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

by Bobby Adair

  Touché.

  We attempt twice more to ram, and then Penny announces that we are at a dead standstill, at least in the reference frame of Iapetus.

  “The three ships are taking up positions around us,” Phil announces. “Not firing.”

  If they were shooting, I think I’d already know it, but I keep that to myself.

  “All static now,” Phil relays.

  Except for the ship on the other side of the lens from me, I can sense the ghostly grav fields from the other ships, too.

  “What now?” asks Penny.

  Jablonsky turns away from his panel, his face alive with excitement. “They’re hailing us in English with a UK accent.

  “Acknowledge,” I tell him.

  Jablonsky nods to me. He already has. “They’re telling us to follow them back to Iapetus. One of their ships will lead, the other three will hang behind. They’ll set the speed and the course. If we deviate, they’ll destroy us.”

  “Penny,” I order. “Do as they say.”

  I turn to Jablonsky. “Find out who they are.”

  He talks with them for a moment longer and then passes the answer to me. “We’re to do as we’re told. Once we land on Iapetus, they want us to leave our weapons on board and exit the ship.”

  Chapter 23

  Everyone is quiet.

  Like me, imagining a dozen scenarios that might play out when we set down on Iapetus’s surface, fantasizing OK Corral shootouts that leave all my people standing amidst a field of enemy corpses. I think of the warehouse prison back on the Potato and how inescapable it was for those inside until my platoon came along to retrieve their helmets. What will my new prison be like? Will my people be tortured or summarily executed?

  And what instructions do I give them?

  Save yourself?

  Tell all you know?

  Go down fighting?

  Risk everything to steal some of these faster, smaller ships?

  And then what?

  We’re skimming the moon’s black surface, maybe a thousand feet up. Iapetus has no atmosphere to speak of. Its terrain is rugged and pocked with craters from ancient asteroid strikes. In front of us, looming larger and impossibly giant is the mountain range we were scanning from orbit when we were attacked.

  “If we’re going back to the damn mountains,” asks Jablonsky, “why did they bring us down so far away?”

  “Deception,” I guess. “In case anyone or anything is watching from afar. Maybe they’re hoping to conceal the location of their base.”

  “Stupid,” he mutters.

  “Phil,” I ask, “can you and the Tick see what’s ahead?”

  He nods. “It doesn’t make sense to me.” He points at a cliff face on the mountain that seems to have been sheared in two. “Just to the left of that canyon about halfway up the cliff.”

  I see it, too, yet I also don’t know what to make of it. It’s a dull grav field of some sort, rectangular and enormous, fifty meters tall, a few hundred wide.

  “I count at least a dozen,” he tells me.

  I shake my head and squint.

  “Only that one is active. Others are burning at a much lower intensity behind closed doors. I think it’s a hangar. There are underground structures all through that mountain.”

  “Are you saying it’s bigger than the base at the Potato?” I ask.

  “As big as a city,” answers Phil.

  “Humans, Trogs, or Grays?” I ask.

  “Hard to tell,” he answers. “There’s a lot of inexplicable interference. We don’t sense any Grays.”

  I hope that’s good news.

  The ship ahead of us alters course toward the peculiar rectangular hangar entrance, and we start to gain altitude. We have thousands of feet to climb to reach our apparent destination.

  Penny turns to me. “We’re going inside when we get there?”

  I nod. I don’t have any ideas to get us out of this predicament.

  Silence settles back over us.

  Kilometers slide past below.

  The rocky cliff face grows to dominate all we can see, black except for the growing rectangle of blue.

  The ship in front of us levels out and adjusts its speed.

  We do the same.

  As we close the distance, I stare through my small viewport. The hangar entrance is covered with a grav field shimmering dull blue and translucent, but distorted. It’s like looking through the surface of a wavy pool. I think I see rows of ships inside a brightly lit space larger than several football fields. Figures appear to move among the vessels, but the movement could be an illusion of the wavy vertical surface.

  When the ship in front of us nears the barrier, it slows to a crawl, and as its nose encounters the rippling blue, its grav drive notches up to push through. It takes only seconds.

  Penny follows and does the same, slightly increasing power to the drive array to pass through the barrier.

  In moments, we’re inside a hangar that runs deeper into the mountain than I had guessed. Several dozen ships of designs I’ve never seen are in rows, some abuzz with mechanics—human mechanics. None of them are wearing spacesuits, though they all appear to have emergency decompression kits attached to their belts.

  There’s atmosphere inside the hangar, held there by the shimmering grav field.

  What the hell?

  I haven’t heard a peep about this kind of technology existing anywhere except in old sci-fi vids.

  “What is this place?” mutters Penny.

  We’re guided to an empty area surrounded by squads of orange-suited soldiers with weapons at the ready. They’re not a danger to us inside the Rusty Turd, but the other four ships are still hovering nearby, their guns trained on us.

  Penny sets the Turd down in the indicated spot and reluctantly powers down our systems.

  Our instructions are conveyed to Jablonsky.

  He turns and looks at us, worry stretching his face. “They want us to come out one at a time. No weapons.”

  That’s not unexpected. I open a comm to the crew. “I’ll go out first. The rest of you, follow their instructions. Brice, you exit last.” I can depend on him to make sure no one screws around and does something stupid. We’ll all be prisoners soon enough, but we’ll have to find a smart way to turn the situation back to our advantage.

  That will have to come later, not now.

  Chapter 24

  A group of a dozen soldiers stands ten meters away. All with helmets, defensive grav fields glowing bright, and railguns in their hands, not aimed at me, but pointing in the general direction of the Turd.

  Despite their ships and miraculous grav tech, they look like us. I try to take some comfort in that.

  With an assault door pushed all the way open, I stand in the doorway, hands raised.

  One of the soldiers steps forward and waves me to proceed.

  I hop out, floating on the light-g down to the deck.

  The soldier points at Penny, who is in the doorway behind me, and he raises a hand to her. She needs to wait until summoned.

  I comm across the channels, trying to establish a connection with my captors. Nothing comes back but static, leaving me only hand motions for communication.

  I don’t talk to anyone on my ship. We decided before we landed to keep the comm links silent as they might be monitored. Unlike our captors, our comm links aren’t encrypted.

  Once I’m close enough to the soldier giving the instructions, I’m ordered to stop. Four of my silent captors surround me, two in front, and two in back. They lead me away from my ship.

  I look over my shoulder as I cross the hangar and hope I didn’t make a huge mistake in surrendering.

  Penny is walking away from the ship to meet up with her own set of handlers. Phil is standing in the doorway with his Gray by his side. Nobody seems to react any more or less aggressively. Maybe that’s a good thing.

  My guards lead me past a pa
ir of parked spacecraft similar to the ones that attacked my ship. I take the opportunity to scrutinize both with my eyes and my grav sense, trying to discern the shape of every piece of mass wrapped inside the ship’s thick metal skin.

  Unlike my Arizona-class jalopy, these ships weren’t thrown together in a rush. They’re sleek and tough. Someone had the time to build them the right way. Both are black—flat black. The builders wanted to keep them hidden from human eyes scanning the heavens, not just Grays looking for traces of grav.

  I have difficulty making out the internal systems, though I’m sure Phil will see every obscured detail when they bring him this way.

  I do see seats for a pilot and copilot, but no room to get up and walk around. It confirms my suspicion that these are designed as space-based versions of the old terrestrial fighter planes. They weren’t built for traveling deep space.

  I sense tanks, presumably for hydrogen stores. The fusion reactor sits in the rough center of the craft, and the main drive array takes up the back half. Like the Rusty Turd, the hull is embedded stern-to-tail with grav plates in various sizes and shapes. The most notable feature is the railgun. The ship seems to have been built around it, with the railgun running right up through the long axis, stretching from the reactor all the way out through the ship’s nose. A pair of magazines is stacked full of slugs, each the size of a bowling pin. Plenty big to rip a hole right through my ship.

  I’m led into an airlock which doesn’t require cycling since the atmosphere in the hanger matches that of the underground complex.

  Once through the airlock, we stop in an anteroom and my helmet and gloves are removed. A bag is placed over my head, blinding me—at least blinding my visual sense. I can still see the men around me in the room, as well as the wide hall I’m led into.

  We walk in silence for nearly half a mile, making turns through broad and narrow halls, passing rooms and what appear to be factory and barrack facilities, store rooms, cafeterias, apartment blocks, everything one might expect to find in a city buried in the ground.

  Several times we ride lifts to take us up or down. We’re in Iapetus’s equatorial mountain range, so I suppose there’s no practical limit to how far up or down the layers of this city are stacked.

  Eventually, I’m taken into a room and deposited in a chair with my back to the door. The bag is removed from my head, and my captors leave, locking the door behind.

  I’m alone, nothing else in the room but a nondescript table and a few empty chairs. A camera is mounted up in one corner, pointed down at me.

  Through the walls around me, I sense I’m in a row of cells just like the one I’m in, only for every interrogation room, there sits one next door for observers with their computers and recording equipment. I can make out the level below me, and it seems to be a holding facility with metal bars—a jail. Some people are down there, but not many. Above, rows of desks are lined up in a large room with dozens of people moving about or working. I can’t sense much past that—the thick floors and ceilings make it difficult to extend the range of what I can extrapolate by grav sense alone.

  I figure I’m in a police station or the office of the underground city’s intelligence agency. Whichever. And it makes sense, any place this size would have thousands and thousands of residents, hence a need for an organization for keeping the peace.

  I wait in silence, expecting the rooms nearby to be filled with others from my ship—Penny, Phil, his Gray, and Brice. Lenox will be along, as will my platoon’s draftees, whose only sin was their random attachment to my company by the SDF administrators back on earth before being shipped out.

  None of them shows.

  In fact, the interrogation floor on which I sit is mostly deserted, though I do sense people in the room next door. I wonder what they’re hoping to see.

  I wait.

  Boredom sets in.

  I scan everything around me again, and again.

  I try to make a game of picking out individuals on the floors both above and below. I’ve never tried before to identify another person from their grav signature alone, but I have time. My captors seem to be in no hurry to move this along.

  Hours pass.

  Perhaps my captors have forgotten about me? The presence of the bodies in the room next door is a reminder they haven’t.

  Finally, the door behind me opens.

  I don’t turn to look.

  Chapter 25

  A man and a woman walk around to the other side of the table. Both are older. His hair is mostly white. Hers is silver with streaks of black. Both wear at least sixty years of wrinkles and sag in their skin.

  Wordlessly, without any animosity I can sense, they each scoot out a chair and sit down across from me. The man reaches a hand across the table to shake. “Major Kane, I’m Dr. Spitz. This is Dr. Gustafson.”

  “Am I ill?” I ask, keeping my hand to myself.

  “I’m a physicist,” says Spitz. “She’s an engineer.”

  “Aerospace engineer,” she corrects. “We were both on staff at JPL before…”

  Before the siege she means. “JPL? I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is.”

  They share the smile of an inside joke. “Jet Propulsion Lab,” answers Spitz. “Before the siege we were instrumental in exploring the solar system.”

  “You were the ones who dropped the ball by not seeing the Grays coming?” It’s an unfair jab, but I’m not trying to make friends. If they’re even telling the truth about who they are. Who they were.

  “The Grays didn’t come from our solar system.”

  “They didn’t show up here by accident,” I argue. “They had to have scouted our system. ‘Not just passing through. Must have been some sign they were coming long before they arrived.”

  Gustafson bristles but says nothing.

  “You may be right about that,” admits Spitz.

  I decide I want to push my pointless advantage because I feel powerless. A hundred insults come to mind but they back up so quickly in trying to get out all I manage to communicate is a shake of my head. “I’ve been a slave my whole life.”

  Spitz short-circuits my nascent rant with, “You’re not one now.”

  “Yeah, I’m a prisoner.”

  “You’re our guest.”

  I decide that despite looking like a nice old man, Spitz must be as contrary as Blair.

  Gustafson pushes a few strands of hair behind her ear, then takes a turn at me. “You have a loyal platoon.”

  I decide maybe Spitz is honest, but Gustafson, no. I poke a finger in spite right at her friendly old eyes. “Are you torturing them? Are you beating the truth out of them?”

  “What truth?” asks Spitz.

  I clamp my mouth shut. I’m not about to give them anything.

  Gustafson is shaking her head, more disappointed than insulted. “Torture isn’t something we condone. We’ll not foster the vile aspects of human nature that would make such behavior possible.”

  “Not humans,” Spitz clarifies as he glances over at her. “With Grays and Trogs?” He shrugs.

  “You tortured Nick?” It’s an accusation, not a question. Of course, it completely sidesteps my hypocrisy for doing what I did to Nick the Tick’s Gray comrades less than a week ago.

  “Who’s Nick?” asks Spitz.

  “The Gray.”

  Gustafson informs me, “Keeping a Gray as a pet is a risky choice.”

  I’m growing impatient with this cryptic fencing. “Why did you attack my ship? Why did you take us prisoner? What is this place, and who the hell are you? And don’t tell me JPL scientists because that doesn’t tell me anything.”

  Spitz leans forward to put him in sincere buddy range. “I’ll answer your questions in a minute. First, there’s something I’m curious about.”

  I respond to his pause with a deadpan gaze.

  “Was your father named Billy Kane?”

  I’m surprised by the unexpected
tack. It’s all I can do to keep a passive face and quiet mouth. This is obviously an interrogation trick to prime the pump so my words will flow more easily.

  Then I realize I’ve already been blabbering. They’ve already primed the pump.

  “The birthday would be right.” Spitz looks down at a thin, flat d-pad with a screen nearly as big as the one on my salvaged computer back home. “You were born about the time Billy Kane’s son would have been born.”

  I don’t respond.

  Spitz tells me a birthdate.

  Indeed, it’s mine. I start to suspect Blair has a hand in whatever mess this is I’m stuck in. This has to be a Free Army base, and Blair must have forwarded my SDF record so they’d have it when I arrived. Unfortunately, the puzzle pieces for my burgeoning Blair-plot-theory fall apart nearly as fast as I can jigger them into place.

  Spitz looks at my eyes and my face, analyzing the details, developing his previous question into unapologetic certainty. “I knew your father.”

  “Not likely.” I top off my counter-certainty with a harsh laugh to make it clear he’s wrong. “Maybe all of you JPL scientists worked night jobs at the molybdenum factory up north of Leadville. Doubtful. That’s where he was working when the cave-in killed him.”

  “No.” Spitz doesn’t say it like he’s making an argument. He’s speaking like a grandpa correcting a grade-schooler. “Billy Kane was a first sergeant and was part of earth’s expeditionary force sent to the moon to combat the Grays at the beginning of the siege.”

  I shake my head and decide it’s time to spout the official party line, mostly because I don’t know how else to respond. “Everybody knows that’s a lie people tell each other to feel some sense of human pride. The MSS says no such attack ever took place. After an unexpected meteor shower killed millions and devastated our planet, our brothers from space, the Grays, arrived to lend us a hand to lead us to enlightenment. No siege occurred. No war was fought. We serve the Grays to repay them for their generosity.”

  Pure MSS propaganda shit.

  Spitz’s mouth hangs agape.

  Gustafson laughs. “Spitz, I think you guessed wrong on this one.” She turns and glares at me before glancing at her d-pad and reading something there.