Rebellion Ebook Full by B. V. Larson

hole had ripped through the nanite skin and I could see the stars whirling by.
    “We’ve been hit!” shouted Kwon unnecessarily. “Orders, sir?”
    I’d always known that these ships were sitting ducks if the enemy had their act together. The problem was, we couldn’t come in at a high enough velocity—not if we wanted to do anything other than ram the station. We had to slow down when we got in close. I cursed the Macros and their deals. They’d once again thrown away the lives of my men.
    The spin slowed down as the ship struggled to control it. The ship was recovering, but I knew Macros tended to fire on a target until it was completely destroyed.
    “Everybody out, we’ve got to expect another strike,” I said. “Deploy your skateboards, marines. The free ride is over!”
    “What about me, sir?” asked the pilot. I was momentarily surprised to hear her voice—I hadn’t really expected her to survive.
    Lieutenant Joelle Marquis. Young, kind of cute, with an accent that turned on Kwon. I hardened my thoughts. I couldn’t worry about saving her butt any more than the rest of us.
    “Can you operate your ship, pilot?” I asked. Around me, twenty men scrabbled to escape their panicked nano straps, which clutched at them like the hands of frightened children. Each of them struggled to get out the disks they sat on and exit the craft through the gaping hole in the roof.
    “I can fly,” she said.
    “We need that big laser to drill into the station. Take it all the way in. Good luck.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    I jumped out then, and Kwon followed me. I wondered if he hated me for giving the girl suicidal orders.
    I stood on my disk and a rippling sheen of nanites grew out of it, bubbling up my body to finally stop at my neck. I could still see through my helmet visor to navigate. There was a flash behind me. I suspected it was the assault ship, taking another hit.
    I couldn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t look back.

-9-

    I’ve experienced a number of strange things in my life. Some of these things no one else in human history has ever lived through. But riding a dish-shaped skateboard through space while under fire had to be one of the wildest, even by my standards.
    The incoming enemy fire was beam-based, presumably lasers. I could tell that much because the beams were fast and invisible. In a planetary atmosphere a really big, powerful laser beam might be visible, depending on its spectrum and the atmospheric conditions. But in space, you really can’t see a laser beam because there is nothing for the beam to touch. You certainly wouldn’t see a pillar of light, not even if it was left on for a while—which they usually aren’t. Unless you have something for the light to hit and reflect off of, it is essentially invisible. The only way I was able to detect the incoming fire was the visible reaction caused when something was hit. Usually, it was another skateboarder like me.
    When one of my marines was hit, he didn’t just explode. He burst into fire, but that didn’t stop his forward momentum. The mass of his body and the skateboard kept moving at significant velocity. Even as they were melted to slag, their momentum carried my dying men toward their target. They looked like meteors, a fireball of bright white followed by a spiraling trail of vapor.
    They were nailing one of us about every ten seconds. I counted thirty hits in my field of vision. After that, I stopped counting, because we were almost there. The assault ships that had survived the approach rotated their primary engines around to aim forward and brake. They slowed dramatically, and all around me my men were doing the same.
    I’d never been trained on this bizarre flying dish I’d designed. I was ashamed to admit it now, but I’d sat out the beta testing, letting others give me input and making the alterations they suggested. I’d never been much of a skateboarder or a surfer, either.
    The worst part was the reversal. I