that victory was not always going be so easy. Around the planet underground shelters were being excavated, with women and young people making up the labor force, since all able-bodied men were on fleet duty or building ships. The work went on in an almost festive atmosphere of confidence. Not once but a thousand times the government's decision to build shelters was questioned. The opinion of the general public was that it was a waste of effort and money. But there were those who knew the true gravity of the situation, and the five men sitting around a table in he Alamo were among them. Arden Wal knew that the next attack would be in force, upward of a million ships of battle.
'There will be no honor in this one,' Blant Jakkes said. 'That's the tone of the reports we get from the spies. Empire says that we fight outside the military code, citing the destruction of five defenseless ships in the raid into the periphery.'
'We'll only be outnumbered five to one,' Billy Bob said. 'And we're mounting up to ten Darlenes on the big Rearguards. We can cut off a hundred projectiles in five minutes.'
Ex-Empire Tech-Chief Form, now Major, drained his glass. 'And five million men will die in five minutes.'
Lex looked at him, knowing his feelings. He still suffered nightmares remembering the flowering of the Empire ships as fifty pounds of expand went off against a hull. 'We've tried, Form, we've offered terms. All we want is to be left alone.'
'Empire's attitude is if you can't control it, kill it,' Arden Wal said.
'I suppose that's the basic issue,' Billy Bob said. 'Empire has built a central government which is all things to all people. Here on Texas we think that government should defend the planet, build public utilities and regulate the numbers of the population for the good of all. When it comes right down to it, that doesn't seem like a big difference, but I guess it is.'
'I'd never sit down to drink with a General in the Empire,' Jakkes said.
'Is that so great an honor?' Wal asked, smiling. 'I feel that I am the one who is honored by the openness of the Texican society. I never had friends before.'
There was an embarrassed silence. It was Form who broke it. 'When I pulled the plug out there and lifted off to see. that Rearguard ship go up I didn't even feel anything,' he said. 'And that's funny, because my logic tells me, told me then, that inside that cold hull there were thousands of men. Men like me. Poor jokers, some of them impressed into service, who would leap at a chance to live like we live here on Texas. But I didn't feel anything for them.'
'You couldn't see them,' Wal said. 'You were killing a machine of war, not men.'
'Yes, that's what makes war so easy, I guess,' Lex said. 'If you had to look into the eyes of everyone you were going to kill I wonder if it would be so easy.'
'We didn't ask for the war,' Jakkes said. Lex grinned to hear him use the pronoun 'we' so easily. In many ways Jakkes was more Texican than most Texicans.
'And we're not threatening the home planet,' Billy. Bob said. 'We have no planetkillers in all of our arsenal. We don't plan to build any. But out there in that fleet there are a quarter of a million ships which are armed to make Texas a cinder. I think that justifies what we've done and what we have to do. I'm not saying that the life of a Texican is worth the lives of a million Empireites, I'm just saying that we are only a few and we have few lives to spare. We have to fight to keep what we have. A man takes your life, he's taking everything.'
'We'll fight,' Lex said. 'We'll kill. I don't quite understand why we have to fight, but it's Empire's choice and that leaves us no choice at all, does it?'
'I've got to get back to the plant,' Billy Bob said.
Lex had one more and then rode
'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
