The Fleet 01 Read online

  Almost everybody at Dinneen House, everybody in Cork, believed that—everybody but English. English had been traded along with the horses he groomed, traded from Shannon, where the poor were wiser, and where a thief learned a thing or two. He’d been a racehorse groom, and at the tracks all over Eire he’d learned more than just a thing or two. And he’d met a man or two who’d been beyond the clouds, in the track bars where winners were decided before races were run, and bets were placed that could buy a man his freedom.

  English was fifteen when he’d grown too tall and heavy to be a good exercise boy for horses whose jockeys never weighed more than fifty kilos, and too manly to pass for a girl at night. Once there’d been beard on his chin, the owner wasn’t interested in him anymore, and he began to learn what real hardship was like.

  There’d been good times, in the bars with the handlers and the handicappers, though; when he’d been traded with the big steeplechaser, Celtic Pride, to Dinneen House, he’d gone sullenly, with a sense of foreboding no worse than the reality to come.

  Cork was the sticks. The Dinneens were feudal, inbred, and sadistic. If it hadn’t been for the times English had gone into town with the trainer, searching out the best bran and corn and manna for the colts, life beyond the stables would have faded into a half-remembered dream. But he had gone to town; he had spent the Sabbath in the horsemen’s bars, and it was there he’d first heard the rumors of the Khalian raid. And it was there he’d made his connections, and his choice.

  “Hey, English, how’s your ass?” The bar was full of smoke and the reek of stale beer; the sawdust under his feet was getting into his boots through the holes in the soles. He flushed when the bookie called out to him, and pretended not to notice, taking off one boot to empty out the chaff.

  But then a beery face was breathing into his, a bent head with blood-shot eyes and sticky lips wanted to know, “You had enough a’ them Dinneens on you arse to last ye’, boy? If it’s still boy ... ?”

  English didn’t ball his fist. He didn’t slam his boot, heel-first, into the greasy jaw of the man bent over him. He put on the boot and straightened up.

  The bookie was named Kennedy, and everyone at the tracks called him Crooked Kennedy, for good reason. There was no mischief this keg-headed, hairy-eared troll didn’t get into, so long as it paid.

  “What you want with me, Kennedy?” English asked, his voice thick with the effort of trying to hold his temper. His butt ached, its muscles clamped shut reflexively, and he found himself wishing that Kennedy’s taunt hadn’t been spoken so loudly that all the horsemen around were watching the two of them and whispering.

  But everybody knew, now, what the Dinneens used English for. If they hadn’t before. Mary Dinneen was no saint, nor was her brother Alton, nor her father the Honorable Lord Harold. And what went on at Dinneen House wasn’t any different from what went on at the other noble houses, English told himself, trying to will the hot flush from his cheeks.

  When Kennedy only leered at him expectantly, English said again, under his breath, “What do you want, man?”

  And Kennedy replied, “Want to invite ye t’ have a mug with me an’ my friends.”

  “You don’t have a friend on this world,” English had said, but he’d found himself at the round table anyhow.

  There he soon realized that the greasy threesome Kennedy introduced him to had a reason for making his acquaintance. It seemed that the Khalian pirates had their eyes on Eire, and any “sensible fella’s got to look out for his own self.”

  This bogeyman bedtime story, delivered in a horseman’s bar by such as Kennedy and his three whiskery cohorts, seemed like the typical drunk’s chatter, until Kennedy introduced him to the men one by one, and it turned out that one of them was from off-planet.

  “So what’s this got to do with me?” English asked, looking at the dark hairs on his wrist that proclaimed him forever of an inferior breed. All the rulers of Eire, all the magistrates of Cork, all the Dinneens, were red-haired and freckled. God loved the freckled. The rest of Eire were no better than beasts of the field.

  “With you,” said the off-worlder who was as swarthy as Kennedy, but had blue eyes like English. It wasn’t a question, that remark. It was a statement. And it was then that English remembered the man’s name: Smythe.

  Smythe leaned close and caught English in a stare like a pair of manacles. “We could use a man like you—someone inside Dinneen House. For logistics. Maps. Routines. Insider info ... Pillow talk from the right beds—”

  The screech of English’s chair drowned out the rest. Perhaps he reacted so vehemently because of the guilt he felt. Somebody’d looked inside his head and listened to his prayers and figured out that he was the boy to ask. The boy who had prayed so hard and so long for the Khalia to come and kick the noble butts of bastards like the Dinneens ... Maybe it was a trap, a trick to test his loyalty. Well he had none, but so what? What had he to be loyal to? He wasn’t a masochist, or a bedwarmer. He was a man. But, a traitor?

  A hand caught his wrist before he could throw his beer or stalk away, and Kennedy was telling him to sit down, sit down. And pulling on his arm so that he’d have to fight or sit.

  English knew what would happen if he started a brawl. He’d lose, against men twice his age and weight. The constabulary would come, and he’d take the blame because Kennedy had money—Kennedy always had money—and wasn’t local, and English was a lowlife, an outsider turned Dinneen groom. The Dinneens would decide whether to bail him out or not—what with the Dinneen Cup steeplechase three weeks away, they probably would. But then he’d lose hide and food and what passed for privileges. And it would be too long until he could sit down, or sit a horse, without wincing.

  So he sat down then, while he still could, before his butt was bleeding, and shook off Kennedy’s hand as if he weren’t afraid. Then he said, “Sure you want to tell me any more about what it is you’re after? What if I say no?”

  “You won’t,” said Kennedy, more to the off-worlder named Smythe, and to the others watching as if they didn’t give a damn, than to English, who suddenly had realized what the answer to his question would be.

  That answer came implacably from Kennedy’s lips: “You won’t be lovin’ the Dinneens by now, m’boy. But you’ll still be lovin’ old Celtic Pride.”

  Threatening the horse went further when English merely stared: “Just a little needle mark can’t be seen. Fluid in the knee, the knee explodes during the race, the horse is put down, and it’s all your fault—you bein’ responsible for his condition, an’ all. Or—”

  “I’m ready to hear you out,” said English then, because he might as well. The big chestnut named Celtic Pride was a yearling when English became a groom. They’d come to Dinneen House together. He couldn’t protect the horse without going to the Dinneens, and probably not then. He could see Alton Dinneen’s cruel lips smiling in anticipation as English tried to explain just what he’d been doing, keeping company with the kind of men that made such threats.

  The deal was simple, at the beginning. Keep his ears open.

  Listen to the politics. Talk about Alliance ships, comings, goings, was what they were interested in. And the whereabouts of the families. On specific dates. There were meets to make and drops decided. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t more dangerous, English told himself that night as he would for six months of nights thereafter, than living with the Dinneens’ power over his head.

  Smythe, when the details had been arranged, leaned close across the table and said, “Things go down rough, son, you use my name—with the Weasels.”

  Those words re-echoed in English’s head now, as the weasel-like Khalia made their slow and careful way toward the house.

  The Khalia took slaves, but they didn’t leave survivors. Everyone knew that. The Khalian raiders were the main reason Eire and the other planets English had heard of were so poor. Or at least, that was wha
t the Dinneens kept saying. Mary Dinneen tended to talk freely on the phone when English was warming her bed. He’d heard all about the Alliance tax increase, the drive to raise enough wealth from the families to install a Home Defense—a space defense—or force the Alliance into stationing more ships in this quadrant, perhaps a ground base, a real military spaceport for Eire.

  There had been an Alliance of Planets fleet for a thousand years, and in all that time, Eire had never been a base for Fleet operations, although its men were conscripted into army units who fought with the Fleet’s land forces. Terry English had a brother who, rumor had it, became a soldier with one of those very “line units.”

  English hadn’t seen that brother since he was five. He was closer to Celtic Pride than to his brother, or to any human. He had no compunction, now, about turning in the Dinneens to the Weasels, if he got the opportunity. And he had to find the opportunity, or he was going to get himself killed, just like Faun.

  If Smythe had been lying and the use of the off-worlder’s name wouldn’t get English special treatment, being a Khalian slave wouldn’t be any worse than being a Dinneen retainer. He had the scars and the memories to attest to that.

  The thing was, Celtic Pride was with the Dinneens in their shelter. To give up his oppressors to these new oppressors was one thing; to sentence the big chestnut to death or maltreatment—that was something else again.

  Frozen with indecision and fear, English hunkered down further into his bower and waited, while the Weasels shot sporadically into the bush and closed on the ruins of the manor house.

  From far behind him, in the sheltering cave, Celtic Pride’s questioning whinny was hardly audible as the evening breeze began to blow toward the family’s sanctuary, downwind from the house, and the Weasels, and English, miserable at his post.

  The Khalian raiders tore through the manor house like the wrath of god, setting shaped charges in their wake. When they had everything of value bagged and tagged, including the few slaves worth keeping, they blew the place, using the grain magazines for a little extra bang.

  Khalian eyes gleamed red in the reflected blaze, where they stood with twenty-odd peasants under their guns. The sixteen captives they’d coffled—healthy, strong, young adults, mostly female—were off to one side, tied to a tree beside the loot.

  One of the Khalians cakewalked around the rest, and calmly shot an aged human. It was a random kill, meant to teach a lesson. One of the women in the coffle screamed and dropped to her knees. A Khalian strode close, forced his rifle’s barrel under her chin, and lifted her upright by that means. There was silence in the coffle.

  But not among the children and the aged. A boy cried, surely for his mother. He tried to break for the coffle, and took his bullet in the head.

  The sortie leader, satisfied that the lesson was taught to the coffle, raised and lowered his hand. He was already walking away from the noise as his men cut down the old and the young. He wasn’t hungry anyway. His gut was knotted up, telling him there was something he’d missed. Something, he was sure from the instinct that made his back muscles jump and ache, behind them.

  He left three with the coffle, which was too terrified now to think of resisting, despite its overwhelmingly superior numbers, and led the balance of his squad back the way they’d come. Something was missing, and his nose knew it had to be downwind, because there were no jewels of consequence in the household, no fat and coiffed noblewomen, no men clutching gold with which to buy their way out of the inevitable.

  And none of the slaves looked upwind, only back the way the sortie party had come. The squad leader had grown rich raiding the human settlements; he had done it by knowing his quarry. It was the hunter’s way.

  Mary Dinneen was suddenly calm. She’d been planning her thirty-fifth birthday party last night. The moon had been full, bright as day, and she’d been so excited. Now she and Alton and their financial planner and administrative assistant were huddled here, in a cave prepared by her father’s father for just such an unthinkable occurrence—a cave no one had bothered much about in her lifetime. Huddled here with the best of the bloodstock, and fewer than a dozen retainers between them and the disgusting, weapon-wielding animals called the Weasels.

  “You’d think,” Alton was saying, sniffing the last of his snuff, “that with all we pay to the Alliance, let alone to Shannon, that we’d have some substantial protection from this sort of depredation.”

  “Up yours, Alton,” she said. “I wanted to invest in a ship like the Caldwells, but oh, no, you didn’t think it was worth it. ‘Ships don’t appreciate, my dear. We’ll be like the Caldwells, indeed—having to trade and take a loss every few years because one can’t have an outmoded ship, can one?’ Well, if one had had any kind of ship at all, one would be well out of harm’s way by now, instead of huddling in here with your accursed—and smelly—horses. Horses can’t help us now, dear brother.”

  Alton stood up and walked away, over to where the bloodstock stamped restlessly. Perhaps the horses could help. Perhaps one could mount up and steeplechase one’s way out of this intolerable predicament.

  But if that were even remotely possible, Alton would have hightailed it away by now, leaving Mary to fend for herself.

  Mary Dinneen examined her nails in the light of an emergency fluorescent. She should have married, was what. Then she’d have a husband to protect her, not be dependent on a self-absorbed brother and a few servants whose loyalty might be unquestionable but whose skills weren’t up to the present task.

  If she ever got out of this horrid cave, she was going to put on a full-time security force, something else that Alton had insisted was a waste of money. If only her father was here. But Harold had gone in to Cork for reasons of state. He’d been slated to speak at a spaceport function of some kind.

  She thought dreamily that it would be just like her father to have gotten away, somehow. And if Father was free, he’d find her. He’d save her. He wouldn’t let her die with Alton, cut down like a dog in a cave.

  She looked past the administrative assistant, who was cozied up with a bottle of wine she’d opened but couldn’t drink, to where Alton was playing with his favorite horse. Damned creature. It might turn out that she’d been right to resent the house’s preoccupation with horseflesh, all along.

  But she wouldn’t be pleased to find that out. Mary sighed, and passed a hand across her brow in a habitual gesture of exaggerated forbearance, finally appropriate to her circumstances.

  She wished she’d kept a few’ more of the servants inside, to cook something. By the grace of God there was food here to be cooked. She wished, too, she had someone to muck the horses, so the smell wasn’t so appalling.

  She was just deciding that there was nothing for it but to pull herself together and at least determine a menu for tonight’s meal when she heard a shot close by.

  She screamed. She couldn’t help it. And that damnable stallion, Celtic Pride, screamed too, much louder.

  It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. She was yelling before she reached her brother, “I can’t stand it. You shoot that horse, and the others, now. Or I will. They’ll give us away. We’ll be prisoners! We’ll be held for ransom ...”

  “Ransom?” Her brother turned on her, one hand on the chestnut’s halter. “Where did you ever hear that the Khalia take hostages? They take slaves, my dear. Slaves. I only have six shots.” He slapped his hip. “And two of those are for us, if we need them.” His mouth was a thin white line. “I’ll let the horses go, when darkness falls. Maybe they’ll survive.”

  “At least the horses will have a chance,” said Mary bitterly, and with her hands shaking and her heart thudding in her ears, returned to the business of finding out what she might have her assistant prepare for a squalid little dinner by emergency light in a cave shared with horses. What was the sort of thing one ate, while hiding from a nonhuman enemy, anyway?

 
The shots were shots in the dark, Terry English told himself over and over. He’d managed to hide as the Khalia went by, but he’d heard shouts and moans which told him some of the retainers sentried behind him hadn’t.

  He’d tried to make himself slip out from cover, walk up to one of the Weasels and introduce himself as the man who’d given their kind so much useful information about the Dinneen estates, but he just couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t hold him.

  One of the Khalian soldiers had come so close that English could see a hairless patch on his hip where a weapons belt had worn away the fur. He could have done it then, but he hadn’t.

  Now it was dark and he was afraid. Afraid they’d shoot first and ask questions later. Afraid he’d be found before he found them. Afraid to move and afraid not to move. Maybe they’d just go away, never find the cave.

  Maybe.

  But he could hear things in the dark. Somebody crying, very low, a bubbling, almost burbling cry that sounded like it had blood in it. And barks like laughter, barks like Eirish foxes might make. But not the same sort of barks that Eirish dogs made. He had to move, soon. He had to get to the Weasels, before the Weasels got to the cave. Celtic Pride was in there, and they probably didn’t know one horse from another, or what Pride was worth. He could be hurt in the fray.

  English closed his eyes against images of Pride, his fine, long ears; his velvet muzzle, his arched neck; the way he danced when you brought him up behind a ready mare. Then those images got mixed with naked flashes of Alton and Mary Dinneen, and English began once more to quake.

  If he didn’t do something soon, he was going to be incapable of movement. He’d been beaten enough and punished enough to know what happened when you were trapped, when you were helpless.