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

by Bobby Adair

  “Yes, we were.”

  “The first two freighters will leave immediately after they offload,” Bird tells me. “My ship will delay until I have some time with Dr. Punjari and his engineers. So, six to eight hours. I’d like you to ride back with me on my ship if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “I will.”

  Chapter 57

  In the ubiquitous blue bubble glow, the freighter seems utilitarian, yet it’s still the nicest spaceship I’ve ever been on. Nothing’s rusty. Nothing’s broke. All the welds are smooth and the metal plates—no matter where I look—seem to be of the right size. The angles are square where they need to be, and the complex curves look natural. In some ways, the freighter feels like a sleek yacht built for sailing around the Caribbean three decades ago. It’s been stripped of its luxuries, leaving only the necessary pieces behind to make it fast and functional.

  The freighter has a crew of six, but can bunk twice that number. With twelve on an interstellar haul, things get pretty cramped. The areas of the ship for the crew to shower, eat their meals, or spend their free time are pretty sparse. Most of the freighter’s interior has been allocated for payload.

  “You like this ship, don’t you?” says Bird. He’s sitting across from me at the only table in a space that doubles as the freighter’s dining room and common area rec room.

  “What makes you say that?” I ask.

  “They way you keep looking at her lines.”

  I shrug. I’ve been busted. “The UN builds them better than they do on earth.”

  “They take their time and try to get it right. Or so I’ve been told.”

  The crew section is pressurized, so Bird has his faceplate open but his helmet on. I’m configured the same way. We both could have doffed our suits, or even removed our helmets, but we’ve seen too much war in space. Neither of us wants to take the risk of being naked.

  “So you said in passing they were retrofitting the Turd II?”

  "I hope that didn't raise your hopes too high," says Bird, "considering what the UN did for the original Rusty Turd."

  “I never get my hopes too high about anything.” Even as I say it, I wonder if it's true.

  “Bigger H tanks for one,” says Bird. “You’ll carry six times the fuel load.”

  “The small gas tank they designed those things with,” I say, “borders on criminal.”

  “They designed them for a single purpose," says Bird. "Well, they built them for a single purpose. The room to expand their capabilities has been in the ships’ hulls since they were on the drawing board.”

  “So more H,” I say. “Much more range. If you tell me we can travel at 30c again, I might lean across the table and kiss you.”

  “30c?” asks Bird. “You’d rather have that than the plasma gun?”

  “I’d rather have the gun—I figured that was a no-go given the state of affairs on Iapetus. I don’t expect the reactor upgrades and computerized plate actuators to optimize my drive array, but for no good reason, I thought they might be a more realistic thing to wish for than the gun.”

  “You’ll be disappointed, then,” says Bird. “You’re not getting those either.”

  I laugh. “Besides a new airlock door and bigger gas tank, am I getting anything?”

  “And no radar console.”

  That’s a kick in the gut, because of what it implies. No radar means my ship will be nearly blind unless I break my word to Phil and convince him to stay. I can’t imagine doing any of what we did with the Rusty Turd without Phil, and without Penny. “No chance on the radar?”

  “I could say we’ll try, but we sent our only functional spares to the cruiser.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll be able to convince Phil to stay with the new ship, unless we’re flying it to the colonies.”

  “That could be a problem. Has he already decided to go?”

  “Pretty much.” I put the question aside for a better time. “So bigger gas tanks in the new ship. More range. Other stuff?”

  “The techs are aligning the plates in your drive array to tighter tolerances,” says Bird. “And they’re making further tweaks to the reactor. It won’t produce the kind of output we got with one of the UN’s reactor control systems built into it, unfortunately, we don’t have the hardware for that anymore. However, the ship will be faster and more efficient. Also, you’ll get a nav computer.”

  “The basic version?” I ask. “Or the whole deal?”

  “Just like you had before. You can preprogram jumps, and pop in and out of bubble so fast the Grays will barely notice you were there.”

  “That’s something.” In fact, that’s something pretty good. That makes me a little happy.

  "You've proven resourceful with what you've been given so far," says Bird. "The Turd II ain't no Cadillac, but you'll have an advantage over the enemy."

  “And what to you have in mind I do with that advantage?” I ask.

  “That’s what you and I need to talk about.”

  “We’re not talking about laying low while we load the cruiser, are we?” Before Bird answers, I make another guess, because something in his tone doesn’t seem quite right. “Or are we talking about even more than that?”

  “Maybe more.”

  “I lost half my crew when I lost my ship.” I don’t want to feel sorry for myself, but Penny’s death haunts me by coming to mind whenever it pleases and trying its best to squeeze some tears from my eyes. I can’t shake the feeling. I can’t ignore it. All I can do is try to blink my eyes clear and keep my confidence from crumbling.

  “I understand,” says Bird, reaching across the narrow table to lay a fatherly hand on my shoulder.

  I nod, accepting the gesture, and wondering why I never noticed before how large Bird’s hands were. The things a mind will focus on to avoid fresh grief.

  “You’ve seen enough good people die,” says Bird. “I’m not saying it gets easier. Ever. This isn’t new for you. Not for any of us.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t let the loss knock you off your game,” says Bird. “No sooner did you lose your ship than you were thinking clearly and making sure the remains of the Rusty Turd didn’t fall into Trog hands. That’s the smartest thing you could have done. You did more than that. You turned defeat into victory. And then, when you were out at the rendezvous, you and what was left of your crew knocked three more Trog cruisers out of commission before making your escape. Despite the losses, you accomplished the mission.”

  “But—” I say.

  “But.” Bird nods and smiles. “Of course, there’s a but. There’s always a but. It's not bad, though. You know that. You've proven for a second time what a good captain can do with an Arizona class ship.”

  “Phil was flying the Turd II when he hit those cruisers.”

  “Phil never would have attacked if not for learning from you.”

  “Phil sees grav better than most Grays. Captaining the ship is easy for him. There’s nothing about an assault ship that doesn’t come naturally to him by now, and there’s little about a cruiser’s capabilities he doesn’t understand. Phil doesn’t need to learn anything from me.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. If not for the time Phil spent with you, seeing what you could make the equipment do, earning the confidence of your victories, he never would have done what he did. Phil learned how to win from you.”

  Maybe true, maybe not. “Where are you going with this?”

  “You and I need to decide what we’re going to do about this war,” says Bird. “We need to figure out if we’re headed to the colonies or if we’ll to stay and fight.”

  “We?”

  “I think we’re both stuck on the question. Am I right?”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” I say. “I can’t answer that question. I mean, I could tell you right now what I want to do, yet I keep changing my mind. First I want to stay and fight. A few hours later, I want to give up a
nd go to the colonies. I can’t settle on a position. What about you? Have you decided to stay? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Bird shakes his head. “I’ll be honest with you, too. I don’t know, either. What I do know, is if both of us stay, we might have a chance. A small one. If only one of us remains, then I don’t think so.”

  “Are you saying you’ll stay if I do?”

  "No," says Bird. "If you choose to stay, others will, too. I know my soldiers. Despite what we've been through, they don't feel defeated yet. What I don't know, is whether or not you understand that if they stay, you'd be best served having someone like me—or I dare say, Blair—to organize them. You're a hell of a ship captain and leader. You inspire people because you lead from the front and you win, but you've got too much cowboy in you to be an effective admiral or general."

  “What you’re telling me is you don’t want me to get your soldiers killed. Is that it?”

  “No,” says Bird, a little disappointed. “You know, I talked with Punjari. He says you’re still carrying around your paranoia from living under the MSS your whole life. So, I understand why you keep questioning my motives. I’m playing no game with you, Dylan. If you remain, and my soldiers want to stay, I won’t try to convince any of you otherwise. It’s a hard choice whichever way you go. I’m only trying to explain to you the problem as I see it. I think the optimal outcome is that you and I choose to do the same thing. If we split, we’ll divide the force. Worse still, whether it’s a war here or a war that comes to us one day out in the colonies, I think you and I in the same navy or army, or whatever this is, have a better chance at victory than either of us has when we’re apart. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  I slump in my seat. I hadn’t thought of any of this in those terms. My view was myopic—myself and my close friends, my crew.

  And whatever is driving me to keep fighting.

  Chapter 58

  I wake to a comm message coming in from Bird. “Yeah?” I ask, alarm bells starting to wind up through the grogginess.

  “Sorry to wake you,” he says. “If you need more sleep, this isn’t important.”

  Doubting I’ll be able to get back to sleep anyway, I tell him. “I’m awake.” I sit up, and glance at my d-pad to confirm there’s still atmosphere in the bunk room. There is, so I slide my faceplate up. I don’t like to sleep with it open. I don't ever want to wake up suffocating in a vacuum while my body spins off into space with the ship falling to pieces around me.

  Pulling the curtain on my berth back, I see two other berths on the opposite wall have their curtains closed, meaning crewmen are sleeping inside. Keeping my voice down, I say, “Give me a sec to get outside.”

  Moving toward the door, I notice the blue glow is gone. We’re out of bubble. I don’t feel the thrust of the drive array pushing the ship, which means we’re drifting. That puts me on edge again. War has conditioned me to be wary of any change in anything for any reason. Still, I’m careful with the door, opening it slowly, stepping through on light feet, and closing it behind with as little noise as I can manage.

  Now I’m in the wardroom where Bird and I spent a few hours talking the day before. Only he’s not inside.

  “Can you talk now?” asks Bird over the comm.

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “I’m outside on the hull above the bridge.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’re out of bubble,” he says. “We’re on a ballistic path down to Iapetus. No power in the engines, nothing to raise the interest of a Gray. Should take another eight hours or so to touch down.”

  I’m thrilled to know that. “Why did you wake me?”

  “Come out through the airlock just behind the bridge and sit with me out here.”

  I groan and stretch.

  “Unless you’d rather not. I’ll be back inside in an hour or two. We can talk then.”

  “You’re calling me outside to talk?” I ask. “That’s why you woke me up?”

  “And the view,” says Bird, and I realize it’s strange hearing him talk like a regular person, someone gawking at the wonder of Niagara Falls for the first time, not the commander of a defeated military.

  “Give me a minute,” I tell him as I cross the wardroom and blink the sleep out of my eyes.

  It takes a few moments for me to run through my pre-vacuum suit checks, a habit I proceed through in near mindless fashion because I’ve done it so many times. I seal my faceplate tightly, step into the airlock and wait for it to cycle.

  Once the outer hatch opens, I climb the ladder, setting my suit grav to keep my boots locked to the hull. As soon as my head clears the outer hatch, I see the view that has Bird so thrilled he has to share it—Saturn. Remembering back to my meeting with Bird outside at the Free Army base before I left for 61 Cygni—also outside, looking at the manmade wonder of the base—I say, "You're a kid at heart, I think."

  He turns and smiles. “I can never get enough of it, the beauty of the universe.”

  From the freighter's position, the sun is shining on Saturn's rings, and they're spread out across the sky with giant Saturn's yellow and gray bands glowing behind.

  I close the airlock hatch and move over to stand beside Bird. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Not really.”

  “Was your mattress lumpy?”

  “No,” he answers. “I have too many unanswered questions on my mind.”

  “What we talked about yesterday?” I ask. “Did you make a decision yet?”

  “No. You?”

  "No, but I won't decide until I can talk to Silva and Phil."

  “Lenox and Brice, too?”

  I nod. “They’re good people. If they choose to stick with me, it would make the choice easier.”

  “But then you have the responsibility for them.”

  “Yeah. That’s one of the things that worries me.”

  “What about Silva?” asks Bird. “What’s up with you and her?”

  “You know about that, too?”

  Bird nods, a gesture that’s hard to see when you’re wearing a space helmet.

  “Am I breaking any rules? You know, her being my subordinate and all.”

  “You’re joking about that, right? Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”

  “Sometimes I’m not sure myself.”

  “No rules I care about,” says Bird. “I was just asking as a friend.”

  “Friends?” I ask. “Is that what we are?”

  “We may as well be,” says Bird. “Will you still follow orders from your CO if he’s your friend?”

  “Can you still order me to trade my life for Punjari if I’m your friend?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did,” I tell him. “You know me well enough by now, that by suggesting it, I’d probably do it. It was as good as an order.”

  “Not consciously,” says Bird, “but you’re probably right. And it was a mistake.”

  “How so?”

  “Punjari is valuable, I’m not going to deny that. So are you.”

  "Thanks, dad." I say it with a chuckle, because I’m not really hurt by it. “I’m a soldier. Before this whole thing started, I accepted I might have to trade my life for the success of a mission. It’s the job.”

  “That it is,” says Bird. “That it is. So you and Silva, are you two in love?”

  “Yeah,” I say, maybe finally accepting for myself what our relationship is. “It’s all I ever wanted. Happily ever after. Grandkids. A dog. A cat. The whole thing.”

  “Does she know it?”

  “Yeah, mostly.”

  “She wants that, too?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure she does.”

  “Then go to the colonies,” says Bird. “Leave all this behind.”

  “Do they have dogs and cats in the colonies?”

  Bird laughs. “Not yet. Or maybe they do. Hell, I don’t know. One of the things Iapetus
has been building out here since The Siege is a genetic bank for all of earth’s species. I’m sure they only have a small fraction in the vault, but the scientists wanted to have the ability to create a new version of earth wherever we wound up. As far as I know, though, they don’t yet have a way to go from a test tube of genetic material to a living creature. At least not on the scale they’d need to populate a planet.”

  “Make a few,” I say, “and let nature take its course.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What about you, Bird? Wife? Kids?”

  He shakes his head. “Both my boys died in the war. MSS wasted them for nothing.” I can hear Bird is still bitter about it. Understandably so. “Wife died before they joined up. The flu got her one winter when there wasn’t enough to eat.” Bird’s bitterness runs deep over that, too. “Too many winters that way. That’s what we’re fighting for, you know. These Trogs and Grays don’t care one iota for the life of a human. We’re cattle to them. Nobody’s ever going to save us, but us.”

  Chapter 59

  “Let’s talk about the situation with the Trogs,” I suggest. “I’ll need to know what I’m up against if I’m going to lay it all out for my friends. “How many ships do the Trogs have left?”

  “Seventy or eighty,” says Bird. “Near as we can tell. The number is changing all the time. Thankfully going down a bit, with you and your new ship in the game. But you have to remember, the earth had sixty cruisers when the war started. Since then, three full fleets of Trogs have come into the system and that small fleet that showed up just before the Arizona Massacre. There’s got to be a hundred and fifty or two hundred derelict cruisers around. We know the Trogs are actively searching them out for salvage. Some they use for parts. Others they repair and bring back into service.”

  “If anything,” I conclude, “we can expect the number of cruisers to grow even if another fleet never arrives.”

  “The only constant,” says Bird, “is the number of Grays and Trogs in system. What’s it take, eighteen months for a Gray to make an egg, and then five years for it to reach maturity, so six and a half years for a new crop of Grays, eighteen years for a Trog, if they even brought females with them, which as far as I know they haven’t? If reinforcements don’t arrive, what we have is what we’re going to have.”