Ghost of an Empire (Sentinel Series Book 3)

by Richard Flunker

  Deespa threw out her gravity field as a whip as soon as she got into range, tangling the Doomguard by the legs and pulling it over. The soldier tumbled down along with it and quickly stood up. The Doomguard attempted to stand up again, but Deespa pulled harder, lassoing the field around its legs tightly. It toppled over again, and this time the First soldier took initiative.

  He removed the plasma core from his rifle, jammed the clip open, and twisted the cap, allowing the contacts to touch. He fired the rifle at point blank right at its back, emptying the remaining charge and sending shards of metal in every direction, including his own body. He then removed the core and jammed it into the slight bit of wreckage he had just created. With the butt of the rifle, he hammered it in, then dove around the edge of the truck. The blast split the Doomguard in half, tossing the soldier’s legs into the truck and spinning him off the side.

  Deespa blinked then rushed forward, reaching out to sever the internal connection on that Doomguard as well. She reached the soldier, sitting up against the side of the truck. He saw her and looked up.

  “Go, I’m fine. Just the breath knocked out of me,” he said with a wave of his hand. She noticed the small dribble of blood coming from his mouth.

  Deespa ran around towards the front of the truck and saw the Vulture out ahead of her nearly a hundred feet. It was moving slowly in reverse, while retaliating against a relentless volley of rockets from the heavy mechs slowly bearing down on it. Deespa glanced a few wrecked mechs past the tank. She broke into a sprint towards the tank, taking a quick look up at the counter, and seeing twenty seven seconds. She reached the tank and in a single leap, reached the top of the turret. A quick internal calibration set her gravity field out ahead of her as a large shield. She drew more gravitational strength from the tank’s own reactor, and held the shield in place. The rockets blasted into the barriers, smashing off as if they hit a solid metal wall. The force of each impact sent powerful waves down her fingers and arms. The second volley hit even harder, and she felt the impact tear her muscles in waves. The HuD in her visor, linked into those sensors she had put into her own body showed stress fractures on both arms, and she felt the pain building up.

  The counter read ten seconds, but she didn’t know if she could hold that long.

  From her right one of the ATVs rushed out, bouncing over a small dip. It came to a quick stop, and an entirely new sound joined the battlefield. It was a sound she hadn’t heard before, a series of repetitive clacks followed by several compressed tanks opening up quickly. Her entire field of vision exploded in black and white. The ATV had pointed the AA guns down onto the heavy mechs and opened fire. The effect was instant. She could easily shield against the much smaller shrapnel, but the mechs were getting torn to pieces.

  The number zero was blinking in her HuD, followed by a high pitched scream that came out of the sky. Far off to her right, the object came crashing onto the battlefield. With both of her arms burning in pain and agony, she leapt off the tank and ran at full speed towards the crash site. As she got close, she heard the ATV behind her explode under a rain of rockets. A small signal link appeared in her visor, and she blinked twice.

  The crashed object was shaped like an overgrown bullet. As she neared it, it split in half, revealing her weapon of choice. Her own mech suit. Detecting her presence, its body cavity opened up, and Deespa jumped in. As the armor closed in over her arms, she felt a surge of pain medicine pumping into her veins, and her internal link slid out and hooked up to the suit. It closed over her body completely and the powerful drive kicked into gear, sending power through her.

  The suit made her fifteen feet tall, lean and black. She jumped out of the drop ship and leapt towards the heavies. They turned their attention on the new target and opened a salvo of rocket fire, but Deespa ran so fast the rockets overshot her position. In a few seconds, she was among the heavy mechs. Compared to her, they were nearly immobile. From a distance, she was barely a blur as she tore through the mechs like a savage beast. Limbs flew off along with heads and armor pieces. She struck a mech in the rocket pack but was long gone when its ordinance exploded. In ten seconds, she had destroyed seven heavy mechs, leaving a cratered and destroyed field.

  There was a moment of static in her HuD, and Deespa heard a voice.

  “You should be my herald. You are like me, far above these primates.”

  There was a brief moment when the ancient one attempted control of her, but it was gone. It was replaced by a text prompt.

  - He won’t trouble you anymore. –

  It was Stargazer.

  Whether it was truly fear, or perhaps the being knew its odds had changed dramatically, the battle came to an abrupt stop. The remaining Doomguard simply stopped functioning and froze where they were, much to the relief of the First soldiers who wasted no time destroying the advanced mechs. Deespa returned to the tank, thanking it for stepping in just in time.

  “No, thank you for stepping in,” the tank commander replied.

  A second comm channel opened up. It was Fangix.

  “My Queen, I set the charges while the battle raged. Let’s set them off now.”

  “NO!” she shouted.

  She sense confusion among the other soldiers. Deespa dashed back to the truck they had taken off the highway and walked back behind it, looking in. Two First soldiers were already there, inside. She fed the camera feed back to Fangix. In the back of the truck, huddled close together, were nearly a dozen men and women. The soldiers had already helped down ten more.

  “They’re carrying people in these trucks,” she said with a mixture of anger and exasperation.

  “Well shit,” was all Fangix could say.

  “First Tennant Ogho, are you within range?” Deespa spoke into her comm. As the adrenaline wore off, she once again felt the pain in her arms.

  “I have lived this day,” he replied.

  “Bring the men back in, including those we have lost.”

  Ogho acknowledged, then signed off. Deespa looked back in to her HuD and called up to Stargazer.

  “I need to know how the ancient one has eyes here. More importantly, we need to figure out how to blind him. I have an idea.”

  3127 – Twenty five miles east of Lake Aglah, Coran

  “Tell me you have good news.”

  The tech looked up from his tablet and gave Ragula a sad look. He then reached back and dug into his pack.

  “Here. Have this sandwich. That’s about all the good news I have.”

  The smoke was still rising from the wrecked Vinicius, now smashed up on the shores of the lake. The threat had been neutralized at great cost. As far as he could see, up and down the coast of the lake and in the fields adjacent, his brother’s craft lay smashed and burning. Countless lives were gone, all too bring down one problematic ship. None of the bombers had survived, and only thirty percent of the escorts had made it, and the majority were just like Ragula. Full of holes.

  His ship wasn’t the only one full of holes. He spent almost an hour getting patched up by a medic with the brief relief being that none of the holes were going to kill him. Others hadn’t been as lucky. He’d landed his Falcon, but was worried it would ever take off again. So he reached out and snatched the sandwich, and ripped the wrapping off.

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  The tech went back to reading the internal diagnostics of the ship. On the outside, the hull was peppered with several lacerations. The only functional weapon he had remaining was one of the nose mounted cannon, and last he remembered, there was barely any ammunition left.

  “Can she fly?” he asked. It was his only concern.

  “That depends. What do you consider flying?”

  “Will it get me back to the fleet?”

  The tech nodded his head. “The reactor is running at nearly half power and you have only one fully working capacitor. You could try to charge some of the other capacitors, but they could just as easily hold a charge as blow up. She will fly, but o
nly at passive power. If you try to break orbit, it’ll take you an hour or two, and you’ll be floating up like a hot air balloon with a giant target on you.”

  “So she can fly. Great!” Ragula exclaimed.

  The tech ignored the sarcasm and went back to work. Like every other ship in the fleet, his Falcon would go through a rigorous checklist to see if it would be scrapped for parts or repaired. It wasn’t the first time he’d lost a ship, and since he was still alive, it wouldn’t be his last. He climbed down off the ridge, the only place he had managed to land the fighter, and back down towards one of the many hastily erected camps in the valley. He heard the news that just hours ago, the Queen and some First soldiers had left on the convoy he was initially assigned to protect from that very spot.

  Now tents and plastic cubes littered the field. In some, the injured were tended to, and in others, men just slept off the exhaustion. There were more of the former than the latter. Ragula would have to wait now until a transport came down from the fleet to pick them up. He’d prefer they did it soon, as they were sitting in a horrible spot without any real backup.

  He chased down the sandwich with a cup of water from one of the many streams that emptied out from the mountains and into the valley. Odds are he probably should have filtered the water, but at this point, he didn’t care. He then found a cot next to one of the many plastic cubes, and after inquiring about who it belonged to, fell asleep on it, directly under the noon sun.

  He woke up an hour later to the sound of incoming transports.

  Peeking around the corner, he saw several ATVs rolling down the small country road into the field, so he got up to see what that was about. As he walked towards them, he saw men and women and a few children coming out of the back. Civilians, not soldiers. The last ATV pulled up, and from there one pod of soldiers emptied out. Ragula rushed up to the first one.

  “Weren’t you guys with the Queen?”

  The soldier looked down at him in silence.

  “Oh for the love of genetics,” Ragula stammered, taking out his ID.

  The trooper scanned it, and got the clearance he was needing.

  They had been with the Queen. He told him about the battle at the intersection, and how they had discovered the people inside of the trucks. The only thing he could say about the Queen was that they had stowed away inside some of the trucks and were headed north. That made his heart race. His Queen was going blind into the nest of the creature and he was stuck there at the camp without a way to support her.

  “Why were there people locked up inside the trucks?” Ragula asked, but none of the soldiers seemed to have an answer.

  Ragula ran back up to his ship, where the tech was working underneath it, the bay door to the reactor wide open. He jumped up into the cockpit and checked the power levels. The tech was right, there was still power. He slipped his helmet on and lowered the visor, then brought up the comms. He typed in the command and waited a moment for the link to establish. A beep confirmed it. He was logged onto the Harmoa fleet comm server.

  He began to file through all the messages, and immediately picked up on the discovery of humans in the transports. He scanned the messages, and as he suspected, it was greatly altering the strategy on the surface. No longer could just they just bomb the convoys. Maybe that was what the being had in mind.

  Ragula scanned for messages about the Queen, but didn’t find any in his clearance section. Whatever she had done was very secret. He sat back for a moment, then brought up messages from the carrier Euphrates, and logged into the casualties list. He suspected as much, but the confirmation of all the losses hit him hard. It was this reason that the Queens revolution had appealed to him. An end of wars.

  He opened his eyes to check his personal messages quickly, not expecting to find anything. Instead, there was one message. It was from that Martian reporter, Yokido. He tapped on it.

  - Captain Messmaria,

  You must come to these coordinates as soon as possible. We have to go after the Queen and we need your skills.

  He punched the numbers into the computer and brought up a location nearly two hundred miles northeast, deeper into the mountain range. Ragula didn’t know the reporter but from their brief mission together. There was nothing further to the message, and no reply form. Hosha could have reached him in many more efficient forms of communication, so why did he use the simple network messaging?

  “Hey, how much longer?” he shouted, leaning out of the cockpit.

  The tech peered out from under the Falcon.

  “Why?” he asked. “Got somewhere you need to go?”

  The tech was joking. Ragula was not.

  “Yeah.”

  Noticing the seriousness in his reply, the tech came out from under the ship.

  “Like I said, you can fly, but you’re not going to get into orbit any time soon. I’m close to just marking her down for repairs. In either case, you’re better off just waiting for transport.”

  “Just close her up. I gotta get her in the air,” Ragula ordered.

  “Now wait,” the tech started, “you have no weapons, and that reactor isn’t going to give you much.”

  “You said all of that already. Now listen to what I told you to do,” Ragula barked angrily, “and DO IT!”

  The tech backed away. “Fine. But I’m making a record of this. This girl crashes and it’s not coming out of my numbers.”

  “Were in the middle of a war and you’re worried about your numbers?”

  The tech ducked back under and pushed the reactor bay doors closed.

  “Asshole,” he muttered under his breath.

  Once in the air, Ragula realized the tech wasn’t kidding. The gravity field was weak, barely held together by the single capacitor that was fully charged. He took all power away from comms and sensors, keeping only the geo maps open to navigate. He even turned off life support and just vented in air from the outside. Didn’t really need to as the ship had enough holes in it anyways. With all the power going towards the drive, he still was only able to pull the Falcon along at two hundred miles an hour.

  Thankfully, he was hiding within the mountain ranges. If there were drones out there, they would have a harder time finding him. He followed the contour of valleys and ridges towards the set of coordinates from the message, dipping down into a small clearing. Two small houses were at the edge of a large fenced in field, likely used for some kind of grazing animal. Ragula gingerly landed the Falcon a few dozen feet from the houses. When he switched the main drive power off, he wondered if it would ever turn on.

  Out of the cockpit, he was greeted only by the sound of the wind blowing through the field. The houses were empty and apparently long abandoned. There was an older vehicle by the side of the house, but it too already had weeds growing around it. He turned to walk back to the Falcon. Maybe he could get the comms back up and try to figure out what was going on. As he climbed up the ladder into the Falcon, a buzzing sound caught his attention. He turned in a flash, and there, towards the middle of the field, was the DGX that belonged to the spy, Fangix. It must have been in its stealth mode.

  As he walked over to the ship, the side hatch opened, and the short Asian reporter stood by, waving. Ragula ran over and as he walked in, shook his hand.

  “I’m glad to see you. Wasn’t sure if you’d get our message in time or not,” Hosha said, closing the hatch behind them.

  “You could have tried something more common. I didn’t even have a way of replying,” Ragula pointed out.

  A new sound echoed over the ship’s speakers.

  “We didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention.” It was a digital voice modulator.

  Ragula looked up into the air, then back at Hosha. The reporter gave a half smile, then began walking towards the small server room.

  “Captain Messmaria,” Hosha said, “say hi to Stargazer.”

  Ragula stopped in his tracks.

  “The AI? It’s here?”

  “He,” Hosha correcte
d, “isn’t here. Kind of. It’s rather complicated. I think I’ll let him explain when were on our way.”

  “Our way where?” the pilot asked.

  “To save the Queen.”

  The pilot settled into the familiar seat as the DGX lifted up and began turning west. A shimmer of light indicated that the stealth had once again activated, and in moments, they had left the small meadow behind, and were flying up and over the mountains. In the distance, Lake Aglah spread out like a dark blue field, surrounded by a wall of mountains.

  “So, Stargazer?” Ragula called out.

  “Yes?” the voice was distinctively male. Artificial, but male.

  “I thought you were on the Harmoa?”

  “I am. I can be many places at once as long as there is a data connection.”

  “It’s that kind of stuff that make AI scary,” Ragula pointed out.

  “It’s also the kind of stuff that makes us useful,” he countered.

  The pilot glanced back at Hosha, sitting in the seat behind him. The reporter shrugged his shoulders.

  “So what’s the plan? What’s going on?”

  “We weren’t able to pick out too much, but it appears Deespa has taken some of her troops and stowed away inside of the transports moving north towards the temple ruins,” Stargazer began.

  “Deespa?” Ragula interrupted.

  “That is her name.”

  “I haven’t heard that one,” Ragula said.

  There was a momentary pause. “Right. Your Queen is known as Magyo the Reborn. I forgot.”

  “An AI can forget?” Ragula challenged.

  “He have priorities for our thought lines. Perhaps forgotten is the wrong word. The Queen cut all connections to the network. While this tactic would keep the ancient one’s eyes off of her, they will also keep our eyes blind from her whereabouts. Problem is, I believe she is walking into a trap.”