Falling Angel Read online

Falling Angel

  by Jesse Jack Jones

  Copyright 2012 Jesse Jack Jones

  ***~~~***

  Far beyond a thick circle of transparent elastomer, sheets of glittering metal stretched out like curved wings, cut by canals dark as the space around them. Implacable, Old Testament divinity seemed to radiate from it, filling the void. Great fields of stars were blotted out by its passage, the distant light of planets eclipsed by its bulk. It left Zhiang sick with awe and hatred.

  Men whispered when they named it the Angel.

  Gutted stomachs of dull grey metal hung like overripe fruit from the cargo gantries of the hastily modified Nearspace III translunar tourist ferry Appomattox Courthouse; the name had some meaning to the American pilot, though Zhiang didn't remember what. Removed from active service years before, the vessel had been rousted from an enthusiast's garage, but he was lucky to have gotten standing room on something as archaic as an N3. After all, for every soldier who found himself on one of the Nearspace Mark VII’s dragged out of the showrooms in Mumbai, a dozen were stuck riding German Sturmvogel cargo freighters, the oldest craft in the impromptu fleet. Junkyards across the Eur-U were empty because of the demand for even scrapped members of that hardy transatmospheric craft’s family.

  A swarm of nearly four hundred ships crowded the vacuum around the Courthouse; every space-faring vessel the human race had power left to hurl skyward. Winged suborbitals with streamlined forms never meant to know deep space were crammed with as few as ten men, while the rare, whale-like super-yachts designed for years-long tours through the solar system played host to hundreds of soldiers in denuded suites and empty pools. Not even those in such relative luxury entertained any deep illusions about a journey home on ships that hadn't the fuel or oxygen for another day's travel.

  "An assault unlike anything in the whole of human history," his commander in the PLA had told him a week earlier, when he was signing 'Zhiang Zhisheng, First Lieutenant' onto a patch of gelscreen. "More than twenty-thousand men, Zhisheng! Each one drawn from the most elite units and skilled specialists of every military and civilian agency in the system! You should be proud to be asked to join such a thing as this!" The man had been very enthusiastic, for someone who had not signed his own life away.

  Yes, it was the single most capable fighting force ever assembled, paraded into the vacuum on any piece of metal that could be coaxed, coddled, or catapulted out of orbit. It would be humanity’s greatest battle.

  And it falls to us to see that it will not be their last, he thought grimly. At least I get an automatic promotion to Colonel when it's over. It would mean far better death benefits for his family; would guarantee his daughter a place in the best schools in China.

  "One quarter hour until contact point," came a cool voice over the intercom, speaking in thickly accented English that Zhiang could barely decipher. Luckily his monocle provided an immediate pinyin translation of the words that came from somewhere out in Earth's great swarm, from the only true military vessel left, tending its flock of civilian spacecraft: the U.N.S.S. Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr.

  "One quarter hour until contact point," the voice repeated, more distinctly.

  The Shepherd—as soldiers more comfortable with English had taken to calling it—was a graceless thing. Ungainly and cigar-shaped, the color of dull alloys bereft of paint, studded with the thin needles of armaments or antennae, it had survived the massacre of its sister ships in the American fleet by virtue of engine troubles that had kept it in dock. While it languished at the Nevada Space Yards in orbit over Laughlin, its kin were battered at the Second Battle of Mars and the last—the Edgar Dean Mitchell—was torn to shreds in the debacle that had come to be known as Keslinger’s Gamble. Last Zhiang had heard, the German general had put a pistol in his mouth and left a red resignation plastered across his office wall.

  When the Galactic War Powers Article was passed by the U.N. Security Council, the Shepherd had been confiscated and outfitted specifically for the coming mission. It was the fist that was to drive the offensive, before the enemy encroached any further on human space.

  If it was not stopped here, it would penetrate lunar orbit in less than two days.

  "Ten minutes until contact point," the voice came anew.

  That started a commotion.

  "Ten minutes until contact point."

  "Okay men," Zhiang called in thickly accented English of his own; it was the language chosen for the task force but not his first by preference or training, "Suits emerald, rifles loaded, packs locked, in that order."

  Even as he spoke, his own fingers were dancing across the seams on his suit, relaxing only marginally when the tactile feedback on his gloves' fingertips confirmed all airtight seals were secured. He proceeded to make sure the short, snub-nosed assault rifle magnet-pinned to his waist was working. A thin, curved magazine was secured to the stock's underside while the barrel mounted a Beck, a 'Base Explosive Capsule' launcher. Only when all of that came back emerald as well did he make sure the pack affixed to his back was stable, its electromagnetic pins energized and locked flush, while the distributed weight of various pouches of food, utilities, ammunition, and medical supplies were secured.

  He had checked all those things a hundred times over the last day; everyone had. And they were all checking them again now.

  "Five minutes until contact point."

  When Zhiang looked up, he could not see the Angel through the porthole anymore. Even if he could have, nothing but a solid sheet of color would fill the space at this distance. They had come too close to see the whole of it now.

  "Five minutes until contact point."

  His monocle retracted as the helmet's heads-up display projected a familiar face. Lines creased the dark western features, thick streaks running through short hair less black than silver. From underneath an almost comically bushy mustache, a deep voice emerged.

  "We stand upon a preh-see-piece." Zhiang wondered why English had been chosen for the operation, when so few seemed able to speak it without drowning it in accent. "Behind us dwells the whole of human hee-sto-ree, exhorting us to greatness; before us lays the inestimable unknown, taunting our resolve." If any man could be said to command the admiration of the gathered forces, it was the gruff Cossack who now transmitted his last message, for he was Kristoff Oleneva and his hand guided the last desperate thrust of humanity's sword.

  "Three-and-one-half years ago, in Jovian space, mankind first encountered an ex-ee-stence alien to our own. Unknown and implacable, this ex-ee-stence has intruded deeper and deeper into our space, scouring all before it with peerless fury. Europa. Gan-ee-mede. Ceres. The Belt Stations. Whitehall. Mars. Deimos. Theia Station. We can know it only through its actions, and from these actions we can give it only one name: Xee-nocide."

  When the plans had been drawn; when the United Nations had assembled its elite soldiers; when the so-called Final Fleet had been commandeered, it was asked: 'who shall lead these men?' At that time, the great generals of China and the European Union, of Brazil and America and India had stood silent. Whoever led this mission would never return to the glory awaiting them on Earth.

  "It seeks to eradicate an ex-ee-stence foreign to itself, and that ex-ee-stence is humanity. All attempts at communication have failed, all attempts at pitched battle have met only disaster, and so we have been called upon to do the unthinkable. We, the greatest humankind can muster, regardless of individual beliefs, national loyalties, or genetic heritage, have come to this place, at this time, to die."

  Into that silence, Oleneva had stepped: quiet, calm, and without apparent fear. It had become one of the most striking of images of the war, this man white-haired with age, stiffer of spine than representative
s half his years, striding from the sparse ranks of Russia’s military, crippled and weak from attempts to defend their Martian holdings. He had marched past the greatest military minds of the mightiest powers on Earth and said, simply, 'I will die with these men.' Oleneva would live far beyond the passing of his flesh.

  "In our deaths, we shall set a pox upon our foe. Even as our ships burn, we shall devour him from within, carving the flesh of our victory off the bones of his. Let us harrow him even as he would harrow us, that our sons and daughters might enjoy the bounty of our worlds.

  "Like many of you, I am not a re-lee-gious man, but if it is an angel as some have named it, then we shall become the wrath of God Himself! Scripture hold that angels have been cast down to serve in Hell before!" The tiny compartment had only the cheers of twenty men in it, but Zhiang imagined he could feel a thousand times that number cheering through the hard vacuum that surrounded them.

  Through an animated graphic in a corner of his H.U.D., Zhiang watched the Shepherd pull ahead, preparing for the first phase of the operation. Weaponry on its dull, uneven skin began to glow and, without sound, streaks of heat spanned the hundreds of kilometers between the Shepherd and the Angel.

  Only to turn away harmlessly, splashing like water striking glass as they drove into the great vessel’s invisible energy prow. Still, the blasts weren’t expected to break the shields so much as announce human defiance for whatever might dwell within.

  Deep inside the Shepherd’s bowels, the true power of the ship was churning to life. From receptacles spaced along the ship’s length, loose protons held in immobile stasis were suddenly agitated into motion, passed into a magnetized accelerator nearly a mile in length that projected out far past the ship’s fore via thin, magnet-studded strings of carbon nanofilament. As the flow of matter began to race through the vacuum tunnel, a series of tens of thousands of pulsing electromagnets imparted their small contribution to an inevitably tremendous acceleration.

  "Contact Point!" The voice called over the intercom. "Contact Point and God speed you all," was the last, whispered thing Zhiang would ever hear from what suddenly sounded like a very kind, very scared young woman.

  Even without a direct view, the porthole filled with light; Zhiang could imagine the brilliantly destructive ejecta pouring out at relativistic speeds from the barrel of the Shepherd’s subatomic mass projection cannon. After targeted assaults by the enemy and experimental sorties by first national and then UN forces had severely reduced the available supply of high-yield nuclear weapons, the experimental SAMP Cannon was the only option left that stood a chance of even temporarily overwhelming the shields on the Angel. A sustained blast was calculated to have enough power to create a brief fracture in the enemy's defenses by overloading at least one of the shield wells. Electromagnetic field analyses had suggested that the massive, pulsing blue spheres resting at either major wing tip were the energy prow's source.

  There was a jarring acceleration as the Courthouse’s solid-state rockets kicked in, no doubt burning through what remained of the precious fuel. Tactical supercomputers aboard the Shepherd would have calculated the positions of the hundreds of ships under its command and sent out orders about coordinates, velocities, and approach vectors to maximize the possibility of penetrating the Angel's defenses.

  "Effing hell," cursed a man off to the left. Someone in the pod was praying in a language Zhiang didn’t recognize. They had known it all along, but it was only now becoming real.

  There would be no trip home.

  What Zhiang could not see was the port shield well, perched like a glowing moon within its depression. It flashed swiftly before going dark. At that moment, the blast from the Shepherd was no longer impeded; a great wave of excited matter coursed through the void, slamming into the belly of the Angel. Heat and energy blossomed out into space like a rose of light, the alien substance volatilized and hurled out in arching plumes. Immediately, the focused plasma projectors that formed the Shepherd's standard armament began to glow in anticipation of adding their own fuel to the fire. Celebration was short, however, as an answering lance of light ripped out from the Angel, piercing the crude Shepherd and tracing a line of destruction along its side, like a child scrawling with a death-colored crayon.

  Even as it crumpled inward, a silent nimbus engulfed the dying cruiser.

  However, Oleneva had had time enough to select the most advantageous of the assault plans, rush a few modifications, and pump it out to the fleet suspended about the Shepherd. Already in motion, they were a swarm of angry bees hoping to fell a giant. More light as dozens of spears from the Angel now filled the silence of space.

  The dying began in earnest.

  Ships transmuted almost peacefully into puffs of debris at the slightest touch of the Angel’s weapons, pods bursting and ejecting their loads into cold space.

  Through the destruction, scores of ships still sailed on, into the breach in the Angel's energy prow, there-in to contend with the closer defenses. The Appomattox Courthouse wove and dove and spun wildly, vernier thrusters flaring with a mad passion that regarded neither fuel nor the comfort of passengers. Somehow, they managed to avoid the Angel's smaller batteries, pulses of blue-white light skirling off through the void as they came within kilometers of the Angel and began Phase Two.

  Even inside the pod, Zhiang could feel the dull chunk of the primary locking bolts disengaging. That would mean...foont...it was deployed. An instant later, their pod sailed out into crowded, deadly space, three more following in quick succession.

  Leading the four ejected pods was a sleek black casing, ostensibly invisible to all forms of electronic detection. It was the technological masterpiece of the Brazilian military: a stealth super-yield class nuclear micro-warhead. It was, unfortunately, of the lowest strength that fell into that category but two-thirds of the swarming ships were equipped with these "Baby Blasters" as they were affectionately known. Striking the smooth, white surface of the Angel, it tore in with all its fury, a carefully shaped, computer-crafted detonation punching through the half-dozen layers that guarded the inner chambers of the alien ship.

  Almost immediately, the wound began to heal, the power of that foreign technology coping in stride with the ferocity of the assault. Zhiang watched through the porthole at the pod's fore as the hole swelled larger and larger with closing distance even as it healed shut.

  "We’re not gonna make it," Someone muttered, voice tense.

  "The plan says we will," Was all Zhiang could respond with.

  The pod made it, if only barely. The sealing skin of the Angel tore into their tail fins—the pods had originally been designed for atmospheric insertions—sending them spinning wildly, even as the retrorockets kicked in to try and slow the hurtling craft. It rolled, slammed into a bulkhead, bent, and pinwheeled off the floor, finally lodging itself against the massive chamber’s far wall.

  The second pod rammed into the almost-sealed hole, only a thin plume of superheated debris squirting through. Meanwhile, the third pod collapsed against the smooth, unblemished new hull surface while concentrated fire from the defensive batteries was busy reducing the fourth pod and the Appomattox Courthouse to vapor. Then it was over, almost as soon as it began, the space about the Angel as still as it was quiet.

  In that motionless void, blue light flickered slowly and then strengthened, steadying as the darkened shield well returned to life.