Original Fiction The Salvation War - Pantheocide

[LTR]

Cruise Liner “Carnival Triumph” Hellgate Bravo, Hamilton, Bermuda, November 2008.

“I can't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but thee
For there is no secret lover that the draft board didn't discover
They're either too young or too old

They're either too gray or too grassy green
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean
What's good is in the Army, what's left will never harm me
They're either too old or too young.”

The singer in the Rome Lounge finished her song with a flourish as the Carnival Triumph edged through the ellipse that marked the boundary between Earth and Hell. Captain Olsen sighed in relief as the dim, swirling red-gray skies of Hell were replaced by the clear blue of his native earth. Then, his own sense of relief brought down a crash of guilt on his head. For at least half the passengers on his ship, this wasn’t going to be a happy return home or a joyful visit to a foreign port. They were evacuees from Hamilton and if the weather reports and news bulletins had been anything to go by, they didn’t have homes left to return to. It sounded like Bermuda had been swept clean.

“Any sight sir? Any sight at all?” The Right Honorable Jenny Smith’s voice was a weird, strange mix of urgent, plaintive and wary, she was asking the question but she really didn’t know whether she wanted to know the answer.

“Not yet, Madame, but the damage on shore looks terrible. The weather reports say this was the worst hurricane the North Atlantic has seen since records started being kept.”

“Sir, off the starboard bow.” First Officer Carsten pointed to the shoreline. Olsen looked through his binoculars and was hard put to avoid gasping in shock. Two warships were hard aground, one almost clear of the water and twisted in a way that made it clear her back was broken. The other, larger, ship was still in the water but was on her beam ends and she was sagging midships in a way that showed her damage too was beyond critical.

Carsten was already flipping through his copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships. “Sir, the big one is the Alvaro de Bazan, Spanish destroyer. The other one is the Nivose, a French surveillance frigate. The hurricane must have got them while they were trying to escape through the Hellgate.”

Olsen stared at the two wrecked ships. “Make to both ships, offer them any assistance within our power. If they have wounded in need of care, we will take them in.”

That could have been the Carnival Triumph’s motto for the last few days. “We will take them in.” What had started as a routine visit on one of Carnival’s “special” cruises had quickly turned into something else. The visit to Hamilton had been a familiar trip, one where Olsen had captained a variety of cruise liners over the years. The last visit had included a new innovation, a quick trip through Hellgate Beta that gave access to Naval Base Hell-Bravo so the passengers could truly say that they’d been to Hell and back. That one had gone smoothly if one excluded the red dust that had covered the superstructure and been – literally – hell to clean off.

This one had been different. The weather picture had started the same as usual, the familiar procession of low pressure areas marching across the South Atlantic. Mostly they either were dissipated by windshear or faded away. Only a few would reach the standard of a tropical storm and fewer still would gain the status of a fully-fledged hurricane. Few indeed, but one of them had, it had started to swing north, taking it over the warm waters of the South Atlantic, picking up strength as it went. The hurricane chasers had plotted its path and projected it would make landfall somewhere in Georgia as a Category Two or, just possibly a Category Three. They had named it Hurricane Paloma and the WP-3s and satellites had kept a close eye on it. It was lucky they did, because it had made an unexpected northwards swing and picked up speed. So much so that Bermuda had received only a few hours warning that the storm was inbound and that its strength was unprecedented.

Olsen remembered those few hours vividly, fortunately the shore excursions hadn’t started so all the passengers were still onboard. Instead of taking the ashore, the ship’s boats had been used for a frantic evacuation of the inhabitants of Hamilton, all 1,500 of them. To make it possible, Olson had brought his ship dangerously close inshore and dropped scrambling nets over the side. He’d got the refugees on board and then, with the winds already howling round him and the rain coming down in sheets, Carnival Triumph had fled for the Hellgate and shelter.

Olsen knew that the memory of that voyage would stay with him until they day he died, and well beyond that. It was a memory he would rather forget but he knew, as all humanity now knew, death was no escape from bad memories. That was a knowledge already being reflected in crime and suicide rates. His ship had been fighting the winds and seas all the way to Hellgate Beta. His bridge still had two smashed windows, now boarded up of course, from where the anemometer had been torn from its bearings and flung into the bridge. It had been reading 155 knots before it had been destroyed and that had been on the edge of the storm. His ship had been listing from the wind pressure on its high sides and swerving almost out of control as the violence of the storm nearly overwhelmed her steering gear.

Almost, nearly, those were the key words. Few other ships could have survived such a hurricane striking in restricted waters and the mute evidence of the two wrecked warships and the unidentifiable debris that had once been private yachts, fishing boats, pleasure launches and all the other maritime inhabitants of a resort island and a naval base testified to the ferocity of the storm. Carnival Triumph had been uniquely fitted to survive the cataclysm although that fact was purely coincidental. She had been designed to maneuver her way into small ports, to dock without assistance from tugs and never to rely on local facilities when she made her visits. As a result, she had been equipped with bow thrusters and her screws were mounted in steerable pods that let her put all her considerable engine power into pushing her around. She could almost stop dead in the water and she could make a complete 360 degree turn in her own length.

That’s what had saved her, that and Captain Olsen had trained in the Coast Guard and had performed his tour of duty on the sailing ship Eagle. There he had learned more about the waves, the wind and the sea than any cadet could ever have achieved on a gas-turbine or steam powered training ship. Every bit of that knowledge had been called on to save the Carnival Triumph. He had stood, staring out of the bridge, watching the waves and the winds, sensing their patterns, how they interlocked, how they would push his ship this way and that. As he sensed them, he had snapped out the orders to counter their attempts to murder his ship, playing the bow thrusters and the stern engine pods, sometimes pushing the ship sideways, sometimes spinning her, always keeping their bows pointed at the black ellipse that offered a bare hope of safety.

Sometimes, he had looked at the track chart and marveled at how the computer had made some kind of sense out of it all. His own memories were of nothing but chaos, his ship swerving and skidding before he had suddenly realized the Hellgate was but a few meters away and a surge of engine power had taken them through. Even there, the other side of the gate, the seas were ferocious and the wind still howled from the energy passing through the gate but here at least he had sea-room and not the ever-present danger of being trapped on a lee shore. He had turned his bows to the wind and seas and as he did so, he saw that he was not alone. Somehow, somebody had radioed a warning that a civilian cruise ship was coming through and would be in desperate need. Had it been one of the two wrecked warships? Their radio operators, knowing their own day was done, attempting at least to give a more fortunate mariner a better chance of survival? Olsen didn’t know. What he did know was that there were two warships there, one of the massive Russian nuclear-powered cruisers and a French amphibious warfare ship, and they had said they would stand by Carnival Triumph until the storm was done. He had watched while the Russian cruiser took green water over her bows, flooding all the way to her bridge, and then had fought herself free.

And so it had gone on for sixteen long hours, until the fury of the storm had faded and the seas returned to tranquility. Eventually he had bidden his protectors farewell and limped back through the Hellgate, his ship battered and torn by the violence of the storm but afloat with all her passengers, crew and refugees still alive. Seasick, mostly, but still alive. They’d even tried to restore the routine of a cruise ship, Olsen knew for a fact that the glamorous singer in the Rome Lounge had still been heaving the contents of her stomach into a bucket ten minutes before her act, but had managed to clean herself up, change into her stage gown and give the best performance she could, before running back and continuing to try and purge the effects of a ride the cruise liner’s designers had never anticipated.

“Madame, Hamilton is off the port bow.”

The Right Honorable Jennifer Smith shook herself and tried to summon up the courage to look at the devastation that had once been Bermuda’s capital. When she finally managed it, devastation didn’t even begin to cover it. There was not a building or a tree standing, even the massive walls of Fort Saint Catherine were tumbled. The island, once lush and green, studded with white houses, was now bare, brown and desolate. Smith picked up the bridge binoculars, swinging them on their stabilized mounting and pointed them at the center of Hamilton. It was not hard to see where the Parliament building and Cabinet Office had been, although the buildings themselves were gone and even their sites were hidden by a massive Japanese car-carrier that had been driven ashore. With her single screw and huge, flat sides, she had stood no chance, no chance at all. Then she gave a shocked gasp.

“Captain, there are Baldricks in the ruins!”

Olsen took the binoculars and surveyed the scene. The hulking black figures of the Baldricks were crowded in the shattered town. Even as he watched, they swung the main walls of a refugee hut into place while another group lifted up the roof to slide it into place. He looked a little more closely, there were television crews filming them at work. “It’s all right Madame. They’re helping with the disaster relief.”

“Over here Madame. You’ll see what they’re doing on CNN.” Most non-mariners didn’t realize that ships had commercial television receivers on their bridges. There were things on television that sailors needed to know and often couldn’t get from anywhere else with anything like the speed and efficiency. The news was one of them.

“for the survivors. The scale of the disaster in Bermuda is only now beginning to sink in. It is believed that as many as 40,000 of the island’s population have died in the disaster inflicted by Hurricane Paloma. The death toll might well have been higher had it not been for an emergency disaster team who portalled in directly from Hell under the command of Arch-Duke Dagon. The daemons started to clear the wreckage while the storm was still blowing and have shown an uncanny ability to find humans trapped in the wreckage. Of course their added strength and endurance had made their efforts on behalf of the victims more effective. Asked about the prompt response to the disaster, President Abigor said ‘To provide aid is the least we can do for the humans who have rescued us from millennia of slavery.’

“And now, for a report of the Bermudan disaster from one of the victims, we now go to our correspondent in Hell who has been allowed to interview some of those killed in the catastrophe. David, are you there?”

First Officer Carsten leaned quietly towards Olsen. “I don’t feel easy in my mind about this Sir.”

“About the Baldricks helping out? Like they did after the tornados in Missouri last month? Or after Ike hit Houston?”

“Sort of Sir, the way Abigor is sending them to Earth and refusing to accept payment for them. It’s a bit like slavery if you ask me. We took Hell to stop that kind of thing.”

“Abigor is getting paid Knut, not in cash but he’s getting paid. He’s reconstructing the Baldrick image, reconciling humans and daemons to living together. Every time there’s a disaster, the Baldricks are there, helping out. One day, he’s hoping, we’ll be comfortable with each other. That day, there’ll no longer need to be a human army of occupation in Hell. You know as well as I do what the people we’ve rescued from the Hell-Pit think of the Baldricks. If we pulled the Army out today, there’d be a massacre of hideous proportions in there and it wouldn’t be the humans who were doing the dying. The Human Expeditionary Army stand between the surviving Baldricks and the deceased humans they spent millennia tormenting. Sending some baldricks to help is a good way of buying back acceptance. And also making us feel guilty by the way.

Carsten nodded. The people on Earth had been cheering their armies on, and still were in some senses, but the film of the battlefields in Hell had stunned them. Especially the scenes along the Phlegethon River with the piles of mangled Baldrick corpses that went on for square mile after square mile. For perhaps the first time, they realized the incredible disparity of firepower that had existed between the human armies and the Baldricks. The sight of the dead where the Baldricks had tried to fight tanks with bronze tridents had changed opinions in a subtle but very marked way. Humans now pitied the Baldricks who had stood so little chance and had died not even understanding what it was that was killing them. It was rumored that change in attitude was also causing trouble in Hell, with the refugees from the pit unable to understand why the newly-dead from Earth should be sickened by the slaughter they’d inflicted.

“Madame, radio room here. We’re receiving message from Prime Minister Ewart Brown. He says that some of the Cabinet and Parliament are in a deep shelter underneath the Cabinet Office. They can’t get out because, and I quote ‘some damned great ship is sitting on top of us’ but they’re safe and the Baldricks are tunneling down towards them. As apparently you are the only surviving member of the Government in the open, he would like you to assume responsibility for the Government until, and again I quote, ‘the daemons get their fingers out and finish digging us out of here’.”

“Thank you, is he still on the air?”

“He is indeed Madame. I took the liberty of asking him to keep the communication line open.”

“Very well, I had better speak to him.”

“We can patch you in from the bridge, Madame, if you so wish?” Olsen made the offer tentatively, he had a lot to do and a politician on the bridge was the worst form of getting in the way.

Smith grinned, she knew exactly when the cruise liner Captain was thinking. “I’ll go down to the radio room Captain. Once you are docked, we may need this ship for accommodation and as an emergency hospital. Will your company allow that?”

“I see no reason why not Madame. Emergency disaster relief considerations were built into these ships although I do not think they have ever been properly used. I will ask Head Office, but you can assume the answer will be positive.”

Six hours later, Carnival Triumph was as near to being docked as the shattered facilities of Hamilton would allow. In fact, she was anchored fairly close to where the quays had been and an emergency set of brows had been lifted into place by a U.S. Navy helicopter. The refugees were on their way ashore, most of them looking nervously at the Baldricks working in the ruined buildings. With one exception, as one of the men from the town had been standing in the street looking at ruins that were presumably where he had once worked, a Baldrick had carefully lifted a survivor from the wreckage, a woman who must have been in an office corner where she had been sheltered from the destruction. Why hadn’t she been evacuated? Too scared to leave the building perhaps or just never got the word. She’d been put on a stretcher and carried away, the man holding her hand all the way. His wife? Secretary? Mistress? Olsen didn’t know and guessed that he probably never would.

He had more interesting things on his mind, not least of which were the two telegrams he had received from Head Office. One was commending him for the rescue of most of the inhabitants of Hamilton, an action described as being in the finest traditions of the company and of the seafaring community. The other reprimanded him for hazarding his ship and passengers. He was trying to work out which one to take seriously when there was a knock on the door.

“Captain, I am Doctor Surlethe, the National Science Advisor. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the storm.”

“I’ll do what I can Doctor, you probably know more than I do. You’re still in office then?”

“I think so, President-Elect Obama has said he will keep in place the scientific and military team that won the war against Hell. The political team is changing of course, although I understand Defense Secretary Warner will also be asked to stay on.”

“Florida and Ohio finally made their minds up then?”

“Nope still hung up. But McCain has conceded, even if he’d got both states, he’d still have been down by an electoral vote or two.”

“I was expecting the election to be a lot more decided than this. After all, the Republicans won the war in Hell.”

“Sure, but that was Bush, McCain didn’t gain that much from it and his attempts to use the victory looked like cheap electioneering which it was of course. The Gee-Oh-Pee had lost a lot of its religious people, that balanced things a bit although it hit the popular vote more than the electoral vote. Most of those who laid down and died did so in areas where they just reduced the Republican majority a bit. And the Democrats lost some of the immigrant vote for the same reasons. The people who do the analyses on the voting will be working for years to try and unscramble all the trends but the upshot is, Barry Obama is in by a narrow margin. Not that it will make that much difference given the circumstances. Now to business. You saw the way the storm changed course and picked up strength?”

“We did. Just like Missouri.”

“And just like Houston in August. By the way, we’ve looked back at Katrina and there was the same anomalous course changes and strength increases there as well. You know what that means?”

Olsen shook his head.

“Remember the old saying, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action? Well we’ve got four cases now of major storm systems that have suddenly changed course and picked up strength. Katrina and Ike were subtle, the storm didn’t pick up that much strength or change course by so very large a degree, but these last two were blatant. In Missouri the storm changed course by more than a hundred degrees in less than a minute while doubling its strength and then redoubled it. The storm here didn’t change course by that much, a mere 40 degrees or so, but its strength was phenomenal. We’ve got records that suggest the wind speed at the peak went over 400 miles per hour. No hurricane had ever, ever got that close. Nor have typhoons or cyclones.”

“Four times. And three times makes it enemy action. These were not natural events.”

“No, they were not. That’s why we need your reports as quickly as possible. It looks like Yahweh is moving against us at last, we were expecting this a long time ago and we’re a bit confused why it’s taken so long. We’ll need to look at all your records and instrument readings, But, we want to take down statements from everybody, impressions, thoughts all that good stuff. What really sticks in your mind about your run for the Hellmouth?”

Olsen thought for a few moments. “It was warm, the temperature was going up even as the pressure went down. That’s unusual, usually a storm like that is cold.”

“Interesting. Anything else.”

Olsen replayed the pictures in his mind. Suddenly one thing really seized his mind. “Yes, the clouds. They were spinning fast but usually hurricane clouds are gray. These were black, jet black, as black as Yahweh’s heart.”

 

[LTR]

Heavengate, Hell, November 2008.

Corporal Dripankeothorofenex had decided, upon mature consideration, that he liked humans. In a manner of speaking, he always had in a culinary sense, but now he was working with them, he was beginning to see that the way they did things had decided advantages to offer a poor footslogger.

Take Heavengate for example. The chamber containing the black ellipse that offered direct access from Hell to Heaven was in the center of a massive fortress, one designed for the sole purpose of stopping the Heavenly hordes from invading Hell. It has served that function, and served it well, for millennia beyond counting. The problem was that the way the daemons had organized the defense, there had to be a guard detail inside that chamber. This had led to a game being played over those millennia. The Angels would stage a raid, pile through the gate, kill the guard and retreat the other side before reinforcements could arrive. Then the daemons would retaliate and stage a raid of their own. And so it went on, millennia after millennia. Greta fun for the Lords who could boast in Satan's court about it, not so much for the foot-soldiers who died.

Then the human army had come and they'd killed Satan, destroyed his court and put their own leader into power. After a while, they'd found Heavengate, looked at the chamber and shaken their heads sadly. Then they'd made a few modifications of their own. They'd walled up the original entrance to the chamber, leaving just a massive steel door for access. They'd built a new room off to one side, with armored glass windows so the occupants had a good view of the portal. Then they'd brought in comfortable chairs for the guards, run a power cable in from a generator outside and even installed a refrigerator so the guards could have a cold fungus ale now and then while on duty. After all, as the Sergeant in charge had said, 'any damned fool can be uncomfortable'. Then they'd rigged the inside of the chamber with their dreaded weapons.

Dripankeothorofenex remembered what had happened next, remembered it fondly. He'd been on guard when a group of angels had burst into the chamber, intent on slaughtering the daemon guard. Then they'd stopped dead, looking around them in confusion at the empty chamber. While they did so, Dripankeothorofenex had picked up the telephone and called the human reaction force waiting outside.

"Hi Drippy, anything happening in there?" The human voice at the other end might have been relaxed but Dripankeothorofenex wasn't taken in. Humans could do more killing while totally relaxed than daemons could achieve with a week's concentrated effort. He was a little proud though, he'd noticed that the human soldiers tended to invent slightly abusive nicknames for each other and the fact he had one of his own suggested they were accepting him as a comrade.

"Angel raiding party just arrived." His report was interrupted by a series of explosions as his Sergeant set off the killing machines. 'Claymores' the humans had called them. "We just blew them up."

"Good for you. We're on our way."

Dripankeothorofenex had settled back in his seat and waited for the humans. This way of warfare, sitting back and killing by remote control, was much preferable to a desperate hand-to-hand fight. He had looked into the chamber, seeing the charnel house resulting from the killing machines. Not an angel had survived. Then the humans had come, taken away what was left of the bodies and reset the charges. "When we will stage a raid of our own?" 'Drippy' had asked the Sergeant commanding the team.

"We won't. Why should we? We don’t know what is that side, we can guess it's probably much the same as this. Why waste lives? Anyway, they sent a raiding party through, it never came back, what would you do?"

Dripankeothorofenex thought for a second. "Send another one through to find out what happened to the first one?"

"Right, Drippy. And we blow that one up too. We could get half a dozen groups before they give it up as a bad job and that's the end of this raiding problem, right?"

That's when Dripankeothorofenex had decided he liked humans. He entered the observation room and relieved the previous watch of their duty. Once his own group were in place, he visually checked the Heavengate Chamber and saw that all was in order. Next item on the checklist, he picked up the telephone and advised the human reaction team outside the fortress that he had the guard and all was well.

At that point he turned around, opened the refrigerator and looked inside. There were flasks of fungus ale, some slices of foodbeast and some metal cans of human beer marked 'Coors'. He took one of the cans, in truth he preferred fungus ale but beer was human so it had to be better didn’t it?, opened it and swallowed the contents. As he turned around he looked again into the Heavengate Chamber and it took a second for the change to register. When it did, he dived for the telephone. The black ellipse wasn't there. The Heavengate was closed and couldn’t be reopened. Ever.

Interstate 95, just south of Dover, Delaware. December 2008

"That's the turning, Interstate 666."

The green sign made it quite clear. "Interstate 666, Delaware City, Middletown and Hellgate Golf." John McLanahan swung the family car on to the exit ramp and started to follow the signs for the Hellgate. The whole road was new and showed signs of the hurried construction. The signs though were unambiguous. 'Military Convoys Have Absolute Right of Way.'

"Are we there yet?" John Junior sounded impatient and fretful.

"Nearly honey. We'll be seeing Grandma again soon. We'll make sure she is all right now she's dead." Naomi McLanahan and her husband exchanged slightly guilty glances, they were making this visit, one that was using a substantial proportion of their monthly gasoline ration, for reasons that were not quite so altruistic.

Ahead of them, Interstate 666 split, the main lanes curving off towards Hellgate Golf, the rest reverting to the prewar road network. Another preemptory sign, 'Civilian Traffic, Right Lane. Left Three Lanes, Military Traffic Only.' McLanahan started to swing right and felt the Toyota Corolla lurch as a ten-wheeled Oshkosh HEMTT roared past. It was followed by more of the same mixed in with tank transporters carrying Abrams tanks and Bradley armored fighting vehicles. The sign about military convoys having absolute right of way wasn't a joke, if the Toyota had been in the way, it would have been pushed out of it. McLanahan shook slightly, being at war took a lot of getting used to. Iraq and the Persian Gulf wars hadn't been anything like this.

Ahead, the road rose before falling away to the area surrounding the gate. Cresting the rise, he could see the whole extent of the human side of Base Hellgate-Golf. There would be more the other side of the ellipse but that was hidden behind the black shadow. "See that Junior? That's the Hellgate. Anybody from your class been through it yet?"

"No." Junior was staring at the lines of vehicles and helicopters parked outside. Most of them were red-stained and battered, waiting for the repairs that the vicious environment of Hell made essential.

Another sign. 'Civilian Parking' and an arrow leading off to the right. Once again McLanahan followed the indicated route to a parking lot. It was much smaller than he had thought, he had been expecting a sea of cars, left while their owners visited newly-deceased loved ones. Then reality set in, there were only a limited number of permits to visit Hell issued to civilians and the McLanahans had been lucky. Most were not. He parked the car and his family got out, looking around as they did so. There was a small shelter nearby, marked "Transit Bus". It drew them over and they stood in the metal lean-to, welcoming the cover it offered from the drizzling rain. A few minutes later, a dark green bus, looking for all the world like a schoolbus pulled up.

"Transit Bus For Hell." The Private driving it was bored out of his mind by the constant shuttling. This was not a prized assignment and he'd really upset his Sergeant at some time to get it.

The bus took them to a single-story building marked "Hell Orientation Center". The McLanahans were conducted into a briefing room, one that had around 20 seats in it. The room filled up quickly, the people eying each other curiously. Then, an Army Officer entered and stood at the podium.

"Welcome to Hell, ladies and gentlemen. A few quick words to advise you of the conditions and regulations concerning your visit. Firstly, this is an operational military base, photography is not permitted while on base grounds. Anybody seen taking pictures will have their camera confiscated.

"Secondly, the atmosphere in Hell is not healthy. It is loaded with dust and that is harmful to your health. You must not, repeat not, take off your breathing mask any time you are in an unfiltered environment. You do, you may be back here sooner than you expect. Some of the troops we sent in right at the start of the war didn't have breathing masks either and their health is now pretty bad.

"Thirdly, all of you are here to visit recently-deceased relatives. Be aware of this, the people you will be meeting are not humans. Not quite. They look like the people you knew and have the same characters but they are in different bodies, ones adapted to living in Hell. Think of them as flasks into which the people you knew have been transferred. So, just because they can do things here – like walking around outside without masks - don’t think you can.

"Fourthly, military convoys and personnel have absolute priority. If they are coming through, get out of their way because they will not stop." The Lieutenant looked grim for a second. "You may have heard that we had some protesters here a few days ago. They laid down in the road in from of a tank convoy. By the time the convoy had passed, they were a thousandth of an inch tall and about eighty yards long. Something like a tank convoy can't stop, understand? OK.

"Fifthly, wandering around is a bad idea. Hell isn’t linear, don't ask us why, we don’t know. If you really want an answer, we'll tell you it's because the polarity is reversed but that's just saying we don’t know using different words. But, it means this. You walk in a straight line out, turn around and walk in a straight line back, you will not end up in the same place you started out from. On walking distances, its only a small error but in the refugee camps, that will get you lost. And that will displease us.

"Lastly, when the bus comes to pick you up, you leave. You'll have about an hour or so before that happens. Please don’t make us come in and get you. That's all. Any questions? No? Excellent. Thank you." The Lieutenant left quickly, giving the orientation speech wasn't a prized duty either and he wondered what he had done that had displeased his Captain so badly.

Another bus pulled into the reception building and the visitors were conducted into it. The driver was another morose private expiating some unknown military sin but there was also a professionally cheerful young woman on board. She handed out breathing masks as the visitors entered. Once they were all seated, the bus pulled out as she checked everybody had their masks on properly. "Did you all get your lecture from the Lieutenant?" There was a mumble of agreement. "He is a bit fierce isn't he? Still, Hell is a hostile environment, but you follow his advice and its safe enough. He probably skidded you past the questions bit so if I can answer anything. My name is Elva by the way, Elva Jones."

The bus slipped through the Hellgate and the inside darkened as the overcast Earth sky was replaced by the red-gray of Hell. Junior stuck his hand up. "You're not wearing a mask."

A chuckle went around the bus at the boy's presumption. The guide smiled for the same reason. "I don’t have to Johnny. I'm dead you see."

One of the men up near the front of the bus couldn’t help but ask. "Miss, ummm, how did you…"

"Die? I was an air hostess and my plane crashed. So, when I was rescued, I got this job." She looked at the man who was about to ask something else. "A DC-2, remember them?" The man nodded and she smiled at him, not many people knew much about old airliners.

"People, we're now entering the Phelan Plain. This is named after Philip Phelan, a mall security guard who gave his life to rescue a group of schoolgirls from a Baldrick attack. We're hoping we’ll find him soon so he can come visit us. The Phelan Plain is where everybody stays after they arrive or are rescued, until they find a better place of course. Now. We're going to the American Arrivals Area, all the people you want to see are there. Just give me your ticket, I'll tell you where to get off and give you a map."

"Miss Jones, the Lieutenant said that people are different. Will we be able to recognize…"

"Certainly. If your relative died before middle-age, menopause for women, they'll look just the way they did when they died. If they died much older, they'll look the way they did in middle age. To quote the Lieutenant, don't ask us why, we don’t know. Right, first stop. Mr and Mrs McLanahan and your son? Here you are, just follow the map, it's only a few yards."

Elva had been right, the small hut allocated to Rose Matthews, Naomi McLanahan's mother, was only a few yards away from the bus stop. Privately, McLanahan guessed that wasn't an accident, that the bus routes were planned to drop each group off close to their destination.

"Oh Naomi, its so good to see you. And you brought little Johnnie too. Come in, why don’t you, it’s a bit small but it's only temporary. Johnnie, would you like a drink or something to eat? You can come in too John." John McLanahan reflected that being dead hadn't affected his mother-in-law at all. Physically though, the change was stunning. When he had last seen her, she had been on a bed in the hospice, breathing through a tube in her nose and fading away as the lung cancer had killed her. Now, she looked like a well-preserved mid-forties, very much like Naomi's sister rather than her mother. And so, he followed them in and settled down

The problem really was that nobody had actually created a set of etiquette rules for speaking to dead people. The ridiculous mummery that the fake mediums had invented when they 'spoke to the dead' were of no help at all and a lot of the normal small-talk subjects just weren't relevant. So, the conversations staggered along. Eventually, it found an interesting area where Rose Matthews started to tell her guests about the people living around her. Oddly it had been Junior who had sparked it off when he had asked his grandmother if she'd met Jesse James yet.

"Goodness me no. Nobody around here is famous. But then, there are so few really famous people and there are so many of us, I suppose the chances of meeting a famous person are very low. But if I see Jesse James, I'll tell him you asked after him." Grandmother and parents exchanged adult glances at that. She'd gone on to speak of her neighbors, of the new arrivals who exchanged news and opinions on what was happening on Earth and how they looked after those who had been rescued from the Hellpit. They'd been shattered by the experience and it took them a long time to realize the horror was over.

"So you are staying here Mother?" Naomi asked the question delicately but her mother's eyes twinkled. She guessed her daughter and son-in-law were finally getting around to the real reason for their visit.

"Here? Oh no, certainly not. This is just temporary until my Villa is built. Should be ready in a few weeks."

"Your villa momma?" Naomi didn't like the sound of that.

"I'm going to be a citizen of the New Roman Republic. I've even got my citizenship paper, look, it says here 'In the year of the consulships of Gaius Julius Caesar and Jade Kim, Rose Matthews being a landowner in the New Roman Republic, is accorded all the virtues and privileges due to a Citizen of Rome."

"Look Rose, we wanted to talk to you about this. When you died, the lawyers said you'd changed your will and left all your money to yourself."

"That's right John. Changed it myself. Saw the advertisements on television while I was staying in the hospice and thought, well that sounds like a good idea. So, I made some inquiries and decided it really was a good idea."

"But, we thought we would be the executors of your estate." McLanahan was trying to find a way of complaining about being left nothing without actually saying so.

"And you thought you would be inheriting everything when I was gone? Not going to happen. I'm sorry John but Mark and I worked hard all our lives to save for what we had. We owned our house free and clear, when Mark died, we didn't owe a penny to anybody. He's out here somewhere, maybe still in the Hellpit, perhaps he's been rescued already and we just haven't found each other. That takes time you know, even with computers to help out. But, when he is rescued or we do find each other, I want a nice home ready for him, just the way we left our old one, free and clear.

"Oh can I meet Julius Caesar?" Junior sounded awe-struck at actually meeting Caesar, it even beat the chance of meeting Jesse James.

"Certainly, the First Consul is always touring Rome, meeting the people. So does the Second Consul, you come to stay at my Villa Johnny and you’re sure to see them."

Junior sat back, his eyes glowing at the prospect. Rose stared at her daughter and son-in-law, her eyes triumphant and just a little malicious. "How often have you two refinanced your house? To pay off credit cards, buy that new trendy in-thing you just have to have and then threw away as soon as you got bored with it? Well, you'd better change your ways because you're getting nothing from me. All the killjoys were wrong, now we can take it with us and that's just what I've done. So have nearly all my friends at the Hospice. There's going to be a lot of disappointed kids who won’t get the windfall they're expecting and serve them right. Mark and I made it on our own and now we're going to enjoy it. I suggest you start to think about doing the same because when you die – when Naomi, it's not an if – you'll need everything you've saved as well. Or, you'll spend eternity living in a little shack like this and working on a road gang to earn money.

There was a long silence. Then Naomi broke it. "What will you be doing in Rome mother?"

"Me? I'll be going back to work of course. Sewing clothes, just a few hours now and then, enough to make some friends and keep boredom at bay. There's going to be factories in New Rome as well and if I get my feet under the table now, I can grow with them. And I might even buy a few shares in them, nothing like owning things is there?"

Once again, there was a few minutes silence as the McLanahan's digested the situation. They'd spent their lives working on the basis that they would be inheriting their family property in due course, now at least half of it had just gone. Probably all of it, John McLanahan thought, for it was unlikely that his father would do anything differently. Quite unexpectedly, his family had been hit with a financial crisis of unexpected proportions. Eventually conversation resumed but it was stilted and awkward until the time came for them to leave and catch the bus back to the Hellgate.

As the door closed behind them, Naomi clutched her husband's arm. "Oh John, what are we going to do?"

"I don't know darling, I just don’t know."

 

[LTR]

Sky over Acara, Brazil. December 2008

In the dark skies of night, illuminated only by the glitter of the stars, a great figure, black as obsidian in the darkness, glided on outstretched wings. Beneath it, the activity of the world appeared to slow down and its sounds muted as if the world and all who lived within it were pausing out of respect for the monstrous being that flew over its head. Yet Uriel was not deceived by the appearance nor did he expect respect for his person. Those who lived underneath were humans and they had defied the almighty will of Yahweh. Not just defied it, but broken it and cast the pieces back in His divine face. They had resisted His commandments, their armies had invaded the realm of the Divine Enemy and cast him down. "Blown him up to the max," as Michael-Lan had put it.

Uriel did not quite know what to make of The Eternal General, Commander of the Armies of the One Above All. He had changed in the last millennia or so, there was a levity in his persona that had been missing from the grimly determined commander who had fought the Divine Enemy throughout the Great Celestial War and led the final charge that had broken the Enemy's last great effort. Sometimes Uriel even questioned whether Michael-Lan was still loyal to the One Above All but he had always dismissed those doubts. He had not dared raise the matter with the others in the First Tier of Archangels. Gabriel and Raphael would have laughed at the very idea. Azrael would have taken the suggestion as a personal affront and even questioned whether the very suggestion was indicative of Uriel's own lack of loyalty. Raguel would have demanded proof of the accusation as was his way and when it had not been forthcoming, would have dared to judge even Uriel himself. Zadkiel would have merely stated that mercy and tolerance were the primary virtues and Uriel might do well to practice them.

It caused great frustration and anger to Uriel that he, the sword and the scythe of the One Above All, the one whose very passing caused entire nations to weep bitter tears, could have doubts about Michael-Lan's loyalty and yet be unable to voice them. Nor was that the only reason for his anger and resentment. For the fact was that the humans were shutting him out of larger portions of their world. He had told his acolytes that the industrialized, developed areas of the world repelled him and he abhorred its clinical acceptance of death as an inconvenience to be wrapped in legal paper and forgotten. He had claimed that the less developed areas of the world still knew how to grieve and has their primal connection to death and mortality. It sounded good and it had much truth in it but it was still a lie.

Uriel no longer haunted the developed areas of the world because it was too dangerous for him to do so.

The change had started some sixty years before, a small change then and beneath Uriel's notice. The humans had invented something that made his skin itch and revealed his presence known to those below. From those small beginnings, the things had spread across the world, covering it with small spots where his skin had become uncomfortable. Then, the humans had linked those spots into great sheets that covered whole countries and they had built weapons that could threaten even Uriel himself. He had learned that when the humans had sent their great burning lances through the sky after him and they had sent those who flew their aircraft to hunt him down. They knew not what or who they were dealing with but they responded with violence as had always been their way only now their ability to destroy was growing at rates the Hosts could not comprehend. He had told the One Above All of the change for all the good that had done. Lost in the surrounding miasma from the praise of his choir, the warning had gone unnoticed. He had told Michael-Lan who had simply replied "don’t sweat it Bro."

What was a 'bro'? And why had the General ignored the warning? Was he, Uriel, the only one who understood the threat developing on Earth? Perhaps then but not now. The destruction of the Eternal Enemy's Kingdom and its occupation by humans had finally gained the attention of the Hosts and his warnings were at last justified, little reward he had got for them. Nor had the ever-growing web of human weapons and warning systems ceased to grow, they had spread from country to country, reaching out ever further, ever higher, crowding him away from the rich pastures of the developed world into the sparser, less populated areas. There, it was true that there death still had its terror and mystery but in truth the death that Uriel now feared was his own. He had never before believed that humans could kill those in even the lowest levels of the Host let alone the glittering archangels but the Eternal Enemy was dead at human hands and Uriel knew if the humans could find him, they would kill him with just as much dispassionate ruthlessness. Uriel looked at the humans and now he knew fear because they were killers with abilities that matched even his.

But, for now, here in time and space what Uriel wanted and what he must do were the sole thing in his universe. He looked down on the small town that lay beneath him, the crowded areas where the poorest lived, the great mansions of the rich and the smaller homes of those who lay between those two great extremes. He surveyed them and nodded as if coming to a decision yet the fate of those people had already been decided. It was merely Uriel's vanity that implied there might yet be a decision made. His hand was already raised and he swept it over the town below, his benison chanted in tones dire with portent. “Peace be with you and my peace I grant you.”

Once there had been a time when every single living thing in the town, down to the angrily buzzing mosquitos and the languid grace of the dragonflies would have dropped to the earth in that instant instant. Those days also had gone. The animals and insects dies, that much was certain but the humans did not and resisted the divine command. Uriel concentrated, stepping up the power of his assault, driving down on the minds beneath him. Eventually, he felt the weakest down below crumble and their defenses collapse. In that instant they died. Even so, there were those who continued to resist and their defenses were too strong for the assault. Exhausted from the effort, Uriel turned in a slow beautiful motion and flew away, the light of the stars reflecting off the ebony wings jutting from his back. His work here was done, as much of it that was within his power. And that was the thing that drove his mind for he had never before experienced the concept that his power could be limited.

Conference Room, White House, Washington D.C. December 2008

"I'm afraid your going to have to get used to these things Barry." President Bush looked at the President-Elect with a considerable degree of sympathy. "They're more interesting now of course, my Daddy said that the ones in his term were incredibly dull."

A swirl of laughter ran around the room. It was crowded, there were effectively two teams present in a room designed for one. The War Cabinet itself, serving President Bush and the Transition team, preparing the way for President Obama. "Well, the Chinese did always tell us to beware of interesting times." Obama repeated the platitude with a certain degree of relish.

"True, and they don’t get any more interesting than this. General Petraeus, the situation in Hell if you please?"

General of the Armies David Petraeus, his six stars clearly visible on the great TV screen that dominated one end of the room, shuffled the papers in front of him. Only one other American had been awarded a sixth star, George Washington himself. Washington had got his for saving an entire country, Petraeus for saving the human race. "Mister President, Mister President-Elect, the Human Expeditionary Army is continuing to grow towards its final strength. The major problems continue to be spares, equipment and support. Our fuel and ammunition stocks are low, much of our equipment in unserviceable and in urgent need of renovation while new production is still inadequate. The truth is, I now have, on paper, five Army Groups yet in terms of available forces, I barely have more forces available than those at my disposal during major combat operations. Fewer if anything, the Russians have hit some nightmarish problems in their occupation zone that are trying down a large proportion of their Army Group. If it wasn't for the arrival of the Chinese Army group, we would be in severe difficulties."

"I thought we'd won this war?" Obama was confused, the picture he was getting was very different from his preconceptions. That applied to a lot of areas, he was beginning to realize just how unprepared for the Presidency he was.

Bush smiled in response. "Barry, don't worry about it. Everybody, but everybody who has ever sat in this office was totally unprepared for it. My daddy was Vice-President for eight years and he didn't have any idea of the burdens involved, same for Bill, same for me. You'll grow into this office, everybody does. Now, on the war, yes, we won the first campaign and we kicked the snot out of Satan and his crew. Dave Petraeus made it look easy but it wasn't. We ran our ammunition stocks pretty close to zero and wore our equipment all the way down. If Satan had hung on just a little longer, we'd have had some real problems. We've had some months to recuperate but we're still weak. Dave, you said the Russians are having problems?"

"They are Mister President, we haven't got too much in the way of details but they ran into something totally unexpected and they're having Hell's own job in handling it. We're expecting more of the same ourselves. Hell is a really big place, we've only occupied a small area of it and we haven't mapped much more. The Baldricks occupied two areas, one around the Hell-pit, the other up at Tartarus and those we hold, but pretty much everywhere else, and that's around 90 percent of the land area is unexplored and, we thought, unoccupied. Only it isn't as the Russians found out. So, we confidently expect to hit something similar ourselves. The other thing is, the Heavengate we found? It's shut down. We can't reopen it, apparently it requires naga or their equivalents at both ends to open a gate between Heaven and Hell. Once co-operation was withdrawn at one end, the thing just shut down."

"General, what can my new Administration do to improve things?"

"Not very much Sir to be honest. Just keep production up and keep the equipment flowing through to us. I'm not sure there is much scope for enhancing production still further. Don’t worry about developing wholly new kit, just keep the good old reliable stuff we have flowing through. Improve it where we can, we need better dust filters and so on. But food, fuel, ammunition, oil, batteries, all of that good stuff we're desperately short of. Oh, and more of those .94 inch Martini-Henrys for the Baldricks, they're a big hit." General Petraeus's image faded from the screen.

"We're arming the Baldricks?" Obama seemed bewildered by the idea.

"Of course, we need them as militia. We even designed a special rifle for them, or rather a lady called Marina O'Leary did. It was her company that came up with the idea for the M114 and M115 rifles. The M116 is chambered for the .94 Nitro-Express round but it is fired from a scaled-up version of the old British Martini-Henry dropping block rifle." Obama looked slightly confused, as a Chicagoan he didn’t have the Texan's finely-honed knowledge of firearms. "The one the British used in the film Zulu." That made the connection.

"Can I replace General Petraeus?" Obama spoke thoughtfully. "We could use him here."

"Not really Barry. In theory you could but the Human Expeditionary Army is his command, with a Council of War to support him. That's comprised of the five Army Group commanders, at the moment, one American, one Russian, one Chinese, one Indian, one Frenchman. All top-rank men by the way. If General Petraeus is relieved, his replacement has to receive the unanimous approval of those five. Very unlikely anybody will get that. Anyway, next issue. The weather."

"You sound like a Brit, they always want to talk about the weather." Obama's voice was suave and it caused another ripple of laughter.

"Well, they're justified in doing so now. We've had three super-storms, all of which have hit us hard. Two were here, we had the tornadoes in Missouri, they killed a lot of people and wiped out the B-2 fleet. We haven't let on just how much of a disaster that was but we're hurting from it. If I had longer in office, I'd cancel efforts to restart B-2 production and concentrate on the B-1 and B-3. That's a course of action I'd recommend to you Barry. The second one hit Bermuda and trashed the base there. That wasn't so bad, we lost a couple of ships and the population got hurt. The third one was the cyclone that hit India a couple of days ago. All three had the same pattern, a storm formed normally but suddenly increased in strength and changed direction. We're being attacked using weather patterns but we don’t know how."

"This has to be Yahweh of course."

"Of course. President Abigor has confirmed that using the weather is a long-standing Yahweh tactic. He used it against the Egyptians now and then. But, how it's done we don't know. Ask the Baldricks and they just look apologetic and say 'magic'. That's their explanation for everything they don’t understand."

"Mister President, Mister President-Elect. If I may have a word?"

"Please Doctor Surlethe."

"We have an idea how the increase in storm strength is brought about. If one takes a hurricane, tornado or cyclone and injects a mass of warm air into the base, that'll do it. That's basically why such storms develop power over the sea and dissipate it over land. Of course, how a mass of warm air got injected into the storm is another matter. Some sort of portal is a working assumption. Steering the storm is another matter, we haven't got a clue on how to do that. We'll just keep battering at the problem until we come up with something."

"A suggestion Doctor Surlethe?"

"Yes, Mister President-Elect?"

"If injecting warm air causes these storms to increase in strength, what would happen if we used a portal to inject cold air? Would that not diminish the storm or even break it up?"

"That's a line of investigation we're following right now Sir. The problem is that storms are hard to model accurately so we're not sure what the results will be. But, that is a promising approach yes. However, we have another problem. We've had a series of attacks in South America, small towns where there have been massive, inexplicable deaths. People just struck down in very large numbers, usually between 70 and 80 percent of the population. The attacks are averaging around one every five days or so. Now, some months ago, we received a letter from a man called Jude Sanchez who claims to have met Uriel in Africa and included an account of this Uriel wiping out every living thing within the confines of a native town. He included evidence of other such incidents and we followed them up; they do pan out."

"Who is this Uriel?" Obama sounded interested if a little incredulous.

"Well, another DIMO(N) operative, one Norman Baines who's about the world's leading expert on mythology, identified Uriel for us and gave a pretty good briefing on this particularly macabre gentleman. The name literally means "Fire of Yahweh" and he's supposed to be one of the topmost ranks of Archangels. He is supposed to have been the Angel who guarded the gates of Eden with a fiery sword and I suppose the best description of him is that he's Yahweh's hit-man."

"The Angel of Death then?"

"Not really Mister President, no. Azrael is supposed to be the angel of death in the Grim Reaper sense. Uriel is more along the vengeance and punishment line. Like a loan-shark's enforcer. There's one really nasty thing about Uriel, he doesn’t just kill his victims, he snuffs out their souls as well."

"That sounds a bit far-fetched."

"Not really Mister President. We have some supporting evidence for it; there have been eight of these attacks in South America, five in Brazil, two in Uruguay, one in Bolivia. They've killed around five thousand people. Not one of those victims has turned up in Hell. There is another oddity. In the Sanchez letter – and in the pictures he included – Uriel killed every living thing in the towns he attacked, even down to the birds, insects and earthworms. He left the ground sterile and clean. Yet in the attacks in South America, the animals, insects and so on all died, but anywhere between twenty and forty percent of the humans survived. The survivors all speak of the same events, things seeming to slow down, everything suddenly going quiet and most of the people dying. Here's an interesting thing, all of the survivors were in the top earning brackets, the richer the inhabitants of a town were, the fewer died. Even more interesting, servants in the rich houses lived, but people living elsewhere did not, even if they were nominally wealthier than the servants. We're still puzzling over that."

"And so the war goes on." Obama spoke reflectively. The meeting had been an eye-opener for him. "We're under attack and we don’t know how its being done or whether we can hit back."

"We'll find a way, Mister President-Elect. Somehow, we'll find a way."

"In the meantime," President Bush had a boyish grin on his face. "we've arranged a little message for Yahweh."

National Cathedral, Washington D.C. Christmas Day, 2008

"We thought that this is the one day Yahweh might be keeping an eye on us, so we are going to send him a message." Bush and Obama were standing side by side in the front row at the National Cathedral, waiting for the ceremony to begin. They were startled by a patter of applause at the back of the nave but it was just a small group of soldiers in the red-gray Hell-BDUs entering. A few of the civilians quickly stood and offered them their seats. Then, as the atomic clock sent out its noon alert, all across America, in every church that was still standing, the same ceremony took place.

A red flag unfurled from the spire, rippling in the wind as it burst open. Simultaneously, a group of trumpeters, in the National Cathedral taken from the Marine Corps band, elsewhere from marching bands, schools, even sometimes hastily-practiced amateur musicians, started a fanfare. It was always the same tune, an eerie, wailing, discordant melody that echoed and re-echoed across the land.

As the last notes faded away, Obama turned to Bush. "I don’t understand."

"You'll never make a Texan, Barry. That's the Deguello. Santa Ana hoisted the red flag and played the Deguello just before the assault on the Alamo. Together, the Red Flag and the Deguello mean that we will give no quarter, we will have no mercy, we will take no prisoners, we will not stop attacking until we have won victory. And we played it on Yahweh's day. I hope he gets the message and chokes on it."

 

[LTR]

Sky over Khabarovsk, Russia. January 2009

Gliding in the skies high over the Earth, Colopatiron Lan Michael, strained all his senses to seek out threats from the humans who crowded the ground below him. The effort interfered with his soavoring of the tastes of human air, the smells, so faint but still unmistakable, of human life. Savoring the senses was one of the great rewards of entering human space but it could not be allowed to interfere with the task before him. This mission was crucial but extremely dangerous for it did not just take the angel into human space but into one of the most heavily defended areas on earth. Colopatiron could feel just how heavy the defenses were here, his skin was itching madly from the strange instruments that humans used and he knew his presence had to be known to the humans. They would be doing something about that very soon and all of Heaven had seen the destruction humans and their weapons had wrought on The Eternal Enemy and his fallen minions. Colopatiron's mission was a response to that stunning display. The consummation of the wrath of The One Above All with the people of earth who had defied His will and continued to live a life of sin in disobedience to the Divine Message and yet did not repent was at hand.

For slung under him was the First Bowl of Wrath and already its contents were trickling out over the ground below. Soon, it would become a loathsome and malignant sore on the people who had the mark of the beast. Colopatiron was but one of twenty angels who were pouring the First Bowl of Wrath. Hand-picked by Michael-Lan himself they were striking the first substantial blow against the mutinous and recalcitrant humans who had become so saturated with pride they had even dared question the supremacy of the One Above All. And yet, his appointment for this mission was a puzzlement to Colopatiron for he had always believed that he was not amongst those Michael-Lan considered his most trusted. Still, who was he, a lowly angel to question the leader of his Choir, the one whose name he bore as part of his own?

The Bowl was nearly empty now but Colopatiron sensed it was already too late. He concentrated his power upon his hearing and was rewarded by the sound of human aircraft, approaching fast. Now, angel or not, owl of Wrath or not, he would have to fight to survive.

Thirty kilometers to the north, in his Su-35BM, Captain Yahiya Saifullovich Fatkullin was flying with his radar switched off but his infra-red tracking system was showing the angel perfectly. Far off to the south, another pair of Su-35s were illuminating the angel with their radars, decoying it away from Fatkullin's formation and diverting their victim's attention away from the vector of the true strike. Maskirovka, always maskirovka, the lesson hammered into every Russian officer from their first day of training. Deceive, misdirect, decoy. Never do the obvious unless the obvious is so unlikely nobody would take it seriously. It was a long, long way from Fatkullin's flight school in the Kurgan region of the Urals, just as his Su-35BM was a long, long way from the MiG-17UTI he had flown in the earliest days of his pilot training.

He glanced down, checking his speed. He was moving in, just under Mach one to minimize the warning given to his prey and to give his missiles the greatest possible kinetic boost. His infra-red tracking system was already feeding target information to his R-77M missiles, he would be firing them using that data and the missiles would only switch on their radar guidance systems when their computers told them the target was only in the no-escape zone. It was a deadly tactic that the Indians had used well against the Americans and given their arrogant Eagle-drivers a lesson to think upon. With a little luck, the angel would never know what it was that had killed it. Another lesson from his flight school, a grim one. A successful fighter pilot was an assassin, not a warrior. Another check on his display, the angel was marked using the data from the infra-red tracking systems, the other pair of Su-35s from their transponders. Even as Fatkullin watched, the southernmost pair of Su-35s turned north and started to move in. Time for the attack.

Colopatiron saw the two human aircraft accelerate and swing towards him. This was bad, very bad. In his excess of the sin of pride, the Eternal Enemy had never bothered to learn much about humans and that was why he had died under their weapons. Colopatiron would not make that mistake. He adjusted his vision for long range and darkness and saw the two aircraft streaking towards him. Instinctively he knew that they were the source of the infernal itching in his skin and he acted according to his instincts. His lungs flexed, his voice drew upon all the powers of the Chorus and he emitted a blast of pure sound at the lead aircraft, sound so pure and above reproach that it flung the fighter from the sky. Colopatiron watched it crumple in mid-air, saw it fall and the human who flew it eject from the great transparent house that rode upon its nose. He felt triumph swell within him at the sight of those who defied the One Above All being driven from the skies they claimed as their own but he crushed it down. There was no time to exult over the fate of a fallen foe.

Lieutenant Viktor Matveevich Rakitin had known that, as the two most junior pilots in the flight of four Su-35s, he and Blue-861 would be the decoys. What he had not expected was for the angel they were hunting to respond to their feint so quickly. The blow that had struck Blue-861 had thrown it out of control and wrecked its internal structure, probably also caused both jet engines to flame out. The fringes of the same blow had caught his own aircraft, throwing him against his straps, but his faithful Blue-863 had stood the shock and kept flying. He had a radar lock on the angel so he selected his R-77Ms and fired a pair of them at the target before heaving back on the stick, ramming his throttles forward and soaring skyward. That had put him well clear of the course of the two missiles and so out of danger when something had tumbled them and sent them plummeting from the sky. It didn't matter though, Blue-861 and Blue-863 had done their job, the angel had spent the few seconds it had to react concentrating on them and in doing so, it had allowed Blue-860 and Blue-862 to get into perfect firing positions.

Colopatiron had blown the two missiles aimed at it out of the sky with the same casual ease he had used to wipe out the first aircraft. Now was the time to deal with its mate, and his eyes tracked the second aircraft as it swept skywards, accelerating fast. He gave forth another blast of sound, revelling in its purity as he did so, but it was ineffective. It did not matter, the aircraft was running from battle and the skies were clear for his return home. Then Colopatiron felt the burning agony as he was enveloped in explosions and he knew that he would not be going home again. Weakened and in agony, knowing he was dying, he tried one last shot against the humans who had out-fought him.

It was a perfect assassination, his flight instructors would have been proud. The angel had never even realized the four missiles fired by the two Su-35s were inbound until they had slammed into his body and eviscerated him. Fatkullin saw the angel writhing in mid-air, saw it turn and mouth at him. His faithful Blue-860 shook in ways that rattled his teeth and caused his sight to blur but the effects of four missile hits had weakened the angel so much that the wall he felt as if his aircraft had flown into was a comparatively fragile thing. His continuously-computed impact point for his 30mm gun was on the angel, so Fatkullin squeezed the trigger and pumped a long burst into the still-moving body. Once his gun had had a burst-limiter but that had long been removed in recognition of the fact that Baldricks and angels were so damned hard to kill. Now, the shells stitched a line across the target and the angel fell from the sky.

"Eagle Control. This is Blue-860. Target is negated, say again, target is negated. Blue-861 lost to an unknown weapon. Returning to base."

The Montmartre Club, Heaven.

The last strains of "Nightmare" faded away and the band leader stepped forward to a burst of rapturous applause from the audience. He cast an apprehensive eye at the great figure sitting off to one side but Michael-Lan had risen to his feet and was applauding enthusiastically.

"Well done, Artie, great performance. You too Billie, shame you two ever split up down on Earth."

"Thank you Excellency…"

"Hey, not so much of the Excellency, you know very well that I have to put up with too much of that nonsense out there. In here, its Michael, Michael-Lan if you want to be more formal. And a great artist like you, well associating with us as if we are equals is just one of the benefits of the job. Anyway, you and your band have a rest now, we've got a stage act coming up and then Glen is on."

Michael-Lan walked back through the crowd, looking around him at the scene that, for all its apparent casualness, lay at the center of his plans. The air was tinged with the scent of fine cigars, the occupants and staff of the club, a mixture of humans and members of the angelic host, were laughing and exchanging pleasantries. Cocktail waitresses in outfits that left nothing to the imagination were serving drinks. Every so often, a customer would grab one of the girls, there would be a brief conversation and then they would vanish to one of the rooms upstairs. Up on the stage, the band had finished clearing their instruments away and the scene was dressed as a room in a hotel somewhere. Two young female angels were on the stage, sitting on the bed, running their hands over each other's bodies. The audience had quieted down a little, they were becoming fascinated by the story the two performers were opening up before them.

Michael-Lan got a strange feeling that if humans had actually designed Heaven, this was more or less what they would have come up with. As the idea occurred to him, he got the warm, fuzzy feeling he always got these days when he thought of humans. For millenia he had despised them, looking on them with the same cold contempt for their mindless obedience and submission that Yahweh had made so obvious. Then, a few centuries ago, humans had stopped being blindly-obedient beasts and started to question what surrounded them. Only a few at first, but slowly those few had opened the eyes of a few more and a few more again. Soon, a critical mass had been reached and the humans had broken out of the prison Yahweh had imposed upon them and begun to build their own society.

Michael-Lan had investigated that society with the intent of tearing it down but as he had started his inquiries, somehow, he'd caught the human disease and started to question the assumptions he'd been trained never to doubt. As the questions in his mind had multiplied, he had found, to his own disbelief, that he was beginning to like these new humans. More than that, a plan, complex and devious, had begun to form in his mind. A small part of that plan was here, small yet critical beyond measure. He had formed this club, he had rescued humans from torment to staff and run it. It drew on all the impressions he had gathered on his visits to Earth, part speakeasy, part bordello, part burlesque show, it was the honey in the center of his scheme.

He glanced again at the stage. The two angels were now down on the bed, twisting in simulated passion. Michael-Lan gave them top marks for innovative use of wings and imaginative application of feathers and then turned to one of his guests.

"Having a good time Gabriel-Lan?"

"As always, Michael-Lan. What did we do for fun before you started this place?" The Archangel Gabriel's voice was slurred from too much whisky. That reminded Michael, he was going to have to do something about ensuring supplies. Earth was getting harder to visit with the war now in full swing. As if Gabriel had read Michael's thoughts, he asked "And how goes the war?"

"The first Bowl of Wrath was poured today. The operation was successful although sadly the Angels delivering the Bowl did not survive the human defenses." Which was fortunate, Michael-Lan thought. He had carefully picked those Angels from those whose loyalties might have been conflicted enough to hazard his plans.

"Seems like a rotten thing to do to the humans down there." Gabriel was definitely drunk. Michael would have to make sure he was sobered up before he left the club. Yahweh absolutely did not need to know this place existed. He might be the all-knowing but that only applied when people didn't use extraordinary measures to stop him from finding out. Michael-Lan had been applying those measures for some centuries now and neither Yahweh nor the late, unlamented Satan had been as all-knowing as they had believed. Michael gave a small signal with one hand and the house madam gave him a knowing grin.

"Gabriel-Lan, we have got to keep the humans out of Heaven. Look, they loathed Satan for everything he did and because of that, they killed him in process of destroying everything he had built. But, Satan just tortured them for all eternity. We betrayed them. Satan never pretended to be anything other than what he was or had plans anything other than what he announced. We, all of us, acted nice, made lots of promises and reneged on every one of them. They loathed Satan but they hate us. If they get their Army up here, they will destroy Heaven and kill us all. You heard that tune they played, it wasn't just an insult, it was a promise and humans keep their promises." When it suits them Michael-Lan added to himself. "Humans captured Dis, they will destroy the Eternal City. Our long, wide boulevards make perfect runs for their tanks, the palaces built of precious stones are perfect targets for their guns. Mark this Gabriel-Lan and mark it well. If the humans get their Army into Heaven, we are lost, all of us."

Up on the stage, one of the angels was kneeling, bent over the bed, with her arms held, twisted up her back while her partner was holding her hair, pulling her head back while she thrust with her hips. Suddenly, the kneeling angel gasped and gave a long, panting cry of ecstasy. Then the two stood up and took their bows to a thunderous round of applause. They got two curtain calls before the stage hands cleared the set and arranged the stage so the next of the big bands could take over.

It might sound dramatic, Michael thought, but it was largely true. If the humans could get to Heaven, the war would be over quickly and unbelievably violently. Not necessarily all the occupants of Heaven would get killed, Michael-Lan had a back-up plan for that eventuality as well and this club featured there as well. But the power structure that had existed in Heaven for untold millennia would be shattered for ever. That was no bad thing, Michael-Lan admitted to himself and he was not adverse to shattering it himself. But it had to be done slowly and carefully and when he moved it had to be with all the cards held firmly in his hand. Satan Mekratrig had been impatient, greedy, avaricious and imprudent. His move had started the Great Celestial War, had split the Host and caused generations of fighting. Michael-Lan had been Yahweh's field commander during that war and he well-appreciated a human saying. One that went "Short of a battle lost, there is nothing so mournful as a battle won." Well, there was, that was a battle that had achieved nothing and changed nothing.

Satan had staged his revolt before he was ready, the result had been a long, bloody war that had achieved nothing and changed nothing. Michael did not intend to make that mistake.

Gabriel-Lan was still at the table and still drunk. Over his shoulder, he could see that Lailah was approaching. She was dressed for work, black leather corset, fishnet tights, high-heeled boots. The outfit was modelled on Earth originals but had been modified to allow for angelic wings although Michael noted she had dyed her wing-feathers black to match the outfit. The dye had to be water-soluble he reflected, he knew for a fact she projected quite a different persona when attending Yahweh's court and jet black wings wouldn't suit it. Her appearance at court was a front, as was that of almost everybody who was a regular guest in this club.

"Why did you think the humans will….." Gabriel-Lan was interrupted by the crack of Lailah's riding crop smacking down across the table.

"You're drunk. Bad Archangel. Bad, bad archangel. What have I told you about getting drunk? How can you pay me proper respect if you're in this condition? And where's my tribute?"

"I'm sorry Mistress Lailah, I didn’t…"

"Stop making excuses. Follow me, I'm going to have to deal with you."

She led Gabriel-Lan away to one of the rooms upstairs, one that she had had carefully soundproofed. Michael-Lan watched their departure. It occurred to him that if he'd hooked Yahweh up with a good dominatrix a lot of millennia ago it would have saved the universes a lot of trouble. Still, the humans hadn't come up with the idea back then.

"Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand." The chorus from the audience was rousing. Michael-Lan reflected on just how different it sounded when people sang because they enjoyed it, instead of the weary, soul-destroyed chanting that Yahweh insisted on from his chorus.

"Michael-Lan, please, can you help me?"

It was one of the junior female angels. Michael looked carefully, her eyes were puffy, her nose was running slightly and she was blinking at an excessively high rate.

"What can I do Maion?" He knew the answer but he wanted to hear her say it.

"Please, I need some stuff, my supply is out."

Michael-Lan ran through the inventory in his mind. She was hooked on heroin and his contacts with the Myamnar military junta were still good. He had a lot of the stuff stockpiled. "That's going to be a real problem, the war with the humans has cut off supplies and everybody is getting really short."

"Please" Maion was crying with desperation. "I've got to have some stuff. It hurts. I'll do anything, anything you want."

Michael-Lan quickly imagined a few suitable 'anythings' but dismissed them from his mind. He had bigger objectives than his own personal pleasures. "Look, Maion, this stupid war Yahweh started has really screwed things up. Everybody's looking for stuff. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll give you some stuff from my own private supply, just to tide you over until the war is finished. Don’t tell anybody though or they'll all want some."

"Thank you Michael, thank you so much. I meant what I said, I'll do anything you want."

And it'll surprise you to find out what that is. Michael-Lan thought. And the caution about not telling anybody means she'll tell everybody I've got a supply. And they'll do what I want as well. "Come along, lets get you fixed up."

Michael-Lan took another look around his club as he left. This were really going very well indeed. Only, now he had to get into character and give the latest news of the war to Yahweh. Perhaps he could get another display of multi-colored lightning this time.

 

[LTR]

Infantry Basic Training School, Fort Benning, Georgia, January 2009

It was all grossly unfair, not the least of it being that Private Martin Chestnut was still a Private. All the other sensitives in military service had been made into officers and had their own staff. Chestnut hadn’t even been allowed to eat in the Officer’s mess, his attempt to do so had resulted in him getting a not-so-quiet word from his NCO and copious kitchen patrol. He’d demanded to be made an officer and had even written to General Petraeus insisting that he be promoted to a Major at least. He’d got a polite letter back from an aide, advising him that his existence now figured on General Petraeus’s radar. Somehow that hadn’t sounded too comforting and his assignments had become dirtier, more tedious and more exhausting by the hour. Eventually he had given up and done the minimum necessary to keep the authorities off his back.

Now, to cap it all, he had gone down with some kind of sickness. It had started a few days earlier, he had woken aching all over and with a sore throat that even the coffee from the enlisted men’s mess hall couldn’t cure. He had reported to sickbay where his illness had been diagnosed as the common cold and he’d been given a couple of aspirin tablets and told to get back to duty. The next day he had been running a fever and felt too exhausted to move. Again, he’d reported sick. Although he didn’t know it, his immediate NCO was a kindly man who felt badly over seeing a young man ruining his life by his own stupidity and had tried to give him some well-meant advice. “Look kid, spend your life doing work that’s worth what you’re paid and you’ll never be paid what you’re worth.”

Chestnut, wrapped up in his grievances and self-righteous indignation, hadn’t listened and he’d carried on doing as little as he could while descending deeper into his malaise. His fever levels were slowly increasing as well and his muscle aches were getting so bad that he was finding it difficult to walk. When reveille blew, he tried to get up but the effort exhausted him. He lay on his bunk, gasping for breath.

“Get your lily-livered ass off that bed Chestnut, you’ve got….” The Sergeant’s voice tailed off. Chestnut’s face was dead white, his eyes deeply sunk and heavily shadowed, his finger nails, lips and ears blue-tinged. For the first time, it was apparent that he was seriously, indeed dangerously ill. “What’s up kid?”

“Headache, so bad can’t think straight. Keep coughing. Can’t swallow, threw up. Please….”

Something clicked in the Sergeant’s mind. “Kid, I want to see your arms now.”

Chestnut flailed at his bedding, managing to extract one arm. Half way between wrist and elbow was an ulcer, one with an ugly black necrotic center. He looked at it, stunned. “That was just a bump last night.”

The Sergeant took one look at it and stepped back, almost in a panic. “Johnson, get the medics here double-fast. Tell them to bring Cipro. And get through to Fort Detrick, tell them we have a red alert here.”

DIMO(N) Headquarters, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, January 2009

Dr Kuroneko stared at the chalkboard, frowning. There was something strange going on here ... . The green board was covered with colorful diagrams and scribblings in the arcane language of tensor mechanics and diagrams; the front half of the room was covered in chalk dust from the layers of revision he had added to his thoughts over the last two hours. Absentmindedly, he rolled a fresh stick of chalk between his fingers as he pursed his lips, wrinkling his forehead. Turning, he looked back at the worn textbook, bending close to the dog-eared page to read a note scribbled in the margin.

His face broke into a smile, and he gave a little cry as he jumped toward the chalkboard, erasing an equals-sign with the heel of his hand and replacing it with a carat. Then he moved to the other side of the board and made some modification to a long expansion of Christoffel symbols, muttering to himself as he did. "No, the mass-energy is different. Take into account the ... " - scribbles - "... energy of the system's curvature ..." - more scribbles - "... embedded into a seven-dimensional space-"

He nearly lost his train of thought at a polite cough behind him, but he held onto the end of it and threw up one finger behind him to forestall any comments as he finished frantically writing. Then he turned, blinking owlishly through dusty glasses at the intruders.

There were two men standing there. One, dressed in a working military uniform with two stars, looked impatient and uncomfortable in the messy office. The other, dressed in rumpled business casual with a tie awkwardly sitting at his throat, had a sheaf of folders by his side, by was craning his neck to follow the argument Dr Kuroneko had laid out. Before the military officer could speak, his companion said, "Is that Crane's argument?"

Dr Kuroneko smiled. "Not quite, Surlethe. I've modified it a little so it applies to our situation."

Dr Surlethe set down his folders and moved up to the chalkboard. "You've modified the metric tensor?"

"Not quite - the chief changes are in the mass-energy tensor. Basically, we have to -"

"I'm sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, but we really need to get to business," said Dr Surlethe's companion, General Schatten. "We have a change of plans for the DIMO(N) science team. Shall we have a seat in the conference room and discuss it?"

They filed out of the Dr Kuroneko's office, as Dr Surlethe cast a longing glance back at the chalkboard, and down the stairs to the conference room next to the general's office. He took a seat at the head of the table; the two doctors sat beside him. Dr Surlethe started. "We have a new direction for the physics team to take. The work you've done so far on portals and modeling the storm influence is excellent, but we need more actionable material on the weather."

Dr Kuroneko nodded his understanding.

"I've come here straight from a meeting with the President and President-Elect. General Schatten has agreed that he would have pursued it anyway even if the politicians hadn't decided for us, but at this point the portal research needs to take a back seat to figuring out just what Yahweh is doing to our weather and how exactly he's doing it."

"What sort of data are we working with?"

"We have access to all of the data that NASA, the NOAA, and the NWS have collected," said General Schatten, "as well as anything that university meteorological departments have gathered on their own. There are also several governments eager to share data and work with us - Japan, India, and Indonesia in particular, since they're worried about the potential for geological assaults - and we'll put their physics teams in contact with you. If you want to share any models, though, it will need to pass by my desk. The portal modeling in particular does not leave DIMO(N).

"Do you have any questions?"

Kuroneko said, "No. By the way, speaking of portals, I think a young man on our team - a Princeton undergraduate, actually - has reached a breakthrough just yesterday."

Surlethe leaned forward. "Do tell." General Schatten tapped his foot slightly.

"Well, I won't bore you with the mathematical details" - he glanced over at General Schatten with a slight twinkle in his eye - "but basically, we've had to rework cosmology. General relativity is still true - as far as we know - but it is a specific case of a more general theory. It looks now like the universe is something like a styrofoam ball. We live on the outside of granules, while Hell and Heaven exist on the inside of bubbles. We’re sort of in the same space but not quite. The implications are fascinating, there could be millions of Hells and Heavens out there."

"That's great," said Schatten, "but how can we use this?"

"That's what I'm getting to. The really nice thing about this model is that it makes a particular set of predictions we can test just by monitoring the opening or closing of a portal. And if it does work, it doesn't require any stellar energy densities or subatomic length scales to apply: we should be able to start engineering immediately." Dr Kuroneko smiled. "Gentlemen, we should be able to open portals straight to Heaven within two years. All we have to do is to find it."

"Great," said Surlethe. "But please do bear in mind that the weather is more important than an abstract model of portal transitions."

"We'll do that," replied Kuroneko.

"Okay, gentlemen," said General Schatten, "I have business to attend to. I'll leave you to discuss the particulars of the weather modelling." He stood and shook hands before leaving.

“All right," said Surlethe when he'd gone, "we've already talked about the rough mechanism - body of hot air injected beneath the base of the storm. By mid-January, we need to have a pretty good idea of just how Yahweh's doing this, injecting hot air or warming it up ..."

As he left the room, General Schatten shook his head at the scientists. They were always so ... loopy. That was a good word.

As he entered the next room, he said, "I'm sorry, I was slightly detained."

James Randi, sitting in front of Schatten's desk, inclined his bald head to accept the apology. "No apology necessary."

"You wanted to see me?" asked Schatten, leaning over his desk.

Randi nodded. "Yes. I have come to tender my resignation."

"Why?"

"The war against Hell is won," said Randi. "There can't be any more need of experts in paranormal fraud; my organization has already started to shrink as people have been reassigned to other parts of the occupation effort. My work here has been done for some months, you have all the methodologies you need to find and utilize the sensitives who can punch the portals through as and where needed."

Schatten smiled. He'd been expecting something like this. "On the contrary, Mr Randi, you may not resign."

Randi had been expecting many answers, but this was not one of them. "I may not?"

"No, sir, for three reasons. First, the war is not over. You haven't been privy to all of the reports, but the war against Heaven is just starting, and we'll need all the expertise that your branch of DIMO(N) has accumulated over the last year in order to pursue it successfully. Second, there's speculation around - I'm sure you've heard it - that Heaven and Hell aren't the only hostiles out there, which means that we're not going to let you go even after we've crushed Yahweh. Third, even if the war ends and everything is just fine, we still need you to filter through populations and help us find people who can make portals.

“They’re a vital national asset, you know that. Portalling is a vital national security issue, as I'm sure you understand, and we need to keep tabs on everybody who's like kitten just to make sure they don't fall into the wrong hands."

Randi looked slightly taken aback at this, and blinked at Schatten. Schatten smiled back. "No, Mr Randi, you aren't going anywhere. Other than back to your office in the Pentagon of course, it’s there, still waiting for you.”

SecDef’s Office, Pentagon, U.S. Jamuary 2009

“So it was a concerted attack by angels?”

“That appears so, Secretary Warner. So far we have reports of twenty angels being detected and shot down over Europe, Russia and the United States. All over populated areas. Six came at us, four each at Russia and Europe, two each at China and India, one at Japan and one at Singapore. We lost eleven aircraft in the air battles.”

“Eleven?” Warner was astonished. Humans owned the air, mastered it completely. Hostile daemons who flew in the skies were shot down, swatted as if they were helpless infants. Which, in military terms they were. Losing eleven aircraft in a single day to hostile action was unprecedented.

“Eleven Sir. Several more have varying degrees of damage. We got away pretty lightly, all we have is a brace of F-22s with some structural damage but they’re fixable. The Russians two Su-35s but their MiG-31s got in and out without loss. We think it’s because they, and our F-22s, super-cruised in and were on their targets before the angels could react. The Europeans, lost three aircraft, two Typhoons and a Rafale. Chinese and Indians put up MiG-21s, the Chinese lost two aircraft, the Indians three although one of them may just have fallen out of the sky, the Indians don’t have much luck with their ‘21s. Finally the Singaporeans lost an F-16. Good news is that all the pilots got out. That’s really strange.”

“How?” That one word had a wealth of importance. The angel attack had caused the humans more combat losses that they’d suffered in the whole of the Hell Campaign.

“Good question Sir, we’re trying to find out. Pilot’s debriefing speak of the aircraft feeling as if they flew into a wall. The crash investigation people are collecting the wreckage already and they hope to have an answer for us. It seems as if the aircraft broke up in mid-air, there’s no trace of fire or explosion damage prior to the wreckage hitting the ground. Other than that, we’re going through flight recorder tapes and the other pilot’s statements but that all takes time.”

“Then see it takes less of it. We can’t afford loss rates like that. We’re flying hundreds of jet fighters against an enemy that have tens of millions of angels. We need that ten thousand-to-one kill ratio we got over Hell or we’ll go down.”

The room was silent, most civilians were out there rejoicing at the quick and easy victory over Hell, or at least the victory that had seemed quick and easy. Some were even calling it the Curb-Stomp War. The experts in this room knew better. Like every task performed by true experts, the war had just seemed easy but in reality it had been a desperately close thing. The count-down clock to when the human army would run out of ammunition and fuel had been getting perilously near to zero-hour when the surrender had come in and it wasn’t that much better now. Warner knew that the people who had made the difference in those last hours hadn’t been American, Russian or British but Chinese. If Norinco hadn’t kept flooding out supplies of both Russian- and NATO-standard munitions, the war might still have gone the other way.

“Can we get the Chinese some decent fighters?” Warner’s question was prompted by that last thought. “If this is going to be a standard means of attack, they’ll need something better than MiG-21s.”

“They have the J-10, J-11 and J-12. Just not enough of them. I suppose we could divert some F-15s to help out. We don’t need them here yet. Problem is, most of them are in dock being refurbished.”

“Work on it, get an answer. For the Indians too. If we can’t help out, then perhaps we can lean on the French or Brits to provide some Rafales or Typhoons.”

“That brings us to another question Sir, the F-35.”

“Not a question. It’s history. We can’t afford to waste time developing an entirely new aircraft. We’ll concentrate on pouring out as many F-22s as we can.”

“That’s going to cause problems, a lot of people were depending in that bird. The Brits wanted the VSTOL version for their carriers. Can’t operate without them unless they redesign the ships.”

“Another non-problem. Got a message from MoD in London this morning. Both carriers have been cancelled. Take too long to build they say and absorb too many resources. Like everybody else, they want kit that can be turned out quickly and Navies are in third place on the priority list. Anyway, that’s all for another time. Back to those angels. Any news on what they were trying to do?”

“Not yet Sir. One thing that might be significant. There was an emergency call from Benning to Detrick this morning, an anomalous infection has turned up. One of the sensitives, a Private Chestnut.”

“Private?” Warner looked up, the active sensitives were all high-ranking and had privileges the rest of the population could only dream of. To find one as a private suggested that something odd was going on.

“Bit of a sad sack Sir. Just coasts along doing the bare minimum to stay out of trouble, always complaining. Can’t see he brings down all the crap on his own head. He literally can’t be trusted with anything more than a private’s rank. Frankly, there’s been talk of retiring him, he’s more trouble than he’s worth. He’s the one who wanted a million a year back in the early days.”

“So how did Detrick get involved?”

“Sir, Sergeant who spotted the case in a recalled Operation Desert Storm veteran. He thinks the disease might be inhalation anthrax. And that’s 90 plus percent lethal.”

Warner looked up sharply. “This is not good.”

 

[LTR]

MoD Main Building, Whitehall, London.

“Well, gentlemen the Prime Minister wants to know how it happened.” Admiral Lord West said as he looked out of the window at the teeming rain battering London. The weather forecast had been for bright sunshine. So the Met Office had gotten it wrong, again, hardly new experience for someone in Britain. This time though, he expected the Met Office had received some supernatural assistance in getting its forecasts wrong.

“The Preston tornado, Minister?” The Permanent Secretary wondered. “Well it was rather more powerful than we would normally expect for this country and the damage to BAE Preston and Warton aerodrome was quite extensive. The Met Office is still looking into…”

“Not the Preston tornado, we have a good idea what caused it.” West replied. “Something much more important than that, the Prime Minister would like to know how the French got command of an army group while we have ended up as, well, an appendage of the American army group. “We now have a large army, experienced commanders and staff, and a lot of combat experience. Arguably more than the French, certainly. So how did this happen?”

“We may have a large army, Minister by our standards.” Field Marshal Dannattt, the Chief of the General Staff, replied. " But its still small in comparison with the whole Human Expeditionary Army. Even then, we don’t have enough equipment, uniforms, or weapons to equip even half of them, and we are only just keeping up with the requirements of our troops in Hell as it is.”

“Indeed, our defence factories are working flat out and yet are only just meeting requirements.” Air Chief Marshal Stirrup commented. “It will be a while before we can put many more troops in the field than we have now; most of our National Servicemen are still at home waiting to be told to report to training centers.

“If we were overstretched before in Iraq and Afghanistan then we’ve gone beyond overstretch.”

Admiral West looked back at the defence chiefs. “It still doesn’t answer the question. We’ve spent the last quarter century commanding NATO ground forces; first the Northern Army Group then the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps; and we’re not getting to use that experience. The Cabinet is not pleased.”

“With respect, Minister, the Cabinet should look beyond appearances and examine what the situation really is on the ground." Dannatt pulled a file from his briefcase and opened it up. "If we look at the Human Expeditionary Army, it is very much a work-in-progress. It's important to remember that armored units, tank and mechanized infantry, are to be considered front-line in this war. Everybody keeps the leg infantry at home for self-defense. Second Army Group (Russian) is complete although many of its units are below strength. No surprises there, the Russians always had a big army and its fully mechanized. Third Army Group (Chinese) is at roughly half strength with 65 divisions out of its planned 125. The Chinese have attached extra leg infantry divisions to their armored units to make up the numbers but we all know that in this war, its armor that counts. In both Russia and China's case, they have huge stocks of war material in storage. The Russians are pulling it out fast and they have come up with some interesting examples I can tell you. Did you know one of their divisions is getting a mix of T-34s and KV-1s?

"That brings us to First Army Group (U.S.). The Americans are cloning divisions as fast as they can equip them – and diluting their force very quickly in the process. Each of their new divisions has a cadre of veterans but that's about it, the rest of the formations consists of raw recruits, including an increasing number of conscripts. In the year since the war started, they've doubled the number of divisions they have available and then doubled it again. They now have 64 divisions in their Army Group. Again, they were able to do that because they had the reserves of equipment stockpiled. To that number, we're adding five British divisions, two Australian, three Canadian and one Commonwealth division, 11 divisions bringing the total to 75. In other words, of the five armies planned for First Army Group, three actually exist. One of those is half-Commonwealth. However, there's more to it than that. Those American divisions are big, they're about twice the size of the Russian and Chinese units. There are reasons for that including structural requirements but the numbers remain.

"Those three Army Groups are the backbone of the Human Expeditionary Army. They are the important ones, the ones that actually matter. Now, the organization of those Army Groups was done to ease command and control. That was the critical constraint and its what put us in First Army Group. The Big Three can be defined by language, First is Anglophone, Second is Russophone, Third is Sinophone.

"Now we look at Fourth Army Group (Eastern). India dominates it of course, they've thrown 20 armored divisions into the pot. Bangladesh has added one, a creditable effort for them if I might say so, Pakistan added five, Sri Lanka one, Indonesia one, Japan nine, South Korea five. The Koreans would like to add more but with North Korea sitting on the fence, they have their own defense to think about. Malaysia's sent one, the Philippines one, Singapore three and Thailand five. Vietnam rounds off the pot with six divisions. Add that up and we can see they have 58 divisions and that's going to be about it. Those countries are straining hard to support what they have, any further force increments in the near future are really unlikely. Then they have the Middle Eastern component, that's got Algeria with one division, Egypt with five, Iran with four, Iraq with one, Israel with nine, Jordan with two, Kuwait one, Morocco one, Saudi Arabia with one and Syria with seven. Another 32 divisions that have even less in common with the rest of the group. The Israelies don’t even listen to the Indians, they just wander off and do what they want. Total, 90 divisions and again, that's more or less it. The big contribution from the Middle East has been the stockpiles of equipment. We got more than 2,000 tanks from Libya and they only have a 25,000 man Army. They may pull some additional forces in from Africa and so on but they won’t make much difference. They have no common language, no integrated command systems no commonality in logistics. They have no common doctrine but at least India has experience of commanding forces of this size in the field.

"That brings us to Fifth Army Group (Europe). We have much the same situation here. Certainly the French politicked their way into command and they put three armored divisions into the field. The Germans added five, the Czechs one, the Danes one and that took a heroic effort from them, Greece four, Italy five, Netherlands one, Norway one, Poland four, Romania one, Spain four, Turkey ten. Sweden's added two divisions, Switzerland one, the Ukraine three. Added up that makes 46 divisions, again with no common language, logistics or operational doctrine. They are mobilizing their reserves but they don’t have the huge stockpiles of equipment that the Americans, Russians, Chinese and Middle East have. So, they're mobilization work is producing mostly leg infantry for guarding the home front.

"In short, Fourth Army Group is marginally useful and Fifth is a shambles. It is reasonably obvious to us that General Petraeus knows this as well as we do. He knows that Fifth composes troops that, in most cases, are very good on the small unit level, up to brigade or division level, but they have no real capability of operating beyond that. If push comes to shove, he'll break Fifth up and use the units as spot reinforcements, especially for First Army Group. The French "commander" will be left with an Army group headquarters but no troops to command.

"Now contrast that with our situation, we are in the primary striking group of the Human Expeditionary Army, we have the ear of the commander of that group and we are trusted, well-regarded allies. Our words weigh heavily with them. We are an influential partner in a vital organization, rather than the head of an ineffectual one. Put another way, we may have an inferior position on paper but in terms of actual power and influence we outweigh the French many times over."

West harrumphed, knowing he would have to pass this information onto his Cabinet colleagues. Both the Prime Minister and his deputy were very keen on the idea of a British led army group; in time Britain would probably have one but not yet. The Human Expeditionary Army, even in its present incomplete form, was just too large.

“How about this proposal to suspend construction of the Queen Elizabeth class for the duration of the war? Surely we need these ships more than ever?” West wondered.

“They’ll never be finished on time to use in this war, Minister.” Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, the Chief of the Air Staff, argued. “Since the Americans have cancelled the F-35 we don’t have a fighter to fly off them, apart maybe from Harriers. I would have thought that the navy would want to concentrate on building cheap, easy to build warships that they can use now.”

West could see Admiral of the Fleet Sir Jonathon Band, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff turning a shade of puce. It was no secret that Band and Torpy had disagreements over the CVF project.

“Just as you are procuring cheap aircraft like the Typhoon, Tornado and Nimrod.” Band commented. “I see you’re also holding on to many of those expensive museum pieces.”

“There’s a big difference, Admiral, between procuring aircraft and two massive warships. By the time a few pieces of steel are cut for these ships I will have dozens of new aircraft in service.” Torpy countered. “Those ‘museum pieces’ you refer to, the Buccaneers, TSR.2s, Jaguars, Vulcans and Canberras are very useful platforms until something better comes along.”

“You’ve wanted to kill CVF from day one.” Band said angrily. “I never thought a war with Heaven and Hell would give you the chance.”

Admiral West held up his hand. “Gentlemen, that’s enough. There is a historical precedent for this decision. In 1939, the Royal Navy had to cancel the Lion class battleships. They were excellent ships, greatly needed and undoubtedly valuable additions to the fleet. The problem was, they wouldn’t be ready until after the war was over and they used resources that were needed for much more urgently-required forces. So, they were suspended, the materials assembled for them were used for other programs and the labor they would have absorbed diverted elsewhere. Today, we face the same problem with CV(F), and I must tell you the answer is the same. We cannot afford those ships, they must be suspended to allow more important programs to be pushed through. I am sorry, but that decision is final. In their place, we will be building additional amphibious warfare ships and a war-emergency version of the Type 45 to escort them.

"We also need to look at something to replace the F-35 in the role of JCA. That is a problem in its own right, frankly I see little chance of getting more aircraft from the Americans, they need every aircraft they can build."

“Looks like Hornets all round then, Minister.” Air Chief Marshal Stirrup said.

"If we can get them, a big if. One thing that is potentially good news. The Chinese have offered to reverse-engineer the TSR-2 using experience they gained in pirating the Su-27 design. They claim they can get a prototype flying in 18 months and deliveries starting in 30. The deal is, they'll give us the first 100 aircraft off the production line in exchange for the engines and one of the two White Ghosts to act as a pattern aircraft. We can't just keep one in service so the other TSR-2 will go back to a museum, only this time with an honorable war record to her credit.

"Can the Chinese do it?" Stirrup was genuinely curious

"They got their copy of the Su-27 out fast, the Russians are hopping mad about it. So yes, I think our Chinese friends can pull it off."

Band looked at Torpy with barely-hidden loathing. Watching them, West couldn't help reflect that it was a rare event that Her Majesty's Government was on better terms with the Chinese than with its own Navy.

Throne Room, The Ultimate Temple, Eternal City, Heaven

Michael-Lan once more entered the Holiest of Holies and his eyes adjusted to the dim glow that contrasted so strongly with the clear, white light that saturated Heaven. Even after his millennia of experience, the sight of the great white throne, with its flashing lightning and pealing thunder surrounding the One Above All Others, never failed to awe him. Before the throne were the seven great, gold lamps, burning their ceaseless incense so that the clouds of scented smoke hung thick and hazy, the smell clinging to everything. There had been a time when Michael loved this room but that was before humans had opened his eyes to what it really represented. As a showman, he admired it, as a General who valued efficient and effective administration above all else, it filled him with frustration at the wasted effort. It hadn’t always been like this, uncounted millennia before when the Great Celestial War had been fought, there hadn’t been this stress of unqualified adoration and infinite submission. 'All Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.' The human motto ran through Michael-Lan's mind and its implications disturbed him.

At the four corners of the room flew four Seraphs, creatures with huge heads and six wings rooted in their atrophied bodies. They appeared to be nothing other than head and wings, their distorted physique making them of little use other than chanting their ceaseless cry: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” The refrain was echoed by the twenty-four members of the Yahweh's Private Choir. They were ancient even by the angels' standards, and were constantly on their faces before the throne, murmuring, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being." Michael-Lan gazed at them sympathetically, they had spent their lives yearning for an eternity in Paradise, now they had it, they spent their time yearning for another death. They had wasted their time on Earth, building up their virtues for their afterlife and now they knew the full extent of the way they had squandered their time. That might not be as crude and agonizing a torture as the ones Satan had dreamed up but it was one all the same.

Michael-Lan had once had a choir just like this one. A century ago he had released them from their eternal chanting and now they sang in his nightclub, choosing their own program and relishing the freedom to do so. They were loyal servants, trustworthy as only those released from a nightmare could be.

Michael stopped in the middle of the lamps and knelt down on both knees, prostrating himself and pressing his flawless lips to the cold, dark jade floor. As though sensing intentions, the four Seraphim quieted, and the twenty-four elders' murmurs died to whispers. From the white throne, the voice of Yahweh thundered: “Michael, my good general, what news do you bring me?”

"Oh nameless one, Lord and God of all, I prostrate myself to your presence. The First Bowl of Wrath is poured, even now the humans who bear the Mark of the Beast sicken and die from its poison. Not less than twenty of my highest servants, ones in whom I espoused a special interest, gave their lives so that your Almighty Will should be fulfilled. They went to their end, singing thy praises and filled with ecstasy at their privilege."

They were not filled with ecstasy, thought Michael quietly, he'd made sure that the doomed group had been well isolated from his night club and the growing web of influence it gave him. His stocks of ecstasy were limited and he made sure it was distributed carefully. And, they didn't die singing, they almost certainly died screaming because that was what human weapons did to their victims.

Michael-Lan sneaked a look at Yahweh, poised on his great throne amid the clouds of burning incense. His mind flitted to the possibility of adding some really good grass to the incense but it veered away from the prospect. The risks were too high, the rewards too low. Yahweh had a dreamy expression on his face, contemplating the sacrifice of those who had laid down their lives so that his wishes could be fulfilled. Michael-Lan decided that he needed building up a little before the blow was struck

"And the rest of the humans?"

"They suffer as the elements themselves turn against them. The very winds and waters rage in anger at their defiance of your divine will. Their dead number in the tens of thousands and their weeping drowns out the words of their leaders."

That did it, Yahweh was transported with delight at the thought of the humans who had defied him being punished. He edged forward on his throne. "And Uriel, does Uriel bring despair into their hearts."

"Ah yes, Uriel." Now this was going to be tricky. Very easy to overdo this. Michael warned himself.

There was a long hesitation. "He has obeyed my wishes?" There was an ominous roll in the thunder and the lightning flickered. Still white Michael-Lan thought. We'll have to change that.

"Would Uriel-Lan, thy sword and spear, do any less? He has killed humans. Some, anyway."

There was suspicion and doubt in the thunder that rolled around the hall and Michael noted the Seraphim were unobtrusively drifting away. It helped to have six wings, it made motion so much less obvious. "But the human cities are laid waste? Their inhabitants and all that live therein dead, their very souls snuffed from existence?"

Now that was a good question. Michael rolled the question around in his mind. He doubted Uriel actually snuffed out souls, in his mind it was more probable he simply sent them somewhere else. There were, after all, enough places to send them to. "The cities, well, yes. I suppose so. Depends how we define cities I suppose."

"What do you mean Michael-Lan?" The clouds were gathering ominously, the lightning flickering more strongly as the clouds of incense roiled and flowed.

"Human cities have changed a lot, Oh nameless one, Lord and God of all. They're quite a bit bigger now but Uriel doesn’t seem to have realized that. He stays in the areas where the settlements are few in number and poorly inhabited. But Uriel-Lan has done his best in the area he stays. I believe he has extinguished a few hundreds of humans."

That did it. To Michael's delight, multi-colored lightning bolts flashed and ricocheted off the walls, sending showers of pristine diamond flakes spiraling through the air. The Seraphim gave up any hope of discretion and dived for cover. Thunder crashed, its echoes rolling down the wide, straight boulevards that divided The Eternal City into its mathematically-precise blocks, shaking the great sheaths of semi-precious stone that formed the walls of the palaces glittering in the clear white light. The Ishim scurried down the alabaster streets, the more astute getting the message that Michael-Lan was making another war report. A few, secretly in their minds, half-hiding the thought even from themselves, wondered why Yahweh had started this war if the news upset him so much. Elohim and Malachim looked down upon the lowly Ishim but the crashing of thunder persuaded them that there was, perhaps, purpose in the disorder.

"A few hundred? He has achieved nothing!"

" Oh nameless one, Lord and God of all, Uriel-Lan has done well given there are so few to snuff out in the are that he resides. Why he will not go to richer pastures, I do not know." Because if he does, the humans will put a cap in his ass thought Michael, but no need to say that The Michael squeezed himself even flatter to the floor because a large chunk of diamond had splintered off the wall and just missed his head. He risked a look up, Yahweh was glaring across the throne room, furious that his sublime delight had been ruined so abruptly. Michael knew from long experience what he was thinking and the word 'treason figured prominently.

" One Above All Others, he must have good reason. After all, there are none who would dare claim that Uriel-Lan's loyalty is any less than my own. Surely he is the most devoted of thy servants. Perhaps he needs a little encouragement?"

"Then send him a message that it is my divine will that he enter the realms of our greatest enemies." Yahweh hesitated for a second. "Who are they by the way?"

Michael thought for a second. It was an interesting question, one that had many answers depending on the interpretation of the words greatest and enemy. He decided that the best possible translation was 'the ones who stood best chance of killing Uriel-Lan.' It had to be humans, in the world here in Heaven, a direct assassination attempt would probably fail and regardless of the outcome, all his plans would be revealed. Uriel was Yahweh's greatest weapon, one that could be turned on his enemies in the Eternal City just as easily as on anybody else. Uriel was too loyal and too deadly to live. Getting rid of him had to be the humans. "The Americans, Oh nameless one, Lord and God of all. They are thy greatest enemy."

"Then order Uriel to attack their greatest city. Without further delay."

That's a message that will get through as "The boss wants you to take out an American city. No hurry, in your own time. Michael-Lan rose and backed out of the throne room, bumping into an Erelim stone-mason as he did so.

"You had to go and do it didn't you." The Erelim sounded bitter as he surveyed the chipped and battered walls. "I'd just got the place fixed up after your last report."

Michael looked sympathetically at him and slipped him a small package of cocaine. Then he slapped the mason on the back. "Look on it as job security," he said comfortingly as he went on his way to meet with Uriel.

 

[LTR]

Air Crash Investigation Group, Wright-Paterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio, February 2009

"Well, look at that." It was more the level of bafflement in the speaker's voice that drew attention than the words themselves.

"What's the matter Rich?" Gail Claiborne looked up from the X-ray pictures of a wing spar she'd been studying.

"I've been listening to the contents of the cockpit voice recorder tapes from Blue-861." Doctor Rich Arden was using words loosely here. In this case, "listening to" meant hearing the words certainly, but also studying the oscilloscope readings and examining the various tracks the system had recorded. It was a much more complex subject than it sounded and outsiders only guessed at the wealth of information the tapes contained.

"Did the pilot say anything?"

"Apart from some fascinating obscenities as his plane disintegrated, not really. Russian's a good language for swearing. The really curious bit is elsewhere. Come and have a look."

Gail walked over to Arden's work area and pulled up a stool. "Show me maestro." Before getting into this line of work, Rich Arden had been the road manager for a heavy metal rock band and his stories of the escapades he and his group had got up to were legendary. They had also resulted in his nickname (and flight callsign) 'Maestro'.

"So, we have the cockpit flight recorder tapes and we play them. Nothing very interesting in the words so lets take them out." He manipulated the computer controls and the speech pattern of the pilot flying the ill-fated Blue-861 were removed. "Now, what we have left is the cockpit background noise."

"What's that?" Gail put her finger on a spike a split second before Blue-861 had fallen apart in mid-air.

"Now that's what I asked. There were two ways of looking at this, one was to start eliminating known sounds, air flow, engine noise, radar sound-effects and so on. The other was to get a cockpit take from a flying Su-35, eliminate speech from it and use that as a template. Fortunately the Russians sent us copies of the cockpit flight recorder tapes from Blue-863 as well and I eliminated the pilot's speech and got a clean trace of the cockpit noise. So I subtracted that trace from the message of Blue-861 and lookee here."

"Oh my." Gail was stunned. "Well, look at that."

"Now somebody else is going to say 'What's the matter Gail?' and I'll have to go through the whole thing again." Arden looked around catching one of the investigators with his mouth half open. The investigator in question promptly looked guilty and tried to hide behind his equipment. The rest of the room had been covertly listening, more in hopes of hearing a new heavy metal band story than anything else. "No? Well, we have something here that I don’t think has ever been recorded before. Want to have a look?"

Arden's work area filled up as the investigators crowded around to look at the display. The green line left on it was remarkable. The baseline showed a small amount of grass, random noise that couldn’t be predicted or ever quite eliminated but the spike that was left had, quite definitely never been seen before. It was a straight line, up and down.

"There's no sidebands, no resonance, no echoes nothing." Gail's voice was awed. "It’s a completely pure note."

"That's right. Every musical note there has ever been has been mixed up with all sorts of distortions. Look at them using this equipment and it’s a ragged peak. It goes up in a jagged line, there's a plateau at the top that shows cyclic variations and it goes down in a jagged line. Then there's side-bands and resonances at different frequencies. Lots of them. All the energy transmitted in the note is spread across the area under that line, dispersed, weakened and generally dissipated. Even so, sound's got a lot of punch, we broke things with it quite regularly."

"Like theater manager's hearts?"

"Those too, although most of them deserved it. Some of them never even read the contract, hence the no-green-jellybean rule. Anyway, that's not the case here. The sound is one perfect pulse. Straight up, point, straight down. A perfectly pure note and all the energy is concentrated in that note. Talk about a slam, the energy here," he tapped the screen with a switchblade, "is incredible. This thing, its coherent sound. It's the sonic equivalent of a laser and I'd guess that its just as destructive. It's got about as much resemblance to a musical note as a high-powered laser has to a flashlight."

"And the walls came tumbling down." Gail spoke almost dreamily.

"Sure. Sound travels faster, the denser the medium is. In air, this thing shook an Su-35 apart and tumbled the gyros on two missiles. What it would do if transmitted in water or rock, we can only guess. A lot of we-wish-that-hadn't-happened would be my guess."

"Write all this up." Doctor Peptuck, the team leader, spoke sharply. "Write it up in as much detail as possible. The brass need to know about this as quickly as possible."

Conference Room, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, February 2009

"You're quite sure about this?" Another investigation, another place, same disbelief mixed with a tinge of fear.

"Of course." Connor MacLeod was quite emphatic. "It helped that we knew we were dealing with inhalation anthrax and that gave us a baseline to work from. It also gave us a puzzle to answer. Why were so few people showing symptoms? If anthrax spores had been dumped over an inhabited area, a high proportion of the population would be dead or dying and there is no cure for inhalation anthrax. We can immunize, and it looks like we might have to, but we can't cure. And yet the death toll was a few here, a few there, a disproportionate number on military bases yet even there only a handful. As information came in from all over, that was the worldwide pattern. A few dead, isolated infections. Unprecedented."

"And it was this Baines guy who gave you the answer?"

"In a way, yes. DIMO(N) were interested of course and Baines knows Revelations and all the derivative material intimately. Unhealthily intimately in my opinion, but he's the best we've got for tracking down this sort of thing. He pointed out that Revelations contains the following prophecy. 'Then I heard a loud voice from the temple, saying to the seven angels, Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God. So the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth; and it became a loathsome and malignant sore on the people who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped his image.' Well, anybody who has seen people dying of anthrax knows the ulceration is certainly loathsome and malignant so that fitted. That left us with trying to work out what the mark of the beast was.

"We started out by thinking that it was poetic or descriptive and was a reverse truth. In other words, we thought it was the writers assuming, not that the disease was infecting people with a particular characteristic but that everybody who was infected was assumed to have the mark of the beast. You know, the old line, 'they must have done something bad to deserve it.' But that didn’t correspond to the infection patterns, nowhere close. So we had to think that there was something about these people that made them vulnerable to the disease. That led us to ask what the mark of the beast could be. You know why sensitives are sensitive?"

"Because they are nephilim, they are descendants of humans who mated with the Baldricks."

"Exactly, and they retain a tiny amount of Baldrick DNA in their make-up and that makes them detectable to the Baldricks and capable of pushing messages the other way. The more Baldrick they have in their DNA, the more effective they are as sensitives. The odder they are as well by the way. With computers and our own transmission equipment, we can boost those contacts to the point where we can open portals. Now, doesn’t having Baldrick ancestry sound like 'the mark of the beast' to you?"

"And so you compared lists?"

"Of course. With our own list, the congruence was perfect. All the reported anthrax infections we had have been people we identified as Nephilim. They're sick and pretty much all of them are going to die. Our portal engineering capability has been hit hard, I'd guess that about a third of our sensitives are dead or dying. The same picture is emerging worldwide but there's an interesting little side-note. It's pretty obvious from the infection pattern that our allies are not telling us about all the Nephilim they found."

"Oh." The word was filled with emphasis.

"Exactly. I would say that, while they are all contributing to the main portal engineering program we run on behalf of everybody, they all have their own national programs as well. From these lists, I would say that Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, India, Israel and Singapore are all running their own portal program and have kept back some of their sensitives, probably the best ones, for that program."

"I think that's very likely." Team Leader Chris O'Farrell sounded more than slightly amused by the idea.

Connor MacLeod looked at him sharply for a moment and then the implication sank in. "And we're doing the same?"

"Of course. Have you noticed that kitten and all the other really top-rank sensitives aren't on the sick-list? We've got them tucked safely away. Navy's doing a lot of work, they’re refitting Enterprise right now to generate her own portals. Can you imagine that as a naval tactic? Got some anti-ship missiles coming in? Easy. Open a portal, step through and close it. Then, wait a few minutes, open another and reappear a few dozen miles away. Or open a portal over and enemy city and drop a nuclear device through it. The possibilities are endless. Anyway, back to the anthrax. So, the enemy has developed an anthrax derivative that only infects Nephilim. That's a hell of a genetic engineering achievement. Are really they that good?"

"Well, that's what we thought. This was a new strain of anthrax bred especially for this attack and that's a scary level of biological warfare capability." Both men looked grim, nobody knew better than the workers at Fort Detrick just how dangerous biological warfare could be. "Anyway, we got samples of the anthrax bacillus from the casualties and had a look at it. We started off on the wrong foot, thinking this was a new variant and that wasted a day or so. Have you heard of mitochondrial dating?"

O'Farrell shook his head.

"Well, basically mitochondrial DNA doesn't change. It does mutate at a known rate but it doesn’t change. So, we can track the age of a sample as compared with its baseline by noting the number of changes. It’s a bit like counting tree rings in a way. We got a surprise, the samples we have showed a lot of changes. That meant either the samples were a long way down the line from our baseline or our baseline was a long way down the line from our samples. Normally, we'd take the second possibility because we don’t get things from the future but nothing's taken for granted these days.

"Now, anthrax is a very old disease, its possible it's one of the oldest still-extant diseases. There's anthrax spores been found in the wrappings of Egyptian mummies and there's even a theory that the so-called curse of the Pharaohs is the result of inhaling those spores. Anyway, we got some spores from the Egyptians, ran the tests and guess what, they're a lot closer to the samples from our victims than our baseline is. So, this isn't a new variant, it’s a very old one, one even older than the Egyptian baseline.

"Norman Baines has suggested its possible that anthrax was a disease specifically intended to kill nephilim and its spread amongst humans and animals is a result of a mutation. He's got the theory that sometime in the past there was a concerted effort, presumably by Heaven, to kill off the nephilim. That would explain why they are so rare. But, be that as it may, I think we have a handle on the first of these so-called 'Bowls of Wrath'. Oh, by the way, there's an upside to all this; since this is a very old variant of anthrax, possibly the original variant, our antibiotics should work fairly well against it.

"Very well, I'll send all this information back. It looks like Bayer is going to make itself another fortune."

Bacup Police Station, Bacup, Lancashire.

Inspector Kate Langley looked up from her desk towards the metal bucket that was catching the leak in her office roof. It was hard to concentrate on her paperwork with that infernal noise going on all the time, the sooner they moved into the new police station and out of this rickety Victorian relic the better. A knock at the door brought her back to the present.

“Ma’m, there’s been a serious landslide at the top of the town.” Sergeant Parrish said gravely. “Looks like several houses have been buried. Our mobiles, the fire service, ambulance and Civil Defence Corps are already on the way.”

Langley stood up, reflexively taking her revolver out of the desk drawer and grabbing her yellow fluorescent jacket and hat. “Right, Sergeant, get as many bodies out there as you can and put a call to H.Q for assistance. We’ll need all the help we can get.

“I’m going to head out there myself to take charge; I’ll need you to coordinate things from here.”

“Not a problem, Ma’m; I’ll get Sergeant Beck to go with you.” Parrish replied.

The scene that greeted Inspector Langley and Sergeant Beck on their arrival at the landslide was one of utter devastation. It looked like half of the hillside had simply given way and had come crashing down on a quiet residential street, smashing it to rubble. Where there had once been houses, trees and grass there was now nothing but black, glutinous mud.

“It’s like Aberfan.” Beck muttered, deeply shocked.

Langley stepped out of the car, putting on her wet weather gear, though by the time she had done so she was almost soaked to the skin. The three fire appliances from Baccup Fire Station had already arrived, as had a couple of ambulances and some vehicles from the re-established Civil Defence Corps. The firemen and civil defence workers had already started to dig amongst the rubble at the edge of the landslide, hoping to find someone alive. As the fire service would have primacy in this case Langley sought out the senior fire officer to offer what help she could.

“What can we do to help, Derek?”

“It’s a damn disaster, Kate.” Station Officer Derek Clarke, commander of Red Watch, replied. “I don’t think there is much you can do here, other than traffic control. I’ve requested that the brigade’s Urban Search and Rescue Unit be sent to us, but I don’t think that they will be doing anything other than pulling out bodies.”

Clarke paused to take a look at the bare hillside; it didn’t look too stable.

“Bronze Command to all units, withdraw now. The hillside looks like it’s about to go again. Over.” He said into his Personal Radio. “Kate, there is one thing you can do.” He said turning back to Langley. “This slip is going to be even bigger by the looks of things, we’ve got to get people out from under its path.”

Langley nodded and sprinted back to the car as she would get better reception from its radio than from her PR.

“Juliet Bravo to Control, urgent message, over.”

“Go ahead, Juliet Bravo.” The voice of Sergeant Parrish said from the radio handset.

“There’s going to be an even bigger landslide, Sergeant and we need to evacuate everyone who may be in its path immediately. Get every spare body onto it immediately, and see if Captain Morrison can spare some of his Home Guards to help out. Over.”

“Understood, Juliet Bravo. Out.”

Inspector Langley held on to the radio handset for a moment, rain running down her face. She looked skywards, oblivious to the rain now running down her neck.

“Damn you!” She called out. “Don’t think you’re going to get away with this! First, we’re going to get up there somehow then we'll kick your arse.”

 

[LTR]

Headquarters, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City, Heaven

The Eternal City, the heart of Yahweh's great empire was a gleaming translucent rectangular pearl that dazed the eyes of newcomers with its rainbows of refracted light. The buildings were made of vast sheets of precious and semi-precious stone, the streets calcite alabaster, polished smooth first by trained crafts-angels uncounted millennia ago and then by the tread of millions of sandal-clad feet over the years. Together, buildings and streets glowed as Heaven's pure white light reflected and refracted from structure to structure in a myriad of interlocking multihued spectra that constantly shifted and changed with every slight movement of the inhabitants therein

That was within the sight of Yahweh's great white throne, in the Ultimate Temple of the Eternal City. Beyond the glittering jasper walls of the inner city, which a discerning angel's eyes could see shimmering in the distance from the steps of Yahweh's stronghold at the top of the temple mount (although the angel wouldn't look so far for so long, because it would strain his eyes and because lines did strange things far away), things were different. The wide main boulevards of the Eternal City and the palaces of the most powerful archangels led to the twelve great gates that led out the Eternal City's to the great slums where the humans who served the angels lived. A realm of mud huts and straw-thatched roofs built closely together in an unplanned, interlocking ring about the Eternal City, the slums could not differ more greatly from the marble, semi-precious stones and black alabaster that formed the Palaces where the angels lived.

It was these slums that Lemuel-Lan-Michael, a captain of Michael's choir and a senior investigator in the ranks of the League of the Holy Court, spent his working hours. It was the duty of the League to detect apostasy, heresy and sacrilege and to stamp them out before they contaminated the rest of the millions of humans who lived only to serve the angels. With that divine duty to drive him, Lemuel spent an inordinate amount of his time in the slums.

And so it was that, when one of his subordinates had reported that a contact had a lead in the Ishmael sacrilege case out in the slums, it fell upon him to lead the investigation. He knew the case well, it was one of the oldest on the books. Ishmael had dared to suggest that there were groups of creatures that had all developed from common ancestors and were thus related. This was blackest blasphemy for Yahweh had made it clear that he had personally created each kind of creature himself, perfect in each of its details. For his ill-chosen words, Ishmael had been hunted for decades but always managed to stay ahead of his pursuers. Today, it was different and Lemuel had, earlier that day, flown to the gates (being old enough and high enough to be permitted the privilege of flight within the walls of the Eternal City) and from there commandeered a chimera to ride out into the slums, so as not to attract any more attention to himself than his size naturally would.

After rendezvousing with a few hired men and coming to the address - a tall wooden apartment in a (relatively) nice district - it was over pretty quickly. Ishmael had been taken into custody and would be moved to the League headquarters where he would be made to answer for his crimes. They even managed not to get any blood on the apartment floor. After he had paid the thugs with golden pieces taken from the League's slush fund, he found himself walking back through the massive onyx arch of the fifth gate on his way to the headquarters of Michael's choir.

The headquarters was within a spire in the lower part of the city that reached nearly as high as the temple mount itself, a reflection of Michael-lan's exalted status. Lemuel had worked for Michael before the Great Celestial War, and afterwards had overseen the erection of the tower as a monument to the archangel's brilliant generalship. When the Eternal Enemy's rebellion had threatened to lap over even the great jasper walls, Yahweh himself had fought, nearly single-handedly turned back the tide with his rod of iron. Or so the story went and there were none who would argue with it. Nevertheless, it had been Michael's leadership in the grinding war that had eventually brought the victory, or as close to a victory as it had proved possible to come. It was his leadership that had been the more prominent, and stuck in angels' minds.

Lemuel-Lan-Michael launched himself up, feeling himself inflate slightly and enjoying the tightening of his back and breast muscles as his pure white wings beat the air behind him, lifting him off the pavement. The offices of the League were in the second ring of the tower, beneath only those of Michael himself. Two centuries ago, that would have been - had been - a measure of their importance in the choir and the esteem in which Michael held their leader. Now, things were slightly different in the political climate, and Lemuel had spent the last several decades on and off trying to put his finger on it. Part of it was the changes Michael had slowly introduced from the top - foreign changes, but on the whole the choir now ran more efficiently than it had even in the Celestial War, but he wasn't quite sure just what those changes had been, or even whether Michael had intentionally made them.

Generally, though, he shrugged and did his job. And right now, that involved making sure he didn't bump his head or scrape his wings on the frame as he alighted in his office with a graceful swoosh. It wasn't cluttered; he had scrolls neatly lining a shelf in the corner - open cases involving powerful people - and one open on his desk, his daily schedule. Writing and record-keeping, one of the bigger changes, had made life both easier and more complicated.

But he didn't need to check his schedule to know what was next on his agenda. He went to the shelf and pulled down a scroll, unrolled it on his desk. When Ishmael had been arrested, the League had searched his hideout in hopes of finding the scrolls that proclaimed his blasphemy. They hadn't found any, something that had disappointed Lemuel severely, but they had found something very peculiar. A glass bottle full of a strange brown substance, one Lemuel had never seen before. He reached for the bottle and looked at it, a strange elixir to be certain. There was a label on it, one in English and it read "Southern Comfort. 100 Percent Proof."

It was strange, strange beyond measure and Lemuel puzzled over the label. It was obviously an elixir that gave absolute proof of something but what? That the answer to a problem lay in the South? He shook his head, there was nothing down there but farmland. Lemuel rolled the bottle around in his hands, then put it up on the marble shelf to study later. His troubled thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. He opened it, and there was the towering form of Michael-Lan, pure-white wings folded casually across his back.

"Hey, Lemuel, I'm on my way to run an errand for the Almighty. He has a message for his Son." Lemuel nodded. Michael's close friendship with Jesus was not unknown within the Eternal City. It seemed a breach of the divine order somehow, the seven Archangels of the First Order might be the highest of The One Above All’s servants but they were servants none the less. For Michael-Lan to be friends with the Eternal Father’s only son seemed, disrespectful somehow. It wasn’t the first time that Michael-Lan had done the unexpected though. Many times, during the Great Celestial War, Michael had wanted to try some unorthodox tactics and Lemuel had advised against them as violating the code of honor, then later as they'd grown into friends. Lemuel always argued against bending the rules - if one started, where would one stop? - and generally prevailed, but the several occasions when Michael had directly overruled him, he'd had to admit that it generally provided results, such as Michael's stunning defeat of Satan at the Battle of Megiddo Valley.

“What do we have here?” Michael-Lan was staring at the bottle on the shelf. Lemuel felt a sudden surge of guilt that cleared as he looked at the records he had just filled out. A light came on in his head at that point, records didn’t just preserve information, they protected those who kept them.

“We took down Ishmael this morning. We found that in his belongings and I was going to investigate it. Do you know what that is?”

Michael-Lan picked the bottle up and peered at it. “It looks human?”

“That’s what I thought, I thought it might be one of their potions. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t be here.”

"I'll agree with that.” Michael-Lan looked at the bottle again and carefully put it back on the shelf. “This is serious. Lemuel, I want you to investigate this in depth. Keep the information to yourself, but I want a briefing every day on this. More often if there is something important discovered. Make sure only your most trusted agents are employed and as few of them as possible, telling each of them as little as possible. But, I must know everything, is that clear? You have no idea how important this could be.”

Lemuel bowed his head and swept his wings forward in assent. Michael-Lan nodded in acknowledgement and left, brushing his wings on the passage walls as he passed. Then Lemuel closed the door and stepped out into midair, his heart rising into his throat as he expanded his sacs and spread his wings to catch the fall. The four joints on his back where they hinged to his spine and scapulae strained, and felt as though they were about to tear, but - as always - he slowed and began to glide.

The Eternal City was built on a smooth basalt plain around the temple mount, the stones of the city quarried from far away - other dimensions, even - and beneath its foundations the basalt still stood. There were tunnels in the rock, tunnels that were older than the first angelic settlements here, and though most had forgotten, some, like The League of Holy Court, still used them when there was a need. Generally, that need turned out to be when someone had to disappear quickly, quietly, and efficiently, and then, after disappearing, needed to answer questions.

Lemuel glided around the tower before alighting at its base, then entered through the crowd of angels - craftsmen, lawyers, merchants, and more - going to and from work. Once inside, he slipped off into a little-used passage and took a lantern from a sconce to light his way as he descended the steps, preferring the artificial light to wasting his own magic.

As he spiraled down the staircase, the stone around him changed from translucent white to dusty white to red flecked with white and gray to dull black. At the base, the stair emptied into a passage wide enough for Michael to fit through, and Lemuel turned left. After navigating another maze of tunnels, he came into a room where the unlucky Ishmael was strapped down to a table. There wasn't any blood spattering the walls or pooling on the floor yet - that would come later - but Ishmael was sobbing already. Lemuel noticed a couple of fingernails stacked neatly nearby on the table.

Two of his interrogation specialists were already in the room. As Lemuel entered, they both looked up and snapped to attention. "At ease," he said. "What's the scoop?"

"Sir, he's not admitted to anything yet," said one. Lemuel raised an eyebrow, then stepped forward. "I know all about your blasphemy Ishmael. That alone is enough to condemn you. But, I need to know where you got that bottle of elixir from. "

Ishmael’s eyes were wide open, wildly flicking back and forth from Lemuel's face to the ceiling behind him. "I - I - I can't -"

Lemuel sighed. Time for the usual act, he thought, as he shrugged and stood up. "Then I'm afraid I can't help you. He turned his back and walked to the entrance of the room as one of the angels wrung out a wet cloth and fitted it over Ishmael’s face, the other raising a bucket of water. There was a second of splashing, then a howl of terror. Lemuel frowned; this wasn’t necessary; the prisoner had been pretty much broken already, and all he needed was a push in the right direction. He turned around, intending to stop them, but they were done: Ishmael had already broken, he was gibbering and sobbing with raw, undiluted terror.

As he quietly noted down the information Ishmael was pouring out, the names of family, friends, acquaintances, contacts identified from surveillance, and where he'd been in the last week, Lemuel was aghast at the potential scope of the treachery. What had started out as the pursuit of a heretic had turned into something much larger. For a moment, Lemuel understood why Michael-Lan held the position he did; he must have realized the full enormity of the threat as soon as he’d seen that human bottle. Michael had always said if the humans on Earth could get a foothold in Heaven for their armies, the war would be over. He must have realized the potential of that bottle to be such a foothold. That sublime insight made Lemuel proud to be his friend.

Underground Command Facility, Yamantau, Russia, March 2009

There was a time when no American President had entered the complex deep underneath the granite monolith of Yamantau. In those days, ones that seemed long ago but were only measured in months rather than years, the only thing that American Presidents had known of Yamantau was its presence on the targeteering plans for nuclear strikes on the Russian Homeland, for it appeared on every such plan and it was marked as one of the targets that had to be destroyed. If it survived the initial blows, assets were diverted from other, less important targets until Yamantau ceased to exist.

Now, President Barak Hussein Obama had disembarked from Air Force One and was on his way into the massively protected command post. His limousine sped along the straight road that appeared to run parallel through the snow-covered pine trees to the mountain that towered over them. As the car swept along the road, Obama saw the installations that littered the countryside around them. His host leaned forward. “Yamantau is quartz-containing crystal Mister President. It blocks radio, indeed any electromagnetic, transmission completely. That makes it the safest place in the world when Baldricks and Angels are on the loose. Of course, it means we cannot transmit out either so the transmission stations have to be on the outside. It is the one advantage Cheyenne Mountain has over us here. Mind you, your engineers made a bad mistake with Cheyenne Mountain.”

“What was that, Minister?”

“They built the command complex in the mountain. They should have built it under the mountain. That’s what we did, there are 6,000 feet of quartz-laced granite on top of our national emergency command post. And even now, our engineers feel the urge to dig still deeper.”

The car turned off the main road on to a side-track that seemed little more than a logging trail. It wound through the trees into a fold in the mountain where the snow drifted high against the rock walls that towered high on either side. Ahead of them was an entrance, for all the world looking like that of an old-fashioned mine. Obama didn’t notice how the fold in the ground curved around so that any blastwave travelling down the valley wouldn’t impact directly on the entrance. He did note that, once inside, massive blast doors closed behind him. The S-shaped curves continued inside the mountain, each one designed to mitigate the effects of a near-miss from the most powerful nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. There was only one way to destroy this massive underground fortress and that was to make repeated passes, each dropping a nuclear weapon into the crater from the one before. It was that job that had once been assigned to the B-52s and then to the B-2s.

Obama left his limousine and was escorted to the elevators that led down into the bowels of the mountain. Even here, the paths were not direct, one elevator would take them part of the way, then there would be more S-curves before another took them further down. Eventually, the lifts and corridors ended in the lowest, safest levels of the complex.

“Welcome Mister President. This is your first visit to Yamantau I believe.”

The conference room had a table, a circular one, that occupied most of the floor. There were 15 seats around the table, one for each member of the council. Fourteen were identical, the 15th was subtly larger and more imposing. Obama had already been briefed on that, in this room, the Chairman of the Council was just the first amongst equals. Nations had gained their place in this room in one of two ways. Either they had the military and economic power to demand it or they had simply been in the right place at the right time to earn it. The United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, Iran, Israel, Brazil, Italy, Thailand and Singapore. The countries that had been in the fight since the beginning and had scored the first kills against humanity’s enemy. There was one great advantage of this council, since it met in secret and its existence was largely unknown, its membership was free of politics. Mostly.

Vladimir Putin spoke from the Chairman’s seat. With the departure of George Bush, he was the most obvious candidate to take over the Chairmanship. The blood shed by the Russian Army along the Phlegethon River saw to that.

“First order of business. The angels. What do we know of them?”

At a side table, Doctor Surlethe stood up. The United States might no longer be Chairman here, but the country still overwhelmingly dominated the research and development effort and, of course, General Petraeus still commanded the Expeditionary Army. That made the American position still dominant.

“We have autopsied the Angels killed in the Anthrax attack on our Nephilim. The Angels have similarities with both us and with the Baldricks, enough to suggest that at one time we had a common ancestor. The Angels are much more humanoid than the Baldricks, they look human, they have human features, they lack the weird and surreal mutations of the Baldricks. They do, however, have the battery of electrocytes that distinguish the Baldricks and can generate bioelectricity in much the same way. There are notable differences between Angel and Baldrick though. The most obvious is that Angels are white, most Baldricks black. Angels have feathered wings like birds, Baldricks scaled leathery wings like bats. Angel blood is white or silver, Baldrick blood can be any one of a dozen colors, except white.”

Doctor Surlethe spoke for about twenty minutes describing the anatomical and other lessons that had been learned to date. Eventually, he got around to the subject of weapons. “It appears that Angels cannot throw lightning bolts, we don’t know why. They have a sound weapon, at first we thought it was a sound beam but we’re rethinking that. However, it is a sound pulse of some sort, in the air battle of Khabarovsk, an Su-35 actually outran it.”

“Do we have any concept of how this weapon works? Is it a threat.” The Indian Prime Minister spoke with a beautifully precise intonation.

“It is yes, precisely because we don’t know how it works. It caught our pilots by surprise, they’d got over-confident flying against the Baldrick Harpies that were virtually defenseless against them. I understand they’re evolving tactics to cope with the situation as we speak. But this brings us to a very important point. Let me show you a film. This comes from some experiments we performed here on Earth. We took one of Belial’s best tridents and copied it, then hooked it to one of our generators. The idea was to generate a super-bolt. Could have all sorts of uses. Watch what happened.”

One of the great screens flared into life and showed what looked like a Baldrick trident being charged up by a generator. The contacts were closed but instead of a bolt arcing downrange, the charge short-circuited to the ground.

“You see that? We can’t get an earth-made trident to fire a bolt, they arc to earth every time. Oh, by the way, guns made in hell work perfectly. This is a very important conclusion that we are impressing on our people. We used to think that the theories and laws of science that existed here on Earth are universal, well the tridents show quite simply that they are not. They are similar, very similar indeed, but they are not the same. Build a trident in Hell, power it by electricity made in Hell and it throws a bolt for up to two miles. Build a trident on Earth, power it with electricity made on Earth and it arcs to ground within a few inches. We now believe that the rules of physics here on Earth and the subtly different rules in Hell are both special cases of a general rule that sits above them. It is by understanding science in Hell and science on Earth that we can comprehend those differences and quantify them. By doing that, we can understand the general rules that previously we have only seen as our own special cases.”

A patter of applause from fifteen Presidents and Prime Ministers followed the presentation. Putin tapped the table in front of him and smiled benignly at the conference. “Now, we come to the next point of the agenda. How do we blow Heaven up?

 

[LTR]

Suwon Palace, North Korea, April 2009

"You know, that haircut is absolutely ridiculous." Gabriel-Lan leaned back and looked at the figure sharing the room with him. He was used to the fact that he towered over humans but the difference was even more marked when he was dealing with this particular man who measured only five foot two. In fact, he looked a lot less than that now and the ludicrous hairstyle he had affected in earlier years had been replaced by a thinning, gray brush-cut. The man's body seemed to have caved in on itself, he was thin and stooped over, lines of age prominent in the shrunken mask that was his face.

Around them, Kim Jong-Il's bodyguards bristled at the insult but they dared not move. Any other person who had made a remark like that would have been arrested on the spot and sent to a prison camp for a prolonged and gruelling execution. The guards had more sense than to try the same on Gabriel-Lan, the personal messenger of Yahweh. Kim Jong-Il's face was impassive as the insult registered, he also knew better than to argue with the great white figure before him. Still, he consoled himself with the knowledge that the benefits of dealing with these creatures far outweighed the annoyance of their supercilious arrogance.

Gabriel-Lan might have looked sleepy, and being honest with himself, he was still hung over from his activities the night before in the Montmartre Club. That same wealth of excesses combined with the attentions of Mistress Lailah had left him slightly reluctant to sit down but duty required him to carry out the messages. Also, he was well aware that humans were dangerous. Satan had forgotten that and now he was dead, along with Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Deumos. Abigor was little more than the human's puppet while Dagon was even less than that. Taking humans lightly was something that put an entirely new definition on the word 'unwise'. He saw Kim Jong-Il's two female companions, one allegedly a nurse, the other certainly a female doctor, move forward carefully and quickly check on their patient. Looking at him, Gabriel-Lan came to the conclusion that Kim Jong-Il would be joining his father very shortly. One way or another.

"Have you considered that a great window of opportunity opens before you?" Gabriel-Lan tried to put some enthusiasm into his voice. "The human armies are tied down in Hell, trying to bring peace to the lands they have conquered there. They cannot be withdrawn easily and their operations have left humans weak everywhere else. Especially south of the border. An assault now, aimed at reunifying Korea under your leadership would be exploiting this moment of weakness to best advantage."

"Much of the armor stationed in the South has indeed been withdrawn." Kim's voice was as weak as his appearance suggested it might be. "But the border fortifications remain. And the Americans…."

"The Americans are tied down in Hell, trying to pacify their occupation zone. And they have expanded their army so fast, their corps of leadership is spread very thin. Their army is but a shadow of what it once was." And even that shadow is enough to roll over anything that gets in its way Gabriel-Lan added the thought silently to himself even as he repeated the words that Michael-Lan had given him. His official title might be The Messenger of The One Above All but Gabriel-Lan believed it was Michael who best understood the new universe that was exploding into existence around them. He'd warned the Nameless One, the Lord and God of all that starting this war with humans was foolish and could only lead to disaster, but Yahweh had been adamant. They had dared to question his words and for they he was bound and determined to deliver them to Hell. Only, it hadn't ended that way, the attempt to deliver humans up to Satan had instead delivered Satan up to the humans.

Away from The Ultimate Temple, away from Yahweh's obsession with forcing absolute obedience and unqualified adoration from the humans, Michael-Lan had explained his strategy to Gabriel and impressed upon him the vital necessity of this mission. "If we fight the humans, head-to-head, we will lose." Michael-Lan had almost become impassioned at that point. "They have advanced so far, so fast, their armies are invincible. At best we can bloody them but the more we win against them, the worse will be our defeat in the end. There is but one force that can destroy a human army and that is another army of humans. If we can prevent them from assaulting us in Heaven and fight them with another human army on Earth, then we might survive this war that Yah-yah has forced on us."

The memory of Michael-Lan's blasphemous corruption of Lord and God of All's name jerked Gabriel-Lan out of his reverie. Kim Jong-Il was still wittering on about the strength of the border fortifications and the danger that the Americans might intervene. Gabriel cut him off sharply. "It is truly said that it is the emptiest of vessels that make most noise. You have a reputation, Kim Jong-Il but you know what reputations are? Words and rumors. You are great with your words and make many speeches but they mean nothing. What matters now are deeds and where deeds are concerned yours are conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps it is time for your father to return to his homeland and for the Great Leader to show the Dear Leader what deeds are."

"But Great Leader is dead."

"So? When did that make any difference?" Gabriel-Lan reflected that Kim Il-Sung actually looked a lot better than his son did. Given their present states, Kim Il-Sung could actually be mistaken for Kim Jong-Il's son rather than his father. "And, anyway, you of all people should know that he is dead. By the way, he wants an explanation as to why you puffed him in the face with that cyanide spray. If you are unprepared to take action, perhaps we should allow him to return and demand that explanation. After all, he is the "Eternal President" of this benighted country. Perhaps he should take up the reins again."

"No." Kim Jong-Il was almost panic-stricken. "You are right, the time has come for the Great Reunification Effort. We will get ready for it at once."

Gabriel-Lan rose to his feet and shook his wings to ease the cramps brought on by the confined room. "That is good news. I will watch your preparations with interest." He left the room, leaving consternation behind him. As he did, he made a quick time calculation. If he got a move on, he would be back in time for another appointment with Mistress Lailah.

Main Command Building, Naypyidaw, Myanmar

"An impressive consignment. Your people have done well." Michael-Lan checked the cargo manifest off with pleasure. Heroin number three and number four, raw opium, methamphetamines, ecstasy, DOM, it was all there in more than adequate quantities. Generous even, the supplies would restock his dwindling stash nicely.

"We are pleased to supply our ally's needs." Secretary-General Myint Oo addressed Michael-Lan as an equal which irked the Archangel greatly although he concealed his feelings behind a friendly smile. "We have established new factories for the synthetic products and driven our rivals for the heroin supplies out of business. We can increase supplies still further if you wish."

"That would be most acceptable." Michael-Lan paused for a second. "Can you supply cannabis as well?"

"Of course. For a price." Myint Oo gave Michael the reminder gently but firmly.

"Of course." Michael-Lan fished out a bag and handed it over. "These should cover this shipment I think."

The bag was full of precious stones, diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires. Myint Oo ran them through his fingers, extracting a few of the better stones for his own supply as he did so. The jewels were supposed to go to Myanmar's ruling junta where they would be exported as if they were products of Myanmar's precious stones industry and the proceeds into the junta member's bank accounts. It was a good deal, Michael-Lan got most of the drugs he needed for his purposes while the Generals in Mynamar lined their retirement accounts. Only one General had argued with the arrangement and he was now in Insein prison on a charge of corruption. That had amused Michael-Lan greatly, to accuse somebody of corruption in Myanmar was rather like accusing water of being wet.

"There is another matter." Michael-Lan spoke carefully. "Has it occurred to you that the Thai Army on the border is now weaker than it has been for many, many years?"

"It has." Myint Oo spoke equally carefully. "Their armored division and both cavalry divisions have gone to join the armies fighting in hell. That means their strategic reserve has been depleted and their defense rests upon their infantry divisions alone. Many of those are in the cities to protect against attacks from daemons."

"Does this not tempt you?"

Myint Oo dropped his voice. There was no need to but the subject of the conversation seemed to demand it. "It might allow us to redress the wrongs done to us in history."

Oh, you little humans are wonderful. You can reach back into your past and find an excuse for anything. Even if you have to invent it. "If your government needs support, financial support, for such redress, there are many more where these came from. Perhaps the time has come for the redress you need."

"Perhaps. It is an idea that has much favor." Myint Oo looked sunwards and then at the black ellipse that hovered a few feet away. "Michael-Lan, we have a small gift for you."

Michael-Lan hid his surprise with the same care as he had hidden his earlier irritation. "A gift?"

Myint Oo waved and some workers brought over a flat-bed carriage that made a whining noise. "An electrically-powered trolley. It will make it much easier for you to take your supplies to the other side of… that."

Michael-Lan was genuinely touched by the consideration. "That is very kind of you. Thank you so much. And good luck with your redress of historical wrongs." Whistling happily, he pulled down on the handle of the trolley and felt the electric motors in the wheels boost his effort. Then, with a cheerful wave, he pulled his cargo of street-corner pharmaceuticals through the portal back to Heaven.

USS Turner Joy, Returning From Hell Deployment

"Bell-bottomed trousers, coat of Navy Blue,
She loved a sailor and he loved her too."

Sophia Metaxas laughed as the chorus faded away, lost underneath the whine of the turbines and the roar of the destroyer's main gearing. The old destroyer had served for almost six months in Hell and was the worse for wear because of it although, oddly, she'd weathered better than some of the more modern ships. Greater tolerances in her construction probably had a lot to do with that. She'd pulled her weight as well, her three five inch guns had made short work of some local baldrick who had tried to buck Abigor's surrender order.

Lieutenant Travis checked his instruments then looked rather hopeful. "We should be back in Norfolk by seventeen-thirty. We're entering the approach channels now."

Senior Chief Robert 'Bob" Gaussington was looking at his engine instrumentation with an increasingly worried expression on his face. He picked up the telephone and got through to the bridge. "Commander Reynolds? We've got a problem down here. We're getting some bad readings on the water flow down here. Much more of this and we'll have problems keeping steam pressure up in the engines."

"Are those pirates of yours down there with you, Senior Chief?"

"That they are Sir. As piratical a bunch as you might want to meet." Turner Joy had a problem, as one of the very few steam-powered ships left in the Navy, people familiar with her plant and systems were few and far between. Except, of course, for the group who had pulled the ship out of a museum and masterminded her return to service. Eventually, the navy had recognized they had little choice in the matter and drafted the whole group, putting them half-in the Navy and half-out of it. This weird status of most of her crew had given Turner Joy what was perhaps the most eccentric ship's company in the whole Navy.

"Well, get them up here. They need to see this." The tone brooked no delay.

Once on the bridge wings, Sophia Metaxas could see what the cause for alarm was. As far as she could see, the sea was blood-red, even the bone in the destroyer's teeth was crimson. It was a stunning, dreadful sight, made all the worse by the silence that surrounded it. There were no sea birds, no fish jumping, nothing. Only the sound of the destroyer as she plowed through the poisonous-looking sea.

"Have you ever seen anything like this Captain."

"Sure. It's a Red Algal Bloom, it used to be called a Red Tide although the name's dropped out of fashion since its nothing to do with the tide and the color can be anything from light yellow to deep brown. I've never seen one this large before though. When I was on the old Seattle out of Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey, we saw this all the time off New York. Everything was right for an algal bloom there, lots of nutrients in the water caused by runoff from the city and a coastal upwelling, that's where Deepwater oceanic currents underwater formations that push them to the surface. The result is the algae grow out of control and we get this. But there, the patches are perhaps a hundred yards long and about twenty wide. We've been sailing through this one for ten minutes and there's no end to it."

"How bad is this?" Sophia looked at the blood red sea and a memory of a chilling paragraph came back into her mind.

"Very. The algae produce natural toxins and deplete the dissolved oxygen in the sea water. That causes wildlife mortalities among marine and coastal species of fish, birds, marine mammals and other organisms. The worst of the poisons is a potent neurotoxin called brevetoxin. That kills everything in the water. A Red Algal Bloom this size, it could be a disaster for marine life around here."

"The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became blood like that of a dead man; and every living thing in the sea died. Revelation 16:3." The verse had returned to Sophia's mind while the Captain had been speaking and she repeated it grimly. "The Second Bowl of Wrath."

Reynolds looked at her suspiciously. "And just how did you know that?"

"My parents and grandparents took their religion very seriously. When the message came though, telling everybody to lay down and die, they did. I tried to save them, I cried and screamed at them, I tried to drag them up out of their beds, I even ripped the earrings out of my mother's ears hoping the pain would bring her back. But nothing worked and they all just died, tearing me apart in the process. They left me alone and it was all a fraud. I'm just waiting now until they get pulled out of the hell-pit so I can go down there and tell them just what I think of them, make them suffer a little for what they put me through."

She caught herself and smiled sheepishly. "I'm sorry Captain, it’s a sore point with me I guess."

"You guess?" Reynolds looked sad for a moment. "None of my family did that, but a few around where we lived did. One memory that I can’t get over, the dogs howling at their owners, trying to make them wake up, fighting the only way they could to try and keep them alive. We took one of them in and the poor thing was so traumatized, he shivered with fear every time one of us had a nap. I tell you this Sophia, if I can get Yahweh under our guns, just once…"

"Sorry Sir. Message from CINCLANT." The sparker passed the message flimsy to Reynolds.

"Well, that confirms it, I think. Whole east coast is affected by this. Copies from CINCPAC say the west coast is the same. They want us to report in from here and start taking samples. They want to try and identify what this particular algal bloom is. One piece of good news is, its affecting shallow water only."

"That makes sense." Sophia thought carefully. "All these prophecies were written in ancient times and the authors knew very little about what was going on. Sailors mostly stuck to shallow water, deep water navigation was almost unknown. So when they saw this happening, they assumed it was all the seas, not just coastal waters. But, this is the second Bowl of Wrath all right."

Turner Joy slowed down while the crew started trying to gather water samples. It wasn't long before the first bottles were on board and Reynolds looked at them with disgust. Normally, even in an algal bloom, the water in a sample jar was only slightly tinged but these were saturated with color and the water seemed oily somehow.

"Captain, Doc Samuels here. Warn the men gathering samples to take precautions against contact with the water. It's causing some of them to blister on their arms and legs and most of them are reporting coughing and sneezing attacks. I'm issuing antihistamines but we've only got a limited supply and if the air intakes start pulling in aerosols of that water, we could have problems all through the ship."

"Thank's doc. Carry on."

Reynolds looked at the blood-red sea water again. "Just five minutes under my guns, that's all I ask. Just five minutes."

 

[LTR]

Briefing Room, White House Washington DC, April 2009

"So what did you think of Yamantau Mister President?" Secretary of the Interior Salazar had wanted to go on that visit but he hadn't.

"It is a most remarkable installation. It comforts me to think that we have something similar here."

"Actually Mister President, we don't." Secretary of Defense Warner spoke sadly. "We have proposed such an installation in the past but funding was always denied. The nearest we have to Yamantau is Cheyenne Mountain and that is in care-and-maintenance status. We have some shallower installations that offer nothing like the protection of Yamantau of course. But, given the threats we face now, Yamantau offers little in the way of protection. As far as we know."

"You think there is more to Yamantau than the Russians have let us see?"

"Of course. But I was more thinking of the kinds of attack we are facing right now. And what may come next, remember we had no warning of the attacks on Sheffield and Detroit."

A grim silence ran around the room. The destruction of Sheffield and Detroit still had the power to awe those who saw the fields of cooled lava that now overlay what had once been two thriving cities. Somehow, it was made all the more striking by the knowledge that the cities could not be rebuilt. Usually, no matter how bad the damage, the city inhabitants had picked themselves up and rebuilt. In Sheffield and Detroit, that was impossible and the devastated areas of the cities had been abandoned.

"You think there may be more sky-volcano attacks?" Obama sounded apprehensive as well he might. The winter had been a rough one worldwide and few people believed the storms had been natural.

"I'm saying, Mister President, we don’t know what's coming."

"That may not be true Secretary Warner." General Schatten spoke carefully as befitted a military man in this epitome of civilian control. "Our resident experts in the field believe that there are likely to be seven attacks before Yahweh really begins to engage us. We've had two and we can expect the third very shortly. That will see the Algal Blooms spreading to our inland waterways. The fourth is expected to consist of fire and heat, that sounds like more sky-volcano attacks to us. Details on the fifth attack are very indefinite and simply refer to darkness and people gnawing their tongues with pain. The sixth simply says the Euphrates will dry up, well, that's bad for Iraq but hardly a gruesome disaster while the last speaks of a massive earthquake and a rain of giant stones. That sounds like more portal work."

"Where does this come from?"

"Book of Revelations, Mister President. Normally we would discount that as a source but the first two attacks do make it look like somebody is sticking to that playbook."

"And just how long do we have to sit here taking it on the chin like this? We finished off Satan in less than six months once we got rolling, why can't we do the same with Yahweh?"

"Because we can't get at him." Secretary Warner reinserted himself into the conversation deftly. "We have no idea where Heaven is, we can’t find it and we can't open a portal to it. Our primary hope at the moment is to understand the structure of the space-time continuum in which Heaven exists and then find it by exploiting that understanding. However, I am advised that it is likely we will find that the space-time continuum in question will contain large numbers of habitable entities and even if we can locate them, finding the right one will be very difficult. At worst, we may end up visiting each in turn until we find the right one. President Abigor has said that is how Satan and Yahweh explored our dimension although they obviously had no understanding of the science involved. Somehow, they got through to planets more or less at random."

"This just is not good enough. We must find a way of launching a counter-attack. So far this war with Heaven has cost us more people and more treasure than the war with Hell did."

"That is hardly surprising Mister President. In retrospect, we were very lucky with the Curb Stomp War. The Baldricks just opened a portal and came straight at us. Not only that, they did so head-on into the biggest concentration of military power we could deploy and one that was well-stocked with munitions. They, quite literally, couldn’t have made it easier for us if they had tried. It's fairly obvious that Yahweh watched that debacle and has decided to try a different approach. I must say, Mister President, that it is easy to over-estimate the damage that is being done to us by these attacks. The anthrax attack cost us a third of our sensitives and that's limited our ability to construct new portals through to Hell. However, we have a contingency plan to deal with the shortage if it becomes critical."

"And that is?"

"To use Baldricks, especially the naga, as substitutes for our sensitives. We don't want to do that, the last thing we need is for the Baldricks to think they are actually useful to us rather than something midway between utterly irrelevant and a nuisance. But it is an option. Anyway, we've had a rough winter and the rest of the world hasn't been much better. The problem is, distinguishing between natural bad weather and the enhanced bad weather that constitutes a Yahweh attack. Some of the attacks are quite clearly the latter, the Missouri tornados that destroyed Whiteman AFB for example. Others may simply be normal bad weather. Britain had a very wet winter with severe rain but looking at the weather data, we can’t see any sign of enhancement to that. One thing that is clear from the NOAA studies of the winter, Yahweh can't create bad weather. He can modify it, intensify it and redirect it but he can't create it. That's very encouraging from our point of view."

"What about this Red Tide? Tom?"

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack leaned forward in his seat. "I'll echo what Rob said, Mister President. It’s a bad blow but we shouldn’t overestimate it. The Algal Bloom is confined to continental shelf areas and then only to isolated parts of that shelf. Those parts make up a substantial proportion of the total maritime area but by no means all of it. The bad news is, we've lost the fisheries in the continental shelf areas and that's hit shellfish production, especially shrimp and lobster, and put the short-range fishing boats out of business. However, deep-sea fisheries and fish-farming are not affected so we've got a substantial proportion of our fish supply maintained. It's the same around the world, shallow-water fishing is hammered but deep sea fishing and fish farming is all right. It's a blow but its survivable."

"How did this happen?"

General Schatten glanced at Secretary Vilsack who deferred to him. "At first we thought it was another case of seeding by angels but we've ruled that out. The Algal Bloom is a natural phenomena that is kicked off by excess nutrients in the water. Our current hypothesis is that an underwater gate was opened in various areas and a large volume of nutrient-rich sea water was injected into the areas affected. We think, and this is a guess Sir, that other attacks were made on deep-water areas but even with the extra nutrients the conditions there weren't suitable and those parts of the attack failed. Another encouraging sign for us, Yahweh is nowhere near infallible.

"We know that no angels were responsible for this. We have a nation-wide portal detection network, we set that up as part of the response to the sky-volcano attacks. Now and then, it's detected portals forming and fading away, we are more or less certain they're the result of angels arriving and departing. Oddly there are concentrations of such formations around San Francisco, Las Vegas, El Paso and New Orleans. Why that is we do not know. One last thing Sir, the Uriel attacks, the mass die-offs? They're moving north, towards us. One was reported in Honduras three days ago. Eight thousand dead."

"Thank you." Obama glanced around the room. "Now, the economy. Tim?"

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laughed a little desperately. "What economy Sir? We don’t have one any more, we've got a train wreck instead. What most people don't realize is that the economy was heading for a major crash before all this happened. People had borrowed too much money and couldn’t repay it, the banks had loaned money they had little or no hope of collecting and the whole house of cards was about to come down. As a matter of fact, it would have collapsed by now if it hadn't been for the mobilization. We've been printing money like mad to pay for it, we've pumped trillions into the economy, nearly all of which has stayed here in the United States. The result, of course, is inflation which is only being stopped from reaching runaway proportions by price controls and rationing. The overall effect has been to devalue people's debts. Also, because of triple-shift working at all the mobilized industries, the reopening of shuttered factories and so on, people have more money in their pockets. Rationing means there aren't many things they can spend it on so they put it in the banks and that's recapitalized them. After all, they can't buy cars because no cars are being made for the civilian market, they can't buy houses because the contractors are building defense installations instead. In economic terms, the mobilization is a massive stimulus program. The problem is, it’s all just building problems up for the future. When the controls come off, all economic hell will break loose."

A grim silence ran around the conference room. At last Obama broke it. "Janet, internal security?"

"There, Barry, the situation is pretty good. Crime-rate is way, way down. Spree killings and so on have virtually stopped, it seems like the majority were the direct result of demonic possession. Street crime is way down as well, partly because everybody is working all hours of the day and are simply too tired and partly because the police, U.S. Volunteers and armed citizens are on the streets all the time. Street crime has just got too dangerous. We do have problems with what was called 'the fifth column' back in World War Two. Mostly, the remnants of the extreme religious groups who didn’t lie down and die with the rest. There have been some acts of obstructionism, trying to get in the way of military convoys and so on. A few cases of family members of serving military personnel being harassed. Most, all pretty short-lived, the perpetrators have no popular support and in a lot of cases, they're lucky if the police get to them before the local citizens. You heard what happened to a guy called Phlops?"

The Cabinet shook its collective head.

"Well, he was the self-appointed leader of an extreme religious cult down south somewhere. Offshoot of the Baptist church although they disowned him a long time ago. Anyway, he and some members of his congregation started disrupting the funeral of some troops who got killed on active service. Yelling abuse at the family of the slain, saying the dead got what they deserved and so on. Anyway, the local population went berserk and lynched them. I mean really lynched. Phlops's body was lashed behind a pick-up truck and dragged around city limits as a lesson to anybody else who might have the same idea in mind."

"I sincerely hope the people responsible have been punished."

"Of course, Phlop's body started to come apart on the second circuit of the city limits. So the police pulled the truck in and charged the driver with dumping toxic waste. No other charges, nobody saw anything or could identify anybody. Oh yes, somebody tipped off a group of deceased troopers in Hell and they were waiting for Phlops when he turned up there. I understand the attitude adjustment was emphatic. But, Mister President, there are a whole load of issues that come out of this. What about capital punishment for example? Pretty much all the logical base behind many of our legal decisions has been swept away and we need to address that."

The members of the Cabinet nodded thoughtfully. It wasn't just criminal law that was being affected, the whole legal concept of death was being re-evaluated. Already the health services were beginning to ask how knowledge of Hell should affect the decisions they had to make. Did it really make sense to keep a dying person alive but in a vegetative state when all that was doing was delaying their transfer to a healthy life in an increasingly-comfortable Hell dimension? The philosophers were agonizing over these and many more related questions.

"Let us leave legal matters to the Supreme Court." Obama spoke decisively. "Let them interpret existing law first before we start making new ones. That's what they get paid for."

Training Camp, 1st Mechanized Infantry Battalion (Demonic), Dis, Hell, May 2009

"Spread out, don't bunch up. Stay grouped together like that and a single inbound artillery round will take you all out at once."

The Baldricks forming the skirmish line stretched out on either side of their armored personnel carrier obediently shuffled further out, spreading their line as the gaps between them opened. For warriors who had spent millennia training to fight with their shoulders actually touching those on either side of them, it was an aching readjustment. The problems weren't helped by the fact that all these Baldricks were veterans, some of the few survivors of Abigor's and Beelzebub's armies that were fit for military service.

Standing behind them, Sergeant Gray Anderson shook his head sadly. It was much easier training new recruits, they didn’t know anything. These Baldrick veterans were full of bad habits that they had to lose if they wanted to live on a modern battlefield. The shuffling stopped, Anderson sighed to himself, and repeated his instructions. "Spread out! Right out. At least twice as far as you are doing at the moment. Otherwise, you will all die."

That was a grim comment, the whole psychology of the Baldricks had changed since they had come under the lash of human artillery fire. As far as anybody could tell, they were more or less immortal unless somebody (or something) killed them. As a result, they hadn't really feared death before but now, after seeing nine of every ten men in their units dying, the fact and fear of death was ingrained in their minds.
"All right, now, look to your front. The targets are set up at the two hundred yard mark. Two hundred yards is as far as you're likely to see the enemies you are shooting at. Beyond that range, we use area fire and suppressive fire. Load one round, take your time, aim at your target and fire."

Taloned hands drew a .940 inch nitro-express round from their ammunition pouches. A quick pressure on the lever under the Martini-Henry rifle and the breech block dropped down. A quick pressure and the round was slid into the chamber, then the lever was lifted to seal the breech. The Martini-Henry was an old design, dating from a hundred and fifty years earlier, but it was uniquely suited to this application. It was immensely strong and could take the very powerful .940 cartridge that exploited the Baldrick's strength and size. The designers had corrected all the problems with the old version and had produced a weapon that was powerful, reliable and accurate. It was also single-shot so the automatic weapons carried by the humans still had the edge. Anyway, the human troops had artillery.

Each Baldrick in the line had lifted his hand, indicating his weapon was ready. "All right, in your own time, aim and fire."

Even through Anderson's ear protectors, the crash of the rifles was painful. The Baldricks didn’t seem to notice and their big bodies absorbed the brutal recoil without problems. That was one of the things that had made Anderson uneasy, at six foot five, he was a big man and he wasn't used to looking up at people who towered over him. He lifted his binoculars and looked carefully at the targets. Of the nine Baldricks in the unit, eight had put their shots inside the six-ring, one had even put his in the black. A big, really big, improvement. One shot seemed to have missed the target completely.

"Hunkhalaphinarexes! You closed your eyes again!" A groan went along the line of Baldricks, unit cohesion was building up and the failure of this one Baldrick was taken by them all as a reflection on their own ability. "Try again. Load up." Anderson walked over to him and squatted on the ground. "You must keep your eyes open when you fire. Otherwise you'll wander off-target. Now try again."

The Baldricks watching were keenly aware that, in the old days, a recruit who fouled up this badly when firing his trident would have suffered a gruesome few days of imaginatively brutal torture. Hunkhalaphinarexes took a deep breath, forced himself to freeze his eyes open, and squeezed the trigger in the approved manner. The shot ripped a hole in the target, three o'clock in the eight-ring.

"Not bad at all Hunky, not bad. We'll make a soldier of you yet. All right, fire ten round at your target, in your own time. Try and get a good, tight group. Remember, doing things right is what we want, doing it fast comes later."

Anderson walked over to the unit's carrier and climbed in the back. It was a highly modified version of the old M-113A3 with an extra roadwheel each side and new hull that had an open crew compartment in the back. Crew of nine, commander, driver and gunner with six dismount infantry. The gunner had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the forward edge of the fighting compartment. The forward compartment had space for the driver and commander, the latter having a radio. Anderson picked the speaker up and patched through to his platoon command.

"One-Delta-Alpha Actual here. We're finishing up on the range now. We're coming back in about thirty minutes. The boys will need feeding."

"Copy that Alpha-Actual, we'll butcher a food-beast for them. How are they doing?"

"As well as can be expected. For recruits with so much to unlearn." Anderson sighed gently, it was only a few months before he'd been in a nursing home, remembering his years of military service while marking time, waiting to die. Then, there had been the day he hadn't woken up in his room but in the recovery ward on the Phelan Plain and the interview with the placement officers who had been waiting for him. One mention of the fact he'd spent thirty years training recruits for Her Majesty's Army and he'd been found this job. The odd thing was, he was rather enjoying it and the memories of his life on Earth were becoming remote. Not fading, if he made the effort they were as clear as they had ever been, but he just didn't think of them so much. His life was here now. "Hey Mitch, do me a favor, pick out a good-looking food-beast for my boys right, they've worked hard today."

 

[LTR]

Outside CBS Studios, New York, NY, May 2009

“I see your show got renewed.” Colonel Paschal looked around the inside of the stretched Hummer limousine. It wasn’t often that one saw limousines like this anymore, not with gas and diesel fuel being rationed the way it was. But, he guessed, his companion was a television star so the studio had certainly made some special arrangements somehow. Anyway, she needed a larger-than-normal vehicle.

“I was not surprised, given my audience ratings over the first run.” Lugasharmanaska settled back in her seat and poured herself a goblet of champagne from the bar in the rear of her Hummer. Paschal caught her yellow eyes looking sideways at him and guessed that she was already trying to work out what he wanted with her and to turn it to her own advantage. He also wondered if the CBS management had been fully aware of how effective her pheromones could be in a confined space. DIMO(N) was still failing to find a counter to their effect, the best that could be done was for anybody dealing with a succubus to be fully aware of the dangers and be on their guard. It didn’t always work.

Still, it might be that he was being unkind to her, ‘Tonight With Luga’ was the country’s top-rated evening chat show. Most of the country remembered fondly how she had boxed Bernie Madoff into a corner and he’d tried to bluff his way out by claiming she would have done the same in his position. Her reply, “Of course, but I’m a daemon from Hell, I’m supposed to be the epitome of evil. What’s your excuse?” had even caused the camera operators and stage crew to break out into howls of laughter. Paschal caught another sideways glance from her eyes and reminded himself that she hadn’t changed. She’d got a veneer of sophistication and style now, and her clothing sense had improved dramatically but she was still the same succubus who’d tried to play everybody around her. And was still doing so.

“You’re on four months hiatus I believe? Going to take a trip back to Hell?”

Lugasharmanaska shook her head. “I didn’t make many friends back home when I sided with humans.”

“You know Deumos is dead? She died of her injuries during the assassination of Satan. Brain got squeezed inside out and the exhaust from the missiles fried her.”

“I know that.” Lugasharmanaska more than knew it, she was intimately involved in the power plays that were going on between the various factions that were maneuvering to replace the late and not at all lamented Deumos. Not as a candidate of course, she had far too enjoyable a position here on Earth and being on the side of the humans brought with it many benefits. One of them was that each of the factions that did want to provide the Succubae with their new queen believed that she had great influence over the humans and could swing their support to her desired candidate. That was why she didn’t wish to visit Hell, if she did, the fact that her possession of any such power was a delusion would become all too obvious. As it was, they were competing with each other to offer her the most tempting considerations and privileges. It was, she had decided, much more profitable and much safer to be a Queen-Maker than a Queen. Anyway, she had her audience to think of.

“So, what plans do you have for the next four months?”

“I’m going to be resting.”

Paschal snorted with laughter. Lugasharmanaska was picking up the habits and traditions of show-business with slightly terrifying speed. If she carried on this way, she’d be addressing everybody as ‘darling’ soon. “In other words, you have no commitments and nothing substantial to do. Well, I can fix that. How would you like to return to DIMO(N) for a few months, help us out with giving Yahweh the same treatment we handed out to Satan?”

“How much, and do I get a percentage of the gross?”

Yup, thought Paschal, our Luga has been in show business too long already. “Voluntary service and no percentage I fear. Although your fans will be ecstatic to hear you’ve volunteered your service to help the war effort. Again.”

She studied his face carefully while the options ran themselves though her mind. The focus groups had pinned down her one drawback as an star was the doubts people had over her final loyalties. This was, Luga thought, unfair. She didn’t have any final loyalties. But, giving up her time on hiatus to help the human war effort would convince the dubious that she was indeed on their side.

“As long as volunteering gets me on the news. What do you want me to do?”

“We’re getting a battering from Yahweh. We’re taking losses, nothing we can’t afford but irritating nonetheless. The problem is, we can’t get back at him. Over the last six months, every possible way we can get to Heaven has been methodically closed down. So we’re pulling in every asset we can get our hands on to change that. And you, Luga, are one of them.”

She nodded. One thought running through her mind was that The Eternal City was effectively a mass of precious stones and looting it would make her a fortune. Another was that poking Yahweh in the eye was always worthwhile. And if it increased the debts that humans owed to her, well, so much the better. “Right, I will rephrase my answer, what do you need to know?”

“Essentially, everything you can tell us about the Great Celestial War, how it was fought, where the fighting took place, how Heaven and Hell managed to get at each other. More than that, what sort of weaponry Yahweh brought to the party.”

“I can answer some of that right here. To get directly from Heaven to Hell or the other way is very hard indeed. It takes much effort and cooperation from both ends. There were very few such links and only one survived the war. Heavengate. Why don’t you use that?”

“It’s been closed.”

“Very sensible of Yahweh, or, I suspect, Michaellanyahweh.” Luga pronounced Michael’s name daemon-style, running all the parts into a single word. “Michael is Yahweh’s general. But weapons? Nothing compared to yours. He has his beasts of course and they are terrible to behold but compared to your tanks and aircraft?” Luga snorted with laughter.

Paschal thought that her laughter had a most engaging quality to it, then cudgeled himself over the head. Damn it, those pheromones were dangerous and the confines of a limousine were perfect for them to develop their effects. He swallowed, got a grip on himself, and continued. “That’s a good start. Anyway, our experts will need to speak with you.”

“Why do you not ask Abigor? He fought in that war, one of Satan’s best Generals. Or Belial, who was one of his worst.”

“We have no idea where Belial is. Anyway, we never rely on a single source.”

“Very wise.” So the humans haven’t found Belial yet? Very interesting. “Driver, take us to my apartment.”

Desert, South of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. May 2009

“Does The One Above All know what He is asking?”

I don’t think ‘asking’ is quite accurate, thought Michael-Lan, screaming demands and issuing blood-curdling threats in almost incoherent rage would be a little more accurate. “Is there anything that is beyond the knowledge of The All-Seeing Father? Yes, He does know what He asks but there is no alternative. It is the Americans who are the center of the resistance to His Divine Will and it is they who must be made to suffer for their disobedience. The city close to here will be a suitable target I think. It is on the border so it should be easy prey for you.” It is also in Texas, whose state motto is ‘Shoot first, keep shooting, shoot some more and if anybody is left standing, ask some questions’. You’re in for an interesting time Uriel-Lan-Yahweh.

“There is no easy prey in this world Michael-Lan. There hasn’t been for many years but now things are much, much worse. Everywhere I go, humans scan the skies with their machines, if they see anything suspect, they send up their aircraft to investigate. Since the war started, every time they see something, they fire their missiles as well. Even the poorest and least of their countries have them now. And they have something else, something I do not understand. I have seen only hints of it but it is beyond my understanding.”

Michael-Lan nodded sympathetically. “Humans love their machines. Some of them even give them their own names and speak to them as if they are alive. Mexico is much poorer than America, come in from the south and the door should be open to you.”

“There is something else. Once, all I had to do was to will it and the humans died. No matter where, no matter when, they died without effort on my part. Now, it takes all my strength to snuff them out and even then, many survive. The animals of every kind die but the humans do not, not all of them. Since this war started, my task has become harder with every day that passes. Their aircraft are worst of all, once I could still the lives of the pilot and the aircraft would fall from the sky.” Uriel paused, remembering the times when he had seized upon one of the great passenger aircraft the humans used and snuffed out the lives of its crew leaving the aircraft to crash. To do the same to the human fighter aircraft had often been harder but now was virtually impossible. He had used all his strength and the effect had been beneath notice.

Michael-Lan frowned mightily. “Uriel-Lan-Yahweh, do you doubt the wisdom of The One Above All?”

Uriel stepped back in sheer shock at the accusation. “Never!”

“I am pleased to hear it. You are the Fire and Sword of The Most High, his most trusted servant and the bringer of wrath upon his enemies. The All-Seeing Father would be most disturbed if he was to hear that you believed there were humans who were beyond his reach. You can say that again, and hear it he will.

“You may tell The One Above All that tonight, Uriel will extinguish the city of El Paso.” Uriel drew himself up in a mixture or pride and offended dignity.

“I shall. Now, I must leave, I have business in the south.” Picking up a consignment of cocaine and some of those exquisite mushrooms. But no need for you to know that. Michael-Lan gathered his wings, inflated his sacs and took off, leaving Uriel staring after him.

2nd Battery, 365th Air Defense Battalion, El Paso, Texas. May 2009

“Sarge, we’ve got a bandit on the radar.”

“Sure it’s not civilian?” There was no need to ask whether it was military or not, there was no identification friend-or-foe system response and all military aircraft had such equipment. Of course, it could be on the fritz but that would then be a problem to sort out later. Better a blue-on-blue kill than a sky-volcano opening up over El Paso.

“If it is, its way out of the safe lanes. Could be a druggie chancing his luck of course.” Every airport was surrounded by safe lanes that civilian aircraft had, on pain of being shot out of the sky, use. Early on, a few pilots had chanced their arm and strayed out of those lanes only to have terminal arguments with missiles or fighters. The first resulting court case had gone to the Supreme Court in record time, where the Justices had ruled that responsibility for the shoot-downs lay with the pilots who had been flying in prohibited areas. Now, the only humans who flew in such areas were smugglers or the terminally stupid. The other alternatives were Baldricks or Angels and nobody objected to shooting them on sight.

“Air Force confirming. An AWACS has the contact as well, they read it coming in from the south, heading almost exactly due north. Speed 180 knots, altitude 7,500 feet.”

“Any word from the DIMO(N) net?” The land-lines were already opening up fast, they did every time something showed up somewhere it shouldn’t. Nobody could forget Detroit and the fifty thousand people who had died there. For a reason nobody could quite understand, the first sign that a portal was about to be opened was that cell phone reception went crazy. Monitoring the disruptions to service gave a warning to those beneath that something dreadful was about to happen.

“The DIMO(N) net reports no towers out, dropped frame rate is nominal. There’s no portal forming out there.”

“Confirm data. That makes it either a civilian bird way off course or a hostile flying in.” Corporal Baughn re-read the data from the displays. “It’s on a direct course for El Paso, or Ciudad Juarez, take your pick. I class this one has hostile.”

The battery commander glanced at the displays. “Confirm that. If it isn’t, he’s too dumb to live. Within range?”

“Sure, those are PAC-3s out there.”

“Get ready to fire.” There was a pause. “Hold one, the Air Farce are vectoring two F-16s in.”

“Trust the fly-boys to muscle in.”

“Not so fast. The fighters will be a decoy, they’ll herd him over us and distract him. Then, when the time is right, we’ll stick four PAC-3s up him and he’ll never know they were there.”

“Works for me.”

Over the Desert, South of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. May 2009

Uriel glided silently through the darkness, savoring the signs of life that came from the bustling city beneath him. If he had his way, he would stay this far south, the city was a fat target and even the human’s new-found resistance to his touch couldn’t save them from a savage death toll. But, he had his orders from The One Above All and they were not to be disputed. He would have to go further north, to the American city that lay beyond the river. It was easy to see where the divisor was; both cities were brightly lit but the part north of the river was almost garish in its multitude of lights and colors.

There was another reason why Uriel knew he was heading further north than he had been for many years. His skin was itching madly and it got worse by the minute. Somehow, the humans knew he was here and were already preparing one of their explosive welcomes for him. He sent out the first gentle touch of his mind, gauging reaction and response rather than actively trying to snuff out the existences of those beneath him. As he had expected, the resistance was there, it varied in its effects from a hindrance to a complete block, but it was there. It was time to conduct his attack.

Uriel concentrated and focused his mind on the northern part of the great sea of light underneath him. His touch was rejected, blocked, neutralized. He concentrated his willpower, pouring energy from his body into the attack, sending out great waves of his touch to blanket the ground beneath. In the part of his mind not conducting the onslaught, he visualized what must be happening on the ground below, the people simply dying as they stood or walked, slumping to the ground, their lives extinguished as if they had never been. His great wings in exultation as the power of his touch lapped the ground below. The resistance was still there, greater than in any of his attacks further south, but he could feel that at least some of the power he was emitting was finally taking its toll.

It was then that Uriel realized he was hearing something, a sky-ripping scream that was still far away but one that got closer all the time. ‘The war cry of a Sky-Chariot’ he thought scornfully, the pathetic name that Satan and the fallen that had been exiled to Hell had coined for what was simply the noise of a human jet engine. If Satan had bothered to stay in touch with humans, studied them, followed their development, he too would have been warned of the way their knowledge and understanding had suddenly mushroomed out. Quite apart from anything else, Satan would still be alive and ruling Hell, not dead and buried with his followers living under human rule.

It was time to do something about these aircraft. Uriel made a lazy turn and headed directly towards them. He gathered his energy, redirecting it from the assault on those beneath him, concentrating it into a triumphant trumpet-call that would hammer the approaching aircraft from the sky. He had heard how the lesser Angels had swept human aircraft from the skies with their trumpeting, rumor said that almost fifty human aircraft had been destroyed in that one fight. Now, the humans would see what the infinitely greater trumpeting of an Archangel could achieve. He summoned his strength, concentrated it into a single great call and bellowed out its note.

It was as if the aircraft had sensed his purpose, for as he had turned to attack them, they had reversed course and fled away from him, their tails glowing bright red. They escaped unscathed, Uriel had the odd impression that his trumpet blast had actually fallen behind them as they fled to safety. He trumpeted again, this time in triumph for had he not engaged the human aircraft in single combat and forced them to flee in disgrace? He set off in pursuit, knowing it was futile since they were heading north far faster than he could fly.

It was then that the constant itching in his skin was replaced by a burning agony that convinced him that he was on fire. Instinctively, he glanced below and behind him to see four great streaks of fire closing in on him. The thoughts flashed through his mind, he had been tricked, fooled, lured into an ambush and he had but a split second to save himself before the missiles tore home. Faster than he had ever done in his life, far faster than was theoretically possible, he opened a portal and it enveloped him. It slammed shut behind him just a moment before the four PAC-3 missiles tore into the sky where it had been.

2nd Battery, 365th Air Defense Battalion, El Paso, Texas. May 2009

The thundering explosions lit the sky above El Paso, the four Patriot missiles expending themselves in an exemplary display of reliability. The question was, had they actually hit their target or simply exploded at the end of their flight. It was an old question and one that had confused more than a few debriefings.

“Did we get him?” It was Corporal Baughn speaking but he was voicing the question held in the minds of all.”

“There’s no reports that a rain of overcooked and slightly-used rump steaks is descending on El Paso so it doesn’t seem so.” A grim laugh ran around the battery control room.

“The DIMO(N) net is reporting Sir. They have a very small portal opening a split second before the missiles exploded. It was there for a tiny fraction of a second only but the position they have is close to our intercept point. I’d say the thing got away.”

Lieutenant Becerra sighed. “We missed him. We’ve never seen a Baldrick do that before.” He stopped for a second and went to the door of the van. In the distance, the sound of emergency service vehicle sirens wailing was clearly distinguishable. “He didn’t miss us though.”

 

[LTR]

DIMO(N) Conference Room, The Pentagon, May 2009

“Well, did you escape with your virginity intact?” General Schatten looked at Colonel Paschal curiously.

“I tell you Sir, those pheromones are dangerous. It’s all right when there’s ventilation or the room is large enough but in a closed space like a limousine, they’re insidious.” Paschal reflected that he’d noticed all too late that Lugasharmanaska hadn’t had the air conditioning in her limousine turned on. “Even when one’s expecting them and prepared to discount their effects, they sort of sneak up on one.”

“So he did lose his virginity to her.” Dr. Surlethe put a great deal of satisfaction into his voice.

“Well, it’s not surprising. Remember that tabloid journalist? From the Enquirer or the Star, one of the supermarket things. Made contact with her, wanting to do an expose on ‘Sex Secrets of the Succubae’ or something. Apparently, she sucked him in and he crawled out of her apartment two days later, hands shaking so badly he couldn’t even type for a week. He’s been singing her praises ever since.” A guffaw ran around the room, the power the succubae had to seduce people was already legendary.

Paschal went bright red which caused an even greater outburst of laughter. “I told you, I didn’t lose my virginity to her….”

“I guess you’d lost it somewhere else first then. Careless of you.” Dr. Kuroneko spoke suavely. “Of course you realize she’s now got your sperm stored away? She’ll transfer it to an Incubus who will then impregnate a woman with it.”

“Ugh, squick.” The executive assistant taking meeting notes in the corner of the room shuddered with distaste.

“You know Colonel, you could be in serious trouble there.” The emotionless, uninflected voice sounded strange in contrast to the joking that had been going on. “The recipient of that Incubus’s attentions could well sue you for paternity. After all the courts have already ruled that a woman who impregnates herself with the contents of a discarded condom has a right to demand child support.”

“You’re joking.” Paschal sounded genuinely panicky. “Aren’t you?” Then he looked at the speaker more closely. “I thought your company had lost its contract when the new administration came in.”

“It did. But the number of people who can do the sort of work we do is very limited. So, when the old company loses the contract, we all get laid off but the new company has to hire staff to do the work. We’re the only ones available so they offer us our old jobs back. In the old days, we used to clear our desks one afternoon, go home, pick up the recruiting call and be at our new desks the next morning. These days things are much more efficient. The old company just transfers the lease on the building and our employment contracts to the new company and we don’t even have to move offices.”

“Has it always been like that?” Schatten was fascinated by the insight.

“Mostly, McNamara bought his own people in from outside, the whizz-kids they were called, and they made a pig’s breakfast of everything. But they went when he did and things got back to normal. Or as close to normal as anything gets inside the beltway. Anyway, Luga’s back on the team?”

“She is. Thanks to the brave Colonel’s sacrifice and devotion to duty.”

“Good, I like Luga.” The targeteer settled down in a seat.

“Why does that not surprise me?” Schatten opened his pad, “You all heard about the attack on El Paso and Ciudad Juarez last night?”

A ripple of acknowledgement ran around the room and the meeting got serious very suddenly.

“We have preliminary casualty figures. More than 30,000 dead, about three quarters of them in Ciudad Juarez. Just over 6,000 in El Paso itself. To put those numbers into perspective, the population of El Paso is roughly 750,000 while that of Ciudad Juarez is 1,300,000. So, the death rate was 800 per hundred thousand or 0.8 percent in El Paso and 1,846 per hundred thousand or 1.84 percent in Ciudad Juarez.”

“That’s very interesting.” Dr. Kuroneko looked at the numbers he’d scribbled down. “The differential is statistically significant.”

“It’s more than that, take a look at this.” Surlethe reached up and flipped the chart over to an acetate overlay map of the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez metropolis. Some of the areas were shaded black and it didn’t take much imagination to see that the depth of the shading represented the proportion of the population that had died.

“It’s related to population density. Hardly surprising.” The monotone voice was not impressed.

“Not quite no, it’s a reasonable assumption and one we made at first.” Surlethe flipped another acetate overlay on to the map. “This is the population density distribution. You can see that it doesn’t quite fit, there are substantial discrepancies. But when we use this overlay, the fit is exact.”

Surlethe flipped a third acetate overlay into place and the attendees nodded. The fit was indeed exact. “And what is that map?”

“It’s a map of the city divided into areas by relative income. And the conclusion is very obvious. Where people are rich, nobody died. Where people are poor, some died. Where they were destitute, a large number died. Even then, the number of surviving humans far outweigh the dead. But every cat, every dog, every rat, every bird, every animal of every sort is dead. Rich neighborhood or slum neighborhood, it doesn’t matter. The animals died, all of them. But the rich didn’t die but the poor did. What does that prove?”

“That Yahweh is a Republican?” One of the staffers trotted out the crack, then looked embarrassed at the lack of response.

“Quite.” Dr. Surlethe’s comment was withering. “It strongly suggests that it's wealth that provided the defense against this kind of attack. We’re assuming an Archangel called Uriel is responsible by the way, we’ve got circumstantial evidence for that and can tie it to a lot more attacks like this down south. They all show the same pattern by the way, poor areas got hit much harder than rich areas.

"So, how do the rich differ from the poor?"

"They have more money." The targeteer reflected that the comment was a BLIFO, a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. "and that means they buy better things. Newer things as well, not old or second-hand stuff. The really poor do without or pick up trash. How did these people, and the animals come to think of it, die anyway?"

"That's the curious thing, the coroners and medical examiners are hard at work trying to find out. The problem is, of course, that the majority of the victims are poor and in poor health to start with. They had a lot of pre-existing conditions that could have caused their deaths, would have done given time, so disentangling what they actually died of is a problem. Then, again, some of the dead did die of natural causes, run down to give one example when a car went out of control because its driver died. The scene was a bit like the attack on Fort Knox in the film of Goldfinger."

"There's much easier ways of knocking over Fort Knox than that." The targeteer spoke idly. "Anyway, do we have any reliable autopsy results?"

Doctor Surlethe fought down the intense desire to ask what was the best way to rob Fort Knox and opened a file. "We have none from the American side, but we do have some preliminary results from an autopsy of an eccentric rich resident of Ciudad Juarez. Apparently, he believed that tinfoil hats were a plot by the United Nations to take over the world and refused to wear one. He did, however, cover his house in aluminum foil. According to the autopsy, he just died of not living. There was no actual cause for his death, he wasn't in perfect health but he had no conditions that would explain how he died. He just stopped living. The Mexican medical examiner, a good doctor by the way, the people in El Paso speak highly of her, admits to being beaten by this one. There's no reason why he died, he just did."

"Was he found inside or outside his house?" The targeteer had leaned forward slightly.

"Sort of both, he was on the patio. The roof was foil-covered but not the sides. Why?"

"We know the Baldrick's mind control powers work by biologically generated electro-magnetic radiation. That's why we all wear hats these days." Unconsciously he touched his 'Nuke the Whales' baseball cap, a gesture that was repeated by several of those present. To humans, headwear had become the same sort of good-luck talisman that had once been represented by rabbits feet, crucifixes and Saint Christopher medallions. "They can use that capability to project images into the human mind and make us believe, and act on, those images. They can't read minds of course, never could, but they can possess our minds. So, suppose this Uriel fellow has the ability to simply suppress the parts of our minds that keep us alive. You know, make our hearts beat, keep us breathing, all that good stuff."

The targeteer thought for a second. "I wonder if there's an eccentric old lady in El Paso who put a tinfoil hat on her much-beloved little dog? And, if there is, I bet that dog is still alive."

"But if that's the case, why the differential between rich and poor. Everybody has a tinfoil hat these days." It was the same staffer who had made the crack about Yahweh being a Republican.

Dr. Surlethe snorted. "That's easy to figure out. We covered it earlier. The rich have more money, they buy better things. I bet if we compare the tinfoil hats worn by the rich people in the area, they're a lot better made than the ones the poor have. And I bet the rich were the first to upgrade their houses to have metal screening built into the walls."

"That comparison is easy to make." Dr. Kuroneko pulled a spare cap from his briefcase. "Standard U.S. protective hat, the insulating lining is a sandwich, two layers of aluminum foil with a thin layer of foamed aluminum between them. That's pretty much what everybody has and if you buy a hat at any mall, this is what it'll have built into it. The standard aid cap, the one given out to people across the world is just a single layer of aluminum foil, its just folded cooking foil really. I'll run some propagation tests but my guess is that our caps have an order of magnitude better screening effect on electromagnetic radiation than the standard aid cap."

"You needn't run the tests, I can guarantee that is so." The targeteer smiled. "That laminate was designed to shield military equipment, its ability to shield against incident electromagnetic signals or surges is very high. This use for it was purely serendipitous. Worked in our favor though, the sheer scale of production needed for hats has cut the cost of the laminate way down."

"EMP resistance." Kuroneko wasn't really asking a question.

"You got it. Also shielding bridges on warships from their own radars and other emitters."

"Well, that just about explains the differential. But, there's something else that is worrying me. Why is the death toll so low? According to the Sanchez letter, Uriel killed anything and everything within his lethal radius. Here, he's achieved that against unprotected animals but his score against humans is tiny. Even against the worst-protected of our people, he's scoring less than five percent and if our distribution map is to be believed, even poor shielding cuts that to almost zero. There's something else here people, and we're missing it."

Headquarters, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City

Lemuel-Lan-Michael sighed gently and eased back in his seat. The pursuit of idolators, blasphemers and heretics sounded glamorous but the fact of the matter was that it usually ended up as a mass of tedious paperwork. The hunt for the source of the human potion that had been found in Ishmael's possession was turning out to be exactly that kind of hunt. The interrogation of Ishmael had been all too effective, faced with the threat of another session under a bucket of water he has spilled out everybody whose name he had even heard of. The problem had first been going through those names and eliminating the insignificant. Of course, therein lay the first problem, how could he know who was significant and who was not?

Even after the obvious candidates had been taken off the list, it was still a frighteningly long document. The next step had been to compare that list with all the others they had, ones obtained from other heretics and blasphemers, lists of those suspected of being part of idolator groups, others who had, perhaps, too elevated an idea of their position in Heaven. There were those who did not comprehend that even being allowed into The Eternal City was privilege enough and they should be eternally grateful for it. This had led to another problem, every time the same name appeared on Ishmael's list and one of those other lists, it resulted in a chain of linkages that spread across dozens of scrolls. Lemuel-Lan-Michael had given up trying to keep a mental note of all the cross-references and had created a chart that covered most of the wall of his office.

It was that chart that had resulted in him running head-on into the third of his problems. He had some of his Ishim clerks copy out the lists on to the wall and then he'd painstakingly drawn in colored lines to indicate the linkages. The wall had swiftly vanished behind a mass of color but the picture that had emerged was rather frightening. It suggested that all the lists were linked and cross-linked, that what the League of the Holy Court had been treating as separate cases were, in fact, part of a great underground conspiracy. It was also apparent that Ishmael himself was only a very minor cog in that conspiracy. That was chilling for one of the consequences of the chart drawn on his wall was that the conspiracy had extended to include angels in its ranks. This was not unprecedented but the precedent that existed was not one to ease the mind of an investigative angel. It reminded him all too clearly of the time, uncounted millennia before, when Satan had been planning his revolt. Was he, Lemuel, looking at the battleground of a repeat version of the Great Celestial War? And did Heaven have the strength to continue the war against the humans if it was split internally by a civil war? Michael-Lan needed to know of this immediately.

"Gazardiel." Lemuel called out for one of his messengers, a trustworthy Malachim who would gain immediate access to Michael-Lan. Gazardiel-Lan-Lemuel received his instructions, bowed respectfully and took off, leaving Lemuel to ponder the problem that he was uncovering. So lost was he in the great chart before him that he failed to notice Michael-Lan entering the offices.

"I see you have unusual taste in wall-decoration Lemuel-Lan-Michael."

Michael-Lan's friendly jibe jerked Lemuel back into the world. He dropped to one knee, folding his wings across his face as he did so. "Michael-Lan, you honor me with your swift arrival. I have uncovered something that concerns me greatly."

"This is concerned with the source for the human elixir you discovered?"

"In a way, High One. I thought the best way to start would be to find out who Ishmael knew and who would be likely to have supplied him with such a thing. In doing so, I have uncovered what appears to be a plot of the gravest dimensions." Lemuel looked at Michael-Lan and saw the cloud of concern sweeping across his face. Once again, he reflected on his great good fortune to count such a perceptive Archangel as his friend. "Look, each one of these lists came from the arrest of an idolator or a heretic. The one here, on a blue background, is from Ishmael himself. His own links to others are also in blue. Links from those others to yet more members of the groups are in green, then further links again in red. See how they spread."

Michael-Lan was studying the lists, disentangling the lines and noting the names linked and, to him, much more importantly, noting the names that were not on the lists or remained unlinked. "But, Lemuel-Lan everybody in Heaven is linked like this. You know the old proverb, everybody in heaven is linked with only six degrees of separation."

"I do, High One, but this is different. See how self-contained this list is. Yes, there are linkages that spread all over the texts, but follow them and they remain within defined limits. Those who are linked, retain their links within the same small group and do not stray outside it. There is no link beyond that circle. Michael-Lan, this is not just a normal social network, this has every sign of a conspiracy. Worse, look at some of the names, there are Angels, Ishim, Elohim, Malachim, even Seraphim and one Hashmallim involved. Does this not remind you of the time before the Great Celestial War?"
Michael-Lan studied the charts again. He had to agree with Lemuel-Lan, this had every appearance of being a conspiracy, in some ways worst of all, it wasn't his. "Lemuel-Lan, you have done noble work here, but this is work that demands the utmost in secrecy. Keep this chart covered at all times, it is for your eyes and mine and nobody else. I feared this discovery the moment you showed me the bottle of human elixir and now those fears have become very real. You are right, there is a blasphemous conspiracy here and one that must be nipped in the bud right away. I will leave you to deal with the humans involved in this while I deal with the angels who need reminding of their station in the great scheme of things."

Michael-Lan noted down the list of angels identified as being part of the rival conspiracy and decided he had his list of volunteers for pouring the next Bowl of Wrath. Then, he swept out, leaving Lemuel looking at his chart, a sense of fulfillment buoying his spirits.

"Noble One?"

"Yes, Gazardiel-Lan?"

"How could sin and corruption have spread even into angelic ranks?"

"It is the influence of humans, their accursed determination to think for themselves ever leads them into heresy and blasphemy. That is why The One Above All decided that their should be no more admissions of humans into Heaven. See what their mulishness has led them to? If only they had accepted what they were told without argument, the doors of Heaven would still be open to them." That thought made Lemuel look pensive for without humans, what would Angels use as menial servants?

Then, another thought occurred to him and it troubled him greatly. For the bottle of elixir was truly sin and corruption but it was of a different kind to the arguments over faith that dominated this conspiracy. It was hard to imagine theological disputes over the interpretation of The One Above All's words to be lubricated by human elixirs. So where did that bottle fit into this. Looking at his chart, Lemuel-Lan-Michael found his eyes drawn to the small number of names on Ishmael's list that were not linked to the conspiracy he had uncovered.

 

[LTR]

DIMO(N) Office of Nonhuman History and Research, Pentagon, Arlington VA

Norman Baines sat at his desk quietly leafing through a text in medieval French recently transferred from the Vatican archives. To be truthful, ‘desk’ was an understatement, as the main table in his office was piled with various books as high as six feet and was becoming more of a fort. There were hi-res digital scans on his computer of course, but Norman absorbed the information better if it was in his hands.

“Anybody home?” A voice called in an atrocious cockney accent, “I’m looking for Professor Dumbledore.” A knock at the doorway snapped Norman out of his work.

“Charlie!” Norman jumped up, knocking over a pile of scrolls at his left and smiled. Rushing over, he gave his twin brother a big hug and then stepped back, “Hey, check out the hardware,” he made a motion of shining his brother’s rank insignia “Captain Baines, eh?”

“Reporting as ordered.” Charles smiled and presented a Vulcan salute to his brother. The memories from their youth made both men laugh. “After I brought your work to them, and did a bit of assisting on some of the new projects DIMO(N) working on, they felt a promotion was in order.”

“Oh yeah?” Norman raised an eyebrow. “What’s your new posting?”

Charlie paused, somewhat confused, “Uh… here? Norm? Bro… I sent you an email a week ago. I’m the new military liaison between the DIMO(N) Applied Technologies at Yale and the head of the civilian researchers here.”

Norman furrowed his brow and turned around to his desk, pressing a button on his keyboard, made of brass and faux stone. A familiar chime sounded, and after quickly scanning the text Norman whirled back,

“That’s great, Charlie, it sounds like all that engineering finally paid off! Well, let’s introduce you to the rest of the department, starting at the top!” Norman went to the doorway and called to his assistant “Carol, who’s the head of R&D now that O’Shea got kicked upstairs?”

Carol sighed slightly. “You are, Mister Baines. For almost a month now.” She shook her head and smiled. “You really need to stop reading demonology texts during department meetings.”

“Oh…” Norman walked back to his computer and tapped through another few e-mails, then shrugged his shoulders. “Then I guess… Welcome to DIMON, Captain Baines! We hope you’ll have a hell of a time.” He shook his brother’s hand. “Why don’t we get some dinner and then I’ll show you around.”

“It’s 10 a.m, Norman.” Charlie shook his head at his brother.

“Oh,” Norman checked his watch and Charlie noticed the numbers were a system he didn’t recognize. “I guess I did that whole staying-up-late reading thing again. Carol!” He called, “how long have I been here?”

“Almost two days, Sir. Today is Thursday. There’s a change of clothes on the hook in your bathroom. You can freshen up there.”

Norman glanced at his brother questioningly, and Charlie made a display of holding his nose in one hand and pointing with the other. Norman returned the salute and dashed off to his private bathroom while Charlie sat down, chuckling. “So, you’re the one who’s keeping my brother fed, watered, and fully-dressed?”

“Yes, Sir, Captain Baines; As much as can be expected. Sometimes he wanders off through the archives and we can’t find him. We gave him a GPS tracker, but he lost it.” Carol continued reviewing and compiling reports for Norman. “He’s a brilliant man, Captain, he just tends to get tunnel vision. A good assistant knows how best to direct and guide the people they work for. You should see some of the intel he pulls out of those texts, it’s astounding.”

“Yeah, you should’ve seen him when he was a dungeon master. Memorized about forty books in under two months.” He grinned. “The adventures were fun, too.” Carol smiled mischievously and held up a small, amethyst dodecahedron, “They still are, Captain. I have a level 9 Tiefling. Tuesday night is game night.”

Just and Charlie began to ask a follow-up question his brother returned, “Alright, let’s eat!” Norman bounded out the door, showered and dressed faster than any would have believed possible. “I think there’s a place in the food court that has fried chicken,” He stopped short and peered into the hallway, confused, “though I don’t actually know where it is…”

DIMO(N) Offices, Pentagon,Arlington, VA

After an enjoyable lunch, nearly an hour away from reading musty parchment, Norman was far more social and tuned in to the world around him. He was enjoying showing his brother around the massive suite of offices in the C-Ring that DIMO(N) now occupied. They came up to a large set of double doors and Norman chuckled, “Oh, now this is a great place, man. You’re going to love these guys!” He opened one of the doors next to a sign that read ‘Innovative Universal Dynamics’ and they stepped in. Charlie stood in awe at one end of a heavily modified by a mid-sized lecture. The walls were rife with computer screens, white boards, blackboards, and even squares of cork with thumbtacks. Diagrams, parchment, maps, charts, blueprints and unidentified documents spanning 3 millennia were plastered on every surface. Throughout the room dozens of men and women paced, strolled, stalked, or ran amongst the clutter, studying this chart or that text, conferring, arguing, and occasionally shouting. They worked at tables and computer stations set around seemingly at random, and off to one side there was a lounge set up with sofas and a small espresso machine where a handful of people were dozing peacefully.

“What is this place?” Charles asked in amazement.

“This,” Norman waved at the room in a grand proclamation “is where we try to make sense of it all. Since the discovery of the existence of Hell and Heaven, physicists have had to throw out a lot of what they thought they knew and start over. We’ve got people here from all over the spectrum that try to take what’s been observed about hell with what we know about our universe and try and fit them together. It’s sort of like a mad scientist convention, only with fewer super-weapons.”

A man in his late thirties walked up to the pair of brothers, and shook Norman’s hand. “Good to see you again, Norm! You here for another round?”

“No thanks, Doc. I’m just showing my brother our facilities, he’s the new liaison from ApTech.” He motioned to his brother “Captain Charles Baines, this is Doctor Junghalli , Lord of the Tank.”

“The Tank?”

“Oh yes, that’s what we call it.” Dr. Junghalli swept his arms around and up, as though he was addressing the masses of an imaginary throng. “Free-spirited discourse on the nature of existence- I suppose we could have called it a Salon but, well, these things tend to go their own way. If you’ve ever got some free time, Captain, feel free to stop by. An engineer with a military mindset could help immensely.”

“Thanks, Doctor.” Charles shook his hand. “But I’m afraid my time at the Academy didn’t cover quantum mechanics or multi-dimensional math.”

“Bah, that’s not what we’re doing here.” Dr. Junghalli shook his head and grimaced as though he was tasting a bitter pill, “We need ideas here in the Tank. Good ones, and then we work them over with the applied math department to see if they fit. See that man over there?” He gestured to a figure hunched over at a table with several pads of paper and a laptop gathered around him, furiously writing, “That’s Banks, he writes science fiction and he’s got a good notion of dimensional mechanics. Went to Stirling in the UK, never took any upper-level science.” Doctor Junghalli led them to the front of the room where they stood at the foot of three massive touch-screen displays.

The first had a sign underneath it at waist level, engraved in brass, that read “What we think the universe looks like TODAY”. It contained a rendering of a broad plane with small swirls on it. “You see, right now we think that all of existence is about two orders of magnitude older than the universe, and that most of it is just white noise. BUT,” He held up a finger and Charlie had a flashback to his college physics lectures, “We think that we, and our companion universes, are merely localized reductions in the entropy that happened by chance, and that while earth and our universe are a bit more stable, we know it won’t last forever and then we go back to maximum entropy.

Charlie looked at the diagram and frowned, but before he could ask a question, Junghalli pointed to the second sign: “What these words mean TODAY!!” There was a host of terms on the board- Universe, Portal, Gradient, Spatial Realm, and Dimension topped the list and seemed to be changing more than the others. Under ‘Dimension’ was a hand-written, asterisked, double-underlined note: Over-use of this word will result in you buying lunch for the people you confuse. “As you can see, Captain, our understanding has become very fluid. An idea we come up with today may make everything fit perfectly tomorrow and then be proven completely wrong in a week.” He tapped the screen with his knuckles, “It’s all about getting this board empty.”

He pointed to the third display; “What we still don’t know.” Underlined and highlighted several times was ‘How to target another universe from the outside.’ “Believe me, Aperture Science has their people in here a few times a day, hoping that we’ll be able to come up with something. As long as heaven can strike us with impunity, we’ll lose this war.”

A frustrated “Arrrgh!” echoed from one of the workstations, and a man and woman laughed as another man stalked across the room to a large empty water jug. He reached into his wallet and pulled out a $20, then stuffed it in. “What’s that about?” Charlie asked.

“That’s the ‘dead scientist’ jar.” Norman smirked. “When the Tank started, people used to keep saying ‘If only we had Einstein on this’ or ‘If only I could show this to Wheeler’. Really, they wouldn’t be nearly as helpful as we think, because we tend to imagine that dead scientists would still know what we know. So, to keep the frustrations down, anytime anyone wishes they had a brilliant dead scientist, they put the money in the jar. Then, on the last Friday of the month, we buy booze.” He looked at the forlorn man who had just surrendered his money, “That was $20 he put in? He must’ve been wishing for a Nobel Prize winner. Those guys are expensive.”

“Sounds like a great place you’ve got here, bro.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Baines.” Carol had suddenly materialized behind them, tapping Norman on the shoulder. “You just got a call for a debriefing tomorrow with Miss Lugasharmanaska and several military officials. 0900 hours.”

“Luga’s coming?” Norman’s eyes got wide, and he rubbed his hand across his stubble. “I need to shave.”

“Dude!” Charles shook his head.

“What?!”

“You remember how upset mom got when I married a Mormon, and now you’re trying to look nice for a demon?” He could barely contain his laughter as he tried not to conjure a mental image.

“Not just a demon, Charlie, a succubus.” Norman grinned as he emphasized the word. “They can look like ANYONE.”

“Fair point, but I’ll stick with my human wife, thanks.” Charles checked his watch. “Well, I need to head on over to Yale, why don’t you stop by my office next time you’re at Applied Technologies.”

“I’ll do that.” The two men embraced briefly with shoulder slapping all around. “See ya, flyboy!”

“See ya, nutjob.”

Destroyer "Turner Joy" off the coast of Virginia, June 2009

The old destroyer swung her bows around and lined up for another pass at the crimson-red sea that lay stretched out in front of her. Her previous path was marked by a brilliant blue streak across the water, one that made the sea look healthy in comparison with the red mess that lay either side. Turner Joy's pumps whined and the sprays fired out from amidships, marking the start of another pass.

"Is this going to work?" Sophia Metaxas looked doubtful, the extent of the marine disaster that had hit Earth seemed too devastating to be countered by blue dye.

"It stands a good chance." Captain Reynolds was surveying the scene through the bridge binoculars. "The blue dye limits penetration of the wavelengths of light required for photosynthesis, and so the algae starve to death. We used a technique much like this in World War Two as an anti-submarine weapon." He glanced sideways at Sophia.

"How?"

"Now, this ain't no shit. We sprayed blue paint on the surface of the sea. When the submarine put its periscope up, the paint covered the lens and the skipper thought he was still underwater. So he kept on going up and when he reached 150 feet in the air, we shot him down with the anti-aircraft guns."

Reynold's face was completely deadpan. Sophia stared at him for a few moments as the sheer outrageousness of the story sank in. Then she started to splutter with barely-suppressed laughter. "I guess that must be what they call an old sea story?"

"One of many Sophia. Beware any that start with NTANS. But the dye thing might actually work. If we can kill off the deeper layers of the algal bloom, we can skim or pump and filter the surface layer. It's worked inland, there's a good chance it'll work out here. Provided the dye doesn’t disperse too fast."

Sophia's mouth twisted. As expected, the Third Bowl of Wrath had hit a week or so earlier with major rivers suddenly starting to turn red with algal bloom. Once-rich fishing rivers had been decimated, their banks lined with the stinking carcasses of poisoned fish and the birds that had fed on them. The disaster, though, had been limited compared with the carnage at sea since governments had been forewarned and were waiting. The spread of the algal bloom had been limited by booms placed across the rivers, the application of finely-powdered clay had agglomerated the algae and allowed it to be skimmed off. The battle had lasted two weeks and had been a total victory for the humans. The rivers had been cleaned out and only one area of fresh water contamination remained, in the Great Lakes. That was under sustained assault from Canadian Kingston Class patrol ships and its area was shrinking daily. Now, the lessons from that battle were being applied to the algal blooms at sea.

"At least we've won one. Out of three."

"Two out of three Sophia. Cipro is effective against proto-anthrax and the stockpiles are being increased every day. We won’t get caught by that one again. Even out here, we're getting the measure of this Bowl, bit by bit. This isn’t the only area of experimental treatment you know. There's another area off Long Island that's being used for biological control experiments. If we can make a predator that feeds on this particular algae, we'll have a defense in place against further attacks."

"It's the next one that worries me, the rain of fire."

"I read about that. I looked up Revelation after our last chat. Hold one. Bring her around to two-seven-zero, make revolutions for ten knots. This old girl is doing well. That does sound like Belial getting back to work, doesn’t it?"

"What I want to know is, how come Revelation predicted all this stuff so accurately? It was written two thousand years ago and its been perfect up to date. Every Bowl exactly as described."

"Oh, that's easy Sophia. Yahweh didn't make the prophesies to fit future events, he's making today's events fit old prophecies. It's an old trick, been used for centuries. Either make the prophecies so vague and ill-defined that anything can fit them or manufacture events to match the prophecies. Let's just hope the city defense people can abort any sky-volcano attacks before we get another Detroit.