Freedom's Fire Read online

  Sensing the external vacuum, the airlock door opens.

  I slip into the airlock and turn away from the door’s small window as I seal it closed. I don’t need to see those soldiers’ eyes drilling me with contempt.

  Air hisses to fill a space large enough to hold a handful of soldiers in full gear.

  I wait.

  A tremor runs through the steel beneath my feet, and I hear the sound of a hammer striking an anvil.

  More gravity stress on the hull?

  The ship shudders as three more hammers pound in rapid succession.

  I open a comm link to the bridge just as a hole punches through the hull in front of me. A sizzling beam of plasma cuts a diagonal line through the airlock, blasting another hole near my foot. The air flashes to fire, completely engulfing me, but instantly dissipating as it howls into space.

  Before I know I’ve been knocked down, I find myself on my ass, pushed against the door.

  Even as I’m trying to figure out if I can breathe, if my bones are broken, if my suit is punctured, I think of the ship, and I understand what’s going on. A railgun slug punched a hole through the airlock and burned the atmosphere as it tore straight through the ship.

  The sarcastic genius who lives in my head tells me we’re under attack.

  I shout into the command comm. “Defensive grav!”

  Another round hits the hull as Phil says something I don’t understand.

  The ship’s interior grav bubble flexes, and disappears without warning as I’m smashed flat against a side wall under five or six g’s.

  The ship maneuvers and I’m thrown against the airlock door and the g’s push so hard my vision tunnels down to a small pool of light in the center of engulfing black.

  I realize I need to grav compensate with my suit just as my vision turns swimmy and reality skews off-kilter.

  I’m not unconscious, though I’m not right. In truth, I’m not sure what I am. I’m on a sidewalk of dreams with memories parading past.

  We met at a required-attendance social function, Claire and me. It was one of those monthly MSS things for all the singles in Summit County. Every locality has them. The Grays want fertile humans to pair up, spawn, and to push offspring into the pipeline that feeds the labor pool.

  Under the Grays’ management of earth, humans are little better than off-brand ketchup packets, out of which every drop of utility must be squeezed.

  Phil was with me that night, as usual. We were making our perfunctory appearance—sign in at the desk inside the front door, stay past the first name check, get a free plate of actual barbecued beef, duck out the back. That was our play. Summit County in those days wasn’t heavily populated with the unattached, and most of us singles knew each other already. Any sparks that were going to fly had already flown. Any carnal play that was going to lead to love, already had.

  Twenty minutes into the event, as our stomachs were starting to grumble, Phil and I were near a window and bitching about the new North Korean overseer at the grav plant. That’s when Phil spotted two girls signing in at the front door, Claire and her twin sister, Sydney. We’d never seen them before.

  I’ve never been comfortable meeting new people, so Phil took the lead. He wasn’t much to look at, but that never detoured him from giving a girl a go. Phil had an edge. He could do so much more with that bug in his head than the rest of us who’d been implanted at birth.

  After introducing us, Phil bet the girls he could guess their names.

  Everybody takes that bet. Why not? It’s nearly impossible to lose.

  They did lose, however, and that obligated them to be our dates for the evening.

  It turned out Claire and Sydney were both born in Breckenridge and lived there until they were in grade school. As the Grays slowly appropriated the whole valley for their growing spaceport, supporting facilities, and factories, the girls’ family relocated to Denver. That’s where Claire worked in a sweatshop assembling wire harnesses for grav lift control panels, among other things. Sydney wasn’t MSS but she worked for them as an auditor, employed by the Front Range Farm Bureau. Her job was to catch farmers cheating on their production quotas by skimming extra food for the black markets.

  Both girls had come up to Summit County because—like Phil and me—they were bored with the prospects at their local social function.

  What followed was an evening of laughs, dances, bellies full of food, and inhibitions dulled by beer.

  By night’s end, the pairing-off worked by some social magic I had no hope of understanding. I was in bed with Claire, naked, ready to unleash months of pent-up sexual frustration and she was greedy to accept it.

  We were breaking the law.

  That’s not to say any rules existed against intercourse. The Grays, through their MSS mouthpieces, encouraged women to get on their backs and invite men in—to hell with human moralizing over which pairs of people could and couldn’t procreate. Rituals be damned, they just wanted more human babies.

  It wasn’t the fornication that was illegal—it was, and still is, the contraceptives.

  I explained to her that I had no condom. Prices on them had been going up at the black market down in Denver. Most times, you couldn’t even find one for purchase. And packaging? Forget it. If you wanted one in a little foil pack printed with a brand name in full, shiny color, a well-preserved, sanitary relic from thirty years ago, those were pricier than a five-gallon can of gasoline.

  Most guys settled for loose condoms sold out of a plastic bag slipped surreptitiously from another guy’s pocket. Probably used before and rinsed clean-ish. It was often the best available.

  Though I always aspired to own two condoms, one primary, and one backup, frequency of opportunity never proved out the necessity. Worse yet, in a desperate moment on a recent trip to the black market, I traded my condom for a computer network card after mine crapped out.

  So, I would have happily been the lawbreaker, if I’d had the means to do so.

  Claire told me not to worry. She was on the pill, making her the criminal.

  I was mortified.

  An odd emotion to have with an erection raging between my legs.

  At the time, I still believed some of the MSS propaganda. I didn’t realize until later that it was one-hundred-percent shit. I was under the impression that contraceptive pills slowly ate away a woman’s uterus, and eventually filled the empty space with pus-dripping tumors that became infected and killed her. In fact, I believed that line of shit so deeply, I was afraid to enter Claire for fear that I might contract a contagious penis tumor that would eventually kill me off through pus leakage.

  The MSS are a bunch of violent cretins, but their propaganda wing can spin some compelling shit.

  As it turned out, Claire found a way to persuade me to ignore what I’d been told about the pill. She’d been on it for years, she claimed, without the slightest negative effect. She was healthy and raring to go.

  In some ways, that was the beginning of my intellectual rebirth. I’d grown up a doubter and a rebel at heart, but society grinds that out of a boy with an endless, slow flood of peer pressure and propaganda. Claire’s healthy, enthusiastic genitalia served as a glaring contradiction that exposed a huge MSS lie. It sparked my quest to see through the rest of their deceptions.

  Just one more boy suffering a vagina-centric epiphany. A born-again minion for the golden beaver of truth.

  A month after our first night together, Claire and I were married.

  Three weeks later, Sydney and Phil tied the knot.

  For a long time, a few years maybe, I thought I was in love. No, I knew it. I just didn’t understand what my relationship was.

  I’d seen love stories and romantic comedies in the pre-siege vids. I’d watched other people meet, mate, marry, move-in, and manufacture babies. Lots of them seemed happy, or at least comfortable with each other. I felt like I knew how love and marriage added up to something they were convinced was special.

  I wanted th
at, too, probably because I believed it was the only way a twelve-hour-a-day drudge slave could find happiness in a Gray-ruled world.

  What I never comprehended at the time, maybe the kind of thing no slave understands when he’s in the sort of position I was, is that to most people I was affluent, or at least I was what passed for rich among the lowly hierarchies stacked beneath the MSS boot. I had a bug in my head, a big house, and more food than most. I was privileged. More than that, being a human capable of carrying on a productive life with an alien implant symbiotically living in my brain, the Grays wanted me to procreate, and procreate a lot, to make more little humans whose bodies wouldn’t reject the bug.

  By their laws, any woman I married would no longer have to work. Her sole responsibility under the MSS was to reproduce.

  Phil and I both thought we were marrying for love. Claire and her sister were simply earning food enough to keep away the hunger pangs, and shucking off the requirement to toil twelve-hour days for the Grays.

  They made their trade.

  Over the years, both grew bitter about the choice.

  Sydney’s dissatisfaction with her deal turned into sharp words and cruel insults that she’d heap on Phil in front of anyone unlucky enough to hear. Toward me, Sydney was always sweet and flirtatious. More punishment for Phil.

  Claire just turned cold.

  And colder.

  Any effort she put into acting the part of loving wife was transparently false by the time we’d been together two years. By five, it was absent. We became two mute automatons, sharing a house, and a bed, a place where we serviced the only apparent need Claire had, her still healthy and active genitalia, protected from pregnancy by her continued use of contraband pills.

  We talked and touched enough to negotiate the coupling. She mounted me like I was a mechanical device and rode until she was satisfied. After she was done, at least she was considerate enough to let me fondle and pump until I reached my biological endpoint as well. No intimacy existed in the act, neither before, nor after.

  Chapter 19

  “Kane! Dylan Kane!”

  “Kane!”

  My eyes pop open.

  My thoughts are treading through mushy neurons.

  I’m piecing together I’m awake. “Penny?”

  “Kane,” she asks, “are you okay? Were you hit?”

  I’m breathing. That’s ultimately important. My arms and legs are still attached. No breach of my suit.

  “Kane,” Penny asks again, “are you okay?”

  “I’m good.” Though I’m not entirely sure. I glance at the two holes in the airlock. I see a spot of blackness through the one above, and I see vibrant blue ocean down below. Far below. We’re still in space. “Status?”

  “I hit full accel,” Penny tells me, kind of apologetic, but not really, “at the same time Phil maxed the grav field on the hull plates to deflect incoming fire. You guys probably felt it inside.”

  No kidding.

  “I spun the ship,” she adds, “so the grav lens is facing the Trog cruiser firing on us.”

  “Great move.” It’s an offensive weapon, yet there’s no reason it shouldn’t deflect incoming fire, it just didn’t occur to me to use it that way. Good thing it occurred to Penny. She was a good choice for pilot. “Are we clear now?”

  “No,” answers Phil, jumping on the line. At least I think he says that. The North Korean first officer is prattling through his bad accent and muddling the comm. Easy enough to fix. I drop him from the command link I share with Phil and Penny.

  “There’s a squadron of Trog ships attacking one of the orbital battle stations,” says Phil, his voice barely containing his anxiety. “One of them is redirecting fire at us now. The shots that already hit us came from one of the three ships bombing the shipyard. We’ll be getting it from two sides.”

  The grav lens won’t be able to keep us safe, I deduce.

  Penny calmly adds, “We’ll be around the curve of the earth in about ten seconds. Safe from enemy fire.”

  “Unless there are more Trog ships waiting for us over there,” says Phil. “Or they slow down the speed of their railgun rounds, so they’ll follow our orbit.”

  “Kill the drama, Adverb!” Penny scolds, to end Phil’s negative speculation.

  “Can’t we grow up?” mutters Phil. He really does hate it when Penny calls him Adverb.

  Unfortunately, Phil’s right. Mostly. We don’t know how many Trog ships are attacking which stations around the earth. But the idea of one of them hitting us with a lucky shot around an orbital curve when they can’t see us—not likely. They’d need a badass targeting computer to instantly work out the orbital mechanics and relative ship velocities for that kind of shot, and if the rumors are true, Trogs don’t have computer technology of any kind. “Phil, how bad is the ship damaged?”

  “Cosmetic,” he tells me. “We got raked pretty good, but all the systems seem to be working. We’ve lost pressurization in the crew compartments. One of the hydrogen tanks is venting, and so are two of the water reservoirs.” Phil pauses.

  I think something ominous is coming next.

  Penny finishes out the status report. “Captain took one through the chest just below the neck.”

  “Ship’s captain or platoon captain?” I ask.

  “Ship,” answers Penny. “Most of him is still inside the suit. If it weren’t for the first officer still being alive, you’d be in charge.”

  Command of the ship is a necessity for the plan. Ships are weapons and weapons turn subversive dreams into revolutionary reality. The captain being hit was unfortunate for him but a piece of luck for me. The first officer is a problem with no good solution. I need to deal with him, except I’m not looking forward to what I’ll have to do. I shift gears. “Any word on the fleet?”

  “It’s chaos out there,” Phil answers. “The first officer is talking on the ship-to-ship comm and switching from Korean to English and back again. He’s freaking out. I can’t say how many ships were too damaged to make it off the ground at the shipyard but—most of them, maybe. With the Trogs targeting the airborne ones just as they leave the atmosphere…” Phil has a hard time saying the next part. “It looks like they’re destroying most of them.”

  Is it bad luck that our new ships were slated to launch on a day when a Trog fleet happened to be in low-earth orbit attacking the space stations? Or is this another betrayal by those damned North Koreans?

  “Phil,” I say, “I need a bead on the nearest enemy vessel—velocity, flight path, profile of their defensive grav field. Penny needs an attack vector if we’re going to be alive after we ram that damn thing. Too fast, too slow, neither works, get us those Goldilocks numbers.”

  “And the Free Army?” Penny asks. She knows our instructions are to go there with the company’s four ships at the first opportunity. “No one will notice if we go now. The MSS will think we’re dead with all the others.”

  But soldiers are dying, and Trogs are killing them.

  As much as my humanity is going to be tested by the things I’ll have to do to birth this revolution, I won’t surrender it to what feels like cowardice. “We’ve stepped into a pile of dog shit up here. If something’s not done about those three cruisers bombing the shipyard, there’ll be nothing left of the two divisions.” I pause as I start to rethink, but I know it’s the right thing to do. “We’re attacking.”

  Chapter 20

  Still stuck in the airlock, I’m hitting the door release so I can make it through to the ship’s pressurized half. The door won’t respond. “Phil, I’m stuck.”

  Phil comes on the line. “We’ve got some holes in this end of the ship. Now the airlock’s sensors don’t detect atmosphere inside but aren’t smart enough to know the pressurized compartments in the rest of the ship are no longer airtight.”

  What were the designers of this ship thinking?

  “Can you override?” I ask.

  “On it,” he tells me.

  While I’m wa
iting, I connect with the company captain. “Milliken, any contact with the other three platoons?”

  “Uhhh.”

  One syllable?

  Are you kidding me?

  “Milliken!” I shout. “Get on your tactical comm and find those other platoons!” I’m hoping he’ll be able to find some information the First Officer isn’t receiving or isn’t sharing. “I need to know if they’ve made it up. I need to know what their operational status is.”

  He says, “I’m coming down there.”

  Christ! The guy is useless.

  I switch to the platoon command channel—me, the three sergeants, and the lieutenant. “Lieutenant Holt, what’s the situation? I need that status.” I tap my d-pad, and it shows everyone in the platoon is still alive and uninjured. I know that’s not true. I saw one of them die before liftoff and I know others are injured. I’m tempted to pound the d-pad with my fist, but I don’t. I can’t indulge the luxury of throwing a tantrum.

  I hear a gurgling pant on the platoon command channel.

  Brice comes on. “Sergeant Drake caught a piece of metal through the chest.”

  “Status doesn’t show it,” I say, regretting the pointless utterance even as the syllables form in my mouth.

  The sergeant curses the d-pad.

  I curse too. Most of our tech is nearly useless, worn out, damaged, and pieced together.

  Brice says, “The corpsman put a patch on Drake’s suit but he’ll be dead before we can get him back to sickbay.”

  “Holt,” I call again, looking for him to say anything at this point.

  “He’s not responding,” says Brice. “Is his comm disabled?”

  Brice is asking if it was me who disabled the lieutenant’s comm and left it that way. That would be an embarrassing screw-up that wouldn’t help with my endeavor to gain the platoon’s respect. I double check. According to my d-pad, Holt’s comm should be working.

  “No,” I answer. “My d-pad shows his comm is active.” It also displays a bar graph giving me an idea of how much time everyone in the platoon is spending on their comm links. The Lieutenant and Captain Milliken are chatting non-stop. Being the company commissar, assuming that feature of my d-pad isn’t on the fritz, I can listen in or hear recordings of all the conversations they’ve had. They’re supposed to be stored on my device, though none of them know it. I hope.