by Steve Perry
Cinch nodded. The plants were about four meters tall, still a month or so away from harvest. The leaves were wet, the smell much like a freshly clipped hedge. Pleasant enough.
“We water the roots more or less constantly,” Gus continued, “there’re seep-lines under each row. The mist we have to do a couple times a day. Stuff likes the sun but it cooks if it gets too dry.”
“Must take a lot of water.”
“Yeah, it does. My crop is only a couple hundred hectares, that’s all my wells will support. Tukul pipes his water in from Green Lake, up in the foothills.”
“From the satmaps I saw, his crop is pretty big. It must require huge amounts of water. On a desert world, the water is supposed to be allotted, isn’t it?”
“Yep. We have us a duly elected, five-member Hemisphere Water Board, all right. Thing is, Tuluk clears a million easy every year on his crop, that’s not counting what he makes from his beeves. A member of the HWB makes about thirty thousand C’s before taxes, just about enough to feed, house and clothe a small family. Three of the members of the board live in big expensive houses and fly very nice vehicles. You don’t have to be a hydrologist to know which way the water flows, son.”
Cinch smiled. “I don’t suppose you’d have a horse I could borrow?”
“Sure, but you’re welcome to use the car all you want.”
“There are places where a man on a horse is a lot less conspicuous than one in a powered vehicle. And places where a mount can go that a car can’t.”
Gus grinned. “Why, son, it sounds as if you plan to do some sneaking around. I ought to tell you, Tuluk’s land is all pulse-posted.”
Cinch shrugged. “Appreciate the thought, but I’m a Stellar Ranger, after all. You don’t think I’d trespass on private property, do you? That would be against the law.”
“I hear you,” Gus said.
* * *
The more you knew, the better off you were, Cinch figured. He stood in the stable next to a big rawhide mare that Gus said was one of his best mounts. He’d already cinched the heavy leather saddle in place–another advantage of frontier worlds, they usually didn’t use plastic for their saddles–and was now strapping a set of saddlebags behind. Gus had lent him a carbine scabbard and he had his rifle shoved into it.
The mare sniffed at him a couple of times, took an apple from his hand and managed to spatter him with the juice as she ate it, but she seemed comfortable enough. Cinch wasn’t an expert when it carne to horses or kuda or other such ridable animals, but he knew enough to let the mount know who he was and get used to him before he tried to climb aboard. The mare–Gus called her “Mada,” which meant “honey” in the local dialect–didn’t seem bothered by him. Which was good, since they were going to be together for the next few days.
Cinch had his map reader packed; the little flatscreen had showed him that the bulk of Tuluk’s property was nearly a two-day ride on horseback. It might take a little longer than that, since he’d be moving cautiously and not in a direct line. It would be good if he and the honey mare got along.
He checked his camping gear once more before he sealed the crow strip on his bags. Solar water still, tab-meals, heat thread blanket and spare batteries, solar recharger, com unity, small medicomp. He had plates of ammo for his pistol and rifle, a small sealed videocamcorder and a camo spidernet tent. He could have packed a lot more, but he liked to travel light.
It was early, just past dawn. He heard her come in behind him and turned to see Baji standing in the stable doorway. She wore a transparent nightgown and a not much thicker robe draped loosely over it. Hardly something to be wearing outside in the chilly morning. He felt the cool air’s touch beneath his synlin windbreaker.
“Where are you going?”
“For a ride.”
She blinked, still half asleep. “When will you be back? Can we have lunch again?”
“Sure.”
He swung himself onto the mare’ s broad back, settled his boots into the stirrups, and urged her to turn with a light pressure of his knees and a gentle tug on the left rein. The mare responded easily, danced back a couple of steps to line them up with the door, and moved forward. She knew he wanted to go out, he didn’t need to do anything else. If he did his job, she seemed to say, she’d do hers. Good.
Cinch felt a little guilty about not telling Baji that their lunch wasn’t going to be today or tomorrow or even the day after that. But not very guilty. He wasn’t her father, her brother or her lover, he was just the ranger come to do his job. Everything else was secondary.
He rode off into the cool morning.
THERE WERE no natural moons hung in the skies over Roget, so the nights were relatively dark despite the thicker sprinkling of stars here nearer the galactic core. Too dark for a man on horseback to be risking his mount’s legs against pooger holes or sand spits. While the days of having to shoot a horse because she had a broken leg were past–veterinary techniques could have a leg bonded and workable in a few days–it would be a long walk back to Gus Kohl’s station from where Cinch was now,
Insects buzzed past in the darkness, mostly on their way elsewhere. Fortunately this world did not seem to have the local equivalent of mosquitoes. He wore a buzz-repeller to keep away any other bugs who might find him tasty.
Cinch lay wrapped in his blanket on a pad of branches cut from a stunted tree that seemed to be halfway between greasewood and Ponderosa pine. The heat threads of his blanket kept the chill away, and his saddle served as a hard pillow. Honey grazed nearby, hobbled so she wouldn’t go far. He had eaten a pull-tab meal, not the best dinner he’d ever had but filling, washing it down with fresh water he’d raised from the seemingly dry ground with his solar still an hour before sunset. The mare had drunk her fill from the plastic tub; he’d washed his face and hands and sponged off his body with the rest before dumping it. He had a canteen for the morning and he would stop and distill another five or ten liters during the day as needed. Most people didn’t realize just how much water there was to be had in the desert, were you properly equipped.
He had the camo-tent laid out next to him, just in case he needed to cover up, but he didn’t think he’d need it in the dark. He was still a day’s ride away from Tuluk’s property, out in the middle of nowhere, It was very peaceful out here, far from civilization. One of the benefits of being on a frontier world, the quiet of the desert at night, just you and the sky unblemished by city glow–
The mare whinnied suddenly and shuffled her feet. Out in the darkness, something hissed. Something with a lot of air to use in making the sound.
Cinch pulled the rifle from the scabbard next to the saddle and flipped the blanket off. He had removed his boots to sleep, stuffing them with his socks to keep out unwelcome visitors, but he didn’t bother to put them on. His guess was that one of the local predators, an ularsinga, had come to pay him a visit. If he’d had a fire, the lizard would probably have steered wen clear of him, but he didn’t want to risk being spotted by a passing aircraft so the campsite had been kept dark. He did have a powerful halogen larnp, however, and he picked it up as he moved toward the mare.
Honey nickered nervously and snorted at the unseen creature that was probably stalking her. She shied toward Cinch. “Take it easy,” he said. “Nobody is going to hurt you.”
The hissing came again.
Cinch marked the direction of the sound and pointed the lamp that way. He dialed the beam to wide-angle and flicked it on. A ragged triangle of desert lit up brightly, the rocks and plants throwing hard-edged shadows as the light splashed the dark ground. There, twenty meters out, the red gleam of a pair of widely spaced eyes reflected the beam back at him.
The horse saw that and didn’t much like it. She snorted yet again and backed away,
Cinch dialed the light to a narrower focus.
The lizard was big, pushing three meters, though a th
ird of that was the long tail it lashed rapidly back and forth. It hissed again, showing pointed teeth as long as Cinch’s little finger.
He held the light steady with his left hand and laid the rifle’s barrel over that wrist, He pressed the sight tab and the tiny red dot lit, floating a couple of centimeters over the weapon’s receiver.
“Shoo!” Cinch yelled.
The lizard flattened to its belly but didn’t move.
“Go on, shoo! You can’t eat my horse!” Cinch yelled at the ularsinga.
He didn’t particularly want to shoot it. He was far enough away from anything that he didn’t think the shot would be heard by anybody, but a dead lizard would draw other predators, probably before daylight, and he didn’t relish having to drag the thing several hundred meters away from his camp in the dark to keep them elsewhere.
“Go away, dammit!”
It must be very hungry not to flee. Most wild animals would run from men, especially if they’d had any experience with humans and their weapons.
The lizard turned to look off into the darkness to its right. It hissed again.
Crap. Maybe Cinch could throw a rock at it and drive it off–
Something else hissed in answer, something that sounded as if it was damned near on top of Cinch.
Oh, shit. He recalled the briefing, now. The things sometimes hunted in pairs.
Cinch twisted, swung the light around, saw the second ularsinga bounding across the sand toward him, mouth open. The thing’s tongue was a pale pink, the inside of its mouth almost fish-belly white. It was maybe five meters away and moving much faster than he would have thought it could. He had maybe a second before it got there–
Cinch put the red dot on the thing’s tongue and fired.
The recoil flipped the barrel up as the plasma roared into the night, burning much brighter than the light he held–
The oncoming lizard tumbled, flipped completely over onto its back in a half somersault. The end of the tail came down and smashed the light in Cinch’s hand, shattering the sealed-beam bulb. With the after-image of the plasma blast making him half blind already, the loss of the lamp didn’t help any.
The wounded lizard thrashed about, throwing up clouds of sand, hissing and making a kind of piglike squeal as it fought a losing battle with death.
Cinch leaped away to avoid being flattened by the thing. Close, too goddamned close–!
Then the sound of the other lizard’s rapid footpads squeaking through the sand reminded the ranger that he was still in trouble. Shit! He turned toward the sound–
* * *
Tuluk didn’t usually stay out in the fields this late, but the Twist was special enough to warrant his attention. Inside a shed made to look just like all the other tool and storage sheds scattered among the blueweed fields, his tame scientist, Picobe, was trying to explain why the yield wasn’t going to be as high as expected. Tuluk wasn’t happy to hear it. Behind them, outside the camouflaged bunker, Lobang stood leaning against the limo, watching the springdog on its deadly patrol.
Picobe’s voice droned on. “–nitrogen fixing nodules are somewhat stunted due to secondary yeast infestations. Of course we can compensate for that, but the absorption of the fungicide slows the normal rate of photosynthesis by partially blocking leaf surface area and naturally that inhibits the ...”
Tuluk tuned the voice out, watching the springdog as it rolled by.
The name had nothing to do with the way the robot looked. It had a head of sorts, but the shape was more like a steel leg-trap mounted on the end of four linked hydraulic pistons and rods. The brain was in the main trunk, which was shaped much like a garbage can pounded flat on the bottom. The machine rolled on eight small independently axled and powered rubbery tires that could extrude small spikes for added traction, allowing the thing to climb a bare rock wall were the incline not too great. The tracks it left in soft ground were a giveaway, being that the robot weighed almost two hundred kilos. The big drawback to using it as a mysterious cattle killer was that somebody had to run around behind it brushing out the tracks or there was no mystery. Still, it was fast, deadly, and could be programmed with basic guard-and-hold or attack-anddestroy patterns. A good tech could override the no-human-target governor built into the biobrain at the factory and this particular model had been rigged to go for anything or anybody Tuluk sicced it on. It was an expensive toy, the springdog, but it had its uses. Men who would charge into the muzzle of a shotgun without a second thought would sometimes go white and back off at the sight of a biomech dog. There was something enervating about being eaten, even by a machine.
“–therefore the third-generation plants will bell-curve somewhat–”
“Picobe, stop prattling on and give me the bottom line here. In language I can understand.”
The scientist, a short and rotund man with a red Botany Guild tattoo encircling his left arm from the wrist to the elbow, blinked and went into what looked like a computer search mode. “Uh, well. At best, you’re only going to get half the next crop fully psychoactive, maybe a quarter more partially so.”
Tuluk thought about that for a second. “Nothing you can do to improve on that?”
“As I have just explained M. Tuluk, no. With the following generation, maybe a 15 percent improvement, generation after that, 8 percent more. It drops off sharply after that. In time, perhaps ...”
Through the open doorway of the shed, Tuluk watched as the springdog rolled silently past, bioelectronic senses searching for prey. Lobang shoved himself away from the limo and followed the thing. He amused himself by tossing pebbles at the robot. The little rocks clacked or clanged or thunked, depending on where they hit. The robot paid the hard rain no mind–there was no danger from it and therefore the pebbles could be safely ignored.
So, what Picobe was saying was that the best yield he could hope for on the Twist a couple of seasons from now was around three-quarters of what was planted. That was acceptable. Tuluk would simply plant more. That had been the intent all along. After all, who would be able to tell that the Twist was anything other than ordinary blueweed? That was the whole point in having these expensive scientist types, wasn’t it? Try to hide ropa plants in a field of tomatoes and any one-eyed yahoo in a spotter craft could see them. A drooling idiot with spectroflex scanners could tell the difference between legal moster and highly illegal kuning almost from orbital heights, even though they looked very similar to an untrained observer. But the Twist looked exactly like blueweed because it was blueweed, save for the invisible chemical/genetic factory installed within it. It was a perfect disguise,
“What about the new refinement procedures?”
“There is no problem there. The lyserje component scans, the bacterial carrier splice accepts the infective viral matrices as designed and engineered. Dosage is stable and consistent at three hundred micrograms.”
“You have samples of the latest batch?”
“Yes.” Picobe moved to a nearby table, pulled a small jector vial from the rack there” The tiny plastic tube had a covered pressure popper on one end. Thumb the cover off, press the popper against human flesh, and it would blast the chemical within through the skin for a subcutaneous delivery. The altered blueweed was the Twist, the genetic parent and incubator, but this was the final product. It had a number of crude, if colorful, names applied by its users: Oh-Oh-Oh!, Throb, Breathe-O, Cumagainandagain. While it was not addictive in the physiological sense, nobody who tried it ever wanted to quit after one dose. According to those who had enjoyed the experience and had something to compare it to, it was the ultimate sensual drug. It gave the user almost thirty minutes of more or less constant physical pleasure, orgasmic intensity arising from even the simplest act. Tuluk himself had never had any desire to try it, but it was potentially worth billions to him. Maybe triilions.
“Good.” He slipped the vial into his pocket.
; To Lobang, Tuluk said, “Stop that.”
The big man turned to look at Tuluk, “Huh?”
“The springdog is worth more than you are. Why are you throwing rocks at it?”
Tuluk shook his head. Clod.
He glanced at the chronometer built into the cuff of his tunic. Almost 2350. He had better get back to the station, he had a special visitor arriving soon.
To Picobe, he said, “All right. Continue your research. Lobang, get the limo.”
As the vehicle lifted, Tuluk looked at the Twist patch. There were only a few hundred of the special plants now, but that number would increase dramatically in the next few years. As would his income.
He spared the springdog a final glance as it patrolled, protecting his investment. Good doggy. And it never pissed on the carpet, either.
* * *
Cinch couldn’t see the oncoming beast but he knew it was close–the ground shook from the thing’s approach. He’d dropped the useless light, and the rifle’s after-image muzzle blast had left him still mostly blind. He knew what he had to do to survive–the trick was, could he do it fast enough?
He jerked the rifle down to his hip, pointed it straight ahead into the darkness and fired. A hit would be a small miracle, but he wasn’t trying to hit the lizard.
Once again the bright flash lit the night, turning the darkness into a lightning strobe of day. Just long enough for him to see the charging ularsinga. It was almost on top of him–
The night reclaimed them. He wouldn’t have time to aim, He pointed the weapon from memory and pulled the trigger as fast as he could, once, twice, three tirnes–
The lizard hit him, knocked him sprawling. He tried to hold onto the rifle, lost it as he tucked and rolled out of the fall. He hit the ground hard on his light shoulder, tumbled up too fast to stay on his feet, fell again. The second roll stopped when he hit body of the first lizard.
