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

by Bobby Adair

  He’s on his back.

  His comm is silent.

  Pieces of shattered ships move across the sky, every one in a different direction at a different speed. Some spin and shimmer like jewels in the sun’s stark white light. Others are dark, and only reflect enough light to cast hints of their size.

  In the next days or weeks, those artifacts of humanity’s last grasp at freedom will be caught in the moon’s gravity and fall. Others will burn up in the earth’s atmosphere. More might slip into solar orbits and follow an elliptical path around the sun for a million years.

  Earth is out there in the void, a quarter million miles away, half-blue, smeared with white clouds, half-black, with continents traced in artificial, gossamer light—earth’s cities, sewing life in the darkness.

  Kane sees the twinkling outline of the California coast, and sees the country’s eastern seaboard just crossing into morning. Dawn’s early light crawling across the world.

  Soon, his wife will be up. She’ll be getting ready for work, and she’ll be watching the news. Every channel will be talking about only one thing, the fleet that went to the moon, and the brave few who took the journey, sacrificing all they had for the freedom of earth’s people.

  Kane talks into his comm and gets no answer. The ever-present static tells him it’s functioning, but no human voice carries on the electromagnetic waves.

  He tries to move, and realizes he’s pinned beneath the wreckage of the ship that brought him to the moon. Scattered around lay the bodies of his men, many of them.

  He wonders if Garcia and Harney killed enough of the Grays’ slave army to get inside the behemoth and detonate their explosives.

  They were close. The numbers looked bad, but the battle was going their way.

  Kane can’t move his arm, so he can’t see his watch to see how long he’s been out. He can’t even check his oxygen to know how long he has left to stay alive. It might be minutes. It might be days. Garcia might have succeeded and he might be coming to the rescue.

  Or I might be the last of the armada.

  Kane struggles against the weight pinning him and realizes it’s not the weight keeping him down. The problem is worse than that. He can’t move his arms or his legs, and he can’t feel them.

  Not like this.

  Please, God. Not like this.

  A rescue he hoped for just moments ago, he now doesn’t want to come. A life of paralysis is unbearable for a soldier.

  Kane’s doesn’t want his son to grow up pushing his father’s wheelchair and changing diapers.

  Despair comes easy now.

  Kane chokes on tears.

  He curses himself for his weakness.

  In truth, he’s not likely ever to leave the moon alive. He won’t face his end like a coward.

  He breathes deeply and accepts the fact that everything is out of his hands. All he can do is watch the beauty of earth so far off in space, and pray that his wife and soon-to-be-born son—Dylan—will live free.

  The dawn is past the Appalachian Mountains now, and the sun is edging its way over the Mississippi.

  A light flashes in the dark part of the country where Kane guesses Montana should be.

  The light is bright and sudden, disappearing like a flash of lightning.

  But it doesn’t go away completely.

  At its center, a circle of fire, yellow-orange, shrinking down to a blot of red.

  Kane prays he’s just witnessed the eruption of a volcano, but he knows even as the thought materializes in his head it’s a wistful lie.

  As if to confirm the lie, the ground beneath him shivers.

  A streak of red shoots into the sky.

  It’s a shot from a railgun, one of the big ones the Grays built into the moon’s rock.

  Kane watches the enormous projectile shrink as it speeds away, growing dull as it cools. As large as it is, as fast as it’s moving, it’ll impact earth with the power of a nuclear bomb. And it’ll look just like the one that hit Montana a moment ago.

  Earth’s first great space armada is now only sparkly space junk.

  The lunar expeditionary force has failed.

  Kane failed.

  And earth is being bombarded in a rain of artificial meteors that will continue to fall until the Grays have killed enough innocent people to break earth’s will.

  Then the planet’s governments will surrender.

  Seven billion humans, arrogantly sitting at the pinnacle of their achievements, are soon to be the conquered slaves of just eighteen effete Grays who parked themselves on the moon with a few technological advantages in their possession.

  My son will grow up a slave.

  Kane wants to cry out in rage.

  How could we be so self-centered-stupid?

  Had earth just prepared, had people stopped killing one another for just awhile, they might have seen this coming. They might have done something.

  Even in high school, Kane knew there were a septillion stars in the universe.

  A septillion, a number so large it’s beyond comprehension.

  To imagine it, Kane has to think of stars like eggs, a million to a carton.

  If he took a billion of those cartons and put them on a really big pallet, and then put a billion of those pallets in a warehouse, then he’d have one septillion.

  A billion, billion, million.

  With so many stars, and so many planets orbiting them, how could anyone believe earth to be unique—life, unique.

  The universe had to be teeming with civilizations.

  Another spot on the earth flashes bright and slowly shrinks to a pool of red.

  It was never a question of whether the aliens were coming. They were always coming.

  The End

  Please,

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  Silly Things Tend I Add to the Ends of My Books

  Book 1 Silliness

  “Dude,” says Brice. “Do you feel that?”

  “What?”

  “That?”

  “Are you high?” I ask. “Drunk? Too much Suit Juice? Brain tumor from too much solar radiation?”

  “No,” answers Brice. “Look around. Things are different.”

  I do look around. “Holy shit! Where’d everything go?”

  “I think we transcended.”

  “We’re dead?” I can’t believe it. “After all the shit we just went through, now we’re dead?”

  “No” Brice is awed. “It’s a weird limbo state. Purgatory. Not dead, but not alive.”

  “You’re freakin’ me out, man.”

  Brice closes his eyes and inhales deeply. “You feel that?”

  “Are you asking me to touch...”

  “No, dumbass.” Brice points into the air at nothing I can see, just dark that’s not really dark, gray that isn’t gray, light that doesn’t glow.

  I shiver. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”

  “Close your eyes,” urges Brice. “Feel it.”

  “Fine.” I do because I know how hardheaded he can be. I wait. I breathe. I do feel it.

  “Holy shit!”

  Brice grins. “See what I mean?”

  “What the hell is that?” I’m looking around. “It feels like somebody’s spying on me only I can’t figure out where they are.”

  “You know what that is?”

  If I did, I’d have guessed already. “Why don’t you quit being cryptic and just tell me?”

  “That’s the reader.”

  “Fuck you.” I roll my eyes. “There’s no such thing as readers.”

  “Man,” says Brice. “How can you not believe in readers? Our whole existence depends on rea
ders. In fact, they say that every instance of existence in our great two-dimensional plane proceeds at the whim of a reader sitting on some great cosmic couch, turning pages, sipping wine, and ignoring his kids in the other room.”

  I make a jerk-off motion, exaggerating as I always do the size of my invisible tool.

  “I’m totally serious,” says Brice, he’s getting excited, like maybe Santa Clause is nearby with a bag of surplus Christmas toys. “Here’s the kicker, the reader controls time itself. Our moments flow from one to the next when she turns a page. When she’s not turning, we’re not—”

  “Not what?” I interrupt. “Not alive?”

  “Not that exactly.” Brice says it calmly, not rising to my argument. “We’re in a gooey nothing limbo land. Like this place. Not existing, really, just waiting for something to happen.”

  “That sounds like a shitty metaphysical system.”

  “Dude, you can’t talk that way.” Brice is mortified. “You’ll offend people. They might put the book down and never pick it up again, and then you’ll cease to exist.”

  “I did say, shitty, right?” I huff. “Shitty! I mean who wants to live in a world where they have no control over whether they live or die? Not me. I don’t want anyone controlling my life any more than I want those damn Grays running it.”

  “Oh, it’s worse than you think,” Brice tells me.

  “How could it be?”

  “There’s also an author?”

  It all sounds like hokum to me. I try to come up with a gesture that’ll express my derision more forcefully than that last juvenile hand motion.

  “He’s like a middleman between our world and the reader’s world.”

  I sigh.

  “Really. I’m serious.”

  Looking for a way to get through to Brice’s rational side, I suggest, “Fine. Let’s go talk to him.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Of course.” I laugh. It’s mean. I want it to hurt. I want to embarrass Brice back to reality.

  He doesn’t take the bait. “The thing you need to know about authors is they tend to be antisocial. They hide in dark rooms and make shit up all day. And they don’t like being around other people. So if they see you coming, they’ll run away.”

  “Poplar at parties, I’ll bet.” I’m getting exasperated. “Why don’t we make an appointment, or send this author dude an email or something?”

  “That’s the other thing,” says Brice. “We can’t. He lives in the three-dimensional world with the readers and exists in a separate temporal space.”

  I look around again at the ambiguous nothing of where we’re floating and realize, not only is everything around me undefined, but I am too. I have no body. I’m just a disembodied voice. That scares me.

  Brice senses my fear. “You’re finally looking. You’re feeling it, aren’t you?”

  I don’t want to admit it, but the words slip out. “I’m worried.”

  “So you finally see what I’m talking about.”

  “Not really,” I admit. “I don’t like this place. Maybe the Grays and Trogs weren’t so bad. I want to get back to our universe?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” says Brice. “We’re not in control. It’s the author and the reader. Lots and lots of readers that control our fate.”

  “Can’t we get off this shit?” I argue, “Do you really believe that we float here in the gray nothing until some reader comes along? We can’t do anything to change our fate?”

  “Well,” says Brice. “There are theories.”

  “Lay them on me, man.” The nothingness is getting to me. I’m willing to listen to any ideas.

  “First off, the author is probably living under a bridge, eating rat-flavored ramen from the clearance bin, and drinking coffee brewed from used grounds filtered through a hobo’s underwear. Life as an author is hard.”

  I shrug. “Sucks for him out there in three-dimensional-land. What’s that got to do with us?”

  “The only way the author’s life can improve,” says Brice, “the only way he can write more books is if readers take an active role in his welfare.”

  “This sounds like the beginning of a multi-level-marketing pitch. I’m out.”

  Brice laughs.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “You said you were out. But you’re still here, stuck in the limbo with me.”

  “Shit.”

  “Listen to me,” says Brice. “It’s not an MLM. All a reader has to do to make our lives full, and long, and eternal, is read the book and then go to a party, get drunk and dance on a table while shouting to everyone who can hear that this is the greatest book they ever read.”

  “Sounds like a commitment,” I grumble. “Nobody’s going to do that. Is there anything easier?”

  “Well, they could tell their friends, I suppose. Maybe on Facebook or social media or something?”

  “Facebook?” I ask. “What’s social media?”

  “It’s what people do on the internet when they’re stuck in a line somewhere and bored or when they’re at home and they’re tired of trying to play smoochy-smoochy with the wife.”

  “Ah,” I say “So that’s it. We’re afterthoughts to their sex lives.”

  “Well, they could leave a review where the bought the book, just tick some stars and save it, or even say a few kind words, you know, like ‘This book was a tolerable string of syllables that kept me distracted while I was waiting in the dentist’s office. But seriously, buy it. It ROCKS!’”

  CLICK HERE TO LEAVE A REVIEW (P.S. GOOD KARMA!)

  “Okay. Is that it?”

  “Not really?”

  “What else?”

  “Well,” says Brice, “there’s the email list. If readers sign up, the author can spam them from time to time when he as a new book out. Or maybe when his friend (or anybody who buys him lunch) has a new book out.”

  “Eh, I’m not sure I’d give up my email address just for a notification about a book.”

  “It’s not just that,” says Brice. “There’s a free book in it.”

  CLICK HERE FOR A FREE PREQUEL, FREEDOM’S SIEGE!

  (Extra note to the readers: This prequel was already included above)

  “Tell me more,” I’m interested. “Are we in it?”

  “No,” says Brice. “It’s about the Grays’ siege of the earth before we were born. Your dad’s in it.”

  “My dad?” I ask. “He died in a mining accident before I was born.”

  “That’s what you think,” Brice reveals. “He was a sergeant in the assault force earth sent to attack the Grays on the moon.”

  “I thought they were all blown out of the sky.”

  Brice shakes his head. “That’s what the MSS wants you to believe, dumbass. You can’t trust those bastards.”

  “So, it’s the story of my dad.” I’m having a hard time believing it. “I’d like to read that.”

  “Sign up for the email list,” Brice tells me. “And leave a review and tell your friends so the author can stop drinking hobo coffee and write some more books.”

  AND OH, WHAT THE HECK…COME JOIN THE FUN ON FACEBOOK!

  Book 2 Silliness

  Please, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Beverly Blair, but you know me as Colonel Blair, perhaps derogatorily as ‘Queen of the Potato.’

  I just want to say, I greatly resent that one, and want to express in no uncertain terms that Dylan Kane is an immature dunce. He’s got a third-grade boy’s cruel heart and I can assure you, he’ll lead this whole endeavor to ruin.

  So please, pay attention when I tell you, don’t encourage him by reading this terrible compilation of half-truths and self-indulgent absurdities. I’m a good person and he makes me look like a total bitch. In truth, I think he has mommy issues. In fact, I’m certain of it. I could tell you some things. I know one he didn’t tell you—among other things, he’s afraid of flying monkeys.
r />   I know!

  Flying monkeys. Can you believe it?

  Who the hell’s afraid of flying monkeys? And that’s just the first on a long list. He’s a total sissy.

  The point I’m trying to get to is this. We don’t want Dylan Kane to torture us with any more of this sophomoric swill, am I right? So let’s all agree, whatever we do, we won’t follow this link and buy the next book in the series:

  CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE FREEDOM’S FRAY

  (Note from Bobby for this edition: Book 3 is included. You already read it)

  We won’t follow this link for a free prequel and email list signup:

  CLICK HERE FOR A FREE PREQUEL, FREEDOM’S SIEGE!

  (Note from Bobby for this edition: The prequel is included. You already read it)

  We absolutely won’t leave a review. I mean, really, do I even have to tell you this?

  CLICK HERE TO LEAVE A REVIEW (P.S. GOOD KARMA!)

  And of course, we won’t Like Bobby Adair on Facebook.

  OH, WHAT THE HECK…LIKE HIM ON FACEBOOK.

  Let’s be honest, if Dylan Kane had a shred of self-respect he wouldn’t need the ephemeral adulation of social-media-centric cyber relationships. Kane should buy a goldfish. They make good pets and are like training wheels for the immature men in our lives who need a dependable starter relationship.

  Thank you for your time,

  Colonel Beverly Blair

  Ministry of State Security

  Book 3 Not-So-Silliness

  I used to write one of these for every book, but I haven't done one in a while.

  As she always does before a book's release, the other half, Kat, asked me this morning if I was going to write a Foreword or Last Word for Freedom's Fray. I said no. However, since that whirlwind cruise and unconventional stingray-themed exchange of vows in 2015, I think she’s contractually obligated now to nag me about this. And like any good wife, she asked me to explain why. So now, I've been thinking about it all morning long.

  Bottom line, I stopped after I received one too many bad reviews, not based on the story in question, but based on something I said in the Foreword or in the Final Word section where I took a moment to tell any interested readers my thoughts about the book I'd just created and published. I used to proudly put this in the front of my books. One of my favorites was the intro to Slow Burn 7, where I talk about how what started out as “just a zombie series” turned into something more than I ever expected. I had no idea that my writing had actually changed lives, helping people rekindle a love for reading, and in a few cases giving confidence that led to a reader going back to school to finish.