I was thankful I had been feeding him all this time.
My full contingent of Kommilaire waited some blocks away. I didn’t think they would be of any use, but I wanted them to witness whatever the outcome might be.
I walked into the gap Wallow created and Garm’s people filed out to stop my progress.
“Halt!” One said.
“I want to talk to Garm.”
“She isn’t seeing anyone.”
“You have gaping holes in your walls and I have the biggest army on the station,” I said, pointing back to my Kommilaire. “She’s going to talk to me one way or another.”
Some of the officers excused themselves to confer.
After a while they returned.
“You may go up, but you have to remove all your weapons.”
“I can’t walk up stairs and I doubt your elevator can support me.”
“The freight elevator can.”
“Alright.”
I got their help taking off all my weapons. They wanted everything gone. My hooks. My cables. My magnet. My food. My tools.
“What’s this?” one asked, holding up a large pouch and tube connected to my waist.
“That’s kind of a colostomy bag. Most toilets can’t support me and my colon hasn’t aged well, so I either go on the floor or use that.”
They let me keep it.
We used the door instead of the hole left by Wallow. I looked up to see if the building was bent or otherwise unsound, but it appeared intact.
I hadn’t been inside City Hall in decades. It was dark. Sanitized. Lifeless. A control center without a lick of elegance.
Garm used to have so many carpets they were in layers on her floor. She used to have paintings on her ceiling because she ran out of space on the walls.
If this was her new style, she had truly changed.
The elevator was glacial and I could hear the cables and pulleys crying out in pain as it tried to lift me. I had a lot of time to think as I went up to the tenth floor, alone. I’d been thinking about the same thing for three weeks, ever since I knew this encounter had to happen.
I was born a mutant. My parents were mutants. Their parents were mutants. They all fought, and died, for the military. Everyone expected me to fight, and die, for the Colmarian Navy as well. I said forget that, and ran off to the furthest place I could find.
This city.
I didn’t get an education other than from Belvaille. I was out here with a bunch of criminals at the edge of the galaxy. How could it not make me who I was?
But I was different now. Maybe not Jolly Sunshine, but I was the Supreme Kommilaire! If you had told me I was going to be a police chief a century ago I would have never believed you. I came here to escape that life.
Garm always had a choice. She had a great job as Adjunct Overwatch. She could have called in military support for Belvaille any time she wanted and cleaned up the city—like I was trying to do now.
Instead, she turned a bad situation worse.
The previous city administrators at least tried to maintain some sense of order. Garm took a cut of all the dirty deals. They flourished under her. The gangs, the gang wars, anything illegal.
Maybe that was okay when we were a little space station on the ass of the biggest failure of an empire in the known universe, but now we had to turn a corner. The galaxy was in ruins, we couldn’t treat Belvaille like it was our personal playground, here for us to plunder at any cost. Garm had to understand that.
Or Garm had to go.
The elevator door opened and Garm stood directly in front of me!
She wore her black hair short and sharp as always. Her body was as muscular and tight as ever. Her eyes were alert and twinkled. She was dressed in her old Adjunct Overwatch outfit with military insignias.
She had not aged a day since I last saw her.
I stood there dumbfounded.
How was that possible? Everyone I knew from those early years was hardly recognizable today. You’d need a geneticist to tell I was the same person as I was seventy-eight years ago.
But there she stood, not the least bit different than I had remembered her.
“Hank, it’s good to see you,” she said, smiling. “Come in.”
I stepped inside, unable to take my eyes off her. She held my arm like we were going on a stroll.
“Sorry I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said. “I haven’t really seen anyone.”
“Except those rich people,” I said, snapping back to reality.
“They serve their purposes. How have you been?”
“I’ve been terrible! What do you mean, ‘how have I been’?” I asked, annoyed.
“You’ve been doing a great job with the city.”
“We’re not all dead, if that’s what you mean.”
“Hank,” she said, turning her beautiful face toward mine, “why are you here?”
I took a deep breath.
“I need to know what you’re doing with Belvaille.”
“Nothing at all.”
“That’s not true, you talk to those wealthy people, invite them over. And you hired my Kommilaire or the feral kids or both.”
“I did that just to maintain the markets,” she said without hesitation, completely unruffled.
“You worked with the judges, skewing verdicts. You created your absurd list of candidates for the election. And—” I wanted to see how she reacted. “You hired a famous assassin to presumably kill a lot of the city leaders.”
She never lost her smile. Not a twitch.
“Hank, I never usurped your authority.”
“What authority? You were doing everything!”
“It was necessary to remove the impediments to true market forces. Belvaille can now function as the absolute center of a galactic commerce hub. The markets must prevail.”
I stood looking at her for some time.
I then gazed around the tenth floor. I had been so amazed by her appearance, I hadn’t bothered to look.
It was almost entirely one room, massive in dimensions. It was circular, of course, since the tower itself was a cylinder.
There were some chairs and a couch, both homey and almost humble. There were some thin, cheap rugs placed on the floor haphazardly, not even aligned with one another, producing an almost broken mirror effect.
Some dusty plants and mismatched tables were here and there.
Garm still stood smiling, confident.
“I’m not sure if this is something you would answer,” I said, “but are you a clone?”
She didn’t move. Didn’t respond.
After some time I took a step to the right and her head followed, with the same expression, but she didn’t speak.
“We’re sorry for the deception, Supreme Kommilaire,” I heard a familiar voice chime.
Two Ank walked toward me from some far off compartment at the edge of the room.
“What’s going on?” I yelled.
“It is much as you have ascertained. We were not aware you had learned so much.”
“We shouldn’t be surprised, however,” another said. It was difficult to tell which spoke since they had identical voices and were still some distance away.
“I don’t understand.” I said.
They stopped about thirty feet back, presumably because they were scared of me wringing their necks.
“We Ank have always maintained our neutrality. It was part of our racial makeup to not take sides.”
“But after the Colmarian civil war, we realized we had been short-sighted. Part of maintaining our business interests meant we had to take a more active hand in policy.”
“The Colmarian Confederation no longer exists. Incalculable resources were destroyed in the process. We could not let that happen again.”
“Why clone Garm?” I asked.
“Because she had decision-making powers. It was a small matter at first to bribe or otherwise influence her. Belvaille had long been run that way. But when she became reluctant to embrace our initiatives, we had to change tactics.”