Freedom's Fire Page 2

  The Grays are moving two SDF divisions into space today, including the one I’ve been attached to.

  I’m anxious to be fitted into an actual battle suit for the first time and to step onto a grav lift bound for the endless void.

  Well, just the solar system, really.

  But it’ll be the beginning.

  A war. A revolution.

  And maybe my death added to a billion others. At least I’ll die a free man.

  After a life of servitude, what price wouldn’t I pay for just one breath of freedom?

  The bike is coasting.

  I check my watch. I need to ride a little faster.

  The Grays are not lenient masters. They don’t understand tardiness, which seems odd for a species that had no concept of measured time before they arrived on our planet.

  They’re a telepathic race, always in communication with one another, living in the now, recalling their history from details parsed among them. When they’re ready to do something, they act by consensus, though there is a flexible hierarchy of dominance between them that no human understands.

  Their telepathy is the reason I hide my thoughts. The gel in their skulls—that goo which passes for a brain—functions so differently than our mass of neurons that making a telepathic link from one of them to one of us is laborious. The microelectrical activity their minds sense in our heads is mostly incomprehensible.

  However, some of them learn, and some of them grow adept at reading humans.

  Those are the dangerous ones.

  Especially for people like me.

  Chapter 3

  Chafing inside my containment suit, I smell my sweat. Worse than usual. I drank too many beers in the wee hours and they’re now seeping through my pores.

  For closure? For celebration? Regret?

  There’s no answer to the why.

  There’s only the future.

  I’ve chosen my path. I harbor no uncertainty about where I’m going.

  Unfortunately, at the moment, my headache is growing so intense it’s hard to focus. And at the gravity factory, focus is everything.

  I’m nearly four hours into my shift, my final. A partial day.

  From the speakers mounted on the ceiling, the shrill voice of a Korean woman bleats monotonic, rhythmic sounds into the sweltering air. The first break of the day is coming. She tells us to pull strong for a few more minutes. For the war effort. For the fate of our eternal brotherhood with the Grays.

  Everything depends on the grav plates we produce.

  Quality.

  Quantity.

  We have to do our share.

  Every shift she goes on like that. The words stay mostly the same, yet they roll off her tongue a little differently each day. I can’t shut her up, and I can’t tune her out. Most of my adult life I’ve worked in the factory. I’ve had plenty of time to fantasize unusual and intricate pain for the woman behind that voice. At the moment, I only hope she hates the monotony of her job as much as I do in the swampy air on the production floor.

  It’s fitting.

  But distracting.

  I’m counting the last minutes of my factory life, feeling them drip by while I’m surrounded by scores of people in bio-containment suits.

  We’re all draped in drab blue, shapeless, with a filter apparatus over every face, clear goggles protecting every pair of eyes. We’re social animals who spend eighty-two sterile hours a week with only a single dimension through which to distinguish one another, to communicate, to form the intimate bonds every human needs.

  Besides our eyes, we’re all the same, except for Phil.

  I look down the line to see him, my estranged brother-in-law. With the extra weight he carries around his gut, he makes his bio-containment suit look overfilled. Everyone on our line is habitually checking on Phil. We can’t have his suit catching on something and tearing. That would shut down the line and maybe the whole factory. We don’t wear the suits for our safety—no, they protect the microbes we inlay on the plates.

  At the moment, Phil is etching the last of the paper-thin, ceramic composite plates I’ll ever have to work.

  After him, cleaners flow chemicals and distilled water over the rotating discs before warm, filtered air dries them. They ensure that no micro-particle remains on the surface, organic or otherwise. Inspectors follow, looking for flaws in the etch, for resilient contaminants.

  Humans, trying to be perfect.

  Our line crew rotates among the stations at every break, every shift. It helps keep us fresh. It reduces mistakes.

  Right now, it’s my turn on the most challenging step in the process, the secret sauce that makes this alien tech the kind of invention we humans couldn’t possibly have stumbled across on our own.

  And I realize immediately how wrong I am.

  We humans have a long history of serendipitous breakthroughs. One of those breakthroughs is proving itself out in the factory right now.

  The war is going so badly that the Grays have finally rescinded a cardinal rule and allowed their mechanically clever monkeys—us—to merge our computer tech with one of their most treasured technologies, gravity manipulation.

  Using computers, two lines in the factory have been converted from manual processes to automated ones. Now, each of those lines produces more by itself than the whole factory did prior to the upgrade.

  Nevertheless, I’m required to finish my shift.

  I place a dinner plate-sized disc in the bottom of an open-ended leaden cylinder large enough to store a few basketballs within. I lean the faceplate of my suit onto the top of the tube, sealing it closed with a rubber ring around my visor. I tune out the noise and ignore the acrid fumes that find their way through my protective layers of Tyvec.

  Sweat beads tickle my skin as they run down inside the suit.

  Concentrate.

  I open and then close each of three gas valves to send small clouds of minuscule organisms into the leaden cylinder. The microbes in the vapor are each married in symbiotic pairs. All of the Grays’ advancements over humans depend on biological technology, most of which utilizes organisms inextricably bound to others.

  Even me.

  As the newborn son of a woman working in the molybdenum mine a half hour west of Breck, my mother made the bold choice to give her son the only advantage she saw in a world run by Grays.

  A choice she hoped would lead to a life of privilege, it carried an unquantifiable risk she was only able to ignore because she was making the decision in the shadow of my father’s death.

  My mother didn’t want a laborer’s short life for me. In those days, there were only two ways out of hard labor in the service of the Grays. One of those ways was to be born a North Korean. They’d made their deal with the Grays and earned their special place while the rest of the world was foolishly trying to stand united against the alien invader during the siege. Since neither of my parents was Korean, that left my mother a single choice, to allow the Grays to implant a symbiont in my head. So few humans were chosen for the privilege, it must have felt like a lottery win to my mother.

  Now I’m a member of the first generation of humans to have an alien bug in his head from birth. An avocado seed of a thing with a thousand hair-thin follicles rooted into my cortex.

  And the privilege came.

  I have an enviable house, a car, gasoline to run it, food at every meal, plenty to sate my hunger—mostly—and even meat on occasion.

  But I’m the Grays’ tool, bound to them by the bug.

  They see the thoughts in my head—they believe they see them all.

  The bug has rudimentary telepathic abilities, so by using it, I have the capacity to control the biological switches in the Grays’ machinery. That makes me useful in a Gray world.

  The bug is able to see gravity, so in my mind I see it, too, a 3D picture of the world augmented in colors and intensities normal humans can’t perceive.

  The alien symbiont made me into a lesser version of the Grays, mo
re capable than normal humans, and more valuable. So it almost goes without saying every unenhanced person I’ve ever met resents me.

  Especially the North Koreans.

  In the grav factory with my face against the tube and my eyes closed, I use my bug—not even thinking of it as anything other than a natural part of me—to precipitate millions of symbiont pairs out of the gas, coaxing them to settle onto the etched disc in just the right orientation, in the perfect spots, touching one another just so.

  An intricate lattice of life.

  To lay all those microbes on a grav plate in the few minutes it takes requires all the attention I can bring to bear. Doing it as quickly and flawlessly as I do makes me the rarest of people. Even among those with bugs in their heads, I’m recognized as a talent, ripe for reward.

  With the war having burned through a whole generation of North Koreans who’d been implanted with bugs and sent into space to navigate the Grays’ ships and aim their railguns, the Grays decided it was time to give their loyal servants from other countries a chance to sacrifice their lives for the cause. They allowed the lines in the grav plate factories to be automated so people like me could be spared to fly into space with the last of earth’s defenders.

  Like most masters, the Grays have a peculiar sense of reward.

  The thing they didn’t understand, though, was my officer’s commission and my attachment to an SDF division was exactly what I’d wanted from the day the war began, when I learned the Grays were putting weapons in the hands of humans.

  A weapon in the hands of a man who grates at the manacles of his servitude is a dangerous thing.

  Breathing slowly to take my mind off my plans and refocus on my job, I lay the last of the microbes in their nirvana spots. I remove the disk from the leaden cylinder and carefully pass it on to the next step in the process. Before any of the unsuspecting little creatures has an inkling of what’s coming, a blast of UV light kills them all.

  The carcasses are then dehydrated where they lay. A protective film is spread over the cemetery disc to hold the special arrangement of their mineral remains in place.

  The finished discs are stacked, all oriented in an exact direction, the edges lined up to form a solid contact for DC to flow in one of two directions. The whole pile is snugged into a titanium housing, and the grav plate is finished. Run a current through one way, and you get gravity. Reverse the current, and you get anti-gravity.

  Combined with the Grays’ fusion reactor technology, it’s the power to travel the stars and to conquer backward apes like us.

  That power, too, will soon be in my hands.

  Chapter 4

  I wear my stale odor like I wear the smudges on my knees, evidence of a life fading into the past.

  Before being granted permission to leave, I had to kneel at the tiny feet of the factory’s six Gray overseers.

  Please, foul little creatures, grant me permission to stand tall like a man.

  It was foolish to think that heretical thought so strong, chomping at my reins, prematurely feeling my freedom.

  Two of the factory’s Korean toughs looked on, or that’s to say, looked down on me as I bowed. Dead coal eyes. Jet-black hair. They’re all fuckers.

  To them, I’m subhuman.

  And then my Gray masters dismissed me so I could bike the last few miles from Frisco down to the spaceport.

  Each bug-headed line worker in the factory bowed the same as me, one at a time, asking permission to go and serve the next overlord in line. In doing so, the Grays, blinded by their pride, willfully sent a host of scheming insurgents into the midst of their last great effort to save themselves from the creatures invading the solar system.

  Back in the moment, I breathe my last peace along the bike path, feeling the crisp, late-morning air. Around me, tall mountains are broken by jutting rocks, blanketed by the carcasses of long-dead evergreens, splashed yellow with autumn aspens.

  I’ll never bow again.

  Never again.

  It’s as much a promise as a prayer.

  I pedal past the reservoir, over the dam, and then back along the burbling river until I roll beneath the interstate highway. It’s clogged both east and west with buses and semis bringing in two SDF heavy assault divisions, their equipment, and support personnel. All virgins to war. It’ll take the rest of the day to get so many soldiers fitted into suits, ferried into space, and loaded onto the newly designed assault ships, the mysterious wonder weapon that’s supposed to turn the tide of the war.

  Not likely.

  I come to a stop. The bicycle path is blocked by a fence. Like everything else on the north end of the valley, the recreational path has been subsumed by the spaceport. I hop off my bike and lay it in the grass by the river. No lock. No need. I open my bag and find a pen and notepad. I write out a message and tuck it into a gap in the headlamp bracket.

  TAKE THE BIKE IF YOU WANT. I DON’T NEED IT ANYMORE.

  Then I wait. I’m supposed to meet Vishnu, my contact with the Free Army, for any last-minute instructions he might have for me before I lead my ring of traitors into orbit.

  Enough time passes to make me uncomfortable, and I decide there must be nothing new. Everything is going as planned.

  I climb a steep bank to get up to road level.

  Chaos.

  Soldiers in uniform unload from their transports and try to figure out where to go. Boys just starting to shave. Middle-aged men with gray-flecked hair. Girls, not old enough for legal sex. And mothers wearing the scars of war’s intimate touch, wrinkles eroded deep by worry, loss in their eyes. Third and fourth choice demographics for the draft. Maybe fifth. Sixth, even. All the strong, the young, the fast, are in suits up there among the asteroids, already fighting, or drifting lifeless in the void as the moisture from their cells leaches into the vacuum.

  Our history could be written in the tales of our armies, their glory and their victories, all forged in the fire of discipline, tradition, sacrifice, and maybe a thousand trivial rules and rituals that don’t make any damn sense to a civilian looking in from the outside. Those ingredients, when drilled into a recruit in the right proportions and reinforced through the camaraderie of soldiers who believe in a cause and know victory is their destiny, turn a regular person into a soldier.

  Sadly, all of those ingredients were left out of this batch.

  We’re soldiers in little more than name. We’re familiar with the words we’re supposed to have memorized and we’ve all passed our multiple choice tests, but we know nothing about marching, taking orders, sacrificing for our brothers and sisters, or any of the steps in-between.

  We’re sandbags being thrown into the breach in the dike.

  Most of us will wash away.

  Others will sink under the weight of the dead, piling on top.

  No, not soldiers, not us. We’re draftees sprinkled with a few volunteers.

  At thirty, still young and strong, I am an oddity among these dregs.

  As sure as I know I’ll never kiss my shriveling wife again, the Grays will bleed our planet to a husk. They tell us it’s the survival of our species we fight for, but I darkly suspect it’s only their pride we defend.

  MSS men—Ministry of State Security—are in their gaudy uniforms everywhere. They’re all North Koreans, of course. And then it occurs to me that I refer to the Koreans the same way the old men in Breck do, as type ‘North.’ The NORTH is a moot distinction. Soon after Pyongyang made its traitorous deal back in the days of the siege, the Grays thanked them for their fidelity by obliterating South Korea. China also paid a price for having nudged too hard, too often, to keep their nasty little subdivided neighbor in line with global norms.

  Now there’s only Korea, bordered on the south by a wasteland peninsula and a desert of destruction on the north.

  I stand on a curb and look around to get my bearings.

  The MSS autocrats are stopping every man and woman, affirming their authority by leaning in close to faces, yelling instr
uctions, pointing, and keying in arm tattoos.

  “You!”

  “You!”

  I realize one of the MSS men is pointing at me, mouth loud and arrogant. A lieutenant.

  “Here!” He gestures at the fragmented asphalt where he expects me to come and plant my feet.

  Normally, I’d hurry to act when ordered by an MSS man. Not today. I don’t feel the fetters of their authority so tight. In the midst of twenty thousand SDF wannabe killers, I don’t even fear the randomness of MSS violence.

  I saunter toward him.

  His face turns redder with each casual step I take. His accented words become harder to understand. He’s got one hand waving his data pad and one on the butt of his pistol.

  I jog the last lazy steps.

  “I could shoot you for delaying. Are you coward?” His accent gets stronger with emotion. “You deserter?”

  “Clearly.” My tone sparkles with sarcasm. The idea of liberty has made me brave and a little foolish. A lifetime of pent-up scorn is trying to burst out. Still, I’m hours away from having a weapon in my hand.

  Just that much longer.

  Forcing myself to look at my feet instead of into the lieutenant’s eye, I wrap my next words in humility. It’s a trap I’m laying. “Clearly, I’m not a deserter, sir. I rode my bike down the path, sir. I just came up from the river, sir.” Holding out my forearm for him to see, I say, “I need my assignment, sir.”

  My arm, from the crook of my elbow to my wrist, is tattooed with an alphanumeric code written in Korean letters two inches tall.

  He reads.

  He keys it into his data pad.

  And then he freezes.

  I look up at him. The trap has snapped.

  He knows.

  I try not to smile.

  His world just took a turn into the surreal, and he’s confused, afraid. A Caucasian commissar outranking an MSS lieutenant, the Korean nightmare coming true.