Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

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.

Riddent.

And Murichon and President Belle Resall and old Andy Gar and all the old, gray advisers who had been in the Dallas City command center. And the home-place, Murichon's house and the fields where he'd played as he grew, all a part of the raw hole.

He had told them he wanted to be alone. And then he'd ridden a borrowed airors from fleet headquarters in the desert to see for himself and had come here, to his home, their home, to walk empty rooms and feel her presence, smell her lingering fragrance.