Freedom's Fire Page 7

  “Move it, move it, move it!” yells Brice. He’s the only sergeant in the platoon who’s seen war with his own eyes, fired his weapon at the enemy, and watched his friends die.

  The rest of us are virgin shock troops, a new kind of soldier with new equipment and new tactics, tasked to storm the heavens and turn the tide of the war.

  But we’re soft.

  Another explosion rocks our shuttle, closer than the last, though out of sight behind us.

  Wannabe killers are falling out the door, hitting the desert dirt and scrambling to get to the assault ship.

  Brice is yelling. “I’ve never seen a bunch of fruit-flavored fuck-nut nitwits as disappointing as you. Don’t you know to hurry when a bunch of idiotic cavemen are shooting at you from space?”

  Orange-clad soldiers are shaking off their paralysis and trudging toward the doors with the weight of death riding on their shoulders. White-helmeted heads sway, awkward and tentative. None of us is yet used to the suits we first donned just two hours ago.

  I see panic in the eyes behind smart-glass faceplates. I hear rapid breathing over the platoon comm.

  Sergeant Brice is at the door of the shuttle, pointing while waving the rest of them out. “That ship, right there. My God, it’s the closest one. It’s the easiest guess.”

  I’m starting to think it won’t matter whether our assault ship was designed to be an elaborately disguised kamikaze or not. I’m a sim-trained novice in the company of amateurs already reeling from war’s brutality and we’re still only spectators.

  We’ll all be dead five minutes after we face our first Trog horde.

  A useless thought.

  All I can do is move forward and try to survive.

  I jump out of the battered metal freight box that brought our platoon to Arizona, and my boots hit the sun-bleached dirt.

  Plumes of smoke rise in every direction. Dust wafts between the ships.

  Bits of gravel rain around us.

  Another hypersonic bolt lances down from above and hits the ground.

  I feel it.

  I hear it.

  Instinctually, I avert my eyes to protect them.

  I look back up to see where the bolt came from and I spot three slivers of frosted glass glued to the sky. They’re Trog battle cruisers, above the atmosphere, sun rays blazing against their hulls, so goddamn proud and invincible they can peg themselves to a geosynchronous spot right above Arizona and fire their railguns down like there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about it, but look and see and piss ourselves.

  I guess leaving more than a thousand secret weapons standing in the desert is no way to keep them hidden.

  It’s like the bunker troll generals want us to die.

  No wonder we’re losing this war.

  Frantic, the platoon’s lieutenant—Holt—is shouting, trying to follow Brice’s example and be a leader, only he’s failing. He’s unraveling already frayed nerves and confusing the platoon.

  Milliken, the company captain was yappy enough when we were at our muster station in Colorado, now I don’t hear him on the comm and he’s disappeared from sight—I can’t imagine where he’s gone. His four platoons are on the verge of disintegrating under enemy fire as they disembark from their shuttles and scramble to their assault ships. I find myself hoping a lucky slug from one of the enemy’s railguns has vaporized him already.

  Penny stumbles out of the shuttle.

  Instinctively, I reach to grab her arm, asking, “You okay?”

  Her feet somehow find their way beneath her, and she straightens up tall as if she meant to come out the way she did. “Fine.”

  A soldier jumps to the ground beside us, glances at us standing there like we’re insane, and sprints for the assault ship.

  “Go!” Lieutenant Holt shouts. “Go, go, go!” He’s out among them, and he’s not even pointing at the right ship.

  “Somebody’s gonna frag him,” Penny tells me over a private comm connection like we’re talking about the length of the grass in his lawn.

  I nod like I know, although I don’t. I’ve only heard what I’ve heard. Demoralized troops tired of watching each other die to support a strategy they don’t understand find it easy to blame their officers and rough out their justice with a grenade or hypervelocity slug. The practice has turned into an epidemic in the SDF, and it’s the reason my job exists.

  Something flashes above us.

  An explosion knocks most of the troops off their feet.

  The pressure wave pushes me into Penny, who seems unaffected.

  Looking up, I see a shuttle has been hit. It’s broken into pieces and its grav plates are driving the parts in cockeyed directions as soldiers in orange suits tumble out.

  A thick dust cloud blows over us, obscuring everything more than a stone’s throw away.

  “This whole thing’s a damn mess,” says Penny, before pointing at the sky. “At least the Trogs won’t be able to see us with all the dirt they’re kicking up. They’ll be shooting randomly now.”

  I figure they already are. The Trogs don’t have the kind of accuracy to hit one of these ships from space with anything but luck. Nevertheless, they’re doing a pretty good job with that. “We need to fix this mess right now if any of us are going to make it off the surface.”

  Penny looks at me. She knows what I’m saying, and she knows the risk of pushing my authority so soon.

  Unfortunately, I don’t see a better way. “You find Phil and make sure he gets to the bridge. I’ll load the platoon onboard.”

  Penny is already moving as she tells me, “Yes, sir.”

  It’s weird, hearing her say it. Until we were officially inducted a few hours ago, we were equals, two worker bees doing the same job on the same production line. Now she’s a lieutenant. I’m a major.

  I activate the grav plates built into my suit, and they push against earth’s gravity field, sending me sailing over the heads of the soldiers in my platoon. I aim for one of our assault ship’s open side doors.

  A third of the length of the ship, maybe sixty feet off the ground, I grab onto an exterior beam and plant my feet on a steel shelf covered in new, orange rust. I don’t think once about the poor aerodynamics of our medieval battering ram of a ship. Once out of the atmosphere, it’ll spend its existence in space. There’s no friction out there between the planets. This machine doesn’t need to be sleek. It only needs to be sturdy and fast.

  A woman is at the top of the ladder below me, just entering the door. “Hurry,” I tell her. And then over the platoon comm, I cast my first official order as I point at the other open doors on this side of the ship. “Don’t run, use your grav. Get in here.”

  Sergeant Brice immediately shoots off the ground and perches himself outside a door twenty feet above me. “Do it, now!” he reiterates. I’m both pleased and apprehensive. I need Brice to follow my orders without question, however, if his fealty to the SDF is unbending, it’ll be a problem.

  Lieutenant Holt isn’t as experienced as Brice, and Holt starts to squawk at me over the platoon comm about chain of command. I cut him off before he’s got a full sentence out. I’m not going to let him get my company killed.

  My company?

  Not yet, but I’m going to make it so.

  Soldiers start to float. Several soar smoothly toward the open doors.

  One activates his suit’s gravity drive and shoots off the ground at rocket speed.

  Before I can do anything to stop him, the streaking soldier slams headfirst into the top edge of the doorframe Brice is perched beside. I hear the crunch of bone over the comm as his helmet splits. Blood and gore rain down in bits as his suit’s gravity drive continues to push, jerking his body in spasms and mashing his head into the steel.

  A few screams echo over the platoon comm.

  Over the noisy channel, Brice announces, “That’s what a dumbass who scammed his way through his sims looks like.”

  I realize the suit’s grav controls were damaged in the
collision.

  One of the younger soldiers starts to sob. I identify him and kill his comm.

  Thinking quickly, Brice reaches around to the dead soldier’s integrated backpack and deftly removes the hydrogen pack that powers the suit’s micro-fusion reactor. That cuts the suit’s power, and the body falls to the ground as his comrades dodge out of the way.

  “Careful,” Brice tells them all. “If you can’t fly the suit, climb one of the ladders.”

  Novices and amateurs.

  Every gap in training is going to be deadly.

  The three other platoons in our company are disembarking from their shuttles and loading into nearby ships. I comm connect to the lieutenants of those platoons and loop in the absent company captain. “We don’t have time here. Tell the ones who can use their grav to fly to the upper doors. Put the rest on the ladders through the doors near the ground. Do it!” I don’t wait for a reply.

  I switch my comm to link the small bridge crews of the four ships. I leave out the ships’ captains and first officers, the North Koreans. “Everybody answers to Penny,” I tell them. I don’t need to be overly formal with this group. Like Penny, they all worked with me at the grav factory. We know each other well. “Penny, get those reactors powered up. If the ships’ captains gives you any crap, loop me in.”

  We can fly the ships without them—the North Koreans, that is. They’re here for political reasons only. Still, overriding their authority will put me in a world of shit if the plan doesn’t work out. “Leave laggards on the ground. Launch at your discretion, but the longer we stay here, the more likely we’ll be hit. Penny, let me know as soon as our ship is ready.”

  Looking down, I see her and Phil moving through the thick door just above the reactors and the aft drive array. They’ll be on the bridge in the pressurized portion of the ship in thirty seconds.

  Our platoon’s lieutenant is in a tizzy. He’s gesturing, yelling silently inside his helmet, and pushing his way up the ladder to get near me.

  I don’t have time to finesse my way through his offended feelings. I decide to take a step I’d hoped to avoid altogether. I override his suit’s control system and lock it, freezing him in his pose.

  Looking down the length of the ladder, I see his face go red as he understands what I’ve just done.

  I laugh a little because I know he’s going to hate the next part even more. I take control of his gravity functions and I remote-fly him off the ladder and through the open door beside me. I deposit his stiff body against the back wall of the platoon compartment. I leave his comm cut. I’ll deal with him later.

  Penny comms me in. “I’m in the pilot seat. The captain is shouting crazy Korean jabber at me, however, he’s got the reactor already purring. I’m goosing the hydrogen flow so we’ll be at max output before you can piss off another officer.”

  “Let me know if the captain becomes a problem. Give me a grav bubble in the forward compartment as soon as you have the power.”

  “And just so you know,” Penny adds, “The company’s captain, Milliken, is strapped into a jump seat on the bridge, staring at the wall.”

  Another problem to deal with later. At least he’s staying quiet.

  Lights come on inside the platoon compartment. The doors we’re not using on the other side of the ship grind closed. I feel momentarily disoriented as Phil activates the gravity field inside, canceling out the earth’s pull and making the interior a weightless environment.

  I comm the platoon and tell them to expect zero-g.

  A narrow flame cuts the air nearby as a sonic boom pounds my ears.

  A flash blinds me for an instant, and a nearby ship explodes. Fire and huge shreds of iron soar into the air. The blast throws me against the hull.

  Most of the soldiers still outside are knocked down.

  Our ship leans and I fear it might fall. Penny is already compensating.

  “I got it! I got it!” She yells.

  Everyone is hollering on the platoon channel. Some are hurt. Others are panicking.

  Brice is trying to get them refocused.

  The troopers already inside are drifting in the weightlessness, holding on, or strapping themselves into seats. One of them pops open his faceplate and pukes. It floats there, an amorphous blob, as I wonder why the anti-nausea drug laced into the suit’s water supply isn’t working.

  Another explosion’s shockwave ripples over us.

  It’s time for desperate measures.

  I freeze the suits of everyone in the platoon except for the bridge crew.

  Brice curses and I realize I should have left him active and autonomous. He’s the only reason the platoon didn’t fall to pieces the moment the shuttle sat down.

  I unlock his suit while I shut down the platoon comm so only he and I will be heard. I quickly apologize to Brice, and say, “They’re coming your way.”

  “No sweat,” he answers. “None of you new officers learns shit from those computer games, but you’ll pick it up.” He laughs. “Who the hell am I kidding? You know the attrition rate for officers?”

  Brice doesn’t bother to tell me any number, so I figure the question was rhetorical, and that’s worrisome.

  My experience in the factory makes the next part easy. I take grav control of a corporal’s suit and fly her up to Brice’s door at a speed that would frighten anyone. “Dunk her.”

  Brice pushes the frozen woman into the zero-g compartment behind him just as another stiff-suited soldier arrives.

  “You ignorant, mutinous pig!” It’s the ship’s captain over the bridge comm. He’s talking to me, of course. “My ship. My command. When I report the—”

  I shut down his comm and freeze his suit. I tell Penny, “If that first officer starts in, let me know and I’ll lock him out, too.”

  Everyone on board is going to hate me, still, at least they’ll be alive.

  More fire lances down from the sky.

  “We gotta go,” Penny tells me. “The reactor is at full power.”

  “Thirty seconds,” I respond. “How are the other three ships doing?”

  She gives me a quick report as I move soldiers.

  One more to go.

  I send him up.

  Brice pushes him through the door into a 3D jigsaw puzzle of floating soldiers.

  I scan the area around the ship as I realize I don’t have time to search for anyone who might be missing.

  “Get inside, Brice.” I look up to see him jump inside. On the bridge comm, I tell Phil, “Close the doors, and give me radial grav at point-two-g inside the bubble.”

  I unfreeze the platoon’s suits.

  The last open doors start to grind on sturdy gears. The radial grav nudges the drifting soldiers toward the walls where they start to strap into empty seats.

  “Done,” Phil tells me.

  “Go, go, go!” I shout, “Penny, get us off the ground.”

  Chapter 15

  The ship shudders and the steel walls glow blue with bands of energy that resemble propane flames dancing over the rust. The glow is a visible artifact of imperfections in the grav field surging off the plates under a heavy load.

  Welded joints groan and metal flexes. It doesn’t seem possible so much steel wrapped around the long tube that carries the platoon can bend.

  But it is bending!

  And shrieking.

  Soldiers are busy trying to strap themselves into the rows of seats lined along the walls of the tube. That’s really all it is—a metal tube, formerly a tanker car, part of a train that hauled oil across the country, repurposed surplus from an obsolete industrial age, like the ransacked steel tracks bent in a crisscross pattern, embedded with grav plates, and welded five deep around the tank.

  Steel, thirty inches thick, squealing as it’s pushed between the power coming out of the drive array behind us through the back half of the ship, and the weight of the gravity lens up front—a conical hunk of solid steel, titanium, and specialized grav plates, the mojo in our wonder we
apon that’s supposed to make this whole quixotic dream real.

  God help us, we’re flying into space, encased in junkyard surplus to ram starships with an invention never tested in battle.

  More in the platoon are panicking as the contagious thought of the ship coming apart spreads.

  “Sergeant Brice,” I order, “get the stragglers in their seats and under control.”

  “Yes, sir.” He firmly starts in on the soldiers, many of whom are having trouble with the radial gravity because it’s not consistent. The field is flexing with the ship and pulsing with the electrical current flowing from the reactor.

  I link a private comm to Lieutenant Holt. “I need you to help Sergeant Brice situate the troops. Provide me a status report on the platoon—how many can fight, and a no-bullshit assessment of what they can do. I’m guessing we’ll see action before we’re ready for it.”

  Completely ignoring my request, the lieutenant starts in on me about how I’m overstepping my authority.

  “Dammit!” I yell at him. “Do your job now, and bitch later. We don’t have time for this shit.” Some people only respond to the harshest of words. “I’m opening your comm to the platoon. Grow the hell up and get me that status report.”

  It works.

  The lieutenant busies himself, following my orders.

  I’m a little bit surprised.

  I don’t know that I’m a natural leader, but I believe in my cause with all my heart, and I hate watching knuckleheads sit on their thumbs while complaining about sore asses. Maybe the mix of those two is enough.

  I aim myself down the center of the tube where the radial g in the platoon compartment cancels to zero. I push off.

  Another soldier opens his faceplate and wretches into the air outside his suit. I point at the troop as I drift by and call Brice’s attention. “This compartment isn’t pressurized. In three more minutes, that’ll be suicide.”

  “Yes, sir.” To the platoon, he orders, “Lock visors closed.” He proceeds to remind them of what they should have learned from their simulators about the effects of a vacuum on a human body.

  Brice is still scolding the troops when I tune out of the platoon comm channel.