Freedom's Fire Box Set: The Complete Military Space Opera Series (Books 1-6)

by Bobby Adair

  “She was gone already.

  “Everything downstairs was clean. It was as if there had been no party the night before.

  “I took a perfunctory look around the house, hoping I wouldn’t find her, then I rushed off to work.

  “It was when I got home that evening I found her sitting at the dining room table. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t yell. She simply said she’d told Phil about it and she’d volunteered us to host a Gray hatchling.”

  “Shit,” says Brice. “You’re kidding. She took on a hatchling?”

  I nod. “A five-year commitment to raise a tick from hatching to maturity, a commitment to give herself to it. Everybody knows what that means. She knew it would age an extra twenty or thirty years out of her and likely as not leave her dead. She knew the surviving family would get a big enough stack of money to leave them well-fed for a generation.

  “Claire got her revenge for what I’d done and she’d committed herself to something that would make me feel shitty every day for the rest of my life.

  “Later that night, Phil kicked Sydney out of his house and she came to live in our basement, making it easier for Claire to shove her revenge in the face of the two people she hated most.

  “Two weeks after that, the tick moved in and Claire started to shrivel away.”

  “Goddamn,” says Brice. “That’s some shit.”

  Chapter 48

  Seven jumps, and we’re out again. I’ve dozed through three.

  Most of the grunts are asleep. I’ve lost track of how many hours we’ve been trying to reach a destination we should theoretically have made in about forty-five minutes.

  “Lived through another one,” announces Phil over the bridge comm.

  At least there’s that. Our ship hasn’t blown up, yet. I ask, “Are we any closer this time?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Penny tells me.

  I didn’t think my tone carried any inflection of hidden meaning, but I suppose she’s getting as frustrated as the rest of us.

  “There’s a wonkiness to the drive array that’s—”

  “It’s okay, Penny,” I tell her. She’s explained it to us a few times already.

  “throwing us off course by—what, Phil—as much as thirty degrees in each jump?”

  “Thirty-two’s the most so far,” he clarifies.

  “And we don’t know which direction we’re going to go.”

  Phil says, “At least the hyper-light speed is consistent on each jump, so we’re developing a cone of probability on our calculations as to where we’ll end up.”

  Lenox shakes her head and pretends to punch herself in the face and looks at me with a silent question, “How many times do we need to hear this?”

  “We understand,” I tell them. “When we get to the base, maybe we can fix the ship. They have to have maintenance guys there, right?” That’s only a hope. I know nothing about where we’re going except it’s an asteroid.

  “We’re three thousand miles out,” Phil tells us. “The asteroid at the orbital coordinates looks to be a little more than two kilometers long.”

  “That’s pretty close,” says Brice. “Too close to be coming out of bubble jump, right?”

  Crap. I don’t need Penny and Phil more defensive about this than they already are, but Brice is right. Coming in or out of jump near a massive object can lead to trouble, the Russian-roulette kind. Maybe you come out just fine and laugh your good fortune in fate’s face, or maybe you’re atomized so quickly you don’t even have a millisecond to think “Oh, shit!” right before you die.

  “Yeah,” Phil agrees, flatly. “Looks like that consistent speed thing I just mentioned is off the table, too.”

  Brice pats the bulkhead beside his seat. “Fantastic!” Then he leans over and catches Lenox’s attention. “Luck.”

  She chooses not to respond.

  “Two assault ships are already here,” Phil tells us. “They’re not directly on the other side of the asteroid. I can see them above the horizon. And Jupiter is huge. I can tell you one thing, we’re a lot closer to Jupiter out here than to the asteroid belt.”

  “Jablonsky,” I call, “find out which ships those are.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Really?

  Brice laughs.

  I decide Phil must be infecting the bridge crew with his pushy cynicism.

  “How fast do you want to get there?” asks Penny. “We could pull some g’s and arrive in five minutes if you want. If there’s no hurry, we can take it slow and cruise on over in an hour or two.”

  “Hydrogen?” I ask. That’s the variable on which the question depends. Heavy g acceleration and deceleration will burn through more of our H than if we take it slow. In fact, if we had a day to spare, we could give the grav plates a tiny bump and then frictionlessly coast the distance.

  “We’re down to just over half in our tanks,” answers Penny. “Depending on where we go after this, we need to start thinking about getting a refill.”

  “We need it either way,” I tell her. “That’s the standing order. Wherever we go from here, make sure our flight plan includes enough hydrogen to make it back to earth.”

  “The standing order?” asks Phil, in a vague tone. He doesn’t have that much overt aggression in him. He likes to chip away with snide comments. “Are we still in the SDF?”

  “Adverb,” says Penny, “don’t start.”

  “He already started,” says Brice.

  It seems Brice is starting to feel comfortable with the social dynamic of our grav factory clique.

  “Phil,” I take a breath, “this isn’t the—”

  “Oh, crap!” he shouts.

  “What?” I ask.

  “They’re under attack!” he shouts back. “Someone’s shooting at them!”

  Chapter 49

  Minutes burn away along with our diminishing hydrogen stocks. We pick up speed and the platoon compartment flutters blue. Our inertial bubble is earning its pay today.

  Rather then driving right at the asteroid, Penny has us riding an arc on a path that’ll curve us around to the other side of the asteroid at high speed.

  “Both ships are dead,” Phil tells us, petulant inflections absent from his voice now that the war has fallen back into our laps. “They concentrated fire on the reactors in the stern of each one.”

  “Are the ships damaged otherwise?” I ask.

  “No grav field emanates from either ship,” Phil answers. “Otherwise, the forward sections are intact.”

  “Are the Trogs still shooting at them?” I ask.

  “No,” says Phil. “They’ve stopped.”

  “Prisoners?” speculates Penny. “The Trogs want to take them prisoner.”

  I’m willing to go with that guess, however, there’s another possibility I want to keep to myself. What if it’s not Trogs on that asteroid? What if we’ve been set up by the MSS in a sting operation to weed out disloyal bug-heads just like us? What if the MSS wants to collect live traitors to feed into their interrogation system so they can find more of us?

  Granted, I can’t think of a reason why we wouldn’t have been arrested before we ever had a chance to board our ship. A lifetime under Gray rule has left me with a healthy sense of paranoia.

  “There’s nothing we can do for them,” Phil tells us.

  “You want to leave your fellow grunts out there to die?” Brice spits into the comm.

  “We don’t have any armaments,” Phil shoots back. “In case you haven’t noticed, this rusty turd was built to harpoon those big Trog cruisers. How are we supposed to attack an asteroid base?”

  “Phil,” I tell him, “cut the chatter. Keep an eye on what’s happening. I need to know everything I can about this place.”

  Jablonsky says, “I can set the computer up to record the feed from the exterior cameras.”

  “How quickly?” I ask.

  “Doing it now.”

  That
makes my next choice for me. “Penny, when you swing around that asteroid don’t slow down. Bring us in close and fast. I want a good picture of what’s on the ground. As soon as we’re past, I want to jump.”

  “Bubble jump?” Brice asks. “That’s dangerously close to the asteroid.”

  “Where to?” asks Phil. “I need a vector.”

  “The asteroid’s gravity field will affect us,” argues Brice, his voice calm and slow. He wants to make sure I understand what I’m asking.

  I don’t need the reminder of the danger, but I don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons. “We’re not going anywhere,” I tell them all. “I just want the Trogs on the surface to see us make the jump. They need to think we’re bubbling out to save our asses. I want them to believe we’re not coming back.” Same thing if it’s the MSS down there.

  “Gotcha,” says Brice. Back to business. He understands. Whoever has control of the base on the other side of the asteroid, our one dinky ship and half-strength platoon can’t take them in a frontal assault.

  “Five or six seconds at light speed is all we need,” I tell them. “That’ll put us a million miles away, far enough they might not notice us pop back out again.”

  “Hey,” says Phil, getting a little excited. “Two ships are coming up off the surface.”

  I try to see the gravity picture in my mind. I see a blurry image of the asteroid, a halo of smaller rocks randomly floating nearby, and the Rusty Turd’s grav plates distorting everything.

  Damn, Phil is good.

  I admit, “I can’t make them out.”

  “Give it a sec,” says Phil. “Another second.”

  “Grav lifts,” Penny tells us. “Just like the ones we rode to the shipyard.”

  “They’re definitely going for the ships,” I deduce out loud. “Penny—”

  “Got it,” she says.

  I feel the ship’s course alter slightly, and I know she understands what I want her to do.

  We’re accelerating again. I only have one suggestion. “If you can nail them both.”

  Blue waves burst over the bulkheads. Our inertial bubble strains and we all feel gravity buffet us with pulsing fluxes.

  Phil is jabbering, trying to help Penny line up on our targets.

  “I got it, Phil. I got it,” she tells him.

  Phil powers up the grav lens and brilliant blue fills the platoon compartment.

  The ship shudders.

  “They’re lined up!” shouts Phil.

  “Everybody hold on,” Penny tells us. “Shifting power.”

  “Hold tight,” Brice tells the grunts.

  They’re already tense in their seats.

  “They see us!” shouts Phil.

  “Nowhere to run, now.” I hear a vicious smile in Penny’s voice.

  The ship lurches to a blinding flash of blue.

  We’ve shattered the first shuttle.

  Another flash follows as our grav lens obliterates the second vessel.

  Bent steel and broken Trogs are thrown into space. The gravity field around our ship is in chaos.

  “Got ‘em!” shouts Penny.

  “Jump!” I order.

  “They’re shooting,” shouts Phil.

  The ground guns are trying to hit us.

  The ship shudders so hard I think it’s going to come apart.

  Electric blue light strobes through the cabin in waves as bright as when we hit the Trog cruiser in the battle over earth.

  Voices are screaming over the comm, and the grav in the cabin is ratcheting up past two g’s, then five.

  Oh, no.

  Without warning, the blue blinks away and we’re suddenly surrounded by nothing but dead rust and the sick yellow glow of the cabin’s weak bulbs.

  The Rusty Turd is quiet, seemingly motionless.

  We’re in zero-g.

  “We’re out of bubble jump,” says Penny.

  Damn, that was quick.

  “Nearly a million miles,” confirms Phil, sounding proud. “Nine hundred and seventy-three thousand.”

  “And we’re alive,” says Brice, because he wants to make the point it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  He’s right, but we did what we had to do. I glance right and left, and say, “To the bridge. We have an assault to plan.”

  Chapter 50

  I’m starting to feel like I’m stuck in a déjà vu cycle: go to the bridge and make a plan, strap into a seat, ram something, go to the bridge and make a plan, strap into a seat…

  Ugh.

  Is this what glorious revolution really is? Repetitive tedium punctuated by frenetic moments of fighting to stay alive?

  I kick things off. “Jablonsky, tell me we got good pics on our flyby.”

  He’s looking at his monitor, scrolling frame by frame through a video of the asteroid’s surface. “Once we hit the lifts, debris flew everywhere.”

  “Can you composite the good frames to give us a complete picture?” I ask.

  “That’s what I’m working on.”

  “We should wait a few minutes and then go back,” suggests Phil. “If they send up more lifts, we can take those out, too.”

  “No,” says Brice, as he comes through the doorway to the bridge. He glances at me. “No, sir. I disagree.”

  “So do I,” I tell him.

  “Why?” asks Phil.

  Phil is great with gravity, but he doesn’t have a good mind for war. Brice knows the answer, so I give him the nod.

  “If we go back and attack,” says Brice, “in the same way we just did, maybe we’ll succeed. Maybe there’s nothing they can do about it. However, if they can do something about it, they will. They won’t be surprised like that again.”

  “So,” I tell them all, “we need to surprise them a different way.” I look at Brice for the next part because I suspect he won’t like it. “We have to wait long enough they’ll think we’re gone for good.”

  “That’s okay,” says Brice. “I know why you’re looking at me.”

  “Then you know if we go back too soon,” I say, “they’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Who’s to say they won’t be waiting for us anyway?” argues Phil.

  “They will,” Brice tells him. “The longer we wait, the more complacent they’ll become.”

  “Or they’ll kill more assault ships that come to the base and fall into their trap,” says Phil.

  “Unfortunately, that’s right,” I tell him. I look around at the others. “Those two ships they were firing on weren’t burning hard to escape. They were hovering over the base, probably looking for a spot to land, and the Trogs on the ground opened up on them. Unfortunately, we can’t just rush in. We’re probably outnumbered. We know we’re outgunned.”

  “So what, then?” asks Phil.

  “That’s what we need to figure out,” says Brice.

  “First things first,” I turn to Phil. “There are plenty of smaller asteroids in the space near that big one.”

  “It had to be a mining operation,” Brice tells us. “That’s what they do. They put a base on some big rock and while they work on mining it for ore, they send out a tug or two to bring smaller asteroids and claim them for later.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Lenox. “I thought the base was in the asteroid belt. Aren’t asteroids everywhere?”

  “It’s not like the movies,” I tell her. “Asteroids out here are something like a half-million miles apart.”

  “The bigger ones,” says Phil. “You could fly through the belt a thousand times looking out the window and never even know you were in it.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” answers Phil.

  “Around some of the bigger mining colonies,” says Brice, “they might have a few hundred smaller asteroids corralled. Those places are like the asteroid belts you see in the movies with big hunks of rock everywhere you look.”

  I turn to Phil. “I want you to p
ick one of the bigger asteroids and plot a course for Penny to bring us around so we’ll be flying in behind the smaller adjacent one. If we do it right, the Grays in that mining colony on the bigger rock won’t be able to see us coming.”

  “They’ll detect our grav signature,” says Phil as he shakes his head.

  He’s almost right about that. Grays see gravity—hence mass—better then humans see light. “If we bubble jump, the grav shadow of that small asteroid won’t hide us. However, like we already agreed, we have time. We’ll come in at sub-light speeds, starting with an acceleration way out here where they’re not likely to notice, and then slide in, decelerating very slowly when we get close.”

  “Okay, okay,” says Phil, looking toward Penny. “We can do that.”

  “No problem,” she agrees, “we’ll use more hydrogen than you’ll want to. I think it will work.”

  “Hydrogen’s not a problem,” I tell her. “Attacking this base will either get us all killed, or we’ll find some miraculous way to succeed. Either we won’t need the hydrogen because we’ll all be dead, or there’ll be plenty available from the colony’s stores.”

  “That’s my kind of optimism,” says Brice.

  Chapter 51

  “I’ve pieced together a map,” says Jablonsky. “If we were back on earth, and I had my computer, I could have put together a 3D rendering, but with what I have here…”

  The ship is rife with shortcomings. I say, “We’re lucky the Rusty Turd has any onboard computer systems at all.”

  “They spared every expense,” agrees Brice.

  Jablonsky says, “I’m sending a copy to each of your d-pads.”

  “Wait,” Penny stops us as she laughs and pats the console. “The Rusty Turd. That’s the name you’re giving this beauty?”

  “Fits,” Phil mutters.

  And that settles it.

  Aside from the smallish monitors on the control consoles, the ship has no large screen we can all stand around and gawk at. Certainly no spiffy, three-dimensional, animated, full-color hologram like spaceships have in some of the old movies. I guess back in those days, with no constraint but the imagination, the realm of the future’s possibilities was as expansive as the universe itself. Unfortunately, the future we wound up with gave us hyper-light travel, yet did so in a Spartan iron tube.