Stellar Ranger

by Steve Perry

  Kohl shook his head, a man put-upon. “Closed doors don’t mean much to some people around here,” he said to Cinch. “Best you keep yours locked if you don’t want company. This is Baji Kohl, my great-granddaughter. Baji, this is Ranger Carsten.”

  She batted her lashes at him. “Should I call you ‘Ranger’ or ‘Mr. Carston’?”

  “Cinch will do. Very nice to meet you, Ms. Kohl.”

  “Call me Baji.”

  Cinch nodded at her.

  “Baji’s father, my good-for-little grandson, Anaki, is offworld negotiating the blue weed contract for next season. He gets away from Roget every chance he gets.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Cinch. Grampa, I need to go to Madeline’s to pick up my new boots. Paku won’t let me take the car unless you tell him it’s okay.”

  “Baji, my little tumbleweed, do you think I invited the Stellar Ranger here to pass the time of day? I don’t want you on the road alone until we get this mess cleared up–”

  “I won’t be alone, Gramp, I’m taking Hadji, he’ll chew the leg off anybody who gets too close. I have my gun. And I promise I’ll be back before dark.”

  Kohl shook his head. “I would rather you didn’t–”

  “Please, Gramp, please ... ?”

  The older man sighed. “All right. But I want you checked in before 1800–”

  She ran to him, bent, and kissed him on the top of the head. “Thanks, Gramp. I’ll be careful.”

  “If you see any sign of the raj I want you on the goddamn com calling here, you hear me?”

  “The raj won’t bother me,” she said. “You know that.”

  “Do what I say or you stay here.”

  “All right. But you’re wrong about them.”

  She turned and left, giving Cinch a brief smile as she departed. He thought he saw something in the expression, a hint of interest. Right. Wishful thinking on his part.

  After she was gone, Kohl shook his head. “Got me twisted around her little finger,” he said. “She’s a good kid but I do spoil her. You had some questions?”

  Cinch nodded. More now than before. He decided to follow up on the newest one first.

  “What is the raj?”

  Kohl returned the nod. “Pick up stuff fast, don’t you? Raj–that’s short for ‘djalan raja’–means loosely ‘the highwaymen.’ A local group of banditos. They hide out in the foothills to the northeast. Not talking big time here, they’re petty crooks, they sneak into outbuildings and swipe stuff they can use or sell. Kids, mostly, led by a couple of malcontents. Only good thing about them is that they hit Tuluk more than anybody else. Course, that’s the rule for thieves, isn’t it? Go where the money is. Anyway, the head bandito is a young man named Pandjang Meritja. He used to work for Tuluk, there was some unpleasantness there, and Tuluk had him horsewhipped in front of half the town. The boy didn’t take it well, but he was smart enough to know he couldn’t go up against Tuluk in the open. So he hits him in the credit wafer. Smart, but he could steal ten times as much as he does every day for the next hundred years and not make a dent in Tuluk’s interest income.”

  “But you’re still worried about your granddaughter’s safety?”

  He shook his head. “No, not really. Pan wouldn’t lay a finger on her. First thing is, he knows I’d hunt him down and deball him with a dull shovel if he did. Second thing is, I do believe he worships the ground she walks on. He’d jump off a cliff into a spearshrub patch before he’d do anything to even make her frown. I just don’t want her associating with them. Sooner or later Tuluk is going to get tired of being harassed and tum his goons loose to take care of the raj. I don’t want Baji in the way.

  “No, what I worry about is what killed my bull and who sent it. If something happened to Baji, whoever did it would be dead before the next sun went down–but that wouldn’t be much comfort.”

  If he expected a lecture on the law, he wasn’t going to get it. Cinch would do the same thing. “Okay.”

  “One other thing I ought to mention. You met a relative of Pan’s when you went into town. His sister. She owns the best pub in Lernbukota.”

  “Wanita’s his sister?”

  “The same.”

  Ah. That maybe explained part of her reaction to Tuluk’s local law and hired gun.

  Good to know.

  There wasn’t an awful lot more he got from Kohl. He had been beset by a whole lot of minor annoyances in the last year–animals killed, water holes soured, com towers cut down, power stations shorted out. He couldn’t prove it, but he was certain Tuluk was behind it. The man had offered to buy him out, and Kohl had refused. Almost immediately afterward, unlucky things had started to happen.

  “You reported it to the constable?”

  Kohl laughed, almost a cackle. He was truly amused. “Hell, son, I might as well have written my complaints on a rock and pitched it down a sinkhole for all the good that would do. If Constable Maling saw Tuluk’s herdsmen marching down the main street of town carrying the heads of my whole herd stuck on top of sharp sticks, he would allow as how the cows must have died of heart attacks and the boys were just having a little fun.”

  Cinch nodded. It was, after all, one of the main reasons anybody ever called the Stellar Rangers on these worlds. When you couldn’t get satisfaction from the local law, you looked elsewhere. Mostly the frontier types just loaded their guns and took care of it themselves. A man or woman stomped on your toes, why, you just smiled and cut them off at the knees. Unless you were outnumbered in a major way, as seemed to be the case here.

  “Well. We’ll see if we can’t get to the bottom of this,” Cinch said.

  Kohl nodded. “I appreciate it.”

  There were a lot of things he could do, and Cinch would begin doing them. Meanwhile, his experience had taught him that just being here was enough to stir the pot some. He’d see what happened when things began to settle out of the brew.

  LIKE MANY frontier world people with a lot of real estate, Kohl had a shooting range on his property. The station’s range was of the most basic kind–no holographic targets or scoring computers, no automatic setters or turners. Here, the range consisted of an, eight-meter-high berm of catdozed dirt, packed tight into a U-shape, with two hundred meters of bare ground in front of it. A shooter could set up whatever crude targets were available in front of the earthen backstop and have at them, without worrying that stray rounds would go far.

  As Cinch looked at the range, he smiled. Even if the misses or richochets did escape the berms, there wasn’t anything to the sides or behind them for as far as he could see apt to be damaged anyhow. The house and outbuildings were all five hundred meters in the opposite direction.

  There was a skeletal structure at the end of the range, basically an Evermore roof on posts that provided blue-tinted shade, with a shooting bench and a couple of rests for rifles under it. Three or four stools, a few plastic stands with self-healing flat bull’s-eye targets, and a beat-up solar-powered electric open-topped cart full of pepper poppers completed the equipment available. The poppers, flat steel plates roughly man-sized, looked in silhouette much like an upright and erect dick stuck through a ball. They had timed spring motors on their bases. You set them up, backed off and shot at them. If you missed, well, you missed. If you hit one, it fell down. After a few seconds, it would stand up again under the impetus of the small motor. The big advantage to shooting such targets aside from their simple reactiveness was the satisfying clang they made when you connected with them. Instant feedback.

  Cinch put his rifle and shooting bag on the bench and went to set his targets. Even though the sun had just come up, it was already hot. For some reason nobody had yet explained satisfactorily, most of the E-type worlds man had discovered, the ones with the right gravity, air and water for more or less unaided human survival, were either tropical or desert over a great deal of their surfa
ce. Sure, there were some ice planets, and a few that were temperate with large oceans, but they were in the minority. The one advantage of the desert was the low humidity, At least the sweat evaporated instead of puddling in your boots.

  He set one bull’s-eye and one pepper popper at two hundred meters, just in front of the berm, A second like pair he put at one hundred meters, He put up three poppers each at fifty and twenty-five meters and the last two steel targets at seven meters. Most actual combat shooting in police or civilian matters took place at seven meters or less. The old ranger saying, taken from some long-lost Terran police agency, was “Three shots, three feet, three seconds.” A foot was, Cinch supposed, a measurement based on the human foot of the same name, about a third of a meter, and very close for gunplay.

  He returned to the bench, put his plasma rifle on it, and checked the powerpak and dot-scope settings. He switched the scope on. A tiny holographic red dot the size of a pinhead floated in the air a couple centimeters above the receiver. You put the dot over the target and, in theory, the rifle would drive the bullet right there, corrected for parallax and dead center at two hundred meters. Farther than that, you either adjusted the sight or held high, close range, you held low. Of course, every time you broke the weapon down for transport, it jiggled the setting. Wasn’t supposed to, according to the manufacturer, but it did. It didn’t make much difference, maybe a fingernail’s width at twenty-five meters, a handspan or more at three hundred meters. Thing was, at long range, a few centimeters either way could get you in real trouble if somebody was shooting back at you.

  Cinch pulled his spotting scope from his bag and set it on the bench, dialed in two hundred meters, and focused it on the bull’s-eye target. He loaded a plate of slugs into the rifle, adjusted the step-up transformer and capacitor, clicked the safety off. He put his earplugs in to block the sound. The rifle mostly made a flamethrower’s whoosh that wasn’t too bad, but the slug broke the sound barrier before it got far and that crack was fairly loud. He pulled a stool up and laid the rifle’s barrel into one of the rests. He put the dot on the target, took a couple of breaths then held the third one. I-Ie concentrated on his heartbeat, waited for the brief interlude between the lubb and the dupp, and squeezed the trigger–

  The muzzle blast of the rifle was fierce as superheated plasma spewed forth. The recoil, though dampened by the biogel pad in the stock’s butt, was also fairly potent.

  Come the sound barrier being cracked open, a hard slap at his protected ears.

  When he’d recovered, he flicked the safety on, put the rifle down, and looked through the scope.

  High and right, he saw. Five centimeters up, eight to the right. He could almost hear his grandfather tsking. Whats the matter son, you gone blind? He smiled at the memory. He used the punch-pick sight tool to unlock the sight, then adjusted it for elevation and windage.

  The second shot was even with the bull’s-eye but still a hair to the right. Damn boy, my mother shoots better than that, and she s dead.

  He made another adjustment.

  The third shot was centered in the black of the bull’seye, maybe a couple millimeters low, but that could be him and not the gun. Close enough, Grandpa? For government work, son, but not much else. Cinch grinned and locked the sight settings.

  He unloaded the weapon, shut the power off, sprayed cleaner through the barrel and action, then ran an absorbent patch down the bore to remove any fouling. The rifle was zeroed and there wasn’t any need to play with it anymore. Anybody could shoot a rifle. Hell, with the settings locked in, his great-grandmother could drive tacks with the thing at this range.

  The handgun was another matter. Sidearms were, generally speaking, underpowered and inaccurate past short range. Then again, they were what you were likely to have when the shit went down, and it was a good idea to be as adept with them as you could.

  Cinch’s gun rode in a vat-grown horsehide holster with a pinchnose that held it firmly in place. He ought to look into getting a new holster while he was here, there being horses around. The pinchnose allowed him to carry without a safety strap, so the gun could be snatched from the holster at speed limited only by his reaction and skill. The trigger guard and trigger were covered, so he wasn’t apt to shoot himself in the ass if he fumbled on the draw.

  Cinch stepped away from the bench and faced the closest pepper poppers. He whipped his hand down, drew the pistol smoothly, and brought it up, catching his right hand in his left in a two-handed grip, feet planted firmly in an isosceles stance. Moving from left to right, he fired double taps, two shots at each target, aiming for the heart. Even through the sound-deadening plugs he heard the steel ring as the four bullets hit. Ting-tingl Ting-ting!

  The two poppers fell over slowly, like a pair of simultaneously chainsawed trees toppling.

  While he waited for them to reset, he fired the last two rounds in his pistol at the twenty-five-meter poppers, taking more time to aim and squeeze off the shots. Tink! Tinkl

  He reloaded and went through a series of drills, double and triple taps at close range, slow fire at the longer distances. He was able to keep about half his shots on the metal at a hundred meters, a third of them at two hundred. Of course the bullets didn’t have much zing when they got that far and the poppers rang but did not fall under the impact.

  He wasn’t the best or the fastest ranger with a handgun; there were younger officers who could outdraw and outshoot him easily in a qualifying drill, but he practiced enough to feel comfortable with his ability. And since he had been in more than a few real life-or-death gun duels, he had that advantage over some of the hotter players. Shooting at a target that shot back was altogether different than plinking on the range against a clock.

  She probably thought she was sneaking up on him but Cinch noticed Baji walking toward the range while she was still a couple of minutes away. He pretended not to see her, continuing his drills.

  She arrived. “Pretty good shooting,” she said as he holstered his pistol.

  He turned and smiled at her. She wore red skintights and a flared cap, molded boot slippers that reached halfway up her calves. Very attractive and she knew it.

  “I get by,” he said.

  “I’m not much good with one of those,” she said, gesturing at the pistol. “I can shoot a rifle okay. My grandfather taught me. We used to go lizard hunting when I was young.”

  Cinch smiled. When she was young.

  “Can I try it?”

  “Sure.”

  He showed her how the weapon worked, told her where to hold if she used the mechanical sights, and that the dot worked just like her rifle if she preferred that.

  “Why wouldn’t vou use the dot? Isn’t it faster and more accurate than the notch thing?”

  “Yes. But if the power fails and you don’t know how to use the mechanicals, it could be a problem. At very close range, a meter or two, you don’t need either, you just point it like you would your finger and shoot.”

  “I see. Very clever.” She treated him to one of her smiles. Took a deep breath and pushed her chest at him.

  It wasn’t much, nothing too obvious, but he smiled again. God, this little girl was flirting with him. He was almost old enough to be her grandfather and she was letting him know she was interested in him that way.

  Cinch had to admit to himself that it didn’t hurt his ego any. Then again, he wasn’t about to screw around with the great-granddaughter of the only man on this planet he could trust, aside from the fact he preferred women with a lot more life experience than this child. Pretty, yes. Sexually attractive, sure, and old enough to be legal, but not for Cinch. What would they talk about afterward? Or before, for that?

  She shot well enough, managed to hit the nearest targets okay, but missed at the longer ranges. She also kept putting herself within reach:

  “Maybe if you stood behind me and helped me hold it right?”

/>   It was all Cinch could do to keep from laughing. She probably thought she was being so clever. When he stood behind her and steadied her hands with his own, she allowed the pistol’s slight recoil to shove her back against him. The musk perfume was stronger with his nose almost in her hair. Her buttocks under her skintights were firm against his thighs, and he was tempted to push against her–for about two seconds. Instead, he stepped back a little and said, “Good shot.”

  He’d gotten past the point in his life where he let his littIe head do the thinking for him. It had, he had to admit, taken some years to manage that. If he’d been twenty-five, hell, even forty, he’d have her on her back on the bench by now, devil take anybody passing by. But not these days.

  “I think that’s enough for now,” he said.

  Baji frowned, an expression that vanished quickly.

  He showed her how to field-strip the pistol and clean it. She did not care in the least, but she pretended to be fascinated as she watched him. She kept trying. The double entendres began getting less subtle.

  “My, that rod surely does fit tightly when you put it in the barrel, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “That why you put that lubricant in first, so it will go in easier?”

  “More to ream it out and leave it clean, actually.”

  He could play. It might not be too smart, but it made him grin. Talk was not action.

  She was getting frustrated and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so he decided to give her something, “Listen,” he said, “I have to go into town. Maybe we can have lunch when I get back, if you’re not too busy?”

  Her face lit up, she smiled, then quickly tried to cover it with a pretended indifference. “Oh, sure, if I’m around when you get back.”

  He would bet his pension she’d be around when he got back, but he merely nodded.

  “What are you going to do in town, if it’s okay to ask?”

  “Oh, this and that. I thought I might talk to a couple of people, ask a few questions. Boring background stuff.”