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

by Bobby Adair

  Do they have a God, or do the Grays fill that role for them?

  As much as I despise the Trogs, as much as I know Brice hates them, I feel sorry for them. As for the Grays, the depth of my loathing for them finds new lows. I read through Phil’s brief history of the Grays—as all histories are, told by the victors, skewed to shine the light of righteousness upon themselves. Every culture does it.

  So as much as the Grays, and even Phil, believe the Grays bred the Trogs until they’d bent them away from their suicidal path, I can’t help but wonder at the long-term malice that must exist in the hearts of creatures who could so doggedly engage in a process to squeeze the souls out of another species.

  Most hypocritical of all, the Grays behaved just as badly as the Trogs once they learned the art of war. The Grays used their stolen killing tech to slaughter one another by the thousands and millions. No limit exists to the Grays’ introspective blindness on this point. They are every bit as bad as the Trogs were when it comes to industrial scale murder.

  “I count eleven,” says Phil, interrupting my thoughts.

  Tarlow agrees, mostly. He says nine, but he’s inferring, where Phil can see the grav systems go offline as the ships run completely dry on fuel.

  “Every one that docked and transferred their H to the Gray’s lifeboat cruiser will run dry by this time tomorrow,” I guess. I turn to Penny. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Eager for the moment to arrive, Penny powers up the Turd’s grav systems and we lift off the ground, accelerating as we go. She’s not putting much g into the drive array. We don’t want to alert the Grays above. We have time to put this ambush together.

  We pick up speed.

  Silva opens a private comm. “Can we get them?”

  “Yeah,” I answer.

  “Why didn’t we just go straight up?”

  “From a dead stop into space where they’re in a geosync orbit over Trinity Base, it would have taken too long.”

  “This will take longer, right?”

  “Yeah,” I agree, “but this way, we’ll be using the protoplanet’s gravity to sling us around the backside while Penny is pouring on the speed. By the time they notice us coming, we’ll be moving so fast they won’t have time to react.”

  “They won’t be able to bubble out?” she asks.

  “I hope not.”

  The slingshot move is going to take a while. The bridge crew is intent at their posts. They know how important it is to get everything right on this maneuver, lest we alert that ship full of little gray bastards.

  “Do you think Brice will be able to repair our ship?” asks Silva.

  “I hope so.”

  “But do you think he will?”

  “He’s used this equipment before,” I tell her. “When he was on a construction crew on the space station. He said he worked with the same kind of welder and cutter we salvaged.”

  “But a space station isn’t a high-tech 30c bubble-jump system,” says Silva. “Do you think he can do it with the precision we need?”

  She’s worried. Uncharacteristic for her. Maybe because the repair and the result will be out of her control.

  “I hate to sound fatalistic,” I say, “but whatever Brice does, I think our odds of success will be better for us than they were when the Arizona yard first built this ship.”

  Silva laughs at that. She’s been infected with Brice’s darkness. We’re all alike in that respect.

  “We’re patching the holes in the hull before we jump, aren’t we?” she asks.

  It’s my turn to laugh, because I see right through that question. “You don’t want to make the trip all the way back to earth isolated in a stinky orange suit with a catheter stuck up your ass?”

  Silva scolds me and says, “I’d like for you to do that naughty thing you did before we get back to the war. I’d like to—”

  “Dylan,” says Phil, “I hate to interrupt, but we’re behind the planet now.”

  I open up the crew comm so all can hear. “Everyone, use your suit g to compensate for the load. Penny, amp up the grav. Phil, make sure we stay in the envelope. We don’t want to get going so fast we fling ourselves out on the wrong tangent.”

  “No worries,” answers Phil. “It’ll be right.”

  “Good. I don’t want these Grays going home and warning their brothers about the storm that’s waiting for them here.”

  Penny burns for several long minutes before Phil gives her the mark. With max-grav powering through the drive array, overdrive in fact. We have to roll Spitz’s probability dice and push to near forty g’s to make the timing work.

  It’s a risk, with odds in our favor, but a downside none of us can afford. If the dice come up snake eyes, the Rusty Turd turns into a glittery vapor trail mingling with the dust over Trinity Base.

  Phil powers up the grav lens.

  The glowing specks of the Trog fleet are scattered through the sky a few thousand miles in front of us.

  On Penny’s screen, I see her zero in on one particular speck, the Gray’s lifeboat.

  Penny lets loose with the axial gun and rips through several hundred rounds. I hear the squad working in the forward sections, loading the magazines even as Penny is emptying them.

  The speck of the Gray ship is growing incredibly fast as our speed soars.

  Penny keeps firing as we start to catch up with the first rounds she shot.

  More shots, those carrying the momentum of the ship speed added to that of the axial gun, find their mark, easily piercing the Gray cruiser’s deflective fields, which aren’t set at combat levels, but kept low so as not to disrupt the docking and offloading of fuel.

  Our plasma slugs shred the hull, making the attack look embarrassingly easy.

  Penny finishes with a long burst and pulls into a turn, just enough to keep from ramming the Gray cruiser as it blasts to pieces.

  Over the comm, Phil announces the success to cheers as Penny eases off the power. No sense tempting fate when we don’t need to.

  I congratulate the crew, and tell Phil to get Penny a bubble jump vector back to Cygni A and our tank ring. It’s time to go home.

  freedom’s fall

  Book 5 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

  Chapter 1

  “Why are we fighting?” asks Phil.

  He and I are sitting on the tank ring’s shadow side as it circles Cygni A. A few hundred meters distant, the Rusty Turd floats in the same orbit as the ring while Brice, Silva, Lenox, and a few others toil over the bracket repairs. I’m thinking about Silva. Aching for her, really. Somehow, as I stare at a multi-colored nebula smeared across the sky, I can’t stop picturing the last time she and I were naked in the library. Every pornographic detail plays through my memory—the tastes, the touches, the warmth of her sweaty skin. In answer to Phil’s question, I shrug, because I don’t want his bullshit to ruin my moment.

  “With all those stars and all those planets,” Phil goes on. “There’s enough of everything for everybody.”

  I shrug again. In my mind, Silva is straddling me, leaning over with her hands pressing against my chest. She’s telling me she loves me, and I’m believing I love her, too. It feels real.

  Phil elbows me. “Are you listening?”

  “No.”

  “You should.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Dylan.”

  “Sometimes I can’t help it.”

  “That’s not news.”

  I sigh. “Why do you want to talk about the war?”

  “Do you ever think about what comes after?”

  I make a flippant guess. “Victory?” I know that’s not what Phil is getting at. In fact, my answer is irrelevant. That’s just the way talking with Phil goes.

  “We have to make peace.”

  “Not if there’s none of them left.”

  “Genocide?” Phil tries to pretend he’s disgusted. He knows I’m toying w
ith him.

  “Why don’t you just say what you’re going to say so I can go back to staring at the pretty colors and fantasizing about Silva?”

  “We’ll have to make peace with the Grays and the Trogs,” says Phil. “The alternatives are unending war or genocide.”

  “There’s subjugation,” I remind him. We spent our lives on the shitty side of that verb. How could he forget that?

  “Peace is easier.”

  “I don’t know.” And I don’t. I truly don’t. “Peace never lasts. War always comes again. It’s always been that way. For us it has—humans, I mean. It was always that way for the Trogs, and now war is the defining element of Gray history.”

  “Maybe it’s peace that always comes again,” argues Phil. “Maybe peace is the natural state and it’s merely interrupted by war.”

  I reach over and rub my hand across Phil’s faceplate.

  He brushes it aside. “What are you doing?”

  “The rosy tint on your faceplate is making the universe look funny.” I laugh. He doesn’t.

  “Maybe I’m realistic.”

  I shake my head. “Peace. War. Peace, and then war again. It doesn’t matter which is first or last, or natural. One always follows the other.”

  “You’re in a black mood for somebody who’s on the infatuation end of love.”

  I roll my eyes. I hadn’t told Phil the depth of my feelings for Silva. He stole it when he was rooting around in my head uninvited.

  “Sorry,” he says. “It’s hard to miss. She’s all you’ve thought about since we got out here.”

  “She’s all I want to think about.” Another admission, I’m loath to make. What’s the point of trying to hide anything from Phil?

  “You’re tired of the war, aren’t you?”

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  “Well, because—”

  “Just stop.” I hold Phil in a stern glare for a moment. “Cut the shit. What are you trying to circle around to?”

  “Nicky and I have been discussing the situation.”

  “You two are scheming to bring peace to the galaxy?” I laugh.

  “If you don’t want to listen to the answer—”

  “Sorry,” I interrupt. I don’t feel like a lecture on being an ass again. “Just tell me.”

  “We should go back to Trinity Base and talk to the Trogs we stranded there. Nicky thinks we can claim them as chattel.”

  I laugh hard at that. “Peace in Nicky’s mind is the same as subjugation?”

  “No.” Phil is offended. “Yes, but it’s a first step. Nicky thinks you should claim your right to enslave them, since you defeated their masters. And then, when you have their loyalty, you should free them.”

  I laugh so hard at that one, I bump myself away from the tank ring and spin off into space.

  Chapter 2

  Everything takes longer than you think. It’s just a rule of life nobody ever wants to learn. Nevertheless, the repairs are complete. The tank ring is mounted. All we need to do is plot a vector and make our first bubble jump toward earth. Everyone is looking forward to shedding their orange suits for a chance to feel human again, if only for the months it’ll take us to get back to earth and back into the war.

  I have the crew crammed onto the bridge for a meeting before we leave. “Before we start back,” I say, “Phil would like to present us with an alternative.”

  Tarlow groans so loudly he eclipses everyone else’s displeasure. “Let’s just go home.”

  Phil ignores him and jumps to his feet. “Most of us were together for the battle at the mining station.” He looks around. Nobody nods.

  “The Potato,” Brice clarifies. “He’s talking about the Potato.”

  That gets them.

  “Yeah,” says Phil. “Remember all those Trogs we captured?”

  Most of us do. For the ones who weren’t there, they’ve heard about it. During the long trip out to 61 Cygni, we had plenty of time to learn one another’s war stories.

  “What some of you don’t know,” says Phil, “is that the Trogs weren’t exactly our prisoners. When Dylan convinced the Grays to surrender…” Phil casts a look at me. Convince was a generous choice of words—I’d beaten one of the Grays to death and I’d killed two others. That convinced the others to surrender. “The Trogs became Dylan’s property according to their law and customs.”

  “So what are you saying?” asks Penny, jumping ahead. “All those Trogs in those ships orbiting over Trinity Base are our property?”

  “Or our responsibility.” Brice and the bright side. “By their law.”

  “Both,” says Phil.

  “We’re not really governed by their law,” I say. “You know, since we’re at war and all.”

  “When those Grays back on the Potato surrendered,” says Phil, “the Trogs were obligated to accept Dylan as their new owner. Since the Grays at Trinity Base didn’t surrender, we killed them, and the customary thing for Trogs with dead masters to do is to commit suicide.”

  Penny reaches over to lay a hand on Brice’s arm. “So no responsibility.”

  “What Phil is suggesting,” I explain, “is that we go back, and see if we can take possession of the Trogs.”

  “To what end?” asks Penny. “None of their ships have any H. Their loving masters pumped it all out so they could escape back to their home world.”

  “The Trogs are already dead,” says Tarlow, daring anyone to challenge his certainty. “Most of the ships shut down right after offloading their fuel. They did nothing but sit there when we made our last attack run.”

  “There’s something you’re not considering,” says Phil.

  “H packs,” guesses Brice. “And cal packs.”

  Phil nods.

  “Depending on stores,” says Phil, “the Trogs onboard might stay alive for years in their ships, just waiting for the next Trog fleet to rescue them.”

  “With no functioning supply depot,” says Silva, “that won’t work.”

  “Or it might,” says Penny. “The protoplanet’s gravity wasn’t that strong. There wasn’t much atmosphere. They could make their way down to the surface and try to scavenge for stores. Or maybe they could repair the base. There might even be subterranean H tanks that survived our attack.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” I say.

  Lenox pipes in, reluctance in her voice. “We could go back to Trinity Base and spend a few weeks mopping up, making sure the base is toast, and finishing off all the cruisers. We have enough railgun slugs aboard to do it, especially since we’ll be shooting at defenseless, stationary targets.”

  “Or we subjugate them,” says Phil. “We offer them a chance to pledge their loyalty to their conquerors and we offer to save them.”

  “How?” asks Penny.

  “One of those H tankers we shot up over Cygni Saturn was damaged but not finished off. Maybe we could repair the drive array and use it to refuel the fleet.”

  Nobody likes that idea. Talking about the enemy as Trogs is one thing, talking about the fleet is something powerful and frightening. Fleets of Trog cruisers are the whole reason earth is losing its war, the reason every kid goes to bed afraid of what might come down out of the night sky.

  “We’ll never have any way to know the Trogs will give us their loyalty,” says Brice. “Who’s to say they won’t betray us at the first chance?”

  “You have to think of them like Samurai,” says Phil. “To them, honor is everything.”

  “Honor is irrelevant if what you’re lying to is a lower life form,” argues Brice. “And that’s what we are to them. We exist outside the bounds of their honor code.”

  “You don’t know that,” says Phil.

  “Neither do you,” says Brice.

  “Yes I do,” says Phil. “I learned it from Nicky.”

  Brice shakes his head, making it clear he doesn’t trust the Tick. “And what do you imagine happens here? We t
ake all these Trogs back to earth and they fight at our side. Fight the other Trogs. Their cousins?”

  “No,” says Phil. “I don’t think we do that at all. I think we subjugate them, save their lives, and then set them free.”

  Tarlow loses his manners and shouts, “The whole reason we came here was to destroy their supply depot so the fleets that show up would die. Why save them just so they can go back home to their masters?”

  “And why risk our lives to do it?” adds Brice.

  “We’d give them exactly the same thing we’re fighting for,” says Phil. “They wouldn’t be our slaves or the Gray’s slaves. We give them their freedom.”

  “And maybe,” I say, getting caught up in an inspiration, “they go home and start their own revolution.”

  “Or they fly on to earth,” says Brice, “and kill everybody.”

  Chapter 3

  We didn’t take a vote. I didn’t dare let that happen. It was easy to tell which way the wind was blowing—against Phil—and I’d chosen to side with him. The upside was big enough to justify the risk. My regret was that I’d had to cash in the trust I’d built with the crew on just one decision. The cynic in me lobbied for the bet. If I didn’t win, we’d all be dead, so I’d never have to suffer the consequences of my loss of credibility.

  But I would be dead.

  With the tank ring mounted snugly on the hull, we popped out of bubble at a safe distance from Trinity Base and took a slow course in. The neat rows of Trog cruisers we’d found when we first arrived were no more. The ships and wrecks drifted as though tossed into space from a dice cup. No order. No sign of life.

  “You ever wonder,” says Brice, “what would have happened after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor if one of the Jap pilots would have circled back, landed at one of the burning airfields, and said, ‘hey, let’s be friends now?’”

  Tarlow finds it funny.