Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (10 page)

“What are you doing in here?” a security guard
asked Delovoa.

“Cleaning,” Delovoa answered.

“Do…do you have three eyes?”

“No,” Delovoa said, closing his third eye.

The security guard stood there a moment longer
and then merely walked away.

Delovoa had been working on his first real
project and it had been significantly harder than stealing mutagens. He had
never had to build a scientific implement before, but once he started taking
apart the Colmarian Confederation technology, he found it incredibly easy to
understand and manipulate, his three brains working in concert.

The last bit only required a small amount of
artifice.

He went to his home town and put up a cheap
wooden stall with signs that said the Shaedsta-2ians required blood samples
from everyone living there.

Delovoa had to deal with the usual amount of
people playing dead, but he eventually got enough blood.

From that, he used the facility’s equipment to
construct a mutagen of his own.

He hooked up all the mutation devices to tanks
which contained his formula.

Delovoa wasn’t sure how long it would remain
secret, but while it did, every Shaedsta-2ian who was processed, would be
mutated back into a Shaedstan.

Delovoa did not quite feel satisfaction.

He did not quite feel remorse.

Those emotional states had been jumbled and
supplanted in his brains for the most part, turned over to other functions.

But as he took a transport ship deep into
Colmarian Confederation territory, he sat in his compartment laughing his
misshapen head off.

It took nearly ten years for Delovoa’s tide
pool of DNA to finally settle down.

At that point he had joined a shipping company
as a mechanic. In a year he was managing the maintenance bay. The following
year a different company had poached him for engine design on their heavy
interstellar transports.

Engineering was incredibly easy for Delovoa.

If he looked at a design once, he could not
only remember it, but instantly improve it and incorporate it into other
designs.

He still, however, had large gaps in his
personality. This led to him frequently getting beaten up, or threatened, or
blowing up vessels because he thought it would be fun to try something new and
not tell anyone.

Word got out about the brilliant inventor and
he was visited by the Colmarian Navy Department of Plumbing and Lighting.

In Colmarian Confederation fashion, the
Department of Plumbing and Lighting was the most prestigious branch of the
Engineering Services. Maybe a thousand years ago they had actually done
Plumbing and Lighting but they had since only concerned themselves with the
most advanced of advanced technologies—it was just too difficult to change
their name.

They were the ones who had built the Portals
that linked the galaxy; and built the teles used to communicate across it; and
designed the dreadnoughts, the Navy’s largest capital ships.

“Do you have a doctorate?” the recruiter asked.

“No.”

“Would you like one?”

“Not really.”

“I can offer you the chance to work for the
empire and really make a difference.”

“Why would I want to make a difference?”

“Well…” the recruiter asked, momentarily
stumped by the blunt response. “What do you want?”

“To build stuff and make money.”

“We work on the biggest projects in the galaxy.
We,” and he lowered his voice and looked around, “break the Tech Laws all the
time.”

This interested Delovoa!

Every time he got a great idea it seemed it was
illegal. He had already been visited by the police and only escaped arrest when
he dumped his project into an acid bath—though he doubted it would have lived
long anyway.

“So what do I have to do?” Delovoa asked.

“You have to pass Exam Fourteen. It’s the
standardized test for all candidates. You can take it once a year if you don’t
pass the first time. It’s fairly rigorous.”

“I’ll look it up.”

Delovoa found he had six months to prepare for
the next exam.

He decided to take a leave of absence from
work, borrowing a shuttle and borrowing about fourteen tons of high tech
equipment and tools.

He figured his bosses would discover he was on
a leave of absence sooner or later and would try and track down the stolen
equipment so he scrapped the shuttle and sold it for parts.

Delovoa took up residence on the planet Nre-dor
which was where the next test was going to take place.

“Hi,” Delovoa said to the scientist, smiling
wide.

“Do I know you?” the man answered, annoyed his
pace had been interrupted.

“What is the best way to cool the outtake valve
of a cylindrical vascilitator on a hydroxen-nitride engine?”

“What?” the man asked.

Delovoa stood there smiling.

The scientist, presented with a puzzle by a
random, creepy stranger, started to think about the potential solution.

Delovoa hit him with 75,000 volts on five
points on his body for a fraction of a second. The scientist fell to the
ground, quivering. Delovoa took the man’s pocket money, because he was running
out of cash for groceries, and attached a small device at the base of his tele.

He then ran away.

The scientist was one of the technicians in the
lab where the test took place. The device that Delovoa had planted was mapping
out the building. It also had a microphone so Delovoa could keep track of all
the conversations inside the building, as well as any the scientist had
outside.

After four months, Delovoa knew every room in
the building, everyone who worked there, their interactions, where they were
most likely to be at any moment, and the affair that the scientist was having
with one of his students.

Delovoa had to electrocute the scientist and
replace the device several more times—as well as steal more money for food.

After another month, Delovoa knew the scientist
had stopped carrying cash and was wearing a thick, rubber suit, which would
protect him from the stun gun.

Delovoa instead blackmailed the scientist by
threatening to expose the man’s numerous affairs. The poor scientist, who was
close to a nervous breakdown at this point, also asked that Delovoa stop
bothering him forever. Delovoa agreed.

On the day of the test, Delovoa was 328 miles
away in the desert on a homemade launch pad.

While rockets were simple enough, the local
Nre-dorian government didn’t simply let anyone put a satellite into orbit. Once
it had launched, Delovoa checked to see if it was in stable geosynchronous
orbit over the testing facility.

It was.

Delovoa realized he needed more money and
decided to go into cosmetic surgery.

This was an excellent opportunity because it allowed
him to experiment on biological life while also getting paid to do it.

Normally you would have to pay your test
subjects.

Almost everyone was happy with “Dr.
Nondelovoa’s” results—he used an assumed name. It was a small matter of erasing
wrinkles and pimples and suctioning fat.

His previous experience with mutations helped
him tremendously as he spliced-in the DNA from more vibrant species. Delovoa
figured by the time people started growing fur, he would have passed the exam
and be long gone.

The satellite was tracking all the electronic
signals from the facility and relaying them to Delovoa. He was hoping to
intercept the actual test questions and be able to get the results that way.

There was so much background noise, however,
that it was nearly impossible.

The next year, Delovoa started hanging out in
the clubs and bars frequented by the younger members of the facility.

Delovoa used a mild nerve gas on a few dozen of
them and after a while he had tiny cameras all inside the test building.

“These people are so stupid,” Delovoa said, at
the ease of it all.

When the test came around, however, he found
the cameras could not view the electronic testing equipment, which were
scrambled from normal view.

These engineers sure were paranoid!

Delovoa had quit the cosmetic surgery business
after the military raided his office. It was his own dumb fault for flushing
bad batches of nerve gas down the toilet. Or sometimes leaving the components
out to dry in the parking lot.

But live and learn.

Getting his hands on enough thorium was hard.
It would have been so much easier to do with plutonium, but isn’t that true
with nearly everything?

Delovoa set up a fake business for the disposal
of toxic chemicals. It took a few years to get it going and to get all the paperwork
straight. He also had to have enough customers to allay suspicions.

When he branched out into radioactive
substances, he had over forty employees and was a respected businessman going
by the name of Mr. Undelovoa.

From the waste materials he got, he managed to
extract enough thorium to make his device.

The security at the testing facility had been
increased dramatically over the years. What with nerve gas attacks and
employees being electrocuted and robbed.

But that was fine.

Delovoa’s device was parked a quarter mile from
the actual building.

It created a large, consistent pulse that could
disable most electronic devices in the building. Of course, he also increased
everyone’s cancer rate by about 13%.

Delovoa hoped that with their devices down, they
would have to use manual tests on visible paper and his cameras could finally
record them.

But the testing was postponed!

His device was found because when aircraft flew
by, they crashed.

Denied again.

It was with a sad heart that Delovoa realized he
had been beaten.

He was going to have to do this the hard way
and actually take the test in person.

When the next year rolled around he had just
closed out his waste treatment operation and converted it to weapons
manufacture. He did this when the authorities found he was merely dumping the
toxic materials he couldn’t recycle into a series of pits and covering them
with soil, polluting the water table in a hundred mile radius.

Delovoa looked as bright as a button when he
went into the facility for the first time, though he knew it inside and out.

Delovoa filled out his name, happy to use his
real one after so long.

Then Delovoa realized two things:

One, he was really bad at taking tests. He was
a haptic learner. He knew things by doing them, not thinking about them
abstractly. Throw him in a junkyard and he’ll fly out with a space ship.

And Two, he probably should have studied
sometime in the last five years.

They even offered sample tests for free. And
test tutoring.

Delovoa skimmed through the test, his heart
sinking. He didn’t know almost any of this.

In great frustration, he clicked off random
answers as fast as he could and left. It was the fastest anyone had ever
finished the test, although nearly every answer would be determined to be
incorrect.

That night Delovoa tried to put the failure out
of his head by finishing his latest project.

He had always prided himself, at least
recently, on being smart. It was all he had.

So it was without much hesitation that he
launched his newly-built cruise missiles at the facility using his satellite
for guidance.

He knew exactly where to hit based on his
extensive studying of the interior and exterior of the building.

Delovoa then drove up, found his tabulated
score on the mainframe, and changed it to a perfect 100%.

Delovoa had scored the highest ever on the Exam
Fourteen.

Candidates were allotted eight hours to take
the test and Delovoa had only taken seven minutes.

No one had suspected foul play because Delovoa
had taken the precaution a few years earlier of backing a revolution in a
breakaway province and fostering anti-government sentiment.

He provided the revolution with his cruise
missiles and other weapons shortly before he used his own. When the stockpile
was found by the military later—based on Delovoa’s anonymous tips—it was
assumed the testing facility attack had been perpetrated by the Antilovoa
Alliance of Nre-dor.