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

out of the gun and can breathe again. Now my eggshell is slowly turning in space, on the way to burn up in the atmosphere below and give birth to a phoenix of war.

We’re not falling alone. Launched with each eggshell are a number of decoy drones, flares, jammers, and a discharge of countermeasure dust that looks like a blast of gun smoke emerging from the railgun.

The carrier is already far behind me, and the Earth is in front of me, in all its strange wonder. This close, the faintly curving horizon fills most of my view with deep blue oceans, swirls of white cloud, and impossibly green landscapes.

The sky above is on fire. We launched in broad daylight to add the interference of the Sun to the swarm of dazzlers, flares, jammers, and laser clusters flashing and sparking off just above the atmosphere. There’s so much countermeasure dust up here that the sunlight has lit up space in eerie, shifting clouds of red and deep purple. There’s a double ring around the Sun and the drive torches of the ships up here, and it’s hard to tell where anything is, even with basic telescopic sight, and radar is useless. It’s a literal man-made fog of war.

That doesn’t stop the Terrans from trying to shoot at us anyway. The dust glows red and orange, and particle beams and high energy lasers cut through it as the enemy below fires blind. Fire from our ships lances back in answering columns of fury. While we can’t see easily through the dust, ground fortifications can’t maneuver, and we’ve already mapped their positions so we can hit them even while blind. Missiles and drones leave trails of blue fire as they rise and fall in the sea of chaos. Flashes of pinpoint blue light are everywhere from detonating plasma warheads. Drone and anti-missile lasers leave glowing trails through the dust, creating a webbed network of glowing fire that my squadron must fall through.

A terrible burning flash of raging photons and searing x-rays fills the universe. It fades to form an expanding cloud of glowing phosphorescent plasma. Then another terrible flash fills space, and another, and again.

The Terrans are setting off nukes in their own upper atmosphere in a desperate attempt to burn us out. They’re still firing blind, but with a nuke, you don’t have to get that close. They’ve probably wiped out all unshielded electronics within a thousand kilometers, but I guess they figure the people outside their towers don’t matter. In all the chaos, I won’t be able to tell what’s happening to my people until we’re in the atmosphere, and I can’t maneuver much in an eggshell, so all I can do is hope that everyone’s made it.

I can already see the thermal bloom of the atmosphere ahead as we skate along its upper reaches. Decoys and drones around me are also glowing red and leaving trials of fire.

Flash! One of my decoys just got vaporized in a blast of white light. Another goes out as a desperate ground laser hits it. There’s a lot of decoys coming down with me, but it’s still a roll of the dice whether I’ll get hit. Will my eggshell and frame be able to take a hit from Terran AA? I don’t know for sure.

The gravity pushes down on me once more as red and violet plasma roars around my eggshell. I’m entering the atmosphere now, and the surrounding blaze of raging plasma is going to block my sensors and any transmissions.

Blinded by plasma fire and shaken by the wrath of the alien atmosphere, I fall to the waiting battlefield below.

* * *

The raging plasma around me lessens in intensity and the Gs begin to drop off. An explosion rocks my frame as the eggshell pod breaks away at last. Light, heat, and radio frequencies fill the air around me as the eggshell fragments light up, becoming jamming and countermeasures devices as they spiral away in the thin air. A couple dozen dedicated ECM decoy drones race away into the air after them and begin maneuvering as I dodge wildly through the air to avoid incoming fire.

The sky is filled with the strange, haunting light refracted from the Sun by all the countermeasures dust. Purples, reds, and greens that don’t belong in any natural sky shift and change constantly in heavenly chaos. Clusters of glowing flares drift like fiery rain, while strobing flashes from dazzlers add to the confusing strangeness.

Blue drive trails from Guardian frames, attack drones, and the swarming decoy craft fill the upper atmosphere around me. My squadron made it down from space safely, so far at least. The other two squadrons are already down here and have been mixing it up with the Terrans for long grueling seconds.

Lasers and particle beams burn through the air, leaving glowing trails of super-heated gas. Enemy missile and drone trails curve wildly through the air. Massive flashes of blue flight grow into angry fireballs as enemy plasma warheads detonate from missiles desperately trying to claw their way up through our laser fire to reach us.

If this is the tower’s air defense after being degraded, I’d hate to see it fully operational.

Below us, the tower rises through the air, seeming to reach for orbit. Its corner is cutting through a cloud a third of the way up, and the shadow of the tower stretches west over land and sea. Smoke is rising in columns from the fields around the tower, but it looks like most of the towns around the giant monolith are undamaged, at least.

The fortifications around the base of the tower have already been hit hard, and there are flames and smoke everywhere around its base. If you heat anything enough in this high-oxygen atmosphere, it’ll burn, and there’s been a lot of heat pouring into those sites from orbit. With all the smoke and fire