Stellar Ranger Read online

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  SOMETHING nasty had killed Gustav Kohl’s prize stud bull.

  Cinch Carston squatted on his heels next to what was left of the bull, looking for clues. Not that there was much left to see. The remains of the entrails had been sun-cooked to stringy, gelid ropes, most of the hindquarters eaten here or dragged and consumed a short way off. Dried blood trails smeared the dirt, thicker near the remains, dribbling to brown flecks only a few meters away. The front half of the critter had also been attended to, the skull and horns and a few vertebrae left behind, those already beginning to bleach under Roger’s hot summer sunshine. Along with a few late-hatched maggots, flies, and that sickly sweet rotten-meat stink, that was pretty much it.

  Cinch rose from his crouch and slowly backed away, reusing his own tracks in the sandy soil to avoid disturbing any possible clues. A few of the flies startled and buzzed, not many.

  The vegetation was sparse here on the plain–scraggly bushes and some short Terran grasses that had taken during the planet’s seeding. There was little water hereabouts; it was hot most of the days, cold at night. Good for running cattle and raising blueweed and not much else. Just like half a dozen frontier planets he’d seen before.

  Cinch shoved his hat back a little with his thumb and continued to look at the hull’s carcass. He didn’t much like what he saw. Or smelled, for that.

  From behind him Kohl said, “I don’t know how the hell Tuluk managed to train the damned ularsinga to attack my cattle.”

  Cinch took one last look at the kill, then turned to face the speaker.

  Kohl was probably thirty years older than the ranger, an easy eighty-five standards. In a galaxy where a man who took care of himself could expect to reach a hundred and thirty, that made the rancher a couple of decades past middle age, Cinch still half that much short of it. But he was a tough one, Kohl, his face seamed and leathery from the weather on this world, his hair white under the wide-brimmed hat he wore for shade. Like many on the frontier tropical or desert worlds, Kohl couldn’t be bothered to use sunblock or melanin implants. He probably had to go in every year or so and have the skin cancers blistered from his face and hands. Cinch would bet the rest of the older man was as pale as new snow under his long-sleeved polypropyl shirt and synlin pants. Sweat stained the cloth, evaporating quickly in the dry heat. Not yet noon and already the temperature out here was well above body heat. Couple more hours and it would be really hot. Cook your brain without a hat. Cinch sometimes wondered if he’d gone hatless too many times already. His own hat and clothes were all that protected him from the fierce sun that beat down on them. He hardly bothered with sunblock himself. When you worked with locals, it didn’t help if you looked as light as a ghost. That marked you as somebody who didn’t get outside much. Frontier folk saw a tan, they sometimes mistook you for one of their own kind.

  “It wasn’t ularsinga killed this animal,” Cinch said. He’d done the requisite scans of the background info when he’d made the hop to this world. The older man was talking about the local predator, an alligatorlike land lizard that normally fed on smaller game like rabbits and ground squirrels. Some of the ularsinga–the name meant “lion snake” in the local lingo–ran to four and half meters in length and maybe a hundred and sixty kilos. They were, according to the scans, faster than a man for short distances and capable of bringing down a full-grown beef cow, especially when they hunted in pairs or triplets as they sometimes did.

  Kohl blinked at Cinch. “I’m not one to try to tell a Stellar Ranger his bidness, but a half-blind idiot can see the lizard track and scat all over the place.”

  Cinch nodded. That was true enough. And the lizard shit stank worse than the carcass. “Yep. The ularsinga surely were here and they did eat most of the bull but it was dead when they got to it.” He turned back toward the carcass. “Corne look at this.”

  With both men squatting on the ground, Cinch pointed at the base of the bull’s skull. A local beetle crawled over the bone. God must like beetles, he made so many of them. Anywhere men lived, beetles showed up eventually. “See the vertebra, right there?”

  “’Course I can see it.”

  “Look at the marks, there and there.”

  “I ain’t blind, son. What am I looking at here?”

  “When a predator with sharp teeth bites something, it leaves marks like that. Usually, though, they look more like those over there.” He pointed at a gnawed shoulder blade half a meter from the skull. “No matter how sharp they are, natural teeth are still biologically generated enamel, Harder than wet bone, but not all that much, relatively speaking.”

  “Okay, son, I appreciate the dental lecture. Get to it.”

  Cinch grinned at the older man’s impatience. “The marks on the backbone are sharp-edged, clean, much deeper and fewer than those on the other bones.”

  “Which means?”

  “Whatever chewed through this animal’s neck did it fast and hard. I can’t tell without putting it under the scope, but my guess is I’ll find metal molecules on the cuts, probably durasteel or titanium.”

  “You’re saying it was cut?”

  “No, sir. It was bitten through, all right, but by something with steel teeth and jaws a lot more powerful than your local lizards–even on a real good day. No natural predator on this planet could do it.”

  “Sweet Baby Jesus and Buddha in a Hammock,” Kohl said.

  * * *

  Kohl piloted the two-seater GE car. Cinch sat next to him and looked at the sage as the car zipped across the flat ground. They left a dusty wake behind them. Most of his gear was stowed at the port, but he’d brought a few things. He could confirm his idea about the bone easy enough, he had collected the vertebrae in a padded silicone bag for the analysis. Though he and Kohl had walked the surrounding area looking for more tracks, the wind and scavengers had obliterated any such sign. It would have helped to find prints, but they hadn’t and that was that.

  The airwall kept enough wind and motor sound out of the topless car so they could hear each other when they spoke, if they raised their voices to a near-shout. The stray dust that found its way into the car was gritty and had a faint alkali taste.

  Cinch spat. “Tell me about Tuluk,” he said.

  “Not much to tell. He’s richer than God, owns the biggest blueweed field west of the Impossibles, runs a hundred thousand head of cattle, most of ‘em prime crossbreed zait-stock–that’s green beeves and going for thirteen a kilo before freezing, right at the moment. It ain’t enough for him, though, he wants to own all the cattle on the planet, all the blueweed, and everything else he can get his clammy hands on. He’s a greedy son of a bitch.”

  Cinch nodded. That wasn’t quite how the scans had put it, but Manis Tuluk was listed as the richest man on the planet of Roget, the wealth not inherited. In his experience, most very rich people who had come by their money through their own efforts had a certain kind of mind-set. True, there were inventors who discovered some new principle or device that could shower them with accidental fortunes, but the people who earned their way into riches by running cattle and growing crops didn’t do it by accident ...

  Cinch’s mentation cut off when something spanged into the side of the car close to his right hip. He felt the tug as whatever it was tore through the seat a centimeter behind his lower back. The crack of the sound followed almost immediately. Hormones surged through the ranger like a tsunami, washing his insides into a gut-twisting reaction.

  “Turn!” Cinch commanded, “Get off the road!”

  Gustav Kohl did not hesitate. He twisted the control wheel to the left. The car swerved from the packed dirt road and flew a half meter h
igh over the looser sandy topsoil of the empty field. The GE fans blew great clouds of red-brown dust into the air, a natural screen that hid the car from behind. Or so Cinch hoped.

  “Swerve back and forth,” Cinch said. “Kick up as much dust as you can.”

  The ranger already had his pistol out, looking for a target, but the cloud behind them worked both ways. If the shooter couldn’t see them, neither could he see the shooter. Not that he was likely to hit anything at this range. There was a stand of trees maybe five hundred meters on the other side of the road, the only spot big enough to hide an assassin and his vehicle, and he surely wasn’t on foot way out here. From the trees, he’d have a difficult shot at a fast-moving target even with a dot-scoped target rifle. And that far away, Cinch wasn’t going to be doing a lot of damage himself. The bullet would reach that distance, in theory, but hitting a man-sized object was real iffy. But it was what he had. He held the antique Smith in both hands, looking for a target.

  “You want to tell me what we’re doing here, son?”

  “Somebody just punched a hole in the door on my side,” Cinch said. “And you’re probably going to need a new set of seatcovers, too.”

  “Damn, I just bought this car last year.” But Kohl continued to weave a side-to-side path across the desert, spewing red-brown billows that rose ten, maybe fifteen meters into the still air. As cover went, it was pretty good. Wouldn’t slow a projectile down, but it was hard to shoot what you couldn’t see .

  If there were any more shots, they didn’t hear them, and nothing else hit the car save for a few unlucky sage plants fanned flat under the front as they sped away.

  * * *

  “Here it is,” Kohl said, coming up from under the driver’s seat of the car. They were back at his station, parked in the garage a hundred meters from the main house. A clanky air conditioner tried to keep the big Evermore plastic prefab building cool but was losing the fight. Even so, it was 20 percent cooler inside than out. The place smelled like old lube and battery acid.

  Cinch looked at the small chunk of mushroomed metal the older man held out on his palm. It appeared to be a copper-jacketed, boat-tailed bullet, the nose deformed and peeled back to show the shiny lead underneath. He picked the bullet up from Kohl’s palm. “Looks like a 7mm,” he said. “Hunting rifle, probably.”

  Kohl nodded. “Yep. Lizard gun. Everybody and his sister around here has one.”

  Cinch tossed the bullet into the air, caught it. “Well. If we ever get the right one, we can do comparison ballistics and get a match.”

  Kohl grinned. “Can’t be more’n twelve, fifteen thousand such rifles west of the Impossible Mountains. Good luck.”

  Cinch returned the grin. “Rangers enforce the law equally, understand, without prejudice, but I tend to take it personally when somebody shoots at me,” he said. “I’ll find who did it. Meanwhile, I suppose I should report the shooting to the local law.”

  “That’d be Constable Maling, and a waste of your time. He’s Tuluk’s man, might as well be wearing his brand right in the center of his fat forehead.”

  “The law is the law,” Cinch said, “until I know otherwise. Where would I find the constable?”

  “This time of day? Either getting stoned at Wanita’s Pub or already sleeping it off in his office. Both’re in Lembukota, what passes for a town around here.”

  “I don’t recall seeing it on the shuttle trip out.”

  “It’s the kind of place you miss if you blink at the wrong time. Four hundred people, maybe. Come on. I’ll take you.”

  “Might be better if I approached the constable on my own,” Cinch said. “If I can borrow your car?”

  Kohl shook his head. “Your funeral, son.”

  “Maybe not.”

  As he drove toward the town, away from Kohl’s cattle station, Rudyard K. “Cinch” Carston grinned. Being a Stellar Ranger was many things, but it had yet to be dull. It beat ship crewing, mining, beacon monitoring and even smuggling all to hell for interesting. Here was another backrocket planet where the locals had stepped over the line; that was why he was here. If they Iearned nothing else, they’d learn one thing:

  It was better not to rness with the Stellar Rangers.

  LEMBUKOTA could have been a two-street town on any of half a dozen worlds Cinch had spaced to in the past thirty years. Most of the buildings were Evermore plastic, that ugly ubiquitous shade of pale blue that most resembled the skin tone of an albino who had died of oxygen starvation. Oddly enough, the smell of the Evermore in the hot sun reminded Cinch of burned circuit boards.

  The prefab slabs had been slapped and glued together with permabonder, and were thus supposed to withstand any climate a human could survive in for a minimum of a hundred and fifty years without chipping, cracking or fading. The buildings he passed in the borrowed car couldn’t be any older than man’s time on this world, that being a mere ninety years, but they were chipped, cracked and faded.

  Maybe they had bought them used.

  The town was laid out in a rough cross, with the north-south line longer than the east-west road. There were some small dirt roads that looped away from the two main roads, alleys between some of the buildings, and footpaths worn into the land by humans or domestic animals. There were horses on this world, practical given the terrain and cost of importing machinery, as well as camels and bond oxen: genetically engineered work beasts that were long-lived and strong, but short-tempered and stupid. Those who could afford machines used those instead of the oxen unless they had a true love of animals. Since manufacturing of complex machineries such as robots and other high tech gear was usually the last thing a frontier world brought on-line, it was much cheaper to breed animals from natural stock. Turn the males loose with the females, feed them, let nature build your machines the old-fashioned way. They were organic, produced useful by-products, and if all else failed you could eat them. Hard to do with a robot tractor that had set you back ninety thousand MUs.

  Cinch made one pass up the north-south road, circled around and slowly fanned the length of the east-west street. Here, some people had planted small trees or shrubbery; there were some flowering plants and a few gardens. The more industrious among the locals had painted their houses or storefronts in bright colors, though most of those had faded under the sun’s bright hammer,

  Cinch filed it all away, noting the locations of the medical building, the constable’s office and town hall, the pubs and markets. A few children moved about in the noon sun, listless in the heat, and he saw a woman leave a small housing unit and hurry to a solar-powered motorcycle. The solar cells formed a small peaked roof over the trike, and the quiet electric engine drove it on hard silicone wheels. A bumpy ride on a dirt road, but faster than walking and doubtlessly cooler.

  The constable’s office was closed. In a chipvox that tried to sound like a sexy woman and almost did, the door-admit computer said, “Constable Maling is not in at the moment. You may leave a message, or if you have an emergency he may be reached by name code on Celcomnet. Thank you.”

  Cinch declined to leave a message and walked back to the GE car. What was the name of the pub Kohl had mentioned? Wanita’s? That was on the lower arm of the north-south road.

  The pub wasn’t particularly imposing from the outside. It bore a windowless facade, painted a once-bright maroon, now faded to a tepid and hazy rose pink. A double set of sliding polarized glass doors in gritty tracks kept most of the heat and light out. Inside the inner doors, the main room held a long, curved bar, wood or a good imitation of it, backed by alternating mirrors and holograms. A table flushtop cooler was set under the mirrors. There were fifteen or sixteen bolted-to-the-floor pedestal tables that would seat three comfortably, four less so; cast lightweight plastic chairs that wouldn’t do much damage if thrown; a CD-ROMbox for music and vids parked next to a public com half-kiosk. Like ten thousand pubs on two dozen other worlds.
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  A tender stood behind the bar, a tall dark-skinned woman with kinky, short red hair, dressed in a loose coverall and apron. Two customers stood at the other end of the bar, eighteen or twenty more sat at the tables, drinking, smoking hazestik, or playing with other legal recreational chems: dust, spike, eyeleaf. The hazestik smoke smelled like crushed green crab apples.

  Everybody in the place saw him come in.

  Some of them stared openly, some of them used the mirrors, some watched but peripherally. But they all looked.

  Cinch grinned. This was a small planet, populationwise, no more than a hundred thousand permanent settlers, most of them well east of the big mountain range two hundred klicks from here. He wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform, just a set of lightweight hot climate dryskins–hat, shirt, pants, orthoplastic boots–and his gun rig. He had a holobadge and ranger ID tucked into his wallet, but those didn’t show. He was a couple of centimeters taller than average but nothing to gape at; fairly muscular but not overly so; old enough to look grown, young enough not to creak. Nobody would cross the street to admire his handsomeness, but likely nobody would cross the street to avoid him for being ugly. Put him in a room with ten other basic male Terran stockers of mixed faces and he’d fade. You know that guy in the back of the room? The one who sorta blends into the background? Well, no, that’s not him, it’s the guy next to him ...

  Since most of the patrons here were also armed, frontiers being somewhat dangerous places, Cinch didn’t particularly stand out. But he could tell they knew who he was. Small-town grapevine com was faster than a hot Salinas Drive starhopper.

  Listen up, folks: There’s a new ranger in town.

  Cinch made as if he didn’t notice the stares. He walked to the bar. Said to the tender, “What’s the local beer called?”

  She grinned at him, showing almost-but-not-quite-perfect teeth, which probably meant they were her own. “Hitch,” she said.