Ghost of an Empire (Sentinel Series Book 3) Read online

  “We’ve got the go ahead. Hang on, we're about to drop.”

  Ogho nodded his head. They were all giants among normal men, but within their battle mechs, they were behemoths. Each drop ship carried two hundred of them. Fourteen thousand men, the entire Seventh Legion, along with their support, would drop from orbit, through a hellfire of missiles and anti-orbital guns. The drop ships were essentially orbital cannon balls, fired at a high speed towards the surface. All ships would crash into a gravity web on the surface along a fifteen mile-wide swatch of suburban land just south of the capital city and the large governor’s palace. What made matters worse was that the Queen had insisted they warn the surface of where they were going to land in order for civilians to get out of the way of the impending destruction. There would be no element of surprise. If anything, they were walking into certain death.

  But it didn't matter, because she would be down there with them.

  “Drops have begun,” Ogho’s controller said. She began counting down as the other drop ships began falling towards the planet.

  “Lock up!” Ogho shouted. He was a pod commander, with one hundred men directly under him. He watched as his men moved their right legs forward into a locking mechanism on the floor of the drop ship. A clamp swung into place over the foot, and the entire suit drew up rigid. It was going to be a bumpy ride.

  A second screen popped up on the HuD, showing the progress of the drop. He was onboard drop ship 619, so towards the end of the entire drop force. The klaxon stopped sounding, and an eerie silence overtook the drop ship. Only the barely recognizable hum from the mech suits cut through the lack of noise. Ogho continued to watch the drop progress and let his anticipation build up as the drop continued right up to their drop ship. Their number hit and he felt a slight shudder, a few seconds of weightlessness, and then that vanished, and he was slammed into the back of his mech. The ships were dropping now.

  The bullet shaped drop ships turned and sped down into the atmosphere of Secundaria, building up heat as they burned through the air. The outer hull of the ship crept up in temperature by hundreds of degrees a second. From the surface, they appeared as burning space rocks, cutting a swath through the clouds. The entire drop force had been preceded by two large gravity webs, giant spheres that crashed into the surface and then spread out a net that would catch the drop ships. The entire drop from orbit to surface lasted only three minutes, but already, Ogho could see, the old Dominion troops were attacking the two gravity web ships. Ogho watched on his HuD as his orders were updated. His pod would now defend the second gravity ship. It landed just two miles south of an habitation subunit. Initial readings were that civilians had evacuated, but old Dominion troops were already there, hammering the ship with their weapons. It wouldn't be long before the ships shielding dropped. If that gravity net fell, then any drop ships not caught up to that point would slam into the planet at mass gravity speeds, killing everyone on board in a flash of a second.

  With a minute to go until they landed, Ogho got his first readings of the planet area where he was landing. Several heavy tanks along with a few hundred troops were already converging on the gravity ship, and two artillery batteries were the ones doing primary damage to the ships shielding.

  “Status update men, check the readings. Mano, Titus, take your two Shals and flank around the armor. We need you back there taking out that artillery. The rest of us will engage the main troops and keep them busy. You have to get that artillery taken out. Light them up and call for a strike!”

  Ogho checked back with the orbital information stream. The battle in space continued, and once again, the Queen’s fleet’s superior tactics were making short work of the old Dominion fleet. The orbital artillery ships were in position and would begin precision strikes as called in. The Queen had stressed that no collateral damage be done, so every strike had to be personally called in by higher ranking officers, like himself. He never quite understood his Queen, but perhaps that was his old soldier training. If it was up to him, he would just bombard every potential target from space, and then walk in to the carnage and clean up. But his Queen hadn’t failed him yet. Not even close.

  He felt the net catching the ship. It was subtle, but noticeable. Then came the final drop, as the drop ship was allowed to crash the remaining twenty feet onto the ground. Four hatches popped open around the base of the ship and the sunlight flooded in, along with smoke.

  “Go, go, GO!” he shouted. His mech whirred to life and he stepped out of the drop ship. His HuD burst into life as sensor readings tried to scan the horizon.

  “Podmaster?” Someone echoed in over their channel.

  “I see it,” Ogho replied. “Let's move. Now!”

  They stepped out into a small field. Crops were grown here during the summer season, but it was winter now. The air was crisp and a small layer of frost still covered the ground. Several hundred feet ahead, a row of houses was laid out, and beyond that the skyscrapers of the capital city loomed behind a haze. His enhanced hearing, amplified by the mechs hardware, could easily make out the sound of battle. Ogho spun around quick, then ran around to the other side of the drop ship, still glowing and smoldering from speeding through the atmosphere. Around the corner he quickly spotted the large gravity ship, a large sphere with seven mechanical legs holding it in place above the ground. He watched as two shells came screaming from somewhere beyond and smash into the ship’s shield, sending a red shimmer down the entirety of the vessel.

  But that was all he saw.

  “We are being jammed,” was the response he got. He knew it already, but just wanted to confirm it.

  “Any sight of First or Second Legions?” That was the pod’s main concern. They would fight them if they had to, but each one of them held to the notion that they, too, would see the light, like they had.

  “None.”

  Mano and Titus moved out quickly with their Shal, twenty men, their suits kicking up frost as they trudged quickly through the field and vanished behind the houses. Within moments, all forty of the Legion mechs had disappeared from sight. Those two Shals were two of the best that Ogho had in his Pod; if any forty men, super or not, could sneak past armor and get in behind them to knock out artillery, they could. If they failed, then the gravity ship would eventually be destroyed, and all he could hope for at that point was that the entire drop was finished by then. He turned and looked up at the sky, and he could still spot several more drop ships burning through like shooting stars towards the surface.

  They were at the very edge of the front line, so most ships were dropping to the west and north of his location. He barked out a few orders and his men began moving out, weapons in hand. The first order of business was to establish a line they could defend. The last images had placed the armor moving towards the gravity net ship about seven miles away. It wouldn’t be long till they were within range, so they had to work fast.

  Small groups moved out quickly towards the line of houses at the edge of the field. The large mechs were surprisingly silent, but stood out horribly on the barren field. Ogho much preferred being on the offensive, as that was what their suits were designed for. But they had to defend that ship, so he had to use what he had for that purpose. As several Shals moved out to establish a line, the rest of the men got to work digging trenches out. Dirt began to fly as the mechanized suits dug through the partially frozen ground, carving a zigzag line hundreds of feet long. As some dug the actual trenches, a few mechs hauled the piles of dirt into mounds every twenty feet or so. These spotted the trench line like a crenellation on a castle. Behind these mounds they began storing ammunition while reinforcing the mounds of dirt with metal beams. Mechs were more than a match for armor, but only if they were mobile as designed. While stationary, they were just as vulnerable as a wall of concrete against the shells from a tank.

  With the efficiency of enhanced genetics, they carved their defensive line and waited. Just twenty minutes after finishing the trenches, the forward Shals began
reporting in that the armor had been spotted. Just a minute after that, those forward positions began dropping back to the main line, reporting that their signals were being jammed. Ogho shuddered as another set of artillery rounds smashed into the shielding, sending shockwave blasts in all directions.

  “Here they come,” someone shouted.

  “Channels locked. Let’s hold this spot men,” Ogho barked out. “Spotters, what do we have?”

  A secondary video stream opened up in his HuD, showing the feed from two of his spotters. In amongst the houses, he saw men running. They were just three hundred feet away, more than close enough for armor to hit, but also to be hit. They had three anti-armor guns with them, laying prone in the trench. Ogho had ordered them to be set up out of sight until they knew exactly how many tanks they were up against. Plus, as soon as their enemy knew about them, the artillery shells now harmlessly hitting the shields of the ship would be targeted on them instead. In fact, he wondered just how long until they tried that.

  Towards the west, the row of houses ended into a long highway, with more empty fields on either side. A large clutch of trees grew on the far side, nearly a mile off from their position. He would have loved to position someone there, but he would never get anyone in a mech across the fields unnoticed. Several two-to-three story buildings-commercial properties of some sort- were clustered together at the edge of the town as well, and he knew what they were being used for.

  “Can we even get thermal readings?” Ogho asked.

  “No, sir, they are using thermal bursts. It’s messing everything up.”

  So not only were they in a stationary defensive position, he had no idea the numbers he was up against. The only consolation he had in this ordeal was the fact that no one had reported any other Legions in sight. His brothers elsewhere on the front were likely engaged with them. It was sad that the greatest infantry forces that mankind had ever created were pitted against each other. But soon, they would see the light.

  “Look!” someone shouted out. Ogho turned and pulled him his secondary feed. The spotter had pointed out a small group of men, regular men, spilling out from the side of one of the houses a bit to the west.

  “And there!”

  The third feed showed the silhouette of a tank moving past a gap in two houses.

  “Did you get that?” Ogho asked his spotter.

  “Yeah, just ran it. It’s a MaMo.” Dominion heavy armor, equipped with depleted plutonium shells.

  “It won’t take too many of those to grind up our line, or the ship for that matter.”

  “All right,” Ogho barked out, “I hate waiting. If we have to stand here, let’s make them pay for every inch. Snipers, start picking foes off. I don’t care who and where. Make them wary. The moment we have any armor turning this way, let’s get those guns up.”

  The nearly silent crack of long range sniper rifles broke the silence on the frozen battlefield. Ogho watched with satisfaction over his feeds as the old Dominion forces, made up of slaves, serfs or genetic rejects, jumped and dropped to the ground. They could now hear the enemy armor, grinding up behind the houses. The sounds came bouncing in as if from the far western edge of the town, but none had been spotted there. He knew they were back behind the houses, using the cover of the town to move unnoticed.

  “Want me to send up a drone?”

  “No point. They will get shot down or jammed,” Ogho replied. He had thought of it earlier. “Any way to link up above?”

  “Same deal. They are jamming us hard.”

  They weren’t going to get any orbital pictures.

  Ogho ducked a bit as gunfire erupted across the field. Several machine gun nests had been set up in some of the houses, and these now began to pour fire down the empty field towards his Pod. They were well within range, but easily hidden in the trenches. Ogho watched as a stray bullet hit one of the soldiers a few feet down from him. A spark showed where it had hit the mech, harmlessly. It was lower caliber armament.

  Two more artillery shells came screaming through the sky and smashed into the shields again. They shimmered red again, still holding. He didn’t have the instruments needed to read the shielding, so he had no idea when they might give out. He looked out across the field again, watching the men scurrying between the houses and the fences. He saw two more tanks roll past the houses, vanishing behind the streets in the neighborhood. He brought up the map, and saw the only three possible routes the armor could take to come out into the field.

  He heard another sound, and watched as several planet-bound fighter craft flew past him at high speed. The air cracked and thunder followed. He didn’t have time to identify them, but they didn’t stick around long enough, and were clearly engaged in the battlefield somewhere else. Far away at the speed they were going.

  Several more enemies dropped as his snipers continued to pick off targets, slowly, but very surely. One of the machine gun nests even went quiet for a few minutes when his snipers picked someone off inside of the house. The rest of his men waited and watched. The foe across the field must have known who it was they had come across and were apprehensive about mounting an assault. And that made Ogho smile.

  He was a soldier, bred and engineered for that very purpose. He was trained from youth as the Spartans of Sol in times long forgotten. He was exceedingly confident in his own abilities, as was every man in the Seventh. He didn’t fear death, but understood that death served no purpose other than to weaken his unit. Dominion super soldiers didn’t believe in honorable deaths, but knew they came. So Ogho was relieved the longer it took them to attack. He would sit there all day if needed, and hopefully, Mano and Titus would get those artillery knocked out.

  He could only imagine what was going on in the town among his enemy. If they fully knew who they had run into, they were scared, as they should be. But time was important. He knew that call would come in shortly, and they would be ordered to assault their position, to take down the ship. Perhaps its shielding could hold against the artillery. Then only the armor would be able to take it down, and that meant coming out into the field.

  Ogho heard the telltale screech of the artillery again and braced for the impact, but was nearly knocked back when the shells hit the field directly in front of them. That was the signal.

  The shells began to hit at a higher rate, but they were of a smaller size than the ones hitting the ship. They came in twos, so they were likely from the same pair that was trying to bring the shields down. They had given up on that idea, or had just decided to use it to try to soften them up for an attack. In either case, it wouldn’t work. His men bunkered down, and unless they had a direct hit, his men would come out unscathed.

  In an era of such advanced technology, it was this same technology that had reduced warfare to such primitive styles. Ultra precise strikes were nearly impossible due to the level of jamming both sides put out, so each side resorted to blind artillery strikes as best as they could.

  His snipers continued to hit targets in between shell explosions, never bothered by the shockwaves. It was one of them that called out the assault. The shells stopped falling and Ogho looked up in time to see a wave of men spilling out from the houses and running across the field. They were dodging in and out of the craters formed by the artillery strikes. His men formed up along the trench and waited. From the western edge of the town two tanks rolled out from behind a house, directly in front of the trees, and smashing through a fence, began rolling towards the ship. Ogho quickly calculated their distance and began to shout out orders when the subsonic crack signaled a shot. The shell went screaming past their heads and directly into the ship, making the red shield splash vibrantly.

  “Go. NOW!”

  Two men brought up the anti-armor gun, a long twelve-foot barreled gauss rifle on a thick tripod. While they worked feverishly to set it up, ten more of his men spilled up out of the trench at the very edge of their line and began rushing towards the tanks. The tanks came to a halt and their turrets began to tur
n. They fired off two shots, cleanly missing his men and they kept rushing to his left, attempting to flank the tanks.

  Several machine gun nests opened up fire from all along the house line, towards the men rushing out as well as his on the line.

  “Let it roll,” he ordered, and the full firepower of the Seventh Legion, Ogho pod, opened fire.

  Thunderous explosions filled the air, as magnetically accelerated explosive bullets flew across the battlefield into the incoming assault. Men were torn apart nearly instantly. A single hit by the high caliber weapon caused an internal explosion in the human body, which if it didn’t instantly kill him, would leave him so terribly damaged that he would certainly die shortly after. Within a few short moments, the assault across the crater ridden field was halted and they began stumbling back towards the houses.

  On the western side, the gauss rifle was already setup, and with careful aim, fired off its first round. The projectile sped off without a sound. The thunder reached their ears just an instant after it hit the first tank, knocking the turret clean off the main body. The resulting explosion set off a chain reaction that turned the rest of the tank into a cheap fireworks display. His men quickly reloaded the gun for a second shot. Meanwhile, his men that had ventured out took cover behind a stone fence alongside of the highway leading out of town and were exchanging fire with enemy infantry. Ogho tried to pick them up on a channel to get a report, but as always, the signal jamming was too strong. It was most likely a very wide jamming, hundreds of miles likely, coming from both sides. As usual, they were going to have to work at it blindly. He trusted his men.