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    Falling Angel
    Falling Angel
    Falling Angel
    Ebook66 pages1 hour

    Falling Angel

    By Jesse Jones

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    About this ebook

    Fledgling colonies burn. Orbital stations are reduced to debris. Expansion into the solar system has been completely halted by a force against which humanity is powerless: the Angel. In a final desperate ploy, the best a dying race has to offer must make unimaginable sacrifices reaching for a faint spark of hope: that angels have fallen before.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJesse Jones
    Release dateAug 16, 2012
    ISBN9781476327266
    Falling Angel
    Author

    Jesse Jones

    A Texas native, Jesse was born in Corpus Christi and lived there until moving to Denton in 1999 to attend the University of North Texas. Thirteen years and four degrees later, he's still in Denton and writing science fiction and fantasy. Though a perennial bachelor, he lives with his five roommates: a programmer, a voice actress, an engineer, a costume designer, and a Japanese teacher. Needless to say, life is never dull.

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      Book preview

      Falling Angel - Jesse Jones

      Falling Angel

      by Jesse Jack Jones

      Copyright 2012 Jesse Jack Jones

      Smashwords Edition

      Discover other titles by Jesse Jack Jones at Smashwords.com or visit the author's website at jessejackjones.com

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      ***~~~***

      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

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