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

Maybe.

We’ll be concentrating everything on the Saturnine forces. They have the largest and most sophisticated fleet heading to Mars, and they’ll be the biggest threat. They’ve also declared themselves to be open and active belligerents by their actions so far. If we can take the Saturnine down quickly enough, and hard enough, perhaps Venus will think twice about getting into a shooting war with Jupiter.

Maybe.

If everything goes according to plan.

Nothing in all the fighting so far has gone according to any plan. Everyone was expecting the next war would be fought at interplanetary distances, in battles of relativistic projectiles, interplanetary missiles, stealth ship attack squadrons, and long-range gamma beam and missile engagements.

It hasn’t been anything like that at all.

We haven’t launched any relativistic projections or long-range beam weapons because you can’t change your mind after you do that. If we do that, the other side does it, and that’s it for a whole lot of fixed targets…like cities and space stations. Instead, we’re holding back, hoping the other side holds back, and maybe everything won’t go completely out of hand.

So instead of going long range, we keep fighting at point-black range. We keep getting sucked into vicious close-up engagements around asteroid bases, in planetary orbit, and even on the surfaces of worlds and in tight, confined corridors. A lot of our inventions, developments, and tactics aren’t meant for those conditions, but maybe the chaotic situation is confusing the enemy as well.

Maybe.

We’re all having to improvise as we go along. Our training focuses on individual initiative and adaptability, and that might give us an edge in the upcoming fight, where who knows what will really happen.

Maybe.

It could be a good thing we’re flying nearly obsolete Guardian-class exo-frames. They’re built for up-close knife-fights like in the old days, so we’re not left with a lot of fancy systems we don’t get to employ. These rugged little frames handle situations like boarding actions and anti-piracy, so they might turn out to be the perfect thing for a crazy fight where nothing makes sense. The systems aren’t even really AI (though they’ve got personality; I know) so there isn’t as much for the Saturnine cyber-systems and viruses to target.

Maybe…maybe…maybe.

That’s a whole lot of maybes to pin one’s hopes on.

The flow of liquid helium stops, and patches are carefully pulled off the skin of my frame by manipulator arms. Right now, my Angel is colder than the surface of Pluto.

I feel the host carrier begin yet another set of maneuvers.

We get the signal.

It’s time.

* * *

The launch is anti-climactic.

I’d have preferred to use the launch gun. Sure, it would have betrayed our location immediately, but it would also have given us more vector away from the ship, thus spreading us around in a larger area of space for the enemy to guess at. It’s also the coolest way to launch.

Instead, we float gently out of the open mech bay into space. The host carrier maneuvers to the side and continues to decelerate. The carrier seems to fall upward past us, combining with the sensation of freefall to make it seem like we’re falling along a metal cliff toward an infinitely far abyss below us.

The carrier is behind or above (whichever way I want to look at it) us in seconds, at first as a huge blazing sun of fusion drive flame, then shrinking away to a fierce blue star. The other ships of our task force are also falling away behind and above us, forming a canopy of bright blue fusion stars, all clustered around the Sun itself.

Below us is Mars. Without magnification, it’s a rusty disc in full phase, sadly not too different in appearance than when the first explorers set down there. Deimos is a visible point at this range, and Phobos…right, no Phobos, not anymore. Passive sensors pick up the loose ring of asteroids that mark the grave of the moon and a lot of good men.

Around us, new constellations of blue, violet, and white stars indicate the drive flames of whole fleets converging on Mars. It’s hard to get much data through all the chaff clouds falling along with us, but usually the blue one’s match Jovian torch drives, though the Lunar ones sometimes look similar since we shared our tech. Violet is usually a Saturnine drive; they tend to burn a little hot and near the edge of what’s safe, and they like to dope the engines with antimatter for extra kick. White drives with less heat and power are probably Venusian, so they don’t injure their living ships with too much heat and radiation.

We’re not falling in any kind of tight formation, though individual flights tend to cluster a bit so they can support each other more easily. Internal gyros help keep us from tumbling randomly, but there’s not really any other motion. Silently, in the dark of space, we slowly separate into a cloud of night-black Angels.

So there’s nothing left to do but wait as we fall past the planet below, and hope we don’t hit anything…or get discovered…or get hit by random enemy fire…or get hit by friendly fire…or…

I settle in for a nice, long, relaxing flight.

* * *

Mars doesn’t look much better up close.

Sure, it has the strange beauty every planet has when you realize it’s a whole world held together by the gravity of its mass, yet it’s still just a minute sphere against the echoing vastness of all creation. It’s grown from a distant astronomical object into a living world with its own geology, geography, weather, and history. Any planet is a wonder in the vastness of space.

For all that, it’s still a dump.

The entire planet is a geological wreck of cratered and cracked desert wasteland resulting from billions of years of asteroid bombardment and