Ghost of an Empire (Sentinel Series Book 3)

by Richard Flunker

  It was a dream come true for Earth. The Solar Commonwealth, Earth, Mars, and several other nearby systems, had long been the target of the Dominion’s aggression. The empire had held its birthplace with enmity, and had in two wars managed to secure their own borders and prove to be a thorn in the Commonwealth’s side. But the Dominion always saw itself as the spited younger sibling, and so Earth had endured continual harassment from its younger sibling, mostly with indifferent annoyance. No matter how great and grand the Dominion claimed it was, and no matter the size of their gargantuan warships, Earth held a technological superiority that kept the brash Dominion out of their backyard.

  But that meant that anywhere outside of Sol, the Dominion harassed Commonwealth lines continually. And so the news of this civil war had come with wondrous joy to the people of the Commonwealth. A few hawks even called for a first strike against their now weakened opponent, but most on Earth just felt relief. The Dominion was too busy imploding to harass their people in other systems. It was also a matter of ridicule that the Earth’s brash younger sibling was collapsing under the weight of its own cockiness.

  The new Queen, though, was something else.

  “And that over there,” Hosha said, pointing towards the Harmoa, the twelve mile long behemoth which was the flagship of the new Queen, “Is the upstart. She needs us here to show just how powerful she is. It’s a propaganda machine for both sides. They’re not going to shoot us down.”

  The brother and sister didn’t seem too sure, but Hosha knew better. He had put himself in incredibly dangerous situations in the past, interviewed murders and barbarian warlords, without fear. He knew that even the worst of men and women, wanted their ten minutes of fame on Earth. And that was the draw. No matter how far mankind expanded, and no matter what grand technological advances they discovered, every single eye was continually turned towards Earth. All men and women, even those born slim and lanky, like his fellow asteroid born partners, or the highly modified men and women of the Dominion, yearned for their ancestral birthplace. The green and blue planet’s approval, or disapproval, was all that mattered to them.

  A bright flash of light filled the cockpit, stunning the three of them. Instinctively, Jainka turned the ship just a bit and a large old Dominion cruiser came into view. It was breaking apart, venting gas and debris into space. Half of it continued to fire thousands of slugs in its defense when a second blast filled their cockpit with light again. It was the Harmoa.

  “WHOA!” Allo shouted.

  “The Dominion sure likes them big don’t they?” Jainka asked, rhetorically.

  The Queen’s ship fired a second blast with its giant beam, the purple torrent of pure energy that erupted from the mouth of the Harmoa like a fire breathing dragon.

  “Did you get that?” Hosha shouted.

  “Duh,” Jainka replied. With twelve cameras focused on all areas of the battle, there was no way they missed that.

  “I don’t think I have footage of the large beam firing yet. That’s pretty impressive. Ratings are going through the roof tonight.”

  He knew about the weapon. Thirty years ago, when the Harmoa had first seen combat against Commonwealth forces, it had a version of that weapon go horribly wrong. Rumor was they had improved on it, but he sure hadn’t expected anything like that. He was working hard on internal sources within the Queen’s forces about some pretty dramatic technological improvements the upstart rebellion had. They were quite closed lipped about it though.

  He had some footage of some pretty bizarre combat back on Urt. It wasn’t clear, and he didn’t even witness it that well, but it was certainly weaponry unlike any he was aware of. He wanted to get down on the ground on Secundaria, now that the Seventh Legion was actually fighting for the Queen, but they hadn’t opened up those right just yet. Still, as he watched the Dominion cruiser crumble into a million pieces of slagged metal, the footage was gonna make him more famous than he already was. Awards were headed his way, as was fame and prestige among the Solar elite. He couldn’t wait. He was just missing one key piece of footage.

  Her.

  He had written about her twice now, but only using the stories told about her. She was in a myth status at the moment, and he, as the ever amazing journalist that he was, wanted to bring her down to earth. All the stories of her manipulating the power of the stars, of being smarter than any man ever, that her beauty could make anyone cry from sheer joy just from seeing her, those were all the kinds of hogwash he had heard in the past, and had debunked. He would play it safe, of course. No need to piss off the new Queen of the Dominion, but whatever he presented to GNN would be amazing.

  Just needed that footage.

  “How many people do you think were on that ship?” Jainka asked, tapping a few buttons on her console.

  “That’s a Beghena class cruiser,” Allo pointed out. He reveled in his knowledge for a moment, “It has a capacity of fifteen hundred men, that…” he sobered up quickly, “are all dead, now.”

  “That,” Hosha exclaimed, “is fifteen hundred more points in our ratings boys and girls.”

  “Wow,” Jainka said, her lip curling up in disgust.

  Hosha shrugged his shoulders and returned to a console at the back of the cabin when a beep opened up a new screen. Jainka read it quickly and spun her chair around towards the journalist.

  “Guess what?” she said. “We just got clearance to get down to the ground.”

  Hosha shouted excitedly. “What are you waiting for?”

  The pilot powered up the reactor and spun the ship around, pointing it down towards the planet. The northern hemisphere was blanketed in white and clouds and down there a storm raged. The large continental swirl was clearly visible from orbit. The ship began to head down towards the atmosphere, a small bubble of gravity pulling it slowly forward. While Jainka kept an eye on the controls, Allo began to read the information stream from the planet.

  “Looks like they, the Queen’s forces, are just outside the capital hub. They took out almost all of the WAJ over the capital. We can probably try to ride on the comms if you want.”

  “You can try, but I bet the Queen still has her jamming up. They will bring down their own wide area jamming soon enough. This battle up here is just a mop up now,” Hosha pointed out.

  As their ship, the Shinso, began to dip into the upper part of the atmosphere, the three watched in awe as large chunks of old Dominion ships sped to their fiery deaths into the planet. Their ship descended in control, while millions of fragments of hundreds of ships burned up over the northern hemisphere of Secundaria.

  “Just like fireworks,” Jainka said quietly.

  “They’re celebrating,” Hosha pointed out, really thinking of his own future fame.

  The siblings merely exchanged glances. They were conflicted between the death and destruction they were witnessing and the fame they were to receive because of it. The ship entered into the storm with ease, wind and snow moved away easily by the power of the gravity field surrounding the ship, and then Jainka pointed the ship down and sped off towards their designated landing field.

  3127 – Secundaria, Somewhere in the capital

  He tapped on the tiny console on his wrist and pulled out a small wire from it. Extending the cable out, he plugged it into a tiny panel. Looking up, he could see the storm blowing heavily from the east and mixing with the snow was heavy black smoke. He could clearly hear the sounds of the battle, even this far deep into the capital city compound. Short of maybe Corunda, the military fort on Coran, this was likely the most fortified city in Dominion controlled space. It was nothing to him though, for he was most likely one of the best trained, equipped, and experienced spies the Dominion had.

  Had was the key word, for he no longer worked for the Dominion. His views were changed when he met the Queen the first time, and he was now loyal to her, and her only. He may not have known it when he first set eyes on her. That time, his desires were not of loyalty, but of perverted lust.

 
Fangix barely remembered those feelings, those emotions that had once burned his insides, because she had cleansed him of them.

  The console on the panel beeped twice, and a light turned green. A hissing sound was followed by a pop, and a nearly invisible hatch slid open right beside the control panel. It was invisible to normal eyes, but his eyes weren’t normal. Far from it, for in nearly every aspect, Fangix was the same super human as those men of the Seventh Legion. Unfortunately, at some point during his gestation, something had gone wrong, and he had become one of the ‘others’; the discarded mistakes.

  The hatch slid shut after he jumped in. The tiny corridor was barely big enough for him, but he was more than agile. He could bend his body in ways very few others could. Like a snake, he slithered his body down the tiny chute, moving every muscle in his body in serpentine synchronization. He could hear commotion up ahead, down the tiny chute, and he knew he was getting near. His hearing was incredible as well, but he had worked hard for many years to enhance that sense. He could sense that there were ten men in room at the end of the chute. They sounded disorganized. He also heard boxes opening, and the sound of tools, or other smaller metallic items being dropped on the floor.

  On the roof of his mouth, Fangix had a few buttons. He depressed one with his tongue, and a tiny image popped up in his eye. The lenses of his eyes were his heads up display. With the motion of his eyes, he typed in a command and a device on his belt hummed to life, and just as quickly returned to silence. At the end of the chute, Fangix felt with his two hands along the smooth surface until he felt the tiny imperfection on it, and very gently, pushed on it. He pushed the hatch aside and found himself behind a large stack of boxes and crates.

  With his back on the boxes, he slid the hatch shut silently. He raised his right hand over the top of the box, extending his thumb out just above them. A microscopic camera in his thumb projected the video stream to his eyes, and the spy got the first view of the room he was in. As she had told him, a large warehouse, with mountains of crates and boxes piled high. Fangix smiled. She was right, again.

  The boxes were made out of an organic weave, strong, resistant. They must have something very important inside. He put his right hand up against the box and waited for the information from the scan to reach his eyes, but smirked when no data arrived. The weave had scan blocking threads in it. They didn’t want anyone to know what was inside of them. Fangix took a quick look from where he was. There were thousands of boxes here, but his scan did reveal that they must have been moved into the warehouse within the past two days. The humidity level on the box told him that much. He would need to open one to confirm the contents before he completed his mission. That would mean taking out the men.

  Fangix smiled cruelly.

  The Queen might have healed his twisted obsession, but had left all the rest of his savagery behind. She had done so purposely and with good reason. Out there, at the edge of the city, her bravest and strongest warriors were doing what they did best, killing. But the Queen knew that there was no one else more skilled at death than Fangix. And he enjoyed knowing that he was the best.

  A quick look showed him where all the men were. Six were standing over a simple wooden crate, removing rifles one by one and stacking them in the rear trunk of a vehicle. Two more stood armed and watchful at the very end of the warehouse, where the large doors remained shut. One was sitting on a box tapping on his tablet while the last man stood relaxed with his back on the front of the vehicle. Fangix reached for his belt and removed a small disk from his belt. Behind the belt, a small sphere fell out into his other hand. With both items in each hand, Fangix tapped the center of his torso with his right elbow, and in that instant, he vanished.

  The countdown began in his eyes. This specific cloaking armor had a reduced power pack, so he only had ten seconds of stealth. As he ran out from behind the stack of boxes, the guard sitting on the box put his tablet down and looked towards his direction. Perhaps he heard something, or just felt that something was coming, but he never saw it. Fangix reached him in five seconds and with a swipe of his blade, took his head clean off. The sight was shocking to the other men, who stood by completely stupefied at the sight of the man’s head flying off his body.

  Seven, eight…

  Fangix sped right past the corpse and jumped clear over the crate of weapons the men were unloading. As he flipped over it, he dropped the small sphere right into the box. Stumped, the men looked down at the humming sphere that had appeared out of nothing. The assassin landed fifteen feet clear of the box and ran next to the truck. The guard there had picked up his rifle and was peering around the corner towards the commotion when Fangix came out of stealth right in front of him, sneering and smiling.

  “Boo.”

  Behind him, he heard his bomb go off. Only he heard it go off, for it activated silently. Inside the sphere, two hundred million tightly wound fabrene coils sat around a tiny gravity generator. The miniaturization involved in creating this weapon had cost Fangix a fortune, but it was worth every last ounce of silver. When the gravity generator burst, it shot out each of the coils out in a radius around it at three times the speed of sound. The coils burst through anything and everything within a ten foot radius of it and then, a second later, recoiled back in. To those who couldn’t see as fast as Fangix could, it looked like a giant ball appeared from nothing, and then vanished again. The six men and the box of weapons vanished in a sludge of wood, metal and flesh, all of it liquefied and crumbled in a large puddle on the floor.

  The guard stood there with his mouth wide open, his eyes going from the massacre to Fangix with realization. His face turned from shock to anger and he brought up his rifle to fire at the intruder. As he brought the barrel up and started to fire, Fangix reached out and grabbed onto the end of the weapon. In one motion, he continued the upward swing of the rifle. Bullets poured out up into the ceiling of the warehouse. In that same motion, Fangix swung his left arm and the blade cut the guards arm clean off. The momentum sent the rifle and arm flying into the air above them, spraying bullets everywhere. The sound of the gun and the man’s blood curdling screams brought the other two guards running over. As blood spurted from the guard’s arm stump, Fangix threw the disc in his hand down on the floor and stepped on it. There was a flash and Fangix heard the ensuing snap and pop with satisfaction.

  He pushed the armless man with force against the side of the truck, knocking his head against the side. As he crumpled over, Fangix ran towards the oncoming guards. The saw him and lifted their rifles, aiming at the assassin. They clicked the trigger, but no bullets came. Fangix’s disk had triggered an EMP pulse that had disabled their electronic triggers. As the two men looked down at their rifles in confusion, Fangix reached the first one, and in two quick motions, stuck one blade right into the man’s heart, and then a second blade right through his throat, just in case he missed the heart.

  The last guard, understanding the futility of his rifle, began swinging it at Fangix. He easily ducked and dodged each unwieldy swing. With his two blades in the previous corpse, Fangix instead traded punches with the guard. With every missed swing the assassin connected one or two seriously hard cracks to the guard’s head or chest. After the fourth swing and miss, the guard stumbled back. Fangix relaxed a bit and watched as the man, bleeding from his cheek and nose, struggled to stay standing. He tried one last time to swing the rifle, but it went flying off as he missed. In the follow through, Fangix let the guard step through, and reached around, grabbing his neck from behind. In one quick motion, he dropped the guard by his neck, snapping his spine on his knee. The man dropped, motionless, on the floor, a dribble of spit and blood pooling beside him. Bubbles of blood formed from his nostrils as he tried to breathe. Never the one to leave a job unfinished, Fangix retrieved his two blades, and applied the coup de grace on the dying man, cutting into his jugular and letting him bleed out.

  This is why she had allowed him to live, and not just live, but become her personal bl
ade in the dark.

  He checked his cloaking armor, making sure it was charging up again. He didn’t need any unwanted surprises. He walked confidently back towards the boxes and ripped one open. Inside were rows and rows of vials filled with a black liquid. Fangix knew it well, but hovered his hand over them anyways. The scan confirmed what he already knew. Vials, likely in the thousands if not more, of pure TGX-17, the deadliest chemical warfare agent known to mankind. It was a product of Dominion engineering, and it was beyond a mere chemical agent. It was a genetic agent. It could be engineered to affect only specific DNA markers, i.e., a class or a race of humans. It was extremely illegal, even within the Dominion. It was used once, and only once, in war, and its results scared even the most hawkish of the Dominion warlords.

  All nations, systems and governments had reacted strongly to its use, and after the last Dominion/Sol war, the treaty expressly forbade its future use. Any hint of it would have brought down the wrath of every military force, Sol, Alliance, and hundreds of independent systems. That’s how nasty the thing was. The video footage of that one time use had been wiped and it had become the stuff of legends. The dark kind of legends.

  Fangix looked around at all the boxes. There was enough TGX here to wipe out several systems. That’s why she wanted him there. He reached into the box and took out four vials, tucking them away in his belt pouch. They might have a future use, if he needed it to. Then he unzipped his jacked and reached into the multiple pockets he had inside, taking out several small devices. He crouched over the floor and began to put them together, remembering every detail his Queen had told him. She had devised the item, and this was a prototype. She would try it out here. Once assembled, it looked like a tiny table. It was flat with five legs holding it up. He set the last part on top of it, a small jelly like substance. It spread out over the small, flat, surface until it disappeared. Then it began to glow red. A small timer appeared in his eyes. Ten minutes.