Ghost of an Empire (Sentinel Series Book 3)

by Richard Flunker

  “The extermination of mankind,” she stated flatly.

  Hosha gasped.

  “Oh.”

  The platform continued to rise up through the darkness. Whatever chaos was coming was up there, a long way in the darkness and peace. The reporter had no clue as to what to expect.

  “So, now what?” he asked.

  “I need to find a friend.”

  “Who?”

  “A Sentinel.”

  3127 – Coran, Somewhere over the Yvala plains

  “Falcon Tega-three, do you have the target?”

  He was starting to get annoyed with those First Army grunts. They walked, he flew. It was like comparing apples to snails. Three weeks of pure hell and they continued to harass him and his group. Three weeks of almost no sleep and constant action.

  “Hold on to your panties Ground. Waiting for visual on the scopes,” he almost barked into his mic.

  “Orbit is still tracking her. You know how to tie in right?” the voice was becoming more and more annoying.

  “Only got it right the last one hundred times,” he said, biting his tongue against using far harsher language, “I think I’ve got a grasp of this.”

  “Keep the comm clear Ground,” a new voice blasted over the speaker. It was from Harmoa command. “Falcons know what they are doing, just stand by.”

  It was always nice to have your back covered by the bosses up in the sky. The Falcons were much closer to Harmoa than the First Army grunts ever were.

  Ragula Messmaria was tired, and at this point in time, he felt it was no longer something he needed to feel bad for. Several months ago, he and his Falcons or Arda fought against the Queen, and were defeated. It was bitter, at the time, for no one had bested the famed fighter group, ever. Plenty had tried though, and only the Queen’s forces had won. Barely. Then the whole Arda family had changed sides, and Ragula sure remembered being extremely pissed. Loyalty was pretty important to him. How the Arda family could just drop the Dominar for this upstart bitch was beyond his understanding.

  Until he met her.

  It was your typical story. Fighter pilot loses battle to bitch. Fighter pilot meets bitch. Fighter pilot wonders why the hell he was fighting against her to begin with. What he considered a moment of weakness on behalf of his sponsors, his family, was clearly not that, but a vision of the future. The Queen was something far greater than any Dominar. She was gonna lead them into the future, not the crusty old men on Coran. The Falcons were ready to follow her into any battle.

  Plus, they got upgrades unlike any he’d ever seen for his ships. It was easy to buy him with toys.

  Turned out there were no battles left. Secundaria had been a cakewalk and they had functioned as glorified escorts and didn’t see any action. The glorious capital had fallen and the new order was well entrenched. Orders came in to debase and upgrade, downtime for the pilots and crew. He was lucky enough to have been on the floor when they announced the design of three super carriers, built specifically for the Falcons. Life was looking up; it was truly a new world order.

  The night of Metola the seventeenth changed everything. At first he was sure it was a drill. He scrambled into the sky only to see a cruiser coming in low atmosphere, dropping a whole contingent of fighter drones, all intent on tearing them apart. He was in the dogfight of his life when his own pilots began shooting at him. It was like one of those dreams where nothing made sense. He half expected to be flying naked. He screamed into the comms to try to figure out why his own pilots were shooting at him. The reply he got was nothing short of the start of a very long nightmare that was now going on three weeks.

  AI had taken control of the cruiser and drones, and then his own pilot’s ships. And that had only been the start. The planet had barely recovered from the battle over Coran when the second war of Machines vs. Man had started right there.

  No one could explain what had happened, or where they were coming from. All they knew was that every machine that had any kind of automated OS or crippled AI, or anything that could be remotely controlled, was now the enemy. In that first day, the fleet lost nearly half of their ships as they crashed out of orbit in a suicidal pattern. Nearly thirty thousand men and women lost their lives, stuck inside doomed ships as they crashed onto the surface, or were destroyed by those ships that had managed to fight the hacking attempts.

  All over the planet, any machine that could attacked humans. The loss of life was staggering. The conservative figures put the death toll at two and half billion. That was the price they paid for modern technology. On that day, if you were driving a vehicle, odds were you died in a crash. Those who were flying, died. In a hospital under automated supervision? Dead.

  But if that was bad enough, imagine you managed to get out of your out of control vehicle only to get shot upon by military mechs. Artillery guns opened fire on cities all over the continent while tanks roared to life and smashed and blasted through everything. As Ragula flew his severely damaged fighter back over one burning city, the chaos he saw beneath him scared him. And he wasn’t easily scared.

  The only reason the pilot had survived had been one of pure luck. His fighter ship, a heavily modified Arda Ringcraft 3 was still missing a few of the Queen’s tech upgrades. It was the Falcon’s mainstay fighter craft. The ship’s propulsion ring was prominent at the tip of it, while the cabin and reactor sat in a sleek shaft down away from the ring. The Ringcraft looked like a branding iron, with a big O at the tip. It did have wings that extended upon entry into an atmosphere, and its weapons, ballistic guns, were mounted around the front of the ring, and actually used gravity to aim and propel.

  Ragula’s personal craft had undergone some major work in the past couple of days, and he was now flying it without all the work having been completed. On that day, while flying into that new hailstorm of drones, he was flying without a network uplink. This new enemy AI hadn’t been able to hack into his fighter, and had likely saved his life.

  That was the only way now. In a world blanketed in wireless networks, signals bouncing off of every inch of the surface, and through the orbit, it was nearly impossible not to be connected. His own comm device, in his chest pocket, had overheated and nearly melted through his suit. They were using his own phone to try to kill him.

  In one day, the Union military had gone from being cutting edge to being reduced to analog radio. They had to relearn how to communicate using old tech. To fight the new enemy, they couldn’t rely on live data streams and instant orbital feeds. It was hard at first, but they managed. After that first onslaught of hacked military vehicles, the Unions fleet had managed destroy whatever forces this new AI could throw at them.

  But, after that first week, the planet of Coran, the glory of the Dominion, had, for all intents and purposes, been lost. Of the three billion people that once lived on the planet, only several million made it off alive.

  The problem didn’t stay on Coran. All communications to the outside of the system had been cut off. Flights in and out of the system were closely monitored by the Harmoa. The giant behemoth, a product of older technology, had survived the hacking attempts. Of course, most gave the Queen credit for that. She had already sent out several ships to other systems to see what was going on outside of Coran, but Ragula sure wasn’t privy to any of that information. His Falcons had been on round the clock AI hunting duty.

  Every several minutes, a new ship was being hacked and brought down to Coran. Merchant ships, pirates, transports, no one was spared. As each day passed, more and more ships were jumping into Coran and heading straight for the capital planet. A small tiny minority of these were saved, only if marines could board them and destroy any and all computing on board the ships. For the most part though, the ships were destroyed as they entered the atmosphere.

  Ragula could still hear the confused screams of the pleasure transport vessel from Alioth as he shot it from the sky. They’d have no worse fates, for the machines spared no one. What the AI did with all these vessels they
routinely brought down to the surface, no one knew. Everyone did know, though, where they were going: the old Holy Seat Temple.

  Something was emerging there, out of the ground. Whatever it was built orbital guns that kept even the Harmoa from coming into orbit above it. What few sorties had been sent against it had been utterly destroyed and the pictures sent through were inconclusive. No one knew what it was, or what it was doing there.

  Ragula blinked again and rubbed his eyes.

  “Ok Ground, I have it now.”

  He could barely make out the ship ahead of him. Some kind of older transport, large and bulky, and definitely slow.

  “Preparing salvo. We will commence firing soon,” as the response from the ground anti-air units.

  Always so quick to fire.

  “Hold on ground, I’m coming up next to it. Let’s see what we can do,” Ragula sent back to the ground units.

  There were still seven safe zones on the surface, heavily fortified by the First Army soldiers, and most of them endured nearly non-stop attacks by the machines as well. He had seen a few of the video streams. Dump trucks, tracked vehicles, garbage collector bots, anything and everything, would throw itself at the soldiers. It would be comical if it wasn’t terrifying.

  Ragula knew how exhausted they were, so he felt their pain, but he was under orders to try to save any craft he could. When he didn’t get a reply back from the ground unit, he knew he had little time left.

  As his small ship sped up next to the large freighter, he wiggled in close to the two small windows at the front top of the ship. They were light shielded, so he couldn’t see into them. Twice he tried to radio in, but odds were they weren’t rigged for analog radio, especially if they didn’t know what the hell had happened to them. He took the light shield off of his own ship, so that at least they could see him. Hopefully, they would get the hint. Ragula only needed a hint that someone was alive in there.

  Of course, if the AI was in control, they wouldn’t even be able to dim the light guard. He hated this. There was little he could do. An alarm went off inside the cockpit and he saw that several missiles were tracking inbound, clearly fired off by the ground troops. They weren’t going to waste any time. Ragula pitched up and sped off. When he turned his head to look, he caught the first explosion. The missile hit the midsection, tearing the bottom off. The ship broke up and split in half. A second missile hit the rear of the ship, blasting it into debris and smoke. As the front half of the freighter fell from the sky, his heart sank as he clearly saw the form of at least three people fall from the inside. There was nothing he could do for them.

  “There were people in there Ground. Couldn’t have given me just a few more minutes?” Ragula barked into the radio, but there was no answer.

  He banked the fighter to the left and prepared his orbital entrance.

  “Command, confirm destruction.”

  “Confirmed from here Tega-three.”

  “Requesting orbital entrance path,” he said into his mic. The path would come in as analog, and he would have to manually input the path in. It was the only way. You had to keep everything disconnected from the craft’s guidance.

  “Negative Tega-three. We are tracking a new target. New flight path coming in now. Looks like another transport.”

  Ragula looked down at his watch. He was going on twelve hours solid in flight. If anything, his ship would need recharging soon.

  “Copy that command. Running low on juice,” he pointed out, thinking mostly about himself.

  There was no reply to that either.

  “Good thing I didn’t want to eat or sleep,” he said. He looked down at the new numbers and inputted the numbers into his ships computer. A new display came up and he banked the ship southeast. As his craft sped off, Ragula grumbled.

  “We’re not going to last long this way.”

  Falcon carriers were nothing like the ocean bound ships of planetary navies. Instead, they were converted haulers. They were nothing more than large empty spaces for the fighters, bombers and fuel and ammunition. The living quarters were even smaller. Still, when Ragula slammed the door open to his tiny cabin, the extremely uncomfortable cot looked like a five star luxury resort on Ohma Prime. All that was missing were the black sand beaches and the hot women. He particularly enjoyed the culture of the planet that felt that clothing was strictly optional.

  Sleep should have come instantly, but instead, his comm alarm erupted. Instead, he sat down on the bed and reached for his tablet. There was a brief moment, somewhere in between the silence and each beep of the comm, where he debated just throwing the tablet aside and pretending he didn’t hear it. No one would blame him.

  But, he was a wing commander. It never looked good if he missed anything. So he tapped the screen.

  A beautiful face greeted him on the other end.

  “Commander Messmaria, I am glad I caught you before you fell asleep.”

  “You still can. Why don’t you come down in person?”

  She laughed. “Another life, perhaps. You’re needed in commsync.”

  “There is no way I’m needed. I’m needed in my dreams.”

  “Ragula, you know I wouldn’t bother you in any other situation, but, this is critical. You better come down.”

  “It better be the damn Queen on the other end or I’m gonna have to punch someone,” he grumbled, standing up and buttoning his shirt up again.

  “It is,” the flight comm officer said. She gave him a halfhearted smile, then the link died.

  The pilot was left standing there, wondering if he had just dreamed the whole scene. He’d met the Queen once, as a part of the loyalty oath ceremony, along with all of the Falcon pilots. This had to be a joke.

  Out he went, and down the cramped passages of the ship. He was well into his twentieth hour of being awake, after only two hours of sleep the night before, and just a few more than that before. The bustle on the ship was constant. Out in the cavernous hold of the ‘carrier’, men and women worked tirelessly on refueling, rearming and maintaining the fighters and bombers. Ants in an anthill.

  Ragula stumbled into the commsync, a round room. Comm and intelligence officers sat around the outer wall of the room while the central room held a raised console. Several monitors hung above the console showing the several flight paths and tags of all the ships flying in orbit and down above the surface. Comm officer Reyes, his never ending flirt, greeted him from the other side of the room. He walked over where she met him with a cup with something hot and steaming and likely laced with something to keep him awake.

  “I’m here,” he said, taking a sip. “You serious?”

  She nodded and pointed to a side room. Ragula stepped in, where he was greeted by the carrier’s Captain and an intelligence officer he had never seen before. This one immediately stepped forward and shook the pilot’s hand.

  “Commander Messmaria, pleasure to meet you. I am Philip Hades, agent in the Queen’s intelligence unit. Please, have a seat.”

  A Solar name. He certainly didn’t look like Dominion.

  “If I sit down now, I’ll fall asleep.”

  “Yes,” the agent said, “I do apologize. This is a matter of utmost importance. You will come to see.”

  The pilot took a sip from the cup and looked at the Captain of the carrier. He could only shrug his shoulders. Ragula pursed his lips and waved the agent on.

  “Very well,” Philip started, typing on the small console available in the meeting room. A large image of the third planet of the Coran system, Mequa, came into view. “Twelve hours ago, we were finally able to track direct laser transmission beams directed at Mequa from the device at the temple ruins. We have been unable to decipher the transmission, only its location, here, on the northern city of Iglah.”

  Ragula looked around.

  “We believe that there is either another AI, or this is the AI that is running the attacks on the system. Unfortunately, our fleet is base here in Coran where we have the situation somewhat
under control.”

  Ragula snorted.

  “Your disbelief is understood. Sadly, the two other planets have been nearly entirely overwhelmed by the machines. We have zero contact with Secundaria, with anyone or anywhere. Mequa is a bit different. The survivors on the surface have fared better, but the orbit is surrounded by countless ships. We simply cannot spare moving the fleet to fight this threat without losing Coran. The Queen refuses to move the Harmoa away.”

  The pilot suddenly understood why he was there.

  “If you don’t think the fleet can move there, what do you think my boys can do? Any kind of bombing run would be suicidal. I thought we were past that sort of thing?” Ragula pointed out.

  “Not your men. Just you,” the agent started.

  “Even better,” the pilot said, rolling his eyes.

  Philip continued. “We need our best pilot to make his way through this blockade and land on the surface in one piece. We have cargo you need to deliver there and then return to us. This mission is of utmost important, I’m sure I have mentioned that already. We cannot fail.”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking this of me,” the pilot said, a hint of anger in his voice.

  “That’s why I am not,” the agent replied. He reached out and tapped the console. The image of the planet vanished and was replaced by that of the Queen.

  “I am asking,” her voice echoed.

  For a brief moment, the pilot looked right at her. The silver eyes stared back, and he quickly turned away.

  “My Queen,” he said, softly.

  “We need the best, and you are the best.”

  His anger melted away immediately. He wondered how she did that.

  “I will serve. What is the cargo?” Ragula asked.

  “Me,” the Queen replied. Everyone’s head turned to the screen.

  “Humph,” the pilot said.

  3127 – Harmoa, Orbit above Coran