Guardian war angel book.., p.21
Guardian (War Angel Book 1), page 21
Maybe.
We’re all having to improvise as we go along. Our training focuses on individual initiative and adaptability, and that might give us an edge in the upcoming fight, where who knows what will really happen.
Maybe.
It could be a good thing we’re flying nearly obsolete Guardian-class exo-frames. They’re built for up-close knife-fights like in the old days, so we’re not left with a lot of fancy systems we don’t get to employ. These rugged little frames handle situations like boarding actions and anti-piracy, so they might turn out to be the perfect thing for a crazy fight where nothing makes sense. The systems aren’t even really AI (though they’ve got personality; I know) so there isn’t as much for the Saturnine cyber-systems and viruses to target.
Maybe…maybe…maybe.
That’s a whole lot of maybes to pin one’s hopes on.
The flow of liquid helium stops, and patches are carefully pulled off the skin of my frame by manipulator arms. Right now, my Angel is colder than the surface of Pluto.
I feel the host carrier begin yet another set of maneuvers.
We get the signal.
It’s time.
* * *
The launch is anti-climactic.
I’d have preferred to use the launch gun. Sure, it would have betrayed our location immediately, but it would also have given us more vector away from the ship, thus spreading us around in a larger area of space for the enemy to guess at. It’s also the coolest way to launch.
Instead, we float gently out of the open mech bay into space. The host carrier maneuvers to the side and continues to decelerate. The carrier seems to fall upward past us, combining with the sensation of freefall to make it seem like we’re falling along a metal cliff toward an infinitely far abyss below us.
The carrier is behind or above (whichever way I want to look at it) us in seconds, at first as a huge blazing sun of fusion drive flame, then shrinking away to a fierce blue star. The other ships of our task force are also falling away behind and above us, forming a canopy of bright blue fusion stars, all clustered around the Sun itself.
Below us is Mars. Without magnification, it’s a rusty disc in full phase, sadly not too different in appearance than when the first explorers set down there. Deimos is a visible point at this range, and Phobos…right, no Phobos, not anymore. Passive sensors pick up the loose ring of asteroids that mark the grave of the moon and a lot of good men.
Around us, new constellations of blue, violet, and white stars indicate the drive flames of whole fleets converging on Mars. It’s hard to get much data through all the chaff clouds falling along with us, but usually the blue one’s match Jovian torch drives, though the Lunar ones sometimes look similar since we shared our tech. Violet is usually a Saturnine drive; they tend to burn a little hot and near the edge of what’s safe, and they like to dope the engines with antimatter for extra kick. White drives with less heat and power are probably Venusian, so they don’t injure their living ships with too much heat and radiation.
We’re not falling in any kind of tight formation, though individual flights tend to cluster a bit so they can support each other more easily. Internal gyros help keep us from tumbling randomly, but there’s not really any other motion. Silently, in the dark of space, we slowly separate into a cloud of night-black Angels.
So there’s nothing left to do but wait as we fall past the planet below, and hope we don’t hit anything…or get discovered…or get hit by random enemy fire…or get hit by friendly fire…or…
I settle in for a nice, long, relaxing flight.
* * *
Mars doesn’t look much better up close.
Sure, it has the strange beauty every planet has when you realize it’s a whole world held together by the gravity of its mass, yet it’s still just a minute sphere against the echoing vastness of all creation. It’s grown from a distant astronomical object into a living world with its own geology, geography, weather, and history. Any planet is a wonder in the vastness of space.
For all that, it’s still a dump.
The entire planet is a geological wreck of cratered and cracked desert wasteland resulting from billions of years of asteroid bombardment and tectonic violence. If Mars was a man, he’d be the guy with a cauliflower ear, broken nose, missing teeth, and a long scar up the side of his cheek from a lost knife fight. Mars is the prizefighter who blocks with his face and lost his chance at the title four billion years ago, but keeps jumping into the ring. It’s the little world that’s all pluck and no luck. If it didn’t keep killing my friends, I’d feel sorry for it.
There are still some signs of hope on the plant’s battered face. Mighty Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, is crowned with a ring of storms from the terraforming stations that still survive there. The polar caps on both poles gleam with water ice now, and thin, threadlike trails of icy clouds swirl here and there in the cold, arid atmosphere. Green life actually covers the bottom of Valles Marineras, and brown patches of hardy, engineered life cling to existence in the uplands, here and there.
New craters mar the surface below. Some of those might have been misses from warships firing on targets below them, while others could have been the result of surface bombardment from Deimos. Most of them are likely the result of pieces of shattered Phobos bombarding the surface below in a rain of fire that must have been unimaginable.
There are pieces of the dead moon orbiting in a loose ring now. Big chunks the size of small mountains tumble around the world, along with rocks, gravel, and clouds of dust. All that dust and rubble helps cover our approach, which is probably the only good thing to come out of all this. There’s no order to the giant grave in space; the explosions that tore the moon apart sent debris in nearly every possible path around Mars. There’s no way to predict it all. Even if I could use active sensors, there’s a good chance I’d miss something. Even if I did see something, I still can’t maneuver to avoid anything in my path—stealth is paramount.
A flash of light from starboard lets me know one of my decoys hit something. It could have been a mine, a sensor remote, a piece of Phobos, or even some other fleet’s incoming drone. There’s nothing to be done about it.
We fall past Mars in cold darkness and silence, hoping we don’t hit anything. Debris from Phobos isn’t the only thing out here. There’s also wreckage from the previous space battle, still tumbling along in wildly unpredictable and unstable orbits. There are stealth satellites, relays, and probes out here, too, all invisible until I hit one. There’s probably even stealth spacecraft out here, trying to maneuver into position before their main fleets arrive, just like we’re trying to. I guess if I crash into a Saturnine attack ship by accident, it still counts as a kill, but I’d never know about it. Then, there’s the mines—and I don’t even have to hit one of them. Stealth isn’t magic invisibility, and if one of those mines finds me, anywhere around Mars is in range for a Saturnine x-ray laser burst warhead.
All the dust out here worries me the most, though. Everyone, everywhere has dumped countermeasure dust, to such a level that there’s a double ring visible around the Sun. This stuff is scraping away steadily at my armor, emitting tiny sparks with each impacting grain. If a computer can connect the dots in all this chaos and figure out where I am from that, my stealth won’t matter. Worse, it’s abrading the stealth and active camouflage coatings that are keeping me hidden. Eventually, we’re going to lose our stealth, but maybe we can keep it long enough to compete our mission.
Up ahead near the horizon is Deimos. The small, battered moon is still an enemy fortress and the main stronghold of Saturn over Mars. We’re going to break it.
* * *
Soon.
Deimos is growing in my sight. On magnification, I can see a number of new craters on the surface of the irregular moon, and whole clusters of weapons batteries and launch bays are missing. It looks like our people on Phobos gave almost as good as they got. Almost. Deimos used up most of its gunships and heavy missiles in the earlier battle, and it looks like most of the really dangerous positron and anti-proton batteries are already gone. Only about half of its smaller armaments and point-defense weapons clusters seem to still be there, assuming they haven’t been utterly wrecked, too. All in all, the ruined Saturnine base is a shadow of what it used to be, and not as much of a threat anymore. It looks like we might not even have to destroy it.
Except we do.
We so do.
It’s still a major enemy base in the middle of an active battlespace. They’ve already demonstrated their hostility and danger. They’ve received the demands to stand down and surrender, but they’re still active hostiles. The Saturnine never surrender, anyway.
Good.
This needs to happen. It isn’t vengeance; that’s a personal and emotional reaction.
This is justice.
Targeting a motionless asteroid is trivially simple, even with no active sensors. Absolutely nothing we’re going to fire at it can possibly miss. The point defenses they have might shoot down about half of the missiles we can salvo at the moon.
Not enough.
We’re not packing anything heavy, only 20-megaton shaped nuclear penetrating warheads. No antimatter. Still, it’ll be enough. They’ll do for Deimos Base, or any Saturnine heavy cruiser. They’ll punch right through the surface and create a plasma spear that will reach down into the guts of the rocky body and create enough shockwaves to collapse any caverns deep inside.
It’ll be quick; they won’t suffer.
We’re coming into position at last.
I get ready to fire.
We should receive the signal from the task force soon. It will radiate out from the Weston, ordering our cruisers, attack ships, drones, mines, and exo-frames like us to open fire, all at once. It’ll be a light-speed wave of destruction radiating out to hit Saturnine bases and ships. Then we’ll take advantage of the chaos and pick our targets in the general battle to come.
The signal should come any time now…
Right about now…
Soon…
It has to happen now. We’re about to go right past Deimos. We’ve got to hit it!
It’s now or never.
Images of my friends flash into my memory. Friends from the past, now gone. My old Phobos posting wasn’t great, but it was home for a while, and now all that is gone.
If I fire right now, I might inflict enough damage to cripple the base, even on my own. The rest of my squadron will follow my lead and fire on it, finishing it off. All I have to do is fire now…it has to be now…it has to be…
NOW!
The moment passes.
Deimos flashes past us, not knowing that death has just brushed past them in the void.
NO!
I want to scream and pound the console of my frame. All of this for nothing! We’ve given up any element of surprise we worked so hard to achieve. We can be certain that Saturn won’t think twice about using a sneak attack to gain an advantage over us. Now we’re going to be exposed to enemy scans while we’re forced to decelerate and maneuver, breaking our stealth, separated from the task force so neither of us can support the other.
…and no justice for Phobos.
Finally, we get our orders from the host carrier, but they’re not what we expected. The attack is canceled. We’re being recalled back to the task force to provide a defensive screen. If that’s what we were going to do, then why didn’t they have us do that in the first place?
We light up our engines and active sensors and swing around to join back up with the approaching task force.
Deimos Base suddenly notices us and lights us up with targeting beams and weapons systems swinging our way.
Please, I think at them as hard as I can. Do it. Go ahead and fire at me. Give me an excuse. Go on…
They don’t open fire, of course. Why would they? Right now they’re sandwiched between our Angel squadrons and the oncoming task force. They’d be wiped out. Why attack now, when they can wait? Their forces are arriving now, and they can always choose another time to hit us, when the odds are in their favor.
So we have to let Deimos go for now. That’s a mistake; we should hit them now, because they will hit us later. Still, I’m not going to violate my orders and start a battle on my own. Maybe command thinks peace can still be salvaged from all of this. I doubt it. Sooner or later, Saturn will cross the line again, no matter how many chances we give them.
Countermeasure dust scrapes at my frame more violently now that I’m moving against its path. Soon enough, all the stealth coatings and active camouflage will be gone, and my frame is already heating up. Stealth is gone, and we’ve lost the element of surprise. The only thing we can do is return to patrol around the task force and try to keep people alive through what’s coming next.
We boost on toward the blue stars of the drives of our task force.
* * *
Back with the task force, I’d like to say we’re ready for anything, but we’re not. We should be loaded with anti-aerospace missiles to defend the big ships from enemy fighters and missiles, not these big, heavy weapons designed to crack fortifications. At least our SPG load-out is set mostly for countermeasures and anti-missile, with the idea that we’ll dump them to cover our retreat during a strike. Now, on escort, we can use them to help protect against an incoming missile strike. We’ve also used a lot of fuel in our rendezvous with the task force, which is itself still maneuvering, not only to enter orbit around Mars, but also constantly changing its vector in the increasingly complex paths and orbits developing around Mars as all of the fleets arrive.
The other fleets and task forces of Jupiter are here—most of them, anyway. Squadrons of our cruisers are taking up positions in various nested protective orbits. Nike-class heavy attack cruisers provide the firepower, while Achilles-class missile defense cruisers are the shields that keep the whole fleet alive to do its job. Our larger and newer host carriers are out here now, with squadrons of more advanced Cherubim-class Angel exo-frames, too. The four-winged exo-frames don’t look like chubby babies; these mechanical monsters are actually our most advanced frames: larger, faster, and much more heavily armed than my Guardian frame. Swarms of light attack craft and drones complete our fleet. Somewhere out there, our attack ships lurk, still able to maneuver unseen, with their highly specialized engine systems that are so secret, no one seems to even know the basic principles they work under.
Saturn’s ships are here now, with all their menace and mystery. Chronos-class heavy cruisers and Cyclops-class light attack frigates make up most of the heavy units of the fleet, bolstered by swarms of Hydra gunships. All the craft have a similar design—radially symmetrical structures of weirdly organic curves ending in sharp edges and protruding spines. They’re all black as space, their shadows only relieved by a few red glowing sensors, and the harsh ultra-violet light of their drives. They don’t have any carriers out here, but they don’t use carriers to transport the swarms of insectile cybernetic assault battleoids that are now swarming through space. All their ships carry a few of them, and they’re all out here now. They outnumber us by an extremely uncomfortable margin.
Then, there’s the ultimate unknown quantity—the Venusian fleet. No one really knows what the Venusians are going to do, and they might not even know themselves. Their organic ships are basically giant cultivated organisms with drives, sensors, and weapons systems grafted on. They do love their bio-tech. Long, thin, spiral-shaped Unicorn-class light attack craft escort their massive nautilus-shelled Kracken-class monitors. Swarms of chitinous Harpy fighters dart here and there, seeming almost hungry for prey.
All the various fleets are crossing paths, above and below, as they come in on each other’s flanks or head-on. Fleets maneuver to avoid coming too close or colliding, even while they maneuver to get the advantage over each other.
I can see why Command pulled us off our strike. If a fight starts out here with everyone packed up together like this, it’ll be devastating. There’s no telling who would win…if anyone. How do you dodge a beam at point-blank range, or shoot down a missile swarm from this close? None of the weapons systems facing us out here are obsolete Terran antiques, either; these are some of the most sophisticated fighting machines in the solar system. Up close like this, offense will count for more than defense, and there’s a lot of temptation to fire first.
It gets even more confusing. Adding to all this are intersecting fields of countermeasures. Crystalline dust is sleeting along, steadily grinding away at everything, giving all of space a weird, diffuse look as through a slightly smudged lens. In radar, it’s even worse. Everything is filed with a weird, echoing radio scream as scanning beams and communications are twisted and sent right back. Adding to it all are clusters of dazzler drones that add to the powerful jamming and flash erratically with diversion lasers. Thousands of small stars are whirling everywhere from the engines of the small craft, drones, and decoys, and there’s not much way to tell what’s going on.
Small craft like our Angels whirl and maneuver in a complex and erratic dance to obtain advantage over any possible adversary in the ever-changing chaos of the space over Mars. Targeting beams are everywhere, while everyone fires off flares and decoys, knowing that an attack could happen at any time.
This kind of tension can only last so long. You can’t amp everyone up and keep them on the edge forever. Someone somewhere will light off the spark that starts the fire.
* * *
A flash of light is all the warning I get.
I’m already maneuvering as the energy beams and hyper-velocity projectiles scream through my squadron. Our decoys detonate in blinding flashes, saving some of our lives, but not all. Seven of my squadron happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and are now expanding clouds of plasma. I just lost Sparky…
The pain will come later; all I feel is an icy void trying to envelop me.
