Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Screw the Galaxy

You’d think there would be a lot of things to ponder in the void of space. Out here alone with myself.

But mostly it was death.

Being surrounded by countless tons of delfiblinium in a primitive raft of a spaceship on my way to blow myself up might have had something to do with my morbid disposition.

I admitted I was afraid. I guess afraid of dying. I wasn’t much on big thoughts, but I knew I hadn’t lived the best of lives. Maybe this final act was a way to get a bit of redemption, for what it was worth.

I woke up to an odd feeling. My back was wet. I guessed I was sweating. As I cleared the cobwebs from my mind, I realized that didn’t make any sense. Any liquids would just roll around in my suit. Then I noticed my arms were no longer floating. I had weight.

I looked back through the window and saw solid red. An orange-red mass. It filled all the windows simultaneously.

“Holy crap,” I breathed.

I tried to focus my eyes. I was likely travelling at tens of thousands of miles an hour. Or who knows?

I grabbed the plunger and clicked it open.

I needed details. What was I looking at? How close was I? It was impossible to tell. My heart was going crazy in panic, my thumb on the trigger. I had never felt so much adrenaline, I could hardly think.

“Don’t waste it. Don’t die for nothing.”

Then I saw structures. Squares and rectangles created by hand, as they were too uniform to be natural. But were they buildings? Cities? There were no clouds or atmosphere, I had no perspective.

There were more. Whole clusters of them. A whole world of them. But I couldn’t tell their scale. I realized I had to do it. I still couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t want to risk pancaking into them.

“Eat suck, suckface.”

I clicked the plunger and nothing immediately happened. I looked at boxes that contained the alloy, expecting some glowing chain reaction, but it was just sitting there.

I clicked the plunger repeatedly, pushed in the cord at the bottom to make sure it was secure. Nothing.

“No!” I screamed.

I was expecting a sudden cessation of momentum with me crushing into oblivion, but it didn’t happen. I slowly became aware of a sound in the ship. How could I hear anything in a vacuum?

A yellow light engulfed me along with a horrible grinding noise. Sparks and hot metal fragments ricocheted around the vessel like a meteor shower. The side of my ship was cut away and some creatures approached the opening.

They had no discernible heads and no great abundance of torso. They were a large sprout of arms/legs which seemed to be interchangeable. They would cartwheel up and down or forward and backward as part of their locomotion.

My mind skipped gears. Either every religion was extremely wrong, or I wasn’t dead yet.

The creatures stood maybe five feet tall, with most of their mass in their appendages; I tried to count how many they had, but they tumbled around so much it was impossible to tell. It was even disconcerting looking at them, like staring at an optical illusion. Their skin colors varied between pastel greens and blues.

About seven squeezed into my ship. I believe they were carrying weapons.

They tried to urge me out of the ship but I was anchored by my spacesuit. They then consulted one another for a second or two via gestures, and essentially attacked me.

What felt like a hundred hands dismantled my suit completely. It wasn’t rough at all, just surprising.

They not only removed my suit, but also my tele and my shotgun and I think the lint in my pockets.

I could breathe. Which was always nice. The air mixture was not the same as Belvaille’s, but I didn’t get a sense it was toxic. It had a slightly industrial odor.

Outside my ship, I saw what looked like dozens more of the creatures. They all moved too quickly to be sure of their exact numbers.

We were in a hangar of gigantic proportions. Fleet ships could dock in it I suspected. They had somehow pulled my ship in and brought it to a halt without me ever feeling it.

I thought briefly about trying to grab one of their guns and shooting the delfiblinium to try and damage this world-ship, but I figured I was much too slow, and I didn’t think it would work. For all I knew they could be carrying water pistols.

They ushered me along in a great mob, not saying anything. I didn’t know if they could even speak. It was slowly dawning on me that I was here. I had landed on the Boranjame planet and was being escorted through its interior by odd creatures.

I had failed in my mission and Belvaille would be destroyed and maybe even the Colmarian Confederation.

I felt the floor shaking and looked up. Two. Two Therezians flanked our group wordlessly.

They wore ornate clothes, jewels that were the size of me, and carried long staves even taller than they were. I actually paused in awe. So that’s what non-crazy Therezians looked like. They really were magnificent.

But they also gave me more of a gauge of the dimensions of the area. Belvaille might be able to fit inside this docking bay.

The arm-creatures made way for one of their kind wearing purple bracelets. It didn’t move nearly as much as the others. It spoke to me.

“Do you speak the Standard tongue?” it asked. I saw that it created sound by manipulating some objects with its many hands. Like it had different ones for bass sounds, for middle range, for treble. It was quite dexterous as they were mechanical devices, not electric.

“You mean Colmarian?” I asked. “Yeah, of course.”

“Follow,” it said.

Without further word, I was taken to a room that was merely a few hundred feet in each direction. The walls were gently arcing, smooth and bare. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all the same metallic color, which gave the uneasy impression there were no dimensions at all because they blurred into each other.

I paced around nervously for some hours. I assumed they were deciding how to kill me for daring to attack them. The purple creature returned with his Therezian guards and a group of his many-armed comrades.

“Are you a representative of your people?” it queried. “And are you authorized to negotiate on behalf of your species?”

I looked up at the Therezians. I didn’t figure it would do me much good to tell them my real objective or that I was merely a thug on a space station.

“Yes,” I said unsteadily. “I’m His Excellency, Hank the Boss of the Colmarian Confederation. Are you the representative for the Boranjame?”

“You see the Po,” the purple creature said. “Slave species of the Boranjame.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, as if I had known that but merely forgotten.

“Please follow,” it said, doing what I guessed was its approximation of a bow.

The Po wriggled forward on its many hands, and between it and the Therezians and the constantly moving swarm of Po flanking me, I was by far the slowest. The purple Po routinely paused to wait for me.

No description as to the size of the ship was really adequate. It was a planet. The place I assumed was a hangar branched off at regular intervals with similar-sized passageways. I then realized I was merely in a hallway. The enormous room I had waited in was probably a closet or maybe a desk drawer.

There were no decorations of any kind that I could see. It was purely functional, covered in pipes and conduits and electrical cables and bolts and all manner of industrial machines. The only thing intriguing about these features, besides their absolutely enormous size, was their composition. The ship seemed to have strata or layers. At one point everything would be a brownish-red color, and after some time walking, the same walkways and railings and tubing would be gray and have a slightly different texture.