"He's been a little devil," she said, smiling as Lex kissed her. "Playing kickball all over the place."
After dinner they watched the news on the trid. Riddent reached for his hand and held it tightly when it was announced that the stream of reinforcements into the gathering Empire fleet had come to a halt. "It is felt," the newsman said, "that attack is imminent."
Lex was in command of a first strike group within the fleet command by Arden Wal. When the fleet was alerted, upon the first outward movement of the Empire forces, he went over emergency procedures once more with Riddent. At the first encounter, she was to take shelter in her assigned underground bunker on the south side of Dallas City. There would be medical attention for her there, and she might, in the excitement, need it, for she was nearing delivery time and her personal doctor had warned Lex that the excitement of the battle would, in all probability, bring on labor.
As he was lifted to his command ship, a powerful Empire Vandy with two Darlene space rifles mounted,
in addition to the standard Empire armament, he was aware of a growing resentment toward those who were taking him from his wife at such a crucial time. He resented, of course, Empire's attempt to take over Texas and make it just another planet in a huge combine of planets, but most of all he hated the Empire war planners for depriving him of being present while his son was being born.
He did not, however, let his anger show. He grouped his strike force on Arden Wal's port flank and ran battle station exercises until his crew was sharp and on the fine edge of their best capabilities. Then came the long period of waiting. Empire was in no hurry. The massive fleet approached with short blinks, scouting the way, line upon line of death edging ever closer.
When the Empire fleet was well into the void between the scattered stars on the galaxy's rim and the Lone Star, Zed, Lex moved. Command ship calculators estimated the probable position of the next advance jump by the Empire vanguard and Lex's strike force was there, materializing out of nothing to rake the ranks of Empire ships with Darlene projectiles, blinking in and blinking out before Empire gunners could train their beam weapons on his ships. Fairly minor alterations had given the captured Empire ships the advantage of the double-blink generator and Empire ships had one advantage over Texican ships, their shields.
Thus it was captured Empire ships which began to strike terror into the Empire fleet before a single Empire ship was in range of Texas.
As Lex, the first to strike, blinked out, men were dying behind him, dying by the hundreds, the thousands, as Darlene projectiles blinked inside the hulls of Empire ships, the shields useless, unable to stop the passage of an object traveling in non-space, and the kill was total.
The vanguard force staggered, regrouped and bored onward. And it was thus for hours as the fleet of the Empire moved on, marching with admirable determination into certain destruction. Ship after ship flamed, burst, became dead particles in space. A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand ships vaporized and still the movement went on, directed by Overlord Guton Artlz from the safely protected Rearguard lingering on the fringe of the galaxy, removed from death. Artlz quoted the Emperor himself when he was informed of the losses. "Let one rebel against the benevolence of the Empire and the disease will become epidemic."
That such a statement represented specious reasoning did riot concern Overlord Artlz. He was the Emperor's own cousin, a man who had been forced by necessity to leave the comforts and pleasures of the court to live in the confines of a spaceship out beyond the limits of civilization. Nor was Artlz overly concerned by the high casualty rate of the approach. He had expected casualties. Not so many, perhaps, but what was a hundred thousand ships? That left him just over nine hundred thousand ships, many of them armed with weapons which could, upon his order, end the battle once and forever with the simple destruction of the whole accursed planet of Texas.
"We must strike," advised one of his Admirals. "They're cutting us to pieces. We must abandon the slow, controlled approach, blink close and engage the main fleet."
"We will carry on as planned," Artlz said coldly, asLex made his second strike, Darlenes rearmed, to burn thirty Empire ships within split segments of a second.
"Like shooting beardies on a pond," Billy Bob Blink reported, after his first strike. He had been fifth in, and when he made his second run, blinking into the center of an Empire grouping, Empire gunners were ready, the weapons trained at a randomly selected area into which Billy Bob's group happened to emerge. The Empire weapons caused three Darlene projectiles to explode prematurely as they left the muzzles of the Texican ships. Texas suffered its first casualties with the loss of three captured Empire Vandys with all members of their, crews.
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.
The sun set.
He stood looking out toward the vast crater until Zed was only a glow below the horizon and the first of the seasonal Texas moons was showing over the eastern world. Death was in him, around him, was a glowing crater whose seared outer rim, flattened, barren, was within his view, adding a dim light to the Texas night He himself had risked death. He had delivered death. He had felt the sickness of it as he ordered Jakkes to kill the first of the five Empire ships which had been destroyed in the airors raid on the Empire fleet. He had seen his grandfather lying cold and still in his own bed and that was death, too, but a clean, natural death which obeyed nature's laws and was, somehow, sweet and bearable, although painful.
But Riddent dead? His unborn son dead? There was nothing natural, nothing fair, nothing acceptable about that."
For a moment, he wished them all dead, all the billions of Empireites. His rage sent him pacing, his face flaming, heat waves causing him to sweat inside his uniform. At that moment, had he been given divine power, he would have depeopled half a galaxy, but his rage faded, paled with his memories of his service in the Empire fleet to exclude the rank and file, the masses. The Emperor, then, all his top advisers, the men who directed the attack on one lonely planet far from Empire's sway.
Someone had said it once, about the Empire: "If you can't control it, kill it."