Freedom's Fire Read online

  Shakily, Holt says, “I have a special comm signal tracer built into my suit.”

  I can see he’s lying just by the look on his face.

  God, I hope he’s lying.

  “And?” Brice asks.

  “There’s a reason we lose every battle with the Trogs,” says Captain Milliken. “They have moles in our ranks who communicate our every move. That’s why they’re always ready for us. That’s why we just got shot to shit.”

  “You’re gonna say that to me?” Brice asks, glaring fiery eyes at Milliken. “You?”

  “That business on Ceres?” Milliken asks as I feel him trying to get more of himself hidden behind me. “You’re still carrying that cross? Put your weapon down, Sergeant!”

  Genius deduction time: These two knew each other before our platoon mustered at the spaceport.

  “Sergeant!” Holt reiterates. “Follow your orders.”

  I’m hoping Brice’s rifle is pointed at Milliken, not me. But from my perspective, all I see is the end of a railgun barrel that looks the size of a cannon.

  Brice’s brows grow heavy and his voice rasps like acid. “Captain Milliken, you’re engaged in an illegal activity. Cut power to that grav plate. Step away from the Major Kane.”

  Milliken huffs and says, “You’ll do as you’re—”

  Brice pulls the trigger.

  Chapter 23

  I’m on the floor and looking up at red mist dissipating to nothingness. Small hunks of gray-red meat are drifting. Bits of shrapnel and glass are bouncing off metal walls.

  Brice, Lenox, and Holt are looking down at me as I realize I’m not the one Brice shot.

  Lenox leans down and disengages the grav plate stuck to my helmet.

  Instantly, I can breathe. I can think. I can focus.

  I hop to my feet, lose my balance, and have to catch myself with a hand against the wall as Lenox steadies me. I say, “I’m okay.”

  She doesn’t let go.

  I glance down to see Milliken’s ruptured helmet, his head a mess, blood bubbling out of the gore and boiling into the vacuum. I turn back to Brice who’s still got Lieutenant Holt pinned to the wall.

  Holt looks like he’s peeing himself. Lucky for him, his catheter is recycling the urine into his suit’s bio-support system.

  Focusing on Brice with a humble expression on my face, I say, “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t do it for you,” he spits, and cocks his head toward the soldiers crowding the door. “Milliken gave me a legit reason, so I did it for them.” He glances down at Milliken’s corpse and then his hard eyes settle back on me. “Don’t get them killed for nothing.”

  The message is clear. Brice won’t mind fragging me, too, if he feels it’s deserved. All he’ll need is half an excuse to legitimize it.

  Humility time is over. I return Brice’s stare. “I won’t.” I override Lieutenant Holt’s suit and lock it. “You can let go of the lieutenant now. I’ve paralyzed his suit.”

  Brice glances at Holt like he wouldn’t mind shooting him, too. “What do I do with the lieutenant?”

  I answer, “We’ll figure it out after the battle. Or maybe the Trogs will blow us out of the sky and we won’t have to worry about it.”

  Brice laughs at that. Too many months spent in space fighting the Trogs have left him with a bleak sense of humor.

  I laugh, too. Maybe I’m tweaked out on the giddy emotions of getting brushed by death. Maybe all this freedom has filled me with a heady rush. All I really know is I haven’t seen a Trog with my own eyes, and this war business is already nastier than I’d have ever guessed.

  Brice leaves Lieutenant Holt’s stiff body against the wall in the airlock, gives me one final glance, and marches into the platoon compartment.

  I think he and I have a bond now.

  Phil opens the airlock’s inner door and steps halfway in with his pistol unsteady in his hand. He spots Milliken on the floor and comms my private line. “I sensed a gravitation anomaly up here. Everything cool?”

  “Is now,” I tell him. “I’m thinking we should probably watch each other’s backs until we figure out where the crew stands.”

  He nods. “I’ll head back to the bridge.”

  “Will that communications guy work out?” I ask, referring to the rude soldier Brice sent back that way.

  “I’m not sure yet, but I think he’ll do okay.”

  “Any word yet on other ships?” I ask.

  “Other assault ships made it up, so it’s not just us,” answers Phil. “Some Korean colonel is making noise about leading a charge. Nothing clear yet.”

  Chapter 24

  Tendrils of blue gravity ionization stream along the walls and the grav field inside the ship turns uneven.

  Into the command comm, I ask, “What’s happening?”

  Phil is immediately on the line. “One of the cruisers attacking that battle station broke off and is firing at us long-range. I’m pulsing the defensive grav to deflect the rounds. We’ve got to get moving. We’re not safe.”

  The ship accelerates, and both Lenox and I lean to compensate. Lieutenant Holt slowly slides down the wall. The inertial bubble isn’t keeping up.

  As if reading my mind, Phil comms in again, “I’m pulling power away from the interior grav bubble. You may feel some discomfort.”

  “Juji Station is coming up off our port side,” says Penny. All of the battle stations are named after Korean mythological figures. “I’m going to fly beneath it. The grav lens deflects everything they shoot at us from the front, but our flanks are vulnerable.”

  “Get us there,” I confirm, as though she’d asked me for permission.

  Seeing I’m busy, Lenox starts placing magazines on my belt magnets. “Two hundred and eighty rounds each,” she says.

  I nod as I keep tabs on the command comm.

  She shoves the rifle into my hands. “You use one of these in the simulator?”

  “Of course.”

  “You any good?”

  “Expert Marksman,” I answer with a grin, because it’s ironic. “Like everybody else.” It seems to me that much of the simulator training was geared to make us think we were much better than we were.

  A confidence booster?

  So we’ll rush headlong into a fight with a false sense of competence?

  I don’t know if I’m that cynical, but then again, those fears disguised as questions did just cross my mind.

  Gravity tugs to my left, and I shift my feet to maintain balance.

  “Lots of debris out here,” Penny tells me.

  “I’ve got two assault ships behind Juji Station,” says Phil.

  “What’s the word from your comm boy?”

  “Jablonsky?” asks Phil.

  “If you say so.”

  “He speaks Korean just like one of them,” Phil tells me in a rush.

  “What’s he saying?” I ask.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Well, find out,” I tell him.

  Lenox points to the rifle, “You shoot one for real?”

  I nod. “I had access to the firing range down by the spaceport.”

  “You go a lot?” she asks.

  I nod. “Expert Marksman rating with an actual gun.”

  “You know the rounds behave differently in atmosphere than in vacuum?”

  “I do.”

  “This is the new model,” she tells me. “You shoot one of these yet?”

  Shaking my head, this time, I tell her, “Only the old single-shot models.”

  She taps the electrodes on her palm. “Electricity from your suit’s micro-reactor powers the gun through the leads in your palm, just like the single-shot models.”

  I look the gun over. Except for the magazine and an extra bulge at the rear of the barrel, it’s pretty much the same as the old model.

  “Just like the single-shot, this is a grav drive gun,” she tells me. “It’ll send a slug downrange at near six k.”

  “Six thousand miles per hour,” I con
firm, “two thousand faster than the single-shot model.”

  “But this one has a reverse-grav recoil compensator built in, so it won’t kick the hell out of you every time you pull the trigger. Matter-of-fact, you’ll barely feel it. The most important feature of this weapon and your pistol is that they’re both grav-integrated.”

  “They didn’t mention that back on earth.”

  “Most people don’t appreciate the significance of it.” Lenox’s serious eyes underscore the importance. “What that means is when your suit’s defensive gravity field is turned on, it treats the weapon like a part of you. If it didn’t, the field would be continually working to shove it away from your body, making it hard to aim.”

  “Good to know.” That never crossed my mind.

  “One other thing about defensive grav,” Lenox’s seriousness doesn’t let up. “If you have it set too high, it will affect the slugs leaving the end of your barrel and ruin your aim.”

  “You know this stuff,” I observe.

  “Before they called my number, I was a certification proctor at the Omaha induction center for three years.”

  That piques my interest. “You know anybody else in the platoon?” It’s a valid question. The way the draft works, inductees are pooled by an automated process that’s not finalized until induction day—this morning for most of us. None of us met until we came together at the muster station.

  “I talked to nearly everybody while we were waiting for our ride.”

  “Anybody else in the platoon any good?” I ask.

  “Sergeant Brice is a pretty good shot,” she smiles. The off-color humor is subtle and contagious. “Peters and Silva seem to know what they’re talking about. No way to know until you see what they do with their equipment.”

  I nod knowingly as I realize at this point, all I’m getting from Lenox is talk. Maybe she knows her stuff academically, and that’s the end of it. But then, she did handle her grav better than most back in the shipyard fiasco.

  “Two things you should know,” she says, patting the rifle in my hands, “because of that recoil compensator you’ll suck down power twice as fast as with a single-shot model. You’ll be more accurate, because it doesn’t kick. If you go to full-auto mode, you’ll burn through your suit’s hydro cell pretty quick.”

  “How long if I’m firing auto?” I’m not happy with the info I got back at the induction center, and I’m hoping for better news.

  “In battle, using your suit grav to power around, shooting a lot, maybe three or four hours—then you better start looking for a new H pack to plug into your reactor. If you need to conserve power and you’ve still got Trogs to put out of their misery, you can switch off the recoil compensator.” She shows me a small lever above the trigger guard. “You’ll save half your energy on each shot.”

  “Gotcha.”

  The walls sizzle bright blue radiance. The grav bubble is straining. I brace myself. Holt, unable to do anything but be victimized by the tug of fluctuating gravity, flips to the other side of the airlock and slams against a bulkhead.

  I don’t say anything about it. I’m hoping he earned a few bruises.

  Lenox apparently reads my thoughts through the look on my face, and in a low voice says, “He was a wormy prick, anyway.”

  “Sharp corner there,” says Penny over the command comm. “We’re coming in below Juji.”

  “Nobody can hit us here,” Phil tells me.

  Soldiers are coming into the airlock, hauling the wounded through.

  “Anything else I need to know right now?” I ask.

  “Final exam is coming up in a few minutes,” Lenox smiles. “Let’s hope you pass.”

  I force out a laugh, because it eases the tension kicking me in the gut, and it’ll keep me from crapping a pharmaceutically-softened load into my suit’s rectal catheter. And I laugh at that, too, because in this vacuum-packed, orange-suited army of sim-trained novices, anybody can get away with shitting their pants in the face of the enemy. What a brave bunch of heroes we are with the product of raving fear sucked away by our suits’ recyclers so no one will ever see.

  Chapter 25

  Phil loops Jablonsky onto the comm line. “It’ll be easier than me relaying,” he says.

  I don’t want to talk to Jablonsky, but nobody ever said being an adult was easy. “Tell me what you know, Jablonsky.”

  “Juji and two other stations are dead.”

  Three of the twenty-six? Not good. “Where’s the fleet?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Where?” I ask. I need to know how far out they are, when they’ll be arriving.

  “Gone,” reiterates Jablonsky. “Destroyed. Captured.”

  The command comm goes silent. Nothing but background static as me, Penny, and Phil try to fully grasp what that means for us. When the war started two years ago, our Gray masters commanded a fleet of sixty-two kilometer-long cruisers, all just like the one they used to conquer earth thirty years ago. Each one built by human hands. Each captained by a Gray and run by Gray and Korean officers, every single one with a human crew and SDF contingent totaling ten thousand, at least.

  Penny breaks the silence first, “But the news—”

  “Propaganda.” Jablonsky doesn’t leave any room for disagreement. “Lies. Everybody knows that.”

  Suddenly, I like Jablonsky a little more, though his assessment is wrong. Half the people I know back home gobble up every ladleful of lies the MSS defecates through their media outlets. Not only are we a race of conquered serfs, we crave self-deception because that wonderfully warped mirror helps us suffer the shame of our choice not to trudge the hard road to freedom.

  And that’s the thing that makes the road so steep—not the bullets in the air, not the blood-slick path, not even the bodies of our dead friends filling the ditches—it’s those first ego-deflating strides into seeing the shiny, multicolor, self-confirming delusion for what it is, and understanding truth isn’t what you believed.

  “I heard from dependable sources,” says Penny, defending herself, “not that MSS disinformation. We’re still supposed to have seven ships.”

  “Can’t say for sure,” says Jablonsky. “Lots of chatter going on about another invasion attempt on the moon that started two days ago. The North Korean captains on the line are talking openly about things they shouldn’t be, and I’m piecing it together, so I could be wrong. It seems the remains of the fleet were sent to the moon to repel the Trogs and the whole thing turned into a trap. All seven ships were destroyed with maybe twice that many Trog ships taken out.”

  “The lunar orbits are full of new wreckage,” adds Phil, for confirmation.

  “The Trogs can afford the loss,” says Penny, zeroing in on the heart of the matter. “We can’t.”

  “Two squadrons appeared out of nowhere to spring the trap,” says Jablonsky. “Twenty-four brand new Trog cruisers straight from their home world. Nobody expected them to show up.”

  “So the only navy we have left are the assault ships on the ground at the Arizona shipyard.” I say it because somebody needs to. “And they’re getting shredded.”

  “It’s a shit show up here,” confirms Jablonsky. “Nobody’s sure what things are like down there right now. All I can tell you for sure is casualties are… it’s… a slaughter.”

  That silences the line again.

  Phil’s turn to break the hush with his despondence. “We’ve lost. The Grays should have surrendered to the Trogs a year ago.”

  “Adverb!” Penny uses the name the way a mother uses a child’s name to let him know when he’s stepping out of line.

  Ignoring her, Phil’s voice finds its familiar frantic edge. “I don’t care who we lose to. One master is as good as the next. The goddamn Grays don’t care if the war drags on to the last man, it’s not Gray lives they’re wasting, it’s human lives.”

  True, mostly, but the Grays have been hatching little Graylettes by the tens of thousands on earth since they solidified their cont
rol of our planet. Plenty of them are being killed in this war, but nothing like the hundreds of millions of humans who’ve been fed into the grinder.

  “When things get bad enough,” Phil continues, “All those Grays running this show from their cozy ship on the moon will bug out to some other unsuspecting planetary system on the other side of the galaxy with a technologically backward race of dumbasses just like us they can enslave.” Phil deflates as he reaches his conclusion. “Then the Trogs will exterminate the rest of us and take our planet.”

  I don’t know how much of that I agree with.

  Something more important occurs to me, we’re letting news of our defeat demoralize us into lethargy.

  No, I’m in charge, I’m letting it demoralize us.

  It’s a sin strangers are paying for with their lives right now.

  I have to get our ship into the war.

  At the risk of hearing a number that’ll worsen the mood, I ask, “Do we have a count of assault ships that made it up?”

  Phil switches gears and offers his opinion. “There’s so much debris from the space stations and so many wrecks, I can’t tell.” Like me, like Penny, Phil has an alien implant in his head. He’s more sensitive to gravity than the rest of us—not as good as a Gray, but better than anyone from the grav factory. That’s how he knows what’s out there—everything with mass exerts a gravitational pull on everything else.

  “I think forty or so are on the fleet channel,” says Jablonsky. “The number keeps changing. Some take a hit and disappear. More hail the command frequency as they come up from the surface. I can’t guess at the number of mayday calls.”

  “You said there was a North Korean officer making noise about being in command.” I just know it’s going to be that North Korean prick of an admiral in charge of the fleet. Trouble never seems to stick to guys like that.

  “No flag officers are out here that I can tell,” answers Jablonsky. “Mostly ships are asking who’s in charge. I’m getting a periodic message from Pyongyang. It says the admiralty is ordering a withdrawal, telling all ships to take up positions around Imugi.”