Steven Campbell - Suck My Cosmos

“What do I do, Delovoa? Help me! Po! PO!”

The Po servant scuttled up immediately.

“Hey, help him!” I shouted.

It waved its arms around a billion miles an hour as if that would help.

“You suck,” I yelled at the big octopus.

I leaned over Delovoa.

“Stay with me, buddy. What do I need to do? Where do I put this hose?”

“Up your butt,” he said calmly.

“What?” I asked, my nerves shot.

He stood up and smiled.

“Gotcha.”

He took the hose from me and disconnected it from his organ-cart and threw it over his shoulder.

The Po began mopping up the floor.

I slumped into a seated position on the ground and stared slack-jawed up at him.

“That was a joke?” I asked.

“More like your first aid skills are a joke. What if you had really pulled out one of my hoses?” he asked.

“How is that funny?” I yelled. Delovoa was such a weirdo sometimes.

I tasted the red glop on my face.

“So this isn’t blood?”

“Oh, it’s blood,” Delovoa said, allowing his Po servant to wipe him clean. “It’s just not mine.”

I spent the next minute spitting and trying to get it off me. His servant wasn’t helping. Maybe because I said it sucked.

“Where is your bathroom?” I asked, trying to keep my temper.

“I don’t use them anymore. They’re so unsightly,” he said, seeming to forget what he looked like.

“Where can I wash up, then?”

“The refreshment room.”

He walked me to it and stood outside. It was a normal bathroom with the toilet ripped out. I had been expecting something more fantastical, given his current state.

“I need you to analyze something for me,” I said, as I was washing off.

“Why should I?”

“What?”

“Why should I?” he repeated stubbornly.

“Besides just giving me a coronary, you’re supposed to be my friend.”

“I’m not a charity. I heard you work for the City Council now,” he said, and I could tell from his tone he was jealous. “Not that I’m jealous,” he quickly added.

“Yeah, so?”

“So it’s expensive living here. And not everyone wants to buy neutron bubbles.”

I paused drying off.

“It’s sad, isn’t it? We used to be the biggest fish here and now we can barely afford our leases.”

“What lease? You own your apartment building! I have weekly rent. So are you paying me or not?” he asked.

I sighed.

“I guess I can expense it. But it’s not going to be some crazy Delovoa price. I’m not having the City Council audit me.”

“What do you want analyzed?” Delovoa asked.

“Soup. Tamshius’ recipe.”

“He’s dead.”

“Does that mean his soup died with him? He gave me his soup restaurant in his will—”

Delovoa threw up his hands.

“Everyone gives you everything! ‘Hey, Hank, want a new body?’ Bzow! ‘Hey, Hank, want a building?’ Cha-ching! ‘How about an expense account directly to the City Council?’ Why do you get all the breaks?”

“Maybe because I didn’t try and kill the whole space station over decades.”

“I didn’t try and kill them. I was just experimenting. Plenty of people ended up better than they started.”

“Whatever. Can you tell me what this is?”

I handed him the soup container. He looked at it briefly.

“It’s not soup?”

“I think it’s some kind of stimulant. It made me go crazy. I’m hoping that was the cause. When do you think you can get me an answer?”

“160 billable hours.”

“What is that, 10 minutes to get the results and then a 159-hour-and-50-minute lunch break?”

“You have the money, what are you concerned about?”

“I don’t got crap. The City Council has the money. Besides, even I haven’t clocked in 160 hours yet. Am I going to tell them I’m time travelling?”

“I heard about you running around and attacking cops,” he said, trying to change the subject.

“How’d you hear that?” I groaned.

“Same place I heard you were sleeping with Malla, who probably killed her husband. For someone who gets all the breaks, you sure do piss them away, Hank.”

I figured I would do Maris-To’s job, even though it didn’t pay as much as the City Council one, because it was an actual job with an actual completion that I wanted to complete. It was also off-station which would put some distance between me and Malla and MTB.

I might be a third rate flunky on Belvaille, but in the Sectors, I still had quite a bit of influence. That’s where all the normal people lived and worked.

They wouldn’t know a person’s heraldry if it jumped up their noses. But they knew what a bulletproof guy was: me.

I was reading the job description as I waited for the shuttle. Maris-To had it written obliquely. It didn’t say, “go in and punch this guy in the ear.” It was such that if anyone picked up this paper they wouldn’t be able to use it to implicate Maris-To. Problem was, trying to make sense of what he really wanted.

My shuttle cab arrived and it looked a bit worse for wear. I still got nervous flying around the vacuum of space. Especially without a space suit and especially in a junky shuttle that looked like it had been put together in someone’s garage and flown on a dare.

“You call a cab?” I heard an electrical voice ask.

I tried to see who was driving and it was a Keilvin Kamigan!

Keilvin Kamigans were a whole other empire. They were probably the weirdest major species in the galaxy. They were made out of gas. Just a cloud. This one was kind of reddish with some crackling pink electrical discharges all through it.

“Yeah. Uh, you’re driving?” I was a bit skeptical since it didn’t have a physical body.

“I will if you can pay.”

Definitely a cabbie.

“I’m going to Education Sector, ship X0113B,” I said.

“Right. Strap in.”

In the back seat I saw his cab registration. His name was Zzzho, which I thought was funny.

Because Keilvin Kamigans were somewhat electrical, they could power devices. Plug themselves right in, which was how they could speak to us—and I suppose how he could pilot the shuttle. But I wondered if the old ones had names that were kind of based off of the bad speaker technology that existed at the time. Like the sound of static or feedback. Then later on when they got better speakers they couldn’t even say their own names.

I didn’t know much about the species except they could live on planets that other races couldn’t, so they almost never had any conflict. No one was going to fight over some gas planet.

We pulled out of the port and headed off.

So many ships out here. I was always impressed, and put off my reading to gawk like a tourist.

Belvaille System was quite ordered. You couldn’t just fly around anywhere. There were plenty of freighters and transports that came and went, but they had to pay fees and were directed by the Central Authority.

All the big ships were permanently anchored in their Sectors. Since there was no star in the System, there were only minute recalibrations that had to take place periodically. Everything was organized in relation to the Portals, which were the most important things here. Even Belvaille itself was secondary.

There were other space stations out here that had migrated to the Belvaille System, though they were fairly small. Belburge, Belton, and Floloria. The first two had changed their names to Bel-something in honor of coming to Belvaille. Floloria was a Rettosian space station and they had stubbornly kept their name. Rettosians, as a species, were kind of stuck-up jerks.