by Bobby Adair
Chapter 52
“You fuckin’ pussy-ass spaghetti-heads,” says Brice.
“What?” I ask, for lack of an ability to come up with more than a single, simple syllable. My eyes are open. My skull feels like it’s three sizes too small for my swollen brain. Nothing makes sense when you don’t know where you are, how you got there, anything. “What?”
Brice is beside me, looking down with unreadable eyes.
Silva is on my other side, face anxious, eyes moist.
They aren’t wearing their helmets. I realize with a start, I’m not either. But it’s okay. We’re all breathing. I see a ceiling above us painted in institutional green. Electric lights illuminate the room in an uneven glow. Some bulbs must be out.
Why is that important? Why am I thinking of light bulbs?
“Are you okay?” asks Silva.
“You made it?” I ask, as though that doesn’t make sense. “Lenox?”
“She’s fine,” says Silva as she tries to smile through tears that won’t stay put.
As I see the tears roll slowly across her cheeks, a sliver of intuition tells me they’re not flowing right. It’s the g, that’s what’s wrong. It’s too light. The tears are too slow.
Because I’m on the moon. I'm in a room, not a tunnel. And we left five nuclear bombs in Gray Eden and in their railgun batteries.
I try to sit up. Too fast. My head punishes me by threatening to pop. I grimace and lay back down.
“Be still,” Brice tells me. “We’re trying to find a doctor.”
“I’ll be okay,” I lie. “Jesus, I’m so fucked up.” I try to look down at my body. I’m worried. Was I blown up? I wiggle my fingers, and then my toes. I rotate my ankles.
“You’re fine,” says Silva, following my eyes and looking me over. “You weren’t injured. It’s that nuclear thing again. You were too close.”
Her words connect with an idea I have stored, and a few pieces start to make sense. Like every piece of a chaotic everything, falling onto the table, flipping themselves over, reorienting themselves, puzzling their way into something consistent.
“The nukes all blew?” I ask. “We did it?”
“If we didn’t,” Brice laughs, “then I don’t know what happened, because it looks like half the moon is in orbit now.”
“Up there?”
“In the sky,” says Brice. “And the cruisers, too.”
“The cruisers.” I’d completely forgotten about those.
“Three of them were obliterated,” says Silva. “Just gone. The rest…” she shakes her head and smiles wickedly.
“There are a lot of cruiser pieces hitting the ground out there,” says Brice. “It’ll go on for a while, I suspect.”
“For a thousand years,” laughs Lenox, coming out of nowhere to kneel and look down at me.
And that reminds me of Phil. "Where is Phil and his thousand-year bullshit?”
Brice nods. “Over there.”
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“Same as you,” says Brice. “He came around about an hour ago.”
“An hour?” That’s a long time. I try to sit up again, and only manage to prop myself on an elbow. “How long have I been out?”
Lenox checks her d-pad. “Coming up on four or five hours.”
I heave a sigh. “Holy shit.”
Brice says, “Take it easy, Superman. The war survived without you.”
“We need to— ”
“Do nothing,” Silva tells me, as she presses her hand to my chest. “Take it easy a little longer. Trust everyone else to do their jobs.”
I don’t know that I can, yet at the same time, I don’t know that I have a choice. I lie back down and look at Brice. I can’t help but smile. “Obliterated? Three cruisers, just gone?”
“None of those twelve that showed up will be back in the war,” says Brice. “Throw in those six we knocked out of action a few days ago, and we’ve taken out nearly half the Trog fleet.”
My brain isn’t functioning enough yet to have made that deduction myself. “Damn. We’re good.”
“We caught some luck,” says Lenox, standing back up to leave me with Silva and Brice.
“That only leaves them thirty-five, maybe forty cruisers,” says Brice.
“That’s not enough,” I say. “Not enough for them to win here.”
“Let’s talk about it after the rest of your brain comes back online.”
I roll my eyes. “Where are we?”
“That communications room Skip told us about.”
“Skip and Frank,” I ask, “they made it okay?”
Silva points across the room. “Over there.”
“And Clark?” I ask. “His squads?”
“I was able to connect with Clark,” says Silva. “The radio gear in here is pretty decent.”
“He made it, then.” That’s a relief.
“One of his squads did,” says Silva. “The others didn’t. They didn’t get away fast enough.”
That sucks. It sucks a lot, but tallies start ringing up in my head, and there is simply no comparison. Our casualties compared to Trog and Gray losses are nothing. I feel guilty for thinking it. I start to get up again. My head protests. “I need to sit up.” I start to move up on my elbows.
Silva stops me.
Brice shrugs. “Phil’s up and around.”
She looks across the room, then glares at Brice.
I put my hands down to push myself up. It’s soft. I look down. It’s a mattress. “You got me a cot?”
Brice shrugs. “We thought you were gonna die, so wanted to do something nice.”
Silva punches him.
He laughs as he gets up to go.
Silva leans over and kisses me. As she sits back up, she says, “Phil wants to talk to you.”
I reach down to see if my pistol is still in its holster. “He’s not still armed, is he?”
Chapter 53
Sitting on my cot’s thin mattress, leaning against the wall, my head slowly clears. I’m in a pretty good-sized room. Radio equipment and radar stations sit atop tables along two walls. Silva and some people I’ve never seen are communicating with the outside world. A half-dozen desks have been pushed into a corner and hurriedly stacked.
Phil’s cot is empty, and sitting near the pile of desks. Phil is on his feet, standing behind Silva, talking in a low voice.
Through an open doorway, I see a larger room. It’s the door Brice and Silva both exited through after they left my side. Dozens of people are out there, talking and moving about. It’s quite the hub of activity.
I’m trying to deduce what it’s all about when Phil suddenly appears in front of me. “Dylan.”
I nod, afraid to say something that might set him off on one of his crazy little rants.
Phil reaches out for a nearby chair. “Mind if I sit?”
I nod again.
“Are the cobwebs clearing up?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to apologize.”
I shake my head. My brain rattles, and I flinch at the pain.
“It goes away,” says Phil, looking down at my d-pad. “A dose of suit juice will help.”
I don’t even think to argue the point. I reach for my d-pad and find the screen to give myself a dose.
“You know those romance vids from before the siege.”
I look up. Phil is still whacked. He must be. “Um, sure.”
“You know how when women lost their husbands, or whatever, you know, they’d say stuff like they felt like they died inside, or something like that?”
“Phil, what are you talking about?”
“People talk in metaphors, to try and make their friends understand what they’re going through. Movies are like that, too.”
“Okay.”
“I know nobody will ever understand how intertwined Nicky and I were. They’ll never know how deeply I was able to bond with a child who
wasn't even born yet. Humans aren't wired for that kind of connection."
I finally understand what he’s getting at. “I’m sorry about Nicky.”
“What I’m trying to tell you, Dylan, is I know I went crazy, and when I say half of me died, for me, it’s not a metaphor. Half of me really did die.”
My eyes find my feet, because I know Phil is telling me the truth, not his version of it, but the explicit, demonstrable, complete truth. He and Nicky were as close to a symbiotic entity as any two beings could be. But all through a mental connection, not a physical one. “I’m sorry. I just thought you’d gone crazy.”
“I did for a while,” says Phil. “I wasn’t able to handle it.”
“Who could?” I say.
“Will you forgive me?”
I laugh at that. “Forgive you?”
“For saying I hated you. For wanting to murder you. For blaming everything on you.”
“We’re here because of me,” I tell him. “I deserve the blame.”
“This is war,” says Phil. “We knew what we were getting into when we joined up.”
Meeting his eyes, I say, “I’m sorry for what happened, I truly am.” I reach out and put a hand on his shoulder. “There should never be anything to forgive between brothers.”
“You see me as your brother,” says Phil, “after all I’ve done?”
“You know I could say the same thing.”
Phil nods and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Brothers.”
I look towards the adjoining room. “What’s going on out there? Who are these people?”
Chapter 54
“The SDF is reconstituting,” says Phil. “This is their command center. Brice and Lenox are coordinating it."
“No shit.”
“Thousands of SDF were traånsferred into the worker ranks when the new Grays took control of the moon. When the nukes blew, they killed all the Grays up here. They were all concentrated in those underground sanctuaries we destroyed. That left the Trogs with no Gray leaders, and you've seen how they react to that. Those that didn't kill themselves outright lined up in ranks, passively waiting for a human to take possession of them.”
“How’d that work out?” I ask.
“Touch and go,” says Phil. “The MSS tried to take charge, but that's not going well at all. Right now, it's the MSS against the remains of the SDF up here, and most of the workers are on our side."
“We’re going to take the moon?” I ask him.
“We control most of it already,” says Phil. “The armories where the Trogs stored the SDF’s and MSS’s weapons after the victory have been found. Both sides are arming, so things could get messy up here for a month or two, unless the two sides can work something out.”
I’m both for and against us taking the fight to the MSS. “The MSS can’t take control, but we have to win against the Grays and Trogs first. Do we know how the fight for the battle stations is going?”
Phil nods toward the radio operators. “We’re in contact with most everyone now. We took all the battle stations except for two. The fighting is still underway there.”
I smile, but at the same time can’t believe we achieved so many of our goals. “And the earth? Did Blair do what she told us she would? Did she nuke Pyongyang?”
“Gone,” says Phil. “Nothing left but radioactive rocks.”
“Holy crap,” I say. “She did it. She came through for us.”
“For all of us,” says Phil.
“Any word from her on the coup?”
"Once the base up here blew and Pyongyang was obliterated," says Phil, "the national governments on earth asserted control over their sovereign territories and turned on the MSS."
“Spontaneous revolution?” I ask.
“The Gray history you had the foresight to give to that work crew back on the derelict battle station we visited made its way to earth. A lot of people read it, and believed it. There was a lot of anger on earth.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s a bloodbath,” says Phil. “Anybody associated with the MSS is being hunted down and hung, or burned alive. There’s fighting all over the planet, but the MSS can’t win. They’re outnumbered a thousand to one, and both sides are armed.”
“Have we heard from Blair at all?”
Phil shakes his head. “Our expectation that humanity would join with the MSS to overthrow the Grays might have been too unrealistic after thirty years of MSS brutality.”
“I feel bad for Blair,” I say. “This can’t be what she wanted.”
“Maybe it was,” says Phil. “If anybody knew the depth of MSS ruthlessness, it was her. I know you never liked her, but maybe this is exactly what she planned. Maybe she made the biggest sacrifice of all.”
I nod, because I don’t know what to say.
“You haven’t asked about the Gray fleet,” says Phil.
“I’m almost afraid to.”
“What looks like the rest of it—thirty-nine ships—have formed up near one of the last supply depots.”
“And?” I ask.
“It’s the same thing we saw out in 61 Cygni once the Grays figured out they were on the losing end.”
“They’re not,” I say.
“They think they are,” replies Phil. “They have to think that. Chikere is there sending back real-time reports. The cruisers are loading what they can from the supply depot. Most of the others are offloading hydrogen from one cruiser to the other, transferring Trogs to the empty ships and moving Grays to the ones they’re topping off. Looks like they’re going to save six cruisers to take back to the home world. The rest, they’ll abandon here.”
I’m hearing it, but I can’t believe it. “It’s exactly what they did at 16 Cygni! You’re not bullshitting me? That’s really what the Grays are doing?”
“Yes,” says Phil. “You had the right instincts about this. We cut off most of their supplies. We took the earth and moon back. We destroyed a huge fraction of their fleet.”
“We got lucky with those last twelve cruisers,” I say. “If they hadn’t come in so close to defend the moon base… ”
“It was enough to convince them their war here was lost.”
“Delayed,” I guess. “They think they’re coming back. Eventually.”
Phil agrees with a nod, but says, “If Prolific Man Killer comes through for us— ”
“For his people,” I correct.
“For his people,” agrees Phil. “Then those Grays will be in for a surprise when they get to 61 Cygni. We won’t be seeing them again.”
“What’s the plan from here, then?”
Phil says, “Bird is on his way out here with one of the freighters. He wants us to go there and see if we can turn the Trogs who are left behind. Or just take their ships after they die.”
“I’m in. We’ve sacrificed too much for me to miss that.” I smile. “I guess that means I won’t need my backup plan.”
“You mean the C4 you have up your ass?” Phil asks me.
I laugh. “You knew?”
“Of course, I knew.”
“You read it from my mind?”
“You’re too closed-off when you want to be. I read it from Brice.”
“Figures.”
I stand up. I’m a little wobbly, but I think I can be ready to go in a half-hour. “We’re getting a fleet for free.”
“Not free,” says Phil.
I know. We’ve paid dearly for this victory. “We’re gaining some time, though. Maybe six months, maybe a few decades.”
"If humanity can get its shit together,” says Phil, “if we can finally unite, we'll be too strong to defeat when they do return."
“All of humanity has been enslaved for thirty years,” I say. “We’ve fought the most devastating war in the history of the world and we won our freedom. If that doesn’t bond us, nothing will.”
The End
Freedom’s Siege
>
The Prequel to the Freedom’s Fire Series
Chapter 1
Nobody ever expected a war like this.
Maybe some sad soldier in every army since the dawn of time has said that very thing. And as those words tumbled out—demoralizing the battered men around him—another thought came to that desperate soldier’s mind, shining there, just behind the eyes, stinging and certain, the next logical step.
We’re going to lose this war.
We’re all going to die.
And everybody I’ve ever loved is going to suffer.
The path to the bottom of despair’s dark hole is paved with logic and facts that make each step down seem like the only sane choice.
Billy Kane had been down that road before. He’d seen his friends killed. He’d known for certain he was going to die as well. But he’d found some things down in that black crater that shored up the weakness in his soul—some things that lit the path back out again, trite ideals with simple names like courage and determination.
To Billy Kane, they were the indispensable ingredients in the concrete that makes a soldier’s heart brave enough to raise his rifle and fire, to march forward into the slaughter. To fight, to win.
And that’s the thing those eighteen twiggy little gray bastards from Alpha Cen-Crap-Star, or wherever the hell they came from, will never understand about the people of the planet earth. No matter how dire the outcome looks, we find a way to win.
Because we’re goddamn humans!
We’re not a race that lets big-toothed monsters scare us. If anything, when we ran out of vicious critters to kill—saber tooth cats, woolly mammoths, giant bears, sharks in the oceans—we started slaughtering each other because we crave violence like a toothless corner-whore craves meth.
We have games about killing, songs about killing, and movies about killing. We have pretend killing, practice killing, and real killing—lots of real killing—because that’s what humans do.
It defines us.
It culls the weak and makes the species strong.
All that crap sounds good in Kane’s head as he sits in the back of a semi-tractor trailer that used to haul ore down from the mine up in the mountains north of Leadville. The trailer is covered with a painted tarp that when seen from above—way above—makes it appear empty. It’s camouflage for the platoon inside, doing everything possible to keep their transport secret as they ride ingloriously to war.
