Sirian Summer (Nick Walker, U.F. Marshal Book 2)

by John Bowers

Nick stared at her in disbelief. He’d grown up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where a typical high in summer might hit 110 degrees—but this!

  A woman stepped through a doorway behind the bar and moved in front of Nick, staring coolly at him. If Nick had thought the girl was beautiful, the woman was even more so. In her early thirties, she was obviously the girl’s mother, with the same exotic facial structure, the same open green eyes, and the same blonde hair, though styled differently. The major difference was that, where the girl was still developing, the mother had a chest that rivaled anything Nick had ever seen. His male instincts went on instant alert as he tried to imagine what lay beneath the tight fabric of her blouse.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked in a throaty voice with a peculiar lilt, after fully fifteen seconds of looking him over. Her tone was neither friendly nor hostile, but suggested hostility as a precautionary default.

  “Nick Walker, Ma’am. United Federation Marshal. Are you the owner of the Vega?”

  “Yes. Suzanne Norgaard. You’re replacing Ron Gates?”

  “That’s right. I’ll be taking over for him, and looking to find out who killed him.”

  The woman’s eyebrows lifted a centimeter, but her eyes gave nothing away. “Good luck.”

  Nick took a moment to study her as carefully as she had done him.

  “Any suggestions?” he asked bluntly.

  “About what?”

  “About who killed Ron Gates.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t prove anything. Nobody can.”

  “I think the jury’s still out on that.”

  She shrugged minutely, then turned to the girl.

  “You have work in the back,” she said, and with a look of disappointment the girl smiled briefly at Nick.

  “Nice meeting you,” she said, and disappeared through the doorway.

  “Yeah, same here.” He looked back at the mother. “Anyway, I just got in today, and I wanted to move around town and get acquainted. Looks like I’ll be here for awhile.”

  Suzanne Norgaard continued to stare at him without expression. Nick had the feeling that she didn’t trust him, but in a town as small as this, outsiders would automatically be under suspicion, perhaps forever. And a lawman from the Federation could easily be seen as a threat. He had plenty of time.

  “What’s the standard drink around here?” he asked.

  “Beer and Lightning. But we have just about anything you want, and if you have a craving for something we don’t have, we’ll order it.”

  “Beer sounds good.”

  She turned and produced another frosty mug, filled it with beer, and set it before him.

  “Five sirios.”

  “Little steep, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the price.”

  He paid her and sipped at the foaming brew. She took the money but made no effort to leave.

  “Tell me about Kline Corners,” he said.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Everything. Start with yourself.”

  “Why? You going to propose?”

  He looked surprised. “Why would I do that?”

  “Every other man has.”

  Nick laughed. “Well, it would appear you’re already married.” He nodded toward the doorway.

  “You mean Kristina?” She shook her head. “No, I never married.”

  She frowned briefly, as if deciding whether to tell him anything more. Finally she shrugged, pulled up a stool behind the bar, and sat down facing him.

  “Okay, Mr. Marshal, I’ll tell you. If I don’t, you’ll find out anyway. I’m thirty-two years old. I’ve been in Kline Corners eighteen years. My parents moved here from Vega when I was fourteen and built this club. They were murdered two years later, but I managed to hang onto the club and I’ve never left.”

  The obvious question in Nick’s mind was, where had Kristina come from?—but he had the tact not to ask. As she’d said, he would probably find out eventually.

  “Who murdered your parents?”

  “Six rowdy cowboys who came in one night with too much vinegar in their blood and drank too much Lightning. Things got out of hand.”

  “You took over the club when you were sixteen?”

  She nodded. “Thanks to Mr. Kline. Willard Kline owns this town and most of the land for a hundred miles in every direction. I got hurt the night my parents were killed, but Mr. Kline saw to it that I got proper medical care, and he put a manager in charge of the club until I was old enough to run it myself.”

  “Sounds like you owe Mr. Kline quite a bit,” Nick observed.

  “I owe him everything.”

  Nick drank in silence for a minute.

  “Did you know Ron Gates very well?”

  “I know everybody very well.”

  “Was he a friend of yours?”

  She continued to stare at him with her direct, piercing gaze for long seconds, then her expression softened just visibly.

  “Ron was a nice man. Yes, we were friends.”

  “Do you have any idea,” Nick asked quietly, “why he was killed?”

  “Why would I?”

  “You know everybody very well. Had he made any enemies?”

  “I’m sure he had.”

  “Did he confide in you?”

  She looked down at the countertop for a moment, frowning in memory.

  “He came in here every day for meals. We talked often.”

  “Was he working on anything that might cause someone to want to kill him?”

  She wrinkled her lips, shaking her lovely head slowly.

  “The usual stuff. Mostly he was concerned with human rights, property disputes, things like that. We have a sheriff who handles the routine stuff, criminal activity, and so on. Ron stuck pretty much to issues that concerned Federation law.”

  “Property disputes and human rights. What sort of human rights?”

  She gestured helplessly. “You’d have to check his files.”

  “I will. I just want to know what you know.”

  “I—I really can’t tell you any more than that.”

  He studied her closely. She knew something, but he let it go for the moment. A cowboy came through the door and headed for the end of the bar. Suzanne moved off to serve him, trading straight-faced jokes for several minutes, then came back to Nick. She sat down again and waited expectantly as he took another gulp of beer.

  “What’s a serf?” he asked her.

  Her eyebrows tilted up.

  “You are new around here, aren’t you? Didn’t they brief you before sending you out here?”

  Nick laughed easily. “Yes, they did, for all of one minute. I was stationed on Ceres in the asteroids and they sent me a scrambled sub-fax that the resident agent had been murdered. I was ordered to replace him and find the killer. That was about it. What I know about Sirius I got from the starship database on the way here, but that wasn’t much. I have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Suzanne took a deep breath.

  “I guess you do. Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll keep it short. When Sirius was first settled, several big corporations got the original charters from the Federation and established settlements. Mining, petroleum, agriculture, wildlife, a few others. Naturally the transportation costs were enormous, so they only sent essential personnel. But as the corporations expanded, more and more people were needed, but costs were still too high.

  “So someone came up with the idea of bringing in labor from Central and South America, where conditions were so bad that coming here was like a utopia for them. Transport costs were still high, but wages were so much lower for these people that it made up the difference. They brought them in by the thousands.”

  “I got most of that from the database.”

  Suzanne continued.

  “The original settlers were mostly white supremacists from North America. These newcomers were mostly Latino, and the white Sirians saw them as inferior. They treated them like dirt, and began calling them
serfs. That’s where the name came from.”

  “If they hate Spanics so much, why didn’t they bring in settlers from eastern Europe instead? Surely there must have been a lot of desperate people in those countries.”

  Suzanne shrugged. “What’s the fun in feeling superior if there’s no one around to lord it over?”

  Nick sat frowning.

  “So racial prejudice still exists here?”

  “I’d say that’s putting it mildly.”

  “Could that have been the human rights problem Gates was working on?”

  She shrugged.

  “So serfs are second class citizens?”

  “In the charter states they aren’t even allowed to hold citizenship. Down here it’s different. We’re still under Federation law.”

  “But they’re still treated like dirt?”

  She nodded. “The attitude is planet-wide.”

  Nick drained the last of his beer and sat upright. He looked into her gorgeous green eyes intently.

  “What do you know about the KK?”

  Suzanne looked surprised. “Not much, why do you ask?”

  “Just curious. How much influence do they have in this region?”

  “I’ve never met one, as far as I know,” she said. “They’re almost like a rumor. Some sort of secret police, very mysterious. People who’ve met them don’t like them very much, and everybody’s afraid of them.”

  Nick nodded. He had taken an Academy course on the different police agencies on all Federation worlds. The KK had been described as very powerful, but almost invisible; their job was to enforce the will of the white supremacists, but officially they didn’t even exist.

  Nick was about to ask another question when he heard the door swing open and Suzanne straightened up, her attention on the newcomer. Nick swung around and saw a big man in his early sixties, florid, paunchy, and swaggering, sporting a large white hat and a heavy laser pistol in a holster. He looked around possessively and then made his way to the bar, stopping beside Nick and smiling at Suzanne.

  “Hello, beautiful!” he boomed in a voice as big as Texas. “Give me a Lightning.”

  Suzanne turned to retrieve it and the big man turned to Nick, looking him up and down with suddenly narrowed eyes. “Federation Marshal, huh?”

  Nick stepped off the stool and rose to his full height, still five inches shorter than the other man.

  “Nick Walker,” he said, offering his hand.

  The big man shook his hand briefly and nodded.

  “I wondered if they’d send a replacement. You sure you’re old enough to handle the job?”

  Nick grinned to cover his irritation. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  “I guess we will. I’m Willard Kline.”

  Chapter 4

  “Local law enforcement in remote postings may have a different priority than your own. Don’t take offense if your mission is not embraced with open arms; remember that your authority exceeds local jurisdictions. Show respect for the local flatfeet—but don’t turn your back on them.”

  —Professor Milligan, U.F. Marshal Academy

  Willard Kline insisted on buying Nick Walker’s dinner. The two sat at a table in the center of the club and feasted on beef prepared Sirian style.

  The meal included vegetables, some of them native to Sirius, and the sauces were nothing short of fantastic. For nearly two years, Nick had eaten food cooked mostly by laser or microwave—this meal was almost sensuous on his palate.

  Kline was a big man, not only physically, but in every other sense as well. He was the rancher who owned the town and most of the country around it. He had built Kline Corners around his enterprise nearly forty years earlier, and in one way or another everyone in the area worked for him, or owed their living to him. He was a cattle baron in the ancient sense of the word, something that today could only happen on a frontier world such as Sirius. Nor was cattle his only business; he also owned thousands of acres of farmland, fertile country, artificially irrigated, which produced all the produce needed for Kline Corners and many of the nearest cities. To call Kline a rich man would be to understate his wealth; he was more than rich, he was virtually king.

  He was also charming and magnanimous. In spite of his professional tendency not to take people at face value, Nick found himself liking the man.

  “I came here when I was nineteen,” Kline boomed as Nick fed his face and sucked his third beer. “Had nothing of my own except my two hands and the desire to carve out a place for myself. Everyone said this country was dead, a desert, worthless. I said by God I was gonna prove them wrong.

  “You haven’t seen my ranch yet, but when you do you’ll get the idea. Just a few miles from here it looks like a garden, and we grow nine percent of the produce and sixteen percent of all the beef on this planet.”

  Nick gazed at him curiously. Those percentages didn’t sound that impressive.

  Kline caught his expression and laughed. “That may not sound like much to you,” he said, “but just remember that most agriculture on Sirius is done by the big corporate giants, Sirius Ag being the biggest. I’m an independent, and I’m still in the ball game with them. No other independent can say that.”

  “That’s quite a success story,” Nick observed. “I’m surprised the town isn’t bigger than it is.”

  Kline shrugged. “Doesn’t need to be any bigger. We set it up as a sort of trading post, a place where the hired help could buy the things they need. Pretty much everyone who lives in town is a merchant of some kind. This is cattle country; we don’t invite settlers or industry, so the place doesn’t need to grow. Kline Corners exists only to service my employees.”

  “How do you get your product to market?”

  “We have rail heads at various points around the ranch. The monorails run north into Texiana.”

  “Seems like you could move things faster by air. You’ve got a runway nearby.”

  “We put that in after the railheads were already in place. We needed the ability to bring the shuttle down right here; sometimes medical or emergency supplies come in by air. But air transport for product would be too expensive. You want another steak there? Plenty more if you’re still hungry.”

  Nick shook his head and wiped his mouth.

  “No, sir, I’m fine. I think I’ve eaten too much already. This is the best meal I’ve had in years.”

  Kline smiled, pleased.

  “The Vega feeds better than most places even in the states. Suzanne has a very good cook in the back.”

  “Do you own the Vega, too?”

  Kline’s grin took on, just for an instant, a guarded look, then relaxed again.

  “No. Suzanne owns the whole thing. My only interest is to keep her here. If the Vega ever closed down, Kline Corners would never be the same.”

  Kline pushed back from the table, giving his stomach room, and lit a cigarette with a gold plated lighter. Blue smoke swirled about the table.

  “And what about you, Marshal? Tell me about yourself.”

  Nick shrugged and shook his head.

  “Not a lot to tell.”

  “Hell, everybody has a story. You weren’t born in a test tube, were you? How long you been a marshal?”

  “A little over four years, including the academy.”

  “Is this your first assignment?”

  “Second. I did a stint in the asteroids.”

  Kline waited but Nick didn’t add anything. The big man laughed again.

  “Play it close to your vest, do you? Well, I guess that’s natural for a lawman. Seems to me Ron Gates was pretty much the same when he first got here.”

  “Did you know Gates well?”

  “Sure, spent quite a bit of time with him. Nice fellow. A little on the suspicious side, but he and I got along okay.”

  “What was he suspicious about?”

  “Hell, who knows? I think that’s the nature of the beast. Even Roy Blake is suspicious. Must come with the badge.” Kline laughed again,
but when Nick didn’t respond, continued. “I think Gates was trying to figure out if I was completely honest running my ranch. Asked an awful lot of questions about my operation.”

  “Are you?”

  “What, honest?” For a moment Kline’s eyes narrowed. “Well, from my point of view, yes. Now and then I might bend a rule here and there, as a matter of expediency, but no one gets hurt. Some of your Federation laws are a little stringent out here on the frontier. They don’t take into account the reality we have to deal with. When that happens, I do what I have to do. When I do, it’s in the best interest of my business and of the people who live here. Like I said, nobody gets hurt.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Kline looked surprised, but covered it with a smile.

  “Should I ask for immunity first?” He guffawed. “All right. Just as an example, there might be times when I have a crop on the line and I need a few more hands than are available. When that happens, I might put a few kids to work. Nobody real young, you know, maybe thirteen years old, minimum. And only for a few days, until the crisis is over. They get paid the same rate as everybody else and we make sure the work isn’t dangerous or overtaxing. I think that might be a violation of some of your child labor laws, but when it happens it’s a necessity, and in the best interest of everyone around here. You see my point.”

  Nick sat a moment, expressionless. He did see the point, but didn’t care to let Kline think he in any way condoned any violation of Federation statute. Besides, he had only Kline’s word about the safeguards.

  “What did Ron Gates think about that?”

  “Hell, you’d have to ask him. He may have made a notation in his files somewhere. He never arrested me or wrote me a citation that I remember.”

  “How many people work for you, Mr. Kline?”

  “Altogether, nearly three thousand. Most of them are serfs—Spanics and a few blacks. They all live on my property, in labor housing. I have villages scattered for miles in every direction. With their families there are more than fifteen thousand people living on Kline property. Their housing is free and it’s adequate. I also provide technical training for the children that are old enough to work full time, skills they could use anywhere on the planet if they ever chose to leave.”