ANGELA GOES TO RIBALL
By Bill Green
Preface
In the beginning, Angela Hart was born on Earth’s moon and inherited an even zillion dollars. In the middle, her grandfather raised her in Kentucky. He was an old retired Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant. Later, somewhat bigger than life, she swashes and buckles about the galaxy and heaps mayhem on evildoers aided by her pet spaceship and its artificial intelligence.
She is actually a paladin with a hidden purpose, i.e., to prevent war between the various planetary governments and Earth by being the epitome of a nice kicker of butts. She really just gets a lot of attention and that detracts from the serious guy’s hype.
This part of Angela’s story is her "gaining experience" phase. There are two or three more of these episodes involving her and some really bad guys who are just plain outclassed and outgunned.
Angela Goes To Riball
Angela dressed and walked to the flyer rental. She checked the fuel cells and electronics on a Zoomer that was at least twenty years old but looked nearly new. She signed the rental agreement as the owner assured her that he used it for family transport when it wasn't rented. Her femininity reassured by the mechanics’ suggestion for a good time later, she cruised slowly down the wide grassy lane back to the hostel with plenty of time to load her gear, and food for ten days.
The clerk fell all over himself to help her load her box marked “TOOLS” as she gave one of her standard cover story lines: “I suppose I’ll never get used to the weight of the tools a prospector has to lug everywhere.” She had an image in her mind of her granddad putting more rocks in this same box. She was amazed by the difference when he directed her to unload the rocks after carrying it on a four-mile fast hike and reload the box with her weapons. She felt as if she could have tossed it over the barn. “Thumper”, the name she gave the monster rifle Gramps had actually handcrafted for her, weighed thirty-two pounds unloaded and without the scope. Disassembled, Thumper’s barrel and receiver was forty-six inches long and determined the length of the box. Thumper and a compact 22 caliber rifle, more of a toy than anything else, a genuine antique 357 caliber semi-automatic pistol, two 10 mil semi-auto pistols, a nine millimeter compact machine gun, a pair of new stunners, a twelve gauge pump shotgun, and ammunition for all, first aid kit, tools, knives, lubricants, solvents, batteries, hand grenades, flares, extra loaded magazines, phones, and a bottle of analgesics, determined the one hundred -twenty-three pound weight. Last year a fellow agent watching her load this array of weapons in the box laughed when she commented, “A girl can’t be too careful nowadays.”
Angie had come to Riball, which had no planetary police agency per se but did have a treaty with the Allworld's council for civil defense, in response to a request for help after a series of brutal home invasion murders. The perpetrators attacked and robbed remote ranch homes in military fashion and left no witnesses. The women and girls had mostly all been raped, some repeatedly, and then murdered. Men and male children were shot and killed where they stood. Riball's population was small since it almost totally owned and controlled by the families of the original discoverers and it wasn’t too difficult to account for most everyone at the time of the murders except for a few hundred town people.
A navy scout vessel had dropped a recon satellite for her and she programmed it to alert her when any flyers left the vicinity of Riball City after sunset. She set up camp in a beautiful little box canyon and settled in to wait. Three flyers were stolen in the first two robberies and all three had left landing tracks at the last five crime scenes. When her wrist comp beeped the sat-receiver screen would display a blip the same as any holographic radarscope but it also showed the transponder codes. With the code she could look up the owner, call one of the governor's people, and verify the flyers occupants, destination, or any other information that seemed logical at the moment.
After three days of catching up on her sleep, sharpening and cleaning weapons, she was more than ready to spring into action when the comp beeped once again. There was little night travel from the city. An occasional air truck headed out to the farms but they had been easily verified as good guys. The few flyers that the satellite picked up were hunters or prospectors that also checked out as legitimate. This time the beep wasn't accompanied by a transponder code. She flipped open a holo chart and saved it to the sat download. She watched the flyer icon crawl across it, surreptiously keeping to the low ground contour until it stopped in a canyon a few miles from hers. It sat still for a few hours, until just before dawn, then it and two more started moving, none displaying transponders. Bingo!
She struck camp in a few minutes and flew around the area once slowly, looking for anything that she might have left. The three flyers crossed a small valley then went south at a speed and course she could intersect long before they approached any homesteads. She tracked them on the display only losing them occasionally when they skirted cliffs and such that hid them from the satellites’ footprint. She stayed back two miles or so until she confirmed their course and then started closing the gap. She located the ranches on their course on her charts and called ahead to alert them to take cover long before the bad guys approached them.
She watched the little icons move into a long canyon, a boxed end valley that led toward a ranch house. It was identified as the Murchison place on the chart and she speeded up until she was only a short way behind them, and then headed over the hill above the canyon to parallel their path.
“Chick” Laswell, thief, murderer, rapist, bad guy, had a hangover and that saved Angela's life when he lifted his canteen to guzzle more water, which caused a slight shift in the weight of the flyer he and Bostick had rigged the homemade cannon on. Bos pulled the string trigger just as Chick moved and the end of the cannon barrel shifted imperceptibly. However the slight movement of course meant considerable difference on the receiving end of the small explosive round.
The cowling just ahead of the windscreen seemed to blow up in Angie's face. She yanked the controller to the rear and right and her already hyper-alert mind was assessing the situation. “The bastards saw me following them and bushwhacked me but missed a kill shot. I have enough control left to survive, crash bags always work, and I’m wearing a four-point restraint harness and helmet. Even in her auto-fugue state she couldn’t prevent crashing into the ground. She managed to hit more or less flat and sliding but a house-sized boulder was in her path.
Just before she crashed into it, the flyer reared on its side and the crash bar smacked hard into solid rock. The mounts broke and the crash bags blasted the seat and Angela into the ground. The seat flipped and she blacked out for an instant. The beautiful old machine broke up and the major portion, the frame, engine, and cowling went on off the ledge down into a deep ravine, the hydrogen bottle blew and the fire ball shot up in a mushroom shape then flashed out but smoke poured from the burning fiberglass cowling.
She regained what she liked to call her “two wits” and feeling excruciating pain from her right leg, she hit the buckle on the four-point seat harness. That had no doubt kept her back from being broken when she bashed into the ground. She moved as deep as possible under the edge of the boulder and its deep shade. She took the little stunner from it’s holster under her left arm rolling the intensity control all the way back, ran it from her hip to her knee. The pain stopped completely and immediately. All the while she was listening for the approach of the bandits to come and attempt to finish her off.
By the sound of it they were hovering above the arroyo that her craft has fallen in. There was no blood yet, so at least there was no compound fracture. The leg still looked straight so maybe it was just bruised or cracked a little. She lay still for a bit until she heard the other flyer move off toward the canyon. “They must have assumed I went down in that gully also” she thought.
She pulled herself farther around the boulder with just her arms and saw that her old kit locker had broke free and was on down the hill a ways. The big old handgun, a gift from Gramps, was still under the seat in a metal box. It was a Krait 357 magnum semi-automatic. The damned thing roared like a cannon, kicked like a mule, and shot fire out three feet. It was also very accurate, and she could put clipfull after clipfull of the high velocity slugs into the black, at fifty yards on rapid fire, or punch the heart out of a standard silhouette at the same distance with paced shots.
The heft and solid metallic reality of the big gun in her hand snapped her mind clear of fear and pain. "Come on back you bastards!" She laughed at the thought of Gramps evil grin that she knew he would display if he could see her now. "Survival 101", the thought made her grin even in the situation she found herself. In her mind she could hear Gramps’ drill sergeant voice, “Survival my ass, attack! Offense is the best defense.” What would he do now? He would either capture the bad guys or blow their fucking heads off, that’s what. She dragged to the kit box and took out the field med kit to get the spray foam. She split her pants leg down past the knee and laid it open. The first aid kit pack went under her knee to hold the leg up and then she sprayed “Quikcast” foam on and under the leg. It expanded immediately and hardened in seconds into a semi-rigid cast. She swallowed two analgesic tabs and one quick swallow of water.
She dragged the box and herself toward a slight rise on the edge of the hill overlooking the canyon and valley. “The next time I break a leg I’ll split the bottom of the pants leg so I won’t scoop dirt in the goddamned cast.” She could see all three of the flyers were together now and were moving slowly toward the ranch house following the contours of the ground to stay hidden until the last minute. She took out a headset phone from the box and called the ranch.
“This is Major Hart; you people have about five minutes before the bad guys get to the front of your house. I suggest you go out the back door and hide in the fields unless you know of something better.” As she talked she began assembling Thumper. “Don't talk, just listen up now, I will take care of every thing on the canyon side of your place but I can’t see behind the buildings. “You’ll have to watch out there for yourselves but whatever you do don’t come on this side when the shooting starts. I’ll say it again, do not show yourselves on this side of the buildings until I say its ok.”
“Where the hell are you officer? Was that you shooting a while ago? Can’t you stop those men before they get here? We don’t have any weapons here but one rifle.”
“You take that rifle and your family out of that house now mister. Those bastards have some kind of cannon mounted on their flyer and shot mine down with it. I can’t get to you but I can shoot from here on this hill.”
“All right we’re going. I have to leave the phone; it's not portable, so how will we know when it’s safe to come back?”
“Watch for a smoke flare then come to it and get me. If you don’t see green smoke, don’t come back.” Angela mounted the big scope on the rifle and zeroed in on a post on the porch of the house. She touched a button and read, “1,150 yds.”
She slid a flat rock and a folded cloth under one leg of the bipod to level the rifle some and opened a box to remove a cartridge that looked like a little polished brass rocket. She noted the wind as she slid the shell into the chamber and locked the bolt home, tapping it twice. She checked the gas relief ports again and rechecked the wind, there was none and the ports were clear. Any blockage in either port could result in wrecking the gun and definitely would crush her shoulder.
She reset the range finder on the big scope again and noted that there was still no breeze at all. “Bad on you, bad guys, good on me.” She said quietly and laid three more cartridges within easy reach.
Her classmates at the academy laughed, at first, at the huge, beautiful, single shot rifle that fired antique aircraft machine gun bullets. They responded more politely when they found out her grandfather had made it in his basement shop. She had drawn a crowd when she started shooting, and her friends watched in awe as she reduced a man-sized boulder to rubble with ten armor piercing shots, never missing once, from twenty-five hundred yards.
Since that time she had fired hundreds of rounds and was positive she could make head shots under the present conditions. Not that she would try, trunk shots were surer and with Thumper, as fatal.
She remained as calm and steady as she always did, even after the traumatic events of the past few minutes. Even with innocents at stake. Her Gramps had described her as a shooter, with a peculiar inflection, to a friend once and when she asked what he meant, he only said she would have to find out for herself. Some months later, in a firefight, caught in the open, she killed three men as their bullets flew all around her. Her sunglasses were shot off her face and one bullet passed under her arm through the sleeve. A local cop in telling about it said, “That big girl just stood there calmly and put two bullets in each of those guys heads. The best shooting I ever saw and all three of them were shooting at her! One of them even had an auto-gun, he got him first, the other two had pistols, like her. Damn, what a shooter!”
The first flyer grounded and then the other two, four men total. One man crouched behind a small shed and was hid from the house but exposed to Angie’s crosshairs. She centered the sight on his body mass and fired without consciously pulling the trigger. The big rifle barrel was tracking toward the next man as Angela said aloud, “one”. She worked the bolt action, reloaded smoothly and rapidly, and fired again. This time she paused an instant and saw her target flip sideways and lay sprawled. “Two.” The third she picked was moving back to one of the flyers so she zeroed in on the seat back and fired just before he reached it. He did reach it, and, at the same time, so did a massive copper clad soft-nosed slug. He flopped over the windscreen and hung there, not moving. “Three.” The last one lay in a low spot and was looking frantically around. Her fourth shot passed through him and his body jumped a little as the ground under him reacted to the big slugs’ impact. “Four.” Less than 10 seconds had passed for all four shots.
She ran the stunner down her throbbing thigh again and sighed with relief, as it became numb again. She looked again at each of the bodies through the scope to make sure they were staying put.
Before the green flare died away completely she heard someone calling frantically in her earphone. She said, “shut up that damned jabbering and come get me. The perps are dead and I’m hungry, dirty, and hurt. Get a move on. Please”
The rancher and his family fawned over her and ooed and aahed over the bodies, especially the massive exit wounds. She accepted some water and sandwiches as they loaded her up into a large truck flyer and started back to Riball City. The local medicine man x-rayed her leg and made a new removable splint for her.
She got the rancher to bring her some spare charges for her stunner and as she made arrangements for the first shuttle up and the first ship out. They had wanted to “thank her properly,” but she declined. When pressed she said, “If you people had dealt with those creeps I wouldn’t have had to. I don’t regret it, that’s my job, but I don’t have to enjoy it either, now go home and let me go to mine.”
On the restful trip home Angela reflected on the recent past and pondered the unknowable future, especially in regard to the Norwegian-looking second mate with the nice butt.
END
Bill Green on Bill Green: "It's been a long interesting trip to here from my Kentucky roots through the Marines, through three marriages, one to a Florida country girl, one to an anthropologist from Brooklyn, and a one to young police-woman from L.A. I have three children from the first wife. A free thinker, a Navy Seal now soldier, a financial analyst, six grandchildren and one and a half great-grandchildren make up the family that I wish I could spend more time around. There were many wonderful years near Key West too fishing for a living, building boats and homes sometimes too. Always reading, reading, I read the entire sci-fi section of the library in Key West while I was recuperating from an accident. I am seventeen years now into recovery from the dreaded scourge of alcohol addiction and I spend a couple of days each week directing others down that precipitous path. It seems odd but I enjoy that as much as I enjoyed teaching my children to catch fish. I'm a happy guy. I have a dog." (and I bet that dog, like I am, is grateful to be called a friend of Bill's--ed.)
