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

tagging it with UV and a few x-ray beams. We add our fire to the energy attacks pouring into it from all around, trying to overwhelm its ability to dissipate heat and radiation.

It’s not enough. The monstrous enemy craft is regenerating and shedding the heat from earlier. Our remaining forces can’t overwhelm it, and there are fewer of us with each passing second. It’s winning…

When everything else fails, pray. I expect we all are; there’s no hope, and death is coming for us. Please protect my home and family, for I cannot anymore. Please stop this thing from rampaging through the solar system and…

Huh?

It stops. It stops firing energy orbs, and the orbs out there just fade away. The alien jamming goes away. It stops hovering over Mars and is now in free-fall. It stops everything.

For a second, everyone in all the fleets just sits there, doing nothing, stunned.

Some kind of weird power fluctuation is building up in the strange craft. Blasts of plasma fire erupt from the giant ship’s black hull.

We open up on it with everything we’ve got left. UV lasers strike the alien hull, now actually heating sections until vapor jets away from the strikes. X-ray beams hit with a real punch, and explosions of hull material fountain up from the carapace armor. Gamma beams punch through the armored shell entirely, leaving glowing holes that tunnel deeply into the strange craft.

With its defenses down, rail cannon fire actually hits the thing, and the plasma warheads detonate inside it. Particle beams vaporize broad swaths of the ship’s surface as they track back and forth across it. Antimatter beams prove that—whatever the alien hull is—it’s still matter, as they carve deep, annihilating, gaping trenches into the colossal ship.

Finally, everyone launches every drone and missile they have left at the thing. The smaller anti-aerospace missiles hit first, streaking in to detonate in a series of bright blue plasma flashes. Then the big capital missiles rumble in and go off with a series of boosted fusion and antimatter detonations that turn the ship into a raging new sun.

When the vast cloud of glowing plasma clears, bits and pieces of the alien ship are left, falling back down into the ruined canyon of Ophir.

A small alien craft escapes from the blast and is on the way up and out. It looks identical to the one that got away from Earth and started everything here on Mars. There’s no telling what this one is going to do. I’ve seen how fast these things are; if it gets away, we’ll never catch it in time. We’ve got to stop it here, now, before something like this happens again.

A transmission comes from the small alien ship, the first time they’ve even tried to communicate with us, and it’s in our frequency and language. “This is Brandt Wills. I’ve neutralized the alien threat, and will be removing the last of the alien equipment to a safe location…”

Brandt Wills…who’s that? Oh, the criminal fugitive from Luna. Not exactly who you want to control powerful alien technology.

One of our heavy cruisers, the Nike, orders the small alien ship to dock with her at once. Saturn and Venus both open up on the small craft. It dodges with freakish ease, and then accelerates like mad, trying to rendezvous with Nike…or ram her.

Desperate to claim the ship for themselves, Saturnine attack ships open up on the Nike, and shoals of Venusian Shipworm missiles swarm at us. We send out what countermeasure dust and ECM drones we have left and fire back. We’re back to fighting each other again, as if the cease fire of before never happened in the first place.

The small alien ship dodges and weaves through the battle space, and then dives away out of sight behind the horizon. That thing can move!

We reacquire it as it’s accelerating straight up, away from Mars, and on a path out of the ecliptic. Where is it going?

I may never find out. Saturn first, then the rest of our fleets fire missiles after the thing. Short range anti-aerospace missiles streak out at incredible acceleration, followed by the far more powerful capital missiles. We all forget fighting each other again in order to bring down the last of the alien ships.

It’s going to die for sure now. Outrunning a ship is one thing; outrunning missiles is another. If it had started out beyond powered missile range, it might have gotten away, but not now.

The small ship accelerates out of the ecliptic. What’s out there? Nothing. There’s nothing out there for it but death.

Is it an alien escape ship? Is it on some further mission of mayhem for our solar system? Is there actually a human being aboard the ship, controlling it, or is it just a deception? I’ll never know for sure now.

The missiles are about to hit.

A strange twisting of the stars ripples around the small ship, and it shrinks away and disappears. One they lose contact, the missiles detonate, spending their fury uselessly in the deep, starry night.

What happened?

It’s gone. Somehow, someway, the small alien craft just disappeared.

What happens now? Do we turn our weapons on each other again and finish what we started?

Long seconds pass, each one an eternity…

The signal comes in. The various forces have agreed to a temporary cease-fire. The ships turn off their targeting systems and deactivate the swarms of drones and mines in orbit. The fleets maneuver again, this time to separate somewhat.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

* * * * *

Epilogue

 

 

We’re on the way home at last.

The hull of the ship rumbles with the faint drone of torch drives underway. Gravity, only 1G, is coming from the thrust of acceleration, as the little boat is too small to rotate.