Read The Fleet 01 for Free Online

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.
    However, for the past two seasons, he had begun to shun the company of his coevals; he showed signs of impatience at the presence even of his closest relatives; he no longer responded to casual