Ashes of Freedom

by K. J. Coble

  Ashes of Freedom

  K.J. Coble

  Published by K.J. Coble, 2021.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  ASHES OF FREEDOM

  First edition. June 26, 2021.

  Copyright © 2021 K.J. Coble.

  ISBN: 979-8201328559

  Written by K.J. Coble.

  Also by K.J. Coble

  Hell's Jesters

  Hell's Jesters

  Cry Havoc

  Rebel Hell

  Heroes of the Valley

  Defenders of the Valley

  Blood in the Valley (Coming Soon)

  Stand in the Valley (Coming Soon)

  The Quintorius Chronicles

  Lord of Exiles

  Legion of Exiles

  Republic of Exiles

  The Vothan Guard

  The Tome of Flesh

  Standalone

  Magic Fire - Metal Storm

  The Shadows of Maunathyrr

  Ashes of Freedom

  Beyond the Bulwarks

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By K.J. Coble

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK I – PATHFINDER | CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BOOK II – SPRING | CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BOOK III | SUMMER | CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  BOOK IV | FALL | TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  BOOK V | WINTER | THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  Sign up for K.J. Coble's Mailing List

  Further Reading: Hell's Jesters

  About the Author

  For freedom-fighters and resistors, the world over -- especially those who earned not victory in their time, but cracked the door for those that would follow.

  PROLOGUE

  The young woman lay in a patch of razor-grass at the edge of a tree line with the smell of frozen dirt and the sour, sickly scent of her poorly-fed body in her nostrils. A breeze churned the brittle blades, gnawed her flesh with a thousand icicle teeth despite the bulk of animal hide cloaks and stolen fatigues.

  She moved with the wind, let it hide the rustle as she edged forward. The barrel of her rifle parted the foliage and she pressed her eye to the weapon’s scope. Everything sprang into flat greenish, light-enhanced view.

  Looking downhill into a broad bowl, she saw open fields divided by well-maintained fences and gravel and dirt roads carving down out of the surrounding hills. Patches of ice stood out in haphazard patterns across trampled grass. It was late winter and the low altitudes of the valley were unlikely to see another heavy snowfall. She panned slowly, alert for movement.

  The light was poor, even with a clear sky through which stars gleamed by the thousands. Lurinari had no moon, as her mother had once told her Earth had. No friendly light in the sky chased back shadow here and Earth was a myth, a mother world that had forgotten its children scattered across the stars.

  Her sight dragged across higher grounds and came to rest on a walled manor.

  The wall had been quite functional when built. Even two hundred years after its colonization, Lurinari had boasted less than thirty million inhabitants scattered across its vastness. The wall kept back not only native predators with a taste for large game but the occasional bandit.

  It had done little good when the Invaders came.

  A motionless figure caught her eye, a sentry standing over the spot where an Invader missile had once breached the wall with fiery ease. She could see into the courtyard, her mind’s eye remembering well-worn grass where she and her sister played, learned to ride, where she fractured an arm attempting to break in a new colt.

  She remembered also the place in the yard, near the main door, where Grandfather had been gunned down, hobbling for safety. Only meters away, the patch of grass where the Invaders had kicked and clubbed Father into a bloody lump, twitching in the crisp spring sun. Inside the manor house dwelt more horrible memories, snatches of violence, the terrifying flash of energy weapons, her mother’s screams, the awful, disinterested silence in which the Invaders carried everything out.

  The guerilla’s stomach twisted in hot, liquid protest to a week without decent food. She’d been on foot some time on errands to the settlement of Teshima. And she’d gone quite a stretch out of the way—as she always did—to see what she had once called home.

  The main gate ground open. The woman tensed, thumbed off the safety on the converted hunting rifle as electric prickles of fear danced through her muscles. She’d been careful, was always. Sophisticated sensor suites monitored the manor and surrounding countryside and the Invaders, themselves, could sense things a person could not. She shrank low into rahillabuy hides, the white speckled browns and greens of the animal superb camouflage in this climate as well as masking most of the wearer’s infrared signature.

  A squad of Invaders issued from the gate, spreading like oil on water into a semicircular formation. Their steps matched one another precisely on a course straight and unimaginative. Their plodding, monotonous air gave them away as the Invaders’ slave-beasts. Harvested from those taken in war, they were mindless things whose only will was their masters’. The resistance bands had taken to calling them the “living dead”, which they were, after a fashion.

  Behind them came an Invader mounted on a stallion whose familiar size and gait made it a probable descendent of the steeds her family had once bred on these lands. She focused on the rider, clad in a featureless black bodysuit, unarmored, easy and confident in the saddle.

  The Invader was male, almost human-looking, a pale, shaved head contrasting his garb. The occasional metal glint at the base of his skull gave away cybernetic interface ports. His face carried no expression, mouth a tight line while puffs of frosty breath left through his nostrils.

  The gate grated shut at his back but the Invader gave no sign of noticing. He and his bodyguards moved down into the bowl. Their course would carry them near the tree line.

  The guerilla slid the crosshairs over his broad-jawed face. Her tongue played in the back of her mouth, worsening the ache of a loose, rotten molar.

  The range was long, but she’d made more difficult. One stroke of the trigger to send a high-density slug punching through the Invader’s left cheekbone. One more payment to the debt of a twenty-year old partisan who had watched her entire world, her mind and body, violated.

&
nbsp; And her soul?

  Her finger took up most of what remained of the trigger pull.

  Then stopped.

  She licked dry, cracked lips, tasted a hint of blood. Killing the one would bring the others, angry, fast and more than a match for a nearly starved holdout with an ancient rifle no match for their plasma weaponry. Logic forced relaxation. She had promised herself a lifetime ago that she would survive this war. She would not betray that for a pointless moment of bloodletting.

  She watched the Invader and his morbid entourage move past, then slid backward through the grass into the trees, slowly, patiently. She shivered, she endured the twisting of her gut and she craved sleep.

  Finally, she was clear, able to scuttle back through brush and bramble and put safe distance between her and the corpse of her home. When enough time had passed and each step no longer held the whispered promise of death, the anger returned to pump through her limbs.

  She stopped, went down on one knee for a rest as lungs took burning breaths. The cold sting of half-frozen tears on her cheeks surprised her. She wiped them away, looked around at the forest. She remembered this place, had played here as a child. She wondered when she stopped being that girl, wondered at what terrible moment the woman she might have been died and the thing she was now was born.

  My name is Sandy Schweppenberg...and this was my home...

  BOOK I – PATHFINDER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Devin Crozier was supposed to be conditioned against fear. Training, surgical enhancement, and hypnosis were all supposed to give him an edge against man’s oldest instinct. But crammed into a coffin of dark, shuddering blastisteel, moving at better than a thousand kilometers a second, he was hard-pressed to keep the cold tightness from his gut.

  Powerful gravity drives strained under high acceleration somewhere above him, sympathetic vibrations thrumming through metal and plastic, rubber and padding, flesh, bone, muscle and nerve. Joints felt battered to jelly. Thought hurt. Crozier swallowed, remembered water’s clear taste and hated the synthetic stink of the helmet clamped down over his face as respirators kept recycled air whispering in.

  He tried to move, felt the straps bite, knew it was a mistake. The technicians who had buckled him into this nightmare and sealed its covers down over him had warned against it. Muscle balled up into a knot of sharp pain in his left hamstring. Crozier bit down, complicating his error with more tension. The urge to scream against the cave-in panic mounted.

  He pulled in a deliberate breath, concentrated.

  His mind’s eye drew a cottage overlooking a lake of water clear enough to reflect the snow-capped spine of a mountain range. Evergreen forest nearby teemed with rabbit, deer and fox hunted in the cold sting of early winter air. His wife sat cross-legged on a rug thrown across the porch, posture serene with meditation while a breeze tousled brown strands across closed eyes. When they opened, they were bright with humor.

  Another breath dragged air in through clenched teeth as calm drove tension back. Sweat dampened the inner lining of Crozier’s battle armor, tickling in his armpits, stinging across skin rubbed raw by straps and confinement. He held the image close, a talisman against the fear trembling around him.

  Power to the gravity drives increased, a new, urgent note drumming through Crozier’s frame. He swallowed again. Tongue dried against the roof of his mouth. Fear had a desert-grit taste.

  A section of his helmet visor lit up with a hologram of a battle-armored figure in a cockpit with personalized graffiti emblazoned across a black helm. The pilot’s blast visor was not down, leaving freckled features visible enough that Crozier could wince at the shocking youth. Barely a woman, he thought. But they all looked like kids, anymore, and it had been a long war.

  “You holding on all right down there, Major?” the pilot asked, voice snarling over the static of energies fluctuating wildly outside the hull.

  The “insertion module” was a gutted Mark IV tracking missile nestled under her Venger-class starfighter. In place of a fifty-megaton anti-matter charge, it carried cocooned in its core Major Devin Crozier, 21rst Coalition Pathfinders.

  “Good so far, Lieutenant—” he paused, straining to recall the pilot’s name “—Reese.”

  “We’re braking for final approach,” Reese said, voice clear over the interference for a moment. “I’m tying your helmet AI to the battle computer so you can observe our progress. The link will remain until you...jettison.”

  “Thank you,” Crozier said, meaning it. If Death held all the cards today, he at least wanted to see it coming. “And good luck.”

  “To both of us,” Reese replied with a touch of bravado that did not seem forced. She was good—to be selected for this run, probably one of the best—but young. And the young didn’t believe in Death, didn’t know how fast it would come in the blind-sided slaughter they were about to enter.

  A three-dimensional battle schematic replaced Reese’s image. In its center hung the orb of a world blessed with ample ocean, mountainous continents teeming with life, and a crust rich in heavy metals. Its blue-green sent a wince of longing for home through Crozier.

  Lurinari.

  A former Citizen-world of the Galactic Coalition, Lurinari had been at its height a growing power in the Middle Sectors with its blossoming population and its burgeoning industrial base. But the planet’s good fortune had not gone unnoticed by eyes less friendly. When the Korvans began their war for domination—nearly nine standard years ago—Lurinari laid directly in the path of their interstellar blitz.

  Korvans.

  Crozier felt the name of the Coalition’s blood enemy sting in his skull. They were cybernetics gone mad; a people no longer human. Driven by a nightmare vision of a society, their technology—their Awareness—made thought accessible to all and only the privileged enjoyed privacy, or even individual thought.

  Existentialism twisted into cyber-fascism.

  Crimson beads flickered into being about the holographic Lurinari. Small designations came next, the starfighter’s artificial intelligence identifying contacts across the void by the signature of gravity drives and fusion reactors.

  Defense and surveillance satellites, light picket vessels, and Korvan fighters, roused by early-warning sensors and rising in angry red swarms from the surface. Golden halos drew themselves around a quintet of icons circling the occupied world in geosynchronous orbit. Korvan orbital battle platforms, high priority targets.

  Across the holographic emptiness came a host of blue symbols, a Coalition strike force, two hundred and ten starfighters strong, tasked with clearing its space of anything Korvan, from the battle stations down to weather satellites.

  Crozier had sat in on the final-stage briefing, watching pilots and wing commanders, their calm smiles as they sipped terrible coffee in a room that stank of cigarettes and bodies that didn’t get cleaned enough during the long, interstellar journey. There was little subtlety to the plan, no guile, no maneuver. A hammer blow attack with only speed and numbers to promise success.

  “Strike wing Alpha, forty seconds to engagement range,” said a voice Crozier didn’t recognize over the tactical network. A string of terse acknowledgements followed.

  A new pair of red icons snapped into Lurinari’s skies, immediately highlighted in flashing double haloes. The AI labeled them Tamrak-class corvettes. Fast and well-armed, a part of Crozier recalled, better than anything the Coalition had in the same class.

  And they weren’t supposed to be here.

  “Shit.” Reese’s voice held the resignation of one accustomed to poor intelligence and reconnaissance.

  “Alpha, re-deploy along Contingency Four parameters,” the voice of what must be the senior wing commander said over a flurry of chatter on the tac net. “The corvettes have target priority. Tighten it up, people! Twenty seconds!”

  “—the hell are they doing here?” Crozier heard the growl Reese had muted from the network but not her internal intercom. On the holographic display, formations shift
ed and jogged into last moment adjustments. It didn’t seem like much. It didn’t seem enough.

  Crozier caught a guilty part of himself praying. He remembered something his wife had said a lifetime ago, something about there being no atheists in foxholes. He saw her again, playful smile tickling beneath his eyelids. He saw the girls. How long since he last held them?

  Red icons birthed a swarm of white arrowheads. Tracking missiles launched across the void as the outnumbered Korvans advanced behind them. The leading wave of Coalition strike ships responded in kind. The opposing volleys met and passed each other, hundreds of projectiles crisscrossing at absurd velocity. Crozier felt the bite of a cramp in his gut. What the hell am I doing here?

  Arrowheads flashed, clawed out of space as starfighter energy weapons opened fire. Scattered flickers became a rash across the hologram as tiny AI’s guided missiles in a gleeful stampede for annihilation.

  An arrow intersected a red icon with an anticlimactic flash. Then Death was everywhere, wading into the melee as blue and red mixed, swirled. The tactical network, disciplined until now, sizzled with the shock, terror and intensity of embattled people and machines. Shouts for help, orders, screams of metal and flesh. But the carnage remained crisp and sanitary on the hologram.

  In a moment, the first wave of Coalition fighters was clear and the second came tearing through dazed survivors to rake the orbital stations and satellites. The battle platforms met the attack with fresh missile salvos, ravening streaks of energy fire and torrents of hyper-velocity slugs. The massacre spilled into the high orbits of Lurinari.

  Crozier closed his eyes, could imagine the battle as it crackled in his ears. Particle beams, bolts of plasma and lasers slashing spacecraft, turning hulls into slag. Whirling wreckage colliding with survivors. Crippled vessels dropping into the upper atmosphere, beginning to take on a cherry glow as their pilots burned and filled the intercom with long, crackling screams.