Ghost of an Empire (Sentinel Series Book 3)

by Richard Flunker

  The second shot from the gauss rifle fired, silently bursting right through the right side armor of the tank, and going clean through. Within moments, fire and smoke were pouring out the top hatch, and Ogho only counted one man, partially on fire, jumping out. He didn’t last two seconds, as his advance team moved on the tank as soon as it was hit. The sole survivor was cut down instantly, and his men began to push towards the road and into town.

  The artillery shells began hitting again. The troops in the town must have had a hard connection to the artillery, or were using the local infrastructure to communicate. He would have to remember that. New craters blew out the old ones, tossing remnants of human bodies into the mix of dirt and frost. His men hunkered down again and waited as the shells continued to drop. Then, just as suddenly as they had started, it stopped. Ogho quickly looked up and out over the field, expecting another assault, but instead only caught glimpse of the slowly retreating force.

  The artillery was down.

  “Time to push.”

  He gave the order, and about two-thirds of his men, in full mechanized suits, jumped up and out of the trench and began rushing forward. Their mechs allowed them to go nearly thirty miles an hour, and they crossed the field in an instant. They entered the town, smashing through the fences. A few machine guns opened fire, but were quickly silenced by some of the heavy guns, mounted rocket packs that nearly obliterated the houses. They ran past as the houses crumbled into a heap of fire on their own yards. The enemy opened fire from houses across the first street and another tank fired off a shot, hitting one of the larger mechs. The shell exploded through him, sending large chunks of his armor and flesh exploding into another house. Two mechs quickly advanced against the tank, jumping onto it and ripping the top hatch off before pouring molten hot plasma down into it. The screams he heard were quickly drowned out by the sizzle of the hot plasma. The two mechs jumped off and in a few moments, the internal ammunition magazines exploded, sending the turret sky high before it came smashing down into a house.

  Ogho ordered two Shals to scout around the east portion of the town and work on cutting off any retreating enemy, and to try and locate their existing communications line. Another Shal reported that they had run into three more tanks, entrenched there on the western edge of the town, near the clutch of trees. Three mechs ran past with the gauss rifle assembly and were running down towards that end of town. Ogho got into close enough range and got the video feed from one of his scouts. He watched as his heavy gun mechs shot rockets at the tanks, but they exploded harmlessly off their armor, leaving scorch marks. The tanks retaliated, but the far more mobile mechs were able to avoid direct hits. They continued to fire rockets at them. Smaller mechs ran up behind the heavy gun mechs and reloaded their rocket packs repeatedly. One took a hit from the tank that ripped its left leg clean off. Two mechs quickly jumped in and moved him off back behind a house.

  While the heavy guns continued to hit the tanks, the gauss rifle was set up and fired. The resulting explosion brought a smile to Ogho’s face. He saw in the feed that the remaining two tanks were backing up out of their entrenchment, knowing they had lost their advantage but the feed cut out before he could see if his men would hit them again or not. The scout must have moved just beyond the range where the signal could overpower the jamming.

  Just ahead and through a gap between two houses, Ogho saw two mechs dive back behind the walls. Gunfire ripped shards off the sides of the house, tearing at the mech’s armor as well. Their mechs were self-powered knight armor that not only enhanced their already impressive strength, but provided them protection against several layers of calibers. Still, it wasn’t their job to stand in a line and get hit, because eventually, the armor wore down and lucky hits got through.

  Ogho leapt forward towards the pinned down men, calling several others forward. He peeked around the corner and took a quick picture then pulled back. The still image showed several dozen men firing from behind a stone wall across another street. The quaint wooden houses were beautiful, if simple, at one point in time, but now they were getting torn up. The stone wall, though, provided good cover. Ogho asked for covering fire, then led three of his men around the right side, sprinting several houses down to get around them. As they rounded a corner, they ran into two enemy combatants who were trying to sneak into a house. They stopped and looked back in stunned silence. Two quick shots left them shredded and they collapsed in front of the door. Ogho tagged the house in his virtual map and tasked two other of his men to root out any others inside.

  They reached the edge of the house and looked down to the left, seeing the stone wall. Two quick leaps and they were behind the stone wall, rushing down towards the men who were hopelessly flanked now. He and his two men opened fire with their rifles, pouring accelerated plasma shards down into the now exposed enemy. As soon as they stood up to react, his pinned down men returned fire, and the dozen men were crushed by vicious crossfire. When Ogho reached the first body, he could barely recognize it.

  Reports started to come in from other sections in the town, run in by messengers due to the ongoing jamming. They were pushing the old Dominion forces back. In fact, it was more than that, they were wiping them out. Within twenty minutes, the town was taken. Ogho looked up, sweat pouring down his face. He popped the visor open and the frozen air stung his face, but the relief was instant. He scanned the horizon as best he could, despite the rubble of houses. Back and forth, from east to west he looked, but couldn’t see the telltale signs of dropping ships. One look back, and even through the rubble, he could still see the gravity net ship. He had accomplished his mission.

  “Let’s get a perimeter setup. And see if we can find some land lines. We need to find out what is going on.”

  He looked up once again, towards the skies. His Queen was up there, somewhere. This was for her. For a new Dominion. He had lost only three men in the action, and two wounded. It sounded like nothing, but his kind were an exceedingly precious commodity. Each man was the result of immense wealth and time, twenty years at least. They had it easy though, for they had fought an inferior opponent. Ogho wondered how the rest of his brothers fared, especially against the First and Second Legions.

  It didn’t take them long to find the land lines. The retreating enemy had destroyed them all, so those would be of no use to them now. Mano and Titus returned with the two artillery guns in tow. Instead of just destroying them, they had captured them. They had encountered little resistance, so took it as a chance of opportunity. Ogho ordered them to set them up in the middle of the town. As they worked on that, he coordinated with the rest of his troops, including those still behind at the trench line. As he walked back to the gravity ship, he could hear the sounds of battle off in the distance. He guessed the battlefield to be almost fifty miles long now, especially if all the drop ships had landed.

  Within a few hours, the larger wave of deployments would come, along with armor and troops of their own. Nearly two million men and women were ready to take the capital, but the spearhead was the Seventh’s alone. Ogho heard a sound and looked up. In the sky above him, three small fighter craft circled around their position a few times. They began a slow circular dive until they slowed down into a fly-by. It was the Falcons of Arda; he could tell by the bright red fire design painted on the sides of the craft, the Arda Ringcraft 3. They made another pass-by, then sped off to the south, away from the battlefield. As he followed the craft south, he spotted another vessel headed his way. He soon felt the familiar hum of the Link-3 craft.

  The saucer-like ships were mobile command units. They hovered a few hundred feet above the ground. The three Falcons were this one’s escort. Instinctively, Ogho looked back west, and could barely make out a few other Link-3. The ships provided overpowered transmission relays, linking up with each other’s mobile unit to provide data and communications within a small range. Their reactors overpowered the enemy jamming so that ground troops could communicate, at least within that umbrella. />
  It took Ogho nearly an hour to get the report fully written up and uploaded to the command net. He had to go over all of the footage so that the big heads up in the ships could analyze everything and make new decisions. His men continued to report in that there had been no further enemy movements. The two artillery guns were dismantled under orders and moved down the line to the west where they would find use.

  Ogho’s pod still held the far eastern portion of the line. Down the west, the Seventh had dropped successfully, despite the enemy knowing exactly where they were falling. They had encountered the Second Legion right on the main highway leading into the capital city, but had been able to push them back, despite heavy casualties. The far west edge of the line had also encountered parts of the Second Legion and had not been able to move forward. Falcons had provided plenty of air power, but were now being hit hard by old Dominion air force as well as anti-air armament in the capital. The line needed to be straightened out as the middle pushed into the city, but the west was having difficulty.

  There were no signs of the First Legion, though, and that worried him. They would have to be dealt with if they wanted to take the city, and with it the planet. Even with the Queen’s other forces getting ready to land, if the Seventh couldn’t take them out, then the battle for the city would be a long, costly one.

  A beep cut through the silence in his helmet and Ogho looked up in the HuD to see a new message coming in from command. He blinked and it opened up, showing new orders. They were to move forward up and further to the east. Their target was one of the main highways that entered the city from the east. Without knowing where the first Legion was, they had to cut that route off. The line would be stretched thinner for a while, but the seventh was progressing easily and quickly up the middle. They had to move quickly and take it within an hour. Command wanted to use that route as one of the main entrances for their troops. The whole countryside to the east was farming land, and would make a perfect drop site.

  Ogho blinked a few more times and forwarded the mission info to the rest of his men. They had seventeen miles to cross and a highway to take in an hour. Their top speed was easily thirty miles an hours, and thankfully, they would be crossing flat farming lands. But that also meant that they would be a clear target. It didn’t matter. That’s what they were for.

  Within a few minutes, the pod commander reached the northern edge of the town they had just demolished. The entirety of his pod was already there. With a nod of his head, they broke into a run, and within moments, were leaving a trail of frost and dust in the air as they sped off north.

  Their trek proceeded with ease. Ogho continued to monitor his communications until they were out from under the command umbrella. From there, he just used his senses. Smoke rose from the edge of the city, several miles to the west, where his brothers continued to push forward. He could routinely see Falcons making quick dives in and out of the city, and the sky was lit up with tracer fire from ground to air guns, and the streaks of smoke from surface to air missiles. They reached the edge of a river that came flowing in from the east and made a turn north where it would eventually spill out into the large freshwater ocean that covered nearly half of the northern hemisphere. They crashed into the water and crossed, walking along the bottom. Their twelve foot mechs kept their heads out of the water. Once on the other side, they sped off again, flecks of ice breaking off of their suits.

  There was a small outpost next to a large bridge that crossed the river on the highway they needed to take. Ogho could tell it was hastily built, nothing permanent. While the Dominion was a warrior society, the core systems of the empire, Coran and Secundaria, were behind so many layers of defenses that the idea of militarizing the planets themselves had been abandoned hundreds of years in the past. Not a single Dominar had ever expected those established defenses to actually turn their weapons on him.

  A crudely built bunker, concrete and rebar built into uneven shapes, sat at the edge of the river bank, next to the highway. Several concrete blocks sat on the road itself, blocking the way. As soon as they got within range, gunfire erupted from several points. Ogho’s men quickly spread out, as they had practiced thousands of times. The commander himself slowed down and allowed his men to work while he watched. Taking the brunt of the attack, the heavier mechs went straight at the bunker. Their armor could take a greater beating than the other mechs. One bullet hit a rocket pack on one of the heavies, setting of a series of explosions off his back. The soldier was fine, but the ensuing explosion left behind a wall of smoke and sparks that only helped his men. Enemy soldiers fired wildly and blindly into the smoke, so the heavies fired off all of their rockets at once at the bunker. They were safe inside of it, but the chaos allowed several more of his men to reach the bunker unnoticed. A few well placed plasma blasts into any opening quickly silenced the bunker and smoke began to pour out of it as well. The rest of his men quickly subdued any other resistance. Within a matter of a few minutes, the highway was theirs. Several flares were dropped that filled up the air with bright red smoke. It was the signal. From space, they could see it and know the front was secured and ready for landings.

  As his men went to work digging out new trenches, they blew out the fire inside the bunker, but there was nothing to recover. Ogho sent out several scouts out across the bridge and to the west. Suburbs, houses and other buildings dotted the landscape, although it was devoid of movement and life. People had evacuated, just as the Queen had hoped. Looking west he could still see the battle waging on, but it was impossible to tell just how far his brothers were coming. Smoke and haze filled the entire air around the city, while its tall skyscrapers pierced through the smoke in the middle of the city, towering high above it all.

  The Queen could have just bombed the city into oblivion if she wanted to. The battle in space was all but over, Ogho found out while under the umbrella. Once again, the enemy’s superior numbers had fallen like leaves in a fire against Magyo’s superior tactics and technology. No one knew for sure how her ships, products of the old Dominion, had upgraded their weapons with guns and armaments they had never seen before. Beams that warped gravity and shards of plasma fired at near light speed. The Dominion, while mightier than the other kingdoms of mankind, were always just a bit behind with technology. Ogho knew that a vast amount of their budget was devoted to stealing technology from Sol or the Alliance of Free Planets. But the Queen had come from the stars with their power in her fingers. Some said she had created the weapons herself, and at this point in time, Ogho was willing to believe it.

  “Commander,” static broke the noise in his helmet. Ogho looked across the bridge just in time to see two of his scouts running back. He had sent three.

  “Report.”

  “It’s the first. They are headed this way. They picked off Branto.”

  “How many?”

  “Five hundred, at least.”

  Ogho counted quickly. He only had one hundred and ninety seven men there, but at least he had the defensive position. He had to hold the highway until the ships started dropping. They didn’t even have to hold the bridge; another one could be built if needed. But they would be facing the first Legion, the prime troops of the Dominar. He glanced up, hoping to see streaks coming down from the sky, but saw none.

  “How far out?” he asked from his scouts.

  “Five, maybe six miles,” they said, “We didn’t see any heavies though.”

  That didn’t matter. “They will be there, somewhere.”

  “How do we do this?”

  Ogho glanced back up to the sky again.

  “The river is deeper here, and wider. They are going to have to cross that bridge, so let’s make them pay.”

  Ogho took up his position in a trench seventy feet back from the river bank and brought up his scope. The high zoom lenses scanned the horizon for the first sign of the incoming enemy, but he was having some issues with the clarity. Instinctively, he hit the side of his helmet a few times, as if that would do
anything, then he turned it off and just looked out through the visor.

  The storm had come.

  In that moment, he felt foolish. At some point in his mission briefings, he would have looked over the weather, he knew he must have, yet here it had snuck up on him. The only benefit of the doubt he gave himself was the fact that the dark clouds were coming in from the east, where he had zero focus on. All eyes were towards the west and the city and the battle, and he had completely missed the impending storm. So as they sat there, in their hastily dug out trenches, the sky began to fill with snow. It fell slowly at first, but within a few minutes, the snow was piling up in a hurry.

  That’s when the second storm hit.

  The first Legion was legendary for many reasons. It was the original Legion, the title given only to the enhanced human warriors of the Dominion. It was funded by the Dominar himself, and whichever house had the most genetics in the man himself. They were not only well equipped with whatever the most modern military equipment the Dominion had at the time, but they were the essence of genetic modification. They were legendary for their lack of fear, mostly due to their lack of ability to sense pain. Not only was their pain bred out of them, it was trained out of them. Short of machines, they were the ultimate in biological programming. In fact, rumor held that they were slowly becoming less biological, and more machine, but such talk was heretical.

  In the first war with Sol, it was the First Legion that shocked the entire galaxy and proclaimed the superiority of the Dominion to all men. At Alpha Metoni, site of the first battle on the ground, one thousand men of the First Legion defeated nearly fifty thousand Sol and Martian allied troops. From that point on, Solar military avoided ground combat if at all possible.

  The First Legion spearheaded the Dominion’s first expansion era, conquering planets merely by their presence. Only with the advancement of mech suits were the Dominion’s enemies able to withstand the fury of the galaxy’s greatest warriors. And then, barely. It didn’t take long for the Dominion to steal mech technology for their own use.