Stellar Ranger

by Steve Perry

Cinch grinned. Hard evidence? That Tuluk didn’t know about? Proof of a conspiracy to manufacture and sell illegal drugs? Oh, that would be nice. Tuluk could run around vacuuming things until they sparkled like diamonds, could wipe away physical evidence until there was nothing left no way to get him on possession or manufacturing–but conspiracy, that was something else.

  “Cinch?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “Kutjang says the dead man took a remote with him at the last meeting with Tuluk and had it set up to transmit to a recorder. He says that’s how he knows his partner is dead.

  “He’s got a recording of Tuluk murdering him.”

  CINCH arranged to rneet up with the doper on the way to Pan’s hideout.

  They connected twenty klicks out of town to the southeast, in a dry wash bounded by tumbleweed and creosote bushes. Pan and Wanita were there, along with Baji and three other members of the raj. The van had been strung with camouflage electronics and should be hard to spot from the air.

  They were playing it cautious, just as he’d advised them. Pan would probably be a lot more reckless if Baji hadn’t been with them. The two of them stood next to each other, Pan with one brown arm draped casually around Baji, and she smiled at Cinch with a nasty look that dared him to say anything.

  See? I can fuck Pan stupid. Too bad you didn’t take it when it was offered.

  Cinch repressed a shudder. If you’re captured by the hostiles, don’t let them give you to the women ...

  Sutera Kutjing was a thin blonde, his hair worn long. His skin was pale under the shade of the wide-brimmed hat he wore, and his features were delicate, ahnost feminine. He wore blue osmotic skintights and looked more like a young boy than a man.

  “I’m Carston,” Cinch said.

  “I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you, but it isn’t,” Kutjing said. His voice was surprisingly deep but filled with sorrow. “I wish the opportunity had never happened.”

  “You and this man, Ulang, were ... partners?”

  “We were not business associates. Our connection was personal.”

  “I see. I’m sorry.”

  “He was a wanted man, a criminal, but he loved me and I loved him. We always knew it might end like this.”

  Cinch couldn’t say he felt a lot of sorrow for the chem peddler’s death, but Kutjing obviously did.

  “I want you to punish the man who killed him. I have the means.”

  Cinch took the packet from the thin man and looked at it. It was a plastic case about the size of a man’s hand.

  “There are hardcast infoballs inside, all of the meetings with Tuluk including the last one. The bastard fried Zar’s brain with a tangIer and had his trained ape do something with the body, I don’t know what, buried it, fed it to the lizards, shoved it into a grinder. It doesn’t matter. I want the man who killed him to die for it.”

  Cinch looked at the plastic container. “I can’t guarantee the death penalty but we’ll come down on him as hard as we can. I take it you are willing to testify as to the authenticity of the recordings? You have seen them?”

  “I watched them as they happened, Ranger. I saw him die. I’ll testify.”

  Gotcha, Tuluk, Cinch thought.

  “All right. I’d like you to stay with Pan until I can get some Galactic Marshals onplanet. It might take a couple of weeks but we have time now. The clock is on our side.”

  Pan said, “Aren’t you worried about Tuluk running? He could be light-years away in two weeks.”

  Cinch shook his head. “He won’t run, not yet. Really rich people never do unless things get really bad. They think they can bury anything if they shovel enough money over it. He doesn’t know about this–” Cinch waved the case “–so while he’s nervous, he probably thinks he has things under control. We can afford to sit tight and wait until the troops get here. A shipload of marshals in combat gear will make short work of his hired guns.

  “Tuluk doesn’t know it, but it’s all over but the mop-up.”

  * * *

  Tuluk reacted to the news with a cold dread. His belly twisted, and had the dealer Ulang been there he would have killed him again, only slower and with a lot more pain.

  Damnation! How could he have missed being recorded?

  Well. Truth was, he had never considered it. Why would somebody record something that would incriminate them equally? That was not very bright. As life insurance, it had failed; as revenge, the success had yet to be determined. But it did make him nervous. If he didn’t stop the ranger and his allies and get that evidence before it fell into the hands of the authorities, Tuluk was going to be in shit up to his hairline.

  It was time to move and decisively so.

  “Lobang, get in here!”

  “What’s up?”

  “The fat is in the fire. We have things to do.”

  * * *

  Cinch’s flight path took him south and then west. He made a long loop so as to get to town from a different direction. He arrived at Lernbukota late in the afternoon, brought the flitter to a stop in front of the constable’s office and alighted.

  He loosened his pistol in his holster and wiped his hands on his pants before he started toward the door. He hadn’t seen anybody following him but he had to assume people were looking for hirn. This little bit of business needed to be done quickly.

  The afternoon’s heat was made worse by the underclothing of stackweave cloned spidersilk he wore under his shirt and pants. Called a stopsuit, the rnaterial was denser than Kevlar and only half as heavy. Even with the trauma panels stitched in over his heart and groin, it was not all that uncomfortable, save for the extra warmth he didn’t need. It wasn’t perfect, the stopsuit, but it would protect him from most common hand-weapon projectiles, from the base of his neck to his ankles, and being a tad overheated was worth the safety factor.

  The constable was surprised to see him when Cinch stepped into the office. The fat man sat in a chair with his feet propped on his desk, looking at a pornoproj that shimmered from a small set on his desk. Something with several women and a single man. A comrnon enough fantasy.

  Maling jerked his feet off the desk and slapped at the holoproj. The orgy vanished. “What the hell are doing, sneaking in here like that?”

  “Sorry,” Cinch said. “I just wanted to keep you up to date on my investigation. Professional courtesy.”

  Maling stared at him, eyes slitting narrower, “Yeah?”

  “It seems that I’ll be leaving your planet soon,” Cinch continued. “I can’t find any evidence that points at a culprit in the malicious doings at Gus Kohl’s ranch.”

  “It’s the raj,” Maling said. “I could’ve told you that all along.”

  “Maybe, but I can’t prove it. So there’s no point in wasting my time here, is there? I’ll be shipping out soon.”

  “How soon? I mean, uh, in the next couple of days or something?”

  “Probably a couple of weeks. I’m going to take a little time off, a vacation.”

  “Here? On Roget? Why would you want: to do that? Nobody comes here for a vacation.”

  “I like wide spaces. Maybe I’ll do a little camping, hunting, fishing, like that. Then I’ll be on my way.”

  “Well. Sorry you couldn’t find what you came for. Feel free to drop by and visit before you go.”

  Cinch smiled and nodded, then turned and walked out. Probably this wouldn’t do any good, this little misdirection, but you never knew. Maling was doubtlessly chuckling to himself about how the fucking Stellar Rangers weren’t so hot, even as he put in a com to Tuluk. While Cinch didn’t really believe it would convince Tuluk he was giving up and going home, it might puzzle him enough to make him wonder what Cinch was really up to.

  Any stress he could pile on the man without revealing what he had and what he planned to do would help. People who were off-balan
ce sometimes fell down.

  Cinch could feel hidden watchers eyeing his every move as he climbed onto the flitter and cranked the repellors up. He left town in a hurry. Anybody who might try to follow’ him would have a hell of a time managing it, certainly not without being spotted. If they did try to tail him, the flitter was fast enough to lose them,

  But he was alone as he cleared the five-klick marker heading north. He put the flitter down and used his electronic sniffer on the vehicle. Nobody had bugged it while it was parked in town. He remounted, lifted, and shot off into the dwindling afternoon.

  * * *

  “You have lost what little mind you had,” Tuluk said to Maling. The constable had come to see him at the ranch, all full of himself. The ranger was giving up and going home, he said.

  “But–but M. Tuluk, he stood right there in my office and told me.”

  “And if he’d told you he could fly by spraying rocket fuel out of his ass, would you have believed that, too?”

  “He’s up to something,” Lobang said.

  “Of course he is up to something. He’s trying to throw us off balance. It isn’t going to work.”

  To the big man he said, “Are you ready to roll on the other thing?”

  Lobang glanced at Maling. “Uh, yeah, that thing, we’re ready.”

  “Then let’s do it. Constable, go back to town and finish your pornoproj. We’ll call you if we need you.”

  Maling looked startled. As if he thought how he spent his time was some kind of big secret. Probably children playing on the street knew all about the constable and his hobby. Lord, he was surrounded by idiots.

  * * *

  Cinch put in a com to Pan and gave hirn his location. “I’ll camp here tonight,” he said, “and do a little more poking around in the morning. I’ve stirred the pot a little, maybe that will help.”

  Pan said, “Okay. Uh ... Cinch? About Baji ... ”

  “What about her?”

  “Uh, well, I want to, that is, I’m glad you didn’t, you know ...”

  Cinch smiled at the com and the unseen Pan all those kilometers away. “She’s a beautiful girl, Pan, but no offense, your sister is a lot more woman and a lot more to my taste.”

  “I’ll tell her you said that.”

  “She already knows. My best to you and Baji.”

  “Thanks, Cinch.”

  He broke the com, still grinning. Don’t thank rne for that, kid. She might be more curse than blessing and I’m glad it’s your lot and not mine.

  CINCH FELT pretty good. He had what he needed to put Tuluk away. His new friends were safe. This case was about wrapped up. So far, he was still alive and in one piece and outside of a few bruises in great shape. Things couldn’t be much better. Yeah, it had been a little more complicated than he had first thought, but it was not the beginning that mattered in this business, it was how you finished it.

  In the morning, he would leave his desert hiding spot and take the flitter to Neglefil, a town some two hundred klicks to the southeast, where he would ship his notes to HQ and ask for them to crank up the marshals. Probably Tuluk had eyes watching for anything addressed to the Stellar Rangers, so he’d use one of the drop addresses and have the message trans-shipped from there. That was always a possibility on these backrocket planets, that your mail might get intercepted, so the rangers had long since figured out a way around that.

  The actual evidence given to him by the dead drug seller’s lover he would keep close to hand. Even if nobody fiddled with the rnail, things got lost accidentally all the time. He wouldn’t risk his case on some bored tube sorter who might drop the evidence behind a desk somewhere.

  His hiding place was in the foothills to the north, once again using a rocky overhang to shield him from the sky. His camo-tent draped over the side like a lean-to completed the cover. Supposedly the big lizards didn’t spend much time in the hill country, but he had a UV fence line set up in a semicircle around the base of the overhang. If something broke the light beam, it would set off an alarm.

  Cinch opened the case containing the recordings. There were three shiny black hardcast infoballs nestled in soft plastic sockets. He pried one of them out and slipped it into his reader, punched the device on.

  The tiny holoproj danced in the night air.

  The image showed two men sitting in the back of a limo. The camera must have been softwired to follow Ulang, for it zoomed in until both he and Tuluk were clearly identifiable, visible from the shoulders up. The viewpoint was outside the vehicle and the angle through the window next to the dealer. It was dark, but the image was augmented so that it had a faint greenish tinge to what was a black-and-white recording. Good equipment. The voices were clear, Ulang must have had a transmitter on him.

  “–cold out there,” Ulang said.

  “How did you–?”

  “It is a big part of my business to be careful, M. Tuluk, and how I go about it is something I prefer to keep secret. I am wanted on several planets and some of the rewards are quite substantial.”

  “I understand.”

  Cinch nodded to himself as he listened to the two men exchange a few chest-thurnpings about how dangerous each could be, and then got to the business at hand. That Tuluk was guilty of conspiracy to produce and market illegal chem was established. Anv forensic scan of his hardcast ball would show it to be first-generation and an unaltered once-only, assuming Ulang’s boyfriend hadn’t messed with it. Cinch was pretty sure he hadn’t. A good simadam could run a vox-match and even a retinal scan on the images and positively identify the speakers, did a record of them exist. Tuluk ‘s mouth talking in his positively ID’d voice would likely be enough to convince a jury of his guilt. Certainly there were ways to fake such recordings, but with the eyewitness testimony that went along with this they had a strong case.

  Cinch unplugged the first infoball and was about to load the second when the tiny alarm receiver he had quikstiked behind his right ear chirped at him.

  Cornpany.

  He shoved the infoball back into its plastic nest and slipped the case into his pocket. He put the tiny holoproj unit down and grabbed his carbine. He duckwalked to the far edge of the tent, dropped to his belly, and crawled as quietly and as quickly as he could along the base of the cliff.

  The invisible fence perimeter he’d set up was fifty meters away from the camp. The reflectors had been perched on rocks or hung in scrub brush high enough so a small animal like a rat or the local equivalent of a rabbit or snake could move under it without tripping the alarm. He hadn’t wanted to be kept up all night by prairie dogs going to take a leak. Anything as big as an ularsinga–or a human–would break the beam.

  As Cinch hustled away along the rocky ground he considered the likely causes of the alarm. Could have been something as simple as one of the sensors being knocked out of alignment. He’d put them into position with quikstik, but cooling rocks could shift, and a night bird could have landed on a limb and jiggled something.

  Maybe a rabbit had chosen just the right time to hop and had interrupted the beam.

  Could be one of the big lizards.

  Could be a human.

  Could be the god Prishina come to share his campfire and pose him the Riddle That Let A Man Directly Into Paradise, too.

  Best he find out which, and quickly.

  When he was twenty meters away from the lean-to of the camo-tent, he stopped. He plugged in his wolf ears and slid his spookeyes down. The night came alive with wind and rustlings and cracklings, the darkness flared into a bright, pale green.

  He heard the footsteps first then saw the figure crouched and moving toward the tent. It wasn’t a rabbit and it wasn’t a wandering god, either.

  Somebody had found him.

  Who? How?

  Worry about that later, Cinch. Deal with the situation first.

  He scanned the ni
ght, looking for other intruders, but did not see or hear any. The one creeping toward the tent made enough noise now that Cinch removed his augmentation as he circled in a crouch of his own, moving to get behind the stalker. If he had to shoot, he didn’t want to go blind and deaf, even for the instant the audio and visual cutouts would deliver.

  Just in time.

  The man got to within five meters of the tent. He carried a shotgun, a semiautomatic, and he raised it and started blasting.

  The booms were loud in the night. Four, five, six, seven of them, a hard sweeping with a steel broom that shredded the tent, spanged off the flitter and chewed at the rock and whatever gear he’d left behind.

  Cinch thanked his fortune that he’d brought the case of infoballs with him when he’d moved out.

  And that he had moved out. If he’d been under the tent, he’d be dead now.

  The man started forward to check the results of his shooting.

  Cinch crept closer, until he was within seven or eight meters of the figure.

  “Move and you die,” he said.

  The man froze.

  “Drop the weapon.”

  The shotgun clattered on the hard ground. Cinch reached up and pulled the spookeyes down. The starlight was enough to show him clearly who had come to assassinate him.

  Maling!

  “How did you find me?”

  “You think because I’m a local I’m completely stupid, but you rangers don’t know everything!”

  Cinch was surprised, sure enough. He’d looked for a tail, high and low, and he was sure the flitter was clean. And yet, here was the constable, having just put seven rounds of sleetshot into Cinch’s campsite. How in the hell had this drag-ass managed that?

  “Nope, we don’t know everything, you’re right about that. Then again, who is it under the gun here?”

  With his augmented vision, Cinch saw the man clench and unclench his hands. He wore a sidearm–Cinch had seen it earlier–but it was a snub-nosed compressed gas slugthrower, more a badge of office than a field combat piece. Oh, you could shoot somebody with it and even kill them, but it was more for show than real work, a shiny chunk of stainless steel or mat-hardchrome that could be worn on a belt day in and day out without discomfort. In the hands of an expert, the pistol could be dangerous out to a hundred meters but somehow Cinch doubted that Maling spent a lot of time at the range practicing. Still, he was only seven meters away and even a pisspoor shooter might hit a man-sized target at that distance.