Ashes of Freedom

by K. J. Coble

  She hoped that Crozier would not die in the first few weeks, as so many had.

  A BUILDING WIND AROUND mid-morning brought a wave of clouds from the southwest, churning over the worn and wearied looking monoliths of the Coreal Range. The small company turned down into the lowlands where increasingly rugged hills would shield them from the elements.

  The partisans slithered and slid along rock and root until they reached the depths of a dry streambed, strewn with shards of sandstone. From there they crawled under a lip of rocky overhang and scuttled into a wet gloom smelling of gouged clay. After a handful of seconds, they emerged into a lozenge-shaped cave, the ceiling barely high enough to sit up straight.

  Crozier leaned against rock, feeling tired and clumsy and uncertain as his gear weighed down on him in Lurinari’s higher gravity. Proto-ration wafers, first aid kit, stimulant patches, and a bandoleer of spare clips and charge packs for his weapons— 10mm heavy pistol worn at his hip, BR-9 Blastrifle slung at his shoulder.

  The battle armor was the worst drag. Covering shoulders, torso, forearms, and thighs, it was proof against blast, shrapnel, and—sometimes—rifle-caliber rounds. His helmet carried an onboard AI complete with compact sensor suite as well as a small library. His smart-fiber and synthe-leather fatigues matched their surroundings, chameleon-like, merging into the gritty brown of the cave even as he sat taking stock of himself.

  His bones screamed for sleep but he would not, could not heed them. Not until he was given leave to do so. He could feel the guerillas’ resentment toward him, their gruff acceptance of a burden. Their eyes were needles that could pierce the unprepared and pump them full of the nightmares they had seen.

  Respect was a universe away. Until he had it, Crozier would not sleep or accept comfort when the others could not.

  “Glow strips only. No fire.” The leader of the partisans sat beside Crozier. His voice was something between a lisp and a growl, had been the voice the night before that told Crozier he’d been intercepted by his contacts, not by a Korvan patrol.

  Some of the guerillas broke out lengths of tape that cast a weak greenish glow across the grotto and pressed them to the wall. Crozier raised his visor, eyes thankful to see without enhancement. He took note of graffiti on the rock, names, obscene pictures and jokes he did not understand.

  His gaze slid across his new companions, four humans, a Shmali, and a Grak—the group leader. They were a cross-section of this world’s pre-invasion population. Lurinari had been settled as a “peace world”, a cooperation between the main member-races of the Grand Coalition, and a rarity as it had been one of the few worlds where the concept had worked—for the most part.

  “How are you faring, Major?” the Grak asked. He was short and compact with a stooped posture. Light brown hair covered his body, streaked with black over the drooping flaps of his ears. A huge forehead, lined with twin rows of knobby horns, protruded over round black eyes and a flattened nose. Notched, stained teeth jutted upwards out of a pronounced under-bite and gave his speech its lisp.

  His name was Ro Atchraq and he was Crozier’s primary contact.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  Ro looked him over. “These last couple days have been hard for you. You should sleep.”

  Crozier shook his head. “I’m all right. I can do my part.”

  The Grak put a clawed hand on his shoulder. “No shame, Major. You are still new to our world. You will be more help to us rested.”

  Crozier wanted to protest but the heavy sheath of pain and weariness tightened, demanding he take the offer. He nodded, decided he could earn respect another day.

  Ro looked at the others. “Cynthia, Vorsh, you take first watch.”

  One of the twin sisters, the one with the longer, reddish hair, paused halfway from taking off her boots. She gave Atchraq a look, let out a sigh, and slid her footwear back on. She picked up her submachine gun and scampered into the dark of the exit.

  The Shmali, Vorsh, spat something in his native tongue that could only be a curse or an insult. He had no hair to speak of on his pale, anemic-looking skin and no visible ears. Huge eyes shined silver-blue and frigid as polar waters. As his mouth cocked into an irritated snarl, rows of needle-like teeth glittered.

  Ro and Vorsh locked eyes for a moment that chilled the cavern. Crozier recalled that the Grak and Shmali had, historically, never been on the friendliest of terms. Vorsh, who had already stripped his assault rifle across an oily rag, reassembled the weapon without looking at it and broke the unspoken engagement with a hiss as he swept from the chamber.

  “The rest of you, sleep,” Ro said to the others, his eyes on Vorsh’s exit. He paused, his profile bestial in the weak light, then followed the Shmali from cavern.

  “At it again,” one of the remaining companions said with a snort. The greenish light gleamed across his smooth, shaved scalp as he shook his head. His skin was black as coal ash. His lips curled upward into an amused smile, distorting the shape of his gray-speckled goatee. He met Crozier’s eyes once then looked away.

  The youthful partisan beside him had disheveled straw-blonde hair and a face made craggy by the scars of acne and childhood malnutrition. The boy’s lips protruded, seemed to pucker like a fish.

  He slid close to Crozier. “Cameron Carlisle,” he said, extended a long-fingered hand. “You’re Crozier, right? Come to help us whip the Screwheads?”

  Crozier nodded, accepting the hand. “That’s right.”

  Carlisle pointed at the black man. “Over there, that’s Cole Worthy. He’s from up north, ‘round Farpoint. He was with the Defense Force back when—”

  “Cameron...” Worthy’s voice was a polite but scolding bass that silenced the youth. The man nodded to Crozier once.

  The boy seemed to consider a moment before gesturing toward the cave’s other remaining occupant, the second twin. “And that’s Sandy Schweppenberg. Her and Cynthia are sisters...’course, well, you probably guessed that...”

  Sandy gazed up from cleaning her rifle, a heavy hunting model with a military-issue scope. The dark brown pools of her eyes looked as though they had stared through the crosshairs more times than could be remembered. Her brown hair was short and ragged with the occasional flash of red. Her scowl faded for a second as she regarded Crozier.

  “They say you’re from Earth,” Cameron said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Crowded.” For a moment, Crozier remembered the apartment-cubicle he and his wife had shared as newlyweds. Making love as the flimsy walls shook and disturbed the neighbors. He shut his eyes, winced the memory away. “Big cities, pollution, too much crime to walk the streets safely. But there are open places like what you have here. More of them than there used to be, too. A lot of people have left Earth over the last couple centuries. All of the opportunities are out here.”

  “Umm...yeah...” Cameron looked down.

  Crozier saw Worthy shake his head and Sandy looked up with sharpened ice in her eyes.

  Oh, I’m an idiot. Opportunity to these people meant a day without fear.

  Crozier’s embarrassed gaze drifted to the stock of Cameron’s assault rifle, stained wood with rude carvings. Not carvings. Hatch-marks.

  “That’s...a lot.”

  Cameron looked up with a grin. He ran his fingertips across the notches, a caress he might have given his first love, in a different world. “Naw...lost track after a while.” His gaze went to Crozier’s blastrifle, alight with desire.

  “Want to see?” Crozier asked, lifted the weapon.

  Cameron nodded, handed his rifle over in exchange. His uneven, blackened teeth showed as his smile grew.

  Crozier examined the boy’s weapon, recognized the make. NA-17, manufactured on Nova for corporate security agencies and frontier world militias. Vorsh and Ro carried them, as well. It was sturdy and easy to maintain with a curved thirty-five round clip of dense, ten-millimeter slugs. The rifle stood an even chance of punchi
ng through modern body armor, when aimed with care. The fire select toggle was rusted permanently at semi-automatic.

  Cameron’s hands worked their way over the dull gleam of Crozier’s blaster. “Haven’t see one ‘a these since the war began. This one’s smaller than the ones I remember, though, fold-up stock and short barrel.”

  “For close quarters,” Crozier replied. “Personal preference, really. You lose some beam coherency without the longer, refractive barrel. But if you’re in tight with something nasty...”

  Cameron looked at Crozier, his expression almost disquieting. With something like reverence, he handed the blastrifle back to its owner.

  “You’ve been fighting the Screwheads a long time?”

  For a heartbeat, Crozier saw a blasted, fog-enshrouded moonscape on Weyland IV. Rain had swept through, after the last bombardment. A body with no legs lay face down in the churned muck, arms wide, as if hugging the ground. Twines of smoke still rose from holes chewed in the corpse’s torso by shrapnel.

  Crozier took a long breath and nodded with a tight grin.

  “Feels like all my life.”

  COLE WORTHY WATCHED the offworlder as Cameron yipped on at him. The kid was like that, clingy. Growing up with no folks in the middle of a war zone would do that to a boy, Cole figured. This Crozier was the youth’s new God.

  At least, until the Korvans got him.

  Who could say? Maybe this Crozier was the genuine article. The Free City State people sent “advisors” now and then, sometimes offworlders smuggled in. Ro always went along with them, the loyal subject, Defense Force veteran with his duty. The specialists would arrive with their enthusiasm for the Cause and their big ideas and they’d end up killing a few more partisans before getting it, themselves. And the group got ever smaller, so few left now it was painful to look at each other.

  But Crozier had a distant light in the eye, like fires had hollowed him out and left something cold. And there was none of the usual offworlder arrogance. He kept quiet, watched the others, and learned.

  Maybe the Coalition had finally sent something real, were finally interested in winning.

  Cole mentally shook himself, forced the optimism down. He’d been losing this war for too long to allow hope. He leaned back against the cave wall, crossed his arms across his chest and blew out a relaxed breath.

  Cameron talked on, Crozier occasionally offering a deep-voiced reply.

  Cole thought about Kat and the boys. It had been seven years now. The last time he saw them was outside Lotos, right before his battalion was rushed north. Kat, black curls loose in the wind with a determined mask fixed over the fear as she waved, the boys clutched close, their eyes uncertain, accusing.

  Four days later, the battalion was dead and he was a prisoner on his way to be converted into one of Living Dead slaves of the Korvan victors.

  Cole shut his eyes. He and the other survivors had been herded north in a long caravan, watched by Korvan tanks and guns. Winter claimed many, their frozen, contorted figures littering the roadside, crusted with fresh snow and slush and blood. Their captors killed at any sign of aggression or defiance. Survival in the dark iciness meant submission of the lowest kind, eyes to the churned road, sometimes crawling, shivering in the clinging wet, feeling his toes numb and the nails crack and peel off.

  And then the scream of gravity drives at night, the delta-shapes of Lurinari starfighters dropping from the sky. Elation, at first, then horror as the prisoners watched their own ships swing in low to vomit lightning. Shrieks and the buffeting of fireballs, chaos whirling about, prisoners breaking for cover, shot down by Korvans torn between containing their charges and the air raid. Vehicles split open, poured fusion fire across friend and foe. Cole crawled from the madness, burned and freezing at once, until he reached safety and began running. He never stopped, never looked back.

  He hadn’t stopped running to this day.

  Worthy opened his eyes. Cameron had stopped talking, had pulled his cloaks over with his rifle cradled close as his eyes drooped into sleep. Sandy had done the same. Crozier was flexing limbs and stretching, his face tight with discomfort.

  “Sore?” Worthy asked.

  Crozier looked up and gave a self-conscious smile. “Yeah. I trained for this in elevated gees but...guess it wasn’t enough.”

  “Give it a few days.”

  “Yeah.”

  Worthy pointed an index finger. “You’re hauling too much.”

  Crozier’s eyes held resistance. “Everything I have is necessary.”

  Worthy shrugged. “You ought to ditch some of that armor, it’s heavy and makes too much noise. But suit yourself.”

  Cole listened to his words and wondered if Crozier could hear the quiver in the back of his throat, wondered if raw nerves were evident behind the faded sheen of bravado.

  Ro came back in from whatever scuffle he’d just had with Vorsh. The Grak was pissed, the way his ears were drawn up from the sides of his head. Ro ought to give Vorsh a wide berth, not try the respect and command crap with the Shmali. The two had never been close and the gulf had only widened when Ro agreed to take on another offworlder.

  Ro ought to watch it. Cole had seen Vorsh do things...

  “I thought I said to get some sleep,” Ro said to Cole while glancing at Crozier.

  Cole snorted and shrugged down into his cloaks, not in a mood for confrontation. Eyes slid shut.

  Kat and the kids again, waving with their eyes dark, as if they knew the future, as if they saw doom the way a dog feels an earthquake coming. Lotos was being evacuated when Cole left. His family would have been trucked south, probably to Talesh. Then, when the Korvans broke through again, they would’ve been sent to Mondanberg.

  Maybe they made it as far south as Defiance, or one of the other Free City States. Safe behind kilometers of trenches and deflector shields. Maybe his boys, who would be old enough to fight, by now, were manning those defenses while Kat worked in a munitions factory.

  Maybe...

  Cole rolled onto his side. Ro was settling into a comfortable position, his ears and bristled neck fur beginning to relax. Beyond him, Crozier lay with his hands folded together over his chest, steepled as if in prayer or meditation.

  Cole Worthy thought about his family and hoped Crozier was the genuine article.

  VORSH HATED WINTER. Shmal, home, was a planet of blasted desert and eternal overcast that locked boiling heat close to the surface. Winter on Vorsh’s birth-world meant brief months of cooling, breaks in the clouds, and a fragile season when the Shmali ascended from their tunnels and catacomb cities to the surface to squint at the sun.

  Lurinari was hell, frozen and dead. And, if the scattering of flakes drifting through the trees were any indication, damnation was about to get worse.

  Vorsh watched Cynthia as she descended from her watch position to the grotto in the ravine. A Shmali possessed superb vision, but he didn’t need his to pick the human girl out, noisy and clumsy. When he shared watch with her, Vorsh always did double-duty.

  He waited to see if the fool’s antics had drawn unwanted attention. For a moment, all remained locked in a frigid majesty the Shmali could almost appreciate. He savored it, drank in the crisp loneliness of the wilderness. Vorsh saw Shmal, felt the steamy heat of caves and the brilliance of the sun pounding his face.

  Wind stirred the forest, brought a thickening wave of snowfall. He blinked as a flake caught stinging in his eye. That brought a whispered curse and he rose from the prone position he’d assumed for hours on the ridge overlooking the ravine. Vorsh scampered down toward the cave.

  Cole emerged just as Vorsh reached the grotto. The two froze and regarded one another over tense weapons. The human relaxed, gave a tight-mouthed smile. Vorsh nodded in reply and indicated with hand-signals the watch spot he’d chosen. Worthy looked up to the ridge before nodding. He stepped by the Shmali, gave a respectful distance.

  Vorsh turned to watch Worthy disappear into the gloom. The human was crafty,
despite his bulk, despite that most of his kind were just too big to be good at this sort of thing. Vorsh barely made out the swish of his mass parting foliage as he scuttled uphill.

  Of all the companions, Vorsh tolerated Worthy the best. The dark-skinned human was not exactly brave or ruthless. He talked too much—like all humans—and wasn’t particularly good at his job. But he had survived this place a long time.

  And he was the only member of the group smart enough to be afraid of Vorsh.

  The Shmali slid under the lip of rock and shimmied with his kind’s natural ease up into the cavern, the safe place the group often stopped over at when things got too hot. A natural spot, really, well hidden from overhead surveillance. There had been the one tight time, when the waters had risen unexpectedly in the otherwise dry creek and they’d been trapped for a day until Vorsh volunteered to swim free.

  Cynthia was already settling into sleep. The others were dormant, as well. Vorsh slipped to the corner where he’d left his sack and set his weapon aside. He pulled a tattered cloth from his gear and unfolded it. With the fabric arranged in a precise rectangle across the cave floor, he assumed a meditative posture with his knees on it. He closed his eyes, envisioned the sun of Smal burning baleful red though late cool-season clouds.

  Vorsh’s left hand went without thought to his chest and drew the dagger from its sheath. The steel made no sound as it slid free. A motion more intuitive than trained brought the weapon flipping upwards into a striking hold, two fingers clenched about the bone handle, meeting the thumb while the index finger remained extended along the blade. Vorsh opened his eyes.

  The point aimed at Ro Atchraq’s sleeping form. Vorsh smiled.

  He relaxed and produced a whetstone, spit on it, and began sliding the steel across in even strokes, the grating gentle enough not to disturb the others. The weapon had been a beautiful tool of ceremony in a religion Vorsh no longer cared to remember. Dimples rubbed almost smooth marked where jewels had once been mounted in the hilt, pilfered long ago to finance Vorsh’s liberty. The bone handle had worn to his grip, characters and icons no longer visible. Only the two-edged blade held its original, pure state, kept sharp and even.