The Fleet 01 Read online

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  “RUN, HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, run!” screamed Faun, waking English from his straw pallet in the stables, where the horses were snorting and squealing and kicking their stall boards.

  For a moment longer, English’s mind insisted he was dreaming. Knuckling his eyes didn’t rub away the flashes of light, though. The whole sky, coming in through the stall windows, was full of flame. Horses hate fire. They were bellowing now, so loud he could hardly hear the stableboy’s pleas that English help him with the horses.

  Halters and blankets rained down upon him as Faun threw tack his way. “Hurry, English. Mi’god, hurry! It’s the Weasels! The demon aliens! Pirates! Space raiders! Please, we gotta save the horses! The family wants—”

  English was up now, halters in hand. There was one horse he cared more about than the noble family who owned everything in the stable, himself and Faun, the blond stableboy, included.

  He shoved the twelve-year-old Faun out of his way as he began to run, tack in hand, for the stallion barn, where Celtic Pride was probably trying to batter his way out of solitary confinement.

  Outside, the manicured lawns exploded in gouts of flame and metal.

  The hospital in Cork was full to overflowing. Casualties groaned in the halls and lay strewn on the lawn like browned leaves after an autumn gust. But the brown was the brown of drying blood, and the stink of fear and death and feces and urine was everywhere.

  The Khalian landing in Cork was a fait accompli. Every administrative building had been precisely targeted. The hits weren’t right on those targets, but what was a few hundred yards, against a helpless enemy?

  There was no centralized authority in Cork left to surrender, if the Khalian raiders had been the sort of enemy one might surrender to. It was possible that there was no centralized authority on the whole of the planet Eire by now, although the larger raid was not the business of the Khalian pirates in Cork. Their business was to take what they wanted, and destroy what they didn’t want. To swoop down, hit the enemy, destroy however much they could of the proliferating pest that was humankind, and get out. Alive. Before the human Alliance of Planets found out where the Khalia had attacked and sent the Fleet to interdict the incursion. There would be a suppression mission launched by the Alliance—an attempt on the part of the Fleet to strike back—but this was the worry of the Khalian high command, not the raiding party. The raiders needed only to triumph and lift off, to disappear into the blackness of space and the cloaking physics of faster-than-light travel.

  Home base had been safe from human depredations all these years; outposts, for both adversaries, had come to be considered expendable.

  On this particular human outpost called Eire, at the city of Cork, the big Khalian troop transports had put down in the main square, and into those belly-landed ships, healthy human slaves were being herded, coffles as long as country lanes.

  There was sporadic fighting, resistance in pockets illuminated by plasma weapons and conventional gunfire, but the aerial bombing had stopped now that the Khalian troops were on the ground.

  They yipped commands down streets blockaded with cars and trucks and wagons; they sortied in strength through the town, shooting anyone who showed the slightest sign of resistance, and all the wounded, the old, the infirm, or the very young.

  In cleanup units of twelve, the aliens advanced, block to block, house to house, leaving nothing alive where they had been. They set fire to whatever would hum, including humans, that wasn’t worth taking. They hosed down administrative facilities and they gassed the prison, according to a directive that determined what slaves were worth having.

  The looting had not yet reached its peak when one of the cleanup squads realized it had found the hospital. The commander, whose fur was naturally red as well as mottled and matted with spattered blood, barked an order into his hand-held communicator. His black nose twitched. His weasel-like face split into a white-toothed grin that was, among the Khalia, a sign of stress. His tongue lolled.

  He was told to wait for reinforcements. He did, closing his squad into a defensive square. While he waited, he fingered the flamethrower he carried, playing with its nozzle. The equipment slung from his narrow shoulders always weighed twice what it should at times like these—times of inactivity.

  His second-in-command lashed a black-tipped tail and sniffed openly, looking into the hospital through shattered doors.

  Its emergency generators had kicked in when the Khalian airstrike had taken out the power grid. In the flickery light could be seen trails of blood marking white floors like computer routes in a troop carrier’s corridors. And bodies on stretchers stacked like slaves in a hold.

  But none of the wounded looked toward the pirates waiting on the steps. These were the humans deemed hopeless by their own kind—the nearly dead, those with lost limbs and blind eyes and split gullets who might have been saved in peacetime but who were as good as dead in wartime, already part of the body count. The smell of them raised the fur on the second in command’s tail to twice its normal bulk.

  The Khalia were carnivores; their hairless enemy called them the Weasels. The fighting had been going on for a hundred years. In all that time, no Khalian soldier had ever admitted to eating the enemy’s hearts and livers. But it happened. Oh, it happened in the dark alleys and the confusion of extraction.

  It would happen here, in the hospital, before the final order to raze the premises was given. But it wouldn’t happen until the Khalian general got here. Whenever there were choice assignments like cleaning out one of these hospitals, the brass always got the first pick, the choicest cuts.

  “Weasels!” screamed the boy hiding in the bush, because it was already too late for him. Too late to hide, too late to run. But Faun the stableboy tried that, breaking from cover, dashing away from the family’s sanctuary, toward the ravages of the manor house, his blond head flashing gold until it flared red as a Khalian sharpshooter cut him down.

  Behind the corpse that flopped to the ground, spasmed, then lay still, came the Khalian pirates. The heavily armed squad moved cautiously among the trees and bushes like the predators they were. Their fur glinted brown in the sun. Their black eyes gleamed and their wet noses twitched, searching for the companions of the enemy who’d cried out before he died. Their clawed, black hands were tight on their rifles.

  From the bush behind them, no sound reached their sharp ears as they swiveled. But furred shoulders were hunched, muscular legs bent in half-crouches. Some fingered the equipment belts on hips below which black-tufted tails lashed furiously. Some growled wordlessly between sharp-toothed jaws. The Khalia had been fighting humans long enough—hunting and destroying and enslaving and eradicating the hairless enemy wherever possible—to know that the casualty had shouted a warning, not a howl of fear or defiance as it ran.

  So the squad moved very slowly across the alien landscape.

  One would scuttle forward, knees bent, head down, merely a moving tripod for the automatic rifle it held at ready, and then stop, poised to shoot anything that moved within line of sight until the trooper behind went past, covering the ground ahead.

  In this fashion, with various members of the squad rotating on point, the whole group moved up, and onward, toward the corpse and the tumbled remains of the manor house beyond in a stilted minuet of incipient death.

  From his vantage in the bush, the Khalian pirates reminded the boy named English of nothing so much as the estate’s human gamekeepers out after a poacher. Only the fur and the black noses, the lashing tails and the wordless growls, were different. And the amount of firepower they carried, of course. The viciousness, the vi
olence, the excitement of the chase ... these the young retainer of Dinneen House—the destroyed manor in the distance—had seen before.

  The Weasels were no different than his human masters, no harder to elude, perhaps, thought the young sometimes poacher crouched in his bower. But the penalties were final if the pirates caught you on the run.

  They took slaves, English knew. They had to take slaves.

  He’d been told so, most recently by Kennedy and Smythe. He’d counted on that, used the thought to calm himself when the raid began. The raid: death raining down from the sky that crushed the poor planetary ground defense of Eire in a single night full of concussion and flame and blast ...

  The stones of the manor house, the walls of the estate, the stables and the magazines, all gone now as if a cranky giant had swept them aside with a swat of his hand.

  But the family remained. Behind him and a dozen other sentries like him, the noble Dinneens were secreted in a cave, still haughty in their concealment, their weapons and retainers and the best of their horses ranged about them.

  As Faun, the corpse now being towed by the point Khalian, had died, so must all of the Dinneen retainers die, before the Weasels could have their way with the family of the house.

  It wasn’t fair. Terry English wanted to run, but he wasn’t ready to join Faun, headless on the ground as Khalian pirates barked and growled at each other, fighting over the corpse. Or to be shot as a traitor by the other retainers behind him, ten left now to protect the family who’d had dozens.

  So English sat and shook in his leafy cover, his young fist slippery on the game knife at his belt. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, not at all. The Khalian pirates should have swept overhead in their gleaming warships, razed the house and countryside, and passed on toward Cork, where in the city they’d receive a proper welcome. They shouldn’t be out here in the bush, tramping the blue grass, biting at each other in fury over which of them would have poor Faun’s right hand.

  English closed his eyes and tremors wracked him. There was no use being afraid; there was no use in might-have-beens, or should-have-beens. The Khalian pirates were here, and Faun was already dead.

  English had never thought to wonder what the Khalia did with their slaves. Slaves were slaves, in his estimation. Slaves were everybody—everybody but the families, with their courts and their laws and their police forces and their unattainable dignities of wealth and breeding.

  Forcing his eyes open, the young groom of Dinneen House watched with all the stoicism of his kind. Was what the pirates were doing to Faun’s dead body really worse than what a Dinneen lord would have done to him if he’d been caught poaching pigeon, or even squirrel? At least Faun was dead.

  English’s buttocks ached, from his crouch and his fear and his empathy for the youth who’d slept beside him in the stables. All the horses, the Dinneens’ precious horses, were dead or loose on the grounds now, except the few family mounts in the sanctuary.

  The Dinneens had been ready to hide, prepared for a siege, and they’d probably survive it, even if all the posted sentries like Faun and himself died to ensure it.

  The Khalian soldiers ahead telegraphed that news to English with every conqueror’s affront they inflicted upon the corpse, with every yip of triumph and every growl of joy.

  The only Alliance ship in normal space anywhere near Eire when the rescue beacon tripped was still sixteen hours from landfall, if its commander dropped everything and burned parsecs to get there.

  Which he did. The crew of the destroyer-class Haig were two hundred of the most seasoned veterans the Alliance could field. The Eire mayday was just their cup of tea. They had a penchant for airdrop and ground assault, and even the fifty men of the 92nd Marine Reaction Company, the Redhorse, who were intent on “Iengthening their coats”: getting enough Khalian tails to make their coup-coats floor length. One of the marines, named English, had a full coat and a bedspread to boot.

  The commander looked at his roster and called in three officers, including English, who was a native of Eire, to draw up a battle plan. The destroyer could and would engage the Khalia in space, ship to ship, but the real work in an engagement like this was on the ground. You tried not to disintegrate an enemy ship leaving a human planet, because there were always so many humans aboard. The electro-intelligence targeting arrays of Alliance ships didn’t like firing on humans. And the Khalia knew it. Damned slavers.

  The thought of Khalian slave holds made the destroyer’s commander sick to his stomach. But he had a feeling that the Haig and her crew had luck on their side, this time. Not only were they inordinately close to the action, but they had a man among them who ought to know Eire like the back of his hand.

  Waiting for his officers, the commander toyed with his desk’s nameplate, an ornate affair of inlaid mother-of-pearl that his wife had given him. Jason G. Padova, it said there. He always got to thinking fondly about his family when action loomed. It wasn’t that he was even the littlest bit cowardly; it was that he’d seen so much combat, and so much Khalian depredation.

  He wanted his wife and kids to be able to sleep without worrying about attack from the night. He wanted to do his job. And he could: the Haig was an ultracomputerized destroyer; she could handle any three Khalian vessels of her class with only a skeleton crew aboard to stick their heads in the com helmets so the com grids could get brainwave readings and eye movement indicators. Failing even twenty men aboard—or alive—the Haig could and would keep on killing anything with Khalian specs that moved within twenty thousand miles until her circuits were melted.

  But that didn’t do you a bit of good if you were already dead. Padova’s incentive was always survival. For Padova, for his crew, for the Alliance craft he’d had under his hand for enough years to bend the rules and get all the extras that the Fleet had to offer. The Haig was a reflexive killing machine, with more roboticized functions than were strictly legal, if you thought about it in strict, legal terms. But in the back of Padova’s mind was always the last-ditch command sequence he’d made, which assured that the automated functions of the Haig would get human commands right up until it was time to self-destruct so that the Weasels wouldn’t get their claws on all the Haig’s ultraclassified goodies.

  As long as there was some guy around to say “Fire,” the armaments and their electro-intelligent components were within Alliance law. And a man’s digitized last-will-and-fire orders were still the instructions of that man.

  So Commander Padova was all ready, when his junior officers came in, to do what he’d been trained to do.

  He waved away the salutes of the grizzled task force leader and his female intelligence officer, and smiled at the young skinhead with the pale blue eyes. “Be seated, gentlemen,” Padova advised the group. And, even before they were: “We’ve got a Khalian raiding party on Eire, or did have, when the SOS came in, bounced from a sat relay and scrambled like it might have been from an escaping civilian ship. Data’s sketchy—Cork and Shannon, evidently, are the cities hardest hit. English, why don’t you tell us all you know about Eire, in as few words as possible.”

  The young marine scratched his stubbly scalp and his blue eyes hit the floor. “Uh, yes sir. Beyond what’s in the logistics data base and the planetary atlases, I guess, sir, I gotta say … it ain’t worth saving, sir!” A defiantly frank stare slapped Padova across the face as the marine lieutenant’s head came up.

  The task force leader’s grizzly head snapped around; the intelligence officer flipped up her porta-base’s lid; the marine offered nothing more, only his full attention.

  Damned land force mentality. Padova nodded slowly, as if considering the marine’s opinion, and then he leaned forward over his desk and said, very slowly and very precisely, “Lieutenant English, your assessment is duly noted. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you, but we’re ... going ... to ... save ... Eire ... anyway. And you’re part of the
tactical planning staff, as of now.” Padova knew his neck was swelling with irritation; he could feel his pulse beating against his collar. “And you’re also first on the ground, so let’s hear everything about Shannon and Cork that you even think you might remember.”

  When it came out that English had a fraternal twin brother on-planet, somehow Padova didn’t find the revelation the least surprising. Damned marines were all alike; no brains, but plenty of mouth. And guts. And brawn to back it up.

  With a marine calling the shots—a marine who hated the locals the way this Lieutenant English hated the Eirish—the Khalia were in for a rougher than normal encounter with their human enemy.

  Padova, who tended to be life-conserving, knew that, and tried not to let it bother him. A little inhumanity might be just the ticket. Now all he had to do was get this crazy bastard into position and pull his pin.

  Watching the stableboy’s corpse because he couldn’t seem to turn away, Terry English didn’t know that he had his fists dug in the turf as if it were his helpless body that the pirates defiled; old memories made it seem as if it was. Nor did he know that he wept, long gray worms of tears stealing down his cheeks. He’d prayed for years that the Khalia would come and give the families a taste of their own medicine. Bring down that haughty and venomous horde whom he’d been born to serve, but who were unable even to admit that he and they were of the same race.

  The Dinneens and the other noble families had their state religion, their planetwide cult of the highborn, to separate themselves from the lower classes. Would their god of blood, that planetary and unforgiving god who cared only for privilege and lineage, save them now?

  Whenever a family member died, the event was hushed up.

  The dull-witted among the retainers believed what each house proclaimed: that the mighty families were immortal, that death was reserved for the serfs, due punishment for their thieving, subhuman ways, and that the family potentates rose to heaven on gouts of flame, where their youth was restored and they lived forever, the recipients of sacrifices, the granters of prayers, the self-made saints of Eire.