Freedom's Fire Read online

Wind is whistling through the gaps in the doors along the sides of the tube, and I still see daylight leaking in around the edges. The doors weren’t built to hold in atmosphere. They were built to bear a structural load and to not jam shut. Considering what the ship is designed to do, the not-jamming part is important.

  I reach the airlock door separating the platoon compartment from the aft half of the ship where we have a rudimentary sickbay, supply rooms, and the bridge.

  A sonic boom rattles the ship as we blast past the speed of sound.

  My God, this thing can push the g’s.

  I’m glad to have the inertial bubble protecting me.

  I push the palm-sized button to cycle the airlock.

  Nothing happens.

  The blue glow in the grav field intensifies around the ship’s structure.

  I link into the bridge comm. “Phil, the airlock won’t open.”

  “Give me a minute,” he answers.

  “I’ll take it,” says Penny.

  “No,” I tell her. “You’ve got to fly this thing.” Taking up Phil’s slack is a habit from our grav factory days I need to break her of. “Phil, tell the first officer to get busy on the comm panel and find our rally point. My guess is we’ll be attacking those Trog cruisers as soon as we’re up there. I need those details. And get me the status of the rest of the company.”

  “I just remembered,” says Phil, “the airlock won’t cycle because we’re still in atmosphere. It locks. It’s a bug. That’s one we know about. How many bugs do you think this rusty piece of shit has that we don’t—”

  “Adverb!” Penny’s had her fill of Phil.

  “Got it.” I turn my back to the bulkhead and grab the handles on the wall—handles are everywhere inside the tube. Other than the two rows of facing seats, and the thick supports running through at regular intervals, the handles are the only interior feature. They’ll come in handy when we’re in zero-g.

  With nothing to do for a second, I take a deep breath to clear my head. I can’t let my nerves frazzle with everything moving so fast. Besides Brice, it’s looking like there isn’t a decent officer or non-comm on the ship. I hope the other three platoons are better off than we are.

  As my gaze drifts over the compartment, I notice most of the troops are locked into their seats. Many of them are looking down the length of the tube, staring at me. Glaring is more accurate. I froze their suits and for a few minutes, they were powerless dolls. I can see some of them won’t forgive me for doing that. Humans don’t like losing control.

  Don’t they understand they’ve spent their whole existence with no say in their lives? Half of us were born slaves to a race of big-headed alien twig-runts who conquered our planet in the briefest of wars some thirty years ago. The other half suffered the more difficult pain of living life with no master and then having their freedom taken away.

  I want to shout—what’s a few more minutes of no control?

  I don’t.

  There’s something more important they need to know.

  I open the platoon comm and mute all of them. “For any of you who didn’t take the time at the muster station to view the company’s command structure on your d-pads, I’m Major Commissar Dylan Kane.” I hold up my arm and tap the d-pad. “You know why I’m here, so I’ll be frank. Nobody gets fragged in this company, officer or otherwise. And just to keep you honest, I’ve initiated the kill switch, so behave, kids.”

  I cut the comm and hit the airlock button again.

  The Solar Defense Force is serious about curbing the practice of troops killing their officers.

  Now, the platoon knows I’m serious, too.

  Chapter 16

  The airlock’s outer door seals shut with me inside.

  I wonder for a moment who I am.

  This morning, I was working a half-shift at the grav factory, and now I’ve just stared down thirty armed heavy assault soldiers—or however many are left after that fiasco at the shipyard—and told them if they didn’t behave I’d kill every one of them.

  Has my rank made me stupidly brave? Has it turned me so quickly into a tyrant?

  I tell myself it’s neither. I’m only working through unforeseen minutiae in a plan that’s been growing in my head since I was still figuring out no Easter Bunny was ever going to leave colored eggs in the spring snow and no Santa Claus was going to bring good-behavior bribes down our chimney at Christmas.

  I wonder sometimes if my childhood had been different, would I have grown up to want to change the world so badly?

  My father was a hoist operator who suffocated under a cave-in at the molybdenum mine two weeks before I was born.

  My mother worked twelve-hour night shifts in the molly mine over by Leadville, hauling ore over the same ground where my father died with eighty-two others. She came home each morning, dirty and tired, and made me breakfast with what little food we had in the house. While I ate, she read me stories from our history—human history—and I learned about a time from before the siege, back when humans arrogantly thought we were the only thinking beings in the whole endless universe.

  What a painful punchline that joke turned out to have.

  Before I learned to read for myself, I was familiar with stories about presidents, generals, dictators, and kings. She and I talked about the choices those men made and the consequences of their actions, and she asked me questions that forced me to think. They were all simple stories and basic questions at first—they became more complex as I grew older.

  Together, she and I learned about the different ways political power shapes the world and the lives of the people in it.

  She wanted me to know what military might could do in the hands of geniuses, fools, and mediocre officers trying to keep their soldiers alive, or in the hands of men willing to trade those lives for glory.

  She didn’t talk much about the leaders who embarrassed our species when the Grays arrived in our solar system just before I was born.

  In fact, for an event so momentous in the evolution of a species, for a war so pivotal in the history of humanity, there isn’t much to tell. The contact and the subsequent war were devastating, decisive, and anticlimactic all at the same time.

  We weren’t a spacefaring species then, not in any real sense. We’d landed some men on the moon, left people in earth’s orbit for long periods of time, and shot fragile little probes into the solar system to gather bits of data about the infinite black void and its hunks of orbiting rock. We had tens of thousands of ballistic missiles we could pop into low-earth orbit in the blink of an eye so we could obliterate each other on some future day when that perfect mix of nationalism, enmity, and stupidity convinced our kleptocrats that a dead planet was preferable to living under the yoke of some other culture’s facade of good governance.

  And that’s one of the defining aspects of human DNA. Something unique in our double-helix of proteins makes abhorrent the idea of kneeling to someone who doesn’t look like us, sound like us, or hate like us.

  Maybe for that reason, the war with the Grays eventually turned me into what I became.

  The siege started a year or two before I was born, when the Grays’ single kilometer-long ship blipped out of hyper-light travel one day and floated into an orbit some twenty thousand miles above the earth’s surface.

  Of course, it was a surprise, and based on the videos I’ve seen from that time, hope and fear were palpable in the air. Everyone had a theory about the contents of the craft—if anything—and what it had come to our solar system to do.

  Every attempt was made to communicate with the ship’s occupants, but as far as anyone could tell, the ship held no living creatures. It responded to nothing.

  After a few weeks of earthly governments making their plans on how to send a vessel out to the interstellar cruiser, it suddenly zipped off to land on the bright side of the moon, right where any knucklehead with a telescope could see it.

  Still, the ship did not respond to any messages from earth, no matte
r what medium was contrived to send them.

  Eventually, the ship’s occupants started building subterranean structures of all different sizes with strange little holes on top. That’s to say, it was deduced the aliens were building the structures, as no one on earth ever got a glimpse of one of them outside the ship.

  A cottage industry grew up fanning the speculation of why the aliens had come and what they were up to with all their activity on the moon.

  Nothing more of consequence happened.

  The aliens’ odd little farm continued to grow.

  Time passed.

  Most of the people on earth eventually grew bored with guessing about a construction project two-hundred thousand miles away that didn’t have any impact on whether they could pay the rent, buy a shinier car, or get laid on the weekend. Our governments didn’t lose interest, though.

  Earth’s technologically advanced countries chose to collaborate on the design of a rocket to ferry a pilot, copilot, a few military men, and a half-dozen scientists to the moon.

  We needed to find out what was up there.

  An astronaut selection process turned into an international drama, re-captivating the world’s entertainment-hungry masses. Construction began on a ship that would take the crew to the moon, not an easy feat in those days since no country on earth had landed a manned mission on the moon in half a century.

  Eventually, they finished building the ship, and they scheduled a launch.

  Chapter 17

  Not since the days of the Apollo missions had so many people been glued to a television to watch a rocket ascend into the heavens.

  The cameras were all turned on.

  The signal was broadcast across the globe.

  The countdown ran its course.

  As expected, the engines roared and mountains of clouds flooded over the launch facility.

  Up the rocket went.

  Three days passed while nearly everyone on earth sat riveted to a television screen or computer monitor watching what might as well have been ten people on an RV trip from New York to Los Angeles, all taking turns peeking through a few tiny windows, without ever stopping to go outside for a walk.

  At the end of it, the ship went into orbit around the moon and made five or six circuits before the final decision came to land. People cheered. There was a certain giddiness to it. Earth’s cultures had finally come together around a common goal.

  By itself, that would have been a significant step forward.

  Without incident, the ship touched down on the moon within a quarter mile of the alien vessel.

  The engines cooled. The crew prepared themselves to exit the lander. And then, without warning, a small projectile fired from the alien ship. It blasted right through the lander’s engines, disabling, but not destroying them.

  The world erupted in crazy talk and unhinged behavior.

  Some thought we’d offended the aliens.

  Others believed our ship had tripped an automated self-defense system set up to protect the empty vessel.

  Still more accurately guessed that the earth had just witnessed the first shot in an interstellar war.

  Amidst the furor, nobody seemed to notice that no attack followed. However, a door opened on the side of the trespassing ship.

  An invitation?

  More speculation.

  The astronauts lingered in their lander for two weeks, confirming and reconfirming they had no way to repair their ship and return from the moon. The mission wasn’t designed to last more than three weeks, and the astronauts ran low on food, water, and oxygen.

  Finally, accepting they were in a position where they had no other choice, they all left the ship together, crossed the moon’s barren surface, and disappeared through the alien craft’s open door. The door closed behind the astronauts and then not much happened on the moon for about a year, except the subterranean construction continued, and the aliens put the astronauts to work slowly disassembling their spacecraft and hauling pieces inside the vessel.

  On earth, the public went back to theorizing and making bad choices.

  During this time it was leaked that most of the governments on earth had agreed the planet was under attack and they were actively working together on a countermeasure. The hush-hush version had the governments of earth building fleets of ships and training soldiers to fly to the moon for an assault.

  Something else odd happened while the world was in limbo about our new neighbors on the moon. Ever the international pariah, the North Koreans launched a rocket that appeared to be a copy of the one the rest of the world cooperated to build. It also orbited the moon a handful of times and landed near the spot where the other ship had sat down. Only instead of lingering inside, three astronauts immediately exited the vehicle and walked right up to the alien vessel.

  To everyone’s surprise, the aliens let them in.

  That didn’t sit well with the rest of the nations on earth. North Korea was pressured for information. Sanctions were stiffened. War was threatened.

  Before that situation got out of hand, the calendar flipped to the anniversary of the first lander’s arrival on the moon and a video signal was broadcast from the alien vessel using the lander’s equipment. It showed one of the world’s chosen scientists standing alone in front of eighteen little Gray aliens arrayed in a semi-circle behind him.

  The short version of what he told the world was that the Grays were a telepathic species with a history stretching back a million years. They were learned and wise, and they had declared themselves humanity’s guardians. In that role, they would shepherd our species through the next ten or twenty thousand years of evolution and help us ascend to our full potential. The small price they required for this benevolent tutelage was our complete obedience. In fact, by their plan, we’d be little more than a slave species.

  Earth’s choice in the matter was to accept their authority without reservation or to submit to them by right of conquest.

  Just to make the whole thing a little bit more like a bad joke, they told us there were just eighteen of them. On their ship, they’d brought with them a few thousand members of another lesser species—slaves. During a question and answer session, the scientist ventured a guess that the Grays’ humanoid slaves were descendants of Neanderthals taken from earth sometime in the distant past.

  And yes, he told the world at least a dozen times, it truly was just eighteen Grays.

  As anyone who knows anything about human behavior might guess, there was no submission. The aliens were told how quickly they could go to hell, and were given the ultimatum to return our astronauts and to get off our fucking moon or suffer the kind of full-scale, pain-soaked annihilation humans had been dishing out since we first fell from the tree branches a few million years ago and started beating each other to death with rocks and brittle bones.

  That’s when the war started in earnest.

  Earth launched its quaint fleet of chemical rockets stuffed with as many spacesuit-clad soldiers as could be crammed inside.

  Like nearly every case in human history, when a technologically backward army attacked an advanced one, slaughter ensued. Not one of the hastily constructed spacefaring warships came close to landing on the moon. The alien vessel’s railguns shredded them en route.

  Thus began the final phase of the war.

  Humiliation turned to devastation.

  The alien ship lifted off the moon and spent two days destroying every human-made satellite in earth or lunar orbit. It then went back to its previous resting place. To earth’s chagrin, nothing could be done to stop them.

  The Grays decided then it was time to show earth what they’d been constructing on the moon the whole time—huge railguns, driven by gravity, powered by fusion reactors. Those two technologies turned out to be a decisive combination.

  While the Grays had the slaves building their battery of weapons, they’d also had them smelting the moon’s ore into metal casings around slugs made of solid moon rock. The slugs weig
hed anywhere from a few hundred pounds to a few hundred tons. Fired by those railguns, the projectiles hurtled toward earth at speeds as high as sixty thousand miles an hour.

  When the kinetic energy of the heavier projectiles converted to heat on impact, they produced blasts on par with small nuclear devices. No fissile material and no chemical reaction required, just simple physics producing the kind of violence that’s been shaping the universe for fourteen billion years.

  On the first day of the bombardment, a dozen small towns sprinkled across the globe were obliterated.

  Earth’s leaders made speeches about putting on a brave face and preparing for an invasion. They told the people that humanity would never submit to a gaggle of effete gray monkeys no matter what technological advantages they possessed.

  As was the usual case in matters of war, defiance was paid for with the blood of people not involved in making the decision.

  The Grays set about raining their meteoric projectiles down on military installations and nuclear missile sites the world over. In the process, they worked their way through a list of the earth’s largest non-capital cities. Shanghai, Karachi, São Paulo were destroyed. St. Petersburg, Munich, Los Angeles and a dozen others went the next day.

  After working through a list of cities, the aliens contacted earth again, only this time it was one of the North Koreans speaking. He told us the Grays didn’t mind destroying all of earth’s population centers except those within the borders of North Korea, home of their newly converted acolytes on earth.

  He said the Grays were gods who lived lives spanning thousands of years and they were a patient species. They didn’t mind devastating the planet and then waiting while their North Korean friends repopulated and redeveloped it to their liking.

  Earth’s revised set of choices—let seven billion people die, or accept the absolute authority of the Grays over every living thing on earth to be administered humanely by the North Koreans.

  That’s the day the world’s leaders set my fate. I was born a slave.

  Chapter 18

  We’ve reached the edge of space and the platoon compartment has emptied of air.