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

taking out missile after missile. The rest of my squadron is also burning down the swarm of incoming missiles one at a time, but there are just so many of them.

Anti-missile fire from our drones and escort ships fills space with a laser web that nothing should be able to get through…I hope. More and more incoming missiles detonate as the unending torrent of precise beam fire comes in from behind us.

The big guns are all firing now, too. Our cruisers are unleashing a torrent of x-ray lasers and particle beams, and radio static bursts tell me that the super-heavy gamma beams, positron guns, and anti-proton cannons are firing nonstop. One of the closing Terran cruisers takes on the full, concentrated force of the fleet’s heavy guns, and it shines briefly in the x-ray spectrum before coming apart into a growing ball of ionized gas. My squadron’s missiles realize one of their primary targets is dead and maneuver to engage the other cruiser.

Throughout Earth–Luna space, lasers and particle beams cross the distance between combatants in less than a second, linking combatants together in a blazing web of destruction. Both Terran and Lunar weapons platforms detonate as they target each other first, taking each other out of the battle in the earliest seconds of the beam engagement. Swarms of drones maneuver and fire, trying to thin out the great streams of missiles flying back and forth. Cruisers and frigates trade blows from their heavy guns at nearly-impossible-to-miss close range, and shed glowing fireballs of volatilized ablative armor, while doggedly fighting on in spite of their terrible damage. Mostly, the Terrans and Lunars are concentrating on each other, fighting out their old grudge at last.

The fighting around L1 is the fiercest. With Lunar gunships and Terran assault-battleoids at nearly point-blank range, space around the colony is ravaged by plasma cluster warheads, and railgun and particle beam fire. Both teams are nearly wiped out by the catastrophic violence, leaving the survivors maneuvering for cover around the station to continue their fighting. The huge station takes a few errant hits, but it’s pretty solidly built, and there’s no sign of habitat rupture.

This whole battle is upside down. According to our current battle doctrine, you have a long-range missile engagement first, then ships and drones move in to attack with beams. Here, everything is so close that beams are dominating the fight. Maybe it’s a good thing a lot of our ships are older models, emphasizing beams more than missiles, and they have the layers of armor to take a slugfest like this.

It’s been a few seconds now, and all the missiles are getting close to their targets.

Our Lancer missiles close on the enemy first. The Terran cruiser fires anti-missile rockets and rail flack guns as well as lasers to try to shoot down our missiles. Our Lancer missiles maneuver and dodge while firing their own weapons to shoot down enemy rockets, and then split into seven independently maneuverable warheads each. The Terran cruiser manages to take out about a quarter of our missiles before they finally get hit. Hundreds of fusion warheads go off near the enemy cruiser. No armor can resist that much damage, and the Terran cruiser disappears in a colossal fireball of fusion plasma.

As for the enemy missiles, they’re getting really close. The good news is they don’t have laser-cluster warheads, or they would already have gone off and burned us. The bad news is that means we’re likely looking at big, old-fashioned, fusion warheads instead.

Our UV anti-missile clusters go on desperate, continuous-beam fire. Our whole squadron links together to form a network of laser fire to stop the incoming swarm before it can get to the task force. Missiles glow and burn out, but more are still coming.

I fire my railgun, adding its fire to my lasers. Those missiles are moving so fast that anything that hits them should destroy them, and the darts of my gun desperately accelerate on curved paths to try to put themselves in the way of all that ordnance coming at us. Some of the missiles spark and break apart, but not enough.

Space fills with blazing light and howling x-rays as a few of the enemy missiles detonate early to try to clear out obstacles such as our Angel frames. Temperature and radiation alarms go off, and the outer layer of my armor burns off in the searing ocean of hard radiation and particles.

When the light clears, my frame is glowing red hot, and two more of my squadron are gone, including Joker. Just like that. My frame feels as cold as space right now.

The rest of the enemy missile swarm has passed us by. Too late to do anything about them now—or maybe not. The fire from the cruiser and our drones thickens, trying desperately to eliminate the enemy weapons before they hit.

Space behind me turns into a roaring sea of x-rays as the remaining warheads go off. When the glare clears, amazingly, all our big ships are still there. They’re glowing red or yellow hot, and shedding gas trails of vaporized armor layers, but they’re there. They’ve taken a lot of damage, though. The light frigate Mackenzie lost power to her engines and is beginning to slowly tumble. Almost all the innermost envelope of drones has been wiped away, and the outer envelopes have lost about a third of their strength.

How could we have taken on that many fusion warheads, with the frigate Mack being the only casualty? I review the data from Chimera quickly. It looks like the enemy missiles’ crude AI systems realized they’d never survive to close to optimal range, so they’d blown up early to dazzle our sensors, and create a kind of nuclear shield, behind which the rest of the warheads could attack. It didn’t work. Our systems were still able to track and hit the warheads, even though all that, probably because