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

by Bobby Adair

  Punjari confirms with a nod.

  “If we can pull it off,” I say, “and I think we do it in a lightning-strike move—”

  “Drama,” mutters Brice.

  I ignore him. “If we can do it quickly enough, I think we might be able to contact the Grays and sue for peace, which means a face-to-face meeting.”

  “And you think they won’t allow you to meet them with your weapons in hand,” guesses Punjari.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “And you don’t trust them,” he guesses again.

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “You trusted Prolific Man Killer,” says Punjari. “You carried weapons in to meet him, but there were so many Trogs there you wouldn’t have made it out alive if he’d decided to have you killed. So you had to trust him.”

  “Yeah,” I admit, “that’s right. This is different.” I glance at Brice, because I know he’s not going to agree with what I say next. “The Trogs are like us in a lot of ways. They’re slaves, yet they have an honor code they live by. Grays are evil to the core.”

  “That’s probably not true,” says Punjari. “They’re living by a set of rules that precludes treating humans and Trogs as equals. You may not realize that in their system of beliefs they’re probably acting morally.”

  "And that's exactly it," I tell him. "In their system of beliefs, humans aren't their equals. So we need to take steps to protect ourselves if things go bad when we meet them."

  “You know it’ll probably be just like when you met with Prolific Man Killer, only more so. The Grays won’t take a chance with you. You might be surrounded by hundreds of armed Trogs, and with any move you make, you risk being killed.”

  “If it comes to that,” I say, “my only goal will be to kill as many of them as I can.”

  Punjari looks at Brice. “And you’re okay with this, going on a suicide mission?”

  “They’re all suicide missions,” he says.

  Punjari frowns. “That sounds like something you’ve practiced.”

  “I’ve had lots of opportunities,” says Brice. “To answer your question, I’m with Kane on this. I know meeting the Grays is a gamble that probably won’t work out, but if it does, we win big. If it doesn’t, we only lose a few lives. Most of all, we need to kill Nicky.”

  “Nicky?” asks Punjari.

  “She and Phil have to come with us,” I say, “to facilitate communication. However, we can’t let Nicky fall into Gray hands. She knows too much about us. About our bases and colonies.”

  “Then you shouldn’t take her at all,” says Punjari. “In fact, none of you should go. You all know too much.”

  “Hence the enhancements,” I say.

  “You want to make a suicide bomb,” says Punjari. “That’s what you want to build into your suits.”

  "Only as a last resort," I tell him, though the truth of it is that this is the first time I've thought through the argument this deeply, and I see he's right. Brice and I both need to be wired with suicide explosives. "Ideally, we'd like to have weapons we can hide in our suits, so we'll still be armed after they take our railguns and disruptors."

  “If they’re smart,” says Punjari, “they’ll take any extra magazines you’re carrying, as well as your cal packs and your H packs. Maybe even your helmets.”

  “If they’re smart enough to take the rest,” asks Brice, “then why not our suits, too?”

  I laugh.

  “What?” asks Punjari.

  “That pretty much leaves us with C4 suppositories.”

  Brice grimaces.

  “If it’s the only choice we have,” I say.

  “It doesn’t have to be unpleasant,” says Punjari. “We could probably snake a good deal of C4 into your lower intestines. We'd just need to find a way to detonate it."

  Brice doesn’t like the idea at all.

  “As a last resort,” I say. “But what else can we do? Can we rig up an internal H source in our suits in case they take our H packs?”

  “That wouldn’t be hard,” says Punjari. “I have a guy who could make the change in a few hours.”

  “Will it be reliable?” asks Brice.

  “We have some time to test it,” says Punjari. “Nothing we’re talking about is happening soon, right?”

  “We have to ship the cruiser off to the colonies before we make any offensive moves,” I answer. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to put all the pieces in place. It could be anywhere from four to twelve weeks out, but I’d bet on four. Are you going with the cruiser when it bubbles out?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” says Punjari. “Perhaps I’ll wait until after I talk with Bird about your plan.”

  “Then let’s call it four weeks,” I say.

  “I’ll set you up with my people,” says Punjari.

  Chapter 15

  The clock ticks through one day, and then another. We spend endless meetings finalizing our plan, which ends up being pretty much what Brice and I proposed to Bird on our first day back. Nevertheless, the details and contingencies need work.

  As the weeks draw on, platoon-sized units start to ship out. The biggest hole in our plan was pointed out in the first meeting with Bird’s staff. We had nearly four thousand troops ready to fight and we were going to add another four. Unfortunately, we had the ability to transport at most a tenth of them. The success of our intended assault on the battle stations depended on all of them arriving at their objectives at about the same time.

  The solution we came up with was novel and dangerous. It involved stationing troops on pieces of space junk, broken cruisers and Arizona Class ships, the remnants of the hundreds of battles fought around the solar system through three years of war. Using one of our freighters, jury-rigged as a tug, pieces deemed large enough for our use were accelerated toward earth and put on meticulously calculated paths at precise speeds. Each was loaded up with one or several platoons, depending on the size of the piece of debris.

  The troops were to sit in space for three to six weeks with nothing between them and the void but a piece of space junk careening toward earth. Not on a collision course, but instead on paths designed to pass through the battle stations’ orbits.

  With so many pieces of so many destroyed ships flying around the solar system, having a few hundred pieces falling toward earth wouldn’t likely raise any concerns. It was the kind of thing that happened every day and would probably continue to happen for decades as the derelicts either fell into orbit around the sun, or were caught by the gravity of the solar system’s nine planets and pulled down to the surface.

  Though that part of the plan afforded us a way to have nearly eight thousand troops show up in near earth orbit all at the same time with absolutely no warning they were coming, the risks were significant. Any mistake in the calculations could crash a platoon into earth’s atmosphere for a fiery death. An error in the other direction might zip them past the earth at a distance too far to cross on suit grav alone. In that case, everyone in the platoon would eventually die when their cal packs and H packs ran dry.

  If the piece of space junk wasn’t accelerated to a high enough speed, the platoon might suffer the same fate, arriving only after they were long dead. If they came in too fast, their suits might not be able to decelerate enough for them to match the speed of their intended targets. Again, death.

  Then there was the psychological burden of having to sit with our backs to a piece of metal and stare at the endless void, thinking about all the ways things could go wrong. That kind of shit wears on even the most stable mind.

  Guesses on casualty rates we’d experience before ever landing a troop ranged from five to fifty percent. I understood the logic, but disagreed vehemently. I explained to Bird’s officers that I’d survived the same ordeal I was sending the troops into. Brice and I both had zero guarantee we’d ever come close enough to a gravitational body to feel solid ground under our feet again. We had the mental resi
lience to survive. The troops we were sending, I argued, had all survived through the tunnel battles with the Trogs. They were tough enough to make it.

  On another subject, the waking of the people in the pods was hard. They’d expected to open their eyes on a future date on a far away world under sunny skies with little to worry about but trying to pick the grassy hill where they’d build their new huts.

  News that the pod people were right back where they started, and they were being thrown into the war, didn’t sit well. Fortunately, most adjusted to the idea as they slowly regained their strength. And that was another unanticipated delaying factor; none of them came out of the pods ready to rock. Recovering from stasis sleep was like recovering from a bad bout with pneumonia. Even after a few weeks of rehabilitation, none were at one hundred percent.

  The only truly good thing to come out of our planning and logistical phase was that the cruiser to the colonies finally did leave. It was a bittersweet departure. The ship represented a huge hope for the future of humanity, but every one of us understood the cruiser was headed to a future we wouldn’t participate in. For the rest of us, we’d win our future through brute force, or we’d die.

  Chapter 16

  “It’s time,” says Phil.

  Lenox pushes power into the Turd II's grav plates, and it glows blue as it lifts off the hangar floor, sliding silently toward the bay doors.

  Phil is in his spot at the nav station with Nicky strapped into a seat beside him made just for her. Silva is at the comm station and Peterson working the radar console. Only Brice doesn’t have a bridge assignment. He can back up Silva or Peterson in case one of them is killed. Or he can captain the ship if Phil and I take an unfortunate hit. As for Lenox and Phil, I’m their backup. We’re the ship’s full crew, though we have a Lieutenant Clark in what remains of our platoon compartment. He’s in charge of five techs who will manage our bomb load. On the munitions pylons on the hull, we can mount six thermonuclear devices like the ones we took with us to 61 Cygni. At the moment, the pylons are empty, and our internal storage is full with six nukes.

  Much of the rest of the space inside the Turd II has been converted to hydrogen storage, enough to keep the Turd II flying in combat conditions for months. We won’t need that much. We have less than two weeks before the assault on the battle stations commences. Our job is to raise hell through the solar system, running as many hit-and-run attacks on supply bases as we can manage. We anticipate taking plenty of hits, not at first, but once the Trogs catch on to what we’re doing and start leaving crews posted by their guns, waiting for us to pop out of bubble. That’s the primary reason we carry so much spare fuel, stored in a honeycomb of tanks filling the forward spaces. We expect to lose most of it long before we burn it.

  Out ahead of my ship is a stealth scout flown by the same pilot who took me, Phil, and Brice on our scouting trip of the earth system when we sent Blair off on her mission. Captain Chikere is piloting again. The scout ship has been put under my command.

  A freighter is leaving behind us. It’s captained by a woman named Leroux. She’s carrying more nukes, stores of H, all manner of supplies, and anything any of the three ships is likely to need on our expedition. She also carries three platoons of soldiers, all cramped in there together. The nukes we intend to use. The troops are along just in case, because as Brice loves to point out, nothing goes as planned.

  Together, the three ships make up the task force I command, though the phrase task force seems like it was coined for some group of ships much larger than the ones I have at my disposal.

  The canyon we cruise through on the way out from the base widens meter by meter, and the ragged ribbon of sky above invites us to blast into open space. Our ship wasn’t built for creeping along the ground between constricting canyon walls, it’s an angry iron spear with a grav-lens tip, wrought to blast through space at blinding speeds and kill Trog cruisers.

  The crew is anxious to do just that. We’ve spent too many long months planning and preparing, cooped up in Iapetus’s tunnels.

  “Keep her steady through the canyon?” Lenox asks, sensing my impatience.

  “Yeah,” I answer. “Once we’re out, follow the cliff face for a hundred kilometers or so, then do another couple hundred across the plain before you head for space.”

  “Can’t let any snoopy Trogs know where we came from,” she says.

  “Peterson,” I say, “once we’re out of the canyon, keep an eye on the space up there. I don’t want any surprises.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “Phil,” I ask, “anything?”

  “I would have told you already if we sensed something.”

  I know. But it feels good to be back in the captain’s chair, with enough time behind me that thoughts of all our dead friends have stopped reminding me of what waits for the rest of us if I fuck up.

  Soon enough, we’re out of the canyon with Iapetus’s plain spreading out to our right. The scout is heading straight out across the rolling terrain. The freighter is heading along the cliff face in the opposite direction as us.

  In an hour, we’ll break free of Iapetus’s gravitational pull and run on sub-light acceleration in any random direction that drives us away from all the local orbital masses. Six hours later, we’ll bubble out of the sun’s orbital plane to a spot one astronomical unit above Ceres. The freighter, having taken its own path, will meet us there at the first of many rendezvous we’ll be making over the coming weeks, all at different randomly chosen coordinates. The stealth scout will not be there. It won't arrive until later. Its first destination will be our first target, the biggest Trog supply base in the solar system, not counting the earth. Chikere will take an undetectable pass over Ceres and let us know if there are any cruisers refueling, or if it's vulnerable.

  Chapter 17

  The last leg of our trip takes a little less than two minutes. As soon as we pop out of bubble, I tell Silva, “Send a message to Iapetus to let them know we’re in position.”

  “Round trip time will be twenty-four minutes,” she says. We’re both telling each other things we already know.

  “Peterson,” I ask, “is Leroux here yet?”

  “No,” she answers. “We don’t expect them for seven more minutes.”

  I turn to Phil, “What do you think?”

  He knows what I’m asking, and it’s not anything about Leroux’s arrival. “It’s a solid plan. At least for Ceres.”

  “It’s a big base,” says Brice. “Making three runs to drop three nukes is the right move.”

  “If all goes according to plan,” says Phil, “we wait for the squadron already there to leave. Intel says another squadron won’t show up for twelve hours to two weeks.”

  “It gives us a wide window,” I say. “Way more than we’ll need.”

  “It’s how they operate all their bases,” says Phil. “At least for now. That’ll change once we start bombing them.”

  “They’ll start keeping cruisers stationed closer in for protection,” says Brice.

  “We have a plan for that,” I counter. “And even if we didn’t, it pins part of their fleet to the bases after the assault on earth starts. Maybe half their fleet. They have seventeen bases we know about. Most small, some big. None as large as Ceres. They only have sixty ships. What’s that, like three or four cruisers per base, if they hold them all out for defense of the bases?”

  “Don’t forget the Arizona Class ships they have now,” says Phil. He doesn’t need to add that it was one of those that destroyed the Rusty Turd on our salvage run to pick up the Trog cruiser we just sent out to the colonies.

  “About that,” says Silva.

  We all turn to look.

  “I just received a message Iapetus beamed out here for us. Intel from earth.”

  “Blair?” asks Brice, “What’s the scoop?”

  Silva looks at me as she answers. "The attempt to contaminate the cruiser's supply of hydrogen was a bus
t.”

  “Shit,” says Brice. “I knew Blair would let us down.”

  “But,” adds Silva, “three of the seven hydrogen refineries suffered catastrophic explosions. The other four have suffered some level of damage.”

  “Blair?” I ask.

  “The message doesn’t say,” answers Silva.

  “I’ll bet it’s the UN’s earthbound intel gathering network,” says Brice. “Bird said he was going to try and repurpose them to engage in espionage.”

  Probably. I don’t say it out loud, though. “Doesn’t matter. It makes what we’re doing out here that much more important. Anything else, Silva?”

  “Maybe the best news,” she says. “The Trogs only had seven other Arizona Class ships in the fleet. They loaded them all into a cruiser three days ago and sent it back to their home world. So, we don’t have to worry about Arizona Class ships for the time being.”

  “They’re still building them back on earth,” I ask, “right?”

  “The message says ‘for the time being.’”

  “That’s probably what that means,” says Phil. “The Grays are consolidating their control of the population through the MSS, and I'm sure they're ramping the shipyards back up. That might be why they feel comfortable loading up those seven and sending them back to their home world."

  “So they’ll have plenty to reverse engineer,” sneers Brice.

  “If Prolific Man Killer holds to his word,” I say. “That cruiser will never reach its destination.”

  “If,” says Brice.

  I ignore that comment. “Luck is with us, then. We’re starting our attack at the right time.”

  “Unless they’ve already ramped up the shipyards and they’re rolling Arizona ships off the line by the dozen,” says Brice.

  “No more negativity,” I pronounce. “Why don’t you review the target coordinates with Phil.”

  “Done that already,” says Phil. “Four times. Once with Colonel Bird’s intel team. Once with operations— ”