Freedom's Fire Read online

  I check the time on my d-pad, and then gaze out through the windows at a view the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in fictional movies and old space documentaries.

  The world is spinning slowly below me as I look down on swirls of cloud, patterns of snow-capped mountains, evergreen forest, and gray cities.

  Earth’s massive battle stations, each constructed in hollowed-out asteroids towed in from the belt, orbit on their basket weave of paths. As I watch, one station seems to come toward me, but I know it’ll pass overhead. I hope. I have no way of telling what my altitude is. Two stations closer to my course are way out in front.

  Juji Station, dead and venting gasses, is far ahead, slowly receding as it moves farther and farther away.

  South of me, at the edge of the planet’s curve, I see Trog cruisers, twelve or fourteen of them, hammering another station that’s sending a storm of fire back. Railgun slugs, hot from the compression of gravity pushing them from standstill speeds up to six or seven thousand miles an hour glow bright yellow and red as they cut paths through the vacuum.

  Assault ships, broken in pieces and shattered into bits, are floating in every direction.

  Pieces of metal and the bodies of SDF soldiers flame bright as they streak into the atmosphere.

  A cruiser, terribly damaged, jetting flame from a dozen fires, is sliding sideways far below me. It’s starting to glow hot as earth’s thick atmosphere drags across its hull.

  I check the time on my d-pad again. Thirty seconds.

  The two-minute mark was arbitrary. However, I had to draw the line somewhere. My plan will disintegrate the more time it takes to develop. I just have no way of knowing how long that time will be.

  Penny comms in. “Where the hell are you?”

  “I told you, I’d meet you outside.”

  “That’s stupid,” she tells me. “Get to the ship.”

  “Is everyone on board?” I ask.

  “Everyone but you.”

  “Don’t wait,” I tell her.

  Penny and I have been friends for a very long time. She’s getting angry. “Don’t go hero on me.”

  “Don’t go Adverb on me,” I shoot back. “This isn’t a suicide mission. Seriously, look for me outside. I’ll come out of the hole the ship’s going to leave once you back it out.”

  “And you really think we’ll find you in all the debris out there?” she argues.

  “I’ll max my suit’s deflective grav once I’m outside. Phil sees gravity better than he sees internet porn. To him, I’ll be glowing like a supernova.”

  Phil cuts in. “You wish.”

  Penny adds, “You know Phil’s still mad at you about—”

  I laugh, if for no other reason than to get back on topic. “I trust you, all of you. Now don’t fuck it up. I don’t want to be orbiting the planet forever.” If I live through what I’ve planned, if I make it out of the ship, orbiting forever will be my only choice if they don’t find me. My suit can generate a grav field, but there’s no way its micro-fusion reactor can sustain enough power to de-orbit me in any survivable way. “Now, move it, and stay focused. Things are going to get messy.”

  “Suit yourself. Penny out.”

  Jill comms in. “We’re pulling out now. It was nice knowing you, Dylan Kane. I’d say more, but my mom always told me, never get in a man’s way when he’s got stupid on his mind.”

  “See you outside, Jill.” I check my watch. Time’s up.

  I feel the Trog cruiser lurch as the two assault ships power up grav fields strong enough to disengage.

  I drop into the tiny pilot’s seat, made for Gray butts, not humans.

  Is this a Trog ship then? A Gray ship?

  I focus on the gravity fields of all the massive objects around me and see the other two Trog cruisers still raining railgun slugs down on Arizona and still shooting at assault ships lucky enough to make it up through the atmosphere. The three cruisers are in a line as we follow the spin of the planet below. Mine is first, the second follows me ten klicks back, and the third is another ten further.

  They’re holding their position against earth’s pull.

  Neither is doing anything to change that. Neither is reacting to the ship I control. Whether they don’t know or won’t accept that a stupid human monkey just captured one of their beautiful mechanical leviathans is irrelevant to me, as long as they don’t change their minds for another minute or two. Then, the unmerciful and unchangeable laws of physics will be in control of their fates.

  I attempt to kill power to all my ship’s interior systems, and screw something up. Internal gravity starts to fluctuate.

  Nonetheless, something worked right.

  My console tells me I’ve got more power available I can direct to the propulsion and maneuver plates, more power than those grav plates can sustain, actually. In short bursts, a grav plate can consume more electricity than it’s rated for. It generates a stronger field for a short time—maybe seconds, maybe minutes—and then the plate’s titanium housing superheats, frying its innards and rupturing. Then the unit turns to junk.

  That’s okay with me. I’m not interested in the resale value of this heap. I only want minutes.

  I push the power flow and over-grav every plate in the ship as I jam it into reverse.

  Blue grav fields glow, and field lines spray in every direction.

  Every piece of metal framework in the ship strains as two million tons of composite and steel try to change direction. The deck rumbles.

  Interior grav disappears completely and alarms sound on one of the consoles. Now every Trog on board, every personal item in every berth, and the loose tonnage of railgun slugs and wreckage in the main hangar tumble forward, smashing interior walls and crushing bulkheads.

  A smile slowly creeps across my face. It strikes me as bizarrely funny that four or five years of labor by thousands of Trogs went into constructing this cruiser and it won’t last ten more minutes under the abuse I’m heaping on it.

  It won’t have to.

  The bridge crews piloting the other two ships—I guess now not Trogs but Grays—with their hypersensitivity to gravity, have to be stunned by the intensity of what just happened inside my ship. I hope they’re speculating and making bad guesses, like maybe a catastrophic reactor failure, or perhaps an impact by another of the humans’ tiny assault ships.

  All I need is another thirty or forty seconds of dithering conjecture from them.

  Once megaton masses start lumbering on a collision course, there reaches a point where nothing can be done to tease the physics of the situation toward any outcome but disaster.

  The seconds tick.

  Grav plates rupture and pop in my hull, shaking the entire ship with each burst.

  The distance between my cruiser’s stern and the bridge of the following ship has halved, and that ship responds.

  Its grav plates plume blue energy as it veers. Railguns still firing at distant targets start sending slugs skipping across the atmosphere and off into space.

  Now I know for sure, the Grays driving the other ship reacted too late and didn’t respond drastically enough. At this point they couldn’t, not without making the hard choice to over-grav their plates and ruin their ship in order to save it.

  Tough shit for them.

  The last satisfying seconds pass.

  My cruiser’s stern smashes into the second cruiser’s bridge, and I steer away just as the collision starts. I don’t want a direct hit, but a glancing blow, just enough to destroy the other ship’s bridge, kill the command crew, and rip away enough of the forward section to expose its expansive hanger bay to the deadly vacuum of space.

  My ship is shuddering around me. Every piece of metal feels like it’s going to break welds and shear rivets as four million tons of reinforced hull and payload in the two giant ships deform and break.

  Still, I pour every amp of power my redlining reactors generate to over-grav my plates.

  My ship is accelerating as my hull rip
s along the other cruiser’s side.

  A huge rocket of air is blasting out of the tear in my victim’s main hangar bay, pushing it to list hard to starboard and roll onto its back. Its grav plates—those with power—are thrusting the ship with nothing controlling them.

  Our ships separate.

  I’m still flying.

  The other is lurching toward the atmosphere and a fiery death for every murderous Trog onboard.

  “Ha!” I shout. “That’s what war feels like, bitches!”

  I turn my attention to the last of the three cruisers.

  I already know I’m going to succeed in killing it.

  It’s slowing cautiously, trying to process what just happened. Maybe the Grays think it’s an accident—one damaged ship losing guidance and colliding unfortunately with a second. Maybe they’re trying to hang close to pick up survivors.

  Maybe the little Gray masters of our universe are indecisive.

  Perhaps that’s the flaw of the hive mind. All those big heads filled with orange brain-goo, arguing telepathically while their placid black eyes cast dirty looks at one another, are unable to reach a decision as fast as a stupid human monkey like me. It might be the key to their downfall.

  It certainly is working today.

  The last cruiser casually veers.

  It chooses left.

  Any direction besides left would have increased its odds of survival. However, at this point, over-grav acceleration is the only tiny chance it has.

  They do me the favor of not selecting that option.

  Still moving faster, I take aim with my smashed stern, my ram.

  Expectedly, they finally get it, and their grav fields erupt in brilliant blue.

  Unfortunately for them, it’s one-hundred-percent too late.

  I laugh.

  I brace myself.

  My stern smashes into the other ship’s flank, just aft of the command section. Steel framework drives through composite hull as both ships start to disintegrate.

  It’s time for me to go.

  I jump out of my seat and fly using my suit’s grav.

  I’m across the bridge and into a clear grav tube in seconds, blazing at a dangerous speed, curving hard in a burst of blue as I make the turn out the bottom of the tube and move into the main corridor back to the hangar bay.

  I see Trogs ahead—three of them—using auto-grav to stick to the buckling floor. They have to know catastrophe is unfolding around them, but they’re unsure how to react.

  My rifle is in my hands, and I trigger a long burst of full-auto slugs as I max power to my deflective field and put the rest into acceleration. I drive right at them.

  Hoping.

  Praying.

  I don’t care if I hit them. I just need a gap.

  No collision.

  I flash past the Trogs, out of the hall and into the hangar bay, wondering how I managed to miss them.

  The stern of my ship is a half-kilometer down from me, collapsing in slow destruction, with geysers of flame searing through the vacuum and disappearing as soon as they form. Explosions of sparks burst in sprays a hundred meters across.

  Cracks run all up and down my hull.

  Giant support ribs buckle.

  I have to find a hole in the hull big enough to use for escape.

  I’m all eyes and panic, knowing the heartbeats left in my life are small in number.

  And there it is, the ragged hole left by Jill’s ship after it wrenched free.

  I adjust my grav field and push toward the opening, but it’s deforming as the hull bends.

  A gravity pulse pushes me off course.

  Grav plates on two massive ships are maxing current and bending space—one to avert, one to cause the disaster already destroying them—and the chaos of attraction and repulsion is making it damn hard to stay on a straight line.

  A metal support the size of a railroad car rips loose and spins through the hangar bay, tearing up every structure in its way.

  I swerve and push.

  I see empty space through the collapsing hole and play the only card I have. I over-grav my suit plates for a punch of acceleration.

  Suddenly, unbelievably, I’m out.

  The earth’s daylight surface is below me, a million scraps of metal are careening in every direction, and the black void of space stretches out to forever above me.

  “Hell, yeah!”

  I back off my suit grav to save my plates.

  I need to get away from the cruisers, while avoiding any hunk of metal big enough to kill me.

  I scan around for my assault ship’s gravity signature. Instead, I see in the distance my first victim starting to break up in the atmosphere.

  The two ships above me are still merging, as blue snakes of grav field lines swim all over the crunching wreckage.

  “Penny!” I call into my comm. “Penny!”

  “Searching,” Phil answers.

  As promised, I max power to my suit’s deflective field. “I’m about a half a klick below the bow, earth side.”

  “Dammit!” yells Phil. “You’re gonna hit atmosphere if you keep going!”

  “Well, then come save me, goddammit.” I’m giddy as I speak, because I just avoided a brush with death that should have killed me. “Wasn’t I clear on that part of the plan?”

  “I see you,” says Phil.

  “Headed your way,” Penny tells me.

  I veer left, bursting blue with grav wash to avoid a huge section of ship’s hull that just blew off.

  Out of the blackness, growing impossibly fast, I see my assault ship coming right at me.

  The grav field dissipates suddenly, and the ship matches my vector. It effortlessly maneuvers up beside me.

  I’m impressed. “Good driving, Penny.”

  Brice opens one of the assault doors, reaches out, and drags me inside. “He’s in!”

  “Hold tight,” Penny calls back. “Max grav!”

  I grab a handhold and put my butt in a seat.

  The platoon compartment is full of battered grunts looking at me in awe. Actually, full is the wrong word. Half the seats are empty now. Half my platoon is already dead. That puts a hollow in my gut I think I might fall into.

  Penny pours on the speed.

  Space flexes for a microsecond as one of the colliding cruiser’s fusion reactors loses containment and blows both ships apart in a nuclear blast.

  Chapter 40

  I’m on the bridge with Brice, Lenox, and the rest of the bridge crew.

  Phil is jabbering on because he can’t contain his excitement. “That’s not the kind of thing that happens, not in a fusion reactor. The old fission ones might melt down, but to see a runaway cascade? No, that’s fission. But fusion? That collision had to do something just right. Know what I mean? Just right. Or maybe it is a fission reactor. Do Trogs use fission?”

  “Why don’t you be quiet,” asks Penny “and let me drive?”

  Phil huffs. He likes to pout. He usually wallows in it until somebody caves in and comforts him.

  “While you boys were out having your fun,” says Penny, “I talked with Jill’s pilot. We’re going back to Juji Station to see if anyone else from our company made it.”

  “Anything on the ship-to-ship from them?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” answers Jablonsky.

  “They might be there,” says Phil, finding his voice earlier than expected, making it clear his feelings are still bruised.

  “Yeah.” I don’t agree. I think they’re dead. Dying’s apparently an easy thing to do up here. “Phil, what’s the status of our ship?”

  “A few more dings,” he tells me, losing a little of his act, now that he has something else to think about. “Nothing major since the first salvo when we were coming up.”

  “Systems are stable?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “How are we set for fuel?”

  “Including what we burned off and what leaked out from punctured tanks, we have about sixty percen
t of our hydrogen left.”

  “Grav plates?” I ask.

  “Seven percent compromised or dead,” he answers. “All of those are hull plates we use for our defensive field and the inertial bubble. The drive array is fine.”

  “Can we bubble jump?” I ask.

  In one of the more advanced training modules, I learned that jumping to light speed and beyond is mostly about generating a sufficiently enormous power surge and dumping it through a specially configured plate array in the rear of the ship constructed around the reactor. The surge spikes an intense and localized grav field that punches the space-time fabric so forcefully it produces a circular three-dimensional wave.

  Did I say I love this kind of techno-shit?

  A simplistic, but illustrative way to picture it is like a wave on the ocean.

  The counterintuitive, but important point is though a powerful wave, a tsunami, might travel across the ocean at four or five hundred miles an hour, it’s not the water flowing, it’s the wave that’s moving through the water.

  Just as a submarine could never hope to generate enough power to move at several hundred miles an hour underwater, a surfer on a board could theoretically ride the wave at full speed across the ocean. Of course, the analogy breaks down on so many technical levels it’s useless from an engineering perspective.

  The major difference is that the space-time wave would dissipate almost instantly if not sustained by a power source in the spacecraft that first generated it. By using the grav array to create the wave, a ship can then feed the warp with a lower energy output to create a standing wave that exists within a three-dimensional space around the ship. A bubble.

  The size of the bubble and the amplitude of the wave are determined mostly by the power the ship can generate to sustain it. The taller the wave, the bigger the bubble, the faster the wave moves through space. The faster the ship moves surfing it.

  Theoretically, there’s no limit to how fast the wave can move, so likewise, there’s no limit to how fast the ship can travel. From outside the bubble, the ship seems to move faster than the speed of light. However, Einstein’s equations aren’t violated, because inside the bubble, the ship isn’t exceeding the universal speed limit, it’s stationary relative to the wave of warped space.