Author: LawDog; Rick Cutler; Becky Jones; Seth Taylor; Mathias Gilliam; Spearman Burke; John D. Martin; David Weaver; Medron Pryde; Danith McPherson
Date: 2023-12-06 08:00:00+00:00
Description: Why Cowboys in Space? Because as humanity moves closer to the stars, the need for freedom, exploration, and the wide open ranges goes with them.

Space Cowboys 404: Cow Not Found

Introduction by LawDog, Edited by Kortnee Bryant

Raconteur Press

Little Lost CAU

Copyright © 2023 by Mathias Gilliam

Lode Claim Blues

Copyright © 2023 by Spearman Burke

The Forever Mug of Joe at Bitsy’s Saloon

Copyright © 2023 by Danith McPherson

Cowboy Dreams

Copyright © 2023 by Becky Jones

Milo Wolfkiller and the Red Terror

Copyright © 2023 by John D. Martin

The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same

Copyright © 2023 by David Weaver

High Noon on the Red Planet

Copyright © 2023 by Seth Taylor

Death and Dying in Feral Canyon

Copyright © 2023 by Rick Cutler

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Cover art and Design by Cedar Sanderson

Contents

Introduction

1. Little Lost CAU

1. Mathias Gilliam

2. Lode Claim Blues

2. Spearman Burke

3. The Forever Mug of Joe at Bitsy’s Saloon

3. Danith McPherson

4. The Guns of Liberty

5. Cowboy Dreams

5. Becky R. Jones

6. Milo Wolfkiller and the Red Terror

6. John D. Martin

7. The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same.

7. David Weaver

8. High Noon on the Red Planet

8. Seth Taylor

9. Death And Dying in Feral Canyon

9. Rick Cutler

Also From Raconteur Press

Call To Action

Introduction

“But, LawDog, why Space Westerns?”

Why not? I cut my reading teeth both on the large collection of Louis L’Amour paperbacks that my father collected, and on the classic Science Fiction books that the engineers favoured. To me it is perfectly logical to combine the two.

As humanity moves out from its ancestral home and into the Galaxy (Science Fiction), odds are that we will have that frontier out where on the dividing line between human civilization and Unknown Space (Western). There will be new lands – new planets – to be tamed, and using advanced technology to tame the land doesn’t make it any less of a wild frontier.

I tend to think that folks have a fondness for that lovely mash-up that are “Science Fiction Westerns”, and for two genres that don’t seem to have much in common, Science Fiction Westerns are not only popular, but have significant staying power.

The original Star Tek was pitched to the studios as a Western in space. It would be, Gene Roddenberry told producers “Wagon Train to the stars”, and it was. Star Trek paved the way for ‘Outland’, ‘The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr’, ‘Firefly’, and so many more.

As popular as Sci-Fi Westerns are in movies and on TV, it seems to be less so in print. ‘Lone Star Planet’ by John J. McGuire, and ‘Six-Gun Planet’ by John Jakes are two that come to mind, as does the ‘Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King; but it becomes harder to think of others after those.

I’d like to change that.

In your hands you hold ‘Space Cowboys 404: Cow Not Found’, and is, I think, proof that people like to read Space Westerns as much as they like to watch them. After all, this is the fourth anthology in the series, with more and more stories coming in; and we will happily publish as many Space Cowboy anthologies as y’all give us stories for.

Enjoy these stories. Nine more authors have corralled pixels to produce their vision of the wild space frontier, and have entrusted us to bring them to you – and we have.

Read them. Tell your friends about them. Send us more of them.

Thank you.

LawDog, Small Town, Texas 2023.

Little Lost CAU

Mathias Gilliam

“All right, Trey, round ‘em up.”

The crackle and distortion of the small speaker in his headset could not disguise the unmistakable voice of The Boss. Trey tapped the sleep button on the side of his datapad and reached up with his free hand to key the transmitter. “Yessir. On it.” He stowed the device in the small bag on the side of his seat and stretched. A series of welcomed pops cascaded up his spine. “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff.”

Trey looked out on an endless blanket of stars. The view from inside the cockpit of the small Appaloosa-class shuttle never got old. A smattering of boulders slowly tumbled by. The true asteroids of the belt were very far apart, but the spaces in between were cluttered with dust and minor bits of rock—fragments of played out asteroids, mining castoffs, and who knew what else. The Sun was a long way off, but there were no planets in the way today, so the detritus in the asteroid field was free to sparkle and shine. Flecks of silica and trace metals twinkled faintly as the rocky masses spun about in the void. Trey took a moment to take it all in, and to let his eyes get accustomed to the field of view again after spending the past couple of hours reading.

He switched his radio over to talk-around and keyed the transmitter again. “All right, boys. Circle up. Sending the ping now.”

Half a dozen responses came back in varying degrees of drawl and wakefulness. Minding the herd could get tedious sometimes, which was why Trey read to keep himself awake. He tapped the recall button on his console and turned his gaze to the herd status panel. The recall command pinged out from his Appaloosa and was being repeated by the rest of the shuttles in his team. One by one, the lights next to the numbers for each Collection Automation Unit began flickering from yellow to green.

At just under 200 CAUs, it would take a while for all the signals to be received. Trey looked up through his cockpit window, the faint glow of maneuvering thrusters in the distance burning between the larger rocks.

His crew was working fast, and he knew more than a few quiet bets had been placed on who could run their route the fastest. The quicker they ran their routes and relayed the recall signal, the quicker they could get back and get to the serious business of shenanigans. From the Great Plains to the asteroid belt, ranch hands never changed.

Giant rocks could play hell with line-of-sight transmissions, and the field was far too cluttered and erratic to allow for static repeaters. To combat this, the ranchers of the asteroid belt had to rely on a modern form of scattering and yelling to get the attention of the herd. It was also a great excuse for young men in fast shuttles to dart around like idiots. The same kind of idiot Trey had been at that age, and still was, if he was honest with himself.

Ten minutes into the recall, Trey was still short by three CAUs. Just once, he would like to be able to hit them all without having to go hunting. If those boys would slow down a little, their Appaloosas could repeat the signal more efficiently and stop missing the ones that wound up in the shadow of one of the boulders. There were plenty of dark corners for a CAU to get lost behind.

Trey sighed and keyed up again. “That should be enough. I know y’all have finished your routes already, but we’re still three head short. Ollie, take point and start bringing in the herd. The rest of you take the flanks. Ellis, stay back with me and help me find the last three. We’ll come up as drag after that.”

The CAUs had a rudimentary sort of AI. Very rudimentary. Something just above a home sanitation unit adapted to move in three planes. The system was just smart enough to help the CAU avoid the most obvious of collisions and follow a beacon; thus, the asteroid ranchers had to guide the simple machines back into the pen at the end of the day. Not much had changed in the hundred or so years since ranching stopped being solely a terrestrial endeavor.

Trey’s radio pinged, and he switched over to his private channel with Ellis. A tinny voice greeted him just as his old friend’s Appaloosa coasted up alongside Trey’s starboard. “You ready, Trey?”

“Yeah, let’s get going. It’s cluttered out there today, so be careful,” Trey cautioned.

“Okay, Dad.” Cheerful sarcasm coated the words.

“Shut up, Ellis.”

The other shuttle sped off at nearly a full gravity of thrust. Trey cinched his harness tight, adjusted the gimbal on the seat to half tension, and grabbed the control handles. With a crank of the throttle, he sped off after Ellis.

The herd was already docked by the time Trey and Ellis came coasting back to the Barn two hours later with two damaged CAUs in tow. The Barn was an extensive ringed space platform, larger and more complex than the original International Space Station, but it wasn’t accurate to call it a station or a satellite. No self-respecting rancher would say, “Time to deliver the glorified vacuums back to the space station.” No, you didn’t mess with tradition. A true rancher brought the herd to the barn.

Ellis was waiting in the locker room when Trey walked in. The younger man had already swapped his pressure suit for jeans and a flannel button-down. “You’re getting slow in your old age,” Ellis jabbed.

Trey laughed as he went through the routine of stripping off his own pressure suit. “Thorough is better than fast. Besides, I’m not that much older than you.”

“Still older, and that’s all that matters to me.”

“Oh, what a joy it must be to be as simple as you.”

Ellis placed a hand over his heart and feigned injury. “I think you just called me stupid.”

“So you can think after all. I knew you had it in you.” Trey grabbed a towel out of his locker and started towards the showers. “Is there any hot water left, or did the boys run it all out?”

“How would I know?”

“You know, if you’d shower more than once a week, your popularity might actually improve.”

“I’ll have you know that women enjoy the smell of a hard-working man.” Ellis took a seat on one of the benches around the corner from the shower wall.

Trey stepped into the shower stall and twisted the knob all the way to hot, making sure to stand out of the way just in case. You only get caught with a cold shower once—twice if you’re slow on the uptake—before you learn that lesson. “What women? There are only five on this whole ranch, and you’re kin to three of them.”

“That still leaves two.”

“And those two already know enough about you to steer clear.”

“I’m playing hard to get.”

“That’s easy to do when they’re playing Do Not Want.” The water was blissfully hot, and Trey stepped under the steaming cascade. Whatever clever retort Ellis muttered was lost to the rushing water around his ears. Trey’s brief stint in the Stellar Navy had instilled in him a habit—and a talent—for a quick shower. In less than two minutes, he was walking out and vigorously drying off.

Ellis was courteous enough to let Trey dress in peace. Jeans and flannel had all but become the unofficial uniform of the ranchers, much like back on Earth. Style and comfort. Nothing beats a properly broken-in pair of jeans. Trey pulled on his boots, stood, and shut his locker.

Ellis shook his head and chucked. “It’s funny how you give me shit about my showering habits when you don’t even stay in long enough to get wet.”

“Like you would know what wet feels like.”

Ellis waved off the jab. “So where do you think that last CAU went?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. It’s too big to have just disappeared, and there was nothing in the field today large enough to have wrecked it.”

“Hell, Trey, you spent enough time out there looking through nothing, I figured you had an idea.”

“I can’t just shrug off a loss like that. And the why is a complete mystery. It’s bugging me.”

“Well,” said Ellis, “you do like puzzles. I know it’s a big deal to lose a CAU, so I’ll gladly head out with you, if you want to search again later.”

“I appreciate that, and that’s exactly my intention. Come on, let’s go check the herd and report in.”

Most of the process was automated. Each CAU weighed several tons, and getting the herd inside required docking clamps and guidance through a set of airlocks, a process best left to the very sophisticated—and very expensive—machines of the docking bay. The CAUs were already secured to their mounts, with various cables and hoses dangling, by the time the two men entered the bay. Trey patted one affectionately as he walked through.

The massive metal machines were not much to look at, really. At twenty feet high and eighty feet end to end, they were culvert-shaped tubes with a main thruster on one end and an open intake funnel on the other end. A dozen smaller articulated maneuvering jets were evenly spaced around the body. The gaping maw of the intake, lined throughout with rows of rotating grinder teeth, looked unsettlingly like the mouth of a gigantic steel lamprey.

The CAUs were designed to coast around and scoop up the dust and smaller bits of rock in the asteroid belt, grind it all up, and separate the debris into batches, according to mineral content. Each unit functioned as a sweeper, grinder, and sorter combined into one imposing package.

The Collection Automation Unit was a crowning achievement in the field of resource harvesting: a model of efficient design and proof of the engineering prowess of mankind. And the ranchers had painted every one of them to resemble the mottled black and white of Holstein cows, even going as far as to paint the valves on the storage tanks the pinky-flesh color of udders. The CAUs had even been “branded” with crudely painted versions of the Diamond Bar T Ranch emblem, a four-point diamond bisected vertically with a capital T and horizontally with a single bar. Ranchers in the belt would never allow anything to be taken too seriously.

Trey and Ellis hurried their way through the bay, careful to stay out of the way of the busy technicians and handlers. On the far end of the workspace, Trey could see the two damaged CAUs they had towed back in. One looked all right from a distance. Trey hoped it was just a simple systems malfunction that had caused it to shut down out in the field. The other CAU looked much worse for wear and had obviously failed to avoid one or more of the larger rocks. The banged-up unit might wind up as fodder for parts later on.

Trey calculated the potential loss from two—no, three—CAUs out of commission. Where had that third one gone? The mystery of the whole thing was still nagging at him. He grabbed a datapad from a workstation and motioned for Ellis to follow him down the hall.

By the time they reached The Boss’s office, Trey had scanned through the collection numbers. The field had been rich in silicate and a surprising amount of nickel. The numbers were still coming in as the last CAUs were being “milked,” but it looked like it was going to be a good day. Trey pocketed the datapad and knocked on the double doors.

“Come in,” the deep voice of The Boss called from inside. There was a sharp click as the door latch popped open.

Ellis made an exaggerated sweeping gesture towards the door. “Age before beauty.”

Trey rolled his eyes and pushed the doors open, stepping confidently into the office of Damon Bartee Jr., “Chip” to his wife and “Boss” to his ranchers. The doors quietly swung shut behind them. “Evenin’, Boss.”

“Evenin’, Trey. Ellis. Have a seat. Y’all wanna drink?”

“Thank you, sir, but no. We’re going to be heading out again after supper.”

Boss Bartee was standing beside his desk, facing the large display screen on the far wall. Half of the screen was taken up by the current market rates for minerals, while the other half was dominated by a 3D digital map of the ranch with a real-time display of the larger rocky masses, not quite big enough to be proper asteroids, floating through it. The borders of the ranch were a fixed section of space, with the asteroid belt traveling through it. This allowed for a fresh field for the CAUs every day and, with the staggeringly massive scale of the asteroid belt, there was no shortage of detritus to be harvested.

In school, they made the kids memorize how much space, by volume, the asteroid belt occupied. All Trey could remember nowadays was that there were a lot of zeros in that number. From experience, he knew a lot of that volume was actually empty, devoid of the big rocks and asteroids that made the belt memorable to the terrestrial folks. But the ranchers were not there for the big rocks.

Boss Bartee turned and cocked his head slightly, raising a single white bushy eyebrow. “Am I not working you boys hard enough?”

Trey knew the man’s sense of humor: dry as Mars. “You know how it is, sir. We just can’t get enough.”

The Boss grunted and turned to fully face his two lead ranchers. “All right, then, what’s going on?”

Ellis spoke up before Trey could answer. “We lost a CAU.”

Trey snapped his head to the side and stared at his old friend. Smooth, he thought. Real smooth, Ellis.

The Boss stared at Ellis for a long moment, as if the younger man had started speaking Mandarin. “Come again?”

“We lost a CAU.”

“Lost, as in broken and taken offline?”

“Well, one of those, too. Possibly two. But no: lost, as in it should have been there, but it’s not.”

Trey continued to stare incredulously at Ellis. Shut up.

The Boss shifted his gaze to Trey. “Would you care to explain?”

Trey sighed and ran his fingers through his hair before meeting the Boss’s eyes. “Yessir. We still have one CAU unaccounted for. On the recall, we were short by three. Ellis and I ran the field and found two, both offline. One appears to have suffered a software malfunction, and the other got beat up pretty bad by a couple big rocks. We couldn’t find the third one.”

The Boss said nothing. His stare was not angry, just impassive.

Trey continued. “We spent the better part of two hours searching and decided to go ahead and bring back the two we found. I figured we could get the passive sensor data from the herd and see if that would yield any clue as to where that last one went.”

The Boss nodded. “All right, get to it, then.”

Ellis and Trey stood and started for the double doors. “Oh, and Trey,” the Boss said, stopping Trey in his tracks.

“Yessir?”

“Your mother is making pot roast tonight. We’ll set a place for you.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be there.”

Trey snapped his harness buckles into place and methodically worked through the power-up sequence for his Appaloosa. The standard work vehicle for the ranch was not much to look at, consisting of a spherical cockpit canopy mounted to the front of a rectangular chassis. The Appaloosa was not designed to be anything close to a cargo hauler. Aside from the engines and cockpit, there was just enough space for some manipulator appendages, a pair of tow cables, and fuel storage. Small, fast, and maneuverable—much like the horse breed it was named after.

The pilot chair was mounted on an adjustable gimbal, which allowed for the rancher to control how quickly the seat shifted to match the direction of thrust. Too loose, and the rancher would find himself with thrust gravity pushing at an awkward angle; too tight, and he would get snapped around during a rapid change. Trey usually kept his at three-quarter tension unless he had to get creative, and then it would go no looser than half. It allowed for his chair to ease into position while still maintaining enough of a forward field of view to keep him from crashing into something unexpected.

The running lights from Ellis’s Appaloosa were already trailing out from The Barn towards the asteroid field. Trey disconnected the docking umbilical and throttled up to meet him. The datapad he had borrowed from the docking bay was plugged into the Appaloosa’s computer and syncing with the navigation system.

“Evenin’, Trey. About time you showed up.”

“Don’t act like you’ve been out here all night.”

“Nope. Just out here before you, and that’s what matters to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“What’s the plan?”

Trey tapped out a transfer command and sent the contents of the datapad over to Ellis. “The techs got everything downloaded. Nothing surprising from most of the herd; however, our two stragglers were a different story.” His console pinged to notify him that the transfer was complete.

There was a pause while Ellis skimmed the transmission. “Man, I’m not reading all of that. Explain it to me in simple terms.”

“I didn’t bring any crayons.”

“Bite me.”

“The busted one looks to be just another fluke. Nothing else.”

“Exciting.”

Trey ignored the sarcasm. “The other one, however, was totally fried on the inside.”

“You mean, like overheated?”

“No. An electromagnetic pulse hit it.”

“An EMP? From what?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. I’ve got the rough location of where the CAU should have been when it happened. Not too far from where we found it, of course.”

“Rocks don’t do that sort of thing, do they?”

“No. No, they do not.”

Most of the asteroid belt was empty. Sure, there were nearly two million proper asteroids, each half a mile across or bigger, but they were spread out over such a staggeringly broad expanse. As such, Trey and Ellis cruised around a vast breadth of nothing, looking for anything that would explain what happened to their burned-out CAU. And the one that was still lost.

“Trey, I’m no scientist or anything, but…I don’t think there’s anything worthwhile out here.”

“As much as I hate to agree with you, you’re right. It was worth a shot, though. You got any ideas?”

“Uh, we could just head back.”

“And how are we going to explain the lost CAU?”

“That sounds like a you problem, Trey.”

“It didn’t sound like a me problem when you dropped the news on the Boss like you did.”

“Hell, I just did that because I love watching you squirm.”

“Ellis, buddy, you’re an ass.”

“Yeah, probably. But I’m good at what I do. And this crew would go to hell without my leadership. Seriously, though, there’s nothing out here. I want to find that CAU as much as you do, but it just ain’t here.”

“Minor losses are easy enough to write off. This isn’t minor, especially if the techs can’t get the other two back up and running again. Broken can be fixed, lost is just lost.”

“Yeah, buddy, I know.”

Trey sighed and turned his Appaloosa to swing it back towards The Barn. And that was when he saw it, right next to the nearest big rock, just over a mile away. “Ellis. Look out toward that slow mover and tell me what you see.” All the humor had dropped from his voice.

“A big damn rock, why?”

“Seriously. Look. Tell me what you see.”

The radio was silent for a long moment. Trey kept his eyes locked on the point beside the not-quite-asteroid. The Diamond Bar T Ranch was the only outfit in this part of the belt, so why was there another shuttle out here?

“Trey, is that—”

“I think so. Come on.” Trey’s Appaloosa lurched ahead as he torqued the throttle.

The pair of Appaloosas covered the distance quickly. A few seconds in, and more than halfway there, the mysterious third shuttle turned away and burned its own thrusters as hot as they would go.

Trey switched on his recorder and spoke quickly. “Unknown shuttle, this is Trey Bartee of the Diamond Bar T Ranch. You are trespassing on private property. Power down and come to a stop.” He set his transmitter to repeat the message and cycle through all the available channels.

They already had a head start by way of accumulated speed, but the interloper was accelerating considerably faster. Trey and Ellis were already pushing it at the Appaloosa’s limit of nearly two and a half g, and they were starting to feel the effects. Trey had experience flying at this force during his fleet training and on a few deployments, but Ellis had never pushed his Appaloosa this hard before.

“Trey.” Ellis sounded strained, almost muffled.

Trey cranked the tension on his gimbal to half and jerked the controls to dodge a rock that had suddenly appeared in his path. He was going too fast, but trespassers were unacceptable, especially trespassers who were most likely thieves.

“Trey…” Ellis slurred, sounding almost drunk.

Trey’s eyes were deadlocked on the other shuttle as it started to open the distance between them. It must have capped out at over three g, and that could not have been easy on the pilot. The spacecraft was not an Appaloosa. Thrust like that could only come from an Arabian. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Trey to dodge the small rocks in the field, and at this speed, even small rocks could be lethal.

“Trey, I’m sorry…I can’t…” Ellis cut his engines. The strain had become too much.

The fleeing Arabian abruptly jerked. The trajectory of its flight changed. Just as Trey prepared to match the other shuttle, a spiraling chunk of rock hit the fuselage of his Appaloosa and threw him into a hard spin. His thrusters shut off as he lost his grip on the control yoke; half of the forward momentum was instantly lost and replaced with a greater centrifugal force. He was slammed forward against the harness and back against the seat, which rotated to match the new fast flat spin of the shuttle. The half tension in the gimbal of his chair saved him from whiplash at best or a broken neck at worst.

One section of indicator lights on the control panel instantly flared red, as if the Appaloosa was indignant at the mistreatment. Trey was pinned back into his chair, exhausted from the extended high-gravity exposure, and disoriented from the collision. Warning alarms blared throughout the cockpit. The view screen was a blur of stars.

The edges of Trey’s vision pulled in, the darkness of impending blackout encroaching as the sustained spin weighed on his body. He could hear the voice of Ellis in his headset, but his brain couldn’t register the words. Goddamnit. Got to stop this. Why hadn’t the Appaloosa’s emergency failsafe kicked in? The maneuvering thrusters should have fired to counter the wild spin.

Trey pushed as hard as he could, reaching out with his right arm towards the control yoke. The strain in his shoulder threatened to tear the muscle while his concentration was rapidly fading. Come on… His arm wavered as it approached the yoke, the shadow engulfing his vision almost complete.

His endurance finally gave out. His arm slammed back against the chair, and the last of the air in his lungs squeezed out. Trey could no longer muster the strength to inhale against the crushing force of gravity on his torso. As the blackness finally overtook his vision, he thought, What a shitty way to die.

Another hard collision rocked the Appaloosa, and most of the weight lifted off Trey’s exhausted body. The gloom in his vision receded as his lungs greedily drew in oxygen. Trey quickly grabbed the controls and jerked the handles to negate the spin. Gradually, under the force of the maneuvering thrusters, the spin ceased, leaving his Appaloosa coasting under the remaining forward inertia.

“Holy shit. I can’t believe that worked.”

“Ellis?”

“Nah, man. It’s Santa Claus. Ho ho ho.”

Trey blinked and took several deep breaths. “What happened?”

“You hit a rock. I think the other guy did, too, but you hit harder.”

“And how the hell did I come out of that spin?”

“You hit something else.”

“Well, that was fortunate. What the hell was it?”

“Me.”

Trey looked up from the panel and searched through the view screen for his friend. Burning to a stop in the distance was the other Appaloosa. “Are you all right? How did that happen?”

“I crashed into you. I thought you had blacked out or something, so I figured the only way you were going to stop that spin was to hit something.”

Trey took stock of the abundance of warning lights and system failure notifications on the control panel. The myriad of alarms echoing through the cockpit wasn’t helping his headache. Several switch flips and button pushes later, he was down to only a lot of warning lights instead of too damn many. He keyed a deceleration command, and the injured shuttle flipped around and burned in the opposite direction of his momentum.

As Trey’s Appaloosa slowed, he stared at his friend’s shuttle in the distance. That was a bold move, and damn near suicidal. “Thanks, man. I’m pretty damn sure you just saved my life. I take back every mean thing I ever said about you.”

“Nah, I earned them all. Besides, you’d have done the same for me. I just couldn’t go back to the Barn without you. Your old man would kill me.”

Trey barked out a weary chuckle. “Not if Mama got to you first.”

“I think I’d rather face the old man.”

“Me, too.” Trey let out a long slow breath, wiping his hands down his face as he tried to regain his shattered composure. His hands came away red and slick with blood. What the hell?

He leaned close to the view screen, and in the thin reflection, he could see a broad smear of blood coming from his nose.

“How’s your ride?” Ellis asked.

“Looks like everything important is still working, but she’s not going to win any beauty contests anytime soon. How about yours?”

“About the same. Let’s get back. That other guy is long gone by now.”

Trey stared into the darkness, not sure which direction the Arabian had sped off into. “Yeah. I suppose he is.”

The Boss was waiting in the docking bay when Trey stepped through the airlock. The older man looked him up and down, raised eyebrows the only sign of expression on his usually stoic face. “Boy, you look like shit.”

“Yessir, I bet I do.”

“Go see the Doc. Whatever happened, it can wait until you get checked out before you tell me. And you definitely need to get cleaned up before your mother sees you.”

“That bad?”

“It ain’t great. Now go on. I’ll be in my office when you get done.”

“Yessir.”

Trey half-staggered out of the docking bay, leaving his battered Appaloosa in the skilled hands of the maintenance techs. He hoped the damage was not too extensive; he liked that shuttle and had grown accustomed to all its little quirks.

Jane Patterson, MD, was leaning against the doorway to her office when Trey ambled up. Doc Patterson was everything a rancher would want in a medical professional: quick, thorough, and easy on the eyes. It took a special kind of person to move their medical practice to a place as remote as a ranch on the asteroid belt.

“Hey, Doc.”

“Trey, what did you do to yourself? Come on in and take a seat on the exam table.”

Doc Patterson had worked for the Diamond Bar T for almost a decade, having been hired just after her residency at Ceres General Hospital on Janhunen Station. The hands were thrilled to have a young woman joining the ranch, and all but fell over each other trying to win her affections. Some of the boys were looking for love, but all of them would have settled for a good time. It took only about a month for the majority of the hands to get the hint that she was considerably more interested in her work than any of them. In the ten years Doc Patterson had been at the ranch, no one had succeeded in as much as a first date.

Trey hopped up on the exam table and immediately regretted his exuberance. He grabbed the edge of the table with both hands as a bout of dizziness came over him. Doc Patterson stared at him, her arms crossed, her head cocked to one side. Trey stared back at her and tried on his most charming smile, which instantly turned into a grimace. His face hurt. Hell, his whole body hurt.

“What happened? The story I heard was that your shuttle hit something while you and Ellis were out running around.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. We were chasing a trespasser and I hit a rock. It spun me out pretty hard.”

“Uh huh.” She stepped forward and shined a penlight in his eyes. He blinked and tried to turn away, but she turned his face back towards her with a strong, cold hand. “Hold still.”

“Yes’m.” He winced under her touch, but held still. He felt like he’d been in a bar fight. The doctor moved the light from his left eye to his right.

“How fast were you going?”

“Pretty fast.”

“And how fast is pretty fast?” She cut off the light and tucked the light into her pocket.

“Not sure. We were going at a couple g for a few minutes before that rock got in the way.”

She put her hands on the side of his neck, feeling the base of his skull and slowly working down the vertebrae. “That’s pretty fast, Trey.”

“I suppose it was.” He grunted and drew his shoulders up. “Damn, Doc, your hands are freezing. I’m going to have to get you mittens for Christmas.”

“You say that every time. Are you ever going to get a new line?” She walked over to her desk and typed in some notes.

“I will when you laugh.”

“I will when you say something clever. How’s your head?”

“It hurts.”

“Care to be more specific?”

“It hurts a lot.”

She sighed and rubbed her forehead. Trey shifted on the edge of the exam table. “Just a headache, really. And a little bit of dizziness if I move too quickly.”

She nodded and typed again. “All right, I’m going to do a scan to make sure you don’t have a concussion. It’ll take about ten minutes and I’ll have the results not long after that. I’m sure you need to talk to your father about all of this.”

“Yeah, I do. Does everything else looking all right?”

“As all right as it can be. You have a lot of sustained pressure trauma, but nothing looks broken or seriously damaged. You’re going to have a lot of bruising, and your eyes will be red for a while. You managed to burst most of the blood vessels.”

Trey nodded and instantly regretted it. “And if I have a concussion?”

“We’ll discuss that if it winds up being a problem, and the scan will find that out pretty quickly. You need to take better care of your brain, Trey. It’s about the only thing you’ve got going for you.”

Trey stared at her, surprised. “Doc, was that an actual compliment?”

“Maybe.” She typed some more, and a panel on one of the walls slid away to reveal the aperture of the scanner. “Now lie down and shut up.”

After a handful of acetaminophen, Trey still felt like shit. He’d have to wait for the results of the scan before Doc Patterson would give him anything stronger. He made his way to his father’s office, wiping his face with a wet towel he had borrowed from the Doc. The fabric had gone from white to pink as he wiped off the dried blood. The front of his pressure suit was a mess, but that would come out in the wash.

Trey knocked on the familiar double doors and stepped inside. The large data screen was exactly as it had been earlier that evening. The old man always kept his focus on the property and the market, which was how he had succeeded in growing the ranch as much as he had since inheriting it from his own father.

The Boss was seated behind his desk typing rapidly. “Have a seat, Trey. I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Yes, sir.” Trey collapsed into the chair and struggled to hold back a groan. He looked around and noted with surprise that Ellis wasn’t there.

The office was as cold and efficient as his father, a framed flag serving as the only decoration. The old gold flag was adorned with the red sun symbol of the Zia people. New Mexico was a long way from here. They might be a hundred million miles away, but the Bartee family had never forgotten their roots.

The Boss stopped typing and looked up. “Well, you look better than you did. How are you feeling?”

Trey snapped out of his daze and sat up straight. “I’m all right. Doc Patterson is concerned that I might have a concussion. She did a CT scan. She said she’ll have the results soon.”

The two men stared at each other for a long, awkward moment. Normally, Trey relied on Ellis to break the ice, but it was just the two of them. Trey was never entirely comfortable around his father. Something in the way the older man looked at him made him feel like he was constantly being evaluated.

“I’m guessing Ellis already told you what happened.”

“He gave me his story, yes, but I want to hear yours.”

Trey recounted the events of the evening, making sure to clearly explain how Ellis had saved his life. This was the first time he’d replayed the events, and he realized how close he had come to dying out there.

He owed Ellis a beer. Every night. For the rest of his life.

When Trey finished, his father nodded slowly. “You think this other shuttle is somehow connected to the missing CAU?” Nothing about the collision, the spin out, or what Ellis had done. Straight to business.

“If he isn’t, then it was a damn coincidence he was in that area.”

“I agree.” His father leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “Did you get a good look at the shuttle?”

“No, sir, but I’d bet it was an Arabian. It was fast and the profile didn’t look like an Appaloosa. Ellis said it was clipped by the same rock that I hit, so it’s probably damaged, too. Maybe the Sheriff can look into it. At the very least, we can get him for trespassing.”

“Already ahead of you on that. I was working on my report to the Sheriff’s Office when you came in. I will add what you said as a supplemental.” He glanced over at the map on the wall and tapped his console. The screen shifted to a fullscreen view of their section of the asteroid belt, before zooming out to show the half of the belt on their side of solar orbit. The Sheriff’s Office was on Janhunen Station in orbit around Ceres. Fortunately, Ceres was pretty close, objectively speaking, so the transmissions would not have to be relayed through too many repeaters.

The map also showed the handful of other ranches and the mining operation on Vesta. As far as Trey knew, the Diamond Bar T did not have any enemies among the other ranches. Each estate had their own little pocket of space, the resources were abundant, and everybody was far too busy to waste time with anything else. Why would anyone want to mess with them?

“All right, then,” The Boss said, turning back to Trey. “Unless you have anything else to add, I’ll let you get cleaned up and get some rest. Don’t forget to check in with Doc Patterson before you go to bed.”

“Yessir.”

“And I’ll tell your mother that you are busy for the next few days. If she sees you like this, she’ll lose her mind. You know how she worries. Whenever you feel up to it and don’t look like a cage fighter, come on to supper.”

“Yessir. Thank you.”

After two weeks of R&R, Trey felt comfortable enough to join his parents for supper. Fortunately, Trey had managed to avoid a concussion. His bruises and other injuries were gone, the last to heal being the ruptured blood vessels in his eyes. For a while, he could have passed for a zombie, while the bruises transitioned from purple to a sickly greenish yellow. The rest of the ranch hands had, of course, given him no shortage of grief for his appearance. He would expect nothing less. If your crew did not give you shit, then they didn’t trust you. That earned trust was the difference between a leader and a manager.

Most of the hands, being bachelors, took their meals in the mess hall, and Trey would join them more often than not. The meals were good and hearty, as it was in the best interest of Boss Bartee to keep his hands happy and well-fed. The married-housing units had full kitchens, and families usually cooked their own meals. The mess hall food was good, but homecooked meals were always better.

The Bartee family meals were no exception. Word of his appearance had spread all over the ranch, so Trey was confident his mother had heard the story, but she didn’t need visual confirmation of his injuries. She could keep whatever image in her head she wanted, a happy delusion Trey would not do anything to disrupt.

That first supper together after he had healed was country fried steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans, his favorite. The chase and the subsequent collision were never brought up during conversation. Boss Bartee tried his best to not discuss business at supper.

Two weeks after that family supper, Trey and Ellis were on a transport to Janhunen Station. The Sheriff had located what he believed to be their missing CAU and requested that a representative come out to Janhunen, a responsibility The Boss had delegated to Trey and Ellis. “I’m too old to take that trip,” he had told them. “Besides, someone has to stay back here and run the ranch. And you can make a supply run while you’re at it.”

Trey was surprised, as there was a lot riding on the outcome of this case. CAUs were expensive, and there were more than a few potential civil and criminal charges that could come of this. His father had placed a lot of trust in him.

The Appaloosas were fully repaired, but they lacked the creature comforts necessary to make the trip all the way to the territorial seat of the asteroid belt, the only thing that could pass for a metropolitan settlement outside of Mars. The asteroid belt was officially under the jurisdiction of the red planet, but Mars had neither the time nor the resources to care about anything off-planet. As such, the rural territory encompassing Ceres and the rest of the asteroid belt was nearly autonomous.

Trey sat in the pilot seat of the transport, one of the largest vessels in the Diamond Bar T fleet. “Janhunen Station, this is the Truth or Consequences requesting permission to dock.”

“We copy, Truth or Consequences. Stand by for approach coordinates and automated docking request.” The traffic controller sounded bored, but otherwise pleasant, the words coming out as the wearied repetition of routine.

“Thank you, Janhunen. Standing by.” Trey turned and hollered back into the crew compartment. “Ellis, wake up. We’re here.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m up.” The younger man walked through the hatchway, into the cockpit, and took a seat in the copilot chair. His left arm was in a sling. He had not made it through his collision with Trey unscathed. A dislocated shoulder, fractured humerus and several strained ligaments were his reward for saving the life of his friend.

The console pinged to notify them that Janhunen Station was requesting piloting control over their ship. Trey accepted the request and switched the controls to Automatic. The two men waited as the ship was guided into dock.

After docking and powering down, Trey and Ellis exited the Truth or Consequences and met the harbormaster, a middle-aged man sporting the latest in technical interface optics. Green lines of text ran across the lenses of the thick-framed glasses at periodic intervals.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Welcome to Janhunen Station.” The man smiled genially and extended a hand to Trey.

Trey accepted the offered hand, shook firmly, and smiled back. “Thank you, sir. This is Ellis Patterson of the Diamond Bar T Ranch, and I am—”

“Damon Bartee the Third. I know.”

Trey’s smile wavered a bit and his eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“No need to be concerned, Mr. Bartee. The docks of this station are my business, and I make it a point to be well aware of all appointments. Sheriff McMurtrie is expecting you.”

“All right, then. And please, call me Trey, Mister, uh…”

“Hunt.” The man’s expression never changed. It was starting to make Trey feel uneasy.

“Thank you, Mr. Hunt. Is there anything you need from us?”

“No, Mr. Bartee. We will take good care of your ship while you handle your business. The Sheriff’s Office is on Level Thirteen. Take a left out of here into the corridor, follow the green stripes on the bulkhead to the first elevators, and everything else should be self-explanatory.”

The pair of ranchers boarded the nearest lift and waited for the doors to shut. “Did that guy seem weird to you, Ellis?”

“Yeah, a little bit. But not bad, just…weird. Kinda like the class nerd, you know? All smarts, but awkward as hell.”

The lift coasted to a stop at Thirteen, and the doors slid open to reveal the lobby of the Ceres Sheriff’s Office. Painted on the far wall was a large five-pointed star with “Office of the Sheriff, Ceres Territory,” stenciled around it. A pair of flags flanked the mural: one the rusty red of Mars with the gold stylized shield and spear associated with the planet, the other the silver grey of Ceres with the black stylized sickle from its brief classification as a planet in the nineteenth century.

Ellis nudged Trey and stepped into the lobby. “Come on, Mr. Bartee.”

“Don’t start that shit with me, Ellis.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Bartee.”

“Smartass.”

The lady behind the reception desk smiled up at them as they approached. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. May I help you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Trey smiled back. “Trey Bartee and Ellis Patterson. We have an appointment with the Sheriff. He said to come by when we docked.”

The receptionist nodded. “Right this way.” The door to the right of her desk clicked as the lock disengaged.

The headquarters of the Sheriff’s Office was unpretentious. Cubicles and workstations filled the center with offices along the perimeter walls, and the smell of coffee and doughnuts coming from a breakroom. Aside from the row of holding cells down one hallway, complete with the angry yelling of an arrestee extolling his innocence, Trey would have mistaken it for any other office space.

The lady knocked twice on the Sheriff’s door and immediately opened it. Sheriff McMurtrie stood behind his desk, in midconversation with a younger man seated in front of him. “Sheriff, the men from the Diamond Bar T are here.”

“Ah, excellent. Thank you, Ms. Bryant. Come on in, fellas. Andy and I were just having a pleasant chat about your missing property.”

“I told you, it’s mine. I didn’t steal shit,” the seated man protested.

The Sheriff scowled at the man, staring him down over the top of his glasses. “Young man, it’s in your best interest to hush right now.”

Trey and Ellis stepped into the office. A pair of chairs waited for them to one side of the Sheriff’s desk, nice comfortable chairs as opposed to the bare metal chair that Andy was seated in and handcuffed to. Trey looked from Andy to Ellis and then to the Sheriff. “Sheriff, I feel as though we’re missing something here.”

“It’s all right, it’ll all make sense soon. Have a seat. I got the report from your ranch, which was very thorough, and for that, I thank you. It just so happens that a few days after your report, a CAU with a fresh paint job showed up on the market here on Janhunen. About that same time, an Arabian-class shuttle was also accepted for repairs at one of our fine maintenance facilities after losing an argument with a rock in the asteroid belt. A real funny set of circumstances, considering your report.”

Ellis was staring daggers at Andy, who was doing his best to look indignant while simultaneously shrinking into the chair. “This is bullshit,” Andy mumbled.

“So,” the Sheriff continued, ignoring the protest, “my deputies looked into it. The Arabian was nothing remarkable, aside from the damage.”

Andy looked up, still sullen. “Told you there was nothing wrong.”

“I said hush. Anyway, my deputies took possession of the CAU for investigative purposes. There was a conveniently fresh paint job for what appeared to be an older unit. However, the serial numbers on the frame, chassis, and grinder housing all came back clean.”

Andy sat up and tried to point, his hand jerking against the handcuffs. “I told you, I’m innocent. That CAU is mine. I’m going to sue the shit out of you for this.”

The Sheriff turned to Andy again. “I thought I said hush. Now, you’re going to want to listen real careful to what I’m about to say. That means shut your mouth and open your ears.”

Andy slumped again and grumbled something about the parental heritage and sexual proclivities of the Sheriff.

“As I was saying, those three serial numbers came up clean. Now, my deputies are methodical and knowledgeable fellas. And what most low-level thieves don’t know,” the Sheriff jerked his head towards Andy, “is that there are two more serial numbers that the manufactures put on the CAUs. Not easy to find, of course, and that’s the point. Those two serial numbers came back to your little lost CAU.”

“So it is our CAU?” Trey asked hopefully.

“Yes, Mr. Bartee, it is.”

“Please, Sheriff, call me Trey.”

“Very well, Trey. Yes, it’s your CAU. We have it in Impound, ready to turn back over to your possession.”

“Well, damn,” Trey looked to Ellis and back to the Sheriff, “that’s fantastic. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But that’s not all, and this is where young Mr. Spurgle here is really going to get upset.” The Sheriff pointed to Andy and grinned. “It turns out that being in Ceres Territory has certain advantages. One such advantage is that the Sheriff has quite a bit of latitude in how he conducts his affairs.”

“Wait, what? What are you going to do to me?” Andy whined.

“That all depends on you, kid.” The Sheriff nodded to the two ranchers. “And how generous these two gentlemen are feeling today.”

Trey raised an eyebrow. “Generous?”

“Yes, Trey. You see, I have enough here that I am sure I could get several convictions.” The Sheriff stared at Andy as he slowly named the charges. “Felony trespass, felony larceny, felony alteration of an identification number, felony possession of stolen goods, felony conspiracy to sell stolen goods.” He paused and looked at the sling on Ellis’s arm. “And I am sure there’s more than one attorney willing to take up the civil case for the injuries sustained in the chase, as well. That arm looks pretty rough.”

Andy shot up in his chair, as much as he was able, eyes wide, sputtering incoherently.

“Now, court out here convenes quarterly—we’re out on the fringes, after all—and the judges travel the circuit between here and Mars. With the next court session not due for another two months, that means you,” he jabbed a finger at Andy, “would remain as my honored guest. I do believe the magistrate set your bond rather high.”

“But…that’s not fair!” Andy squawked.

“Fair?” The Sheriff leaned over, palms on his desk as he stared Andy down, whatever amiability there had been in his expression long gone. “Young man, let me tell you something. Fair is a ranch being able to conduct their livelihood without worrying about some shitheel stealing their property. Fair would be me turning you over to these men for some proper frontier justice. Do you know what happened to rustlers back on Earth?”

Andy shook his head rapidly, eyes wide, sweat beading on his brow.

“A heavy rope would be tied around his neck. Then the ranchers would find a nice tall tree, sling that rope over the tree, and tie the end to the saddle of one of their horses.”

Ellis was grinning. He was starting to like this sheriff. The man even had a framed flag of the State of Texas on the wall behind his desk. There was probably rancher blood in the man’s veins.

“Then,” continued the Sheriff, “they would have that horse pull, lifting the rustler up by that rope so carefully placed around his neck. And they would hold him there. You ever seen someone strangle to death, son?”

Andy swallowed nervously and slowly looked over to Trey and Ellis. The smile on Ellis’s face made Andy’s guts knot up and turn to water. Trey just stared back impassively, unconsciously adopting the face of his father.

The Sheriff continued. “No, I didn’t think so. It ain’t pretty. The body starts to jerk and twitch as the brain is deprived of oxygen. The rustler hangs there by his neck, his arms tied, and his feet kicking about underneath. It’s almost like dancing.” He paused, staring at the young man. “Do you know how to dance, Andy?”

Andy blinked, surprised and still terrified. “What?”

“I asked if you know how to dance.”

“No…”

“I see. I’m sure these two gentlemen here would be more than happy to teach you. Ain’t that right, fellas?”

“Sure would, Sheriff.” Pure delight saturated Ellis’s voice.

“That’s mighty generous of them, don’t you think, Andy?”

Andy shook his head violently. “I don’t wanna dance.” His voice was small and weak.

“You don’t? Well, you didn’t want to stay here as my guest, either. That doesn’t leave us with many options, now, does it?”

Andy trembled. No more defiance, no more lies. Just fear remained.

The sheriff slapped the top of his desk and stood up quickly. Andy jolted in his seat, rattling the cuffs around his wrists. The Sheriff grinned broadly. “You know what? I just had an idea. And I think you’re going to like it, young man. You want to hear my idea?”

Andy sputtered out an unintelligible response and nodded vigorously.

“What was that?”

“Yes, sir. Please.”

“That nice Arabian shuttle that just got patched up—you know, the one with the aftermarket EMP unit on it—seems like it would go a pretty long way towards offsetting the losses the Diamond Bar T Ranch suffered. These fellas did have to conduct a fair number of repairs after your little stunt, not to mention heal from their injuries. If you ask real nice, maybe they’d be willing to take that Arabian in fair compensation and forget about this whole thing.”

“You know, Sheriff,” said Ellis, “that would make my arm feel a whole lot better.”

Trey nodded. “That Arabian sure is pretty. Looked like it handles real smooth.”

The sheriff spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. “It looks like these nice men from the Diamond Bar T Ranch are quite reasonable sorts of fellas. What do you say, Andy?”

The terrified young man nodded again, tears welling up in his wide eyes.

“Use your words like a big boy.”

“Yes. That sounds fair.”

Ellis leaned closer to Andy and whispered, “I believe the sheriff said you should ask us. Real nice like.”

“Please,” Andy whimpered.

The grin on the face of Ellis had turned feral. “Please what?”

“Would you, uh…would you be willing to take my Arabian and, uh, forget about all this? Please? I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry. I won’t do it again. I just want to go home.”

Ellis looked over to Trey and shrugged. “What do you say, Trey? You’re in charge here.”

“That sounds fair,” Trey replied, one corner of his mouth turning up into a wry smile. “Sheriff, I think we have a deal.”

“Excellent. It warms my heart when folks can come to an understanding. I’m proud of you, Andy. That showed real maturity. I’ll get one of my deputies to draw up the transfer paperwork.”

Trey stood and offered his hand to the sheriff. “Sir, it has been a real pleasure meeting you.”

The sheriff took his hand in a firm grip and shook. “Thank you, young man. A shame we had to meet under these circumstances. See Ms. Bryant on your way out, and she’ll make sure you get the release form for your CAU. I presume you fellas are going to resupply while you’re here.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll probably stay a couple of days to get everything sorted out.”

“Good plan. Come on by before you leave, and we’ll have the paperwork ready for that Arabian, too.”

“Thank you, Sheriff. If you ever find yourself out our way, please stop by our little homestead.”

“Thank you, Trey. I may just take you up on that one day.” The Sheriff and Ellis shook hands. “Now, young Mr. Spurgle and I need to have a little chat about not coming back to my territory ever again.”

As Ellis walked out, he patted Andy firmly on the shoulder. “You might want to listen to him, kid. I have a feeling that the sheriff doesn’t play around.”

Suppertime in the Bartee household was usually just The Boss and his wife, Mama Betty. The routine exception was Sunday. Sunday Supper was a tradition for the Bartee family, and you had better have a damn good reason to turn down an invitation. It was bad enough that Trey had missed two weeks during his recovery, then another two weeks to travel to Ceres and back. One Sunday out of five was not enough for Mama Betty.

Tonight, to commemorate their return from Ceres, the invitation had been extended to Ellis and his younger sister, Doc Patterson. She was seated next to her brother, who was now without a sling and looking like his usual self. The meal tonight was braised short ribs, roasted rosemary potatoes, and asparagus. There were rumors of a blackberry cobbler for dessert.

Grace was offered, plates were filled, and the conversation cycled smoothly through the usual pleasantries, and eventually, a full recounting of the meeting with Sheriff McMurtrie. Mama Betty smiled when Trey described how the sheriff had suggested hanging the young rustler.

“I’ve got plenty of rope,” she offered merrily. Doc Patterson nearly choked on her tea at that cheery little suggestion.

After half an hour of the best supper a man could ask for, Trey was feeling great. And it turned out that the rumors were indeed true: there was blackberry cobbler. After supper, dessert, and coffee, Ellis and his sister thanked the elder Bartees and left for the evening.

Trey was helping his mother clean up in the kitchen when his father walked in. “Well, Trey, it sounds like you handled that pretty well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mama Betty smiled at her son and handed him a pot to dry.

“What do you suggest we do with that Arabian?”

Trey paused in the middle of his drying and looked up at his father. “Sir?”

“That Arabian. What do you suggest we do with it?”

His father had never asked for Trey’s opinion before, especially about something relating to the ranch. “I figure Ellis should get it, sir.”

“Is that so?” As usual, the old man gave away nothing with his perpetual poker face.

“Yessir.”

“And why is that?”

Trey started drying again. “He got busted up pretty bad out there.”

“Uh huh.”

“And he’s my number two in the field. He works hard, the boys look up to him, and he never complains—even about getting his arm broken, saving my foolish hide out there.”

A quick scowl crossed the face of Mama Betty at the memory of her boy getting hurt. She brushed it aside and handed Trey a plate.

The old man nodded slightly. “That’s reasonable. You don’t want it for yourself? Your Appaloosa got tore up much more than his did.”

“No, sir. I don’t need it. My fast days are behind me.”

The kitchen was quiet for several minutes while Trey and Mama Betty worked through the dishes. Merle Haggard was playing softly in the background, the soundtrack of the Bartee kitchen for as long as Trey could remember.

“Son, this ranch will be in good hands when you take over.”

Mama Betty smiled.

Lode Claim Blues

Spearman Burke

Gunnar’s flak-weave duster coat concealed a number of guns, knives, and a host of other sins. Opposite him, leaning casually in the open airlock doorframe, was a slick-looking Pallascore executive who had probably never experienced a day of hard labor in his life. The executive took in Gunnar’s dungarees and mag boots, then grinned. Captain Warnock’s body was barely cold and the vultures were already circling. Accompanying the exec were two geared-up hench-goons. High speed and low drag, their kit and armor were the latest in off-theshelf tacti-sexiness and badassery. Their fully enclosed helmets bristled with optical gadgetry and left them faceless. Their comportment gave Gunnar the impression of hounds eager to be unleashed.

A smooth sweep of Gunnar’s hand drew the overcoat away from his left hip, revealing an oversized revolver in a cross-draw holster. The prosthetic fingers of his cybernetic right arm tickled the butt of the weapon. His left hand remained behind him. It kept the coat out of the way and allowed him to grip another pistol tucked into the small of his back.

“Easy, cowboy.” The exec raised his well-manicured hands in a playful act of surrender. “What’s with the hand cannon?”

“Just a fist full of HESH rounds,” Gunnar drawled. With his augmented limb, he could fire the high explosive rounds, no problem. The rest of his flesh would hurt like blazes, though. “Never know when you might bump into the odd warbot here and there.”

The operator goons’ postures sagged in their war gear. The notion Gunnar could, at any moment, shoot bucket-sized holes through their body armor had significantly impacted their attitude. The exec attempted to rally.

“I’m Phineas Canebrake.” He smiled, revealing perfect rows of veneers and capped teeth. “I’m a licensed notary with Pallascore and we’re here to facilitate the final disposition of the late Mr. Warnock’s property. This includes the…” He paused to scan the data screen on his watch. “SS Kobold and its contents.”

“Nope.”

“Excuse me?”

A burst of vox static cut in.

“Gideon Station is an independent ore processing facility unaffiliated with Pallascore.” The voice of Gunnar’s shipmate, Clutch Ancona, came over the 1MC speakers. The direct sort, the staccato of her speech reminded Gunnar of heavy machine-gun bursts. “You have no corporate authority here. The crewmembers of the SS Kobold are also investors. Thus, the Doctrine of Limited Liability applies. We are fully and legally capable of seeing to the disposition of Captain Warnock’s property. Thanksgoodbyenow.”

“That’s the ship’s engineer and acting captain.” Gunnar’s fingers gently caressed the butt of the big pistol. “She fabricated this beauty. Real smooth action.”

Clutch cut off the comms with another burst of static. Gunnar shrugged at the Pallascore flunky.

“Gangway, please.” A station courier appeared behind the uninvited guests in the dockyard and held up a data slate. “Captain Warnock’s personal effects, all accounted for.”

“How much we owe?” Gunnar motioned with his chin for the lad to approach through the now-crowded airlock door.

The courier made a hand sign in miner’s argot, indicating there was no charge. The captain was a known figure on the station who had done a solid time and again for various folks. Someone had covered the mortuary expenses.

Gunnar moved over for the courier, but pointed his left hip at the Pallascore exec. He wanted the greaseball to understand that if anyone cleared leather, his corporate ass would be cut in half first. Shame to ruin such a pristine suit.

“Transfer the data at the pad, kid.” Gunnar motioned with his head, but kept his eyes downrange.

The courier punched some numbers at the pad behind Gunnar and touched the screen with the slate.

“Transfer complete, everything’s in order,” the young man said. “You can pick up his remains and personals at the mortuary. Time-hacks are attached. Our condolences.”

The young porter pushed past the goons and disappeared into the dockyards. Canebrake took this as his cue to pick up where they had left off.

“Sir, I assure you my credentials are legitimate. Having to handle all the legal and administrative obstacles without my help could be…” He grinned and slid his hands into his pants pockets. “…An unnecessary purgatory of suffering.”

“Look here, Finn.” Gunnar rolled his neck once around. Phineas blinked at the nickname. “I don’t think either of us need to adjust our dials here. It seems pretty clear to me.”

“What?”

“Ever since the Captain filed his lode claim on that asteroid, Pallascore has been offering to buy the rights off him.”

“Pallascore has interests throughout—”

“After the latest round of refusals, he gets accidentally knifed to death and thrown over a railing in the station Promenade.”

“Gideon station is renowned for its lawlessness—”

“And I find your sudden offer of legal aid oddly convenient, to say the least.” Gunnar’s cybernetic hand clamped down on the butt of the heavy revolver. “And downright suspicious, at its worst.”

“I see.” Canebrake pulled on the hem of his suit jacket. “If you change your mind about my services, you may message me, Mister?”

“I think you already well know who I am.”

Any pretense of amiability fell from the corpo’s face and melted into a sneer.

“Indeed, we do.” Phineas Canebrake turned on his heel and stepped smartly out of the airlock into the dockyards. He called over his shoulder, “Good day, Sergeant Knox.”

“So they knew your name?” Tinker Yaz was the ship’s techie. She printed and maintained the mining drones and a bunch of other esoteric nerd stuff on the ship beyond Gunnar’s understanding. “Do you think they’ve been data mining information about us?”

“More than likely.” Gunnar rubbed a cloth down two freshly cleaned and lubricated auto-shotguns on the table in front of him. The Kobold had a small armory in the event they had to run off outlaw boarding crews, ore pirates, or tech scavengers. This situation certainly met the minimum standards of what constituted piracy, so he had drawn the weapons and made sure they were ready for action.

“That was probably a short investigation.” Clutch had Voidspace Law open on a screen and was devouring everything she could process. Her short hair, skin, and oversized coveralls were filthy with lubricant and grease from the depths of the engine room. “A surly veteran of the Albigensian Crusades and a couple of dust mining burnouts who never struck it rich.”

“Who’s surly?” Gunnar gave her a mock sneer and set the shotgun down alongside the other on the table.

“Well, at least you could go back to soldiering.” Yaz slouched. Unlike Clutch, she was fastidious and neat, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. “Without this gig, I’ll end up piloting ratcatcher drones in a rad sump somewhere.”

“And I’ll be venting human waste on some garbage scow.” Clutch’s tired eyes looked up from the screen. “At least you could still bang around the sector as hired muscle.”

“Excuse me, I’m high-class muscle.” Gunnar flexed his cybernetic arm like a bodybuilder. “And giving up one limb in a genocidal conflict against religious fanatics was one too many. Once my contract was up, I was done with that career field. Besides,” Gunnar grabbed a couple drum magazines and started loading them with flechette rounds, “military objectives tend to align with the corporate interests that sponsor them. No thanks.”

“Yeah, this has been the best job I ever had.” Yaz sighed. “Small crew and percentage of the take suited me just fine. Can those corporate jerks just take over the ship like that?”

“There isn’t anything here about any corporate authority impounding a vessel upon the death of the owner.” Clutch continued to scroll through the legal docs. “Cap didn’t owe Pallascore any debt, right? Unless some other corp sold it to them?”

“Nah.” Tinker shook her head. “Cap was a tight seal.”

“Yeah, he was.” Gunnar looked pointedly at his shipmates. “That’s why I’m going to collect his remains tomorrow. By myself.”

“You can’t go collect him all by yourself!” Yaz’s dejected posture uncoiled, and she stood at attention. After Warnock’s demise, she and Clutch had issues with any of them wandering into the station proper.

“She’s right. Look what happened to Cap.” Clutch tucked a pinch of qad into the inside of her cheek. It was a fungal stimulant she cultivated in the guts of the ship.

“I’m not Cap,” Gunnar growled.

Both ladies were older than Knox and were generally protective of their intern. They’d all been shipmates for a few years standard now. They were a tight crew.

“They might come at you as soon as you step foot out of the dockyards.” Tink started pacing, tracing station routes on a holo-screen her augmented corneas projected in front of her. “The Promenade is where they aced Cap, and the Souk is a warren of ambush opportunities. This idea sucks vac.”

“What’s a more probable course of action is they come here after I leave and force their way onto the Kobold.” Gunnar slammed home a drum mag into one of the shotguns.

Stunned silence descended on them like the void of outer space. He had their undivided attention now.

“What they’re after is the geoloc data codes of Cap’s lode claim.” He loaded another drum into the second shotgun. “That data alone is worth more than the ship and all our lives put together.”

“Buddha’s butt in both hands!” Tinker brought up the flight logs with the flick of a finger and scrolled. She compared them to a star map in another window. “Even without the geoloc beacon codes, our flight logs would probably lead them to the claim. And if I purge the logs, the codes would still be on the claim docs. Why can’t those cannibal dirt birds leave us alone?”

“Greed.” Gunnar shrugged.

“Most of Pallascore’s local resources go into atmospheric mining projects on the planet surface.” Tinker enlarged the holo-projected star map. “The rest of us scrape by mining dust and ore from the ring of asteroids and ice in orbit.”

“Guess expecting them to remain content with its huge percentage of the atmo-mining game was too much to hope for.” Clutch spat qad juice into a spittoon.

“Don’t worry about it.” Gunnar stretched and yawned. “If they breach the hatch while I’m gone tomorrow, just let them make it into the airlock, then fill it with flechettes. Be a nice ‘purgatory of unnecessary suffering’ for ‘em. You can’t miss.”

They looked at him like he was stupid.

Firearms were not allowed outside the dockyards of Gideon Station. Anyone wishing to enter the station proper had to keep theirs locked within their own ship’s armories or turn them in to the Dockyard Guard Force. There was only one personnel hatch between the docks and the rest of the station, so the dozen or so members of the Guard Force could simply keep the gate sealed until they got compliance. If things got bad enough, they could simply pump out the oxygen and force everyone back on their ships.

Gunnar was fully armed as he approached Dockyard Gate. If they wanted a piece of him this side of the gate, he would properly oblige them. Beneath his flak-weave duster, he also wore a low-profile vest with flexi-plates made of shear thickening gel composites. Wearing it was a good insurance policy, station firearms rules or not. Other weapons were allowed within the station and he was allowed to keep his arsenal of blades. His shipmates never understood his penchant for hand weapons, considering his prosthetic arm was an elegant construction of titanium bits, ceramics, and non-fiber muscles. One simply never knew when a knife would come in handy. Usually, it was at the very moment you weren’t carrying one.

Gunnar turned in his firearms at the Guard Force armory window. The Guardsman raised his eyebrows when the small cache of weapons included a handful of grenades. Gunnar shrugged at him and put a receipt in a pocket of his dungarees.

Once he was through the gate and stepped out on the causeway, the environment of the station abruptly changed. The cool loading dock and machine shop atmosphere had been replaced by the hot press of humanity. Petty cabs bustled through the crowd and a vendor hawked his wares from a food cart. Life support on the Kobold smelled somewhat different than the aroma of so many people packed together.

Tink was not content to let him skulk through the station alone. She had forced him to take along a palm-sized drone so she could monitor his status. He had agreed on the condition she didn’t fill his ear with worried chatter the entire time. Once he was through the gate, he took the drone from a coat pocket and turned it loose.

“Your eye is in the sky, Tink.”

“Copy, I’ve got you five by five.”

He weaved through the stalls of the Souk on his way to the medical center near the Service Promenade. Gideon Station had been constructed from the hulk of an abandoned asteroid mining project and turned into an ore processing facility. The rest of the station grew up around it.

A hawker called out and waved him over.

“Mista! Got real good body armor here.” The man continued to beckon excitedly. “Military grade!”

“That’s not the ringing endorsement you think it is, friend.” Gunnar inspected some of booth’s wares and lowered his voice. “Watchu got, Rahid?”

“A lot of Gazam mercs pollutin’ up the place today.” Rahid spoke in the same low tone, while showing Gunnar various types of ballistic-arresting fabrics. “They’ve been on and off the station a lot lately. Docked again over midshift. The Souk’s been particularly thick with the shitbirds all morning.”

The Gorai Gazam was a private military contract company on paper. Unofficially, they were known for their unethical dabbling in human trafficking, illicit substances, and all types of malfeasance that paid. Captured prisoners of war might find themselves sold to organ harvesters if they were unable to procure ransom for their freedom, or if they decided you were plump enough to eat. If the Gazam were on the station, it was only to engage in the worst kind of business.

“Mercs? You think they’re huntin’ me?”

“Your crew been in some trouble recently.” Rahid shrugged. “Not hard to do the math.”

“Those Kobold girls aren’t pushovers, you know.”

“Surely, but they’re the brains. You’re the muscle of the outfit. Watch your tailfeathers, brother. These buzzards will bite them clean off.”

“Okay. Shukran, Rahid.”

“Aala eih? Your captain was a good sadiq.” Rahid spat. “May Pallascore suck the blackest vacuum.”

“Inshallah.” Gunnar raised his voice and waved off the hawker in his booth. “No sale today, friend!”

“Nonsense, we have the best merch in the Souk! You’ll be back!”

Gunnar continued to sidle his way through the alleys of the Souk.

“You copy all of that, Tink?”

“Only your side of it, which doesn’t make me feel any better about this.”

“Just let me know if you spot any tails before I do.”

“Roger.”

Here and there, he pretended to examine the various wares of the Souk. It allowed him to keep an eye out for any Gazam hitters trailing him. Eventually, he caught sight of a couple of them loitering in his wake. They had enough sense to maintain a discreet distance, but they stood out from the station regulars. The Gazam tended to have long unkept hair and wore a patchwork of bloodstained uniform bits, flight suits, and flak gear. Curved and hooked knives, hatchets, and cleavers hung from their belts. Real butcher’s tools. The wicked points of their filed teeth were a dead giveaway, too.

“I’ve got two on my six, about thirty meters away.”

“Those ugly villains? I’m surprised you didn’t smell them first.”

“Now that you know what you’re looking for, see how many you can spot for me in the crowd.”

At first, he spotted the two, then more. Tink saw two more paralleling him on his flanks. They seemed to be closing the distance as their numbers increased. They attempted to be discreet, but the locals tended to make plenty of space around them. Then there were two on either side, two lurking ahead, and two more tailing him.

“Gunnar, there’s one more to your direct front. Fifteen meters!”

Seven? Oh, well. In Gunnar’s war fighting experience, there was only one way through a near ambush: assault through. He quickly ducked under a tarp and past a kebab cart.

“Looks like they lost sight of you.” Tinker sounded relieved. “There’s two scrambling toward the cart.”

In their haste, the two Gazam collided with the kebab vendor. Amid the cursing and shoving, Knox stood and drove his augmented fist deep into the first one’s chest. The snapping of the fractured sternum sounded the opening bell. Between the additional strength of his nanofiber muscles and the ceramic knuckles, his prosthetic arm really lent itself to bone breaking. Any augmented strength it lent him was limited to how much his spine could endure. In a close combat fight, though, Gunnar’s prosthetic fist was a mace with fingers.

His other hand came up with a straight blade toward the second man’s throat. The Gazam flinched. The knife nailed his mandible to the roof of his mouth. Gunnar let go of the knife. His cybernetic fingers smashed into the merc’s jugular, then squeezed and twisted hard. The penetrating trauma sent him to the deckplates with a shocked gurgle. He wheezed another breath through his smashed trachea. Gunnar reached down and lifted a meat cleaver from the struggling man.

“Come on, then, you gutter sluts!”

They obliged him with enthusiasm.

Howling with bloodlust, another Gazam leapt at him with a long knife in each hand. One of the blades lacerated his scalp. Gunnar slashed the blade of the cleaver cleanly across his attacker’s eyes. He raised his prosthetic forearm to intercept a falling hatchet from another attacker, leaving the other still howling at his feet. The hatchet thudded into his arm, but failed to even cut the flak-weave material of his sleeve. Gunnar hammered the cleaver into hatchet merc’s neck, then roared in pain. A mohawked Gazam had approached from behind and was furiously stabbing him in the kidney. The overcoat saved him from death, but not kidney punches the size of a knife point. Snarling, Gunnar turned back and drove his left elbow into mohawk’s chin. A cybernetically enhanced overhand right followed, and Gunnar began to smash the ugly face over and over. Splintered teeth and crimson snot arced across the stalls of the Souk.

Distressed Souk patrons screamed.

Two more fighters closed on opposite sides of Gunnar. Their bodies stank of coagulated gore. A serrated blade tugged on Gunnar’s coat as a dreadlocked merc slashed at him. His ceramic hammer fist smashed dread’s collarbone into splinters. Gunnar produced another knife and thrust it into the man’s armpit. The other attacker loomed in from behind. Gunnar donkey-kicked to the rear. The merc doubled over. Turning, Gunnar chopped a cybernetic knife hand into the base of the Gazam’s skull. There was a sickening crunch, and the man slumped to the deck like bag of dirty laundry.

“The last one’s running away!” Tink shouted in his ear. “You got ‘em! You got ‘em!”

He had forgotten one of them was still kicking at his feet until the blinded merc thrust a knife through his calf. Roaring like a wounded buffalo, Gunnar nearly punted his head off with his heavy mag boots. He yanked the knife from his leg with a much less rugged-sounding squeal.

Gunnar snatched a pashmina from a nearby booth and tied a makeshift bandage around his calf. Dammit, it hurts. Around him, people shrieked in fear and alarm. He limped over to where he’d left the merc with the sternum fracture. Panting with effort, the wounded Gazam was trying to crawl away. Gunnar’s cybernetic hand grabbed the man’s ankle and hauled him in close.

“You’re still alive for a reason.” Gunnar could taste sweat and blood. Some of it was even his. “Who hired you?”

The Gazan fighter wheezed a hiss of defiance.

“Who was it?” Gunnar gritted his teeth.

“Sukah!” The merc hoarsely cursed.

Gunnar gripped the man’s hand in his prosthetic fist, and broke two of the merc’s fingers. He let the yowling subside before speaking again.

“Keep calling me names and I’ll just start ripping bits off.” He squeezed the broken digits tighter and twisted. “Tell me!”

“Pallas…core,” the merc wheezed. “Canebrake!”

Gunnar stood and looked out at the gathered crowd. They alternately gawked, pointed, and whispered. Blood was running down his face and filling his boot. He probably looked just like one of the Gorai Gazam.

“I’m Gunnar Knox of the Kobold.” He raised his voice like his old drill sergeants used to. “These men are part of an attempt by Pallascore to jump our captain’s claim!”

The man at his feet moved, and Gunnar kicked him in the ribs. Someone from the crowd stepped out and spat on one of the fallen Gazam. The crowd murmured. Poor folk out on the fringe didn’t take kindly to corpo proxies trying to snap up what little they had.

“That last one is hauling it back toward the Dockyard Gate,” Tinker said in his ear. “You look like vented waste.”

“Meh, I’ve had worse.”

“By the way, I’m pissed at you.”

“Just…point me at Medical.” Gunnar’s scalp burned and he limped on his throbbing calf.

“Face right, numbskull,” Tink said.

People pulled him in the direction of Medical, shouting for others to get out of the way.

The med tech worked over Gunnar’s wounds with betadine and what had to be industrial-grade sandpaper. A bag of intravenous fluids hung nearby. Outside, Tinker’s drone hovered in overwatch.

“Geez, Doc.” It was taking everything in Gunnar’s power not to wince. “You don’t have to be so gentle with me.”

“I’m not the doctor,” the woman said. “And you said you didn’t want any meds.”

“Gotta keep my head straight. Just need to get patched up and back in the fight, Doc.”

“I said I’m not the doctor.” She punctuated the sentence with a vigorous scrub. “I’m a dental technician.”

Gunnar just stared at her for a moment.

“I’ll try not to let that affect our relationship, Doc.”

Her look gave him the impression he might be gumming his next meal if he wasn’t careful.

A third person entered the treatment room. He was clearly not the doctor, either. The grey Nehru suit and white shoes indicated his role was more administrative in nature. Small, round framed glasses with black lenses and side shields hid his eyes. How had Tinker missed him entering the building? Probably because she was looking out for unwashed, hatchet-wielding brutes. Hands clasped behind his back, he visually inspected the treatment room before speaking.

“Mr. Knox,” the bald man began. “I represent a group that has taken an interest in your recent situation. You may call me Pho.”

“What group might that be?” Gunnar’s hand hovered near a knife on his belt.

“The Gideon Station Council, Mr. Knox.” Pho inclined his head slightly. “The heads of Ore Processing and Claims, the Dockyards, the Service Promenades, the Souk, and the Gideon Labor Union, specifically.”

“Oh?” Gunnar kept his hand on the knife. “Define ‘interest’ for me.”

“Certainly.” Pho turned to the med tech and motioned a slender finger toward his ear. “My dear, if you would, but please keep working. We will be covering the medical costs today.”

The tech nodded, then rummaged through her pockets and inserted a set of ear buds in her ears. She cranked up the volume loud enough that Gunnar could hear the lyrics.

“First things first, Mr. Knox.” Pho touched something behind his ear and gave a subvocalized command. Another admin type dressed like Pho came in with a large copolymer protective case and set it down heavily, then left. Gunnar raised an eyebrow.

“No matter the direction this conversation goes, the contents of this case are yours to take, Mr. Knox.”

“Okay…”

“Since the construction of Gideon Station, various antagonistic entities have attempted to buy, sue, or steal themselves a controlling interest on any commerce onboard. Until recently, Pallascore has been content to keep its mining interests strictly planetside. The members of the Council have monitored the recent purchase of smaller independent mining outfits, like yours, by Pallascore. At the same time, there has been an uptick in reports of claim-jumping and direct hostile action against any competition that has not sold out.”

“Huh.” Gunnar shook his head. “No one hates a free market more that mega-capitalists, I guess.”

Pho shrugged noncommittally.

“Going to staple this scalp lac!” the med tech shouted, far too loudly.

Gunnar braced himself for the ordeal. At heart, he was still a grunt. He’d be damned if was going to show any weakness in front of some station admin guy. Pho merely touched twice behind his ear again as the tech punched the first staple home.

The administrative aide entered again with a much smaller case, and remained standing next to Pho, holding it in both hands. Gunnar was a bit distracted, wondering if the med tech had switched the medical staples with carpentry nails.

“For some time, the Council has felt this kind of hostility toward small enterprise is not in the best interest of Gideon Station or its citizens. To protect the station, the Council filed articles of incorporation with the Colonial Judiciary seven standard months ago. The station recently received its charter and is now legally a home rule city, fully authorized to make the proposal I am about to offer.”

The last staple ker-chuncked into his scalp, as if in emphasis. Gunnar thought of saying something about the questionable genetic origin of the med tech’s mother, but she wouldn’t have heard him. She ripped open a silk suture packet and moved on to his calf.

“The Council will remain indifferent if you choose a course of vendetta against…” Pho pursed his lips in disdain, “…Mister Canebrake.” He raised a finger. “However, if you scan this proposal from the Council, and find it agreeable, your actions will have the full support of the Gideon Station city government and community.”

Pho placed his palm on the case his aide was holding. A soft click indicated it had accepted his biometrics and unlocked. Pho removed a data pad from the case and handed it to Knox.

“In your good time, Mr. Knox.” Pho gestured at the open case. His aide set it down nearby and disappeared.

“Should you accept this course of action, the remaining contents of this case are yours, as well.”

Gunnar scrolled through the data on the pad as the med tech sutured up his leg. She was wrapping and dressing the wound when Gunnar looked up at Pho. A burst of static in his ear interrupted his thoughts.

“Gunnar! There’s a whole bunch of those merc dudes outside the Kobold airlock!”

“I’m en route.” He turned to Pho. “I’ll need Captain Warnock’s remains and personal effects, please.”

He’d almost finished the sentence when the aide entered the room, carrying a good-sized satchel.

“Of course, Mr. Knox. This satchel contains the late Captain Warnock’s cremated remains and personals that were on him.” Pho turned and made a motion toward the larger case that had been originally brought in. “Your biometrics will unlock this case. As I said, its contents are yours.”

“How did you get my biometric data?”

“Please, Mr. Knox.” Pho smiled slightly. “You bled all over half the Souk.”

Gunnar strode with purpose, and a slight limp, back toward the Dockyard Gate. He carried the large case under his prosthetic arm and the satchel slung across his back. There had been no signs that any Gazam were still tailing him. Locals buzzed with rumor as he passed.

“That’s the guy what aced like a dozen mercs in the Souk!”

With the word spreading like that, Canebrake and a whole gang of dirtbags would probably be standing by to greet him. That type never took no for an answer. Captain Warnock and others had learned the hard way.

He stopped.

“Tinker, are they still just standing around the airlock?”

“Yeah, they’re not doing anything, but we’ve got the shotguns out in case they do.”

“They’re not coming after you.” He stepped off again. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Careful, Knox. This bunch is just as ugly as the last one.”

Gunnar slowed his pace. They had showed up outside the Kobold airlock to get him to hustle back to the Dockyard. But there wasn’t any reason for him to stay on their schedule. He turned off the causeway and back towards the Souk.

“Where the hell are you going, Gunnar!” Tinker was nonplussed.

“I’ll be along in due time.” He grimaced at his bad leg. “What we need here is some tactical patience.”

Sure enough, when Gunnar didn’t make an immediate appearance, the Gazam brutes hanging out in front of the Kobold airlock got bored and wandered off. He decided to make them wait even longer.

It was an hour after evening shift change. Most of the causeway was clear. Gideon Station operated on twenty-four-hour days split into three eight-hour work shifts; days, eves, and mids. Business never stopped on the station, but there was often a lull between shift changes.

Gunnar Knox strolled down the causeway toward the Dockyard Gate, taking his time. He had left the large case and satchel in Rahid’s care. No sense letting Finn have it if this all went radioactive.

He entered the gate and approached the Guard Force armory window with his receipt. The man on the other side of the reinforced glass gave the hand sign for “danger.” Gunnar nodded. The guardsman touched a panel in front of him. The glass tint between them turned opaque. The blast doors of the gate began to grind shut.

“Sergeant Gunnar Knox.” Phineas Canebrake appeared, flanked by his hench-stooges, their bullpup rifles carried in a low ready position. Canebrake was particularly smug. “Looks like the armory is closed.”

As expected, an indeterminate number of Gorai Gazam skulked nearby, grinning as they cradled sub-guns of various makes. They leaned or slouched against crates stacked throughout the dockyard. It had been a long afternoon of waiting around for their payday to show up. Gunnar was counting on their lackadaisical attitude.

“Oh, I well know it is.” Gunnar lifted the big revolver Pho had delivered to him in the large case and fired.

KA-BOOM! The first smash head round punched through a hench-goon’s armor and sprayed a bucket of offal behind him.

KA-BOOM! The second goon’s armor cracked like an egg, splashing the yoke of his innards all over Canebrake’s suit. The corpo dove to the deck, huddling as thick ropes of blood arced over him.

The careless Gazam hitters finally opened up with their suppressed sub-guns. Gunnar advanced as the crack of return fire snapped and tugged at his coattails.

KA-BOOM! Gunnar hit a Gazam attempting to take cover behind a crate and spread him and machine parts all over the deckplates. KA-BOOM! He aimed the last round at another crate. It burst apart, sending shrapnel everywhere. Mercs dove for cover.

Holstering the big weapon, Gunnar fired a pistol in his left hand as he advanced. He winged another merc who had moved too slow and ducked behind a pallet of foodstuffs. A burst of Gazam sub-guns sent ketchup and gravy erupting from the pallet.

Gunnar fished around in his pockets and produced a flashbang grenade. He pulled the pin and tossed it toward his next objective.

“Grena—!”

The detonation produced a blinding flash. Gunnar rose from behind the pallet with a heavy machine pistol. Advancing past a forklift, he shot bursts of automatic fire into the impaired Gazam, and eliminated two more.

A muzzle flashed in the corner of his eye, followed by sharp pops. He was slugged in the chest as a round impacted his flexi-plate. The energy transfer threw him back onto the deckplates. Eager Gazam broke cover to charge their fallen target.

Gunnar engaged one from a supine position and stitched him up the centerline. He sat up out of pure orneriness. He attempted to reengage when a storm of gunfire erupted off to his left. The merc he was targeting twitched and fell as loads of three-centimeter flechettes peppered him from the waist up. The firing continued amid Gazam shouts and sub-gun bursts. One seemed to be fleeing, and Gunnar shot him in the back.

The abrupt silence when the gunfire stopped felt more deafening than the shootout. It lingered for a moment, then some familiar voices chirped.

“Did we get ‘em all?”

“I think so!”

“Clutch? Tink?” Gunnar managed to rasp.

“Yeah?”

“I’m coming out.”

Gunnar leaned on the forklift and dragged himself into something that vaguely resembled a standing position. The silk sutures in his calf protested at all the abuse. He grinned at the sight of his shipmates.

Clutch and Tinker were wreathed in gun smoke, shotguns propped on their hips. Spent casings littered the deck at their feet. Tinker grinned, flightsuit clean as a whistle. Clutch chewed on a cheek full of qad, filthy as an old-Earth chimney sweep.

“Looks like butthead made it.”

“Huh, barely, thanks to us.”

Gunnar had no idea which of them was speaking and didn’t care. He took a ragged breath and pointed at Canebrake.

“Grab the suit before he tries to run,” Gunnar managed.

Fortunately, the trembling exec was still curled into a shivering ball on the deck. The ladies kicked him over onto his back and shoved the hot barrels of their shotguns into his chest. The rough treatment caused him to cough in discomfort.

“Can we shoot him now?” Clutch seemed eager for just one more squeeze of the trigger. Gunnar didn’t blame her.

“Nah, Clutchie. Pallascore might take exception to the assassination of one of their executive officers and open up…” Gunnar took a deep breath, “… their own inquiry into the incident.”

Gunnar limped painfully over to them. Everything hurt. The girls let him suffer.

“More corpo suits and their hired flunkies littering the Promenade is not what the Gideon Station Council is interested in.” Gunnar paused, and rubbed a hand underneath the abused flexi-plate. “But legal proceedings surrounding the criminal behavior of their employees is another matter entirely.”

It had been a while since he had experienced a beating like this.

“Besides, the only thing that terrifies those soft-handed suits more than death is hard labor.” Gunnar finally stood over Canebrake and looked down into the corpo’s wide eyes. The clown was clearly gobsmacked at the turn of events. “How does a few decades breaking rocks in Ore Processing sound to you, Finn?”

“What in the wide, wide void of space are you talking about, Gunnar?” Tinker and Clutch glared at him in the matronly way they did when they were fed up with his nonsense.

Gunnar merely grinned and shoved the machine pistol in its shoulder rig under his arm. Now he revealed the contents of Pho’s smaller case. A smooth sweep of his hand drew the overcoat away from his chest to reveal the star pinned to the left side of his plate vest.

“Phineas Canebrake, as the lawfully appointed Marshal of the incorporated municipality of Gideon Station, I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Captain Shane Warnock of the SS Kobold, and for other crimes against the people of this community.” Gunnar leaned forward, jaws tight. “Brace yourself for a purgatory of unnecessary suffering.”

“Yeah! You villainous snake!” Tinker gritted her teeth and jabbed hard with the barrel of her shotgun. Clutch spat full in the fallen exec’s face.

Gunnar drew a set of plas-cuffs from his coat and offered them to his shipmates.

“Deputies, cuff the man.”

The Forever Mug of Joe at Bitsy’s Saloon

Danith McPherson

Isat in Bitsy’s Saloon after finishing the graveyard shift, not wanting to say or think anything. Most of all, I didn’t want to blink. Bitsy balanced a breakfast platter in one hand, and sloshed another dose of liquid understanding into my mug from the pot in her other hand. She did the same for Christoph, who shared garage duty with me.

The color of old leaves, Christoph’s hair straggled to his chin. We’d angled our chairs together, keeping our backs close to the wall. A compact guy to start with, he’d grown pale and thin over almost two years on-station, leaving him wispy, like a diffused nebula.

My dark skin saved me from turning pasty in the limited spectrum light, which was good, because I’d been here a lot longer than Christoph. Still, I was far from the muscular, bullet-chewing, former fighter pilot I’d been when I’d swaggered off the bus from Earth almost six years ago. I’d drifted away from the image of that man. Sitting in Bitsy’s, I was just Randolph Stetson, sled cowboy, who paid the bills patching engines with salvaged parts and high impact glue.

And who sweated like a comet from the effort of not blinking.

Bitsy already knew we were raw from scooping mangled lumps of flesh out of a cockpit. If you’re thinking people called her Itsy Bitsy, you’re wrong. She stretched the seams of her retro jeans with wide curves. “If it ain’t on the menu, you can’t get it here,” she’d snap to lewd suggestions from brats who didn’t know better. Jokers who’d been around a while got a stronger response and a spin in sickbay. Her quip wasn’t really accurate. Less than two hundred souls inhabited Armstrong Two, a gigantic mushroom at the mossy edge of the solar system. They all ended up at Bitsy’s. I’d seen a lot more dished out than beans and biscuits. Been on the receiving end, too. Like now. She understood the horrors we carried like lost ghosts.

Some spirits came with the place. An asteroid that used to orbit here exploded just as it happened to pass the original station. Ribald Company insisted it was a natural—though unexplained—event. I kept my doubts to myself. They’d messed with some scary stuff back then. Probably still did.

The resulting dust, rubble and space junk formed the maze. It’s like sand on a metal plate that’s stroked by a fiddle bow. You know, that Chladni thing, only three-dimensional. The cosmos slowly played a tune. Each note vibrated the debris into a different pattern, connecting us to someplace we didn’t know existed. Maybe another part of space, or another universe. Something we don’t have a name for yet.

When the song reached the last tone, it started over, like the call of a lonely bird in search of a mate that never answers.

I stared at the saloon wall, stenciled to simulate wood slats. I stared at the table, painted in green and white, like a checkered tablecloth. I didn’t look into Christoph’s face. His features would be a bleached reflection of my own dark shock. And I didn’t blink. The inside of that sled burned black and red on the back of my eyelids, waiting for me to flip them down over my retinas, so the scene could wrench loose my guts again.

Bitsy moved on to slap an order of steak and eggs in front of a researcher at the next table. The lab rat was beginning his day while Christoph and I ended ours. It wasn’t really steak. It wasn’t really eggs.

It wasn’t really coffee.

What can you say about something that calls itself one thing, but everyone knows is something else?

I’d been hoping we’d get through a few weeks without any casualties on our watch. Christoph was getting close to his anniversary. Ribald—Giving You the Future Now!—didn’t allow slackers. If you reached a year and a day without a run, the cops put you on the next bus to Earth. That’s the rule. Few residents were exempt. Just the ones the company hired: administrators, farmers, security, scientists on government grants. Oh, yeah, and business owners like Bitsy. Those of us who’d paid our own fare for the privilege of riding sleds usually ended up doing grunt work once we were faced with the high price of everything, and with the realization that it wasn’t as easy to get rich as the recruitment ads said.

All sorts of celestial bodies were accessible through the maze, depending on which note the universe played. In five days, Nelson would spin past an open slot in the current pattern. Large enough to be a planet, it had a number of mundane contracts available, but no sign of any of the little extras likely to generate cash and fame. Christoph had claimed an assignment to collect atmosphere samples. After what we’d just scoured out of the pod from Grissom, I worried his nerves wouldn’t hold. I considered lending him my good luck charm, despite the risk of letting it out of my grasp.

My time was short, too. Twenty-four days and counting. I thought of the return ticket with my name on it registered at the company bank. When you booked transport to Armstrong, you bought round-trip passage. As with everything, pages of company policies applied to it. You couldn’t cash it in, use it to leverage a straight flush, or pay off a debt. Alive, dead, or in between, the only thing it could get you was home. If no physical body was available to use the ticket, your heir received the refund.

For most of us, there wasn’t much to go back to. We were a bunch of pathetic loners who’d stalled out on the technology curve. The only jobs elsewhere in the solar system for people like us, like me, were piss-poor, with wages to match. Only a big score could save us—me—from poverty and having to accept that our lives hadn’t improved the condition of our species.

The digital bell over the saloon door chirped. I looked without looking. Five brats entered, still in one-piece jump suits, fresh off the toad bus that had docked at the main terminal as Christoph and I timed out of the garage. Shiny-eyed, strutting like horny prairie chickens, eager to punch through to an alien world and come back with fists full of gold nuggets. Their confidence stung like a cattle prod to the back of my neck. We’d all had that self-assurance before our first rides. Some clung to it after, the way you’d grip the straps of the ejector seat as it bucked you out of a tumbling aircraft. The bravado never lasted. Maybe because cowboys rarely survived their Third.

A young woman led the way to the center table, the one veterans avoided because, after a while, you get used to close walls. Enamel-black hair mowed pilot-short framed her sharp features and flint-gray eyes. Her liquid stride rolled like a warning. Adrenaline and space lag made the other brats too chatty and loud. She was quiet. She sat by them, but she wasn’t really with them.

I could feel energy and expectation vibrate from the boisterous four. If they were lucky, they’d survive one ride, then go home. But not her. I knew she’d keep going through again and again until she got what she wanted. Or until Christoph and I pulled her gnawed bones from a sled.

I blinked. For a moment, it was her slashed face frozen in the etching on the back of my eyelids. Her vacant eyes nestled in a visorless helmet, tinted by the pod’s polarized canopy and death. I washed away the image with a slug of thick joe.

Word had gotten around, as it does without anyone seeming to say anything, about the sled and its grisly contents. The bold woman sat aloof while the others speculated about the details right out loud in Bitsy’s. Christoph choked on a last swig. “Later, Stetson.” He shuffled out with a little jangle of the bell. Other patrons left, using the same unhurried technique. Soon, the new arrivals and I were the only ones for Bitsy to fuss over in her gruff way. I would have followed, but that etching waited behind my unblinking lids.

Bitsy tried to divert the newcomers by getting them to sign up for her bottomless mug special. One fee, all the joe-juice you can drink for a whole year. “It won’t take us that long to get rich,” one bragged.

The young woman suddenly stood over me.

“You Randolph Stetson?” She slipped an open hand in front of me, not even expecting an answer. “Name’s Verissa Santori.”

“Nice to meet you, brat.” I shook her hand, hoping she couldn’t sense that moments ago, mine had been on disgustingly intimate terms with a guy’s detached dick.

“I’m a pilot.” Her posture and manner already told me that.

“On Armstrong, you’re a brat until you make a run,” I said. It went beyond that, but I had no interest in explaining.

“Then I won’t be one for long. Thought I’d get advice from a veteran. Everyone says you’re the man to talk to.”

I wasn’t fooled by the flattery. Sure, I was sort of the top dog, but an ancient one on the dark side of forty. She was at least a decade of years and a century of experience my junior. “Doesn’t matter much what I tell you. You’ll just listen with that smirk on your pretty face, then do what you please.”

“Probably.” She shrugged and sat in Christoph’s chair uninvited. “I like to research a mission.”

That seemed closer to the truth. “You sound like U-NASA,” I probed. I expected a tight intake of air.

There was only a nanosecond pause. “Nine years.”

I’d made it to twelve. Neither one of us had gotten close to retirement and a fat pension. This place was a black hole for military wranglers left behind in the rounds of musical cockpits, where there were always less seats than pilots. One day when the music stopped, I was the poor sap still standing, thumb up his ass. I wasn’t told I couldn’t cut it. I just wasn’t transferred to Yeager Control with the rest of the team.

Instead, I was left behind to fly an obsolete inverse wing, and to decipher the writing on the hangar wall for myself. Shit, I hadn’t even had a chance to save the world.

I set out to prove that my oh-so-superior officers were wrong. That I did have the reflexes and the skills—stinking bouquets of them. I hopped on the bus, planning to go through the maze, and come back a hero with the biggest belt buckle you ever saw.

Others had done it—but I was still here.

Bitsy clattered a mug before the brat, and cascaded coffee into it without a word. I’d heard that Bitsy had done a run, made a big score, and bought out the old spacer who originally had the saloon. Rumor was she now owns more than this one wedge. Christoph says Bitsy controls the whole station, that she is Ribald Company. I doubt it, but I suppose if you operate a monopoly, and you live long enough, you could own an entire galaxy.

“You’ve made more runs than anyone,” Santori said. “Something like six?”

“Something like that,” I said. She’d gotten it wrong on purpose.

“How about some pointers?” She smiled as if it were an innocent question, but her gray eyes were hard metal.

I stared at the wood grain crawling across the wall. “Pay attention at the orientation meeting that you’re probably skipping out on right now. Ribald has more rules and regs than U-NASA. Some of them are even important.”

“I’m sure I can learn more from you.”

I blinked, then wished to the depths of my soul I hadn’t. It made me want to slap someone else in the face with reality. “I’ve made eight runs. Most cowboys don’t make it past three. They come back sliced into bite-sized pieces, like the one your friends were talking about. Sometimes their sleds return without them. Once, a sharp woman—a lot like you—got a suit with an oxygen system that malfunctioned. She suffocated before she even reached the target. The autopilot brought her back. A nice little round trip for a cadaver. We shipped the body to her next of kin without a mark on it.”

I swallowed a lump of coffee. I thought about Saffron Mandan every day. She’d had the instincts and the reflexes of a bush-country coyote. She’d probably just shaken off the jolting launch and was relaxing into the vista of stars, almost sure she could see the flickering blur of the maze entrance, when the buildup of her own CO2 smothered her. She’d died serene when she should have had a warrior’s death. If I’ve ever loved anyone, it was Saffron. “My advice is that you go home while you’re still breathing.”

I escaped, wanting to rip out the sensor for that damn bell. My mind hoped I’d scared Santori into using her return ticket. My gut knew I hadn’t.

Hell, I’d been no different. When I came back from my first ride, I thought I was hot shit. I slid into the garage from an over-picked rock with barely enough primordial goo to pay my keep for a few months. If I’d been smart, I would have gone straight back to Earth, grateful that I had a slight improvement in my finances and a terrific story to tell. Instead, I’d rushed into two more, defiantly getting through the jinxed Third. Then I slowed down.

Eight runs in almost six years. I was considered a legend when I was really the poster boy for failure.

I sat in my room, knowing sleep would be a mistake. I didn’t own much beyond the essentials. My notes and drawings of various rocks dotted the walls amid posters of the newest intersystem crafts, sleek birds crafted from substances way beyond plastic-metal that I would never fly.

The company didn’t invest in exploration just for fun. For the honor of piloting a sled, you had to do something Ribald deemed useful—as in, might make a profit. Once on the rock, you DTPF, Do The Paper First, although there was no physical paper involved in the DNA-stamped, registered contract. Then if there was time before you had to get your butt back into the pod, you could search for treasure. Stuff covered by the agreement belonged to the company. Anything else was yours. Ribald offered bounties on some lifeforms and improbable artifacts proving intelligent aliens existed.

When new brats invaded the place, they snatched up papers like candy, shutting out the rest of us. I needed to lock down my next run while I still had options. I checked the postings for what I already knew. The best candidates coming up, Chaffee and Komarov, shared the same launch window. A promising rock, Chaffee had research and collection assignments available.

Komarov, a speedy little pebble with a nasty atmosphere that shot through half as often as Chaffee, offered a contract for level two samplings. INAs, Information Not Available, littered the only report on the lump. The atmosphere did funny things to instruments and drained fuel cells. The file had recently been smacked with a requirement that sleds carry D-class shielding and extra juice. I wondered how many unshielded units, confused by distorted readings, had zigged into a wall of asteroid rubble when they should have zagged. How many cowboys hadn’t made it back? Reports never included that kind of intel.

I shifted my good luck charm from hand to hand, back and forth, back and forth, feeling the swish of sand in the transparent cube. Notations spaced screens apart on the mostly blank forms linked in my mind—igneous rock, magnesia-rich sedimentary rock similar to dolomite, evidence of periods of high heat. I imagined the possible result: a gorgeous marble-like swirl suspected to be the favorite snuggling place of a darling little microbe. Ribald offered an enormous upfront bounty, and promised royalties on any wonder drug developed from the strain.

That elusive slime, my friend, is the fantasy of this place. It’s every cowboy’s dream wrapped up in a single organism: the thrill of the ride; more money than a media mogul; and a cure for some devastating disease, enshrining you as a hero in the hearts and minds of the entire human race. No surprise that I wanted the last part as much as the rest. Maybe more.

I punched in my code, committing to Komarov, then reserved sled 27D, which boasted a decent performance record, and no one had died in it.

Windows for Collins, and Aldrin rolled through during the day shifts, sparing me and Christoph. The night of the Shepard window, the dung gray, cavernous garage seemed cramped with old echoes. Central Control periodically reminded us: “Keep bay clear. Three incoming pods scheduled.”

“Yes, Mother,” Christoph and I automatically responded.

The docking tube scrubbed the exterior of the first sled as it slid in. Through the tinted canopy, I saw Helen, a veteran of two runs, barely conscious, rolling her helmeted head from side to side, as if in disbelief. Tape from the emergency kit sealed her envirosuit where her gloved left hand should be. An improvised tourniquet made from strip adhesive and the canopy release lever she must have sheared off with an ore cutter cinched her arm.

Christoph and I locked hoses to couplers on the pod’s skin, flooding the interior spaces with decontamination gases. We tapped on the neoglass and mouthed brilliantly encouraging things to her. “It won’t be long now.” “Hang in there.”

At the end of the de-con cycle, I unhooked the fat, black snakes and used the outside release to crack open the cockpit like an exotic nut. Medics hauled Helen away without taking her out of her suit. It was tidier that way, less blood for Christoph and me to mop up.

We always bet on three-timers. Christoph won this one. I couldn’t say why I’d wagered against Helen’s surviving—other than the curse of the Third. Maybe I was afraid to jinx her with optimism.

We heaved a heavy trunk out of the cargo hold. I wondered what might be worth losing a hand. No way was I peeking inside. Only two people could legally open it: Helen and Whitney Frayler, Ribald’s procurement agent.

I slapped a security seal on the lock and shoved the container into a storage bin. I dropped the plastic neon-yellow key into the slit in the vault and sent a “Disabled, Survival Potential Good” alert to Whitney. Around the garage, we just called it MBM, Maimed But Mobile. Whitney would be asleep, like most of the station. She rarely set her message alarm for an injury, so I knew she wouldn’t show up just for this.

When the next sled glided into the bay, I sent her a “Dead on Arrival.” The garage term is CIC, Corpse In a Can. Christoph and I silently attached the hoses. Bits of blood and guts formed fractals on the tinted dome. Through the canopy, one of the shiny-eyed brats who’d arrived with Santori looked like a deflated bag. He must have punctured his suit and been invaded by one of the many ravenous microorganisms on the maze worlds. They loved the taste of human bones, and didn’t care how much vital tissue they burrowed through to get at them. The little devils might be worth something, except the company couldn’t risk having live ones on-station to examine.

Whitney showed up in ten flat, beating the medics, who had no reason to hurry. Her wiry, black hair hung loose to her chin. Instead of a colorless corporate uniform, she wore a loose caftan printed with blurry water lilies. I avoided looking into her golden-brown eyes set in a perfectly oval face. She’d been on Armstrong five years. It wears on you to work in hell that long.

When incapacitated—and death will do that to you—Ribald became the guardian of us all. Whitney authorized medical treatment. I popped the canopy with a whoosh. The medics hauled away what they could, and left us a bag for the odd pieces we were sure to find when we scoured the sled.

Whitney put a seal on the cargo trunk and sent the oblong silvery box to the lab, along with the one Christoph and I had pulled out of Helen’s sled. She held the brat’s plastic key for the next of kin, but left one-handed Helen’s untouched.

“Keep bay clear. One incoming pod scheduled,” Mother reminded us.

A panel by the door to the repair shop glowed with amber numbers against an ebony background. Second by second, they flickered away, showing the narrowing window to Shepard. From Shepard.

Whitney, Christoph and I kept our eyes on the display. Whitney held her breath, as if to freeze the digits and halt the motion of universes. I realized she hadn’t been curled up slumbering like a dreamless kitten. She’d been sitting sleepless, monitoring updates.

The numbers rolled past when auto-return should have slipped the last pod into the garage.

Whitney sucked in air, accepting her inability to affect time and space.

I verified the lost sheep with Mother. She was AM, Aware and Monitoring. Hard to say if a minor glitch or a major shitstorm had occurred. The amber countdown changed to red, and the sled wasn’t here. Now it was up to the cowboy, if alive, coherent, possessing functioning appendages, and with the skill to use manual controls. Possible, but—well, you know.

Whitney paced, nervously flipping the dead brat’s plastic chip in beat to the changing scarlet numerals. Christoph and I cleaned up gore and pretended she wasn’t driving us crazy.

The marker flashed a row of zeros. Mother reported empty space on this side of the maze.

The fiddle bow stroked against the metal plate, playing the next note in the cosmic jig. The rubble danced into a different pattern. Shepard moved on. Wherever the sled was, the fuel cells were drained to empty blocks of useless weight. The cowboy’s e-suit, power exhausted, no longer pulsed with artificial breath.

No one else was coming home tonight.

Whitney silently gazed at the mouth of the landing tube, then left, her steps echoing in the hollow bay. Almost comatose, Christoph shuffled through the rest of our stint.

The garage hummed quiet as a mortuary. 27D gleamed like a cold, silver bullet as my trembling fingers put every instrument, gauge and switch through its range of motion. Tight responses from the controls should have been comforting. They weren’t.

I pretended I was really going to take the ride. If nothing else, my on-station meter would be reset, giving me another 365 days to—

To do what? Continue ignoring the gap between what I was and what I thought I’d be by now?

I took care of our time tags and led Christoph to Bitsy’s, where we drank joe until the A-shift swarmed in, jangling the bell over and over. I really wanted to shoot that bell.

The next day, I sat down at my usual table, feeling like shit. Bitsy plunked a steaming mug in front of me. She tucked an errant strand of platinum back into a lacquered curl. “You up for that run, Stetson?” It wasn’t really a question.

I nodded, not sure.

“When you get back, you’ll be solo in the shed until a new mech gets trained.”

I gulped hot liquid. Last half of his round-trip ticket now digital dust, Christoph was on his way to Earth, with nothing and no one waiting for him.

Four sleds crowded the bay. Santori, icy and confident, tugged on the tight balloon of an e-suit. A guy named Singh, hoping to beat the odds on his Third, prepped with fragile seriousness. I had no one to bet against him with. The other guy, one of the loudmouths who’d arrived with Santori, tried not to act like an excited kid as he scrambled into a pod for his first run.

I suited up and crammed my bulk into 27D’s pit. Outside, the maze finished reforming the path to our destinations. Inside, timers for Chaffee and Komarov flashed golden and began flicking down. I felt behind before I started.

With a jolt, I shot clear of the station. I breathed in the rush of stars and filtered air, suddenly high on the thrill I craved. Armstrong spun like a dingy portabella behind me, cap embedded with solar collectors pointed toward the sun. The maze entrance wavered in front of me, no more than a distortion I was never sure I saw.

I pulled out my good luck charm, AKA the Stetson Ass Saver, and stuck the grippy side onto the instrument panel. I gasped like a fish flopping on a dry riverbank as the programmed pilot twisted the sled through a hole in floating rubble. The dust in the cube formed a miniature tunnel, mimicking the channel. It told me what instrument readings and gazing through the canopy didn’t, that I followed a true course, safely away from the maze walls.

According to station rumors, pilots who’d tried to navigate the maze on manual all failed. An easy bit of lore to circulate, since there was no one alive to contradict it. Except me. I’d done it, but I kept my mouth shut.

On the return of my fifth run, the navigation system faded with a whiny sigh. I’d had the cube with me on two trips by then, enough time to study the tiny dust-defined hole swerving like a snake in response to forces outside. That day, I’d used the Stetson Ass Saver to save the Stetson ass.

Officially, I swore the nav failed just as I’d cruised free of the maze.

I knew how seriously Ribald took its own regulations. The grit in the cube came from a chunk of asteroid rubble I’d found embedded in a hull. It happened sometimes. A sled got out of alignment and picked up a hitchhiker. Technically, the stone belonged to the cowboy. Well, to the heirs of the CIC, in this case. Ribald would have paid something for it, but not much. I should have turned it over to Whitney. Instead, on a hunch, I pulverized the stolen rock and built my good luck charm.

After the malfunction, when I knew the SAS worked, I carefully suggested to Whitney that such a device might be possible, and that I’d be willing to experiment with it if I could get some rubble. She just as carefully told me the company was already “working on it.” That slammed the subject behind an airlock decorated with a giant biohazard sign. We never talked about it again.

Now, as I reached the far side of the maze, dust plastered itself to the side of the cube facing me. Through the canopy, alien space burst into a foreign pattern of stars. I whooped at the sight. Chaffee and Komarov bloomed with irregular fire as they reflected the rays of an unnamed sun that was suddenly at my back. The sled veered to the smaller blaze. I flipped on manual and dove toward it. A tumultuous atmosphere sparked against the hull as I made a stomach-churning landing on the rusty surface.

I grabbed my ass saver and sealed it in a sleeve pocket. Some precautions you force into becoming habits so you don’t slip up when it really counts. I climbed out into the red landscape and secured the canopy. Shaking off an adrenaline buzz better than any I’d gotten as a fighter pilot, I admired a band of lightning in the upper atmosphere that pushed shadows through the thick air. A salmon dust devil, possibly caused by my landing, capered in the distance.

I was not there as a tourist, and Komarov was already whizzing past Chaffee. Amber characters on my faceplate flashed away each precious second. At zero, the sled would launch, with or without me. I could override it, but what was the point? Once you went into negative numbers, you might as well have jam in your pockets, because you were toast.

I performed each task by the book. Soil sample, ten meters; soil sample, ten meters. Nearby, a sand dune taller than me and four times as long as the sled stood scarlet in the dust-scattered light. An anomaly in the flat landscape, it sang to me. I ignored it, reminding myself to keep an even pace. You made mistakes when you rushed.

The number in the corner of my vision kept decreasing. I chucked the specimen pouches into the cargo hold. Shadows had already collapsed, then stretched as the rock raced by the star. Even with the low gravity, I checked the sled’s weight-thrust ratio to make sure it was in the green. The necessary extra shielding and fuel cells made me nervous. The company calculated resources with bloodless precision, and didn’t provide for the drag of excessive souvenirs. I sealed the hold and bounded to the other side of the dune. Hell, I practically skipped. Then I skidded to a stop.

Priceless seconds faded like sunsets while I listened to my own breathing and tried to wrap my mind around what I saw. As I had hoped, sand sat like frosting along the sled-side slope, hiding a bare stone ridge on the other. The craggy backbone had thrust its way through the crust during some violent convulsion, forming a fantastic cathedral laced with dark lines that were perfect for a microbe colony. But that’s not what made me suddenly plant my boots into the sand.

A figure in an e-suit, back toward me, stood at the base with an ore cutter. In a sickening flush, I knew it was Santori. She sliced off the tip of a prominent spire in an act of desecration, then popped it in a pouch clipped to her belt.

Her sled, 60W, rested a short distance away on an arid oceanbed, canopy open to this world. I groaned. She should have attended orientation. Any native animal, vegetable or mineral—friend or, more likely, foe—could jump right in. Typical pilot. She thought the danger was in the flight, and the destination was a benign background until she could fly again.

But the open canopy was trivial.

She turned, cast in a rosy glow that seemed obscene. She wasn’t the type to wear pink. She waved as if we were friends. “Hello.” Her voice rang tinny through the suit’s electronics.

The kindest thing would have been to wave back, climb into my sled, and let it haul me out of there. But I couldn’t. “You’ve made a very bad mistake,” I shouted.

She smiled as if I were senile. “So I’m not going to fulfill my contract on Chaffee. I’ll say the pod malfunctioned, and I had to land it myself. You can’t tell these rocks apart from space. I just picked one. It’s the company’s fault, anyway, for only having one contract for Komarov. You thought you’d have this place all to yourself. I told you, I do my research. While the others were messing around with geology and biology and ridiculous theories about aliens, I studied you. I figured you haven’t been hanging around doing one run a year because you liked the grilled cheese and chili special in that awful saloon. You were waiting for Komarov. Well, you go right ahead with your plans. I’ve got my own.”

“You screwed up,” I said. “You might as well pitch a tent, ‘cause you’ll never make it back to Armstrong.”

She brushed my words aside with a flip of her gloved hand, sending a cotton-candy whirl over her shoulder. “You think I spent two runs ogling the scenery?” She pointed to her sled. “Don’t worry, I adjusted the instruments for my changed flight plan.”

I realized her pride was going to need a very long dipstick to show her just how deep a latrine she was in. “How much time on your countdown before launch?”

“Two hours plus—the same as yours.” She slipped the ore cutter into a pocket, pulled out a trowel and looked around for something to gouge.

“My countdown is at six minutes,” I said. She froze. I kept talking. “You went through a class D atmosphere in a class W sled.” I pointed overhead to lightning leaping among the clouds, a horror flick in pastel. “Those fireworks scrambled your instruments and sucked life out of your fuel cells. And it’ll happen again when you launch. You’ll be blind and running on spit.”

I suddenly clicked to what she’d said about two rides. This was her black-cat, evil-hex Third.

She pivoted toward me. “Let’s say I believe you.” Her evaporating arrogance told me she did.

My mind raced through possibilities. We couldn’t both go back in my sled. My paper was for a few bags of soil samples. Even if I dumped them, our combined weight would be way beyond the skimpy margin the company allowed for extras.

I cringed at the sight of 60W practically begging the flora and fauna to hop inside. And I fought the impulse to put a hand to my sleeve pocket. I hadn’t trusted Whitney or Christoph with knowledge that the cube existed. Could I take a chance and give it to Santori? If she made it back to Armstrong, I’d be in a dung heap of trouble, and I’d lose my good luck charm forever. If she smashed into a wall of pebbles and scraps of old Armstrong as her pit light dimmed to black, well, same outcome for the cube.

I considered another depressing option. Could I fly 60W out of here?

I’d dreamed of being a hero. I hadn’t figured my chance would be one-on-one. Fate was rubbing my nose in a puddle of reality pissed from my own dreams.

Ego aside, did I have a better chance at making it back to Mother in a crippled sled or did she? Was she, with her younger reflexes and illusion of invincibility, the superior pilot, or was I?

She dropped the trowel and jogged awkwardly toward me, inexperienced with low gravity and the suit. She grabbed my biceps so tight, I could feel her padded fingers through the pressurized fabric. For a moment, I thought she would implore me to save her. But her voice did not beg, it demanded. “What does your countdown read?” Her eyes were like a winter sky.

“Five point three six.”

She lifted me off the ground and shoved. The force propelled her into a backward somersault. I soared, tilting into a horizontal projectile, and thudded into the dust. The world blazed white. Far away, 27D’s thrusters kicked into a shrill squeal that scraped against my brain. I was glad when the noise faded to darkness.

Something nudged my head with a metallic clink, snapping me awake. An eyeball-like orb stared at me through my visor. The creature attached to it screamed. I screamed. The countdown in the corner of my vision had vanished along with my sled. Had seconds passed or hours? Since I hadn’t been eaten, I chose to think it was seconds, even though muted shadows had stretched longer while I was peacefully unconscious.

I forced myself to my feet, and staggered through red swirls to 60W. Wondering if my big-eyed buddy had friends lurking inside, I heaved myself into the pit and sealed the canopy to what might be my coffin.

The autopilot howled a litany of alerts as I manually launched. I pulled out the dust-filled cube and slapped it onto the instrument panel, covering readings that tried to convince me as I zipped along through liquid nitrogen.

I was light-years beyond pissed. Santori hadn’t just hijacked my sled and abandoned me to die with only my eyeball pal for company. I’d had a chance to find out if I’d truly choose the hero route. She’d cheated me out of that decision.

Six years ago, I would have realized she’d try to steal my sled. Six year ago, in her situation, I would have thought about doing the same thing.

But I never would have. At least, I don’t think so.

I broke through a murky, charged atmosphere into starry sky. The twice-scrambled instruments told me I spun in circles. I aimed a bit to the right of the warm star that had been behind me when I’d arrived, guessing at its relative position to the invisible maze entrance.

The fuel gauge redlined, but I still had juice. I knew what to rip out to kill the erroneous scarlet and to decrease power usage. The guts were soft and dripping. Wire-munching beasties had taken the open canopy as an invitation to lunch. I wondered what else they’d find tasty.

Panel lights flickered in a visual death rattle, then expired. One interior light illuminated my small world. I didn’t strain to see the slight rippling flaw in the ebony fabric of space. Instead, I scanned for a glimpse of 27D.

I couldn’t blink. I might miss some telltale. Or, on the back of my eyelids, I might see Saffron, peaceful in death.

A spark flared to the right, and then another. Two tilting sleds from Chaffee reflected rays from the unnamed sun. With instruments working perfectly, they curved sweetly toward the maze. Minutes ahead of me, each snuffed out like a candle. I adjusted my trajectory to intercept the point where they’d disappeared.

Speckled space turned to black liquid as I breached the shimmer. The other sleds were too far ahead in the twists and turns for a visual. Encased in the maze, I slowed to a cosmic snail’s pace.

In the faint cabin light, I watched a tunnel form inside the ass saver. I pointed my nose at the corresponding opening before me.

Staring at the miniature map, I tried to sense the pulverized asteroid around me; to feel the boundaries; to make mind, body, and sled dance together to the universe’s fiddled tune.

A vibration scraped along starboard, shaking me out of that crap. I compensated. The cube showed a clear opening, but the cockpit echoed with a hundred pings. Despite what my lucky charm told me, I must have lost the path. A bit of rubble—big or small, it didn’t matter—was bound to pierce the hull soon. Funny, it looked like snow.

Ice pelted the canopy. A stray stone must have punctured one of the other sleds. The bit of Chaffee atmosphere captured inside hissed out in a frosty ribbon. I plowed through the blizzard, following the white road.

Crystals exploded as a familiar sun flared behind them. My fuel was gone for real now. Remnants of digested wires floated free. The humming of my suit stuttered. Soon, it would poison me.

Hopelessly out of alignment with the station, I activated the emergency signal, not knowing if my tiny traveling companions had dined on those cables, or even if Mother was paying attention. The mushroom grew larger. It floated overhead and out of view.

I could drift like this forever. Maybe I would. I wondered if the influence of various gravity wells would deliver me to a floating graveyard where lost sleds bobbed about like abandoned wishes. I couldn’t keep my eyes open to enjoy the sparkling scenery. My lids slipped down with a shock that vibrated through the hull. I expected to see a gruesome etching in black and red with my ugly features on the corpse. Instead, I saw Saffron, beautiful, as she would always be. And I was content in my death.

“Wake up, faker,” she yelled at me. A slap stung my cheek.

I was in the garage. Seems I was right about the station being hell. My eternity wasn’t looking so good.

27D, canopy open and cockpit empty, sat like a giant seed next to 60W. Behind it, Santori spoke rapidly to Whitney. That’s when it hit me I wasn’t dead—or maybe it was the second slap from the medic looming over me. Whitney, fluorescent key moving through her long, graceful fingers, ignored the intense woman’s frantic gestures and walked toward me.

One medic stuck a pharma patch on my neck to neutralize any nasties in my blood, and another shoved an inhaler up my nose to clean my lungs. They babbled about how lucky I was that Mother had detected my weak signal. She’d sent a tug chugging out to haul me in, probably only to salvage the company’s property.

Whitney leaned in and gave me a corporate once over. Medic Slappy proclaimed me “fit and mobile.” I found that disappointing. I didn’t feel capable of crawling out of the cockpit on my own, but I hoped that any beasties had choked on their last meal.

The mechanics helped me out, guiding me over de-con tubes snarled across the floor. Having done this part for others with my shift-mate, I wondered where Christoph was.

Santori stalked over, her composure perfect. Not bad, since she must have been crushed that my remains weren’t being boxed up for export. “You saved my life,” she said too loudly. Her audience wasn’t really me. “I never could have maneuvered the maze in a crippled sled the way you did. If you hadn’t insisted we swap, I’d be floating off into nothing instead of standing here thanking you. I’m going to make sure everyone knows you’re a hero.”

So that’s how she wanted to play it. All I had to do was confirm her story. If I didn’t, I was stuck with the tale of a pathetic nine-timer who’d been tricked by a brat.

Santori half-turned to Whitney, keeping me in her sphere. “I’ve been explaining to Agent Frayler that we agreed to sort out the cargo when we got back.”

Her smile hit me like a thruster blast. Damp with sweat, I was suddenly chilled from my ordeal and fresh drugs. I stared at the arrogant bitch who thought she knew me to my soul. I turned to Whitney. “My key, please.”

Whitney placed a lime-green chip in my palm. “That’s for the trunk.” She slipped another on top of it. Hot orange, I swear it gave off heat. Santori’s steely eyes turned to storm clouds. “That’s for the specimen pouch that was in the cockpit,” Whitney said. “Let’s go to my office. I’d like to get these processed before I deal with Pilot Santori’s unauthorized detour.”

Whitney and I left the garage. It should have been a great exit, but I was dead on my feet—pardon the tasteless expression.

At Whitney’s desk, I shed my DNA onto forms allowing the company access to the pouch for analysis, and confirming that it had first bid. She duplicated the key for Ribald, then pressed the original back into my hand, along with my good luck charm. Having been distracted by almost being a CIC, I’d neglected to hide it. I hadn’t noticed she’d snatched it when she’d checked on my condition. I staggered to my flat and slept through nightmares.

I woke up a day later and checked station news. A message from Whitney made me realize I was starving. Bitsy’s Saloon went silent as I entered.

Santori, sitting one tier out from the middle, drilled a glare into me. I gave her a nod, and took my usual place against the wall. Bitsy dropped a mug on the table and splashed brown liquid into it. The aroma hit my aching lungs like a tropical breeze. I ordered the breakfast platter.

“You going to renew your joe-juice subscription for another year?” Bitsy asked.

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

She patted my shoulder, then went to give coffee and comfort to the (no longer excited) guy, who’d come back from Chaffee with nothing but his life. Singh had arrived CIC, a coin-size hole in his canopy and helmet. The medics had retrieved a pebble from his brain and whisked it off for examination. The pebble, not the brain.

I pulled out the neon-orange tag and slid it around the painted-on checkerboard tablecloth. In the early days, if another guy’s cargo looked more promising than yours, you fought him for it. The winner rode it home. Now ownership was as clear-cut as the company could make it. If it came back in your assigned sled, it was yours, no matter who sat in the pit.

I owned the cargo from 27D, including the contents of Santori’s pouch.

I tapped the orange chip against a green square. I tapped it against a white square. Santori would get a reprimand and a fine for not fulfilling her Chaffee contract, but she’d be allowed to stay on-station. I thought about the open cockpit and the digested wires. She wasn’t going to survive. She didn’t have Saffron’s instincts, and, unlike Bitsy’s joe, dumb luck didn’t go on forever. Despite my magic cube, some day I’d reach the dregs of mine, too.

I could register a complaint and get her kicked back to Earth so hard she’d have a boot mark on her ass. She hadn’t been gone long. She could get a job with one of the shuttle lines.

Hell, how could I expect her to accept a life I was never able to face myself?

According to Whitney, the broken spire of Komarov’s marble cathedral was thick with precious little microbes. Ribald hadn’t posted the find yet, but they already had bids from two pharmas. Which made me think they’d better review the security in their lab.

I could say, now that I was over all the trauma, that Santori and I had agreed to sort out the cargo when we got back to Armstrong. I could say she was the rightful owner of the hot orange chip and all it represented. Then she’d return to Earth with megabucks and a great story that would get her lots of free drinks, no matter how she chose to tell it. And I wouldn’t end up scraping what was left of her out of a cockpit.

I could walk over to her right now and give her the chip.

I could do that.

Bitsy put a plate of jaundiced eggs, flat bacon and round toast in front of me. I ate without thinking about the taste, and took a long drag from the heavy mug. Those who came here with a craving turned into addicts pretty fast. Maybe it was the coffee.

The joe, the saloon, Bitsy—it was all part of the mystique that kept some of us here.

Why did I have this urge to flip the orange chip onto the checkerboard in front of Santori and keep walking? In a way, it was the same as on Komarov. One of us would live, and one of us would grab death’s tail.

I had the decision back, the one she’d stolen from me on the rock. I could be a hero. That thought hung on like the old pal you wondered if you’d outgrown.

I could make it real.

I could do that.

I took a swig and swallowed, tasting ground nut and ash. I tapped the plastic treasure against the painted tablecloth. Green square. White square.

I motioned to Bitsy for a refill.

The Guns of Liberty

The Privateer erupted out of hyperspace like a whale breaching the surface of the water. Normalspace recoiled at the invasion and rogue gravity waves scattered rainbow light all around the new arrival, though this was a rather grumpy rainbow, protesting the violation of the general laws of nature and science.

“Welcome to the jewel of the Hyades Cluster,” the pilot of the starfighter slung beneath the starship said in a wry tone as the target of their flight came into view.

The planet Liberty.

The cybernetic intelligence sitting atop the fighter’s main console crossed long holographic legs emerging from under an equally holographic yellow sundress. “We aren’t even in the Hyades Cluster, anymore.”

Jack chuckled. “Tell that to the Star League.”

“I do every chance I get.” Betty crossed her arms and shook her long blonde hair in a most disapproving manner.

“God love bureaucracies.”

The cyber snorted at Jack’s comment. “Because no one else will.”

“Exactly.” Jack aimed an outrageous wink at her.

“Fort Liberty is challenging us,” the Privateer’s redheaded cybernetic holoform reported. “Responding with standard authentication package.”

“Now we see if that code is worth the price we paid,” Jack whispered under his breath.

“Really?” Betty cocked her head to the side. “A Star Wars quote?”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a classic.”

“It’s our normal code.” Betty rolled expressive blue eyes at him. “We didn’t pay anything for it.”

Jack gritted his teeth. “We paid twenty years.”

Betty let out a long breath and nodded very slowly. Then she leaned back as the other cyber turned her focus back to Jack.

“Negative permission,” Ranger reported. “Fort Liberty does not, say again, does not give us permission to land.”

“Did you resend the package?” Jack asked the starship’s cyber.

“Yes. They said we are not wanted here.”

“Us?” Jack asked in an innocent tone. “Not wanted?”

“Imagine that,” Ranger said in a wry tone.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but my imagination is not up to that task.”

“As you say.” The redhead rolled her eyes at least as much as Betty had.

A beam of incorporeal light shot across their bow.

“Warning shot.”

“Well, that was downright un-neighborly of them.” Jack frowned. “Continue towards the planet.”

“As you say.”

The ship shuddered as the deflection grid twisted a much closer shot into open space.

“Not a warning shot.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling they don’t want us here.”

“As I said.”

“No need to gloat.”

“Not gloating. Just right.”

“No need to rub it in, then.”

“As you say.”

Jack aimed a wry look at Betty and mouthed, “I don’t think she likes this.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Betty whispered in his earbud.

“I can read lips, you know,” Ranger grumbled.

The sensor display flashed red as missiles shot out from Fort Liberty and accelerated towards them.

“Incoming fire,” the starship cyber announced. “Orders?”

“Identify and target all weapons emplacements. Defend yourself. No offensive fire.”

“As you say.”

“Jazz?”

A third hologram appeared on the fighter’s main console. It started hazy and inconsistent, but quickly took on a feminine form. Long brunette hair faded into existence atop the holoform. Then came blue jeans and a grey tank top. The holoform snapped into focus, and Jasmine’s brown eyes met his gaze.

“Yes?”

“Talk to Ranger. She’ll give you Fort Liberty’s weapons. Destroy the weapons only. Leave the fort intact.”

“On it.” Jasmine gave him a jaunty salute and turned away for a moment. She smiled when she turned back to him. “We are coming.”

“And that’s our cue,” Jack said, and nodded towards Betty.

Betty smiled and leaned forward again, letting him know that she was all in for this.

Jack flipped a switch to release the docking latches. Then he tapped the verification key. Then he turned the dial to inform the system that yes, he really meant it. He really, really wanted to detach from the starship. A warning buzz and vibration filled the starfighter cockpit, giving him one last chance to back out. “Detaching now.”

“Good hunting,” Ranger said as her holoform stepped back to give Betty the spotlight.

The latches snapped open with a clang that reverberated throughout the fighter.

Jack grasped the throttle in his left hand, pressed it down as maneuvering thrusters came to life, and they fell away from the starship. He lifted the throttle back to neutral and pushed it forward. The four fusion torch engines answered his command and they shot towards Liberty on tongues of blue fusion flame.

“Fort Liberty is challenging us,” Betty reported. She shifted to cross her legs the other way and sighed. “They are demanding we turn around and leave.”

“Ignore them.”

Jack twisted the joystick in his right hand to turn them off a direct course towards the orbital fort.

Betty winced. “They’re targeting us.”

“Let them.”

Jack pressed the throttle to the stops, and the engines flared to maximum rated power. A small amount of gravity leaked through the compensators, and an elephant crushed Jack into the back of his seat. He grunted, cleared his throat, and twisted the stick to bring them around to charge directly at Fort Liberty.

“Light ’em up.”

Betty smiled and went to work.

The modern Avenger-class starfighter carried a pair of missile packs and eight laser cannons that gave them impressive anti-fighter capability, but it was the array of three massive gravitic cannons that constituted their true claim to fame. They could cut down capital warships when deployed in squadron strength, and no orbital fortress built by man could stand against that kind of firepower for long.

All three cannons powered up and gravity turned on its side as the fabric of space itself protested the assault. Three solid streams of tortured gravity linked Jack’s Avenger and Fort Liberty for half a second. A full second. Two seconds. Three.

Fort Liberty’s deflection grid warped, wavered, and shivered as it fought to recalibrate its power grid to keep the starfighter from piercing its defenses. Fort Liberty was a tiny thing, compared to Fort Wichita back home, but it quickly became apparent that it had the power to counteract the attack of a single starfighter, even one as capable as a modern Avenger. Fort Liberty reasserted its control over local gravity and opened up with enough firepower to erase any starfighter ever built from the face of the cosmos.

All it had to do was hit.

But Jack had already slammed the throttle to the side, pulled the stick over, and twisted it to send his Avenger into an almost out-of-control spin at a wildly divergent angle to their previous course. Betty added her own twists and turns to the evasive maneuvers, and they became effectively impossible to hit from more than a quarter lightsecond away. Lasers filled the space where they should have been, but the swarm of missiles turned to chase them down along their new general course. Betty was ready for that, and the starfighter’s lasers and missiles chattered out a steady stream of anti-missile fire that swept them out of space.

And that was when twenty more Avenger-class starfighters exploded out of hyperspace and opened fire on Fort Liberty from every quarter.

Jasmine’s holoform looked up at Jack with a smile. “We are here.”

Some Avengers faced reinforced deflection grids that shrugged off their gravitic assaults with ease. Others found grids drained of energy sent to confront Jack’s starfighter and sliced them apart like hot knives going through butter.

“It’s good to have you,” Jack returned with an answering smile.

“Yes.” Jasmine winked. “It is.”

Jack leaned back and watched pinpoint laser and missile strikes penetrate the breached deflection grid to defang the orbital fortress. The starfighters finished the job in seconds before sliding in close to the fort and coming to a stop with all of their weapons aimed straight at it.

Jack chuckled. “Do you think you can encourage them to surrender?”

“Mmmm. I think I can take care of that.” Jasmine shot him a wry smile and a sloppy salute and stepped back to join Ranger in the background.

Jack let out a long breath as they spun past the fortress on their way down towards Liberty. He removed his hands from the controls and placed one on the console next to Betty.

She cocked her head and rested a feathery holographic hand on his.

“Take us down?”

“I can do that.” She smiled and pulled them out of their spin. “What’s the magic word?”

“Please?”

“That’s the ticket.” Betty quickly reoriented the starfighter and sent them straight down towards Liberty. Then she aimed a wry look at him. “Anything else you want?”

“Every day,” Jack answered with a grandiose wave of his free hand.

Betty playfully swatted the hand she held captive before giving him a very long look. “I meant about the mission.”

“Oh.” Jack made an act of giving up on his dreams, but then he rallied with another verbal salvo. “Well, would you care to come dance with me?”

“Why, Jack?” Betty cocked her head at him, and another wry smile colored her lips. “Are you intending to use me as camouflage?”

Jack chuckled. “You do make the very best camouflage.”

“I do my best.” Betty chuckled.

“And if things go south, I could use the backup.” Jack gave her a meaningful look.

Betty nodded slowly. She knew as well as he that this could go south very quickly and totally. She finally gave him a big smile. “If you want me, then you will have me.”

“Music to my ears,” Jack said with another grandiose wave. Then he relaxed in his seat, reached up, and flicked another switch.

The seat promptly dropped out of the cockpit and into the starfighter’s enlarged nose. The seat laid back and slid into the fighter’s massive belly, spun around, and lowered his feet to the deck so he could look out at the roomy living compartment. Roomy, considering it was all inside a starfighter. Not that most starfighters were large enough to contain a comfortable kitchen and living room like this, or enough chairs for eight people to lounge around in comfort.

The original Avengers had been packed with sufficient capacitors to power gravitic cannons capable of breaching warship deflection grids using purely Earthbuilt gravtech, and the first hyperdrive small enough a starfighter could carry it, even if that starfighter had more in common with bombers than other fighters. The capacitor banks required to power that hyperdrive had been truly massive.

Jack smiled at the men and women sitting in comfortable chairs in the middle of a space that had once held one of those massive capacitor banks.

They returned his attention, but did not move beyond crossing and uncrossing their legs.

“Johnny?” Jack turned his attention to the man wearing a long red trenchcoat.

Johnny peered at Jack over his round sunglasses. “Yeah, boss?”

“Keep your men back unless the shooting starts.”

Johnny smiled and pressed the sunglasses up to hide his eyes, as if he had no doubt about that future. “Roger that, boss.”

“Let’s go, Betty,” Jack said and walked towards the back of the compartment.

Betty’s full-size biological avatar sprang to her feet with the same yellow sundress her holoform favored. Her anatomy bounced in a particularly pleasing manner, showing she was absolutely ready for their upcoming mission.

“I’m ready when you are,” she said through rose-red lips, and aimed a pointed look at his flight jacket.

Which, of course, was her subtle reminder that it was his time to prepare. He nodded and stepped into the closet built into the back of his living space. He quickly shrugged out of the flight jacket and tossed it towards its hook. A quick double tap of the flight suit’s cuff preceded the suit liquefying around him. It quickly reformatted itself into white slacks and a shirt, and he reached for the white suit jacket that had become his trademark. He slipped it on and looked in the mirror.

Blond hair and blue eyes met his gaze over a white dress suit that looked at home on any street in the Republic of Texas. Jack smiled and straightened the jacket with one tug. The look wasn’t complete, but he looked good.

“Are you done admiring yourself?” Betty asked from outside the closet.

“I’m not admiring myself.” Jack pulled the last part of his outfit off its hook and walked out to her knowing smile. “See? I’m ready.”

Betty rolled her eyes at him.

Jack sniffed and turned towards the armory built into the starfighter’s rear end.

The airtight hatch rolled open, and he stepped in to see three nice young ladies standing in front of the racks of weapons big and small. Jack raised both eyebrows and made a point of looking back into the living area towards the empty chairs they had so recently inhabited.

“See, that’s how he subtly suggests that he didn’t ask us to come,” the redheaded personal assistant he grew up with said to the other two. The fact he’d named her Red just showed how little imagination he’d had as a kid. Or maybe it just hung a lampshade on the nature of his priorities back then.

“Yeah, but that can’t possibly be right,” Claire returned. That much better name had come from a game.

“I know,” Becca added with an innocent look. Another game. Also, pretty awesome. “He only told the men to stay back.”

All three looked at him and planted their hands on blue jeans that declared without any room for argument that they were absolutely of the female persuasion. There were still far too many places that banned the use of robotic avatars and often cybers altogether. And they would really have a cow if they learned all the truths about Betty’s biological avatar. The Cybernetic Council gave those laws all the respect they deserved: none.

Jack glanced back and forth between the four cybers. Part of him wanted to limit the party to him and Betty. She could be mighty distracting when she wanted to be. All four would be a weapon of mass distraction without compare. And they did not look like they were going to let him get away today. He could argue about it, or just accept that they were going to go out with him.

“Just remember to be on your best behavior.”

The girls made an act of falling all over themselves like drunk college girls that wouldn’t dream of threatening a flea.

Unless it started drinking their beer. Then it was going to be a dead flea.

Jack chuckled and let out a long breath. “Then I guess it’s time to rock and roll.”

The armory’s hatch ahead of him rolled open, and the dusty landscape of Liberty appeared before him as the starfighter came down as gentle as a lover. The ramp lowered and a slight puff of dust heralded its impact.

Jack smiled, pulled in a deep breath, and called on an old friend. A friend he had used for years. A second skin. The perfect camouflage. He lowered his head and placed the last part of the outfit on his head with a firm hand: a white cowboy hat.

He breathed out. He breathed in. He tapped his suit cuff to start the holographic concealment that would disguise his identity and felt the old friend engulf him.

Captain Jack raised his head and smiled at the world stretched out before him like a promise. Speaking of promises…he turned towards the four lovely specimens of femininity standing next to him and spread his arms out wide.

“Shall we, my ladies?”

They poured into his arms without hesitation.

Captain Jack smiled and sauntered out onto Liberty with four lovely ladies on his arms. Ladies advertising everything they were going to do in the night to come for any passerby to see.

The four lovely ladies and the one very lucky guy sauntered and stumbled their way across the dusty landscape. No one in town would miss the fact that they walked in right after the starfighter landed, but it was the thought that counted. A polite fiction the locals would recognize and maybe respect. Maybe. It was all going to depend on how itchy local trigger fingers were. The War might be over, but far too many people still shot first and demanded answers of the corpses later.

The small town spread out as they approached. The last survey reported five hundred souls, seven churches, five bars, a general store, and a single fuel station. It was the kind of small town Jack had grown up around in Northern Minnesota, and it looked the part. Though this town sported far too much dust and tumbleweeds for Jack’s comfort, and ground that cracked under each step was really not hospitable to his blue Scandinavian eyes. He would certainly never live here by choice. But that was the whole problem.

They made their way into town without challenge, and walked down the main street to where the best bar held court. Jack felt eyes following them, and his smart contacts highlighted movement in windows up and down the street. They displayed numerous virtual screens detailing the possible number and nature of threats, but none of them approached totality. His cybers thought the locals were nervous, not murderous, and Jack agreed. It didn’t feel deadly at the moment. It could be, but it wasn’t yet.

Jack nodded to his girls, and they ducked into the bar and dragged themselves onto the nearest barstools. The bartender took their drink orders with a grim expression. He waited for Jack to drop coins, swept them up, and smiled before putting the ordered drinks down. Then he kept them coming after Jack emptied the first in one long draw.

The act went on for several minutes until a single man on the other end of the bar began to clap. It was slow and methodical, designed to grab the attention of everyone in the room.

Jack continued to drink as if he was oblivious.

The man laughed. “I have to respect your method acting, but that big ass starfighter outside town puts a rather big hole in the story you’re telling.”

Jack put his drink down and let out a long breath, as if the man had just reminded him of something. He snapped his fingers and leaned back from the bar with a rueful look. He gave the man a bashful smile.

“You know, I was thinking there was something wrong with the act, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Thank you so much for telling me. You are a credit to the human race, good sir. Can I buy you a drink for your fair service?”

The man smiled and shook his head. “I’d prefer to know the name of the man who walked in where he wasn’t wanted.”

“Not wanted?” Jack’s voice oozed wounded pride and shock. “Not wanted? My good sir, my coins spend just as good as any other.”

He finished by slapping another pile of coins on the counter and waving for the bartender to bring him some more.

The man at the other end of the bar waved a hand towards the back. The bartender responded by taking the coins, and the drinks, and disappearing into the kitchen.

Jack blinked. He sniffed. He looked at the empty bar before him and his lovely ladies. And then he looked towards the man at the end of the bar.

“It would appear you have me at a disadvantage, my good sir.”

“Yes.” The man just smiled at him. “I do. Now would you please tell me who you are?”

Jack spun on his stool very slowly to keep from alarming any watchers, leaned one elbow on the bar, and smiled at the other man. One hand slipped over to a suit cuff, and Jack let out a long breath.

“Captain Jack Hart.” He tapped the cuff, the holoconcealment faded away, and his white suit and hat stood out like a beacon in the dim bar. “Cowboy.”

Stools spun as the people on them disappeared in the blink of an eye. The rest of the bar emptied in seconds, and Jack looked around in amusement. The locals had some really good survival instincts.

The man at the end of the bar laughed again, reached for the cuff of his shirt, and his face and clothing wavered. Jack looked into a face he knew well a second later.

“I’d say it was good to see you again, Jack, but it’d be a lie.”

“Likewise, Bruce.”

Bruce brought a hand up and rubbed his jaw.

“Look, Jack. I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

Jack met his gaze without flinching. “You know exactly what I’m doing here.”

Bruce sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. So what of it? Are you just going to come in and bust heads and just make everything better?”

“I’d rather not kill anyone today.”

“These people have a good life, Jack.”

“But it could be better, Bruce. And you know it.”

“Yeah, but they don’t.” Bruce leaned forward and aimed a hard look at Jack. “These people have been kept under the thumb for so long they don’t even know what to do with that whole freedom nonsense your Star League’s peddling.”

“So what?” Jack aimed a matching glare at the soldier he had fought next to so many times. “Make them slaves again? This time with you at the top?”

“They aren’t slaves.” Bruce glared at him. “They can leave any time they want…”

Bruce trailed off and shook his head, obviously knowing how that sounded.

“Do they even know what that means?” Jack raised both eyebrows at the other man. “Can they even conceive of that?”

Bruce shook his head again and sighed. “Not most of them, no. That’s the real problem, Jack, and you know it. We can’t just wash generations of slavery away and tell them they are all free men now. We have to…help them… Guide them…”

“While you get all the pretty girls and the best coins?”

Bruce froze and gave him a very long look. “We don’t take anything they don’t give willingly. And they can always say no. They can always walk out. No repercussions. No nothing.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Bruce leaned away from Jack and let out a long breath. “And so can you.”

Jack raised questioning eyebrows at the man.

“For old times’ sake, get back in that fighter, get out of here, and don’t come back. No harm will come to you.”

Jack tapped the bar and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not an option, Bruce. The Star League sent me to fly the flag of law and order out here. They wouldn’t take kindly if I turned around and ran. Now you have a lot more choice here than I do. You can leave, and I have no reason to follow you. I never even saw you here.”

“Leave with what?” Bruce shook his head angrily. “Those fat cats embezzled our severance pay. They’re never going to find the money. Not for us! They want old soldiers like us to just disappear, and you know it. And if we don’t slink away quietly, they kill us, and you know that, too.”

Jack raised a placating hand. “There are other ways, Bruce. Better ways.”

“Tell that to them! How many of yours have they killed?”

Jack’s eyes turned hard.

Bruce laughed. “You think we haven’t heard the stories? The Cowboys that fought for twenty years and then just…disappeared?”

“We’re looking into those stories,” Jack whispered.

Bruce slid off his stool and made his way very slowly over to Jack. He slipped between Jack and the lovely ladies, who were suddenly not drunk at all. Bruce leaned against the bar and just looked at Jack for a long moment before poking the white suit in the chest.

“What about the people that killed you, Jack? Are you looking into them?”

Jack let out a long breath. “People don’t come back from being dead, Bruce. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Not according to the stories I’ve heard.”

Jack chuckled. “Then I’m afraid you’ve been hearing some really crazy stories.”

“Just ‘cause their crazy doesn’t make them not true.”

Jack shook his head. Then he sighed. “Look, Bruce. I’m going to level with you.”

Bruce met his eyes with a questioning look.

Jack smiled. “If there was any truth to the stories you’ve heard, and I’m not saying there is, you understand. But if there was, the people that did it paid for it. And now we’re dealing with the whole stinking mess of them. But it’s going to take time to clean the system. And the best we can do out here is try to make the best of it in the meantime.”

Bruce sighed and shook his head. “But you know they’re going to keep killing us out here? Right? We’ve outlived our usefulness. We’re a threat now, and you know it. They’ll never let us go home. And if we try to make something of ourselves out here, they’ll just send someone to kill us for it. You know that, too. Right?”

Jack looked into Bruce’s eyes and saw the old soldier in them. The man he remembered still lived behind those eyes. So he nodded. “Yeah. I know that.”

Bruce sighed. “What are you going to do about it?”

Jack slowly reached into his jacket, pulled out a small electronic device, and handed it to Bruce.

Bruce took it and examined it in confusion. “What is this?”

Jack stood up and stepped away from the bar. “Law and order is coming for this world, Bruce, and you can’t stop it. Today, I’m just here to sell the line, so no rush. I’ll walk away today. You should sleep on it.”

Jack looked pointedly at the device in Bruce’s hand. “Sleep on it tonight. And if the morning comes and you still think you can’t just walk away, I’ll meet you out there on the street. High Noon. You and all your men. If you’d rather die than slink away, I’ll give you the death you want. Tomorrow.”

Jack turned his back on Bruce and walked away.

“Jack.”

Jack stopped at the door to the bar and turned to look at his old colleague.

“They really did kill you, didn’t they?”

Jack tilted his head to the side and gave Bruce a nasty smile. “They thought they did. I got better.”

Bruce looked down at the device in his hand and then back up at Jack. “And tomorrow is better than today?”

Jack’s smile turned bright and happy. “Infinitely better, Bruce. Infinitely better.”

Captain Jack Hart tapped his cuff and disappeared back behind his holographic camouflage. Then he turned and sauntered and stumbled out of the bar into the dusty street of Liberty with four very lovely ladies falling all over him in a drunken stupor. The night was shaping up to be an amazing night.

He wasn’t going to have to kill anybody today.

That thought was foremost on his mind when the first bullet struck.

Becca spun away in a cloud of gears, gizmos, and doodads as her shoulder exploded into a million and more pieces. Her robotic avatar hit the ground, and a stream of profanities that would make a dairy farmer blush erupted out of her mouth.

The second bullet struck before Jack could react, and Claire’s torso exploded in front of him. It was a perfect shot, dead center where most people kept their hearts. Any biological human shot like that would be dead right there, long before they hit the ground. But Claire had a split second to shift her footing before the second bullet hit, and her robotic avatar simply took another step or three back as a whole mess of expensive parts spilled out of her shattered chest.

She quickly began giving Becca a challenge in the cursing department.

Then death’s shadow shivered through Jack’s spine, time slowed to a crawl, and he wrapped one arm around Betty before pushing Red away from him. He dragged Betty out of the line of fire before the third bullet shot past his nose. The shockwave nearly made him sneeze, the building past him shuddered, and he spun as he pulled his little friend out of holoconcealment.

The bullets’ paths strobed across his contacts, and he brought up the revolver to follow them back to their point of origin. His eyes locked on his target in time to see the distinctive muzzle flash of an M-56 sniper rifle.

Well, frak. That was going to hurt in a moment. There wasn’t any bulletproof suit worn by a man that could stop one of those rounds.

But he was already pulling the trigger. Taurian Arms of Odessa made a truly impressive number of firearms for the Republic of Texas Armed Forces, and Jack carried one of their biggest and baddest offerings. Sporting what Texas still stubbornly called fifty-caliber chambers and a ten-inch barrel, there was nothing light or small about his little friend. The hammer came down, the old-school chemical propellant flashed, and the projectile roared out of the barrel at the forefront of a compressed shockwave of air that thundered off every building up and down the street.

The fourth sniper bullet arrived an instant later, penetrating clean through his right hand, tearing up his arm, smashing through his right shoulder, and bursting out through the back of his suit in an explosion of bone, flesh, and arterial blood that killed most biological humans dead right there.

Jack stumbled backwards, saw his revolver flying out of his useless hand in the corner of one eye, watched Betty fly in the other direction in a mass of fluttering yellow sundress, and had just enough time to see the ground come up to hammer him before he hit. He screamed in pain and fury as the dusty streets of Liberty ground their imprint into his beautiful white suit. The bastard had messed up his suit.

That was when everybody else in the street opened fire. Bullets sparked off his mostly bulletproof suit, spat dust in his face, and exploded off the walls behind him.

Jack’s viewpoint shrank to the narrowest of filters as his body reacted to the violence all around him, and he counted up everything he could rely on. The right arm was useless, but they’d missed his brain. They’d missed his heart. They’d missed killing him dead right there. His heart beat once more, pushing one last spray of blood out through the ruined artery before his body’s enhanced healing clamped off that particular problem. It was the last of the blood he was going to lose from that wound. He was alive. Pain faded as his body’s improved painkillers flooded everywhere without making him dumb.

Several bullets careened off his back and into the next building. They weren’t getting through, but they still kicked like a stubborn mule. And that hurt.

His brain kicked up into the next gear, and there was no time for compassion. No time for mercy. There was only kill or be killed. It was time to show them what a Cowboy could do.

Jack’s head snapped up, he placed his good hand on the ground, and sprang back up to his feet. His useless right arm flopped around like a torn sack of meat. That was going to be a problem. It would kill him dead right here if it flopped around him at the wrong time. Which meant he only had one choice. He could grow the arm back again later, if he got out of this alive, so he grabbed it with his good hand and tore it off.

Pain ripped through his body, and Jack roared like an angry and wounded animal. The painkillers fought to keep up with the torture, tears sprang from his eyes, and they even blurred in shock. But then all the fun little gengineered doodads and whatzits running through his body snapped him back into battle focus. The pain disappeared. His eyes widened into spectrums no merely Earthborn human saw. He threw his severed arm at one gunman hiding behind cover. The man stood up in time for the arm, and the armored sleeve it still wore, to hit him on the head like a baseball bat. The man dropped back out of sight.

Jack stepped to the side before another gunman pulled a trigger in his direction. The bullet flew through where his right shoulder had just been, and Jack looked at the man. He catalogued everything the man brought to this gunfight. A rifle. Some grenades. A heart racing in fear at the realization of exactly what was staring at him. Jack reached down, pulled the second revolver out of its holoconcealed holster, and shot the man through the heart with the first bullet. Dead right there.

Jack took a moment to scan the area and moved behind a handy piece of cover as other gunmen tried to catch up with him. They failed.

A bright yellow sundress spun around Betty as she punched a man. He flew back into a wall and fell to the ground in a limp heap. Blood flowed from several wounds all over her avatar, but she still fought. She still lived. The combat shotgun in her other hand spoke, and another gunman hit the dirt with the kind of wound that nobody got back up from.

Claire and Becca strode down the street in unison, combat shotguns roaring in their hands. Gizmos and widgets sprayed into the street as standard rifle rounds sparked off their armored hides or smashed into the holes in their robotic bodies created by the sniper rifle. They swore through their magazines one round at a time, spraying destruction and death at their attackers. A flash of red hair heralded another gunman flying out of his perch and into the street, where he hit with a meaty crunch. Ragdoll physics had nothing on real life.

A pair of gunmen found his cover and began to throw death his way. The rounds bounced off the cover for a second, then began to punch through, and Jack had two choices: fall further back to safety and away from the fight or step back into it.

Well.

Jack was not the kind of guy to leave friends in the lurch. Besides—he had a reputation to keep up.

Jack moved back into the street, stepping ahead of the gunmen trying to center him in their sights. Some rounds sparked off his dirty white armored suit, but most whizzed past him, and he brought the revolver up to shoot the second bullet at one of them. Perfect center mass shot. Dead right there.

He stopped to let the other man catch him with a stream of death fired at full rock and roll, then stepped back so most of the rounds whipped past him. The handful that hit hammered him hard enough to crack ribs. One or two may have even snapped entirely, and that hurt. Those did not regrow overnight.

Red shot the man from her new perch. Good. He didn’t want to waste a bullet on that man, anyways.

Death’s shadow touched Jack’s spine again and he stepped back to keep it from catching him. A round that really wanted his name on it sparked off the force field covering his face and slammed into a metal sign beside him.

“Sweet Jesus.”

That was too close for comfort. A gun stepped out of the bar behind him, and Jack turned to shoot it dead right there with the third bullet. That was a mistake. He knew it the moment he pulled the trigger, but it was too late to take it back.

A suit of powered armor stepped out of the dust cloud dominating the far end of the street, holding a glowing electromagnetic rail gun. It fired, and a hypersonic crack blasted through the town. Red, her perch, and half the building it occupied disappeared in a spray of wreckage.

Jack swung the revolver around and fired his fourth and fifth bullets at the armored faceplate. The cylinder smoked on empty, and he dropped it back to the holster.

“Explosive rounds,” he ordered and took a step back towards cover.

The armored trooper braced himself, shook the hits off, and swung his massive cannon around towards Jack. The main electromagnetic rail yawned dark in Jack’s eyes, but the secondary barrel spat a stream of fully automatic rounds straight at him.

Jack backpedaled faster, but the rounds caught him and threw him back behind the cover he sought. He hit hard, driving the breath from his lungs, and a solid mass of pain ran all over his chest. He looked down to see his outer suit jacket shredded by the heavy fire, but his inner suit remained unpenetrated. Mostly. His ribs were quickly reminding him of a new definition of pain and suffering, but the pain killer doodads in his bloodstream flooded that away almost quicker than he could feel it. Almost.

He shook his head, dispelling the stars that threatened to take over his vision, and sprang back to his feet in time to see the powered armor stumbling back as Claire and Becca pumped simultaneous combat shotgun rounds into it. They stepped forward and fired again, and again, and again, a steady metronome of destruction that kept the armor off balance. The other gunmen took advantage of their total concentration to pour fire into them with more confidence and volume. Their robotic avatars jerked with each round that whizzed off into the distance and twitched as shrapnel sprayed all over the street, but they continued to drive their unrelenting attack onto the armored soldier.

Jack’s contacts flashed green, and he pulled his reloaded revolver out of its holster again. He brought it up and fired directly at the armored faceplate again. The round exploded, and the soldier stumbled back from the concussion. Jack pulled the trigger a second time. A third. A fourth. The fifth round in a row exploded on the faceplate, the rapid concussions driving the armor’s occupant into a punch-drunk stupor.

Then half a dozen gunmen turned their fire on Jack, and there was no way he could avoid all of them at once. He dove back for cover, but they caught a weak spot in his armor to penetrate through his ribs, tore into a leg, bounced one off the good shoulder, and smashed his back hard enough to slam him into the ground with bone-crunching force.

Frak. That hurt. All over.

Jack’s vision blurred.

Snapped back into focus to a pair of round sunglasses and a red trenchcoat running down the street with guns set to fun. Three other figures followed, and the thunder of guns ruled the streets of Liberty.

His vision blurred again as pain drove through everything his body had to fight it.

The roar of maneuvering thrusters took over the world, and his eyes snapped open to see his starfighter slowing to a stop above the street. The fighter’s laser cannons spun back and forth, ready to shoot anything that still looked like a threat. The thrusters powered down, the starfighter hovered on her gravplates, and silence ruled over the town.

Then a blur of yellow turned the corner and slid to a stop next to Jack. Bright yellow, stained with red.

“It’s okay,” rose-red lips said. “You’re okay.”

He wasn’t okay. Not one bit okay, and he knew it.

“I’m…sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

His vision blurred a third time.

Sharpened again, back to blue eyes locked on his.

Jack coughed. That hurt. A lot of things hurt. His soul hurt.

“I…killed…today…”

She bent over to hug him, and bright blonde hair spilled all over him.

“They didn’t give you a choice.”

“We always…”

His vision went out again, along with everything else.

Then it was raining. Rain hadn’t been in the forecast. Jack opened his eyes to a yellow sundress. Blue eyes filled his vision again.

He sucked in a painful breath. “…Have a choice.”

Rose-red lips smiled at him. “Just as long as you choose to stay with me.”

Jack gave her a weak smile and looked into her eyes.

Yeah. That was the ticket.

They were worth keeping his eyes open for.

He could look into them for the rest of his life.

Cowboy Dreams

Becky R. Jones

“Darien! Darien!” His mother’s voice filtered through to his hiding place in the one spot behind their living unit that had an actual bush growing in real dirt.

Darien quickly shoved the small, old vid player back into the waterproof bag, and placed the packet into the shallow hole under the bush he was lying behind. It was one of the few spots of open dirt in between the plascrete walkways and patios in the living complex.

He didn’t know why there were a few open spaces. Most areas inhabited by humans were almost completely covered in plascrete, but he was grateful this particular spot was behind his family’s living unit.

He loved to watch the old vids about men on Old Earth called “cowboys.” It had taken several months of watching sporadically, when he could sneak away, to figure out what they did, what a “horse” was, what a “cow” was, and how those all figured into the stories. It was fascinating. These cowboys rode the horses, and for some reason pushed cows along as they rode. They also, shockingly, seemed to eat from plants and animals they found along the way.

That’s how Darien knew these were just stories. Long lectures in school, and in speeches from the Council, had pounded into him the knowledge that humans ate only manufactured nourishment. Nobody ate animals or plants. All food came from the Food Laboratories. No human would eat something that grew in the dirt or any living being that ate things which grew in the dirt.

Lying half on plascrete and half on actual dirt, as he was right now, was also considered dangerous and anti-social behavior. But the cowboys on the vids slept on the ground and didn’t seem to have any problems with it. Darien felt closer to the cowboys when he felt the dirt under his arms.

“Darien!” His mother’s voice sounded again. Darien wiggled backwards from under the bushes, carefully moved to his right, and quickly brushed off any dirt before standing up. He didn’t think his mother would punish him for lying on the ground and watching vids from Old Earth, but she might let it slip to his father and he would definitely punish Darien.

“Over here!” he called, jogging quickly towards his mother. “Is everything okay? I was just out for a short walk,” he lied easily.

“There you are! We just got a message…the Director of Food Laboratory Forty-Seven will be calling you in an hour! The Director himself!” his mother called excitedly.

Simultaneous jolts of excitement and dread pulsed through Darien. If the Director was calling him, that most likely meant that Darien was going to be offered one of the rare and much-coveted positions as a lab assistant.

His history courses had detailed how the original colonists of Siris IV had manufactured their own food, and when the nascent colony had been cut off, had continued to manufacture food rather than attempt to exploit the resources of the planet. Those individuals who kept the food manufacturing equipment running had become the most respected of the original colonists, and that had passed down to their descendants.

The position of lab assistant in a Food Laboratory meant prestige, high pay, and respect. Such a job would mean security not only for Darien, but his entire family for the rest of his life.

His mother grabbed him into a strong hug. “I’m so proud of you! All your hard work in school has paid off, and you’re going to be a lab assistant! Wait until your father hears this news!”

Darien returned his mother’s hug, then pulled away, shrugging. “Thanks, Mom,” he muttered, staring at the ground. Should he tell his mother about his doubts?

The greyish-white plascrete glared back at him, as if it knew his reservations. Yes, a position as a food lab assistant was what he’d been working towards almost his entire life, but it wasn’t really what he wanted to do.

Ever since Siris IV had been discovered ten years ago—or as he’d learned, rediscovered—by a Central Galaxy search team, Darien had had dreams of leaving the suffocating, completely planned life he’d known and going into space, maybe even finding some cowboys somewhere. Becoming a food lab assistant meant that he’d never have a chance to leave.

He opened his mouth to tell his mother, but one look at her face, and the pride for her oldest son shining in her eyes, and he simply reached out and hugged her again.

Mother and son walked back to the house, arm in arm, his mother chattering happily about his new life, and what it would mean for him and for the family.

Darien could only bring himself to answer in monosyllables. Fortunately, his mother, in all her excitement, never noticed.

An hour later, he was sitting in front of the large vid screen in the main room of the house. His mother had shut herself into his father’s office so she wouldn’t be a distraction or appear in the call. Darien knew that interference from family members had caused some potential lab assistants to lose the promised job offer, and his mother did not want to be the cause of something so traumatic.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Stratten,” the Director said, once the call connected. The Director was an imposing-looking man, even seated behind a desk. Darien could see the logo of the Food Labs over the pocket on the Director’s shirt. His dark eyes seemed to stare right through Darien.

“Good afternoon, Director Langsdale,” Darien replied politely, hiding his shaking hands in his lap. “How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine. I’m sure you know why I called, but this needs to be done in a formal manner,” the Director answered.

Darien nodded, not trusting his voice.

“You have been on the lab assistant track for the entirety of your schooling, your school record is impressive, and your lab supervisors all agree that your work is clean, meticulous, and you follow instructions well. Therefore, I am offering you a position as Laboratory Assistant Third Class at Food Laboratory Forty-Seven. This position comes with housing in Lab dormitories, and a starting salary of fifty credits per week. If you accept this position, you will need to present yourself at the main entrance one week from today at precisely seven o’clock in the morning. Do you accept?” The Director’s voice was formal, and he only looked up from his tablet at the end.

Darien nodded again. The Director gave him a small smile. “You do need to say ‘I accept’ out loud, Mr. Stratten. I need to record a formal acceptance.”

Darien swallowed. “I accept,” he said in a quiet voice. After all, no one ever turned down a career with the food lab.

“Excellent. Now, since you are local, I presume you can get yourself to the main entrance at the necessary time?” the Director asked.

“Yes, sir. I don’t live that far away,” Darien answered.

“Excellent. A list of your job responsibilities, what you can and cannot have in the dormitories, and the dress code will be forwarded to you as soon as this call is ended. I look forward to meeting you and your cohort in one week. Good day.” The Director leaned forward slightly, and the screen went blank as he ended the call. Darien sat there for a moment, trying to digest what had just happened.

He jumped when his mother hugged him from behind. “I’m sorry! But I’m just so excited! This is everything we’ve dreamed of for you!” she said breathlessly. “My baby’s gonna be a lab director!”

“Mom! It’s a lab assistant! You better not say that to anybody else!” Darien said, glancing around as if somebody might overhear them.

“I know, I know. I won’t say anything. I’m just sooo proud of you!” His mother laughed again, and Darien couldn’t help but smile. Her happiness was contagious.

“I’m gonna go do some reading up on the science. Wanna be ready next week,” he told her, plastering a smile on his face.

“Of course! Dinner will be in a couple of hours, once your father gets home. I’ll call you,” his mother told him with one more hug.

Darien wandered up to his room. He didn’t want to sit outside, where one of the neighbors might see him and want to talk. And then he’d have to tell them and act excited, because who wouldn’t want a career in the Food Labs? He closed the door to his bedroom and leaned on it. A heavy sigh escaped him, and he threw himself on his bed. Of course he wanted this career. Everybody did. He was really lucky to get it. But…why wasn’t he as excited as his mother? Or as proud as he knew his father would be when he heard the news?

Lying on his back on his bed, staring at the ceiling, Darien dragged his hands down his face as scenes from his hidden vids played out behind his eyelids. Food labs. Cowboys. Leaving the planet. Were there cowboys in space? Would he ever find out, for certain? What was he going to do? He let his mind drift to the new spaceport, the traders he’d met, the market, and the vid he’d been surreptitiously watching when his mother had found him.

A few weeks ago, inspired by one of the vids that told the story of a young boy who’d followed some cowboys, Darien had taken the risk of visiting the market at the spaceport. What he’d seen had been astounding.

Food that had been grown, not manufactured, people who were loud, boisterous, and seemed slightly crazy to a sixteen-year-old raised in the restricted culture of Siris IV. The market was a cacophony of color, sound, and smells. Darien thought it was glorious. He’d started chatting with one of the traders, Zaran Falzon. Zaran had answered all of Darien’s questions with good humor and some sympathy. Darien had managed to return to the market almost every day to talk with Zaran. It was Zaran who’d given him the old vid player and the vids about cowboys.

Darien sighed and brought himself back to the present. He had a week before starting his new job. At least he had one more week to visit the market.

Later that night, after dinner and a long discussion with his father about how Darien was carrying the reputation of the family now, and he had to be careful about who he was seen with, and how he conducted himself, and he had to remember that they were all relying on him, Darien collapsed back in his room.

It felt like the walls were closing in. He had excelled in the food lab track at school, but he’d only chosen it because his parents, specifically his father, pushed it. Yes, there were other career tracks, but this one, food lab assistant, was the most difficult to get into and finish successfully, and the most prestigious.

It was the one his father spoke about most often. He’d never told the whole story, but Darien thought that his father had tried to become a food lab assistant and had failed one or more of the required classes or exercises. Thus, he’d pushed his dreams onto Darien.

The house grew quiet, and Darien came to a decision that had been floating around in the back of his head ever since he met Zaran, and had been cemented after the call with Director Langsdale, and his father’s words at dinner. Darien was leaving the planet. He wasn’t going to live his father’s life. He was going to live his own life. Before he could change his mind, Darien grabbed a small backpack, and with shaking hands, stuffed in some clothes, food cubes, and a light. He turned off his percomm to avoid being tracked, and stuck the unit in a pocket of the bag.

Like every kid raised in the restricted world of Siris IV, Darien had learned long ago how to avoid the ever-present cameras and scanners to sneak out of the house at night. He waited until he was certain his parents had gone to sleep, then waited another fingernail-gnawing twenty minutes before quietly slipping out of his bedroom, and stealing down the hallway to the front door.

Once at the door, he paused and waited for the front camera to shift away from the door. As soon as it started to move away, he ducked, darted down the three steps, and crouched between the stairs and porch support wall. Darien watched the red eye of the camera swing back, and once it started away again, he raced down the path to the street, making a sharp left and stopping behind a fence. After counting out the seconds that the camera would take to make another circuit, he carefully stood up. and putting his backpack on his shoulder, forced himself to walk away from the house.

As he walked, the full implications of what he’d just done hit him in a shockwave of emotion. He gasped for breath and doubled over with his hands on his knees.

He was never going to see his parents again. They’d never know what happened to him. Hopefully, they’d figure out he went offworld, and hopefully the Community Council for Social Control would not punish them for something he did.

He knew his father would be angry, but there was no help for that. Mom would be sad, and he cringed when he remembered how happy she’d been that afternoon, but Darien thought that there might be a very small part of her that was happy he’d left. He straightened up and forced himself to keep walking.

Once he reached the edge of the living area, he picked up his pace, and kept a watchful eye out. While the living area was quiet at this time of night, there was still a good deal of activity in the commerce area. With the spaceport and traders not that far away, it was busier than it had been in the past.

He walked up to the trader’s entrance to the spaceport instead of the main market. His nerves were on fire. No one had tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t be happy until he was sitting with Zaran. It occurred to him that he hadn’t mentioned his plans to Zaran. Hopefully, the trader would be willing to take a new assistant offworld with him.

Darien decided he couldn’t worry about that right now. It was too late to turn back. If Zaran wouldn’t take Darien with him, then he’d just find another trader to hire on with. They were always talking about needing help; there had to be somebody who’d take a chance on him.

At the spaceport entrance, he was stopped by one of the Trader’s Guild security guards. Thankfully, it wasn’t one of the Community Guardians. Darien remembered that one of the arrangements for the traders, at the insistence of the Community Social Control Bureau, was that the traders would provide their own security.

Darien gave a small sigh of relief when he recognized the guard. Indranee had seen him many times as he came and went visiting Zaran. She smiled at him as he came up to the entrance.

“Darien! What brings you out here this time of night? Shouldn’t you be at home?” she asked in a quiet voice. She motioned for him to come through the gate.

“I, uh, I need to talk to Zaran,” Darien told her, moving quickly into the spaceport. Doing so meant he was no longer on official Siris IV territory.

Indranee cocked her head to one side. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but then just smiled. “Well, you know where to find him. I’ll see you later,” she said, gesturing toward the busy center of the spaceport.

“Thanks, Indranee. I’ll see you later.” Darien returned her smile and set off towards the docking bays and Zaran’s ship.

After ten minutes of weaving between vendors and food stalls (with real food, which still amazed him), Darien found himself at the back edges of the spaceport, where the ships of the traders were docked.

He was always fascinated by all the different shapes and sizes of ships, from large, luxurious liners that looked like they could hold a few hundred people, to small one- and two-man hoppers, some of which looked like they were held together with a wish and a prayer. Darien walked past the pad entrances until he found Zaran’s sigil hanging above one of the doorways.

Pushing the coms link, Darien hoped Zaran was on his ship and willing to see him. Several heart-stopping seconds passed before the intercom next to the door crackled to life.

“Who’s there?” Zaran’s deep, accented voice came out of the speaker.

“It’s me, Zaran. Darien. Can I talk to you?” Darien asked hesitantly.

“Lad! Of course, of course! Come in!” The buzzer on the door sounded, and Darien pushed it open and stepped into the docking bay. The ramp on the ship sitting in front of him was lowering as he walked through the door, and Zaran hurried down to greet him.

“Darien, lad! What brings you out here now? Is everything okay?” Zaran asked, gripping his forearm in greeting.

“Everything’s fine. I…um…I wanted to talk to you about something,” Darien said.

Zaran eyed the backpack that Darien shifted on his shoulder, and a knowing look came into his eyes.

“Of course. Come in. I’ll make some tea and we’ll talk,” the trader said warmly. He gestured for Darien to precede him up the ramp and followed him into the ship.

Zaran led the way to the living quarters area, where there were a couple of sleeping cabins, and a tiny sitting area with a table, two chairs, and a short sofa with a built-in vid viewer next to a small galley. Zaran waved to the table and chairs, and Darien sat down while Zaran busied himself with putting water into an electric kettle, and pulling out a teapot, real tea, and mugs. When the water boiled, he poured it into the pot containing the tea leaves and put the lid on. He reached into the cooler and pulled out a jar of what Darien remembered was called milk. Zaran waved the bottle at Darien in question. Not terribly familiar with it, only having had it a couple of times before when he’d had tea with Zaran but wanting to fully embrace his new life as much as possible, Darien nodded. Zaran poured a bit of the milk into each mug and then brought mugs and teapot over to the table.

“While we wait for the tea to fully steep, tell me what’s going on,” Zaran said. He folded his arms on the table and gazed expectantly at Darien.

Suddenly unsure in the spotlight, Darien wiggled a bit on the chair and cleared his throat. Zaran waited patiently.

“Well, um, I, uh, I was hoping I could come with you when you leave here. I don’t want to do the job the Council has for me. I want to find cowboys!” he mumbled.

Zaran raised an eyebrow. “You want to find cowboys?”

“Well, yeah, like in the vids you gave me. If they exist. And I’m really sorry, but I had to leave those… I didn’t have time to go back and get them…they would’ve seen me! But, um, I really don’t want to be here…I mean, on Siris IV anymore. I don’t want to work in the Food Lab. I mean, I know it’s prestigious and all, but it’s boring…and I’ll never be able to go anywhere!” His voice rose to a quiet wail.

Zaran gazed at Darien, sympathy in his eyes. “Okay, lad. Back up and tell me the story from the beginning,” he said, pouring tea for both of them.

Darien told him everything. It felt like all his doubts, worries, dreams, and emotions just flowed out of him. The idea of a sympathetic listener was new to Darien. Anybody else would have shut him down for having the wrong kinds of thoughts. It was a relief to finally pour out his heart. Throughout the entire retelling, Zaran’s expression shifted from concerned to sympathetic, to anger at one point, and back to sympathetic.

“And so Indranee let me in and, um, well, here I am,” Darien finally finished, staring down at his cooling tea.

Zaran quietly sipped his own tea before looking back up at Darien.

“Well, lad. I know where I can find some cowboys for you. Even some cows. Are you really sure you want to come with me? I’ll be honest: I’d like some company for some of the long hauls, so I’m happy to take you on. But are you sure you want to do this? It can take weeks to get between stations and might be even longer before we set down on another planet,” Zaran said.

Darien swallowed. He knew it would be unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, but… “Yes, sir. I am sure. If I stay here, I know exactly what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. I have no idea what will happen out there,” he waved a hand vaguely upward, “but I’d like to find out,” he finished.

Zaran stared at him for a long moment, and Darien’s stomach clenched with worry. Finally, Zaran smiled. “Okay then. You can come along. But!” He waved a finger at Darien’s wide grin. “You have to leave a message for your parents with the port authority. I don’t want anybody thinking I kidnapped you, and that way, they won’t worry as much.”

“Yes, sir! I can do that. Can I ask Indranee to take a note?” Darien answered. He practically vibrated with excitement.

“Yes, Indranee can deliver a message. But don’t you have your percomm on you?” Zaran asked.

“I do…but I turned it off so the Guardians couldn’t track me,” Darien said, suddenly afraid everything was about to be snatched away from him.

“Ah. Good idea. I’m glad you thought of that. Let’s go talk with Indranee and see what she says,” Zaran replied. He stood up and put his teacup on the counter in his small galley.

Stepping out of the ship and walking toward the entrance to the dock, Darien heard raised voices coming from the direction of the spaceport gate. The voices were drawing closer to the docking bay entrance.

“Get back inside, son,” the trader hissed, shoving Darien back. “In the passageway between the galley and the bridge, find the floor panel outside the supply closet. Pull it up and hide in there. Don’t say a word. Move!” He gave Darien another shove and turned to back to the entrance, just as the intercom buzzer sounded.

“Zaran? Are you there? There are some Guardians here who want to ask some questions.” Indranee’s voice came through the speaker.

Darien whirled around and ran back into Zaran’s ship. He raced along the passageway and almost missed the storage closet. Skidding to a stop, he frantically looked around for the promised floor panel. He finally spotted a small inset ring on the floor at the corner of the closet door. He stepped to the side of the door and pulled the ring along the small track. The floor panel popped up and slid sideways across the floor.

After one quick glance down, Darien dropped into the opening, hoping it wasn’t a long fall. He hit the bottom quickly and realized there was not enough height for him to stand up when the panel was closed. He reached out to grab the panel and pulled it over his head, crouching down in the dark space. Once it was aligned over the opening, the panel quietly slid back into place.

Darien was impressed with the ingenuity of the hidden space and wondered why Zaran would need something like that. Footsteps and loud voices sounded overhead, and Darien crouched down into a sitting position, trying to scrunch himself into a corner of the space, as far from the opening as he could get.

“Praetors, the treaty clearly states that you are not to come onto the grounds of the spaceport without express permission of the Trade Overseer.” Indranee’s voice came faintly through the floor.

“We have permission,” one Guardian responded. “A citizen of Siris IV is missing, and we have permission to search for him.”

“If he is a citizen, does he not have the authority to do as he wishes? Why are you searching for him?” Zaran’s mild question sounded from right above Darien’s head.

“He is a valued member of this community,” the same Guardian said. “And even though he is of age, his father is worried the boy is under some vile influence or kidnapped, as that would be the only explanation for his disappearance right before he is due to start a coveted job at the Food Production Laboratory.”

Darien smothered a gasp. His father had sent the Guardians after him. He must not have evaded the cameras as well as he thought. Darien held his breath, listening to the conversation above him.

“Well, you’re welcome to search my ship… provided you don’t touch anything and personally pay for any damages you might incur, as per the treaty,” Zaran answered.

The footsteps paused. “This is a small ship, and I don’t see anywhere a sixteen-year-old boy could hide,” the other Guardian said in a bored voice. “Let’s move on to the next ship so we can finish up with this.”

“Rest assured, we will let you know if we hear of anything,” Indranee said.

Footsteps sounded overhead once again and then faded away in the direction of the entrance to the ship. Darien held his breath and didn’t move. Ten minutes later, he nearly jumped out of his skin when the floor panel slid back. Zaran stuck his head into the opening.

“They’re gone, son. You can come out now. I’m aiming to take off in about an hour. Sooner than I was planning, but I don’t want those Guardians coming back. Can’t keep you in my hold forever.” Zaran smiled at Darien and held out a hand to help him out of the compartment.

Darien grabbed Zaran’s hand and clambered out. He stood in the passageway, shaking and trying not to cry. For his father to have acted so quickly, he must have been spying on Darien for ages. That would explain how he knew to send the Guardians to the spaceport. Taking gulping breaths, Darien forced the threatened tears to recede.

Zaran looked at him with sympathy in his eyes. “Let’s go to the galley and get another cup of tea and then I’ll show you the pre-flight routine. Today, I’ll do the outside checks for obvious reasons, but you can help me run through the computer checks once that’s done.” He smiled and led the way to the tiny galley.

Darien took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He was committed now. Leaving Siris IV and heading into the unknown of space. At least, unknown to him. And there might just be cowboys somewhere out there in space.

Two weeks later, Zaran guided the little trading ship into one of the docks in the market section of the Thonides spaceport. Thonides was the largest city on Unkiri, and Darien knew that Zaran hoped to make most of his money from this stop. They’d be here for at least three weeks.

Once landed and locked into the dock, Darien helped Zaran off-load his goods and set up a trading kiosk just outside the docking bay. They’d live in the ship while working at the kiosk.

Darien was unloading the last bundle of goods when he saw it. Stuck to the wall, between two kiosks across the way, was a poster.

A poster with a cowboy astride a bucking horse, advertising a rodeo. With real cows, real horses, and…

Real cowboys.

Darien caught his breath. Real cowboys. He dropped his bundle and darted across the small alleyway to get a closer look.

GALAXY RODEO

The galaxy’s only live rodeo!

Re-live the Wild West of Old Earth with calf-roping, bull-riding and more!

Shows every other day through the end of Discovery Day celebrations. Tickets available for 25 credits per person.

Learn to ride like a real cowboy! Private lessons available on days without a show. Send a message to Galaxy Rodeo for details.

“Ah, you saw it. I was hoping to surprise you,” Zaran’s voice came from behind him.

Darien whirled around. “Did you know this was here?” he asked in a whisper.

“Yep. I contacted a couple of friends and got tickets right after we left Siris IV.” He pulled out his percomm and tapped the screen, turning it so Darien could read it. The tickets were for tonight! Impulsively, Darien threw his arms around the trader.

“Thank you, Zaran! Thank you! I’ll figure out a way to pay you back! Thank you so much!” he exclaimed.

Zaran pulled back. “Eh, kid. This is a present for you. You’ve been asking me all about cowboys practically since the day I met you. Think of this as my gift celebrating your new life.” He laughed at the look on Darien’s face. “But first, we have to get set up for tomorrow. Then we can wander over to the arena. Might be that my friend can get us in early to see the horses and cows.” He gave Darien a wink and strolled back over to his kiosk.

Dumbfounded, Darien stared after Zaran. “Hey, kid! Quit blocking my customers!” a surly voice sounded on his left. Darien jumped guiltily.

“Sorry!” he threw back over his shoulder before racing back to Zaran’s ship.

“Zaran!” he called, running into the ship. “Zaran! Are we really going to see cowboys tonight?”

A chuckle floated back from the cargo bay. “Not if you don’t help me get these crates outta this hold and set up!” Zaran replied.

Darien sprinted toward the cargo bay and snatched up the last few crates before turning and racing back out to the booth.

Zaran let out a loud laugh and followed at a more sedate pace.

A couple hours later, the booth all set up for the next day’s trading and locked down for overnight, Darien eagerly followed Zaran as they walked to a bank of taxis. A five-minute taxi ride brought them to the front of a huge entertainment complex on the edge of the city.

Darien swiveled his head back and forth, trying to take in all the sights and sounds of the city and the entertainment district. Zaran smiled. “C’mon, kid. The arena for the rodeo is over this way,” he said, angling his way through the complex. Darien hurried to catch up, desperately afraid of losing Zaran in the crowd and thus losing his chance to see cowboys.

Zaran led the way around the arena to a door marked “Performer’s Entrance.” A security guard standing outside the door raised an eyebrow as Darien and Zaran approached. Darien felt his stomach drop. Hopefully, the guard would let them in.

As they got to the door, it opened and a tall, rangy man wearing a cowboy hat, blue pants, and—Darien swallowed a gasp—actual cowboy boots stepped out.

“Hey, Zaran. There you are,” the man said with a smile.

“Hello, Marek. We had to set up for tomorrow first. This is Darien Stratten. Darien, this is Marek Dohnal. This is his rodeo,” Zaran said, giving Darien a small push forward.

Marek tipped his hat at Darien. “Pleased to meet you.” He turned to the security guard. “How’re you doin’, Dragan? These are the guests I was telling you about.”

The security guard nodded. “Good, thanks, Marek,” he replied, stepping aside so Darien and Zaran could enter. “You gentlemen enjoy the show.”

“Thank you. I’m sure we will.” Zaran gestured for Darien to follow Marek into the arena.

Inside, Darien took a deep breath, recognizing the smell of horses, cattle, and hay by the descriptions rather than any experience with them. It was intoxicating, even with the slight underlying smell of manure. Somehow, that made it all the more real. This was what it meant to be a cowboy.

Zaran nudged him with an elbow, and Darien realized that Marek had been speaking to him.

“I’m sorry, sir. What did you say?” Darien asked, feeling his face flush.

Marek laughed. “Don’t know that I’ve ever seen anybody as entranced as you are, lad. I asked if you wanted to meet some of our horses, and I’m going to guess that the answer is a resounding yes!”

“Yes, sir! Please!” Darien exclaimed. “I’ve never seen a real horse before!”

“Well, then, follow me,” Marek said, walking toward a barn area that appeared after a turn in the corridor.

Darien restrained himself from jumping up and down in glee when he entered the barn behind Marek. He remembered from his reading and vid watching that horses didn’t react well to sudden movements or sounds. Marek stopped in front of one stall and ran a hand down the long bay nose that poked out to greet him.

“This is Apollo. He’s one of the best calf-roping horses there is. Apollo, this is Darien. He’s never met a horse before, so be nice,” Marek said, smiling at the horse.

Apollo snorted and nodded his head. Marek looked over at Darien. “C’mon over here and say hello. He won’t bite. Here, you can give him this.” Marek fetched a chunk of something orange out of his pocket and handed it to Darien.

Darien turned over the orange thing in his hand, marveling at the rough feel of it. “It’s a carrot, lad. A real, grown-from-a-seed carrot.” Zaran’s voice came from behind him. Darien glanced back, his eyes wide. “Raised on Siris IV,” Zaran explained to Marek.

“I’ve never seen one before, sir,” he said, turning back to Marek. The cowboy shook his head.

“Put the carrot on the palm of your hand and keep your hand flat. Right. Now, put your hand under Apollo’s nose and hold still,” Marek instructed him.

Feeling nervous, both because of the huge animal in front of him and the strange sensation of the carrot in his hand, Darien did as he was told. He carefully edged his hand with the carrot toward Apollo. The big bay stretched his neck out and gently pulled the carrot off Darien’s hand with velvet-soft lips. Darien turned to gaze at both Marek and Zaran, a wide grin splitting his face.

“That was amazing! May I do that again, sir?” he exclaimed, looking up at Marek.

Zaran laughed. “That’s the biggest smile I think I’ve ever seen on anybody!”

Marek joined the laughter. “Maybe after the show, we can go for a bit of a ride,” he offered.

If possible, Darien’s eyes got bigger. Ride a horse? That was an impossible dream!

Zaran gave him a small shove in the back. “Okay. We’ll come back after the show, Marek. Let’s go find our seats, lad,” he said, winking at Marek.

Darien bobbed his head frantically, hoping that Marek and Zaran understood that he would be coming back for that promised ride. Still grinning from ear to ear, Darien followed Zaran back through the barn and out into the main arena. The air was warm, and the slight breeze from the venting system carried the smell of hay and animals.

He took a deep breath. He wanted to imprint the memory of those smells in his brain. He never wanted to forget this moment. Real cows, real horses, and real cowboys. Any twinge of guilt or longing he might have felt on leaving his parents and Siris IV vanished with those smells. There was more life, more freedom, more adventure just in this arena than he’d ever experienced back home.

Zaran led him to their seats, which overlooked a small pen with a high fence around it. “Marek got us some good seats,” Zaran commented as they sat down.

Darien looked at him. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“See that pen?” Zaran pointed down. “That’s where the bull and bronc riders will mount up before being released into the ring. We’ll have a close-up view of it all,” he told Darien with a smile.

Darien glanced down at the pen. It really wasn’t all that far away. He tried to imagine what it would be like to see a bull that close. Would it be as exciting as seeing the horses? He wasn’t sure it could get any more exciting.

An hour later, he had to revise his ideas about how exciting a rodeo could get. The show started with barrel racing and team roping. Darien watched, fascinated, as the men and women became one with their horses and raced around the arena, or worked together to rope a calf within the allotted time.

Then came what Zaran called the saddle broncs. He explained to Darien that the cowboy had to stay on the wildly bucking horse for at least eight seconds, holding on with just one hand, to remain eligible for a score. Most exciting of all, the bronc riders and horses used the pen just below where Darien and Zaran were seated. As each horse and rider exploded out of the gates, Darien’s heart jumped with excitement.

As the events went on, Darien’s attention remained glued to the arena floor. He had never seen anything like it. The clear working relationships between horse and rider, the respect everybody had for the bulls and horses they attempted to ride was eye-opening for him.

Growing up, he’d been told that humans and animals should remain separate and that humans shouldn’t interact with animals, thus the need for the Food Lab workers. The idea that humans and animals could have any sort of relationship was completely new to Darien.

After the show, Darien was buzzing with excitement as he and Zaran made their way back to the barn to meet with Marek. As they wended their way through the corridors leading to the barn area, a young man about Darien’s age and bearing a strong resemblance to Marek fell in beside them. Zaran clapped him on the back in greeting.

“Remington! How are you? Darien, this is Marek’s son, Remington Dohnal. Rem, this is Darien Stratten, currently my apprentice and assistant pilot.”

Like his father, Remington sported a cowboy hat and boots. Darien felt a small spurt of jealousy for how easily Remington carried himself, just like a real cowboy.

Remington held his hand out. “Pleased to meet ya, Darien. Dad mentioned you’ve never seen a horse before?”

“No, I haven’t.” Darien blushed. Even though this cowboy was the same age as him, he felt somehow much younger and more naive. “On my planet, we didn’t have any animals around us.”

Remington’s mouth made an “o” of surprise. Zaran nodded. “His planet is one of the lost colonies. Didn’t get rediscovered until about ten years ago. So, yeah, some interesting cultural habits,” he said, rescuing Darien from trying to provide an explanation that he himself didn’t really understand.

“Oh. I can show you around, if you like,” Rem offered. “After you take that ride with my dad, of course.”

Darien nodded. “I’d like that,” he said, as they reached the entrance to the barn area. Marek was standing in the aisle between the stalls holding the leads to two horses.

“There you are. Ready to go riding? Neither of these guys had to work tonight, so they’ll appreciate a little exercise. This is Slate.” He nodded at the tall grey gelding on his left, “and this is Duchess.” He tipped his head at the smaller palomino mare standing on his right. “I’m giving you Duchess, since she’s quieter and more patient than many of the others. Ready?” He smiled at Darien, who nodded vigorously. “Let’s go.”

The small group made their way back out to the now-quiet and empty arena. Marek glanced around. “Since we’re doing shows here for the next couple of weeks, this place is pretty much ours for the duration,” he said, answering Darien’s unspoken question.

Marek walked both horses over to one side, near the pens where earlier Darien had watched riders clambering up onto bulls and broncs. Zaran climbed up on the railings surrounding the arena floor and perched on the topmost rail. Remington took Duchess’s reins and Marek turned to Darien.

“All right now, stand here, facing her tail. Now, grab the saddle horn and the back of the saddle. Exactly, good. Now, put your left foot into the stirrup. I’ll give you a boost and you push off and swing your right leg over, got it?” Marek instructed.

Darien swallowed. “Yes, I think so. Put my left foot in the stirrup, push up and swing my right leg over Duchess, sit down in the saddle.”

“On three,” Marek said. “One…two…three!” The big cowboy lifted while Darien pushed himself up with his right leg and then swung it over. He landed in the saddle with a thump.

“I did it!” he exclaimed. He grinned at Zaran, who gave him a raised fist in response.

Remington grinned, as well. “See? Not that hard!”

Marek mounted Slate and nodded at his son, who handed the reins up to Darien. “Ready, Darien? Hold your reins like this,” Marek said, demonstrating. “Let’s go.”

Darien clenched the reins as Duchess took her first steps, following Marek on Slate. As they walked side by side, Marek gently instructed Darien on guiding the horse, sitting properly, and how to grip with his legs. After a couple of laps, Marek pushed them into a trot, and then a few laps later, into a canter.

Darien rode in a haze of joy. He was riding a horse! Just like a cowboy! He was riding with a real cowboy! Marek let him canter around the arena a few more times, before slowing them down to a trot and then a walk.

“Son, you have more natural talent with a horse than I think I’ve ever seen,” Marek told him when they finally stopped next to where Remington and Zaran sat on top of the railing. Marek looked over at Zaran. “Don’t s’pose you’d see your way clear to letting your apprentice pilot become my apprentice cowboy, would you, Zaran? Rem here is my only apprentice right now, and I gotta keep the show going.”

Darien held his breath. Become a cowboy? He glanced at Zaran. He and Zaran had talked on the trip to Thonides about Darien becoming Zaran’s assistant and learning about trading. He felt a little guilty about leaving Zaran, but the possibility of becoming a cowboy was a dream come true.

Zaran gazed at Darien for a moment and then nodded. “If the lad wants to spend his time mucking out stalls and getting thrown offa bulls, who am I to stand in his way?” he replied with a smile. “Truth is, I can’t think of a better way for the boy to make his way in the galaxy. He’s a good shipmate and I’ll miss his chatter, but I was kinda hoping, for his sake, you’d take him on.”

Darien scrambled down from Duchess and ran over to where Zaran sat on the rail. “You really don’t mind? I mean, you almost got in trouble for helping me get off Siris IV. I owe you a lot,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Lad, you remind me of myself when I was your age. Anxious to go see the rest of the world and the galaxy. Only difference is, you had far more to overcome than I did, and you want to do it on a horse. I didn’t expect you to stay with me forever. Why do you think I brought you here? All your talk of cowboys and the old Earth west…I knew what you really wanted,” Zaran told him. He jumped off the railing and gave Darien a slap on the back. “I think you’ll make a much better cowboy than trader, anyway.” He laughed.

“Thank you,” Darien said, impulsively hugging the trader.

“Welcome to the show!” Remington slapped Darien on the back.

Darien blinked and then laughed. “Thanks!” he replied, shaking his head.

He was going to be a cowboy. A space cowboy.

It didn’t get much better than this.

Milo Wolfkiller and the Red Terror

John D. Martin

The early morning air was cool that cloudy spring day, as Milo and Virat Patel strode through the dew-damp grass, the moisture beading off their heavy boots but soaking into the lower legs of their work pants. Both wore light cord-weave jackets against the chill. Virat wore his 45-70 repeating rifle strapped across his back. He brought it as a precaution against the black hook-jawed canids, red-eyed ursids, and other predators known to stalk the wild fringes of their farmland and all lightly populated areas near the Kerryangul Forest in New Hyderabad Province of Herschel III. The expansive, gently undulating pastureland north of the wheat field was shrouded in a gauzy fog that kept naked-eye visibility down to ten meters. That was why Virat was scanning the terrain around them with vis-enhance binoculars.

“See it anywhere, Pita?” Milo asked his father.

“No, not the baby. Just Neha, Smita, only the big girls,” Virat answered.

“I thought that thing had IR capability? Shouldn’t you see a calf in the fog?”

“If it isn’t obscured by something. If it isn’t too far away. If I’m looking in the right direction at the right time. It’s not magic, son,” Virat said playfully. “And it seems like Neha hid her offspring really well.”

Milo sighed, and Virat peered into the fog through his binocs for another few minutes with a fruitlessness that grew increasingly intolerable. They knew that red-and-white Neha, their oldest cow, first of their herd, had birthed her newest calf out near the woods two days ago sometime during the night, and had kept it hidden from them. Jasper Collins had told them of cows doing that, but none of their cows had done this before. This spring, some caprice of Neha’s bovine instincts had driven her to conceal her third calf from them. And though she herself was walking right toward them, Neha was not making it any easier for Virat and Milo to find her offspring. Finally, Virat muttered, “At least I have a better grasp of our small mammal and bird population,” put his compact electronic binoculars in his jacket´s left breast pocket, and told his son it was time to drive the cows in for milking.

Owing to the weather, gathering all nine adult milking cows and driving them into the milking yard took twenty-five minutes instead of the usual nine. The milking itself only took a quarter hour, once all nine of the red, pale brown, or red-white-and-brown-piebald cows had been herded into the Patel family’s feeding yard and milking barn. The structure and the adjoining yard were located to the west and north of the house, beyond the long field, and a mere fifty meters to the northeast from the calf barn. Those two were the newest structures on their land, built three years earlier and in use for two and a piece. The whole area dedicated to their small dairy herd had been carved out of what had previously been the eastern section of their nearest crop field, the one they most often used for wheat. It was far from the largest dairy operation in the province, but it was the newest.

Later, as Virat and his son were driving the cows out of the yard after the milking, back to the north pasture, Milo peppered his father with questions.

“Didn’t our ancestors think cows were sacred? I mean, weren’t they Hindus?”

“Yes, some of them did, some of them were,” Virat replied. “But it’s been centuries.”

“Wouldn’t they have been displeased that we keep cattle like this? Were they even allowed to drink milk?” Milo asked. They had stopped following the cattle and turned around to make their way back to the house.

Virat chuckled. “Displeased that we milk them? No. They did drink milk, and one of our ancestors from the United States ran his province’s second-biggest dairy, back in the twenty-first century. Now they might be upset, even angry, that we eat beef, but reformed Hindus after the turn of the twenty-second century? They wouldn’t.”

“And if this calf is a cow, we keep it, but if it’s a bull, we fatten it up and sell it for meat. Is that right?”

“We do that, or we sell it to use as a stud. I wouldn’t want to keep it to breed here. That would harm the gene pool as the herd grew, possibly.” Virat fished around in his other jacket pocket and found a package of small, tart candies he knew his oldest son—he still had to deliberately think of Milo in that role—and offered him one. “Any reasons you might be asking this?”

“Just thinking that, if a hardworking boy like myself might find that calf before his Pita did, and bring it to the farm, then maybe that boy could raise that calf himself, and maybe he could take it to the auction himself and start a savings account at the bank for himself, maybe.”

Milo rattled the whole sentence off with songbird speed that Virat could not help but chuckle, prompting a protestation of, “Pita, I mean it, truly,” from the boy.

“Yes, if you do find him or her, if you do bring the calf in by yourself, then I would let you take it to the auction yourself, and we would put the money in the bank for you,” Virat answered in a matter-of-fact tone.

Milo chewed his candy and beamed at his father as the two walked toward their house. “Then I will.”

“You will? Just don’t go out unless you know I’m around. Don’t. We’ve got predators and vipers out here, remember? Now, tomorrow, when we go to bring in the cows, I’ll drive them up to the yard while you go look for the calf.” Virat stated his conditions plainly and directly, looking his son in the eye while he did. The boy nodded in acknowledgement. “Now, where are all these questions about cows and Hindus coming from? Grandfather, again?”

“No, I’ve just been reading.” Milo paused, then asked, “And what are we?”

“Farmers, Milo,” Virat answered. “We are farmers for whom questions like those are of little everyday relevance.”

Milo thought about his father’s proposal all through his afternoon school time, chores, supper time, and through the bedtime wash-up and story-time routine. He thought about it when his six-month-old baby brother, Nitesh, woke everyone up at quarter-to-one in the morning, and from that moment, he knew his plan. It all depended on getting out of the house before Pita or Mata woke up. It also meant…slightly bending Pita’s agreement. Pita would be out in the field while he looked for the calf. Eventually. Milo would just be there earlier.

I will find that calf myself, he thought, and when Pita gets to the pasture, he will find me standing over it, waiting for him. He will be so pleased, so proud of me.

Fewer than three hours later, after a shallow, dreamless sleep, Milo slid as carefully and quietly as he could, out of his bed and dressed as quietly as he could, either hoping or praying—he wasn’t sure of the difference—that he would not wake his little sister, Prija, sleeping in the next bed. He crept into the hallway, then down to the outer storeroom, where boots, coats, and his father’s rifles were stored. He first put on his heavy, overlarge black Brahman leather jacket, the one he was still a good year out from fitting, and his boots, which did fit well, though purchased over a year past. The time of day meant he was going to need a light for a while, so he reached up into the tool rack along the wall and took down one of his own head-mounted lights, the kind that cast a cold, blue circle of light directly in front of the wearer. That would be sufficient, and he knew he would only need it for an hour or so.

Next, he weighed his choices of firearm. Pita always took a gun with him when they went out to bring the cows in for milking. His father’s .45-70 was both off-limits and out of the question, due to its size relative to him. And the recoil, he thought, was likely to knock him flat with his first shot, even if he could shoulder it effectively. Those facts made the .36 caliber u-coil rifle his only choice. It was in its charging rack along the inside wall of the room. Its charge indicator showed full, all green. As quietly and carefully as he could, he removed the weapon from the charging rack.

“What are you doing with Pita’s gun?”, came Prija’s high, accusing voice, loud as any fire alarm, startling him so much that he nearly dropped the rifle.

Milo pivoted, catching and supporting the rifle as he did, and there stood little Prija. She was in her magenta pajama-suit with the pink butterflies printed on it, and she carried their Maine Coon, Grey, baby-doll style in her arms. The cat had a look of longsuffering annoyance on his feline mien.

“Prija, go back to bed and take him with you,” Milo hissed, quietly conveying his irritation at a volume he hoped only she and Grey could hear.

“I will if you tell me what you’re doing,” she answered, and shifted the cat to a draped over-the-shoulder-position, stroking him to keep him from running away. Grey twitched twice and then relaxed, his purr filling the small room.

Milo sighed with tense exasperation, then said, “It’s a surprise. I’m going to get that calf Pita and I couldn’t find yesterday. Now go to bed.”

“Are you going to shoot it?” she inquired, pointing at the gun. “Because Pita probably won’t want you to.”

“No, this is for any wolves or ursids or wildcats. Just should they show up,” and he leaned down to her, lowering his voice even more to sound conspiratorial. “If you want to help me give Pita a great, big surprise that he’s going to love, then get back to bed and wait until they get up. Now, go. I don’t have much time.”

“All right, I’ll go, but this had better be worth it,” Prija muttered sulkily, and shuffled off quietly down the hall. As soon as he saw that she had carefully and quietly closed the door to their room, Milo crept toward the outer door to leave the house.

It was still almost absolutely dark outside as Milo headed up the wide path that bisected the north field, headed toward the back pasture where the cattle slept at night. The air was cool, but thankfully, there was no fog this morning, the sky starry bright, therefore cloudless, and when he got far enough from the farmyard’s outdoor lighting to need it, he activated his headlamp so that he could see the ground in front of him clearly. He did not want to step in a cow pile or on a Grant’s viper or other dangerous crawling beastie on the way out to find and retrieve that calf.

Neha’s baby would be…four days old now, he realized. That meant it would be very active, having had plenty of time to gain good control of its legs over the uneven terrain of the far pasture. How big would the calf be? Milo’s family had not been running dairy for very long at all, but he knew from what their neighbor Mr. Greene had said that newborn calves could weigh as much as forty kilos. It was now nearly three years since Uncle Jasper had suggested that the Patels take up the dairy business, two and a piece since his father and he had gone to the cattle auction with Jasper and their friend Mr. Kohli to buy their first four cows and their bull. The bull, a Brahma named “Trampler,” had sired their first seven calves, then been sold with the two male calves. That happened after he had proven that he could live up to his name and nearly killed Prija one day when she had wandered, unobserved, out into the pasture. Pita had decided at that point that paying stud fees to Mr. Kohli or Mr. Greene was preferable to keeping and feeding their own bull.

Milo, though, kind of liked the idea of having a bull around to protect the herd. Would it be a danger to Prija and Nitesh when he got old enough to walk outside? It wouldn’t be Trampler. The easy answer was better fences and maybe a realtime tracking device on his little siblings, maybe coupled with shock collars that triggered every time they got too far from the house. Aff…that would solve the problem.

The rifle was bumping his back and shoulders uncomfortably, so Milo stopped for a moment to tighten the strap. Because he was walking carefully by the light of his headlamp, it took him much longer than usual to reach the cow pasture. He shuddered slightly when he passed the blasted, charred skeleton of the red oak that had once overshaded a huge nest of hooded vipers that had plagued their farm. One of those had nearly killed his mother. He smiled at the memory of how he, Pita, and Uncle Jasp had burned those monsters to ash. None of those green devils would threaten any of them again. Not from that nest.

At that moment, the first pale light of the Herschelian sun was just beginning to tinge the eastern horizon with silver and white. Pita would be waking soon, if he was not already awake. Had he made his time window too narrow?

Milo’s ruminations were smashed apart by a blood-chilling howl, a sound the fourteen-year-old had previously only heard from a great and safe distance, and indoors. It was the howl of the hook-jawed canid, followed by the sounds of a bellowing cow and bawling calf. The animal vocalizations were coming from the northwest, about where the pasture ended, and the skirt of the big north woods began. Right where Pita told him never to go alone.

Milo slid the rifle down off his shoulder and into his hands, so that he could hold it in front of himself in a ready position while he ran toward the source of the animal noises. Racing over the pasture, through the thick grass, he stumbled once on the uneven ground, but recovered, avoiding a violent spill. The howl came again. He sped up, legs pumping and heart pounding, and in a scant few seconds had curved around the forest skirt and up the slight rise in the land that laid to the west to a point where he could see the source of the howling and bellowing. He slowed rapidly and then stopped when he could clearly discern the horror in front of him in the early dawning light.

Neha´s pale red calf, a bull, Milo could see, stood bawling in a break in the forest where the grassy terrain of the pasture became relatively flat. The cow herself was set upon by three…no, four…of the most feared local predators: hook-jawed canids. Nearly everyone in New Hyderabad County called them “black-hook wolves” or just “black hooks.” Each of the attacking predators was most of a meter tall at the shoulder, half and again as long, and two-thirds as wide, he quickly assessed. That matched what Milo had read about them in biology class at the local school group, as did their mottled charcoal and starless-sky coats. Milo had never seen the “hook” part of the name, the jutting, extendable bone protrusions on either side of their jaws in action before. As he watched, his heart accelerating, the rush of fear and terror gripping him, two of them tore into Neha’s rear legs. Another leaped at the panicking bovine’s throat as she thrashed, trying to kick her other attackers away. The fourth was stalking around to the cow’s front, between Neha and her calf.

Whether that fourth hook-jaw aimed to keep her from fleeing or keep her from protecting their obvious real target, the calf, the sight of that calculated, predatory stalking caused a sudden and complete change in Milo’s heart and mind. The fourth black-hook turned with the speed of angry lightning when it heard the horrid, unshaped, sound that escaped from Milo’s lips. The sound was not one of fear, though, but of pure, righteous rage, ready to deal death.

In the bat of an eye, Milo raised the u-coil rifle to his shoulder and fired off three shots, aiming at the black-hook closest to Neha. Only one shot hit, but it put the wolf-like Herschelian predator on the ground, spraying the grass on the far side of it with dark red blood. Milo aimed and fired at the second one that had been worrying Neha`s right leg above the hoof. The shot went wide, so he fired again, hoping not to hit his family’s injured livestock, and with hypersonic speed, a sphere of gleaming steel just smaller than a table-tennis ball tore that hook-jaw’s hindquarters almost completely away from its spine.

Freed of her attackers at the rear, Neha shook off the third, then ran away from the dying canids toward her calf. After only a few meters, she stumbled, though. Her injured rear legs gave way. The bleeding cow, bellowing constantly, attempted again to stand, and fell. Milo had to tear his eyes away from that sight and look to his left. He could see what he took to be the leader, the fourth black hook-jawed wolf, racing toward him. The sound of its growl, its heavy, running breath, and Neha’s panicked bellowing filled his head, but still he looked for that third wolf, the one that had been going for Neha’s throat. There. About seventy meters now, running away. Milo aimed and fired, anyway, and was rewarded by seeing the beast fall to the ground in midlope, then slide in the dewy pasture grass.

The fourth black hook-jaw was almost on top of him, and he could see the bestial, killing gleam in its eye when he turned to fire on it. His shot missed completely. The beast accelerated and closed the distance. Before Milo could take another shot, the massive form lunged through the air, as if shot from a railgun toward him. Milo felt the bulk of the animal drive him hard to the ground. Barely—just barely—he kept his grip on the rifle, and as he felt the raging canid’s teeth sink into his shoulder and upper chest, he fired again. Then twice more. Blood, muscle and mottled, dark fur flew in gouts around him. After that, his monstrous lupine attacker twitched, then fell limp.

Milo laid panting under the crushing weight of the dead creature for one, two whole minutes before the sound of the bellowing, injured Neha and the bawling of her calf drew his mind back into focus. It took all the strength, all the effort he could muster, but he shoved the wrecked, torn canid carcass off his chest, and stood. It took him another minute to catch his breath anew. Then, shaking, bleeding, and feeling every beat of his heart, he started, in a trotting gait that was less than stable, toward Neha and her calf.

The cow had bled profusely from her wolf-inflicted injuries. Standing over her, Milo could now clearly discern that the two hook-jaws which had torn at Neha’s hindlegs had ripped the flesh and muscle sheer open, likely tearing arteries with the curved, bony protrusions that gave them their names. The black-hook that had attacked her from the front had also torn a wound in her right shoulder. Neha laid on her side, panting rapidly, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. The cow’s large, dark eyes were growing dull, Milo saw. There was no way to save her, he realized, not even if Dr. Straub, the veterinarian from Kaur City, was standing right next to him with his whole large animal skimmer, ready to take her off to the livestock clinic.

The calf bawled again somewhere to his left. Milo heard it, but he would not take his eyes off Neha. She had been their first cow. In most of three years, she had given their family five calves, counting the distressed one standing nearby, watching its dam die on the ground. Milo aimed his rifle again, this time at Neha’s skull. He shot a quick glance to his left, toward Neha’s last calf, and shouted, “Don’t look!” before pulling the trigger.

The sky was now growing morning bright, and Milo walked, still unsteady, toward the still-bawling four-day-old bull that now stood barely sixty meters from the site of his fight with the hook-jaws. Milo’s shoulder was pounding, and he knew he had to get home, had to get Mata and Pita to call a doctor, an ambulance, right now. How badly he was hurt, he could not tell, exactly, only that his condition was dangerous and getting worse. But he had come out to this field to do a job: to get that calf for his Pita, and he was not going to leave it out here. No way. There could be other hook-jaws about.

He walked toward the frightened young animal slowly and began talking to it.

“It’s all right. I’ll take you to where you’ll be safe, little bull.” He stopped and bent down a bit, thinking that might make him appear less threatening. “You’ll get to the calf barn where you can have all the milk supplement you can drink, all the grain you can eat.”

“Buuaahh,” replied the calf. And then started to run off to the right, in the direction of the forest’s edge where the pasture ended.

“Ah, so that’s where your mata was hiding you,” Milo surmised aloud as he dashed to intercept the small red bull. “I’m sorry about her, you know, but you must come with me. Now.”

The calf stopped in front of him, stared at him and bellowed, “Buuuuaaah” at Milo once more, before trying to charge past him again. Milo blocked him again, and they repeated this dance maneuver five more times before Milo brandished his rifle, screamed, and charged the bull. That got the red beast to run toward the farm. That was the right direction, at least.

“And you need a name,” Milo muttered, panting as he did. “Goraj, maybe? Or maybe the Red Terror?” He stood watching the calf run farther and farther away from him, but then turn to the west in a loop, slow, and stop, disappearing as it laid down in the tall grass.

“Good, lie down and quit, you…four legged… Hey. Where are all your aunties, huh? Where’s the rest of our herd? They should be right over there.” Milo gestured to the east, then stopped talking. His lungs, his heart, and the pulsing pain in his upper body suddenly and emphatically reminded him that he had little breath left to spare. And that he was starting to shake. He felt a blast of weakness wrack him from the chest downward.

A new sound drew his attention back to the south, toward his family’s farmyard, the keening sound of a skimmer engine at high speed, headed in his direction. It sounded like their cargo skimmer, the one they had bought last year. Milo summoned what strength he had remaining and trotted toward the sound. A pale gold finger of sunlight glinted on the skimmer’s windshield and caught his eye. He started shouting, loud as he could. “Pita! Here!”

The smooth, blue-and-silver vehicle veered off the cow path and came to an abrupt stop a short distance away from him, levitating a half meter off the ground. Pita was behind the steering control. He leaped out of the vehicle with an agility that made the young man smile.

“Son, my God! What happened? Where?” Virat Patel’s words were rushed, frantic, and loud, and he reached Milo just as the boy collapsed to his knees. Virat knelt, put his arm around him and heaved him to his feet. Then, Milo rallied enough that Virat needed to only half-carry the boy to the skimmer. “Son, son, son,” Virat repeated as they walked. “Why? You could not wait until I got up?”

“Wanted to surprise you,” Milo said weakly. “The calf is over there in those tall weeds. And…Neha… Pita, the black-hooks got her. I tried… I tried.”

“From here, looks like you did well.” Virat laid the boy down on the rear benchseat, and kept the fear, the terror caused by the sight of his mauled son lying there from seizing him. He jumped back into the driver’s seat, hit the transmitter/receiver button on the media console and shouted, “Hyderabad County Emergency, this is Virat Patel. My boy’s been attacked by wolves. Respond! Respond!”

The last thing Milo remembered hearing clearly on that day was his father’s calm, taut, but hammering-loud voice telling Ambulance Number Four to meet them at the Collins farmstead and have Type A-Negative blood ready.

Milo awoke to the sounds of his father’s voice and that of another man, a voice he had never heard before. They were speaking in hushed tones, and Milo understood almost immediately that they were talking about him, using words like “blood loss” and “nerve damage.” He opened his eyes and saw his pita and a shorter, older man in one of those surgical outfits they wore at the Kaur City Hospital standing a couple of meters away, more animation in their gestures than their words as they spoke. Then he became aware of a pressure on his chest and shoulders. Tilting his head, he looked down at himself and saw that instead of his jammies or a hospital gown like Mata had worn when they had brought her to Kaur City, a glint of metallic bronze, a swathe of dull plastic brown, and the blaze of a set of yellow and green indicator lights shining up at him.

“Pita, I’ve been turned into a hideous cyborg!” he shouted, the loudness of his voice startling himself and causing the two men to turn and rush to his bedside.

Virat Patel gazed down at his son with concern, said his name, and sat down on the bed beside him, while the older man stood next to the bed, smiling and chuckling softly.

“No, young man,” the older man said. “That’s a chest unit for telemetry and precision-controlled administration of the medications that are regenerating your tissues and suppressing the pain. Units like this were standard issue on the colony ships from Earth, and we still find them useful, antiquated as the technology is. I’m Doctor Witherspoon, and I led the surgery team that put your shoulder back together.”

Milo looked from his father, who was stroking his left hand gently, to Dr. Witherspoon, and asked, “My shoulder? How long have I been unconscious? I guess I can’t call it ‘asleep.’” He paused to cough, noticed the dryness in his throat, and asked, “Can I get some water? Please?”

“You’ve been out for two days, and yes, of course.” The doctor nodded, and Pita went the short distance across the room and got Milo a small plastic cup of cooled water from a bubbler in the corner of the room.

Virat sat down on the edge of his son’s hospital bed again, and after Milo had drained the water cup, asked him, “You’re awake now? Alert? Feeling a bit better?”

Milo nodded, and then Virat slapped him hard across the left cheek. “That was from your Mata, for scaring her half to death, and from me, for disobedience. I told you not to go after that calf alone, didn’t I?”

“Mister Patel,” Dr. Witherspoon said loudly, “that was completely uncalled for, and I don’t think…”

“What you don’t think doesn’t matter,” Virat responded. “And you have learned something, haven’t you, son?”

Milo had crushed the plastic cup in his hand, and a tear trickled involuntarily out of his left eye. He nodded, coughed again, and then said, “Yes, Pita. It was foolish. I could have been killed.”

“Yes, you could have.” Now it was both of Virat Patel’s eyes that began to weep. “If I had not found you in time…” He did not complete the thought aloud, but wiped his eyes, then continued speaking, pulling Milo, chest unit and all, close to him as he did. “First your mum, five years ago, then you. Don’t do that to me or her again. If I say ‘don’t,’ you don’t? Aff?”

“Aff, Pita.” Milo pulled back, nodded, and wiped his face. Then he asked for more water, and how things on the farm had proceeded after he had passed out in the skimmer. Dr. Witherspoon offered to get the water, leaving father and son Patel to talk to each other.

“Well, Milo,” Virat began, “after I called the ambulance, they met me at the Collinses’ place. I asked Jasper to get help for your Mata on the farm while I followed the ambulance to hospital. He and Willie took care of the milking, then Mata called around for help for the next couple of days. Mark Greene is helping with the planting and the Kohlis’ oldest daughter is helping Mata with Prija and Nitesh. What’s her name again?”

“Aditi,” Milo supplied. “She’s a year ahead of me in my school group.”

“And yet you know her automatically, like you’ve been paying attention to her or something…” Virat let the sentence trail off as his son blushed and took the second cup of water from Dr. Witherspoon.

“The Red Terror…I mean, the little bull?” Milo asked.

“Jasp and Willie brought him in to the calf barn,” Virat answered. “And Red Terror’s a great name. It took them an hour of chasing him around that field to wear him out enough to catch him. Before you ask, I will honor our agreement. You didn’t exactly bring him in, but you did find him, and… Hey, what’s wrong?”

Milo wiped his eyes again, then looked up at his father, meeting his gaze. “Neha, Pita. I had to shoot Neha. The hook-jaws, they had ripped her legs open. Her shoulder. There was blood everywhere. There was no way. I couldn’t let her bleed to death there. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, the two were silent, while Virat patted the boy’s machine-encased back and stroked his hair. Dr. Witherspoon muttered something about needing to continue his round visiting patients and excused himself from the room.

Another minute passed before Pita Patel said, “Glad he’s gone,” evoking a chuckle from Milo. Then, Virat continued. “You can raise the calf, son. Oh, and you get both the bounties and the proceeds from selling the pelts of those wolves. Wildlife Management likes to reward those who protect livestock and people from those things, and you did both, so… How does 400 dollars toward your account sound? Plus, the proceeds when we sell the Red Terror.”

Milo shook his head and looked up at his father. “Pita, I want some of that money to go towards replacing Neha. I shot her, so…”

“That’s a very noble idea, but we’ve got enough, if we just keep one of the cows born this year. And it’s not your fault. The wolves were after her before you got there, son. What you did was save the…Red Terror from them,” Virat explained. “And, boy, I am proud that you didn’t run and didn’t give up. Just don’t go out there alone again, armed or not.”

Milo was released from Kaur City Hospital a day later than Dr. Witherspoon had predicted, when the medical telemetry indicated that his injuries were finally healed enough to remove the chest unit. For the three weeks following that, his father assigned him only light chores on the farm: feeding the calves, feeding the chickens, and such. Thanks to the continued assistance of the older Greene girl and Will Collins around the Patel farm, Milo’s mother had the duty of driving him back and forth to physical therapy appointments in Kaur City and took time both ways to remind him that his injuries and his “pernicious torment” were all the results of his decision not to wait on his father that fateful March morning. Milo bore these reproaches in silence and sought chances to change the subject every single time. The most successful of these attempts came when he asked her advice about what to do with the “wolf money” and the future proceeds from the sale of what Milo was convinced would be a prize bull, come next year.

“Save it,” said Mata. “You’ll be old enough to want a skimmer of your own in a couple of years, or a horse.”

“I could get a horse?” The incredulity in his voice was clear. “Really? That would make me a…cowboy.”

He said the word with an almost religious awe, and in that moment, Preeti Patel realized she had said exactly the wrong thing.

“Or a skimmer,” she nearly shouted through clenched teeth, as she imagined a future of emergency calls and drives not unlike their drives to Milo’s post-wolf attack physical therapy appointments. Then a brainstorm occurred to her, and she asked, “What were you talking about with Aditi after your chores yesterday out by the chicken house?”

He blushed. “Oh, just the latest Jared Thorne adventure on the media net, the one that has the monster from the dark vortex. It starts with…”

And she listened to her son recount the heroic adventures of the number one selling character in young adult literature in New Hyderabad for the rest of their drive.

The week after that, when the therapist had given his approval for Milo to resume his normal farm chores, Milo returned to helping his father bring in the herd and tending the vigorous red bull that they intended to sell for a handsome profit come next spring. That meant Milo spent many hours that summer chasing the Red Terror across their farm, out of the wheat field, out of the pasture and back into the calf barn. “RT,” as they began calling him, proved to be a skilled and determined escape artist, leaping over higher and higher barriers, and finally battering through the wooden fence around the back of the calf barn. That happened one particularly hot afternoon in late summer, when he, Uncle Jasp, and Pita were busy preparing the sprayer drones for herbicide duty. Milo reacted first to the clamor coming from behind the barn, racing to intercept the springing, leaping bovine before it could get to the field and cause some unwelcome crop destruction.

“Your name is a little too apt,” Milo panted as he squared off in front of Red Terror. The bull stopped and snorted in front of him. It didn’t charge, but did shove its head against his chest. Milo scratched him behind the right ear, and the calf rolled its head against him, pushing the boy back only a half a meter. Milo pushed back, and for the next two minutes, he and Red Terror tested each other, shoving, turning, four legs against two, bovine instincts versus young man’s mind, until the calf, not the boy, gave way, turned bucking away, while Milo jumped back, stepped aside, and shouted, “Get on back to the barn, you! Get!”

Jasper and Virat were standing a few meters away, watching the whole contest. The giant redheaded man smiled, pressing his lips together. The dark-haired Patel stared at his son, gape-mouthed in surprise.

“I knew he was getting stronger, almost fifteen,” Virat quietly admitted to his old friend, “but that calf is four months and big for that age. My boy pushed it back, and it did not knock him down. Is that just because it trusts him?”

“Eh, just ‘cause they’re playing,” Jasp commented. “But you know what? All that bucking? All that trouble RT’s givin’ you? He might make a good riding bull. And Milo a good rider.”

“Riding bull?” Virat repeated the words louder than Jasper had said them. “Like those crazy men ride at the city fair? The huge ones?”

“Yeah, the huge ones. Red Terror’s a good name for one, and if you feed him right, train him right, he could be a great riding bull, I think. And Milo? Hell, in town, they’re calling him Milo Wolfkiller. You heard that, right?”

“Yeah, at the feed store the week before last,” Virat answered. He watched as his son batted the now-compliant calf on the shoulder to indicate the direction it should go. It went. Virat made eye contact with Jasper and asked, “Think he could make city champion?”

Jasper nodded curtly. “Or provincial champion, if you start training him soon. Lots of boys start at fifteen. The provincial champion last year was only eighteen. Some kid named Bhattacharya,” Collins explained. Virat punched him in the shoulder hard enough to make a sharp sound on impact. “Hey! I didn’t say ‘I got me an idea,’ Vir!”

“No, but I could hear you thinking from here. What’s worse, I like it. And I know he would,” Virat said, pointing at Milo, who was goading, cajoling, and yelling at Red Terror by way of “leading” him back into the calf barn. “Hey, son, your uncle and I have something we want to discuss with you.”

Jasper Collins stifled a laugh.

The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same.

David Weaver

“Have a good day at work,” my wife said to me as I got up to leave. The baby was asleep beside us.

“Should be an easy day. We rounded up everything yesterday. We’re just going to be escorting them across the canyon and then calling it. I might even be home early,” I replied before I left.

The ranch I worked at was not one of the biggest, but it did have the notoriety of being the only one on the planet that worked both sides of the canyon. We only had a few thousand milk cows left on this side. The beef had been moved the week before. We had to move them because they were organic free-ranch squared cows, meaning they lived on two ranges instead of just one. Apparently, this increased profit margins by entire percentage points, sometimes even multiple ones, depending on where the products were shipped to.

As I drove up to the corrals, I noticed something—or, rather, the lack of something. The cows were mostly gone already. They weren’t supposed to be rounded up and moved to the new range until this afternoon, but they weren’t there. At least, most of them weren’t.

I entered the hangear. If I could go back home and take the day off, it would be an even better day. If there were just a few hundred left to move across the canyon, it would only take an hour or two to finish. I was surprised. Normally, on moving day, there were a bunch of mistakes, and it took all day.

“Good morning, Jack,” I said. Jack was the radio operator. He was sitting out front of the hangar. “Did we hire a night crew? And did the night crew get them moved already?”

“Yeah, about that…” he replied.

“Oh no, what happened?” I said.

“The force gate circuit that’s always on? It got turned off sometime last night, and pretty much the entire herd wandered off. You’re gonna have to round them up again. I already got your craft ready to go,” he said as he looked down at his feet.

“We really should get an actual gate. I’ve been saying it for literally seconds now.”

“Yeah, but if we do, we take a five percent cut when we ship dehydrated milk out of the system. People want the cows to feel free and not trapped by a fence. At least, not a fence they can see.”

The corral was definitely much emptier than it should be. Instead of the few thousand cows, I painstakingly herded up and put away properly the previous day, there were a few hundred. I could tell they were the lazy cows, as none of them were more than a few yards away from the troughs. I tried to stay positive. That should make it easier to get the rest of them back into the pen. Why eat grass when you can eat grass that’s been processed and placed in front of you? That’s what humans did. And we created spaceships. As far as I could tell, cows had never invented anything of note. That must mean they want to be back inside the corral. Obviously, the escape attempt was just a miscommunication on the cows’ part.

I quickly cleared a thousand feet in altitude, and my Heads Up Display showed a topographic map of the ranch. A bunch of small dots popped up, showing where all the twenty-four hundred and change escapees were located. Most were in large groups. There were only a few that had decided to try and make a go of it alone. Perhaps these were the inventive ones. I decided to keep an eye out for any signs of intelligence, just in case.

Modern cows were a lot different that even the breeds we had a few hundred years ago. Genetic modification had come a long way. The Monsa-Phyz Mark IVs were genetically modified to be raised on New Catalina. They had to be modified because New Catalina had a problem most cows never really ran into back on Earth: mainly, giant eagles. Or something that was close enough to an eagle that they were called eagles, even though they didn’t lay eggs. Or have feathers. Or beaks. They weren’t really birds, either.

The giant eagles, upon finding out that cows were food, did basically the same thing we did. They started eating them. The genetic coding of small mammals that feared large raptors was inserted into the cows. Whenever the shadows crossed over the new breed of cattle, they instinctively ran to cover.

An interesting side effect of the modification was that the Mark IVs were also afraid of anything that seemed to them to be a giant eagle.

Like the hovercraft I was flying, which for purely asethic reasons, had completely unnecessary swept-back wings, almost like a soaring bird of some kind. A fence and gate that cows could see was inhumane. Chasing them into a fence they couldn’t see, using a genetically induced brainwashing was humane. I was paid to do this.

Herding a large herd of genetically brainwashed cattle was not as complicated as it sounded. Flying between the strung-out herd and the sun, the shadow of my craft passed over them. They looked up and saw me off in the distance. It was still early enough in the day that at a few thousand feet in the air, my shadow was much further away from me that the herd didn’t panic. They just started slowly grouping up together again and headed away from me.

Keeping to the outside of the herd, and slowly moving stragglers into the main body, I spent the next few hours of my day slowly pushing them towards the outside edge of the fence. I could control what parts of it were live, and once the vanguard of the herd crossed a line only I could see, I started turning the fence on section by section. The herd moved in and finally I finished the work I’d done yesterday again, today. Luckily, there were no signs of any bovine-based technology. I checked, to be safe.

It was time for lunch.

Jack came to see me as I was finishing up. He probably already had the force chute prepared. All I’d have to do is get into the air, shadow the entire herd as they moved between two invisible walls, across a bridge, and then into a completely new range full of grass for them to eat and things for them to defecate on. A cow’s favorite hobby, from what I could tell at five thousand feet.

“Hey, Jack, you guys ready for me? I’m pretty much done here,” I said. He looked kind of sad. I probably should have saved one of my wife’s cookies for him so that he knew I wasn’t upset about the issue earlier. I knew it wasn’t his fault.

“About that…” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

He didn’t say anything, either.

“What happened now?” I asked.

“You know the circuit that got turned off which let the cows out the gate? Turns out no one turned it back on,” he said while again looking down at his feet.

I didn’t say anything.

“If it helps any, it’s a hundred percent on now. We decided to tape a box over it so no one would accidentally turn it off again and then—”

“Leave it turned off?” I said.

He swallowed. “Yeah.”

This time, instead of a few thousand escaping, it was just a few hundred. And they had all spread out as far apart as they could.

Maybe the cows figured out the switches? This could have been an inside job. I bet it was the independent cows I herded up earlier. Instead of inventing space flight, they learned how to operate force field hardware. It was the only thing that made sense. How else could a switch that was almost always on get turned off and left off?

Why else would a switch that was in the middle of a giant panel of other switches get turned off? It wasn’t even needed that often. All the feed trucks had transponders on them to let them through the fence part of the force field. The gate was just there for the occasional time we had to let someone into the pens on foot. It rarely happened, due to the cows’ lack of plumbing development. Their favorite hobby made walking unpleasant.

My hovercraft quickly reached minimum altitude over the landing pad I had parked on earlier. As the HUD popped up, only a few hundred head were missing. The bovine escapees seemed to want to stick close to the general population that stayed rounded up.

“Hey, don’t run them too hard. Boss says that between the escape earlier and the long trip later, they might get too stressed. Try not to over fly them, if you can help it,” Jack said over the radio.

That made things harder. It was barely past noon. The sun was high in the sky, and I could only project my plane’s shadow a few degrees away from what was directly underneath me. If the escapees saw my shadow and realized I was directly above them, they’d panic. That would normally send them to where they feel safe, but it would also make them extremely stressed. Thinking you’re about to be eaten by a giant carnivorous not-bird thing would do that to anyone.

“It’s going to be a while, then. I have to wait for the sun to move a bit,” I radioed back.

“He’s good with that,” Jack said after a moment. “We have the chute set up already and are moving the feed trucks though the corral into it. A decent portion seems to be following them. We might be able to get half or more across before you finish there. You’ll have to get the rest across before we lose the light.”

After almost an hour of waiting, watching the escapees slowly get further and further away from where they should be, I started to herd them back in. I altered the fence a bit in order to get a wider entrance, and at least thirty of the four hundred or so cows made their way back to where they were supposed to be without my help.

“You have that switch turned on right, Jack?” I asked as the last few individuals went through the fence.

“Yeah, we double-checked just to be safe,” he radioed back.

“Can you confirm that for me? I really don’t want to do this a fourth time this week.”

“Give me a minute,” he said.

After a short time, my phone notified me with a ping. Jack had sent me a picture of a tiny switch, in the middle of a bunch of other switches, and all of them were on. I had no idea how it managed to get turned off. Maybe my cow theory was correct?

As I flew back to the landing pad, I took a look at the ranch. The automated milking barn was already packed up and on its truck. The corral’s footprint on my HUD was already shrinking. That would force the herd into the chute, but we couldn’t do that the entire way. Invisible fences might make people happy, but using the invisible fences to replace the work of a pilot in a cow’s nightmare-shaped hovercraft was inhumane. Part of me was happy about that, or I’d be out of a job. Or my job would just be corralling escapees, and after doing that twice today, I was really glad I didn’t have to do it full-time.

The sun had fallen enough that I could project my craft’s shadow far enough ahead to unnerve the herd and get them to move through the force chute that kept them on track to move to the new range. It was slowgoing, though. At one point, the chute had to cross a road, and whenever a vehicle came close, we had to stop the cows, close the chute on both sides of the road, then open up the road so it could pass. All in all, it took a few hours to get the entire herd across that road. Then we had to deal with the canyon.

The canyon was considered one of the planet’s greatest features. It almost stretched from one side of the continent to the other. Something had cracked the planet thousands of years before we found it and terraformed it. Sometimes you could even see lava at the bottom. The news people said one day it would eventually split enough to allow the ocean into it. Then we’d have the narrowest and longest ocean ever discovered.

Naturally, the cows did not like being near it. A giant crack in the earth that glowed a little at night must have seemed mildly intimidating to them.

The bridge they were crossing was a prefabricated one that was only ever used for this exact situation. Apparently, the tourism department thought that if they had permanent bridges across the canyon whenever and wherever they were needed, it would slow down the many dozens of tourists we got every year.

Wanted to take a ground vehicle across? Had to pay to have it flown. Or wait until the medium-sized ranch that crossed both sides of the canyon put out the prefabbed bridge for cows three times a year. Everyone on both sides of the canyon waited until we started to move the herds in order to cross, and they paid us to cross after. Sadly, we couldn’t leave the bridge up too long or the government would complain. Perhaps two or three of the dozens upon dozens of tourists that were going to show up anytime now wouldn’t have a good time looking at the enormous crack in the ground.

Naturally, the cows didn’t like ground vehicles. The people in the vehicles didn’t like the cows, either.

After many many hours of slowly moving the herd across, we were done. Back to slowly moving them through a force field fence that they couldn’t see but could feel, with a craft they were terrified of if it got too close, which it couldn’t, because then they’d panic and I’d get in trouble. They finally moved into the corral right before the sun went down fully.

There was one last thing I needed to do, though.

“You’re sure the force gate on this corral is on, right? Switch is on, a box is taped onto it so no one can accidentally turn it off, and you’ve banned all the temp workers from it?” I asked Jack over the radio. He had traveled with the dismantled milk barn.

“Yes, I’m really sure. I double and triple-checked, and we even put a note on it to make sure it didn’t get turned off and left off ever again,” he said. He sounded a little upset that I asked.

“How was your day?” my wife asked. I’d come home well after dark on a day when I should have been back hours earlier.

I patted the baby on her head. “Not too bad,” I said.

High Noon on the Red Planet

Seth Taylor

“Give up your guns! If you come into town armed, we will arrest you!” The cry was oddly accented and carried down the street on a gust of dry Martian wind.

Issach Robbershon squinted his eyes as he sized up the four figures standing at the far end of the street. They were dressed like Hellassian Range Wardens. Black turbans with trailing red scarves topped their heads. They used the scarves to wrap around their faces to protect themselves from the winds of the highlands. Long, flowing black robes were draped loosely over their frames and allowed to flap in the breeze. The robes were pulled back, away from their waists, to reveal tan- or ochre-colored garments which were wrapped tightly around their bodies. It also showed off the weapons they carried on their belts.

Pistols, mostly. Issach could not make out exactly which types, from this distance, but it was a fair bet they were some species of revolver or another. The design might have been ancient, but fewer moving parts and other fiddly bits meant it was rugged and reliable. More importantly, it had fewer places where regolith could gum it up. In the partially terraformed areas of Mars like the Sabaean Highlands or the Noachis Desert, there was still enough of the fine dust particles drifting about to make semi-automatic pistols unreliable, at best. Revolvers could be counted on to work when a man needed them. The Warden on the end, though, he carried a shotgun which was partly concealed by his billowing black robe. He also had a robotic arm that glinted in the weak Martian sunlight.

“That one there, on the end,” said Billium. “That would be Doctor Ramadan.” Issach’s brother spat on the ground in disgust. “Couldn’t hack it as a sawbones in Hellas, but still has everyone call him doctor, anyways. Mean sonofabitch, though, and fast. He killed Herb Shtewart three months ago. Can’t tell who the other three are from here.”

“How did he lose the arm?” Issach licked his lips. The men over there looked as tough as any Arabician cowboy or prospector. Even back on the Freehold in Arabica, he had heard stories about the brutal Range Wardens of the Kingdom of Hellas. He had even bragged that he could take any Warden who thought they could push him around. Those boasts now tasted like ashes in his dust-dry mouth.

“Rumor is he was attacked by a Noachis lion while on patrol.” Billium made it sound like surviving an attack by one of the largest predators on the planet was not particularly impressive.

“Sure you want to do this?” asked Issach as his eyes roved over the four armed men. Besides the distinctive Doctor Ramadan on the right end of their line, the other three were all very similar-looking, with black beards obscuring most of their faces. They looked tough, though, and confident. Their stances said they were completely unconcerned about the armed men down the street from them. Issach hoped his own posture was similar. He was afraid it wasn’t.

“We need to buy supplies,” his older brother replied. “Can’t make everything out of rocks and wind.”

“But we can do as they say and give up our guns while we are in town.” Even as he made the suggestion, Issach fingered his own pistol nervously. It was a faithful reproduction of the ancient Colt Peacemaker, right down to its ivory inlaid handle. It had been a gift from his father, and the thought of giving it to some corrupt lawman, even temporarily, did not sit well with him at all. Still seemed better than what was coming, though.

“No man of the Arabician Freeholds gives up his guns,” replied Billium with a growl. “Least of all a Robbershon.”

“Nor a Yama,” agreed Thom.

Issach looked away from the lawmen at the far end of the street and glanced to the right at his companions. Right next to him stood his older brother, Billium Robbershon. Though five years separated them, Issach knew they looked much alike. Sandy-colored hair crowned a face that was handsome in its youth, even as it was being prematurely aged by the harsh weather of the Highlands. Black eyes looked out of that face with its premature lines, and they were as hard as titanium alloy. Just beyond Billium stood the imposing bulk of Thom Yama, and on the other side of him, the short and slender shape of Franches Yama, his cousin. Thom was as aggressive as a bull in heat, while Franches barely ever bothered to speak.

Despite the difference in their looks and temperaments, they were all dressed as Arabician cowboys.

Just like the Wardens, the cowboys were dressed to combat the harsh climate of the Sabaean Highlands, but their clothes sprang from a different cultural corner of Old Earth. They wore wide-brimmed hats and long dusters that also protected them from the dust and the wind. But while the lawmen wore bold red and black to announce their authority, the cowboys’ clothes were muted browns and reds to better blend in with the partially terraformed landscape. Underneath the dusters, their clothes were simple work shirts and pants made of durable cloth and not meant to impress anyone. The only colorful parts of their attire were the bright colors of the bandanas that they had wrapped around their necks.

“Besides,” said Billium, after giving Thom a grunt of agreement, “they only want to disarm us so that their own people can beat and rob us. We give up our guns, and we might as well hand over our money with them.”

Issach nodded reluctantly and breathed out slowly through his nostrils. “Right. Seems an awful lot of trouble for this shithole. We are days of travel away from anywhere.”

The buildings that lined either side of the street were made of bricks of compressed regolith. That material was only used in the newest and roughest of settlements on Mars, as this area had only become minimally habitable for humans a few decades before. The buildings were low and crude, with no effort wasted on artistry or architecture. The only signs that the frontier outpost belonged to a technologically advanced civilization were the glittering solar panels atop some of the roofs, and a half-dozen solar-powered buggies parked along the street. Issach knew that the buildings around him held nothing more than a few stores and workshops and a couple hundred souls. It was the middle of nowhere. The locals called it Mezar Tasi.

“It’s not about this town,” explained Billium. “It’s about us. These assholes from Hellas don’t like that Arabicians are setting up Freeholds in the Highlands. They think we are a bunch of craterbillies who need to stay off their lands.”

“But they don’t claim the Highlands,” Issach protested. “No one does.”

“The Kingdom of Hellas knows that if it formally claims the Highlands, then it would be war with the Freeholds. Instead, they send in their Wardens. They say it is to keep the peace. Really, it’s to keep any Arabician from setting down roots. We are not welcome here.”

“They’re doing their job. I feel pretty damn unwelcome.” Issach looked back toward the four figures at the end of the street. None of them had moved. They were obviously waiting to see what the cowboys were going to do. “What do we do?”

“We call their bluff. We’ve had run-ins with these guys before. They’ll try to muscle us, but they know they can’t kill us without it being a ‘diplomatic incident.’ If they want our guns, they can take them from our cold, dead hands.” Billium gave his younger brother a confident smile, white teeth flashing under his ebullient mustache. “As Da would say.”

“I think Robbershon men have been saying that since before we came here from Earth.” Issach knew that his own smile was a weak and sickly thing by comparison, but he made the effort, anyway.

“Welcome to the Highlands, little brother.” Billium turned to the Yama cousins. “Let’s get this over with. I want to get back to the cattle before dark.”

All four started walking down the street.

“They are still coming,” remarked Warden Alp Ersoy to his brothers.

“Damned Arabicians are a stubborn people,” Deniz Ersoy replied with some resignation. “How many of these free grazers have we run out this year? Five? Six? And still they come.”

“They are not the type to give up easily. But once we make it clear we will not allow them to establish any ranches, or their damn Freeholds, up here they will go back to their miserable lands on the coast and leave the Highlands to honest Hellassians.” Omar Ersoy did not relish the job that the Office of the Interior had handed him. There was much to admire in the Arabician people, but they were not his people.

“Our people need the room,” said Alp. “Our people deserve the room. We have been trapped between the rising waters of the Hellas Sea and the Highlands around us for centuries. We labored as hard as any other people on Mars to terraform this planet, to bring air and water to the Highlands around us. We deserve these lands, and now that they are finally habitable, these Arabicians dare to claim them?” The youngest Ersoy brother was also the freshest from the indoctrination of the Kingdom’s schools.

“Perhaps,” replied Omar with a weary sigh. “The thing is, those Arabicians were given some of the shittiest land on the planet. Arabia Terra is all craters and crevasses, and now it’s half flooded. They see the Sabaen Highlands as their birthright, just as much as we do.”

“Except they are wrong.” Alp spoke with the certainty of untested youth.

“Probably. But they come from a harsh land, and the peoples who settled Arabia Terra were drawn from many of the mountainous areas of Earth. They are stubborn, brave and tough. Don’t underestimate them. I think I have met several of these cowboys before.”

“Do you recognize them?” Alp asked his older brother. “Have we seen these particular craterbillies before?”

“Yes. The big one in the middle there, with the green bandana, has to be Thom Yama. Which would make the little one on the left his cousin, Franches. The other one in the middle with the blue bandana is Billium Robbershon.”

Deniz sucked air in through his top teeth, which let Omar know his brother was worried. “Tough customers. Wasn’t Thom Yama the one who beat Etemad Kus unconscious?”

“Yes, and Billium shot both the Fisek brothers when they tried to hold him up.”

“I don’t care how tough you think you are,” interrupted Doctor Ramadan. As always, his voice sounded like he had his throat stuffed with wet sawdust. “Every man is just meat when they get shot.” He worked his mechanical arm for emphasis, and the prosthetic buzzed and whirred. “Except me, of course.” The three sentences were too much for the man, and he was forced into a hacking cough. The Doctor did not talk much. Breathing in too much regolith did that to a man, and he had breathed more than his share when he had been on patrol in the Naochis Desert. He was too damned mean to retire, though.

“Who is the one on the right? Next to Billium?” asked Alp.

“I don’t know,” said his brother as he squinted into the sunlight to get a better view.

“Do you recognize the other three?” muttered Thom as they slowly led their horses down the street.

“The Ersoy Brothers,” replied Billium.

“Feck. They don’t mess around.”

“No, they don’t. The tall one in the middle, that would be Omar. He’s the one in charge.”

“Met one of the others before. Deniz. He’s an asshole. Tried to say my cows were on a wildlife preserve. Who ever heard of a wildlife preserve in the Highlands?”

“You just keep your lip zipped and let me do the talking. I know how you can get.”

Issach barely heard the interplay between Billium and Thom as they walked down the street. He was too busy controlling his breathing. They moved slowly, not doing anything that could be constituted as a threat. As his brother had said, they were only in town to buy supplies. Nothing else.

Each of them was leading their horse behind him, and Issach thought about the rifle sheathed in the saddle scabbard right behind him. He would feel much better if he held the lever action in his hands. Reaching back to pull out a rifle would almost certainly be considered provocation, though.

Instead, he concentrated on gripping the reins tightly so his hands would not shake. He was an Arabician man, and could no more show fear in front of his friends than he could fly. If he did, he might as well change his name and move to one of the underground cities of Tharsis. He knew that. Yet, he still wanted to jump on his horse and ride away as fast as he could flog the poor animal into moving. The figures at the other end of the street were big and imposing in their black turbans and robes. They seemed completely unmoved by the advance of the cowboys, and their hands were already on the butts of their guns.

It was not supposed to be like this. He was supposed to join his brother and his friends in the highlands and raise cattle to sell to the city folk and make a bundle. Sure, there were going to be some adventures, but he did not think he was going to get into a gunfight. That was just something guys bragged about…

“Issach.” His brother’s voice snapped him out of his panicked train of thought.

“Yeah, Billium?”

“Are you solid?”

“Yeah, I’m solid.”

“Good. We are going to need you in this. Remember: we are Robbershons. We don’t back down. They are government lackeys collecting a paycheck. They’ll blink.”

“Still not backing down,” observed Omar. “Let’s get this over with.”

The four lawmen started striding slowly down the street towards the recalcitrant cowboys. They walked silently, but the flapping of their robes in the wind and the crunch of their boot heels on dirt heralded their passage. Omar wished that he had thought to bring his rifle with him today, but he had not been expecting trouble. He supposed his pistols would have to do. He did not see any of the cowboys armed with anything other than revolvers, though. Those should not pierce the ballistic silk vests that the Wardens wore under their clothes. Throw in Doc Ramadan’s shotgun, and the Wardens had them outgunned. Good. Maybe he could still convince the idiots to go away, if not surrender their weapons.

By some sort of unspoken agreement, the two groups stopped once they were roughly twenty meters apart. They were in one of the town’s few intersections. At one corner was the general store, another a hookah parlor, and a third held a machine shop. All three buildings looked nearly identical, though, besides their signs in Turkish. The fourth corner was taken up by a corral that held a half-dozen nervous-looking horses. The corral was attached to a stable just down the street, which was owned by Ozgur Kubilay. Omar could just see the stable owner peeking nervously out the door of his establishment. It did not look like he was ready to pitch in on the side of his countrymen.

The two sides stood for several long moments.

No one moved. No one spoke. Only their eyes danced from one figure to another as each man sized up the fellows that could very well be trying to kill them within the next few seconds.

Omar broke the stalemate.

“Billium Robbershon, Thom Yama. The ordinances of the town of Mezar Tasi state that only residents are permitted to bear weapons within town limits. I demand that you either hand your guns over to me or leave town immediately.”

“Oh, we will leave.” Billium’s black eyes were hard and cold over his handlebar mustache. “Just as soon as we buy our supplies. We will be keeping our guns, though.” Though they both spoke English, the Arabician’s words seemed…mushy to the Warden and hard to understand. He knew Arabicians technically spoke a dialect of the language, but Basic English was as much a second language for them as it was for him.

“I cannot allow that,” replied Omar. “It is for the safety of the residents, many of whom are subjects of the Kingdom of Hellas. It is my duty to see to their safety and disarm you.”

“And what of our safety? Huh? You going to protect us, too, while we are in town?”

“Of course.” Omar did not try following up the lie with a smile. He knew it would have only made the words greasier.

“Bullcrap!” snapped Billium. “I know how this goes. You take our guns and then a half-dozen thugs will rob us and beat us to within an inch of our lives. It happened to the Clanton brothers just last week, and Jude Shmith two weeks before that. They never got their guns back, either.”

“We are investigating those unfortunate attacks. I am afraid that their weapons were needed as evidence and could not be returned.”

“How are they evidence? They didn’t even have them!”

“Regardless. The law is the law and, as a Warden, it is my obligation to enforce the law.”

“I’d like to see you try.” The tense silence after Billium’s challenge stretched into seconds as hands hovered over pistol butts and fingers twitched towards triggers. Omar kept his eyes locked on Billium. The man had a reputation as a gunfighter. If this came to violence, then he would need to be put down first.

No one made a move aggressive enough to provoke instant reactions from the others. The tension stretched and then passed when it became clear nothing was going to happen just then. Fingers twitched away from guns and muscles relaxed slightly.

“Who’s this?” asked Omar as both groups stepped back from the brink of combat. He cocked his head at the unknown man on the right end of the cowboy’s line. The family resemblance was strong enough that he suspected he already knew the answer, but just maybe he could talk these morons into leaving town.

“This my younger brother, Issach.”

“Then, for his sake, let’s avoid violence here today. You men can still walk away. Leave town if keeping your weapons is that important to you.”

“And where else are we going to buy food, batteries, and ammo? Am I just supposed to build those out of rock and regolith?”

“That’s not my problem. Keeping this town safe is.”

“You think we don’t know what your game is, lawman? You Hellassians think you own the Highlands, and you think if you just make us miserable enough you can keep us Arabicians away. Brother, you don’t know how bullheaded we can be.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. If you have a complaint, you can inform your government and…”

That was when everything went wrong.

It seemed that just maybe there would be no violence. Billium was still talking with the leader of the Wardens, and Issach knew from long experience that if his brother intended to hurt somebody, he would not spend a lot of time jawing with them first. He allowed himself to relax. That knot of tension in between his shoulders loosened slightly.

Then he saw the Warden on the opposite end of the standoff from him, the one directly across from Franches. The cyborg that his brother had called Doctor Ramadan. He had carried that shotgun under his robes with its muzzle pointed at the ground throughout the encounter, until he began to move it while everyone else was paying attention to the argument between Billium and the lead Warden. No one else saw him start to raise the muzzle of his weapon so that it pointed at Issach’s brother.

“Billium!” Issach shouted even as his hand dropped back towards his pistol and ripped it from its holster. His shout broke the frozen standoff between the Wardens and the cowboys, and everyone snapped into motion all at once.

“Billium!” The shout cut through the bland bureaucratic jargon that was designed to give the Kingdom plausible deniability. Out of the corner of his eye, Omar saw the younger Robbershon draw his weapon.

Omar Ersoy had been in a dozen gunfights over the course of his career with the Wardens, which meant he spent no extra time trying to figure out what was happening and even less time trying to stop it. Action was how a man stayed alive through fights like this.

The Warden’s hand blurred down to his pistol.

Like nearly all denizens of the Highlands, he had chosen a simple revolver over a newer model pistol. The weapon that Omar carried on his belt was a seven-shot Girsan from Mehmet Foundries and chambered in 9mm. It was a standard issue for the Wardens, and he had practiced with it so often that it had nearly become an extension of his arm. It flew out of its holster as if it had been fired by pressurized air, and Omar had it leveled at Billium’s chest a fraction of a second later.

As fast as the Warden had been, the Arabician had matched him, speed for speed. Billium’s gun was pointed at Omar’s own chest, and the two men pulled their triggers simultaneously.

It was the fastest draw that Issach had ever performed.

Even though the disgraced surgeon had already been raising his shotgun towards Issach’s brother, he had not gotten off a shot before the young Arabician had drawn his pistol, aimed. And fired.

He fired two rounds into the Warden, who staggered backward, his shotgun discharging into the ground. Hard-packed red dirt was blasted into the air in a red cloud which obscured Ramadan as he fell to the ground. Somehow, Issach had beaten the infamous Doctor Ramadan. Only then did Issach’s attention waver away from the man who had tried to kill his brother, and he realized what he had wrought.

He saw Billium and Omar empty their weapons at each other in a storm of gunfire. Beyond them, Yama charged the Warden who had been between the leader and Ramadan. The lawman seemed so surprised by the sudden rush that he did not draw his gun until it was too late and the massive Arabician had taken him in a tackle. Franches had drawn his gun, but did not seem to know who to shoot with it. It was chaos.

That was when Issach realized that he had forgotten someone. He whirled back towards the Warden who had been standing right across from him. Before he could complete his turn, his right foot was swept out from underneath him, and he crashed into the ground.

Omar had been shot before. Twice, actually. It was a hazard of his occupation. But he had never been shot multiple times in the same sitting. It was not an experience that he would have recommended.

When he had seen Billium Robbershon leveling his pistol at him, Omar had emptied his revolver as fast as he could in hopes of interrupting the other man’s aim. It had not worked. He knew that he had hit Billium several times, but he had no idea who had been hurt worse in the exchange. With an empty gun and his left hand clutched to his chest, he stumbled back from the fight. He made for the corral, where he could find some cover while he reloaded. He was vaguely aware that Billium was not retreating. The Arabician was standing there in the middle of the street as he reloaded his pistol.

A small solar truck loaded with a couple of bales of hay was parked beside the Corral. Likely, Mr. Kubilay had been feeding his horses before being driven inside by the impending showdown. It would not stop a bullet, as those trucks were built lightly, but it would at least keep him from being seen. Omar fell behind the truck just as a pistol round cracked past him and hit one of the corral’s fenceposts in an explosion of splinters. He began trying to reload his revolver with shaking hands.

It was hard, much harder than normal. His vest had stopped a couple of rounds, but the trickle of blood running down his leg said that at least one had gone through or around it. He had only gotten one round into his weapon when someone else threw himself behind the truck with him.

“Brother,” Omar grunted in greeting once he saw the familiar face of Alp. He then tried to guide another round into the next chamber of his gun. Another bullet snapped by overhead.

“Shit on this situation!” spat Alp as he tried to reload his own gun. He was halfway done before he glanced at his brother. “You’re bleeding.”

“Glad you noticed.” Omar flinched to the side when a pistol bullet tore its way through the hay bale right between the two brothers and sent a spurt of yellow straw into the air. “Where is Deniz?”

“Grappling with that bear, Yama. Ramadan is down. Franches is the one shooting at us. I shot Billium’s brother.”

“Is he dead?” Omar finally closed the cylinder of his revolver, the last round loaded. He supposed he should take some time to stop the bleeding, but that was going to have to wait.

“I do not know.” Alp finished reloading his own pistol. Franches’s gun cracked again, and this time its bullet ripped partially through the top of Alp’s turban and unwound it from his head. He ripped the rest of it off, revealing his head of close-cropped black hair. “Do we wait for Franches to run empty?”

“No, he is keeping us pinned while his friends reload. We go on…”

Then they heard the boom of Ramadan’s shotgun.

“Now!”

Issach knew he was not dead. He was in far too much pain for that to be a possibility. It was not “Fires of Hell” agony, either. It was a much more specific “I just got shot in the shin” pain that burned up and down his leg. There was another spot of fire on his ribs, but it was a candle next to the inferno that was his leg.

He raised his face out of the red dirt of the road and looked around. He had landed facing away from the action, and when he turned his head to the left, he could see his brother and the Yama cousins.

Billium was standing in the middle of the street, reloading his gun. At first, he looked calm and unbothered, but Issach saw him sway and caught the glint of the sun off a round’s brass casing as it fell between his fumbling fingers. He had obviously been hit a few times.

Thom was mercilessly pummeling the Warden he had tackled into the hard-packed dirt of the road. He was like a wild animal, caught up in one of the rages that had made him one of the most feared brawlers back on the old Freehold.

Franches was carefully firing his pistol at something directly down the street from Issach, something that he could not see, with the way he was currently lying.

Directly in front of Issach, about twenty yards down the road they had walked down, his horse was nervously shifting and dancing about. The animal had obviously partially bolted when his master had dropped his reins and the shooting had started. It hadn’t gone far, though. Issach had trained his mount to go hunting with him, and it did not spook easily at the sound of gunfire.

He turned his gaze back towards his brother and Franches, and debated with himself as to what he should do next. Should he use the four rounds remaining in his pistol to help his friends win the fight, or should he make for the rifle he had scabbarded in his saddle? It was then that a shotgun boomed, and Franches’s chest disappeared in a welter of blood. Like a zombie from the old stories from Earth, Ramadan sat up from the ground and swung the smoking barrel of his weapon around towards the rest of them.

Fecking cyborgs!

Alp popped out from behind the truck. Omar was forced by his injuries to creakily lean out from the side. They both had their pistols out and were ready to shoot somebody, preferably the man who was beating their brother to death.

Thom Yama might have looked like a bear, but he moved as fast as a snake. When Doctor Ramadan had miraculously reentered the fight, Yama snatched the half-limp form of Deniz Ersoy up from the ground and held the Warden in front of him as a shield. He then hastily backpedaled so that he was close enough to the swaying Billium that he was at least partially shielded, as well.

Omar and Alp were ready to shoot somebody, but they could not with their brother being used as a human shield.

“You have no honor!” spat Alp at the two Arabicians.

“Ramadan was trying to get the drop on us!” Yama shouted back. He was close enough to Billium now that his back was touching his friend. The injured Arabician gave up trying to stand on his own and leaned against the much larger man. He kept his pistol out and steadily trained on Alp and Omar.

“I wasn’t trying to get the drop on you, you dumb ox.” Ramadan’s already gravelly voice sounded even worse, and there was an unpleasant wheeze under his words. “I was trying to scratch an itch, and that dumb greenhorn panicked like a chicken seeing a cat.”

At the mention of Billium’s younger brother, Omar’s eyes flicked over to the right side of the street where that young man had been. They found him crawling down the street, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The rookie was obviously running like a coward, and the Warden dismissed him as a threat.

“That doesn’t matter now,” said Omar, and he hoped he sounded better than Ramadan had. He looked and saw that Deniz was still weakly moving. His brother was still alive. “You have fired upon and injured Range Wardens in the lawful pursuit of their duties. The only way you avoid the noose is to give up now, and let my brother go.”

“I don’t think we will, lawman.” Billium sounded worse for wear, as well, and there was a distinct note of pain underneath the defiance in his voice. “We know what the justice of the Kingdom of Hellas is worth. We will keep your brother close and mosey our way on outta here. We will release him when we are out of town.”

“They killed Franches,” protested Thom to Billium, but he spoke loud enough that Omar could still hear. “We should take one of theirs as payback.”

“Shut up, Thom. Do you want them to shoot us dead right now?” Though it was half-muttered, Omar could also hear Billium’s response, and he relaxed slightly. It was still a bad situation, but he could at least count on Billium being rational. “What do you say, lawman? Let us go in exchange for your brother.”

“I don’t think so,” responded the damaged voice of Ramadan, and Omar realized that it was not just his opponents that he needed to count on being rational. “We have three guns on you from two different directions, and Deniz there is only big enough to cover one of you at a time. Go ahead. Try to leave. You will slip and then you will be dead.” The former doctor had not tried getting up from the ground, but from his seated position, he still had his gun trained on the two men with their hostage. There was no way he could fire without hitting Deniz.

“Ramadan…” growled Omar in warning.

“These pricks shot me, Omar. Me.” Ramadan sounded as if he still could not quite believe it. “I’ll be damned if I let them get away with it. Deniz is a Warden. He knows the risks.”

“If that’s the way you want it to be, I will kill him right now,” threatened Thom.

“Go ahead,” laughed Ramadan. “I don’t even like him. He cheats at cards. Even you aren’t so dumb to not know what happens when you do that. I shoot you, and Omar and Alp shoot you. You die, and then I piss on your corpse. That will make my day.” The more the man talked, the worse his voice sounded. He did not seem to care, though. Spitting out his hate was far more important to him than the pain it caused. The cyborg did not even pause for one of his wracking coughs.

“Reverse psychology?” asked Alp in a quiet murmur.

“Hard to tell. He is mean and crazy enough that he might actually mean it.” Omar was tempted to shoot down Ramadan himself, but he kept his gun aimed at Yama and Robbershon. Maybe the crazy bastard could bluff the pair into surrendering.

“What will it be, boys?” asked Ramadan. “You going to rely on the court’s mercy or my mercy?”

“They are one and the same to me,” said Billium defiantly.

“Have it your way.” Ramadan leaned into his shotgun, and his finger tightened. Omar felt his eyes widen. There was no way Ramadan could avoid hitting Deniz with his shotgun at that range. He opened his mouth to order the other Warden to stop, but he could tell by the set of Ramadan’s features that such an order would be as unheeded as the Highland wind.

Then there was the sonic crack of a rifle round.

He ignored the resurrection of Doctor Ramadan.

He ignored the pain in his leg.

He ignored the standoff behind him and the peril of his brother and friend.

The only thing that Issach was focused on was reaching his horse. The animal had backed up another few steps. He was obviously unnerved by his master crawling along the ground toward him like a brokeback coyote. But it stopped. Soothed by the low comforting tones that Issach used when he spoke, even as he crawled along with as much desperate haste as his injuries would allow.

“Here, here, there’s a good boy. Hold on right there, Stalker.”

The meaningless babble worked, and he got close enough to catch the reins that hung from his horse’s bridle. He then hauled himself up enough to grab onto the pommel of his saddle, and he pulled himself fully on top of his mount, even as his injured leg screamed in pain.

No one else seemed to have noticed that he had made it to his horse. They were far too busy with the standoff that Thom had engineered. Or maybe they had noticed him and assumed that he was running away. That shamed him. But he knew what he had really been after.

Issach pulled his rifle from his scabbard. Like his pistol, it was a replica of one of the guns from the ancient frontiers of Earth. They had been recreated partially because they held up well under the brutal conditions of the Highlands, and partially because of a wave of Old Earth nostalgia that had been sweeping through the Arabician Freeholds. That meant the gun he held was as close to a clone of a Winchester Model 1894 lever action rifle as one could make with modern materials on another planet.

The Arabician cowboy set the iron sights of his gun on the sneering face of Doctor Ramadan and pulled the trigger. Ramadan’s head snapped to the side as .30 caliber round punched through his temple and out through the rear of his skull.

“Let’s see him get up from that,” Issach said to himself as the cyborg’s brains splattered out of the back of his head. He shifted his aim over to the two Wardens behind the truck with the hay bales.

Everyone was shocked into motionlessness by Issach’s sudden reentry back into the fight. The Wardens seemed especially stunned. They were outgunned now. Issach was nearly forty yards away, and their pistols would have nearly no accuracy at that distance. The same was not true for his rifle.

“Give up your guns!” he shouted.

“What do we do now?”

Omar was disarmed and tied to the fence of the Ozgur Kubilay Corral. It was humiliating and, in his current state, painful. Yet, he was alive and could still be dangerous. Even as he hung his head in apparent unconsciousness, he made sure to listen to his enemies talk amongst themselves. That had been a question from the younger Robbershon brother.

“Now we get the supplies we need and get the town medic to patch us up. That vest I was wearing stopped some of the rounds, but one got through. Some medical nanobots should fix me up, though. Then we get the hell out of here.” Billium sounded as bad as Omar felt, and the Warden was gratified to know he had tagged the cowboy at least a couple of times.

“Where do we go?”

“I don’t know yet. We are outlaws now, and these bastards and their friends will be hunting us.”

“Seems to me that we shouldn’t leave them alive, then,” grunted Thom Yama. He had taken out a very large knife and was ostentatiously testing its edge.

“No, we need them to send a message to their kingdom.” There was the thump and drag of a partially crippled walk, and then a gun barrel was put under Omar’s chin. The relentless steel tilted his head up until he was looking into Billium Robbershon’s face. “I know you were listening, lawman. So, listen to this. We are Arabicians, which means we are as mean, tough, and stubborn as this miserable planet can make ‘em. I know your Kingdom means to take the Highlands for itself, but know that they will have to first fight it out with every mean sonofabitch Arabician up here first. And think about this before you try hunting us down. Next time, we won’t leave you alive.”

“Next time,” Omar replied, though he knew it was a bad idea. “You will be food for the ravens. Ramadan was fox crazy and a snake-mean bastard, but he was one of us. There will be no mercy.”

“Glad to see we are on the same page.” Billium actually tipped his hat at the Warden and then removed his gun barrel from under Omar’s chin. “Let’s go. Thom, get what we need from the general store, and don’t bother paying. We are already outlaws, anyway. Issach, let’s see if we can get our hands on some medical nanites…”

Omar forced himself to watch as the outlaws took what they wanted from the town he was supposed to protect. Watched as they loaded up the body of their dead comrade and rode off into the setting sun.

There was nowhere they could hide. Billium Robbershon, Thom Yama, and especially the murderer Issach Robbershon would be brought to justice.

Omar Ersoy would see to it.

Death And Dying in Feral Canyon

Rick Cutler

“Colt! Colt Ostergaard!”

Colt dropped his hand to his six-gun and looked around the J. Barrett Saloon to see who’d just called him out. On Fenris, most every critter was dangerous and deadly. They didn’t hold a candle to the kind from Old Earth. He relaxed, mostly, when he saw Shelby Yodersen.

He almost didn’t recognize her, leaning on the bar and drinking a frozen margarita. She’d grown up and filled out since he last saw her on the Yodersen ranch. The baggy, flannel shirt was replaced by skinny denims, leather vest, and a floppy brimmed hat. A side-iron was slung low on her hip. Colt looked around for her father, but she was alone.

Shelby pushed off the bar and slowly walked across the room with the margarita in one hand and the other resting on her side-iron. She caught the eye of a dozen men and women and she worked it, enjoying the attention. She was welcome to it, as long at that attention didn’t spill over onto him.

“Shelby.” He pinched the brim of his hat.

“Colt. I thought maybe you were dead.”

“Not yet.” Only mostly. But I’m doing better now.

“It’s been a couple of years. You got time to sit for a spell and catch up?” She nodded at an empty table.

Colt checked the room. The holographic stage at the back of the room had an AI-generated band, controlled by a conductor in the holo-synthesizer pit. More importantly, none of the high-rollers at the gaming tables, the off-shift miners, or the day drinkers were looking his way. The working girls looked relieved, now that Shelby had singled someone out. There was time enough and no trouble brewing. He held out a chair for her and she sat in the one on the other side of the table.

“You thirsty?”

“I’m good. How’d you end up in Irontown?” The official name was Ciudad de Hierro, but only Alphies called it that, and they wouldn’t be caught dead in a common saloon like Barrett’s, which suited Colt just fine.

“I started out as a swing rider on a cattle-drive up to the Oslo sale barn. Once all the New-Cows were sold, I got the bug to see more of the range, so I kept going. I did some varmint control for a couple of farms, rode shotgun for a wagon train out of Dunedin, and a few odd jobs here and there. The last brought me to Irontown.” She licked the salt off the rim of her margarita

“What’s your father think about all that?”

“My father can suck on a cowpie, for all I care.”

No surprise there. Her father killed a boy she was sweet on because he was an Alphie soldier. The war with Alpha Lympos, their sister planet, left deep scars.

“How about you, Colt? The last I saw, you dropped out of sight after that shootout in Piano Gulch.”

“Keeping tabs on me?”

She shrugged. “Sort of.”

“I took some time off. Traveled a bit.” In other words, healed up from that gunfight and dodged some bounty hunters. “I picked up an old six-shooter that needed some work and Irontown was closer than riding back East.”

Irontown was also in the middle of the La Kratera province, the only province that didn’t sign the Declaration of War when the Alphies invaded Fenris. Alphies were free to come and go here, and where there were Alphies, there was Alphie medical technology.

“A six-gun? So you’re still using those gun-powder barkers?” She pulled out her side-iron and thumped it on the table. “You need to step it up, Colt. Winter is over and electro-magnetic railguns are the future.”

Colt used the tip of his finger to turn the railgun so that it wasn’t pointing at him.

“Shelby, don’t be slapping iron on a table, especially in the middle of a saloon.”

“It’s not armed, and the safety’s on.”

“Even so, there’s a whole mess of reasons why that’s a bad idea. For now, just do me a favor and put it away.”

“Fine.” She rolled her eyes and holstered her piece. “How long are you here for?”

“Don’t rightly know. The gunsmith said to come back tomorrow. Could be a couple weeks of work, if she does it right.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Expect so.”

“In that case, I’ve got a proposition for you. Something to fill your time and your pockets.”

“I’m—”

“It’s for a good cause, for someone who really needs help. And the money is good.”

“Then why cut me in?”

“You stood up for me, played it straight with my father, and you did your best for Martin.” She blinked and looked away.

Two years gone and she’s still grieving for a boy she barely knew. Her first love ran deep.

She looked back, and Colt saw the same iron in her face that her father had.

“I need someone I can trust to watch my back. What do you say?”

The money might be handy. Finding a Doc with Alphie Med Tech shouldn’t be hard. Paying the Doc to grow me a new set of lungs might cost more than what I’ve got.

“What needs doing?”

“Let me call my client, Dr. Ramesh. It’s better if he tells you.” She pulled a personal comm out from inside her vest and manually punched up a connection. It was one of those new ones that masked conversations. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t hear what she said or see who she was talking to. Her expression said it didn’t go well. She closed the connection and stood.

“He’s not convinced, but he said to come on up.” She took a gulp of her drink, then headed for the second-story stairway. This time, there wasn’t any sashaying across the room. She was all business now. He took his time following her up the steps and down the hallway.

“Shake a leg, slowpoke. You getting old or something?” She stood next to a door with her fists on her hips.

“Or something.” Not old. Just recovering from the holes in my chest and leg, compliments of Piano Gulch. He caught up to her, and she put her hand on his bad shoulder. He kept a straight face. It didn’t hurt that much.

“Colt, this is important to me. Just promise to hear him out, all right?”

“I’ll give him a fair shake.”

“Thank you.” She let go and knocked on the door.

“Envenu. Come in.”

The Hisperanto greeting made the hairs on the back of Colt’s neck stand up. Shelby opened the door and waved him in.

Dr. Ramesh stood in the middle of the room, facing them with his hands behind his back. He was taller than Colt, gray-haired and hatchet-faced. The neck brace for a metal exo-skeleton was visible under the stand-up collar of his floor-length suitcoat. The coat and the exo-skeleton confirmed what Colt suspected.

Dr. Ramesh was an Alphie.

I figured I’d see one sooner or later. I just didn’t expect to find one here. He crossed his arms and kept his hands clear of his six-gun. No cause to look threatening.

“We don’t need this man.” Ramesh had a heavy Hisperanto accent, as if he’d just gotten off a ship from Alpha Lympos.

“I’m good at what I do.” Shelby stopped and shook her head. “In fact, I’m the best you’ll find in Irontown, but we need more than just me to handle this. Colt knows the Ferals. He knows the High Plains and the range, and he’s good with a gun.”

“Find another.”

“No. It’s him or the deal’s off.”

“Shelby.” Colt cleared his throat. “I haven’t said I’ll help. I don’t even know what the job is.”

Ramesh tilted his head and stared at Colt’s chest, then gave him a slow once over. Colt straightened, ignoring the invisible needles in his leg and shoulder.

“Your breathing and your posture give you away.”

“Gives away what?” Shelby looked from Ramesh to Colt.

“She doesn’t know?”

“Didn’t come up.”

“What don’t I know? What didn’t come up?”

Ramesh waved at a wall-mounted screen. The mechanical joints of his exo made soft, whirring noises as they assisted the Doctor’s low-gravity muscles and bones.

The screen flashed, then displayed a picture of a young Fenri, wearing a frilly Alphie dress.

“This is my wife, Luna. Five nights ago, she was kidnapped outside my office by one or more of your nomadic outlaws. I need to get her back.”

“Nomadic outlaws?” Colt frowned at Shelby.

“Ferals.”

“Got it. Doc, don’t you have a sheriff here? Why didn’t they call up a posse and go after them?”

“We have a garrison of the Alpha Lympos Peace Monitors stationed here. They waited the requisite twenty-four hours before investigating. A patrol followed the trail until they lost it up in the mountains. They gave up after that.” He pressed his lips together in a straight line.

“They gave up because his wife is a Fenri.” Shelby crossed her arms.

Damn.

“Now you get it, don’t you?”

“I do.” A Feral had tried to kidnap Shelby when she was fifteen. He’d failed, and now Colt carried the dead man’s 30-06 on his saddle. “Yeah. I’ll help.” He nodded and stuck his hands in his pockets. “What’s he paying you?”

“Five thousand credits. I’ll split it fifty-fifty.”

“That’s mighty generous of you, but keep it.” I got no interest in taking money for this. I’ll deal with the doctor bills when I get them. He squared off with Ramesh.

“Here’s how it is, Doc. She gets half up front in gold or silver. No paper or bank credits. The rest when we get your wife back.”

“It’s all right, Colt. Credit vouchers are fine.”

“No. I seen how data miners can wrangle anything on the net, and that includes electronic money. Never take anything but bullion when you have a job like this.” Or an Alphie for a client.

Ramesh shook his head.

“I don’t have metal currency or bars. A quarter down and the rest on a credit chit.”

“Dr. Ramesh.” Colt pushed his hat back. “Are you actually dickering over this like she’s a piece of livestock?”

Ramesh hesitated, then shook his head.

“No. Half it is. I’ll withdraw it tomorrow when the bank opens. But I will brook no more delays. She’s been gone too long already. Who knows what these degenerates have done to her?” He put his hands behind his back and glared at Colt. “Now. Men like you don’t work for free. Why are you helping? What’s in it for you?”

“Well…” Colt squinted one eye and scratched behind his ear. “I suppose I could use a referral. I need a transplant. Set me up with a lung doctor and we’ll call it square.”

“New lung procedures are reserved for the miners when they retire. There’s a waiting list for anyone else, and it takes time to culture a new pair.”

“And?”

“And what you are asking isn’t unreasonable, considering your condition. I agree to your terms.”

“Dammit, what condition?” Shelby grabbed Colt’s arm and shook it. “What are you talking about?”

“I got a couple holes in my lungs from a railgun.”

“And you lived?”

He shrugged his good shoulder. “I’m not running any races, but I’m still man enough to do what needs to be done.”

“Good.” Ramesh nodded at Shelby. “Meet me in the morning outside my office. We’ll go from there.”

“We?” This time it was Colt’s turn to look Dr. Ramesh up and down.

“Yes. I’ll requisition a hover car from the lab’s motor pool.”

“Don’t be so quick to tag along, Doc. I can’t guarantee you’ll be safe if things go sideways. It’s not like you’ve been dosed with steroids and trained in heavy-grav like your soldiers.”

“They were Peace Monitors, not soldiers, and I was embedded as a medic with them. I can take care of myself.” He looked at the picture of Luna for a long moment. “There will be no negotiations on this. I’m coming with you.”

Colt looked at Shelby. She nodded.

“It’s Shelby’s call, so I guess it’s settled. See you in the morning.”

It was settled, but something about it still didn’t sit right with Colt.

Erin O’Mainen put twenty boxes of shotgun shells and hollow point rounds on the display counter.

“Are you putting in some range time, or just starting a war?” She raised an eyebrow at Colt.

“Had enough of war, ma’am.” He dumped all of his silver coins on the spectro tray for O’Mainen to scan for purity and weight. “Just a little hunting up in the mountains.”

O’Mainen fired up the spectro and adjusted the scan. “I’d head South or maybe West, if it were me. I hear tell that there’s a snarlie been making the rounds up on the North rim.”

“Rim?”

“It’s what the locals call the mountain range surrounding the province.”

“Got it. How about Ferals? Much trouble with them lately?”

“The Sundogs camp up on the High Plains, so we don’t see much of them. They keep to themselves unless you poke them or they think you’re trespassing. We had some Jolly Rogers about a year ago that caused some ruckus, but the Peacers did their job for once and chased them out.”

The spectro dinged, and O’Mainen studied the results. She gave Colt a furtive glance, then counted out half of his silver and pushed the rest back.

“You sure about that? I know the silver’s good, but it sure ain’t pure.”

“It’s your lucky day. Ammo’s on sale for half off.”

Colt turned around and looked at the gunsmith’s shop. There were racks of traditional handguns, rifles, and shotguns. The electro-magnetic guns got their own rack. Knives, ammunition, and survival gear were laid out under the lighted display cases. There weren’t any signs about a sale on ammunition.

Funny way to do business…if that’s what’s going on.

“Thanks.” He left his change in the spectro and started loading the boxes into his saddlebag. “You looked at my six-shooter yet?”

“I did a deep scan on it last night. It’s pretty clean. No fouling, cracks, or flaws. There’s a couple spots that could use some polish, and the springs need to be replaced.”

“How long to get that done?”

“About a week. I’ll have to custom-order the springs from Viking Arms. You know, a Shark Elite like that is a pretty rare piece, especially in such good condition. If you don’t mind my asking, how’d you come by it?”

“Won it in a poker game.”

“You play with high stakes.”

“Sometimes. Speaking of hardware, I see you carry civilian railguns. Are they really that popular? An electro-magnetic pulse would take them right out.”

“That’s why the Alphies and their garrison pushed to make EMP grenades illegal in La Kratera. Electro-mags are a fad, but as long as folks want them, I’ll sell them.” She hesitated, looked at the door, then raked her fingers through her shag-cut hair. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“I’m just a cowboy. No need to ask my permission for anything in your own shop.”

“I was at Camp Harmonia when the Alphies got the order to bug out.” She rolled up her left sleeve. There was a scar where a micro-chip had been cut out of her arm.

“They had us lined up in front of a pit when the counter-order came down. I’d be rot and bone at the bottom of a mass grave if you hadn’t made that deal with the Alphie Command.”

“I just did what I had to do.”

“And the Generals cashiered you for it. A lot of vets, like me, know the score. We got to come home because you traded their lives for ours. We owe you.”

“Not me. The soldiers who bled and died to keep us free are the ones we owe.”

“Too right, sir. So, what are you really hunting up on the Rim?”

“A woman. Her Alphie husband says some Ferals kidnapped her.”

“You believe him?”

“Not sure.”

“Then you best be watching your six. The Alphies signed the Armistice, but I don’t trust them. Or their toadie collaborators. Hold on for a second.”

She slid her hand under the counter and buzzed the lock on the front door. Then she knelt behind the counter and pulled up a floorboard.

“They thought they were tough, so big and bad, that they’d just roll over us with their walking armor and railguns. They didn’t figure we’d come up with these.” She stood and put three disk-shaped EMP grenades on the counter. They were thin and about the size of a throwing star. Each one had a pull tab in the middle.

“You never saw these and I never had them. If you run into trouble, pull the pin and throw it. In four seconds, every railgun in a fifty-foot radius will be dead.”

“How much?” Colt picked one up. These are military grade, not something wired together on a kitchen table.

“No charge. Call it even for what you did.”

“Much obliged.” He tucked one inside his hat and the others into his back pocket.

“Good hunting, sir. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. And don’t forget your change.”

“Put it towards fixing up my Shark.” He hoisted his saddlebag over one shoulder. “And if I don’t come back, the Shark is yours.”

The iron dust blown off by the sonic pulverizers in the strip mines was everywhere. It turned the land between Irontown and the Alphie domes into a rusty desert.

Colt reined up Big Fella, his six-legged riding yima, and leaned on the saddlehorn. There were hundreds of black domes in the Alphie suburb, connected by airtight pedestrian tunnels. Living without a personal comm, a slate connected to the net, or any kind of electronics meant he couldn’t be tracked. It also meant he couldn’t use the net to find out which dome was Dr. Ramesh’s office.

“How am I going to find them?”

“Off-off?” Big Fella turned his ostrich-shaped head around and whined. He didn’t like the dust mask Colt tied over his beak.

“I don’t blame ya, but not yet, buddy. We’ll take them off just as soon as we’re out of this dust bowl.” He adjusted his own dust mask and took out his field glasses. “Now if I were an Alphie doctor, where would I put my office?”

He swept the glasses back and forth until he spied Shelby outside a dome as big as a warehouse. She stood in the saddle stirrups of her gray yima, watching him through her own field glasses and waving at him. The Doc’s hover car was parked nearby.

“Gotcha.”

“Off-off?”

“Soon-soon.” He patted Big Fella on his front shoulder, snapped the reins, then headed for Shelby and Ramesh.

The hover car was a black two-seater with clear, bubble-shaped canopies over the front and back seats. Ramesh blinked the lights as Colt rode up.

“Boss.” He nodded at Shelby.

She did a double take and smiled.

“Took you long enough.”

“Won’t happen again. So how’s this going to work? His hover-c is going to kick up a lot of dust.”

“We’re in the lead. He gave me the GPS coordinates of where the trail ended, up the northwest side of the Rim.”

Colt looked up at the distant mountains. A huge chunk of iron had hit Fenris here a million or billion years ago. It knocked the planet into an orbit where winter and summer lasted some forty years. The impact also created the Rim.

“Looks like we can make it to the foothills by sundown.”

“Ramesh and I figured the same. Let’s ride.”

Colt popped the top off his can of beans and put it beside him on the ground while it warmed up. Big Fella and Princess Moxie, Shelby’s yima, were bedded down on one side of the clearing. Dr. Ramesh was parked on the other side. Colt and Shelby sat across from each other around an LED lantern.

“Have you done any figuring on how to get Luna back?”

“I got some ideas.” She pulled the heating tab off her Ready-Eats tray and broke the spork off the side. “If it’s just one or two Ferals, we can go head-to-head to get her back. If they’re smart, they’ll let her go.”

“If they aren’t smart?”

“We learn them with lead and iron.”

The beans started bubbling, and the rim of the can turned red. It would turn blue when it was cool enough to eat.

“It’s been six days, Shelby. Time enough for them to join up with their people, if that’s where they were headed. What then?”

“That depends on what we find.” She peeled the cover off her tray and dug in with the spork. “If we’re lucky, we’ll find a chance to grab her and ride like hell for home. No blood, no shots fired.”

“If we kill any of them, that could start a blood feud.”

“Yeah. That would reek. But I’ll do what has to be done to get her back.”

“Good. Call the shots on that and I’ll back you.” Colt spooned up his beans, and the conversation died while they listened to the wind slapping the branches and leaves against each other in the trees above them.

Ramesh eventually rolled back the canopy on his hover car and got out, brushing invisible crumbs off his chest. He’d changed his expensive suit coat out for a thin brown one with baggy sleeves that covered him from neck to toe. It flapped in the breeze as he walked up.

“Just a lantern? No campfire? Don’t you need fire to keep wild animals away?”

“Not on Fenris, Doc. Fire and smoke attract their attention, sends some of them in to a rut. You don’t want to be near a Woolly when that happens. They’d smash your hover-c flat.”

“Not just that.” Shelby held up her spork. “Smoke and fire would warn the Ferals that someone was out here. That’s why we keep a cold camp.”

“I see. This isn’t my field of expertise, so I’ll bow to your informed opinions.”

“So what is your field of expertise? What kind of Doc are you?”

“I specialized in Applied Genetics.”

Colt frowned and pushed back his hat. “You mean like mutating germs?”

“Germ warfare? Porque ne! No! I am a doctor. We use gene therapy to cure diseases. Remediate birth defects. Repair chromosome damage. We adapt livestock to new environments. Where do you think New-Cows come from?”

“Old cows?”

“I’m being serious here. People in my field genegineered the New-Cows so they can live off your prairie grass and still provide viable dairy products.”

Colt stretched out on his bedroll and used a spare blanket for a pillow. “I do like a good steak, so thanks for that.” He started to lock his fingers behind his neck when a cough started pressing in at the top of his lungs. He sat up and pulled out a bandana, covering his mouth as he turned away.

The single cough turned into a fit, tearing at his lungs where the rounds hit him. His ribs ached and left him sore when the flare-up finally petered out. He checked the bandana for blood. None, so far. He turned back to find Shelby and Doc Ramesh staring at him.

“I’m fine.” He stuffed the bandana in his pocket. “Just dust from the ride.”

“Rubbish.” Ramesh walked back to the hover car and pulled out a black medical bag. He rummaged through it until he found an inhaler.

“I prepped this for you last night.” He handed Colt the inhaler. “One puff daily and then as needed. It will speed up your recovery and relieve your congestion.”

Cold eyed the inhaler suspiciously. “How do you know it will work? You didn’t even examine me.”

“It’s a broad-spectrum enhancer. It’s safe. Anyone can use it.”

Colt took a puff and held his breath. Cool streams trickled down into his chest. The ache in his ribs faded. He let go of his breath.

“Not sure what to say, Doc. Thanks.”

Ramesh shrugged as much as his exo-skeleton would let him. It looked to be a civilian model. Military hardware was bulkier with better articulation.

“I’m a doctor. I do doctoring things.”

“Colt!” Shelby jumped to her feet and put her hand on her side-arm. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Listen.”

Colt stood and drew, squinting into the dark. Then he heard it. A snarlie roared. It was hardly louder than the wind in the trees.

“What is it?” Ramesh dropped his hands to his sides and took a step back towards his hover car.

“Good ears, Shelby.” He glanced at Doc Ramesh. “Don’t worry. It’s a snarlie, but it isn’t close. Sounds like a challenge. Might be another snarlie is poaching on its territory.”

“That’s not at all comforting.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Although they are a fascinating creature. Have you ever wondered why the Grumus, your snarlie, only has four legs?”

“Can’t say I have.” He holstered his six-gun.

“It’s because they aren’t native to Beta Lympos. They’re an alien species.”

“You say that like it’s important.” Shelby took a last look around before disarming and securing her railgun. “We know we aren’t the first ones here.”

“It is important. They’re genetically the closest species to human on Beta, and they’ve fully adapted to Beta’s food sources, to its seasons and gravity in only 30,000 years. It’s amazing.”

“Doc.” Colt crossed his arms. “We aren’t Beta Lympos anymore. We aren’t your colony or your penal dumping ground. We fought that war and we won.”

“You’re one of them? One of the Rebels?”

“I’m a patriot.”

“You hate us. You killed soldiers that surrendered. You committed heinous war crimes. Why would you agree to help me? Is this some kind of trick to get me out here and kill me, too?”

“There were war crimes on both sides. I had nothing to do with that. I never killed a prisoner or a soldier that put down his arms. Your people signed the Armistice and that’s the end of it. The war is over.”

“It’s true.” Shelby put her hand on Colt’s shoulder. “He’s a good man. He’ll do right by you no matter which side you were on.”

“Perhaps, but I believe it is time for me to retire to my car and lock the doors. Bonas Noktos. Good night.”

The night was quiet after that. The snarlie didn’t attack until the next day.

By midmorning, they’d reached the mountain meadow where the Peace Monitors lost the trail. The waist-high grass was beat to the ground in a circle big enough to park a dozen hover trucks. Trails into the grass spread out in every direction. Doc Ramesh grounded his car at the edge of the circle, next to where the yimas were picketed. He joined Colt in the middle while Shelby paced the perimeter, her eyes focused on the ground.

“The Peacers…” She glanced at Ramesh and started again. “The Peace Monitors didn’t help much. What they didn’t muck up with their hover cars, they stomped into the ground with their boots. Colt, you got anything?”

“Something, maybe. Come here.” He hunkered down and picked at the grass with his range knife. “This patch is brown. It’s dead. The grass all around it is smashed, but still alive.” He grabbed the patch down by its roots and yanked on it. It came away easy. Underneath was a crumpled, dirty rag. He pulled it up and out by the tip of his knife. The rag used to be a white sleeve. Dirt and dried blood clung to it.

“You recognize this, Doc?”

Doc Ramesh stared at it. “Yes.” He put his hands behind his back and turned away.

Shelby pointed at the shallow hole. “There’s something else in there.”

Tiny bits of metal and a shattered ceramic casing were crushed into the dirt. Put together, it might be as big as his fingernail.

“Doc, how about this? Do you know what this is?”

Doc Ramesh didn’t answer.

Colt looked up and saw a snarlie standing between Doc Ramesh and his hover car. Its raised spine and ribs stuck out, as if it hadn’t eaten in months. Three of its legs were just skin over bone and bulbous joints. It cradled the fourth, a foreleg, tight against its chest. Glittering black eyes stared at Doc Ramesh from under a protruding, low brow.

The beast let out the low, rumbling snarl it was named for.

“Doc, don’t turn your back or run away. Wave your arms over your head, if you can. It will make you look bigger.” Colt slowly pulled out his six-gun.

The snarlie lowered its head, ready to charge.

Three quiet beeps sounded off, the sounds of a railgun being armed. Only one of them was Shelby’s. The other two came from Doc Ramesh.

The snarlie didn’t hesitate. It jumped back into the grass instead of charging.

Ramesh shot his arms straight out, firing his railguns into the grass. The capacitors whined as they fast-charged after every round. Hyper-sonic cracks echoed across the meadow, and the snarlie bellowed. Ramesh tried to track it, firing until he ran dry. He flipped the mags to reload and looked from side to side. Nothing moved except the wind in the grass.

Colt checked on Shelby. She blinked and holstered her side-iron. Moxie was on the ground and Big Fella was curled around her, watching the grass.

“Doc, that was more than just doctoring. You got any more surprises under that coat?”

“A few. I came prepared.” He dropped his arms, and the railguns disappeared.

“So it seems. Too bad that snarlie popped up when it did. The Ferals will know for sure we’re here.” He checked his six-gun and holstered it.

“Indeed.” Ramesh stared out across the meadow, as if daring the snarlie to come back. “What do we do now?”

“We go that-away.” Shelby pointed at a plume of smoke in the Northern skyline.

“Sounds right to me. Big Fella!” Colt whistled and slapped his thigh. “Up-up.”

The yima nuzzled Princess Moxie, then stood and ambled over to Colt.

“Good boy.” He swung up into the saddle, then checked his pockets and gear. The 30-06 hung in its scabbard on his right, the Foster Twelve Gauge hung on the left.

Shelby mounted up and waited until Ramesh was back in his hover car and bubbled up before sidling over to Colt.

“That was strange.” She spoke quietly, with her head turned away from the hover car. “You ever seen a snarlie target someone, then run off when they heard a railgun being armed?”

“Nope. It was like she’d heard it before.”

“She?”

“Yep. Keep a sharp eye out. Something ain’t right here.”

The smoke led them to Luna, and she wasn’t alone.

Red-rocked cliffs hemmed the canyon where they found her, where a waterfall fed into a large pool below. A wide swath of grass surrounded the pool, and the mist from the waterfall made a rainbow over the canyon.

It was idyllic, except for the snarlie sunning itself beside Luna.

Shelby pulled back behind the cover of a rock outcropping and looked at Colt.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yep, and it don’t make much sense. It’s still spring. That snarlie should be tending a litter of cubs somewhere else.”

“Did you find her? Is she here?” The roar and splash of the waterfall covered Ramesh’s heavy-footed approach. The wind blew up, ruffling his coat, and he carried his med-bag with him.

“Yeah, but let me take a closer look.” Colt pulled out his field glasses and leaned over the top of the outcropping.

Luna stirred and pushed up on one arm. Both sleeves were torn off her ragged smock, and her left arm had a stained rag tied around it. She fed the fire, then fell back on the ground, curled up and holding her stomach. The snarlie raised her head, watched Luna for a moment, then put her head back down.

Colt swept the rest of the canyon.

“No Ferals.” And no snarlie cubs. He turned back to Ramesh. “Just a snarlie, but I reckon you know that already. Why is there a snarlie keeping Luna company?”

“I have no idea, but if that beast has Luna, we need to rescue her.”

“Colt, we got a problem.” Shelby drew her railgun. “Check it out.”

The snarlie was on its feet, looking in their direction.

“Take out the beast. I’ll get Luna.” Ramesh strode down into the canyon.

“Doc— Damn it. Big Fella, stay-stay.” He yanked the 30-06 off his saddle, slung it over his head and shoulder, then charged after Ramesh. Shelby followed on his heels.

In less than a minute, all three of them were down in the canyon. The snarlie stood over Luna. Colt and Shelby spread out on the left and right. The snarlie barely acknowledged them. Its attention was all for Ramesh.

“I’ve got a shot.” Shelby held her railgun in a steady, two-hand grip.

“No!” Ramesh dropped his med-bag. “Don’t shoot. You might hurt the baby.”

“Baby? What baby? Nobody tells me anything!”

“Grumusa!” Ramesh dropped his arms. His railguns clicked into place and armed themselves. He stamped his foot. “I’m right here. Come and get me.” He fired a round over the snarlie’s head.

The railgun whined. The snarlie growled, then jumped towards Ramesh.

Shelby fired as the beast sprang past them. Colt hit the dirt to get out of the line of fire. Ramesh opened up with both barrels.

The snarlie landed in front of Ramesh. They looked eye to eye. The beast coughed, swayed, and collapsed.

“Shelby?” Colt got up and slung the 30-06 over his shoulder. “Shelby, what the hell? Didn’t nobody teach you about friendly fire?”

“Are you hit?”

“No.”

“Then don’t worry about it. I’m a sure shot. I never miss.”

“Until you do.” He shook his head and stomped over to Luna.

She was pale and unconscious. Ramesh was on his knees beside her, pulling cartridges out of his bag and slapping them into a med-gun. He shot her in the arm, neck and belly. She squirmed and shook her head.

“Monster.” It was barely a whisper; a whisper drenched with hate.

Ramesh unwound the rag around her forearm. It was crusted with blood, and her arm underneath it was swollen. Red streaks shot out from an inflamed, oozing gash. Ramesh took her arm in both hands and squeezed. Green pus spurted out of the wound.

“Aiiyee!” Luna shrieked and opened her eyes. “Monster!”

“The monster’s gone, Luna. You’re safe now and coming back home.”

“Monster!” She pushed Ramesh away.

“You need to calm down.” He reached into his bag and pulled out another cartridge. “This will help.”

“No no no.” She tried to turn over and crawl away.

“Doc, that was a tracking chip she dug out of her arm, and she likes you about as much as that snarlie did. I’m thinking she’s not really your wife.”

“Nonsense. She’s just delirious. She just needs to calm down before she hurts herself or the baby.”

“I want to hear that from her.”

“She’s mine and I’m administering a sedative.”

“No, Doc. No more drugs.”

Ramesh stood and turned. He had both railguns armed and aimed at Colt.

“The two of you have been useless. You didn’t do anything I couldn’t do myself. I was wrong to think I needed help.”

“There’s no need for gunfire, Doc.” Colt held up his hands.

“You called yourself a patriot. Well, so am I. Luna and the others will be the mothers of a new generation of soldiers, loyal to Alpha Lympos. They’ll be stronger, faster, and they won’t need steroids or exo-skeletons, because the Grumus genetic material will make them that way.”

“You put snarlie genes into her?”

“No. Into the baby.” He curled his lip. “You’re just a renegade, a dissident. You don’t understand loyalty, fidelity, or anything that makes a good soldier. These men and women will overcome you and restore the colony to its rightful place under Alpha Lympos.”

“The cubs.” Shelby stood next to Colt. “You took her cubs. That’s why she knew you. She knew your scent.”

“She should have died the first time I shot her. I needed the genetic material. She could have always had another litter. Now drop your weapons. Both of you. Gunbelts, too.”

“Do it, Shelby.”

“But—”

“Trust me.” Colt carefully put the 30-06 down, then loosed the leather ties on his holster. “Power it all the way down. Disarm it.” He unbuckled his gunbelt and watched Shelby do the same. She looked angry, frustrated, and more than a bit put out.

“Trust me. It will be all right. Just back up away. This is between Ramesh and me.”

He put down his belt, then took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

“You got the drop on me, Ramesh, so it’s your move. But I got to say, if you’re going to cowboy up on me, at least wear the hat.” He pulled the pin on the EMP grenade inside the sweatband, then tossed the hat at Ramesh. It spun like a disc and landed at his feet.

“Cowboy up? What does that even mean?”

The grenade clicked, like the soft snap of the fingers. Colt felt the electro-magnetic pulse, as if there were a lightning strike next to him. He didn’t have anything electrical on him or in him to disrupt. The Alphie’s railguns and exo-skeleton were a different matter. Ramesh was trapped inside a man-shaped cage with dead weapons.

“Colt?”

“It’s all good now. Step on back and get strapped.” He looked down at his hat. A hole was burned through the side where the grenade was stashed. “Damn. I liked that hat.”

“Was that an EMP?”

“Yep. His railguns and exo were civilian models. They weren’t hardened against a pulse. Your side-iron should be fine, since it was powered down. But just in case,” he picked up the 30-06, “hang on to this and keep an eye on the Alphie.”

Colt strapped his gunbelt back on and tied the holster to his thigh again. Luna was awake and watching Ramesh. Colt took a knee between them, close enough to see the faint lines of a Feral family tattoo on her neck. Someone had tried to erase them.

“My name is Colt Ostergaard, of the Ostergaard clan. I swear on my honor and in the name of my clan that I mean you no harm. You are free to go where you will, and where you wish.”

“Luna Padilla. Former Jolly Roger.” She turned her head and spat. “The Jolly Rogers sold us to him, Dr. Monster.”

“Us?” Shelby crouched down beside Colt. “There’s more of you?”

“Many. Some from other families.”

A metal marble bounced on the ground next to Colt. It was perforated with tiny holes, and it hissed.

“Turn about is fair play, Ostergaard. I told you I came prepared.”

Ramesh was out of this exo-skeleton. Long, lean muscles bulged in a skin-tight, black unitard.

“The exo-skeleton was a subterfuge. I never really needed it.”

Shelby swung the 30-06 up to cover Ramesh.

Colt tried to stand and fell on his knees. He was dizzy, and something in his lungs was heating up. He coughed. He coughed again and again. Each time the cough was deeper, stealing his breath. He jabbed his finger at Ramesh.

“Shoot him. Take him down.”

“You can shoot me, but your boyfriend will be dead in ten minutes. Probably less. But he doesn’t have to die.”

“Shoot. Him.” He tasted blood in his mouth.

“If you are wondering, you’ll be fine, Yodersen. There’s nothing for you to worry about. The gas is activated by a compound in the inhaler.” He stuck his hands behind his back and spread his legs. Alphie soldiers, the Peace Monitors, called it “Parade Rest.”

“I’m taking Luna back to the Lab, where she will be humanely cared for. Walk away, Yodersen, and I’ll pay you the balance of the contract. I’ll even give you the antidote that’s killing your boyfriend. What do you say to that?”

“Shoot.” Colt propped himself up on his hands and knees, coughing out clots of blood. “Do. It.”

Shelby lowered the 30-06 and stepped back.

“I don’t have to.”

The snarlie jumped Ramesh from behind. She wrapped her good foreleg around his throat and clawed into his back with her hind feet. Her jaws clamped onto the back of his neck, and she drove him to the ground. Blood gushed from the ragged tears in his back. Ramesh tried to break free, and she snapped his neck. He’d never hurt anyone again.

The snarlie let out a long, sad howl and joined Ramesh in death. Their blood mingled together, soaking the prairie grass.

Shelby grabbed the med-bag and turned it upside down, shaking ampules, vials, cartridges and medical supplies out of it. She dug into the pile.

“Anti-this. Hydro-that. Colt! How do I know which one is the antidote? Did he even have one?”

“Pockets.” His throat burned and each breath labored. He laid down on his side.

“What?” She looked at Colt and then Ramesh’s coat. “Pockets!” She tore through the coat until she found an unmarked inhaler. She ran back to Colt, put it between his teeth, and pumped.

“Breathe, damn it.”

He couldn’t breathe. Not anymore.

She rolled him on his back. “Don’t you die on me!” She sucked a dose out of the inhaler, then pinched his nose, sealed his mouth with her lips, and blew. Hard. She did it again.

The third time, he felt something break loose in his chest. He sucked in a small gulp of air. Shelby put the inhaler in his mouth and pumped a full dose into it.

The burning faded, just a little, and he started coughing again. Shelby rolled him back on his side and let him cough out the black sputum. She cradled his head in her lap when the worst was over and he could breathe again. He looked up into her eyes.

Oh, hell no. She’s too young to be looking at me like that. He looked past her and wheezed out a “damn.”

They were surrounded by Ferals.

One of them, a man in a fur-trimmed vest and a fierce, black beard, squatted next to Shelby. His reddish-yellow headscarf had a pawprint on the sun pattern, the trademark of the Sundog Ferals.

“He gonna die?”

“No. I won’t let him.”

The Sundog tilted his head towards Luna.

“Her?” Three Feral women sat with Luna, talking, looking at her arm, and touching her belly.

“I don’t know. She’s hurt and she’s with child.”

“His?” He pointed at Colt.

“Theirs.” She nodded at Ramesh and the Snarlie.

“You city-dogs are strange.”

“Boss-dog.” Colt forced himself to sit up. Shelby braced him, and he waved towards Luna. “The Jolly Rogers used to be her family. They sold her to that man, the Alphie. Now he’s dead.” He held up his hand and caught his breath. “She needs a strong family, a loyal family. Could she ride with the Sundogs?”

Boss-dog took a long look at Luna, then made several hand signs. One of the women with Luna returned the gestures.

“We’ll give her a chance.”

“The baby. It could be normal. Or it could be stillborn, crippled, even a monster.”

“Doesn’t matter what it is. The baby will be born a Sundog. We take care of our own.”

“Then she is in good hands.” He put his hand on Shelby’s shoulder. “Mind if I lean on you?”

“For a bit. Fair warning, though, I’m not going to carry you all the way back to Irontown, you slacker.”

“I’d expect no less.”

She helped him to his feet, and he weakly coughed a few more times. He wasn’t cured, but he wasn’t dead.

“Boss-dog, what brought you here today?”

“This is our canyon. We saw smoke.”

“Thought so. We’ve trespassed and have to pay for it. What would it take for you to let us walk away whole and free?”

“What have you got?”

Colt reached into his back pocket and pulled out the last two grenades.

“You know what these do?”

Boss-dog looked at the discarded exo-skeleton and railguns.

“I do.”

“Is it enough to forgive our trespass?”

“It’s enough.” He held out his massive hand. “Tau Zapata. Go where you will and go in peace.”

Colt took it and shook.

“Colt Ostergaard. Live long and go where you wish.”

The Ferals disappeared into the brush and trees, taking the Alphie’s coat, exo, and medical supplies with them. He squeezed Shelby’s shoulder and took a shaky step on his own.

“It’s been a hell of a day. Let’s go home.”

The yimas were still where they left them. The hover car, of course, was gone.

Colt took a sip of his whiskey. It burned all the way down, but it was worth it. He sat elbow to elbow with Shelby in J. Barrett’s Saloon.

“I miss my hat. It was custom made and I had it broke in just right.”

“We’ll get you another. Maybe something old school, like that six-gun of yours.”

“We’ll see.” He watched the stage at the other end of the saloon. The band was replaced by a local news broadcast, reporting on the vandalism at one of the Alphie medical facilities.

“That snarlie.” Shelby leaned on the table and swirled the tequila at the bottom of her glass. “Do you think she knew the baby had some snarlie in it? Maybe even from her own cubs?”

“I seen some strange things out on the range. Things I can’t rightly explain. Could be she smelled something in Luna’s blood. Could be her maternal instinct kicked in. Or maybe their mutual hate for Ramesh made them kindred spirits. Take your pick.” He shrugged and drained the last of his whiskey.

“I don’t plan on spinning my wheels over something I’ll never figure out. It happened. It’s over. Time to move on.”

Two men dragged into the saloon and sat at the table next to Colt and Shelby. A third joined them with mugs and a pitcher of beer.

“Damn shame,” one of them finally said.

“I’d rather have a job instead of a severance check,’ said another.

“At least we got that. They lost everything when the lab burned down. Those EMPs the Ferals used took out the micro trackers on the livestock. We’ll never recover any of them.”

“Not only that, they wiped out all of Project Chimera’s research.”

“Locally, sure. But you know they have copies of everything back on Alpha.”

“That won’t matter.” The third man refilled his mug. “You know how we shipped those animals and the livestock to Alpha?”

The other two nodded.

“I heard they can’t do what Dr. Ramesh did. He was holding back something because all the embryos died in just a few days.”

“I heard he got sideways with Ferals. How’d they get in and out of town so easy?”

“Hell, I want to know where they got the grenades. Had to be those damn rebels or reb sympathizers.”

Shelby looked at Colt and kept her voice low.

“Was that your doing?”

“Nope. Well, maybe a little. I introduced the Sundogs and one of the locals to each other, but that was it.”

“Innocent people got hurt in that raid.”

“Innocent women got rescued. If it were me, I’d do anything to get out of a cage, no matter how nice of a cage it was. And I hope to hell if I couldn’t get out, there’d be someone out there who cared enough to help me.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” She punched him in the shoulder. The wrong one, of course, but he didn’t say anything. “Those women are free, the monster factory is shut down, and there’s plenty of drinking money. I can live with that.”

Colt smiled and saluted her with his empty glass.

“Fill her up.”

Also From Raconteur Press

Ghosts of Malta

Knights of Malta

Saints of Malta

Falcons of Malta

Space Cowboys

Space Cowboys 2: Electric Rodeo

Space Cowboys 3: Return of the Bookaroo

Space Cowboys 404: Cow Not Found

Space Marines

Space Marines 2

PinUp Noir

PinUp Noir 2

Your Honor, I Can Explain…

You See, What Happened Was…

He Was Dead When I Got There…

All Will Burn

All Will Burn: Fierce Love

Moggies in Space

Moggies Back in Space

Full Steam Ahead

Giant! Freakin’! Robots!

Call To Action

At Raconteur Press, our motto is Have Fun, Get Paid. Hopefully you enjoyed the stories in this volume. If you did, please take the time to leave a quick review. Our authors love to hear that people enjoyed their stories and it encourages them to write more of them.

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Table of Contents

- Introduction
- 1. Little Lost CAU
- 2. Lode Claim Blues
- 3. The Forever Mug of Joe at Bitsy’s Saloon
- 4. The Guns of Liberty
- 5. Cowboy Dreams
- 6. Milo Wolfkiller and the Red Terror

- 7. The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same.

- 8. High Noon on the Red Planet
- 9. Death And Dying in Feral Canyon
- Also From Raconteur Press
- Call To Action