Freedom's Fire Box Set: The Complete Military Space Opera Series (Books 1-6)

by Bobby Adair

  Not sure if I’m supposed to say something, I go with the generic. “Good work.”

  “Eight assault ships are on their way here,” says Blair. “We would have been fine without you half-destroying the base.”

  “No doubt.” I’m bored with this conversation. I drag my boot across the bottom of the pool, trying to rub the orange brain goo out of the tread.

  “They’ll be here in a few days,” Blair assures me. “We would have held out that long on level three.”

  Why does she feel like this is important? I make a guess. “You did a good job, Blair. I’m proud of you.”

  “I don’t need you to patronize me, Major.”

  Oops. Wrong guess.

  I don’t rise to it, though. In fact, I try not to laugh. With the artificial pain the murdered Grays hotwired into my nervous system rapidly turning into a repressed memory, I want to revel in thrill of victory. It’s time to talk about something productive. “I’m sure we can squeeze a lot more info out of these Grays down here.”

  “With torture?” spits Blair.

  With fuck you! But I don’t say that. “If we can find the location of a Trog base or two, we’ll have enough assault ships to do some damage. No, more than that. We’ve proven the effectiveness of these weapons. We can win this war. We can clear the Trogs out of the solar system. Are those eight all we have? Is that the whole Free Army fleet?”

  “We have more.”

  “A lot more?” I push. “Some more? Isn’t it about time we embrace one another in a circle of trust.” I nearly laugh at that, too, because I think it’s funny.

  “I’m afraid you’ve pushed yourself right out of that circle, Major.”

  I exaggerate a sigh. Blair can’t get past the games. “Look, you can stay here and be Queen of the Potato if you want. I’m going to steal Tarlow from you and maybe some of his buddies from downstairs and have them fix my ship. Then I’m going out with our little fleet to attack the Trogs. With any luck, you’ll never have to see me again. So can we play nice until then? A few days, please?”

  “Do you know a Lieutenant Holt?”

  That stops me cold. When I recover, I say, “He was the platoon commander on my assault ship. We decided not to kill him. We put him off on Juji Station before we came here.”

  Blair laughs. Maybe cackle is a better word. And better than that, maybe chortle like a witch watching her favorite newt drown in a boiling cauldron.

  I decide I really, really despise her, but I need to know what has her so tickled. “What?”

  “The MSS is broadcasting a news vid where—”

  “Propaganda vid,” I correct.

  “—Lieutenant Holt presents evidence that you’re a Trog mole and you’re responsible for the Arizona Massacre.”

  “The Arizona Massacre?” It has a name? That angers me. I can’t believe it. “They’re pinning that fiasco on me?”

  “They claim you’ve been in league with the Trogs for years. You’re the reason we’re losing this war.”

  “Everybody knows the MSS is full of shit.” Dismissiveness. I tell myself, that’s the best play here. No point in getting wrapped up in MSS lies, even if they are personal.

  “Nobody in the fleet will trust you,” says Blair. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Nobody will believe those stories either. They’ll assume all of your heroic exploits are lies.”

  “All bullshit. Total crap.” This all goes back to that argument she and I had in front of the warehouse after I freed her. This is a power play. I know she’s behind it, somehow. “We’re all out here because we know what the MSS is. These soldiers will fight beside me. I’m not worried.”

  Blair isn’t done. “What about Holt?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s SDF, maybe MSS. You were supposed to kill him, and you didn’t. Even if everyone out here decides the MSS story is made up of lies, then what are they to think of Holt? Are you an SDF sympathizer? Are you going to betray us to them? Are these heroics your ruse to put all of our necks in a noose?”

  “Fuck you.” I close the connection. I’m steamed. I stomp around inside the pool, thinking about killing something else, maybe a Gray, maybe a Trog. I stop myself. It’s Blair who deserves my anger.

  God, I despise that woman.

  Everyone around me is asking questions. None of them were on the comm with Blair and me. They don’t know what’s transpired.

  I push through the effort to calm myself, and decide I’m not going to listen to Blair’s shit. I’m going to do what I do.

  I open a comm to my soldiers. “We’ve won. The asteroid is ours. The Trogs have surrendered. They’re all marching toward the mine. Let’s secure these prisoners. The Free Army fleet is coming. It’s time to prepare the Rusty Turd for the battle with the Trogs’ armada.”

  FREEDOM’S FRAY

  Book 3 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

  Chapter 1

  Level nine is a warren. Dark and depressing.

  It’s an industrial space with tunnels rough-cut through the asteroid’s stone, gritty and wet, with ruts ground into the floor from the passing of heavy machines. Vast caverns are burrowed out of the rock and packed densely with low-g foundries and high-temp kilns, ultrasonic rock smashers, and ionic particle separators, everything the human mind can contrive for extracting incremental ounces of elemental value and complex compounds from metric-ton loads of raw ore.

  At least it holds atmosphere tight against the vacuum outside.

  The whole subterranean installation is now sealed, except for half of level seven where I crashed my ship through the asteroid’s surface rock during the battle several days ago. In an astonishingly quick repair, work crews sealed off that part from the rest of the complex. Now, the machinery down here burns hot again, warming the air and heating the asteroid’s glacial core that for billions of years waited in stasis for the fervid breath of humankind’s industrial exhaust.

  The rugged walls in the tunnel aren’t colored a pleasant pale gray, and they aren’t polymer-sealed. They’re abrasive and wet, sweating out H2O and humidifying the air. With my helmet off and gloves dangling from a clip on my belt, I feel the dampness on the little bit of skin left exposed by my suit’s translucent, thermal undergarment. It coats my hair in gritty wet. It runs down my forehead and stings my eyes.

  Feeling like a cloudy summer day when the air is so thick with promises of rain, you just want the thunder to crash and get on with soaking you to the bone. Instead, it holds you hostage halfway there. As earth days go, it’s one of those where it feels gross to be outside, wearing a stink of perspiration that won’t evaporate away, causing your underwear to chafe and sweat to dribble off your nose.

  I keep my gripes to myself, though.

  For something like a week, I’ve been cocooned in my suit, pampered at a perfect temperature, caressed in comfortable humidity, nearly losing track of the sensation of having skin. Now the air feels real, like something from earth, so I breathe it in. I feel it, because icky something is better than the deprivation of absence.

  Having spent most of my time away from earth so far in light, asteroid gravity or zero-g, my muscles are already atrophying. I feel it in my legs. They’re not quite tired, but they don’t like the exertion of walking. Just walking! My back aches, and my heartbeat keeps pounding inside my head like maybe on one of the upcoming beats the pressure will surpass the burst strength of my skull bones and explode all over any passersby. My brain spins dizzily from standing up too quickly or walking too fast. I’m placing bets with myself as to whether I’m going to stroke out and die, or faint and crack my head on a jagged stone.

  What’s earth-g going to feel like when I’ve been out here for a month or a year?

  Despite the discomfort of my exertions and the compilation of my fears, I’d love to be out of my suit. Unfortunately, the Potato is in a war zone. Being technically accurate about it, earth’s solar system—every inch of eve
ry rock, and every cubic meter of nothingness in between—is in the theater of war. No place is safe. And having killed countless Trogs by doing little more than exposing a safe interior to the cold vacuum of space, I won’t fall victim to that same mistake.

  Ahead in the long, wide corridor, a few miners are bouncing toward me in a low-g skip. Neither is wearing a suit. They both have breathing masks attached to the emergency safety packs on their belts. Both are wearing thick pants and carrying heavy coats, too thick to wear in this environment. They’ve been working in one of the frigid mine shafts burrowed deep into the rock, chasing a vein of mineral that’s in acute demand by whatever exchange of goods passes for an economy out here in the asteroid belt.

  When the two miners draw close, they swerve to give me a wide berth—not out of respect, certainly not out of fear. The story the MSS made up of my collusion with the Trogs has spread throughout the colony, along with a few dozen versions of what I did during the space battle over Arizona. Some accounts have the events close to correct. Others place the credit all in Blair’s intricate planning, describing me as a cancerous cog in her perfect machine.

  She’s successfully fooled so many.

  The two miners have chosen to believe one of the stories where I’m the villain. Their glowering eyes tell me that much, and their receding mutters leave me to imagine the words they share as a plot to steal my helmet and toss me into the vacuum.

  Nevertheless, I don’t turn to keep an eye on them. I listen, and I focus on the mass of their bodies walking away. My bug senses the full three-dimensional space around me, them included. I don’t see anything as clearly as Phil would be able to. I’m a long way from matching his skill, yet one thing is for sure, out here in the war with my life becoming more and more dependent on my ability to perceive gravity, my sense is sharpening.

  Further ahead, a trio of orange-suited soldiers walks with their suit gravity turned on. It’s easy to tell by their gait and the glow of their grav through my bug’s eye. They’re looking around, checking out the industrial spaces, not guarding or searching. With no military imperative for them to be down here, they’re off duty, spending their free time exploring the colony. They want to know the terrain if we have to fight for it again.

  Like me, all are armed. Like me, their helmets are off, clipped to carabiners on their belts. Soldiers who want to demonstrate their loyalty follow my example and wear their suits like me. They’ve all been through the shit, and they know the price of being out of your suit when the vacuum comes to take your life.

  Unfortunately, we’re in the minority on the base.

  Eight assault ships with nearly full crews and platoons arrived the day after our victory over the Trogs. Not one of those ships bears a scratch or ding. On the morning of the battle over Arizona, they were among the first to rise out of the desert and fly into space. The eight ships were already above the atmosphere and well away from the coming carnage when those three Trog cruisers peeled off from their attack on earth’s orbital battle stations and started bombing.

  I’ve learned that much is true.

  However, every question I ask about when those ships bubble jumped out of earth orbit and high-tailed it to the asteroid belt is met with harrumphs, vague hand-waving, and lame misdirections to someone up the chain of command or lateral in the hierarchy, always somebody somewhere else who bore responsibility for the decision.

  Each bridge crew I question tells me they were following orders, delivering their stolen ships to the Free Army and cleansing their ranks of MSS lackeys and loyalists. Just as they were told to do.

  Not one of them made an attack run on those Trog cruisers. None of them made the hard choice to defend their orange-suited brothers and sisters who were being slaughtered on the ground and vaporized in the air.

  Had those ships remained to fight, thousands of men and women, teenage boys and girls, would still be alive. Not only would hundreds of assault ships still be airborne, but with the 20-to-1 advantage in assault craft we started the day with, we could have destroyed the Trog fleet. The Trog menace in our solar system would have ended, and instead of us trading guesses about how we’re going to find the enemy cruisers and win this war, we’d be fighting humanity’s real enemy, the Grays and the MSS.

  Every time I indulge this line of thought, trying to reason through to a better conclusion, I come to only one logical set of choices: My revolutionary comrades from these eight ships are cowards. Or idiots. Or incompetents.

  It’s unfair for me to believe that about so many when only a relative handful made the choice to flee. Yet they strut around an asteroid base my soldiers took with their blood and bravery, and they pretend I’m the traitor the rumors paint me to be, all the while closing their eyes to the hypocrisy of it.

  A division is running deep into our little revolutionary army, and I fear what will become of us when we’re tested by battle.

  Chapter 2

  My destination is ahead, Reservoir 9D. It’s one of the dozen built on this level for storing water extracted from the asteroid’s rock. Of late, this particular one held more than a hundred human prisoners, put there by the Trogs who’d taken the Potato, and compelled to remain there by the Trog guards stationed in the corridor.

  Now, the cavernous reservoir holds only one occupant and one visitor. The guards outside the watertight door are human. Not one is wearing an orange spacesuit. They’re Blair’s people.

  Every soldier in the two Heavy Assault Divisions launched wearing an orange suit over a green inner liner. None of us carried anything but weapons, ammo, and backup H packs—no duffle bags stuffed with personal items, and no off-duty clothing to wear.

  These eight, like most of Blair’s bunch, are wearing coveralls scrounged from the stores the mining company used to clothe its personnel before the base went rogue, well before it turned into a Free Army outpost. The coveralls, like every leftover anything we humans have, are colored in various shades, all faded from some initial hue of matching blue. Military insignia are stamped on the upper arms and chest in black ink.

  It looks like five of the guards are in their teens. Kids. That feels more surprising than it should. I know at least half of both divisions are made up of teenagers. When we were all in our orange suits and engulfing white helmets, we seemed a little more generically similar. Two of the adults are in their forties. One is in her mid-fifties.

  Each wears a thin backpack, the detachable microreactor from their orange suits. The fusion reaction burning in their packs pumps power through the conductive, fingerless gloves each wears. They need those to power their railguns and the emergency breather masks they each have on their belts.

  What the dumbasses don’t understand is the gear will suffice to get them through a short line at an airlock for a chance to save their lives. It won’t help them into a suit fast enough to combat the most likely cause of a sudden decompression event, attacking Trogs. I suspect once a group of those Trogs understands the enemy behind each airlock is without suits, well, let’s just say the solution presents itself—break a door, and let the cold vacuum separate the souls from the corpses.

  The guards eye me with blank, hard stares one of them learned from an old vid full of twentieth-century actors pretending to be soldiers. Since most of them are trying for the same look, I figure my guess is correct that one of them saw the old movie and taught the others.

  Bravado with nothing behind it that isn’t a lie.

  Eight fakers.

  Eight fuckers.

  I suppress a chuckle. Both fit.

  One boy, a broad-shouldered kid with a flat face and green eyes, hefts his weapon and rolls his shoulders as he stares so hard at me it’s like he’s looking right through. He pretends like he doesn’t, but I’m sure he recognizes me. I’m known Potato-wide—hero, or the asshole who betrayed humanity. Nevertheless, he’s challenging me in the body language of whatever group of bullies he ran with back in school.

  He’s b
igger than me, and he probably thinks that’s enough, because in his past, it always was.

  What he doesn’t understand—what none of these green, sim-trained recruits has any inkling of—is that I’ve already seen real people die. I’ve killed Trogs, Grays, and humans alike. I flew into space in the company of soldiers who chose to follow me rather than desert, and most of them are dead, too.

  Now an empty black hole gapes wide through my concept of morality and the foundation of my identity.

  It started to grow when I murdered that first North Korean. In that moment, I think I was standing at a fork in the road to two distinct futures. In one, guilt promised to haunt and maybe rule me. In the other, the ache of the deaths in my wake would nag my silent hours until the memories faded into tolerable tedium.

  For whatever reason a mind does what it does, I subconsciously embraced the path to tedium.

  What the bully private in his off-color coveralls doesn’t understand is that he exists outside my circle of loyalty, and if he postures himself as too much of a threat, I’ll kill him. Not because I’m stronger or faster. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I’ll put a railgun round through his sternum, because while he’s still running through the slow escalations of grade-school bully behavior, I’ll have already taken the ultimate step in that decision tree.

  Something the war as already changed in me.

  A sergeant, one of the two older men, looking soft enough to have spent his twenty-five adult years sitting at a desk, steps tentatively in my path. “Major.”

  I stop two paces in front of him and point to the door to Reservoir 9D. “I’m going in.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “Let’s not pretend you have the authority to question me.” I sprinkle some acid on the words to make them sting with an ambiguous threat.