Rat-A-Tat: Short Blasts of Pulp

by Russ Anderson, Jr

  Cradling the shillelagh in both hands, the large man turned to regard Vanzetti, slumped against the wall. The man had red hair and his shirt was open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up. A shoulder holster carried a .45 automatic.

  Trying to bluster past his confusion and worry, Vanzetti looked at the big man. "Aren't you worried about the fire you all started?"

  The big man shrugged and knelt down in front of Boss Vanzetti, leaning on the shillelagh. "Sure and that was just a wee bit of theater mate. No sense in burning up a perfectly good rail car. Particularly one o' these Pullmans. They're a damn sight out of our budget, truth be told."

  Vanzetti leaned forward, a hopeful smile on his face. "Budget is not a problem for me my friend. Perhaps we can work something out."

  A sudden movement brought the bulb of the cudgel down upon Vanzetti's hand, smashing the bones there and he screamed in pain. The large Irishman's face never changed expression. "Sorry boy-o, but I didn't hear that last bit. Must have been mistaken, but I could have sworn that you were offering a bribe of some sort."

  Boss Vanzetti, former scourge of the Chicago underworld, writhed on the floor of the train car, cradling his smashed hand. Through gritted teeth, he yelled out, "Who the hell are you people?"

  The Irishman stood up and moved to join the girl and the thin man. "My name is Connor O'Quinn. This wee lass I call Hellcat Maggie."

  The girl smiled and waved, blood dripping from the sharpened metal fingernails on her hand.

  "Your dapper fella over there is known as Straight-Razor Nero," The big man continued.

  Nero took a small theatrical bow. "It is my sobriquet because once, I was a nefarious villain like yourself sir," he said to Vanzetti. "But now, I find myself happily walking the straight path of justice."

  O'Quinn gave him a wry look. "And those two straight razors in your hands have nary a thing to do with the name, eh mate?"

  Nero gave him a slightly hurt look. "Not at all, Connor."

  Connor leaned over Vanzetti again, the portly mobster cradling his ruined hand. "You see mate, we're the Welcoming Committee. When fine gentleman of your ilk fix it in your head to come out here to our fair city by the Bay, we like to meet you first. Give you a nice and proper welcome here." He paused. "Strangely enough, most choose not to stay and head back the way they came. A shame that." He leaned even closer to Vanzetti, looking him square in the eye with a gaze harder than the gnarled wood of his shillelagh. "Sure and we would love to get to know new visitors in a more permanent fashion."

  With that, he stood up. "The train will be back at first light to hook up your fine rail car here and start you on your way back where you came from. Safe travels to you." He paused and gave him a cold grin. "Until we meet again."

  With that, Connor O'Quinn hefted his shillelagh over his shoulder and walked out. Hellcat Maggie and Straight-Razor Nero following in his wake. And behind them, they left four of Chicago's toughest and most vicious mobsters unconscious and bleeding on the floor of a Pullman railway car, and one Chicago crime boss with a new understanding of why there were so few outfits relocating out West.

  MINOR PLANET MAMBO

  By A. Stuart Williams

  It was a joint like any other, maybe more down-at-heel than most. Dark corners, hot lights and hot babes at the bar (at least they thought so). Careworn stools, stained tables and patched booths, grey dust ground into the aluminum checker-plate floor. The air would have been heavy with cheap smoke, and cheaper perfume, had it not been spiraled away by the whirling air-con.

  Actually, the booth I was sitting in, trying to drown my sorrows and failing miserably, looked out on a view that was anything but ordinary, at least if you were a groundhog fresh up from Earth. There weren't many of those here in the Main Belt, and 'Athena's' was usually frequented by veteran asteroid miners hitting town on leave. They'd head here after planetfall, looking to relax, have a few drinks, some electrosmokes, maybe do the mambo with a dark-eyed girl who didn't care about the iridium dust in their hair. They were a hard-headed bunch, but mostly honest working guys. Though if you hung around too late, a less savory, less clean clientele would emerge.

  The surface of Ceres, grey, dusty, strewn with small boulders, stretched off in the distance, but not so far you couldn't see the sharply-curving, cratered horizon and, way above it, the Milky Way stretched overhead like a shimmering shower of pearls pulled from some rich dame's neck. Despite the distance from Sol, the light was still harsh, undiffused by any scrap of atmosphere. And if you concentrated real hard on the black, in time you would see a billion distant suns sashay slowly past the viewport.

  We were on the rim of Crater City, in the mining quarter of Watertown, a good ten miles outside Central Dome, definitely the 'wrong side of the tracks' from Old Earth.

  I was nodding now. Thirteen empty glasses of Rocket Jock Daniels' Bourbon, the sort they spiked with crystal methanol for extra kick, sat in a row, empty on the table in front of me. I felt like I'd been jato'd, but there was no liftoff in sight.

  "One more for the road!" I slurred, raising a hand to wave the bartender over with another shot, but he could see I'd had enough, even if I couldn't, and said so. A red mist took my sight for a moment, burning out of control, and I heard a splintering crash as my fist came down, smashing through the plexiglas table, shards of glass and plastic alike flying everywhere. Iridium steel has a habit of doing that.

  Shocked out of my stupor, I pulled myself together, lurched up and apologized to the barkeep, tossing a sheaf of credits on the counter. He was a Martian, out of Syrtis Minor; he'd been quietly keeping his third eye on me for a while, but he'd seen far worse in his time and nothing fazed him. He scooped up the scrip with a tentacle, nodding.

  I took a tab; liquid pain management they called it, it worked for a while, sure, but the only pain management I needed was to find the bastard who'd put me in a basket and ended my career in the service.

  I sat down hard in the booth, head spinning, brushing shards from the worn 'leather' seat that had never been closer than a quarter billion miles to a steer. I could see the door out of the corner of my eye. Flashing lights outside, a roller pulling up. Two uniformed men entered, looking in my direction. They were Ground Patrol. I ought to know, I'd seen too much of them after I was invalided out of SolFed following the 'Trojan Wars' as the newsvids called them.

  I'd been badly injured when my ship was hit by terrorists during that 'police action' in Jupiter space. A tunnel rat with teeth had holed us with a rail gun as our patrol ship came out from behind 588 Achilles, cracking our fuel lines, and we'd spun out in flames.

  A half-melted vacuum suit could be a death sentence, but when your blood boils down the right-hand side of your body and the rest lives by some freak of fate, the results are never pretty. Some days I thought the two men who'd died at my back that day had gotten off easier. Still, I'd managed to hang on long enough to dump a blockbuster down the main shaft of their hidey-hole; the rest soon gave up after that, although we never caught the ringleader. The holo channels had screamed about it for days, but eventually forgot. The brass had pinned a medal on me for it. Now, it gathered dust in a drawer and I tried not to think about it.

  I was quietly pensioned off with a robot arm and a cyborg leg for my trouble. I was 'fixed', the doctors said. But the pain kept on coming back - and the memories. 'Psychological', they responded, shrugging. I didn't know anything about that; all I knew was the only thing that took my mind off it was thoughts of revenge. That was five years ago, though it didn't seem five minutes in my nightmares.

  The two patrolmen spoke briefly with the manager, then sauntered over to me. They took my ID and scanned it in for Central to check.

  "Bob Howard," said the one on the left, looking at me with the misplaced awe I'd seen in so many eyes before. "COMMANDER Howard," followed his younger sidekick, exaggerating the rank. "Hero of the Solar Federation. A Fed, and now a freelance bounty hunter. Quite a record," reading off the comm.

 
"EX Commander, kid. Ex-Fed. And ex-hero. Just an ordinary spacerat now..." I responded ruefully, standing and running my still-human left hand through my iron-grey crew-cut. The pain was fading now and I distinctly remembered having my skip tracer’s license suspended after the last time I'd shot first and asked questions later. I was waiting to be hauled up before an enquiry and I knew the likely result.

  Then everything faded, my head swimming. It wasn't just the Rocket Jock, I was exhausted. As I swayed back in slow, half-G motion (it wasn't worth the energy budget to maintain full Earth Normal in the Quarter), I could sense the floor rising up to meet me, and as I entered a black hole, I could just hear "Grab him Joe, the Commander wouldn't like it..."

  I came to slowly, clambering upward toward the blinding light, rubbing gunk out of my bleary eyes with one hand and instinctively reaching for the battered old Tesla Mark IV stunner I usually kept handy on the bedside cabinet. It wasn't there, and neither was the cabinet - or the bed.

  Disorientation spun me out of control for a moment, but as the world shimmered back into view the comforting throb of fusion engines in the background told me where I was. Strapped in a reclining grav couch at the rear of the command module of the SFPS 'Cerberus'.

  "How's tricks, Bob?" grinned the Russki pilot in his Siberian accent. Swiveling round to look at me, he threw a mocking salute as he did so. Well, maybe it wasn't so mocking after all. Yuri Leonov, or to give him due rank, Second Pilot Leonov he had been last time we'd met. Commander now, judging by the stars on his collar. He was a career officer, space was in his family's blood way back.

  "Where have you been all these years, Yuri?"

  I grimaced, but I already knew. He'd been aboard the old 'Cerberus' with me when we'd crashed, but he'd been wearing a hard suit. He'd broken a few bones but otherwise was unharmed, lucky for him. I didn't grudge him that, but I'd not seen him since, my fault mostly.

  Yuri had recovered, carried on in the service and they'd given him the new 'Cerberus'. She was bigger and better; though they'd drawn the budget line at terawatt lasers, there being "no-one to shoot at now". They'd given her short-range masers instead. With those, she might as well have been an ice mining skip, fit for slicing up comets or drilling Ceres for water. The 'minor planet' wasn't the commercial center of the Belt for nothing; water mining was big business and was fuelling, literally, the Jupiter Expansion. There was even talk of extrasolar popsicle ships, coating the outside of cold-sleepers in quarter-mile-deep ice for life-support, fuel and shielding on a thousand year journey, but I doubted I'd see that day. Any ways, Ceres was buzzing, and over the past fifty years Crater City had become a growing sprawl, diverse and decadent in places.

  Yuri's grip was strong, but not as strong as mine when he shook my right hand. I could see the shock in his eyes for a fraction of a second; I grinned, nodded and did my best not to squeeze too hard.

  "Oh, here and there, Bob - mostly here, you know how it is..."

  "So what do you need an old has-been for, Yuri?"

  "Less of the old, you always were a kidder, Bob," he laughed and grinned again, sheepishly, but there was something else there, itching to get out.

  "Do you remember..." I knew what he meant.

  "Yeah, yeah..." As if I could forget.

  "Well, it's like this - I asked the Ground Pounders if they could pick you up, because I knew you'd want to be in on it..." he tailed off again.

  "Spit it out, Yuri."

  "Bob, we've tracked him down."

  Blood thundered in my ears as I felt near-weightless with rage. Too much rage. I swore, and a crumpling sound indicated I'd crushed the arm of the couch.

  "Oh. Sorry about that." My turn to look sheepish now.

  "Easy for you to say, I'm going to have to explain that to the bean counters back at base!" Yuri laughed it off.

  'Him' of course referred to Klaus Ubermann, the ex-asteroid mine owner and self-styled 'freedom fighter' who'd touched off the 'war' in the Trojan asteroids and caused so many deaths. Freedom for him and his survivalist cronies, anyway. Turned out he was a closet Nazi with delusions of grandeur. Go figure.

  He and his kind, some disgruntled Belt miners, others imported from the old Mars colonies, had started quietly clearing out the Martians from the Trojan settlements. Then they'd smuggled in women, food, medical supplies, weapons, fuel and a few old freighters they'd stripped down, beefed up and turned into makeshift fighting craft with exterior mounted rail guns and shaped iridium ammo.

  'Stormships' they'd called them, what a joke. Except that it wasn't a joke, as we found out to our cost when SolFed was called in after people and ships started going missing. The Martians hadn't said anything, they'd just gone home, or more often floated home the 'long way down' after being spaced by Ubermann's 'blacksuits'. They'd had enough of that before, when the first Earth settlers began colonizing the red planet last century and had begun mining the permafrost, hoping to terraform the otherwise inhospitable world. The Ice Wars, they'd called that short-lived but bloody conflict.

  Yuri went on to explain that SolFed had received a tipoff that Ubermann had surfaced again - ironic considering it now seemed he'd drilled his way deep into 4486 Mithra... They had no idea why he'd chosen that most bizarre of the Apollo asteroids, except its eccentric orbit crossed both Earth and Mars'. Even way back in the twentieth century it had been classified as "potentially hazardous", which was worrying the SolFed brass now.

  My old comrade Yuri had actually been keeping an eye out for me, or at least on my record, since I'd gone privateer, and knew I'd want in. It was the least he could do, for old time's sake, he said. One last chance to help clear the Belt of Ubermann's kind, and set an example to those with similar ideas 'back home'.

  I sighed, thinking to myself that humanity had seen too many pointless little wars. Now it was time to finish another.

  Soon we were angling for Mithra. Our high-impulse fusion drive, ion tail flaring blue behind us, would have us there in hours. We were taking no chances, this time around. Cerberus was a tough little ship, with double armor; that lesson had been learned, for sure. There were two crewmen apart from Yuri and me, and by the time we were within visual range of Mithra, all four of us were in hard suits; they restricted movement but we'd be a whole lot safer.

  I felt even better since Yuri had thought to bring along my old Tesla Mark IV; the battered ion-stunner could be set to knock out, paralyze, or kill without blasting a hole through the hull during hand-to-hand combat, which was why I'd kept it as a 'souvenir' from the service. It had sure come in handy for running down bail jumpers and their more dangerous buddies in pressurized domes and on shipboard, when you sure didn't want a blow-out. He also handed me a WTS .50 caliber BMGR automatic 'pistol' with rocket shell ammo, a gun that could break the shoulder of most ordinary men after one shot. Not something that the SolFed bureaucrats would have approved of, but then I was not exactly standard issue either.

  I grinned, snapping the Tesla magnetically to my cyborg leg; sometimes it was useful to have a body shot full of steel rods and actuators. The WTS I slung over my back out of the way.

  As we approached Mithra, we could see that a mining skip had been used to carve out two tunnels in the 'south' pole of the asteroid, allowing two 'Stormships' to be rammed nose-first inside. They'd been augmented with massive fuel pods and additional boosters, and there could only be one reason. Ubermann and his crazies were also on a revenge kick; they planned to shift Mithra's orbit so it would tumble down the gravity well all the way to Mars, or even Earth. This little planetoid was no dinosaur-killer, but it would make one hell of a mess on impact, and might even bring the skies down in what the Old Earthers had used to call a 'nuclear winter' before the missiles were all scrapped.

  Zooming in with the ship's visual scanners, we could see tiny figures rushing about making final preparations to launch. We had to do something, anything, before they launched, but we couldn't use the masers, they would have blown the fuel, with God knows what ef
fect on Mithra's orbit.

  Instead, the plan was to go in hard and hit the ground running, taking out the enemy by hand. Yeah, right.

  Yuri handed over the conn to his co-pilot and we headed for the airlock, clipping maneuvering packs to our suits on the way. Cerberus matched speed with Mithra just as the converted freighters began main burn; our helmet filters kicked in automatically. No choice now, it was almost too late.

  We leaped out of the airlock and tumbled toward the asteroid in free-fall, fingers poised on the thruster controls on our belts. This would have been second nature in the old days, now I was playing catch-up, but I could see there was something wrong with Yuri's thrusters; he screamed in out of control, slamming into the 'dirt' and skidding all the way as he rammed the side of a freighter, stunned. Vac-suited tunnel rats swarmed over him and, before I could land, they ripped off his helmet, heaving him into the void. He spun off, trailing bloody foam.

  "Nooo!" Not again. Please.

  Sickened, swallowing, through sweat and tears I could see Ubermann in his black vac suit gesturing, saluting, mocking. My blood boiled again, as it had those five years ago, and I hit the retros, pulling three g's to a hard stop, almost a hundred fifty feet above him. Sliding the WTS round to my front, I held it up to the faceplate of my helmet. The gun activated the heads-up display. Mithra filled the virtual sight; I clicked the mag setting till the swastika on his helmet filled my vision and let out my breath slowly, squeezing the open double trigger gently as I did so.

  There was a click, unfelt through the rigid gloves, but sensed, and the first half-inch shell leaped out, as if in slow motion, followed by ten more which peppered the fuel pods. Through the sight I saw Ubermann's helmet, and his head, explode, but only for a fraction of a second, then I was tumbling back through space, sent flying by the recoil and the blast from exploding fuel. That didn't quite fit the plan, but at least we had ended it.