Stellar Ranger

by Steve Perry

  “Lose the pistol,” Cinch said. “And then we’ll have a little chat.”

  He very much wanted to know how Maling had located him. If this lame excuse for a peace officer could find him, what might that mean if somebody good came after him?

  Maling must have thought Cinch could see no better than he could in the darkness. Without the spookeyes, Cinch was probably a dimly viewed shape against the horizon. The constable started his reach for the handgun slowly, but once he had his finger near it, he snatched at the weapon.

  “Don’t do it!” Cinch yelled. “Drop it!”

  Maling wasn’t listening. He jerked the pistol from its holster. The spookeyes showed the weapon as a greenish bit of mirror, leaving phosphor trails as it came up–

  “Drop it!” He didn’t want to have to kill the man–

  The clump! of the gas blowout was loud in the night. Maling didn’t use the sights, but point shot, thrusting his hand out like a punch.

  The slug caught Cinch square in the chest, right over the heart.

  Even with the trauma plate under the stopsuit, it hurt, like being thumped with a hammer. A good shot under the circumstances.

  Cinch dodged to his left as Maling fired twice more, and both slugs found him, each a little higher than the one before. Damn, maybe the bastard did practice!

  His head wasn’t bulletproof and Cinch’s emergency override squashed all thoughts but one: stop him!

  Cinch fired the carbine. The spookeyes’ flare protection shutter kicked on for a quarter second and the world went dark. When the green field relit, Maling was still falling.

  Cinch rnoved to the man. The high velocity projectile had punched him in the center of mass and gone through the sternum, taking a big chunk of his spine with it when it blew through his back. He wasn’t ‘Nearing a vest, and it probably wouldn’t have stopped the round anyway.

  Maling shuddered and went limp.

  Cinch checked the carotids. No pulse. Massive shock to the system did that sometimes,

  Well, shit.

  However the man had located Cinch was a secret he took with him when he left. That was worrisome.

  Things got no better when he went to check on the flitter and his gear. The sleetshot pellets had blown out the left repellor, as well as big chunks of the fibercast body on the vehicle, and it wasn’t going anywhere under its own power without more repair than Cinch could manage here with the few tools the flitter carried. Somebody’s uncle was going to be real unhappy.

  His bedroll was also ruined, the small holoproj was dead, as were his com units, both of them, and most of his food and water were also beyond usefulness.

  Amazing what a shotgun could do at close range.

  Maling hadn’t walked out here, so he must have transportation nearby. Cinch wasn’t all that happy about using it, but it was a long hike to anywhere and if Maling could find him, somebody else might.

  And Tuluk might be able to locate the raj.

  A search of the body failed to turn up a com, though he did find a keycard.

  Cinch left the dead man where he lay and went looking for his ride. He found it half a klick away, parked under some scrub. It was the official law enforcement vehicle, a boxy patrol hopper that would seat six, the rear cornpartment a meshed caged for prisoners, the whole thing painted a distinctive blue and green with a large number “1” stenciled on the roof. There was a com unit mounted in the hopper but Cinch didn’t think it was a good idea to use it, it was probably monitored.

  He considered his choices.

  He had just sent the local lawman into the Great Beyond. His own flitter was gravely wounded and his cornmunications were dead. He had a cold feeling that Wanita and the raj were endangered and he wanted to warn them, but the com unit in the constable’s vehicle would probably pipe itself directly to Tuluk’s ears.

  He wasn’t exactly sure where the raj were hiding, although he thought he had a general idea.

  What was his best course of action?

  While it was still dark, he could drive the constable’s hopper to a place close to where he figured Wanita and Pan were hiding, then put in a fast call. Even if Tuluk’s troops overheard and traced the com, he could get to the raj before they did. Then they would all move, to somewhere far away. That seemed like a plan.

  As to Maling, well, he hadn’t been much of a peace officer. He couldn’t get any deader than he was. Maybe he would serve some purpose by feeding the night creatures.

  Cinch slid into the hopper, pushed the keycard into the slot, and started the engine. He let the engine rumble for a while until it came up to lifting speed. He engaged the repellors and the vehicle rose slowly until it was twenty meters up. He hit the blowers and sped off into the remains of the night.

  CINCH HAD a general idea of where the raj were hiding out. From some of what Pan had said and what he filled in on his own, he thought he knew the heading and about how far away it might be. When he was where he thought he might be no more than thirty or forty minutes from his best estimate, Cinch put in a com to Pan’s secret number.

  “Pan, Cinch. I think maybe we might have some problems. I’m on my way. How do I get there from here? Just give me headings and distances, no coordinates.”

  With that, Cinch told Pan what landmarks he could see from where he held the hopper in a high and tight figure eight.

  Pan rattled off turns and kilorneterage.

  It would take him about twenty minutes to reach the hideout from where he was now. Not a bad guess, considering.

  Cinch broke the holding pattern and flew toward the raj’s hole in the wall.

  * * *

  If he hadn’t known where it was, Cinch would have missed it. The area was wooded, more so than he had seen before, although the trees weren’t particularly tall, maybe ten to fifteen meters. Some kind of evergreen with a pyramidlike canopy and short needles for leaves. It wasn’t much of a forest compared to jungle worlds he’d been on, but for local vegetation it was the champion. There were four or five patches of it, the largest of which was maybe five hundred meters wide by a thousand long; it was hard to tell from the air at night exactly.

  Cinch dropped the hopper to a bare spot near the third such copse. One of the raj who was good with electronics had rigged electronic camouflage so that a house-sized tent was supposed to be hidden in the middle of the small wood. Even as he walked toward the still unseen tent, Cinch still couldn’t see or hear anything to give them away. It was very quiet, no light visible. They were doing a good job here, Cinch thought. The night air had a pleasant, piney scent to it.

  He finally spotted the tent and moved toward it. Fortunately there wasn’t much in the way of undergrowth among the trees so he didn’t have to look for a path.

  When he was fifty meters away, Cinch felt a coldness in his belly, like he’d suddenly swallowed a lump of metal left out in deep vacuum.

  Something was wrong.

  For a tent with at least six or eight people in it, there ought to be more incidental sounds.

  He stopped and moved behind the partial cover of one of the trees. This feeling didn’t make any logical sense, but he’d learned a long time ago to trust it when it happened to him. If he were wrong, he’d feel a little foolish, maybe. If he were right, however, and he ignored it, he might feel a little dead.

  He laid the carbine on the ground and used his sensory augmentation gear once again. The night lit up in spookeyes ghost-green; the sounds of trees creaking in a gentle wind came through the wolf ears. He retrieved his carbine and began a circle around the tent. With the ears working, his own movements sounded like an elephant stomping across walnut shells. Every few meters he would stop, hold his breath so that didn’t interfere with the sound, and listen.

  When he was twenty meters out, on the opposite side from where he’d landed the hopper, he sat with his back against a tree and
watched the tent, breathing slowly and evenly, listening carefully between each inhalation and exhalation.

  After another fifteen minutes, his caution paid off.

  “Where the fuck is he? He shoulda been here by now.” The voice was a whisper, kept low enough so anybody with normal hearing would not have picked it up this far away.

  “Shut the fuck up,” a second voice whispered in answer. Cinch didn’t know either of the speakers. What he did know was that they were waiting for him.

  Damn.

  What had happened? If they’d been there when he called Pan, surely the boy would have figured out a way to let him know they were being held captive? Cinch went over the conversation again. There hadn’t been any strain in Pan’s voice, things had been okay then, the ranger was fairly sure. He wasn’t that good an actor.

  So, in the twenty minutes between his call and his arrival, somebody had gotten here, taken control, and set up an ambush.

  What about the raj? Wanita and Baji? Were they still in there? Tied up, gagged, knocked out, or worse? He had to know before he did anything dangerous. If they were in there and alive, he had to get them out in the same condition.

  If they were dead, the men who killed them were going to be sorry they were ever born.

  How to get the bushwhackers out without darnaging the captives, if they were still there?

  Cinch looked at the tent. It was a standard big dome configuration, large enough to sleep twenty people, draped over flexible carbon fiber rods that formed a springy framework. Two doors–he was looking at one of them–and the material was camouflage cloth set to match the ground and trees. The power source for the cloth would be somewhere in the base, a high-voltage, high-capacity solar battery, probably, with a little step generator for augmenting it when it couldn’t get enough recharging time. The tent fabric would be fire-resistant, but if he could locate the battery ...

  It took less time than he thought it would. The battery was next to the door. Good.

  Moving with great care, Cinch attached a popper to the battery. Of course, the tent fabric was between them, but a device that would generate enough heat to melt steel would burn through the cloth real quick. When the battery got hot enough, it would rupture. It shouldn’t explode–the cast plastic cases were designed to let go at a safety seam so that wouldn’t happen–but by the time it broke open the contents ought to start smoking pretty good and the smoke should stink like a live skunk-roast.

  Cinch set the popper for two minutes and crawled away. He made a circle around the tent again, so he was watching the other door. When the battery melted, they weren’t going to go toward it. He stretched out prone and aimed his carbine at the door.

  “–the fuck is that?”

  “–Jesus, the tent is on fire, it’s a short in the goddamn power!”

  The tent’s front door, a thick flap of cloth, snapped open. Four men ran out, and greasy black smoke boiled out through the opening with them. Two of the men were coughing, one cursing loudly, and the fourth came out crouched, waving a submachine plasma rifle back and forth in short, flat arcs, looking for a target. All four wore full military-grade body armor, helmets, visors, and bulky suits that covered them from chest to boots. The only target effective target area was from their mouths to the bases of their necks.

  Cinch was twenty-five meters out and the protective gear they wore would stop anything he could throw at them, even his armor-piercing bullets, which he hadn’t loaded.

  Standard procedure called for him to identify himself as a ranger and order them to drop their weapons. Standard procedure here would get him killed. These were mercenaries, rigged for combat, and if he gave away his position, the alert one with the submachine gun would chop him into pieces.

  His friends and lover could be in there. They rnight be dead. If they were alive, he had to get past this quad to rescue them. He had no choice.

  All of this took maybe a second for Cinch to recognize and decide upon.

  He put the sighting dot on the lips of the submachine gunner and fired. The flare shield in the spookeyes blinked and blanked the scene, but he had already begun to swing the carbine to the left a hair, and when the eyes lit again he lined the dot up on the second man’s throat and fired again. Then he rolled, covering three meters until he slammed into a tree. He scooted behind the base of the trunk.

  The other two troopers oriented themselves toward his muzzle flash and opened up with their weapons. The automatic fire lit the night and Cinch jerked the spookeyes off. The continuous flares would keep the shutters up to protect his eves and he’d be blind. It didn’t matter that the wolf ears had shut his sound input off, turtling the roar of gunfire into the cracks of sticks breaking.

  The muzzle blasts of the gunners were enough for him to see his targets. He aimed at the jaw of the third man and fired.

  The fourth gunner swung his gun around. Bullets chewed at the tree as Cinch rolled to the opposite side, bark splashed like water; he felt the impacts of the metal pellets against the wood vibrate into his belly as he finished the roll and aimed at the last gunner. He fired, missed, fired again, missed–

  A round from the armored trooper’s gun smashed into Cinch’s carbine. Like most men under fire, the hired gunner aimed at the perceived threat, in this case, the muzzle flashes of Cinch’s weapon.

  The shot wrenched the carbine from Cinch’s grip, nearly breaking his trigger finger as it did so.

  Cinch rolled again, moving back to the other side of the tree, snatching his pistol from its holster. He stretched his alms out, lined up on the patch of pale skin visible between the helmet’s blast visor and the upper edge of the collarbone armor plate. Cinch fired, once, twice, three times–

  The trooper fell backward, hit the tent flap, and went through it.

  Smoke continued to pour from the tent.

  Cinch came up from his prone position and ran in a half crouch to where the four men lay. It didn’t take long to determine they were all dead. A high-velocity rifle round to the face or throat was usually fatal, hydrostatic shock and wound cavity being pretty severe. The last shooter had taken at least two of the three bullets from Cinch’s pistol. One had gone under the shield, probably as he was falling, and hit him next to the left eye.

  He held his breath and moved into the tent, keeping low. The smoke was thick and acrid, but he was able to see what he needed to see:

  The tent was empty,

  Outside again, Cinch reloaded his pistol and holstered it. He had four dead men and his friends and allies were gone.

  What the hell had happened here?

  What was going on?

  This was wrong. How had Tuluk’s men gotten here ahead of him? Quick enough to capture everybody, get them away, then set up a trap?

  Too much coincidence. First, the constable had found him, now this. It didn’t make sense, except for one reason Cinch didn’t want to believe it. But he couldn’t ignore it:

  Somebody in their group was a traitor.

  WHEN THE SUN broke night’s grip and there had been no call from the mercenaries declaring success, Tuluk assumed that the ranger had either bypassed the meeting at the tent in the woods or proved rnore adept than those lying in wait for him. Given his successes thus far, the latter seemed a distinct possibility.

  He had Lobang put in a com to the merks. They weren’t, it seemed, answering their calls just at the moment.

  Score another point for the ranger, then.

  Oh, well. It didn’t matter. He still had the trump card in his hand.

  Tuluk smiled as he activated the com. Getting the code from the leader of the dreaded raj had been simple, all it had taken was to point his tangIer at the boy’s sister and threaten to use it. These fools had over-reached themselves and now they knew who was in control.

  “Yes,” came the voice from the com. No surprise, no question in it.
>
  Tuluk leaned back in his chair. Lobang and two of his men had the captives in another room, out of earshot, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they overheard the conversation. When all was said and done, they wouldn’t be telling anybody anything.

  “Good morning, Ranger.”

  There was no preamble: “What do you want?”

  “I would like to conduct a little business. You have something I want. I have something you want. Perhaps a trade might be in order?”

  “Your four men for the raj and the others?”

  Tuluk laughed. “Don’t be absurd. If those four are alive, they are inept and worthless. If they aren’t still among the living, you can feed them to the carrion birds. You know what I am speaking about.”

  “So the deal is, I give you the recordings and you let my people go, is that it?”

  “It’s a bargain. It’s the only game in town.”

  “I’Il think about it and call you back.”

  Tuluk frowned at the com as the carrier wave shut off. He had the upper hand here, how dare the man act this way? He was a ranger, he couldn’t let the captives die. Now what was he up to?

  He called to Lobang: “Bring Kohl’s great-granddaughter in here.”

  There came the sound of a scuffle. After a moment, Lobang came into the room, leading Baji. Tuluk raised an eyebrow.

  “The dreaded leader of the raj objected,” Lobang said. “He’s taking a little nap now.”