Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (5 page)

He was by far the ugliest person I had seen in
my life and was a new low for Belvaille.

His face and body were almost randomly stitched
together. It’s as if he was an ugly man who was looking in the mirror and the
mirror smashed. Then someone made a drawing of the shattered image while an
angry dog chewed at the artist’s feet.

It was the first time I heard people really
start to worry about our gene pool. We were all pretty good-natured about being
unattractive, but was Belvaille really going to become the refuge for the
galaxy’s most hideous people?

That was pretty depressing.

The man’s name was Leeny and he seemed to check
the city out for a few months and then disappeared.

When he came back maybe six months later, Belvaille
would never be the same.

He brought with him about a thousand of the
most attractive people we had ever seen.

It was like a non-stop model convention.

No work got done for at least a month as the
city suffered from a series of terminal infatuations.

Leeny supplied brothels, escorts, dance
partners, bartenders, waitresses, and hosts. Any job where it helped to be
good-looking kicked a percentage back to Leeny. And that was an awful lot of
jobs.

Men, women, and other, he catered to all
interests.

There are many ways you can become mentally
impaired: being very sleepy, drinking to excess, getting hit in the head, being
drugged.

But nothing makes a person quite as stupid as
falling in love.

It’s not even as if everything you ever learned
was forgotten, that would be simple. It’s like your perceptions and cognition
are warped in completely inexplicable directions.

Of all the debilitating loves, young love had
to be the most severe.

I was still technically young when I met and
fell in love with a woman named Karene Cantosh.

I won’t even try and describe her because it
would be pointless. I was in love immediately so what my eyes communicated to
my brain was gibberish. Suffice it to say, I had heart palpitations around her,
I sweated uncontrollably, and only by regularly telling myself to breathe did I
not keel over dead on the spot.

Karene was a waitress at a restaurant. She had
no dark past—not very dark, anyway. Her planet was one that practiced arranged marriages
and Karene was nearing the tail end of the acceptable age range. Her parents
were consequently becoming more and more desperate for a match.

Karene instead decided to join Leeny for an
adventure and leave all her unsuitable suitors behind. Leeny never forced her
to do anything, she could have certainly made a lot more money as a prostitute,
but she wasn’t interested in that.

You wouldn’t think such a trivial, superficial
thing as adding some pretty faces would have much effect on an entire city.

But it did.

Those who ran shipments to Belvaille, picked-up
goods and delivered supplies were no longer in such a hurry to leave, being
frightened away by our collective monstrosity. They now had reasons to linger.

With more people staying, the kind of businesses
that Belvaille was capable of supporting expanded. We now had clubs and bars
and restaurants and hotels. Later, we had grocery stores and apartment
buildings and music shops and hardware stores.

Whereas before we had only produced goods and
services for use off-station, we now had a local economy and growing
population.

There were turf wars about the turf here. Real
streets on the city, not shipping lanes or planetary markets light years away.
It was just as important to control a casino on Belvaille as it was to control
a money laundering operation off-station.

And it all snowballed. The more people who
came, the more businesses the city could support, and the more criminals came
to operate those businesses.

The almost chivalrous ways of fighting gang
wars were completely gone. You fought to win with almost no limitations or
exceptions.

There isn’t such a thing as a perfect romance
anywhere across the galaxy.

Karene and I were as close to a perfect fit as
any two distinct organisms can be while still being sentient. We had some great
days and days that weren’t as perfect.

This all changed when I was visited by her
father, who came to see me at my home.

She had only told me obliquely about her past just
as I had done about my own. And while my reluctance stemmed from a desire to
protect her and keep my Navy connections at bay, she had completely different
reasons for her reluctance to share.

“She is to be a countess,” her father said to
me.

“What will she count?” I said without even a
hint of sarcasm.

He looked at me a long moment.

Her father was a tall, young-looking man with
coal-black hair. He had poise and the underside of his nose was not quite
parallel with the ground, as if the sky held more interesting things to view.
He seemed wealthy, and all his clothes were baggy and flowing. They were
similar to the clothes very poor and lazy people wore, except richly
embroidered and meticulous.

“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.