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

Up ahead, as Mars rotates under us, we’re coming up on some kind of conflict over Ophir Chasma.

* * *

A gigantic alien spacecraft is rising from the surface of Mars.

It’s crazy, but when I look again—it’s still there.

The ship is a multi-kilometer mountain of monstrous aberrations. It’s perfect in its asymmetry, a thing of terror and otherworldliness utterly beyond any human experience. Faint glows of infernal red and eerie violet light up the otherwise space-black carapace of the thing. Strange spirals, loops, and spines seem to jut out all over it. The pattern of its construction isn’t random as it first appears; it’s clear there’s some kind of underlying order, if only the mind could comprehend it all. Worse, the structure of the ship seems to shift and flow as I watch, undulating and oozing into new configurations, even while in flight.

The thing is hovering somehow, floating up directly from the surface of Mars with no apparent form of propulsion. Below, Ophir Chasma is filling with dust from the eruption in the crust that ejected the monstrous ship. Trails of dust and smoke follow it to the top of the atmosphere, as if pointing out the alien intruder in our solar system.

No one has to tell me it’s an alien; it’s obvious. No human designed the bizarre ship or organism hovering above Mars. Never have the Venusians in their bizarre bio-labs and twisted inventiveness made such a thing. Even the Saturnine, in their bid to escape their own humanity, have never managed to succeed in such a way. It’s unlike even our weirdest dreams or most horrible nightmares.

It doesn’t belong here. How could we ever understand it or communicate with it? What possible peace or accord could be reached with that?

A low, sinking feeling comes up from my gut that has nothing to do with freefall. We were fighting over that thing’s technology, confident of the edge it would give to whoever possessed it. Now, that seems like madness. How could we understand such strangeness? Even if we could, should we? What will such technologies do to our civilization, our way of life, our very being? We’ve changed a lot with our technological inventions over time and made a lot of mistakes. But in the end, that was all us—our mistakes and our pride. What terrible things could an utterly inhuman and alien mind do to us? We might never understand or anticipate the danger.

There is danger in that thing, and it’s clear to all now.

The fighting between ships seems to pause without any general order. There’s no need. The shock of the titanic aberration floating above Mars alarms everyone. The various fleets are circling, scanning, probing, and waiting to see what happens next.

We fall back on what we know, even when confronted with the unknown.

Angels, drones, and fighters move in closer to set up a perimeter around the alien vessel. Larger ships maneuver to bring their powerful axial-mounted weapons to bear. Defensive drone networks are redeployed to cover the critical vessels from possible attacks from the mysterious monstrosity.

Everyone broadcasts at the thing. Our Jovian fleet orders it to stay immobile, identify itself, and explain itself immediately. Venus offers peace, coexistence, and alliance, as well as cultural and genetic exchange. Saturn sends an icy demand for immediate surrender backed by the threat of total annihilation. The messages go out in our languages, and many others, in pictographs, and in a mathematical matrix that contains the fundamentals of building a working language within its equations. All the messages repeat, again and again.

Nothing happens.

Then it launches a small craft, a black, streamlined ship only a little larger than my frame, that heads back down to the surface of Mars. The alien ship begins to move again, away from Mars, destination unknown. It could be going anywhere, loose in our solar system, to do anything to anyone.

The Jupiter fleet fires warning shots across its bow and repeats our demands. Venus launches a squadron of Narwhale-class boarding ships. It’s Saturn that fires the first, deadly shots. Their missiles explode long before they get to the alien ship, but no beam seems to hit them. Their antimatter beams and railgun projectiles just curve away from the monster vessel, completely missing it, but coming perilously close to other ships. It’s the gamma beams that actually get through, though, and blow away sections of the ship to leave a number of glowing holes in its hull carapace, which begin to heal even as I watch.

They just made it mad.

The alien thing coughs up scores of glowing blue-violet spheres of plasma at everyone. These things are obviously weapons, and they lock in and track the ships of all three fleets.

Everyone, everywhere, puts everything they’ve got into stopping the things. I don’t know what happens if they get close, but it can’t be good. Jamming, countermeasure dust, and decoys don’t sway them from their path at all. The spheres just soak up point-defense lasers, and even the heavy beam weapons don’t seem to do anything to them. Anti-missile missiles race out at them, and are either absorbed by the spheres, or the missiles’ explosions seem to do nothing to the orbs of energy.

The only thing left to do is run. The problem is they’re faster and more maneuverable than anything we have, even the drones. I lose another of my squadron as one of the infernal spheres passes right through him, like he and his exo-frame didn’t exist. There aren’t even any stray particles left afterward; he’s just gone. The spheres brush right past our perimeter squadrons and head for the big ships.

They’re targeting the cruisers, monitors, and attacks ships, the only things that have managed to even scratch the monster ship so far. The orbs burn right through the toughest armor plating in the solar system and detonate deep inside the massive warships.