Freedom's Fist

by Bobby Adair

  Not so.

  At twenty minutes in, Penny tells me, “It won’t accelerate any faster.”

  "Physics," Phil explains, like I don’t know what he’s going to say. "Our reactor and drive array push g’s like nobody’s business, which works out just fine for making our relatively small ship zip through the galaxy. In trying to push this megaton brick…"

  He lets the words hang on the comm.

  “I know,” I say, “all that momentum is hard to redirect. Momentum is what we’re counting on.” I turn to Penny. “Get it going as fast as you can without blowing our reactor.”

  Brice comms me from the front of the ship. They’ve just closed the assault door up there. “I need to know when they get close again.” He’s talking about the Trog soldiers who’ve been trying—unsuccessfully so far—to mount an attack on our ship through the demolished passageways in the stern of their cruiser. “We have charges placed in the debris and we—”

  “Not too close to the grav lens,” Phil confirms. “We can’t afford to damage it.”

  “I thought it was indestructible,” says Brice.

  “Nothing’s inde—”

  “Don’t worry so much,” Brice tells him. “They’re all placed a good bit away, with bulkheads between us and them.”

  Phil’s not satisfied. “C4 will—”

  “Let me do my job,” snaps Brice. “You do yours. Warn me when the Trogs close in so we can detonate.”

  Phil grumbles, but agrees.

  “Major,” says Brice, “everything is a mess out there. We were able to set up charges in a few halls on the starboard side of the ship, and in an engineering space below. We can’t get to the other areas without detouring deep into the cruiser and working our way around. Unfortunately, those areas are full of Trogs.”

  “Too much to risk to in,” I tell him.

  “Most of the ones we saw were dead,” says Brice. “There seem to be plenty more getting suited up and organized. I’d expect a coordinated attack soon.”

  “Right now,” Phil cuts in, “they’re massing in the halls where they spotted you and the others. I don’t think it’s occurred to them to attack our ship with their disruptors.”

  “Phil,” I ask, “can you keep them at bay by pulsing the grav lens? You know, knocking the hell out of them when they try to come close?”

  “Can do.”

  “Penny,” I ask, “how’s our speed?”

  “Good.”

  “Heading?”

  She shrugs. “I’m flying blind. This is Phil’s show now.”

  With hundreds of tons of cruiser machinery and hull material packed around us, I can’t make out anything but mangled metal with the bug in my head. With my eyes, I see the same thing Penny does.

  Tarlow is out of the game. The Rusty Turd isn’t buried so deep in the cruiser’s aft section that his radar dishes were scraped away, but several were damaged, and those that weren’t are blocked by the cone of the cruiser’s cavernous drive array. Still, he moans, “Don’t run us into anything.”

  Glancing over at Penny, Phil says, “Stay on the headings I send to your console.” Over the comm, he calls to Brice. “The attack is coming.”

  “Roger,” answers Brice. He alerts everyone onboard as an explosion rocks the ship—not close, but we feel tremors through the metal in which we’re lodged.

  “The ship is coming loose,” says Penny. “I feel it on the controls.”

  I glance at Phil.

  "Nothing we can do," he explains, and then he turns to Penny. "We can push further in. I’ll pulse the grav lens while you pulse the main drive."

  “Let’s try it,” she says.

  “Don’t get us stuck,” whines Tarlow.

  Blue flashes bright through our ship as we lurch forward.

  “Tight again,” says Penny.

  Phil is shaking his head.

  “What?” I ask.

  Phil is anxious. A lot is on his plate. “We have a platoon, maybe more, coming up to the port side of the ship.”

  “We can’t get to that side,” Brice reminds us.

  “Grav pulse again?” I ask.

  “When they get close,” says Phil.

  I can sense the speed we’re building, and it seems like we’re headed back toward Trinity Base. “Phil, how long until impact?”

  “How close do you want to cut it?”

  “So close we can’t be stopped,” I tell him. We need all the momentum in this big cruiser we can manage so the Trogs below won’t be able to push it off course when they start bubble jumping to safety. “Are they responding yet?”

  “Yes,” says Phil. “They’re clearing a path. We need another ninety seconds.”

  “We’re coming loose again,” says Penny.

  “The cruiser isn’t designed for what we’re doing,” says Phil, losing patience with the stress of the entire situation being dumped on him and Nicky. “The interior structures we’re pushing against can’t handle the loads we’re putting on them.”

  I feel metal bending and grinding through the souls of my boots. If we weren’t in vacuum, I know I’d hear it, too.

  “How fast are we going?” asks Tarlow, doing all he can to find some calm.

  “Fast enough,” says Phil.

  “Jesus!” shouts Brice. “One of them just jammed a disrupter through the hull. Starboard side.”

  I think the Trog must have slid the blade down between the railroad ties and found a spot where the steel was thin enough to go through. Still, if one is doing that, others must be out there, hacking at the bent railroad ties with those damn lethal blades. I shout, “Pulse the grav!”

  “Can’t,” answers Phil.

  “I’m barely holding straight now,” says Penny.

  “We’ll lose hull integrity,” Brice calls. We’ve already lost pressure. It’s structural integrity he’s worried about. “I’m blowing the rest of the C4.”

  The charges aren’t on the side of the hull the attack is coming from, but—

  A blast shakes everything.

  Penny curses.

  Grav fields push chaotically on me as I turn to Phil. “Keep us straight.”

  “Phil,” asks Penny, “when do I release?”

  “Veer to port,” he answers. “Hard, or we’ll miss.”

  I sway with the ship. It feels like we’re jamming it through a recycled tinfoil factory as metal all around the hull tears and bends.

  “Now! Now! Now!” hollers Phil.

  “Grav tight!” I call to everyone, as I glue my ass to my chair and amp up my suit’s compensating grav.

  Penny reverses the field on the drive array as Phil maxes our remaining power into the grav lens.

  The ship jerks free of the cruiser and its metal carcass freight-trains past us, leaving us, for the smallest moment, in silence.

  Our hull strains under the load Penny and Phil are putting on it. The inertial grav fails to compensate.

  I try to see what’s happening outside with my grav sense and all I see is the intense blue of our fields. Over Penny’s shoulder, her screens have flashed to life, and the Trog cruiser is racing ahead of us, a gaping hole in its stern, girders and plates flapping and falling away. In front of the cruiser, I see the protoplanet mostly obscured by the cruiser’s bulk.

  Far below, ships lumber out of the way. A few are firing, but not much. They barely have a defensive load of slugs.

  Penny swerves hard to pull us off our collision course.

  The cruiser recedes as it draws closer to the small planet’s surface. I see the gridwork of Trinity Base, and I extrapolate a course in my head. The rapidly changing parallax makes it look like the cruiser is going to miss. "Phil?"

  He’s focused on managing fields and doesn’t respond.

  “Are we on target?” I ask, as inertia nearly crushes me.

  Over the comm, everyone groans from the weight.

  “Sorry,” Penny calls, as she flattens out our path, still running toward the planet. I see the horizon ahe
ad of us.

  Penny flips the view of one of her screens to aft, and I see the cruiser getting visibly smaller due to the perspective of our distance and our rapidly increasing speed.

  It looks to be on target. And then it appears to fly past the planet.

  Yet only for a microsecond.

  A white flash washes our monitors in static.

  When they come back, the base is erupting in a geyser of fire and stone tearing all the way up into the scattered cruisers in their cockeyed orbits above.

  That, you fucking Trog Empire, is what it feels like to get a big human fist smashed in your face!

  Chapter 62

  Penny rides the protoplanet’s gravity to slingshot the Rusty Turd away from the battle at high speed.

  “Direct hit?” I ask the bridge crew.

  “No,” Phil answers. “It came down near one edge of the base, but I think it won’t matter.”

  “How long do we wait to recon?” I ask.

  “We need to return to the tank ring to refuel.” says Phil.

  “How badly?” I ask.

  “We might not make it.”

  “What?” I try to hide my anger.

  “Pushing that cruiser,” says Phil, “burned off a lot more H than I estimated it would.”

  Nodding, I accept it’s my fault. “When you say we might not make it, what does that mean?”

  "I’m charting the most fuel-efficient return path now," he answers. Glancing at Penny, Phil adds, "Her using the protoplanet’s gravity to accelerate the ship instead of burning our fuel will probably save us.”

  “Good job.” I reach forward and pat her on the back.

  “I can read a fuel gauge and make coffee, too,” she answers.

  “Get us back there,” I say. “We’ll figure out our next step once we gas up and evaluate our damage.”

  Chapter 63

  The jump is quick—nine minutes. We barely notice.

  Finding the tank ring is easy. It’s in the orbit where we left it. Even parking the Rusty Turd in the ring and locking the fuel lines goes off without a hitch. All is good until we start brainstorming the solution to our biggest problem.

  “Seven of thirty-six mounting brackets are damaged or scraped entirely away,” says Brice, as we start the meeting.

  “And the hull?” I ask.

  “Seven holes,” he answers. “Three the size of your fist, one a centimeter or two across, a few slashes from those disruptors. The rest of the hull is nicked up, but we still have enough steel on our skin to make it through a few more battles.”

  A lot more than that, I hope. “Internal damage?”

  “A bunch of railgun slugs fused together,” says one of the gun techs. “The big rounds came through the hull into one of our magazines.”

  “A small round tore a hole through the commode,” adds Lenox.

  “All ship systems are operational,” says Phil.

  “Our tanks are topped off,” adds Penny. “We’re ready to fly. Trying to bubble jump with the tank ring will be a mistake. The ship is locked in, but I feel a little jiggle in the controls.”

  “Bubble jumps are about precision,” says Phil, looking around for everyone’s attention. “If we don’t—”

  “We know,” Brice cuts him off. “We don’t need that lecture again.”

  It’s my turn to look around to make sure all eyes are on me. "We can’t bubble jump back to earth. It was my decision to ram that cruiser. That’s when the brackets were damaged.” I’m stuck on the next part. Do I apologize for the choice to strand them all here? Or do I tell them to suck it up like soldiers do?

  “Or,” says Brice, coming to my rescue. “We don’t beat ourselves up about any of that. This is war. All of us knew what we were in for a long time before we got on this ship.”

  Nods all around, some reluctant.

  Silva is the next to speak up. “Focusing on the decisions already made isn’t going to change our situation.” She looks at me. “You did what you did to accomplish the mission.”

  “She’s right,” says Brice. “Now, we need to figure out whether we can make it home. If not, we need to get comfortable here.”

  “We can’t bubble jump with the tank ring,” says Phil, making sure we all understand that. “With seven mounting brackets gone, it’ll be suicide.”

  “Can we repair the brackets?” asks Lenox. I know she knows the answer.

  “One of the sacrifices we made to save weight,” I tell the crew, for any who don’t know, “was on equipment to affect such a repair. We have the basics—some electronic diagnostic meters, a few basic tools—but nothing like what we’d need to repair the brackets.”

  “What about all those damaged cruisers?” asks Lenox. “Our cruisers, when earth was building them, launched with shops and equipment to repair just about anything that could go wrong with a ship.”

  “That’s an idea,” says Phil, “but we don’t know how far the Trogs stripped their ships down to make the long jumps to get here.”

  “We know they fitted them out somewhere,” argues Lenox. “Maybe at the last star along the way.”

  “Maybe in earth’s system,” says Phil.

  “Or here,” I add. “Spitz’s people suspect the railguns are added at Trinity Base. We just don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Brice.

  Tarlow laughs uncomfortably. “I always knew I was going to die in space.”

  Everybody ignores him.

  “Brice,” I ask, “what do you mean, ‘it doesn’t matter’?”

  “Boarding one of those Trog cruisers we shot up is a gamble,” he says. “The repair shops might be functional. They might be vaporized. Any ship still intact enough for the shops to be online is probably half-full of Trogs who’d love to filet us with their disruptors. There aren’t enough of us to take on ten thousand Trogs. Or even a few hundred.”

  “The way the cruisers are designed,” says Penny, “puts the maintenance shops in the aft section of the ships, adjacent to the barracks.”

  “So if we go back and try to kill the Trogs still onboard a disabled cruiser,” concludes Lenox, “we probably destroy the fabrication shops.”

  "Not that all the Trogs on those vessels are going to wait in the barracks for us to come and kill them," says Brice. "Boarding a disabled ship is a gamble."

  “It’s one we might have to take,” I say, “if we want to get home.”

  Brice shakes his head, “There’s a better place we can go.”

  Chapter 64

  We pop out of our fourth hop, our shortest of the trip, less than three thousand klicks above and on the opposite side of the protoplanet that used to be the cozy home of Trinity Base. Wasting not a second, Penny accelerates us down to the surface.

  Tarlow, finally settled down, is scanning with his functional dishes. Phil and the Gray are trying to get a picture of every gravitationally significant body within a quarter million miles—Trog cruisers are what they’re searching for.

  Through Penny’s monitors, I see the protoplanet is engulfed in what seems to be a dust storm with thunderheads standing hundreds of miles above the surface. Lightning flashes the brownish clouds and streaks of meteors burn long trails, disappearing into the thick haze below.

  “I need to power up the grav lens,” says Phil. “There’s too much debris to go through without it.”

  Without looking over at him, I say, “As little as we can get away with.”

  “I can’t even see the planet,” says Penny.

  “It’s down there,” Phil assures her. “We’ll need to be careful.”

  “Anything out here?” I ask, as Tarlow seems to be spending too much time looking at Penny’s monitors, too.

  Tarlow grunts and goes back to his work. “Cruisers. Some drifting. Most under power. Generally moving back toward Trinity base. Nobody in a hurry.”

  “All this mess,” I ask, pointing at Penny’s screens, yet wanting an answer from anybody. “This is our handiwork?”


  “Yes,” says Tarlow.

  Phil agrees. “The collision of the cruiser with Trinity base pulverized mountains of rock and threw it into the atmosphere and into orbit. It’ll take years for it to settle back to the ground.”

  I look over at Brice.

  He shrugs. “I didn’t say there were any guarantees.”

  Chapter 65

  Penny has the ship down close to the surface, at less than a hundred feet, flying through the haze, descending as we close in on our target.

  “Can they make us out from above?” I ask.

  Phil shakes his head. “It’s all about mass. With so much debris above us, the Grays won’t see us unless we start pushing a lot of grav.”

  “Can you see them?” I ask.

  "I can," he answers. "A cruiser is a whale. We’re a fish. They’re far enough away and they aren’t enveloped like we are. The advantage is to us.”

  “Can you tell what they’re doing?” I ask.

  “Besides coming together?” answers Phil. “No.”

  “Tarlow?”

  “My images are fuzzy from all the crap in the air,” he says. “I think they’re forming up again.”

  “Strange.” I look around. “Brice, Lenox, any ideas?”

  “Staying near the base,” suggests Lenox. “Waiting for the next fleet to arrive? They can’t go anywhere, can they?”

  “A few of the cruisers,” says Phil. “Maybe. We don’t know if any ever completely refueled before they took off. Maybe they weren’t even refueling yet. Maybe they were working on fitting the railgun slugs. We don’t know. As far as Nicky and I can tell, the ones who were docked when we arrived, were the same ones there when we attacked.”

  “So maybe nobody has enough gas to get home.” I know it’s wishful thinking. We don’t have any evidence to the contrary yet.

  “Have they landed to search for survivors?” asks Brice.

  “There aren’t any,” says Phil. “We can’t pick up the presence of any life forms, Gray or Trog.”

  “Could they be here?” asks Brice. “Out of range?”

  Phil nods. “No Trog cruiser is on the surface. I can tell you that for sure. If they dropped off a search party and went back up, that’s a possibility. If so, they’re too far away for us to know they’re here. There might be too much rock and whatnot between us and them.”