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

by Bobby Adair

  “We can start over,” I tell him. “We can raid, just like Hawkins was doing. We can capture Arizona Class ships as we go. We can keep the resistance alive. The longer we do, the more humans will come to our side. Even in the face of incessant MSS propaganda, humans won’t give up hope.”

  Bird stops my argument with a raised hand. “If you start raiding, then the Trogs will start looking for a base. They won’t find one, not until they start searching through the remains of the installations they’ve already destroyed. So they’ll eventually come back to Iapetus. I can’t have that. The Trogs need to believe they’ve pacified the solar system.”

  I don’t buy it. “People on earth won’t accept this. Not in the long run.”

  “They did for thirty years already,” says Brice.

  “Earth is a different story,” says Bird. “What happens on the surface is separate from what happens out here. Even the Trogs can see that.”

  “So that’s it?” I ask.

  “These people in these pods are mankind’s hope. The UN got into the war, much, much too late, that’s obvious to everyone now, but the factions that advocated for staying out of it used the destruction of Iapetus as proof they were right all along. Not a lot anyone can do to make the counterargument now that we’re standing in the proof. We’re all on their plan now. We need to get these people out to the colonies. Out there, we’ll have time to rebuild. No matter what the difference is now in arms, we have the people to create a technological advantage, so in a few generations, or a few centuries—who knows—we can come back and defeat the Trogs and free the people of earth.”

  “Except,” I say, “earth is full of humans, too. Who’s to say the Trogs won’t figure out how to utilize them to their fullest. Can a colony of a few tens of thousands compete with the brainpower of a whole planet?”

  “A planet of uneducated slaves?” asks Bird. “Earth’s top talent was here. Iapetus has been harvesting the best from earth for a generation. They’ll have the edge out in the colonies.”

  I don’t agree, but I don’t push it. Even through my stubbornness, I see things have been decided. Worse, I can’t fault the logic. Mostly, I can’t. “I know where we can get our hands on a Trog cruiser.”

  “The solar system is full of them,” says Bird.

  “I’m not talking about hijacking one,” I say.

  “You want to go back to 61 Cygni?” he asks, the gears starting to turn as he guesses where I’m going. “You’re thinking of taking all of these pods out in one load?”

  I nod. “But I don’t think we have to go all the way out to 61 Cygni to do it. I know of a salvageable ship we can get right here in our solar system.”

  Chapter 24

  It’s me, Phil, Nicky and a pilot in one of the UN’s stealthy little scout ships, one of just two left, with the other having problems. We’re bubbling out toward Jupiter, of course taking low-power short hops in random directions to obfuscate our point of origin.

  Back in our battle for the Potato, Phil rammed the Rusty Turd into the bridge of an attacking Trog cruiser. Later, when the battle was over, Jill’s pilot used the mining operation’s tug to push the cruiser into an orbit around Jupiter. We didn’t destroy it because I thought a day might come when we’d be able to salvage the ship.

  “How do you feel about it?” Phil asks me. He’s not talking about the cruiser.

  “About the demise of our cause?” I punctuate with a shrug, but the gesture is a lie I’m trying to make myself believe.

  “You’re not going to give up, are you?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to, but what can one ship do against—” I want to say fleet, and then navy, yet it’s so much more than that. It’s not even just one planet now, it’s the whole solar system under Trog control. Well, there are the rogue mining operations out in the belt, but that’s a legless argument. They’ll fall under Trog dominion as soon as they’re discovered.

  “If they haven’t all been destroyed or conquered already,” says Phil.

  “Stop that,” I tell him. “If we’re going to have a conversation, we do it in one medium—speech, okay? I can’t keep up with you and Nicky in your telepathic connectivity.”

  “You don’t want to be the dullard in the back of the class?” It’s not much of a deduction. He and I have talked about it before.

  “We’ll get Bird this cruiser,” I say. “After, who’s to say we can’t stay here with the Rusty Turd and see what we can spark. With a little time and caution, we can mount a guerrilla war here and—”

  “What if Bird won’t let you keep the ship?” asks Phil.

  “Because…”

  Phil nods. “You know, it’s not exactly your ship.”

  “It’s not his either, is it?”

  “We were in the service of the SDF when we mutinied and took it.”

  “But the SDF is no more,” I argue. “Bird said it himself.”

  “He didn’t exactly say that,” says Phil, prying into my memory of the encounter. “He said the resistance was at an end. The SDF still exists. Their role has changed.”

  “They can’t exactly make me give them the ship,” I tell him. “Not if I decide to keep it.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “The only way they can take it,” I say, “is if we happen to be at their base and they lock us up, but taking the ship when we’re in flight—” I snort, “there’s not a damn thing within fifty light years that has a chance against us.”

  "Only it's not that simple," says Phil. "If it were, we'd fly over to earth and defeat the Trog armada today, and we wouldn't be having this conversation."

  I roll my eyes. "Okay. Whatever. I'll make my case with Bird when this cruiser salvage is all wrapped up, and the stasis pods are on their way to the colonies. After all we've done, he can hardly order us to leave with them if we want to stay and fight.”

  “What about the we in that statement?” asks Phil.

  “Are you asking about the crew?”

  “You need to consider what they want, don’t you?”

  “You think they’ll want to go out to the colonies?”

  “Some of them might. You need to leave the choice up to them.”

  Of course, Phil is right. I sigh. I don’t want to lose anyone from my crew, but I don’t want to force them into risking their lives.

  “What do you think Silva wants to do?” asks Phil.

  “We talked about it already,” I tell him. “Hypothetically. But you know that, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t read it from your mind,” Phil says. “Silva talked to me about it.”

  “When?”

  “The journey back from 61 Cygni gave us all a long time to talk about the what-ifs.”

  “You don’t think the crew wants to stay?” I ask.

  “They’ll do whatever you ask of them.”

  “But?”

  “I think most of them would prefer to go to the colonies,” says Phil. “None of them expected to come back to a total loss.”

  “It’s demoralizing.”

  “What you need to know is they’ll follow you, whatever you decide to do, even if they don’t want to keep up the fight.”

  “Are you saying it’ll be my responsibility if they don’t go?”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t agree. “I’ll give them permission to leave. I’ll talk to them like adults about it. If most go, I’ll bet there are plenty of guys in Bird’s command who’d jump at a chance to crew with us and get some payback.”

  “You need to give them more than permission,” says Phil.

  “What does that mean? I’ll have to order them all to run away?”

  “Run away?” asks Phil. “Is that how you see it?”

  I deflate. Maybe I do. “I don’t know if I can give up. I don’t know how to convince the crew to go, if that’s what they want.”

  “They’re loyal to you.”

  “Now that seem
s like a bad thing.”

  “It’s not bad,” says Phil. “If you’re loyal to them—”

  “If?” I challenge him. “Do you think that’s even a question?”

  “Sorry. No, I don’t. Bad choice of words on my part. I’m just saying loyalty will make it difficult when the time comes.”

  “Two minutes,” says the pilot over the comm. “And we’ll be close enough to slip into orbit around Jupiter.”

  Chapter 25

  Even with Nicky and Phil and their unparalleled skill with gravity, even knowing the orbit in which we left the cruiser, it takes us several hours to locate the ship. Jupiter is just that big.

  I’m standing up, looking over the pilot’s shoulder to get a view through the cockpit glass. Phil and Nicky can see everything they need to see from where they sit, down inside the ship’s all-purpose payload bay. Gravity is all they need.

  “Can you sense any life?” I ask.

  “We’re still scanning the area for other ships,” answers Phil.

  “I don’t see any,” I say, as I reach out with my grav sense, knowing that for a distant ship, I’m more likely to sense a grav plume if it’s accelerating or slowing down than I am to see it with my eyes.

  “I think we’re alone,” says Phil. To the pilot, he says, “Fly in close and slow.”

  Careful not to push too much grav through the drive array, the pilot guides the scout craft toward the derelict cruiser.

  Even dead, it’s an ominous sight, hanging in the sky, silhouetted by Jupiter’s swirling clouds. As we close in, the damage to the bow is almost hard to find. It doesn’t look as bad as I’d imagined. Perhaps I’d enhanced the memory to inflate my ego for my part in the ship’s demise. However, on the scale of the kilometer-long vessel, spotting the roughly round hole three meters across is like looking for a pimple on an elephant’s butt.

  And that brings something more important into perspective, that these giant cruisers can be disabled with such a small wound in just the right place.

  “How close?” asks the pilot, as the distance to the cruiser shrinks.

  “A hundred meters if you can,” says Phil. “Start at the bow and follow one of the spines all the way to the stern. Then follow each of the other spines.”

  “It’s difficult for Phil and Nicky to scan the interior,” I tell the pilot, “with all the complexities of the cruiser’s internal structure.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “I get it.” To Phil, he says, “If I’m going too fast, just tell me. I can approach as slow as you like.”

  We end up scanning the ship several times before Phil finally says, “The ship is completely powered down. Inside the temperature is a few hundred degrees below freezing. Every Trog inside is frozen stiff.”

  “What about damage?” I ask. “Anything besides what we did to the bridge?”

  “The ship looks to be intact,” he answers. “It even has about half its hydrogen stores and most of its water.”

  “I wonder why the Trogs didn’t use the H in the ship’s tanks to refill their H packs,” I muse.

  “Probably ran out of cal packs and starved,” guesses Phil. “Or, they killed themselves, like Prolific Man Killer’s soldiers did. We did kill their Gray bosses when we rammed their ship.”

  It doesn’t matter. I say, “I think we should bring a work crew back to salvage the ship. What do you think, Phil?”

  “I don’t see any reason why not.”

  I pat the pilot on the shoulder. “Take me closer, then.”

  Moments later, the pilot has the scout ship floating in space just off the cruiser’s bow. Except for the dark hole where the Rusty Turd breached the hull, the rest of the ship looks like any other Trog cruiser—white, worn, and dirty. Ready to fly again.

  I slip out of the hatch and suit grav my way toward the hole through the cruiser’s bridge. I have a video camera mounted on my helmet next to a bright light to illuminate all I see. We’ll need a detailed look at the bridge for the engineers back on Iapetus to make the final call on a salvage attempt.

  Chapter 26

  Three days pass by the time I find myself sitting in another conference room down in the bowels of Iapetus. Bird is running the meeting, Phil and I are there, with Brice, of course, and Nicky, since we all saw the damaged cruiser firsthand. Our scout pilot is with us and so is Penny, since she was piloting the Rusty Turd when it smashed through the bow of the cruiser.

  A gaggle of Bird's officers is in the room, and so are a handful of engineers. A few of them look familiar. They were on Spitz’s staff, part of the pack of productive geniuses that built the enhancements into the Turd. They’re led by a competent guy named Punjari. That’s something to feel pretty good about.

  The video from my helmet cam is playing on a cracked LCD screen hanging on the wall. The image is panning across the wide bridge. Pieces of metal and glass hang motionless in the vacuum. Three Ghost Trogs are on the bridge—two whole, one not. Frozen Grays, whole and in pieces, are in every shot. Some are floating, some are belted into their seats. Their bodies are shrunken and crinkled. Their resilient gray skins found their match in long-term exposure to the harsh vacuum and deep cold. All the internal liquids—liquids at normal earth temperatures—have slowly sublimated into space.

  It’s strange that the bridge seems like a crime scene frozen in time, something that could have happened hours ago, or centuries past. Besides the desiccation of the Grays, there’s no way to tell.

  “The shockwave of the impact and intense field of the ship’s grav lens killed everything on the bridge, or close to it,” says Punjari. He points a casual finger in my direction, “Major Kane explored much of the forward section. Bodies like these are in most of the compartments within sixty or seventy meters of the impact, which goes a long way to explaining why no attempt was ever made by the ship’s occupants to affect some kind of repair. Every Gray or Trog capable of stepping into a leadership role was killed or mortally wounded in the impact.” He glances at Bird. “Not to belabor the obvious, but this information could be used tactically.”

  Bird makes a note on his d-pad, politely, I’m sure. The colonel doesn’t need an engineer to tell him what he’s seeing. Any good officer knows an opportunity when it’s presented.

  “The fortunate surprise for us,” says Punjari, “was the angle of the impact.” He finds a frame on which to freeze and goes to the screen to point out the features we should examine. “See here how these consoles right through the center of the bridge are missing?”

  “Looks like a direct hit to me,” says Brice, glancing proudly at Penny.

  “Exactly,” says Punjari, “however, it’s more direct than you could imagine. See these scrape marks coming across the floor all the way through the wall at the back of the bridge?”

  Everyone nods. They’re pretty obvious.

  “The ship came in parallel with the floor and sheared off the workstations,” Punjari chuckles, “obliterated them is more accurate. Many of the pieces of metal you see floating are from the consoles. My point is, because of the angle, because of the tremendous forces involved,” he zooms in on the floor beneath where a bank of workstations had been attached to the floor, “the conduits and wire bundles connecting the console to the ship’s system were sheared cleanly.”

  Bird’s attention is on the screen. He leans forward.

  Punjari points at the connectors. “We should be able to splice into these with ease.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Bird. “The ship is definitely salvageable?”

  “Given the information we have on the hydrogen levels in the tanks,” says Punjari, “I think we could go in with the right set of replacement consoles and a handful of engineers to reactivate the nuclear plants, and we could have the ship ready to fly in four to six hours."

  “Ready to fly?” asks one officer, “or ready to fight?”

  “Ready to fly,” says Punjari. “I wouldn’t risk going too fast.” He changes to
another view of the front of the ship. “Nothing is left of the smart glass panels or support structure to protect the bridge crew.”

  “How long would repairs take to make the ship fully operational?” asks Bird.

  “Depending on the size of the crew and resources available, anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.”

  “But if we do the quick repair,” asks Bird, “to get it moving, we could take it away from Jupiter, and put it somewhere safe where we could manage the repairs?”

  Punjari nods.

  Bird glances over at me and then looks back to Punjari. “That’s what we’ll do then. Put together everything you need, the people and the equipment. We’ll go back and take that ship. I don’t know where yet, but we’ll think of a place to go. How long do you need?”

  “A few days,” answers Punjari.

  “We’ll send one of the freighters with the engineers and the equipment.” Bird looks back at me. “Your people will ride shotgun in your ship.”

  “Yes, Sir.” It feels good to have a mission.

  Chapter 27

  True to his word, Punjari’s people are ready in two days. The freighter is loaded with what looks like a few tons of replacement equipment and tools. Nearly twenty of Punjari’s techs and engineers are onboard, leaving room for a few squads of SDF grunts, all experienced. I remind myself to thank Bird for those when we get back. You can never be too careful.

  The freighter and the Rusty Turd fly out of Iapetus together with flight paths and bubble jumps planned out ahead of time. In bubble, our ship and the small freighter will be alone for all practical purposes. The freighter, being a faster ship than the Turd II, will dial back its speed so the Turd II will arrive at each jump point first, giving us time to ensure the security of the area before the freighter arrives.

  As Bird told me more than a dozen times, with most of the best engineers having already been sent to the colonies, Punjari is valuable. And the engineers he selected for the mission represent the best left on Iapetus.

  Trying to get a clarification on that point, I ask Bird, “And if I have to sacrifice my ship to save them? Are you telling me to do that?”