Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy (7 page)

And just as abruptly as the swaying and shaking
started, it was over. Completely. I patted the cold metal wall next to me and
it was as solid as ever.

I looked down at the drugs and they were still
there. But Jyen was gone. Was I high? Had I simply imagined a blue lady, and if
so, what was the psychological significance of me giving her such oversized
ears?

No, she was real. My tele registered the new
three grand. I left the apartment and briefly considered the elevator, but
decided on the stairs.

I woke up to Garm at my front door. Sucks
having a friend who doesn’t need to sleep.

“What?” I asked, resting my head against the
door, my eyes shut.

She pushed past me and came inside.

“What do you mean, ‘what’? Didn’t you feel that
this morning? It was like the whole station was going to break apart.”

“You felt it too? I thought I was going crazy.”

I went to my kitchen for something to eat. I
found some packets of rations, a real space station staple from the early days.
We had decent food now, but I had eaten rations for so many years I was used to
them.

As I chewed, Garm paced around, agitated.

“They’re out there,” she said. “The Dredel Led.
One of the techs, one of the old-timers, was looking through our computer
systems and said someone broke in.”

“Could it be one of the bosses snooping
around?”

“Why would a boss want access to our
facilities? Besides, he could trace where the access point was. It was out
west. No one’s going to be out there. Not with what was printed in
The News
.
People are scared to walk outside, let alone the 220
^th
block.”

Western Belvaille had been dark for decades. It
was just too much hassle keeping utilities functioning across a sparsely
populated city. When people left the space station after the Portals were
closed, those folks that remained were forced to move east.

“I didn’t even know the street numbers went
that high. Well, what do you want to do?” I asked.

“I want to go out there. They must have done
something to cause that shaking.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Do you want to wait a week? We might
not be around that long. We tracked the break-in.”

“Alright,” I said with little enthusiasm.

A hot shower would have done me a world of
good, but I changed my clothes, grabbed my guns, and walked to the door where
Garm was waiting impatiently.

Garm and I were in the back of one car with a
driver up front. The rest of her soldiers were in a separate vehicle. The car
was spacious, with tinted glass, had six wheels. I think Garm had
“commandeered” it long ago from a gang boss for some made up fraction. The
other car was more functional and about half the length. I continued to eat my
rations as we drove past apartment buildings.

“I wonder what parents tell their children in
situations like this,” I said dreamily.

“I told my son to sit tight and not let his
daughter go to school.”

I turned to stare at Garm.

“You have a son? Belvaille has schools?”

“You didn’t know that?”

This was like someone suddenly telling me that
in actuality I was a twelve-year-old girl with pigtails and gap teeth.

“Who’s he work for?” I asked.

“Threezo-threez Finance. He’s an accounts
payable clerk.”

“Here?”

I just couldn’t see any spawn of Garm being
anything but some rough go-getter. I figured a junior gang leader at least.

“Not everyone on the station does illegal work.
We have plenty of decent folks.”

“Yeah, I know that,” I said quickly.

“My son is just a nice kid with a good family.
Though I told him he could do a lot better. The pay is good.”

“So you’re a grandmother too?”

Garm was now aggravated, her lips pressed so
tight I thought they might burst into flames.

“Yes! Just because you’re anti-attachment…”

“What are you talking about? I have
attachments. I know half the people on this station.”

“Half the felons, maybe. But as long as you’ve
been here I bet there’s not more than a handful who even know where you came
from.”

The car moved smoothly along, the hum from its
engine a constant.

“I lost a daughter once, too. Bet you didn’t
know that,” she said.

She gave a small shrug, not dismissive or
uncaring, just something to do with her shoulders as she gazed at the empty
streets.

This was a sorry topic of conversation. It
never would have occurred to me in a million years she was a grandma with a sad
past. Not that that carried any significance. It’s not like she wasn’t Garm
because of it.

But a clerk? Really?

We came to the block that had been tracked and
everyone got out of the cars. The soldiers were taut, their heads swiveling
every which way as if they were trying to wrench them off their bodies. They
had on bulky, padded armor connected by cords and topped with a hard shell. I’m
sure it would protect great against rocks or debris hurled in a riot, but a
Dredel Led seemed likely to laugh at it.

While there were small red emergency lights
here and there, and the latticework shed some light in this direction, it was
fairly dark for the most part.

I took the point and walked to the…I don’t know
what you call it. I guess they’re all over the station, but it’s just one of
those things you don’t pay any attention to. They’re maybe four foot tall
cylinders a foot in diameter, spaced out along the sidewalk every few blocks.

This one in particular had been opened. Inside
it showed all kinds of circuitry and cabling. I looked closely at it as the
soldiers made a perimeter around us.

“This is where the Dredel Led tapped in,” Garm
whispered.

“Should I put the cover back on it?” I asked
her, not having any better ideas.

She made a series of hand gestures to her men.
One squad headed off the way we came, guns at the ready. The rest fell in line
behind me.

She then pointed at me and then pointed down
the road.

I went to the center of the street and began to
walk. It seemed fairly pointless to me since there was clearly no one around.
Did she expect the robots to crack open the panel, do their tinkering, and then
take a break up the street?

We scouted for a good hour. I know, because I
was checking my tele. I ate some of the leftover rations I had in my pocket.
These things were so good. They didn’t even make you thirsty.

“Okay, Hank, let’s call it,” Garm said finally.

Everyone relaxed and we turned and headed back
towards the cars. Just then I heard what sounded like a combination whistle and
deep roiling. That wasn’t so unusual as much as its point of origin, which was
above me.

I looked up in time to see an object fall at
what must have been fifty miles an hour right in front of me. It hit the
ground, bent its knees and back to absorb the impact, and immediately stood up
straight.

It was a Dredel Led.

I could tell it was a robot. Not because I
recognized it from the video, but because there was something just not right
about it. Colmarians can look pretty different in a lot of ways—clubfoots,
clawed hands, faces of every imaginable type—but this thing was just off. Like
how little kids draw people with coloring sticks. Eyes were uneven, hair was a
scraggly mess, nose and mouth weren’t aligned. It had three joints in its left
arm instead of a single elbow, and had way too many fingers on both hands. Its
clothes were also off. It wore a big boot on one foot, a sandal on the other,
bright shorts that hung past the knee and a puffy winter coat with fur trim cut
off at the shoulders.

“Hank!” I heard Garm say from somewhere behind
me.

I looked back and saw nothing. Where’d they all
go?

The robot was standing maybe ten feet ahead.

“Eat suck, suckface!”

I pulled out my shotgun and aimed. The gun has
two triggers. The first one fires the top two barrels, left to right. The
second fires the bottom the same way.

I pulled both triggers at the same time, which
was something I’d never done before. About 200 foot-pounds of recoil hit me and
the gun twisted to the side, but I held on. I jerked it back and pulled both
triggers again.

So in a blink I launched eight ounces of metal
at nearly 1,500 feet per second at this thing.

Other than the smoke, the bangs, and the fact
I’d ruined its jacket, there was no discernible evidence that I had done
anything at all.

Standing alone in the middle of the street
facing a malevolent fairy tale…I ducked.

The Dredel Led made some movement, I heard a
noise, saw a brief light; then I saw the superstructure above, then I saw a
building, then I saw the road, then I saw another building. And I thought:
“This is weird.”

Then I saw nothing and tasted blood. I was
pretty sure it was mine.

Your body is good at telling you stuff to do
and most times you should listen. It tells you when to eat. It tells you when
you should go to sleep. It tells you when you’re doing something painful and to
quit it. It tells you when you’re afraid and you should run like hell.

My body was telling me—screaming at me—to shut
down and hope whatever unfortunate thing was going on would pass me by. I felt
a dark cloud enveloping me. But it was a good cloud. It took away the pain and
made me feel warm and pleasant.

No.

I didn’t want to feel warm and pleasant. I
didn’t want to forget what was happening. I wanted to be neck deep in it. I’m
too stupid to lie down. You’re going to have to make me!

I climbed up out of the pit that was my mind
and opened my eyes to a bright reality of anguish. I found myself on the
ground, propped against the side of a building and the sidewalk, my arms and
legs splayed outward. My whole body shrieked like grinding metal as I slowly
righted myself and tried to comprehend my environment.

There was gunfire. Lots of it. I couldn’t quite
place who or what was firing and where they were. I heard some muffled, urgent
noise and realized it was Garm yelling at me a foot away from my face.

“Hank, get up,” she was saying.

I somehow managed to climb to my feet and I
took in what was going on.

There were soldiers lying on the ground. Two
were firing from the doorways of buildings. The robot hadn’t moved. Or at least
not very far, I couldn’t be sure where we had started at this point.

The Dredel Led looked over at one of the
soldiers. It then used its legs to brace itself and raised its right arm, which
most definitely had some kind of barrel on the side of it. It fired what I
presume it had shot at me. A white blob of light sped out and exploded in the
doorway. The impact was enough that I was sure the soldier was either gravely
injured or dead.

The cannon itself had a recoil and exhaust only
a robot could withstand. You’d never put a weapon like that in the hands of
something biological, it would kill you trying to wield it.

The robot then twisted itself and fired at the
last soldier, hitting the wall in front of where he’d been hiding.

And then the Dredel Led began walking towards
Garm and me.

Garm fired with her pistol, the gun booming
with each shot, but other than some dull pangs from the impacts, it had no
effect.

My brain was still trying to get in gear after
being slammed against the side of my cranium. I was standing there dazed as the
robot moved closer. I saw the soldiers had shot off much of the ugly
prosthetics that had once been its body, revealing a bright silver material
underneath.

Dumbly. Out of habit, if nothing else, I
reached into my jacket, found my Ontakian pistol was still there, pulled it
out, and powered it on. I was going to blow myself up before I let this robot
do it.

And
whoosh
. He took off into the sky.

I looked up, waiting for him to land behind me.
Or land on me. But I could see his contrail streaking off into the distance
where the darkness swallowed it.

“Huh?” I said astutely.

“See? They’re scared of that gun,” Garm said.
Then she ran off to check on her men.

I stared at my pistol. I was too numb from
adrenaline to feel its hum vibrating my innards, but its piercing green glow felt
like a gentle fireplace providing shelter.

Garm was communicating with her base and I was
looking around for a good place to take a nap when she rushed over.

“We got a bead on it. A building a mile from
here was accessed and nothing has come out. It’s in the direction that thing
flew. Let’s go.”

“What?” I looked around at the carnage. I
couldn’t believe she wanted to repeat this, except with fewer people.

“We have the upper hand now, Hank.”

“How so?”

I could see she was exasperated at my slowness.

“It ran from your pistol. It’s afraid of it. So
that means you can kill it.”

“Or. It ran because it was bored. Or because it
knew my pistol would explode if I fired it. Which is what happened when anyone
else tried to use Ontakian guns.”