Read The Fleet 01 for Free Online Page A

challenges in the manner of a youngling, by a rough-and-tumble fight more play than purpose, but either dismissed them with expressions of ‘Contempt or, if provoked past bearing, went for what might more than once have been a kill, had others not intervened.
    Accordingly, on a day appointed, they took him to a wilderness on the far side of the planet, where he must survive by his wits until they came again. If he were found alive, he would be accepted as an adult. They gave him a baldric from which hung two containers, one for solids and one for liquids, holding rations for about three days. Otherwise he must provide for himself. But there was little water here” and less prey. Besides, there were always hundreds like him undergoing the same trial by ordeal. It was the Khalian way. There was no penalty attached to taking another’s kill—or even another’s life, if that was imperative to save one’s own—though it was best to avoid doing either, for it would entail lasting enmity from every member of the victim’s clan, and certain clans were very powerful.
    All this passed through his mind as the flier that had brought him boomed away into the sunset. Nonetheless he felt wonderful. The bones of his predecessors who had failed the test were scattered around the spot where he had been dropped. Not even they could diminish his sheer joy at finding himself so alone. He had been told, but until now had not appreciated, how much the Change would make him crave the vastness of wild and open landscape, after the crowded conditions of the multifamily village where he had grown up.
    As darkness fell he stared skyward. The welkin was clear, sown with brilliant specks as sharp as claw-points. He ached to the inmost fibre of his being with longing that he should one day be allowed to roam the greatest wilderness of all, the void beyond the air. All his life it had been his ambition to join the star-rovers, to prey on lesser species, not for food but use, to bring home riches that would make his descendants respected, famous, maybe even the root-stem of a new clan ...
    He roused himself from dreaming. In order that his ambition should become reality, he must survive this test. But even as he selected a safe place to wait for dawn, his thoughts were with the rovers, with the ravagers.
    So too were those of Yuriko Petrovna, though for a very different reason.
    And, indeed, she was not as yet aware of the fact. She—the pronoun was correct, though she had never borne children nor did she have any intention of so doing—was among the not quite lowliest of the Fleet. Her title was grander than her actual status. She was officially a pilot, and had command of an FTL starship. In fact, she was scarcely more than a passenger, aboard a single-person scout of a class so numerous its members were not even granted names ... though privately she had accorded one to hers: the Nag. Her study of history had taught her that that had once meant a broken-down horse. It also, and still, meant someone given to continual complaints and reprimands. Her ship had been refitted so often it was hard to be sure whether anything except a few struts and girders were original, but some of those were past the century mark, while every time she attempted to give a command the computer disapproved of warning lights flashed and its vocal circuits filled the air with harsh objections. So the nickname was befitting on both counts.
    As part of her training she, and fifty others like her in similar ships, had been assigned to one of the Fleet’s routine tasks: searching—very probably in vain—for a missing merchant vessel, overdue on a trip back to Fleet-controlled space from one of the outlying colony planets.
    But to her, if not her colleagues or those who had ordered out the search party, this was a special case. The lost ship was called Chrysanthemum, named by her captain for the national flower of his mother’s homeland back on Earth.
    His mother ... and