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

lose another frigate to the swarms of enemy missiles and drones, but none get through to score a direct hit on the host carrier. Still, the armor on our ship is glowing red, and even white hot in patches, while trailing vaporized metal that looks like a smoke cloud. Laser-cluster warheads don’t need to get too close to do damage, even to a big ship like the Weston.

The Saturnine took a hard hit in those first few seconds as well. My original target blew up from concentrated particle beam fire before my missiles ever got there, and now those heavy missiles are wandering around out there, with their simple AI minds looking for a Saturnine ship to hit. The rest of my squadron did well, taking out two frigates, a half-dozen assault battleoids, and crippling a cruiser.

The Venusians are hit harder than we are by the Saturnine offensive. Lots of their smaller craft are now seared, carbonized wreckage, unable to handle the terrible energies that are being thrown at them. One of their massive Kraken monitors is blown completely into glowing bits—there’s no way even one of their ships can regenerate from that.

Most of the missiles have either found their targets and gone off or been destroyed by this point.

Now the Venusians launch their counterattack. Most likely they delayed, not knowing who to side with in the battle, or possibly hoping Jupiter and Saturn would neutralize each other, and they could finish off the survivors. Either way, Saturn’s attack made up their minds, and they unleash everything they have on the Saturnine fleet.

Good for them.

Venusian beams and rail cannon aren’t hitting the Saturnine hard enough to seriously damage them, but they’re causing enough damage and distraction for the real danger to close on the enemy: semi-organic Harpy fighters and living Shipworm attack drones. That ought to keep the Saturnine fleet’s big ships busy for a few minutes.

A swarm of Saturnine Asp attack drones and Tarantula assault-battleoids are trying to make a rush on our carrier. They’ll have to get past us to do it.

The faster, more agile Asp drones are coming in first. They’re nasty pieces of work: axial x-ray laser cannon, dorsal and ventral UV point defense lasers, and six missiles in a rotary cylinder, powered by a boosted-fusion engine. They must have already expended their missile ordnance, because they’re coming straight into open fire with x-ray lasers. The good news is the Asp has to maneuver to bring its main gun to bear. The bad news is they’re very, very maneuverable. Up this close, laser diffraction dust, countermeasures, and maneuvering can’t do much against lasers, so it’s all going to come down to accuracy.

We seem to fire at the same instant, their computers against ours. About half of the lightly armored drones explode, and one of my wings vaporizes and detonates after an x-ray laser passes through it, sending me spiraling through space. That probably saves my life from the other two beams that come a second later. I recover my flight awkwardly, incidentally dodging another laser shot in the process. We lose three in that opening salvo.

We open fire as the Asps pass. Our point-defense lasers and railguns tear into the lightly armored drones, wrecking most of the rest, while their point-defense laser fire degrades our armor, but doesn’t take anyone out.

The remaining Asps continue toward our task force on a suicide mission to inflict as much damage as possible. I guess they figure the time it’ll take for them to decelerate and get into a dogfight with us isn’t worth it.

We turn to fire on them from behind, and their straight flight profile and the signature of their engines makes it easy to lock onto them and destroy the last of them with our own x-ray lasers.

Now come the Tarantulas, closing fast. Saturn churns these cyber-nightmares out for ship boarding and surface action. Their main punch is the 16 on-board missiles and copious SPG magazines, all of which are probably spent by now, or they’d be using them on us. Their eight UV lasers are another matter, and can be used offensively, as well as in point-defense mode.

We open up with everything on the chitinous armored monstrosities: rail cannon, x-ray lasers, and point-defense beams. Their armor soaks up a surprising amount of damage; only the x-lasers and rail cannon get quick kills, everything else seems to just make them angrier.

We’re getting painted by their UV lasers. Our hulls begin to glow, armor is boiling away, and some of our sensors and laser clusters burn away, too, but nothing critical.

The first of the Tarantulas survives long enough to get close to us and…

A searing flash fills the universe. I can barely hear the alarms over my own scream, and my brain is trying to remember how to see again, so I can understand what my cyber-sensorium is trying to tell me. Precious fractions of seconds are lost…

Chimera saves my life, going into full acceleration, dodging something, and then maneuvering again to fire the railgun.

Finally, I can see and hear again.

So…Half of the armor on my front is gone, along with all my frontal sensors and laser clusters, including my x-ray lance. My railgun was hit, too, but those things are tough. I picked up a few more rads, but everything seems functional. Shifting to reserve sensors, I can see what’s happening, and link back up with my squadron…

It was a nuke. The Tarantula raced ahead of its fellows, then blew up to flash-blind us so its swarm could fly past. The blast of the suicide-spider also took out two more of my squadron. The rest of us have degraded laser and senor capability, and almost no armor left.

Now the armored Tarantulas are racing past us toward the fleet on a nuclear kamikaze mission.

We turn again and fire to burn them out of space. One