by Bobby Adair
Chapter 62
Sokolov goes apoplectic as unintelligible words bubble through the spit on his lips.
Herrera agrees, yet he’s wary.
Bird doesn’t react, not at first. He takes a solid thirty seconds as he evaluates me and contemplates my assertion. Finally, he says, “I don’t need your blessing for anything I do.”
“No,” I agree. “You don’t. I’m putting my cards on the table here.” I look past Bird at the twenty men and women standing along the wall, pretending to be prepared to kill me. I know—at least I think I know—nearly half of them are faking it. Their loyalties don’t lie with Blair and her lackey Sokolov. “All of you back there, you know who I am. I know you’ll follow me in to fight the Trogs. I know you’ll bleed with me. I know you’ll die for me, just like I’ll die for you.” I look back at Bird. “They’re the ones I came for. They’re the beating heart of the Free Army. I thought the rest of you were a cancer. But I didn’t know all of you.” I glance at Sokolov. “Now I think it’s him and a handful of others who are the tumors. For the rest of you, I think if we fight together for what we all believe in—”
“What we all believe in?” Herrera interrupts.
“Freedom,” I tell him. “That’s why I raised a rifle. Not just freedom for me, but for all of us, for every human on earth and on every rock from here to the Kuiper belt. Everyone.”
He nods. He believes me.
“If we fight together,” I continue, “we might still win this war.” I fix Bird in my hard stare again. “I think you’ve got the mettle of a man I can fight for. You need to take charge of this army, and you need to decide right now whether you’re going to believe in me. I’m no spy, not for anybody. I am exactly what I seem to be. Let me do what I do, take the fight to the Trogs, pound them with our metal fist, and take our freedom back.”
“What about Blair?” Sokolov shouts as he wags an accusing finger at me. “He’s a kidnapper. He can’t be trusted.”
Bird turns his angry eyes on Sokolov, and the captain loses his will to talk. He seems to shrink into his suit.
Bird looks back over at Herrera, who gives him a nod. Bird turns to me. “Okay.”
I salute Colonel Bird and say, “Thank you, sir.”
Bird returns my salute and then looks at Hawkins while he asks me, “Now, who’s this guy?”
“This is Colonel Hawkins. He can give us what we need to win. He’s our secret weapon.”
FREEDOM’S FIST
Book 4 in the Freedom’s Fire Series
History of The Grays: Part 1
Time casts a haze over the past, transforming whatever it had once been into a different thing, a legend of soft breezes, caressing suns, and unified Gray minds.
A million images, sensations, and communal truths condense to a core idea squeezed by primitive human speech into a pair of inadequate syllables—Eden.
Gray Eden.
The Children of the Sun lived there.
Sadly, bitter blood passed from parent to child never sweetens. It never runs dry from the vein. It requires no histories or sharp memories to keep it flowing. All it requires is the fertile soil of an impressionable soul to grow the seeds of a parent’s loathing into a new generation’s hate.
All of that came later.
No living Gray holds the memory of every ancestor in the lineage from themselves all the way back to The Enlightened One—he who first shared the secret of opening his mind to another. The depths of that past are so dark they can barely be imagined. No Gray can directly recall a memory shared to them by a parent that encapsulates the whole of Gray history, or even a thin thread running all the way back to the beginning.
No mind could contain so much.
Nevertheless, every Gray accepts as truth that their kind once lived in an idyllic garden, on a world they still call Home, where they basked every day in the loving warmth of Mother Sun, her dim, red brother, and her four, tiny siblings, whose light seemed to glow only enough to illuminate themselves in the heavens. These six celestials, they believed, created the Gray race, and nurtured them with their light.
It was into this paradise that Mother Sun sent The Enlightened One to share her most sacred secrets, those of Unity. For among the Grays in the Garden at that time, there was no sharing of thoughts, no collective mind. Grays were individuals, concerned only with their personal pleasures, doomed to loneliness, though they were always among their kind.
When the Enlightened One shared the miracle of these new secrets, some were able to accept the gift and join the collective mind. Many were not ready.
Sadly, those who did not meld with the others grew suspicious of those who did. Over time, the suspicious ones grew restless and jealous. The creation of the collective mind, such a wonderment though it was, was not seen so by all. Instead of joining all Grays, it divided them, and for the first time since the creation of Home, Grays left the Garden.
Some of the suspicious went north, following the iridescent flying animals that filled the sky with the passing of the warm season. They believed these flyers knew secrets of the world they could share. In chasing these creatures, this band of suspicious Grays abandoned the teachings of The Enlightened One, so Mother Sun punished them with something they’d never felt before on their skin—snow. Just as snow kills the plants in the cold season and hardens the dirt, it hardened the souls of those Grays. It took all the kindness out of them, and in the resulting void, something grew that the Children of the Sun never knew existed in the universe. That thing was called evil.
That band of Grays came to call themselves the Snow Grays.
Others ventured west, seeking the place over the horizon where Mother Sun journeyed each day. They hoped to live there and spend eternity in the bosom of her love. These Grays called themselves the Seekers.
More went east after losing faith in the benevolence of Mother Sun. They were convinced that The Enlightened One’s truths were valueless tricks, and that Mother Sun’s true power lay in the knowledge she kept hidden. These Grays came to be called the Unbelievers.
Many of the suspicious Grays journeyed south. For it was in the southern sky where the Red Sun spent his days, shining his light more generously than he did in the north. These Grays came to believe Mother Sun’s golden rays were cold and wicked, and only the light from the Red Sun truly nourished.
While in the south, these Grays taught themselves a special secret that they called numbers. And while all modern Grays know of numbers, it is only those descended from this sect who worship them, for it is the foundation of all they believe. Numbers only existed because of counting. Counting led to comparisons. Comparisons infected these Grays with a thought-sickness called Greed.
This group came to call themselves Red Brothers, after Mother Sun’s lesser sibling in the sky.
Of the Grays who stayed in the Garden, those who were eager to learn the Enlightened One’s lessons and maintained their fidelity to Mother Sun came to call themselves the True Children of the Sun, or simply True Children.
Seasons passed.
Pods of True Children chose from among them a bearer of hatchlings, shared in raising their young, grew old, and died. And so passed many generations as the True Children thrived and all but forgot about the suspicious Grays who left the garden to struggle in a wilderness of deficiency and despair.
Only The Enlightened One’s secrets were a cure for that loneliness.
The True Children grew to so many that they overflowed the garden in every direction, eventually coming into contact with bands of the lowly ones. It was almost never physical contact, but touching of the minds. The True Children would feel the presence of their long-lost cousins in the hills and forests, sometimes near, often far. They tried to teach the Enlightened One’s gifts from a distance, never knowing if the miracle spread to those demented souls.
They were to find out through the generations that it did, but in a perverse form.
And then
, the Red Brothers returned to the Garden with what they called The Truth.
They believed Mother Sun’s weak, red brother was not a brother at all, but a father to Mother Sun. He was a parent whose kindness ran so deep that he gave his all to Mother Sun, whom they called the Greedy Yellow Goddess. They believed that the Red Father was so benevolent he’d allowed himself to be enslaved by the Greedy Yellow Goddess, and in expending his effort to hold her up in the sky for all eternity, he’d grown weak, and was condemned by his jealous daughter to slowly die, suffering through every long moment until the end of time.
The True Children knew this story to be false and tried to show the Red Brothers that all the good in the universe flowed from golden Mother Sun.
The difference in beliefs led to disdain and rejection. From out of which grew something new, rabid, and viral, something that could touch a Gray’s soul with barely a wisp of a breeze and twist it rotten. This new feeling had a name and it was Hate. Yet Hate was not a lonely thing; it bred offspring into the souls of all Grays—Fear, Murder, and War.
***
I open a comm to Phil who’s in one of the forward rooms keeping the Gray company while it sleeps.
“I’m reading this Gray History report you wrote up.”
“Your tone is bloated with meaning,” says Phil. “What do you want to ask me?”
“Are you trying to make it sound biblical?”
“No,” he answers. “What I was trying to do was express the reverence the Grays feel toward their history, while at the same time trying to portray as much accuracy as I can distill from Nick’s memories.”
“Okay.” I’m already winding up for my next question. “What’s with this Eden business? Please tell me that’s a word you came up with.”
“After all these years with a bug in your head and you still don’t understand Grays.”
I sigh. “Fine. Tell me.”
“They don’t think in words like we do. I mean, humans don’t necessarily think in words either, but our thoughts crystallize that way because we use spoken language to communicate. Grays never had the need for the shorthand of a spoken language. They never had to summarize an idea down to a few dozen constraining words. They never had to try to describe a feeling, a memory, or a sunset that way. They just shared what they remembered. When I use a word like Eden, I do it because it conveys more than a biologically optimal environment. It conveys the reverence the Grays put on their inherited memories of the place.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “I get it.”
“Are you going to finish reading it now, or keep on criticizing me?
“I’m reading, Phil. Don’t get so touchy about it.” I cut the comm and go back to the report.
History of The Grays: Part 2
So began the Black Forever as Hate’s offspring grew in the souls of the Red Brothers, the Seekers, the Unbelievers, and even the True Children.
All Grays learned to make and use weapons to kill one another. A long time of dying fell upon Home’s children. It was said in those days, one’s eyes could not gaze upon any field or hill or vale without seeing the bleached skulls of Grays littering the ground.
The war lasted longer than any Gray’s life. It went on for generations as the sides allied with one another against a foe and they betrayed each other to realign to a new advantage, with no side ever having the strength to bring the war to an end.
It was Mother Sun who finally awoke Home to the terrors of murder on her face, and when she saw—when she felt the pain of the Grays killing one another for misbegotten faith—she cried in the only way a planet can. Her mountains spewed fire and ash into the sky for a full season, and for another, lava flowed down their slopes, finally coming to an end in a great explosion felt the world over.
The cold time followed.
Snows fell through all the seasons, and in all the places where they’d never fallen before.
Glaciers grew tall and crept slowly out of the northern mountains, dragging themselves across the land. With them came the Snow Grays, the most vicious of all Grays. Their numbers were few, but like their souls, they were hard. They knew how to make war like none of the southern races, and they learned a new concept to describe Hate and Murder on previously unfathomable scales. They called it Genocide.
The only thing that saved the dying novices to war—all the tribes in the south—was the small number of Snow Grays. Their hard lives and constant feuds made it impossible for them to thrive. So there were few of them to wreak their havoc on the rest.
Eventually, the home world started to warm again, but the Grays who were left had broken up into countless tribes and small bands who learned to keep to themselves, avoiding any who were unlike them. They’d all learned indelibly about Hate and all her twisted progeny.
That’s when the Helpers from the stars arrived.
History of The Grays: Part 3
The Helpers were unlike anything the Grays had ever imagined. They stood twice as tall as a Gray and outweighed them by four or five times. They were powerfully muscled bipeds who tore plants from the ground and ripped the flesh off animals to cram into the spikey maws on the fronts of their heads. This horrified the Grays, who’d thought the only way to derive energy from the universe was to soak up what was given by Mother Sun and her dim, red brother.
These great beasts were what humans would come to call Trogs.
The Trogs came into existence on a world as ancient as Home. In a surprise the Grays could never quite accept, Trogs evolved without the ability to connect their minds. They were doomed to live their lives like the ancient tribes who’d left the Garden to run away from The Enlightened One’s truth. They were individuals, and always would be—hence lesser beings.
The Trogs’ inability to commune hadn’t kept them from making the darker discoveries of existence. They knew Hate and all her terrible progeny. They worshiped a god they’d conjured out of their imaginations, and they called her Conquest.
To prove their love for this cruel queen, the Trogs ritualized their conflicts, which were vicious beyond imagination.
They were a short-lived, prolific species. For most of their history, their population was held in check by their continual slaughter of one another. For those who managed to survive the wrath of their cousins, the ubiquitous diseases, hostile weather, and famine were always waiting around the corner to continue the killing.
The Trogs’ home was not like the serene, stable world where the Grays had lived their millennia. Theirs was a fetid cesspool filled with so many nightmarish creatures and privations that no Gray could hope to survive there for more than the span of a day.
It was, reasoned the Grays, why the Trogs were such formidable beasts. Their home world was not one for weaklings. Unfortunately for the Grays, strength was not the Trogs’ only asset. What set them apart from all the beasts on their world, and from the Grays on Home, was the Trogs’ mastery of the elements in the universe. The Trogs had taught themselves to fabricate tools, and with those tools they constructed factories, and with those factories, they’d produced mechanical wonders—inorganic things without soul, devoid of life, but capable of burning a fire within their hearts so strong it could power a sun.
They’d used that power for their incessant wars, and in all their strength and cleverness, they, like the Grays so many centuries before, had summoned the ire of their gods. With weapons that burned hotter than the soul of the universe, they’d destroyed their home world and were left no choice but to wander the stars in great ships hoping one day to find a world to replace the one they’d reduced to cinder.
The search ended on the True Children’s home planet under the golden hues of Mother Sun’s rays.
The Trogs, being beasts who were curious, ambitious, and greedy, claimed Home as their dominion and enslaved every Gray who lived upon its face.
It was not a harsh slavery, for the Trogs saw the Grays as little more than house servants and pets, incapable of d
oing the hard labor of tending animals, raising crops, and tearing the core out of the planet to feed their insatiable factories.
As the two cultures became one, the Trogs started to envy their Gray servants, not for the Grays’ ability to commune with one another as a single, melded mind, but for their ability to communicate thoughts between themselves. The Trogs saw The Enlightened One’s gift in the only way their limited, singular minds were able, as a way to pass their crude words to one another in secret, as a way to make themselves stronger than their Trog brothers.
To the Trogs, The Enlightened One’s gift was merely a path to more power.
Generations passed as clever Trogs sought to resolve their envy and steal from the Grays that the last thing they had to give—The Enlightened One’s secret. During those years, the Trogs spread across Home, even as they explored other worlds and established settlements in places far away, among the stars. The Trogs’ medical and cellular engineers experimented with ways to surgically meld one of Home’s simple life forms into the Trogs’ bodies. They learned to implant these creatures inside the big, boney skulls of their offspring. The corpses of Trog children sacrificed to this cause could have filled a valley and fouled a river for a generation. However, Trogs were persistent as well as clever. They counted life sacrifices for the good of the clan as sacred gifts. Parents gave willingly of their newborns.
Success did finally come.
Young Trogs would be implanted shortly after birth. Trog and symbiont would grow together—one strong, one delicate—the Trog in control, the other the servant. In this way, the Trogs were able to see the gravitational flow of the universe as a Grays do. They were able to share their thoughts, not as fully as a Gray, but enough to fulfill their ambition, enough for the gift to feel like a new power in their hands.
Of course, they turned this hard-earned gift to their advantage, and it upset the balance of power among the Trog clans.