Freedom's Fury (Freedom's Fire Book 2)

by Bobby Adair

  Brice is putting a full bottle on his thigh as well. “Feels good knowing you’re going to live three more days. Right?”

  I agree, of course. “It’s a funny thing knowing your life expires as soon as that little bottle runs dry. I never thought about it when I was back on earth. I never thought about the details of life out here, how it was so different.”

  “You mean the null g?”

  “No,” I say, “everybody thinks about that. You know, when you’re a kid and dreaming of coming into space, it’s all about zero-g, and rockets blasting, and space battles with aliens. Stupid shit like that. No, I mean the details.”

  Brice laughs loudly. “We’ve done some of that, right? So you’re not far off. But you’re right, life out here isn’t what you think it’s going to be when you’re sitting on the farm dreaming about rocketing into the void.”

  “Is that why you came up?” I dig. “To escape the farm?”

  “Of course,” says Brice. “Some people were made for Nebraska life, living in an endless sea of wheat, rolling hills to the horizon, peace and quiet under blue skies. My parents loved it. They were the right people for that kind of living. I hated it. At least I thought I did.”

  “So you weren’t drafted into the construction crews, you volunteered?”

  “I’m a genius like that.”

  Chapter 40

  The mangled shelf containing the H and C packs turns out to be the best container we have available. With one of several carabiners attached to my suit’s belt, I connect to one end of the shelf. Brice connects to the other. It’ll make for awkward going, however, staying connected once we’re out in the void will be worth any imposition.

  We talk. We weigh the pros and cons. We do it quickly. We’re both pragmatic. We both know the longer we stay on our spinning rock, the more likely we’ll die.

  And then we wait.

  Jupiter sinks below the horizon, and the sun’s tiny bright sparkle rises above the other.

  “I don’t see the Potato,” says Brice, peering into the blackness.

  “Give it a minute.” I’m looking toward the horizon as well, trying to remember where we last saw the asteroid colony with respect to the position of the sun. I point to a spot in the sky. “Maybe around ten o’clock asteroid time.” I’m so clever. “I think that’s when we’ll see it come up.”

  Brice looks. “When was the last time you did see it?”

  “Before we started digging this shelf out of the collapsed shack.”

  “An hour?” Brice asks.

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “How much farther away are we, do you think?”

  I shrug. “I don’t have any clue how fast we’re moving.”

  We watch and wait as the sun climbs in our sky. I begin to think maybe I was wrong, and begin to wonder about other possibilities. Taking all I don’t know about orbital mechanics into consideration, the possibilities of where my thinking and planning went wrong are too far beyond my educational level to even guess at.

  Still, I scan the sky, trying to find that grayish-brown smudge of hope. “You know there’s something I always wondered about?”

  “What’s that?” asks Brice, his eyes riveted to the sky.

  “The people in Breckenridge, up near the spaceport—we had this image of farmers, like they always had plenty to eat because they had farms.”

  “Like Phil had plenty to eat?”

  “We talked about Phil’s problem.”

  “Sorry,” says Brice. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “That’s okay. I know you don’t like him.”

  Brice takes a moment before putting together a real response. “You know the MSS has an office in every farm county, right?”

  “I didn’t know that, exactly.” It makes sense, though. “Phil’s wife, remember her?”

  Brice’s smile looks a little too lascivious.

  I’m pretty sure it’s a dig at me for my indiscretions. “Sydney, she worked as an auditor for the Farm Bureau. MSS, right?”

  “They have to be in charge of every detail.” Brice scans the heavens for a few more silent moments. “When I was a kid, there was this family that lived out east of town. I didn’t know them well. I saw the kid in school. He was a few grades ahead of me and kind of a bully. A chunky kid. Phil reminds me of him a little bit.”

  “Because he was chunky?” I guess.

  “Maybe,” admits Brice. “Not a lot of people around who can afford the luxury of a few extra pounds.”

  Truer by the day on an earth ruled by twiggy Gray bastards.

  “What happened to the kid?” I ask.

  “I was pretty young. Maybe second grade, so I didn’t really understand it. The MSS arrested the kid’s family, him, his two sisters, and the parents. Hung them all from some gallows they had the farmers build on the lawn in front of the courthouse. Said they were hoarders.”

  “Food hoarders?” I’m angered, but not surprised. It’s a common story. It seems anytime the MSS is too lazy to beat the hell out of someone, they have them hanged instead.

  “I didn’t understand what that meant,” says Brice. “‘Hoarders’ is all everyone called them after that. The MSS officer stood them on dining room chairs under a beam with nooses on their necks. He screamed at them for a long time, you know the way they do, all red-faced and spit dribbling. When he ran out of breath, another one walked down the line and knocked the chairs out from under their feet. They kicked and wiggled while their faces twisted and turned purple and their eyes bulged out. It gave me nightmares.”

  “Why do you think your parents made you watch?”

  “Everybody in town had to be there,” answers Brice. “That’s the way the MSS wanted it. You know how they are.”

  “Yeah.” I’ve got nothing but dark thoughts for those fuckers.

  Brice looks up at the sun and then scans across the horizon again. “Should we see it by now?”

  I nod, but don’t say anything.

  “After that,” says Brice. “No more chunky kids in school. As a matter of fact, I never saw another overweight person who wasn’t MSS until I met Phil.”

  “Yeah, the MSS is never short on food.”

  Brice points at the sky. “I think we waited too long.” He turns to look at the H and C packs in the deformed cage linking us together.

  I extend an arm and point it at the sun. I jab another downward, in the direction I think Jupiter is currently orbiting. Rotating one arm around to point at nothing apparent, I say, “The Potato should be that way. We can’t see it because it’s small and doesn’t reflect any light.”

  “What does your bug say?”

  “I wish something more. I’m sensing masses all through the darkness out there. Probably pieces of the ship. Maybe other asteroids.”

  Brice laughs. “Are you saying we head out in that direction and pray we run into it?”

  I pat the wire cage holding our provisions. “We have enough hydro to last us for months, so we can stay here and hope somebody happens upon us, or we can go. The longer we wait, the less likely we are to find the Potato.”

  “I’m not sure we’re at all likely to find it now.”

  Looking into the blackness for any hint as to the location of the asteroid, I admit, “You’re right, but we both know that staying is choosing to die.” I look around. “Though we will miss out on all the modern conveniences and great views.”

  “I’m not arguing.” Brice sighs. “I don’t want to spend the last weeks of my life picking out the best hole for you to bury me in. Better to take our chances out there.”

  I look up at the stars to find my bearings. “I think I know the direction. If you want to relax, I’ll handle the grav in both suits.”

  “Fine by me. Just say the word.”

  “Hold onto the cage,” I tell him. “For stability. No point in putting all of our trust in me or that carabiner.” I gently apply the grav, and we lift off the asteroid’s surface. “I’ll accelerate for thirty minutes
or so, and then we’ll coast and see what we see.”

  “You’re the pilot.”

  Chapter 41

  The only gauge I have for our speed is the rapidity with which the asteroid we left shrinks behind us, and that tells me just about nothing. We might be moving at two hundred miles an hour or five thousand.

  And direction?

  What the hell was I even thinking when I jumped off our rocky little home trying to eyeball-navigate across the solar system? The smaller that asteroid shrinks, the more folly this seems.

  Sure, Jupiter is behind me. The sun is to my left. Brice and I are streaking toward the asteroid belt, going pretty much in the direction of the Potato, but I know that if the asteroid is a little farther away than I hoped, if we’re a few degrees off, we might zip on past it, missing it by fifty or a hundred thousand miles and never know.

  Maybe that’s the worst part, I don’t know how far away we were when we started, and I don’t know how close we need to be to see it. Maybe every part is the worst part, right down to staying put on the asteroid and waiting to die.

  “They left them there,” says Brice.

  I look back at him. “What are we talking about?”

  “Those people they hanged.”

  I chuckle, and then apologize. “I’m not laughing about the hoarders. I just didn’t know we were still having that conversation.”

  “Better than staring at the black and thinking about what dying out here will feel like. Nothing to touch. No grav. No heat or cold. Nothing to feel at all. How long before you think a person would go insane out here?”

  I don’t want to talk about any of that, so I change back to the subject Brice was hoping to keep his mind busy with. “How long did the MSS leave them hanging in front of the courthouse?”

  “Months,” he answers. “Birds would sit on them and pick at their skin. Coyotes came around at night and chewed at their feet. We didn’t come into town but maybe once a week, sometimes twice a month. There was less and less of them each trip. Then they just disappeared. Nothing left but ragged ropes and dark spots in the grass. At least the spots went away in the spring when the green grass grew in.”

  “The MSS left the ropes and the gallows there?”

  “Might still be there,” says Brice. “They wanted the farmers to know they were serious about food theft.”

  “Did it work?” I ask. “Or did people just hide it better?”

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “How so?” It doesn’t seem odd to me. “We’ve all lived under the North Korean tyranny. We’ve all broken the law. Everybody becomes good at it, right? At least the ones of us who stayed alive.”

  “You sound like my dad.”

  “I think you and I are about the same age.” I look him up and down. “Don’t pull that dad shit with me.” I smile.

  “The summer after the hanging,” says Brice, sounding particularly guilty, “I pilfered some corn from the harvest. I stashed it in the barn, back in the loft, a couple of bushels. It was enough so I’d be able to sneak in every day or so and eat some. I was always hungry.”

  “You got away with it.” An easy deduction since I see Brice has lived to experience the good fortune of our current situation. “No big deal, right?”

  Brice disagrees.

  I decide at that moment all of his stories must have shitty endings.

  “My dad followed me into the barn one day and caught me.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He beat the hell out of me.”

  Trying for some happiness in it, I say, “He was looking out for you.”

  “Not in the way you think,” says Brice. “When he was done, he didn’t take the corn. He didn’t tell me to turn it in. He told me to get better at hiding it. If he could find it, so could the MSS. Then he went back to the house and left me in the barn.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I didn’t know where to put it. I thought I’d already found the best place. So I fed it to the pigs.”

  “And you went hungry?”

  “Nothing new for us,” says Brice. “I didn’t want my parents hanged in the square. So, like everybody I knew, I grew up starving surrounded by piles of food. I was kicked out of school after sixth grade like everybody else, and I went to work on the farm, twelve hours a day. By the time I turned seventeen, the Grays were siphoning every able body they could fit into an orange suit, and sending them to build that goddamn stupid giant wheel in space, floating forever at LaGrange Point One. When finished, it would have been a thousand miles across, three hundred wide. There were supposed to be two million square miles of happy Gray habitat inside when we were done. After that, the Grays were supposed to leave us alone on earth. They’d have their place, and we’d have ours. All that work for all those years. All those lives. You can’t even measure it. And it was the first goddamn thing the Trogs destroyed when they attacked.”

  “Second.” That just slipped out.

  “Yeah,” admits Brice. “They did attack the moon colonies first, yet the moon survived. We still own that.”

  Feeling my political hackles rise, I ask, “Nobody really believed the Grays would stop at one ring, did they? If we’d ever finished that one, they’d have made us build another and another and another. We’re their slaves, and as long as they’re alive in this solar system, it’s always going to be that way.”

  “I don’t need to hear your rebel recruitment pitch,” Brice grouses. “Look at me, I’m already sold. I fragged my company captain. I’m complicit in a mutiny. I’m a rebel, and now I’ll always be, whether I like it or not. I’m committed.”

  “Sorry.” Not about Brice’s choice to come to my side, but for me slipping a foot onto my favorite soapbox. “Sometimes it just happens. I hate the Grays even more than I hate the Trogs.”

  “Turns out they’re the same people,” laughs Brice. “Same management, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Looking for something else to talk about, I try another subject. “Did you like working in space?”

  “At first, yeah, of course.” Brice sounds suddenly nostalgic. “There’s the novelty of it. Who wouldn’t love it? Working construction in space is a lot harder than you think it should be. You still sweat. Sometimes so much you think you’re going to die of heat stroke, or you freeze for days on end because you’re suit’s thermostat won’t calibrate right. Or it gets the O2 mix wrong, and you run around high as a kite, or your cal mix runs lean, and you lose twenty pounds over your three-week in-suit rotation, and you don’t even know it because you never see yourself in the mirror, never step on a scale. You never even put on pants and figure out they’re loose, because you’re in the suit for the weeks-long stretch.”

  “Was that the deal?” I ask. “Three weeks in, and what, three days off?”

  “Five off,” says Brice. “The Grays were generous with us up there. You could get to the moon a couple of times a year, back to earth once every twelve months or so. If you were lucky. Mostly we spent our time off in the dorms on the site. Slums really, with stacks of bunks ten tall in warehouses for a thousand off-duty slugs just like you. Sounds shitty, and it was, but it was something. You were out of your suit. You could eat real food, for a couple of days anyway, before you were back on the colon cleanse to empty your system and prep for being back in the suit. At least you had artificial gravity and had a chance to feel another human’s touch.”

  “Sounds like there’s more to it than just that,” I observe.

  “There was a girl,” admits Brice. “I was young. She was, too.” He laughs. “Of course, there was a girl.”

  I chuckle because I’m a guy and I know, the girl always comes up. “Pretty?”

  “You bet,” says Brice. He laughs some more. “With every day that goes by, the girls in your memory grow prettier, or they turn meaner.”

  “Or both.”

  Brice finds that exceptionally funny.

  I think of how Claire’s flaws seemed to have evaporated in the
years after she took in the hatchling, not in real life, but in my memory. In my mind, the real Claire died the day she embraced that Gray, and the woman I married was replaced by a withering facsimile.

  I wonder whether she’s still alive.

  I feel suddenly like I’ve been away from the earth for months, yet I know it’s only been days.

  Chapter 42

  “They organize the work crews into pods of six,” says Brice. “Like the Grays do with things, everything is six-this and six-that. Six pods of six workers made up a crew. She was in another pod in my crew, all on the same rotation. I don’t even remember how we met. I think we bumped into each other in a chow line on one of our five-day breaks. She talked about going to the moon because she’d never been. Neither had I. We were both new then. She started sending me messages when we were out in the void, and we started hooking up during our downtime. We explored the ring we were building. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of it were finished by then. Lots more were in some state of completion. We used to sit out on the framework of an unfinished section and look at all the orange suits crawling over the structure, millions of ants busy at work with countless shuttles coming and going, dumping materials brought up from earth. It was mesmerizing. Eventually, we grew comfortable with silence. We often sat with our legs dangling over a trillion miles of nothing, thinking what-if thoughts, and watching the universe slide by.

  “We messaged a lot when we were on duty. We slept together during our rotations back to the slum. Funny thing is, by that time, I’d had my fill of space and so had she. We dreamed about going back to earth when our ten-year term was up. We talked about maybe getting a farm, can you believe it? At the time, we still believed once the stations were finished, life would be better on earth. We’d raise some kids, listen to the birds tweet, sit in the shade of a tree—a tree—you wouldn’t believe how much you miss trees once the shine wears off the whole space thing.

  “Maybe we’d go rogue, run up to Canada, hide in the mountains off the grid, and wait for all the shit to blow over.” Brice’s unexpected laugh comes out mean and hard, and I can feel he’s carrying a lot of bitterness. I dread where the story is heading.