Earth descends into the Third World War and the advanced weaponry of the late twenty-first century dispense destruction upon the nations of men. Gabriel Huntingfield, a captain in the United States Navy, experiences the comprehensive ineptitude of his superiors and decides to join the noble mission of a man who is a director of a secretive organization, a company that had secretly created the most powerful weapon humanity has ever seen. One immensely powerful man, Subutai—the leader for the armies of the People’s Imperium of China—learns of the secretly made weapon through one of his stealthy agents, and as his forces assail the American coast, he rushes to capture the weapon, to harness its power in his quest to remake humanity in his inhuman image.
Gabriel will have his command skills tested and his loyalties challenged after uncovering a deep-rooted corruption within his nation’s government. Ultimately, in his quest to save as many of his fellow Americans as possible, he will look beyond the rapidly failing civilizations of Earth and discover an ancient mystery, a curse that has been hidden within ancient texts and has plagued humanity since the beginning.
Nations will fall, leaders will die, but humanity will continue.
The global Babylon has fallen—its all-seeing tower toppled—and the sky wept warriors as apocalypse assailed the Earth. Destroyed astronautical craft fell from the heavens, their burning hulls scattershot across the crimson sky. Lines of piercing blue light—briefly solid—faded after only seconds of crossing the vast battlefield of Earth's orbit. As debris rained upon the cradle of mankind, hovering vessels lobbed magnetically accelerated munitions from the cover of mountain peaks, shooting across the Pacific Ocean to strike at targets half a world away. These ships relied upon their bow-mounted gravimetric sensors to acquire and track targets far beyond the planet’s curvature as the vast arrays of intelligence gathering satellites, once available to humanity, had been neutralized within the opening minutes of the Third World War.
The battle for the fate of humanity would not end in a cleansing nuclear fire, but by bullet and missile, tactical and precise; as within the first few minutes of World War Three, the nuclear arsenals that had been expected to snuff out humanity were instead precisely intercepted by the railgun weaponry mounted upon astronautical frigates. After the weapons of mass destruction had been countered, the same space-capable frigates turned their massive weapons upon their enemy counterparts across the ocean. These vessels—built by the United States and the People’s Imperium of China—had been launched from fortified hangars hidden within the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and the Himalayas respectively.
At the outbreak of war, the frigate deployment maneuvers were swiftly completed as they merely ascended and orientated their long gaze over the peaks of the same mountains that had berthed them, and using the cover of ancient granite they targeted their enemy counterparts on the other side of the world, fighting for orbital supremacy from behind the cover of mountains as they utilized Earth’s gravity and the advanced guidance systems of their munitions. As both nations exchanged transorbital volleys, the tops of mountain peaks became ruined piles of slag as the ship-killing slugs perforated the ancient cover that stood between them and their intended targets. Some frigates hugged the cover of mountains, while others—piloted by much bolder crews—raced towards orbit in the hope of maneuvering gracefully within the vacuum of space, a realm without the slowing effects of atmospheric friction. Unfortunately, the valor of these orbit chasing crewmen was only rewarded with their premature deaths and the trailing fragments of their atmosphere shattered frigates.
These ‘lance-frigates’ had been designed for extreme range combat; thus, their armor was primarily clustered around the enemy-facing bow in concentric aventails of angled plates, meticulously engineered rare-metal latices that included depleted uranium, titanium, and tungsten. Because of the strategic aspirations of their creators, the frigates had been designed as little more than glorified platforms to aim and operate the enormous ship-length railguns that accounted for more than half of their total tonnage. Although the astronautical frigates were not gargantuan by historical naval standards, their average dimensions measured at least one hundred meters in length, thirty meters in beam width, and twenty meters in depth from the top plate to the bottom keel. Although the lance-frigates were space-capable vessels, they maintained suborbital hovering altitudes while bearing the mass of thirty thousand tons, a mass that accounted for their bow armor, railgun, ammunition, reactor, fusion-pulse engines, and other important subsystems. Each frigate was powered by the newest generation of miniaturized nuclear fusion reactors, a technology that had reached its prototype stage only a few years before the first lance-frigate designs were drafted.
Just as much attention was given to the design of the railgun munitions as the weapon system and ship that fired them. Each magnetically accelerated round was a massive sabot-styled cylindrical projectile that measured nearly ten meters in length and a meter in diameter. The front of each sabot was composed of molecularly weaved alloys in which the component elements of depleted uranium and tungsten were interwoven with interlocking lattices. Near the back end of each sabot, an onboard guidance system provided accurate course corrections by using retractable stabilizing fins and a limited fuel afterburner to account for atmospheric disturbances and help guide the sabot towards the target. Although these sabots were mostly ballistic in nature, the guidance systems of these intelligent ship-killing bullets could target the vulnerable section of an enemy vessel; thus, a single sabot could outright destroy an enemy frigate with a well-aimed hit. Unfortunately, to the chagrin of both nation’s gunnery officers, both nations had the foresight to protect each vessel with a mantlet of bow armor. If properly utilized, each frigate could survive several direct hits to the armored bow.
However, if a single lance sabot were to hit another frigate anywhere besides the armored bow, if that frigate was improperly orientated or outflanked, then the frigate would be annihilated by that single hit. The ballistics profile of the penetrating sabot would cause a devastating tumbling affect when the front end, after being rapidly decelerated by the penetrated material, loses velocity faster than the back end that would then flip forward as it carried on with momentum. During this tumbling, the dense metallurgical slug would flip head over end with supersonic speed after penetrating the hull, thus resulting in a vaporific cataclysm upon the internal systems of the ship and any unfortunate crew caught before its path—metal and flesh would all be equally battered into a fine hot mist.
Although remote control technology had been included with the design of the frigates, the advances in electronic warfare meant the enemy could easily jam control signals from half a world away. Consequently, both nations were forced to risk their pilots with the direct flight and control of their frigates. In prediction of this inevitable necessity, to increase crew survival rates the latest generations of lance-frigates had been designed with an armored citadel located at the heart of each vessel. Each citadel contained critical ship systems and doubled as an impact resistant lifeboat that could endure planetary reentry if the frigate around it was destroyed.
As the third World War raged, and the ship-sized railguns lobbed rounds over the curve of Earth’s atmosphere, both nations launched squadrons of nimble fighters to support the cumbersome frigates. The single pilot craft, designed for both space and atmospheric flight, were undetectable at long range, and to avoid the continuous volleys of hypersonic sabots streaking across the orbital ceiling, they flew low over the water—crossing the Pacific—to deliver their precise payloads. Uplifted walls of water trailed the formations of these impossibly fast fighter-bombers as they passed, for the updraft they created—by their micro-fusion-pulse drives—was so forceful that the ocean reached up to fill the hypersonic void created in their passing. By the time these smaller craft had been detected they were already too close for the enemy frigates to target effectively, and as they closed in, they launched payloads of cluster-missiles from relatively short range, munitions designed to target the frigates behind the armored protection of their bows. Many frigates succumbed to the close-range missile assaults and the cleaved halves of their destroyed hulls tumbled onto the harsh granite slopes of bunker-filled mountains. These nimble attackers were intercepted by similar fighters of the opposing nation and brutal dogfights between dueling strike craft enveloped the lines of hovering lance-frigates, their burning, arrow-shaped fuselages adding to the metallic cascades of destroyed frigate hulls, a scene that duplicated itself on both sides of the Pacific.
Within the opening minutes of conflict—with transcontinental scale—both nations grinded their respective stockpiles of military hardware upon one another, hoards of arms that had taken decades to acquire. Countless hours of research and labor exploded with every bomb and evaporated with every magnetically accelerated round. As fast as these vessels rose from the Earth they were destroyed, crippled, or forced to land in the face of the harrowing barrage sent from their enemy counterparts. The lethality of each nation’s armada was so great that the art of war had been reduced to mutual destruction, a hopeless escalation of conflict that could never end without a great loss of life. So effective was the latest generation of weapons technology that the very idea of assault had been outmoded, easily countered by defending lance-frigates using mountains like riflemen huddled within humble trenches.
As fighters and lance frigates fought for air-orbit supremacy, fleets of Chinese water vessels raced across the pacific, their angular prows skipping above the waves at extreme velocities as their deep reaching hydrofoils allowed them to move through water with nearly effortless momentum. Unlike previous generations of ships that were at the mercy of ocean currents and fluid friction, these modern vessels maintained cruising speeds as high as hundreds of knots per hour. The nimble gunboats danced over the waves, strafing from side to side, as they returned fire upon the distant American lance-frigates with their own turreted railgun weaponry, their barrages adding to the chaotic screen of destruction blighting the American coast.
Other vessels, burdened with much bulkier hulls, trailed behind the nimble combat skimmers, and while not as fast as their vanguard brethren they maintained exceptional speed, despite their large dimensions, as they carried strategically important cargo: thousands of soldiers ready to initiate the coastal invasion of the United States. The seaborne infantry battalions were merely the first wave of boots in the global civilizational war that consumed the northern hemisphere. They were clad in lightweight armor and carried an array of small arms: assault-rifles, marksman-rifles, anti-material rifles, anti-armor launchers, and various side arms. Their briefings had been short but significant; they were not to take prisoners as this was a total war of political annihilation, the Americans were not only their foreign adversary but their ideological nemesis.
The objective for the first wave of People’s Imperial infantry was to secure the western ports and docks for the arrival of further reinforcements. After the ports were secured, and enemy long-range artillery had been suppressed or neutralized, the larger and less nimble bulk-transports—carrying mechanized armor or other heavier equipment—would be able to safely unload their tactical cargo. The People’s Imperial Army would need these heavier vehicles to penetrate the continental United States, where their forces must navigate vast landscapes and hostile terrain while suffering constant harassing fire.
Although a significant portion of the American political and military establishment had been compromised by Imperium agents—poisoned moral and delayed defense mobilization—vast numbers of disenfranchised, well-armed Americans would not sit idle while their homes are invaded and pillaged, thus the People’s Army had planned to have as much armored transportation as possible to increase the survival rates of their soldiers. Regardless of armor availability, and even if sustaining countless casualties, the top commanders of the People’s Army were not averse to sacrificing vast legions of their own soldiers to American gunfire if such a bloody purchase delivered victory. For the ruling elite of the People’s Imperium, what was one life weighed against the greater good? Nothing, as the culture of authoritarianism had stripped every compliant soldier of their sentience. The elite of their civilization would demand them to casually dispense with their own individual lives if it meant their nation, and the ruling party, could obtain final victory.