Freedom's Fray (Freedom's Fire Book 3) Read online

  FREEDOM’S FRAY

  Book 3 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

  A novel

  by

  Bobby Adair

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  Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair

  Credits at the end of the book.

  Chapter 1

  Level nine is a warren. Dark and depressing.

  It’s an industrial space with tunnels rough-cut through the asteroid’s stone, gritty and wet, with ruts ground into the floor from the passing of heavy machines. Vast caverns are burrowed out of the rock and packed densely with low-g foundries and high-temp kilns, ultrasonic rock smashers, and ionic particle separators, everything the human mind can contrive for extracting incremental ounces of elemental value and complex compounds from metric-ton loads of raw ore.

  At least it holds atmosphere tight against the vacuum outside.

  The whole subterranean installation is now sealed, except for half of level seven where I crashed my ship through the asteroid’s surface rock during the battle several days ago. In an astonishingly quick repair, work crews sealed off that part from the rest of the complex. Now, the machinery down here burns hot again, warming the air and heating the asteroid’s glacial core that for billions of years waited in stasis for the fervid breath of humankind’s industrial exhaust.

  The rugged walls in the tunnel aren’t colored a pleasant pale gray, and they aren’t polymer-sealed. They’re abrasive and wet, sweating out H2O and humidifying the air. With my helmet off and gloves dangling from a clip on my belt, I feel the dampness on the little bit of skin left exposed by my suit’s translucent, thermal undergarment. It coats my hair in gritty wet. It runs down my forehead and stings my eyes.

  Feeling like a cloudy summer day when the air is so thick with promises of rain, you just want the thunder to crash and get on with soaking you to the bone. Instead, it holds you hostage halfway there. As earth days go, it’s one of those where it feels gross to be outside, wearing a stink of perspiration that won’t evaporate away, causing your underwear to chafe and sweat to dribble off your nose.

  I keep my gripes to myself, though.

  For something like a week, I’ve been cocooned in my suit, pampered at a perfect temperature, caressed in comfortable humidity, nearly losing track of the sensation of having skin. Now the air feels real, like something from earth, so I breathe it in. I feel it, because icky something is better than the deprivation of absence.

  Having spent most of my time away from earth so far in light, asteroid gravity or zero-g, my muscles are already atrophying. I feel it in my legs. They’re not quite tired, but they don’t like the exertion of walking. Just walking! My back aches, and my heartbeat keeps pounding inside my head like maybe on one of the upcoming beats the pressure will surpass the burst strength of my skull bones and explode all over any passersby. My brain spins dizzily from standing up too quickly or walking too fast. I’m placing bets with myself as to whether I’m going to stroke out and die, or faint and crack my head on a jagged stone.

  What’s earth-g going to feel like when I’ve been out here for a month or a year?

  Despite the discomfort of my exertions and the compilation of my fears, I’d love to be out of my suit. Unfortunately, the Potato is in a war zone. Being technically accurate about it, earth’s solar system—every inch of every rock, and every cubic meter of nothingness in between—is in the theater of war. No place is safe. And having killed countless Trogs by doing little more than exposing a safe interior to the cold vacuum of space, I won’t fall victim to that same mistake.

  Ahead in the long, wide corridor, a few miners are bouncing toward me in a low-g skip. Neither is wearing a suit. They both have breathing masks attached to the emergency safety packs on their belts. Both are wearing thick pants and carrying heavy coats, too thick to wear in this environment. They’ve been working in one of the frigid mine shafts burrowed deep into the rock, chasing a vein of mineral that’s in acute demand by whatever exchange of goods passes for an economy out here in the asteroid belt.

  When the two miners draw close, they swerve to give me a wide berth—not out of respect, certainly not out of fear. The story the MSS made up of my collusion with the Trogs has spread throughout the colony, along with a few dozen versions of what I did during the space battle over Arizona. Some accounts have the events close to correct. Others place the credit all in Blair’s intricate planning, describing me as a cancerous cog in her perfect machine.

  She’s successfully fooled so many.

  The two miners have chosen to believe one of the stories where I’m the villain. Their glowering eyes tell me that much, and their receding mutters leave me to imagine the words they share as a plot to steal my helmet and toss me into the vacuum.

  Nevertheless, I don’t turn to keep an eye on them. I listen, and I focus on the mass of their bodies walking away. My bug senses the full three-dimensional space around me, them included. I don’t see anything as clearly as Phil would be able to. I’m a long way from matching his skill, yet one thing is for sure, out here in the war with my life becoming more and more dependent on my ability to perceive gravity, my sense is sharpening.

  Further ahead, a trio of orange-suited soldiers walks with their suit gravity turned on. It’s easy to tell by their gait and the glow of their grav through my bug’s eye. They’re looking around, checking out the industrial spaces, not guarding or searching. With no military imperative for them to be down here, they’re off duty, spending their free time exploring the colony. They want to know the terrain if we have to fight for it again.

  Like me, all are armed. Like me, their helmets are off, clipped to carabiners on their belts. Soldiers who want to demonstrate their loyalty follow my example and wear their suits like me. They’ve all been through the shit, and they know the price of being out of your suit when the vacuum comes to take your life.

  Unfortunately, we’re in the minority on the base.

  Eight assault ships with nearly full crews and platoons arrived the day after our victory over the Trogs. Not one of those ships bears a scratch or ding. On the morning of the battle over Arizona, they were among the first to rise out of the desert and fly into space. The eight ships were already above the atmosphere and well away from the coming carnage when those three Trog cruisers peeled off from their attack on earth’s orbital battle stations and started bombing.

  I’ve learned that much is true.

  However, every question I ask about when those ships bubble jumped out of earth orbit and high-tailed it to the asteroid belt is met with harrumphs, vague hand-waving, and lame misdirections to someone up the chain of command or lateral in the hierarchy, always somebody somewhere else who bore responsibility for the decision.

  Each bridge crew I question tells me they were following orders, delivering their stolen ships to the Free Army and cleansing their ranks of MSS lackeys and loyalists. Just as they were told to do.

  Not one of them made an attack run on those Trog cruisers. None of them made the hard choice to defend their orange-suited brothers and sisters who were being slaughtered on the ground and vaporized in the air.

  Had those ships remained to fight, thousands of men and women, teenage boys and girls, would still be alive. Not only would hundreds of assault ships still be airborne, but with the 20-to-1 advantage in assault craft we started the day with, we could have destroyed the Trog fleet. The Trog menace in our solar system would have ended, and instead of us trading guesses about how we’re going to find the enemy cruisers and win this war, we’d be fighting
humanity’s real enemy, the Grays and the MSS.

  Every time I indulge this line of thought, trying to reason through to a better conclusion, I come to only one logical set of choices: My revolutionary comrades from these eight ships are cowards. Or idiots. Or incompetents.

  It’s unfair for me to believe that about so many when only a relative handful made the choice to flee. Yet they strut around an asteroid base my soldiers took with their blood and bravery, and they pretend I’m the traitor the rumors paint me to be, all the while closing their eyes to the hypocrisy of it.

  A division is running deep into our little revolutionary army, and I fear what will become of us when we’re tested by battle.

  Chapter 2

  My destination is ahead, Reservoir 9D. It’s one of the dozen built on this level for storing water extracted from the asteroid’s rock. Of late, this particular one held more than a hundred human prisoners, put there by the Trogs who’d taken the Potato, and compelled to remain there by the Trog guards stationed in the corridor.

  Now, the cavernous reservoir holds only one occupant and one visitor. The guards outside the watertight door are human. Not one is wearing an orange spacesuit. They’re Blair’s people.

  Every soldier in the two Heavy Assault Divisions launched wearing an orange suit over a green inner liner. None of us carried anything but weapons, ammo, and backup H packs—no duffle bags stuffed with personal items, and no off-duty clothing to wear.

  These eight, like most of Blair’s bunch, are wearing coveralls scrounged from the stores the mining company used to clothe its personnel before the base went rogue, well before it turned into a Free Army outpost. The coveralls, like every leftover anything we humans have, are colored in various shades, all faded from some initial hue of matching blue. Military insignia are stamped on the upper arms and chest in black ink.

  It looks like five of the guards are in their teens. Kids. That feels more surprising than it should. I know at least half of both divisions are made up of teenagers. When we were all in our orange suits and engulfing white helmets, we seemed a little more generically similar. Two of the adults are in their forties. One is in her mid-fifties.

  Each wears a thin backpack, the detachable microreactor from their orange suits. The fusion reaction burning in their packs pumps power through the conductive, fingerless gloves each wears. They need those to power their railguns and the emergency breather masks they each have on their belts.

  What the dumbasses don’t understand is the gear will suffice to get them through a short line at an airlock for a chance to save their lives. It won’t help them into a suit fast enough to combat the most likely cause of a sudden decompression event, attacking Trogs. I suspect once a group of those Trogs understands the enemy behind each airlock is without suits, well, let’s just say the solution presents itself—break a door, and let the cold vacuum separate the souls from the corpses.

  The guards eye me with blank, hard stares one of them learned from an old vid full of twentieth-century actors pretending to be soldiers. Since most of them are trying for the same look, I figure my guess is correct that one of them saw the old movie and taught the others.

  Bravado with nothing behind it that isn’t a lie.

  Eight fakers.

  Eight fuckers.

  I suppress a chuckle. Both fit.

  One boy, a broad-shouldered kid with a flat face and green eyes, hefts his weapon and rolls his shoulders as he stares so hard at me it’s like he’s looking right through. He pretends like he doesn’t, but I’m sure he recognizes me. I’m known Potato-wide—hero, or the asshole who betrayed humanity. Nevertheless, he’s challenging me in the body language of whatever group of bullies he ran with back in school.

  He’s bigger than me, and he probably thinks that’s enough, because in his past, it always was.

  What he doesn’t understand—what none of these green, sim-trained recruits has any inkling of—is that I’ve already seen real people die. I’ve killed Trogs, Grays, and humans alike. I flew into space in the company of soldiers who chose to follow me rather than desert, and most of them are dead, too.

  Now an empty black hole gapes wide through my concept of morality and the foundation of my identity.

  It started to grow when I murdered that first North Korean. In that moment, I think I was standing at a fork in the road to two distinct futures. In one, guilt promised to haunt and maybe rule me. In the other, the ache of the deaths in my wake would nag my silent hours until the memories faded into tolerable tedium.

  For whatever reason a mind does what it does, I subconsciously embraced the path to tedium.

  What the bully private in his off-color coveralls doesn’t understand is that he exists outside my circle of loyalty, and if he postures himself as too much of a threat, I’ll kill him. Not because I’m stronger or faster. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I’ll put a railgun round through his sternum, because while he’s still running through the slow escalations of grade-school bully behavior, I’ll have already taken the ultimate step in that decision tree.

  Something the war as already changed in me.

  A sergeant, one of the two older men, looking soft enough to have spent his twenty-five adult years sitting at a desk, steps tentatively in my path. “Major.”

  I stop two paces in front of him and point to the door to Reservoir 9D. “I’m going in.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “Let’s not pretend you have the authority to question me.” I sprinkle some acid on the words to make them sting with an ambiguous threat.

  “Our orders are to let no one in without explicit permission from Colonel Blair.”

  “Get permission.”

  It’s then I notice the gray-haired woman is already talking quietly into her radio.

  The sergeant glances back at her.

  I tire of the grownup grade-school bully’s glare and turn back in his direction, silently daring him to do something, anything.

  His eyes don’t hold mine. They drift around, looking for something to focus on. His posture loses its menace.

  Apparently, my dare isn’t something he wants to accept.

  “Permission granted,” says the gray-haired woman from where she stands near the back of the group.

  The sergeant gives me a nod and tells the tall bully to open the door for me. The soldiers part, allowing me a wide path.

  A young girl opens the reservoir’s maintenance door and nearly gags as she gets a face full of the air from inside.

  Gray stink.

  I pass the guards without another word and enter the reservoir. I’m used to the smell.

  The door closes behind me.

  Inside, the room is a big, hollow disc, probably fifty meters across, with a ceiling ten meters above the floor. A half-dozen thick posts are supporting the ceiling. Down here near the asteroid’s axis, most of the gravitational pull from the stone below us is canceled out by the pull of the rock above.

  The walls, ceiling, floor, and even the support posts are covered in a watertight white polymer, leaving every surface smooth and echoey, though smudged from the boots of all the people the Grays had stored down here after they captured the mining base.

  Near the far side of the reservoir, in front of a post, in the glare of several portable lamps, a Gray is basking uncomfortably on the floor. On a chair, a few paces in front of the Gray, fidgets Phil. They are the only two in this makeshift prison.

  Chapter 3

  Without turning around, Phil greets me. “Hello, Dylan.”

  “You never did that kind of obvious mind-reader shit back on earth. Are your skills sharpening, or did you always keep them hidden?”

  “Or I guessed who you were.” He’s smug about it. “Who else comes in here?”

  “But you didn’t guess, did you?”

  Phil turns to look at me.

  It’s creeping me out that I’m on the uncomfortable end of a conversation where I know I’m being mentally probed in a way I’m
afraid I can’t defend against. “And the answer is?”

  “Both.”

  “You sneaky bastard.”

  Phil smiles.

  I chuckle my way past my discomfort, reminding myself I need to stop seeing Phil as the façade he shows to the world. “You’re full of surprises.”

  He shrugs as I step up beside him.

  My attention falls on the Gray who is moving from a lying to a sitting position, trying to expose different parts of its skin to the light.

  “He doesn’t like these lights,” says Phil. “In fact, he’ll eventually die. These LEDs only emit a narrow band of frequencies.”

  “All light is not created equal,” I cleverly muse. Natural white light is made up of a wide range of frequencies, and humans can only perceive a small percentage of them.

  “For a Gray,” says Phil, “depending on the light from a narrow band of frequencies is like putting a human on a diet of saltine crackers and nothing else. The human will eventually die of malnutrition. A similar thing happens to the Gray. They need a full spectrum.”

  “How long are we talking?”

  “A year or two.”

  “So nothing urgent.”

  Phil shakes his head. His face tells me he doesn’t agree. “It will suffer.”

  Of course, I look at the Gray, shifting around and trying its best to resemble a starving puppy. Well, a big-headed, hairless puppy with a squirmy alien soul that would murder me given half a chance. Oh, and as lovable as a novelty buttplug—that kind of puppy.

  Still, I watch it.

  It lies back down and adjusts its position in slow, wretched moves. The Gray can’t get comfortable on the cold floor. The light isn’t strong enough to keep it warm. It’s already suffering.

  I don’t want to look at it, but my eyes don’t want to turn away, or even blink.

  If it wasn’t for my animosity toward the smelly little planet-conquering bastard, I might feel sorry for it. Hell, who am I kidding? I do feel—