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

distorts the image. Apparently, the Terrans put radar refractors into the facings of the fortress, so now I’m getting this weird, scattered imagery because the pieces of the refracting facings are now shattered and strewn everywhere, like a ruin of broken mirrors.

The Marines are going to love landing here. I think there’s a flat space somewhere around here…maybe.

Now that I can sort of see again, so can the enemy. A hatch opens on the top of a mostly intact structure, and a figure in power armor struggles to bring a heavy railgun to bear on me. I blow him apart with my railgun first and send an SPG out after. The bomblet races out, then it takes a sharp turn straight down the shaft the trooper had come out of. There’s a flash and rumble that comes out of the shaft, and soon fire is pouring out of the hole and out other nearby cracks.

A flash of blue light from an exploding plasma warhead sends me flying. Chimera was still paying attention and knocked out the incoming missile before it could hit me, though his defensive laser clusters don’t have much range in all this smog. Still, I only got caught by the edge of the blast, so I’m still alive.

I roll behind a heavy chunk of wall, getting out the way of a hail of heavy railgun fire that chews up the ground and is only stopped by the layers of composite armored ruin I’m sheltering behind. Whatever is shooting at me has probably homed in on my microwave scanners. Chimera ejects a sensor probe, giving me a look around.

There’s the outline of a hulking armored carapace, dotted with weapons arms and tentacles, skittering along in my direction. It’s an assault-battleoid—a giant armored cybernetic warrior. The Terran version here is a knock-off of the Saturnine original—half as tough, but just as ugly. It finally homes in on my probe, and the image goes blank as it destroys my remote eye.

That’s fine. I know what I need to do now. I send one SPG around the corner to detonate immediately in flash mode, blinding the cyborg with intense light, sound, and radio, then send another immediately after it. There’s a huge explosion close by; it either hit, or it got close before being shot down.

Either way, it’s time to go.

I come around the corner, firing. Heavy rail darts hammer into the tentacled monstrosity, weapon-tentacles get cut off, and still it still fires at me. It’s firing wild, though, barely able to hit me. Rail darts glance off the flanks of my frame, shattering armor segments as they go. Scattered laser light fills the world with fire and ablates my frontal armor.

I charge into it, firing everything as I go. It’s larger than I am, but I still manage to knock it over and pin it to the ground. Writhing tentacles claw at my frame, trying to cut through the armor with spinning mono-molecular blades. I force the thing down and fire my railgun on full auto until the thing finally stops fighting.

Yeah, only half as tough.

This really isn’t working as planned. We’ve got broken terrain, sightless conditions, and bad guys popping up out of tunnels.

Time to do something different. I send the coordinates of a flat area I’ve microwave mapped. “Assemble on this area and defend it. This is going to be the landing site, and I’m calling in support around our perimeter.”

We move to the location in short leaps, barely pausing between each jump to clear out enemy jammers or blast suspicious hatches. Once we’re in place, we launch a few probes to form a sensor perimeter around the mostly undamaged square. I fire up a drone above all this stuff to relay a map of the terrain and our status. “We’ve located a landing position. Requesting Pilum and Guardian support to patrol the perimeter. Hostiles are still present in underground structures.”

Guardian frames and Pilum drones come screaming down from the sky, and the ground rumbles with the thunder of explosives. A tentacled assault-battleoid figures out what we’re trying to do and rushes us, weapon-tentacles firing wildly. We cut it down with railgun and x-rays. Now all we have to do is hold here until…

A powerful microwave transmission from above reaches us. The Marines are on the way.

The company of jump-troops lands around us, jump-jets screaming from their heavy power armor. “When you Angels drop smoke, you go all the way!” one of them comments. They get a proper perimeter set up with sentry guns and smart mines in a few seconds.

Another signal booms down. Here come the rest.

The gunships arrive first. They’re rounded, armored weapons pods with a man inside. Marine gunships are equipped with the same weapons we’ve got, and are about as fast, but don’t have the flexibility of landing and fighting. Their engine wash blows the smoke away into twisting clouds, while rail cannon and laser clusters blow away the opposition still out there.

Next, heavily armored transports drop out of the sky, their weapons tracking around, looking for any remaining trouble. They land on our square pad, and hatches open to disgorge platoons of Marines in full heavy power armor.

By now, enough smoke has cleared that I can see the massive, heavily armored doors of the tower. Beyond that gateway, the Terran forces will be ready and waiting for us.

So far, this has been the easy part.

* * *

The rest of my squadron is here, ready to assist the Marine company in assaulting the tower. We’ve spent all our missiles and most of our SPGs, but at least we have mostly full magazines for our railguns, and don’t have too much armor damage. The good news is we don’t have any casualties.

The Marine battalion is ready and eager to go. Every Marine has a rail-rifle and SPGs, and there’s a few