The Fleet 01 Read Online Free PDF

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