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

rebuild a lot of the faulty Terran construction afterward. Still, they’d both managed to use the station as a shared resource to trade with the rest of the solar system.

Until now. Terra had been making more and more demands about the station over the years, and they’d outright claimed ownership of the entire facility last year. Now they’d gone ahead and taken it. I don’t know what L1 had to do with the incident at the Lunar town below—maybe nothing. They probably figured if they were going to have an interplanetary incident, they might as well grab L1 at the same time.

Lunar demands to return the station and their people have gone unanswered. Ships that make any attempt to approach the station have had warning shots fired across their trajectories. Now it’s the tensest point in the whole war zone.

Civilian ships are fleeing the whole area as fast as they can go. Terran gunships and assault battleoids have set up a defensive perimeter around the station. Lunar warships and assault transports are on the way, ignoring the increasingly strident warnings from the Terrans. If anything lights off the conflict between Earth and Luna, it’ll probably start here.

Which is why we’re flying right by it all, of course. The idea is, if a Jovian task force is right there, maybe people will stop and think about what they’re about to do. It seems like a reach to me, but no one asked me. The other point is, if fighting does break out, we’ll be in the middle of it and can maybe keep stray warheads from hitting L1 or any other city. That will probably work, since they’ll be so busy shooting at us, they won’t have much to spare on any civilian craft or structures.

Still, maybe people will think twice, and there’s a chance they can all talk it out—

A bright flash fills space off to my right. The Terran ships have just blown apart a Lunar transport with a particle beam. Ships flash and flare as lasers crisscross through vacuum at nearly point-blank range, where it’s impossible for even Terran computers to miss. Missiles and submunitions are filling the space between the two small fleets. Bursts of coded transmissions trumpet into space, calling everyone to action.

It has begun.

* * *

“Break!” I and Rackham call out at once.

Gravity slams me around as I go into a wild series of evasive maneuvers, like the rest of the wing. We’re dodging through space, desperately trying to avoid the laser fire none of us will ever see unless it actually hits us. Terran craft and weapons platforms give off the tell-tale signatures in infrared and microwave, indicating they’re firing lasers and particle beams at the Lunars and us. Flares of light and heat bloom on the armored hulls of our fleet’s big ships as they take hits. A flare of raging x-rays and expanding plasma marks the death of Allen “Archer” Wallis as a gamma-beam burns through his frame.

All that in less than a second.

Time slows from a combination of adrenaline and my cyber-augments running at maximum. Ship movements and missile tracks become slow enough to see and react to, and even the terrible rain of beam fire becomes comprehensible. It’s now possible to think and act at the same speed that this computer-dominated war is running at. I might even be fast enough to save our lives.

“All Angels, fire heavy on marked targets,” Rackham’s calm voice cuts through the chaos. A series of target priorities come up from Chimera’s core: primary targets like weapons platforms and cruisers; secondary targets like missile bombers, gunships, and fighters; and a long set of tertiary targets, including nearly any Terran military ship in space. ‘Fire heavy’ means we can unleash our heavy weapons, the nuclear ship-killer missiles.

I focus my squadron’s targeting on two big Terran cruisers heading our way. I figure the missile bombers will flush all their missiles before ours can hit them, and the stationary weapons platforms will mostly neutralize each other after exchanging fire. Those cruisers, though, they’re a real long-term threat that can keep pouring heavy weapons fire into the fleet until they’re taken out.

Blazing plasma temporarily blinds me as all twelve of my Lancer multi-role missiles roar out of my twin missile bays. I instantly dodge again, figuring I’ve just made myself even more noticeable. The rest of my squadron follows suit, unleashing their missiles on the two Terran cruisers, creating a small cluster of blue stars racing off to the enemy.

More missiles roar away into the battle from the rest of the Angels, drones, and capital ships of our fleet. The other Angels and drones are firing missiles similar to our Lancers, while swarms of giant capital missiles pour like rain out of our cruisers.

It will be long, slow seconds before any of those missiles influence the outcome of this battle. All around us, space is filling with missile tracks. Everyone has to get their ordnance in flight before they’re taken out, and there’s no shortage of targets. Missile platforms, missile bombers, frigates, and cruisers launch everything at nearly the same time. Because of light delay, it looks like the storm of war is expanding outward from around my own position, but it probably looks like that to everyone out here.

With the missiles gone, our next best long-range weapons are our x-ray laser lances. I pick out a big Terran ship-killer missile heading our way. It’s screaming out jamming and countermeasures signals, but with that blazing plasma engine, it has no way to conceal itself from my sensors. I fire my x-ray lance as it comes straight at us. Its mirrored anti-laser coating can’t handle anything as powerful and high frequency as my lance, and I burn through, turning it into an expanding cloud of blue plasma and fragments. One down, thousands more to go. I swap to continuous targeted pulse fire,