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

the AI on our ships could predict their motion in that short period of time, even while temporarily blinded.

Throughout the battle space, missiles are beginning to go off in a cascade of destruction. Space fills with flares of fusion and plasma detonations. The occasional monstrous gamma-ray flash of an antimatter weapon burns through the lesser explosions. Our fusion cluster munitions and laser warheads flash and explode in a wave of destruction that seems to take hours, but is over in seconds.

The battlespace is an orbiting ruin now. Faintly glowing clouds of ionized gas expand slowly all around us. The glowing wreckage of ships and platforms tumble through space like dying embers. Some ships are still moving through the ruins, and drones dart here and there, maneuvering and attacking each other amid the wreckage. Clouds of countermeasures particles unleashed at the start of the fight finally begin to fill space around the two worlds, scattering light and radar, and creating an eerie, spectral fog of war surrounding Earth.

Most of the military targets aren’t there anymore. Almost every orbital weapons platform I can identify has been destroyed. Any military target that couldn’t maneuver isn’t around anymore. Terran and Lunar ships hide behind clouds of countermeasures, launched decoys, and the chaos of the battlespace.

Somehow, the destruction hasn’t hit everyone. None of the L colonies have been blown up, though they all look like they’ve taken a stray hit or two. Most of the civilian ships are still around, boosting away from the battlespace as fast as their engines can take them. There are a few new glowing craters on Luna. Some of the Moon’s surface towns had been hit, along with the Lunar weapons installations. Earth hasn’t been hit, but all those high-energy detonations in orbit are probably going to be rough on the upper atmosphere.

Several urgent targets come up in my cyber-sensorium. Big missiles are lumbering out of the clouds of ruin in space, thundering up from the surface of the Earth or from under the seas, all with one destination, Luna. The fleet’s letting me know exactly what these are—antimatter missiles.

The crazy Terrans went ahead and did it!

If any of those hit a Lunar city or L colony, there won’t be anything left.

That’s why we’re going to make sure none of them hit. With us right between the worlds, our fleet is perfectly placed to intercept missiles from Earth to Luna. The big guns of our cruisers open up first, picking off the giant missiles one at a time. Each missile goes off in a furious gamma-ray burst as its containment fails.

Those Terran antimatter missiles are crude and rely on magnetic bottles to keep the warheads from detonating. That’s probably why the fleet waited until the missiles were free of the atmosphere before firing on them, protecting even the world that fired them from the destruction antimatter would unleash upon a living world. That’s also why the missiles are so slow; if they went as fast as a solid-state fusion warhead could, they’d rupture their antimatter containment. It’ll take whole minutes for the missiles to cross the distance to the Moon.

Plenty of time.

Our fleet and the Lunars join together to destroy the incoming missiles. Our squadron burns them down with x-ray lasers, while drones and defensive lasers from the fleet carve through the armor on the hulking missiles. I fire away with my x-ray lance until heat alarms sound, and still I keep on firing. The missiles get closer and closer, and soon the titanic blasts are going off all around us as the Terran weapons try to bypass us on their mission of mass murder.

The last missile detonates uncomfortably close to Luna’s surface. Hopefully, no one was outside a shielded compartment when that went off. Still, we managed to stop them all. All the antimatter missiles, anyway. There are a few new craters where high-speed fusion missiles managed to hit a settlement or town.

The Lunars are going to be beyond furious.

If they fire antimatter on Earth, do we intercept those, too? I think so; the main reason to have those things is to deter the other side from using them—which they’ve already done. Terra fired everything it had; they’ve nothing left like that to fire now. Bombing Earth with antimatter would just be revenge.

I hold my breath.

The Lunars don’t fire antimatter missiles on Earth in return. The Terrans probably flushed their total arsenal of antimatter weapons once the fighting started, figuring if they didn’t launch them, they’d be destroyed in the fighting anyway, leaving them vulnerable to a Lunar attack. Still, the Lunars aren’t launching. Maybe they figure they don’t need to, because now the Terran antimatter weapons have been taken off the table. Maybe they figure they’re going to win the war now. Or maybe they just figure enough people have died already, and they don’t want to wipe out the Earth. I’m pretty sure, though, if those Terran missiles had destroyed any of the Lunar cities, they’d be feeling pretty differently about the whole thing, and I bet they’d be firing now.

Lunar heavy beam weapons aren’t done, though. Gamma-ray beams and heavy particle cannons hunt down the remaining Terran ships as they flee to take cover behind Earth, and scour the atmosphere to hunt ground bases and submarine launchers. Earth’s atmosphere might protect them against minor attacks, but big beam cannon like these aren’t attenuated by atmosphere, the ocean depths, or even solid rock. They burn right on down to get to the people who tried to murder their entire civilization. Clouds of steam and dust rise from the sites of the strikes. The Lunars are going to make them pay for this.

Was it militarily necessary? Maybe, maybe not…but it was necessary, nonetheless.

The battlespace has changed. The fury of the first few minutes has faded. Now, ships hunt each other through the glimmering fog of countermeasure dust, wreckage, radiation,