by Zach Hughes
"Scrub, shit-eater. Every inch of it. Anything I hate it's a smart-assed recruit. They tell me all Texicans eat meat, shit-eater. Is it true?"
"Yessir."
"Here's about seven inches, shit-eater, eat it."
"Sir, show me that in regulations."
"You're learning, shit-eater. Scrub." The floor extending for endless yards, an indoor parade of time-worn plastic, impossible to clean, his hands, his knees, his arms and legs protesting as he scrubbed and remembered soft lips and the winds of the plains and looked ahead with a despair which was a physical pain in his gut.
"I sentence you to a labor planet for a period not to exceed twenty years and not less than ten years." His voice harsh and alien in Lex's ears, the room a-rustle with approving sounds.
"For to seize one of the Emperor's subjects, to carry her against her will far from the benevolent rule of the Emperor and all it stands for, is a crime of serious degree."
That wasn't all I did to her, Lex was thinking, standing straight and tall.
"Let not the leniency of this sentence influence future wrongdoers," the Judge continued, "for it is to be noted that the Emperor's agent herself," a glance toward a box seat where the Lady Gwyn sat in regal splendor, "has appealed for temperance. Thus, I am pleased to say that the Emperor is willing, subject to consent by the convicted, to commute the sentence to an equal term of service in the Emperor's battle fleet."
On an icy flatness, protected from drifting snow by heat shields, a grounded fleet: the hull of a Vanguard destroyer salvaged after the Battle of Wolfs Star, an aged middleguard cruiser and a Rearguard battle cruiser, huge, as long as three blocks in Dallas City, a city known for its spaciousness, weapons in place, engines deactivated but there, endless hours, in battle gear, at station behind the controls of the weapons, mucking in lubricants to test mechanical aptitude, assembling and disassembling, doing it by the book even when it took, obviously, longer. Empire life support armor was heavy and awkward, and finding a suit to fit Lex was not, seemingly, within the capacity of the Emperor's battle fleet. Tight joints chafed his skin, limited his movements, but the tedium of basic was over and he was oblivious to the harassment as he devoted himself to learning as much as he could possibly learn about weapons, ships, hardware, techniques, even the thinking of the Emperor's defenders.
Texican lads began tinkering with their airorses before they knew enough math and physics to understand the theory behind the hardware involved, and, indeed, tinkering seemed to be a natural ability with most Texicans. Lex knew the workings of a blink generator without knowing fully the theory and the whys of its working, but he could take one apart and clean it and test the various components and replace faulty ones, and the small blink generator on hisZelda , back on Texas, made the Empire machines look like primitive imitations of the real thing. He was shocked by the total lack of refinement.
Of course, the Empire generators did the job, but they were bulky and cranky compared to the souped-up models used onTexas, and not one advance had been made, seemingly, since the blink was perfected for the great expansion outward from Earth. It was thus with most Empire hardware. It was basic, stripped-down stuff of a simplicity which made it duck soup for Lex. However, very early he decided, having learned the operations of a ship of the line from his training manuals, that he did not want to be stuck below decks in the generator room mucking around in the Empire's primitive power plants. He had little to gain from ten or more years of service in the battle fleet, but one thing he could do, and that was observe. To observe, he had to be where the action was, and so he purposely made himself look to his instructors as if he were a six-thumbed novice with mechanics and showed his best on the controls of various beam and ray weapons.
On weapons, he allowed his reflexes, which could guide an airors inches off the uneven terrain of the deserts ofTexas, full play. He was fractions of a second faster than any other trainee at programming the automatics which guided the weapons, and when assignment time came, he was sent to gunnery school on a planet some light-years away from the cold training planet where he excelled at knocking drone targets out of space.
It all took time, but not enough time. Days seemed both to crawl and to fly past. Hours in classrooms were devastatingly slow, but weeks went by without conscious observance. It was the months, building up to years, which seemed longest. Gunnery trainee Lex Burns had been offTexasfor six months when he was assigned to the training ship T.E.S.Crucis . Behind him were endless long, lonely nights, countless humiliations, small victories, moments of looking upward to the crowded skies of the galaxy and thinking of home. He was more alone than he'd ever been while roaming the Bojacks of home in solitude. He formed no close associations. The Empire trainees seemed cold, distant, forming their little groups for games and talk and gambling without inviting the big outworlder to join. Not that Lex wanted to join in with the Empireites. They were a scurvy lot in general, runted, harsh-voiced, arrogant without reason. No, he was content to be the loner, obeying orders, doing each assigned task to the best of his ability, remembering, at times, Billy Bob's suggestion that he come with him and steal an Empire ship.
Perhaps, in the endless years ahead, he would think about it. In training, of course, escape was impossible. He didn't know where to run even if be could escape.
"Where is your home planet?"
"What course did you fly into the galaxy with the Texas fleet?"
"If you don't know where the planet called Texas is, tell us about the skies of Texas. What are the star formations?"
Under deep hypnosis, drug-induced, leaving small shards of memory, the voice of a man speaking quietly: "They are not primitive in their techniques, for if they were, there would be a residuum of the knowledge we seek. However, if the knowledge has been truly erased, there is no way of putting it back, at least not by someone who does not have the knowledge."
In his mind were dozens of interrogation sessions and he remembered with satisfaction their deep interest in the Darlene space rifle, their consternation upon discovering that the last active battle between the opposing forces came about not because of a Cassiopeian miscalculation, as they had long believed, but simply because one Texican had strayed, was captured and was rescued by a small Texas fleet.
The concept of a world moving, using all its resources, to save the life and liberty of one man was alien to them.
"Do you expect us to believe that your planet sent a fleet to rescue one unimportant prospector for metals?"
"No Texican is unimportant to Texas."
"He was the son of a great man then? Or he had important friends?"
"I think he was just a loner, an old prospector with a junk ship trying to make a dollar."
"When you kidnapped me," she said, standing before him in formal Empire uniform, small, beautiful, coldly distant, "were you acting on orders from higher up?"
"No, ma'am, I just liked you. I thought you liked me."
"Just answer the questions," said the Lady Gwyn.
"You acted like you liked me," he said, grinning. "That night on—" "Shut up. Was this a plot to hold me for ransom?" "No, I just wanted to marry you." "Lady," asked the uniformed guard with her, "shall I still his insolent tongue?" "Let him talk," the Lady Gwyn said. Lex was seated, chained to his bunk in the prison. "What did you
hope to gain by kidnapping an agent of the Emperor himself? Surely my momentary attraction to you did not make you think that a cousin of the Emperor would choose to live out her days on an outplanet herding some dirty animals?"
"You liked me on the way back to the Empire, too," Lex said. "Enough," said the Lady Gwyn. "He is hopelessly stupid." On the way back to the Empire he hadn't had much to lose and she was there, taking over the cabin of
the First Officer, having her meals served there, not choosing to associate with the lowly Texas crew. One day out, when the routine of blink, rest, blink and rest was established and the ship was running smoothly, Lex took her tray from the steward and delive
red it in person.
In order to carry more cargo, the flagship had been stripped of luxuries. It was warm in the cabin and she was dressed in nothing more than the undergarments worn by a Texas girl, low-cut panties and a nearly miraculous bra which supported where no support was needed by some invisible means which had always puzzled Lex, not being too familiar with the article of clothing.
"Your food, ma'am," he said, knocking on the door.
He heard the inner lock pushed back. "You may put it on the table," she said, before opening the door. Then she tried to close it in his face, but he pushed in, almost spilling the contents of the tray. "Get out," she said coldly. "I don't believe I will," he said. "I will inform the Captain," she said, taking a step toward the ship's communicator link in the cabin. He
stood quickly between her and the unit. "You are in enough trouble," she said, as he put the tray aside and looked down into her face. "M'am, since I'm in Empire trouble, I been reading all about your laws. Seems there's no law against
what I'm going to do to you." She backed slowly away. "Don't touch me." "Well, I don't think I'll justtouch you," he said, advancing. "Way I look at it you were the one who
issued the invitation back there on Polaris Two. What we did there seemed to be fun, but didn't seem to matter much to you, so if it doesn't matter to you I don't see why we should spend a couple of weeks or more without having fun, do you?"
"I will have you publicly whipped," she said, as he caught her, pulled her to him, held her arms as she tried to scratch his face.
"I figure worse things than that are already lined up," he said. He picked her up bodily and threw her, somewhat roughly, onto the bunk. He discovered that the fragile-looking bra was stronger than it seemed, for when he ripped it away the straps left red marks on her delicate brown skin.
She was surprisingly strong, but he was stronger and his body weight, atop her, soon exhausted her struggles.
"Animal," she said. She spit into his face. He wiped it off by rubbing his cheek on her breasts and leaned to kiss her. She bit him and he bit her back, leaving a big purple bruise on her lower lip.
"We just promised to deliver you back to his bigness," he said. "We didn't say unbruised. You wanta play rough I'm here."
The strange thing was, as he remembered the incident, that she came to enjoy the roughness, seemingly urging him on even after her cone-shaped breasts began to heave with her rapid breathing, forcing him to force her until, with a melting, gasping, moaning lunge, she came to him.
And it was never mentioned. Not at the trial, not ever, not by Gwyn. He made the reference to it when she took her turn at trying to pry the location of his home planet out of him, but that was it. He didn't see her again after that, but he spent a lot of cold hours in the training camp thinking about those times aboard the flagship when he'd knock on her cabin door and she'd open up, sometimes dressed in the Texas undergarments, sometimes in only her brown skin, her arms opening to him, that wondrous world of sensuality opening up to him at the sight of her.
Women.
He thought a lot about women. Not that he suffered unduly. It seemed to be much harder, those long weeks of male society on the training planet and on the ships and in schools, for the Empire trainees, because, as he'd heard in their conversations, things were much different on Empire worlds, with sex taken free and easy from an early age. He didn't suffer, because on Texas you didn't expect the total joy of sex until you were old enough to make your first trip into Miss Toni's place in Dallas City and after that until you courted and won. He was weeks short of his eighteenth birthday and he'd known three women. Miss Pitty once in fear and trembling and fumbling quickness, a second time when she, taking time from her work to give him a rousing send-off from Texas, taught him some interesting variations. Gwyn. He'd lost count. He tried, when things were rough and he had trouble getting to sleep, to remember the times. Some stood out. Others faded into the sweet, sensual memory of the totality of those long weeks of it there on the flagship. And Emily. Of all the three, she was the best. She was a Texas girl, all of Texas, all of life and sweetness and love and tenderness and beauty, the girl he would marry, someday, the girl he would have married sooner had he not lost his head and kidnapped an Empire farlcat.
Emily alone was more than most Texicans his age could hope for and when you added in Gwyn there was no reason for him to suffer, because he'd had more than his share of women. So he counted his blessings and wondered about women and used his memories to ease his desperate homesickness.
T.E.S.Crucis was an antiquated Middleguard with some of her communications and battle gear removed to house dozens of trainees and the extra weapons on which they practiced. She was a leaking old hull and the Texican was often rousted from his bunk, hustled to the locks, suited in L.S.A. and shoved out and away to crawl awkwardly over the rusting hull to patch weaknesses. He got all thegood details like that, mostly because he was the outworlder and possibly because he did them uncomplainingly. He was good with a space welder and did the job neatly so that theCrucis leaked less and less because the job was done right.
They were out in Vegan space, shooting at drones, when the main seam gave over the power compartment, stressed by the weight and mass of the generator, let space in and did in three power men before the compartment could be evacuated and sealed off.
Dead in space, theCrucis reflected the glitter of Vega as Lex, pressed into service as usual, crawled the curves, clanking soundlessly, except in the atmosphere of the L.S.A., to see a serious breach.
"Sir," he sent to the officer on the other end of his communicator, "it's a big one this time. I'll need help."
"Damn, Texas, can't you handle it?"
"Take a look, sir." He put his scanner on it and let the officer take a look. He heard a gasp. As the scanner moved, the seam opened wider, moving along the vertical axis of the hull. If it opened much wider it would rip into the crew area, venting a good deal of the ship's air into space and closing off a full quarter of the ship.
"A plate of extra patching metal and a magnetic clamp, too," Lex said, beginning to move already, taking his welder to the hairline crack which moved even as he began to throw a temporary weld onto it. "And, sir, I'd hurry if I were you."
They sent out an Empire Sub-Chief, not trusting the job, which had suddenly become critical, to a trainee. Sub-Chief Blant Jakkes stood five foot ten and, as did most Empireites, rather hated the big Texican, not because he knew Lex well enough for hatred, but mainly because Lex was an outsider and different and bigger and faster and decidedly more handsome. The Sub-Chief was a career man who had done ten toward his retirement at the end of thirty and he was a member of the training cadre of the Crucis because he'd shown, in a couple of duels with the Cassiopeians, that he was one hell of a weapons man. He was also a good teacher and, even if he did resent Lex, he had to admit that the Texican was also one hell of a good weapons man. That didn't make it right to have an alien on one of the Emperor's fleet ships, but the Texican did know his way around a beam control panel.
Blant Jakkes came crawling out, attaching and releasing his lifeline, carrying a plate of patching metal and a clamp to look down on the breach, which was still creeping forward in spite of Lex's efforts, with some concern.
"Right," Lex said, opening the communicator with his tongue. "We need the clamp here and there." He pointed with the welder, making marks on the hull. There was no time for Sub-Chief Jakkes to remind the trainee that he'd give the orders. He set his lifeline and put one contact of the clamp at the indicated near spot and crawled abeam to set the other. He felt the hull jerk under him and looked back, startled, to see that the seam had opened all the way to the joint of the inner-support bulkhead and he cursed the old single-hull construction, wishing that he were back with the battle fleet, where all ships had double hulls.
"Move," Lex yelled. "Set that contact."
Jakkes moved and his movement violated Newton's third law of motion to the point of sending the S
ub-Chief spinning off the hull to jerk to a stop at the end of his fifteen-foot lifeline. The unconnected contact of the magnetic clamp was jerked from his hand, jiggled, hung from the connector free. The seam, stressed hard from below, tried to rip through the bulkhead fastenings and Lex moved as fast as he could, ignoring the struggling Sub-Chief as Jakkes pulled himself down hand over hand trying to make contact with the hull, not watching his lifeline as it coiled and floated to let two loops fall into the opened seam.
Lex placed the second contact and, looking over his shoulder with some effort, saw that there were seconds to spare before the bulkhead fastenings went and activated the coil of the clamp. As the clamp contracted, there was resistance and the movement of the opened seam was jerky and slow and then, with a sudden snap, the seam closed, cutting Jakkes' lifeline in two places to leave him holding a line with no anchor, floating five full feet away from the hull. Although they were dead in space, there was some residual forward movement of the ship, Jakkes keeping pace, trying desperately to remember from long-forgotten training which movement to make to cause a reaction which would drift him toward the hull. He made exactly the opposite motion, a sudden jerk, and began to swim slowly outward. The situation was serious, because the ship was dead, damage having been done in the power compartment by explosive decompression. Jakkes knew that he was a dead man, because his L.S.A. communicator was of limited range and before the ship could be brought under power for a search he'd be the tiniest mote on a big black emptiness and he had enough air for, say, three hours.
"Texas," he yelled, his voice not concealing his fear, but far short of panic.
Lex looked up, sized up the situation immediately. A man who can fly an airors inches off the deck can judge distances. He saw that Jakkes was already too far out to be reached from his own lifeline and that there was only one chance. Extending out from the rear hull was a thin weapons pod, tipped by spidery direction-finding equipment. The tip of the framework was just under fifteen feet from the hull. Lex loosed his anchor, crawled swiftly aft, loosed the anchor again and, without thinking of what would happen if he missed, he tossed the anchor carefully, accurately, toward the very tip of the spider and it hit, held. His range of activity extended fifteen feet beyond the hull, he launched himself, swam slowly in weightlessness, caught the drifting Sub-Chief in a bear hug. After that it was just a matter of pulling themselves in, like toothfish from the western sea caught on a line from theCrucis .