Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

grow up under the threat of the Cassies. What I'm saying is you don't know shit about the situation, boy, and sometimes you come close to talking treason."

So he stopped talking, even to Jakkes, who, after training, had requested an action station and had pulled strings to take Lex with him.

The thing about it was that there were facts and figures. The military budget of the Empire was a matter of record and, after his brain stopped swimming with the astronomical numbers involved, Lex began to think, more and more, that the waste was not only foolish, it was criminal.

Down near Centaurus there was a ship's graveyard. It consisted of outmoded warships and it extended for thousands of miles with the dead, stripped, pitted hulls packed as closely as possible. There was, in that ships' graveyard, enough metals to represent the ores of a hundred Texas-sized planets with normal density, enough to supply the needs of Texas for a thousand years, and it was a total waste, since reclamation was more expensive than mining new ore on the out-planets of the Empire. When Lex punched up the visual tapes showing the "reserve fleet," he was astounded. He put the facts into his brain and told them to stay there for future reference. He spent nights thinking about how a Texas fleet could blink in, latch onto a hull and blink out with enough salvageable metal to add to the meager reserves of Texas a stockpile which would make piracy worthwhile. "Alternately, he envisioned trade deals, meacr for old ships. The Empire, as imagined, would trade low, because they had fresh ores and their labor guilds would not stand still for Declamation, because it would throw miners out of work.

He had a lot of time to think as the Rearguard cruised up and down the line, covering an assigned volume of space at sub-light speeds, traveling from nowhere to nowhere and back again, instruments tracking the Cassie opposite who traveled the same empty trek time and again until the routine became automatic and the only escape, during his off-duty hours, was the library.

At the end of his first six months' tour he was somewhat of an authority on the war, could recite its high points and its isolated hot battles, knew and laughed at the dueling concept, and he had not been close to an enemy ship. Toward the end of the tour, he was almost wishing for a fight, anything to relieve the endless routine.

Luyten Three was a fleet port, a planet devoted to the clang and din of repair, modernization and outfitting of battle vessels. Land area was scant, isolated volcanic tips thrust above the endlessly rolling seas, but the location of the planet saved long and tedious blinks from that sector of space back into Empire central.

Luyten City was a brawling, tough town, always packed with spacers on holiday, its streets lined with gaudy fronts and flashing signs designed to lure the bored, spacesick servicemen into parting with their accumulated pay. Luyten City offered everything, whores for whoremongers, gambling for gamblers, Feelies for those who wanted their kicks vicariously, nude shows for voyeurs, safe drugs for those who wanted to drop out for a while, illegal and even deadly drugs for more reckless souls, drinks for drinkers, culture in the form of live drama and museums for the aesthetic, vulgarity for vulgarians and, for Lex, a meacr steak, costing a week's pay, served by a sweet-faced little girl in the scantiest of costumes who told Lex that she was off duty at local midnight and that her cost was reasonable.

"Don't mess with any of the townies," Blant Jakkes had warned, just before he disappeared for three days into a government-controlled brothel. "Some of them you put it in and it has teeth, boy. You wanta get laid, you go to a government place, right?"

"Right," Lex said, holding his town guide map and marking the restaurant which, according to the information, offered the foods of a thousand worlds. And he struck pay dirt in the form of a fairly decent steak, the first real meat he'd had since leaving Texas, and thanked the little girl while declining her invitation and then went out to look things over, feeling good solid land under his feet and missing the wide expanse of home, for the Luyten landscape was hilly and the sea was never far away.

He'd asked, there in the restaurant, where the steak had come from, hoping to hear someone say "Texas."

"You got me," the little girl had said.

"You read anything recently about a planet called Texas?" he asked a runty little fellow in a stand selling printed materials and stat papers.

"Who reads 'em?" the runt asked. "You wanta read, you buy."

He bought a couple of stat papers and scanned them. Most of the news he'd heard on the daily report put onto the ship's communications system, all Empire stuff. Nowhere was there a mention of Texas, not even a mention of a trade deal for meat. But he knew that the trading had to be still going on, because he'd had a Texas meacr steak which could not have been preserved from the first shipment.

He hit a couple of bars and listened to the talk there, strange-sounding places and the typical language of the fleet, walked, feeling lonely, toward the brothel where Jakkes had disappeared, made a fantastic discovery.

Aboard ship Gunner Basics didn't have access to blinkstat machines. But there, on the corner, was a sign saying "Public Blinkstat." He had to go into a bar to get the proper coinage for the machine and then he sent a blink addressed to his father via First Leader Jum Anguls, Ursa Major Sector. He waited for acknowledgment and got it, acknowledgment meaning only that the stat had been started across the parsecs toward the addressee. He had no assurance that there was even contact between the First Leader and the Texicans, but he was hungry for some word from home. He wanted to know how his father was feeling and how Billy Bob was holding out and, although he had not dared ask in the stat, he wanted to know about Emily. He left the column of the enlisted men's mess and his name and rank with blinkstat central in case there was a return message before his ship lifted off Luyten Three and then wandered the streets, hitting a few more bars but limiting his drinking, talking with fleeters, comparing tours of duty, getting around to asking, always, if anyone had heard any news about a planet called Texas.

Texas didn't exist.

"Texas? What sector?"

"I don't know," he had to say. "Had a buddy from there. Trying to locate him."

"Never heard of it."

Liberty was, in many ways, worse than duty, and the Luyten liberty was the first of many on isolated outplanets where the fleet touched down. And they were much the same, all the planets, chosen for their lack of livable land area, suited only for the fleet workshops, peopled by parasites who reached into the pockets of the fleeters, whores, gamblers, opportunists, perverts, retired fleeters making a credit on their ex-buddies. Liberty was loneliness and frustration, because each of his attempts, for a period of eighteen Months, to reach or make contact with his father brought nothing in return. Each time he'd send his blinkstat, at the cost of a week's pay, and each time he'd wait in vain for an answer. It was as if Texas had ceased to exist.

Gradually, however, he ceased to be a loner. His acceptance by Blant Jakkes threw him into association with others and he came to find that not all Empireites were scrungy. Some of them were fairly decent fellows. Talking with his fellow crewmen, listening to their descriptions of their home worlds, gave Lex an embryonic feeling of being a part of something and helped to nurture his growing, if grudging, admiration for Empire. For the Empire was, truly, huge. Rambler, the converted Cassiopeian, talked of his home and the far-flung alliance of star groups on the other side of the line and Lex felt a glow of pride to be a member of a race which could, in so short a time, conquer so much of the galaxy.