Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

“Pee in the shower,” the plumber offered helpfully. “Or move to one of the apartments in the next building. Then you can still be on the ground floor.”

“Then I’ll be that much farther from the train. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been in this apartment?”

“Long enough to bust a metal toilet clean from the wall.” He saw my reaction. “Look, Hank, I’m not trying to annoy you. Those pipes are all crooked. I don’t have the tools to cut them out and even if I straightened them they wouldn’t be sealed and your wall would leak.”

I stood there irked. I would have to charge the pale ladies more for this. Speaking of which:

“Hey, have you seen this woman?” I showed the tele picture to the plumber.

“I wish.” He kept staring at the image long after he had acknowledged not seeing her. I finally had to pull my tele from his hands.

“Is there anyone who can fix my wall?” I asked.

“I’m sure the tools are around, I just don’t have them. It’s not a one man job to cut through these buildings, you know. Why don’t you just put your toilet outside on the street? I mean you have this whole block to yourself, don’t you? I’d sure like to be able to come home and just have my crapper be waiting for me on the sidewalk.”

“That’s gross, man.”

He looked back at me.

“You got a dead body not five steps from your front door. Are you really worried about the property value?”

Toby hadn’t changed much since I first saw him.

There were no rats or insects or much in the way of viruses or rampant bacteria on Belvaille. Most of that stuff was killed at quarantine and through ongoing sterilization.

The Colmarian Confederation had something like 50,000 species in it and countless inhabited planets. Couple that with space travel between them all and if we didn’t have good quarantine, our empire would have self-exterminated ages ago.

So Toby would lay here until I got rid of him as it would take forever to decompose. He didn’t even smell that bad. I knew plenty of live people who stank a hell of a lot worse.

He wouldn’t fit in my trash can and the nearest dumpster was in corporation territory. I tried to stay out of those areas because there was constant fighting between corporations—which also made it a bad place to be walking around with a corpse on your shoulder.

I would work it out later.

I went to visit my friend Delovoa. He and I had been through a lot together in the past.

Delovoa was a big-brained scientist who sold technology to anyone who wanted technology. Even the corporations used him because Belvaille was still far away. We had three Portals leading to Belvaille. But our population wasn’t large enough for it to be profitable to ship many specialty goods here.

The Navy controlled the Portals as they were insanely expensive pieces of hardware to manufacture and only empires could do it. Theoretically, ships could have their own a-drives which would in essence allow them to portal on their own, but only military vessels had them.

I had wondered how much the Navy would leave us alone once we became an Independent Protectorate, but they had mostly kept to their word. They leased from us a huge set of telescopes they used to eavesdrop on the rest of the galaxy, but other than that, they weren’t much of a presence here.

The Portals, however, were another matter. Sure, Belvaille was independent. Fat lot of good it will do you, though. If you want to go to the next system you need to use a Portal. And to approach the Portals you have to pass the Jam: about a half dozen Navy cruisers and a battleship.

They charge a toll to use the Portals. I heard for a large freighter the fee can be almost a million credits! That would be enough to buy a whole freighter—and not a bad one.

Belvaille going independent was the most profitable thing that ever happened in terms of the Colmarian Confederation, because they never made a single credit off us before.

I buzzed Delovoa’s door and waited. He had about the most secure home on the station because he also sold, and designed, automated security systems and he wasn’t going to skimp on himself.

After a while he finally opened the door.

“Hank! Long time,” he said, shaking my hand.

Delovoa had three eyes that blinked and looked independently of one another, which could take some getting used to. I usually just picked one and made eye contact with that. His head was somewhat of an upside-down pear shape and he was bald. He was a thin man and tended to wear lab clothes.

His insatiable curiosity had been a cause of problems in the past, but I bought most of my goods from him because he did excellent work. Delovoa’s place was massive. It was one of the few buildings that had a belowground space, which was where he kept most of his wares and did his tinkering.

“Do you make the body armor for the corporations?” I asked, as we walked through his basement.

“No, they do their own things like that.”

“Ioshiyn makes all their uniforms.”

“I highly doubt it,” Delovoa said dismissively.

“He does, I saw them hanging there. Like twenty different corporations.”

Delovoa’s three brows furrowed.

“How many people does he have working for him?”

“Just a couple that I saw,” I said.

“And just that one shop?”

“He’s not a franchise.”

This seemed like some mystery to Delovoa. But I think he was annoyed that someone was getting corporation business besides him. Not that he made clothes.

“Where are your shoes?” he said, finally noticing I was barefoot.

“I’m going to try and get them repaired. That’s why I was at Ioshiyn’s. But I’m here because I need a new gun,” I said.

“I don’t believe it, are you finally retiring your shotgun?” Delovoa asked, his eyes staccato blinking.

“I’d like to keep it, but I need something better. More power, smaller, maybe more bullets, and better accuracy.”

“That’s not really possible, Hank. But let me show you something. I was designing a gun just for you as a matter of fact. I was going to give it to you on Thad Elon’s Day.”

There were maybe a dozen Creation Myths for the Colmarian Confederation. Different regions believed different people or groups were responsible for the formation of our empire. No one knew for sure. Thad Elon was one of the more popular mythologies. Some people thought of him as a hero, other regions did nothing but use cuss words all day in commemoration. It really depended on whether you felt the Colmarian Confederation was an outrage or merely inept. There wasn’t a whole lot of middle ground.

In Delovoa’s basement we went past row after row of weapons and security systems and anti-security systems. I felt myself growing more excited.

“Here you go,” Delovoa smiled, spreading his arms magnanimously.

On the table in front of us was a seven-foot weapon of some kind. It had an absurdly long barrel surrounded by a metal cooling sleeve, a drum magazine underneath, two metal bars sticking out on the side—I think one was for your forehand—and a very bulky mechanism at the rear. It had no stock and the rear grip stuck out to the right side and instead of a trigger for your finger, it was long enough that you could put your whole hand on it. It was vastly bigger than Balday-yow’s machine gun.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“It’s an autocannon,” Delovoa said proudly. “They’re usually mounted on vehicles.”

“I’m not a vehicle,” I reminded him.

“This is what you wanted. It’s stronger—a lot stronger. It’s not smaller but—”

“No kidding it’s not smaller,” I interrupted.

I reached down and took hold of it where I thought my hands should go and tried to lift it. It didn’t move. I figured it was bolted to the table for testing, until it rolled a bit.