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

by Bobby Adair

  Chapter 36

  The tug’s metal hull is glowing bright. The air on the bridge has heated up fast enough to kill us if it weren’t for the orange suits maintaining comfortable temps inside.

  “If it gets much hotter,” says Lenox, making a guess, “we’re going to start losing insulation around the ship’s wires, and then—”

  She doesn’t need to finish. If the ship’s systems fail, we all die. Each of us knows it.

  “Deep enough?” I ask, looking at the elapsed seconds on my d-pad, and then trying to gauge Jupiter’s pull on the Rusty Turd.

  Lenox answers by punching the tug’s grav plates into reverse.

  A cable breaks and the Rusty Turd speeds ahead through a plume of burning atmosphere.

  Our glow diminishes with our speed.

  “So far so good,” says Silva.

  We’re not out of the woods, not by a long shot.

  “Keep an eye on the internal temp,” I tell her. I don’t know what number will kill the ship, but knowing the current temp seems better than knowing nothing.

  The tug creaks under the strain of Lenox changing its course.

  “We gonna make it?” asks Peterson.

  Lenox answers with a fast series of nods. They’re a lie. She’s not sure.

  “Everybody strap in,” I tell them. If the ship breaks up, we’ll have a better chance if we’re belted down. I think.

  “Won’t make a difference,” says Silva.

  She’s probably right.

  “Look.” Silva points at one of her monitors.

  Far below and far behind, the Rusty Turd is careening to its death in a spectacular fireball.

  Burning hard g’s to chase it, the last Arizona class ship is blazing its own meteoric path through the atmosphere.

  “They know what it’s worth,” says Silva, watching the distant chase.

  “They won’t make it,” Peterson hopes out loud.

  “If they do or don’t, it’s out of our hands,” I say. We made our bet when Lenox broke away. I don’t say that last part, because I don’t want to blame her. She made a guess. I concurred.

  The glow on our smart glass windows is thinning significantly. Above, I can see a hint of outer space.

  I start to formulate a plan based on what I think will come to pass. We’ve chased a ship down into the atmosphere of a gas giant back at Cygni B. I decide the Rusty Turd will vaporize, and I make the further guess the Arizona class ship’s captain will soon come to the same conclusion and choose to save his ship. Once he makes that decision, he’ll come after us.

  I tell Lenox, “As soon as we hit space,” wherever the hell that vast, ill-defined border exists, “punch it back to max grav and put us on an intercept course with the cruiser.”

  “Plan?” she asks. “We’re not ramming it, are we?”

  “We’re going to bail out.”

  “Bail out?” she asks.

  “It’s our only choice.” I turn to Silva. “Did any of those Trog riggers make it inside?”

  “Nope.”

  "Good job, you two. If you can, see if you can get the rear hangar door open. The sooner, the better."

  “And?” asks Silva.

  “Get down to the hangar bay and chuck out everything you can lift. Do it fast. We won’t have much time.”

  “What the hell?” asks Lenox. “That Arizona class won’t be fooled. The Grays onboard will know we still have power. They’ll see our grav plates pushing g’s.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Chapter 37

  The Arizona class makes its choice. It gives up on chasing the flaming remains of the Rusty Turd and changes course to come for us.

  “If you have any more C4,” I comm to Silva, “blow up anything you think we can afford to lose.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No,” I tell her, “just be careful back there.”

  “10-4, Chief.”

  “Chief?” I ask.

  Her and Peterson are laughing as they cut the comm.

  “Is this a joke with you guys?” I ask Lenox.

  “Can’t say, Skipper.” She grins at me. “That Arizona class can’t chase us at max acceleration, because it’s still down in the soup, but it can cut through the atmosphere faster than we did using its grav lens to clear the way, so to speak.”

  “How long do you think we have?”

  “Three? Four minutes? You know I’m guessing, right?”

  “Me, too,” I say. “I just wanted to see if your guess was in line with mine.” We’re out of the atmosphere and picking up speed as Lenox pushes all the ship’s power to its grav plates.

  “I’m gonna blow the rear door,” Silva tells me. “At the hinges.”

  “She’s an overachiever,” says Lenox. “That’s a quick way to shed twenty tons. It’ll make us faster.”

  I know the incremental increase won’t win us a race with our pursuer, yet it’ll pad our margin of error. “Be quick, Silva. We have maybe three minutes before we have to abandon ship.”

  “Abandon ship?” Lenox asks, getting the reason even as she speaks. She knows we don’t stand a chance once that Arizona class ship breaches the atmosphere. “That could work.”

  “So we’re on the same page.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going down to help out Silva and Peterson,” I tell her. “As soon as you have us on course. Autopilot if it still works, and then get down to the hangar with us.”

  The ship lurches violently.

  “Oh,” says Silva over the comm. “Brace for detonation, like, a second ago.”

  “Thanks.” Sarcasm. “Did the hangar door break free?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She’s proud of her work.

  With my grav sense clearing up now that we’re out of the atmosphere, I see the massive hangar door falling away behind us. “Keep at it. I’m coming down to help.”

  “I have the autopilot set,” says Lenox.

  Damn, my people are good.

  “Let’s go together,” I tell her, feeling better that I won’t be abandoning her on the bridge.

  It only takes a few moments for us to race from the bridge down to the hangar bay. Lenox and Silva are busy throwing out every piece of equipment they can lift. Down the path our ship traveled, pieces of steel, tools, thick lengths of cable, pieces of crap I can’t even guess the purpose of are flying through the vacuum. Far back, the heavy door, its momentum significantly diverted when the C4 separated it from the tug, is glowing as it brushes along Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

  Past that, barreling toward us out of a cloud of fire, the Arizona class is passing it by. It’ll max grav any moment. Destruction of the tug will come seconds later.

  “It’s time,” I tell the ladies. “Everybody out. Don’t grav your suit, do your best to look like a corpse.” None of them needs encouragement beyond that. It’s a race to run to the vast broken doorway at the back of the tug and dive into open space.

  Chapter 38

  None of us went out in a straight line, that's to say we didn't jump straight out the back. Doing that would have left us on the path the tug followed on its run toward the cruiser. With the assault ship bursting out of the atmosphere far below, intent on chasing the tug down, that path wasn’t a good place to be.

  “Everyone okay?” I ask.

  “I’m low on H,” says Silva.

  “What?” I’m pissed. “Spare?”

  “My Velcro thigh straps broke. It got hung on a piece of rebar back on Iapetus.”

  “I have plenty,” says Lenox. “You can use my spare.”

  "Can you make it to Lenox?” I ask.

  “Don’t get melodramatic,” says Silva.

  “Don’t do anything yet," I tell them. "Let's let this play out a bit, and once their attention is off us, we'll move."

  “You’re the boss.”

  The comms go silent.

  Accelerating away, the tug is gl
owing in a mishmash of poorly shaped grav fields, but it's on a collision course with the cruiser—at least with the vast distance to cross, it looks that way to me.

  Below, the Arizona class has changed course. Its grav lens is blazing bright blue. In contrast to the tug, it’s sleek and fast. It looks like a living torpedo of lightning, blazing an arc through space well off to our right.

  “I figured he’d come right at it,” says Lenox.

  “My first guess, too,” I admit, as I see the error in it. The captain doesn’t want to come at the tug from behind, because he doesn’t want the debris from the collision to stay mostly on the course it’s traveling toward the cruiser.

  The attack ship is lining up on the tug’s flank. We all know what’s coming, having ridden the Rusty Turd on similar maneuvers countless times. We've just never seen it from this perspective.

  “Good thing we got out when we did,” says Lenox.

  Silva and Peterson voice their approval.

  It’s frightening watching the assault ship blaze in on the lumbering tug. One is a shark, the other a helpless victim, with no recourse but to pray. We’re on the front row, watching the carnage take shape, and then the collision. The tug shatters, sending a thousand shreds of steel in every direction. The bridge section is mostly intact, careening toward Jupiter. The reactor core is spewing coolant from a dozen leaks and is flying toward us.

  The Arizona class is already fifty kilometers away, shutting down its grav lens, and redirecting gracefully toward the cruiser.

  “Anybody survive that?” asks Brice over the comm.

  “Brice?” I’m half surprised, and the rest happy. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d hear his voice again.

  “Anybody but you survive that?” he asks.

  Silva, Peterson, and Lenox answer.

  Brice says, “I found Phil.”

  “And?” I ask.

  “I’m okay,” says Phil. “Banged up. I’m with Brice now.”

  “You still have Nicky with you?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “And Penny?” asks Lenox.

  “We’re down to seven,” says Brice, “if you count the Tick as one of us.”

  “Seven it is,” I agree.

  “I’m so sorry about Penny.”

  Others express their condolences, unfortunately, we’ve all lost. And the conversation turns to that, each of us trying to comfort another.

  Phil comms me on a private loop. “Do you have a plan to get us out of this?”

  “I’m glad you made it, Phil. I don’t know—” I feel like a drama queen. Of course, I know what I would have done if I'd lost him. I'd move on. That's how I'm wired.

  “No need to tell me what I already know,” he says. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Over the open comm, I ask Brice, “Where are you in relation to the cruiser.”

  “Twenty or thirty klicks ahead of it. Well below.”

  “Meet us at the cruiser?” I ask. It’s not a suggestion that needs selling. Unless we want to orbit Jupiter until we run out of H and freeze to death, our only chances are the cruiser and the ship that just rammed the tug we were on. “We’re flying out of here on one of those two ships. I don’t care much which one.”

  Chapter 39

  With no layers of hull metal cocooning us from the vacuum, relatively little debris in the vast space between us, and with a direct line of sight, Phil is close enough to link to each of our suits. I handle the permissions through my d-pad, and Phil takes over control of our g. Using our suits’ grav, he gives us each a nudge to send us on an orbital intersect path with the cruiser.

  If Phil calculated correctly, Lenox will arrive shortly before Silva, and the rest of us will come in a few seconds later, all at the same place. The ‘exact’ same place, or so Phil tells me. We won’t have to grav adjust our speed or path in flight. Phil assures me of that as well. And the Grays on board shouldn’t see us coming. Well, they’ll sense a handful of insignificant masses coming to gently bump the ship. Not a danger, and not even worth remark. Debris from the fight is spread all through the orbits around us, moving in every direction.

  We have twenty minutes to kill as we float toward our target. We have downtime to reflect, or an opportunity to watch Jupiter’s mesmerizing clouds slowly swirl.

  On a private comm, I link to Phil. “How’s Brice doing? Are you two pretty close?”

  “Brice doesn’t even like me,” snaps Phil.

  “What I meant was, are you physically close?”

  “In arm’s reach.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “You know Brice. He has the emotional depth of a brick.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “You’re letting your dislike of him color your evaluation.”

  Phil heaves one of his petulant sighs. “His girlfriend just died. He’s handling it like any macho asshole would, by pretending that beating the shit out of something will make it better.”

  “That doesn’t work?” I laugh.

  “You know it doesn’t.”

  “Sometimes it’s all you have,” I say.

  “It’s never all you have,” says Phil. “We all have friends to talk to. We—”

  I don’t point out that most of our friends are dead, because I don’t have to. That’s why Phil stopped himself. “How are you?”

  “I think we killed off the whole crew now.” Phil’s voice deflates with each word. “Not just on our ship, but all of our friends from the grav factory.”

  It sounds like an accusation to me, and I want to argue that we don’t know for sure all of them are dead. But I don’t. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this.”

  “Yet you knew they could die when you started this whole thing.” Phil sniffles, like he’s trying to hold in some tears. “We both did.”

  “All of us did.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?” he asks. “We all knew what we were getting into? We’re all adults?”

  "No, I don't. I carry the guilt. I probably always will. I take responsibility."

  “Everybody we ever knew is dead, Dylan. Do you ever think of it that way? And Claire with that Gray, and Sydney.” He stops. “I’m sorry. I’m getting carried away.”

  “If you need to blame me, Phil. Go ahead.”

  “I do, but it won’t help.”

  “If we get out of this, maybe you should go to the colonies.”

  “Oh, thanks for permission,” says Phil. “That’s the only choice any of us has.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You’re the most hard-headed person I’ve ever known. You’re going to stay here? You’ll die, you know that, right? We’ve lost, Dylan. The war is over. All we have left now is to escape if we can, and rebuild somewhere else.”

  “After I got all my friends killed?” I ask. “I’m supposed to run away? Phil, what’s that life supposed to be like for me? What?”

  “Happy?” It’s not a guess. It’s sarcasm. “Silva loves you. You love her. You’ll build a life out in the colonies. You’ll have kids. You’ll be happy. That’s what you always wanted, right? Why does that life have to be on earth?”

  “We don’t know anything about the colonies except they’re far away.”

  “You’re afraid of the unknown? You think you’ll get cheated?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “You’re just arguing for the sake of disagreeing with me.”

  “No.” I know what it is. “If I run away, it means all my friends died for nothing.”

  "Sometimes you do your best, and you lose anyway," he counters. "Maybe our friends died to give us a chance to live. Us and everyone else who's gone out to the colonies."

  “We’re talking in circles. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Will I be ready to help you fight when we get to that cruiser?” he asks. “That’s what you want to know, right? You think I’m too fragile. You think—”<
br />
  “Phil, stop. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re our secret weapon. With you on our side, everything works."

  “Says the man with a wrecked ship and only a handful of survivors left.”

  “If we don’t do this, Phil. We’re all going to die.”

  “You’ll have Nicky and me both, one hundred percent.”

  Chapter 40

  As promised, we’re floating in like a cloud of corpses. Lenox is out ahead by a few hundred meters. Part of the plan.

  “Madsen,” I call over the comm for about the tenth time since we started closing in on the cruiser.

  “Kane?” he answers.

  “What’s your status?” I ask.

  “Fucked. What’s yours?”

  “The same.”

  “How fucked?”

  “We lost the ship. But we’re headed your way.”

  “That’s pretty goddamn awful news,” he tells me. “We’re under some pressure here. The Trogs stormed in through the hole in the nose and killed about half the engineers. We lost some marines, too. Now it’s me and four others, protecting what’s left.”

  “Punjari?” I ask.

  "He's with us. We're in one of the fire control bays, down at the end. It's a constricted space, about ten meters wide, a few meters high. You've seen the targeting bays, right? One down each spine to aim the railguns firing from that spine.”

  “Yeah.” I know exactly what they look like.

  “We’re about forty meters from the door. It gives us plenty of time to shoot at them before they get in range with those disruptors.”

  “Is the situation stable? Can you hold out?”

  “No. We mauled ‘em pretty good. Unfortunately, there’s too many of them. They’re whittling us down. We’re getting low on ammo. They haven’t made a run at us in about thirty minutes. I think they’re trying to formulate a new plan. Maybe using those disruptors to cut through the walls to flank us.”

  “Any Ghost Trogs with them?” I ask.