Stellar Ranger

by Steve Perry

  “Perhaps after dinner we might enjoy cigars and some single-malt scotch or brandy while we discuss the details of our new venture?”

  “M. Tuluk–”

  “Call me ‘Manis.’ ”

  Ulang grinned. “You are a man after my own heart, Manis.”

  * * *

  The team following Cinch during the day usually numbered five, as best he could tell, each in his or her own vehicle and working carefully so that none of them was ever in his line of sight too long before being replaced by another. They were competent, but he had followed enough subjects that it hadn’t taken him long to spot them. The SOP was to pretend you didn’t see them, so they wouldn’t know they were burned; otherwise, they would be replaced and you had to ferret them out again. Better the devils you knew than the ones you didn’t.

  At night, however, the tail was shortened and shrunk. Only two operatives kept watch on him. Assuming he would have to sleep some time and having demonstrated his preference for that after dark, they felt they could afford to be lax.

  Cinch, now dressed in his camo gear, slipped from one of the house’s side windows and moved into the night. Because they couldn’t get too close to Kohl’s ranch house proper, the pair of agents were hidden in carefully excavated ground blinds, one in front and one in back, with, he, assumed, decent optical equipment trained on the house’s entrances. Probably the scopes were rigged with motion detectors so that if the doors opened, an alarm would wake a dozing operative in time to get a quick look at who caused it before they got very far. With a sixth- or seventh-generation LG eye lit and working, they would be able to see the exits under available starlight as if it were noon–albeit a somewhat cloudy and green-tinted noon.

  But as Cinch half-crawled, half-duckwalked away from the building and toward the garage, he smiled at how easy it was to slip surveillance in this kind of setup. The scopes and electronics would probably be top quality, but at the range the watchers were from the house they would necessarily have a very tight field of view. From a kilometer away you could certainly see a man open a door but without magnification, you wouldn’t be able to tell who he might be. Even a power zoom wasn’t instantaneous; so while you could rig your scope relatively wide to see the entire door and area around it, a much bigger field wouldn’t give you the detail you needed. And if the damned electronics fizzled, as they sometimes did at just the wrong time, you would have to manually refield and you might well miss your subject in the dark, he was in a hurry. So watching the, whole house was not impossible, but real unlikely, which meant nobody was going to see him leave via the window because nobody expected that and so wouldn’t be set up to cover it.

  Cinch reached the garage and slipped in through the door he’d left open earlier. Inside was a bike he’d set up, with a nearly silent fuel-cell electric motor connected to the rear wheel. It wasn’t fast but it was quiet, and he had a relatively smooth route picked out that angled away from the two watchers. As long as there wasn’t a third one he’d missed, he would be a dozen klicks away in half an hour and the two in the blinds would not suspect a thing.

  He rolled the bike out on the dark side of the garage and switched on the motor. He climbed onto the bike and engaged the drive. He and the little bike moved off.

  The watchers had similar vehicles hidden in their lairs, but if they suspected he was gone, it was their coms they would use, not their wheels. He couldn’t outrun a radio pulse, so the trick lay in keeping quiet and not being seen.

  And, as the bike jumped across the unpaved ground, keeping himself from being tossed off by a bad bump and breaking his neck was also a consideration ...

  * * *

  Pan had his borrowed truck parked ten kilometers away, under the overhang of a rocky outcropping on a smallish hill, with camouflage netting strung over the exposed side. If Cinch hadn’t known it was there, he would have missed the van.

  Cinch whistled as he drew near, Ioudly, a five-note sequence he and Pan had agreed on. He kept the bike’s lights off as he rolled up to the netting.

  “Evening, Ranger. Nice night for a ride.”

  Actually it was nicer than Cinch had hoped. The promised weather front had stalled, and while there were a few high clouds, there wasn’t any fog or rain apparent in the near future.

  “Any trouble?” Pan said.

  “Nope. You set?”

  “Yep. Want to take a look at your new ride?”

  Cinch followed Pan around the end of the netting. The younger man opened the back of the van. Inside, Diji and Po sat, playing cards on a box between them. They nodded at Cinch, made polite and somewhat nervous noises at him.

  “There it is,” Pan said, pointing.

  Cinch looked at the small vehicle. It was a two-passenger flitter, looking much like a motorcycle without wheels, with a black plastic faring and clear windshield and a big repellor unit amidships, “Very nice,” he said. “A racing model.”

  “Yeah, and take good care of it,” Po said. “We couldn’t find what you wanted on the street so I borrowed this from my uncle. You wreck it and he will skin me with a bent gravy spoon.”

  Cinch smiled. “I’ll be careful.”

  Pan blew out a nervous breath. “You okay?”

  The young man nodded. “Yeah. A little tense.”

  “That’s okay, so am I.”

  “You?”

  “Risking your life is something you only get used to in the abstract,” Cinch said. “When it gets to the actual event, the pucker-factor still happens every time.”

  “Pucker-factor?”

  Cinch grinned. “How tight your anal sphincter gets in response to danger. On a scale from one to ten, one is hardly noticeable, ten is so strong it would suck up a couch if you were sitting on it.”

  Pan and his two friends laughed.

  “So, let’s get this bird into the air, okay?” Cinch said. “Before my PF gets too high to let me use the seat.”

  “Right.”

  The four of them moved the flitter out of van and down the ramp extruded from the rear. When it was on the ground, Cinch powered up the vehicle’s computer and downloaded the map from his flatscreen into the navigation program. He checked to make sure it was glitch-free, ran a quick diagnostic on the flitter’s systems, then nodded. “Looks good. Let’s make sure our chronographs are in tune.”

  The four checked and adjusted their personaI timers so they all matched.

  “Let’s do it,” Cinch said.

  He climbed onto the flitter, fixed the seat, powered the repellor up. The machine hummed quietly to life.

  “Good Iuck,” Cinch said.

  “You, too,” Pan responded.

  With that, the ranger sped off into the night.

  EVEN AT half throttle, the little flitter was fast. Cinch rocketed over the mostly barren ground at just over two hundred kilometers an hour, maintaining a height that would have clipped the tops of short trees, had there been any. It wouldn’t fool a good simadam running doppler, but ground clutter ought to cause regular radar problems spotting him. What he hoped was, anybody normally looking for him would be too busy by the time he got there.

  Crouched down low behind the windshield, Cinch swung a long and wide turn to the northwest, circling around Tuluk’s property. His destination was logged into the navicomp and the flitter could take him there on its own, but he preferred to keep manual control. If something happened to him before he got there, the map program he’d loaded was rigged to erase itself so nobody would ever be sure where he’d been going, at least nobody who shouldn’t know.

  The night air was crisp, and blowing past at two hundred per, bit at any part of him that was exposed. He’ d raised his head above the shield once, and his hair had streamed as the wind took his breath and watered his eyes. He’d quickly ducked back behind the protection. A fat night bug would be an organic bullet at this speed, could put
out an eye or maybe even knock him senseless. He should have gotten a helmet to go with the eyewear; that would have been smart, too.

  Ah, well. So he wouldn’t win any prizes for brainpower. He could live with it.

  Time passed, and Cinch monitored its passage. That part was critical. Too soon, and there was a chance some doodab with a spookscope might see and shoot him out of the air; too late, and the same thing applied. He’d be dead and that was bad. He’d never know what exactly old Tuluk had been up to, and somehow that was almost worse. Solving the puzzle was what kept a ranger sharp, what kept him going.

  He grinned and opened the flitter’s throttle a little more. The night world blurred past. He still believed that when your number came due, you paid the price; but he had begun to realize that since you didn’t know when it was about to appear on the horizon, there wasn’t any point in being too fatalistic. You took that to the extreme and you could justify jumping off a tall building into the plastcrete.

  * * *

  Tuluk and Ulang were considering the details of delivery, how best to distance themselves from the freighters that would be hauling the refined chem. Tuluk was willing to defer to Ulang’s experience in these matters, but he wanted to know the particulars. Knowledge was indeed power, and he preferred to keep as much of that for himself as possible. .As always, forewarned was forearmed.

  “I always use a ship of Gowah or Gorn registry whenever possible,” Ulang was saying. “They are both particularly paranoid about secrecy, which is how they keep offworld moneys coming into their treasury–”

  The door to the study zipped open and Lobang ran into the room,

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry, boss, but we got trouble. The pipeline–”

  “Send the leak patrol. I’m busy here.”

  “Uh, boss, it ain’t just a leak. Somebody blew it the fuck up. In a bunch of places.”

  Tuluk stared at Lobang as if he had just sprouted quills. Blew it up?

  Dammit!

  * * *

  Cinch glanced at his chrono. If everything had gone as planned, the raj had just set off a bunch of explosive charges, shattering the pipeline that fed Tuluk’s blueweed fields. The system had been designed to stop major leaks. Automatic valves were set to kick in way up the line if the flow increased past a certain point. AlI that valuable water wasn’t supposed to be feeding desert scrub, and any halfwit computer watch program would know that. But the automatic valves had been given other instructions, courtesy of the raj. Somebody was going to have to tum a shutoff manually, and some of those had been tampered with, too.

  As if somebody wanted to waste all Tuluk’s water. Imagine that.

  It wouldn’t take all that much to stop the flow, despite the sabotage. The computer would find a good valve and somebody would get sent to it in a few minutes, fifteen, twenty, no more, Rebuilding the shattered line would only take a few days, if that. No, it wasn’t a big disaster, but it was big enough for an anxious man to scramble his troops to see what was going on. Especially since the raj would continue setting off more fireworks designed to draw as much attention as possible.

  With any luck, Tuluk would think there was a fullblown war cranking up out in the northeastern badlands and he’d have to take appropriate action.

  And while he was over there, Cinch would be over here.

  He was on-line now, skimming the tops of the tallest blueweed plants. He couldn’t assume that Tuluk would leave the shed completely unattended, not if what was there was as valuable as a springdog guard would indicate. And he had to consider the biomech, too. It might be back on-line. Armor-piercing didn’t work all that well at handgun velocities, but he had his carbine loaded for electronic and plated bear. If they sicced a dog on him again, they were going to be out more of their expensive hardware.

  He also couldn’t expect to fly up to the door and stroll in. He would have to put the flitter down far enough away so the sound wouldn’t reach his target, and so any detection systems that might be up and running wouldn’t get a good look at him before he vanished.

  Tricky.

  He decided to drop the flitter into a lane between rows and baby it along to within a kilometer or so before he started walking. He could jog the remaining distance in a few minutes and still be in and out before Tuluk’s troops got through chasing after the raj. Who ought to be fanning away from the pipeline at a good clip by now.

  The flitter chugged along, quiet but not silent; after the fast run through the night it felt as if he were crawling, even though he was still doing fifty.

  Close enough.

  He dropped the flitter almost to the ground, eased it into the weed out of sight, set his locater so he could find it if he got turned around.

  Cinch took a deep breath, let it out. Time to take care of business.

  * * *

  “Christo, what a mess,” Lobang said.

  Looking down on the scene from fifty meters up in the limo, Tuluk agreed. The car’s spotlights, dialed to broadbeam, revealed a section of the plastic pipeline. Or what had been a section of it; the explosives had shattered a good twenty meters of pipe into fragments, the largest of which seemed to be no bigger than a man’s hand.

  Ulang had elected to stay at the ranch and indicated that he might not be there when Tuluk returned. Chem peddlers were by nature cautious, even to the point of paranoia; and Ulang’s first reaction had been to wonder if this debacle had been aimed at him.

  “Take us to the next one,” Tuluk said.

  Lobang accelerated the limo. Four sections, hundreds of thousands if not millions of liters of water wasted. Lobang had a dozen men at each location running around waving guns, but they were a waste of time, Tuluk knew.

  “We are going to have to do something about the raj,” Tuluk said, his voice cold.

  “You think this was them?”

  “It’s got their prints all over it. I want you to triple the offer of a reward on Panjang Meritja, same for his gang. Put it onto the net right away.”

  “We’ll have bounty hunters crawling all over this place like ants on a dead mouse, boss.”

  “Good. Maybe if Pan knows he’ll get his face shot off if he shows it, it’ll give him something else to think about instead of aggravating me.”

  “Okay.”

  Tuluk leaned back in the plush seat and considered this most recent attack. What was to be gained here? Pan wasn’t a stupid boy, at least not in terms of pure brainpower. He would have to know that bombing the pipeline would be a temporary irritation at best. He must have spent considerable resources setting this up: the cost of the explosives, the transportation, the planning. What was the point? There was nothing to be gained here, save to pull on his enemy’s tail. It was not like breaking into a warehouse and stealing something of value. A couple of days and the line would be as good as new. So why would he make this gesture?

  Probably the same reason he made all the other gestures. It was the best he could do, like a fly biting an elephant.

  “Here’s the second one,” Lobang said.

  Tuluk leaned his head out of the window. The air was frosty, his ears starting to ache. Another big section of pipe had been pulverized. That would have taken a number of charges, placed sequentially–

  Came the dawn of realization, all in a rush. “Oh, shit!”

  “Boss?”

  “It’s a diversion! This isn’t about the damned pipeline!”

  “Huh?”

  “The ranger, the goddamned ranger is sleeping with Wanita Meritja! He’s using her to contact her brother! The ranger sent them to do this!”

  “But–why?”

  “The blueweed processing station. The Twist! He knows about itl Get on the com and call Picobe!”

  * * *

  Cinch looked and listened for the springdog, but so far hadn’t detected it. He wore his wo
lf ears and spookeyes now and moved through the darkness easily, able to see almost as well as if it were daylight, able to hear much better than normally. This kind of augmentation was effective, but risky. If you got dependent on it and your electronics went wonky, you could find yourself in deep shit in a hurry.

  But for the moment, moving toward the dimly lit shack just ahead, the extrasensory gear was a big help.

  There was a generator thrumming along a few meters behind the main shed, under a low-roofed outbuilding that was basically four slabs of Everlast–a slant roof and three walls. Cinch guessed that this far out there weren’t power lines laid and the city cast wouldn’t reach, so the generator probably supplied all the power for the blueweed shed.

  He edged his way toward the outbuilding. Still no sign of guards or the dog. He shut his wolf ears off. The generator would deafen him otherwise, it was loud enough to hurt but not so loud as to trip the safety cutout. He also slipped the spookeyes up on his forehead to examine the machinery up close.

  The generator, a simple exchange-drive with a line going into the ground deep enough to tap into geothermal, was locked and needed a mechanical key to operate the controls. Cinch leaned his carbine against the wall of the shed and pulled a popper from his pouch. He set the popper–a melter rather than an explosive–just over the generator’s driveshaft and triggered it. He looked away from the intensely bright light that resulted as the popper flared. Jesus, it lit the place up like noon! Hard shadows danced on the back of the nearby shed, and the stink of melting metal and plastic came forth in a boiling cloud of blue smoke.