“No, she is to marry into the royal family. She will become Third Countess of the Heolmarkt.”
“Oh.”
“She did not tell you this?”
“No. She said you have arranged marriages. That’s all.”
“It is arranged. It’s been arranged for thirty years before her birth,” he said.
“That seems…inconvenient. What if they don’t like each other?”
“They don’t.”
And he had no other answer than that and he seemed to think it warranted none.
“She’s happy here. We’re both happy. I love her,” I said.
“I will grant that you are being truthful on all three accounts. May I ask what it is you do here, Hank?”
“I’m…I do odd jobs,” I said.
“You are security. You fight on behalf of gangs. You negotiate deals. Collect debts. Act as a messenger,” he retorted.
“If you knew, why did you ask?”
“The fact you were willing to lie tells me you are embarrassed of your position, which says you are both self-aware and have a kind heart. My daughter made a good choice. However this city is not a place for her.”
“We can move to another city. We’re not tied to Belvaille.”
“Yes, you can move. But you have learned some skills here. Those I have enquired with have spoken highly of you. You would have to start from scratch wherever you move.”
“We’re young, we can do it.”
“Yes. My daughter can become…a waitress on some other planet even though she has been brought up from birth to be a countess.”
Come to think of it, Karene was kind of a bad waitress. She seemed to have difficulty understanding the basic concepts of customer service.
“She can learn. Karene is smart.”
“She is. Which is why she needs to take her place at court. If she does not, her family will be forlorn.”
“What’s that mean?”
“All of our wealth is owned by the royal family. It is how our society operates. We have been preparing for this event as a certainty. If she stays here with you, her entire family will become destitute. Her six sisters and four brothers—”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Her mother. Myself. Her cousins. All of us who had prepared for this union will be left without resources.”
“Well…” I said, struggling, “that’s your fault. She should be able to choose who she wants to be with.”
“If this was a millennium ago we would not even be having this conversation and we would forcefully take Karene away from here,” he said.
I was about to get angry but he held his hand up in some royal gesture that instantly silenced my plebian blood.
“But it is not a millennium ago. I have not come here to force anything. I have come to speak to you man-to-man. I ask what future do you have and at what cost would it come? This has been an experience for her, maybe the greatest of her life. But you must be intimately aware there are always repercussions for our actions, no matter how well-meaning. If you were to stay here on this path, would she be safe? Would she remain happy?”
I understood familial pressure. I had shirked my responsibilities by coming to Belvaille. But the only ones who were disappointed about that were the Navy and maybe my parents. I didn’t make fifty brothers and sisters paupers or give up a title.
Later, Karene confirmed everything her father had said.
But she also stated she was willing to give all that up and her family would have to get by without her. She said it was unfair that she should be burdened with this responsibility since before she was even born.
I did not fall out of love with her in those moments, but my rational brain, so long strangled by the tentacles of love, finally reappeared.
What would we do?
I could be successful on Belvaille because no one could hurt me. I saw that this city was uniquely predisposed to reward my mutations.
But Karene was not only unprepared for life here, she was unprepared for life nearly anywhere.
All my days growing up I had been trained that I would be joining the Navy. I was a warrior by instinct and by heritage.
Karene had been trained to be a countess. And while she could carry a tray of drinks semi-competently, since her father visited, I became more and more aware that she had little appreciation of life outside a palace.
I was still deciding what to do with all this when Karene’s father came to visit along with a dozen of his soldiers. Perhaps to drive the point home a little clearer.
But Karene was a countess and she was not going to be bullied, even by her father.
They had hard words for each other and her father was going to leave, but he ran into Leeny’s men approaching.
“Hank,” I heard Leeny say through a speaker. “Give up the girl.”
It was a ludicrous statement.
“Why?” I yelled back, noticing about twenty of Leeny’s armed men.
“She hasn’t paid me my cut of her earnings since she got here, and by contract, she’s mine to sell now,” he said.
I stared back at Karene.
“You weren’t paying him?”
She was confused.
“Paying him what?”
“The percentage of your paycheck,” I said.
“Was I supposed to be getting paid?” she asked, further confused.
Love may not be blind, but it was certainly bad at finances.
There was no way out of this apartment except past Leeny’s goons.
“You need to go with your father,” I told Karene. “His men can keep you safe.”
“What about you?” she implored.
“If he knew I was here, he has weapons he thinks can hurt me. That means I might not be able to fight them off. I’ll go after Leeny, you get her out of here,” I told her father.
He gave me a slight bow.
“Hank,” she said, and gave me a kiss that was pure desperation.
I looked at her pitifully.
“If I don’t see you, know that I loved you,” I told her.
“Don’t say that, get past them and father will protect us,” she said.
“If you can reach our ship at the port, we have twenty-three more men,” he stated.
“Okay, I’ll buy you some time and head there. But keep her under cover,” I said.
I touched her hair, looked into those beautiful eyes, and rushed outside with a battle cry.
Her father’s soldiers and Leeny’s men began to trade fire. I hadn’t expected them to be this ferocious and disdainful of casualties. But I guess the life of a fantastical woman was worth countless ugly thugs on a remote space station.
I looked back and saw her father shielding her as they hurried in the direction of the port.
Some bullets bounced off of me and I felt this would be rather easy until two men stepped up and threw buckets of liquid at me. I almost stopped in my tracks simply because it was so odd. Did they think I was water soluble or something?
When they flung lit pieces of paper at me was when I realized: it wasn’t water.
Head-to-toe I burst into a giant orange fireball!
I couldn’t see anything and I flailed around helplessly.
“Hank!” I heard Karene scream from down the street.
There’s not a lot you can do when you’re doused with a burning liquid on all sides. It’s such a primal fear that grips you that even if you had a fire extinguisher in your hands, you’d be hard pressed to use it.
I fell to my elbows and knees and finally to the ground.
I could faintly hear what I thought to be Karene in the far distance as the shouting and shooting all died down.
“That was the most romantic thing I ever saw,” Leeny said, “except for all that bad acting.” He scowled at his men.
They smothered me with some blankets and extinguishers and I stood up. I had lost all my hair, my clothes, but otherwise I was unhurt.
Conventional fire d
idn’t do a whole lot to me.
Everyone except Karene had been in on the subterfuge. We thought it was the only way to ensure she would leave willingly. No one was ever in danger, other than me if the fire went wrong.
It had been the most difficult decision of my young life, but I felt there had been no choice. I could never have protected Karene. Not all the time.
If I hadn’t been punching people in the Navy or punching people on Belvaille, I would have been punching people somewhere.
If things ever got nasty enough, they wouldn’t go after me they would go after her to get to me.
On Belvaille, family was almost universally excluded from gang fights. It wasn’t that they were too polite to hurt family, it was that they didn’t need to. Why attack the girlfriend when you can attack the gang member himself?
If I stayed in my life of violence, which was something I was uniquely suited for, Karene would never have been safe.
We might have had some amazing years, but I felt confident it would have turned out badly.
She would have ended up resenting me for cutting her off from her family and her life of luxury; and to shelter her, I would have had to take a job back in the sewers or some equally horrid place.
Even if we weren’t hurt or killed we wouldn’t have been able to live up to our potentials. She wouldn’t have been a countess and I wouldn’t have been a well-respected thug.
By ending the story before it turned sour, we could always pretend it would have had a happy ending.
ADJUNCT OVERWATCH
“What do you make of them?” Yre-yon asked me.
We were at the docks watching men, Colmarian Navy soldiers, come aboard our city.
“I can’t say,” I replied.
Belvaille had just lost its sixth Navy leader.
It wasn’t much of an honor to be sent to Belvaille, at the edge of the galaxy, to maintain a city with very little population and even less value. The last man, Korpal Rushe, had died of drinking and drugging and other such things. I’d like to say he expired in a blaze of excitement, but he was pretty wretched and foul near the end.
It wasn’t even as if we had bribed Rushe with the lifestyle that killed him. He had nothing the criminals of Belvaille needed. He was just a customer like anyone else. I think some of the gangs even tried to cut him off from their wares, fearing what would happen if we continued our trend of extinguishing the noble military men who were sent here to govern us.
We had Navy personnel on the station already. They had been here from the start. There were only a few hundred out of a city population that was around fifty thousand at this point. They did their things and we did ours.
It was recognized among all the gangs that we didn’t mess with our Navy citizens. If we went to a warehouse with twenty hard thugs, planning on robbing and stripping the building bare, and there was one skinny Navy cadet standing guard, we’d all turn around and leave without a word. Increased Navy oversight could bring Belvaille’s illicit operations to an instant and bloody end.
And then what would we do? Go back to regular Colmarian space? That was a death sentence for quite a few people on the station. Best to leave the Navy alone.
“Go talk to them, Hank,” Oeul’tain nudged me.
Of the five of us standing here, three had been in gang wars with one another just a few months past. But that was then, and now they were just guys standing around bored.
“Sure,” I shrugged.
I was just starting to get established in my role as negotiator and fixer. Not a strict member of any gang. It shouldn’t be a big deal to talk to some Navy guys.
I walked across the street to where three Navy soldiers were looking at their teles and speaking in quiet tones.
“Hey,” I said jovially. “Welcome to Belvaille. Where do you all hail from?”
All three men drew their weapons on me instantly and wore evil expressions.
“Back off, filth,” one of them commanded.
I hurriedly returned to my fellow hoodlums.
“What did they say?”
“We got a problem,” I answered.
The Navy set up operations in City Hall.
The man in charge was Adjunct Overwatch Monhsendary. Adjunct Overwatch was his title. The highest title we had before was a Lance Major, with all the rest being Korpals.
Adjunct Overwatch was apparently some big deal. It was a position specifically created by the military to run installations like Belvaille. This guy wasn’t here because he washed out of Navigator School. He was here with the express purpose of dealing with this station. His whole job was created with that in mind.
Apparently, Adjunct Overwatch Academy taught violence.
Soon after Monhsendary was settled, something we liked to call the “Knuckle Squads” appeared.
About ten Navy soldiers would move in a group and ask you what you did for a living. If they didn’t like the answer, and they pretty much never did, they beat the living crap out of you.
Right there in the street. Or wherever you happened to be.
No sentencing. No fine. No formal proclamations. Just, “hey, what is your occupation?” And if you weren’t one of the few people who worked on the city’s infrastructure or otherwise had a “real” job: blamo!
I was a bit concerned what I would do if they asked me. Not because I was worried about being attacked, I was worried they would learn I was here and I’d get recruited into the Navy like all my previous family members.
“You. Come here.”
“Me?” I replied to the soldier.
“No, your Aunt Tillee. Get over here.”
I clomped over, flat-footed, my mind racing.
“What’s your name?” One of them asked.
“Oltendius Balvorian, apprentice Oscillation Scoop Operator.”
“What’s that?” one asked suspiciously.
“It’s the upper armature that secures ships docking at Belvaille’s port,” I lied expertly.
“How long you been doing that?”
“Four years. Before this I worked in the sewers for twelve years with Organa Dultz.”
They looked me over. Clearly I was not a sewer worker.
“Why would you work in the sewers for twelve years?”
“It was a steady paycheck. They didn’t have anything else open at the time. Once this job was available—the previous guy was crushed to death—I jumped here.”
One of the soldiers spoke up to his comrades.
“I hear those jobs are really dangerous, especially in space stations like this.”
“Oh, it is,” I confirmed. “If we don’t work with the pilots perfectly, their ship can lurch forward and kill the operator.”
The soldiers who were looking for a fight were already bored.
“Hmm,” they said, forgetting me.
I hadn’t even rehearsed this lie. It had just come to me. I had intended to go a different direction, but I suddenly thought: what would be detailed and dull at the same time?
“Monhsendary has to go,” one of the gang bosses said, pounding his table.
We were in the Belvaille Athletic Club in the very first city-wide gang boss meeting. I was invited as a courtesy.
Every table was filled with three or more bosses, many of whom disliked one another and may have even fought in the past.
I couldn’t get over how nice the place was compared to the Belvaille Gentleman’s Club. The food was good, the furniture was tasteful and expensive, and it didn’t stink in here.
“I say we just walk up there in force and shoot him,” Bremin said, clouds of smoke exiting his mouth. He was some peculiar mutant and was literally burning up.
“We can’t just openly kill him,” Sonidara said. She was one of the few female gang bosses at the time. An older woman, thin, with wispy white hair. She looked like a great-great-grandmother but she was one of the big players in counterfeit artwork on the station. In fact, that racket didn’t exist before she brought it here. Belva
ille produced about a freighter’s worth of ancient, treasured collectables every year like clockwork.
“We’ve been through how many Navy bosses?” a rosy-cheeked boss asked, his comb-over oiled and gleaming. “They’ll just send another.”
“Sonidara is right,” I said. “We’ve had other Navy heads, but if one is actually murdered, that’s a whole other story. They’ll hook up cables to the station and fling us into a star. Or worse, they’ll land and start doing background checks.”
Everyone considered that.
“Hank, do you think you could talk to this Adjunct Overwatch?” Tamshius asked me. He had recently become a boss himself. He had a restaurant and casino that were doing well.
All eyes were on me.
“I…don’t think so. He’s not like one of us. He’s Navy.”
“We’re all Colmarians, right?” Sonidara said.
“What am I going to say? ‘Hey, could you stop beating us up?’ It’s not as if he doesn’t know it’s happening. We have to offer him something.”
“Find out what he wants,” a short boss named Fingers said. He only had two fingers. He was a very odd mutant. He could turn parts of himself into extremely powerful explosives. It’s how he lost his fingers. Not blowing them off, by selling them.
“I can try, I guess. But I want to get paid.”
There were lots of grumbles and I interrupted them.
“If anyone else wants to walk up to City Hall with the hundreds of guards there, and then knock on the door of an Adjunct Overwatch, then I’ll gladly step aside.”
We negotiated back and forth for a bit and the bosses took up a collection.
I wasn’t sure how to get into City Hall, actually.
This was a guy who randomly beat up people in the city he controlled so why would he deign to speak to one of its citizens?
I didn’t think I could bribe the guards—there were too many. They also seemed to be a bit too sadistic to choose money over a good club to the head. And I liked my head.
“I can get you a meeting with the Adjunct Overwatch,” Delovoa said.
Delovoa was weird even by Colmarian standards. He had three eyes and a large cranium. He was a supplier of technological goods on the station. He had a very bizarre personality, but I liked him because he was funny, his work was good, and he had the same non-gang status that I had.
Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years Page 4