“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 violence, 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.
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 what 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.
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.