Freedom's Fist (Freedom's Fire Book 4) Read online

  Maybe that’s love.

  Chapter 32

  After five months of faster-than-light travel in the Rusty Turd, we’re all suited up. The underlying tension we felt about the journey to another star has eased. The anxiety over not being in the war, killing Trogs, and stomping Grays, has dissolved away. We’re reaching our destination, coming into a hostile system. We’ll all be ready for action as soon as we pop out of bubble.

  Of course, we’re not expecting to see anything but empty space around us. We still have to find the enemy. Every one of us has seen what happens to the unprepared. That’s not going to be us. We’re not going to die with our pants around our ankles.

  Passing by my pair of techs at their stations on the axial gun, I give them each a confident nod as we head for the steps at the end of the hall. In moments, I’m on the bridge.

  “‘bout time,” says Phil. I can’t tell if he’s perturbed or pretending.

  Penny smiles and winks. She thinks I’ve been with Silva again.

  She’s right. Silva and I spent several long minutes staring at one another through our faceplates, knowing uncertainty was coming.

  “We’ll be exiting bubble in about thirty seconds,” announces Penny.

  Jablonsky is at his station, ready to broadcast a call to Jill’s ship. Phil is watching his console though the heavy lifting of the grav work is all taking place in his head. Tarlow’s systems are powered up, and he’s ready to scan the space around us.

  Brice, Lenox, Peterson, and Silva are in the forward section of the ship with the nukes, already in the vacuum of space. Clawson is with them. They’ll open the forward assault door and squeeze out in the narrow gap between the H tanks and the hull, then work their way down the length of the ship, disconnecting each bracket, so Penny will be able to back the ship out of the tank ring.

  Hauling the tanks into battle is a bad idea. First off, we can’t afford to have them damaged and leaking. We’ll need a good portion of the remaining hydrogen to get us back to earth. Second, the ship would be hard to maneuver with the extra mass, and in battle, quick maneuvers could mean the difference between living and dying.

  Once the ring is disconnected, we’ll leave it in orbit around 61 Cygni A’s third planet with the radio beacon powered on so we’ll be able to find it again when we need an H refill, or we’re ready to dock and head home.

  It’s a plan nearly as simple as plans get.

  What could go wrong?

  Inside my head, I laugh at the phrase, because I’m cynical enough to know every plan has its failures baked in from the moment it’s conceived and layered on thickly through every step of preparation and execution. All you can do is minimize the pitfalls and work hard to avoid stepping into them.

  “Coming out of bubble,” Penny tells us as the glow in the hull seems to get sucked right back into the rough metal.

  The living ship always seems like it dies when we leave bubble.

  I sense the grav plates creating the field around us, even as Phil powers them down and says, “Going to point one internal g.”

  I amp up my suit grav to keep my ass pinned to my chair, and think to wrap my seat belt across my lap. I leave the shoulder straps off. We’ve got nothing big planned. “Are we alone?”

  “Nothing here but us,” Phil tells me.

  “I don’t see anything,” adds Tarlow.

  Jablonsky is already broadcasting.

  “Anything from Jill?” I ask. If she’s already in system, we should find her tank ring orbiting the planet.

  “Nothing,” says Jablonsky.

  “Orbital speed?” I ask Penny as I feel the ship’s drive array pushing us.

  “Not yet,” she tells me. “I’m adjusting. Just a few minutes.”

  “Nothing nearby,” says Tarlow. He’s not talking just about Jill’s ship or tank ring. He’s talking about Trogs and bases.

  “Should we undock the tank ring?” asks Penny. “We’ve reached orbit.”

  “One more check on the surrounding space?” I tell Phil and Tarlow.

  They spend some time at it while the rest of us wait patiently.

  After several minutes, Penny asks, “How long?”

  “A few minutes,” answers Tarlow, perturbed.

  “No,” Penny looks at me. “This is where we’re supposed to meet up with Jill’s ship on arrival. How long do we wait here?”

  And that’s the big question none of us has yet discussed. Most of us have thought about it, but nobody voiced it. Nobody wanted to do anything except hope that we’d fallen out of sync on the hops with Jill’s ship on the way here from earth, and that was the full explanation of why we hadn’t seen her in over four months.

  “We’ll wait for a day,” I decide. “If they don’t show by this time tomorrow, we’ll decide then what to do.” Looking over at Tarlow, I tell him, “Take your time. Scan as far as you’re able. Take as long as you need. We’ll disconnect the tank ring when we know we’re alone.”

  Chapter 33

  The tank ring disconnects without a hitch.

  Deciding it would be better not to fly through the system with armed nukes mounted outside the hull, we decide to keep them stored inside. We do use one for the crew to practice mounting and testing the detachment mechanisms, which are triggered from one of the buttons on Phil’s grav console. He’s the clear choice for bombardier. The bombs are ballistic weapons, meant to be dropped onto a target from a B-52 or B1 flying at twenty-thousand feet over a target and then following a ballistic arc, probably breaking the speed of sound at terminal velocity—nearly a half-ton of aerodynamic steel with an H-bomb core, ready to explode after burrowing fifty or a hundred meters into the ground.

  Out here, our plan isn’t to depend on the gravity of earth to pull the nukes down to the target, but to depend on our momentum. We’ll barrel out of space at ten or twenty thousand miles per hour, slam on the brakes to reach a speed at which the nukes can collide with stone and not vaporize on impact, but burrow through, and then release one or several of them to rain down on our target, punch holes into the earth, and turn the supply depot into a heap of radioactive slag.

  Phil’s Gray—I still have trouble thinking of her as Nicky—has an old, secondhand memory of a depot that’s expansive. Like the mining installation on the Potato, it has tunnels running nine levels deep and in every direction. Only it’s larger. It covers an area, as near as we can guess, maybe a mile square, and maybe a half-mile deep. It’s a huge place, on a protoplanet larger than earth’s moon, large enough to sustain a colony of maybe a hundred thousand Trogs, all toiling away to stockpile metals and volatile elements to top off any number of Trog cruisers that comes passing through.

  And if the size of the place isn’t enough to give us a sense of inadequacy even with our eighteen measly nukes, we can’t help but speculate as to the size of fleets Trogs built this facility to support.

  The sixty-two that showed up with the first fleet that attacked the moon, and the subsequent reinforcement fleet of twenty-one, were just the beginning. This base is built to handle much more. And maybe it’s not just earth the Trogs are interested in. Perhaps this is one of many steps in their plan to expand beyond their home system. Maybe they’ve grown large enough, numerous enough, and ambitious enough that eyeing all the nearby stars has set them to dreaming that all of it might be theirs, if only they could build out their armies, fleets, and infrastructure.

  Those kinds of thoughts set my mind to spinning up a whole different set of worries. If the Trogs and their Gray masters are capable of building such a supply depot as only one of several in a chain that allowed them to leapfrog from earth all the way back to 18 Scorpii, what else might they be up to? Or more pointedly, what else might they be capable of? How vast is their military power now? How expansive is their industrial might?

  Is it possible that their expedition to earth is little more than a distraction for them, something of a police action on which they wasted a tiny fraction of the squadrons at their d
isposal just to handle an irritant, to get revenge, to bring a band of rogues to justice?

  What would happen to earth if the Trogs decided to bring the might of their whole fleet to bear?

  How many thousands, or tens of thousands of star cruisers might they have at their disposal?

  I shudder when I think about it.

  It’s not just the numbers—the vast, vast numbers of soldiers and ships, and all the power they represent, it’s the timescale involved. War in space is nothing like what passed for conflict at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when countries like the United States could project power anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, with ICBMs, anyway. Not that there were any countries like the United States. Militarily, it was in a class all its own, with the Soviet Union looking on enviously, and the Chinese working at a ferocious pace to catch up. With conventional bombs flown in B1s or B2s, they could bring the might of the US arsenal to any human on earth in under twenty-four hours. The US could fly in troops, jet fighters, even tanks and artillery, all in a matter of days.

  And communication? Instantaneous from nearly anywhere on earth.

  But this war in space?

  A radio signal would take nearly forty-five years to travel one way from earth to 18 Scorpii. That’s a ninety-year round trip.

  At best, a Trog cruiser could make the one-way trip in seven or eight years.

  What does that tell me? The rogue Grays first showed up in the earth system some thirty years ago. Even if their pursuers were right on their heels, and knew where they landed, it’d take the chasing cruiser seven years to get back to 18 Scorpii. And it would have had to have been a stripped-down version of one of their battlewagons.

  Calculating in seven years of return time for the fleet that finally arrived to go to war, that means the Trogs must have built out their chain of supply depots in twelve to fifteen years.

  Scarier, is that they either had sixty-two extra cruisers waiting around to send on the mission to earth, plus another twenty-one two years later, or they built them for the purpose. I don’t know which problem frightens me more, that of a vast stockpile or a production capacity of at least ten cruisers a year.

  The whole of earth builds one cruiser every two years.

  Now with the war on, they surely know the potential value of earth—a reasonably advanced population of slaves. Who knows what the Trogs will send in order to take control of us. There might be thousands of ships in the pipeline.

  And holy crap, that’s a sobering thought.

  Chapter 34

  Three days sitting in a spot, with nothing going on except for the Newtonian dynamics of the 61 Cygni binary system moving the planets and moons and asteroids and comets and every little rock and leftovers from the formation of the system.

  And no Jill.

  Is it possible they arrived so far ahead of us they tired of waiting, ran the mission, and headed home already? Yeah, sure, one of a hundred speculations we churned through as we sat in our orange suits and stared at one another.

  We were more productive than that, it just doesn’t seem that way, though our inaction and uncertainty has left the crew on a slow drift toward poor morale and it’s something I need to change.

  I have the crew crammed together in the largest space on the ship, having an impromptu meeting over breakfast. Not really. We’re on three shifts. Those of us who want to are sucking liquid calories through a straw. Others aren’t. If we were a million miles away from one another talking over a comm, it wouldn’t be less personal. But it’s a life that feels comfortable in its odd way for those of us used to it. It carries with it a kind of independence for those who can live without human touch.

  “Today,” I tell them, “we proceed with the mission.”

  Looking pointedly at Phil, Penny asks, “Do we know yet where we’re going?

  Knowing that Phil and Nicky haven’t been able to resolve our destination down to anything narrower than a few billion cluttered cubic kilometers at the Lagrange zone between the two stars, I say, “We’ll fly out to the border of the zone, cut grav power and zip through like a comet.” I look pointedly at Phil, too. “We’re thinking if Nicky gets a closer view of the asteroid and whatnot, maybe something will trigger her memory to lead us in.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” asks Penny.

  There’s no answer that doesn’t leave me sounding like Captain Ahab, at least in my head. “We have a mission. All of you know how important it is. You can guess as easily as I can what the Trogs might one day send this way. We’ve all talked about it a hundred times.” Looking to Penny, so she’ll know I’m answering her, “We’ll give it our best shot. We’ll search as long as we think we need to. We’ll talk. We’ll decide. Let’s not start assuming we’re going to fail.” I look down at my d-pad, peck at it with a finger, and then add, “Not until Tuesday.” I laugh so everyone knows it’s a joke.

  They laugh, too, because they’re all just polite that way.

  Chapter 35

  Easy to say, hard to do, maintaining a positive outlook on the success of the mission when you can’t find the objective.

  We’re on our eleventh day searching an asteroid field with so many hunks of rock large enough to house a supply depot we could conceivably spend the rest of our lives here, flying the endless distances between them, scanning each in detail, and then moving on to the next. Even then, we’d never finish. There aren’t enough days in a human life to make such an endeavor practical.

  So, we didn’t even consider approaching the problem that way.

  We spend most of every day drifting down a path through the zone, one of hundreds we’ve mapped, in hopes that Phil and Nicky, with their refined grav sense, and Tarlow with his radar array, can examine large cubic swaths of seemingly empty space for the rocks and spheres and the gravitational anomalies and stark geometric patterns that would be the markers of intelligent life—Trog and Gray life.

  It’s as boring as boring can be.

  Luckily, no one has yet chosen to stand on a soapbox to make an argument that we’re on a futile mission, and we and earth would be better served if we’d turn around and head back. At least there, we’ll be able to find the enemy in earth’s solar system.

  The talks we tend to have most often now are those preceding that inevitable stump speech, what are the factors we should consider when we do get to the point of deciding whether to stay or go?

  Hydrogen fuel stores are going to be part of the discussion. Food and water supplies will also be part of it. The immeasurable level of the crew’s sanity from being bottled up in the Rusty Turd for half a year with little to do has been agreed as something we all need to consider in determining our length of stay in 61 Cygni.

  What about the ship? When will it break? Or wear out? When will it need maintenance? The things were originally built on earth and sent aloft with crews that only carried H packs and cal packs enough for a few days of fighting. Earth’s generals never expected the ships to last this long. And not one of us ever thought to ask Spitz or his people any of those questions. We were all too focused on short-term goals—how fast will it go, how many rounds can it shoot, will we live to see the sunrise tomorrow?

  At some point, we’ll have rounded out all the parameters of the question, and then we’ll start talking about the milestone we need to pass that’ll trigger our return home. That’s when the arguments will come, if they do. That’s when the measure of the crew’s trust in their leadership—in me—will be tested.

  I know how this group will stand up in battle. We’ve all fought and bled together. Some of us have worked the long years slogging through pools of our own sweat in the grav factory, always thinking about a far-off goal. I know Penny and Phil will back me up no matter what I decide. Maybe that’s a hope I’ve convinced myself is a certainty.

  As for the rest, idle time is not good for soldiers. There’s only so much busywork on a ship like the Rusty Turd. We may have to come to—

  “Dylan.”


  I look up from my thoughts as I sit in the captain’s chair on the bridge.

  My comm crackles again. “Dylan?”

  “Phil?” he’s not on the bridge. It’s his off-time. Lenox is on the nav station, doing her best with what training she got from Phil. Unfortunately, she has no bug in her head. She can only do so much.

  “Yeah?” I ask.

  “Nicky sensed something big.”

  I sit up straight in my chair, catching the attention of the others on the bridge. “What?”

  “I’m coming up.”

  Chapter 36

  Phil is bubbling with excitement when he mounts the stairs to the bridge. “Nearly a hundred million miles,” Phil tells us. The Gray is following behind him, staying close.

  Penny climbs the stairs, and so does Brice. The bridge is getting crowded.

  Lenox surrenders the nav seat to Phil and moves to one of the benches at the back of the bridge.

  “Is this it?” I ask, hoping.

  Tarlow pokes his head through the doorway.

  “Come in,” I tell him. “Take your station. His backup moves away. The first string is on duty.

  “I think so,” Phil finally answers as he settles into his seat.

  “Give Tarlow the heading.”

  Penny is looking at me for orders.

  “If it’s as far as Phil says, accelerate us in the direction,” I explain. “Don’t push too hard, but get us moving.”

  She understands. Take our time on the accel, and get us up to speed. Don’t flash a huge grav plume that every Gray in the neighborhood will see.

  Phil sends the details over to Tarlow.

  “Got it,” he grunts and focuses on his work with his backup looking over his shoulder.