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

by Bobby Adair

  “You better tell Colonel Bird your thoughts on that,” says Blair, “because you won’t live long enough to make any of it happen.

  Brice chuckles, giving away the fact he was only pretending to sleep.

  “People keep predicting my death,” I say defiantly. “And they keep being wrong.”

  “Eventually, all of us will be right,” she says.

  Chapter 2

  “You all buttoned up back there?” asks Chikere.

  All of us have our suits sealed up with faceplates closed, even though the scout ship sustains an internal atmosphere. “What’s up?” I ask.

  “There’s a pretty dense sphere of debris around the planet,” he says, “I’m going to slip us through with the rest of the crap until we can hop over to our rendezvous point. We might catch some high-speed space junk and get a hole or two.”

  “Understood.” Looking at the others, I say, “You might want to amp up your suit’s defensive grav a bit.”

  Each of them does. Phil scoots close to Nicky and pushes her against me. Being so close, the combination of our fields will protect her nearly as well as they protect us.

  “We should consider a scorched-earth approach,” says Blair. “It may be the only way.”

  “Scorched earth?” asks Brice. He wasn’t in on the meetings where that had been discussed. Well, not really explored, more suggested and shouted down was more like it.

  “You need to talk to Colonel Bird,” says Blair. “You don’t have many good qualities, but you’ve got balls. You can do what needs doing if it comes to that.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Brice asks me.

  I nod at Blair, “It’s your idea. Sell it.”

  “You think I’m afraid of a dare?” she laughs. “Brice is a pragmatist. He’ll understand better than you.”

  “What?” he asks. “Are you talking about blowing up all the factories? Collapsing the mines? Burning the crops? What?”

  “Oh, no,” I laugh. “That might work when you’ve got columns of armor marauding across the steppe in a diesel punk war from last century, but on a planetary scale?”

  “The Trogs and Grays are here for one thing, and one thing only,” says Blair, “and they stay, because of one other thing.”

  “Don’t be cryptic,” says Brice. “Spit it out.”

  “The Grays and Trogs are here to harvest the earth of its labor pool. Material resources are secondary.”

  Brice frowns. He’s already guessed.

  “The Trogs and Grays stayed to fight us because we’re weak. An easy mark. Good slave material. We can win if we change the equation.”

  “Change the equation?” I chide. “That’s an awfully bland euphemism.”

  “It’s simple,” says Blair, focusing on Brice, “we take over the command center on one of the battle stations.”

  “You can’t defend it,” says Brice. “Not unless you bring a huge force, or convince the MSS and SDF troops to mutiny and support you.”

  “They won’t,” says Blair.

  “Not if they know what you intend,” I say.

  "We only need to hold it for five or six hours," says Blair. "Every battle station has enough grav plates to keep it stabilized in its orbit, and enough reactor power to shift to a higher or lower orbit if need be. Nothing can be done quickly, but they can be moved."

  “And?” asks Brice, pushing for the surprise we all know is coming.

  "We drop it into the orbit of another station," she says, "on a collision course. A head-on collision course."

  Brice shakes his head.

  I say, “By arresting the momentum of both stations—”

  “I know enough about orbital mechanics,” says Brice. “They’ll both fall to the surface.” He turns to glare at Blair. “A billion—two billion tons of rock from the sky.”

  “Won’t matter where it hits,” I say. “Won’t matter much how fast it’s going when it does. I mean, the remaining hunks won’t be traveling at planet-killing speeds, but they might as well be. So much debris will be ejected into the atmosphere it’ll throw the planet into a winter that’ll last a thousand years.”

  “It would kill everyone,” says Brice.

  “Everyone who would otherwise be used to build fleets of ships that’ll eventually come out to your colonies and conquer them, too,” she says. “This way, no ships, no invasion force, and the best part, the Grays and Trogs will never fuck with humans again, not after they see what we’re capable of. They can’t win a scorched-earth encounter on a planetary scale, so why fight it.”

  “But they won’t lose, either,” says Brice, “if we kill off our species to avoid becoming slaves.”

  “Which would you rather be,” asks Blair, “a dead man or a Gray slave?”

  Chapter 3

  “You might want to stop talking and clear your mind,” Phil tells me. “We’re coming up on one of the battle stations.”

  “Gotta slide by pretty close,” says Chikere. “Or I’ll have to nudge the grav drive, and at this range, one of those Grays down there might see right through our stealth field and figure out we’re a hostile ship, and not just a black spot floating across space.”

  “You think they’ll sense us?” I ask Phil. By us, I mean him and me.

  “If we can sense them,” he says, “they can sense us. There are plenty of Grays and bugheads down there. You can hear the noise of their thoughts if you focus. Lucky for us, all of their thoughts create a background noise that we’re not likely to stand out against, but if you’re arguing with Blair, the emotion brings your thoughts into a bright focus that’s easy for a Gray to pick up on.”

  I accept Phil’s guidance with a silent nod, lean against the wall behind me, and close my eyes. I try to watch using only my grav sense to see, only the bug in my head to hear.

  Brice and Blair stop talking.

  Phil and Nicky seem to disappear, where a moment ago their thoughts were bouncing through the ether, now they’re gone. All I sense of them is the gravity of Phil’s mass and the void where the Gray takes up the space beside me, seeming to sponge gravity from the space around her.

  The mass of the battle station glows bright as we close in.

  From one end to the other, we skim over its surface not two hundred meters up.

  Below us, across the rough surface, I’m able to make out the barrels of railguns, some long, some short, large calibers and small, clumped and spread out in no apparent pattern, except to make the gigaton asteroid look like an astral sea urchin covered in tiny spines. Many of the railguns are broken. More are bent. Pocks the size of swimming pools crater the surface.

  Through the beating the station took during the war, I don’t see any holes big enough to have knocked it out of commission.

  As a human, it shames me to deduce that the station surrendered, like I know they all did at the end. Though, I suppose the Trogs could have landed and taken the asteroid by invasion.

  That’s some solace.

  Below me, down in the rocky corridors, I can sense hundreds of Trogs moving from place to place, hauling rock and repairing walls. Grays are down there, too, not many of them I can see, but they’re present. Some are broadcasting their orders loudly on telepathic links, keeping their Trog slaves busy and their human slaves hard at work. I can’t guess if the Grays are expecting an attack soon. They seem to be preparing for one.

  Eventually, the battle station passes aft of us. I watch its bulky mass slide into the background, and hear the noise of alien thoughts fade to nothing.

  When Phil is satisfied we’ve gone far enough, he says, “They didn’t see us.”

  Blair sighs, realizes we noticed, and works on resituating herself in her seat, pretending her relief was something else.

  “How many do you think were down there?” I ask.

  “I knew you were going to ask me,” says Phil.

  I make a point of looking at Blair, and say, “That’s the whole
point of this mission. That’s why you’re along. We’re gathering intel. Right?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “No colliding battle stations, right?”

  Her expression turns sour. “I don’t know what you think—”

  I raise a palm to stop her. “Just checking to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

  “I’ll be lucky if I don’t get arrested and tortured,” she tells me. “Taking control of a battle station isn’t something I’ll be able to do on my own. It’s not something anyone in the MSS was able to do by themselves, not even before the Trogs took over.”

  “So why’d you suggest it?” asks Brice.

  “There are other ways to take control of a battle station,” she tells him.

  Brice shrugs and goes back to counting stars.

  “Refueling schedules,” I say. “That’s what we want. Docking procedures, hydrogen transport details, everything having to do with taking H from earth up to the Trogs’ cruisers in orbit. If we can get— ”

  “I know the mission,” she tells me. “Swap out an alternative gas for the hydrogen in the supply chain, something that’ll spontaneously generate a powerful exothermic reaction on contact. That’s what we want—to destroy their fleet through sabotage.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “It won’t work,” she tells me. “We’ll be lucky to damage one or two cruisers before the Grays realize what’s happening.”

  She doesn’t know all of the plan. She doesn’t know we only need a few cruisers to blow up before other parts of our plan work out. “It’s a start. You need to quickly establish a counterintelligence network, and work towards our list of—”

  “Don’t talk to me like I don’t know what I’m doing,” she snaps. “I was a member of their Young Pioneer Corps before I even understood the difference between a Korean and a Caucasian, but I learned pretty quick that I wasn’t as good as they were and that I never would be. When I was thirteen, I earned a spot in the Youth League, and I was already a mole by then, lying to them to make them despise me a little less while I stole every trivial secret I could learn. I was developing stupid, pubescent Korean boys into spies when you were still trying to get up your nerve to kiss your first girl. I know what I’m supposed to do. I know how I’m supposed to do it. I don’t need your advice on any of it.”

  “I’m just…” I don’t know what point I was trying to make.

  Phil takes her side. “She’s right, Dylan.”

  “Sorry,” I tell her. “I wasn’t trying to say you didn’t know your job.”

  "I know you don't like me," she spits. She cuts a glance at Phil and Brice. "None of you do. I know you'd be just as happy if I'd been killed back at the Potato or when the SDF base out in the Trojans was destroyed. Happier, I'm sure. But I didn't get killed. You know why? Because I know how to take care of myself even when every single person I see every hour of every day is my enemy.”

  Chikere calls over the comm to us. “Thirty-five or forty minutes before we come up on our destination.”

  Blair gets up and moves into the cockpit to peek over Chikere’s shoulder for a view of the earth.

  “You should talk to her,” says Phil, over a private comm link.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  "You should," I tell him. "Me and Blair will never be friends. We don't have anything to talk about besides the mission. That's it."

  “You should try.”

  “Phil,” I tell him, “the world isn’t rosy pink and pretty like you seem to think it is sometimes. Blair is a sour-sap Medusa who hates everybody she meets.”

  “Because of how she grew up,” says Phil. “You know what she’s been through? How does anybody come out of that still being capable of normal relationships?”

  “You’re dumping shit on me I don't want and can't do anything about. Too much sewage as flowed under the bridge between Blair and me. There's nothing we like about each other, and the only reason one of us doesn't shoot the other is because we're working toward the same goal. That's it."

  “That’s something.”

  “Whatever it is, it’ll never be what you seem to think it is. If you want Blair to have a shoulder to cry on, you go ahead, but don’t get your hopes up. She’s a heartless husk of a human in a female wrapper. Don’t let your eyes fool you. That little woe-is-me show she just did, that’s some kind of manipulation, is what it is. I’ll bet both my balls on that. When’s the last time you ever saw her vulnerable side? Never. Right? She’s up to something.”

  Brice says, “I’m with Dylan.”

  I curse and look down at my d-pad. It says I’m on a private comm link with Phil. Brice shouldn’t be on it.

  “I don’t need any shoulders to cry on,” says Blair, apparently on the comm link, too. “And you two can fuck off.”

  Great.

  Chapter 4

  The battle station ahead is cratered so deeply it’s hard to imagine how it didn’t fracture. It’s been months since the last battles ended and jets of oxygen and hydrogen still shoot out, burning brightly against the black sky when they mix and spark. It’s no wonder the station is one of the few not swarming with workers trying to bring it back to life.

  The pilot sets our ship down inside one of the blast craters and reduces power to all systems. He calls to us, “It’s your show now.”

  Using the ship-to-ship radio, Blair broadcasts her signal. I imagine to some starry-eyed Korean man she tempted with her touchy-feely parts back when they were in junior high together. And now he’s still pining for another taste.

  And then I want to kick myself, because I can be a judgmental bastard sometimes. I just can’t get past my dislike for Blair.

  “Anything?” asks Brice.

  “Nothing yet.” She checks the time on her d-pad like it’s an excuse.

  We’re on time, despite knowing that a precise rendezvous minute was only an aspiration. “Were you able to connect at all?” I ask. “Do we know if they’re on their way?”

  "No response," she tells me, and I can hear the tension in her words. It's been a long time since she was in contact with her people on earth. At least, that's what she told us when we were planning the operation. Time has a way of turning loyalties into holiday relatives that you prefer never called you in the off-season.

  We’re in the off-season.

  “We sense work crews here,” says Phil.

  “I thought this rock was abandoned,” says Brice, glaring at Blair. “That’s what your source told you, right?”

  “They’ve been refurbishing all the damaged stations,” says Phil. “They were bound to get to this one eventually.”

  “Bad timing, though,” says Brice. “Don’t you think?” He’s suspicious.

  “Yeah,” I agree, but I’m not ready to jump to a conclusion just yet. “Phil, do you and Nicky see ships coming this way?”

  “Nothing has reacted perceptibly to our presence,” he answers.

  “How many workers are here?” I ask. “Are there Grays with them?”

  “We can’t feel the presence of any Grays,” says Phil. “No Trogs, just humans.”

  “And their ships?” asks Brice.

  “Can’t say for sure,” says Phil. “Maybe they landed on the other side of the asteroid. There’s nothing we can see except the battle station’s rock.”

  “How many?” I ask again.

  “A group of six fairly close,” says Phil, “working their way across the surface. Several hundred meters to our stern, just over the horizon. A few more groups of six are deep inside.”

  “They aren’t working on this place,” I guess. “That’s not enough workers to make a dent in the damage. They’re assessing it.”

  “Probably,” Brice agrees.

  “Could any of them be your people?” I ask Blair.

  “None responded to the encrypted message I just sent,” she answers.
<
br />   “You wanna try again?” I ask.

  “Even if the message is encrypted,” she snaps, “the more we broadcast, the more likely it is someone will notice. We’re dealing with humans now, not just Grays and Trogs.” She’s right, and she wants to make sure I know she’s right.

  “Phil,” I ask, “that group on the surface, tell me they’re headed away from us.” I’m hoping, but I know how luck always seems to turn out badly for us.

  “Can’t,” he says. “They’re coming this way.”

  “Quickly?” I ask. “Like they saw us?”

  “No,” he answers. “They’re not moving with purpose. Their progress is slow. Lots of starts and stops.”

  “If they’re assessing,” says Brice, “Like Dylan thinks, then they’ll be testing the rock for fissures. Blasting seismic charges and mapping the interior structures. They’ll have to do that as a first step in evaluating this station.”

  “Probably right,” says Phil.

  “Can you read their thoughts?” asks Brice.

  “If they were bugheads and closer,” says Phil. “But normal humans from this far, no.”

  Brice looks at me, hefting his railgun. “What’s the plan, boss?” He’s asking if we’re going to run for it or kill some innocent orange-suited workers.

  “We’ve been working on this for two months,” says Blair, starting on her argument for staying and toughing it out.

  “And we’ve been working on the cruiser longer than that,” says Phil. “Sending the pods to the colonies is still our first priority. We have maybe another month to go, so we can reschedule this for another time.”

  “We’re not going to endanger our transport cruiser by waiting here for my contact to show,” says Blair.

  “It’s not your call to make, Colonel,” says Brice. “It’s up to Colonel Kane. He’s running this mission.”

  Blair snorts. She’s been pissed since the moment Bird told her he’d promoted me.

  “We may not get another chance at this,” says Blair. “

  "Don't be dramatic," says Brice. "Your contact will get another chance."