by Zach Hughes
"I'm fine. Now."
"He kicked," she said.
"You're kidding."
"Here, you can feel."
He put his hand on her stomach and his son obliged. He felt life under his palm and he grinned. But the
grin faded. He was remembering the five ships which had blossomed into deadly fire out there in space.
Chapter Ten
He was older. On the outside he still looked as if some teenage boy had stolen his older brother's uniform, but inside he was old and sad. He was in a place called the Alamo Bar, a new establishment on the outskirts of Dallas City where servicemen gathered to forget the boredom of patrol after a tour of duty. He wore the insignia of a full colonel. The medal, which he didn't wear, had been pinned onto his blouse by Belle Resall herself. The men with him could have worn the same medal, Jakkes, Form, Arden Wal, Billy Bob Blink.
They had been screening volunteers from the captured Empire forces. Texas had ten thousand new ships, but it needed trained men to man them. Even now the hospital at San Ann was working overtime to remove the thought monitors from the skulls of the top officers, many of whom had expressed an interest in joining the Texican fleet. It was an old custom for lower grades to defect to the other side upon capture, so there were some seven thousand enlisted men undergoing indoctrination and training now for the purpose of joining the Texicans. It had been decided to give the ex-Cassies among the Empire fleet almost immediate status in the Texican forces, for in a fight against Empire, the Cassies would, it was felt, be loyal to anyone lighting their traditional enemy.
The planet was, more than ever, on a wartime footing, for the capture of a battle group and a top Overlord of the Empire fleet had sent vibrations throughout Empire, all the way to the old man who sat his throne on the planet called Earth. Spies reported renewed activity among the gathering attack fleet, rigid security measures throughout the Empire. There would be no more sneak attacks, for once aroused, the Empire was a fearsome military machine. Arden Wal estimated, for the high Texas brass, that it would take a mere three months for the empire ship works to replace the ten thousand ships lost to Texas.
Billy Bob was also advanced in rank after the airors raid and was in charge of rearming the captured Empire ships. Already more than half of the new ships had been outfitted with Darlenes and were on the line, ready to fight the last battle for Texas.
The mood of the planet was good. Had they not emerged victorious from two major battles without the loss of a single man? The problem, in fact, was not in preparing the Texican people for war but in impressing upon them that victory was not always going be so easy. Around the planet underground shelters were being excavated, with women and young people making up the labor force, since all able-bodied men were on fleet duty or building ships. The work went on in an almost festive atmosphere of confidence. Not once but a thousand times the government's decision to build shelters was questioned. The opinion of the general public was that it was a waste of effort and money. But there were those who knew the true gravity of the situation, and the five men sitting around a table in he Alamo were among them. Arden Wal knew that the next attack would be in force, upward of a million ships of battle.
"There will be no honor in this one," Blant Jakkes said. "That's the tone of the reports we get from the spies. Empire says that we fight outside the military code, citing the destruction of five defenseless ships in the raid into the periphery."
"We'll only be outnumbered five to one," Billy Bob said. "And we're mounting up to ten Darlenes on the big Rearguards. We can cut off a hundred projectiles in five minutes."
Ex-Empire Tech-Chief Form, now Major, drained his glass. "And five million men will die in five minutes."
Lex looked at him, knowing his feelings. He still suffered nightmares remembering the flowering of the Empire ships as fifty pounds of expand went off against a hull. "We've tried, Form, we've offered terms. All we want is to be left alone."
"Empire's attitude is if you can't control it, kill it," Arden Wal said.
"I suppose that's the basic issue," Billy Bob said. "Empire has built a central government which is all things to all people. Here on Texas we think that government should defend the planet, build public utilities and regulate the numbers of the population for the good of all. When it comes right down to it, that doesn't seem like a big difference, but I guess it is."
"I'd never sit down to drink with a General in the Empire," Jakkes said.
"Is that so great an honor?" Wal asked, smiling. "I feel that I am the one who is honored by the openness of the Texican society. I never had friends before."
There was an embarrassed silence. It was Form who broke it. "When I pulled the plug out there and lifted off to see. that Rearguard ship go up I didn't even feel anything," he said. "And that's funny, because my logic tells me, told me then, that inside that cold hull there were thousands of men. Men like me. Poor jokers, some of them impressed into service, who would leap at a chance to live like we live here on Texas. But I didn't feel anything for them."
"You couldn't see them," Wal said. "You were killing a machine of war, not men."
"Yes, that's what makes war so easy, I guess," Lex said. "If you had to look into the eyes of everyone you were going to kill I wonder if it would be so easy."
"We didn't ask for the war," Jakkes said. Lex grinned to hear him use the pronoun "we" so easily. In many ways Jakkes was more Texican than most Texicans.
"And we're not threatening the home planet," Billy. Bob said. "We have no planetkillers in all of our arsenal. We don't plan to build any. But out there in that fleet there are a quarter of a million ships which are armed to make Texas a cinder. I think that justifies what we've done and what we have to do. I'm not saying that the life of a Texican is worth the lives of a million Empireites, I'm just saying that we are only a few and we have few lives to spare. We have to fight to keep what we have. A man takes your life, he's taking everything."
"We'll fight," Lex said. "We'll kill. I don't quite understand why we have to fight, but it's Empire's choice and that leaves us no choice at all, does it?"
"I've got to get back to the plant," Billy Bob said.
Lex had one more and then rodeZelda , stripped of her extra features and returned to her clean lines, to his home, where Riddent waited, the evening meal on the table, her stomach protruding past all laws of anatomy.
"He's been a little devil," she said, smiling as Lex kissed her. "Playing kickball all over the place."
After dinner they watched the news on the trid. Riddent reached for his hand and held it tightly when it was announced that the stream of reinforcements into the gathering Empire fleet had come to a halt. "It is felt," the newsman said, "that attack is imminent."
Lex was in command of a first strike group within the fleet command by Arden Wal. When the fleet was alerted, upon the first outward movement of the Empire forces, he went over emergency procedures once more with Riddent. At the first encounter, she was to take shelter in her assigned underground bunker on the south side of Dallas City. There would be medical attention for her there, and she might, in the excitement, need it, for she was nearing delivery time and her personal doctor had warned Lex that the excitement of the battle would, in all probability, bring on labor.
As he was lifted to his command ship, a powerful Empire Vandy with two Darlene space rifles mounted,
in addition to the standard Empire armament, he was aware of a growing resentment toward those who were taking him from his wife at such a crucial time. He resented, of course, Empire's attempt to take over Texas and make it just another planet in a huge combine of planets, but most of all he hated the Empire war planners for depriving him of being present while his son was being born.
He did not, however, let his anger show. He grouped his strike force on Arden Wal's port flank and ran battle station exercises until his crew was sharp and on the fine edge of their best capabilities. Then came the long period of waiting. Empire was in no hurry. The massive fl
eet approached with short blinks, scouting the way, line upon line of death edging ever closer.
When the Empire fleet was well into the void between the scattered stars on the galaxy's rim and the Lone Star, Zed, Lex moved. Command ship calculators estimated the probable position of the next advance jump by the Empire vanguard and Lex's strike force was there, materializing out of nothing to rake the ranks of Empire ships with Darlene projectiles, blinking in and blinking out before Empire gunners could train their beam weapons on his ships. Fairly minor alterations had given the captured Empire ships the advantage of the double-blink generator and Empire ships had one advantage over Texican ships, their shields.
Thus it was captured Empire ships which began to strike terror into the Empire fleet before a single Empire ship was in range of Texas.
As Lex, the first to strike, blinked out, men were dying behind him, dying by the hundreds, the thousands, as Darlene projectiles blinked inside the hulls of Empire ships, the shields useless, unable to stop the passage of an object traveling in non-space, and the kill was total.
The vanguard force staggered, regrouped and bored onward. And it was thus for hours as the fleet of the Empire moved on, marching with admirable determination into certain destruction. Ship after ship flamed, burst, became dead particles in space. A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand ships vaporized and still the movement went on, directed by Overlord Guton Artlz from the safely protected Rearguard lingering on the fringe of the galaxy, removed from death. Artlz quoted the Emperor himself when he was informed of the losses. "Let one rebel against the benevolence of the Empire and the disease will become epidemic."
That such a statement represented specious reasoning did riot concern Overlord Artlz. He was the Emperor's own cousin, a man who had been forced by necessity to leave the comforts and pleasures of the court to live in the confines of a spaceship out beyond the limits of civilization. Nor was Artlz overly concerned by the high casualty rate of the approach. He had expected casualties. Not so many, perhaps, but what was a hundred thousand ships? That left him just over nine hundred thousand ships, many of them armed with weapons which could, upon his order, end the battle once and forever with the simple destruction of the whole accursed planet of Texas.
"We must strike," advised one of his Admirals. "They're cutting us to pieces. We must abandon the slow, controlled approach, blink close and engage the main fleet."
"We will carry on as planned," Artlz said coldly, asLex made his second strike, Darlenes rearmed, to burn thirty Empire ships within split segments of a second.
"Like shooting beardies on a pond," Billy Bob Blink reported, after his first strike. He had been fifth in, and when he made his second run, blinking into the center of an Empire grouping, Empire gunners were ready, the weapons trained at a randomly selected area into which Billy Bob's group happened to emerge. The Empire weapons caused three Darlene projectiles to explode prematurely as they left the muzzles of the Texican ships. Texas suffered its first casualties with the loss of three captured Empire Vandys with all members of their, crews.
At a point in space a few astronomical units from Texas, the Empire fleet began its encircling maneuver. While this split the Empire forces into spaced groupings, making the strikes by the double-blinking captured ships less hazardous, it also split the Texican forces facing the main fleet, setting the stage for a face-to-face encounter near the planet. From the Texican flagship went out the orders. Full attack.
Two hundred thousand Texican ships locked on targets, blinked, left havoc in their wake as they blinked out, but not without losses. Empire gunners were not that slow. In the point of time required for aiming and firing Darlene rifles, the Empire ships could bead on the enemy and the unshielded Texican ships burned easily. Belle Resall's horde would, after all, be needed to restore the balance of the sexes on Texas. There would, indeed, be a national day of mourning, if the planet survived.
Now the multiple guns of the captured Rearguard and Middleguards were brought into play. Shielded by the Empire's best screens, the big vessels turned the tide, fighting on the Empire's terms, head to head, visible by optics, sending salvos of Darlene projectiles into the Empire ranks.
The skies of Texas were no longer empty. Those who watched from planetside saw stars born and die in seconds as ships burned.
Not even a million-unit fleet could take such losses and remain a fighting unit. A single Texican Rearguard, able to sit through the barrage of weapons aimed against it for the time required to launch projectiles, could kill a hundred ships in five minutes. One million of anything represents a huge quantity, but when the whole was being reduced at the rate of approximately eight thousand per five-minute period, with the resulting loss of Texican ships on a scale less than one one-hundredth of that total, the facts were made clear even to the Emperor's own cousin, who had moved into range but was still safe out in the depths of space.
With a red and angry face Overlord Guton Artlz gave the order. "Prepare to disengage."
The signal went out too late for a thousand Empire ships. The broken and detached remnants of the greatest strike force of all time began to regroup, unable to count the soaring losses, and, on a signal, blinked away, taking a long hop to the bigness of space.
There, with the strike forces still blinking in and out, caving flaming stars in their wake, another order was sent from the Empire flagship.
"Missiles," Guton Artlz said, his lips compressed in hatred.
They traveled at sub-light speeds and were picked off in space by the Texican fleet, alert to the possibility. They went out from the Empire fleet by the thousands, each potentially deadly, each, if the Empire had chosen planetkillers, capable of ending the battle for all practical purposes. The Texican fleet would be homeless, able only to extract a measure of revenge before running short of supplies. And space was lit by them, by the thousands, to be centered on target finders and then destroyed systematically, by the hundreds, then by the tens as they streaked through space.
On the planet, screens were filled with them and the controllers worked frantically, pointing out positions to the wildly blinking fleet as it chased missiles. Had the Empire fired from close range it would have been hopeless, but from a distance hours were available to seek out the missiles and destroy them.
Meanwhile, regrouped, the shattered Empire fleet limped toward the periphery, safe from Texican pursuit, since all Texican ships were involved in the life-and-death game of tag with the missiles.
A few hundred of the missiles made it past the Texas fleet to home in on the planet, gaining speed with the planet's gravitational pull. Lex accounted for dozens of them as they neared the planet, throwing his ship around space with reckless abandon, lashing out with rays and Darlenes at the points of death which appeared in his finders, listening with half an ear to the locations sent up by the ground controllers. And when the missiles, those very few which had gotten through, began to glow with heat upon entering atmosphere they were met by the reserve guard, Texicans on highly mobile airorses, herding missiles instead of winglings, burning them until, with a sigh, the ground controllers said, "All clear."
The missile which took out Dallas City was a fluke. A near miss out in deep space had killed its power, leaving its velocity and direction. The fleet was engaged in mopping up, finishing off partially destroyed missiles, when the alarm sounded from the Dallas City control center and fire began to form on the nose cone of the missile as it hit atmosphere. A twelve-year-old boy, mounted on his first airors, was in position to strike the missile, but he blew it, punching too much power and overshooting, and screens all over the planet watched the missile fall the last few thousand feet until it was below horizon for all but the screens in the greater Dallas area and then seismographs registered the hit.
The planet did not burn.
They were using population reducers, strategic weapons designed to kill concentrated groupings of humanity and leave the lush agricultural countryside intact. The force was
not even dirty. Radiation was no problem. But where once the largest city in Texas had spread its broad avenues and its parks in all directions there was a crater hundreds of feet deep.
The point of impact, it was determined later, ground zero, to use an old term out of the past, was immediately over the underground bunker which had sheltered Lex's wife and unborn child. The entire complex was vaporized. Search teams could find nothing to bury, nothing of several thousand inhabitants of the city.
Chapter Eleven
He could stand on the patio of what had been their home and look at the fringe devastation. The blast had extended outward past his property line, taking the acres given in reward to Blank Jakkes, and almost reaching the main house. There, glass was shattered and there were brown singe marks on the frame of the building itself. But it was not the damage to his property which caused Lex to stand, weeping, looking out toward the raw crater which had been Dallas City.
As in almost every tragedy, the word "if' was the epitome of sadness.
If he had not insisted that she go to the shelter—
If he had insisted on staying with her—
If—if—if—
Had she stayed in her own home she would have been shaken, but alive. Even if she had been in the main room, where glass was shattered everywhere, her worst injuries would have been cuts and bruises.
At times, during the first terrible hours, having returned subdued but victorious, he had told himself that it
wasn't true. He had not seen her body. Therefore, she was not dead. She would show up, appearing miraculously, having decided to disobey his stern orders and weather the attack in the home of a friend well away from Dallas City. Seeing is believing and he couldn't see her dead so she wasn't dead.
Except that she was and he knew it. She would never have endangered their unborn child by failing to seek shelter and somewhere up there, in the warm, formerly friendly atmosphere of Texas, the minute atomic parts of her were floating, traveling the routes of the jet streams, moving with the planet's weather to fall, someday, somewhere, to enrich the soil.
