Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Screw the Galaxy

She seemed suddenly very excited and clasped her hands together in front of herself like she was a little girl and I was certain to give her presents.

“Could I come inside?” she asked.

I hesitated. Bringing a stranger into my home didn’t scare me, but I kind of felt like relaxing at this point. And while this woman was cute in a gigantic ear kind of way, and it might be a job she was offering, something told me it was going to be a hassle not worth the time.

“Sure,” I said finally, holding open the door.

She entered and stared around my apartment with what I thought was a sense of wonder. But then I realized it was confusion.

“You are the one in The News they call ‘Hank’?”

There was only one newspaper on Belvaille. The News . “The Twenty Most Influential” quarterly list it published was about the closest thing we had to being designated royalty. For the last eighteen years I had placed #21 with an asterisk.

“Yes.”

She looked around my apartment some more. It wasn’t big. Or clean. Or free from smashed bullets on the walls or the residue from fires. It did not look like the home of the 21 stmost influential person who lived on a crime lord’s space station.

As she continued to scan, I found myself growing more self-conscious. Would it kill me to fix the place up?

Then she looked at me. My torn jacket. My smudges caused from dropped shipping crates. The fact I was standing in my underwear. I could see her earlier enthusiasm retreating.

Most times I met people I either went to their place, we met at some restaurant, or if they came to my apartment they were the kind of guys that didn’t care if there were dirty clothes on the floor. Hell, they didn’t care if there were dirty corpses on the floor.

“Let me go change real quick,” I said, suddenly feeling prudish.

I hurried to my bedroom and grabbed the first pair of pants I saw and put them on.

“What can I do for you?” I asked after returning.

“My brother and I are new to the space station. We came from the state of Lagles Prima. It wasn’t easy getting here.”

I was vaguely aware of the name. It was practically the other side of the galaxy. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would travel so far to reach our humble state of Ginland, let alone our far more humble space station.

Belvaille had been constructed some 300 years ago back when every empire believed their prestige was dependent on how much territory they could claim. It was meant to be a stepping stone for the great Colmarian Confederation to expand outward across the galaxy.

But then I think we realized that the great Colmarian Confederation wasn’t that great and we had a lot of trouble managing the space we already owned. So they shut down all the Portals leading to Belvaille except one and about 95% of the population left.

“I may be interested in hiring you, if you are available,” she continued.

“For what?” I asked.

“Forgive me, but I must be certain you are the correct person. You are a mutant, right?”

“Yes.”

“And what are your abilities?”

“I’m hard to hurt.”

“Excellent,” she said, seemingly overjoyed. “So what if a destroyer was to hit you?”

You know how you get on different threads of a conversation and your brain conjures up images trying to fill the gaps? I didn’t know what she meant by “destroyer” and I was thinking it might be some brand of firearm I didn’t know.

“What’s a destroyer?” I asked.

“A ship.”

I cocked my head.

“No. I am, my body is, difficult to injure. Bullets and bolts will hit me, but I will be fine.”

“Right. So what if a destroyer’s cannons shot you?”

“A destroyer,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“Like a Colmarian Navy ship?”

“Yes,” she said brightly, happy I finally understood her ludicrous question.

“So like, you’re asking what would happen if I was maybe, swimming around in space, minding my own business—”

“The reason doesn’t matter.”

“Right, sure,” I said to this lunatic. “And this destroyer turned its cannons on me and fired. You’re asking what would happen?”

“Exactly,” she said with deep contentment, as if she were being totally reasonable.

“Well, I’m not a physicist.”

“You don’t have to be precise. Just what do you think?”

“I’d explode and be smeared all over the galaxy,” I said tersely.

“Oh,” she said, and looked greatly disappointed.

“Wait, you said a destroyer, right? Those ships that hold thousands of people? That guard the Portals and chase down smugglers and such?” I was still wondering if we were talking about the same thing. She couldn’t honestly expect anyone to survive personally being attacked by a military vessel. That was nonsense. No mutant of any level could do that. Mutations were generally small things like being able to rotate your eyeballs 360 degrees, and many times they weren’t even helpful.

“Yes. And you’re positive that would happen?”

“Well…no, I’m not positive. I’ve never actually put on a spacesuit and gone out and punched a destroyer. Didn’t seem like a smart play.”

“So you don’t really know?”

I didn’t want to lie to her and who knows, maybe she had a destroyer chasing her all the way to Belvaille and her idea was to fling me at it.

“I guess technically I don’t know. But I’m pretty certain I’m not going to win a fight with any military vessel.”

“What mutant level are you?”

“I’m a level four.”

She shook her head in surprise, her ears twirling around her face like braids.

“Level four, that’s it?”

I was really over this conversation. I sometimes had jobs requested by the more run-of-the-mill citizens of the station, but it often seemed to turn into stuff like this. They just didn’t know what they wanted, how, or how much. And that’s fine, they were in different lines of work. I mean I can’t tell someone how to fix a coolant module, and the folks that work on it would probably think I was an idiot if I tried to make any suggestions.

“Yup, I’m just a little old level four.”

“Are you sure?” she asked skeptically.

“That’s what they told me.”

“And when was that?”

“When they first classified me. I don’t know, maybe 160 years ago?”

“Oh,” the woman said again, thinking. “And you haven’t been tested since then?”

“No,” I said, instinctively flexing my pinky that had long ago been chopped.

“Hmm,” she said, scrutinizing me. “I would like to give you some money to purchase some drugs for me.”

Ugh! I can’t believe I listened to all this just so she can try and get high.

“I don’t really do that. But there are plenty of people who I’m sure will be happy to sell to you.”

She ignored me and pulled from her glove a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a list with a truly fantastic amount of drugs on it. Not enough to go into business, but certainly more than enough for personal use.

“I want you to get these. Or as many as you can. I will pay you 10,000 if you can get them to me in 48 hours and 20,000 if you can get them to me in 24 hours.”

Those numbers made me reevaluate the list. I’m not a prima donna. Odd jobs are what I do. And I can help out a nice blue lady now and then.

“This stuff is pretty expensive,” I said. “If you’re new to Belvaille you have to realize that only a few dozen drugs are actually manufactured here. The rest have to be smuggled in and there’s just not a big market for a lot of these.”

She handed me a token for 40,000 credits.

Tokens weren’t used much anymore in the rest of Colmarian space I’ve heard, most transactions being tele-to-tele or straight to banks, but Belvaille was sentimental about anonymous, portable tokens.