Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (7 page)

BOOK: Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck
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http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/hong.gif

 

CHAPTER 7

 

The next day I travelled with my
Kommilaire across the city.

There were some roadblocks of refuse
along the way we had to take down. Not sure what they were for, maybe gangs
trying to demarcate their territory, maybe a really big trash monster taking a
crap. Didn’t matter, it was in the way, and there was no one else to move it.

We eventually came to an entire block
devoted to one man. He was the most powerful person on Belvaille. He was
perhaps the most powerful man alive—though admittedly I didn’t get around much,
or at all, so I wasn’t exactly an authority on the galaxy’s power rankings.

The whole block, both sides, were his
buildings.

I had my own block named after me: “Hank
Block.” But I only owned one building. Most of the other buildings were
apartments for the Kommilaire or wealthy individuals who wanted to feel safe.
Or catch a glimpse of my sexy body.

At the entrance to this block—which
didn’t have a name, because it didn’t need one—there were full-on concrete
emplacements with manned machine guns, chainguns, and even cannons.

If Belvaille ever did fall into chaos,
it would still have a tough time penetrating into here. More likely, even at
the height of its insanity, it would still have the sense to leave this man alone.

I had to present my credentials before
the guard unlocked and opened the massive gate that barred entrance to the
street. The Kommilaire had to wait outside.

I walked to the building to meet his
majesty. Guns from adjacent buildings tracked my movements.

After a series of lengthy security
measures, I was finally admitted inside.

A young, incredibly athletic man,
wearing billowing pink pants, stepped out to meet me. His hair was long and
curly.

“And who are you?” he asked with a
sneer.

At this, another figure appeared behind
him, wearing a tattered blue robe and slippers. He was very old and frail. His
head was peculiar in that it looked like an upside down, wrinkled pear, with no
hair. He had three misaligned eyes that blinked and looked independently of one
another.

It was obvious he had no teeth and his
lips had collapsed inward to fill the space. His hands and feet looked gigantic
on his emaciated frame, which was visible because part of his robe was open.

“Shoo! Shoo!” Delovoa said to the
golden-haired twink, slapping at him rudely.

The younger man hurried away, pouting.

“Hank,” Delovoa smiled his gummy smile,
“great to see you.”

Delovoa was a mutant like me, though his
mutation no longer functioned. I think at one point he could create external
heat a few inches from his body. Handy if you needed to solder something, but
otherwise useless. That was a level-one mutation. I was level four.

The scale for mutations went up to ten,
theoretically. I had met one level-ten mutant in my life, Jyonal. He could make
anything he thought of happen as long as he could imagine it, and as long as he
was high on drugs. Jyonal had even made himself a new body when he was trying
to hide from the authorities. He was a dangerous guy to have around.

Delovoa was the last of the great engineers
and inventors—at least in this region of space.

Without him the Portals would stop
working and the countless improvements he had made to Belvaille’s
infrastructure would fail.

Belvaille was never designed to house as
many people as it currently did. It was only through Delovoa’s continual
jury-rigging that we weren’t all suffocating in a massive cloud of carbon
dioxide, were capable of recycling our waste, and able to refuel and repair space
ships.

He was a god on Belvaille and it was a
death sentence to even joke about harming him. He didn’t pay for all this
security constantly monitoring his safety, the city did.

And it did so gladly.

His very name was synonymous with
brilliance and eccentricity. People quoted and misquoted him often. The only
ruling in a trial that could trump an official opinion from Delovoa was another
official opinion from Delovoa. Like if he said something had to be done for the
safety of the city, it was done. Period.

We sat in one of his spacious living
rooms. Despite him having vast wealth, he was relatively humble. There were gadgets
and parts and wires all over the place. Toys and projects he was currently
tinkering with.

He and I had gone through a lot
together.

He had a special chair for me to sit in.
It was tall and kind of slanted and I could just lean into it without it
crumbling.

Delovoa sat on a big cushion and his
bony knees stuck out.

“What brings you here, Hank?”

Why
was
I here?

“Do you ever wonder why we do it,
Delovoa?”

“Ah, a bitch-session,” he said, his three
eyes popping.

He grabbed a little bell from the table
and rang it angrily, as if he hated it.

“Boy! Boy!”

A young man, different from the first,
came hurrying in. He was muscular and bare from the waist up.

“Sir, you called?”

“Not you, the pretty one. Oh, never
mind. Bring a bottle of Kozk and two glasses. And ice. And…” he turned to me,
“I’m sure you want food, right?”

“Sure,” I answered.

“Food. Something tasty. Bring a lot.
Hank eats everything. Go!”

The young man darted away.

“Do what, now?” he asked me.

“Any of this. Remember the Naked Guy?”

“Who?”

“The Naked Guy. Come on, the guy.”

“I know a lot of…oh
the
Naked
Guy. The person who practically destroyed the entire galaxy. Yes, he’s tough to
forget.”

“Well, he was like billions of years
old. And he just…despised everything. Saw how pointless it all was and how
everyone just repeated all the same mistakes forever. I go riding out every day
and I see the same thing. I’m not close to a billion years old, but I can see
that people just don’t learn. Don’t want to learn.”

“How is this news?” Delovoa asked.

The young man ran back in with a bottle
and glasses.

“I said Kozk. This isn’t even alcohol.
Kozk!”

Delovoa threw the bottle at him, but the
young man was too fast and Delovoa threw like an old lady with bad depth perception
because of his three eyes.

“Sorry. Yes. People are stupid. You
can’t teach a triangle pi. I’ve had dozens of apprentices—” he started.

“Is that what you call them?”

He continued as if I had said nothing.
His snarkiness was on a whole other level I couldn’t touch.

“But none of them got anywhere. They’re
either too old to learn new things or too young to understand. It’s not like I
can teach feral kids advanced technology. The war wiped us out.”

“It’s the same with me. I’m trying to
teach the Kommilaire but it feels like they’re just going through the motions.
Like they’re mimicking what I do without knowing why. I might be wrong half the
time, but I at least know my objectives.”

“Well, you’re certainly popular. I get my
people to tear down those damn loudspeakers blaring your trials, but someone
puts them right back up.”

“That’s not just me. People like hearing
the other programs too. I only do about a trial a week. But I just wonder,
what’s going to happen in the future. What’s our legacy? What happens when you
and I are gone?”

Delovoa smiled.

“I can tell you exactly. This station
dies. The Portals in this system die and then eventually all of them across the
galaxy. Then I suspect some thousands of years of Dark Ages where there are no
empires. When the furthest any race can reach is its current solar system.
Until science and technology and economies grow enough that they can make
contact again.”

“Wow. You’re a downer.”

“It’s not going to happen overnight. It
will likely take some hundreds of years after we’re gone. But it will happen. We’re
already seeing it now. Belvaille isn’t exactly the height of civilization. And
remember, we’re the center of the galaxy. We
are
the height of
civilization.”

“So do you think when all the races meet
back up again, they’ll do it different? Somehow better?”

He laughed.

“Why would they? How would they know or
care what we did?”

“Then Naked Guy was right. We’re just
going to repeat all our mistakes forever,” I said.

“If he really was billions of years old,
then he must have seen this dozens of times at different scales. Maybe this was
the biggest collapse. Maybe not. Maybe there was some prior society that
spanned galaxies and then it turned to hell.”

“So why am I getting up every day and
literally killing myself trying to keep this all together?” I asked.

“What else are you going to do, retire?
When are you going to admit that you enjoy your job? You just like complaining
even more.”

 

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

 

CHAPTER 8

 

Ouch, my brain.

I bet whoever invented alcohol totally
regretted it the next day.

The previous night had been spent
drinking with Delovoa. Not sure how many bottles I had gone through, but my
mouth was pasty and my eyes were dry and I felt tired.

I was too old to drink like that
anymore. I would feel bad for two days, probably. It so wasn’t worth it.

Being an old mutant was a drag. I couldn’t
drink. I couldn’t appreciate food. There was so little for me to physically
enjoy in life now.

Sex? Not many women wanted to romp with
a seven ton guy.

I was very unattractive. I knew that.

I prided myself on being self-aware. I
knew my weaknesses. I knew my strengths. I just didn’t go trumpeting them because
no one cared, and if you did, you came across like an ass.

I twisted on my bed and grabbed hold of
the reinforced railings. I got to my feet and felt three times worse.

I stumbled into my bathroom and drank
from the faucet a good long time and splashed water in my face. My nose was dry
I was so dehydrated.

I stood in front of my toilet trying to
go. I probably had a two hundred pound prostate gland and going to the bathroom
wasn’t always an easy task.

To try and relax I thought of the
Ginland Glocken team, which I still considered my home team even though they
were on the other side of the galaxy. The sport of glocken hadn’t stopped,
though away games were rare now.

Ginland’s Reskin Sleepers hadn’t won a
single game in their history. Their losing streak had outlasted the very empire
they were created in. Talk about folk legends.

I heard my radio going off in the other
room.

Took a few minutes longer, but I managed
to empty my bladder.

“Yeah?” I answered the radio.

“Look outside,” MTB said on the other
end.

I walked over to my front door and
opened it.

There were thousands of people in the
street!

It wasn’t violent that I could see.
Wasn’t a war or gang fight. So I closed the door and decided to change. I found
I didn’t have as much powers of persuasion talking to people while in my
underwear.

After I got all my equipment secured and
drank a lot of water, I headed out.

“What are you doing on my lawn?” I said
to anyone who could hear me.

They were chanting, clapping,
disorganized. They carried banners and signs. They seemed upset.

They saw me come out of my door and a hundred
voices accused me at once, making it impossible to tell what they were saying.

“Whoa. Whoa. What’s going on?”

A bold man in dingy clothes walked up to
me with a pamphlet.

I tried to focus, holding it a bit
further away because of the small type.

It said that each Kommilaire got paid
150,000 thumbs a year salary and that we had given ourselves a 25% raise. It
also went over a list of perks and bonuses that were extreme in their largesse.

I had been around forgeries for
centuries. Real forgeries. This was a professional attempt to look
unprofessional. It was fake.

This wasn’t printed by some concerned
citizens in a rented workshop. It was on durable material with excellent presentation.
Some real printers who knew their craft made it.

What’s more, it mentioned things like
banking rates and lend-leasing and utilities and obscure concepts that simply
weren’t known by the public and certainly not known enough to print and be pissed
off about.

The details were all fabrications, of
course. But I didn’t have any of this in writing. I didn’t keep a stack of
ledgers I could wave around and go, “See? This is all untrue.”

BOOK: Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck
2.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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