Hard Luck Hank Screw the Galaxy(5)

“Yup.” I went over and shook his hand. I liked shaking hands. My mitts felt like rocks and it was an extra means of intimidating people.

“Okay, guys. Move this stuff,” I indicated to Zadeck’s men. Some restlessness remained, as the crew still had their weapons. I tried to defuse it further by approaching one of the guys holding a gun.

“That’s a Dooli?” I asked him. “How’s it shoot?”

“What? Oh, yeah it is. It’s fine, doesn’t kick that much but it doesn’t sit right in the hand. Pretty narrow.” Crooks loved to talk weapons. It was how they bonded.

“Is that really an Ontakian pistol?” he asked quietly.

“Yup.”

“Can I see it?”

“Nope.”





CHAPTER 3


When the sailors finally departed for their hotel and the many sins Belvaille had to offer, I returned to my apartment to get some new clothes.

Had I just washed them too much? My pants, that is. Was that why they had holes and came apart when I got pulled from under the crate? I tried to remember when I bought them, but drew a blank. The days and decades tended to blur on Belvaille.

The streets were quiet, with very few people about. It was still considered morning by Belvaille standards and the city tended to wake up late. This was fortunate for me since I was still relatively unclothed.

The whole space station was an exact square, fifteen miles by fifteen miles, with trains bisecting it regularly. Some extremely wealthy gang bosses owned cars, but there wasn’t much use for them except as status symbols.

The buildings varied from one to ten stories tall, the shortest being things like warehouses and maintenance facilities, the tallest being residential complexes. All of them were dull silver unless painted and boringly square in design to maximize real estate.

The city itself was open air. Or open space. There was a latticework of supports high above the city that controlled lighting and air and whatever else goes on up there. The whole station was of course protected by a shield, to keep those pesky meteors away and our atmosphere in place.

I stumbled into my apartment and looked for something to drink. I just wanted juice, something cold.

My place wasn’t fancy and was on the ground floor to save me walking. There were five rooms and a bathroom. My only decorations were scraps of junk and weapons and laundry. The furniture had been replaced as fights necessitated, and what remained was scorched and torn. I had taken up a cornucopia of hobbies and inevitably given them up after a few months. There were rusty instruments, barely begun paintings, puzzles, blocks of somewhat chiseled metal, and many other things scattered around my rooms.

The doorbell rang and I thought about whether or not to answer. After a moment I threw open the door and outside was a petite woman with vibrant blue skin, a tiny nose, and incredibly long, floppy ears that hung halfway down her ample chest. She was dressed in what I assumed to be a fashionable outfit because it looked weird. It was plastic weave and cords, but spun and twisted as if it were based on a design that had once been cloth in some ancestral past. It accentuated her attractive figure while not showing much skin. She wore white gloves and had tall boots that disappeared under her dress. In fact all of her body was covered except her neck and face. Her age was hard to tell, but she looked extremely young, maybe barely in her twenties.

“Er, hello,” I said.

“Are you the one they call ‘Hank’?” she asked in a lilting accent.

“Yeah, that’s me. What can I do for you?”

She seemed suddenly very excited and clasped her hands together in front of herself like she was a little girl and I was certain to give her presents.

“Could I come inside?” she asked.

I hesitated. Bringing a stranger into my home didn’t scare me, but I kind of felt like relaxing at this point. And while this woman was cute in a gigantic ear kind of way, and it might be a job she was offering, something told me it was going to be a hassle not worth the time.

“Sure,” I said finally, holding open the door.

She entered and stared around my apartment with what I thought was a sense of wonder. But then I realized it was confusion.

“You are the one in The News they call ‘Hank’?”

There was only one newspaper on Belvaille. The News. “The Twenty Most Influential” quarterly list it published was about the closest thing we had to being designated royalty. For the last eighteen years I had placed #21 with an asterisk.

“Yes.”

She looked around my apartment some more. It wasn’t big. Or clean. Or free from smashed bullets on the walls or the residue from fires. It did not look like the home of the 21st most influential person who lived on a crime lord’s space station.