Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (12 page)

Bshzow!

The weapons all fired at the same time.

I unloaded my guns at 19-10.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

The three Ank all slid to the ground
from their chairs. Each had been shot in the left leg at the same location by
19-10’s guns.

I had shot…nothing. The wall opposite
me.

19-10 was gone.

I spun around the room looking for him,
waiting for him to pop back and attack.

The door burst open and I turned my guns
on it. Two Reserve guards stood in the door with their weapons drawn.

“Get these men to safety. A small room.
The elevator!”

I’m sure the guards thought I had shot
their employers. It was unlikely they guessed a teleporting battlesuit did it
since those weren’t exactly known to exist.

“Do as he says,” one of the Ank said,
and even shot, he sounded just as sweet as when he had been unshot.

http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/ank.gif

We had a dozen guards covering the
elevator, a dozen more outside. Ten Stair Boys patrolled the immediate area. Two
medical technicians and I were in the elevator.

The elevator was locked on the bottom
floor so it could handle the weight.

The technicians patched the Ank and
confirmed the wounds were not life-threatening.

As I thought about the attack, it made
less and less sense. From a fixed position 19-10 had shot three targets at the
exact same time in the exact same locations on their bodies: their upper left
thighs. That alone required vast skill, as 19-10 was not close to being
equidistant from them all, so each pistol had to be aimed independently at a
different angle.

But if he could pull off shots like
that, he could just as easily have killed them instead of aiming for the legs.

Was it a taunt? A challenge? A warning? I
sure as hell didn’t come close to hitting him with my return fire. He probably
disappeared a good second and a half before I fired, which was a lifetime in a
gun battle ten feet apart.

The weapons he used weren’t all that
dangerous—for guns. I guessed they would have done nothing to me. They didn’t
even cause major wounds to the Ank, who weren’t exactly a hardy species. Is
that why he didn’t shoot at me?

I explained to the local guards as much
as I could about the assassin and recommended attacking on sight. I also posted
ten of my Stair Boys as extra security.

I had doubted Zadeck’s description of
19-10. People loved their tall tales. There were plenty about me.

But I couldn’t teleport into a locked
room, shoot three guys, and teleport out in the blink of an eye.

http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/19-10.gif

“What do you know about Messahn
battlesuits?” I asked Delovoa at his compound.

He was wearing a fluffy robe and fluffy
slippers. Come to think of it, he seemed to always wear a dressing gown and
slippers now. I guess if you could pull it off, why not?

“Promise you won’t get mad,” he said
sheepishly.

“If you have to start with that, you
know I’ll get mad.”

Delovoa had really poor judgment
sometimes. He had gotten us into trouble in the past due to his curiosity and
not thinking things through. I had petitioned the city to lock him away in this
block not just for his safety, but for ours.

Not only was he too valuable to lose, he
was too careless to be loose.

Delovoa once had top secret clearance in
the Navy. If anyone on Belvaille knew about 19-10, it was him.

“Well,” he began, tugging at the cords
of his robe. “Someone came to me a few months ago asking for some chrodite-399
and information on a Messahn battlesuit. Chrodite is an isotope, a kind of
metal. It decays over time and powers the Messahn armor you encountered.”

“And you gave it to him?” I yelled. “You
have that metal now?”

Delovoa reached around to the back of his
robes.

“Yeah, I have some. Let’s see…it’s in my
butt.”

“What?”

“I just told you it’s radioactive. No, I
don’t have any. But I informed him about the project that created the armor. It
was instituted right at the end of the Confederation and apparently was created
for use by clones. As only they could handle all the sensors and fit inside.
Like most of the later year war projects, it was funded by the Ank.”

“Ironic it comes back to shoot them. But
clones are stupid, right?” Delovoa and I had dealt with clones some decades
ago. He had even dissected some.

“Single-minded of purpose might be a
better description. They can handle simple tasks and instructions. If he was
really designed to be an assassin, then he would be doing what he was created to
do. I said the Ank traders were the best way to get some chrodite, if any still
existed.”

I grunted in exasperation.

“You gave all that information to an
assassin who just shot three Ank?” Delovoa really did lack wisdom.

“Three Ank were attacked?”

“Yeah, I haven’t told anyone. I don’t
want there to be a panic.”

“Did he steal any chrodite?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “What did
the person look like you explained all this to?”

“I don’t know. Normal. Man. Colmarian.”

“Not this tall and this wide with four
arms?” I asked, indicating with my hands the approximate dimensions of 19-10.

“Not at all,” he said.

“But wait a minute, even a single-minded
clone wouldn’t be taking on contracts. And travelling. Or coming to talk to you.”

“Yeah. He probably only understands how
to kill people.”

“But he didn’t kill them. He
purposefully injured them. And not even badly.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know. The other thing
is that the armor can portal,” Delovoa said.

“I could have told you that. He blipped
in, fired, blipped out. Do you know how it works? Even a-drives are supposed to
be huge. I was exposed to a Portal before and it almost turned me inside-out even
though I was blocks away from it. This one was nothing. Just some bright light.”

“I don’t know how Portals work,” Delovoa
said.

“What are you talking about? You fix our
Portals.”

“I’m a mechanic. I tighten screws and
weld cracks. I know the engineering of a Portal. I don’t have the faintest
concept of the physics involved. I doubt there is any one person in the galaxy
who knows that anymore.”

“So you gave a bunch of information to
an assassin or his handler whose job may or may not involve killing me. But
what the void did you get out of it?”

Delovoa walked across the room to a
glass cabinet. He opened the door and carefully removed an ornate sculpture of
some kind.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a crystal-porcelain figurine from
Onyeu representing happiness. It’s a water fowl. They didn’t allow any to be
taken off the planet. And of course, the planet was essentially destroyed in
the war. It is probably the only one left in existence.”

I glowered at Delovoa, who was lightly
stroking the object.

“That’s a duck?”

“They had a different word for it,” he
said haughtily, “zshu-maen.”

I couldn’t believe it.

“Give me that,” I said, stepping
forward.

“No!” Delovoa screamed. “Help! Help!
Help!” He shrieked.

One of his boy-toy twinks came running
into the room.

I pointed a gun at him.

“Go away,” I demanded.

The twink screamed and ran.

I plodded a few steps forward and it hit
me square in the chest. I felt my head go light and my feet and hands turn to
ice.

“Great,” I managed to squeak.

My gun dropped from my limp fingers and
I soon followed it to the ground.

As my heart was seizing up I tried to
occupy myself by counting the squares on Delovoa’s carpet. No, they weren’t
squares, they were triangles. Or squares in triangles? Dumb carpet.

It was like I was underwater holding my
breath. Maybe I was in space. Belvaille had finally lost its protective
shield—probably because Delovoa had forgotten to fix it while he was off
trading for ducks.

Time goes weird when you’re dying. I
could feel a lifetime slide by. Not a particularly interesting lifetime, though.
Maybe the life of a librarian who wasn’t allowed to read any books.

When I came around, Delovoa was next to
me looking worried.

“How long was I down for?” I asked.

“Hank!” Delovoa cried. “I-I don’t know.
Maybe a couple minutes.”

“Felt like forever.”

“Do you want some water?” he asked,
uncertain.

“No, just let me rest.”

Delovoa squatted down next to me.

“This isn’t the first time, is it?”

“How could you tell?”

“You seemed bored.”

Hobardi would have to wait. I didn’t
know how to find Two Clem and the evidence pointed to the Olmarr not abducting
him. If he even
was
abducted.

I would have to try and figure out
another way to get Hobardi to reverse the Brotherhood Commandment as that was
going to become more and more annoying.

Right now, however, protecting the Ank
was key.

I put the word out I was looking for a
guy with four arms. Belvaille had a lot of people, but four arms were still
pretty uncommon in a galaxy full of mutants and aliens.

Found one guy pretty fast, but he was
the shape of a blubbery boulder and his four arms were little nubby things.
Found a different guy with five arms and a woman with three arms, but I was
pretty sure this was a case of close didn’t count.

Delovoa had done more research on 19-10’s
armor. All he learned was the manner in which the armor portaled.

A Portal or a-drive could move long
distances really fast. Instantaneously.

The Messahn armor could move very short
distances very slowly, which was why it hadn’t suddenly dominated the war. It
wasn’t all that useful.

Delovoa guessed it actually took the battlesuit
longer to reach a spot than it did to walk to that place normally. But the deal
was, you could bypass everything in the way and be undetectable, because it was
spinning through some parallel dimensions.

Apparently our normal XYZ axes weren’t
the only physical dimensions that existed and there were a whole slew of other
ones that folded over, into, through each other and on top of ours; which was
why it took so long for the armor to move, because it was actually traversing a
greater distance and trying not to get lost in the process. Delovoa tried to
draw it for me and explain, but the upshot was I couldn’t see 19-10 or shoot
him when he was travelling like that, and that was all I needed to know.

Beyond this theory, Delovoa didn’t know
much about it. But that gave me a lot. It meant the owner had to have come to
Belvaille in a ship. No way someone “walked” through space unless they left a
trillion years ago.

Delovoa also said that like an a-drive,
19-10 couldn’t carry anything with him, just the armor—and the owner inside. He
had those guns attached to his hands, but those things likely wouldn’t hurt me,
so I wasn’t terribly worried about being assassinated.

19-10 must also have some way of seeing
where he was going. Otherwise he could accidentally appear inside a wall or
floor. So he knew the Ank were in that room, and I was in that room, and it was
indeed a planned attack.

I just couldn’t figure out why.

So far no one knew the Ank had been shot.
The markets were calm. All the news was about the elections.

What do you gain by shooting an Ank in
the thigh? Or three Ank in three thighs? It sounded like the set up for a bad joke.

I was out driving with about thirty
Kommilaire when I got word of a disturbance to the west.

We headed out there and stopped well
away.

It was a gigantic riot. Or
demonstration. Or something. It was the Totki. You could tell because every
damn person carried a polearm of some kind.

It was difficult to tell how many there were,
but hundreds. I heard from the loudspeakers a news report.

“I’m wondering what the Supreme
Kommilaire’s views on this are,” Rendrae said. I heard his voice in stereo and
noticed he was standing right next to me pushing the microphone under my nose.

The mob down the street stopped and
momentarily quieted.

“Um…” I answered, hearing my voice echo
across the city. “So what has happened exactly? I just got here.”