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

Message delivered—do not shoot at our ships. We’ve been broadcasting to them from orbit and dropping transmitting nano-dust into the air with the same message; don’t shoot at us and you will live. It’s simple enough that I’m sure everyone gets it, but Terrans are just stubborn, I guess. Honestly, I hope I’d fight at least as desperately if someone attacked Jupiter.

Dense green forests race away under us, strangely, vibrantly alive out in the open air and sunlight. They’ve got this amazing, living world…why go to war to take the Moon? Why force almost everyone to live in crumbling archology towers?

It’s all about control, of course. The Council Supreme declared the right to control everything and everyone. That’s why our ancestors originally left, and why we’ve had to come back.

“Weston, this is Thunderbolt,” I send. “We’re out of ammo and low on fuel. Request landing and resupply.”

“Docking approved,” the host carrier replies. “The following route is cleared.” A path up and out of the atmosphere appears in my cyber-sensorium. It’s a vector leaving Earth where the surface should be cleared of enemy anti-aerospace weapons.

We change course and angle up. The air thins and grows cold as the sky darkens, then turns black as the stars come out. I focus a telescope on the distant dot of Jupiter…home. Earth may be our original home world, but it’s not home, not anymore.

I long for the sky-cities of home.

Soon…after this is all done.

* * *

It’s looking like this isn’t going to be over any time soon. As I’m going over the data for my squadron back in my office, it’s becoming clear that we’ve got a problem.

We’re going through fuel, ammunition, armor packages, and spare parts at an astonishing rate. That’s better than going through pilots and frames, but it’s still something we can’t do forever. Our little task force is fighting an entire planet with billions of people on it.

The Lunars are doing a lot of the fighting. This is their war, after all. The Lunar fleet might be a whole lot smaller than Jupiter’s, but out here, they’ve got more ships and drones than our single task force. Between us, we’ve obtained near total space superiority. The Terran space defense network is gone, and so is any of their space navy that was in orbit. The rest of their space assets have long since fled, surrendered, or been destroyed.

Maybe we thought that would be the end of it. Once one side has total space superiority, the sensible thing for the other side to do is realize they can’t win and give up, right?

Except it didn’t happen that way.

Terra has since fired almost everything from their surface that could go into space: drones, missiles, and heavy beam weapons. So we’ve been sending sortie after sortie down there to take out all that. Then they’ll stop, right? At least they’ll negotiate a cease-fire, since they can’t actually fire anything up here anymore, right?

Nope.

Luna certainly isn’t going to just let this go, either, since Terra actually blew up a few of their cities and tried to wipe them out entirely.

That means invasion is the next step.

There’s only one problem with invading Terra. It’s impossible…for anyone.

It’s a planet with billions of people, with habitats and settlements everywhere. Luna can’t invade—they have a few cyborgs modified for heavy gravity fighting, but aside from those strike forces, they have no one able to fight in six times their native gravity. The problem with us invading isn’t gravity, of course. When you’re a Jovian, every other planet is a low gravity planet. Still, even if we sent every Marine, reservist, and Angel that Jupiter has down there, it wouldn’t be enough. The entire solar system acting together couldn’t put together a ground force large enough to invade and occupy the whole Earth. It just can’t be done.

Planetary invasions aren’t really supposed to happen, anyway. Highly populated, developed planets with dispersed manufacturing like Jupiter, Saturn, Earth, Luna, and Venus have too many people, too many locations where new forces can be armed, trained, and dispersed across too much terrain to be invaded successfully by another planet. Sure, raids are possible, and we could take over an asteroid or space station—we’re all trained in that—but holding an entire hostile world? How? I guess someone could park a manufacturing center in orbit and rain drones down day and night until the ground was a meter deep in fighting machines, but Saturn is really the only world I can see ever trying something like that.

Saturn’s strategy seems to be setting up a thousand different crises all over the solar system, none of which we can ignore. We couldn’t ignore Eros turning into a zombie station, and we can’t ignore Terra trying to antimatter Luna. Asteroids and space stations all over the solar system are having trouble right now, so we have to be everywhere at once. It costs Saturn only a little, while we get tied down in all the fighting and rebuilding. We’re risking running down our fleet and personnel before the fighting even starts with the real enemy, Saturn. Just because I can see the problem doesn’t make the solution obvious, though.

Earth is the biggest issue right now. It’s the origin of humanity, the common ancestral home of us all, and the only naturally living world in the solar system. It’s the symbolic center of humanity still, and it would be an atrocity if Saturn took it over or it was destroyed.

A floating hologram of the Earth hovers off to the side of my desk. It doesn’t look like a nearly impossible fortress; it looks like a beautiful work of priceless art instead. That’s part of the problem, actually. It’s so easy to break.

We could bomb the entire State of Terra easily. It would