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

by Bobby Adair

  I jump to my feet and sprint toward him, railgun blazing as I close the gap.

  My rounds go up, down, and wide, but they pound his deflectors and knock him off balance. He falls as I cross the last few meters.

  While he’s trying to bring his disruptor around to cut through my neck, I push the barrel of my railgun under his outstretched arm, well inside his defensive grav, and send a handful of rounds through his suit, exploding out his back in a puff of shattered bone and blood.

  No time to revel in my ghost Trog kill, I spin to see Brice swinging his disruptor in a fight with the other ghost, a towering, thick one, a giant among Trogs. “Get out!” I shout. “Get out of there!”

  Brice ducks under the ghost Trog’s blade, and jumps as his free hand moves to his d-pad’s grav controls.

  I jump too, and max grav directly at the ghost whose attention follows Brice into the air above his head.

  At the last breath, I switch my power to defensive grav and smash bodily into the Trog.

  He flies into a line of his simpleton brothers, and I angle up, slowing and spinning as I bring my weapon to bear, spraying the whole mess of them from above with un-aimed rounds, hoping for a hit.

  “This way,” shouts Brice.

  “We can’t hold this many,” I tell him.

  My God, I’m a deductive genius when it comes to the obvious!

  “Of course we can’t!” He angles toward the hull again, trying to move us another forty meters farther from the disorganized mob of Trogs.

  He touches down, spins, and raises his rifle, ready to fight.

  A second later, I plant my feet on the hull beside him, and start shooting as I comm the squad. “Lenox, we’re pushing our luck here.”

  “Thirty more seconds,” she tells me, “then get your ass out of there.”

  Chapter 37

  The sky fills with fireflies of red zipping past us, some near, most far, railgun slugs fired by Trogs angry for having missed their chance to kill us when we were down among them.

  Thirty seconds?

  I didn’t count the ticks.

  Brice and me both empty our magazines and take off. With only disruptors left and no explosives, we have no defense against so many Trogs and only our lives to trade for a delay.

  All we can do is try to keep their attention and hope a ghost Trog doesn’t catch us. We’re heading away from the Trog cruiser, back toward the asteroid where we picked up Lenox and the others.

  “Silva, Mostyn, Lenox,” I call. I hear only static.

  “Lenox,” calls Brice as the grav fields shrink to null around us.

  No response for him either.

  The mob of Trogs runs across the hull, looking every bit like an aquatic invertebrate preying on a fish.

  I accelerate toward the asteroid’s horizon, searching the surface as I fly, hoping to see the others.

  “The ship’s turning,” says Brice.

  I glance back to see the massive cruiser slowly rotate, bringing one of its spines of railguns to bear, but not the one we planted our explosives in. “Follow me!” I veer hard to the right.

  Brice is close behind.

  A volley of huge railgun slugs streaks past us and explodes on the asteroid’s surface.

  “That’s overkill!” shouts Brice, like he’s being treated unfairly. A bit uncharacteristic for him.

  “I’d say they were pretty pissed about us being on their ship.” I turn again, going up this time.

  Railgun rounds start to pour out of the ship.

  “Over the horizon!” shouts Brice. “We need the asteroid between us and them.”

  “Max grav!” I shout back. “As fast as you can go.”

  “I hope you’re off the ship!” That catches my attention. It’s Lenox on the comm.

  I look back at the cruiser as I accelerate, not an entirely smart thing given how fast I’m moving with the asteroid below me and debris in the sky everywhere. I’m rewarded for my carelessness. The upper spine of the ship erupts in fire and shrapnel as railguns mounted there fly apart.

  “Our TX!” I shout at Brice.

  He turns to see.

  All along the gun spine, the cruiser splits open, and the rent in the hull stretches wide as hunks of bent metal small and large blast into the vacuum. For a second, I can see clearly into the giant ship. Trogs inside are looking up at empty, black space, their death.

  The cruiser lurches.

  Another explosion rocks it.

  Bodies and railgun slugs pour out through the gaping wound.

  The grav fields flicker on and off, overlap, and stress the hull in places where it’s now weak.

  A huge section along one side of the tear caves in and is then pushed back out by escaping gases.

  The ship starts to spin and bend.

  Trogs that had been on the surface of the hull, the ones trying to kill us, are running in every direction. Some are making the most uncomfortable choice for a Trog and going airborne, leaping for the nearest asteroids.

  Cracks spider-web across the hull and spread wide. Lights flicker. The grav fields go from chaotic to frenetic.

  “This is going to get fucked up out here!” shouts Brice. The sky is filling with high-speed jetsam. It’s impacting the asteroid below us, and flying past into deep space.

  The grav fields near the center of the cruiser, where our bombs did the most damage, flash brilliant blue. I feel the sting all through the bug’s tentacles in my brain as the ship rips apart—half rocketing away from us, two other massive hunks coming our way.

  “Shit!” I over-grav my plates and burn for the asteroid’s far side.

  Brice sees the same situation as I do and does his best to keep up.

  In moments, I’m down close to the surface on the backside, and I’m reversing my field to avoid a crushing impact. Thankfully, the familiar pop of frying plates doesn’t sound. I’ve gambled again with my personal orange terrarium, and I’m alive.

  My feet find dirt, and I switch to auto grav and start to run.

  Brice touches down ahead of me, and I point to a ravine between two ragged ridges of stone.

  “Catch me if you can!” he shouts as he finds his feet, switches to auto grav, and sprints.

  The asteroid rumbles as part of the cruiser impacts on the other side. The ground beneath us shifts suddenly to the left and both Brice and I tumble down.

  He’s quicker to recover, and he’s moving again.

  I’m crawling and pushing with my grav and running as the star field above us races across the sky. Grav around us fluctuates wildly and the stone below us shakes like it’s going to disintegrate.

  Brice finds his way into the fissure first and turns to see me tumble over on top of him. We bounce off each other, and off the stone walls, as our mutual defensive grav fights with the asteroid’s ambient field and wild fields flaring through everything around us.

  I’m on my back, lying on jagged rock when I stop moving. Looking up, seeing the tiny sparkle of our sun slide across the sky, I know the asteroid is spinning. That thought barely has a moment to gel when the Trog cruiser’s grav array fills the sky above and crashes into the rocks protecting us.

  Chapter 38

  I’m the first to poke my head through the gap of twisted steel and shredded hull composite, and notice the sky above is still moving. “I’m through.”

  Brice sighs his relief.

  We’ve been working our way through the wreckage trapping us in the shallow canyon for nearly two hours.

  “That was a hell of an impact,” I tell Brice. “The asteroid is spinning pretty quickly.”

  “Can you make it all the way out?”

  “I think.” I wriggle myself through the hole, careful not to move too fast or push too hard. Plenty of sharp edges around me could tear a fatal hole in my thin orange sanctuary. If I get too anxious for freedom, it could be my death.

  “I’ll admit it,” says Brice. “I wasn
’t a believer.” He’s talking about our plan to use Tarlow’s TX to destroy the Trog cruiser.

  I laugh. “Me neither. I was just placing a bet.”

  “Same here,” Brice laughs, too.

  Plenty of new metal meteors are in the sky racing away from us, remnants of the star-faring leviathan we killed.

  I pull my legs up, turn, and sit on the edge of the hole. “I’m out.”

  I can’t help but notice Jupiter’s ragged stripes of rust and gray coming up over the horizon, engulfing our eastern sky. Pulling my boots free, I turn to reach a hand in to help Brice.

  “Jesus,” he says, as he pokes his head through the hole. “That’s a sight.” Then he grins because we’re out of immediate danger. “I can’t believe that worked.”

  I’ve had a lot of time to think about it while we were exploring the wreckage to find a way through. “Those ships are built for a specific kind of warfare, big ship-to-ship engagements. It’s the kind of fight they expect to be in. The unofficial rules of their warfare. Doing things the way they’ve always done.” I look down at Brice. “They’re going to be rethinking a lot of that now that we’ve destroyed five.”

  “That worries me.” Brice settles in for a moment, resting in the hole, the urgency gone now that he can see the sky. “We’re winning because we keep surprising them. What happens when we run out of surprises?”

  I laugh.

  “What?”

  “We’re humans,” I tell him. “We’ve been killing each other since the dawn of time, and coming up with new ways to do it at every turn. We’ll never run out of fresh ideas. It’s the genius of our species.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Damn right, I’m right.” I grin.

  Brice laughs.

  “The Grays and the Trogs and any other imperial dipshits in this galaxy better figure it out because they’re dealing with humans now. We might not have the tech, but we have an irrepressible hankering to slaughter.”

  I guess, tired of my pontifications on warfare, Brice heaves himself out of the hole and looks up to see Jupiter reach its zenith, high-noon, filling half the sky above.

  I realize, we can’t be in the asteroid belt. In fact, the Potato never was. We’re way too close to Jupiter.

  I stand and straighten up to look around. “I’ll bet we make a full day in ten minutes. Maybe forty-five.”

  “A day.” Brice laughs as he sits on the edge of the hole with his feet dangling inside. “It’s weird to think of it that way. A day is twenty-four hours on earth’s rotation.” He watches Jupiter barrel across our sky. “We’re moving, too, right?”

  He’s right. We’re not only spinning, but flying through space.

  Brice scans the sky.

  “You can’t see it until the sun comes up.”

  “The Potato?” He asks.

  “That’s what you were looking for, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it a minute.”

  “Are we pretty far?”

  I nod.

  “Really far?” he asks.

  I nod again. “I saw it when I was still in the hole and first spotted the sky. It was a smudgy brown spot up above us then.”

  “Shit,” he says. “A big, brown spot?” He’s hopeful for the word, ‘big.’

  I shake my head, straighten my arm, and hold a finger against the sky. “The size of a penny maybe. A dime.”

  “How far do you reckon the asteroid is?”

  I’m scrutinizing the tip of my finger. “Maybe it wasn’t that big.”

  “You’re not making me feel better.”

  I turn to look at him as Jupiter slides toward our horizon. “Is that what you wanted, me to make you feel better? Despite your off-color humor, I had you pegged for a no-bullshit kinda dude.”

  He sighs. “Sometimes the burden of the straight scoop wears me down. Maybe a little sugar-coating now and again wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

  “I think they’re sending a grav lift out to pick us up right now.” I grin.

  Brice grimaces. “Too much sugar.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you propose?”

  I take a moment to examine my d-pad, looking for info on how much H I might still have in the tank. As usual. It tells me just about nothing.

  “Looking to see if anyone is in comm range?” Brice looks at his d-pad.

  “H,” I tell him. “My suit burns it like it has a leak or something.”

  “It’s these micro-reactors,” Brice tells me. “The smaller they are, the less efficient.”

  “How are you set?” I reach around to my back and tap mine as if that’s going to give me any information.

  “That’s pointless,” Brice tells me.

  “I know. My indicator doesn’t work.”

  “There’s a warning light built into your helmet display.”

  “The light doesn’t do anything until I run completely out.”

  “That’s not very convenient.”

  I reach down and check for the spare canister on my leg, only to realize I never obtained a spare after the last one ran dry. “That mining hut. The one Lenox said had all the spare canisters in it. We need to find it.”

  “This asteroid isn’t that big.” Brice looks back and forth across the rough landscape, then points. “They were drilling those cores down through the centerline. If we follow the line of holes, we’ll come to that shack.”

  Brice is already out of our gopher hole and walking across the broken section of cruiser hull. He’s not one to dick around once he makes up his mind. I follow, letting my suit’s auto grav keep my feet oriented toward the asteroid’s center of mass.

  “So we stock up on H and cal packs,” he says, “then what?”

  Calories. I forgot about those. I can’t remember the last time I ate something. I take a sip through my calorie tube, and nothing comes out. “Crap. I think my cal pack is dry, too.”

  “Should be plenty of both in that shack.”

  “Yeah.”

  We make our way slowly down to the surface, and I wonder as I plant my feet on the ground why we didn’t just hop off and float down.

  Jupiter is just starting to slip below the horizon when I say, “I think if we put on fresh H packs, we each load on a spare, and then grab a few more,” I tap a few of the empty magnet mounts on my belt, “We should be able to fly back to the Potato on suit grav alone. I don’t know. It can’t be more than a few thousand miles.”

  Brice climbs over a tumble of rough stone and starts down the other side. “Back when I was working construction, there was this story about a guy whose lift went haywire or something. He’d just dropped his load on one of the rings.” He’s talking about the giant, ring-shaped station the crews were working to construct for the Grays. “This was back before my time, so who knows how much is true. You know how stories go over time. They get better.”

  I agree.

  “They said the ring was already spinning then.” Brice focuses forward as he talks. “Nobody’s sure what happened to cause the accident. Maybe he didn’t account for the spin. Maybe he was a new guy making new-guy mistakes. Long story short, the ring’s billion tons of mass collides with his lift and mashes something in his grav accelerator mechanism. His ship shoots out of there like he’s just floored it. I mean he took off faster than anybody had ever seen one of those lifts move.”

  “Yeah?” I make it over the tumble of stones and follow Brice as he seems to have a good bead on where we’re headed.

  “In no time, the grav lift shoots out of the orbital plain and disappears from view. Everybody figures the guy died in the collision.”

  I make the brilliant deduction the story has a kicker, so I keep my mouth quiet and wait for Brice to surprise me with it. I’m polite that way.

  “What they learned later was this guy was knocked unconscious by the collision. He wakes up seven or eight hours into his flight. His s
hip is still accelerating away from earth, and he has no way to slow it down. So his choice is to sit there and wait to die, or do something.”

  That’s my prompt. “What did he do?”

  “He jumped out of the ship.”

  “He used suit grav to get himself back?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” answers Brice. “That’s it exactly. Only he was smart enough to know he couldn’t do a max grav burn or he’d use up all of his H and then suffocate. So he did a slow burn—a real slow burn—just enough to reverse his speed. Because he was in the ship, he was already moving away from the earth at twenty or thirty thousand miles an hour. He had to burn through all of that negative speed, get up a little forward speed, and then kill it. Then he had to hope he was going fast enough to make it back to earth before he ran out of H to sustain the suit. Go too fast, you burn too much H on acceleration. Go too slow, and you burn all your H on life support during the long trip back. He prayed he made the right guess on how long and how hard to burn. All he had then was hope.”

  “I take it the d-pads weren’t sophisticated enough back in those days to make the calculations for him.”

  Brice shrugs. “Same d-pads we have now. Probably an older version of the software. It didn’t matter. Half the time, his was on the fritz. He had to eyeball the whole thing. Course, acceleration, everything. Then he had to rest calmly in his suit using minimum energy so he could max his time to stay alive.”

  “I take it there’s a happy ending.”

  “No.” Brice shakes his head like that much was obvious from the start. “He died and froze to death on the way. Solid chunk of ice when they intercepted his body floating in earth orbit one day.”

  “How long was he out there?” I ask.

  “Nearly two months before they found him,” says Brice. “He recorded a diary on the d-pad. One of the only features still working. That’s how they knew what happened to him.”

  “Why did you tell me this story?”

  “Because if you’re thinking, we’re going to suit grav back to the Potato, I don’t want to end up like a popsicle. Let’s take plenty of H and plenty of C. Like all we can haul with us.”