Guardian (War Angel Book 1) by David Hallquist (best contemporary novels .TXT) 📕

with all the years on him. I figure if he can’t shoot it, he’ll kill it with that icy stare of his.

He’s now going into the likely political considerations leading to this action. Saturn may be lending aid to their Terran allies in a possible upcoming war with the Lunar Republic. Or maybe they’re going to try to kick us off Phobos and Mars and take the whole planet. Or maybe they’re going to stab their Venusian allies in the back first, before they can stab Saturn in the back. Or maybe they’re going to the asteroid belt to seize control of it and all its vast resource wealth.

That possibility is why we’re on the way to the asteroid belt, specifically Ceres Station. We could never catch up the Saturnine fleet, so we’re sending various task forces out to different strategically important locations. I guess the idea is, if we can’t stop them with concentrated force in a few places, we’ll spread ourselves out a whole lot and turn ourselves into targets, while whatever concentrated force they put together rolls right over us in that location.

It doesn’t make sense to me, but they didn’t ask me. I guess the plan has the advantage that, since the Saturn fleet can change its mind at any point until they slingshot around the Sun, nothing will be left completely undefended. Still, when Saturn commits to strike an area, it’ll be a really bad time for whoever is unlucky enough to face the full force of their attack, and they can only hope reinforcements from around the system will arrive in time. They won’t, of course; all any reinforcements would find by the time they got there would be wrecked Jovian ships and the grounds for war. An even more cynical take on it might be that we’re spreading ourselves thin on purpose to entice Saturn to take the first shot. Whatever the big plan is, I’m not going to be told.

Politically, we cannot ignore a challenge to the asteroid settlements. Both Trojan asteroid settlement communities are protectorates of the Jovian Republic. We’ve also consistently reserved the right for our ships to pass unmolested throughout the fractious and conflict-filled asteroid belt. More importantly, the asteroids have resources we and other worlds desperately need. We cannot let any other power take full control of the belt—and it would be easy for Saturn’s navy to flatten any of the locals’ small and primitive navies.

Maybe Saturn will roll into the asteroid belt, declare themselves to be keeping order, and then use their position there to create a stranglehold of vital minerals on the rest of the solar system. Maybe. They already basically own Vesta Station, so maybe they’ll make a play for all the asteroids. So, once we have a carrier task force at Ceres and Eros, they’ll think it over and then decide it’s not really worth it. Maybe.

I don’t buy it, though.

Most people think Saturn is like other nations and worlds. They think Saturn practices war as “politics by other means,” like other states. Man is a political creature, so the causes of war must then be political. That works when thinking about men.

The problem is, the Saturnine are no longer men.

They first went out to Saturn, with the best of intentions, long ago. They never set out to create Hell in space, but that’s basically what they did. The original idea was for the scientists fleeing the encroaching tyranny on Earth to go all the way out to Saturn to build a new society…and a new kind of human being. They thought they could make people perfect—without evil at all. So instead of a little genetic manipulation here, or some cybernetic tinkering there, they went deep. They found that to profoundly change human nature, you had to change everything.

So they did.

Now, instead of freedom, cybernetic implants compel loyalty in tortured brain tissue. In place of just modifying the human form, they crawl about on monstrous collections of cybernetic limbs, forever trapped in a black metallic battle shell. The tormented, inhuman descendants of those first Saturnine colonists are now locked into the gears of the vast Saturnine war machine.

Why is Saturn fighting? It’s not about territory, or power, or money, or even pride. It’s something more basic, more central, more primordial. It’s basically a religious war to convert the entire universe, not spiritually, but psychically and mentally, to their monstrous cyber-state. They believe they’re destined to be the next step in humanity’s evolution, on the way to the great technological Singularity that will finally change everything. The rest of us don’t count in those big plans to re-engineer the universe. How do you negotiate with that? How do you expect them to count the military cost of a war, when no one is even capable of disagreeing with the computerized Saturn Undermind, anyway?

So why are we going to Ceres, then?

Basically, it’s better than doing nothing. By sending forces out to all our allies, we’re letting Saturn know they’ll have to fight us if they mess with any of them. If we huddled up near Jupiter space, we’d have the firepower to fight them off, but we’d be signaling that they could eat up the rest of the solar system one bite at a time.

That’s my guess, anyway. It’s not like they’re going to share their top-level strategy with me or anything.

The official line is, we’re heading to Ceres Station to assist in the security and protection of traffic, in light of recent attacks and incidents by small craft. Anyone can read the system map, though, and see what it means—get ready for a fight with Saturn.

* * *

I decide to look at my exo-frame on the way back to my cabin to see how Griffon is doing. Was there any damage from everything that happened on Jupiter, or did anything happen when he was shipped back up