Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

People who had taken the training more seriously knew all the steps. They contacted the other shelters, confirmed statuses, conditions, and emergency messages were sent. While messages had already been sent to the Colmarian Navy, these were going to rescue services within the state of Ginland itself and they would be a lot faster responding.

Hopefully.

Some of the technicians in other shelters said we were completely losing power on the station. The reason was unknown.

As we settled in for the long haul and the adrenaline was wearing off, I felt a familiar sensation.

A tremendous force pulled on me almost like a hand had grabbed hold of my stomach and was trying to yank it out of my mouth. I fell to my knees and nearly fainted.

Drooling on the ground, I slowly rose to a sitting position.

People began screaming.

“What was that?” a person asked.

“Someone give me your tele!” I yelled.

No one answered, so I simply grabbed the guy next to me and squeezed.

“Give me your tele!”

He gave it.

I called Delovoa and Garm. Please be alive. Please be there.

Delovoa answered.

“Hello, this is Delovoa.”

“Hey, it’s me,” I said.

Garm answered once she saw Delovoa was on the line. Then saw me too.

“What was that?” she asked.

“That was a Portal,” I said.

“All the Portals are disabled and Belvaille is way too large to fit through one,” Garm said.

“It wasn’t a Portal,” Delovoa gasped. “It was an a-drive! The corporation must have installed an a-drive on Belvaille. They moved the whole city!”

“The shield just collapsed,” Garm said.

We were expecting to have to weather inside our shelters for weeks at the least.

It was only a handful of hours before we were in widespread tele communication. Not with the Navy, but with nearby ships.

The Colmarian Confederation had five capital planets, with a sixth one disputed. Belvaille had been transported to the solar system Ceredus.

The system was adjacent to one of the capitals, Capital 3. It was so named even though it was the second capital. One of the previous capitals decided it no longer wanted the designation or responsibility.

Ceredus had the most Portals of any system in the Colmarian Confederation. It was almost exactly in the center of the empire.

I had assumed killing Naked Guy, destroying the Portal, and the Gandrine, would stop his schemes to start a civil war. But it did nothing of the sort.

We only knew a small piece of what was planned and nothing about how it was to be implemented.

Naked Guy had said he was going to give these weapons to warring groups within the Colmarian Confederation. And so he did.

But not by sending out transport ships loaded with goods, but by taking all of Belvaille and transporting it, along with the attached freighters.

When the shield and gravity were deactivated, the Therezians were free from the confines of the station. Space, while death for a Colmarian, did not pose the same danger for the giants. They could survive unprotected in outer space for hours. But they didn’t need that long because they were picked up by waiting ships—other corporate vessels that Naked Guy had prepared months or years in advance.

The freighters full of weapons were split off and separated, their goods transferred to other craft.

The ships then used the vast array of Portals in Ceredus to spread out instantly across the empire.

The Navy, who was only regionally aware of a disturbance in the distant state of Ginland, was not prepared for an entire space station to a-drive in, unload its cargo, and split in a thousand different directions.

No space station had ever portaled before, let alone a-drived. Besides, there was nothing they could have done. They didn’t know what they saw was the catalyst for a galactic civil war.

I had failed.

The immortal Naked Guy had known us and what our responses would be. He had given the exact push needed to get racial, religious, and political conflicts to finally erupt.

He chose his targets perfectly.

Within weeks there were battles raging all over the empire.

We were a Confederation that had always been tenuously held together. But those ties were coming apart fast.

Belvaille had just been a small piece of the puzzle. He needed somewhere to stockpile those weapons out of Navy view and jurisdiction. And he still had his agents everywhere. The corporations continued to exist, even if their chairman had been disintegrated.

Killing him had done nothing other than granting him his greatest wish.

Belvaille itself had survived. We had to wait in our shelters for a week while they repaired the ruptured latticework, which had been disengaged to access the Therezians.

Approximately one thousand civilians died when the systems shut down. They hadn’t made it to the shelters in time, or had thought it was a drill, or had no clue what was going on, or were too drunk or drugged to notice.

All the corporate soldiers died as well, but no one cared about them.

Belvaille was not at the edge of the galaxy anymore. It was smack in the center of a Confederation at war.

I sat with Garm and Delovoa in City Hall two weeks after Belvaille had been restored and the scope of our defeat was becoming clear.

“So what do you guys plan on doing?” Delovoa asked.

The station was in lockdown, with no one able to leave until the authorities pieced together what had happened.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I feel like I just helped doom our species.”

Garm took out from her safe an expensive bottle of alcohol. She poured us all glasses.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. The Navy is going to look around Belvaille, kick us a bit, strip out anything dangerous, and then leave. Then I’m going to buy it from them.”

“Buy the station?” I asked her.

“Yeah. Belvaille was never profitable and they need every credit they can get.”

“How much do you think it will cost?” Delovoa asked curiously.

“If it’s less than a billion, I’m buying.”

Delovoa and I looked at each other. I knew Garm was rich, but I had no idea she was that rich.

“What will you do with a junky space station?” I asked her.

“It’s a junky space station sitting next to the highest concentration of Portals in the Confederation. And it’s one of the only places that isn’t fighting over something, using tanks and Therezians and chemical weapons.”

“It’s an idea,” I said.

“I need someone smart here,” she said to Delovoa. “Belvaille hasn’t been updated since it was created.”

“A job?” Delovoa asked, skeptical.

“A partnership. There’s going to be a lot of business, a lot of money coming in here.”

“I’ll think about it,” Delovoa said, but I could already see he was on board.

“Hank—” she started.

“I think I should just become a farmer somewhere,” I interrupted.

“What are you going to do if you fall down while planting?” Delovoa asked seriously.

“Belvaille is going to be filled with refugees soon. Filled like it never was. It’s going to need security,” Garm said. “I want you to be security.”

“I can’t do security for a whole city. I was a decent gang negotiator. Terrible doorman. And very skilled civil-war-starter. But you’d need an army to run security for Belvaille.”

“You are an army. And you didn’t start the war. You broke your back to stop it.”

“It didn’t help.”

“Look, you can either beat yourself up forever over something you couldn’t have stopped—that no one could have stopped—or you can make the most of it. As Belvaille’s Supreme Kommilaire.”