Freedom's Fire

by Bobby Adair

  It all sounds easy, but it’s not.

  The first big obstacle to going any distance is power—a lot of it—and power ain’t free.

  Fusion-drive ships turn pairs of hydrogen atoms into helium, and because the curve of binding energy has an advantageous shape with respect to that type of atomic reaction, scads of energy is thrown off, snorted up by the mechanical systems of the fusion reactor. The smaller reactors, at least with the designs we’ve inherited from the Grays, are less efficient at converting hydrogen to usable power. Little ships like ours have to bring along a crap-load of hydrogen to get where they’re going and have enough to bubble jump back again.

  Run out of hydrogen somewhere along the way, and the bubble disappears, the wave dissipates, and the ship falls below light speed. If that happens on a jump between planets, maybe you get lucky, and you fly along at five or ten thousand miles an hour until the gravity of some planet catches you and hauls you in. Maybe you are picked up by a salvage crew, and you have a great story to tell your friends at the bar about how your ship went ballistic in deep space and yet here you are, still alive.

  Run out of hydro on an interstellar trip ten trillion miles from nowhere, and you might as well just shoot yourself, because eventually, you’ll run out of food, water, or air, and die. That’s it. You’ll never reach a planet, and no one will ever find you. The void is just too damn big.

  The other critical aspect of bubbling is navigation. Thanks to our friendly Gray masters, there’s precious little computer power built into our ships. Those little Gray fuckers, with their naturally evolved gravity-tuned sensory systems in their funky-big heads, can stand on the bridge of a cruiser, look at a star twenty light years away, eyeball a vector, and bubble jump right to it.

  It’s one of a thousand reasons Grays are easy to hate. They’re naturally better at something than we are.

  Any human endeavor to jump from star to star or even planet to planet would need to run on the precision of a computerized navigation system. What we have instead is Phil with an alien bug in his head and grav skills honed from working twelve years on the line at the factory.

  Penny and me are the backup systems.

  So we’ll be making our jumps in hops—a few long ones, and some short ones. It’s like playing croquet and trying to knock your ball closer and closer to a wicket, hoping to get through before something bad happens, like running out of hydrogen because you keep missing the mark.

  Oh, and if there’s even the tiniest imperfection in the alignment of the grav drive array relative the ship’s central axis, forget about it. You might as well email your mother one last time and fly into the sun, because your life will end badly.

  And they say bubble jumping isn’t fun.

  Chapter 41

  “How fast will this thing go?” asks Phil. “Rumor I heard from one of the pilots in the fitting hangar was 1.5c.”

  “C?” asks Lenox.

  “Engineer slang for the speed of light?” answers Penny.

  I know the answer, and it’s not as rosy as any of them would like to hear. Unfortunately, they need to be told. “If we can make the jump to light speed the ship might do 1.5c.”

  “If?” asks Phil, pumping about ten groans of trepidation into that one syllable.

  “This ship is new.” I drag my hand across the wall to help with my point. Paint flakes off. Flecks swirl in the light-g and turbulence left by the passing of my hand. “I think they skipped some quality steps when they rushed these things through production.”

  “Quality?” Phil asks, as his voice finds one of its emphatic, higher octaves. “Quality? This ship is a rusty piece of shit!”

  “It flies,” Penny tells him. “It’ll pull twelve g’s.” She glances quickly at me and the others who rode in the platoon compartment through the roughest parts of the battle. “Without too much discomfort.”

  “We’re not talking about bull-dyke gas-peddle pushing through low earth orbits,” Phil argues.

  “Hey,” says Brice, giving Phil a stern look.

  I didn’t expect Brice to stand up for Penny. I wonder what that’s about.

  “Jumping to light speed,” Phil continues, as though Brice has said nothing, “isn’t about pulling g’s, it’s about precision—super precision. Every plate in your drive array has to be perfectly configured. Perfectly. Do you know what that means? In a ship this size, the geometrical position of every plate has to be relatively aligned exactly with the axis of the ship.”

  Penny says, “They’ve been building drive arrays at the Arizona shipyard since you were still wishing you’d grow up to be a man.”

  Phil’s on his stump, and when he’s up there, everybody gets ignored. “The capacitors storing the power that produces the electrical surge have to be exactly timed to fire—not just at the same time, but the electricity also has to arrive at the grav plates at the simultaneously. If any moron in the factory mis-measured the wire length, put in a dead capacitor, ran out of shielded wire and threw in a length of some crap they found at an old, abandoned Home Depot, then we won’t hit light speed. Worse, we will, but our grav wave won’t be perpendicular to the axis of the ship, and instead of flying in the direction the ship is pointed, we’ll skew off one way or the other and smash into the moon.”

  “The grav wave will flow around the moon,” says Penny, and then in a spiteful tone, she says, “Basic grav dynamics. Even us bull dykes know that.”

  Phil slumps in his chair. He’s out of steam for the moment. “If our ship flies a tight turn around a gravitational mass when we’re moving at light speed, our inertial bubble won’t save us. We’ll all be mashed to jelly inside these shitty secondhand suits.”

  Everyone’s awkwardly silent for a minute. Penny and I have all seen Phil ride the wave of his little tantrums on countless occasions, over anything from the watery gruel served at the factory cafeteria to the inherent injustice of North Korea’s favored status with the Grays.

  “You’re a moody bitch sometimes,” observes Brice. He’s talking to Phil.

  Phil stares sheepishly at his hands in his lap. “I know.” He turns to Penny and says, “Sorry about the dyke remark.”

  “You know I love you, Adverb.” Penny smiles sweetly. “But don’t hate me because I like real men.”

  Everybody laughs.

  Everybody but Phil. He brings it on himself.

  It’s time to refocus. I say, “Now that you kids are through, Phil’s not entirely wrong. The SDF has been hush-hush about everything having to do with these ships.” I pause because I’m reluctant to tell them the truth of the situation we’re in. Still, if it were me, I’d want to know. “My contact with the Free Army says one in twenty of these ships disintegrates the first time they make the jump to light speed.”

  That stuns everyone on the bridge.

  “Can you trust this guy?” asks Brice.

  “I already bet my life on it.” That’s a true, and hopefully sufficient, answer. “Some of these ships barely made light speed when they tested them. Some of them will do the full 1.5.”

  “So they’ve all been tested?” asks Penny. “You mean the ones that blew up already blew up, and we’re good, right?”

  I shake my head. “They tested the first ships off the line. There’s no way they could have tested them all without attracting Trog attention.”

  “Oh, holy shit!” Phil gets it. “This is absolutely the first time this ship has ever flown—now, today.”

  “You got it.” It’s a crappy truth, but it needs to be out there.

  “If we don’t blow up,” Phil is putting sarcasm to use, “that’ll make navigation a breeze.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” I tell him. “You’re good at that sort of thing.” I make it sound sarcastic, but it’s true.

  He mutters a response only he can understand.

  “Phil, Jablonsky,” I say, “I need to know what’s going on out there. Penny, get us to Juji Station if that’s where we’re going. Brice, Lenox, get me
a casualty count. My damn d-pad still tells me everyone’s fine.”

  Chapter 42

  Penny is steering the ship through the debris field surrounding Juji Station.

  “Jesus, they beat the hell out of this place,” says Phil.

  “Any radio traffic from Juji?” I ask.

  “No,” says Jablonsky. “I’ve hailed them, asking for anyone. I receive no response on any channel.”

  “That’s the way they do it,” says Brice. He’s talking about the Trogs. “If they don’t land an army to take it, they keep pounding long after defensive fire ceases. They want to kill everything, reduce the base to rubble.”

  “Why?” asks Phil. He can’t believe the brutality of it.

  “So they won’t have to fight the same battle again when they come back,” answers Brice.

  “It might get bumpy,” says Penny. “Gases are venting through the fissures. You want me to pull farther away?”

  “No,” I answer. “Down here in the debris no one is likely to think we’re a target worth wasting fire on.”

  “That’s not a problem,” says Jablonsky. “The Trogs are withdrawing. I’m picking up chatter about it now.”

  Phil stares off at seemingly nothing for a moment. “I see them.” He’s using his finely tuned sense of gravity. “They’re all bubble jumping out.”

  “Going back to reload,” says Brice. “It takes the Trogs about a week to fill one of those cruisers with a full supply of railgun slugs. They have bases scattered in the asteroid belt and out in the Kuiper Belt.”

  “They’re not going to different bases,” says Phil. “They’re all hopping down the same vector.”

  “They don’t even respect us enough to hide it,” mutters Penny.

  “Arrogant bastards,” agrees Brice.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. Nothing’s to say they’re not hopping a billion miles out of the orbital plane and redirecting from there.”

  “Only they’re not,” says Phil. He plays around with the computer on his console for a minute. “They’re headed out to Ceres.”

  Brice shakes his head.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Trogs took Ceres about six months ago.” Brice looks angry, like there’s something he’s not saying.

  “I thought we still had Ceres,” says Lenox. Everybody knows it’s the largest object in the asteroid belt, nearly half the size of Pluto. We have a huge base there. “I saw the video of—”

  “I saw that video, too,” Brice tells her. “They made it look like some kind of San-Juan-Hill-Remember the-Alamo-hero-gasm. Pretty good video if it wasn’t ninety-proof Hollywood bullshit. We were slaughtered there. I lost a lot of guys that should have lived.” Brice looks around the bridge like he’s wrestling with what to say next. “Command bugged out. Left us there.”

  “What do you mean, command bugged out?” I ask.

  “Exactly what it sounds like,” says Brice. “Morale was bad. We were short on everything because the Trogs had been blockading us for months. Everybody figured we’d already lost the war. Once the assault started, most of the field grade officers jumped in a ship and bubble jumped the fuck out of there.”

  “You’re kidding?” Mostly, I just don’t want to believe it.

  “MSS went first,” says Brice. “One minute, North Koreans are around every corner, sneaking and trying to catch you doing something wrong—you know how they are.” Brice looks at each of us. We all know exactly what he means. “Then they were gone. The rumor spread over the base they were ‘called back to the moon.’ Yeah, fuckin’ right.”

  Knowing nods. The MSS doesn’t play by the same rules as the rest of us. It doesn’t need to be said.

  “Two or three hours later,” says Brice, “you’d be lucky if you could find a lieutenant. By then, the Trog cruisers were pounding the hell out of us, and half our railguns were unmanned because crews were busy making their way to the hangars to catch a ride on the last ship out. That sealed it.”

  “How’d you get out?” asks Phil, it comes out like an accusation, but he probably didn’t mean it that way. That’s just Phil.

  Brice bristles and gives Phil a look like he’s thinking about unloading a magazine into his pudgy gut. And then his tone comes out icy and dark. “I don’t answer to you, donut-junky.”

  “Be cool,” I tell, Brice. “Phil’s a harmless idiot. You’ll figure that out soon enough.” But that doesn’t seem like enough to defuse the situation.

  Brice is still glaring.

  Phil is squirming in his seat and probably pissing in his suit.

  I need them both. Phil is talented with gravity like nobody I’ve ever met. I don’t know how Brice got off Ceres, and I don’t care. Everything I’ve learned about him in a single day tells me he’s exactly what he seems to be—a good soldier. And then, intuition comes to my aid. “Was Milliken there?” I ask. “On Ceres?”

  That takes Brice off-guard. He redirects his attention from Phil and looks at me. “How’d you know?”

  It was a guess, but I say, “Is that the beef you had with him?”

  “He was never a good officer,” says Brice, “but he had a goddamn duty.”

  “Did you file a complaint when you got back to earth?” asks Lenox. “Charges? Those officers were guilty of desertion, right?”

  Brice shakes his head. “You’ve got a lot to learn about the world, honey.”

  “The SDF couldn’t file charges against its officers,” I deduce, “because the MSS deserted first. If the officers were guilty, then so was the MSS.”

  “If I’d have made a peep about it,” says Brice, “it would have been me they hanged.” He takes a long slow breath. “So I end up back with my unit on earth—the officers and just a few of us enlisted men—only a handful out of a whole company. Over a hundred are dead up there on Ceres.”

  “Jesus,” says Phil.

  “So I didn’t say anything,” says Brice. “I waited because I knew they’d send us up again.”

  “And today was your chance?” I ask, as though the answer isn’t obvious.

  Brice nods again, and in his eyes, despite his seeming certainty, I can see he’s conflicted about what he did.

  I say, “Duty is more about following your heart than following the rules.”

  Chapter 43

  “How organized is the SDF right now?” I ask.

  Jablonsky looks at me, wide-eyed. “You asking me?”

  “You’re on the ship-to-ship radio. You hear what’s going on. You’d know better than anyone.”

  “Sounds like a mess,” he guesses. “Nobody knows who’s in charge. We’re hearing conflicting orders from a division commander still on the ground in Arizona, different instructions from some North Korean Colonel up here—I think the same one we went on our attack run with—and Pyongyang is still squawking.”

  “Confusion?” I ask, summing the situation up to a single word.

  “Yes,” Jablonsky answers definitively.

  “Okay.” I turn to Penny. “Get us down on the surface close to the deepest hole you can find.”

  “What’s with the change of plan?” asks Brice.

  “Our supply rooms are empty,” I tell him, as I look around the bridge. I’m not yet sure everyone’s aware. “The generals sent us up here with what we have on our backs—three days’ power, three days’ rations.” I glance down at my d-pad and see that I have barely enough hydrogen to power my suit for six more hours. “They didn’t expect any of us to live long enough for resupply.”

  Brice guesses first where I’m going. “I can take a squad inside, and see what we can find.”

  “Lenox,” I say. “You take one, too.”

  “Can do,” she answers.

  “Don’t wander too far,” I tell them. “Scrounge what you can, as quick as you can. “My guess is we’ll have twenty or thirty minutes. We don’t want to push it. I want to be away from earth before anybody downstairs has time to figure out we’re not one of the derelicts out here junking up t
he orbits.

  “Okay,” says Penny. “I think I’ve got one.” She confers on a private comm link with Phil to coordinate.

  Brice and Lenox exit the bridge and head for the platoon compartment.

  “And medical supplies,” I call after them. “Whatever we need for the wounded.”

  Brice stops and turns back to face me. “None of the wounded made it.”

  “What?”

  He guesses I’m still running on earth intuition. “Most of the time the wounded don’t make it. Sealing the suit after a wound only buys you some time. The only way you have a chance is to move them into a pressurized environment.”

  I feel a little bit like a scolded schoolboy for having Brice remind me of our earlier conversation. “If you happen across a portable welding rig we can use to patch the holes in the hull, pick it up.”

  “That reminds me.” Brice looks up the length of the hall. “Lieutenant Holt is stowed in the supply room.”

  I’d forgotten about Holt. I nearly laugh at the callousness of it, but excuse myself. I’ve been busy. “I don’t know what to do with him.” I make the first guess that comes to mine. “Prisoner of war?”

  Brice shakes his head. “In my experience, we always run short on H or calories, something. Keeping useless bodies alive is expensive.”

  Many have died at my hands, yet none were murdered in cold blood. I don’t feel a thing one way or another about those deaths. The thought of killing Holt bothers me. It would be murder. Murder in the in service of the revolution, but still murder.

  Brice, reading my face, comes to my rescue. “I can’t murder him either.”

  I purse my lips and draw a sharp breath. I’m the commander. I can’t ask Brice to do what I’m not willing to do myself.

  “I don’t think we should kill him.”

  My jaw drops. “Honestly, the idea of a dead Lieutenant Holt doesn’t bother me. The thought of killing him for the crime of being a moronic asshole doesn’t appeal to me. What do you have in mind?”

  “Something stupid.”

  “We’ve been through some shit today.” I think Brice is wary because he’s still not sure what to think of me. “You had my back. I’ve got yours. You don’t need to worry about me putting a knife in it. Just say what’s on your mind.”