Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Screw the Galaxy

“Good, let’s start,” Garm began. “We…what’s that on your head?” she said to me, surprised enough to interrupt her speech.

“A bullet,” I replied coolly. I had not removed it since yesterday. I was just going to wait until the skin popped it out. It was a good conversation starter if nothing else.

Everyone at the table was staring at me. I kept nonchalant. Besides, any facial movements threatened to squeeze out the bullet like an overripe pimple. Yup, I kill alien robots and get shot in the face. Big deal.

But then I looked over and saw Zadeck. He was trying to use the other bosses as camouflage.

“What the null is he doing here?” I yelled. The balls on that guy.

Garm looked around. She was obviously clueless as to the situation.

I reached into my jacket and pulled out my shotgun. The fifty bosses that had been at the table soon became five, the rest taking cover in a decidedly un-boss fashion.

At this, about a dozen soldiers who had been positioned in inconspicuous areas rushed forward with their rifles out.

“Put it down!” one of them screamed.

“Hold it. Hold it,” another said.

“I got a shot,” said one with a young voice who obviously didn’t know me.

“Hank, come on,” said a reluctant guard, who obviously did know me, “you’re making this difficult.”

“What are you doing?” Garm shouted. She got in front of me and forced my shotgun to the side. Now the last bosses at the table finally moved as my barrels swung across their positions. I wasn’t able to aim with Garm twisting my arm around, and she’d apparently had some real combat training because she did it with relative ease, despite me being vastly stronger than her. She just redirected my exertions.

“Zadeck put a hit on me. That’s how I got this souvenir,” I said, pointing towards my forehead.

Garm seemed surprised at this news, glancing over her shoulder briefly.

“Everyone here has grievances with each other, Hank. You know that. We all have to put them away for the time being for the greater good.”

“I’m not a boss. I’m me. And when someone shoots me, I shoot them back. And we see which of us dies first.”

“Technically, it wasn’t a-an assassination,” Zadeck said from what sounded like a billion miles away. “I knew Hank would survive quite easily.”

I was feeling foolish with Garm twisting my gun around and around and me getting nowhere closer to aiming. I let my hand go limp and she took my shotgun from me. Which I felt was a bit unnecessary.

“Zadeck!” Garm barked. “You need to apologize to Hank so we can get on with this.”

Garm didn’t know what she was asking. Standing in front of every rival he’s ever had or ever will, it probably would have been easier to let me have one free shot.

He stepped forward gingerly, looking at the other bosses. You could see him thinking.

“I don’t see—,” he started.

“You either apologize or you leave and be the only person not here. And trust me, you want to be here,” Garm said, determined.

“Just do it,” one boss piped. “We’re wasting time.”

Zadeck cleared his throat. He blanked his face. Gave a little bow.

“You have my deepest apologies, sir.” It almost bordered on parody, but it was not so obviously sarcastic that it was invalid. Having to apologize twice would have killed him.

“No problem,” I mumbled, and I snapped the bullet from my forehead. It came out with hardly any pressure at all.

“Fine. Good. Okay—,” Garm started.

“I got a grievance too,” a small-timer said.

“Shut up.” Garm lost it. She pointed at everyone in the room. “All of you, every single one, are going to be dead in a month if you don’t listen.”

That was one way to get attention. Garm should have been a public speaker. She thrust my shotgun at me, which I collected and returned to its holster. She then straightened her hair and smoothed her uniform, neither of which appeared unkempt even after she disarmed me.

“Right. As some of you may have heard, the Colmarian Navy has sent a battlecruiser group to Belvaille. It is on its way. The Captain of that detachment has already declared martial law on this station. Twenty-five thousand soldiers are going to be disembarking and living here. The duration is unknown.”

“Do they just want to make sure the Dredel Led are gone?” an ancient boss asked.

“I do not know what their priorities are,” Garm said. “But the way I see it, every bit of contraband that exists anywhere on this station has to be destroyed or hidden. And if it’s hidden, it has to be hidden well.”

“I’m not flushing my livelihood down the toilet just because some Colmarian monkeys show up,” Ddewn said. I figured he’d be trouble. But there were lots of agreements to his outburst.

“There’s one thing the Captain specifically didn’t tell me about, but I learned anyway. On the other side of the Portal—”

“You mean that broken thing that’s preventing us from getting any goods in or out of here?” a boss who I knew to be big on foodstuffs said. A chorus echoed his anger.

“The Navy controls the Portals,” Garm said, and by her manner you could tell she had explained this many times recently. “They turn it on or shut it off as they see fit. Don’t blame me. But anyway, on the other side of that Portal sits a dreadnought.”

She had obviously meant this to have some meaning, but it was clear no one here had any stake in it.

“Put it this way, a dreadnought makes a battleship look like a mouse. I mean a mouse compared to something really big.”

Still no recognition.

“Okay, a dreadnought is the Colmarian Navy’s largest capital ship. Its weapons are only good for shooting other massive ships. Or bombarding planets. Or…blowing up space stations.”

That got some reaction.

“You’re worrying about losing some liquor or some drugs? I’m worried about them turning on that Portal, wheeling that dreadnought through, and having it kill every living thing on Belvaille,” she said.

“They wouldn’t do that!” an obese boss named Galagher yelled. He wasn’t much of a boss, but we extended the net pretty wide for this meeting. He was a recent addition to the station, one of the newer breeds trying to buy his way up.

“Why? Because Belvaille is such a bastion of noble enterprise?” Garm asked. “We were just compromised by Dredel Led. What do we have going for us?”

“Would they really kill all these people?” I asked.

“They’re bringing transports. Presumably they have enough space to evacuate us. But will they chance that with Dredel Led around? They might not even disembark. Saying they’re bringing transports could be them trying to con us so a panic doesn’t break out over their real intentions of destroying the station.”

“So why bother?” said a gloomy man with a face to match.

“That’s worst-case scenario. Actually, that’s just one. The other is they stay here. Forever. Battlecruisers hovering nearby and a quarter-million soldiers.”

“How many?”

“That battlegroup,” she said, “holds anywhere from 200 to 300 thousand troops.”

The bosses, so recently worried about the prices of liquor, their shipments perpetually stalled at the Portal, and various other small things, found themselves pondering an ocean of police trampling them underfoot. That is, if they weren’t destroyed from space.

“Can we leave Belvaille? I know the Portal is down. Could we load our goods on ships and wait them out?”

“They would scan us,” Garm said. “The Navy is coming from as far away as the Colmarian capital, which is why it’s taking them so long to get here. That’s how big a deal it is. Our port is closed. It is to remain closed until they arrive. If a ship left and was scanned down, they wouldn’t bother boarding it.”