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

floating above the golden clouds; basically, a military version of one of our floating cities. There are rings orbiting it—the whirls of glowing force-cables generating the field that’s lifting the whole thing up. With Jupiter’s magnetic field as powerful as it is—all you need is a strong enough magnetic force field to push back with to hold up, well, anything…bases, cities, nearly any weight any all. Those magnetic field generators also make handy protection against lightning strikes, radiation, and meteorite impacts. The large jet intakes on the sphere suck in hydrogen for the fusion reactors, not for propulsion. Still, you’d never want to get a ship near one of those things, as getting sucked into a fusion ramjet could really ruin your day. The docking bays are above and below the rings, the ships coming and going seeming minuscule at the distance and scale of the whole thing. As we get closer, I can see the lights of windows, balconies, and broad viewing galleries looking out into the sea of clouds.

Those clouds are already beginning to turn red with evening light. The short Jovian day is already ending, but my day has only begun.

* * *

Finally, I get to my temporary quarters on the base. It’s a small, square room, with one wall projecting the nighttime cloudscape below and the moons rising above. I send the mental command to morph one piece of my furniture into a desk—there won’t be a chance for sleep any time soon.

I bring up a series of communications on the local computer and get my resident computer secretary to sort the incoming messages by rank and official importance. Whew! That’s a lot of data-work to process. There’s all the data on performance review for my flight team in the exercise, and much more importantly, data-work on my injured teammate, damaged exo-frames, one destroyed frame, and of course, requisition orders for new personal and equipment. Lastly, there’ll be the upcoming matter of the inevitable inquiry when someone’s injured or killed.

All that can wait a minute—I need a shower first. After hours of flight in even simulated combat conditions, I’m a stinking mess.

The door to the shower and refresher opens as I walk toward it. I lose the old, soiled uniform and use my cyber-augments to send the message for a freshly cleaned uniform to be delivered by remote to my quarters. It’ll be there when I’m done, of course. Just like the meal in the mess hall will be there, exactly to my preferences, and the morphic furniture will always fit me like a glove. Jovian civilization has come a long way from those early years when we were barely hanging onto life.

Once the steaming water rinses off the last of the suds, the air flashes hot and dry, getting rid of the last of the moisture. My new uniform is already waiting for me on the bed, and it feels good to get into something clean and dry. Ordering one of the walls to turn into a mirror, I check my reflection to see if I’m presentable.

OK, I’m not the knockout sight holo-drama portrays Angel pilots as. Still, the basics are all there. I’ve got the massive build everyone gets growing up in the heavy gravity environment of Jupiter, and I’m actually a bit taller than the average pilot. The holos usually get that wrong. The Navy likes pilots smaller because they’re easier to cram into an exo-frame. Also, no one has long hair in the services. Long hair or crazy beards get caught in helmet seals at the wrong time—and that can kill you. So, unlike the holos, my hair is a short, black fuzz, and I’m clean-shaven. They get the blue skin right, though, but the actual tone varies a bit from light blue to deep purple, depending on skin tone and how much anti-rad nanotech is concentrated in the upper skin at the moment.

A lot of Navy regulars go for a lighter treatment, unless they work in engineering; the Marines go for maximum protection; and Angel pilots like us tend to stay somewhere in between. I don’t know why—it takes us about a day to get out of regulation blues, no matter how much we’re using—I think it’s just the about the culture that came about over time.

Since Angel pilots are Navy, my uniform is a deep, royal blue with gold trim. It’s flashy, but also functional. Those metallic strips indicate where to seal the uniform’s front and cuffs, and where to attach the helmet in the event of depressurization. You want everything to stand out when the lights are out or if there’s smoke and fogging in the air. The Marines go for red and gold, which actually blends in pretty well on Io’s Camp Baker. Any of the uniforms can activate their nanoflage to make their wearer nearly invisible and stop a low-velocity railgun dart. The whole thing can function as an emergency space suit when sealed, though it’s flimsy compared to the armored suits we wear as pilots. Even though my suit and cyber-augments will display my name, rank, and serial number on an authorized query, my uniform is displaying my rank as Flight Leader; my name, Michael Vance; and call-sign, “Thunderbolt.” Thunderbolt doesn’t have anything to do with my flying or weather…it’s from an unfortunate night out drinking on Calisto—and that’s all I’m going to say about it.

The pistol and dagger at my belt complete the uniform. My sidearm is a C-90 variable-beam UV laser, able to fire in high-powered single pulse, or in a continuous beam. Sure, there’s no recoil, like with a railgun, but I miss the stopping power of my old sidearm. Still, unlike with my old sidearm, I can link the fire control of the pistol to my cyber-augments and never miss anything I can see. The dagger is atom-thin super-carbon crystal, able to puncture an armored suit, but it’s more useful for