by Bobby Adair
FREEDOM’S FURY
Book 2 in the Freedom’s Fire Series
A novel
by
Bobby Adair
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Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair
Chapter 1
Who risks death when a half-assed lie is enough to guarantee life?
Pretty much nobody.
Orange-suited SDF troopers are cycling out through the warehouse’s airlock, stepping into the bleak vacuum over the asteroid’s surface, empty-handed and angry-eyed.
Is it the loss of their ships and the death of their comrades that’s left them bitter? Is it their short imprisonment?
Or is it the charade they play?
How many of these mutineers are liars who were afraid to lose their lives when others in their platoons chose rebellion? Did they each raise a hand and say ‘Me too’ for fear of being executed and ejected into space? How many made that choice in hopes of finding a chance to get away later?
With each burp of the airlock, more empty helmets go in, and more SDF mutineers come out.
Blair is trying to organize them into their platoons without much help. We’re short on officers, and the sergeants are showing the inexperience of their fresh stripes and simulator training. None has seen as much war as Brice.
The only organizing most of the sergeants have engaged in was lining their squads up for orderly loading into the grav lifts back at the Silverthorne spaceport. The only leading they did was through the chaos of the bombardment in Arizona, herding their troops into the assault ships. “Run that way and get on that ship or die!” Probably the only order most of these sergeants has ever barked.
My god, the non-coms are little better than hall monitors.
Blair directs the loitering troops to scavenge weapons from the dead Trogs. She’s taking charge, and is obviously comfortable with it. Everybody seems perfectly satisfied to act on her commands. She’s now a colonel—her SDF rank has translated seamlessly into the same rank in our tiny insurgent army.
My major rank did, too.
Do we humans so desperately hunger for structure that we’ll accept any, even if the legitimacy is nothing more than a shoulder decoration left over from a previous job?
I guess.
So, I listen for instructions. Why not?
I’ve already done all I knew to do, or guessed to do on my own, following my steps as one led to another. I brought two of my company’s ships to the Free Army’s asteroid base. I led a commando-style raid to take out the Trogs defending the surface and manning the anti-ship guns. With the help of my squad, I freed the prisoners, sent Jill and her platoon away in the mining tug to dispose of the damaged Trog cruiser, and directed our only functioning assault ship off the surface in case the battle for the mining colony isn’t over.
Now, nothing is happening except organizational bullshit. I’m awaiting instructions, and Blair is in her element, providing them to everyone her eye falls upon.
I’m starting to think maybe my place in the world—my natural element—is in combat. Weird to imagine that for a guy who’s spent his whole life constructing an elaborate lie to live behind, while pushing plate after plate after plate down the grav fab line.
My life has been nothing but lies and fantasies.
And a nagging, yet distant danger.
People in charge of the world like to hang spies and rebels who don’t appreciate the status quo. That’s one thing the siege didn’t change.
Still, when the Trogs were swinging their blue disruptor blades and coming to kill me, you know, for being on their ship and trying to destroy it, I was just as frightened as the next grunts in the platoon, yet didn’t succumb to it. I didn’t think about dying. I didn’t dwell on it, anyway.
I just did what needed doing.
Maybe that was luck, one fortunate event on top of another. If I’d cowered, if I’d doubted, or overthought everything trying to find the safest approach, I think I’d be dead right now and so would every man and woman on my ship. Well, if not dead, then consigned to a serf’s future, not any different from the past we’re all trying to escape.
At the moment though, I’m bored.
I’m staring at the black sky, watching Jill’s mining tug slowly shrink to a pinprick of reflected light as it races through space to catch the damaged Trog cruiser and push it so far away that it’s ten thousand Trog legionnaires won’t be a danger to us.
I wonder, does the boredom make me normal or something else?
Does it matter?
Is it just that some people are cut out for the logistical side of war, and some aren’t?
And is it not just that I have an aptitude for fighting, now that I’ve glimpsed at the clarity of life through the lens of mortal struggle, tasted deathly fear as it courses through my veins and dribbles onto my taste buds, and rode the wave of victorious elation with my enemy’s blood on my blade and his body under my boots, I have to ask, am I an addict?
I do crave another helping.
“Are you as surprised as I am?” asks Sergeant Brice.
I turn to see him walking up beside me while ejecting the magazine from his railgun and checking to see how many rounds are left.
“What are we talking about?” I ask.
“That we lived through that.”
I shrug. Twenty-four hours ago I was on earth and had never seen a Trog in real life. “I don’t have a frame of reference.” But in my heart, I think I know. “I take it this isn’t a typical day for SDF troopers.”
Brice laughs. It’s that dark laugh of his, not mean, but twisted black by too many days dodging the reaper’s scythe. “Mostly we just die.”
“Maybe I’m surprised.”
“That we’re not dead?”
“I guess,” I admit. “Truth is, I was just thinking about that. I want to stay alive as much as the next guy. I just don’t expect I’ll be the one who catches a bullet or who’s cleaved by a Trog. Maybe that’s conceit, or it might be delusion.” I shrug. “I don’t care which.”
“You shouldn’t,” says Brice. “You don’t want to question things too much. Questions turn to doubts, and doubts undermine a soldier’s confidence. Call it conceit. Call it whatever, but sometimes, it’s all you’ve got.”
“Maybe all you need?” I ask.
“All you needed when you told us we were ramming those Trog cruisers,” confirms Brice. “All you needed when you stormed that bridge all by yourself.”
I laugh. “That wasn’t the plan, exactly.”
“Just turned out that way?” Brice chuckles.
“And maybe imagination,” I add. “Maybe it’s the intangible mix of both. You think of something crazy, and then believe you’re indestructible enough to pull it off. Maybe that surprised the Trogs as much as anything.”
Nodding, Brice concludes and affirms, “They’re dead. We’re not.”
“They never imagined a handful of humans could attack them like we did,” I say. “So of course they never expected it, never dreamed to look for it, and that was a huge part of our success. It’s easier to shoot a Trog not shooting back because he’s busy eating his lunch and not imagining you’re behind him.”
“So that’s it, Napoleon?” Brice laughs, “Surprise, conceit, and imagination, the ingredients of victory?”
I don’t say anything. I’m not sure if Brice is laughing at me or if he’s giddy on a post-battle high. Instead, I start thinking about the cost of the victory. Half of my squad died, half of my platoon is gone. Half of my company was blown to bits wh
ile their ships were rocketing into space from the Arizona shipyard. They never even tasted war.
In total, the company is nearing seventy-percent casualties in the first twenty-four hours.
Holy Christ!
“What’s the matter,” Brice asks. “Your face just changed.” He looks me up and down. “Your catheter slip out? You got shit dripping down your leg?”
“Casualties,” I tell him.
He stops his train of thought, probably runs a quick estimate on the numbers and morosely says, “Get used to it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“That’s admirable,” he tells me, as his gaze wanders over to Hastings’ body, and it seems suddenly inappropriate that she’s still there on the ground, slowly freezing solid.
I look around. Trog dead are scattered everywhere. Some are on the ground. Some are floating, waiting for the asteroid’s micro-g to finally pull them down. One body is at knee-height, stiff, but spinning in the vacuum as its suit vents gas through a small hole under the arm. Morbidly hypnotic. All those Chinese SDF corpses are stacked like firewood along the warehouse’s exterior wall. Hundreds of them.
I think about all those Trogs I saw in the hangar of the cruiser we rammed, grasping onto anything to keep from being sucked into space as they slowly suffocated. How many were in there, dying as I watched, dying because I killed them? They seemed like humans—ugly humans—live, thinking beings.
But God, I hate them.
“The thought you need to take to heart,” says Brice, punching me in my sternum, “is that we’re in the army.” He emphasizes the next part. “This is war.” He lets that hang on the comm between us for a moment. “It’s a shitty war, that we’re losing, and that doesn’t matter, because you know what? Even if we were winning, people would still die.”
I take a half-step back out of fist range.
“I hate to see it when that happens,” he says. “I hate it more than you know.” Brice stares for a few long, uncomfortable moments into my eyes, drilling me aggressively, rudely, like he’s caught me washing my dick in the shower a little too long, like he’s looking for things that are none of his business, and he’s finding them.
I find something to glance at over the horizon. Anything to turn away from his interrogating eyes.
“You’ll know,” he tells me. “You have an inkling. I see it in you. It hurts you to lose people.” He nods slowly. “It’s like they’re your kids, almost. You’re responsible for them.” He steps close, balls his fist, and taps his knuckles roughly against my sternum again. “You feel it here every time one dies. They’ll haunt your memories. You’ll see their faces when you close your eyes, and you’ll hear them scream when you’re trying to be alone with your thoughts.” He shakes his head as his lips curl up around an unpleasant taste. “You’ll never be alone again, never. They’ll always be there with you.”
He steps away from me, turns, and scans the horizon, collecting his thoughts for another moment before he goes on. “I think you need to feel that to be a good officer, or sergeant, or whatever you are when you’re responsible for someone else’s life. Just as importantly, you have to be able to trade those lives away when you need to. Maybe that’s what makes a good officer, knowing what it costs to swap lives for objectives, but being able to do it just the same.”
I start running through numbers in my head again. Three Trog cruisers. No, four now. At least ten thousand Trogs on each, and that’s just in the battle legions they keep in the barracks in the back. What, another four or five thousand Trogs and Grays to fly the ship and keep the railgun hoppers full of slugs? Four ships, and sixty thousand Trogs? Holy shit. Sixty thousand. The rough math churns out the result, though I can’t say the number with any pride. There’s too much weird emotion stuck all over it. In an assault ship with forty troops ready to die—ready to do what I tell them, I’m a Hiroshima bomb. “The objective has to be worth it.”
“Damn well better be,” says Brice. “And you need to be willing to die right along with them. The objective has to be worth your life, too. Your troops need to see that in you if you want their loyalty.”
Sixty fucking thousand?
How goddamn deep is my hate?
Or is that just war?
I fear I’m so far out of my depth that my fake leadership is apparent to everyone who sees me, and my insecurity comes to the surface. “Am I doing that, winning their loyalty? Their respect?”
“Yeah, you are,” says Brice, nodding. “I don’t know how long any of us in this company are going to live with you in charge. You’re dragging us into some crazy shit. We’re all behind you, because we’re winning. That’s better than what we were doing before, dying for nothing.”
Chapter 2
“Kane,” calls Silva over the comm, “Kane?”
I look up. Silva and Mostyn are up there in the sky with gray asteroid dust clinging to their orange suits. They’re hard to make out against the black of space. Lenox, not yet coated with dust, is easier to spot. “What do you have?” I’m looping Brice and Blair into the conversation as I look at my d-pad to see who’s on.
“A dozen Trogs are filing out of one of the railgun pits.”
She’s talking about the railguns we disabled when we first attacked the mining colony. Each had a door down at the bottom, undoubtedly connecting them to a tunnel system.
“Why am I just now hearing about this?” snaps Blair.
“I just looped you in,” I tell her, not understanding her anger.
“If we’ve got Trogs coming,” she clucks, “I need to know right away, because I’m in charge. I need to—”
“Chill, bitch,” says Silva, cutting her off. “Who are you again?”
“I’m your commanding officer,” Blair points out, her voice seething. “If you don’t like it, I can kill switch you and your whole platoon.”
Kill switch?
“Listen,” I nearly shout. “Blair—”
“Colonel Blair,” she clarifies.
“Colonel Blair,” I acquiesce, “let’s talk about all this bullshit after we figure out what the Trog situation is. I looped you in as soon as Silva called with the report.”
Brice is looking over at Blair, standing a good twenty meters away, and I can tell by the expression on his face, he’s contemplating giving her the Milliken treatment—a railgun round right through the faceplate.
I shake my head, just enough for him to see. If Blair is serious about her kill-switch authority, it may be that she’s got all of us tied to her biosensor, so if she dies, every rebel on the asteroid does, too.
Brice understands, and instead of ventilating Blair with a burst of railgun slugs, he says, “Trogs don’t do anything with just a hundred or two hundred soldiers.” He looks at me to confirm that his subversive thoughts are set aside for later. “I think a thousand Trogs is the basic unit.”
“Basic unit?” asks Blair.
“Like a platoon for us,” he answers. “We break down to fireteams of two or three, and squads of five to ten, but the platoon is the basic building block of the SDF. When we send troops into battle, they go as a platoon. Forty is the SDF standard.”
“So you think there might be eight or nine hundred below the surface?” asks Blair, doing the math. She sounds like she’s afraid.
“That’s what I’m saying,” answers Brice. “One thing you need to understand. For an enemy we’ve been at war with for two years, we know pitifully little about them. So don’t take my word as gospel.”
“I’ve got at least fifty out of that hole,” says Silva, “and they’re still coming.”
“Toward us?” Brice asks.
“Just exiting and loitering,” says Silva. “Not coming this way, yet.”
“Lenox,” I call.
She answers the question I’m going to ask. “I’m already deploying my squad in positions to defend the warehouse.”
I’m guessing there are still a hundred prisoners inside.
“That’s fine,”
says Blair, like she was the one Lenox was talking to.
Mostyn says, “Kane, I see them coming out of another gun pit on the other side of the mine. Both emplacements on the far end, the first two we took out.”
It crosses my mind that Mostyn is skipping right past Blair to piss her off.
Brice smirks for me to see, points in the direction of the strip mine, then toward the railgun emplacements a kilometer away. “They’re massing. There must be a few dozen airlocks in this complex they can exit from—maybe twice that many. They know we’re slaughtering them when they attack in small numbers. The Trogs are falling back on a tactic they know works. They’re going to gather their force and overwhelm us.”
“Is that gospel?” asks Blair, harshly.
Unprofessional, I’m thinking. She needs to learn how to lead, not just lurk in the shadows like an MSS officer, pouncing on mistakes.
“As gospel as it gets,” Brice tells her, ignoring her tone.
“We’ve got some time, then,” I announce. “Silva, Mostyn, keep a close watch. Let me know as soon as the Trogs start moving. Lenox, I want you up here near the colony where you can see your squad and keep an eye on surface installations.”
“Already here,” she answers.
I look up to see her orange suit moving across the sky, headed exactly where I would have put her. I decide she’s more than competent. Maybe I’m not the only one born for this shit.
“We need more people up there,” says Blair, past her tantrum and back to pragmatic bureaucrat.
Surprised, both Brice and I are stunned by the quick switch in tone.
“Okay,” I answer. “Brice, get with the other sergeants who are out of the warehouse and find us three or four more lookouts who have good grav control and can fly in low g.”
Blair is walking toward us, giving me a nod like I’ve done a good job at conveying her orders, and I’m more than a little put off by it. Still talking to Brice, I say, “Make it six for lookouts. And find us a handful of volunteers who can fly. We need to reconstitute our squad.”
“Will do.” Brice turns and hurries out among the troops who’d been prisoners and still look like a disorganized mob of protesters.
