Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

I was pretty much ready to say the corporations were alright. If they ever got a little weasel-y with me, I could go buy myself a moon somewhere and settle down.

“What?” Garm answered her tele.

“How many corporations are on the Governing Council?” I asked her.

“Thirty-eight. Why?”

“Thirty-eight? I thought there were like twelve or something.”

“Nope, there’s a lot.”

“Do you know the names of them all?”

“Not off the top of my head. What do you want to know, Hank?”

“When you guys sit down for meetings, do the corporations work together?”

“What’s that even mean?”

“Are they like working in concert or do they backstab each other and have rivalries? Like the gangs did.”

“First off, we don’t meet. There’s not some giant table where a bunch of corporations all sit down. None of those people are even on Belvaille.”

“How do they get anything done?”

“We’re at the edge of the galaxy in the least-populated state in the Colmarian Confederation. Belvaille is just a manufacturing and shipping point to them. They don’t need executives here. If something comes up I just ask them and wait for a response.”

“Okay, when you ask them, do they work together?”

“Depends. If it’s something that helps them all, like increasing the port size or electrical grid, sure. If it’s something that only helps one of them, they fight about it and argue.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“What are you digging for?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m trying to figure out the corporations. The only things I know are gangs and the military.”

“They’re a little like both. They don’t have the egos of gangs but they’re also not as efficient. They’re a lot more efficient than the military but they’re not nearly as influential. If the Navy tells us to do something, we do it, no one argues. Not even the corporations.”

“Can you think of any reason why they would want to attack the telescopes?”

Garm pondered that.

“No. If we ever piss off the Navy enough, they’ll simply tear up the Independent Protectorate contract and take us over, then the corporations will lose all their investments. Is there something I should know?”

“Nah. Been talking to Rendrae. But what he said doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Rendrae is a has-been. He’s on the take from the corporations spreading propaganda. I’m not sure which ones he works for, might be different each week. So you need to take his information with skepticism. That’s his meal ticket.”

“He used to be a good reporter.”

“We all used to be a lot of things, Hank. Times change.”

I went back to City Hall to review check-in records. It might be the lowest paying of my jobs, but it was easy to make headway. I was nearing the end of the time window for when the Quadrad sister supposedly arrived when I spotted something odd.

“Hey.”

For five minutes all the videos were blank.

I called in Buddl.

“What’s wrong with your system, there’s a big gap here on all the videos.”

He sat down and checked it too.

“That’s not possible,” he said astutely.

“Then it’s a miracle. Your main feed must have been scrambled or something.”

“But that’s the point. Each one of the cameras is independent and feeds to a different bank. One might go out, but never all of them. Not sure if you know, but some years ago Belvaille was invaded by Dredel Led at check-in.”

“Yes. I’m aware.”

“Oh, right. But we increased security after that. If this happened, it would trip alarms for all the guards.”

“Could the guards have been bribed?”

“That’s twenty people who are on random schedules. Not even counting the people at City Hall. Did you check quarantine records too?”

We pulled those tapes to cross-reference the ships that would correspond to that gap at check-in. The data was also missing from there.

“That’s not possible,” he said again.

These pale ladies were good. No wonder Garm didn’t want them skipping around. Not that they were exactly on a leash.

“Can I get the ship manifests that would correspond to these points at check-in and quarantine?”

“I can get you the passenger manifests, but not what was shipped. But it could be up to thousands of people. It depends on how many ships came in at that time.”

“That’s fine.”

I figure with the list, I could then search for all those people. By process of elimination, the person I didn’t find would be the pale sister. And I would have a name, description, and other information from the ship’s record.

“Is it possible a person could be shipped as cargo?”

“No. Even animals have to be put into a passenger manifest. If it’s not, it won’t be protected and when the ship portals, it would be killed. That’s why good beer tells you how many times it’s portaled before it gets to you on the container.”

“Really? I never saw that. You learn something new every month,” I said, wondering how long I’d been drinking bad-tasting beer and didn’t know it.

Now I had to see a man about a gun.

“Hey, Hank. What are you wearing?” Delovoa asked as he opened the door.

“It’s a helmet.”

He stared at it.

“It’s fancy. Is that the new style?”

“I don’t know. I just have to wear it for a job.”

“And you’re wearing shorts and new shoes. This is like a whole wardrobe switch.”

“Eh, you got to stay hip,” I said. “And women like to see men’s legs just like we do.”

“They look comfortable.”

“They are,” I said, demonstrating by lifting my legs.

“So what you been up to?” he asked.

“Working. I got a bunch of new jobs. I’m working for the corporations now, too.”

“I figured it would only be a matter of time. They got a lot of money to throw around. Might as well grab some.”

“I’m trying to figure them out, but they’re complicated.”

“What’s complicated?”

I told him about Rendrae’s story and the corps fighting by the telescopes.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Delovoa said, biting his lip in thought.

“That’s not what I came here for, though. Your autocannon nearly killed me firing it.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“I—wait, how did you hear? I was the only one there.”

“No, I don’t mean someone told me, I literally heard it. That gun isn’t exactly quiet. Did you say the suckerface thing before you used it?”

“Suckface. Maybe. But when I shot, it flung me like twenty feet in the air and I landed on my face.”

“It couldn’t possibly do that.”

“Maybe not twenty feet, but a lot. And it spun me like a top.”

“How did you hold it?”

I showed him.

“No, you need to get your legs down and lean into it. Keep your center of gravity low,” he said, stretching down like he was about to do the splits.

“I can’t do that,” I complained. “Especially during a fight. I’m not that flexible. Can you make the gun a bit smaller?”

Delovoa threw his arms up.

“It’s not a recipe where you can just add more or less sugar. It is what it is. Everything about that cannon is designed to work a certain way. It was hard enough to make it manual. Even if I cut down on the charge, the ballistics would get all wonky and it would lose tremendous accuracy.”

“Accuracy? I can’t even aim. It doesn’t have a sight for me to look over.”

“Hank, if you put your head above that barrel to look down a sight the cannon would flip up and hit you in the face. And that might be enough to hurt even you. You need to keep your bulk behind the recoil.”