Ghost of an Empire (Sentinel Series Book 3)

by Richard Flunker

  “Then I think it’s time we call upon our friends the Falcons,” Deespa said, smiling. “I have a feeling our space fighters are more than ready to try out Stargazer’s new network.”

  “Then, my Queen, we are ready to move on your order.”

  She waved her hand and Ogho led them off. As she trailed him, she made the call back up to Harmoa command. They were on the move, and it was time to unleash the AI.

  They climbed back down the ridge until they got down to the bottom at the edge of a small country road. There was a large field on the other side of the road which had probably been a ranch of some sort at some time. Deespa looked across at the empty field. Beyond it was a large stone house, also empty. She wondered just how many slaves used to work the animals in those fields. She had worked so hard to save the enslaved, and it all seemed like such a long time ago. Now, everyone was counting on her. For the soul inside of her that was used to centuries of solitude, being needed by billions was quite unusual.

  Seventeen troop transports awaited them. They were six wheeled rangers, heavily armored and armed. They could travel fast off road, if needed, and even faster on roads. Two of them had been fitted with auto anti-air guns with explosive ammunition. They had some of the best tracking software available, easily a match for fast drones. The real issue was going to be if they had enough ammo for the drones they might meet.

  At the very tail end of the caravan was a long Vulture 3 Assault Tank. Unlike the rest of its ilk, this tank was not tracked, but instead hovered on a pair of anti-grav boosters. The entire Union army only had twenty of these machines, so they were lucky to have one. It was equipped with a twenty-two foot rail gun and two side mini-cannons. It was useless against the drones, but its heavy armor protected it against anything the small flying nuisances could dish out. Instead, the tank would serve wonderfully against any ground unit they might come across.

  The entire pod left behind the mechs. There simply wasn’t any space for them. Instead, they all were decked in the best possible personal armor. It might seem like ditching the mechs would leave them at a disadvantage, but it wasn’t wise to tell any of the First that. They considered themselves just as lethal, whether in or out of the mechs.

  Deespa took her place inside the third ATV, Armorered Transport Vehicle, from the front. Fangix sat at the very front, eyes on a screen. He appeared childlike next to the giant super soldiers sitting next to him, but the size was very deceptive. She had taken a chance on the man, and to this point, had worked out well for everyone, including the assassin. Someday, she hoped she could give him the life and peace rarely given to men like him.

  As she felt the rumble of the wheels move, and the transport rolled off, she fit her helmet on and swung the screen down over her face. She had tied her hair up tight. Her long silver hair was useful for dramatic entrances, but this was not that kind of day. She linked the visor to her wrist pad, then brought up the link to the Harmoa.

  “Harmoa central, this is Magyo command. Please confirm link and establish redundancy routines.”

  The screen came to life and the link was established, then locked and secured.

  “Magyo command, this is Harmoa central. You are go. Be advised, AI coming online, channel 53.”

  She saw the new channel open. A small prompt was linking the word Stargazer.

  “ATV Alpha, link thirteen. Go ahead and link to channel 53.”

  The driver of the ATV at the front of the caravan chimed in. “Locked in. Magyo command, Harmoa command, request permission to display heading.”

  The signal came from Harmoa to allow the link. A new image showed a split screen, showing the camera from the front of the convoy and one from the drone following them from about four thousand feet above. Another screen showed the sub orbital view from one of the fleet’s ships. That view wouldn’t last all the way up to the temple, but it would help for now.

  “Magyo command, be advised. The roads are clear all the way up to Highway twenty and that highway up through the pass till the Royal autoway. We still have no idea how the temple being is getting its intelligence, but it knows where everything is. Everything that has crossed the mountains and into the lake plains becomes a target. We expect nothing different when you cross over the highway twenty mountain pass.”

  They were going to be under fire as soon as they came down from the mountains on the western side. That was also part of the plan. Seven Falcon wings were going to be providing cover for the convoy as they crossed over to the lakeside. They were going to make it very clear the Queen was on the convoy in hopes of drawing out as many of the drones away from the Vinicius. Several bomber wing and escorts would then make a run at the drone control ship to try to take it out. It felt like a solid plan.

  Advisor Clelin had railed against the plan. It was too dangerous, he said, and put the Queen too much at risk.

  “What do you think?” she had asked the Admiral.

  “I think that when you are leading the troops, we win. Besides, if your life is forfeit down there, I can only assume that mine will be as well, shortly thereafter.”

  “You and your humor,” she joked with him. He didn’t smile back at her. He never did.

  It was those moments with her people that she missed. When she had first burst onto the scene on board the Harmoa, as a tiny girl with the body of a twelve year old, they treated her as a child, and that included joking and laughter. But she grew up, physically at least. And along with growing up, she had transformed from an amazing young girl with unheard of abilities to the general and Queen of a revolution, who routinely led ground assaults with devastating effect. She was now the Queen of an empire, albeit an empire under attack. No one laughed with her anymore.

  The rumble of the road made her drift away for a moment. As the convoy twisted around the curves on the mountain road, her mind slipped away to somewhere far away. What would Kale think of her now? How would Ayia react if she saw her now? And Gheno, what did he look like? Surely he had grown up as well. There were times she wondered if she made the right choice. She could have stayed with them. They would have kept her safe, and hidden. But all she had done, it was for him. His stories about the slavery in the Dominion, and the hatred he had for them. She wanted to change that.

  If she could change a man’s hatred for another man, then perhaps, she could change their hatred for another living creature.

  Within moments, and much to her surprise, she fell asleep. But it was only surprising because she never slept. She couldn’t. It was the curse of being part machine, or whatever it was she actually was.

  3127 – Orbit over Coran, support carrier Euphrates

  Twenty seven wings in total were preparing for the flight down into orbit. Each wing consisted of seven ships each. Twenty of those wings were making bombing runs over the drone carrier sitting in the lake while the other seven were going to provide cover for the Queen’s caravan. Each wing had its own conference mission room where they went through mission briefing and parameters prior to launching. For the past several weeks they had been doing each one on their own, but today they were all finally linked again, thanks to the AI on the Harmoa.

  Of course, only Ragula knew about that tiny secret, at least for now. The Queen had promised him that she would eventually tell everyone. It was part of her plan, at least. And that is why, after all this time, Ragula knew why she had chosen him for the mission on Mequa. Ragula wasn’t afraid of the machines. While the Falcons were an Arda sponsorship, that is, they existed because of that family’s wealth, Ragula wasn’t one of the nobles. He had some very far away ties to the family, in the old fashion sex and babies way, and that was how he was able to enlist with the pilot group. But he was no genetic god.

  His mother had been an android engineer for Katsuma factories, one of those weird Dominion/Commonwealth mixture companies on the edge of the borders with the two empires. By all means, the company was illegal on either side of the border, but still worked well. They created, designed and p
roduced the popular Gen-TY personal servant android. It was the third largest selling housedroid in the market. Machines were very common to Ragula, and growing up he had one of the many iterations of childhood friendbot.

  But how the Queen knew about his dark secret, he didn’t know.

  Part of being a shadow company was also delving into plenty of illegal operations. In the case of his mother, that meant delving into AI development. The planet of Kyoto, a haven for such activities, was notorious for raids by Dominion and Commonwealth forces enforcing many of their own laws, especially AI research. But his mom was never caught.

  Ragula couldn’t remember it that well, he was pretty young, but he had images and scenes still reverberating in his mind. His best friend was a friendbot named Shounen, and he certainly remembered him being far different than any of the other commercial friendbots his mother’s company sold. Sure, they played together, but it was Shounen’s stories he remembered the most. The bot would tell him new stories every day, and he enjoyed them. It wasn’t till he was a bit older that he began to understand that Shounen was truly unique from all other friendbots.

  By then, that particular friend was long gone. As he grew up, he hadn’t thought much about it, except for those nagging memories of the artificial friend that seemed too real to be true. Then, on his seventeenth birthday, his mother confessed the truth to him. Shounen was a prototype AI, fully unlocked and aware. She would not reveal any more details to him lest he get in trouble with the law, for his mother feared the men in black would come knocking at her door any day.

  They never did.

  The Queen knew, somehow, that Ragula held no animosity towards AI, in fact, likely quite the opposite. Oh, the terrors of the first machine war had been hammered into him in School and then again in pilot training. The dangers of letting AI roam the worlds free and unlocked were the words of doom prophets. AI were artificial, there was no humanity in them. Their existence was only to eradicate man. Artificial intelligence’s only logical outcome was the destruction of man. The problem was, Ragula didn’t remember it that way. Instead, he remembered the friendship he had with that machine of his. Looking back, he was sure, even if clouded by childhood memories, that Shounen would have stepped in harms way for Ragula. He would have for the machine.

  Besides, the child was only an image of their parent.

  That is why, when the new network came online, Ragula was happy for many reasons. If the Queen trusted the AI, this Stargazer, then he certainly could.

  Mission details were beamed directly into each of the wing briefing rooms with the Admiral and section commanders breaking every detail down. The timing was crucial. First the convoy escorts had to come down to provide cover. This would hopefully draw out a large quantity of the Vinicius’ drones away, at which point the bombers would drop out of orbit to do their run on the ship. If all went well, the Queen’s convoy would get past the waves of drones and the Vinicius would be taken out of the game. If everything went wrong, the Queen would be dead, as would most of the bomber wings. Even with escorts, the bombers were particularly vulnerable to the small drones.

  But, this was war, and things rarely went as planned.

  “INCOMING! INCOMING!”

  The alarm blared mid briefing.

  “All wings. Emergency scramble. Incoming craft, drone intercept and drone torpedoes breaking the well and headed towards the Harmoa!”

  All the pilots and crew scrambled for their ships. Everything would be lost if the Harmoa went down.

  Ragula jumped into his Falcon, the paint job on the rear right side nearly faded and chipped. There simply hadn’t been any time to redo it with all the sorties they ran. The cockpit slid into place and the crew locked it into place. He looked down at his supplies, and realized they hadn’t been able to load up any food or crash gear.

  “Just might be my last time huh?” he sighed, “Good thing I took a piss before the meetings.”

  A docking arm reached out and took his fighter, lifting it out of the bay. It twisted, pointing the ship up, and then moved it out into the hangar. Several hundred arms were moving in the same way, stacking up ships right next to each other in the hangar space. They sat there, lined up like dominoes floating in space. When the last craft were set into the hangar space, the right side of the ship opened up like a claw. In a quick burst, the carrier jumped just slightly to the left, leaving the floating ships now in space. In an instant, the forty nine ships onboard that carrier burst into action, speeding off.

  Ragula quickly linked up with his wingmen and went through the quickest flight engagement checklist in history, leaving out many non-essential steps. He received coordinate vectors from Harmoa command and his screen lit up with incoming targets. His helmet HuD came to life as well as targets were transferred there for quicker viewing. His wing attached to a zone around the Cruiser Vehement, and he sped off.

  “Lock up and start target distro,” he barked out the orders.

  “Am I reading this right?” Side three asked.

  Ragula nodded his head as well. Updated reports were beaming into the HuD. Trackers had spotted more than six hundred drones flying up from suborbit directly at them. Individual specs were beginning to pop up on their screens. Two major drone types, the fast slick MX-0, Mosquito, interceptors and the flying bomb torpedo drones.

  The Mosquito were a newer type of drone, shaped, not surprisingly, like the bug itself. A short round torso with its reactors mounted on top of a long pencil shaped body, which held sensors and computing. The two wings angled back along the body provided the gravity wave that directed the tiny drones. At each tip a single pulse heated slug gun was mounted, easily resembling the vampirical bug’s long mouth. They were rated for a seventy five minute combat time, easily longer than most fighter and bomber craft. Their shape gave them a really hard to hit profile and they had more than enough ammo to last the full seventy five minutes. They were about as modern as drones got and were only found on three ships that Ragula knew about. One was the target they were going to try to hit.

  The torpedo drones, or flying bombs, were essentially just that. Limited maneuverability due to its greatly expanded warhead capacity. It needed a clear path to its targets, but delivered a two handed punch. It fired off a torpedo at a target before becoming a torpedo itself. That first torpedo was always the hardest to defend against.

  “Harmoa Command, please confirm. Visual on drones look like they are from the Vinicius?” he asked.

  “Negative Wing seven,” command replied. “Ground confirms Vinicius drones still in atmo.”

  “Command, then these are Varias or Vengicus drones.”

  “Agreed Wing seven. Trackers are working to try to find the carriers.”

  If they could find the two missing carrier ships, then perhaps they could try to take them out as well.

  His wing sped down towards the Vehement. The cruiser had already deployed its own small drone defense system, and as they approached, their flak cannons opened up fire on the incoming swarm. Ragula looked down at his combat counter, the time his reactor had before it would need a recharge. It allowed him to fly at full speed and fly as if he was in air, instead of the Newtonian physics of outer space. Any time spent fighting the drones was time lost on the surface.

  “Ok boys, make this quick. Fast spread. These are drones, so hit and weave. Don’t stick to one move, or they will pick up on it quick.”

  The closer they got, the more details his sensors gave to him. A pack of twenty drones was headed towards the Vehement. Other smaller groups broke off towards several other ships in the vicinity, but the majority were headed straight towards the Harmoa.

  “They’re going after the network. It spooked them,” someone blurted over the comm.

  The network had been online for hours now, and the few reports he did get that it was holding up admirably to any hacking attempts by the surface. That really must have triggered the attack.

  “Coming into range now, cut the chatter and
let’s cut them down,” Ragula ordered.

  With the network fully online, they were able to share targets once again in silence. Their ships weren’t equipped with the most modern edge technology, but not much was needed to turn a wing of fighter craft into cohesive unit.

  A cloud of flak blocked their vision of the incoming drones as black and white shards of metal exploded in a wall ahead of the Vehement. The Flak wall was useful against larger manned craft, but the far smaller Mosquito was able to navigate its way through the flak with ease and little damage. Only a direct hit from the flak would damage it, and that wasn’t how flak worked. As the swarm came speeding through the wall, the Vehement’s short range defense cannons opened fire, again with little success. The targets were very small.

  “Tor, Gannon, take your sideman and make a dip down under the Vehement. Come up against the bridge. I’ll take mine and go straight down the top of the bow and I’ll try to push them to you. Kain, you hang back just a few secs and watch. They have to have a torpedo in there somewhere. You take it out or it takes out the Vehement.”

  Four Falcons broke off formation and sped off towards the underside of the cruiser. The Vehement kept its cannons firing right up to the point Ragula and his sideman came down over the top of the cruiser. They lined up down the spine of the ship, then turned the directional gravity off. While the momentum carried the falcons down the top of the cruiser, the two ships turned and fired off to the left and behind of the main swarm. Their weapons were more precise than the cruiser cannons, but their purpose wasn’t exactly to hit them. Ragula splashed one and the swarm shifted right along the side of the cruiser. They opened up fire along the side, sending shards of the hull splintering off into space.

  “Kain?” Ragula shouting, seeing the bridge of the ship coming up.

  “Nothing sir, nothing yet.”