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

Big mistake.

A Guardian-class exo-frame is basically a collection of parts and components in motion, which mostly happen to be moving in the same direction. Usually, you don’t see everything scattered all over the place. Usually.

The maintenance techs salute as I walk into the work bay. I nod back, and they get back to work. Griffon, my Angel frame, is scattered all over the place. Parts are everywhere, and parts of parts, and even smaller parts of those parts. About a dozen techs and their repair mechs are working on four frames now, in various states of disassembly. Everything needed to assemble a new frame is aboard a host carrier, and it’s entirely possible that all the parts of my original frame have been replaced over time, like the ship of Theseus, so that nothing is original anymore.

Right now, Griffon is stripped down to his load-bearing endoskeleton, with the integrated fusion reactor showing. Everything else seems to be either being worked on or double-checked. Armor here, control cockpit structure there, engines over there. Everything is locked down, of course. Since a warship might have to accelerate or change course at any time, every part is locked in a maintenance frame, strapped down, or locked in a secured container if it isn’t directly in the hands of a technician or mech.  The result looks like a clinical autopsy of my frame, with exposed parts gleaming under the bright lights overhead.

It hurts to see my frame like this. These older Guardian models aren’t self-aware AI…but they’re getting close, and you get more attached than you would to a regular vehicle. This must be what ancient cavalrymen felt when what they rode into battle was actually alive. You hate to see your mount injured and down. When I try to reach out through my cyber-augments, all I get is the carrier-wave from Griffon. He’s offline now.

Yes, Griffon is a “he.” In the Navy, all ships are “she.” Exo-frames are “he.” I don’t know why. If you fly and fight in one—you just know it is true.

I hadn’t thought I’d banged Griffon up so much in the fight, so I check the orders list with my augments. The data floats in my vision—he’s up for a total refit, just like all the other frames.

That makes sense. We’re on a long burn in-system, so there’s plenty of time to get the work done. There’s also the point that we’ll likely be seeing action, so everything will have to be functioning flawlessly. There’s also no telling when we’ll have time to have our frames overhauled again, between operations and repairing battle-damage. Finally, the Guardian frames are getting on in age, and it takes a lot more maintenance to keep them going.

Still, coming here was a mistake. I could have gotten any of this data off the ship’s network, or even accessed holography of the maintenance procedure with my augments. All I did by coming here was interrupt the crew doing vital work on the machine that will be responsible for my life. I nod and turn to go, leaving them to get back to their work.

Still, it’s nice to see that Griff’s going to be OK in person, somehow.

* * *

That done, I make my way down the corridor to the closest transport capsule. Like all warships, the corridors are designed to be walked down while under thrust (as now), and also have handholds along the lit corners for when the ship is in zero gravity (as is the usual case). The hatch to the capsule opens, revealing a small room with a series of stanchions on the walls, and I step inside and tell it to bring me to my cabin through my cyber-augments. I grab hold of a stanchion as the hatch closes, and the capsule rushes through the network of transit ways that are necessary for travel in a ship this large.

The Admiral Marshal Weston is named after the man who organized and ran our Navy in the early days of its formation, fighting off both Belt raiders and the punitive expeditions from the State of Terra that were attacking our new Republic. The Westie is a Defender-class Host Carrier, one of the earliest (and now obsolete) models designed expressly to bring in a full wing of 125 exo-atmospheric combat frames—exo-frames, or Angels—into the teeth of battle.

That takes a lot of ship. So the kilometer-long hull and thousand or so crew are all there for one purpose—to get us into battle so we can go into harm’s way, in the same way a drone carrier or missile ship is there for their own weapons. Not that the Westie is unarmed herself; she has extensive missile bays, drone launchers, and x-ray laser clusters, but most of that is for ship defense.

She also has a few anachronisms from being an older design, like her counter-rotating habitat rings. Built before modern engines that could burn for days at a time, rotational gravity was really the only way to get any gravity on long deployments. Even though her engines have been upgraded to modern standards, the old rings are still there, but we only spin ‘em up when we’re still or coasting. For the whole trip out to the Belt, they’re going to be immobile.

That’s why, when the capsule drops me off near my quarters in the forward ring, I’m walking on the walls. When the rings are spinning, I’d walk on the floor facing outward; when it’s zero-G, I’d float along using the handholds spaced along the corridors; and now that we’re under thrust, I walk on the walls. It doesn’t matter much. Like in any warship, it’s possible to walk along any surface, and there are handholds in all the lighted corners of the hallway.

I get to my cabin, pull down the extendable ladder, and climb