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

by Bobby Adair

  That knocks me off track, because I know Tarlow quakes away from Blair the way any sane person would fear a grizzly bear scratching its way through the kitchen door. Still, the leap from there to helping Phil doesn’t make any sense. “Keep talking.”

  “Those radar dishes they put into our hull.”

  More to fume about. “Are you trying to piss me off?”

  Phil shakes his head. “Tarlow inadvertently mentioned to Blair that he was working on modifying some surplus equipment to try out on the assault ships after he found out how little instrumentation they were built with. Blair heard what she wanted to hear and ordered Tarlow to install the equipment on our ship even though he didn’t think it was ready.”

  “Why didn’t he just tell her?”

  “Not everybody’s as ready to argue with Blair as you are.”

  I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or something else. “I still don’t follow.”

  “After Blair harangued Tarlow into coming along, he contacted me to see whether I could gather the information Blair needed from a safe distance.”

  “And?” I ask. “You can, can’t you? From earth orbit on our first day up, you were able to sense the absence of our cruisers defending the moon base.”

  Phil confirms it with a nod. “I explained as much to Tarlow, but manipulated him by telling him that with Nick’s help, he and I could see much farther with more clarity.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “So with the Tick, we don’t have to get as close to get the same information?”

  Phil answers with a shake of his head. “We can keep a good distance. With the ship bubble jumping the way it does, we won’t have much control over where we come out. We may be far away, or we may be uncomfortably close.”

  Chapter 18

  We pop out of bubble jump between Saturn and one of its largest moons. Iapetus is an odd, half-black, half-gray orb with a 60,000-foot ridge of mountains running around its circumference, giving it something of a walnut shape.

  Our drive array is powered down, as are all internal grav systems. Any Gray looking in our direction would have seen a flash of grav when we pulsed out of bubble, however, if they’re not concentrating on our piece of sky, we’ll avoid detection.

  At least that’s how it’s gone on the three outposts we’ve scouted so far. No Trog cruisers, and no detection we were aware of, although two of the bases were operational, with plenty of surface activity and plenty of Trogs.

  “We’re too far away,” Phil tells us, with a cross glance at Penny. He and Penny are both irritable from struggling with our imprecise navigation for the nearly thirty hours since we left the Potato.

  Penny apparently interprets Phil’s observation as a slight and decides to pick up the gauntlet. “We were in bubble exactly how long you told us to be, Grav Man.”

  Standing on the bridge between their stations, I laboriously remind them, “None of this is exact. If the Rusty Turd had been built with the kind of computing power a starship should contain—”

  I leave it hanging there. Everyone knows the conclusion.

  We’ve all seen pre-siege vids, the true-to-life banned ones that revealed the technical prowess of our armies. We’ve watched the fictions that showed the kinds of spaceships humans should be riding to fight our space wars, ships filled with every imaginable instrument for measuring, understanding, and visualizing the void, its hazards, and its hostile denizens. Maybe more important than the full-color, high-def fantasy was the computing power that went into generating vids that appeared so incredibly real.

  If we could only harness that kind of power now. With the Gray’s grav tech in our hands, there’d be no stopping us.

  Penny asks Phil, “You and Nick can’t scan the moon from here?”

  Phil concentrates as he stares into space. “Something’s anomalous, but I can’t be certain.”

  “Cruisers?” I ask.

  Phil shakes his head. “Probably not.”

  “And the Tick?” I ask.

  “I’m speaking for both of us.”

  I cast a glance at Tarlow, but his system went on the fritz when we scanned the last moon. “Almost there, he tells me. I found the problem. Just fixing it now.”

  No help there.

  “I can power in closer.” Penny scans around the bridge. What she’s proposing would endanger us all.

  Phil explains, “Powering up our drive array will illuminate us too bright for any Gray down there to miss.”

  “We’re too close to Iapetus to try a bubble jump.” Penny is looking at the instruments on her panel.

  Phil shakes his head. “From a grav perspective, that would flash us brighter than powering to a closer position.”

  Bubble jumping right at the moon, or even to anywhere near it would leave us with too little room for miscalculation. We’d likely end up liquefied by the g-forces resulting from our mistake. I need more information. “Penny, leave all the grav systems powered down for now. Phil, you can’t resolve the structures on the surface for certain, or anything in the air?”

  “If there were anything of a substantial size above the surface,” answers Phil, “especially if it was a Trog cruiser, I’m pretty sure we’d sense it.”

  Brice crosses his arms. “We don’t know the Gray won’t lie.”

  “I keep telling you,” shouts Phil. “Grays don’t know deceit like that. They’re a telepathic race and they don’t have a mental mechanism for conveying lies. There’d be no purpose in it. All Grays can read each other’s thoughts.”

  Brice points at me, then lets his accusing finger rest on Phil. “You and him both keep your shit hidden from the Grays. You’ve done it all your lives. You’ve told me so.”

  “Well, yeah,” Phil stutters. “Grays can do that, too.”

  “Lying by omission,” Brice clarifies. “Still lying, right?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I guess I don’t.” Brice turns to me. “The Gray has been helpful so far. I’ll give you that. It’s just the longer we have it on the ship, the more uncomfortable I feel about it.”

  No point in getting any further into that right now. I glance around at the others. “Okay Phil, it was you and the Tick who sent us on this detour. Where are these anomalies you sensed, are they on the surface?”

  He answers, “I didn’t say they were on the surface.”

  “What are we talking about them for?”

  “They’re anomalies.”

  I open my mouth to shoot back with something stinging, yet I feel like manufacturing an insult is not only counterproductive, it would keep me from spending thought on more important questions I should probably be dreaming up to ask.

  “We don’t know what they are,” Phil tells me. “They’re transient and small. Sometimes larger and fast. Mostly near Iapetus.”

  “Massive?” I ask. “Do they have grav fields?”

  “Something about grav.” Phil is perplexed. “Like nothing I’ve seen before. More like ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?” Brice laughs.

  “I don’t have a better word.” Phil looks into the distance again. “Faint. They don’t seem to be there. And then they are again, like something you notice out of your peripheral vision and when you turn to look, it’s gone.”

  Penny switches to Phil’s side and shoots Brice a dirty look. “Sounds like ghosts to me.”

  “Phil,” I ask, “do you and the Tick sense anything going on near the surface?”

  “We’re pretty far out.”

  Sometimes being the boss is frustrating. I turn to Penny, and pause as I make my commitment. “Hard-g, right at the moon. When we get close enough for a fast, tight orbit, slow us down for orbital insertion and then kill the grav arrays and let’s float our way around to the other side, as invisible as we can be to a pair of Gray eyes. Phil, you and Nick keep your attention glued to that ridgeline. As soon as you
sense even the slightest hint of a grav plume, alert Penny. Penny, when that happens, you punch it and get us the hell out of here before the railgun slugs start coming our way.”

  “If there are hostiles down there,” argues Phil, “any grav plumes we see will probably be from railgun slugs, not ships.” Phil can’t help it, I know. I figure he and Blair have a contrary gene in common that just won’t let them allow anything to slide on by.

  “Just alert Penny.” I sigh. “I don’t want any more holes in our hull.”

  Penny gives Phil a glance in the silent language of two people very good at working together. She powers up our drive array as Phil compensates with an internal inertial bubble to save us all from injury.

  Chapter 19

  We enter orbit above the black side of Iapetus.

  Brice is glued to one of the small viewports, watching through the glass for anything he might see down on the dark surface.

  Tarlow turns away from his monitors to glance at me, nodding emphatically to make sure I know his system is online. “Nothing but natural geological structures.”

  Our grav systems are all offline, though Penny sits with her hand on the throttle, ready to amp up the power outflow from our fusion reactor and goose the drive array for a quick exit.

  Despite the absence of a field from our hull plates, I’m having trouble with my grav sense making out any but the roughest detail below on the moon’s surface. Instead, I look over Tarlow’s shoulder and watch the visual feed streaming across two of his six computer monitors, the two that display the quadrant containing the moon.

  The terrain creeps sideways from edge to edge, monochromatic but sharp. In the absence of visual cues, I have to remind myself that the rows of peaks stand twice as tall as Mt. Everest and twenty times taller than those giant Trog cruisers are long. What I’m looking for won’t be a row of whale-sized Trog ships docked along the face of the mountain range, but a tiny school of guppies in an Olympic-sized pool.

  “No unusual gravity fluctuations,” Phil reports.

  “And the Tick?” I ask, “what does he see?”

  “Same,” he answers. “I speak for both of us.”

  I nod. I don’t want to get used to Phil’s implicit mental merger with Nick the Tick.

  Penny is watching her external monitors, as is Jablonsky. Both are tense.

  Penny taps her screen, and I step over for a look.

  A sliver of light gray is glowing across Iapetus’s horizon.

  She says, “We’ve crossed the entire black half.”

  That feels like a relief, though one I guess is based purely on the fear of the dark fostered by the lizard part of my brain.

  The light gray sliver grows wider, as the black recedes toward the bottom of the screen.

  Penny announces, “We’ll be passing over the border momentarily.”

  I glance back at Tarlow’s monitors. His colors haven’t changed. Of course, they haven’t. His system is radar-based. I knew that before I looked. Still, I had to do it.

  Glued to his screens, now that they’re functioning, Tarlow tenses and raises a finger to point. “Hey.”

  I lean closer to get a better view. I don’t see what he sees.

  Penny’s fist grips the throttle.

  Brice is looking back and forth rapidly through the window. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Something’s out there!” Phil shouts. “Nick sees it. Coming fast from the stern.”

  “There!” Tarlow’s fingers are sliding across his monitor, tracking a faint smudge.

  “Punch it!” I order.

  Penny hits max grav and we all sway with the jolt because the inertial bubble kicks in an instant late, just long enough to make if feel like we were sloshed by a high-speed wall of Jell-O.

  “Trogs?” I ask.

  “I—” Phil doesn’t have an answer.

  “Coming fast!” shouts Tarlow.

  “It’s going to hit us!” Phil braces for the collision.

  Penny swerves hard left and down. The inertial bubble flashes brilliant blue under the strain, and I feel my stomach do a flip.

  “It went past,” Tarlow tells us. “It’s fast.”

  From where I’m trying to keep my feet stuck to the deck, I can’t make out anything on Tarlow’s screen, but that doesn’t change what we need to do. “Get us out of here, Penny.”

  “Another one!” shouts Phil. “Right behind us.”

  Penny cuts a sharp turn as the ship jolts hard.

  Phil hollers.

  Jablonsky curses like he thinks the ship is going to come apart.

  Penny mutters something and pours power into the grav array. The ship strains and shudders as her words turn to a string of curses.

  “The array,” Phil tells us, “it’s been hit.”

  “Penny.” I drop to a knee on the deck beside her. “Talk to me.”

  “He’s right. The array is damaged. We can’t bubble jump.”

  “How do you know?” asks Jablonsky.

  “Hit to the drive array,” Phil explains quickly as though Jablonsky just came into the conversation. Phil turns aft and shakes his head. “I see an unstable deformation in the fields. If we jump, we’ll disintegrate.”

  “Find us something to hide behind,” I tell Penny, quickly. “Phil, what was that?”

  “Not a railgun slug,” he answers. “The first one tried to turn with us and missed. The second one followed our turn and exploded.”

  “Exploded?” I ask. “Or hit us?”

  “Both,” answers Phil. “I think it was a missile.”

  “A guided missile,” Brice clarifies.

  “Missiles?” I’m taken aback. We might as well be talking about catapults. Nobody’s fired a missile in the solar system since the siege. “How could a missile match our acceleration? They have chemical drive systems, right?”

  “Shit!” Phil’s head snaps as he looks in a random direction. “Grav plumes.” He seems confused. “I think.”

  “I’ve got more bogies,” Tarlow tells us. “Same as before. Only different.”

  What the fuck does that mean?

  “Where?” The inertial grav bubble glows bright in response to Penny’s high-g maneuver.

  “Nick sees them,” Phil tells us, making sure to credit the Tick for the benefit of the rest of us. “No wait, I see them, too.”

  Tarlow points to his screen. “Here.”

  I step over to take a closer look. Three prominent smudges are accelerating off the side of a mountain.

  “Three,” Phil tells me. “Accelerating hard.”

  “Penny?” She knows what I’m asking.

  “I can only get eight g’s.” She’s worried.

  “Phil?” I ask. “How fast are they coming?”

  He’s shaking his head. “Fifteen…sixteen g’s.”

  “What are they?” asks Brice. “No way a cruiser could move that fast.”

  He’s right. “How big are these ships, Phil? Tarlow, anybody have an answer? Jablonsky, radio them, see who they are.” Trogs and Grays don’t have radios. If they answer, at least they’re human.

  “Can’t tell until they’re close,” Tarlow rattles.

  “Impossible to say,” answers Phil. “The grav fields are foggy, almost invisible. Only the hard acceleration warping the grav field around them is clear.”

  Probably more maneuverable than us. I’m worried. “Phil, use the hull plates to help Penny pull some hard turns if we need to. Get ready to shunt power to defensive grav.”

  “Together, me and Nick can—”

  “Now’s not the time for Tick shit,” I tell him. “Don’t give him control of any system on this ship, you hear me?” That’s when I start hoping I have something to say about it. The Gray can probably access every grav switch on the whole ship.

  Chapter 20

  “We’re not going to get away,” admits Penny.

  “Phil,” I urgently ask, “anything
we can hide behind out here? Asteroid? Clouds of shit? Saturn’s rings?”

  “Nothing close. Wouldn’t do any good. They’d see where we went.”

  “Over-grav the drive plates,” I tell Penny. If we lose a few, it doesn’t matter. We’ve already lost our ability to bubble jump. “Straight line. Don’t maneuver.”

  Worry on her face, Penny puts us on a straight course and pours power into the misshapen field formed by our drive array. The ship struggles with the vector and the inertial bubble shimmers and flows to make up for it.

  “More,” I tell her.

  Penny increases the power.

  A harmonic hum runs through the hull. Its frequency starts to build. Vibrations run along the deck and the array flutters.

  “Phil,” I order, “fix that vibration.”

  “It’ll tear us apart,” Penny tells us.

  “I’m on it.” Phil is sweating over his console. The inertial bubble starts to fluctuate nearly out of control.

  Putting a ton of effort into keeping a steady voice, I turn to Tarlow. “What’s the story?”

  He stutters. He didn’t expect to find himself in an active role in a combat situation. Still, the words find a way out. “Coming in fast, right up our ass.”

  “How far out?” I ask. “Time to intercept?”

  “I… ah… I”

  “Seventy seconds,” Phil answers, “unless they accelerate even faster.”

  Time for me to earn my pay. “Who feels lucky?”

  Brice laughs darkly. He knows something unconventional is coming up.

  I put a hand on Penny’s shoulder. “How long to spin the ship around?”

  “Spin?” She doesn’t know why I’m asking. “You want to fly backwards?”

  I nod.

  Penny runs an estimate in her head. “Five, ten seconds. I haven’t tried it. I’ll have to cut power to the drive array to make it work.”

  Phil is maybe catching on. “I can assist with the grav plates.”

  “Wait until the last second,” I explain. “When they’re almost on us, spin the ship. As soon as we’re lined up one hundred and eighty degrees, fire up the grav lens and dump the rest of our power into the main drive array.”