Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Screw the Galaxy

I gazed at the stack of work and my heart sank.

“I quit,” I said seriously. I had been thinking of the best way to do that all day. I established a Governing Council. Garm, some of the bosses, some Naval officers, merchants, and a few chief engineers who kept Belvaille afloat.

I basically gave them all the decision-making power and I went back to being Hank, though with a really cool uniform.

With my new freedom I stopped by to see Jyen and Jyonal. Jyen was as worried as ever, practically trembling.

“You need to work on how you handle stress,” I said once I had stepped inside.

“I was so worried about you. I’m worried about all of us.” Her eyes were lucid. You could be swallowed by them.

However, before that could happen, Jyonal came in looking like he had just woken up.

“Hank. Great to see you,” he said, shaking my hand. “Sorry about trapping you with the Dredel Led, it was the only thing I could think of.”

“No problem, it worked.”

“He’s been feeling guilty for weeks,” Jyen explained.

“You guys want to eat?” I said to prove there were no hard feelings. They were good, if very troublesome, kids.

I awoke in my apartment later that night to sirens and screaming. I staggered outside to see what the commotion was.

I grabbed a soldier running by.

“Are the ships ready?” I asked him, assuming the Boranjame had finally made an appearance.

“We’re evacuating now, sir,” he said quickly and rushed off.

Huh? I meant were they attacking.

Back inside as I dressed, I tried contacting anyone I knew on the big ships. The Wardian, General, anyone above me. No one responded.

I got a tele from Garm.

“The Boranjame,” I said.

“I know,” she replied. “It’s a royal world-ship.”

Garm, Delovoa, and I were in one of the telescope buildings looking at data I didn’t understand. Even the normally calm operators were tense and sweating.

“See this,” Delovoa said, pointing at abstract numbers and swirling magnetic patterns. “That’s them.”

“So what’s that mean?” I asked.

“It will take them a while to get here depending on how quickly they travel. It can’t be very fast just because of its mass,” he said.

“Can the Navy destroy it?”

“Hank, technically we’re in a wide orbit around that ship. If it gets much closer, its gravity alone will tear us apart.”

“Dreadnoughts are designed to destroy planets, right?” I begged.

“It’s not a planet, Hank. It’s a spaceship. An armed one. If the Navy is smart, they’ll run,” Garm said.

“What will that solve?” I fired back.

“Them being blown up,” she said simply.

I didn’t have real access to the top-secret Navy intel, but I could tap into some officer tele channels because of my rank. In their haste and panic, they weren’t very cautious with messages.

The Navy was indeed fleeing. It became pretty obvious as all the remaining soldiers disembarked. They abandoned everything they couldn’t carry in their hands.

They were all gone in a little over two days.

Not only were they leaving Belvaille to its destruction, but the entire state of Ginland that housed it. Who knows how many billions of people. Once folks learned we were not being evacuated, there was panic and more than a handful of deaths.

We didn’t receive official word until the fleet was underway. Basically the gist was they were in combat mode and couldn’t risk the rest of the Colmarian Confederation by taking time to rescue all us civilians. And they expected to be in battle shortly anyway.

It was as cutthroat a sentiment as I’d ever heard in all my years on Belvaille. And just like that, the Navy was gone. Every ship except maybe a few dozen shuttles and some frigates with mechanical problems they left behind.

For the Boranjame world-ship to use its a-drive deeper into Colmarian space, it had to reach the unique area around the Portal. Delovoa calculated that when it was finally close enough to be able to activate, Belvaille would actually be within the diameter of the ship. So even if we survived its gravity, which we wouldn’t, it would physically run into us. And that’s assuming it didn’t blast the station out of the way first.

Freighters had been languishing around the station for months, but people couldn’t be put in cargo holds, they’d die in transit. We figured only a few thousand people at the most could be evacuated from the station using every ship we had. Because of that, we decided to not even try, lest open conflict broke out for those precious seats. The dock was closed.

Jyonal knew a world-ship was coming before the rest of us did when the Navy tried to kidnap him before they left. That didn’t turn out so well for the poor souls who failed to realize what he was capable of.

But as strong as he was:

“I can’t hurt that thing,” Jyonal told us. “It’s too far away, I can only affect stuff I can see. Besides, it’s a planet.”

We had all gathered at City Hall. With Delovoa, Garm, and many of the bosses on the steps addressing the crowd. Seemed like every person in Belvaille was there. Old, rich, poor, children. The streets were crammed with folks looking for a miracle, as they were well aware of what was in store for us all.

Garm stood up to begin. She spoke into a microphone.

“Does anyone have any ideas?” she started with confidence.

“If we get out of the way of the ship, won’t it just leave us alone?” I asked. “We’re pretty small.”

“That’s a good point,” Delovoa stated. “If they are after resources, they’d expend more trying to deal with us than they could ever recoup.”

An old-timer who ran systems spoke up quietly.

“Belvaille can move. In addition to its stabilizers it has real engines, but they haven’t been turned on in fifty years at least. And it’s not fast. It’s a space station,” he explained.

“The Boranjame aren’t fast either,” Delovoa said.

“Those engines don’t work,” another old-timer, clearly involved with the same work, replied. They began to argue about it.

“Can’t we take the Portal? I know there’s some ships here,” one person asked.

“Not enough time and not nearly enough ships,” I said.

“Can’t we send a ship to them and talk? Work out an agreement?” a boss naïvely asked.

“That’s a world-ship. That means somewhere on board is a member of the royal family. Anything that gets remotely near it will get scanned down and destroyed,” Garm replied.

“Delfiblinium can’t be scanned,” I blurted.

“Hank, that square of delfiblinium you have won’t do anything to a world-ship,” Delovoa cautioned.

“You got some delfiblinium?” one of the bosses asked me with respect.

“We have as much as we could possibly need.” And I looked towards Jyonal.

Most of the station was trying to get the engines going and get us fit for travel.

Jyonal was at the dock with Jyen creating as much delfiblinium as he could.

And I was getting the bad news from Delovoa and Garm.

“We can’t just stick it in a shuttle,” Garm said. “They would detect the shuttle even if they didn’t scan the metal.”

“Why does it have to be a shuttle? Tie it together with a rope and push it out,” I said.

“The real problem is how do we detonate it?” Delovoa asked.

“I thought it was super explosive.”

“It is, but not to start. It’s an ultra-complex alloy with very specific requirements to trigger it.”

“Can you make a detonation device?” Garm asked.

“Yes, if I had more time, but it’d need a very strong transmitter and power source as well as the ability to track the Boranjame ship. The problem is any large electronics will be scanned. They’ll see it and shoot it to be safe. Their range is much further than the radius of any explosion we create.”