Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy by Steven Campbell

from one
man! After soaking all this in I finally spoke.
    “Why…,” I began weakly. “Why the drugs?”
    “It’s what he needs for his mutation,” Jyen
said as she stood over her brother, who was now resting on the floor. “If he
believes it, it exists. Anything.”
    My tele went off and with trembling hands I
took it out of my pocket. I saw it was Garm. I was about to answer when I
looked up and saw Jyen coated in her patina of crackling electricity.
    I dropped my tele as my forearm and hand were
scorched.
    “Hey, what are you doing?” I yelled.
    “I asked if we could trust you,” she said, now
only mildly charged. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”
    “Why?” I said, spitting on my sizzling hand.
“Don’t you know what he can do for us?”
    “That’s what everyone says. That’s what the
government said. But they just wanted to use Jyonal as a weapon.”
    “Well…yeah,” I answered.
    “He can do anything. Do you think the Colmarian
Confederation is going to let him be just a regular citizen? This is him in
recovery,” she said, pointing at the man lying on the floor.
    “With a new body he had to create for himself
after they practically destroyed his natural one.”
    So that’s why these siblings looked so
different.
    “Why did you come to me? You don’t need me to
stand up to a destroyer, you can just have your brother think it away.”
    “He might be able to do that. But he can’t
forever and they’ll keep looking for him. The drugs will eventually kill him,
you know that. We just want to be left alone. Like you.”
    I looked around the room and weighed what Jyen
had just said. If I was a boss, like a galactic one, and there was a tool that
could unmake everything I had done, I could see not wanting anyone to have it.
And definitely not wanting it to have its own free will and decision-making
ability.
    And then it hit me.
    “The Dredel Led are here for him. Not me.”
    Jyen looked guilty.
    “When I escaped with my brother, we tried to
cover our tracks as best we could. But he can only make things he understands.
Making a new body was hard enough,” she said, looking down at the wasted man.
“But all the passports and clearances and permissions, they’re too complicated.
Microscopic. We used my identity for a while until we could get forged
credentials. I believe they may have tracked us here.”
    “So,” I began awkwardly, “you guys going to
leave now?”
    “We need your help,” she said.
    And I laughed. I realized it was a pretty bad
move snickering in front of a twitchy level-four mutant and one of the most
powerful entities in the galaxy—who also happened to be an addled drug user.
But the concept was simply ludicrous.
    “How can I possibly help you two? I should be
asking you guys for help.”
    “We’ve been imprisoned for the last
thirty-something years,” she pleaded, and my smile immediately vanished. “We
don’t know anything. Where would we go? How? It took everything we could do to
get here and we were still followed. My brother is all I have. We want to be
safe. We don’t want to hurt anyone.”
    It was heartfelt. Those blue eyes were
streaming tears. I didn’t know what to tell her.
    “Jyen, I haven’t left this station in about a
hundred and forty years. You probably know more about the galaxy outside
Belvaille than I do.”
    “Why have you stayed so long?” she asked,
obviously not so enamored with the charms of the city.
    The question threw me.
    “I suppose I’m scared to leave.”
    There was an ugly silence.
    “Can you help us?” she asked.
    “What can I do that he can’t?”
    “Look at him,” she said. “It takes all his
concentration—all his drugged concentration—to be able to change things. It’s
really difficult for him.”
    “I just don’t know what I can do for you guys,”
I explained.
    “Can you get us fake documents? And transport?”
    “Oh,” I said, surprised. “Yeah, I can get all
kinds of stuff like that. I was