Freedom's Fire Read online

  This cruiser is the apparent galactic standard in ship design. It’s made to bombard its targets from orbit, then land to let a contingent of soldiers mop up any who resist.

  Everything about this ship is built for the kind of war the Grays fight—giant capital ships, pounding one another with railguns, fluctuating their grav fields for defense. It’s like a game of chess where a punch in the face hides behind every bad move.

  An unlikely form of war, evolved through a long history where the Grays and their adversaries have the same goals, because they value the same things.

  They want to control solar systems with planets like earth, with hospitable atmospheres, non-toxic chemical compositions, and tolerable gravity. They like moderate temperatures with liquid water and not too many voracious microbes.

  Most of all, they want to possess planets with large populations of technologically backward creatures that can be put to use constructing navies to fight their inevitable wars, building orbital battle stations to defend habitable planets, and to provide muscle and sweat for thousand-year projects building donut-shaped space stations ten thousand miles across, artificial ring-worlds, Eden bliss for a billion of their kind.

  And why stop at one?

  Earth’s solar system is full of raw materials, and breathing human bodies are cheap—we just can’t stop making more of ourselves.

  Earth is a prize worth fighting for.

  The gravity in the hangar bay is stabilizing.

  Trogs are scattered like goldfish out of water on the decks above and below, and half a kilometer aft to the barracks. Their mouths are opening and closing, gulping for breath in air too thin to sustain life.

  Thousands of them dying, and I don’t feel an iota of pity because of why they’re here—to enslave me and every generation of humans from now until God gets tired of playing dollhouse with his shitty little universe and flushes it down a black hole.

  It’s time to do some killing.

  Chapter 32

  We’re close enough now for suit-to-suit comm with the other assault ship, so I open a connection with Jill Rafferty. “Status?”

  “Bumpy ride,” she answers immediately. “We’re all good. Glad you made it, cowboy.”

  Like our platoon, hers has three crew-served railguns that fire slugs the size of fifty-caliber machine gun rounds at speeds near 7k. “Leave three fire teams on board or near your ship. They need to be in a spot where they can fire on the barracks at the aft end of the cruiser. Start shooting as soon as they’re set up. Punch holes in the barracks wall in the back of the ship until the Trogs start to come out, then pin them in the doorways if you can.

  “But,” Jill pauses, “why shoot the walls?”

  “Vacuum,” I remind her. “Any Trogs not suited up inside will suffocate when the air goes.”

  “Shoulder-fired rockets would sure come in handy for that.”

  “I’ll file a complaint with the MSS,” I tell her, a grim smile on my face, because she’s right. With a half-dozen decent anti-tank rockets from any old rotting warehouse on a military base left over from before the siege, we could punch enough big holes in the forward and aft sections that most of the Trogs on the ship would die before we had to deal with them head on. “Hold another squad back for reserve and send the other two forward.”

  “Send?” she asks me. “I’m leading them.”

  I’d prefer she stayed with her ship to manage our rear defense, however, I’ve known her long enough to know there’s nothing I can talk her out of once she sets her mind. “Leave a good sergeant then.”

  “Will do.”

  “We took nearly thirty percent casualties coming up, including noncoms and officers,” I tell her.

  “Legit casualties?” She’s asking if it was enemy fire or the mutiny that killed them.

  “Legit plus a few,” I tell her. “I’ve got two sergeants, and me. I’ll take two squads forward and leave three fire teams on my ship for defense. Tell your sergeant guarding our rear to keep tabs on them.”

  I switch to my platoon’s command comm. “Brice, Lenox, it’s time to go.”

  A blistering red trail of machine gun fire traces a line from Jill’s ship down the length of the Trog cruiser. Rounds pierce the barracks wall with so much energy metal explodes.

  Another machine gun joins the first. A third opens up.

  Maybe rockets aren’t needed, after all.

  I set my comm to loop in with Jill, Brice, and Lenox. I add in the grunts in Brice’s squad since I’ll be going in with them. It’s not the optimal command solution for the battle, but I’ve got to earn respect from the grunt level on up, which means I need to do grunt work with a gun in my hand and dead Trogs under my feet.

  “Jill, we’re moving now.”

  “I’ll race you to the bridge.”

  Soldiers in their dirty orange suits bounce out of Jill’s ship and start running across the cluttered deck.

  I hit my grav and fly toward the bow. “You better hurry.”

  Chapter 33

  I accelerate as I fly, aiming toward one of the three closed doorways that’ll allow us access to the Trog cruiser’s forward command section. “Brice, bring the squad to me.”

  “Yes, sir.” I hear him and the others over the comm as they make their leaps from the open assault doors into emptiness in the Trog ship’s main hangar. They’re flying for real, and doing so in a surreal environment as different from anything they’re likely ever to see or feel.

  Lenox’s squad is jumping down to the decks, running, bouncing, or falling depending on their skills. They’re using their suits’ auto-grav full time, so their suits will always orient gravity toward whatever the feet are standing on.

  Halfway to my target door and just beginning my deceleration, I see a pair of odd shadows in the jumble of strewn railgun slugs on the deck below. The shadows move enough like humans, so I don’t need a full view to know they’re Trogs—the jet-black concerns me. Trogs always wear suits that were once white when manufactured, but now are weathered, gray, and finger-painted in primitive symbols and designs.

  Ghosts. The Trog elite.

  The ones who wear black are their generals and captains. At least when they’re among the Trog hordes.

  The Trogs clad in crisp ebony who move about on their own, are the killers. The best of the Trogs.

  They need to be dealt with. “Brice,” I say, “I’ve got ghosts up here.”

  “Trogs in black?” He asks without hesitation.

  “Roger that,” I tell him as I glance back at our ship and see him standing in an assault door hustling the last member of our squad out.

  “Location?”

  I point.

  Lenox says, “My squad can take ‘em.”

  “Be careful,” Brice tells her. “You’ve got the numbers, use that to your advantage.”

  “Will do.” Flying above her troops, Lenox divides her squad into fire teams, guiding them into deadly crossfire positions as they move toward the pair of ghosts. Some of the troops move like soldiers. Others straggle, just trying to maintain pace and direction.

  They dying will start soon.

  I hope some of us will live to leave this ship.

  Taking a glance toward Jill’s ship, I see her two squads running across the deck, bouncing, and some flying. She’s apparently left her squads mixed.

  I make a note to tell her about the way we’ve separated ours. Experience with grav control is the major factor in troop mobility, and maybe combat effectiveness. Units of mixed skill level only serve to drag the entire squad down. At least that’s the assumption we’re working under in my platoon.

  However, the middle of a battle is not the time for those kinds of instructions, so I keep them to myself, and turn to see how close—

  I slam into the wall and bounce off.

  I hit the floor and rebound, going high and into a slow roll.

  Dammit!

  I’d stopped paying attention to where I was.

 
Good thing I’d engaged my suit’s automatic defense. It creates an anti-grav field around my body to deflect incoming fire. Fortunately, it also works like an invisible fat suit to soften the impact of collisions, like the one I just had with the wall.

  Just as I start to hope the mistake went unnoticed, a few women in my squad giggle.

  “Silva? Mostyn?” I ask, and the giggling stops. “If you’ll forget you saw that, we can negotiate a bribe later.”

  They laugh some more.

  Clearly, they don’t agree.

  I switch my suit to auto-grav and orient my feet beneath me. All the time I spent in the zero-g room back home in Breck is paying off. Using the suit’s controls is second nature to me.

  I take one of the two C4 charges off my utility belt, attach it to the door, and tell my squad, “Explosive set!” Translation: hurry the hell up.

  The door is inset into the wall by eighteen inches, which works out perfectly for what’s about to happen. I jump away from the door and take six quick steps before stopping to put my back against the steel.

  I won’t catch any shrapnel, and I should be far enough away not to be hurt by the blast. I amp up my defensive grav just in case, and take a few more steps.

  Brice hits the wall beside me, followed quickly by Silva, Mostyn, Bautista, Mendez, and Hastings. All are women except Mendez.

  It’s an unexpected mix of genders that makes me wonder about the procrastination habits of the two. Maybe when the girls were hard at work with their sims, the boys distracted themselves with salacious videos. A thought for another time.

  What really distracts me at a moment when I have a hundred more important things on my mind is Silva’s smile. I can’t put into words what it is about a woman’s smile when it’s just right, only that it opens a trap I happily fall into.

  The smile wisps away in an instant.

  Silva is back to business. I am too.

  My squad arranges itself flat against the wall.

  I raise my arm so I can see my d-pad. There’s nothing on the touchscreen but one big red dot. I push it to detonate the C4.

  I feel the shock through my back and hear it through my helmet because it’s pressed against the wall.

  Over the command comm, I tell them, “Going in.”

  Chapter 34

  Like me, Mostyn has only seen simulated battle, but she’s already pulling an explosive charge off her belt and jumping around me for a peek past the doors we just destroyed. “It’s an airlock,” she tells us. “Inner doors intact.”

  “Blow ‘em,” I say.

  She disappears through the outer doors’ splinters.

  Silva bounces around me, weapon up. “I’ll cover.”

  I see Lenox’s squad firing into a sunken walkway sixty or seventy meters away.

  A ghost in black jumps out of another walkway. Scarily fast, he comes up behind a grunt on the flank of the formation.

  Lenox yells a warning.

  It’s not enough.

  The ghost swings a blade-shaped weapon with blue parallel lines glowing down its length. The blade cuts through the soldier’s ribcage all the way to the spine, and then, as if the movement was planned, the ghost spins with his momentum and hops back into another walkway.

  “Lenox?” I call.

  “We got this,” she tells me. “Keep your squad alive.”

  She’s right. It’ll be my grunts dying if I try to micromanage the other squads.

  “Trogs coming out of the barracks!” Jill calls over the command comm.

  “Does Sergeant Bruckert have it under control?” I ask. Bruckert is the man she left in charge of our rear defense.

  “I’ll tell you when he doesn’t.”

  Silva and Mostyn come bouncing back out of the damaged airlock. “Ready?” Silva asks.

  I give her the nod.

  She winks at me and pushes the glowing red dot on her d-pad.

  The charge blows.

  Again, the wall and floor shudder.

  A spray of metal shards rides a blast of wind out of the airlock as the ship’s forward section depressurizes.

  Pieces of one or two Trogs in black suits blow past us. It’s hard to guess the count when the parts aren’t sinewed together anymore.

  A Gray flies by, missing an arm, head split, amber blood spraying out.

  A Gray?

  My squad congratulates themselves.

  “Bow section breached,” I call over the comm for Jill and my other squad leaders.

  My grunts have their weapons up, and they’re off the wall, forming up to move inside once the depressurization finishes, and I’m thinking we’ve not proven ourselves yet, but so far the simulator training hasn’t produced a bad result.

  I take point, knowing it’s a terrible place for a commander.

  Brice grabs my shoulder to stop me and shakes his head.

  I can’t get past the respect necessity even if it is all in my mind. “I need to. At least for today.”

  The wall and floor shudder again, and I glance toward Jill’s squad. They’ve just blown their airlock’s outer door.

  The howl of wind out of our doors diminishes.

  Any second now.

  Lenox comms in. “Ghosts down. We’re on the way.”

  Good news.

  I step through broken metal doors and lead my squad inside.

  Most of the lights down the hall are working. Most of those nearby are broken.

  The white walls and floor are scorched by the blast, however, anything not built in is gone, blown out in the decompression blast.

  Except—

  I kneel quickly and grab the handle of a sword-like Trog weapon stuck in a crag of door metal. The parallel rows of blue light activate as soon as my palm wraps around the handle.

  “How ‘bout that?” utters Silva.

  “Yeah.” I’m thinking, how about that? Trog weapons are powered just like ours.

  “You hold onto that,” says Brice. “Damn things are deadly as hell.”

  “I got Trogs!” calls Lenox. “Coming out of the third set of bow doors.”

  The only door of the three we’re not assaulting. “Ghosts or regular?” I ask.

  “Regular,” she tells me. “We’ll take ‘em.”

  Brice says, “Send a fire team in to cover our rear as soon as you can spare them.”

  “Will do,” answers Lenox. Whereas our squad has five soldiers—not counting Brice and me—Lenox’s squad has fourteen. The downside of separating them by skill level.

  The walls and floor shudder again.

  “Breach!” calls Jill.

  I reach my ghost Trog weapon over my back and feel it clink against one of the magnet mounts on my integrated backpack. It sticks.

  In we go, four of us on one wall, three on the opposite side.

  It’s easy to hurry. We have no obstacles.

  At twenty meters, we pause as we arrive at a wide cross-hall.

  So far everything in the Trog ship’s layout has been an exact match with our cruisers. That means to the left, at the end of that hall, are the residential quarters for the forward crew. To the right, down a short corridor, stands a pair of doors that lead to a long bay running parallel to one of the gun spines. It’s where all of the weapons-targeting personnel sit, aiming the railguns.

  “On the corners,” Brice orders the squad. “Cover both doors. Let’s blow them simultaneously.”

  Silva runs toward the barracks door. Mendez sprints toward the other, each readying a C4 charge.

  The rest of the squad aims their weapons down the halls.

  I keep an eye up the main corridor in front of us, but glance back to see a fire team from Lenox’s squad just outside the doors we blew to get in.

  A blast of wind explodes from the main corridor.

  The wind tunnel force nearly knocks me off my feet, but I increase auto grav to keep my boots stuck to the floor.

  Two of my squad slide down the hall, dragged by the wind.

  “Increase grav!
” I holler at them as I ready my weapon to shoot.

  Everything is happening fast, and something I’m seeing down the hall doesn’t make sense. It takes a frantic fraction of a second for me to understand. Two black shadows are riding the wind, coming impossibly fast. “Ghosts!”

  Panic trips my trigger finger, and I fire on full auto.

  My rounds spread spears of red all through the hall.

  The ghosts are bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and floor.

  Brice is shooting, too.

  The rounds whiz past the ghosts or deflect off their blue pulsing anti-grav fields. Suddenly, my brand new superior firepower 6k, two-hundred-rounds-a-minute, recoil-compensated, state-of-the-art, grav-drive Trog-killing rifle doesn’t seem like it’s worth its own weight in dog shit.

  It’s clear to me, the single-shot weapons our troops have been using so far in this war against Trog armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands is one of the big reasons we’re losing.

  Only a heartbeat or two has passed.

  Still, I fire.

  As the Trog in front moves closer, more of my rounds find their mark, and the blue anti-grav deflection field shimmers non-stop, overloads, and lets some slugs through.

  The Trog’s body takes a shot through the shoulder and he tumbles in the wind, still swinging his blue-lined blade.

  Blood is spewing from his wound.

  And he’s on us.

  He slashes his blade.

  Bautista’s head spins away from her body as her neck still squirts blood to feed a brain no longer integrated into the system.

  The wounded ghost Trog is past us in a flash and slams into Lenox’s grunts back at the blasted door.

  Somebody shouts.

  There’s still one coming.

  Chapter 35

  I’m not sure how frustration turned to inspiration and then to action so fast, but it’s clear to me these ghost Trogs’ black suits have an extra helping of defensive magic built in.