Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

“Garbage. Look, the inside is fur,” he said, tilting it up. “The outside is hinged steel. The sole is two inches of rubber and a tacky plastic. Not even you can wear these down.”

“How much do they cost?” I asked, as he bolted one onto my foot. It slipped on surprisingly easy, as it was like a door opening and you put your foot in and closed the door.

“Two hundred. That’s a friend price. And twenty-five for the shorts. If you bought them new it would be three times that if you could find any that fit.”

I clunked around in the boots.

“These aren’t very flexible,” I said.

“That’s why you destroy normal boots, because they let you slide all around and you wreck them.”

“Okay,” I said, not feeling like shopping anymore. “Don’t you think I should paint them black to match my shorts?”

“No, leave them metal. They match your gun and those cables on your vest.”

As I was paying up, I looked again in the back and saw the corporate uniforms.

“Hey, Ioshiyn. Which corporation has a yellow pattern with red lines running down like this?” I wanted to confirm what the Naked Guy had told me.

“I don’t know their names.”

“How can you not know?”

“Heh, I was just paid by a third party contractor on Tlevd-o 33 for a corporate order.”

I shrugged.

“I had to look it up too. It’s a planet on the other side of the galaxy. And when I billed the same corporation for a shortfall, it was sent to a completely different planet five states away.”

“How can anyone keep track of all that?”

“I don’t think they do. Not one person, anyway. They all just know enough to get what needs to be done right in front of them. And it somehow fits together to make this massive corporation.”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“Nah, think about it. You and I can only see what is in this room right now. But outside there is a whole city we’re a part of. Even if we can’t see it.”

“Remember when there were just bosses and gangs underneath them?” I asked wistfully.

“Sure. But I also remember doing a job for 200 credits and this happening,” he said, pointing to his mutilated face. “I just got a corporate requisition for undergarments and I stand to make 75,000 credits on it.”

So this was it, you played nice with the corporations, you made it big. If you stood in their way, you got cut down.

Now I had to go find some people to help me do the cutting.

I was in my kitchen eating some rations, which were very old-timey space station food. You would think with all these new people here, and two new Portals added, Belvaille would have a lot more cuisine options than it had in the past. But for whatever reason, we had less.

My front door rang and I walked over to scan who it was. I never scanned the door normally, I just opened it. But with the way things were lately, even I was becoming paranoid.

It was Rendrae outside.

I opened the door and went back to the kitchen.

“I didn’t believe the rumors,” he said, after entering. “But you really do have two Gandrine sitting on your front steps. And dead bodies. Did you kill them or did the Gandrine? Are they your bodyguards or something?”

“What do you care if they are?” I asked, eating my food.

“It’s news!”

“Since when have you cared about news?”

Rendrae, normally thick-skinned, looked stung.

“I’m not happy with the way things went. But the corporations didn’t give me a choice.”

“Why are you here?” I asked, not really caring about his excuses.

“What are you so uppity about? I heard you’re working for the corporations too.”

He was right. And it was indicative of how good his news sources were that he could know it so quickly.

Still, I grumbled, as I didn’t really have any better response.

Rendrae slid a piece of paper to me, all the while looking around my cramped kitchen, as if someone were going to spring out of one my drawers.

I read it: “I witnessed a corporation fight in the North a few weeks ago at 9 thand Scope Block. These are two—”

He suddenly snatched the paper from me and set it on fire.

“Hey! I hadn’t finished reading it,” I said.

Rendrae sighed.

“Do you read at a primary school level or something? You had plenty of time.”

“I’m eating too,” I said defensively.

Rendrae bent over and whispered to me, cupping his hand by my head.

“I can’t even hear you,” I complained.

Rendrae straightened then put both hands around my ear as if he were pouring toxic words into my head and didn’t want them to spill.

“I saw two corporations fighting in the North a few weeks ago by the Navy telescopes. I counted over a hundred on both sides. For all the hardware and vehicles, they hardly did any damage to each other. But as soon as some people—Navy Intelligence people—came from the telescope installations, stray shots went up and they were killed. These are highly-trained corporate soldiers who can’t seem to hit one another. Yet ‘innocent bystanders’ are shot as soon as they step within a block of the conflict.”

“Are you saying it was a staged fight?”

Rendrae shushed me, flapping his hands.

“What, this is my apartment, Rendrae.”

“Have you looked outside your door? This does not strike me as the safest place in the galaxy.”

So I motioned for him to lean in and I whispered.

“A general at the Jam was concerned that the telescopes were going to be damaged by all the fighting. Give me more information,” I said. “How many soldiers did you see fall?”

“A couple,” Rendrae whispered.

“Out of two hundred people?” That seemed impossible. Even the drunkest, most incompetent gang members could shoot better than that. “How long were they fighting?”

“I don’t know, I saw maybe five minutes, I wasn’t there from the start.”

“And how long did it take for the Navy workers to be shot?”

“Instantly. One minute there was nothing being fired that direction, the next minute five people hit the ground and there were sparks and ricochets all around them.”

That settles that.

“If this is true, it seems pretty obvious they were trying to kill them. But why would corporations kill Navy personnel? The telescopes are for spying on other empires.”

“That’s what Naval Intelligence says…”

“That’s what Garm says, too. And I trust her, even if you don’t. Do you think the corporations could be working together?”

“I don’t know. The corporations I saw were Alomium Stellar and Shipping Transport Services Galaxal.”

“Those names mean nothing to me,” I said.

“Alomium uniforms are blue with like three yellow crowns on a red circular field. STSG uniforms are brown with white triangles.”

They sounded vaguely familiar.

“So you going to research this?” I asked, liking the return of the investigative journalist.

“No. I’m telling you so you can investigate.”

“I’m not a reporter!”

“And I can’t carry gigantic guns or convince Gandrine to guard my front door.”

I needed fifty guys.

My big concerns were finding quality people and finding quality people who didn’t work for the club we were about to attack.

I could pay them twenty grand each and equip them with five grand of hardware. That left me with 750,000 profit for doing a job which might only take one night. Which might only take one hour.

If I did this five times a month for a year I would have almost exactly the same amount of money that I had earned, and subsequently lost, over a century and a half as a gang fixer.