Freedom's Fist (Freedom's Fire Book 4) Page 3

  “Tired.” I need to give him more. “The short hops, back and forth for a week, sleeping in spurts, it takes its toll.”

  “War,” Bird summarizes. “How much time do you need before you’re ready to head out again?”

  “Two hours if we have to.” If we have to? My crew needs some downtime.

  “I don’t need to send you out today,” Bird tells me. “I’m looking for an honest assessment.”

  “Twenty-four hours. We’re tired, but a good night’s sleep will get us back on track.” Making a guess as to where we’re going with this, I ask, “Is Jill’s ship still on schedule?”

  “Your UN friends tell me it will be ready the day after tomorrow.”

  “And Hawkins’?”

  “They’ve mobilized every tech and mechanic they have,” says Bird. “Both ships will be ready.”

  “Have Hawkins’ people decided whether to let their ship participate in joint operations with us?” It’s an important question that remains unanswered. “We did some damage to the Trogs with just one ship at Ceres.”

  “Saved us from a total loss,” agrees Bird. “With three such ships, who knows what we could do? With ten, we’d make short work of the Trogs.”

  That’s only fanciful speculation at this point. “We’re months from having a fourth. They don’t have the manufacturing capacity on Iapetus to produce another axial gun faster than that. That’s what Spitz told me.”

  “Now that they see the value,” Bird explains, letting me in on some new information, “they’re ramping up. If we can keep them supplied with materials, inside of a few months they’ll be producing those guns at the rate of one every three weeks.”

  “And the ships to carry them?”

  “The best they can do is four or five a year. They don’t have the infrastructure to make them from scratch faster than that.”

  “Disappointing,” I admit. “But it sounds like relations with them are progressing.”

  “We’re on the same side,” Bird assures me. “Maybe most important of all, now we’re on the same page.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re going to refocus all of their production to support the war effort. They still have to take care of their colonies, but now they know we have hope.” Bird clarifies further, “The Free Army has hope.”

  Brice laughs in that dark way of his.

  “Ceres convinced them?” I ask, not entirely believing it. “That’s a huge change of policy.”

  “It may be the saving grace that makes our sacrifice at Ceres—” Bird stops when he notices the look on my face, “—blunder is a better word, I suppose.”

  I silently acknowledge.

  “If we can unite now,” says Bird, “we can still win. We’ll soon have the weapons to clear the Trogs from the solar system.”

  “And then the Grays,” I boldly conclude. “Our Grays, on the moon.” Our slave masters. “And the North Koreans.” I see from Bird’s expression he’s not following me to that conclusion. He has bigger worries, or deeper doubts. “What?”

  “I know where your heart lies. You want to start this revolution in earnest and free earth.”

  Bird’s remark sparks the fuse on my anger, but I do my best to keep it tamped down. “But?”

  “I need you for something else.”

  “Something else?” I’m staggered as a thousand doubts explode in my mind. If Phil were here, he’d be voicing them for me. I’ve lived and worked for the revolution for more days than I can count. And now, seeing a real light glowing on the horizon after our defeat at Ceres, Bird wants me to do ‘something else’?”

  “Something more important.”

  My defiance bubbles over when I ask, “What could be more important than freeing all of humanity from those stinking Ticks?”

  Chapter 3

  Bird doesn’t rise to my argument. Instead, he points out at the array of asteroids, at the utility ships moving among them, at digging machines working on the surface of several, at people, dots of light and color busy preparing the defenses. "Terrible configuration for defense, don’t you think?"

  Obliviously! But I don’t say that. I nod, instead.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many hours we waste talking about how to reconfigure the asteroids and anti-ship guns for the best mutually defensive configuration. Seems like every month or so, someone brings it up at the command council meeting, and we waste hours debating it.”

  Not knowing where Bird is going, I muse one vague observation, “Politics.”

  He shakes his head, though he says, “I suppose.”

  I look across the flat array drifting in its perfect grid, hating the way humans get so caught up with inconsequential details and ignore the most important things, like defending the Free Army base from a powerful enemy. “Too much arguing. Not enough deciding. This place could be a fortress.”

  “And that completely misses the point.” Bird smiles slyly. I make the guess that he just laid a trap I stepped right into. “We can’t move the asteroids.”

  Another quick glance at the giant rocks is all I need to count the big mining tugs, just like the one we found on the Potato. Massive though these asteroids are, any one or two of the tugs has the power to nudge them slowly into place. “How many tugs do you have in all? I see six right now.”

  “Nine altogether,” answers Bird.

  “So why the hesitation?”

  “You know how much energy it would take to move one of those asteroids into place and then stop it again?”

  I jump to the first guess that crosses my mind. “You have a hydrogen constraint?”

  Bird shakes his head. “It’s the grav signature that always stops us. Those tugs, maxing their drives to get those asteroids moving, would produce a bright grav signature that a Gray might see from ten million miles away.”

  Crap.

  Being a bug-head with my grav sense of the world always beaming brightly in my brain, I feel embarrassed for not guessing that from the beginning. But then again, I am a human, and no matter how early the bug was implanted, it’s still an alien, forever trying to show me the world in a way my synapses aren’t wired for. A Gray, though, evolved with an intimate connection with the universe’s gravitational subtleties.

  “Why are we talking about the configuration of the base’s defenses?” I ask. “Are you wanting to keep my ship here in a defensive posture?"

  “No,” Bird answers. “I’m making the point that the best strategy is not always the most obvious one, and it’s almost never the one that feels good.”

  “I guess we’re getting back to the ‘something else’ you were talking about a moment ago.”

  “We are.”

  I surrender. “What do you have in mind?”

  “That Gray of Phil’s—what does he call him—Nick?”

  I nod.

  “Do you think the information Phil extracted is accurate?”

  “I’ve thought a lot about it,” I tell Bird. “Phil and I have talked about it enough times to wear it thin.” I heave a deep sigh as I’m being put on the spot to pass a final judgment. “Yes. I think it’s true.”

  "Anything, in particular, to make you believe that?"

  “The Trogs. They’re Neanderthals from earth. Or they’re evolved from earth’s Neanderthals. I don’t think there’s any way we can argue that. I think one truth leads to another.”

  Bird isn’t satisfied. “Or, one truth can mask a larger lie.”

  I smile. “ hard to talk to.”

  “I’m cautious with the lives of my people.”

  That’s something I like about him. It makes it easy to be loyal.

  Bird asks, “Would you bet your life on that judgment?”

  “That Phil’s report is true?”

  “One-hundred-percent true.”

  That’s a harder question to answer, yet I already know. “Phil and I have held one another’s lives in our hands for a long time. I trust him, and I trust his ability to give me good information.
Yes. If Phil says his report is gospel, then I believe it. I’ll bet my life.” I’m apprehensive, but I get the cold feeling Bird is preparing to hold me to it.

  “There are notable omissions from Phil’s reports.”

  “It’s going to take a long time for Phil to learn all the Gray knows. And the Gray was young when he attached to Phil. There’s plenty it never learned.” And that pulls me out of the realm of things I know are true and steers me right into the domain of things I hope are true.

  “From what the astronomers on Iapetus have guessed, the Trog home world is 18 Scorpii.”

  That doesn’t mean much to me. “So, it’s a star we have a name for? One nearby?" Of course, that makes sense. Everybody knows the Trogs couldn’t have come from too far away in the galactic neighborhood.

  “Do you know how far a Trog Cruiser can travel in interstellar flight?”

  I admit I don’t. All I have are watercooler speculations.

  “It’s not the kind of question that arises all by itself, right?” Bird smiles. At least he can see the humor in my ignorance, perhaps an ignorance he recently shared. “They arrived, right? Just like the Grays did all those years ago. However they got here, nobody ever thought to ask from how far away they came, because it was irrelevant. Their ships were able to make the trip. Maybe we all just assumed those big cruisers could fly forever.”

  “But they can’t.” It’s more than a guess. Of course, they can’t. No ship can. They all need to refuel and resupply. And just as Tarlow and Phil and I discussed before, no Trog ship of which we’ve seen the inside was set up for long-term space voyaging.

  "The top speed on those cruisers," says Bird, "is eight times the speed of light."

  “8c,” I confirm.

  “But they can only run for six to nine months at that speed, depending on how their loads are configured.”

  “Wait.” A conclusion that should be obvious is knocking on the door to my brain. I’ve never thought of the cruisers from this perspective before. “So, their max out-and-back travel distance is two to three light years?”

  "And their one-way distance is four to six."

  “One-way?” That doesn’t make any kind of sense in terms of space travel.

  “And the only way to extend that range,” says Bird, “is to lighten the load by replacing the railgun slugs with larger stores of hydrogen for the ship, and oxygen, water, and cal packs—everything you need to sustain the crew and Trog marines they keep quartered in the rear.”

  “How far can they extend?” I ask.

  “Estimates are for one-way trips at ten light years, maybe more.”

  “Without any railguns slugs,” I mutter. “And that would mean the passengers would spend more than a year at hyperlight speeds and then arrive with no way to defend themselves. No way to attack.”

  “It explains a lot if you think back to how the Grays first arrived in our system all those years ago,” says Bird.

  Brice is on a roll, and I let him go.

  “The Grays,” he says, “took up residence on the moon and sat there for years, mining ore and manufacturing railguns and slugs. There were only eighteen Grays onboard the ship, a small contingent of Trogs, and barely enough weaponry to defend the ship from a half-ass attack. The speculation is that they rigged the ship for a long trip across interstellar space and made some big sacrifices to do it.”

  “So if we’d been able to attack them with a credible force early on,” I guess, “we might have been able to beat them.”

  “Probably true,” agrees Bird, “but irrelevant now. Where this is going is that 18 Scorpii is forty-six light years away.”

  “Forty-six?” The math is easy, but makes no sense at all. “Can a stripped-down Trog cruiser make it that far?”

  “According to the engineers,” says Bird, “it should be impossible for a Trog cruiser to make it here from 18 Scorpii.”

  Chapter 4

  Bird has my attention. “What are you telling me?”

  “The only way the Trogs could make it here is to leapfrog.”

  I don’t know if Bird is drawing an analogy, or tossing a technical term at me I’ve never heard before. “Leapfrog?”

  “Jump from star system to star system,” he explains. “Maybe pick a system within range of your ship, say four light years, go there, build a supply depot—”

  “A gas station for the cruisers," I explain to myself, feeling a little stupid because it’s such an obvious solution to the problem.

  Bird nods. "Do that five or ten times, and you end on Alpha Centauri, and in the neighborhood. Maybe once the network is established, your ships can make the long one-way jumps of ten light years or so. Not much risk if you know there’s a depot at the end.”

  “And then a week or so to resupply,” I add, knowing the turn-around time for the Trog cruisers in system.

  “That’s right.”

  I start shaking my head. “We’d been speculating the Trog system had to be close, no more than six or eight months away, four to six light years, because we didn’t think the ships were built for long-term life support.”

  “You were mostly right on that.”

  “So the Grays and Trogs attacking us spent what, five or six years getting here?” That’s not even the most significant realization. “They had to have spent decades searching for the Grays who conquered us, and building out the supply bases along the way to support moving a fleet forty-five light years across the galaxy.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jesus.” I feel insignificant and ignorant. Creatures from such a faraway place were engineering the destruction of my world from a time when I still thought the moon was made of cheese. I can’t help but stare into the void. Every one of those sparkles up there could be a home to hostile monsters. “How many of them are already on the way?”

  Bird is looking up, too. He knows how easy despair can come at moments like this. “We’re not the kings of the jungle. We’re the chicks in the nest learning to fly.” He turns back to me. “Every raptor starts out small and weak. Tell me, Kane, are you going to grow up to be a falcon or a chicken dinner?”

  "A falcon.”

  “Then I need you to make a hard choice.”

  “Which is?”

  “We need to cut our enemy’s supply line.”

  I make the guess as to what that means in exact terms. “We need to destroy the Trogs’ supply depots?”

  “Just one of them,” Bird clarifies. “Split one link and the chain breaks.”

  “And any Trog ships flying to the system will be stranded there,” I guess. “They won’t have enough hydrogen to continue the journey and not enough to go back the way they came.” But that can’t be true. “Wait.” I try to recall all I was taught about the design of the Trog cruisers.

  “I know what you’re going to ask,” Bird tells me. “Can those cruisers live off the land? Can they harvest the elements available locally?”

  “Yeah,” I confirm. “That’s exactly what I’m curious about.”

  “The answer is no, they can’t. All of their ships are built according to one design, just like ours were when we still had a fleet. They were built for war. They need the support of other ships that can come into a system and bring in the bodies and the machinery to build out the infrastructure to supply them.”

  “Is it possible,” I ask, “that they don’t do that at all? Could they just bring along their support ships to process the hydrogen for their drive systems and the water for their crews’ needs? Could they have ships that process ore to produce the slugs for their railguns?”

  Bird nods. “That is a possibility, yet we haven’t seen any evidence of it. We’ve never seen a factory ship.”

  “But we’ve never seen a ship that comes in and sets up a processing factory on some asteroid or moon or something, either.”

  “Haven’t we?” asks Bird.

  Oh, shit.

  Bird smiles. “The first ship the Grays brought to our system, it was b
uilt on the same platform as all their other warships. It landed on the moon and busied itself constructing processing facilities to refine the local ores for the elements they needed. They created their life support supply chain and armaments factory from nothing but what they brought along.”

  "That ship is still sitting up there on the moon.” Like everyone who has watched the war these past two years, we all know that cruiser didn’t take part. It has never moved from its dock. Everyone speculated it was worn out, that it would never fly again. Now, I suspect it’s something else, a lifeboat for select Grays to use once the war turns into a lost cause.

  “Factory ships,” says Bird, “they’re what we’ve seen circumstantial evidence of in the supply bases the Trogs set up around the solar system. After the permanent bases are built out, the factory ships are converted back to warships. That’s what they do. And if there’s anything we know about the Trogs and the Grays, once they’ve figured out how to get something done, they don’t deviate. They don’t trouble themselves to invent something better.”

  I accept that Bird is right. “So now that we know how the Trogs are getting here, how do we find the star systems their supply depots are in? Maybe the harder question is, once we identify the system, how do we find one tiny supply depot in a solar system with dozens of planets, hundreds of moons, and billions of asteroids and Kuiper bodies? That doesn’t even bring up the difficulties of how we move a strong enough force all they way there to destroy it, or how many months or years they spend in transit.”

  “Those are the details that make this mission difficult.”

  And then it hits me. “You want me to do this.” I point an accusing finger at the infinite blackness above us. “You want to send my ship on this snipe hunt. That’s why we’re having this conversation.”

  “That’s right.”

  Chapter 5

  My first instinct is to show Colonel Bird my gloved middle finger and to stomp away, because the math is easy. Even if the Trog outpost is on some lowly asteroid orbiting the sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years away, that’s nearly a five-month, one-way trip on my ship. If the Rusty Turd could even go that far, which I know it can’t.