Freedom's Fire Read online

  “That’s pretty close,” says Brice. “Too close to be coming out of bubble jump, right?”

  Crap. I don’t need Penny and Phil more defensive about this than they already are, but Brice is right. Coming in or out of jump near a massive object can lead to trouble, the Russian-roulette kind. Maybe you come out just fine and laugh your good fortune in fate’s face, or maybe you’re atomized so quickly you don’t even have a millisecond to think “Oh, shit!” right before you die.

  “Yeah,” Phil agrees, flatly. “Looks like that consistent speed thing I just mentioned is off the table, too.”

  Brice pats the bulkhead beside his seat. “Fantastic!” Then he leans over and catches Lenox’s attention. “Luck.”

  She chooses not to respond.

  “Two assault ships are already here,” Phil tells us. “They’re not directly on the other side of the asteroid. I can see them above the horizon. And Jupiter is huge. I can tell you one thing, we’re a lot closer to Jupiter out here than to the asteroid belt.”

  “Jablonsky,” I call, “find out which ships those are.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Really?

  Brice laughs.

  I decide Phil must be infecting the bridge crew with his pushy cynicism.

  “How fast do you want to get there?” asks Penny. “We could pull some g’s and arrive in five minutes if you want. If there’s no hurry, we can take it slow and cruise on over in an hour or two.”

  “Hydrogen?” I ask. That’s the variable on which the question depends. Heavy g acceleration and deceleration will burn through more of our H than if we take it slow. In fact, if we had a day to spare, we could give the grav plates a tiny bump and then frictionlessly coast the distance.

  “We’re down to just over half in our tanks,” answers Penny. “Depending on where we go after this, we need to start thinking about getting a refill.”

  “We need it either way,” I tell her. “That’s the standing order. Wherever we go from here, make sure our flight plan includes enough hydrogen to make it back to earth.”

  “The standing order?” asks Phil, in a vague tone. He doesn’t have that much overt aggression in him. He likes to chip away with snide comments. “Are we still in the SDF?”

  “Adverb,” says Penny, “don’t start.”

  “He already started,” says Brice.

  It seems Brice is starting to feel comfortable with the social dynamic of our grav factory clique.

  “Phil,” I take a breath, “this isn’t the—”

  “Oh, crap!” he shouts.

  “What?” I ask.

  “They’re under attack!” he shouts back. “Someone’s shooting at them!”

  Chapter 49

  Minutes burn away along with our diminishing hydrogen stocks. We pick up speed and the platoon compartment flutters blue. Our inertial bubble is earning its pay today.

  Rather then driving right at the asteroid, Penny has us riding an arc on a path that’ll curve us around to the other side of the asteroid at high speed.

  “Both ships are dead,” Phil tells us, petulant inflections absent from his voice now that the war has fallen back into our laps. “They concentrated fire on the reactors in the stern of each one.”

  “Are the ships damaged otherwise?” I ask.

  “No grav field emanates from either ship,” Phil answers. “Otherwise, the forward sections are intact.”

  “Are the Trogs still shooting at them?” I ask.

  “No,” says Phil. “They’ve stopped.”

  “Prisoners?” speculates Penny. “The Trogs want to take them prisoner.”

  I’m willing to go with that guess, however, there’s another possibility I want to keep to myself. What if it’s not Trogs on that asteroid? What if we’ve been set up by the MSS in a sting operation to weed out disloyal bug-heads just like us? What if the MSS wants to collect live traitors to feed into their interrogation system so they can find more of us?

  Granted, I can’t think of a reason why we wouldn’t have been arrested before we ever had a chance to board our ship. A lifetime under Gray rule has left me with a healthy sense of paranoia.

  “There’s nothing we can do for them,” Phil tells us.

  “You want to leave your fellow grunts out there to die?” Brice spits into the comm.

  “We don’t have any armaments,” Phil shoots back. “In case you haven’t noticed, this rusty turd was built to harpoon those big Trog cruisers. How are we supposed to attack an asteroid base?”

  “Phil,” I tell him, “cut the chatter. Keep an eye on what’s happening. I need to know everything I can about this place.”

  Jablonsky says, “I can set the computer up to record the feed from the exterior cameras.”

  “How quickly?” I ask.

  “Doing it now.”

  That makes my next choice for me. “Penny, when you swing around that asteroid don’t slow down. Bring us in close and fast. I want a good picture of what’s on the ground. As soon as we’re past, I want to jump.”

  “Bubble jump?” Brice asks. “That’s dangerously close to the asteroid.”

  “Where to?” asks Phil. “I need a vector.”

  “The asteroid’s gravity field will affect us,” argues Brice, his voice calm and slow. He wants to make sure I understand what I’m asking.

  I don’t need the reminder of the danger, but I don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons. “We’re not going anywhere,” I tell them all. “I just want the Trogs on the surface to see us make the jump. They need to think we’re bubbling out to save our asses. I want them to believe we’re not coming back.” Same thing if it’s the MSS down there.

  “Gotcha,” says Brice. Back to business. He understands. Whoever has control of the base on the other side of the asteroid, our one dinky ship and half-strength platoon can’t take them in a frontal assault.

  “Five or six seconds at light speed is all we need,” I tell them. “That’ll put us a million miles away, far enough they might not notice us pop back out again.”

  “Hey,” says Phil, getting a little excited. “Two ships are coming up off the surface.”

  I try to see the gravity picture in my mind. I see a blurry image of the asteroid, a halo of smaller rocks randomly floating nearby, and the Rusty Turd’s grav plates distorting everything.

  Damn, Phil is good.

  I admit, “I can’t make them out.”

  “Give it a sec,” says Phil. “Another second.”

  “Grav lifts,” Penny tells us. “Just like the ones we rode to the shipyard.”

  “They’re definitely going for the ships,” I deduce out loud. “Penny—”

  “Got it,” she says.

  I feel the ship’s course alter slightly, and I know she understands what I want her to do.

  We’re accelerating again. I only have one suggestion. “If you can nail them both.”

  Blue waves burst over the bulkheads. Our inertial bubble strains and we all feel gravity buffet us with pulsing fluxes.

  Phil is jabbering, trying to help Penny line up on our targets.

  “I got it, Phil. I got it,” she tells him.

  Phil powers up the grav lens and brilliant blue fills the platoon compartment.

  The ship shudders.

  “They’re lined up!” shouts Phil.

  “Everybody hold on,” Penny tells us. “Shifting power.”

  “Hold tight,” Brice tells the grunts.

  They’re already tense in their seats.

  “They see us!” shouts Phil.

  “Nowhere to run, now.” I hear a vicious smile in Penny’s voice.

  The ship lurches to a blinding flash of blue.

  We’ve shattered the first shuttle.

  Another flash follows as our grav lens obliterates the second vessel.

  Bent steel and broken Trogs are thrown into space. The gravity field around our ship is in chaos.

  “Got ‘em!” shouts Penny.

  “Jump!” I order
.

  “They’re shooting,” shouts Phil.

  The ground guns are trying to hit us.

  The ship shudders so hard I think it’s going to come apart.

  Electric blue light strobes through the cabin in waves as bright as when we hit the Trog cruiser in the battle over earth.

  Voices are screaming over the comm, and the grav in the cabin is ratcheting up past two g’s, then five.

  Oh, no.

  Without warning, the blue blinks away and we’re suddenly surrounded by nothing but dead rust and the sick yellow glow of the cabin’s weak bulbs.

  The Rusty Turd is quiet, seemingly motionless.

  We’re in zero-g.

  “We’re out of bubble jump,” says Penny.

  Damn, that was quick.

  “Nearly a million miles,” confirms Phil, sounding proud. “Nine hundred and seventy-three thousand.”

  “And we’re alive,” says Brice, because he wants to make the point it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  He’s right, but we did what we had to do. I glance right and left, and say, “To the bridge. We have an assault to plan.”

  Chapter 50

  I’m starting to feel like I’m stuck in a déjà vu cycle: go to the bridge and make a plan, strap into a seat, ram something, go to the bridge and make a plan, strap into a seat…

  Ugh.

  Is this what glorious revolution really is? Repetitive tedium punctuated by frenetic moments of fighting to stay alive?

  I kick things off. “Jablonsky, tell me we got good pics on our flyby.”

  He’s looking at his monitor, scrolling frame by frame through a video of the asteroid’s surface. “Once we hit the lifts, debris flew everywhere.”

  “Can you composite the good frames to give us a complete picture?” I ask.

  “That’s what I’m working on.”

  “We should wait a few minutes and then go back,” suggests Phil. “If they send up more lifts, we can take those out, too.”

  “No,” says Brice, as he comes through the doorway to the bridge. He glances at me. “No, sir. I disagree.”

  “So do I,” I tell him.

  “Why?” asks Phil.

  Phil is great with gravity, but he doesn’t have a good mind for war. Brice knows the answer, so I give him the nod.

  “If we go back and attack,” says Brice, “in the same way we just did, maybe we’ll succeed. Maybe there’s nothing they can do about it. However, if they can do something about it, they will. They won’t be surprised like that again.”

  “So,” I tell them all, “we need to surprise them a different way.” I look at Brice for the next part because I suspect he won’t like it. “We have to wait long enough they’ll think we’re gone for good.”

  “That’s okay,” says Brice. “I know why you’re looking at me.”

  “Then you know if we go back too soon,” I say, “they’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Who’s to say they won’t be waiting for us anyway?” argues Phil.

  “They will,” Brice tells him. “The longer we wait, the more complacent they’ll become.”

  “Or they’ll kill more assault ships that come to the base and fall into their trap,” says Phil.

  “Unfortunately, that’s right,” I tell him. I look around at the others. “Those two ships they were firing on weren’t burning hard to escape. They were hovering over the base, probably looking for a spot to land, and the Trogs on the ground opened up on them. Unfortunately, we can’t just rush in. We’re probably outnumbered. We know we’re outgunned.”

  “So what, then?” asks Phil.

  “That’s what we need to figure out,” says Brice.

  “First things first,” I turn to Phil. “There are plenty of smaller asteroids in the space near that big one.”

  “It had to be a mining operation,” Brice tells us. “That’s what they do. They put a base on some big rock and while they work on mining it for ore, they send out a tug or two to bring smaller asteroids and claim them for later.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Lenox. “I thought the base was in the asteroid belt. Aren’t asteroids everywhere?”

  “It’s not like the movies,” I tell her. “Asteroids out here are something like a half-million miles apart.”

  “The bigger ones,” says Phil. “You could fly through the belt a thousand times looking out the window and never even know you were in it.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” answers Phil.

  “Around some of the bigger mining colonies,” says Brice, “they might have a few hundred smaller asteroids corralled. Those places are like the asteroid belts you see in the movies with big hunks of rock everywhere you look.”

  I turn to Phil. “I want you to pick one of the bigger asteroids and plot a course for Penny to bring us around so we’ll be flying in behind the smaller adjacent one. If we do it right, the Grays in that mining colony on the bigger rock won’t be able to see us coming.”

  “They’ll detect our grav signature,” says Phil as he shakes his head.

  He’s almost right about that. Grays see gravity—hence mass—better then humans see light. “If we bubble jump, the grav shadow of that small asteroid won’t hide us. However, like we already agreed, we have time. We’ll come in at sub-light speeds, starting with an acceleration way out here where they’re not likely to notice, and then slide in, decelerating very slowly when we get close.”

  “Okay, okay,” says Phil, looking toward Penny. “We can do that.”

  “No problem,” she agrees, “we’ll use more hydrogen than you’ll want to. I think it will work.”

  “Hydrogen’s not a problem,” I tell her. “Attacking this base will either get us all killed, or we’ll find some miraculous way to succeed. Either we won’t need the hydrogen because we’ll all be dead, or there’ll be plenty available from the colony’s stores.”

  “That’s my kind of optimism,” says Brice.

  Chapter 51

  “I’ve pieced together a map,” says Jablonsky. “If we were back on earth, and I had my computer, I could have put together a 3D rendering, but with what I have here…”

  The ship is rife with shortcomings. I say, “We’re lucky the Rusty Turd has any onboard computer systems at all.”

  “They spared every expense,” agrees Brice.

  Jablonsky says, “I’m sending a copy to each of your d-pads.”

  “Wait,” Penny stops us as she laughs and pats the console. “The Rusty Turd. That’s the name you’re giving this beauty?”

  “Fits,” Phil mutters.

  And that settles it.

  Aside from the smallish monitors on the control consoles, the ship has no large screen we can all stand around and gawk at. Certainly no spiffy, three-dimensional, animated, full-color hologram like spaceships have in some of the old movies. I guess back in those days, with no constraint but the imagination, the realm of the future’s possibilities was as expansive as the universe itself. Unfortunately, the future we wound up with gave us hyper-light travel, yet did so in a Spartan iron tube.

  But I exaggerate.

  It’s salvaged steel and titanium. Iron would be too brittle.

  Looking at his d-pad, Brice says, “I see lots of blurry spots on my map.”

  “I had to extrapolate,” explains Jablonsky. “We were ramming through two lifts when we made our pass.”

  “Got it,” answers Brice.

  Pointing at the map, Jablonsky says, “The asteroid is oblong, around two kilometers in length, and three quarters of a kilometer at its widest. It’s shaped like a big gnarly potato.”

  I’m examining the photo on my d-pad, as is everyone on the bridge. The first thing I notice is a canyon gouged erratically down the asteroid’s long axis.

  “They must have hauled out a shit-ton of this rock’s ore already,” mutters Phil, as he scrutinizes the image.

  I notice the canyon’s walls are too neatly cut for it to be natural. Then I spot
mining equipment in the hole, and try to make a guess as to how many people it took to keep the mine producing. I don’t have any idea.

  Down at one end of the canyon, I see most of the colony’s permanent structures. Dozens of habitat domes and industrial buildings rooted into the asteroid, no telling how deep. A couple of large hangar-style structures stand among the others, I guess housing equipment for separating the ore from the tailings, or whatever it is mining operations on asteroids do with the material they dig up before sending it back to earth.

  The roofs of the hangars look sturdy and need to be so. They’re piled with layers of crumbled stone a few meters thick. The roofs out here in the belt aren’t like those back on earth, protecting from rain and hail, instead providing protection from gamma rays, micrometeors, and high-velocity space trash. Nobody wants to get a sub-light screwdriver through their skull while topping off the hydraulic fluid on a surface excavator.

  A single mining tug is parked in a well-worn area near the center of the community. I can’t tell whether it’s operational. I have no reason to suspect it’s not. With a drive array a quarter the size of the ones they put on the big Trog cruisers, it looks strong enough to push a good size asteroid at light speed, but not nearly big enough to move the rock it’s parked on anywhere fast.

  I spot three more grav lifts that I guess are functional. They’ve all been beat to hell. I’ve never seen one that wasn’t. Workhorses of the human space industry, used for moving anything and everything from the surface up into space and back again, they’ve been produced on earth by the millions and they never seem to wear out.

  I notice rows of equipment lined up in the bottom of the mining pit. Zooming in, I’m surprised. “In the floor of the pit, just where it starts to angle away from the colony, do you guys see what I see?”

  “Ships?” says Brice, fingers scrolling on the screen on his arm.

  Inside her helmet, Penny is nodding. “Look closely.”

  I’m looking at that part of the image, too. “They look like assault ships. Kind of like ours, but smaller.”

  “First-generation vessels?” suggests Brice. “Prototypes?”

  “Fuck me,” Phil nearly shouts. “There’s got to be…” he’s tapping the space above his screen as he counts, “fourteen ships?”