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

heavy weapons types with heavy railguns like ours, or plasma cannons, or missile launchers. In addition to the troop transports, several more cargo transports have landed with all the various sundries like extra ammo, medical supplies, and portable nano-printers.

Service modules and crews from the host carrier rearm our frames and replace lost armor segments. It gives the other side time to dig in and prepare, but they’re ready for us anyway, so there’s no need for us to rush it, either. We’re going in with guided cluster munitions for this one, since we don’t want to make too big a bang inside the structure. We’re trying to capture the tower, not destroy it.

The Angels and Marines above have taken the roof and are ready to begin their downward assault into the tower. Sentry drones have been set up on all the hatches along the tower’s walls. There’s no way out for them, at least none we can see.

Our repeated broadcasts demanding the Terrans stand down and surrender the tower have been greeted in the negative with obscenities. As expected, I guess. If they were going to stand down, they would have done it earlier. We’re going to have to beat them in a close-up battle before they know they’ve lost.

Plasma explosives have been set all over the door. Proper armor is a nano-laminate of ultra-dense metal, specialized ceramics, and super-carbon fibers patterned with heat and electrical superconducting networks. It’s tough, and like all armor, the thicker the better. There’s scarcely thicker armor than on an immobile fortress. Still, normal matter just kind of goes away under the twelve-million-degree heat of a shaped plasma charge.

We get down into cover, either to the sides of the door or in the ruins of the fortifications before it. We’re protected by frames or power armor, with sound and flash protection, so we should be all right…probably.

There’s a searing flash of blue-white light, and my radio systems hiss with static momentarily. The blast echoes past us and shakes the ground. We probably broke some windows in the nearby town with that one.

When I can see again, the door is still there. There are white-hot glowing lines, slowly cooling to yellow, marking the edges of the door where the explosives were. Then, with a deep groan, the massive gateway begins to tilt out and over. Maybe it’s the low Earth gravity, but it seems to take forever to tip over, then it thunders to the ground and shakes the earth beneath our feet. A cloud of dust rolls over us with a blast of wind, and then…

Everyone inside opens up on us.

Enemy railguns, lasers, SPGs, missiles, plasma bolts, and particle beam lances stream out of the gateway in a massive torrent. Our defensive laser clusters go on full stream fire, picking off the storm of seeking explosive projectiles in a series of thunderous detonations. Our countermeasures clouds and the smoke of explosions fluoresce in the laser and particle beams, turning it into a vast tongue of glowing fire stretching out the doorway.

Yeah, we’re going into that.

But first…

Our own answering fire goes back in the form of missile and SPG swarms. They’ve fired their beam weapons enough that we now have a fix on where most of their forces are. Behind the cover of our countermeasures clouds and that giant curtain of flame, they can’t see us. Neither can they see to target our answering missiles and SPGs homing in on enemy positions until they’re nearly upon them. A series of detonations on the other side of that wall of fire echoes out to us.

Before the cloud of fire can disperse, we go on the attack. Marines pop up from behind cover to fire, and Angels and gunships dart past the entrance to open up on the now-identified targets within, and then dart back into cover.

I fly through the fire and smoke, firing both railgun and x-ray lance at maximum rate, and send missiles and SPGs racing into the conflagration. All around me, rail darts and projectiles scream past in both directions, streaks in the smoke, glowing paths of lasers burning through the particles in the air, strobing flashes of bright plasma bolts, and the terrible light of blue particle lances. Fire seems to stream off my armor as it burns away under the relentless laser fire, and the small caliber rail darts sound like rain against my glacis…

One of my team gets hit by a particle lance. The beam goes straight through, and the exo-frame collapses and tumbles, burning, to the ground.

I fire off a cluster missile where the beam came from and fly down to pick him up. No signals are coming from the frame at all, but he might still be alive in there. Don’t look at the glowing hole of melted metal through the pilot’s compartment! I pick him up and fly back with him to where the medical corps are waiting, then fly back into the fight.

The enemy fire is dying down, but we keep pouring it on. We’ve all taken casualties, and no one’s interested in backing down now.

Eventually, the firing stops. No answering fire is coming from within. A river of smoke flows out the tunnel and up into the sky. Inside, through the haze, fires burn and glare out at us.

We pause to reload and rearm again. I get the bad news—another of us didn’t make it. That particle lance burned right through the pilot’s compartment. Death would have been instantaneous. I knew it deep inside; I just didn’t want to face it. It must have been a lucky shot, they were shooting blind, it could have happened to any of us, but why…

We get the signal. It’s time to move in.

Inside is the nightmare of the entrance tunnel. Blackened bodies lie everywhere, shrunken and twisted by terrible heat and force. I try not to look at