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

so fast, all I can see are glowing streaks of blue light that branch, and branch again as the warheads split off to connect with the expanding fireballs where the Terran missiles used to be. Still, we dodge anyway, and eject countermeasure dust and anti-missile drones.

Now it’s payback time.

We each send one of our penetrating missiles down. More streaks of light connect to the ocean below. There’s barely any delay, then a column of steam and sea-spray erupts into the sky. Nothing nuclear, just shaped plasma charges. Scratch one Terran sub.

“We’ll have to share the score on that one,” Mad Dog says.

I disarm an SPG and drop it in the water to float as a sensor and transmission buoy. If there are any survivors now, we’ll know where to pick them up.

Contrails of missiles rise over the horizon. Some Terran base apparently held off firing until space overhead was temporarily clear of ships. It doesn’t help much. Once they clear the atmosphere, one of the ships gets a straight shot at them, and they vanish in a flash of light visible in broad daylight as anti-missile lasers take them out. Clouds overhead glow orange and begin to melt away as the Terran base tries desperately to fill the sky with enough lasers of their own to protect them from the Jovian and Lunar missiles on the way to them. Ah, looks like they got one. A single flash of light glimmers high in the sky, and then the descending missile trails glow like branching blue lighting as they come down, separate, and strike unseen targets over the horizon.

The Terran base lights up on our cyber-sensorium in bright red. A Terran base in a heavily forested coastal region. Well, it used to be. Now the forest is on fire, and there’s smoking craters everywhere. From our satellites, I can see where the Striker aircraft and assault-battleoids are going airborne, and the remaining weapons systems and turrets of the base. The underground components were likely buried by our ship’s ground-strike, with only a few combatants remaining, scattered and disorganized on the surface. It’s now an enemy target, and we’re on the clean-up team.

“Fire at will as we pass,” I tell my flight as we change course and accelerate. Everyone locks their x-ray lances and rail cannon in the forward high-speed flight profile, we lean forward, and our boosters come fully to life, leaving a roaring trail of plasma behind us. There’s a brief shake of turbulence as we cross the sound barrier, and then flight is smooth again. We’re raising plumes of seawater and vapor behind us as we blast in toward our target. There’s not much chance of hiding our approach, and we need to move fast to make sure no more missiles or beams come up on any other vessels passing overhead. Staying low is our best defense; the Terran high-altitude aerospace missiles and heavy particle cannon don’t work well through an atmosphere, and the horizon will protect us from a lot of other attacks until we get closer.

Being low isn’t going to protect us from the attack drones, short range missiles, and Striker aircraft on the way to us, though.

That’s what our aerospace missiles are for. Our missiles streak away in curving lines of blue light over the horizon and can just make out the flashes of light from the multiple warheads on the horizon like distant lightning. As the surviving aircraft missiles and drones come over the horizon, we’re already burning them down with x-ray lances, while our anti-missile laser clusters are more than enough to finish off any remaining drones and blind even the armored Strikers or assault-battleoids. The distant horizon is filled with burning craft and cyborgs falling from the sky, and as we get closer, we add in the fire from our railguns, as well.

Next, we fire our ground-attack missiles as one. The swarm of our missiles races out, jamming enemy radar and deploying countermeasures pods as they crest the horizon. Terran defense lasers still get two before they hit home. Cluster munitions scatter plasma bomblets over much of the base’s surface. An instant after that, our penetrating missiles burrow deep underground and detonate, collapsing any subterranean fortifications our ships didn’t get.

The first sign of white water breaking against a tan shoreline becomes visible. Columns of black smoke rise into the sky, marking where the enemy are. We’ll be there in seconds.

I designate our fire areas and priorities, and we get ready to hit our targets. We’ll pass just above ground at three times the speed of sound. Most of their lasers shouldn’t be able to depress enough to hit us, but we should have good fields of fire as we pass over, since we know exactly where we’ll be, and they don’t.

Here it comes. What was once a sprawling military compound is a sea of smoke and fire. Our x-ray lances are firing automatically at every targeting beam or weapon emplacement our Angels can see. Our defensive laser clusters go on automatic, filling the air around us with a grid of defensive fire to cut down any incoming missiles or drones launched as us at close range.

We go over it all in a flash, literally. Chimera reports a laser hit on the starboard glacis, and other frames report hits as well. It’s impossible to track the blur of motion and flame as our laser clusters fire on anything that has an energy signature on our pass. The supersonic wake of our passage stirs up a tornado of flame behind us. We use that wind to distribute the clusters of SPGs we drop in a stream of detonations behind us.

Then we’re past. I take another hit from a surviving laser somewhere, and our laser clusters hum away to take out the handful of rockets and drones they managed to fire at us. We unload our remaining SPGs, running as jamming