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A CALL TO ARMS

It was 1994, but Gwillam Forte was an entrepreneur of the old school. Twenty-three disabled Veterans needed a reason to live, so he gave them a rusty hult--the battleship U.S.S. Texas--and unlimited funds to make her beautiful and swaworthy in time for Independence Day, 2000.

But the world changed quickly and for the worse.

By 1998, the Texas and her supermodern weapons were needed for duty far more important than guarding the National Monument in which she rode at anchor.

LONE STAR REPUBLIC TO THE RESCUE!

In 2008, when the Russians ruled most of the world and the United States was suffering from a catastrophic drought, most everybody went to bed a little hungry every night.

But out in the South Atlantic Ocean, a Texican named Ripley Forte was riding herd on the answer to America's deadly water shortage, hauling toward Matagorda Bay the only natural resource that could make the Republic of Texas rich again.

And while he was at it, Forte would teach the Russians a thing or two about surprise attack.

To save the civilized world, all he had to do was live long enough.

Twice the Soviet Union had attacked the young Republic of Texas, and twice the Soviets had their noses bloodied.

In 1998 and entire Russian fleet disappeared from the Houston Ship Canal in a cloud of superheated steam and atomic debris, vaporized in the one-man suicide charge of Texas's richest man, Gwillam Forte.

Then, in 2008, the KGB threatered Forte's son with an H-bomb. But the young Texican managed to vaporize Moscow--and a good deal of the surrounding landscape--with its own weapon.

Now the Russian were really mad: defeat in Houston had cost them trillions, Moscow glowed in the dark, and their international prestige was lower than whale spit. Yet the world still held three threats for them: Ripley Forte, the Republic of Texas, and the United States.

But the Russians had bought solitions to all three--or so they thought--and black storm cluds were gathering on the horizon...