Hell's Hoplites - Book 1 - Thebes - 1 - Prologue

Prologue -

Some Time in the Distant Past

The man who had over the last ten years of warfare had become known only by his rank sat ramrod straight in the command chair on the bridge of the super dreadnought ''Battle Of Breaker’s Tide. ''

The Colonel wasn’t sitting ramrod straight because he wanted to; no he was doing it to keep his fatigue from showing; that and watching as the Holo-Tank in the middle of the bridge as it updated with the latest astronomical data in a ten light minute radius around the Breaker’s Tide and her consorts were the only two things keeping him from falling asleep. Turning slightly towards the tactical section he called out to the tactical officer, “Mr. Anarel what are we up against?”

“We are looking at right on half dozen anti-fleet units, ten anti-ship units, and fifteen smaller anti-spacecraft units,” Commander Devis Anarel informed the fleet commander as he studied the tactical sections smaller Holo-Tank.

The Colonel wanted to curse and throw something but that would have been unprofessional and would have done nothing save to ratchet up the bridge crew’s tension way too much. Studying the Holo-Tank he considered the two dozen plus red marker beads denoting the War Machine Units. At the center of the huge plotting tank were the ten green beads of his own command, three Basilica-Class super dreadnoughts including Breaker’s Tide, the Driven Plains, and Tiger Mount. The other seven consisted of an outdated Fusilier-Class Battleship, three Cayman-Class Destroyers and three Perdition-Class Frigates; an entirely to weak force to face one anti-fleet war machine let alone the half-dozen he was facing along with the others.

Glancing into the furthest corner of the tank he saw the green beads that denoted the guessed at position of the escaping ships that carried desperate civilians under the command of Admiral Novakia Tyrian trying to flee the system and find an inhabitable world somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy. Those ships and the ones hiding in cloak just behind his own fleet were the last of his home world’s population. If things at least went partially the way the Colonel was hoping those other ships would be landing on the third planet of the system; a blue green jewel that his people had left as a nature preserve until now after their own planet had been bombarded with nuclear tipped munitions and artificially created bio-plagues by the War Machines.

If things go as planned, he thought to himself making sure to emphasis the IF in his own mined. Turning his mind away from those thoughts he reviewed the plan he had come up with; the cloaked ships would run a quick orbit around the planet launching drop pods filled with civilians and supplies but no high tech to alert any remaining War Machines that there was a human presence on the planet. They would be starting over literally.

The Colonel literally shook himself as he threw off those thoughts and the bone crushing weariness that covered him like cloak. Looked at the tactical officer again he questioned, “How soon before they’re within our missile engagement envelope?”

“They are currently at a range of 3 light minutes and traveling at .2c; we‘re doing .1c ourselves and they should reach our missile envelope in niner point five five minutes, Sir,” Bereva answered.

“Thank you Lt.,” the Colonel said and then nodded to himself. “Launch our decoy probes; prepare to jettison and fire missile pods as soon as they are within range and then go to pulse mode on the launchers and concentrate our fire on the Anti-Fleet Units first. If I have to I’ll run our magazines dry,” the Colonel ordered the Tactical Officer coldly. Pulse mode would quickly run their magazines dry since it basically belched out five missiles at a time per tube and if they didn’t get them with the first salvo they’d almost certainly be out of missiles and have to rely on particle beam weaponry at close range.

“Aye, launching decoys, preparing to jettison missile pods, preparing to go to pulse mode,” Bereva repeated the orders.

“Chief Tyco; take the inertial compensator safety interlocks offline and give me full military power on my mark, and then give us a slow roll so that we can bring both broadsides to bear,” the Colonel ordered.

“Aye, removing safety interlocks, preparing to go to slow roll,” Master Chief Elen Tyco repeated her fingers dancing across the keys.

Throughout the ship general quarters alarms started blaring followed shortly by instruction that this was not a drill. Crew members, fighter pilots and marines scrambled into their Skinsuits and prepared for battle. Pilots and Marines climbed into their fighters, hard suits, and armored vehicles; gunnery crews cycled their weapons, on mount magazines were queued up loading the deadly anti-matter tipped sub-field drive missiles into their tubes. Thousands of Marines were strapped into Drop Pods ready to set up a beach head if the task force managed to make it to the Sol System’s fourth red planet.

The Basilica-Class Super Dreadnought was a fearfully awesome vessel with fifteen separate gun decks she could in pulse mode put out over 3300 missiles in a single salvo, and adding in the eighty missile pods racked along her deck edges she could put another 2400 Anti-Matter tipped ship killers into space in a single salvo. The seven and a half kilometer long vessel also carried a comprehensive energy battery of over 300 medium anti-ship particle cannons, and over sixty heavy anti-ship particle cannons, which gave her a deadly knife-fighting range armament.

Held in her hull was an entire Marine Corps Division of almost 50,000 marines and their equipment and over 500 strike fighters bobbed in their magnetic launch cradles waiting for the launch order that would send them streaking down the armored acceleration tubes that were still currently covered by the ship’s shielding. Weighing in at 246,000 Megatons she could take a beating and still keep going; which is exactly what Breaker’s Tide and her two sisters would have to do if humanity was to have any chance of surviving the next few hours.

The Colonel unhurriedly stood up from his chair and entered his day cabin off of the bridge quickly pulling on his own Skinsuit; he paid for the haste with a jab from the plumbing connections and then returned to the bridge.

The nine plus minutes that Bereva had told him about trickled down slowly with everyone on edge; this would be the last showdown between humanity and the War Machines; giant robotic thinking mecha that had turned on their masters and who had killed over eight billion military personnel and civilians over the past fifteen years of bloodshed, death, and tears.

Back in his crash chair the Colonel kept his eyes on the two sets of light beads as they drew closer, when the red digits of the timer trickled to zero he sat further back in his chair and locked his crash frame into place. “Tactical you may open fire, Chief Tyco you have a free hand to maneuver,” he ordered.

“Aye, executing primary fire solution,” Anarel replied back.

“Aye, I have a free hand to maneuver,” Chief Tyco answered.

Between the ten ships they had a total of 348 missile pods and as these were ejected from the rails along the hulls of the vessels they spat out over 10,000 missiles at a mere six targets; these were soon followed by an initial pulse mode broadside of another 5,700 missiles. As the missiles drove home at over .3c they started taking losses especially at this extreme of range; 45% were lost to point defense batteries, another 12% were sucked off course by EW systems and either sailed off into space or found less protected targets, the shields of the Anti-Fleet Units accounted for another 22% but that still left well over three thousand anti-matter tipped missiles spread over only six targets; albeit large and heavily armed and armored targets.

One by one the Colonel watched as the anti-fleet units winked out of existence along with four of the ten anti-ship units and eight of the anti-spacecraft/ground combat units.

The taskforce wasn’t without it’s losses however as he felt his own Super Dreadnought buck from multiple hits and watched as the Tiger Mount detonated in an actinic flare as a warhead penetrated her shields and hull armor to detonate one of her reaction induction furnaces.

“I need an update Tactical,” he told the section.

“Sir, we’ve lost Tiger Mount, the destroyers Haberon, and Kideron, and the frigate Palerimo; the Driven Plains is down to a quarter her speed and has lost most of her port broadside tubes, the Fusilier is out of control and lost all of her compensator nodes,” Anarel informed him.

The Colonel grimaced at the last one and tried to shy away from the thought of what the interior of the battleship would look like after loss of her inertial compensators when moving at .1c.

“Sir,” Lt. Bereva the communications officer said loud enough to grab his superior’s attention.

The Colonel whipped his head towards the communications section, “Yes Lt. Bereva.”

“Sir, the Driven Plains’ Captain says she’s going to stay along with the Cederon, Portetn, and Kemidago to draw and keep the anti-ship units off of us but we’ll have to deal with the anti-spacecraft units ourselves,” Bereva informed him.

“Tell Captain Varington good luck and god’s speed,” the Colonel said to the communications officer his heart sinking slightly. Staying behind would be a suicide mission and he’d being losing another friend he’d known since military school.

“Aye, Sir,” The communications officer bent back over her console and relayed the message.

Shortly before reaching the fourth planet the Colonel launched his remaining fighters to try and take out the Anti-Spacecraft units and succeeded in destroying three of them but at the loss of all five hundred of his fighters, the War Machines were just too heavily armed and armored.

The Breaker’s Tide made orbit and started spitting out Marine Drop pods filled with Infantry, Artillery, and Mecha around the hidden facility at the base of the planet’s largest mountain range.

Leaving the bridge in the capable hands of his tactical officer; Lt. Anarel the Colonel headed for his regular cabin one deck down and gathered his two adopted daughters Taki and Kati to him and got them into Skinsuits. After making sure the two teenage girls were properly suited the three of them headed for one of the shuttle bays to board an armored assault shuttle. The assault shuttle dove towards the planet dodging and weaving between fire from the ship, other assault shuttles, and the War Machines as it screamed downwards and into the atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere the assault shuttle dove through the sky at max speed the pilots fighting the bucking delta winged craft as it headed for the facility that the ground forces were protecting and trying to hold off the War Machine, unfortunately the Marines were slowly losing the battle.

The Colonel had an external jack hooked into the shuttles comm systems and the continuous updates he received didn’t help with his frame of mind as the two dark haired girls huddled in a pair of seats across the troop bay from him.

“It’s alright girls, we won’t be involved in the fighting at all and once inside the facility you’ll be safe,” the Colonel told his daughters with a reassuring smile.

The only time he lost his cool was when he found out that the Driven Plains and her consorts had finally been destroyed taking out the last of the anti-ship units and he slammed a fist down in frustration.

On the surface below him the remaining Anti-Spacecraft/Ground units engaged the Division of marines as explosions rocked the quiet planet’s surface as two more of the War Machines were destroyed but they took three quarters of the marines with them.

Unplugging from the shuttles long range comm unit the Colonel ordered the pilots to land the shuttle near the entrance to the facility and then take off again to add its guns to the fight.



The underground facility shook as it was continually hammered by the particle beams and missiles of the War Machines as they rushed to wipe out any last hold outs on the planets surface.

The Colonel and his daughters had just barely made it out of the shuttle and to the entryway of the facility before an anti-craft missile from one of the War Machines obliterated the still grounded assault shuttle.



Hopefully the 307th Heavy Division will be able to hold out just a little bit longer and take a few with them, thought the Colonel as he pulled Taki along with him deeper into the facility under the planet’s red crust. Although his hopes weren’t very high the division would hold out very much longer, it had already been whittled down to little more than a battalion at this point.

The two of them reached the final door before their destination and the Colonel pressed his right thumb to the small glass plate next to the door which slid open with a slight pop of displaced air as the two sections equalized in pressure and a lyrical female voice greeted him by a name he hadn‘t used in quite awhile.

The room that they entered was populated by a single smooth surfaced copper hued console and the Colonel hugged Taki to him as bunker buster style munitions shook the facility and tried to drill into its heart and destroy it. Releasing his daughter he turned to the console and ran a hand over watching as the control panel’s glyphs extruded from the smooth metal he hurriedly typed in the needed commands.

As the facility continued to shake Taki huddled closer to her father in fear, she wasn’t as strong willed as Kati and she knew it and tried to draw reassurance from her father as he scowled at the panel.

After nearly five minutes the Colonel stabbed a finger down on the execute key and the voice activated system came on line asking him to confirm with a verbal security code.

“I Colonel….,” the sound was drowned out by a massive explosion that almost threw the two of them to the floor, “….Security Access Code Zed-Zed-9-8-5-5-Alpha, execute command.”

“Command code accepted, welcome Colonel…,” Another explosion drowned out the voice activated system.

As he watched a thin circular crack appeared in the smooth surface of the floor and irised open a tall glass cylinder sliding into view and mating with a plate with numerous hoses and wires that descended from the ceiling both connected with a solid sounding series of clicks as the two were locked together.

Taking the girl gently by her forearms the Colonel walked his daughter to the cylinder and pushed her into it as a two piece armored glass door parted.

“Listen to me carefully,” he ordered gently looking into her wide frightened eyes. “You and your sister are the only hope for the future, she’s been taken to another part of the facility and both of you are being put into stasis. When you awake you must tell whoever finds you about the threat of both the War Machines and those from the darkness,” the Colonel told her.

“No, please father I want to stay with you,” The girl struggled for a few moments and then broke down into sobs.

“I know that,” he said holding her against his chest. “You should always know that I love you and your sister; I’m not doing this to punish either one of you, but if there is to be any hope at all of stopping these threats, it lies in the future, hopefully a future that is less corrupt than our own era,” the Colonel said bitterly.

The girl only stood there tears trickling down her face.

“Do you understand me?” he said shaking her gently and hating the thought of putting this kind of burden on her.

She sniffled once, wiped tears from her cheeks and smiled tentatively at him, “Yes father I understand.”

“That’s my girl,” he said hugging her to himself. After a second he pushed some buttons on the control panel and a series of rails rose waist high from the interior of the cylinder; gently he pushed her into the cylinder and then pulled a plug attached to a delicately thin wire from behind her ear and connected it to a socket on the underside of one of the rails.

“May you wake in a better era,” he told the girl as he stepped back. Moving to the console again he pressed a another series of buttons on it causing the cylinder doors to slide shut; the tube quickly filled with a golden/amber liquid and the girl’s brown eyes closed sleepily as she started to float in the golden/amber liquid that soon started to flicker with motes of light and her hair splayed around her head in a dark halo the motes crackling along the tips as if in a lightning storm. Her once bright blue mono-suit took on an ugly green tinge as the cylinder finally finished filling and sustaining Nannites and software came online.

Turning back towards the console he pressed several more buttons and the cylinder slid back into the floor trailed by various wires, tubes, and pipes then a burnished metal cylinder slid from the ceiling to conceal these from view.



After leaving the control room the Colonel walked down the hall passing through several security doors before finally coming to a stop in front of a pair of heavy armored doors. Entering his pass code and pressing his thumb to the plate next to the door he watched as the heavy doors rumbled open. Stepping into the room he passed by rows of power staffs and walked directly to the back wall of the huge room buckling one of the heavy rail gun pistols around his hips and slinging a bandolier of hand grenades over his shoulder, most had a blue and white band denoting a plasma charge around the detonator cap but a single one had a red and black band around it.

Before leaving the armory he grabbed two more weapons from the racks, which caused even his own enhanced musculature to feel strained under the added weight of a six-barrel 13.3mm mini-gun with it’s thousand round ammo hopper and a six-shot mini-missile launcher that would hopefully do some damage against the remaining war machines. Grabbing these final tools he passed through the heavy doors and waited for them to rumble closed behind him before taking the elevator to the surface lobby, the lobby‘s pink and gray marble interior flashed brilliantly as missiles and particle beams detonated a few hundred feet from the facility, the shaking causing the lights to judder and shake.

Exiting the building the Colonel paused for a second to allow his Nano-enhanced eyes to adjust to the glare of the sun off the red-soil and focused on the battle before him. He could see that the 307th had already destroyed two of the ten-story tall war machines but at a high price. Of the 50,000 man strong Division that the Colonel had landed with only a tattered Battalion of Infantry and half a dozen guns from the Artillery Company remained. As he watched the Artillery guns rained 255mm HEAP and Plasma shells down on the War Machine Code-Named: Loki decimating it but a return missile barrage from Thor and Odin wiped out the battery sending men and artillery pieces winging through the air as if they were sticks and cotton.

The infantry counter-charged the last of the War Machine’s Spider-Bots and destroyed them but were wiped out by particle beam fire and heavy 13.3mm rounds from the War Machines, as he watched his men were either torn apart by the large depleted uranium rounds or turned to gases as the particle beams ripped into them.

Cursing quietly to himself the Colonel brought the mini-gun up and opened fire rending great divots in the armor of Thor as he zigzagged across the ground avoiding fire from both monstrosities as he closed with the giant War Machine. Reaching his intended target he dropped the smoking and spent weapon as he leapt up and grabbed a protruding piece of the Thor’s knee joint and crammed all but the red and black banded grenade into the central portion of the War Machine and quickly spun the detonator cap off of one and depressed the button. Shoving himself off of the machine he was still caught in the massive blast as he was flung back and down the missile launcher torn from his back as he landed in the dirt broken and bleeding.

“It seems your pathetic efforts will be for nothing,” the Colonel heard in his head feeling as if his delicate ear bones would vibrate apart from the strength of the signal over his personal comm.

“Why don’t you try speaking out loud you Bastard,” he choked out spitting several teeth and what appeared to be about a gallon of blood onto the already red sands around the facility.

There was a loud pop and snap as loud speakers came to life all over the machine, “is this more to your liking Colonel?” Odin taunted as he moved closer to the injured and dying man.

“Yup that is exactly what I needed Odin,” the man grinned behind a haze of blood. “Execute,” he said sub-vocally.

“What was that you said, are you praying to your pitiful gods, maybe you should pray to me, maybe I’ll spare your life,” Odin taunted.

“Nah I always preferred going out with a bang,” and with the last of his strength the man tossed the IR locater grenade at the foot of the monstrosity, the magnets locking into place and holding it their.

“Hah what do you think that pitiful thing will do to me?” Odin boomed out a camera lens on one of his legs zooming in on the ovoid.

“Nothing but I’m sure that will do something,” the man said pointing to the sky as a bright flash of light entered the atmosphere.

The War-Machine only had a few seconds to react but didn’t do anything realizing that it would be futile.

Far above the surface of the planet escape pods and short range shuttles spat from the sides of the huge super dreadnought and were recovered by the escape fleet as they passed by. As the vessel plowed through the layers of the planets atmosphere its shields flared and went out one final pod dropped away from the ship and aboard one of the immigrant vessels Commander Anarel and Chief Tyco stood side by side as they watched the death of their vessel and their leader.

The Battle Of Breaker’s Tide slammed dead center into the huge machine splitting it and then impacting with the ground the heavy battle steel plates used to build the vessel either popping free from the Nano-welds or accordioned as the 7.5 kilometer ship continued to plow into the ground and finally detonate it’s engines digging a deep crater into the ground and burying the facility.

As the Colonel’s life signs flickered out two other things occurred, charges set on and around the atmospheric generators for the red planet detonated destroying the machinery and on another planet a huge computer executed a program, and then put itself into a loop repair cycle to prepare itself for the coming awakening.