Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

"Big night?" Murichon Burns asked absently, as his eyes followed an intricate pattern of meters and instruments. The ship was almost to lift power.

"Big enough," Lex said. "We leaving?"

"How did you ever figure that out?"

"You heard from the great leader, then?"

"We'll hear from him via blinkstat from a few parsecs out," Murichon said. "I'll feet better about it that way."

A soft bell sounded the readiness of the ship's power. As Murichon's hands played over the console the hum of the plant changed, became a bee's song.

" Texas Queen ," a voice said on the sound system, "you do not have clearance to charge."

"I'm taking clearance," Murichon said, without activating the broadcast unit. "Read me clearance one-one-hundredth unit vertical vector," he told Lex.

"Traffic as thick as parasites on a molting meacr," Lex said. "Depth and layers."

"Find me a hole, boy. We're going into it."

It was risky business. It was a busy planet and an active spaceport. Inbound and outbound, the starships, the interplanetary craft, the privates and atmoflyers cluttered the screens.

"The button's yours," Murichon said, giving way to the superior reflexes of the young. "When you find a hole, hit it."

" Texas Queen, Texas Queen ," the control voice said, "you will decharge immediately."

"Now," Lex said, the screen giving him a small vertical hole which, the computers estimated, would be open for a millisecond, and the button was punched as he spoke and there was a feel of intimate and disturbing events in his gut as he looked out on the blackness of space with Polaris off the starboard quarter and depressed at an angle of seventy.

"I'll take her, boy," Murichon said. "We'll likely have company for a while."

Company they had. She signaled her blinking from outside the planet's atmosphere and emerged into space a telescope's shot away, a sleek and deadly Empire Vandy, painted the black of space but visible as the Queen's autos homed in on her. Aboard was Fleet Captain Arden Wal, veteran of the Battle of Wolfs Star, graying, slim, impeccable in his gold and black. As the Texas Queen moved at sub-light speed, charging for a big blink, Wal had time to report. He was near enough to use voice transmission, scrambled, of course. "As you suspected, sir, the bird flew prematurely."

"You're with her?" The voice was the smooth, cultured one of First Leader Jum Anguls.

"We have her, sir. We'll stay with her."

"Not too close."

"Of course, sir."

Wal relaxed. His superior power was ready, capable of outleaping that rusting antique by a hundredfold, equipped with instruments which could, in that micro-microinstant of blinking, measure and follow and emerge within a few thousand miles of any blinking ship. His Vandy had just been reconditioned at the Empire yards on Polaris Two. She was a smoothly functioning unit with a crew seasoned by two tours along the Cassiopeian frontier. To think for one moment that she was incapable of following the primitive Texas vehicle through space was to approach heresy.

Ahead, the Texas Queen blinked along a line down the Orion Arm and she was there, recharging, when Captain Arden Wal's Wolf emerged. The mission, Wal was thinking, was duck soup, a welcome rest for a crew which had earned a rest. He began to have his first doubts when a series of straight vector blinks showed the line of travel to be directly toward the Cassiopeian defense lines beyond Antares. If the Texicans continued in that direction, it would prove one thing, or one of two things. Either Jum Anguls was right in suspecting that the Texicans were Cassiopeian spies or the outworlders were just plain crazy, flying into the teeth of five full Line Fleets, each ship of which was more than capable of making scattered atoms out of the Texas Queen . Already the Cassiopeians would be alerted by the signals which a bunking ship sends ahead of itself through the continuum. Already a thousand weapons would be moving ponderously toward a possible emergence point.

The Texas Queen leaped parsecs through the emptiness, not deviating from the line of travel. Zigzagging to avoid large stars which could disrupt a blink generator and send a ship and its contents into limbo for eternity, the ship blinked and rested, bunked and rested, traveling the Orion Arm in seven-league boots, covering distances which strained the imagination in an instant, held back only by the need to rest, to recharge, to build for the next jump. And always behind her the sleek, dark form of the Empire Vandy.

Wal rang battle stations when, with gentlemanly courtesy, the warning came. "You are nearing Cassiopeian space, guard yourself and identify."

Wal listened for the telltale identification from the vessel ahead of bun. None came. Instead, as instruments whined td measure, she blinked and the Wolf followed on automatic with the crew tense and all weapons ready and hell broke loose as the Wolf emerged into space dead center of a whole Cassiopeian Line Fleet and screens sizzled as an incredible assault was made by a thousand weapons centered.

"The Texan, the Texan," Wal said, his voice calm.

"Gone, sir." The tech was not so calm. Bedlam was breaking loose as the ship's screen began to fail and force hammered the hull.

It was true. The tuned screens which had been following the Texas ship were blank. She'd blinked into the middle of a fleet and disappeared and now that fleet was pounding the Empire Vandy and gunners were opening up and, as he gave the emergency one order which gutted his power and left him a derelict in dead space—but out of Cassiopeian range—he saw first one and then another Cassiopeian cruiser puff as screens went under the concentrated fire of the Wolf . At least, he thought, in the silence of a dead ship, we took two of the bastards with us.

It is not a pleasant feeling to kill a fine ship. One instant with smooth sounds she's alive around you and the next she's silent as a tomb and floating free in uncharted space and you know that the power is melted into a useless blob of metals and all that's left is life support emergency to hold you, maybe, until you can find out where the hell the undirected emergency blink sent you and call in a wrecker. The hull can be salvaged, if it isn't too long a tow back to an Empire base, but she's no longer the same ship. Once before he'd been forced to do it, in the last stages of the Battle of Wolfs Star when he'd been Captain of an old Middle-guard cruiser. Now he'd been forced, to save his crew, to save himself, to kill one of the newest, finest ships of the Empire fleet and it caused him indigestion as his navigators searched unfamiliar stars for a clue to their location and the signalman sat patiently waiting to send out a tow request. And as he felt his stomach growl in protest he knew a mixture of hate and puzzlement. It was a strange feeling. He had little experience with hate. He didn't like the Cassiopeians, of course, but they were gentlemen.

They knew the rules of warfare and followed them. Their warning had been in the finest traditions of the hundred years' war. It was the Texicans who were barbarians, leading the Wolf into a trap, without a doubt by some prearranged plan wherein the Texas Queen went unharmed while the Empire ship came under the concentrated fire of a fleet. Only the superiority of the Empire screens had saved her. Yes, it was clearly the men from Texas, wherever the hell it was, who were responsible for his being, for the second time in his career, aboard a killed ship, a ship gutted by his own orders. They would pay.

It took eighteen hours to locate the Wolf in the sea of uncharted stars. The distress signal going into the nearest blinkstat relay point was weak, incomplete. The Wolf wallowed in her own misery for two long, sweating, stale-aired weeks before a rescue tug blinked alongside to begin the tedious journey to the Empire.