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

suits are tough but can’t stop a hull-splinter the size of a man. Emergency medical signals from the crew light up everywhere, and the medical and damage control crews are on the way.

There’s nothing I can do for them—

Something is crawling through the hole. A swarm of worm-like creatures with segmented armor and glowing eyes swarm into the hole.

Shipworm…

The infamous Venusian Shipworm missile carries something that’s more of a parasite than a warhead. Unlike other missiles that accelerate at the end to attack, the Shipworm slows down so it can deliver its hideous, cybernetic drones still alive into the target. Then the missile burrows in with a plasma penetrator and releases a swarm of the things. The idea is to keep a ship busy and fighting the infestation to take it out of the fight.

So…the Venusians just stabbed us in the back. I’m not surprised.

I open up with my railgun and laser clusters on the worms, and the rest of my squadron joins in. The cybernetic parasites burst apart and burn under our assault, but there’s bound to be more elsewhere aboard the Weston.

We need to get back out there and clear space of these things…and get some payback on the Venusians.

I give the signal, and we fly back out of the bay and into the battlespace again.

* * *

Now we’re back out in space, and the Westie doesn’t look good from the outside. The big ship has a few new holes in her, and those parasite worm things are crawling over the outside of the hull. Our carrier’s already deployed some short-range drones to act as an immune system, cleaning off the things with bursts of laser energy as they orbit in close to the hull. We join in, making a close pass, and burn them off of with our point-defense lasers.

The orders come in from Rackham, “Leave the worms to the ship’s defenses. We need to clear out enemy fighters.”

We peel off to our sectors to defend the task force.

Our targets appear almost instantly. Organic, chitinous, insectile ships about twice the size of our frames, roaring in on fusion drives to attack. Venusian Harpy fighters. They’re bio-engineered cyborg spacecraft. The engines, missiles, and x-ray lasers are standard technology, while almost everything else was grown in the vast Venusian war-vats.

We don’t want to get into a dogfight with the things. They can take higher gravities and have more acceleration. They haven’t fired their missiles at us yet, and data updates from the Weston are telling me they’ve already fired off their missiles, hitting our ships with the worms. Now they’re closing to finish off the frames.

They’ve made a big mistake.

Time seems to slow again as my cyber-augments go fully active. We’re close enough that the fighters have to maneuver to hit us with their axial x-ray lasers. We’ve got to take them out before they can dogfight with us and burn us down. Their lighter laser turrets are firing, but there’s no significant damage thanks to our reflective coatings. Only x-ray and higher frequency beams can burn through this new armor coating.

Our turn.

We select targets and let them have it with our anti-aerospace missiles. They have countermeasures and point defenses, and they hit a few of our missiles, but not nearly enough. Apparently their ECM and targeting aren’t as good as ours or Saturn’s. A series of sharp blue flashes fill the space around us as the multiple plasma warheads of our missiles detonate. Most of the enemy fighters have been destroyed, and the others are fleeing, leaving their wounded craft behind.

No one ejects. The Harpy isn’t a piloted craft, nor is it really a drone. It’s more like a pet, though a fusion-powered, laser-armed, spaceship-killing pet. Are they intelligent? It’s hard to tell; we’ve never been able to talk with one. Still, we order the wounded ships to surrender. In the end, they either go down fighting, or self-destruct instead.

A Venusian Unicorn light attack ship is closing fast. The twisting, spiral-shaped craft is trying to line up one of our capital ships to hit with its axial gamma beam. Our ships are maneuvering to prevent it getting a clean shot with that cannon, while harassing it with drones. It’s hard for us to get the big guns on it this close, too.

We close to attack. Our frames immediately glow with a blinding light as they recognize our threat and pour their point-defense laser fire on us. While firing on us, they’re paying less attention to the drones, and a few manage to slip through to set off massive fireballs of plasma up close—but not quite close enough. The enemy ship is still there, glowing and shedding clouds of vaporized armor. Fire on us decreases, and now we can get into position to fire ourselves.

We unleash our x-ray lasers at the computer-recommended targets on the ship. We think those are the ship’s weak points, but each of these ships is grown a bit differently from the others. Plumes of vaporized carapace erupt, fluorescing in the light of our beams. The Unicorn seems to shudder, then its engine flickers and dies. Good guess this time.

The wounded ship sends a distress signal, then bright orange organic life-pods explode from under its spiral chitin, much like seeds from a pod. They’re designated non-targets by our computers and begin to float down to the surface of Mars. We won’t fire on them, of course. I wouldn’t count on Saturn’s mercy, though.

Our big ships are opening up on the Venusian Monitor-class ship. The heavy nautilus shell armor on the behemoth is boiling away, fluorescing as gamma rays and antimatter beams cut into the huge vessel. Several holes have been burned through the Venusian ship, but somehow it’s still moving away as fast as it can. Looks like it’s trying to run over the horizon to get away from our cruisers.