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

by Bobby Adair

  "Whatever you do," I say, "I think you shouldn't do it for long. The Grays and Trogs aren't as stupid as we like to think they are. And we've all been guilty of that. We talk about the arrogance of the Grays, and we're guilty of the same attitudes. Now here we are. They found us. They came after us, and we barely escaped."

  Punjari’s smile seeps away. “Twice.”

  “Yeah,” I agree, “back at Jupiter, too. They almost got us there.”

  Punjari rubs his eyes, and he looks away, the loss of his friends is still too fresh for him not to be ambushed by the feelings.

  “Sorry,” I say, my feelings sufficiently repressed. I’ve had a lot more practice than Punjari.

  Chapter 54

  We arrive at the rendezvous, and then the waiting begins.

  My first order of business is to set up a bridge rotation to keep a full flight crew on duty at all times. The cruiser is a pirated ship in a war zone. No safe base. No free parking. The duty schedule I order doesn’t leave us much time to proceed with our work on emptying the cruiser of the bodies or the half-million tons of unused railgun slugs, but priorities had to be set.

  We convert the unused war room behind the bridge into a dorm, moving Trog bedding from the rear barrack section of the cruiser up to the front. Punjari puts together a work schedule for anyone not on bridge duty, and orders his repair workflow to move forward, keeping in mind no major system can be offline again.

  On the morning of our second day, I wake up in one of the cots in the war room. I’ve slept long enough I should feel revitalized, yet I don’t, so I feel cheated instead.

  Not wanting to wake others in the room who are still asleep, I make my way out, check in on the bridge crew, and hop into one of the lifts in order to access the forward section’s other decks, and I explore. I don’t have a goal. There's nothing I hope to find. I just want to get my blood flowing in the cruiser’s ten-percent g. I decide along the way I want to familiarize myself with every detail of the layout—the thickness of the bulkheads, the position of airlocks, and the contents of each room I come across. It’s all tactical knowledge that might prove valuable the next time I find myself assaulting one of these leviathans.

  When my free time starts to run out, I make my way back to the lifts, hop into one of them, and pop out on the bridge.

  “Good morning,” says Punjari. He’s standing near the back wall, not on duty yet, just watching.

  I check my d-pad. We still have thirty minutes before our shift starts.

  “You sleep well?” he asks as I walk over.

  “Fitful?”

  “Nightmares?”

  "I keep thinking about mistakes and near-misses, trying to imagine what I would do if I were a Gray right now, knowing we're out here somewhere. They have to find us. And they have to kill us.”

  “How do you think they’ll try and find us?”

  I sigh, because the answer isn’t one I have. "In these cases, I depend on Phil and Nicky to tell me.

  Without them, I don’t know if we’re far enough away that a Gray can sense us or not. I don’t know if our radar can see a Gray cruiser before the Grays aboard can sense us. So, I have to assume one of them is always close, and I have to have a plan for escape when they show up to attack. Moreover, I have to assume the Grays all share their info on us, so if they attack again, they won’t come at us like they did last time. They’ll do it in such a way that we can’t escape.”

  “And how’s that?” asks Punjari.

  “Risk a bubble jump endpoint such that the arriving ships pop out in a spherical formation with us at the center. Close enough that it'd be dangerous to bubble out.”

  Punjari goes pale. “They’d have us.”

  I nod. “It would be a good way to trap us. That’s one of the things that worried me last night. So I got up and left a standing order with Nav and Helm to set a random timer that’ll trigger a move event. When the timer fires, their orders are to move the ship by five or ten thousand miles in a randomly selected direction.”

  “We’ll burn a lot of fuel,” says Punjari, “but that should work. Roughly how frequently will we move?”

  “I told Nav to program the average length of time between moves to about three to four hours.”

  “If it took us thirty-seven hours to get all the way out here,” muses Punjari, “we could set the timer for much longer intervals.”

  “Well, we don’t know they’ll make the attack run from earth to here in one hop. They might pick a spot a million miles away to marshal their forces, and jump in from there.”

  “If they do that,” says Punjari, “we may need to move more frequently, or just keep moving.”

  “With random course and speed changes,” I say. “As long as we stay in the same general area so we’ll be close enough to communicate with Bird when he shows up with his freighters.”

  “I think we should do that.”

  “Agreed.” For the moment, it feels good to have a plan to thwart the next attack. Yet the peace of mind lasts for only that—a moment. “Once our next evasion succeeds, we’ll need to come up with a means to escape detection on the third attack, because they’ll learn, too, and they'll come back with a new plan the next time, and we may not have the luxury of a few days to come up with a new evasion plan."

  “And the next, and the next,” says Punjari. “A problem that keeps requiring a new answer.”

  “And maybe that’s why war is the mother of invention.”

  “War?” asks Punjari.

  “The cliché works better that way, I think.”

  “You have a good mind for this,” says Punjari.

  “I just like staying alive.”

  “I think you’ve found your place.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I think everyone has a talent or two. Me, I’m an engineer and a fair pilot. I suppose I could have been good at any number of things, but as an engineer, I shine.”

  I don’t make a joke of Punjari’s lack of humility. “Bird said as much before we left. In fact, he said you were so valuable he suggested if I had to choose between your life and mine, I should choose yours.”

  Punjari is appalled. “I’d never want anyone to sacrifice themselves for me. Especially you.”

  I laugh at that. “I’m just another grunt with a gun.”

  “You’re the reason we’re alive. The revolution needs people like you more desperately than it needs another engineer.”

  “Revolution?” I laugh in a very Brice-ian way. Most days it seems our long list of defeats have put our revolution in a hole too deep to climb out of. Ever. “Tell me about the colonies.”

  Chapter 55

  Punjari’s initial instinct is to clam up. He starts to speak, thinks better of it, and stops. And then he laughs.

  “What?” I ask.

  "The colonies," he says, "they're our best-kept secret."

  “But they’re real, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know this for sure?” I ask.

  Punjari shakes his head and says. “Of course.”

  “Why did you shake your head?”

  “You were raised on earth,” he says. “Under the MSS.”

  “Were you born on Iapetus?” I ask.

  “Earth?” he says. “I was recruited to Iapetus when I was fourteen.”

  “I never imagined they took kids that young. I guess, well, to tell you the truth, I never thought about it much. I just assumed they were culling the planet for PhDs and whatnot.”

  “Fourteen is unusual,” says Punjari. “Somehow I was identified as a candidate and picked up.”

  “Just like that?” I ask.

  “They brought my parents, too.”

  “That had to be something,” I said. “Going from earth, with what it’s been like, to Iapetus. What a change.”

  “The biggest change,” says Punjari, “though you’ll find it hard to believe, is being
able to trust again.”

  “Trust?” I ask, and the urge to laugh starts but stops as I begin to think about the reality of it.

  “I know,” he says. “On earth, you’re constantly bombarded with MSS propaganda you know is untrue because it tells you not to believe what you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears. Propaganda isn’t a lie the state asks you to believe about the world. Effective propaganda is a lie the state convinces you to tell yourself.”

  Holy shit, he’s right!

  “It undermines the rational part of your mind,” says Punjari. “It creates a troubling cognitive dissonance that’s difficult to accept.”

  “Unless you surrender to it,” I guess. “That’s the only way to find any mental peace. You have to give up, right?”

  “Correct,” says Punjari. “I couldn’t give up. Neither could you. That’s the reason for us both being here. The root of it, I think."

  “So, that’s why you believe the colonies are real,” I say. “You believe the government on Iapetus.”

  “We have an understanding,” says Punjari. “We were a society working toward a common goal. We disagreed on the war with the Grays and the Trogs, and the arguments sometimes became heated on what we should do about it, yet at the end of the day, every one of us was committed to the community. We were committed to the whole human race. That was more important than any rancor that might have grown between us. And you can do that in a society where trust exists. So, to answer your question, yes, I believe what I’ve been told. I’ve never been to the colonies—I’ve only seen pictures and videos, and I’ve read the stories. Mind you, everything I know is necessarily out of date. Every bit of information we have about our colonies is years old by the time it reaches us. The flight takes years in our freighters, and they travel at three times the speed of light.”

  “Are they safe?” I ask. “The colonies, I mean.”

  “My parents are there,” he says. “They were lucky enough to get a place on a ship before the fall of Iapetus. Perhaps I shouldn’t say they are in the colonies. They won’t reach the nearest for several years yet. They’re in transit.”

  “I know you can’t tell me where the colonies are,” I say. “I’m fine with that. Considering what I do for a living and all.”

  Punjari laughs, and so do I. There’s always the possibility that I might be captured and have my memories mined by some Gray who knows how to read the human brain. How long could I hold up my façade of lies if the Trogs decided they wanted to make me talk? I’ve already seen what little value they place on their own lives. What would hostile Trogs do to an uncooperative prisoner?

  “What are these worlds like?” I ask. “Are they like Iapetus, or more like earth?”

  “Colony A,” says Punjari.

  “A?” I ask. “I can’t even have the name?”

  “Better that I don’t tell you.”

  I shrug. “Go ahead.”

  “Colony A is very much like earth. A little lighter g, a sun producing light very much like on earth. More water, if you can believe it. Rich flora and fauna. Minerals. It’s as close to an ideal planet as we could ever have hoped to find.”

  “And how is the colony there doing?” I ask. “I’ve read old history books about the early colonies in the Americas back in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. It was a hard life for those who made the Atlantic crossing.”

  "We've had our setbacks," says Punjari. "But you have to keep in mind, we're a technologically advanced race. Back in the sixteen hundreds, the people might have been forced to drink brackish water from a well dug too close to a salt water source, not knowing the high salt content was slowly killing them. They didn't know mosquitoes carried malaria. They were clueless about bacteria and viruses and proper nutrition. We know these things. We account for them."

  “So people didn’t go to Colony A and die for no apparent reason?” I ask.

  “At first,” says Punjari, “yes, to a degree. Nearly a third of all the colonists who arrived on the first ship didn’t live through the year. Due to pressures here in the earth system, risks were taken for the sake of expediting the process that wouldn’t have been taken otherwise. Because of that, the people died. Nowadays, with all we’ve learned about our new home, mortality rates are only slightly higher than Iapetus. One thing is for sure, though, people on Colony A live longer than they would on earth.”

  That’s easy to believe. “So are they living in grass huts or log cabins out there?”

  Punjari laughs at that. “No. On Colony A we have a handful of towns and numerous agricultural and mining hamlets. The towns are quite modern, though they have shortages from time to time. Out in the hamlets, I’m told life is much like life on earth in the agricultural zones. They don’t have modern conveniences, but I understand there are few complaints. The people I’ve talked to who’ve been there, the people who crew the freighters that fly back and forth, they want to return. They describe colony A like it’s a virgin earth, savannahs covered with great herds of native herbivores, oceans teeming with fish, unending forests, and air cleaner than any living human can remember.”

  “Sounds like heaven.”

  “That’s a word they use,” says Punjari. “Are you asking because you want to go to the colonies?”

  “I’m on the fence about it,” I tell him. “One day, all I want to do is stay and fight. The next, I just want to leave.”

  The woman currently on the radar calls over the bridge crew comm, “A ship just came out of bubble.”

  That puts us all on alert.

  Punjari steps over to the helm to take the place of the man there. I do the same on the grav console, and I try to see into the distance for detail.

  Our cruiser is already accelerating.

  “It’s a freighter,” says the radar woman.

  “Comm?” I ask, as I turn to the man stationed on the ship-to-ship.

  Tense moments pass as we pick up speed.

  “It’s Bird,” says the man at the comm station.

  Everyone relaxes.

  To the radar woman, I ask, “Any others?”

  “I see just the one,” she tells me. “No, wait. Two more. Both freighters.”

  Chapter 56

  Logistics. Ugh.

  It takes several hours to plan, but finally, Bird sends a naval crew aboard to pilot the cruiser and coordinate with the three freighters. Relieved of my responsibilities for the leviathan, I leave the bridge with Punjari in tow to go down to the main bay to watch. With grav set to zero inside the hangar, we take up a position floating on the long axis of the ship with our backs to the wall separating the forward section from the main bay. It gives us a commanding view of the cavernous space.

  Soldiers in orange, each carrying a weapon, are at work, more than a hundred of them. Some ferrying stasis pods in through the open doors, others securing them to the floors. Some are working with hoses, transferring H into the cruiser. It’ll be a little more than a sip considering the size of the cruiser relative to the size of the freighters, but I suppose, given enough loads, eventually, they'll fill up the cruiser's H tanks.

  Given the view of all the work Punjari and I see, it’s no surprise when Colonel Bird comes floating toward us from one of the open airlock doors with several of his personal guards following close behind.

  Easily in comm range, Bird has the good etiquette to wait until he comes to a stop in front of us before he says anything. “Congratulations are due.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” says Punjari.

  “Just doin’ the job,” I say.

  “Sorry about your losses,” he says. Bird looks us each in the eye and adds, “You’ve both lost friends you’ve been with for a long time.”

  I nod and keep my words to myself.

  Punjari does the same, learning, I guess, that sometimes the words don’t help.

  “Your people on the Turd II are fine,” says Bird. “Phil told me to be sure and tell you when I arrived.�
�

  “Thanks.” I'm relieved, but I have other things on my mind now, like seeing to it the cruiser we sacrificed so much to salvage is defended. I point at the floating orange suits. “How many of those troops are staying with the cruiser?”

  “Nearly all of them,” says Bird, turning to watch the crews work.

  Knowing part of what’s planned is to use the metal from the railguns and supporting structures to build racks for storing the thousands of stasis pods we’ll be transporting from Iapetus, I ask, “And steel workers?”

  “All of our troops serve double duty,” says Bird. “Everyone who came along on this trip is capable of helping with restructuring the cruiser’s interior space.”

  “How many pods did you bring on this trip?” asks Punjari.

  “A hundred or so,” says Bird, “but we used most of the room inside the freighters for people, tools, and materials. Once we’re moving primarily pods, we’ll be able to ship a few hundred with each trip, for each freighter.” Turning back to Punjari, Bird asks, “How’s this cruiser? Is it all we hoped for?”

  “Yes,” says Punjari. “It’s in excellent shape. Enough fuel to keep it running for another six to twelve months, depending how much we use evading the enemy. We still have repairs to finish on the bridge and equipment to switch out, but we’re on track.”

  “Will we be able to fly it to the colonies?” asks Bird.

  “It’s everything Kane said it was,” says Punjari. “Better still, with reactor optimization and drive array refinements, we should be able to increase the range and speed.”

  “Good,” says Bird. “Very good. We’ll run through a formal debrief once we have everything and everyone offloaded.”

  “How soon before the freighters leave?” I ask.

  “You’re anxious to get back to your new ship,” says Bird.

  “New?” A sour smile is the best I can do to convey my feelings over that. “It’s hard to fly that thing after losing the Rusty Turd.”

  “If we had the capacity,” says Bird, “we’d retrofit the new ship to match the capabilities of the one you lost. You and your crew were hellions in that beast.”