Freedom's Fire Read online

  Much more gently than the first time he did so, he takes my wrists.

  Still, he doesn’t believe. I can see it in his body language.

  His voice is syrup and sugar now. “May I read you again?”

  I nod so that he knows he’s not worth the effort it takes me to release a word into the air.

  He looks at my tattooed skin. Carefully, he keys one symbol at a time into his device.

  No mistake.

  His face is animated with the thoughts running through his head. Meekly, he says, “Major Commissar Kane?”

  Satisfaction.

  Oh, glorious satisfaction.

  For years, I worked hard to be the most productive bug-headed drone in the grav factory, and every time the Grays invasively probed my thoughts, I showed them the enthusiastic servility they hoped to see. I convinced them past any wisp of doubt that I was just brimming with that one human characteristic they value above all others—loyalty.

  So much loyalty, in fact, they believed I would be an efficient proxy for squeezing it out of other humans.

  So, without one shred of military experience, they commissioned me Major Commissar Kane, an unflinching enforcer of their will in their flawed military.

  Now I’ll be expected to raise my weapon and gun down human cowards and mutineers.

  Only, I won’t need to.

  As the highest-ranking officer on an assault ship, only the Korean captain and the Korean communications officers will be outside my direct authority, though not necessarily above it. Mortified with the way the war is going, the Grays, instead of blaming themselves for their feckless strategy and ruinous weapons prohibitions, put the fault for the mess on their Korean lapdogs. The shift in power away from the Koreans is their punishment.

  As for the two American members of the bridge crew and every SDF soldier we’ll be hauling into battle, they’ll all have to answer to the officer above them in their chain of command. They’ll also have to answer to me. To make sure that authority is real, every battle suit worn by every one of them will be coded to special gravity switches embedded in my helmet. I’ll be able to magnetically freeze the metallic parts in their suits at will, rendering them immobile. I’ll be able to turn off the life support, and in the worst cases, instantly kill any one of them or all of them with a high-voltage jolt from the micro-fusion reactor that drives their suits.

  I’ll be the most powerful man on the ship.

  Feared.

  Hated behind my back.

  Plotted against.

  And the system is designed for that eventuality as well. I can opt to link my gravity switches to a biosensor in my suit. If I stop breathing, they all do, too.

  They can’t murder me.

  When we go into battle, they’ll do everything they can to protect me even though I’m not expected to fight.

  Regardless, I’m ready for war.

  What no Gray is aware of, what none of the MSS men realize, what not one of the twenty thousand combat troops flowing into the spaceport knows, is that I’ve run through every simulator on every weapon. I learned about the tactical roles of each man in a squad and platoon in every situation the simulators had to offer. I’ve familiarized myself with every job of a naval ship’s small human crew. I think I understand space warfare in three dimensions with variable gravity.

  Hopefully not false hopes from book-learnin’ bullshit.

  The only thing I’ve actually done with my own real-live body in three-dimensions was that I spent hundreds of hours in a zero-g training room put together by me and my grav factory coconspirators with reject plates in an unused theater. And a friend let me onto the rifle range at the spaceport from time to time.

  I’m a pretty good shot with a railgun.

  My biggest concern? I’ve analyzed the rumors that have been trickling back to earth so I can understand why—if the whispers are true—we’ve lost every major battle in this conflict so far.

  Besides a fair number of the sergeants, men promoted from those few lucky enough to have survived a battle or two, I might be the most combat-ready soldier in the spaceport.

  “Major Kane, sir.” The MSS lieutenant is pointing over the throng moving through the gates. He wants me away from him before I decide to do something about the disrespectful tone he took when he first addressed me. “Staging J-33. The hangar with the curved, red roof.”

  I look at the vast rows of warehouses and buildings, spotting J-33 painted in tall letters on a wall a half-mile ahead. “I pick up my gear there?”

  “Yes, sir. They’ll have your lift assignment, crew and platoon rosters, and assault ship designation.” He taps his data pad with a finger. “I have you checked in.” He cordially waves me to start moving. “This way, please.”

  I nod. No more words for him.

  It’s petty revenge.

  Like every other human on the planet, I despise the Koreans, not only for the betrayal, not only for the collaboration, but for the way they relish the brutality they dole out to the rest of us.

  Like the Grays, soon the Koreans will be no more in earth’s solar system.

  One more item of my list of gruesome to-dos.

  Chapter 5

  It’s been hours.

  I worked through the crush of bodies all moving toward their assigned armory buildings. At the door of Hangar J-33, I was scanned again and told to wait in one of eighteen lines.

  Now, the toes of my shoes are touching a yellow stripe across the floor I’m not supposed to cross until I’m called.

  Next in the queue to receive my equipment.

  I’m hot, and I’m bored.

  In the lines around me, I’ve spotted several of my coconspirators. Some are already through and on their way to their muster stations. Others, like me, are still waiting. We’ll all be commissars. J-33 is the commissar equipment building.

  Vishnu’s promises, so far, have been kept.

  Past a female commissar finishing up at the station with the techs just in front of me, past a staging area where workers in coveralls scurry, busy at tasks moving pieces of equipment needing to go here or there in a hurry, I see into the bowels of the warehouse.

  Racks stand in rows, forty feet tall. Technicians push ladders on wheels up and down the aisles. Near the front, they’re moving coffin-size lockers on and off the shelves. Each of the coffins is open on one side, and contains a full commissar kit—weapon, ammo, undergarments, and battle suit. A modified construction suit, really. Each is sized—height, weight, arm and leg length—for the soldier intended to wear it.

  Further into the warehouse, people are working at putting the kits together from racks that contain the individual pieces.

  Past them, rows and rows of technicians toil at stations, repairing damaged suits and testing the systems contained in the integrated backpacks.

  At the far end of the warehouse, through the open doors, out in the sun, laborers are unloading dumpster-size containers. Scarred, limp battle suits tumble out onto expansive metal grates above drain culverts.

  No bodies inside, just the suits.

  Also guns, empty magazines, boots, and helmets.

  People in coveralls, rubberized up to the chest, use pressure washers to clean the salvaged suits, inside and out. Water sprays in white and foamy, and drains down reddish-brown.

  A tech down there stomps a lump to push it through the grate. It looks like the flesh of an animal killed on the road. Then it’s gone, washed away with swirling water.

  I realize then that none of the equipment is new. The Grays don’t waste anything—anything except people.

  “Step up, dumbass! How many times I gotta ask?”

  The commissar who was being equipped ahead of me is gone. Moved out through a side door. In her place, one of the coffin-sized lockers is standing, full of my equipment.

  “Waste of my time.” It’s the sergeant in charge of distributing my new equipment. His patience seems to have been used up years ago. “I’ll be fitting this suit on someo
ne else tomorrow.” He goes on to mutter, “Might as well go up naked and save me the goddamn trouble.”

  I step across the line and hold out my forearm for him to read as I take my place in the designated spot.

  The guy glances at the tattoo and enters my info into his data pad. Without looking up, he says, “You saw what everybody else did, strip.” Again he rhetorically mutters. “Why do I gotta ask?”

  I drop my bag, untie my shoes, and peel off my clothes.

  “Jesus, you got a Gray stink on you.”

  I ignore him.

  He starts his interrogation.

  “Any injuries?”

  “No.”

  “Open wounds?”

  “No.”

  An assistant bags my belongings and writes my name and ID on the plastic.

  “Bad teeth?”

  “No.”

  “Venereal diseases?”

  “No.”

  The list of questions goes on. I drone the same answer over and over. I figure my responses are irrelevant. I’m a hot carcass on the cutting line. The war needs bodies to bleed. I can do plenty.

  It’s not a hard quality to measure. Five quarts of corpuscles? I’ve got that.

  Another tech comes up and fetches an apparatus of tubes and connectors from my kit box. I know what’s coming. I cringe.

  The sergeant sees my reaction and glances at the tubes. He laughs.

  “Ever had a catheter?” the second tech asks.

  I shake my head, wishing he were female. Somehow, that seems like a better way to go. “Is that recycled too?”

  “Waste no pennies, want no pennies?” The tech says it like it’s a question as he looks at the sergeant for confirmation. “How’s that phrase go?” His hand is already on my penis like it’s a piece of meat on a backyard grill. Nothing special. Not sexual. Not repulsive. Just plumbing.

  Everybody gets used to their job, I guess.

  “The suit is a self-contained life support system,” he tells me as he works. “You’ll be like a frog in your own personal terrarium.”

  The catheter slides in. I tense, but it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

  He says, “It’ll give you all the air, warmth, and water, you need for three months or three years without cracking open, as long as you change the calorie packs and hydrogen cells. Occasionally, the recycler unit in the backpack will eject a solid waste pellet. A little flat disk about an inch across. Don’t be alarmed when you see it.”

  “How often?” I ask.

  “Depends on the person. Your metabolism. Your activity. What residual solids are in your system when you start.”

  I continue to wait for an answer.

  He makes a guess. “Once a week. Once a month. It varies.”

  “Three days out of a cal pack,” the sergeant tells me. “Your suit comes with one in the mount.” He points at my shoddily-repaired orange gear hanging in the coffin. A dented thermos—the calorie pack—is attached to the backpack integrated with the suit. It looks to hold a little more than a liter.

  “Turn around,” the catheter tech tells me. “Gotta catch the outflow. All of it.”

  I turn.

  He roughly goes to work prepping me for the second tube. “The suit recycles just about everything. Hell, if you keep the hydrogen cell swapped, you could spend the rest of your life in this thing.”

  The sergeant laughs and looks at me, taunting me with his aversion. “Don’t worry about how long the cal pack lasts, you won’t make it to your first change.”

  I ignore him.

  “You been on a liquid diet?” asks the guy handling my plumbing.

  “Yes.”

  “How many days?”

  “Three.”

  “Did you drink your prep kit liquids?”

  “I did.”

  “What did your last bowel movement look like?”

  “Rocky Mountain spring water.”

  “Hope you enjoyed it. It’s the last real shit you’re gonna take until this suit comes off.”

  The second catheter goes in.

  Chapter 6

  His work done, the catheter tech leaves.

  Another technician arrives, a woman. She helps me into my suit’s undergarment, a skintight layer, thicker than a t-shirt, thinner than flannel. It’s translucent green and webbed with coppery filaments that’ll regulate my temperature, cold or hot, and wick away perspiration to the suit’s moisture recycler. It’ll self-seal over smaller wounds, retaining blood inside my veins to keep me in the fight a little bit longer. It even has a bio lab on a chip installed in a small module pressed against one of my thighs. The device can sample my blood and diagnose a range of conditions as well as administer coagulants, morphine, and the one everyone seems anxious to try, Suit Juice, an amphetamine cocktail created to keep a sleepy soldier’s eyes open and pump him or her full of confidence.

  The micro-fusion reactor in the integrated backpack will power my new veneer. Once I’m encased in the ragged orange relic, the undergarment will keep my temperature in a normal range at any place I’m likely to end up in the solar system.

  Of course, the sun’s corona is on the list of notable exceptions.

  Time for the outer layer, a repurposed and reassigned space construction suit.

  Through three decades of occupation, earthbound factories have produced these suits in the hundreds of millions to support the Grays’ ambitious lunar and orbital building projects. Like all of the suits, mine is orange, formerly bright, now dirty and scuffed. My name, rank, and alphanumeric code in Korean are stenciled on the chest.

  The remnants of a previous owner’s letters have left a ghostly haze.

  The gruff sergeant hauls the suit out of the coffin on its hanger. He hefts it on his fingers as he shrugs. He wants me to know how light it is. Coin-sized patches mar the surface in seven or eight places, but the sergeant runs his fingers over a large repaired tear across the torso. It’s clear the suit was nearly ripped in half. “Wonder how that happened?” he muses.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” the female tech tells him.

  The sergeant’s disdain for me is starting to grate on my tired nerves. “Has the repair been tested?” I ask. “Will the suit function?”

  The sergeant points vaguely toward the men and women working at the repair benches down at the far end of the hangar. “Those people slave around the clock for you spaghetti-heads, and that’s how you show your appreciation? Slagging the quality of—”

  “Sarge,” says the female tech, getting his attention, “you’re talking too much.” She looks up at me and winks. “The major could slap an insubordination charge on you and hand you to one of the MSS dinks outside. It’s been a long day for all of us. Be smart. Clamp it.”

  The sergeant huffs, thinks about things for a moment, and then leans in close to my face. “Jokin’. Stress and all, you know, with the Trogs conquering the solar system and coming to cannibalize my kids for dinner. You understand.”

  He sees only dead ice in my eyes. I know, because his expression changes. His breathing quickens. His posture droops, just a hair.

  I don’t know if I’m as dangerous as I’m pretending to be at the moment, but he knows I’m willing to find out.

  And that’s enough.

  “Cannibalize isn’t the right word.” The female tech smiles like she’s trying to hold in a laugh. “We’d have to be the same species as the Trogs for it to be cannibalization.”

  “The suit’s been tested,” says the sergeant sheepishly, as he moves to help the female tech stuff me inside.

  The explanations come now without any editorial inflection.

  The suit will protect me from the vacuum of space and high pressure up to thirty-eight atmospheres. It was designed to shield the wearer from cosmic radiation, micrometeors, and other bits of high-velocity space trash, though the repaired holes attest to its limitations in that regard.

  It’s a marriage of the Grays’ alien tech and human ingenuity. Far from a
magical weapon of war, but it’ll help keep me alive in an environment that would snuff me in seconds given half a chance. And with the suit’s tiny, built-in gravity plates, it might even sway the odds a bit in my favor.

  It feels a little bulky now that it’s on, although not much more so than wearing a few layers of sweats. It’s completely flexible but can go rigid in small areas or wholly. It shouldn’t impair my movement once I’m used to wearing it.

  “It’s getting warm in here,” I tell my dressers.

  “Don’t worry.” The woman moves around behind me and seats the hydrogen cartridge into the backpack.

  I feel a mild vibration.

  “The micro-fusion reactor kicks on automatically as soon as you plug in the hydrogen fuel cartridge.” She picks up a second hydro cartridge and straps it into a place made for it on my thigh.

  My skin starts to cool. “Feels fine,” I tell her, nodding. “Thanks.”

  “If you’re out in the vacuum, I wouldn’t go more than five or ten minutes without a hydro pack. You’ll have time to swap it when this one runs out, but don’t lollygag.” She smiles again.

  I like her. Working with her is how things should be.

  Sarge stays quiet as he fetches my boots.

  Together they help me push my feet in, and then they seal them to my suit. The gloves follow a similar procedure. Finally, the helmet engulfs my skull with the smart-glass out of its seal and slid up over the top.

  The whole integrated ecosystem doesn’t weigh thirty pounds.

  We run through a series of tests to make sure each subsystem works.

  It feels rushed, like we’re bumping up against a time constraint nobody acknowledges.

  I’m shown how to switch the calorie cartridge. It works just like the hydrogen cell. Calories on the left, hydro on the right. I try each once, burning the exercise into my memory as I go. My life depends on getting it right when the time comes to do it myself.

  The woman mentions the suit’s gravity controls but figures since I’ve worked in the grav factory, I’m likely to know way more about it than she ever will.

  They give me a pistol-shaped weapon. Being a commissar, I’m not assigned a rifle.