Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

“We do not.”

“Does the sister I’m looking for have it?”

“She is not our sister.”

“Quadrad. Buddy. Pal. Whatever. The person you hired me to find. Does she have it?”

Another pause.

“Possibly.”

Hah. Who says I’m stupid?

“Does she plan on selling it here?”

Pause.

“No. She plans on using it.”

Whoa.

“This is why she is a criminal. She broke her oaths by coming here alone without Garm’s permission. We are trying to return her to the Quadrad to face charges.”

“Who were you all originally looking for?” I asked.

“We cannot say. That operation is no longer being carried out.”

“But it may help me find her.”

“The other is not your concern,” they said.

I thought about asking for the device. Like, “Hey, do you guys mind if I have the weapon you stole from the Navy?” But then I thought that was pretty dumb. Of course they would mind. I doubted they searched through a dumpster and happened to find a disintegrator.

But the advantage was mine.

If my target did have the device, and I did find her, that meant I would be able to get it before the pale sisters. Of course, it also meant the criminal assassin I was looking for was armed with a disintegrator.

And that didn’t sound good.

I now had a toilet, a burnt couch, three corpses, and two Gandrine outside my apartment. It was like the worst yard sale ever.

The pale ladies dropping by had given me a lot more to go on, though they might not have known it.

From the picture of her I had, she looked just like the other Quadrad, so I assumed she was as skilled. If she was going to use the disintegrator, there had to be a reason. Meaning, she couldn’t kill them normally, otherwise she wouldn’t waste such a valuable item.

Garm had personally held off two of the sisters. So Garm might be a potential target. Wallow could squash a pale sister with no effort whatsoever, so he could be a potential target. The Gandrine probably wouldn’t even notice a pale sister stabbing them, so a disintegrator might be the only method of efficiently killing one.

Then of course there was me. As annoying as the pale sisters were, in a real fight I believed I could withstand them. I just needed a lot of toilets.

Maybe she was even killing the people who came to my front door. But why wasn’t she taking that opportunity to disintegrate me?

I also didn’t know why she would care. I hadn’t even heard of the Quadrad until recently.

But really there were very few people to disintegrate on the station. Two were sitting right here and one was me. If I waited next to the Gandrine, one of us being disintegrated would be an awfully big clue to where she was.

But I wanted to be a bit more proactive than that.

Especially since I had no idea how a Navy, a-drive disintegrator operated. Did you just point it at someone and shoot? Or was it mounted and powered by an actual Navy vessel? It might be able to erase the whole space station for all I knew.

Instead of waiting to get turned into nothing, I decided to go with my current leads provided by Tejj-jo.

I checked at Leeny’s to see if he had seen the pale sister or used her as an escort. The woman from the passenger list was there.

Although fit and attractive, she was clearly not the pale sister.

That only left Zadeck’s paid girlfriend to match the scrambled section of quarantine records.

I was eating some fake sausages in a restaurant, when a little boy came up to me and stood by my table expectantly.

“Yes?” I asked him.

He handed me a note and then ran away. The note said: “Read the second to last advertisement in the help wanted section of today’s The News .”

I turned to it as I ate. It was gibberish. Just a bunch of words seemingly chosen at random.

I shrugged and left the restaurant after paying my bill. I headed to the train. As I was waiting for it to arrive, a different little boy ran up to me.

He handed me a note and ran away just as quick.

“Hmm.”

The note said: “The advertisement is a code.”

I looked at it again. I tried taking the first letter of each word, but that made it worse. I tried skipping words. Tried reversing them.

I gave up. I’m not a code breaker.

A tele came from Delovoa.

“Hank, where you at?” he asked.

“Going home, why? Is that you with the kids?”

“What? Just come over,” he said.

I headed to Delovoa’s, even though I was worried about catching diseases from his dead corporate soldier.

Inside, Delovoa looked disconcerted.

“Follow me,” he said, as means of introduction.

We walked towards his basement without fully going down.

“Look.”

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked.

He pointed to nothing.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly. Someone stole him,” Delovoa breathed.

“Stole who—you mean the corpse?”

“Yes. They broke into my house, bypassing all of my security, and removed him. There’s no trace he or anyone was here!”

“Well that’s just great!” I protested. “I got three dead bodies on my front yard I can’t pay anyone to take away and someone broke into your apartment and actually stole your corpse.”

“Did you tell anyone I had it, Hank?”

“Who would I tell?”

“Nothing else was taken. They tracked my movements, waited until I was out of the house, and overcame a very significant number of security systems to get that body.”

“I mean, it’s really weird, Delovoa, but so what? Isn’t it safer to be rid of him? Did he have sentimental value?”

“I thought you followed these events,” Delovoa said, irritated.

“You thought I was interested in corpse theft?”

“No, but obviously there is something bigger here. Why would they recover him?”

“Maybe they wanted to give him the rest of his brain. I don’t know, Delovoa. I don’t even understand what he was.”

“A biologically engineered Colmarian, missing significant portions of DNA.”

“Right. And that’s my concern? Like I go around monitoring who has good DNA. As you remember, until very recently I was a doorman.”

“Why aren’t you taking this seriously, Hank?”

“Because I don’t see how it matters and I don’t know what we can do. Maybe if I brought some of my corpses down here I could get rid of them.”

I exited Delovoa’s place and a little girl who had obviously been waiting for me across the street, skipped up and held out her hand, holding a note.

“Where the hell are all you kids coming from?” I said, looking around.

She stood there silently until I took the paper. Then she ran off.

The note said: “If you had bothered to at least work a little on the code it would have instructed you to meet me at the Ulzaker-Ses club, 3 rdfloor, today at 9pm.”

I checked my tele. It was already past 9pm, but I didn’t feel like having another deluge of little children assault me with notes and codes, so I headed to the club that had been the recent site of carnage.

The fire had destroyed the club’s interior, leaving indistinguishable charred piles everywhere.

I stepped delicately through the refuse. I didn’t want to disturb any bodies, not from squeamishness, just from a sense of propriety. My feet were going to be black with soot after this.

It was also quite dark as the firebombs had melted any lighting that existed. Only the street illumination that came in from the windows made anything visible.

I walked around for maybe fifteen minutes, but saw nothing code-worthy.

“Come upstairs,” a voice called down to me. The voice was clearly modulated, disguised via some electronic means. I could tell it was masculine, however.