Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (6 page)

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 didn’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.

“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. Belvaille 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.

“Why would he listen to you?” I asked.

“I’m still an employee of the Navy in the
Department of Plumbing and Lighting. I do a lot of work for them.”

This struck me as unlikely. Not only did the
Navy not have “employees,” but I couldn’t see them having one as kooky as
Delovoa in a department with such an absurd name. What did he possibly know
about plumbing?

Delovoa put a cap on it by immediately throwing
up on the carpet in his living room. When he finished retching he stood up
straight and looked at me as if nothing had happened.

“So, do you want me to put in a good word for
you?” he asked.

“What…exactly are you going to say?” I asked,
worried that the Navy might suddenly try and kill me after Delovoa mentioned
what a great guy I was.

“What do you want me to tell them?”

“That I’d like to talk to him. The Adjunct
Overwatch.”

“Sure. I have to go see him anyway.”

“What are you seeing him about?” I asked.

“I’m giving him a demonstration on a product he
requisitioned.”

“Some plumbing or lighting?”

“No, it’s a nerve toxin aerosol.”

I dragged Delovoa to Sonidara’s office, which
was in the back of a warehouse.

The office was stacked with paintings and
sculptures and holograms and glyphs. It was all so much junk waiting to be
shipped. You couldn’t take a step without tripping over a ten thousand year old
figurine—and it didn’t matter if you did, because there were five exact copies
right next to it.

“Tell her what you told me,” I demanded of
Delovoa.

“Stop tugging,” he said, trying to get his
sleeve free from my grip and failing. “The Navy came to me with a requisition.”

Sonidara shrugged. You could tell she was put
off by Delovoa.