Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

He was sorry to leave the old Rearguard when transfer orders came, sending both him and his best friend, newly promoted Weapons Chief Blant Jakkes, to a fleet port on the far edge of the core sector to be assigned to a wheezing Vandy with a lonely sector of space to patrol. There at the core the worlds were few. The dense star fields glowed brightly, with no space debris in the relatively small areas between old suns, and the only reason for patrolling it at all was to forestall a Cassiopeian scouting sweep into Empire from the rear.

After the spaciousness of the Rearguard ship, the small Vandy was cramped. Worse, her age and condition seemed to dictate at least one cooling failure per day, so that the crew was constantly grumbling, out of uniform, sweating, panting, cursing the day they were ever assigned to T.E.S. Grus .

However, no one cursed the old Grus more than her skipper, Fleet Captain Arden Wal, hero of the Battle of Wolf's Star, goat of the Texas incident. Having lost two first-line ships, Captain Arden Wal was fortunate, he realized, to have any ship at all. But he had been passed over for promotion and had narrowly escaped being shipped back to the central Empire to fly a desk. He'd been saved from that fate by discovering the Grus on the way to the ships' graveyard, claiming her, seeing to her outfitting personally and calling on a long-overdue favor from an Admiral on the Emperor's staff.

There were days when he regretted his good fortune of getting another ship. Like the day when the blink computer misfired and sent them out into space so close to a huge core monster of a sun that the paint began to melt on the hull and the coolers whined with overwork and threatened to fail and bake them all and the generator seemed to take forever to charge for a quick, cooling blink to anywhere except almost in the Hades of that bastard sun.

When it was over and the coolers stopped complaining, Wal went storming down the corridors and ladders to chew on his navigator a little and, on the way, passed crew's quarters where he saw one helluva big man out of uniform, sweating, his chest bare and drops of perspiration forming on his well-developed muscles.

"Fleeter, you're out of uniform," Captain Wal barked. "When I come back, don't be."

Lex put on his T-top and swore a little, but snapped to attention when the Captain came back to stand in the hatch and look in with grim approval on his face. "Sure it's hot, fleeter," Wal said, "but we're all hot, carry on."

It was later, after the duel, that each of them was to discover that they had something in common, a chase into Cassiopeian space which had cost Wal a ship, a promotion and his career.

Since the blink computer proved to be accurate only to plus or minus one tenth of a unit, the patrol was, at times, a nervous one and the word got around and the crew began to sweat each time there was a charge building up in the generator, because one tenth of a unit is a not inconsiderable distance. There, near the core, one tenth of a unit could put them back into range of a star or send them close enough on a straight-line blink to a mass to warp the generator. Between blinks, the tech crew labored with the computer, but it was past its prime and it was all they could do to keep it operating within that plus or minus one tenth unit range.

Off duty, Lex wandered into navigation and listened to the techs swear and peered over shoulders to see that the computer was a relatively primitive, fairly simple model out of the past, the kind kids practiced on back on Texas. Lex didn't follow the technical jargon being bantered about, but he knew a little about computers, especially the kind he and Billy Bob used in school, on the sly, to predict the possibility of Lex's sweet little girl friend's capitulation to more than a sneaked kiss. He soon realized that the computer was a shotgun model, designed to do far more complicated jobs than run a blink vector, and that some of its brain was superfluous to its present function. Moreover, the malfunction seemed to be in one of the superfluous sections.

"You might try bypassing this sector," Lex suggested to the Chief Tech, a man who occasionally drank with him and Jakkes.

Empire techs did things by the book. The Chief looked at him blankly, asking silently what Gunner knew about 'chinery, and turned back. The next blink showed an error of just under one quarter light-year and left them a week's run at mini-blink speed to the appointed station, making the opposition Cassie a little nervous. Lex was on the bridge at his gunnery station when the communication came through.

"You're consistently giving us false information," the Cassie sent.

"Computer failure," the Grus sent,

"Let us hope that your errant computer does not send you into our space," the Cassie sent.

So another element of tension was added, for the patrol route was along the line, close in, and the Cassie opposite was a new Vandy type with all the latest gear. There hadn't been a duel in the core sector in decades, but as the Grus limped and missed, limped and missed, the communications from the Cassie became more and more curt.

"He thinks we're up to something," Jakkes said. "We're going to have to fight him sure as hell."

"We haven't even got the latest screen on this old tub," said the Tech Chief, who was drinking with them. "And he's got us outgunned."

"You think he'd take us in a fight, then?" Lex asked.

"No doubt about it," Jakkes said.

"Why don't you bypass that defective lobe and give us at least that much?" Lex asked.

"Look, Texas," the Tech Chief said, "you just don't go frigging around with a computer. That lobe was put there for a reason. I have no idea what would happen if we blinked with that lobe bypassed and I don't intend to find out."

"It was put there to handle information not needed on a blink," Lex said.

"In view of your erratic and deceptive behavior," the Cassiopeian Vandy sent, "we must reluctantly challenge you."

The honor of the Emperor was at stake. Captain Wal knew that he had a slim chance in a head-to-head duel with the new Cassie Vandy and he answered with his head high, but with inner anger. So it was to end like this, out here in the core, on a ship which was years overdue for the junk heap.

"In the name of the Emperor, I accept your challenge," Wal sent. He followed, since he was the challenged party, with a time in universal and with coordinates in a clear area of space which would give his errant computer room for wide misses.

"Do we have to fight him?" Lex asked Jakkes.

"It's the code."

"Let me be sure I understand," Lex said. "We blink out at a place we've given him in advance and he'll be there and then we just sit there blasting at each other until something gives."

"That's the way it is."

"Why?"

Jakkes shook his head. "Hell, that's just the way it is."

"It's based on trust," the Tech Chief said. "By making the duel conform to tradition we assure the Cassie and he assures us that the duel is an isolated engagement and that neither of us is up to any tricks. That keeps it one ship on one ship and doesn't expand the fight."

"But we're apt to miss the coordinate by a few million miles and make him think we're trying to sneak by him into Cassie space," Jakkes said.

"If we do, we'll have a battle fleet down on our ass in hours," the Tech Chief said.

Jakkes was getting drunk rapidly. He looked at Lex with watery eyes. "If you want to write any last letters home, better get with it."

Lex didn't even know where home was. And he wasn't ready to write last letters. He'd done two of his years with the fleet and he'd even begun to believe, after the slow passage of what seemed like aeons of time, that he'd live to see Texas again as a free man.