I look for them? I had two million credits to my name. I called the shots.

  I sat down in the corner of the cafeteria.

  “Put some blinds around here,” I said to the cook, indicating my table. “And bring me a party tray and twelve cans of beer—that hasn’t portaled more than twice.” I gave him a token with a hundred credits on it. He looked at it in his greasy hand.

  “What’s a party tray?”

  “Stuff with dips. And things to dip. That can be shared.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “I can make sandwiches,” he said. “And we got three beers. Garbage, junk, and not bad.”

  “Twelve cans of not bad and fifty cups. And make me like fifty little sandwiches. Really small—”