Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Screw the Galaxy

“Stop it!” I yelled.

The flimsy shoes honked in exaggerated clownness as I ran. Then it began to rain.

I actually stopped and gazed upwards in amazement. It was honestly raining. On a space station.

Jyonal wore a big, pleasant smile.

“Ah, don’t look at me,” I said urgently. I didn’t want this freak’s mind wandering while he stared at my face. I might end up with four noses.

There was no ZR3 that I could see. I don’t know if it had only taken a few steps or if Jyonal had gotten rid of it. But I wasn’t going back.

I skipped the train and walked with Jyonal. He sobered up fairly quickly. Or became sober enough to talk to anyway, and his eyes, thankfully, stopped glowing. It ceased raining almost immediately. I think it was just in a tiny patch above us, but I couldn’t be sure.

“I need my old boots back,” I said, holding up his creations. The clown shoes were poorly constructed and hadn’t fit well. But it’s easy to be a critic.

He laughed at them.

“Seriously,” I said.

“I can’t. They’re gone.”

“Can’t you undo it?”

“I don’t even know what you were wearing.”

“They were black boots.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything, Hank.”

“And I had a cool gun and that’s”—I looked inside the shoes to be sure—“not here.”

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his head. “This is why I gave up drugs.”

“Did you kill the robot?”

“No, I couldn’t see it.”

“How could you possibly not see it?”

“No, I could visually see it. But I couldn’t ‘see’ it. It wasn’t there.”

“What?”

“When I first started training, they would teach me to tell the difference between hallucinations and reality because I have to use so many drugs with my power. It was almost like that.”

“Hallucinations don’t tear up metal houses.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw. Or didn’t see. It’s like it wasn’t real.”

Jyonal was really tired and I carried him on my back the rest of the way home.

So we still had a robot and I had no boots.

I wondered if Delovoa was still sitting in the corner with his hands over his ears.

Bright yellow shoes adorned my feet. I didn’t like shoes in general. They didn’t have the same heavy construction as boots, and they tended to tear along the seams when I wore them. But I was tired of having black feet because of ash from the fires and I wasn’t going to wear Jyonal’s clown shoes.

With the cargo ships here, we had a large assortment of food choices that had been absent before. My stomach had been loudly protesting my new dietary habits.

I was at a restaurant eating a kind of fried vegetable dipped in a spicy sauce. Not even five bites in, my stomach was already trying to push the food out.

A trim man wearing sunglasses, a hip beard, and some kind of antique military fatigues sat down across from me at my table.

“Hank,” he said.

I had no idea who he was, until:

“Rendrae?” I asked, shocked.

He looked around smoothly, trying not to attract attention.

“No names, please. Good to see you.”

I could barely recognize him. How did he change so fast? He took from his trousers a pistol that appeared to be bothering him now that he was seated and put it on the table.

“I’m just calling to check whose side you’re on.”

“Side of what?” I asked.

He lowered his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. As if talking to me these few moments was already frustrating beyond belief.

“There’s a revolution coming. You know this.” He stated both points as fact.

“I do?” I was utterly confused, so confused my stomach even seemed to stop complaining.

“You know about the military here,” he said, and sighed.

“Yeah, we already went over this. The telescopes and translators and such. I talked to some of those people. They’re fairly reasonable in the right circumstances.”

“Not them,” Rendrae snapped. “The Navy is here.”

I looked up at the ceiling. I don’t know why. We were in an enclosed restaurant and the latticework would have blocked any ship’s lights anyway. He continued.

“You think the cargo transports sat on the other side of the Portal for months, surrounded by Navy vessels, and nothing happened?”

I shrugged.

“Happened? Like what?”

“They boarded them,” he almost yelled, “and left some of their spies behind. When the ships docked here, they got off with the rest of the crew. The Navy has been watching us for weeks.”

Holy. Crap. My jaw dropped.

The bonfires. The airlocks. The gang reorganizations. Everything we were trying to hide, they would have seen. And it looks even worse that we tried to hide it because it shows we knew it was all illegal.

“So you see,” Rendrae continued, “we’re going to be in a fight really soon whether you like it or not.”

“Rendrae, even if this is true, how can we fight battlecruisers? Aim our pistols in the air? The Navy can do whatever they want.”

“No,” he replied. “They’re going to drop off troops and equipment. When they come, we’ll attack.”

“You’re crazy. You think just because some guys know how to gamble and…and counterfeit luxury goods they know how to beat the Navy in protracted firefights? We’ll get slaughtered.”

“We don’t have to win. We just have to make it not worth their while.”

“This isn’t a business venture for them. They’re the Navy.” I said, exasperated. I liked Rendrae more when he was a pudgy, sycophant journalist instead of a counter-revolutionary.

“They want this station. We just have to convince them to let our side exist as normal.”

“I don’t even know what that means, Rendrae.”

“You’re right, we can’t win a protracted war with the Navy. But this is a big station. As it is, we take up way less than half of it. We can share so long as they leave us alone. It’s mutually beneficial for both sides. And we’d have a full-population Belvaille.”

“You think we’re just going to kill a bunch of them and they’re going to want to live with us peacefully? Not only that, but you expect the Navy to work next door with organized crime?”

“They’ve already been side-by-side with us since Belvaille opened. They’ll just be here in greater numbers now. It’s not that unreasonable. Colmarians have a long history of resisting occupation.”

“Alien occupation. How can our own race conquer us?”

I was shaking my head at Rendrae. But if the Navy was here, and it sadly seemed a very real possibility, things looked grim indeed.

“I need to know what side you’re on, Hank.”

“There are no sides yet. But you know me, I’m always neutral.”

“That’s not going to work anymore,” he said almost threateningly.

“Hey,” I interrupted, suddenly looking at his gun on the table. “Where did you get that pistol?”

“What?”

“Did you get that from Been-e?” I continued.

“Yeah. I think so. Why?”

“That gun shot me. Twice,” I said, annoyed.

“Oh.” Rendrae seemed thrown on how to continue. “Well, that’s all I wanted to say. Enjoy your lunch.”

I kept glowering at the pistol, as if it were a personal enemy, as Rendrae quickly put it back in his pants and left the restaurant.

I couldn’t contact Garm. She was so busy lately it was almost impossible. Also, her staff was keeping her whereabouts strictly secret, even from me. I just hoped she knew about the stuff Rendrae had mentioned.

First thing I could think of was Delovoa. We had to move that stupid robot somewhere.