The Fleet 01 Read online

  He had to do something, soon.

  He was just about to stand up, to stride bravely into the dark in the direction of the barks—and of the cave—when all hell broke loose.

  He couldn’t see much; the moon wasn’t high enough above the hills yet. But he heard lots of barks and howls. He heard scattered shots, then more; a steady barrage of automatic weapons fire. Then he heard a stallion’s bellow, and frantic, galloping hoofbeats.

  He shrieked, “No!” and bolted toward the cave.

  He ran through thickets he should have known enough to avoid. He was torn by brambles. He heard another scream, a loud, horrible horse’s scream, and heard more shots.

  Then he came upon the Khalian camp, and Celtic Pride was down in the middle of it, bleeding.

  English didn’t know how he got to the horse’s side. He didn’t realize he’d run straight through the startled Weasels until he was looking down the barrels of their weapons. He’d thrown himself against the great, warm neck of the downed stallion and was trying to make Pride raise his beautiful head.

  It was no good. There was no life in Celtic Pride. And there was no reason to care about the guns pointed at him or the five-foot-high Weasels wielding the weapons.

  Pride was all he had, all he’d ever cared about. The great horse wasn’t even quivering. His warmth was ebbing. He farted, the flatulence of the dead.

  With tears streaming down his face, uncaring, English let the Khalians haul him up.

  They barked at him and he yelled at them. He didn’t know what they said, but he said, ‘”You bastards. You stupid, fur-assed bastards. You kill a horse like this? He’s worth more than all of you! Don’t you know who I am! I’m English! You wouldn’t be here, except for me! I’m the man Smythe found for you, your contact. You—”

  He stopped, thinking about all that he’d said. One of the Weasels sidled up to him and poked him, cocking its head. It growled something.

  English didn’t care what it said. He told it, “They’re in that cave back there. They’re no better than you, you know? I don’t give a damn what happens to any of them, you think I do?

  Smythe promised me I’d be safe, that you’d leave me alone. And he promised that the horses wouldn’t be hurt. And he—”

  A buttstock hit him in the jaw, and he crumpled, blind with pain, to his knees. Something cracked against the back of his skull, and he fell forward, over the still neck of Celtic Pride, for the sake of whom he’d turned collaborator.

  He remembered Smythe promising him how, when all this was over, he’d have Pride all for his own. That he wouldn’t be a slave at all, but a free man with a fine horse along with all the others on Eire who’d be picking up the pieces once the raid was over.

  Of course, he’d never believed that, not about being free.

  But he’d never thought that Pride would die on his account. And then something hit him once more. This was something that hit so hard, he couldn’t even tell if it hurt. There was just an impact, and then there was nothing more.

  The Khalian pirates cavorted over the cache in the cave. When the big animals were all dead, the human slaves counted, and the loot divided, there was much to celebrate. The high-priced slaves were obvious. These were fat, sleek, and heavily decorated. The woman’s face was painted and she was not scarred or stretched from whelping. They had fun with her, and her tight-arsed companion.

  These slaves and their booty were coffled with the crazy slave, who nonetheless was strong, the one who’d come charging into the bivouac area, and these were marched to the manor house, where the team tagged the newcomers and secured them before moving on. A beacon would guide the booty ship to the cache.

  The Khalian raiders themselves had received an order to proceed to the extraction site, which they did, playful and raucous now that their work was done. Of course, there was some biting and scuffling among the ranks, now that there was time for it, over protocols and slights. Many noses were harshly bitten by the squad commander over the surprise attack of the big four-footed animal, and the charge of the single human slave. But it was nothing for which a raider needed to die. There were enough spoils to make up for any sloppy conduct. A roll on your back, a crawl on your belly, submitting your nose to disciplinary teeth, and all was forgiven.

  The sortie leader, when they made the hilltop, let out a great howl, his throat arched in the moonlight. The others took up the triumphant call, and the planet Eire trembled under the Khalian raiders’ fury for as far as that howl could be heard.

  There wasn’t much to fight, by the time English’s strike force put down in Cork. He leaned against one of the long, lateral landing fins of his APC and squinted up at the sky, where, beyond the cloud deck of early morning, Padova, in the Haig, might be having better luck.

  Lieutenant English’s men were still off-loading ground support vehicles. Had to go through the motions. But the marine’s instincts told him there were no Khalia here. The deep indentations in the sward where they’d landed—and lifted off—proved him right. As did the silent, dead town where nothing but casualties could be found.

  The hospital, the administrative buildings, everything—what hadn’t been bombed had been hosed down pretty good. It was like any other war zone, only this one deserved the drubbing it had taken.

  Toby English had had an odd feeling, during drop, as his craft put out from the belly of the Haig, like some part of him had just been severed.

  It was a weird, quick, anguishing moment. He felt as if his neck had snapped, but the pain came and went and then everything was fine. In his helmet and ground-attack electronics, that was easy to check out. He was monitored like any other piece of expensive equipment. And expensive he was, with what the Fleet had put into him, added to what the marines had spent, training him up to where he wasn’t a hick from Eire any longer.

  And he wasn’t. He felt a satisfaction he couldn’t admit, and something deeper, as he walked his men, in careful wide maneuvers, through the murdered town of Cork. This time, the gutted bodies, the missing livers, the torn-out hearts, the slit throats—none of it bothered him like it usually did.

  This time, he had a certain amount of empathy for the raiders. Or hostility toward the casualties. Civilians: he routinely risked his life to protect them. They were the warp and woof of the Alliance, the taxpayers. But Cork was hell; Toby English knew it like nobody else here knew it.

  His sergeant and his men were tight-lipped and wan, frustrated because there was nobody here to hit. If he could, he’d have explained how the Eirish deserved whatever they got. He’d have explained it, except it didn’t make any sense, even to him, to think that way.

  He’d had a rough time here, yeah. But he’d gotten into the marines here, because even Eire had to send its share of bodies out to protect humanity.

  He didn’t like his own reactions, and he kept looking at his bio readout to see if anything was wrong with him. He even scrolled back and found the spike, recorded when he’d had the pain on the way down here. But it didn’t mean anything, at least not to the computer. So it shouldn’t mean anything to him.

  He wondered if how he felt had anything to do with his brother. Twins were supposed to have some weird bond, even fraternal twins. But he didn’t want to think about his brother. Terry English had made his choice. So had Toby. And whatever suppressed hostility to this whole damned world made Lieutenant Tolliver English less squeamish about counting bodies than usual—maybe it was good. He was a marine lieutenant, not a psychotherapist.

  But he’d put in for a psychover when he got back, if there wasn’t anything better to do, like chasing Weasels.

  Thinking of Weasels, he used his prerogatives and called upstairs for a readiness check. Maybe Jay Padova had something more interesting for him than preparing to write one of those non-contact reports.

  Padova was busy, but English got some news for his trouble. The Haig had
detected a Khalian infrared track, hot enough to follow, and a good vector. If they caught the enemy before the Khalia dropped out of normal space, there might be some furry tail to kick, after all.

  Although English didn’t like ship-to-ship combat much (it made him feel too helpless), he sure as hell preferred it to waiting around counting corpses until the Haig got back. If it did. Marooned on Eire for the foreseeable future wasn’t his idea of R&R.

  So he got cleared for emergency lift, pulled his men in, and started lift-off procedures. The dead would wait.

  And they would, in one form or another. Lieutenant English’s party lifted off in due time to make its rendezvous with the Haig, and well before the lieutenant had a chance to notice a particular casualty, on the green by the deep indentations that the Khalian ship had cut there during landing.

  This particular body was lying face down, anyway. Unless the lieutenant had turned it over personally, he wouldn’t have been informed that his brother, Terry, lay dead there, cut out of coffle and shot through the neck. The pale eyes staring at the grass weren’t enough of a resemblance for any of the marines to have made the connection. The two brothers, living and dead, just didn’t look that much alike.

  By the time somebody got back to finish the casualty count, none of the dead were recognizable. The Khalia had shot the horses, but they hadn’t shot the dogs.

  In the hold of the Khalian slave ship, Mary Dinneen, naked and shivering, her back already striped with welts, huddled next to her brother. Not for comfort, for there was none. Not for warmth, for the hold was hot from the body heat of so many slaves in such close quarters. But because there was nowhere else to go.

  And her brother, Alton, who had always had all the answers, was mute and sullen when she asked him, over and over, “How did it come to this?”

  They’d had time to find out, from a raving stableboy, that there’d been a traitor in their midst. But there was always a traitor, wasn’t there? If not a person, then oneself? One’s own shortsightedness? One’s own greed?

  Mary Dinneen was a survivor. Right now she wasn’t sure whether that was a desirable trait. But she was stuck with it. And she wanted to survive.

  More, she wanted her brother to survive. Alton was in shock. She knew what shock looked like. She knew that it could kill. And because she had no blanket, no comfort, no medicine or anything but her voice, since her hands were tied, she tried to use that to bring Alton back to reality.

  “Alton,” she said in her most demanding voice, “I want you to talk to me. I need to know everything you know about the Khalia, and quickly. I need to know what we can expect. I need to know if we can find a way to mitigate our plight. Find a raider who might be amenable to trying to ransom us.”

  That brought a rise from her brother, who said, “I told you, they don’t do deals. There’s no contact points, no bureaucratic infrastructure with them—nothing.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “There just ... isn’t,” Alton said dully, shaking his head.

  “After a hundred years of this?” she said disbelievingly. It hadn’t mattered when the Khalia were a vague threat, when the raids were always on somebody else’s planet. Now it mattered, if only to keep Alton talking. “Alton, how can that be? What’s the Alliance good for? What do we pay them for?”

  “To fight ... when they can. For us. I don’t—” His face was tortured now, but that was better than a vacant face.

  This was going to be a very long ride, Mary knew. She didn’t want to spend it next to a vegetable. Or next to a corpse. “Then let’s figure it out,” she pressed. “How did all this start? Why aren’t there representatives trying to negotiate a settlement? What are we paying for, gunboat diplomacy? And if so, why isn’t every human settlement protected?”

  Mary didn’t really care. She knew it wouldn’t do her any good to know the answers. But she had to make herself care about something. She couldn’t just sit there, not when her fate was so horrid and unknowable. And, as Alton tried to straighten up and animation came fully into his face, she knew she did care.

  Not about how the war had gotten started. But about her brother, and about making sure that both of them survived. She’d seen what happened to crazy English, shot down like a dog on the common. It wasn’t going to happen to her, or to Alton, if she could help it. That was what being human was all about.

  You didn’t give up. You asked questions. You made the best of what you had and tried for better. You bided your time. And you fought back. Somewhere out there, among the slavemasters, would come a time and a place where Mary Dinneen could make her life count for something. Until then, there were the questions. And the answers.

  “Pocked hulls!” swore the perfectly groomed, clinically handsome and impeccably dressed Fleet Support Officer. He switched off the Omni, still clutching the offending memo.

  “Pocked hulls and overheated drives!” He had always been proud of using the same obscenities as battle-hardened Fleet personnel.

  On the far side of an office specifically designed to instill a feeling of confidence and professionalism in any visitor, the three-dimensional image of Crag Courage, Fleet Captain, and his radiantly beautiful Executive Officer, Lieutenant Amethyst, obediently disappeared. They had just finished thwarting the extravagantly evil (and after three seasons in the top of the ratings), infamous pirate Mac Niphe. In doing so, they just happened to recover the entire Alliance treasury, so saving all from ultimate destruction for the one hundred and seventeenth time.

  Lieutenant Commander Guilliame Kanard was proud of Crag Courage. The show had been one of his first successes as public relations coordinator for the Fleet. The animated robot of Courage on his desk had been presented to him by the grateful network in a ceremony attended by no less than four admirals.

  Gill was also quite familiar with unreasonable demands. If the situation didn’t call for a miracle, the brass rarely resorted to the Sentient Relations and Communications Division.

  The rambling memo could be summarized in two sentences, though no Fleet clerk would stoop to such directness:

  1) The Khalian situation was rapidly developing into a full-scale war.

  That was fine with Gill, in port and comfortably far from the frontiers where the trouble was occurring. Wars were much easier to sell than the routine dullness that normally characterized the activities of the Fleet’s ten thousand plus ships. But—

  2) Commander Kanard was to prepare a public relations campaign to support the major tax increase which would be requested of the Alliance Council.

  No wonder all the Admiral’s personal staffs were passing along this hissing grenade. A tax increase? Talk about a no-win situation. If Gill succeeded, then taxes went up and no one would be happy. If he failed, he’d be lucky to find a job doing PR for a Vegan whorehouse.

  For several seconds Gill Kanard sat, randomly shuffling printouts. His thoughts raced, seeking a winning solution to an impossible situation. There simply was none. Gill’s finely trained mind carefully traced the ramifications, personal, and career, of the order. In less than a minute he had traced the nine most probable result-paths to their conclusions. In all nine he ended up beached and abandoned with his carefully choreographed career in ruins. In one scenario he was actually lynched by a mob of irate taxpayers.

  Bitterness edged in and tainted Gill’s growing despair. Tax increase projects were the fusion bombs of office politics. Someone wanted very badly to get him.

  Then he noticed a short note, on the back of the memo. Just one line on the back of the second page.

  Gill, this one’s for real. Duane.

  A faint smile crept onto the PR officer’s face. In four words Admiral Duane, one of the few true fighting admirals left in the Fleet bureaucracy, had changed everything.

  This was not just another Fleet attempt to extend its influence or buy more toys for the brass to play
with. Nor was it a trap laid by a jealous colleague. If Duane thought so, then this was indeed the start of a real shooting war.

  The side of him that believed in Crag Courage crept out from behind a carefully schooled veneer of professional detachment. For a surprisingly long time Gill Kanard toyed with the novel sensation that he was doing something desirable. Finally, smiling broadly now, he slid his chair across the room and placed himself in the center of one of Port’s most impressive arrays of communications and computer controls.

  He erased notes on the project he had been struggling with, an attempt to convince the notoriously obtuse residents of some mudball named Freeborn that joining the Alliance had been a good decision, despite the recent bout of inflation it had caused.

  Approaching the problem logically, Gill decided to start at the beginning. In a few deft keystrokes he called up the earliest records relating to the Khalia. They were surprisingly old.

  THEY MET AS total strangers. The meeting brought one fame, the other infamy. The outcome was the loss of countless lives.

  This is the tale of how it started.

  The Change was working in him. Him? No doubt of it: this individual was never destined to bear young. Apart from that, though, his identity was as yet somewhat uncertain. He did not exactly have a name. He was accustomed to utter a noise between a hiss and a screeching whistle, sounding like “Tschweeit,” that served to identify him as a member of his species, with overtones of incipient maleness. Also, of course, he knew inflections that he could employ when it was necessary to establish his clan and his caste within the clan. But these related rather to his family than to him, and he seldom had occasion to use them. Among his kind, the Khalia, recognition was primarily conveyed by odour, and at his age he was not regarded as having enough of a personality for adults to be much concerned about.