Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years Read Free Page A

a brand new
operation on a brand new city; those not particularly welcome in the main
Colmarian Confederation; and those brave and unattached enough to go to the
ass-end of the galaxy.
    There were no gangs at the start. There was no
need for them.
    Most of the crime wasn’t focused on Belvaille,
it was focused off Belvaille. The population had left, so you couldn’t make a
living selling forgeries to the locals, there just wasn’t enough business. You
had to sell off-station.
    But there were a limited number of ships making
runs to Belvaille and a limited market within range of those ships. There was
no point spending 250,000 credits delivering 100,000 credits’ worth of
counterfeit goods five Portals away.
    After a time, the different criminals began
fighting for space on those ships and for access to the most attractive
markets.
    It began small enough, but as the population of
Belvaille ramped-up again, and the operations grew larger, the gangs also grew
larger to protect themselves from one another.
    At this point, a big gang might have twenty
people, with only about five of those actually dedicated to security. It was an
expensive proposition paying for someone to stand around scratching his butt
because of the prospect of violence.
    I was such a butt-scratcher.
     
    I worked for Mordi Mudanus, who was a kind of
middle man. He bought supplies and made contracts on behalf of others.
    I did deliveries, collected payments, guarded
shipments, and did anything where being bulletproof was a benefit—which was
most things.
    I had about 75,000 credits in the bank now and
felt fantastically wealthy. I kept telling myself I should splurge and buy
something, but I didn’t really need anything, so I kept saving.
    We had a postal service on Belvaille same as
anywhere else. I never concerned myself with it because I never got mail.
    When I came home from lunch one day, however, I
had a note that there was a package for me. This was a little disconcerting
because no one in the galaxy knew I was on Belvaille, at least no one who didn’t
also live on Belvaille.
    I went to the post office, picked up the metal
container, and took it home, wondering what kind of horror it contained.
    I pried it open with great effort and found at
the top a dark blue cloth.
    Pulling it out I saw it was a Navy uniform,
specifically, my father’s.
    He was a big man, my father. It would have been
baggy on me and I was not a small person. It had his name, and it had various
medals and ranks which meant nothing to me.
    I pulled out the trousers and found wrapped in
them my father’s old plasma pistol.
    He had always carried it with him. It was an
Ontakian plasma pistol taken from that alien race when one of my forefathers
had battled them.
    There was nothing else in the box.
    This told me several things. It told me the Colmarian
Navy knew I was here, and it told me my father was dead.
    My father had served in the Colmarian Navy, his
father, his father, his uncle, their sisters, sons, daughters, everyone in my
family tree who possessed my mutations. They had all died in the Colmarian Navy
as well.
    None of them died peeling potatoes or slipping
on bars of soap. All of them, to a person, died in combat. Being nearly
invulnerable with heightened regeneration was a surefire way to get murdered—if
you were in the Navy.
    And when they died in combat it wasn’t a stray
bullet that got them, or a stray hundred bullets. Our mutations made that
impossible. It took something big and terrible to kill us and those things
weren’t in short supply in the galaxy.
    I had seen the writing on the wall when I was
young. I was going to join the Colmarian Navy and I was going to die there. I
don’t think it was ever demanded, but after like the fifteenth generation of
service, it stops becoming a request.
    As I saw it, I didn’t choose to have this mutation
and even if I had, I didn’t owe the Navy my life because of it. People in my
family tended to die before their