Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (42 page)

“Currency. Finances. And the Market.
Those are the only truths.”

“We would like you to remain with us, Supreme
Kommilaire, Secretary of City. You will hardly have to change your behaviors
and we can make your remaining years tremendously comfortable and rewarding.”

“Your legacy will be safe with us.”

I didn’t know what to say. It’s like I
was having a heart attack except it was my brain.

All the while the clone Garm kept her
fake eyes on me, her fake smile.

“I can’t let you do this. You have to
have known that.”

I took a step.

“Hank,” one said.

I stopped. I don’t think I’d ever heard
an Ank call me by my name. It was sinister even though it sounded as pleasant
as ever.

“Garm knew she couldn’t harm you
physically.”

“You were growing larger and more
resilient with each passing year.”

“Garm trained as a Quadrad, an elite
assassin. She was supremely cautious.”

“She never quite trusted anyone.
Including you.”

At that, the floor suddenly opened
underneath me and I fell into a pool of water.

I sank like a boulder coated in metal
and shot straight down out of a cannon. I saw some rugs. A few small tables.

And Garm.

Clone Garm was in the water next to me.
She apparently hadn’t been trained to swim. She wore the same smile and stared
at me as she fell to the bottom, bubbles streaming up.

I looked around, trying to overcome my
panic.

The pool was only about ten feet deep,
but it might as well have been a thousand. I couldn’t swim even if I had a jet
pack.

The pool had no stairs. No railings. No
inclines of any sort. It was too narrow for laps. It was too deep for relaxing.
This was designed as a trap.

A trap for me.

Garm had built this at the top of City
Hall without me ever knowing. It must have cost a fortune. Not the engineering,
but to keep its creation secret.

I wasn’t sad about dying. But I was sad
Garm had felt the need for this back when we were on good terms.

I looked at Garm’s clone one last time.
She really had been a fantastically gorgeous woman.

The thing was, though, I never really
trusted her completely either.

I reached back and pulled out my
colostomy bag. I held it as high above my head as I could reach.

Boom.

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

There was nothing for it except to jump.

Ten stories.

I dented the metal road around City Hall
when I landed. Debris was raining down on me from above.

My ears were ringing. My sight was
blurred. I couldn’t breathe well. I may have been having a heart attack.

The usual.

I saw Garm’s guards. My Kommilaire. MTB.
Valia. They all stood some ways back, not sure what was going on, but smart
enough to avoid a building that partially exploded.

I screamed out in pain.

Slowly.

Slowly.

I stood up under my own power. Maybe the
first time I had gotten to my feet without assistance in fifty years. I’d be paying
for that in the morning. I’d be paying for a lot of things.

My arm that held the bomb was ripped and
blackened. Even my blood was thick. It oozed like red mud. It looked like it didn’t
want to leave my body and came off in hesitant glops.

My team hesitantly approached.

“Boss,” MTB asked, his eyes wide. “What
happened?”

“Take the Kommilaire and head to the Ank
Reserve. Put all the Ank in custody for Crimes Against the City.”

“The Ank?” he asked, shocked.

“Yes.”

“Boss,” Valia said. “You’re on fire!”

I looked around, and sure enough, the
back of my vest was on fire. Whatever. I was too tired to deal with it.

“What was that explosion?” she asked.

“Delfiblinium. They once used it to push
around comets and such. I knew a mutant named Jyonal who could make the stuff
with his mind.”

No one had a follow-up question to that.

I took a few tentative steps that didn’t
feel too good. I was pretty beat up.

“By the way, tell Rendrae that I am
declaring myself the new Governor. Until we can have a proper election.”

“
New
Governor? Who was the old
one?” MTB asked, confused.

“Just tell him! And say all debts will
be settled. The Belvaille Confederation is alive and well. And the city is open
for business.”

“Where are you going?” Valia asked.

“To lie down.”

“What are they?” I asked Delovoa.

“Some clone thing,” he responded sagely.

“I know
that
.”

“Then why did you ask?”

We were in one of the upper floors of
the Ank Reserve and nearly every room was filled with advanced technological
equipment.

What was most disconcerting, however,
were the tubes. There were tubes that were roughly Colmarian-sized. We figured
they were used to grow the clones, store the clones, or hold the original
people who were cloned. We weren’t exactly sure which.

The question was: what do we do with
them?

“Can you open them?” I asked.

“Sure. Give me a hammer.”

“Can you open them without killing
what’s inside, smartass?”

“I don’t even know what’s inside,” he
said.

“Can’t you scan them or something?”
Delovoa could be so frustrating.

“I guess,” he sighed, as if it was
soul-crushing that he had to work. No wonder machines were falling off the
latticework. “I’ll have to go back to my lab.”

I had my Kommilaire escort him, not just
for his protection, but to make sure he came back promptly and didn’t get distracted.

The Boards continued operation despite
there being no Ank. I was still deciding what to do with the Ank themselves.
The values on the markets dropped steeply but they would recover in a few
weeks. People wanted to make money. They weren’t going to stop trying to make
money just because there were no Ank around.

You can get used to anything, really.
You don’t have a choice.

One of my Kommilaire made me a big gold
sticker and wrote “Governor” on it because they felt I should have something
official. And because it was funny. I wore it on my chest.

My arm was still ruined and I was doing
a lot of things with my left hand. I knew it would heal but it looked gross
right now.

When Delovoa returned with all his
equipment we found about half the clone tubes were occupied. Twenty-four. He discovered
how to open them up and began doing so.

There were gang bosses, Order members,
Olmarr Republicans, Totki, Kommilaire, and others. A diverse swath of
Belvaille’s population. All these people were the original Colmarians who had
been put to sleep and then replaced with clones. Some were captured years or
even decades ago. Hobardi and Two Clem, and other major figures were among
those found.

On the top floor of the Reserve we found
the facilities for creating clones. None were being cooked at the moment,
thankfully, so we didn’t have to address that.

We also found:

Garm.

It was the oldest tube in the building.
A different construction, covered in dust, set back in the corner. It must have
been the first one built.

I’d say my heart was in my throat as
Delovoa was going through the procedure to release her, but my heart was too
thick to get in my throat.

When the tube cracked open and the air
cleared, I gasped. Even Delovoa gasped.

There was Garm. She looked exactly like
her clone. She must have been in hibernation for at least half a century!

Her eyes fluttered open and her
immediate expression was one of confusion.

She reached out a tentative hand and
touched my face and stroked my hair.

“Welcome back,” I told her.

“Hank?” she asked. “What the hell happened
to you? You look horrible.”

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

I put out arrest warrants for all the clones,
but I had no idea how to handle them. Should we kill them? They weren’t real
Colmarians. They only had partial brains and were programmed to act certain
ways. But it wasn’t their fault they were made that way.

We tracked them down easily. Without the
Ank guiding them, they were just dumb, fleshy robots.

We got a lot of appreciation for
returning everyone’s lost companions. Even from groups like the Olmarr
Republic. It also proved to the station why we had to remove the Ank. There
were some doubts as to the scope of what the Ank had been doing.

The news organizations couldn’t keep up
and I granted Rendrae a few exclusive interviews in repayment for his recent
help.

Delovoa was concerned about who had been
doing the actual cloning. It wasn’t a minor procedure and the Ank, despite
their insane financial acumen, weren’t known to be great inventers.

I think he was upset he might not be the
only mad scientist on the station.

Garm was appalled with what had happened
to Belvaille since she had been away and it was a long process to bring her up
to speed on our new society.

She also went on an extremely strict
health plan when she saw what us old-timers had turned into.

“It’s good having you around,” I told
her at my place. “I missed you.”

She knew all about my mutation and my
heart attacks. When she looked at me nowadays, it was often with sad eyes.

“Do you really think Belvaille can
recover?” she asked. “I never imagined it could be as bad as it is now.”

“It has to recover. If all these Portals
start going offline, just think what will happen. Besides, it enjoys the best
location in the former empire. If this city can’t make it, what hope does the
rest of the galaxy have?”

“You need replacements for the Ank, but
with accountability. They had too much power. They kept saying ‘free market’
but they manipulated everything. You have to root out all their back channels
so no one else uses them.”

“Well, maybe you can help with that. I’ll
make you Assistant Governor.”

“I don’t want to be Assistant Governor,”
she said.

“Heh. Isn’t this funny? Like, eighty-something
years ago, you were Adjunct Overwatch and were trying to recruit me for the
military and I didn’t want it. Now it’s the reverse.”

“I don’t think it’s very funny.”

“Hibernation probably messed up your
sense of humor.”

“At least I’m not two thousand pounds.”

“I wish I was only two thousand pounds.
I’m more like seven thousand.”

She looked at me with pity again.

“How long do you have?”

“Who can say? Realistically, not that
long. Now that you’re here, when I’m gone you can become Governor and Supreme
Kommilaire and Secretary of City—actually, I don’t know if that position exists
anymore since it was your clone that created it.”

“Hank, I’m a Quadrad. I ran Belvaille
when it was a freebooter stronghold. Yeah, we had a small Navy presence, but
there are millions of people here now. It’s a real city. I don’t have the
skills, the temperament, the inclination for this.”

“I didn’t either. I got fifty years’
experience on you.”

“I’m also not sure the city can make it.
I mean, is it a lost cause?” she asked.

“Belvaille is like me: you cut it, you
shoot it, and it heals up stronger.”

“Yeah, but scabbed and bloated and
unable to stand up. Using yourself as an analogy isn’t a great endorsement. You
have to see that even with an expert at the helm the city will be hard-pressed
to survive. I’ve spent half my life asleep. I’m not an expert.”

“It requires patience and compromise.
You need to listen, negotiate, reason. Every problem has a solution. Only
rarely is it a violent one.”

She smirked.

“When did you become a pacifist?”

“When I stopped being able to chase
people. Look, you’re the smartest, hottest, most dangerous person I know.
You’ve got the skills—maybe not the people skills—but you’ll get the hang of
it. You also got a long life ahead of you. You have to do
something
for
the next hundred or two hundred years. Might as well save civilization. Just
tell me you’ll think about it.”