Stellar Ranger

by Steve Perry

  “Hitch?”

  “Yeah, ‘cause it’ll melt the hard chrome plating off a blueweed combine’s trailer hitch.”

  He gave her a smile in return. “That’ll do.”

  “A half liter of Hitch, coming up.” She pulled a chilled ceramic mug from a cooler and filled it from a tap. Knifed the foam off the top and added more beer, set it on the counter in front of him.

  He reached for his credit wafer.

  “First one’s on the house,” she said. “I’rn Wanita. This is my place.”

  “Cinch Carston,” he said, offering his hand.

  “The ranger,” she said.

  He nodded. Her grip was firm, her hands tough but with smooth calluses. The half-length sleeves revealed veined forearms and etched musculature. That was enough for him to know she was in good shape under that baggy coverall and apron. She stood in balance, so she knew some kind of fighting art or maybe was a dancer or gymnast.

  The beer was much better than the warning. He took two swallows, savored it, then put the mug down. “Which one is the constable?”

  She lost her smile. “Table in the back, far right.”

  Cinch glanced that way. There were two men at the table.

  “Maling’s the fat, stupid-looking one with the neon green cap and the wine stains on his shirt,” she said. “The bodybuilder in the spandoflex tights is Anjing Lobang. He’s Tuluk’s chief pistoleer and headbreaker, a real sweetmeat.”

  He looked at her. “Doesn’t sound as if you particularly like either one of them.”

  “If you want to shoot them both in the back right now, I’ll swear it was self-defense.” She grinned again.

  “Thanks for the beer, Wanita.”

  “My pleasure, Ranger.”

  Cinch took a deep breath and let it escape slowly. Might as well get it over with.

  He walked to the rear table, aware that Lobang avoided looking at him and the constable couldn’t stop watching him. When he was two meters away he stopped. “Constable Maling?”

  The fat man wiped his mouth with one hand. No veins visible there under the insulating blubber.

  “I’m Carston, Stellar Rangers.”

  “My, my,” Lobang said, his back still to Cinch. “A real, live Stellar Ranger. Well, I’m impressed.”

  Lobang had black hair, buzzed short, and the swelling lines of his heavy back and shoulder muscles were easily visible through the skintights. From the way he sat in the plastic chair, Cinch could see his sidearm. It looked to be an M- frame I2mm Vapen, a electroplasma flechette pistol. It was made of wound supercarb fiber, lightweight, impervious to ordinary wear, accurate to a hundred meters, and had a built-in laser sight. The high-velocity darts it fired were designed to tumble after they hit something solid, tearing great holes as they did so. It held fifteen rounds unless an extended magazine was fitted and since the mag’s base was flush to the butt, fifteen it was. Fine piece of hardware, expensive, built for use and not looks.

  Cinch’s own weapon, left to him by his grandfather, was a Smith & Wesson CGLS, old when his grandfather owned it. The stainless-steel semiauto used a magazine powered by a double cylinder of highly compressed and esoteric gases, a special enzyme added to keep them from liquefying. The projectiles were teflex-coated lead starfish bullets. When one of the bullets hit something the consistency of tissue or harder, they expanded from 9mm to 15mm in the shape of a starfish, even at the modest 300 meters/second subsonic velocities at which they flew. The magazine held only six shots before he had to reload.

  In a long-range shootout from behind cover, against somebody with a Vapen, Cinch would be outgunned.

  At two meters, it didn’t make any difference at all. Either gun would kill you just as dead as the other.

  “What can I do for you?” the constable said.

  “There was a shooting earlier today, on Gustav Kohl’s station. Somebody shot through the door of his GE car while he and I were in it.”

  The fat man shrugged. “Anybody hurt?”

  “No.”

  Maling essayed a nervous smile. “Prob’Iy an accident. Somebody potting at a lizard missed, you caught a stray round, ricochet, maybe. Happens now and then. Long as nobody was hurt it’s nothing to worry about.”

  Lobang turned. His face was as muscular as the rest of him. He looked like a squirrel with nuts stuffed into his cheeks. Too many steroids, or somebody had tweaked his GH levels. His sclera were more yellow than white. His hair made a widow’s peak almost reaching to his eyebrows. He was young, Cinch decided, and probably not very bright: not much blood left for the brain after feeding all that muscle mass.

  Lobang said, “Yeah, them rifle bullets, they can zip a real long way when somebody misses their target.” He gave Cinch an evil grin. “Got to be careful wandering around out on the plains, you do. You could get shot, eaten by a lizard, could step in a pooger hole and break your leg. This here is dangerous country, you don’t know your way around it good.”

  Cinch restrained an urge to shake his head and laugh. This guy must have gotten his education from kidvids. He’d had a mustache, he probably would have twirled it.

  “Funny, I don’t remember saying anything about it being a rifle bullet that hit the car.”

  Lobang’s smile faltered just a hair. Cinch could almost hear the gears turning inside the man’s head as he tried to understand he’d just made a mistake.

  Maling leaped in to spare Lobang: “Well, we just assumed that was what it was. Hell, even Lubbie’s handcannon there won’t hardly stop a real big ularsinga with one shot.”

  “Did I say it was only one shot?”

  The constable rubbed his mouth, glanced at Lobang. The bigger man didn’t turn to look at Maling, but said, “Shut up, Deter. And don’t fucking call me Lubbie.”

  Maling nodded, a slight motion. Looked up at Cinch. “Look, Ranger, if you want to fill out a report–”

  “Maybe later,” Cinch cut in. “I just wanted to check in and let you know I was around. I’ll be here awhile.”

  “Doing what? I mean, I’m the Constable–”

  “–and I wouldn’t think of interfering in your business,” Cinch cut in again. “See you around.”

  What was left unsaid was: And don’t you get into Stellar Ranger business. Cinch was pretty sure that Gustav Kohl’s assessment of Deter Maling as bought and paid for by the local cattle baron was probably accurate. Crooked cops irritated Cinch, but it was good at least to know the local law was that way. If that was the case, Maling was already up to his butt in this business. That happened sometimes. You could deal with it.

  Cinch walked to the door, using the mirrors to keep watch on Lobang. He hoped the man wasn’t so stupid as to try to shoot him in the back.

  Cinch nodded at Wanita as he left and achieved the sliding doors without a problem. Maybe Lobang was smarter than he looked. Too bad. Stupid crooks were so much easier to deal with.

  He climbed into the car and headed back toward Kohl’s station. He needed to meet another major player, but he expected that Manis Tuluk would find a way to pay a call on him fairly soon. On a frontier world, when the rangers showed up, even rich men took notice.

  THE RICHEST MAN on Roget, Manis Tuluk, was not pleased.

  He sat behind his hand-carved shinestone desk, the pearly material glowing softly under the indirect lighting, and glared at Lobang. The handmade whispersilk suit he wore, which normally felt so sensual against his skin, did not comfort him. Did he have to do everything himself?

  “But I thought–” Lobang began.

  “No, you didn’t think,” Tuluk cut him off. “I don’t pay you for your brains. If I gave you what those were worth, you couldn’t afford to feed a piss ant with its jaw wired shut!” His anger made him sweat a little, and that triggered his body perfume. The scent of ripe peaches rose from Tuluk’s armpits.

 
; Lobang, for all his testosterone augmentation and muscle mass, was basically a bully. If you had a bigger stick, he would back down. The larger man stared at his boot tops.

  Tuluk was too rich and too old to have to put up with this kind of shit but he had mellowed somewhat. Thirty years ago, he would have pulled his tangIer from the desk and fried Lobang’s brains for such a stupid stunt. Of course, even at this range, he might have missed, given the tiny size of the target. Then again, good help was always hard to find, and it was a small planet. Lobang did have his uses. He had to remember to think of Lobang as a favorite dog. Sometimes it was going to pee on the rug and that was all there was to it.

  “I’ll explain it to you. When you shot at the ranger, what would have happened, do you think, if you had hit him?”

  “He’d be dead,” Lobang said, smiling because he had what he was sure was the right answer.

  Tuluk nodded. “That’s right. He’d be dead. And they’d feed him to the recyclers or the furnaces and that would be that, right?”

  “Right. End of problem.”

  “No, stupid, that would not be the ‘end of problem!’ If we kill this ranger in such a way that any moron with an IQ equal to his boot size can see it is murder, then the next star hopper will bring more rangers than fleas on a field cat! Rangers take care of their own. They would turn over every rock on the planet to find the killer and in the process would find out a whole lot of things I would not want them to find out!”

  Mercifully, Lobang did not say anything.

  “I will make it simple,” Tuluk said. “Yes, we want the ranger to either go away or get dead. But if he dies, it has to look like an accident.”

  The dim bulb that was Lobang’s mind glowed to life. Six, maybe eight watts. “Ah, I get it.”

  Jesus. The man could almost pick himself up with one hand, but he had the reasoning ability of a tree stump. Nice puppy. Now, you scratch at the door if you want to go out, you hear? Hell, might as well send him to take care of his biomechanical kin.

  “All right. Go and see to the springdog. I want it ready to use, but I want it kept out of sight until I tell you. And nobody looks crooked at the ranger unless I say so.”

  “Yes, M. Tuluk.”

  After Lobang left, Tuluk leaned back and steepled his fingers, thinking about the problem. He should have killed Gus Kohl fifty years ago, when they’d still been friends and he could have gotten away with it. Now the old bastard was dug in, had enough money so he didn’t need to sell and was too stubborn to be scared off. He was a major impediment in Tuluk’s plans, and now he had this damned ranger nosing around. Not good. Not good at all.

  Tuluk shook his head. He’d maybe made a mistake, trying to scare Gus away. He should have known better. But it was done now, and he had to live with the consequences. If he could keep things quiet so the ranger came up empty, that would solve part of the problem. If the man filed a report and left, Tuluk would be more careful next time. But if the ranger got too close to something he shouldn’t–and God knew there was enough of that–then the ranger would have to be dealt with, one way or another. There was too much at stake to let anybody get in the way now.

  Tuluk had his spies in place; he would keep a close watch on the situation and see how it developed. Rangers weren’t supermen, after all, they put their pants on one leg at a time like everybody else. Maybe he would poke around and then go away. Even though Lobang had tried to kill him, maybe he would buy the accident scenario.

  Yeah, right. And maybe Tuluk would learn how to walk on water, too.

  He spoke into the servant call on his desk. “Lipas, bring me a whisky.”

  A minute later the butler arrived, bearing a glass containing precisely fifty-eight cc’s of the best single-malt scotch in the galaxy, chilled, two cubes of ice. A bottle of the made-on-Terra liquor cost enough to support a middle-class family here on Roget comfortably for six months; Tuluk had a case of it in his wine cellar. He allowed himself two glasses a day, though usually not this early in the afternoon.

  He sipped the whisky, enjoyed the smoky taste as it flowed smoothly down his throat. Then he sighed. Why was his life so much harder than everybody else’s? There were always so many problems. It wasn’t fair.

  He sipped the whisky, No, it definitely wasn’t fair.

  CINCH had accepted Kohl’s offer of a place to stay. He had plenty of room, he said, and Tuluk owned the only hotel in town, a situation that might make security somewhat frail. Even rangers had to sleep sometime.

  The verdict wasn’t in on M. Tuluk yet, but since Kohl was the citizen most responsible for Cinch being here, he tended to trust him. He liked the older man, and unless he came across something that said otherwise, assumed he was probably a more or less upright citizen. A person didn’t have to be pure white to be a good guy. Cinch himself had done his share of things illegal, and sometimes the ranger methods might seem to stretch the boundries of the law a bit. The way Cinch looked at it, the intent was more important than a technicality. On a civilized world, with established rules and regs, there were recourses to handle nearly every little thing. On a frontier world, sometimes minor points had to be overlooked in the interest of greater justice. Somebody had to decide in those cases, and often enough it was the ranger whose butt was on the line.

  He’d put Kohl in that category. He could be a crook, of course, but even stupid crooks seldom called the rangers in to investigate themselves.

  The room Kohl gave him was large, lit by filtered skylights, had the usual bedroom furniture and a small fresher attached with a toilet and shower. Cinch had stayed in worse places.

  He unpacked his gear. Took a few minutes to assemble his plasma rifle. It was more like a carbine, the barrel only a little over forty centimeters long, but accurate and hard-hitting out to seven or eight hundred meters once he got it sighted in. He’d have to do that, soon. If a handgun like the one Tuluk’s pistoleer carried would barely stop the local carnivores, Cinch needed to be carrying something bigger than his Smith if he did any outback work. And if somebody started shooting at him from long range, he wanted something he could hit back with. An expended uranium slug traveling at over a thousand meters a second would make a hole in just about anything short of full battle armor.

  The scan on the bone he collected confirmed his guess about the metal molecules. Somebody had sicced a biomech on the dead bull, probably a springdog, maybe a chopper, unless the local lizards had somebody doing some fairly complex dentistry on them. Cinch grinned at the idea of a frontier dentist capping the teeth of a wild reptile that could take an arm off with one bite.

  Biomechs wouldn’t be all that common on a world this far out from the main stellar groups. The technology to build them didn’t exist here yet; that meant they were imported and only somebody with a hefty credit account could afford to own and keep one repaired and running properly. That didn’t mean it was Tuluk–he wasn’t the only rich man on the planet–but it did point in his general direction. There were ways to trace such things, even when somebody tried to hide them. He would begin that process.

  He printed out the results of the bonescan, put the sampIe into an evidence tube and sealed the mechanism with the date and time and his personal code. He would forward it to the ranger vaults when he had a chance. He would also uplink a verbal report into the comnet. In theory, the pulse would be beamed to the nearest transmission center and downloaded into a fast mail ship. Given the time it took to get there and then get carried to within spitting distance of Regional Ranger HQ–radio still being lightslow and tachyon transmission an iffy thing on its best day–Cinch couldn’t expect any useful advice or help for days, weeks or maybe even months. As usual, the old maxim of “One planet, one ranger” held true.

  He went into the fresher, used the facilities, took a quick shower, dressed in clean clothes. Might as well go and see what else he could learn from Kohl.

  * * *<
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  Gustav Kohl had taste, Cinch gave him that. The room he’d designated as the library had been paneled in some dark local wood, polished to a dull sheen. Shelves of hardcopy books, tapes, and infoballs lined the walls. There were two computer consoles, a holoset, and four comfortable stuffed chairs covered in leather, probably from his own cattle, Cinch guessed. Some nice, if not spectacular, artwork on the walls, plus a small statue of Saint Dirisha, the patron of close combat, on one of the shelves. The statuette was of a slim and muscular woman staring off into the distance at some unseen enemy; she was portrayed naked and unarmed, save for her own trained hands and feet. According to the mythology, these hands and feet had been sufficient in themselves to defeat a small army. Most rangers liked Dirisha and considered her their personal saint. The place had a nice odor, a blend of leather and furniture polish.

  “Something to drink or smoke?” Kohl offered.

  “I’m fine. Couple of questions I would like to ask.”

  “Ask, son. What I know, you can have. I didn’t call the rangers because I was bored.”

  Before Cinch could speak, however, the big wooden library door slid open and a vision of beauty danced in.

  “Grampa, I need to go into–oh, hello.”

  She was short, petite, with dark hair cut in a short and feathery cap that framed an almost elfin face. Her eyes were electric blue, her smile warm and wide, and she wore a gauzy green caftanlike garment over skintights that revealed as much as they hid. She was quite lovely, strikingly so, and carried herself with that look of invulnerability only the young can bring off successfully. Her perfume was faint, something musky. Cinch guessed that she was eighteen or nineteen standards. If he had been thirty years younger, hell, even twenty years younger, he would have walked through a forest of brambles bare-assed just to have a woman like her smile at him that way.

  Youth was surely wasted on the young.