Freedom's Fire Read online

  “Listen to what I’m telling you, Kane. Who do you think made the assignments you asked for? These are military ranks and positions on ships of war. Vishnu is a black market salvager. He doesn’t have that kind of authority.”

  By guessing my thoughts, she has me. I’m still having trouble with the fact she’s an MSS colonel.

  Then again, I am an MSS major, and I’m a rebel.

  “You made the assignments,” I conclude, glancing around for uniformed MSS goons, thinking they’ll be cockroaching out of their crevices to arrest me now that I’m incriminating myself.

  “We don’t have time for your games, so I’ll just tell you what you need to hear. Vishnu was captured alive.” Blair’s disappointment looks real. It runs deep. “They’ll torture him. He’ll talk. Nobody holds out for long. You and I both better hope we’re off planet by the time that happens.”

  If Blair is telling the truth, then my friend is suffering, and soon he’ll be dead. I grimace. Too much is changing, and it’s changing faster than I’d like.

  She goes on to say, “There’s a coded message on your pilot’s d-pad. There’s an encryption key on yours. Drop them both into the same folder. Among other things, they’ll give you a location for a rendezvous. We don’t know when each ship will be able to sneak away, probably in the chaos of the battle once we get up there.”

  “This is really happening, then?” It’s a childish question, an incriminating question, a hopeful question. I’ve put years into this dream. I don’t want it to fail. I want to believe Blair.

  “Yes,” she tells me, with a look in her eyes that tries to erase my doubts. “Get your ship to the…” she pauses and looks left and right, “to the Free Army’s base. However you need to do it. You understand?”

  I nod. Mutiny is easy in the abstract, but by the end of the day, I’ll need to test my mettle and actually kill a North Korean officer.

  “Once we have our forces at our bases, we can start running this war the way it needs to run. We can win it. And then we can win the revolution.”

  I ask, “Where is the rendezvous?”

  “Asteroid belt. A mining colony where the people are sympathetic to our cause.”

  It sounds like a base to me. Good. There is more to this rebellion than my do-nothing conspiracy and a dodgy MSS colonel. I figure I’ll press her for information I know is secret, test her. “I’ve heard a lot of conflicting rumors about these assault ships we’re supposed to be taking up. I’ve heard they’re not built for deep space.” Meaning we won’t get to the asteroid belt. “Do they have the power to make light speed?”

  “1.2.” Blair shrugs. “On average. Some barely make it over the hump. Some’ll do 1.5.”

  A range for the top speed? Not something specific? That worries me. And even worse, 1.5 is nothing close to the hyper-light velocities the big Trog cruisers do. They’ll blaze across the universe eight times faster than a photon in vacuum. “Are these assault ships another shitty Gray design?”

  “I don’t think the Ticks are capable of creating anything new.” Blair looks around, worried. She’s just uttered a heresy, an illegality. Everybody on earth is habituated to take that cautionary glance when they voice the unspeakable. “I think everything the Grays make us build for them is based on designs they stole from wherever they came from. You’ve probably heard the Trogs use pretty much the same tech we—” Blair thinks for a moment. “Their cruisers are exactly like ours.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Exactly.”

  I shake my head. I’d long ago stopped believing the news feeds, instead, trusting my instincts to ferret through old histories and current rumors to find my truth. The stories of Trog cruisers being exactly like ours, that one seemed beyond belief.

  “These assault ships are all us, but with all the damn Gray laws about what we can and can’t do, humans don’t have enough people with the right kind of expertise anymore. Things aren’t like they were before the siege.” Blair sighs. “These ships were fast-tracked through design and rushed into production. You’ll see what I mean when you lay eyes on one. They look like something you’d find in a junkyard.”

  “Great.” Full dose of sarcasm on that one.

  “The will fly. They’ll do what they’re designed to do. But light speed…” Blair sighs again.

  “What does that sigh mean?”

  “You can ride a brick into space if you attach a few grav plates and a power source. No big deal. But generating a grav bubble robust enough to warp space into a localized wave you can surf past the speed of light…” Blair pauses and switches to a different subject. “You know how the Grays are, they don’t name their ships, their space stations, not even each other. So there wasn’t a name for this assault ship design. Once the engineers understood what they were creating and how it would be used, they started joking around about what to call it.”

  I understand where she’s going, so I ask, “Which was?”

  “Kamikaze.”

  “Great.” It’s a good day for sarcasm.

  Blair says, “The name stuck during testing when nearly one in twenty came apart trying to get to light speed. The more you fly ‘em, the worse your odds. That’s why the SDF decided on an official designation for the type—Spitfire. They figured a name like kamikaze would be bad for morale.”

  Skipping the sarcasm for a moment, I start running numbers in my head to calculate how many of my friends these ships will kill by day’s end. The result of my calculation is, surprisingly, more sarcasm. “These ships sound wonderful.”

  “They’ve got their flaws, but they’ll do what they were built for. Human ingenuity.” Blair nods proudly.

  Nobody says that kind of crap anymore. I wonder if it’s real or part of her act. “So what does an assault ship do, besides assault?” I’m thinking D-Day landing craft and high casualty rates.

  “At sub-light speeds they’ll pull twelve g’s all day long.”

  “All day?” I laugh a bit too derisively. I don’t need to do much math in my head to know it won’t take long at twelve g’s to start bumping up against light speed, and then infinities in the equations start making everything impossible.

  “That’s not what I meant,” says Blair, “They’ll do twelve g’s when you need it. And they’re maneuverable because they’re small. Those big Trog cruisers max at four g’s.”

  “So we can dodge their railgun fire and win with numbers?” I ask. I’m trying to guess the tactics and wondering why ships with such small crews have such a large contingent of grunts onboard. “What are the armaments?”

  “None.”

  Sometimes, even sarcasm isn’t enough. “Because?”

  “Weight.”

  “Please tell me you’re getting to the good part.”

  She nods. “Our physicists have engineered a gravity lens.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  Chapter 10

  “This is our best-kept secret,” says Blair. “A decisive weapon. Invented by humans, manufactured by humans.”

  “With permission from the Grays,” I add, “because we’re losing the war so badly.”

  “Exactly,” answers Blair. “If we were winning with their weapons, they wouldn’t give us permission to do any of this stuff. You’d still have a single-shot pistol, and you’d die trying to reload it while a thousand Trogs swarmed over you.”

  Yeah, well, she’s mostly right there, but training draftees with the damn weapons would go a long way toward making them more than squishy speed bumps for the invading hordes. “What’s this gravity lens?”

  “It’s built from specially shaped and configured grav plates controlled by computer.”

  “Computers and grav tech?” I ask, shocked, but completely out of habit. Mixing the two technologies used to be a death penalty offense.

  “The assault ships were built with special permission,” Blair tells me and then taps the underside of her left forearm. “Just like the computer enhancements to your suit.”
/>   The computer-controlled features of the suits have been in existence so long they’ve become mundane. Proof that if the Grays would get out of the way, we could do so much more. “Tell me about this gravity lens.”

  “It focuses an ultra-intense gravity field down to a narrow point.”

  I’m thinking of a magnifying glass and cooking ants on the sidewalk with the sun’s rays.

  “The lens forms a conical anti-grav field that narrows on a 3-D parabolic arc toward the tip. It pushes matter away from it.”

  I’m trying to imagine how such a thing could be used as a weapon.

  “Think of it as a lance, like knights used to joust with in the Middle Ages. The lens is the handle, the anti-grav cone is the long pointy part.”

  I’m stuck on the jousting image and can’t get past it. “What do we do with it?”

  “These assault ships are built like battering rams,” she answers. “All steel, fusion reactors, and grav plates, with just enough room inside for a platoon of SDF troops.”

  I get the picture, and I really don’t like it. “We’re going to ram Trog cruisers in space?” I’m recalculating the number of my friends I think will soon die, and the mortality rate is soaring. It’s odd how quickly math converts to sarcasm. “Why do they call them kamikazes?”

  Blair contains her exasperation over my thinly veiled disdain, and says, “You’ll have some time at your muster station to gain an understanding of the technology and the tactics. The information is on your d-pad. Yes, these assault ships were built to ram Trog cruisers.”

  I’d have preferred not to have that confirmed.

  “It sounds bad,” admits Blair, reading the look on my face, “but if all goes well, your ship’s hull will never actually collide with the cruiser’s hull. The focused gravity cone is so intense that with the momentum of an assault ship behind it, no material we know of can hold together against it. The gravity cone will pierce the target cruiser’s defensive fields and impale the hull, creating a hole large enough for the assault ship to slip right in. Of course, the whole process is extremely violent on the cruiser’s side of things.”

  “And on the assault ship?” I ask. “Aren’t we going to be inside?”

  “Like I said,” she answers, “the assault ship is made of steel, reactors, and grav plates. No comforts. They’re built for this, and this only. They have enough plates and they can generate enough reactor power to create an inertial bubble around the crew compartment. You won’t even feel the impact. The trick is coming in fast enough to punch through the defensive grav fields and the hull, but not so fast that you obliterate both ships in the collision.”

  “In ships where one in twenty falls apart when you step on the gas?” I make it sound like a question, but I’m just making a point. “So far, this revolution isn’t sounding anything like the one I envisioned.”

  “We have to win this war,” says Blair, “or at least drive the Trogs out of our system. Without an end to hostilities, revolution is pointless. First one, then the other.”

  I don’t need that point clarified for me. I understood it from the day the Trogs first set foot on the moon, blowing everything to hell and trying to kill everybody up there.

  “If things go well after you ram the Trog cruiser, you capture it,” says Blair. “That’s the idea.”

  “The hope,” I translate, for both our sakes.

  Ignoring my comment, Blair says, “With these assault ships and our new tactics, we’ll destroy enough enemy cruisers that the Trogs will go back to where they came from. If we capture enough ships, we’ll make the Free Army the preeminent power in the solar system, and then we can rid ourselves of those little Gray miscreants and their Korean lapdogs.”

  “All with a gravity lens.” I want to believe it, I really do.

  “The Grays conquered us on the back of two technological advantages,” argues Blair, “fusion power and gravity manipulation. That’s all they had over us, and it was enough.”

  I nod. I know that’s true, though the MSS propaganda machine would have us believe the Grays are our benevolent big brothers in the universe, and that our acceptance of their rule over us was voluntary because we sought a path to physical and spiritual transcendence through their guidance.

  Total shit.

  Chapter 11

  Blair leaves me and heads back up the road to fetch another commissar like me in need of final instructions.

  I walk on toward my muster station, thoughts swirling with what-ifs and feelings that don’t want to be ignored. Vishnu is as good as dead, but I’ve got no time to indulge any emotions over that.

  Around me, soldiers are stopping and looking at the sky.

  At first, it’s just one or two and I ignore them. I’ve got no time to stare at a cloud that looks like a bunny or a horse on a pogo stick. I’m thinking about the tactics of ramming another ship in space and how difficult it’s going to be to keep the assault ship moving in that window of relative velocities that’ll produce a successful attack and not kill us all.

  The thought bothering me the most is that our commanders might not care much about our success in that regard. If one assault ship and its platoon are obliterated while taking a Trog cruiser out of action, it would be an easy trade to justify—forty or fifty soldiers for thousands of Trogs and a capital ship. Any admiral would make that choice.

  I can’t help but consider the possibility that maybe these assault ships aren’t meant to survive at all. Maybe the platoon rides along as a way to spoof the pilot into thinking he has a chance to survive the collision. And that’s how they SDF convinces the pilots to do it.

  Suicide zealots are hard to come by.

  I don’t want to believe I’m kamikaze bait, but it would account for the apparent quality of the troops the SDF is sending up today.

  I bump into a man who’s stopped but barely takes notice when I excuse myself. It’s then I see everyone has stopped, not just some of them. They’re all looking at the sky.

  I stop walking and look up too.

  Way above the clouds, a misshapen blob glows white like the daytime moon, but about half as big. It’s moving across the sky fast enough to make a full orbit in ninety minutes. Lights sparkle and flash around it. Sprays of fireworks’ explosions streak through the atmosphere, far away and silent.

  Only they aren’t fireworks.

  The blob is one of the twenty-six asteroids that were towed in from the belt over the years and placed in orbit around the earth two hundred miles up. Each is roughly a mile across. They’ve all been drilled, cut with tunnels, and honeycombed with dormitories, armories, cafeterias, and storerooms, everything an orbital fortress would need to survive a battle or a drawn-out siege.

  I’ve watched enough vids on the Internet to know it’s an attack I’m seeing. The Trog cruisers are up there pounding the fortress with railgun fire, trying to destroy the defending guns buried inside. Hunks of stone are being blasted off the surface. Some of the rock is hitting the atmosphere as meteorites and burning up. Some of it, maybe lots, will impact the ground below.

  “Is that where we’re going?” asks the corporal I’d bumped into moments before.

  “I don’t know.” I hope it’s not. I pray command wouldn’t send us off the ground and straight into a firefight. No general could be that stupid, that wasteful, with the lives of the men and women in his command.

  Unless we are just kamikazes.

  The lights of the battle cross out of sight behind the mountains, and people scan the sky looking for more. Another asteroid comes into view, glowing white as it catches the sun high above. It’s on a different orbit, moving southwest, away from the battle that went east, maybe to swing around the backside of the planet and fire on the Trogs from a direction they aren’t expecting.

  That’s the genius behind the orbital arrangement of the asteroids. None share an orbital plane. None share an orbital radius or an orbital period. They’re all around two hundred miles up, crisscrossing the sky in no appa
rent pattern. When any of the asteroids are attacked, they receive defensive help from others that happen to be close. Attackers need to defend themselves from all sides, so they can never fully focus on the particular asteroid fortress they’re trying to destroy.

  But the genius part of our orbital defense is also the most boring part. It’s all mathematics and orbital mechanics, and nobody likes to think about that. The flashes of light are gone. People start to walk again.

  Most continue to glance at the sky, whether looking for more flashes or worrying about the same things as me, I can’t tell.

  Chapter 12

  No tarmac seals the ground, and no lights stand on poles along the perimeter. The spaceport’s landing pads are just squares and rectangles, hundreds of them, marked by pale-colored rocks in a pasture of beat-down grass, a new set of Nazca lines some far future generation might speculate about if the Trogs win this war and choose to annihilate mankind.

  As I follow the directions on my d-pad, I walk past platoons scattered in many of the squares. Some are loading into grav lifts. Others are sitting, talking to pass the time, or staring at the sky, waiting for the next hint of war to slip by in an orbit way overhead.

  I know I’m getting close when I start to see friends of mine from the grav factory, my insurgent recruits, standing in twos and threes among soldiers waiting to go up.

  Apparently, none have been arrested by the MSS. One bucket of worries empties down the drain. That means Blair must have been telling me the truth about being my new contact with the Free Army.

  I hope.

  Yeah, I’m that much of an optimist.

  A new worry bucket starts to fill with the possibility she could be playing a deeper game than I’ve guessed. That’s a symptom of growing up under the boot of an oppressive regime, never believing you’re winning, just knowing you’re too stupid to figure out how you’re losing.

  Despite that, I move forward.

  Freedom calls.

  Station 13C suddenly presents itself in front of me.

  Penny, my pilot, is standing by herself, looking away from me, down the valley. I don’t need to see her face or read the name stenciled across her chest to know it’s her. She has a shape to her, large-breasted, wide hips—voluptuous they might have called it in another time. She spends her free time in the gym, so she has an athletic build. In fact, she’s more muscular than most of the men I know.