He decided appearing to act tough with the visitors, in front of these witnesses, would keep him in the good graces of both men. “Clyde, don’t you be rough with her, but get her butt out here where she and her brother can answer my questions.”
He should have followed Ethan’s suggestion and let him call his sister out.
Cautiously Clyde opened the door wider and stepped into the dimness, now lit from behind him by the light filtering in from the outer room. He fumbled for a light switch but couldn’t find it immediately, placed as it was behind a machine, and he took another step into the room. He saw a bulky shape on the floor to his left, in front of two of the hot food dispensers.
She’s a fat’n, he thought. Must be o’re three hunnert pounds.
He decided rough talk wasn’t excluded so he said, “Wake up tubby! Sheriff needs ta talk at ya.”
Suddenly, two intensely blue, softly glowing lights turned his direction. There weren’t any beams visible through the dusty air, but they appeared to be aimed at him. It sent a shiver down his knobby spine.
A voice that was too deep to be from any fair maiden, but which might have come from a hefty older saloon girl that smoked a lot, said, “Who are you calling tubby, stick man? Shut the door behind you as you leave, before I knock you on your bony ass, I haven’t finished my nap.”
Insulted yet again, and this time by a fat assed woman that threatened him, he was going to show her who was boss. “Hey, bitch! I said git up. I’m Depity Claghorn. Tha Sheriff wants ta ask ya sum questions.”
He stepped towards the shadowy figure, intending to nudge her bottom with the toe of his boot. He stepped on something soft as he approached her. That’s when the two lights abruptly lifted higher and widened, accompanied by a growl.
“Off my tail, you ignorant ass.”
Jumping back, he was startled, flustered, and slow thinking. “Uh..., ‘scuse me. I mean…, uh, whut?”
The blue lights narrowed to slits and rose to a height almost level with his face. Then they blinked off for an instant as they came closer. Suddenly, he could make out details of the blue lights, and knew with a surge of fear what they really were. Retinal reflections.
There was something large, dark, and massive behind that pair of intensely blue eyes, and its hot breath reached his face.
He screeched and reached franticly for the pistol at his hip. As it cleared the holster, something powerful, and sharp, painfully tore it from his hand, and it went spinning to the floor.
“Don’t go after it!” The threatening voice told him, as he looked and leaned in the direction he heard the gun slide. “You only lost a finger, I’d hate to have to tear off your whole hand, or rip your heart out. Ethan would be very annoyed with me.”
Now unarmed, and feeling the blood flow from his missing trigger finger, Claghorn did the only thing his manhood permitted. He grabbed his bleeding hand, turned and ran screaming through the open door.
He didn’t stop when he dodged around the four men in the center of the dining area. He was in too much of a panic to get out. He pushed his way through the four men crowded at the cantina door, smearing blood on two of them, something they didn’t notice immediately as he babbled something about a “bear.”
Ethan, relieved the man at least remained ambulatory, grinned wider. “I told him to let me call her out.”
“Bear?” McKinnon asked. His right hand now resting on his gun butt. He’d also heard the husky voice and growl.
“Don’t be ridiculous, sheriff. I told you it was my sister in the back room. I even told you what she was.”
“That sounded just like a bear,” Cliff said. His hand was on his right gun butt, crouching next to Jace.
“No it didn’t.” Ethan refuted. “It sounded exactly like a tiger.”
“What?” Was the more or less common reply.
He cheerfully clarified. “She’s a large, teal colored, intelligent Koban tiger, and a nonhuman alien citizen of the Galactic Federation. My sister by adoption, Kit.” He waved his hand at the open door to the darkened room.
A massive blue-green furred head poked around the doorframe, her large muscled body still concealed. She attempted a human-like smile, which did nothing to make her appear at all friendly. Not with six-inch incisors partly revealed, and her pointed ears upright and angled forward, as if in excited expectation.
“Kit, stop it! I’ve told you that expression doesn’t look at all like a friendly smile.”
Ethan turned back to the others, to explain that Kit’s smile was intended to look inviting and warm, when he was forced into taking action to prevent a sudden escalation. One that would end badly for the man involved if not countered swiftly.
Cliff, a practiced gunman, already had his weapon out of his holster and halfway leveled. He became Ethan’s first priority. Snatching an empty beer bottle from the table, he flung it at the pistol barrel in a perfect butt first spinning spiral. Then, even before it hit, he focused on the sheriff, who was older, slower, and standing closer. He quickly reached over and snatched the .45 from the man’s limp grip, rotating the weapon to the side to extract his finger from inside the trigger guard, to avoid it from pressing the trigger by accident or breaking the sheriff’s finger.
The beer bottle struck hard and shattered on Cliff’s pistol, and the high momentum did its job, knocking the weapon flying across the room to the base of the wall. With McKinnon’s pistol in his left hand, Ethan stepped swiftly to the sheriff’s side and leveled the weapon at the four just-now reacting cowboys. They had been distracted by Clyde’s pushing his way past them, and hadn’t yet seen the “bear” become a tiger.
“Boys,” Ethan ordered. “Leave your guns in their holsters. That tiger is a highly intelligent, speaking citizen of the Galactic Federation, or an alien if you prefer that term. She has lived as part of my family for her entire life. I’ll defend her with my life, but I assure you, if I wasn’t here to protect you, and you tried to kill her, not one of you would live beyond the first ten seconds. Not even if one of you somehow managed to shoot her. Since I am here, I’ll use the sheriff’s pistol to make certain that you do what he would tell you do, as soon as he has time to think about this.”
He backed away from the sheriff, looked him in the eye, and asked, “Isn’t that right Sheriff McKinnon?”
Shocked at how fast the man had moved, and had disarmed him and Cliff with hardly any effort, he nodded and found his voice. “Keep your guns holstered men. I’m only here to ask questions. I didn’t come out here to make an arrest.” Then he looked at Ethan, holding the pistol rock steady at the men in the doorway.
“Why in hell didn’t you tell us your partner wasn’t human?”
“Would you have believed me if I said she was a blue tiger from a planet you’ve barely heard of?” His grin returned and he reversed the pistol with a flip, grabbing it by the barrel. He’d surreptitiously flipped the safety on, to give him a half-second warning if McKinnon reacted wrongly. He offered him the weapon butt first.
Cliff was cursing and shaking his stinging right hand. A bottle fragment had skimmed over the base of his thumb, causing a thin line of blood to well up. It was the concussive impact that caused the pain, and he felt like his gun had been shot from his hand.
Silently, using his Comtap, Ethan told Kit, “Watch them. I’m going to turn my back after the sheriff takes his gun.”
“Too trusting, brother.”
“We’ll see.”
McKinnon, shocked at the display of speed and the ease with which the unarmed man had gained control of everyone in the room, accepted the return of his weapon. Without even checking the safety, he returned it to his holster, as the visitor turned his back on him in a show of faith, slowly walking back to his chair.
In a warning to the others, the sheriff said, “Don’t anyone threaten that tiger. Cliff, leave your gun where it is and I’ll pick it up for you. Why don't you and the deputies help Jace outside to one of the cars? See if Clyde is still arou
nd and get him tended to as well.”
Cliff helped a cursing Jace rise and they moved towards the door, but Jace saw Ethan’s back turned as he placed his chair back next to his original table.
Kit’s warning came by Comtap a mere hundredth of a second after the action began, transmitting a live mental image from her perspective. “The one named Jace just grabbed for Cliff’s other gun.”
Cliff had steadied the injured man and his damaged right arm, which placed Cliff’s left holster with the semiautomatic next to Jace. The humiliation felt, as Jace saw the regular cowhands staring at his tear-streaked face was too much for his ego. Cliff had his left arm around Jace’s shoulder for bracing, and was using his right hand to add support under Jace’s damaged right forearm.
Jace let go with his own left hand and reached down and around to yank the semiautomatic from its holster, having observed Cliff chamber a round before exiting the car earlier. He painfully leaned away from Cliff to create a gap, half turned to aim the weapon between them, and he pulled the trigger. The gunshot was loud in the small cantina, and there was no way he could miss the muscular back of the man, only five feet away when he started the trigger squeeze. The bullet passed directly through the space occupied by Greeves spinal column.
Had been occupied, rather. Ethan wasn’t there when the slug passed, because he was five feet in the air, still rising, head down and looking back towards Jace. He was holding onto one arm of the chair, which he’d torn loose as he did a front flip upward, using a lightning fast push from a slight knee flex he’d already had as he sat the chair down. He’d generated a hard upward thrust using the balls of his feet. After all, this was only sixty percent of Koban’s gravity, and Ethan had a vertical standing leap of roughly four body lengths back home, thanks to carbon fiber reinforced muscles.
From upside down, Ethan flipped the chair’s armrest directly at Jace’s face, timing the rotation so that the curved part of the front hand rest crunched into the bridge of his nose like a punch. The look of triumph vanished, as Jace’s eyes took on the glazed look of unconsciousness. His broken nose was generously spared the additional damage of smacking into the floor by the back of his head, as he fell back when Cliff quickly released him and stepped away.
Ethan had taken advantage of the high vaulted ceiling of the cantina, and he dropped back to the floor lightly, performing a half twist as he did so to land facing the other men.
“Sheriff, if anyone else pulls a gun on me or my sister, I’ll kill them. Is that understood by everyone here? That pathetic dumb ass is alive only because I’m not being paid by anybody to kill him. I don't work for free.” Nothing like a dramatic statement to give them each pause for thought.
He sat down in the same chair he’d placed by the table, which was now minus a left armrest. The four men at the door backed a careful distance away. The sheriff, and Cliff, stood there slack jawed in disbelief for the moment.
Ethan pointed at the unconscious bleeding man on the floor and used his other hand to wave the four deputies back. “You four men, and Cliff whatever-your-name is, haul this mess outside before he draws flies.”
They all hustled to do as instructed, and Jace, oblivious to the world, of course uttered no complaint about the rough handling, despite being lifted by his damaged arm by one of the men. Ethan thought Jace was a rather a peaceful sort, once you helped him with his manners.
Inviting the sheriff to his table, Ethan said. “Sheriff McKinnon, please sit with me. I believe you have some questions for Kit and me. If you don’t mind, and please don’t be nervous, but Kit will come over here and I’ll introduce her.”
Fully convinced the two of them could have taken on and killed everyone in the room if they had wanted to do so, McKinnon swallowed, but had the courage to sit across from young Greeves, as Kit walked lithely through the vending room door and squatted on the floor across the table from the sheriff. Her head was still a bit higher than that of the seated man when she sat.
She was a beautiful teal color, had intense blue eyes, black whiskers, sported a body length tail, and she weighed at least six hundred and fifty Earth pounds. Her only ornamentation was a black snug fabric collar, with a dark disk-like fob hanging at the front.
At the introduction Ethan said, “This is my adopted sister, Kit. She’s a native of Koban, where I was also born, and we call her people rippers, for what should be obvious reasons when you note her claws and teeth. They hunted humans when we first arrived on Koban, but we eventually became friends. They were one of our allies against the Krall in the recent war, and the only alien ally that was capable of directly fighting Krall warriors. They absolutely terrified those allegedly fearless killers.”
McKinnon heard Kit speak again, but this time, up close, he noticed that her mouth didn’t move. The voice issued from the black disk. She saw his glance down to her neck as she spoke, once he was able to tear his eyes away from the penetrating gaze of her eyes. “Sheriff, I’m wearing a speech synthesizer device that is linked directly to another device in my brain. It’s far more complex than a communications transducer placed behind a human’s ear, but it serves a similar function. I think of what I want to say in Standard, the first spoken language I learned as a cub, and the words come out there.”
Ethan explained. “The disk is an example of alien technology, which some of our other Federation citizens produced, to help us fight the Krall and to stay in contact with one another. It also serves as a translator device of the languages of our different species. You might only have known you were meeting whoever was the pilot of our ship, but my name is Ethan Greeves.” He held out his hand, and McKinnon, after a slight hesitation at the old cultural gesture, shook his hand.
While gripping his hand firmly, Ethan asked, “Why’d you bring so many men out here to meet us, and where did the other seven men go?” He nodded, and glanced at the big cat, even before the sheriff had spoken his first carefully considered words.
A bit of silent and extremely rapid conversation took place between the siblings, using their mind-to-mind Comtap link. The sheriff’s words offered only limited confirmation of what Ethan had picked from the man’s unguarded thoughts, in response to the two-part question. He told Kit what he’d learned.
“Kit, he works for the city of Cayuga, but most of his income comes from the Chisholm Cattleman’s Association in private payments. He would have preferred to drive out with just his half-wit deputy. That fool happened to be on night duty when we came in early this morning, and then, without authority, he deputized four men to come out here with the sheriff, and contacted the two CCA gunmen. McKinnon believes the deputy brought extra men to intimidate us into leaving, or to refuse to work for the people that invited us. He correctly assumes that we were invited by someone from the Stock Growers Association.”
“What about the seven men in the truck? Do we need to teach them respect too? The deputy wasn’t nearly as much fun as I expected.”
“Don’t think so. Those aren’t temporary deputies at all. They’re just ranch hands of the deputy’s rich uncle that owns the two parked shuttles. The sheriff thinks they were told by Deputy Nitwit that we might plan to steal or damage the shuttles parked out here. That’s why the sheriff had to race out here behind them.”
“Will we be free to meet our contact and work out terms of a contract?”
“McKinnon doesn’t give a damn what we do, so long as we don’t cause him any problems. He’s afraid the CCA will care, because they’ll be opposed to our talking to their opposition.”
Their mental exchange, via the Comtaps embedded in their brains only required seconds, at the speed of organic superconducting thoughts.
The sheriff was less than half done explaining why fifteen men had rushed out to the airfield. He was saying, “So, the men checking on the two shuttles will come over here I expect, and they’ll probably head back to town with us, since you two will likely ride back with me. My deputy stirred all this crap up on his own, before he even cal
led and woke me up this morning, a half an hour after you landed. The way you handled Jace and Cliff, the two men who came inside with me, solved a problem for me. They generally act with little regard for the law, or those that are presumably paid to enforce it.” The word presumably revealed the sheriff was honest with himself, at least.
“You’re welcome. Glad to have been of service.”
“You aren’t being thanked, you young smart ass. This morning may still blow up in my face. The men that pay Cliff and Jace will want to know what sort of so-called security you can offer here. They’ll probably offer you more money than those people you intend to meet can afford to pay. From what I just saw, you, all by yourself, would be worth it.”
“Thanks for your vote confidence, Sheriff,” said Kit. Peeved that her intimidation of stupid and cowardly Claghorn hadn’t impressed his boss. She exposed her full incisors in a wider imitation grin.
McKinnon quickly spoke to mollify her, “Clyde’s afraid of his own shadow. If it’s any consolation, I was ready to wet my pants when you stuck your head out.”
Ethan, to speed things along and change the subject, summed up the short non-interview. “So, you offered us a ride to town. Does that mean we’ve satisfactorily answered your questions and can keep our appointment later tonight?”
The older man nodded, “Your actions did the answering, proving you have the skills needed for those security consultations you described. I knew before I came out here that you didn’t come here to talk to the CCA. That only leaves the Stock Growers. Can I tell the CCA people that you’ll listen to what they have to offer before you make a final decision? I strongly advise you to do that, I don't care how good you think you are at your job.”
“Sure. We haven’t heard both sides yet.”
“Perfect. I needed to take that bit of information back to them. I’ve no doubt they’ll send someone to find you to make you an offer. A stranger with a blue tiger in a town like Cayuga won’t be hard to spot.”
Koban Universe 2: Have Genes, Will Travel Page 8
