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

by Bobby Adair

  “I thought you had the whole division.” Was she bluffing about how much authority she had when she pushed it on me earlier?

  “I, uh.”

  “You fucking worthless pile of shit!” I shout over the comm. She was bluffing, and I bought it.

  “They’re wearing Chinese helmets.”

  Ugh! Why didn’t we start there? The Chinese helmets all have the red PRC flag emblazoned on the side. “Bad guys and good guys sort themselves by helmet color. Just tell everybody that!”

  Brice pushes the door open to face the business end of a half-dozen railguns. Thankfully, all the eyes looking down through the sights are familiar—Lenox, Silva, Peterson and a few others. They’re my people.

  “I have a squad up here,” I tell her. “I’m taking them in, and the rest of my platoon will soon follow. Keep me apprised.”

  Chapter 9

  “They’re trying to board your ship,” Tarlow tells me.

  Brice curses.

  “Not to worry.” I can hear a smile in Tarlow’s voice. “Your pilot, Penny, is inside with a few mechanics. She has the doors locked.” He was baiting me.

  “Direct me to them,” I order, as I glance around at the maze of hulking ships and piles of equipment standing in the dust. Three days since the Trog bombardment and the Potato is still shrouded in debris. Visibility is maybe forty meters. “I need an attack route.”

  Brice gives me an anxious glance. “Orders?”

  I point to Peterson. “You stay here. Wait for the rest of our platoon.”

  “You see the wall to your left?” Tarlow asks.

  I glance and can barely make out the wall in the fading gray. “Yeah.”

  “If you follow that wall to the front of the hangar, you won’t see a single orange suit until you reach the assault ships.” Tarlow quickly describes the tactical situation.

  “Got it. Thanks.” Looking at my troops, I point to the hangar wall and tell them, “We’re going in fast and hot. Right at that wall and then left. Nobody’s there to stop us. A row of nine ships is sitting down at the open end of the hangar, all lined up and facing out. From where we’ll come out, the second ship in line is ours. Penny’s on the bridge, and the bad guys want in. The rest of the loyalists are boarding two other ships, the fourth and seventh in line. Once we’re there, shoot anybody with a PRC flag on their helmet. Don’t trust anybody who’s not us. For the moment, we’re the only unit here on our side. The situation will change in a hurry, so pay attention to your comms. Two fire teams—Brice, Silva, with me. Lenox, you take the other two. Let’s fly!”

  I jump into the air and run up the power to my suit’s grav and zip toward the wall. My squad follows.

  I cut the turn hard and hug the hangar wall, accelerating on a straight shot for nearly two hundred meters, following Tarlow’s directions. The dust is so thick in this part of the hangar, every shape fuzzes to gray before I can identify it.

  As we reach a huge stack of parts packed in battered metal crates, I spot the stern of a partially disassembled ship. I reverse my grav and call over my tactical comm. “We’re here.”

  I slow for the turn and rotate to put my feet on the ground, drifting around the corner, weapon at my shoulder.

  My squad follows, raising their guns, ready to fire.

  I pass the first ship and look into the gap between it and the Rusty Turd.

  Flashes from a hundred sparks cut through the gray haze.

  I instinctively duck as I spot three orange-suited loyalists standing near my ship, firing their weapons at one of the assault doors.

  I take aim just as the Turd surges bright blue.

  A gravity pulse knocks me and my squad back against the stack of metal crates.

  On the second it takes to clear my head from the effects of the gravity punch, I see the soldiers who’d been firing bounce off the hull of the neighboring ship and drift in apparent lifelessness.

  I hear my squad grumble over the comm, and I take their complaints as a good thing. They’re pissed and bruised instead of injured or dead.

  “Lenox.” I point between the two ships where the soldiers are drifting. “Take your fire team and handle these. Check the other side. Coordinate with Penny. Make sure the Turd is ready to fly.”

  “Brice, Silva, with me!”

  I accelerate again.

  “The three of us against, what, twenty or thirty?” asks Brice.

  “They’re boarding their ships to make a run for it,” I tell him, hoping I’m right. I link to Tarlow for my next question. “Are the loyalists all on board the other ships?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Mostly.”

  “Can you tell if the reactors are powered up? How soon before they’re ready to go.”

  “I have to guess on that one. Less than a minute.”

  We’re closing in on the other two ships and I see a faint glow of blue emanating from both their drive arrays. “Tarlow, any more loyalists out here we need to worry about?”

  “None that I can find on the cameras.”

  I push my suit grav hard toward the nearest ship. “Brice, Silva, either of you have any C4?”

  “I do,” says Silva, “Three charges.”

  “Let’s each take one.” I spin around as I fly and reach out.

  Silva shoves one into my hand as she gives another to Brice.

  “Attach it to the drive array,” I explain. “Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. We just need to damage the array enough that the loyalists can’t bubble jump.”

  “You stay here,” Brice tells Silva, “and trigger the charges before they are out of range.”

  Brice points at the first ship as he accelerates away. “I’ve got this one.”

  I spin and max grav toward the other.

  The whole ship starts to glow blue. As it rises off the surface, and as the drive array flashes to brilliance, the ship jumps toward the hangar door.

  Shit!

  I turn into the gap it left and see its stern passing through the gaping doors as the ship angles upward toward the stars.

  It’s going to get away!

  I over grav my suit’s plates and feel a burst of acceleration.

  In seconds I’m out of the hangar and shooting out of the Potato’s obscuring haze.

  Silva and Brice are saying something over the comm, but my helmet is generating an alarm and is flashing a series of red lights from my reactor. I’m pushing my systems too hard.

  The ship seems to pause as it searches for the right vector.

  My opportunity to catch it.

  I only have seconds before it gets away. I don’t let up.

  One of my grav plates pops and punches my leg so hard I think it might have broken the bone.

  No time to whine over the pain.

  No choice but to push.

  The ship is starting to accelerate again as I reach the edge of its drive array cone and grab on.

  The array blazes bright, and I feel it pick up speed.

  Another grav plate, one in my boot, ruptures and torques me so hard I nearly break my wrist from trying to hang on, but the spin puts me in a position to grasp the outside of the cone with both hands. I manage to lodge one foot in a gap between two support beams.

  Thank the Arizona shipyard for shoddy construction!

  Despite my grip, I have to keep my grav plates maxed as the ship accelerates so my momentum doesn’t drag me off the rear.

  The ship is burning hard to escape.

  It’s then I realize the reason I have two hands precariously gripping the ship. I’ve let go of the C4.

  Dammit!

  Looking astern, I see the haze-veiled mining colony starting to recede.

  What few desperate choices I have are rapidly degrading to ineffectual, suicidal ones.

  No time to dawdle.

  I scoot down to the edge of the cone, knowing I’ll be blown off when my next grav plate ruptures. I let go of the ship with one hand
and point my rifle at the nearest grav plate I can see, hoping as I pull the trigger the shrapnel my slugs spall off will be shoved away by the ship’s drive field before they hit me.

  I unload a full magazine through a shower of blazing metal, and the ship jerks.

  Not much.

  But enough?

  The shape and intensity of the ship’s blue drive field changes.

  With one hand, I try to reload my weapon.

  The ship blasts hard on its drive array and jerks out of my hand, and accelerates surprisingly quickly.

  With both hands free, I hurriedly load a new magazine and fire. The stream of glowing rounds veers away from the grav field formed by the ship’s array as it recedes.

  I curse, and hope.

  It seems like every alarm in my helmet is blazing red and beeping. Every one except for my hydro pack sensor. That one is still silent.

  I try to adjust my suit’s grav to set a vector back toward the Potato. My failing suit barely responds.

  I curse again and try to raise my squad on the comm.

  Chapter 10

  Penny comms in, urgent, but not panicked. “I’m loading the squad.”

  “Brice and Silva, anybody there?” I look back toward the Potato. I must be five or six kilometers out.

  “Almost here.” Brice crackles over the comm.

  I’m relieved they’re both alive. Brice is more than my sergeant, he’s my friend. Silva—I don’t know what she is. I only know what I’d like her to be.

  The day after we took the Potato from the Trogs, I saw her and a few others from my platoon in nothing but their translucent undergarments as they were going through maintenance with some of the techs we’d freed. Bottom line, she didn’t look to be a day over seventeen. A teenager. I felt like a pervert for the thoughts I’d entertained about her. I still do.

  I checked my d-pad to pull up what info I could get on her, hoping, maybe a little desperately, she’d be over eighteen. Of course, the fucking d-pad showed me nothing. The feature that handles personnel files was on the fritz.

  Skimming slowly over the surface of the Potato I see the second ship of escapees. It’s running down the asteroid’s long axis. The metal on one edge of its drive array looks torn, and its blue grav field is flickering and misshapen. It’ll be going nowhere fast. Brice must have set his charge in the perfect spot. “Penny, can you see that other ship?”

  “I see its grav signature.”

  “Knock it out if you can.”

  “Will do, boss.” I see the Rusty Turd drift out of the hangar, floating just off the asteroid’s surface. The grav blaze flashes to life.

  Brice comms in. “We’ll be on board in ten seconds.”

  “Waiting for them,” Penny tells me. “What’s all that noise on your comm?”

  “My suit is failing. I pushed it too hard.”

  She switches into savior mode. “To hell with those loyalists, I’m—”

  “It’s not as urgent as it sounds. Take out that ship, and then come for me. I’m not going anywhere.” Anywhere fast. I’m still speeding away from the Potato on the vector I was riding when my suit grav decided to switch into useless mode.

  The loyalist ship below starts to pick up speed but can’t hold a straight course. It’s over the open pit mine, and I can’t believe what I see, what I think I see.

  Are those captured Trogs still there? All in the open, lined up in rows, not moving?

  I thought Blair took care of them. Housed them, or something.

  I make a mental note to talk to her about the prisoners, not that I have a clue what to do with them. As Brice tells me, though, she’s the logistics queen. She should be able to figure it out.

  I look up into the blackness to see the blue glow of the escaping assault ship. It’s as bright as a comet, impossible to miss. Phil isn’t aboard the Turd to keep track of their grav signature, however, we should be able to see them as long as they don’t cut power to their drive and try to disappear into the background.

  “Tarlow,” I call, “can you track those loyalists?”

  “I have some equipment I can redirect,” he tells me. “It will take a few minutes.”

  “Do it,” I tell him.

  I link into the command comm. “This is Kane. I need to speak with Blair.”

  “Just a moment, Major Kane.”

  “What?” It’s Blair, shiny happy as usual. Not.

  “One ship got away. I’ve damaged the drive array so they can’t bubble jump. The other ship is struggling and heading south.”

  “We have it on tracking.”

  “Can you track both ships?”

  “Yes,” she tells me. “We have them both.”

  Penny cuts in, “We have Brice and Silva on board with the rest of the squad.”

  I look down, and I see her pointing the Rusty Turd in the direction of the damaged ship. “One sec,” I tell her, then I switch back to Blair. “I think we’ve disabled bubble jump on both ships. What do you want us to do now?”

  “Stop them!” Blair shouts.

  I look around near the Potato, scanning the sky. “Where are the other assault ships, the ones that brought reinforcements?”

  “Not here.”

  I rev up to yell at her that she needs to stop with the secrets. I don’t. I stick with pragmatics. “If it’s just us out here, we only have one way to stop those ships.” I want it to be clear. “Capture is out of the question. We have to ram them. They’ll likely be killed. Is that what you want?”

  She’s silent.

  I don’t add that all the men, women, girls, and boys on those ships are human soldiers just like the rest of us. Maybe all of them are loyalists. Maybe some of them were unlucky enough to be caught in the herd when the others decided to make their break. Maybe they just want to run as far from this war as they can.

  Finally, Blair comes up with an equivocation she thinks will keep her hands clean. “Whatever solves this problem the fastest.”

  “Kane out.” I huff on my anger at Blair and then link to Penny. “Ram that ship, try to aim for the drive array and disable it.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “If it can be done, you’ll do it. You’re the best pilot in the company.”

  Penny laughs. “Out of both of us left?”

  Far below, I see the Rusty Turd’s drive array burst a blue grav pulse that pushes it to accelerate away from the Potato.

  I’ve seen this tactic before, but from a different perspective.

  The whole ship is glowing brightly from the strain on its internal inertial bubble as Penny pulls a high-g arc to come in perpendicular to the path of the loyalists’ wounded ship.

  I guess there’s no grav officer on escaping vessel, because it doesn’t respond to Penny’s maneuver. A bug-head would have seen the Rusty Turd glowing like a supernova zipping through the sky off their port side.

  A few seconds pass, and all that’s left is inevitability.

  I see the collision in a blue flash.

  All in an instant, the loyalists’ vessel’s grav plates cut from living blue to dead black. The conical drive array bursts into a thousand shards of deformed metal, spraying in every direction. The Turd passes through, barely slowing as it zips safely away. The rest of the loyalists’ ship, most of the bridge, and the platoon compartment remain intact, caught in a flat spin, careening into the void.

  I comm to Blair. “The first ship is neutralized.”

  “I know,” she tells me.

  “Probably survivors.”

  No response.

  “Blair, do you hear me?”

  No response.

  Leaving the grav lens powered up, Penny angles the ship up toward me. “I can’t make out where you are out there with all this grav blazing around me. You’ll have to guide me in.”

  “You’re headed in the right direction. Just don’t come in too fast and skewer me with that thing.”

&
nbsp; She laughs, I guess thinking how I might look kebab-style.

  I turn to confirm for myself the other ship is still burning bright to make its getaway. “Let’s cut that grav lens off for the moment.”

  Chapter 11

  Everyone is on the bridge when I get there. Plenty of room. No crowding.

  “You should take Phil’s grav and nav console,” Penny tells me.

  We’re the only two bug-heads on board, so I comply. “Can you still make out the other ship?”

  “Yes.”

  I look around the bridge. “I guess Jablonsky didn’t make it.”

  “Why would he?” asks Penny.

  “Why wouldn’t he?” I shoot back. Sometimes we blabber on about nothing, just like any two people who’ve known each other a very long time. “What are you thinking, tactic-wise?”

  She shrugs. “Same as with the other ship?”

  “Ram the drive array from the flank?”

  “It’ll be harder with them accelerating the way they are, and, well, with you on grav and nav instead of Phil.”

  “You nailed the other ship with no help.”

  “It was disabled. It was slow.”

  I’m losing the argument. I point forward. “Go that way, fast.”

  Penny chuckles politely.

  I turn to Brice and Lenox. “Any ideas?”

  Shrugs.

  “Anybody know how to use the communication console?”

  Silva raises her hand. Nobody else does.

  “Did you train for it?” I ask.

  “Not really. I ran through one of the simulators.” She smiles sweetly, flirting with me. She doesn’t seem to mind the age difference between us. “No guarantees.”

  “See if you can raise that other ship. We’ll be out of range soon for suit comm connections with the base. So we’ll lose Blair and Tarlow.” I nod toward the console. “Get them on the line as well.”

  Silva steps over to the comm panel, and Lenox goes with her.

  The interior light on the bridge is turning a brighter blue, so I know without looking through my small window that Penny is accelerating and tracing an arc to bring the Turd in from the other vessel’s flank.