Freedom's Fire by Bobby Adair

Freedom's Fire by Bobby Adair

Author:Bobby Adair
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Beezle Media, LLC
Published: 2017-05-08T06:00:00+00:00


Chapter 29

The ship is hurtling toward the earth.

The current is reversed in our drive array’s grav plates, and so is the polarity of the fields. The earth is pulling the ship closer, and the planet is moving in the most imperceptibly minuscule smidgen of a degree toward us.

The mutually attractive hug of gravity. Physics again.

Far below us, I see our targets in my mind, glowing fiery-brilliant grav signatures from their megaton masses. Multiple fusion reactors pump gigawatts of current through their drive arrays, sending blue field lines pulsing over their hulls like giant jellyfish tentacles.

Each of the kilometer-long ships is shaped like a sleek leopard shark without fins, with a crest of bristling railguns down the back, and two more along the lower edge on port and starboard. It has a roughly triangular cross-section so the three rows of guns can shoot at the three hundred and sixty degrees of space surrounding the ship. Each crest is lined on both sides by rows of grav plates huge enough to handle the load of maneuvering the megaton monster through the solar system.

Despite all that power, like our cruisers, those Trog ships max at four g’s acceleration.

They can’t escape.

At least not at sub-light speeds.

We’re halfway down the descent leg of our parabolic arc when the Trogs realize what’s happening. It’s not something they expected.

Some of their dorsal guns start to fire.

The three Trog ships are cruising in a line with ten-kilometer gaps between them, yet their order is dissolving as each maneuvers tentatively.

Nothing they can do will make a difference now.

No ship in existence has the power to move a megaton mass out of our way in the short seconds left.

“Slowing to ramming speed!” Penny shouts over the comm.

God she’s got to be the bravest of us, flying headlong into a collision we’ll only survive if our secret weapon works as planned.

“Redirecting all power to the grav lens,” Phil tells us.

The sky fills with railgun slugs from all three ships.

The Trogs’ squirmy brains have deduced all the doubt out of their guess as to the flavor of shit that’s screaming in their direction. Their fears have awakened.

I see their grav fields as clear as the sun.

All five of our ships are heading toward one of theirs, and it’s maxing its starboard grav plates to get out of our way.

“Ten seconds,” Phil warns.

All of the grunts tense.

Then the grav picture unexpectedly shifts.

“Shit!” shouts Phil.

Chapter 30

Ramming anything at the speeds we’re moving would be suicide if it weren’t for gravity technology.

As it is, even nestled in the grav bubble protecting the crew, if our ship collided with an alien vessel at several thousand miles per hour, both ships would be obliterated, and there’d be nothing left of our bodies but a haze of complex molecules.

The ramming tactic depends on something besides speed, and that’s the strength and polarity of the target ship’s gravity defense. The plates in their hull that help it maneuver and create artificial gravity inside—just like ours—serve double duty to create



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