Skeleton Wars (2 page)

In the struggle that ensued, two of the ten
Ghoes managed to escape by disguising as palace servants. They ran
away from the palace to the residential areas from where they
disappeared completely after mixing with the ordinary ghosts. The
remaining eight Ghoes were helpless because by then, they had not
yet built a standing army that could have defended them. Even the
servants at the palace could do nothing to save them because the
bandits were outnumbering them.

It did not take long before the other
ordinary ghosts learnt about the coup. Immediately, they staged a
strike and headed straight to the palace to save the Ghoes.
However, Roth and Luthus had already planned for them.

The first group of rioters that arrived at
the palace was left to enter through the Western gate without
impediment.When all of them were inside, all the gate were closed
to prevent more rioters from entering.

The rioters, who were chanting slogans that
were praising the Ghoes, moved straight to the Ruthst Square and
started calling Roth and Luthus to come out of the palace. But they
were surprised to see that none of the guards that had been
deployed at the palace seemed to be bothered by their presence.

When Luthus came out of the palace to face
them, his looks had changed so much because he was putting on a
black crown on his skull, which made him look like a monster. He
went straight to the platform and stood in front of them. He said
no word but instead he raised his one arm and pointed at the
sky.

Immediately a strong lightning came from the
clouds and struck into the middle of the rioters. It burnt to ash
some of the skeletons that were standing in the middle of the
group. Others were lifted up in the air by the violent windstorm
that followed the lightning and by the time they returned to the
ground, their skeletons had been shattered into pieces.

The ghosts that remained standing were
dispersed in different directions as they tried to run away from
this mysterious lightning. The northern gate was intentionally
opened to let a few of them escape so that they could spread the
information about what had happened to their colleagues so that
those who had intentions of striking could be warned in
advance.

Those that were prevented from escaping were
arrested and chained by the palace guards. The following day, they
were forced to start constructing an underground dungeon which was
to be their own prison. For the following seven days, they worked
on this site without resting until when it was completed.

The ordinary ghosts were invited to the
Ruthst Square to watch for themselves as their colleagues marched
into the underground prison where they were to spend the rest of
their time. The eight Ghoes entered into the prison first and were
followed by the other ghosts.

From that day, Luthus announced himself as
the new leader of the planet. He gave himself the title “LORD
GHOST’’ and made Roth his deputy. The presence of the dungeon and
his possession of unknown magical powers instilled fear in the
ordinary ghosts. They were always reluctant to rise against his
regime for fear of ending up in prison. But the more he stayed in
power, the more the ghosts hated him.

The bandits that had helped him overthrow the
Ghoes were further trained militarily and formed a standing army
which he used to pass on his decrees to the ordinary ghosts. The
army would perform raids in the residential areas of the ordinary
ghosts in which it could arrest many that it could suspected to be
harboring intentions of rising against Lord Ghost. For his first
ten years in power, he concentrated much effort in looking for the
two Ghoes that had escaped from the palace on the day he had
attacked it.

Many ghosts who were suspected to be the two
Ghoes and those that they suspected to be their accomplices were
always arrested and imprisoned without trial, on a daily basis. But
with time, Lord Ghost gave up on searching for the two Ghoes,
thinking that he might have arrested them among the other
prisoners. However, he maintained a strong spy network to track
down the dissidents before they could invade the palace.

But all that had happened hundreds of
thousands of years before. Not many ghosts were present in the days
of the Ghoes. Actually, to many of the young ghosts, the story of
the Ghoes was like a fare tale, that was always being told to them
by the pioneer ghosts. Some even thought that the story had been
concocted by the pioneer ghosts to make them hate their leader Lord
Ghost!

From the Ruthst square, Lord Ghost had moved
straight to the boardroom of his palace. He had scheduled to attend
another meeting with all the ten generals with whom they had been
planning for the attack on earth. Four of the generals plus Roth,
had remained on planet Ghostia for all the four hundred years. They
had been left in charge of the administration of the planet. They
would only meet Lord Ghost once in a while for consultations. Lord
Ghost and the other six generals had been underneath making
preparations for the battle with man which was in the offing.

In his speech to the generals, Lord Ghost
first summarized all the events that had taken place in the four
hundred years in their chronological order. They had started with
enlarging the prison into a giant science laboratory, arsenal and a
training ground for their soldiers and scientists, a process which
took them over ten years. The prisoners that had been locked up in
the dungeon by then were the ones that were used to construct this
underground complex. From above the ground, it still looked like a
simple dungeon which made it difficult for the ordinary ghosts to
suspect that something different was taking place down there. The
opening which served as both exit and entrance was heavily guarded
by the palace guards to prevent any unauthorized intruder from ever
getting access to it.

This underground structure was encompassing
five hundred acres and went four stories deep! It had existed for
all those years without any ordinary ghost knowing. But the truth
was that only a small section of the facility had been reserved as
a prison. In fact, only the eight Ghoes were being kept there. All
the other ghosts that had been caught before and those who were
caught after had been persuaded to join Lord Ghost in his attempts
to subdue earth. Some had been absorbed into the military force,
while others were used as scientists. Those that had refused to
comply were forced to provide manual labor on the facility.

Lord Ghost explained that after building the
complex, they started recruiting more soldiers and scientists. To
persuade them to join him, Lord Ghost promised to free them after
conquering earth and to give them better living places of their
choice on earth. Half of the first floor from the top had been
designed as a training ground for these soldiers. All the soldiers
first underwent a basic training for fifty years. This involved
learning discipline, marksmanship and military courtesy. They were
also toughened by calisthenics, marches and close combat
drills.

After that, they went into advanced
individual training for more ten years. From there, they were
assigned to different units to learn working as a team. From those
units, they were further trained as specialists in different areas
for example infantry squad leadership, aircraft operation and
advanced computer systems. Training devices were always used to
simulate conditions of spaceflight and different earthly
environmental conditions. They were often placed in large
centrifuges that could spin up to speeds of ten thousand
revolutions per minute, to get acclimatized to some of the
conditions in which they were to fight with man.

In addition, the warriors had been trained in
tactics that could enable them survive, in case they were forced to
land in a water body or any other place on earth with adverse
climatic conditions, for example deserts and rugged mountains.
Lastly, they received intensive scientific and spacecraft systems
training plus rigorous drills in athletics. By the end of the
training, all the warriors were specialists in sea, air and land
based warfare. Each soldier could operate virtually every weapon
they could come across, starting from simple stones and clubs to
the most sophisticated war planes and missile systems. Each
skeleton warrior was therefore far better than any human soldier on
earth.

But the greatest venture the ghosts had
undertaken was developing their air force. Right from the start,
they had envisioned that an air force with a great striking power
was to be the greatest decisive factor in any battle with humans.
Many aircraft, which had high degrees of maneuverability coupled
with hypersonic flight speeds were manufactured. The whole second
floor of the underground facility was designed as an aircraft
manufacturing and testing plant.

Work on these aircraft began with developing
the alloy they were to use to build their bodies. It took them
fifty years to discover an alloy which was lighter than manmade
duralumin but at the same time two hundred times stronger than
steel! In case of collision with a concrete building on earth, the
aircraft could move away without any damage on its fuselage. The
alloy could even resist blasting when hit by most anti-aircraft
missiles.

These aircraft had been installed with the
best weapon systems possible. They had a high energy liquid laser
area defense system that could emit laser beams that were one
hundred times hotter than an electric stove. Such lasers could
shoot down any manmade projectile including rockets, missiles and
artillery shells, with a lot of ease. By heating its skin, the
projectile could be weakened and then fail due to high speed
stress. These lasers were to be the primary antimissile weapons of
these aircraft, but could also be used to shoot down military
planes in a vicinity of two hundred feet during a dogfight.

More still, the aircraft had been armed with
air-to-air missiles which had advanced computerized homing guidance
systems. The missiles were semi-autonomous in a way that once fired
at a target they could hunt it down wherever it would go whilst
taking evasive action against counter anti-missiles. They could do
this without need for external signals since they could guide
themselves towards the set target until they could hit it.

The stealth system of the aircraft had been
worked upon for more than seventy years. They were totally
invisible to radar, infrared, sonar or any other detection methods
used by man. With this stealth system, plus total silence during
flight, they were capable of passing through the most restricted
airspaces on earth unimpeded. Secondly, they had been equipped with
advanced radar jamming systems which could fail even the most
sophisticated Passive and Bistatic radars of the most powerful
countries on earth. Speed was another plus for the aircraft.
traveling hypersonically at Mach 40, the slowest would take less
than twenty hours to reach earth.

According to size, they fell into three
categories; large, medium and small. The large ones were about the
size of a large ship and were the slowest of all. They were mainly
utility aircraft, designed to perform miscellaneous missions like
carrying large numbers of skeleton warriors and cargo loads. They
could even be used to carry more than ten other small spacecraft.
The medium-sized aircraft were the functional unit of the air
force. Given their high speed and degree of maneuverability, they
could serve as both fighters and bombers. The small aircraft, the
fastest of all were mainly tactical fighters.

All the three types of aircraft needed no
runways since they could land and take off vertically like manmade
helicopters. Another unique feature was their ability to submerge
in a water body and remain concealed in one place or steer through
the water like manmade submarines. Apart from the warriors that had
specialized as full time pilots all the fighters had been equipped
with some knowledge on how to operate these aircraft.

Other weapons that the ghosts were to use had
been manufactured from the last floor at the bottom of the
underground facility. This floor was actually the strongest of all
because it was their armory and missile test center.

After Lord Ghost’s speech, Gen. Cov, the
commander in chief of their forces made a presentation about how
the war was to be conducted. They were to attack earth three times.
The first two attacks were to be preliminary raids and the real
attack was to be the third one. The first preliminary raid was to
be a reconnaissance mission on earth. It was to take place at the
George Bush Centre for Intelligence, the CIA Headquarters in
Langley, Virginia. To every one’s surprise, the general gave a
detailed structural location of the headquarters and how they were
to be accessed by their soldiers.

“The George Bush Centre for Intelligence
serves as the headquarters of the US Central Intelligence Agency.
The center is located at 1000 Colonial farm road in McLean, Fairfax
County, in the US state of Virginia. It is found at latitude N
38
^o
57.1733’ and longitude W 77
⁰
9.1487’, two
miles west of Washington along the Potomac River. The perimeter of
the site is bounded by trees for most of its part, especially on
the side of the river.

“The center consists of a New Headquarters
building that is joined to the West facade of the original
building. The new building is a six storied steel and glass
structure whereas the original building is a concrete structure.
The buildings and ground sit on an area of two hundred fifty eight
acres of land. The center can be accessed via George Washington
Memorial Parkway or State Route 123.”