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

  Finally, after a dreadful battle over a planet with no name orbiting a star no Gray had ever even noticed in the endless sprinkle of lights in the heavens, the surviving handful of Trog starships chose to run in order to survive. It was the first sensible choice a Trog master had made since any Gray could remember.

  Together, the cruisers jumped from star to star to star, journeying year upon year through the void, only to fight again with a fleet of ragged pursuers as they both tried to refuel and replenish their stores.

  More ships were lost. More Trogs and Grays died in the terrible, cold vacuum of space.

  And then they happened upon a star system where no pursuers ever arrived. No battle followed. The Trogs did what they could for their ships and their people before hurriedly taking off again, jumping to another star on a years-long journey. Knowing upon arrival they were not yet safe, they jumped again, and again, and again, until finally limping into a star system that looked like their own Eden.

  They counted three habitable worlds, the best of which they chose to land on and call their new home world.

  History of The Grays: Part 5

  The Grays found themselves in a place where they could thrive. They needed little more than the right spectrum of rays from a local star, warm-blooded animals on which to nest their young, and a range of minerals their bodies could slowly absorb as needed from the water, earth, and air.

  Colonization for the Trogs was a more arduous process. They were in a constant war with the local vegetation, always finding better ways to kill it lest it overrun their fields. The animals they’d brought along struggled to stay alive. Local predators found them a delicious addition to their diet and indigenous diseases killed entire herds.

  Fortunately for the Trogs, they were nothing if not persistent and tough.

  They dedicated themselves to victory over the local environment with all the enthusiasm they’d brought to the war with all the cousins they set out to cleanse from their end of the galaxy. Perhaps that was a good thing—maybe the best thing for them and their servant Grays. They ended up spending centuries trying to kill all of that world’s flora and fauna so their favorite plants and animals would take over.

  It kept the Trogs from killing each other.

  It was during these years that the survivors of the Seekers, the Unbelievers, the Red Brothers, the Snow Grays, and the True Children built an alliance that would stand for thousands of years, all bound by a single foundational concept—that the Trogs, once they’d beaten their new world into submission, would again turn on each other in a war of annihilation. The Grays, being able to see this cycle as inherent to the Trog species, knew that extinction was certain to come one day. Being beholden to the Trogs, the Grays would die off, too.

  That was unacceptable for a species that saw itself as superior to the Trogs in every way except for brut stature, and the ability to master the elements for building tools and machines—an area of expertise that eluded even the most imaginative of Grays. They came to understand that the Gray mind had not been created for such things. Theirs was the transcendent realm of the collective mind. The shaping of dirt clods into tools of destruction—that was the domain of the lesser beings, the Trogs.

  So it was that the Grays developed their plan.

  After war, it might be said that the Trogs’ secondary passion was that of sloth. A Trog might lie about for days thinking no thoughts with his weak mind and doing no work with his strong hands. Hence, the Trogs grew dependent on their Gray slaves for many things. Teaching Trog children how to think with their big, unused brains was one area where Grays almost completely supplanted adult Trogs. Teaching Trog children to bond their telepathic symbionts was another realm where servants shouldered the work for their brawny masters.

  Ever so slowly, over many, many generations, the Grays learned to position themselves within Trog households and social hierarchies so they could exert influence. They learned to tug and gently nudge individual Trog minds toward a desired outcome. The Grays used this power to urge Trogs into forming breeding pairs that were likely to produce the most pliable offspring, pliable by the Grays.

  It was an effort that took millennia to bear fruit, but the life of a Gray runs for a thousand years, whereas a Trog might live for a tiny fraction of that.

  So it was that the Grays bred away Trog intelligence, independence, and much of their aggression, until after many generations, the Trogs were but simpleton shadows of the formidable conquerors who’d arrived on the Grays’ home world all those years before.

  The Trogs retained their physical strength. They were still smart enough to manipulate their machines, though they were no longer intelligent or creative enough to imagine and design new ones.

  Most of all, they were ready for slavery.

  History of The Grays: Part 6

  Perhaps every creature with the capacity for complex thought believes they can change the world without being affected by it. The Grays, in their long road from slave to master believed it, just as the Trogs did when they took the Grays as their slaves and lived through many generations walking a path toward their destruction.

  They were both wrong.

  The mighty Trogs learned how to serve. The Grays assimilated a lust for conquest.

  Or perhaps a new aspect of Gray nature arose, one that thrived on the conceit they felt at having mastered creatures with so much power in their minds and muscles.

  The transition of slave to master, just like any change in the tide of history, requires a war to seal the deal. So it was with the Grays. They took their new horde of gullible Trog slaves and pitted them against the last of the Trogs who were still able to grasp the concept of free will.

  It was a brutish affair that ended as all Trog wars did, with a long campaign of annihilation. The slaughter lasted generations—Trog generations—but such lifespans were nothing to a Gray.

  When all the dead had been reduced to ashes and sent into the wind, the Grays, with their new itch for killing, had only themselves to turn on. The old animosities between the Seekers, the Unbelievers, the Red Brothers, the Snow Grays, and the True Children festered into brushfire wars that broke out between clans. Alliances formed and shifted as clans positioned themselves for a greater share of power and land.

  The battles were fought exclusively with the muscle and blood of Trog slaves, which were bred more and more for that sole purpose—to carry destruction to the enemy.

  Still, Grays died. Deaths lingered long in their memories. Grudges went unresolved long after peace was negotiated. Animosity was stacked with piles of distrust, kindling for igniting the next war.

  Despite the fighting, the Grays and their Trog slaves thrived. Over many thousands of years, they filled the system’s three habitable planets with billions upon billions of their kind. They constructed star-faring ships by the hundred, and then the thousand, all of the battle-tested design they inherited from the earlier Trogs.

  On the longest time-scale imaginable by a human for such an endeavor, the Gray-Trog culture slowly developed the technology to manufacture space stations. These evolved into gigantic wheels in space, large enough to make a home for a billion Grays. Such stations became necessary as the planets overflowed and the wars for resources grew more frequent.

  Every clan and sub-clan with a ship or two to fly into space embarked on an endeavor to strip the asteroid belts, the Kuiper belt, the Oort Cloud, the moons, and rocky inner planets of every material necessary to build the great wheels.

  It was during this phase of Gray history, with space stations being built all through the solar system, with clans competing for resources, fighting over what they perceived as the perfect place in orbit to build their new wonders, that the True Children realized the position in which they stood. Over all those generations, they’d grown to such prominence of power and number, they realized they were equal to the sum of the four major clans and all the thousands of sub-clans put together. The True Children decided they should rule the
others, and secretly developed a belief that their offspring should survive to one day rule the galaxy.

  And so began the most terrible war in all of Gray history.

  Over a thousand years, the war ebbed and flowed, grew hot, and then cold again, as each side jockeyed for position and strived to build alliances that would evaporate as soon as the necessity of it disappeared, usually with the decimation or annihilation of an enemy.

  The bleached skulls of Gray and Trog alike littered the surface of every planet. Nearly a third of the space stations were destroyed or rendered unlivable. Vast lands were scoured of life, regrew over centuries, and then scoured again. Mines in the asteroid belt and on the small, rocky, inner planets were destroyed and rebuilt.

  And slowly, the great fleets of ships the Gray clans used for war, for transport, for exploring the nearby star systems were whittled down. Many were obliterated. Many crashed into planets. Many were damaged and repaired and damaged again so many times they lost structural integrity and disintegrated when making the jump to light-speed.

  As the slaughter became unbearable, some of the small clans escaped. They took a few ships, or a dozen, loaded as many of their kin and Trog property inside as they could, and escaped into the void, looking for a home far from the violence.

  By the time the end came, Grays were down to just a tenth of their number. The Trogs had suffered even more. Only one was left alive for every twenty or thirty who fought in the Gray armies, worked in the fields to feed their brothers, or toiled in space on the great ring colonies. As for the True Children, a final battle raged for weeks in which every True Child Gray and all of their Trog slaves were finally wiped out.

  Except for three pods, eighteen Grays, and nearly five hundred Trogs who escaped in a single ship, racing across the stars to save themselves from the just retribution of all the suffering their clan had brought upon the Gray species.

  Chapter 1

  I finish reading Phil’s report on Gray History and look through my tiny, forward-facing window, as Penny brings us in slow and quiet, nearly drifting.

  Given all that Phil must have learned from his little Gray friend, I need to applaud his efforts. The report is concise for a history that covers thousands and thousands of years. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder how much is left out. Is there some nugget on the cutting room floor that would be of use to me in our inevitable battles?

  Of course the cynic in me asks how the hell I’d even know until after the fact.

  The story’s pretentious tone still bothers me, and I wonder how much of that is Phil’s conveyance of the Gray’s reverence for its history, and how much is Phil’s admiration. It never stops worrying me that the Gray might be assimilating Phil, and not the other way around.

  Either way, I hate the thought of it.

  Me, with a gooey alien spaghetti bug in my head.

  We’ve made our jumps all over the solar system, taking no direct approach, going out of our way to hide our destination should any Gray happen to be in the right place at a proximate distance to guess where we might be going.

  Making the run back and forth for over a week ferrying everything of value that could be scavenged and stuffed inside an assault ship has been a little stressful. We’re abandoning the Potato, expecting at any time the Trog fleet will show up to pound it to dust. Everybody knows it’s coming.

  Still, we gamble, because out in space, every piece of equipment is worth so much more than back on earth. Unlike the UN base buried in the mountains of Iapetus, the Free Army has no manufacturing capacity off-earth. That is, except for the rudimentary kilns and furnaces on the Potato, which were built for refining the most valuable bits out of ores and stone, not for molding and assembling complex machine parts. Pieces of those kilns and furnaces, those that could be disassembled, make up our current load.

  As I sit in my chair on the bridge of the rusty beast, silently sliding through space, while most everyone onboard dozes or talks quietly over private comm links, I wonder if the Free Army is guilty of optimism or stupidity. Did they think their revolution would be so quick that building manufacturing infrastructure out in space would be a wasted effort? Or were they just too stupid to plan for the long-term? Or maybe I’m just a dick because it’s easy to judge others when your eyes are full of hindsight and your heart is smoldering anger over all the lives wasted for a poorly managed good cause.

  And why does life have to have so many unanswered questions?

  I find myself daydreaming more and more when the illusion of love made me think I had all the answers I’d ever need—a warm woman to hold in my arms, a blue sky and a bright sun, and mountains standing tall all the way to the horizon, like they were everything in the universe that mattered.

  But that was an illusion back in those days, one I worked hard to get away from.

  I sigh.

  The sighs come easy on days when the memories tease me with an ever-sweetening past.

  Spread across the void ahead of our ship, an oddity of geometry comes into view.

  We’re in Jupiter’s L4 zone, one of those gravitationally stable areas in the solar plane where the pull of the Sun and the nearby planet zero out, kind of a gravitational backwater where the small crap in the solar system collects to drift forever.

  For an inner-solar-system planet like earth, with a small gravitational pull relative to the gas giants in the outer solar system, not much junk gets caught. Only one hunk of rock was ever found, floating along in earth’s L5 zone, following the planet’s orbit around the sun.

  Jupiter’s L5 zone makes earth’s look like a joke so dry it needs a footnote to explain it. Over a half-million hunks of rock, ice, and whatnot, each at least a kilometer across, are spread through the space, following along in Jupiter’s orbital wake.

  The space around our sun is just chock-full of crap I never suspected was out here when I was a kid looking up at the twinkling stars in the sky. And if our system is so full of raw materials just lying around for the taking, why would any bunch of aliens need to come so far just to get their hands on it. Surely, their home system must be the same. Then I remind myself, it’s not the metal ores and volatile gases they’re after, it’s us they want, an endless stock of labor.

  It’s hard sometimes assimilating the concept that you’re a commodity.

  Beside the point.

  Up ahead of our ship, I’m counting rows and columns in a perfect grid of asteroids, dark against a black background and barely visible except for the weak glare of the sun shining on ridges and crags. They’re all of the kilometer-plus variety—six rows, nine columns, fifty-four in all, spread out in space several kilometers apart. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that every one of those rocks must have been surveyed and assayed and pushed here by some mining operation’s big rock-moving tugs. Like all of the operations out here, their processing capacity is tiny relative to the wealth of raw materials. Why not lock in your stock for future generations before your competition shows up to lay its claim?

  Penny guides our ship past the first row of asteroids. All those around loom large as she decelerates the ship past.

  The Free Army’s facilities are spread across nine of these rocks, and they have railgun emplacements burrowed deep. Unfortunately, not all of them are manned, and over a third of the big guns don’t yet have a functioning fusion reactor built to power the weapon and life support facilities.

  “We’ll be down in five,” Penny tells me.

  Nodding, I say, “I’ll wake everybody up.”

  Chapter 2

  It takes nearly four hours to do all the things that seem like they should have taken only thirty minutes, but that’s just the way life works sometimes. Maybe all the time.

  When I catch up with Colonel Bird, he’s outside, standing on the raw asteroid rock with nothing but the great black void above him glistening with stars promising a billion flavors of undefined hope. A trillion really. Maybe a trillion trillion. Or probably that’s only a fraction o
f an estimate. The expanse of the universe really does outstrip the capacity of the human imagination.

  Opening a comm link to both me and Brice as we walk up, Bird observes, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” I stop in front of him and salute, still feeling awkward about it. The military training on that pointless bit of protocol never sank in with me.

  “Brice. Kane,” greets Bird as he salutes us back. Several paces behind him, three guards stand watch. Four others are spread out nearby, keeping an eye in all directions. Not that there’s anyone out here but us. The asteroid we’re standing on is near one corner of the grid of floating rocks.

  Gravity, time, and the violent history of collisions over billions of years have ground most of the kilometer-sized rocks to roughly shaped ovals and spheres. A few odd exceptions float among the others. The one we’re standing on is oblong—not unlike the Potato, where my crew was first sent to rendezvous with the Free Army after the Arizona Massacre—and it’s standing up relative to the plane of the array, so we’re well above the others, with a good view.

  The sight is gorgeous in a dark, menacing way. And it’s unique, like everything else I see when I’m out here. Though the beauty of novelty is losing its ability to impress me.

  I start the conversation with, “There’s plenty more still there. Back on the Potato.”

  Bird nods. “It’s too dangerous. We’ll wait a month or two, and try then.”

  “Yes, sir.” I’m still getting used to using the words. Too much of my personality rubbing me wrong, or too much ingrained push-back over Blair’s insistence on the honorific. I don’t know. “I think that’s wise.”

  Brice nods, too. He approves.

  "How is your crew holding up?" Bird asks. He does sincerely care.