Hard Luck Hank: Fourth Quadrant by Steven Campbell

Author:Steven Campbell [Campbell, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Brief News Update

While Hank and company were busy making friends in the wilderness, the rest of the galaxy was coming to grips with the events of the Belvaille Massacre.

The Ank had been prevented from sending direct assistance to Belvaille and that had been the final insult. But the Ank were bankers, and they took measured, appropriate responses.

What they did was a series of downgrades, financial reallotments, credit exchanges, and about 14,000 other things that no one actually paid much attention to because they went on all the time.

But after all the Ank activities began to coalesce, the upshot was, money markets were left in turmoil. No one knew what was going on.

In fact, no one knew it had anything whatsoever to do with the Ank or the so-called Belvaille Massacre. Because no one knew what that was. Because the rest of the galaxy didn’t concern itself with happenings thousands of light-years away. There was plenty to be concerned about right in your own planetary neighborhood, thank you very much.

And when no one understood what was going on in the realm of finance, no one did anything. Because pan-galactic financiers aren’t the kind of people to go pulling random levers to see if that will help.

The giant engine of trade was slowing and stuttering. And entire empires were starting to panic.

And none of that had been what the Ank intended. They believed their actions would be obvious. But they also didn’t want to come out and thump their chests and say: “We’re the badasses responsible.” That wasn’t the kind of bankers they were.

And when your “empire” consisted of a single planet and one of your major embassies had just been eradicated, it made the Ank even more aware of how unwise it was to go around bragging.

Way out on the Colmarian Confederation planet of Belvaille, where the Ank had wanted to put the most pressure, the only hints that anything was wrong was a slight pullback in the number of trade shipments scheduled for the coming months.

But that was hardly worth noting.

It would take years or even decades for the full force of the Ank’s actions to reach Belvaille—which was a single city on a single planet in an enormous empire. Belvaille didn’t rely on trade, they relied on the fact they had a Thad Elon relic. And mortgage rates wouldn’t change the relic.

Even when the effects finally reached Belvaille, no one would have any idea what the cause was—even if the Ank called them up and explained it. Belvaille simply didn’t have those kinds of people and resources.

The general levels of unease, concern, volatility, instability, turmoil, and angst were ticking up slightly across the galaxy. Those, and millions of others, were metrics that the Ank closely monitored.

Unfortunately, no one in the Colmarian Confederation was calling or apologizing or was even aware that they had been directly targeted. They were just as clueless as everyone else. To their credit, the Colmarians were much more clueless than everyone else.

The Ank had basically begun a very slow, galaxy-wide economic meltdown for no reason.

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