Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

She was surprisingly strong, but he was stronger and his body weight, atop her, soon exhausted her struggles.

"Animal," she said. She spit into his face. He wiped it off by rubbing his cheek on her breasts and leaned to kiss her. She bit him and he bit her back, leaving a big purple bruise on her lower lip.

"We just promised to deliver you back to his bigness," he said. "We didn't say unbruised. You wanta play rough I'm here."

The strange thing was, as he remembered the incident, that she came to enjoy the roughness, seemingly urging him on even after her cone-shaped breasts began to heave with her rapid breathing, forcing him to force her until, with a melting, gasping, moaning lunge, she came to him.

And it was never mentioned. Not at the trial, not ever, not by Gwyn. He made the reference to it when she took her turn at trying to pry the location of his home planet out of him, but that was it. He didn't see her again after that, but he spent a lot of cold hours in the training camp thinking about those times aboard the flagship when he'd knock on her cabin door and she'd open up, sometimes dressed in the Texas undergarments, sometimes in only her brown skin, her arms opening to him, that wondrous world of sensuality opening up to him at the sight of her.

Women.

He thought a lot about women. Not that he suffered unduly. It seemed to be much harder, those long weeks of male society on the training planet and on the ships and in schools, for the Empire trainees, because, as he'd heard in their conversations, things were much different on Empire worlds, with sex taken free and easy from an early age. He didn't suffer, because on Texas you didn't expect the total joy of sex until you were old enough to make your first trip into Miss Toni's place in Dallas City and after that until you courted and won. He was weeks short of his eighteenth birthday and he'd known three women. Miss Pitty once in fear and trembling and fumbling quickness, a second time when she, taking time from her work to give him a rousing send-off from Texas, taught him some interesting variations. Gwyn. He'd lost count. He tried, when things were rough and he had trouble getting to sleep, to remember the times. Some stood out. Others faded into the sweet, sensual memory of the totality of those long weeks of it there on the flagship. And Emily. Of all the three, she was the best. She was a Texas girl, all of Texas, all of life and sweetness and love and tenderness and beauty, the girl he would marry, someday, the girl he would have married sooner had he not lost his head and kidnapped an Empire farlcat.

Emily alone was more than most Texicans his age could hope for and when you added in Gwyn there was no reason for him to suffer, because he'd had more than his share of women. So he counted his blessings and wondered about women and used his memories to ease his desperate homesickness.

T.E.S. Crucis was an antiquated Middleguard with some of her communications and battle gear removed to house dozens of trainees and the extra weapons on which they practiced. She was a leaking old hull and the Texican was often rousted from his bunk, hustled to the locks, suited in L.S.A. and shoved out and away to crawl awkwardly over the rusting hull to patch weaknesses. He got all the good details like that, mostly because he was the outworlder and possibly because he did them uncomplainingly. He was good with a space welder and did the job neatly so that the Crucis leaked less and less because the job was done right.

They were out in Vegan space, shooting at drones, when the main seam gave over the power compartment, stressed by the weight and mass of the generator, let space in and did in three power men before the compartment could be evacuated and sealed off.

Dead in space, the Crucis reflected the glitter of Vega as Lex, pressed into service as usual, crawled the curves, clanking soundlessly, except in the atmosphere of the L.S.A., to see a serious breach.

"Sir," he sent to the officer on the other end of his communicator, "it's a big one this time. I'll need help."

"Damn, Texas, can't you handle it?"

"Take a look, sir." He put his scanner on it and let the officer take a look. He heard a gasp. As the scanner moved, the seam opened wider, moving along the vertical axis of the hull. If it opened much wider it would rip into the crew area, venting a good deal of the ship's air into space and closing off a full quarter of the ship.

"A plate of extra patching metal and a magnetic clamp, too," Lex said, beginning to move already, taking his welder to the hairline crack which moved even as he began to throw a temporary weld onto it. "And, sir, I'd hurry if I were you."

They sent out an Empire Sub-Chief, not trusting the job, which had suddenly become critical, to a trainee. Sub-Chief Blant Jakkes stood five foot ten and, as did most Empireites, rather hated the big Texican, not because he knew Lex well enough for hatred, but mainly because Lex was an outsider and different and bigger and faster and decidedly more handsome. The Sub-Chief was a career man who had done ten toward his retirement at the end of thirty and he was a member of the training cadre of the Crucis because he'd shown, in a couple of duels with the Cassiopeians, that he was one hell of a weapons man. He was also a good teacher and, even if he did resent Lex, he had to admit that the Texican was also one hell of a good weapons man. That didn't make it right to have an alien on one of the Emperor's fleet ships, but the Texican did know his way around a beam control panel.

Blant Jakkes came crawling out, attaching and releasing his lifeline, carrying a plate of patching metal and a clamp to look down on the breach, which was still creeping forward in spite of Lex's efforts, with some concern.

"Right," Lex said, opening the communicator with his tongue. "We need the clamp here and there." He pointed with the welder, making marks on the hull. There was no time for Sub-Chief Jakkes to remind the trainee that he'd give the orders. He set his lifeline and put one contact of the clamp at the indicated near spot and crawled abeam to set the other. He felt the hull jerk under him and looked back, startled, to see that the seam had opened all the way to the joint of the inner-support bulkhead and he cursed the old single-hull construction, wishing that he were back with the battle fleet, where all ships had double hulls.

"Move," Lex yelled. "Set that contact."

Jakkes moved and his movement violated Newton's third law of motion to the point of sending the Sub-Chief spinning off the hull to jerk to a stop at the end of his fifteen-foot lifeline. The unconnected contact of the magnetic clamp was jerked from his hand, jiggled, hung from the connector free. The seam, stressed hard from below, tried to rip through the bulkhead fastenings and Lex moved as fast as he could, ignoring the struggling Sub-Chief as Jakkes pulled himself down hand over hand trying to make contact with the hull, not watching his lifeline as it coiled and floated to let two loops fall into the opened seam.

Lex placed the second contact and, looking over his shoulder with some effort, saw that there were seconds to spare before the bulkhead fastenings went and activated the coil of the clamp. As the clamp contracted, there was resistance and the movement of the opened seam was jerky and slow and then, with a sudden snap, the seam closed, cutting Jakkes' lifeline in two places to leave him holding a line with no anchor, floating five full feet away from the hull. Although they were dead in space, there was some residual forward movement of the ship, Jakkes keeping pace, trying desperately to remember from long-forgotten training which movement to make to cause a reaction which would drift him toward the hull. He made exactly the opposite motion, a sudden jerk, and began to swim slowly outward. The situation was serious, because the ship was dead, damage having been done in the power compartment by explosive decompression. Jakkes knew that he was a dead man, because his L.S.A. communicator was of limited range and before the ship could be brought under power for a search he'd be the tiniest mote on a big black emptiness and he had enough air for, say, three hours.