by Zach Hughes
But when they snuck up on you in your sleep—
He'd been lying on his stomach thinking of that little girl back in school and wondering what she was doing. He dozed and awoke to a feel a draft on his backside and then the bite of a needle and he yelped, twisting away to break the needle off in his flesh.
"Now see what you've done," said a female voice.
"Ouch, dammit," Lex said, as fingers pushed flesh down around the stuck needle and then plucked. "Great Zed's balls, do you have to—" He halted in mid-sentence, for a big, forceful hand had zapped him, hard, right on the spot where the needle had penetrated. "Ahhhhhh," he groaned, rolling over to escape and then he was frozen because she stood there, tall, new whites crisp and bulging with Texas girl, big, a man's woman, an armful.
"I will not," she said, her lips pulled back, her eyes fierce, "tolerate such language."
"Duh," Lex said, his mouth open.
"Not on my first day," she said, her eyes going moist.
"Well, look, I'm sorry," Lex managed, but the tears were there and she turned. He tried to scramble off the bed, but his pajamas were down and he fell heavily and she, hearing the thump, turned, tears streaming.
"Oh, did you hurt yourself?" She was kneeling by his side and he was thinking more of his exposure than of his bruises, and was pawing at his pajamas and trying to look at her eyes, which were as blue as Texas skies, and her hair, which was the yellow flame of a sun, and her—well, he was trying to look at all of her and his eyes weren't made to take in that much at one time and they crossed as he let them fall to the bulging front of her whites.
She, seeing his crossed eyes and thinking terrible things about concussions and possible reinjury, went white through her lovely tan and said, "Don't move, I'll get help."
"Help," Lex repeated, in a stunned voice, as he fell a thousand parsecs deep into her eyes.
"Yes," she said, pushing him back as he tried to sit up. "I'll get help."
"You help."
"Yes, yes, I will," she said, her voice agitated.
"I'm all right."
"Yes, I'll get help."
He grabbed the sleeve of her dress. "No, don't leave me."
"I have to. I have to get help."
"I'm afraid," he said. He was truly afraid, afraid she would walk out and he'd never see her again.
"Yes, yes, I'll help." She began tugging on him. He was a big lad. Her hands were so warm, so soft on his arms. He let her pull him to his feet, and then he leaned, putting an arm around her shoulder. He had the universe in his arms, the stuff of creation was bursting inside him. He let her guide him to the bed.
"Where do you hurt?" she asked, leaning over him anxiously.
"Hurt?" he asked stupidly.
At last she recognized his dazed look. "Oh, you," she said, popping him on the chest, hard, with her fist.
And then she was gone, turning, skirt flaring to show lovely thighs.
"Miss, miss," Lex wailed, seeing her back retreating from him. She paused, turned. "Don't go, please don't go."
"There's nothing wrong with you," she said.
"I'm hurting. The fall."
She approached his bed warily. She looked at him with her big eyes squinted. "I can give you a shot." "I don't hurt anymore," he said. "Don't go," he said, as she turned.
"Look," she said. "I have work to do." "Give me the shot," he said. "You don't need a shot." "I need to—look at you." "You can do that every day when I make the rounds." She smiled, the skies opening up after a dark,
northern storm. "No extra charge for looking." Her name, he discovered, was Riddent. In Old English that meant "laughing." It was, he felt, a beautiful name, a descriptive name, for just seeing her made him want to laugh, to sing, to do things like leaping on
an airors and gunning it to all-out and making low passes at the hills. And there were no rings on her fingers. Not even a promise ring. "Riddent?" "Yes?" Patient. Eyes so large, so deep. "Don't go." His hip tingling from another shot. With perverse female joy, she seemed to like punching him with
needles. "I have work to do." Another day. "Riddent, have lunch with me." "Sorry, I have a date." He sneaked into the dining hall, ambulatory to a limited extent, to see her lunching with a doctor, a
youngish doctor, but old enough to be her father. He guessed her age at eighteen.
"He's too old for you," he said, next time she rolled him onto his stomach. She slapped his bare hip, drove the needle ouchingly deep into his flesh, and then wiped the sting with a cool, damp something. "Who?" "That man. The doctor." "That's none of your business." But as she left the room, she turned, gave him a pixie grin. "He's my father." And, another day, the rain clouds rolling down from the big northern emptiness, gusty winds making
themselves heard inside the room, fat drops running down the glass. "I'm a San Ann girl. Grew up in the shadow of the hospital."
"And you wanted to become a doctor?" "Not a doctor. Yeeech. Cutting into people." "You shouldn't have any qualms about cutting people the way you drive that needle into me." "For that, smart ass, I'm going to put laxative in your afternoon milk." And she did. "Damn, Riddent," he complained. "Well, it was doctor's orders." "And you just doubled the dosage." She grinned. "No. You do me an injustice." "Well, I'm sorry." "I tripled it," she said, fluffing his pillow and smiling so sweetly that he forgave her immediately, even as
his stomach cramped again and he went white, sweat popping out on his brow as he tried to wait until
she was gone. Recovered, emptied, he watched her, next morning, come through the doorway with his breakfast, a big,
sweet-limbed Texas girl with a mouth which opened wide when she smiled. Her hair was pulled into a
neat mass at the back of her head. Her ears were delicately formed. "Something wrong?" she asked, as she saw him following her every move avidly. "No." "You're still angry about the laxative." "Not angry, but you're going to have to make retribution." "It was a dirty trick, wasn't it?" she asked, with a girlish giggle. "Filthy." "Horrid." "Terrible." "What can I do, sir, to make it up to you?" she asked, not very seriously. "Marry me," she heard him say.
"Not a chance."
"You owe me that much," he said. "Come back in five years." "You'll be old and out of shape, past your prime." "Tough," she said. "If you don't marry me I'll tell your father you poisoned me. A good nurse doesn't poison her patients." "It's hospital fever. All patients fall in love with their nurses. You're getting out tomorrow. You'll go ;;way
and find another girl and," she was hamming it up, making her voice tragic, "you'll forget all about me."
"You won't marry me?"
"Not today."
"Why not?"
"You've got too many holes in your hide from needles and your insides will all run out, leaving only an
almost empty husk. I don't want to marry a husk, co you?"
"If you won't marry me, go swimming with me."
"OK."
"Tomorrow?"
"Sorry."
"When?"
"I'm off Saturday."
"That's five days away," Lex said. "I can't stand it."
"Tough."
"I'll have a relapse and stay here until Saturday."
"You do and I'll give you twelve shots a day."
"I'll come back Saturday."
She gave him her comnum. He hadn't touched her, except when she helped him get back into bed the day he fell with his pajamas down around his knees. He reached out and put one finger on the back of her hand. It was delicately veined, warm. She looked down at his finger making a little white indentation in her brown skin.
"I shouldn't go with you," she said.
"Why?"
"You're a man of experience."
"You're—"
"No," she said, "I was at the port when you came back, with her."
"Oh," Lex said.
"But since I won't marry you, I don't care. Just don't think—"
"I wouldn't dare," Lex said, grinning. "Saturday?"
"Against my better judgment," she said, leaving him.
When he was cleared from hospital he looked for her, but she was assisting her father in delivering a new Texican up on the third floor.
Chapter Eight
The new uniform of the Texas fleet added inches to his height. Janos Kates of Dallas City designed it. It was a man's outfit, made of a tight-fitting but stretchy material, a masculine light tan in color, colored by unit insignia and rank badges. The meacrhide boots were heeled and soft to the touch and made authoritarian clicks on walking. You saw it everywhere. You saw it on the streets and in the training sessions and at dinner—Murichon was a General. Not that Texas was suddenly a militaristic society, just that when a Texican was faced with a job he attacked it with a single-mindedness designed to see the job through.
Lex was a Captain, and as such, ranked high enough to command a ship, although he was steadfastly refused a ship. He was too valuable at headquarters. He was in constant demand for conferences on Empire methods and technology. He protested, and asked repeatedly to be assigned to the same battle group in which Hilly Bob had a ship and where Arden Wal, his thought monitor at last removed, wore the Texican uniform with his proud flair and sported the insignia of a full General. In that same battle group Captains Form and Jakkes served, Jakkes having spent some few weeks on his new ranch only to report in as the reports of the spy ships told of massive buildups of Empire force in the periphery. Form, knowing nothing but the service life, was senior in rank to Jakkes and was in charge of battle group maintenance, having adapted to Texican methods with a pleasing rapidity.
And all the time the battle group was doing its turn on patrol and training Lex was talking to gray-haired politicians and generals in headquarters with scarcely enough time to continue his courtship of Riddent, much less take time off for an airors ride.
Out in the galaxy, the Empire was swarming like angry biters driven from their mud shells. At some risk, a Texican scout, equipped with the new bunk power, the latest advance from the Blink Space Works, observed an encirclement of a dead planet and reported the efficiency of the Empire fleet in urgent blink-stats, adding that the culmination of the exercise was planet-blasting, total destruction.
President Belle Resall was worried. She'd lifted breeding restrictions temporarily, messing up the new administration's generation plan to a point of total despair, but she and all her advisers felt that Texas would not be so lucky in the next battle. There would be casualties. The casualties would be male, of course, since males fight wars. So, every Texican woman of breeding age was trying for a boy and if the first sperm wasn't the proper sort the fertilization was negated and Texican women tried again, and again until a male union of sperm and egg was achieved and there was, in the minds of the moralists, something musky in the atmosphere.
Belle, being a logical woman, worried, first, that Texicans would die and, second, that they wouldn't die and she'd be the President who completely unbalanced the sexes on Texas, leaving the planet with a surplus of males which not even places like Miss Toni's in Dallas City could handle.
And she worried, but not as much, knowing Texicans and having faith in Texas men, about a planet being killed. That was a possibility. All of Texas might end up a cinder orbiting old Zed, but that was only a farfetched possibility and her main worries were the deaths of young Texicans and the host of younger Texicans who would, in a few months, start screaming and breathing the air of the planet.
Now and then she'd leave her desk and walk the streets, a handsome, matronly woman in sort of old-fashioned meacrhide skirts, taking the grins and the salutes, for they were her due. And her heart would fill with pride as she saw the tall Texicans in the new uniforms which she'd commissioned from Janos Kates and then she'd go back to her desk refreshed and call in General Murichon Burns and a few other old heads and ask, "Do we have to risk it? Isn't there another way? Can't we negotiate?"
They'd tried that. "We don't want war," they'd blinkstatted. "We do not ask for war."
And in return they got cold silence, the stars themselves answering with their eternal radiations, but no word from Empire.
On a night when the two moons were full, a rare event, Lex rode double onZelda with two soft and warm arms around his waist and landed at his favorite deserted beach to roast candies over an open fire and drink good Rio and look into the firelit beauty of Riddent's face. She was in swim wear and it was almost too much for him. It was almost too much for both of them. There was a musk in the air. There were two moons. They were young and he stopped himself and tore away and wept with his sadness at having to stop. She, recovering, said in a small voice, "Thank you, Lex."
He had seen and felt the warmth of her, the top of her. "I'm not making excuses," he said. "But I would not have done that—"
"I know. Things are different. The war—"
"No excuse," he said. "Riddent—"
"Yes?"
"Just Riddent. It has a good sound."
She moved to lean against him as they sat in the sand. They heard the rote of the waves, the far-reaching combers, the whistle of a predatory nighter. There was a sense of peace there on their deserted beach, until a squadron on training bunked low into atmosphere, chasing dummy missiles. The streak of fire was death, a missile past the last line of defense. They had seconds to live and they watched as the streak came in like a runaway meteor and two fast destroyers chased futilely and the missile splashed out there, just this side of the horizon.
A shiver went through her and he put his arms around her.
"It was only practice," he said. "They set up impossible situations, making it as bad as bad, as difficult as possible. We'll catch the real ones."
Her skin felt cool. She did not stop shivering.
Above them, the two destroyers climbed and blinked out of existence, to go back to the squadron for a reaming out for having missed.
"I wish you hadn't stopped."
"You don't mean that," he said.
"Yes, I do. I don't want to die not knowing—"
"Riddent, Riddent."
"I will I know it. I feel it. I know that you'll be killed and I'll be killed and Texas will be killed—"
"Now you stop it."
But she was weeping. He held her close and felt utterly helpless and then, with his eyes milky with tears, he kissed her wet cheek and turned her lips up to him and after that there was an irresistible force which pushed, propelled them and when it was sweetly over she wept again, but not from sadness.
"Wasn't that a clever way to trap you into marriage?" she asked.
His shout, his whoop, jarred her, causing her to pull back, holding her outraged ear. Then he was dancing around her, a nude, mad young man, until she giggled and said, "Damned fool," and rose to join him in his mad dance on the hard-packed sands near the pounding surf until, with another whoop, he picked her up and swung her around in his arms and then, panting, held her at arm's length. "You mean it?"
"You know I do, silly."
He bounced sonic booms on the way home and sang of his joy in a loud, untuned voice and then woke up Murichon, who had slept six hours of the past twenty-four, to shout, "She said yes, Dad, she said yes."
They spent three nights in a cozy cottage on the northern ice. There, there was no war, no threat. There were only endless hours of togetherness and happy, giddy experimentation and a growing wonderm Lex that he should have been fortunate enough to court and win Riddent. He would awaken in the middle of the night and feel her body warmth next to him, her amazing softness, and he couldn't believe that she was his, that he had his own wife in his own bed and that his feelings were not unwelcome and that, his hand doing things, she responded and woke and said, "Glutton," and then added her gluttony to his for a sleepless hour before, moist and sweetly warm, she slept atop him.
Naturally, now that he had a reason for wanting to stay at headquarters, he was transferred. Saying goodbye was the hardest thing he'd ever done. It made his first dep
arture from Texas, into Empire servitude, seem distant and not at all serious. She was weeping when he boarded the shuttle to join Arden Wal's battle group and he remembered the things she'd said there on the beach when the practice missile got away and went splashing down into the sea. On the way out he decided, for sure, that he didn't want to die and, above all, he didn't want her to die. Then he started to think of ways he could assure prevention of either.
"You're crazy," Billy Bob, Captain, said when Lex told him that he wasn't about to die and that he wasn't about to take on the Empire fleet face to face outnumbered and outgunned. It was the duel with the Cassie all over again, Texas waiting to fight the Empire with the Empire's rules.
"He's crazy," Billy Bob told General Wal, when Lex demanded and got an appointment, with Captains Billy Bob, Jakkes and Form in attendance. "But I like the idea."
"It is crazy," Wal told them, after he'd heard the proposal.
"It just might work," Blant Jakkes said.
"The crazy bastard kept us alive when that Cassie had us cold," Form said. "Let's give it a try, General."
"We'll have to file for permission," Wal said. "There are regulations—"
"If you always followed regulations, sir, you'd be dead now," Lex said. "Executed by your own people. At least we don't have the death penalty on Texas."
"I could have been in charge of a sector," Wal said, rolling his eyes and grinning, "but I had to meet a crazy Texican."
The main force of the Empire fleet was grouping near an isolated red giant inside the periphery. Outlying zones were thickly patrolled by Vandys. A blink-stat message couldn't be smuggled through the dense lines, much less a vessel. But, to the rear, there was an entire Empire group which acted as security against a sneak attack by a suicide force of Texicans. At least that was Empire thinking. Lex had done his own thinking and he had convinced a cadre of fellow officers, up to and including Arden Wal, that his thinking was good. Wal, knowing the terrible force represented by the gathering Empire battle fleet, was fearful for Texas. And he found, in those first few months on the out-planet, that Texas was all that Lex had described, that his new freedom was more precious to him than he could ever have imagined. An alien, former officer in the force of the enemy, he had proved himself in the first battle of Texas and had been accepted as one of Texas' own. Nothing in his life had ever given him as much pride as the insignia of General in the fleet of the Planet Texas, and he was prepared to take some risk to preserve his new liberty, his pride, his peace of mind. Thus, he was a willing accomplice in a wild plan dreamed up by a young Texican just past his legal majority.