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Armageddon?? by Stuart

Chapter One

Eagle Flight, Over The Eastern Pacific

“I, Satan Mekratrig, Lord of Hell, Commander of the Legions of the Damned do hereby declare my dominion over the earth and all that it contains. Crawl to me, humans, knowing the eternity of torment that awaits you.”

“Balls.” Said Lieutenant Michael Wong. The voice that had come over the radio link, booming in the cockpit of his F/A-18E, had distracted him from paying proper attention to the cockpit display of his APG-79 radar. The new AESA radar was a vast improvement over the older APG-73 but that was, as always, a slight problem all of its own. Until the pilots learned how to take full advantage of the improved data flow, they could be swamped with it. Wong was experiencing that problem now, the resolution of the new radar was phenomenal but it seemed to indicate that the wings on the targets 60 nautical miles out in front of him were flapping.

“Full of himself isn’t he? Or should it be ‘it’?” Lieutenant Anthony Squires was genuinely interested, he was renowned as being the Ronald Reagan air group’s grammar geek.

“Try a ‘that’.” Wong wasn’t really interested, the targets in front of him were behaving oddly. They were slow, 180 miles per hour at most, they had a strong radar image yet seemed to have no infra-red signature. That was an odd combination to put it mildly. The bombastic message that had interrupted his concentration was irritating, no more than that. So what were those contacts in front of him? Birds? They were too fast for that surely? The Peregrine Falcon was the fastest bird known and that could, just, hit 180 mph in a steep dive. These were doing that in level flight. So they had to be some form of aircraft. That was assuming the AESA radar wasn’t generating a completely false image of course. And who knew how the electronic systems were malfunctioning following the delivery of The Message three days ago? There was one way to find out.

“Buster, this is Eagle Flight, 200 miles out, bearing 353, we have an anomalous radar contact some 60 miles out in front of us. Please confirm.”

There was a pause for a few seconds, electrostatic discharges in the atmosphere were playing havoc with radio communications but the systems filtering programs quickly cleared the white noise from the channel. “Confirm contact Eagle Flight. Bearing 358, range from Buster is 66.6 nautical miles. Target speed 184 knots, course one-three-fiver. For your information, Crown and Scepter are tracking also. They have locks.” There was a pause, a series of crackles on the radio, then the message resumed. “If targets are hostile, you are cleared to engage.”

Wong translated the message in his head. ‘Buster’ was CVN-76 USS Ronald Reagan, ‘Crown’ was CG-70 USS Lake Erie, an AEGIS cruiser, while ‘Scepter’ was DDG-93 USS Chung-Hoon, one of the Arleigh Burke class destroyers that now dominated the fleet’s surface combatant force. Also AEGIS-equipped, that meant whatever the targets were, they were now being tracked by three of the most advanced radar systems in the U.S. Navy. The ‘lock’ part of the message was really interesting, that suggested the order to open fire was already being passed out.

That didn’t surprise Wong, human reaction to The Message had split neatly down religious lines. Those whose religion had demanded blind submission to the ‘Will of God’ had accepted it without a struggle and more or less laid down and died. They just weren’t around any more. The rest of the world’s population had followed the example set by Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown. His reply to The Message had been “Sod off, Baldrick,” followed by a reassuring message to the British people that he had a cunning plan to deal with the situation. The British had enjoyed the joke, whatever it was, and collectively told Satan to perform some highly improbable obscenities on himself. They’d been the first only by a matter of minutes as most of the other countries in the world has replied with similar messages. Ever since then, The Message had been repeated at regular intervals, almost as if the concept of human defiance was so completely unexpected that the powers ‘up there’ couldn’t comprehend its existence. Well, if that was the case, the powers ‘up there’ didn’t know the human race very well.

The three days since the first reception of The Message had been something of a standoff. Humans had waited for the next development, allowing the situation to mature in military parlance, while the only response to their defiance had been the repeated proclamations. No effort to force compliance, not yet at any rate. And no overt human resistance. Wong got the feeling that was all about to change.

“All members, Eagle Flight, increase to fiver-six-zero knots, say again increase to fiver-six-zero knots. Intercept targets in front, range, five-eight nautical miles. Weapons are free, say again, weapons are free. Good hunting Eagle Flight.”

The four F/A-18Es accelerated out of cruise speed, building up to maximum subsonic. The E model had more range and fuel than the older As and Cs but fuel status was always a serious concern to Hornet drivers. Wong had listened with envy to those who had flown the now-gone Tomcats or even longer-lost Intruders. Then, he glanced down at his radar scope again. There were four targets, apparently blissfully ignorant of the Super-Hornets bearing down on them. That was neat, one each.

“Eagle Flight, we are swinging around behind them. I have radar paints on all four, no infra-red signature yet. Each Eagle aircraft, take target corresponding to your flight position, from the left. Use AIM-120 then close in for 20-mike-mike. Not sure AIM-9 will work unless we can get a heat signature off whatever is out there. We’ll get a visual ID first.”

At twelve nautical miles range, the U.S. Navy Hornets got their visual ID. The contacts were four giant creatures, jet black in color, looking like a hideous cross between a gorilla and a bird. Four limbs, two wings, flying in an unconcerned, oblivious line.

“Just what the hell are those?”

Wong wasn’t sure which pilot had breathed the comment into the radio. Didn’t matter, they all knew what to do. So did he come to that. “Buster, this is Eagle. Targets visually identified, large flying humanoids about the same size as a Super-Bug. Wingspan at least twice as great as ours, probably much larger. Engaging.”

“Eagle, this is Buster. Acknowledged. Targets designated as demons. Good luck Eagle Flight.” A few days earlier the fighter controller might have added “And may God go with you” but not after The Message and the betrayal it had represented.

Wong switched the annunciator on his AIM-120s on. They were growling gently, a sustained continuous note that indicated their homing heads were logged on to his selected target, the demon second from the left. The F/A-18s were closing fast, the range was dropping to the point where the hits would be almost instantaneous. “Eagle Flight, open fire.”

Wong’s pressure on the firing button was almost simultaneous with his order. A pair of AIM-120 missiles streaked ahead of his aircraft, curving after the demon he had picked out for his target. He’d been right, the gap was so short that the target couldn’t have evaded even if it had wanted to. It never even tried.

Demon Shingroleth was actually aware of the approaching fighters, he’d seen them when they were still 15 miles out, far beyond the range of any human eye, so he had assumed their presence was coincidental. He had other problems to worry about, a few inconsequential humans were of no significant account one ay or the other. What concerned him was the way his skin was itching, it had started a few minutes before and was getting steadily worse. Maddening. He hadn’t even worried when the four human machines had swung in behind his group and started to close the range on them. That had been when his skin itch had become really intolerable. Then, the humans had done something really strange; odd streaks of smoke coming out from under their flying machines. Surely they couldn’t be resisting the all-powerful armies of the damned?

The AIM-120s worked as advertised. They were good missiles, well designed, well-tested, and they had a target that was proving co-operative to the point of suicide. No maneuvering, no electronic warfare, no interference, if the guidance had been capable of human thought it would have been vaguely offended at being asked to solve a task so undemanding. The first missile exploded between Shingroleth’s legs, just underneath his tail. The 50 pound explosive warhead was wrapped with heavy-gauge pre-notched wire that disintegrated into an annular hail of pre-formed fragments when the missile’s proximity fuse set off the explosive charge. Some of those razor-sharp fragments slashed through Shingroleth’s tail, severing it at the root and sending it spinning off in a long arc. Others ripped into his legs and genitals, tearing open the great arteries, sending his fire-and acid blood spraying over his body, and mangling his reproductive organs beyond recognition. Shingroleth’s scream of demented agony was heard even in the sound insulated-cockpits of the F/A-18s.

The second missile did really serious damage. Its proximity fuse initiated it right underneath Shingroleth’s belly. The holocaust of tungsten-steel fragments ripped open his stomach and tore his abdominal cavity to shreds. Even in a mind crazed by the ghastly pain from the first hit, Shingroleth noticed the sudden drop in weight as his intestines dropped out of his body. Then his fire-and-acid blood, spraying from more wounds than could reasonably be counted, set fire to his flesh. Shingroleth tumbled downwards, all hope of control had gone when he had lost his stabilizing tail. By the time his remains hit sea level, all that was left of him was a fine carbon dust.

Immediately on firing, Wong had firewalled his throttles, cut in reheat and taken his F/A-18 up into a steep climb. The last thing he had wanted to do was get too close to those things. As he rolled over at the top of the climb, he could see the havoc his attack had wrought on the demon formation below. His target had gone, its death marked by a black streak towards the sea far below. Another one of the formation had taken hits from four AIM-120s, for some reason two F/A-18s had fired on the same aircraft, well, that sort of thing happened. It had meant that the demon had been quite literally torn apart by the storm of fragments and blast of the explosions. More than 200 pounds of best explosive American dollars could buy had vented its wrath on the hideous creature and all that was left of it was a shower of burning fragments. A third demon was staggering away, it had been the last to get hit and had escaped the eviscerating body hits. Instead, one of its wings had been torn to tiny fragments and it was going down in a helpless spin. Even as Wong watched, two of his F-18s were closing on it.

Prigrathrath was desperately trying to control his descent. One of his wings had gone, it was just a mass of torn flesh and spurting blood. The only thing that was saving him was that his flight path was keeping the blood-and-acid away from his body, the fate of Shingroleth and Caranaskatos had shown him what would happen when demon blood and body parts mixed. Two of the gray-painted human machines were coming after him, he could see them, but with his crippled wings there was little he could do about it. It was odd, there was a strange twinkling light coming from the front of the two flying machines. Then Prigrathrath’s lights went out.

Squires had fired a much longer burst than was normal for the M61 cannon in the nose of his F/A-18. He and his wingman had aimed very carefully, using the plane’s on-board computer and continuously-computed impact point sights to place all 100 rounds of their bursts square into the demon’s face. The effect was more than either pilot could have hoped. The great, hideously malformed head had just disintegrated as the armor-piercing incendiary shells ripped through the skin and shattered the bones underneath. The demon’s eyes, in fact every feature of its face, had been destroyed in the hail of cannon shells tearing through its structure. Once again, fire-and-acid blood spraying from the ruptured veins and arteries finished the job of destruction that fragments, explosions and blast had started. The demon erupted into flames and dropped like a stone towards the sea below.

That had left one demon, untouched, unharmed by the sudden, vicious attack. Quellarastis simply couldn’t believe that the humans had dared to attack him and his colleagues, let alone that they had killed three of his flight-mates with such contemptuous ease. Filled with unrighteous wrath at the effrontery of the attack, he swerved to retaliate at the pair of human flying machines that were coming straight at him. Now, they would learn what the wrath of a demon meant. He opened his mouth and gave a blast of terrifying hellfire straight at them.  In Eagle-One, Wong saw the fireball leave the demon’s mouth and flipped the ailerons over, pulling the stick back in a barrel role around the jet of flame. It wasn’t precisely a hard maneuver, the demon may have had powerful lungs but they could only drive a jet of flame so fast. Compared with the problems posed by trying to dodge a multi-mach missile, the flame was easy to avoid. Even better, the jet of fire was a perfect infra-red source for his AIM-9 Sidewinders. Both annunciators were screaming with the demand to be let loose and Wong obliged them both. They streaked from his wingtip mounts, heading straight for the inferno of heat that was the fire-breathing demon’s mouth.

Quellarastis did the worst thing he could possibly do under the circumstances. He gulped in shock as the two missiles hurtled into his mouth. Once again, proximity fuses worked to perfection, preformed fragments slashed out, ripping through the slate-black flesh of the demon. Some went up into his brain, bouncing around inside his skull until all that laid within was reduced to a finely-ground slush. Others sawed down through the demon’s chest, carving into his heart and lungs. More fragments, from the missile Quellarastis had accidentally swallowed tore the demons neck apart, severing his spinal column and paralyzing him. That was a mercy for Quellarastis, it meant that he did feel it when his blood set his flesh on fire and he vanished within a ball of fire.

“Buster, this is Eagle. All four demons engaged and destroyed. Inform all Buster elements, they blow up and burn if you hit them hard enough. We’re on our way back, we’re hitting bingo fuel out here.”

“Eagle Flight, this is buster. Come on home, the party is just starting down here.”

Wong relaxed in his seat. His Eagle-One had two confirmed kills, Eagle-Three and Eagle-Four had one each. Not ace status yet, but a good start.

National Command Post, Washington D.C.

“Mister President, a message from the Ronald Reagan battle group out in the Pacific. They’ve engaged four flying demons, killed all of them. No casualties on our side. Whatever these things are, they aren’t immortal or invulnerable. They burn and die, just like we do.”

President Bush looked dully at Secretary Gates. The betrayal that had been represented by The Message had hit him deep, torn apart the faith that had kept him going even in the darkest years of his presidency. Then, with his opinion poll figures trending up at last, this had to happen. He shook his head, tried to clear the clouds of despair from his mind and absorbed the information. As he did so, his eyes lit up for the first time in three days.

“Get word out to all our armed forces. Tell them to engage these, these things, at every opportunity. Shoot first, hit hard and keep hitting them. Let them know that we may go down but it won’t be without one hell of a fight.”

“Them Sir?”

“Them. Everybody. Our forces, the religious leaders who brought that message to us, those who the message came from. I don’t care who “they” are, either they attacked us or they betrayed us and I don’t see the difference between those who promise us an eternity of torture or those who would hand us over to that fate. They’re both our enemies now. And we’ll fight them. All of them.” Bush’s voice had gained strength and he made his commitment. “We may have believed in higher powers once, but they’ve forfeited any loyalty we may have owed them. Secretary Gates, get the word out. We fight.”

“Sir, I have to warn you, this may well be committing a war crime. We haven’t had United Nations approval for any action and without a vote in the UN, we are committing an act of aggressive war, which is a war crime. I therefore rule that we must hold off any action until there had been a full meeting of the Security Council. I will also issue orders for the pilots involved in this incident to be arrested and brought up on war crimes charges.”

There was a rumble of discontent around the war room. Bush heard it and that made up his mind. He looked at the JAG officer with contempt. “Place this man under arrest. Remove him, get rid of him. From now on, the United States will act in its own best interests and defend itself as best it can. Any other nations who want to join in this struggle are welcome to do so.”

“There might be quite a few of those Mister President.” Secretary Rice was carrying a mass of message flimsies. “We’re getting messages from other countries right now. First one is from Mr. George Yong-Boon Yeo, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Singapore. Apparently a demon landed there, carrying a demand for Singapore’s submission.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing Sir. The demon’s demand was wrapped up in some sort of parchment and he dropped it on landing. Littering is a serious offense in Singapore Sir, and the Singapore police riddled the demon with bullets and then beat it to death. Anyway, Mr. Yeo says that Singapore’s going to fight and they’d appreciate our help.”

“He’s got it. Who else?”

“Another one landed in Bangkok, Thailand. That one didn’t get very far either. It wouldn’t bribe the police at a checkpoint to let it through and then got stuck in the Bangkok traffic jams. The Army blew it away. With tanks. Apparently, local street traders are selling bits of demon to the tourists. Anyway, same message from the Thais, they’re going to fight and they’d appreciate any help we can send, only they’re adding if we need any aid, we only have to ask.”

“Nice of them. Well, people, it looks like the war has started. Let’s try to do a better job this time round, right?”

Chapter Two

HMS Astute, On Sea Trials, North Atlantic

“Any idea what it is?”

The Sonar Operator shook his head. The Type 2076 sonar system was the most advanced the Royal Navy had ever deployed, one Admiral had tried to describe its capability by saying a submarine in Winchester could use that sonar to track a bus going around Hyde Park Corner in London. That comparison wasn’t true, but the real capability of 2076 was a closely-guarded secret. Tracking buses at that range was child’s play compared with what it could really do.

The waterfall display on the sonar panel was showing the target track, it was diverging from norm slightly, first one way and then the other, as if the unidentified contact was snaking in the water. It always came back to the same course though, one that took it to London. Eventually. That was another problem, the target track indicated a speed of around 12 knots. Not the sort of speed that made much sense. Too fast for economy, too slow for a speed run.

“I’m not getting any blade beat Sir. None at all. In fact I’m getting no machinery noise at all. No pompholugopaphlasmasin.” The sonar operator got the odd word out without missing a beat. He was referring to the odd selection of pops, hisses, squeaks and rattles made by machinery as it went about its daily tasks, an odd selection that was a clear signature to a passive sonar system. “I’m getting broad-band flow noise and that’s about it.”

“Biological?” Whales, clouds of shrimp, schools of fish, all got give strange sonar readings. Pompholugopaphlasmasin was the sonar operator’s best tool to distinguish man-made equipment from the natural sounds of the sea. And there wasn’t any. That would normally point to a biological but the one thing these times were not was normal. There was a body in the submarine’s freezer to prove that. The Ship’s Chaplain had committed suicide when the full implication of The Message had sunk home.

“Not at 12 knots Sir. A biological will either drift or move slowly at random directions. One holding 12 knots would be attacking something and this one isn’t. Then, there’s it’s course. Straight for London, never changing. No Sir, this isn’t a biological but that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t pick up anything on our narrow-band demodulated noise tracker.”

“You don’t suppose it could be….” Lieutenant-Commander Michael Murphy adopted an exaggerated expression of terror. “….the Red October.” Across Astute’s control room, the duty crew rolled their eyes in disgust, then shook their heads. That wretched author had caused so much trouble….

“No Sir. But respectfully Sir, we are on trials. FOSM may have slipped us a weirdness just to find out what we would do with it.”

Murphy nodded. Flag Officer, Submarines was known for doing things like that. “Right, Atkins. We’ll treat this like a hostile.” His eyes flipped to the tactical display where a long oval marked the position of the anomalous contact. Passive sonar could give fine cuts on bearing but its range data was much less precise. “We need to fine that up a bit. We’ll establish a baseline. Make course one-eight zero, speed 34 knots, hold for 20 minutes. Anybody want to take a head-break, now’s the time, we won’t be tracking anything at that speed.”

That was true enough, Astute didn’t have the phenomenal underwater speed of the American Seawolf class but then few other submarines did. Astute was still fast enough for the flow noise over her hull to blank out her sonar. Murphy checked the plot again and thumbed the intercom. “Captain to the bridge.”

Captain Phillips materialized almost immediately. Captains tended to do that when trouble was brewing. “Problems Number One?”

“Don’t know sir, we have a highly anomalous contact. Behaves like a submarine but has the signature of a biological. It’s maintaining 12 knots, course takes it to London. I’m establishing a baseline for range now.”

“Very good Number One.” Phillips studied the tactical plot with great care. When a new submarine ran sea trials, it wasn’t only the ship that was being tested. Her crew were under the microscope as well. “Very good Number One. I have the con. You take over the attack team. If this is FOSM playing games, we’ll go along with it.”

The crew felt the vibration from the submarine’s machinery build up under their feet. One advantage, one of many, held by the nuclear-powered boats was that they never had to worry about fuel status or battery charge. The Royal Navy nuke-drivers pitied their NATO allies who were stuck in diesel-electrics and spent their lives with one eye glued to their battery charge meters. Astute was barreling through the water, putting distance between herself and the scene of her first set of track readings. Once she got a second set, the cross-bearings would give her the range data she needed.

Twenty minutes later, Astute dropped back down to her four knot observation speed. The sonar team dropped their relaxed air and immediately got down to work, trying to re-acquire the anomalous signature. That didn’t take much effort, they knew where to look and the weird flow noise was distinctive enough.

“Got it Sir. Range 18,000 meters.” On the tactical display, a second long oval appeared. The computers eliminated the time delay that had taken place and then superimposed the two sets of reading. What had once been long, thin ovals now crossed and gave a single precise point. Then the screen blinked again as the computers applied the range data they had just calculated to the bearing figures already on file. A single green line now appeared on the tactical display, one that gave both range and bearing. All that was, in fact, needed for an attack.

Phillips thought quickly. “Stream towed array, sonar team check on passive for any emissions, anything at all. Every frequency band you can think of, whatever we’re tracking doesn’t have to be using what we are.”

It took a few more minutes but the result was worth waiting for. “Got him Sir. Active emission, very high frequency, much higher than ours.” Atkins’ voice was triumphant. “It’s like a biological, well more like a bat really, but it isn’t. Power too high. I’d guess it’s a navigational or mine avoidance sonar but its nothing like anything we have on the books. That’s why the computer didn’t call it.”

“Very good. Helm take us up to periscope deck, sensors prepare to extend radio mast. We’d better call this in.” Phillips disappeared into the radio room for several minutes. When he came back, his face was a mixture of grimness and elation.

“Word direct from DOps.” A stir went around the control room, when Directorate of Operations gave the orders, things were happening. “The situation is breaking loose. The Spams shot down four Baldricks a few hours ago. Been a few other similar incidents around the world. The old stories be damned, the Baldricks are not invulnerable and we aren’t going down without a fight. There’s nothing friendly out here so we can presume that any unidentifiable target we’re tracking is hostile. Torpedo room, load two Spearfish, tubes one and two. Load sub-Harpoon into three and four. Helm, take her down to two hundred feet, make speed 34 knots, course one-six-three.”

Helm punched the figure into the computers. The tactical display flickered again, the green track turning to red and a blue line superimposed on it. That gave the relative position of Astute and the target. Phillips looked at the position. “Make that 35 knots and one-six-one.” A tiny refinement that would put Astute into a perfect position for a torpedo attack.

Phillips watched the display as the carat marking Astute’s position moved along the blue projected course line. Mentally, he was calculating angles and ranges, the computer could actually do that for him but he preferred to do his own check. “Drop speed to four knots, say again, to four knots. Bring bows to oh-one-oh. Open bow doors, tubes one and two. Sonar, hit that thing with a low-frequency pulse to check range. One pulse.” Phillips took his authorization card from around his neck and inserted it into a slot in the sonar control console. By using active sonar, Astute was announcing her presence and position to the world at large, That was why using active sonar required the Captain’s explicit authorization. One the card was in place, the BA-WHOOM from the sonar array in the submarine’s bows could be heard throughout the boat.

Ralaraspanathsis was swimming quietly through the ocean of this strange planet, his great tail swinging from side to side as it drove . As one of the Corps of Diabolical Heralds, his job was quite simple, he had to go to the designated place where the humans gathered and give them the message that informed them of their fate. Not that their fate was ever in any doubt but it seemed as if the powers higher up had got bored with playing their little games with this dimension and decided to wrap things up. Ralaraspanathsis actually slightly regretted that, this wasn’t the first time he’d been on this planet and he’d rather enjoyed the way the humans had cowered before him on his first visit. Still, perhaps his master would allow him to play with some once they were all in his domain.

It was half way through that pleasurable thought that the pain hit Ralaraspanathsis. His head seemed to explode, his ears crushed by a terrible pressure that shattered the bones in his inner ears. His forearms moved, almost of their own accord, covering his eardrums, trying to shut out the dreadful crushing noise. Then, almost before he could think again, the terrible noise was gone.

“Wow, will you look at that.” Atkin’s voice was awed. The contact was spinning in circles, threshing in the water creating a maelstrom of flow noise emissions. “It didn’t like that at all.”

“Hit it again. Full power to the forward sonar transducers.” The contact had been settling down when the second pulse hit it. If anything the threshing was even worse than with the first pulse. “That’s a Baldrick, no doubt. Weapons, fire tubes one and two. Target that thing.”

Taking four tons off the extreme end of the moment arm caused Astute’s bow to dip. It didn’t matter to the torpedoes, they were already out and climbing to the shallower water near the surface. Once there, they kicked up to 81 knots and ran out to the estimated position of the target. At that point they dropped their guidance wires and dived vertically on the contact below them.

A shaped charge can penetrate six times its diameter; that gave the pair of Spearfish torpedoes a theoretical penetration of 126 inches. In fact, they did a bit better than that, blasting deep cavities in Ralaraspanathsis’s back, severing his spinal column and burning deep into his vital organs. His body tissues, vaporized by the blast, sprayed out and down, searing and cooking his internal organs and bursting open the swim bladder that kept him afloat. Crippled and dying, he felt himself floating upwards towards the surface. Confusion filled his mind, he was a herald. How could they have done this?

“Well, there’s no doubt about, we just scored a Baldrick.” A cheer went up around the control room. Ever since Prime Minister Gordon Brown had quoted ‘Blackadder’ in his initial announcement, the British had taken to calling the denizens of hell, ‘Baldricks’. It had a nice, contemptuous air about it, one that was beginning to catch on. “Number One, take the boat to the surface, we need to collect samples.”

Phillips looked through the periscope again. “In fact, if we can tow that wreck in, so much the better. Environmental, keep a check on water conditions, the Spams said the ones they shot down had acid blood. We don’t want our hull plating corroded, the taxpayers would get perturbed.”

Tamanskoya Motor Rifle Division, Outskirts of Moscow

“Remember Bratishka. Rodina, chest, slava! Let the name of the Chertkovsky Tank Regiment chill the very fires of hell!”

The Americans had killed four of the demons, others had killed one each. Now it was time for the Rodina to strike its blow against these arrogant beasts who had dared to declare their dominion over humanity. The demon had appeared an hour or so earlier and was walking across the countryside towards the Kremlin. If the pattern from earlier encounters was holding true, it was making for Russia’s capital. Well, it wouldn’t get there, not if the Chertkovsky Tank Regiment had its way. Colonel Mikhail Suranov had worked on the presumption that the beast was heading for the city and set up a neat L-shaped ambush. The kill zone was covered by the 125mm guns on his tanks and, just to make sure, he had his Smerch multiple rocket artillery systems dialed in.

Berwaniklasnin had his message to deliver, as a herald that was his infernal duty and he was going to do it. The problem was, word had started to spread that the humans weren’t cowering in fear the way they were supposed to, before it had only taken a single appearance to throw them into panic. Now, there was a whisper they were fighting back. Not just fighting back but showing uncanny skill in doing so. That was a troubling concept. Berwaniklasnin felt a sudden itch on his skin, there were ten or more brilliant green dots on his hide, points where his flesh was beginning to swell. One of his arms moved to cover them, as he did so, the dot vanished from his hide but appeared on the back of his hand. A beam of some sort? He never had a chance to work it out because a massive blow struck his chest and sent him staggering backwards.

The first shot had sent the HVDUAPCFSDS bolt screaming into the beast’s chest, sending it reeling backwards. An instant later the nine other T-90S tanks of the first company fired in salvo, their shots striking home as almost a single blow. The Russian tank gunners had been told that the Thais had killed one of these beasts with their pathetic little M-41s, the Russian T-90S could do better than that surely? There was an unspoken message, it had better. And it could. The beast was down, battered off its feet by the depleted uranium bolts that had smashed into it. Even as the gunners watched, the beats tried to get back to its feet but Second Company were waiting. A brief interval as their laser rangefinders locked in, then another salvo of shots. These ones struck low, sheering the beast’s legs from its body. It rolled to the ground, trying to pull itself upright.

What criminality was this? Berwaniklasnin couldn’t believe what was taking place. He was a herald, one of those charged with carrying messages to the others. By all the laws and customs, he was granted immunity from attack for how could wars be fought if neither side could talk? But these humans had opened up on him without warning. It was a hideous crime for which the wrath of the higher powers would be terrible. Berwaniklasnin shook his head, he was crippled, his legs gone, his green blood soaking into the earth. Even as he looked around another salvo of shells struck him, ripping his arms from his body. He crashed onto his back, helpless and dying.

Suranov looked up at the beast dying on the ground. It had taken 30 hits from 125mm guns to bring it down and it wasn’t dead yet. If these things resistance to damage was as high as that, these beasts were going to be trouble.

“Tovarish Colonel. Please ask your men to help me. I need to sit on the beast’s chest.” It was one of the politicians from Moscow. It didn’t take long to help him up, a T-90 pulled alongside the beast and the political was unceremoniously hauled up into place. Somebody handed up a camp stool and he carefully selected a spot overlooking the beast’s head, one clear of the bubbling craters where the armor piercing shots had torn through the beast.

“Beast. Before you should die, I believe you should know who it is you are waging war upon. I will therefore read you some of President Putin’s speeches. Listen well and learn of your folly.”

“I can almost feel sorry for the beast.” An engineer sergeant placing the demolition charges around the great body spoke quietly but his team heard and laughed. The word spread amongst the tank crews and the chuckles spread there as well. The politician appeared not to have heard, his droning monotone carried on unaffected.

A few minutes later, the preparations were ready. Suranov looked up at the politician who was starting the third speech of his program. “Tovarish. We are about to blow the beast. Please come down.”

“But I must finish the President’s Speech to the Iron Worker’s Union.”

There was a hideous racking groan from the beast, muted only by its failing strength. Suranov got a clear mental picture of it begging to be put out of its misery, anything other than to have to listen to another speech. The Colonel could see its point. “Now, Tovarish, my orders are to destroy this thing then bring samples back for analysis.

The politician reluctantly agreed, and the charges were detonated. Looking around, something puzzled Suranov. “Didn’t the Americans say these beasts had acid blood? Because this one doesn’t.”

James Randi Educational Foundation, Florida, USA

“Thank you for seeing me at such short notice Sir.” The woman was Thai, middle-aged, still poised, elegant and attractive. She also had the hardest, coldest black eyes James Randi, aka The Amazing Randi, had ever seen.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance Ma’am.”

“Major-General. Sir, for many years your organization has run a million-dollar prize for evidence of people with supernatural abilities.”

“That is correct General. We were going to end the challenge in a couple of years but now, after these events….”

“Sir, that is why we wish to speak with you. The events of the last few days have changed everything. You and your organization have decades of experience in exposing frauds and discrediting psychics. You probably have more practical experience in this than anywhere else. My government, and quite a few others I believe, need to exploit that experience. We believe that buried amongst all the frauds and imposters there may be a few who really can talk to the dead. If there are such people, we need to speak with them very badly. We want you and your organization to find them for us. Mr Randi, I do not exaggerate when I say that the whole future of the human race may depend upon us finding such people.

Randi looked at the woman sitting before him. “In that case, how can I refuse?”

National Command Post, Washington D.C.

“Congratulations Prime Minister. And yes, we gladly accept your offer of cooperation in analyzing the body your submarine is towing in. We have heard from the Russians, they also have samples they are prepared to share with us. The more information we have the better, there appears to be significant differences between these recent kills and the ones shot down by our pilots. By the way, Gordon, are your legal people giving you trouble? Ours are claiming all sorts of strange things. Their latest one is that these are peace emissaries and we’re committing war crimes by killing them.

“We have had some such troubles yes. I suggest, Mister President, that you tell your people what I told mine. In view of the circumstances, Britannia waives the rules.”

Chapter Three

Cabinet Conference Room, White House, Washington D.C.

“Condi, could you summarize the international situation at this point?”

“Mister President. So far, more than two dozen of these invaders, Baldricks the Brits call them, have been killed around the world. The latest was off Tokyo where a monster similar to the one killed by HMS Astute came ashore. It was engaged by the Japanese Ground Self Defense Forces and destroyed. According to the Japanese Ambassador, all that time spent shooting at Godzilla finally paid off.” A laugh ran around the room, partly a release of nervous tension but mostly in appreciation of the unexpected sense of humor shown by Ambassador Nishamura. “Most of the Far Eastern countries are coming on board pretty quickly. China, of course, has taken an early stand. The People’s Liberation Army, Army Air Force and Army Navy have all gone to full alert. Europe’s following the same approach, they’re all shooting at any Baldricks that appear on their territory.

“On the debit side, South America and Southern Europe appear to be in shock still. Christianity was deeply rooted there and The Message struck them very hard. The idea that they’ve been systematically deceived by the very being they worshipped has left them adrift.” Secretary Rice paused for a moment. Coming from a religious background herself, she could empathize with the degree of bewilderment that was paralyzing so many governments around the world. “The Middle East is a mixed bag. We’d expected the area to be virtually depopulated; after all the word Islam means submission to the will of god and we assumed that the populations there would just lie down and die according to demand. Well, that hasn’t happened, not universally at any rate. It’s hard to work out exactly what is going on but it seems as if, with radical Islam being discredited by The Message, the alternative philosophy of assertive Arab nationalism is returning. The largely socialist Arab nationalist movements have been eclipsed by the Jihadists in recent years but now, they’re coming back and coming back strong. Of course, the Sunnis are blaming the Shia and the Shia are blaming the Sunnis for The Message and they both blame us. Business as usual there. Equally predictably, the Israelis have gone to work with a vengeance. Apparently one of the Russian Baldricks appeared there, homing in on Jerusalem and the Israeli Defense Forces shot it to pieces. According to the Israeli Ambassador, 120mm shells are much more effective than sounding trumpets. They’ve sent word by the way, don’t use armor piercing shot to take the Baldricks down. Just whips straight through them. HEAT, high explosive and canister all work much better.”

“You like the term Baldrick then Condi?” Department of Energy Secretary Bodman seemed to favor the expression as well.

“I do Sammy, it has a nice, contemptuous ring to it. But, much more importantly I think it is very important to distinguish between the mythological demon and the creatures we face in reality. There is little doubt that the monsters we face today are the source of the myths we have all read about but I believe we must make the difference between the two very clear. There is nothing ghostly or ethereal about the Baldricks, they are very solid reality. As to what their powers are, that we must find out.”

“On that note, we need some scientific input. Thank you Condi. I have asked the Department of Defense to coordinate the scientific research into these Baldricks. Secretary Gates has resigned from his position as head of Defense, I have appointed, subject to confirmation by the Senate, Senator John Warner to be the new SecDef. John?”

“Thank you Mister President. At the moment we know very little about these creatures. Factually, we have identified three separate types which have very different characteristics.

“The first are the flying Baldricks we shot down off California. They’re the same ones that were whacked in Singapore and Bangkok. Working on camera gun footage from the F-18s, we can size them at around 30 feet long from tip of horns to root of tail with a wingspan of around 60 feet.” Warner gestured and a picture was projected onto the screen at the end of the Cabinet Room. “As you can see, they look rather like the traditional depiction of a demon or a cartoon devil. Horns, tail pointed beard. Two arms, two legs, two wings. This raises an interesting point, the combination of weight and musculature mean these things can’t possibly fly.”

“Just like a bumblebee?” Education Secretary Margaret Spellings tossed the quip in, one that gained her a reproachful glance from the President.

“In a way yes. You see, the musculature of the back doesn’t give any great strength to the wings, it can’t the bone structure won’t support it. The only way this thing can fly is if it weighs virtually nothing so its wings provide propulsion and lift, not steerage. The only way we can think of doing that is if the body contains a lot of very light gas, probably hydrogen. We think that is why they burned so fiercely when they were hit. The pilots reported that the creature’s blood set them on fire, we can only think that there’s some sort of body process in there where very acid blood reacts with a mineral to give off the hydrogen needed. That would allow the Baldrick to breath fire as well. There are things about these flying Baldricks that are reminiscent of humans, its almost as if they were a parallel evolutionary path from a common ancestor somewhere.

“The second class we’ve run into are the aquatic ones. According to Astute, the one they killed was more than a hundred feet long, about 20 feet in diameter and has flipper-like legs, six of them. They did careful pH testing on the water as they closed on the corpse and detected no sign of acidity. Also, note, despite being hit by two torpedoes, it didn’t burn. So, our working hypothesis is that this one doesn’t have acid blood. The one that came ashore near Tokyo walked on its flipper-legs, all six of them. Apparently it fought by shooting jets of water at things. Anyway, the JMSDF-GF will be sending over information as it develops. One thing they have said, apparently the flesh doesn’t make good Sushi. I’m not sure what worries me most about that, the fact that doesn’t make good Sushi or that somebody tried it. Either way, at the moment we’ll know more about the Aquatic ones than the others soon.

“The third group are the land ones. These have just started to appear. According to the Russians, they’re over a hundred feet tall. They’re tough, they walk on their hind legs using their forearms to strike blows. They have vestigial wings only. No acid blood again. The ones that appeared have been killed so quickly we have no idea whether they breath fire or what.”

“We’re going to need names for all these types. Baldrick’s good enough for a generic name, I agree with Condi, we have to distinguish between the mythology we’ve all read and the reality we have to fight.” President Bush leaned back in his seat, rubbing his eyes. “Does it seem to anybody that these Baldricks are getting tougher.”

“Certainly Sir.” Senator Warner tapped the pictures of the three types of demons. “There’s a definite progression here. There’s another thing, we have people going through ancient records, demonologies, grimoires that sort of stuff. Now, the information in there is undoubtedly corrupted and distorted but we’re hoping it gives us some form of clue as to what we can expect. One thing we have noted. You’ll note that these Baldricks haven’t come in blasting. We would, under the same circumstances, we’d be advancing behind a wall of missiles, tactical air and artillery fire. These just cruised straight into our defenses and died on them.

“We think we may have discovered the reason for this. One of our early readings found a mention of demonic heralds who were supposed to carry the word of their master to his new subjects. Apparently they would just appear in a population center, announce that all within were now subjects of their master and carry them off to hell. As far as we can see, nobody ever resisted. There’s even a suggestion that, by some sort of celestial Geneva Convention, these heralds are immune from attack.”

Bush frowned. “Attorney General Mukasey, has the United States ever signed an agreement to that effect.”

“No Sir, we have not.”

“Good, doesn’t apply to us then. Tell everybody to keep shooting. A question John, does ‘immune from attack’ mean that they can’t be shot at or that they are immune to weapons fire?”

“Our guess at this time Sir is that the second lead to the former. People found their bows and arrows and so on didn’t work against them so they rationalized it by creating the former. Of course, we could be wrong on that. But the key point is, if these are the heralds referred to in the Grimoire, the real armies of hell are still to get here. We have to stack our defenses ready.”

“I agree, Henry.” Treasury Secretary Paulson started. “Henry, we need supplementals, huge ones. This is a war, we have to fund it as such. We’re going to be spending serious money. Organize it. Elaine, Carlos, get to work shifting our industry to a war footing, get the missile factories and tank lines on triple shifts. Tell Boeing we’ll take every F-22 they can build, cost-plus basis. I believe the B-2 jigs and tooling are still in storage, if they are, get the Spirit back into production. Same with the Bone. What we can’t build, we’ll buy from abroad.

“Oh and John. Defense is fine but nobody ever won a war by defending. We have to go onto the offensive and attack. Find out how.”

Throne Room, Infernal Palace of Dis, Hell.

“They have done what?” The infernal voice boomed across the hall, making the thick red vapor boil and eddy as the banners of long-forgotten kingdoms twisted and furled in the smog.

“Your Eminence, I cower at your feet.

“I know. Do it some more. Then tell me what you meant.”

Abigor cringed on the ground at Satan’s feet, his tongue flicking over the great hooked claws. “Sire, forgive me”

“No. But continue.”

“Sire, they killed your heralds.”

“My gentlemen!” The scream of anger made the very foundations of hell shake. Across the fields of burning rock where the souls of the dead were forever held in torment, the devils looked up from their work and shuddered in fear. “They killed my gentlemen. It is laid down by our immortal will that the heralds shall be forever immune from attack.”

“Sire.” Abigor whimpered and abased himself still further. If he had been human he would have lost control of his bowels several minutes ago. “We believe that one of the heralds may have lived long enough to say that.”

“And what did those insignificant humans say to that? Do they cry for my forgiveness? Not that they’ll get it.”

“No Sire. It is reported they replied ‘screw you and the horse you rode in on’. We don’t quite understand that Sire.”

“Then they must learn obedience. I blame this all on Yahweh. He was supposed to have softened this lot up, got them to believe anything and obey everything. I thought he had too. Abigor, you will rectify this. You command 60 of the 999 legions of Hell. You will take them and wipe these upstarts out.”

“Sire, may I beg your indulgence for one moment of your time.”

“No.”

“But Sire, the heralds are dead and we do not know how or why. The impossible, the impermissible, the unforgivable has been done and we know nothing of this. Sire, we should find out before we invade, then we can inflict yet greater suffering and despair upon them.”

“Greater suffering and despair, I like the sound of that. What do you propose?”

“Sire, I suggest that I ask Deumos send the comeliest and most seductive of her Succubi to Washington, capital of the greatest nation on Earth. There is one there, peculiarly susceptible to her charms who might be seduced into telling us what we need to know. Think, Sire, of his grief when he learns his lusts have betrayed all humanity.”

Macdonald’s Restaurant, just off Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.

Former President William Jefferson Clinton jogged up to the restaurant and headed through the doors, his Secret Service detail following behind. He stopped to mop his forehead, his sides heaving with the exercise. He carefully did not look at the two Secret Service agents, he guessed that they were unmoved by his evening routine. In fact, he doubted if they were even breathing heavily. Fortunately, the place was empty, or nearly so. It pretty much always was this late at night.

“Can I help you Sir?” The young Latina girl behind the counter was too tired to recognize the former President.

“I’ll have a double quarter-pounder with extra cheese, two super-size portions of fries, oh and a small diet soda please.”

“Coming right up Sir.” The girl got her order from the pass and gave it to Clinton. He paid his bill and went to a table.

“Hi Sir, mind if a girl sits with you? Don’t want to be on my own this late at night.” Clinton glanced up. The woman waiting politely by his table had a mane of jet-black hair that fell in curls half way down her back. Great, luminous black eyes and a mouth that promised everything imaginable without saying a word. “I’m Sheba, please I won’t bother you, your such a big, strong man. I’m sure I’ll be safe with you.”

A few feet away, the two Secret Service agents registered the scene with horror. How in hell had she slipped in there? It was appalling, a total breech of security, one which the senior agent had to do something about.

“Hey Lady get away from here. Don’t you know who….” Sheba looked at him her eyes pleading for understanding. “Well, alright I suppose it’ll be OK.”

Clinton finished his snack, leaving the garbage to be thrown away by one of the Secret Service men. As he left the restaurant, the girl was trotting along beside him. Clinton kept throwing calculating glances at her, she was, perhaps, a little on the heavy side but that mouth was so enticing.

“This is so wonderful, what is it?” Sheba was stroking the great black wheeled vehicle that stood on the road.

“A Chevvy Suburban. It belongs to my bodyguards.” Clinton threw another calculating glance at Sheba. “Would you like to see inside.”

“Ohhh, yes please.” Sheba peered in, the front seat was like any other automobile, controls, a steering wheel, pedals on the floor. “How many horses does it take.”

“Three hundred and thirty five.” Sheba blinked trying to imagine the sight.

“The front’s standard, all the good stuff is in the back.” He turned to his Secret Service men. “Open up the back please?”

“But Sir..”

“Open it up please.” Clinton’s voice was insistent. The agent sighed and did as he was told. A lot of the equipment in the back was classified. “Isn’t that one of the new automatic shotguns?”

Clinton took the nod for an answer and reached in, picking the heavy weapon up. With slickness born of long practice, he spun around, racking the mechanism as he did. Then, with the barrel less than a foot from Sheba’s stomach, he pulled the trigger.

The long roaring burst drowned out her scream and the blasts of buckshot hurled her backwards across the sidewalk, rolling her over as she started to fall apart. The Secret Servicemen’s faces were expressions of utter horror at the scene, horror that was replaced by revulsion as the figure sprawled on the ground began to change, its flesh going black, horns growing from its head, a tail sprouting from under the absurdly-short skirt. Their reactions were, under the circumstances commendable. They stopped their dive for Clinton in mid-lunge, spun, drew their SIG-Sauer P-229s and each emptied all twelve rounds of .357SIG into the writhing demon. Clinton had dropped the empty magazine of his shotgun, loaded another and a second roar finished the job. The demon was dead, its bright yellow blood spreading across the sidewalk.

“It was a demon.”

“Hey, Bill’s killed a demon.”

The whispers from the crowd grew as they recovered from the shock of the violent confrontation. One man, obviously the worse for drink, staggered up and smacked Clinton on the back. “Well done Bill. Have a drink.” Clinton grabbed the bottle in its brown paper bag and took a swig.

The senior of the secret servicemen was speaking on the radio. “Stay away from the body please, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here.” Then he turned to Clinton. “Well done sir, but, how did you know?”

Clinton grinned, the easy, friendly grin that won him elections. “I’ve been married to Hilary for thirty years. Believe me, after going through that, I have no trouble recognizing a fiend from hell.”

Chapter Four

Oval Office, White House, Washington D.C.

“Sir, newsflash just in, Former President Clinton has just killed a baldrick at the McDonalds just down the road.”

“Damn, that will cost us at least one more seat in the House.” President Bush looked pensive for a moment. “I don’t suppose we could get my pappy to whack one?”

His public relations advisor shrugged, if one turned up in the right place it could be arranged, probably. But that was asking too much. “No Sir, not that we can rely on anyway.”

Bush’s mouth twisted, a pity to be disappointed so late in the evening. “How did it happen anyway? How did Bill, I suppose we’ll have to call him Wild Bill now, manage it? And what were the Secret Service up to?”

“The details are very brief, Sir, apparently he just blasted the baldrick with an automatic shotgun. Doctor Surlethe, the National Science Advisor is waiting outside, perhaps he can give you some more details.”

A sigh wafted gently across the room, President Bush really didn’t like being briefed by scientists. They tended to use such long words. Like any good politician, Bush knew that the time taken to say a four-syllable word was greater than the attention span of the audience. “Trot him in.”

Bush leaned forward in his seat, giving the impression of studiously examining the papers on the Presidential desk. “Doctor Surlethe, good to see you. A great achievement by the former President, but one that raises a few questions I think?”

“Indeed so sir. Mr. Clinton was very lucky that the baldrick in question was a new type, one that apparently has some unnerving capabilities. In accordance with your instructions, we’ve started naming the baldrick types we encounter. For example, the we’ve designated the flying baldricks as harpies, the aquatic ones as leviathans and the land-based one as behemoths. The one killed by Mr. Clinton was human sized and gave every appearance of being a human female, a very seductive one. It changed appearance into what we assume was its real form only when blasted with several dozen rounds of double-ought buckshot and automatic pistol fire.”

“Wait a minute, this thing was able to simulate people’s appearance? It’s a shape shifter? That means it could be anybody, you, me, anybody could be killed and replaced by one of those things.”

“Yes Sir, although things may not be quite that bad. The other thing is that this baldrick, we’re going to call this type a succubus, just materialized by the former President’s table and started to speak to him. The Secret Service men thought they’d fouled up badly but nobody saw that thing before it was standing next to the former President and speaking. It’s as if it simply materialized there.”

“That’s appalling. It means nobody is safe, one could materialize here and now.”

“Well, that all depends Mister President. There are pretty much two possibilities. The first is that the succubus really is a shape-shifter and can teleport around. If that is the case, then we can take the entire science section of the Library of Congress and toss it on to the landfill. Everything we thought we knew about the physical world is wrong. However, the other possibility is much more probable and something we can handle.” Doctor Surlethe paused for a second. This was going to be the tricky bit. “This option is that the succubus doesn’t change shape or teleport, it simply makes us think it looks the way it does.”

“How can it do that?” Here comes the long words Bush thought to himself.

“Mister President, are you familiar with the concept of quantum entanglement.”

Knew it Bush thought. Four syllables at least. “I’ve heard the term.”

That means no. Doctor Surlethe said ruefully to himself. Oh well, here we go. “Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which two or more objects influence each other at a quantum level even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems. For example, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it.”

Surlethe looked at the President, he wasn’t sure but Bush’s eyes seemed to be rotating in different directions. “What this means is that one quantum state can duplicate itself, transit information on itself if you like, to another without a direct contact. This has been experimentally demonstrated within a laboratory and we are just beginning to appreciate the implications of the phenomena. Now, the workings of the brain and nerves all use various kinds of energy fields, you’ve heard of brainwave measurement and things like that. We’ve been doing that for years. Now, theoretically, its possible that the succubus can entangle its energy field with those around it so that it transmits information to them, in effect it duplicates itself in them. So, the succubus holds a mental image of itself in its mind and uses this ability to entangle the sense transmissions in those around it so it duplicates that image in them. In short, all those around the succubus see it the way the succubus wants them to see it. It doesn’t change shape, it simply changes the way people see its shape.”

“And the teleport thing.”

“Easy, the succubus simply transmits an image of itself that isn’t there. It isn’t invisible, it simply tells the senses in its victim that it isn’t present. Now, if this is correct, we should be able to detect that energy field, there isn’t a part of the electromagnetic spectrum we can’t detect and measure, and work out a way to stop it. Only, we’ll need a live succubus for that and we haven’t got one. Until we get one, we won’t know which explanation is correct.”

“We don’t need a succubus Doctor, we’ve got the evidence we need.” Bush grinned to himself, just because he didn’t like using four-syllable words and usually mispronounced them when he did, didn’t mean he couldn’t understand them.

“We have Mister President?”

“This is Washington Doctor. The city with one of the highest crime rates in America. Knocking off fast-food restaurants and shooting the staff is a daily event. Or was, until the places started installing video surveillance cameras. Now, if I follow your explanation properly, the entanglement thing you talk about works on the energy fields in the brain. Surveillance cameras don’t have brains. The film should show us what is really there, not what it wants us to think is there. So, lets get that film.”

It took just under an hour. The manager of the 19th Street McDonalds had the interesting experience of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III arriving to collect his video surveillance tapes personally. Director Mueller carried the tapes went back to the White House where they were set up in the projection office just off the Conference Room. By the striking of the hour, the audience had assembled and the tapes were run.

“Right, here we are, we can see the former President and his two Secret Service men entering the restaurant …… will you look at that!” Mueller’s voice was incredulous. A jet black figure, human-sized but with a set of rounded stub horns and a long pointed tail entered through the open doors of the restaurant, only a foot or so behind the rear Secret Service man. By the time the doors had closed, it was inside. “He’s getting his food, going to the table.” The succubus had walked less than a couple of feet in front of the Secret Service agents, both had looked directly at it, but neither of them had seen it. The succubus spoke with Clinton while he ate, then the two left together. A few seconds after they left, there were the brilliant flashes of gunfire outside.

“There we are, Doctor Surlethe, it doesn’t teleport and it doesn’t shift shape. It just makes us think it does, so you can start to look for your energy field, right?”

“Yes Sir.”  Bush relaxed in his seat, running the implications of the scene in his mind. “Doctor Surlethe, your Quantum Entanglement theory was very interesting and, as far as I can make out, plausible. Don’t concentrate on it to the exclusion of other theories though. I’ve seen that happen all too often.

“Gentlemen, we’ve proved something else today. We can rely on our optical sensors even if we can’t rely on our own eyes and ears. That’s worth spreading to the troops, to everybody in fact. I doubt that this succubus thing that Bill killed so emphatically will be the only one that we run into, there will be more and we need to be on our guard against them. Closed-circuit television surveillance, remote surveillance so that the operator isn’t within the zone of control of these things, is essential. By Executive Order, I’m making the installation of such equipment a tax-deductible expense as from now. See that gets out as fast as possible.”

James Randi Educational Foundation, Florida, USA

James Randi rubbed his eyes. The last few days had been tiresome in the extreme, ever since the announcement that all mediums were being tested so that their abilities, if any, could be used in the war effort went out, the Foundation had been besieged by applicants. The big names, of course, had refused to show their faces. They were scared spitless of The Amazing Randi and with good reason. He knew the tricks they used and how to expose them, submitting to tests by him would destroy their livelihood. That reasoning hadn’t helped them, they had found themselves being picked up by the FBI, bundled into the back of a Chevvy Suburban and brought down to the Foundation. A few hours later, they had been on their way back, their fraudulent claims exposed and discredited.

“Not one. Not one genuine medium in the whole lot. There was a time when that would have delighted me but not now. We know there’s something out there but we can’t get at it. It was easier being an atheist, now I don’t know what to believe. Guess that makes me agnostic.”

“No, James. I know that the idea an agnostic lies between the extremes of atheism and religious fanaticism but it does not. It is a separate line of thought. An atheist denies the existence of any sort of god, the theist affirms it. An agnostic believes that the existence or non-existence of a god can never be proven, the Gnostic believes that the existence or non-existence of a god is subject to rational proof. If I understand your position correctly, you were a Gnostic Atheist. You denied the existence of a god and thought you could prove that your denial was correct.”

“And I was wrong, General.”

“Why James? We know now that there is life after death, that is undeniable. We know that the afterlife is ruled by beings. Why do you believe those beings are gods? We have already proved we can kill their servants with almost absurd ease. Why cannot we kill them as well? They’re probably more trouble than they are worth anyway.”

“We don’t like our gods, so we kill them. Now that’s a soldier talking.”

“No James, it is not. A soldier fights for those who cannot fight for themselves. Today we fight for all those who have died, who are being held in horrid slavery. We fight for all humanity, past, present and future. You are part of that fight, don’t forget it. In this war, you are as much a soldier as I.”

“General, while we are speaking on this subject, may I ask something? How does The Message affect you and your people? Few or you are Christian.”

“On one level James, The Message does not concern us. I am a Buddhist, so are more than 90 percent of my people. The Lord Buddha was not a god, he was a man. A very wise man who laid down rules for living one’s life as well as possible on an imperfect earth. Good rules that when applied mean one lives a good life. To us, being a Buddhist simply means following those teachings, I could give you a long lecture on what that means but here is neither the time nor the place. When we meditate we simply ponder the teachings of the Lord Buddha and try to seek enlightenment on how they can solve our problems. When we pray to him, we simply are asking him what he would do under these circumstances. Any question of gods or devils is quite irrelevant to that center core belief. In my country, we are animists, we believe that everything has a spirit that lives in it, a spirit we can talk to and who will talk back to us. So The Message didn’t affect us much. On another level, what does affect us is the assertion that all humans go to eternal punishment no matter what they believe. The Message made no distinction between the religions or stated that one would be exempt while another was condemned. All humans are subject to the same fate. So we fight. That’s why governments pay us the big bucks.”

“Which brings us back to where we started. We’ve been pulling in every psychic, every medium, every fortune teller we can find. When we’ve exhausted this country’s supply, we’ll start abroad. Yet, for all our efforts we have not come up with one single person who can actually speak to the dead. What if there are none? What if the dead are indeed beyond contact?”

The General finished her whisky and refilled her glass. “Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that so-called mediums cannot speak to the dead but that those who can speak to the dead are not mediums. After all, let us suppose that one can communicate with the dead. What will we learn? That the dead are subject to an eternity of hideous torture, without hope of end or reprieve. That the same fate awaits us all. Now, the grieving family of a dead person turns up on our doorstep. They want reassurance, they want to know that their beloved husband, or wife, parents or children have gone to the better place promised, that they are happy in their afterlife. Would you tell them the truth? That a terrible fate has fallen on them and that the same awaits their relatives?”

Randi shook his head. Such cruelty would be inconceivable. Thinking about it, The Message itself was an act of diabolical cruelty, one that only a truly foul mind could conceive. When Satan had proclaimed his dominion over the Earth and proclaimed that all its souls belonged to him, regardless of virtue or cause, he had fully lived up to his reputation. “So where do we look?”

The General sipped her whisky, savoring its smoky taste. “Imagine yourself as someone who can speak to the damned dead, know their pain and anguish, feel their agony, know that the same fate awaits you and that there is no hope, that the fate ahead is what inevitably awaits you. What would you do?”

Randi thought for a second. “I think I would go mad.”

The General looked over the rim of her glass. “Quite. So shouldn’t we start looking amongst the mad? Looking at those who hear voices, voices whose messages are so dreadful that they have driven the listener insane? All through history there have been those who have claimed they have heard voices that drove them to acts of rage or despair. They’ve always been treated as though they were insane but suppose they were not? Suppose they really did hear voices, either accidentally or deliberately. In ancient times, such people were described as possessed but in our arrogance we assumed otherwise. We assumed that they were sick, that they had a mental defect that we could treat. Perhaps they were not, perhaps they really were possessed by the demons who now assail us. That they were victims of the hideous game we are now playing to its final act.”

“So we should start looking amongst the mentally ill. That will be a long job.”

“It will indeed, James, but it is one we can move fast on. We are looking for specific kinds of people, those who hear voices that drive them insane. I think computers can help with this, we need to have the records searched so that we can find the most promising cases. Then we can bring them here.”

Office of the National Science Advisor, Washington D.C.

“Call for you, Doctor Surlethe. From Florida.”

“Thank you, put it through.” Surlethe waited for a moment. “Surlethe here.”

“Doctor, this is the James Randi Educational Foundation.” Surlethe recognized the contralto voice, one that had a threatening growl underneath it. The sound of a well-fed tiger that was eying a small animal with the thought that it had just a little room left in its stomach.

“Ah yes General. How is the research going down there?”

“We’ve hit a dead end, our initial concept was wrong so we’re changing tack. We’re writing off the known mediums etc as source material, its pretty obvious they’re all frauds and confidence tricksters. Instead, we’re going to start looking at people who claim to hear voices in their heads and are under treatment for such ‘delusions’.”

“So you and The Amazing Randi think that some of them really do hear voices.” Surlethe’s voice was bitter. Scientists had never forgiven Randi for exposing tricksters whose acts had fooled ‘scientific’ testing. Randi had pointed out that the skills needed to expose a fraud were different from those needed to conduct an experiment. It hadn’t helped, if anything it had made things worse.

“We do. What we need you to do is to get as much information on such cases to us as possible so we can start working through them. Also, I read the note about the search for energy fields? Can you get some instrumentation down here pretty quick, if we do start finding what we’re looking for, we should be able to measure what it is they’re hearing.”

“I’ll get the equipment sent down, along with some experts to install it. Thank you General, and good luck.”

Surlethe leaned back in his seat. A new front had been opened against the forces that were threatening humanity. While the armed forces were picking off the baldricks who appeared in earth, science and reason were striking at the very heart of their power. For the first time since The Message, Surlethe felt good.

Chapter Five

Martial Field of Dysprosium, Hell.

His troops were formed up on the field, awaiting his inspection. 60 legions, each with 6,666 demons, a total force of over 400,000 demons if Abigor’s own command staff were included. By far the largest force that Hell had ever sent to another world yet it was only a tiny fraction of the army that Hell could deploy if it wished. There were 6,666 legions in hell, a total of 44,500,000 demons under arms, a mighty host that had never in its history been deployed against a single foe. There had never been a single foe whose ability had demanded that level of force. Always, those lower down the scale of existence had cowered in fear when the demons had arrived, genuflecting at the appearance of the creatures from a greater dimension. Mostly, the armies of Hell had never been needed, the Heralds had been terrifying enough to put their victims into a state of catatonic terror.

Only, not this time. This time the creatures from the lower dimensions had the temerity to fight back, even more than that, they had killed the Heralds. That had disturbed Abigor more than he let on. If the Heralds could be killed, what did that mean for the demons in his ranks? The Heralds were deliberately created to be awe-inspiring, terrifying by virtue of their size and apparent invulnerability, yet the humans below had fought back and killed them. Individually, the demons in the ranks of his legions were much less formidable than the great Heralds. They were formidable enough, that was true, their tough hides were impervious to arrows and the blows of swords yet would that be enough? What did the humans have that could kill so effectively?

There was another point that worried Abigor. The Heralds had been killed, what had happened to them. The rulers of Hell knew what happened to those on the lower dimensions, their creation and life built up a form of energy that, when they died, boosted them over the threshold and translated them to the next level of dimension. Unfortunately for them, the energy needed to surge the occupants of this reality level was much greater. That’s why Hell existed, the second deaths of the unfortunates from realities below were prolonged as much as possible, by millennia or longer, nobody knew the limit yet, so that the energy released by their suffering would boost the rulers of Hell up to their afterlife. The creatures from below suffered in their afterlife to provide the creatures of this level with theirs. But suppose the beings who lived in the reality above this one adopted the same philosophy. Was there a super-Hell that awaited Abigor and his kind?

The infantry in his legions were crashing the butts of their tridents against the ground as Abigor rode past on his beast. 56 of his 60 legions were his infantry, Abigor’s host was one of the less mobile of its kind, he had only three mounted legions and one flying legion. The information he had was that the humans lived mostly in cities, that meant the war would be one of sieges, the cities fighting from behind their defensive walls in a series of last stands. That would put a premium on his infantry, his mounted and flying legions would only be of use in isolating each city before the infantry besieged and destroyed it. It had been done before, Abigor knew that human myths were full of stories of cities that had been besieged by hordes of monstrous, inhuman foes. Now they would find out where those myths had come from.

The horns sounded, their wailing drowning out the crashing cadence of the trident staffs. The legions did a right-face, towards a black dot that had suddenly appeared against the roiling red smoke of the sky. The dot expanded, opening a gate into the lower dimension that had dared to defy the will of higher beings. This was the critical stage, the energy gradient ran steeply from the lower dimensions to the higher, it was relatively easy for the higher dimension beings to gain access to the lower, much harder for the lower dimensions to ascend. Only opening a portal could ensure easy access between the dimensions. Yet that same energy gradient meant that once a portal between the levels was opened, it would be very hard to close. Size also was a factor and this was the largest portal that had ever been created. Just how hard would it be to close again? Abigor had an uneasy feeling that nobody had thought to ask that question.

The portal reached its full extent and the horns wailed again. Abigor lead his host forward, into the black circle of the portal and from it into the brilliant yellow light and the clear blue skies of Earth.

Headquarters, 1st Armored Division, Task Force Iron, Multi-National Force Iraq

“Have we got the Global Hawk Feed set up?” Major General Wilkens snapped the order out. The situation was breaking loose at last and he didn’t want to fall behind the loop.

“Sir, yes Sir. Direct feed to us, to Washington and to Moscow.” The latter part was new, one of the hurried preparations that had been made over the last two weeks. There had been a frantic effort to link up the world’s military headquarters so that the fight, if it started, when it started, would be properly coordinated. Task Force Iron also had a direct download from Russian satellites and other recon capabilities but it was the RQ-4B Global Hawks that were the key asset. Nobody knew where the attack would come, on paper it could be anywhere but Iraq had been a leading bet. The association of old legends and the fertile triangle of the Tigris-Euphrates was too powerful to ignore.

High above the desert, the Global Hawk turned lazily, its long wings biting at the thin air. Its stabilized cameras focused on a strange sight in the desert of Western Iraq, a black oval that had suddenly appeared in the stony wastes, one that spread even though it had no apparent substance. It wasn’t even a shadow, it was more of an absence of anything. The cameras zoomed in on the strange spreading stain that still grew beneath it.

“Well, that looks like it.” Brigadier General Boothe looked at the image with horrified fascination. If the guesses were right he was looking at something humanity had discussed, described and occasionally cursed but never actually seen, the mouth of Hell itself. The black shadow had stopped spreading and seemed to be holding its breath. “Is that thing flat on the ground or perpendicular to it?”

“Can’t tell.” Wilkens spoke quietly, the tension in the room seeming to dull voices. “I think it’s a different dimension entirely, we’re not seeing it, we’re seeing its shadow. I don’t think it has dimensions or proportions as we understand them.”

Something stirred in the shadow and a line of figures started to appear. “Zoom in on that.” The order came from the commander of the UAV detachment that was operating the Global Hawk. The image enlarged in a series of jerks as the operator clicked up through the zoom scales. The group of figures resolved, one huge figure surrounded by a group of others. Then, another smaller group appeared out of the shadow, followed by lines of others.

“What do you make of that?” Wilkens wanted other opinions, other eyes looking at this.

“First group, the command group. Now. We’ve got combat troops appearing.” The analyst looked quickly at the emerging lines. “They’re coming out in a parade formation. If we only had the assets within range.”

“The alerts gone off to the fly-boys and the squids. We’ll have jets here soon enough. And we’ve got the friends with their toy on scene.”

On the screen the figures had continued to pour out of the portal, forming up into a huge square on the desert. The UAV operator dialed his cameras in again. “OK, that formation seems to be complete. I make it 81 ranks, each of 81 baldricks. They’re subdivided into 9 groups of 9 ranks with a command section between each. I guess that gives us 6,666 down there.”

“Appropriate number. About a brigade-sized formation then? And that would make the smaller sub-divisions battalions.” There were nods around the room, it seemed fair enough, 9 ranks of 81 meant 729 demons in a battalion. This was translating raw numbers into a structure that could easily be understood – and to the people in this room, what could be understood could be destroyed. Once structure, form and numbers were evaluated and put into context, destruction was a matter of planning. “Each line is a company with nine nine-baldrick platoons?” More nods of agreement

“If that’s it, this is something we can cope with.” Boothe spoke as if he was trying to convince himself. He needn’t have bothered, the situation was changing even while he spoke.

“More coming out Sirs.” On the television screen, a second square was forming beside the first, the stream of black figures emerging from the Hellmouth coalescing into a second square to the right of the first. Even as it was completed, a third square started forming to the left of the first. Still the figures poured out, new squares forming until the line had seven in all.

“Assuming the squares are all identical, there’s almost 47,000 of them down there. The baldricks aren’t playing games are they?”

Wilkens shook his head. Even as he did so, the line of seven squares started to move forward and another wave of black figures poured out, forming into squares exactly as their predecessors had done. The command center was utterly silent as the imagery poured in from the cameras on the Global Hawk. The second line of squares was finished, moved forward and a third row started, then a fourth. By the time the figures ceased to pour out, there were eight rows in all, 56 of the black squares spread out on the Iraqi sand.

“Rows are divisions, the whole thing’s a Corps.” More nods of agreement, faced with the huge numbers assembling on the screens in front of them, naming units seemed trivial yet it was utterly important if the enemy was to be understood. “Span of command is very large. Seems to run in nines.”

“Probably personal command, we’re going to be looking at a slowly-reacting army here. It’s very low-geared. Big but ponderous. Suits us just fine.” More nods around the room. The United States Army was built to fight large, ponderous opponents. It was beginning to look like it had finally found one.

“What are those?” More figures were pouring out, larger ones. The UAV operator played with his camera controls, zooming in on the new arrivals. They were baldricks still but sitting on a beast, one that looked vaguely like a rhinoceros with a great horn on its nose, but with a scorpion’s tail arched high over its back and claws like a lobster.

“I’d guess those are the cavalry. We don’t know how fast those things can move, mark them down as priority targets.”

“More coming.” The figures pouring out of the Hellmouth were flying, winged creatures, like the harpies show down by the squids a couple of weeks earlier but smaller. They landed and formed a last square. Seconds then minutes crept by but no more baldricks joined the awesome parade in front of the Hellmouth. The Global Hawk wasn’t equipped to pick up sound but nobody watching was in any doubt that the desert was alive with the sounds of drumming and the hammering of feet.

Hellmouth, East of Ar Rutbah, Iraqi Desert  Unnoticed in the noise and confusion, a small winged structure danced in the dust and glare. It was an odd little thing by anybody’s standards, a lumpy fuselage with two longish wings, a tripod tail unit and a propeller was at the rear. Its name was an MQ-1B Predator.

The Predator didn’t have markings which was hardly surprising, it’s operators, far back at Task Force Iron’s command center weren’t from the U.S. armed forces, they were Central Intelligence Agency. For almost five years, the CIA had been operating a clandestine force of Predators, using them for covert assassinations of terrorist leaders and others considered undesirable. That role had abruptly ended with The Message, those who had taken the “submission to the will” bit seriously had died, the rest had thrown their lot in with the rest of humanity. Now, the U.S. Army and CIA had the strange but not unfamiliar experience of working with people who only a few days before had been their blood-enemies.

The change had meant the Predators had a new job, one which was of absolutely vital importance. It was essential to find out if human weapons, human technology could be sent into Hell and return. More importantly, were those weapons as destructive there as they were proving on Earth. If the answer was yes, then humanity had a means of striking back at its foe, if not, then they would forever be condemned to an ultimately futile defense. The Predators were the vanguard of this exploration, the information they gained within the next few minutes would mark the start of the investigation. It was, quite literally, reconnaissance by fire. It’s orders received, the MQ-1B obediently turned around and headed for the shadowy ellipse that marked the Hellmouth.

Headquarters, 1st Armored Division, Task Force Iron, Multi-National Force Iraq

Back in the command center, the CIA operative held his breath as the little drone approached the disk and became swallowed in it. Then, the whole section erupted into wild cheers for on the monitor screen, images had emerged. Pictures of a vast plain, bare rock under a swirling red-orange sky, dust clouds sweeping backwards and forwards over the desolate scene. The image brightened and sharpened as the computer-controlled adaptive optics compensated for the wildly unfamiliar light levels and spectra but the images were there.

The operator manipulated his controls, getting the vision head on the electro-optical pod to pivot around. The pictures swirled, grotesque and unfamiliar but still vaguely recognizable. The imagery was coming back, that had enormous consequences.

“Tell Washington, and everybody else, Phase One is complete. We got the bird in and we’re getting data out. There is something the other side of that gate and we can get at it.” The agent’s voice broke into a chuckle. “No huge letters of fire yet, now we’ll try and change all that.”

He played with the optical head again, looking for something important. He found it, at least it seemed important. Some sort of review stand at a far part of the field. The Predator was closing in on it, the trouble seemed to be that it was hard to judge ranges in the red-clouded murk. A quick flash with the laser rangefinder built into the Predator told him what he needed to know. The target was four thousand yards away, easily within range of the two Hellfire missiles hanging under the Predator’s wings. He locked their homing heads onto the stand and fired them both.

Martial Field of Dysprosium, Hell.

The parade was over, the Army of Abigor had departed into the lower dimension, and the guests who had watched it leave were making their way off the stand. It had been quite an unusual sight, never before had such a force been sent to a lower dimension to enforce the will of those above it. Defiance was unprecedented, such a display had never been required. Now, with the mighty force appearing before them, they would be regretting their failure to submit. The demons who had watched the army leave never saw the two missiles streaking through the red murk towards them, or, if they did, they never realized the significance of what they were seeing.

The explosions destroyed the stand totally, sending fragments of wood and stone flying through the air, ripping into the hides of all around them. Blast seared their skin, flaying flesh from bones, shattering limbs, tearing at bodies. What had just a demonic second before been a decorated review stand was now a pile of shattered wreckage, splattered with the green, yellow, black, red and white body fluids of those who had been standing on it. Those outside the blast area looked on appalled at the catastrophe that had suddenly enveloped the senior guests. The more astute of them started running towards the disaster, hoping to gain status and rewards by being the first to aid the stricken. Above the chaos, still unnoticed by those below, the Predator turned around and flew back towards the Hellmouth.

Headquarters, 1st Armored Division, Task Force Iron, Multi-National Force Iraq

“Phase Two complete! Two solid hits, it’s chaos down there. Wherever it is, whatever it is, our weapons work there. Look at that people, boy have we just kicked an anthill over.” The CIA Agent’s voice was triumphant, the camera on the Predator was showing a boiling mass of confusion where the target had been. He had no idea of who or what he had just killed, if indeed he had killed them, but there was no doubt of the destruction. The reviewing stand had gone, its position marked by a pyre of smoke and flame. There was just one thing to check and that was coming up soon. The Predator approached the Hellmouth and flew through it. It took a second for the optics to readjust but when they did they showed the blue sky and yellow sand of the Iraqi Desert.

“Phase Three complete. UAV recovered.”

“Confirmed, we have a radar paint.” The transponder in the Predator marked the position of the drone as it set off on its long flight back to base. It had done its job better that anybody could have hoped and certainly far better than its manufacturers could have ever contemplated.

The Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.

“My fellow Americans.” President Bush paused, then shook his head. “No, my fellow humans, for today we all stand shoulder to shoulder against a threat that promised to engulf us all. Truly, in these desperate days, if we do not hang together, we will all hang separately. Today, there are no Americans, no Russians, no Japanese or Chinese or Australians. We are all humans together and it is to each other that we must look for our survival. We cannot hope for aid or help from others, we stand alone with only each other and the tools of our joint ingenuity to protect us.

“We have learned, beyond any shadow of a doubt that Hell and Heaven both exist but that the doors to the latter are closed to us. If we lose the fight in which we are now engaged, the entire human race faces only a screaming eternity. Hell and Heaven both have, by both word and deed, declared their undying hatred of Mankind united, and as such we return it tenfold. As of this day, we find ourselves embroiled in a war, the war, Armageddon as it was never once dreamed in the worst nightmares of our forefathers, a war not between Heaven and Hell for our own salvation, but between Heaven and Hell and Humanity, a war we must win completely and utterly if we desire the slightest chance of sparing untold generations of future men and women a literal eternity of suffering. We claimed to be fighting in a 'War on Terror', now we find ourselves allied with our former enemies, they are our brothers in a wider struggle, on all of those who would condemn humanity to an eternity of suffering.

“Once, mere weeks ago, I would have prayed to God to have mercy on our souls. Now I, and all others on this Earth, know better; the being many of us once worshipped as a God has stated in no uncertain terms that there will be no mercy on our souls. To that 'God,' to Lucifer, to all the angels and devils massing to rend and destroy the hope of Humanity's future, I respond: You who would show us no mercy shall receive none in return, for the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve do not suffer betrayal!

“Today we struck our first blow at our oppressors. Acting on national intelligence information received from reliable informants, a Predator aircraft operated by an intelligence organization struck at a major enemy leadership figure. It is believed the attack was successful and the target was killed. This is the first in a series of targeted assassinations aimed specifically at the enemy leadership. There will be more. They will not know where the blows will come from or when they will strike but there will be more.

“In the war we are about to fight, we will take casualties, probably more than at any time in our history. But in this war, our fight does not end with death. I charge those who fall to spread the word in hell. Humanity is coming. We will not stop, we will not cease, we will not fail. To all those in hell we say, hold fast, we are coming. No matter what it costs, no matter what the sacrifices we must make, no matter how long it takes, no matter who we trample on the way, we are coming for you. You will be freed, your souls will be liberated from torment. You will be saved, not by prayer or submission to the will of some self-proclaimed deity but by the force of our arms. No human will be left behind. I will say that again so there is no misunderstanding. Myths speak or rapture in which many will be ‘left behind’. This may be their way but it is not ours. We serve notice. No human will be left in the clutches of those who would hold us in bondage for all eternity. On that promise may our enemies rest in an uneasy and frightened sleep.

Thank you, and good night.”

Thanks to White Haven for valuable inspiration and much of the content of The Speech

Chapter Six

Throne Room, Infernal Palace of Dis, Hell.

“And exactly how did they spontaneously explode?” Satan’s voice had a silky, oily quality to it that was far more unnerving than any of his berserk rages.

“We don’t know Sire. We found bits of metal in the wreckage so we think it was one of the human machines but we don’t understand it.”

“A machine? A human machine you say? They invaded my territory and killed four of my subjects with a machine?” The silky, oily quality was fading, replaced by the hysterical screams of rage. The audience found that immensely reassuring, it was business as usual. The unnatural calm had been horrifying from its unprecedented nature. A raving, screaming temper tantrum was much more familiar. “And nobody saw it?”

“None Sire. Although we do have a message that was transmitted by one of their warlords. It refers to a Predator aircraft.”

“And just what is a Predator?” Satan was struggling to keep his temper under control.

“A hunting bird.” The voice came from a tiny minor demon on the floor. Satan glanced sideways and his glance mashed the speaker into a purple pulp that drained away through the stone floor.

“Does anybody else want to state the obvious?” There was a sudden shuffling of cloven feet and demons glancing sideways at each other. The more astute of them were already trying to work out the best place to take cover when their infernal overlord decided it would be necessary to stage a massacre.

“There is another problem with that message.” Asmodeus spoke carefully. “The warlord spoke of ‘major enemy leadership figure’, we assume that means an important person here. Yet there was nobody on that stand of any importance, a few relatives of Abigor, that is all. None in the leadership and none of any importance. We do not understand this.”

“Perhaps I can explain.” Beelzebub was also speaking carefully. “The warlord also spoke of ‘information received from reliable informants’. There can be only one explanation for that comment. There are those of your Infernal Majesty’s subjects who are in contact with the humans and are passing information to them.”

A horrified gasp went around the hall. The whole concept was a nightmare to contemplate yet was also eerily plausible. Who here had not sold information on an ally to an enemy in order to bring about a tactical advantage?

“But Sire.” Asmodeus was appalled, his voice terrified at even speaking of this idea. “Nobody important was killed.”

“Nobody important perhaps.” Beelzebub spoke almost as smoothly and calmly as Satan had done. “Not in our terms perhaps. But the traitor – or traitors – who sold the information to the humans may have been using them to settle a private score of his or her own. Who knows where treason might end?”

Even Satan was silenced by that thought. The hall was still, silent as the occupants absorbed the implications of what Beelzebub had said. Then, the glances that they were exchanging underwent a slow change from apprehension at what might Satan might do next to suspicion at what their neighbors might be saying to these upstart humans. No matter how intense those suspicious glances became, they couldn’t match the ones Satan was casting at them.

Room 352A, Arkham Asylum, New York City, NY

The voices had been haunting Julie since her sophomore year of high school. Every time she'd tried to tell them to go away, they simply laughed at her. And when she denied they were real, they'd whisper to her, caressing her mind like an unwanted lover, telling her secrets – what was happening far away, what others were thinking about her, telling her things that were never wrong.

And they were always right, always there, always just out of her senses, dripping across her mind like black grease. Even after she'd tried to kill herself – it hadn't worked; they'd told her that it was pointless, that someone was at the door just as she'd watched the blood stream from her wrists with morbid fascination – even after the suicide attempt, when her family had tearfully waved her goodbye, and she'd gone to Arkham for treatment (which hadn't worked) and incarceration, they were telling her things, what was happening outside. The conquest was on, they'd said. The infernal deal that had haunted her nightmares since she was five, that had haunted every waking moment since the voices had first come, was sealed and complete. Heaven's gates were closed and locked, the whole of humanity damned without hope of rescue or reprieve.

Her cell was locked, as always. The white walls were padded, and she was sitting on her cot in the corner murmuring to herself when one of the voices – Domiklespharatu, it called itself – whispered, "Look to the door!" She did; the lock on the door clicked and lifted. "They're coming to get you ... coming to take you away ... to experiment on you ... to rape and torture and mutilate and humiliate you ... ."

The voices were never wrong. She hurled herself back into the corner, away from the strange people filing into the room. Then there was Dr. Becky, her presence a welcome familiarity that was dispelled by the presence others, more people in uniforms and more in white lab coats. Domiklespharatu laughed. “Look at you, pitiful little girl.” The floor reared up, and she stumbled backward into the walls.

Dr Becky Skillman had worked at Arkham for fifteen years, and in all that time she’d never been visited by the government. Two men in suits, with dark sunglasses, guns, and no sense of humor had knocked on her office door, shown her a pair of bright and very impressive badges, and asked her for a list of the patients at Arkham for whom treatment had done absolutely no good. Especially the ones who heard voices.

She wasn’t one to deny the government a request, especially not in this day and age, with the Message, a quarter of the Arkham staff were gone, and the strange reports filing through the news were unsettling. There was fighting, of some sort, the sort that reminded her of the nightmarish hallucinations of her patients. The men had been from the Secret Service and they’d thanked her cordially, gone, and then a half hour later were back with an entire platoon of men in fatigues with rifles, asking to be taken to Room 352A on the third floor.

Julie Adams had been at the top of the list, and they’d decided to take her first. Before Skillman had a chance to ask any questions, they’d waved a piece of paper – subpoena or something like that – in her face, and were demanding the case files.

Adams was an untreatable schizophrenic, and had only gotten worse through the eight years she’d been in Arkham. No treatment had worked – and they’d tried them all, from the newest drugs to some of the oldest tricks in the books, the sort that the staff all mutually agreed to keep quiet because people who didn’t work at psychiatric hospitals just didn’t understand. And now the government wanted to take her away?

Skillman shrugged. Eh – not her place to question or worry. As they filed into the pure white cell, Adams was scrabbling against the back wall, face contorted in fear, the greasy tangles of her long, black hair swabbing the wall. “No! NO! I’m not gonna let you take me!”

The soldiers impassively moved forward, seemingly deaf to the woman’s harsh, pathetic screams. Reaching down, two deftly warded off her slaps and kicks and lifted her by the shoulders so that she hung between them like a rag doll. Brushing past Skillman, they filed back out of the room, Adams’ screams echoing down the corridor. The two men in black thanked her, and walked out, leaving her standing in the silent room, listening to the sick woman being dragged down the hall.

Temporary Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

James Randi sighed and rolled his eyes. While the search teams were scouring the nation’s medical facilities for the apparently insane who might not be insane after all, the fakes and charlatans had continued to pour into the Institute in unimaginable numbers. The publicity combined with the persuasive talents of the US Secret Service and the FBI had achieved results that even his million dollar prize had failed to attain. Privately, Randi kicked himself, he should have involved the Secret Service earlier. They’d even brought John Edwards and Sylvia Browne in, over those two unworthies angered protests. It had taken only a few minutes testing to discredit that pair of mountebanks, after which they’d been unceremoniously ejected from the building. As Agent Stella Carter had remarked ‘Hey, guess what. Sylvia didn’t bounce.’

Up to now, that had been par for the course. There were still the palm-readers and card-players who waited in the antechamber for their turn, all dressed up in beads and eye liner and all sorts of clothes that looked mysterious in smoky, underlit rooms but just appeared absurd under fluorescent business lights. They were the routine dross that had to be inspected, just in case. Even so, there was hope for the plea for any real psychics or necromancers to come forward had brought in five or six possible hits – all quiet, shy people who worked ordinary jobs and lived ordinary lives.

He was just about to call the next person in when his cell phone rang. He checked it; it was a 555-1000 number. He answered. “Randi here.” After a moment, he nodded and said, “Will do. Please bring her in.”

At last. Randi sighed the words to himself. Ever since his discussion with that charming Thai General, he’d been waiting for the first of the medical subjects to arrive. Then, he squared his shoulders and opened the door to the antechamber and just stood there, looking out toward the outside door. It opened, and eight national guardsmen marched in, wearing full combat fatigues. Two of them were carrying what appeared to be a heavily sedated woman, her glassy eyes half-open and a bit of drool trailing down her cheeks. Behind them were three men in lab coats, looking like stereotypical doctors. As they reached where Randi stood, one of the men in lab coats strode forward past the soldiers and offered his hand. Randi shook it, and the man said, “James Randi? Dr Ed Bullmore, psychiatry and neurology at Cambridge. Pleased to meet you.”

“The pleasure’s mine, Dr Bullmore. What do we have here?”

Bullmore spoke with a pleasant British accent. “Untreatable schizophrenia patient from New York. Name: Julie Adams. Onset at age sixteen. Reported ability to read minds.” He looked meaningfully at one of the soldiers, who spoke up, sounding shaken. “On the way over here, she told me about my daughter who drowned. No way she could have known about that – she was locked up for years before Kelsie was born.”

Randi thought for a moment. “Bring her in.” Briskly, the white-bearded man walked back through the door. He glanced over at his secretary. “Jane, please request brain-imaging at the nearest hospital ASAP. Play the DoD card if you have to.”

Neuroimaging Center, Arlington Hospital, Arlington, VA

Julie Adams woke up in a little tube of metal, found herself immobilized, and felt a little whisper in the edge of her mind. “See? I told you soooo!” Then she slipped back into unconsciousness.

When she next woke up, she was sitting in a chair, leather straps holding her wrists to the chair arms. Sitting across the table from her was a grandfatherly-looking man, bald but with an enormous white beard. A voice danced across her vision, and she said, “James Randi?” The man raised one eyebrow, dropped it, and continued to regard her over clasped hands. She struggled with the bonds.

“They told me you’d do this to me! They told me!”

He spoke, his voice, calming and authoritative. “Who told you?”

She’d never been asked that before. Before, they’d always assumed the voices weren’t real, that she was crazy. She wasn’t crazy; she just heard voices. “They did.” A warning buzzed across the back of her mind – “Don’t trust him. He’s going to rape you.”

The man smiled. “Have they ever told you who they are?”

These questions were completely foreign to her. “Uh … I … no … .”

His eyes twinkled through his spectacles. “Well, Julie, we want to help you. We know they’ve hurt you. We’re going to hurt them back, and we’d like your help.”

It was tempting. She’d always thought of them as enemies, even when they were telling her the truth. But they’d been enemies of her enemies, and so they had been her friends. But now, this man was offering his help to her, to her … “DON’T LISTEN TO THEM!” screamed a voice, and spots erupted behind her eyes as Randi morphed, grew – black scales erupted on his face, horns growing from his bald head, his glasses falling to the desk, shattering; furred bat wings unfurled, spread, brushed the walls and ceiling, looming over her. And now a smell like rotten eggs was strengthening; the room was darkening, and she could hear faint screams in the distance, like a chorus of damned souls.

She was dimly aware of her own screaming, of the stabs of pain spiking through her; the thing across the desk was prodding her with a pitchfork, leering at her. It stepped backward and lustily licked its lips, grabbing a giant organ from between its legs and –

The hellish scene shimmered and faded suddenly, and the previous scene returned with the bald, grandfatherly man looking concernedly down at her and two men with chiseled faces hovering right above her. One of the men said, “Hold still, sister. You’re almost safe.” There was a prick in her arm, and then she was happy, floating free down toward blessed oblivion.

Randi straightened up and looked over toward the door. The psychiatrists and a lab technician were filing through the door. “Did you guys get it?”

“Yes James, we did,” said Bullman. “Before we hashed the room with electronic white noise, the electronic surveillance system we had set up caught a faint signal. It was a miracle we picked it up at all, it was right on the edge of the spectrum covered by the ESM but it was there and we’ve recorded it. It has some strange properties, and we’re sending the records to the physicists next door. They’ll digitize it, feed it into our threat libraries and we’ll be able to monitor for it. Also, if we can feed the waveform into the computers controlling our own emitter systems, we should be able to transmit ourselves.

“Much more importantly, we’ve already figured out how to keep her, and others like her, safe and sound from any further interference.”

Randi cocked his head curiously. “And what’s that?”

“Well, James, the signal in question isn’t that much different from an electromagnetic pulse, you know that thing the scare stories have claimed would wipe out electronics worldwide. We’ve known how to defend against that for decades and the power levels are much lower here. So, building on that experience.” Bullman grinned and pulled a shiny contraption from his lab coat. “A hat made of aluminum foil.”

Recon Team Tango One-Five, Wadi Haran, Western Iraq.

“Control, we have baldricks, column advancing along the Pipeline Route. Estimated battalion force with company-level harpy cover.”

“Very good. Engage and harass.”

Lieutenant Jade “Broomstick” Kim acknowledged, the transferred her attention back to the mast-mounted sight on her AH-6J helicopter. A deft touch on the controls and the aircraft rose slightly so that the ball of the sight just peaked over the ridge. The picture hadn’t changed much, even though the column was mounted on the rhinolobsters, they were moving slowly. Well, slowly by United States Army standards, Broomstick guessed that by medieval standards they were fairly galloping along. That was excruciatingly slow when compared with the way the First Armored Division was moving up.

A long rectangle of rhinolobsters, each with its rider and a small group out in front. They’d have to be the command group. The primary subject of interest, the cream of the crop in this target-rich environment. Eliminate the command structure first, leave the combat elements floundering around without orders. It was a process the United States Army called ‘shaping the battlefield’. “Tango Leader to all Tango birds. Select Hellfire missiles, target the command group in front, ripple fire both missiles.”

Spaced out down the wadi, the three Little Birds gunner their engines slightly and lifted up still further. The column ahead was oblivious to their existence, even when the laser target designators locked into place. On her display, Broomstick could even see the designated targets starting to shift and scratch as the lasers irritated their skins. Then, a gentle squeeze on the firing button and the first of the Hellfires streaked off across the desert. Off to her left, a split second later, Tango-one-five-Bravo fired its first missile with Tango-one-five-Charlie following an instant after that. Broomstick had already selected her next target when she fired her second missile, as soon as she saw the explosion from the first hit she swung the laser to her selected victim and watched the Hellfire missile obediently switch targets. The explosions four thousand yards away seemed an almost continuous rolling thunder as the six missiles devastated the command group.

“All Tango-One-Five elements, jobs done, let’s get out of here.”

“We got a problem ell-tee.”

Broomstick looked across at the burning patch of desert where the baldrick command group had been. Above it the harpies were heading for the position of her three Little Birds, coming in very, very fast.

“Bug out, everybody bug out now. Max speed.” She rammed the throttles forward, swinging her helicopter into its high-speed position, trying to get away from the cloud of harpies that was closing on her.

“No good ell-tee. They’re faster than us.”

Broomstick didn’t acknowledge, she didn’t have to. The AH-6 could do about 180 miles per hour flat out and the harpies were closing the range. She pulled back and swung the nose round, flipping her armament selector switch to the pair of Stingers mounted on the side of her cockpit. The annunciator tone was mixed, even in the cold of a desert night, they were having difficulty locking on. It was no good, whatever lock they had would have to do. She fired into the mass of harpies, watching as one missile went through the formation without exploding, the other struck home and she saw a harpy briefly outlined in fire as the Stinger tore into it. There was another flare as well, but Broomstick had no time to congratulate herself or anybody else. She was turning away, diving, obeying the old rule, no matter how little height you have, trade height for speed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Tango-one-five-Charlie had left it too late. The Little Bird was engulfed in jets of fire from the harpies, its fuel tanks exploded and the flaming wreckage fell out of the sky to earth.

She was back in the wadi, heading away from the cloud of harpies, grimly aware they were closing in on her. “Control, engaged baldricks, command group badly hit. We are under attack by company-strength harpies, Charlie is already down. Two harpies down. Issue is in doubt. Tell others, don’t close in on harpies.”

Duty done, Broomstick spun her helicopter again and went straight at the formation of harpies pursuing her, her two miniguns blazing a long, long burst. It registered briefly that there were two piles of burning wreckage on the desert floor now and that she was alone. Bravo had gone. So had at least two more harpies, torn apart by the stream of bullets from her miniguns. Then, there was a clank and silence, she’d run out of ammunition. The harpies were on her, clinging to the airframe, tearing at it with their claws, kicking at the skin with their hooves. One was clinging to the cockpit canopy, smashing at it with its claws, trying to tear its way in. She could see the demented, screaming hate on its face, she could smell the stink of jet fuel as the harpies tore their way into the Little Bird’s structure. That was all she saw and smelt because that was when Tango-one-five-Alpha exploded.

My thanks to Surlethe for his work in writing the middle part of this section and his most appreciated inspiration and encouragement.

Chapter Seven

309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona

She was an old lady, put away in her retirement home like all too many aged family members who were just too much trouble to look after. Her age showed in so many ways, her wrinkled skin, shabby appearance, general neglect. Another few months, a year or so at most, and she would have been gone, forgotten. Only now times had changed and those who had written her off as a relic of the past now found they needed The Gray Lady again.

“What about this one?”

The AMRG clerk looked at the tail number and turned to the page in the ledger. “This one’s a good prospect Sir. She hasn’t been stripped or cannibalized yet and she was in good condition when she arrived. I’d mark this one down as a definite.”

“Do it, we’ll get a team down here to work on her. The draft notices are going out this morning.” For once in its life, the U.S. Government was beginning to move fast. The re-institution of the draft had been authorized late the previous night with the highest priority being to get the maintenance and technical support personnel who had left the services over the last few years back into uniform. In a strange way, it was almost like the job being done here, inspecting the veterans and getting them back into service. The B-52G in front of them looked like an early candidate for a return to the colors.

“How many does that make?” Colonel Degan was in charge of this particular effort, a few hundred yards away, another team was going through the short line of eleven B-1Bs parked in storage. That team wasn’t doing well at all, the Bones here were in a hell of a mess. It was very doubtful if any of them could be repaired. The B-52s, that was another matter. Still, there had been some pleasant surprises, tucked away in one corner of the airfield had been a B-52H along with four B-1Bs and one of the surviving B-1As, all in perfect condition. What the latter was doing there was something of a minor mystery but it had been rumored for years that more B-1As had been built than the official records showed.

“There are 43 B-52s in repairable status Sir. Of those, 20 require a medium level of remedial repairs, the remainder, well, they’re a real mess. Take months if not years to fix them up. Shortage of engines is the main problem, they’ve all been stripped of those. Mind you. We’re not short of spare parts.”

That was true enough, Degan thought. There were 45 more B-52s in the Boneyard but they’d been scrapped. The wreckage was still here though, the wings shorn from the fuselage, the tails chopped off. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of fixing the wrecks?”

“No Sir,” the technical officer was quite firm on that point. “The wing spar’s been chopped and the forge to make new ones was scrapped decades ago. Those birds are gone, at best they’re spare parts for the rest.” Degan grimaced. Those planes were badly needed. The technical officer saw the expression and sympathized. “Good news though Sir, the tactical boys have been through the line of F-111s, there’s 169 of them here and they reckon we can salvage enough to equip a group, fifty or sixty if we’re lucky. And the transport guys did even better, Lockheed-Martin are coming down to refurbish all twenty of the C-5s we have here.” In some cases that would mean almost a new aircraft, it was an old joke, ‘repairing” an aircraft meant lifting up its registration number and sliding a new aircraft underneath.

“Any word from the Rhino drivers?” There were literally hundreds of surplus F-4 Phantoms here and several teams were working their way through them, trying to find how many could be brought back into service. Not many, was one guess but times were desperate and at least F-4 components were still in production. That was the second batch of draft notices going out, by tomorrow a lot of airline pilots were going to be trying on their old Air Force and Navy uniforms again.

The technical officer shook his head. Those teams had a lot of work to do and it would be days before they finished. He scratched his head, the Arizona sun was beating down hard and the aluminum foil lining his baseball cap was getting uncomfortably hot. Still it was better than having some baldrick invading his mind and turning his thoughts to jelly. “OK Sir, I think we’re done with the bombers. You want to have a look at the KC-135s? See if any of those are fixable?”

“Lead on.” Degan looked back at the B-52 behind them. Already, people were starting to go over her in detail, listing all the fixes needed. There were 84 B-52s in USAF service and another 9 in the Air Force Reserve, if they could bring that up to 120 with the aircraft salvaged from here, it would be a decisive step forward.

Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.

“Did it pass Dick?”

“It did indeed. 99 in favor, one against, you can guess who that was. Effective as of 1800 Washington Time, the United States of America has formally declared war on Hell. Unconditional declaration, first time we’ve had one of those for decades. We’ve issued a conditional ultimatum to Heaven as well. Unless they open the gates and surrender those who closed them for trial within 72 hours, a state of war will exist there as well. Civilian mobilization bill is through, reserves mobilization bill is through, first issue of war bonds will be released tomorrow.

“Next stage is to mobilize industry, we’re making plans for that now. We’ve got the leaders of our major defense contractors up all night, working out what they need and how we can ramp up production. At the moment we’re concentrating on getting ammunition supplies increased, we’re expecting to use up our stocks of Hellfire and AMRAAM missiles pretty fast at the rate we’re going, as for aircraft we’re hoping Davis-Monthan will bridge the gap until upped production rates start to fill the gap. Ships can wait for the time being, tanks and armored vehicles will be more important, at least in the short term.

“Mister President?” Condoleezza Rice was punctilious about using the President’s formal title when other people were around.

“Condi.” President Bush turned around, taking quick note of the Secretary Rice’s headgear. “Nice hat.”

Rice smiled in appreciation, she’d been on the telephone to Donna Karan to have her aluminum foil hat designed professionally. After she’d been appointed Secretary of State, one of the satirists had said that her appointment marked the first time in its history when the United States had a Secretary of State who looked good naked. She thought that was a little over the top but at least she’d always taken pride in her wardrobe.

“Good news Sir. The Indian Ambassador has just told us that the Indian Air Force are sending a combat wing to Iraq. A squadron of Su-30MKIs interceptors, two of Jaguar ground attack aircraft. Even better, the new Iranian Government is opening up its airfields to us. That gives us some badly needed depth. General Petraeus was worried about how close our airfields in Iraq are to the invasion. Word from the Israelis, they’re moving up from the east now, their F-15s will be available to give top cover when we need them.”

The President nodded, one of the problems in this situation was that the bulk of America’s F-15 fleet was grounded with structural problems. That left the country short of heavy fighters, privately he wondered if that was a coincidence or not. Just how long had the enemy been planning this assault?

Al Habariyah, Iraq

The clear yellow light was painful to the eyes of beings accustomed to the comforting red skies and dust clouds of Hell. Not that there wasn’t enough dust here but it was the choking clouds of silica, not the soft, warm touch of volcanic pumice. The accursed sand was getting into Hornaklishdarmar’s hooves, rubbing even his hardened skin raw. Glancing across at the eight demons in his contubernium, he could see they were having the same trouble. When they’d first entered this world, they’d held straight ranks, lined up in perfect parade order but that had been long abandoned. Now, the legion was straggling, spread out, its ranks tangled as the fitter or less feeling had moved ahead and the lesser spirits had lagged behind.

It wasn’t as if this area was actually worth the discomfort. On the long march from the portal, the legion had seen nothing of any value, just the empty desert and the accursed sand. At least now they were approaching some sort of civilization, a collection of huts, so poor that they didn’t even have doors, just some sort of blanket hung in the entrance. There were even one of the human’s weird four-wheeled chariots, a white thing with a boxy body at the side of the road, its front wheels crushed and broken. Obviously abandoned as the humans had run from the approaching legion.

“Lords! Have mercy on me! I beg you, forgive me for not submitting to you sooner. I was mislead by traitors who denied you. Forgive me and accept my obeisance.”

Up in front of him, Hornaklishdarmar could see the human run out from one of the buildings, an older human, portly and dressed in a flowing robe. He dropped to his knees in front of the legion. Hornaklishdarmar saw the commander of his Octurnia go towards the man, raising his trident to strike him down.

Hornaklishdarmar was on his knees, his head ringing from the terrible blast that had suddenly engulfed the human and the demon poised to kill him. The human had gone, only his head was left, rolling in the dust leaving a wet trail behind on the sand. The commander of the Octurnia had gone completely, just yellow smears on the ground behind where he had been. Several of his staff were down, screaming, ripped open by the blast. Hornaklishdarmar saw the other demons of the legion edging away from the scene and the hut from where the man had come. Suddenly, the sight alarmed the demon, there was something wrong.

Now, Hornaklishdarmar was on his back, and he could see the yellow fluids leaking from his body. His instinct had saved his life but he was still hurt. Where the truck had been was now just a crater, black, smoking, surrounded by the dead bodies of demons, tens of them, some smashed and pulped beyond recognition, others still demonic in form but dreadfully still. Yet others were worse that dreadful, writhing and threshing with the wounds ripped in them by shrapnel. He pressed his arm into the vicious rip in his skin, feeling the comfort the pressure caused, and looked at the scene again. It had been planned, he could see it now. The first man, the fat one, had caused the demons to crowd back against the truck, packed them around that second, huge explosion. It had all been planned, very skillfully planned.

Operation Iraqi Freedom Headquarters, Baghdad, Iraq

General Petraeus stood before the transmission screen and waited for it to light up with the link from Washington. His briefing would be going direct to the command center in the White House and to as many of the growing list of allies as could be provided with the equipment.

“Mister President Sir. My situation report.

“We have identified the enemy force as eight infantry divisions, three cavalry brigades and one airborne brigade. The enemy main body consists of four infantry divisions and is advancing towards Khan Al Baghdadi. It is preceded by one of the cavalry brigades supported by an airborne battalion. The cavalry brigade itself is split into three columns each containing three cavalry battalions supported by three airborne companies. At the moment, we are falling back in front of that force, we have no wish to engage it at this time.

“To the north is a flanking force consisting of two infantry divisions. They’re moving close to the Syrian border, again with a cavalry brigade in front supported by harpies. We’ve been harassing that screening force overnight, I’m sorry to report that the 160th Aviation Brigade took significant losses, at least a dozen AH-6 and MH-6 helicopters were lost to Harpies. We’ve learned from that, the Harpies make helicopter operations too dangerous, we’re going to have to eliminate them before we can send helicopter-based forces in again. However, their sacrifice was not in vain, we’re driving their reconnaissance elements in on the main body and we’ve severely hit their command and control structure. We believe we’ve eliminated a significant proportion of their battalion and brigade level command staff. A brigade of the First Armored Division is moving into position around Al Qaim. It’s a perfect kill zone, with their recon element driven in, their heading into it blind.

“To the south is another screening force, identical to the one in the North. We haven’t done much about that one yet but the British are moving up a mechanized battle group to handle it. We had word from al Qaeda a few minutes ago, they hit one of the infantry divisions with a combined suicide and truck bomb attack. They claim to have killed more than sixty baldricks including a part of the brigade command group. We can’t confirm the numbers but a Global Hawk has confirmed the attack.” Petraeus paused for a second. “Sir, I still can’t get used to feeling pleased about an IED incident.

“Overall, we’re about to start the main phase of our defense. We’re going to kick the northern and southern screening forces in and push them back on the main body. That will put them in a kill zone west of the Hawr Al Habbaniyah. As we compress them in that area, we’ll be hitting them with artillery and all the tactical air we can bring up. If we stop them, we can drive them back across the desert, all the way back to the Hellmouth. If we can’t stop them there, the only way forward is through two narrow necks of land, north of the Bahr al Milh and south of the Buhayrat Ath Tharfar. Those are also perfect killing grounds and give us a another chance at them.”

“They won’t get through?” President Bush sounded concerned. The heavily populated Tigris-Euphrates valley was in the direct path of the advancing baldricks.

“No Sir, we’ll stop them dead. After a while, all their added numbers means they’ll be piling more bodies into the kill zone. The days when an army could be swamped by sheer weight of numbers are gone. The way we’re mauling their command structure, once they’ve started advancing into the killing ground, they won’t be able to stop, the sheer pressure of the forces at the rear will drive them forward.”

“General.” Rice smiled an apology for the interruption. “Be advised, we’ve just heard from the Russians. They’re sending down forces from their southern military region. Armored divisions, battle experienced from Chechnya, they’re coming through Iran. They’ll be with you in a few days, you can count on them for reinforcements.”

“Thank you ma’am, that’s good to know. If you’re speaking to the Russians, could you ask them for their Smerch rocket launchers. We need all the salvo rocket artillery we can get here. Also, their Luna short-range ballistic missiles, we’ve got ATACMS here but we need something with a bit more reach.”

“I’ll do that. The Iranians are promising to send help as well. Any requests?”

“Fuel. That more than anything. We’re going to need all the fuel we can get. We can’t cope with these baldricks in a slugging match, we have to maneuver them to death. One thing my people here are asking. Why here? For the sort of enemy we’re fighting, this is perfect ground for us. No restrictions on maneuver, no civilians to get in the way, we can use every scrap of firepower we’ve got. So why here? Why not straight into New York or Washington? Come to think of it, why aren’t we seeing more hellmouths opening up anyway?”

Vice President Cheney leaned forward. “We have a theory on that, we think that for some reason the Middle East is where is easiest for them to open the portal, it may be the only place they can open a portal we don’t know. But we think that its no coincidence that all the reports of monsters, hells, battles between good and evil etc start in this area. We don’t know but that’s our guess. Anyway, don’t knock it, its better we fight them out there than back here.”

Petraeus laughed. “I’ve heard that before. Another question, a policy one. We’re likely to start taking prisoners soon. What do you want us to do with them.”

Rice’s voice was decisive. “Ship them to Gitmo.”

“I thought we were closing that place?”

“We were, but plans changed. Its under international management now. It’s being organized by the Italians, Bangladesh is providing the funding, the Germans the guards, the Russians the political speeches, the Belgians the entertainment, the Japanese the music and the British are providing the food.”

Petraeus visibly winced at the thought. “Ma’am, that’s inhuman. Please, whoever thought that arrangement up, buy them a beer for me.”

“Why, thank you General. I’ll enjoy it.

Chapter Eight

Muncie, Indiana, United States of America

Muncie was a small town, typical of the American rust belt. Highly religious, conservative, with 65,000 people before the Message and 50,000 after, the city had been ailing even before a quarter of the population had laid down and died. The manufacturing industry had been slowly abandoning the city for decades, leaving it with rusting, overgrown factories, a 23 percent poverty rate, and a hospital and university as the largest employers. The Message had hit the town hard, too as it had most of the rural, conservative American Midwest, leaving the local economy in shambles and even further down the toilet.

Sharon McShurley, newly elected mayor, was sitting at her desk in the Town Hall wondering for the millionth time that day what she was going to do when the telephone rang. She picked it up. “Hello, the Mayor speaking.”

“Mrs. McShurley?” The voice was male and unfamiliar.

“Yes? May I ask who this is?”

“This is Nathan Feltman, Secretary of Commerce for Indiana.”

“Ah, Mr. Feltman. How can I help you?”

“Mrs. McShurley, I was contacted not five hours ago by Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. You know of The Message?”

“Of course.”

“And of the developments in Iraq?”

“Of course. It's been all over the news.” Truth was, she'd been doing little more than watch the news since The Message. There had seemed so little she could do even to regain control over her small town.

“Secretary Gutierrez has informed me that the United States is immediately shifting to a war economy. I don't know how things will work on the military side, but on the economic side, we're going to be ramping up production as fast as possible. I've already spoken with the mayors of Indianapolis, Gary-Hammond, Fort Wayne, Evansville, and Anderson. Do you have a list of production overcapacity and unused assets in Muncie?”

“Yes, we do.” Unemployment was just the single most pressing problem in the city, and had been for thirty years.

“We need to compare our list with yours, and then we'll send the updated version to the US Department of Commerce. They'll be asking corporations to buy them up and get working on military equipment. Given Indiana's central location, rail accessibility, and manufacturing history, we'll be up near the top.”

Feltmann gave McShurley the fax number for the Indiana Department of Commerce, and within twenty minutes, the substantial list of old factories, closed-up warehouses, abandoned rail yards, and defunct properties was on its way to Indianapolis. A half hour and two double-checks later, it was again winging its way through cyberspace to Washington, D.C., where an undersecretary of commerce opened it and copy-pasted its contents into a secure website, open only to the procurement officers of the vast national and international corporations which supplied the US military with its equipment.

The next day, McShurley was in her office when the phone rang again. “Hello?”

“Mayor Sharon McShurley?” Another unfamiliar voice.

“Speaking.”

“This is John Walker, with Borg Warner Automotive. In light of the recent developments, we've decided not to close down the plant in Muncie. Instead, we're retooling it to provide transmissions for tanks.”

“Well, that's certainly happy news. Thank you.”

The man hung up, McShurley got back to her paperwork, and within a half hour the phone rang again. “Hello?”

“Mayor Sharon McShurley of Muncie?”

“Speaking.”

“I'm James Torida of General Dynamics Land Systems. We have acquired an older factory in Muncie to build M1A2 parts, and we would like the cooperation of the local government in finding employees and in renovating and retooling the plant as quickly as possible.”

“We'd love to help in any way we can.”

They discussed the details of the deal for fifteen minutes, then hung up. McShurley heaved a sigh – two in one day! Wow!

The phone rang again fifteen minutes later. It was General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, wanting again cooperation, tax breaks, etc., to get another old plant up and running, this time to manufacture AIM-120C missile casings. McShurley was more than willing to cooperate.

Before business hours ended, three more corporations had called. One wanted to acquire land to build a fourth railroad track south through the city; apparently, it was working on a line south from Chicago to Cincinnati and the Ohio River to supply raw materials from the mines in Minnesota and Ontario down to barges on the Ohio. The second had bought two abandoned warehouses on the south side of Muncie and wanted to open up the old trackyard to the warehouses to help supply the rejuvenated factories. The third was applying for a construction permit for the properties northwest of town that had so recently been slated for urban sprawl.

804 South Tillotson Ave., Muncie, Indiana, USA

Jim Schenkel had been a tool machinist for forty years before being laid off from his long-time job in 2003. He'd elected to retire instead of pursuing another job, and for the past five years he'd followed the same schedule: up at six, drink his coffee, read the morning paper over toast, an egg, and a glass of orange juice, tend his gardens until lunch, eat a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, monitor his investments and piddle around in his workshop until dinner, eat a bowl of soup, then watch the news until 10.

It was 1:30 AM when the phone rang. Groggily, he rolled over, and picked up the receiver on the sixth ring. “Hello?”

“Jim? Jack Roberts here.” Jack Roberts was his old supervisor at the ABB factory, before they'd all been fired and the place shut down.

“Jack? Why the hell are you calling me at –“ he squinted at the clock – “1:30 in the morning?”

“Jim, you're re-hired. We need you in tomorrow morning at 6:30.”

“What the hell's going on, Jack?”

“The factory's been started back up for the war effort. We need all the equipment repaired and retooled; the management wants the lines rolling in a week.”

“... the hell? I'm retired, goddamnit.”

“Like I said, we need you back. To be blunt, Jim, you don't have a choice. We'll send men out to get you if you can't make it on your own.”

“I don't give –“ he stared at the receiver, listening to the audible dial tone.

The next morning, at 6:30, he pulled into the parking lot of the ABB factory on the south side of town, and stared. It was packed with cars, and people were streaming toward the factory. The factory itself was brightly lit; the loading docks were packed with semis, and parts were already starting to form small piles waiting to be taken inside. He parked his car and joined the flow of humanity heading back to work.

That morning, The Star Press headlines read, “Look out, Baldricks! Here comes Muncie!” That day, the Mayor's office received eight more phone calls from corporations, and the first semis and trains started to roll into the city as construction equipment started to move away from the university – which had agreed to put its new dorm on hold for the time being to aid in the war effort – and toward the old, broken-down factories. Overnight, the city had been transformed.

And it wasn't alone. All across the eastern Midwest, the rust belt was being de-oxidized. Surveyors were entering old factories, cleaning companies entering and sweeping up dust, weeds being cleared and broken windows replaced. Lights that hadn't shone for decades were being turned on and replaced; cars were parking in lots that were more grass than gravel and hadn't been touched by tires for thirty years. More and more trains were rolling out of yards and thundering down the immense but ailing network of tracks connecting American cities to each other, and tractor-trailer semis were moving down the highways in huge fleets, carrying piping and wires and tools and other implements of the new war economy.

If Satan could have looked up from Hell and seen this, if he had wanted to learn about his enemies, if he had been capable of comprehending the vast network of the US economy and felt the rage at betrayal coursing through the collective veins of that nation, he might have felt that he was seeing the first traces of life in the resurrection of a giant long dead. But in the next dimension, sitting on his throne, lording over his sulfurous domain, and trying to figure out how fifteen of the senior generals in Abigor's army had spontaneously exploded, these thoughts never even occurred to him. Ignorance is bliss, until the first bombs start dropping.

Moscow, Russia

And these changes were hardly unique to the US. In Russia, Vladimir Putin had immediately accelerated the redevelopment of the military; old factories closed during the economic woes of the 1990s were being reopened, old mines and oil wells were being rechecked for viability. The storage depots and military installations were being searched for equipment, tanks, armored carriers, artillery that had been sitting in storage for a decade or more was being refurbished. New tracks were being laid, and the first of tens of thousands of new T-90S tanks were rolling off the final assembly lines even as he walked toward this meeting, flanked by security forces.

Putin entered the church, and crossed himself before the altar before he turned to the men gathered there, about ten in all: the heads of the Russian mob. He spoke first, taking charge, as always. “Gentlemen. You are not stupid; you know why I've gathered you here today.”

They all nodded with varying degrees of alacrity. Putin continued. “Now, the human species faces a threat greater than anything it has ever faced in its past. We – I and all of you – face not just extinction, but eternal damnation. This is now our reality.” He paused to evaluate what he saw in their faces. Blank, hard, determined – they share the vision, he reminded himself, just like every live human now. “Therefore, in return for amnesty from prosecution for any crimes which may have been committed prior to the Message, I would like to request that all of you cease from any illegal activities in which you may now be engaged.”

There was a small stir in the room. One, a fat man with an unlit cigar drooping from his lips, spoke. “Sir, with all due respect, why do you take us for criminals.”

As he spoke, Putin fixed him with a lidless stare until the other man dropped his gaze. “We are not stupid, you nor I. You know that I called you here today; you know that I am aware of who you all are in actuality and where you may be found. These things are not unknown to the government.”

“Then why are we guaranteed amnesty?”

“Because the fabric of society must not buckle during this war. All of you are hard men; we need such men to help prepare our society for the terrors of a war on the very forces of Hell. And we will need such men to administer the territories of Hell once it has been conquered. I am asking all of you to become respectable, but I am not asking you to lose profits.”

That seemed to seal it for most of them. As he walked away, Putin allowed himself a thin smile. Russia would show the world what she was capable of, and Russia would play her part in fighting eternal damnation now and forever.

The Fifth Circle of Hell

Lieutenant Jade Kim tried to move. She was stretched out on some form of frame, her wrists secured by an iron shackle with a heavy spike driven through the palm of her hands. The pain caused by her moving was severe but that was the least of her problems. She was submerged in a ghastly mass that seemed to be comprised of equal portions of mud, toxic waste and raw sewage, she was drowning in it, only able to breath by the occasional drafts of air as the movement of the foul swamp briefly exposed her face. She had no idea how long she’d been here but she did know she’d be in this place for eternity unless she did something about it. Or, worse, she might be hauled out for another dose of the treatment she’d got when she had arrived. Gang rape was so unimaginative but she knew that if she hadn’t already been dead, the internal damage the baldricks had done would have killed her.

Time for applying the lessons driven home at SERE school. The drill taught by the instructors, Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape. Lesson in part four was that all bonds would loosen in time if worked on. Of course she’d never been nailed down at SERE. The spike through her hand was the first problem, until that was out, she couldn’t do much else. She twisted her hand around, trying to get a grip on the spike, succeeded even though the effort sent waves of pain up her arm. Then she started to rock it from side to side. She had no idea how long she kept trying for, it seemed like forever, but suddenly she was aware the spike was moving slightly with her pressure. Encouraged, she kept up the effort, feeling the motion increasing as the spike worked free. Then, at last, it was loose and she worked it up through her fingers, exquisitely careful not to drop it. Who knew how deep this foul muck was and anything dropped would never be found again.

But, with the spike free, she had a lever at last. Still with painstaking care, she worked it around and pushed it under the iron bracket that held her wrist down. Once more she started to push, levering the bracket away from its frame. In time, it loosened and she took a deep breath. The way she had been taught, she crossed her thumb over the palm of her hand and wrenched. Her hand slid under the shackle, scraping skin off in the process but her arm was free. That made levering the rest of the ironwork off her much, much easier. Her arms and legs freed, she was able to move and she now had four spikes as weapons.

The sight once she got her head out of the muck was grim, some sort of river meandering through the gray, foul-smelling wasteland. Enough to fill anybody with despair which was, she supposed, quite intentional. There were rocky outcrops from the swamp, breaking the featureless plain but they didn’t matter too much right now. She’d survived and escaped, now it was time to evade. She stood, sinking in the foul mess up to her waist, and started to make her way to one of the rocks. It would be a start, but she’d only managed a few feet when she bumped into another cross under the mud. Instinctively, she reached down to clean the filth off the face of the victim.

“Hi ell-tee.” It was McInery, the pilot of Tango-one-five-Charlie.

“Hi Mac. Hold tight. I’ll help you get out of this.” With her spikes as levers, she was able to pry the shackles off quickly. “Salvage the spikes, we’re going to need them.”

She looked around quickly, it suddenly occurred to her that all the members of her unit would probably be close at hand. It didn’t take long to prove that correct and not much longer to get the six members of Recon Team Tango One-Five out.

“You’re out of uniform ell-tee.” McInery noted the fact casually. Kim looked at him and laughed, the first time that sound had been heard here for longer than anybody could remember.

“So are you sergeant.” She reached out and quickly drew three chevrons on his bare arm, using the mud that coated them all. “There, that’s better.”

“You OK ell-tee?” Robinson, her co-pilot on Tango-one-five-Alpha spoke with pity in his voice, another thing that had never been heard for longer than anybody knew.

Kim glanced down, the damage the demons had done to her was obvious, even though the wounds were healing unnaturally fast. “Won’t do much good for my future sex life.” Then her voice caught and shook as the memory quickly overwhelmed her. “It wasn’t the size, it was the barbs.” Then she shook herself. It was gone, past. Now was time for the group to evade.

Only, something else got in the way. Or, to be more precise, the supervisor of this area did. Jarakeflaxis was doing his routine rounds, amusing himself by disemboweling some of the humans choking in the swamp. In truth, he wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings, he’d been doing this round for millennia. He heard something, that wasn’t unusual, moans, screams wails, all were quite familiar to him. Only this sounded like a human woman yelling “take him down.” Then six figures smacked into him, knocking him over and swarming on top of him.

Jarakeflaxis couldn’t believe it, they were humans. What were free humans doing here? They were slamming metal spiked into him, keeping him pinned down as he floundered in the mud. One of the humans was the woman he and his friends had enjoyed not so long ago. She had a spike in her hand and he could see the gratification in her eyes as she started her swing. Then, he could see nothing because they’d driven their spikes into his eyes and he was blinded.

Kim looked down at the torn, shattered body. Rage, hatred and Krav Maga had killed Jarakeflaxis, killed him dead. So started the Resist bit of SERE. “Well done boys. Get him over to the rock there.”

They dragged the body over, then Kim drove spikes through its hands, crucifying it against the outcrop. Then, she dipped the hand in its green blood and painted four letters over the scene.

“PFLH?” McInery was confused.

“People’s Front for the Liberation of Hell.” Kim grinned savagely. “That’s us boys. Let’s tear this place apart.”

Wadi Al Khirr, Western Iraq  Memnon hissed softly and sniffed the remains of his companions. Groztith and Hezbitari had been flying next to him, soaring on the very ethers of this world savoring the panic and the fear. It was like the sweetest nectar to their refined senses. These monkeys were clever little things, they always had been but who would have imagined they would have come so far as to fly themselves in chariots of steel and plastic? Plastic. Memnon snorted in confusion. What was it? It was hard like metal yet he could divine nothing of the earth from it. No metal, no ore. It had no elemental song within itself, it did not sing, it did not even hum. It was a dead thing this plastic that only told him its name and nothing more.

Yet these chariots of steel and plastic had been so very deadly, yes. Unleashing arrows of fire and steel that tore through ethereal flesh with rude abruptness and unerring accuracy his wing mates were overcome. Groztith barely had time to chant its challenge to the once-born. The arrows tore him into this pool of viscera and smoking bone. Memnon groaned slightly as his ruined left shoulder began throbbing again, ephemeral essence gelling and congealing over the gaping wound where his massive leathery wings had been. The chariots had eyes and they were not fooled.

It had taken all of his will to overcome the pain and panic as another human arrow of steel and fire had pinned him between his once proud wings. Hezbitari was dead as well, the leering face plastered against the cracked tree trunk to his left. The rest of the demonic form was sprayed in a smoldering mess splashed among the tree tops and underbrush. "You're a fool Hezbitari." Memnon growled as he made it up to his cloven hooves and steadied himself. Above him he still heard the chariots roaring triumphantly as they raced away after having circled over his clearing these last few minutes.

His senses smelled the approaching monkeys before he heard them and he licked his lips. He smelled more plastic and steel and he knew they were armed with weapons that wounded far worse than simple steel swords and spears. It did not matter. Briefly, it was like the old days, he had the advantage. He had their minds before they even knew he was there. These ones were not like the others, the ones whose minds seemed shielded by something he couldn’t explain. These ones, the ones in the long robes, were vulnerable still. He held their minds in his hands and carefully formed the image of himself, transparent, invisible in his own. They would see what he wanted them to and that was nothing. He let loose a deep throaty laugh like some predator from this world's bygone days. Memnon liked to play with his food. It was time for his pound of flesh.

The first monkey peered over some underbrush, carefully keeping his crafted spear of plastic and steel before him like a talisman. Memnon stood imperiously, arms crossed and quietly waited as more of them approached, tentative and fearful. Some whispered curses as they saw the charred remains of his wing mates blasted all over the clearing. Several were easily within an arm's length of the never-born as it watched them with cold satisfaction. Twelve of them in all moved in tight formation into the clearing. What an auspicious number, Memnon mused.

Arabic. The language was Arabic. His gift of tongues was perfect as he listened to the monkeys musing and whispering as they examined the remains of his wing brothers. By the time the clouds overhead lifted and the sun shown down on these fields the ephemeral flesh and bone would boil and hiss away. One of them lifted a box to his ears and spoke into it. He could feel the ether sparking around him and trilling with voices. They were communicating over distances without seeing their audience. He had heard of this phenomenon from those who dared venture into this plain. He did not believe it until now.

"Clever little monkeys, you have come far." He finally spoke breaking the silence in perfect flawless Arabic save for the omnipresent low growl that undercut every syllable. Some of the al-Quaeda men whirled around and began firing wildly. They could not see him.

No matter. It was time for his pound of flesh. One of the humans stared dumbly down at his chest as a taloned claw erupted from his chest in a gruesome spray of crimson gore and bone. The soldier's eyes focused on the still beating heart held in the claws like an obscene flower before dimming forever. Memnon shuddered in near orgasmic joy as he felt the passage of the Essence through him and into the depths of his realm. The fallen soldier’s fellows screamed incomprehensibly in a panic, some fumbling for grenades and others were firing into the smoky form dancing along the edges of their perceptions. They heard the guttural chant of challenge from their unseen attacker and some of them found their bowels turned to water and fear gripped them as surely as the talon gripped the hapless soldier's heart. They had come to set up another roadside bomb, to strike another blow at the satans who had invaded earth but it was they who had been ambushed. Memnon's eyes rolled into the back of his head like a Great White Sharks' revealing black within black eyes, lifeless, like a doll's eyes, and he descended upon the children of Seth and ravaged them as only the never-born could with divine fury and hunger. Their screams could be heard for kilometers and then there was only a sudden still silence.

Commendations to Surlethe who wrote the first part of this section and to Stravo who wrote the last. Well and nobly done guys!

Chapter Nine

Wadi Al Jaram, Western Iraq

“Now hollow fires burn out to black, and lights are guttering low.  Square your shoulders, lift your pack, and leave your friends and go.  Oh, never fear, man, nought's to dread, look not to left nor right:  In all the endless road you tread, there's nothing but the night.”

“Sorry Sir?”

“Houseman, poem called ‘A Shropshire Lad’ about the kids who died fighting for Queen Victoria in far-off parts of the Empire. How they left home and died for thirteen pence a day. His theme was that they couldn’t see what they were dying for or the point of it all. We’re spared that, we know what we’re fighting for here.” Brigadier John Carlson glanced down at his watch. “Today. When dawn comes, we will be fighting for everything there is to fight for. There’s literally nothing we won’t be fighting for.”

“That’s not true Sir.” Simon deVere Cole, Carlson’s ADC was speaking equally softly. “We’re not fighting for God. Queen and Country, yes. Our people, yes. The whole of humanity, yes. But not God. Never again. We stand for ourselves this day, on our own two feet. The men are saying its about time too.”

“That’s good. I wish there were just a few more of them.” That was the truth. Carlson had the British Brigade here, The Royal Dragoon Guards, a regiment of Challenger II tanks, were dug in along the ridgeline, with the 1st Duke of Lancaster and 1st Mercian, two battalions of mechanized infantry with their Warrior armored carriers, beside them. From the front, all that could be seen of them was the tops of their turrets peeking over the ridge. From behind, the tanks were sitting in open-backed revetments so they could fall back from this position to the next. Carlson looked up at the stars overhead. It was a trite cliché that looking up at them made man and his works seem insignificant and now it was a false cliché as well. For today, man’s works made the heavens themselves insignificant. And Carlson had just a regiment of tanks and two battalions of mechanized infantry. Plus his artillery batteries of course and a lot of engineers. One advantage of a “peace-keeping” mission was that there were a lot of civilian development projects involved and they had needed engineers. Those engineers had been hard at work for the last few days.

Out in front, he could see the result of their labors. A shimmering river that stretched north and south as far as he could see, glistening gently in the moonlight. It was a beautiful sight if one didn’t know what the silver river was, to those who had seen what razor-wire could do, it glimmered with evil promise. Yet even worse was what nobody could see until it was too late, the thousands of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines sewn across the front. Carlson’s plan was quite simple, all good military plans were. He would break the enemy attack on the minefields and wire while his artillery poured fire into the mass of enemy hung up in front of him. As they broke through the mines and wire, as they surely would, his tanks would slaughter them while the infantry protected the tanks. The wire and the mines were his force multiplier, the thing that would allow him to stand against the force threatening him.

He ran those figures through his mind as well, 93,300 infantry, 6,666 cavalry, 2,187 harpies. Less those killed by attrition in the long march to contact. Against them, he had just over 8,000 men. The government in the UK had promised him more, but they were a long time coming, years of British under-spending on defense had seen to that. Those years were gone but even with the Government printing all the money it needed for the war effort, it would take time for the added production to reach the front. The RAF had only four C-17 transports and their first priority had been to fly aluminum foil out to the theater. Every man in his force now had his helmet lined with aluminum foil and the people in the rear were handing rolls of the stuff out to the civilians. In a strange way, this was already shaping up to be one of the great logistics achievements of the war. A concerted effort to give every human on earth his own aluminum foil hat. Carlson chuckled, he suddenly had a picture of aluminum haberdashery becoming a study topic at Sandhurst.

“Sir. General Fereidoon Zolfaghari to see you.” deVere Cole interrupted the train of thought.

“General, Sir.” Carlson snapped out the salute. The Iranian General returned it punctiliously.

“I think you will be pleased to see me Brigadier.” The English was excellent. “I have brought with me the Shamshar Armored Division. Three of my regiments of T-72s, 324 tanks, are moving into position along your left while we speak, supported by a regiment of armored infantry, 108 BMP-1s. We have not the excellent position you have here but the Global Hawks tell us the enemy will strike your position first. When they die on your wire, we think they will try and flank you. They cannot go to your right, the Hawr al Hammar prevents that. They must go to the left, right into the guns of my tanks and artillery.”

“We’re more than pleased to see you General, you’re a sight for sore eyes. We’re expecting to get hit after dawn. That glow on the horizon? It’s the Baldrick’s campfires.” A thought occurred to Carlson. “Have all your men aluminum foil for their helmets? We have plenty if you are in need.”

“The Americans gave us enough, thank you, but I will spread word. If any of my units are short, we will come to you. If I may offer you some help in return? You are very light on anti-aircraft here. I have an extra anti-aircraft regiment, the Shamshar is a composite division, made up from what is left of all four of our southern armored divisions. So many of our men went when The Message was sent, we could not support all the units we had. At least it means we are not short of front-line equipment for those we have left. I would be honored if you would accept the attachment of the regiment to your force. It has SA-8 missiles and ZSU-23/4 guns.”

“Thank you, I am honored to accept. General, I was about to have some tea, a little fruit. It is poor refreshment to offer a comrade in arms, but perhaps you would deign to join us?”

“I would prefer a glass of the whisky for which your Scots are so famous.” Carlson lifted an eyebrow and Zolfaghari smiled gently. “The pact is broken, the commandments do not apply. Now we have faith only in our tanks and guns.”

Like any good ADC deVere Cole had anticipated his Brigadier’s needs and a bottle of 18 year old Laphroig had appeared. He measured out glasses for the two officers.

“Oh come on Simon, pour one for yourself as well.”

“Thank you Sir.”

“To the morrow and may the day be ours.” Carlson’s voice rang across the moonlit desert.

“And to our arms. May we bring honor to our countries and those we fight beside.” Zolfaghari’s response echoed across the dunes. Below them, the razor wire seemed to sway in response but it was just the wind rippling across the sand.

Headquarters, Multi-National Force Iraq, Green Zone, Baghdad.

General Petraeus stood in front of the great screen that showed the disposition of forces in Iraq. Viewed one way, what he was about to do was committing an act of mass murder. The thought made him chuckle quietly to himself, a long time ago he’d held a press conference and the subject of night vision equipment had come up. The American officer behind the podium had explained how the U.S. Army had night vision equipment that enabled them to fight a 24-hour battle while their enemy didn’t have anything approaching that capability. One journalist had been greatly angered by that and had launched a tirade about how the one-sided night-fighting capability “wasn’t fair.”

Well, what was happening now wasn’t fair either. The screen showed the disposition and order of battle of the Hellish forces in great detail. The Predators and Global Hawks were doing sterling work, tracking every move the baldricks made. Zoom down far enough and the display could show how and where individual baldricks were deploying and spending their time. It was painfully obvious that the baldricks had no such capability. They were charging head-first into a trap, unwavering, unconcerned with what the humans were doing. Petraeus was doing his best to help them, his aircraft had been carefully hitting the command structure of the enemy forces, slowly but surely breaking up their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

It was far worse even than that. The baldricks were moving slowly, as a professional, Petraeus recognized them for what they were, an infantry army that moved like one. Slowly, ponderously. They had their cavalry out as screens of course but it was a myth that cavalry forces could move much faster than leg infantry, they could in a tactical sense but the difference strategically was marginal at best. The harpies had been more of a worry, there had been an effort to use them as an advance guard but they’d been shot out of the sky by the F-16s based at Kirkuk and Incirlik. The small detachments, usually three at a time hadn’t stood a chance against the fast jets and after a while, their commander had stopped sending them out.

In contrast, the Allied forces were mobile almost to the point of insanity. They could slash at an enemy formation, disengage, regroup and slash again while their enemy was still wondering what to do about the first attack. Petraeus had moved the whole of his First Armored Division against the northern flanking force. Petraeus grimaced, the northern force was identical to that bearing down on the British Brigade but the British formation was the weakest of all of his combat groups. It was a calculated risk, nobody could be strong everywhere and the British position was the easiest to defend in depth. If the baldricks broke through there, Petraeus had two brigades of the Fourth Infantry Division north of the battle area and the 82nd Airborne in Kuwait ready to pinch off the breakthrough.

In the center, Petraeus had positioned his 25th Mechanized Infantry Division, the 10th Mountain Division and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Brigade. They were his stop line, intended to hold the main body of the baldrick force. Only, Petraeus didn’t intend to stop them If the baldrick commander had anything like the command capabilities at Petraeus’s disposal he could have seen what the American General actually had in mind. The main body of the baldrick force would indeed be pinned on the American Corps in front of Baghdad but while they threshed there, the allied northern and southern forces would be closing in on their flanks and rear. By the time they realized what was happening, the racing tanks of the First Armored would be between them and the hellmouth. It had all the makings of a military catastrophe.

Petraeus knew that if he pulled this off, it would go down as one of the greatest envelopments of all time, comparable with those the Germans had pulled off at the start of their war with Russia. That was one of the things that made Petraeus uneasy, for all the scale of those early victories, the Germans had lost the war with Russia and most skilled strategists knew that they had never really had a chance of doing otherwise. What was facing the baldricks was an unparalleled military disaster yet Petraeus knew in his heart that this was just the opening move. He had no idea of the military resources hell could throw at Earth and until he had a handle on that data, he was fighting blind. All he could do was make sure the casualty rate was as lopsided as possible.

“Sir. Message just in. The Iranian Shamshar Division is arriving and taking up position to the south of the British. They’ll be in defensive position by dawn. General Zolfaghari has ceded operational command of the defense to Brigadier Carlson as officer-in-position.”

“Thank you Charles. Send my compliments to the General and my appreciation of an advance to contact well-executed.” There was more to that message than met the eye and the recipient would know it. Ceding overall command to an officer of lesser rank had been a magnanimous gesture, one that spoke volumes about the character of the Iranian general. Privately, Petraeus promised himself that he would see Zolfaghari received full credit for his part in this operation. Then his mind went back to the battle that was about to unfold. What could go wrong? What hadn’t he foreseen? What were his options when everything dropped in the pot?

He looked again at the huge display on the wall. Four new symbols had just appeared, the Iranian regiments covering the southern flank of the British brigade. Everything was set up, the pieces were in position. Behind the allied lines, the truck convoys with their supplies of ammunition and fuel were waiting to support the lunge forward. With them were his reserves, Stryker brigades, more mechanized infantry. Again Petraeus reflected on just how unfair this battle was going to be. A human general would have known how and where the great ambush would be mounted, to a human, brought up on armored warfare and battles of maneuver, the Iraqi road network made the positions and deployments entirely predictable. The baldricks painfully obviously had no concept of those matters. Truly, this was a bronze age Army fighting a force from the 21st Century. That didn’t change the fact that this was a – literally – hellishly big bronze age army.

“I’m going outside for a few minutes. Get some fresh air.” Petraeus spoke to his deputy, settled his aluminum-lined baseball cap on his head and left the command center, his bodyguards following. Outside, it was still night, the stars shining brightly down. In front of the command building sat four of the hulking M1A2 Abrams tanks, silent shadows in the darkness. Petraeus walked over to them, absent-mindedly returning the salutes from their crews as he racked his brain trying to think of outcomes and eventualities that might have missed his attention. It was no good, as far as he could see, he’d done all he could, it was time to rest and let the battle unfold.

Then he patted the massive sloping armor of the nearest tank. “Well, honey-bunny. It’s all down to you and yours now.”

Headquarters, Army of Abigor, Western Iraq.

Abigor stood over the wooden table, looking down at the parchment scroll that was pinned to it. It was a map of the area, with thick lines drawn on it, representing his forces as they fanned out across the countryside. His plan was simple, three thrusts, each aimed at a major population center. The city called Kirkuk in the north, Baghdad in the center, Basrah to the south. His mounted troops would brush any enemy opposition out of the way and leave the cities isolated. Then, his infantry would besiege them, cut off their supplies and starve the defenders. When the cities collapsed, they would storm the walls and ravage the inhabitants amid scenes of horror that would panic the remaining humans. They would stream away from his advance amid utter terror and he would slaughter them while they did so. Humanity would die screaming for its defiance. As it should.

Where to go next? Once the fertile crescent of the Tigris-Euphrates had been cleared, what to do? Keep heading east into Persia or head west towards Jerusalem? Ravaging the area the humans called “The Holy Land” would be satisfying and it would give Satan an opportunity to goad Yahweh over the fate of his “Chosen People”. That made Abigor grin, how could the humans have believed Yahweh for so long? Accepting every bit of good fortune that came there way as one of his gifts, dismissing every disaster as a test or trial. Abigor couldn’t help but think that humans must be terminally deluded. Perhaps that was why they were resisting now? They were hoping their Yahweh would change his mind and come to aid them? They were in for a disappointment if they were, it simply wasn’t happening.

Abigor tapped the parchment with a claw, thoughts irritating the outer edges of his mind. Just why did his commanders keep exploding? Obviously the humans had something to do with it, putting things together it had become obvious that the commanders exploded when the human’s flying chariots were around. Yet how? The chariots flew so high up they could hardly be seen. Sometimes the only clue they were there was the great white streak they left across the sky. How could they hit so precisely from so high? It was impossible. Abigor’s customary scowl deepened. Perhaps it wasn’t the humans after all. Promotion by assassinating one’s superiors was a well-known tactic in hell, smiles upon as long as it was successful. A commander who couldn’t even protect himself was unfit to be in a position of authority. And yet, and yet…. Some commanders had noted another pattern, it was always the leaders who rode ahead of their command, their banners flying proudly that died. Some had started to hide themselves in their units, keeping their banners furled and marching on foot like the rest. It showed lack of pride and hurt the morale of the units but those commanders lived.

Problems, more problems. The truth was that Abigor wasn’t quite sure where his units were or how much resistance they were facing. The distance he and his kind could read minds was limited to line-of-sight and with so many dead commanders lost from his ranks, communications were spotty at best. He’d tried sending out small groups of the flying demons to get information on the positions of his units but the human flying chariots had killed them. Those flying chariots were a nuisance, they’d made the demonic fliers too vulnerable to use except in large groups. Just how did humans get them to fly so high or move so fast? Some of them were so quick they arrived before their noise could be heard.

Abigor stretched and walked outside his tent, his clawed feet clicking on the stones in the sand. Above him, the stars shone brightly, their light apparently amplified by the clear, dry desert skies. That was a unique thing about this dimension, Abigor’s home had no stars, no planets, not like these. It was a place that existed in and of itself, self-contained and alone. Heaven was the same, another self-contained, isolated entity that was complete within itself. Bubbles in a formless void.

Idly, Abigor wondered what would happen to this planet once the humans on it had been harvested. It would make a nice private retreat for his personal use, would Satan allow him to keep it? He had conquered it after all. In his heart, he knew that would not be the case, Satan wouldn’t allow any of this realm to establish a presence outside it for to do so would be to give them the chance of establishing a power base independent of his reign. This planet would be abandoned, left to develop without humans. Perhaps to see another species of intelligent life develop and in its turn be harvested to serve the beings from the higher dimension. Abigor had heard that there were creatures living in the sea that were almost as intelligent as humans.

Another problem, another worry that flittered on the edge of his mind. He and his kind were used to being able to read human minds and control their thoughts, even across the dimensional rift. Once he and one of Yahweh’s angels had held a competition to see who could cause the most minor fatal accidents in one day; he’d won that, 106 to 102. But now, it was becoming harder and harder to find humans who could be affected by the demons mind control. Something was getting in the way, something was stopping the demons possessing the minds of anybody they chose. Already, nearly all the important people, the leaders, their minds were closed off. Even the lesser people, the peasants, were becoming immune. It was so hard to find one who could be possessed now.

Abigor shook himself. Why was he worrying, a few days and it would all be over. Humanity would be a panicked mass, fleeing for its survival and a few days beyond that it would be gone forever. There wasn't any point in worrying about details.

Chapter Ten

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Time to mount up.” Guardsman Bass finished the last of his tea and shook his mug over the sand. His Challenger II was ready to move, one of the 56 tanks lined up along the ridge. It was still dark but the eastern horizon was glowing red as the sun approached it’s first appearance. That’s why the tanks were along this ridge, with the sun behind them the baldricks would be advancing with the glare of the dawn directly in their eyes. It was a small point perhaps but the officers were paid to think of things like that. He climbed up on to his tank and slid into the turret beside the 120mm gun, settling comfortably into the familiar seat. “Boiling vessel on?”

The loader nodded, the tank was going to seal down, they’d fight that way. Nobody knew what the baldricks would do when they found themselves under fire so orders were to expect the worst and make sure the tea urn was ready to use. Bass felt his ears click as the positive-pressure system powered up. The air inside the tank was at a higher pressure than that outside so that if there were any leaks in the tank, the flow would be out, not in. They had rations, everything they needed without depending on the outside world. They even had some empty cases from the artillery so they could relieve themselves without leaving their armored home.

“Sabre-One Actual.” Lieutenant McLeoud’s voice was calm, studied. “All Sabre One units. Confirm sealed down.”

Bass thumbed his transmitter button. “Sabre One-two sealed down.”

“Very good. Recon tells us the baldricks are moving, straight at us.” There was immense satisfaction in the Lieutenant’s voice now. ‘Straight at us’ meant straight into the minefields and on to the razor wire. We will be opening fire at 5,000 meters with HESH. Aimed shots only boys, we can’t waste ammunition. Hold Fast!”

The last words were McLeoud’s family motto, repeated with almost boyish enthusiasm. Young officers bass thought, a little patronizingly, a little sadly. So keen, so likely to die. “You heard our Lieutenant. Load HESH.”

“Up.” The one word meant that the 120mm gun was loaded, ready to fire. Bass leaned forward slightly and peered through his commander’s periscope. Even in the brief time since they’d mounted up, the sun had risen enough to start lighting the battle area. Across the dunes, Bass saw a section of the horizon turn black. Baldricks crossing it in strength, a great square of them. He knew the numbers, 81 ranks, each of 81 baldricks. This was the cavalry, their advance guard. As he watched the great square changed, splitting into three rectangles, the two at the rear moving up either side of the lead so they formed an extended line. Then the rectangles split again, into three sections, one behind the other. The numbers played in Bass’s head, 729 in each sections, almost 2,200 in each of the three closely packed waves. This would be a bloody day, Bass had read the intelligence on the baldricks and of their wild, primary color blood. So what color would the blood be?

“They’re charging by battalion.” Bass lased the formations that were approaching at steadily-increasing speed. “Range 17,500 meters. They’re not holding formation very well. No discipline there at all.” A critical point, a charge had to hit as a solid blow, a fist formed of every available asset. If the charging cavalry were ill-disciplined enough to allow their formation to break, the strength of the blow would be much reduced.

F-14A Tomcat over the Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Lion-Leader, the enemy are moving. Engage airborne threats as detected.” Lieutenant Hooshank Sedigh looked around at the other Tomcats making up his formation. The last weeks had been strange, after decades of sour hostility, the airfields around Dezful had seen a constant stream of C-5 and C-17 transports landing as the Americans shipped in supplies of spare parts for the Iranian Air Force. Not just spares, stocks of AIM-54C missiles for the F-14s that had done without for so long and, even better, American technical service teams, Tiger Teams, to bring the Tomcats back up to full serviceability. Aircraft that had been stripped hangar queens for years had been towed out and were being repaired. Sedigh’s Tomcat had been upgraded by a team lead by retired Navy maintenance chief who had been drafted out of his civilian job. Now, more things worked on the aircraft than they had for years.

“Be advised, Indian Air Force Su-30s are closing on your position from Omidiyeh.” Another change, Iran’s airfields were crowded with aircraft from all the surrounding countries. A weird mixture of types and technologies. It was lucky the American AWACS birds were up, keeping sense of it all. “F-15s approaching from King Khalid Military City.” The American controller tactfully didn’t mention that the F-15s had been Saudi until quite recently. The Saudis had been terribly hit by The Message, a huge percentage of their population had just died. Typical of the Sunnis thought Sedigh then mentally kicked himself. The time for that nonsense had gone. It didn’t matter any more. How could he rail against unbelievers when everything he had believed in was a proven, demonstrated lie? Anyway, the Americans had repossessed the Saudi Air Force, although it did seem that, even before they had done so, a surprising number of “Saudi” pilots answered to the name of ‘Bubba’ or ‘Jim-Bob’.

“We have first target group on scan now. They are stacked behind lead ground element, estimated number approximately 950. Lion Group will engage. Fire at will.” Sedigh swelled with satisfaction, his 24 F-14As were Lion Group. They would fire the first shots of the Battle of Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah.

First Brigade, First Armored Division, Tel Ash Sha’ir, Northern Iraq.

“It’s starting.” Colonel Sean MacFarland looked at the electronic displays in his command center. He’d zoomed in on Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah where the map was showing the first of the Baldrick formations moving up. They were leading with their cavalry down there, just like they were doing here. MacFarland zoomed out, moved his point of display up to Tel Ash Sha’ir then flipped the display mode from synthetic to raw video. The pictures from the Global Hawk showed the baldrick cavalry shift from a solid block to a column of three long lines. The British had placed their faith in wire and minefields to stop the initial push but MacFarland was relying on his artillery. It wasn’t as if he was short of it.

Command Sergeant Major Frank L. Graham picked up the microphone. “All Ready First units, now here this. The enemy is moving. These are the bastards who thought we’d just knuckle under to their wishes. Well, they’re wrong and we’re going to show them just how wrong. We’re going to teach them what American values stand for. We’ll show them the meaning of truth, justice and the American way, and by the last of those I mean, of course, mindless indiscriminate violence.” There was a chortle of laughter at the crack. “So show them just how much violence Old Ironsides can do when we put our minds to it.”

He put the microphone down. “The MLRS and Paladin batteries are waiting Sir. Just give the word.”

Cavalry Legion, Right Flank of the Army of Abigor, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq  Visharakoramal kept his beast in hand, trying to keep lined up with the other members of his unit. It was hard, the great beasts wanted to surge ahead, their claws snapping in anticipation of biting into flesh, their tails arched up, ready to strike. Ahead of him the first rank was already breaking into a gallop, the beasts covering the ground with great loping strides. The second rank were into the trot, waiting for the order so they too could start their charge. Visharakoramal’s third rank was still at the pace, their turn had not come yet. Far ahead of him, he could see a strange shimmering cloud that seemed to stretch across the battlefield. Odd, but then this human world was full of surprises. It wasn’t the way they’d expected it to be.

It was time, his beast broke into its trot as the lines in front shifted to the gallop. The waves had spaced out, the gaps between them lengthening as the beasts accelerated to full speed, their riders letting them have their head in the race to gain the honor of being the first to crash through the enemy lines. Then, the surge and the pounding in his rear end as his beast went into the gallop, its head stretching out as its muscles pushed it faster towards the enemy. Visharakoramal sneered at the enemy in front, instead of forming up in the open where they could fly their banners and show their defiance like proper warriors, they were hiding behind the hill crests. Not that hiding would save the humans. In front of him, the first wave was nearing the shimmering river. Then, the earth opened up and swallowed them.

F-14A Tomcat over the Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Fox-Two, Fox-Two, Fox-Two, Fox-Two, Fox-Two, Fox-Two.” Lieutenant Hooshank Sedigh was one of 24 pilots making the ritual chant as the missiles streaked away from his Tomcat climbing up, high into the stratosphere as the started their deadly course. This was what the Tomcat had been built for, taking on a massed formation of enemy aircraft and blasting them apart with long-range weapons. It was, after all, what their American Tiger Teams had said, it was all very well to win a fight but much better to kill your enemy before he knew the fight had started.

The radio crackled again, the Su-30s were opening fire with their long-range missiles. They didn’t have the multi-target capability of the Tomcats, not quite, they could engage four targets at once instead of the Tomcat’s six, but they were firing their R-77 missiles in a stream at the mass of harpies. As the first four hit, the radar would automatically switch to the next four, and then the next. Sedigh realized something else, the harpies would be looking at the huge salvo of missiles aimed straight at them, not upwards to where the AIM-54s were already hurtling down. Off to the south, the American F-15 formation was already closing to follow up the initial long-range pounding.

Over a hundred kilometers away, Inkraskalitran saw the sky in the far distance turn into a white could, one that lengthened towards the flock of harpies with incredible speed. This had to be the fire-spears thrown by the human sky-chariots, the harpies had all heard of them and quietly discussed them. There was word that three of the great Heralds had been destroyed by the fire-spears, if so, what could the smaller fliers do against them? He watched the fire-spears approaching, then the whole world seemed to turn upside down.

His eyes blurred, de-focused from the shock, Inkraskalitran looked with horror at the chaos wrought upon the harpy flock. One of his wing-mates had taken a direct hit from a fire spear and had been blown to fragments. Others around him had been caught by the blast and fragments and were fluttering down, crippled, wings torn apart, some already burning where their bodies were being seared by their blood. Even as he watched, the members of his flock were dying as more fire-spears tore into them, the explosions adding to the chaos in the flock. Hundreds were dead and dying as Inkraskalitran tried to absorb the havoc that was being wrought. In the chaos, he saw a fire-spear coming for him. Panic-stricken, he dived and turned away, trying to accelerate as fast as he could but the fire-spear obediently changed course and followed him. That just wasn’t fair.

“I love it when a plan comes together.” The voice in Sedigh’s earphones was a mixture of professional satisfaction and awe. The sky where the harpies had been was a mass of explosions and fireballs. “Lion Group, return to base, maximum speed. Reload and get back out here fast. Don’t worry about fuel, we’ve got tankers up if anybody gets short. Tiger Group,” That was the Indians Sedigh thought. “close on what’s left of that harpy formation and slaughter it as soon as the F-15s have finished. Don’t hang around, don’t get close, zoom and boom. Watch out, the F-15s will be there as well.”

Sedigh thumbed his transmitter. “Eagle Eye, kill totals?”

There was a laugh in the controller’s voice. “Bloody fighter pilots. Hard to say Lion Leader. In that mess, its hard to work out who’s killing what. We have Lion Group down for 121 kills, Tiger Group for 290. Panther Group is about to engage. Good luck Lion Leader, look forward to seeing you back here.”

It made sense, Sedigh thought. The Tomcats were long-range killers, they had no place getting mixed up in a wild furball, but the fighter pilot in his soul screamed in protest still. Because what a furball it was going to be. Behind him, the area of sky occupied by the harpies redoubled in its fury as the salvoes of AIM-120Cs tore into it.

Cavalry Legion, Left Flank of the Army of Abigor, Tel Ash Sha’ir, Northern Iraq.

Zorankalirtagap jabbed his heels into the neck of his beast, urging it onwards, towards the enemy who was supposed to be trying to stop the Legions of Abigor. His beast responded gallantly, straining every muscle in its body to get ahead of his rivals and be the first to start the slaughter of the humans. Dawn was well advanced, the sky turning from black to blue, only it wasn’t? Zorankalirtagap took time to glance upwards, there was a weird white cloud rising from behind the humans, a cloud tinged red from the rising sun. The appearance of a cloudy red sky for one second made Zorankalirtagap homesick but the clouds shot through with streaks of intense white fire. Suddenly, Zorankalirtagap saw the streaks of fire were curving through the air and the curve was going end with him.

The mathematics were simple and deadly. Just under 25 kilometers away from Tel Ash Sha’ir were 29 M270A1 MLRS rocket launchers. Each had 12 rockets. Each rocket had 644 shaped-charge multi-role sub-munitions. 12 x 29 x 644 = 224,112. Getting on for a quarter of a million sub-munitions were descending on the 6,600-strong cavalry legion that was charging across open terrain. The United States Army had a name for what was happening. They called it steel rain.

Zorankalirtagap was staggering around amid the wreckage of the cavalry charge. His beast was down, threshing on the ground, screaming with the agony of holes blasted through its body. Great craters seared by the fury of the shaped-charges that had blasted raw copper plasma into its body, they were something that the beast had never experienced before. All around it, others of its kind were in the same condition, screaming, legs, claws, tails blasted off, their faces melted, their bodies ripped open and their organs hanging out. Some were dead, they were the ones who had been fortunate enough to be hit so hard that even the tough body and lust for war that was bread into the beasts could not allow them to survive. Between the bodies of the great beasts, their riders were strewn, some dead, some screaming from their wounds, all hurt in a way none had ever experienced before.

It really didn’t register in time, the screams from overhead that drowned out even the shrieks and howls of the shattered cavalry charge. The explosions did catch his attention, they were large enough to attract anybody’s. they rippled across the killing field, tearing apart the force pinned down there and finally bringing peace to the crippled beasts as they were blown apart.

Just over 12 kilometers away, the 18 M109A6 Paladins had dropped into the steady firing rate of four rounds per minute, the rate that conserved ammunition and broke armies. Their shells arched over the Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles of the First Brigade and slammed into the mass of struggling baldricks below. On the ridgeline above the tankers and mechanized infantry watched in slightly bored interest as the baldrick cavalry died. There was nothing to be really interesting here, they’d seen MLRS and artillery at work before. The artillery observers actually had something to do, they watched the patterns of shells landing and datalinked a stream of information back to the guns, directing fire onto any pockets of survivors.

In the middle of the mass of artillery fire, Zorankalirtagap was learning new lessons and learning them very fast indeed. He was learning that he was helpless, that there was no defense against the shells that were moving backwards and forwards across the killing ground. He was learning that artillery and the controllers who directed in had no mercy, no compassion for the creatures they were slaughtering. They were just targets, to be erased as quickly and conveniently as possible.

Zorankalirtagap had learned one other thing. He was a creature of hell but these seemingly puny humans could create hell any time they wanted to. For the first time in his long life, Zorankalirtagap knew what sheer, unadulterated, panic-stricken terror felt like.

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Now that is a sight.” Guardsman Bass swung the turret of his tank so he could watch the scene in the minefields. The meter long bar mines had been designed to knock out tanks but they worked against the baldrick’s rhinolobsters very effectively. The first wave had been blown apart by the mines, Bass had seen one rhinolobster have both its left legs torn off by the mines, as it had collapsed to one side it had landed on another and been killed by it. But the problem with minefields were that they were declining assets, every mine that claimed a victim thinned out the field. The second wave had done much better than the first, for a time at least. Quite a few of the rhinolobsters had made it though the minefield and then they’d hit the razor wire.

Razor wire was nasty stuff, lift a piece carelessly and it could remove a man’s fingers. There were dozens of interlocked coils down there and even as Bass watched he saw the rhinolobsters tear into it and become entangled in the mass of razor-sharp edges. They screamed and threshed as the wire sliced ever-deeper into them and their efforts only got them more entangled and inflicted yet more damage. Some of the riders tried to help their mounts, grabbed the wire to lift in clear and these ones learned the terrible truth and the wire sliced their fingers to the bone.

Behind that second wave came the third and these had learned. Most of them followed the paths of the rhinolobsters that had made it to the wire. They climbed over the creatures from the second wave, escaping the first entangling coils of wire but got bogged down in the rest. Others followed them and by simple weight and mass they crushed down the wire with the bodies of those in front of them. By sheer weight of numbers, the enemy cavalry had breached the wire and were through.

“Get ready Boys.” Lieutenant McLeoud’s voice came over the radio. “The artillery lads are opening fire. Get ready to pick off any of them monsters that get through the barrage.”

Bass settled down into his tank commander's seat, then took a look through the scope. The blood in the minefield and on the wire was green.

Chapter Eleven

Su-30MKI Tiger Group Leader over the Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

The world rotated around Wing Commander Gurka as his Su-30 hit the top of its climb and he rolled smoothly over. The survivors of the massacre were far below him, their bodies barely visible. His radar could see them though, he’d lost them as he’d climbed out but now he’d re-acquired. The devastating missile salvoes had destroyed hundreds of the harpies, their bodies dissolving in fire as the missiles ripped into them. Once there had been so many that they’d swamped the memory on the radars but now, the situation was clearly defined. There were barely two targets left for each of the allied fighters and Gurka had already killed one of his. He’d picked his target for the next pass already, one harpy flying west, its nerve broken, running for its life.

It didn’t stand a chance. Gurka pushed his throttles over and went after it in a long, smooth dive. His gun-sight carat showed the predicted impact point of his cannon burst, it was sliding towards the harpy, the diamond embracing its back. Then, it turned red and Gurka squeezed the trigger, blasting burst of 30mm armor-piercing incendiary ammunition into the harpy’s body. For a second or so, nothing happened although Gurka could swear that he saw lumps of black flesh flying off the body. Then it flared into orange fire, burning and spinning for the desert floor.

“Tiger Group, time to go home. Call your boys off Tiger Leader, the squids want to play.”

Gurka looked around. Already the American F-15s were heading south, their missile racks empty. “Acknowledged.”

“Head for Dingbat Tiger Group,” Gurka mentally translated that. Dezful. “Some Russian transports have landed with missile reloads for you. Good luck and don’t mix with any naughty ladies.”

“All Tiger aircraft, break off, head for dingbat.” Gurka looked hard to the west. There was a black cloud approaching. “Eagle Eye, contacts to the west.”

“We have the Tiger Group Leader. More harpies, covering the ground force main body. Sea Eagle Group will be handling them. Out.”

The out had a definitive note to it. The Su-30s were out of missiles and very low on cannon ammunition. Eagle Eye up there in his AWACS wasn’t interested in them any more. His attention was steering the group of F/A-18s from the three carriers offshore into the new harpy cloud.

Headquarters of Merafawlazes, Commander, Northern Flank, Abigor’s Army

“The cavalry have gone!”

“They’re through then. Order the flies to pursue the humans and cut them up on the way. The infantry will follow through. Advance on this place the humans call Kirkuk. Ravage it, Abigor will be pleased.”

“No, Noble master.” The messenger dropped to his knees and crawled across the floor to Merafawlazes hooves. “I must tell you, the cavalry have not broken the humans. The cavalry are dead. All of them. The humans killed them all with their magic.”

“What is this insanity? Humans do not have magic.” Merafawlazes’s voice dropped to a menacing growl. “This is not a good time to jest.”

It never was thought Falabrednowsa. Being a messenger was a very chancy and dangerous profession, especially where the recipient of the message was a Duke. They’d been known to eat messengers who brought bad news. “Sire, I fear to contradict you.”

“Good.” Merafawlazes interjected the comment with silky menace.

“But the humans do have magic. They have used it against the cavalry. They can call down thunder from the sky and drown their enemies in fire. They have destroyed our cavalry. It is a horrible sight, our cavalrymen dead on the ground torn to pieces by the fire, the surviving beasts on the ground screaming with pain as they die.” Merafawlazes attention was drawn by a thunder in the skies overhead, a roll of thunder followed by a deafening, hideous scream. “Sire, that is the war-cry of the humans in their sky chariots. A great battle is raging while we speak, the flies fight for their lives against the sky chariots. There is magic there too, the humans throw burning spears that never miss.”

“Our flies do well against them?”

The answer had better be yes was the reply running through Falabrednowsa’s mind. But he was a messenger and it was his duty to speak the truth. “No Sire, they die as the cavalry died. The human sky chariots are so much faster than they are. Our enemies cannot hear them come for the cowards give their battle cry only after they have launched an attack. They travel faster than the wind, they climb faster than any of us have ever seen before. They afraid to fight us in honorable combat so they kill by the hundred with their fire spears without ever coming close. Then, they sit above our fliers and dive on them like hawks. Our flies are worse than helpless against them.”

Merafawlazes grunted and turned his attention to the parchment map on the table before him. It wasn’t much help, it just showed the positions of the cities and his best guess at the locations of his troops. Why had the humans chosen to fight here? There was nothing important to fight for here, the nearest great cities were far away. All there was here were these rolling hills with the strange black strips the humans built across them. As he stared at the map, Merafawlazes got the feeling he was missing something very important.

Twenty minutes later, Merafawlazes strode out of his tent, towards the commanders of his remaining legions. Overhead, the sky was covered with strange, crisscrossing white clouds, although he didn’t know it, the contrails from the F-16C Vipers of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group. The Lawn Dart pilots had, to put it mildly, been having a field day. Merafawlazes didn’t know and didn’t care, he had more important things to think about. “Get the Legions moving forward, all of them. Two waves, seven and seven. Tell all the infantry, the suffering of those who hang back will be legendary even for hell.” Merafawlazes picked a piece of Falabrednowsa’s flesh from his teeth. He’d finally worked out what he had been missing. Breakfast.

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Isn’t this what they call a target-rich environment?” And that, Guardsman Bass thought, was the understatement of the century. The first wave of the enemy attack had been smashed, it had died on the mines and razor wire, the few survivors had been torn apart by the artillery. That had seemed like a victory until the whole horizon had turned black with enemy infantry. The enemy line was almost 10 kilometers long, the rising sun glittering gold off their bronze tridents. It was a terrifying sight, one that told Bass just as surely as if he could look into the mind of the enemy commander himself that the baldricks had never seen wire and minefields before.

‘Look into the mind of the commander’. Bass rolled the words over in his mind. It would come, it would come. The ability of the baldricks to enter people’s minds and create illusions had been a nasty surprise but it had been discovered. Once something was discovered, it could be investigated and measured. That meant it could be understood and one the scientists understood something they could duplicate it. Once the scientists had duplicated it, the engineers would take that work and turn it into practical tools. Once the engineers had created the practical tools, the armorers would turn those tools into weapons. And once the weapons were available, the soldiers would use them. That was the way it had always been, that was the way it would be now.

Bass lased the enemy line, waited a carefully measured ten seconds then lased it again. The computer in the tank thought for a microscopic second, then translated the two readings into a speed readout, one that made Bass raise his eyebrows a second. “Right lads, they’re advancing at 15 kay-pee-aitch. The brass better know about that.” Another guiding human principle, Bass had no doubt the same piece of data was being transmitted in by dozens of other tank commanders but it was better for an important piece of data to be transmitted a thousand times than never transmitted at all because everybody thought everybody else had done so. The fact that baldricks on foot could move three times faster than a human was very important.

Third Legion, Southern Flank, Abigor’s Army

Krykojanklawas jogged forward, most of his attention devoted to the enemy in front, the rest to the leader of his contubernium. Like most of his fellow demons in the ranks, he was holding his tripod underarm, the points angled upwards so he didn’t stab the demon in front. There might be time for that later. He and his fellows were lucky, the ground in front of them was clear, they wouldn’t have to pass through the hideous scene where the human magic had destroyed the cavalry legion. Word that the humans had magic had spread through the ranks like wildfire, the stories growing with each retelling. They could make the ground rise up and swallow their enemies, the stones come alive and crush their victims. They could conjure up snakes from the ground that would wrap themselves around their prey and slice them apart. That story was true, Krykojanklawas decided, he could see the great circular holes in the ground where the snakes had come from.

He could see something else, the ground ahead of him was littered with strange-looking bars, painted gray-yellow so they were hard to see against the sand and rock. There were a lot of them though. Curiously, Krykojanklawas glanced to one side, there were a lot fewer where the cavalry had ridden to its death. Even as he watched, a demon in the front rank stepped on one of the bars and the explosion threw him in the air, spraying yellow body fluid as his legs spiraled away from his body. The bars were human magic, Krykojanklawas realized the truth as additional explosions added their noise to the death toll that was already far higher than the Greater Demons had expected. He didn’t care much about the expectations of the Greater Demons though, what he did understand was that stepping on the bars was death. He’d heard about human explosives, how they could blast even a Lesser Demon apart so that all that remained was stains and rags of flesh. If they could do that to a Lesser Demon, what could they do to a Minor Demon like him? Krykojanklawas had just seen the answer and it didn’t please him.

So there were a lot fewer bars where the cavalry had died? Krykojanklawas did the obvious and started to edge sideways, being careful not to step on the bars, heading for where the ground was just littered with the scraps of flesh and mutilated bodies of beasts and their riders. All along the ranks of the legions, the other demons were starting to do the same.

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Here they go….” Bass watched with interest. There had been a ripple of explosions as the advancing horde reached the outer edge of the minefield and the first victims stepped on the bar mines. The mines had been intended for anti-tank work but their fuses had been adjusted so they’d be set off by much lesser pressures. That had worked, a handful of baldricks had died but the rest were starting to funnel in towards the area partially cleared by the cavalry charge. Bass lased them again, the advance had slowed right down as the baldricks tried to pick their way through the minefield. Poor sods. Bass thought, he could almost feel it in his heart to be sorry for them. Almost, but not quite.

Watching through the high-powered optics of his Challenger II, Bass could see the ranks of baldricks stretching, bucking and surging. He knew what would be happening in there, the NCOs and officers trying to prevent the lines drifting into the cleared zone, trying to force the baldricks to keep moving straight ahead, accepting the losses from the minefield. Idly, he wondered what the Iranian division was thinking, hidden far off to the left, but doubtless watching what was happening. He’d heard they’d cleared minefields by marching infantry through them. Looked like the baldricks were doing the same.

Overhead, Bass heard the scream of shells. “Outbound,” the sound easily distinguishable from the ominous “Inbound”. He wondered quickly how long it would be before the baldricks learned to tell the difference. He looked again through the optics, seeing the shells impact on the mass of baldricks hung up on the flanks of the cavalry graveyard. The artillery forward observers were doing their job, directing the artillery in on the flanks, trying to compress the advancing army into a huddled mass. That was happening already in the graveyard, the baldricks lucky enough to be facing that area were moving in but the ones to either side were sliding in also and the resulting congestion was slowing their movement to a crawl. The spams called this “shaping the battlefield”, a typically melodramatic term in Bass’s opinion but descriptive enough.

Anti-Aircraft Battery, Brigadier Carlson’s Headquarters, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“There are satans approaching. Raid count 20.” The Iranian Lieutenant rapped the report out in Farsi, then translated to English for the benefit of Sergeant Major Harper. “Prepare to engage.”

“With respect, Lieutenant, might I suggest we wait for a short while and let the situation develop?”

The Iranian frowned slightly, more from curiosity than annoyance. “Sergeant, we have modernized Osa-M missiles here. We have more than 20 kilometers of range.”

Harper settled back slightly. He’d been expecting some of the harpies to leak through the fighter screen, no fighter cover in history had managed to eliminate the threat of just one or two survivors getting past. The sheer numbers of harpies had meant more than that would although this was a larger group that he’d expected. “Lieutenant,” Harper’s voice was very quiet so nobody else could overhear, “how long have you been in the Army.”

“Three years Sergeant.”

“I’ve been serving my Queen for twenty. Let me give you a little advice. We blast those harpies now, when they’re 20 kilometers away and the brass will think our job is easy and move us somewhere dangerous. Now, we wait until they’re five kilometers away and the brass is really sweating, then blast them, we get to be heroes, get a commendation and possibly even a three-day pass. And we get to keep this nice soft billet.

“Ahhh.” The Lieutenant was impressed and a felt a little honored at receiving such a free gift of valuable expertise. Truly there was much a young officer could learn from a veteran such as this. “We will hold fire until… five kilometers?””

Harper nodded fractionally so the officer gave the orders to his men, adding the explanation he’d been given as if it was his own idea. He could see his men nodding as the logic appealed to them.

At five kilometers, the four Osa-M missile launchers opened fire, pushing 24 missiles at the 20 harpies now closing in on the base. One harpy made it past the missiles only to be sawn apart in mid-air as the ZSU-23/4s caught it in a crossfire.

Back in the battery command vehicle, the telephone rang. Carlson’s voice was on the other end. “Well done Lieutenant, that was a getting us a little worried. I’ll send a commendation to General Zolfaghari.” He paused slightly. “You left it a bit late didn’t you?”

“Needed to get a proper tactical picture Sir. We’ve only six ready rounds on each launcher and I didn’t want to get caught reloading.” Out of the corner of his eye, the Lieutenant saw Harper giving him a discrete sign of approval.

“Very wise.” Carlson paused for a second. “We gave you Sergeant-Major Harper as liaison didn’t we? Please tell him I would like a few words with him later.”

Local 3751, ATK Medium Caliber Systems, Mesa, Arizona

“Look, it's like this see. The plant is going to triple shift work whether we like it or not. We’ve talked with the bosses and this is what we’ve come up with. Morning shift from 6am to 2pm. Afternoon shift from 2pm until 10pm. Graveyard shift from 10pm until 6am. Graveyard pays double time. Shifts switch around monthly so everybody gets a crack at the double time.”

“What about weekends?”

“Forget them. Everybody works four days on, one day off. That’ll be staggered so there’s a full shift working the plan all the time. 24/7.”

“Four days on, one day off? That’s not fair.”

“Shadap Al, the boys on the front line don’t get one in five off, why should we.” A mutter of agreement ran around the room.

“What happens if we don’t approve the deal?”

“Mexicans. Or the Army gets the sub-munitions from Israel. Or wherever. Anyway, I’ll put it to the vote. All those for accepting the management offer?” Hands went up all over the room. “And against?” A scattering of hands, mostly those the organizer recognized as those who voted against everything. “It’s carried. New arrangements start tomorrow. Management will tell you which shift you’re starting on and your day off.”

A few hundred yards away, another meeting was being held. One where the worker’s spouses were being gathered. Once it would have been an all-women gathering, these days a few men were there as well.

“So that’s the new arrangements. Look, the guys on the production lines are going to be working their asses off, they don’t need to be worried about problems at home. So if there is a problem, deal with it, don’t go whining. If you can’t deal with it, see us here at the Union. We can help. Above all that, help each other. You older women, you’ve been through this before. You know the problems the young mothers will face, be there for them. Even if its just baby-sitting so she can get out of the house and have some peace for an hour, do it. Watch out for the oldsters as well, nobody will be around as much as they were so we all have to look out for each other. We know nobody else will. Don’t think some guardian angel will be looking out because we know they’re the enemy as well now.”

Across America and the world the same meetings were being held, the same messages given. Under them all was another simple, deeper message. The whole world was at war.

Chapter Twelve

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“I see you finally got your new offices.” Julie Adams looked totally different from her first visit here less three weeks ago. Her hair was washed and shining, she was wearing skillfully-applied make-up and was smartly, fashionably, dressed. As with all the latest fashionistas she was wearing chic aluminum foil hat that covered her head and extended down the back of her neck. Producing elegant headwear out of aluminum foil had proved a challenge but the French and Italian designers had come through with flying colors. Julie’s aluminum hat had more to do with her change in appearance than her clothes or make-up. For the first time in many, many years her eyes were quiet and rested, she looked at the world with peaceful confidence not abject terror.

“They’re nice aren’t they.” The Amazing Randi was sitting behind his desk, sorting through the letters received by his unit, trying to pick out the genuine prospects from the fakes. It was a harrowing job. “Our General bullied the decorators until they did what we wanted. By the way, the walls are foil-lined, we’ve got monitoring equipment here and we can’t pick up any extra-dimensional signals. So it looks like we’re safe. I guess the next set of building codes will stipulate aluminum foil in all walls and ceilings.

“Anything.” Julie shuddered at the memories of what Domiklespharatu had done to her.

Randi smiled again, understanding her expression like any skilled cold-reader. “Julie, would you like to get your own back? Punish Domiklespharatu by hurting him the way he hurt you?”

“Sure. Of course. Can I?”

“Come to the laboratory.” The two went into the next room. There was a comfortable reclining chair with some electronics behind it and a swinging table with a microphone. “Don’t ask me how any of this works, I’m a conjuror, not a physicist.”

“It’s quite easy James.” One of the men in white coats was talking. “The baldrick mind control works by quantum entanglement, essentially they transmit their mind signal to a victim and force its mind pattern to match theirs. When we intercepted the baldrick signal, we identified both the baldrick’s pattern and that of Miss Adams. So we just reversed the procedure and we’re going to try and entangle its mind pattern. The catch is its much easier for hell to transmit to us than us to transmit to them. So, since we’re not short of raw electrical power, we’re going to boost it upwards until we can transmit to hell. If we’ve done this right, you can speak into this microphone and broadcast straight into Domiklespharatu’s mind.”

“Thank you gentlemen, I still don’t understand how it works but you’ve done wonders, that I know. If this goes well, what we plan to do is to open a new radio station transmitting to everybody in hell. And, Julie, you’ll be our first newsreader. Now settle down and start to try.”

Julie slipped into the chair and pushed her headset on. Earphones and a simple microphone. Behind her, the systems specialists started to ease the power up, seeking the threshold that would tell them they had breached the barrier between the dimensions. In her seat, all Julie could hear was the signals hum, slowly increasing in pitch and intensity. Then, suddenly it stopped, there was an eerie silence at the other end and Julie could sense the suspicious questioning as Domiklespharatu felt a new presence in his mind.

“Remember me Domiklespharatu? I’m Julie Adams, the woman you got your kicks from torturing. Well, I’m back only I’m in your mind now. I can get into your head but you can’t get into mine any more. So guess what, Domiklespharatu, its my turn to have some fun and yours to suffer. Let’s see, where shall we start? Oh yes, here’s a good one. We’re coming for you and all your kind. You had the impertinence to invade us and we’re slaughtering your kind here. You don’t stand a chance against us. We’re coming for you and we’re going to free all of our people you hold and hand those of you that survive over to them. We’re going to hand you over and watch all our people do to you what you have been doing to them. There’s a new order coming and we’re the ones on top. So, you’d better start running Domiklespharatu because we’re coming for you and we won’t stop. Not now not ever. You’ve pissed off the human race Domiklespharatu and, oh boy, what a price you’ll pay for doing that. Oh, and tell that freak you have in charge there, he’d better find a good lawyer. He’ll need one for the war crimes trial.”

The system powered down and Julie took her headset off. There was an enthusiastic round of applause. Randi laid an approving pat on the shoulder. “Impertinence. That was great. I guess you’ll be taking the job then Julie.”

On the Shore of the Styx River, Fifth Ring, Hell

The woman was crouched behind a rocky outcrop on the edge of the Styx in the fifth circle, watching the scene unfold in front of her. Luck was an amazing thing, wasn't it? For thousands of years, she'd been purposefully moving through hell, taking account of the humans who suffered here – some worthy of her attention, others, weaklings, worthy only of her contempt. Of course, given the billions of souls – there must be billions, now – she could only rely on her instinct to guide her. And now, this. Just as she was in the area, some new arrivals had escaped with apparent ease, had tackled the demonic overseer with impunity, stabbed and bludgeoned it to death with skill, and had just crucified it to the rocks in front of her. Such open defiance was unprecedented and dangerous.

In ten thousand years, she had learned many languages from the screams and gibbering cries of the tormented, so with only a little difficulty she recognized what they were saying. The woman was speaking to a man, something about resistance. She smiled to herself. If only they knew … As they turned to go, she stepped out from behind the rock.

"Hello!"

The two newcomers whirled, the bronze spikes they carried up and ready. The woman smiled and spread her arms, revealing herself unarmed. "I have seen what you have done. Excellent work."

The apparent leader of this group was a woman, short, already healing from the gang rape. She gestured to her companion and he lowered his weapons, though they still stood cautiously at the ready. All were in excellent physical shape, save for the quickly-healing wounds and scars. "Who are you?"

"A fellow resistance member." Suddenly, the woman felt a stab in her back above the kidneys. She almost fainted with terror, had a demon caught her for the spikes against her were certainly the bronze of a trident. She turned slowly, looking over her shoulder. There were more newcomers behind her, one armed with a cut down trident, the other with a club made from the section of haft that had been removed. The woman was shocked, she’d been so pleased at tracking this group, she hadn’t seen they’d spotted her and had set up an ambush.

Now, the leader of the group was speaking, her voice hard, cold, suspicious. "There's already a resistance?"

"Of course there is. There has been a resistance in Hell since it began."

"Well, take us to its leader."

The woman again spread her arms. "I will certainly do that. But first you must tell me your names."

"When we meet the leader."

"Okay. Then follow me; we're going to the rim between the fourth and fifth circles." And she turned and stepped into the waist-deep muck, wading past the still-bleeding corpse of Jarakeflaxis. The six newcomers followed her at a distance. The woman didn’t notice but two of them dropped out of sight, following from the flanks.

Over her shoulder, the woman said, "If I duck under the mud, you do the same. As long as the demons on patrol don't see us, we'll be fine."

The Tango flight members exchanged glances, that remark was more telling than the woman had realized. It should be the demons who lived in fear. First rule of establishing liberated area – those who stayed out of it were safe, those who entered it, died. Obviously what she meant by resistance wasn’t what they meant. Kim started to form a mental picture of what the resistance here really was, probably groups of escapees hiding out, spending their time avoiding capture. Kim had in mind something far more ambitious.

The Galaxy Turkish Bath and Massage Parlor, Bangkok, Thailand

The succubus slipped into the bar carefully, keeping in the dark as much as possible. Once it had been easy to fool the humans but no more. Now fewer and fewer of them seemed vulnerable to mind-masking. This group seemed to be though. All women, that was good, massacring them would cause great alarm and misery. There were a group of them by a long wooden table at the end of the room. The succubus kept her self-image clearly in her mind, a young Asian woman dressed as these were, short skirt, skimpy top, baseball cap perched on their heads. A couple of women were dancing around a pole on a small stage, under a sign that said “Coyote Dancing”. Well, they could wait until last.

The succubus went up to the group by the table, picked the one at the end and drew back her clawed hand ready to plunge it into her victim’s chest and tear out her heart. Then she paused, she’d never realized quite how big a half-inch could look when it was pointing straight at her face.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking, can you kill me before I pull the trigger? Well, seeing as this is a .50AE Desert Eagle, the most powerful semi-automatic hand gun ever made, you have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky?” The human woman chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

The succubus looked around carefully. She was the center of a ring of gun barrels, all aimed at her, all obeying the third law of gun-fighting – calibers measured in inches should begin with a “.4” or greater. It was pointless, over. She let her image drop and from the lack of shock on the faces of the women, she realized her illusion had been just as pointless. These women had recognized her as soon as she had entered and they’d trapped her.

“So kill me.” She’d failed, it was hopeless. Death was the consequence of failure.

“Perhaps not. Sit down. Don’t try anything stupid and we won’t shoot. Why did you do this?”

“It was my mission. Deumos sent me to seduce a leader and bend him to our will.”

“So Deumos is your pimp.” The woman with the Desert Eagle put a mountain of disgust into the word. “That doesn’t explain why you came here to try and kill us.”

“I failed, we were told that politicians here were easy to seduce but I couldn’t make mind-contact with them. I hoped killing you would buy enough favor to save my life. People here no longer are deceived by our mind mask.” The succubus thought for a second. “What is a pimp?”

“Somebody who lives off the money we earn.”

“I do not get paid.”

“Then you’re a sex-slave?” The women in the bar were genuinely shocked. They frequently told their tourist clients they were poor women, tricked into a life of sin by unscrupulous brothel-owners but that was just a line to get some sympathy-money. They were all Bangkok girls, born and bred in the city. Country girls couldn’t compete with them and didn’t try. Not one of the girls in the bar had ever actually met a real sex-slave.

“Aren’t you?"

“No!” Noi, the girl with the Desert Eagle, was horrified and insulted. “We are business-women. We are free professionals and paid as such. Why last week I made more money than an office lady makes in a year. Look…. What’s your name?”

“Lugasharmanaska.”

“Look Lugasharman… do you mind if we call you Luga? Nobody has the right to go around telling you who you can have sex with. Not unless they pay you for the trouble. It sounds to me like this Deumos person has been treating you pretty badly. You’d be better off staying with us that going back to him.”

“Her. Deumos is a female. A Greater Demon.”

There was another round of indignant snorts. “That’s disgusting. A woman treating you like this? A man, perhaps I can understand, they always want it for free but another woman? That’s sick. You should be free to make your own living. It’s your body.”

“I could make a living doing it here?” Lugasharmanaska’s voice was uneven, curious, confused.

The women in the bar laughed, although that didn’t affect the way they held their guns. “You bet. A real demon whore? There’d be men lining up out the door to do you. You could look like yourself, or like their favorite actress or whatever. You’d make a fortune. Why a couple of months and you’d own a bar like this. Less if an American warship pulled into Pattaya.” A chorus of happy sighs ran around the bar. To the women, an American warship full of Walking ATMs was their idea of the Great Cornucopia. Noi continued. “Look, Luga, last time one American carrier pulled in for a week, I made enough money to buy a new pickup truck. Cash down. Lin over there paid for a whole year’s college tuition for her younger sister and Dip bought a house for her parents. How do you think we all ended up with American guns? Tourists are profitable enough, we all make a good living off them. And this Deumos person makes you do it for nothing. It’s not just disgusting, its unprofessional.”

“Well what can I do?” Lugasharmanaska almost wailed out the question.

The girls did a quick conference. “Come with us, we’ll take you to the Army. They’ll look after you, they know if they don’t look after our friends, they’ll never get any in this city again. I’ll get my truck and we’ll go around to the Cavalry Depot in Thonburi.”

Five minutes later, one succubus and five ladies of the night were piling into Noi’s pickup truck, Lugasharmanaska having been strongly cautioned not to scratch the paint with her claws. A ten-minute drive took them to the depot gates where, for the second time in an evening, Lugasharmanaska was surrounded by guns.

“Hi boys.” Noi’s voice was bright and friendly.

“Sisters, you do know you got a baldrick in the back there?”

“Of course. Her name is Luga. She wants to surrender so we brought her here. We don’t trust the police.”

“I can understand that. I’ll have to call the Officer of the Guard.”

Another ten minutes and the group were telling their story to the Officer of the Guard, making it very clear that the succubus was under their protection and if she was hurt, nobody in the Second Cavalry Division would be welcome in a Bangkok bar again. Most of the troops had gulped at that threat and mentally promised to guard their prisoner with their lives. Within 30 minutes, the Thai MoD was on the telephone to Washington.

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Well, it’s a step forward but it doesn’t really get us that far.”

“I thought Julie did well.”

“She did, and we told her she can use the equipment any time she likes to torment Domiklespharatu. But its one-to-one communication. It’s using a telephone and we want to use something like radio. We want to transmit to everybody and this system just can’t do that. It needs a mind-pattern to lock in to, like I said, it’s one-to-one.”

“But baldricks can deceive large numbers of people at once.”

“Sure, but we don’t know how. We’re a long way out from knowing that.”

The telephone on Randi’s desk rang and he picked it up, mouthing an apology as he did so. As he listened, his eyebrows lifted.

“Well, this might change things. That was the Ministry of Defense in Bangkok. We’ve got a defector.”

Tip of the hat to Surlethe who wrote the hell section of this installment.

Chapter Thirteen

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“How shall a man die better than facing fearful odds?  For the ashes of his fathers and the future of his buds.  It’s showtime boys”.

Guardsman Bass put the tank intercom down. Like every good tank commander, he had anticipated the order, getting his Challenger II ready to move well before the word came down from Regimental HQ. It hadn’t taken that much anticipation in fact, just a modicum of skill and experience. Skill and experience was something that the long-term professionals that made up the British ranks had in abundance. The spams may have the shiny toys, the British tankers said, but the Brits knew how to play with them.

In the valley below, the baldrick army was slowly extricating itself from the tangle caused by the minefields and wire. What had started as a serried mass of infantry was being distorted and funneled into a confused mass, made all the worse by the pounding of the AS-90Ds. The 155mm guns were lobbing their shells into the mass of infantry still seething through the gap in the wire torn where the baldrick cavalry had died. They were concentrating on the mass targets but that meant the infantry was slowly penetrating the first line of defense, breaking through in a thin, steady stream. They were beginning to move across the valley floor, making their way towards where the Challengers were sitting in wait behind the rippling sand and gravel dunes.

Even with the snarled mess down by the wire holding up the bulk of the baldricks, Bass was appalled by the sheer number of them coming towards his position. Intellectually, he had heard the number that was expected, nearly 100,000, but he had never imagined what 100,000 infantry swarming towards him would look like. Now, he knew. It was a sight few had ever seen before even where human armies were concerned. The mass of baldrics were something that belonged out of human prehistory.

“Mark your targets as they come.” The voice over the radio was calm and collected, the boyish pitch already well-controlled and only barely a reminder of how young their officer was. It didn’t matter much, everybody knew a junior officer fresh out of Sandhurst was still being trained in his craft. This one was doing well, Bass thought. If he survived, he might go far. Even while he thought that, his hands were selecting a group of baldricks as his target.

“Lase them.”

A brief pause. “5,003 meters boss.”

Another brief pause and then Lieutenant McLeoud’s voice cut in again. “On my word boys. Hold Fast and ….. shoot!”

“On the way.”

Third Legion, Southern Flank, Abigor’s Army

He had survived the snakes, he had seen their silver bodies stretched out on the ground, tape-like creatures that were threatening even in death. Those who had stepped on their bodies had screamed in agony as the snake teeth cut their feet apart. Demon skin was strong but the silver snakes were stronger.

He had avoided the yellow bars as well, taught by the fearful fate of those who had been careless enough to step on them. He had threaded his way through the maze on the ground, catching only minor injuries from the fragments as more careless, or less fortunate, as Krykojanklawas was quickly beginning to realize, on a battlefield they were the same thing, had stepped on the bars and been blown apart. Krykojanklawas corrected himself, the lucky ones were blown apart, the unlucky ones just had their legs ripped off and lay screaming on the ground.

The bars weren’t the only magic in the ground here. Something else was hidden in the sand and gravel, something nobody saw until it was too late. Something that threw a metal ball up into the air so that it could explode and throw out a slashing rain of fragments. The humans had a touch of true evil in their magic, the balls always exploded at about waist height and the ones caught by them were the unluckiest of all for they were rarely killed, just disemboweled and castrated by the blasts. Their screams were truly dreadful.

That was the worst thing of all, the overwhelming noise, the sensation that the bath of sound they were immersed in was itself a weapon hammering them flat with repeated waves of blasting. The explosions of the mines, the flat crack of the balls as they were thrown into the air and exploded, worst of all, the howl as the human mages created thunderbolts and hurled them into the mass of troops advancing on them. They mixed with the screams of the dying, and those who wished they were dying, in an all-embracing cacophony and the war-cry howls of the humans in their sky-chariots overhead, hunting down the surviving flies. Krykojanklawas had never heard anything like it before. If anything the sound was worse than the magic that was being thrown at him, its pressure on his head made it almost impossible to think straight.

He lifted his head slightly, the human mages were up to something new. A ripple of lightning flashed along the ridge crest ahead of him. His eyes focused on that ridge, there were strange boxes scattered along it and the lightning seemed to have come from them. Before that could really register, the bath of sound that enveloped him was punctuated by ear-splitting screams, more human battle cries Krykojanklawas presumed. How could such puny creatures give out such cries? Off to his left, a tight knot of demons had penetrated the wire, using the body of a dead Beast as a bridge. As Krykojanklawas watched, one of their leaders seemed to be hurled backwards, disintegrating into a fine spray of mist and parts as he did so. Most of those around him fell, spurting yellow body fluid from wounds torn by fragments from the magic bolt. Along the line, Krykojanklawas could see forty or fifty more such explosions as the magic bolts tore into the demonic ranks.

For the first time, he sensed that moving forward was impossible, that he could not do it and survive. All along the line, the same idea was beginning to filter into the minds of his fellows, the advance was faltering. Although he had never experienced anything like this before, the simple instinct of self-preservation cut in and Krykojanklawas took cover in a convenient dip in the ground. He was just in time, another salvo of the screaming bolts slammed into the ranks where the demons had clustered, spreading more death and destruction. At that point he noticed something, the human mages were hurling their bolts where the demons were most tightly packed, the area effect of their blasts ensured multiple kills for each bolt. Krykojanklawas began to wonder if his survival in this human-created hell, he used the phrase without any sense of irony, was due to the fact that he was in a thinly populated section where most of the demons were already down.

The human magic was being concentrated on a section of the line far away, even the terrible noise seemed to have slackened a bit. That gave Krykojanklawas an opportunity. He had already spotted another, better dip in the ground ahead of him, so he leapt up and sprinted across to it. On the way he discharged his psychic force into his trident and aimed a bolt at the ridgeline ahead. The blue bolt shot out, it would take time for him to recharge but at least he’d taken a shot at the mages. Then, he was in his new hiding place, trying to find another one that was both better and closer to the enemy.

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“What the blazes was that?”

Bass shrugged. Something had hit his tank, it seemed like some sort of ball lightning or something. It had come from the mass of infantry they were pounding. “No idea. Any damage.”

“No boss, computers flickered for a second but that’s all. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we got hit by lightning. If we did, the system hardening worked as advertised.”

Bass looked across the line, it seemed like quite a few bolts were coming in from the direction of the enemy. “The old books said that demons could throw lightning bolts didn’t they? Looks like we just got hit by one.” Ahead, down in the valley, a group of baldricks had penetrated the wire in his sector. “Load HESH.”

“Up.”

“Shoot.”

“On the way.”

The tank lurched as another 120mm HESH round went down range and Bass saw it plow into the group he’d selected, blowing one baldrick into fragments while those around it went down wounded. The thought crossed Bass’s mind that he was currently firing the biggest and most expensive sniper’s rifle in history. It also crossed his mind that snipers couldn’t possibly stop a massed attack like this. He had to give the baldricks credit, the ground in the minefield and around the wire was carpeted with their dead yet they were still pushing forward. It took gutsy infantry to do that.

“Make that a definite on the ball lightning.” Bass had seen another Challenger getting hit by a ball of lightning and briefly lighting up the way a ship’s mast sometimes did in an electrical storm. St Elmo’s Fire it was called or something. He switched to the platoon net. “Lieutenant, Sir, we’re taking incoming fire here. Some sort of electrostatic bolt, like lightning or EMP. Doesn’t seem to be dangerous to us but worth reporting.”

“Roger that Bass. For your information, other tanks and the crunchies in their Warriors are also reporting the bolts. Hold Fast.”

Bass switched back to tank intercom and picked out another baldrick target. Once again, his 120mm gun crashed, sending the baldricks flying. Their casualty rate down there was appalling, the AS-90Ds were still pounding them with their 155s while the tanks added precision fire to the execution yet they were barely making a dent in the mass of baldricks still moving forward. Bass got an uneasy feeling that the battle was not going well.

First Brigade, First Armored Division, Tel Ash Sha’ir, Northern Iraq.

“They may not know what they’re doing but my word, do they have guts.” Colonel Sean MacFarland watched the slaughter on his display. The Global Hawk was relaying real-time video of the battle as it developed, sending back pictures of the baldrick horde as they floundered under the lash of artillery fire. The MLRS batteries were inflicting incredible losses on them, every time they fired, whole sections of the baldrick front just vanished under the Steel Rain. There were two problems with that, the batteries fired about once every eight or nine minutes and that just wasn’t often enough. The other was that they had already dumped more than a million DPICM bomblets into the target area. With a 2 percent failure rate, that meant there were already 20,000 dud rounds scattering the battlefield. That would make it a hazard for years to come.

Still, the gap between the MLRS salvoes was being filled by the Paladins. All 54 guns in the First Armored were now pouring fire into the enemy army. A human army would have broken by now, given up, known that getting through the artillery fire was impossible, and saved their lives by pulling back. The baldricks weren’t doing that. Not yet at any rate. MacFarland know they would, sooner or later. They were fighting the United States Army on its terms, on its ground, giving it exactly the target the Army was supremely good at destroying. The baldricks would either run or die. Even as he watched, a new element was added to the massacre, the Bradleys of his mechanized infantry were firing TOW anti-tank missiles into the enemy formation, picking out the groups the artillery missed and cutting them down. The tanks were silent, MacFarland intended to hold fire with them until the enemy were 2,000 meters away. The 120mm smoothbore didn’t have the accurate range of the British rifled 120mms so the Bradleys had to take over the long-range precision fire role.

MacFarland looked at the mass of infantry threshing in the kill zone and shook his head. They had to stop. Didn’t they?

Cavalry Legion, Left Flank of the Army of Abigor, Tel Ash Sha’ir, Northern Iraq.

They were hunched up, backs bent, heads down, looking for all the world as if they were trying to walk through some ferocious storm. Same grim determination to find shelter. And that wasn’t a bad comparison thought Zorankalirtagap, that’s what they were. Facing a storm that slaughtered everything in its path. Ever since his Beast had been killed, Zorankalirtagap had been advancing with the infantry against the hideous magic of the humans. He caught his breath, suddenly the sky behind the humans had turned white again, white shot with fire as their fire-lances sped towards the floundering demon advance. He watched the sight with fear in his heart, then sighed slightly as it descended on the flank of the line, far from his position. It happened again, the same rippling cloud of explosions that left no demons standing when it cleared. Anything was better than the fire lances, even the magic bolts that screamed and caused the ground to erupt under their feet.

There was something new, from a position in front of them, more human chariots had appeared, barely visible with just a small box over the ridgeline. For all their skills, the humans were cowards, Zorankalirtagap consoled himself with that thought, they didn’t stand proud and fight, they hid in hollows and dips in the ground to kill. And kill, and kill, and kill thought Zorankalirtagap grimly. Oh yes, they were very good at that.

The boxes fired fire-lances at a group of demons on Zorankalirtagap’s right. The targets scattered but it did them no good. They’d been lucky enough to escape the fire-lances and the bolts but these new weapons were different. As Zorankalirtagap watched appalled, the fire-lances changed course to follow their targets. Even those who forget their honor and took cover in dips like humans could not save themselves, the fire lances were following them into the cover they had sought. It was more than flesh and blood, even demonic flesh and blood could stand. The leading demons started to edge backwards, even as the ones behind continued to push forward. The advance ground to a halt in the chaos.

The Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“Air Raid Warning Red! Red! Red!” The scream over the radio was just in time. A group of about 30 harpies had managed to assemble themselves from the massacre in the skies over the battlefield and attacked the tanks sitting on the ridgeline. Bass could feel his tank lurch as a group of them landed on it, heard their claws scrabbling at the armor. His radio went dead, at a guess, he thought the antenna had probably been ripped off by the harpies. Then he heard a ringing noise, the sound of machine gun fire bouncing of armor plate. The Warriors were machine-gunning the tanks in an effort to drive the harpies off them. Bass looked through his vision blocks, some were masked by clawed hands trying to rip them open but he could see Bravo-Three was also covered with harpies, the tracers from three Warriors converging on it as the infantry protected the tanks from the sudden assault. On a sudden thought, Bass looked up and made sure his hatch was firmly clamped shut. One harpy was driven off the tank by the fire, it exploded in the air as the Warrior fired a few rounds from its 30mm RARDEN gun into it. Others were dying as they were shot up by the Warrior’s coaxial chain guns. That was creating a new problem, Bass could see Bravo-Three was starting to smoke, the acid from the harpy’s blood probably. The paint on the Challengers would resist the acid but there were other things out there that could be vulnerable.

The tanks were backing up. Bass hadn’t received any orders but with his radio down, it was a fair guess they were out so he joined in the movement. Like the other tanks, he popped his smoke launchers, the choking white fumes driving off the remaining harpies. By the time the baldricks swarmed over the positions he had once held, the Challengers were back behind the next ridgeline.

Headquarters, British Brigade, Wadi Al Jaram, Western Iraq

Brigadier John Carlson looked at his map, his front line had been driven in, the tanks and armored infantry pushed back to the next defense positions. That left the baldricks spread out between the wire and the next defense line in a vast disorganized mass. He picked up his radio, it was already set to the right frequency. “Now, General Zolfaghari, now’s your time. Put every gun to them Sir, every gun.”

“Getting a bit Wellingtonian aren’t we?” The Iranian General’s voice was urbane and slightly amused. Then his division spoke for him. Outside the sky to Carlson’s left turned white as the massed batteries of Iranian BM-21 rocket launchers opened fire, pouring their rockets into the baldrick’s flank and rear. Under the white cloud was a black one as the T-72s gunned their engines and started their charge at the enemy.

Third Legion, Southern Flank, Abigor’s Army

The onslaught was totally unexpected, the enemy were in retreat, covered by the fog they had conjured up. Then, somehow, they had poured a new mass of fire into the right flank and rear of the demon forces. Krykojanklawas looked over to the left and saw the black cloud as something crossed the ridgeline. He focused his eyes and almost screamed in horror at what he saw. “The humans have Iron Chariots!”

He wasn’t the only one. Others saw the more than 300 T-72 tanks pouring over the ridgeline, moving terrifyingly fast through the sand. They saw them spit fire, the blaze rippling along their front line as the shots went on their way to tear into the demonic ranks. Every demon sensed the new chariots and knew the truth. they were made of iron. Not just any iron but some sort of super iron. The demons recoiled from their old enemy, it was just too much. After the pounding, the mines, the wire, their nerve broke.

Headquarters of Merafawlazes, Commander, Northern Flank, Abigor’s Army

Merafawlazes had learned much about war in the last few hours. He had learned that cavalry could no longer charge an enemy. He learned that artillery was the great killer no matter whether the targets were demons or humans. He had learned that his soldiers were helpless against tanks. He had learned that humans were the supreme masters of mass killing and were only too keen to practice their art. Now he learned that the moment an Army disintegrates and changes from a defeated force to a panicked mob can be measured with exquisite precision. The French Army at Waterloo disintegrated at precisely 8:15pm, the Union Army at First Bull Run at precisely 4:20pm. Merafawlazes saw his army disintegrate with exactly the same precision. As the great iron chariots of the humans emerged from their hiding places, his army dissolved into chaos, running for the rear. The Iron Chariots followed them and they could move much faster than even the panic-stricken demons. That was when he had his next lesson. An Army suffers heavier casualties when it breaks than it does when it stands.

M1A2 Abrams Charlie-Three, Tel Ash Sha’ir, Northern Iraq.

There was thirty dead an' wounded on the ground we wouldn't keep --  No, there wasn't more than twenty when the front begun to go;  But all along the line o' flight they cut us up like sheep,  An' that was all we gained by doin' so.

The M1 crested the ground smoothly, the great barrel of its gun held in place by the stabilization system. There was hardly any need to use it, the baldricks were running for the rear, the Abrams tanks spraying them with fire from their coaxial and turret-top machine guns. In the driver’s seat, SPC Brungardt saw a wounded baldrick fall to the ground in front of the racing tank. The 70 ton Abrams didn’t even lurch as it drove over the body. Brungardt thumbed his intercom button. “Hey guys guess what. Baldricks go crunch too.”

Chapter Fourteen

Wadi Abu Tahir, Western Iraq, late afternoon

Memnon snorted in disgust as he watched the young human die. He stared into those cow-like eyes as they fluttered and the hands feebly clawed at his infernal flesh. He could feel the soul within stirring now as the meat caging it finally ceased its life functions. He casually allowed the corpse the slide out of his grip and he was quiet for a long moment, listening. The humans were about in large numbers and he was no fool. His wings would take time to regenerate and his flesh was still aching from his wounds. Their spears of plastic and metal spat hot burning bolts that could wound even his great personage. This was not the way it was to be. Go find them and challenge them, he was told. They will cower before you. He had found the humans but their chariots of steel and plastic were far too powerful for him. He had lost two wing mates already and he was in no condition to meet them again. Not yet, anyway.

Memnon smiled cruelly. When he did, there would be blood. Enough to drown a thousand human infants, and then the pain would come. Sweet melodic pain. Memnon’s eyes fluttered and the never born knew that it was time to rest. His prey had been bested and he had claimed a lair for himself. At least long enough to heal the wounds and allow his spirit flesh to sing to the domain he called home. This wretched place of cloying life and limited matter was not to his liking. He was his own being and he needed rest.

“Just for a little while.” Memnon growled and curled down onto the floor next to the corpse of the boy. He looked with contentment at the place that surrounded him for sprawled out across the couch was an older woman, head turned completely around and leering at him while a younger woman was impaled on a broken piece of furniture, scream frozen on her face. All were small offerings to the Morningstar and his Prince to watch over him in this moment of weakness. He would repay them with more flesh and blood when he was whole again.

Wadi Abu Tahir, Western Iraq, just before dawn

A single eye snapped open at the sound of the tea pot whistle and Memnon spoke. “For disturbing me in this moment of respite, you shall know such wonders of pain, I will make a cathedral of your bones and sinew and your agony will be my choir, pathetic human.” He snarled coldly at the young Arabic man who now shared the high-roofed barn that was now his den. A man dressed in plain khakis and a billowy white shirt opened at his chest who nodded politely to Memnon and knelt cross legged across from him as he delicately poured himself a cup of tea. The steam rose lazily from the ancient chipped porcelain. It had been brewing on the stove and the smell wafted over to the groggy demon.

“Peace and blessing be upon you, Fallen One. Your absence still saddens my patron.”

Memnon paused. He stirred more now, unfurling like some obscene spider, long leathery limbs reaching out as he rose with eyes like cold embers pinning the young man with a predatory gaze. “Slave of the Nameless One.” Memnon inclined his head with bitter sarcastic politeness as he smelled the clean scent of the Angelic.

“Care for a cup?” the Angelic asked with a child like innocence as he sipped his own, for a brief moment he closed his eyes and seemed to savor the tea like one savored the sensation of forced coupling.

“You’re all whores to your senses, you know that, don’t you?” Memnon chuckled darkly, his cloven hooves clomping on the packed earth floor like a caged bull as he paced back and forth before the kneeling man.

“This world is delight and rapture. It is the fulfillment of all and the joy of bliss.” The young man sighed as he inhaled the aroma from the tea cup.

Memnon said nothing. They liked to talk, they liked to taste, they liked to savor, these slaves of the Nameless.

“What is the purpose of this world if not to delight in its wonders? You must remember, surely, how bright it is in our Ethereal Realm. How the chorus of praise and supplication a constant backdrop to the great one above us all as he basks in our light of selfless devotion.” He continued in a soft whisper like leaves on silk.

“What manner of slave are you, eh? Cherub, perhaps?” Memnon asked silkily. How frail he looked just sitting there, it stirred his predatory urges like a woman’s breast called to a male. Memnon clomped forward a bit, talons gleaming dangerously.

The Angelic inclined his head and closed his eyes and listened to intently for a moment, he looked absolutely beautiful, like a statue carved of perfect alabaster, there was not a blemish on his skin and his body moved with a sublime grace that would have made a human weep. Was it a wonder that these bastards had their way with the women of this wretched place while his kin had to forcibly take what they wanted? Was it any wonder they were always the ones the Nameless sent in his stead to speak for him.

Always put your best face forward they say. They were such supple and elegant heralds. How could the humans resist worshipping the Nameless One when these were the ones he sent in its name? If the humans could only see what they actually worshipped, now that would be worth the price of admission, no?

“It is so…quiet here.” The Angelic announced with tears welling in its eyes. “No maddening chorus always haunting your every thought, no cries of baseless devotion, no shrieks of joyous revelation. Just. Silence.” There was a sadness there, deep and abiding.

Memnon could stand it no longer, it maddened him to see this abject weakness paraded before him. “Slave!” he roared.

There was a rip and whirl of taloned hands and leathery limbs flashing forward and the angelic merely raised his head as if offering his throat to his attacker but it gestured with its hand and Memnon was catapulted off his feet and landed in a heap against the far wall of the shack, shaking the entire frame to its core.

The angelic was off his feet and had crossed the room in a single stride in between heart beats and he had a flawless alabaster hand wrapped around Memnon’s throat. Without a grunt of effort, the Angelic hoisted the still stunned Harpy off his feet and held him high above him. The eyes were no longer human but white within white and there was a low sound growing around him like a chorus of women slowly building up tempo.

“I am Appoloin, servant to Gabriel-Lan, Seraph of the Hosts of Michael-Lan, Devout Servant and Herald of He Above All Others. You will listen to my words and heed them.”

“I…listen.” Memnon managed to choke out.

“Are you certain?” Appoloin asked tightly and there was a cold smile on his face. Oh, yes they were beautiful, but they were also terrible in their wrath. These humans worshipped the Nameless with such zeal and spoke of his Perfect Love never really discussing that when the time came for punishment it was these beautiful angels that delivered death and destruction without hesitation or remorse. In the end, human morality was just as alien to this beautiful creature as it was to Memnon.

“Yes, Appoloin. I attend your words.” Memnon stammered.

“We are watching. Tell your prince that. The One Above All has spoken yet he sees vile repugnant defiance from humanity. The Great Chorus must not be disturbed. The Chanting must not cease. Your ilk were given this world and we see nothing but abhorrent failure. We do not want to take a more active role. Uriel awaits on the ether like a sword of Damocles.”

“Uriel?!” Memnon exclaimed.

“Last he moved upon man, the Land of Khemet wept bitter tears. Do not force our hand. Cow them. Stop the defiance. Should they find a way to disrupt the Chorus we will end this charade once and for all.” Gabriel jerked Memnon down to face him, tusk to nose.

“Clear, foul one?” Appoloin replied like ice and hurled the Never Born back through the wall of the shack. Corrugated tin and sheet rock gave way and Memnon found himself running before he even realized he was touching ground again.

“Peace be with you.” Appoloin whispered into the dawn wind and calmly sat back down to enjoy his tea.

He was disturbed in his tranquility by a roar and a clattering noise that shook dust from the ceiling of the hut and spoiled his tea. Dawn had still only half arrived but standing at the door, he could see a hulking brute made of square boxes sitting in the road. Two more of the same were behind it and three smaller brutes. Appoloin looked more carefully, there were twenty thin black rings painted around the long tube that stuck out of the upper box. The there was a squeaking noise and something opened from the top. At first Appoloin thought it was one of the foul ones but then he saw it was a human. With his eye for beauty, he saw her as comely, and buxom even by the standards of the daughters of Ham.

Lieutenant Keisha “Hooters” Stevenson didn’t feel comely. She was gray with exhaustion, her hair under her communications helmet was matted and her scalp stinging with sweat. She and the crew of Alpha-One-One had been on the move all night, at first chasing down the fleeing remnants of the northern army. Later, they’d split away and were now swinging west and south across the rear of the Baldrick army. If it had been a human force, there would have been supply columns to devastate and rear area units to destroy but here there was nothing. Until they’d come to this tiny village. Here, they had to wait until the great ships of the desert, the Oshkosh Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks, could catch up with them and bring them new supplies of fuel for the greedy gas turbines and ammunition for their guns. Although Stevenson thought, they didn’t need ammunition for all their kills. The roadwheels and bellies of the Abrams and Bradleys were stained green and yellow with baldrick blood. It was a dirty little secret of armored warfare that tanks killed infantry with their tracks just as often as they did with their guns.

There were other dirty little secrets as well of course. One of them, she had found, was that her physique wasn’t perfectly suited to the inside of a cramped armored vehicle. Put quite bluntly her breasts got in the way. Back in her first unit, their impressive size had got her the nickname of ‘hooters’. Woman in the Army reacted to things like that one of two ways, they either got offended, kicked up a fuss and were eased out or they sucked it up, gave back as good as they got and were accepted. Stevenson had been one of the second group but that didn’t help her now. After being thrown around inside a fast-moving tank all night, she was sore, tired, bruised and battered. And she had seen so much killing over the last twenty hours that she was a veteran with a veterans lack of patience for stupidity.

Still the dawn chill felt good after being sealed down for so long. She looked around the village, saw people slowly coming out of the buildings to look at the great American tanks. She checked them over carefully, noting the glitter of silver from their covered heads. The word was spreading fast, cover your head with foil if you don’t want a baldrick stealing your mind. Even out here in the back of beyond. The breeze sure did feel good though, even though it gave her a shrewd idea of just how bad she must smell. She slipped the shoulder straps of her top off to get full benefit from the cool air. That caused a stir of disapproval from some of the men in the village, although she did note they kept staring at her to remind themselves how offended they felt.

In his doorway, Appoloin saw the gesture and felt perturbed. She might be comely but such brazen behavior was immodest. He stepped away from his doorway into the street, projecting an image of love and friendliness with all his might. “Cover yourself woman,” and his kindly voice echoed across the street.

“Screw you!” Stevenson’s voice was harsh for she was a veteran and didn’t suffer fools gladly. “And the horse you ….. SHIT! Baldrick 20 degrees left! Canister!” She dropped back into the turret of her tank, by long practice ending the fall in her commander’s position. The turret was already swinging to bear on her mark.

“Up.”

“Shoot.”

The gunner saw the cross-hairs merge with the figure standing silhouetted against the rising sun. “On the way.”  The blast of canister took Appoloin full in the chest, hurling him backwards and tearing at his body. Incredibly, it didn’t kill him although there was no way he would have survived wounds that terrible. It was the bursts from the 25mm Bushmaster chain guns on the Bradleys that finished him off. Confused by the sudden, vicious attack and in agony from the wounds, Appoloin died in a spreading pool of white blood.

A few minutes later, Stevenson and her crew were looking down at the body, now revealed in its true form, a white humanoid with wings. “Not the same as the ones we’ve killed so far ell-tee.” Stevenson’s crew were punctilious about addressing her correctly when others were around. Inside their tank she was ‘hooters’ just as the gunner was ‘baldy’, the loader ‘crab’ and the driver ‘biker’ but, for them, using her nickname where outsiders could hear would be disrespectful.

“Not the same at all. I guess this is one of them angels. Doesn’t matter, we declared war on them as well.” She raised her voice slightly. “Did anybody see where this one came from?”

One of the village women pointed at a barn-like building. Crab went over and looked inside, then came back, his face grim and as white as the body stretched out on the ground. “You’d better take a look at this ell-tee.”

Stevenson went into the hut and looked for what seemed a long, long time. When she came back, her eyes were blank. “Well, that puts paid to any idea about them being good guys doesn’t it? We need a camera crew up here to film that.” Suddenly, she shook with rage. “Damn him. He sat there drinking tea surrounded by that horror show. Slaughtered an entire family and then drank a cup of tea.”

“Don’t sweat it ell-tee. We done good here. Nobody believed they were on the side of righteousness any more. Not after The Message.” Baldy was speaking from the barrel of the 120mm gun where he had just finished painting a white ring to match all the black ones.

Far away, in the rocky wasteland, Memnon heard the crash of the gun and crackle of gunfire and decided he’d better vacate the area. Very quickly.

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Next.”

James Randi sighed. It sounded so good using the enormous expertise his Educational Foundation had built up in detecting fraudulent psychics and mediums to try and find the real thing. It was hard to believe that the JREF was now the front line in humanity’s fight against its enemies. Neither consideration changed the fact that the day-to-day reality of the task was boring. He had another candidate for testing, a young woman who called herself kitten. No capital he noted, important thing that. It was essential to make the interviewees comfortable. He heard the door open and glanced up. Years of expertise in self control kept his face expressionless but he knew this day at least would not be considered boring.

Two people had entered the room, one a young man dressed all in black with a vaguely military style coat that reached down below his knees. A goth, although that wasn’t what had added interest to Randi’s otherwise routine day. With him was a young woman, another goth dressed in black with her hair down around her shoulders, her long dress low cut and held by thin shoulder straps. The young man was leading her around by a dog-leash attached to a collar around her neck.

“You must be kitten?” Randi’s voice was even. “Would you like to take a seat?”

The girl paused for a second until the man with her gave a quick nod, then she sat down. “I’m kitten, yes.”

“You too Sir, please sit down.” The young man did so. “kitten, why are you here today?”

“I read your advertisement asking for people who can contact the dead to call you. I can do that, sometimes. I can also see into hell.”

“I see, what’s hell like?”

“Some parts of it aren’t too bad. Imagine a really destroyed city, one where all the buildings are smashed, the streets ruined. Like those pictures of those World War Two German cities after the Allied bombing. Freezing cold, raining all the time, people gathered around burning garbage to keep warm, the only food available, trash from skips. And no hope, everybody knowing that it’ll never be any different, never going to get any better. That’s where I’m going when I die. I’m lucky, some parts of hell are much, much worse.”

“How long have you known this kitten? Been able to see these things.”

“As long as I can remember. I’m not quite normal you see. In fact, I’m very far from normal.”

Randi’s secretary came in with a file and handed it over, being very careful to keep her face straight. Randi looked at the psychiatrist’s report. It described kitten as a paranoid schizophrenic with apocalyptic delusions but added that she was perfectly well compensated and, despite her condition, was able to function in society without medication. In fact, the shrink had concluded, functionally she was the most well-adjusted person he dealt with and that included his own staff. Randi allowed himself to smile at that. Then he flipped over to her birth certificate and he couldn’t stop the look of surprise.

“Um, your birth certificate has you listed as male?”

“I was born in the wrong body. I’m having it put right surgically. I’ve had these,” she waved at her chest,” done already. We’re saving up for the big operation now.”

“Well, if you do well here, my government will pay for that operation for you.” Behind them, General Asanee had entered the room, as silently as always. Randi found it perturbing how she could move with so little disturbance. “We have the best surgeons in the world for that type of operation and my Army will see you get the best of the best.”

“Quite. Obviously if your claims are proved, you will be very important to us.” Randi hesitated, not quite certain how to address kitten.

“Please use either ‘she’ or ‘it’ when referring to me. I don’t want to be called ‘he’ ever.” Kitten spoke firmly and decisively on that point. Randi nodded, he could respect somebody who stuck to their guns regardless of public opinion.

“That’s fine with us kitten. Now, did you sell your vision services to people, to contact their relatives, that sort of thing?”

Kitten shook her head. “How could I tell people what had happened to their friends, their family? It would be cruel. I’ve told close friends that I could see into hell but that’s all.”

“That’s very good. Right, kitten, we are going to carry out some tests on you. We think we’ve detected how people can communicate across the dimensional barrier and we can measure it. So we’re going to see what happens when you try and look into hell. Sir.” Randi switched to kitten’s friend. “We have a very comfortable waiting room or, if you like, one of the guides can give you the Pentagon tour.”

“Sir,” kitten spoke deferentially. “I do this much better if I’m comfortable and I’ll be much more at ease if Dani is with me and holding my leash. So can he come in please?”

“If that’s what you wish, of course.” Randi dug into another file. “We’re going to ask you to try and contact these people, they are the crews of some helicopters that were lost in Iraq almost a fortnight ago. If you’d like to study these pictures, perhaps you can get through to them.” He handed the pictures over. They were of Lieutenant Jade “Broomstick” Kim and the rest of the crews of Tango-One-Five.

(Note of appreciation to Stravo who wrote the first half of the first part and to Her Grace, the Dutchess of Zeon who kindly told me about kitten)

Chapter Fifteen

Headquarters, Multi-National Force Iraq, Green Zone, Baghdad.

Once again, General Petraeus was standing before the great screen in his command center, only this time it was linked directly to the Pentagon, the White House and an increasing number of capitals around the world. The screen showed President Bush, Defense Secretary Warner and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but he knew that many, many more people were watching than that.

“Sir, we have the initial reports from the battles on the flanks in. We have successfully routed both flanking forces. In the North, the First Armored is already outflanking the baldrick main body and moving into positions to its west. In the South, the Iranian Shamshar Division under General Fereidoon Zolfaghari is also outflanking the enemy and we expect it will link up with the First Armored sometime tomorrow. At that point, the enemy main body will be completely encircled. Our casualties have been remarkably light. A Challenger main battle tank, a Bradley fighting vehicle, two HEMTT trucks and of all the soldiers involved in the fighting, only twenty five have lost their lives. As far as we can tell at this time, all our losses were victims of harpy attacks.”

“Enemy casualties?” Secretary Warner spoke urgently.

“We’re not into body counts Sir, not after Vietnam, and the enemy dead are so smashed up it’s impossible to tell how many there are. Details of the pursuit through the night are also only just coming in and it appears the enemy believed that fighting would stop at dusk. We didn’t oblige them of course, we kept going and made it a twenty-four hour battle. During the process, we overran a lot of baldricks who had settled down for the night. So I cannot give you a figure I would be confident with.”

“An estimate, a guess, anything?”

“At a conservative estimate, I would say the enemy cannot have lost less than 60,000 dead, probably many more. What’s left of the flanking forces is falling back on their main body. That main body is still advancing on the center of our line, we expect them to launch their attacks in a few hours. We’ll be concentrating all of our airpower to sweep the sky clean of harpies. Once we’ve done that, the ground forces can repeat the punishment we handed out yesterday. If anything the balance of forces is more favorable to us in the center than it was on the flanks. Once the harpies are out of the way, we can start using our helicopters over the battlefield again.”

“How are your munitions supplies holding up?” Warner’s voice was concerned.

“Very well Sir, we are well-supplied here, we built up a good stockpile in case Iran invaded us and they built up an equal stockpile in case we invaded them. Some, not much but some, of the stocks are interchangeable and the Russians are flying in more. There’s a couple of Il-76s here now, unloading rockets for the Iranian artillery. Secretary Warner Sir, may I ask how the production ramp-up is proceeding? We’re OK for ground forces ammunition but we’re running through AIM-120s at a terrifying rate. After tomorrow we’re going to be real short.”

“Not well General. The problem is that so much of the need is inter-related. The AIM-120 is a good example, we’re accelerating production of the missile as fast as we can but we’re short of guidance systems. We’ve got AIM-120 airframes backing up out of the door waiting for the guidance modules. Raytheon have come up with a partial fix, they’ve designed a new weapon, the AIR-120. Essentially its an AIM-120 with a simple inertial stabilization system that keeps it flying straight and level. They’ve packed it with a warhead that’s three times more powerful than the AIM-120 and given it a fast-burn motor for high speed. It can be carried on a standard triple ejector rack in place of a single AIM-120. Raytheon will build as many AIM-120s as they can get guidance modules for and the rest will be AIR-120s.

“It’s the same across the board I fear. We’ll get it straightened out but we’re running off stocks until we do.”

On the screen, Petraeus nodded. It was more or less what he has suspected.”

White House Conference Room, Washington DC

“Thank you General Petraeus. Doctor Surlethe, what are the results from our investigations of the baldricks.”

“They’re going to start flooding in fast now Sir. We’ve had only limited samples to work with to date but now, with all this in Iraq, that’s going to change. And we’ve got the succubus that defected. We could learn a lot simply by dissecting her.”

“No way.” Director of National Intelligence Donald MacLean Kerr jumped straight on the idea. “She’s the first live baldrick we’ve got our hands on. We need to talk to her, she knows how hell is organized, what its chains of command are, what its social and political structures are like. We’re not dealing with a different country here, or even a different world. We’re dealing with an entirely different dimension. We need to know how that dimension works, what its economy is like, if indeed it has an economy. We need to know what sort of enemy we are fighting and what his resources are like. We can’t get any of that from her dissected corpse.”

“And suppose she won’t tell you?” Doctor Surlethe jumped straight back.

“We could always waterboard her?”

“How do you know she can’t breath water?” Secretary Rice’s voice was droll.

“Exactly my point.” Surlethe was getting impassioned. “Military and political data is all very well, economic information too, but first we need to know much more about the baldricks themselves. How do they work? Can we get some idea of what powers they take for granted but seem magical to us? I’m sorry Don, but investigation of the baldricks themselves must come first. Which is rather unfortunate for her of course.”

“Gentlemen.” The room quieted as President Bush spoke. “You are forgetting that this succubus came over to us on a promise that she would not be ill-treated. We did not make that promise but it was made to her on our behalf by our allies. We cannot go back on our word. We must not.”

“She didn’t defect voluntarily, she had a ring of guns pointed at her.”

“I know. If she’d fought, she’d still probably have killed some of those women. She chose not to.”

“Sir.” General Petraeus spoke from the screen. “There is a practical side to this as well. We have one defector who came over on a promise of good treatment. How we treat her may very well decide how many more baldricks decide to surrender or, even better, defect. If they get the idea that surrendering is a way out from certain death facing our tanks and artillery, it might end this war more quickly. It may very well mean fewer of our people get killed. Treating surrendered enemy personnel with extreme brutality has never worked to the favor of those committing such acts.”

“I agree.” Secretary Warner added his emphasis. “We’ve danced on a thin line during the War on Terror and shot ourselves in the foot doing it. We should not repeat that mistake.”

“General, Secretary Warner, your practical comments add weight to my instincts on this. Doctor Surlethe, you may investigate the succubus using non-invasive methods provided they do not inflict harm upon her. You may, with her consent, take blood samples etc. But there will be no dissection, is that clear?” Surlethe nodded. Unhappily but still a nod.

“Mister Randi, how is your end of this going?”

“Very well Sir, we made a breakthrough today. A young…..” Randi hesitated and then decided to keep going. “… woman came in, she can see in to hell. We have her trying to contact some of our deceased personnel now. Hunting through psychics and mediums was a false step, none of them turned out to be anything other than common mountebanks and tricksters, but we have found some interesting cases under psychiatric care. Also, our advertisements have brought in a few people with promise. We have another young lady who can get into the mind of a demon and she’s exploiting that right now. As soon as we can work out how to expand that from talking to one demon into talking to all of them at one, we’ll launch Radio Free Hell.”

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA.

Lugasharmanaska was utterly bewildered. She’d been on earth not so long ago, a mere couple of centuries, but she’d had nothing like these experiences then. How had all these machines suddenly appeared? She’d flown for hours in a huge sky chariot, one loaded down with crates of more things called supplies. The crew had been nice to her of course, that was inevitable, they’d offered her food and drink and she’d accepted it even though it wouldn’t quench her appetite much. Her body craved raw meat, preferably torn from a still-living body and the thing she’d been given didn’t even come close. Just what was a ‘hot pocket’ anyway?

She could have adapted more easily to the sights around her if there weren’t so many of them. The city she had been assigned to was bad enough, all those tiny chariots racing around, but this great field was full of the huge Sky Chariots. Even as she watched, a different one was coming in to land. To her incredulous eyes, it changed even while it did so, its swept-back wings suddenly swinging forward to reach straight out. Then it touched down on the long black strip and started to slow. Immediately a band started playing, making her jump.

“Yeah, bands do that.” The Air Force policeman watching her was sympathetic. Of course. Her mind-mask didn’t work any more but the miasma was still doing its job of creating sympathy with the humans around her. “It’s the 32nd Tactical Fighter Wing standing up. That’s the first F-111 to rejoin the Air Force.”

None of that made much sense to Lugasharmanaska. She did note one thing though, the Sky Chariot that had brought her was painted light gray, the one that had just landed was a cloudy mix of gray and orange-red. It never occurred to her that its paint job was an exact match to the skies of hell.

A long black ground chariot had pulled up and she was escorted into the back seat. The driver looked at her with hate that quickly faded to mild affection. The door closed behind her and the chariot pulled away. Lugasharmanaska couldn’t see where the horses were hidden. Still, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that she was safe. She quickly recalled the split second of blind panic when she looked at the ring of guns pointed at her and knew death was but a split second away. Miasma had done its work, Lugasharmanaska didn’t know it but the panic had kicked her glands into working overtime and secreting human pheromones that created sympathy for her with everybody around. That had bought her just enough time. She’d worked her situation out with speed and hedged her bets by surrendering. If the demons won, she would have fulfilled her mission and penetrated the enemy leadership, gaining vital information. She would have done her duty and be rewarded. If the humans won, and looking around her Lugasharmanaska had an unpleasant feeling they might, she would be the first defector and would also be well-rewarded. No matter who won, she would be safe.

Sacramento, California

Norman Baines sighed and rubbed his eyes, and glanced at his watch. He'd been sitting in front of his computer for about ten hours, plowing through a weeks' worth of reports for his job. He didn't actually have to work forty hours, as long as it LOOKED like he did. "Time for breakfast." Victor, one of his cats and self-appointed overseer gave a 'rowr' of approval as he hopped down and padded after Baines towards the kitchen. Two other cats, Roger and Clarence, soon joined him as they all gathered around their communal bowl. Baines peeked through the kitchen blinds and gave the sky a glance. "No eternal darkness yet," He said with a wry grin. His 'boys' looked up at him, curiously, "looks like the betting pool is still open!" With that Victor, Clarence, and Roger bent down to their dry food. Fixing a bowl of nondescript bachelor chow, he wandered over to the couch and turned on the TV.

He sighed at the empty beer cans on the coffee table, they were his way of coping with the betrayal he'd felt after the Message came out. A man in his late twenties, Baines had been very active in his church, a faithful man but also fairly rational. And, as Dawkins had said, extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence. He'd gone to services once, but it had seemed hollow. Now he spent his days processing reports for his job from his home computer, enjoying the relative safety of his home.

Picking up the remote, he flipped through the channels.

*CLICK*

"Hey kids, its Bill Nye the Science Guy here! Be sure to keep your foil hats on at all times, you can never be too safe. Let's see how science protects YOU from the baldr-"

*CLICK*

"The Top Ten Signs that annoying guy in your office might be a demon number ten: Instead of decaf he drinks brimsto-"

*CLICK*

"And if you act now we'll throw in a FIFTH digital camera for free so you can monitor your home for demons twenty-four-seven!"

*CLICK*

"Coming through the desert in West Iraq, if you come to East Compton I'm gonna bust a cap! Don't bring your demon nonsense up in my hood, the Crips are rollin' large and we up to no good!"

Baines sighed and looked at Clarence, now bathing himself on the recliner. "I don't know if its more disconcerting that he's rapping about demons, or that it's a good tune." There was a loud knock at the door. He walked over and picked up a digital camera. Opening the door, he turned it on and looked at the screen. Humans.

He looked up and his eyes widened. It was in fact two men in suits and two men in army uniforms carrying automatic weapons. "Norman L. Baines?" One of the suited men asked.

"Ye-yes, sir." Baines stammered It was a strange feeling to be unused to talking to someone else. He hadn't said five words to a human being since the Message. He stuck out a foot to prevent Victor from making an escape.

“My name is Robert O'Shea, I'm with the Pentagon. This is my colleague, Doctor Watts. May we have a few moments of your time?" He stood solidly, implying that his request was nothing but. Dr. Watts, however, looked like someone who would rather be anywhere else.

"Ah, sure, come on in." Baines shook himself out of his momentary daze and ushered the men in, hurriedly moving dirty dishes and stacks of books and papers out of the way. One guard remained at the front door and the other simply nodded to O'Shea and began to move through the house. "Please, sit down.", Baines gestured to a dingy sofa. O’Shea sat down, but Doctor Watts remained standing, studying one of Baines's bookcases. "How can I help you guys?"

"We wanted to talk to you about your book, Mr. Baines." O’Shea opened his briefcase and pulled out a thick, collated document bound in plastic.

"I never… my…" Baines took the book and his eyes bulged as he read the cover, The Science of Hell, by N. L. Baines. "But this wasn't published! Where… how in the hell did you even GET....CHARLIE!" He looked at O’Shea. "Charlie gave it to you! That bastard!"

"That's right Mr. Baines, your brother gave this to us. Don't be hard on him though. The President recently signed an executive order requesting all knowledge of demonology and demon-history be surrendered to our department. Had Lt. Baines withheld this document, he could have been tried for treason." O’Shea leaned in closely, his eyes scrutinizing Baines inch by inch "Where do you get your information, Mr. Baines?"

Baines's mind swam. He'd had this same feeling in graduate school when he showed up for his final on archaeological methods after spending the night cramming for medieval literature. "What? Uh... I just kinda read-up on it. It's a hobby, you know?"

A snort from Dr. Watts drew Baines's attention to the bookshelf. "This is the Key of Solomon?" Baines shrugged. "In Latin? That's a bit more than a 'hobby', Mr. Baines.

Baines felt his hackles rise, "And what? I'm supposed to trust that dipwad, Mathers to translate it correctly for me?"

Watts wasn't listening as he pawed through more books, "O’Shea look at this nonsense: A Field Guide to Demons, A Dictionary of Angels, Dragon Magic, Secrets of the Vatican, Norse Runes and Magic..." He shook his head in disgust. "He's just a nut. We're wasting our time."

Baines was on his feet in an instant. O'Shea was startled that this mild-mannered scientist could look so enraged "Now you listen to me, you pompus, self-assured, g-man prick! I don't come into the Pentagon and tell you how to polish your desk and shuffle your papers, so don't tell me what I know in my own house!" He took the books out of Watt's hands, and pointed at the couch. "By the way, you're right. Most of what's in these books is ridiculous superstition and nonsense, collected by centuries of nut-jobs. However," his voice began to change into the voice of an excited professor and O'shea was briefly reminded of his History professor back at NYU.

Watts rolled his eyes. "For example?"

Baines sighed condescendingly, "qui habet aures audiendi audiat. Alright, Captain PHD, take a look at this!" Baines walked over to a wall and pulled down a large hanging rug with a flourish revealing a large chart. There were hand-written notes, string, and pictures all over it. Both men stared blankly, as though unsure if Baines might turn into a baldrick at any moment "THIS," He pointed to the chart. "Is just about every book ever written about Judeo-Christian demons and hell, set chronologically." He pointed to lines connecting them. "As you were so kind to point out, they're about eighty-five to ninety-five percent crap, but they have common threads, and those threads migrate over time." He traced the lines with his fingers. "You can see here's old-testament, pre-Christian stuff, and it trends onward, and then BAM." He stopped at a prominent 'zig' "Constantine and the Roman Empire. Changes opinions, but some things stay the same. We also have shifts during the Dark Ages, and a BIG shift with Dante. But, if you look hard enough you can sift through the crap and find out what makes sense."

"Makes sense? Robert, this man is a GEOLOGIST." Dr. Watts got up and walked toward the opposite wall. He scratched some paint from the wall, revealing silvery metal underneath. "And his entire house is wrapped in aluminum foil. I'd wonder if anything DOESN'T make sense to him."

"Wait a second," Baines raised a hand. "I did my house like this because I have an aluminum allergy. You got a better idea? And for your information Doctor," again he spat out the word, "I only WORK as a geologist. You have my book, you have my file. You know what I've studied, but it's obvious you're here because you want to know what I know." Baines spoke slowly and with purpose, as though he were waking up from a dream and finding the real-world was a much better place for once.

"It makes sense to me, Watts. And remember, he figured out how demons could fly before we knew they existed." O’Shea stood up and walked towards the chart. His fingers traced various threads, and as he looked at Baines, he felt he was seeing the man for the first time. "He may be a little crazy, but you should see the people Randi is getting." He pulled out a cellular phone and pressed a button. "He's a keeper." He closed the phone. "Norman, how'd you like to go to Washington?"

The front door opened and soldiers came in with boxes and hand-carts. Baines waved them off. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Back the truck up!" He glanced warily at O'Shea, "I've got a job here, and you still haven't told me who you're working with." The agent handed him a card.

DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE AND MILITARY OPERATIONS (NETHERWORLD)

"D.I.M.O.(N)? Kudos to your acronym department. You're kidding me, right?" His smirk faded as he looked at his living room. There were two government agents, two armed soldiers, and four more soldiers loading his entire library and home into boxes. "Have I been drafted?"

"Not exactly, Norman. It's kind of like eminent domain. You've been forcibly hired," O’Shea stuck out his hand and smiled for the first time. "Welcome to government work, Mister Baines. The pay sucks, but you get to kill things and nobody will call you crazy."

Baines felt weak at first, with everything moving so quickly around him, but he then gave O'Shea's hand a firm pump and said resolutely "I'll go get my lightsaber and then we can go." Then he thought for a second. “What about my cats?”

O’Shea sighed quietly. “You have carry-boxes? They might as well come as well. Nothing could be crazier than the way things are going right now.”

(Note of appreciation to Chewie who wrote the last section).

Chapter Sixteen

On the Shore of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

The six newcomers followed the woman along the banks of the Styx. She moved swiftly and surely, as though she'd been along this way a thousand times before. As they waded through the mud, she spoke back over her shoulder: “You're lucky they put you here in this part of the Styx. This ring is ten miles across; you could have been walking for several days to get to Dis.”

“What’s Dis?” Jade Kim asked.

“Satan’s capital. His palace is there, all the administration is run out of there as well. It surrounds the whole of hell like a wall.”

“And you’re taking us there?” Kim’s voice was loaded with suspicion.

“Of course,” said the woman. “That's where the resistance is headquartered.”

“Tell us about the resistance.”

The woman smiled. “It’s hard to know where to start. You see, the resistance has a long history; it's been around almost as long as I have.”

“And how old are you? And, who are you?” Kim’s growing suspicion and dislike for this woman made getting an answer very urgent.”

“I've been dead for ten thousand years.” The woman laughed at the expression on their faces. “Why are you so surprised? Once you're dead, you're effectively immortal; aging is slowed by orders of magnitude, and you're healthy and robust so the torment doesn't put you under. As for who I am, you may have heard of me. My name is Rahab. That’s right, that Rahab” The woman’s voice was bitter. “I betrayed my country to help the Israelites and their god and he tossed me down here anyway.”

“So, if there’s been a resistance for all these years, why hasn't hell been overthrown?”

“It can’t be. This is it, there’s nothing more. We can’t overthrow the order here. All we can do is try to disappear, save ourselves from torment. That's not as hard as it sounds, Hell is a big place, and it takes a long time to move around in it or communicate. I've just finished a two-month walk from Dis down to Cocytus, up to the first ring, and back. The fact that there are constant patrols is a real problem, and though they don't really go out of their way to look, if they see anything untoward, they light on it immediately. And one demon is more than a match for four or five people.”

“Then how did we manage to take down that baldrick?”

“To be blunt, you got lucky. He came down for a spot of torture and fun, and you surprised him before he could react. If he'd seen you guys free before you were on him, he'd have called for some help and then zapped you with lightning from a distance.”

Once again, the members of Tango-one-five exchanged glances. The picture they were getting was that the so-called resistance wasn’t resisting at all. At best they were an escape group, an underground railway that tried to keep themselves away from the pits that made up the rings of hell. It seemed as if the people here had accepted the line that this was the ultimate end of things, that any effort to change it was doomed to futility.

Kim looked around. They were on the edge of the river, if it could be called that. It was more like a rippling strip of clear water through the mucky water surrounding it. Ahead of them, through the vile, thick mist, they saw a tall, stone tower looming. Rahab turned and put a finger to her lips, then sank lower into the mist, crouching into the mud. She moved forward slowly.

Kim followed suit, but kept looking around. The tower moved closer and closer, and she looked up. At the top, suddenly, an flare burst into existence with a foomp. The light from the signal fire lit everything around them in a dull orange glow, making the mist look a bit like tomato soup. Abruptly, their guide ducked under the muck. Kim caught a glimpse of a towering silhouette looming through the mist before she followed suit – except, she didn't duck all the way. Instead, she sank down as far as she could go while keeping her face above the surface of the mud. Simultaneously, she shrank back toward a clump of stringy, greasy grass.

The baldrick passed within five feet of her. It was mounted on what looked like an oversized rhinoceros with a scorpion-tail arched overhead – A rhinolobster, she recognized it an instant later from that last mission in Iraq, which was wading through the swamp. Looking neither left nor right, the baldrick reined his mount forward when it sniffed and started at something, and kept moving until the mist had swallowed it. The baldrick itself had been huge, twice the height and probably four or five times the weight of the one they'd killed back there.

Rahab surfaced from the mud as the rest of the Tango flight members came up for air. “If you'd attacked him, you'd have had no chance,” she said. Though that was all, the words had clearly been aimed at Kim who had her own thoughts on the matter.

It was very easy to think of ten thousand reasons why something could not be done, it took a different mindset to think of the way it could be achieved. Kim had her own ideas there, she’d thought of two ways of taking the mounted patrol down already, although much depended on what could be found locally. She’d seen the black outcrops that spoke of coal and coal meant powdered carbon. This whole area was volcanic, and that meant sulfur. Now, if there was only some saltpeter around, they had the start of an IED. “Keep a look out for yellow deposits.” She whispered to her people.

“Ahead of you ell-tee. Already been looking. There’s some in the rocks. We’re two for three so far. And there’s some pretty crystals that might be good for fragments.”

They moved on for a while before Rahab broke silence and asked, “So, what are things like back topside?”

McInery piped up. “We were all pilots in the 160th SpecOps in Iraq when the Message came. Lost a tenth of the regiment, then didn't do much of anything until the hellmouth opened in western Iraq and we got sent out to take a look at the baldrick advance. Took down the command structure of a regiment, then got outrun by harpies and taken down.”

The woman was smiling bemusedly. “You lost me at 'Message',”

Kim exchanged glances with McInery. “You don't know about the Message?”

“No, not about this Message. It wouldn’t have been the first you know.”

“Basically, God said that heaven was closed, and told everyone to lay down and die. So those people who really believed laid down and died, and the rest of us had no idea what to do. Then the Navy shot down some bald…. some demons and showed us they could be killed. So we started to fight. Doing pretty good too.”

There was a bridge coming up out of the thinning mist now, next to the road they'd been wading beside for some time. Rahab turned and said, “Stay low and follow me single-file.” She crouched and moved beside the road to the base of the bridge, then slipped underneath. The members of Tango flight followed suit. There, bolted to the base of the bridge, was a rope that stretched across the river beneath the arch of the roadway. The woman took hold of the rope and started pulling herself hand-over-hand across the river. Kim looked at McInery, shrugged, and followed.

On the far side, Rahab crouched and hissed, “Okay, this is the most dangerous part. The walls that separate the fourth and fifth circles of hell are right up on the other side of this embankment, and they are constantly manned. The guards are vigilant and they will see you if you poke your head up, so you stay low and follow me as fast as you can.”

Kim nodded. SERE – still in the “evade” part. Rahab turned and, crouching, ran to a rock outcropping sticking up several dozen meters away. She looked around, then beckoned. Single-file, the escaped soldiers followed, making sure to stay crouched. They followed her from formation to formation, putting distance between them and the bridge as quickly as possible. At one large boulder, they stopped, and Rahab pointed back. Just at the edge of vision, the bridge stretched back into the mist covering the far shore of the Styx; across it snaked a long, black column of baldricks. It was following the road up the embankment to the plain and across that to the city, whose high walls were visible even here. When they moved on after a short rest break, the column was still marching with no end in sight.

“They must have found that body you crucified. See how they react?” Rahab’s voice had a mixture of conceit and spite in it. Kim looked at her steadily, if she couldn’t see the baldrick column was marching out, not in……..

At length, the woman led them up the incline and onto the plain, one that was littered with what looked to be bonfires, although from the distance it was hard to tell. She moved purposefully forward, and as they followed her, Kim got a chance to more closely examine the bonfires. They weren't bonfires; they were what looked like burning coffins, of all things. On some, the lids were half-off; she could hear groans and cries of pain drifting out of them.

Rahab stopped at one coffin, which was glowing dully. “What sort of metal is it?” McInery idly asked.

“Bronze. Everything here is bronze.” said Rahab as she bent down and casually lifted the lid off. The hissing sound as the metal seared her flesh was audible.

Kim gasped. “What the hell ... ?”

The woman shrugged. “It'll heal in no time.” She gestured. “In you go.”

Kim looked down. The coffin had no bottom; instead, it was a stairwell. The top two stairs were afire, but the rest looked cool enough. Hesitantly, Kim stepped in, and gingerly hopped down to the third stair before crouching and continuing down. There was certainly pain in her feet, but it wasn't unbearable, and the cool stone on them felt good.

The rest of her team followed, wincing and grunting as they crossed the fire. Then the woman jumped into the coffin, grabbed the lid, and swung it back on. It fell on with a dull clank, and what little light there was vanished, save that cast by the flickering flames above. There was a flare, and more light: the woman was holding a torch, one she'd obviously picked up from the stash Kim could see on the fourth step.

She descended and brushed by them, then took the lead. They followed her for what seemed like miles -before the tunnel opened into a room. As they stepped into the cave, Kim realized that her feet didn't hurt anymore. The room was well-lit by torches ensconced in the wall, and there were some chairs and a sleeping pad in the corner. She sat down, and gestured to some chairs. “Please, sit.”

For the first time, Kim began to relax, and felt the adrenaline slowly draining out of her. She recognized the signs, end-of-patrol-itis, something that had killed more soldiers than most other mistakes. Assuming that the danger was over because they were about to re-enter their base, the getting ambushed when their guard was down. Kim kicked herself hard, mentally, danger was never over down here, she could never let her guard down. Especially with this woman.

“Anyway,” continued Rahab, “you need to tell me about this 'Message' and everything that's happened since.”

And they did. They told her about the Message, and the peoples' death, the declaration of war on Hell and Heaven – “Mmm, Yahweh's in on this, too?” wondered Rahab out loud – and the opening of the Hellgate in the wastes of western Iraq. When they were done, the woman sat for a long time in silence. Then she said, “If you will excuse me, I will be gone for a couple of days. I will be back to take you to our leader.” Then Rahab stood and exited the room.

“What do you think ell-tee?”

Kim looked around at the room. “We’re like rats in a trap here and I don’t like it. And I don’t trust that woman, her main priority appears to be keeping out of the way of the guards and not getting caught.”

“I can understand that ell-tee.”

“So can I, but Uncle Sugar doesn’t pay us to sit around. She must guess that and knows we are set on stirring things up around here. That could easily mean things get pretty precarious for people who just want to keep their heads down. I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty bet she’s arranging to turn us in right now. If she isn’t actually part of the security system.”

There were nods. A fake “resistance movement” that drew in likely recruits so they could be quietly killed was a tactic as old as the hills. The Company had been running similar things Iraq before The Message had come through. And Satan was known as being the Prince of Lies.

“Yeah, ell-tee, and she’s pretty bitter about Yahweh sending her down here. That could easily translate into her working with the other guy.”

“So let’s get the hell out of here.” McInery spoke decisively.

Kim agreed, it was against the grain to stay in one place under these circumstances. They made their way back up to the surface and out. Then, they moved as fast as they could to put as much ground between them and the hiding hole as possible. A few hours later, well concealed from any observers on the walls towering high above them, they came to a stop.

“What next ell-tee?”

“First priority, find a way of attacking and killing one of those big baldricks on a rhinolobster. An IED should do it. They’re supposed to be so invulnerable, taking one down will be a real blow.”

“That bridge. Now if we could blow it under a baldrick column.”

Kim laughed at that one. “We’ll need something more than gunpowder to do that. What did you think of that column by the way?”

“They were marching out ell-tee. Being pulled out of here, for something else. The only thing I can think of that would warrant that kind of movement is fighting us.”

“Agreed. A sign our boys are doing well back there?” Then her face froze. There was a voice playing in her head.

“Hello, is this Lieutenant Jade Kim? Hello, hello.”

“What’s the matter ell-tee?”

“Got voices in my head. Sound like us, human. Hold one.”

“This is Kim. Identify.

“I’m kitten. I’m in the Pentagon. I’ve been asked to try and find you.”

“Authenticate two-eight-six” Kim snapped the numbers out.

There was a long pause and Kim was about to give up when the voice came back. “Sorry, we took some time to find the security number from the night you were shot down. Authentication is two-oh-five.

Jade Kim tried to stop herself cheering. “Guys, we’re through. Somehow, the brass have found a way to get word through to us. I think we’re back in the Army.”

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

There was no restraint in the laboratory, the cheering could be heard outside the doors and all down the corridor. Randi stuck his head around the corner, beaming at the sight of his staff dancing up and down.

“I take it something worked?”

“kitten got through to those helicopter pilots. They’re on the line now.”

“How solid is the contact?”

“Very Sir.” kitten spoke respectfully. “It’s comfortable to hold and there’s no fade.”

“Ask her where she is and what her situation is.”

kitten’s eyes defocused while she “spoke” with Kim. “She says she’s in the fifth circle of hell, she and her unit have escaped from captivity. They’ve started to set up a resistance, they’ve already killed a baldrick. The resistance is called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Hell. She says they need supplies if we can get them to her.”

“Is there a resistance already? Escaped prisoners and so on?”

Another long pause. “Yes, but Kim says she doesn’t trust them. Their main priority is keeping their heads down and avoiding recapture. Her plan is to keep them at arms length until she and her unit have stirred things up enough so that they don’t have any choice about joining the insurgency. She also says there are signs of major troop movements out of hell itself, suggesting more forces are being readied for the invasion of earth. She’s asking how well the Army is doing up here.”

“That’s my girl.” General Schatten had entered the room quietly. “Tell her we’re kicking ass and taking names, we’ve won the first two battles big-time. Then, kitten, find out what Kim’s supply priorities are please. Tell Kim we can’t promise we’ll get stuff through to her but if its possible, we will.”

One again, kitten’s eyes defocused. “First priority is webbing so they can carry stuff. Then, she wants C-4 explosives, or better if we can send it, M-24 claymores, AT-4 anti-tank rockets and radios. Detonators or as many types as possible. She says an M82A1 .50 sniper’s rifle would be nice as well.”

Schatten finished writing the list on a pad. “Can we get back through to her any time?”

“I think so, Sir. It should be easier to reopen the link than it was to find her.”

“Very well, tell her we’ll be back in touch. We don’t want to keep this link open all the time, it’s a security risk.”

“Very good Sir.” kitten’s eyes blanked out again, then returned to life. “She’s gone Sir. I wished her luck on your behalf.”

“Thank you kitten.” Schatten’s voice was kindly. “I just hope we can send her a bit more than good luck.”

(Note of thanks to Surlethe who contributed the first part of this section).

Chapter Seventeen

Headquarters, Army of Abigor, Western Iraq.

It had been dusk when the flier had arrived. Abigor had been standing outside his tent, basking in the last rays of the setting sun when the flier had staggered in. A very badly wounded flier, its body dreadfully burned along one side, its damaged wing causing it to fly unevenly. As it approached, Abigor saw that it had lost an eye from the same burns that affected the rest of its body.

“Your Excellency, I bring word from General Merafawlazes.”

Abigor looked at the battered flier. Was this the best Merafawlazes could send to bring news of his victory? It was insult. Abigor paused for a second, a deliberate insult? Was this Merafawlazes’s attempt at deposing him? “What word?” His voice was curt and irritable.

“Sire, terrible news. The Army of the North has been defeated. It is in full retreat heading south. The enemy are pursuing it in their Iron Chariots. They move fast sire, faster than the swiftest Beast. As our infantry run, they are being crushed by the Chariots. It is a disaster, Merafawlazes says beware of the fire lances and the Iron Chariots for our forces are helpless against them.

“Defeated?” Abigor was stunned by the news. “How?”

“The humans have terrible magic sire. They cause the ground to erupt and swallow our infantry whole, their fire lances tear them apart. They can call up thunder at will and their breath leaves nothing but the dead where they breathed. In the sky, their fire lances seek us out no matter how much we twist and turn. One touch from them is death Sire. One passed close to me, did not even hit me and look what its fire did.”

Abigor listened in shocked disbelief. There was no way this story could be faked, no Duke would admit to so crushing a defeat. No demonic army had been defeated, not since That defeat, the one before time had properly begun. Abigor had been at that battle and known defeat then. He remembered its taste and suddenly, after countless eons, his mouth was filled with it again.

“Come to my tent, tell me all that you know.” He saw the flier hesitate. “You have nothing to fear.”

That’s what they all say the flier thought, before they kill the bringer of bad news

An hour later, Abigor was trying to absorb the flier’s description of the battle. He had his own battle plan market out on his map, in essentials it was simply a larger repeat of Merafawlazes’s attack. Cavalry first to break up the enemy line, then the infantry in a thick mass to swarm over the wreckage and finish the enemy off. He had his 28 infantry legions in a huge block, seven legions wide, four deep, the ranks massed tight and deep. By all that was traditional it should have been invincible. Merafawlazes had thought that, now Merafawlazes Army was dead or running.

“They hid behind the hill you say?” Abigor’s voice was thoughtful.

“Sire, they did. They were lined up behind the ridge where they could not be seen by our force. Only after our army had been almost destroyed by their magic and we fliers slaughtered by their Sky-Chariots did they venture over the crest and charge us. Even then they did not dare to fight in honorable hand-to-hand combat but let loose their fire-bolts at us from a distance. Only when our comrades lay wounded and helpless did they close on us and then they crushed the wounded under their chariots.” The wounded flier dropped back to his knees again, still not quite sure he could believe the fact he was alive and uneaten.

Abigor thought the information over. He had to change plans, his original was an open invitation to a massacre by the human mages. His mind mulled the information over. His original front was over a mile long with the ranks extending almost two miles backwards. If he lined his legions up in single row, they would form a front almost five miles long. His mind chewed away, the human magic slaughtered by area, why stop at lining up his legions side by side. There was no need for the legions to maintain their block, 81 ranks deep. Suppose each Legion formed three blocks 27 ranks deep? And those blocks were lines side by side? Why, that meant a front approaching 15 miles wide! Abigor stared at his map, with a front like that, he could extend beyond the range of the human mages and their magic, envelop their flanks and roll them up. It was brilliant. It was also, of course against every concept of demonic warfare. Battles were decided by massive blows aimed at the center of the enemy force, the two masses colliding and slugging it out. This idea of thinning his lines and enveloping the enemy was, wrong somehow. Yet the humans were wrong, they didn’t fight like warriors, they lacked the spirit to close in to hand-to-hand combat range. That hadn’t always been the case, there had been examples in the past when humans fought demons hand-to hand. They’d always lost of course.

He wrote the new orders down on parchment and then added another thought. The enemy mages had to be on that ridgeline. If they could be prevented from casting their spells, that would be a major part of the enemy’s defense gone. So he added another line, ordering all the infantry to keep firing their tridents as rapidly as they could recharge them. It didn’t matter if they hit anything, just to keep that ridge crest under continuous fire. Then, he turned his attention back to the flier still cowering in a corner.

“You, what is your name?”

“Tomovoninkranfat Sire.”

“I need you to take these messages to the legion commanders. It must be done tonight.” Abigor was about to issue the usual blood-curdling threats when he stopped himself. This one had flown in with the messages although terribly wounded. Hell ran on fear and terror but surely nothing could be worse than what this flier had already faced. “Tomovoninkranfat, you have already served me well and I thank you for everything you have already done. I see your wounds and know how much this must cost you but these messages must get through.”

To Abigor’s astonishment, Tomovoninkranfat drew himself up. “Your wish is my will Sire.” And he left clutching the parchments in his unburned hand.

Behind him, Abigor felt another wave of surprise. Could it be that it wasn’t necessary to terrorize everybody in sight in order to get things done? That praise and trust could sometimes work as well?

Headquarters, Multi-National Force Iraq, Green Zone, Baghdad.

“They’re moving.”

The great screen in General Petraeus’s command center was showing a sudden surge of activity in the baldrick Army that lay along the Wadi al Gudrhat. Formations were beginning to move shifting sideways, the deployment changing. Far over their heads, the Global Hawk was faithfully recording everything they did but what it could not do was tell General Petraeus why they were doing it. That, he had to work out for himself.

“A night attack Sir?” An aide spoke with unease. It was hard to make a guess based on intentions with so little to go on.

“Could be. They’re moving sideways though, not forward. Extending their line. I’d guess this move started when word of what happened on their flanks started to trickle in.”

“Perhaps they’re trying to replace the flank cover we destroyed yesterday?” Captain David Tall was jumping in with both feet as usual.

“Could be.” Petraeus repeated the same words absent-mindedly. “Any other suggestions?”

This was his “school for Captains”, the time when his aides were invited to give their opinions on what the situation on the display actually meant and what should be done about it. Later they would compare their opinions with what had really happened and learn.

“I think they’re scared.” Captain Ellen Yarborough flushed slightly as the General looked straight at her.

“Why do you say that Ellen?”

“Because they don’t know what hit them yesterday. They’re still trying to piece it all together. Look what hit us over the last 24 hours. Cavalry, phalanxes of infantry, I mean real phalanxes General, only those harpies were anything even remotely modern. Now look what hit them. Tanks, Mick-vees, artillery, MLRS. Its completely outside their terms of reference. So they don’t know what hit them.

“What they do know, Sir, is what we did to them. I bet the commander over there has reports coming in and he’s trying to make sense of them. He’s noted we kill wholesale, not retail. So, he’s thinning his troops out, trying to reduce his casualties by giving us less to shoot at. He’s also extending his front and might hope to outflank us but that’s a secondary thing.”

“Anybody any comments on that?” Petraeus looked around.

“It means he’s pretty smart. They didn’t fight smart yesterday.” Tall looked around at the group gathered around the screen.

“Oh yes they did.” Another officer, Captain Keith Renshaw cut in. “They fought very smart in their own terms. Can you imagine trying to stop that attack with spears and bows? They’d have stomped straight through us. And they kept going even while we slaughtered them. Can you imagine a human army taking a battering like that and keeping up the advance? I can’t.”

“Important point that Keith.” Petraeus spoke approvingly. “They showed a lot of guts. They didn’t change plans though, that tells us something about how fast their command structure can handle changes. Ellen, you make a good point as well. The commander over there is responding to what happened, doing so pretty fast.” He paused and looked at the display again, it had updated to show the baldrick positions moving further sideways. “Whether he’s simply reducing the richness of the target environment or has thoughts about outflanking us doesn’t matter. What he’s doing gives him the option and we have to allow for it. Any suggestions. Ellen?”

“The critical point is here, at Hit. If Hit falls, and its right on our front line our extreme right flank, he can cross the Euphrates and come down between the river and the Buhayrat ath Thatthar. Cut us off from our supply lines. We have two brigades from the Fourth Infantry Division in reserve, I suggest we order one of them to move to cover that area, position them east of Aqabah. With the divisional M270s in support. That way they can either block the baldrick advance or, if they don’t cross the river, swing and hit their left flank.”

“Comments?” Petraeus looked around.

“Sounds good to me.” There was a mutter of agreement.

“That’s because it is good. Gives us plenty of options. One change, the MLRS launchers stay where they are. They have the range to support the 4th from their present positions and we might need that firepower. 25th Mech and 10th Mountain can provide most of what we need but I want to keep one battalion of M270s on a ready-to-shoot basis in case of unexpected developments. Thank you.”

Petraeus turned back to his display. The baldrick line was definitely extending and thinning. Yarborough had been right, they were learning fast. Not fast enough though.

DIMO(N) Conference Room, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Doughnuts and Coffee ladies and gentlemen and, errr, other lady.”

There was a quick stir as people descended on the refreshments trying not to be seen as too keen to grab the iced donuts. Lugasharmanaska looked at the plates with a distaste and a certain element of despair. It had been a week since she had eaten and her body was screaming for raw meat. These balls of fried plants were of no use to her.

“You don’t like donuts Luga?”

“I eat meat. Fresh meat. Not vegetables.”

“Donuts aren’t vegetables.” One of the women present, a dedicated vegan didn’t like the way this conversation was going.

“Donuts are made of flour yes? Flour is from plants. Plants are vegetables so donuts are vegetables.”

“I must try that on my doctor.” One of the men spoke quietly but the vegan lady still glared at him.

Robert O’Shea was speaking to the Pentagon kitchens on the telephone. They had some standing ribs down there and he asked for the largest to be sent up. “Beef all right Luga?”

“Human is better but any meat will be good.” She noted the expression on the faces of the rest of the people in the room. “You do not eat your dead?”

“No.” It was a short, clipped phrase.

“How strange. So you just waste them.” Lugasharmanaska shrugged and then her eyes lit up as the raw meat arrived. She grabbed the joint and ripped at it with her teeth, tearing off large lumps and swallowing them. The vegan lady nearly fainted. There was a general agreement that they’d learned a first important thing about the baldricks. Their table manners were appalling.

“If we might get started.” O’Shea looked at Lugasharmanaska who was still grunting, snorting and tearing at her meat. He couldn’t help thinking it was a charming sight to see somebody enjoying their food so much. “First item, communications. We can communicate back up to Hell on a one-to-one basis but that’s all. Luga, how do we open a portal.”

“You can talk to people back home? Then you can open a portal. Just add more power. Get more of your mages to add their power to the message. First you can get messages through then with more power the message opens a gate. It’s easy. As long as you use a Nephilim to contact.”

“What’s a Nephilim?” The vegan lady wanted to keep Lugasharmanaska talking in case she decided she wanted some more meat and created another display like the previous one. The stripped bones were still on the table to remind her of what that sight had been like. Idly, Lugasharmanaska picked one of the ribs up, cracked it open with her teeth and sucked out some marrow.

“Nephilim are humans with demon ancestry. Long time ago, when we were here before, we mated with humans. We succubi still do. Sometimes there are offspring from such matings that are both human and demon. Now, the demon ancestry in a Nephilim is mostly very small but enough remains. We can contact them even from our dimension.” Lugasharmanaska thought carefully, how could her information be valuable without giving away too much? “We can make you see what we want you to see but we must be able to see you for that. But with Nephilim we can contact make messages without seeing.”

“Is that how you come to Earth.”

“Yes. We contact a Nephilim and use our mind-mask to establish a message link. Then our leaders add more power and form a gate we can step through.”

Lugasharmanaska looked around and saw the growing affection in the eyes of the people around her. And gratitude for her assistance. She was doing well, and her stomach was full at last. Only one person present didn’t like her and that was the woman who had complained about eating meat. Lugasharmanaska eyed her and wondered, purely academically and without any intention of actually trying, what she would taste like.

Observation Room, DIMO(N), The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“What do you think of her Robert?” James Randi looked at O’Shea, his eyes twinkling slightly.

“Well, she’s not the sort of girl I’d take home to meet my mother.” O’Shea thought for a second. “On the other hand, she eats humans so I might take her to meet my ex-wife. But in her way, I thought she was quite pleasant.”

Randi smiled and shook his head. This was why the JREF always filmed their tests and trials, it was amazing what one could see when a situation was played back. “Watch this Robert.”

It was a film of Lugasharmanaska eating, her teeth ripping at the meat, blood spraying around her, running down her chin. She was looking around, half suspicious that somebody might take her food but it was obvious that her eyes were also assessing the chance of eating one of the other members of the meeting.

“Quite pleasant Robert?”

O’Shea looked appalled. “I don’t remember it like that. Oh, I noted she was a bit gross when she was eating but nothing like that.”

“That’s why we record all of the tests we do. See things that get missed first time around. We’ve noticed how that succubus seems to get on everybody’s good side very quickly. Nobody had much bad to say about her. There’s something we need to look at here.”

“We all had our foil caps on.” O’Shea sounded defensive.

“I know, anyway it seems like we need to investigate this a bit more. Robert, something your people can look at, I need to get go and get more power pumped into our links to hell.”

Chapter Eighteen

Headquarters, Army of Abigor, Western Iraq.

The Great Beast saw Abigor approaching and clicked its claws in greeting. As befitted Abigor’s status, his Great Beast towered over the lesser Beasts ridden by the cavalry brigade and its black skin swirled with iridescent colors that caught the rising sun and sparkled into a shimmering halo. Abigor returned the salutation of his Great Beast and swung up on to the animal’s back. Over his head, he could see the viciously curved tail straighten and then fall back to its natural position. The Great Beast was ready to move, to attack the humans that dared to defy its master.

Ahead of him, Abigor saw his legions start to roll forward, the thinned ranks looking pitifully slender by the standards of demon warfare. The legion was designed to fight as a solid mass, its 81 ranks adding mass and weight to the charge that would strike the enemy with the force of a battering ram. Abigor had knowingly sacrificed that weight, given up the power of his charge in favor of hitting the humans along a much broader front. Ahead of him, he could see the humans had done it again, they had formed up behind the ridgeline where they were shielded from the trident bolts of the demon infantry. They had to be up there though for this was the day of the great battle.

Overhead, Abigor could see the strange white clouds the human Sky Chariots left behind them as they searched out the remaining fliers. He could hear the sound of their battle-cry, a strange roaring scream punctuated by thunder-like explosions as their fire lances tracked their targets and blew them apart. There were more Sky Chariots here that Abigor had ever seen before, they filled the sky above the battlefield, dipping down to slash at the fliers who floundered helplessly below them. Casualties up there must be terrible, Abigor thought. Even as he watched, three fliers fled westwards back to the hell gate. A Sky Chariot was in hot pursuit, closing the range on them with terrible speed. Oddly, this one was silent and if Abigor hadn’t been watching, he wouldn’t have known it was passing. Only after it had passed did Abigor hear the thundering crash and roar of its battle-cry. The Sky Chariot swerved after the fliers and it gave forth a rasping moan that filled the sky with bright lights. One flier exploded, there was a brief pause, then another rasp and a second flier died. The Sky Chariot zoomed skywards, rolled over and slashed down at the third. It too died as the lights engulfed it.

Still, it was the ground forces that were important. Fliers were important for terrorizing a fleeing enemy but in a real battle, it was the cavalry and infantry that counted. Abigor urged his Great Beast forward, keeping close to the infantry as they surged forward. He could sense the uneasiness in the ranks, the infantry felt exposed without the thick mass of the ranks that usually surrounded them. And the Cavalry were staying back, normally they led the charge, the shock of their weight and speed breaking through the enemy lines. Now they were being held to wait on events. If the army started to fall apart, it would be their job to stem the breach and hold the line. Abigor suddenly stopped himself, he was thinking about what would happen if he lost? Something had changed in him the previous night when he had listened to Tomovoninkranfat’s account of how Merafawlazes’s Army had died. Defeat had ceased to be unthinkable, now it was all too real a possibility.

The sky to the east was changing, suddenly, the rising sun was shining through the streaks of the human fire lances suddenly emerging from far behind their lines. Their mages had to be at work already. The front like of the advancing infantry lowered their tripods to the horizontal and let fly with a withering barrage of lightning bolts. The ridge crest was at extreme range and man of the bolts had dissipated before they made it there but enough hit the line to disrupt the concentration of the human mages. Abigor was sure of that. Yet it did not seem to affect the Fire Lances as they arched over and raced down into his infantry. The rippling sea of explosions engulfed a whole section of his front line, devouring it, shredding those unfortunate enough to be caught in its hot breath. That was how Abigor found himself thinking of it, it was the Humans breathing death over his infantry. They were faltering, looking around, seeing the wire ahead of them and realizing what was to happen. Abigor drove his Great Beast into the middle of their ranks, urging them forward, firing his tripod – and hearing the wailing screams as yet more human magic was added to the chaos.

Headquarters, Multi-National Force Iraq, Green Zone, Baghdad.

“Pumpkin-One reports receiving heavy inbound fire Sir. The baldricks are firing on the ridgeline as they come in. Fire is ineffective Sir.”

Petraeus nodded. The truth was, he wasn’t that interested at this point. His artillery was tearing huge gaps in the baldrick attack although the reduced density of targets meant the death toll was lower than it had been yesterday. Standing in front of his screen, he could see the baldricks surging forward, taking their losses from the deadly MLRS barrages and the minefields. They hadn’t reached the wire yet. Not that it mattered to him, the brigade commanders along the front knew what they had to do and Petraeus had left them to get on with it. They had enough on their plate without their commanding general peering over their shoulder and second-guessing them. Petraeus had enough to do as well, in addition to handling his corps artillery, he had to keep supplied of ammunition and fuel flowing towards the brigades. He had truck convoys scattered all the way between the front line and Baghdad, keeping them flowing forward was a job in itself. He had staff handling that as well, his part of the battle was to stand here in front of this screen and spot things going wrong.

“There’s a flight of C-17s coming in from CONUS. Carrying reloads. Make sure our fighters screen them from any harpies surviving out there. And have the fighters report when the harpies are cleared out of the way. The Apache crews will want to get their licks in.”

“Sir, Yes Sir.” That had to be one of the Marines Petraeus thought. Still it was better than the Rangers, that constant Oooh-Agh got on his nerves after a while. Getting the AH-64s into action was going to be critical for more reasons than one. The 25th Mechanized Infantry Division, known on the radio as “Pumpkin” was already tearing the baldricks apart, they had the firepower and mobility they needed. The baldricks in front of them were going to die, it was simply a question of how many of them would do so before the rest broke and ran. Not that there was anywhere for them to run to. In the west, the Shamshar Division and the First Armored were rapidly closing the gap that was the baldrick’s only escape route.

No, 25th Mech were going to be all right. The problem lay to their north, where the 10th Mountain Division, call sign Mango, held the line. They were a light infantry division, they didn’t have the armor that had dominated the battlefield so far. They did have four brigades rather than three and more artillery but their force structure was light. Petraeus had put them on his right for two reasons. One was that they covered a more inhabited and built-up sector of the front where the armor would be at a disadvantage. The other was a more ruthless one, Petraeus had to find out how human infantry would fight against the baldricks. All the reports so far said that the baldrick infantry were larger and stronger than humans and they took a lot of killing. Could human infantry stand up to them? It was a question that had to be answered sooner or later and sooner was better than later.

Hence the importance of getting the Apaches back over the battlefield. They were an important part of 10th Mountain’s firepower.

“Sir, Mango reports the baldricks are moving to attack them. Should we divert artillery support from Pumpkin?”

Petraeus thought for a second. “Negative. Keep battering the troops attacking Pumpkin. We can destroy that attack fastest, then we can thin out Pumpkin’s positions and shift forces to support Mango.” 10th Mountain had its artillery and that would have to do. The 25th Mech and 4th Infantry Division’s artillery was concentrating on the baldricks assaulting Petraeus’s left, over 100 Paladin self-propelled 155s and 60 MLRS launchers. The sheer volume of fire they were pouring into the advancing baldricks was enough to stop even an Army from hell. Or so Petraeus hoped.

“Gee Sir, will you look at that!”

The Marine’s voice had lost its dispassionate inflexion. In the middle of one surging mass of baldrick infantry, pinned up against the wire, was a single jet black figure that towered above the rest, mounted on a rhinolobster that dwarfed the others.

“I guess he must be important.” Petraeus raised his voice slightly and addressed the fire direction center. “Put an MLRS battery on to that location soonest.”

Front Line, Army of Abigor, Western Iraq.

Abigor saw his infantry surging against the river of silver threads that strung across the battlefield. Some of his demons had tried to grab the threads with their hands, only to scream in anguish as the razor edges bit through their flesh to the bones. Others had tried to force their way in through the coils, only to become entangled and slowly sliced apart. The momentum of the attack was broken and all the time the shrieking howls of the enemy magic drowned out any attempt at thought. The infantry had to get through the threads, there was no other choice.

He saw the answer over his shoulder, on their way through to the threads, they had crossed a field covered with bars that exploded when a demon stepped on them. Many of them had been killed and their mutilated corpses littered the ground. Others writhed in pain from the traumatic amputations the bars had caused. Yet, Abigor thought, even the dead and the half-dead could still serve him. “Get those bodies. Throw them on the threads and use them as a bridge.”

The noise was too great for his words to carry far but some heard and started to collect bodies and throw them on top of the coils of threads. Others saw what was happening, understood and copied them. Soon the wire was sagging under the weight and the first of the demon infantry was running across, clear of the wire and into the open ground beyond.

“Sire, there are problems on our left!” One of the lesser demons, a legion commander by the look of him, carried the message but could barely make himself heard.

The left, Abigor thought, ten minutes fast ride away. He had better get there and find out what was happening. “Take over here, keep driving them forward.” Then, he turned his Great Beast’s head and started the ride up to his left flank. This was a problem he hadn’t thought of, in the traditional formation he could see all of his forces, in this new style of attack, he could see only a small portion of the battle at any one time. He was spending all his time running from one crisis to the next, trying to solve each one before it became a major problem. Time he should have been spending in finding the enemy commander so Abigor could have the pleasure of killing him.

There was another shrieking howl and the terrifying ripple of explosions that were the trade-mark of the fire-lances. Abigor felt the blast and the sting as stray fragments at the end of their trajectory flicked at him. Behind him, the area where he had just been had vanished under a rolling cloud of dust and smoke. Abigor had already seen enough fire-lance breaths to know that nothing was left alive in the area he had been in just a few minutes before. Then it struck him, he might not have time to find the enemy commander, but the enemy commander had found him.

Headquarters, Multi-National Force Iraq, Green Zone, Baghdad.

“Missed him.” The Marine sounded disappointed.

“Don’t sweat it son, it was only a chance. He’s heading north, guess on his way to Hit. Sitrep?”

“Mango-Four is in Hit sir, they’ve dug in. They’re all west of the river and there’s only one bridge out.”

Petraeus knew what that meant. If Mango-Four tried to evacuate the city, there would be a massacre as they piled up before the bridge.

“Sir, Mango Four requests permission to blow the bridge. They say it won’t do them any good and taking it intact might help the Baldricks.”

“Tell them to do it. We can throw an assault bridge over easy enough. The baldricks don’t seem to have heard about combat engineering.”

“Sir, with the bridge gone, Mango Four won’t be able to…..”

“I know, so did they when they suggested it. Order Cherry-One up on Hit. Tell them to form up to the east of Al-Ramadi.”

Outskirts of Hit, Western Iraq.

“We’d just got this place quieted down as well.” Corporal Tucker McElroy looked out at the advancing baldricks with certain level of disgust. A year earlier, Hit had been torn to pieces by gangs of terrorists and insurgents whose attacks and murders spared no one. Then, the Marines had moved into the city as part of Task Force 17 and cleaned the city up. It had come back to life and its economy had been improving everyday, so much so that a week before The Message had changed everything, the City had been handed over to Iraqi security forces. Now the baldricks were coming.

Not as many as there had been, that was for sure. At first their long ranks had been a terrifying sight but Mango-Four’s artillery had got to work as the baldricks had stalled in the minefields and on the razor wire. By the time the baldricks had swarmed through the artillery over the wire, their neat ranks and serried formation had gone. In its place was a stream of baldricks in groups of varying size making their way towards the outskirts of the city. McElroy heard the 120mm mortars coughing as they lobbed their first rounds at the larger of the groups, the brigade 155s were still pounding the baldricks hung up on the wire. By now, the leading groups of demons had reached the great divided highway that swung around the outskirts of Hit. It was time to do some real soldiering.

A few yards away Charles Foss was scanning the nearest group of baldricks through the powerful scope on his M82A3 sniper’s rifle, well, it wasn’t actually a sniper’s rifle, officially it was an anti-material rifle. There was even an urban legend that it was illegal to use it against humans but that wasn’t true. Anyway, the targets this time weren’t human. Foss checked his ammunition, the tips of the .50 caliber bullets were green on white. That meant they were Raufoss SLAP rounds, multi-role armor-piercing explosive incendiaries. They’d been pouring in to Iraq for days now, the joke was that they had still been warm from the production line in Norway when they’d been stuffed into a transport and flown here. The infantry formations had been given priority for their issue, they needed the firepower.

Magazine in place, Foss squinted through the scope again. The baldricks cleared ground fast, at least twice as quickly as a human. One figure in the nearest group seemed to be the driving force, urging the others forward. Foss put the cross hairs on his forehead, just between the horns and gently squeezed the trigger, just the way he’d taught his six-year old son to shoot. Never pull the trigger, squeeze it. The heavy Barrett rifle kicked and the baldrick went down.

“Damn.” Foss swore to himself. The baldrick was down, his head mangled, but he was still moving. What did it take to kill these monsters?. A second shot was the answer, it fixed the leader for once and for all. Foss swung his scope to the second in the group and fired again. This one went down hard and finally with the first shot. The rest of the baldricks went to ground, confused by the inexplicable outbreak of sudden death that had struck them. That was a fatal mistake. The mortar teams saw the group stop moving and a pattern of 82mm mortar bombs blanketed their position. By that time, Foss and his fellow snipers were seeking fresh targets.

Inside the fortified house, McElroy looked over the sandbags that blocked the doors and windows to see the baldricks rapidly closing in on the forward defense line. They were over the inner ring road, less than 200 yards away, running into an area of ploughed sand where a new city block had been planned. Those plans had been abandoned and would probably never be revived now that half the city’s population had laid down and died as demanded by The Message and the rest were refugees being sheltered further east. But the blocks either side of the cleared area had been built and then they’d been fortified.

Human infantry would have seen the deadly danger of that open ground and avoided it. To the baldricks, it was an alley into the city and forty or more piled into it. They’d been the first group through the wire and minefields, the first to cross the open ground and get close to the city, the city that was defenseless. To their astonishment, they could see the buildings in front of them, the humans hadn’t built walls or moats to keep attackers out. Just the threads, the exploding bars and their horrible magic fire-lances.

McElroy gave a last check, the baldricks were in a three-cornered ambush with infantry squads on both flanks and another in front of them. Worse, from the enemy’s point of view, McElroy had dismounted the Browning .50 caliber from their Humvee and had it on its tripod, firing through a narrow slit, its green-and-white tipped bullets waiting to bite. Fine, the baldricks were in a trap, time to spring it.

“Open fire. Let them have it!”

Chapter Nineteen

Defense Perimeter Charlie, Hit, Western Iraq.

“Just how many of these bastards are there?” McElroy was distinctly aggrieved. Despite the fight they were putting up, he and the rest of his squad were being pushed steadily back by the sheer weight of numbers that were being thrown against them. They’d bled the attackers badly on Perimeter Alfa, the baldricks seemed to have no idea of fire and maneuver, they’d just walked straight into the machine gun fire. Only the waves behind the first group had simply climbed over their dead and kept on coming.

“I heard over a million.” Private Gerry Links repeated the rumor with grim relish. “And it looks like most of them are here.”

“If you mean right in front of us, right now, I’d say you’re just about right. There’s more of them than we’ve got bullets.” And that, McElroy thought, was the pure, unvarnished truth. Oh, the .50s were cutting the baldricks down all right and the snipers were having a field day but there weren’t enough of them and they were being swamped by the numbers coming through. More than just the numbers, the bastards were so damned difficult to kill. The truth was that the M16s just weren’t cutting it. McElroy had put a whole 30-round magazine into one baldrick and the damned thing had still torn Jim ‘Cookie’ Fields apart before it had gone down. Explosives were doing most of the work, grenades from the M19 automatic launchers and the M203s. That and the Claymores, human or baldrick, the spray of fragments from a Claymore shredded them nicely.

“Here they come.” There was a crescendo of firing from the block to their left, a mad minute as Baldwin’s squad poured fire into the baldrick assault teams before leaving via the back of their building. That would leave McElroy with an exposed flank and he’d have to fall back as well soon. To his front, he saw black figures suddenly detach from the building in front and run out across the street. He took a careful bead on the leader and fired as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, watching shot after shot slam into the baldrick’s chest. It was staggering but still coming forward, McElroy felt he would have better luck if he spat at it. Off to his left, the squad machine gun snarled out a burst and the baldrick McElroy had wounded went down. There was a crash that shook dust from the walls and wrecked ceiling of the block, the last of the unit’s claymores had gone off.

The front of the building caved in, the baldricks were a lot stronger than humans and the flimsy construction of Iraqi walls wasn’t even close to being strong enough to hold them out. McElroy had lost some of his people first when the walls the baldricks pushed down had trapped the men behind them but they’d learned that lesson. Now they were in hastily-prepared positions at the rear of the room, firing up and out at the baldricks as they loomed over the wrecked structure. Baldricks weren’t actually that much taller than humans, McElroy guessed that they averaged between seven and eight feet tall but they seemed to be much bigger – especially when they were coming straight at you all teeth and claws.

He had a fresh magazine in his rifle, that was the good news. The bad news was that it was his last one, he’d run through his basic ammunition load in just a few minutes. He saw the green spurts as the bullets tore into the chest of the leading baldrick but, as McElroy had expected, the damned thing just kept coming. “Everybody out!”

He heard the rest of his unit scramble out the hole they’d knocked in the back wall of their block. McElroy paused just for a second, tossing a hand grenade at one of the baldricks. The black monster caught it and looked curiously at the small metal egg. The sheer incongruity of the sight caused McElroy to delay for a second and that killed him. The baldrick he’d just shot slashed at him with his claws, ripping through his body armor and tearing his chest open. McElroy screamed as the baldricks fell on him, tearing him apart and stuffing meat from his body into their mouths. Then the grenade went off and he, along with the baldrick who had been holding it, died.

Gerry Links heard the screams and explosion and knew that he was now in charge of what was left of the squad. The building they had been defending backed on to another with a narrow alley down the side. That lead into the divided highway that ran through the center of Hit and, hopefully too the open ground the other side. He turned and hosed out fire from his M16 then he and his men dropped flat as an automatic grenade launcher thumped out a burst from the buildings opposite.

“Down the alley fast, the grenadier will keep them back.” They were being pushed back, certainly, but they were bleeding the baldricks at every step. The time to fight it out, room to room would come later. And that, Links thought, would be a bloody day. Links fired another quick burst and saw a baldrick flinch. The M16s might not be killing them but they could hurt. Off to his left, he heard screams, human screams, was it the grenadier who’d held on to give his squad cover? Links didn’t know and didn’t have time to think about it. He and his men emerged from the semi-shadow of the alley and saw the most welcome sight of their lives. A Bradley was sitting on the road, its turret trained on the alley they had just come from. They could guess what was coming and scattered to either side. There was a rasping burst from the chain gun and this time the screams were baldrick. M16s may be ineffective but 25mm APHE was not.

“In the back fast.” The Bradley commander snapped the order out. Links and his men piled into the back and the ramp closed behind them. They were safe at last, behind armor.

“Where we going?”

“Defense Perimeter Delta. The other side of the clearing. We’re holding there. No more falling back.”

“Just how the hell are we supposed to do that? These 16’s ain’t worth shit against a baldrick.”

“You’ll get sacks of grenades and AT-4s issued when we get back to your position. And M72s. Once we’re in Delta, we’ll do it Stalingrad style. Room to room.

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Do you believe her?”

“If I’m in the same room as her, probably.”

Randi chuckled. There had been some discrete experiments going on. Put a subject in the same room as Lugasharmanaska, measure their initial reaction to the succubus and then watch as that changed. Their prejudice started to soften within five minutes and by 30 minutes at most, they were friendly. “What do you think? Mind control?”

“Can’t be. We know roughly why their mind control works, they have the ability to entangle pathways in our brains using a bio-generated electrical field as a carrier wave. Your work with Julie and kitten shows we can do the same only we can’t generate the bio-electric field as a carrier. We also know that electrically conductive headgear blocks out the signal. Humiliating that isn’t it. For years people who were being persecuted by demons tried to warn us and tell us how to block the signals and we laughed at them. Ridiculed them, then locked them up and doped them to the eyeballs. The tinfoil beanie became a symbol of cranks and nut-cases – and all along they were right. Anyway, we’ve all been scrupulous about wearing our tinfoil beanies yet Lugasharmanaska gets the same reactions every time. Must be something else. We’ll keep trying until we get there.”

“Nicely switched away from the subject Robert. Now, do you believe her?”

Robert O’Shea thought for a second. “No. That stuff about breeding with humans can’t be true. We’re different species and different species can’t breed together, that’s a basic definition. The question is why is she lying? And if she is, why don’t we just hand her over to Doctor Surlethe and let him get some real information from her.”

“She might not be lying Robert. Just because she isn’t telling us the truth doesn’t mean that she’s lying. She may honestly believe that what she is telling us is true. It may be true, its just that we don’t understand what she is saying.” Randi paused. “I’ve had that with people who honestly believed they had psychic abilities. They were so convinced they were telling the truth that they just couldn’t believe there were other explanations. Parents were the worst. They got the idea their child was ‘special’ in some way, and which parents don’t believe that, and couldn’t accept that there were rational reasons why the kids were getting the results they were. We had one little girl whose parents honestly believed she had X-ray vision, even when we filmed her moving her head as she read a book ‘blindfolded’. Once we had sealed off her normal vision, her ‘ability’ stopped dead. And don’t get me started on dowsers.

“Look, I’m a conjuror, not a scientist but I’ll say this. Luga’s given us something to work with. It may be true, it may not be, but its something we can test. We have a theory from her, we can test that theory against reality and come up with the disconnects. Then we can learn by explaining those disconnects. And the first disconnect is how everybody feels warm and fuzzy towards Lugasharmanaska when she is, quite literally, a demon from hell.”

Randi stopped and knocked on a door. There was a mumbled ‘Come-in’ from inside.

“Norman, how are you settling in? And how do your cats like the Pentagon?”

“They’re getting overfed already. And I didn’t know the Secretary of State likes cats.”

“That’s a well-kept Washington secret. Did all your stuff get here safely?”

“Sure did, I’m getting it set up now. Any chance of meeting Lugasharmanaska?”

“Not at the moment, you can watch her but we’re trying to keep a limit on who actually sees her. She seems to have an uncanny effect on people around her.”

“I don’t see why; I’ve seen her pictures. She looks like something out of a nightmare. But then given the habits of the Succubi, I suppose she should look gross.”

“What do you mean Norman?”

“Succubi are supposed to mate with humans to collect male sperm. Then mate with their male equivalents, the Incubi and transfer that sperm to them. Incubi then mate with human females and impregnate them with that sperm. I guess that’s about as close to a dictionary definition of yukkiness as we’re ever going to get.”

Randi turned to O’Shea who was standing in the door with his mouth hanging open. “Well, it is a different dimension from ours, Robert. But that might explain how the Nephilim Lugasharmanaska was talking about could arise. They’re not hybrid human-demons, they’re corrupted humans somehow. Score one for the Succubus.”

“I’d rather not. The thought of waking up next to that thing is just about the most horrible thought I can imagine.” O’Shea paused for a second. “Except waking up next to my ex-wife I guess. Thank’s Norman, those were mental pictures I could have done without. My next week’s sleep is likely to be permanently ruined.”

“I aim to please. Doctor Randi…”

“It’s James, Norman. And I’ve never been any sort of Doctor. You want to be formal, you could call me The Amazing Randi if you like, but James will do just fine.” Randi gave Baines a gentle grandfatherly smile.

“James, where are we going from here?”

“Lugasharmanaska gave us some clues on how to open a portal to hell. I’m going to get my people together and we’re going to try it. If it works, score two for the Succubus, if it doesn’t we’ll learn from finding out why. By the way, spread the word, Doctor Surlethe is on his way to Baghdad. The Army is collecting corpses of baldricks for him but the Air Force won’t fly them over here. Dead baldricks decompose pretty fast and the smell is dreadful. Even through a body bag so the Air Force boys won’t have their nice clean transports fouled up by them. So, if dead baldricks won’t come to Surlethe, Surlethe will have to go to the dead baldricks.”

Randi left and went down to the corridor. Outside the conference room his team was using as a laboratory, four armed Marines were on guard. That was new but when Randi went inside, he could see why. The room was stacked with packages wrapped in green plastic. Small packages, rectangular in shape, about two pounds each Randi guessed. He had a sudden premonition that had nothing whatsoever to do with pseudo-science that smoking in this room would be a very bad idea. There was other equipment around, boxes, odd shapes and two vicious looking rifles.

“Sir, General Schatten will be with us immediately Sir.” Randi nodded. In the background, he could hear music playing, Sheryl Crowe’s voice sounding incongruous amongst the electronics, weapons and piles of high explosive.

These, in the days when Heaven is failing. The days when earths foundations fled They follow their military calling And now they fight to save our dead

And now they fight to save our dead.

Their shoulders hold the sky suspended They stand and earth’s foundations hold Whom God abandoned these defended And they saved the sum of things today.

And they saved the sum of things today.

“I hope you don’t mind Sir.” kitten was stretched out on a couch, her boyfriend sitting beside her. “Some music helps me relax.

“No problem kitten. You know what’s going to happen here?” kitten shook her head.

“This room is shielded against electromagnetic radiation so anything we pick up is you linking to hell.” The scientist spoke carefully. When he’d got his PhD (a highly classified one as it happened, in electromagnetic propagation which was a euphemism for some of the more spectacular aspects of electronic warfare), he’d never envisaged working on anything like this. “We’re running those signals through a massive amplifier and blasting them out. According to our information, we push enough power into the transmission and the visions you can experience will be converted to a real portal that we can step though into hell itself. And step out of to get back here.”

He was interrupted by the military members of the group snapping to attention. General Schatten had entered with an Army Major in tow. He returned the salutes and looked around at the room with satisfaction. “I see the Czechs came through with the Semtex then. This is Major Warhol, he’ll be training the A-teams who’ll be organizing the insurgency in Hell. Major, this is the team trying to get through for your people.”

“Thank you general.” The expression on Warhol’s face was one of stunned disbelief. “If I may summarize my mission, I and my people are going to use an inter-dimensional rift created by a masochistic paranoid schizophrenic transsexual acting on information received from a turncoat succubus to invade Hell, start an insurgency with the aim of destabilizing the whole set-up there, subverting the rule of Satan and eventually organizing an internal coup to overthrow him.”

“That’s it in a nutshell Major.” Schatten’s voice was amused by the horrified expression on the Major’s countenance.

“When I selected Special Forces at the ‘Point, they told me there would be days like this.”

“What did they recommend Major?”

“Cyanide Sir.’ A laugh ran around the room.

“People, we’re ready to get started.” The scientist was trying desperately to get back into control. “Once the portal is open, we don’t know how long we can keep it open so we have to move fast. General?”

“Yeah, when it opens, everybody start throwing stuff through as fast as you can. Just throw it through, leave the people the other side to catch and store it. One question Bob, why can’t we keep the portal open? The baldricks don’t seem to have any trouble.”

“Imagine it like this General, a very fast flowing stream with a pair of old saloon doors, the kind that swing both ways in it. The baldricks upstream, us downstream. They can push the doors open easily enough but to close them they have to pull the doors against the flow. To open them we have to push against the flow but that same flow will be constantly trying to push them shut again. kitten, I think there’s going to an incredible strain on you once the portal opens, even with electronic boost, you’re fighting forces we have no way of understanding. Don’t worry about how long you can hold on for, just do the best you can. If you can give any warning when you’re going to lose it, please try but if you can’t, don’t worry. Remember, you’re a unique resource at this time, you’re worth more than pretty much anything else we have.” kitten nodded. “Right people, let’s get going.”

Chapter Twenty

On the Shore of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

The six members of Recon Team Tango-one-five crouched behind a large rock outcropping beside high walls that separated the Sixth Ring from the Fifth. On the other side of the rocks was the gate, no less than fifty feet high, and probably much higher. It was open, and a steady stream of Baldricks was pouring out of the Sixth Ring, and setting off across the Fifth to where a distant set of gates offered access to the Fourth Ring. . Kim looked over to McInery and hissed, “What’s your count, Mac?”

“I’m at five thousand two hundred twenty, ell-tee. Twenty-nine. Thirty-eight. …”

“Aye. Forty-seven now. How many command units?”

Gerald “Bubbles” Tarrant chimed in. “That’s a little more than seven battalion-sized units, and we’ve seen eight big guys on huge-ass rhinolobsters. I think they’re battalion commanders, ell-tee”

Kim nodded. That made sense. And they were still pouring out from the city in ranks of nine abreast, with no end in sight. It was like being caught at a crossing by a two hundred car train … her gaze softened as she started to think about the wide skies and waving grain of her Midwestern ho—

She slapped herself softly. No thoughts of home now; she was in hell, and she had a job to do. Fifty-seven sixty, fifty-seven sixty-nine – “Mac? How many?”

“Five thousand seven hundred seventy eight and counting, ell tee.”

“Bubbles?”

“Here comes the ninth big rhinolobster; this’ll be nine battalions of 81 nine-baldrick platoons.”

They kept counting for another couple of minutes, and then there were no more baldricks. As the tramping feet died off into the mists of the Styx, Kim looked over at McInery. “You have 6,666 baldricks, including the command groups?”

“Aye, ell-tee. Right in line with what Bubbles has got.”

“Damn. That’s a whole brigade.”

There was silence for a minute, then Bubbles asked, “So, ell-tee, what are we doing now?”

“Now, we move away from the city, stay in the region, and find a relatively safe place to get some rest and wait for more contact.”

“Aye, sir.” They darted one-by-one from boulder to boulder, heading away from the city across the coffin-dotted plain. Around them, the groans and cries of the damned rose into a haunting chorus as the unquenchable flames – What powers them? wondered Kim idly for a moment before pulling herself back to the present – balanced by the supernatural healing powers of their new bodies.

Nearly an hour later, they were again at the shore of the Styx. The soft mud oozing gently through their toes belied the roar of the waterfall ahead, and the thick pea-soup fog was getting heavier as it mingled with the mist thrown up by the falling water. There was a horrible stench in the air, and the mist tasted of sulfur.

Kim led Tango-one-five toward the cliff. The mud thinned at last and gave way to rock; the land rose into a jagged, twisted badland around the river basin as the river gained speed heading toward the gorge. They clambered over the slick rocks and around monolithic boulders, until Kim stopped.

They were standing on a low peak with a commanding view of the surrounding terrain, at least as far as the mist let them see. Ahead of them, the broken terrain dived down into dimness; to the right, the Styx plunged down the gorge; to the left, the cliff edge stretched off into the mist, with a subtle curve that just evaded the eye; and behind them, the badlands stretched for what must have been several miles. They were surrounded by a ring of low, jagged boulders.

Kim nodded. “Here is where we make the base of operations. We’re staying here until command contacts – ” Her eyes defocused, and she relaxed visibly.

McInery was next to her, and grabbed her muddy shoulder. “Ell-tee? Ell-tee??”

She tensed up again with a start. “That was the brass in Washington. They’re going to try to get us some equipment.”

Lieutenant Kim? It was kitten again.

Kim tried her best not to fade out and lose the contact. Yes? “Mac, I’m still talking to them. Hold on a second.”

General Schatten is wondering if where you are is a safe place right now?

Yes, we’re safe enough.

Okay, good. We’re going to try an experiment here. If it works, I’ll see you in a moment. Or something will be happening.” Kim felt a giggle in kitten’s voice. Nobody is quite sure what.

Randi Institute of Pneumatology, the Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“I’m through Sirs.” kitten spoke with an unaccustomed level of authority in her voice. “Lieutenant Kim says they are in a safe place right now.”

The attending scientist nodded. “Are you ready?”

Taking a deep breath and closing her eyes tightly, kitten nodded.

“We have kitten’s signal recorded and digitalized?” The question was a rhetorical one only. Nevertheless, one of the electronic techs checked the files in the signals analysis computer.

“Confirmed, we have it. Like nothing we’ve ever seen before but we do have it.”

From his pocket, the scientist pulled what looked like a TV remote and hit a couple of buttons. Across the room, the digitalized version of kitten’s bio-electrical signal was being fed into an amplifying system that had been modified from a deception jammer. The result as the technologists started to increase the output power was immediate. kitten began to shake visibly, rattling the chair she was lounged on. The tendons in her neck were standing out in strain. Her boyfriend held her tightly, and was about to say something when everyone in the room jumped. A black ellipse was staring to form in the room. It was hard to say where it was, it seemed to be at once parallel with the floor and perpendicular to it. It was also hard to say what it was, it seemed black and almost infinitely absorptive yet it also glared and irritated the eyes. A shining shadow didn’t make sense yet that was what they had created.

“What is that?”

“Must be a projection of something our senses can’t cope with so they’re doing the best they can.”

“Hurry up can’t you?” kitten’s boyfriend almost snarled out the words. “Can’t you see how much you’re hurting her?”

Still not quite believing his eyes, Randi picked up the paper airplane he’d brought and threw it; it traveled through the portal and vanished. A split second later it came back out, stained and smelling of sulfur.

General Schatten didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a Barrett M107 rifle from the pile of military shiny toys, a bag of electronic equipment, then tossed a “Warhol, grab some more and follow me” over his shoulder before stepping into the shadowy circle and vanishing.

On the Shore of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

Kim suddenly felt awake again, but the daydream wasn’t gone. In fact, it seemed to be superimposed on her vision. She passed a dirty hand over her eyes and squinted, trying to get it to go away; her mind was playing tricks on her, she got the sense that something was forcing its way through to her. Then, a black ellipse started to form, one that defied easy description. “Hold on still, guys. I think I’m still hallucinating.”

“You too?” asked Bubbles, who was blinking rapidly.

Kim spun around and looked at her surroundings. All normal, and she was feeling fine. Then she turned back again, and there was the tunnel. “You guys see it too?”

“Yes,” said the others at once. As they did so, a paper dart flew through the ellipse and hit Kim on the forehead before fluttering to the ground. Perplexed, she stooped and picked it up: a paper airplane? Then the anvil dropped and she threw it back through the ellipse. After a few seconds, a man stepped through, an M107 Barrett over one shoulder, a large bag in one hand. Kim and her companions snapped to attention.

“Lieutenant, you’re out of uniform.” General Schatten looked around, a foul, stinking swamp covered with a yellowish mist that stunk of sulfur and fouler things. He was standing on a rocky outcrop amid an atmosphere of desolation and misery that told him, more clearly than anything else could, that he was truly in hell.

“Sorry Sir, that joke was old the first time I heard it. Anyway, this is the uniform of the day around here. Skin and mud.”

“You need uniforms? We’ve got a lot to get through to you and we’re not sure how long we can hold the portal open for at any one time.” Another figure emerged. “This is Major Warhol, Special Forces. He’ll be liaising with you and providing technical and operational assistance.”

“Welcome to Hell Sirs. First thing, intelligence, we’ve counted five brigade–sized units moving out of the lower reaches of hell, heading upwards. There’s a lot more baldricks coming your way Sir. How’s thing going out there?”

“Dave Petraeus is doing a number on the invasion force. He’s literally shredding them with artillery and armor. The baldricks are losing in six-digit numbers.” Schatten paused for a brief second. “Their command structure is shot to hell, you and your team mates did a damned fine job.”

Randi Institute of Pneumatology, the Pentagon, Arlington, VA

Major Warhol was already on the other side of the portal, and the military personnel were forming a line and starting to hand off crates of ammunition and explosives, piling it through the portal as fast as discipline and urgency could make possible.

“All hands to the pumps. Get this stuff through as quickly. Maximum urgency.” Randi looked at where kitten was shivering on her couch, obviously in great distress. “Everybody, this isn’t just a military business. Throw stuff through if you can’t hand it.” He paused for a second. “Is it safe to throw Semtex?”

“Sure is. Thank’s for the help.” The stream of equipment being passed through picked up speed.

On the Shore of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

“All of you, stand to, and help us unload these supplies,” Schatten snapped, then turned and passed his rifle to Kim. “It’s an M107, hot from the production line. We got you Semtex instead of C-4, its 30 percent more powerful. She, in turn, handed the rifle to McInery, who leaned it against a boulder. The stack of equipment grew until they had received six webbings to carry things in, two slightly modified 0.50 calibre assault rifles, 30 crates of ammunition, 180 kilograms of Semtex with all the requisite electronic fusing, two dozen M24 claymore mines, the same number of AT-4 anti-tank rockets, six pairs of night-vision goggles, and twelve outfits of dark combat fatigues.

Behind them, the portal started to shimmer, Schatten guessed that kitten was finally losing her grip. “Anything else you need Lieutenant?”

“Yes Sir. We need to change our allocations so our dependents get all of our salary. We don’t need money here.”

“But you’re dead.”

“With respect Sir, the contract with the Army says nothing about ‘til death us do part’ and obviously it hasn’t. Sir, this is hell, we are not short of lawyers down here.” Kim grinned broadly, perfectly well aware of the size of the demolition charge she’d just thrown into the Army bureaucracy.

Schatten returned her grin. “Lieutenant, you’ve enabled me to fulfill a life’s ambition. When I hand your – perfectly reasonable – instructions over to the proper authority, I can finally make those REMFs at Pay Corps suffer as much as the troops on the front line. Good luck Lieutenant and kick some ass down here.” Then he and Warhol stepped back through the portal and were gone.

Kim surveyed the equipment and smiled. “Okay, guys. We don’t have to eat. We don’t have to sleep. We heal ten times faster than ordinary humans. We’re the United States military.” Her smile widened into a full-toothed grin. “Let’s go blow up some baldricks.”

Randi Institute of Pneumatology, the Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“I’m losing it!” kitten’s wail cut across the room. The elliptical portal started to shiver as General Schatten and Major Warhol stepped out. A second or so later, it collapsed completely. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be my dear.” Schatten’s voice was comforting and quiet. “Look, we got all the stuff they needed through to them, they passed some intelligence that was very important back to us and, above all, we’ve made solid contact. You did better than we had any right to expect, so you go and have a rest. You deserve a medal for what you did today.”

“Sir, you should have let me go through first.” Warhol’s comment came as kitten and her boyfriend left the room.

“Major, sometimes a commander has to lead the way. Try it with noodles one day. Try to push a cooked noodle across a plate, then try and pull it across. See which one is easier. We’re going to be literally asking men to go into hell itself. Now, when we do ask, they’ll know that we went first.” Schatten brushed at his uniform, it was covered with foul-smelling mud and a disgusting greenish slime. “I’m going to wash and change. If this smells as bad as it looks.”

“It does.” Said Randi reassuringly.

“Then that’s an early order of priority. I guess the Lab boys will want to analyze this stuff as well.”

“I brought some samples Sir.” Warhol held up what looked suspiciously like a jam jar filled with the mud from hell.

“Well done. And that applies to everybody here. We’re in a position to strike back at last.”

Defense Perimeter Delta, Hit, Western Iraq.

“What the blazes is that?”

The first layer of buildings was acting as a sieve, forcing the Baldricks to break up into small groups as they forced their way through the alleys and narrow streets before breaking out into the open ground that marked the gap between the now-fallen Perimeter Charlie and the disputed Perimeter Delta. That open ground, traversed by a divided-lane highway, was the new killing ground and the carpet of black bodies was growing as the 10th Mountain Division’s armored cavalry units swept it with fire. The problem was the steadily-growing number of bodies in Army camouflage that were joining the baldrick dead. Now, there was something different happening, a white pick-up truck was tearing down the roadway, swerving around the bodies that littered it and heading straight for a large group of baldricks that had just emerged from the buildings.

The Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans of 10th Mountain guessed what was about to happen, they’d seen exactly the same tactic tried out on the Bradleys and Abrams tanks as they’d done their thunder runs through Baghdad. It had failed then but the baldricks didn’t have heavy armor supporting them. The suicide bombers them had died screaming “God is Great” but it was unlikely that they made the same call now. “Death to God” was more likely. It made little difference, the truck plowed into the group of baldricks and exploded, scattering fragments of steel and baldrick for dozens of yards around. Even here, in Delta, the blast was stunning.

“Come on, follow me.” Links screamed out, the last baldrick push had sized a building that was a Delta strongpoint and it was up to him to retake it. While everybody was stunned by the suicide bomber’s blast was as good a time as any. He was pressed up against the wall one side of the door, he swung past and kicked it open. Ina well-time drill, two of his men threw a pair of hand grenades each inside, then the other pair raked it with fire from their M16s. Links rolled through the door, two of the baldricks inside were dead or dying on the floor, two more were still standing although obviously torn up by grenade fragments and bullets. Links pushed up to his feet and slammed into the nearest baldrick, knocking the wounded monster off its feet. He and three of his men piled on top of it, pinning its arms down, slamming their K-bars into its eyes. The baldrick screamed and threshed, one of its clawed feet catching an infantryman in the stomach and disemboweling him.

Across the room, the remaining badlrick turned and ran, out of the door and into the open ground beyond. He made a few yards before smoke trains erupted around him and he vanished into the concussion of RPG-7 warheads exploding. The irregulars in Hit had joined in the fight and the RPG-7s they carried in place of rifles were lethal. Links looked up, the terrific noise of the firefight was joined by something else, a rhythmic throbbing that shook dust from the ceiling and caused the shelves on the wall to bounce. Over his head, the sky suddenly turned black and red as a hail of unguided rockets passed overhead to slam into the buildings opposite.

“It’s the Apaches!” Links’ voice was triumphant as the four helicopters swept low overhead, their 30mm chain guns hammering at the baldricks caught in the open. All along the line, the AH-64Ds of the aviation unit were sweeping the killing zone with gunfire and rockets while overhead, F-16s prowled, ready to take down any harpies that appeared.

Headquarters, Army of Abigor, Hit, Western Iraq.

Abigor watched the human sky chariots pouring fire into his troops. Some of them were simply saturating the area with fire lances, others were using a magic fire lance that would turn in the air to follow its prey. Seeker lances he thought, what else could they be?

“Sire, our demons are falling back.”

“What?” Abigor contained his urge to destroy the messenger. He had learned how futile that could be.

“They have lost eight in ten of their number Sire and the humans will not retreat from us. They cannot hold and now the sky chariots have arrived, the iron chariots will not be far behind. It is over.” The messenger bowed his head and waited for death.

Abigor looked across the roofs of Hit where the sky chariots were attacking the remnants of the legions deployed here. He had had such hopes of this outflanking move but in his heart he guessed the humans had been ahead of him all the time.

“Yes, it is over. Spread the word, order the legions to fall back and regroup.”

Regroup with what? the messenger was tempted to ask but he held his tongue. Surviving this message was good fortune enough for one day, no need to tempt fate.

Headquarters, Multi-National Force Iraq, Green Zone, Baghdad.

The baldrick attack was collapsing, General Petraeus could see the truth now, unfolding on the giant screen before him. He had raw video up, it showed the black line that had pressed up against his defenses melting away, beginning to stream to the rear as it collapsed. Up at Hit the issue had been close for some hours and the brigade holding the city had been battered but they had held and now the enemy was in retreat there as well. Petraeus switched over from raw to synthetic video, the pictures of the battle replaced by blue and red military symbols moving slowly as the baldricks retreated and the human formations started their advance.

Not that there was anywhere for the baldricks to retreat to. The armored spearheads had already linked up behind their lines and blocked the retreat to the hellmouth. The back door had slammed shut, there was nowhere for the baldricks to run to.

Commendations to Surlethe who wrote the first part of this section

Chapter Twenty One

Executive Office, Pima Air & Space Museum , Tucson, Arizona

The sound of R-3350 engines starting up woke Daniel J. Ryan, Executive Director of the Pima Air and Space Museum up from an exhausted sleep. For weeks it seemed as if his whole museum had become a research center, digging out old documentation that allowed the aircraft stored at the AMARG boneyard down the road to be brought back into service. His prized restoration experts had suddenly found themselves wearing Air Force Blue uniforms and preparing aircraft to go to war again. AMARG was slowly beginning to empty as the aircraft capable of being returned to service were brought back to operational status and the rest were stripped of what parts they had left.

He got off the couch in his office, hearing the whine of the R-3350s outside pick up in volume. He shook his head and headed for the executive bathroom, his mouth tasted foul after what had passed for a night’s sleep and he desperately wanted to clean his teeth. He checked his tinfoil hat was on safely, a gesture that had almost become a reflex amongst the human population over the last few weeks, and then headed for a shower and a shave. Half his job involved being the public front for the museum, and that meant looking well-groomed whenever he could. His wife was bringing him freshly-pressed clothes over each day and he couldn’t let her down by not shaving. Even though the R-3350s were making his mirror shake and his hand unsteady.

Finally, he was ready to face the coming day and he went back to his desk. He’d pulled a cup of water from the dispenser and the R-3350s were causing concentric ripples on the surface. He looked at them for several seconds before the significance sank in.

Ten seconds later he was out his office door and running for the flight line, shouting “Hey, bring my B-29 back!”

Flight Line, Pima Air & Space Museum , Tucson, Arizona

“I’m sorry Sir, technically the aircraft still does belong to the Air Force and we’re repossessing it. We’ll be taking your KB-50 as well, as soon as we can get it flyable and converted back to a bomb carrier. And, of course we will be taking all three of your B-52s.”

“But these are museum pieces…..” Ryan spluttered, aghast at the thought of Pima’s superb collection of aircraft being dismantled.

“They can still perform useful roles Sir. If its any consolation, the Commemorative Air Force and the New England Air Museum are losing their B-29s as well. Not to mention Wright Patterson losing Bockscar and the Smithsonian parting with Enola Gay. There’s more than 20 others as well, although there are only five B-50s and they’re in pretty rough condition. Except yours of course, Still, we should have enough to make up a mixed B-29/B-50 group by the time we’ve finished.”

“But they’re obsolete.” Ryan’s voice was weak.

“Not so much so Sir. They still haul bombs and are fast enough, and fly high enough, to keep out of harpy claws. And we’re not sure how well jets will adapt to the conditions in hell so we’re hedging our bets.” Behind him, there was a roar and the B-29 took off, heading for its new operational base. Ryan could barely stop himself crying.

“What else are you taking?”

“Oh, not much Sir. Your F-111 and your A-10 of course. You’ve kept the planes here in superb condition, I must say. We may want some others as well, depends what we can find elsewhere. We don’t want lots of single aircraft but if there are enough to make up a small group……”

“I suppose you’ll want our replica Wright Flyer?” Ryan spoke bitterly.

“No Sir, not under current plans. But we would like to talk to you about your B-36.”

Executive Office, Alexander Arms Corporation, Radford Arsenal, Virginia

“Mister Alexander Sir, it’s a Colonel Matthews from the Defense Logistic Agency.” Alexander’s secretary sounded urgent.

“Put him through then Jeanie.” There was a click on the line “Bill Alexander here.”

“Mister Alexander, its Colonel Matthews here from the DLA. If you haven’t heard already, you will be fairly shortly, our M16s and M4s aren’t showing up very well in Iraq. Don’t have the stopping power to finish off a baldrick. So, we need to change approach fast. You’re making .50 Beowulf M16s for the Coastguard, well, you can start expanding that production line right now. We need you to start mass-producing .50 Beowulf upper receivers with a 24 inch barrel right away. We’ll issue them and mate them with in-service lower receivers. We’ll be faxing you the paperwork later today. Take this telephone call as authorization to start work.”

“How many?”

“Our initial production target will be one million sets of parts needed to convert in-service weapons. For your information, the new rifle will be the M16A6 and the M4A5.”

The room was swimming around Alexander’s eyes. “We’re a small company, there’s no way we can make that number of rifles. And the ammunition.”

Matthews sounded more than slightly irritated. “Then license other producers. Talk to Ordnance, they may have facilities you can take over. Listen man, this country is awash with weapons producers, if you can’t meet the production targets, make some arrangements. Our boys have died out there because their rifles didn’t do the job. And you know where they go when they die. You’re a manager, so get the lead out of your pants and start managing. Don’t make us write more letters to mothers telling them their kids died because they didn’t have the tools they need. Understand?”

Alexander didn’t have a chance to answer before he heard the telephone bang down. He stared at the receiver in his hand for a long moment that was only interrupted when his fax machine started to spew pages out. “Jeanie? Get me a list of all our subcomponent suppliers, we have to jack production up soonest. And get me the heads of Bushmaster, DPMS, Olympic Arms, Colt, FN and any other rival you can think of.”

Headquarters, Boeing Military Aircraft Division, St Louis, Missouri.

The voice as impossibly British. “I say, is that Mike Graham, T-45 project manager?”

“It is. To whom am I speaking?”

“Sorry, old chap. James Kendrick here, Hawk 200 Project Manager at BAE Systems. We’ve had some calls from our respective governments asking us to put our heads together and come up with a new aircraft for our forces.”

“Excuse me, I’ve heard nothing of this.” There was a ‘ding’ on Graham’s computer indicating a top-priority email from corporate HQ in Chicago. He read it. “My apologies, I’ve just been told.”

“No problem. Everything is screwed up. Anyway, basically the RAF want a cheap, light fighter to make up numbers, the Navy want one for their carriers and your chaps want some for everybody. So, our governments have decided to combine your T-45C trainer with our Hawk 200 light fighter and produce a single-seat, radar-equipped fighter for everybody. My bosses think it’s a pretty good idea, one that should sell well. So, we need to get cracking. Can we arrange for our design team to come over there?”

“Sure, or would you prefer us to come over to you?”

“Really, we’d rather come to you if you don’t mind. Have you ever tried to get a decent steak in Britain?”

Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Blasted rock, pools of mud and other less wholesome liquids, gauzy wisps of orange fumes, the odd crucified body; Hell wasn't anything pleasant to look at, even through a window. Standing in front of that window was an Army officer facing out towards a room occupied by a mix of civilian and military engineers along with a sprinkling of figures in Air Force, Army, and Marine uniforms. As the last straggler slipped through the door set in the far wall, he began to speak.

"Gentlemen, ladies, my name is Major Warhol, and welcome to Section Twelve of DIMO(N). I'm sure we'll be assigned a mouthful of an acronym soon, but for now we've just been calling it the Hell Lab." He stepped to one side and waved an arm at the window behind him.

"To get straight to the point, sooner or later we're going to have to fight in Hell, and from what limited intel we've gathered so far, it's a hell of an environment." He winced slightly at the awful pun, then shook his head with a sheepish smile before continuing, "It's going to do a number on our gear, and long-term exposure isn't going to do humans any good either. That's where we come in. We've put together a mock-up, our own personal Hell-in-a-jar based on the intelligence we've received so far, and we're going to be testing our gear in it. That's for the servicemen among you. The rest of you," he nodded towards one of the engineers closes to the window, "are here to fix whatever doesn't work, or failing that, to devise something new to fill a gap where our existing equipment doesn't cut it. We've got five other rooms like this one, with different speculative environments, and we'll be updating all of them as we learn more of the makeup of Hell. At the moment, we’ve only got actual data on one part of hell, one segment of the 5th circle. However, it looks like Dante’s Inferno was a pretty accurate description so, until we know more, we’re working on that basis. We’ve got people here digging through other old records as well so we’ll refine the picture as we go. Across the hall, there's another team that'll be doing the same with Heaven once we know something about it."

He singled out a lone man in a suit with a nod, "Agent Carson accomplished the only strike mission so far into Hell, albeit remotely. He's at your disposal for questions, and the CIA was kind enough to send the Predator he used for the strike along with him." Carson’s lips cracked in a wry, sardonic smile. He’d sat behind an operator’s terminal and sent in a drone but that made him a celebrity. "I'm told we're free to disassemble the Predator, but the Agency would like Agent Carson back in one piece. Or at least, if we do dismantle him, can we number the pieces so The Company can reassemble him. Also, please remember, he’s a star on the war-bond sales pitches."

A chuckle ran around the room, accompanied by a snort from Carson himself. Major Warhol let the room settle for a few seconds before he started back into the briefing, "Air Force types, the wind tunnel's still under construction, but once it's up, you'll have down-checked aircraft of more or less any make you need in the hangars on-base to test in a Hell-condition wind tunnel. Sorry to give you the castoffs, but we're short there as it is. Some of the birds are types we don’t have in the inventory any more but we’ve repossessed from museums. Feel free to test those to destruction. Infantry, there's a target range with variable-density cloud generators to simulate atmospheric conditions. Armor, you're going to be a bit limited for a while, we're not going to have room for a half-dozen large-scale Hell-jars for you to play with, and the one we will have won't be finished for a week or two."

Warhol signaled with his hand, ordering a guard to open another door. A group of a dozen Arabs filed into the room, dressed in loose white robes. A rustling murmur passed through the briefing room's other occupants as they turned to look at the newcomers, several frowns flashing into place. Before anything could get out of hand, Major Warhol's voice called out again, louder at first to cut through the whispered speculation,

"I’d like to welcome Abdullah Rashid, formerly one of the Iraqi insurgency leaders, and now head of the DIMO(N) S12 insurgency team. I know!" he shouted, cutting through a rising babble of voices, "That many of you will be uncomfortable working with him and his men, but the fact remains that the Iraqi insurgents have had quite a lot of experience in running insurgencies recently and their people fought alongside ours in Hit. We’re allies now." His lips quirk in a thin, humorless smile, "And there’ll be others joining us as well, including some explosives experts from the Provisional IRA. They are probably the best on the world at their particular art, they should be, they fought the British for long enough. If I hear of them being frozen out of discussion here, I'm not going to be a terribly happy man, and none of you want that. These teams will be focusing on the best ways to manufacture explosives, weapons, IEDs, anything they can think of that can be made and used in whole or in part using Hell-native resources and conditions."

Warhol surveyed the assembled men and women for a few more seconds, and then nodded to himself,

"Alright, dismi--actually, one thing I forgot. Everyone, if you'll please inspect the walls."

He waited for a few seconds for people to turn and look, Scattered around the walls of the room at regular intervals were glass-fronted cabinets loaded with shotguns and submachine guns, On each one was printed in tall, red letters, 'IN CASE OF BALDRICKS, BREAK GLASS.' Another chuckle ran through the room, albeit a somewhat nervous one.

"We don't know the limitations of the Baldricks' teleportation and portal abilities yet, so we're going to assume they could pop up in here. Familiarize yourself with the locations of the emergency arms cabinets, and with the weapons. There's an earth-environment firing range on base, feel free to avail yourself of it if you want to brush the rust off; I'd hate to lose any of you to something as silly as a lone baldrick raider Dismissed." He pauses for a moment, then grins, "And I mean it this time. Break into teams and let's start figuring out how to raze Hell."

The Oval Office, The White House, Washington DC

“My fellow humans.” President Bush looked into the camera and gave a careful, friendly smile. The truth was that he was actually feeling reasonably happy at this point, his approval rating had gone over 50 percent for the first time in years. “You have all been following the events in Iraq where allied forces have engaged a baldrick invasion army estimated at over 400,000 strong. Much of the fighting has been obscure due to the area it has covered but now, I am able to give you some accurate information on what has taken place.

“The baldrick army has been defeated, not just defeated but destroyed. Our troops and those of our allies, most notably the Iranians under General Fereidoon Zolfaghari and the British under Brigadier John Carlson have beaten back the enemy and inflicted enormous losses upon them. We believe that the total of their dead is in excess of 300,000, a number that is rising hourly as our forces pursue the defeated enemy back to the very mouth of hell.” Bush looked down at his desk briefly, the retreating enemy hadn’t yet encountered the blocking force that was between them and safety. That was a nice surprise that was waiting for them.

“Our own losses so far are just over 600 dead. Most of these were suffered in the battle for the town of Hit. There, a brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division held the town against an overwhelmingly powerful force of baldricks and drove them back, fighting room to room in the process. In doing so they proved that not only do our armed forces have superior equipment to our enemy but our men are better trained, braver and more resourceful than their baldrick counterparts.

“Now, however, we must look to the future. We have learned that the force that struck us represents only a small portion of the forces that the enemy has available to him. Beyond that, we know that the forces of Yahweh still exist and must be numbered on the list of our enemies. Already, we have killed one of them, one responsible for an atrocious massacre carried out against defenseless civilians in the peace of their home. Our forces have achieved wonders, General Petraeus has won a victory that will forever place him amongst the Great Captains, but this is not enough.

“We must mobilize for war. Our armed forces depend on armored vehicles for their mobility and for defense against baldrick attacks. Those armored vehicles need fuel and the battles over the last few days have shown how much they require. We must give them priority for supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Accordingly, I have given orders for fuel rationing to be instituted here in the United States. Each licensed driver in a family will be allowed to buy no more that twenty gallons of automobile fuel per month. Government help will be provided for car pooling and other requirements. There is a crying need for more vehicles to carry the supplies needed to our troops. Therefore, most private automobile production in this country is to be converted to military use. Heavy truck plants will, of course, be converted to produce military trucks. Car and SUV facilities will be converted to produce light armored cars or aircraft depending on their level of technology. The only exception to this will be factories producing electric cars or small commercial vehicles. We have talked much about replacing gasoline-powered automobiles in our society. Now, our hand has been forced.

“In the last two days, 600 of our men and their allies have sacrificed everything they had for us. They gave their lives, knowing what awaited them beyond death. Now, we must match their sacrifice and bend every will, every nerve, every muscle in a great national crusade that will see our enemies driven into the dust and humbled. Thank you all, and good night.”

President Bush turned off the microphones and stared at the office wall. He’d just told the American people that they couldn’t drive around any more they way they used to. Ah well, it had been nice being popular again for a while.

Chapter Twenty Two

Ibn Sina Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq

“These things smell dreadful. Couldn’t we have chilled them?”

“We did Doctor. Unfortunately dead baldricks appear to rot very fast indeed. As far as we can tell, its daylight that causes them to decay, not temperature.”

“Ultraviolet sensitive then? Would that tie in with reports of their sensitivity to lasers?” A doctor in the observation gallery sounded very thoughtful.

“They do seem to be sensitive to most of our technology, from ultra-violence to infra-dead.” A chuckle crossed the gallery. The baldricks were running west, with three armies in hot pursuit and another closing in from the North. Suddenly, they seemed far less frightening.

Doctor Surlethe nodded and looked at the baldrick corpse stretched out on the dissection table in front of him. “This is a big one even by baldrick standards, nearly 3 meters tall, weight 200 kilograms?”

“Before your army shot large pieces off him, yes.” Another ripple of laughter ran around the operating theater. The relationship between Iraqi and American had eased to the point where they could make jokes about each other without fearing consequences. On the other hand, the Iraqi nurse flushed slightly, even now she felt ill at ease receiving public attention.

“Let’s have a look at the X-rays.” Surlethe had them set up on the overhead displays. “Is everybody seeing what I’m seeing?”

“It’s very human.” One of the watching doctors spoke hesitantly. “Human but not human, as if it was a human body seen through a nightmare.”

“Exactly, the body is laid out almost identically to ours. The single upper arm and upper leg bones, the two bones in the lower arms and legs. The same number of ribs, of vertebrae. If we go by bone count and position, this thing is human. But, of course, we know it isn’t. The bones themselves are twisted and distorted, and there are things here that have no equivalent in our anatomy. Not just superficial things either, like the horns and tail. There’s these things as well.” Surlethe tapped the body where what appeared to be huge muscles ran down its back. They were so large they made the creature’s spine look as if it was in the middle of its body rather than its back. The creatures stunted wings stuck out of them reminiscent of broken branches from a snow bank. “50 percent of its body mass would you say?”

There was a ripple of agreement. “I thought they were muscles that allowed it to fly but they’re not. This thing can’t fly. Did histology come up with anything?”

“Doctor Surlethe, we find this hard to believe but we think they are electrocytes. The samples we took show them to be very similar to those in the electric eel but they are much larger and many times more numerous. The electric eel generates 500 volts at 1 amp, if these cells work the same way, the baldrick should be able to generate 5,000 volts at 10 amps. Almost 100 times more power.”

“That would explain much, especially their ability to fire bolts of lightning. Let’s have a look inside shall we?”

Surlethe took an electric carving knife, he’d already found from bitter experience that surgical scalpels had a very short life when faced with baldrick skin, and sliced into the dead baldrick. The smell was far worse once the skin was opened up and inside, the internal organs were already decomposing into slush.

“From what we can see here, it’s the same as with the bone structure. The internal organs are human in placement but wildly different from us in shape and appearance. We have no real idea of the fine detail of function of course. For example, this looks like a liver but is it? What else does it do? Thoughts people?”

“It is as if it was human but became corrupted.” The Iraqi nurse was speaking slowly. “Almost as if this was once human but something got at it, corrupted its DNA.”

“It’s worth noting that the other bodies are very similar to this. If this is the result of DNA being corrupted, then the corruption was done systematically. The process has created a new species.”

“Did this evolve from us? Or is it parallel evolution?” Another Iraqi doctor watching the dissection spoke. He was slightly guarded, incredibly, he’d heard that there were Americans who were still dumb enough to believe in creationist stories and deny the scientific truth that stared into their faces. It was so strange, how could a people who could create such wonders also believe in things so foolish? Still, he didn’t want to upset one of them, they had guns as well as strange beliefs.

Surlethe thought carefully. “I’d say its parallel evolution, they started out as the next-level-up version of us and something happened to them. Either they’ve been infected with something that messed up their DNA or they’ve been engineered to look like this.”

“Genetic engineering needs technology.” Yet another Iraqi doctor. “And we know they don’t have it.”

“We think they don’t Doctor. Its very probable they don’t and we certainly haven’t seen it yet. But we can’t rule out the possibility that there’s pockets of technology somewhere. However, genetic engineering doesn’t need that high technology, just patience and breeding experiments. Look at dogs, a Rottweiler and a Chihuahua were engineered from the same ancestor. These could be the same.” I wish they’d let me dissect that succubus Surlethe thought. Then we’d have something to compare this with. “Right, well, lets look a bit more before this one decays to nothingness.”

Outside Gary’s Shoe Store, Lakeview Mall, Chicago, Illinois

“But its….. una ropas de puton.” Maria looked at the top her school-friends were urging her to buy. If she’d worn it back in Honduras, her mother would beat her and old women would whisper accusations behind her back. But here?

“Look girl, you’re in America now. Halter tops, mini-skirts and fuck-me pumps get issued at the border. Get used to it.” Shana’s voice was severe but she was laughing underneath it.

Maria looked dubious but she could see her friends were right. Dress standards were different here. She’d only been at the school six weeks and this was her first time hanging out in the mall with her new friends. She didn’t want to embarrass herself or them. What she didn’t know was that she was far from the first new arrival from Central America who’d joined the school and all the girls with her understood how difficult the adjustment from the highly conservative lifestyle she’d come from was. The Immigration Department might run assimilation classes for new arrivals but the high school girls had their own, much more efficient program. She should have guessed from the way they were speaking, the group had two African-American girls, three Anglos and two Latinas. They were speaking in a strange mixture of Spanish and English, switching from one language to the other in mid-sentence with unconscious fluency, the whole mixed in with ebonic slang. Viewed objectively it was an awesome display of bilingualism.

She held the blouse up against herself again. In truth, it was quite modest by the standards of teenage girls at a mall and was on sale, 80 percent off. And it did make her look nice. She pushed her hat a little back on her head, trying to make up her mind. All the girls were wearing the fashionable kepi-style caps with aluminum foil built into the crown and neck, that was one thing that had changed since The Message. Now, everybody wore caps, all the time. The stores here were full of them, some cheap baseball caps with foil inserts, others much more expensive. Maria finally made her decision. She’d take the top. She took it to the counter and, as she started to pay, her friends broke out in a round of applause. She’d just done something her mother would not approve of and that was her first step to becoming a real American teenager.

“Hey man, you, like, going to get some more donuts?” One of the Anglo girls, Marcie, was speaking to Philip Phelan, the shift supervisor of the Mall security guards. He smiled a bit weakly at her, it was a joke all the rentacops on duty here had to put up with but she was a customer so her jokes were, by definition, funny.

“Fraid not ma’am. Crispy Kreme ran out of original glazed so I’m going to have to make do with Pop-Tarts.”

“Poor baby.” Marcie’s voice was sweetly consoling. “The red light comes on again in an hour so I’m told.”

“Why thank you ma’am. I’ll bear that in mind.”

Marcie watched Phelan continue his rounds, a shadow of concern crossing her mind. He was way too far over-weight and she could see him wheezing slightly. It reminded her of her father before he’d had his first heart attack. He really should be sitting comfortably behind a desk, she thought. Then she frowned slightly, there was a ripple in the air down by the food court. Something overheating? Or a fire? She was just about to call attention to it when the ripple changed to a black dot and then to an ellipse.

She’d seen what stepped out of that ellipse on news programs, on film of the fighting in the Middle East, but she’d never expected to see something like it in her local mall. A baldrick, fully nine feet tall, complete with horns, tail and trident. Eyes glowing red and small pointed beard seeming to bristle at the stunned shoppers. There was an eerie silence as people tried to absorb what was happening. A silence that was interrupted by a crack and brilliant blue flash as the baldrick discharged his trident at a woman pushing baby carriage. The crash as the woman went down, convulsing from the massive electrical shock, broke the spell.

“Run!” Shana grabbed Maria and started bundling her forward. Years of threatened shootings in high schools had lead Americans to learn a vital lesson; when trouble is breaking out, get as far and as fast in the opposite direction as possible. Maria didn’t have that inbred instinct and had to be shown. Her friends half-pushed, half-dragged her towards the exit adjacent to the mall’s Macy’s store.

Across the mall, the shoppers were dispersing in different directions, depending in which exit was nearest. The silence was replaced by the sound of screaming from the chaotic mob of people. In its midst, the baldrick grabbed another victim with the claws of one hand, ripped him open with the other and threw the disintegrating body into the mass of running people. Then, it looked around, its eyes fixed on a group running for the Macy’s exit and set off after them.

Philip Phelan didn’t run. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a gun either. The mall rentacops weren’t allowed to carry them. He did have a taser and he used it, helplessly watching the barbed metal spikes bounce off the skin of the baldrick. The monster had already carved its way through three more people, throwing their dismembered remains around and Phelan believed that his job was now to buy as much time as he could for the rest to get clear. The monster reached out for him, almost lazily , its great claws reaching for his throat. Phelan had drawn his baton and he swiped at the grabbing hand, knocking it to one side. Them he slashed back in the opposite direction, hitting the monster in the throat, causing it to stagger for a second. For one delirious moment, he actually believed he had a chance of winning the encounter, then he felt the claws on the baldrick’s other hand sinking into his abdomen. They hooked around the bottom of his ribs and the last thing that Phelan ever felt was him being hurled into the air as his chest came apart.

The baldrick watched the fat old man land in the food court on the floor below and looked around for another victim. A middle-aged woman had stopped running and was facing him, holding both hands out as if she was praying. A ridiculous idea but who knew what these humans would try. Then there were a series of bright flashes from the woman’s hands and the baldrick felt six jabbing pains in his chest. He paused for a brief second then started after the woman.

“Lady you got reloads?”

“No.” She wailed, looking at the monster bearing down on her.

“Run!” The man speaking had another handgun out. One a lot bigger than the woman’s little Kel-Tec .32. He was in the correct position, M1911A1 in both hands, right hand pushing, left hand pulling and his nine shots made a perfect group on the baldricks chest. Then, his slide locked back on empty, he followed the woman running for the exit, the baldrick now streaming green blood from the wound in its chest, closing rapidly on them.

They were saved by the shoe salesman in Gary’s Shoe Store, who had been a mighty athlete in his day. As the baldrick crossed in front of his store, he ran out and took it in a perfect football tackle, slamming it off its feet and into the guard rail. The railing, more decorative than ornamental, cracked free of the floor and for a moment looked like it might give way under the impact, but it held and the fighting human and baldrick bounced off it back onto the floor. The baldrick managed to tear at the human’s face with one hand and that gained him enough of an advantage to throw him off. The shoe salesman was blinded, crippled by the injury and didn’t have a chance of evading the slash that tore out his heart. By that time, the man and woman who had shot the baldrick were safely away.

Out in the car park was a Ford F-150 pick-up truck, covered with NRA stickers. More significantly, both its driver and passenger were hunters who had come in for some supplies at the Northwest Face store before going off on a trip. Bill Redfield saw the people pouring out of the exits and managed to stop one as he ran past the truck.

“What’s going on?”

“Baldricks, in the mall. They’re killing everybody.” The man tore himself free and continued running.

“Can’t get in though the doors Jim, too many people coming out. Like running into an avalanche.”

“The Café.”

“Hit It.”

The Coffee Cup Café was on the ground floor level with the car park and, better, it had a terrace and windows that were a rare interruption in the otherwise blank mall walls. Jim Caldwell slammed his truck into gear and floored the accelerator. He was doing over 60 miles an hour when his truck ploughed through the terrace tables and smashed open the windows beyond. Redfield and Caldwell, and their truck, were in the mall. A few seconds later they were running into the main concourse holding their hunting rifles.

“Escalators, up.” The screaming said the baldricks were on the top floor. They sprinted up the escalator in time to see a single baldrick, there was only one, tearing a man apart outside a shoe store. The baldrick stood up and started to close in on the people struggling outside Macys but Caldwell dropped to one knee and took aim. He had an old Garand, sporterized and fitted with a scope, across the width of the mall it was murderously accurate. He squeezed out his eight rounds of .30-06 and heard the characteristic ‘ting’ as the clip was ejected. The baldrick staggered with the impacts, obviously finding it had to stay on its feet, but it was still obviously determined to get into the crowd of humans. That wasn’t bad tactics either, once mixed in with humans, the usefulness of the hunting rifles would be much diminished.

Redfield stopped that happening. His favored game was elk and moose and he had the rifle to match. A Weatherby Mark V Deluxe chambered for .416 Weatherby Magnum. With its scope, it had cost him almost $3,000 and his wife had given him the silent treatment for three months after she’d found it in the gun safe. He dropped flat and took careful aim, squeezing the trigger and feeling the brutal recoil as the rifle sent the heavy bullet tearing down range. He didn’t stop to see what the result was, he was working the bolt to feed the second round into the chamber. By the time he got his eye back to the scope, the baldrick was sitting down, the wall behind it splattered green with its blood. Redfield fired again, seeing the baldrick jerk as the bullet ploughed into it. There was no doubt, it was down for good but he still had a single round left in his rifle and the thing was still moving. He worked the bolt again then took careful aim at the monster’s head. It burst very pleasingly as the bullet struck home.

Redfield straightened up, pleased with himself despite the pain in his shoulder. Caldwell was looking at him. “Remind me never to poke fun at that cannon of yours again,” he said.

Across the concourse, it was hard to believe it was over. The baldrick lay dead barely ten feet from where Maria stood crying. She was in shock, from terror and the deafening explosions that had brought the monster down. She and her friends had been at the back of the crowd trying to escape and they would have been the first to die if the baldrick had reached the crowd. Maria knew it but all she could think of was that in the panic she’d lost the bag holding her new blouse. Now she’d lost it, it seemed enormously important to her. Behind her, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey Maria.” It was Kelly, one of the Anglo girls with Maria’s shopping bag. “You dropped this. Second lesson on being a mall rat, never, ever, let go of your loot.”

Across the mall concourse, two men in hunting clothes stood up. There was silence for a second, then an eruption of cheering. One of the men waved, the other held his rifle above his head. The cheering redoubled.

Maria found a microphone stuck in her face. “KVTW News. What did you see?”

“I saw the devil coming to kill us and an old security man attacked it with a stick. It killed him but he saved our lives. Éra el hombre mas valiente que nunca haya visto.”

The television reporter turned to another person, a woman who was staring at a tiny semi-automatic pistol in her hand. “Ma’am, what do you think?”

She looked dazedly at the camera. “I need a bigger fucking gun.”

Chapter Twenty Three

Military Attache’s Offices, Royal Thai Embassy, Washington DC

Major General Asanee settled back in her seat to watch the early morning news. She knew what the leading item was likely to be but the U.S. news networks always amused her. She flipped the television mounted on the wall to Fox and waited for the headlines. She wasn’t disappointed.

The death toll in the baldrick attack on the Lakeview Mall in Chicago continues to rise. At least ten humans are reported to have been killed when a lone baldrick materialized in the shopping area of the mall and started to indiscriminately kill shoppers. Hero of the hour was 56 year old security guard Philip Phelan who saved the lives of a group of teenage girls when, armed only with a baton, he defended them from the baldrick. Now, from the scene of the attack….

The General pursed her lips for a second and asked herself the same question that was puzzling people in government offices across America. Why had this happened now? Was it linked to the crushing defeat of the baldrick army in Iraq? If so it appeared to be opening an entirely new front in the war. Almost absent-mindedly she flipped channels to CBS.

An incident in a Chicago mall turned violent yesterday when two gunmen opened fire with assault rifles on a baldrick that was visiting the shopping plaza. The gunmen, both members of the NRA, had brought their guns into the mall in flagrant violation of the operation’s “no guns” policy and started shooting without warning. More than ten people were killed in the attack.

The General sighed quietly to herself, the American media never changed she thought ruefully. Perhaps it was better that nobody believed a word they said. Still, that comment about the NRA started a chain of thought in her mind, one that rotated around the phrase “a well-organized militia”. Her country already had one, the Tahan Phran and it was a key part of their defense against terrorism. She nodded quietly to herself and picked up the telephone, dialing the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “Hello, this is Major-General Asanee here. I would like to speak with Secretary Warner, this morning if possible.”

Outside the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC

The television cameras had been waiting outside the White House since early morning, hoping to catch one of the Cabinet members in a limousine just after the imposition of gasoline rationing on the rest of America. So far, they had been sorely disappointed since the only footage they had got was one sequence of Condoleezza Rice on a bicycle and John Warner jogging into the building. The cameraman was about to give it up as a bad job when he felt a tap on his shoulder. A small, nondescript van was pulling into the White House driveway and, significantly, it passed through security with hardly a moment’s delay. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing.

White House Conference Room, White House, Washington DC

“You all got the warning about the television cameras then?” President Bush glanced around the assembled members of the Cabinet, reassured by the nods he received. “Right let us continue. Just what happened in that mall? And why did it happen?”

Secretary Michael Chertoff looked down at the brief he had been given. “The eye witness accounts are pretty confused as one might expect. As far as we can make out, the baldrick just appeared within the mall and started killing people, more or less at random. It carried on doing so until it was shot dead. And that’s pretty much all we do know.” The Homeland Defense Secretary looked up at the meeting. “It’s critical we don’t confuse what we think with what we know here. We can make all sorts of guesses but the amount of hard information we have is very limited. We can really screw ourselves up if we start thinking our guesses are facts.”

There were a series of nods around the table. In some ways, it had been an unnecessary comment, not confusing facts with deductions from those facts was a caution that everybody knew. In another way, the warning was timely and vital for, although everybody knew the principle, they forgot it with dreadful regularity. People treating their opinions as facts was called the Rumsfeld Syndrome in this room.

“Another fact for the pile.” Secretary Warner spoke quietly as was his usual practice. “That baldrick took a lot of killing. It got hit 15 times with pistol fire, OK six of those were .32s but the rest were .45s. Also eleven rifle-caliber hits. Only the last three really hurt it.”

“Not quite so John.” Secretary Michael O. Leavitt consulted his brief. “My people tell me that the .30-06 hits would have killed the baldrick eventually but the .416s really hurried things along. This fits what we’re getting back from Iraq I believe?”

“It does Mike. Baldricks appear to die from bleeding out, they can take quite devastating hits but if they don’t cause massive blood loss, they can keep going for some time. Some of our snipers report that baldricks have kept going after taking .50 caliber bullets to the head. On the other hand, fragmentation damage rips them up and causes extensive bleeding that finishes them quickly.”

“Very interesting.” Bush was a little annoyed, this was all very well but it didn’t answer any of the key questions he needed to deal with. “But why did this happen, how likely is this attack to be repeated and what can we do to stop them? If this thing just appeared in the middle of a mall, it can appear anywhere – can’t it?”

In one corner, General Schatten coughed gently. “If I may be permitted Sir, we have brought along about the only expert we have on how and why baldricks think the way they do. If I may be permitted to bring her in?”

Bush nodded. General Schatten left for a moment, then returned with a companion whose appearance stunned the room into silence. It was about six feet tall and was wearing a cape-like red robe which did not hide the fact that it was naked. Its skin was the sort of shiny black normally associated with insects except around the head where is faded to a corpse-like white. Its hair was pinkish-blonde with two red-tipped horns emerging from its lank folds. Its the mouth large and vivid red, the eyes sunk deep in shadow, their yellow gaze darting around from one person to the next. On closer inspection, it was female.

“That’s a baldrick, are you insane bringing that thing in here?” Secretary Warner’s voice almost cracked with the shock.

“Ladies, gentlemen, this is Lugasharmanaska, a succubus who has defected to us. She has provided us with a significant amount of intelligence over the last few days. Secretary Chertoff, you stressed the need for facts, not opinions. Luga is the only person who can give us facts.”

“Take a seat my dear.” For want of any more appropriate attitude, President Bush dropped into his genial Texan host mode. Lugasharmanaska took a vacant seat, appreciating how those nearest to her shifted away. “You heard what happened yesterday afternoon in Chicago?”

“No.” Her yellow slitted eyes darted around again, measuring up the people in the room with her.

“Show the film please. Lugasharmanaska this is film taken through our video surveillance system at the mall. It shows a baldr…. a demon …. Attacking the crowd.”

Luga watched the film without any real interest. “So?”

“So why this attack, why now?”

“Why not.” Lugasharmanaska shrugged, a curiously human gesture. “This is nothing new. Just another berserker attacking. Odd your people fought back though, usually they do not.”

“Wait a minute.” Secretary Rice jumped on the last phrase. “Usually, this has happened before.”  Lugasharmanaska was almost impatient. “Of course it has. How many times have you had mass killings in your schools or parks? How many times has an isolated community been mysteriously wiped out? Always it was either us or Yahweh. Sometimes our berserkers would do it themselves, other times they would possess another human to do it.” She stirred slightly in excitement. “That was always very good because we would let the person see what they had done and know they would be punished for it. Their despair was joy to us.”

“Yahweh did things like this?”

“Of course.” Impatience had become scorn. “Most were his, to keep you frightened and depending on him. Ours were just for sport.”

Bush glanced around the assembled cabinet, gathering in the expressions of horror and disgust on their faces. What must it be like working daily with a monster like this, listening to these horrors?. “Always the attacks were on schools and malls?” The question was soft, he was controlling his voice very carefully.

“Of course. That is where fear and terror would be greatest.” Lugasharmanaska paused for a second. “You were very wise keeping your guns out of such places, it hid them from us.”

“But you can go anywhere, appear anywhere.”

“No.” Impatience returned again. “We need nephilim to home in on. In malls and such there are large concentrations of people so the homing signal is strongest there.”

“So you can only appear where there are concentrations of people.”

“That is what I said is it not?”

“So the timing of this attack has nothing to do with the fighting in Iraq?”

“What fighting?”

Bush glanced at General Schatten who shook his head. They’d told Lugasharmanaska nothing of the battles in the Iraqi desert. “Your army invaded us. We defeated it, totally. Wiped it out at little cost to ourselves. What isn’t dead is running. And don’t think this will end there. We fight to win.”

“Defeated? Which Army?” Lugasharmanaska was stunned, she knew humans were unexpectedly powerful but to defeat an entire Army? Lead by who? She gathered herself, noting the renewed confidence in the humans. Her shock had cost her ground. “No, this attack has nothing to do with that. The Duke who launched it may not even know the war has started yet. Hell is a big place and communications are very slow. By messenger mostly. Many parts may not have got the word yet.”

The interrogation went on, pushing Lugasharmanaska for added details of the berserker raids. In the background, one of James Randi’s JREF observers was filming the whole process.

DIMO(N) Conference Room, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Notice something odd about this film Robert?”

“About a demon in the Conference room? Nothing at all odd. I’d guess in some previous administrations there were several. I’ve always wondered about Robert McNamara myself, he’s a good candidate for a fiend from hell.”

“Not bright enough. No, look at how this meeting starts. See how everybody is disgusted by Lugasharmanaska, repulsed by her. Combination of hatred, loathing, abomination, abhorrence, you name it, every negative emotion imaginable. Now look at these scenes at the end of the meeting. What do you see?”

“Doesn’t look very different to me. The President is being charming but if looks could kill, Condi’s laser gaze would have fried poor Lugasharmanaska on the spot.”

“Right, and what is it we’ve noticed about people meeting Lugasharmanaska?”

“Everybody accepts her and gets sympathetic, warm and fuzzy about her. Oh, I see what you mean. The Cabinet didn’t.”

“And they all had their caps on so it isn’t mind control. Whatever it is that she does, it didn’t work there.”

“Must be environmental, must be. How does that conference room differ from ours?”

“It’s a lot bigger of course. And more expensively equipped. That’s all.”

“And its air is screened.” General Schatten cut in from one corner

“General?”

“The air is screened, its continually drawn out, filtered and recycled. There’s quite an airflow but is through vents in the floor so people don’t notice it. You can throw a tear gas bomb in there and the air will be scrubbed clean before it hurts anybody.”

“The air gets scrubbed clean. All the time. James – pheromones sound likely to you?”

“Ummm.”

“Scents used by humans to modify behavior around them. For example, women who are ovulating use them to be particularly attractive to men, pheromones from pregnant women make people around them feel warm and fuzzy, its part of our non-verbal communication system.”

“I do not like thee Doctor Fell  Why this is I cannot tell  But I know this and know full well  I do not like thee Doctor Fell.”

“Exactly James, a lot of our subconscious likes and dislikes are determined by pheromones. We’re only just beginning to get into what they do and the field’s opening out. It may well be that our sense of smell is vastly more important than we ever gave it credit for. The conference room is big, that means Lugasharmanaska’s pheromones didn’t have time to build up the necessary concentration before they were swept out and scrubbed out.”

“Does that mean we have to wear a gas mask before we speak with her?”

“Might not do any good, there’s some evidence that pheromones work by skin absorption as well. The upside is that pheromone effects are insidious but if people are aware of them, they can filter them out, recognize and discount them if you like. Another good thing about this…”

“What’s that Robert?”

“I doubt if Lugasharmanaska understands what it is that makes people agreeable around her. I bet she just takes it for granted that they will be. That means she must be a very confused succubus right now.”

“Did you see her face when the President told her about our victory in Iraq? She was shaken to her very roots. She’s shaken up in more ways than one.”

Office of the Secretary of Defense, The Pentagon, Washington DC

John Warner sighed and rubbed his eyes. The logic laid out by the charming but ice-cold Thai General was undeniable, especially with what they’d learned from that foul monster General Schatten had brought into the White House. Baldricks could teleport into any large group of people. So there had to be guards everywhere. That meant a militia, well, the Constitution provided for that, encouraged it even. And there were enough guns floating around in America to arm it. His pen sketched doodles on a pad. Of course the term militia was out, too many negative connotations these days. His eye rested on picture of the American Civil War and the letters USV. United States Volunteers. That wasn’t right though, these people would be defending their homes. Local Defense Volunteers. That had a good ring to it and glossed over the fact that they were going to be drafted.

Every man and woman between the ages of 18 and 50 who wasn’t already part of the armed forces, that was what the new draft would bring in. To be armed and sent as patrols to sports stadiums, schools, malls, anywhere people would be gathering. Average strength on any given day, 25 million. One more burden for a nation that was already working long hours with little rest. Yet, the benefits were already showing, new M270A2 rocket launchers, M2 Bradleys, M1 tanks were starting to flow from the production line. Aircraft were the problem, production would take a long time to ramp up and bring retired old aircraft back from the graveyard could only achieve so much.

His phone beeped. “Mister Secretary. A Ms O’Leary to see you. She’s your eleven o’Clock.”

Warmer sighed again. What did she want? “Miss O’Leary, How can I help you?”

“Secretary Warner, I understand you’ll be needing a lot of guns, needing them quickly and they have to be powerful enough to take down a baldrick with a minimum number of shots.”

“That is so.” More than you can possibly realize he thought.

“I own a small custom gun producing company. We make a derivative of the M1 Garand in.458 Winchester. Our production isn’t great but we can expand a bit and we know other companies that can do the same. There are quite a few others, including Springfield who make the M1A, a semi-automatic version of the M14, who can retool to make .458 Winchester versions of that weapon. Between us we can make a lot of these rifles. They’re accurate at longer range than the .50 M16s you’re introducing and they don’t use the same industry resources. We can use furniture makers for the wooden stocks etc, and the parts are milled, not stamped. There’s lots of small engineering companies that are hurting right now, they aren’t into the high-tech stuff our modern weaponry requires. But for something at World War Two levels, they’re perfect. And they want in on the war effort.”

And in on the profits Warner thought. But she was right, and this would help arm the Local Defense Volunteers. And it did make use of small industrial capacity. “An excellent idea Miss O’Leary. Let’s talk money on this.”

Chapter Twenty Four

The Banks of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

Chondrakerntolis rode his Beast carefully along the banks of the Styx. Something worried him about this area, not so very long before, his Beast had been alarmed by something along just this stretch of road. And then there was the mysterious death of Jarakeflaxis. They’d found his mangled body, studded with stab wounds and crucified on one of the rocky outcrops. The letters PFLH had been scrawled over his head, in his own blood. Nobody could make sense of it, or them come to think of it. PFLH? No sense at all.

Somebody was up to no good that was certain. Crucifixion pointed to Yahweh and his people but they rarely came down this way. He had heard that a delegation from Yahweh was on its way to visit Satan but who knew what for. Wise demons did not involve themselves in the affairs of those so high up for when giants fought, midgets got trampled. The most likely bet was that one of the Dukes was making a power-play, trying to expand his influence over the netherworld at the expense of Chondrakerntolis’s Duke. Now that would make sense.

Something weird had been happening recently. The number of souls that had been arriving in hell had suddenly accelerated, rising by orders of magnitude. They’d been dispatched to the various regions of hell of course but at every level the numbers were being hidden so that their essence could be used by the lower-level demons instead of restricted to those of higher caste. Was that why Jarakeflaxis had been killed? Had one of the Dukes or Greater Demons found out that human life essence was being diverted and settled for that public punishment. But if it was an example, why was there no indication of what it was an example of?

That question so Chondrakerntolis that he never noticed the thin wire stretched across the pathway. His Beast saw it but the threat it represented didn’t register. The prime characteristic of a Beast was its unthinking ferocity, caution was not a desired attribute. As a result of their inattention, neither was quite aware of what happened next or the skill with which it had been planned. The wires were attached to push-pull detonators fixed to four claymore mines, placed so that their victim was the center of an X defined by the cones of cubical metal shrapnel they generated. The wires also tripped a timer switch on four one-kilogram blocks of Semtex that had been buried under the path’s surface.

Chondrakerntolis tried to make his brain work, he was surrounded by flying mud and dust, his body ripped by wounds that sprayed his green blood around. His Beast was down, its front legs and one of its claws torn off, it’s body broken and bleeding. Even as he watched, the path surface erupted, shredding the already-dying Beast and throwing its parts around. The connection was inevitable, whatever the reason for the death of Jarakeflaxis, he was also to be its victim.

The mud and mist stirred and three figures emerged. HUMANS!. Chondrakerntolis cudgeled his dying brain into absorbing this data. Humans had done this? How? They were cattle, prey to be milked of their life essence, nothing more. They had killed him? How?

A human female knelt beside him and he heard her voice. “Somebody told us you couldn’t be killed. Guess they were wrong huh?”

Chondrakerntolis tried to reply but couldn’t. As his vision faded out, one question tormented him. What happened to demons when they died?

Watch Tower, Banks of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell.

The thunder, strange and mysterious had echoed around the Fifth Ring. Naxalavorsetys looked over the rim of his tower, there wasn’t much to see, just the seething of the mud in which the humans spend eternity on the edge of drowning. Just to be sure, he fired off a flare, lighting the area around the tower a bit better. Still nothing. He shrugged, strange noises were not unknown in hell. It was nothing to worry about. His shift would be over soon and he could go back to his normal life. The regular legions were all being called away and the jobs of the guards were being taken over by civilians such as him. This was something that he did not like at all.

The second blast was very definitely something to worry about. It was stunningly close, Naxalavorsetys felt the superheated air blast at his skin, felt the shock-wave pummel him. More importantly, he felt his watch-tower lurch as a major portion of the stonework on one side was blown away. His tower was collapsing and he realized what that meant even though he couldn’t comprehend how it had been done.

It wasn’t the fall that killed Naxalavorsetys, it was the wreckage of the watch-tower landing on top of him that did the job.

A few minutes later the two three-human strike teams joined up and set off for the next target.

The Division Wall of the Sixth Ring, Hell

Kerflumpus always enjoyed stretching his legs, even if just to torture a few humans here and there. Now, he was marching out of the Sixth Ring into the Fifth he proudly threw out his chest and swung his arms. News had been all over about the crushing defeats inflicted on the insurgent humans, and his legion was mobilizing to move out and continue the pursuit of the shattered human nations, to spread out and batter their world into submission.

The prospect excited him. They said that the sky in the human world was different, that it was light and dark, instead of the dull orange-and-brown striation. Well, now he would get to see it – and to experience crushing the humans and driving them before him, to taste their panic, blood, and flesh, as a member of the second army to pour from the portal into the humans' plane.

Kerflumpus was in the second platoon of his legion; ahead and to his left, the commander, a Greater Demon, was swaying with the gait of his Great Beast as it stepped off the Styx bridge. Its arched tail curled over his head, and he was sitting in the saddle with a bored look on his face when, with a sigh, his head exploded. Kerflumpus caught it out of the corner of his eye, and swung around with horror, as every other demon in the unit did.

Suddenly, something similar happened to the demon next to him: there was a whistling sound, and then they were both staring in horror at the fist-sized hole that had opened up in his chest. Spattering green blood all over Kerflumpus, he staggered a few steps and fell over the parapet of the bridge into the slow-moving, murky Styx below. All across the bridge, it seemed that demons were falling at random every ten seconds or so, and the situation was proceeding nicely toward absolute pandemonium: the head of the legion was held up at the forward edge of the bridge by the dead commander, milling about with no idea what to do; the tail of the legion was crowding into the bridge with no idea what was going on. Meanwhile, the legion ahead of them was marching off along the road into the mists of the fifth ring, with no idea what was happening behind them.

There was obviously some wizardry at work here, heretofore unknown in hell. In sheer, undiluted panic, Kerflumpus charged his trident and loosed it off the bridge. He was watching the head-sized ball of magic zip across the river toward the far side when the air punched him, blanking out all sound as he was thrown up, spinning in midair. All around him, he saw other demons thrown up, some weakly flapping their vestigial wings; it was almost comical, and it was the last thing he saw before the masonry fragments and shrapnel shredded him.

Across the river, Lieutenant Kim whistled as the bridge blew. It was more spectacular than she'd expected; the initial flash of detonation was impossibly fast, and the blast wave ripped apart the bridge as though it were made of sand, sending Baldricks flying. She nodded back at McInery and Tarrant. “Good work placing the semtex, Mac and Bubbles.” The two were grinning ear-to-ear.

Behind them, two of the other three members of Tango-one-five were setting down the M107s. “Good shooting to you guys, too,” said Kim. It hadn't really taken much; the Baldricks had been tightly packed on the bridge, and all they'd had to do is fire into the crowd. The .50 caliber Mk213 bullets had done a fabulous job. As usual.

After surveying the scene for few minutes and letting the two pilots – both avid big-game hunters before their units were called to Iraq – pick off a couple of more bad guys and the commander of the next brigade-sized unit, Kim hoisted a satchel of webbing onto her shoulder. It had about two dozen more bricks of Semtex, the detonators, and several boxes of ammunition. “Okay, boys. We're done here. Let's head out and get the next ambush set up.”

Adjusting her webbing straps so they didn't chafe her through the mud caking her body, Kim led Tango-one-five back down the Styx toward their supply cache and the rope bridge they'd strung across the river. Once on the other side, they would set about making the Dis-Dysprosium road a hell within hell, one that Baldricks would fear more than they feared Satan himself. Kim already had a name for it. La Route Sans Joie.

Palace of Satan, Infernal City of Dis, Sixth Ring of Hell

The banners of kingdoms long conquered swirled in the red mist as the Akropoulopos approached the diamond throne of Satan. He had always known being a messenger was a bad idea, and now he knew that his life was a couple of minutes from ending. “Oh mighty prince,” he began, “overlord of the innumerable legions of – ”

“Get on with it,” snapped Satan irritably, clicking his claws against the hewn gem. “What news have you brought me of Abigor's brilliant success?”

“Sire, the messengers from Abigor are silent. I bring news not of Abigor, but of terrible happenings much closer to your throne.”

“Well, what is it? Hurry up; my time is not your kidling's plaything.”

The messenger swallowed and groveled. “My lord – I do not know how to say this. The bridge leading to the road to Dysprosium has been destroyed.”

Satan stopped clicking his fingers. “What?” His voice was quiet, which was even more terrifying than the hysterical fits. “Repeat yourself.”

Akropoulos was shivering uncontrollably. “Your invincible eminence, the bridge across the Styx has been destroyed. Those legionaries who were there report that it burst into many pieces with the roar of ten thousand demons. Flying stones killed many, and –”

“What,” asked Satan, cutting him off with a word, “do my advisors think to be the cause of this ... outrage?” Still silkily smooth and quiet.

The court was silent, save for the shuffling of feet as some of the more perspicacious demons positioned themselves so that the inevitable rage would not claim their lives.

“Speak!” roared Satan. “I COMMAND you all, SPEAK!!”

One demon timidly cleared his throat. “Um, Sire, none of us can think of any explanation, save ... .” He trailed off, but not in time to save himself.

“Save what?” screamed Satan, balling his hand into a fist and pounding it on his throne.

“Save ... uh ... save, perhaps, most improbably, a bit of stray human magic?”

Satan's glare squashed him into an unimaginably horrible pulp. “You will all find us the cause of this outrage! You will ensure that it does not happen again! This is our domain; our immortal, invincible will decrees that no human mage shall ever work his magic once more in this infernal pit!”

As the court demons hastened to obey, scrambling around the wide hall, Akropoulos took the opportunity to scuttle unnoticed away. As he hurriedly left the palace, he promised himself to try again to join the legions; messengering was too hazardous a job.

Fifth Ring, Hell

The road, large flat paving stones laid atop a low causeway of dirt, wound through the foggy swamps. The half-muted groans of the eternally-drowning souls crucified in the mud echoed dimly through the stinking air. McInery surveyed it with a grim smile. “You think we can actually blow the causeway, ell-tee?”

Kim shrugged. “Why the hell not try, Mac? Bubbles, you got the Semtex?”

“Aye, ell-tee, right here.”

“Let’s lay it.” Kim directed the other members of Tango-one-five recon flight to lay eight Semtex bricks on each side of the road, spaced several hundred feet apart. The bricks were pushed down into the soft earth, no more noticeable than large rocks.

As Tarrant finished pushing the electronic detonators into the last brick, McInery hurried up to where Kim and the rest of Tango flight were standing. “Ell-tee, we have contacts coming from that direction.” He waved behind him.

“How many, Mac?”

“Didn’t count; just saw the torches and heard the voices.” In the distance, dim chanting floated through the mist toward them.

“Everyone, off the road!” she hissed. She grabbed the last bag, slung it over her shoulder, and waded into the bog after the others. They made toward a low granite outcropping just within view of the road. As they hurried behind it, stumbling past several submarine crucifixes, the chanting grew louder.

“Pie Iesu domine, dona eis requiem.” The tramping of the feet, all in step, grew, and the first torchbearers appeared through the mist. Kim suppressed a gasp; they were not Baldricks. These were honest-to-God Cherubs, dressed in pure white that seemed to glow like pearl through the thin fog, and they were chanting something – was it Latin? Whatever it was, Kim had enough of a musical ear to note that the singing was perfect, the pitch exactly correct, the timing exquisite. She couldn’t have emulated it herself, when trying to sing, she hit all the right notes, she just hit them in the wrong order.

In the midst of the Cherubs – all chanting, all bearing torches, and all wearing swords at their sides – were greater humanoids head and shoulders taller than the others, with flawless skin and, damningly, white wings folded across their backs. “Mac, how many you count?” whispered Kim.

“I got seven angels, ell-tee, and seventy-seven cherubs.”

“We’re at war with heaven and hell both, right, guys?”

There was a mutter of affirmation from beside her, and a brisk, quiet, “Let’s take them!” from one of the big game hunters, who had been a devout Catholic up until The Message. Kim nodded and thumbed the detonator.

The concussion knocked the breath out of her, even at this distance. The blast tore the heavenly emissaries apart, spattering white and red blood and body parts along with the dirt, mud, and chunks of rock. After, where there had once been a road, there was a giant gaping hole filling with vile, gurgling swampwater. The group of angels and cherubs was scattered in many pieces through the surrounding swamp.

When she got her breath back, Kim was last in line as Tango flight trooped away from the carnage as fast as they could, quietly jubilant. Then a stray thought crossed her mind. “Boys, we’re going to need some more Semtex.”

The Banks of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

Rahab looked at the dead Beast and its rider in horror. The Beasts and the demons who rode them were invulnerable, everybody knew that. Those few who had tried to kill them had died deaths that were terrible even by the standards of hell. Yet those new arrivals had killed this pair. She knew who had done it all right, nobody else would have the gall to even try. And if that wasn’t enough, the letters PFLH written n the Beast’s side in its own blood were enough.

Were they insane? Rahab’s stomach clenched with fear at what was likely to happen. Once these deaths became known, there would be revenge, reprisals. The demons would come down here by the legion, searching every inch of ground for those who had done the deed. In the process, they would find all those who had escaped from the pits over the millennia and, at best, return them to torment. Thousands of souls doomed to return to their agony because these six decided to upset the natural order of things. When she had left them in the underground room, Rahab had been sorely tempted to ‘arrange’ for them to be found by the guards and returned to the pits. She had dismissed the idea, believing that their comments and stories had been just wild boasting. Now, she guessed they were not and she bitterly wished she had betrayed them. Condemning six souls was better than dooming the tens of thousands of escapees.

She’d been searching for them for days, trying to catch up with them and bring them into shelter. Now she had found this. She agonized over the decision, what to do? At that point another fact penetrated her bewildered mind. She had seen no flares from the watchtower that lay close at hand. Fearfully she made her way to where it had stood, only to be appalled by the sight that loomed through the mist. The watch tower was a blasted stump, its wreckage spread all over the paths, some of it sinking into the mud. And on the stump were the letters PFLH. Written in the blood of the watch-demon.

What else had these mad humans got in mind? And what to do about them? In Rahab’s mind was another question as well. Was it time to join them? And did she have any choice in the matter?

(Appreciation to Surlethe who wrote most of this part).

Chapter Twenty Five

Somewhere In The Desert, Western Iraq, late afternoon

The sand collapsed underneath his clawed feet, sending him tumbling downwards into a ravine he had never seen. Memnon had been staggering through the desert, at first with purpose, trying to make his way back to the Hellmouth and deliver his message but all plan or intent had long since been burned out of his brain. The sun had seared him, brutally, without mercy, sending his body temperature soaring and fogging his brain with mists that owed as much to hallucination as the shimmering heat haze. The bitter cold of the nights had been worse, if anything, than the roasting heat of the sun. There were parts of hell where the souls of humans were roasted in coffins or blasted around on super-heated winds. Now Memnon knew the sufferings they endured

He’d also had a plan, to keep going until his wings regenerated and he could fly the rest of the way. That plan too had died, his wings were regenerating although slowly. They were growing back twisted, malformed, useless. Memnon guessed that the fragments of iron that he could feel in his back, the legacy of the fire-lance that had torn his original pair off, were interfering with the growth patterns and leaving him with these poor apologies for wings. Whatever the reason, he knew that he would never fly again. Never soar through the comforting skies of hell, looking down on the great city of Dis that surrounded the pit where human souls were forever condemned to suffer.

Nor were his mutated wings the only parts of his body causing him grief. His stomach was an empty pit, chewing at the very center of his being. His last meal of human flesh was long forgotten in his screaming need for raw meat, yet in this endless expanse of sand there was no sign of food. Nor was their water and his throat was closed tight, swollen with the thirst that was adding its measure of suffering to the madness that was slowly but surely taking him over.

He rolled down the sandbank, seeing the sky rotate above him, the hated yellow sun glaring down as it laughed at his suffering. His body stopped its role, impacting on a strange irregular mass that yielded on his impact. Memnon looked harder at where he had ended up, it was a gully through the sand, perhaps one carved by flood water and not yet erased by the wind. It was not the sand that had stopped his roll though, it was the bodies of dead demons, perhaps half a dozen of them, piled in the bottom of the crevice. Had they crawled here for shelter and died? Or had their wounds overcome them?

Memnon pushed at the bodies, feeling one firmer than the rest. That is what kicked his mind into action, here was meat. He ripped off a large chunk from the firmest corpse, the others were already far advanced in decay and sank his teeth into it. His throat was too swollen to swallow at first but a thin stream of fresh blood from the meat eased it enough. Then, the implication of that thought struck Memnon at the same time as there was a faint, racking groan from the body he was eating. The demon was still alive. It took only a second for Memnon to fix that, his claws lashed across its throat, killing it. It was, probably, a merciful act.

Memnon filled his stomach with fresh meat and the blood eased his thirst a little. It was then he heard a strange sound, a thumping from the sky that reminded him of clawed feet marching down the road from Dysprosium. There was a great bridge on that road, one over the River Styx, where a demon could stand and drink in the sufferings of the humans below. He would like to stand on that bridge again.

The thumping grew worse and to Memnon’s horror a human sky-chariot flew over a hill, obviously searching the ground. It was not one of the sleek ones, the ones that had mutilated and maimed him, it was an uglier, more ungainly monster that had a strange rotating structure over its head. As if its wings spun around instead of flapping. The sky-chariot slowed down abruptly and its nose started to swing backwards and forwards, searching the ground ahead of it. Memnon knew what it had spotted, the pile of bodies in the ravine and it was checking to see if they were dead. He paused, then froze. Perhaps if he played dead, it would go away. The shame of that thought made him want to weep but he remained motionless anyway.

There were a series of explosions, very fast, and streaks of fire from under the sky-chariot’s nose. They ended in the ravine and walked a long it in a series of small blasts. Memnon willed himself to remain still, if he got up and ran, the sky-chariot would kill him for certain. If he stayed still and silent, he might survive, and he did have the message to deliver. The blasts stopped well short of him, it had only been a very short burst. Memnon realized that it had been intended to scare any living creature in the mound into moving so that it could be killed. He congratulated himself on defeating the cunning plan, and again when the sky-chariot turned and flew away.

Soon the desert was silent again and Memnon could start moving. He left his ravine, it took much longer to climb up the sandy banks than it had taken to descend, and started off again, heading west towards the setting sun. He didn’t even have a clear idea of where he was any more, only that the portal home was somewhere to the west. He wanted home so badly he could taste it, anything to get away from this hideous planet and the humans with their deadly chariots.

Some time later, he had no idea whether it was minutes, hours or days for his whole world now concentrated on the effort needed to pick his feet up and lay them down again, to keep up his slow journey west, he saw a strip of black. A human thing that they laid across the desert so that their chariots could move faster. Memnon’s heart stirred for on it were familiar figures, infantry demons. Also heading west. From a rocky outcrop on top of a hill overlooking the blackstrip, he summoned up his energy and focused his far-seeing vision on them.

The sight of a defeated army was a pitiful one, it always was, always would be. Memnon had seen a defeated army before, in the skirmishes that constantly went on in Hell as the Great Dukes jockeyed for position there were defeated armies often enough. This was something else, something that went so far beyond pitiful that Memnon had no words to describe it. The infantry had thrown their tridents away and were staggering as they walked west. Some supported others, helping them along and that amazed Memnon for in Hellish armies the demons lived or died by their own strength. Even as he watched, he saw one fall to its knees and try to collapse in exhaustion but the two nearest helped it to its feet and half-carried it onwards. He had never seen anything like that before. Nor had he heard anything like it, a moaning, half-wailing sound of demons in dire distress.

Then he heard the same dull thudding noise only this time he knew what it was. The Sky-Chariot was coming back. He looked and saw it, black against the sky and with three more of its kind in company. They were heading in fast, obviously knowing precisely where to go and, as Memnon saw, what to do. Two fire-lances erupted from each of them, swinging out towards the column of misery he had been watching. The fire-lances streaked in, too fast to see properly and terminated in explosions, all eight equally spaced along the column on the blackstrip. He could hear the explosions from where he lay and heard the screams they caused.

The Sky-Chariots didn’t leave it there, they were closing on the column and Memnon saw them rake it with the same weapon he had experienced earlier, the same rapid series of explosions the same red streaks ending in smaller bursts on the ground. Only these ones were in the mass of living demons and he saw them flayed by the bursts, chopped down. Two of the sky-chariots flew parallel with the column, peppering it with the explosions, tearing at it. Some demons tried to escape by running sideways but the sky-chariots followed them and chased them down. Each attempted escape ended the same way, the demon vanishing in the dust of the blasts, to be seen torn and dead when it cleared. It didn’t take long for Memnon to understand that the sky-chariots were playing a game, competing between themselves to see who could kill the largest number of escapees.

What sort of people were these humans? Memnon was bewildered by what he was seeing, the army was defeated. Anybody could see that. What was to be gained by this slaughter? In Hell battles were fought until one side had lost then stopped. Sometimes a battle would never start, one commander would see he was clearly outmatched and stand no chance of winning so he would concede the issue. He had never seen this before, this relentless pursuit and destruction of a beaten enemy. The sight made him shift with rage, boiling anger at human cowardice seething within him. Even destroying the retreating foe, they stood off and killed from a distance, they never closed and fought their enemy honorably. He controlled himself, he had no desire to be a target of the sky chariot’s games.

Finally, when all on the blackstrip was still, the four sky chariots made a final pass over the scene of carnage and left. Memnon was about to leave his cover in the rocks that topped his hill when he saw dust on the horizon. He shrank back into his rocky shelter and watched. The cloud materialized and Memnon saw something that chilled his heart still further. A long column of Iron Chariots, some big, some smaller, with a sky-chariot flying on each side. He watched, appalled as they drove over the demon corpses stretched out on the blackstrip, grinding them into green and yellow smears on the black surface. Then, once clear of the remnants of the column Memnon had watched, they peeled off the blackstrip and spread out in a circle the long tubes pointing outwards.

He was fascinated by the sight. As far as he knew, nobody had ever watched the humans in their iron chariots when they weren’t killing. He saw humans climb out of the iron chariots, oddly the smaller ones seemed to have more humans than the big ones. They walked around, he could see them unloading things from the chariot and pass them around. Then more chariots arrived, great ones that dwarfed even the bigger iron chariot. Some had tents on the back, others great cylinders.

The tented ones started to unload boxes, the humans breaking them open and passing the contents to each other. Strange things, pointed cylinders that gleamed in the sun. They put the cylinders inside the iron chariots and seemed to be happy at the labor. Others were passing around other things from the boxes. But it was the great cylinders that confused Memnon. The chariots carrying them pulled alongside the iron chariots and somehow the humans connected the two with a long snake. Were the two chariots mating? Memnon shook his head in disbelief and continued to watch what happened beneath.

Alpha-One-One, Somewhere In The Desert, Western Iraq, before dusk

“That’s it Hooters, we’re out of gas. Or as near to it as makes no difference. Got a little in case we have to maneuver but we go no further.”

“We don’t have to Biker. This is where we’re supposed to wait for the supply trucks. We clear of the stink?”

That was a lesson the tankers had learned early. Dead baldricks rotted fast in the sun and the smell was dreadful. It was so bad back where the baldrick army had been broken under the hammer of artillery fire and the anvil of armor that there was serious question whether people would be able to live there again. The smell seemed to seep into the soil.

“We’re fine Hooters.” Baldy had stuck his head out and sniffed. “The fly-boys in the Apaches did a good job on this lot.”

“Hokay. Take five guys. Crab, Baldy, stay on overwatch while Biker and I stretch our legs.” She picked up the M4 carbine from its clips and heaved herself out of her commander’s hatch. It took a moment’s effort to scramble down the outside of her tank and then the sand felt good and solid under her feet.

“This sounds crazy Ell-tee, but you know, I’m kinda getting to like the desert. It seems grow on us dunnit?”

“It does Jim, it truly does. There’s a grandeur here, something elemental somehow.” They’d both noticed the crews of the other Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry combat vehicles also dismounting to stretch their legs and dropped the nicknames. “You ever seen a desert before?”

“Nope. I’m from Vermont. Just a rubber who spent the week in the city and the weekend in the hills. Then my Guard unit got called up and here I am.”

“Rubber?” Stevenson looked curiously at her driver. He didn’t look like a contraceptive.

“Rich Urban Biker. Where you come from El-tee?”

“New Jersey. Bayonne to be precise. Joined the Guard to work my way through college and found myself here in the sandpit instead. Then the Message came, your old Ell-tee laid down and died and I was the only spare officer available.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised, he always was a sanctimonious old bastard. When we at camp and he visited a local knocking shop, he’d get on his knees and pray for forgiveness first. Cracked the girls up it did.”

Stevenson whooped with laughter and hook her head. “Don’t it always go to show? Them that talks the talk don’t walk the walk. Right Jim, we better give the others a chance to stretch.

She’d timed it just right. By the time her crew had got their break, the big Oshkosh ships of the desert had arrived and were driving into the laager. Critically, all the fuel trucks were there, their load of fuel was desperately needed. She watched carefully as the hoses were unreeled and the fuel trucks started gassing up the Abrams and Bradleys. Other trucks were unloading boxes of ammunition.

“Hey Ell-tee. You need reloads?”

“Sure do.” She looked at the barrel of her tank. They’d stopped using a single ring for each baldrick kill, now they had a one-inch band for 10 and a quarter inch band for singles. Plus their single white band as well.

“Right, can give you ten Sabot, twenty HEAT, the rest canister.”

“I’d like more canister if you’ve got it. Not much use for sabot.”

“Sorry Ell-tee, we’re running low. We’re sharing out the HEAT and canister and making the numbers up with sabot. The brass tell us they’re flying 120 in direct from home and more’s coming from Europe but we’re still running low here where it counts.”

“Hokay.” Slightly resigned but there it was. Nobody said war had to be easy. Stevenson and her crew started breaking open the crates and bombing up their tank.

They were interrupted by the sound of a Blackhawk landing.

“Captain Stevenson?”

She turned around, slightly irritated. She assumed the mistaken rank was a comment on her dress, she was wearing a tank top and had left the top of her BDUs in the tank. The desert may be grand but it was still hot.

“Its Lieutenant, Err Sorry Sir, I’ll get my blouse right now.” She did a double take. Colonel Sean MacFarland was standing in front of her.

“Well, when you do, you can get to pin these on it.” He handed her a small box, containing double silver bars. “Congratulations. You’ve done a fine job out here.”

“Sir, thank you Sir.” Stevenson looked at the bars in her hand.

“You’ll take over this combat group. You done good Stevenson, especially for somebody thrown in the deep end the way you were. The whole group will be staying here tonight, the way the pocket is shrinking around what’s left of the baldricks, there’s too much danger of friendly fire if we don’t take things carefully.”

“Big jump up Sir.” Stevenson was nervous, what amounted to a company command was a challenge to put it mildly.

“Same for everybody Stevenson. Army’s growing fast, we’re taking cadre out of units to help train new outfits as fast as we can. You stay alive, you’ll have a battalion in a few months. Well done Captain.”

MacFarland wandered off, apparently at random but to those under him, it always seemed that he would turn up an exactly the time needed to spot a problem developing. Around the laagered combat team, the dusk started to settle and the flashes of artillery fire grew more distinct.

Somewhere In The Desert, Western Iraq, night

Abigor huddled in the rocks, looking out across the desert. If his instincts were right, the hellmouth was very close. The last few days had been a horror, the human sky-chariots had hounded his force as it had disintegrated. They’d never let up, their curious rotating wings beating the air, the thumping of their weapons always so deadly. His Army had started retreating, what was left of it, then the retreat had become a rout. Still the humans hadn’t let up, they’d pursued him until the rout had become a panic stricken flight for the rear and the defeated army had become a helpless mob that had been slashed into ever-smaller pieces. Then, when he thought he had finally escaped, he’d seen more of the human iron chariots in front of them, blocking the retreat.

That was when he had understood at last. The humans didn’t fight their battles to make a point, they fought them to destroy their enemies. He’d noted something else. In Hell, armies fought their battles bottom-up. The foot infantry would get killed but rarely any of higher rank. Commanders had better things to do that kill each other. Anyway, how could one negotiate a deal with somebody one had just killed? But the humans fought their battles top-down. They started by killing the enemy commanders and then slaughtered the decapitated mass that was left. There was a corollary to that, they fought that way because they didn’t intend to negotiate with the losers.

How could they have understood humans so little?

Abigor shook himself, and cautiously looked around. The humans could see in the dark, shots could come out of nowhere. Still, it looked safe enough and there wasn’t far to go. The hellmouth was so close now, just a few more hours away.

Chapter Twenty Six

Central Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Inspector Richard Doherty was a veteran police officer, having been in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, or Police Service of Northern Ireland (incorporating the Royal Ulster Constabulary, George Cross) to give it its full name, since 2001 and had served in the Royal Ulster Constabulary for twelve years before the change of name. He was one of the 20 percent of the service’s officers who were Catholic (well, ex-Catholic and it was about 15 percent since The Message), though as a veteran RUC man he thought of him as an eight percenter, 8.3 percent of the old force having been Catholic. The Message had hit Northern Ireland harder than the Mainland; around a quarter of the population had just lain down and died, or committed suicide, including many of the Province’s religious leaders and some of the political ones. Sadly for the police about ten percent of the service had been amongst those who had died.

Like many of his co-religionists he represented the fact that Catholics had been promoted in numbers well out of proportion to the percentage of total officers. He still remembered the days when becoming a police officer, or soldier, was a very dangerous choice for a Catholic. Not only were you likely to be shot in the back, or blown up while carrying out your duties, but your family was also at great risk. Only now, times had changed.

The appearance of the armies of Hell in the desert of Iraq and a baldrick attack in America had really stepped up the level anxiety for the public. To reassure the population, the PSNI had put a strong armed presence on the streets of the Province. Backing them up were a couple of regular army infantry battalions, who would soon be joined by the recently re-formed Home Service battalions of The Royal Irish Regiment. Men and women (known as ‘Greenfinches’) who had served in these battalions had flocked back to the colors when the decision to re-form them had been announced. Fortunately the army still had enough equipment and uniforms in storage in Northern Ireland to equip them.

The Inspector was in charge of a Police Support Unit of twelve officers, mounted in a pair of armored Land Rovers, known as the Tangi. Once upon a time the Tangis of the RUC had been painted grey, now they were painted in the same orange and yellow checkered ‘Battenberg’ high visibility scheme worn by similar vehicles on the Mainland

Doherty shook his head as he saw a man and a woman, both carrying Armalite rifles, walked past as they did their shopping. One of the first acts after the British Government had declared a State of Emergency was to repeal all existing gun control laws. Illegally held weapons were now appearing openly on the streets. It was quite amazing how many of them there were. But then, the various groups of Irish terrorists had been notorious for burying stashes of guns all over the countryside.

“Few years ago we would have been arresting that pair, or worse, Sarge.” Doherty commented.

“That’s right, to be sure.” Sergeant Chris Ryder replied. “I don’t think I’ll ever get use to seeing ex-Provos or Loyalists walking about with their guns openly.”

“Yeh, I know what you mean, Sarge. If I had my way half of them would still be in the Maze; murderous bastards the lot of them. Those rifles won’t do them much good anyway; I hear that a full thirty round magazine of 5.56mm rounds only slows a baldrick down.”

Doherty had every reason to be bitter about the terrorists. One of his friends had been shot in the back by an IRA gunman while administering First Aid to a woman injured in a road accident, while another had been crippled by a blast bomb thrown by a Loyalist mob.

Suddenly a series of loud screams caught the attention of both officers. Doherty and Ryder turned towards the sound, just catching the sound of two ‘pops’, pistol shots. They were just in time to see one of the police support unit personnel, Glock 17 still in his hands, being eviscerated by a three meter high demonic apparition.

“Jesus…I mean bloody hell! ….. I mean, oh shit!” Doherty exclaimed as he watched the baldrick kill a civilian who was too slow in running. His mind seemed to be running in slow motion and he had time to reflect that The Message had eviscerated the English language’s stock of forceful expressions.

“Get the rifles out of the Tangis!” He yelled to the remainder of the unit, then “RUN! RUN!” to the nearest civilians.

Doherty and Ryder both drew their pistols and opened fire, even though they knew that the 9x19mm rounds would probably do little more than piss the baldrick off. The baldrick turned as he felt the new stinging impacts, he turned and saw two more of the humans dressed in green and wearing those funny hats pointing their outstretched arms at him, as if praying, or begging for mercy. He marveled at their apparent stupidity, praying had not saved the last green clad human.

The two police officers retreated towards the Tangis, changing the magazines in their pistols. Several other members of the unit had also opened fire, but to Doherty’s horror he could see that although the baldrick was bleeding from multiple wounds it had not even been slowed down. All he could do was continue to fire until he ran out of ammunition, and hope for the best.

At this point an armed civilian joined the battle, engaging the baldrick with an AK-47, the demon paused, ignoring the police officers for a moment to take hold of the civilian, tear out his heart and throw him through the air.

Finally the two officers assigned to the task managed to get the six HK33 rifles that were held in lock boxes in each Land Rover and threw them out. Doherty dropped his Glock and grabbed the rifle from the police woman with a great deal of gratitude. He had no hesitation in selecting full auto, raised the rifle to his shoulder and opened fire. Now that the surviving officers were armed with rifles, even ones firing 5.56x45mm NATO rounds, the baldrick finally began to show that it was feeling the effects of the gunfire. It began to stagger back under the effect of the massed gunfire, especially now that several armed civilians had joined the fight. Two of them had pump-action shotguns and the heavy slugs produced the first real impacts on the creature.

They drove it back, the bullets pounding on its body. Finally it collapsed to the street, dead. Doherty and Ryder advanced on the body cautiously, changing the magazines on their rifles. To their relief it was very dead.

“Score one for the good guys.” One of the armed civilians was loading his shotgun with more heavy slugs. He looked sadly at the street where a police officer and two civilians were down, in crumpled, lifeless heaps. “Cost us though.” Then he grinned at the police officers. “Still, its good to see true fighting Irishmen all on the same side at last.”

Cabinet Office, White House, Washington D.C.

“We must anticipate that there will be further attacks of this kind. In view of what that monster told us…” Secretary Warner was interrupted by a tangible shudder that ran around the room. Memories of the succubus’s presence at a meeting were all to fresh. “these attacks have been going on for a long time and we see no reason why they should stop now. In fact, with the destruction of the baldrick army in Iraq, they might well pick up in tempo. So, as a line of defense against such attacks, I propose the formation of a local defense force that will protect areas where there are large gatherings of people. Malls, sports meetings etc. The personnel will be drawn from all citizens between the ages of 18 and 50 who are not currently serving in the armed forces. Obviously, we’ll give priority to people whose industries are not needed for the war effort, they can serve one of their work days. We’ll arm them with the new .458 rifles we’re putting into production. I propose the new force be called the Local Defense Volunteers.”

“Local Defense Volunteers.” Secretary Rice’s voice was thoughtful. “LDV. You know what they’ll be called don’t you? The Look, Duck and Vanish.”

“Look, Duck and Vanish?” Warner thought for a second. “I suppose so. How did you come up with that?”

“The British had a similar force back in World War Two. Originally they called it the Local Defense Volunteers but they changed it to ‘Home Guard’ because of the misinterpretation of the acronym.”

“How did you get Local Defense Volunteers anyway John?” President Bush’s voice was curious.

“I was looking at a picture of the Civil War and it made me think of the U.S. Volunteers. The new group is for Local Defense so I put the two together.”

“What’s wrong with U.S. Volunteers?” Bush was curious. “Sounds good to me. We can revive all the names of the Civil War units for the local forces. Add a sense of history to the undertaking. We can even call on some of those re-enactor people to start them off. They’ll have to use their own guns to start with of course.”

“I’d love to see the effect of a minie ball on a baldrick.” Rice’s voice was droll. “They might like the smell of black powder though. Lots of sulfur in it.”

“So, we’ll get the bill written and pushed through. U.S. Volunteers it is. So decided?” Bush looked around. There was a unanimous nodding of heads. “So be it. Next issue?”

“Aircraft production Sir. We’re getting the B-1 production line set up now. It’ll be starting work in around three months time, expect to see the first aircraft off the line this time next year. It’s good we kept the tooling. The first AT-45Cs are coming off the Boeing line now. They’re a minimum-change armed version of the T-45C, they’ll keep the line running until the single-seat D model is ready. F-111s and B-52s are re-entering the fleet from Davis Monthan now. A lot of older aircraft as well, we’ve got some like the F-4 being assigned to wings, more as placeholders than anything else. The rest we’re going to use for tests. To see what sort of aircraft can fly in Hell-like conditions.”

“Any F-102s?” Bush spoke with a mixture of nostalgia and enthusiasm.”

“Yes Sir, nine were preserved, we can make two flyable. Not enough for issue so we’ll be using them for experiments.”

“No you won’t.” Bush spoke firmly. “This is a Presidential directive. Get those two flyable F-102s down to Andrews and designate them the Presidential Fighter Flight. And get somebody to check me out on them, it’s a long time since I flew a ‘102.”

In the background, the Secret Service Presidential Bodyguard detail went white at the thought of a President flying a death-trap like the F-102. The President might think he was going to fly one and the aircraft might be sitting at Andrews with a pretty paint job but he would get in the cockpit over the Secret Service’s collective dead bodies. From the expressions around the Cabinet Room, they weren’t the only ones with that in mind.

‘PINDAR’, under the MoD Main Building, Whitehall, London.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown looked across the table at his new Deputy Prime Minister. God (he’s have to remember not to use that name again), that grinning idiot got on his nerves, he’d strangle him if he asked Brown to call him ‘Dave’ again. Well, it was the price of coalition politics he supposed, and there was not a great deal he could do about it. The PM did reflect on the fact that Deputy Prime Minister David Cameron did rather remind him of a poor clone of his late, unlamented predecessor. Who could have imagined that Tony Blair had been so devout? It had come as quite a shock, even to this son of the Manse.

Given his Scots Presbyterian upbringing, his father had been a Minister in the Church of Scotland, The Message had hit Brown hard. He felt angry and betrayed, but could not help wondering if this was some kind of supreme test by God, or maybe the creature claiming to be Him was in fact not the Supreme Being at all, but some kind of imposter. The latter had certainly been the opinion of the Moderator of the Church of Scotland when Brown had spoken to him.

In the first couple of days after The Message there had been a great deal of uncertainty in the United Kingdom. Those who were most religiously devout, around a tenth of the population, had died; some had just lain down and given up, others had committed suicide in a variety of imaginative ways. Some religious leaders had spoken to the Prime Minister, demanding that Britain surrender to the inevitable; those that were still alive were now residents of HMP Belmarsh, which was rather empty now that most Islamic fundamentalists were gone.

While a smaller proportion of the population of Britain had died, the deaths had been largely concentrated in a few areas. Parts of Leicester and Bradford had become ghost towns and at least a couple of the smaller Western Isles had been totally depopulated. Clearing up the bodies before they decayed and caused a disease outbreak had been quite an undertaking. The government had called in the army, who had assisted in clearing up the corpses and building the funeral pyres used to dispose of them. Facing economic and social chaos on a scale never before seen, Brown had declared a State of Emergency and had signed Queen’s Order Two, mobilizing the entirety of Britain’s Armed Forces. ‘Entirety’ included all reserve forces, service pensioners and all cadet force personnel over sixteen.

Britain was going to need everybody who could hold a rifle, or train others to do so. One largely unknown fact was that the Army Act and its counterparts covering the RAF and Royal Navy allowed for the reintroduction of conscription without any new act having to be put before Parliament. In his second speech to the British people Brown had announced the immediate reintroduction of National Service for everybody between 19 and 55. Finding enough equipment, uniforms, or personnel to train the millions of men and women who would now be inducted into the army, navy and air force was another matter, and would take some time.

The next step had been to examine existing Emergency Powers Bills that had been prepared for potential wars and see what was applicable to this particular situation. While all of the anti-terrorism related emergency plans were up to date those doing the research were rather alarmed to find that the last time the plans for General War (the closest scenario to this one) had been updated was 1992! This set of plans and Emergency Powers Bills had served as the basis for those that had just been rushed through Parliament along with a declaration of war on Hell, which along with Britain’s devolved parliament and assemblies, was now prorogued, the remaining members having dispersed to their constituencies.

At least now with Parliament prorogued Brown would now only have to deal with his Cabinet and the three First Ministers, though they could be something of a pain. At least many of the government’s emergency powers overrode much of their authority. The Prime Minister realized that the Minister of Defence was speaking and tried to look like he had been listening all along.

“…And the news from Iraq certainly seems to be good. The baldrick attacks on Allied Forces have been totally defeated and their army is in headlong retreat towards the Hellmouth.” Admiral of the Fleet Lord West was saying. “Damn all good it will do them because the American 1st Armored Division and the Iranian armored division have cut off their line of retreat.”

Appointing Admiral West as the new Secretary of State for Defence had come as a development of the horse-trading that had taken place during the formation of the Coalition government. The Service Chiefs as well as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had made it very clear that they had no confidence in West’s predecessor, Des Browne, so he had to go. The Admiral was already the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Security, so he had experience of working in government, he had great experience of military matters and was highly respected by both the Services and politicians.

“The 4th Mechanized Brigade has performed very well against the baldrick army; I think our retention of rifled guns for the Challenger 2 has finally proven its worth.” The Admiral said, continuing his briefing. “They’ve demonstrated an ability to strike the enemy at a greater range than the smoothbore guns on the American tanks.”

“That’s certainly true.” General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, agreed. “Our HESH rounds have also proven to be somewhat more effective than the HEAT rounds used by the Abrams, though we do need something like the canister round they have. There was a canister round produced for the old Challenger 1, and if we have any left they may be compatible with the Challenger 2.”

“Talking of shells, ammunition is one thing that Major General Binns has expressed concern about.” Admiral West told the Prime Minister. “A great deal of ammunition was expended in stopping the baldrick attack and while the stockpile in theatre is in no danger of running out just yet he is beginning to run short.”

“I take it we are moving further supplies to Iraq?” The Prime Minister asked.

“Yes, Prime Minister.” West confirmed. “We are moving stocks of ammunition from the UK and Germany to Iraq. The remainder of the 1st Armoured Division is moving to ports of embarkation in Germany in case it is needed in Iraq, and we have alerted 3 Division to be ready for possible deployment, though we may need them at home.

“Immediate reinforcements for our forces in Iraq will come from Afghanistan, where the threat has disappeared overnight. In fact the senior surviving Taliban commander has sent a message to the commander of ISAF offering the support of his men in fighting the war. Iran has agreed to assist in the movement of our troops, and other contingents of ISAF from Afghanistan to the theatre of operations.”

The Prime Minister nodded, indicating that he understood.

“What progress is being made regarding the restarting of tank shell production?” Brown asked. “I don’t think that we can rely on supplies from South Africa, as memory serves they were somewhat shoddy anyway.”

“We have sent a Ministry team up to the site of ROF Bishopton, along with some chaps from BAE. It seems that the factory is still largely intact, so restarting production should not be too difficult, if a bit expensive.” West replied. “Fortunately the plans to build houses on the site were delayed, so no demolition has taken place and most of the equipment is either there, or was put into secure storage. The initial estimate given by my people is that the factory should be up and running within two months.”

“Good.” The PM replied. “I trust there will be no problems regarding finance, Alistair?” He asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

“Not at all, Prime Minister.” Alistair Darling replied. “Defence and industrial projects related to the Defence of the Realm will get all the money they need. The Bank of England is printing more money so that we can continue to pay our bills; that does, of course risk the most appalling economic downturn when the war is over.”

Gordon Brown laughed, the first time he had done so in a long time.

“Only if we win, Alistair. If we lose then I don’t think it will be a problem.” He turned back to Admiral West. “Admiral, if at any point BAE drag their heels, either over Bishopton, or increasing production of aircraft, tanks, rifles, or whatever, tell them that should they continue to bugger us around Her Majesties Government will nationalize the company and sack the management, thus making them eligible to be conscripted into the army.”

“Certainly, Prime Minister. I shall certainly look at sending them somewhere nasty if that happens.” West said.

“I’ll deploy them to Iraq.” Dannatt commented. “My soldiers need more equipment as soon as possible, so I’ll not have them putting their lives at risk any more than they are already. There is one thing that we do need to ask your permission to do, Prime Minister. The SA80, along with all rifles chambered for 5.56mm NATO rounds have proven to be less than effective at dealing with baldricks. They will kill them, but it takes a great deal of ammunition, and has resulted in soldiers being killed before the baldrick dies.

“We have found that the .338 Lapua round used in our sniper rifles is far more effective, so we would like to start immediate and rapid development of a rifle chambered for this round to replace the SA80. My staff have identified the old SLR as a suitable basis for this weapon, so we would like to arrange for production facilities to be set up as soon as possible.”

“An Urgent Operational Requirement I take it, General?” Brown asked. “Then by all means do whatever is necessary to get this weapon into the hands of our soldiers.

“On another matter entirely I have heard that the Americans have managed to make contact with some of their soldiers in Hell and are in the process of starting an insurgency. Are we engaged in a similar undertaking?”

He saw the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, smile in very cat like way.

“We most certainly are, Prime Minister. Our Special Forces people are working very closely with the Americans on this. If possible we’d also like to try to contact any of our personnel who have ended up in Hell. We believe that if we can organize all of the ex-military personnel who have ended up in Hell, or even just a small proportion of them, then we may be able to get quite a rebellion going.”

(Thanks to Jan who wrote the beginning and end of this part)

Chapter Twenty Seven

Apartment in Queens, New York  He carefully wrote out the name and address on the plain manila envelope with his black sharpie. It whispered across the surface as his elegant but simple strokes spelled out the name James Randi. He stopped for a moment, the quiet dulcet tones of the classical music in the background was swelling up now and he listened. He ignored the palsied shaking of his left hand. There was no time for fear.

His eyes drifted down to the small pile of photos stacked up next to the open envelope. The top photo was a wide angled shot of an African village, thatched huts and low hanging solitary trees with scrub brush everywhere. It was almost clichéd as if he had taken a photo of an African village set in the back lot of Paramount. He only wished that were true. In the wide angled shot there were plumes of black smoke rising up in several locations throughout the center of the village. His thoughts, unbidden as always, drifted back to that moment in time. His eyes lost their focus on the photo and he was no longer in his quiet home in a non-descript neighborhood of Queens. He was stalking through the deep scrub brush of the African village.

The heat was oppressive and the sweat clung to his body unwilling to leave and unable to really cool him in this Subsaharan warmth. He had heard of the atrocities committed here in Darfur and like many of the Western journalists here he was losing hope that anyone cared about the Africans dying in the wastes of this forsaken place. As he walked into the village he was painfully aware of how alone he was here and how exposed should rebel or government forces decide to descend on this village and finish what they had obviously started. He could already hear the lamentation of the women. It was a mournful yet desperate dirge that refused any succor or solace.

It was the wailing of the women, the gnashing of the teeth of the men that must have attracted it here. The sounds of death in the old ways. The way people used to mourn before things got so civilized. But he was getting ahead of himself, wasn’t he? He stepped between huts and abandoned carts, weaving through the debris and the occasional crater caused by some form of ordinance. Perhaps the government had sent another of it Russian made bombers up north to deal more death to these villagers. It had happened before.

He camera whirred and clicked in rapid fire sequence as he took his shots while moving through the village, a discarded doll, a shoe left in the dirt, blood smeared across a doorway. It was all a flowing narrative and he was capturing it as best he could in this miserable heat and squalor. The smell struck him as soon as he approached the town center and he immediately knew what the fires were. People were burning. He pulled his camera up before him like a weapon, fingers tense as he prepared to take his shots.

He stepped over a dead mule, the flies already swirling in angry buzzing clouds. His eyes narrowed on the ruined town center. The market was on fire and there were people trapped within some of the flaming wrecks. A lot of people. The bombs struck at midday when many of the villagers were gathering what they could for dinner. The people who did this knew precisely what they were doing when they carried out the attack. He began snapping photos, lens quietly clicking as it focused in on the flailing limbs of the trapped and burning, capturing the expressions of pain and anguish. The lost hope was stamped across the faces of relatives. He had to keep taking the pictures because if he stopped, even for a moment, he could actually begin to comprehend what he was actually seeing and he would lose all sense of composure and self control.

People were trapped in the rubble and being burned alive and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He captured, with numb resolve, the desperately futile attempts by relatives and good Samaritans to douse the flames with buckets of water or dirt. He continued snapping pictures as they worked furiously. Suddenly a young girl rushed up to him and began tugging at his arm and speaking to him in machine gun like delivery. She was begging him, begging in the most heart wrenching manner for assistance. All he could do was drop his camera for a moment and shake his head sadly. Tears welled up in her eyes and she pulled now, almost as if trying to physically drag him to the scene. He continued to shake his head and then weakly responded in his stilted version of her dialect that he could do nothing.

She shook her head and wailed, slapping herself on the sides of her forehead and falling to her knees. She sunk down into the packed earth and sobbed into it as if it were her mother’s breast. Her body shifting back and forth furiously as if trying to burrow into the ground to escape her grief and her cries were like knives in his heart. He stared down at the sight dumbly, unsure what to say or do. His Western mind was unprepared for this level of grief.

“It is like music don’t you think, Jude?”

He froze. The voice was soft like silk sheets on skin. The person stood beside him, materializing out of the air like a shadow escaping the noon day sun.

“The anguish, the terror, the guilt. When death comes for humanity it is the most feared and awesome event in their too brief lives.” His eyes slowly turned to regard the person. He stood taller than Jude, black as obsidian in the sun and wearing simple white shirt opened at the chest with filthy khakis. His feet were clad in battered hiking boots. The boots were splattered with what he guessed were ancient blood stains. “Imagine it, Jude. You come into this world and breath for the first time you have simultaneously taken one more step towards death.” The newcomer turned his head slowly to face him and it was so achingly graceful that Jude wanted to weep. “The moment you are born you are dying. That is the paradox in which you live.”

Jude shook his head slowly. “Who are you?” he asked quietly. There was an awesome sense of power around him, like standing next to a livewire and he was dimly aware that the activity around them, the dying and the screams were all slowing down and muted as if the world were pausing out of respect for his conversation with the stranger.

The stranger smiled softly as if at a private joke. “I am a traveler in your world, I come and go as I please and where I go death follows me.”

“You’re not human.” Jude replied without thinking and immediately had no idea why he just said that.

“I am more than anything you have ever known, Jude, son of Gregory. I am the sword, the scythe of the One Above All and in my passing entire nations have wept bitter tears. The first born tremble at my name.”

Unspoken, Jude heard a single name whispered with reverence in his head. “Uriel.”

The black Adonis like being said nothing but pursed his lips as if contemplating his next words carefully. “Follow me.”

“What?” Jude stammered.

“Follow me, Jude. I have many roads yet to travel and this continent pleases me. The people here still know how to grieve. They are still connected on a primal level to death and mortality. Your sterile world repels and abhors me. Death in your world is a clinical state with consequences tied up in paper work and inconvenience. Here. In this place.” Uriel slowly raised his arms as if to embrace some unseen thing on the ether. “Death is still felt.”

“This is insane.”

“No, this is life and death happening now. There is something coming. A great message that might make even your great Empires in the West feel again. I wanted to bask in the cold glow of entropy one last time before I must leave this place.”

“I’m talking to the angel of death…” Jude whispered to himself in disbelief. “I finally lost it. I’ve seen too much.”

Uriel suddenly reached out, at least Jude guessed he reached out because he must have done it between the blinks of an eye, for the in the next instant Uriel’s hand grasped Jude’s chin tightly and forced him to look into his eyes. And in the angel’s eyes he saw pool of white within white and something else. Something dark and chittering like a mad insect.

“FOCUS child of Seth.”

Jude’s hair grayed at the temples and he felt a palsy come over him, hands shaking and his bowels released their contents without hesitation. He stood in abject terror, rooted in place and suddenly everything Uriel wanted and said was the sole thing in Jude’s universe.

“Follow me, you will know my wake for in it there is pestilence, war and famine. Follow me throughout this continent and see my great works. For when I am gone there will be none like me again in this universe. I am the One Above All’s scythe, where I go, humanity dies. I am not just some quaint Angel of Death, I am entropy incarnate. I weep for your world for my touch is far more merciful than what is to come. The Morningstar has always been too…blunt an instrument for my taste.”

Jude said nothing but his tongue lolled in his mouth and his vision began to fade. He could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears and the roar of blood., His heart was slowing, inexorably slowing to a dull thrumming and he could feel ice collecting where Uriel’s fingers touched his flesh, his blood had instantly recoiled at the touch and remained away from the points of flesh on flesh contact.

“Within your bloodline is carried the ancient gift like the one borne by the Witch of Endor and all that ilk. You can see me for what I am. So follow me, Jude, I choose you as my final witness in these dark days. A prophet for a new age.”

Uriel released Jude’s chin and watched the young man for a moment as blood rushed back into his face and graying cold clammy skin slowly regained its luster. His hair remained grey and his cheeks had sunk in slightly. There was no doubt these were scars that would remain. One did not touch the divine without scars remaining to mark its passage.

Uriel looked back over the crowd of screaming refugees, the world apparently was coming back up to speed and volume and nodded as if coming to a decision. “Peace be with you and my peace I grant you.” He whispered and suddenly every single living thing in the town square down to the angrily buzzing flies dropped to the earth in an instant. Uriel nodded in satisfaction turned in a slow beautiful motion and strode away. In the glaring noon day sun Jude saw the hint of ebony wings jutting from his back. He numbly looked around and then realized what had happened and acted as only he could. He lifted his camera.

He snapped back to the here and now and saw that he had finished writing the address. He sighed softly and coughed. Blood speckled down on the white coffee table. Yes, one did not walk with the Angel of Death and remain untouched. He gently took the stack of photos and scanned them one last time before slipping them into the envelope. Each photo a place in Africa, each one a record of devastation and death and each one followed by a photo of a black man, black enough to have been carved from obsidian like a walking statute and beautiful, so beautiful that in many instances the photos of his face simply blurred as if man’s technology simply could not capture the sheer grace of the being, and in many of these photos there were the onyx wings unfurled like a predatory hawk as it strode through the wreckage of its passing.

Every prophet needed his gospel. Every prophet needed to warn the people. Jude Sanchez was no different. He had to warn the world that Baldricks were not the only thing that stalked them from beyond. He sealed the envelope.

Hampshire, England.

The knock at the door came while Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward, DSC, AFC, RN (Retired) was eating his breakfast. Cursing the interruption at this hour of the morning he made his way to the door.

“Yes, what is it?” He asked before taking in who his visitor was.

To his surprise he saw a very young looking Sub-Lieutenant, Ward noticed the wings on his sleeve marking him as a naval aviator, with two armed bluejackets, both wearing the brassard of the Naval Police, standing behind him.

“Commander Ward, Sir.” The young officer said.

“Yes, how can I help you, Sub?”

“Your presence is required at Yeovilton, Sir.” The Sub-Lieutenant replied, handing Ward a sealed envelope.

He was shocked to discover that is was from the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Jonathan Band, himself. It informed him that the Royal Navy was returning the Sea Harrier FA.2 to service and as part of this was recalling as many retired Sea Jet pilots to service as it could. As the senior Sea Harrier pilot, and pioneer in operating the aircraft, his services were required for refresher training. Admiral Band also offered him a promotion to Captain should he accept this post, if not he would simply be conscripted as a pilot at his former rank.

“Give me ten minutes to pack a few things, Sub, and those two Regulators won’t be necessary.”

Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome, Leicestershire.

The aerodrome echoed to the sound of four Rolls-Royce Olympus turbojet engines being throttled up to full power. A great delta winged shape emerged from behind one of the hangars and made its way towards the runway; Vulcan XH558 was back in service.

Taking their lead from the USAF, the Royal Air Force had been scouring the countries aviation museums for aircraft that might possibly be returned to service. A small collection of various kinds of Tornado and Harrier were already on their way to RAF St. Athan, or BAE Preston for refurbishment, while a small collection of Blackburn Buccaneers was currently being assembled. Finally the air force’s attention had focused on the only remaining airworthy Avro Vulcan B.2 left in the world. They were also now looking at the Vulcans and Victors maintained in taxiable condition, as well as those held in static condition.

Meanwhile the volunteers of the Vulcan Operating Company had either found themselves back in the RAF, or conscripted into the air force. The technicians, assisted by a team brought in from the rest of the air force, had been working hard for the last couple of weeks turning XH558 from a display aircraft into a warplane once again. One advantage that they had discovered was that the modern electronics that they had installed took up less space, and were lighter than the 1950s equipment that the aircraft had once carried; that left more capacity for fuel and weapons. Spares was a potential issue, though at least the VOC had assembled enough to keep XH558 going for a while, and fortunately Rolls-Royce still had the details of how to build the Olympus engine. If push came to shove though, some spare parts might have to be manufactured from scratch.

If returning XH558 to service was successful it would serve as the model for XL426 and XM655, both of which were potentially airworthy, and for any of the other surviving Vulcans and Victors that were in reasonable condition.

For the entirety of the past week RAF armorers had been conducting weapons fit tests, confirming that yes, the Vulcan could still carry 1,000lb bombs, and just as their counterparts in 1982 had discovered, that she could carry three 1,000lb Laser Guided Bombs in its bomb bay. They had also double checked that it could still carry another weapon it had once carried too.

As one of the aircraft chosen to carry the ill-fated Skybolt missile XH558 had two underwing pylons that had been used in the Falklands War to carry Shrike missile and ECM pods. These pylons had been reactivated so that once again they could be used for weapons, or jamming pods.

Today XH558 was heading off to the RAF bombing range at Garvie Island to test her newly restored capability, her belly full with twenty-one 1,000lb bombs. Her pilot and co-pilot advanced the throttles forward to the stops and the bomber began to accelerate down the long runway, once used by SAC bombers on Reflex Alert and roared into the air as if she was young again.

“London Military this is X-Ray Hotel 558, requesting permission to climb to flight level thirty and proceed on flight plan, over.”

“Roger that, 558. Welcome back to air force, over.”

(Thanks to Stravo and Jan who wrote the first and last parts of this respectively.)

Chapter Twenty Eight

Oxford, England.  Professor Richard Dawkins was a deeply unhappy man. He had spent much of his career trying to prove that God, and by extension Satan, did not exist. He had even managed to convince himself that he had proven it beyond reasonable doubt. Several scholars disagreed with him and had even gone as far as to write books that argued that Dawkins was wrong, though the professor was so convinced of being right he had not even tried to debate with them, despite the apparent logic of many of their arguments. He was right, and that was all that mattered.

The Message had upset all of his work, God did exist, even if he had abandoned humanity to the tender mercies of Hell. Despite all of his efforts to try and prove it was fake, The Message had been all too real. The only crumb of comfort he could take from the situation was that his thesis that religion was inherently bad had been proven right, and at least he had not had to listen to the faithful said ‘I told you so’, which would have happened had a benevolent, loving God revealed himself.

Despite all that was happening in the world Dawkins had decided to devote his time to writing a book that argued that The Message had vindicated his work, glossing over the fact that he had been wrong about the non-existence of Heaven and Hell; most readers would not remember that, he thought. Evidently he had not been paying enough attention to the news, the Government had implemented paper rationing to go with fuel and food rationing, and very few books would be getting published in the near future. In fact very little other than military manuals and very truncated newspapers would be published from now on. To the intense distress of some, The Sun had decided to discontinue Page 3 for the foreseeable future.

Dawkins’ stomach reminded him that it was time for lunch. He left the Oxford University college where he worked, intending to eat in the pub frequented by C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkein, idly wondering whether they continued their theological argument now that they were in Hell.

He passed two Thames Valley Police constables, the thought of John Thaw coming into his mind as he did so. What did bring him up short was that both officers were armed, still something of a rare sight in Britain. The two Police Constables carried the standard Glock 17 as a sidearm, though one carried a G36C rifle, while the second carried a pump-action shotgun. The British police had searched through their armouries to for suitable weapons to arm as many of their officers, whether Authorised Firearms Officers, or not.

“Professor Dawkins?”

Dawkins turned back from staring at the two coppers to see a slightly dishevelled, long haired man in his mid twenties standing in front of him. The professor was not worried, lots of his fans and acolytes liked to speak to him about his work, or ask for his autograph. It wasn’t as if he was likely to be assailed by any religious fanatics these days.

“Yes.” He replied. “I think I have a pen here somewhere…” Dawkins continued absentmindedly.

“Good, good.” The man said satisfied. “This is all your fault!” He suddenly yelled, taking the professor by surprise. “You and your ilk denied the All-Mighty and he has abandoned us to eternal damnation as punishment!”

“Look here…” Dawkins began to say hopping that those two police officers he had seen earlier were not too far away had heard the commotion and would come to his rescue, but was cut off by a sharp pain in his chest.

He looked down to see the wild eyed man pull an eight inch knife out of his chest. The man raised his arm and stabbed again, and again and again.

The two police officers had indeed heard the yelling and had been hurrying to deal with it. Instead of seeing two men arguing they saw one man lying on the pavement surrounded by a spreading pool of red, while the other was spattered with blood and held aloft a dripping knife. He looked straight at the aghast police officers.

“All-Mighty lord, today I have truly done your work today. I will gladly do my penance!” The murderer screamed, his voice rich in exaltation.

The shotgun armed constable brought up his weapon and shot him once. The heavy slug intended for use against baldricks made an incredible mess of a human being, blasting a huge hole in his chest and throwing the corpse out into the road.

“Enjoy rotting in Hell mate.” The copper said as he worked the slide on his weapon. “You’ve condemned an innocent man to hideous torture.”

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“This letter was received by the Institute a few hours ago. It provides us with eye-witness evidence that angels as well as demons have been behind much of the misery that has afflicted our world over the centuries..... Excuse me.”

Randi turned to a secretary who had brought in a message flimsy. He read it, then turned dead white. “Gentlemen, Ladies, my apologies. I must ask to be excused. Please carry on with the agenda.” He turned and left the conference room, the sharper observers noting that he staggered slightly as he did so.

A few minutes later, Julie Adams knocked quietly on the door of his office and went in. Randi was sitting at his desk, his face in his hands, sobbing quietly. She slipped behind him and put an arm around his shoulders, she owed her sanity to this man and some comfort was the least she could provide.

“What’s happened James?”

“An old friend of mine, Richard Dawkins, has been killed. He was attacked in the street, in Oxford. He never stood a chance.”

“A baldrick?”

“No, that’s what is so horrible. It was some religious nutcase, witnesses say he was screaming stuff about how Richard and I brought all this down on humanity, that by denying God, we brought about all humanity’s damnation.”

“That’s ridiculous James. The poor man was probably insane – or possessed. Was he wearing his hat?”

“Is it so ridiculous? Really. We were so sure we were right, that all this talk of gods and devils and great sky pixies was just old, outmoded superstition. Just ancient people without the knowledge to understand what was going on around them giving the only explanation they could think of. We laughed at them, ridiculed their ideas and beliefs and all the time there was a higher dimension, there were creatures who influenced our lives. The old legends did have a base of truth in them and we laughed them off. Just as we laughed off the people who tried to tell us we needed these tinfoil hats. Now its the people who refuse to wear them that are the dangerous cranks. So did we condemn humanity by our arrogance?”

“When did Heaven get closed to new entrants James?”

“Nobody knows. Everybody has different theories but 1000 AD is the most popular.”

“And you and your friend are really that old?”

Rand started at the suggestion and frowned. “This isn’t funny.”

“No it isn’t James. It’s not funny at all. You’re blaming yourself, your friend and all those who thought like you for something that happened more than a thousand years ago. That’s absurd, not funny. Got news for you James, the world does not rotate around you any more than it rotates around any one of us. Your friend was a victim of the same mean, treacherous deception that made victims of us all. So stop blaming yourself and try to think out how we can help your friend.”

“What?” Randi was stunned by the comment.

“Well, we know he’s in hell don’t we. Everybody who dies is. We know kitten can find people in hell and contact them if she has enough to go on. You have pictures of your friend, personal stuff, things he gave you? Then give them to kitten, see if she can contact him. Then we can work out how to get him out of there.”

“Bring him back from the dead?”

“Why not? We’re sending enough occupants of hell in the opposite direction. At least let’s try instead of wallowing in self-pity.”

Inner Ring, Seventh Circle of Hell

Richard Dawkins writhed and twisted on the burning sand, trying to evade the flurries of searing flakes that tormented him. As far as he could see, he was in a featureless desert, broken only by the forms of other victims thrashing about in the same agony as him. He had no idea how long he had been here, all he could remember was the knife plunging into him and then everything round him converging into a single bright dot, the way an old-fashioned television did when the station closed down. Then the impression of a tunnel and the sudden impact of the pain as he had found himself here.

This was it, this was hell and he was stuck here forever. Then he mentally struck himself, no, he wasn’t here forever. He was here until humans could blast their way down to him and free him. That was it, that was it all. He had to hold out until then.

The burns from the sand and those accursed flakes made thinking difficult and Dawkins believed he was going mad. There was a voice calling him. “Richard, Richard.”” He knew the pain from the burning was making him hallucinate. “Richard, Richard?” It was still going on.

“Lalla?” It couldn’t be, she was still alive. He was imagining things.

“No, its kitten. Is this Richard Dawkins?”

“Who are you?”

“You don’t know me, I work for James Randi. You are Richard Dawkins. If you are, we’re using you as an experiment.”

“I’m Dawkins. Please, help me.”

“We’re trying. Hold on.”

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“I’m through, I got him. Poor thing, he sounds terrible.”

“Being knifed and sent to hell will do that to a man.” The speaker was one of four Special Forces men in the room, wearing orange-red BDUs and armed with the new M4A5s.

“Get ready to move Lieutenant Madeuce. Once the portal is open, we can’t hold it for long. And don’t forget the bolt-cutters. Ready kitten? Here we go.”

James Kirkpatrick started turning up the dial, artificially boosting the signal they’d recorded connecting kitten and Dawkins. Soon enough, the now-familiar ellipse started to form. As it increased in size kitten was threshing round helplessly on her couch, her partner dabbing her forehead and whispering comfortingly to her. Then, it was large enough and the Special Forces H-team stepped through.

Inner Ring, Seventh Circle of Hell

“Get a poncho over him fast. Damn these blasted flakes, what the hell is this place?” Madeuce was angry and hurried, this was nothing like what had been described to them.

“Hell boss. Sir, stay still Sir, we’ll get you out of this. Just hold still.” The tool-steel bolt-cutters sliced easily through even the thick bronze shackles.

“Shit we’ve got company!” A figure, tall and black had suddenly appeared. Madeuce squeezed off a burst from his carbine at him and saw the figure lurch with the hits. Then a streak of fire shot across the burning desert and the baldrick exploded. “Well done Frankie. They don’t like them AT-4s.”

Behind them the other two members of the team had freed Dawkins and dragged him through the ellipse. Madeuce and Frankie Portello followed them out and the ellipse closed behind them.

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“We got him!” The voice from the Special Forces team was triumphant. All four were back in the room and the portal had been open for less than a minute.

The body of Richard Dawkins was in the room with Doctors applying instruments and probes. “We’re getting readings, he’s errr.....” The doctor was about to say ‘alive’ but stopped himself. “With us.”

“Richard can you hear me.” Randi was urgent, almost frantic, far removed from the gentlemanly, calm demeanour he usually maintained.

“James how did you... what’s happening?”

“We got you out. Don’t ask how but we did.”

“Mister Randi, energy levels we’re getting are fading, its as if his life, if he wasn’t already dead, was leaking out.”

“Right.” Kirkpatrick was already speaking to kitten. “Can you contact Lieutenant Kim please. Then we’ll open a portal to her.”

“All right, please hurry though.” kitten relaxed on her seat and closed her eyes, concentrating on her picture of Jade Kim. Over the other side of the room, the H-team was loading up with supplies for the PFLH. No point is wasting trip.

“Richard, we can’t keep you here, we’re sending you back to the Fifth Circle. We have a resistance team there, they’ll shelter you until they can get you into hiding.”

“Ma’am.” Lieutenant Madeuce was speaking to kitten. Don’t hold the portal open after we’re through. Once we’ve arrived, we’ll be staying there for a while.” kitten nodded with her eyes still closed.

On the Shore of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

Kim’s eyes suddenly defocused. “Message coming through guys. Our resupply hopefully.

Lieutenant Kim? It was kitten again.

“Yes kitten”

“Get ready, portal opening. There’s a special forces team and a passenger coming through with some supplies. They’ll explain what’s happening. Get ready now.”

The black ellipse formed as a point and rapidly swelled to its full size, large enough for a man to step through. Five figures came through, four in red-brown BDUs that matched the foul air of Hell very well. The fifth man was naked, his body burned but already starting to heal. Kim recognized that, it was the enhanced healing power of hell. This person was one of the dead, just like Kim and her little unit.

“Ma’am. Lieutenant Madeuce. Special Forces. This is Richard Dawkins, we pulled him out of somewhere else in Hell and brought him here.”

“Why? We haven’t room for passengers.”

“We needed to know if people can be brought from hell to earth and stay there. Well, they can’t, he was, well, dying for want of a better word. The egg-heads needed to know if kitten could find other people, we needed to know if we can do transits like this. So many things. Look, we’re staying on to help you here. In your reports you mentioned a refugee organization. Can they look after him?”

“Why can’t I fight as well.”

“Because you’re not trained to. This is a job for professionals.” Madeuce’s voice was curt. “Can we get him to safety. Ma’am. My orders are to place myself under your command.”

Kim nodded. Being dead had its advantages, if this war went on long enough, she would be the most senior Lieutenant in history. “There is a refugee organization, headed up by a woman called Rahab. We don’t know if we can trust her, this will make a good test. OK, Bubbles, Mac, we better find Rahab. Madeuce, you bring supplies?

“120 kilograms of Semtex, another M107 a lot of ammunition for same and six M4A5 carbines. Oh, and a video camera. The brass want pictures and films of hell.”

Kim nodded, the Semtex wasn’t enough but it would do. “Who are you Sir?”

“Richard Dawkins. I was an author.”

“I know, I read one of your books. Guess you must be pretty embarrassed huh? Don’t sweat it, we’ll look after you.

Chapter Twenty Nine

Martial Field of Dysprosium, Hell

Had it been only two earth weeks ago? Then, his army had marched out, banners flying, horns, and trumpets blaring, drums thudding. A sight to stir the blood and induce martial ardor in all who saw it. A huge Army, 60 legions strong, 400,000 demons had sortied to defeat the humans. It was all supposed to have been so easy, so glorious. Trampling humanity underfoot, ravaging their cities, destroying their works and carrying their souls back in triumph to Hell.

And what was left now? How many of the 400,000 had made it back alive? Or even half-alive? 300? 400 at most and the majority were wounded, some so badly they would be little more than helpless children. Neither the humans nor their weapons had mercy, those who their weapons spared, they left crippled and feeble. The sounds were as appalling as the sight of the shattered fragment that was all that was left of his Army. No martial music, no bombastic speeches either. Just the wailing of the wounded and the bereaved. Abigor didn’t know which was worse, the cries of the wounded or the yowls of the females as they hunted through the survivors for their mates. Mostly those howls turned into screams of misery as they realized their mate was not on the tiny list of survivors, on rare occasions, the scream of relief was moderated, diluted, by the grief when they saw the awful wounds the humans had inflicted. Rare indeed for a mate to find her demon whole and untouched. Not one in tens of thousands.

Abigor heard the sobbing at his feet. A cavalryman was sitting down cross-legged on the ground, the head of his Beast in his lap. The cavalryman was badly wounded, his side laid open by fragments, but his Beast was dying. The fire in its angry red eyes was slowly dimming and the cause was obvious. The wound in its side was massive, blasted open and burned deep. A seeker lance had caused that, Abigor knew from seeing too many.

“Sire, he wouldn’t stop. I tried to make him stop and rest but he wouldn’t. He just kept going, carrying me back here. I did try to make him rest but he wouldn’t and now he’s dying.”

In this case, the Beast had shown better tactical common sense than its rider, Abigor reflected. If they had stopped, they’d have been caught and killed by the Iron Chariots. But it was true, the Beast had saved its riders life. “What is your name rider?”

“Visharakoramal Sire, of the Right Wing.”

“Visharakoramal, take your mate and go home. Go to somewhere quiet and remote where none who might seek would look and make your home there.” On the ground the light in the Beast’s eyes flickered and went out. It was dead. “Do not let his sacrifice be in vain. Take your mate and go home, when hundreds of thousands are dead, one more will not be noted.”

Visharakoramal nodded and gently laid the Beast’s head down, then took his mate and quietly left. Abigor looked around, catching another three figures coming through the hellmouth. Two demons carrying a third whose legs had been blown off, probably by one of the mage-bars the humans had scattered. That was new also, the sight of demons helping their wounded. They must have learned it from the humans, at Hit, Abigor had seen how many humans would risk their lives to rescue one of their own who was in trouble. He’d seen the great Iron Chariots go places and do unimaginable, terrible things to help one of their own. It was strange, exposure to the humans was changing the demons in ways other than the nightmare of the human’s crushing superiority in weaponry.

“Sire?”

Abigor turned. Behind him was a figure, not as great as he but still larger than the pitiful remnants of his Army. A Lesser Herald, but one whose wings were stunted and malformed.

“Sire I am Memnon, Lesser Herald. I have a message for His Infernal Majesty. May I accompany you to audience with him?”

An audience with Satan? Abigor shuddered, to relay the tale of this catastrophe was certain death. “You realize my company might bring you death? Who is your message from?”

“From Yahweh. And death I think, is the least of our problems.”

That was true, Abigor thought. It might be good to have company on this final walk. He found himself urgently wishing he’d died on the run to the hellmouth just a few hours ago.

Six hours earlier, Hellmouth, Western Iraq

Abigor crouched in the hollow. The hellmouth was clearly visible on the horizon, the impossible geometry glimmering black against the dark blue velvet of the predawn sky. For the umpteenth time that night – he hadn't slept; the quiet desert sounds kept startling him from any pretence of restfulness – he began to mull over the defeat, and stopped himself. There was just no way of explaining how the humans had become so powerful.

Sighing, he shook himself and peeked up; the huge portal was less than ten miles away. A straight run would get him there in less than an hour. He would cross through and – and then what? Report to Satan? Abigor frowned. If Satan had heard already, Abigor was as good as dead; no other Duke would want to begin to associate with him. His position in the court was gone, taken now, probably by Belial or some other scheming coward.

Could he stay with his former allies? The thought flitted through his mind, then was easily dismissed as he began trudging through the soft sand toward his destination. The Dukes who were former allies were just that – former. None of them would touch him with a thirty-foot pole now; given the totality of his defeat, he suspected that nothing could save him. But what alternatives did he have? Stay here, where the human magic crushed everything in its path and they sought out their defeated enemies to slaughter them like cattle? He had to get back to hell, he had to warn the others of the nightmare they faced.

The sun peeked above the horizon behind him, and his shadow stretched far ahead of him. The cloudless sky was striated orange and pink, fading to purple in the western sky before him. For a moment, Abigor stopped and looked around him, at the last clear, white stars fading in the west, at the beautiful dawn panorama unfolding in the east over the flat, unimaginably vast desert wastes. The ground here was as like a part of hell as any he'd seen, and yet above it stretched such beauty. The humans didn't know what they had, he thought; how could they appreciate such sublime beauty? And demons didn't know what they were missing either. With a twinge of sorrow, he contemplated again his ruined future back home under the dull, ceaseless striation of hell's skies.

Suddenly, his ears perked – a small buzz in the distance. Could it be a human implement? He froze for an instant, and in that instant, he detected a now-familiar deeper rumble: horseless iron chariots. He broke into a flat-out sprint for the portal.

Multi-National Force Headquarters, Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq

“Have we got the Global Hawk feed up?” asked General Petraeus.

One of the technicians, Bert, replied, “Yep. It should be on the main screen right ...” there was a ticker of fingers on a keyboard and a mouse click “... now.” The screen blinked, fuzzed, and there was the hellmouth, black against the pink-lit sand.

The whole scene moved slowly as the cameras on the Global Hawk zoomed in on the portal. The entire hellmouth surveillance mission had been on the backburner as the Global Hawks had been used to control the allied forces that had annihilated the demonic army. That was over now, the baldrick army was shattered beyond comprehension or reconstitution, there were only handfuls of baldricks free and alive between the hellmouth and the Euphrates, and that had pushed intelligence-gathering back to top priority. Nobody ever won a war by defending themselves. They won it by taking the fight to the enemy. It was time to begin striking back at Hell, and that meant learning as much as possible about it, especially the terrain near the hellmouth which was, in the plans Petraeus and his colleagues were starting to draw up, the site of the first beachhead.

For a moment, Petraeus wondered if this was how Eisenhower had felt in 1943, then stifled the thought; Eisenhower had known so much more about his enemy, and his enemy had known about him. The two situations were only comparable if you didn't think about it. Then, he noticed a small black figure far below the Hawk, also making for the portal. “What's that?” He indicated the figure.

“Just a moment, sir.” The feed one the screen jumped through the magnifications until the figure was clearly visible: a large baldrick, running as fast as it could.

“Feed this through to the nearest armored unit, with orders to intercept and – wait, zoom in just a little bit more.” Something about the figure had triggered his memory. The feed duly zoomed, and Petraeus recognized the baldrick: his counterpart, the lucky one he'd missed with the artillery during the main battle. “Orders to intercept and capture.” If this worked out, it would be a huge intelligence bonus.

Hellmouth, Western Iraq

The roar of the Abrams engine almost deafening and the imperfections in the land bounced her around in her commander’s seat, adding extra bruises to the impressive collection she had already collected. Captain Keisha Stevenson nodded as the crackling orders came through the radio, and then repeated them on the company channel. “Guys, we've got a target. Orders to capture.”

In the light of the Iraqi dawn, the Abrams tanks and Bradley vehicles under her command sped up and veered left, the Bradleys belching black smoke and kicking up sand that hovered in the air in their wake, slowly dispersing.

Abigor ignored the pain in his side, pushing his legs as fast as they would go. The hellmouth was growing larger, a black swirling void underneath the horizon. If the humans didn't notice him, he was only a few minutes away from home. He could almost taste the sulfurous air.

But the roar of the iron chariots was louder dominating the sounds of early morning. He didn't let himself look over his shoulder, only gamely pushed faster. All he felt, his whole being, was now his feet pounding into the ground, his heart thumping in his chest, and the tingle of the magic in his back (he had long since abandoned his trident), all undercut by the gathering rumble of iron chariots.

All too soon, they were close behind him the cloud of dust they raised choking him. One pulled ahead of the rest and was almost beside him its odd head turning so that the long tube was pointing at him. Abigor tried to run around it, failed, then he switched doubled back and ran behind it, the hellmouth just a few yards away. His senses were overwhelmed by the cold and unyielding taste of the iron, not at all like the friendly warmth of the bronze or tin he was used to. As he dived behind the Chariot, he could feel a blast of heat, uncomfortable even for his own thick skin. Even as he expected the deadly blast off human mage-magic in his back, he continued to marvel at the humans' ingenuity and ability to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Chariots, without horses, that generated their own heat, propulsion, and magic fire lances while carrying humans within them.

Then, even as the muscles in his back cringed in anticipation of the expected blow, the blackness of the Hellmouth enveloped him

“Alpha-Actual. Sorry Sir, he got past us. No excuses Sir, he was so close to the hellmouth we only had one shot and we blew it. Want us to go in after him?”

There was a pause and Stevenson knew the message was going up the line and the response was coming down. “Alpha-Actual, Command Prime was watching on Eye-Five. Word is don’t blame yourself, that big baldrick would make a great football player. Stay out of hell for now. Drop back one klick and go hull down with a line of fire to the Hellmouth. The Generals are thinking.”

And we all know that makes their heads hurt. Stevenson thought, and settled back as much as was possible in the turret of an Abrams. “Biker, take us back one click to the ridgeline we crossed. Time to have a rest.”

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

“... and remember that problems one, three, and four of section 37 in the Munkres text are due next Tuesday. You may assume the Tychonoff Theorem; we will finish proving it next class. Problem five is extra credit. Class dismissed.” As the students in his Topology I class finished packing up their papers, Dr Kuroneko turned to the board and began erasing the proof of a lemma for the Tychonoff Theorem.

A polite knocking at the door caught his attention, and he turned around, adjusting his glasses and absentmindedly smearing chalk dust across his cheek and nose. “Yes?”

To his surprise, it was not a student wanting help with the homework questions; it was three men dressed in military uniforms. “Dr Kuroneko?”

“That's me, yes. How may I help you?”

“I'm General Schatten, of the US Army's D.I.M.O.(N) section. I understand you are the foremost mathematical expert in ...” He wrinkled his nose, fished in his pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper. “... in 'higher dimensional topology.'”

Dr Kuroneko shrugged. “Some people say that I am, yes.”

“Well, we have a team of physicists working on a project for us, and they recommended you as the mathematical expert we need. We've already talked to the math department here; they're more than willing to help with the war effort, so they've granted you indefinite paid sabbatical. We will, of course, be more than willing to provide you with additional compensation for your services. As well, your landlord has agreed to let us pay your rent while you live in Arlington and work for us, again indefinitely.”

The mathematician blinked. “So, I'm working for you? On what sort of project?”

“Dr Kuroneko, we have a problem. We’ve managed to open a portal to hell and we can communicate with those inside on an individual basis. We need to communicate with everybody in there, baldricks, humans everybody. We know it can be done because they did it to us, there was The Message and then that bombastic nonsense from Satan. We need you to work out the mathematics that underlies the situation, we need you to analyze the basis of how this communications phenomena works. The only way to understand something is to understand the maths behind it. At the moment we’re doing it on a purely empirical basis, we need you to make sense of it. Once you’ve done that we can start to use it properly.”

Kuroneko’s eyes lit up. Secretly, although he was too polite to say so, he was amazed that an Army General would understand the importance of basic theory. It never occurred to him that Generals dealt with basic theory and applied mathematics as a routine part of their job. “That sounds fascinating! When do I start?”

General Schatten smiled. “Yesterday if possible. Today at the latest. We're already loading your possessions into the moving van for you.” He stepped forward and shook Dr Kuroneko's hand. “Welcome to D.I.M.O.(N), Doctor.”

Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina

“Man, what do we want with a piston-engined bird that’s fifty years old .” The F-16 pilot leaned back on the O-club bar, not noticing the slight air of reproof that went around the room. The two old B-29s sitting on the flight line might be relics of a bygone age but their crews were guests of the mess and the comment was out of place.

“We don’t know that jets can fly in hell yet, in fact we know nothing about the place at all other than its pretty unpleasant. We know that there’s a high content of particulates in the atmosphere, sulfur and pumice. The Predator that went in came back pretty messed up. So, prop birds give us another option. Also, we need every modern bird we can get up in the air, every second or third-line job that gets done by a museum piece is one more modern bird freed up for combat. That’s why we’ve got C-47s back in the inventory as well.” The scientist drank his beer reflectively. The tour around the museums hadn’t picked up that many usable aircraft, there was a big difference between a plane that looked good on display and one that was able to be returned to flying status, but they had a few. By a quirk of history, the B-29s had done better than most and even then only a handful were available for service. The non-flying birds and the aircraft too old to be of even fourth or fifth line use had their own role to play though. They were in the Hell Jars, being experimented on.

“Yeah but prop-engined bombers.” The F-16 pilot spoke with scorn and didn’t notice the frown of displeasure from his commander.

“I know, I know.” Colonel Tibbets put down his beer. He’d kept quiet to date, partly because he didn’t want to rise to the bait and partly because he had his own position in mind. He suspected somebody in Air Force Personnel had a sense of humor and had searched through the Air Force list to find a Colonel Tibbets to command the newly-reformed 40th Bombardment Wing. “We’re really going to need you guys in the fighters to protect us. Like we always have I guess. Why don’t we buy you a drink or three, show our appreciation?”

Next morning Lieutenant Barham woke up in his quarters with a head that felt ready to explode. The party that had started in the O-club had then moved to the strip outside the base and turned into a real bar crawl. He didn’t remember too much after the fourth or fifth bar but his head was dreadful. Those bomber boys certainly knew how to party. He glanced at the flight-line, both the B-29s had gone, probably on their way to whatever experimental station they would be assigned to.

At that point, Barham realized that it wasn’t just his head that was hurting. His rear end was also feeling --- inflamed. With a dawning sense of horror he went to the washroom and looked in the mirror and what he saw their confirmed his worst fears. On one buttock was tattooed the unit crest of the 40th Bombardment Wing and the motto “Old Age and Treachery Beats Youth and Skill”. The other buttock had a plan view of a B-29 and the motto “Four Screws Beats A Blow Job” tattooed on it.

Barham was still dumbly contemplating the sight when the phone rang. “The Squadron Commander wishes to speak with you. Now,” was the message.

Chapter Thirty

The Banks of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

Another demon had died, his head grotesquely shattered by the human weapons. Rahab recognized the signs by this time, the physical destruction that had been wrought from a distance that gave the victim no chance of surviving, not even warning that it was under attack. She wasn’t quite certain how many had died to date, might have been twelve or more. She did know the number included some of the demons that had once ridden so imperiously on their Beasts. The humans had proved her wrong, they could be killed. In fact the humans had killed them quite easily. There was much to think on there. There was something else to consider as well. In her travels, trying to find the six new arrivals who were causing this mayhem, she had watched the demons and learned something else. They were scared, too many of their number had gone out on patrol and never returned. Now, they were beginning to skimp those patrols, to head through the area as fast as they could, not stopping for anything until they got back to the safety of the walls.

Rahab found herself asking, just how safe were those walls? She had seen what was left of the mighty bridge over the Styx, a mass of destroyed masonry flung around the way an angry child might scatter play bricks. A bridge that had stood for untold millennia had been wantonly destroyed, with, it was rumored, the best part of a whole legion that had been unfortunate enough to be standing on it. There were work gangs trying to repair it, some of them humans driven by demon overseers but the destruction had been so great it was defeating their efforts. She had watched while some of the repairs collapsed again, the foundations undermined by the power of the destruction. There had been other attacks as well, on the great road that led from the depths of Hell up to the city of Dis and from there out to the field of Dysprosium. Rahab had never been outside the great pit of hell but she had heard the area outside Dis where the Demons lived was quite pleasant by their standards.

Getting there would be a problem for the demons now though. That road had been the scene of one attack after another, the dead mounting as explosions tore into formation after formation. Rahab shook her head, it made little sense but she sensed the demons were losing the fight down here. They were trying to protect themselves against ghosts who would strike and slip away before they could be found. The new arrivals didn’t fight the demon way, for pride and honor. Rahab realized they fought for other reasons entirely, they fought to win and woe to anybody who got in their way.

Rahab felt the slam in her back that threw her to the ground and knew the agony of fear. Had she been caught after all this time? A figure was holding her down, her arms twisted behind her back and she guessed what was to come next. An agonizing rape certainly, then return to the hell-pit from which she had so barely escaped once before. Her time of freedom was at an end, there was no point in fighting and she went limp as she was rolled on to her back.

It was a kind of demon she hadn’t seen before, one with huge, staring, lidless eyes and a face below them that was featureless. It was red-brown, a varied skin coloration that merged in with the background. Then, as her senses overcame the blind panic, she realized something else. This creature wasn’t a demon, it was human. More than that, it was a living human, one from outside Hell. A living human that had voluntarily come to Hell? It was rumored there had been others but this was solid fact.

“Hello Rahab. I see you’ve met Lieutenant Madeuce. Sorry about the abruptness of the meeting.” Rahab looked up, it was the woman she had met before, the one who had abandoned the hiding place with her friends. Now she was different, she was wearing the same red-brown clothes as the still-alive had on. Rahab looked harder, she was also wearing a harness with strange green slabs on it and she had a black stick in her hands. An oddly, indescribably-shaped stick.

“Who are you?” Rahab needed to know.

“I’m Lieutenant Jade Kim, call-sign Broomstick. These are the rest of my unit. That’ll do for now. You might have noticed we have started a war down here. It’s going to get a lot worse. That’s part of the reason why we found you.”

“Found me, how…”

“It wasn’t hard. Leave it there. I’d guess the only reason why the baldricks haven’t found you is that they couldn’t be bothered with you and there weren’t enough of you to make any difference. So, they didn’t even try. That’s changing, we’ve hurt them bad and they’re going to start fighting back. You need to warn your people and get them out of here. We don’t have the numbers, yet, to protect a static population.”

“Yet?” Rahab was bewildered. None of what she was being told make sense.

“That’s our first question, you wander all over the place. Have you seen any more like us arriving? If so, tell us where they are.”

“Do you know how many people arrive here all the time? And this is a small part of Hell, a segment of one circle. A small segment owned by a minor duke. A few more have arrived here recently, I can show you where. But what if they are not the ones you want.”

“That’s the second thing. First part. We busted a guy out from one of the other rings. Tried to take him back to Earth but it didn’t work out. He started dying as soon as he arrived. So, he was brought back here. He’s not a soldier, no use to us. We want you to take him in, hide him. Second part. Same with any others that we bust out. If they’re of no use to us, we want you to hide them along with the rest of your people.”

“So you made a mistake and now you want me to put it right for you.” Rahab had the conceit and viciousness back in her voice. “Why should I help you?”

“Because we’re all human, because hell isn’t going to last very long. Our people are coming for us and Satan and all his foul legions won’t stop them. The more chaos we stir up down here, the less resistance he can put up back there, and the sooner we will win. Because we are, believe it or not, on the same side.”

“Or we’d better be.” Madeuce’s voice was muffled by the scarf over his nose and mouth. The first few hours down here had been horribly uncomfortable for him and his chest still felt raw and heavy from the atmosphere. The scarf and goggles had helped a lot, just as they had in the sandstorms of Iraq. “Just an idle question Rahab. What happens when people down here die?”

Rahab felt her stomach drop slightly at the veiled threat. “The Demons believe that we generate some sort of force that helps lift them to their afterlife. Humans, I suppose we just vanish.”

Kim nodded. “Not a good deal is it? We can offer you a better one. Out of this pit, movement elsewhere in Hell, whatever elsewhere is, and a life. We’re on the same side, just lets act like it, huh?”

Rahab thought it over. They were right, things were changing and, like it or not, there was a war starting in Hell. “Very well, I’ll take in your person. And any more you ‘bust out’. Just don’t overload me with numbers and give me time to get them away before your war turns into a bloodbath. Turns into more of a bloodbath.”

“Done.” Kim turned around. “Bubbles, get Richard out of hiding, tell him he’s got a new girlfriend.”

Throne Room, Palace of Satan, Infernal City of Dis

Satan relished the atmosphere of absolute terror that was building up in his great throne room. The word was spreading across the halls and circles of Hell, through the streets of Dis itself, down the great Pit that it surrounded and into the garrisons that held the walls separating the rings of Hell. Abigor had failed. Abigor had been defeated, his army massacred. He had been defeated by the humans, his Army driven back inside the gates of Hell. He had been ordered to crush the humans and he had failed. It had amused Satan to dream up some really inventive punishments for one who had defeated him so badly but there were more important things than petty revenge. He had to find out how this unimaginable thing had occurred. Was Abigor treacherous or just plain stupid?

The audience stirred and shrank back as Abigor entered, a Lesser Herald trailing in his wake. In a way, it was almost amusing, the desire for the other Demons to get out of the possible line of fire. Abigor walked down the hall, conscious of the eyes on him as he approached the great throne where Satan sat, watching him. He reached the foot of the throne and threw himself at Satan’s feet.

“So, Abigor, you have come to tell us of your great victory and regale us with stories of the sufferings you have inflicted on the humans?” Satan’s voice was the silky smoothness that portrayed real trouble and Abigor knew it.”

“Infernal Majesty, I fear…”

“Good”

Abigor felt a flash of irritation at the interruption. “I fear that I have grim and terrible news. My Army was defeated, destroyed by the Humans. Something has happened on their world, something that is terrible beyond belief. They have magic that is so powerful we could not stand against it. They can breath on whole sections of an Army and leave nothing but mangled flesh, they have lances and arrows that never miss their target, that follow the one they aim at no matter how much they run.

“Run? So you admit your army ran?”

“After all but one in a thousand had died, Yes Sire, we ran. All those who did not died. Most of those who tried to escape the humans died. The humans have iron chariots.”

A thrill of horror went around the room. Iron chariots had caused them problems once before, problems that had required a succubus, a peasant girl and a tent peg to sort out. Now they were back in a new and more terrible form?

The thought of Iron Chariots sent screaming rage flooding through Satan’s mind but he kept himself under strict control. There was so much he needed to know. “Tell me all Abigor. From the start.”

Sprawled on the floor, Abigor started to relate the history of his devastated Army. How it had marched out of Hell and across the desert to its first objectives. The strange attacks on the way, the flying chariots that had killed some of his commanders, the mysterious explosions that had wiped out whole command groups. Then, the enemy defense line, the fire lances, the exploding ground, the snakes of iron that tore his troops apart. The way the humans had breathed death, how they never came close to their enemy but killed from distances. How they had slaughtered Abigor’s Army then chased it back across the desert, killing remorselessly as they did so. By the time he finished, the room was silent and the demon Dukes were looking at each other with profound unease.

“So now we know the reason for the destruction of your Army Abigor.” Satan’s voice oozed charm, then suddenly turned to a berserk scream. “It was cowardice. Unmitigated cowardice. You claim that your Army pressed home its attacks bravely yet you are here alive to give the lie to that statement. Your soldiers were cowards who would not charge the enemy but ran away and you were at their head. You led the disaster, you led their failure. Your cowardice was the cause of your army’s destruction.

Here it comes Abigor thought. A hideous death.

“But I am merciful.” The oily cooing was back in Satan’s voice. “I will give you a chance to redeem yourself.”

“Majesty, I thank you. But there is something we must do first. We must close that portal before it can be used against us.”

“Would that we could.” The words were not spoken but formed in Abigor’s mind. It wasn’t Satan speaking but he didn’t know who it was. “Our mages have been trying with all the energy they can command. It is no use. We cannot close it. It may decay on its own, in time, but we cannot close it. It is as much a fixture now as the very walls of Dis itself.”

“That is not your concern coward.” Satan turned to Memnon. “Tell me your story Herald. Let us hear how you ran from the humans and betrayed our kind.”

Memnon stared at the leering, sneering figure on the throne. Satan had no idea, what hew as hearing simply wasn’t registering. He began to speak, the experiences of the last month pouring from him.

Outside the Portal To Hell, Western Iraq

Running. It was all he could think of doing. Legs pistoning like a great machine his hooves kicked up sand and grit into thick clouds with each giant stride. His breath came hard and fast, foam flecked at the corners of his mouth and his eyes were narrowed into slits as he pushed his body to its limits and beyond in a frightful dash towards home. His mind was racing along with his body. The memories of his recent sojourn here on this dreadful plane burned through his fear and panic.

He had watched his wing mates annihilated by sky chariots. They never stood a chance and all their infernal might was no match for human magic. He did not have time to taste the shame that shot through him. It was not the time or the place to wallow in his misery. He needed to survive. He needed to get home. He needed to repeat the words.

Uriel. Damn the Nameless One. To unleash Uriel on this world in all his awesome wonder and glory was almost too much to bear. After all who was he but a humble servant, a warrior for his Duke. And now to be a messenger, a go between for the angelics made him want to spill his guts into these desert wastes and scream with impotent horror into the night.

But there was no time for that. There was only time to run and not think about the sounds around him, the cracks in the air that indicated some human was pointing his plastic lance and firing bolts of fire nearby, perhaps even at him as he rumbled by like a run away freight train. Were his wings healed he would be flying so hard so fast that the very sinews of his shoulder blades and joints would tear away.

There were the more ominous cracks of artificial thunder as human sky chariots blasted their way overhead. Sometimes it was followed by the deep bass rumble of human fire magic as it burst over a concentration of Never born and spread them over the wastes like fertilizer. He had seen one such strike up close as he ran.

One of the cavalry servitors tending to his dying mount looked up at him as he raced by, several foot soldiers were standing by the noble one waiting instructions. One must submit his will and being to a demon of higher order. It was the way of things. It was the natural order. The cavalry servitor demanded he halt and give a chant of greeting and submission. Memnon had actually considered for the briefest moment to do as he was told. Every fiber of his being seemed to tense as it prepared to submit as was custom and tradition.

The artificial thunder rumbled directly overhead and he remembered the death, the fire bolts, the arrows of doom that could pluck them from the sky as easily as a hawk picked off a field mouse for supper. And he responded in a manner that still haunted him.

“Run you fool!” he spat and his hooves did not falter, did not pause. He simply continued running, hot sweat hissing as it touched whatever it fell upon like an obscene rain. The cavalry servitor was stunned. Eyes bulged and tusks snapped loudly in anger and confusion.

“In the name of Abigor you will submit to me now or----”

Then there was the brief sound like parchment tearing or the clothes of some helpless human wench being rent by lecherous claws and then the cavalry servitor, his mount, and several of the closest foot troops exploded into a thick cloud of blood and bone. They were gone in a moment as if they had never been there. Several of the surviving foot soldiers were crawling away screaming in agony as they left liquefied or shattered limbs behind. He looked up long enough to see a sky chariot with its wings whirling over its head roar past in a low trajectory like a bird of prey surveying the carnage of its passing.

“Or what you fool? Everything has changed. Our world has been torn asunder.” Memnon spat to himself in sheer disgust. He paused only long enough to make sure the chariot did not come around for another attack run but the combination of the billowing clouds swept up by the chariot’s passing and his own panicked running had obscured him from its sight and unlike the other higher flying iron and plastic chariots this one seemed to lack the keen senses of its brethren and that saved the wayward servant of the Morningstar.

His body started to seize up and muscles cramped as he took those moments to slow down. He had pushed himself beyond all endurance and his body was now reacting to his fevered pace. At any moment he would collapse in an exhausted heap and sleep through the hazy pain to awaken refreshed.

However, one glance back at the bloody crater where before several of his kith and kin had stood fired him up and he raised one arm to his mouth and he bit deeply into the bicep. Flesh was rent from his bone and blood gushed into his nostrils. He snorted in pain and pleasure and that small spark of pain he was so keen on inflicting upon the useless wretches of humanity kindled a small surge in power pushed by will and fear and the Never born exploded back into his break neck pace.

And so he ran and ran. He ran past the sight of his grand army shattered into bloody remnants and screaming broken brethren who were begging for release, for a return to the fiery bloody skies of home and cursing humanity in whatever tongue they deemed fit. He ran through a charnel house of guts and sinews, hooves cracked exposed bone and ribs. He ran even as the air burned within his lungs like a furnace. He ran as he heard more thunder claps and whistling booms. He ran until he could run no more and collapsed in heap, blood spewing from his ruined bicep, frothy saliva spilling from his mouth and foam flecking along his heaving flanks.

There was no more left. No more to give and not even enough energy to take.

Memnon was spent to the last dregs of his reserves and he looked up to the sky to scream his defiance and await the human magic that was sure to rend him limb from limb. But then he noticed he was right at the lip of the portal to hell. Could it be? Was it not a failure? Had he pushed himself enough? Before him in a pathetic display a great beast dragged itself towards the yawning doorway home. Both hind legs reduced to splintered messes of dying meat and trailing entrails still it tried to get itself home. A leg from its rider was still firmly in the stirrup the rest of its charge probably scattered along the wastes. Memnon growled and fell upon the beast in a scream of desperation and anger at the predicament he find himself in, reduced to feeding off one of the great beasts to survive. He let his anger and frustration out on the wretched beast as it bleated in its death throes while teeth and claw rent muscle and sinew from bone.

Memnon fed deeply and voraciously as his anger, despair and shame burned in his belly worse than the rancid meat being guzzled in with such relish. He wanted to feed away the pain, the anguish of the defeat, the shame of running from prey, the despair of knowing that their magic had failed so completely and utterly and the gnawing fear that Nameless One was moving behind the scenes, that Uriel would trod this world completely unleashed.

What victory was there in that? It was whispered from the elder days that Uriel’s power was so grand that his death touch obliterated not only human life but also the human soul. His power, one of the greatest of all angels save perhaps for Michael the Great General, was the ultimate weapon because it robbed everyone, including the Nameless of the prize of human essence. When the first born of Khemet were swept aside their souls did not go screaming into Hell or the Etheric Realms. They simply ceased to be. Oblivion.

The very concept chilled the demon to its core. Nothing. Just the great darkness and void. At least in hell these pathetic humans drew solace from the fact that they still existed. Despite the pain and anguish they still mattered. But Uriel robbed everyone of that solace. He was the Nameless Ones’s weapon of last resort. The great scythe that robbed all sides of the prize. Or so it was rumored by those higher than he otherwise why the dread at his coming. Why the reticence of the Nameless to unleash him? His thoughts paused in a moment of revelation.

Standing at the Hellmouth was a Lord. The Duke, Abigor.

In that instant he felt something alien. Something alarming yet exhilarating as he watched his Duke move among the shattered remnants. He was still tall and proud yet there was no longer that cold arrogance to his gait, the sneering pride on his features, the snarl of command on his lips or the lash of rebuke in his eyes.

Haunted.

He looked haunted and humbled yet he was proud now, not a pride borne of Dukedom granted to him in the mists of ancient history but pride in personal knowledge that he had faced the human magic and lived. Pride in that he was still here. He was a Duke of Hell yes, but now he was a survivor. Memnon watched him speak gently to one of the survivors and he heard a brief whisper in his ear.

“Follow him. Follow him till the end of your story.”

Memnon nodded numbly and rose wiping the gore and gristle from his snout. He strode up to the lord and spoke.

“My lord?” When Abigor turned to regard him Memnon knew he had found his leader.

Throne Room, Palace of Satan, Infernal City of Dis

There was, once again, silence in the great Throne Room.

“And what was Yahweh’s message?” Satan’s voice was loaded with contempt.

“He said this. ‘The One Above All has spoken yet he sees vile repugnant defiance from humanity. The Great Chorus must not be disturbed. The Chanting must not cease. Your ilk were given this world and we see nothing but abhorrent failure. We do not want to take a more active role. Uriel awaits on the ether like a sword of Damocles. Last he moved upon man, the Land of Khemet wept bitter tears. Do not force our hand. Cow them. Stop the defiance. Should they find a way to disrupt the Chorus we will end this charade once and for all.’ That and that alone, Majesty.”

The silence in the room deepened. This was unheard-of, the great ones never interfered with the domains of others. When they did, it meant a war. There had been one between Satan and Yahweh already and nobody wanted that experience repeated. Still, Yahweh never interfered in the work of hell, just as Satan never did so with Heaven. Or anywhere else for that matter.

“Despite those ill-chosen words, crushing the humans is a necessity. All our armies are being brought to full strength of 81 legions.” That was almost 550,000 demons in each. “Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Dagon will command three such armies including their own for our renewed assault in Earth.” A gasp went around the room, that meant Satan was committing 729 legions out of the professional Army force of 999 legions, 939 now that Abigor’s Army had been destroyed. They would only have 210 legions left in Hell to train the reservists and conscripts that made up the rest of Hell’s nominal force of 6,666 legions. Almost 5 million demons would be turned loose on Earth. There had never been a military exercise like this, not even in the war with Yahweh.

“Sire, I beg you.” Abigor’s voice was urgent, his mind filled with the picture of what must surely come. “The portal is a death trap even for such a force. There is a ridge that dominates in and humans fight from behind ridges. By now they will have every chariot, every fire-lance, every seeker lance they have aimed at that portal. As our demons funnel through it, they will be destroyed. The death will continue until the portal is blocked by our dead.”

“I know.” Satan’s voice was still calm and oily. “That is why you will take your Army and seize that ridgeline.”

“My Army has been destroyed. Barely 300 are left in condition to fight.”

“Then make up the numbers with your mates and your kidlings. The youngest and the oldest. If they can carry a trident they go. If they cannot, they can go anyway and fight with bare hands. You will leave none of your clan behind. If they can crawl to that ridge, they will go.”

Abigor shook at the sentence. It meant death for him and all of his line, that was clear. He rose to his feet, nodded and left.

“And now, Herald, what shall I do with you?”

“Majesty, I would join Abigor and go with him.”

“So be it.” Memnon turned and left, following Abigor from the throne room.

“Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Dagon. You have many reservists in your ranks. Train them properly before launching your assault. There is no hurry.”

Asmodeus frowned. “But Sire. What about Abigor?”

“Abigor who?”

Chapter Thirty One

Army Training Centre, Cultybraggan, near Stirling, Scotland.

Warrant Officer Class II William Bell watched with some satisfaction as the company he had helped train entered the firing range to practise their musketry skills. The men who made up D Company, 7th (Fife) Battalion The Black Watch, had shown great promises; there had been many bright individuals among them, who were potential Non Commissioned Officers, and also possibly officer material, and all had been keen to learn. That was something of a relief, the problem with any rapid force expansion was finding good NCOs and reasonable competent officers. The British Army had paid badly for that particular problem in the past, Bell hoped that this time around it would be different.

He was also rather pleased that General, sorry Field Marshal Dannatt, as he was now, had decided that as the army was expanding that the recent regimental amalgamations, which had been deeply unpopular in Scotland, would be reversed. Hence The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland had once again become the 1st Battalion, The Black Watch, and the regiment had regained its independent identity. The alternative, as Dannatt had pointed out, was to have battalions with absurdly high numbers, and anyway the public better identified with the more traditional regimental names. That argument had carried the day and regiments were demerging all over the U.K.. The parades as the merged regiments had formed, then split apart, their colors being cased and replaced by the old traditional standards were a frequent news item on television these days.

Bell himself had served for the full twenty-two years in the 1st Black Watch, retiring as a Company Sergeant-Major. Like all other army pensioners he had been recalled to the colours to help train a new generation of National Servicemen. It was highly doubtful that he would actually go into action with the new battalion once it was operational, but he was certainly fit enough to continue to serve in his current training role, or transfer to the re-established Home Service Force.

As the first platoon began to shoot at the targets, Bell remembered the first month after conscription had been brought in. The army had been totally unprepared, the last time they had to train thousands of new recruits had been 1960, and arguably they had not faced a situation quite like this since the raising of the Kitchener Armies in 1914. There had been not enough uniforms, weapons, equipment, or accommodation, as in 1914-1915 new recruits had to be billeted amongst the civilian population while new hutted accommodation was constructed.

At least now the worst of the shortages were over, everybody now had uniforms and at least most of the normal equipment that an infantryman should expect to have. Moreover the new L1A2 Self Loading Rifle chambered for .338 Lapua rounds had begun to come off the production lines in some numbers. The first orders had gone to FN-Herstal over in Belgium. Years of being players in the export market had meant they were geared up to switch between calibres quickly. The omnipresence of the 7.62x51 NATO and, later, the 5,56x45 had eroded that capability but enough had remained for them to start producing the new rifles within a week of receiving the orders. Initial priority had gone to regular and Territorial units in the Middle East, which had at least freed up numbers of L85A2 and L86A2s for the National Servicemen to train on, but now the first L1A2s had begun to be issued to conscripts for familiarity training. British production was ramping up as well and once that happened, the re-equipment of the rest of the Army would follow.

Today was the day that the 7th Black Watch would get their first chance to fire the new rifles, having spent the previous week learning how the weapon worked, how it should be cleaned, and what its various features were. Bell himself had examined one of the rifles closely himself and had realised that although it was semi-automatic, just like the old 7.62mm L1A1 SLR the old matchstick/paper clip trick would work on it. However it was debateable whether firing a .338 rifle on full automatic was a good thing. The old 7.62 NATO had been hard to control on full auto, the .338 was way out there. Given the muzzle climb, it might be good for shooting down harpies though.

“In your own time, commence firing!” The range officer called out.

‘CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!’

Bell watched with interest as a few members of the platoon paused after the first shot, somewhat shocked at the recoil of the .338 round compared to the 5.56mm that they had gotten used to. To their credit they adjusted their position slightly and resumed firing. From what he could see, despite the extra power of their new weapons the level of marksmanship had not dropped off appreciably.

“They’re shooting very well, Mr. Mathews.” Bell observed to the platoon commander.

“They are indeed, Sergeant-Major.” The young subaltern, who had found his Sandhurst class suddenly passed out early, replied, slightly nervous of the very experienced Senior NCO. “In no small thanks to your training of them.”

‘THUD! THUD! THUD!’

Both men turned their heads towards the sound and saw that on the range next door that S Company had begun to practise firing their newly issued Browning Heavy Machine Guns. The 12.7mm round was a prodigious man killer, and was also pretty effective against baldricks, so every infantry battalion were being issued with the big machine-gun. The M-2s had come from FN-Herstal as well, Bell couldn’t help reflecting that the armourers were doing well out of the Salvation War. The M-2 issue was even including the units due to be mounted in Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles. The 7th Black Watch was one of them and would be receiving its new Warriors as soon as the vehicles were available. Until then, they were making do with FV-432s and some M-113s the government had found somewhere.

Two Warriors had recently visited Cultybraggan so that the men destined to join armoured infantry regiments could become familiar with them. They had been examples of the new Warrior Mk.2, armed with the 40mm CTA cannon, rather than the old 30mm RARDEN cannon. The RARDEN had proven very effective against baldricks, but its one weakness was its low rate of fire, the troops in Iraq had requested a weapon with a greater rate of fire. The MoD had bitten the bullet and decided that the time had come to make a choice, and quickly. The BAE Systems proposal, which involved installing a 40mm CTA cannon in the existing Warrior turret had been chosen, even if the turret was now a bit cramped, because it could be manufactured more quickly and existing Warriors could be modified faster.

“Have you tried the new rifle yourself yet, Sir?” Bell enquired.

“I certainly have, Sergeant-Major.” Mathews replied. “It has one hell of a kick, left my shoulder all black and blue, and one really does need that bipod. I think it will make a good battle rifle, though, once we all get used to it.”

“Rather reminds me of the old Slur, Sir.” Bell said wistfully, having left the army before the SA80 family had entered widespread service. “Bit fiercer, though.

“It’ll certainly give those baldricks a pause for thought if they come back again.”

Western desert of Iraq.

Corporal James Moss, well he was an Acting Sergeant, as the old platoon Sergeant was gone (he had been a member of the Free Church of Scotland), of 3 Platoon, A Company, 1st Battalion The Royal Scots, scanned the desert around him from the commander’s hatch of the FV432 ‘Bulldog’ APC. As with the other Scottish regiments 1st Royal Scots, the senior line infantry regiment of the army, had been de-amalgamated, in its case not only from The Royal Regiment of Scotland, but also from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Part of the regiment, mainly men from the Borderers, had been sent home to the UK to help form the new 1st Battalion, The King’s Own Scottish Borders, while a mixture of reservists and Territorial Army soldiers took their place in Iraq.

While the upgraded ‘Bulldog’ was considered by the troops to be an excellent vehicle, having protection fully equal of the Warrior IFV, the fact that it was only armed with a GPMG had kept the units equipped with it out of the fight with the baldricks. Major General Brims had kept them and the 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment back as his reserve, while the 1st Battalion The Scots Guards and 1st Battalion The Mercian Regiment (Cheshire) had all the fun in their Warriors.

Determined to play some useful part the Scots and Lancasters had scoured armouries for heavier weapons to replace their GPMGs with. Moss’ ‘Bulldog’, for example, had a Browning HMG on the commander’s mount, the GPMG being relocated to a pintle mount aft of the main troop compartment hatches. Getting enough Brownings for his platoon had cost Moss every bottle of whisky that the platoon possessed, and most of their beer. A very happy American unit had handed over the HMGs and ammunition and had immediately drawn replacements for themselves.

Other ‘Bulldogs’ had Russian made DShK machine-guns taken from Iraqi armouries while some sported American Mark 19 Grenade launchers. The British Army had adopted that weapon for use in Afghanistan and the Quartermaster would surely be surprised to find out how many were now in the unofficial inventory. With their new armament the ‘Bulldog’ equipped battle groups had been sent out into the desert behind where the armoured battle groups of 4th Mechanised Brigade had advanced, to sweep the ground for any stray baldricks who may have escaped.

A few baldricks and injured harpies had already been encountered by the mechanised patrols and successfully dealt with. Mostly killed, but there were whispers that some had been taken prisoner. It was also whispered that units who managed to take such prisoners would be smiled upon by those in authority. However this long after the defeat of the demon army the chances of encountering a live baldrick, or even a dead one, as the corpses had largely decomposed, was slim. Still, Acting Sergeant Moss was ever hopeful of getting his chance.

“I can see something move over there, Corp…er, Sarge.” One of the dismounts, who was standing head and shoulders out of the open troop hatches reported.

Moss cocked the big Browning and swung it round in the direction that the private had indicated, while he studied the object through the Common Weapons Sight on his new L1A2 (he had taken the CWS off his old L85A2 and fitted it to the new rifle).

“Oh, sorry, false alarm, it’s a cow, or something.”

“Bloody numptie.” Moss complained. “You had me going for a minute there.”

“That’s the feckin’ real thing though!” Another soldier called out, flipping the safety catch off his rifle and opening fire.

The baldrick that the soldier had spotted had started to try an run as soon as he had heard the APC approach, but was too weak to move particularly fast. The .338 Lapua round struck him in the side and was enough in his weakened state to bring the demon down.

“Davie, halt!” Moss said to the FV432’s driver. “I think we might have just taken ourselves a baldrick prisoner.”

The Portal From Hell, Western Desert, Iraq

In any other circumstances, the sight would have been hilariously funny. The little force about to sally through the portal was built around veterans of the first great invasion, most still bearing the wounds of that horrifying massacre but the rest? Kidlings wearing equipment to big for them, so heavy they could hardly lift it, mates who were scarcely any better off. None of them knew how to operate their tridents, how to charge them and then discharge the magic in a searing bolt. Most of the mates were crying, they knew what awaited them. The kidlings were excited, trying to run around with their equipment, assuming that what was about to happen was just a game. One kidling couldn’t lift his trident properly so had it over his shoulder with the end trailing on the ground behind him. In any other circumstances, the sight would have been hilariously funny but Abigor’s heart was near breaking.

“Get ready!” His order ran around the group, bringing them into some form of formation. “Move out.” He went into a jog-trot and stepped through the great ellipse that represented the portal between dimensions, into the clear yellow sun and blue skies that he had devoutly hoped never to see again. Behind him, his pathetic rag-tag band appeared in a grim pastiche of a fighting formation.

The truth was, Abigor was surprised to be still alive. He had expected to be swamped by a barrage of fire-lances and mage bolts as soon as he and his band had emerged but the desert was silent. The ridge up ahead of them seemed deserted but Abigor wasn’t fooled by that, he knew the humans would stay below the ridgeline where they were safe until it was time to pour their fire into their enemies. Thinking about it with the clarity that accompanies imminent death, Abigor suddenly realized that it was a very sensible approach.

Yet still the desert was silent, no hideous holocaust of fire erupting around them. Had he been wrong? Had the humans given up and gone home? Surely that was unlike them, it didn’t fit the remorseless harrowing of his Army as it had retreated across the desert. But why was it silent?

“Everybody, be careful where you put your feet. Do not step on mage-bars. They will kill you.” Or worse he thought, but there was no need to worry the mates and kidlings with that possibility. Despite all his fears, the ridgeline was approaching fast as he jog-trotted across the desert. For preference, he and his veterans would have been at a full run to cover the ground as fast as possible but they had to measure their pace to the abilities of the weakest members of their group. This attack was a sick joke and Abigor knew it.

Yet it had succeeded. They reached the ridgeline and deployed on it. The mates and kidlings were exhausted by the run across the desert, the veterans were barely fazed by its exertions. Abigor was keeping them relatively closely bunched. He knew it was wrong, that he should be dispersing his people out so they would not be slaughtered in mass by the human mage-magic but that was not his intent. He knew his group could not survive and keeping them bunched would mean a quick death for them all as the humans concentrated their fire on them. He had seen to many demons screaming their last seconds away as they had been torn apart yet still lived. He did not want his kidlings and mates to die that way.

The minutes ticked by, Abigor marvelling that the humans had taken so long to react. He glanced behind him, the forces that were supposed to have followed him out were nowhere to be seen. That, he had expected. He had known from this start that this ‘attack’ was really just a mass execution. Then, overhead, Abigor heard the screaming howl of mage-bolts as they started to descend upon him. It was all over.

Combat Team Alpha. By the Hellmouth, Western Iraq

“Any movement Hooters?”

“All still out there. Nothing happening.” Stevenson’s combat team had drawn the hellmouth watch assignment for the day. She had her platoon of Bradleys in the center, holding a ridgeline while her two platoons of Abrams tanks were spread out to either side. If the baldricks emerged, they’d fight in the best traditions of the U.S. Army, they’d protect their artillery observer while he called down unimaginable firepower upon their enemies. “Wait one, there’s movement. Here they come again.”

Down in the desert, figures were emerging from the hellmouth. They were a disorganized stream, undisciplined, nothing like the neat formations that had emerged before. They were spread out in the desert, running straight at the dug-in Bradleys but to Stevenson’s already experienced eye, this wasn’t an attack. Anyway, was that all of them?

“Alpha-actual to Domino. We have hellmouth activity. Baldricks emerging, number estimated at..” Stevenson did a quick count, there were around 400 at most. “Four hundred, say again four-zero-zero. Heading for our position.”

“Four hundred? Are you sure of that?”

“Sure am. Four hundred, no follow up force. There’s something very wrong about this.” She thought for a second and looked through the high-powered optics on her tank. She blinked and looked again. “Sir, this force is a joke. There are some regulars down there but there are some small ones that can hardly lift their weapons. Others don’t have any at all.” She looked again, at the way the formation was breaking up as it crossed rough ground. For the first time she appreciated the amount of training the earlier formations had shown. Their lines had never wavered, never broken no matter how rough the ground or intense the fire brought down in them. This mob were not even in the same class. “Sir, these baldricks aren’t soldiers, most of them aren’t. They look more like civilians.”

“Understood.” There was a pause. “Deny contact, ring them off, don’t let them go anywhere but hold your fire until ordered otherwise. Give them at least 1500 meters clearance”

“Very good Sir.” Stevenson broke contact and changed to her command frequency. “Third platoon fall back, let them have the ridgeline, we don’t need it. First and second, move up to flanking positions. Hold fire.”

There was a cloud of dust and black smoke as the Bradleys backed off their ridgeline and headed for the one about 2,000 meters to the rear. They were already in position when the baldricks ran up on to the ridge and started to deploy into a defensive perimeter. A tight one, Stevenson thought, perfect for artillery. Didn’t baldricks ever learn?

“Report.” The single word came over her radio.

Stevenson looked carefully. “We’re in position. Sir the enemy force is at least 50 percent civilian. There are small ones running around, I think they’re playing, it looks like their children of some kind. And others are behaving like their mothers.” She flipped her optics up to full power. “Well what do you know, our big friend the football player is up there.”

“Very good. Hold positions, do not open fire. This is going right up the chain.”

Stevenson relaxed in her seat, watching the baldricks. There were some real soldiers across there, they were watchful, their tridents at the ready. But the rest? No way were they soldiers. Women and children was Stevenson’s guess. Hokay, I guess now is when we find out what sort of people we really are she thought to herself. The minutes ticked by until almost an hour had passed.

“Alpha-Actual. This is Command-One.”

Whoa, that meant General Petraeus himself. “Alpha Actual Sir.”

“Get ready, there’s artillery fire coming in. IP between you and the baldricks. Safe distance from both but its tight. FYI, we’re going to try and get this lot to surrender. As soon as the shells have landed, expose your vehicles but do not, I repeat do not, open fire. One shot from you without orders, Captain, and you’ll be burning shit for the rest of your career.”

“Understood Sir. Expose but do not fire.”

Overhead there was a howl of descending 155mm shells from a Paladin battery. The salvo was beautifully placed, one shot to each side of the baldrick group, two in front of it, two behind. A perfect hexagon that was just, only just, far enough out to be safe. “All Alpha Vehicles, move up onto the ridge crest. Do not under any circumstances fire. Repeat, do not under any circumstances open fire. Require verbal repeat and acknowledgement of that order from each vehicle.” She listened as the acknowledgements came in. Then, her Abrams lurched as she moved up to the crest of the ridge.

On The Ridgeline, Hellmouth, Western Iraq

Abigor’s skin crawled as he expected the lash of mage-fire and iron fragments but the desert erupted in a neat hexagon around his unit, the bursts harmless. Oh, they buffeted and shook the ground but there were no screaming, disembowelled demons on the ground to show they had landed. Then, all around him, Iron Chariots appeared. In front, to either side, behind him. The humans really did love surrounding their enemies so that none could escape when the killing started. But the Chariots remained silent. No fire lances, no seeker lances, the chariots just sat there and watched him. The silence was eerie after the crash of the mage-bursts. The kidlings had stopped their games, the mates their weeping, everybody was just waiting. It dawned on Abigor they were waiting for him. Everybody, demon and human were waiting for him.

If they were waiting for him to start fighting, what happened if he did not? Why had the humans given him a chance denied to him by Satan? What would happen if he took that chance? It couldn’t be any worse than what would happen if he didn’t. Abigor made his decision and stood up, throwing his trident away. Then, he raised his hands to show he was unarmed. “All of you, throw down your arms. Stand up and raise your hands like mine. So that the humans can see we are unarmed.”

Across the desert, the Iron Chariots kicked up a cloud of dust and started to move in.

Combat Team Alpha. By the Hellmouth, Western Iraq

“Sir, they’re surrendering. They’ve thrown down their arms and are standing up. They’ve raised their hands, all of them.”

“Captain Stevenson, move in, carefully. This may be a trick but if it isn’t we have a priceless opportunity here. Do not fire, even if fired upon.”

That means I’m the sacrificial goat. Stevenson thought. She gave the order and her command started rolling closer to the group on the hill crest. They were motionless as her tanks and armored infantry vehicles closed in. When they were less than fifty meters away, the big one, the one Stevenson thought of as the football player, dropped to the ground and sprawled out on the sand. She checked her intercom, making sure it was set so only her crew could hear her. “Reminds me of one of my ex-boyfriends guys. I wonder if he wants me to trample him too?”

There was a suppressed series of snorts from her crew. She stopped the vehicle and got out, climbing down the outside of the turret and on to the ground.

“I am Captain Keisha Stevenson, United States Army. I am authorized to accept your surrender.”

“I am Great Duke Abigor. I am, or was, commander of sixty legions. I offer you my surrender and fealty.”

White House Communications Center, Washington DC.

“Vladimir, this is Dubya. I have urgent news. General Abigor has just surrendered and defected.”

“That filthy Vlasovite bastard.”

“Sorry, Vladimir, you misunderstand, he’s a baldrick, he’s defecting to us.”

Without missing a beat, Putin carried on, “What I meant to say of course was that he is a heroic champion of freedom and liberty who has overcome his corrupt upbringing so that he can rally to the side of truth honor and justice.”

“That’s right Vladimir, he’s a filthy Vlasovite bastard, but he’s our filthy Vlasovite bastard.”

Chapter Thirty Two

Headquarters, Multi-National Force, Baghdad, Iraq

“Well, they’re human.”

“You have got to be kidding us. There’s no way those things are human.”

Dr Surlethe settled back in the conference room chair with every sign of comfort. That was one thing the higher ranks of the Army had down to a fine art, their conference rooms were well-furnished, air conditioned and had all the luxuries one might wish combined with hi-tech presentation equipment. It would be years before civilian releases caught up with the Army version of Microsoft Powerpoint. The Marines, now they were different, their “conference room” was usually a tent somewhere with a bare wood trestle table and a few camp chairs. One Marine General had remarked on the Army’s “excessive facility” only to be rather coldly told that ‘any damned fool can be uncomfortable’.

“Nevertheless, they are human. Sort of.” There was a stir of relaxation at the qualification.

“What do you mean Doctor?” General Petraeus needed to know a lot about these creatures, not least because he had almost a thousand of them in a Prisoner of War camp.

“General, we’ve looked at the DNA of the baldricks and its human.” Surlethe thought for a second. “Look at it this way, the difference in DNA between a chimpanzee and a human is around two percent. The difference between baldrick and human DNA is about one half of one percent. So baldricks are much more closely related to us than we are to chimpanzees.”

“They don’t look it.”

“No, they don’t General.” Again Surlethe thought for a moment. “Actually they do. If we ignore the way-out bits, the strange contortions and so on, they do look like us. We started off by thinking that they were a next-level up version of us that simply evolved differently but when the DNA comparisons came through we had to abandon that. There’s no doubt about it in our minds, we and the baldricks had a common ancestor somewhere way back when. The really big question is did that common ancestor evolve here on earth, on the hell-place or somewhere else?”

“I still find it hard to believe that something that’s so different from us could be related to us. DNA shifts and mutation rates can’t explain that level of difference.”

Protect us from intelligent, well-read generals Surlethe sighed quietly to himself, life had been much easier in the old days when Generals knew how to destroy armies and nothing else. Then, they just accepted everything a scientist said. Put on a long white coat and they were as good as gold. This one had an annoying habit of arguing with scientists and, even more annoying, was very often right. He quickly realized that it was about to get worse.

“I’ve been reading up on the Human Genome Project. According to their findings, the useless repetitive sequences, the junk DNA make up at least 50% of the human genome. According to the people working on that program, the junk DNA doesn’t have a direct function, but they reshape the genome by rearranging it, thereby creating entirely new genes or modifying and reshuffling existing genes. It also appears that something quite drastic happened around 50 million years ago that caused all our junk DNA.”

“That’s correct General. Our working hypothesis is that somehow we and the baldricks split away from each other way back then. We went our way, they went theirs. Perhaps we all came from somewhere else and the ‘something quite drastic’ was that we stayed here and they went to the hell-place. We each used different parts of our junk DNA and activated different strings. The difference may be only one half of one percent but it’s a very important one half of one percent. There’s more to it than that of course; it looks to us like the baldrick DNA itself has been corrupted, either by selective breeding, prion infection, both or something else.”

“So, how can you help me look after the prisoners we’ve acquired.”

“Well, we know from other sources that they are exclusive carnivores. Its probable that they’ll eat any sort of meat, they’ll eat in large quantities but at irregular intervals. Without need for major physical exercise, they’ll probably eat only once a week or so. Won’t be a pretty sight when they do though.” Surlethe thought back to the sight of the succubus eating and shuddered. “Medication might work on them, we’ll have to be careful and take it by stages. Oh, and General, their metabolic pathways are almost identical to ours. Chemical weapons should work on them just fine.”

The Ultimate Temple, Heaven

The archangel Michael strode forward into the Temple. All about him, the people sang; he could feel the ecstasy of the choirs of angels, of those few, fortunate saved humans. As he entered the Holiest of Holies, the thick marble of the temple walls drowned out the beautiful music outside; reduced to a dim glow, he focused his attention on the sight before him.

It awed him every time without fail: the great white throne, with its flashing lightning and pealing thunder surrounding the giant figure who sat on it, the One Above All Others. 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. On one Michael loved it, the pomp and circumstance, the splendour all appealed on a very basic level, as they were supposed to. On another level, Michael-lan found them disturbing and slightly repulsive. There was something very unhealthy about the whole set-up and the mentality behind it. It betrayed a fundamental lack of balance.

At the four corners of the room stood the four living creatures, chanting their ceaseless cry: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come;” and the twenty-four members of the 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." Time was, their voices had outstripped even the living creatures in volume, but even here they were not free from time's ravages. An astute observer might look closely into their eyes and see the misery and despair there. Singing the same praises for untold millennia was not as heavenly as it sounded.

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 living creatures 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 messengers of Gabriel have returned, save one – Appoloin – who was killed in your service." As he related the information, he couldn't help the quiver of surprise that crept into his voice; the idea that humans, of all things, could destroy demons or angels, let alone the merciless slaughter to which they had apparently subjected the demonic army, still confused him. If he were capable of admitting it to himself, he might even have said that the prospect scared him. But had he not seen for himself, on his visits to Earth just how far humans had advanced? So to be surprised at their lethal killing powers didn't make much sense at all.

"My Lord, the army the Morningstar sent forth has been utterly destroyed. The human magic has proved far beyond the capability of the fallen ones."

Yahweh was silent for a moment, then spoke. "Interesting. And what of the rest of Satan's hordes?”

"My Lord, the delegation you sent to Dis has not returned; it is several choirs overdue. It is not known if the messengers we sent have been received."

"Is Uriel prepared to go out into the world?"

"He is, my Lord.”

"Summon him to me, Michael." At the decree, Michael's fist clenched and lightning sparked around it as he bit down on his excitement. The chance he had been waiting for was finally arriving.

Camp Echo, New Amarah Airfield, Al Amarah, Iraq

The truck convoy, a long line of the eight-by-eight HEMTTs, pulled up at the long line of huge hangars that were half-buried in the ground. This was one of Saddam Hussein’s airfields, one disused until recently but now put to a use that the deranged dictator could never have imagined. The great buried hangars were perfect as a detention area for captured demons. Some of the baldricks sitting in the trucks looked at the razor wire that surrounded the hangars and shuddered. Many bore the scars of that infernal wire.

Abigor had a truck to himself, his size and weight made that essential, and the truth was that he had thoroughly enjoyed his ride. The great truck had moved faster than he had ever dreamed possible, carrying him away from the Hellmouth and towards wherever it was that the humans would take him. The trip itself had been an eye-opener. The black strips the humans laid across the desert were crowded with chariots, nose-to-tail convoys of them, mostly heading west. He had, at last, seen the Iron Chariots, ‘tanks’ they were called apparently, at close quarters. Many different types of them, some looking similar, others very different. Long lines of them moving west and he noted how everybody got out of their way. He’d seen the humans inside them and they’d waved at him, shouting things as they passed. Some had been abusive, Abigor recognized curses when he heard them, but most were almost friendly. Once or twice he’d waved back and that had caused the tank crews, even the hostile ones, to behave in a more friendly manner. It seemed that humans had a strange attitude towards their enemies.

He’d also looked at one of the homes of the Flying Chariots as the convoy had made its way East. Two of them had been taking off, the howl they made painful to the ears. ‘Warthogs.’ One of the truck drivers had shouted. ‘Wait till you see them babies at work.’ They were babies? What did the parents look like? A few minutes later, Abigor had his answer, a great chariot many times the size of the warthogs landed and started to disgorge tons of cargo. Another followed and by the time their convoy had moved on, two more. The movement at the flying chariot base was constant, if the chariots weren’t taking off, they were landing.

“General Abigor? Follow me please.” The human spoke politely but firmly. From the number of chariots around, disobeying him was unwise. Anyway, Abigor remembered the long streams of chariots heading west. Arguing wasn’t an option. He followed the human into the hangar.

It was pleasantly gloomy inside, a pleasant change from the glaring desert sun. It was cooler too although Abigor hadn’t been upset by the heat outside. The interior was divided up into cages, each holding a single demon prisoner. Large enough for him to get up, walk around and exercise. The cage walls were wire layers interspaced with razor-wire.

“General, these are the prisoners we have taken to date. We are doing the best we can to look after them properly, if there are any complaints, please tell us. You are senior officer here and responsible for them all.”

Abigor didn’t understand much of that but the last words made sense. The humans had given him a command, far less than a single legion that was true, but a command none the less. It was a start. He stared at the nearest prisoner, entangling its mind with his own.

“What have they done with you?”

“Nothing, they just keep us here. They feed us meat, give us water.”

“How did they torture you?”

“They did not. They are soft and weak. Jahnibatwesvhik over there had a long splinter of enchanted iron in his chest. It was poisoning him so they took it out. Gave him a drug so that he slept while it was done. As if he couldn’t have stood the pain like a true demon.”

Abigor nodded and turned to the human with him. “You have looked after them well.” His voice showed disbelief and confusion.

“It is our way, when we can. What do your people do for amusement? We have no idea what to give our prisoners. Do you have books you read or games you play?”

We torture human souls for our amusement. was the answer that ran through Abigor’s mind but he guessed that saying so was not the smartest thing he could do at this point. “We will be happy for whatever you can provide.”

“Good, we’ll find something. General, there were civilians with your party. I must warn you, we do not look kindly on those who use civilians as cover for their actions.”

“Satan sent them with me, they are my family. We were all sent to die together.”

The human nodded. “We’ll investigate that further. In the mean time, the women and children will be housed in another building like this one. We want you to point out which child belongs to which mother so we can house them together.”

Abigor absorbed the information that was pouring in on him. It was impossible, surely, that these genial hosts could be the same merciless killers who had destroyed his Army. “Did you take part in the fighting?”

“Sure. My brigade held the town of Hit against your infantry. We got pasted holding it, your guys fight well up close, but we held long enough for the gunships to get to work. General, are any of your women nurses?”

“What are nurses?”

“Those skilled with helping to treat the wounded. Most of your people have wounds.”

“No.” Abigor’s confusion levels increased to near-breaking point. What was with these humans? In the demon armies, nobody treated the wounded. They died or got better according to their luck. A popular demon might be looked after by his immediate comrades, an unpopular one might get killed so he wouldn’t hold up the rest, but that was all. Then, Abigor thought of the sight of two demons carrying a legless third all the way back home. Contact with humans was having disturbing effects.

“That’s a pity. We’re short of medical staff here and we don’t know our way around your bodies. If we operate, we could be doing more harm than good. Our medications could kill.”

“Would dissecting a few living demons help? I can assign a few of these to you for that purpose if you wish?”

Colonel David Paschal looked at the baldrick towering over him and shuddered at the thought. Then reminded himself that these were demons after all, they were not supposed to be nice people. He also reminded himself that his job was to watch, learn and interact with these creatures while his shattered brigade was rebuilt. “No thank you General Abigor, that would be prohibited by our laws.”

Abigor was looking at him curiously. “Sire, you seem to know much about us already?”

“You are not the first to rally to our cause. We have others as well. Some have proved most helpful, especially a succubus we captured.” Paschal held his breath, would Abigor fall for the bait.

He did. His explosive snort rattled the cages. “A succubus! I hope you do not believe everything that single-sex freak told you. They are deceivers and seducers all.”

“No, we adopted an old human principle ‘trust but verify’. Your people here have been helpful in the ‘verifying’ part.”

Abigor relaxed. “Then I will order them to continue doing so.”

Paschal looked at the hangar around them. There was no sign of the modification but the roof had been coated with a new aluminum foil foam laminate that was orders of magnitudes more effective at stopping the baldrick mind-entanglement capability than normal foil caps were. With luck, people in this hangar should be isolated from outside mind-links. “Please do that General.”

Headquarters, Multi-National Force, Baghdad, Iraq

“Major Marina Fyodorovna Luchenko, First Guards Engineer Division reporting Sir. My General has assigned me to you as liaison. He asks what would you like built where?”

General David Petraeus looked at the Russian officer. “Good to have you on board Major. And your engineers, we need them badly. Our supply lines are very difficult, the road network is completely inadequate for the volume of traffic we are moving. It would help if somebody told the Israelis about obeying traffic signs. Our traffic accident rate is bad enough without their assistance.”

Major Luchenko snorted delicately. “So, Sir, what can we do to help?”

“We need a highway Major. Starting at Diddiwanyah, then going around Al Najaf and then due west to the hellmouth. I’d like four lanes going each way, each lane extra wide to handle our HEMTTs – and your trucks of course.” Petraeus looked at the Russian woman and grinned broadly. “That’s right Major, I want you to build the ultimate highway to hell.”

Chapter Thirty Three

Swamps by the River Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell

Okeraphluxos looked over the swamp from his castle. It was small, of course, just as he was a minor duke; he owed his fealty to Kinathroses, the major duke who controlled about half of the sixth ring, and that duke, in turn, owed fealty to Asmodeus, who held the segments of the fifth, sixth and fourth rings, and had just acquired a sixth of Abigor's former holdings, including good land outside the pit and a chunk of the third ring. It had been a long time since a Great Duke of such high status had vanished and the others were falling over themselves trying to seize the choicest of his properties.

His yearly report to Kinathroses was due in the next week, and he needed to find a way to conceal the strange things that had been happening. Oh, not just the usual fudging of the numbers; he'd been doing that for the last few centuries, since the number of humans arriving into hell had ballooned. But even more recently than that, his guards had become reluctant to venture into his swampland realm. He'd had to make an example out of the most recalcitrant, crucifying and then disemboweling him. That hadn’t done much good, they were still reluctant to go out into the swamps alone and when they did, they were quick to return. Those that did return.

It wasn’t just the mysterious disappearances of his guards and the equally mystifying destruction of the causeway through his territory. Okeraphluxos had other major problems on his hands. His best troops were being taken away to reinforce Asmodeus’s Army, leaving him with only the least effective, the very old, the very young and the infirm. All untrained and looking like the soft civilians they really were. As he sat in his chamber pondering the issue, another dull, distant thud rumbled across the swamp. The damnable noises had been going on just a little longer than this mysterious disease of cowardice had been infecting his troops. The minor duke shook his head, cleared his thoughts, and returned to the business of figuring out how to continue deceiving his lord.

Outside the castle, Lt Kim regarded the building skeptically. “That's a castle?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

Rahab nodded. “That is the home of the minor duke who commands this chunk of the fifth ring.”

Kim looked at it critically. It was a large house rising out of a cluster of smaller houses, surrounded by a piled stone wall at least fifteen feet high. From her vantage point on top of a mound of granite, Kim could see baldricks coming and going through the gate; most were marching in short columns, but one, leading a row of animals that looked like rhinolobsters, but without the long, arching tails, was seated on the beast at the head of the column.

“Note that animal shipment down, Mac,” said Kim. “Brass will want to know everything they can about the economy here.” Beside her, McInery was clicking away with the cameras, documenting as much of the outpost as possible.

Rahab was looking at Kim with a mixture of distrust and curiosity. “What are you planning to do?”

Kim smiled, rather viciously. “You'll see.” Indeed you will, she thought. And it will blow your stone-age mind.

Behind them, Madeuce loomed up, face impassive beneath its mask and goggles as always. “Are you ready to start, ma’am?” he asked.

“You OK, Mac?”

“Yeah, my lungs feel like shit though. Gonna be glad to get out of here though.” Madeuce bit his lip in self-reproach. Getting out wasn’t an option for Kim and her crew. They were stuck here and he’d just rubbed that in.

Kim guessed what was running through his mind. “You’ve earned an out and it’s different for you. This place is ours now, earth is your place. Anyway, this is your last run, kitten will be contacting us soon and then, your on your way home. So, as your final hurrah, take it away, Lieutenant.

The big man nodded, a hint of a smile playing about his lips. He signaled to the other three men accompanying him, and they marched off. Kim detected a hint of motion closer to the wall; through the dim, noxious atmosphere, she could just make out Bubbles planting the last few bricks of Semtex. The perpetual mists and fog of hell were annoying but it made the life of the guerilla much easier. As Madeuce disappeared behind another rock outcropping beside the causeway leading out of Okeraphluxos' stronghold, Bubbles slowly made his way back from the base of the wall.

Okeraphluxos was still sitting in his chamber and thinking when he heard a series of loud pops from the window. The sounds were entirely unfamiliar; curious, he stood up and went over to the window as the cracks continued. The sight that greeted him was entirely unexpected: at the gate, his demons were milling about; some were yelling and screaming, and some were running back toward the barracks. With each pop, another demon yelled and dropped; once or twice, heads literally exploded. The foodbeasts below were panicking, and stampeding straight for the back of the compound. He saw several demons trampled beneath their hooves as the small herd ran in blank terror. Several more cracks, and the remaining demons were also heading back into the compound, abandoning their injured comrades.

Abruptly, the walls around his castle just disintegrated. An instant later, a deafening concussion physically knocked him backward, and a shower of stone fragments flew through the window, lacerating the duke's face. In shock, he felt his face, felt the blood oozing out, then crawled back to the window. The room was still spinning around him, and he fought the urge to retch on the windowsill.

Outside, his castle was a complete wreck. The retaining wall had entirely vanished, the causeway leading through the swamp toward the Dis-Dysprosium road had disappeared, and two of the barracks buildings had collapsed. At first, he thought there was nothing left of the demons who had so recently been busy about their business in the castle, but then, looking more closely, he saw, strewn about the jagged rubble coating the ground, lumps that were smoother and darker than the rock fragments. Then, he did vomit on the windowsill.

It was that move that saved his life. As he ducked to vomit, the stone just behind where his head had been exploded in a vicious arc of fragments as something hit it. Okeraphluxos continued downwards, landing on the floor below the windowsill and crawled away. Just what was happening? Obviously his castle was under attack but he’d never seen a siege start like this before. Oh, sieges were known events, a property might be disputed or perhaps seized as a bargaining chip for some other issue but they ran to a set pattern. The besieging commander would pull his army up and display it in front of the target castle so that the besieged commander could see what he was up against and compare his own forces to them. Then besieger and besieged would meet and decide if the balance of forces made resistance practical. If it was, then the siege was on, if not then the defending garrison would surrender. This sort of sudden attack was unheard-of. And what had destroyed his outer walls?

Okeraphluxos decided to take a better look and was about to do so through the window he had just used when it occurred to him that doing so would be a terminally bad idea. He crawled out of the room, then went to another and used the window there. What he saw appalled him, the remainder of his troops were sprawled on the ground, dead or dying. Yet, across in the swamps, he saw a group of figures moving, six of them, humans by the look of them but colored so they were virtually invisible against the ground and mists of Hell. The six figures ran forward to new positions, spread out in front of his massacred men then dropped to the ground. Okeraphluxos took his eyes off them because as they dropped flat, four more humans, colored the same way, emerged from hiding places and ran across the ground.

One surviving member of Okeraphluxos’s garrison stood up to take a shot with his trident but before he could do so, there was a rapid series of small thuds and he fell down. They’d come from the area where the first group of six humans had gone to ground. He could hardly see them when he tried to make them out and by the time he spotted the first, the second group had taken cover as well. Then, the first group got to their feet and closed in on the large house that formed the keep of Okeraphluxos’s castle. They did something to the door and then retreated. Watching carefully, Okeraphluxos was bewildered, there was no precedent for what was happening. Sieges took a long time, even for a small castle like his. But this time his defenses were collapsing as if they didn’t exist. It was barely a few minutes since the first explosions had taken down his outer wall and now his keep was under attack. The destruction of his keep gate seemed tame compared with the series of blasts that had destroyed his walls but Okeraphluxos new it was the death-knell for his defense.

Outside the keep, Kim couldn’t help but feel smugly satisfied. The sudden, violent assault was doing its work, the baldricks inside the defenses couldn’t adapt to the speed at which the situation was changing. By the time they responded to one development, it was already history and the course of the battle had moved on so their attempted response just led to an even greater disaster. It was a classic blitzkrieg, something that the trackheads in their armor thought they monopolized. They didn’t, infantry could do it as well.

If the baldricks had kept their heads, if they’d been able to respond fast enough, they should have turned the remaining parts of the outer defenses into strongpoints, each of which would have had to be reduced individually. That would have broken the momentum of her attack and allowed the rest of the garrison to stage a counter-attack that would have destroyed her puny force. But, they’d never had the chance, by the time they’d overcome their initial reactions to the unprecedented violence and speed of the attack and started thinking, the opportunity was gone. The outer defenses had fallen and the keep was on its own – and now its gates were gone.

Kim looked hard through the mists. The baldricks were starting to react logically and she would have to stop that. They’d piled timber, carts and furniture up inside the gates to form a secondary barricade and were waiting behind it. Not bad she thought, a viable countermove against the sort of attack they were used to. Only, this wasn’t one. Quite apart from their superior weaponry and military tactics built a round those weapons, Kim and her men had the experience of two thousand years of warfare engrained within them. It wasn’t conscious knowledge, none of them had ever trained to take down a castle defended by medieval or older weapons, but they’d seen it done in the movies, read about it in history books. There wasn’t a move the baldricks could make that they didn’t know about and counter.

Countering the barricade was easy and Kim didn’t even have to give the orders. From his overwatch position, Madeuce had anticipated the barricade and was ready for it. He and his men each had an AT-4 anti-tank rocket launcher ready. The orange-white fire and streak of white smoke began with them and ended in rolling explosions that tore the barricade and its defenders apart. The explosions had barely subsided when Kim’s team charged forward, spraying the remaining defenders with bullets from their M4s. Madeuce waved and his men joined the assault, slower because they were the support team, loaded with heavy equipment, but still fast enough to get through the gates before Kim and her people vanished inside the keep. There were sounds of intermittent burst of gunfire from the rooms inside and then silence.

Okeraphluxos had seen the destruction of the last of his garrison at the barricade and knew it was all over. The humans hadn’t even bothered to ask him whether he wanted to surrender and it was pretty obvious that they weren’t about to. There was a trident hanging on the wall, not the run-of-the-mill cast one, a Tartaruan trident that had been forged with care by Belial’s best craftsmen. It could hold a charge better than the normal ones and its prongs would stab deeper and break less. It would be a good weapon to die with. His grip as he took hold of it was careful, he concentrated his magic into charging it up, ready for the burst of power that would open the fight.

He never got the chance. Kim’s men were already in the corridor when he stepped out of his room and the short, stubby M4s were far better suited to fighting in confined areas that the unwieldy tripod. The last thing that Okeraphluxos ever heard was the thudding of the gunfire and the last thing he felt were the bullets that killed him.

Ten minutes later, Kim was settled down in a comfortable chair, waiting for the scheduled contact. It came, right on schedule. Jade, this is kitten. Is it safe to open up?

Sure is kitten. Got a surprise for you too. We’ve just taken a baldrick castle. Not an impressive one but still a castle

Oooh, well done. Opening now.

The familiar ellipse started to open. “Madeuce, get ready to go through, its been good to have you with us.” Kim reached into a pocket and fished out a piece of jewelry she’d found as she’d been searching the building. “Give this to kitten for me will you? It’s the least we can do for her. And take the cameras with the pictures the brass wanted back as well.”

Madeuce nodded and stepped through the ellipse followed by his special forces team. As soon as they were clear, the barrage of supplies and ammunition came the other way. Then the ellipse closed off.

Twenty minutes later, Kim and her team had evacuated the castle. They’d left the bodies of the dead baldricks piled up in the courtyard, under a message that was much more detailed than the usual four letters. It read They oppressed the people. They faced the people’s justice. Fear Us. Popular Front For The Liberation of Hell

Rahab ran the words over in her mind. They were succinct, merciless. One side of her was appalled by the destruction and violence, another was fearful of the consequences that would result from the destruction of even a minor duke and his fortress. But there was another emotion as well, one she had forgotten could exist. It was called hope and she had felt it as she had watched the almost-casual destruction of the castle. She needed to discuss what she had seen with a military expert and fortunately she knew one who could help her.

417th Flight Test Squadron, Edwards Air Force Base, California

“How’s it going Sammy?”

Samuel Allansen looked up at the mis-shapen Boeing 747-400F behind him. “Well, its going.”

That was something of an understatement; the Boeing wasn’t really a -400F at all, it was something much more interesting, a YAL-1A Airborne Laser aircraft. The real distinguishing feature was the turret in the nose that controlled the Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser, or COIL installed in the aircraft’s body. Originally the YAL-1A had been designed to shoot down tactical ballistic missiles but it looked like that role was already history. It didn’t matter too much, after years of parsimony, the Salvation War was making funding available for all sorts of programs and the ABL was one of them. Nobody knew what was coming out of hell next and the capability of the ABL was just too delicious to give up. The test program had been accelerated by almost a year and three more YAL-1As were already being built at Boeing’s facility in Wichita. Once they joined the test program, things would really start to move.

“Shot down any baldricks yet?” Mickey Jennings was poking fun at his old friend but there was an element of frustration in it for them both. They were stuck here at Edwards on the ABL test program while other Air Force pilots were making sky-high scores downing harpies.

“Nah, can if any show up though. We’ve got the COIL installed and we’re doing systems integration stuff at the moment. The brass has ordered us to cut short the systems level ground and flight tests and bring the intercept tests against in-flight targets forward. They’d be happy if we could do them last week but yesterday will be soon enough for them.”

Jennings nodded sympathetically. The ABL had been a source of frustration to the people working on it, not for technical reasons although the program had been, to put it mildly ‘challenging’ but for finance. The budget had never been enough to work at optimum speed and there was always the threat of it being cut completely. At least that had gone, but the problem was now the constant push to get the program operational.

“And its not as if we don’t have things to work out yet.” Allansen was still talking. “The laser has a tendency to overheat and we’re not sure if the fire control system will be good enough to take on a baldrick. It’s infra-red and was designed to lock on to the flare from the end of a ballistic missile. That’s a whole world hotter than a baldrick and the egg-heads aren’t sure it’ll work against them.”

“The fighter jocks are complaining about the AIM-9 as well. Apparently it has real difficulty locking on to a baldrick. Still the 120s are doing well.”

“Yeah, but we don’t carry them. I’ve been on about that. What’s the point of building a critical bird like this and then giving us nothing to defend ourselves with? To do our job, we’d have to be within 300 klicks of an enemy missile base and you can’t tell me the bad guys will be happy about that. Yet here we are, the biggest, most expensive clay pigeon in the world.”

“Harpies ain’t no skeet-shooters, that’s for sure?”

“No? They took down enough helicopters for the Army to stop using them until the fighter jocks could clear the sky. OK, we’re safe enough from harpies at 40,000 feet but who knows what we’ll be facing next time around. And there is a next time coming, everybody knows it. Anyway, Mickey, that’s not why I asked you over. My copilot, Jimmy Grainger, is being assigned to one of the new birds Boeing is building. He’s leaving end of the month and I won’t be seeing him much in between. Want to join the crew? It’ll get you out from behind that desk.”

“Oh nooo. Why should I want to fly an aircraft when I can sit behind a nice comfortable desk, just loaded with routine paperwork? I’ll make you a counter offer, you can have my desk and I’ll have your bird.”

“Not a chance. Seriously, if you want the job, its yours. The Air Force is calling back all of its retirees and the ones who are too old to stand up without a walker get the desk jobs. You should see the F-111 wing that’s forming up in Washington. And you heard about the B-29s I guess.” Allansen adopted a comically exaggerated ‘hush secret’ pose, looking around theatrically. “I hear you’re down for transfer to a B-17 wing if you don’t get out from behind that desk.”

“OK, OK, I surrender, I’ll take the job. Anything but a B-17.”

“Welcome on board. And by the way, be careful what you say about the B-17s. Curt LeMay might hear you – remember we know now he’s out there somewhere. He was mighty fond of the B-17.”

(APpreciation to Surlethe who wrote the first half of the first part )

Chapter Thirty Four

Private Quarters, Palace of Satan, Dis, Hell

Satan contemplated the goblet of wine in front of him and sighed moodily. Then he grabbed the orc servitor that had brought him the cup and wrung him out over the still, red liquid. When the luckless orc was quit dead, he threw its mutilated corpse into a corner. Behind him the majordomo also sighed. Good staff was getting so hard to keep these days.

Satan didn’t worry himself with such mundane concerns. He had much more important things on his mind than his domestic staff. He stirred the wine with a talon, watching the contents of the goblet dissolve the organs squeezed out of the luckless orc, and then drank it down. Especially domestic staff that didn’t taste good. Had Yahweh planned this whole mess?

The fact was that the unexpected resistance of the humans had thrown all his plans into total chaos. It was just not supposed to happen this way. Ostensibly because the growing lack of respect (by which Yahweh meant blind, unquestioning worship) from the humans had soured him of Earth, Yahweh had washed his hands of them and signed them over to Satan. In reality, Satan knew what really lay behind that, Heaven’s gates had been closed for millennia now, closed and locked. Giving Earth to Satan had just confirmed a situation that had actually existed for a very long time. Without even a nominal interest in Earth, Yahweh could retreat to Heaven and concentrate on more enticing projects.

It should have been easy, invade Earth, crush the remaining humans and bring their souls here to Hell. Leave the Earth almost depopulated, erase humans and all trace of their works, let it – and them - redevelop and see what happened next. Only it hadn’t worked that way. The Humans had massacred the Army sent against them. The news of Abigor’s crushing defeat had ricocheted around Hell, creating alarm and uncertainty unknown for thousands of years. Satan had had to move fast there, if Abigor had been left alive to spread his tales, that alarm and uncertainty would have turned up panic and demoralization. Exterminating Abigor and all his line had crushed that and shown everybody that Satan still had the situation in hand.

And that, Satan thought, was a very good question. One he would annihilate anybody who dared ask it. Did he have the situation in hand? The demons around him had no idea how critical the situation had become. If the situation on Earth had been the only one he faced, then there would have been no problem but that wasn’t the case and there was the whole problem laid out simply and neatly. Satan knew that he had been neatly impaled on the points of a trident and any attempt to free himself from one prong only resulted in him becoming more firmly transfixed by the others. Oh, he had made a great show of ordering the assembled legions to go forth and invade Earth, this time in overwhelming numbers but he knew all too well that those orders were just for effect. To make the armies fit for war, they had to have their numbers made up with reservists, civilians who hadn’t handled a trident in anger for centuries. They just weren’t fit to go right now and if he sent them, he would leave Hell open, bereft of trained troops.

That was where the second problem came in, the second trident fork, the rebellion that had started in Hell itself. Oh, Asmodeus had hidden the extent of it, or rather he thought he had, but words was spreading anyway. Asmodeus himself was losing power because of the inability of his minions to put down the revolt, it was even being whispered that it was humans themselves who had risen against Satan’s power. And had done so with more of the devastating magic they’d used on Earth. Just how had they found such mages? Humans had never been seen to have magical powers before? Who had given them such powers?

There was only once plausible answer to that. Yahweh. And that brought his mind back to the original question, had Yahweh planned the whole thing? There was no doubt Yahweh was on the move, an Angelic delegation had been sent to Dis, but it had never got to the city walls. The rebels had killed it, wiped it out with that confounded magic of theirs. That left Satan with a very real problem, he was already getting some polite inquiries about that delegation. If he denied all knowledge of it, that would be instantly disbelieved and that disbelief would be expressed as an assumption Satan was admitting guilt for its disappearance. That could lead to war. On the other hand, if he admitted it had been destroyed by rebels, that would be an admission of weakness so profound it could lead to war.

No, if he invaded Earth, he would be leaving his realm open to invasion from Heaven. If he kept his Army here, he would be leaving Earth to build up its forces for an even deadlier defense. If he split his forces between the two, he might not have the strength to do either. And if he ignored this rebellion, it would grow and become a third, equally powerful demand on his strength.

All of which pointed to the third spike in Satan’s gut. Yahweh had never forgotten Satan’s rebellion that had established Hell as an independent entity. Oh, Yahweh was happy enough claiming victory and boasting of how Satan had been ‘cast down’ but the truth was simple. Before Satan’s rebellion, Heaven and Hell had been one entity, ruled by Yahweh. Now they were two independent entities and Yahweh ruled only one of them. And he had never forgotten it. Had he planned this whole mess? Once again the question echoed through Satan’s mind. Then another displaced it. Had the humans planned this whole situation. Had they, enraged by Yahweh’s betrayal of them, decided to take a deadly revenge on both? If that was true, where would they stop? Would they stop?

“Your Majesty, Asmodeus awaits.” The Majordomo measured the distance to the nearest cover, a familiar precaution these days, one which his predecessor had inexplicably neglected.

“Send him in.” Satan stared morosely as Asmodeus crawled in on his belly.

“Your Majesty, I abase myself before you.”

“Not enough. And your cringing is inadequate also.”

Asmodeus shriveled slightly on the floor. “Your Majesty, I bring bad news.”

“Let me guess, the rebellion you are tolerating in your domain is getting worse.”

On the floor, Asmodeus shuddered. “Majesty, one of my underlings has been killed, his castle stormed and its garrison wiped out. The attackers left this message. They oppressed the people. They faced the people’s justice. Fear Us. Popular Front For The Liberation of Hell

To Asmodeus’s amazement, Satan actually smiled. “The Liberation of Hell. I fought for that once. And won. And now the humans fight me for the same thing.”

“Majesty, they..”

“And you let them.” Satan’s voice had its oily, deadly quality back.

“No Majesty. This stupid rebellion can be crushed, easily. All I need to do is take five legions down there and hunt the rebels down. We can be training the rest of the armies while I do that. This must be done Majesty.”

“Then do it. And take ten legions, not five.” That was a solution Satan thought, he could tell Yahweh that the delegation had been destroyed by rebels who had been wiped out for their impudence.

“One other thing Majesty.” Asmodeus felt himself beginning to lose control of his bowels.

“Speak.”

“Majesty, Abigor is not dead. Our watchers saw him surrender his forces to the humans. He has defected to them.”

Satan’s scream of rage could be heard across four rings of hell.

Celestial Mechanics laboratory, DIMO(N), Yale, New Haven, Connecticut

“Why don’t we just nuke the wretched thing?” General Teed Michael Moseley glanced at the nondescript civilian sitting beside him. The man quietly reached out his hand, flat, palm down, and moved it slightly backwards and forwards in negation. Moseley’s mouth twisted slightly, a targeteer had spoken and the answer given, ‘not enough data’.

Dr Kuroneko frowned, then gestured at the projection screen. His first assignment had been to find a way of closing the Hellmouth in the Iraqi desert down if that became necessary. The obvious answer, the one the Air Force loved, had been his first guess as well. A bad guess as it happened.

“It won’t work General. Let me show you.” The EM field graphs disappeared and were replaced by an intricate wireframe animation, sprinkled liberally with numeric labels and equations. It seeming to show two spheres stuffed into the ends of a short rubber hose, which was threaded through the centre of a spinning donut. Glowing pinpricks were appearing in the upper region, alighting on the top sphere and streaming along the surface of the tube to the lower sphere, where they dissipated. Meanwhile the surface of the donut rippled and shifted in almost hypnotic patterns.

"This is our current best guess at the actual structure of the portal. We've been given free access to the NSF supercomputing grid, which helps a lot.The coders are still catching up with the theory though and the theory itself still lacks experimental confirmation."

Dr Kuroneko paused. The military types didn't seem to be nearly as concerned about the lack of rigour as the audience at a typical physics conference. He shrugged and continued.

"This is just a projection of course. The real thing is seven dimensional. The energy, or whatever is the equivalent of energy flows down from higher dimensions to lower ones. By the way, there’s no sign of it stopping with us, so there could be as many dimensions 'below' us as there are 'above'. The key to the portals is this constriction in the flow; it's formed of some kind of exotic matter, brought into existence by specific patterns of microwaves. We still don't have an empirical model of how that works..."

The audience were frowning now. The doctor's tone became defensive.

"...after this branch of science is so new it hasn’t even got a name yet. What we can do is model the behaviour of the portal once it's open. Once we could do that, your idea was one of the first things we tried."

The doctor touched a button on the remote and the lower sphere exploded into fragments. With nowhere to go, the glowing particles built up in the centre of the donut. Within seconds, they burst through into the lower area again, as if a temporary dam had been washed away. The particles sprayed wildly for a few more seconds before stabilizing into a new lower sphere.

"That was at x10 speed. Hitting this end of the portal can buy us only minutes at best." Dr Kuroneko paused to cast his eyes over the impressive collection of military brass. They weren't so different from freshmen, he thought, both spent most of their time playing video games these days. That had been a problem in itself. Politicians, civilians, had seen modern military command systems and noted their similarity to computer games. They’d somehow jumped to the conclusion that the similarity meant that wars could be made bloodless, a stupid concept now disproven by 400,000 dead baldricks in the Iraqi desert. He shook his head, refocusing on the task at hand.

"I know what you're thinking, what happens if we disrupt the far end? Well, watch this." He pressed the remote again and this time the top sphere shattered. Deprived of energy, the lower sphere faded away, but the glowing particles didn't stop coming. Instead more and more started to appear and this time they were drawn straight to the central torus instead of passing through to the lower region. The spinning donut started to twist and oscillate more and more wildly as it was bombarded with energy, then suddenly the screen went dark.

Kuroneko swore. The simulation had been thrown together in a 36-hour coding session so bugs were to be expected, but it had worked fine in the dry run. Naturally. He reset and tried again. Again the torus was bombarded with energy, looking as if it would fly apart... but then it suddenly swelled to twice it's original diameter. The particles could now make it through, and both spheres reappeared, much larger than before.

"As you can see, unlike our own efforts to date the strange matter envelope in the demon version is self-stabilising. Simply pouring energy in will only result in it reforming around a higher harmonic." Some of the military types still weren't getting it. He sighed and rephrased it into baby-talk for them. "So no General, you can't nuke it. We'll have to think of something else.

There was a long pause. The brass shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Dr Kuroneko pre-empted their next question.

"We have come up with one possibility. The inner structure of the portal is in a complex dynamic balance. If we can hit that torus with a blast of directed electro-magnetic energy, on precisely the right frequencies, it's very likely that we can overwhelm that balance and disrupt the exotic matter. It will dissipate and remove the constriction in the flow, thus closing the gate, Permanently unless somebody opens a new gate in the same place. Unfortunately the only a few systems in the world that can generate that kind of pulse, and all of them are huge pieces of apparatus built into research institutions."

That was that. There was nothing to do but get back to work on the simulation. If they could understand the resonance better, perhaps a series of smaller pulses, spread out over time...

"Actually Dr Kuroneko you may be in luck." The man speaking seemed to be a civilian, with a curiously flat voice. He reached inside a case and removed several copies of a file, which he passed out. Dr Kuroneko blinked. They were stamped 'TOP SECRET' and 'CANUKUS EYES ONLY'.

"When I received your initial report I did a little digging. I remembered hearing about a crazy idea that a group of Brits at Aldermaston came up with in the mid 80s. NATO was desperate for a way to stop a Soviet tank army steamrolling Germany without resorting to nukes. A lot of left-field ideas were studied and this was one of them."

He flipped the file open to a page showing a full-page schematic.

"As you can see, the device is conceptually simple. Two inner coils nested inside an outer one. Capacitors energise the inner coils and an explosive forces them apart. Tremendous current is generated in the outer coils and channeled into the Klystron array in the nose. Power output spikes in the terawatt range in the milliseconds before the device is destroyed. They called it Project Starglider. Don’t ask me why."

General Schatten spoke up. "Don't we have something similar? They don't show me all the air force toys but I've heard the rumors about e-bombs used in early strikes on Iraq."

"Nothing on the scale or precision of this device, General. It was designed to burn through EMP hardening and leave an entire division without communications or radar. It projects a precisely controlled spectrum in a relatively narrow burst. Only two problems; the working parts have to be kept filled with liquid helium and the damn thing weighs nearly 20 tons."

"Ah, so rather like the very first hydrogen bomb?" Dr Kuroneko was used to theory, not hardware, and he was struggling for a frame of reference. "It explodes but is almost completely immobile?"

“It’s a device, not a bomb, and it initiates, not explodes.” The targeteer spoke idly. “But you’re right, it was a clumsy device, even for a B-36. We built five of them in early ’54 designated the TX-16.”

“I never knew that.” Kuroneko was amazed, he’d always assumed the Ivy Mike device was a useless technological dead end.

“So don’t worry about size and bulk, if we need it we can move it. The Brits were planning to dump it out the back of a C-130, though that idea was marginal at best.” The targeteer’s voice was still idle and steeped with professional disinterest.

There was a long silence as the attendees paged through the file. Eventually General Moseley's impatience got the better of him. “So, did it work?"

"They built two quarter-scale prototypes. The first one was a non-superconducting test article. It was only fired at low power and according to the file, it's still in storage at the AWE. The second one was a full prototype. Results from the sole test were mixed. Power output was disappointing, but the amplitude profile did suggest that ten of the twelve emitter tubes shattered prematurely."

Dr Kuroneko had been frantically scanning the project history. "Ah, of course, the fact that the… device …. is destroyed when used would make finding out what happened rather difficult. Hmm. It looks like the engineers were convinced they could lick the problem, but the project was defunded in 1993... I presume because of the end of the Cold War?"

“That’s not why it was cancelled Doctor.” The idle voice was getting on Kuroneko’s nerves. “EMP is a grotesquely over-rated weapon. It’s literary achievements far outweigh its practical applications. There are much simpler ways of taking down a command system."

There was another long silence, before Secretary Warner decided that he had all the information he needed. The details were clearly best left to the specialists. It was time to ask the key question. “Can you make it work for us?"

All eyes turned to Dr Kuroneko, who had gone back to devouring the file. For a moment, he was oblivious to the discussion surrounding him, but then he sensed the silence and looked up.

"Ah, well, it looks like..," This is insane, he thought, I'll need a whole new set of simulations to even start... "Was the result of the British tests omni-directional or uni-directional?"

The flat voice answered again. “It was designed to hit everything in a ninety degree frontal cone, but I'm sure the engineers can refine that.”

"Well then sir, at first glance the theoretical work looks solid, we can replace the original coils with high-temperature superconductors to bring down the mass..." He grimaced briefly at the though of federal agents raiding half the low temperature physics lab in the nation for the material. "If we can get it working at design power... couple the simulation to an evolutionary algorithm to find the optimal frequency spread... then yes sir, I think it will work."

Buckingham Palace, London.

“Behind me you can see the new Regimental Colonel presenting the regimental colors to the reformed 1 Battalion, The Cameronians, also known as the Scottish Rifles. Due to defense cuts in the late 1960s the regiment chose disbandment over amalgamation, although two Territorial Army companies of the regiment survived as late as the 1990s before the final company was re-badged as part of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

“Today the only Scottish rifle regiment has rejoined its illustrious fellow regiments in the Scottish Division. Over the last month we have become rather used to de-amalgamation parades, but today’s parade is something special as it is a long time since the army has reformed a disbanded regiment.

“Behind me you can see the first recruits to join the battalion, in their distinctive Douglas tartan trews; some are former members of the two Territorial companies, though most are National Servicemen newly out of basic training.

“The Regimental Colonel is now taking the salute as the battalion marches off the parade ground.

“This is Brian Rix, for Reporting Scotland, in Hamilton. Back to the studio.”

“Your granddaughter seems to suit her new job very well, Your Majesty.” Prime Minister Gordon Brown remarked as he watched the television. “Would you like me to switch the set off, Ma’m?”

“I can manage thank you, Prime Minister, I’m not in my grave yet.” Elisabeth the Second, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Lord of Mann, Duke of Normandy etc, etc, formerly Defender of the Faith, said lightly as she got up to turn off the television.

“Anne is certainly very proud of Zara, though I’m not sure I approve of a rather junior subaltern being appointed as a Regimental Colonel. I do know that she is rather disappointed to have been assigned to The King’s Troop when she chose the Royal Horse Artillery; she wanted to see some action rather than being assigned to Home Defence.”

“The Ministry of Defence is rather nervous about assigning members of the Royal Family to active units. They feel they rather used up their luck with Harry. Losing a member of the Royal Family in action might hurt the nation’s morale, Ma’m.” The Prime Minister replied.

“Prime Minister, today we face the most serious threat that this country, indeed humanity, has ever faced. Should we lose the war then we will all end up in Hell, so it will not matter much if one of my family should die during the war. I also feel that we must bear all of the same risks that every other family in Britain must run.

“Andrew has already rejoined the navy; you may have noticed that Charles and my husband have been drilling with the Home Service Force Company formed from palace staff, so I do not see why William, Harry and Zara should not get their chance to see active service in this war.”

Gordon Brown smiled, this was why he liked Her Majesty, and why, on the whole he got on very well with her. His first audience with the Queen on becoming Prime Minister had been far longer than that of his predecessor; Her Majesty liked all things Scottish and was always keen to talk about Scotland. She also rather liked Sarah, the Prime Minister’s wife. “I shall pass on your wishes to the Ministry of Defence, Ma’m. When the Household Cavalry is sent into action William and Harry will not be held back, and I’m sure that if Zara wishes a transfer to another regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery it will be looked upon favorably.”

“Thank you, Prime Minister. The great advantage of a hereditary monarchy is that there are plenty of us spare should something happen to someone further up the line of succession.

“Anyway, where are my manners, how is your family?”

Chapter Thirty Five

Palace of Asmodeus, City of Dis. Hell

“Explain yourself.” Asmodeus’s voice was unforgiving.

The subject of his displeasure was cringing on the floor, trying to think of some good reasons why the situation had ever got to this point. The problem was that, while Kinathroses could think of some very good reasons indeed, speaking any of them would get him killed. Instantly.

“Sire, I was betrayed by my subordinates….”

“That goes with the territory. This is hell you know.” Asmodeus spoke in an almost friendly manner, giving Kinathroses some vague hope that he might survive this session. “Your subordinates are supposed to try and betray you. It is your duty to detect their treachery and deal with it. If you are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot do that simple thing, then you are obviously unfitted to hold the position that you presently occupy. Perhaps the subordinate who betrayed you might better be suited to your present responsibilities.”

Kinathroses’s hopes of survival took an immediate downturn. Even if he survived the interview with Asmodeus, he would be demoted to the lower ranks and left to serve one of those who had once served him. And his new lord would promptly have him assassinated to avoid any attempts to reverse the situation. Better to try a different approach. “Sire, it is the humans who are at the root of this trouble.”

“Ahh. Human magery.” Asmodeus was enjoying himself immensely. “You claim human magic is so powerful that your armies could not stand against it. Abigor claimed that you know. It cost him everything.”

May your talons rot thought Kinathroses. You have no idea what the humans are capable of. You come here, throwing your weight around without understanding anything of what has been happening. Well, you can learn the way we are learning.. “Sire, human magery is much over-rated. Oh, they have some special tricks that it true but they are of little significance compared with other factors.”

“What other factors?” Asmodeus was genuinely intrigued. This was a cut on the situation he hadn’t expected.

“Sire, it is not what the humans have to fight with, it is how they fight. Or rather how they do not fight. They do not seek out our armies to face them in combat. They hide in the rocks, the mud and the caves. They wait until they have a demon alone, or perhaps a small group, then they strike from concealment, killing without warning. Then they fade away again. With all the demons leaving to join the armies for the invasion of Earth, we have too few under arms down here to stop them. By the time the message gets back of the attack, the humans are long gone. Mostly. Sometimes, we send a rescue column out and the column itself is attacked. And again by the time we react, the humans have gone. We cannot get messages around quickly enough, there is too much space to cover.

“And then there are the mage-blasts. Nobody knows where or when the next one will be. Our demons can be on the walls, marching along a road, or resting in their outposts when a mage-blast wipes them out. No warning, no challenge to combat, just a mage blast from out of the mists and darkness. Those that survive are horribly wounded. That is the factor that we cannot fight Sire. How can we fight those who will not stand and fight.”

“Trap them so they have no choice but to fight.” Asmoedeus’s mind turned to the problems he had just heard. He had ten full legions coming down, 66,666 trained veteran demons. That would swing the force level problem decisively his way. The communications problem was one he hadn’t thought of, in his military experience, mostly limited to the formalized, choreographed skirmishes in Hell, commanding units had been no problem. The troops had always been in range of his voice or mind-masking power. It had never occurred to him that wouldn’t be the case here. But he did have enough troops to overcome that problem.

The picture of the rebellion suppression campaign started to form in his mind. He would start with a single main operational base on the edge of the 5th circle segment where the rebellion was concentrated. Then, he would start to spread across the segment, establishing each outpost within sight of another. If one was attacked, support would be immediate because other outposts would see what was happening. And, even better, they could relay mind-masked messages from one to the next, allowing the great rear base to be informed quickly.

Asmodeus mulled the concept over, It seemed to work but he could see one flaw. If he pushed out from one point, he would force the rebels back. That’s where Hell’s strange topography cut in. It was an odd fact about Hell that if one set out in a straight line, in any direction, one ended up in the same place one had started. Left, right, forward, backwards, up, down, it made no difference. Keep going long enough and one ended up where one had started. Heaven was the same. Unless one created a portal, there was no way out because there was nowhere to go out to. Thinking about that made Asmodeus’s head hurt. Still, there was a solution, start from two bases, one at each end of the segment of the 5th circle and close in on the middle. That way the rebels would be trapped between them and eventually, they’d have to fight in the open.

Throne Room, Palace of Satan, Dis, Hell

Count Belial watched Satan rage at Hell’s inability to immediately destroy the impertinent humans, his own mind boiling with thoughts of how he could exploit this unprecedented situation. It had been a scant five millennia since he had clawed his way back to a place at Satan's court, a singular feat among dukes who had fallen so far from their lord's favor. His presence here was still something of a joke; as yet he commanded but a single legion and his domain could muster only a meager tribute of human essence. Most of Hell's nobility thought of him as little more than the court jester, but a few understood the influence that the great mines and furnaces of Tartarus gave him.

Those were the dangerous ones. He had to go from beneath notice to beyond challenge in a single stroke, or he would inevitably lose his domain to one of the dukes. This could be the perfect opportunity, but the timing had to be exquisite. As Belial watched, Satan scooped up another unlucky minor demon and crushed it into paste, squeezing the creature's remains out of his clenched fist before whirling to seek another target. Too early and he would only draw Satan's wrath as the unfortunate ogre had. Too late and his proposal would be seen as a challenge to Satan's preferred course of action - dangerous even for once as favored as Abigor had been, probably fatal for one as lowly as him. Belial waited for the instant that Satan's terrible eyes turned from rage to cold calculation, then spoke.

"Your Eminence..."

Every eye was on him. Satan's gaze bored into him and he dropped groveling to his knees in the expected manner.

"Your Eminence, my demons can strike back at the humans immediately. At your command I will reward their insolence with fiery annihilation. Of course my lord recalls the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah."

There was a murmur of suppressed laughter around the room. Sodom and Gomorrah had been essentially party tricks. They had occurred at a time when Satan and Yahweh were engaged in an informal competition to visit the most creative 'punishments' on the lower planes. The humans had become so pathetic, so despairing at the demons presence that there was little scope for honorable warfare against them; they simply ran screaming or lined up and waited to be hewn down like crops. The demons were always ready to appreciate new forms of suffering and Belial's creative use of magic had been quite spectacular, not to mention entertaining enough to gain his return to the palace. However his suggestion that such tricks be considered a legitimate means of waging war was ridiculous. Surely their lord could not be seriously considering it?

In fact Satan was doing just that. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to prepare another attack on the scale of Abigor's, and much as he wanted to believe that this was simply due to the incompetence and treachery of his former favorite, he knew this was not the case. He had Asmodeus away dealing with the rebellion down in the fifth circle and Yahweh was in the wings. There was another possibility that was on his mind as well, if one attack had failed he had to consider the possibility that a second would also fail. The humans had undoubtedly taken horrible losses, but Abigor was doubtless proclaiming that he would lead them to victory and instructing them how best to resist demonic powers. Combined with their strange and seemingly powerful magic, Satan had to agree with Abigor about one thing; he had to know what forces the humans could muster, what it would really take to crush them. That would take time, as would dealing with the chaos resulting from Abigor's fall.

Already Satan's informants reporting skirmishes between the forces of dukes trying to add chunks of Abigor's domain to their own. That situation was confused, sometimes it was hard to tell whether the demons who had been found brutally murdered or had just disappeared without a trace were the victims of that internecine skirmishing or had been the victims of the human rebellion. Satan was sure that the assassinations had been carried out on the direct orders of his dukes, testing each other's defenses, each preparing to take advantage of any opportunities the way Belial was. An interesting question, was the human rebellion actually the work of a Duke who had seen human magery as a new way of fighting a war? It didn’t really matter, with Asmodeus and his Army moving to crush the rebellion, the status quo would return soon enough, but in the mean time Satan had to be seen to take decisive action. Belial's suggestion was perfect; it was fast, if it worked it would kill enough humans to claim a major victory, and if it didn't Belial was completely expendable.

"You want to act like a human, cowering in your own realm, killing with magic instead of rending your enemies?" Satan spat contemptuously.

He's playing with me, Belial thought with some relief even as he continued to abase himself. Those words stated flatly would have spelled his doom. Phrased as a question, Satan was just forcing him to justify himself.

"Your Eminence, of course your glorious armies will grind the humans into dust, Abigor's failure will be of no consequence in the long run. But it will take time to muster fresh legions, the humans may falsely believe that their resistance has won them a respite. Please sire, let me erase that hope, command me to make them burn and suffer even as they await their final extinction."

Belial Kornakat raised his head and a silent understanding passed between him and Satan Mekratrig. He would get a chance. Success would mean elevation sufficient to ensure his survival in the court. Failure would result in a fate even worse than Abigor's.

"Very well. I see no reason to allow the apes the luxury of hope. You will choose two of their largest cities and destroy them utterly as you destroyed Sodom, as you destroyed Gomorrah."

Belial thrashed his tail and licked at Satan's talons, resembling for a moment a gigantic, monstrously disfigured dog. All for show of course; mentally he was weighing the risk of asking for more resources and looking weak against the risk of the attacks failing. He had heard that the humans had multiplied greatly since the time of Sodom, and this had to be a most spectacular defeat.

"Thank you your Eminence, we will begin at once, the suffering will be glorious... but sire... the bigger the coven, the more humans we can burn. If I could have more naga for the effort, our blow will be that much more crushing for the humans."

A fresh murmur passed around the throne room. Satan merely snorted. Belial's admission of weakness was pathetic. There was truth in his words though. With the grand portal to Earth already open, the naga would not be needed for the counter-strike, so the other dukes might complain but could definitely spare them. If his plan was successful, such reliance on others would prevent him gaining too much glory.

"Attend me. Each grand duke will send a party of portal-mages to Tartarus such that he deems fit to compensate for Belial's inadequacy."

Satan's gaze returned to Belial, who was writhing in fresh paroxysms of abasement. "You are right to bask in my generosity, Belial. I will allow you twelve days to destroy two great human cities. Fail me and I will have you baked alive in one of your own furnaces. Now leave us."

"Of course your Eminence! I will begin the preparations immediately!" Belial scrabbled to his feet and fairly sprinted from the throne room; meeting Satan's schedule would take a minor miracle.

DIMO(N) Headquarters, Crystal City, VA

Lugasharmanaska looked up at the moon and stars overhead, marveling at their beauty. She was relaxing on a long bed-like something that, like the roof garden she was in, was a left-over from the time this building had been a luxury hotel. The bar in one corner was closed but the furniture was still here. Not wood or stone but the curious dead material the humans called plastic. They used the plastic for almost everything it seemed. And there was an awful lot of everything, that was why Lugasharmanaska was thinking so hard.

The problem was quite simple, her original defection had placed her in a position where she could benefit no matter which side won the war. The more she had learned, the more she had seen, the more she had become convinced that the humans were not going to lose. They were wealthy beyond any demonic dream of avarice, they had machines to do their work for them and they had an unlimited number of those machines. And that was the problem because they used those same machines to do their killing. Lugasharmanaska shuddered slightly to herself. Humans were so good at killing, when they couldn’t find demons to kill, they practiced on each other.

It wasn’t just that they were good at killing, they were good at understanding as well. If they met something they didn’t understand, they didn’t write it off as “magic” or “magery”, they didn’t consider it to be “the will of something or other”. They set people to work studying it and those people would nibble away at the mystery until they had worked out what it was all about. Then they would hammer away at what they had learned some more until they not only understood the mystery but had worked out practical applications for it. Applications that were far more useful than the mystery itself.

In a flash of insight, Lugasharmanaska suddenly understood why Yahweh had abandoned this world. For millennia, humans hadn’t thought that way, they’d accepted what they had been told, treated “divine revelation” as something sacrosanct that it was death to dispute. Suddenly, that had changed, humans had stopped accepting what they were told and started asking questions. And, when they didn’t like the answers, they’d started arguing. They’d found their own answers and realized there was no place for “magic” and “magery” in the world they were learning about. There were only things they understood and things they didn’t understand – yet. Their plastic, their machines, their terrible efficiency at killing, all came from that same desire to understand what they didn’t understand – yet.

And that was why Hell and all its demons were going to lose this war. They accepted things the way they were, they didn’t ask questions about why. Things were what they were and that was it. Humans didn’t agree with that, things were there to be understood and used. They even had names for these arts. Understanding things was called “cyunse” and using things was called “enjunyrin”. Lugasharmanaska almost fell into the trap of believing they were new religions but she’d been saved from that error by a fluke.

She’d been in one of the buildings devoted to trying to understand Hell when she’d seen two men arguing in front of an audience. An old man, obviously of great importance and a younger man, probably his follower. They’d been arguing furiously, shouting at each other, waving their arms around and making marks on a great black board. Lugasharmanaska had expected to see the young man struck dead for his impudence, what Satan or Yahweh would do to a follower who argued with them in public defied even Lugasharmanaska’s devilish imagination. But the young man had made some triumphant marks on the board and the old man had looked at them for a minute or so then said, simply ‘he’s right you know”. And the room had burst out into applause and the old man had clapped the younger one on the back and shaken his hand. That was when she had understood, when cyunse said something was so, that was only the case until somebody proved otherwise. Then the old truth was dropped and a new one put in its place until that too was disproved.

That was why humans would win this war. Whatever Satan and his armies did, humans would understand it, improve it and then use the improved thing against their enemy.

The question was, what should Lugasharmanaska do now? She’d already modified her original plan quite drastically, her intent had been to tell the humans as little as possible and distort what she did say to them in ways that would benefit her. She’d nearly been caught, had only escaped by pure luck. Humans had taken what she had told them and used their cyunse on it. They’d proved that some of the things she’d told them contradicted others. She’d pretended ignorance, said that was the way she’d understood it and acted bewildered. And she’d made a vow to be much more careful for she knew her survival depended on being useful.

That was why she was up here on the roof. She’d accepted that mind-masking didn’t work on humans any more and that they were aware of her miasma and on their guard against its effects. Her ability to communicate with home had also gone. But she had to try, she had to warn her liege-lord Deumos of the danger she faced. For Lugasharmanaska understood humans and how they regarded their enemies. As long as the enemy fought, the humans would kill without mercy. If Deumos was to survive the oncoming destruction, she would have to find a way of not being an enemy of the humans without being slaughtered by Satan as a traitor. Somehow, Lugasharmanaska had to get a warning through. So she lay on the plastic chair, apparently relaxed and resting but in reality, screwing every ounce of mage-power she could muster in an attempt to contact Deumos. In the middle of the fierce concentration, she found herself wondering what her mage-power really was.

(Note - compliments to Starglider who did the middle section)

Chapter Thirty Six

Section Twelve, DIMO(N), Fort Bragg, North Carolina

“Let’s start with weapons. Jerry?”

“In Helljar-One, that’s the one simulating the normal Hell-place environment, it’s the older stuff that does best. Shouldn’t surprise us really, tolerances are greater so they can take the sand and grit better. The pumice in the air is the real problem. It mixes with moisture and oil to form a cement that really blocks the weapons up. Regular cleaning is essential and using Militec rather than lube oil is a good start. Good news is that grenades and fused weapons like rockets and shells work just fine. Bad news is that the M16 and M4 have very serious problems. The gas tube and bolt carriers jam up so fast it isn’t funny. We got the first of the new rifles, the M114 and M115, they both work better. All weapons have to be carefully cleaned and often though.

“Helljar-Two, ironically, is a lot easier on weapons that One. The mud and filth is bad of course but its something the troops know how to deal with. We’ve had the reports back from Tango-Bravo, and the first A-Team we sent in to help them out, and we’ve correlated them with the results from Helljar-Two. Very high degree of congruence I’m glad to say, that gives us a degree of confidence in our results. Based on our studies, we’ve pulled the M4A5s from Tango-Bravo and given them pre-production M114s instead. They’re happier now. The Special Forces group in with Tango-Bravo now also has M114s.”

“Excuse the interruption Jerry, but while we’re on the subject of the Special Forces people we’re sending in, any word on the medical side of this.” General Schatten looked at the woman who was supervising the medical side of the studies.

Doctor Sangina thumbed quickly through her notes. “The first group under Lieutenant Madeuce have suffered quite badly. They have pumice deposits in their lungs and those will have a severe impact on their future health unless we can find a way of treating them. This isn’t a new problem, its been known in the mining industry for centuries. It’s usually called silicosis although the specific form here is known as Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. There are some treatments under evaluation for the condition, including whole-lung lavage but, unless we get a breakthrough, I’m afraid the first group of patients are going to have to accept some severe health consequences 15 – 20 years down the line. The second group we sent in, and all after that, have breathing masks that filter out the dust. That should solve the problem.”

“Apparently, people in the Hell-Place heal a lot faster than they do here, any word on that?”

“It is true, that’s why the victims in Hell survive the way they do. It’s not a function of place though, it’s a function of being a creature of that place. Souls who have transitioned to hell via death or creatures that are native to hell have much-enhanced healing power and wound resistance compared to us. They retain those advantages when they come to our dimension. The catch is that humans from hell can’t survive here for long, they leak, ohh, I don’t know how to describe it, life energy I suppose. Baldricks can survive here as long as we don’t kill them, we think because they use their bio-electrical generating capability to replace the leaking energy, to trickle-charge themselves so to speak. Reborn Humans don’t have that capability so they die in our dimension. Now, if we go to the Hell dimension, we don’t get a boost in healing or damage resistance, we’re just the same there as we are here.”

“Thank you. Sorry, Jerry, I was very concerned about the people we’re sending in. Can you continue please?”

“No problem. Helljar-Three is the one with the burning desert. That’s the one we know least about, we’ve only got limited intelligence there. In some ways its much more hostile than Helljar Two, when the reports said burning desert and flaming rain, they weren’t joking. In other ways, its more benign. The air is much drier and the dust content is a lot, lot lower. As far as we can make out, our equipment functions much better there, its just that we don’t.

“Thank you Jerry. Greg, vehicles?”

“Main problem is dust and the pumice cement. We have heavy-duty air filters that can cope with it and we’re designing better ones. Like the weapons side of things, the secret is to clean and keep cleaning. A couple of things, diesels are less susceptible to choking on dust that gas turbines. We might want to think about a diesel-powered M1 for operations in Hell itself. That always has been an option but the gas turbine’s advantages have meant we haven’t gone there before. Now, we might want to rethink that. But, as long as we use the right filters and keep cleaning things, we can take our ground vehicles in right now. Oh yes, current NBC protection systems for the crews of the Abrams and Bradleys are quite adequate for the conditions. Strykers as well. The logistics vehicles may need an upgrade.”

“Which brings us to aircraft. Bill?”

“Bad news all around I’m afraid Sir. Same problems Jerry and Greg have been talking about. Dust chokes the engines quickly and cakes the airframes. Being sucked through a jet engine causes hellish erosion problems, mostly on the blades but its pretty gruesome in the rest of the engine as well. You can take a zero off the number of hours between overhauls at least, probably two. That’s not the worst of it, the dust scours the aircraft itself, abrading the wing and fuselage surfaces. Faster aircraft go, the worse that gets. We need new coatings for the aircraft that’ll help cut that down.

“We tried the prop-planes as well. Mixed news there, the erosion problem on the airframes isn’t so bad since the aircraft are much slower but the damage to the propellers is wicked. You should see an old P-47 we stuck in a wind-tunnel and blasted with a simulated hell atmosphere while we ran its engine. After an hour, the prop was ground to nothing. Aircraft with liquid-cooled engines were a problem, the cooling system got jammed up so the engines over-heated and seized up. Radial engines were bad as well at first but we’ve managed some work-arounds for them. Oil coolers are still a problem though.

"Sum of it all, we’ve got a lot of work to do before we can deploy air power into Hell. Priority problem should be airframe erosion, once we can lick that, the others will follow.”

Schatten looked around. “Good work guys. I’ll transmit the data through to the Army in Iraq.”

Combat Team Alpha. By the Hellmouth, Western Iraq

“Hokay, lot of men told me to go to hell in the past. The Big Cheese is the first one who really meant it.”

“We really going into Hell, Hooters?”

“Sure are Biker. It’s a thunder-run. Hold one.” Stevenson flipped her radio system so she was addressing all 14 vehicles in her command. “Right, this is what’s happening. We’re going in through the hellmouth, according to our source, the area inside is called the Martial Plain of Dysprosium. It’s a prairie-like area the baldricks use for parades and so on. We can swing in, cross it and hit two encampments that are about twenty miles inside. We’ll take them down and shoot up any resistance. Anybody who shoots at us gets greased. Try not to hit non-combatants but if they’re being used as shields or getting in the way, that’s too bad. Word from the top is, we don’t deliberately target any non-coms but they’d better learn to keep out of our way. No vehicles to be left behind, there’s an engineer unit out here, if one of us gets immobilized, we send for them and they tow us out. All clear? Good. Formation, my four tanks lead, line abreast, Bradleys behind, four more M1s at the rear. Right hand tanks watch right, left hand watch left, forward center pair ahead, aft center pair behind. Bradleys, watch the sky, the Harpies are our worst threat. See one, kill it. I’ll command from Alpha-One-One.”

That would upset the two Bradley crews that technically formed the HQ section but Stevenson felt much more at home in her Abrams.

Stevenson flipped her radio back to the in-vehicle circuit, “Biker, take us through.”

“Coming inside Captain?” The driver didn’t know whether the radio was still set to company-wide so he was careful.

“Sure. Orders are to seal down. Gonna limit our vision though, everybody watch out, if something blows as we go through, we’ll need to react fast.” Stevenson relaxed, leaning up against the cupola ring as she heard the gas turbine behind her spool up The back of her tank looked different after the week waiting outside the hellmouth. It had what looked like a low tent over it, one made of metal filter foil. It would allow air in, some, but it would also keep dust out and stop harpy-fire basting the engine. The top edge of the Abram’s performance had gone, reduced airflow to the turbine had seen to that, but the big tank was still fast and agile enough. She took a last look around at the blue sky and yellow sun of Earth, then dropped inside her tank and dogged the hatch down. As the Abrams lurched forward, she could feel the air pressure increase slightly as the tank’s NBC system established a positive pressure gradient.

Outside the black wall of the ellipse was approaching as the tank accelerated towards it. There’d been a lot of debate about whether to crash through at high speed or to ease through. Eventually, the decision had been left to her and she’d decided the high speed approach was best. Get through and in before anybody waiting in ambush could react. Besides, nobody had even a slight understanding of what the inside of the portal was like and being half-in, half-out could be a very bad place.

It didn’t seem to matter; the wall approached them but Stevenson wasn’t aware of actually going through it. One moment she was on Earth, almost instantly and without any other sign, everything had changed to the thick red light of hell. No shock, no jolt, nothing. Just the sudden switch in lighting conditions. Stevenson looked through her optronic system and saw the terrain ahead brightening as the system compensated for the light. A check on the navigation system was more worrying, the compass needle was spinning around uselessly while the GPN navigation system had gone dead. According to the inertial navigation system, she was still on Earth, about a klick from where she had started. She wished that were true.

“All Alpha vehicles. I’m defining the hellmouth as position zero, its direction is East. Adjust all inertial systems accordingly.” She punched the data in herself and watched the electronic compass settle down. Her tank’s nose was pointing dead ahead, bearing two-seven-oh so to get back to earth she would have to drive on oh-nine-oh. She looked behind on oh-nine-oh by the compass and to her relief, the hellmouth was still there.

She had the hand-drawn map in her hands and carefully orientated it with the hellmouth. Whoever had drawn it had nice handwriting she thought. It showed the plain she could see now and the two installations way over on what would be her arbitrarily-defined south. She looked again through the optronic surveillance system, she couldn’t see much ahead, there was a pile of burned out timber over one side, she guessed that would be the reviewing stand the Predator had blown up in the first days of the war. Or what was left of it. Another glance at the compass showed that the computer had settled it down to correspond with her arbitrary alignment.

“Hokay, Biker, take off, head course one-eight-oh. Try and hold 20 mph.” She flipped the radio back to company net. “All vehicles, one eight oh. Expect target in 20 miles. Contact time one hour.”

The ground was a lot smoother than she’d expected; compared with the rough jolting she got every time her tank crossed the Iraqi desert, it was a positive luxury. She looked behind her, the Bradleys were following in her wake with the second group of M1s behind them. A cloud of red dust was rising behind the vehicles, a V-shaped cloud from each that merged behind them to give a fair equivalent of a smoke screen. If it had been white and at sea, it would have reminded her of water skiers at a beach resort. Only, it wasn’t white it was red and this wasn’t a beach resort, it was Hell although compared with the beaches in her home of Bayonne, it would be hard to tell the difference. And they weren’t water skiers, they were the point of a very, very pissed-off human army.

“Boss, target up ahead.” Anything here that wasn’t a tank or a Mick-vee was hostile. This didn’t need that distinction, a line of nine baldricks, tridents on shoulders, marching across the plain. A guard patrol perhaps? Stevenson didn’t know and didn’t care. Her laser gave a quick flash that was instantly translated into range. “All Alpha-One vehicles, targets one-six-three degrees, range 1,200 meters. Engage HEAT.”

The baldricks realized what was about to hit them a split second before the tank guns crashed. They turned, aiming their tridents at the oncoming tanks. Two lightning flashes hit Alpha-one-one’s turret, causing the computer to blip and reset. No damage and the shells exploded in the baldrick line, throwing parts of them skywards. Those who weren’t dead were still writhing on the ground when the four M1s drove over them. Stevenson could feel the tank shift slightly as Biker used his tracks to grind them into the ground. Then they were gone, just leaving a green stain on the ground.

A TOW-2 missile shot overhead, turned in mid air and plowed into a small stone building that had been half-concealed in a dip in the ground. Probably a guardhouse, possibly for the patrol that had just been summarily blasted out of existence. One of the Bradleys hadn’t wanted to be left out of the first engagement of the first human Thunder Run through Hell.

“Target should be up ahead.” Stevenson transmitted the message long after the mangled remains of the patrol and the burning guardhouse had been left behind them.

“Not here, Captain.” Baldy’s voice was regretful.

“It has to be. Map shows it due south of the hellmouth. Unless it ain’t that accurate. Hokay, we’ll do it the hard way. Bravo units form here. Keep radio link open so we can get directional cuts on you. Charlie team, go east, twenty minutes at 20mph then come back. Use Bravo’s links for direction. Alpha, we’ll go west, same time, same speed, do the same.”

The formation split into three, the Bradleys forming a defensive laager while the two platoons of Abrams tanks set off in opposite directions. Stevenson’s luck was still holding, ten minutes after the split, she spotted the encampment that was her primary target. A small group of buildings surrounded by a stone wall. “All Alpha elements, target located. Home in on my radio.” She waited until she got the acknowledgements and then started to edge her tanks forward.

Fublaronishel’s Encampment, Martial Plain of Dysprosium, Hell

It wasn’t a great command but for an ambitious young demon, an independent command like this was good. If he did well, his overlord would see and reward him. If he did not, the command was small enough so that any errors would be easily concealed. Fublaronishel had high hoped of this command, hopes that it would lead to better things and perhaps the award of a mate. Then his eyes narrowed, a cloud of dust? It couldn’t be the patrol he had sent out, they weren’t due back for two days. Then he saw what was approaching and his heart went cold.

“Iron Chariots! Iron Chariots are coming.” It was impossible, the Humans couldn’t have brought their Iron Chariots here. They had been terribly hurt by the nameless one whose disgrace was such that even thinking his previous name was punishable by death. They couldn’t be coming. Fublaronishel knew that they were, because he could see them. They still couldn’t be. “Turn out the guard. Every demon to the walls.”

His men were well-trained, they ran out of the barracks and scaled the walls, facing the dreaded Iron Chariots. The humans had stopped, many spear-throws from the walls, perhaps they were afraid to attack a fortification. Then the desert erupted into smoke and dust as the fire lances screamed out from the long tube that topped the Chariots. The walls shook with the impact, the stones shattering, fragments thrown across the encampment ground. It dawned on the stunned Fublaronishel that they had struck his wall before he had heard the sound of their launch. He staggered, looking at the walls, still standing although shaken to their core. Too many of his men were down, he was understrength to start with, he had only six of his nine nine-demon sections and one of those was out on patrol, a second was at an outpost less than a couple of miles away. That had left him with 36 and already a quarter of them were on the ground, dead or wounded it was hard to say. Then, another scream and the explosions struck his wall, tumbling it down into a pile of pulverized rubble. That was when he heard another sound, a whistling roar, something he had never heard before.

It was one of the great Iron Chariots, it reached the ruined wall and started to cross it, something no chariot Fublaronishel had ever seen could do. The roar increased and the Chariot pulled up over the rubble, its front pointing at the sky, then its nose suddenly crashed down and the chariot accelerated down the other side of the rubble pile. The strange box and tube seemed to rotate, the tube swinging around to point at him but he didn’t see the great blast as it launched a fire-lance. Instead, there was a dancing point of light and Fublaronishel felt the impacts knock him off his feet. He was weak, unable to rise, and helpless when the chariot crushed the life out of him with its treads.

Combat Team Alpha. Fublaronishel’s Encampment, Martial Plain of Dysprosium, Hell

“And the walls came tumbling down.” Stevenson’s voice was smugly self-satisfied. “Baldricks, meet depleted uranium.” Her platoon’s first salvo had been sabot, bolts of depleted uranium alloy that had smashed into the wall, the shock waves from the impacts leaving the stones riddled with stress fractures. The second salvo had been HEAT rounds, their explosions blasting the riven wall down, leaving it a gentle pile of rubble, the wall’s defenders mixed in with it. “Biker, take us through.”

She flipped her radio back to company net again. “All Alpha-Alpha vehicles, over the wall, destroy the encampment. One and three take the buildings on the left, two and four the right. One HEAT round into each.”

“Wait for us, we’re three minutes out.” She recognized the voice, the commander of Alpha-Bravo, pleading to be allowed to join the assault.

“Can’t let them regroup. Its pedal to the metal time boys.” Her tank was accelerating towards the ruins of the wall and the baldricks staggering round behind it, She lost sight of them as the bow rose, the gas turbine screaming out power as it pushed the tank over the rubble. Then the bows dropped again and she saw the pitiful little encampment in front of her. A baldrick was trying to aim his trident at her tank but Baldy cut him down with the co-axial machine gun before he had the chance. Several more baldricks were over on the right, she ignored them, they were Alpha-Alpha-Two’s responsibility. A charge well and truly kept for even as her first HEAT round flattened the nearest left-hand hut, a canister round from Two turned the baldricks in the group into chopped fragments.

The encampment was burning, the building set a fire from the copper plasma jets formed by the HEAT rounds. Some of the baldricks had been taking cover inside, their screams as they burned could be heard even inside the tanks as they waddled down the single street between the buildings, their guns crashing as they demolished what was left of the encampment. They were wreathed in the smoke, only vaguely semi-visible, the screaming roar of their engines the only thing that the baldricks could hear before they emerged from the cloud that hid the monsters. It was the roar of the engines that broke the baldricks more than the gunfire or the screams of the victims as the tanks cut them down or ground them into slush with their tracks. The baldricks that were left ran from the burning encampment into the open ground where they hoped to make their escape. These baldricks knew nothing of how tanks fought infantry.

Behind her, Stevenson could hear the crackle of 25mm gunfire as the Bradleys caught up with her platoon and added their own quantum of destruction to the holocaust that was engulfing the outpost. Her tank had reached the end of the street and it crashed through the wooden gate that gave access to the highway in front of her. A dozen, perhaps a dozen and a half baldricks were running away, trying to escape across the open ground. It was pitiful, Stevenson felt slightly sorry for them as her four tanks formed into their line and the canister shells scythed them down. Baldricks could run faster than humans, a lot faster, but that didn’t save them. The ones who survived the canister were cut down by the machine guns and then crushed under the tracks. If any had survived, they would have learned an important lesson that day. Mechanized warfare is a bitch.

Over to her left, another black pyre of smoke was staining the red sky. “Charlie, is that you?”

“Sure is Captain. We cut the corner and hit the secondary. Its ashes, there were eighteen, perhaps twenty Baldricks here, all dead. No casualties.”

“Bravo, any casualties back there?”

“Not a one Cap. We’re fine and we got some of the baldricks you missed on the way through.”

“Hokay, guys, form on me. We’re heading home.”

An hour later, Stevenson was staring at her map again. “It’s got to be here. We came back on an exact reciprocal of the way we came in. It’s got to be here.”

“Could they have closed it Hooters?” Crab’s voice was worried.

“I’ll tell you something else, we didn’t see that guard house we flattened on the way in. We weren’t that long, we should have seen the wreckage at least.”

Stevenson pressed her lips together. “Right.” Radio to company command channel. “All right guys, same drill as before. We go two ways, Bravo stays here and keeps in contact. We’ll find that hellmouth.”

This time it was Charlie that lucked out, at the end of their cast. They spotted the burned-out display stand and that gave Alpha Team the reference it needed. Twenty minutes later her command reassembled and drove triumphantly out through the Hellgate

As they crossed the ridge, Colonel Macfarland was waiting for them, impatience conflicting with congratulation on his face.

“Sir, both targets wiped out, no casualties, more than 100 baldricks dead. And Sir, something’s really screwy with directions in there.”

Chapter Thirty Seven

Tartarus, outer borders of Hell

Count Belial had long since stopped watching the bleak landscape roll past below. He had been flying for two days straight and even his inhuman endurance could not prevent the ride becoming extremely uncomfortable. The wyverns flew faster than any demon, while his own prized flock flew faster than anything the demons had ever encountered, thanks to Euryale's breeding program. Unfortunately it was also fast enough to transform the normally soft and welcoming clouds of ash into a blast that stung Belial's eyes and scoured his skin. The remoteness of his domain made the wyverns a necessity if he was to maintain any real presence at Satan's court, but Belial had also found them useful as a mercenary force. After millennia of facing virtually helpless lower-plane species, few demon lords bothered to maintain the kind of aerial combat forces seen in the Great Celestial War. They mostly depended on the harpies who, one on one, were no match for a Wyvern and its rider. The timely arrival of a few of his superior wyverns at a flier skirmish usually won him considerable favor with the victorious duke.

Whatever the merits of wyverns, right now Belial wanted nothing more than for this flight to end. From the moment he had left Satan's throne room, his mind had been churning on the details of the plan. The attack had to be spectacular, of that there was no doubt, but this time spectacle was not enough. Destroying a couple of human settlements would get him temporary adulation, but when the main attack began the glory-hungry dukes would soon see fit to consign his actions to historical trivia. They would say that his attacks merely kept the court entertained while the real forces were mustered. To gain real status he had to play a major and unquestionable role in the demon victory. His first thought was to burn the human capitals, but it was no use - the humans seemed to be divided into thousands of city states that had temporarily united into a planet-wide crusade against the demons. Destroying a mere pair of them would undoubtedly terrorize the local population but likely have little effect on the forces the humans could field. In fact, if their political leadership was anything like Satan, destroying it may actually give an advantage to the human armies. Belial laughed grimly at the joke he would never dare make to anybody.

Half a day into the flight, a revelation came to him, and with it the solution to his dilemma. Belial had been trying to comprehend why the humans fought so well now when they had never done so before. The reports of the few battered survivors had stressed the killing power of the human magic, but when pressed they had admitted that had never seen human mages conjuring the magic unassisted. What they had seen were and endless array of strange metal items; boxes that spat killing flame, spears that threw metal pebbles, sky chariots that loosed the deadly fire arrows and of course the iron chariots of legend. The humans had never shown any magical ability when the demons had visited before.

To Belial, it was obvious. The foundation of his painstakingly rebuilt power base was the superior weapons his forges produced. The difference between a typical bronze trident and a Tartaruan one was relatively slight. The painstakingly crafted copper laminations increased its power by around one and a half-fold, almost two-fold in the jeweled silver versions he made for the nobility. The secret tempering process produced prongs that bit deeper and snapped off with noticeably lower frequency than a common cast trident. The difference was not overwhelming, but it significantly tilted the odds in the small skirmishes that had been typical of Celestial warfare since the end of the Great War.

Even still the difference between an armed demon and an unarmed demon was not great. The tridents permitted the lesser demons to fling lightning, but it took many blasts to fell one demon and against celestials served only to thin out a charge before contact. The real fighting was done in close quarters. While tridents and swords had useful reach they often broke and did no more damage than tooth and claw. Belial saw that because the humans were so weak, they had been forced to invest tremendous effort into creating powerful weapons, weapons that could multiply their strength until it was sufficient to challenge a demon. In a flash, Belial saw the humans' scheme. When they had first seen the demons five millennia ago, they must have realized that weapons of unprecedented enchantment were the only thing that could offer them a hope of resisting the armies of hell. They had probably been refining their lore and stockpiling them in secret all this time, revealing their new magics only when threatened with outright extinction. Belial had not thought the short-lived humans capable of such patience and planning. Regardless, now that he understood where their strength came from, he could destroy it.

Belial felt the wyvern's weight shift beneath him and the pounding of its wing beats slowed slightly. Immediately he connected with its mind, ready to punish the creature for its laziness. Instead he was relieved to find that the beast had sighted its roost and had begun a slow descent towards the palace. Belial raised his head into the slipstream, opening his eyes and blinking back the grains of pumice that battered against his face. The dusty red foothills of the Tartaruan range were dimly visible beneath them, dotted with flickering fires and columns of smoke rising from the forges. His capital sat in a deep depression between the upper foothills, now almost perpetually shrouded by smog. The palace itself had originally been a prison, carved laboriously from adamantine to house the most dangerous angelic prisoners of war. Many millennia ago Satan had found it most amusing to exile him to an abandoned ruin in a worthless backwater, but Belial had gradually transformed it into a great arsenal and an almost impregnable fortress.

The wyvern dropped into a glide, shedding speed fast as it circled over the dwellings of Belial's subjects. The great guardian-beast at the main gates spotted its master returning and loosed an ear-splitting discordant screech from its thirteen throats. The scurrying figures below had long since stopped being startled by the noise, but they did pause and look up, before falling to their knees in deference to their master. His steed began its final swoop down onto the basalt flagstones of the outer courtyard. Belial saw that Euryale was already waiting for him on the terrace, accompanied by assorted servants. As he drew up she was stared disapprovingly at his mount, clearly angry that he had pushed one of her prized specimens so hard.

"My Lord." Euryale's snake-like 'hair' writhed and glared at him, but her tone was flatly deferential.

She gestured to a pair of servants. "You two, take this beast to the roosts immediately. Feed him chopped flesh, not live and not too quick. Don't let him bloat himself. If he sickens I will hold you responsible."

The self-proclaimed gorgon queen turned back to Belial, who had begun striding up the steps towards the palace. She hurried to keep up. "So what news from Mekratrig's court? What great deeds have you accomplished while I mind your palace for you." Her tone carried bitterness rather than resentment; gorgons in general and Euryale in particular were not welcome in Dis. She too had been an outcast and she had even further to go before returning to favor.

"Not here." Belial paused to address the servants. "I want every baron, every captain and every senior overseer in my throne room in four hours time. Send the fastest fliers. Stop groveling and move!" The lesser demons took off, some literally while the flightless ran for the barracks, leaving count and consort to enter the palace and make their way to Belial's study.

No sooner had the bronze doors clanged shut than Euryale spat "So let me guess, Satan exiled you again and now we must prepared to be invaded by half the neighboring dukes."

"Silence wench!". Belial had seemed distracted, but now he fixed her with a gaze so terrible she immediately regretted her taunt. For a moment she thought he was going to strike her, but when he spoke again it was not with a roar but with pride tinged by glee. "Abigor has been proven a fool and a traitor. He allowed most of his forces to be slaughtered by the humans and then joined their side." The news had stunned every demon to hear of it and Euryale was no exception.

"Our lord Satan has chosen me to strike the next blow against the humans. My plan will deliver a decisive blow and stand in sharp contrast to Abigor's failure. They must have places like Tartarus, hidden places where they produce and stockpile their enchanted weapons. We will find these places and we will destroy them they way we destroyed the last two human cities. With most of their weapons gone and no way to make more, the human armies will falter and be swept away."

Belial's plan seemed mad to Euryale at first, but within seconds she began to see the logic. It was not the way wars had been fought; destroying crops and food stores was standard practice, but disarming the enemy had never been considered a viable or useful tactic. Yet the human magics were unprecedented and the humans were so very reliant on them. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense.

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“May I speak with you, Excellency?”

James Randi looked up at the figure that had just entered his office. He felt the start of a surge of affection and crushed it down ruthlessly. Damn, these succubi are dangerous ran through his mind. Even aware of their ability to induce empathy with anybody within smelling distance, the pheromones worked. “I’m not an Excellency or even a Sire. And calling me that doesn’t get you any favorable consideration, quite the reverse in fact. But if you want to call me James, or The Amazing Randi, then we can talk.”

Lugasharmanaska noted the abruptness and guessed it was the man over-compensating for the effects of her miasma. It was a pity the humans had found out about that. “James, I know we have the ability to talk to demons in hell now. Using your machines.”

“We can. One on one. Julie’s making Domiklespharatu a whimpering nervous wreck. It doesn’t get us very far but it’s giving her a bit of revenge for the torment he put her through. So?”

“My Liege-Lady is Deumos, the Princess of all the Incubi and Succubi in Hell. There are thousands of us you know. I would like to speak to her using your machines.”

The reply was so blunt it had to be honest. No wheedling or trickery, just a blunt request. Randi was amazed and suspicious. “And just why should we do that.”

“My mission was to seduce one or more leading politicians, bend them to my will and then learn from them as much about you humans as I could. I failed, the politicians who were leading in Bangkok resisted me. That failure could earn me my death. But I need to report to Deumos my findings.”

“Why, if you’ll be killed.” Randi thought for a moment. “Could she kill you here, by remote control so to speak?”

“No, but that does not matter now.” Lugasharmanaska gave what was her equivalent of a smile. “Anyway I have not failed any more have I? I am here with you now and this building is indeed a palace of power. I did not get here the way intended but I am here. And I ought to report my findings to Deumos.”

“And what findings might those be?” Randi was interested in how this conversation was going. He had the impression Lugasharmanaska was being honest for the first time since she had arrived here.

“I will tell her that you humans are going to win this war. That short of some incredible stupidity on your part, and you are not a stupid people, you can hardly help but win. Already she must know about the raid yesterday, it will do no harm to tell her it will be the first of many, each more destructive than the last. I will persuade her that her only chance of survival will be to join the human side, to stand with humans against Satan. She may stand with him and die for a certainty, or stand with humans and have a chance of survival. And she will believe me for I will be telling her the truth.”

“That never got anybody believed. I was telling people the truth about cheap tricksters like that Israeli idiot and malicious frauds who pretended to be mediums for decades and nobody believed me. Lugasharmanaska, let me take this to the powers that be. We’ll see what they say.”

It hadn’t actually taken much persuading. The chance of turning a demon lord was too good to pass up. Anyway, measuring the signals generated as Lugasharmanaska talked to Deumos would provide a whole world of valuable data. So, four hours later, the succubus was relaxing on a couch while the technicians worked on the wiring connecting her to the signals amplification system. A group of four Marines were in the room as well, their orders simple, if the Succubus tried anything, kill her. However, there was something else as well. Randi had given their leader a letter Lugasharmanaska had written, one that had made his eyebrows rise.

“OK, Luga. Off you go, try and get through.”

Lugasharmanaska screwed up her eyes and concentrated her very hardest. As the signal started to be generated, the electrical sensors around her head picked it up and started boosting it, driving it against the indefinable, unknown barrier that separated the dimensions. She grimaced slightly, she guessed the humans weren’t trying to hurt her but the boosted signal was having the same effect on her mind as over-loud music had on human ears. Then, there was a snapping sensation. She was through.

“Your Royal Highness. It is Lugasharmanaska. I have much to report.”

“You have been gone for a long time kidling. We thought you were dead.”

“I was recognized and captured. I failed in my mission.”

“Then it would have been better for you if you had been dead.” The mock-affection had gone from Deumos’s mind voice.

“Highness. I failed in my mission, but I have also succeeded. I am in the human’s power palace now, speaking to you from there. I have become part of that power structure, a lowly part but still high enough to learn things you must know. Please, I beg of you, hear me.”

“Speak then kidling. Perhaps your words may earn forgiveness.”

“Highness. I have learned this and it is truth. The humans will not lose this war. They will win and Satan’s empire will come crashing down upon him. They have killing arts beyond our imagination and the ability to use them. They have not shown us a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of what they can do. Did you hear of the attack yesterday when the humans sent their tanks and mickvees into Hell itself? When they destroyed whatever they could find, killed all and destroyed all.”

“I had heard this. None here could understand it. They did not kill quite all, some wounded were pulled from the ruins. Why did they not hold what they took for ransom?”

“Highness. Humans called this a Thunder Run. It is to demonstrate they can go where they wish, when they wish and you can do nothing to stop them. They do not wish for plunder, just to kill. We have nothing that they want except for our utter destruction. They see us as their, I think the phrase is, mortal enemies. The raid yesterday was the first of many, each more destructive and devastating that the last. Nothing Hell has can stand against them, Heaven itself cannot stand against them. You have two choices Highness. You may stand with Satan and be destroyed with him for a certainty or you may stand with us and have a chance of survival.” Lugasharmanaska’s mind voice was desperate, she had to convince Deumos of the catastrophe that faced her.

“Us, kidling?”

Lugasharmanaska took a brief gasp of air and then concentrated again. “Yes, Highness. Us. I have joined the humans and cast my lot with them. I may not survive to see their victory but it is better to have a chance of living to see victory that a certainty of seeing defeat. Highness, by every standard of loyalty I owe you, I beg you to do the same.”

“And why should I believe you?” Deumos’s mind voice was cold.

“For this reason.” Lugasharmanaska waved her hand and the technician started upping the power in the transmission. The pain in her head was dreadful, it seemed to fill her whole body. She had thought kitten had been weak and foolish when she had writhed in pain during this transmission but now, for the first time, she understood what the young Goth girl had suffered every time she made a bridge.

Sleeping Chamber, Palace of Deumos, Hell.

For a moment, Deumos did not recognize the black ellipse that was forming in her bed-chamber. By the time she did, four humans had stepped through it. Their leader, his features strangely obscured by a mask that covered his nose and mouth looked at the great figure that was sprawled on the couch, and lifted a tube to his shoulder.

“Whosh, blam, thank you Ma’am. You’re dead.”

Then they stepped back through the ellipse letting it collapse behind them. The whole attack had taken less that five seconds and Deumos had never had a chance to react.

“Highness, they could have killed you if they had wanted to. They can kill you any time they want to. They can kill anybody any time they want to.” Lugasharmanaska’s mind-voice was very weak and shaky. “To join them is your only chance.”

“Very well kidling. I will think on this. You have done well to tell me of these things.” Deumos leaned back on her couch, her mind just beginning to absorb how easily she could have been killed. And Satan was lying, hiding just how powerful humans were. She had a lot to think about.

Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

Lugasharmanaska was gray, her normal shiny black skin, dull and faded. That alone told anybody watching what she had gone through. Her mind was weak but still calculating, assessing the result of this, the greatest gamble she had ever made. As soon as she had heard Abigor and a Herald had defected, she knew that her usefulness was diminished to almost nothing. She had to find a new role for herself if she was to continue in her privileged position. This was her throw, her attempt to do so.

“Did it work?” Randi was speaking.

“Sure did. Never seen anybody so stunned. We could have put the AT-4 into her and there was nothing she could have done to stop us. Perhaps we should have done.” The Marine Lieutenant sounded quite regretful.

“Perhaps. Luga, your side of this. Did it work?”

“Perhaps.” She had thought to exaggerate the effects of her message but she decided not to. Only the truth would serve her now. “Deumos will think on what I said and the demonstration. I would not expect her to do more. Once we make a few more demonstrations of power, then she will join. But she will join I think.

Chapter Thirty Eight

Camp Hell-Alpha. Martial Plain of Dysprosium, Hell

“The dimensions are all screwed up.” Captain Keisha Stevenson was watching the mechanics take the dust filters off Alpha-Alpha-One and take them away to the cleaning area. The building they were in was a garage large enough to hold all four Abrams tanks with room to spare. It was pre-fabricated, the parts flown in using one of the massive Russian Mil-26 helicopters and then brought through the Hellmouth and assembled. It was one of four such buildings in the complex with more to come. At the moment, Battle Group Alpha was the only portion of the US Army permanently stationed in Hell. A lot more was coming in and out, but Alpha was the only unit that actually stayed there. Once again, she thought, her unit was ending up as the sacrificial goat. She was beginning to regret blasting that angel, the act that had brought her on to General Petraeus’s radar. The she thought about the scene in the hut and decided that she didn’t regret firing that canister round at all.

“The beacon worked though?”

“Sure, but it was weird, we were steering straight line, not deviating a degree, but we could see the beacon behind us slide slowly away to one side.”

“It’s not just bearing, it’s range as well. We took the data out of your navigational computer and analyzed it. The speed you were doing, the time you took and the distance you covered don’t add up. I needn’t tell you the problems that causes the artillery boys. It’s not just you, all the other units are reporting the same thing. Bearing and range are all out of whack. We’re going to have to find something to pound on in order to see how significant it all is. Before that we’re going to establish another beacon, about 30 miles out from this one. Get a cross-bearing and navigation will get a lot easier. Also, we can compare our data with the on-the-ground data and that’ll give us a handle on what is going on. If there’s a mathematical relationship, we can program the navigational computers to handle it.” Major Warhol didn’t look that convinced. But then he hadn’t been on the Thunder Runs and didn’t appreciate how disturbing the distorted dimensions were to crews who wanted to get back home. That was one reason why he was here, to see how the real conditions of Hell compared with his simulated Helljars.

Home, now that was an interesting word, Stevenson thought, looking around the base. At the moment, this was home. Four garages for her armored vehicles, all with a positive pressure system to keep the unfiltered Hell atmosphere out and dust-trap doors to let the vehicles in. Massive filters on the roof to clean the air before that got in. Workshops to keep her tanks and armored infantry carriers running, and that meant scrubbing the engine air filters every time they went out. As a start, there was much else as well. Torsion bars had to be cleaned, the maintenance list went on and on. Still, at least the pumice was softer than the hard sand of the Iraqi desert. Then there were the barracks. The living accommodation wasn’t bad but it was Spartan. At least the air was clean there as well although that had its disadvantages. Two days ago, the cooks had tried to raise morale by serving good old American hamburgers, comfort food for the crews. The smell of fried onions had lingered for hours and hours, constantly recycled by the air purification system.

The whole lot was surrounded by razor wire and there were anti-harpy systems all over. Russian Tungaskas for long range defense, twin .50 machine guns in old-fashioned, but still power operated, turrets on the building roofs for close-in work. More loot from the museum stripping exercise she guessed. Outside the razor wire were minefields. The next unit in would be an artillery battery that was being attached to Alpha for the duration of its stay in Hell. Stevenson was in no doubt that Hell-Alpha could put up a devastating fight if it had to but the baldricks operated in such large numbers, devastation might not be enough.

“You’re worried about the defenses?” Major Warhol had caught her unconscious glance up and out.

“Aren’t you? Abigor hit us with nearly 400,000 baldricks and it took five divisions plus to stop him. We stopped him cold, sure, but you and I both know how many more legions Satan’s supposed to have. How are we supposed to stop them with just a reinforced company?”

“It won’t come to that. Anyway, the hellmouth is right behind you. If you look like getting overrun, you can just back out and there’s those five divisions still covering you.”

“That’s another thing. How can we be sure that thing is going to stay open?”

“It will, Captain, we think so anyway. We think the baldricks made a huge mistake, they opened a portal so large they can’t close it again. We’re working on a way to close the things but we think they can’t.”

“Major, no disrespect sir, but its our ass that’s hanging on your think.”

“None taken. If its any consolation I’m going to be here for some days so its my ass hanging as well.” Warhol glanced around and dropped his voice. “And Dave Petraeus is moving here as soon as we can get an HQ building put together. And even if the Hellmouth closes, we already know we can open new ones, small ones, to get people out. We’d have to blow up the equipment but we’re sure we can get you and your people out. Anyway, when you going out again?”

“Tomorrow. The map shows a river not so far from here. We’re going to push right up to it and see what it’s like. See if it really is boiling blood like the legends say.”

“The Styx?”

“Nah, not according to our map. It’s called the Phlegethon according to Abigor. Deepest penetration we’ll have done. Want to come along? You can ride in one of the Tracks.”

It was a challenge and Warhol knew it. One he couldn’t resist. “Sure, a day by the river? What more could a man ask?”

North-West-Upper Gallery, Shaft 18, Slocum Mine, Tartarus

Publius Julius Livianus had long since lost track of when he had last seen the sky. From what he recalled it wasn't a great loss. The diffuse reddish light, constant choking smoke, jagged volcanic landscape and demons, demons everywhere the eye could see, all combined to make the surface a living nightmare. Down here in the flickering torchlight existence was almost tolerable. The demons still came and on each visit they lashed him with their barbed whips, but rarely more than once a day. As long as he kept up a steady rhythm with his pick-axe, then the ore crates filled up. If the ore-crates were full, he received only a single lash. In all it was far superior to the earlier place, where for uncounted centuries he had lain pinned to the ground on an endless plain of burning sands, his flesh continually scorched but yet never dying. Publius shuddered. The only reason he still thought of the place was to remind himself that progress was still possible. Through sheer will he had maintained his sanity and eventually managed to meditate on virtue even in that place, and he had ascended to this less tortuous level of Hades. It seemed logical that with sufficient effort he would be released to the next level. At least, that's what he told himself and any fellow prisoner who would listen.

Suddenly, Publius became aware that the general din of the mine workings had changed subtly. Every alert for the approach of an overseer, every human in the gallery began to lighten their strokes and raise their head, listening intently. There was a commotion of snarls, shouts and the clang of dropped tools, punctuated by the occasional scream. The source soon became apparent as a demon entered their gallery, bellowing orders and lashing his whip idly as he went.

"Go to the loading area. All of you, now. Leave your tools. Go."

None of the humans waited to be lashed and Publius ran with the others until he reached the loading area. The large gallery was normally where the crates of ore were tipped into carts to be dragged up to the surface, but it doubled as an assembly area when the demons wished to 'motivate' the workforce, usually by eating whichever unfortunate had missed their quota that month. With all the workings on this shaft emptied several hundred humans were crowded into the cavernous space.

This time however the scene was a little different. A dozen demons were gathered on the platform and some of them carried bronze tridents instead of whips. One of them was quite different from the rest; obviously female, she was covered in fine coppery scales that glittered softly in the torchlight. A snakelike tail coiled around her feet and great bat-like wings were folded against her back. However her most distinguishing and terrifying feature was the mass of snakelike growths that took the place of hair. Publius had heard the rumors many times; the black snakes could freeze a man rigid, the red ones could enslave his will. The rumors weren't clear whether it took a bite or just a look, but just to be on the safe side he avoided looking at the snake-demon directly.

The largest overseer spoke first. "You vermin are here to answer a simple question. As long as one of you answers it correctly, you can all go back to work. Fail to answer and you will all be thrown back into the hell from which you came. Do you understand ?"

The humans seemed dazed. Some were nodding, others just stared at him. Moronic beasts, Oodusjarkethat thought I wonder why are the brass are bothering with them. Surely if the rulers of hell needed to know something about the human world they could just send a succubus to find out.

Lakheenahuknaasi wasn't sure why they were bothering either. She felt claustrophobic down here and her wings kept fluttering involuntarily. Fortunately the non-fliers were unlikely to understand why. The humans seemed to be trying to stare at her without actually focusing on her. They were pathetic, with their corpse white skin, sunken pink eyes and wild unkempt hair, yet their mass gaze was strangely unsettling. She shook her head. Their minds were dull, expressing nothing more than unfocused despair and hatred tinged with a slight curiosity about her presence. They were just humans.

"We desire to know where humans make your weapons. What towns make the flame lances, sky chariots, fire arrows, thunder sticks and iron chariots. Where are these weapons stored. You will tell us or suffer the consequences."

Lakheenahuknaasi waited. Silence. The humans looked at each other, then the demons. There was a murmur, indistinct and almost subliminal. She struggled to distinguish words from the diffuse babble but it defeated her. The mental activity jumped up an order of magnitude, as if the humans were shaking off a stupor. The noise started growing, chaotic, unformed, unstructured and somehow threatening. It swelled and broke up into distinct fractions, some just an undifferentiated mumble but other parts clear and distinct. Some of the humans began to shout names.

“Eyam!”

“Woolwich!”

“Slough!”

“Donzy!”

“Essen!”

“Hobbiton!”

“Carthage!”

“The Emerald City!”

Lakheenahuknaasi tried to focus, to see which ones seemed sincere but it was impossible. The humans were grabbing at each other, punching, kicking. Even as she watched, the guards were allowing the situation to get out of control, an unthinkable, unprecedented situation. They were bellowing and lashing at nearby humans with their whips but they were barely making a dent in the din that was reverberating off the cavern walls. One torch was knocked over, then another, as the assembled ranks of workers dissolved into chaos.

The gorgon's question had set Publius's mind racing. He had always thought of the demons as mere servants of the cosmic order. Yes they were malicious, but that was their lot in life, they could no more go against their nature than a wolf could avoid chasing a hare. Other prisoners had told him of their notions of two celestial realms opposed, of demons as evil beings that had rebelled against a benevolent creator, but he had placed no stock in it. What omnipotent god could would permit the existence of opposition, and what benevolent god would give them humans to torture? Yet here was undeniable proof that the demons were not simply cosmic jail-keepers. The only reason they would want to know about human weapons was if they were fighting humans. That meant the demons invading his home, laying siege to Rome no doubt - or just possibly, he barely dared hope... the legions coming to liberate him? The demons were desperate to know of human weapons, could it be that they weren’t just fighting humans, they were fighting and loosing? Could it be that the demons were not part of the cosmic order at all, simply common slavers?

Publius was snapped out of his reverie by a stray elbow catching him in the ribs. He dropped into a crouch and realized that he was in the middle of a riot. For a split second he considered rushing the demons, but it was impossible, they were armed and organized and any case even if they could be overcome the humans would still be trapped and at the mercy of the hordes of demons on the surface. For now the important thing was to prevent the demons from getting the answers they were so desperate for. Publius had seen the men shouting names, some were obviously faking but a few had a defeatist desire to collaborate. One of the later group was stumbling around right in front of him, weakly shouting "No, no, do what they say, you'll get us all eaten alive". He knew what he had to do. Lifting a dagger-sized rock flake from the nearest crate, Publius yelled "Death to the traitor!"

Lakheenahuknaasi found herself backed up against a wall. The humans were pressing close and she reflexively loosed a spray of paralyzing darts at them. Eight poisonous spikes shot out from a pair of her head-tendrils and embedded themselves in the chests of three humans, who staggered and fell twitching. Meanwhile her escorts were firing blasts of lightning into the crowd, electrocuting humans when they hit, blasting clouds of rock dust into the air when they missed. The humans fell back, hiding behind rock crates or cowering on the floor. Slowly the noise abated and the dust began to settle.

Lakheenahuknaasi climbed back onto the dais and surveyed the chamber. The floor was splattered with blood strewn with human bodies, from which a distinct smell of cooked flesh emanated. They would be up again soon enough, the humans in hell recovered from a single lightning bolt within minutes. She searched for the humans that had been calling out names earlier, in particular one from whom she had picked up a feeling of honesty and compliance. Her eyes stopped on a human that seemed more badly injured than the rest; it was lying in a spreading pool of blood, its neck at a strange angle... in fact looking closer she could see that its skull had been crushed in multiple places. Lakheenahuknaasi blinked. It was the human who had been trying to answer her question. She glanced around, all the ones from whom she had picked up a tendency to co-operate were dead. Killed by their fellow workers. And from the rest were other feelings, fear certainly, bordering on pathological terror but something else, something she’d never thought to associate with humans. They were triumphant.

Brown’s Lane, Coventry.  For three long years the spiritual home of Jaguar Cars had lain idle, the last car had rolled off the production line here in 2005 and the firm had moved its operations elsewhere, fifty-four years after production had started. It seemed that the Jaguar’s parent company at the time, Ford, cared little for tradition. Now the idle car factories of Coventry, Birmingham and Dagenham had found a new role; while the Land Rover factory at Solihull would essentially be doing the same thing, just swapping civilian production for purely military models, the other car factories would be supporting the war effort rather differently. There was help arriving for that, the company’s new Indian owners were sending over plans for a light armored car that would fit the existing production line well.

The roads around the Brown’s Lane factory were jammed with low-loaders carrying various versions of the FV430 tracked armored personnel carrier and wheeled Saxon carriers. They’d all been brought from the nearest rail freight yard, itself hastily restored to operation and now filled with military vehicles on flat-bed trucks. The FV430s were vehicles that had either been in storage, or in various museums up and down the country. What they all had in common was that they had not gone through the ‘Bulldog’ upgrade. While BAE Land Systems was fully occupied building newer vehicles like the Challenger 2, Warrior and AS90, car factories like Brown’s Lane would take up much of the slack involved in upgrading existing vehicles. Eventually once the tooling from India was in place they would also begin to manufacture military vehicles.

Until then, each FV430 which arrived at Brown’s Lane would be stripped down, worn components replaced. The old Rolls Royce K60 engine would be removed and replaced by a modern Cummins B series engine with new sand and dust filters. Once that was done, Israeli designed appliqué armor and a Remote Weapons Station would be added, though not the weapon itself; the army was still debating as to whether the tried and trusted Browning Heavy Machine Gun, or a new FN designed weapon, the BRG-15, firing a 15.5 x 115 mm cartridge should arm the FV432s. The later was more powerful and likely to do more damage to a baldrick, but the Browning had the advantage of already being in service in some numbers. The last thing the British Army needed right now was another cartridge on top of the 9mm, 5.56mm, 7.62mm, 8.59mm and 12.7mm rounds it already employed. The armorers had enough of a headache as it was.

The Saxons, some of which were the Saxon Patrol variant that had replaced the last of the Humber ‘Pigs’ in Northern Ireland, were coming in for a slightly different upgrade. At the moment they were somewhat lacking in offensive capability, a single 7.62mm GPMG was considered inadequate against baldrick attacks. Like the FV430s they would be fitted with an RWS, though for the moment they would be issued to units assigned to the Home Guard rather then being sent out to Iraq. The Saxons, as it turned out, were far easier to work on and even better, once finished, they could be driven to where they were needed, rather than taking up valuable rail cars and transporter trucks.

Just to make life even easier, the workers who had been made redundant by the collapse of MG Rover and the contraction of the car industry in general in the West Midlands had flocked to get jobs in the new defense related concerns that had grown up. To its immense relief and surprise the government had not needed to use its new powers to direct labor to where it was needed. To protect these vital factories from potential baldrick attack a company of the Home Guard had been formed from the workforce. It was now a common sight to see workers who were not on shift drilling in the car park of Brown’s Lane and the other former car factories in the area. At the moment all they had were L85A3s, a semi-automatic version of the standard SA80 intended for use by cadet forces, though the Brown’s Lane Company had somehow managed to get hold of a Carl Gustav and a few rounds of HEAT and HE. How, was probably a question better not asked.

“Well, we’re certainly back in business.” The Works Manager looked at the sight below with satisfaction. Behind him, the representative from Tata Motors nodded with satisfaction. The purchase of the company by the Indian Tata group had caused extreme concern over whether the plant would just be taken off to India and the workers thrown out but the Tata management had gone out of their way to prove otherwise. Then, The Message had come and national identity had become very unimportant. Oh, there were a few countries still who were predictably refusing to join the rest of the world’s fight, North Korea being prominent amongst them, but India had thrown all its resources into the human struggle against their enemies. One small part of that effort was this plant here.

“I think it’s time for lunch, don’t you?” The Tata representative had a twinkle in his eye when he asked. The British had always had a love-affair with what they called Indian Curry and Tata had brought in staff who knew how to make it properly. As a result, it was quietly acknowledged that the Jaguar works canteen was the best Indian Restaurant in the Midlands. And with food rationing back, a good mid-day meal was something to be treasured. As long as it didn’t delay the work on the factory floor of course.

(Thank's to Starglider and Jan who provided the second and third parts respectively.)

Chapter Thirty Nine

Outer Ring, 7th Circle of Hell

The voice was urgent, omnipresent. Corporal Tucker McElroy! Do you hear me?

I hear you! McElroy screamed back in his mind. It wasn't because he realized that he was being contacted via some sort of telepathy; writhing in the river of lava for last month or so had burned his lungs so badly that he couldn't speak, so this was his only option.

You were killed at Hit, correct?

Affirmative! McElroy bellowed back. I'm burning up here, so please, whoever you are, get me out of here. McElroy remembered his manners at the last moment. Pardon my bluntness!

Not at all. My name is kitten. I work for the government. We have been trying to contact all U.S. military personnel killed in action during the first battle with the baldricks. So are you in a fire? Is there a way out?

It’s some sort of river, of lava. I’ve tried to get out but I never make it very far. There are baldrick guards on the banks, sooner or later, one of them comes along and pushes me back in. Are you taking a survey or something?

Please climb out now. We're sending in some cover for you, but you need to be on survivable terrain.

That galvanized McElroy. He would have double-blinked, if his seared eyelids were still functional. He half-leaped, half swam and broke the surface of the lava stream. It wasn't quite liquid, wasn’t quite solid and it was certainly more substantial than flames, so with great effort, he could make his way through it. He didn't know how big the river of flaming lava was, but he couldn't see the far shore, in fact he couldn’t see anything, his eyeballs were also boiled into uselessness. In any case, he’d never ventured out far enough to try. Most people, including him, spent their burning time marshaling enough strength to crawl out onto the shores of the river for a brief respite. Then, a baldrick would come along, stab the unfortunate soul with a trident, or perhaps its claws, and hurl the screaming creature back into the lake.

McElroy lost count of how many times that had happened to him.

On my way! McElroy shouted. I'll let you know when I'm out.

It didn't take long. Panic-driven instinct combined with this glimmer of hope, and he scrambled out of the flames and onto the rocky shores of the lake. Unmindful of the sizzling hunks of flesh and fat that he left on the ground behind him, he crawled ten meters before he collapsed.

Clear!

He just wanted to close his eyes, but of course, he couldn't. He wanted to breathe again, but he couldn't. The agony slowly dimming and to his amazement, his sight was already beginning to return. Dim and shadowy certainly, but returning. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, he noted with detached amusement that a demon had already spotted him and was closing quickly, bellowing some pointless taunt or curse. Tucker couldn't tell, because his ears were long gone.

Had he dreamed the whole thing? Hallucinating on top of burning in Hell? He would've smiled at the thought, but he already brandished a skeleton's grin. Maybe when his lips grew back, he'd smile again. Now, though, the demon was nearly upon him.

Oh well, back to the lake for him.

Then, the demon did a very strange thing. He was perhaps three meters away when he stopped. McElroy felt a distinct throbbing, a rapid whump-whump-whump of displaced air passing over him. He turned his head the other way.

A mini-Hellmouth dominated the background nearby. In front of it stood four uniformed soldiers, unmistakably United States Marines. They were all firing, unloading their weapons into the demon. It was quite thoroughly dead when they were done.

Corporal! Have the team arrived? kitten spoke in his mind. The voice was in distinct pain, as though someone were squeezing all the air from kitten's lungs. To have that kind of effect within thoughts...what the hell was kitten going through to do this?

And how! They just smoked a baldrick. Merely thinking the words gave him strength enough stand up. He mused that he must look like Anakin Skywalker at the end of the most recent Star Wars movie, all burnt and freakish. He turned to the four marines and saluted, and they matched him. One of them, stepped forward and began to speak, his facemask wobbling slightly as he jaw moved beneath.

He was still deaf, so he couldn't hear what the Marine was saying. Hurry, please! Send them back! kitten suddenly squealed.

McElroy held up his hand. Pointed to his ears, shook his head. Pointed at the marine, then the portal, and made shooshing motions. The marine stopped, nodded, and passed what looked like an old-fashioned rifle with a wooden stock and a rucksack to McElroy. The four Marines vanished into the portal, which itself closed a second later. He looked at the rifle, recognizing it as an M-1 Garand but with a bigger bore than any Garand he’d ever seen.

You're on your own, Corporal, kitten said, voice weak and dim. Your orders are to evade and survive. You're the among the first we've extracted and armed successfully, so you may be on your own for a while. I'll contact you on a set schedule, its in the rucksack. Understood?

Affirmative. Thank you, kitten. Please pass along word to my family that I'm out and kicking. He didn't get a reply, but that was alright. McElroy was already scanning the area. The wind was throwing dirt into his unprotected eyes, but he could already see better than just a few minutes than before.

The shoreline was deserted, aside from the baldrick corpse. The stream of lava stretched on for miles in each direction, but there was cover further inland, or so it appeared. He squinted; maybe it was a edge of a forest? Or tall grass? Or just a rocky outcrop? His vision was still too bad to tell. At any rate, it would leave him less exposed. He was like a piece of metal in a sand tumbler out here, and the fresh burn wounds were all singing "Ave Maria" as the grime and grit blasted him. They were healing fast though, he could feel his ears returning already.

Placing the Garand and rucksack down for a moment, he went over to the baldrick. It was dead all right, big holes blasted in it and even bigger ones where the bullets had exited the wounds. The monster had nothing he could use, except its trident of course. McElroy hitched his pack to his back, slung the Garand over his shoulder and took off, running up the shore towards what he could now clearly see was a forest.

Throne Room, Belial’s Palace, Tartarus

Belial's throne room was, in many ways a microcosm of his lord's. A mason would note that the columns were carved of adamantine rather than granite, and inlaid with gold and silver rather than sheathed with brass. A soldier's eye would be drawn to the assorted barons in attendance; much of their forms were covered by burnished bronze plates, many set with gaudy jewels. At no other court in hell would a demon show such weakness as needing armor to protect themselves. Here in Tartarus the master proclaimed dominance through superior arms and the servants competed to show their devotion to his principles. A politician would ignore these trappings and focus on the occupant of the throne. The Count's face was lined with the rage and exasperation of a master failed utterly by his servants. The skilled politician would look through this to recognize the desperation of a being that believes it is about to miss its only opportunity for survival.

Euryale's eyes took in all of this as the great doors swung open and admitted her to the room, along with one final similarity to the His Infernal Majesty’s court - the gutted carcass of overseer Oodusjarkethat still cooling on the floor. If Count and King shared anything, it was a healthy respect for the demonic tradition of taking out ones frustrations on ones underlings. That's the fourth one in as many days she thought. The interrogations were proving disastrous, not only had they failed to produce useful information but they had cut production to barely a third of its normal level. The lack of success along with Belial's retribution was crippling the demon's morale.

She strode forward into the throne room, flanked on the left by the long slithering form of Baroness Yulupki. As the most powerful of Tartaruan naga, Belial had charged Yulupki with preparing the chorus that would provide most of the power for the portal ceremonies. The first of the foreign naga had begun to arrive, borne on makeshift litters slung between pairs of Great Beasts, and the baroness's already inflated pride had swelled to new heights as she began to drill her expanded chorus into harmony. Euryale was still technically in command of the portal opening, but it was a strained relationship at best. Yulupki wasted no opportunity to demonstrate her kind's great superiority in psychic strength over the gorgons.

Euryale reached the dais and kneeled perfunctorily, but the naga was even quicker.

"Count Belial, my chorusss stands ready. The firssst of the foreigners are being broken in and I forssseee no problems in producing the level of energy you requesssted.", Yulupki hissed eagerly.

She fancies herself a rival for the count's favor thought Euryale, what a ridiculous notion. For a start, she has completely misjudged his mood.

Sure enough, Belial rose to his feet and rebuffed the naga. "And of what use is your snake pile when we have no idea where to strike? Four days! Half our time gone and still no answers. How difficult could it be? Truly you are the dregs of hell, if I cannot even count on you to wring a few simple facts out of an ample supply of apes!"

Yulupki drew back, coiling upon herself and seemingly genuinely bewildered to be the target of the Count's ranting. "Sssire, we naga are ready to play our role... it was the gorgonsss, sssire, who were supposssed to drag the truth out of the humansss. It was Euryale who promisssed to find their armoriesss for you!"

It was an obvious move and Euryale was ready for it. "Sire, no demon can be blamed for the humans behaving so unreasonably. Something strange has gotten into them, something new, as it has their brethren on Earth. Your genius revealed the source of the earth human's new-found power and the stratagem to eliminate it. I am sure that we can discover the source of the slave's unexpected rebelliousness and counter it."

The flattery went down smoothly and Belial sank back into his throne, his ranting abating to grumbling. "If that hag Deumos would just send me some succubi we'd have answers in no time."

Euryale gritted her teeth. Every gorgon quickly became used to being told they were not as effective at persuading humans as succubi, much weaker fliers than harpies, less powerful witches than naga, poorer fighters than a common lesser demon. And yet there was truth in his words, something odd had happened to Deumos over the last few days. She’d become reserved, distant, as if she was watching and calculating rather than participating. That didn’t change the fact that few demons appreciated flexibility and fewer still valued intelligence over brute strength. Belial usually did and that was the one thing that made being his consort tolerable, but sometimes even he succumbed to the official propaganda that cast the gorgon race as a failed experiment. She had long since learned to bide her time and treat the other demon's scorn as a blind spot to be exploited.

"Belial, succubi would not help. They'd get the humans talking all right, every single one would say whatever he thought the harlot wanted to hear. It would take weeks to sort out the sincere ones and even longer to find the useful ones." The truth of her words was plain and the count slumped deeper into his throne.

Euryale paced in front of the dais, her tail lashing across the floor, thinking out loud. "Collective punishment isn't working. The humans were already becoming inured to torture and now they think they can accomplish something by resisting. There are far too many to interrogate each one fully in the time we have. They now resist enthrallment so strongly that when we barb them repeatedly they go almost immediately from refusing to talk to saying whatever they think we want to hear."

Her thoughts were interrupted by one of the barons speaking up. "With all the chaos out there we can't afford to lose a significant number of humans anyway, who knows when we'd get fresh ones sent up." Others began to whisper to each other and murmuring filled the chamber.

Euryale shook her head. Guruktarqor's statement was correct but irrelevant. The key question was... where was the human resolve to deny them answers coming from? They were actively killing their own kind to deny the demons answers. She found it hard to believe they were just being perverse. What did it look like from the humans point of view? Information about weapons, needed urgently, could only mean the demons were fighting humans somewhere. With that thought, understanding dawned.

"I see it now." Euryale's voice rang out clearly and caught the attention of every demon in the throne room. "By asking such direct questions, we have acted as unwitting carriers of the disease of hope. Clearly all humans are inherently prone to the insane belief that they can prevail against the forces of hell. It took hold on earth and drove them to create magic weapons that seemed powerful enough to justify their belief. Now thanks to our actions it had taken hold here too."

"What is that antidote for hope?" she continued. "We know it well, despair, the proper natural state of a human. But merely restoring despair is not enough, for apathy does not serve our purpose. We must corrupt their newly minted hope into selfish desires, harness it to drive the humans we want, and only the humans we want, to step forward."

Euryale paused for a moment to let her words sink in and Yulupki took the opportunity to heckle. "Pretty ssspeech gorgon, but just how do you propossse to do that? You are no sssuccubusss, to manipulate the humansss emotionsss at a whim."

The gorgon flicked the naga a look of contempt, more for her utter predictability than anything else.

"I propose that we take the humans from one mine and have my gorgons enthrall them all. We will convince them that they are recent arrivals from earth and that the armies of hell are already marching triumphantly across the planet. But there are many fortified cities that will take long sieges to reduce. We must make it clear that the humans are doomed, but that it will take us many years and many demon lives to eliminate them all unless we can strip them of their weapons. We will release these humans individually into the other mines. Finally we will present the humans with a new, false hope. Any human who gives us the information we seek will be released from bondage and held in quarters on the surface. We will promise that should their information proves correct, the next human city to attempt surrender will be spared and given to them to rule. If it proves useless, they will suffer the personal attentions of our best torturers and then eaten alive."

The whole court was stunned. Euryale's plan was so radical, so ambitious in its exploitation of the human mindset that they did not know what to make of it. Every head turned to look at the Count, looking for his cue on whether to treat this gorgon as a genius or a lunatic. For a long moment Belial's face remained impassive, unreadable. Then it broke into a vicious grin.

"I find your suggestion most suitable Euryale."

She inclined her head. "With my lord's permission."

"Granted. All of you, give her whatever she needs."

Euryale turned and fixed Yulupki with a predatory glare, which for a gorgon meant a scaled face framed by no less than twenty four spine-fringed tendril-eyes staring blankly at her target. The naga's will broke and she hung her head, coiling around herself and folding her own tentacles behind her back in submission. Thus vindicated, Euryale swept out of the throne room, her wings fluttering impatiently while she barking orders to the retinue now trailing behind her.

Belial was still smiling. She regularly failed to give him due respect, and this display had been forwardness bordering on insubordination, but somehow he still enjoyed being reminded just why he kept that gorgon around.

{Thanks to Alferd who contributed the first part and Starglider who produced the second}

Chapter Forty

The Phlegethon Bridge, Dysprosium Highway, Hell

“Well, its not boiling blood.” Captain Keisha Stevenson looked at the scene through her electro-optics. It was one of almost pastoral beauty, the angry, gray and red sky, the yellow-green river, the blackened-red grass, the shining black demons on guard around the bridge. Thinking over the definition of pastoral beauty, she decided that she had an unexpected talent for irony.

“Will you look at those mothers. Never seen anything like them before.” Baldy was using his gunner’s sight to look at the scene. “Big, aren’t they?”

“Big.” Stevenson spoke agreeably. “As big as the ones who started this whole mess off. That means they will take a battering before they go down. How many hits did that one outside Moscow take?”

“Most of a tank battalion so I heard. But then they didn’t know what we know now.”

“True. Hokay. Load HEAT.” Stevenson flipped over to her company command net. “All Alpha vehicles, we have some new baldricks ahead of us. They look like the warriors we’ve been whacking to date but these ones are about 40 feet high. Force count is nine, one of their squads by the look of it. Alpha and Bravo platoons, we’ll attack them, nothing elaborate, straight at them shooting as we go. Charlie section, keep your Bradleys here, once we’ve cleared the big guys, you go straight over the bridge and lay that group of buildings to waste. Don’t leave anything standing. Then, get back this side and we’ll blow the bridge. Understood?”

The acknowledgements came over the radio. Stevenson flipped back to her intra-vehicle comms. “Right Biker, take us down. And try and keep it smooth, we’re a long way from home to be wasting ammo.”

Five thousand meters away, Sanskiworlanaskim was bitterly annoyed at being told to guard a bridge. Perhaps, guard was the wrong word, control might be a bit closer. There were rumors that the humans were raiding into Hell itself, their Iron Chariots ranging over Dysprosium, destroying everything they found. The stories were incomprehensible, the humans weren’t trying to seize anything, they just came, destroyed and left. The accounts had to be those of terrified refugees, some of a steadily increasing stream that were coming back from the settlements on Dysprosium. That was why his unit, a part of Satan’s own private guard, were here on this bridge. The last thing His Infernal Majesty needed at this point was to have a load of cowardly refugees spreading their panic-stricken stories across Hell. His orders were quite clear, turn them back and if they wouldn’t go back, kill them.

“Turn Out The Guard!” the cry jarred Sanskiworlanaskim out of his reverie. He took an appalled look across the ground, there were eight clouds of dust moving towards the bridge. For a brief second he thought they were more groups of refugees but that didn’t last for more than a second. At the foot of the cloud, moving terrifyingly fast, were the squat shapes of Iron Chariots, the odd rectangular shape on top already swinging in his direction. Then, another cloud of dust, an odd one like a ball in front of the Chariot, and a red streak leaping out towards where the bridge guard was waiting. Sanskiworlanaskim saw it hit one of the guardsman square in the chest, rocking him back on his feet as an orange fireball erupted in front of him.

This was unthinkable, His Infernal Majesties own guard under attack? This was just not permitted, to disobey one of the Guard, let alone attack them was punishable by the most horrible death Satan could imagine. Sanskiworlanaskim admitted to himself that Satan really did have a vivid imagination in such things. In the brief second that the reflection had taken, the stricken guardsman had dropped to his knees, purple blood pouring from the gaping hole burned deep into his chest. More fire-lances struck around them, the ground erupting where they impacted. The humans were missing? The whispered rumors from the destruction of Abigor’s Army were that the human fire lances never missed. Or was that the Seeker Lances? Or both.

Then, a burning, agonizing pain in his leg. Sanskiworlanaskim looked down, the wound was a slight one, just a line slashed through his skin but it burned as if he was in the lava pits of the depths. Then, he understood, the wound was from a fire-lance fragment and the fragments were made of iron. Demons and iron didn’t get along very well. That’s why iron was forbidden in hell, another rule the humans were too treacherous to obey.

The Chariots had closed still further so Sanskiworlanaskim dropped to one knee and aimed his trident carefully. He could feel his body pouring magic into it, felt the energy surging through him and depositing in the shaft of the trident and boosting its power up higher. Then, when it could hold no more, he pushed the haft forward so that it made contact with the copper core of the weapon and the magic discharged in a brilliant lightning bolt that left the three tines and streaked across to hit one of the Iron Chariots.

“Wow, that smarts.” Stevenson had felt the electric shock in her seat, the tank’s frontal armor was non-conductive but enough power had leaked through to give the crew a bad shock. “You guys?”

“I thought the electric chair had been declared unconstitutional?” Crabs sounded aggrieved.

“Fire control computer went down Hooters. Its coming back up now, the Tempest hardening worked fine.”

Stevenson nodded to herself and flipped to the Company net. “Anyone else cop a burst like that?”

“Bravo-Three Ma’am. We took one as well, lost the fire control and engine control computers for a second. Back up now, no apparent damage. These guys throw the big bolts.”

“Sure do, take them down.” There was another crash as her tank’s main gun fired. The shot was wild, heading over the river to somewhere else. “All vehicles, slow right down and make aimed shots only.”

In the guard post by the bridge, Sanskiworlanaskim was trying to understand what was happening. The post itself had gone, fire lances had hit it and it had flown apart with the impact, dissolving in the red balls that marked the fire lance’s anger. Six of the guardsmen were down, their wounds bleeding purple and stained with copper. That was something else Sanskiworlanaskim could not understand, how did a fire lance blast copper so deep into its victims. One thing Sanskiworlanaskim did understand was that he too was dying. A fire lance had hit him low down in his stomach and he could feel the burned tissue deep inside him. The copper was inside him as well, he could feel it grinding at his guts as it turned solid.

Out front the Iron Chariots had stopped and were standing off, firing their fire-lances into the wreckage of the bridge. His sight dimming, Sanskiworlanaskim saw another fire lance coming straight for him. He never got to see the explosion.

40 minutes later. The Phlegethon Bridge, Dysprosium Highway, Hell

“I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“We’ve got new engine filters and there’s an experimental coating on the blades. We’ve lost a lot of performance but we can fly. Just keep it slow and steady.” The Osprey pilot looked at his cargo being unloaded. “And don’t overload the bird.”

“So we’ve got to stay here?” Stevenson’s voice was disbelieving.

“That’s right. This is the new forward base. You should see Hell-Alpha, there’s work all over. Even building a runway. Oh yes, Petraeus asked me to give you these.” Captain Mark Sheppard reached into a pocket and gave Stevenson a small box, one that contained two gold oak-leaves. “Congratulations Major. The General asked me to reassure you that as soon as you’re relieved here, you’ll be going back to our world. I think he has a battalion waiting for you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to base before the engines seize up.” He looked fondly at the Osprey. “I surely do love this bird though.”

Overseer Barracks, Kubelethakka Drift Mine, Tartarus

"We are done here. Take it away, bring me a fresh one."

The overseer gave a sharp tug on the brass chain connected to the human's collar, jerking the still slightly dazed creature off its feet. Lakheenahuknaasi sighed. She had long since ceased to be amused by such petty cruelty, but the lesser demons never seemed to tire of it. Still, it might be uncreative, but every little torment contributed to keeping the humans bleeding out precious spiritual energy. Euryale's quotas were strict though and she wasn't going to let this simpleton make her miss it.

"Now!" Lakheenahuknaasi hissed, baring her black poison-tentacles at the overseer, who grudgingly stopped kicking the fallen man and backed off. The human managed to regain its footing, only lightly gashed by the rocky floor, and was quickly dragged away. Within seconds a new human was shoved into her niche. This one had skin the color of sulfur. After a few centuries in hell it took a lot to scare a typical human, but Lakheenahuknaasi's stare was enough to reduce most to gibbering. It wasn't so much her bronze-scaled face or slitted golden pupils as the writhing cloud of black and red tentacles that surrounded her head, each tipped by four spines and a single unblinking eye. This particular specimen was kept whispering "Yato-no-kami, Yato-no-kami!", whatever that meant.

Six ought to do it Lakheenahuknaasi thought, gauging the human's body mass. A pair of the red tentacles idly trained themselves on the prey, and with a wet crackling noise a flurry of spines leapt from their tips to embed themselves in the man's shoulders. He screamed and writhed, futilely seeking some means of escape. The venom worked quickly however and in less than a minute his struggles had subsided into docility.

She shifted back on her haunches, considering what history to give this one. "What is your name?"

"Hijikata Katamori"

"You lived in Tokyo. It held for many weeks but it was eventually reduced by the legions of Merafawlazes."

"No, I lived... wait... the forces of Yomi assaulted Edo? What became of Shogun Ieharu?"

"All the humans were slaughtered. Their defiance bought them only ruin. Their iron chariots killed many demons but they could not save them in the end."

"Iron chariots?" asked Katamori, "That sounds impractical."

Lakheenahuknaasi slapped the human roughly across the face. Her claws left deep scratches on the man's cheek. "Listen carefully. You watched the fire throwers on the city walls kill many of our cavalry, but once they revealed themselves they were destroyed by our fliers. You ran from the walls as they were scaled by our infantry. The lightning from their tridents cut down humans to your left, to your right, but you found shelter."

Katamori was nodding vaguely, beginning to get into the fantasy. "I hid behind an overturned cart. The lightning set it on fire."

"You tried to hide but it was hopeless."

"We hid in the ruins but they had magic that could track us unfailingly!" Katamori could see the scene vividly in his mind.

"You were caught and executed."

"They ate the children, as if they were delicacies! For a moment I thought I had been spared, but then flying beasts swooped down and set the whole city aflame! One passed over me... and... I was burned alive..." he sobbed.

And that's enough of that thought Lakheenahuknaasi. This one must be a peasant that he knows nothing of the iron chariots, probably died in a house fire, no sense wasting more time on him. Now for the finishing touch...

This time it was a black tentacle that loosed a pair of spines, which bored straight into the human's neck. Again the man reeled, trying to scream but this time no sound would come. Euryale had discovered this particular technique and instructed all the gorgons in its use; a moderate dose of poison delivered directly to the brain would scramble the human's memories just enough to imitate a fresh arrival, which were almost always slightly crazed. As a side benefit it tended to hide the flaws in their stories.

Lakheenahuknaasi's forked tongue flicked out and licked the traces of blood from her claws. "This one is done. Next!"

Base Camp, Outer Ring, Seventh Circle of Hell

McElroy was running the handcrank on the universal charger when kitten's voice penetrated his thoughts. Corporal McElroy, are you there? May we speak now?

Sure thing, my dear. McElroy smiled, despite himself. How've you been? Are they treatin' you OK?

I'm fine, and I've been treated very well.

Well, that's great to hear. McElroy stopped charging and lifted the lid on the laptop. It was a military-grade device, built to withstand just about anything you'd expect in a hostile environment. It booted to life quickly. Shall we get down to business?

Yes, please.

McElroy went over his notes. This appears to be a rural region of Hell. Based on the information contained in the laptop here, it'd be extremely difficult to hook up with any of the current cells of the PFLH. I've observed no geographical features or landmarks that match anything described or photographed by those cells. I have been photographing my surroundings and attempting to map my location, though I never was much for computers.

kitten was quiet for a moment. Acknowledged. Four your information, you are now the Hell’s People’s Liberation Front. Have you established a safe base of operations?

Affirmative. We've taken up residence in a cave which is deep in a forest. If the colors weren't all wrong, I'd say we were up in the Catskills or somethin'. Looks like the divider between two circles.

I'm sorry, did you just say 'we'?

Affirmative. I've pulled seven U.S. soldiers out of the river of lava. Well, they pulled themselves out. I blasted the baldricks trying to chuck them back in. As an aside, please pass my compliments along to whoever designed the rifle you guys gave me. This sucker'll put a hole in a baldrick the size of your head!

kitten's tone was vaguely amused. I'll be sure to do that, Corporal. They're asking for the names and service numbers of the personnel you freed. Could you get them for me?

[i]Yup, one sec...damn computers. OK, here we go. First is Private First Class Arthur DeVanzo. Service number... and he rattled off the rest of the names, before concluding, We got one other fellow, too, but he's Japanese, and not exactly military.

Oh, I see. A pause. If you'll give us his name and as much personal information as you can, we'll try to locate his family.

Ah, well, that might be a touch difficult. He's, uh, been in Hell for a while. He's a Samurai, and from what he's told me, he's a warrior from the Ashikaga shogunate, and from what I can remember from my college history classes, that puts him anywhere from five to seven hundred years old.

kitten was silent for a moment, then said, Understood. So that makes nine of you?

Correct.

The people here are curious: how is it that you knew the people you were rescuing were U.S. military?

McElroy laughed out loud. I didn't. I just hung by the same stretch of river that I was in. It's like they're stacking us up like cordwood; the more recently you die, the further downriver you are. Or, at least, that's what the baldricks in this particular region are doing. That's why I was surprised when Ori showed up; he told me that he'd been flailing around blindly in the river for a very long time, so I guess he managed to swim a good distance away from where he was put in.

And how are you communicating with him? Does one of you speak Japanese?

McElroy shook his head, before realizing the idiocy of such a motion. This telepathy stuff sure did mess with your mind. Nope. We just talk. He seems to understand us. When he talks, we understand him. It's like with the baldricks. When they speak, we understand what they're saying, right? But how could they tell, just from looking at us, what language to speak? There's somethin' funky goin' on here, kitten. I wish I could tell you more, but I'm just a Tennessee hillbilly at heart. I mighta gone to college, but I got a liberal arts degree, for G---for Asshole's sake. Pardon my language.

McElroy could actually hear kitten's laugh in his mind. It felt like someone had tickled his brain. Well, another item on a long list of things we'll investigate.

Alright, kitten. I guess that brings us to our final item: resupply.

There was silence in McElroy's head; like someone had left the mic depressed by accident and was flooding the two-way with dead air. Finally, kitten said, You won't be being resupplied for at least four weeks.

You're shitting me. McElroy would've kept the anger out of his tone, as well as any vulgarities, were he speaking, but he couldn't conceal it within his mind. Four weeks? How am I supposed to continue operations here? What's the holdup?

I am, kitten replied. I'm the only one who can do this, and opening a portal causes me great pain, and I simply can't take supplying seven separate cells all at once. I'm sorry, Corporal.

McElroy cringed. Oh, kitten, I'm, uh, no. No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have... please forgive me, it’s real crappy of me to blame you. Look, we owe you everything--we all owe you everything, and nobody ever thought what it must be costing you! My daddy would whale the tar out of me if he knew what I’d just said. Please, accept my apology.

I accept, Corporal. I would've told you earlier, but, well, it shames me that I can't push myself harder to keep you all supplied. It's just...it hurts a great deal...

McElroy blinked back tears. I won't hear none of that! We're all managing as best we can, and I cannot bear the thought of you suffering on my account. We'll get by just fine. And you tell the brass that I want my next allocated portal window to go unused, so that you might have a respite.

Thank you, Corporal. McElroy could hear that kitten was flattered. But it is matter of personal pride that I work as hard as I can. I've been able to see into Hell for a long time. I know what goes on there. I want to do everything I can to end that evil.

Well, fair enough, kitten.

So, as a final matter, what is your current armament?

Well, we got a mess of tridents from the baldricks. All different designs. I photographed each, so you'll be able to study them in further detail later. Oh, when you do get a portal to us next, can you send a sword for Ori. He doesn’t approve of guns. Talking of which, we got the one rifle, twenty total rounds left. Nine are reserved.

Reserved for what?

One for each of us. If things go south, I'm not going back to that river. None of us are. We'll take our chances with oblivion...or super-Hell, if that's what's next.

kitten was silent for a moment. Understood, Corporal. I'll do my best to get you fresh supplies in four weeks' time. In the mean time, we'll continue with our scheduled briefings.

Acknowledged, kitten. Thank you for everything. Be well, we'll speak next week.

Thank you, Corporal.

McElroy closed the lid of the laptop and sighed. "Four weeks, guys. Can't use the rifle anymore, except in emergencies. Looks like we're going to be strictly recon for a while."

The others gathered around him in the cave groaned. "Look," he continued. "They got this poor...girl doing all this shit on her own. It damn near kills her when she opens a portal, even for a few seconds. I ain't gonna ask her to go through that. Are you? Look, it'll get better soon, I'm sure. If one person on Earth can do it, I'm sure others can. It'll just take time to find 'em and train 'em."

"Got another one!" Private Tom Walsch said from the mouth of the cave. Holding the rifle in one hand and a charred human in the other, he and Corporal Juan Menendez dragged the half-sensate creature into the cavern and dumped it onto the floor.

They were all used to this by now, and McElroy took point. He kneeled down next to the trembling figure and asked, "Name, rank?"

"Puh-puh-private Joanna Cassidy, USMC," the figure croaked.

"Huh, first marine! Well, Private Cassidy. You're among humans, among friends. We're part of the resistance here in Hell. You feel like kicking some baldrick ass?"

Cassidy opened her eyes, revealing half-formed, half-seeing blobs of pigment and ichor. "You bet your ass I do."

This was met with a chorus of approval by the assembled people, even Ori. "Alright, Private," McElroy continued. "Take a breather, grow back your skin." He looked up. "DeVanzo, grab a couple tridents. I knew there was a good reason to collect those things. I want to check out what's beyond the north ridge."

Before he left, he set a rifle round aside with the other nine.

Chapter Forty One

Randi Institute of Pneumatology, the Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“I guess it’ll be a relief dealing with normal people after having that sick freak around.” There was a stir of anger in the room, kitten’s boyfriend had started to get up but she put her hand on his and stopped him. It was a gesture that did not go unnoticed by most of the people in the room. Martin Chestnut was one who didn’t, he looked around smugly, the angry reaction to the insult aimed at kitten amused and satisfied him. Another thing he didn’t notice was two of the Special Forces troopers exchanging significant glances, they knew what kitten had gone through to keep the link to the teams in Hell open. Chestnut had just scheduled himself for an old military custom, a blanket party, at the first available opportunity.

James Randi cast a very sharp look at Chestnut, he’d spent his life exposing frauds and imposters and he was convinced Chestnut was one although in what sense he wasn’t quite sure yet. There was no doubt in Randi’s mind that the man had skills though, he’d made everybody in the room hate him. Randi had caught a whispered comment from a visiting Marine, something about Chestnut being a candidate for wall-to-wall counseling. Still, business first.

“We have to evaluate your ability to open a link before we can take this matter any further. We have several people now who can speak to various people in Hell, but so far kitten is the only person we have found who can sustain a link and open a portal. She’s worked very hard for the last few weeks and she needs a break. So, we are going to try and open a portal to a team we have on the Seventh Circle, they are desperately short of ammunition and need resupply urgently. So, kitten’s going to talk to them and they we’ll see if you can open a portal.”

“Just keep that pervert away from me.” The Marine and the Special Forces troopers exchanged glances, the blanket party attendance had just grown. On one of the seats, kitten relaxed and opened her mind up.

Tucker? Are you there? Can you speak?

Hey kitten, sure can. We’re having a rest, we’ve just got a new member here. Private Joanna Cassidy, USMC. He rattled the serial number off. She’s in a bad way but she’ll mend, physically anyway.

“Got her, Marine Private Cassidy. Killed in a humvee wreck about six months ago, in Iraq.” The Marine had typed the number into a notepad and the answer was immediate.

Confirmed Tucker. Now, we’re going to try something. We’ve got another guy here who can contact Hell so we’re going to see if he can open a portal. If he can, we’ll be able to get you some stuff, we have a sword for Ori, one he’ll like we think. Its called a Katana, it’s a gift from the Japanese Government. A swordmaster over there made it from modern steel. We have more ammunition and some semtex for you.

That’s fabulous kitten, sure you’re not going to get hurt for this?

Quite sure, I’m not going to hurt. At the other end, Tucker noticed the satisfaction in her thoughts and wondered what was going on back there.

“Link’s set up. Martin, please make the portal.”

“Its Mister Chestnut to you.” He relaxed on the couch and had the wiring set up around him. Meanwhile kitten disconnected and isolated herself from the system. Behind the control bank, the operator started running the power up to portal threshold. Chestnut started writhing and moaning on the couch. “Shit, this hurts, you never told me it would hurt like this.”

Then, the black ellipse started to form in the room and Chestnut’s wailing reached a new level. The sword was the first thing to get thrown through, followed by some packs of Semtex and boxes of rifle ammunition. Then, the ellipse slammed down.

kitten grabbed her head-set and pushed through a contact. Tucker, did you get anything?

Yeah, thanks, the sword’s here and we got a box of ammo and five of Semtex. Guess your guy wasn’t too hot huh?

Very noisy. Bye Tucker, talk to you soon.

Bye Kitten

“They got a little stuff, the sword, 5 kilos of Semtex and 250 rounds of ammunition.” kitten relaxed a little.

“And that’s all anybody will get until you agree to my terms.” Chestnut had a predatory grin on his face.

“What terms?” Randi spoke cautiously.

“I want a million a year retainer. A hundred thou bonus every time I have to open a portal up for you. You’ll buy an apartment for me wherever I choose to live and I want a Ferrari. I’ll tell you which kind later.”

“That all?” Randi was beginning to lose his temper.

“No, but I’ll add the rest later. You might as well agree now though, you haven’t got any choice.”

“Actually we do.” The voice from the door was contralto and silky. For those who knew the General, this meant trouble was coming for somebody. Nobody had ever heard her swear, she’d never had to. “We have three more candidates coming in today. An Indian and a Chinese lady and a Chinese man. All have passed the initial tests you laid down James, they’re looking very good. The Indian Lady speaks very good English so I’m told, she worked in a bank customer service center before she went mad.” The General was staring at Chestnut expressionlessly. It occurred to Randi that the lack of feeling was more terrifying than any display of dislike could have been. “General Schatten? A useful recruit this one? For the field test?”

“Yes indeed Ma’am. Mister Chestnut.” Schatten loaded the ‘Mister’ with irony. “Here’s our counter-offer. We give you a nice green suit with a red-brown one for work-wear. We will pay you one thousand two hundred and forty five dollars and ninety cents per month, before deductions. We’ll also provide you with a comfortable pair of boots for walking around in. They may even fit. We’ll even feed you and give you a bed to sleep in.”

“Forget it. No way.”

“You don’t have any choice, Private Chestnut. You’re in the Army now. We have reinstated the draft you know.” Schatten’s voice was richly amused by the sudden change on the man’s face.

“You can’t make me do the portal thing. Or anything else. And I won’t. Not unless I get my money.”

“It’s Sir to you. No, we can’t. But I must advise you that you’re being assigned to a field test program. We know that sensitives can contact Hell, but what happens if we put a sensitive in hell and try to contact out? We need to know that but kitten was much, much too valuable to use that way. Still is. But you’re not. So, we’re assigning you to Camp Hell-Alpha and you’ll stay there until the program is complete. Of course, if you don’t co-operate that may take a very long time. You two.” Schatten gestured at the two Special Forces men. “Take Private Chestnut away and show him how the Army works.”

“It’ll be a pleasure Sir.”

“I thought it might be.” The two Special Forces men led Chestnut out and closed the door behind them. A few seconds later there was a muffled thud and the door shook, followed by an apologetic “oops”. The Marine in the room suddenly developed a satisfied expression in his face,

Major General Asanee had sat down beside kitten. “How are you doing?”

“Well, thank you ma’am.”

“Good, for I have some news for you. If our three new recruits work out a bit better than Mis…. than Private Chestnut…. did, you’ll get some leave soon. My Learjet is waiting to take you to Bangkok for your operation, as I promised, my government will pay the account. Until then, I’d like you to meet somebody, one who has already been through the procedure. She’ll tell you what to expect and how to do things afterwards. She’s waiting outside, as soon as you’re done here, you two can get together.”

Deep Tunnel Stygia ('The Slime Pit'), Shaft 14, Slocum Mine, Tartarus

Captain James Shanklin stood knee-deep in the stagnant water, listlessly hacking away at an exposed copper vein. It had been something like a century now that he'd been in this literally God-forsaken place, give or take a decade. It was all so unfair. Hadn't he died for King and Country, like you were supposed to? He'd gone to church... mostly. He'd been a faithful husband... almost. There had been that one time, a year before the German shell ended his life, just after that fresh-faced young private had joined the squad. In the earthly hell of the Somme they all thought they had only weeks to live, surely God could forgive a man for seeking whatever companionship and release he could under such conditions?

It would seem that God could not. James dimly recalled spending decades in an empty wasteland scoured by a constant terrible storm, wandering without ever finding rest or shelter. Then he was brought here, seemingly to mine copper for all eternity. The last few months had been particularly intolerable. He was sure that other prisoners were stealing ore from his crates when he wasn't looking, because he'd been sentenced to work in the slime pit almost every week. Worst of all, the pointless riots meant that all the humans were now kept chained up at all times. The corroded bronze manacle had already rubbed his ankle raw. The formerly lax demon supervisors seemed to have found a new motivation for their calling, as they were more eager than ever to apply their whips.

The rumors had been going around the mine since the demons had first questioned them about human weapons. At first there was nothing but a welter of speculation, but as of late they had taken a decidedly grim turn. New workers were arriving, fresh from earth and bringing tales of their homes falling to an irresistible demonic onslaught. City after city was apparently being raped, pillaged and burned by the fiendish legions. Some refused to believe, harping on about inconsistencies in the stories, but James knew they were just grasping at straws. He had seen what being in the midst of brutal slaughter could do to the mind first hand, at Flanders and Neuve Chapelle; if anything the confused ranting of the new arrivals only confirmed the horror of what they had witnesses. In his mind all of humanity was clearly doomed to suffer, individually and collectively.

Into this uniformly depressing picture had come an unexpected ray of hope. At the start of this shift, they had been assembled in the loading area again and Medusa had a different message for them. Reading from a slate chalked with strange runes, she had implored the workers to reveal the location of the human arsenals. Only then would the demons be able to spare the remaining cities from total destruction. Any human who helped make this possible would be rewarded with dominion over one of the surviving settlements, to rule it in Satan's name for the rest of time.

For Captain Shanklin the struggle with his conscience had been a brief one. He had been loyal to the King and the Empire had sent him to a fair approximation of this place, rendered in stinking trenches and screaming shellfire, only to throw away his life fighting over a patch of worthless French mud. He had been faithful and his God had abandoned him. Even in this place, his fellow men seemed to wish him only further suffering. No, he no longer gave his loyalty to anyone but himself. James resolved to grasp this chance. He was already in hell, he could hardly damn himself a second time by supping with the devil. Besides, if the people of Sheffield saw sense and surrendered, perhaps he would be able to save his home from total destruction. What more noble deed could be expected of him?

A dull pounding echoed down the tunnel, muffled by the standing water. An overseer was coming; at regular intervals the hoof-beats paused and were replaced by screams as another miner was given a taste of the barbed whip. The pounding became splashing as the demon approached. James' hands began to tremble as he waited for it to reach him, sweat beaded on his forehead as he prepared to betray everything he had ever known. At last the monstrous creature came into sight. The demon seemed to combine the worst features of a gorilla and a goat into a vast brutish humanoid. The sight of the human's motionless pick had just registered on its face and it began to raise its great spiked lash.

“Wait!” shouted Captain Shanklin, “I can help! I can tell you where all the Empire's steel comes from! I can lead you to the forges that make Britannia's great guns and railways!”

The demon paused with whip raised, uncomprehending. James shouted desperately. “The weapons that are giving your armies pause! The metal they are made from, you call it 'enchanted iron'. I can show you where most of it is made!”

For a moment it looked like the demon would ignore him, but then it slowly lowered its whip and reached into the water. The chains confining the humans had no locks; if the demons were capable of such craftwork, they did not waste it on lowly human prisoners. Instead there was simply an unwelded bronze link too thick for a human to bend, but which the overseer's supernatural strength could easily open and close. The demon's clawed hands emerged holding the end of the chain, with which it yanked the human forwards.

“Come.” James has no choice but to follow the brute up through the winding tunnels towards the main shaft, the chain pulling him roughly to his feet when he tripped and fell. “I hope you're lying, little human, because I'd love to make a feast of your entrails.”

They turned off the main tunnel into an area James had never entered before. It seemed to be a kind of office, well lit with numerous torches and filled with carved stone tables and stools. Slates filled with chalked runes lay on the tables and hung from the walls, along with thin fired-clay tablets covered in more runes. His eyes only had seconds to take this in before Medusa entered the room, her snake-hair writhing gently. James averted his gaze as quickly as possible, falling to his knees in the manner he'd seen the lesser demons use during the rare visits of the senior overseer.

“This one claims to know where the humans make their enchanted iron.”

Lakheenahuknaasi stared at the wretched human cowering before her. Its form was still dripping with rank water. She hoped this one had something useful. Euryale had gambled a lot on this wild scheme, and if it failed she would undoubtedly ensure her handmaidens suffered with her. Lakheenahuknaasi aimed a tentacle at the human and shot a single enthralment dart into the man's shoulder, enough to make it difficult for him to lie to her without robbing him of his wits. He reeled, shook his head and then tried to look at her out of the corner of his eye, in that annoying manner humans seemed to have. Lakheenahuknaasi smiled at him, unaware that her fangs made the gesture more threatening than reassuring. “So, you have something to tell me, yesss?”

Throne Room, Palace of Satan, Dis, Hell

Satan had thrown some temper tantrums in his time but this one exceeded any those present could easily remember. Most of the Orc domestic staff had died one way or another, and the only reason why the massacre had stopped there was that Satan had run out of energy. While his magic built up again, he contented himself with screaming abuse at the gathered nobles. Eventually even that led to an exhausted silence. He looked around at the stunned nobility, his eyes flickering from one to the next, trying to catch even the slightest whiff of treason.

“How many members of my guard were killed?”

“Nine, Sire.”

“And you claim that humans did this.” There was a sly inflexion on the ‘you claim’.

“They did Sire, they were seen by a Greater Herald that flew not far away. He saw the Iron Chariots killing them.” That was a trump call, Satan wouldn’t argue with testimony from one of his own Greater Heralds.

“And after the battle they crossed over the bridge and destroyed the camp the other side of the Phlegethon. Then they retreated back to their side of the river where a Flying Chariot joined them.”

Satan screamed again, and a lightning bolt struck down the speaker where he stood. “Their side of the river? Who else thinks such treason?” His eyes ran around the room, seeking for treason again, or an excuse to kill, there wasn’t much difference really. “The humans are still at the Dysprosium Bridge.”

“They are.” Beelzebub spoke carefully. “But they destroyed it. The Phlegethon is unbridged there now.”

“Then destroy them. Take your legions, all of them, and destroy them. Belial, is your plan ready to carry out? Or will you be seeing your furnaces from the inside?”

“We are ready Your Majesty. We have the information we need and the chorus is set up.” And I can only hope that’s true Belial thought. It wasn’t when I left two days ago, and when I get back, I’ll have little time left.

“Then you will time your attack to match Beelzebub’s assault on the Human Army. How soon can you move your army.”

Beelzebub cast an eye at Belial and thought carefully. “Four days Your Majesty.”

“Then that gives you two more days than I promised Belial. Use them well.”

Behind the scene, Deumos watched carefully, absorbing every nuance, every undercurrent in the great room. And through her mind kept running the phrase “the humans cannot lose.”

Then, the audience was disturbed by a Greater Herald who stumbled in, exhausted from a too-rapid flight. “Your Majesty, terrible news. Asmodeus is dead.”

Chapter Forty Two

Banks of the River Styx, Fifth Circle of Hell

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Lieutenant (deceased) Jade Kim was concerned. This was by far the most ambitious scheme she and the Special Forces H Team assigned to her had attempted. It was taking up a frightening amount of resources, all their Semtex, their claymores and their concentrated strength. More than twenty humans, six deceased, fourteen living, and a small group of deceased spectators. Hell was going to hell Kim thought, they’d be having embedded reporters here next.

Beside her, Lieutenant Rollings watched the bottleneck in the road below. The ambush had been very carefully set up and additional troops brought in to bring it off. The problem was, the plan depended upon the baldricks keeping to their usual, predictable, selves. Faced with a problem, they invariably responded the same way, presumably the one that had been tested and proved successful over more years than humans could comfortably contemplate. If they continued to work that way, then this ambush would also work. If they didn’t, then the team here would be seriously weakened. There was a back-up plan for that, if necessary, the whole group would bail out through a portal, the living humans would stay back on Earth while the deceased would quickly re-insert into another region of Hell to join one of the new groups that had started up.

The strategy had been in operation ever since the baldrick forces had started their campaign to suppress the PFLH. They’d begun their encampments around a massive fortification near the now-severed bridge over the Styx. They’d started building them in a checkerboard fashion, each one within sight of the next, moving slowly forward as the lines of outposts were complete. The baldrick commander didn’t seem to be short of troops, that was for certain, and his strategy was quite obvious. To slowly shrink the ground the PFLH had to maneuver in until they were forced to fight in a static battle against overwhelming odds. It was a familiar strategy, one that had been used against guerilla forces since the days of Caesar’s battles in Gaul and probably for a long time before that. Still, Rollings had been taught his trade well and knew how to handle this particular problem. After all, the U.S. Army had been taught that particular lesson in the jungles of Vietnam by some real experts in guerilla warfare. Idly, he wondered just where the dead Vietcong were, they’d make excellent recruits for this particular war.

The dance had started with attacks on the leading edge of the outpost line. When one row was completed, somewhere the next row had to start with a unit being pushed forward. That unit, nine baldricks strong had been ambushed and wiped out. There was no doubt about it, the M-107 rifles were a murderously effective tool when used right and they could cut down the baldricks from ranges that the demons couldn’t easily grasp. After losing the first couple of advance units, they’d tried pushing several forward at once. A rapid-fire series of assaults had done for them as well. As the baldrick casualties had mounted, fighting an enemy they couldn’t see or touch, their morale must have started to plummet because they were showing less and less desire to be moving forward.

Well, that had led to the next stage, the baldrick commander had started to push bigger units forward, a full 81-baldrick company rather than the nine-baldrick squad. Interesting that, Rollings thought, they’d jumped the 27-baldrick platoon completely. That might be a measure of the morale problem down there or perhaps a shortage of junior leaders. Armies that had problems with their NCO numbers frequently dropped the platoon as an effective combat element and treated it as a training ground for company-level NCOs. Whatever. The baldricks had pushed a full company out to secure the basis for their next row of outposts. They’d expected that unit to be attacked and the PFLH had obliged them. They’d taken out the two outposts behind it, isolating it from aid and then laid siege. Of course, the baldricks had done what every army did in such circumstances and sent in a relief force, in this case, two more full companies.

They’d learned the lesson the U.S. Army had learned about that very quickly. The relief force had itself been ambushed, it had been swamped by a hail of rifle and rocket fire that had driven it back in disarray. That battle had cost the Special Forces the life of one of its troopers, fried by a lightning bolt. He’d been too keen, he’d kept firing from the same position rather than changing after every shot. He was doubtless somewhere out here, trying to escape and rejoin the fight as a trooper (deceased). If he could be located, they’d rescue him, DIMO(N) were working on that. By the time the battle was over a couple more of the Special Forces people had been wounded and the team had to be replaced, that was where Rollings and his group had come in.

With their first rescue column mauled and repulsed, the baldricks had thrown in a bigger one, probably the rest of the battalion, almost 500 strong. It had been lead by a major demon, a huge creature who had been carefully photographed and the images sent back to DIMO(N). They’d identified him as Asmodeus, one of the Great Dukes down here. They’d added that it was the custom for senior leaders to lead in person at a critical point in a battle and that had been interesting from several points of view. Not least of which was the fact that the baldricks obviously considered this engagement a critical one. He’d lead the relief force, the PFLH had refrained from engaging it and the outpost garrison had then been relieved.

That had set the style for the next period of fighting. The PFLH would besiege an outpost, inflicting casualties on it but not taking it. If a smaller relief column set out, it would be ambushed and its mauled remains sent scurrying back with its tail between its legs. But if Asmodeus himself led the force, it would be left unattacked. For the last couple of sieges, the baldrick commander had dispensed with the small relief column and led a full battalion himself, obviously convinced that his presence deterred any further attack.

So, the battlefield had been shaped and the blow set up. The baldricks were indeed predictable, it was easy to determine where their future outposts would, if they had such things as checklists, Rollings could have written one for them and they wouldn’t have known the difference between his and their own. He’d been able to choose his ground carefully, the place where he would attack his outpost and the place where he would ambush the relief column. This time, the presence of Asmodeus would be the reason for the attack, not one to pull back.

“There they are Broomstick.” The column was approaching, a way off yet, but still visible, a shining black mass against the gray-green slime of the Fifth Circle. “And the Tall Fellow is leading them again.”

“What’s that above them.” Kim spoke urgently, her binoculars traversing the scene.

“Damn. Harpies. That’s a new wrinkle. They smarten up faster than we thought. They’re staying close in though, they still don’t understand how far away we can reach. Nine of them?”

“Nine, Chris. Confirm they’re close in.” Her radio blipped and she listened briefly. “Three of my people back at Outpost 11-1 have taken a few more shots but the baldricks there have learned as well, they’re keeping their heads down. Those that still have a head that is.” Over the last few weeks, Kim and her team had pulled a dozen or so people out of the mud. Nine had been more or less useless, civilians, ancient, modern and in between, without any useful skills and she had sent those to Rahab. Three had been soldiers, two modern U.S. Army people. One of them had been killed in Vietnam, another in Operation Desert Storm. They’d taken little in the way of instruction and had checked out on the M107 and M114 fast. The third had been a French Poilu who’d died at Verdun. He’d taken a bit more training but his attitude to the battle had been an inspiration. His constant muttering of “they shall not pass” and his assertion that Hell was an improvement on the mud and slime of Verdun had become unit legends.

Rollings watched the column enter the killing ground he had chosen. The Tall Fellow was leading on a Giant Rhinolobster, by far the biggest that had ever been seen, right at the head of his troops where good demonic practice said he should be. Rollings judged his moment carefully and twisted the first of his detonators. The explosive pattern was the same one that Kim had used weeks earlier to kill her first baldrick rider, an X-shape of Claymores but this time, the X had six of the directional mines in each of its arms, saturating the entire head of the column with the clouds of pre-shaped metal fragments. Rollings didn’t stop to admire his handiwork, there was too much to be done. He twisted the second detonator, setting off the huge semtex charge that was directly underneath Asmodeus. Over a thousand pounds of the Czech high explosive was buried there, covered with rocks for fragmentation, but it was the sheer blast that Rollings was relying on. The explosion had the striking power of an 8,000 pound aerial bomb and the explosive blocks had been laid in a dish-shape to focus that blast upwards. Asmodeus disappeared in the rolling orange ball of fire and smoke, even as his troops were scythed down by the claymores.

Above the column, the harpies were flung around by the huge blast, tumbled in mid-air, left stunned and disorientated. Several had been hit by flying rocks and dropped to the ground, others on the rim of the blast pattern started scanning the ground trying to pick up the authors of the devastating blow. Even as they did so, one burst into flame as a .50 SLAP round from an M-107 ruptured his body and his acid blood set his tissues on fire.

Two of the harpies were luckier, they had been on a far swing, away from the sight of the devastating concussion, and they spotted two humans on the ground, firing at the baldricks around the blast sight and so absorbed with that they simply didn’t notice the threat looming above them. The harpies dived on them, grabbing them with their claws, rending their flesh from their bodies, their calls of triumph blending with the screams of the dying humans. One of the Special Forces heavy weapons team saw the attack and swung his .50 caliber Browning machine gun onto the scene, chopping both harpies out of the sky, too late to save their victims. The machine gunner noted that grimly and made it his duty to get the rest of the harpies before they could do any more harm

On the ground, the smoke was clearing, revealing the huge crater where the head of the relief column had been. The mud had been blasted away down to bedrock, figures of baldricks were scattered around but of the Great Rhinolobster there was no sign. It must have been part of the horrible tangle of eviscerated body parts that strewed the area. Rollings surveyed the area intently but it was Kim who spotted Asmodeus first. He’d been shielded, partially, by the rhinolobster he had been riding but he had been thrown hundreds of feet and the lower part of his body was hideously mangled. She shouldered her M-107 and took careful aim through the telescopic sight, putting round after round into the Great Duke’s head. Asmodeus was still moving, trying to drag himself along by his hands, trying to get away from the blows that were destroying him. He felt his strength fading, then there was another blast and his struggle ended.

Kim saw the great body cease moving and watched as two rockets plowed into it, ending the work of destruction. She saw the rest of the column looking at the scene in appalled silence as the stunning realization that a Great Duke of Hell had just died sank in. For a moment everything on the battlefield was still, an eerie silence with neither humans nor baldricks firing. Then it was broken by the hammer of the .50 machine gun as it started to rake the survivors. That did it, the baldricks broke and ran.

“Sorry about your men Chris. We’ll watch out for them. If kitten can find them, we’ll get them out for you.”

“Thanks Broomstick. We’d better get out of here, those harpies were a nasty surprise. We want to be a long way away before the baldricks get their act together and come hunting.”

Throne Room of the Adamant Fastness, Tartaruan Range, Outer Rim of Hell

“There had better be good news.” Belial had had his days on wyvern-back to absorb the news of the death of Asmodeus and there was no upside to that story. One of the greatest Dukes of Hell was dead, killed by humans. If they could kill him, they could kill anybody. They could even kill……. Belial stopped himself, if Satan detected that thought, Belial’s end would be horrible beyond contemplation. “We must avenge Asmodeus.”

“Please tell the court what you told me, about the forges of Sheffield.” Lakheenahuknaasi asked, as sweetly as she could manage following the stunning news of the death of the Great Duke. Her mind was also calculating, if the humans could kill the Great Dukes, then they had to be stopped before they won this war. And if they couldn’t be stopped, wasn’t it time she……?

Captain Shanklin was shaking with fear at the sight of the vast ornate room filled with huge armored demons. Their stares seemed to bore straight into his mind, rendering any notion of backing out now ludicrous.

“Well, m'lords and ladies, you see, all our guns, all our shells are made of steel. You call it 'enchanted iron', not that that's a bad thing to call it of course, since it just be iron with some special additives.”

This caused a minor stir in the court. One of the great armored demons spoke; “Human, do you know the secret of this alchemy? Could you transform plain molten iron into the enchanted iron?”

James gulped. “Perhaps, m'lord, it being the case that I was a foreman at the Bessemer works before the Great War... I would have to see your furnaces...”

As his words trailed off the great antlered demon on the throne spoke in a thundering voice. “I am sure that Baron Trajakrithoth's question was purely hypothetical. Our lord Satan has decreed that hell does not need iron and that no demon shall attempt to make weapons from it. Our furnaces smelt bronze, brass, copper, silver and gold, no iron.” Those words did not seem to be directed at the human, but the next ones were. “Now, what of this 'Sheffield'? It has many furnaces, many forges?”

”Aye, the city of Sheffield makes more steel than anywhere else in the Empire. The best steel too, and many things from that steel, cast and machined.” Despite all that he'd been through, there was still a hint of pride in Shanklin's voice.

The demon lord was clearly pleased and James sagged with relief. “Excellent. Where can I find this city of steel?”

“Why, in Yorkshire, centre of the British Isles, m'lord. Look sixty miles north from Birmingham, or thirty miles west from Manchester, or even twenty miles south from Leeds.”

Belial's expression did not show any hint of recognition at the names of the various British cities, but the rough triangulation seemed to satisfy him for now. “Very good... Jaameshankel.” The count waved his hand dismissively, which Lakheenahuknaasi took as a command to lead the human away.

“You said you had another trai... ah, informant, Euryale? One who knows of the iron chariots?”

“Yes, my lord.” The gorgon queen turned to address another of her retinue. “Present your new friend, Megaaeraholrakni.”

The second handmaiden stepped forward, her clawed hand keeping a tight grip on the shoulder of a short, bald human. The man swayed unsteadily; Megaaeraholrakni had dosed him heavily with her poison, not wanting to risk him having a last-minute change of heart. She whispered into his ear, “these... men... are very interessted in your 'tankss', please tell them what Dee'Troyt can offer them.”

Bob Reed recited his pitch by rote. “Well sirs, if it's quality you're looking for, dee-troyt has the finest workforce and the most modern production lines in the world. No need to worry about capacity either, we built twenty thousand tanks for uncle sam in double-u double-u two. Don't let the guys from cry-slur fool you, with our boys fighting the gooks in core-rea, their lines are tied up turning out em forty sevens for the feds. It stands to reason, if you've got a big order, gee em are the logical choice. We can get a plant switched over for you in...”

The demons were throwing baffled glances at each other. Could this 'uncle sam' really afford three legions worth of chariots for his troops? More likely the human was inflating the figure to impress. 'Tank' seemed to mean 'iron chariot' but what was an 'em forty seven'? Their lord seemed annoyed and that never bode well for the source of the annoyance.

“Enough. Human, you were asked a simple question. Is this 'Dee’Troyt' a major source of weapons for the human resistance?” Belial's tone oozed with the promise of horrible consequences should this question not be answered promptly.

Now it was Bob's chance to be confused. His eyes remained unfocused as he continued; “Why haven't you heard? Detroit is the arsenal of democracy. Eff Dee Arr said so himself.”

Belial couldn't resist taking over. “So Detroit makes all the chariots for the state of Democracy? Which is ruled by Uncle Sam and populated by Feds? And your great general Eff'dee'ar is leading your armies against us, the ones you call the gooks?”

Bob was saved solely by his loyalty to Selfridge's mantra; 'the customer is always right'. “Well, yeah, I suppose you could put it like that...”

The tension was over now that Belial had made sense of it for them. The barons abandoned the hard task of trying to comprehend the insane humans and slipped back into familiar territory; a flattery competition.

“Excellent deduction my lord!”

“Masterful interrogation, Count Belial!”

Belial allowed this to continue for a few more seconds before silencing the court with a chopping gesture.

“You have pleased me...” there was a slight pause as the count pulled the name from the man's mind... “Bobbreed.” He turned to one of his ubiquitous minor demon servants. “Take them both to the guest rooms. See to their needs until I require them again.” The two humans were led away.

“Excellent. Euryale, you have surpassed my expectations. We now have the location of the two most critical arsenals supporting the human resistance. Once they are destroyed, the human armies will find their reinforcements either severely diminished in number or lacking the enchanted weapons that allow them to challenge us.”

Belial had been concerned that the intelligence would be dangerously out of date. The constant stream of unpleasant surprises since the heralds had first arrived on earth had driven home how much the humans had changed since the demons last visited earth in strength. But the first informant had been dead less than two human lifetimes, the second barely one. Save total destruction by war, great cities could not change significantly in a mere handful of decades.

Euryale half-spread her wings, holding the leathery membranes low in folds that touched the ground, and lowered her head. It was a gesture that implied respect and submission without the admission of inferiority that the more usual forms of groveling involved. “I am most glad that my humble efforts please my lord.” she said, with only the slightest hint of sarcasm.

'I really shouldn't let her get away with that' Belial thought, 'but I suppose this once she's earned it.'

The gorgon continued, “There were a few other traitors who I thought might be of use to you. They did not seem to know where the enchanted weapons were produced, like these two. But they did claim to know how to make them.”

Belial looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking his head. “Move them to the palace. Keep them isolated and under guard. Perhaps they can be of use to Trajakrithoth, perhaps they are best used as wyvern feed, but that can wait. We have only three days left to meet Satan's deadline.” Actually it was five, but he had already decided to keep the two extra days in hand as his last reserve.

His gaze shifted to the serpentine form of the leader of the Tartaruan naga. She looked distinctly uncomfortable, her tentacles twitching and her coils shifting irritably on the flagstones. “Baroness Yulupki, your naga are ready of course?”

“My lord, the chorusss will have no difffficulty with the firssst portal...”

Belial frowned. “And the second?”

“It isss not my fault, my lord, the additional naaaga I was promisssed, only a quarter of them have arrived. From the rate that they are arriving, three daysss hence we ssshall ssstill have barely a third.”

Belial slammed his fist down on the arm of his throne hard enough to crack the stone. Nearly every demon in the hall startled at the noise, excepting the court mason who merely sighed at the thought of having to carve yet another throne. “Naturally, the dukes seek to sabotage me, claiming honestly that they sent naga while knowing all the time they will not arrive quickly enough to do any good. But I shall not be denied.” he thundered.

The count pointed at Hipparferstiphasus, the leader of his meager flock of harpies. “You will take every demon that can fly and you will search out the witches we were promised. Then you will take every wyvern we have, snatch up the naga and fly them directly to Okthuura Yal-Gjaknaath.”

“Of course my lord.” The harpy bowed low, wings spreading on the floor, then ran from the throne room.

Yulupki writhed. “My lord, without time to harmonissse the chorusss, we risssk...”

Belial smashed his fist down again, this time hard enough to spall splinters of adamantine from the side of the throne. “No excuses. Why are you still here? Take your naga up to the first portal site immediately and make ready to open it up.”

Yulupki bowed, whirled around and slithered away through the great bronze doors. Euryale didn't even bother to hide her smirk.

“And you, Trajakrithoth?” Belial continued ”Tell me you have the shrines ready.”

The baron charged with running the main forges and workshops was a huge demon with streaky brown fur, little of which was visible under his massive bronze armor, and a voice like a stone grinder. “Almost, my lord. The shrines on Okthuura Jorkastrequar are complete. I am allowing my demons no breaks, no respite. The shrines on Okthuura Yal-Gjaknaath will be completed within two days.”

Belial sat back contentedly, but the forge-master had not finished. “I must warn you though, between making the shrine rods and the rebelliousness of the humans, trident production has been completely disrupted.”

Baron Guruktarqor cut in. “Stocks of refined copper and tin are running low sire, half of our smelting furnaces are out of operation. Plenty of ore in the silos sire but output from the mines is also down to less than half.” The baron was small and runtish for a demon of his station, speaking in a voice reminiscent of a squealing boar; most of the court found him intolerable, but Belial found his talent for keeping track of the minutiae of Tartaruan industry useful. “Euryale's manipulations have stopped the rioting but we need more workers sire, demon and human.”

“You shall get them. Already messengers have arrived from Beelzebub, Merihem and Gressil, demanding our best tridents to equip the legions they are mobilizing. I expect there will be more shortly. I have demanded twelve humans and one lesser demon per crate. They will have no choice but to pay the tribute, unless they would rather leave their legions helpless against the humans and their magery.”

“If I could make a request, my lord?”

The count tilted his head, inviting Euryale to continue.

“I have some ideas on how to improve the humans' enthusiasm for their work. But I will require some females. A few dozen should do to start with.”

Belial snorted, a reaction shared by most of the demons present. Tartarus had always levied male humans in return for its wares, as both sexes were equally useful to the torturers but males were obviously far superior manual laborers. There was only one thing Euryale could want the females for and Belial didn't like that notion at all.

“Have you forgotten that we still need the psychic energy of the humans? It hardly matters if we produce a few more tridents, if my serfs are rebelling because your pampered humans no longer give up enough energy.”

“My lord, I am confident that will not be the case. You see, recent events have shown how acclimatized to their condition the humans had become. When a human has nothing left to lose, the quality of anguish we can inflict is limited. For a few decades they rage and hate, but then their minds decay into apathy. By mixing in a little pleasure with their pain, by giving them something to lose again, I will heighten their suffering and inject fresh desperation even as they toil ever harder in your service.”

Again Euryale had caught the attention of the whole court and they were nodding in appreciation of her logic. 'She does have a talent for speeches', thought Belial, 'I will have to find a way to make use of that.'

“Very well. I shall permit you to continue your games... as soon as Sheffield and Detroit have been reduced to glowing slag.” Belial settled back in his damaged throne with a question left unanswered. Why did the humans refer to demons as gooks?

Chapter Forty Three

The Hellmouth, Martial Plain of Dysprosium

“Let’s have any HEAD you have on board.” The voice from outside the tank combined urgency and boredom.

“Would you care to repeat that soldier?” Major Stevenson peered over the edge of her turret. She and her combat group had been waiting in the traffic jam by the Hellmouth for nearly four hours and she wasn’t in the mood for any insubordination. Besides, she was hot, tired and sticky from being inside a tank too long and chewing out a subordinate would be welcome relief. As the thought crossed her mind, she decided she’d probably been in Hell too long.

“I’m sorry Ma’am, but its orders. All outgoing armor is to unload any HEAD ammunition on board for reissue. Its in short supply and the units up on the Phlegethon are going to need it.”

“HEAD? You mean HEAT?”

“No Ma’am. High Explosive Anti-Demon. New round, just started getting the first shipments. Got an iron liner instead of copper. Baldricks surely do hate iron. If you got any Ma’am, we’ll unload it for you.” The Sergeant had noted the battered vehicles and suddenly decided that these units had been in Hell a lot longer than he had. And messing with this Major might be a very bad idea. Especially if the scuttlebutt about a battle brewing was true.

“Hokay. Sergeant, we’ve none of that on board. Any idea how long we’ll be hung up for? I kinda hanker to see a blue sky again.”

“Dunno Ma’am and that’s the honest truth. There’s stuff pouring in all the time. The Russians have been coming in all morning and we had an Israeli armored division before that and I’m told there’s a European armored division behind them. And then there’s the aircraft the brass are towing in. There’s more of our boys unloading down South, or their equipment is. Guys themselves being flown in. Look over there ma’am.”

‘Over there’ was the road leading through the hellmouth. The stream of Russian armor had stopped for a few minutes, their place taken by aircraft tractors, each one towing what looked like an A-10. Only, they were now painted red-gray and they had a mushroom-shaped filter over the engine intakes. Stevenson lifted her mask slightly and took a cautious sniff of the air. It was a lot cleaner here than further into hell, presumably there was some gas exchange through the Hellmouth, but there was a new smell as well. One that achingly reminded Stevenson of home in Bayonne. The smell of tar and oil refineries.

“A blacktop road in Hell. Whodathunkit.”

“Engineers all over ma’am. You should see the roads their building down from the north and up from the ports in the South. And the airfields, they’re sproutin’ like weeds after a thunderstorm. Some of the fighter jocks flew their birds through the ‘mouth but brass put a stop to it. Too risky they said. Look, ma’am, keep your engines running, I’ll get my boys to make a hole for you. Slide you out as fast as we can.”

The Sergeant did his best but it still took more than an hour to get Stevenson’s unit out. Finally, they managed it, sliding her out between the end of the A-10 unit and the start of a Hungarian Su-25 outfit. But, the military police managed it and, once again, there was the silent, undramatic transition as the cloudy red and gray overcast of Hell was replaced by the clear blue of the Earth sky. Just looking at it made Stevenson very happy. Ahead of them, a traffic direction private waved them off the road into a vast parking lot, full of Bradleys, Abrams and Paladins. Plus all the other vehicles that made up the order of battle of an Armored Division. Stevenson recognized the markings, they were all First Armored.

When his Bradley came to a halt, Major Warhol stretched and dropped out of the back, leaving the cramped compartment that had been his home for over a week. Some of his staff from the field operation of DIMO(N) were waiting and he got the customary back-slapping greeting. Behind them, the long cavalcade of vehicles had started moving again, the great Russian ZIL and MAZ trucks being followed by the first of the European Leopard II tanks. Warhol gestured at the convoys that stretched, nose-to-tail, as far as he could see.

“Well, if there wasn’t a Peak Oil problem before, there certainly will be now.”

One of the scientists snorted. “Peak Oil? That…. Oh, never mind. Anyway, we’re hoping we’ll hit oil in Hell. How did it go Major?”

“Not bad, our sims were pretty accurate. The dust is bad though. I’m surprised to see aircraft going in. Licked the filtration problem?”

“Yes and no. The filters cut airflow to the engines by about 20 – 30 percent. So that hits performance. And the time between overhauls is horrible, 50 to 60 hours before an engine has to be pulled and stripped. The good news is the clogging problem’s been licked.”

Something about the way the man put that caught Warhol’s attention. Putting on his most casual voice he asked the question they’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “How did you crack it then?”

There was an embarrassed shuffling of feet. “Well, actually we didn’t. We designed a filter pack and a pod that would use reverse air blast to clean the filters. Only problem was the pilot would have to glide with the engines out while he used it. They didn’t like that. Couple of aircraftmen came up with something better, a series of tabs on the inside of the filter that interfered with the airflow and made the filter shake. The dust in there is dry and that worked like a charm. Doubled or more the time taken for the airflow loss to reach mission-ending proportions.”

Warhol laughed and shook his head. “Right, I just got to say my farewells and then you can bring me up to date on the rest.” Then he set off to where Stevenson was speaking with MacFarland.

“We’re leaving the vehicles here, First Cavalry will be taking them over. First Armored is being split up, First Brigade will be staying as the cadre for the rebuilt division, Second and Third will be cadres for two new armored divisions. We’re all going back to the States for that. Stevenson, you’ll be commanding First Battalion in the new First Brigade. Any idea what you want to name your battalion?”

Stevenson thought for a second. Spearhead was too obvious. “How about the Hellcat Battalion Sir?”

“Good choice. You done good Stevenson. So have your crew. Got a commission for one of them, the others get to jump up the enlisted grades. Who’s best officer material in your crew?”

Again, a quick thought. “Hey Biker? You’re an officer.”

Her driver’s head emerged from his hatch, his attention caught by the use of the crew nickname. As the message sank in he shook his head. “Oh no Boss, you can’t do that to me. Please. Not an Officer.”

The Hospital, Mai Xiao Village, Sinkiang.

“Every morning they came down to the village tea house to drink their morning cup of tea, well laced with an illicit portion of rice wine. There were ten of them now, once there had been fifteen but time and old age had taken its toll and one by one, they had quietly vanished. Even fifteen had been a dramatic fall for sixty of them had left the village in the far off days of 1950 and only those 15 had returned. Now, the ten survivors were old, old men. They youngest, still called ‘the boy’ by his fellows was eighty years old and the oldest, their sergeant, had been a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army even in 1950, and he was far into his mid-nineties. But his moustache still bristled even though it was snow white and his back was still straight.”

“They saved from their pensions to bribe the tea house owner to slip them their rice wine, I knew about it of course, everybody did, but these men were heroes and who denies a hero a little comfort in their old age? The truth was that their small savings wouldn’t buy them the drinks they needed but if the other villagers chose to make up the difference, that was their business, nobody else’s.”

“And so, every day they would come down, and gather around their table, drink their tea and tell their stories. Of how they had held the hill in Korea against the Americans. Of how they had been outnumbered and outgunned and the American artillery never stopped shooting and their planes never stopped bombing but they had held the hill anyway. Every year the story got a little more fanciful, the attacks so much worse, their stand so much braver. They’d tell the stories to everybody who listened, and everybody did because these were old men, whose wives had long died and they were left alone. Lonely as only old men who had outlived their time could be. So the villagers listened to the stories and counted themselves lucky they had not gone to Korea.”

“Then there came that day. The old men hadn’t arrived yet but something else did. A monster, a hideous monster from hell, the one the Americans call the baldrick. The village went black in its middle and the creature stepped out, looking only to kill and mutilate. Most of the men were far away, working in the fields or on the road and could not help. There were just the women and children left and they screamed when they saw the monster and they ran. But the monster could run as well, faster than they could and it started to kill them.”

“As the Party Leader I had a Type 56 rifle in my hut and I got it. I fired a burst at the monster and I think I hit it for it stopped and shook itself. But it wasn’t dead, it seemed hardly hurt and it turned to come for me but it heard more screams where the children were running from the school. It forgot me and went to kill them. I fired again but it was too far away, more than 100 meters.”

“Then I heard a shouted order, one that cut through the noise and screams. The old men were there, all ten of them and they had their old long 3-line rifles. They dropped to the ground in a line, their hands working the bolts of their rifles with the muscle-memory of skills never forgotten. They fired all at once, in a volley and their hands worked the bolts again for another.”

“The monster staggered with the first volley and lurched with the second. It turned away from the children and came for the old men. The sergeant ordered independent fire and the rifles crackled but the monster kept coming at them. The old men’s hearts were brave but their eyes were dim with age and their hands shook, not from fear of course, but from infirmity. I doubt if one bullet in ten they fired was biting home. The monster had a three-point spear and it’s lighting flashed out, killing ‘the youngster’ as he fired his rifle. The others did not pause or hesitate but kept on firing until their pouches were empty. How they had kept their rifles and ammunition I do not know and do not intend to ask.”

“With the monster close and their ammunition gone, they fixed their bayonets, they got to their feet and they advanced on the monster, their bayonets leveled. I had changed my magazine by now and I had run over to where I also could fire on the monster. The old men had surrounded it, it was slashing at them with its claws, but they parried its slashes and thrust their bayonets home. They were old men and slow, they could not evade all the blows from the monster and their numbers shrank even as I watched. But the monster was down, on its knees, and the old men, now down to three with their sergeant still leading them, kept thrusting. I had a clean shot and I emptied my rifle into it, saw it bleeding and dying on the ground. It fired its trident again and the lightning bolt hit me. It must have been weak with death for I did not die when the bolt hit my face.”

“So, you see Doctor, my blindness is nothing to be sorry for. What finer sight could I, Party Leader of Mai Xiao Village, treasure as my last than those ten old men saving our children by bringing down the monster with their bayonets?”

Okthuura Jorkastrequar, Tartaruan Range, borderlands of Hell

Yulupki sat unhappily atop the Great Beast as it clambered up the side of the volcano. The track was so rough as to be virtually non-existent, it was really just a relatively level strip that had been cleared of boulders. It had been two months since this particular cone had last erupted and ash-laden smoke was still pouring out of many fissures in its sides. There was no guarantee that the lava would not again start pouring out while the ritual was in progress. However Belial had insisted on placing the portal as deep as possible into the magma, which meant the ritual had to take place on the rim of an active crater.

She was sure the lumbering Beast had picked up on her distaste for its kind and was doing what it could to throw her off. Not that there was much chance of that, as the leather harness held her coils tightly to its back, but the lurching made it difficult to focus and prepare for the task ahead. Naga could manage short bursts of speed when pressed, but in general their speed was much inferior to even the common demon warrior, much less the cavalry or fliers. That made this indignity necessary but not any more tolerable.

Finally the Great Beast attained the rim of the crater and Yulupki was afforded an expansive view of Jorkastrequar. A hundred yards below her a veritable lake of semi-congealed lava bubbled and hissed. Fortunately the copious smoke it was spewing was carried straight up into the sky by the strong thermals, otherwise visibility in the crater would have been near-zero. As planned, the forge demons had erected three great shrines to the barrier spirits, spaced equally around the rim. Each shrine consisted of a row of thirteen copper rods driven into the pumice at three yard intervals, each rod thirty feet tall and tapering from four inches diameter at the base to a sharp point at the top. The rods supported a great spider's web strung in copper, silver and gold wire.

Both the pattern of the web and the bifold curve of rods was the result of millennia of painstaking trial and error, carried out by naga searching for the arrangement that best pleased the spirits that dwelt between worlds. Rumor had it that the existence of the spirits had been discovered quite by accident. Long ago a lone naga had attempted to open a portal to gate a small force of warriors to another world. As luck had it she performed the ritual facing the warriors, who had at that moment presented their tridents in salute to a passing baron. The portal sprang into existence at twice the expected size. The passing baron commended the naga for the strength of her magery, which forced her into a desperate series of attempts to replicate the feat.

Eventually that nameless naga discovered that a close packed arrangement of bronze rods could multiply the effect of her ritual many-fold. This could only be the work of unknown beings existing in the strange realm the portal crossed. The creatures clearly desired the shrines, but could not enter the physical world to construct them themselves. Thus a wordless bargain was struck; the demons would build the shrines, and in return the barrier spirits would aid the naga in their work, adding their psychic strength to the task of opening the portal. As long as the shrines were constructed according to the prescribed traditions, Yulupki had never known the barrier spirits to renege on their end of the deal. This was just as well, because they would need all the help they could get to meet Belial's demands.

In front of each shrine the demon workers had carved out six crude terraces, each of which held thirteen wooden pallets. Three quarters of the pallets were already filled with the long coiled forms of naga, each resembling a giant snake with a scaled and vaguely female humanoid torso in the place of a head. More continued to arrive as she watched, strapped to the backs of lesser Beasts that strained and staggered under their weight. For now Yulupki was basking in the waves of heat, but she knew that it would become unpleasantly hot by the end of the ritual; the insulating pallets would prevent burns to their undersides. Eager to begin the ritual, she commanded the Great Beast to take her to the nearest shrine.

Great Hall of the Adamant Fastness, Tartaruan Range, Outer Rim of Hell

The great hall was filled to capacity with demons, including every minor noble from Count Belial's domain save a few lesser baronets that could not be spared from overseeing production. They were seated at carved stone tables more commonly used for victory feasts. There was little sound other than the padding of servants running to and fro, running errands and bringing chunks of fresh meat refreshment. Save for these minor disturbances, every demon seemed to be concentrating intensely.

The count himself paced back and forth on the raised platform in the centre of the chamber. Sharing the platform with him was the great gorgon Euryale, flanked by her handmaidens Lakheenahuknaasi and Megaaeraholrakni. To a human, the trio looked quite similar. All three were clad in nothing but their shining bronze scales, had for tresses a mass of tentacles each like a cyclopean snake, and possessed both great bat-like wings and a pointed tail that curled about their taloned feet. On closer inspection however, differences were apparent. Euryale's curvaceous figure and enchanting voice (at least, to other demons) clearly favored her succubus heritage. Megaaerah's anemically slim form and reputed skill at portal magery were much reminiscent of her naga cousins. Lakheenahuknaasi 's relatively compact and muscular form, not to mention her straightforward attitude, showed more of a kinship with the harpies.

Also present on the platform was Captain James Shanklin, who was flanked by a pair of demonic guards and looking extremely pale.

“I have one!” Castellean Zatheoplekkar's shout broke the silence. “A male, in a city... called Not-Ingham.”

Within seconds Belial Kornakat was towering over his vassal. “Show me.” Belial entered Zatheoplekkar's mind and from there followed the psychic link to the possessed human. Through his eyes he saw a cramped, cluttered room, dominated by a large glowing picture of two seated humans. Curiously the picture seemed to be moving. Belial pressed harder, mentally wringing the mind of the man for information, faintly amused by the pain he was causing.

“His name is Christopher Hughes. He lives alone, but in a crowded part of the city.” A rasping chuckle escaped Belial's lips. “He believes us to be a fiction invented by their nobility, for the purpose of...” the demon struggled to extract sense from the human's chaotic mind “placing all nations under the dominion of the You En.” He looked questioningly at the human traitor, who had been instructed to keep close by his side.

Captain Shanklin found his hands trembling again. “My lord, I have never heard of this 'U N'. Most likely it is a wild fancy of his. But I do know of Nottingham. It is a city of two hundred thousand souls a mere twenty-five miles south of Sheffield.”

Euryale seemed less satisfied than her lord. “That is closer than 'Birmingham', but still, I would rather not send my handmaiden into the heart of a large human city. You have spoken at length on the potency of their new weapons. The chance of failure is too high.”

Belial frowned. “Keep that one possessed.” he instructed Zatheoplekkar. “Very well. I will allow you another hour, no more. Then she goes.” He gestured at Lakheenahuknaasi, who looked nearly as uncomfortable as Captain Shanklin.

Fifty minutes later, the only other Nephilim that the assembled demons could locate was in Leeds, which if their tame human was to be believed seemed little better than Nottingham. Lakheenahuknaasi considered her options. She could wait until nightfall, but if she flew low over a settlement filled with humans she was still likely to be seen. If the rumors about the fate of Abigor's harpies were true this could be a suicidal proposition. Perhaps it would be better to enthrall a few humans and get them to sneak her out of the city somehow. Undignified, but less likely to get her killed by the humans. On the other talon, delaying for long enough to disrupt the Count's schedule would likely get her killed on her return, if she was allowed to return at all.

Lakheenahuknaasi 's musings were interrupted by an excited squeal. “Sire, sire, I have one! A human woman! She is in an uninhabited wilderness, somewhere to the west of the target.” He shrank back as the Count forced his way into the psychic link. “As you can see my lord, vanity was her undoing.”

This time Belial let loose with a full-blown maniacal laugh. “Indeed I can Guruktarqor.” The human female was cleaning her hair in some kind of indoor waterfall. For some reason, the mysterious effect that was protecting humans from entanglement had ceased to work with this one. A few minutes of vulnerability were enough to allow the demons to find her and gain purchase in her mind. “That one will be going directly to the eighth circle.” He nodded to Euryale.

All eyes were now on the hall's central platform, which now stood empty save for the gorgon queen. She spread her wings and closed her eyes, joining the psychic link to the possessed human girl and focusing intently on that target. Static discharges resembling miniature sheet lightning danced over her wing membranes as she poured psychic force into the connection. Several pregnant seconds passed before finally the familiar black sphere of nothingness swelled into existence in the centre of the room.

Belial gestured to a waiting squad of lesser demons. “Entertain me.” The small strike force was eager, loyal and expendable. Roaring battle cries, the demon warriors charged single-file into the portal and disappeared. The count closed his eyes, concentrating on distant events. A vicious grin slowly spread over his face. His eyes snapped open again and fixed on Lakheenahuknaasi. “Now it's your turn.”

Chapter Forty Four

Command Building, Camo Hell-Alpha. Martial Plain of Dysprosium

“When can I take my command to battle?”

“Say what?” General David Petraeus stopped admiring his fifth star and gazed at the massive baldrick in his office.

“I have over 300 tridents. Where would you like us to fight? Now that we have joined you.”

Petraeus looked slightly bewildered. “You and your men are prisoners of war. We don’t expect you to fight.”

Now is was Abigor’s turn to be bewildered. “But we surrendered to you. So we should fight for you now.”

“Not according to our rules you don’t. When an enemy surrenders, they get put in a prisoner of war camp. We look after them and feed them until the war is over, then we send them back home.”

Abigor’s jaw dropped open. If Hellish Armies fought that way, both side’s foot soldiers would surrender as soon as possible. In hell, surrendering meant changing sides, not a way out of the fighting. “You humans are impossible.”

Petraeus thought quickly. He guessed he would need a convincing story to make sure Abigor forgot any idea of joining the fighting. Anyway, his baldricks would be a liability on a battlefield dominated by artillery and armor. “Look, the Free Hell Army is much too valuable to us to throw away on a battlefield. We know nothing about Hell, what its like and how its run. You can do far more for us by telling us everything you know than by fighting.”

Meaning we are useless to the humans Abigor thought grimly, but if that were the case, why was he being kept alive? Still, to be a source of information was better than nothing.

“Excuse me Sir. General Ivan Semenovich Dorokhov to see you.”

“Thank you Private. Send him in.” There was a brief pause while the Russian entered the room, his jaw dropping at the sight of Abigor’s huge form sitting sprawled in one corner. “Ivan Semenovich, it is good to have you with us. May I introduce Grand Duke Abigor, formerly in the service of Satan and now commander of our allies in the Free Hell Army.”

Dorokhov looked slightly flustered, starting to salute, changing his mind, and wondering what to do next. In the end he settled for a curt nod of the head. Abigor was equally flustered, normally he’d have hit the ground and groveled, throwing in a good foot-licking as well but he’d quickly learned humans had nothing but contempt for such displays. In the end, he returned the nod.

“Are your troops in position, Ivan Semenovich?”

“First Shock Army is setting up along the banks of the Phlegethon. We have four armored divisions, two artillery divisions in position with the Army artillery setting up. Do you know how many enemy there are?”

“Abigor tells us 243 legions, that’s over 1.6 million Baldricks. Don’t know how they divide up yet.”

“That depends on who is their commander.” Abigor’s voice was thoughtful. “Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Dagon were the three appointments I heard but that was for the invasion of Earth. Do you know which?”

“Its not Asmodeus. He’s dead.”

“What?” Abigor was stunned. “Asmodeus dead? For all his mania, Satan has never dared kill a Grand Duke before. He wouldn’t even kill me, he preferred to send me where you could do this.”

“Satan didn’t kill him, we did. Or rather, the people we have fighting in the hell-pit did. Apparently he led some of his army against our guerillas, walked into a trap and they got him. Asmodeus is dead all right. Thoroughly blown up”

Abigor was awed. “You have done the unthinkable. Even in the Celestial War, no Grand Duke was ever killed. Not even Yahweh achieved such a thing.”

“So its Dagon or Beelzebub then.” Petraeus wanted to get the conversation back on track. “What does that mean for General Dorokhov?”

“It will not be Dagon. Many of his legions are Krakens, sea creatures. It will be Beelzebub. They do not call him Lord of the Flies for nothing. His army has 27 legions of Harpies. The rest will just be infantry.”

“180,000 harpies. I hope you have plenty of triple-A Grazhdanin Ivan.”

“One Tungaska or Shilka for every three vehicles. And many brigades of surface to air missiles. Some old but they still work. All radar-guided. And all the BMPs have shoulder-fired missiles on board. Sometimes it is good to have great warehouses. We are dug in and waiting. Abigor, this Great Celestial War, what happened?”

Abigor shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Two or three million of your years. We had found this planet and on opening a gate back to our home a mistake was made and we opened a gate to here. A place like Heaven but unoccupied except for unimportant creatures. We took it for our own. Then, Satan wanted it for his kingdom, separate from Yahweh’s Heaven. Yahweh wanted both. Satan rebelled and about a third of us joined him. The war went on for a long time but Satan won, Hell became his kingdom and Yahweh kept Heaven.”

“That’s not the way our stories told it.” Petraeus was grimly amused.

“They were written by Yahweh’s people weren’t they?” Abigor grinned. He’d been watching The History Channel on television.

Outer Ring, Seventh Circle of Hell  What amazed Aeanas the most about his time in Hell was the fact that he remained sane. He knew his name. Remembered his family. His wife, his two sons. Remembered dying. Knew that he had been in Hell for a long time(though the exact length of time remained elusive). And his torment never drove him insane.

Perhaps that was the most insidious aspect of Hell: they protected your mind from shattering. From becoming a shell with no feeling, no thought, no mind. After all, what use was there to torturing the mindless husk? The joy in the demon's faces came when they saw his terror, his fear, Aeanas could see this. If he had no mind, he might scream, but would he really feel the pain?

So, Aeanas feared them every time they came exactly as much as he had when they first set themselves upon him. Throughout the ages of screaming agony in the river there had been no emotion associated with his sufferings. How did it feel to have his skin seared from his body, his eyes boiled in their sockets, his genitals burned away? He could never grasp these; such memories danced just out of reach.

That was the rub. If he could remember what it felt, perhaps he wouldn't fear the demons so much. But in the heat of the moment, any kind of mental preparation he had made vanished into a cloud of palpating terror and pain. He always begged not to be thrown back into the river, a simpering weakling, utterly without shame or pity. He screamed the same pathetic, high-pitched scream that he let out every time his body hit the flaming lava, the kind of blameless, ringing screech that only mortal injury and mortal fear can evoke.

Except it wasn't mortal in this place; each time he escaped from the river, Aeanas was made whole again. Somehow. He really didn't have time to think about it, because the respites between tortures seemed fleeting and ephemeral at best. Sometimes he saw others tormented as he, but that really didn't matter.

He was dead.

This was Hell.

And this was how he was going to spend eternity. Each soul-rending abuse seared him but did not destroy him. The memories were not his to cherish. He would never know the wondrous oblivion of insanity. He was instead doomed to repeat every torment as though it was his first, though he knew this wasn't the case.

So, as Aeanas sprawled on the bank, writhing from his burns but never dying, he was in the full grip of panic. His eyesight was only coming back and he would have screamed if he could, if his lungs had not been seared to uselessness. Breathed if he could. Instead, the hard earth of Hell smashed into Aeanas' flailing form. He nevertheless attempted to scramble away. From what, he couldn't say, because he couldn't see more than a few feet. And he couldn't get very far, because he still couldn't breathe. Then, at once, the choking fume and heat were gone. Reflexively, he gulped in air. The sulfur-laden fumes did nothing good for his lungs, but breath was breath. Based on his fuzzy past, he expected perhaps a barrel of molten rock to be poured over him it didn’t happen. He opened his eyes, and he saw a hand. But this hand wasn't scaled. It had no claws. It was a human hand, as his own. Following it up, he saw its owner: a man, naked, stood before him. In his far hand was a spear--no, a trident, but beyond that, the visage of Hell faded to a blurry, ruddy nihility.

Aeanas reeled and tried to scrabble away. What new torment was this? But the figure snatched Aeanas and hauled him to his feet.

"It's alright!" he said in a language that wasn't Aeanas'. But yet, he understood it. How could that be? "What's your name, soldier?"

Aeanas gulped. His throat, long charred by the heat and flames, was already feeling better. "Aeanas," he replied finally.

"Anus?!" another voice shouted. A similarly-naked figure, also carrying a trident, stepped under the tree, into the range where Aeanas could see clearly. "Your name is Anus?!" The man roared with laughter.

"Cool it, DeVanzo," the first man snapped. Again, Aeanas was forced to marvel at the fact that the two were speaking an entirely different language than his own. The first man continued: "He said, 'Aeanas.' That's Greek, right?"

Aeanas nodded, then asked with some timidity: "Who are you?"

The first man started. "Oh, right! Name's Tucker McElroy, from Tennessee originally, though most recently I found myself in the molten river a ways that way. This uncouth gentleman's name is Artie DeVanzo, from New Jersey."

Aeanas nodded blankly. New Jersey? What was that? Where was Old Jersey?

McElroy regarded Aeanas for a moment, then said, "Say, you ain't a new arrival, are you? How long you been here, son?"

Aeanas shrugged. "I...could not tell you. A long time, I am sure."

"Well," DeVanzo said, stepping in, "how did you die?"

"I was struck in the heart with an arrow," Aeanas said. "Then, I believe my throat was cut."

McElroy whistled. "Ain't that a way to go. What was you doin'? Hunting? I didn't know they did that over in Greece."

Aeanas shook his head, his puzzlement now building into a frustration. "Of course not. I was in battle!"

McElroy did a double take. "Battle? Just how old are you, anyway? Shit, no one's used bows and arrows in battle for five or six hundred years!"

DeVanzo then interjected. "What battle were you in? Where was it?"

"It was in Greece, at Thermopylae," Aeanas said warily. Were these demons, trying to trick him into revealing something? What could they be after?

McElroy's eyes went wide, as did DeVanzo's. "Holeeeeee shit," McElroy said. "You died at Thermopylae? The Thermopylae? King Leonidas? Xerxes? The Persians? The Spartans?"

Aeanas nodded. "Yes. Do you know of it?"

McElroy snorted. "It's only one of the most famous battles in history!"

Aeanas shifted his weight. He fear was actually abating. Were they trying to lull him into sedation? "Why?" he asked McElroy in typical laconic bluntness. "It was a simple delaying action. What makes that so famous?"

DeVanzo sputtered, "You faced a million Persians! And there were only three hundred of you!"

"Wrong," Aeanas corrected immediately. "Thespians more than double our number stayed, and we had the Thebans."

McElroy shook his head. "That don't matter none! We got ourselves a genuine Spartiate!" McElroy was now speaking to the other man, DeVanzo. "Man, I can't wait to bring him back to base! A Spartan hoplite from Thermopylae! One of the three hundred!"

"Yeah, and the oldest member of the resistance!" DeVanzo chimed in. "I bet that'll give Ori a thing or two to chew on!"

"Ori's another old revival," McElroy said to Aeanas by way of explanation. "He's a warrior called a Samurai, from a place called Japan, that...well, shoot, it'd be outside what you'd know as the world!" The two men laughed easily together.

"Stop!" Aeanas roared. They would get no more from him; they would confuse him no longer. From this moment forward, they paid for information in blood.

He surged at McElroy and wrapped his arms around him. With fluidity that came with years of practice, he wrenched the man bodily into the air and slammed him to the ground. Most importantly, as he rose, he snatched up the trident and advanced on DeVanzo.  DeVanzo was obviously some kind of fool; he wasn't even holding his weapon properly. With three swift motions, Aeanas swatted the trident aside, forced it from his grasp, and had a point at DeVanzo's throat.

The man instantly raised his hands, and Aeanas jammed it in hard enough to draw blood. He then rotated around DeVanzo so that he was standing side by side with still-dazed McElroy. Through clenched teeth, he hissed: "Explain yourselves, else I will destroy you both!"

And much to his surprise, both men smiled broadly.

"You know, we could actually use you!" McElroy shouted, brushing the reddish dust from his body. A cut on his knee bled feebly. "Alright, here are your answers: as you've probably figured out, you're in Hell. You've been dead for over 25 centuries. That's 2,500 years. The world as you knew it does not exist anymore! You understand? Everyone you ever knew is dead, and probably here, being tortured. You have a wife? Kids? They're somewhere out here!" McElroy gestured wildly at the Hellscape surrounding them. "And they've suffered exactly as you have for that last 2,500 years! Do you hear me?"

Aeanas lowered the trident. McElroy went on, "But things have changed. The situation has changed. We're fighting back, both here in Hell, and on Earth. We're gonna free as many soldiers as we can, and we'll all fight against Hell. Most times, it's modern soldiers, but hey, I can't wait for the guys back on Earth to hear that we got Spartan warrior and a Samurai fightin' with us. Won't that be a trip?

"Anyway, Aeanas, we are the Hell's People's Liberation Front, and we want you to join us." McElroy held his hand out.

Aeanas paused, but just for a moment, then passed the trident back to him. "Good," McElroy continued. "We could probably use some more people proficient in your type of fighting. Word is that our cell won't be getting supplied with modern weapons for a while, so for the time being, we're stuck with more... primitive means of defending ourselves and killing ba--demons. Plus a trick or two we've learned over the centuries."

Aeanas then did something hadn't done since the day before he died, over 2,500 years ago: he smiled. "So they can be killed."

"Betcher ass they can," DeVanzo crooned. "How do you think we got these tridents?"

"So," McElroy continued. "Will you join us? Maybe teach us how to throw a demon like you just did to me? Or maybe how to correctly hold a spear? In return, I'll show you some things that you'd call magic."

Aeanas laughed. "Has anyone said no?"

Chapter Forty Five

F-111C, Koala Flight, Approaching Hellmouth

“Koala Flight this is Hellmouth Air Traffic Control. Come to course three-three-fiver, altitude three thousand feet for Airstrip Delta Approach. You are cleared to use Runway 31.”

“G’day cobbers. Everything bonzer down there? Throw another shrimp on the Barbie for us.” Squadron Leader Mackay’s weapons systems operator gave him a pained look. “Don’t blame me, that’s how the septics expect us to talk. Don’t want to disappoint them now do we?” Mackay flipped back to the ATC frequency. “Don’t get in tizzy about us landing, we’ll go straight through.”

The voice on the air traffic control net sounded slightly strangled. “Koala flight, be advised, it is against regulations to fly through the Hellmouth. Please land and your aircraft will be towed through.”

“May be against your regulations mate, not against ours. Anyway, you can’t tow an F-111 like that. Nose is too long and the weight distribution won’t hack it. We’ve got to fly though.”

Mackay’s WSO looked appalled. “Sir, that is utter bullshit.”

“Charlie, I know that and you know that but do you think the liability-obsessed septic down there knows that? Its been almost twenty years since the USAF mothballed it’s Pigs, that kid wasn’t even a lecherous gleam in his father’s eyes back then. He’s not going to take the chance of these birds getting damaged on his say-so. He’ll let us go through, our responsibility, you watch.”

“Koala Flight, this is Hellmouth air traffic control. At your request, you are cleared for flight transit of the Hellmouth.”

“Told you.”

The four F-111s, three strike aircraft loaded down with air-to-surface ordnance and an RF-111 with a full surveillance fit, dipped down and started to skim across the sand dunes towards the black ellipse of the Hellmouth. The book said that the ellipse was 800 feet high and 1,200 feet wide which gave the F-111s plenty of room to make their transitions. Beneath them, the desert was covered with armored vehicles, some parked in long lines, others forming convoys through the Hellmouth. The F-111s were low enough to see the commanders of the tanks and armored infantry carriers sitting in the turrets, to see them look up as the scream of the jet engines grabbed their attention. Some waved and Mackay rocked his wings in response.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” Charlie Cartwright was awed by the armored vista spread out beneath him.

“Nobody has, not since the Second World War and not so often then. Every armored formation in the world must be closing in on this place. That’s the pattern, armor comes here, infantry stays at home to protect the people back there. You see the roads and pipelines being built as we came in? Hold one, here we go.”

The ellipse was approaching with frightening speed but Mackay wasn’t aware of having passed through it. The blue sky and brilliant yellow sun had simply gone, replaced by the murky redness of the Hell environment. Mackay could feel the engines starting to labor as they gulped air through the filters that kept the worst of the dust out. The Pig was shaking slightly as the filters vibrated in the airflow, casting off the dust before it could choke them.

“Watch those engine temperatures like a hawk Charlie. If they start to climb, we’re out of here. You got the nav beacons?”

“Both of them. Realigning navigation computer now.” One of the purposes of this flight was to establish a comparative base between the Euclidian geometry of Earth and the non-Euclidian environment of Hell. Once that was done, navigation computers could be reprogrammed and another problem facing humans trying to fight in this, the strangest of all battlefields, would be solved. As they were all being solved, just taking one at a time.

“Koala-Three here. Cameras are rolling.”

“Roger, Koala Three. Any electronic emissions?”

“Ours. The spectrum’s full of them. Radar, comms, you name it. Nothing hostile or unidentified.”

“Friendly aircraft, this is Dysprosium Air Traffic Control. Please identify and file flight plan.”

“This is Koala Flight, three F-111C and one RF-111C on armed reconnaissance flight to Dis and the Hellpit. We’ll let you know the course as soon as we figure it out. This place just isn’t right.”

“You’re telling us Koala Flight. Good luck.”

The F-111 flight soared over the Martial Plain of Dysprosium, heading towards the Phlegethon River that represented the front line of the human advance into Hell. That advance had stopped temporarily while the infrastructure needed to support the next phase was being established. More importantly, there was a lot of evidence that a huge new Hellish Army was moving up against the troops digging in along the river. That was one of the things the aircraft had been sent in to check. In the meantime, the Russians were digging in, establishing a defense in depth. The central portion of it was underneath them now, a sea of platoon-sized strongpoints, the arcs of fire of each interlocking in a maze of death and destruction. Mackay couldn’t see them but he knew the gaps between the strongpoints were filled with minefields and razor wire. Backing the whole defense position up was the artillery. The Russian artillery didn’t have the flexibility or precision of its American equivalent but then, Mackay thought, the septics didn’t line their guns up, wheel to wheel, for 30 kilometers either.

“We’re in hostile airspace now Control.”

“We have you on radar, be advised, you are the only friendly aircraft in the area. You can take it as read, if it flies, its hostile. You’re cleared to shoot.”

“Thank you Control. Be sure to tell the air defense guys on the ground we’re here.”

“Already done Koala Flight. If they open up on you, it will be in a friendly manner.”

“Reassuring that. Charlie, warm up the AIM-9Zs. Be good if One Squadron gets the first air-to-air in Hell. Give those upstarts in Six something to chew on.”

“Koala-Three here, take a look below us. I think that’s the hostile army we were told to watch out for.”

“You think?” Beneath them, the ground was covered with demons moving towards the Phlegethon River. Far, far too many to count, they turned the ground black with their number. Some were harpies, they tried to climb and challenge the racing F-111s but they lacked the speed and the ability to climb fast enough. “Control, confirm sighting of hostile force moving on the Phlegethon. Rhinolobsters, baldricks, harpies, you name it. Better tell our Russian friends to keep their powder dry.

“Roger, wilco. For your information, its not just gunpowder they Russkies have got back there. Any sight of Dis?”

“Ahead of us now. High stone walls, as far as the eye can see which isn’t far in this clag. Looks like an old medieval castle, not the Hollywood version, the real thing. Like they have in Wales. We’re going to try and break some glass now.”

Mackay dipped his aircraft and headed for the walls of Dis. The terrain following radar was working perfectly as he skimmed the wall, barely a hundred feet over the crenellations. Inside was a town that looked something straight out the middle ages, a tight mass of buildings separated by narrow alley-like streets. There were baldricks down there, ones that looked up in stunned shock at the monsters that had suddenly crossed the wall and were screaming defiance at all around them as they passed low over the roofs. The demons stood and watched long after the Pigs had gone, awed by the sight and realizing that things were never going to be the same in Hell again.

Unconscious of having caused a spiritual crisis in Dis, Koala Flight arced over the great pit that formed the center of Hell. Mackay looked at the sight below, a supercaldera that would be a vulcanologists dream but represented all of humanities worst nightmares. His thumb itched to pick a target and release his bombs on to it but his orders were strict, fire on ground targets only in self-defense or to protect the reconnaissance aircraft. Still, he could think of the humanity that had to be suffering in the nightmarish scene below and he could promise to come back with every pound of ordnance his faithful Pig could carry. “You got all that Koala-Three?”

“Affirmative.” Koala-Three’s voice was subdued.

“Lets get out of here then.” The four F-111s made a gentle turn, trying to cover as much of Hell as possible. Mackay hoped that, down below, the souls trapped there would see them, some would know what they were and they would spread the word. Humanity was coming with every weapon it could muster and what stood now would not be allowed to stand again.

Banks of the River Styx, Fifth Circle of Hell

“My leader wants to talk, very urgently. Anywhere you wish. It is most important.” Rahab spoke earnestly, Gaius Julius Caesar had been most explicit with his instructions. These humans, living and dead, were what he had spent two millennia waiting for. A way to fight back against the monsters that ran this place.

“Important for him? Or us?”

“For us both I think. He….” Rahab stopped speaking her voice drowned out by a terrible screaming howl.

Lieutenant (deceased) Jade Kim recognized the sky-ripping sound instantly, the sound of jet fighter engines. Even as she looked up, four F-111s emerged from the overcast, their wings stretched out and loaded with bombs, lazily making a turn over Hell. Then, they were gone, on their way back home, just leaving their sound behind. Around her, the living and deceased members of the PFLH were jumping up and down, cheering and smacking each other on the back. Rahab looked at them in amazement.

“What is that terrible noise?”

Kim looked at her, her eyes dancing with joy. “That isn’t noise Rahab. That’s the sound of Freedom.”

High Peak Youth Hostel, Peak District, British Isles

As Lakheenahuknaasi emerged from the portal the first thing that hit her was the overpowering scent of a great deal of blood spilled in a confined space. The second thing was that this part of earth was unpleasantly cold. She found herself in a rather small room packed with demon infantry, whose cloven hooves continued to crunch the smashed remains of wooden furniture. This chamber and the others she could see leading off from it were littered with human corpses, most of them obviously torn apart by demon claws. She stepped lightly around them for now and addressed the squad leader.

“I see that you have not so much secured the area as painted it with human blood. Did they give you any trouble?”

“Very little.” The demon seemed unsure whether he should treat the gorgon was his superior or inferior. “One of them managed to grab a fire-spear and wounded one of my warriors before perishing.”

Lakheenahuknaasi's gaze followed his gesture. The injured demon was sitting on a broken table, in a white room that reeked of stewed vegetables. His left flank looked like a piece of wood riddled by termites, oozing green blood from numerous tiny holes. As she watched the demon yanked the heart out of a human corpse and stuffed it into his mouth. The dead man still held a fire spear in his hands; a chunk of carved wood with two short black metal rods sticking out of it.

“If you require nothing further?” Some of the demons had slung human corpses over their shoulders, undoubtedly as rations for their victory feast.

“Go. But take that fire spear with you. Baron Trajakrithoth may want to examine its enchantments.”

The demon warriors squeezed back through the portal, which promptly closed up behind them, leaving Lakheenahuknaasi alone in the human building. It seemed to be some sort of inn. with a central common area, what was presumably a kitchen (though she could see no cooking fire), indoor latrines (which appeared to have just been emptied) and several rooms full of (mostly smashed) bunks. It could have been a barracks but for the lack of weapons. A large triangular window showed a sunset obscured by clouds, painting the landscape of rolling grassy hills and forested valleys in a mix of oranges and grays. Here and there beams of golden light broke through and highlighted an outcropping or a stream. It almost looked welcoming save for the sparse flakes of snow melting on the window.

Lakheenahuknaasi could see no other buildings, but if this was an inn travelers could arrive at any moment. She made her way down the stairs, taking care not to slip on the blood still dripping from step to step. The door barring the main entrance was broken and warped; the triple indentations and the dead human woman seemingly still trying to grasp its handle bore witness to a last desperate attempt to escape. Stepping over the body, the gorgon yanked the protesting door open and slipped out onto the moors.

Sure enough, half an hour later Tom Sullivan crested the last ridge and sighted the hostel. “Ah, there it is dear.”

Trailing behind him, his fiancée Jennifer was not in the best of moods. “You said we'd be there two hours ago. This is the last time I let you plan the route.” She paused, out of breath. ”I'm never voting Labor again. If Gordon hadn't commandeered all the planes we could be in Italy right now. Tony was so much nicer.” Tom shook his head. He was beginning to have second thoughts about this relationship.

The couple made their way down the track to the building. What they saw there left both retching for a good five minutes. As soon as he'd regained his senses, Thomas reached for his mobile. He'd entered the number of the national demon sighting hotline just before they set off, almost as a joke, never expecting horror like this to come to sleepy Yorkshire. Five minutes later the first police units were dispatched to set up a perimeter and ten minutes after that the first territorial army trucks began to roll out of Worsley Barracks.

Lakheenahuknaasi had long since found a convenient cliff and launched herself into the air. There seemed to be no convenient thermals in this freezing place and she was forced to hook her arm spurs into her wings and flap strenuously for altitude. She became acutely conscious of how conspicuous her metallic bronze scales made her after the first time she flew through a shaft of sunlight and lit up like a disco ball.

Lakheenahuknaasi muttered a satanic curse and wished she'd had the foresight to cover herself in mud. She would've endured the mocking of the other gorgons if she'd known how much safer it would make her feel now. She considered trying to gain the relative safety of the clouds, but her wing and arm muscles were already tiring and she didn't want to risk accidentally over-flying the target. Instead she flew low, weaving through the valleys and trying to stay in the lengthening shadows. Though she did not know it, the decision saved her life; air defense control at RAF Boulmer began enforcing a no-fly zone over the area shortly after she descended to an area its radar could not cover. The inclement weather had kept most walkers at home and left the rest disinclined to watch the skies.

The gorgon flew an erratic course through the twisting valleys for the better part of an hour, with only her perception of the planet's strong magnetic field keeping her heading towards the target. Even using that was hard due to the sheer density of psychic emanations in this part of earth. Clearly the humans had not only learned the art of telepathy, they were using it to constantly gossip with each other. As she flew she saw several isolated farms and the occasional village visible in the distance. Not enough to concern her, but hardly the 'uninhabited wilderness' Baron Guruktarqor had described. Most puzzling were the lights that speed along the black strips, some constant yellow, some flickering white and blue. They could have been chariots bearing torches, but for their impossible speed and brightness, matching or even outpacing her own aerial progress.

Finally, as her wing and arm muscles were ready to give up she crested a hill and saw a great city laid out before her. It was lit so brightly that at first it seemed to Lakheenahuknaasi that the city was already aflame. On closer inspection however it was clear that she was seeing thousands of torches, strung on poles, shining out of windows and attached to moving carriages. This vast sprawling metropolis had to be the target. She could not see the smoke or fires of the forges yet, but that could wait. The immediate priority was avoiding detection while the portal was summoned. Lakheenahuknaasi glided down to a copse near the top of the hill, keeping the trees between herself and the city as much as possible. Once down she crawled into the undergrowth and crouched shivering under her wings. This world of humans was cold, unbearably cold.

The humans should be thanking me she thought, a nice lava lake is just what this place needs to warm it up a bit.' The gorgon began reaching out with her mind, straining to push through the barrier and contact her superiors. Immediately she was hit by the overwhelming babble of human telepaths. Most of the mind-speech was not speech at all, merely indecipherable gibberish. Some of it was comprehensible though. Curiously the humans seemed to have found a way to enchant their musical instruments to transmit their notes into the ether. Lakheenahuknaasi shook her head at the thought of wasting energy on such frivolous magery. Another particularly powerful human mage seemed to be chanting the words 'Hallam Eff Em' several times a minute, accompanied by jangling chimes. She spent a moment pondering the significance of this ritual before deciding that it must be just another symptom of human insanity.

Pushing the human transmissions aside, she broke through the barrier to contact Euryale. The force of greater demon's mind was almost overwhelming. 'This is Lakheenahuknaasi,' she reported 'the human city lies before me. I am ready to guide the portal.” Euryale's response was swift. “I am approaching Jorkastrequar now. Keep the link open and focus your thoughts on the city. They know it not, but a wave of fire is about to carry those pitiful beings straight into our domain.”

Chapter Forty Six

Outer Ring, Seventh Circle of Hell  Aeanas continued working with the file; he was nearly through. He'd been worrying it back and forth for some time now, and at last, the left prong of the trident was free. It clattered to the dirt floor of the cave where the right prong lay, leaving only the center on the weapon. Aeanas stood and hefted the weapon. It was heavy, like the doru to which he was accustomed, and the balance seemed correct on it now. It would make a passable weapon.

The warrior called Ori watched him silently. Like Aeanas, he didn't speak very much, and for this he enjoyed the man's company. He was grateful and loyal to McElroy and the others, but they prattled on like children! Perhaps Aeanas didn't want to like his new companions. Sure, they were soldiers, and they found some common ground in that, but everything about them was alien and heterodox. As a Spartan, he'd spent his entire life turning his body into a weapon; turning the doru, the xiphon, and the aspis into extensions of his body. Just by holding a weapon, his muscles knew how best to move it so that he might destroy his enemies. There was nothing else to his life but killing his enemies.

But these soldiers from the future--no, from the present--were different. They knew how to read. They spoke of music and art, and of other forms of entertainment that he could not understand. For their purported superiority to other soldiers(after all, they managed to escape where he hadn't), the fact remained: their martial prowess was not their only consideration! In that way, Aeanas thought them similar to the citizen-soldiers of the other Greek cities. Though, he mused, there was courage in that kind of man. He recalled those Thespians, those brave men who refused to abandon the Spartans at Thermopylae. The night before they all died, Aeanas recalled sharing a meal with a Thespian named Polyphanes, who was by trade an architect. And the morning before the final battle, he and Polyphanes traded cloaks, and was proud to have died with that man's cloak upon his shoulders.

But everything about these soldiers was different. Much of what they said was barely comprehensible, anyway. Whatever magic allowed him to understand their speech was somehow flawed, and much of their slang was indecipherable for him. But perhaps most oddly, these alleged soldiers didn't know how to fight with a sword or spear! Well, most of them didn't. Ori was a warrior to Aeanas' liking; he was skilled in many forms of unarmed and armed combat. He had received one of his native blades from the living world, and he practiced frequently. But more than that, he was an outsider, too. He trained for war and only war, so he did not care for art, or music. Like Aeanas, he couldn't even read. Ori stepped closer to Aeanas and held out his hand. Aeanas passed him the weapon. Ori tried a few maneuvers with it, then passed it back to Aeanas with a grunt.

"Graceless," he muttered. "The weapon should bend around your body."

"Why?" Aeanas asked. "A bent spear is useless to the phalanx."

"What is that?"

"It is how we fight...how we fought," he corrected, casting a glance of disdain at the modern humans nearby. "Heavy armor, large shields. Shoulder to shoulder, four ranks deep." He mimicked the pose of a man in the first row. "Make a wall of shields and spearpoints, and break your enemy upon them. Never let a gap open up in your line."

"A phalanx," Ori said, stroking his beard thoughtfully. "How many men wide?"

"As wide as possible. Prevents flanking." They were silent for a moment. "And how did you fight?"

"Many ways. Sometimes I would ride and shoot my bow, or charge with a spear. Others I would simply fight with my katana."

Aeanas held his hand out, and Ori stiffened for a moment. Then, silently, he passed him the weapon. Drawing it out from its sheath, Aeanas commented, "A longer sword. And single edged. Must be made of iron, yes?" Ori grunted in the affirmative.

"So the balance would favor..." he sliced through the air, "...a two-handed grasp. You do not use a shield?"

"Not with the katana. I can parry and counterstrike to great effect with it."

Aeanas nodded, passing back the katana. "I hope to see you slay a demon with it soon."

They were silent for a moment. "And you are proficient in unarmed combat?" Ori asked.

Aeanas shrugged. "For my part, yes. I wrestle. I wrestled."

"I too, grappled. We must spar some time. To test our styles against the other."

Aeanas smiled at this. "It would be a privilege. I am sure you will be more engaging than the others. I threw McElroy as through he were a woman!"

Ori suppressed a laugh. "Yes, they are soft creatures, made so by their infernal weapons. Why need they fight honorably when they can strike you down from a great distance? They're so weak that they may count women as soldiers!"

"Hey, baby dick!" snapped Private Cassidy, skin newly grown, stepping in close to them. "You got a problem with me?"

Ori frowned. Aeanas thought that, wherever this Japan was, their men did not suffer the barbed tongues of their women. But they were a long way from Japan, so...

Ori grunted, "I was discussing with Aeanas the weaknesses of modern men, and how they compensate for this weakness through weapons requiring such little strength and courage that even women can wield them."

"Man, shut the hell up," Cassidy snarled, crossing her arms over her ample breasts. Aeanas thought them unappealing things, the breasts of a peasant woman with a litter of babes to feed. "If it weren't for those weapons, you'd still be cooking in that river!" For a moment, Aeanas thought that Ori would strike her, but the moment passed quickly.

"Alright, can it, you guys," McElroy said, stepping in. "Ori, take your sword and go with DeVanzo and Walsch down to the river. Walsch, you got the rifle." He turned to Aeanas. "Come on, hoss. You, Cassidy, and I are gonna go check out that cluster of villages on the other side of the northern ridge. You can bring your new spear if you want, but I dunno if these things are worth a damn against baldricks." He hefted his own trident, adding, "Better than nothing, though."

From the cover of the forest's edge, they watched the sloping grade down to the river. And waited. For Tom Walsch, it was still strange to think that millions of people were writhing in agony beneath that river at this very moment. And why were they pulling out only military? Odds were extremely low that they'd get no civilians at all. Perhaps there were only military in this molten river, civilians went to other torments. Then again, the civilian mindset was different. Persons of weak will might simply resign themselves to their torment and sink to the bottom after a few years of failed escapes. In utter misery, they would only move as reflex to the burning, sightless, deaf, pain the only sensation they knew. Military people of all types would fight, though. Futility didn't matter; that's why military history was littered with otherwise pointless last stands. It might take longer for a soldier to break the way civilians did. After all, Walsch had only been in the river for a scant few weeks before he was pulled out, and he had the benefit of hoping that his persistence would pay off. And it did.

"There's one," DeVanzo whispered. Walsch scanned the shoreline before spotting the creature. It was an act he'd seen a dozen times. It flopped like a fish for a while, and then, as it became able to breathe and see, it started crawling further up the bank. They would continue until a baldrick sentry happened along, which could mean they'd be anywhere from ten to fifty meters from the river.

This particular one made it about twenty-five before Ori grunted, "Demon. Left."

Walsch chambered a round and waited. He loved this rifle; it was simple, deadly, and accurate. Though he'd always been an excellent marksman, this thing made it almost too easy. And he had a whole box of ammo to hold them over until the next official resupply.

The baldrick was a typical sentry, sporting a trident and simple bronze armor. He bellowed, as was the wont of these sentries, and charged. The crawling creature, now looking a bit more like a human, stood up and began hobbling away.

"Alright, that's good enough for me," Walsch muttered. He lined up the shot and fired. The round took the baldrick in the throat, blowing out just about everything between his massive deltoids. Pouring blood out all over the packed, burnt earth, he stumbled, staggered, then crashed right at the feet of its target, who watched in befuddlement.

"Chump," Walsch grinned. DeVanzo clapped him on the shoulder. "Hey Ori, why don't you go finish it off, and bring the new recruit back up here, OK?"

Ori frowned, but drew his katana nonetheless and began crossing the open ground to reach his feebly-moving target. It was only seventy-five meters, but he covered it quickly and hacked the demon's head off without delay. As he did this, DeVanzo and Walsch took up a new position, fifteen meters to the north.

"Shit," DeVanzo said suddenly. "Shit shit shit, another baldrick!"

Walsch swung his rifle around. A baldrick within miles of another sentry was unheard of. The patrols were frequent enough to catch the escapees, and that was all that mattered. That's why they were able to pull this off with a single rifle and a spotter or two. They must be pairing the patrols. They're reacting to what we're doing. This baldrick was not like his now-dead partner. He did not bellow or scream. He stalked forward at an inhuman rate, raising his trident high. Ori didn't see it coming, and the rescued human was still half blind. So Tom Walsch chambered a round, took aim, and fired. The shot was hurried, but it was lucky. It winged off the baldrick's elbow, no doubt shattering bone and shredding muscle. He dropped his trident with a roar of anger and pain and stopped, looking for the source of this new attack.

"OK, Ori, time to go," DeVanzo hissed quietly. Walsch took aim and shot at the baldrick, who was now scanning the treeline. He must've spotted them, because he was in motion just before the shot rang out. Instead of catching him in the chest, he moved just enough to one side that he took the round in the upper arm--the one that had already been shot. He hit the ground hard but got back up quickly.

But Walsch was quicker. He chambered a round, aimed, fired--and nothing happened.

"Shit, misfire." Walsch groaned and worked the action of the rifle. It refused to budge. "Jammed up."

Now the baldrick had definitely spotted them, and he roared a monstrous battle cry. But before he could take a step, Ori was there, blade at the ready, bellowing his own challenge to the massive beast.

"What is he doing?" Walsch cried out, while working to clear his weapon.

"He's starting to believe," DeVanzo stated with awe. "He's The One."

"Now is not the time for Matrix jokes!" Walsch said.

The baldrick only had one good arm, but that meant he retained eighty percent of his deadly ends. He swiped at Ori, but he dodged with blinding quickness and countered with a slice. The baldrick had the sense to offer his mangled flesh, but he hadn't counted on the blade being of iron. The wound seared as the blade bit deep, and the baldrick reared back in shock, kicking at the offending creature with one foot.

Ori was already in position to meet the incoming appendage, and he held his blade firm. It passed between two toes, cutting the webbing there and carving deep into his foot. When Ori twisted the blade and wrenched it free, the baldrick couldn't help but scream. Now limping, he swiped again with his hand, catching nothing and receiving a flurry of slashes from that wretched iron blade. Ori was without pity or quarter, nor was he stylish. He opened up as many wounds as he could, as quickly as he could, until the demon was attempting to hobble away in retreat.

But there would be no retreat. Ori feigned a lateral slash, and when the baldrick made to block it, he swooped in slow and stabbed up between the plates of his armor, entering at the armpit and piercing to the heart. Ori received three horrendous lacerations across his back for it, but it didn't matter anymore. The baldrick fell to his knees, limp and defenseless. Screaming with the strength of a half a millennium of remembered agony, Ori cleaved the baldrick's head from his shoulders in two savage blows.  The entire fight had taken less than twenty seconds.

DeVanzo and Walsch looked at each other. "Mission accomplished," Walsch whispered. "Now let's get outta Dodge." The leaped from the forest, DeVanzo running to gather up the wounded Ori, and Walsch to fetch the latest rescuee. Overhead, there was a berserk scream, one that neither Ori nor Aeneas could recognize. The Americans did and they looked up with elation at the F-111s making their slow, lazy turn overhead.

Secure Facility, Camp Hell-Alpha, Martial Plain of Dysprosium.

“Got them.” The intelligence officer had the 10x12 inch prints in his hand. More were still coming over but these were the critical ones, the pictures of the Hell-pit itself. The F-111s had landed a few minutes before and the digitally-recorded pictures had been sent over by fiber-optic cable. Another sign of just how much things were changing; Hell now had computer access, or rather the human army fighting there did.

General Petraeus looked at the prints. “It’s a caldera, no doubt about it. A supervolcano caldera. Like the one that’s supposed to be under Yellowstone. Must be bigger though.”

“Yeah, size ain’t a problem for this thing. Explains the foul atmosphere of this place. That thing must be pumping the contaminants upwards. Take a look at these enlargements Sir. Shows what’s going on down there.”

Petraeus looked at the enlargements and then sharply at the third person in the room, the hulking figure of Abigor. “We knew it was bad in there, not this bad. Looks like Dante was spot-on in his description of the place though. More or less.” He paused for a second trying to regain his balance. Then, he addressed Abigor. “How could you, how could anybody do this?”

“We must.” Abigor’s voice was unapologetic. “Our survival depends on it. You kill lower animals to eat, to provide yourselves with food. This is no different, to us you are, were, lower animals to be exploited. So we exploited you to fill our needs.”

Petraeus reflected that Abigor was going to have to be very careful how he spoke in future. Otherwise he wasn’t going to survive much longer. There was an old Western custom involving a tree and a rope that was likely to be reborn. “This isn’t farming for food. This is just inflicting suffering for the sheer joy of it.”

“We do not eat your kind just for food although your kidlings are great delicacies.”

Yup thought Petraeus, he was going to have to be much more careful. “Then why?”

“Because we need the energy. When you humans live, you build up energy in your bodies. When you die, that energy boosts you up from your level to ours. But the energy barrier that separates us from the next level up is much stronger than the one that separates your level from ours. We need much more energy to cross it, energy we generate by prolonging the second deaths of your kind.”

“How do you know this?” Petraeus was genuinely curious, for the first time he was getting a real insight into the mind of Humanity’s greatest enemy.

“Because Satan told us so. Yahweh harvests energy as well for the same reason only he gathers his by making his subjects worship him. He gets the power from devotion.”

“Like the Ori.” The Intelligence officer was an avid Stargate fan.

Petraeus wasn’t but he still got the reference. “And that makes the baldricks like the Goa’uld I suppose. Abigor, you didn’t answer my question. How do you know this?”

“Because it is so. It has always been so. We must harvest energy to cross the barrier to the afterlife. Satan has us do so by the torments of the pit, Yahweh by demanding unending worship.”

“But that doesn’t make any kind of sense. How can two such totally different approaches yield the results you demand? It just doesn’t make sense.” The frustration was creeping through into Petraeus’s voice.

“As I said, it is what Yahweh and Satan both said. Why should they lie? They are Gods, they demand faith,”

“And I’m a General, I demand firepower. And we’ve seen what happens when your faith meets my firepower. The truth is Abigor, you don’t know any of this. You’ve got no proof for any of it. You’ve been sold a bill of goods, just like we were for so many thousands of years. You’ve been fooled, just like we were.”

Abigor stared at the pictures taken by the RF-111C, thoughts churning in his mind. He’d never thought this through before, those to whom he owed allegiance had demanded he accept their words and he had. But now he owed allegiance to humans and humans demanded proof. Those were their eternal replies when somebody claimed something. ‘Prove it.’ “How do you know?’ ‘What’s your proof?’ “If you can’t prove it, then it isn’t so.’ And the answer he could give to all those was ‘I can’t.’ For everything he believed was unproven. And that meant so many things.

Abigor spoke very slowly as the words formed in his mind, breaking the mental blocks of millennia. “No, I don’t know any of this. I just believed it. And if my belief was false.” His great clawed hand waved over the pictures. “Then all of this, all of it, was for nothing.

Chapter Forty Seven

Sheffield Cathedral, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Lakheenahuknaasi flapped clumsily over the vast human metropolis, making her way to the place where she could sense the half-open portal pushing gently against the fabric of this plane. She was freezing, aching and frustrated. The city was supposed to be a great engine of industry, but she could see no great fires or forges, nor could she hear the ringing of hammers on anvils. Instead there was an endless jumble of tightly packed stone buildings, tiny ones with peaked roofs and much larger boxy ones. Ahead, surrounding the place where the portal was lodged great towers thrust into the sky. Impossibly, many of them seemed to be made out of glass. No; as she got closer, Lakheenahuknaasi sensed that they had skeletons of iron. She shuddered. Humans were far too fond of iron.

The gorgon sited the spot where the embryonic portal was floating and smiled faintly at the irony. Invisible to the naked eye in its current state, the inter-dimensional nexus was hovering perhaps a hundred yards above a large temple to Yahweh, the walls of which were awash with the light of human magic. Lakeenah blinked. What she had taken to be an outbuilding next to the temple revealed itself to be a giant metal snake. As she watched it whined loudly and began to hauled its segmented bulk away into the city. At this point she had ceased even trying to comprehend the purpose behind the bizarre human constructs.

In truth she was not sure where else to put the portal. The horrid snow had stopped, but the low clouds and mist had kept visibility down to a couple of miles. She had risked one quick, wide circle around the temple and spied a few structures that appeared to be large chimneys, but no smoke issued from them. Lakeenah settled on destroying as many of the huge towers as possible. They seemed more like palaces than castles; undoubtedly they were occupied by the city's elite, the overseers and the most skilled artisans. Even this was not straightforward. The terrain was quite hilly and if she placed the portal in the wrong spot the lava might flow around the towers without destroying them. She settled on a monolithic black tower that stood proudly above and a little apart from the rest. It was sited on a low hill and at the top of a slight groove, which she hoped would act as a channel leading straight to the rest of the towers.

Lakheenahuknaasi finished her approach and began a slow descending glide over the temple. Bracing herself for the pain, she prepared to reach out with her psychic power to grasp the nexus. The familiar stinging sensation washed over her wings and suddenly she had it. Pumping her wings with grim determination, she strained to drag the nexus away from the temple. Immediately she could feel her queen's powerful presence.

“I have it. I am moving the nexus... into position.” Lakheenahuknaasi exclaimed, with the mental equivalent of a gasp.

Euryale replied with a curt “Good. Do not fail me now.”

Lakheenahuknaasi sensed the portal swelling as the naga back in Hell poured energy into it. She had the target in sight, but it seemed agonizingly far away. The pent up psychic force was building to monstrous proportions and she had to switch from 'pulling' the nexus to 'pushing' against it to prevent it opening prematurely. At last she was almost over the tower.

“Ready!” she shouted into the ether, hoping Euryale sensed her over the human din and howling energy of the portal itself. She released the nexus, half-folded her wings and dropped away from the tower, racing to escape the literal piece of hell that was about to be unleashed.

MD-902 G-SYPS (South Yorkshire Police Air Support Unit)

Peter Taranaski swung the helicopter around in a lazy semi-circle, ready for another slow pass over Hillsborough. Police work didn't pay well, but it was a lot more interesting than playing air taxi to overpaid executives or spending all day creeping along power lines. Better yet, there was the regular thrill of accomplishing the mission, protecting the public and nabbing the bad guys. Back in the army air corps, it had mostly been an endless series of make-believe exercises. Even in weather like this, he was usually eager to take to the Explorer up, but when the scramble order came through he was expecting yet another false alarm. Now that command had confirmed baldrick activity in the peaks the tension in the cabin was palpable.

In the left seat Sergeant Oliver Webster was staring intently at his main monitor, which was showing a thermal image of the streets below. The younger man had quickly gained a reputation for competence and calmly directing ground units through crisis situations. In Pete's opinion though, the sergeant took life a bit too seriously; in particular, his jokes were usually met with a disapproving silence. That was one good thing about the war; the second observer position had been replaced by a couple of heavily armed squaddies, who did seem to appreciated his one-liners.

The RT crackled. “Sierra Yankee Nine Nine, new baldrick sighting reported, single flyer low over the town hall, over.”

Webster was quick to respond. “Acknowledged. We'll head over there now. We've covered Hillsborough twice now, nothing to report.” His voice continued over the intercom “Peter, I'd like an orbit of the ring road.”

“Confirmed.” Pete eased the cyclic forward and the aircraft began to pick up speed until it was holding 60 knots. ”I'll take it easy. No sense wasting fuel.”

He looked over at Sergeant Webster, who nodded. Other units were scouring the Peaks for baldrick invaders, they were tasked with rapid response should the demons slip through the net to populated area. That meant maximizing endurance, as they'd do no good if they were down for refueling when the baldricks went on a rampage.

“Sierra Yankee Nine Nine, make that multiple sightings, at least one baldrick over Pond's Forge, priority one, over.”

“Roger control, on our way.” Webster replied. Pete had already dipped the nose and the MD 902 leapt forward, speeding towards the city centre. He cut in on the RT “Have ATC got a blip this time? Over.”

There was a long silence. “Ah, negative Sierra Yankee. They've got some kind of interference though. Radar cover is compromised.”

Sergeant Webster had zoomed the IR camera and had a pulsating speck centered on his monitor. As the helicopter drew closer it took a form reminiscent of a giant long-legged bat. “Baldrick sighted! Single flyer at 600 feet AGL, heading west from cathedral, over.”

The reply was immediate and emphatic. “Say again Sierra Yankee, one baldrick flyer over central Sheffield? We've lost your telemetry.”

Pete had a visual on the baldrick and was maneuvering the helicopter into its rear quarter, staying well back. The Explorer was quieter than most helicopters, primarily due to its lack of a tail rotor, but he was still under no illusions that the baldrick couldn't hear them. He just didn't want to force a confrontation until they were ready.

“Affirmative, baldrick flyer proceeding west towards university at about 50 knots. It's a small one...” Webster's voice trailed off. He had switched back to visual and noticed that the demons wings were glowing with a ghostly blue-white light. Worse, the air beneath the creature was shimmering, as if by heat haze. What the devil was it up to?

“Ack... ledged... alert... intercept com... def..” The duty officer's voice distorted and dropped out. Sergeant Webster flipped channels but the error indicator on the radio panel wouldn't go out. It had to be whatever the demon was doing, if the radar was affected too. Time to make a judgment call.

“Peter, take us up over it for a shot.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Corporal, you're up. Take it down.”

The two riflemen were ready for the order and sprang immediately into action. Private Hughes slammed back the door, while Corporal Sinker heaved his AS50 anti-material rifle onto the pintle mount. The target was easy to make out despite the fog, with the bright glow emanating from its wings... but then the light suddenly went out and the bat-like shape veered off and dropped away. Sinker put his eye to the scope, hoping to line up a shot before the helo started changing position... and then recoiled from a sudden, overpowering rush of heat and light. An impossibly deep, deafeningly loud roar had a moment to pound his ears before the helicopter was sucked into the maelstrom.

The University of Sheffield, 11:26pm GMT

The Arts Tower was a Sheffield landmark, a striking twenty-one story monolith built in the early sixties and still the tallest university building in the British Isles. The midnight black disc of the portal swelled into existence almost directly above the tower, appearing for all the world like a flying saucer from a low-budget sci-fi movie. In the space of an eye-blink a glowing stream of magma had burst out from the disc’s lower surface and begun to plummet towards the building, while from the upper surface a fountain of liquid rock sprayed into the air. A full four seconds passed as the magma blossomed in mid-air; those few onlookers that survived would later report being transfixed by the deadly beauty of the scene. Then the crushing stream smashed into the tower’s west side, driving it into the ground and exploding the opposite side in a spray of fire and shrapnel.

The shockwave created by the magma hitting the ground smashed windows and ruptured eardrums out to over a kilometer. The gas entrained within the rock erupted from confinement, sending clouds of shoking vapor across the city. Half-powered by the gas, half powered by the sheer kinetic energy of the fall, liquid rock splashed out from the impact site, smashing into the lesser tower blocks surrounding the impact point, which immediately began to collapse. After another four seconds the canopy of glowing projectiles formed from the upper spray began to impact on the surrounding area with the force of thousand-pound bombs. The campus vanished into a huge cloud of dust, lit from within by the hellish light of the magma stream. Thousands of tonnes of rock continued to slam into the impact site every second, creating a roar that outclassed even a Saturn rocket launch. The relatively soft ground shook and slipped under the onslaught, leading to further collapses as buildings further out were hit by the deadly combination of tremors and projectiles.

MD 902 G-SYPS

Private Jamie Hughes was being battered by noise, light and g-forces beyond anything his worst nightmares had imagined. After the initial lurch the helicopter had spiralled out of control, shaking as shrapnel hit the fuselage. At first his only thought was to hang on and prepare for a likely fatal impact. Finally the aircraft began to stabilize and he could fight through the shock to assess on the situation in the cabin. Corporal Sinker was down, sprawled on the deck and unmoving. A massive pillar of fire and smoke filled the port windows. Jamie’s first thought was ‘nuclear bomb’, but surely they’d been too close to survive a nuke going off?

He was about to check his C.O.’s wounds when he spotted a flash of movement through the open door. As he struggled to focus the bronze glint resolved itself into the shape of the Baldrick flyer, flapping furiously to escape the destruction it had wrought. Oliver’s mind filled instantly with rage and a determination not to let that bastard get away. Leaning over the corporal’s body, he grabbed the AS50 and swung it up to firing position. The helo continued to shake and buck, making it almost impossible to keep the fleeing baldrick in the sights. Private Hughes knew he had only seconds to make the shot, so he let fly with five rounds rapid. The first one went wide, the second should’ve hit but had no visible effect, then the third one went wide again as the helo started to shudder. Somehow he managed to bring the rifle back on target and the last two rounds hit the creature, spraying blood visibly as he watched through the scope. That was all he saw before the floor dropped away from under him.

Meanwhile Peter Taranaski had been fighting hard to stabilize his bird, which had been thrown violently out of the flight envelope by the initial shockwave. The strong gusts and uneven thermals kept undoing his efforts – the controls didn’t seem quite right either, while all the time that pounding roar bored into his head. Glowing balls shot through the sky all around them and he flinched repeatedly at the near misses. Finally he managed to get the Explorer back into level flight, but they’d lost most of their altitude and airspeed.

“Sergeant? Sergeant!? Corporal!!?” There was no response over the intercom, so he tore his eyes away from the instruments and glanced over at the observer’s position. Sergeant Webster was slumped forward in his seat, seemingly unconscious, but what struck him cold was the sight through the window. Some kind of massive explosion had obliterated the university and fingers of glowing lava were streaming out from the base of the smoke column. They had to get out of here, now. Peter began to pull the bird up and away from the inferno, yanking the collective just as the helicopter entered a powerful updraft created by the lava flow. The swirling air quickly formed into a vortex ring, stalling the rotors as the helicopter literally lost its grip on the air. The Explorer rolled sideways and began to plummet towards the ground.

A moment’s hesitation would have been instantly fatal, but fortunately Peter had encountered this problem twice before, in a combat landing exercises. He shoved the cyclic forwards, trading his precious remaining altitude for speed in a desperate attempt to escape regain lift. He succeeded, but it was already too late to avoid his pressing appointment with the ground. The Explorer skimmed over a half-completed apartment block then ploughed into the corrugated metal roof of a small tow-bar factory.

‘PINDAR’, under the MoD Main Building, Whitehall, London.

The Prime Minister strode briskly through the underground corridor. He’d retired to Number 10 after the initial searches had turned up nothing, but in truth he’d only been napping. He wasn’t ready to believe that the demons had simply retreated after their slaughter, and it would seem that his instincts were correct.

“It’s Sheffield sir,” the aide next to him said, “some kind of massive incendiary attack. Reports of fires burning out of control and of buildings collapsing. No baldricks though.”

Gordon Brown didn’t bother asking her to elaborate, as the situation room was just ahead. He spotted Lord West across the room – the Secretary for Defence probably hadn’t left since the initial attack – along with several other cabinet members. The screens showed images of fire, brimstone and digital maps with conspicuous red outlines superimposed on them.

“How bad is it Admiral?”

“Prime Minister. In short, the Baldricks have hit Sheffield with a weapon of mass destruction, based on their portal capability. We’re looking at a total loss of the city centre, severe damage out to three miles and significant damage to the surrounding areas.”

The PM’s expression was grim. “Comparable to a sub-strategic nuclear yield?” The scenario seemed familiar somehow, but he couldn’t place the source of the déjà vu.

“Not exactly sir. We had one piece of luck, a police helicopter caught the deployment on video.” Lord West nodded to the comms officer, who touched a control. A pair of images appeared on a large screen, documenting G-SYPS’s initial encounter with the Baldrick.

“Right is natural color, left is the thermal image. They intercepted the demon over the cathedral, don’t know if that was significant.”

The PM was staring at the Baldrick. It looked like a grotesque cross between a woman and a bat, with bronze skin and no visible arms. There was something odd about its hair… and its wings had started to glow.

The image began to show streaks and speckles. Lord West continued to narrate. “Intercept control lost radar coverage over the city shortly before the intercept. Radio contact with the helicopter was lost about now.” The buildings began to recede and the angle shifted. “They’re maneuvering for a shot. A little too late, unfortunately…”

The baldrick suddenly closed its wings and fell away, leaving a tower block in the centre of the frame. The image flared; the visual camera quickly recovered to show a blossoming orange firework, while the thermal image stayed whited out. The room was silent as the cascade of magma obliterated the buildings below. Then the image spun crazily before blanking out.

“The helicopter went down?”

The voice came from behind him but it was one the PM had become tiresomely familiar with. Sure enough, Deputy Prime Minister David Cameron was standing behind him.

“Actually no, though it was a close thing.” As if on cue, the video switched to showing a panoramic aerial view of the destruction. “They recorded this before they had to return to base. We’ve established that the burst height was a little over eight hundred feet. Portal diameter is about fifty feet, and the damn thing hasn’t shown any sign of closing yet.”

Threads. That was it. An old BBC documentary, about Sheffield’s destruction during a nuclear war. Gordon pushed the trivia out of his mind, but not before thinking well, at least things aren’t that bad.

"Casualties?"

"We're guessing at the moment, but I'd be surprised if we take less than ten thousand fatalities. Still, it could've been much worse. That figure would be tripled if the attack had come at noon instead of midnight."

And that was our safest Labour seat the Prime Minister thought grimly.

“What’s our response so far?”

“We’ve got fighters up Sir. Tornados patrolling and some Hawks. They’re trainers but they’ve always had a war-emergency point defense role. They’re carrying a gun pod we’ve had in storage ever since the Phantoms were phased out.”

“Tornados? Hawks? What happened to the Typhoons? For all the money those things cost us….”

“They’re out in Iraq Sir. Anyway, the Home Guard is being mobilized and we’re moving in. With that portal still open, we’ll have to be damned careful. The explosion did one hell of a lot of damage and if there’s another, we could lose all our first responders. Casualties? Quite apart from the numbers issue, we’ve got the lot. Severe burns, blunt force trauma, gas poisoning, you name it. The baldricks didn’t hit us with a nuke but they might as well have done. First priority is to get the scene cordoned off…”

He was interrupted by the telephone ringing. One of the aides picked it up and spoke for a few seconds. “Sir, I have Dublin on the line. They’ve picked up the news, probably intercept of the transmissions we’ve been watching. The Dublin Fire Brigade is already on its way. A ferry is being held for them.”

“Word’s out then. Didn’t take long did it. Have we any more data to give out.”

“No Sir. We’ll be getting download from a Keyhole fairly shortly but that’s all we can expect. All our good stuff is out in Iraq or on its way there. We can get a Nimrod down but it’ll take time.”

“I thought BAE Systems had killed off our Nimrod fleet?”

“Not all of them sir. Just the ones they ‘upgraded’. The old ones are still flyable.” The phone rang again. “Its Norway, Sir. They got the news about the attack but no more than that. They say, whatever they’ve got and we want we can have.”

“Nice of them. Still no theories on why Sheffield was the target? Ground zero was the university, were they doing anything important?”

“Nothing credible Prime Minister. I checked the university… their materials department did some engineering work on the new HEAD shells, but that’s all.”

Another cold war memory bobbed unbidden into Brown’s mind; a novel in which the Russians had destroyed Birmingham with a single ICBM, then tried to sue for terms. Bad end to a good book… he couldn’t remember the title. No matter, it was a plausible scenario here. The attack might be a carefully judged attempt by Satan to demonstrate his power before opening negotiations. But it was also plausible that Sheffield was just unlucky, and that more strikes would follow as fast as the demons could manage.

“We have to know why and more importantly if, when and where the next strike will be. What about that demon general the Americans captured? If he’s supposed to be on our side why didn’t he bother to warn us about this?”

“You’ll have to ask the Americans that Sir, he’s in their hands.”

“We’ll do just that. Mr. Cameron, if you could call the White House and the Kremlin please, I’ll want a video conference ASAP.” Brown was more inclined to assign the twit to making tea, but alas one had to accommodate political realities.

(Hats off to Starglider who did this bit (all the Belial/Lava attack parts are his).

Chapter Forty Eight

'The Cavendish”, West Street, Central Sheffield

Alex Malcolm had saved up two week's worth of alcohol rations for the pub crawl, and he was determined to use them all before the night was over. University life hadn't changed that much, at least not for the engineering students. They'd all had to join the cadets and that meant weekends wasted on the firing range and the drill ground, but that was all. Not like the humanities students, most of whom had been evicted from the halls of residence and drafted. In their place were throngs of 'mature students' being pushed through the new short technical and medical courses. In Alex's mind the humanities students were no big loss, it's not as if they were doing real degrees anyway, though the replacement of all those hot young psychology girls with boring ugly ex-call-center workers was a crying shame.

Alex downed his sixth pint and lurched to his feet. "Back in a sec, mates." he slurred, as he made his way unsteadily to the men's restroom. Half way through the process of relieving himself, the world exploded into noise and darkness.

He'd fallen against the wall, bruising his head against the pipe-work. Pain flashed across his back; he instinctively reached over to feel the wound and his hand closed around the chunk of broken glass embedded there. He pulled it out, slicing his hand open in the process. The lights were out, the windows were smashed and the whole building was shaking. Alex had only one explanation for this, earthquake, but how could an earthquake on this scale happen in England? Screams began to ring out over the rumbling and roaring, multiplying as the panic spread. Adrenaline coursed through his system, fighting the alcohol to get him moving. He had to get out of here, the earthquake was showing no sign of abating and the whole building could come down on him. He barreled forward down the corridor out of the lavatories, dripping blood and urine, and emerged into a scene of utter chaos.

Over a hundred drunken pub-goers were trying to force themselves through the building's two exits, screaming , shouting, punching and kicking at each other. The scene was lit only by a glowing orange light streaming in through the windows. Alex couldn't understand why the earthquake was making people so desperate that they'd risk being crushed to death… wait, was that light coming from a fire? He tried to jogged over to the windows, but caught his foot on an overturned stool and went crashing to the ground. Ignoring the fresh bruises, he hauled himself up and stared in horror at the scene outside. A wall of glowing lava over a meter high was advancing inexorably down the street, surrounded by flames and smoke from the burning buildings and crowned by the twisted wrecks of cars being carried along by the flow.

Another crash, this one startlingly close. Someone had thrown a chair through the next window along, carrying most of the broken glass and wooden dividers out into the street. He turned in time to see two of his mates leap through the window. There was no time for thoughts of rescuing others, he'd be lucky to save himself. Alex clambered out through the shattered window, heedless of the fresh cuts to his hands, and recoiled from the blast of heat that scorched his skin. He began to jog away from the lava, towards the city centre, but he made one crucial mistake; he looking back. The lava flow had accelerated as more rock poured into the channel, and the intense heat seemed to scorch his eyes. The world dissolved into pain as he tripped on a kerb and fell sprawling. The only mercy was that his suffering lasted only seconds before the lava washed over him. Well, that part of his suffering anyway. As everybody now knew, death was only a temporary respite.

MD 902 G-SYPS

Sergeant Webster groaned as he fought his way back to consciousness. His head throbbed with pain, which the pounding roar and ragged whine were only exacerbating. He forced his eyes open. The forward cockpit canopy was a crazy patchwork of cracks and holes. The helicopter seemed to have landed on a building… no, it was partially embedded in a saw-tooth roof. The rotors were still turning; the pilot was fiddling with the flight controls, but far from shutting down, he seemed to be trying to start one of the engines.

"Taranaski? What are you doing? We have to bail out."

Private Hughes' voice answered over the intercom. "Sir, Corporal Sinker has concussion and I think a dislocated shoulder. I broke my leg in the crash. There's no way we can make it before… well… look to your right."

Sergeant Webster twisted around to look behind the aircraft. The whole area was shrouded in smoke and flames, but one thing stood out very clearly; the river of lava pouring down the hill towards them. They weren't in its direct path, but that small mercy could buy them only minutes at best.

The whine from above intensified and took on a discordant, surging character. "Got it" yelled Taranaski. "Port turbine spooling up, hang on, I'm trying it again."

Peter waited for the rotor RPMs to build to the maximum then eased back on the collective. The Explorer trembled and began to lift. The crew could barely hear the cracks and squeals of strained metal over the din as the bird struggled to free herself from the twisted metal roof supports. The cabin tilted backwards and then halted, shuddering.

Private Hughes pulled himself over to the gaping opening in the side of the aircraft; the door had been ripped off in the crash. Leaning out into the ferocious downwash, he could see the problem clearly. "It's no good sir. The skids are wedged in good. The forward struts have snapped but the rear ones are holding us fast." He looked up just in time to see another of the glowing rocks slam into a nearby apartment block, shattering the few remaining windows and starting fires across several floors.

He had to cut through those struts. What tools did he have? Just one. Jamie reached for a spare .50 cal magazine.

Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Western Sheffield

Rebecca Burdett stared out through the empty window frame at the vast lake of smoking lava that mere minutes before had been the university campus. From her vantage point on the seventeenth floor she could see countless human forms running, staggering and crawling away from the inferno. Everwhere she looked people were dying, caught by the flames, collapsing under the heat or obliterated by a flaming boulder.

She turned away. There was no doubt about it, the hospital had to be abandoned. The lava seemed to be flowing away from them for now, but several of the hospital buildings had been hit by the boulders and looked ready to collapse. The ground fires were advancing steadily despite the inrushing air and the earthquake showed no signs of abating.

The fire alarm was already blaring, but the nurses she could see were still transfixed by the scene outside. "Snap out of it! We have to move!" Rebecca sprinted through the ward to the reception area, where she snatched up the microphone for the P.A. system.

"Everyone, your attention please. This is Matron Burdett. The hospital must be evacuated as quickly and calmly as possible." She delivered the words with a slightly eerie calm. "Patients, if you can walk, go to the lobby area via the stairwells, do not use the lifts. Otherwise please wait for a member of staff to assist you. Do not leave the building. Transport will be arranged."

Rebecca clicked the microphone off, then pulled out her phone and punched the button for reception. The extension for reception was busy, of course. Cursing, she dived into the stairwell, pushing past the throngs of people that built up steadily as she descended. By the time she emerged into the lobby it was already packed with shouting and screaming patients.

"PLEASE REMAIN CALM" she shouted, in a tone that did not sound like a request. "THERE IS NO IMMEDIATE DANGER." Not really true but it seemed to placate the crowd for now. "Non-critical patients, move in an orderly fashion to the car park. We don't have nearly enough ambulances for you all so we'll be using private cars."

She finally made it to the reception desk. David was usually pretty competent but he seemed ready to have a nervous breakdown. "Rebecca, thank…" He caught himself.

"What the hell is going on?"

"Don't know. Some sort of attack, massive fires. We have to get the patients out, that's all that matters."

"I tried to call Northern General but I couldn't get…"

"Forget it. They're probably in the same boat as us, or will be soon. Now take Tracy, Mark and anyone else you find on the way and get to the car park. I don't want anyone leaving without a full load of patients. Tell them to go straight to Manchester."

"Manchester? But…"

Rebecca grabbed the man's shoulders. "There's massive casualties out there. Everyone local will be overwhelmed. Now get moving."

She grabbed the phone from David's hand as he stumbled away and searched through the memory for the number she needed. "Whitworth? This is Matron Burdett at Royal Hallamshire. We've got a huge… explosion in Sheffield, we have to evacuate. I'm sending our intensive care patients to you… yes I know you don't have the capacity… you'll have to turn them out… no, listen, this is a gold-level disaster. No, I don't know who… look, I'm sure they'll contact you shortly. Meanwhile people are dying here. You are going to send every ambulance you have to Sheffield and you are going to do it now, understand? Good."

MD 902 G-SYPS

"Control this is Sierra Yankee Nine Nine do you copy? Over."

Sergeant Webster was still trying to get the radio working. Meanwhile Private Hughes struggled to find a position in which he could get a shot at the rear support strut. He could see the target clearly enough, it was buried in a tangle of metal half a meter beneath the door sill, but with his broken leg there was just no way to aim the heavy rifle at it from inside the cabin. He considered shooting through the airframe, the AS50 undoubtedly had the power to punch through, but he'd be firing blind and in any case he was pretty sure the main fuel tank was under the cabin. Bad idea.

"Control this is Sierra Yankee Nine Nine do you copy? Over."

"Oliver! I copy. What the blazes is going on? First we thought we'd lost you, then we got a report you’d landed at Sheffield City Heliport. Everything has dropped in the pot here, nobody knows what is happening. Just what is your status, over?" The communications channels were clearing and the response from the command centre at Atlas Court included the alarms and a commotion of voices in the background.

"We were knocked down by the blast, my bird is seriously damaged. Can you see what's happening out here? Over."

"Confirmed, we're seeing it over CCTV, hell we can see it out the windows. We're preparing to evacuate, at this rate the lava will be here in less than half an hour. Are you airworthy over?"

"Negative control, we're stuck in a roof, the lava is about to surround the building. Need a pick-up urgently, Over."

There was a slight pause before the duty officer responded. "Sierra Yankee, army choppers are inbound but the closest is still ten minutes out. Over."

"Acknowledged control." Sergeant Webster hadn't expected anything else. Every commander would be in triage mode now and plucking a helicopter crew off the top of a doomed building wasn't a high priority. "Situation understood. Sierra Yankee Nine Nine out."

Private Hughes had been listening to the exchange and cut in over the intercom. "Sir, I think I can free the helo but I'll have to climb out onto the roof."

Webster gave it only a moment's consideration; there was no viable alternative. "Roger Private, we'll hover until you're back on board."

Jamie unplugged his headset and clambered out onto the twisted girders, gritting his teeth at the pain that flared in his leg. The metal was hot to the touch and the blistering heat and swirling smoke was making it increasingly hard to see or breathe. Once he'd steadied himself he grabbed the heavy rifle from the helicopter and began to work himself into a braced position. The pilot was watching him through the cockpit side window; Jamie give him the thumbs up and the engine noise intensified, as the helicopter once more struggled to lift off.

There it was, the near-side support strut clearly visible now that the helicopter's belly was clear of the corrugated iron roofing. He pulled the scope off the rail and lined up the AS50 with the iron sights, bracing it against a girder. Two sharp cracks and the job was done, the .50 caliber rounds shredding the aluminum alloy tube. The helicopter lurched upward again and shuddered, straining against the last remaining strut. Jamie struggled to maintain his balance as the roof started to collapse, chunks of metal tumbling down into the building below. A fresh wave of heat hit him and with horror he realized that the lava was already pouring into the building. Jamie swung the heavy rifle around and unloaded his last three rounds into the tangle of metal around the back of the remaining skid.

The recoil was the final straw for the critically weakened factory roof. With a shrieking groan the entire section collapsed into the burning interior. With both skids now sheered off the Explorer leapt upwards into the sky, climbing away from the collapsing ruin. The last thing Private Hughes saw was the underside of the helicopter vanishing into the sky.

South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue HQ, Central Sheffield

The screens in the control centre normally showed simple dots representing the incident sites. Only for the worst industrial fires did the staff have to draw rings around the affected area. Now the entire centre of the city was marked in red, and that stain was growing rapidly.

"…and a second line of firebreaks here, here and here. That should save most of Hillsborough and Stannington. The lower Rivelin valley is a write off, the best we can hope for is that it floods fast enough to save a few buildings. We'll worry about Fullwood if we get time, industrial areas take priority. Now get to it."

The sheer spectacle of the aerial volcano had convinced Chief Fire Officer Spurrier to dispense with the usual levels of escalation and go straight to damage limitation mode.

He turned to Assistant CFO Lloyd, who was co-ordinating with the other responders, category one and otherwise.

"Get anything out of Highways yet?"

"No sir, they just say they'll call me back. We'll probably have to send our own people out to the depots to get the moving."

"Do it. I'll have the authority sorted out by the time they arrive. Keep reminding the police that we need those construction sites stripped too. We'll need every earthmover we can get if we're going to box in that lava flow."

A young firefighter burst into the room, still in full heat-resistant gear. "Sirs, we can't hold it, there's just too much, we solidify one stream and it comes at us from another direction. We've got to pull back."

CFO Spurrier sighed. All that effort rebuilding the city centre into a something actually pleasant to look at, and now it was all going to be buried in basalt. Ah well. At least the EU had footed most of the bill. For brief second he pitied the baldrick who would have to explain to the bureaucrats in Brussels what had happened to their investment. Then his momentary glee faded; having to abandon his new state of the art command centre was too a hard a blow.

"Okay. Tell Scott to redeploy along the Moor and Arundel Gate. You've got to keep the southern ring road and the station open as long as you can."

"Stephen, divert everything to Mansfield Road for now, then shut down. We'll be going straight to the forward command post at the airport."

MD 902 G-SYPS

Pete began to swing the helicopter around for a pass on the factory. Private Hughes had risked everything to save them and Pete wasn't going to just leave him.

Sergeant Webster's voice came over the intercom, barely audible over the screaming engines and still omnipresent roar. "Peter, what are you doing?."

"Going back for him of course."

"Peter, he's gone. The entire building collapsed. I was watching as we took off, there was nothing we could do."

There was no response from the pilot, so Webster took the opportunity to contact control.

"Control, Sierra Yankee Nine Nine, do you copy?"

"Sierra Yankee! I copy, what's your status?"

"Airborne again, but we've taken a beating. Are you still receiving telemetry?" The camera pod on the helicopter's nose had jammed in place, but it could still transmit a picture. “We’ve got some more stuff for you.”

"Ah… roger . Sierra Yankee. Bloody hell."

The Explorer was circling slowly over central Sheffield, a position which afforded a fine view of the magma fountain, blurry but visible within the base of the rapidly forming mushroom cloud, as well as the rivers of lava consuming the town centre. Every few seconds another building would collapse, adding further haze to the scene below. "Oliver, we have to evacuate. The fires are getting close and the lava isn't far behind. Pogo one seven seven, stay up as long as you can then abort to the airport, acknowledge."

"Acknowledged. Switching to channel one seven seven. Sierra Yankee Nine Nine out."

Taranaski's voice came over he intercom and he did not sound happy. "We've got a seriously bent bird here, controls are wonky, port turbine is running very hot and I think we're leaking fuel. We should get her down Ay-Sap."

"Negative Peter. Unless you're sure she's going to drop out of the sky, we stay until we're relieved. Command have to know what's happening."

"But Sergeant, the corporal needs a medic, hell we all need…"

"Pilot. As long as we can fly, we stay until we're relieved." Webster's hard tone softened slightly. "It shouldn't be long. Now bring us around, command will need an idea of how fast the fires are spreading."

Owlerthorpe, South East Sheffield

The convoy of big Bedford trucks rolled onto the field and came to a halt one by one. As soon as each vehicle had stopped moving soldiers poured out of the rear, already in full combat gear. Overhead, the grim red column of the magma stream shone through the vast pall of smoke that surrounded it, lighting up the area in a confused, scarlet glow. Just like the descriptions of Hell that had been coming back from the troops that had entered that region. The smoke pall was spreading fast, the most obvious sign of the inferno that was devouring the city. Not the only sign of course, the constant vibrations that were running through the ground were another. They could be felt through the soles of the soldier’s boots and were enough to make hands that held binoculars shake enough to blur the image. Then again, there were other causes for hands to shake as well.

Sergeant Pottington had his orders and he knew how to execute them. He’d been a British soldier one, then he’d retired and set up a gardening business. There were plenty of houses around Sheffield where both husband and wife were working all day and didn’t have a chance to tend to the garden. There were also plenty of pensioners who were fit, healthy and bored stiff. Putting the two together had been an easy exercise for a man who’d effectively run a company of infantry. Grimly, Pottington wondered how many of his client list or workers were left. Looking at the vast pall of smoke that was covering Sheffield, not many.

“Right, you men, get the barricades across the roads. I want three volunteers, you, you and you, to get a GPMG set up to cover the blocks. Anybody who tries to run the roadblock, spray them.” Pottington looked at the stream of traffic that was building up as the population of Sheffield made a run for it. Understandable but not something that could be allowed. Men were needed to build firebreaks, construct barriers and dig ditches, try and divert the lava streams away from the industrial area to where they could do least damage. Women were needed to help the wounded and look after children. In a disaster like this there were no useless hands. He walked into the road and held up a hand in the traditional ‘stop’ sign. Traditional in the UK anyway, he’d seen films of American police giving stop signs by waving their hands around like demented organ-grinders monkeys. Hysterical load of spams Pottington thought.

A car was ignoring the ‘stop’ signal, instead it had picked up speed and was going to either intimidate him into getting out of the way or go around him. Pottington produced his pride and joy, an old Webley Mark V with a six-inch barrel. It had been his grandfather’s in the First World War and Pottington had kept it carefully hidden away during the long years of the handgun ban. Now, he had it out again and he even had the Mark III “manstopper” bullets to go with it, hollow-point rounds with a steel ball molded inside the lead to add to the effect. One round dealt with the windscreen of the approaching car very satisfactorily, shattering it and sending fragments spraying around. The car came to an abrupt halt.

“Hey what you done to me ride?” The young man driving was aggressive and aggrieved but both emotions faded when he heard the clicking of rifle bolts being drawn back.

“Commandeered it sir. Any other occupants? No? Then, Sir, we’ll have to ask you to wait here. The civil authorities will be forming work teams shortly and you’ll have the honor of being a founder member. Simmonite? Move this vehicle off the road, it’s a four-wheel drive so the Home Guard will be wanting it. Clegg, Dewhurst, move two-wheel drives off to that field over there. Park them neatly now, we don’t want to be slovenly soldiers. ”

Behind them, the traffic was backing up quickly. The soldiers quickly checked each vehicle, sending the ones likely to be useful off to one side, the rest into a field to be parked. With gasoline rationing in force, it was amazing how many vehicles were using this road, but Pottington guessed that fleeing lava meant more than conserving gasoline rations.

“Sergeant?” A new voice had spoken from behind him. “Lieutenant Batty, Home Guard. We’ve come to take over the road block when you’re ready. Midlands Command want your unit to join the rest of the regulars in case of the Baldricks trying to follow up this attack. Nobody knows what they’ll try next.

“Very good Sir. Quiet word sir, don’t hesitate to shoot if the situation demands it. It won’t take much for a panic to start here, we’ve got to keep this situation under control.”

“Understood Sergeant.” The ‘thank you’ was unspoken but there. “There’s coaches coming up to take the women and kids to a refugee center. Trucks will be coming for the men, take them back to the city. Every pair of hands needed there.”

Pottington looked at the red cloud surrounding the stream of fire and the pall that hung over the doomed city. “Did they save Park Hill Sir?”

Batty shook his head. “It’s gone. The firebreaks hung on long enough for the people to get out but the blocks have gone.”

“Ah well, suppose that’ll end the talk about what to do with them. Good luck Sir.”

“Thank you Sergeant, and the same to your men here.”

Chapter Forty Nine

Celestial Mechanics laboratory, DIMO(N), Yale, Connecticut

“…but that would still allow higher dimensional rotation of nanoscale structures, so clearly your topology cannot be correct.”

“Why is that a problem? The molecules are still confined to…”

“Chirality.” Dr Kuroneko regarded his colleague with a vaguely disappointed look. “Look it up. I am hardly a biologist, but I do know that if you flipped a significant fraction of the molecules in a human body the individual would be dead or dying within hours. Too many critical enzymes operate on only on a specific stereoisomer.”

“Oh. Well… how about…”

The conversation was interrupted by the double doors flying open and admitting a very purposeful looking army officer. “Doctors, we have an emergency. Follow me please.”

The two bemused scientists were quickly escorted to the conference room, which despite the late hour was filling up rapidly. Dr Kuroneko’s gaze was drawn straight to the main screen, which was showing a lake of fire with a great glowing fountain shooting out of it. No, not fire… lava. A waterfall of magma was pouring onto an expanse of burning rubble.

“What on earth…”

“That’s Sheffield. It’s a city of half a million or so in northern England. Or was, I’d guess its quite a bit below half a million now.”

That flat, disinterested voice again. Kuroneko looked over his shoulder, and sure enough, it was the mysterious man who had gotten the whole Star Glider project rolling. The man was either an undercover demon with powers of personal teleportation or had an uncanny knack for turning up just as the excrement was about to hit the rotary impeller.

“The Baldricks found a way to dump magma on it… at something like a million tons a minute. As yet we don’t know why that target was chosen or when they might repeat the trick. Your team is our best bet for finding a countermeasure before we lose another city.”

“You were expecting this? And just let it happen?”

“We were expecting something Doctor. It is not the mark of an intelligent person to assume that he can administer what amounts to a historic ass-kicking and not get some form of come-back. The question was never whether something would happen but what and when. We knew that we had to be able to close a portal or one day, one of them would bite us in the ass. Put the two together and we have Project Starglider. Dumping magma through a portal is an interesting concept though, it has several advantages over the way we would normally address the problem of a city we didn’t like very much.”

Kuroneko got the unpleasant feeling that he’d just seen the birth of a new part of America’s strategic arsenal. “You take this attack very lightly Sir.”

“Not in the least. I find the concept of opening a volcano directly over one of our cities to be quite disturbing. Not least because if they can do it once, they can do it again. So we can expect to see another attack like this. That raises a lot of questions for my colleagues and I to address, one of which is why they chose Sheffield and what that might tell us about future targets. But that is for us to think about, your job Doctor is to make sure there are as few of these attacks as possible.”

Dr Kuroneko realized that everyone was staring at him. He gulped, then stared at the table for a second. When he brought his head up, his eyes were hardened with determination.

“First we must understand what happened. What data have the Brits sent so far?”

Incident Command Centre, Sheffield Airport, United Kingdom

After many years of being virtually empty, Sheffield City Airport had been scheduled for closure in early 2008. The defense build-up allowed the runway to be kept open and the ILS operational for contingency use, but there was still no scheduled traffic. Now the tiny apron was packed with transport aircraft, offloading fire-trucks and earthmoving equipment before departing full of casualties on stretchers. The lava flows had crept ominously close, buffeting the approaching aircraft with thermals, but for now the wind was blowing the smoke and toxic fumes away from the site. Less than a mile off the M1 motorway and possessing a largely vacant business park, the airport was an obvious choice for the forward command centre, and control staff from all the emergency services had been streaming in all day. Not all the traffic had been civilian; the airport now featured two Rapier FSC launchers and several hastily dug machine gun emplacements.

Chief Fire Officer Howard Spurrier had been on duty for thirty hours now, but between the adrenaline and numerous cups of black coffee he hadn’t noticed his fatigue. In fact he had no choice but to stay focused on the details of the operation least the horror of it overwhelm him. He’d lost over a hundred of his own people so far, with more killed by collapsing buildings and falling rocks every hour. The other services were taking similar casualties as they risked their lives to pull civilians from the rubble. As for the city itself… well, his original calm detachment had vanished as soon as he stepped out of his doomed former command centre. The sight of whole crowds being pursued by the lava, screaming, blistering, bursting into flames before falling and being consumed by the rushing inferno… they’d all be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.

“CFO Spurrier I presume?”

He jerked his gaze from the electronic map projection and stared at the newcomer. She was tall, dark haired, casually dressed and wearing what struck him as an indecently placid expression.

“Who the hell are you?” Howard snapped.

“Keavy McManus. I’m the vulcanologist… you should’ve been told I was coming.”

Assistant CFO Colin Lloyd had spent most of the last twelve hours talking into a headset and updating the tactical picture. He cupped the microphone inside his hand for a moment and announced in a hoarse voice. “Sorry sir… slipped my mind… she’s the best available, the home secretary approved her personally.” Colin immediately went back to assigning tasks to the newly arriving units.

“You’re an academic?” Howard’s expression left no doubt that he had little time for academics telling him how to manage a disaster. “Find a desk, stay out of my way, let me know if discover anything relevant.” He turned back to the map.

Keavy strode over and stood in front of him, forcing the man to look at her. “Yes, I write papers and I teach. I’ve also helped plan relief and containment operations in Hawaii, Iceland and Italy. I probably have more practical experience with lava flows than anyone in Britain – and you have none, so you’d better start listening to me.”

Howard blinked. “Ok then, Miss McManus.” He pointed at the map. “We’re trying to use the Don valley to pipe the lava through the central industrial area. The plan is to turn the Meadowhall region into a cooling pond…”

Keavy cut him short. “I know, I brought myself up to date on the plane, they emailed me all this stuff. You’re not thinking long term enough though. I assume you want to save the motorway viaduct if possible?”

“Yes, and the new rail freight terminal, they’re finally rebuilding the Tinsley marshalling yard you know…” Even after all the destruction, Spurrier just couldn’t help letting a little pride creep into his voice. “Wait, how long do you think this eruption could last?”

Keavy was scanning the inventories, rosters and situation reports littering the table. “It’s Mrs. McManus by the way… Anyway, can’t tell for sure of course… the survey team isn’t set up yet, military still wouldn’t let them through last time I heard… You see the thing is…”

She looked up. “To get that kind of pressure they had to be draining from well inside the throat – but not too deep, since it isn’t spraying up thousands of meters. The flow rate slackened off in the first hour, then built up again. On earth, lava like that would come from a shield volcano. My guess is draining all that lava off the top of the vent triggered a full scale eruption, most of which is getting sucked through to us. Could be days, weeks or months before it lets up… no way to tell without seeing the geology at the other end.”

It was Keavy's turn to gesture at the map. “If it doesn't let up ash buildup and fumes will render this whole area uninhabitable anyway. But we can buy the crews enough time to dismantle and move the factories. Now, about your dyke placement…”

Cliffton Council Estate, Nottingham, United Kingdom

The screen flicked between grainy images of burning and collapsing buildings, of streams of glowing lava progressing inexorably through city streets and of people running in terror from it all. Some were apparently less terrified than others, because they'd taken the time to record the disaster on their cellphones and digicams. The later images were clearer but less dramatic; they showed bulldozers flattening buildings and creating ramparts from the rubble, lines of fire crews trying to halt the advance of the flames and rescue crews carrying stretchers out of damaged buildings. The montage ended on images of gridlocked roads lined with armed soldiers and refugees wandering aimlessly about.

Meanwhile the text continued to scroll across the bottom of the screen: 'Central Sheffield destroyed by volcanic activity, thousands dead, presumed demonic attack may be linked to High Peak incident. Prime Minister asks nation to remain calm and stay vigilant for any further Baldrick activity...'

"The city has now been completely sealed off by army units. This is the closest we can get, as the government has made it clear that civilians will not be allowed through the perimeter."

The BBC News correspondent was standing on a flat roof, lit by a harsh floodlight. The sky behind him was filled entirely by a diffuse orange glow, the smoke now completely obscuring the area around the portal. A deep rumbling was clearly audible.

"The lava still appears to be flowing... the fire services are starting to get the fires under control, but they're contending with toxic smoke and collapsing buildings."

A bright flare appeared in the background, hazy but quite distinct from the central glow. A couple of seconds later a crackling roar could be heard, while the speaker flinched visibly.

"That was probably the gasometer at Attercliffe, we were told that there was some difficultly pumping the gas away with the power out." The speaker composed himself.

"The emergency services are making a tremendous effort to limit casualties and contain the damage. They aren't the only ones... we've heard numerous reports of ordinary people pulling casualties out of the rubble, in the first hour after the attack... I understand construction workers have been arriving at the cordon and volunteering to help with the firebreaks."

Christopher Hughes stared at the television in horror. Not that this was a matter of choice; he had tried to look away, but his limbs seemed frozen and the effort brought only blinding pain. The terrible presence of them made it difficult to even think clearly. It was obvious that he'd made a horrible mistake. The shadow government wasn't the enemy after all, they'd probably been secretly preparing humanity to fight the demons for decades, if not centuries. Christopher withdrew to a corner of his own mind, mentally whimpering at the thought of how many people the demons would make him hurt before they were done with him.

Tapton Hall, Western Sheffield, United Kingdom

Since the opening of the portal, Lakheenahuknaasi’s universe had consisted mostly of pain. The first shot had merely smashed a finger in her left wing and tearing a ragged hole in the membrane. The last two had ripped through her right leg, shattering the femur, mangling the knee and nearly amputating the appendage. She had fallen from the sky, trailing a spray of blood behind her, desperately trying to extend her glide far enough to escape the tide of lava. She managed to stay in the air for almost a minute, tossed about by the blast wave and then the inrushing winds. Finally she could manage no more and aimed for a clump of foliage that had offered some scant hope of concealment. The ground rushed up Lakheenahuknaasi’s world went black.

She had awoken to a fresh agony; someone had shoved her hand into a fire. Barely able to avoid screaming with the pain, the gorgon hauled herself upright. The clump of bushes was starting to burn, nearby trees had been set on fire by a projectile thrown from the volcano. Lakheenahuknaasi could hear human screams but also shouted orders and the growling their chariots made when moving. No doubt their army had moved in to try and control the chaos and if she didn’t move right now they would doubtless capture her and torture her to death in revenge.

The gorgon crawled forward, dragging her broken wings and mutilated leg behind her. There was a large square stone building ahead, presenting a wall full of square windows, many broken by the initial shock. She just had to hope that it had been deserted. After what seemed like an eternity she was at the base of the wall, feeling horribly exposed in the open. She could spare only seconds to rest before she had to drag herself through the nearest broken window. The jagged glass couldn’t penetrate her scales but it tore fresh rips in her wings; a pain that seemed trivial compared to what she’d already endured. Lakheenahuknaasi had collapsed onto some sort of cot and promptly fainted from blood loss.

When she awoke again it was to a repetitive banging sound. Humans were coming. It sounded like doors opening forcefully, mixed with footsteps. Sometimes it was accompanied by a splintering crack. They were searching the building and the sound was definitely getting nearer. For the first time in her life, Lakheenahuknaasi was paralyzed by fear of the humans. What horrors would they inflict when they found her?

Great Hall of the Adamant Fastness, Outer Rim of Hell

Demonic laughter echoed throughout the hall, as the assembled nobles took turns forcing themselves into the human’s mind. Servants scurried about with plates of freshly slaughtered livestock and cages of live vermin delicacies. The atmosphere was entirely festive; Belial’s court lacked the sophisticated entertainments of his wealthier peers, but the strike force had taken to chanting battle songs and many of the nobles were joining in. They were not exactly skilled singers at the best of times and the copious quantities of fermented fungus being consumed were not helping matters. No one seemed to mind however.

Euryale had just arrived back from the volcano and her normally bright bronze scales were still streaked with ash. She pushed her way through the rowdy lesser demons and arrived at the central table.

“Ah, Euryale, you return to witness my triumph.” Belial pushed a heavy goblet of faintly glowing liquid into her hand. The fine liquor was made from juices squeezed from the crushed abdomens of a rare insect; it was rarely seen in Tartarus. “The attack destroyed scores of their great towers, razed hundreds of workshops and killed many thousands of humans.”

“Most pleasing, my Lord. However…”

The count continued on as if he hadn’t heard her. It looked like he’d already put away quite a bit of the glow wine. “Of course I appreciate your efforts. Such a shame Baroness Yulupki isn’t here to receive similar praise.”

Euryale snorted. It gave her great pleasure to envision the naga being hauled over to the second volcano on the back of a lurching Great Beast and hating every minute of it. She’d requested a wyvern of course but Euryale had made sure that they were ‘none available’ and then chosen the most cantankerous Great Beast in the stables..

“And what of your handmaiden? Lac-nina-urk-nasee wasn’t it?”

The gorgon rolled her eyes, confident that Belial was too drunk to notice. She put down the goblet and replied carefully, shouting to be heard over the din. “As I was about to say, my lord, neither I nor any of my servants have been able to contact her. Most likely she was killed by the humans.”

The count’s face flickered with a moment of concern before brightening again. “Oh well, no matter. She died gloriously. A gorgon for a whole city seems like a fair trade to me.”

Euryale grit her fangs. “In that case I hope your ‘stratagem’ will not require the destruction of many more cities. Now if you would excuse me…” The gorgon queen whirled around and stormed off, the point of her tail quite deliberately flicking the goblet from the table as she went. Belial surged to his feet and began to summon psychic force to smite the insubordinate wench, but then paused. What if he had to kill her? Best not risk that until after the second attack he had promised Satan was complete. He shrugged, laughed and settled back into his throne. There would be plenty of time to clip the gorgon’s wings later. Hopefully metaphorically, Belial mused, but you never knew with females.

In a corridor of the palace Euryale was also having second thoughts. Belial’s casual willingness to sacrifice her kindred had stoked her rage. True, she was just as willing to send any number of lesser demons to their deaths to achieve her own aims. But lesser demons teemed in multitudes. Millennia after the purge, there were still precious few gorgons in existence and Euryale was not about to allow Belial to undo her progress.

Still, he was not that hard to manipulate as long as she applied herself. Defiance like that risked a confrontation and even if she somehow won the physical contest, she doubted she’d last long as ruler of Tartarus. Losing her temper like that risked…

The gorgon’s thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a servile demon trying to attract her attention. “Ah my lady, I abase myself before your glory and humbly ask…”

“What is it?” Euryale snapped, lacking the patience for the usual groveling.

“The six flights of wyvern riders that the count bid depart, which beasts should we…”

“What is this?” The gorgon queen fixed the servant with a multi-eyed stare. “Where are my wyverns going and why?”

“To the grand army, for the destruction of the human invaders!”

Euryale shook her head. Belial seemed bent on squandering precious assets. “Did he say why he is risking my, ah…, his wyverns when Beelzebub must have two score legions of harpies to throw against the human sky chariots?”

The stunted orc seemed to be trying to shrink into the floor. Likely he thought there was no safe answer to this question.

“My lady, it is my understanding… the wyverns are to be loaded with hail javelins and bags of brimstone .… I do not think they are intended to fight the human sky chariots.”

Euryale stared for a moment before she realized what the count was doing. It wasn’t about Satan’s favor, the magma attack was a far better way to gain that, it was simply a merchant taking an opportunity to demonstrate his wares.

“Very well. Attend me.” She set off for the wyvern roosts.

Chapter Fifty

Seafire One, over the Midlands, England.  Acting Captain Sharkey Ward, RN (yes, the ‘acting’ part of his rank did slightly irritate him) did not need to do any fancy navigation on the way to Sheffield. The waterfall of lava flowing out of the sky and the huge smoke plume rising over what had once been the centre of the city was a give away. Below his Sea Harrier FA.2 the main roads leading towards Sheffield were a sea of blue lights. Ward, and his wingman Commander Andy Auld, RN, who was also a recently recalled former Sea Jet pilot, had been assigned to help provide reconnaissance support to ground forces, and also provide local CAP if necessary. For the later role both aircraft were armed with four AMRAAM missiles and a pair of 30mm ADEN cannon pods, while for the former a BAE digital recce pod with the capability to down-load its imagery to ground stations was fitted to the centre-line pylon between the cannons.

The Sea Jet’s Blue Vixen radar showed that the airspace around Sheffield was extremely busy. At low level there were dozens of helicopters, both military and civil, there was also a queue of transport aircraft waiting to land at Sheffield airport. Higher up there were a pair of Jaguar GR.3As each fitted with the Digital Joint Reconnaissance Pod, while above them were a pair of Tornado GR.4s fitted with RAPTOR pods. Far above these aircraft was a single Canberra PR.9 rescued from a museum, using its sophisticated recce fit to take high altitude pictures of Sheffield and the surrounding area as part of the efforts to predict where the lava flow would go next. Those on the ground would certainly not want for aerial imagery. Just to cap it off a Sentry AEW.1 was now also airborne over the area providing RAF Boulmer with assistance in traffic control, and radar coverage.

“Boulmer, Seafire One requesting permission to enter exclusion zone. Over.”

“Roger, Seafire One. Please remain at your current altitude and avoid the airspace around the city, also remain clear of the portal area.”

“Roger that Boulmer. We are commencing our photo run; the pointy heads on the ground should be receiving our imagery in a few minutes.”

“Roger that, Seafire One. Please be aware that a water bomber flight is currently inbound and will pass five hundred meters below you. Over.”

“We’ll keep an eye out for them. Out.”

Incident Command Centre, Sheffield Airport, United Kingdom.

“That looks bad.” Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, late of the Scots Guards, said as he viewed the screens showing the aerial imagery now coming in. Lethbridge-Stewart had been sent in by Midland Command to take charge of all military units being sent to assist the fire service, and to serve as senior liaison officer. The ground stations that he had brought with him were normally used in conjunction with the Sentinel R.1, but could also show imagery from the DJRP and RAPTOR pods, though it was also showing pictures taken by the high flying Canberra.

“Mr Benton could you ask CFO Spurrier, and that vulcanologist woman…what’s her name?”

“Mrs McManus, Sir.” Warrant Officer Class One John Benton replied.

“That’s a familiar name for some reason.” The Brigadier commented. “She’s not a large Scottish lady is she?”

“That would be Michelle McManus, Sir, almost a different species I’d say.

“I’ll go get them, Sir.”

“Well I certainly think that this will be a great help, Brigadier.” Chief Fire Officer Spurrier said a few minutes later after taking in the various picture feeds.

However Lethbridge-Stewart could see that the vulcanologist, Keavy McManus was not looking particularly happy.

“Is there something else we can do for, Mrs McManus?” He asked, being especially charming.

“Yes, Brigadier, you can let the survey team through them military cordon. They’re not doing us much good at the moment.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Mrs McManus, though actual access to the danger area is at the discretion of the fire service.

“Mr Benton, could you ask Captain Munro to organize passes and an escort for Mrs McManus’ survey team; it’s a top priority matter. If they need any engineering assistance then Captain Price should be able to help.”

“I’ll get right on it, Sir.

“There’s a message from Midlands Command for you, by the way, Sir, Major General Rutledge wants to speak to you.”

“If you’ll excuse me, Mr Spurrier, Mrs McManus, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Colonel Mace.”

Captain Marian Price, Royal Engineers, was tired and hot. She had spent the last twelve hours supervising the unloading of heavy engineering and fire fighting equipment which had been flown in by heavy transporters, such as RAF and USAF C-17A Globemasters. The last thing she needed now was an additional commitment.

“I presume, Private Jenkins, that at least we won’t be required to provide an escort to this survey team?”

“No, ma’m.” Private Ross Jenkins, the messenger from the Command Post, replied. “The Red Caps will escort them in.”

“Well that’s something at least.” Price said. “If they let me know what sort of equipment they might need then I’ll see what we have around.”

She glanced around at the concrete parking apron. It was a chaotic scene of bulldozers, various pieces of heavy plant, fire service High Volume Pumps, and various military vehicles, both armored and soft skinned.

“That’s if I can find anything amongst this lot.” She muttered.

Tapton Hall, Western Sheffield, United Kingdom

More fire crews were arriving every hour, from increasingly distant parts of the UK and even Europe, but they hadn’t been able to prevent the flames advancing up the hill into Broomhill. The order had come to pull back to the Rivelin fire break and that meant a last sweep for civvies trapped in the doomed buildings. Constable Matthew Hillier was one of those detailed for that, something that was a familiar duty by now. He moved briskly through the building, checking each room for anyone left behind by the original evacuation. At least that was improving; the chaos and confusion following the initial attack was diminishing as fresh command staff were flown in and a strategic response plan developed.

Another locked door. Hillier sighed and brought up the fire axe. Fortunately the internal doors were weak and one good strike was enough to smash the lock mechanism. The door splintered and shuddered open to reveal a crumpled female form. He moved quickly to check for signs of life. Relieved to see that the girl was still breathing, if only barely, he reached for his radio.

“This is unit 523, found another casualty in the dorms…” The young woman let out a horrible hacking cough and convulsed, revealing an inhaler grasped in one hand. “…looks like a reaction to the smoke, any ambulances available? Over.” Hillier already suspected what the answer would be, but he had to try. He pulled a spare filter mask from a bag hanging from webbing and drew the elastic over the girl’s head, before grabbing her by the waist and hoisted her up into a fireman’s carry.

That was enough to revive her a little. “Who are… where are we going…”

“Constable Hillier. Stay calm lass, we’ll get you out of here.” He was listening to the chatter on the radio; every channel seemed to be crammed. Finally there was something relevant.

“Unit 523, no ambulances free for non-critical patients at this time. Is she conscious?”

“Barely, control.” Matthew had nearly reached the main entrance. The conversation was interrupted by a report of looters in Walkley. The sound of shots fired came over the channel as the transmission cut off.

“All units be advised a dedicated field hospital for air poisoning casualties just went operational at evac camp beta. 523, take your casualty there.”

Hillier emerged into the car park, a surreal scene of dirty snow and drifting fireflies - or rather ash and embers. The rear doors of the white police Transit van were open and another three late evacuees were huddled inside, all wearing the same cheap filter masks. One was rocking back and forth and crying; he’d been hysterical and Matthew had had to call his partner to help drag him out of the building. Another girl had broken arm an arm and several ribs and moaned constantly with the pain. He set the new arrival down on the sill and spoke to the single uninjured passenger. This man had merely been trapped in a kitchen by the partial collapse of a section of the building. “She’s having trouble breathing, I think she’s asthmatic. Try and keep her conscious.”

He nodded. “I recognize her, nursing student I think, Anna was it?” The girl smiled weakly. "I'll do what I can Constable."

Matthew returned to the building, his thoughts returning to his wife. He still hadn’t heard anything; even away from the city centre, his mobile wouldn’t connect, and everyone at control was far too busy to handle personal requests. He tried to push the worry out of his mind. At least the kids were safe, staying in Northumberland this month… That was funny. Special Constable Amstead had been making plenty of noise earlier, but now the only sounds were coming from outside. Matthew reached for his radio again.

“Unit 523 to 3861, where are you Johnny?”

Fifteen seconds passed, with another report on the looters (one shot dead, two surrendered), but nothing from his partner. “Unit 3861, say location please.”

Constable Hillier unslung his MP5 and chambered a round, clicking the selector from ‘safe’ to ‘auto’. No one on the force ignored the possibility of a surprise Baldrick attack after the events in Belfast. It was probably nothing, but… He made his way up to the second floor of the south wing, the last place he’d sent John to sweep.

“Control this is unit 523, lost contact with my partner, moving to investigate.” He waited for the response before proceeding.

“Confirmed 523.” Now should anything happen to him, a response team would be dispatched immediately. He made his way forward down the corridor, gun at the ready, checking the rooms on each side. He made it half way down before glimpsing the prone form of a police officer in the room to the left. There was no obvious blood and the man’s pistol was still in its holster. A quick glance showed the room to the right to be empty, so he stepped into the doorway and dropped into a crouch. “John?!” Too late, he noticed the four thin bony spines sticking out of the special constable’s back.

Constable Hillier almost anticipated the sharp pain that hit him in the spine, though not the strange sputtering crack. He whirled around, bringing the sub machine gun up. His gaze was met by a nightmarish face surrounded by snaky tentacles, the humanoid demon crouching low in the doorway opposite. The gun spat but the burst went high, and before he could correct his aim the gun slipped from his numbing fingers and clattered to the floor. Matthew collapsed, paralyzed and helpless before the demon.

Lakheenahuknaasi pulled herself upright and stared at the men for a few moments. When she spoke it was a smooth and slightly sibilant voice.

“Two little humanss, all for me. Now, what shall I do with you?”

Hunger gnawed at the gorgon, her body desperate for materials to begin rebuilding her smashed leg, but giving in to her instincts now would be suicide. She’d tried to contact Euryale, but every time she began to summon psychic force she nearly fainted again with the pain. No, emulating the tactics of her queen was the only hope for escape. Lakheenahuknaasi brought up her tentacles and prepared to loose her enthrallment darts.

Hellmouth, Field of Dysprosium, South of the River Phlegethon

As his car rolled out of the black oval, Dr Surlethe looked out the window in awe. The long columns of tanks and other armored vehicles, which had stretched out toward the horizon under the blue Iraqi sky, continued here as though there were no break between dimensions. As the highway to hell continued, suddenly the rows of tanks were flanked by buildings, and he was aware of the car slowing down. Ahead was a squat, nondescript building with a thicket of antennas sticking out the top. On the other side was a veritable forest of flagpoles; each had a different flag flying in what looked to be a stiff breeze. The colors looked positively gaudy against the dull, orange sky.

The driver noticed what he was staring at, and commented, “That's the headquarters building, and them's the flags of all the nations that've signed on in the war against Hell and Heaven.”

“That's a lot of them,” he said, half to himself. “Where's the science building?”

“Over this way,” said the driver, and he turned the car to the right as the road they were on fed into another maze of streets in front of the headquarters building. Barracks and other buildings slid by them as they drove, weaving through heavy traffic. People were everywhere – surveyors, construction crews, military types – and the place was buzzing with activity.

They passed an airstrip after a few minutes, the car shaking as some sort of jet climbed over them and thundered off into the sky. As the driver edged over into the left lane, he remarked, “F-111, Aussie bird. Must be off on another reconnaissance mission. The diggers have been working right hard.”

Dr Surlethe nodded, preoccupied. They had not veered to the left or right as far as he could tell, which meant that they'd traveled through a right angle. That meant the hellmouth – still close enough to be visible – should be behind and to the right. Yet it was directly behind them; he could just see it if he craned his head around the passenger seat. This was interesting. The surface geometry here was very clearly non-Euclidean, but light still traveled in straight lines. Very interesting.

The drive pulled off the road into a parking lot and stopped in front of another squat building. It looked exactly the same as the headquarters, except without the flags in front of it. “Thanks,” said Dr Surlethe. He hopped out of the car, grabbed his briefcase, and quickly strode into the building, noting the double airlock doors that excluded the polluted atmosphere of Hell..

In the building, before the receptionist could say anything, he removed his breathing filter and asked, “Where's the meeting?”

“Your name Sir?” she asked.

“Dr Surlethe,” he said.

“Ah, welcome to Hell!” She smiled. “The department head meeting is down the hall on the left, third door. Room 108.”

“Thanks,” he said over his shoulder, already moving down the hallway. A clock over the receptionist's desk read 1:02. Inwardly he cursed; damn, two minutes late. As usual.

He took a second outside the door of the conference room to catch his breath, and then opened it as quietly as he could. Every eye was on him; most of the scientists, with mild respect, but there was an air of disapproval about three men in uniform. Dr Surlethe smiled. “Hello, gentlemen, ladies; sorry I'm running a little late.”

“That's perfectly fine,” said Dr Griswold. He was the head of the geology department, his size and beard making him one of the few people who actually looked the part. “Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the head of the table.

Dr Surlethe nodded, pulled back the chair, sat, and opened his briefcase, pulling out a tablet of paper and a pen. “Okay, let's see who's here,” he said. “Dr Griswold, geology?”

“Here.” Dr Surlethe nodded and made a note on the paper.

“Dr Jamison, physics and astronomy?”

“Aye.”

“Dr Sullivan, biology?”

“Present.”

“Dr Fulton, geography?”

“Here.”

“And Dr Abrams, climate science?”

“Here.”

“May I ask who these gentlemen are?” Dr Surlethe blinked at the three military men.

“Certainly,” said one of them. “I am Major Jim Schaeder, your liaison with the military. These are my aides – Leftenant John Grissom from the U.K. and Captain Aleksei Stepanovich Panasov of the Russian Army.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Dr Surlethe. “Now, I'm sure you all know this, but it bears saying anyway. The goal of this advance research center is to gather as much data about Hell as possible, as quickly as possible, and start to form a coherent picture of the world that we've entered. We'll be sending the information back to Earth, but, we are the scientific front line.

“Now, let's see where we stand. You have all prepared reports as I requested?” There were nods all around the room. “Dr Jamison, you'll go first.”

Dr Jamison, a slight, pretty redhead, stood up and shuffled some papers on the table in front of her. “We have not done too much. There are no obvious physical differences between Hell and Earth; on a basic level, at least, they're very much the same since we're all standing here.” She smiled, and chuckles drifted around the table. “However, there is some indication that the local gravitational field is maybe as much as 10% weaker than that on Earth; surely you've all noticed it walking.” Nods. “Initially, this will obviously impact friction, vehicle performance, etc. That may be why the air is so dusty as well. Other than that, we're looking to collaborate with geology to get an idea of what's going on under the ground.

“Putting on my astronomer's hat, we've got no idea what's going on above this damnable cloud cover.” Dr Surlethe noted that he might need to split the department soon. “We'd like to get a rocket launch pad –” this was aimed at Grissom – “but we understand we're relatively low priority here.” She turned back to Dr Surlethe. “That's all I've got.”

“Thank you, Dr Jamison. Next, Dr Griswold?”

Dr Griswold stood up. “Geologically speaking, Hell is a very interesting place. It's incredibly geologically active; the soil here, at least, is composed mostly of broken-down volcanic materials. I won't bore you with details, but I'll just say that as recently as two million years ago, this entire plain –” he stretched his hands out, obviously talking about the whole of the prairie that apparently stretched from the Phlegethon just to the north all the way to Dis – “was under a half-mile of lava from that giant caldera to the south. When I say giant, I mean it, We’ve got the first pictures back from the RF-111s, the diameter of that caldera is almost 700 kilometers. It’s circumference is more than 2,000 kilometers. It must have been one hell of a bang when it let go.

“That's about as much as we can say about the geologic history of Hell; we need more data. Hopefully, as the geography grows clearer, we'll be able to say something about the underlying geology and start to construct a picture of the history. And, as Dr Jamison said, we are working to get some geophysical measurements; hopefully, that will start to flesh out our picture some more.” Unceremoniously, Dr Griswold sat down.

“Thank you. Dr Fulton, are you ready?”

“Certainly,” said Dr Fulton, who unfolded himself from his chair and stood up, blinking at the papers in front of him through round spectacles. “This is probably the most pressing field of exploration here, since navigation and knowing what the terrain around us looks like are the most relevant issues to the military. As you all know, the terrain here is decidedly non-Euclidean.” More nods around the table. “We've been taking measurements, but this is actually a math problem and not one that any of us geographers have encountered before. So is there a mathematician in the house?”

“That can be arranged,” said Dr Surlethe.

Dr Fulton continued. “Other than that, we've been putting together a temporary map based on surveillance pictures from the recent reconnaissance flights. Here it is.” He picked up a stack of papers and handed them out one-by-one as he kept talking. “As you can see, we have the Phlegethon just to the north. In the distance, there are some hills; we speculate that they are foothills to a larger mountain range. In the other direction, it's all flat, with no major rivers, to the city of Dis. There's Dis, and then it drops off into the pit.”

The handout wasn't so much a map as a collage of pictures pasted together in photoshop. The pictures seemed oddly distorted, and didn't quite match up together at the edges, but the basic components of the terrain were still visible.

“The pit of hell appears to be arranged into nine concentric rings. It's eerily similar to Dante's description, working hypothesis, a baldrick got hold of Dante’s mind and let him know what he was in for. We don't have much data, but we surmise that the descriptions that have been given to us by the DIMO(N) counterinsurgency department match what is visible here, in the sixth ring.” He tapped an area on the map that looked like nothing more than a dark coffee stain. Through it, a river lazily wandered before apparently plunging off the side into the next level. “We surmise that is where the insurgency is located.”

Dr Jamison raised her hand. “Is this part of Dis, here on the fifth ring?”

Dr Fulton nodded. “You can see that a spur of the city has been built down into the pit itself, down this flat slope.” He indicated on his copy the extension of the demonic capital. “The city then extends for a ways along the fifth ring to the point where the river cuts across the ring. The spur itself acts as a base for walls that separate the rings.

“Anyway, that's pretty much as far as we've gotten geographically. We await more data from reconnaissance flights. We'll take as much as you can give us. Thank you.” He sat down.

“We have Dr Abrams and Dr Sullivan left. Who'd like to go first?”

“I'll go,” said Dr Sullivan, his heavy Oxford English accent being almost amusing given the environment. . “Aside from the baldrick corpses dissected in Iraq, and the biological knowledge that gave us, we've got very little information about the lifeforms and ecosystem here in Hell. Because it's similar to life on Earth, we hypothesize that there are common ancestors involved somewhere – in fact, the data from the dissections and corpse analysis suggests that the most recent human-baldrick ancestor dates from about one point five million years ago. Evolution here has been pretty drastic though and followed a different path from ours.

“But we need more data to test this. We're planning some expeditions out to the surrounding countryside, but if in the military advance there are any dead animals, please have them sent back to us. Thank you.” He sat down.

“Oh, I think we can guarantee you lots of corpses.” Panasov’s voice was almost droll as his mind recalled the long rows of guns awaiting the Baldrick assault.

“And, Dr Abrams,” said Dr Surlethe.

“Thanks,” said Dr Abrams, an older gentleman with a fine Santa Claus beard. “We find that the atmosphere here is relatively similar to that of Earth, which means that there was either gaseous exchange or the life processes here are similar to those on Earth. The high particulate count at this location suggests some volcanic activity in the vicinity, or a hell of a lot – pardon the pun – of volcanic activity somewhere far away. Other than that, we can't really do any meaningful climate science, aside from weather observations, without getting data from the upper atmosphere. We've sent to NASA for some weather balloons to go up; hopefully, they'll get here in the next couple of days, and then we can go from there.” He sat down.

“All right,” said Dr Surlethe. “Is there anything else?” Nobody spoke, so he continued: “Excellent. Let's plan on meeting weekly from here on out and comparing notes. Thanks, everybody!”

As the various scientists were moving out of the room, Dr Surlethe tapped Dr Fulton on the shoulder. “Mind if I have a word with you?”

“Sure,” said the taller man.

“I'm a mathematician by trade. Do you think you could email me the data? I'll see what I can do with it in my spare time.”

“I'd love to. Our department is all geographers; none of us really have the experience or knowledge to deal with this sort of non-spherical geometry.”

“Thanks,” said Dr Surlethe. “I look forward to it.” And he walked out of the room, contemplating just what he was going to tell the president and cabinet at the next meeting, and wondering on top of that what sort of shape could explain the curvature that was obvious here.

(Congrats to Jan who wrote the first part, Starglider the middle and Surlethe the end)

Chapter Fifty One

Secure Accommodation Block, Camo Hell-Alpha, Martial Plain of Dysprosium

The double doors burst open and Colonel Paschal strode in, flanked by MPs carrying menacing USAS-12 combat shotguns. The concrete room was the size of a small hangar, but the huge demon made it look like a cramped apartment. The big plasma screen was showing images of WWII aircraft attacking warships. The stack of DVD cases next to it confirmed that Abigor had been continuing to absorb military documentaries and war movies. The infernal general looked up with a surprised expression, which quickly hardened as he saw the heavy guard detail.

“General Abigor.” Paschal was carrying a ruggedized laptop, which he opened and placed on a table in front of the demon. “Can you explain this?” The colonel’s tone was not quite threatening, but clearly the humans were not pleased.

Abigor stared in silence as the images of lava, fire and destruction played out. “Belial” he said, in a tone of mild contempt. “This has to be his doing.”

“Belial?” Paschal had studied Abigor’s profiles of the top demon leadership but he didn’t recall the name. “Who is Belial?”

“A sniveling failure. Count Belial is the ruler of Tartarus, a barren wasteland in the part of hell furthest from Dis. Satan exiled him there many millennia ago, after he walked right into a trap laid by Lahabiel and got his entire army captured or killed.”

“If he’s an exile, how did he manage to do this?”

“Belial has been trying to regain Satan’s favor, by all means of craven and dishonorable means. His realm survives only because he makes himself useful, with his fancy tridents and his overgrown wyverns. His retinue is composed of failures like himself, mostly demons that deserted their lords instead of dying gloriously in their service.”

Abigor paused for a moment before continuing, uneasy with how close he had come to describing his own situation. Then he tapped the computer screen with a talon. “I have seen this before. Belial used a similar trick to destroy two human cities, back when we were last surveying this planet. Satan and Yahweh were competing to visit creative forms of suffering on the humans. As I recall, Belial’s flashy little stunt went down quite well, well enough for Mekratrig to allow him back into his court.

Paschal frowned. “The bible speaks of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah… by Yahweh though, not by Satan or his minions.”

Abigor snorted. “Well of course. The angels were always better at propaganda than us. Whatever your books say, it was Belial’s doing.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier?”

“It did not occur to me that Satan would consider this a viable tactic. This is not the way wars are fought…” The demon paused for a second, considering the things he’d seen on the image panel. “At least, it is not the way we fight wars. Most likely Belial is looking for another opportunity to ingratiate himself and Satan has permitted him to proceed in the hope of distracting you while Beelzebub moves his army up for a fresh assault.”

Colonel Paschal seemed to relax fractionally. He couldn’t be sure Abigor was telling the truth, but his story was plausible given what he’d seen of demon mentality so far.

“So how does this work? Is the lava coming from a volcano?”

“Most likely. The last time I was in Tartarus was during the Great War, when we used it as a prison to hold high-ranking captured angels. That was a very long time ago, but I remember the prison nestled in the mountains, many of which were crowned with fire.”

“Can you give us anything more specific?”

Abigor shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know the specifics of the ritual. Large portals are always handled by the naga, they keep many of the secrets of portal magery to themselves.”

“Naga? Is that what you call the demon flying over the attack site? Looked like an anorexic harpy to me.”

A low chuckle escaped the former general’s lips. “No, that was a gorgon. Another exiled failure, not surprising that most of them took up with Belial. Naga are much more common… I’m sure I described them to one of your vassals earlier.”

Colonel Paschal hit a few keys, calling up the interrogation logs for Abigor. Sure enough, there was a page of text describing ‘naga’ along with a striking artist’s impression of the half-snake, half-humanoid demons.

“I had a coven of them in my retinue,” Abigor volunteered, ‘but I didn’t bring any with me to earth. They’re slow and soft-skinned, and I did not appreciate the power of your ranged weapons, so I didn’t see any use for them.” He wondered if it would’ve made a difference if he had brought them. Certainly not to the outcome, but perhaps the human casualties would have been a fraction higher. He thought again, a small fraction higher.

“Is the gorgon necessary to open the portal? If we shoot it down before the portal opens, will that prevent the attack?”

Abigor stared into space for a moment. “I believe the gorgon was there to ensure the portal opened over the target. You see, the larger the portal, the harder it is to predict where it will open. The one you call the ‘hellmouth’ opened a full five leagues from the nephilim I possessed.”

“The naga do have a means of opening portals more accurately, but it requires a portal mage at both ends. I imagine the gorgon you saw was involved in that. If you could kill Belial’s witches as they appear, then he would be reduced to striking at random in the vicinity of whatever nephilim he could find.”

‘Better than nothing’ Paschal thought. “The target was Sheffield, a relatively small city in the British Isles. We aren’t aware of any obvious reasons to target it, other than the fact that British troops played a small but significant role in your defeat. Do you know why Belial chose that target?”

“No. Belial is fond of bizarre schemes… but then he must have used a nephilim to open a portal for the gorgon. It may be that your counter-magic is getting so good that he was forced to take the first nephilim he could find, and the gorgon just flew to the nearest city.”

‘So no way of knowing where they will strike next’ Paschal thought unhappily. “We need to know when he’ll strike next. How many times can Belial do this, and how often?”

“I can’t give you firm answers Colonel. I do know that opening large portals is a great strain on the naga, they are weak and pained for many days afterwards. Tartarus has a great many volcanoes. The rate at which Belial can open portals depends on how many naga he has and how quickly he can find targets. If Satan intends to use this method to exterminate you, then he might order the dukes to loan Belial their covens until the task is done.”

“If not a firm answer, then an educated guess?”

“Belial should be able to open at least one portal a week.”

Paschal was silent for a moment. “I’ve got to relay this to my superiors. Sit tight, Ill be back shortly.” He pulled a black box from a pocket and brought it up to his ear as he left the room.

Abigor stared at the frozen image of the burning city. For a while he was completely certain that the humans would defeat Satan, but now he was not so sure. Old traditions were being discarded, the once unthinkable was being considered. The humans had given hell an object lesson in how efficiently war could be conducted when one made decisions purely on the basis of effectiveness, not honor, politics, auspiciousness or tradition. How fast could hell learn?

Paschal had returned. “Ok General, let’s do this properly. I need everything you can tell me about Belial and Tartarus, starting with its grid co-ordinates.”

Abigor wasn’t sure what ‘grid co-ordinates’ meant but he got the impression it had something to do with maps. “You want to know how to get to Tartarus?” Of course, the humans wanted to stop the attacks by destroying Belial. “It is almost three thousand leagues from here, across all manner of terrain. Even with your chariots, it would take many months to fight your way there, and Satan would harass you and your supply train all the way.”

Paschal smiled grimly. “General, I have a small gift for you.” He handed over a small flat box, one that Abigor recognized immediately as a DVD. It was labeled ‘A History of the Manhattan Project’. “Abigor, you have barely begun to see what we can do when we truly wish to destroy our enemies.”

White House Communications Suite, White House, Washington DC

“Well, if we can’t shut it off, I suppose the only thing left will be to market it as a tourist attraction.”

It was probably fortunate that everybody’s attention was focused on the imagery being transmitted from the aircraft circling Sheffield. Had they been looking at Condoleezza Rice, they would have seen her eyes bulging from their sockets with sheer horror. “I can’t believe he just said that.”

Beside her Defense Secretary Warner nodded fractionally in agreement. “I don’t know which is worse, the fact he said it or the fact that its true.”

“Mister President, thankful as we are for America’s usual generous aid in a time of disaster, I must remonstrate with you. This is hardly a laughing matter for my country.” Gordon Brown looked shocked as indeed he was.

“I agree Gordon, and I am sorry if my remark sounded disrespectful of your country’s loss. But the fact remains, I do not see what we can do about this yet. We will stand by you, fight with you to save what is left of Sheffield and its people, but I do not know how we can stop this torrent of lava. And if we cannot stop it, we must find a way to make use of it.”

“You mean for all our military forces committed to this war, we cannot stop this nightmare? That baldrick General who has defected to us. Is he of no help at all?”

“If I may interrupt Sir.” On another screen, General Petraeus spoke quietly as was his way. “We have discussed this with Grand Duke Abigor. He has told us much of value, identifying the primary culprit, a minor baldrick lord called Belial. He has told us how it was done and from where. Belial’s stronghold, a place called Tartarus.”

“So we can destroy it.” Three people spoke in exact unison even though they were on different continents. A minor marvel of modern communications that everybody in the room took for granted.

“That’s not so easy. Belial is a minor figure, in some disgrace and his fortress is far from our forces, Three thousand leagues in fact, we make that around 10,500 miles as a B-1 flies.”

“Can you get your bombers there?” Brown spoke urgently, the pain of Sheffield making his voice falter.

“We can Sir.” General John.Corley spoke from Offutt Air Force Base. “As soon as we find out where ‘There’ is.”

“Abigor told us. Tartarus.”

“Yes, but where is it. Sir, I’ve seen the map Abigor drew for us. It’s a good map, very carefully drawn, one that Abigor obviously took great care over. But it’s a map drawn by somebody who lives far in our past. It isn’t what we call a map, its more a picture. You’ve seen old maps Sir. The one Abigor gave us isn’t scaled and he doesn’t even know what projection is. Come to think of it, nor do we where Hell is concerned. We’ve got mathematicians working on that. But all we have is a picture. We’re going to be looking for a target probably about the size of a town hall, in an area the size of North America. And we’ll be doing it what amounts to a dense fog. We’re modifying our B-1A to an RB-1A with sidescan radars and a lot of extra fuel and it’ll go out and look but it could be weeks before she spots a target.”

Brown thought for a few seconds. “When we do find it?”

“We’ll smear it across the ground. But we have to find it first. Bombers aren’t the only option of course.” Corley spoke carefully.

“A ground strike? If you need people, the SAS and SBS are ready to go. But how will they know where?”

“They won’t have to.” Petraeus’s voice was precise and emphatic. “We don’ have to know where a Portal is, we just have to know its in the right place. Then we can put a team in with beacon equipment to home the RB-1A in. And she can lead the rest of the Bones.”

“And the Tu-160s.” Prime Minister Putin’s voice was equally emphatic.”

“And the Tu-160s.” President Bush smiled engagingly at the screen. “General Corley wants to speak with you about the Tu-160.”

“One question, General.” Petraeus raised an eyebrow, “if the team are going to be pathfinders, how will they stay healthy long enough? They can’t have armor and air-locked buildings.”

“Mister Prime Minister. We do have military units that are native to Hell now. And we can reposition one of them for the job. In fact, we are selecting one for it now.”

Outer Ring, Sixth Circle of Hell

Hell made you different. It was the only way he could've reacted how he did to what he and the others had seen. But then he had felt the same way when he had heard of children dying of abuse back home. The same sick rage and desire to kill those responsible. But McElroy crushed his feelinsg down into his boots and forced himself to watch dispassionately.

Aeneas, born in an older, harder time, nevertheless felt the same. He and McElroy had crossed one of the low ridges and advanced down on some of the garrisons that were starting to spread along the banks of the lava flow. Not too close of course, even baldricks didn’t feel a desire to be too close to that nightmare, but far enough to provide patrols. The old days, of a single baldrick patrolling the banks for days at a time were gone. Too many had gone out and never come back. Now they patrolled in groups, never far from support. And that meant garrisons. Where there were garrisons, that meant troops who had to be supplied and the baldricks had never heard of logistics. So there had to be a market and sure enough, there was. In a cleared out patch of land, just outside the walls of one of the fortresses, many dozens of demons plied wares, bartered, and went about their business. Aeanas kept losing count, but there had to be well over three hundred demons. The best part of a whole company perhaps?

It was in this market that he spied a particular demon, whose cart was packed with writhing bodies. Human bodies. They were too far away to hear, of course, but every once in a while, a demon would come by and begin some sort of haggling. The merchant would fetch a victim from the cart and pass it the customer who would open its throat with one of its claws, snap its neck for good measure then eat the carcass on the spot, devouring the body in a few short seconds. It did not take any of them very long to realize that the humans in the merchant's wagon were exclusively children.

Aeanas stared at the scene with cold fury. He did not angrily demand that they throw caution to the wind and charge in to save the children, a hot-blooded rage that blinded its victim to common sense would have called for that. Instead, stone-faced, he watched the merchant empty his wagon, pack up his other trinkets, and be off down the rutted dirt road. So did Cassidy and McElroy. There would be a time for vengeance, a time when debts like this one would be paid but this was not it. Three humans attacking 300 baldricks with edged weapons was simply a way to die. Or be thrown back in the lava streams

Aeanas was a Spartan warrior. To him, nothing was more satisfying than battering his opponent down and finishing him with two or three blows. An honorable battle where one man was pitched against another with victory going to the strongest and bravest. Only that way was victory meaningful. So when he thought about helpless children being sold as some sort of delicacy the scene just added to the anger and voluminous hate he held in his heart for his tormentors. He could not be certain, but he suspected that Cassidy and McElroy felt largely the same way. But did they? They didn’t look upon war the same way as he did, war for them was an exercise in cost-effective killing where the objective was to make sure the enemy never stood a chance. Aeneas had tried to explain where true honor lay once but McElroy had simply looked at him and said “If it’s a fair fight, you made a mistake somewhere.”

So were they affected by the horror they had seen? They were, of course, silent on these trips unless speech was absolutely necessary, but they didn't seem any more subdued or lethargic. Instead, they pushed on to get back to base at their same stalwart pace that their state of second death afforded them. It was that silence that allowed Aeanas to kill his first demon.

The three of them trudged through the forest, moving quickly and quietly. The gnarled black trees were thick, and their sickly foliage was slimy with some sort of excretion. Fortunately, this deadened what noise they made. Unfortunately, it reduced their effective range of hearing that much further, but the odds of encountering anything out here were low. Low, but not zero. Aeanas spotted the clearing first. Silently, he tapped Cassidy on the shoulder. She tapped McElroy, and all three halted. "Clearing ahead."

Aeanas didn't even bother to nod. He slid back into the woods and worked his way to the far side of the clearing. When he was settled, he could spy McElroy just barely, but it was enough. Aeanas could at least see the hut's entrance, so he was not surprised when a demon stalked out of it and into the clearing. What shocked him was that the demon appeared to be somewhat aged, or perhaps infirm. He was not a mass of protruding muscle and claw; he was much thinner than most demons, and he had almost an erudite air to his mannerisms. He was still, of course, extremely tall, but his gait was that of someone who doesn't wish to strain himself, like that of an elderly or sick person.

The demon walked around to the side of the hut, where a garden of sorts grew. He plucked a bulbous, red plant from the earth and went back inside his hut, shutting the heavy wooden door behind him. The clearing was silent. The three of them moved quickly and silently across the clearing. Aeanas held his spear in a two-handed grip, at the ready. He was trained, of course, to have incredible power and precision when thrusting single-handed, so the added might of his shield-arm was all the more devastating. When they reached the door, Aeanas took up a position to one side of it, Cassidy to the other. McElroy stood in front of it, looked to both of them, then knocked on the door three times, politely, but firmly. The door swung outward after a moment, towards Cassidy. The demon took a half-step out and froze, a universal look of shock upon his face.

"Howdy!" McElroy crooned. "You know where the river of fire is? We wanted to go for a swim, but we got lost!"

As he spoke the word, "lost," Aeanas thrust. In a smooth motion and with precise aim, he drove the spear up into the demon's open mouth, encountering only feeble resistance when the point struck and passed through the soft palate. It stopped just before striking the brain, but after punching into the sinus cavity of the monster. With even greater fluidity, Aeanas twisted sharply and pulled the point free.

Blood pouring from the demon's mouth and nose, it finally started to move. Aeanas thrust again, taking the demon through its throat. Twisting the spear, he now used it as leverage to wrench the demon backwards into the hut and off its feet, and it fell with a crash. Now McElroy and Cassidy got in on the action, each slamming their tridents into the creature's belly.

"Hurry!" McElroy hissed.

Aeanas obeyed. Unmindful of the numerous lacerations that the demon was opening up on him with its swiping claws, he summoned all his strength and pounded the spearpoint through the demon's eye and into its brain. Swirling it a bit, the demon instantly went limp. After a moment, Aeanas turned back to McElroy and Cassidy, who had shut the door behind them and were eying him with something like awe. McElroy pointed. "Looks like he might've got you."

Aeanas looked down. Sure enough, a few greasy coils of his intestines were protruding from a deep gash just above his groin, with blood sheeting over his genitals and down his legs--it was certainly a sight he'd seen before. Shrugging, Aeanas stuffed his guts back inside of his body with his fist while Cassidy and McElroy wrapped a piece of cloth around his midsection, securing with a length of rope. By the time they were done, the bleeding from his other wounds had nearly stopped.

"Alright," McElroy began, "we'd best clear out and head back to base." He looked to Aeanas. "You OK to walk? You need a minute to rest?"

"I will be fine," Aeanas grunted. The pain was searing, but the fact that it abated steadily was what made it bearable.

"Good man," McElroy said. He turned to Cassidy. "Anything we can use?"

She was poring over the variety of desks and shelves all around the tiny hut. "Ethanol!" She set aside a second jar. "Or close enough. I didn't realize these things knew how to distill. We should report this."

"Are you sure it's not methanol?" McElroy asked.

"Yup. Methanol smells sweet, like antifreeze. This is probably demon moonshine. Want a swig?"

McElroy shook his head. "I wasn't much of a drinker back on Earth, and I don't see much reason to start now. Least of all with Satan's version of white lightnin'."

Cassidy shrugged, and took a pull. Frowning as it went down, she rasped, "Yup, that's ethanol all right. Absolutely devastating. But it's good, 'cause it means they can distill..." she went quiet for a few minutes, moving from jar to jar. She fetched another satchel and loaded up the now-capped jars in them, passing it to McElroy.

"Geez, this crap's heavy. Let's go." McElroy opened the door a crack and peered outside, stepping out after a moment. Cassidy followed him and Aeanas came out last.

They stayed that way until they got back to base. McElroy started typing the details of what they had seen into his computer, ready for the transmission back to earth. Standing over him, Cassidy read what he wrote and a tear trickled down her face. Now that the patrol was over they could let themselves feel what they had shut out before.

McElroy, is it all right to talk? kitten?”

No, kitten is away on leave at last. My name is Indira, I have taken over from her for a while. Have you anything to report?

Too much Indira. Far too much. McElroy went through the report on the scene at the village.

That is terrible.

This is a terrible place. Can you resupply us now?

Yes, we have rifles, ammunition , explosives coming through. But, I must also tell you that your group has been selected for a special mission. One that will take you outside the Pit.

You couldn’t have said anything better Indira. No place could be worse than this, I guess that must be the whole point.

Chapter Fifty Two

Secure Accommodation Block, Camo Hell-Alpha, Martial Plain of Dysprosium

“The Enemy is Dust, dust that gets in your boots, your hair, your eyes, your lungs. Dust in vital systems and gears and axles. Dust is the common enemy DRS Technologies helps to manage, banish or thwart in Hell, every minute of every day. The enemies DRS fights can be huge or as small as a grain of sand. And the solutions can range from providing expert service personnel to developing novel technologies. Like self-lubricating sealed axles for tank trailers. Systems that let pilots see through the clouds of dust in Hell’s atmosphere. And fully-sealed, fanless mobile computers. The goal: to help our forces achieve their objectives in Hell. Bring us your problems, your toughest challenges, we are always looking for a new enemy to conquer and take us one step nearer to completing or mission to save our dead.”

Memnon laid the copy of Defense News to one side, marveling at the casual ease with which the humans spoke of finding solutions to problems. As if problems were games to be won, not hardships to be endured. Almost without thinking he flexed his great wings, now regrowing strong and true. Another problem humans had solved. They’d seen the mangled stumps that had been growing before and he’d explained that the fragments of steel from the missile warheads were the problem. Iron didn’t agree with demon bodies. They’d nodded and come up with a plan. They’d amputate the new growth and remove the iron fragments, then allow new wings to grow back. They weren’t sure it would work, but it was a good chance, their “medic” had said. Memnon had agreed, he had nothing to lose after all.

They’d taken him into a section of the great building that was all white. Then they’d said they would put him to sleep for the operation. Memnon had refused that, refused angrily. Who were they to put him to sleep like a kidling? He was a Lesser Herald, he could endure whatever pain the humans had in store. The doctor had agreed and said that they’d just give him a little injection to help his muscles relax, make it easier to cut his mutilated wings off. Now, if he’d just count backwards from ten……

And Memnon had woken up when it was all over, his failed wings removed and the searing hurt of the iron fragments removed from his back. And he had learned something about “medics” and “nurses”. They could be even sneakier than other humans. But he’d watched as his new wings had regenerated and they were true wings, ones that would support him in flight.

The doors banged and some humans came in, soldiers in the odd clothes they wore. The ones that had a strange pattern that made them hard to see. “Memnon, my name is Colonel Paschal.”

“Colonel.” Memnon stood up and tried to hold himself erect the way humans did. Not grovel on the floor and lick his boots as a high-ranking demon would demand. The Colonel looked at him and nodded slightly, like most of the human troops in Hell, he found the baldrick displays of submission sickening.

“Memnon, do you know of a place called Tartarus?”

“Certainly. It is the stronghold of a minor lord called Belial. I have had little to do with him, he is of little account. A defeated loser surrounded by others of his kind.”

“Well, he’s just become important to us. Critical question, you know where Tartarus is, you can get there?”

“Of course, Now my wings are well again, I can fly there. If I go as fast as I can, it will take me….” Memnon stared at the ceiling and calculated distance. “A minimum of 70 of your hours.”

“Seventy hours. Nearly three days.” Now it was Paschal’s turn to think. “How soon can you leave?”

“As soon as my lord commands. I have sworn fealty to Abigor and he to you. So when your lord orders it I will leave. What message must I give to Belial?”

“Oh, you? Nothing. We have a message for him,. One he won’t forget in a hurry. Your job is just to get to Tartarus, stay close to Belial’s fortress and wait, unseen. We will contact you there and send you the message we will wish delivered to Belial.”

Memnon nodded, now he could see why the humans had restored his wings, they needed his services as a Herald. Was Belial planning to defect to the humans as he and Abigor already had? If so, then he, Memnon, would be well placed in the favor of these strange new lords to whom he had sworn fealty.

Outer Ring, Sixth Circle of Hell

“All set up?” McElroy looked around at his unit. Well, it wasn’t his any more, but he still had a proprietorial feel over it, even though the living troops from Earth had inflated its numbers and provided a proper command structure. The strike team was now nearly 60 humans, living or deceased, and they were about to teach the baldricks a lesson in applied firepower. And applied vengeance.

“All units, get ready. Mortar teams, prepare to open fire on my command.” The voice on the radio was heavily accented. European, where in Europe was beyond McElroy’s ability to identify. Their equipment was Russian, or at least Eastern-Europe though. That meant Poles? Or Czechs perhaps. No matter, they were somebody’s special forces troops and whoever they were, they were very good.

“Fire!” The accented word came over the radio and McElroy heard the coughing thump of the mortars opening fire. They were the big ones, 120mms, the biggest modern artillery deployed within the Hell-Pit. Despite their size, their crews went to work with a vengeance. A good mortar crew can get six bombs in the air before the first strikes home and these crews were better than good. McElroy watched the ripple of explosions walk across the market place, the fragments scything down the baldricks as they stood around the stalls. They’d never been under mortar fire before, they had no idea what it was that was killing them and they just stood there, bewildered, while the bombs crashed down around them.

Mortars are deadly weapons, their rate of fire and high payload making them great killers of creatures caught in the open. Their worst limitation is ammunition supply; especially when the weapons were man-packed in the way these were. The crews were already running short and they kept back one round each as a final envoi for when the humans withdrew, Their role was taken over by three machine grenade launchers, AGS-17s, that pumped their small rounds into the target, picking off the groups of baldricks left standing by the 120s.

Down below, McElroy saw the baldricks starting to react. Cries of “human magery” echoed up the slope and figures broke from their paralysis to try and get away from the unexpected danger. The problem was, they had pitifully few places to go and far more then half their number were already down.

“Move in.” The orders were curt, tense. McElroy brought his M115 up to his shoulder and squeezed off three rounds at a baldrick that seemed unusually active in trying to rally resistance. The figure went down, sprays of green blood erupting from its body. Then it was his section’s time to move forward. The others were laying down intense fire, pinning the baldricks in position. The deceased humans got to their feet, running forward to their next position, a shallow depression about half way down the slope. It took seconds to reach it, seconds that seemed like hours, but they made it and spread out, giving covering fire for the next group to move forward.

It was classic stuff, fire and maneuver, each squad moving forward while the others covered it from their own positions. There were a few bolts coming out from the beleaguered baldrick positions but they were wild, McElroy suspected some of the enemy were just holding their tridents over whatever it was they were hiding behind and blasting away at random. It took only three jumps to close in on the marketplace and by then what few baldricks were left alive had pulled back into their camp, but doubtless they’d be re-organizing in there. Time was short.

That wouldn’t matter much. The great cart that was the object of the attack was in front of them, the mortar and grenade crews had been careful to keep there patterns of shells and bombs away from it. McElroy saw a baldrick, his legs shattered by fragments, trying to drag himself away from the slaughterhouse that had once been a market. He didn’t even pause before shooting the crippled demon in the head.

Indira, are you there?

Waiting for you. Ready now?

Biggest portal possible Indi, big as you can, it will only be for a few seconds. We’re on our way out.

In front of him, the red air of hell shimmered and a black ellipse formed. McElroy and the rest of his unit grabbed the cart and started it rolling forward, ignoring the screams from the children inside, Behind them, the mortar crews already had their weapons on their carts and were rolling them towards the hole while the rest of the special forces group gave covering fire. Then, the red/gray environment of Hell vanished and McElroy found himself inside a large building, a hangar, lit from outside by the clear yellow light of earth’s sun.

Behind him, the heavy weapons group were already through the portal, and the special forces troopers were backing out, firing through the black ellipse as they withdrew. Six of them were bringing three others who were obviously hurt, another carried a dead man in a fireman’s lift. Then, as the last came through, the portal shut down.

DIMO(N) Transit Facility, Moffet Field, Mountain View, California

As the last of the raiding group cleared the portal, a wave of cheering erupted across the occupants of the transit facility. The building had once been used as an airship hangar but had been quickly modified into its present role. It was a much better deal than the cramped Pentagon quarters that had been used before. The size was valuable, the great cart that had been wheeled through the ellipse was testimony to that. Around it, the deceased humans of McElroy’s unit were standing bewildered.

“You OK Sergeant?”

“Its Corporal Sir, Corporal McElroy.”

“No, its Sergeant (deceased) McElroy and if you knew how much trouble you were causing the pay corps, you would be a very happy man.”

“I’m just happy to be here Sir. Out of that place, shit, I feel crappy.”

“You can’t stay here son. You’ll have to go back, but we’re linking you directly to Camp Hell-Alpha. That’s a U.S. Army facility by the Hellmouth. A Colonel Paschal will be waiting for you and your unit, he has orders for you. By the way, you’ll be losing Ori and Aeneas, the historians want to talk to them and, frankly, they’re dead weight for where you’ll be going.” Major Warhol sounded apologetic but in truth he  wasn’t. Anyway, he wanted to talk to somebody who had fought at Thermopylae.

“Sir, I don’t think….”

“No choice Sergeant.” Warhol softened a little. “Look over there, Your mom and one of your sisters has come in. You’ve got a few minutes to say ‘Hi’ then you’re on your way to Hell-Alpha. You can’t stay here, this level will kill you soon.

Warhol looked over to the small crowd of people who were standing beside the doors of the hangar. McElroy’s men had run over to them, recognizing their relatives. Cassidy had her head buried in a young man’s chest while he stroked her hair. At their feet, a dog was sniffing at her, confused, knowing this had been his human before she’d gone but also that she wasn’t human any more. That confused him and dogs do not like to be confused.

‘Sir, over here!”

The staff had the gates at the back of the cart open and were quieting the children inside. They too would have to go back to Hell but to the area occupied by humans. What would happen to them in the longer term was anybody’s guess. People were only just beginning to realize the implications of seizing hell and Warhol knew in his heart that the problems facing humanity when it occupied Heaven and kicked out the previous management were going to be just as bad.

“What have you got?” To his surprise, two of the troopers who had opened up the cart had vomited and three others were openly crying. This was not something he had expected to see from the “Screaming Eagles”

“Look at this Sir, just look at it.”

‘This’ was a large pot, looking for all the world like an old-fashioned chamber-pot. Larger than any thunder-jug he had ever seen though. Warhol looked inside and saw a writhing mass of small red things, some looking fairly human, others barely formed.

Warhol was confused. “What are they? Baldrick kidlings?’

“No Sir. Ours. They’re human embryos. Perhaps those that were miscarried or aborted, I don’t know. But they’re our fetuses and the baldricks just ate them like snacks.” The tears were streaming down the airborne soldier’s face and he didn’t even bother to wipe them away.

Well, that’s the end of Roe versus Wade Warhol thought to himself, more to deny the horror of the scene than anything else. “Right, we have to get this lot back into Hell. Round up McElroy’s people and get them ready. Time to reinsert.

Over by the equipment bay, Indira Singh had shifted off the couch and Jennie Kwang had taken her place. “Ready to go Jennie?” She gave a big thumbs-up and settled back to make contact.

Are you there Private Chestnut?

Do I have any choice? The mind-voice was weak and sulky. From Jennie’s experience in the People’s Liberation Army, the Sergeants were in process of breaking down the spoiled little brat and building the man that would replace him. It was a form of rebirth as well.

No, so please open up the portal. It was much easier to do it from his end and would cause her little or no pain. Even humans needed only marginal amplification when opening a portal from Hell-side. The black ellipse popped open almost immediately,

“Right, McElroy, take your people though, everybody else, get that cart through.” Warhol snapped out the orders. McElroy’s unit finished saying their good-byes to their families and stepped through the portal to Camp Hell-Alpha. When everything that had to go was gone, Kwang snapped the portal shut. Given electronics, and a presence the other side, humans had the best of both worlds, they could open gates easily from hellside and close them equally easily from earthside. Would that the Sheffield problem was so easy to solve.

Warhol was speaking into a mobile radio. “They’re gone General, just a few seconds ago. The kids as well and that’s a sight that I don’t want to ever see again.”

Indira was standing beside him, politely waiting for him to finish. Her normally olive skin was gray but her tinfoil hat shone in the sun streaming through the windows, making it seem as if she was wearing a halo.

“Will they be coming back through here Sir?”

“McElroy’s people? Yes, we can’t portal from place to place in Hell, for some reason the portals can’t form when there isn’t a barrier. Like you can’t have a door without a wall to put it in I guess. But, they’ll be coming back through, in around three days if all goes well.

Oval Office, White House, Washington.

“Well, that’s the end of Roe versus Wade. The public won’t balk at ‘right to life’ legislation now.”

President Bush lifted his eyes from the report and looked steadily at the speaker. “Karl, hear me on this and don’t even think of crossing me. You will say nothing of this, do you understand, nothing. We’re classifying this report so deep that it will never be found.”

“But Dubya, it’s a prime opportunity to get that judgment reversed.”

“I don’t care. Karl, have you any idea how much suffering this report will cause if it gets out? All the women who have lost babies for any reason, natural or otherwise, read it, they’ll think of their baby in those vats, waiting to be used as a baldrick snack. You’ve read the reports on depression and stress disorders amongst women who’ve lost or aborted babies, I will not be responsible for increasing their suffering. We will have a quiet word with the Justices, share this information with them, then when the opportunity comes, they can make the ruling that they think fit. But we will not cause the suffering and grief that results from this report to force their hands in public.”

“But….”

“I said No Karl, what part of that don’t you understand. And I’ll repeat this, don’t try a leak or ‘arrange’ for somebody else to do it for you. Got that into your head? Because it is a warning.”

Camo Hell-Alpha, Martial Plain of Dysprosium

“McElroy? This your unit? Good. We’ll get you to a briefing room ASAP. We’ve got three days to train you up on operating the navigational beacons and get you prepared for the next part of this operation. Your instructors will be with you shortly.”

McElroy looked around at the Army base, its scene familiar even of its setting wasn’t. He might be out of the Hell-Pit but he was back in the regular Army. And its habits hadn’t changed, it was still ‘hurry up and wait.’

Chapter Fifty Three

Banks of the Phlegethon River, Hell

It wasn’t the way Abigor had described in the last report he had made before his disgrace and desertion. He’d spoken of the human forces lining up behind ridges, ready to hurl their mage-fire bolts into an attacking enemy. That wasn’t how these humans were deploying at all. They were spread out, small strong-points forming, each built around four of their iron chariots. There were hundreds of those little forts, arranged in staggered rows with great distances between them, stretching back as far as he could see. The iron chariots were surrounded by earthworks, the red soil of hell piled up in great banks so that only the curious round structures on top of the chariots peered over the crest. Another thing that didn’t make sense, didn’t that provide dead ground close in to each little fortress? Beelzebub thought that over carefully.

“The day of glory draws closer master.” Chiknathragothem spoke deferentially to the great demon he served, Satan’s favorite and nearest-thing-to-trusted General. “Soon we shall lead the great charge that will tear these humans apart.”

“I think not.” Beelzebub was still mulling over the sight before him.

“Sire?” That had been an unexpected retort and Chiknathragothem didn’t quite know what to make of it.

“Abigor made a wild charge at the enemy and look where it got him. Defeated and disgraced. We must try to be a little more cunning. Where is Asmodeus’s Army?”

“A day’s march out Sire. Coming up from the south. Two hundred and thirty three legions including nine of cavalry and three of fliers. All he had save for the ten he took down to the pit.”

“Where they did him little good eh Chiknathragothem?” The death of Asmodeus was still causing shock-waves throughout Hell. The other Great Dukes had descended on his estates and property with unparalleled avarice, hoping to divide the spoils between themselves. And what spoils there were for Asmodeus had been a rich and powerful Duke, to absorb even a portion of his holdings would enhance the power and status of any noble demon.

That was what had made the next step so inexplicable. Normally Satan encouraged infighting and maneuvering amongst his entourage on the very sensible basis that when they were conspiring against each other, they would not be conspiring against him. But this time Satan Mekratrig had stilled the struggle with a single booming command that had echoed throughout the streets of Dis. Rather like the strange flying chariots of the humans that made no noise when coming but went overhead with a dreadful crash and left a deafening scream behind them. Satan had gathered his court and harangued them all for their disloyalty and treachery, asking them why they fought each other when the humans needed destroying. Only his loyal vassals Beelzebub and Belial were standing by him, he said, while others looked only to their own gain. As a result, the holdings of Asmodeus would be distributed by Satan when the war against the humans was over and the extent of the rewards would be measured by the service the recipients had provided. And so far, Satan had concluded darkly, only Belial had qualified.

The thought that Belial might inherit the whole of Asmodeus’s vast holdings had horrified the demon hierarchy. All too many remembered the slights and humiliations they had visited upon him when to do so won them favor in Satan’s eyes. The destruction of Sheffield had added very real fear to the horror, was it not possible that Belial might take his vengeance by doing the same to them? And there were his gorgons to consider; Euryale was well-known for her large collection of cherished and carefully-maintained grudges.

“Chiknathragothem, see here where the Phlegethon bends? It turns towards us here, then turns back to its original course for about 20 leagues, then turns away from us before one more returning to its original course.”

Chiknathragothem looked at the parchment with the line of the river drawn on it. The course of the river was primarily a straight line but here, near Dis, there was a great bulge towards the Infernal City.

“The humans have set up their defenses here, fortifying this bulge. It is obvious they intend to use it as a launch point for their attack on Dis itself. So we must strike first, to destroy this position.” Beelzebub thought for a few seconds. “Abigor told us that the humans like to encircle their enemies, so that none can get away when they start to destroy them. Perhaps we should do the same.”

“But Sire, if an enemy has no means of retreat, will he not fight harder?”

“Chiknathragothem, Abigor took more that 400,000 with him, 60 Legions. The humans wiped them out, almost to the last. One demon in a thousand returned. Do you seriously think the humans can fight any harder than already have? No, I think not. You will take Asmodeus’s Army and move it here, where the river turns away from Dis. And you will thrust across the river there and move into the rear of the defense along the Phlegethon. I will assign you three additional legions of fliers for the assault. And Belial is sending us 80 Wvverns that he has trained to attack forces on the ground. We will see how the humans cope with fire from the sky. My main thrust will be at the upstream bend, and I will also move into their rear. We shall meet behind the great bulge with the human army trapped against the river. And then we will destroy them.

“Think on this Chiknathragothem, had things gone as originally planned, we would be fighting on Earth, far from sight and where the news of our victories would be sung by Heralds. But now, we will win the fight within Satan’s sight, under his own walls. Much will be our glory and great our rewards.”

Conference Room, The White House, Washington D.C.

“What is the news from Sheffield?”

“Cautiously good Mr President. Our vulcanologist, Keavy McManus, has measured the lava flow and its decreasing steadily. Since the eruption started, its fallen off by around 30 percent and the rate of decline is accelerating. There are shifts in the gas content of the lava and its composition that also indicate that the magma chamber is nearly empty and that means the end of this disaster may be in sight at last.

“Mrs. McManus believes that we didn’t get the full blast from a primary volcano. Her opinion is that the structure that caused this problem is a major caldera with a large number of daughter outlets around it. We got the output from one of those daughters. That would match up with the description of Tartarus we got from Abigor and that Herald creature. Where is he by the way?”

“Abigor, still at Hell-Alpha. Spends most of his time answering our questions or watching war movies. He’s very taken with the Hollywood definition of war. Although that Spartan spearmen we found isn’t so enamored, The troops had a showing of “300” and he sat in on it. He was foaming at the mouth by the end and tried to stick his spear through the screen. I hate to think what will happen when our Japanese Samurai sees ‘Kagemusha’.”

“Kagemusha is supposed to be very accurate actually. But I think Zack Snyder had better run for his life if Aeneas finds out where he lives.”

On the great video screen, Gordon Brown drummed his fingers angrily. He wasn’t used to the way American meetings tended to wander off the point sometimes. “Mr. President, I didn’t mean Abigor, I meant the Herald thing that was with him. Menthol, or whatever his name was. What is he doing?”

“ Memnon.” Condoleezza Rice smiled engagingly at the screen. “He’s off doing what he does best, going places in Hell. We can contact him anywhere we want, any time. So, where he is can be very important to us.”

“What Doctor Rice means.” Secretary Warner threw an amused glance at his colleague. She was one of the few people who had contributed her name to the international lexicon. Across the diplomatic world, a Condele referred to a long, impressive and reassuring speech that, on close examination said nothing and meant nothing,. “Is that Memnon is engaged in an undercover operation of critical importance and we’re not at liberty to say any more than that in case that operation is endangered.”

“That is as may be. But the British people want vengeance for Sheffield.” Brown was truculent and the other listeners believed he had every right to be. The destruction of Sheffield with its 15,000 dead, the number was still rising, had been a hard blow.

“And they shall have it Gordon. Pressed down and running over. But, we must make certain that our vengeance is both appropriate and properly targeted. That blow must make our enemies weep bitter tears, not just for the pain it inflicts but for the harm it causes.”

Brown was silent for a few seconds. He knew what the President was really saying, that the vengeance for Sheffield must do real harm to the enemy. For all its horror, Sheffield had not. Which gave rise to the question that had never been satisfactorily answered, why had that city been hit. It was almost pointless, a minimal return for what had surely been a great effort.

“Aye, I can understand that. But the British people, they need to see something happen. Can’t we blow something up? We have the weapons, why not use them?”

Senator Warner suddenly looked weary. “I wish we could. But we’re in a long war, we have no idea of how long. We have a rough idea of how big Hell is, and the answer is frightening. The land area of Hell exceeds that of our own world and it’s all grouped in one great continent. It could take us most of a generation to establish our hold over it and if we’re not careful, we could end up fighting a guerilla war that would last for longer than that. And beyond that, we have the war against heaven . We can be sure those who reside there, have been watching what happens in hell and are casting their plans accordingly. We need to keep as much of our power in reserve as we can. We must release just enough at any given time to maintain our superiority and that’s it.”

“Easy for you to say Sir. But the political pressure here to do something is overwhelming. It is politically essential that we be seen to take a terrible revenge for what has been done to us. There must be some action we can take. If not, I honestly question whether our people’s morale will hold up. It is easy for you to say we should hold on and measure our revenge but it is not your city that is now a lava pit. Our people go to sleep every night, wondering whether this is the night that a volcano will open over their heads.”

“Perhaps there are some things you can do.” From the screen, General Petraeus spoke, the red sky outside the window of his office revealing that he was speaking directly from Hell. In fact, the transmission was going out by way of a fiber optics cable to a transmitter the other side of the Hellmouth but that was another matter. A scant few weeks earlier, anybody who claimed that a television transmission from Hell was possible would have been declared insane. That had happened all too often, but those who had been declared insane were due a major apology. Now it was a mark of insanity not to wear the trademark tinfoil hat.

“In a few hours, perhaps no more than two days, there will be the biggest battle the world has ever seen. We’ve spotted two baldrick armies closing in on our defense line along the Phlegethon river. Between them, they number almost three and a quarter million baldricks. If our intelligence is anything to go by, and our sources have proved reliable to date, this is a major part of the baldrick professional army. We intend to destroy that army and we will be using our tactical air power to achieve a large part of that. That will let the secret of one of our most devastating weapons be out of the bag then. You have your Tornados Mister Brown, we have a map of Dis and we can suggest a few targets that might be highly satisfactory. They’ll act as a curtain-raiser to the main act.” Petraeus hesitated, what he was about to say could endanger humanity’s best hope for preventing further Sheffields. “There is another possibility also. Soon, we will be able to strike directly at the source of these volcano attacks. We need Special Forces troops to do that and our own are already thinly spread supporting the insurgent groups in Hell. Your SAS and SBS troops are well-known as being the best in the world at their trade. If you can ready a strike force, we can, when the time is right, send it in.”

“So something is happening? That is good to know. Thank you General, I look forward to hearing from you.”

The Ultimate Temple, Heaven

“And what is the news of the war?”

“The Humans have done well, oh nameless one, Lord and God of all. They have breached the defenses of Hell and even now mass for an assault on the eternal enemy in his lair of Dis. The infernal one himself is massing his army to strike back. A great battle is looming, one that will pit our enemies against each other.

“The Infernal Enemy has struck back against the humans in their homes. He has destroyed one of their cities by pouring lava over it.”

There was an affectionate laugh from the great throne that dominated the room. Around the walls, the singers carried on their complex chorus of eternal praise, but some of the words had sunk home into their minds, numbed by countless millennia of repeating the same hymns. The humans were winning the battle against hell, could salvation be at hand? Could there be salvation from salvation?

“That Belial, he always was a joker. Even when the Eternal Enemy seized credit for his destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

That was rich thought Michael to himself. Considering Yahweh himself had stolen credit for that particular prank.

“The humans are cowering in fear at the destruction?” The amusement in Yahweh’s voice had gone.

“No, oh nameless one, Lord and God of all. There is fear yes, but much more anger. In their own strange words, they are royally pissed off. I think the Eternal Enemy will rue the day he tried that action.”

“Who cares what he will or will not rue. It is the humans who must be made to bend. They denied me my worship. They challenged my rulings. They dared to argue with my divine truths!” The voice rose into a demented scream and for a brief second Yahweh sounded like Satan in one of his more extravagant moods. Then the voice returned to normal. “They must be brought back into the fold, they must be returned to their rightful state of obedience. If the Eternal Enemy cannot do this then we must. Uriel has been readied, he is planning his attack now. If the humans do not fold before the might of the Eternal Enemy’s army, then they must be made to fold before our anger.”

Underground Caverns, City of Dis

She'd been this way many times, most recently to let others know about the new arrivals, who had slipped back out while she was gone. The new arrivals, who were doing things that she'd never have believed if she hadn't seen them with her own eyes. Her thoughts went back to the assault she'd witnessed, how they had magicked down the walls, then moved methodically through the ruins, ruthlessly killing and killing and killing.

How they did it, she didn't know. She'd never been a fighter, preferring instead to ply a different trade, but she'd been in contact with enough soldiers to tell when someone knew what he was doing. Or she, in the case of this Kim. And, during her six to ten thousand years as a free person in Hell – she wasn't sure how many; the centuries blurred together now – she'd made contacts, and met quite a few military men. Most had been just the humble rank-and-file, but not all. Some had been great leaders and one of them was just down the passage.  In this small underground city hewn from the natural cave network beneath this spur of the giant encircling city of Dis, the torches lit the dark passage with a flickering, orange light that played off the dry stone tunnel; above them was thousands of years' worth of soot staining the rock.

The passage branched; before turning left, Rahab looked at the symbol scratched in the rock, as much out of habit as to remind herself; she'd been this way many, many times over the centuries to consult with the man who lived at its end, behind the simple wooden door that was before her now. She knocked twice, then thrice, a code as old as the resistance. If it's so old, how do we know they don't know? That was a disturbing thought, of the kind she'd been having more and more since the newcomers had arrived with their strange ways.

The door cracked open; a man with heavy eyebrows and what seemed a perpetual frown peered out underneath short golden curls. His face softened as much as it could when he saw who had knocked. “Ah, Rahab. Please come in.” He opened the door wider to allow her to enter, and then shut it behind her.

The room was much like the one she'd left a few minutes before, except that in the fireplace was a fire. In front of the fire was positioned a large wooden table strewn over with piles of dried clay tablets and some parchments. Sitting hunched with his back to her, carefully impressing on a wet tablet with a stylus, was a lithe man of average height, with thin black hair. Standing behind him and looking over his shoulder was a tall, dark, man with a short crew cut and a jutting chin.

At the sound of Rahab's entrance, the man glanced over his shoulder, then smiled broadly, standing up and stretching. “Rahab! Come in! It has been too long!”

Rahab smiled wanly back and embraced him. “Gaius Julius Caesar, it has indeed been too long.”

He returned the hug warmly, then held her at arm's length. “What brings you here, my friend? The changes shaking up this prison we live in?”

The surprise must have been evident on her face, because he burst into laughter even before she could ask, “You know about it?”

“Rahab, how long have you known what I've been doing here? I have contacts all over Hell, and I have information constantly coming in.” Caesar smiled. “I know that there are rumors flying all throughout Mekatrig's domain about an invasion of Earth, about Abigor and his expeditionary force, and about a part of the Fifth Ring, along the Styx, where they dare not go. And most of all, of the assassination of Asmodeus. That news made all of hell ring with its chimes. Have you come to give me a rumor?”

“No,” Rahab said firmly. “I have something far better than a rumor. I have seen it all firsthand.”

Caesar's smile was gone in a flash, and he pulled a chair away from the hearth. “Sit,” he said, gesturing. She sat, he sat, and then she started talking. She told about her first encounter with the four strange escapees, how she'd led them to the holding room, and how they'd disappeared. She told about the explosions that had started echoing across the swamps, how the bridge across the Styx had been destroyed as though it were built of children's blocks, how the demonic patrols had started disappearing. She told how their shattered, lifeless bodies had started appearing, with the letters “PFLH” scrawled in the greenish blood.

After a little bit, Caesar held up his hand. “Forgive me; I was so happy to see you, I did not offer you refreshments. Pullo, please get our guest some water.”

His companion nodded and moved into an adjoining chamber. Caesar nodded at Rahab. “Please. Continue.”

And she did, stopping only to take the cup of water from Titus Pullo. Now, she told of her encounter with the forces, of the assault on the castle she had witnessed. She told of the lightning speed with which the insurgents had moved, of their ability to kill from a distance and to call explosions. As she did so, Lucius Vorenus moved slightly and listened to her words. Always the eternal soldier she thought. And she told of the strange man she had been tasked to hide, the man who was so fascinated with ants. Then she was done, and Caesar stared at the wall, his face hard and unmoving in the firelight. The only clue to his thoughts was the drumming of his heel on the ground, which continued incessantly.

At last, he spoke. “Rahab, I need you to contact the leader of this PFLH. I need to talk to her as soon as possible. Tell her that we will meet on neutral ground of her choosing. She will know that this means I am approaching her in good faith. I will send Pullo and Vorenus with you; they are to collect the man you brought with you and bring him back here. Now go; go now, and may the powerful gods that caused me to be spared down here guard you also.”

Chapter Fifty Four

Tapton Hall, Western Sheffield, United Kingdom

"Come on now, clear out, we can't take you after all."

The older man was furious. "Are you insane? Two of us can barely walk and that guy is completely out of it." His mask was still on and his voice was slightly muffled.

"I'm sorry sir, we have priority orders. There's another unit in the next road over there." Special Constable Amstead gestured towards a row of houses half-hidden by the drifting smoke. "I have to ask you to move, now." He put his hand very deliberately on his holstered Smith & Wesson pistol, but it was more the blank uncaring look in his eyes that convinced the evacuees not to argue.

John watched the civvies limp away, the cursing man trying to support the two girls and the younger man trailing listlessly behind. It was a sad sight but this a was top priority mission. He ducked back into the building, where Constable Hillier was escorting the demoness down the central corridor. He'd managed to splint and bandage her leg and even her damaged wing with creative application of duct tape, but it was obvious that every step was still a minor agony for the creature.

"Affirmative, the weapons discharge was accidental. Piece of falling debris caught me on the arm, no injuries. My partner's radio was out, no cause for alarm. 523 out."

Constable Hillier clicked the radio off. It was lucky they'd found the demon defector first. She'd already been wounded by a unit that obviously shot first and interrogated any survivors later, and if those trigger happy Home Guard amateurs had gotten to her first they'd have likely finished the job.

"Civvies are clear, we can move her into the van now." John reported.

"My apologies for what happened to you. You did a brave thing coming here." Matthew looked at the demon uncertainly, not sure if he was improving the situation. "I'm sure with your help we can prevent this happening again."

The gorgon spoke in a silky yet slightly rasping voice. "Yess, of course, but you have to get me to that meeting with your king's advisors. I was told to speak only to them."

"Right, you were flying there when you were shot down."

'Probably the SIS Matthew thought. 'Odd, but if that's what she says...' The idea that the demon might be lying was somehow unthinkable. They'd arrived at the van; the sounds of the fire teams and circling aircraft louder than ever but the thick ashen haze rendered them invisible.

"Where did you say the rendezvous was?"

"A small village, a dozen miles to the north of here. I cannot remember the name..." Lakheenahuknaasi tried her best to look sympathetic.

'Poor thing, probably scared out of its wits.' "Barnsley perhaps? No, that's a decent size town..."

"Grimethorpe?" Special Constable Amstead volunteered. He had an aunt who still lived in that run-down sink-hole.

"Yes, that's it, Grim-thorpe!" Lakheenahuknaasi was desperate to escape this awful place, anywhere would do. She climbed into the yawning interior of the iron chariot, shuddering at the feeling of the cursed metal all around her.

“Huh, lucky guess John.”

'How can she be cold in this heat?' Matthew thought. "There's some space blankets and a thermos of tea in the back there." The gorgon blinked at him. "Shout if you need anything else. We'd best be off then." The two police officers shut the rear doors and climbed into the cab. Moments later, the van pulled away and headed north.

DIMO(N) Special Devices Assembly Facility (formerly Payne Whitney Gymnasium Complex), Yale, Connecticut

The raised track formed a convenient balcony for viewing the main assembly area, one which Dr Kuroneko had taken to spending his breaks in. The repurposed space was packed with tools, workbenches, stacked components and half-finished subassemblies. Many would not be out of place in any light engineering shop, but some were thoroughly exotic and quite a few had been requisitioned directly from high-energy physics labs. The place was crowded with engineers and technicians of diverse specialties; DIMO(N) drafted whoever they needed (not that coercion was required often) and left no stone unturned in building their tiger team. The work went on 24/7, watched by the heavily armed guards that stood at every entrance.

“Quite a sight, isn’t it.”

The flat voice again. Kuroneko tried not to look startled as he turned to face the newcomer.

“You’ve been approved for deployment over Sheffield.” the man continued “Your project plan implies that you’ll be ready to ship the first device in five more days, correct?”

“If everyone continues to work day and night and there are no more component problems, then yes. But remember that this is just a prototype…”

“Yes, you’ve made that clear, we won’t string you up if it’s a dud. Not the first time anway.” The man smiled. Kuroneko tried to smile back.

“You’ve got a third prototype under production now?” he continued.

“Yes, but we’re holding further components for the weaponised version. The engineers tell me those HT superconductors are hell to work with, we’ve trimmed another three hundred kilos off but I’m not sure how much more we can take out.”

“These aviation types don’t look hard enough. I’ll see if I can get you some ICBM RV designers. There’s no one better at shaving ounces.”

Kuroneko didn’t know how this mysterious civilian was going to rustle up nuclear missile builders and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Both men stared out at the work in progress.

“In any case, you’ve been assigned a designation. EBU-5(V)1, prototypes will be mod 0, first production run will be mod 1. McAlester is turning out the casings for you now, based on the GBU-43 supersize design study. C-17s will be providing emergency capability until we can dedicate B-1s for the role, crews are about to start training in Nevada. Just as soon as we can spray paint some weather balloons black to serve as the targets.”

Kuroneko wished he could tell when this guy was joking. Best to change the subject, the thought.

“What about early warning? Would you believe, the cellphone companies told us to quit bothering them! Told us to go through the FCC, and they’re a bunch of…”

He was cut off again. “Not a problem. I have it on good authority that they’ll be a presidential order going out in the morning. You’ll have full access to network diagnostics and freedom to reprogram the base stations as needed.”

“Right. Well, that’s great. Thank you.” Kuroneko stammered. “Of course that’s just, ahh, how do you say, ‘emergency capability’, until the production line for the dedicated sensors is running.”

“Of course.” The man looked at his watch. “Keep up the good work, Doctor.” He walked briskly away, leaving Kuroneko alone.

‘Damn’, the scientist thought, ‘now my coffee’s gone cold’.

Lady Wood, near Grimthorpe, United Kingdom

The big police Transit rolled to a halt on the loose gravel, stopping under the canopy of trees at the end of the disused lane. Two police officers got out and opened the rear doors. An unearthly humanoid form emerged, trailing oversized bat-wings and gleaming bronze and silver in the fading afternoon light. The silver came from the mylar blanket that the creature had wrapped around itself like a shroud.

"Are you ok?" Constable Matthew Hillier looked at the demon dubiously.

"Well enough, human." She flashed a fanged grin. “Your assistance is appreciated.”

"You're sure this is it? There's no sign of anyone else here."

"I was to meet them at a farmhouse, in that direction I believe." The demon pointed into the trees, seemingly at random. "You will escort me of course."

"Of course." Matthew echoed. He was feeling increasingly uneasy about this. There was something wrong here... had someone tricked the demon perhaps? To what end? In any case they couldn't abandon her. He unslung his MP5 and moved forward.

"That was a close call back at the checkpoint." his partner remarked, after a few minutes walking. “If those yobs hadn't been making a scene, they probably would've searched us.”

“Yeah, then we'd have had some fast talking to do.” Matthew couldn't shake the feeling something was horribly wrong here. The more he thought about it – and for some reason he hadn't until now – this scenario made no sense. Why where they here? Why had they taken that creature at its word? Suddenly he realized that the demon was no longer beside them. Clarity came a moment too late. The spray of paralyzing darts pierced his back and for the second time his limbs went rigid before he could draw a bead on the demon. For a moment he stood like a statue, before falling to the ground stiffly. As he fell he saw that John had suffered the same fate.

Lakheenahuknaasi limped up to the paralyzed humans. They always looked so pitiful, frozen in horror like that. And to think that they'd been trying to show her pity.

“It's almost a shame, after you've been so helpful.” Clinically, she reached down with a clawed hand and ripped out the first man's throat. “But I'm afraid you've become more trouble than you're worth”. The second man was staring at her in terror; he mumbled something, but it was too slurred for the gorgon to tell whether it was begging or defiance. No matter. She grabbed his throat and squeezed the life out of him. Finally giving in to her instincts, Lakheenahuknaasi dropped to her knees and began to feast.

After half an hour she'd had her fill. The demoness dragged what was left of the bodies into a nearby ditch, concealed them as best she could and slipped away into the woods.

Underground Caverns, City of Dis, Hell

Despite the oppressiveness of being cooped up underground, Richard Dawkins was fully recovered and had been for some time. The professor of biology part of him was only half conscious of his surroundings, the rest of his mind was riveted on the world around him. As the trauma of his days of torment had slowly died, long after no trace of the hideous burns remained, he'd begun to take note of hell, his scientific training taking over.

Even here, inside this labyrinth of granite caves, he'd examined his environment. The floor was coated with mud, brown, but flecked with what looked a bit like duckweed, or algae of some sort. It was the consistency of cake batter. There were tufts of thick grass growing out of it here and there, but it wasn't like any grass he'd ever seen – short, thick, and serrated. On the walls surrounding him, were strange lichen formations. And the bugs – the bugs were like nothing in his experience.

An evolutionary etymologist by profession, Dawkins had spent his life studying insects. He knew a new species when he saw one, and right now, all the things he was seeing were new species. The flies buzzing around, flitting from wall to wall, light source to light source, were larger and faster than their counterparts back on Earth. The dragonflies that swooped in and out of the shadows that marked the natural origin of this complex did so on iridescent wings that were colored to reflect the environment of Hell, striated orange beneath and muddy brown above. Dawkins supposed that they must have a natural predator, else there would have been no need for camouflage from above.

So, in the true spirit of scientific inquiry (he would not admit to himself that he had nothing better tp do at this point) he devoted himself to carefully watching the insects around him for several hours. Finally, he was vindicated as a small, dark-orange bird swept out of the shadows, caught a particularly large and (Dawkins supposed) juicy dragonfly in its beak, and perched on a convenient ledge not two meters from him. As it crunched on its meal, it looked for all the world like a little puffed-up bundle of feathers with two large, black eyes and a short, sharp beak.

Yet for all its differences, the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that everything here was similar, somehow, to everything on Earth. The biosystems had to be related somehow; it was all slightly different, slightly off, from the natural ecosystem, but they were so much the same. Certainly not the entirely different life forms one would expect from a completely separated alternate universe. That fitted in with all his observations to date, wherever this place was, it shared a common ancestry with Earth. Or at least the creatures here did. He wondered briefly if they were the, he tried to think of a description, his mind rebelling from using the word soul,

It didn’t help that he wasn’t quite aware of what his exact status was here. Somewhere between a guest and a prisoner and certainly a damned nuisance (literally he reflected bitterly). The door of his room wasn’t locked but he was cautioned that the network of caves was great and it had dangers all of its own. Early in his stay, that woman, Rahab, had taken him for a walk through the tunnels and he had seen a row of ants marching from one crack in the walls to another. They had been the size of his big toe, larger and fatter than any sort of ant he'd ever heard of on Earth. And, they were dark, mud-colored. Their pincers were almost certainly able to break skin; he took some care to take a big step over the line. He’d turned to Rahab and tapped her on the shoulder. “Excuse me.”

She didn't stop, but flatly shot back, “What?”

“Do you spend much time here?”

“Not as much as I would wish. Do you think I want to get caught out in the open by those demons?”

“Ah.” Dawkins was silent for a moment, then spoke again. “Rahab, do you think you can answer a few questions for me?”

She audibly rolled her eyes. “All right.”

“Do you know what kind of ants those are?”

“Ants?” Rahab sounded genuinely surprised. “What ants?”

“The ants we just stepped over.”

For a moment, Rahab cast about her memory. “Ah, those ants. There are a lot of them around here. What about them?”

“Do you know anything about them?” Dawkins asked.

“Not really.” She paused for a second, looked at him, then continued walking forward. After another few minutes, she asked quietly over her shoulder, “What do you care about ants?”

Dawkins, busy scanning the ground for insects, said after a few seconds, “Well, the ecosystem here is fascinating. Those ants aren't like anything back on Earth. So I'm trying to find out about them, and about all the other plants and animals, to learn more about Hell and what its history must have been.”

Rahab frowned. “You can tell the history of the place just by looking at its plants and animals?”

“A little bit,” said Dawkins. “We can make some surmises as to the evolutionary history of the ecosystem by studying the plants and animals. For example, we can tell how long ago their ancestors came here from Earth, and how much has occurred since then.”

She’d looked at him, bewildered, and shown him the way back to his room. And he’d been here more or less ever since. It was comfortable enough although if Dawkins made it back to Earth, he would never complain about a Ramada Inn again. He’d had nothing to do other than watch the insects and try to work out if any of them were dangerous. He was still mulling over the options there, contact poisons, bites, spitting, when there was a knock on the door.

“Come in.”

Rahab entered the room, two men behind her. Dawkins recognized the type instantly. Heavies. Muscle. The names varied from country to country but their kind never did. He didn’t know whether this was a good time to get scared or already too late for that. But, they didn’t look hostile. More curious than anything else.

“Our leader would like to speak with you. We will take you to him and then we must go outside. Do you need help?”

Dawkins relaxed. A little. “No, Rahab, I’m recovered now.” He turned to the two men. “I’m Richard Dawkins.”

“Good for you.” The fair-haired man grunted the words out.

“Don’t mind him. He’s always a bit irritable when Caesar’s alone. I’m Titus Pullo, he’s Lucius Vorenus.”

“The Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus?” Dawkins was stunned.

The big man laughed. “So, you’ve read Caesar’s book then. Spins a good yarn doesn’t he.”

“I’ve read the book, but you’re the stars of a television program as well.”

The big man looked confused. Rahab cut smoothly in. “Don’t worry Titus, none of understand what he’s saying most of the time. He likes ants though, if you see any, take him to them. They’ll keep him happy for hours.”

Chapter Fifty Five

Belial’s Study, Adamantine Fastness of Tartarus, Hell

Of course, Belial never sat with his back to a door. No demon made it past squad leader without learning such basic common sense. Thus when Euryale entered she was immediately met by the count’s calculating stare. She made no sign of having noticed it though, instead concentrating on bringing the food she had prepared for him to his table. She’d made certain that the tray held everything he liked and nothing that he did not, that wasn’t just being seductive, that was simple self-preservation. Once Belial’s meal was laid out, she sat quietly on the couch beside him, saying nothing. Belial was very familiar with this game, but still drunk on success he was in the mood to let it play out. He continued to stare at the meal laid out on the table, aware that the Euryale’s tail had curved around his leg and its tip was caressing the back of his thigh.

“Satan Mekratrig is pleased at my success. He has named me as one who stands beside him and is in his favor.”

“My Lord. The Baroness Yulupki is in position with her chorus. The second attack, on Dee-Troyt, will commence when you give the word.” Her voice was quiet and respectful but her tail continued to move suggestively up his leg, its tip now reaching his knee. The torchlight was glittering off her smooth bronze scales. Conniving little harpy. Belial thought, though the constantly-moving tip of tail curling around his lower leg was rather distracting. Still as comely as ever though.

“And then Satan will indeed reward me and grant me back the power I once had. Which raises the question of what to do with you, Euryale. Your display tonight was unforgivable.” Mentally, Belial gulped, the top of her tail had now reached his groin and thinking straight was becoming every more difficult. “You must be punished for your insubordination.

“I am in great fear of your punishment Belial.” Euryale put a distinct tremor into her voice, one that was either lust or fear and there was no way of telling which was which. In fact, of course, the answer was neither but that didn’t really matter. She twitched the tip of her tail and saw Belial jump slightly. You ignorant oaf, half your court want to rebel against you, the other half just want to assassinate you. The only thing stopping them is they don’t regard Tartarus as being worth the risk. As soon as you have something worth usurping, they’ll be at your throat. If it didn’t suit me to have you on the throne… the tip of her tail had reached up and now was circling Belial’s penis.

Any hope Belial had of thinking straight had long gone. Ah well, may as well go with the flow was the one thought that was running through his mind. He lurched upwards, getting to his feet and dragging Euryale up with him at the same time. Then, he pulled the demoness off the couch, and slung her over his shoulder before he carried her through an archway and flung her onto a sleeping pallet. Euryale landed heavily on her back, splayed out on the matted fungus. The briefest flicker of fear crossed her face before her features melted into a look of unbridled lust. Belial couldn’t tell if she was faking that or not, but his matching expression was certainly genuine.

Outside, the listening orcs heard the intense screams and were indeed convinced that a most horrible tortures were being inflicted. By the time the story had been elaborated and repeated, it was enough to chill the blood of even the most ruthless of Belial’s minions.

Half an hour later, Belial was back in his study, staring dreamily through the window (or rather, trident firing loophole). This owed less to the massage Euryale was giving him than to the drugged dart she’d managed to administer while the count was quite thoroughly distracted by her claws raking his back. It was a tactic she used most sparingly, due to the likely horrible consequences of him realizing what she was doing, but in this case she’d considered it justified.

“Yes, such a shame really, losing brave Lasee-urk-nasee.”

Euryale sighed mentally. “Actually Lakheenahuknaasi survived. She made contact with me just an hour ago, of course I came to see you immediately. She says that she was intercepted by a human sky chariot and gravely wounded. Lakheenahuknaasi thinks we must minimize the time between sending the pathfinder and the strike itself. If we do that, her sister will have a much better chance of survival..”

“Of course. Your handmaiden is alive? I expect you will want to retrieve her then?”

“Actually I convinced her to stay for a while. She said that she it may be possible to build a small cult of humans and that from them she can learn much of value to you.”

The idea of any of his subjects having a private cult didn’t sit easily with Belial, but then again they were only humans. After the immense effort it had taken to find the first two targets, the prospect of his own intelligence network on earth was tantalizing, however modest its beginnings.

“Most pleasing, Euryale. What has she discovered so far.”

“Alas she is still evading human pursuit and has not had time to gather much yet. But think on this my Lord, we both know how much influence Deumos gains just from her legion of succubi – yet she could not warn us of the human magery. My handmaiden has shown that given the chance, we gorgons can provide you with a superior spy network. How much would that be worth at Mekratrig’s court?”

The offer would have been tempting anyway, had she managed to get the count to hear it out, but in his current state it was irresistible.

“Very well. We attack De Troyt immediately and we use a nephilim as close to the target as possible. The search must begin immediately, to be sure of finding one who can travel there in time.” Suddenly energized, Belial stormed out of his chambers, bellowing for servants and messengers as he made his way to the great hall. Euryale followed behind, savoring a smug grin before she had to begin her performance for the nobles.

Third Platoon, Second Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Regiment, 247th Motor Rifle Division, Phlegethon River Front, Hell

“Bratischka, many times we have said that the spirits of our ancestors look down upon us but this time, it is true. They are there, Bratischka, there beyond the river. There, the heroes who defended the Bagration flèches, who fought to hold Port Arthur, who defended the Rodina against the Germans, they wait for us. There our gallant comrades who held the ruins of Stalingrad, who broke the fascist beast on the fields of Kursk and who chased him all the way back to his lair in Berlin, they wait for us. Everything we have we owe to them, everything we are, is because they sacrificed everything for us. Now it our turn to fight and make whatever sacrifices we must in order to repay our debt to them. Now it is our turn to break the armies of hell on our armor and send them scurrying away under the lash of our guns. Bratischka, the Americans won a great victory in the desert of Iraq fighting these same enemies. Can we show ourselves to be less than them? I say no! I say we should show the Americans how a Russian Army fights! I say we should score such a victory today that the world will be in awe of our power and the enemy shall tremble at the thought of fighting us again!”

Lieutenant Anatolii Ivanovich Pas'kov, standing on the back of the BMP-2 armored personnel carrier, looked down at the cheering men in his little command. Three BMP-2s, one Tungaska air defense system. Not so much as things went but one of hundreds of dug-in strong points that defended the front. Miles deep, each strongpoint covering the others so not one inch of ground was left unswept by heavy automatic weapons. The BMPs had been modified, they each had two AGS-17 grenade machine guns mounted on their rear decking to provide that extra bit of close-in firepower. Outside the earth banks, the ground was covered with wire entanglements and under them were the mines, hundreds of thousands of them. As a final thought, the river banks were criss-crossed with trenches, each carefully calculated to be deep enough and wide enough to catch a rhino-lobster’s hooves and send it sprawling on to the ground.

And far to the rear was the Final Argument. Artillery. Guns were lined up in a density unheard of since Zhukov and Koniev had raced to capture Berlin. In fact, some of the guns had fought at the Battle of Berlin and had been taken out of the storage where they had slept for so many years. Guns, 122mm and upwards, salvo rocket launchers and the short range ballistic missiles that could deliver their own special kind of hell. Further behind them were the aircraft, British, American, Russian, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, other nations too many to remember. All brought together to do one thing. To turn this stretch of the river into a killing ground the like of which had never been seen before.

Piquette Street, Detroit, Michigan

The tremors, the voices, the migraines; Donnie Cook was used to all of these. Indeed in the long, agonizing periods between hits, he had often fancied himself to already be in hell. For three years now heroin had been his demon, the black tar forcing him to beg, to steal, to prey on the unwary, whatever it took to keep the craving at bay. Now all that seemed like just the warm-up. Hell had come to him and made him its own.

Donnie stumbled through the abandoned factory, his emaciated body moving with the jerkiness of a puppet. In truth Baron Zatheoplekkar was having some trouble controlling the human; its whole nervous system seemed to be warped and damaged by the many cocktails of poisons it had consumed. To the demon it almost seemed that to kill this pathetic creature would be doing it a favor, and that quite took the fun out of it.

The man’s wasted form jerked to a halt in the centre of the ground floor, the puppet-master seemingly satisfied that the ruined building was deserted. For over a minutes he just stood there, twitching and staring wildly. At last the black disc of the portal swelled into existence, briefly surrounded by a carpet of tiny sparks as the wash of energy hit the rusting junk littering the floor. The gorilla-like forms of lesser demons began to emerge from the blackness, their tridents held low as they fanned out through the structure. Another minute passed before a single final creature emerged, closer to human in form if one could ignore the writhing hairlike tentacles and great folded wings.

To Donnie the creature seemed anorexically thin, yet moved with a flowing grace that only heightened the sense of being faced by a deadly humanoid snake. The female demon was within an arm’s length of him now and her stare bored into him. Fight fought flight as he alternately wanted to scream and run, or club and stab the monstrosity, but all he managed was a series of low moans. Animal yelps and screams echoed off the crumbling walls before cutting off sharply.

Megaaeraholrakni cocked her head at the approach of the strike leader. “I ssee that they are jusst as pathetic on thiss plane as they are in the miness.” Her imperious gaze switched from the possessed human to the demon. “No others witnesssed my arrival?”

“No humans here, gorgon. Just those.” He gestured at a pair of his demons approaching with the broken bodies of stray dogs dangling from their claws. Their expressions showed a clear disappointment at the lack of fresh human meat on this mission, but a determination to make the most of it anyway. “A fitting audience for your grand entrance.”

The gorgon hissed and thrust out her arm at the insolent demon. A bright bolt leapt from her claws and stuck the strike leader, leaving him reeling and roaring defiance. “Go! Before I fry the lot of you!” Megaaeraholrakni screamed, her form glowing with witchfire. She exchanged a long stare with her opponent before he decided that it wasn't worth risking the count's wrath. At a silent signal from their commander the growling lesser demons began to file back through the black disc and disappear. “And take that wretch with you!” The last demon in line dragged the human through the portal, which promptly shimmered and vanished.

Her flickering aura relaxed as Megaaeraholrakni released the psychic force. In truth, she could not have done much more; her kind were not built to fling lightning the way the naga were and it had taken her millennia of practice just to achieve the limited aptitude she had. No need for lesser beings to know that of course. She made her way to the staircase and from there to the highest floor of the crumbling building (a disused storehouse perhaps? she couldn’t tell and didn’t particularly care). A large section had collapsed completely, revealing a panorama filled by more nondescript boxy buildings, all made of the humans' odd artificial stone and many in a similar state of disrepair.

Like Lakheenahuknaasi before her, she recoiled in distaste from the telepathic clamor which filled the humans realm. Megaaeraholrakni was undeniably the superior witch though, or perhaps just less interested in comprehending the human babble, for within ten seconds she had pushed through the barrier to contact her waiting queen. It was time for this place to burn, so that this silly rebellion could end and she could get back to her studies.

Free Hell, Banks of the River Styx, Fifth Circle, Hell

You Are Now Entering Free Hell

The sign meant that they’d done it. For the first time in its history, there was an area of Hell where humans ruled. After the assassination of Asmodeus, the baldricks had stopped their advance and dug in. A de-facto border now existed, on one side of it the Baldricks continued their network of fortifications, on the other, humans had established their own administration. An uneasy truce existed between them, one that could be summarized from the human point of view as “don’t put your hoof over the border and we won’t blow it off”. It seemed like a small, practical agreement but in an insurgency there was no such thing as a small agreement between the government and the insurgents. Any agreement at all reflected a level of equality between insurgents and authorities and that made it an epoch-defining defeat for the baldricks. They’d been forced to deal with the dead humans as equals and concede ground to them.

“Friend, if I could speak with thee for a moment. I have a request for thine attention.”

The archaic language snapped Captain (deceased) Jade Kim's attention back to the reality of Free Hell. For a moment, she thought that it was one of the recovered dead, but the breathing mask showed it was a volunteer from Earth, one who had come to help with the task of finding the victims of this place and rescuing them. Behind him she could see another one of the crosses being hauled out of the swamp and figures starting to work, freeing the poor soul attached to it. Kim remembered her own time nailed to a cross and drowning in sewage and she shuddered.

“There’s a problem?”

“There is friend. Many have been rescued from the swamps and have recovered enough to travel. Some wish to stay here with thee to fight.” The speaker’s voice showed his dislike of that concept. “Others, they wish to leave this place. Can thou contact earth and arrange a way out for them?”

Kim relaxed, this had been anticipated. “Some don’t like our company huh? They know they can’t survive on Earth, right?”

“They have been told this, yes. And they understand but still wish to leave.”

“Well, they can. The plan is we’ll portal them back to Earth and then they’ll be relayed straight back to an area of Hell that’s under human control.” To her amusement, her companion looked around in alarm. “No, not like this one. We’re holding a pretty big area between the Phlegethon River and the sea, its called the Martial Plain of Dysprosium. There’s refugee camps being set up in there for the people we rescue. They’ll be looked after until we’ve won. I have no idea what will happen then, I don’t think anybody has. The catch is, I can’t contact out, DIMO(N) has to contact me. We have a schedule for that. Next contact is in a few hours, get the evacuees ready to move then.”

“Thou are kind. Thank you.”

The man turned to leave but Kim was seized with curiosity. “Excuse me, but could I ask a question of you. A personal one?”

“Certainly friend. I will answer if I can.”

“How come you people didn’t just die when we got The Message. A lot of religious people did, too many of course. But none of your people. Why?”

He smiled gently beneath his mask. “Friend, hast thou ever heard of Testimony of Integrity?” Kim shook her head. “It is one of our central beliefs. It says that we should always tell the truth but it means more than that. It means we should always deal fairly with people, we do not believe we should trick others by making statements that are technically true but whose meaning is false. It is our belief that this is how God deals with us and we deal with others. When The Message came, it did so as an inner revelation at our meetings. Those who received it stood to testify but at once there were doubts as to whether this was a true revelation for it ran against the Testimony of Integrity. How could a God who had for so long demanded we base our lives around the concept of fair dealing countenance such an enormous betrayal? Surely this could not be so and The Message was a trick, perhaps by Satan himself. So our meetings all decided to wait and see what would happen. Then the fighting started, we saw the baldricks invade and we heard what they did. We still do not believe that The Message came from Our God but it does not matter. The Message was true and we must wait to see what the whole truth is. Before then, our beliefs, the Testimony of Peace does not allow us to fight but it does allow us to come here and aid those who have suffered for all too long. So here we are.”

Rather you than me Kim thought to herself. Better to fight baldricks that spend the time here scrambling around in the mud, finding the souls in torment here then rescuing them. Unconsciously she shifted the M115 on her shoulder. Especially since modern weapons gave her such an enormous advantage over her enemies. The baldricks had numbers but even that advantage would fade as more and more souls were liberated from the torment in which they were held. And that, of course, raised issues all of its own.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a long rolling thunder, one that was very far away yet she could still feel the vibrations through her feet. Her companion was standing politely beside her, waiting for her to speak again, but the sound made him glance up.

“I did not know that there were thunderstorms in this place.”

“There are not.” Kim spoke absently. “That’s artillery fire.”

Chapter Fifty Six

Command Post, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

“My Lord, this is against all our traditions.”

“And humans fighting back is not? If they defeated Abigor, then they are adversaries worthy of note. Abigor’s description of the great battle was quite clear, the Beast charge at the start of the fighting was a disaster for his cavalry. We must learn from those mistakes. Even if we can never admit the source of our learning.”

Lapradanultrox looked out across the array of forces now moving down on the northern flank of the great bulge in the Phlegethon river. The sight was a strange one to demonic eyes, the great square blocks of the legions divided into much smaller groups. Even more oddly, the cavalry legions had been completely broken up, dispersed amongst the infantry. One Beast supporting each group of 27 foot-soldiers. Behind the hills that ranged along the river, the great flock of harpies, almost 180,000 of them were waiting to launch their attack. This was also unprecedented, the mores of demonic warfare were clearly established. The Harpies reconnoitered to find the enemy, the Beasts charged to crack a hole in the enemy defenses, the infantry closed to destroy the broken army.

That was the way it had always been and that was the way Abigor had fought. And his army had been destroyed in the most catastrophic defeat ever inflicted on demonic arms. Not even the Celestial Enemy had ever done the damage the humans had inflicted on Abigor. Lapradanultrox appreciated Beelzebub’s desire not to repeat the same experience on an even more cataclysmic scale but to cast away every basic principle of warfare? Beelzebub’s decisions were courageous in more ways than one. Such a break with the past would be heroic, if he won. It could easily be considered treason if he lost.

“But where is our great blow? How shall we defeat the enemy without the one massive strike to break his will? How can we crush their defense without the concentrated blow of the Beasts?” Lapradanultrox looked again at the strange formation.

“Look at the humans, Lapradanultrox, look at them. Where is the defense for us to breach? They have not drawn a line, not even one behind a ridgeline as Abigor described. Instead there is a field of death ahead of us, as deep as we can see. Our cavalry cannot charge through it, they will lose speed and momentum before they get far enough to matter and they will be destroyed. We cannot charge through the defense the humans have constructed, we mush chew our way through it. The foot soldier groups, each with the extra strength of a Beast to support them, will take on those small defense positions and we will chew our way through.”

“This will be a bloody day.” Lapradanultrox adjusted his vision for long range and scanned the human defenses that were waiting, silently, mercilessly.

“Bloody day? I think not. This battle will not be over in a day. It will go on for days until the human army has been crushed. Like it or not, Lapradanultrox, the days when a battle would be decided honorably in a single day are gone. The humans have won the first battle of all, we now fight on their terms and no matter what happens, things in Hell will never be the same again. Now, sound the advance to contact.”

Below them, the great Army started to move forward. Word was being passed to the assembled harpies, to swarm into the air and commence their assault on the humans. That was Beelzebub’s plan, to hit the humans with his foot soldiers, harpies and Beasts all together so that the humans would be overwhelmed.

Then, far away behind the human lines, beyond the region where the dust-laden atmosphere closed out vision, Beelzebub saw something strange and inexplicable. A sheet of flickering light, like the bolts thrown by the tridents of his foot soldiers and nagas, but covering the horizon in great sheets, reflecting off the clouds overhead.

“Human magery!” Lapradanultrox’s voice rose into a scream. “The human mages have started their work. The battle is joined.”

Artillery Battalion, Rear Echelon, Phlegethon River Front

This particular battalion had guns that were an odd hybrid, old D-30 122mm guns mounted on a new truck chassis. A product of the emergency mobilization that had all of Russia in ferment. The guns had come from storage, the trucks had once been intended for the civilian market, although why civilians would need 8 x 8 trucks had never been quite clear. It was rumored Americans wanted them for conversion into SUVs. But, the design for the self-propelled guns had been drawn up for the export market where wheeled, self-propelled artillery had been a big growth sector. Those plans had been modified quickly for the Great Salvation War and the truck-mounted guns had poured off the lines as fast as the factories could be converted. Artillery was the God of War, a God that had never let the Russian Army down.

Lieutenant Sergei Aleksandrovich Ehlakov commanded this battery of six guns and he had his assigned fire-plan. It was laid down, strictly, severely, the targets clearly designated for destruction on a finely judged schedule. It was not his place to select targets or to swing his guns from one place to another. He was not an American officer who would swing his guns from one point target to the next, his place in the scheme of things was as a part of a machine that delivered massive, total destruction. His task was to keep his guns firing, to drench the battlefield with high explosive so that the enemy could not move forward to attack the defense lines. He had his support of course, the big trucks carrying ammunition and all around him, the little jeeps with their anti-aircraft guns welded on to the beds. His D-30s had come from store and so had the anti-aircraft guns. Quadruple 14.5 mm machine guns, twin 23 mm cannon, whatever had been in storage was here, to protect the guns from attack.

“Battalion Control Tovarish Lieutenant. The enemy is moving. Commence fire plan in six-zero seconds.”

The gunners were waiting, the first shells already in the breeches of the guns. Who would have the honor of firing the first shell against the enemy horde descending upon them? The first of the thousands that would descend like rain on that enemy and grind his forces into the mud. Would his guns, here on the northern flank, succeed in opening this great battle? Or would the guns further south have that honor? Ehlakov watched the figures on his clock changing as they reached the appointed second. Then, the strained silence turned into a mighty roar that crushed his eardrums and seemed to drive him into the ground. The ground that was already shaking in a rolling sea-like motion as the long lines of guns recoiled, their spades digging deep into the ground, before they returned to their position and their gunners could stuff more shells into their chambers and send another ‘package’ to its recipients. Now, all that Ehlakov could see were his men dropping into the methodical, routine motions as the shells were brought forward and fired. He looked down to his next target, in two minutes he would have to shift to the next aiming point.

Third Platoon, Second Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Regiment, 247th Motor Rifle Division, Phlegethon River Front, Hell

“Here it comes Bratischka. The enemy advances and our gunners make their reply. Soon it will be our turn.”

Lieutenant Anatolii Ivanovich Pas'kov dropped into the turret of his BMP-2 and fastened it in place. There was nothing to be gained by staying outside now. The word passed down from on high was that humans were more or less safe inside their armored vehicles. They should fight from them, not outside them. Pas’kov felt agreeably comfortable with that advice. Overhead, he could hear the express-train roar of the artillery shells overhead, heard it even through the metal shell of his BMP. “Outbound” he yelled, instinct taking over. For a quick second he wondered what it would be like to be outside, under the tons of descending metal that was aimed at the demons, then he decided he didn’t care and certainly didn’t want to find out. Being inside his faithful BMP-2 suited him just fine.

Outside, seen through the vision blocks of the BMP, Pas’kov could see a mass of black covering the opposite banks of the river. A terrifying sight, he’d heard the numbers of the enemy were counted in the millions but he’d never quite imagined what “millions” looked like. Now he knew. The artillery had its work cut out.

Tornado GR.4, 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force.

“You know, it’s a pity we phased the old JP-233 out of service.”

“You can say that, you never used one.” Squadron Leader Desmond Young had been one of the pilots who had used the JP-233 on its one and only operational deployment, 17 years ago in the Gulf War. He wasn’t quite certain which had been worse, the light displays as the submunition dispenser had fired its cargo, the violent changes in pitch as the weight distribution had changed or the Iraqi anti-aircraft fire that had been all around them. All in all, it had been an exciting night and Young had been only too pleased to hear that the JP-233 had been withdrawn from service. Officially that was because of the anti-land mines treaty but the real reason was that the crews had made their discontent with the weapon very plain.

“Targets dead ahead.” In the back seat, Flight Lieutenant Wyngarde had the target area marked on the rolling map in front of him. Navigating in Hell was weird, nothing seemed to work quite right, an aircraft couldn’t just retrace its route to get home. A crew that relied on instinct to navigate could get hopelessly lost. Still, the navigation systems people were working on that, they had the beacons set up and, with them, a modernized version of the old Gee navigation equipment first used by Bomber Command in World War Two. It might be an old system but it worked, even in Hell. “Clear of the prohibited zone.”

That was crucial, the last thing the Tornadoes needed was to get caught in the mass of descending Russian shells. So, the bombers had flown a looped route, one that took them parallel to the Phlegethon River and over the area where the drones had said the enemy harpies had gathered. Young didn’t need navigation systems to see where his target lay, it was directly ahead, marked by the beginnings of a cloud of harpies taking to the air. The strike was a few second late but that didn’t matter too much.

The eight Tornadoes swept over the harpy assembly area, raining more than 60 BL-755 cluster bombs on the creatures below. The ground vanished under a rippling wave of explosions as the Tornadoes swept over the scene and turned for the run home, the airborne harpies floundering in their wake. Long before the Tornadoes crossed the Harpy grounds, they had pulled back into a steep climb, releasing their bombs as they did, so the bombs were tossed into the mass of harpies, rather than dropped on them. By the time the bombers reached the center of the target area, they were already clear of the harpy cloud and climbing steeply.

“We’re clear Peter, Dragon-one to all dragon elements, weapons delivered, time to go home and get some more.”

Wyngarde looked over his shoulder at the explosions still rolling over the ground now far below them. “Drop confirmed Boss. And to think they wanted to take our cluster bombs away.”

Command Post, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

The flickering lightning seemed never to stop, it was rolling backwards and forwards along the horizon. Overhead, Beelzebub heard a dreadful screaming noise, obviously the battle-cry of the human mages. It was squeezing his mind, causing his vision to blur, and as it peaked, he saw the whole of the river bank under his army erupt into volcanoes that spewed mud, water and bits of demon skywards. A rippling surge of explosions that blanketed the whole area. That was when Beelzebub felt something very strange, a wind, a warm wind that picked up force as the human mage bolts pounded into his Army. Overhead the same winds rippled the clouds of dust that saturated the atmosphere, forming them into strange patterns that swirled and changed even as he watched them. Like the blood of a human kidling stirred into a cup of wine.

“My Lord, the magery, it is causing winds to blow and storms to form.”

So the humans could control the weather as well as their other accomplishments. That thought did not make Beelzebub any happier. The descriptions he’d heard of the human mage-bolts had been bad enough, although he’d dismissed Abigor’s more colorful descriptions as being part of his alibi for defeat. But he’d never mentioned strange winds and patterns in the sky. The idea hardly had time to form in his mind before the explosions that were shattering his army along the banks of the Phlegethon shifted back to engulf a new zone and spread their death toll amongst another portion of his Army. Beelzebub looked at the carnage forming on the ground in front of him and knew that Abigor hadn’t lied, if anything he had understated the truth. He’d mentioned the human mage bolts that struck from afar and devastated the ground but he’d never said anything about a concentration of magery like this.

Combat Group, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

Hertonymarkess felt himself staggering under the sheer impact of noise and the crushing power the explosions that were all around him. He couldn’t think straight, every time a thought tried to form in his mind, the terrible screams and explosions drove it away or entered his head and shredded it. Screams, they dominated even the explosions, the battle cry of the human mages as their mage-bolts slammed into the army, the screams of the demons and Beasts as they were torn apart and died. He couldn’t hold his trident properly either, the shaking was too much. The ground was heaving and rolling under his feet, in ways Hell had not experienced since the great earthquakes a few millennia ago. The little quakes, the ones Hell experienced every day had nothing on the destruction the human magery was causing.

Yet Hertonymarkess knew that the magery was only part of the shaking that was causing his problems. The rest was his own muscles, shivering with fear of the mage-bolts. An enemy, even a human, was not something he feared. If there was a human in front of him now, he could have fought and, win or lose, fought ferociously. It wasn’t the prospect of fighting that was terrifying him at all. It was the human’s ability to deliver remote-controlled death. For, there was nothing to fight here, the humans were still far away and their mage bolts just pounded the target, administering death and destruction at random. There was nothing Hertonymarkess could do about it, his skills, his courage, his training, his spirit mattered nothing. All that mattered was the pure blind chance of whether he and his combat team would be standing where the next mage bolt, or dozen, landed. It was that utter helplessness in the face of random, pitiless fate that was so terrifying.

Without being aware of it, Hertonymarkess had entered the Phlegethon River and it was with utter astonishment he realized he was in water up to his waist. The wading was slowing him down but he realized it mattered little. The human mage-fire was concentrated on the banks of the river behind him, some of the bolts were landing in the water but they were few in number. Most of the bursts were behind them and he got the feeling the ones in the river were mistakes, bolts that were landing short. Ahead, he could see a target, the first of the little forts that the humans had set up. Now that was odd. Why had the humans set up lots of little forts rather than one big one? Everybody knew that the bigger the fortress, the harder it would be to take?

There were Iron Chariots in the fortress, Hertonymarkess felt his stomach cringe at the thought of iron, then he set his grip firmly on his trident and closed the grip, discharging a bolt at the defenses ahead. It was immensely satisfying to strike back at last, after the helpless terror of the mage-bolts, now there was some way he could fight. Overhead, the vast cloud of harpies was closing in, with luck they would suppress the defenses long enough for his group to get close to that little fort.

Harpy Group, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

Uxaligantivaris screamed out her battle cry and tried to launch a jet of flame at the Sky Chariot but it was too fast for her and it rolled away and zoomed upwards. The humans were cowards, they refused to fight, they just stood off and let fly with their fire-lances and seeker-lances, cutting her comrades out of the sky. She knew the losses already suffered by the harpies were almost beyond comprehension, the first strike by the Sky Chariots had killed hundreds before they had even taken off. Then, there were the great seeker lances that had torn into the formation from afar, their explosions killing hundreds more. Then, after that, the Sky Chariots had returned and were slashing at the harpy cloud.

Her skin was on fire, a mass of mad itching that threatened to drive her mad. If the voices in her head didn’t do that first. There were so many of them, some were human speech that made little sense, others were a weird, intense beating noise, as if somebody was pounding her with a giant hammer. Yet others were a gentle hiss that simply filled every corner of her mind and drowned out all that went on inside. The mass of electronic noise was hardly surprising, Uxaligantivaris had no means of knowing it and would not have understood the implications even if she had, but she was being painted by more than 2,000 radar sets. Those alone were doing damage to her, quite distinct from the missiles and guns that they targeted. Uxaligantivaris knew that something was wrong but she couldn’t know how wrong for the truth was she was being slowly microwaved to death in mid-air. Already her body temperature was slowly rising as the radar energy was exciting the molecules that formed the liquids in her body.

Below her, she could see the human forts that formed their defensive position. It made little sense to her, but her job wasn’t to understand, just to do as she was told. Even though that meant something she had never done before. Harpies were scouts and raiders, intended to observe enemy formations and report on their movement. Sometimes they would attack undefended positions by night to spread fear and terror. Never before had the harpies been told to attack defensive positions that were fully-equipped and putting up resistance. Harpies traded protection and firepower for speed and flight. Not enough of either of course, not compared with the human Sky Chariots, but a good trade for their proper role. Now, they were being pitched against a serious defense.

There was one advantage in doing that. Uxaligantivaris had noted that the human Sky Chariots were staying high, not dropping close to the ground. Perhaps they couldn’t, she’d noticed that their wings didn’t flap like any proper flying creature. Oh, a couple had had wings that seemed to flap forward and backwards but none flapped properly. Still, the message was clear, close to the ground and the Sky Chariots would leave them alone. Cheered at the thought, she folded her wings, expelled gas, and dropped like a stone on the defense position beneath.

Command HQ, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

“The battle is joined Tovarish General.” General Ivan Semenovich Dorokhov was standing in front of his screen, the facilities here in hell were nowhere near as good as those General Petraeus had left behind in Baghdad but they would serve.

“Very good, Ivan Semenovich. How goes the day?”

“Well, David Howellovich.” Both men grinned at the mangled Russification of Petraeus’s middle name. “Our artillery and air strikes are hurting the baldricks badly. We estimate their casualties already must be approaching ten percent of their total.”

“A word of advice Grazhdanin Ivan, divide your estimates by three. We learned this the hard way in Iraq and before that in Vietnam and the Balkans.”

“And we learned that same lesson in Afghanistan and fighting the Hitlerites. But Gospodin David, we have hit Beelzebub’s army hard. His casualties on the northern flank are mounting and they are only now moving into our main zone of resistance. The southern flank is moving more slowly, the situation had not developed there yet. There appears to be no movement at all in the center.”

“Hmm. The baldricks are learning. Not slowly either. Whatever you need, just call. We’re lining up the support for you here.” As far as Petraeus was concerned, that was his role in this battle. Let the Russian Army do its thing and just make sure they have every tool they needed, and some that they didn’t know they needed, not yet anyway. “For your information, the BUFFS have arrived. They flew through the hellmouth a few minutes ago and are circling to gain height. They’ll be ready when you need them.”

Dorokhov laughed. “The sight of those flying through the Hellgate must have been impressive. Is there an intact eardrum left back there?”

“Not a one. Not a one. But tell your men, the Gray Lady is coming.”

Chapter Fifty Seven

DIMO(N) Headquarters, Crystal City, Virginia

For the fourth time in the last half-hour, a gentle beeping filled the monitoring room. With some irritation, Technical Sergeant James Nevaquaya put aside the draft response procedure he’d been reading and glanced up at the grid of monitors. Code:

! 2-network Anomaly Detected  ! --------------------------  ! VERIZON node 21633 : 28% dropped frames : Detroit, MI  ! VERIZON node 21638 : 12% dropped frames : Detroit Metro, MI (4.8 km)  ! SPRINT  node 45-3C : 15% dropped frames : Detroit, MI (2.5 km)  ?  ? Detailed capture triggered on 36 nodes.

One monitor was showing a map of the anomaly site – freeways snaking through a dense grid of streets, north of Detroit. Nevaquaya’s hand went to the mouse as he tried to bring up the spectrum display. The prototype was barely functional, a cobbled together mess of mostly civilian technology, but for now that novelty and importance of the task was keeping frustration at bay. The spectrum analyzer was still hobbled by the cell site’s receiver limitations, but it was clearly showing a broadband hump peaking in the low gigahertz.

The gentle beeping was abruptly replaced by an insistent two-tone warble. The text scrolling onto the status display snapped Nevaquaya’s mind to intense alertness. Code:

! Multi-network Anomaly Confirmed  ! -------------------------------  ! VERIZON  node 21633 : 34% dropped frames : Detroit, MI  ! VERIZON  node 21638 : 25% dropped frames : Detroit Metro, MI (4.8 km)  ! VERIZON  node 21629 : 17% dropped frames : Detroit, MI (6.5 km)  ! VERIZON  node 21635 : 14% dropped frames : Warren, MI (9.3 km)  ! SPRINT   node 45-3C : 31% dropped frames : Detroit, MI (2.5 km)  !                       CDMA2000 down  ! SPRINT   node 45-3A : 20% dropped frames : Detroit, MI (3.9 km)  ! SPRINT   node 44-8D : 16% dropped frames : Warren, MI (8.7 km)  ! CINGULAR node MA335 : 26% dropped frames : Detroit, MI (3.9 km)

W-CDMA down  ! CINGULAR node MA334 : 22% dropped frames : Detroit Metro, MI (5.2 km)  ! ALLTEL   node  4775 : software failure   : Southfield, MI (11.2 km)  ! T-MOBILE node MA5XA : W-CDMA resetting   : Detroit, MI (6.3 km)  ?  ? Composite spectrum display enabled.  ? Detailed capture triggered on 92 nodes.  !  ! *** POSSIBLE PORTAL OPENING - heuristic match 0.82 ****  !

Within seconds an office chair rolled through the door from the adjoining office, carrying Graeme Wilson with it. The civilian contractor took in the situation on the monitors almost instantly.

“0.82? That’s the highest yet. What do you make of the spectrum?”

“The general spike structure sure looks like the recordings. I’ll call NORAD – can you get any more resolution out of those sites?”

Wilson had already begun typing, his fingers a chattering blur. Console windows popped up and streams of incomprehensible commands flashed past. Meanwhile Nevaquaya had gone straight for the first entry in the speed dial.

“…big one, at four two degrees twenty three minutes north, eighty three degrees four minutes west. Confidence is moderate.”

Nevaquaya watched the civilian work while the duty officer at NORAD checked the radar picture. The contrast between the usual procurement process, even the usual R&D process and what was going on here was incredible, things were happening in days that had taken years just a few months earlier. The monitoring system was crude and buggy as yet, but getting even that operational in under four days was amazing. America had apparently rediscovered engineers who thrived on doing the impossible. Then Nevaquaya thought again, no not rediscovered, just set free from the demands of reaching some unattainable ideal of perfection.

The spectrum display flicked and restructured itself, crisper and with fewer gaps. Secondary windows began to fill up with phase analysis of signal components. “There, how about that?”

Nevaquaya stared at the screen for three seconds before speaking directly into the phone.

“Confirmed, we’ve got more data here too, confidence is now high, repeat, confidence high for portal opening over northern Detroit.”

He pressed mute, then another button that began sounding the incident alarm in the other offices. Finally he turned to Graeme. “The spikes match. NOARD is seeing radar interference at that location. Looks like the demons are going for Detroit, with a big one too by the look of it. Fighters are on the way, they’ll be contacting national guard units next.” Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside as more DIMO(N) staff converged on the monitoring room. Both men stared at the screens, where the error rates and signal strengths were climbing inexorably. Both knew that their warning was better than nothing, but also that it left precious few minutes to intercept the demon targeteer. If friendly forces couldn’t stop it in time, the heart of a great American city would die in ash and fire.

Over Interstate 75, Detroit, Michigan

Megaaeraholrakni’s arm and wing muscles already ached from the exertion – she had done very little flying these last few centuries – but the demon was so enraged that she barely noticed. How could Euryale have been so incompetent? It could not have been her own fault, she had concentrated firmly on the great glass towers that stood haughtily above the human sprawl. Yet the portal had opened half a league to the north, instead of half a league to the south, almost completely the wrong direction. ‘More likely that half-witted naga.’ she thought, as she painfully climbed through 500 feet. ‘though surely Yulupki isn’t stupid enough to try sabotaging the Count’s scheme?’

Below her streams of tiny iron boxes raced back and forth, traveling along two wide black strips set in a shallow trench. The trench cut through the human city, snaking gently and occasionally joining up with other trenches in curious curling structures reminiscent of spilled entrails. Many more of the iron boxes stood motionless on parade grounds dotted between the buildings. ‘Perhaps they worship them’ Megaaeraholrakni thought; she could think of no other reason to go to such extreme efforts for the chariot’s sake.

The gorgon could sense the nascent portal ahead; indeed it would be hard for her to miss it, given how much psychic energy it was leaking. Belial had exhorted the naga to put every effort into this attack and they were obviously giving it everything they had. It could be that this focus on power accounted for their lousy aim. She was drawing near now and the air itself seemed to crackle with power. The portal mouth was bobbing high in the air over a dark L-shaped castle, or more precisely over the bone white chariot-filled parade ground behind it.

Megaaeraholrakni began a slow sweeping turn, oblivious to the attention she was beginning to draw on the ground below. She reached out with her mind, the psychic force radiating down from her wings to caress the extra-dimensional nexus at the heart of the portal. Crude ‘dragging’ was for novices, one merely had to induce a desire to move in a particular direction and the portal would do the work (or rather, the teams of naga powering it would be forced to do the work, but it was all the same to the gorgon). But mere seconds after the portal had begun to move it began to oscillate wildly, shedding energy that arced to the ground as lighting. Megaaeraholrakni had no choice to use every ounce of strength she possessed to wrestle the portal back into submission. Flying directly above it, buffeted by the thermals created by the arcing, it seemed to her that she was riding an untamed beast, ready to throw lighting back at her at any moment. The gorgon’s confidence in her own ability was supreme however, and perhaps not unwarranted, as she soon had the unborn portal simmering in a semblance of submission. Grimly she set off towards the great gleaming towers, a corner of her mind already devising a way to gain revenge on whoever was responsible for this mess.

Tanner Firearm Supplies, Northern Detroit

“Thanks for keeping these aside for me Erwin. I know they’re hard to come by right now, what with the Brits adopting them as standard and grabbing the whole production run.”

“Hey no problem Danny. Wouldn’t want to see a friend short of firepower if one of those monsters makes an appearance.” The shopkeeper insisted on shaking the customer’s hand. The man then scooped up the box of .338 Lapua from the counter and made his way out of the store.

Daniel Wright had stowed the ammo in the under-seat safe and was about to start his pickup’s engine when a glint in the sky caught his eye. He considered himself something of an aircraft buff and took a closer look, trying to the identify the type. It was bronze colored, the silhouette changing as he watched… something clicked into place as he realized that it was not a plane, but a creature. A creature that looked just like the grainy news footage from England. At first it had looked like it was circling over the AA&M building. Now it was definitely heading for downtown; the shop was built just off the I-75 and the demon was flying roughly parallel to the highway.

He leapt out of the truck, grabbing his Barrett 98 from the rack. Fortunately the optics were still in place from his Sunday range visit. As Daniel unlocked the safe he hesitated for a second; shooting into the sky was usually a reason to make fun of ignorant third-worlders, as what went up had to come down and it could well come down on someone’s head. But only for a second. The Sheffield death toll had now passed 16,000 and he had to stop that happening here at any cost. Daniel clicked the magazine home, braced himself on the side of the truck, brought the monster into the sights and fired.

The shot was on the edge of effective range to start with, and without tracers it was basically impossible to correct for drop, deflection and wind drift, so Daniel just had to give it his best guess. He could hear other shooters opening up, and with luck one of them got lucky. He blew flew the first magazine with no apparent effect on the distant flapping form and as he was reaching for the second he noticed that other shoppers from the gun store had joined him in the parking lot. Some were starting at him, some at the sky.

“There’s a damned Baldrick up there!” he shouted, “grab a rifle and start shooting, or it’ll burn the city.” He didn’t wait to watch them respond, the fresh magazine clicked home and he soon had the rifle realigned on the target. This time the creature definitely seemed to be hit, dropping suddenly and flapping erratically as he fired his last three rounds. No way to know if it was one of his rounds that did it, but it didn’t matter. Erwin and Bob were back with AR-15s from the store, and beside him even Emily was enthusiastically letting fly with her Smith & Wesson 586. Top marks for effort, Daniel thought, as he noticed a large dark green and very old half-track coming to a stop on the side of the freeway. The ready platoon of the 3rd Michigan Infantry Regiment, United States Volunteers had arrived with an M-16 quad-50 they’d “liberated” from a museum and they wasted no time opening up with their much-loved M2 mount. Wright recognized some of the volunteers as they took up their positions, the 3rd Michigan had been built around a re-enactors group and to Wright, they looked a bit odd in modern BDUs.

I75-I94 Interchange, Detroit, Michigan

The gorgon’s mood had improved somewhat as she flew south towards the human towers. This realm’s bright direct light had been painful at first, but now it felt pleasantly warm on her back. The proto-portal seemed to have settled down, and she was free to gaze at the landscape below, savoring her power to end their pitiful existences. She was death incarnate, an avatar of cleansing flame come to burn this hive of vermin off the face of the planet. Megaaeraholrakni had always reveled in the exercise of psychic power, and now this was the culmination of all those millennia of effort.

That said she did have something of a dilemma. As she ascended it became clear that the towers were built next to a wide river. If she opened the portal over them, the lava would pool there and many of the lesser buildings would be spared. Perhaps it would be better to open it some way from the river, to ensure that the rest of the city burned? There were a great many parades of chariots here – the big flat buildings next to them could be workshops, and Belial had been quite insistent about destroying those. On the other hand, blocking the river with lava would not be so bad, the scalding steam and the flooding was sure to be amusing…

Megaaeraholrakni’s musings were interrupted by a sharp pain in her right wing. Suddenly she became aware of the irregular cracking sounds coming from below, coming faster and faster with each passing second. Agony flashed down her side as something tore into her flank. The gorgon looked back in disbelief at the green blood dripping from the wound. How dare they? She’d heard the rumors of the human’s newfound magery… now too late she realized how foolish she’d been to dismiss those warnings.

Another projectile slammed into the base of her tail, shattering a vertebra and sending pain shooting up her spine like a white hot poker. Megaaeraholrakni screamed and flailed wildly in the air, an act that granted her a brief respite as the next few shots went high. The portal crackled dangerously below her and she threw her wings out again, desperately trying to glide clear. It was at this moment that the hail of machine gun rounds began to arrive. The heavy rounds ripped through her torso, spraying yellow blood into the air as the gorgon began to fall out of the sky, trailing limp wings behind her. Megaaeraholrakni had a final few seconds to reflect on her folly before she plummeted through the phantom portal mouth. The massive electrostatic charge building there found a convenient discharge path through her body, and the gorgon finally died in a white hot flash of lightning, her charred and broken body tumbling down onto the interchange below.

Okthuura Yal-Gjaknaath, Tartaruan Range, borderlands of Hell

Baroness Yulupki’s eyes were closed, her coils writhing with pain as she tried to force the chorus back into harmony. The ritual had started to go wrong as soon as the portal begun to form. Instead of a single unified psychic push, there was discord. The closest human sensation was ‘tone’ and ‘timbre’; the ritual needed pure chords, but some of the naga were holding the wrong notes. The situation had rapidly deteriorated as each naga tried to stay in ‘tune’ with her neighbors, magnifying the initial dissenting voices into a psychic cacophony.

“All of you, follow me!” Yulupki screamed, over the wails of her subordinates and the hissing of the lava. It was hard to know if the naga on the other platforms heard her, but telepathy was out of the question in this din. The effort had dried out the tips of her tentacles and the energy began to arc back to the surrounding flesh, charring the scales. To the naga it seemed that her body was on fire and her brain was being squeezed in a vice, but gathering strength she didn’t know she had, she made a final push to stabilize the portal. She was somewhat surprised to find it actually working. Her strong, clear stream of psychic energy stood out clearly in the haze and the other naga rallied around it.

“That’s it, hold it, a little longer!” Why hadn’t that damned gorgon opened the portal yet? She couldn’t keep this up, if the signal didn’t come in another minute they’d just have to…

The wash of feedback hit Yulupki like a brick wall. She collapsed onto her pallet, barely hanging on to consciousness. The raging psychic turmoil had been replaced by a numb calm. ‘No, that can’t be, oh no…’ Her pitiful cry rang with the anguish of a human whose eyes had just been torn out.

From her vantage point on the crater rim Euryale had been watching the ritual with mounting concern. She was not yet a participant, but she could sense the unbalanced forces and the resulting instability in the half-formed portal. At the same time, she could sense Megaaeraholrakni’s progress over the human city through the mental link with her handmaiden. That link had just dissolved into echoes of pain, confusion and panic before disappearing entirely. Mere seconds later, what could only be described as a psychic shockwave had rushed out from the centre of the crater. The gorgon could barely make out the great snakelike forms through the dense smoke and heat shimmer, but she could tell that nearly half the naga were down and the rest were thrashing and wailing. Behind them the shrines were breaking out in glowing red patches, as local hotspots began to melt the metal.

Euryale launched herself from the rocks, determined to save the ritual. She pushed questions of what had gone wrong and who would pay out of her mind. That could come later. Her wings billowed taut as they caught the strong thermal and she soared over the bubbling lava. The thick smoke stung the gorgons eye’s; she couldn’t see clearly, but the series of bright flashes and a tortured groan probably signaled the collapse of one of the shrines. She was right over the portal now and she could feel it swelling and ascending, pushed out of the volcano’s throat like a cork in a barrel.

It was the moment for Euryale’s own supreme effort. She put everything she had into a single release aimed directly down, hoping to slam the portal down into the lava in the same act as pushing it over the threshold for opening. For a split second the smoke seemed transparent, as the entire crater was lit up by a storm of dancing lightning. Then noise and motion returned and Euryale was falling, the air whistling through great burning rips in her wings. The lava below convulsed, dropping and splashing and throwing out great chunks of magma. Desperately she tried to ride the thermals clear of the maelstrom before she was swatted from the sky or consumed by the fire.

Chapter Fifty Eight

Heavengate, Hell

The stones upon which Shakoolapicanthus walked were smoothed from the guards' tread over dozens of millennia. He could almost see his reflection in them, he thought, as he continued pacing along the top of the defensive wall.

The wall – it was massive, the work of millennia. It had been built, at first, of mounded earth, but the earthworks had long been replaced with huge blocks of granite. Fifty times the height of the tallest Dukes, the huge loop towered above the surrounding foothills. A human looking down on it from the air would have thought it looked nothing more than a giant tire sticking out of the ground. The outer face sloped gently down toward the plain, crisscrossed with trenches and ringed with smaller fortifications, parallel to the main wall. The inner face sloped sharply down toward the large inner ring. It was faced with granite, polished by the sweat and blood of thousands of lesser demons and enslaved humans to gleam in the dull, striated light.

Faced entirely with polished granite, that is, save for a small staircase almost too narrow for the scrawniest demons to walk down. That staircase was joined to the ramparts at the top of the wall by a small, nondescript crenelation, which Shakoolapicanthus found himself approaching for the twentieth time since his shift had begun. This was the final circuit, and he was ready to be done with his portion of the guard duties. There was just one task that remained.

He passed the standing guard, taken from Satan’s personal legions. They stood fifty feet apart all around the wall for the duration of their shifts, staring impassively down at the large building in center of the wall's inner ring – and stepped backwards down onto the staircase, as though he were climbing a ladder. The steps were also smoothed by continual travel, but far rougher than the smooth stone to either side. For a moment, he contemplated what a rush up that wall would be like, then shuddered at the thought of even trying, let alone in the face of tridents raining down magic on the attackers. This was a unique fortress, designed to keep attackers in, not out.

At the bottom of the wall, he straightened and turned around. The building was before him, towering over him even as it was dwarfed by the ringing wall; a giant demon-made mountain of stone, is what it was. A ring of demons stood guard about it, and twenty were orderly clustered about the only entrance, staring at it as though it were a poisonous snake about to bite them. Shakoolapicanthus stopped before them and said, “I am entering the Gateway.”

The demon in charge of the guard challenged him in the ritual. “Who are you to enter the Gateway?”

“I am Shakoolapicanthus, a captain of the Guard. I see that all is well within.”

“Shakoolapicanthus, a captain of the Guard, I will permit you to enter the Gateway. Bring word of the inner guard.”

Shakoolapicanthus nodded, the demons before him parted, and he stooped as the guard raised the iron portcullis. As he passed beneath it, he shivered; the feel of iron nearby always made his back crawl. It was the only place in all of Hell where iron had a use; it was rumored that the gate's construction had cost the lives of fifty demons, and that a thousand naga had enchanted it with the strongest spells imaginable.

The iron behind him, he made his way forward through the low, twisting passageway on his hands and knees. It was uncomfortable, and certainly made walking impossible for even the lowliest demons or angels. The stone around him seemed to weigh down on him, to close in on him.

Never too soon, the inner sanctum approached and the passage widened. The first thing that tipped him off was the stench of blood. He rolled his eyes – Again. The two sides sometimes made points by bursting into the realm of the other and slaughtering the guards before dropping back to the relative safety of their own homes. Once, the raiding parties had encountered each other; it had taken two centuries to alleviate the tensions from the resulting bloodbath. Another consequence of the raiding was that only the lowliest, unluckiest demons were chosen to be the inner sanctum guards; Shakoolapicanthus speculated that the same was true of the other side.

The passage opened out into the inner sanctum, a rectangular room as small as possible. Dominating the chamber, seeming too large for the room in which it was contained, was the jet-black portal: the last one open between Heaven and Hell. Creation of portals between the realms had been forbidden at the end of the Great Celestial War, and only one had been kept open to permit contact and the occasional diplomatic delegation between Satan and Yahweh. A delegation had come through recently, Shakoolapicanthus reminded himself; according to rumor, human magery had destroyed it in the Pit. The higher-ups vehemently denied the rumors, of course, but that made him all the more certain that something had happened. Certainly, strange things were happening in Hell, human armies were fighting in the Infernal Region itself and all the barrack room rumors were of the humans in the pit rising against their tormenters. It was even whispered, there was now an area in the pit where no demon dared go, where if one tried, the penalty was a horrible death by human magery.

The two guards were lying contorted on the ground, charred in places and dismembered in others. Blood was spattered all throughout the chamber. But something was different; standing in front of the portal was a towering white figure. It was staring at him with its pale, white eyes, and Shakoolapicanthus felt himself shudder far more than he had passing under the iron portcullis. This was no mere angel; this was a high-ranking one, one who could probably crush him as easily as it had these two unfortunates.

Slowly, like a cornered Beast, Shakoolapicanthus started to back away toward the tunnel. The angel did nothing for a moment, then flared its wings – they stretched nearly across the chamber – and said, “Stop.” Shakoolapicanthus stopped. He was shivering uncontrollably.

Slowly, the angel raised his sword. It glimmered in the torchlight, bronze lined with pale gold. The angel was gathering fearsome magic; it was already making Shakoolapicanthus' hair stand on end. Then it spoke. “Do you know who I am, fallen scum?”

“N-n-n-no, sir. I do not.”

“I am Michael-lan, commander of the forces of the Most High One. I have a message for the Fallen One from my master. You will bear it to him. Tell him that these words have come from the Throne of the Nameless One. ‘Satan Mekatrig, despite previous warnings you have failed to oppress and dominate the humans. They have forced their way into your realm and still you cannot defeat them. Your failures in this matter have ensured that the humans are developing into a threat to the chorus. The gates of Heaven may be closed to any who may wish to enter but our hosts may leave to engage our enemies at our pleasure. As a last warning to the humans we have gathered Uriel and the Bowls of Wrath. Your failures are causing us to intervene against our wishes but the chorus must not cease. On your head lies what may result.’ Tell him that, and only that.”

The archangel stepped forward, over the twisted bodies, and touched Shakoolapicanthus on the forehead. As he did, he released a surge of magic; the demon howled in pain and surprise as the archangel seared a mark onto his face. Then, without a backward glance, the archangel disappeared back into the portal.

Shakoolapicanthus emerged from the gateway so disturbed he didn't even notice when he bumped his head on the iron portcullis. He said nothing to the guards, but ran as fast as he could to the stairs, and took them up as fast as he could. Five minutes after a brief meeting with his garrison commander, he was on the back of a surging Beast, heading from the Heavengate into the Elysian Fields, toward the city of Dis.

Camp Hell-Alpha, Hellmouth, Martial Field of Dysprosium, North of the Phlegethon, Hell

Abigor's room was pretty spartan, but someone had apparently taken the notion that he might like some plants for decoration. Ordinarily, he'd be offended at the notion that he enjoyed decorations – everyone knew that he used wealth only as a display of status and not because he was soft and decadent – but these plants were green, and had flowers on the end, rarities in Hell. They let off a sickly sweet smell, which Abigor actually liked.

He sniffed them once more, and then sat back, taking a few minutes to try to digest everything he'd learned since his surrender. On his left was a towering pile of DVDs and books on the history of human militaries. It was rich and fascinating, full of change – nothing like the static, unchanging nature of the civilized warfare he was used to in Hell.

For centuries – he was becoming used to the human way of telling time – for centuries, humans had fought in mostly the same way. Infantry would line up and charge each other – sometimes with spears, sometimes with swords. Auxiliaries would harass the enemy lines with projectiles; arrows, stones. Cavalry would protect the flanks, swoop in and charge the enemies. There were similarities to what Abigor knew, of course; infantry and auxiliaries would be combined in Hell, since all infantry could fire projectiles. Cavalry were more important; in Hell, they made or broke battles. And in Hell, flies were an integral part of the battlefield; perhaps they were analogous to auxiliaries? Something to ponder. Humans had not taken to the air before a hundred years ago. The short human timescale still surprised Abigor; a century ago was yesterday.

But with the humans, the themes of infantry-auxiliary-cavalry interplay were repeated in so many variations. In some parts of their world, huge hordes of men armed with sticks and swords had swarmed each other; in others, disciplined infantry formed the core of armies; while in others, men had shot their arrows from horseback. One book claimed that an army was made up of horsemen who could hit a teacup a hundred yards away from a galloping horse. Abigor hadn't heard of any demon who could match that feat from a galloping Beast.

And then, three centuries ago, the human inquisitiveness, curiosity – the human tendency to treat the world as a problem to be solved, rather than a place to live, their almost desperate need to know why – had apparently begun to reward humans. Three centuries ago seemed like last week, when humans were nothing but cattle, to be tortured for benefit and eaten as delicacies. Yet it seemed that no matter what question they asked, the answers that they found were immediately turned into weapons of destruction.

Abigor considered the benefits they had reaped. The ability to throw projectiles further, faster, more frequently, and more accurately seemed to be the chief benefit; it had reshaped the battlefield. Humans could now throw projectiles over the horizon, on long arching curves that impacted precisely where the humans wanted them. It seemed that their entire ground combat doctrine, Abigor now saw, was shaped around using these 'guns' – what he had called fire-spears – as effectively as possible. The accuracy with which humans could throw projectiles explained why they fought like cowards. Their goal was to win the battles; so instead of presenting themselves entirely and honorably, they presented as small a target as possible while still permitting themselves to throw back.

And then there was the question of flying chariots, which were known to humans as 'aircraft'. They flew higher and faster than flies and their firepower was far beyond the flies. The same magic – Abigor caught himself; there was no magic here. There were only skills he did not understand. The same ability that let humans throw projectiles such long distances and with such accuracy also permitted them to create 'bombs', which could be dropped with great accuracy . The seeker lances – 'missiles' humans called them though why was an odd thing that Abigor had yet to fathom out since they never missed – were another manifestation of the same abilities: projectiles that flew like aircraft and sought out their target.

Before the destruction of his Army, he had seen how the human aircraft had decimated his flies and he had thought that was the end of it. Now, he knew differently, human aircraft could do many things, they could wipe out flies with contemptuous ease but they could also raid death and destruction on the ground forces. He had seen a little of that but only a thin shadow of what human aircraft could do when unleashed to use their full power. He had seen how the humans themselves had been forced to invest huge sums in the development of anti-aircraft weapons to defend themselves against aircraft. That was something Satan didn’t have to worry about deploying, there wasn’t an anti-aircraft gun in all of Hell.

And then there were the human boats. They were larger than any boat he'd ever seen; anywhere you needed to go in Hell, there were roads, or Belial's wyverns if the place was inaccessible. The human boats had guns on them, and could also throw missiles. Some even had aircraft on them, and some could actually swim under the water to throw missiles or hunt other boats. Abigor thought of the seas that surrounded Hell’s one great continent and imagined the human boats loose in them. All of Hell would be at their mercy with only Dagon’s few legions of Kraken to defend it.

So much to absorb. Abigor shook his head. Most bombs, missiles, and artillery shells exploded like injured flies, while other projectiles were solid iron. Some were thrown from guns, and others were dropped or thrown from aircraft. These new things were all so confusing in the details, but in general he was starting to absorb the picture of how humans did things. They fought to win – that much he'd already seen. But they didn't fight to win by outmaneuvering…… Abigor stopped himself, that wasn’t true, human armies could maneuver in ways a demonic army couldn’t even dream of. To humans though, maneuver was a way to bring overwhelming firepower to bear on their enemy with the aim of annihilating either his desire or his ability to fight – or, in some cases, both.

The DVDs he'd seen had been particularly illuminating. He'd had no idea how ferocious humans were to each other, and the scale of the battles that had raged across the human world even in the last century – the last few days, to him – stunned him. How had they come so far in so little time? He'd seen lines of chariots – trucks – stretching for miles, throwing their projectiles into the air all at once. The sound was familiar to him, the thumping of artillery and the scream of inbound shells and rockets. They still took him back to the battlefield in the human world, where he'd watched his army disintegrate around him; he still had nightmares about that.

He'd seen lines of trenches, with humans running about in them – and in between them, a charred, muddy, churned-up wasteland that was as bad as anything in the Pit. Coils of razor wire criss-crossed that little hell, and guns crashed and chattered across while artillery lobbed back and forth. Once, he saw a flood of humans boil up out of one trench and charge into the hell, only to be scythed down. One had made it back to the trench.

He'd seen a coastline lined by razor wire and huge guns, and the dawn bring with it a sea of iron – boats as far as the eye could see, all firing at once, as people once more charged bravely into the crossfire from small boats that scuttled like beetles up to the beach.

He'd seen the view from above of a jungle wasteland with craters evenly spaced as far as the eye could see, as a line of explosions marched up the screen. The trees looked like grass, and the people running about looked like ants.

Abigor shook his head again. The myriad, creative ways humans had found to destroy their enemies were mind-boggling. Then a strange thought came to his mind, based around the way the humans had suddenly changed from a primitive mob that was just walking meat to a demonic army to the pitiless killers against whom no demonic army could stand. Oh, Abigor had heard the guns thundering, tens of leagues away as a human army stood against the sledgehammer blows of the combined armies of Asmodeus and Beelzebub, and in his mind’s eye he could see what was already happening, the demonic horde screaming and dying under the pounding of the human guns. One of his books had expressed it so well, ‘Artillery is the King of War, Infantry is the Queen of the Battlefield. And it is well known what the King does to the Queen.’

Abigor shook his head, it had all happened so suddenly. Three centuries from helpless victims to the Lords of War. Unnaturally quickly. Had there been another hand here? The way the humans had fought each other, each set of wars driving their weapons technology further forward and setting the conditions for the next set. As if humans were being trained to fight, bred to destroy both Satan and Yahweh. Abigor could see now why Yahweh had washed his hands of them, the human’s driving need to know had caused them to reject his teachings and ready-made answers in favor of finding their own. They had even laughed at Yahweh’s pronouncements, and dared his prophets to “prove” their doctrine. When the prophets and true believers had repeated Yahweh’s rulings, they’d been faced with the human battle-cry ‘prove it’ and ridiculed the prophets with evidence of the truth. There was even a slogan they used for such contests, one Abigor had spotted somewhere. “Science, and mockery of stupid people.” It was quite clear who they meant by the stupid people bit, Yahweh himself. No wonder he had been annoyed with them

Humans couldn’t have done it by themselves could they? Surely they must have had help. Were there others whose hands were involved here, perhaps the others who had once held sway on Earth but had been driven out by Yahweh and Satan? Their hand was still present, Abigor knew that, there were a small number of humans who were protected by them, who lived in Hell but were free of its torments. Had they trained humanity to become the Lords of War who would drive both Satan and Yahweh away from Earth?

This was worth further thought, but one thing was bothering him. This artistic destruction, he had all experienced. All save the use of aircraft, but that did not create much more destruction than the pounding artillery had. What had the Colonel meant when he'd said that Abigor had not even begun to see what humans could do when they put their minds to it? On his right lay a single DVD case. He picked it up, delicately opening it with his claws, and popped the DVD into the player. The large screen in front of him went from off to blue to black with white letters: THE MANHATTEN PROJECT.

The first part of the video, Abigor didn't understand. It was about things called “Adams” – wasn't Adam the first human to come to hell? He was still in Satan's palace in a little cage, if Abigor remembered correctly.

Then came the first pictures of what humans did with these Adams, and Abigor became very interested. He became very interested indeed.

An hour later, Abigor was sitting on his couch, mouth agape, staring at the screen as the credits rolled by. What sort of gods were the humans, to be able to destroy a city with a single bomb? He closed his mouth, then shook his head. A single bomb, capable of annihilating an entire city. An entire army would be nothing. They had played with him, when they could have destroyed him and everyone with him with ease.

Suddenly, the part of his mind that had been bothering him since his defection, the part that continually accused him of treason, became quieter and smaller. A lot quieter, and a lot smaller. There was no doubt that the humans were going to win this, no doubt at all. He saw it now: the humans were deploying just enough firepower to utterly destroy whatever was sent at them, waiting, keeping their cards in reserve, watching their enemies to see how they reacted. So simple, so logical, so utterly unconventional.

There was a knock at the door, and Abigor looked up. It opened, and a languid man walked in, flanked by two soldiers carrying nasty-looking guns – shotguns, Abigor recognized now. The lights in the ceiling seemed to flicker a little bit, casting a slightly dimmer glow. The man looked familiar, then Abigor placed him: he'd come a few days earlier to interrogate Abigor about the city of Dis and possible military targets.

“General Abigor, I'm pleased to see you again.” The voice was flat, uninflected, almost disinterested.

“Likewise.”

The visitor took a thick piece of rolled parchment from under his arm and spread it out on the table. “General, would you mind coming here to look at this?” Phrased as a request, there was no doubt it was a command.

Abigor rose and stepped over to the table, looked down. It was a copy of the map of Dis he'd looked at earlier, but now there was a set of red concentric shapes drawn on it, basically circles but strangely distorted. The shapes were colored successively darker toward the center but the relationship was strange, distorted, darkening quickly where they overlapped, sometimes dramatically so. Some of the shapes were arranged in neat triangles. And in the center of those formations, the area of darkest red was horribly large and terrifyingly dark.

His hair was standing on end as he looked down at the map. The shapes and patterns went on and on, so that the city was completely covered by the circles. Satan's palace, on the fortified spur that stuck out into the Pit, was invisible under the triangles of overlapping circles. What could the circles mean? There was only one explanation – and it came from the DVD he had just watched and Abigor suddenly knew why it had been given to him. It made all the pieces began to fall into place. The humans could destroy whole cities with single bombs, and they had shown they could do so without any compunction. Dis wasn’t the only city in Hell, but it was the largest and it was the administrative center for the whole of Hell. Why would a city be a target? Hadn’t Belial just destroyed a human city with his party tricks? Was this to be the human revenge? With a rising wave of bile in his throat, Abigor began to suspect what the shapes and colors meant.

“General Abigor, what do you make of this map?” asked the Targeteer.

“It seems that ... that this is a map of the destruction caused by the explosion of atomic bombs to the city of Dis.”

The visitor raised one eyebrow. “Very good, General, though we call them 'devices', not 'bombs' and they ‘initiate’ not ‘explode’. Technically, a nuclear initiation isn’t an explosion. These circles represent the overpressure radii of each individual initiation, they’ll all be taking place at once by the way. As I'm sure you learned, one way our devices bring about the destruction of their targets is shockwave caused by the initiation; the shockwave is measured by over-pressure. Where patterns overlap, the over-pressure increases dramatically. Terrain is critically important as well, the shockwave will be channeled by some features, reflected by others. Where it is channeled, it will extend further in one direction at the expense of others. Where it is reflected, it will cause no damage beyond the point of reflection but destruction before that point will be multiplied many times over.

“As is our way, we targeted only military installations – the barracks, production centers, command and control points, administrative buildings and so on – but you can see that the installations are so densely concentrated in the city, the city would be destroyed by such an attack. No part of the city is subject to a shockwave of less than 5 psi overpressure; such strength guarantees the destruction of all but the most hardened targets. Most of the city, more than 90 percent of that will suffer from overpressures an order of magnitude greater.

“We did need to use very high-yield devices in ground bursts to destroy the most hardened targets. These are the earthworks and the walls which surround the city. We suspect that the construction of the buildings is so poor that the ground wave caused by the destruction of the walls would destroy the city anyway. Of course, blast is just one way a nuclear device destroys its target. There is also light flash which will blind every unprepared person for tens of miles, and fire. Another map for you, this one shows the anticipated firestorms. You’ve seen those films of what a firestorm in a city can be like? You can expect winds approaching 200 miles per hour, heat levels so high that it will melt steel let alone bronze, the fires will suck all the oxygen out of the air and the people trapped in the wreckage of Dis will asphyxiate. Finally, there’s direct radiation as well, but that isn’t a factor, after somebody has been reduced to the size, shape and appearance of a McDonald’s hamburger by blast, fire and debris, irradiating them as well is a mere technicality. Of course, that doesn’t cover fallout. The ground bursts will create horrible levels of contamination. Normally we wouldn’t worry too much about fallout from air bursts but the atmosphere here is so dusty, even air bursts are going to generate a lot of fallout as well.”

“So,” said Abigor flatly, “you will destroy Dis.”

“No, we needed to create a plan to destroy Dis, but it is just a contingency plan.”

“Then why are you showing this to me?”

“Because, General, you need to know what we can do – what we are willing to do. The destruction of Dis would take the lives of nearly every demon living there. It would leave no building standing, and in its wake there would be giant radioactive firestorms. After the fires died, there would be nothing of Dis left save craters; what was once a city would become a charred, radioactive wasteland. Nobody, human or demon, would live there for ten thousand years.

“We can do that, General. And we would be right to do that, after how your people have treated us in the past. Demons have enslaved humans, treated them as cattle, eaten them, and tortured them for thousands of years. As a professional, its not my job to make moral judgments on the people whose destruction I plan. But, just for once, I’m going to indulge myself. A quick death in nuclear fire is the least that your race deserves.

“But we are magnanimous in victory, General, as you know. We fight to win, but once we have won we strive for peace. If there are other options that make this plan as superfluous as all the others I have drawn up over the years, then we will prefer to use them. But I warn you, we can be pushed too far for that. This map.” He tapped it with a finger. “Is still not the worst we can do. General, if you really anger us, we will try and bring democracy to your country.”

“I see.” Abigor frowned down at the map, trying to picture the bustling city he'd known for dozens of thousands of years as a charred, smoking wasteland, trying to picture the city vanishing in a series of impossibly bright flashes. And if that was so, what was this other hideous threat? Yet he had a strange feeling there was something he didn’t quite understand because the last remark had made the two soldiers in the room grin broadly. “Who are you. What are you.”

“People call us many things. Targeteers, Contractors, The Business, The Wizards of Armageddon. The last was intended as an insult but we rather like it. And, of course, it has turned out to be a much more accurate description than its author realized.”

Abigor sighed. “You must be a great General then.”

“Actually, I’m not in the armed forces at all, in fact I never have been. I’m a civilian who is employed by a consultancy company, something we call a think-tank, to do analytical work. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for more than 25 years.”

“To do this for years. Then I can assume your plans are ….. complete.”

“Then you understand.” A statement, not a question. The Targeteer began to roll up the map. “Thank you for your time, General Abigor. I am sure we will meet again.” The two soldiers escorted him from the room, and Abigor's hair began to lay down. Outside the room, the thunder of artillery had never ceased but now Abigor put it into its true perspective. It was indeed just a pale shadow of what humans could do when they wanted to. He glanced at the door after the man, then looked again. He could have sworn those plants were green and flowering before the man had come in.

Thank's to Surlethe for these two sections. Now, back to the battles......

Chapter Fifty Nine

Coach Insignia Restaurant, Renaissance Center, Downtown Detroit

Gloria Hurst clearly remembered her first trip to Renaissance Center, three decades ago. The gleaming complex of glass and metal towers had promised a fresh start for the city, still struggling to get over the stigma the 1967 riots had created. The 80s rolled around and the dreams of a regenerated Detroit never came to pass; outside of the little oasis of ‘civilization’ the corporations had built, the slums had just continued to decay. Jobs kept leaving and never seemed to come back, buildings crumbled and the criminals seemed to multiply . So many times she’d thought of selling up and moving out, but somehow she’d never had the heart to leave. Her children had never understood that, particularly after her house had been robbed twice in the same month.

The war had almost come as a relief. All the plants still open were running at full capacity and many of the closed ones were being reopened. The roads were clogged with buses (only the gas rationing had forestalled gridlock) and downtown the crowds were thicker than ever. Still, Gloria’s own neighborhood had hardly changed. All the attention was on places like Sterling Heights and Livonia, where the remaining plants were. As for the suburbs, she’d heard that the government had been requisitioning all the foreclosed McMansions and subdividing them to create cheap worker accommodation. She imagined the look on the faces of the homeowners association and laughed.

However the ring of slums between downtown and the industrial belt was being ignored, if anything there was even less interest in regenerating it now that war production was at the top of everyone’s minds. Gloria sighed. At least the muggers were keeping a low profile. The cops weren’t playing catch-and-release any more, the ones who got arrested tended to be drafted and the ones who fought back usually got splattered by the huge guns all the cops were carrying now.

“Granny!” The young boy’s voice roused Gloria from her thoughts. Ah, there they were, her eldest son and his family, come to visit her at last. “Granny, what’s that?” Her grandson was staring out the windows, which had a fine view of the city due to their location near the top of the city's tallest skyscraper. The boy seemed to be pointing at something near the horizon. Gloria turned stiffly in her chair and strained to focus on the distant buildings. There was an odd flickering over an intersection, perhaps two miles to the north, and a glint that seemed to come from something falling out of the sky. Her heart beat faster as she realized that the irregular, chattering roar that had been slowly building was the sound of many, many guns being fired. Was it the demons? Had the army shot down a demon? The sound of gunfire died away. Several people were standing at the windows now, asking out loud the same questions she was thinking.

The molten rock literally exploded out of nowhere, the unstable portal hurling great sprays of magma in every direction. Many who’d seen the images of the portal opening over Sheffield had remarked on the eerie beauty of the hellish fountain, unfolding in its first few seconds like a giant deadly firework. This attack was different, a raging beast that seemed to lashed out at random without symmetry or reason. Gloria winced as the first gouts of lava reached the bottom of their arcs, smashing into buildings with a spray of fire and rubble. The freeway intersection collapsed and disappeared in a vast cloud of smoke, peppered with tiny gouts of fire as gasoline flash-vaporized and exploded. For a full ten seconds the scene unfolded in silence, save for the screams and yells of the people in the restaurant. Glasses and plates began to rattle and fell as the first seismic vibrations made their way up the building. Then the shockwave hit, an overpowering roar overlaid on a deep rumble that seemed to grab Gloria’s guts and shake them in her torso.

“We’ve got to get out of here! Mom, come on, let’s go!” Her son had grabbed her shoulders and was trying to pull her up.

“Lawrence. Lawrence! Look at that crowd.” Lunchtime was the busiest period for the Coach Insignia and now it seemed that nearly everyone was trying to jam themselves through the doors at once. Some of the staff were shouting, gesturing, trying to control the flow but without much success.

“You watch the news, you know what happened in England." Gloria was shouting hoarsely, to be heard over the din. "That lava will flow downhill, straight towards us. I’ll never get out in time, not with my arthritis.”

Her son just stood there, stunned. “We can’t leave you…”

“Of course you can! You have to save your kids! Now move!” Gloria shoved his arms away.

Lawrence Hurst’s face was full of anguish, but his mother’s reasoning was indisputable. In the distance he could see the lava already beginning to flow down the trench the freeway sat in, heading for the river - and downtown. He hugged her tightly. “Goodbye mom.” Then he was gone, trying to force a path through the crowd for his family, his wife dragging their screaming children behind them. Gloria turned back to the window, tears streaming down her face. The tears were not for herself; oh, fear was welling up inside her, and frankly she hoped the building would collapse before the fire got to her. The tears though, they were for her city, which had suffered so much and struggled so hard to rebuild, only to have its heart burnt out by a war that nobody could even have imagined just a few months ago.

GM-Cadillac Hamtramck Assembly Plant, Detroit

It had been a hell of a job to get the plant converted over in two months flat, as much for training the workers as the retooling. Jake suspected that the Army already had a plan for the switch ready before the Message, because once the word was given the work started almost immediately – and went on 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, UAW be damned. Somehow they’d pulled it off and now the triple-one sevens were rolling off the line. Production was already up to ten units a day and still increasing. His section was responsible for wiring and accessory fit and they’d had some pretty horrible QC issues while the new workers were broken in. Jake O’Reilly’s temper was legendary at the plant, but truly he didn’t mind the hours or the problems; it was worth it to see his people so energized and the factory back at full capacity. The triple-one seven wasn’t as tough as a Bradley, but it was a huge step up from a Humvee and a hell of a lot easier to build than the Stryker. If the Army kept kicking Baldrick butt (armies even – couldn’t forget the Ruskies and the Brits, Jake thought), then they’d be a lot of escort and patrol missions coming up, and the ‘hell-model’ Guardian was the ideal tool for that job.

The attack came without warning; the factory floor was too noisy to hear the gunfire outside, and the management were still arguing on the phones when the portal opened. Tons of molten rock crashed through the roof, spraying onto sections of the line below. Sizable sections of the plant were destroyed within the first ten seconds, and fires began spreading immediately through the remainder. Shockwaves battered the staff as shrapnel zinged through the air, combining with the heaving ground to leave many workers in a state of shell-shock. After Sheffield everyone had been told that this might happen, the most pessimistic staff had even expected it, but nothing could prepare them for the reality of having a volcano appear in the sky nearby. Jake’s first thought was to get his people out. His second thought was to save as many vehicles as he could. His third thought was that these goals combined nicely.

“Listen, all of you…” It was useless, the roar was overpowering. Fortunately since the new workers had been put on the line Jake had been keeping a megaphone close at hand. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d used it to stop some butterfingered technician about to burn out a wiring harness; now he cranked the volume to the max and used it to save their lives.

“LISTEN, ALL OF YOU. TAKE ANY VEHICLE THAT CAN DRIVE AND GET CLEAR. THERE ARE PLENTY IN THE TESTING AREA. IT’S YOUR BEST HOPE FOR SURVIVING THE ROCKS AND THE SMOKE.”

The burning rocks seemed to have stopped coming for now, and Jake used the respite to herd his team into the nearly completed vehicles. The power had gone out, throwing the factory floor into a hazy twilight filled with screams, shouts and running forms. “TODD’S TRAPPED, YOU THREE, PULL HIM OUT OF THERE. RICK, IT JUST NEEDS FUEL, GET SOME DAMN DIESEL AND DRIVE HER OUT.”

The Guardians were roaring to life and starting to move, knocking equipment aside as they sought any open path out of the chaos. Jake looked around – all of his staff seemed to have gone save a few huddled in a still unfuelled M1117. The smoke was already too thick to see the other sections…

The brief respite ended as a fresh wave of flying lava crashed into the plant. Jake fell to his knees, dazed by the impact of a trolley propelled by the blast. His eyes were swimming and his throat burned with the heat and the toxic smoke. He couldn’t see the Guardian… he hadn’t heard it leave, but he couldn’t see it… he struggled to regain his feet but the shaking, cracking floor seemed to defeat his efforts.

A hand gripped his wrist and pulled him up. It was Todd, and Jake had never been so grateful to see the spiky-haired brat. “She’s fueled up boss, let’s go.” Jake was half-dragged, half-clambered through the door of the Guardian. The cabin was filled with injured workers, and someone was already in the driver’s seat, because no sooner was he on board than the engine roared to life and the armored car pulled away. Flames licked at the windows as the vehicle sped through the factory, crashing through the wreckage of jigs and component bins as it made for the doors. Then they were clear, rolling across the huge parking lot, surrounded by a mass of other vehicles trying to escape the destruction. Lava continued to rain down, destroying some of the cars even as they watched, but luck smiled on their Guardian and they were soon out of range.

Jake leaned forward to address the driver. “Get us up to the Davison intersection. The VDF are bound to set up a checkpoint there, we can drop off our wounded and refuel. They’re going to need all the help they can get.”

White House Situation Room, Washington D.C.

“Sir, it’s Detroit. City’s been hit hard, the attack started just a few minutes ago.”

“Let’s hear it John. In a hundred words or less, please.”

“Mr. President, the Baldricks hit Detroit with a lava attack. As far as we can see right now, it’s the same mechanism as Sheffield, but bigger and nastier. We shot down the spotter demon, but the portal still opened. We’ve got something like forty thousand tons of lava a second falling out of the sky a couple of miles north of downtown.” Secretary Warner paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts.

“The Cadillac plant took a hell of a beating and Wayne State has already become a firestorm. The freeway trenches are channeling the lava; we can’t stop it before it reaches the river. In the next half hour we’re going to lose the Renaissance Center, plus the tunnel and the bridge to Windsor. As for casualties… haven’t got an estimate yet, but worst case is well into six figures.”

“You know, Detroit is the Democrat-voting stronghold of Michigan, if it’s gone, then it might be enough to flip the state into our column.”

There was a stunned silence in the room. Eventually President Bush’s voice cut through the disbelief, pitched low and frighteningly cold. “Karl, shut up, just shut up. John, could you continue please.”

“Personnel at DIMO(N) detected the portal activity at 12:43 Eastern. NORAD was informed immediately of course. We vectored in F-16s from the 127th out of Selfridge, they flew up on full reheat but the local United States Volunteers got to the co-ordinates first. As far we can tell, they sighted a demon of the same type that the Sheffield footage shows, what General Abigor calls a ‘gorgon’. Local citizens already had it under fire when the USV shot it down with triple-A. Unfortunately the damn things seem to be salvage fused.”

Blank faces stared back at him. “It’s a nuclear warfare term, it means… never mind. The point is, shooting down the gorgon seems to cause the portal to open prematurely. We bought some time to evacuate, but not nearly enough to save everyone. Sadly the LDV unit was directly under the portal when it opened; they were killed instantly.”

Bush stopped glaring and his face softened from his barely suppressed anger at the earlier remarks. “They died in the line of duty? That should be recognized, it’ll put the Volunteers on the map as part of our armed forces. Medal of Honor?”

Secretary Warner thought quickly. “I agree with the sentiment, yes Sir. But the Medal is a bit over-doing it. A Silver Star each for the crew would be appropriate I think, and a Presidential Unit Citation for the Third Michigan USV. The situation in Detroit is pure hell, if you’ll forgive the phrase sir. There’s a serious difference between this attack and Sheffield. Over there, the portal remained in one place and poured its lava over the same target. So, although it spread, the starting point was constant and to some extent the damage was self-limiting. The Baldricks have learned their lesson from that Sir, this time the portal is moving, its sort of dancing around at random over a two or three mile area, a bit like a deflating balloon. So the lava’s being spread over a much wider area and the damage is a lot greater.”

“I hope nobody ever thought the Baldricks were stupid, that could be the worst mistake we could make.” A slight surge of amusement went around the room at that point, briefly lightening the somber tone. The President himself had benefited more that once from a presumption of stupidity. “As soon as word of this second attack hits the streets, we’re going to be under pressure to do something. Remember World War Two?”

The reference caused a certain degree of bewilderment in the situation room. Eventually the Army Chief of Staff, General George W. Casey, explained. “Back in World War Two, there was popular demand for anti-aircraft batteries around our cities. So the President ordered 90mm anti-aircraft batteries set up. Unfortunately, those guns were also badly needed as tank-killers in Europe but the Army there never got them due to the AA priority. So a lot of our tank crews died while our cities were never attacked.” Casey settled back, mentally noting that the aide who had slipped him the explanation for the President’s remark had just earned himself a promotion and a choice assignment.

“Can we pull any triple-A back from Hell?” Bush didn’t sound hopeful.

“Not a chance Sir. The Harpies are the most effective weapon Satan has, they’re giving us a lot of trouble. They’re like aircraft but present in infantry numbers and our fighters just can’t shoot them down fast enough. We were lucky first time round, Abigor had only one legion of them, sixty-six hundred. We believe there are at least 33 legions being thrown into the battle to under way. Over 200,000, our troops need every anti-aircraft system they’ve got. We can’t even give them air support properly at the moment, all our planes bar a few, are killing Harpies. If anything we need more triple-A out there not less.

“Anyway, Sir, its pointless. We know now that killing the gorgon path-finder doesn’t do any good, well, not much anyway. Once it’s over a city, that city is gone. It’s like the bad old days before we had the GBIs up in Alaska, once we spotted an inbound missile, we knew the city it was aimed at was gone, it just hadn’t died yet. We can’t defend the cities because by the time the gorgon appears, its too late. We have to pre-empt the attacks at source. Now, there are a few things we can do there, our early warning system based on the cell phone net worked. We need to give DIMO(N) all the resources they can use, that they don’t already have anyway, for early warning. It isn’t much, but it’s the best we can do until we get all our pieces into place. Other than that, all we can do is to mitigate the disaster. I do hope FEMA are going to be a bit more competent this time than they were at New Orleans.”

There was an embarrassed shuffling of feet at that remark. Secretary Dirk Kempthorne took the bait elegantly. “Well, at least we’re arming the victims this time around, not disarming them. I guess the crime rate will be a bit lower.”

“Given the size of the holes the LEO community have taken to blowing in the alleged perpetrators, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.” There was a brief spasm of amusement at the sally from FBI Director Robert Mueller. “One thing about these lava attacks, we don’t get much looting, people are too busy running to think about getting a free television. Most of them anyway. And the draft is sweeping most of the candidates for street criminals out of the way into the forces where the Sergeants are straightening them out. Law and order isn’t really a problem, you’d be surprised how rarely it is in a really major disaster. How long it will stay that way is another matter, one or two more attacks like this and we’ll have mass panic on our hands. That’ll do more damage to our industrial production than the attacks themselves.”

"Which brings us to the why? Neither Detroit nor Sheffield were really important production centers, so why Detroit? Have the analysts worked out the enemy's strategy?"

"Only the obvious so far, Mr President.” Secretary Warner took a deep breath. “Sheffield and Detroit were both industrial powerhouses until quite recently, very recently in Baldrick terms. Remember, to them, centuries are a short period. My guess is, this 'Belial' has worked out that our military strength relies on our industrial base, but his intel is stale and his targeteering is lousy. Make no mistake though, he hit us hard this time around, this is the worst blow we've taken since this whole business started. We don't want to give him a chance to refine his aim."

“Then we have to kill him at source. Now. Prime Minister Brown was right, we can’t just let this pass. Hell has to hurt for this and hurt badly. We lost under four thousand people in 9/11 and we took two countries down by way of retaliation. Now you say we’re going to lose upwards of 25 times that number.” Bush’s jaw set. “They’re going to have to pay, the American people demand it. Tell me what we’ve got and how we’re going to use it. The answer ‘nothing’ won’t be accepted.”

“Sir, we have several plans in motion. We have a path-finder of our own on the way up to Tartarus, he’s expected there in 24 to 36 hours. Once he’s in place, we can portal a deceased special forces team to his location and they’ll position navigation beacons to home a B-1 strike in. They’d devastate the area. As a back-up we have a British special forces group ready to go in. If the B-1s can’t do the strike, they’ll do a ground raid. We have a B-1 searching for Tartarus as well, if our pathfinder can’t get through, she’ll find Tartarus, eventually. We have time Sir, we believe that it will be a week or more before Belial manages to get set up for a third strike. One of our options will be in place by then.”

“Not good enough, what do we do now?” Bush’s voice was dogmatic and a little petulant.

“We can hit Dis with an air strike, the B-1s won’t be able to hit Tartarus for days, we can let them loose on Dis. With conventional bombs of course. We have a nuclear strike plan, we can adapt it for a conventional bombing strike. That’s about our only serious option right now.

“In the meantime, we have to think about limiting the disaster we have in hand. We have a couple of options there. We have a prototype device that is designed specifically to close portals. This prototype is too large to be carried by an existing bomber but we do have a different alternative. We have old C-54s we’ve pulled from the boneyard and we can refit one to carry that prototype device. The original plan was to use a Britannia and target the Sheffield portal but that’s run a long way out of steam now, the vulcanologist believes it’ll run dry in a day or less. We can test out our new device in Detroit instead.”

“There’s another thing we can do.” Doctor Surlethe’s voice was clinical. “We can deprive the baldricks of their own navigation beacons. I propose we test the entire population for the Nephilim genetic ancestry and quarantine those carrying it in isolation camps until the war is over.”

There was another stir in the room, this time of anger. In one corner, Karl Rove leaned back in relief, somebody else had made a political error of grade one levels. Secretary Kempthorne was the one who took up the cudgels though. “And we know what to look for do we?”

“Well, we will, after some investigations.”

“And then you propose to place people in indefinite confinement without them having committed an offense on the vague off-chance that a baldrick might use one of them?”

“Better that than an incinerated city.”

“Even though we already know that wearing tinfoil hats offers complete protection against mind entanglement?”

“But there are a few people out there who won’t. There are always eccentrics who deny that the tinfoil hat is absolutely essential to prevent baldricks taking over their minds.”

“And you want to indefinitely jail an unknown number of people, possibly millions, because one or two might refuse to wear their hats?”

“Well… Put like that…..”

“And that’s how it will be put ladies, gentlemen, Karl.” Rove winced, he hadn’t been forgiven after all. “We will make it a legal requirement to wear a tinfoil hat and enforce it. But there will be no mass detentions. We did that in 1941 and the stain is with us still. Thank you, we will have another meeting in six hours time when we can get some of the rest of the world in with us. Karl, Dr Surlethe, I wish to speak with you two privately.”

Chapter Sixty

Indian Air Force Jaguar-IS “JM-414” Over the Southern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge

Statistically (as confirmed by the Federal Aviation Administration) 80 percent of cockpit voice flight records recovered after aircraft crashes, end with the words ‘Oh Shit.’ The speaker may have been the pilot or the co-pilot (or, it is rumored, in some cases the aircraft itself although this possibility is denied, derided and generally rejected) but the ultimate words remain the same. So, Flight Lieutenant Aniruddha Mehta’s exclamation when a wyvern came out of nowhere and removed his Jaguar’s entire vertical fin and rudder assembly was entirely in accordance with tradition. It was no consolation when the Wyvern almost thereafter immediately had a terminal encounter with a U.S. Navy F-18E and gone down after taking two hits from AIR-120 rockets and a burst of 20mm cannon fire. The fact was that JM-414 was going into a flat spin and there was nothing Mehta could do about it.

Mehta hadn’t seen anything like the creature before, not outside mythology and fantasy art. It was a huge flying creature two legs, one pair of wings and small steering fins on the lower tail and upper neck. Mehta estimated is size as roughly 12 meters long and its wingspan around 40 meters. It had been fast, it had dived on him in a collision course with an approach speed of around 400 knots. As it had passed it had taken a swing at his aircraft with the great spiked ball on the tip of its tail, a ball covered in strong scales. It had totally wiped out his fin and that had killed JM-414 as surely as a missile hit. He looked downwards, he was over the battle area but whether he was on the baldrick or human side was another matter. On the other hand, he had no real options in the matter, JM-414 was uncontrollable, going into a flat spin and would soon break up. His only choices were to eject or ride the aircraft in. He opted for the former and felt the slam in his back as the ejection rocket blasted him through the disintegrating canopy of his aircraft.

U.S. Navy F/A-18E “Eagle One” Over the Southern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge

The Indian pilot was out of his stricken aircraft, that was one good thing. What would happen on the way down and when he reached the ground was quite another. Lieutenant Commander Michael Wong really didn’t have time to worry about him. The sky was full of flying things, harpies, a wide variety of human aircraft and now these wretched giants that had appeared out of nowhere. They were about the same size as the Greater Heralds he had killed right at the start of the Salvation War and which were now proudly represented by the two great red kill marks under his cockpit.

“Eagle One to Regent. New sighting, big creature, looks a bit like a traditional dragon. One just took out an Indy Jaguar. Pilot’s out, call in CAESAR for a pick-up,”

“Very good Eagle One, for your information, new sighting is a Wyvern. They’re reported to be hitting the ground troops hard. Report status.”

“All AIM-120s gone. Two AIR-120s left, cannon and fuel low. The sky’s full of shit out here. Target rich environment.”

“Well say goodbye to it Eagle Flight. Return to Earth-Yankee base for refuel and rearm. Also for your information, the O-club is open there.”

That was a step in the right direction Wong thought. The tempo of flight operations precluded a beer but even soda would cut through the dust of Hell that seemed to get everywhere. His squadron was lucky, after being detached from Ronaldus Magnus they’d been assigned to one of the satellite air bases that surrounded the Hellmouth. What it must be like for the air crews, mostly A-10 and Su-25 drivers, who were based in Hell was difficult to contemplate.

Wong swerved his aircraft around and took aim at a harpy that was coming dangerously close. He lead it a little bit, squeezed the button and saw one of his remaining AIR-120s streak across the sky towards the bird-like creature. It saw the rocket and tried to evade but it was too late and the harpy vanished in the explosion that was part rocket and part its own body chemistry. “Formate on me Eagle Flight, we’re outta here.”

The navigation beacon was dead ahead, closing fast. “Eagle Flight to Regent, we’re closing on the portal now.”

“We have you Eagle Flight, you’re clear to transit. Hand over to Yankee once you’re though.” That was lucky, the amount of traffic through the portal could mean aircraft stacking up for hours. That was a disturbing thought, the whole human war effort in hell was being funneled through a bottleneck that was 1,800 feet wide and 1,200 feet high. If it closed now, the whole lot would be cut off. Then there was the quiet, undramatic switch from the red murk of Hell to the clear blue skies of Earth. Wong felt the engines surge in power as the filter vanes in the intakes rotated to clear the airflow.

“Yankee control here, Eagle Flight, you’re clear to land. Turn to oh-eight fiver and come straight in on runway 85.” Wong swung the F-18 to the bearing and saw the comforting rectangle of the new concrete strip up ahead. Something the Russian pilots, flying birds with undercarriages that looked like they could handle landing on a plowed field made fun of. Landing was proving an interesting experience, the modern aircraft were OK but the old birds brought out of store, or the boneyards, were a different matter. Pilots used to F-16s and F-18s were having a hard time adapting to the ‘hot and heavy’ characteristics of the old types. Wong wondered how Ronaldus Magnus was getting on with her older aircraft.

The runway was approaching fast now, Wong made minute adjustments to line himself up and cut power back so his aircraft drifted down in to the concrete. A different feeling entirely from the spine-crunching ‘controlled crash’ of a carrier landing. Over on the parking strip, Wong saw that a group of F-4s and A-7s had arrived. Rhinos and SLUFs, this war was getting more like a time machine every day. His F-18 stopped rolling and he added a touch of power to taxi off the runway on to the parking strip.

The debriefing hut was still a temporary structure, little more than a tent. Wong went inside and sighed to himself. One of the other F-18 pilots, a Lieutenant George Witz, was standing over the officer behind an interview desk. One of the problems with the mobilization was that it was calling back the bad as well as the good. Witz was one of the bad, Wong believed that first time around he’d probably resigned rather than be eased out. Now, he was cursing steadily, damning his aircraft, his missiles, the ground control. The AIR-120 was his present target and his denunciation of the unguided rocket was colorful even by fighter pilot standards. Wong sighed and went up to the first vacant desk. The officer behind it smiled at him, she already had his camera gun “film” up on her laptop. There was a lot to be said for digitization.

“Right Mike, we got you down for 14 harpies and a wyvern. Four AIM-120 kills, two gun kills and eight AIR-120 hits on the harpies, two AIR-120s and gunfire into the Wyvern. That square with what you remember.”

“Sure does ma’am.” In fact, Wong could have sworn he got two more harpies with gunfire than he was being allocated but in the wild furball that was going on in Hell, who could really say what was what?

“Bullshit.”

“I’m sorry?” The intelligence officer’s voice had gone cold. If she’d been the speaker’s wife, the victim would shortly be due for the ‘we’ve got to talk’ treatment followed by long nights sleeping on the couch.

“I call Bullshit. Nobody’s getting eight kills with those bits of crap. Somebody’s faking their claims.”

The AFIO was about to blister Witz’s ears when Wong cut in ahead of her. “You have a problem with the AIR-120?”

“Sure have, damned things go all over the place. Not one flies true. Haven’t had any luck all day with them crapshoots. You claim you got eight, you’re bullshitting.”

“Camera gun doesn’t lie, Lieutenant.” The AFCIO’s voice had dropped through sub-zero. She called up White’s download, the shots clearly showing the rockets flying straight and true but passing ahead of the targets. “It’s pretty obvious, you’re firing from too great a range and leading the target excessively. You’re using a rocket, not a gun, the lead you need is minimal. You watch Lieutenant Commander Wong’s downloads, they’ll show you how its done properly. We can’t give you ammunition to waste, you’re off flight roster until you can get consistent hits on the simulator.”

Witz turned away, still cursing under his breath. The AFIO packed up her laptop and smiled. “O-club’s open Mike.”

“Join me for a drink, Captain?”

“Be a pleasure. My name’s Patricia.”

“Is Witz going to be all right, he doesn’t seem happy.”

“Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s just Witzless.”

Wyvern Flight, the Southern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge

If the wyverns and their riders could have seen the radar tracking plots, they’d have known they were heading at 250 knots towards the center of the human positions along the southern flank. They couldn’t so all they knew was they were heading at their normal speed to where the humans were fighting. Each side of the wyvern, on panniers made of Beast leather, were loads of sulfur, ready to be set on fire and dropped on the humans below. Brimstone, burning sulfur, was one of Hell’s great weapons, an attack that burned, crushed and gassed all in a single blow. Far below them, they could see the human sky-chariots tearing into the harpy cloud, leaving the sky studded with the orange-and-red balls of fire as the harpies died.

Up here, more than half a league into the sky, the formation of 80 wyverns had gone more or less unnoticed. That had to be why the human sky-chariots were ignoring them in favor of rending the harpies. Still, it given the slaughter that was taking place in the harpy ranks, the wyverns and their riders were content with what small mercies they were given. There were whispers that more than seven thousand harpies had died already, more than one legion’s worth out of the six legions that had started the day’s battle.

Faranigranthis saw the wing leader up ahead make the signal, it was time for the attack. He ran a quick glance over his equipment, the sacks of brimstone were ready, all it would need was to pull the bronze bar from the rings and the sacks would upend, pouring the burning sulfur on to the enemy below. Behind them were the bronze flechettes, hardened in Belial’s workshops and also ready to be dropped on the enemy. Then, he returned his attention to the formation, already the first rank were peeling off for their dive on the enemy below. His turn came, he jabbed his spurs into the wyvern and felt it drop out of the sky as its wings folded and it howled its battle-cry.

This was the bit that made a wyvern rider’s life worthwhile. The screaming dive on an enemy below, watching them disperse and run to escape the deluge that was to come. Faranigranthis saw the humans below, their fortresses built around their iron chariots besieged by harpies and with the ground forces and beasts closing in. Off to one side, he saw a strange rippling blue flash tearing at the human positions and realized that had to be the naga at work, pouring their lightning bolts into the enemy ranks. As his wyvern dropped, Faranigranthis could see them more clearly, could see the great coiled forms strapped to the back of the Great Beasts that carried them. He touched his wyvern with his mind and the creature changed the angle of its dive so he could dump its load on the humans engaged by the naga.

It was time, nearly time. Faranigranthis calculated angle and speed, He had selected a line of three fortresses for his attack, a group that was already under heavy fire from the naga, the blue lightning bolts rippling off their armor. He touched the igniter that set the left hand set of brimstone bags on fire, then hesitated slightly and pulled the drop bar. To his delight he saw his aim was true and the deluge of burning yellow stones swept across the human iron chariots. Beneath him, the harpies swarmed over the stricken vehicles and the infantry floundering across the open space between the Phlegethon and the human defenses gained fresh heart. They swarmed up the banks and over the iron chariots that lay within them

Then, Faranigranthis saw how the human defenses worked. As soon as the three fortresses he had hot were in danger, those on either side opened fire on them, the little red flashes that streamed from them raking the position held by their fellows. From beneath the seething mass of harpies and infantry, he saw the iron chariots moving backwards, out of the overrun fortress, back towards the safety of the line behind. Still they were being raked by their fellows, but Faranigranthis saw the red fireflies bouncing off the iron chariots and he realized what was happening. The human fireflies couldn’t penetrate iron so they bounced off and just killed those outside its protection. None of whom were human of course.

Well, Faranigranthis knew what to do about that. He still had his right side pouches of brimstone and his flechettes. He dragged his wyvern’s nose around, touched its mind and gave it the instructions necessary. His next run would be on the second line of fortresses, the ones that were covering the escape of his first target. Once more his aim was true and the yellow cloud of flaming sulfur engulfed the iron chariots in their fortress. Their fireflies faded away and stopped as the chariots tried to back out from the cloud. Above them, Faranigranthis turned his wyvern again and headed for the chariots that had been the victim of his first pass. They were still there, fighting the infantry and Beasts that surrounded them and the harpies that flew over them. He aimed carefully and saw his flechettes hail down upon them. As he turned away, his load gone, he could see a rolling cloud of black smoke, laced with orange. An iron chariot was burning and he, Faranigranthis, had killed it.

It was time to go home. The Wyverns were assembling back at their original height above the battlefield and Faranigranthis could sense the exultation of the riders. They’d got in and they had struck a savage blow at the humans. Then, he did a count, there were fifty three Wyverns flying in the formation of the eighty that had dived on the humans just a few minutes before.

Naga Group, the Southern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge

Baroness Yuku fought the exhaustion that was growing throughout her body. The naga were built for maintaining a constant series of discharges but the rate at which she and her fellow naga had been firing them at the humans was greater than they had ever attempted before. Yet it had to be done, the humans had to be kept under fire if the assault was to stand a chance. Yuku mentally thanked her Lord that he had had the wisdom to ‘modify’ the instructions to send his best naga to aid Belial in his mad schemes. He’d interpreted ‘best’ to mean his youngest and least experienced coven, keeping his two most experienced groups with him for this battle. By the look of it, several other lords had done the same and that was a good thing, otherwise the assembled covens would be collapsed into semi-consciousness by now.

Those that still lived that was. There had been 54 covens assembled for this assault, just over 700 naga, and Chiknathragothem had grouped them in the center of his formation top punch a hole for the rest of his army to follow. That had seemed like a good idea until the holocaust of human mage-fire had descended upon them. The casualties had been dreadful but the soft, unarmored nagas had been hard hit. Less than 300 had survived the mage bolts and the churning ground. They’d forded the river and kept the human chariots under a constant series of bolts but nobody could do much more until the wyverns had doused their positions with burning brimstone. That had forced the humans back and out of their defensive positions.

The combination of bolts and brimstone from above, the relentless fire of the nagas and the advancing infantry and fliers had done it, they’d started to destroy the human defense. From her position on the river bank, Yuku could see the black, rolling smoke rising from more than a dozen iron chariots that had been overwhelmed and destroyed. Around them lay the bodies of their crews, many half eaten as they had been cut down. That might once have been a satisfying sight but Yuku could see more. The ground was black with the bodies of Chiknathragothem’s army where human magery had caused its terrible toll.

One of the infantry cohort commanders waved her forward, the foot-soldiers and cavalry were trying to clear the evil metal snakes and exploding mage-bars that covered the ground. The mage bars could be cleared by the simple expedient of picking them up and throwing them away, if they exploded, the mage-bar was gone, if it did not, it was gone. Slowly, a way was being cleared through the defenses, even though the human mage-fire never ceased and the casualties of those doing the clearing were high beyond counting. Yuku started to lead the seven surviving members of her coven forward along the cleared path, summoning up enough energy to unleash another series of bolts against the defenders. That was when the foot soldier leading her raised his trident.

“No further Highness. This is as far as we can go, the next line of human defenses is ahead of us.

And on either side of us and behind us thought Yuku. Nowhere is protected on this battlefield where the humans can see all and their mages can strike where they will.

Then, she heard a strange whistling sound and more mage-bolt explosions. Only these were soft in comparison with those she had experienced on the banks of the Phlegethon and they looked different. Instead of rolling clouds of black and red smoke, surrounded by thrown earth, they were gentle and white, almost angelic in the purity of their whiteness. Yuku watched confused as the white feather-like tendrils spread into a cloud that was utterly opaque yet still had the blinding white purity of the initial bursts. The clouds started to rise and that was when Yuku felt the intense heat as more of the mage bolts spread the white cloud still further.

Yuku was suddenly aware that the white cloud was irritating her eyes and her nose was running. A stray cloud of the white smoke swept over her and she coughed, an explosive cough that shook her whole body. She looked around, she and her nagas were surrounded by white fragments that were falling over the whole area. One of the fragments landed on her skin and she looked at it, curiously at first but then in horror as her scales started to bubble and smolder. The lump was eating its way into her body, she could feel it searing into her flesh as it bit deeper and deeper. The agonizing pain started to spread as more and more of the lumps touched her and started the process of her destruction. All around her figures were on the ground, rolling and screaming, trying to brush away the fragments that brought this unbelievable horror to them. Even as they did so, more of the rounds thumped down, adding yet more smoke and fragments to the cloud that was enveloping them.

The Great Beast that bore Baroness Yuku was on the ground, writhing and bellowing in agony as the white mage-fire burned into its body. Yuku was trapped underneath it, her body being crushed by the beast’s weight even as it burned from the white mage-fire. As she died in searing, mind-crushing agony, Yuku learned that it was very unwise to upset humans.

Chapter Sixty One

Comercia Tower, Detroit, Michigan

It was a nondescript conference room in a nondescript office in downtown Detroit. Oh, certainly some lawyer's name was on the door, but this was just a quiet place for two sons of Michigan's most powerful political family. "You know we have to resolve the issue, Carl. You’d think she’d shut up when Barry got the nod." US Representative Sander Levin of Michigan's twelfth sighed. "We can't let those two keep sniping at each-other like a couple of fifth-graders, not when the world is going to hell."

"Hell's coming to the world is more like it, Sandy." Senator Carl Levin, Sander's younger brother, joked. "I know, its bad. But what do you want me to do? Anyway, I don't LIKE that woman. I'd rather have a baldrick on the ticket than her. At least then we know what we'd be getting."

Sander laughed, and blocked out words with his hand. "Beelzebub-Levin in 08, why settle for a lesser evil?" He shook his head. "No, I think the best we can do is to keep supporting Barry and ……" suddenly there was a rumble that turned into a steady vibration, and the lights in the room flickered.

The door burst open. "Sirs!" A secret-service agent stepped in, listening on his earpiece and with a weapon in-hand. "A portal has opened pretty close to us, north of here. Its looking like a replay of Sheffield, and we have orders to get you out of here." His voice made it clear it wasn't a request. After the incident with Bill Clinton, the Secret Service had mandated that all members of congress be protected with at least one agent at all times, to prevent demonic possession. "If you'll follow me to the street, we will evacuate you to the west, we have an airplane waiting but all of the metro-airspace has been locked down."

Both men nodded grimly, and they began following their agents; the meeting room was on the twenty-second floor and it was a long way down. Like every other stairwell in downtown, the way out was clogged with a mass of people, and it only took a few to panic and fall to turn the evacuation into a crush. The secret service tried to clear a path, shouting “Federal Agents!” and “We have a US Representative, let us through!” but with little effect on the crowd. Their hopes picked up when one of the elevator doors began to open, but it revealed a car packed to bursting with bodies.

“Citizens, please, we have a senator and a congressman here, we need to evacuate them.” The men and women in the elevator stared back with panicked eyes. Two of them spilled out into the hallway, but the rest shrank back. The agents looked at each other, considering whether to press the issue, but it was rendered moot as the building suddenly lost power. With set expressions they returned to trying to force a path for their charges through the crush.

Okthuura Yal-Gjaknaath, Tartaruan Range, borderlands of Hell

It was hopeless. No matter how she struggled her ripped wings couldn’t find enough purchase on the air. The magma level had already dropped noticeably, but the receding lava just exposed a steep, jagged rim of still-glowing rocks. To Euryale it looked like a rack of red hot knives ready to tear her apart. Already she seemed to be drowning in an ocean of merciless heat as she fell into the volcano’s throat, the rim drawing away even as the ground rushed closer. She knew it was hopeless, but instinct made her try to flare anyway, throwing away the last of her airspeed to prevent an instant crushing death on impact.

In what seemed like a miracle, as she hovered for that final two seconds the sharp glowing rocks were replaced by a shifting mass of gray-brown rubble. The gorgon landed heavily, splaying onto the still scorching-hot stones and gaining a fresh set of sprains and bruises, but to her utter surprise she was neither incinerated nor broken. Elation lasted for only a moment as Euryale realized that the lip had collapsed and she was crawling on a landslide. Desperately she tried to out-pace the sliding rocks, scrabbling for purchase as the rim continued to crumble into the throat. At last she was out, stumbling into the crater proper and panting despite the searing air.

She wasn’t out of danger yet though; the unstable portal was still churning the lava, which was spitting out globs of molten rock at random. She’d emerged near one of the shrines, a tattered mess of bent rods and half-melted wires, still sparking feebly with residual psychic energy. A half dozen naga lay collapsed in front of it, abandoned by their peers, who were slithering out the crater as fast as their coils could carry them. Euryale found most of the naga rather hard to tell apart, but one snakelike form was unmistakable; Yulupki had always had a taste for tacky jewelry and for the ritual she’d liberally festooned herself with beaten gold trinkets. Euryale had an overwhelming urge to leave her there. It would certainly make explaining the disaster easier. No, it didn’t make sense, too much was riding on Count Belial’s scheme and losing Yulupki would be too much of a blow, to their portal capability and to morale.

As she got closer she saw that the naga’s eyes were still open. “Baroness! Snap out of it! Come on, you can’t stay here!”

“It’s gone! My magic! I have no magic!” Yulupki wailed.

Euryale shook her head. She’d seen Megaaeraholrakni suffer exactly the same thing when she pushed herself too far. It was temporary of course. Demons could recover from nearly anything that didn’t kill them outright, save the touch of iron. “Snap out of it witch. You’re mewling like a kidling.”

The naga didn’t seem to have heard her. “I can’t hear it… I can’t feel it… I am nothing…”

Euryale rolled her eyes then slapped the baroness across the face. The naga hissed and bared her fangs, suddenly focused. “You’ll be fine… if you get out of here now. Come on. I can’t carry you.”

A thump followed by a sudden scream issued from nearby as a piece of lava narrowly missed another of the naga, spraying the creature with glowing fragments. Yulupki painfully began to slither up the slope towards the crater rim, while Euryale went to find a Great Beast to help her move the other wounded survivors.

Ford Field Stadium, Detroit, Michigan

Lieutenant Preston swept the binoculars across the smoke-shrouded asphalt, trying to verify the charge placement. The scene took him back to Kuwait, the same dirty haze backlit by towering flames. The plan was a desperation tactic to start with, worked out in haste at the marathon emergency civil defense meeting just two days ago. With only half his platoon available it would be a minor miracle if they pulled it off. Worse, breathing gear was in critically short supply, the best they could manage was taking gulps from medical oxygen bottles. Even up on top of the stadium’s parking deck, the noxious air was burning his throat and making his eyes water. His men down in the freeway cutting had it much, much worse.

The old-style surplus radio crackled to life. “Sir, I’m seeing lava flow under the Wilkins Street bridge, it’s gonna hit you in five to ten minutes. Over.”

“Got it Private. High tail it out of there. Have you got civvies on board?”

“Yes sir, Alan been picking up wounded, truck’s full of them.”

“Great. Get them clear. Out. Taguba, how are those charges coming?”

Sergeant Taguba’s voice came in ragged gasps. “Just doing the… last column now… Quarrie’s collapsed… put one of the bottles on him.”

Another, higher pitched voice cut in - Sergeant Sharoff’s squad had already finished the northern bridge and moved on to one of the ramps. “Sir, we ran out of satchels, we’ve been improvising with loose blocks but we’re still stringing detcord…”

Lieutenant Preston cut him off. “Sergeants, we’re out of time. Prepare to set timers, three minutes, on my mark.”

There was a long silence – on the radio at least. The city was anything but silent, with the wailing sirens, honking horns, roaring flames, human screams, drawn-out thumps of collapsing buildings and the omnipresent deep rumble of the falling lava. Number four platoon, bravo company was the best approximation of a combat engineering unit the Third Volunteers could manage, but faced with an attack on this scale they most they could hope for was buying a little more time.

“Ready. My boys are pulling back.” Another pause. “Sharoff, in position.”

“Mark!”

“Timer set.” Pounding footsteps came over the voice as Taguba wasted no time pulling back.

“Timer ru… sir…” Sergeant Sharoff’s voice cut off.

”Well done, now haul ass! Samuels, stop the traffic now, any means necessary.”

“Yes sir.”

Preston could just make out diesel starting up as his men moved commandeered trucks to block the freeway overpass. The civvies would hate them for it, but better that than let them get blown up or dunked in lava. His knuckles went white as his grip on the binoculars tightened. The smoke completely obscured the ramps now, but there was a streak of movement… yes, yes! it was Taguba’s truck barrelling down the freeway, his men piled into the bed. But where the hell was Sharoff?

“Sharoff? Report! Sharoff? Lee?” Preston tried to force back the growing sense of horror as the second pickup failed to appear. He dropped the binoculars and jumped back into the SUV, addressing his driver. “Take us out to the edge of the lot. As soon as the charges blow, we go down after our men, understand?”

Private Russell was only nineteen, a trainee machinist when he wasn’t drilling with the regiment. Preston guessed that the kid had spent a lot of his time fooling around with cars before the Message, judging by the work he’d done getting the ex-museum pieces back into working order. Russell’s hands were trembling on the wheel as he steered the Cherokee down the parking ramp, and he gulped before responding with a shaky “Sir yes sir.”

“Steady now. The rubble will hold back the lava, we’ll be in and out before the smoke gets us. If the gas has knocked them out, we’re their only hope…”

A deafening, stuttering series of cracks and booms drowned out the Lieutenant’s words. The smoke swirled and for a moment cleared to reveal the two freeway bridges collapsing in a tumble of concrete rumble. A second later one of the connector ramps came down, breaking into spinning chunks as its support columns cracked unevenly. The charge placement was supposed to tip the decks on end as they fell, and from here it looked like they’d not done too bad job. Splashes of color showed where cars had been on the bridges when they fell. Preston hoped they were abandoned, but if not… well, they were warned, and thousands of lives were at stake here.

Private Russell had the accelerator on the floor before the rubble had stopped falling and the SUV surged forward, smashing through a low metal barrier, crossing an on-ramp and charging down the grassy slope towards the freeway proper. Visibility dropped to mere feet as they entered the now settling dust cloud. Suddenly the vehicle swerved left, braking hard and throwing Lieutenant Preston against the dash. Two shapes emerged out of the gloom, bent low and moving slowly, passing a bright red bottle back and forth between them. Preston shoved the door open, admitting a wash of heat and smoke to the cabin, and pulled the men into the back of the SUV.

“Did the others make it?”

Corporal Lee had a horribly pained look in his eyes. “No… don’t think so.” His voice was a croak. ”Sharoff insisted on wiring more detcord! I think the gas got them, they weren’t moving. Sorry sir, no choice, had to leave them.”

A cracking, rumbling, groan proclaimed the arrival of the lava, punctuated by the distorted screams of tortured rebar. The makeshift barrier shifted but held for now, checking the stream’s headlong rush towards downtown and the river. Preston nodded to Private Russell. “Go!” he shouted, then in a quieter voice “we did what we could. Now lets see where else we’re needed.” He reached for the radio again.

Congress Street, Downtown Detroit

At last, they had reached the lobby. Sander was breathing heavily, at sixty-seven he was hardly a young man. He paused to catch his breath, but what he saw outside snatched it away again. The sky was turning pitch black, and ash was falling like snow. Into the streets they went, but traffic had long since ground to a halt as cars had stalled from the ash or been abandoned by their drivers. Coughing and stumbling, they made their way slowly through the deepening black. It was hard to keep a sense of direction; were they heading towards the river?

After what seemed like an eternity, a piercing scream cut through the darkness. They rounded a corner, only to see a city street backlit by a lava flow. A side-channel of the main flow, it wasn't going at a breakneck speed, but it was steadily making its way down Randolph street. Carl grimaced, knowing the park had to be in flames by now. But worse than that, if the lava reached the entrance of the tunnel to Windsor, a critical evacuation route would be cut. "We've got to do something!" He yelled through the din.

"Our job is to get you to safety, sir!" The agent grabbed his shoulder, but the Senator from Michigan refused to be moved. Lights flashed ahead, dimly in the smoke. A hulking yellow form resolved into a back hoe; it was an abandoned highway repair site.

"There!" He spied a dump truck with a bed full of gravel and ran to it. "We can put a bit..” Carl’s voice trailed off into a hacking cough. ”…A bit of a barrier up, we can dam the lava." The agents looked at each other, then at Sander, who nodded. They weren't likely to make it out of the city alive, but the longer they could keep the streets clear, the better chance other people would have. "I'll do it, sir. I was in the Army Corps." The agent climbed into the cab and fired up the engine.

Coach Insignia Restaurant, Renaissance Center, Downtown Detroit

Gloria had wept for a while, but the sorrow had receded for now. Perhaps it was the unreality of the situation, like a disaster movie. Possibly though it was what she’d been watching below, because she’d never expected to see this much heroism in the face of hellfire and damnation itself. She had a fine view from the deserted restaurant and she’d seen people dragging others out from burning buildings, others digging through rubble of collapsed ones even as the lava closed in on them and private cars actually driving back in to the city to pick up more survivors. She’d seen a news helicopter buzzing around lifting children off rooftops and another big helicopter dropping packages to the survivors – after watching for a few minutes she was pretty sure they were gas masks of some sort.

Then there were the barricades, springing up everywhere as people tried to hold back the burning tide for just a few more minutes. It had started with the freeway collapse, that had gone down and sent up a big cloud of dust right before the lava got to it, so it had to be deliberate. She wasn’t sure if that had been a good idea, the stadium had gone up in flames and then the molten rock had pooled and started heading west along the I75, cutting off escape to the north as it went. Then again she’d probably be in hell already if they hadn’t damned the flow, along with thousands of others caught in downtown.

One particularly bold group had tried to block the road just in front of her skyscraper, piling up rubble and cars and trucks and all manner of junk right under the people mover track. The lava had already reached the barricade, which was burning and melting and shifting dangerously, yet they still kept reinforcing it. Another rumble, another boom… another building was collapsing, just a hundred yards north of the barricade. The lava was closing in, seeming to come at the tower from every surrounding street. Weren’t they going to run? Didn’t they realize that this was the end? Gloria closed her eyes, wondering if a New Detroit would ever rise from the plains of Hell.

Brush Street, Downtown Detroit

Agent Drexler finally found the control that tilted the bed of the truck, and slowly drew a line of gravel three feet high across the street. Other people stopped, and seeing what they were doing, began to manhandle benches, tires, and any still-working cars into the line. After only a few minutes they had a barrier five feet high. The lava began to pool behind it, but as the rocks glowed, they fused into a solid berm. The lava swirled slowly.

Sander clapped his brother on the shoulder, and they both smiled. Before either had a chance to say anything, a loud -CRACK- echoed above the din. On their right, a building bucked wildly, shedding a rain of cladding, and they both saw the lava pouring into the basement windows and storm drains. With all the heat, the foundations were giving way. The crack repeated again, into a deafening roar as the building came down. The two brothers looked each other in the eyes, knowing they wouldn't see each-other for a long time, bracing themselves for what was in store, as hundreds of tons of steel and masonry came down on them.

Neither flinched.

Free Hell, Swamps by the River Styx, Sixth Rings of Hell

In the distance, the Russian artillery rumbled, sounding for all the world like far-off thunder. Jade Kim could only imagine what it was like in the firing zone, or the hell on the receiving end of the steel rain. Once, she'd been near a single large howitzer firing; the sound had knocked the breath out of her and deafened her even through the headphones. And knowing the Russians, they'd lined up their artillery wheel-to-wheel for fifty miles. She wouldn't want to be in that big baldrick army assaulting the Russian positions right now.

Kim brought her mind back to Free Hell. Initial estimates put the number of people imprisoned in Free Hell at a bit over one hundred thousand. The sheer number still surprised Kim on a gut level when she thought about it, so she constantly had to remind herself that there were ninety billion people in the Pit alone, and the surveying flights had shown that Free Hell controlled little more than a mere millionth of the surface area of the Pit. Spread out before her was a rudimentary map of Free Hell. She was in between appointments in her command tent, contemplating the area they controlled. Marked were the major rock outcroppings, particularly dry and wet places, the courses of streams and rivers, baldrick roads, and known human and baldrick positions. She had also penciled in the locations of canals-in-progress and the small, growing city that housed all of the freed humans.

Nearly one-third of Free Hell's border lay along the Styx. Along the other two-thirds, Tarrant had placed extensive minefields and regularly spaced small fortifications, generally taking advantage of particularly wet areas and clusters of boulders thrusting up through the mud. These had repulsed several weak baldrick assaults in the last few days; they'd taken no casualties, while the baldricks had gone down heavily.

But there wasn't enough information about the main baldrick forces. The noted baldrick strongholds were vague, and there were all too many question marks. She wasn't sure how many reinforcements had arrived, or even just how many baldricks had been under Asmodeus' command in the first place. This lack of knowledge was disturbing.

Kim frowned. There were several token emplacements along the shore of the Styx, one monitoring the destroyed bridge and the others spaced evenly across the banks. The defenses there were too thin; Tarrant was relying too much on the Styx as a natural barrier. She made a note to speak to him about that later.

McInery stuck his head in the tent. “Ell-tee?”

“Yeah, Mac?”

“Rahab is here with three men to see you.”

Ah, yes. Rahab and Julius Caesar. “Who are they?”

“One identifies himself as Julius Caesar and says the other two are his bodyguards.”

“Please show them in.” She made sure that her pistol was loose in its holster, just in case, and she'd have Mac here as well if things went sour. She had no intention of that happening, however.

The tent flap opened, and Rahab stepped through. She was followed by Caesar, a short man with thin, black hair and a wide mouth. After Caesar were two men. One was large and very muscular, with a forward-thrust head and short hair; the other was shorter, with curly blond hair and jutting eyebrows. Both were wearing scabbards, but no swords. Mac was on top of his game.

Rahab spoke first. “May I introduce Gaius Julius Caesar. With him are Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, his bodyguards.”

Kim nodded. “Thank you, Rahab.” She rose and extended her hand. “I am Lieutenant (deceased) Jade Kim, commander of the People's Front for the Liberation of Hell and administrator of Free Hell.” Caesar passed her hand and clasped her wrist. After an instant, she grabbed his wrist. His grip was firm, and he squeezed for an instant before releasing.

“Please, take a seat.” Kim gestured to the chair in front of her desk and three others along the wall.

Licking her lips, Rahab said, “If you don't mind, I'll be going.”

“Suit yourself,” said Kim. Caesar, meanwhile, sat at the chair before her 'desk'.

Kim looked inquiringly at Pullo and Vorenus. Vorenus shook his head and spoke for both of them. “If you don't mind, ma'am, we'll be standing.” Kim nodded. In the back of the tent, Mac stood unobtrusively.

“So, Mr Caesar, how can I help you?”

Caesar smiled. “Please, call me Gaius. I'm here to offer you my help.”

Kim raised an eyebrow. Caesar continued, “I know that you're surprised at the possibility I can help you. I've taken your man Dawkins into my protection. In conversing with him, I've learned much about what has happened since I arrived here in Hell, especially in the last few centuries. You have weapons that are far beyond anything I, or any Roman, could have dreamed of.”

Kim nodded her assent. “This is true.”

Caesar leaned forward. “But,” he continued, “in establishing yourself here in Hell, you do lack one thing.”

“And what is that, Gaius?”

“Manpower.” Caesar smiled. “Every year, since I arrived, I have freed men. They have gone on to free men, who have gone on to free men. I have created a network to shuttle these people to safety in areas the demons do not regularly patrol. There are small groups hiding out in the interiors of each ring, ready to act at my command.”

“And what good are they to me,” Kim asked, “if they don't know how to use my weapons?”

“They can be trained. So this is what I propose, Lieutenant Kim. If you equip and train my army, it will be ready to rise up against the demons all at once, throughout Hell, at your command.”

“How many men do you have?”

“At this point, my people number over two and a half millions.” Kim nodded, carefully concealing her surprise.

“Thank you, Gaius. We will be in contact. Can I put you and your men up here for the night?”

“We would be pleased to accept your offer, Lt. Kim.”

“Mac, would you find a place for them to stay over the night?” asked Kim. McInery nodded. “Thank you.”

As Caesar and his two bodyguards exited the tent, Kim turned back to the map, her mind churning. After a moment, it began to settle. First things first – now to talk to Tarrant about the Styx line of defenses.

Bank of the River Styx, Fifth Ring of Hell

Xisorixus had been a nobody. During the last few millennia, however, he'd risen to his own fiefdom at a breakneck pace. Through a combination of military prowess, conniving wit, and sheer raw courage mixed with an outrageous level of bluff, he now commanded a large, prime piece of territory in the Sixth ring. With the death of Asmodeus and so many lords under him, Xisorixus was the senior demon in the legions remaining near the human-infested territory.

Although he was busy consolidating his control over the lands of those minor lords who had died – his holdings had tripled since Asmodeus had been killed – Xisorixus was also consolidating his command and beginning to lay plans for the feat that would cement his place in Hell's hierarchy for all eternity. Xisorixus was going to utterly destroy the humans who had freed themselves.

Through the past few days, he had been feinting at the humans, testing their defenses. They were thorough on the sides of the human-occupied territories facing away from the Styx; Xisorixus harbored few illusions about the ability of his forces to storm through the magical defenses and emerge in enough strength to wipe out the humans on the other side.

But his eyes and ears had been busy gathering information. The overwhelming human defensive magic was indiscriminate, he'd learned; one of his spies had watched human mages preparing the spells, and one of the spells had accidentally exploded, leaving the human a bloody mess, screaming and writhing in pain on the ground. This had given rise to the beginnings of an idea: if he could somehow get across the Styx and gain the upper hand against the humans, he could drive them back and trap them against their own magic.

To make the situation even better, Xisorixus had learned that only a few humans watched the Styx. His demons were now able to show themselves in full daylight without earning the slightest magery in retaliation, save in a few places. Once, he'd tried restarting construction on the demolished bridge, but the humans had unleashed their magic on him and he'd lost nearly two hundred good demons.

He emerged from his tent into the bustle of Dis itself. This was the one place he could be assured that no humans would spy on him, so he'd asked permission to bring his legions here. Satan had absent-mindedly agreed – rather, one of the lower bureaucrats in the government had agreed – so his five remaining augmented legions had requisitioned, and were occupying, these few blocks of city. He'd attached to each legion a fifth-legion of flies, from the sizeable air force he had accumulated in his rise to power.

Today was the day he was going to test his plan. In the courtyard of his headquarters, by his tethered wyvern, were ten curious wooden bundles. Standing by them were three wyverns, to which the bundles would be attached for transmission. His air guard snapped to attention as he exited, and fell into escort around him. They would follow him through the air and to the testing grounds, at a wide, shallow part of the Styx between the human area and the waterfalls. There, a cohort of his troops awaited him. Xisorixus smiled. The floating bridges would almost certainly work, and from there it would only be a few days before he joined the battle.

Chapter Sixty Two

Incident Command Centre, Sheffield Airport, United Kingdom.

“I think me may have a little bit of a problem, Sir.” Colonel Mace said as he stepped back into the command trailer. “I’ve just been speaking to the Chief Constable and it seems that two of his officers along with their vehicle have gone missing.”

“The situation in the city is pretty confused, Colonel.” Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart replied. “I’ve been led to believe that the network that supports the emergency service’s radio network has been damaged, so it is hardly a surprise that officers may be out of contact.”

“Ordinarily that fact would not worry me, or the Chief Constable, Sir, but witnesses some of our men rescued in the city a short time ago have reported that the officers ejected them from their vehicle and placed a baldrick inside. Now no baldrick prisoner has been reported as being taken so…”

“Something was badly wrong.” Lethbridge-Stewart finished the sentence. “Intelligence does say that some baldricks may be able to exercise mind control by injecting their victims with some kind of poison. We’re overstretched as we are, but we better find this baldrick before it does any more damage. Put together a unit to go and hunt it down, I’ll ask Midlands Command if they can send us some Paras, or Marines to act as a hunter unit if necessary.”

“I’ll command it myself if I have to, Sir.” Mace replied.

The Brigadier turned slightly as Keavy McManus stepped into the Command Trailer.

“Ah, Doctor, how can I help?”

“It’s just Mrs McManus, Brigadier.” The vulcanologist corrected him.

“My apologies, Mrs McManus, a habit from a previous posting.” Lethbridge-Stewart replied. “How is your survey team getting on?”

“Apology accepted, Brigadier.

“I just wanted to thank you for your assistance. I understand that you are very busy with rescue and recovery duties, not to mention Law and Order and providing a cordon, yet you have managed to spare manpower and vehicles to escort my team.” Keavy McManus told him.

“Always nice to be appreciated by the best in their business, Mrs McManus.” The Brigadier told her. “Your work is extremely important; we need to learn how to deal with events like this. I Think you must have heard the news from Detroit, we can be sure that it won’t be the last attack of its kind.”

Western Sheffield, United Kingdom.  The convoy transporting the survey team halted as it prepared to take more readings of the lava that covered much of the city. The army had managed to provide a rather eclectic group of vehicles from those it had assembled at the airport. Leading the group was a Land Rover SNATCH 2, carrying some of the RMP escort, which was followed by two Saxon Patrol APCs, which carried the personnel and equipment of the survey team; various aerials and sensors now poked out from the roof hatches; and a Fuchs Reconnaissance Vehicle, its NBC sensors adapted to detect the various products the portal was spewing out, the rest of the RMP escort was carried in a Vector armored patrol vehicle. Bringing up the rear was a Trojan Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers, the engineer variant of the Challenger 2. It was there in case anything large and heavy needed to be moved out of the way, it also had a GPMG mounted in a Remote Weapons Station which might come in handy.

Staff Sergeant John Mann, Royal Military Police, was not in a particularly good mood as he watched the survey team, who were all wearing protective suits, dismount from the two Saxons and start taking readings, assisted by some members of 1st Royal Tank Regiment, who manned the Fuchs, from the Land Rover. Mann was a senior member of a Special Investigation Branch (known in the RMP as the ‘Branch’, and in the wider army as ‘Shit In Bulk’) team based in Midlands Command and felt that he should not be here; his job was to catch criminals in uniform, not shepherd civilian scientists. However he had been available and many of his team had been dispatched to the city to reinforce members of a Territorial Army Provost Company. What Mann had seen today reminded him of something out of a disaster movie, or one of those nuclear war docudramas that had been popular during the Cold War. One image that had stayed with him was the sight of a Traffic Warden cradling an old SLR as he guarded a group of looters Were they really so short of manpower that somebody had decided to arm the Traffic Wardens?

Mann put on his mask and stepped out of the Land Rover, intending to check on the troops under his command. He trusted his fellow SIB and RMP soldiers, but he was not sure about the men from the Military Provost Guard Service sent to bolster the escort. Although they were exclusively recruited from ex-servicemen they usually spent their days guarding base entrances and patrolling perimeters. He leaned back into the Land Rover and grabbed his L1A2 battle rifle; the TA and MPGS members of the escort still had L85A2s, L86A2s and Light Machine Guns, all 5.56mm weapons, but as regulars Mann and his team were entitled to the latest small arms.

“Anything interesting happening, Sergeant?” Mann asked one of the senior NCOs manning the defensive perimeter.

“Not a thing, Staff, apart from some poor moggy that must have been killed by something.” Sergeant Jo McDonagh, a fellow member of Mann’s investigation team, replied.

“I reckon everyone must have self-evacuated out of here long ago; it was a pretty well to do area so I hope nobody has been stupid enough to… Hey you three! Yes you, halt!”

Sergeant McDonagh flinched as Mann suddenly yelled at full volume. His was a voice feared throughout the whole of the SIB. She spotted that he was yelling at three youths who had emerged from a house just beyond the perimeter carrying some plastic bags, they looked over their shoulders, saw the soldiers and started to run.

Mann and McDonagh brought up their rifles, as did the other Red Caps present.

“Halt, or I fire!” Mann yelled.

The Emergency Powers only required that a member of the Security Forces give one warning before opening fire, and in extreme circumstances they could fire without a warning. Mann technically obeyed the instructions, his shot coincided with the implied exclamation mark at the end of his shout. The .338 Lapua Magnum round inflicted terrible damage on the body of the looter. He was dead before he hit the ground. The other two stopped in their tracks, dropped what they were carrying and put their hands up. Mann strode up to them and delivered a swift smack in the small of their backs with his rifle butt, knocking them to the ground.

“Do you two idiots know the penalty for looting then?” He snarled to the two terrified survivors. “Search and cuff them.” He ordered the other Redcaps. “Sergeant, search the house in case there are more of them in there.”

“Yes, Staff.” McDonagh replied.

Sergeant McDonagh led half a dozen Redcaps into the semi-detached house. With the power cut it was eerily quiet, though there was the distant sound of dripping water.

“Clear!” Each soldier shouted as he, or she cleared a room.

“There’s a door here, Sarge.” A corporal said to McDonagh. “I reckon it leads to a basement.”

“Right, Corporal, you go first. I’ll cover you.” McDonagh ordered, turning on the torch attached to her L1A2.

The Corporal kicked in the door.

“On the floor! Nobody move!” He yelled as he charged through the door, Sergeant McDonagh close behind him.

He swung his L85A2 around the room until the torch tapped to it illuminated the body of a middle aged man. His head had been caved in.

“Oh shit!” The Corporal breathed.

“Maybe later, Corporal, but now I think we’d better tell the Staff about this.”

“There were three bodies, Staff.” McDonagh said to Mann a few minutes later. “They’d been sheltering in their basement, who knows why. There was a middle aged man and woman, I presume husband and wife; they’d both had their heads caved in; and an old woman, looked like she was in her late seventies, or early eighties.”

“Had they killed her too?” Mann asked, the disgust dripping from his voice.

“There were no signs of violence, it looks like a heart attack.”

Mann kicked the nearest of the two looters savagely, hard enough to break his ribs.

“Is this your handiwork, you scum?”

“No, they were already like that when we got here!” The looter with broken ribs said through clenched teeth.

“It were ‘im!” The other looter protested, indicating the dead man.

“Get these two pricks out of here before I do something they regret.” Mann snarled at the other Redcaps, before storming back to his wagon.

“You heard the Staff, get them moving.” McDonagh ordered. “And don’t forget to bring the evidence.”

One of the MPGS soldiers searched through the plastic carriers. Rather surprisingly one of them was filled with food rather than valuables.

“There’s a packet of crisps in here.” He said to his ‘oppo’, holding up the bag.

“What flavour?”

“Prawn cocktail.”

“They would be, I hate prawn cocktail.

“We’d better get a shift on before Mr Nasty notices we’re dawdling.”

“Did you get their names?” Mann asked McDonagh a few minutes later. “The stiffs, I mean?”

The sergeant reached into the pocket of her DPM jacket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.

“I found a gas bill by the door, it seems that they were a Mr and Mrs Beckett.”

“Well hopefully that should help us to locate next of kin; as for the bodies, we’ll just have to let command deal with that.”

Sixth ring of Hell.  Corporal Louis Hoffman paused as he spotted some movement ahead, dropping to the ground and signalling the rest of the patrol to halt and take cover. In this part of Hell is was probably a baldrick patrol and while the patrol from Air Troop, G Squadron, 22 SAS, had enough strength and firepower to deal with any isolated group of baldricks they did not want to draw attention to themselves, at least not yet anyway.  Hoffman carefully swung his L1A2 battle rifle from left to right, scanning the ground ahead. Neither his eyes, nor the Combined Weapon Sight fitted to the rifle revealed anything.

“What is it, Louie?” The voice of Captain Patrick Fleming, the patrol commander, said in his headset.

“Thought I saw some movement ahead, Boss.” Hoffman replied. “I’m not sure now.”

“Seeing things now are we, Louie?” The voice of Staff Sergeant Henry ‘Don’t call me Henno’ Garvie remarked. “Better safe than sorry, though.

“Dave, go forward and support Louis. See if you can spot what’s up there.”

Now that the forces of Satan were on the back-foot, Hell was crawling with human Special Forces, and Britain was one of the major providers. Patrols from both the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service were roaming the areas of Hell assigned to the UK, gathering intelligence and rescuing inmates where ever possible. The Special Reconnaissance Regiment had established a number of Observation Posts from where they could watch the comings and goings of Hell’s military forces, and direct attacks when necessary, while the Paras, Marines and RAF Regiment Gunners of the UK Special Forces Support Group were on stand-by to support any patrol that got into difficulty, or add extra muscle to any attack.

The various UK Special Forces patrols had already managed to rescue quite a few former military personnel, who had been marked down as a priority for recovery. These deceased personnel had then been transferred via portal to a safe area near the Hellmouth for rehabilitation. Encouragingly many, mainly amongst the more recently arrived, had volunteered their services.

The Staff & Personnel Support Branch of the Adjutant General's Corps now had the headache of working out the back-pay and allowances of these deceased soldiers. There had also been suggestions that it might be possible to use some of these troops as battle casualty replacements for units deployed in Hell, or to form new units. That didn’t solve the legal problems of course, after all, how does one pay the dead for their services and what were the limits on service terms? Technically, those who were being found in Hell hadn’t yet fulfilled the terms of their enlistments and that raised even more legal questions. It was reputed that several members of the Pay Corps and Legal branch had already gone mad trying to think out the implications.

Corporal David ‘Dave’ Woolston carefully made his way forward. He was a large, powerfully built man of Afro-Caribbean extraction, and thus was one of the two members of the patrol carrying a GPMG, in this case the new L7A3 variant, which was chambered for the same 8.58mm round as the L1A2.

“Spread out, but be careful, we don’t know what we are dealing with.” Captain Fleming ordered.

“Wait, I see something.” The patrol’s sniper, Corporal Finn Younger reported.

Corporal Younger normally carried an L115A1 Long Range Rifle, though for the deployment to Hell he had decided to draw an AW50F from the armory at Credenhill. It gave him an extra reach and the 12.7x99 Raufoss Mk.211 rounds it fired were extremely powerful.

Younger lined his weapon up on the target, preparing to fire if necessary. However to his surprise the figure in the sight resolved itself into a human shape rather than a baldrick. Even more surprisingly the figure seemed to be moving tactically rather than in the way a civilian might cross a piece of terrain.

“I think we have possible friendly forces ahead, Boss.” Younger reported.

“Right everybody, carefully stand-up, its time to reveal ourselves.” Fleming ordered. “Staff, Fin, Dave, Pete, you stay down for now to give us covering fire.”

The rest of the patrol slowly got to their feet to discover that they were being observed by two figures that were definitely human.

“Who are you?” Captain Fleming called out.

“Sergeant Tony Stevens, 2nd Royal Irish Rangers! Who are you?”

“Captain Patrick Fleming, Special…I mean 1st Scots Guards.”

“You’re one of THEM, eh, Sir.” The filthy bedraggled figure replied. “Don’t worry I have heard of you, I died back in 1978, an IRA sniper.

“This is Corporal James Beveridge of the Royal Engineers.”

The other figure nodded.

“If you want any tunnelling done, I’m your man.” The engineer said. “Still that’s what did for me in the end, bloody Bosche heard us coming and blew up ma tunnel.”

“How many of there are you?” Fleming asked.

“About twenty in this group, Sir.” Sergeant Stevens asked. “I think you’d better come and meet our Senior Officer.”

Sergeant Stevens led Captain Fleming and Staff Sergeant Garvie into a poorly lit cave. They could see that someone was sitting at the far end hunched over what looked like a table, though it was probably a large stone. Stevens saluted smartly and introduced the new comers.

“Sir, this is Captain Fleming and Staff Sergeant Garvie of 22 SAS.”

“Which squadron?” The Senior Officer asked.

“G Squadron, Sir, Air Troop.” Fleming replied, saying ‘sir’ because the voice sounded like someone senior in rank to him.

The figure, a veritable giant of a man at just less than two meters in height, stood up and stepped forward into the light, Fleming and Garvie recognised him at one. After all they had seen his photograph often enough.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain Fleming, Staff Sergeant Garvie.” Colonel Sir Archibald David Stirling, formerly of the Scots Guards, 8 Commando and Special Air Service, said stretching out his right hand. “I take it you have orders to extract groups like mine?”

Fleming and Garvie had never shaken hand with a corpse, or was he a soul, and it was a rather strange experience, yet Stirling seemed as alive as they did.

“Yes, Sir I have. Our orders are to gather intelligence and evacuate as many military personnel as possible.

“Can I ask how many of there are you?”

“Twenty three, some British, there are a few Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Indians, South Africans and what not. We’ve got a Zulu here who died at Rorke’s Drift and his stories are going to change the history books. I think I can speak for everyone but we are pretty keen to do what we can to liberate this place, just give us the tools. I for one have been waiting for eighteen years to give something back to the demons.”

“We’ll get evacuation laid on as soon as we can, Sir.” Fleming said. “Do you know of any other groups near-by?”

“There are small groups scattered all over now. Mostly, we’ve been keeping our heads down and trying not to get found but the war’s changed all that. You know there’s a liberated area up in the Fifth Circle?”

“Free Hell Sir. Run by the People’s Front For The Liberation of Hell. That’s mostly a Yank operation but we’re all involved in getting people out.”

“Well, Yanks or not, you better get word to them, they’re in trouble. Our OPs have spotted a big force of demons converging on the river bank opposite the area they’re holding. About 30,000 foot sloggers and 1,300 fliers. No cavalry that we can see.”

Fleming and Garvie exchanged glances. Even with the influx of deceased volunteers and the support of special forces units from Earth, a force over 30,000 baldricks was too much even for modern weaponry to cope with. If that attack got launched, it was going to overrun Free Hell. “Thank you Sir. We’ll get word straight through and see what can be done.”

DIMO(N) Transit Facility, Fort Bragg

“Colonel Aidan Dempsey, Sir, a pleasure to meet you.” The current commander of 22 SAS said once Stirling, who was the last man through, stepped into the transit facility.

“Likewise, Colonel.” Dempsey’s predecessor replied. “I can’t say I feel too clever though.”

“I’m afraid you can’t stay here too long, Sir. We haven’t solved the problem of bring people back from Hell to Earth yet, but we’ll transfer you and your men to an area of Hell we control. I understand you wish to offer us your services?”

“Of course, Colonel. Both myself and my men have been waiting for revenge for a long time, and I think we can help you locate more groups like us. Just give us the appropriate equipment and training and we’ll do the job.”

“It will be a pleasure to have you in this fight, Sir. If you’ll just follow me I’ll take you to Camp Brimstone.”

Chapter Sixty Three

Third Platoon, Second Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Regiment, 247th Motor Rifle Division, Phlegethon River Front, Hell

The BMP-2 was shut down, its hatches sealed and firmly dogged in place, overpressure system on to prevent harpy gas and flame leaking in from outside. Bullets were rattling off the armor plate as the three MICVs machine-gunned each other in an attempt to drive off the hordes of harpies that were swarming all over the vehicles, tearing at anything breakable. Last time Lieutenant Anatolii Ivanovich Pas'kov had looked through the turret optics, a dozen or more of the beasts were trying to bend the barrel of his 30mm cannon, he didn’t think they had succeeded but he was reluctant to fire the gun anyway. He hunched down, trying to ignore the acrid fumes from the gunfire that was creating havoc with the harpies outside. Only, some of the acrid stench wasn’t cordite residue, it was the smell of the harpies’ acidic blood attacking bare metal. Certainly the chemical weapons-resistant paint on the BMP was protecting most of the hull from corrosion but there were still parts that were vulnerable to acid.

His little command had done well at first. The Tungaska had fired its eight laser-guided missiles and turned more that a dozen harpies into spiraling explosions, then its 30mm cannon had started chopping more out of the sky. The BMPs had joined in, their turret cannon selecting the closest harpies and shooting them out of the sky. But there had been so many of them, more than 200,000 so the intelligence reports said, and the hundred or so that the 30mm guns had killed were hardly noticeable. The rest had descended on the vehicles and started their assault. Oh, Pas’kov knew that their claws and teeth would not get through the armor but the harpies had other weapons as well. They breathed fire and there was much on an armored vehicle that could burn. The Tungaska had already gone, its engine compartment had caught fire and its crew had been forced to abandon their vehicle into the flock of harpies. They’d tried to run for the BMPs but they were brought down, torn apart and eaten before they’d made more than a pace or two. Pas’kov had been glad of that in a way, he wouldn’t have opened his hatches to let them in anyway.

“Ammunition is running out.” The cry was from one of the two riflemen in the fighting compartment of the vehicle. They were hosing fire out of the fighting ports in the rear compartment, the steel floor covered with their expended cartridge cases. The BMP was carrying more that its allowed load of munitions but the rate of expenditure was such that even its enhanced stocks were getting short. Pas’kov swung the turret, feeling the power traverse fighting the harpies swarming outside, and let off a burst from his co-axial machine gun. The harpies trying to bend his 30mm cannon barrel were caught unawares and the heavy machine gun burst tore into them, spraying acid blood into the air and causing their flesh to char. The cordite smoke-laden air inside the BMP got more dense if that was possible, the heat rising further.

“Get us out of here, we must pull back.”

“We cannot, the transmission is jammed.” The driver’s words didn’t really make sense but Pas’kov guessed what had really happened, the suspension was being attacked by acid and the treads were jammed.

Instead, he got the radio, with just a little luck, it might be working. The whip antenna had long gone, torn off by the harpies, but the little blade antenna might still be intact.

“Company, this is Three. We’re running out of ammunition and are trapped. Our AA vehicle is gone. We need final protective fire now. Right on top of us.”

Pas’kov knew his company commander realized the same thing that Pas’kov himself had done. Calling fire directly on his position was suicide, the guns would tear the armored vehicles apart. But it was better to go that way than be shredded and eaten by the harpies screaming outside.

“Request approved. Being passed up. Hold on Three. Seal down tight. Full protocol.”

Guards Special Mortar Regiment, Northern Front, Phlegethon River.

The great 300mm rockets loaded into the Smerch multiple-launch rocket system were black, with glaring yellow bands painted around their nose. No other rocket had quite such vivid or elaborate markings and for a very good reason, nobody wanted these rockets to be confused with anything else. Even the Smerch crews were afraid of them and their cargo. They’d taken them out of their storage boxes with painstaking care, only too aware that one accident, one slip meant a ghastly death for all around them. Guards Captain Yurii Leonidovich Zabelin had personally supervised the loading process himself and inspected all the firing connections and status checks before reporting his battery ready to fire. Then, he had been told to wait for the current barrage was the work of the heavy guns. The Smerch launchers with their deadly black rockets would have their time, when the right moment came.

The radio in the command vehicle suddenly jumped to life. The right moment had come.

B-52H “Emma Peel” 28,000 feet over the Phlegethon River.

“That makes life a bit better.” The red-and-gray camouflaged B-52s had burst out of the murk at 28,000 feet and Colonel Haymen had pulled back on the lever that operated the engine filters. They’d rotated though 90 degrees, so they were now parallel to the air flow through the engines and the pick-up in power was immediate. The Gray Lady was back to performing the way she should and the old adage held true again. Never underestimate the Gray Lady.

“Hammer Control, this is Storm flight, we’ve broken out of the clag at 28,000 feet. Air is clean up here. Light still red, but visibility good. Tell the Bones to get up here if they want a long, fast cruise.”

“We’ll do that Hammer Flight. Be advised, a pair of B-29s did test drops for you. Computed ballistic corrections hold true, no need to correct programming for bomb drops.”

“Thanks Control. And thank the guys in the Superforts for us too.” Haymen sighed slightly in relief. That was one of the problems of fighting in non-Euclidean hell, there had been no guarantee that the bombs stuffed into Emma’s belly and hanging under her wings would drop true. The only way that anybody could find out was to try and that was what the B-29s had been doing. Drop bombs, compare impact points with those projected and calculate corrections. It had been a long, arduous job, constantly dropping and recalculating, it was lucky the old Superforts had been available to do it. Otherwise more valuable aircraft would have had to be taken out of the line.

“Take everybody up to 32,000. We can expect the drop order soon.”

“Hey, wait for me.” The plaintive voice came from Major Hennessy at the back of the formation. His “Vengeance Is Mine” was the only B-52D in the group of 72 B-52s that were lining up ready for their strike. A museum recovery, it just didn’t have the engine power of the Gs and Hs.”

“Come, on, hurry up old-timer. We haven’t got all day.”

“Hurry up? Hurry up!! I’ll have you know that at least our wings are level back here.”

Haymen snorted. The B-52s had all been through a very hurried “Big Belly” modification that had seen provision for 750 pound bombs increased from 51 to 80. The problem was that the G and H models had a lighter wing structure than earlier marks and now those wings were bent in a graceful curve from tip to root. Only the solitary D-model had wings that were still uncurved. It still carried more bombs as well, 88 instead of 80.

“OK, OK. All Storm birds. The Superforts have confirmed the corrections, we can use the programmed bomb drop. Waiting for word now.”

Command HQ, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

“How goes the day Tovarish General?” General David Petraeus stood in front of his view screen, looking at the Russian commander at the other end

General Ivan Semenovich Dorokhov was a harassed-looking man, already tired from the volume of fighting that was going on. “It is a bloody day Bratishka. We are holding them in the North at great cost but the force in the south has bitten deep into the defenses. The North too will start to collapse soon, we are already getting requests from the front line to bring down fire on our own positions. The harpies in the north are pinning our men down, our artillery is hammering the follow-on forces but soon they will have crossed the river and then our positions will fall fast. Still, we have some tricks to play yet and your bombers are ready I think.”

“On your word Tovarish General, just give us the word. Good news, the air is clear up where they are, they can hold up there for longer than we thought. And in the South?”

“Bad. The enemy there are half way through our defense zone. They are paying a terrible price but they have naga carried by Rhinolobsters that are very effective and the Wyverns have done us some harm. But our artillery hit the nagas with white phosphorus and the Wyverns are no match for fighters. The advance there will run out of power soon. But we might need to counter-attack them before they can break through. It will be a finely-judged thing, whether their advance runs out of energy before we stop them.”

“The German and Israeli armored divisions are well placed for that. Order them to make the attack.” Petraeus hesitated for a brief second. “Make sure the Israeli unit has plenty of space around it.”

Dorokhov frowned. “You expect treachery? Surely not.”

“Not treachery, stupidity. The Israelis are too trigger-happy for their own good. They will not shoot up one of our own units deliberately but they are all too likely to do so by accident. We know that to our cost. It would be best to give them an end-run so they are well clear of the rest of your forces. Get them over the Phlegethon so the rest of us are safe.”

The Russian General laughed. “Good advice Tovarish David. You heard the enemy used burning brimstone on our troops? Well, know we will show them what we can do when we wish.”

“Weapons Are Free General. And give us the word when you want the Gray Lady to come calling.”

Over the Northern Front, Phlegethon River

It had many names. Some called it 2-(Fluoro-methylphosphoryl)oxypropane, others preferred O-isopropyl methylphosphonofluoridate. The military eschewed such long-winded nomenclatures and just called it GB. The world at large knew it as Sarin.

The great black rockets with their gaudy yellow markings had been launched all down the line. This is what they had been waiting for, when their ability to saturate an area with fire could be turned to best advantage. As the rockets had started to descend, the outer casing had been discarded and the ranks of sub-munitions had been exposed. Further down, those sub-munitions had started to be launched and they had formed a spreading pattern that resembled a great shotgun blast. It was the same mechanism that the Americans had used to bring down the hideous steel rain that had destroyed Abigor’s Army. Only this time, when the sub-munitions detonated they didn’t bring down a curtain of steel fragments or blast from shaped-charge munitions. First they started to spin and the action mixed the charges of methylphosphonyl difluoride and a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and isopropyl amine. They reacted to form the Sarin and then the sub-munitions burst to release a fine gentle rain, one that none of the screaming hordes of harpies below even noticed for the liquid was colorless and odorless. The only thing that Beelzebub and his Army did notice was that the human mage-fire that was pounding the bank of the Phlegethon furthest from the Russian positions had ceased.

Every so often, in a battle, for no apparent reason, the noise stops. The gunfire, the roar of the artillery, the growls, whines and snarls of engines, the demented shriek of depleted uranium bolts hitting steel armor, the crackling grumble of fires, the screams of dying men stop and there is an eerie silence. So it was as the Sarin descended on the positions under harpy attack. The Russian guns stopped firing so that the passage of their shells through the air would not disturb the blanket of chemical warfare agent that had been so carefully calculated. Beneath, the Russian motor rifle units were sealing down, hoping that the overpressure systems on their vehicles had survived the harpies and that their chemical warfare suits were proof against the gas. In case it wasn’t they had their atropine injectors ready but the truth was that even if they used them the gas would wreck their bodies. With atropine they would survive but they would never again be the men they had been once.

Uxaligantivaris concentrated on the Iron Chariot that was under her claws. She and her companions were ripping at it with their claws and breathing fire over it as fast as their bodies could recharge their gas sacks. They had used so much of the fire-gas that they had lost the ability to fly but it didn’t matter that much. All that mattered was to keep the Iron Chariots under attack so that the foot soldiers following them could destroy the defenses. Then she shook her head slightly, Hell was a dim place, its light levels low and subdued but suddenly she could see everything was becoming bright and clear to her. So bright that the light was hurting her eyes in a way that she had never experienced before. She looked at another harpy that had stopped ripping at the iron projections on the chariot and saw that her flight-mate’s eyes were strange, the slitted black pupil had contracted to a fine line, almost invisible in the yellow of her eyes. Her nose was running, mucus streaming out of it and coating her chest. Uxaligantivaris touched her own nose and realized that she too was streaming fluids from her nose and that there was a strange tightness in her chest, as if she was having problems breathing. In fact, she realized, that was exactly it, she was having problems getting her ribs to suck air into her lungs. The effort was making her feel sick and she could feel herself drooling uncontrollably. She couldn’t help herself, she vomited helplessly and felt her body loosing strength. Across from her, the other harpies were collapsing as well, vomiting on to the Iron chariot that was now forgotten as the agony took hold of them. Her flight-mates were defecating and urinating like helpless kidling, their bodies twitching and jerking as they tried to escape the unseen thing that was inflicting this terrible end on them. Uxaligantivaris felt her muscles become paralyzed and she slipped down the side of the Iron chariot to lie on the ground spasming and writhing as the Sarin destroyed her nervous system. Eventually, what seemed like an age later, she found herself slipping into unconsciousness and never felt the series of massive convulsions that fractured her bones and tore her muscles while she died of suffocation.

Command Post, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

Beelzebub looked at the horrific scene with utter bewilderment. When the human mage-bolts had stopped hammering his forces, he had thought the battle was reaching its turning point, that the human mages had run out of their magic and that now the humans would have to fight on even terms. He’s even welcomed the eerie silence that had descended on the battlefield. He wouldn’t make that mistake again, nor would he ever forget what he was seeing. The silence was part of a human magery that went beyond anything he could even imagine, more than he had ever experienced. Not even Uriel could do what the humans had done to his harpies for in the few seconds that the silence held, his great flock, still far more than 100,000 strong started to die. Not just die, but die in horrible, unspeakable ways, twitching and convulsing in a pool of their own body wastes. Where a few second earlier the human Iron Chariots had been swamped in a sea of harpies that were slowly reducing them to burning hulks, now they stood clear, surrounded by the dying remnants of Beelzebub’s prized force of Harpies.

That was when the silence broke for the iron chariots opened fire again, the mage-bolts pouring from the long staffs they carried, sending the orange-red fireflies lashing at Beelzebub’s foot soldiers on the other bank. They’d taken the quiet, the sudden end of the mage-bolts to try and rush the river. The forces at the back had pushed hard as they surged forward but those at the front had seen what was happening to the harpies, the terrible death that was engulfing them and they were reluctant to move. No warriors were braver or more contemptuous of death that the foot soldiers of Hell yet this magery that inflicted a silent convulsing death on its victims was hideous in a way nothing they had previously experienced could be. They hesitated and the combination of their immobility and the advance of those behind was squeezing the foot soldiers of Beelzebub’s army into a dense mass alongside the river.

The crackle of fire from the Iron Chariots was suddenly drowned out by the roar of human mage-bolts slamming into his force. For a moment, Beelzebub thought that the mage barrage had started again but he was wrong. For off to his left, a line of eighteen great explosions had torn into one flank of his Army. They were mage-bolts all right but their size was greater by far than any he had seen to date. Even as he watched the first bolts swelling and bursting, another salvo landed just in front of them, and then another line just beyond them. Then, Beelzebub saw something that had never been seen in hell before, ahead of the great mage-bolt blasts, a shimmering wall was starting to form, a faint whitish-blue cloud that strengthened with every salvo of bolts that landed and started to race across the crowded mass of his foot soldiers. The great orange and black balls of fire and smoke marched along behind the blue cloud. When both wall and bolts had passed, there was nothing left but bare ground and chewed soil.

It wasn’t magical of course, it was just a matter of physics and the great bomb bays of the Gray Lady. The first of the 750 pound bombs that had poured from them had hit the ground more or less where they had been aimed, hell’s atmosphere was dust-gorged and murky but it also lacked the strong winds that distinguished Earth. For the Gray Lady, this was an easy assignment. The bombs had exploded and created a blast wave that had spread out in a hemispherical pattern from the impact point. Sideways, each blast wave had merged with the other 17 in that particular line to form a long cylinder, fronted by the shockwave and centered by a whirlwind of fire and steel fragments. Normally, with a few bombs, the blast wave would spread and dissipate but this was the Gray Lady and her wrath was terrible. The next salvo of 750 pound bombs, released by the intervalometers in the B-52s at a carefully chosen interval, hit the ground just behind that advancing shockwave, adding its own fury to the wave that was racing across the ground. The third salvo did the same, each series of blasts adding its own power to the shockwave that built up in power with every series of bombs that pounded Beelzebub’s helpless foot soldiers. The shock wave wasn’t just the power of one bomb, it was the power of all of them added together, a cumulative effect that turned blast into a solid, irresistible and strangely beautiful wall that nothing human or demon could withstand. By the tenth bomb, the blast wave was invincible and there were seventy more to come before the second wave of B-52s took over and added their loads to the holocaust that was consuming Beelzebub’s army.

High overhead, so high where she couldn’t be seen or heard from the ground, the Gray Lady wrought death and destruction on the forces gathered below, an apocalyptic catastrophe that hell and its inhabitants had never even conceived. Watching from his hilltop as his army was consumed, Beelzebub at last understood what humans could do when they decided to stop playing with their enemies.

Chapter Sixty Four

Free Hell, Swamps by the River Styx, Fifth Ring of Hell

Human laughter was not a common commodity in hell. Demonic laughter was, but human mirth was rare in the extreme. So, the sound of three humans laughing uproariously struck Lieutenant (deceased) Jade Kim as worth investigating. Even as she made that decision, it struck her that she too had not laughed for a very long time.

“Whoever these people are, they certainly got you right eh Titus?” Caesar was wiping his eyes clear of the tears that helpless laughter had caused. The three men were gathered around a small portable DVD player, one whose eight-inch screen was showing the end credits from an episode of the HBO series ‘Rome”.

“Yeah, but Atia? She was to busy praying and trying to be sanctimonious to get up to any of that stuff. Now, if they’d said she was Fulvia….”

“Enjoying the show gentlemen?” Kim’s voice cut through the end music.

“Very much thank you. I was quite flattered by my depiction.” Caesar leaned back and started to sort through the disks for the next episode.

“I wasn’t. Bit harsh I thought.” Pullo’s expression belied his words, Kim got the impression he also was impressed by the television show. “And it got my army life really wrong.”

“That’s true Titus, you didn’t need to get drunk to do some really stupid things. You nearly got us both killed over and over again without the aid of bad wine.” Lucius Vorenus wasn’t laughing, his voice was quiet and melancholy.

“Yeah, but if we hadn’t kept going, the gods wouldn’t have taken a fancy to us and we wouldn’t have gained their protection here would we.” Pullo’s chin jutted out, then his voice softened. “They got Niobe right didn’t they.”

Vorenus nodded. “She didn’t have to do it. If I hadn’t lost my temper, she’d would have lived.”

“And so would I, Lucius.” Caesar’s voice was shot with mock severity. “Getting killed wasn’t in my plans for the day you know.”

“She’s down here somewhere Lucius.” Kim tried to sound comforting. “She would have ended up here anyway as far as I can tell. We’ll find her and then you two can make your peace. If you want to.”

That was a good point and everybody around knew it. Sooner or later it was going to have to be addressed, what would happen when couples who had been married were reunited. Would they want to be? Kim quickly considered the problems Henry VIII was likely to face and shuddered. Then she was aware of Caesar sitting close to her in an uncomfortably familiar way. That fitted what she knew of him from the histories, ‘every woman’s husband and every husband’s wife’ had been one of the ancient barbs thrown in his general direction.

“What happened to Servilia? Did she really die like that?”

“Nah, she outlived the lot of them.” Kim paused. “Gaius, you know what happens to women when they arrive down here?” Caesar nodded, guessing where this was going. “Well, I got all torn up inside.”

“We all heal fast down here Jade. We’re not the same bodies we had on Earth, look the same but we’re not. Your wounds have healed.”

“Not the ones up here.” She tapped her head. “I still feel all torn up. So, Gaius, no. Thank you, but, just, no.” Then she smiled quickly. “But I do have one thing to ask of you, personal favor?”

“Anything for the beautiful woman who has brought hope to hell.”

“I got my copies of ‘The Gallic War’ and ‘The Civil War’ brought through when I heard you were coming. Could you sign them for me?”

Caesar chuckled. “Of course. I….” Then he was interrupted by McInery entering the cave, very fast.

“Ell-tee, got a radio message came in, top urgency.” He handed over a slip with the message printed on it. Kim read it and went white.

“Gaius, we got a problem. One of the Spec Ops teams down in the Sixth Circle has sent in a sighting report. There’s a major force of Baldricks, some 30,000 strong with about 1,500 harpies, moving along the Sixth Circle boundary towards us. They’re the other side of the wall at the moment but they can pass through the gates any point they want to. They’ll be here in two days, perhaps three.”

The amiable smile fell from Caesar’s face and suddenly he was the military commander known to history. “They’re coming here?”

“Pretty sure of it, nowhere else they could be going with a force like that. If they link up with the forces we have on either side of us, we got real problems.”

“Why would they want to do that? You’ve already stalled the demons there. They’ll hit the river flank. How many men do you have?”

“I’ve got about a hundred soldiers trained to handle modern weapons. That’s it.”

Caesar smiled at the emphasis on ‘soldiers’ rather than ‘men’ but let it pass. “So you can’t fortify the river boundary properly. I can get some people here, a thousand or more in a day or so and five thousand in two or three, but they won’t help much.”

“They won’t help at all, we haven’t a chance to train them to use rifles and we haven’t got the equipment for them even if we could. Humans don’t stand much of a chance against baldricks without them. Still, the river’s still on our side.”

The comment made Caesar’s mouth twist in despair. He kept forgetting that this woman was a Lieutenant only, she was a junior officer and had the training to match. In other words, not very much. “Jade, in Gaul I threw a bridge over the Rhine in a couple of days. The Rhine is bigger and faster flowing that the Styx. This river barrier you’re putting so much hope on counts for very little in the scheme of things. You need all your ….. soldiers …. to hold the two end flanks. You can’t defend that river as well. If the enemy has 30,000 troops coming in, you’re done. Time to get out of here.”

“Can’t do it. We’ve got civilians here now, we have to get them out, and the dead we’ve rescued, we can’t hand them over”

“Ell-tee, the British want a word with you, they ran the special ops team that got this warning to us. They say they have some suggestions.”

British Expeditionary Force HQ, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

“Are you sure this is a good idea Sir?”

“Can you think of a better one?”

“Honestly Sir, yes. We’ve got the lift, evacuate the place.”

“Not good enough. Look, Colonel, Free Hell and the PFLH is about the only successful insurgency we’ve got running in Hell. Oh, the other groups are operating there, but they’ve all got tied down rescuing the prisoners and so on. Very estimable and good work but it isn’t actually fighting Hell. Only the PFLH have done that and they’re entirely an American operation. So, while the Spams run around making decisions, we do something to help the people on the sharp end. That way we get to muscle in on their operation, even take it over if everything goes right. The PFLH is run by a Lieutenant, so we send in 2 Para and its got a Colonel, you, in charge. That makes you the ranking officer on scene and puts you in command. And, once we’re in we stay in – with you in command. We’re doing them a big favor inside, that Lieutenant has done well but she’s way out of her depth. They need military expertise in there if they are going to survive.

“We’ve got Chinooks and Merlins to lift your battalion in. You’ll have Typhoon and Tornados for escort, more Tornados and Jags to give air support one everything drops in the pot.”

“Very good Sir.”

“Move out as soon as you can. And remember, you are the ranking officer down there.”

B-1B “Dragon Slayer” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Approaching Dis

“Everything dialed in?” Major Curtis Trafford looked at his WSO and got a thumbs up by way of response. The four B-1Bs were in a loose, finger-four formation, cruising at 29,000 feet. The discovery that the air was clear up here had been a major advantage but it also meant that their target was lost in the rolling clouds of red dust underneath. The mapping radar was doing a good job of penetrating it though, the city of Dis was ahead of them and the long spur that stuck out into the great caldera of Hell showed up clearly. Their target was where that spur ended in a rounded promontory, for in the center of that feature was Satan’s palace.

Detroit was to be avenged and the United States Air Force did not take its revenge by striking at the inconsequential As many consumer advocates had put it, ‘if you want action, go right to the top’. There was another saying as well, ‘for delicate work, get a bigger hammer’. The hammer hanging under Dragon Slayer was the biggest conventional hammer the United States had at its disposal. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000 pound bomb capable of tearing its way through at least 130 feet of moderately hard rock. What it would so to the rock Dis was built on was an interesting question. The hope was that it would collapse the whole spur and drop Satan, complete with his palace, right into the center of Hell.

The MOPs had been modified for this mission, normally they were GPS guided but the global positioning system was useless in Hell. No satellites and it was not certain whether there was anywhere for a satellite to fly or even anything for them to orbit. Hell wasn’t Kansas. Instead, the bombs had been equipped with an inertial system that was supposed to prevent them wandering off a true trajectory. That left the aiming job in the hands of the B-1s radar.

“We’ve got a radar picture now. The spur’s showing up really clearly. Also showing was the red carat that marked the predicted impact point of the MOP. All four bombers were on slightly converging courses and the intention was that all four bombs should hit Satan’s palace at the same instant.

Beast Stables, City of Dis

“Take care of that wyvern. Feed him carefully, do not let him bloat. If he is made sick I will flay you alive and have you eat your own skin.”

The orc blanched slightly and took the reins of the Wyvern away from Belial. In the back of the orc’s stunted mind, a memory stirred of the time before these creatures had come. Perhaps it was a genetic memory, perhaps the effect of stories quietly whispered in the dark of night, but there were memories nonetheless. Of a time when the orcs had been free and this had been their home. Before the demons had come, before the great eruption that had poisoned everything. Now, there were more whispers in the darkness, more words on the wind. Words that said the millennia of slavery to the demons was ending, that the demons had taken on a force to powerful even for them to handle. Words that said the orcs might be free again. And these words were backed by the thunder that never stopped, the thunder that came from the Phlegethon River.

Belial also heard the thunder of the Russian Artillery but it hardly registered. He had other things on his mind, how to present what had happened to his best advantage. He had fulfilled his promise all right, he had identified the two great arsenals of the humans and destroyed them both. The problem was that half his naga were dead and the rest were crippled, stunned by the accident that had taken place during the Dee-Troyt attack. He knew what was the cause of that of course, the other lords had been told to send him their best covens of naga but what they had actually supplied was their youngest and least-experienced. Lying crippled in her sick-bed, Baroness Yalupki had told him of the trouble in getting the inexperienced naga to sing in chorus and how that had caused the portal to flare out of control. Thought of the crippled naga in her sick-bed made Belial think quickly of Euryale but he dismissed the matter. She was a gorgon, in the final analysis replaceable. If she did die of her wounds, she could be replaced with a new consort, one more fitting to be seen at Satan’s Court. In the back of his mind was an uneasy idea that it all wouldn’t be quite that easy.

He shook himself and walked on. The highway to Satan’s palace, gleaming red-gold as its bronze plating reflected the fires of the hell-pit below, lead along the promontory towards the domed island ahead. As always, Belial looked down at the tiers beneath, the nine great rings separated by high walls that defined Hell itself. Once he had been banished from the city to the wilds of the North and it had taken millennia to worm his way back in, and then only as something barely more than a court jester. Now he was entering as a potential great lord. One who would bask in the favor of Satan himself. Yes, the attacks on Sheffield and Dee-Troyt had gone very well indeed. All that he needed to do was to convince Satan of that.

Third Platoon, Second Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Regiment, 247th Motor Rifle Division, Phlegethon River Front, Hell

“Halt” The order was abrupt and there was a tremor of fear in it. The three BMPs approaching the decontamination facility had been right under the Sarin gas cloud that had scoured the harpies from the battlefield. They were doubtless soaked in nerve gas and there was no way anybody here was going to take chances. To either side of the vehicles, high-pressure hoses were already pumping out thick streams of alkaline slurry to coat the BMPs in their white paste. Then, a truck backed up, a jet engine on its back. The exhaust was played over the outside of the armored carriers, swiftly raising the temperatures to almost-intolerable levels. Almost, but not quite and the temperature was needed to hydrolyse the residue of nerve gas on the BMPs. Eventually, the jet engines and the sprays had done their work. Detector waved over the carriers remained silent and Pas’kov’s little command was ordered to one side.

Yet, the work wasn’t done. They opened the hatches on the BMPs and the crews scrambled out, only to be sprayed with alkaline slurry and brushed down with brooms. Once again, the detectors remained silent and, at last, Pas’kov and his men could remove their chemical warfare suits.

“Well done Bratischka.” A Captain was standing to one side, his own suit still on. “You have fought as heroes today. We will repair your vehicles and send you back soon but until then you can rest. We have vodka for you, and fresh food.” Behind them, a group of men were being lead away, gently but firmly. They looked healthy but they moved with the shaking, trembling slowness of very old men. The Captain looked at them sadly. “They were not so lucky. Their radio was down and they did not get the word about the gas. Harpies had breached the seals on their vehicles and they were contaminated, They used their antidotes but…..” He shook his head.

Pas’kov knew what he meant. The atropine and pralidoxime injector had saved their lives but now they were old men in their twenties and would never be anything more. The gas had slaughtered the harpies in a way no other weapon could but it had costs all of its own.

Assembly Area, Southern Flank, Phlegethon River Front  Major Evgenii Yakovlevich Galkin looked at the boxy vehicle next to his tank. One with red mottling applied over its dark gray paint, just as his was mottled with red over its moss-green. The tank looked huge beside his sleek, curved T-90 but there was more to that to fill Galkin with unease. The tank was German.

“Tovarish major” The voice calling from below was in atrocious Russian, the accent making the simple words almost unintelligible. Still, Galkin understood and dropped off the turret of his tank to where the German was waiting.

“Soon we will fight together. I just wanted to wish you good hunting.” The words were a lot better this time, Galkin guessed that the German had carefully rehearsed the phrase in an attempt to be friendly. Time to respond. Galkin’s German was better that the German’s Russian.

“May you have a good bag and a safe hunt.”

The German beamed in response, then caught the Russian looking at the Leopard. “Have you seen a Leopard II before?”

“Only at our tank museum in Kubinka. This is the first one I have seen on service.” The German officer’s eyebrows twitched, there wasn’t supposed to be a Leopard II at Kubinka. How had the Russians got hold of one? “Is this the first Russian tank you have seen?”

“For me yes. My father, he saw many of course.”

“In the Great Patriotic War?”

“He fought at Prokhorovka. With the Panzers, Heer, not SS.”

Galkin nodded. Odd coincidence. “My father also fought at Prokohorovka. And later.”

There was a long silence, neither man quite certain what to say next. Eventually Galkin spoke carefully. “Our fathers caused great destruction, between them, at Prokhorovka. Now we can join together and inflict the same those who threaten us both.”

The German nodded. “We can. As soon as our commanders let us off the leash.”

Chapter Sixty Five

Winder Street, Detroit, Michigan

“Go ahead and blow it Taguba.” Lieutenant Preston didn't need binoculars this time; the old factory was right in front of him. The weathered brick building appeared to have been a food processing plant, before being boarded up and abandoned. Now it would provide much-needed material for the bulldozers.

The demolition was on a smaller scale than the intersection they'd destroyed earlier, but at this range it was just as loud. The building didn't collapse completely, but it was good enough for the dozers to get to work without risk of being crushed. Right now this was a relatively safe area, the lava seemed to be flowing down towards the river and the inrushing wind made Detroit's wide highways function as acceptable fire breaks. That situation could change at any moment though, and securing a safe perimeter was vital. The improvised levees and wide areas of cleared rubble behind them were the only way to do that.

“Good job.” Actually it was pretty sloppy, Preston thought, but right now morale was a much higher priority than perfecting combat demolitions technique. “Move on to the next block.”

“Thank you sir, will do, Taguba out.” The Sergeant's voice was muffled by the filter mask but still clearly enthusiastic. Probably adrenaline. Preston hoped he didn't use it all up too quickly, this was going to be a very long shift.

“Sir, looks like those Guardians are back.” Private Russell was pointing to the south and sure enough a pair of boxy, angular shapes were emerging from the gloom. The first one didn't slow, heading straight past them towards the field hospital still being set up at the outer perimeter. The trailing armored car rolled to a halt; much of the paintwork was burned black, the hull bore dents and gouges and smoking debris still clung to parts of the body. The side hatch swung open to reveal a familiar face.

“Lieutenant, thought yah should know... the Lafayette's gone up completely now, we won't be pulling any more people out of there.” Preston nodded grimly. Neighborhoods full of trees were a death-trap in a fire this big. The man continued; “The fire's moving west along the bank, it looked to me like the FD are gonna try and hold it at Chene Street...”

He was interrupted by a sudden drawn-out roar, distinct over the omnipresent deep rumble and thuds of the lesser collapses.

“Hell, that was probably the Ren-Cen going. One of the towers at least. The lava must've hit the river by now.”

“Thank you...” Preston struggled to remember the man's name. “...Mr O'Reilly. We'll get down to Chene and see if we can help as soon as we're done here.”

“Right. We'd better drop this lot off and get back in there. Todd, let's go.” The hatch slammed shut and the M-1117 moved off.

Looking back to the destroyed plant, Lieutenant Preston was glad to see one of the dozers already plowing through the far corner, pushing rubble towards the slowly growing levee.

Belial’s Stronghold, Tartaruan Range, Northern Region of Hell

“It's a simple question, Baroness, was it sabotage or incompetence? When our Master returns in triumph from Satan’s court, he will want an answer.” The emphasis Euryale put on the naga's rank dripped contempt. The gorgon stared down at the prostrate Yulupki, her pose imperious despite the nasty burns and tears that marked her bronze flesh. As soon as Belial had left for Satan’s court, mounted on the fastest wyvern in the stables, Euryale had dropped the ‘critically injured’ pose and started to get her arrangements in order. “Of course it amounts to the same thing, since you personally assured the our Master that sabotage was impossible and any attempt would be suicide for the naga that tried it.”

Baroness Yulupki was a much less imposing sight, sprawled on an unkempt couch and still writhing with pain from the injuries she had received in the disastrous ritual. “That would have been true, if the witchesss the other nobles sent been worthy of the name!” she snapped back. “This group might as well have been hatchlingsss, it was obvious that they had never worked as a large chorusss before.” She glared at the memory of seeing yet another limp snakelike form being dragged over the crater rim by the winged silhouette of one of Euryale's handmaidens. The humiliation tasted bitter to the naga leader. “Of course if I'd had a reassonable amount of time to train them...”

“So, what are you going to tell Belial? That his plan was unrealistic? Or that you could not make a gang of hatchlings obey you?”

“I will tell him that this disassster was the result of your ssservant's incompetence!” Yulupki was screaming at this point. ”That a gorgon cannot be trussted with sseriousss witchcraft or expected to ssurvive the least bit of human resissstance!”

Euryale flashed a fanged smile back, but it was a humorless one. “You expect that to be believed, do you?”

She was fairly confident that she could prevail over Yulupki, but a fight over blame would leave both of them looking bad. The plan could be disrupted even more, and she didn't put it past Belial to throw a tantrum and dismiss both of them – and if it hadn't been for the apparently successful destruction of the human city, the consequences would've been much worse. Euryale stared down at Yulupki, waiting for her to falter. It didn't take long. The naga looked away and began to hiss softly; “Well, I mean, I will make it clear...”

Euryale cut her off. “It was obviously sabotage. You detected the culprits, but the unexpected incompetence of the foreign naga masked their actions until too late. They were in the delegation from...” The gorgon's voice trailed off expectantly.

Yulupki looked startled. “I can't be ssure, most likely thosse of Bezeelbub, but it could have been the ssenior ones from those Asmodeusss ssent or even...”

“...the delegation from Asmodeus.” Euryale continued smoothly. ”I hope at least one survived as you know how the Count enjoys dispensing appropriate punishment.”

Euryale sighed. From the look on her face Yulupki obviously still didn't get it. “Getting Belial angry at Bezeelbub will only cause unnecessary problems. Asmodeus on the other hand, firstly he is dead... oh, you didn't know? Of course not, silly me, your commendable dedication has left you a little out of the loop.” At this point Euryale was simply toying with her rival. “Yes, Asmodeus is dead, and his outer holdings lie ripe for Belial's taking. I think a little extra incentive should get things moving nicely. Understand?”

Yulupki couldn't bring herself to reply, but nodded silently.

“We understand each other then. Excellent.” It would be a long time before that one dared challenge her again, Euryale thought smugly.

Detroit River, Michigan

The Stormont ploughed through the fast-flowing water, its engines straining hard to push the massive flat barge in front of it. Its usual cargo of trucks had been replaced with as many humans as would fit onto the deck; the ferry had become one of the few escape routes for residents trapped in the inferno that had been downtown Detroit.

In the wheelhouse Captain Marcie Mahaffey drummed her fingers on the throttle levers, trying to will the ship to go faster. As a girl she’d always wanted to be a trucker, much to the derision of her male relatives. In retrospect, her ambitions had a lot to do with the fact that truckers spent most of their time in places more interesting than her hometown. Somehow, though, she’d ended up on the great lakes freighters, where it had taken near ten years of hard work before she got her master’s license. At last she had a ship to call her own, even if it was just a tugboat. Now fate had come calling and it was up to the Stormont and her crew to save hundreds of lives.

Marcie’s eyes straining to pick out the far bank from the grey-orange glow. By now the entire downtown grid was an inferno and she wasn’t sure there would be any survivors left to pick up on this trip. On each landing it had been agonizing pulling away the last time, but once people started to be forced off the sides of the barge into the water she’d had no choice. Some people had been so desperate they’d thrown themselves into the river and swam for it. Their chances weren’t good; the Detroit river was notoriously treacherous under normal conditions, and with the thick smoke and drifting ash drowning was even more likely. She’d ordered the crew to tie lines strung with floats off the barge, and that seemed to have saved a few strong enough to hang on until they reached the back.

They were close enough to see the buildings now, backed by a bright glow – Marcie gulped as she realized that the lava was nearly at the bank Correction; was already spilling into the river. As she registered that fact a shuddering roar rattled the windows; something was falling, something very big. One of the Renaissance Center’s five towers had come down, briefly dimming the glow from the lava in a fresh cloud of smoke and dust.

Captain Mahaffey pulled the wheel over, steering the barge away from the deadly glow, and grabbed the PA microphone. “Now y’all hear, this is gonna be touch-and-go, the others ‘ll be down in a sec, the whole bank ‘ll be gone not soon after, and we ain’t hanging around for that.” Ahead she could see one fireboat still spraying the shore around the tunnel entrance, but no other ferries. There were even more bodies in the water that before, but there was nothing to be done about that. Marcie reversed the port engine, then a few seconds later the starboard one, trying to soften the barge’s impact on the quay. The thud as it struck the bank in front of Hart Plaza was still enough to throw her against the wheel.

The smoke was so thick it was difficult to see what was going on, but there seemed to be shapes moving on the flat deck of the barge. The roar came again, louder this time and longer; Marcie looked right to see the dim hulking shape of the Renaissance Center’s remaining towers collapse into a giant ball of smoke and flame. Cracks and clunks sounded as debris hit the tug; one window shattered violently and then the deck heaved as the wave from the displaced water spread from the impact point. Marcie had ducked for cover when the window shattered; she could barely hear the screams from out front confirming that the barge had also taken impacts. She looked up to see the that the fireboat just upstream had been hit much worse. In fact it looked like it had taken a beating; its superstructure was smashed in several places and its pumps had stopped spraying. As she watched it lost headway and began to drift downstream – directly towards the barge.

Captain Mahaffey shoved the throttles to full reverse, the Stormont’s twin diesels now straining to pull the barge out of the collision zone. With painful slowness the tug-barge combination began to back off. She keyed the PA mike again, and this time it was to holler that one stereotyped line every captain hoped they’d never have to say. “All hands, brace for impact!”

There just wasn’t enough time to clear the fireboat, and sure enough the stern of the other ship slammed into the far end of the barge, forcing it away from the bank and spinning it almost ninety degrees. The tugboat was designed to push not pull, and the strain was too much for the coupling. The now-untethered cable whipped back to slap against the hull, the Stormont surged backwards and the hapless barge floated free.

Marcie struggled back to her feet, fighting mild concussion resulting from the sudden encounter with the deck. Already painfully hot, the turgid air was becoming increasingly difficult to breath, due to the vast amounts of steam being produced by the lava entering the water. Escaping downstream looked like a good idea at this point, but left to its own devices that barge would likely ground again on the now-burning banks. So she thrust the throttles forward once more, hoping the machinery (not to mention her crew) hadn’t been shock damaged. The tug was built tough and didn’t disappoint her, surging forwards again to catch up with the errant barge. As she feared, it was bumping along the western bank and in danger of snagging on one of the piers. But before her own boat could reach it, the fireboat emerged from the smoke and pushed its prow against the barge’s stern. The two vessels pulled away from the bank; once they had reasonable clearance Mahaffey skillfully maneuvered the Stormont into place next to the fireboat. The lettering on its hull read ‘Anthony J. Celebreeze – Cleveland Fire Department’ - Marcie was surprised it had been able to get up to Detroit so quickly.

With the two boats pushing together the barge was soon downstream of the Ambassador bridge and clear of the steam and smoke. Marcie could now see the people on the deck clearly; most still slumped motionless, but a few moving around, trying to help the wounded. She let out a long, relieved whistle – these people were alive, and clear, thanks to her and the Stormont. Many more hadn’t made it though – and the current definitely seemed to be getting stronger, which meant the channel was becoming blocked. On the plus side, she thought blackly, a little flooding would make controlling the fires easier.

Lady Wood, near Grimethorpe, United Kingdom

“Sir, the dog team has found a body. Could be one of our officers.”

Inspector Heaton looked up from his clipboard, which held a map of local area annotated in felt-tip pen. Laptop computers had their uses but he preferred good old hard copy where possible.

“Already? Where are they?”

“About a quarter mile due north.”

The forensics team were still examining the rear of the abandoned van. “Mitchell, got a body for you, are you done there?”

“Pretty much Inspector. The blood is definitely Baldrick, no surprises there. Still no idea about those needles, we'll have to wait for the lab work.”

“Ok. Constable Dasari, escort them over to the K-9 team please. I'll shift the sweeps north... oh, and here come the squaddies.”

Inspector Heaton didn't recognize it, but the bulky 4x4 roaring down the track was a Panther CLV. He did recognize the machine gun and grenade launcher on its remote weapon mount, though he'd never seen both mounted together like that before. The vehicle came to a stop and Heaton found himself facing a dark-haired officer with a prominent moustache, flanked by two soldiers carrying battle rifles.

“Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.” The newcomer thrust out his hand and Heaton reflexively shook it. “I take it we have a confirmed Baldrick presence?”

“You could say that. That van was driven here from Sheffield and the back is coated in dried green blood. Plus we've just found...”

Inspector Heaton clicked the channel selector on his radio and spoke into it. “Sergeant Taylor, any ID on the body yet?”

The voice that responded sounded vaguely sick. “Yes sir... make that two bodies. They're badly torn up but they're definitely our lads. Sir, the way the entrails are torn out... I think the demon was eating them. They've got more of those needle things, sticking out of them.”

Lethbridge-Stewart's eyebrow shot up. “Inspector, pull your men back. They're not trained for this.”

“And yours are?” Heaton was affronted at the implication that his officers couldn't handle one murderer, however vicious and depraved.

“Not just trained, combat tested. Don't ask, you're not cleared for it. Look, I see you've already got a perimeter in place, good work. You can hold that until my troops can relieve you. But more Baldricks could portal in at any moment.”

Heaton gulped. “Yes sir.” He started barking orders into the radio.

Somewhere in Hell, On The Way To Tartarus

Hello, Memnon, can we talk?”

Memnon recognized the voice in his head. One of the humans making a scheduled contact. The conversation would make a good excuse to rest.

Yes, I am resting for a while. Tell my Master Abigor that I am doing well, that I have covered almost two thirds of the distance to Tartarus.

There was a brief pause and when the voice came back, it was tinged with respect. You have made good time then. We had expected you to be only half way by now. Way to go Memnon!

Memnon basked in the praise, that was a nice thing about humans, when somebody did a good job, they noticed and praised it. Didn’t scream in rage and demand to know why the achievement hadn’t been commonplace in the past. Memnon thought about that, nobody in Hell really tried to exert themselves because if they excelled in anything, that would become the standard they would be held to from that point onwards. ‘Just good enough’ was the watchword.

My Lord demanded that I move as fast as I could. I just obeyed his commands

Nevertheless you’ve done well and bought us a little time we didn’t expect. Take some of it to rest up. Is there anything you need? We can open a portal to you if we need to.

I am doing well thank you. I hunted on the way up and fed well. Soon I will be at Tartarus.

Good. Find yourself somewhere safe, not too far from Belial’s fortress so we can portal our team to you. We’ll be in contact again this time tomorrow.

Memnon settled back on his rocks and relaxed, feeling very good about himself. It was nice to work for people who appreciated his efforts.

CNO’s Office, the Pentagon, Washington D.C.

“We’ll need a portal at least 200 feet wide and at least the same high. For safety, three hundred feet. That’ll mean we can get a CVN through and run the SSNs in submerged. How many of my CVNs do you want to send to hell.” Admiral Gary Roughead paused for a second. “I still can’t believe I just said that.”

Secretary Warner grinned in reply. “It does take getting used to doesn’t it. Anyway, we want to send two carriers through initially, with full air groups. By the way, they’ll be joined by the Admiral Nakhimov and the Pyotr Veliky. They’re on their way over to Norfolk now. Screening ships as required.’

Roughead drummed his fingers. “That leaves us with eight CVNs this side. Pretty thin, even with Newport News working triple shifts on the two new ones. Overrunning Hell is one thing but this is our home, we have to be secure here.”

“The Lyndon Johnson and Herbert Hoover? Even working flat out, they’re four years away. We looked at re-commissioning some of the old dinosaur-burners but they’re too far gone. We’ll have to make do with eight this side I’m afraid.”

“And they’ve lost their E/F-model Superbugs. We can send Truman and Stennis through. They’ve got three squadrons of Bugs and one of Rhinos each. We’ve fleshed the squadrons out, they’re at eighteen birds each right now. Gives them 72 attack birds each. I wish we’d never pulled the A-6s from service. We’ve got some SLUFs coming back though. Question. How do they get back? I’m told its virtually impossible to hold a big gate open from this side.”

“It is, but we’re going to push this one through from hellside to the AUTEC site off Bermuda. We’re going to try and make it large enough so that it’s permanent, like the one in Iraq. That way, if we lose the Iraqi one, we’ve got this as a backup. Has to be a sea gate so we can get freighters through to supply the forces we’ve got deployed in hell right now.” Secretary Warner thought for a second. “Like it or not Admiral, hell is part of our environment from now on. It’s there, no matter what happens. We have to have solid contact with the place, communications, everything else we take for granted. This second permanent portal won’t be the last, there’ll be more, many more. Our world literally has gotten to be a whole lot bigger.”

Chapter Sixty Six

Beelzebub’s Command Post, Northern Front, Phlegethon River

There was nothing left, nothing that Beelzebub could see anyway. He could see what was left of his harpy flock, the ground black with bodies where human magery had slaughtered them. A few survived, some because they were outside the area affected, others by some weird fluke that defied definition. Others were staggering around, their movements jerking and ill-coordinated. But of the foot-soldiers who had been caught under the dreadful barrage of mage-bolts, there was nothing left. The ground was bare, harrowed, even the vegetation was gone. Swallowed up by the rolling earth that had thrown Beelzebub himself from his feet and shaken him until he thought every bone in his body would break.

He cudgeled his brain, trying to get the thoughts in his head back into some sort of order. The blow had been shattering, a huge part of his army had been squeezed along the banks of the Phlegethon, most of his harpies had been concentrated over the human defenses. Just what had he got left of the 243 legions that had started this battle? Not all his legions had been in the waves that had fallen victim to the human mages, surely not all of them had died. He clawed his way to his feet, shouting for a harpy to carry his messages.

One presented himself, dirty, stained, muddy but alive. “Sire, I come from Pritograshnaris, Commander of the sixth line of your Army. He begs your forgiveness sire, but he reports that he must halt his advance while he re-organizes his force. His forty legions are in disarray my Lord.”

“Casualties?”

“Not many Sire, the human mage-fire fell short of his line. His formations were disrupted by the earthquake caused by the mage-fire, the foot soldiers could not remain standing while the ground rolled under them. Many are injured but they can still fight….” The harpy stopped, awkwardly, not knowing quite what to say next. Or, rather, not knowing how to phrase the message so that he could survive delivering it.

“What.” Beelzebub snapped the response out.

“My Lord, the soldiers, they are reluctant to advance still further. They fear the mage-fire will come back for them and they fear the magery that destroyed the harpies still lingers there.” The harpy dropped his head and waited for death.

Beelzebub reflected that it had been a long time since he had last eaten and he could use a snack. However, harpies were in short supply after that terrible mage-blast. It was an unfamiliar feel for a Lord who had built his forces around his harpy-flock. He needed this one alive. Snacks could wait. Anyway, his foot-soldiers were right, the human magery was lingering, he had seen some of them flee forward to escape the mage-fire, across the river and they had died convulsing and twitching just as the harpies had done. The human defenses were still there, he adjusted his vision to long range and saw the hole torn in their lines, a hole that barely scratched its depths and one that new Iron Chariots were already moving in to fill. He knew what would come next, the chariots would charge and crush his force. It suddenly dawned on him that his 40 surviving legions were the only organized military force between the humans and Dis.

“Go to Pritograshnaris, tell him to suspend the attack. Form a defense line on the, no, behind the hills. If the humans can fight from behind hills, then so can we. Dismount the naga from their beasts and get them ready to fire on the human attack. Human magery and mage-fire have broken this attack, now we must break theirs. After you have delivered that message fly south and see Chiknathragothem. Tell him that our attack here has stalled due to magery of unprecedented power. It is now down to him to break through the human defenses and repel their army. We shall block the road to Dis. He must be the hammer and we shall be the anvil with the humans crushed between us. Now go.”

Thankful to be alive, the harpy left. Beelzebub stared after him, then concentrated on the area in front of his position, where the first five line of his army had once been. Incredibly, survivors were moving down there, pulling themselves out of the very earth itself. They were picking themselves up, retreating, staggering would be a better word, back to where his new defense line was forming. His decision to end the attack was the right one, but even if he hadn’t made it, what was left of his army would have made it for him. For the first time in his long life Beelzebub knew the full meaning of defeat. It didn’t mean that the benefits of fighting on did not match the costs, it meant that an army could no longer fight. In his heart, Beelzebub knew that this war was lost, that it had been lost before it had even started.

“Sire.” A Greater Herald was landing. Beelzebub was shocked, the creature was gray and visibly shaking. “Sire, something terrible had happened.”

Satan's Palace, City of Dis, Fifth Ring, Hell

The four B-1s had already made three runs over the target area, assembling their radar picture and ensuring the primary drop point had been properly identified. Their fourth run was the real thing. At almost the same instant, the four B-1Bs released the MOPs. The four massive bombs began accelerating at 0.8 Gs and quickly turned nose-down, presenting a small, hardened cross-section to the granite they were about to strike. As they fell, the radar in the nose of each B-1B tracked the fall and the approximate trajectory, and automatically radioed small corrections to each corresponding bomb, causing the fins to slightly turn, adjusting its course. In just under forty-seven seconds, the four bombs had all covered the five-and-a-half mile drop, and at precisely the same time they struck the bronze roof of Satan's palace in a square twenty meters across.

As it happened, an unlucky orc was standing directly beneath one of the bombs, which was now hurtling down at more than 1,250 miles per hour; he was crushed into a paste before he realized what had hit him, and his remains were carried down in front of the bomb as it crashed through the floor into the basement, and then through the basement floor into the rock foundation of Satan's palace. Each of the four bombs traveled approximately 130 feet into the granite underneath Satan's palace before the fuses in their tails initiated. The combined 120,000 pounds of steel and high explosive detonated an instant thereafter.

Because granite is far denser than air, the speed of sound in the rock is much higher than the speed of sound in air. In fact, the speed of sound in granite is approximately 19,500 feet per second. As the bombs detonated, a shockwave formed in the explosive material and hit the surrounding rock at more than 20,000 miles per hour, driven by the gas products of the reaction. Impact from the shockwave vaporized the granite surrounding the bombs, creating a core of superheated rock vapor which followed the pressure wall as it continued at half again the speed of sound through the granite, vaporizing rock which it encountered.

The four roughly spherical shockwaves met each other in less than four thousandths of a second. If an observer could have seen the meeting in a cross-section of the granite foundation to Satan's castle, he would have seen the four spheres of superheated gas seem to merge as they encompassed each other, merging into what would appear to be a flattened pancake, centered at the center of mass of the four bombs and traveling outward at mach 1.5. Looking up, he would see Satan's castle -- and he would focus on the single wavefront traveling upward, about to reach the surface.

The rock holding back the volume of gas melted under the onslaught of the shockwave, draining energy from it and slowing it until it slipped under the shockwave threshold and became a particularly large and destructive pressure pulse, traveling at just under the speed of sound. Just under six thousandths of a second after the bombs first initiated, the pulse from the blast reached the surface. When it did, several things happened at once. Where it touched the foundation rocks, the stone out of which Satan had built his palace transmitted the pulse upward, buckling and crushing the huge building blocks where they stood. Where it touched nothing but air, the spalling effect threw huge chunks of rock into the air, jarring from the spur and turning them into missiles that arced upward and outward to descend in a ghoulish hail onto Dis.

As the pressure pulse reached the edge of the spur, the energy had nowhere to go. If the spur had been made of some extremely ductile metal, it would have sprung out and then back, reflecting the pressure wave back into the interior and causing it to ring like some gigantic, unimaginably deep bass gong. As it stands, granite is nowhere near as flexible; therefore, the pressure wave fragmented the surface of the spur into house-sized boulders and threw them out into the surrounding caldera like pebbles.

Meanwhile, at the top of the spur, the pressure pulse traveled up through Satan's palace until it reached the roof, which popped off like an immense champagne cork, jumping several feet before it started to fall back down into the interior as the support columns buckled. Seven thousandths of a second after the detonation of the four MOPs, Satan's sprawling, magnificent fortress, built over a period of scores of millennia, began to crumble, its hard granite rock left with no more structural integrity than a sand castle facing an incoming tide.

Out on the long causeway that lead along the spur from the main circle of Dis to the promontory of Satan’s palace, Belial lay stunned by the bombs that had demolished the work of millennia. The rolling, heaving shockwaves had thrown him off his feet and tossed him around on the ground as if he was of no more account than a kidling. Once, in the great feasts at Tartarus, one of his minions had said that nobody could call themselves drunk unless they couldn’t lie on the floor without holding on. Now, Belial knew what that meant, he’d tried to hold on to the ground under him but he had failed and it had evaded his grasp at every turn. He was dazed, half-blinded by the great cloud of dust that was enveloping the whole area. Beneath his taloned feet, the ground was still shaking as the after-shocks reverberated in the structure or the rocks thrown high in the sky made their way back down. He tried to stand but the ground was too unstable, too riven by the blasts to allow him to do that. Instead he crawled, trying to find some cover from the rain of fragments that descended around him. In one corner of his mind, he realized that this was the human response to his attacks on Sheffield and Dee-Troyt. Abigor had said that when the humans fought, they went for the top first, decapitated their enemy and cut away his ability command. The humans had done as Abigor had warned, they had gone straight for the top. Then, another part of his brain told him that this was an insight he had better keep to himself. Speaking of it would mean a hideous death.

He tried to get to his feet again, this time making it as the rolling aftershocks faded away. The causeway in front of him was crumbling, even as he watched, another section broke away and fell into.. what? He needed to see, to assess what damage had been done. It had to be huge, incomprehensible. Belial was beginning to know his enemy and when humans wrought destruction on their enemies, they tended to go for the huge and incomprehensible.

Slowly, carefully he made his way along the causeway, to where the crumbling lip marked the edge of the crater where the bombs, oh Belial knew the right words now, a bomb dropped by aircraft, not a magebolt from a sky-chariot, had landed. Back in Tartarus, a few humans had turned their coats and told what they knew of human destructive powers. In some cases, they knew just the names, in others a bit about how the weapons worked. But this? None of them had mentioned this.

Nearer to the rim, the sentries that had guarded the entrance to Satan’s palace were dead, blood trickling from their noses and mouths. Other than that there was no reason why they should be dead, there were no obvious wounds on their bodies. Had the bomb been poison? And if it was, why had Belial himself survived. There was much here to think upon and for a brief moment Belial wished that Euryale was with him. The gorgon would see a pattern in this, somehow.

Then, Belial looked down and realized the full scale of the shattering blow the human aircraft had delivered. The whole of the promontory that had served as a base for Satan’s palace was crumbling, subsiding into the caldera below. He watched it falling, the ground slowly shifting downwards as it settled, spreading sideways as the weight of rocks above compressed those underneath. Somehow, without thinking it through, Belial knew that the settling would continue for days. There was no hope for those under the ruins, they were either being choked by the dust or crushed by the constantly-settling rock. With another flash of insight, Belial realized that the demon’s superb resistance to wounds and infection was going to be a terrible curse here, death was inevitable but the process of having life crushed out of them was going to take much longer.

Of Satan’s palace there was no sign. Then he looked closer, and realized he was wrong. There were signs of it in the settling debris below. Sheets of bronze from the roof, shattered pieces of statuary, blocks of dressed and polished stone. That was all. Satan’s palace had taken millennia to build and work on it had never really finished. Always there had been extra stones to add, extra rooms, crueler and deeper dungeons. Well, it was all over now, the palace had been destroyed and its monstrous occupant with it. Belial felt like screaming with despair, all that work, all that planning and scheming, the stunning success of Sheffield, the lesser success of Dee-Troyt, all had been aimed at restoring him to Satan’s favor. Now, Satan was dead, or dying of slow suffocation in the ruins below. It had all been for nothing. Standing on the crater rim, looking down at the devastation, Belial wept with despair.

Free Hell, Banks of the Styx, Fifth Circle of Hell

The explosions had echoed and re-echoed around the great caldera of hell, stunning the demons and suffering humans alike. Lieutenant (deceased) Jade Kim saw the shining bronze palace on its rock high above and far away, start to crumble. In painfully slow motion, the whole great structure collapsed, the very rock it was based on falling into the caldera underneath. Kim realized that at least some of the debris was landing on humans, killing them (again) before they could be liberated. A sacrifice, but one merited by the majesty of the sight that was unfolding above her. ‘Shock and Awe’ she thought to herself, an overused and much-discredited phrase but one that was curiously appropriate to the sight.

“Way to go fly-boys.” Her voice seemed to blend in with the rumble of the collapsing rock. “That’s the Air Farce, go straight for the top with the biggest bombs they can carry. B-2s I guess, or B-1s.”

“You’re saying things we don’t understand again.” Titus Pullo couldn’t restrain himself from the half-joke, even in the face of the incredible sight before them.

“Sorry, Titus. We have big aircraft, bombers, to carry very large bombs. I guess the B-52s are being used elsewhere and the other types we have are B-1s and B-2s. They must have used bombs that penetrate deep into rock and ruptured the very foundations of that place. There’s nobody left alive in there, that’s for certain.”

“Good, very good.” Lucius Vorenus was looking at the subsiding ruins with quiet satisfaction. “Then he’s dead.”

Kim was about to respond when she heard another sound, the sky-tearing noise of jet fighters moving fast. The six aircraft erupted out of the dusty sky, arching over Free hell and orbiting around. They were loaded for air-to-air, she could see the batteries of missiles hanging under their wings.

“British, Typhoons.” Then there was another wound, one that she found achingly familiar, the rhythmic whoop-whoop noise of helicopter rotors. She’d never realized how much she had missed that noise before. They were helicopters all right, big ones. Single rotor amidships, that meant either Marine CH-53s, Russian Mi-171s or British Merlins. Some were carrying slung loads, others were clean and one of them was coming straight in. She saw it touch down only a few dozen yards from her and figures started to pour out. Camouflaged figures wearing red berets. British paratroopers. One of the figures detached from the rest and came over to her.

“Lieutenant Jade Kim?” There was a heavy accent on her rank and she guessed what was coming next.

“Present Sir.”

“I’m Colonel Andy Jackson, commanding officer Two-Para. As senior officer here, I’ll be taking over command. Could you bring me up to date on your defenses please? I understand there’s some nausea coming this way.”

“Certainly Sir, I’ve got our maps at hand I’ll…..”

“Welcome to Hell Colonel.” Jackson looked surprised, a man had just arrived, one with a vaguely familiar face. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gaius Julius Caesar. You say you are a Colonel? That makes you the commander of a cohort?”

“Err, I think so.” Jackson thought quickly, his 700 men were about a cohort.

“But not the First Cohort though.” Caesar’s lips twitched slightly. “I am First Consul and commander of two legions in this area. That makes me a General I think. And Jade Kim is the Second Consul of the forces in Free Hell, which includes one of my Legions. So, that makes me at least, the ranking officer here.”

“But you have no idea of what modern forces are capable of.” Jackson was caught completely off guard.

“I have some idea, Second Consul Kim is a good teacher. But, you are right so I must ask that you remain in your position, commanding your Para. Perhaps we can get together and work out how best we can deploy your men.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I must insist…”

“That’s very good then, After all, the principles of strategy doesn’t change much although weapons have obviously done so. Have you read my book on Strategic Principles.”

“It’s been lost I’m afraid.” Kim was trying to stop laughing. The sight of the British officer trying to think of reasons why this shouldn’t be happening was hilarious.

“Not any more. With nothing else to do for 2,000 years, I’ve re-written all my books from memory. By the way Jade, your translation of the Civil War is very incomplete, allow me to give you a full copy. I’ve signed it for you. Anyway, Colonel Jackson, what forces did you bring with you.”

“Err, my battalion, a battery of 105mm field guns, Land-Rovers with machine guns and grenade launchers. Lot of grenade machine guns. And we have a forward air observer group. We can pull in a lot of air power if we need it.” Jackson shook his head, he’d been outmaneuvered and he know it. But then, it was no shame to be embarrassed by losing to Gaius Julius Caesar. Now he’d lost, the next priority was to do the best job humanly possible for his new commander. Honor demanded no less.

Beside him, Jade Kim felt a mixture of sadness and relief. Her little state had suddenly become a Roman province but at least she was out of the hot seat at last. Away from the dreadful nagging fear that her next more would be the mistake that brought everything crashing down around her ears.

Chapter Sixty Seven

Chiknathragothem’s Command Post, Southern Front, Phlegethon River

The harpy landed, its wings shaking with exhaustion. “Sire, I bring much terrible news.”

“Speak.” Chiknathragothem didn’t have time to worry about the usual genuflections.

“My Lord, the humans have unleashed magery of unimaginable power. Beelzebub’s Army is stalled, its casualties are beyond counting. He has forced a crossing of the Phlegethon but is unable to make headway into the human defenses. The human mages breathed death over his forces, their spells robbing his harpies of the breath from their bodies, of the very air from their lungs. His harpies died as one, nothing like it has every been seen before.”

“That could well describe our whole war with these humans.” Chiknathragothem was impatient, he had better things to do than listen to a litany of disaster, even if opportunities lay in them. “Tell me something I have not heard before.”

The harpy gulped but he had been tasked to deliver a message and deliver it he would. “The humans also delivered a huge number of mage-bolts, so many that they blended together into one huge cloud of death that drank Beelzebub’s army. Together, barely one demon in four survives of his force. He has abandoned his attack and is pulling back in defense to block the road to Dis. He charges you with penetrating the human defenses and crushing them against that defense.”

“Is that all.” Chiknathragothem’s voice clearly indicated that he was contemplating a quick meal.

“No Sire, the worst is still to come. The humans hit the city of Dis itself. They have destroyed His Infernal Majesty’s palace, crumbled in and the rock it stood on so that only a pile of sand and ruins remains.”

“His Majesty…” Chiknathragothem had gone gray with shock. “Did he survive?”

“Nobody knows Sire. If he was in his palace then he did not. More than forty Grand Dukes and Dukes are known to be dead, and the palace staff are all gone. The dead number in their thousands. And, My Lord Beelzebub says, if Yahweh gets to hear of this catastrophe, and he will, then there will be nothing to keep him out of Hell itself.”

Shocked to his core, Chiknathragothem stared into the distance, trying to imagine the full consequences of what had just happened. If Satan was dead, then the great bulwark against Yahweh absorbing Hell into his own domain had gone. There was more to it than that, the human life-energy that all demons gathered and paid as tribute to Satan was suddenly without purpose. Satan had used it to boost his faithful servants over the barrier that existed between this level and the next. That was, after all, what the great pit of Hell was all about. The demons served Satan and in exchange he used the life-energy he had gathered to save them for eternity in the next dimension. All of this would be lost if Yahweh was allowed to make his way in and seize Hell for his own. The celestial abode that had been split apart so many, many millennia ago, would be reunited once more.

Unless, Chiknathragothem suddenly realized, another took over the role of leader, seized power and used the system Satan had devised to guarantee his own survival. In a flash of inspiration, he suddenly realized why Beelzebub was abandoning this fight, he wasn’t blocking the humans from Dis, he was advancing along that road himself, to seize power and take Satan’s throne. He, Chiknathragothem, was being left as the rear-guard to distract the humans from pursuing Beelzebub. He was a sacrifice to Beelzebub’s ambition.

For a wild moment, Chiknathragothem thought of pulling back himself, of setting out for Dis in an attempt to beat Beelzebub to the punch. Reality quickly intruded itself and squashed that idea. Beelzebub’s Army blocked the direct road and was much closer to Dis than Chiknathragothem’s. Beelzebub had the direct route, Chiknathragothem would have to go around him. There was no way, no way at all, that Beelzebub could be beaten to Dis. Then, another thought entered Chiknathragothem’s mind. He had battered his way through most of the human defenses, the end of the great zone of little fortresses that could do so much damage was in sight. One more push, one more effort and he would be through. Then, the human army would collapse. Beelzebub might enter Dis first, but it would be at the head of a defeated army, a thin shadow of the great force that he had once commanded. On the other hand, once this battle was one, he, Chiknathragothem, could also enter Dis but at the head of a victorious army, one that had defeated the humans who had destroyed Abigor and so badly crippled Beelzebub. The inhabitants of Hell were practical, they would back a winner over a loser any time.

So, he had to win and had to win fast. That made his decision obvious. He would have to group his remaining forces here, at the point where victory was on the point of being won. The remaining naga, the remnants of Belial’s wyverns, all in a concentrated blow. Overhead, Chiknathragothem heard the wailing sound of the human sky-chariots as they tore into his dwindling flock of harpies. His army was mauled, badly mauled, but nothing like the scale of destruction that had been visited on Beelzebub. The white mage-fire had been a shock, more for the horror of its effects than its real damage, but that was all. And there were fewer sky-chariots than there had been. His advancing foot-soldiers had found the wreckage of two, brought down by the wyverns with their great spiked tails, but it seemed as if the humans were running out of them. Everything suggested that this battle was at the point of balance. His one more push would win it, and with it a far greater prize than was being contested here on the plains of the Phlegethon.

Command Cave, Free Hell, Banks of the Styx, Fifth Circle of Hell

“Estimated force of 35,000 baldricks, at least 30,000 foot, the rest harpies. They’re the dangerous ones, not much firepower but they can get at us and our ability to bring them down in droves is limited.” Colonel Jackson looked around at his companions. He’d had an embarrassing discussion over the radio with his commander when he’d had to admit that he’d been outmaneuvered, politically speaking of course. In retrospect, he couldn’t honestly critique his decisions. He’d had a very questionable maneuver to pull off, one that depended on a junior officer’s instinctive deference to an officer of much higher rank. He’d gone in hard, trying to bulldoze her out of the way and accept his command before she had time to think the situation through. It had worked too, only how could he have known he would run into Gaius Julius Caesar. Some historians had questioned Caesar’s skill as a politician, well, he had been on the receiving end of that expertise and could now testify that the reality of the man lived up to his reputation.

The infuriating thing was that he, Jackson, had been right and what he was seeing proved it. The young American Lieutenant had done well, that was certain enough, but she’d done it through luck, guts, the inability of the baldricks to accept that humans could fight and, most of all, her serene ignorance of the fact that what she was attempting was impossible. Her whole operation was running on borrowed time, if this crisis hadn’t arrived, something else would have done. Time to rub that in a little.

“So, how many troops do you have Lieutenant?”

“Armed with our weapons? Around thirty. Split equally between the two flanks. About sixty more with captured baldrick equipment, some reinforcing the positions on either flank, the rest string out along the river.” Jackson and Caesar exchanged glances, the Lieutenant was a pilot, not a ground-pounder and her dispositions had made that fact clear. They were an invitation to disaster. “I know, I know, but we’ve got some things running for us. The whole area on these flanks is a maze of minefields and demolition charges. Ever since we blew up Asmodeus, we’ve got the baldricks too scared to put their feet on the ground. Just often enough, when one of them does so, it kills them. The river is wide open, I know it, but we can’t be strong everywhere. He who tries to defend everything….”

“Defends nothing. Quite right Jade.” Caesar looked at the map, probably the first accurate one that had ever been drawn in Hell. “Colonel, you’re the expert, I’m just the representative of the free human population down here, what do you recommend?”

Jackson caught the fleeting smirk on Kim’s face and guessed that Caesar had been given a quick introductory lesson on the concept of civilian control of the military. And was now using it to his advantage. Oh, it was to his own advantage, Jackson knew that, Gaius Julius Caesar was up to something. That insight came from the simple appreciation that Gaius Julius Caesar was always up to something, the only real question was, what? Jackson was highly doubtful that the man’s ambitions were restricted to a few square kilometers of mud on the banks of the Styx. Still, that matter could wait until later. As could the command issues that this whole little skirmish had highlighted. He had no doubt they were being discussed at a much higher level than his.

“We must assume the force moving along the river is our first priority. I’ll string my battalion out along that front, its thin coverage but with down here with modern weapons, we can hold much longer fronts than in normal wars. I’ll have to depend on your people to hold our flanks Kim. But frankly, if the baldricks hit us with a coordinated attack, both flanks and the river, we’re gone. There is no possibility of us stopping an attack like that.”

Caesar got up and stared across at the great cloud of dust that hung over the site of Satan’s palace. “Well, we’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen, won’t we?”

Palace of Deumos, City of Dis, Hell

Deumos stood on her balcony, looking at the same great cloud of dust. For weeks she had been struggling with the problem of what to do and where to cast her allegiance. At first, she had been swayed by her vassal Lugasharmanaska’s opinion that humans could not lose. She had seen them invade Hell, seen their columns first make the Martial Plain of Dysprosium untenable to the demons and then bring it under their sway. Then they had started to build up their defense along the Phlegethon and Deumos had been on the verge of casting her lot irrevocably in with them. Then, had come news of Belial’s success at Sheffield and she had hastily reconsidered, to make a firm decision might yet be premature. Dee-Troyt had confirmed that, or so she had thought.

Now the humans had struck at the very heart of Hell, they had utterly destroyed Satan’s palace. And, presumably, Satan himself. That meant the great ruling force that dominated Hell had gone. As soon as Yahweh found out about that, he would be on the move, trying to reclaim the lands that had been torn from him at the end of the Great Celestial War. Deumos didn’t have to have explained to her what that would mean for her and her kind. Succubi were despised in Hell but reviled in heaven. Yahweh’s return meant death for her and her vassals. Hell had to have a new leader, and quickly.

That led to the obvious question, who. Like any baldrick, Deumos had a simple answer to that, her. The question was, how. Once again, the simple fact that Succubi were despised in Hell stood in her way. To make her own power hold, she had to have powerful allies. Which Grand Duke would be willing to ally with her. Despised or not, her Succubi were powerful allies who could offer much intelligence and influence to the right duke. But who? Deumos realized she didn’t even know which Dukes were still alive.

Then, that thought made her kick herself. She had missed the obvious. The Dukes were not the most powerful forces in hell any more. Humans were. The destruction of Satan’s palace proved that. She went to the couch in the corner of her room and sat down, her mind already roving across the gray expanse that marked some sort of dimension she could not describe or explain. There were bright lights in that expanse, the minds of her Succubi. Without being able to explain why, she knew which light belonged to who. She was looking for one light in particular, one that would be far removed from the rest.

Luga, child are you there? Deumos’s mind had the sickly-sweet sound of an adult cooing to a child

Yes, my liege. How may I serve you.

Deumos was momentarily irritated, she expected a lot more groveling than that. Obviously too long an association with humans was having a bad effect on her. Still, punishing her for that could wait. Child, what is the situation on Earth? Are the humans in despair at the loss of their cities?

No, my Liege. Not in despair. Furiously angry would be the best description. There have been riots in the streets here, people demanding that the destruction of Sheffield and Detroit be avenged by the ‘nuking’ of all hell. I do not understand what they meant by nuking but it does not sound friendly. You must have seen the action the humans have taken in response.

There were riots caused by our action? The humans massacred their own then.

No, my liege. The police and Volunteers restored order and they arrested those who caused acts of violence but the rest were allowed to demonstrate. It is their way. It was helped by the news that the volcano over Sheffield has finally stopped and the Detroit attack is slackening quickly. Otherwise, the demands for a nuking might not have been so easy to ignore.

Luga, child, this war must end before even more die. I would wish to speak with the leaders of the humans. Perhaps together we can find a solution to this horror.”

Lugasharmanaska’s mind-voice betrayed her suspicion. Another thing for which Deumos decided that she would have to pay later. My Liege, I can arrange such a meeting but I must counsel caution. The humans are in an uncompromising mood and will not listen to much in the way of appeasement. The leaders here speak of unconditional surrender when they think of the future of Hell. They will not settle for less than that. If you wish to have influence with them, then you must offer them a way to achieve that.

The impertinence of the comment ground further at Deumos’s nerves. How dare this minor vassal give her such advice? She would, Deumos decided, spend many, many years screaming in agony for such impudence. If she liked humans so much, perhaps tossing her into a boiling lava pit with them might be suitable. Your wise advice comforts me child. I will think on this. But arrange for me to meet the leaders with whom you deal and I will see what agreements we can make.

Deumos closed the contact and relaxed. Now, how could she bring enough Dukes into her orbit to make her an ally the humans would value?

Conference Room, White House Washington DC.

“Mister President, the supplemental funding is through. I just hope we can survive the peace when the war ends.”

“That may be a long time. What’s the progress in production.”

“It’s picking up, but we’re still expending munitions a lot faster than we can make them. We’re running low, the projections are that we’ll bottom out before we are completely expended but it’s going to be close. It’s lucky the Russians are carrying the load in the latest battle and that they can use a lot of Chinese stuff. Otherwise we would be really hurting right now.

“Army’s doing OK, we’ve recommissioned most of the Abrams and Bradleys we had in storage and we’re working on the M113s right now. Light note Sir, we had some idiot called Sparks turning up and demanding we name the M113 the Gavin and build our forces around them. Anyway, we drafted him and sent him to Alaska. Apparently there’s a shortage of latrines up there and he’d digging the new ones. Anyway, as fast as we get the vehicles, we’re building up new units around them. The veterans from the battles against Abigor are worth their weight in gold as cadre for the new divisions.

“Air Force, well, we’re desperately short of heavy bombers and it’ll be months before we get more. Northrop are working on a simplified B-2, they’re stripping out all the stealth stuff and that cuts cost and production time drastically. Boeing are doing the same with the B-1, they’re using the B-1A as a base, not the dash 1B. Northrop say they’ll have a prototype B-2B up by the end of the year, Boeing a B-1C at the same time.

“F-22 and F-15E production is ramping up fast, F-16 more slowly. F-18s are doing pretty well and the first A-45s are coming off the lines. They’ll be going to the Navy for the carriers. The navy’s rebuilding some of its discarded ships, mostly Spru-Cans and Fig-sevens. Gas turbine ships we can bring back, the steam turbine ones are gone. It’ll be years before the Navy gets a lot of new construction though, we just don’t have the shipbuilding base we used to.”

“Any other problems we have to deal with John?”

“One big one Sir. Command. We’ve done pretty well so far but the command of the forces deployed is a mess. It’s just been thrown together as the forces arrived and the situation had been moving faster than we can get things tidied up. We’ve only got away with it this long because the guys at the top back there are professionals and are making it work. But, we had a minor fracas with the British yesterday.”

“Not another friendly fire incident?”

“No, although we’ve had all too many of those. Our lodgment in Hell is about to come under attack and the British sent reinforcements. Their commander wanted operational control, which was quite reasonable of course, but there were some disagreements on that and a local deceased human took over. One Gaius Julius Caesar.”

“I’ve heard of him.” Bush’s voice was reflective.

I should hope so thought Secretary Warner. “Anyway, its all sorted out and it never really amounted to much but it’s a warning. We’ve got to get a permanent, proper, flexible and fast-reacting command structure sorted out. Otherwise, one day we’re going to have a real problem that’ll get people killed. A lot of them.

“Two final things. One is that the kiddies on Kos are claiming you and Halliburton conspired to get this war started so you could make money on the share prices.”

“Good idea, I wish we’d thought of it.”

“Quite Sir. The other is our contact with the Succubi in Hell has said that Deumos, the Succubi Leader has asked for a meeting, she wants to come over to our side.”

“Aren’t we grooming Abigor as our ruler down there?”

“We are Sir, but the faster we can bring about the collapse of hell the better. We’ve still got Heaven to deal with, they’re quiet at the moment but how long they’ll stay that way is another matter. If this Deumos creature comes over to us, it might split hell up and bring them down. That’s why we whacked Satan after all.”

“Any word on that?”

“No, Mister President. Pictures show the whole palace and its foundation rock are gone, blasted to dust. But we still have no confirmation that he was in there. Abigor says he spends nearly all his time in that Palace so its pretty good odds we got him.”

“Hope so. Anyway, thank you John. Condi, do you have any thoughts on this command issue?”

Chapter Sixty Eight

Headquarters, 302nd Motor Rifle Division, Left Flank, Phlegethon River Front, Hell

“Lieutenant Edovin, Georgii Aleksandrovich reporting for duty Tovarish Colonel.”

Colonel Aleksandr Klavdievich Parfenov looked up at the young Lieutenant standing before his desk. Reinforcements were always needed but this was an inconvenient time to say the least of it. The baldricks had ground their way through his division, at frightful cost, certainly but they had ground their way through. One of his regiments had been virtually destroyed, the other two had been badly mauled but they had done their duty. The baldricks had been pinned down by their defense, allowed to entrap themselves on the maze of strongpoints, minefields and barbed wire. The harpies had exacted their toll and the wyverns had been a bad surprise certainly. The nagas strapped to the backs of rhinolobsters had also taken their toll. The real cost to the baldricks was that their unit structure had been destroyed by the defenses, where once they had been cleanly divided into their legions, cohorts and maniples, now they were an amorphous mass of mixed units. What that mass didn’t know was that ahead of them, sitting quietly behind a ridgeline, were more that two divisions of tanks including his own tank regiment. What he didn’t need was another green Lieutenant.

“Transfer papers.” Parfenov stretched out his hand.

“I don’t have any Tovarish Colonel. But I am already assigned to your division.”

That triggered something in Parfenov’s memory. He dug through the status reports on his desk, trying to find the one he needed. As was always the case, it was on the bottom of the pile. As he had thought, the name was there on the casualty roster. “Edovin, Georgii Aleksandrovich, you are dead.”

“Yes Tovarish Colonel. But I am reporting for duty still.”

That thought Parfenov represents dedication to duty even by Russian standards. This was something he had to find out more about. He would indulge himself, he had the time to listen before the tanks went in.

“Tovarish Lieutenant. Tell me what happened.”

“It was harpies Tovarish Colonel. They set the engine compartment of my Shilka on fire and we had to bail out. We all got out of the ZSU all right, but the harpies got us as we were in the open. The BMPs we were covering tried to help us with their machine guns but there were too many of the harpies and they tore us apart. The next thing I remember was sailing through the air and landing in a river of molten lava. The pain was terrible, I was blinded and deafened, all I could think of was to get out somehow. I tried to crawl, or swim, a mixture of both really, to where I remembered the shore was. I got there and got out of the lava and started to crawl away. My hearing came back first, I heard a crackle of gunfire, then my sight slowly came back.

“There were Marines there Tovarish Colonel, American Marines. They had shot down a group of six baldricks, the bodies were still on the shore, and they were helping the people escaping from the lava. One of them came to me and asked me who I was. I understood every word he said, even though he spoke in English. I identified myself and told him I had been killed in the fighting along the Phlegethon. He asked my unit, then called on the radio to report finding me. Soon a portal was opened that took me to somewhere in America and then another brought me back to the great American base at the Hellmouth. From there, one of the Americans gave me a lift in a Humvee so here I am. Reporting for duty, Tovarish Colonel.”

Parfenov shook his head. It was quite a story. It also put a quite different complexion on this war, if they could get their casualties back this way, it would solve many problems. Create a few as well but that was for others to think about. “Were other of our brothers there?”

“I think so Tovarish Colonel. The baldricks just stack people into their pits and swamps as they are received. So those who die together tend to stay together. I looked for my crew but did not find them before I was taken out. But the Marines are guarding the whole stretch of that lava river, if they can get out the lava, they will return.”

“Good, Bratischka, very good. I have an assignment for you. There is an American anti-harpy unit not far away, a trials unit. They need a Russian officer as liaison, since you are dead and can thus understand Americans, I will assign you to them. Stay with them, help them as best you can and remember to report anything interesting you learn.

Site of Satan’s Palace, City of Dis

Belial did not know how long he had been standing there, looking down at the settling ruins of Satan’s palace. Time had a different meaning in a hell where eternity was a real, present concept. It might have been a few seconds, perhaps longer. All he knew was that tears of rage and frustration were pouring down his cheeks at the sight. Then, slowly, he became aware of a growing crowd crossing the broken stones of the causeway and staring also at the ruins. That jerked him back into the present.

“You, all of you, get down there, start digging. There may be survivors down there, waiting for us to free them. Get to work.”

“Why?” One voice echoed from the crowd. “Leave us alone,” was another. “He’s dead at last,” was a third. Belial looked at the mutinous crowd of demons and orcs and grabbed a trident from one of the dead guards. It was one of his best, he noted, a definitely premium product as befitted Satan’s personal guard. As he charged it, he swung his eyes over the crowd.

“You don’t rule an……” The orc had spoken unwisely, while Belial was looking straight at him. The trident flashed and the lightning bolt charred him instantly, his body collapsing on the stone. Next to him, two others were burned by the discharge and also fell, wailing with the pain.

“Any more arguments?” Belial looked around grimly. The killing had made him feel a lot better. There was a rumble of discontent but the outright mutiny had simmered down. For the moment. “Then get down there and start digging.”

The crowd edged over the rim and started to make their way down the wall of the crater to where the stone jumble started. Belial stood on the rim and watched, with more of the demons from the city joining him as word spread and curiosity brought out bystanders. Belial spread them along the crater rim so that the orcs working down below could be watched. The first down there had picked up bits of shattered rock and looked around for places to put them. Eventually, they set up a chain, carrying the rocks out of the crater and to the edge of the causeway where they could be dropped into the caldera far below. It took a long time but slowly a dent was made in the pile of wreckage that had once been Satan’s palace. It exposed the first victim, a crushed figure, lifeless.

Belial recognized her, it was Naphula. He recognized her griffin-like wings and the lion-like head. Once she had been a powerful Great Duke of Hell who had commanded thirty-six legions of demons. Belial had liked her, she had shared his taste for mechanical things and the unusual. Once he had even sought an alliance with her but his position as a virtual outcast, only just barely tolerated at court had precluded that. Her pride would not tolerate an alliance with as lowly a lord as he. Now, she was dead and her crushed body looked small and useless. “Take her body out to the causeway and place it up there. Do the same with the rest of the bodies you find. And dig faster. We may find our master awaiting our rescue at any moment.”

F-105D “Frankenwhoosh” 273rd Fighter Group, Over the Sixth Ring of Hell

The fact that any F-105s had survived at all wasn’t so unusual, but the sheer number of them had been remarkable indeed. The search through the museums had found no less than 103 F-105s of assorted marks, in conditions varying from the derelict to the pristine. Some had even had their engines and cannon still installed and three had been in immediately flyable condition. Over the last three months, 15 more had joined the 273rd making up one of its squadrons. They were all a blend of the most intact airframes with parts taken from the airframes too far gone to bring back into service, hence they all bore names starting with “Franken”. The single-engined aircraft were old and tired, all the museum salvaged aircraft were that, but they could still fly and haul bombs. They would do, they would fill the gap, until new aircraft came into service in enough numbers and the Thunderchiefs could return to their quiet life in the aircraft museums of America. Only this time, they would be sporting the red-and-gray camouflage scheme worn by the aircraft that fought in Hell.

Captain Casey “Loco” Jones angled his wings slightly and turned to follow the Styx as it meandered down below. The five other F-105s following him did the same. The aircraft were sluggish, the F-105 was stunningly fast low down but nobody had ever described it as agile. With six 750 pound bombs hanging under its belly, four more on each inner wing rack and one on each outer, a total of 12,000 pounds, the old aircraft were really hard to fly. It had been a wrench for him to be taken out of his Boeing 767 and put back into a Thud, but the old-timers who had flown the bird before were getting thin on the ground.

Down below, he could see a long black snake following the river. It was the column of baldricks he was hunting, apparently they were advancing on an area of Hell that had been liberated. Well, there were things he could do about that.

“All Frankenstein aircraft, target is below, roll out and follow me down.” Jones rolled his wings to vertical, feeling the aging spars and frames creaking in protest then pulled the stick back, hauling the nose of the Thunderchief around. Then, he leveled the wings, dropped the nose and rammed the throttle all the way forward. The F-105 responded gallantly, its engine surging with power, even through the filters built into its engine intakes.

Under his nose, the column was now stretched out before him, his flight path taking him along its length. Something that hadn’t been obvious before, there was a wall between them and the river, an old-fashioned, crenallated wall that marked the division between the fifth and sixth circles of Hell. That wouldn’t make much difference, it offered little cover and wouldn’t even get in the way of the bombing and strafing passes.

The target below was growing rapidly, this was a part of the attack that needed care. The Thud dived very fast and was too ponderous to pull out quickly. More than one F-105 pilot had been so interested in strafing his target that he’d left pulling out too late and flown right into the ground. A gentle pressure on the stick, pull the nose back and then release the bombs. Behind him, the dark green 750 pounders dropped clear, their tail fins spreading sideways as they opened up to slow the fall of the bombs. Those retarding fins and the long fuse extenders made sure that the bombs would explode above the ground, maximizing the radius covered by their fragments. The F-105s streaked over the column of baldricks, unleashing their total of nearly a hundred bombs onto the figures below, then used the energy they had built up in their dive to get clear. By the time the bombs exploded, they were already miles away and thousands of feet above the devastation their bombs had caused.

At the top of his climb, Jones rolled over again and started his second pass. The bombs had mostly hit around the head of the column so he thought it would be only fair to give the rear some attention. He put the pipper of his cannon sight on the last ranks and squeezed the trigger, haring the vicious rasp of the M-61 as it pumped its shells into the scattering mass of baldricks. Then, he lifted the nose, marching the tracers along the column, only ending when he was getting too low for comfort. Still, he had some ammunition left and a part of it was used on a harpy that staggered across is nose. Then he was away again, once more climbing for altitude.

“Frankenstein aircraft, formate on me, we’re going home to get some more goodies.” If there were any he thought quietly, the rate we’re using the stuff up, the day when we run out can’t be that far off.

The six Thunderchiefs formed up into a loose arrowhead and started back towards the Hellmouth and home. Up ahead of him, Jones saw something that he couldn’t quite identify so he angled his course to take a closer look. It was further away than he had thought, mainly because the objects were so much larger.

“Just what the blazes is that?” the voice on the radio wasn’t quite identifiable but Jones shared the sentiments. It was a huge, misshapen beast, flying in an ungainly pattern, not quite holding a true course or height. He looked harder, it had wings of course, and a tail that seemed to act as a rudder. Then he caught his breath – it had seven heads.

“It’s a hydra, a flying hydra. And its huge, those wings must be three, four hundred feet across. Uh-oh look out guys. There’s wyverns with it and we haven’t seen ones like this before.” The wyverns were far larger than any that had been reported to date and were a brilliant gold in color. Jones started to count them and as he got to twelve, they broke formation to attack his aircraft. Simultaneously, the hydra dived away and started to break for cover, it might be ungainly but it was fast.

Jones picked out one of the Wyverns, the old Thud was no dogfighter but this wasn’t the time to argue matters. Once again he firewalled the throttle and felt the surge of power from his engine. The formation of six aircraft split into three pairs, one heading up and right, one up and left, the center pair with Jones in the lead went straight up. He glanced at the speed tape-gauge, he was pulling almost 18,000 feet per minute in a climb that was close to being straight up. As his speed bled off, he timed his climb, then rolled the F-105 over and dropped the nose. The wyverns were beneath him and his chosen target was in the perfect position for a gun pass. The Thud accelerated downwards and he moved the pipper so that it was on the tail of the monster. Then his cannon rasped again and he saw the tracers thudding into its body.

It was a short burst, it had to be he’d used most of his ammunition up on the column of troops. He saw tracers flashing past his wing, his wingman was firing as well, using up what was left of his cannon ammunition on the stricken wyvern. The creature was flailing, dying, the ball that ended its tail whipping through the air. That ball was dangerous, it had already cost the humans aircraft and that had been from the much smaller wyverns seen over the Phlegethon. It didn’t matter though, the Thuds were clear and three of the wyverns were dying, shot to pieces by the 20mm gatling guns in the nose of the F-105s.

“Any sign of that hydra?”

“It’s gone Loco.”

Jones swore quietly, a modern aircraft would have an air-to-air radar that could have found the beast in the dust laden air but the F-105 was old and obsolete. Still, she’d done her best at an age when any aircraft should have expected genteel retirement. The hydra had got away but the troops on the ground hadn’t. Nor had three wyverns.

Sixth Circle of Hell.

Xisorixus pulled himself out of the ditch that he had managed to find when the human sky chariots had found him. It had been so sudden he hadn’t had time to think about what to do, the chariots had screamed out of the sky and dropped their mage-bolts all over his column. Then they’d come back and repeated the performance, spraying fireflies into his foot soldiers. A few seconds that was all it had taken. They’d gone and left this shambles behind them.

The road was torn up, the stones shattered and cast around by the mage bolts that had left craters where they had landed. Around them were torn fragments of black flesh that was all anybody would ever find of those unlucky enough to be hit. Further out from the mage-bolt craters the wounded were sprawled on the ground, wailing with pain from the injuries inflicted by the iron splinters in their bodies.

“Get up, get moving. His Infernal Majesty did you the honor of inspecting you in person. Now show yourselves worthy of that privilege.” Then Xisorixus looked up at the city of Dis towering overhead and saw the great cloud of dust that masked where Satan’s palace had once stood. Others were looking at it as well.

“He might do the inspecting but he’s not around to do the fighting is he?” The voice from his troops was unidentifiable but the murmur of agreement that swept through the ranks showed that the speaker had a lot of agreement. Xisorixus was about to challenge the speaker, whoever he was, but then he decided to let it slide.

“How many have we lost?” Instead it was time to take stock of his losses.

“About eight hundred.” The reply was from the senior ‘Baron’ who Xisorixus had appointed to lead his first Legion. A ‘Baron’ who had led nothing larger than an octurbinium before and whose aristocratic rank was unrecognized by anybody outside Xisorixus’s hastily-assembled Army.

Eight hundred out of thirty thousand. A sharp loss for an attack that had been over in seconds but one that his army could swallow. The whispered words about the fighting on Earth and now along the Phlegethon were that a human attack usually created far more havoc than this.

“Resume our march. We will overrun the rebelling humans and gain great glory. And much favor in the eyes of His Majesty. We will have succeeded where Abigor and Beelzebub have failed!”

A ragged cheer went up and Xisorixus’s Army started to move again, leaving its dead beside the road. As they did, not a few were wondering when the Sky-Chariots would return and what form of death they would bring next time.

Chapter Sixty Nine

RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus.  Wing Commander Martin Winters eased Vulcan B.2 XH558 down onto the air station’s long runway after taking her up for an air test. RAF Akrotiri was being used by the RAF as a staging post for aircraft bound for Iraq and onwards for operations in Hell.

The station was crowded with military aircraft and was busier than it had been at any point in its history, since the old days of the Near East Air Force anyway. In fact apart from more modern aircraft like Typhoons and Tornados it even looked like something out of the old NEAF days. Other than XH558 there were three other operational Vulcans and two Victor K.2s, a line-up of twelve Buccaneer S.2s, some of which had come all the way from South Africa, now wearing the markings of a reformed 208 Squadron, while four Phantom FGR.2s sat at the end of the row of Buccaneers, their paintwork looking a little faded, but were every bit operational. On the opposite side of the runway parked among ultra-modern Typhoons were a pair of Canberra PR.9s and a T.4. Winters expected to see the Battle of Britain flight with its Spitfires, Hurricane and other Word War Two veterans turning up an any moment. Then he reminded himself that those aircraft had been assigned to the Home Guard and were patrolling over cities in case of any more lava attacks. Of course, there was always the Shuttleworth Trust……

Ground Traffic Control was bleating as usual, they just weren’t used to having this many aircraft on the ground at once nor were they accustomed to the big bombers being around. Wing Commander Winters taxied the big bomber to the end of the row where the rest of the V-Bomber Flight was parked and shut down the four Rolls Royce Olympus 201 engines. Within seconds with the air conditioning turned off the cockpit began to get unbearably hot.

“Come on, lads, let’s get out of here before we all fry.” Winters said jocularly to his crew.

Like many of the aircrew in the flight Winters was a recalled pilot who had last flown the Vulcan in the early 1980s. The flight had the highest average age of aircrew of any unit in the Royal Air Force, and the highest average seniority, there were far more Wing Commanders and Squadron Leaders in such a relatively small unit than there normally would be. The air force was now attempting to rectify this situation by transferring some aircrew from the Nimrod and Tornado force to the V bombers. Since the RAF was hoping to buy some of the B-1Cs that the Americans were planning to put back in production the experience of flying large bomber aircraft would be valuable. Just as was happening all over the world, the museum-pieces were filling the gap until new production could replace them and allow them to return to retirement.

Winters climbed down the crew ladder, making sure he remained in the shadow of the big bat-winged bomber while he waited for the four other men to climb down. While he was doing so he heard the sound of another pair of aircraft making their approach. He did not recognise the engine sound and decided to go take a look, perhaps it was a visiting aircraft from another NATO unit.

“Bloody hell!” He remarked in astonishment as he saw the first of the pair of new aircraft flare out and release its braking parachute.

The large white aircraft’s nose wheel touched down and it began to decelerate, demonstrating the short-field capability that had been designed in from the start. As it passed XH558 Winters took in its pale, bleached national roundels and its serial number – XR220.

The Vulcan’s co-pilot, Squadron Leader David Maxwell, noticed that Winters was standing as if he was in a daze. He had not yet noticed either of the two arrivals.

“What is it, Boss…?” He said just in time to see the second aircraft, XR222, taxi past. “No…that couldn’t be! Tell me the Sun has finally gotten to me and that was a Tornado, not what I just thought it was.”

“I’m afraid that’s what you thought it was, it’s the second one in fact.” Winters replied.

“Well they kept that pretty quiet, Boss. I never heard so much as a peep that anybody was working on them.”

“Considering that they’ve got no hours on the airframe and have been cosseted for the last forty odd years it must have been fairly easy to get them flying again. Depends how extensive the internal damage was I guess, I’d heard Healey had ordered them cut up inside. Either the staff fixed them up while they were on show or the orders sort of got lost. I suppose they looted the Concorde program for engines and spares. I always heard Maggie Thatcher wanted the aircraft put back in production so some work must have been done back then as well.”

“Way I heard it, it was just the electrical wiring that was hacked up, they even cut the cabling rather than disconnecting it. But they’ve been in temperature-controlled and air-conditioned environments so the wiring may have been the only thing that needed replacing. Winters turned to the great bomber above and behind him. “Sorry, Old Girl, I’m afraid you’re no longer the star of the show.”

Winters could swear that he heard the bomber ‘harrumph’, evidently she disapproved of such show-offs as the ‘Grey Ghost’. On the other hand it could just be the airframe expanding and contracting as some bits of it heated up in the Sun and others cooled down.

The two new arrivals taxied to the end of the line of Buccaneers, shut down their Olympus 22R engines and opened their cockpit canopies. Winters and Maxwell recognized their aircrew as belonging to the Fast Jet and Weapons Operational Evaluation Unit, which until recently had the number plate of 41 Squadron, though that unit had reformed as a Jaguar GR.3A squadron. Since nobody had flown an aircraft like these since Roland Beamont had test flown the first prototype it was probably quite sensible to have the most experienced pilots in the service fly them.

Behind him, Maxwell shook his head. If this looting of museums went on, there wouldn’t be an aviation collection left intact. Idly, he wondered what the Russians were recovering from Monino and whether the Chinese would let the Americans have their U-2 back. Then it struck him that this showed just how seriously humans were taking this war. They were prepared to destroy their past, their history, their background, everything that they normally held dear if by doing so they could get one more combat aircraft, one more ship, one more tank into the battle zone. They were fighting this war regardless of cost, regardless of effort. All that mattered to them was winning. Suddenly he felt quite sorry for Yahweh and Satan whose posturing had unleashed this fury upon them.

Mission Control, Detroit

“Now, this is going to present an interesting problem.”

“I thought this test shot was pretty well worked out. There’s nothing that problematical about a radio-controlled aircraft surely?”

“Not that. The test will work or it won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.” The Targeteer gestured at the newspaper that was folded up and discarded on the desk. “That will.”

Doctor Kuroneko looked confused. “The election.”

“That? It won’t really make that much difference who wins. The Republic is stronger than a retired warhorse and a jackass combined. No, I meant the court ruling from Texas. They’ve just sentenced a sex offender called James Kevin Pope to 40 life prison terms — one for each sex assault conviction — and 20 years for each of the three sexual performance of a child convictions. They’ve made the sentences consecutive so he’s got 4,060 years. He will be eligible for parole in the year 3209.”

Doctor Kuroneko still looked confused. The problem with the targeteers was that their disinterested, inflexionless voices gave no hint as to whether they were joking or not. “I’m sorry, I still don’t follow.”

“Well, in the past, all such jail sentences were a bit absurd, after all, what were they going to do? Hold parole hearings around a two millennia old grave? But what happens now? Pope goes to jail, dies in his cell sooner or later, probably sooner, ordinary decent criminals don’t like child molesters, and goes up to the next level. Does he serve out the rest of his sentence there? Or does he get a pass since he’s dead? And if you think we had trouble over capital punishment in the past, wait until everybody starts arguing the issue now.”

“Excuse me Sir, the transport aircraft is approaching the portal now.”

“Thank you Captain. Any problems?”

“No Sir, the C-119 is behaving like a charm. A very well-behaved old lady. The museum we got it from looked after her well. It’s a pity to blow her up really.”

“Not really, the other option is to waste a modern transport and we need all the ones we can get.”

In the distance, the great waterfall of molten rock was still pouring down over the city of Detroit. Most of the city itself was hidden behind the clouds of smoke and steam that were rising from the blocked river and the burning city center. Detroit had been a horrifying experience for everybody involved, much worse than the disaster that had engulfed Sheffield. The river had been the real factor that had made everything so grim, after the lava flow had blocked it, the city had been flooded, drowning many of the trapped people before they could be rescued. New Orleans had been bad enough, Katrina had left the city so badly damaged it was doubtful if it would ever fully recover but Detroit was worse. Even with FEMA actually doing their job this time, Detroit was still far worse.

The electro-optical display showed the view from the cockpit of the remote-controlled C-119. The torrent of lava was filling the screen and the temperature readout was reaching critical levels.

“It’s time, touch her off.”

“Sorry old girl.” The Captain at the remote flight controls whispered, turned a key on the control board, then lifted a switch cover and pressed the button it concealed. Just below the sky-volcano, a brilliant flash momentarily eclipsed the orange-crimson stream.

The watchers held their breath while the blast was absorbed by the portal. The lava stream seemed to falter, spluttering as the black ellipse of the portal fluctuated in size. There was a breath pause, the darkness seeming intense without the great luminous stream.

“Do you think it…” Doctor Kuroneko could hardly bring himself to say the word ‘worked’.

“No.” The targeteer stared at the ellipse, it was reopening and a surge of lava poured through, a much greater torrent than there had been before the blast. It faded away again as the pent-up mass dropped through but only to return to its previous volume.

“I was afraid of that.” Kuroneko sounded distressed. “I think we’ll have to explode the bomb from the other side to close the portal.”

“No problem. We’ve got a for that plan in place. Several in fact.”

Site of Satan’s Palace. City of Dis, Hell

“Work faster you lazy fools. Our master may be waiting for you.” Belial screamed out the challenge. He had assumed responsibility for the rescue effort, sending out his demons to bring in every orc they could find. Now the crater was full of them, digging out the shattered stone. Some had already been killed when the stones had shifted and they had fallen into a void, only to be crushed when the stones moved again.

Belial looked down in growing frustration, there had been no survivors found yet and his hopes were fading fast. All his efforts to win his way back into Satan’s favor couldn’t be wasted, could they? Then, he was aware of a darkening, a shadow over him. He turned and looked up, afraid this may be yet another devilish human trick. But it wasn’t, with a surge of relief he recognized the great wings and the seven heads that looked down on him. Euryale had bred this creature herself, using all the skills and magics she could bring. A cross-breed of a Greater Harpy and a Hydra, a mount that had no equal anywhere else in Hell. It had been a gift for Satan, a great mount that was unique, that Satan could use to overawe any who saw him. The seven great heads stared at him and he wondered if they knew it was to his house that they owed their existence. Or if they cared. The implication of the sight dawned on him and relief surged through his body.

“Your Infernal Majesty. You live!”

Satan looked down on the figure below him. “Belial, you brought the humans here! You betrayed me to them.”

“No Sire, I was on my way here myself when the human aircraft struck. They dropped their bombs but I was just far enough away to live.”

Satan stared at him still, weighing up the scene before him. “And you started the rescue effort. How many other Lords of Hell aided you?”

“None, Your Majesty.” Because they are all dead he thought but no need to say that. “But the lesser demons you see here rallied around to aid. All they needed was direction. We gathered the orcs and started digging. We will not stop until we have an accounting.”

Satan nodded slowly and focussed his vision on Belial’s face, seeing the traces of his tears from frustration and rage. “And you wept for me Belial.” Satan’s voice was dumbfounded, disbelieving. “You wept for me and fought for my life while others scurried away to save themselves. Such bravery and loyalty deserve recognition. The realms of Asmodeus remain unawarded. From now on they shall be the realms of Belial. I give them to you, holding them of course is up to you.”

Belial looked around, he was heir to Asmodeus and faced wealth unparalleled. Then he frowned slightly, Euryale hadn’t just created the giant flying hydra, she had bred the golden wyverns, greater by far than the normal breed, as its bodyguard. She had created twelve of them but there were only nine surrounding the crater.

Satan saw him look and deigned to give an explanation to his now-favored vassal. “I was meeting with my Greater Heralds for information on the battle for they can be trusted when the reports of others cannot. I was there with them when this happened. On the way back, a group of human sky-chariots, you called them aircraft? attacked us. Three of my wyverns were killed. They attacked me!” Satan’s voice went into a pitched, intense scream. “I must have revenge. How did the attacks you promised succeed.”

“Beyond our best hopes Your Majesty. Sheffield and Dee-troyt have been destroyed, one of my agents on Earth reports that the human herald Cee-En-En says that many factories have been destroyed. My promise is fulfilled Your Majesty, I await your further orders.”

“Destroy more cities. And your next target will be?”

“Turin Your Majesty. One prisoner identified it as a great arsenal city also. And there is something strangely satisfying about the idea of pouring white-hot lava over Turin. But Sire, we will need more Naga, to open more portals.”

“Then take what you need from the other Lords.” Satan looked down at the pit where the orcs were laboring to excavate the ruins. “And when those orcs have finished digging down there, kill them all. I do not want their stories being told.”

Chapter Seventy

Recreational Hall, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

“Aces and Eights with a Queen on the side. Read’em and weep.” Sergeant (deceased) Tucker McElroy reached out and scooped the pool off the table with a flourish.

Corporal Gerry Links looked miserably at the empty table and his depleted stake. “I guess you had to come up with the Dead Man’s Hand didn’t you? That a common deal down here?”

“Depends on the dealer.” McElroy leaned back and tried to make his mind up what to do with his winnings. That was the trouble with Hell, there just wasn’t that much to spend money on. No economy as yet, not for humans anyway. His reverie was interrupted by a whack on his back.

“Hey Tucker dude, Good to see you. I heard you got killed up at Hit.” Elmer Carleton was an old acquaintance of McElroy’s, now part of 1st Brigade.

“I was.” McElroy eyed him to see the effect. Living humans hadn’t quite got used to the idea of speaking with the dead yet. Not in social circumstances anyway. Carleton didn’t disappoint him, the corporal’s eyes started to bulge.

“So you’re dead, dude.” The words were interspaced with disbelief and confusion.

“Sure am. You sitting in on the game? Got a stake?”

“No, unless you want to stake me.”

“You know the rules down here Elmer. I give you a stake, you got to sign your soul over to me as security. Now, if you’ll just sign here, in blood of course….” McElroy looked at the retreating back of the Corporal with great satisfaction, then turned to Links. “Never fails. Too many Hollywood movies. Looks like the game’s over Gerry, want to go for a burger?”

“I didn’t think you dead ones ate?”

“We don’t have to but we still like food. Don’t have to sleep either but its still good to. Demons eat, don’t ask me why we don’t and they do. Leave them questions to the egg-heads. Let’s go get that burger.”

Field Trials Unit, Left Flank, Phlegethon River Front, Hell

It didn’t quite look like any vehicle Edovin had seen before. A bit like an American Bradley but it had eight roadwheels and a lower, sleeker superstructure topped with a bulky turret. For all the vehicle’s size, the gun mounted in that turret seemed remarkably small. At the back of the gun mount was a drum-like radar.

“Lieutenant Edovin, Georgii Aleksandrovich reporting for duty Tovarish Lieutenant.”

The American officer turned around and looked quickly at the Russian. “Ah, you’re our liaison officer. I’m Mickey Marston. Good to have you on board. The ole’ bus will be a bit cramped until we’ve shot off some of the ammunition but it’ll be OK afterwards. Make yourself at home. Got any kit with you? That’ll have to go inside, new rules, nothing flammable outside the armor. Too many vehicles lost to harpy-fire already.”

“Yes bratischka, my Shilka was one of them. What is this vehicle.”

The American laughed. “A bit of everything. It’s basically an M-2 Bradley, believe it or not. We had a thing called the Future Combat System, a crackpot scheme to have a new standard vehicle for the Army that would do anything. Well, the contractor had to produce something to show where the money went so they built this stretched Bradley. Fooled the Congresscritters into thinking something was happening. Then, The Message came and the war started. FCS was cancelled and the production of Abrams and Bradleys got restarted. This was shoved into a shed somewhere until we realized how dangerous the harpies were and it got dug out. Now, the Navy had just adopted a Swedish 57mm gun for a couple of its programs, they’ve been cancelled as well of course, so GD Land Systems stuck the gun in a new turret, fitted a radar stripped out of old F-18s for fire control and kludged the whole thing together. So here we are, four prototype vehicles each with a radar-controlled 57mm gun and 1,200 rounds of ammunition.

“Rate of fire?” Edovin looked at the vehicle, for a hastily-thrown together improvision it looked remarkably capable if ungainly.

“240 rounds per minute. Three round burst-limiter on the gun. Throws a six pound shell.”

“Sir, we got the mount up order.” One of the vehicle crew, presumably who had been on radio watch, yelled out the message.

“Right, Georgy, mount up, we got to go shooting.”

The American Lieutenant had been right, the vehicle was cramped inside despite its size. Ammunition everywhere, some in ready-to-use racks, the rest stowed around wherever space could be found. That was something humans were learning fast, combat vehicles needed ammunition stowage above pretty much everything else. There were information screens as well, but they were mostly turned off, the Russian Army just didn’t have the combat information systems the Americans had, but then few did. Once screen was lighted and it showed the dots that represented the airborne harpies over the remains of the attacking baldrick formation. The baldricks were perilously close to breaking through. Marston flipped some more switches and additional screens lit up. The were fuzzy for a second and then cleared, showing the array of tanks that were waiting. Over a thousand after the latest reinforcements had arrived, mostly Russian by a division of Germans, a brigade of Indian T-72s, even some Turkish M48s. The old M48s were more useful than might be suspected, their 90mm guns could kill a baldrick just as well as a 125 but the M48s had twice as much ammunition as the more modern vehicles.

“Roll.” Marston’s voice snapped out the order and the anti-harpy vehicle started forward, it’s three companions keeping alongside it, spaced out to cover the maximum amount of front. Edovin looked at one of the displays, it showed the long barrel of the 57mm gun, it was probably the electro-optical sight. Without warning he was thrown off his feet as the turret swung fast to a new bearing and the gun cracked out three rounds, so fast the bursts seemed to blend into each other. On the electro-optical screen, a harpy exploded as the rounds tore into it. Edovin had barely time to register the score when the turret lurched again and another burst cracked out.

“Sorry about the turret.” Marston yelled over the noise of the diesel and the sound of the 57mm ammunition sliding around. “Navy thing, swinging it so fast.”

That made sense for a point-defense gun. Edovin thought and wondered if somewhere surplus Russian Navy point defense guns were being mounted in a chassis for this role. If not, it would be a good idea to report the idea. He bounced off the side of the turret again, the swings of the gun and the rapid cracks of its shots were almost continuous as the experimental gun started carving the surviving harpies out of the sky. Beside them, the waves of tanks accelerated towards the baldricks ahead,

140th Guards Tank Regiment, 5th Guards Tank Division “Don” Southern Flank, Phlegethon River

This was it, the great scything blow that would send the baldricks staggering back across the river in defeat. Just as Zhukov’s tanks had once advanced through the mud to send the fascists back across the Dneiper and the Dneister rivers. Major Evgenii Yakovlevich Galkin knew his history well, one German Army had been destroyed at Stalingrad but six had been wiped out in the great Mud Campaign in those first months of 1944, and three Panzer armies had been wrecked so badly they were never worth much afterwards. Today, it would be the start of an equal destruction, one that would be known to the world in a way the great Mud Campaign had never been.

The baldricks had forced their way through the Russian defenses at last, it had taken them time and they’d been bloodied terribly in doing so but they had made it through. Now, just when they thought they could see the clear ground beyond the killing fields, this mighty wave of tanks would sweep them away. Glakin looked quickly through the remote control on his turret top machine gun, the briefing had been very clear. The flying harpies were the main threat, they could hurt armor with their fire. Kill them first. The baldricks foot soldiers were less of a threat, they could be shot and crushed just as tanks had always crushed the infantry that had dared to oppose them. The briefing was being obeyed, the sky over the baldricks was black with anti-harpy fire. Every gun that could be found was here, there were even ancient ZSU-57s, twin 57mm guns in an open turret on an old T-54 tank chassis. Their crews had courage for their turret gave them no protection if the harpies got close.

Off to the right were the Americans with their experimental anti-harpy tank. They were struggling to keep up with the fast Russian tanks and their gun was swinging wildly, with short bursts at odd intervals. At first Galkin thought the American crew were panicking but then he realized those short bursts were tearing the closest harpies out of the sky. It was speed of reaction, not panic and Galkin was suddenly impressed. Around the tanks and anti-harpy vehicles were armoured personnel carriers. This time they were not carrying infantry to screen the tanks, they were the refuge for any crew that lost their vehicle. If a crew had to bail out, the nearest APC would hasten over to pick them up before the harpies could kill them.

Speaking of harpies, Galkin saw one staggering close to his tank. His machine gun spat out a burst and the creature flopped from the sky. It had probably been dying anyway but it never hurt to make sure. Then the tank lurched slightly as it ran over the body. Never hurt to make very sure. Galkin looked at the sky again, the anti-harpy fire was slackening off to a faint shadow of its previous self, the gunners running out of targets at last. As if to confirm his thoughts, the radio crackled briefly, orders for all guns to cease firing on airborne targets and concentrate on the ground. Then the message was suddenly reinforced, friendly aircraft were coming in. Galking grinned to himself, the baldricks were about to learn the joys of being on the receiving end of close air support.

He looked again, this time at the baldricks up ahead. Mostly just a battered, exhausted mass of foot soldiers but he could see one of the great rhinolobsters with a coiled naga on its back. The lightning was flickering out from the creature as it attacked one of the vehicles racing across the plain. Then, Galkin saw the aircraft coming in. he ran through the shape in his head, straight wings, twin tail, two engines, between the wings and the tail, an American A-10. This, he thought, should be good.

It was, the A-10s nose erupted into flame and the Rhinolobster and its burden vanished under a cloud of dirt and dust thrown up by the torrents of shells. When it faded, the creatures were lying on the ground, smashed and eviscerated. The A-10 turned slightly, climbed a little then changed course to unleash a hail of rockets on to another group of baldricks off to the left. The aircraft knew exactly where to go, Galkin guessed that they were being steered in by the Americans somehow, by an airborne command aircraft perhaps? Or even those new anti-harpy vehicles?

The lines of baldricks were approaching fast and it was time for the Don Division to strike its own blows. The foot soldiers had lined up, forming ranks as the tanks had appeared, now those ranks vanished as the 125mm shells tore into them. Galking could almost sense the weariness and despair in their minds as they saw their lightning bolts bouncing off the tanks, realized that the tanks were not going to stop. The turret of his tank was filling with smoke as his gun swung from one group of baldricks to the next, firing their shots into the mass of infantry. They were close enough now so he could see individual features of the baldricks as they crumpled and died under the onslaught. He had his own commander’s gun firing, sweeping the tracer bullets across the enemy ranks, watching the baldricks fold as they were mown down. The tank’s main gun was silent, the last few rounds were being kept for emergencies and the gunner was using his co-axial machine gun in its place.

Still closer, the baldricks still there – and then they broke, broke and ran from the tanks that were already far too close for any retreat to bring safety. Galkin’s tank tore into the mass, its machine guns still firing, the driver spinning the T-80U on its tracks, grinding the baldricks underneath the vehicle as it plowed through their ranks. They were running, all around the tanks they were running, the machine gunners spraying them with fire, chasing them down and crushing them. Galking could hear the rattle as bullets bounced off his armor, the tanks were hitting each other in the wild frenzy of the slaughter but it didn’t matter. Machine gun bullets couldn’t hurt the tanks. Nor could the baldricks although they tried, breaking their tridents on the armor, trying to tear at the tanks with their hands. They fought, hopelessly, bravely, uselessly.

Off to his left, Galkin saw baldricks, a dozen or more of them in a ditch, behind a mound. Were they hiding? Or wounded and looking for a place to die? It didn’t matter, he gave his orders and the tank swung around, parallel with the ditch. Then he felt one side drop as the treads went into the ditch and he drove along it, crushing the baldricks sheltering within. Glakin heard screams, perhaps the baldricks, perhaps just the metal tracks as they ran over the suspension rollers. Then his tank levelled again and he made another turn back to his original route. The Phelgethon River lay ahead, the gains the baldrick army had fought for two days to secure and for which they had sacrificed so much had been wiped out by the tanks in less that twenty minutes.

South of the City of Dis  This time Belial had taken his wyvern low, down beneath the dusty brown overcast that was nearly ubiquitous in hell. With the human 'aircraft' still very evident, screaming and roaring somewhere over the Phlegethon river, Belial thought it best to stay inconspicuous. What he saw beneath him steadily drained away the elation from his sudden elevation. Countless demon warriors, streaming towards Dis, some still as ordered legions but many as individual squads or even disorganised crowds. The horrible wounds that marked many of the demons, the battered or missing equipment, the cries and wails both audible and telepathic, all made it clear that this was an army retreating in defeat. Belial had cast his mind out, trying to make contact with a commander to learn what manner of catastrophe had inflicted such ruin on the grand armies of hell. It was no use though, despite being leagues from the front lines his mind still rang from the impossibly powerful psychic emanations from the massed human mages. The din made it impossible to hold a coherent conversation from a thousand feet up and Belial couldn't risk stopping. 'But where are all the harpies?' he thought.

Belial soon reached the far edge of the ragged demon column and had resigned himself to remaining ignorant of the details until he next returned to Dis. As he looked up from the ground a flicker of movement caught his eye. Sure enough, at the far end of a low valley he could make out a group of tiny flapping shapes. He spurred his mount to greater effort and it surged ahead, making up the distance to the other flyers which quickly resolved themselves into six of his own wyvern riders. The beast were flying slowly; two had flanks marked with horrible gashes and burns and another had wing membranes so shredded that Belial was surprised it was still airborne. The riders didn't look much better.

Count Belial! Aaesurnarthuse's tone betrayed a strange mix of surprise, relief, fear and exhaustion. The humans... it was a slaughter. Great flocks of harpies, torn from the sky or poisoned on the ground. Fire lances and iron pellets everywhere. Ikaarithanjuur went down on our third strike, they hit him with two huge fire lances... Beelzebub's forces started to retreat... I took command and ordered a withdrawal. It sounded better than 'I ran away', but not much.

It is Grand Duke Belial now. Are there any more of you? Did any others escape? These are all that are left? Belial couldn’t keep the shock out of his mind-voice. A niggling voice told him that Euryale would be furious when she found that her prized war-wyverns had been slaughtered. Furious and heartbroken, Belial thought and was surprised to realize that the thought of her grief saddened him

Belial's wyvern reached the formation and they automatically fell into a V behind him, the wounded beasts struggling to keep up. Mere hours ago he would have had the flight leader executed for cowardice, but after the events at Satan's palace he was beginning to understand what fighting the humans must be like. This wasn't war as demons understood it. It wasn't even the war he'd imagined, a decades-long conflict between dug-in formations that could be won by disrupting the human's supply of magic weapons. This was anhiliation, this was vengeance come swift and terrible to smash their strongest holdings and humble their greatest generals, this was... with rising horror Belial realized that this was exactly what the demons had done to hundreds of lower plane worlds, but with speed and efficiency the legions of hell could only dream of. If the humans could not be stopped, and after what he'd seen today that seemed like a very real danger, then the entire demon realm and every demon in it would be slaughtered.

I can't say my lord. I saw others flying away from the battle, but the sky chariots were on their tails. I fear only a handful made it.

Your two uninjured riders will fly a search pattern and round up any survivors. They are to return to Tartarus after four days at the latest. Your injured riders are to stay together and return at the best speed they can manage. Avoid the humans at all costs. With most of his prized war wyverns destroyed, the count was in no position to write off injured troops. You will escort me and tell me everything you can of the battle. These humans must have weaknesses, and we must identify them. He nearly added 'before it's too late', but there was no point further demoralizing his troops. Quite the opposite, if this continued the demon armies would need hope that the humans could be defeated at all, and he was the only one who could give them that. The secret of Palelabor could be kept no longer.

Chapter Seventy One

Dis-Dysprosium Highway, Hell

His army was disintegrating, dissolving into chaos even while he watched. It had sounded so easy, so sensible, to drop back to a defensible line where he could hold and block the human advance. Demonic warfare had few concepts for defensive operations, mostly the two armies just attacked each other, but defense was the only option he had. Or thought he had for it had turned out that the option existed in name only.

He had picked his defensive ground carefully, a low line of hills, steep on the face the humans would have to climb, gentle behind it. It had been good ground, a good defense line and the humans had got there first. While one of their armies had pinned him on the Phlegethon, another had outflanked him and already taken the position he had picked with such care. What was left of his army had crumpled against their gunfire. His last organized legions had been shattered by mage bolts and sky-chariots that had swarmed all over them

Beelzebub heard the scream that announced the arrival of more sky-chariots and cursed Belial. It was that pathetic minor lord with his wyverns who had given the humans the idea of using their sky chariots to attack forces on the ground. If he’d minded his own business and left war to the Great Dukes who were practiced in it, then his force would not be subject to these shattering attacks. Over his columns of retreating legions, two white sky-chariots made their pass, a stream of objects falling from their bellies and under their winds. The objects stopped abruptly in the air as their tails spread out, then they started to shed a cloud of small balls that dropped over the heads of his soldiers before exploding. By the time the smoke cleared, a gaping rent had been cleared in one of his columns, another legion savagely mauled.

Overhead, four more sky-chariots were already closing in, ugly, ungainly looking beasts compared with the sleek white creations than had just passed. They had flown overhead high up, then one had turned and dived, the others following their leader. They were slower too, much slower and Beelzebub briefly wondered where his harpies were, they could destroy beasts like that. Then he remembered, they were dead, wiped out by sky chariots and a magery to horrible to name or even envisage. His pride, his flock of harpies that had gained him his name of ‘Lord of the Fliers’ were dead, their corpses already rotting on the accursed field of the Phlegethon.

Beelzebub watched with resignation as the Sky Chariots got to work, pouring fire-lances into a mass of his foot soldiers that were clustered on the road. What was it for? His army was gone, defeated, destroyed, savaging the remnants like this made no sense at all. Then his spine started to bristle for two of the sky chariots had turned and seemed to be heading for him. He heard a weird noise that drowned out the wail of their battle-cry a rasping, crackling noise that coincided with fire burning in their nose. A few trident-lengths short of his, the ground erupted in a cloud of dust and broken rock, a cloud that raced across the stony soil of Hell and embraced him. Beelzebub felt the slam as the mage bolts tore into his body, felt them bite deep, spreading sickness and destruction permeate him. Without being aware of it, he had dropped to his knees, and he was too tired to move. So tired, tiredness he had never felt before, weakness that made him want to give up and sleep. Overhead, the other two Sky Chariots made their passes and fired two more fire lances. Had Beelzebub been aware they were called Mavericks, he might have appreciated knowing the name of his killer but he didn’t and their impact sent him spiraling down into the sleep that he craved.

Cliffton Council Estate, Nottingham, United Kingdom

It had been ten days now, ten days of being forced to sit here all day staring at the news channels until he had passed out from exhaustion. Even that brought little respite, the foul presence made sure that his sleep was uneasy and his dreams visions of fire and pain. The demons had relaxed their mental leash from time to time, just long enough to see to essential bodily functions, but Christopher was still unable to do so much as leave the house. Every time he'd tried the crushing pain overwhelmed him; after the third day he simply had no fight left in him. The presence did seem to change from day to day, as if different minds were taking control, but he hadn't been able to identify specific demons.

They'd made him watch Detroit burn and the feeling of glee had been even stronger than for Sheffield. The demons seemed certain that the destruction of humanity was inevitable and Christopher had despaired. But when President Bush had made his defiant speech promising swift retaliation, a flicker of hope had returned – not because of the man's inarticulate rhetoric, but because the echoes of harsh laughter in his head had rung hollow somehow. Finally the pictures had come, supposedly 'before and after' infra-red images of 'Satan's greatest stronghold'. The reaction from the hellish presence was difficult to read but seemed to be disbelief. Christopher could feel them prying at his mind, trying to use his own memories to justify the idea that the whole thing was a sham. Before the possession he would indeed have been the first to proclaim the reports a hoax, but now he took a bizarre pleasure in telling himself that it was the unvarnished truth. It was a small victory, but it seemed to be enough to make the demon presence lapse into a morose silence for the last day.

The low throbbing of a diesel engine became audible over the television before cutting off. Someone was coming, in a van by the sound of it. Christopher jerked his head around to stare at the front door, struck by a sudden mix of fear and hope. 15 Psyops group perhaps? There had been rumors of a British counter-possession unit on all the blogs... The doorbell rang, its cheerful little electronic tones seeming surreal in the nightmarish situation, and suddenly his body was moving, his possessor operating him like a puppet. He pulled the door back to reveal a lanky youth with a mop of jet black hair. He looked haggard and strangely blank. Behind him was a large yellow van, parked on the street in front of the house and bearing a logo for 'Dynaflow Plumbing and Electrical - Grimthorpe'.

"Mr Hughes?" Christopher nodded.

"She wants you to come with us. Do you know who I mean?" Christopher had no idea but apparently the demon did because he found himself nodding again.

"Into the back then please. Come on."

The newcomer pulled the house door shut. Christopher wanted to protest but of course he was powerless to do so. The rear windows of the van were blacked out. He got a brief glimpse of bronze scales and glittering eyes before he was shoved roughly inside and the doors clanged shut, trapping him in the dark interior. There was a brief pause before the engine started up again and the van moved off. He had no way of telling where it was going and in any case the prospect of meeting a demon in the flesh was occupying all of his attention.

With a click the darkness was replaced by the sight of a humanoid shape crouching on the floor, clad only in metallic scales and possessing great bat-like wings, a twitching tail and face taken straight from a nightmare. The thing held a fluorescent lantern in one hand and seemed vaguely female. Then there was pain, something lancing into his chest accompanied by a sputtering crack. Chrisopher cried out and pawed at his ribs, his fingers closing around a handful of quills, which he pulled out. The demon presence was still there but it seemed content to allow him to act on his own initiative for now. For a second he considered attacking the demon but that would be suicide, it had claws that looked razor sharp and more of the quills sticking out of the snake-like growths around its head. A minute passed in silence, save for the sound of the van's engine.

Christopher was finding it hard to focus. The creature was staring at him, it didn't seem to want to attack. Finally his curiosity triumphed over his fear.

"Who are you? What are you? Why am I here? What do..."

His voice trailed off as the demoness put a finger to her lips.

"My name is Lakheenahuknaasi, and I am your goddess." In reality her voice was still raspy, but to Christopher it seemed like honey. "I see evil has made you its servant, but not willingly. I will rid you of it."

That's enough Zatheoplekkar, I'll take it from here

Are you sure? The count ordered me to keep this one alive and possessed.

This is how the angels operated, and you know how devoted their servants were. I will take all responsibility. Release him... please.

Very well.

The winged bronze woman made an extravagant gesture and Christopher slumped forward, suddenly in control of his own body again. The demon presence seemed to be completely gone from his mind! All thanks to this creature, who was seeming more pleasant by the minute. "Thank you... thank you..." The combination of stress, exhaustion and the drug infusion was too much, and Christopher collapsed to the floor, out cold.

Lakheenahuknaasi snorted. The earth-humans were so weak. No matter, she would continue later. She turned back to the magic tome the younger human had given her, unfolding it and waiting for it to come alive again. The human device was a marvel. Specifically, it was a marvel of foolishness. The humans had somehow crammed the contents of a vast library into a single tome, but they had filled that library with details of their entire magical arsenal and handed out copies to their most minor laborers. Her tame human had shown her the invocations of 'goo gul' and 'wiccan pee-dee-ah', which had revealed to her a treasure trove of secrets. The last was protected by an insidious spell that caused her to constantly lose track of what she was looking for, flipping from page to page until she was reading irrelevant nonsense about 'collectible card games' and 'sonic the hedgehog'. She persevered though, as it clearly warranted such protection because it was so rich in secrets. The task was made even harder by the casual way in which the humans seemed to mix reality and legend. She was fairly sure that this 'James Bond' was a most dangerous enemy assassin, but the notion of whole cities being destroyed by pieces of the sun was clearly either mythology or propaganda. The 'yoo tuub' and cee-enn-enn spells had shown her images from Abigor's pathetic defeat – for all his failures, his warriors had managed to slay some humans. She was sure that if the humans had possessed such impossible magics, they would have destroyed his army outright rather than face the demons at such close quarters.

Lakheenahuknaasi had already conveyed more valuable information back to Queen Euryale on her own than Deumos had obtained (or at least, shared with the other demons) with all her thousands of succubae. Her wounds were almost healed and she was fairly sure she could fly again if she had to. The next step was to acquire more worshippers. Here on earth her enthrallment darts held for days at a time, so she could easily build a small cult around herself. She would work her way up into the higher ranks and discover the human's most secret plans. Certainly she would at least be made a baroness for her accomplishments.

Broken Skull Gallery, Shaft 14, Slocum Mine, Tartarus

Reusikaanophaar stalked through the tunnel, his hooves crunching on the gravel. He was in a particularly foul mood, all of the demons were. The humans seemed to have settled down again, but there was still something wrong with them, something he couldn't quite put his talon on. Still, he'd heard that the Count's attacks on the humans had been a resounding success. If Satan granted Belial new lands to rule then he'd be sending his loyal servants to occupy them and with luck that could mean a posting on the surface for Reusikaanophaar.

The light here was very dim, but there was definitely something moving ahead. The demon strained to pick out the details... definitely a human, and its chain was broken off.

"Human! On your knees! What are you doing..."

Instead of throwing himself to the ground in the usual manner, the human had taken to his heels and sprinted away. Reusikaanophaar bellowed as he brought his trident up, then let loose with a lightning bolt. He'd had little practice with the weapon in the last few centuries and the bolt went wide, drawing a spray of rock chips from the wall. The human darted into a side tunnel before he could fire again. The demon roared again and charged after the man, now thoroughly incensed. The stupid little thing couldn't escape, all the passages here were dead ends. But he probably wouldn't be allowed to eat it; apparently the convoys of fresh humans from the pit had been interrupted, which meant no killings unless the human actually fought back. Then again, in this remote part of the mine, who'd know?

Ah, there was the human, waiting at the next bend. Probably frozen in fear. Reusikaanophaar closed the distance, bringing his trident up again... and found himself suddenly weightless, surrounded by snapping planks and falling rock. Before he could realize what was happening, there was a horrible impact and he found himself flat on his back, writhing in pain from the bronze spikes piercing his torso. With a roar that was almost a scream, he tried to lever himself back up. He was at the bottom of a twenty foot pit, filled with splinters and gravel. The bottom had pick-axe heads set into it, now dripping with his own blood. The deep wounds hurt terribly but his limbs seemed to be intact, so he should still be able to climb out. Reusikaanophaar looked up to see the face of the human staring down at him. It was a trap of course, it knew it had no chance in honorable combat and had resorted to this cowardly pit. He cast about for his trident and soon enough his hand closed around its hilt, half-buried in the rubble. But before he could bring it to bear a great lump of rock landed on his arm, shattering the bones. Reusikaanophaar screamed and looked up - there were more human faces up there now, and more rocks coming down. Almost every bone in his body was broken were broken before one boulder mercifully fell straight on his skull. The demon's last thought was regret that he'd never see his mate again.

"Well done Simplicus. Going out to face that demon unarmed, that took true courage."

Publius had been overjoyed to find another of the legions here in the underworld mines, even though their lives had been separated by over a century. He had no idea who this 'Mithras' character the man kept mentioning was, but he clearly felt betrayed by him. In any case Simplicus was a reliable recruit with a good sense of discipline and right now that was what he needed most.

"It was nothing. Those brutes are thoroughly predictable. I doubt they've had an original thought in the last ten thousand years."

The younger man's words were modest but his tone was full of enthusiasm - Publius couldn't remember the last time he'd heard that. He'd spent many hours telling his men that the demons weren't invincible, that they would die like all flesh and blood if they could be hurt badly enough, but here was the proof.

"These ones maybe, the leaders though..." But now was not time to discuss what he'd learned about the demon activity on the surface.

"Come on men, let's get this leveled off and concealed. We don't want to give away our tricks before we have to."

Division Wall Between 5th and 6th Circles of Hell

“Looks like they are coming.” Colonel Andy Jackson looked across the Styx at the great wall that separated the fifth and sixth circles of Hell. Gates were opening at regular intervals along its base and troops were starting to pour out. “Time for some action I think.” He dropped his hand to the Bowman radio and patched through to his battery of 105mm guns. “Battery, target reference……” A quick check with the laser rangefinder built into his binoculars and a frown. The dust in the Hell atmosphere played havoc with laser-based equipment. The range read-out was flickering and changing Jackson made a quick guess and read out a six-figure set of coordinates. A ‘best guess’ was better than nothing.

The gunners had their pieces loaded and ready to go, it took only a few seconds for three shells to whistle overhead and explode on the far bank of the Styx. Jackson winced slightly, the shells were well short. “Up 300, fire for effect.” The train-like roar of the shells passing overhead was immensely satisfying. This salvo landed directly in front of one of the gates, turning the baldricks pouring through it into a tangled mass of casualties. Very impressive Jackson thought, But that’s just one gate of the eight or ten the baldricks are using. The rest of them are getting out and forming up unscathed. Time to do something about that.

“Support group, bring down mortar fire on the area between the wall and the river bank. Grenade machine guns, do the same, open fire as soon as baldrick formations are within range. Artillery, keep hitting the present target until I tell you differently. Forward observer, we need some air support, now.”

“We have Jags coming in Sir. They’ll be here in five minutes. Cluster bombs and cannon.”

“Very good, what the hell do you want here.” The last remark was addressed to Jade Kim who had dropped into place beside him.

“Situation report Sir.”

“You’re supposed to be with the flanking forces.”

“Yes Sir. But the people I’ve got there are perfectly capable and don’t need me to look over their shoulders.”

At least she knows how to delegate. Jackson thought, for a junior officer, she’s got a lot of promise. She’d probably go far if she wasn’t dead. “Very good then. Now situation?”

“No movement on our flanks Sir. I’ve got my gun armed people and those who are trained to handle guns but haven’t got them yet spread out. We’ll do it Russian style, the ones who haven’t got guns can pick up ones the casualties don’t need any more. Caesar’s bringing up reinforcements, he’ll throw them in at the right moment.” Kim grinned to herself, Caesar had been very busy for the last 24 hours. She had watched him and realized exactly why poor old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus had never stood a chance.

“As long as he doesn’t get them in the way.” Jackson didn’t like the way Caesar was operating, he had no idea of what modern weaponry could do or the effects that it could have on the recipient of the firepower it generated. He could screw the whole battle up by getting his untrained personnel into the kill zones Jackson had so carefully set up. “Thank you Lieutenant, return to your flank command and hold there.”

“Sir.” Kim slid backwards and set off for her command. In theory, anyway, in fact, it was very important she didn’t go too far.

Across the river, the baldricks were forming up on the banks and starting to throw things into the water, things that floated. Others were carrying planks, the makings of a floating bridge. The mortars and artillery weren’t putting down enough firepower to stop them. That would change, Jackson thought. As he watched, he heard the grenade machine guns coughing and starting to pump their 40mm grenades into the teams assembling the bridges

The baldrick response was almost instantaneous; from along the top of the wall opposite, a great streak of lightning flashed out, lashing at the human-held bank of the river. Jackson guessed that the baldrick commander had a high proportion of his force up on that wall and were firing down at his positions to suppress fire. They learn very fast, very fast indeed ran through his mind. The fire wasn’t, couldn’t, cause many casualties but it would pin down his men and allow the baldricks to build their bridges and cross the river.

“Sir. Large baldrick movement on our right flank. At least four of their legions are moving up to the flank positions in regular formations.” Jackson grimaced as the radio spat out the message. That was it, game over. Kim’s tiny force couldn’t hold against an attack of that size, not even with the minefields and booby traps she had set up. Then the Bowman crackled again. “Sir, Harpies taking off from behind the wall.”

Jackson cursed then looked at the wall through his binoculars. The harpies were there all right, rising from behind the wall as reported. He did a quick count, gave up and made a guess. Eight hundred or so? He knew the enemy force had taken a heavy pounding from air attack on the way down by even the force left was more than he could cope with. What else did he face? He looked off to the right and saw the four great black squares of the baldrick legions advancing in column. They had harpies as well, a great cloud of them. Half a legion, 3,000 or more? This situation wasn’t just critical, it was a catastrophe in the making. Jackson had a nasty feeling that 2 PARA was about to join the Gloucesters as a part of the British Army’s list of gallant last stands. Then his grim thoughts were interrupted by Kim rejoining him.

“Lieutenant, what the hell are you doing here I ordered you to…”

“Sorry Sir, but I have to be here. Your Bowmans don’t talk to our SINCGARS and we need both communications nets working. Anyway, I’m here in my capacity as Caesar’s First Tribune, not as a U.S. Army Lieutenant.”

“Lieutenant, or whatever you want to call yourself, you are going to regret this.”

“Probably Colonel. But please take a look to your right.”

Jackson followed the suggestion. The great black blocks of the baldrick legions had advanced right up to the point where the human defenses started and then stopped. Then, as he watched, they changed subtly although he couldn’t work out why or how. The harpies overhead had also changed, they were splitting into two groups. Then, the ripple of lightning flashes erupted from the baldrick legions, not from the front as he had expected, but from the sides, directed over the river. The salvo tore into the baldricks trying to build the bridges, scattering them. As Jackson watched in disbelief, the harpy cloud crossed the river, the smaller group tackling the harpies rising from behind the wall, the larger group descending on the crenellations that topped that wall. Abruptly the barrage of lightning fire from the wall stopped as the baldricks up there stopped to fight off the harpies that were attacking them.

“Caesar’s brought up his reinforcements Colonel. Four legions of foot soldiers and a half-legion of harpies. The whole of the baldrick army that was on our right flank. Under the command of Plomniferasticas. He used to be one of Asmodeus’s lieutenants but when Asmodeus was killed he was left in command of the force Asmodeus had brought down. He didn’t have a liege-lord any more and wasn’t given one. So Caesar persuaded him to change sides. The baldricks on our left flank are also under the command of Plomniferasticas and they’ve changed sides as well. Plomniferasticas has sworn allegiance to Caesar, and to me by the way as Caesar’s tribune. The left flank force is the anvil, the right flank under Caesar is the hammer. Hold one.”

The radio in Kim’s hand was crackling. Kim lifted it to her ear and spoke quietly.

While she did so, Jackson took another look through his binoculars. Overhead was a swirling mass of harpies, studded with fire as the two flocks fought. The wall over the river looked like it was crowned with fire, lightning bolts sparkling as the garrison tried to fight off the harpies. Far off to the left, he saw the shapes of four RAF Jaguars hurtling through the overcast, bearing down on the baldrick force between the wall and the river. “Forward air control, tell those Jaguars, on no account to hit anything our side of the river, no matter what it looks like.” Jackson looked back at the baldrick force on his right, still pumping lightning bolts into the enemy ahead of them. Then the carnage caused by their fire was blanketed out by the greater slaughter of the cluster bombs exploding over the baldrick force gathered between the wall and the river. As the jets howled away, the legion at the far end of the baldrick line started to move forward, crossing the river.

“Caesar loves radios Sir.” Kim had finished taking her orders from Caesar. “He’s crossing the Styx now, his force will swing through 90 degrees, then advance with the wall on one flank and the river on the other, rolling up the enemy line. He wants 2 PARA to concentrate its fire, especially the artillery, on the baldricks ahead of him so they don’t get a chance to form up. Baldrick warfare depends on rigid formations, so if they can’t form up, they’ll be destroyed.”

Jackson nodded and gave the necessary orders over the radio. The artillery and mortar fire shifted, concentrating on the baldricks who had survived the cluster bombs. By the time he had his orders issued, Caesar had his legions across the river and had executed his change of front. Jackson watched fascinated, knowing he was the first living human to watch demons fighting demons. The front rank of Caesar’s legions fired their tridents at the disorganized mass in front of them, then dropped to one knee to recharge. The next rank passed through them, fired, and dropped as well, followed by the third and fourth ranks. The effect was a constant ripple of fire that ground into the baldrick ranks. The fire from 2 PARA completed the job and in front of him, Jackson saw the force that had threatened Free Hell dissolving into chaos.

“How did he do it Lieutenant?”

“He took my DVD player Sir. And disks we got last night of the fighting along the Phlegethon. He just told Plomniferasticas that he could be with us, then showed him film of the gas attack on the harpies and the Russian tanks smashing Beelzebub’s right wing. Or he could be against us and then he showed him the film of the battlefield, carpeted with layers of dead baldricks, mile after mile of them. Baldricks aren’t fools Sir, Plomniferasticas knew he couldn’t win against us so he changed sides.”

“But we couldn’t have stopped him. Not with them as well.”

“I know that Sir, you know that, Caesar knew that. Plomniferasticas didn’t know that. To him we are the Lords of War, unbeatable. We even blew up Satan’s palace, we didn’t get Satan himself by the way. Plomniferasticas isn’t afraid of Satan any more sir, but he’s mortally afraid of us. Oh, by the way, the army in front of us is commanded by one Xisorixus. Another Lieutenant of Asmodeus left adrift when the Grand Duke was killed. His army was basically Asmodeus’s portion of the sixth ring garrison plus odds and ends he scraped up. Not real legions at all. Plomniferasticas has real legions. Take a look.”

Jackson did as he was told. Across the river, Xisorixus’s army was collapsing, Large portions were throwing down their arms, the rest were being driven into small groups and cut down. At the forefront of the advancing legions was a single figure in polished bronze armor. Jackson didn’t need to be told that was Caesar. He was directing the troops, sending groups forward, navigating the advance so that it would do the maximum damage possible.

Kim’s radio crackled again. She listened and then smiled. “Cease fire Sir. Xisorixus has just been taken prisoner. Its all over. He’s quite a man isn’t he?”

Jackson looked sharply at Kim. She was smiling gently and there had been a lot more than just professional respect in her voice.

Chapter Seventy Two

Four Leagues West of Belial’s Stronghold, Tartaruan Range, Northern Region of Hell

Memnon settled back and closed his eyes. He was almost gray with exhaustion but he’d made it up and found a good place to hide. One concealed from Belial’s stronghold yet with good observation points near to it. Now, all he had to do was to make contact.

Hello, humans. Anybody can answer? This is Memnon speaking.

Memnon? Where are you? Is anything wrong.

Memnon stirred with pleasure, it was the human female with the rich mind-voice that sounded like water running over stones. The one who had praised his earlier efforts. “Nothing wrong, I just wished to report that I have reached Belial’s stronghold. I am four leagues west of it now and ready to receive the humans.[/i]

There was a startled silence at the other end. Wow. You must have moved very fast. Well done Memnon. You wait until I tell the Generals this, they’ll want to give you a medal or something. How are your wings?

Memnon was happy, at hearing praise again, and at the fact one of his masters cared about his health. They ache but they will be better with rest. I had to get here fast so I could arrive when the light dimmed. Nobody will have seen me come.”

That’s great. I’ll get word that you’re in place out, we’ll open a portal to you soon.

Memnon relaxed back on his rock and got ready to doze. His wings hurt and he was hungry but he didn’t care.

Recreational Hall, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

“McElroy? McElroy?”

“Here, Sir.” The Special Forces Lieutenant looked a bit harassed; he’d been told to find the dead sergeant quickly and it had taken longer than he had expected. And in any case, he felt awkward speaking to somebody who was dead. It was something a lot of people were going to find took a lot of getting used to.

“Get your team together. Quickly, the mission is a go. Get your kit as well, we’ll be gating you to Earth and then to your operational location. Be at the portal hut in twenty minutes.”

“Very good Sir.” McElroy saluted, mentally debating whether he could get away with saluting with the wrong hand and explaining it as being one of the curious effects of being dead. Not worth trying, he decided. Not now at any rate. The Lieutenant, now definitely relieved, vanished in the direction of the command hut.

“Cassidy, DeVanzo and Walsch. Get the rest of the team together, we’re ruling out. Mikkelson, get a work detail, draw our gear and get it over to the portal hut. Let’s roll guys, we’re on our way.”

McElroy, turned and headed for the door, almost bumping into a figure as he went. He stopped for a second, hardly recognizing the man in the red-mottled BDUs. “Hey, Aeneas, how goes things?”

“Not fit work for a man. Teaching scholars about what really went on in Sparta and Thermopylae. One of them insulted Queen Gorgo and when I disciplined him, there was much trouble over that.”

McElroy was fascinated. “Disciplined him? How?”

“He wrote lies about our Queen. So I broke every bone in his writing hand. I thought it was only just but the others were most displeased with me. I wish I was going with you and the rest of the gang.”

“I wish you and Ori were coming too but the brass says otherwise. This is a modern-soldier job. Where is Ori by the way?”

“Teaching some Japanese about the way of life in his era.” Aeneas shook his head. “The ideas you people have are so strange, when they speak of us it is like we see ourselves in a mirror coated with mist. The form is there, but the details…. Anyway, take care my friend. I will tell Ori that you remembered him. And kill baldricks.”

McElroy left and ran over to his quarters, picking up the bankroll he had won at poker over the last few days. One thing that didn’t change was the laws of chance and the fact that people couldn’t understand the mathematics of odds. He had a nice roll of bills for his family, enough to keep them going anyway.

By the time he got to the portal hut, his team was assembled, eight modern soldiers, all dead, none more than twenty years ago. All loaded down with the electronics gear for the mission.

“Ready to go everybody? You know the drill, spot Belial’s fortress, then set up the navigation beacon and wait for the B-1s. No fighting, no hunting, no shooting except if we get discovered.”

There was a series of nod, then a pasty faced, sulky-looking man settled back on the portal generation couch. There was a quick hum and the familiar black ellipse opened up.

“That’s quick.” McElroy was impressed.

“Our gear’s a lot better than the early versions, and its easy to push a portal through from this side. You wait, tomorrow we’re opening up a portal big enough to bring a carrier through.” The technical sergeant grinned. “I’ve even heard that Enterprise is being fitted to generate her own portals. Through you go Top.”

McElroy stepped through the ellipse and found himself in the hangar. Once again, a few families were there to greet the relatives they’d never thought they would see again. McElroy found his brother and slipped him the roll of cash. A few hugs and back-slaps later, he was on his way back. An Indian woman in a royal blue sari was taking to the technical operators.

“Excuse me, you must be Indira Singh. I’m Tucker McElroy. I’m sorry to trouble you, but do you know how kitten is?”

“It is no trouble Tucker. kitten is doing well, she had her last operation three days ago and is recovering properly in the best hospital money can buy. She has many visitors, she is something of a hero for the way she held the portals open by herself while other sensitives were being located. She is much honored.”

“Operation? Nobody told us she was sick as well as suffering from keeping the portals open. What was the matter with her?”

“Oh she was not ill, but she had to complete her gender reassignment surgery. Because of her efforts, the governments picked up the charges to make sure she had the very best.” Singh looked at the shock on McElroys’s face. “You did not know that kitten was a trans-sexual?”

“No.” McElroy was aghast. In his pocket was a long letter he had written to kitten, expressing his gratitude for all she had gone through on his behalf. Then to find out she was a……… McElroy stopped himself, hard. She still had gone through all that hadn’t she, still suffered so the people she was supporting in hell could get the tools they needed to stay free and out of torment. How dare he criticize her when she’d done all that? Inbred prejudice and irrational bigotry warred with McElroy’s reason and sense of justice. Reason and justice won out and he reached into a pocket. “Indira, could you see kitten gets this please. And send her our love, that’s from all of us. Tell her we’ll never forget what she did for us and we hope we’ll see her again but if we don’t, we hope she’ll be very happy. And tell her she won’t have to worry about going to hell any more because she’ll have lots of friends there ready to look after her.”

His team assembled, McElroy looked around. Singh was already on the portal opening couch, searching for Memnon’s mind. She found it and locked on. Then she started to shudder as the electronic equipment opened up the portal. McElroy stepped through and found himself back in Hell, but in a vastly different Hell from his previous experience. The mountains were stark, mostly volcanic, but the valleys between them were covered with vegetation, green and purple. It was warm and relatively pleasant, even the choking dust of Hell was less pronounced here. In front of him, the hulking black shape of Memnon was looking at him curiously.

“Sergeant (deceased) Tucker McElroy. We’ll take over the surveillance from here. You are Memnon aren’t you?”

“I am.” Memnon was amused by the way the question had come last. Humans were so confident their machines would work. “I must brief you on this area and where are the things you seek. Then I must fly back to Dysprosium.”

“Why don’t you portal back? We can open a gate easily enough. Just rest up until the next scheduled contact and then we’ll gate you back. No need to work harder than you have to.”

Memnon thought it over. He’d assumed he would have to fly back but the human was right. There was no need to, not now. The humans had a staging point near Belial’s fortress, why should he have to fly?

The Collegium of Fornessa, City of Dis, Hell

“You have heard the fate of Beelzebub?” Deumos sat elegantly in the luxurious seat she had brought with her.

“That he had been defeated, yes.”

“Not defeated. Killed. In an attack by human aircraft. They shot him with their cannon and blew him up with their missiles. He died like an orc, sniveling and weak.”

Dagon looked around at the decaying building that housed the meeting. He needed time to think over the news that Beelzebub had followed Asmodeus into the void. Followed him and all the others. The ranks of the Hell aristocracy had been thinned in a way none could remember. Not even the Great Celestial War had caused carnage like this. So he decided to stall for that time. “Why do we have to meet here? In this disgusting place overrun with orcs?”

Deumos recognized the stall for what it was and knew she had shocked the Great Duke. Time to answer a question with a question. “And where is Satan?”

“He moves from place to place, hiding from the humans and their aircraft. Never stays in the same place long for fear of them finding him and sending their bombers after him.”

“Satan fears the humans. Yet he asks us to fight them while he runs and hides.”

“Lady, those words are treasonous.”

“Does that make them untrue? How many millions have died already? I you do not know, I will tell you. More than three and a half million. Of Beelzebub’s army, 476 legions, only 39,000 survive of the more than 3 million who set out. The rest are rotting on the banks of the Phlegethon River. And the humans advance on Dis even while we sit here speaking.”

Deumos’s words were interrupted by the howl of jet fighters overhead. Both Great Dukes paused and looked up. The jet noise receded and was followed by the dull sound of explosions, a long way off. Somebody had just been bombed. The noise did not cause any great surprise, the sounds of human aircraft and their deadly cargoes were familiar. Familiar but still terrifying.

“And their aircraft fly over Dis without opposition.” Deumos smiled briefly. “And what are your plans Dagon.”

“I have been ordered to fight. To attack the human armies. Those orders still stand.” Dagon was uncomfortable, he had chosen to sit far away from Deumos, by an open window so the air gods would protect him from the strange magic that the Succubae used to bend others to their will.

“You will fight.” There was a note of derision in Deumos’s voice. “To what end? How will your army achieve that which eluded Beelzebub?”

“I do not know.”

“I do. You will fight, you will lose, your army will be destroyed, you will be killed. End. Have you learned nothing? The humans are the Lords of War, they cannot be defeated. They squash our armies with casual ease and they still hold back the most powerful and deadly of their weapons. For every move we make, they have a counter, already sitting in their arsenal, ready to be used.”

“But Yahweh?”

“You think Yahweh will aid us? He will sit and watch Hell and Human fight until one is gone, then he will attack the survivor. That is what humans think, it is what I and my Succubae think, and we can be very sure it is what Yahweh thinks. And the end of Hell is coming fast Dagon. It is days away, perhaps weeks at most. Have you heard the news from the pit?” Dagon shook his head. “An entire army, ten legions that were once part of the host of Asmodeus have rebelled. They have declared their fealty to the humans and attacked those who would make war on the humans. In the pit, human and demon now fight side by side, as allies. A great area of the pit, a segment of the Fifth Ring and a smaller section of the Sixth are now in human hands and those still faithful to Satan die if they go there. That area spreads hourly as the humans rescue their dead and many of them join the human army. Free Hell they call it.”

The demons rebelling and joining the humans. It seemed incomprehensible. Not just joining the humans but doing so as the junior partners in the alliance. Dagon shook his head, Deumos was right, Hell was dying. His mind ran over the options available to his army. They were few indeed and all of them led to death.

“What do you suggest Lady?” Dagon asked the question but he knew the answer.

“The humans hold Satan responsible for what has happened here. The legions in the pit have the right answer and we must follow their example. We must make peace with the humans, we must pay whatever price they ask for that peace. And, the first thing they ask will be Satan’s head. Detached from the rest of his body and very, very dead. You have said how Satan moves around too much for the humans to catch him. So we must do the deed. Kill him and set up a new rulership in hell, one that can make peace with the humans.”

“With you as ruler.” Dagon’s voice was openly scornful. The Succubae were despised, the idea of one ruling Hell was unthinkable. Most demons would die rather than allow it.

“Of course not. I am not stupid Dagon, I know what will be accepted and what will not. I cannot be ruler in Hell. But you Dagon, you can be. You are one of the very few surviving Great Dukes, you have your army to keep order. You have not fought the humans yet, they do not know much about you. We can turn that to our advantage. For we must make you acceptable to the humans, a leader they can accept.”

Ruler of Hell, successor to Satan Mekratrig. Dagon rolled the idea around in his mind. It beat inevitable death on the battlefield. “And how shall we do that, Lady?”

“The humans have been driven by the way we treat their dead. So we try to show you did what you could to help them We will set up an underground movement, we will call it.” Deumos ran the information Lugasharmanaska had sent her, searching for a suitable name. “Demons for the Ethical Treatment of Humans. We will forge documents, information, to show the humans we were trying to stop the torment of Hell, have been doing so for many years. Humans will see these and accept us. And make you the new ruler of Hell. All that we need is for Satan to die.”

Dagon ran the picture through his mind, then came across a great block that stood in the way. “But without the life energy from humans, how do we ascend to the next level. Satan collects it, it is our tribute to him. He uses it to boost us to the next level when we die. What will happen when he is gone.”

“Then we will control the human life energy. And we can use the existing energy stored for our own ends, to cement the allegiance of those underneath us. And we will make an agreement with the humans, we will continue to milk the energy from some and release the rest. They will agree to that.”

Dagon nodded. “It is agreed Lady. Now, how do we make this fine-sounding plan reality?”

Belial’s Stronghold, Tartaruan Range, Northern Region of Hell

Euryale smoothed lotion on her burns and relaxed on her couch. Quietly, she closed her eyes and sent her mind searching for Lakheenahuknaasi. She found the mind she sought and opened contact, feeling the mind-voice in her head, sensed the respect tempered with ambition.

“What have you learned Lakheenahuknaasi?”

“Much, Highness. I have learned about human weapons, seen what they have. Highness, we have not seen a tenth of what they can do.” The near-panic in Lakheenahuknaasi’s mind-voice was evident. “The deadliest weapons they have are still unknown to us.”

“But you have learned how to make them?”

“Highness, I have learned we cannot make them. The instructions in the magic tome are here but they are full of things we do not understand. And when we look up the things we do not understand, those descriptions also are filled with things we do not comprehend. Everywhere we look, we are faced with the impossible. All I have studied has shown us how little we know, and what we do not know will kill us. Above all, Highness, know this. The humans have no magic. None at all.”

“Impossible. We have seen what their magery does.”

“No Highness, we have seen what their machines can do. They have no magic, in fact the best and cleverest of the humans laugh at the very idea of magic. They say it is a foolish game to amuse little children. They call it conjuring and those who practice it do not pretend it is anything but trickery. The humans have no magic so they build machines to do magical things for them. And those machines are what destroys us. Highness. I will say more. There is no magic, for I no longer believe we have magic either. There are simply things we do not understand.”

“Very good Lakheenahuknaasi. Anything else?”

“Yes, Highness. Our Lord was wrong when he said there were a few great places that build the human machines. There are not. The places that make human machines are everywhere and now they all build weapons. What we face is not a stockpile that has been built up over thousands of human years but what they produce today. We cannot destroy them by striking at their production, we must strike their leadership.”

“And do you know where that is?”

“Yes. In a city called London. A place called Pah-Lee-Amant.”

Chapter Seventy Three

Vulcan XH-558, Over Western Iraq.  XH558 was flying her first operational sortie since returning to RAF service, a survey flight of Hell. With her long endurance she could stay on station for a long time and increase humanity’s knowledge of the geography of Hell. Wing Commander Winters was quietly proud of what the British had achieved in mobilizing their air force, pulling it back from the shadow it had nearly become to a viable multi-role force with a seriously destructive capability. They had managed to put a higher percentage of their museum and reserve aircraft back into service than the Spams had managed. Winters wondered if that meant that British museums kept their exhibits in better condition or that the RAF was simply that much more desperate? Even the old Swordfish from the Battle of Britain Flight was back on duty, patrolling over coastal cities in case a Gorgon turned up to open the skies and pour lava over them. There was a joke running around, if one of the amphibious baldricks turned up, it would get an 18 inch airborne torpedo right where it hurt most.

While the other three Vulcans, XL426, XM584 and XM603 were being loaded up with 1,000lb bombs in preparation for bombing missions in support on British troops in Hell, XH-558 had received a different fit. In the forward part of the bomb bay was a reconnaissance crate containing a number of different radar, IR and visual sensors which would record the ground conditions below the bomber. They would record to digital storage in the aircraft, but could also download to ground stations. As well as the ultra-modern sensors in the bomb bay the Vulcan would be using its H2S bombing radar and a digital video camera someone had installed in the visual bomb aiming blister. Two air sampling pods were also being carried under the wings.

Unlike the Americans the RAF had not bothered to alter the tactical camouflage schemes of its aircraft, as yet. They did not have the manpower to spare at the moment, and to be honest were not really convinced that it was necessary. The most they were willing to do was to paint the two TSR.2s into a similar two-tone grey to that worn by the Tornado GR.4 and Buccaneer S.2B and they hadn’t even done that yet. The aircraft had carried out their first strikes in their gleaming white prototype paint. Repainting the Vulcans wasn’t even on the cards, so the Vulcans were still resplendent in their green and grey wrap-around tactical schemes.

In the aft portion of the bomb bay was an additional fuel tank to reduce the aircraft’s dependence on air-to-air refueling, something that had not yet been practiced in Hell, at least not by the RAF. That was about to change. The Spams were counting on aerial refueling to get their bombers all the way up to Belial’s stronghold and they needed a test of the system to see whether it worked. XH-558 had got that job as well. Plus one or two more. The Vulcan currently had its H2S radar radiating as it closed with a tanker aircraft to top up its tanks before entering the Hellmouth. The first of three planned refuellings, two of which would take place in hell itself.

“You should see her soon, Skipper.” The Radar Navigator, Squadron Leader James Bolam reported.

Wing Commander Winters strained his eyes to see their tanker, reflecting on the fact that his eyesight was not quite as good as it had once been. There, he spotted an object ahead of them trailing a vapor trail.

“I’ve got her, Jimmy, shut down the radar so that we don’t microwave the crew.” Winter said.

“Right, David, let’s see if we can put all that refueling practice to practical use.”

“X-Ray Hotel Five, Five Eight, this is Spartan One, is that you lighting up my ECM display, over?” A voice in Winters’ and Maxwell’s ears said rather unexpectedly.

“Yes it’s me, Spartan One, good to hear your voice, Stu; I’d heard that you were back flying tankers.” Winters replied. “Are you ready to give me some fuel, over?”

“Yup, we have the centre hose trailing, now be gentle with me.” The tanker pilot replied, using a feminine voice to finish the sentence.

As XH558 closed in on the tanker it revealed itself as a hemp painted Victor K.2, in this case XL231, Lusty Linda / Spirit of Godfrey Lee. The Victor was one of the many RAF aircraft that had been forward deployed to Basra airport, it had seemed appropriate to refuel one V-bomber with another one.

While Winters carefully lined up the Vulcan behind the Victor Maxwell maintained careful control of the throttles. The refueling probe made contact with the basket first time and the transfer began, though as usual aviation fuel leaked over the bomber’s canopy, partially obscuring the view. This was a problem which had first arisen during the ‘Black Buck’ missions of the Falklands War. The RAF engineers had never quite found out yet why the probes, which had been perfectly serviceable in the nineteen sixties until they had been removed, should now leak fuel like it was going out of fashion.

“Ooh, you are a big boy.” A sultry female voice said over the radio.

Winters looked at Maxwell somewhat surprised. Below him he could hear the rest of the crew roaring with laughter.

“Ah, do you have a split, sorry female crew member, Stu?” He asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, lover.” The same voice said.

“Err…can we land somewhere soon, Boss.” The Tactical navigator said, chocking back laughter. “I think I need to visit the bog.”

“I’m not landing so you can knock one out, Flight Lieutenant Pervert.” Winter replied laughing.

Once the tanks were filled up again Winters dropped back and took station off the Victor’s port wing.

“Thanks for the top up, Stu. I think we’re going to need it, over.”

“You’re welcome, Martin. Good luck, I would say ‘see you in Hell’, but I think that would be inappropriate, over.”

“See you when we come back out.”

Twenty minutes later, systems checks complete, Winters and Maxwell stared at the dark ellipse of the Hellmouth. They had seen it on footage from UAVs and combat aircraft and had it described by fellow RAF aircrew, but nothing really prepared them for the sight if the thing itself. Maxwell throttled back and engaged the filters that would protect the Olympus engines from the various kinds of filth found at low level in Hell.

“Oh well, here goes nothing.” Winters said as the Hellmouth began to fill his forward vision. “Hold onto your hats, lads.”

The change from the skies of Earth to Hell was sudden and rather unexpected, catching both Winters and Maxwell by surprise. There was no transition, one moment the Vulcan was in the clear blue skies of Iraq, the next in the red, cloudy murk of Hell. The Vulcan was already starting to climb when they saw another old aircraft making its landing run on the airfield at Hell-Alpha. One of the B-29s the Spams had brought back into service for second-line work. Both pilots peered hard at the veteran but it was too far away and the air was too foul to make out its name. They’d heard the Enola Gay was back in service and wondered if it had been her.

That made Winters reflect on something he had seen just before launching from RAF Akrotiri. Two Globemaster C.1s; the new fifth and six aircraft; of 99 Squadron had landed, taxied to a remote part of the air station where they had been placed under heavy RAF Police and Regiment guard. Rumor had it that their cargo consisted of ‘special weapons’ and having seen the level of security Winter had no doubt that for once the rumors were true. It was logical of course, he did know that someone in the MoD had realized that it would be somewhat difficult to use the navy’s Trident missiles against Hell, so some of the Trident warheads had been remanufactured into free-fall bombs. AWRE Aldermaston and ROF Burghfield had used the most recent design of weapons as the basis of these new ones – the WE.177A/B/C, and they were also working on a warhead for an extended range version of the Storm Shadow.

Hellmouth Air Traffic Control Center, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

Sergeant Stephanie ‘Stevie’ Moss liked being an Air Traffic Controller. It gave her a real feeling of power over the officers that flew the RAF’s aircraft. To help manage the flow of aircraft around the Hellmouth Number 1 Air Control Centre had deployed a Type 101 radar and a Tactical Air Control Centre. Some of the ATC staff were less than pleased to be deployed to Hell, but Moss did not mind, it would be the first chance for her to earn a campaign medal, and besides they did have the entirety of 1 Squadron, RAF Regiment defending the radar site, so she was not particularly worried.

She watched as the blip she had been expecting appeared out of the Hellmouth.

“X-Ray Five, Five, Eight, this is GCI. Welcome to Hell, gentlemen. You are clear to climb to operational altitude, over. Keep alert at all times, the air here is crowded and poor visibility means you will have very little warning of any aircraft out of their approved flight path.” There was a note of asperity in Moss’s voice, most pilots were doing their best in the unfamiliar conditions but there were some who just did what they wanted and left everybody else to sort out the problems.

Vulcan XH-558, Over Hell

It was reassuring to hear a familiar accent from ground control. “Thank you, GCI, climbing to cruising altitude, over.”

As expected at 28,000 feet the Vulcan broke through the clag and Squadron Leader Maxwell pulled back on the lever that opened the filters. The power from the engines surged and the bomber immediately began to climb more rapidly, up to its operational ceiling of 55,000 feet.

“Okay, open the bomb bay doors. Time to start our Cranberry impression.”

Underneath, the mapping radars scanned through the murk and started to make their record of the terrain that lay under the reddish fog that masked Hell. The minutes ticked past and turned into hours as the maps were generated, watching his displays Winters wondered how long it would be before there was a Google-Hell to partner Google-Earth. Even the thought suggested to him that Hell had irreversibly changed since The Message had arrived eight long months ago; no matter what happened in the war, it would never be the same again. While the radar system mapped the ground hidden in the murk below, the optical equipment started measuring the density of the dust suspended in the atmosphere, trying to gauge the size of the plume that extended from the giant caldera that formed the hell-pit. Above them, the sky was a red glare, no sign of anything to break the uniform light. Or to indicate what the light was for that matter, a problem that was believed to have given several physicists nervous breakdowns.

“Any sign of anything interesting down there?” Winters nodded towards the H2S display. As primarily a bombing radar, it was good at picking up the rectangles of habitations. Human ones anyway, yet another reason for this flight. Nobody really know how the baldricks actually lived. Did they have houses? Or live in caves? Nobody really knew.

Maxwell shook his head. “Nothing. This place seems almost unoccupied apart from the concentration around Dis.” He looked down to the flight instrumentation. “Time for a tank-up Boss.”

“Gotcha. Dropping down to 30,000 feet. That’ll be above the clag but the tanker should be able to manage it. Who have we got?”

Maxwell looked at the roster. “Lion-Oh-Three. Singapore Air Force KC-135. I’ve got his beacon up.”

“Fair enough, I’ll give him a bell.”

The refueling went efficiently enough, without the backchat that distinguished the RAF-only refueling hook ups. Winters got the impression that the Singapore Air Force crew were going out of their way to seem professional and efficient on this, Hell’s first aerial refueling. Other than the inevitable fuel leak, the hook-up went fine and the tanker peeled away to return to its base back on Earth.

“Humorless lot aren’t they.” Winters was relaxing as XH-558 climbed back to her operational altitude. “Still, coming from a country where one has to get a police permit before chewing gum…”

“Is that true? I thought it was an urban legend.” Maxwell stopped suddenly. “Whoa, now that’s one thing we wanted to see. The beacon is up.”

Sure enough, the navigation display showed a bright light far to the north of them. The beacon set up by a Special Undead Forces team to steer the heavy bombers to their target. Winters didn’t hesitate. “Control, this is XH-558. We have the Belial Beacon on our display. We read location as….” He hesitated and read the numbers off the display. “Have you got that? Then tell the spams their Bones are in business.”

Market Place. City of Dis, Hell

Yellithanakstra went around the stalls in the market, looking for food for herself and her mate. And their kidling of course. Sometimes she had to remember that there were more than just the two of them now. There were some small food-beasts around but the choice had dropped dramatically. Word was spreading across Dis despite the efforts of the surviving Dukes to stop it, Beelzebub’s army had been smashed, destroyed. The humans had slaughtered his forces just as efficiently as they had destroyed those of Abigor. Now they were spreading out, surrounding the city, slowly cutting it off from its sources of supply. As they did so, their aircraft were pounding targets across the city.

Even as she thought of the humans and their machines, a wailing noise erupted from the roofs and walls of the city. The watchers had seen more human aircraft coming in and were blowing their horns to warn the demons in the city to take cover. Yellithanakstra looked around, some of the demons here were already scrambling for cover, trying to hide under abutments and arches from the bombs that would still be raining down. The older hands, like Yellithanakstra didn’t bother. The human aircraft, she rolled the new word around on her tongue, might be fast but they were incredibly accurate. Their bombs, another new word to savor, always hit the targets they were aimed at. Mostly the palaces of the powerful dukes, the barracks where their legions lived, the fields where they trained. They never scattered their bombs at random across the city. Yellithanakstra wondered at that, if they did, just bombed at random, they could create panic and chaos in Dis.

She looked at the aircraft approaching fast. Big aircraft with the strange wings that could flap forwards and backwards. Their camouflage made them hard to see against the red-gray sky but she caught a brief glimpse of the red stars on the wings and tails of the four aircraft. Then they were overhead, their howl making her head shake, and she saw them bank before releasing a rain of bombs. Underneath them, the palace of Naberius disintegrated into a cloud of dust shrouding a pile of collapsing stone. The humans weren’t perfect, she thought, Naberius had been killed when Satan’s own palace had been bombed. Or perhaps they had decided to destroy the palace anyway in case somebody had taken Naberius’s place.

Yellithanakstra sighed and started to return to her home. Her mate would be off duty soon, returning from the walls where he and his legion were waiting for the human assault they knew had to come. Demon armies fighting humans in the open had been destroyed. Would they have any better luck fighting from behind stone walls? She was so absorbed with her worries and the sight of the human bombers flying effortlessly overhead that she never saw the wooden pole being pushed out from behind a cart. It was beautifully timed, going between her legs and catching her feet, sending her sprawling to the ground.

For a second she lay there, on the cobblestones, stunned by her fall. When she had collected her wits, she started to get up again but a violent blow to the back of her head sent her back to the ground. Half-stunned, she looked around and saw greenish, scaly legs surrounding her. Bewildered, she looked more and realized she was surrounded by a group of orcs, almost a dozen of them, all carrying heavy clubs. They were jabbering at each other, rattling away in a language she couldn’t understand. Orcs never spoke in the presence of a demon, to do so was to invite death and so few demons understood orcish. Whatever the argument was about, one of the orcs solved it by taking his club and swinging down, hitting Yellithanakstra on the back.

She screamed in rage and tried to summon up magic to drive them away but the rest had been encouraged by the success of the attack and they joined in, swinging their clubs down on her with all the force they could manage. Yellithanakstra felt the bones in her body breaking with the impacts, felt the ones to her head driving away her ability to concentrate for the generation of magic or even to think. She tried to crawl away but the orcs followed her, still battering her with their clubs. Eventually, she collapsed, her body shaking as the street faded away from her sight.

The orcs looked down on the body of their victim, a few still taking a few last swings although the demon was obviously dead. Then, they heard other demons running towards them and they scattered, running through the narrow alleyways and into the drains. Soon, they would gather and try and set up another ambush for an unwary demon.

Al Sahra Airfield, Iraq

”What a show, what a fight, we really hit our target for tonight, though with one engine gone we will still carry on coming in on a wing but with flair.

The chorus of the old song reverberated around the beams of the mess. Al Sahra had been one of Saddam Hussein’s based, now it was the home of the B-1Bs of the 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard. Major Curtis Trafford gave out a cheer as the song ended and he finished off his drink. Coca Cola as it happened since he was on alert, waiting for the word to come that the beacon was up and the strike waiting in the dispersal areas could head off for Beelzebub’s fortress. Six B-1s, two of them were carrying the massive EBU-5(1) Mod.1 bombs intended to close off the portals showering lava onto Sheffield and Detroit. The other four ware loaded down with conventional bombs, some unitary penetrators designed to knock down fortifications, others anti-personnel bomblets to slaughter any baldricks caught in the open.

“Attention, your attention please.” General Graydon was standing on a chair at the end of the room. A dangerous thing to do in a mess full of rowdy pilots. “We have just heard from the Brits, a Vulcan they have up has picked up the beacon from Tartarus. The raid is on. All assigned crews, report to your aircraft. The tankers are already taking off. You have already had your briefings, be ready to follow them. Thank you.” Graydon stood down and left the room.

Across the mess, the 24 crewmen assigned to the strike quietly got up and left, collecting back-slaps and salutes as they went. Trafford followed them, out to where Dragon Slayer was waiting. The mission was a complex one, already tankers would be converging on the strike route, some to refuel the B-1s, others to refuel the tankers. It took 14 tankers to get each of the B-1s to their target and back and more than a few of those tankers would be flying two missions. It was a 22,000 mile flight in total, making this the longest-range bombing mission that had ever been attempted. It was one for the history books, and it was one to avenge Detroit.

Trafford started to climb in to his aircraft then stopped half way in, reaching out to pat the airframe. “Well, honey-bunny, we’re on our way at last.”

Chapter Seventy Four

USS Turner Joy, On Trials Before Leaving For The AUTEC Transition Point

"Kind friends and companions, come join me in rhyme...  ..Come lift up your voices in chorus with mine.  Come drink and be merry, from grief we'll refrain..  For we know not when we will all meet again.  So here's a health to our company and one to my lass,  We'll drink and be merry all out of one glass,  We'll drink and be merry, from grief we'll refrain,  For we know not when we'll all meet again!"

"But we WILL meet again!" Rochelle Emerson added with a dark laugh as the chorus faded off, their voices hoarse from shouting over the noise of the turbines and various gear. "Even if it be in the burning lakes of Hell!"

"Does the ship actually have alcohol on board?" Lieutenant Travis frowned for a moment and then looked rather hopeful.

Chief Robert 'Bob" Gaussington, who was effectively heading the revitalization efforts that culminated today, seemed like he had just spat. "I hope they find Josephus Daniels last, with respect, Lieutenant."

He'd lost his right leg in a car accident in '96, and that was why he wasn't called back to the colors himself, blast it all. Particularly since the car accident had cost him his wife; as far as he was concerned, the war was an intensely personal thing. His course in virtually delivering their proud ship to the Navy single-handed had been the best he could contribute not merely to revenge but liberation for the woman he had loved. He masked his dedication with an incredible sense of humor which had carried through all the engineering students he had recruited.

And why not? It's better than never seeing someone ever again. Sophia Metaxas thought to herself as she listened to the banter, in particular, the Chief's ability as a civilian to explain to a lieutenant precisely why Josephus Daniels deserved to burn in Hell longer than any other person so condemned. Also he could hide the location of the liquor store which would just happen to all have to be consumed before tomorrow. Then, if all went well, USS Turner Joy DD-951, would gain her commissioning pennant once more and become one of the last operational steam warships in the navy.

Decommissioned on November 11th, 1982, she was handed over to a preservation society in Bremerton, Washington, in the year 1990 after being struck from the reserves, and the Turner Joy's new owners had found themselves with a luckily well-preserved ship, and enough money to make her last. Almost two years of extensive reconstruction and preservation efforts had followed, and the ship that came out looked almost exactly as she did in 1982 when still in regular service, and might have even been in better condition. And they'd kept her that way: Her hull and her interior and engines bore no sign of rust, her 5in rifles had never been demilitarized, nor her torpedo tubes, and her masts had not been cut nor most of her electronics fully stripped.

Bob Gaussington had been one of the half a dozen or so men who had committed themselves to spending a great chunk of their retirement maintaining the ship. When the general mobilization could not, of course, include him, he went back to work at the shipyards from which he'd only recently retired. But then he'd heard that the steam warships still preserved would not be considered for restoration to active service. And it had irritated him, severely. He'd gotten the rest of the volunteers together, mostly also workers at the shipyard, and they'd spread the word at the 'yards.

Then he'd talked to Dr. Brown, the head of the engineering department at Olympic College, and obtained permission for his students--exempted from the draft due to their needed profession--to abandon their free time with the promise that "we can damn well make her sail again, Doctor." And so more and more men had started pouring in from the shipyards, volunteering their time off to the effort--and with a benevolent ‘official’ eye turned, borrowing equipment not needed for anything else at the moment.

Several weeks later the Navy had got wind of it, and been goaded into sending a survey party. Two days later, everything had kicked into high gear; the poor USS Barry at the Washington Navy Yard and the Forrest Sherman and Edson, both retained for future donation as museums, were ripped apart at the docks where they lay by navy teams for any spare parts that could possibly be redeemed for use, in the same way the few surviving Charlie Adams' had been stripped to support the Germans in recommissioning the Mölders. The work teams had been made official, and additional weapons and electronics started arriving for the ship.

And now under a short crew with most of her civilian workers onboard, monitoring the ship's machinery and running final tests, she was making ten knots through the shipping channel of Rich Passage out to Puget Sound for the speed trials which would put her boilers to the test.

"Sophia!?" Dr. Brown stepped down into the engine room, as unflappably calm about the situation as might be expected, even when he had to shout to be heard. "Can you check some the connections on the foremast!? We're having some problems in CIC with the radar feed from the SPS-64!"

"And I'm the only one who won't fall off the mast, right, because everyone else is a fat nerd."

"Hey! I resemble that remark!" Mark, it turned out, still had enough of his hearing left that he could hear her from his position next to her.

"Yes! Yes you do! Watch to pressure for me?"

"No problem!"

She left the engine room in some relief and climbed up to where the usual Washington rain met her. That, and the other ship that the Engineering students had been tapped into working with, to her surprise at delight--the ferry Kalakala, miraculously restored from a rusting hulk--well, she was still a rusting hulk, but one that worked, hauling a load of shipyard workers in from Seattle on the cross-sound run, her direct drive diesel sounding like it would destroy the army of Hell by sound alone. Along with the four Steel Electrics and the Olympic, they filled out the ferry service while the Super's had been pulled from the regular routes to do commuter service between Seattle and Boeing Everett via Mukilteo, and Todd in Tacoma on the other side of things, also replacing a large number of rationed cars. In some respects, it was a return to the 1880s for the region--every single boat which could carry large numbers of passengers was pressed into service as a new Mosquito fleet now gas rationing was taking effect and they could supplement buses on land. Even the rusted and battered old Kalakala would have to last just long enough for new vessels to be built.

Just like the Turner Joy would. Sophia reached the foretop with some pride in the fast of even a light breeze, the Kalakala hammering her way to Bremerton in their wake, Rich Passage churned with the speed of her effort, all concerns over shore erosion gone, and the destroyer, for her part, was now at last rounding Bainbridge island with the open waters of the Sound ready for their speed run north through Admiralty Inlet to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the national flag crisp in the wind, though for the moment there was no jack. Sophia got to work with her diagnostic equipment--it turned out to be just another artifact of the rush job, and five minutes of twisting and adjustment solved the problem. The climb back down came just in time, too, as Commander Reynolds brought them around to port and rang up revolutions for twenty-five knots. The brave old lady dug in her heels and surged forward. Everything worked perfectly as billows of oil smoke trailed behind her.

They brought their course a bit to starboard to avoid the huge M/V Spokane as she made the Bainbridge Island run, and then leveled off north by northwest while Sophia stepped in to make her report to Doctor Brown--and then to Commander Reynolds, who, effective tomorrow, would be kicking them all off and turning the Turner Joy back into a warship. So life went in the age of gasoline rationing and electronics doubling in price as the industry retooled for War, of vehicles emptying from the dealerships back near home on Auto Center Way, and not being replaced. Of a country, after more than sixty years, united in will and purpose to fight a war for the liberation of their forefathers.

Sophia stepped back out on deck to clamber below to return to the engine room. Commander Reynolds ordered revolutions for thirty-two knots rung up. Now the old lady bit her heels in as far as she could and surged north, under the black trail only an oil-fired steam man'o'war could make, and aimed her bow for Admiralty Inlet, the deep dark waters of the sound combing off and around her and lashing Sophia with spray. She lingered for a moment, looking fore to aft: Three 5in/54cal rapid-fire guns and three twin Type B 40mm DARDO mounts. The Italians had come up trumps there. The OTO Melara facility in Turin was working triple shifts to turn the mounts out and had donated the three mounts ‘for the common good’. Two of the twin-forties replaced her long-gone 3in/50's, the third was amidships. Elsewhere six single unstabilized 25mm mounts were cramming the decks in every place they could be laid, triple torpedo tubes again ready to be fired, and depth charge racks aft.

She was ready to fight; but Sophia didn't want the ship fighting for her family, in a perverse way she still felt guilty about. Her parents and grandparents had died with The Message, religious to a fault and obedient to an end. They had laid down and refused to move or indeed do anything at all, and within a couple days, simply died where they had been, as they had been ordered to do, of natural causes--while she cried and screamed and tore herself to pieces trying to save them, even ripping the earrings out of her mother's ears in a last desperate hope that pain might bring her back where love had failed, and where the emergency services were far to overwhelmed by the scale of the task involved in simply removing the bodies to offer any aide.

The ship thrummed comfortingly below her, and Sophia climbed back inside and below decks. She had helped bring the Turner Joy back to life, but she hoped the ship wouldn't bring her parents back to live. The months of scar tissue, and the searing memory of their brutal abandonment of her and her fourteen year old sister, had turned into a bitter hate that left her to whisper, lost over the engines, "I hope they find you last, right goddamned next to Josephus Daniels." Back to work. They were making 32kts, after all, and engines didn't do that without help.

Belial's Palace, Tartarus, Hell

Euryale had been in the wyvern caves when the lookouts spotted the Belial's meager formation, and by the time she'd glided down to the courtyard he'd already gone inside. The gorgon caught up with the count in the throne room, where he was already issuing orders.

“...full mobilization immediately, you will lead them down into to Asphodel Plains tomorrow. Satan has granted me the whole province, but there may be some foolhardy barons who... Euryale!”

As she made eye contact with her lord, she saw something she'd never seen before. Euryale had seen Belial frightened before, many times when he had pushed one of the dukes too far and Tartarus had come close to being invaded, but there was none of the bluster this time. His gaze was flat and hard, weary yet manically determined. She couldn't put her talon on what this meant and that worried her, though he did seem genuinely pleased to see her.

“I'll need you too, await me in my study.” Belial jerked his head in the appropriate direction and then turned back to his officers.

Euryale arrived to find Baron Trajakrithoth already there. The huge brown demon was wearing his greasy bronze armour as usual – Euryale couldn't remember ever seeing him without it – and cradling the 'gun' he'd spent so much time working on. From what she'd overhead in the throne room it seemed that Belial would want to talk about occupying territory, so she made herself useful by retrieving the largest map of hell from its bronze storage tube and spreading it on the table. The ornate map was covered in tiny images of monstrous creatures and blocky keeps.

The Count arrived at last, accompanied by Castellean Zatheoplekkar, the most trusted of his officers. He was the only one of Belial's original legion commanders to stay with his lord through disgrace, exile and all the millenia of obscurity and ridicule since. Perhaps now that loyalty would pay off, if the Count had really been awarded the former holdings of Asmodeus. At a gesture from his lord, Zatheoplekkar slammed and barred the heavy doors. Belial sat down in his throne and stared off into space for a moment, before fixing each of them with his gaze.

“Our lord Satan has decreed that knowing what I am about to tell you is grounds for immediate execution. I will not hesitate to enforce this order if I discover that you have revealed the situation to any others without my express permission.” Belial paused for a second to allow this to sink in.

“Three days ago, the humans used their 'aircraft' to smash the tip of Lucifer's Finger. Satan's place was completely destroyed, rendered into rubble along with everything nearby. I commanded near a hundred orcs to dig through the ruins for half a day, but we found no survivors. Our lord survived only because he was away, sightseeing over the pit on that monstrosity Euryale made for him.”

“You understand what this means? The humans can destroy any strongpoint, anywhere. Their sky chariots fly too fast, too high to be stopped. With what we've done, and with that traitor Abigor...” Belial's tone dripped with contempt for the turncoat general “...must be telling them, it's only a matter of time before they come here.”

The room fell silent. The destruction of Satan's palace was nearly unthinkable, no one knew how to respond to it. Yet Belial still had more bad news to deliver.

“As I returned from Dis I overflew Beezelbub's army, or rather the tattered remnants of it. The humans had destroyed it almost completely. Our wyvern riders – the few who survived – speak of poison fog that strikes down all who enter and rolling thunder that obliterates everything in its path. In short the human used their magery to destroy our grand army, while suffering trivial casualties in return.”

Belial looked upon the faces of his servants and saw shock, horror and poorly concealed disbelief. “There can be no denying this. We thought we were going to earth to exterminate the humans, but in truth exactly the opposite is happening. They have come here to destroy us utterly, to slaughter every demon in hell, and so far our armies have been as helpless against theirs as theirs once were against us.”

Euryale spoke at last. “Count Belial, you make our doom sound almost inevitable. Yet you do not despair. So you must have a plan to stop the humans?”

“Actually it's Grand Duke Belial now, for what that's worth. I am Satan's favored servant, at least for as long as our Lord can evade the hunting aircraft.”

“I am certain that the humans will strike Tartarus the way they struck Lucifer's Finger. It is only a matter of time. I intend to preserve my own forces at all costs and rally what I can of the Asmodeus's reserves. We will move into Asphodel immediately. Zatheoplekkar, you will devise marching orders that avoid concentrating our troops in obvious strongpoints or large formations. The humans are moving on Dis and despite their magery it will take them time to reduce a city of that size. We have some time to prepare defenses.”

Zatheoplekkar was staring at the map, a charcoal stick clutched in one hand. “My lord, we can occupy the territory, but if what you say is true what good will it do us? If the Lord of the Flies could not stop them...”

Belial cut him off. “Your goal is to buy time. Perhaps you can draw inspiration from the defensive tactics the human use - I will have you question the wyvern riders about what they saw of the battle later. For any hope of success, we rely on the efforts of Trajakrithoth and Euryale.” He turned to the hulking forge master. “What progress have you to report?”

The baron had been eager to demonstrate his new weapon, but now the obvious inadequacy of it in the face of the situation made him almost ashamed. He had no choice but to proceed though.

“The humans call this a 'shotgun'. The escort we sent with that first gorgon, they brought it back from earth. We can't make an exact duplicate, but we can make something that works well enough. I'll show you.”

Trajakrithoth raised the black double-tube, gripping the bulging end with a single massive hand. The weapon now possessed a pair of tiny holes in the top of the chamber, each with a ring of bronze soldered clumsily around it. The demon pulled out a phial of powder and tipped a tiny amount into one of the bronze rings, then drew out a taper and lit it from one of the candles. He pointed the weapon at a wall and touched the burning taper to the improvised flash pan.

Flame spewed from the barrel, accompanied by a retort that was deafeningly loud in the enclosed space. The thick cloud of acrid smoke made the demon's eyes water as it dispersed into the room. The stones in the far wall had cracked and now had several lumps of jagged iron embedded in them.

“The weapons we are making now will be easier to fire of course, though harder to reload, as we have not found a way to make the barrel break open” 'At least not without exploding' Trajakrithoth thought, but no need for his lord to know that.

“Euryale's handmaiden described something called 'flintlocks', which would be even better, but for now we are making what she called 'matchlocks'...”

Trajakrithoth's voice trailed off. Belial had leapt to his feet and his expression has furious.

“Toys! Worthless toys!” The horned demon lord grabbed the improvised arquebus from his servant's hands. “You expect this to stop an iron chariot? How am I to defeat the humans with such pitiful weapons?”

Despite his bulk Trajakrithoth was cowering and for a moment Euryale expected Belial to kill him right there, but amazingly Belial managed to reign in his rage. His expression softened and he handed the gun back to the other demon, then grabbed his shoulders.

“Trajakrithoth, I am certain this would have been a useful terror weapon if we were fighting demon armies. But the situation has changed. You must give me a way to stop the aircraft and the iron chariots. You must find it soon or we are all food for the humans. Do you understand me?”

“My lord, I... what you ask... I don't know it is even possible...”

“Euryale, you still those human traitors who claimed to know how to build their weapons, yes?”

“Yes, my lord. They are here in the palace. I assigned some of my gorgons to continue manipulating them, cementing their loyalties.”

“Send them all down to Palelabor with Trajakrithoth. Secrecy is irrelevant now. Do whatever you have to, tell them whatever you have to, ignore any traditions that get in the way. Just find me a way to destroy those iron chariots.”

Trajakrithoth still looked dazed by this radical turn of events; meanwhile, Euryale was calculating furiously. Belial frowned. “The humans draw closer every moment. Move!” Shocked out of his stupor, Trajakrithoth bowed clumsily and ran from the room.

As soon as the doors had slammed shut again, Euryale spoke up. “Are we to continue the lava attacks on the human cities?”

“Of course. Satan commands it. More importantly, it would be pointless to stop now. The humans will be coming for us either way, so we might as well inflict what wounds we can on them.”

“But if they do strike, destroy your palace, would it not be best to stop attacking, make them think they killed you? If your goal is to buy time...”

Belial stared at Euryale. “I will decide policy here. What news from your servant on earth? Has she identified more targets for us?”

“My lord, not only has she done that, she believes she can attack them even without portals. She has built up quite a cult and her humans have been telling her about 'karr bombs' and 'EyeEeeDees'...”

Belial waved dismissively. “Fine, tell her to continue. But I have a more urgent task for you. The humans have revealed themselves to be a more formidable enemy than the Enemy himself ever was. It is time to see whether the Enemy of our enemy might be our friend.”

Deep Beneath the Tartauran Range

The rough hewn tunnel went on and on, descending deeper than Herwijer had thought possible given the demon's primitive tools. The huge armored demon seemed to read his mind; "It took hundreds of slaves a score of human lifetimes to reach the veins I scried, and two score more to dig out the complex itself." The huge platform bumped and swayed as it ran on into the darkness, its bronze wheels screaming in complaint as they rounded the sharper terms. The hot, dead air suddenly became damp, and presently the walls fell away as they passed over a rough stone bridge spanning a vast chasm. The torches on the cart could revealed nothing in that vast space to human eyes, but Herwijer thought he could make out the faint splashing and roaring of running water before they plunged into the opposite wall. They continued on for another ten minutes, the monotony now broken by the occasional side tunnel, all of which looked thoroughly abandoned.

Presently the tracks emerged into another vast cavern, but this time there was no water and the air became suffocatingly close. Instead Herwijer caught a brief glimpse of monstrous shapes, seemingly half-man and half-rat, clinging onto the walls of the cavern. Their eyes flashed red with hatred and fear, before they scurrying away into the darkness. The platform began to slow as it passed over the second bridge, a persistent whining building into an ear-splitting scream as the servitor demon applied the brakes. Huge piles of smashed rock were visible to either side of the track, the spoil of uncounted centuries of mining. A dim glow appeared ahead, resolving into a pair of ornate bronze doors set in a carved stone archway that must be a hundred feet high. Numerous burning torches protruded from niches in the stonework, maintaining the cavern's smoky atmosphere and giving the whole scene an appropriately hellish glow. For a moment it appeared that they were not slowing fast enough and every human on the platform braced in anticipation of hitting the doors, but with a great crack they split apart, drawing open at the pull of creaking chains.

The platform screeched to a stop in the entrance hall. Great carved columns supported the roof of a vast space, mostly filled with crates, barrels and neatly stacked metal bars. The humans stared around them, seeing a maze of tunnels leading off in every direction. A steady yellow glow lit many of the lower tunnels, suggesting open lava flows close by. Swarming everywhere were short but stocky demons, with grey skin and hairless but for a mass of bedraggled, matted fur hanging from the bottom of their wizened faces. Most of them were carrying picks, axes and tongs. They seemed to move with furious industry; they barely paused to incline their heads to Trajakrithoth before continuing with whatever tasks they were set. Herwijer blinked and looked closer. The tools they were carrying were made of iron.

Trajakrithoth spoke at last, he voice filled with pride. "Humans, know that you are uniquely privileged, for of all your kind you are the first to ever enter the Fortress of Palelabor."

(Marina contributed the first part and Starglider the last two).

Chapter Seventy Five

RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire, UK.

Flight Sergeant John Archibald wiped his brow, reflecting on the fact that changing the gun pack on a Hunter FGA.9 had never been as hard work ‘back in the day’, at least it was not a Lightning ‘quick change pack’. If ever there was a misnamed piece of equipment that was it. Still he and the other ‘old timers’ needed to show these young National Servicemen and women how to do the job of rearming an aircraft and demonstrate that they were still up to the job themselves.

“And that, boys and girls is how we change the gun pack on a Hunter.” He paused for a second to let a patrol of Hawk T.1A trainers, once painted in bright red and white colors, but now hastily painted grey and armed with AIM-9Ls and a 30mm gun pod, take off behind them. “Not as difficult as you might have thought, was it? “We’ll get you started on changing gun packs today and once you’re proficient on that we’ll move onto something more challenging like a SNEB rocket pod, or one thousand pound bomb.”

Before retiring from RAF service as a sergeant Archibald had been an armorer, mainly working on Lightnings and Phantoms. Amongst the milestones of his career had been when a Phantom FGR.2 he had been responsible for had managed to accidentally shoot down a Jaguar GR.1, and he and some colleagues had once managed to trick an airman into standing guard over a WE.177 that was supposedly leaking ‘liquid plutonium’. His face when the ‘clean up crew’ arrived in full NBC gear had been a picture; sadly the RAF Police had been less impressed by the joke. Like so many other service pensioners once Queen’s Order Two had been signed he had found himself back in RAF blue, though at least he now wore a crown above the three chevrons of his former rank.

The RAF had deliberately chosen to form a number of new squadrons equipped with the Hunter. There were still many of them around in airworthy condition, the Avon engine was still in production for industrial use, they were rugged aircraft, not so sophisticated that they would need lots of technical support, yet fast enough to be able to deal with Harpies if necessary, and had a useful ground attack capability. The first source of Hunters that the RAF had turned to had been the one’s the service owned itself, aircraft in taxiable condition that were use for ground movements training, and British museums. After that they had gone abroad, buying some Swiss Hunters, before going as far a field as Zimbabwe, India and Chile, looking for potential airframes. Fortunately the majority of those aircraft exported were either FGA.9s, or had been based on that model, so commonality was not too much of a problem, though the most troublesome aircraft had been the ex-Royal Navy GA.11s which had to have ADEN cannons and ‘Sabrinas’ fitted to them, both of which were not always easy to source.

One other advantage of using the Hunter was that it was a good aircraft to teach newly qualified pilots and ground crew on. The RAF had also been lucky that the Hunter had survived in such prolific numbers and that there was no great shortage of spares. Besides learning to manufacture some spare parts on a lathe was good training for some of the conscripts. Some Hunters had already joined the Tornado F.3s and Hawk T.1As in performing Combat Air Patrol duties over the UK while the small number of FR.10s and similar Photo Reconnaissance variants had already proven themselves to be a useful Tac Recce asset to CINC-Combined UK Land Forces.

One other somewhat newer aircraft the RAF had considered was the English Electric Lightning. The problem with this aircraft, however, was that apart from the former Saudi and Kuwaiti aircraft, they could only carry out the air to air mission and were rather lightly armed for the anti-Harpy role. . Still, the air force could not really afford to ignore a potential combat aircraft, at least not until more Typhoons, Tornado GR.4s and the new Hawk FGR.2 were delivered. Even the Tornado F.3 had managed to diversify into the anti-Harpy mission and the RAF was now looking at adapting some of the F.3s it had brought out of storage to carry other types of air to ground ordnance Given his experience working on the Lightning it was inevitable that as well as his duties which involved training National Servicemen Flight Sergeant Archibald would also be assigned to the Lightning Training Flight that had been established at Scampton. Once he was able to hand over supervision of the trainees to a sergeant he drove over to the dispersal of the LTF, which was currently made up of four two-seat T.5s and five F.6s. The air force was hoping to get a few more F.6s and F.53s operational, but for now this small force was it.  The first problem after restoring the aircraft that the RAF had faced was arming them, while 30mm ADEN shells were plentiful enough and still in production, there were not exactly lots of Red Top missiles around. Back in the 1970s the RAF had trialed fitting AIM-9 Sidewinders to a Lightning F.6 as a possible replacement for the Red Top, though the MoD had decided that there was no money available for such a modification to an aircraft soon to leave service. Now the armorers of the LTF were working on fitting AIM-9Ls to their aircraft and getting missile and weapons computer to talk to each other.

“How’s it going?” He asked another Flight Sergeant armorer once he had arrived.

“It’s not bloody well going, Jack. The ruddy missile will fit.” He said pointing to an AIM-9L attached to the nearest Lightning. “But the bloody plane’s weapons computer, such as it is, doesn’t want to know. Damned thing has less processing power than my watch.

“I don’t suppose somebody has found a bunker full of Red Tops so we can knock this on the head by any chance.”

“Sadly not, this is something we’ll need to crack on with. You be nice to the Lightning and it will eventually do what you want it to.”

Archibald shook his head, perhaps the Lightning was going a step too far. It was just at the awkward point of development, too complex to run as a simple gun-truck like the Hunter, not complex enough to carry modern equipment. That brought him to the next item on his list of duties, one he was looking forward to. He had to go to Nottingham and pick up a cache of electronics equipment and technicians then bring them back to this base. It really was amazing what the RAF had stashed away over the years and, in many cases, forgotten that they ever had it. Perhaps the idea of a bunker full of Red Top missiles wasn’t so outlandish after all. Anyway, he had to take a small convoy of trucks over and that was the pleasant bit. Just over 100 kilometers and petrol rationing meant that the roads would be clear. A pleasant drive in the countryside was just what was needed to take thoughts of the Lightning’s balky computer out of his mind.

Three hours later, he was on the outskirts of Nottingham, doing the unthinkable. He was asking directions. His little convoy had managed to take a wrong turning and somehow got hopelessly off course. The problem was that somebody, in a fit if excessive zeal or perhaps ingrained memory of anti-paratrooper precautions from World War Two, had taken down all the street names. Rather than waste precious petrol he’d stopped at the first large store he’d seen, a garden supply center, and gone in to find out where he was and what he had to do to go where he was supposed to. His uniform had got him some quick attention.

“Twelve sacks of fertilizer.” The voice came from behind him, from a man speaking to one of the service clerks.

“Any particular kind sir?”

“Nutrafin.”

That made the staff pay attention and Archibald’s ears pricked up. Nutrafin was an ammonium nitrate fertilizer and, while not exactly a controlled substance any more, it was an ‘object of interest’ when purchased in bulk. Twelve sacks of the stuff were more than slightly ‘bulk’. That made the purchase more than slightly ‘interesting’.

Discretely, Archibald turned around and looked at the would-be purchaser. He was unkempt, dirty, disheveled, well, a man who spent his time working on other people’s gardens and didn’t get paid more than a very basic wage could well look like that. There was something else about him though, something that Archibald couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was as if he wasn’t quite here, as if a part of him was detached. Perhaps he was educationally sub-normal and this was the best job he could get? But if that was the case, why would he have been trusted with what had to be a major purchase?

“I’m afraid we’ll have to get an order that large from the warehouse Sir. It’ll take a while, would you mind waiting? Or perhaps you’d like to come back for it?”

“I’ll wait. And hurry up, the Goddess is waiting.”

Normally a remark like that would have added at least 30 minutes to his wait time but the garden center staff had noted there was something odd about this man as well and wanted him out. Archibald sympathized with them but the incongruity of the remark nagged at him. A worker might well refer to an imperious and demanding female manager as “the goddess” but there was something in the man’s voice that belied that explanation. There had been an echo of love. Adoration even? For a brief second Archibald toyed with the idea that the man might be the bottom in a BDSM relationship but his sordid appearance didn’t fit that either. Then his distanced attitude clicked in Archibald’s mind. He’d read an intelligence report about the gorgon incidents around Sheffield, how they appeared to be able to control people, even those who were wearing their tinfoil hats. Eye witnesses to the two doomed police officers had remarked on their distant, remote appearance. And the gorgon had vanished despite an intense hunt.

“Look, do you have a large-scale map of the area in your back office? That would make sorting me out a lot easier.” Archibald spoke easily and was relieved that the on-the-ball manager picked up the hint.

“Yes, of course Flight Sergeant. Should have thought of that myself. Come with me.” The two men walked away, into a back office where there was no map but which did possess a telephone with an outside line.

“Thank’s. Can you stall that man until I get help?” The manager nodded and quietly left for the warehouse. Delays were about to multiply drastically. After all, nobody could work slower than a British worker when he put his mind to the problem. Behind him Archibald picked up the phone, punched “9” and then dialed the number for the service hotline.

“This is Flight Sergeant Archibald here. Could I speak with the duty officer please?”

“Captain Mannock here Sergeant.”

“Sir, I’m at the Moors Garden Center, just outside Nottingham. A man’s just come in here, asking for twelve sacks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. He’s an odd one Sir, I may be all wet but I think he’s entranced. He’s acting just like the descriptions of those two coppers the gorgon killed. And nobody buys that much ammonium nitrate for their back yard.”

At the other end of the line, Richard Mannock drummed his pencil on the desk. It was weak, certainly, but this came from an NCO, almost certainly a recalled veteran. Such men did not jump at shadows. Anyway, the leads on the missing gorgon had dried up and there was nothing else to follow. And if gorgons could entrance people, then it was possible they might be able to exploit their knowledge. Most people knew how to make ANFO.

“Well done Sergeant. Can you follow him when he leaves?”

“I’ve got RAF trucks here Sir, bit obvious for a tail. Hold one.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at the manager who was just re-entering the room. “We think we’ve got a line on the gorgon that did for Sheffield. Have you got a van or car I can borrow? And a cell-phone?”

“We’ve got the garden center van, its just a plain white one. And you can have my cell phone. But the petrol?”

“If the van’s full and we get the gorgon, I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about petrol again. Thank’s mate.” Archibald took his hand off the mouthpiece. “Got both Sir. We owe the garden center manager who’s arranged them. Owe him a lot.”

“Noted Sergeant. Get on with the tail and don’t be seen. Call us when you’ve found where he’s going or if you lose him. We’re sending a team down now, they’ll be there in an hour or so. Even if this guy isn’t entranced and its something else, its still worth looking into.” The telephone clicked and Archibald guessed that wheels were already starting to turn very fast.

“Here’s the keys Flight Sergeant.” The manager handed them over and Archibald left by the back door, clutching a local map in one hand. A few minutes later, the suspect finished loading the sacks into the back of his car and, with the rear suspension sagging dangerously, left. Archibald eased out and followed him, trying to keep at least one car between them. It wasn’t hard, the man was driving slowly and steadily, apparently not paying any attention to what was happening around him. That caused a few outraged honks from horns but he apparently ignored them.

Eventually he turned into the driveway of a detached house in what looked like a council hosing complex. He got out of the car and opened the garage door, allowing Archibald to see more sacks of fertilizer stacked up inside. The Sergeant drove past, stopped a hundred yards or so down the road and then got on the cellphone. This time he got straight through to the duty officer.

“Captain Mannock Sir? Sergeant Archibald again. I’ve followed the suspect to his home, there’s a lot more fertilizer in his garage, saw it as I drove past. The address is.” Archibald fumbled the map for a second. “18 Grays Lane, Clifton Council Housing Estate.”

“Good man. An emergency response team is already on its way down. Wait where you are and they’ll be with you soon.” Mannock hesitated slightly, the Sergeant had done well and he didn’t want to sound as if he was putting the man down. “We’re sending in the heavy mob so they can do the rough stuff. We need you to identify the man from the garden store after they’ve finished cracking skulls.”

Archibald grinned to himself, he’d been in the RAF long enough to recognize a tactful ‘stay out of their way’ when he heard it. “Very good Sir. Message understood.”

He settled back in the driver’s seat and, on a whim, opened the glove compartment. To his delight there was a Mars bar and a Twix pack in. Munching on the chocolate and watching the house through his mirror, he almost missed the sight of two Chinook helicopters passing overhead.

B-1B “Dragon Slayer” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Approaching Dis

Major Curtis Trafford shifted uncomfortably in his seat, knowing that it was going to get a lot worse. He had been airborne for ten hours, Dragon Slayer pounding north, over the sea of murk that represented the dust clouds covering Hell. They had traveled more that six thousand miles since take-off and he was already aware that he was now deeper into Hell than any living human had ever gone. He also knew that his status in that respect was increasing every minute as the B-1s continued their marathon flight and that meant the aircraft’s fuel tanks were steadily being depleted. Coming up was their first refueling point, the tankers were already closing in on the agreed rendezvous point and their beacons showed clearly on the navigational displays.

The aerial refueling arrangements were a thing of beauty. The tankers themselves, a mix of existing KC-10As and newly-modified KC-10Bs, had already refueled once on the way to the rendezvous and would have to refuel again on the way back. The arrangements for the next refueling of the B-1s, after they had completed their strike were even more complex, the KC-10s would have to refuel twice before making the rendezvous with each of their tankers themselves having to be refueled in mid-air on the way. Overall, more than 100 tankers were assigned to this mission and that didn’t change the fact that it only needed one of the B-1s to develop problems with its air-to-air refueling system and that aircraft would be inevitably lost. The only air base that could take them was 6,000 miles behind them and there were no alternatives or emergency landing fields.

On the other hand, this mission was the only way humans could strike at the source of the attacks that had destroyed Sheffield and Detroit. Not to mention the only way any further attacks of the kind could be prevented. There were special forces in the vicinity of Belial’s fortress, the radar beacon they were using for navigation proved that, but they lacked the strength and firepower to do much about the place. A long way south, two human aircraft carrier battle groups were due to enter the Hellish Sea and start pounding their way up north but even flat out it would be two weeks before they were on station – and supporting them this far away from a home base would be a real pain. No, for the moment, the bombers were it, the best and most plausible form of striking at the source of the sky-volcanos.

“Tankers ahead Curt.” The co-pilots voice was relieved. It hadn’t quite been decided what to do if the complex refueling arrangements hadn’t worked. The B-1s couldn’t make it to the target area without refueling so if the refueling went sour, the aircraft went down. Trafford assumed that the only course of action would be to walk out but 6,000 miles was a long way by B-1. On foot it was an impossibility even forgetting the hostile environment of Hell. So, seeing the glint of red as the light flashed off the silver wings of the tankers was a great relief.

“Got them. This is Foxhound Leader to all Foxhounds. Tankers in sight, prepare for refueling.” Trafford relaxed a little and shifted in his seat again. “3,750 miles out, none of us are going to walk right for a month after this.”

“There’s always the steam baths and massages.” His co-pilot’s voice was droll, the idea came from an old film starring Jimmy Stewart and its ideas on post-flight treatment were a long-standing bomber crew joke.

“Yeah, right. It look to you like the clag is a bit thinner up here? Sometimes I’d swear I can almost see the ground down below.”

“Just your imagination Curt. Take two reality pills and remember we’re bombing the crap out of Hell.”

Chapter Seventy Six

Walls of Dis, Hell

This wasn’t like normal sieges. The rules of a siege were well-established; the defenders mounted guard on the walls of the besieged fortress, the attackers started to build their own fortifications around that fortress. Their aim was to cut supplies to the besieged garrison and eventually bring about its surrender. If that didn’t seem likely, they would concentrate on the weakest point of the line and break through there. Or try to, a wise garrison commander kept a force in reserve for exactly that eventuality. The reserve force could be used another way, if food was running out, it could launch an attack on the weakest point of the fortifications and break out. If there was a reserve.

Nobody had ever besieged Dis before, not even during the Great Celestial War. It was too big, its walls too long. It would require more than the total armies of Hell, even before the humans had set about decimating them, to set up a proper siege. Garrisoning Dis was even more impossible. Dagon had 243 legions, of whom 24 were Krakens and 16 cavalry. That left him with 203 legions of foot soldiers, 1,350,000 in total. That meant he had one soldier for every 50 feet of wall. That wasn’t a garrison, it was a fig-leaf. Dagon snorted at the use of the old Earth religious reference. These humans weren’t the blind, foolish followers of superstition that the Demons had known. They were supremely logical, supremely practical, utterly ruthless killers. And nobody had told them that putting Dis under siege was impossible so they had gone ahead and done it.

At first, Dagon didn’t even believe that the city had been put under siege. There were no earthen walls being thrown up, no garrison surrounding the city. The humans had started to arrive and set up their camps, scattered around the city, wherever they felt the ground suited them. Isolated encampments, just their tanks and mickvees parked on the plains, surrounded by a wall of earth. And their artillery of course, Briefly Dagon wondered at how Belial had got to know all the names for the human weapons, was he in league with them? That was a question better not asked because Belial was now Satan’s favorite and to criticize him meant death. Anyway, the names were good, ‘aircraft’ made much more sense than ‘sky chariot’ and few now used the original demon names. That was good for the old names implied magic and there was no magic in the human’s arsenal. They used machines instead. Engineering had met magic and engineering’s victory had been absolute. Dagon knew Dis would fall, his paper-thin screen of soldiers couldn’t stop the human onslaught.

Dagon shook his head and returned to the problems of the siege. He had more soldiers, more by far than the humans. The human encampments hadn’t linked up, they were still separate entities. Last night, some demons outside had tried to get caravans of supplies through to the city, knowing that prices within the walls were already soaring. The great camps between the human positions had seemed an open invitation and that was just what they had been. An invitation to destruction. The caravans had set out and died under a hail of mage bolts – Dagon stopped himself and carefully used the right words. A hail of artillery fire. The caravans had been destroyed, when the light had returned, all that was left of them was charred wreckage. The siege was as tight as if the humans had surrounded Dis. How they’d done it, Dagon didn’t understand but they had and that was all that mattered.

“Keep down My Lord.” One of the foot soldiers near him whispered urgently. That was something else Dagon had noted. The soldiers up here crouched behind the stone crenellation and spoke in whispers. They were afraid, mortally afraid and once more Dagon knew that the fall of Dis was inevitable.

“You fear the humans?” Dagon’s voice was silky as he asked the question that was also a threat.

“Humans, no. Their magery yes. “ The new words hadn’t spread down to the rank and file yet. “My Lord, if they see you, you will die. They can see in the dark and strike without warning.”

The ranker measured distances and the route that Dagon had used to approach. “My Lord, they are watching now for you. They saw you come to us and now they wait for you. When you appear again, if you appear again, you will die. Watch this.”

The soldier placed a spare helmet, Dagon didn’t like to think of how the helmet had become a spare, on a trident and lifted it where Dagon’s head would be if he stood up. There was a dull thud and the helmet lurched and spun. When Dagon looked at it, there was a hole the size of his talon punched in the front but the back was a gaping void, its edges hot and singed.

“Three soldiers we’ve lost tonight to that magery, on just this section of the wall. How many more, I don’t know but if the rest of the walls are like this….”

The soldier didn’t need to finish the thought but Dagon did it for him, silently, in his head. If this rate of attrition kept up, he wouldn’t even have a paper-thin defense when the assault came. He had a mental picture of what that would mean, the humans breaking through the walls, their tanks and mickvees plowing through the streets, their artillery devastating the city and they took in by storm. Every demon knew what happened when a fortress fell to attack by storm, a days-long orgy of looting, rape, pillage and torture than would only end when there was nothing left to kill and destroy. If the humans were as efficient at storming fortresses as they were at destroying armies in the field, and there was no reason why they should not be, then Dis was indeed doomed. And with it the whole demon race.

Dis could not be stormed, its surrender had to be negotiated before the humans got to work. Deumos had been right, somebody had to contact the humans and ask for terms. But, nobody could do that while Satan still lived. The answer was obvious although millennia of loyalty screamed in protest at the inevitable conclusion. Satan had to go. That meant Dagon had to see Deumos and throw his lot in with her plan. Now, quickly because the humans would attack soon and then it would be too late for Dis and everybody who lived within it.

B-1B “Strawberry Bitch” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Over Tartarus

“I guess that must be the first target?” Major Andrea Czernick swung Strawberry Bitch around in a wide circle, looking at the great black ellipse beneath them. “Sheffield or Detroit do you reckon?”

“No way of knowing is there? Hang on a minute, Sheffield’s lava outfall has stopped, Detroit’s hasn’t. The portal is that crater is clear of lava. Looks like its building up though and will lap over again soon but its clear now. So that must be Sheffield. Damn.”

Strawberry Bitch had been allocated the southern portal, a few miles away, Shoo Shoo Baby was lining up on the other. It looked like Shoo Shoo Baby had got lucky and drawn the Detroit portal.

“Look on the side Jim, at least if this thing works, we’ll stop the Sheffield attack resuming.”

“If it works, I hear the first test was a flop. Lining up Andy?”

“Lined up. Bomb-nav system on, target designated, approach height 29,000 feet, speed 454 knots. All data entered. Take it from here, Strawberry Bitch.”

The B-1B settled into its bomb run, the attack-navigation system taking data from the flight computer and bombing radar and transforming it into precise flight commands. Humanity had come a long, long way from the crude Norden bomb sight in the B-24 whose name the B-1 carried. At a precisely calculated moment, the aircraft lurched as the EBU-5 dropped clear of the bomb bay and arced downwards. Czernik held her breath as she watched it fall in a perfect ballistic arc that terminated in the center of the portal. There was a brilliant flash, one that seemed unnaturally bright against the black of the portal, a flash that seemed to grow out of all proportion to the size of the bomb she had just dropped. The black ellipse of the portal seemed to flicker, its edges pulsating as they absorbed the blast from the bomb. Then the portal started to swell outwards , doubling or tripling in size, before it collapsed and vanished.

“Yee-hah!” Czernik’s scream of triumph was echoed throughout Strawberry Bitch as her crew looked at the featureless crater that now lacked its black crown. A split second later a similar scream of triumph came over the radio from Shoo Shoo Baby. Obviously the Detroit sky-volcano had just been shut down as well. Czernik pulled the control column back, bringing Strawberry Bitch into a gentle climb away from the target location. First responsibility was to clear the target area for the formation of four B-1s that were targeting Belial’s fortress. Second was to send a message home. She thumbed the button on the radio that selected long-range communications and composed her voice into its best neutral-official tone. “This is Foxhound-Electric-Leader to Rivet Crown. Do you read me?”

“Rivet Crown here. Receiving you.” That was a relief, there were no satellites in Hell and the egg-heads seemed to believe there never could be so relay aircraft were being used. Rivet Crown was an old EC-121 that had been ‘borrowed’ from a museum and pulled back into service while Boeing 747s were converted to take her place. She had last directed air intercepts over the Gulf of Tongkin more than forty years before. Another old lady doing her best.

“Report Operation Electric Strike successful. Repeat Operation Electric Strike successful. Both portals hit by bombs and closed down. Both portals shut completely. No sign of further sky volcano action here.”

“Confirming that Electric Strike Leader. Both portals shut down. Wait one.” There was a long humming crackle of static and Czernik thought she could hear the drone of the relay aircraft’s piston engines. “Electric Strike Leader, we have word from Detroit. Sky volcano has vanished, the lava has ceased to fall and the portal has closed. Mission confirmed as successful. Rivet Crown out.”

Czernik relaxed in her seat, as much as was possible in the poopy-suit she was wearing. That was one thing the air force still had to sort out, a decent means of in-flight relief for female crew members. And it was still a long way to go back home.

B-1B “Dragon Slayer” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Over Tartarus

“The sky volcanoes are down!” Rivet Crown just confirms shut-off.” Trafford relayed the message to the crews and heard the explosion of cheering in the four aircraft. “Now let’s get that bastard Belial.”

Even if this part of the strike was a failure, the mission would still count as a success. The volcanoes had to come first, partly so the bombing conditions for the two Foxhound-Electric aircraft would be perfect but also, as the old proverb insisted, business had to come before pleasure. So, taking out Belial and his fortress had to wait for second place. But, the main formation’s time had come and the four B-1s dropped into the appropriate formation.

“Bomb-nav system on, target designated, approach height 45,000 feet, speed 522 knots. Intervalometer on. All Foxhound aircraft synchronize now.” The master bombing system on Dragon Slayer sent out an electronic bleep that aligned all four bomb-nav systems on the aircraft to within a thousandth of a second. Ahead of them was the great square that Abigor had described as “The Adamantine Fortress” and carefully drawn for them. The special forces team that was on the ground below had photographed the installation as well and those illustrations had made up the target pack. Now, the bombers had a radar image of the target and the set was complete.

A mix of BLU-116 Advanced Unitary Penetrator bombs and Mark 83 conventional bombs were stowed within the cavernous forward bomb bay of the B-1s. Trafford had wondered why the BLU-116s were being used rather than the Massive Ordnance Penetrators that had made such a spectacular ruin of Satan’s palace but it had been explained that there were mines underneath the Adamantine Fortress and there were human slaves in those mines. It was, therefore, desirable to destroy the fortress without too high a probability of caving in the mines underneath. The BLU-116 fulfilled that role perfectly. The Mark 83s had been substituted for anti-personnel cluster bombs at the last minute, supplies of the cluster bombs were running very low and they were being saved for even more pressing targets. With the assault on Dis just days away, Trafford could see why.

He felt the snap as the bomb bay doors opened and the vibration as the aircraft’s bomb load started to pour out of its forward bay. That would give the aircraft a C-of-G problem until the fuel in the tank occupying the aft bomb bay had been consumed. But, that extra fuel tank gave them a margin of safety in the event of problems with the intricate chain of tankers that were supposed to get the bombers home. Beneath him, Trafford saw the target area disappearing under a rolling cloud of explosions. Mission accomplished.

South of the Adamantine Fortress, Hell

“Will you look at that!” Tucker McElroy whooped and smacked the nearest member of his team soundly on the back as the fortress they were observing disintegrated into a rolling cloud of brilliant orange and black explosions, punctuated by the roar of the blasts and brilliant flashes of light as the structure of the building shattered under the hammering of the bombs. The whole of his team were dancing with delight as the ground shook under their feet and the air around them roiled from the devastating destruction that was being meted out. Through the blasts, McElroy could see the whole structure collapsing into a pile of formless wreckage. Revenge was definitely an under-rated pastime he reflected.

Beside him Memnon watched the bombing with awe, he’d heard claims that Satan’s palace had been destroyed but he had dismissed them as exaggerations and propaganda. Now, with Belial’s palace crumbling before his eyes he forced himself to remember that where destruction was concerned, nothing was beyond the abilities of the humans. Nothing in hell anyway.

“That’s show the bastard to pour lava on our cities.” McElroy was still whooping with delight. “And once we’ve finished with this place, we’ve got a few other scores to settle as well.”

“With Yahweh?” Memnon was curious. “You humans plan to deal with him as well.”

“Of course.” McElroy paused. “We’ve already got one of his minions. Some bastard called Appollyon or something. One of our tank-heads blew him away in Iraq. The shit-head had slaughtered an entire family and sat there drinking tea surrounded by the bodies. Until an Abrams turned up and blasted him. He died, just like the ones down here.”

Memnon remembered the incident and thought about correcting McElroy’s version of events but decided it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Anyway, if the mistake meant the humans were going after Yahweh as well, who was he to argue? Yahweh had always been a great one for saying nothing happened without a reason, so he couldn’t complain about this could he? Besides, only two beings, Apollyon and Memnon, knew what had really happened that night and Apollyon wasn’t talking. That made Memnon think back on the creature he had been then and compared it with his present status. The thought made him uneasy, these people had taken him in, cared for him, cured his wounds, respected him for his abilities and applauded his efforts. Compared with the savagery of the demons and the arrogant, supercilious cruelty of the angels, weren’t they the examples to be upheld and emulated?

“Beware, for the angels have powers and abilities all of their own.” Memnon spoke slowly. “We beat them in the Great Celestial War only by great efforts and much sacrifice. You will not find them as easy to beat as the enemy here. I know some, Abigor knows more. What we know we will tell you but I warn you there are many more weapons that the angels can deploy against us than we know.” Memnon looked again at the crumbing ruin of Belial’s fortress then frowned. He focused his vision to great distances and saw the columns heading north. “And I fear Belial anticipated your raid. He had evacuated the Adamantine Fortress and headed north. Why I cannot tell you.”

Cabinet Conference Room, The White House, Washington D.C.

The conference room was bitterly cold, primarily because the air conditioning had been turned up to its maximum setting. Demons liked warmth and President George Bush saw no reason why their visitor should be comfortable. Also, the air purification system was running full blast and the air current out through the vents in the floor were enough to rustle papers.

“This is crunch time Lugasharmanaska.”

“Crunch time Sir?”

“Time to make a choice. You’ve been playing both ends against the middle ever since you surrendered to us. We knew it of course and it suited us to let it continue. Now, it doesn’t. You’re going to have to pick sides. You’re either with us or with Deumos. That means with us or against us. Which? Make up your mind.” Bush sat in his seat with a gentle smile on his face. One he usually reserved for people he was allowing to hang themselves.

Lugasharmanaska stared back. She’d long accepted that her miasma no longer worked but the blunt statement shocked her. Succubae weren’t used to be given ultimatums. She tried to buy time, to think this through. “My choices Sir?”

“You can stay here with us, work with us without reservations, or go back with Deumos. Take your pick.”

The succubus weighed options briefly. “I will work with you Sir. My place is here now.” It hadn’t taken much, when Deumos had contacted her, asking to arrange this meeting Lugasharmanaska had quickly probed her mind, as much as she was able, and detected a tinge of anticipation that did not bode well for her. She had a strong suspicion that despite her efforts, Deumos did not look well upon her and had a gruesome revenge in mind. The humans were a safer bet, much safer.

“Good. Welcome to the team. You may leave now.” Lugasharmanaska left with her guards. She may have joined the team but Bush intended to take no chances. “Show Deumos in.”

The Queen of the Succubae or whatever she chose to call herself, was big, Bush reflected. The creature was walking crouched and bent-over and was still finding it hard to fit into the confined spaces of the White House. Even when she sat on the floor by the table, her horns still nearly touched the roof. Bush had no doubt that the gas chromatographs measuring pheromone levels in the room were going off the chart.

“You are Deumos.” That was a nice, stupid way to start the conversation Bush thought, years in politics and winning elections had proved to him that being underestimated was a valuable attribute. “To what do we owe the honor of this visit?”

“There may soon be some changes in the power structure of Hell. I wish to discuss a way of ending this war with you.” Deumos’s voice was a deep, grinding rasp that she probably thought was seductive.

“We can do that. Your unconditional surrender should do the trick.”

Deumos barely managed to conceal her shock. Wars always ended in compromise and with terms. Never a bland demand for a complete surrender. Even the Great Celestial War had ended with terms demanded and given. Internally, she was worried, normally when she spoke her miasma made them accept what she said. “I and my colleagues plan to remove Satan from power. Very soon, at a meeting to discuss the strategy of the war.” Where Satan thinks he will be giving the orders she thought. “Once that is done we will take power and we will declare the war over. For that, we will demand one third of your dead so we may extract energy from them and the support of your armies against any who stay loyal to Satan. Is this agreed?”

Bush grinned to himself, reveling in the degree to which Deumos was talking herself into a hole. It was true what Ronald Reagan had always said. Just keep smiling and people always hanged themselves. “A very interesting offer Deumos. I can safely say that you may have an answer in accordance with our traditions very shortly and I am certain you will find it assertive. Thank you for attending this meeting.”

Bush watched while Deumos shuffled out, barely fitting through the double doors. Then he thumbed a button on his intercom. “She’s gone. Bring Luga in.”

It was a relief to be dealing with a normal-sized figure again. “Lugasharmanaska, you can lock in on Deumos’s mind at any time?”

“Yes Sir.

“Good.” Bush pressed another button on his intercom. “Condi, please call Vladimir in Moscow. There’s some equipment we need to borrow.”

“Very good Sir. Oh, Sir, there’s something on television you should watch. The Pope’s issued a statement.”

“I thought he was laying low. Oh well. Thank you Condi.” He switched the intercom off and went into an anteroom where a large flat-screen television was set up. His aides checked the channel was set to Fox news and turned it on. Fox’s Rome anchorman was speaking.

“And we have just received the news of the Papal statement. The full version will be issued in about three hours time but we have an advanced abstract now. It reads as follows.

“Current events have challenged the very core of our beliefs and thrown all that we believed into doubt. One thing must remain clear, that we follow the teachings of Jesus Christ that provide a good and just basis for all of human conduct. But we cannot deny that these have been corrupted and misapplied, that grave mistakes have been made and that crimes of great magnitude committed. At times like this we must believe that we have been mislead and deceived by imposters and deceivers who succeeded in leading us down a false path. We can be sure that the God who has led us down this false path is not the God of whom our Lord Jesus Christ Spoke. We can be sure it is those deceivers and imposters and in particular those who lead them, that are responsible for the grievous errors that have been committed in our Church’s name. we must cast out such deceivers and purify ourselves so that we can, once more, follow the teachings of Christ as they were meant to be followed.

"To do this I call upon the Holy Catholic Church to excommunicate God.”

Chapter Seventy Seven

Plateau of Minos, Hell

By the standards of Hell, the Plateau of Minos was well-organized. If was dominated by the great black gate at one end, a gate that had all the appearances of a transit portal but was set in the rocky face of the Hell-pit, in the mouth of a cave that defined its shape. Nobody knew what lay beyond that gate, the Demons who had been brave enough to try crossing it, or had been unfortunate enough to fall through it, had never returned. One thing that the demons working on the Plateau did know was that it was through that gate that the human dead arrived in Hell.

Once working on the Plateau had been an easy position, only a trickle of dead humans arrived to be processed, but that had changed. The demons working on the Plateau of Minos had been the first ones to be aware of the changes on Earth. For millennia the rate at which the human dead had arrived had been constant but a mere few centuries that had started to change. The trickle had become a stream, the stream a river and the river had turned into a flood. Now, three bodies arrived every second and any break in the routine would cause a disastrous backlog. The fact that there were worse disasters than a work backlog never dawned on the demons who worked on the Plateau but it should have done. If they looked over the chasm that separated the Plateau of Minos from Lucifer’s Finger, they would have seen the crumbed ruin of the great spur of rock and the palace that had once stood on it.

But, bowed down by the routine demanded by the constant stream of bodies emerging from the gate, they didn’t. Instead, the ancient tradition held sway. Two demons would pick up each unconscious human dead and carry it over to one of the line of hydras waiting on the edge of the Plateau. The command would form in the hydra’s heads, it would wrap its tail a number of times around the human and then flick it out across the chasm to the Hell-Pit. The number of times the tail was wrapped around the victim determined which circle it would land in. Down there, other demons would receive it, make the preparations needed and the victim would awaked to begin an eternity of torment. On his throne above the plateau, Minos himself sat, commanding the work of the line of 27 hydra that worked on the limits of his domain. Minos had by far the smallest holding of any Lord of Hell but his was also the most important. Without him, no dead human would reach its proper place in Hell.

This morning, Minos wasn’t feeling particularly well. He had a headache, one that had led him to assign the arriving humans to the most agonizing of Hell’s circles. In the last few minutes, his headache had been joined by a curious throbbing sensation, one that seemed to vibrate the air around him and make the dust on his throne bounce. It wasn’t the human aircraft overhead, they were a familiar sight by this time, streaking through the comforting dust of Hell’s atmosphere and then swooping down to pound some selected target in Dis. A palace perhaps? Or a barracks? There were times when Minos was grateful that his realm was so tiny.

What happened next defied his whole concept of reality. A formation of human aircraft, not the sleek ones overhead but ungainly-looking things with wings loaded with weapons and a strange set of whirling blades above them. Painted red and gray like so many other human aircraft but with a blue, six-pointed star on the body. One of them rotated towards him and its wings erupted in fire. Minos just had the chance to see 16 missiles streaking off their racks towards him before his headache was cured forever.

Beneath him, the laboring demons were stunned into immobility as the AH-64D helicopters rose over the rim to pour 30mm gunfire, rockets and Hellfire missiles into the mass of demons in front of them. It was slaughter, pure, unmitigated and relentless. The gunners in the helicopters unleashed salvo after salvo of unguided rockets into the mass in front of them, playing their gunnery controls as if they were musical instruments, switching from rockets to cannon and back again as they split the mob of screaming demons into small groups and then cut those groups down. The demons were unarmed, defenseless, their command cut off by the first salvo of Hellfires that had slammed into Minos and cut him down from his throne. Now, an Apache was hovering over his body, studding it with 30mm cannon fire to make sure he was truly and irrecoverably dead. His minions were workers on the plateau, they didn’t even have their tridents and all they could do was run. Only, there was nowhere to run to, the gunships were advancing slowly across the plateau, mercilessly cutting the demons down no matter whether they stood or ran. As they did, they taught a grim lesson to the shrinking numbers of survivors. This is what helicopter gunships do. This is what they are for.

The demons were driven backwards, always backwards, away from the Plateau rim, towards the great black stain in the wall that represented the death gate. Then, there was nowhere further they could retreat to, some took the dreadful chance and dived through the blackness to escape the relentless hammering of the gunships, the others gave up and stood by the cliff face until the helicopters killed them.

Behind the first line of eight AH-64s, a second group of eight hovered over the hydras that writhed and screamed on the plateau rim. More Hellfire missiles slashed out, thumping into their bodies, ripping them open and sending multi-colored sprays of demon blood arching through the air. In their death-spasms, some fell off the edge, screaming and falling down into the hell-pit where they had thrown so many unnumbered thousands of humans. Others threshed around for a few minutes before the combination of Hellfires and gunfire stilled them forever.

The Plateau was silent except for the thudding noise of the gunships as they circled overhead, looking for any sign of resistance (by which the pilots and gunners meant any sign of life). At the cliff face, the pile of human bodies arriving through the gate was rising steadily, well, the second wave of the assault would handle that. It was already arriving, nine UH-60 Blackhawks loaded with Israeli commandos, their command section and one very special, absolutely indispensable passenger. The Blackhawks touched down, the commandos spreading rapidly across the plateau, quickly ensuring that the dead demons strewing the rocky surface were indeed dead. There were some dead humans in there as well, those unfortunate enough to have arrived just as the assault was starting. They had died with their demon captors although the unconscious humans had never been aware of by how little they had missed salvation.

With the plateau secured, the commandos started picking up the human bodies that were still pouring through and moving them to safety. Another small group disappeared down the tunnel that marked the only access to the Plateau of Minos and started setting explosive charges on the tunnel wall. The men were experts, demolition men who had set more charges than most people would be able to count. A few seconds after they emerged from the tunnel, a dull blast and a cloud of choking gray smoke marked the success of their latest labors. A couple of them went back into the tunnel and re-emerged, their thumbs raised. It would be years before anybody used that access route again.

In his command helicopter, Colonel Jonathan ben Amiel picked up his radio microphone and clicked it to break squelch. “This is Strike Force Deliverance. Objective is secure, hostile access is denied. Minos is dead and the transfer of souls to the Hell-pit has been stopped. We are setting up the gate now.”

Amidst the helicopters a young Indian girl found a comfortable piece of ground near one corner of the plateau, close to the gaping black void of the existing gate. She closed her eyes and concentrated, seeking out the minds of her colleagues the ‘other side’. Then, almost like opening a door, contact was made and the portal began to form in front of her.

DIMO(N) Facility, Fort Bragg, North Carolina

“We’ve got contact! Get the equipment fired up!” Colonel Warhol stopped to stroke his brand-new rank insignia as he gave the orders. One thing about this war, promotion was fast. Pre-war Lieutenants, especially those with experience in Afghanistan and Iraq (which meant nearly all of them) were already Captains and Majors. Warhol guessed that unless he screwed up this mission really badly, he’d be a General within a month or so. After all, this was the most important mission DIMO(N) had ever staged. A mission aimed at nothing less than cutting the flow of deceased humans to Hell and redirecting them to a refugee facility in the Phelan Plain.

Warhol grinned quietly to himself. What had once been the Martial Plain of Dysprosium had been renamed after the security guard in a Chicago Mall who had sacrificed his life to save a group of schoolgirls from a Baldrick berserker. Philip Phelan had to be out there somewhere and Warhol wondered what his reaction would be when he found an entire region of Hell had been named in his honor. Then his mind snapped back to the task at hand. Sisse Petersen, a recently-arrived Danish sensitive, but one with remarkable linking powers was on the couch surrounded by the latest Mark 3 amplifiers. They caused a lot less discomfort than the earlier versions despite generating more power. Even better, once the portal was open, the Mark 3 could keep it that way without a human operator.

“We’re through, portal opening now.” Sure enough, the portal opened and spread until it was wide enough to take the equipment planned for it. Then, Petersen stepped off the couch and the portal was steady. A cheer went up.

“I will take the next one now.” Her voice was uncompromising, she’d started this job, now she would finish it. She took up position on the next couch and waited for the push from the other side. It came soon enough and the second portal was opened. Now, there were two ellipses, about twelve feet apart. Time for the engineers.

The equipment was already waiting. A skid-mounted set of rollers and a belt were pushed through the first portal. Unseen hands the other side grabbed it and stretched it out. Then the process was repeated with the other side. Once again, the unseen hands there quickly stretched it out. Then, the engineers in between the portals adjusted the tension in the conveyor belt and the job was done. With a flourish, the commander of the Army engineer detachment pressed a button and an electric motor spun to life. There was a rattle and crash, then the conveyor belt began to move.

“I’m glad that worked.” Warhol hardly dared breathe.

“No reason why it shouldn’t. The fuel pipeline through the Hellgate is working OK. And we’re getting aircraft and equipment through no problem. So this should be fine. Ah, here we go.”

The first deceased humans were on the conveyor belt that had no accelerated to full speed. The pile of bodies appeared at one portal, rolled across the gap between them and disappeared back through the other. Warhol sighed with relief. Human dead were no longer going to hell, now they were being transferred directly to the waiting refugee camp. One part of the promise had been kept, no human would ever go to suffer eternal torment in the Hell-Pit again.

Refugee Transit Facility, The Phelan Plain, Human-Occupied Hell

Janice Haggerty woke up very carefully. She was in a great room, far larger than any hospital ward she had ever seen. There was a dull reddish light that was permeating through from outside, was this a tent? And where was she? The last thing she remembered was a tree leaping at her out of the darkness. Then, she looked down and realized she was on a hospital-style bed, naked and uncovered. She yelped and tried to cover herself with her hands.

“Don’t worry, we’re all like that here.” A man on the next bed looked at her appreciatively and in a way that Haggerty found upsetting.

“He’s wrong.” Haggerty sighed with relief, a nurse had appeared, her face oddly obscured by a mask. Surely a little nurse-to-nurse professional courtesy could get her some clothes?

“Where are we?”

“We’re in Hell dear. You’re dead I’m afraid. If you’re strong enough to walk, we need you to you outside to reception and task assignment. Every dead human from Earth and Hell is coming through here and this place is only just large enough. Three of you every second arriving.”

“Three of us every second.” Haggerty tried to wrap her mind around the number. It was hard to imagine that was the number of people who died all the time.

“Yes, and its never going to end so please, hurry up and vacate this bed, we’re going to need it soon.”

“I’d like to rest for a while.” It was the man on the next bed.

“I’m sure you would, but this is a temporary facility only. Just while you regain consciousness. Now, move on please, we need this bed.”

Haggerty got up and, to her relief, found there was a hospital-style robe at the foot of the bed. She slipped it on and stepped through the opening, she had been right, the facility was a series of huge tents. Somewhere near was a powerful electric motor running. Ahead of her were lines of people forming and she joined what looked like the shortest one. The man who had been on the next bed pushed in front of her at the last moment. Hell seemed to have the same problems as Earth sometimes she reflected. Then, the woman sitting behind a computer screen. She looked at the man expressionlessly.

“Name and nationality?”

“George Tubshaw, Irish-American.”

“Cause of Death?”

“Choked on a pretzel.”

“Any military service?”

“No, I always thought I could serve more effectively by working in the private sector.” There was a snort from another line at that.

“Qualifications?”

“Degree in History of Folk Music.”

The woman behind the computer pursed her lips and entered “Useless” into the field for qualifications. “Very well Tubshaw, we’re assigning you to a construction gang. Somebody will teach you how to hit nails with a hammer or use a spade. Next.”

“But… I’m an administrator.”

“Why didn’t you say that before, what did you administer?”

“Well, a music appreciation course in community college.”

“Construction gang. Next.”

“Janice Haggerty, British, No military service.”

“What did you do Janice? And your cause of death?”

“I was a nurse. I was in a traffic accident. We’d been treating casualties from Sheffield, there were so many badly burned people to look after. I must have fallen asleep driving home because the last thing I remember is a tree.”

“A nurse. That’s good. Do you fancy working with people recovered from the Hell-Pit? A lot of them are badly traumatized, they need sympathetic handling. You’d be doing a really needed job.”

“Please, umm Miss, excuse me asking but….”

“The name is Fiona. Yes, I’m dead as well. I died in the Great Influenza of 1919. I wasn’t as lucky as you, I spent the last century being drowned in a cess-pit until some Quakers rescued me. So, you see, I know how much you’ll be needed. Thanks for helping Janice. Next.”

Haggerty walked away, hearing the voice behind her. “Nguyen Huu Phai, Vietnamese, two years military service in the Vietnamese People’s Liberation Army. Died of snake-bite.”

“Right, the military authorities will want to speak with you. Please go over there and wait for a truck.”

A truck, Haggerty thought, obviously the fuel shortage that permeated Earth wasn’t affecting hell, or at least not the Armies fighting in Hell. Overhead she heard the scream of jet aircraft and saw two white-painted military jets making their landing runs, their bleached-out roundels showing them to be British. The TSR-2s, the press had been full of their exploits before she had died. They’d made it sound like the “White Ghosts” were winning the war single-handed. She chuckled, poor old Dennis Healey had been excoriated in the press for canceling them so many years ago.

There was a blast on a horn and she stopped short, the blacktop of a road was in front of her and she’d nearly stepped out in front of a huge tank. She looked around and saw a black American woman officer in a Humvee parked by the side of the road.

“Hokay, you want to die twice in one day? Look where you’re going girl. Them Abrams will squash you flat.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve just…. Can you tell me where the treatment area for people who have been recovered from the hell pit is?”

“Sure can. We’ll be passing right by it. I’ll drop you off, get in.”

“Thank you.” Haggerty climbed awkwardly into a Humvee. “Last time I was in a vehicle I went to sleep and that got me here. I’m Janice Haggerty, nurse.”

“Keisha Stevenson, Colonel United States Army. My battalion just got here.”

“You’re new here too?”

“Nah. Last time I was here, this was all Baldrick country. Now its just like downtown Bayonne. There’s even a Macdonalds as if hell wasn’t bad enough on its own.” The Humvee swerved through the column of tanks and dropped off the blacktop on to a dirt road. “Hellpit recoverees are just ahead. Some of them are in pitiful state. Been in torment so long they can’t remember anything else. You gonna be doing a worthwhile thing there girl. Hokay, this is your stop. Keep the faith.”

Haggerty started. “What faith.”

Stevenson smiled broadly. “Why faith in science, engineering and applied firepower of course. What other faith could there be?”

Chapter Seventy Eight

Grays Lane, Clifton Council Housing Estate, Outside Nottingham

Time, tide and the SAS wait for no man. Gorgons, they were something different. Gorgons needed care, the available intelligence pointed out that they were uniquely dangerous. They had a means, as yet unidentified, of entrancing humans even when their victims were firmly clad in a good–quality tinfoil hat. The experts had been consulted and the results were disquieting, they suggested that the gorgons could entrance a human just be staring at them. Fortunately, the bit about them turning a human into stone had been discounted, it was believed that they were just a greatly exaggerated version of entrancement. It did appear, though, that the gorgons could kill as well as entrance. Some of their victims had been found with curious spines in them, that was a hint as to how they managed both entrancement and killing.

So, the SAS troops were kitted out in head-to-toe Kevlar, woven to give anti-stab protection as well as against bullet strikes. Of course, that wouldn’t help any if the gorgon started throwing lightning bolts around but one took what one could get. All in all, Captain Greg Crowleigh felt he had taken every precaution he could, the SAS might have a reputation for charging into situations but in reality, a vast amount of careful planning went on first. This strike had been no different although Crowleigh was grimly aware that he and his men were considered the B-team if that. The best of the SAS personnel had been deployed to Hell where they were raising their own particular brand of chaos. Well, now was the time to show the powers that be what his people could do.

“Ready Sergeant?”

The figure behind the grenade launcher nodded although the motion was barely visible behind the gas mask and body armor.

“In your own time then. Your shot is the go-signal.” There had been no need to repeat that, it had been stressed in the briefings often enough but Crowleigh was taking no chances. He hadn’t quite got the self-confidence to trust himself to get the message over. Although he didn’t realize it, that was why he was in the B-team.

The grenade launcher coughed, sending a 40mm tear gas grenade through the downstairs window of the house. An instant afterwards, four more launchers sent similar grenades through the other windows at the front, sending white smoke boiling upwards. Crowleigh started his run, jumping up from cover behind the hedge and heading for the bay windows that marked the living room. The house was a standard council property, similar to thousands of others scattered all over the U.K. This one hadn’t been bought by its occupiers during the 1980s but that wouldn’t change its floor plan. If anything, it made the assault easier for the tenants wouldn’t have made any radical changes the way an owner might.

Two blasts from the automatic shotgun he carried dealt with the window itself, then Crowleigh dived through the shattered glass, landing on the carpet inside in a smooth roll. A figure, human, was staggering around in the white haze of tear gas, wailing and holding it’s eyes. Then, it saw the black shape as Crowleigh rose to his feet.

“Goddess, you’ve come down to save us!” Then there was a brief pause as the human stared at the new visitor through streaming eyes. “You’re not our Goddess, get out of our temple.”

The figure lunged for Crowleigh with hands raised in claws. The Captain didn’t hesitate, one shotgun blast threw the human back against a wall, a second sent it tumbling to the floor. As it died, a Sergeant moved past him and flipped the internal door open. It lead to the hallway, stairs to the top floor leading off from one corner. Another figure was standing on those stairs, holding a piece of wood as a club. The Sergeant didn’t let it speak, although it was so racked by coughing that speech seemed unlikely. The burst from the shotgun blew the figure into rags.

Crowleigh and his men quickly fanned out through the tear-gas ridden house. Individual shotgun blasts or short bursts marked the demise of more members of the cult who had made this house their ‘temple’. The old days of HK-5 sub-machine guns had long gone, pistol bullets just didn’t work well enough against Demons. Two more cult members tried to escape out the back doors but were shot down by snipers who were part of the perimeter that isolated the building. The gorgon inside had evaded capture at least twice already, it wouldn’t make it three times on Crowleigh’s watch. The neighbors had been quietly evacuated, the surrounding buildings checked out then used to house the SAS personnel who were conducting the raid. Further out, a second perimeter reinforced the first. Nothing got through either without being very carefully searched.

Upstairs, Lakheenahuknaasi heard the crash of the windows breaking and the sound of gunfire as the members of her cult were cut down. That didn’t worry her, they were expendable and could easily be replaced if she got the chance. That was the problem, if. The house was filled with a strange white smoke that caused her eyes to stream and her lungs to sear. Worse, the same smoke was having the same effects on the tendrils that adorned her head, they were writhing in an incontrollable red and black mass. Completely useless and without their protection, Lakheenahuknaasi felt hideously exposed as she heard the pounding on the stairs that presaged the door of her room exploding inwards.

Sergeant Doyle saw the ghastly figure in the back of the room, its golden scales not hiding the horror of its appearance. It’s head was crowned by a mass of red and black snakes that seemed to have gone berserk, they were flailing about uncontrollably but he could still see the single eye that dominated each. The threads were shooting off barbs, mostly they were hitting the walls and ceiling but a few came Doyle’s way and that was enough. He leveled his shotgun and fired round after round into the struggling gorgon.

Lakheenahuknaasi felt the shots hit her and knew it was over. She had failed her mistress and her time on earth was done. It had been nice being a Goddess for a while and she had had an insight into what made Yahweh tick. It was good to be adored, even if the adoration was forced on an unwilling subject. The human was standing over her with his shotgun leveled and that was the last thing she saw as the world faded out around her.

“That is one ugly mother.” Crowleigh looked down at the mutilated gorgon on the floor. “Is it dead?”

“I do sincerely hope so Sir. I put ten slugs into it.” Sergeant Doyle had already reloaded his shotgun just in case.

“The orders were to take no chances. Tell Private Bodie to get the refrigerated van over here. The medics will want to dissect this one before it rots too much. And wrap that head up in something, the last thing we want is those blasted snakes shooting off more spines.”

Crowleigh left the house and watched the bodies being assembled on the pavement. More than a dozen humans, some men, some women, all entranced by that single gorgon. It had been busy during its brief stay on Earth. Around the barriers set up by the police, a small crowd was growing, mostly just staring at the bodies as the line grew. The sky-volcano over what was left of Sheffield had gone, the gorgon responsible had been killed at last. It had proved a reasonably good day after all.

Underground Fortress of Palelabour, Tartarus, Hell

Euryale woke with a shock, her eyes quickly scanning her lair for an assassin who might have crept in. The cave seemed empty, it wasn’t an intruder who had wakened her so abruptly. On an instinct, she started to scan across the gorgons who had made the trip to Palelabour. They were all present, but one mind, one far removed from the rest was gone. Euryale knew who that mind was and could guess why it was no longer showing up on her scan. Lakheenahuknaasi are you there my child?

Silence.

Euryale repeated the call over and over but there was no response. Her fears were confirmed, Lakheenahuknaasi was dead. She had expected it, the earth-bound gorgon had lasted longer than she had expected and the information she had brought back was more than valuable. It had given Euryale an insight into human habits and capabilities that had stunned her. She had shared only a little of that information with Belial, keeping most of it close to her chest because the implications were so overwhelming. Besides, information was a treasure and nobody parted with treasure when they didn’t have to. Now, the source of that treasure was cut off and Euryale would have to make do with what she had.

One thing stuck in her mind. Lakheenahuknaasi had told her humans were vengeful and held grudges a long time. She had told Euryale of historical disputes that had gone on for centuries over some small, insignificant patch of land. In some parts of the human realm, feuds had gone on for centuries over some minor insult whose original cause had been long forgotten. When she had heard that, Euryale realized that the humans would not forgive the destruction of Detroit and Sheffield. They would want vengeance and would go to any lengths to achieve it. The destruction of the Adamantine Fortress had shown that. Euryale had flown over to it, seeing how it had been crushed into ruins. If Belial hadn’t had the insight to get them out, he and all his clan would now be dead.

Euryale relaxed back on her bed, staring at the ceiling of her lair. Human vengeance was a certain factor and they would not stop until they got it. So how would she and her gorgons survive the impending disaster? That was the question and it still nagged at her mind until she slipped back into sleep.

The Ultimate Temple, Heaven

This, Michael-lan thought was going to be tricky.

Yahweh was sitting on his throne, in the same half-bemused position that he had occupied when Michael-lan had last seen him. His eyes were remote, unfocussed, hypnotized by the rhythmic chants of praise that filled the air around him. Combined with the clouds of incense, they created a glurge of adoring worship that quite turned Michael’s stomach.

“Oh Great and Eternal Father of us All. I bring news of the great conflict between Earth and Hell and of the fate of our Eternal Enemy.”

Yahweh’s eyes snapped out of his trance and focused on Michael. “And have the humans been defeated? Has Satan done as we wished and taken them into his domain?”

Here we go. Michael’s inner mind relished the effect that his news was going to have on Yahweh. And let the good times roll. Michael-lan had liked New Orleans almost as much as he liked Las Vegas. He had been really upset with Yahweh when, in a fit of pique over something or other, Yahweh had turned the course of Hurricane Katrina on to New Orleans.

“No, Eternal Father. In fact, it is our Eternal Enemy who faces defeat. The humans go from strength to strength, they have smashed the armies of Hell, and killed many of the leading commanders. Beelzebub is dead, Asmodeus also, both killed by humans. Many more, too many to name now, although we have the list. The humans bombed the Eternal Enemy’s own palace, reducing it to rubble and killing all who attended him. The Eternal Enemy was spared only by chance. Dis itself is under siege and the Eternal Enemy is trapped inside. The humans command the skies over Hell, they have occupied much of its ground. Their armies go where they wish and destroy all who stand before them.

“But this is not all. Eternal Father, Highest of the High, Ruler of the Heavens” Michael left the ‘and Earth’ bit off, partly to annoy Yahweh, partly out of regard for the truth, but mostly because he’d get to that bit later. “The Humans have struck at the Plateau of Minos. They have killed Minos and all who labored with him and they have seized the plateau. All the humans who die are now transported to the parts of Hell occupied by humans. Not one human soul goes to Hell.”

Yahweh exploded with rage, his fury causing the clouds of incense to roll back and forth. “They have done what? It was my eternal will that humans should suffer for all eternity save those I thought worthy of salvation. And none now are worthy of that. You tell me they have once more rejected my divine commands?”

Oh, this was good thought Michael. Brightens up a dull millennia perfectly. He hadn’t had so much fun since he’d slipped Saint Peter a large dose of LSD he’d obtained on a trip to ‘Vegas.

“There is more O Immaculate One. The human church has repudiated you. They have excommunicated you. They have declared you a false god and affirmed that their beliefs apply to a true god whom you usurped.”

That did it. To Michael’s unrevealed delight, Yahweh went ballistic. Lightning bolts flashed around the throne room of the UltimateTemple and ricocheted off the walls, sending showers of pristine diamond flakes spiraling through the air. Thunder racked and rolled the air of heaven, sending people scurrying through the alabaster streets, seeking cover from the wrath that all too obviously centered on the Ultimate Temple. Eventually, the air calmed down and Yahweh started making sense again.

“Which church did this?”

“The Christians Eternal Father.”

“The one that idiot son of mine invented? Is he involved in this? What is the stupid moron up to now anyway?”

“I believe he is in retreat Eternal Father. Meditating on his existence in an effort to improve himself. By which I mean mentally added Michael He is getting ready to try out some really good grass I scored on my last trip to Earth. And I’ll be joining him as soon as I’ve got this tiresome chore out of the way. Anyway, blaming him for this mess is quite unreasonable, we all told you that the humans were advancing faster than anybody could expect but did you listen? Oh no, you had to know best didn’t you?

Yahweh nodded, his rage subsiding. “Is there anything else?”

“Not much O Heavenly Father. Only that some humans called lawyers have sued you in the Louisiana Supreme Court for damages resulting from Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans. The Church described that as being ‘an act of God’ and that’s been taken as an admission of guilt. According to the judge, you owe the State of Louisiana eighty billion dollars.”

That did it, more lightning flashes battered the already-scarred walls of the throne room. For a moment Michael thought Yahweh was going to have a seizure but he controlled himself. “And what am I expected to do about that?”

“Well, you could pay them. Or you could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That would mean you have to hire some lawyers though and most of them work for the Eternal Enemy. Or you could ignore them but then the humans might send an Army to collect it.”

This time the lightning flashes were multi-colored and went on for a long time. “My patience is at an end. Uriel’s plans are laid, the cups of wrath are ready to be poured. We will inflict tribulations on the humans that they cannon imagine even in their wildest nightmares. Order Uriel to set forth without further delay. The humans will weep for their insults to me.”

“Your will be done Eternal Father.” Michael took a step backwards and headed out of the palace. He’d been right, it had been a tricky meeting but he’d pulled it off. Uriel would set forth and, if Michael was any judge of the way things were going, he wouldn’t find it a happy experience. Anyway, that was for the future and, contrary to Yahweh’s frequently voiced opinions, the future could be trusted to take care of itself. In the immediate present, Michael planned to get stoned.

The Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.

“Are we all set up?”

“Yes Mister President. The equipment we asked for has arrived, four AN-124 transports landed with them on board a few hours ago. Putin sent the crews as well, so we wouldn’t have to waste time training our own people. So, all we need is the word and we’re set to go.

“Apart from that, everything is going well. The last organized demonic armies in hell have been dispersed, the city of Dis is cut off. We’ve seized the reception area for our dead and redirected them towards our own territory. That’s going well, Expedia.com are even advertising trips to our refugee and recovery area in hell so grieving relatives can welcome their deceased family members into the next life. Bit pricey but if that’s what the market demands… Anyway, as long as they don’t interrupt the logistics streams into Hell, that doesn’t worry us. The sky volcanoes have been shut down and the source of them bombed.”

“An interesting thing there Sir.” Doctor Surlethe cut across Secretary Warner when the Senator paused to catch his breath. “As far as we can make out, Tartarus is the contra-coup from the Hell Pit.”

“What?” President Bush looked confused. That was the sort of statement that made his head ache.

“Its like this Sir.” Surlethe produced a strip of paper, gave it a half-twist and stuck the ends together with tape. “Any dimension in hell is like this a Moebius Strip. The whole of hell is like this, we can’t visualize it because it needs extra dimensions but it does. Now, look at this.” He took a pencil and drew a line on the paper, around the circle. It kept going, without the point being lifted from the paper, until eventually it reached its starting point. “You see Sir, the paper only has one surface, a loop without the twist has two,. Hell is like this Sir, no matter which way you go, we always end up where we started, in every dimension. Now, the bombers flew to Tartarus and back, its exactly half way around the world from the Hell Pit. So if we draw that in the Moebius Strip, we see that half way around is exactly where the Hell Pit is on the other side of the dimension. Mathematically, that’s fascinating.”

“I’m sure Doctor. Secretary Warner, in spite of all the good news and the progress we have made, I trust nobody is going to declare that we have reached the end of major combat operations?”

“No Sir. That caused enough trouble the last time.”

“Good. Thank you for the briefing. Oh, Doctor Surlethe. You said this Moebius Strip effect works for all dimensions in the Hell-dimension? So surely it should apply to time as well?”

Chapter Seventy Nine

Bravo Portal, Off Bermuda, Earth

The black ellipse had mushroomed open and now dominated the Great Sound of Bermuda. The shipping channel into the ellipse was guarded, for what came one way through the hellgate could be matched by what came in the opposite direction. Naval Base Hell-Bravo was as much a defensive installation as an offensive one.

Out in the shipping channel, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, CVN-75, was making her way slowly up towards the hellgate, surrounded by a bevy of tugs that were working overtime to keep her within the strict navigational limits. She was a big ship, she drew a lot of water and the last thing anybody needed was an unexpected accidental grounding. Up in front of her, two fire tugs were directing their hoses into the sky, the brilliant sunshine turning the spray of water into a myriad of colors. It was incredibly beautiful. Once again, Captain Herman A. Shelanski reminded himself that pulling into a foreign port was an experience that made all the sacrifices of living in the Navy worthwhile.

“Give ‘Em Hell Harry!” The woman was speaking through a bullhorn from a speedboat that was racing alongside the great carrier. A Cyclone class PC was keeping between her small craft and the side of the carrier, this may be the Salvation War but nobody had forgotten what had happened to the USS Cole. That wasn’t going to be the case here though, the speedboat curved away then made another run alongside the Truman. This time, the girl in the back pulled the bra of her bikini down and did as good an imitation of a pole-dance as was possible under the circumstances. The roar of cheering from the seamen manning the rails on the carrier drowned out the diesels on the tugs. Once again, the speedboat peeled away, this time it was for good because the ellipse was near and the girls wanted to repeat their performance on the John C Stennis following behind. Idly, Shelanski wondered what the Russian crew on the Piotr Veliky, third in line, would make of the display.

“Ready for hell Transit.” It was an order, not a question.

“Aye Aye Sir. Ready for Transit.” Master Chief Walker glanced out at the deck beneath him. The Truman was up to her full complement of aircraft for the first time in many years even if some of them were refugees from the boneyard or a museum. The backbone of the group was the 54 F-18 Electric Bugs, backed up by 18 F-4 Rhinos. Then there was the new addition to the group, the 18 AT-45s, a single-seat strike version of the T-45 Goshawk. They’d only just arrived in time for the transit, the last had made it on board just as Truman swung to enter the navigational channel. With her six E-2 Hawkeyes and eight SH-60R helicopters, the big carrier had 104 aircraft on board. Too many, her decks were cramped and Shelanski had already decided to off-load nine of the AT-45s to the Stennis

“They’re going to be worn out by the time the group’s through.” Shelanski’s Exec, Captain Ronald Reis waved at the cheering crowds on the jetties that separated the Little Sound from the Great Sound. It looked like the whole population of Bermuda had turned out. As Truman’s bow started to touch the great ellipse, a burst of fireworks exploded overhead. Then, the clear blue sky of earth was replaced by the filthy red murk of Hell.

The tugs had peeled away at the last moment but the Truman was not alone. Six DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers and a pair of CG-47 Ticonderoga class cruisers were waiting for her with another, similar group waiting to screen the Stennis. They were making the air crackle with the power output from the SPY-1 radars of their AEGIS systems and their sonars were lashing the water at full power. Here in Hell, there was no worry that the sonar emissions would harm the local wildlife, in fact creating as much havoc as possible was the reason why the big SQS-53s were cranked up to maximum power. The early battle Astute had fought against one of the Greater Heralds so many months ago had shown just how effective low-frequency sonar pulses could be against the Baldricks.

“Clearing transit area now, Sir.” Navigation passed confirmation up to the bridge.

“Screen forming around us. Johnny Reb is emerging from the portal.” Behind them, the Stennis was half through Hellgate Bravo and Shelanski wondered what would happen to her if the portal shut down for some reason at this precise moment. Anyway, it was a pointless speculation since CVN-74 was already emerging from the gate.

“She’s through Sir. Piotr Veliky will be next. As soon as she’s arrived, we’ll be on our way.”

Shelanski nodded. On the bridge above his, the Admiral was doubtless working out the routing that would take the two carriers all the way north to Tartarus. They wouldn’t be the first human naval assets on their way there; all three Seawolf class submarines had transited the portal days earlier and were already heading for Tartarus at maximum speed. They’d already be almost half way there and they had a load-out the featured a lot of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Nor would the two carrier battle groups be the last. Once they had finished transiting Hellgate Bravo, the long line of amphibious warfare ships and their screens would start. A Marine division, rich in helicopters, Harrier aircraft and armor, aboard an imposing array of LHDs, LPDs and LSDs, a British brigade group with their LPH and transports, an equivalent French force and another made up from the smaller European Navies. Even the Peruvian Navy was represented, they’d sent the cruiser Almirante Grau, with her six inch guns, she had the heaviest battery in the fleet.

The Baldricks had all their remaining armies bottled up in Dis, besieged and isolated. They had no idea of the amphibious hammer blow that was about to land on the far north of the land they had once claimed as their own. Shelanski felt the vibration building up under his feet. His ship was picking up speed for the long run to Tartarus.

1/33 Battalion, Third Brigade, Third Armored Division, Ninth U.S. Corps. North of Dis.

The Third Armored was officially designated as the Spearhead Division although it was less formally known as the “Third Herd”. And a herd it was, thundering north as fast as its tracks could carry it, modified only by a degree of prudence. The baldricks had nothing that could stop a tank, nothing that was known, anyway. Still, it paid to be prudent.

Keisha Stevenson looked around at the array of armored vehicles sweeping across the countryside. Things had changed since her first tentative forays into Hell months before. A handful of vehicles she’d had then and they were all of human forces in hell, stepping gingerly into unknown and hostile terrain. Now she had a full combined arms battalion, two companies of Abrams tanks, two of mechanized infantry in Bradleys and a battery of the new 57mm armed anti-harpy vehicles. A force that dwarfed her previous command and yet was a tiny part of the armored avalanche descending on anything that dared to get in its way. It wasn’t just Third Armored; alongside them and off to the east was Sixth Armored and to the West was the Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division with the 30th Mechanized Infantry following as Corps reserve. Just to complete the formation was another reformed unit, the 26th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Stevenson shook her head, four whole divisions and an armored cavalry outfit that was called a regiment but was closer to a small division all by itself. Times had surely changed.

“Village up ahead Colonel.”

“Deploy, standard drill.” Since her return to Hell, her battalion had done this operation a number of times. This was the first time that they’d been out of the area that fed and supported Dis though, it wasn’t likely that would make any difference. She looked through the tank’s optics and saw an embankment, a few pitiful feet tall crossing the track that led into the scattering of small huts beyond. She knew what was beyond it, a ditch, digging that had provided the red soil that made the fortifications. She almost snorted at that and then remembered her dignity as a Colonel. Lieutenants snorted, Colonels looked fierce. She had to remember that. Even if she had only been a colonel for a few days and had spent barely more time in the ranks between.

“Hokay, all units, on the barricade, high explosive, open fire.”

Thirty Abrams tanks fired in a single salvo, hiding the earth embankment behind the rolling orange balls as the 120mm guns sent their shells downrange. The two Bradley companies held their fire, they were on overwatch, waiting for any harpies to appear. Stevenson looked at the destruction developing the baldrick position and shook her head quietly to herself. This wasn’t war, it was getting to have the unpleasant characteristics of a massacre. Had the troops at Wounded Knee felt this way?

“Cease fire. Advance slowly, prepare to open up again if there’s any resistance.” The tanks jerked and then started their slow roll forward. There was no hurry, the 120mms were loaded and ready to fire. Her battalion had older Abrams tanks, ones pulled from the boneyard and refurbished. The new production tanks had 90mm guns, once mounted in M47s and M48s and stored away. Those new Abrams were called stubbies and their crews were the butts of crude jokes about the size of their equipment. Stevenson shook her head more obviously, jokes like that was never a problem she’d had to face. But, in truth, the 90mm killed a baldrick just as dead as a 120mm and the smaller gun allowed the tank to carry twice as much ammunition.

“Will you look at that?” The voice came over the vehicle intercom. Her Abrams was cresting the battered remnants of the barricade and the crew could see the baldricks who’d been sheltering behind that. “Colonel, I thought you said these things were big.”

“They are, or the ones we met so far were. Eight feet, sometimes ten or eleven.”

“Well these ain’t. Same size as us I’d say. Six feet tops. And they don’t even have tridents. Looks to me like those poor bastards have got farm tools for weapons.”

Stevenson looked down, at the bodies surrounding the tank. They were smaller than the ones she’d seen on her first tour all right. And their weapons? She could see a pitchfork and a scythe. One had a wooden pole with what looked like a knife tied to the end. A crude spear. They’d faced up to tanks and they’d been armed only with farm implements and kitchen knives?

She flipped to the battalion command frequency. “Hokay, we take the village. Don’t shoot if you don’t have to, the baldricks over here are just farmers. Remember, a scythe can kill you just as dead as a 120 so if anybody fights, waste them. But if they don’t fight, we don’t shoot, got it?”

Her tank nosed forward again, heading for the gap between the rows of huts that served as a main street. There was nobody in sight, no barricades, nothing. It was an eerie sensation, the words ‘its quiet, too darned quiet’ ran through her mind. Then, from one of the buildings a baldrick ran out, one more of the size she remembered and this one did have a trident. She reacted instantly, the remote-controlled machine gun mounted over the main gun swiveled and fired a burst. The baldrick lurched as the .50 caliber bullets tore home, then collapsed as a second burst finished it off. That was it, that was all?

The mechanized infantry were dismounting from their carriers, spreading out through the huts. Stevenson joined the lead group (much to the private dismay of the Lieutenant who was also leading it) and waited while two of the men moved up to the building. The job was done in standard style, they kicked the crude door in, it was barely more that a collection of brushwood anyway, and a second pair dived through, rolling as they landed, their M4 carbines scanning for targets. Stevenson followed them in, just in time to hear the scream from the dimly lit room.

“No, please, don’t kill them.” A female baldrick was in one corner of the hut, crouched over something, her arms spread protectively over whatever it was she was hiding. “Kill me but don’t kill them.”

Stevenson looked closely, and listened. There was a thin wailing from under the baldrick, one she recognized from her childhood in Bayonne. An infant that had picked up on its mother’s terror and was itself terrified although it didn’t know why.

“Hold fire, she’s protecting her kids.” Stevenson looked again, more closely. “There’s two of them. Get a light over here.”

One of the infantrymen brought a flashlight over and shone it on the female baldrick. She was still sprawled over the infants and moaning gently. “Not my kidlings no.”

“Aww, ell-tee look at this. Their babies. Cute little things, even got little beards.” The private looked at his battalion commander. “Sorry Ma’am. Forgot you were here for a moment.”

“Forget it private, I guess I shouldn’t be.” Stevenson turned her attention to the female. “It’s all right, we’re not going to hurt them. You don’t fight us, we don’t fight you. Have you food for them?”

The female nodded, her yellow slitted eyes looking around suspiciously.

One of the soldiers had come over and was looking down at the babies. “They really are cute.” He dug in a pocket and got out a candy bar. “Reckon they can eat this all right?”

Stevenson nodded. “Saw it back at Hell-Alpha. Abigor’s people love chocolate. Even the kidlings. Ma’am, is it all right for us to give your kids some candy?”

The female still looked suspicious so the soldier with the bar broke off a piece and ate it himself. Then he broke off another piece and gave it to the kidling who seized it and started to chew. The chocolate vanished with astounding speed.

“Here, kid, have another piece. YOW! Hey Colonel, ell-tee, be careful they bite.”

Stevenson remembered her job. “Check this place for weapons then move out.” She left the hut, watching the soldier give his candy bar to the female as they left.

Out in the center of the village, her medical team was working on another female, this one smeared with bright yellow blood. “Colonel, we need help. This one caught a stray fifty-cal. Hurt bad.”

A brief nod, one thing her division wasn’t short of was medical facilities. The ToE was built around a reasonable casualty level, not this walk-over. Once again her conscience started pricking her. “I’ll get a medevac for her. Lieutenant, see to it. Pronto.”

Most of the other villagers were kneeling in the dust of the street, their hands clasped behind their heads. They were all much smaller than the ones she’d seen before, the baldrick her tank had killed had been the only one comparable with them. That thought gave her a clue. “Was that your leader?”

“He was our Lord, yes.” A baldrick, perhaps a little braver than the rest spoke up.

“A lord who sent you out to die and hid himself? Hokay, you didn’t get lucky with your choice of lord did you?” There was a stir of agreement at that. “Look, we don’t want to hurt you.”

“You will not kill us all?”

“Of course not.” Stevenson was painfully aware that she could very easily have done just that. All it would have taken was a lightning bolt from a hut and all of these baldricks, and the chocolate-loving kidling would have been blasted as the tanks drove through. “We try not to kill those who don’t fight us. You spread the word to the other villages, if they don’t fight us, we won’t hurt them.”

There was a stir in the assembled baldricks, a mixture of hope and disbelief. She went over to her command track, one she very rarely used. She just felt better riding in a tank. “Patch me through to Brigade.”

There was a wait for a few seconds while the signal went through. One nice thing about Hell, with the baldricks not having electronics, there was no interference or jamming to worry about. “Sir, we’ve got a situation here.”

“Resistance Stevenson?” She picked up on the note of surprise.

“No Sir. Oh, they blocked the road but we blew that away, killed some of them I regret to say, but the village is ours. No fighting in the populated area. We killed the village lord though, he went for a tank with a trident. One other civilian wounded, rest are fine. They seem harmless,

“They are. Stevenson, according to the scientists, these baldricks are Minor Demons. The ones we have been fighting and seen in the hell-pit and around Dis are Lesser Demons, the next size up. These Minor Demons are peasants, serfs, villeins, little more than slaves themselves. We’re getting the same reports across the whole front. You say you killed their lord?”

“Yes Sir?”

“That means you are their new lord. Promotion by assassination, its something the Baldricks understand. How does it feel to be the Lady of the Manor?” There was a degree of humor in the brigade commander’s voice.

“I don’t think my momma would believe it Sir.”

“Well, you’re stuck with the job until we can get civilian affairs up there. Do the best you can.”

“Very good Sir. I’m sending some of the villagers out to tell the surrounding settlements, don’t fight us, we won’t hurt you.”

“Good move. Brigade out.”

Stevenson thought for a few seconds then turned to the baldricks kneeling in the dirt. “Hokay, I’m your new lord.” There was a stir of satisfaction and relief. The baldricks accepted that they weren’t all about to be killed. “And stand up, we’re your lords now and we don’t like people who grovel in the dirt. And we really don’t like people who make others do that. Have you all got food here?”

There silence, the baldricks glancing at each other. Stevenson sighed and pointed at one, the same one who had spoken up earlier. “You, has the village got enough food?”

“We have some noble lord.”

“Enough?”

The baldrick shook his head. “The lords took it for Dis.”

Stevenson’s mouth twitched. Her unit was carrying supplies, mostly MREs. They’d have to do. “Hokay. there are crops on your farms, will they be ready soon?”

“Yes Noble lord. You will be taking them?” There was hopelessness in the voice.

“Of course not. We will give you some of our food. Until your crops are ready or we can arrange something more permanent.”

The shock on the baldrick face was immediate. As the realization spread, Stevenson saw the baldricks expression change to one of hope. The females were first, they realized that they would have food for their kidlings after all. The surviving males picked up on their relief and also started to relax. Stevenson looked around and decided there could be something in this 'Lord' business.

Chapter Eighty

The Amphitheater of Tranios, Underneath the City of Dis, Hell

It had once been a gigantic volcanic bubble, a chamber filled with lava from the vents underneath. Then, during the great eruption that had created the Hell Pit super-caldera, the bubble had vented to the outside and the magma had drained away. All that had been left was this great cavern buried deep in the super-volcano mount, its vents long sealed by the action of time and rock. Above it, hundreds of feet of solid rock, far below it, the lava still roiled and grumbled but never tried to make its way to the surface for another devastating eruption. Would it do so one day? Nobody knew but everybody present in the great chamber did understand it was much safer to be down here than on the surface where the human aircraft prowled overhead.

The demons didn’t know the term ‘air supremacy’, not the ones here anyway. They understood the concept though, they were in process of being given a post-graduate education in it. It meant they couldn’t move without being bombed. Yes, down here in the great volcanic bubble was much safer.

Or, to be more precise, the risks were ones they well understood. Most of them centered around the huge red figure at the end of the hall, sitting on a throne hurriedly carved from the volcanic rock. The throne was rough, unpolished and simple, a spectacle far removed from the ornate structure now laying crushed to powder in the ruins of Satan’s palace. If Satan lost his temper, even the Greater Demons here could die. On the other hand, being seen on the surface meant they would die. Could beat would.

“Your Majesty, I have to report that the city is completely isolated from the rest of hell. The humans control all the access points and their troops increase in number every day. Their artillery has already started firing on the walls of Dis.”

Satan listened to the report quietly. Those in the chamber noted this, Satan had changed, dramatically so. The destruction of his palace, his near-death at the hands of human aircraft, his life on the run from the humans who made no secret of their intense desire to kill him. “The walls are standing?”

“Yes Your Majesty. Even the human artillery cannot penetrate them.” That was hardly surprising, the walls were 200 feet high and more than 100 thick, made of the hardest volcanic rock that could be found in Hell. In truth, the walls of Dis were an architectural marvel than made the Great Wall of China seem inconsequential. “But they are battering them with their guns. And slowly the walls crumble at the points they have chosen. One day, the walls will fall. And then we will see them attack. When we do we cannot stop them, our best troops lie dead at the Phlegethon River. My own troops, the last of our trained professionals, hold the city walls but they do so as lightly as dust falling on a glass sheet. Every day their number gets fewer as the humans pick them off, one by one.”

“Sire, there is another problem. The humans have seized the Plateau of Minos. Minos is dead, the work force exterminated. The humans redirect their dead to their own camps in Hell. Since the assault, not one dead human has been received by the Lords of Hell.”

“Then kill the humans and take the Plateau back.” Satan’s scream was an echo of the Lordly Demon he had once been.

“We have tried Your Majesty.” Dagon spoke quietly, soothingly. The time was not quite right yet. The hopelessness of the situation had to be made clear to all so that when he made his move, he would have the support of all here. Quietly he wondered how many of the surviving Greater Demons, the Dukes of Hell, Deumos had recruited to their cause. And what she had promised them. “We launched an assault with harpies and the few Wyverns we have left. The attack failed, the human aircraft wiped out the formations and the few that got through were destroyed by the garrison the humans left on the Plateau. We lost much and gained nothing.” And that, Dagon thought, is the story of this war.

“The supplies of new human life-energy have also stopped; all we have are the supplies from those already in the pit. Those grow fewer every day, the loss is slow but it never stops. Humans now dominate large areas of the pit and as they take over each new area they remove their dead from it and send them out. Our troops in the pit are defecting to the humans in ever-greater numbers and they help the humans recover their dead. Already, armies that are part-human, part-demon are forming. Demons armed with human weapons and taught to fight in the human manner. The forces that remain loyal to you cannot stand against that combination.”

A shudder ran around the room. Humans and human weapons were bad enough but demons with human weapons and human war-fighting methods? It was worse than a nightmare.

“Even Dis itself is not secure. The orcs are rising. Many areas of the city are such that a single demon cannot walk alone. Those that try are found beaten to death in the alleys. Even broad daylight is no defense, many of those who died, did so in the full light of day. Your Majesty, we have lost the war. It is time we sued for peace.”

“This will not be!” Satan’s demented scream rang around the chamber, echoing off the roof so that it seemed like a great choir was raging at the security report. “Belial burned their cities, we will burn more. It is your cowardice Dagon that is costing us this war.” Satan summoned himself to swat Dagon, to reduce him to pulp on the floor. Before he could do so, Deumos’s voice cut across his scream.

“Dagon speaks the truth. We must sue for peace. Terms have been discussed with the humans, we demanded a third of their dead for our energy. They said they would make their response clear to us and they have. By seizing the Plateau of Minos, they have shown us they will comply with our demand. They have taken all their dead so they can give us the third they demand.”

Deumos looked around, in this confined space, her miasma was effective and people were listening to her. She had spent her time well, bringing Duke after Duke into her web, each with the promise that, once Satan was deposed, they would be the one she supported for his successor. They would fight over the succession and she could step forward as the compromise candidate that nobody really liked but one that was better than interminable fighting. And a Succubus could reign in Hell at last. She glanced around, looking at the painfully-thinned ranks of Dukes. What was left of Hell, anyway. Then she became aware of a tickling sensation in her mind. She sensed it, it was Lugasharmansaka trying to make contact. Not now child, affairs of state are in progress.

Dagon still stood, defying Satan’s wrath. “Sire, if you cannot make peace with the humans to save what is left, then you must stand aside and let those of us who can rule!”

There was a gasp, of shock, horror and fear. The idea of a direct challenge to Satan was unimaginable to those not already in the plot. Even Satan was momentarily taken aback by the challenge.

Watching in the audience, Deumos felt the tickle in her mind again. I said, not now she thought irritably. Then the tickle changed to cold, lifeless, impersonal fingers that sank deep into her mind and took hold, twisting her brain around as they established a grip that even her powers were helpless to break. There was a shadow of Lugasharmanaska in the fingers but only that. As if she was steering the power that held Deumos’s brain captive. She howled with the pain, saw her vision blurring and saw the black ellipse of a portal forming.

Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

“We’re through.” General Schatten’s cry of triumph overwhelmed the rumble of the diesels in the four large trucks far behind him. They looked like fuel bowsers with the great cylinders on their backs but they weren’t. Anyway, all the real fuel bowsers were in Iraq, supplying the armored forces in Hell. In front of him, a black ellipse was forming, poised between the antennas that directed their effort. Off to one side, Lugasharmanaska was writhing on a couch, whimpering, mucus pouring from her nose and mixing with drool from her mouth.

“Hang on, we’re getting there.” James Randi looked at the succubus on the couch, she was certainly proving her new loyalty the hard way. She was in agony and would stay that way until the other side of the portal was secure enough to get a sensitive through and punch a gate from that side back to here. He shook his head quietly to himself, when he had been asked to use his foundations expertise in exposing fraudulent psychics, he’d had no idea it would lead to this.

Behind him the trucks gunned their engines and the great cylinders on their backs started to rise, elevating until they were at a 35 degree angle. Their crews were already lifting metal screens over the glass in the truck cabs. Behind them. In the control cabin, the launch crews were already waiting for the final order.

“Fire Missile One.” The button was pressed, the booster rockets fired and the missile left its launch tube, slowly at first but with increasing speed. Then the turbojet on the Progress anti-ship missile cut in and the missile arched upwards towards the gate that was almost five miles away. In the control cabin, the operator acquired it with his command guidance system and steered it for the very center of the black ellipse. He had little time but he managed it and the missile flew straight through the gate, parallel to the ground.

The Amphitheater of Tranios, Underneath the City of Dis, Hell

The great green monster flew through the gate, its roaring flames filling the chamber with smoke and heat. A few feet from the gate, Deumos felt the blast from the engines shriveling her skin, burning her with an agony that made the pain in her head seem inconsequential. She was blinded by the blast so she didn’t see what the missile did next nor did she see the fine fiber-optic wires it was trailing behind it.

Satan saw it and he saw that the missile was coming straight at him. He tried to summon up the magic needed to throw the missile away. It just needed a second or so to summon up the power but that was time he just didn’t have.

The Progress missile was doing more than 600 miles per hour when it hit Satan in the chest. The kinetic energy of the blow alone was enough to send Satan reeling backwards but that was inconsequential. The missile also had a 3,300 pound explosive warhead that was configured as a shaped charge. Normally it had a copper lining but this one had been modified with an iron liner and sintered iron powder in the cavity. One thing hadn’t changed; the warhead on Progress was behind the main fuel tank and that tank was filled to capacity with jet engine fuel.

The explosion as the warhead went off was powerful enough to bring rocks down from the ceiling and enough even to roil the lava far below. It blasted a mixture of iron plasma, powdered iron and blazing jet fuel deep into Satan’s chest, leaving him blasted burned and poisoned. The great figure, its chest ripped open and splayed apart staggered backwards, slumping down to the floor to sprawl out in a pool of boiling purple blood. Incredibly, the body was already beginning to repair itself when a second missile erupted through the portal.

The operator had done a fine job with the first missile, he’d hit a small moving target with a weapon never designed for the task and which had been hastily modified. The second shot was much easier. Satan’s body was almost still and the few twitches it made didn’t affect the firing solution. The second Progress missile plowed straight into Satan’s head, vaporizing it completely. The great body gave one more jerk and was still. Satan was dead.

As the echoes following the scream of the missiles and the terrible blasts, a great silence fell on the Amphitheater of Tranios. It was interrupted by only the falling of the rocks shaken loose from the roof and the whimpering of those burned by the blast of the missile engines. Shock paralyzed and silenced every demon present, even those in the plot to remove Satan from power had never contemplated this. Dagon was first to recover his senses although his head felt stuffed with mud and neither his eyes nor his ears were working right.

“By right of succession I clai…..” He got no further for another roar filled the chamber, this time one which too many demons knew all too well. The roar of human diesel engines.

A strange vehicle emerged from the portal, one with tracks like the tanks but with high sides and an open back. Actually, it had been built as a carrier for Lance missiles but that weapon had been declared obsolete and the M667 carriers built for it had been in storage for years. Then, they’d been found and it had been realized they made perfect armored carriers for Abigor’s troops. In it were sitting figures, large ones and definitely not human despite their similar equipment. More vehicles followed the first, one occupied by a single very large figure that the Dukes recognized instantly. Despite his human-design (if greatly enlarged) battledress helmet and body armor, the figure was known to them all. It was Abigor, commander of the Free Hell Army.

In the background, unnoticed, a Humvee skidded through the portal and a single small figure climbed out, awkwardly and unsteadily. kitten was still recovering from her surgery and was technically unfit for duty but this operation had needed the best sensitive DIMO(N) had and she was it. So, for the first time, kitten was standing in the hell her visions had warned her of so often and now she was instrumental in destroying it.

“OK Luga, I’ve got the portal. I’m punching it through from this side.”

Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

The portal shivered slightly then enlarged. Punched through from Hell-side it was much more stable than before. It would have to be, in addition to Abigor’s armored personnel carriers, an entire Marine battalion task group was ready to roll in. The two companies of tanks and a company of infantry in AAV-7s would be the punch backing up Abigor.

Over by the gate, Luga was being disconnected from the equipment that created and amplified the portal. She was so gray that she seemed almost white and was too weak to stand. Medics surrounded her, working to help her recover from the tremendous strain she had been other. Quietly, General Schatten made his way over to the scene.

“Luga, we pulled it off. Thank’s to you. Keeping a gate like that open so long, that was gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. I’ll see to it that you get recognized for what you have done today. Now rest.”

The Amphitheater of Tranios, Underneath the City of Dis, Hell

Abigor glanced down at the badly-burned Deumos as his armored carrier passed. She had been quite incredibly stupid, she had been so sure that the humans could only agree to her demands, she’d failed to see the emphatic refusal that the attack on the Plateau of Minos had been. Then he transferred his attention to Dagon who was standing with his mouth hanging open, his claim for power cut off mid-sentence. His APC mounted the steps that led to the throne Satan had occupied and stopped, just a few feet from the cooling corpse of Hell’s last ruler. The noise of diesels was deafening as the coup forces moved in. Around the perimeter of the amphitheater, humans and their tanks were beginning to form up, their weapons covering the assembled crowd. Abigor noticed, with some grim amusement that they looked at his troops with amazement but they watched the humans with fear.

When the roar quieted down, Abigor picked up his rifle, a conversion of a British 30mm Rarden gun, and stalked over to the platform that overlooked the crowd. Dagon was still standing there. “You were saying Dagon?”

Dagon looked at the humans and their tanks that had forced their way into the great amphitheater. An amphitheater that, despite its size, was getting crowded. He shook his head, he knew a losing battle when he saw one and this was one.

Abigor nodded and raised his voice. “Satan is dead. Humans killed him with their weapons. With their weapons, not with magic for magic and superstition is powerless in the face of human science. We are powerless in the face of human engineering. They have won this war and nothing we say or do can change that. Hell is changed forever and nothing we can do will change that either. The humans have told me they wish me to be the new leader in Hell, answerable only to them. I have agreed. If you do not like the idea of me as your leader, don’t tell me.” Abigor gestured at the Marines and their vehicles. “TELL THEM!”

There was silence once again as the echoes of Abigor’s shout faded away. Then, around the great hall, figures started to sink to their knees. Dagon looked around and followed suite, a move that caused the rest to follow him. Around the room, the chant grew, faint at first but growing louder and more certain. “Ab-ig-or. AB-IG-OR, AB-IG-OR

Abigor let the chant carry on for a minute or two and then silenced it with a chop of his hand. The fact it was the hand holding his rifle was a mere coincidence. “For my first official command.” He waved at the ruined body of Satan. “Somebody, clear away that trash.”

Chapter Eighty One

Command Area, Free Hell

“Looks good on you Jade.”

“Did I get it right? Nobody back on Earth dresses like this any more, not that I know of anyway.”

“Looks right to me, look if The Boss isn’t interested, you might give me a call.”

Jade Kim punched Titus Pullo’s arm and entered Caesar’s tent. He was bent over a table that doubled as his desk, piles of paper scattered around him. Despite the apparent chaos, Kim noticed that he never had to search for a document he needed. Obviously there was method in the chaos.

“Jade, thank you for coming. Any chance of getting more supplies?” Gaius Julius Caesar straightened up and looked over the crowded desk. “Now that is a sight I haven’t seen for many a long year.”

Kim posed, very self-consciously, one leg thrust forward, hands on hips. “I had it copied from one of Servilia’s dresses in ‘Rome’. Do you like it?”

“Very much.” Caesar paused slightly. “That play of yours was very unkind to her you know. And to Atia.”

“So some historians said.” Kim giggled slightly. “I suppose they’re all out of a job now. Why go through ancient records when they can ask the person who wrote them? Anyway, on supplies, they’re coming through but nowhere near the amount we need. I don’t think that’s coincidence.”

Caesar looked up sharply. “We’re being kept on a leash? By restricting supplies?”

“That’s my guess. I think nobody back on the living level knows what to make of you. They’re worried, a bit frightened. You’ve got quite a reputation you know and getting ten legions to change sides sort of confirmed the image. And they can guess you want out of here.”

“And I want the Romans out of here as well. We’re surviving down here but we can do a lot better. We need land outside the pit. Any word on that?”

Kim leaned back against a tent pole, almost putting her weight on it, then deciding that it wasn’t strong enough. “Gaius, I’m a Lieutenant still, and nobody tells Lieutenants anything. Especially dead ones. All I can pick up are rumors and you know how reliable they are. Anyway I don’t think the politicians have decided what to do next, they’re far behind the curve. We’re winning this war so fast that the politicians are out of the loop. When they took down Minos, they gave themselves all the problems they can cope with just handling all the recent-dead that are coming through. The recovered dead, they haven’t even begun to think about. My guess is, you move fast enough, they’ll accept what you achieve rather than argue it. One caution, Gaius, don’t call yourself Dictator. I know you were but the word has really bad connotations for my people. Try ‘First Senator’ or something like that.

“Another thing, I have got some maps of Hell, the whole place, not just the pit. We’ve only mapped small areas in detail but we’ve got the general sense of the ground here. It’s huge, one continent with a land area at lest 50 percent greater than that of Earth, seas proportionally smaller. Also, the climate doesn’t change no matter where one goes. There’s a huge amount of usable land here, its not like Earth where so much can’t be used. That’s good because there are a lot of people to find homes for. The guess I’ve heard is that there’s 90 billion humans in Hell. To put that into perspective, baldricks and orcs together don’t total a billion.”

Caesar nodded slowly. “Enough room for all the humans in Hell. So we need to grab ourselves a good bit. Anything else?”

“So what are you up to?”

“Reorganizing the Army so it makes a bit more sense. The demons relied on mass and shock charges, they don’t work against firepower. So, I’m altering their legion structure to maximize their firepower at expense of shock. If we could get rifles for them, it would help.”

“Not a chance. There are rumors that we’re making rifles suitable for baldricks but none are finding their way here. All we’re getting is stuff suitable for humans. M114s and 115s, grenades, C-4 packs, mortars. Perhaps if we corseted the baldricks with human troops carrying guns?”

“Corseted?”

“Put small groups of humans in with the demons to stiffen them. Our military technology is so far in advance of theirs even a small number of humans should make a big difference. Corseting is a pretty standard way of strengthening weak armies allied to strong ones.”

“Our British Colonel won’t accept his battalion being split up like that.”

“Doesn’t matter, he’ll be gone soon. The British tried a take-over bid, it failed and they need the troops. Anyway, that’s what rumor says.” Kim took a deep breath, this was what she had been putting off. “Important thing, how do you like your breakfast eggs?”

“What?” Caesar was astonished at the apparent irrelevance. “What do eggs have to do with this.”

Kim was trying to control her shaking breath, and the fact she was frightened in a way that hadn’t been the case for years. “Gaius, in our culture, when a girl wants a man friend to know he’s welcome to spend the night with her, she doesn’t say so outright, she just asks him what he wants for breakfast.” She controlled the shaking, Kim knew she was close to crying and her voice was trembling. “So what do you want for breakfast?”

Caesar stared at her. “You’re terrified. We’ve got a good alliance here, one that works because we need each other. You don’t have to force yourself to sleep with me in order to maintain it. And I don’t force women.”

“And if I don’t force myself, I never will. Like riding a horse, once somebody falls off, they have to get right back up again or they’ll never ride again. Gaius, I want a normal life and I want it with you. So, just pretend I’m not forcing myself, please? This is nothing to do with politics or armies. Just with me and getting my head fixed.”

Caesar nodded slowly. “Ah, so I’ll be doing you a kindness then. That’s different. By the way, I like my eggs boiled.”

Kim grinned and held up a finger. “One moment.’ Then, she went to the flap of the tent and stuck her head out. “Sorry Titus, you’re out of luck. Won’t be calling.”

Underground Fortress of Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

“Baroness Yulupki, when will the chorus be ready?”

The naga shifted uneasily on her couch. “Sssseven dayssss perhapsss. The new nagasss must be trained and we mussssst rehearse. Or we may have another dissssasssster.”

“Then you have seven days. Then we will open up another portal and drown Turin in white hot boiling lava. The humans think they were clever to shut down our previous portals? They will find we can open them faster than they can close them.”

Around Grand Duke Belial, the courtiers applauded the bombast. It was always safer to do that. Euryale masked her own thoughts very carefully. What she had discovered about the humans and their war-making capability gave her no confidence that Belial could, in fact, open portals that fast. Even if he could, humans had a demonstrated preference for striking at the head of an enemy rather than nibbling at his talons. Sheffield and Dee-troyt had made the humans into mortal enemies of Tartarus and all it contained. What would they do if more of their cities were added to that list. Lakheenahuknaasi had passed some information about what humans could do when they got really angry. In doing so, she had made it clear that some of those things scared even them. One of them was something to do with Nagas like Yulupki, They’d done something called a Naga-sarkee.

Euryale didn’t want to be around when they did another one.

Belial had finished his interrogation of Yulupki and withdrew. Euryale followed him, the next stage of the day’s duties was an inspection of the new weapons being developed by the workshops far below. Weapons that might yet change the course of the war. The procession trailed down through the tunnels and caverns, far below the normal workings into areas where the heat grew oppressive. Down here, demon workers would sicken and would die if not relieved at regular intervals. The heat wasn’t the reason but the iron tools they worked with were. Down here, iron was used instead of bronze and that was why Palelabor had been kept such a total secret.

“Have you perfected a means of destroying the human tanks? And shooting down their aircraft?” Belial’s bellow was directed at the human who knelt before him.

“Yes Sire.” Herwijer had, or at least believed he had. The unfortunate thing was, he wouldn’t know whether his belief was true or not until he tried it out and that was likely to be a do-or-die moment for him.

“How?” Belial’s question was short and sharp.

“Sire, we can use the bolts from a naga. They are powerful enough, they contain enough energy, to destroy a tank or an aircraft but it is too spread out. I have built a system that will compress the bolt so that the energy will do its work. It is called a capacitor.”

“Show me.”

Herwijer led the way to a wooden cart that was off to one side of the chamber. On it was a pile of strange looking structures and wires. In the middle of it all, a young naga, one that had been badly burned an crippled during the attack on Detroit was coiled, fastened down by bronze hoops around her body. While everybody was looking at the equipment, Euryale took the opportunity to stamp on the Naga’s tail. The creature hissed in protest but only one of Belial’s guards noticed and he gave a broad grin. Nagas were even less popular than Gorgons normally were. And the stock of Gorgons was rising, Euryale had gone to great lengths to see to that.

“Sire, the naga generates her charge as before but instead of discharging it in a bolt, feeds it into the capacitor. Then, the operator can discharge the capacitor in a much shorter more intense bolt. Watch this.”

Herwijer instructed the naga to generate and fire a normal bolt. It shot out, briefly illuminating the darkened recesses of the cavern and revealing the hideous creatures that lurked in the shadows. The bolt hit one of them, sending it to the ground, its fur burning.

“That was a normal bolt sire. Now, we try the enhanced bolt.” He connected wires to the bronze rings securing the naga and told it to generate its charge.

“Nothing is happening.” Belial sounded disappointed and that was a serious threat in itself.

“Not yet sire. But when we fire the weapon…” Herwijer closed the switch and another bolt shot out, one that was many times more intense than the previous one. It was gone so quickly that the audience could barely believe it had happened yet it left colored after-images dancing in their eyes. What was not in doubt was the damage the bolt had wrought on its target. The rat-monster had exploded and its burning fragments were scattered over the floor of the cave. Behind it, a dark crater scarred the wall. A murmur of appreciation went around the room. This was a weapon indeed.

“You have done well human. Bring this weapon up to the palace level. We will install it at the gate in case the humans come. And you will build more of these.”

“Sire, I need one naga for each. Those crippled by the accident will do, they do not need to move. As long at they can generate the charge.”

“Take what you need, leaving only those needed for Yulupki’s chorus.”

Belial left the chamber greatly cheered. With the next lava attack in hand and a way of stopping the human tanks available at last, things were looking up.

1/33 Battalion, Third Brigade, Third Armored Division, Ninth U.S. Corps. North of Dis.

The trouble with the situation was that the whole of Ninth Corps was bogging down as it occupied more of the small farming villages on the outer fringes of Dis. Stevenson’s own battalion was now split up between twelve such villages, controlling each of them although, in truth, not that much control was actually needed. Most of the communities had got the message from the runners she had sent out sand simply laid down their arms, such as they were, when the tanks had appeared. A few of the lords had put up a fight and they were now dead. The rest had just accepted it was better to be alive and deposed than killed.

The good news was that the armored cavalry had pushed further north and reported that the villages had petered out and the rest of the territory was apparently unoccupied. As far as could be seen so far, demon inhabitation of Hell was concentrated within a relatively small radius of Dis. The rest of the single great continent was split up as the ‘holdings’ of the various great dukes but they’d done nothing with it. It was all very strange.

Stevenson strolled through the village that had become her base, looking at the baldrick farmers as they got on with their daily routine. They ignored the Abrams and Bradleys that were parked around the buildings, intent on simply making sure they had food enough to eat. A few baldrick kidlings were playing on a tank and over in one corner, a couple of her soldiers had gathered some older kidlings and were teaching them to play basketball. It occurred to her that since she now had a dozen or so minor ‘lords’ reporting to her, that meant she was going up the ranks of the aristocracy as fast as she was through the ranks of the Army.

It was nice and quiet up here though. The aircraft were still pounding Dis last time she had heard, and most of the actual fighting was concentrated down there. With the airfields and logistics bases to the south of Dis, the areas to the north of the city had an almost bucolic charm to them. That charm was interrupted when a V-22 swung overhead, its slung load pivoting as the pilot brought the tilt-rotor in. It was the extra rations she’d requisitioned for the villagers. The V-22 shifted back to forward flight and set off over the horizon. Peace and tranquil calm returned to the village. Stevenson noted that the baldricks had paid little attention to the aircraft as it had made its delivery. Humand and their equipment were already becoming part of the environment.

“Colonel, you better come. Brigade is on the line.”

She walked over to the radio shack, actually her command track with a tented enclosure at the back.

“Kilo-Alpha Actual Here.”

“Kilo prime. Stevenson, are you sitting down?”

“Sir?”

“Got news for you. We whacked Satan just a few hours ago. No doubt about it, he’s gone.”

The news spread across the camp at a speed that comfortably exceeded the speed of light. Stevenson heard the cheering and looked over her shoulder. The local villagers were being just as enthusiastic as her troops.

“What does that mean Sir?”

“We’ve put our own guy in charge. Abigor, now President Abigor. You remember him, the football player?”

“For sure yes. So he’s made President.”

“More like President on a string. Anyway, the second thing he did was sue for peace. There’s a ceasefire in place as of about an hour ago. The following is the word straight from General Petraeus. All offensive actions against the baldricks are to cease as of 1300 Zulu. Defensive only actions will be undertaken. Any hostile forces attacking your positions are to be killed in a friendly manner.

“So its all over Sir.”

“No way. Our guess is that at least some lords will repudiate Abigor’s lead and try to carry on. Belial is the leading candidate, he must understand we want his guts torn out. But, as far as organized resistance is concerned, that’s over. Just try and make sure that none of your people are the last to die.”

“Willco on that sir.” Stevenson thought for a moment. “And there’s always Heaven isn’t there.”

“That’s right Stevenson, there’s always Heaven.”

Chapter Eighty Two

HMS Astute, Northern Seas, Off Tartarus, Hell

“The spams said the Seawolfs were fast, they never said they were that fast.” Captain Phillips looked up from the chart plot with irritation in his voice. “We’re falling further behind all the time. How long until we’re off the coast of Tartarus?”

Lieutenant-Commander Michael Murphy grimaced slightly. “We’re not doing so bad ourselves, the old S and T boats couldn’t hold speed like this. Even so, our ETA off Tartarus is in 30 hours. Unless, of course, we have to take a detour. We’re in a deep water channel now but I’ve no idea how long we’ll be able to use it.”

Captain Phillips drummed the chart display with his fingers. “And I don’t like charging around blind like this. We’ve got no idea what the topography is here, we could charge straight into an underground mountain. Just like that spam boat did a couple of years back. That was in an area that was pretty thoroughly charted. We’ve got no clue what’s down here. We don’t even know if it’s like Earth or not.”

“You get the feeling we’re the guinea pigs for the big boys following behind?”

“That’s exactly what I think. Florida and Georgia are thumping along behind us somewhere and my bet is we’re doing the mapping for them. And all the subs are trailblazing for the carriers and amphibs. One good thing, at least the spam boats are already on station. So if there was anything really bad up there, we’d be getting word by now.”

Murphy nodded, in complete agreement with his Captain. The plan was for Seawolf and Connecticut, their torpedo rooms stuffed full of Tomahawk missiles, to stay way offshore while the Jimmy Carter went in and unloaded a group of special forces personnel. They’d be doing beach surveys and preparing the way for the amphibious forces coming up. If Belial was still alive, and if he was planning to continue his lava attacks, the Tomahawks would be the first line of attack. Not all the missiles had conventional warheads; the baldricks might believe their fortresses were tough but they’d never seen what a nuclear ground burst could do. The marines coming over the beach were the second act in the elimination of the threat to Earth’s cities.

“Thirty hours then. And let’s just hope we don’t hit anything.”

56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, City of Dis. Hell

The gates of Dis creaked mightily as they opened, the great bronze hinges squealing as the doors swung outwards. They pivoted slowly, opened by great winches powered by straining teams of orcs whose labors were soon to be ended. What to do with the orcs? That was a very good question, one that human politicians hadn’t even begun to get their minds around yet. The orcs would be freed from their millenia of slavery, that was certain, but how to go from there? Nobody knew, it was just one more set of problems in a vast array that grew by the hour.

It had seemed so easy. Bust into Hell, trample on anybody who gets in the way and free the humans held in torment. And still the list of problems still grew longer by the hour. Still, that was something the soldiers in the field didn’t have to worry about. Their job was to win the war and they’d done just that. The gates swinging open in front of them were proof of the victory. They’d taken humanity’s oldest, most fundamental enemy and crushed them. Now, the city gates were swinging open in homage to the victors.

Colonel Chisholm waved his arm in the traditional cavalry gesture and his command Stryker eased forward. The information from Abigor, backed up by the product from the photo-reconnaissance aircraft had been that the streets in Dis were narrow and poorly surfaced. Too narrow for the Abrams and Bradleys to pass so the job of being the first American unit into Hell had fallen to the 28th Mechanized Infantry Division, Pennsylvania National Guard (Federalized). Along with America’s other infantry divisions, the 28th had been reorganized with three Stryker Brigades and a single armored brigade and was ideally suited to the move into Dis.

Inside Dis, Chisholm was reminded of films he’d seen set in the medieval era. Same kind of buildings, cobbled streets, highly suspect sanitation. The strikers were moving slowly, edging through the clutter than lined the roads and alleyways, the crews keeping a sharp look-out. Dis might have surrendered, the government here might have changed hands but that didn’t mean the war was over. There were a lot of Iraq veterans in the 56th who knew full well that ‘end of major combat operations’ was not the same as ‘peace’. Too many people had forgotten that and not come back. If there was going to be a firefight, the Strykers were going to be ready to give out as much punishment as necessary.

“Any word from the Russians?”

“Some Sir. They’re not hitting any opposition either.”

Chisholm nodded. This was a delicate, dicey operation. The humans were coming in as conquerors, they wanted to be perceived as liberators, as the people who would make things better. Flattening half the city was not a good way to start. The Israelies had been politely but firmly excluded from the initial occupation for exactly that reason. Their instant response doctrine was just that bit too vigorous for this particular situation. There were other situations where their operational doctrine would be appropriate, but not here, not now.

Around them, the baldricks were watching. Mostly females and kidlings, the latter sometimes making shy, quick waves at the troops passing. That was a worry, a wave could easily be mistaken for a throw, and that wave could easily turn into a real attack. Despite the apparent calm, Chisholm could feel his stomach knotting up. This was the real danger, nerves would tighten and tighten until they suddenly snapped and somebody did something very stupid.

“Sir, over there!” Chisholm heard the call and very nearly did something very stupid with his Mark 19 grenade launcher. But, it hadn’t been an attack warning, instead the private was pointing at a female with pink skin and blonde hair. A human female. Chisholm held up his hand and the column stopped. Then he waved the woman over. She came out of the shadows and knelt by the Stryker, looking down at her feet.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? And stand up, stop grovelling.”

“Balthechildis, Noble Sire.” The woman rose to her feet, unsteadily, tentatively. Even when standing she still looked down, avoiding the eyes of the men in the armored vehicles.

“Why are you here?” Chisholm tried to moderate his voice, who knew what this woman had suffered during her stay here? “And I’m not a Noble Sire. I’m a Colonel. Colonel James Chisholm.”

“I am a servant No… Colonel. In the house of Anthrapixicatis. I was brought here when I first came.”

“Are there others like you? Servants of the baldricks… the demons?”

“Some, Colonel, those who wanted human servants took them when we arrived.”

“And how long ago was that? Where did you come from?”

“I do not know how long Colonel, I was a wife in a Frankish settlement of the Danemark. I died in childbed.”

“This Anthrawhatyoucallededhim. Did he treat you well?”

“Yes Colonel. I was not whipped too often.”

Chisholm wanted to say something but he changed his mind. Too many problems could start that way. “Very well, Balthechildis, you don’t belong to him any more. Go outside the city, follow the vehicles along back to the gate. Outside are some people who will help you. You’re free now.”

The woman obediently started walking back the way Chisholm had indicated. Beside him, the vehicle sergeant spoke very softly. “He treated her well, didn’t whip her too often. What sort of place is this?”

“This is Hell Sergeant, you know that. And I guess Stockholm syndrome works down here as well. Think about hit from her point of view, being a servant up here must be a prime choice compared with what goes on in the pit. Roll forward.” He flipped on his radio for transmission to Division HQ. “Sun-Ray Alpha Actual Here. Spread the word, there are humans in Dis, servants and others. Keep a watch for them and send them out to the reception teams when we spot them.”

The message went out and a few seconds later his radio came alive again. “Sun-Ray Alpha Actual, this is Sun-Ray Prime. Be advised your earlier message is confirmed. Russian, British and Czech units all report finding humans in apparently menial positions.” The voice on the other end sounded as if it was trying to stop laughing. “Lead elements of the French cavalry division report they have found what appears to be a bordello staffed with humans.”

“Trust the French to find a brothel.” One of the troopers in the command Stryker looked around at the sordid streets of Dis reflectively. “That we should be so lucky.”

The vehicle procession started again, the crews scanning the ever-growing number of faces watching from the buildings. Eventually they came to a large open area, backed by a second wall, one thinner and lower than the great outer wall. From behind it, plumes of smoke, faint but discernable, were rising. The heat was noticeable, not quite burning his face but giving him the same feeling he had when he’s been out in the sun too long. Chisholm looked at his map just to confirm what his eyes had just told him. “This is it people. The other side of that wall is the Hell Pit. Now, our problems really start.”

Underground Fortress of Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

Belial was in an expansive mood. In the five days since the demonstration of his new Great Tridents, the workshops had produced half a dozen more, each with a naga assigned to it. Perhaps the disaster at the second portal had been a good thing after all, it had left a good number of crippled naga that were fit for little more than power sources. They could all be used up in powering his new weapons. Entering the Great Hall of his fortress, Belial saw something that made him freeze in his tracks. A figure, only marginally smaller than he was, with great wings that stretched out. Most of his court was prostrate on the ground in front of it.

“Belial.” The great voice boomed out, shaking the stone walls of the fortress.

“I am here Messenger of Satan.” There was no mistaking who this creature was. One of the surviving Greater Heralds, a member of the Corps of Diabolical Heralds.

“No Belial, Not a Messenger of Satan. Here me now. Satan is dead. The Lord Abigor now rules in his place. By my Lord Abigor’s ruling, the war with the humans is over. The City of Dis has surrendered and even now the humans move in to occupy it. My Lord Abigor commands you to lay down your arms and surrender to the humans. The war is lost, the fighting must end. So says my Lord Abigor.”

The Greater Herald crashed a staff down on the floor, sending chips of stone flying.

“NEVER!” Belial’s voice thundered around the hall, causing a stir of alarm from the assembled court.

“It is His Infernal Majesty Abigor’s will.” The Greater Herald spoke what was to him a simple truth not to be countermanded.

“Abigor is a traitor, a coward who surrendered to save his own life. Now he is a mindless puppet of the humans. I say he is unfit to rule. I spit upon his will and his commands. If Our Rightful Lord Satan has died, then it is I, I who was his favorite, I who was the only one to strike a blow against the humans, I who shall assume his throne.”

“So you may claim. But Abigor occupies the throne and has been acclaimed as ruler of Hell. He has challenged any who might disagree not to argue it with him but to do so with the humans. Those same humans who have destroyed every army in Hell at trifling cost to themselves. They stand behind Abigor now. And I note that the Adamantine Fortress has already been the subject of their wrath. It looks a little damaged from the experience. Submit Belial. And make your peace with the humans. My message ends.”

Belial looked at the Greater Herald and then looked at the Great Trident beside him, one that had just been delivered and was fitted with a naga in place and was charged up. His foot reached out and he kicked it so the barrel was in line with the Herald. One closed contact and the bolt flashed out, striking the Greater Herald full in the chest. The creature went down, its chest torn open, its blood already starting to burn its flesh. There was an awed silence in the great hall, nobody, dared to kill the Greater Heralds. Unless they were human of course, they killed everything that got in their way, Greater Heralds included. But demons never killed the personal representatives of the rulers of Hell. Belial looked at the audience and measured his power. It was growing fast and had just been confirmed.

“So perish all traitors to Hell. Surrender? Never. My orders from Satan were to destroy human cities and that is what we shall do. This Herald of the Traitor Abigor has received my reply to his insulting message. Now the humans shall receive my reply to theirs. Their cities shall burn. Yulupki, the chorus is ready?”

“It is Sire, although two more days…”

“Will be two days too long. We move out tomorrow at dawn. Are the shrines at Okthuura Jorkastrephas ready?”

“They are.”

“Then there is no reason to wait. My first act as the new ruler of Hell will be to bring the humans to their knees. I say this again, their cities will burn. This is their legacy from Satan just as my supreme power is his legacy to me.”

Belial gazed around the great hall again, drinking in his new-found power and status. His planning and scheming had worked better than he had any right to expect. With Satan dead and Abigor a traitor, all hell would rally to him. From a humble and forgotten count to the Supreme Ruler, the Infernal Majesty of Hell, he had much to thank the humans for. Not that he intended to show any gratitude for their services to him of course.

City of Dis. Hell

The Humvee drove down the street, the center of a convoy of five vehicles. The first pair contained troops from DIMO(N), the fourth was a communications truck, the last contained more troops. The center vehicle contained Julie Adams and a mass of electronic equipment. Every so often, her mind reached out, amplified by the electronics and touched a mind she knew all too well.

“He’s here Jack. That building there.”

“Got it ma’am.” The convoy came to a halt and the troops started to dismount, their .50 caliber M4s swinging into firing position with comfortable ease. It seemed a long time since the M4 carbine had fired the puny .223 caliber round.

Julie dismounted also, touching her hat to make sure the tinfoil screen that stood between her and madness was still in place. These days, every cap on sale, be it a baseball cap or a British bowler had its tinfoil lining – and the days when a man or women was seen without a cap were also long gone. Building contractors were making a fortune, rebuilding houses, apartment blocks and office complexes with continuous metal linings built into their walls. Just one part of the way humanity was reacting to its new reality.

The soldiers kicked the door of the house down without any real effort. It was flimsy, a nothing when matched with steel boots. Inside a group of demons, some male, some female, cowered at the sight of humans with guns. They knew what guns were now, there wasn’t a family in Dis that hadn’t lost many of its males to humans with guns.

“Domiklespharatu. Where is he?” Julie rapped the words out, impatiently, angrily. She was carrying Desert Eagle handgun, also chambered for .50AE ammunition. It was a very popular hand gun these days for people who liked semi-automatic pistols. People who liked revolvers tended to go for the Smith and Wesson 500. Then she looked around the house. It wasn’t what she had expected. She’d thought Domiklespharatu was a prince living in a great palace somewhere, not a hut that was barely more than a hovel. A slightly better hovel than those around it, agreed, but still a hovel. Across the room, one of the females gasped, another pointed to a curtain-covered doorway.

Julie went through it, brushing the dirty curtain to one side. “Remember me Domiklespharatu? Remember what…”

Then she stopped. It was Domiklespharatu all right, but he was as little as she had imagined as this house had been. He was cowering against a wall, shaking with fear, his eyes already beginning to glaze over. As she watched, he started to lose control of his bowels, urinating on the floor in sheer panic. And it was hardly surprising, Domiklespharatu was barely a half-grown kidling.

“It was a game, it was just a game,” he was whimpering with fear, trying to drop to his knees to grovel in front of her yet he had lost the muscle control needed to do it.

“Just a game.” Julie looked at him with loathing. All the misery she had endured for years was ‘just a game’. “And you think that made it all right.” She lifted up her Desert Eagle, feeling the comfortable bulk of it in her hands. She had dreamed of this ever since her tinfoil hat had brought her sanity back.

Domiklespharatu looked down the bore, his mind seeing it grow by the second. “My father said it was all right. He gave you to me to play with. It was just a game. Please, I didn’t know you’d….”

“You didn’t know I’d come here. You didn’t know you would have to face what you did to me.”

That did it. Domiklespharatu lost whatever was left of his composure and burst into child-like crying. Julie stared at him, her gun still aimed, held steadily in the approved two-handed grip. ‘It was just a game’, the words running through her mind. As if that made it all right. Then she thought some more, about the people on earth who thought that adding ‘just kidding’ to the end of a phrase made everything all right, no matter how rude or offensive they’d been. Or the humans on the internet who thought that they could do what they liked to people’s lives because they’d never have to face the victims of their ‘games’. Were they actually that different from Domiklespharatu? If she killed this one, shouldn’t she kill them as well? She thought of one friend of hers whose life had nearly been wrecked by an internet user who’d tricked him into doing a highly illegal search on the FBI’s server. Wasn’t he just as bad as Domiklespharatu?

The Desert Eagle was still aimed at the sniveling wreck on the floor. Quietly, one of the DIMO(N) troopers stood behind Julie, watching her aiming the pistol at the baldrick. “Is that really worth a bullet ma’am. Bit of a waste if you ask me.”

“You didn’t have him in your mind for all those years Jack. You didn’t have him tearing at you, wrecking you. If it hadn’t been for James and all the others who sorted this thing out, I’d still be like that.” Then she sighed and the barrel of the Desert Eagle lowered. “But you’re right. He’s not worth it.”

Julie Adams walked over and spat on Domiklespharatu. “We won, you little shit. Just like I told you, we came for you and we never stopped and we won. And when we did, you weren’t worth the effort of killing. Just remember that. You weren’t worth the effort of twitching my finger and blowing your brains all over that wall.”

Julie turned and left the house, sliding into the front passenger seat of the Humvee. “You know Jack, that felt good.”

Chapter Eighty Three

Hills Around The Underground Fortress of Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

“Team-One reporting in Sarge, there’s life down there.” Cassidy shifted her position on the rocks and steadied her binoculars on the gates concealed in the canyon walls. Whoever had built the approach had done a fine job of concealing it, the canyon itself had a narrow entrance that was lost in the folds of the rock. It was narrow, so much so that the baldricks had difficulty using it. Behind that restricted path, the canyon opened up but the rocks had a marked overhang and shadowed the gates that lay underneath them. Even then, those gates were masked by more variations in the rock walls. Somebody stumbling across the canyon would have to go almost to the farthest end before the gates became visible. McElroy’s team had steered reconnaissance aircraft in over the site and they hadn’t seen a thing. Even using the battery of image modification technologies available, the underground fortress was virtually invisible.

“What’s happening?” Tucker McElroy crawled up to the observation position. His team was split in two parts, one was watching the gates themselves, the other the path that led away from the canyon towards the daughter-volcanoes that marked the flanks of the great cone overhead.

“Can’t see anything yet. Team One reports that the gates have opened and that there appears to be some sort of procession emerging but .. hold one Sarge.” Cassidy listened to the radio again. “Make that a definite on the procession emerging. Baldricks on foot, rhinolobsters with a burden, looks like those snake things, Nagas intel called them. They’re going down the canyon now, we should be seeing them soon.”

“Good. DeVanzo, get the laser sight set up. Cassidy, stay on watch, let me know as soon as that procession appears. Walsch, radio. Patch me through to Saber.”

It took a couple of minutes to get through to Saber, the duty submarine on Communications watch. As far as McElroy knew, there were three submarines offshore who rotated radio watch between them. All used the Saber code-name as required and there was no indication which boat was actually answering.

“Saber. Sitrep?” Submarines didn’t like transmitting, it ran against their collective ethos and the messages were terse.

“We have activity, procession now leaving the underground fortress. From intel, it looks like another volcano attack being initiated. We are setting up the laser target designator now.”

“Confirmed. Wait.” The radio went silent for a couple of minutes. “Ready to launch. Twenty four cruise ready. Half and half. ETA 15 minutes from launch. Indicate when firing is needed.” The radio went dead again.

“Right guys. As soon as we give the word, there will be twenty four Tomahawks inbound. Cassidy, any sight of the target yet?” In just a few seconds, the procession had become a target.

“Emerging through the canyon now Sarge. Confirming, baldricks on foot with tridents, rhinolobsters with, confirmed Sarge, they have nagas coiled on their backs.”

“Saber, confirm target is volcano-initiating party. Fire when ready.”

“On the way.”

The seconds ticked by and turned into minutes. Ten minutes after the launch confirmation, DeVanzo turned his laser designator to active and trained the dot on the ground just in front of the column that was advancing across the plain towards the volcanoes about twelve miles away. McElroy was amused to note that they’d be passing the ruins of their previous home on the way. If they lived that long of course.

“Remember not to shine the laser on the baldricks until after the missiles start to arrive.” McElroy’s voice was urgent, the baldrick’s skin was sensitive to laser light and shining it on them might give them enough warning to get clear.

“I know that” DeVanzo spoke irritably, annoyed at the interruption disturbing his concentration. He was holding the designation dot just in front of the feet of the leading baldrick. He’d flip it back as soon as he heard the Tomahawks making their run.

He didn’t get that much warning, the first group of three missiles skimmed over the hill to their east and started the run down towards the column before he could register their presence. Originally, the Tomahawks had been GPS-guided but the Global Positioning System didn’t work in Hell and it was looking increasingly unlikely that it ever would. The older option, radar terrain mapping and matching required accurate maps of the target area and those would come eventually, but not now. So, for want of a better choice, the missiles had been modified to use laser designation.

The first salvo of three missiles had unitary warheads and the explosion of the 700 pound charges enveloped the head of the column in rolling orange-red fireballs. Through her binoculars, Cassidy saw the baldricks start running sideways trying to get away from the onslaught they knew had to come. Word from the survivors of Abigor’s and Beelzebub’s armies had spread fast, when the humans started shooting with their missiles, the only way to survive was to run far and fast. And so they did, or they tried to. Cassidy swung her binoculars back on to the great Rhinolobsters. They had been abandoned on the track and the magnification of her binoculars allowed her to see the great beasts swinging their heads around, looking for an enemy to gore, while the terrified nagas on their backs screamed and tried to struggle free.

That’s when the second wave of three Tomahawks hit. DeVanzo had switched his point of aim back along the column and the three missiles sensed the change of aiming point and lifted their nose just a little. In a straight line, about 100 yards between each missile, the three weapons soared straight over the shattering baldrick column and started to distribute their submunitions. The launching submarines hadn’t known what the warhead requirements would be so they’d loaded their eight tubes with four missiles with submunitions and four with unitary warheads. The skippers had alternated the loads as they’d emptied their tubes but the spotting team on the ground didn’t know that. Each type came as a nice surprise.

It wasn’t so nice for the demons on the receiving end. The first three explosions had blown the leading demons into unrecognizable chunks of flesh and bone, then the submunitions had scythed down the others as they ran. The only thing that saved some of them was that the missiles were too spaced out and the coverage too thin to blanket the area the way and MLRS salvo would have done. Cassidy smacked DeVanzo’s arm and pointed to the group of Rhinolobsters. He swung the laser designation spot on to them and held it there while the third wave of missiles slammed their unitary warheads into the great beasts. Even far away, on the hills, McElroy’s team heard the animals screaming as the warheads blasted them.

DeVanzo held his designator on the same spot, directing the fourth salvo of missiles so that their submunitions would cover the area just pounded by the blast of the high explosive charges. The nagas were the creatures that opened the sky volcanoes, they were the primary target. The other baldricks were just meat on the table, footsloggers who found themselves in the target area. Slaughtering them was a bonus but not really necessary. In his heart, DeVanzo found himself feeling slightly sorry for them, the war was over but they were still going to die because their boss was too dumb or too stubborn to admit it. Reflecting on it as the fourth wave of missiles blanketed the Rhinolobsters, DeVanzo decided that it was just too bad.

A group of baldricks were running south, towards where the team had their position. It wasn’t an attack, the baldricks had no idea what was killing them let alone where it was being done from, it was just plain bad luck on their part. DeVanzo designated them and watched the fifth and sixth salvos of missiles tear into their ranks and send them stumbling into the ground. Then, a final switch to another group who still seemed to have some level of organization and it was all over.

McElroy looked down on the devastation that lay in the valley underneath his position. “Well, that livened up a dull morning didn’t it.”

Valley Leading To Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

Belial couldn’t quite believe he was still alive. He’d been on the edge of the bombing that destroyed Satan’s palace, he’d seen the shattered remnants of Beelzebub’s army retreating from the Phlegethon River but he’d never been under the relentless hammer of the human war machine before. He was stunned by the enormity of the attack, but even more so by its impersonal, faceless nature. The humans didn’t fight, they just stood far away and destroyed their enemies by remote control. He felt hatred surging, uncontained, within him. The humans had been his route to greatness, his attacks on them had won him favor with Satan and now lifted him further than he’d ever dared hope he’d rise. Now, their machines were tearing him down again.

Around him, the survivors of his column were picking themselves up and trying to make sense of the carnage that surrounded them. Some went to help wounded friends who lay helpless on the ground, their bodies slashed by the deep gouges that were the marks of human weapons. Not all could be helped for the humans used iron in their weapons and iron was poison. Enough of his minions had died in the mines of Palelabor from iron-poisoning to show how deadly that particular aspect of human weapons was.

Then, Belial looked at the center of his column, where the Beasts and their Naga burdens had been caught on the road. They were dead, all of them. Blown apart then the survivors cut up by the humans. There were no survivors, none. They were all dead and that meant the attacks on human cities were over for there were too few nagas left to open the portals. It was over, he would have to think of a new way to continue this war for it was only by continuing the war that his rise to power could be confirmed and yet more power gathered into his claws. He would have to think of a new way, Euryale would help him. Quietly, Belial gave thanks that she had not been here to fall under the human onslaught for he needed her support and insight.

“We will return to Palelabor. Bring along those who can recover.” Belial set off, unknown to him, watched by Baroness Yulupki who had managed to slide off her Beast in time to worm her way under the rocks and so protect herself from the explosions and slashing iron fragments. She would not join the sad procession back to Palelabor, Belial thought she was dead and it was better that way. Now she could quietly leave his retinue and find a way to get back into the changing world of Hell.

Belial’s column, the healthy and the wounded, the latter supported by other demons, wended their way though the twisting canyon that led to the valley that was their final refuge. They’d left barely an hour before, on their way to inflict another great blow against humans. Now all they needed was shelter. Belial led the way back, down the valley and then turned to approach the gates that marked the entrance to Palelabor. Those gates were still closed, and Belial quietly gave thanks for Euryale’s common sense in closing them as soon as she’d heard the explosions of the strike that had wrecked his column.

“Open Up, Your Master Awaits.” His voice boomed out, echoing across the valley.

The reply was sudden and deadly, a barrage of lightning bolts slashed out from the firing ports in the walls around the gates, tearing into the survivors of his column, cutting them down as they stood motionless, in shock. Then, the spell broke. Some ran, trying to escape from the vicious crossfire, others attempted to charge their tridents and return fire. Both were futile, there was nowhere to run to and the demons inside the fortress were behind firing slits, protected from all but the luckiest of shots. Belial knew what was happening, there were three demons behind every slit, two charging tridents and the third firing them. The result was a steady rain of fire that decimated what was left of his force.

“Euryale!” His voice echoed again and this time there was hopelessness in it.

Hills Around The Underground Fortress of Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

“Team-One reporting in Sarge. You’re going to love this.” He ought to, Cassidy thought, she did. “The survivors got back to the fortress and the garrison first slammed the gates in their face and then opened fire on them. Team-One says it’s a massacre down there. The baldricks outside are being cut to pieces. There’s a big one, he must be the Belial we heard about I guess, just standing there and shouting something.”

McElroy nodded. “Tell Team-One to watch and report. I’ll radio this in.”

Outside Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

“Euryale!” Belial called again, but there was no answer. For the second time in an hour, he couldn’t understand while he was still alive. There was no sign of her, she must have been imprisoned, there must have been some kind of coup while he was with the column. Then his heart sank for he knew that in hell coups never involved taking the deposed prisoner, they were always killed. Euryale had to be dead, She had to be.

The fire around him slackened and he saw movement on the gallery over the gate, artfully carved so that it fitted in with the natural contours of the rock. There was a flash of gold up there, and Belial adjusted his vision for long distance. It was Euryale, standing on the gallery, her wings folded behind her.

“Euryale, you’re alive!”

She looked down at him; Belial wasn’t certain whether he actually heard the words, read her lips or received a thought transmission but its words were clear. “Kill him.”

The warning was just enough. Belial dived for cover as a hail of lightning bolts slashed at the rocks where he had been standing. He took cover, feeling one bolt tear into his wing tissue. Not a serious wound for a Grand Duke of Hell, it took many lightning bolts to kill a Greater Demon. He wormed his way behind the rocks, sensing the relentless battering of the massed trident fire that was aimed at him. When he’d got clear enough he took the chance of looking. Euryale was standing on the gallery still, directing the barrage of fire against likely hiding places. Beside her was one of his new Great Tridents, a naga strapped to it. Belial didn’t kid himself that it wasn’t fully charged.

Then Euryale saw him, she must have had her vision set for long distance as well, and the Great Trident was aimed straight at him. Again, Belial dived and rolled, trying to get clear and escape from this murderous ambush. The Great Trident bolt hit exactly where he had been, shattering rocks and sending fragments tearing into him. “Euryale!” Belial’s voice was closer to being a sob than anything else.

Belial knew there was only one chance, he had to get out of the killing ground before the Great Trident was recharged. He leaped up to his feet and started running, ignoring the lightning bolts that hissed around him, paying no attention to the one that hit his back. He was running from battle, something no Great Duke ever did and the thought of it shamed him. It was the human’s fault, all the human’s fault. They’d disrupted his plans, they’d stopped his rise to power, they’d resisted him, defied him. They’d turned Euryale against him.

At that point, instinct made Belial dive suddenly to one side and roll over. The Great Trident bolt again hit exactly where he had been had he not made that dive. With luck, he’d be out of range before the machine was charged again. There were more thuds as lightning bolts from normal tridents hit him and he could feel the injuries taking their toll. He was weakening, slowing but he had to keep running. There was a point in the hills where the slopes were not so steep, where he could climb his way out. He dived again, this time around a fold in the rock and he was, at last, out of the killing zone. He had survived, somehow.

Belial’s mind didn’t really appreciate the fact that he had, yet again, survived. It was too filled with hatred for the humans who had done this thing to him. All he could think of was revenge, revenge for the destruction, revenge for his fall when he had so nearly reached the apex of power in hell. Revenge for taking Euryale from him. It had to be human magic, it had to be human magery, some unknown power they had that he was not aware of. Had not her handmaiden said the humans had other weapons they had not used yet?

“Euryale.” Belial moaned the word, the pain of his wounds seeping slowly through the red fog of rage and grief in his mind. He didn’t know what the humans had done to her but he would have his revenge. Even if it killed him.

His breath recovered, Belial started off on his escape from Palelabor. One thing nagged at him, Hell had fallen to the humans, his was the last outpost of resistance. Where was he to go, what we he to do? The questions nagged his mind as he staggered across the valley and climbed out of the valley. As darkness fell, all he could think of was the sight of that golden figure on the gallery and the words “Kill Him.”

Fortress of Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

“It is done as you ordered, Chatelaine.” Euryale looked at the major-domo of the fortress.

“They are all dead?”

“All of them Chatelaine. All those who remained loyal to Belial are dead. It was a cunning move to put most of them in his column to the volcano. May I ask, how did you know the humans would be there?”

“The humans are the Lords of War, nothing is beyond them. They destroyed the Adamantine Fortress, that showed they knew who was responsible for the attacks on their cities. They shut down the two existing portals, showing they knew how to do it. It was certain they were watching us in case we started a third. And if they were watching us, they knew how to kill us. I did not know how they did it, but they would. And they did. Now, are all our people well-briefed?”

“Yes Chatelaine. Belial seized your fortress and imprisoned you and those loyal to you. Then he and his people set about their evil schemes. It was a time of great hardship but we managed to plot our escape and recover the fortress. We have stopped Belial’s plans for more attacks and killed those responsible. Now, we wish to surrender to the humans who killed those who treated us so brutally.”

“Very good. Make sure everybody remembers it. For the survival of us all depends on our being seen as Belial’s victims.”

Chapter Eighty Four

Hartlepool, Lancashire.

“BBC Radio 2, online, on digital and on 88 to 91 FM.” The voice of veteran DJ Terry Wogan said over the car radio.

“It is eight o’clock, here is the news read by John Marsh.” The news reader said once the time signal had finished. “Allied Forces in Hell continued their advance today against negligible resistance and have reportedly entered the city of Dis, Hell’s capital, without a shot fired. BBC reporters embedded with the 4th Mechanized Brigade, the first British formation to enter Dis, report that Allied troops have freed large numbers of human slaves apparently used as domestic servants from demonic captivity. Human forces are already beginning to move into…….”

Inspector Kate Langley turned off the car radio as she parked outside Hartlepool Police Station. It was a small town police station, originally built in the late Victorian period and was now more than a little crowded as the builders had not envisioned all of the electronic communications equipment that the modern police force required to function; indeed Lancashire Constabulary was currently seeking new accommodation in Hartlepool to replace the station. The overcrowding was even worse now that the station had to accommodate the Special Constables on permanent duty, new recruits and retired officers returned to duty.

“Good morning, Joe.” She said to the desk sergeant. “Any messages for me?”

“Morning, Ma’am, nothing bar the usual.” Sergeant Joseph Beck replied. “Oh, there was a call from Mrs. Durbleigh, she said she would call you later on this morning, I believe it was with regards to the firearms registration business.”

“I see, I’m sure that’s going to keep us busy.” Langley replied, not relishing speaking to her now promoted predecessor, she was after all busy enough as it was.

“Where’s Sergeant Parrish?”

“I believe he’s off cleaning his rifle, Ma’am. I’ll let him know you’re here.

“Shall I send in some tea, Ma’am?”

Langley thought for a second, she did not often drink tea, though her sergeants always asked just in case she changed her mind.

“Yes thank you, Joe, I’d like that.”

The Inspector hung up her coat and hat after entering her office and took off her holster. She hated having to carry a revolver, she had not joined the police to carry a gun, this was Lancashire, not Texas after all, and knew that the majority of the officers under her command hated it as well. Langley hoped that once this war was over, whenever that was, the officers not assigned to Force Firearms Units would be able to hand their weapons back into the various armories, she would hate it if the war changed the character of the British police. It was a matter of pride to her that British Police officers, unlike those in America and Europe, had remained without firearms as part of tehri standard equipment for so long.

Langley placed her revolver, an old, but sound, Webley Mk.VI .455, in her desk drawer and locked it. It, five other revolvers, four No.1 Mk.III Lee-Enfield rifles and four Mk.V Sten submachine-guns had been found in the basement of Hartlepool Police Station; evidently from the dust that had gathered on the box the revolvers were stored in they had been down there since around 1945.

After some testing the revolvers had been issued, as had the rifles, but the Sten guns were worn from use in the Second World War and had been condemned. Amazingly the police had managed to get their hands on useable stocks of .455 Webley Mk.III ‘Manstopper’ bullets, which were felt to be more effective against Baldricks than the later rounds, which had been designed to comply with the Hague Convention. Less surprisingly, they had also managed to get a supply of .303in rounds from South Africa. The South Africans were doing well with their .303 production, as were all the other producers who had retained production lines for full-powered rifle ammunition. The remaining officers had been issued with a variety of firearms from police and others armories.

Langley sat down and reviewed the paper work waiting for her, as expected most of it related to the issue of firearms registration. In the panic after the first Baldrick attacks the government had suspended the majority of the country’s firearms legislation, meaning that anyone could effectively own almost any weapon they chose. The Home Office had now decided that when it came to firearms legislative anarchy was not a good idea, instead they had decided that anyone who wished to own a firearm should register it and that the local police should decide if the person was suitable to hold a firearm; they did not want a repeat of Hungerford, or Dunblane.

Of course the job of interviewing those who wished to legally own a firearm fell to the local police, not that they did not have enough to do as it was.

Just after Constable Sparks had brought in the tea the phone on Langley’s desk rang.

“Chief Inspector Durbleigh on the phone for you, Ma’m.” The voice of Sergeant Beck said.

“Put her through, Joe.”

“Good morning, Kate, how are you?” The voice of Chief Inspector Jean Durbleigh said. Before her promotion to fill a vacancy at the constabulary’s headquarters, Durbleigh had been the uniformed Inspector at Hartlepool and occasionally still took a special interest in the place.

“Good morning, Ma’am, I’m fine thank you. How can I help you today?”

“It’s about this firearms registration business, I know you are busy enough as it is, but we’ve had another message from the Home Office this morning. They’d like us to ‘encourage’ applicants who are fit enough to join the Home Guard if they have not done so already, should they be reluctant we are to take it into account when considering their application.”

“I see, and I take it we are to confiscate any weapons from those we refuse a certificate to, Ma’am?” Langley asked.

“I’m afraid so, and I know all too well how limited your manpower is. Of course should you confiscate anything useful then I’m sure nobody would object to you keeping hold of it. Well I won’t keep you any longer, Kate, I’ll speak to you later, good bye.”

“Good bye, Ma’am.”

Once Chief Inspector Durbleigh had hung up, Langley called Sergeant Beck.

“Joe, I need to speak to both you and Sergeant Parrish, I’m afraid we have a busy day ahead of us.”

“No change there then, Ma’m.” Beck replied.

H.Q UK Special Forces Support Group, Camp Brimstone, Hell.  Colonel (D) David Stirling watched the comings and goings around him with interest; he had taken in the various cap badges associated with the SFSG, the majority of the group wore the maroon beret of the Parachute Regiment, the next biggest group wore the green beret of the Royal Marines, while he had also noticed the blue beret of the RAF Regiment and a number of other cap badges, including the Royal Engineers, Royal Signals and Royal Logistics Corps. Men from his own regiment, the SBS and this new regiment, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment could occasionally be seen visiting the headquarters on a variety of errands.

While it was clear that the modern soldier was not a whole lot different from those of the past what had amazed Colonel Stirling was how much communications technology had improved in the eighteen years since he had died. The ability to send text and pictures as well as voice communications in a few seconds was incredible as was the development in computer technology in what was, after all a very short time. The H.Q was full of small thin portable computers known as ‘lap-tops’, many of which showed information being sent back from radio controlled drones, which those controlling them insisted on calling Unmanned Air Vehicles, evidently the military habit of giving something simple a long complicated name had not disappeared since he had left the army.

As well as being home to the H.Q UK Special Forces Support Group Camp Brimstone was also the rear logistics base for all British units assigned to the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps and it was also the base from which the British had launched their power-play into Julius Caesar’s growing territory and to where 2 PARA battle group had been recovered to once the fighting was over.

Stirling had also observed that logisticians had not changed a great deal either. He was also interested to see that while the technology inside was radically different the latest Main Battle Tank, the Challenger 2, was not radically different in configuration from the Chieftains he remembered in the last decade of his life on Earth. Actually the British Army had managed to get enough old Chieftains running to form an RAC training regiment and had managed to get hold of quite a number of old Challenger 1s from a decimated Jordanian Army.

“Good day, Colonel Stirling, I hope you are being well looked after?” Colonel Dempsey asked cheerfully.

“I’ve few complaints, Colonel Dempsey, apart from the fact that I feel my talents are being a little underused.” Stirling replied. “The improvements in technology in the last few years have been pretty impressive; perhaps I’m hopelessly out of date.”

“If I can learn to use a computer, Colonel, then anyone can, besides computers of today are somewhat easier to use than the computers of the late ‘80s.

“Anyway the reason I came was to give you this.” Dempsey said with a smile holding up a bottle of single malt whisky and two glasses.

“Ah, now that is a sight for sore eyes.” Stirling replied. “I wonder if it’s still possible for a dead person to get drunk?”

“I can’t think of a better opportunity to find out.” The present Commanding Officer of 22 SAS told the regiment’s first Commanding Officer. “I’d be honored to research that problem with you.”

Stirling smiled. “I’d be more than happy to drink with any commander of the regiment, Colonel Dempsey.”

“And I with its founder. But, I’m afraid we have business to discuss as well. The war in Hell is over, the major combat operations part of it anyway. What’s left is peace keeping, not that such operations can’t be trouble enough.”

“I know, I’ve whiled away the hours reading the files on Iraq. Idiots.”

“Can’t blame the Spams, not really. They were hit by a manpower shortage and they needed to know if there was a way of doing things that economized on manpower. There wasn’t, they just took time to realize it.”

“Not just the Yanks, everybody. Including us. So, if the war here is over, what’s next?”

Colonel Dempsey leaned back and sipped his whisky. “Have you any ideas about raising Hell in Heaven if I may put it that way?”

Randi Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

James Randi looked around the empty office and sighed. It had been fun while it lasted but his part in The Salvation War was over. His brief had been to filter the world’s population of mediums, psychics and other ‘supernaturalists’ to see if any of them really had useful talents. He’d tried to do that once with his Million Dollar Prize and failed, the big names had refused to come anywhere near him and the small fry had been winnowed out early. Then The Salvation War had started and he’d had the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI and eventually Interpol and every intelligence organization in the world working to find likely suspects. Those that had been reluctant to submit to rigorous scientific testing had been dragged in by whatever force was needed.

None of them had qualified, not one. Of all the ‘names’ that had dominated the ‘psychic’ industry before the War had started, not a single one had shown any genuine ability to contact the Hell dimension, or anywhere else for that matter. Randi grinned to himself, the courts were blocked with law suits, some individual, some class actions, brought against the fake psychics for fraud and extortion by their victims. They were all using his Institute’s test results and the damages being awarded to their victims was mounting satisfactorily. The work he had started with the James Randi Educational Foundation had born fruit at last.

With it, the need for his Institute had gone. The existence of a ‘world after death’ had been proven but it wasn’t a matter of faith or religion. It was just another plane of existence, one that had been predicted by scientific theory but never proven. Well, now it had been proven scientifically and science was showing the way to understanding what was going on there. Humans understood the Hell dimension a bit, there were human tanks and artillery sitting in the central plaza of Dis to prove that. The Hell dimension was a strange place, its basic laws of physics differed a little, not much but a little, from Earth. Just enough to make it interesting, Massachusetts Institute of Technology was already offering a Master’s course in “Hell Studies” and were promising a PhD course as soon as they knew enough to decide what it should contain. Humans were at work on what made Hell tick and would worry away at the mysteries until they weren’t mysteries any longer.

What was it General Petraeus had said to Congress? “Their faith met our firepower. Firepower won.”

Randi nodded and closed the door behind him. His work was done all right, the protocols, the strict testing, the constant guard against fraud, all the techniques he had pioneered at JREF were now a standard part of the investigative techniques at DIMO(N). It was strange though, all the ‘professional’ psychics and mediums had turned out the be tricksters but ever-increasing numbers of people with real abilities were being located. Some had been aware of their abilities and in most cases their knowledge of what awaited them the other side had driven them mad. Others had been unaware of their gift and had been as surprised as anybody else when their abilities had been revealed.

Science again, Randi noted, there was even a DNA scanning test to pick out likely candidates. There were hundreds of people who could open portals and the number was growing steadily. Randi thought back to the early days when kitten had been the only reliable link between the dimensions and she had worked herself into exhaustion to keep the war effort going. She was a civilian, she wasn’t eligible for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but there were equivalent medals and she was getting most of them. It seemed that nations around the world were in a race to give her the highest award they could find.

But, all that was past. Randi adjusted his tinfoil had and set off down the corridor to where his car was waiting. The inside of the Pentagon was being refurbished, again, this time to install metal linings in the walls. That was a part of the Federal Building Code now, all new buildings had to have metal linings in their walls. That left only one question, just what was he going to do next?

First Circle Of Hell, Hell-Pit, Hell

“This isn’t how I saw it,” kitten looked out of her Humvee at the First Circle. It was a desolate scene, that much was right, there were ruined buildings, mud, trash everywhere. But the bitter cold, the biting wind, the night-time darkness and the constant ravenous starvation were gone. “but this is where I’m going.”

“You’re wearing your tinfoil hat, kitten.” Colonel Paschal was slightly amused. “If you had been here when we blew the gates open and hadn’t been, you would have seen what you expected. Starving people gathered around crude campfires in the mud, eating maggot-ridden food from garbage skips. Some of it was real, some illusion and when we took down the mind entanglement, the latter went away. But, kitten, you’re wrong. You’re not coming here.”

“But that’s what the future holds for me. I saw it.”

“Sure you did. But you’re making a mistake, what you foresaw isn’t in your future. It’s your now. This, here, now, is what you foresaw all those years. You came to the first Circle of Hell, sure, but what you didn’t see was you brought the whole United States Army with you. And quite a lot of others as well. You didn’t come to hell as a victim, you’ve come as a conqueror. You fought the demons and you won. Now you can get on with the rest of your life.”

“Hey, kitten!”

The shout came from outside the Humvee. kitten looked around and saw a group of eight soldiers running across to the Humvee. Her mind reached out and she recognized them instantly.

“Tucker!” She jumped out of the vehicle, just in time to be swept up in Tucker McElroy’s arms.

He gave her a resounding kiss and then passed her around the team. “kitten, we’ve never been able to thank you for everything you did for us. Not properly. And I guess we never will be able to do it right. But we’re here to do our best.”

“Tucker, I thought you were up in Tartarus?”

“We were, but the Marines landed an hour ago and the DSEALs took over from us. So we portalled out and then over to here. How are you feeling? Did your op go well?”

“Very well, The General had everything lined up ready for me. Pretty much all the work is done now.” kitten hesitated. “You know what my operation was don’t you?”

“Sure I do. Be honest, it would have got to me once. Not now. Might be being dead and all more likely I just grew some common sense but seems to me you had a problem and the surgeons sorted it out for you so now you’re the way you always should have been. And every one of us here’s going to get drunk to celebrate for you. If we can get drunk of course. We haven’t really tried yet. Want to join us in the experiment”

kitten giggled. “Can’t I’m afraid, still on medications that don’t allow alcohol. But when I’m off them, I’ll come and look you all up and we’ll try them OK?”

Executive Office, Pima Air & Space Museum , Tucson, Arizona

The sound of R-3350 engines winding down woke Daniel J. Ryan, Executive Director of the Pima Air and Space Museum up from an exhausted sleep. He’d been trying to arrange what was left of his museum so that he would have at least an approximation of a display for his visitors but it had been a hard job. He’d heard it was worse over at Davis-Montham, there every aircraft worth salvaging had been removed and the ones that had been left reduced to piles of junk, stripped to keep the others flying. Then, the significance of the sound sank home. He looked out of the office window and saw that his B-29 had returned. Ten seconds later he was running across the taxiway towards the parked aircraft.

“She’s back.”

Colonel Tibbets turned to look at Ryan. “She surely is. And she fought well for an old Lady. Did three bombing raids on Beelzebub’s army and that’s the least important part of it. She and her sisters did nearly all the experimental work that was essential for the bombing raids to work. They freed up the more modern aircraft for strikes and without them, The Salvation War would have taken a lot longer. Yup, these old ladies more than earned their keep. Cost us too, you know three of the ladies crashed when their structure gave out?

“Now, they’re being retired again. The 40th is to receive B-1Cs and we’re gonna start conversion soon. So, Mister Ryan, the Air Force says you can have her back again. On one condition though. You keep her in her Hell camouflage scheme and with her Hell mission tallies in place.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way Colonel.”

Chapter Eighty Five

Outside Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

“Do you think she’s lying?”

“Of course she is. This is hell, remember. The only question is, what is she lying about?” General Thomas Waldhauser was watching the gates of the fortress with professional interest. “You know, looking at this place, you’d almost think they were expecting an attack by us. That choke point getting into the valley was a perfect defensive bottleneck and the valley itself is a great killing ground. The hills are too steep for Tomahawk to handle and the whole geography is wrong for a ballistic missile attack. This place would have given us conniptions if we’d had to force our way in.”

“Even the baldricks could have fought us on even terms here.” Division Sergeant Major Carter was also watching the gates of the fortress. It was one of those days when killing people and breaking their things seemed like an entirely reasonable way of life. The First Marine Division had been on board their amphibious warfare ships, pounding north at 20 knots when Dis had fallen. That had gained all the headlines but it was this operation, the storming of the northern redoubt, that was the really important one. This was where the attacks on Sheffield and Detroit had been mounted from. Waldhauser and Carter were both definitely of the opinion that breaking things was in order.

“The gates are opening.” Waldhauser was almost speaking to himself but the stir of activity was easy to see. Tank guns, missile launchers, artillery, MLRS vehicles, all were training on the great doors in the rock. If the occupants did try a double-cross, the amount of firepower that could be poured into the fortress was impressive even by human standards. The baldricks inside would learn that there was no worse enemy than the United States Marines.

A golden figure walked out, followed at a respectful distance by others. It was a gorgon, easily distinguished by the mass of writhing tendrils that formed its ‘hair’. It approached Waldhauser and stood in front of him.

“On your knees, hands behind your head.” The Marine sergeant snapped the words out. The gorgon obeyed, indignant at the treatment but determined to obey. Because obedience meant survival.

“I am Chatelaine Euryale, mistress of Palelabor.”

“I will decide what your title is and I will tell you what you are.” Waldhauser’s voice was ice-cold. “Until then, you are nothing. Understand me?”

“Yes master.”

“When addressing the general, first and last words out of your mouth are ‘Sir’.” Carter spoke abruptly, precisely the way the same order had been given to him, first day in boot camp. “Try again.”

“Sir, yes sir.” Euryale clenched her teeth forcing herself to remember that these were humans, they could destroy anything, any time they wanted.

“Are all your personnel out of the fortress?”

Euryale looked carefully behind her and did a count. “Sir, all that survived yes. Many of my people were killed by the usurper Belial and many more in the rebellion against him. These are all that are left Sir. But Sir, the passageways and tunnels beneath Palelabor are deep and complex. It may be that a few of Belial’s people survive down there. Sir.”

“If there are, and we find them, they will be killed. The gorgons, order them to assemble over there.” Carter pointed at a flat area of ground. “You join them.”

Euryale called her gorgons over and led the way to the indicated area. Flat, no cover, surrounded by rocks, to her practiced eye, it had every indication of being a killing ground. One of the marines made a waving motion with his hand and the party knelt again. Then a group of the marines appeared carrying what looked like bags. They put one over the head of each of the gorgons, Euryale last. He last thought before the bag shut light out was whether this would be the execution she feared.

“Listen up. You may move the bag so you can see. But you will keep those head things of yours covered at all times. Any gorgon seen with its head-snakes exposed will be killed without warning. Do you understand?”

“Sir, yes Sir.” The gorgons echoed the words.

Waldhauser turned to his officers. “Order the men in, search that place from top to bottom. Any baldricks still in there, kill them Find the human slaves, all of them, bring them out. Once we find out how many are here, we’ll decide what to do with them.

Broken Skull Gallery, Shaft 14, Slocum Mine, Tartarus

Publius had set the ambush up carefully. There was a thing strand of wire across the tunnel floor, one end securely anchored to the rock, the other tied around a delicately-balanced support. If something tripped over the wire, the act would pull that support out and drop a barrage of heavy rocks on the victim. Then, the humans could close in and beat it to death with their war-hammers. Publius was proud of those hammers, a heavy wedge of stone, its edges painstakingly sharpened so that they could cut as well as crush. The whole thing tied to the end of a solid handle that gave it extra momentum. The war-hammer could crush a demon skull. If they could find a demon with a skull to crush that is.

“Where have they all gone?” Simplicus looked around at the humans gathering for the ambush. The demon presence had vanished, as if the monstrous creatures had evaporated overnight. It had been three or four days since the last of the demon overseers had gone away and none had come to replace them. The humans had continued working for one of those days, then stopped. Then they’d split into two groups, the sheep and the wolves. No, Simplicus thought, that wasn’t right. They’d split into three groups, the sheep, who sat around doing nothing, the wolves, who had already started to prey on the sheep, and the sheep-dogs, who were protecting the sheep and starting the rebellion against the demons. He, Publius and the rest of the humans here, they were the sheep-dogs and Simplicus felt strangely proud of the distinction.

“Something’s coming.” The words were whispered, alerting the defenders. “A demon from the left, another group from the right.

This is it. Simplicus thought carefully. The demons were coming back, now the fighting would really start. A war of traps and ambushes against the demon’s strength and magic tridents. Perhaps they could get the single demon first and flee, leading the group into another ambush? That should work, doubtless Publius was already thinking that out.

What happened next was totally outside his experience. There were a short series of yells from the group and a series of loud explosions that lit up the tunnels with their flashes and echoed around the rock walls, making Simplicus’s ears hurt with the reverberations. The single demon was hurled back against the wall, his bright blue blood splattering all over the floor of the tunnel. He fell, half-sitting against the cave wall and another barrage of explosions caused more of the injuries that had brought him down. Then, he fell sideways to lay on the floor, very obviously dead.

The group who had killed him came into better view. They were the same size as humans, but they wore red-and-gray mottled clothes that seemed to blend into the cave walls. They were loaded down with equipment and each man carried a strange lance-like object in his hands. Their faces were half-hidden by strangely-shaped helmets that gave them a strange, beetle-browed ferocity but Simplicus could see that their real faces were hidden behind a mask that covered their nose and mouth and goggles that covered their eyes. Strange goggles, black ones that seemed to project forward from their faces and glowed with a strange green light. With a sudden insight, Simplicus knew that these new arrivals were human.

“You human slaves down here?” The leader of the group spoke curtly as if he had a lot to do and not much time to do it.

“We were, we’re rebelling against the demons.”

“Good for you.” The same voice was now warm and friendly. “You don’t know it, but you’ve won. This place surrendered a couple of hours ago and its previous owners are in custody. There’s been a war between Earth and Hell and Earth won. You’re free. Just follow the way we’ve marked to the surface and there’s people there waiting to look after you.”

The leader of the group stepped forward and to his horror, Simplicus realized he hadn’t seen the tripwire leading to the booby trap. There was only one thing to do and Simplicus did it without thinking. “Look out!” He yelled the words as he dived forward, pushing the human leader backwards, out of the way of the rocks. In doing so, he hit the tripwire himself and the last thing he registered was the battering of the rocks as they hit him.

Publius stared down at the body of his friend, crushed beneath the carefully-built deadfall. The leader of the humans picked himself up from the floor where Simplicus had pushed him and carefully inspected the body. Then, he looked at Publius and shook his head sadly.

“And to think that we came down here to rescue you.”

“He was my friend.” Publius’s voice was loaded with grief.

“He was also a Marine.” Sergeant Voight looked down at the man who had saved his life. “You men, take him to the surface, with an honor guard. The rest of us will keep looking down here.”

“My name is Publius. I was a legionary once. May I come with you? I can help you find your way around, show you where the rest of us are.”

“Very well. Lead on Publius.”

Outside Palelabor, Tartarus, Hell

The humans were streaming out, most blinking at the unfamiliar light. As they did, they were being greeted, their names taken for the ever-growing database of the rescued humans and herded out of the way. Not all of them though, a few, a small handful of them were being shepherded to one side where they were guarded by hard-looking men who wore white helmets, white scarves and white gloves. The soldiers were military police, those they guarded were the humans who had turned traitor and aided the baldricks in their plans against Earth. The guards weren’t there to keep them in, they were there to stop the other rescued humans tearing them limb from limb. That had already happened to some, the men here were the survivors.

Beside them, a Humvee pulled up and a man got out, one whose uniform was subtly different from the Marines. He walked over to General Waldhauser, and saluted crisply. “Sir, may I have permission to see the names of those we have recovered.

“Yes, of course Major.” Waldhauser waved and carter passed a notebook computer with the latest records on it.

The strange major loaded a flashdrive into the side and pressed a key. Then his eyebrows went up. “With your permission Sir, I would like to take this one.” He passed the notebook back.

“Obersturmbannfuhrer Herwijer. Guard at Majdanek. Sure, Major you can have him. Take good care of him.”

“Yes Sir, I will take very good care of him,” said Major Ben-Ari of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Route One, Hell.

“So you renamed it Route One.” Gaius Julius Caesar looked at what had once been the Dis-Dysprosium Highway.

“That’s right, makes things a lot easier.” Second Consul Jade Kim watched the humans walking out of Hell. Caesar had assembled his people fast and they were already on their way to the area he had picked out as suitable for his new home. “Its all fixed Gaius, I’ve resigned my commission so I’m a free agent now. A word to the wise, the U.S Army knows what you’re up to and they don’t object too strenuously as long as you don’t make it too obvious. As far as they’re concerned, as long as you keep the peace in the area, its one they don’t have to worry about. The officer who processed my papers kept referring to a Roman Awakening. I’ll explain that later.

“While I was away, I checked my finances, I’ve got my separation bonus, my back salary and a few other things. I also contacted a publisher back on Earth, your original books are public domain but you’ve rewritten them so the rrewritten versions are copyright. You can make a fortune off the royalties.”

“She’s saying things we don’t understand again.” Titus Pullo pulled an exaggerated face of despair.

“It just means our First Consul is going to be rich. Again. And our new state needs the money. For vehicles, weapons, fuel and other equipment.”

“And radios,” added Gaius Julius Caesar. “Don’t forget radios

Banks of the Styx. Fifth Circle of Hell

“Fire in the hole!” The combat engineers gave the time honored cry and watched the workers scrambling clear. A stretch of the Styx and the swamps that surrounded it had been painstakingly cleared of imprisoned humans, then the charges set. They would blow the bank away at a specific spot, diverting the water away down a series of channels. Once the previous river bed was drained, the remaining humans could be located, rescued and taken out of Hell.

“Firing, bank charges, in Three, Two One GO!” The blast rocked the area’s ending ripples across the surface of the Styx and causing the mud in the swamps to shiver. The bank vanished in a carefully-controlled blast that left a deep hole where the high bank had been. The Styx started to flow down its new path and the water level in the old bed started to fall.

“Firing, Bed charges in Three, Two, One. Go!” A second series of charges blasted mud into the old river bed, forming a dam. The remaining water in the old bed drained away, exposing thousands of bodies, nailed to crude crosses.

“Thank thee friend. We can work now and bring help to these poor creatures. Where art thou going now?” The Quaker looked solemnly at the Army engineer.

“To the Sixth Circle. There is a river of lava there that also must be diverted and drained. And after that? Your guess is as good as mine, there’s more than enough work down here for one generation. Clearing this place out will be a job for our children and their children.”

“I fear thou art right friend. But we shall all do what we can.”

Ninth Circle of Hell

“So this is the Ninth Circle of Hell. General Schatten looked at the area beneath him. A tiny area, a sheet of ice on which strange creatures, a mix of gorillas, bears, horses and things he couldn’t even imagine paced. They wandered from place to place, chewing on the heads of humans who were frozen in the ice. From where he stood, Schatten could see six of them. Doubtless, there were more. “Who are these people.”

Abigor looked down on them. “The greatest traitors of history. Brutus and Cassius, Andrey Vlasov, Ephialtes of Trachis, John Anthony Walker, Vidkum Quisling, many more.”

Schatten looked more carefully. In the middle of one group was an unfilled hole. “The unfilled hole. Who is that for.”

Abigor searched his memory. “A countryman of yours I think. One called Robert Macnamara.”

Headquarters, First Human Expeditionary Army, Camp Hell-Alpha, Phelan Plain, Hell.

General Petraeus sighed quietly to himself. He was now commanding, if not quite the largest, certainly the most powerful, army humanity had even put together. A force that was growing all the time as more and more units joined the ranks. Five Army Groups, each with five Armies, each with five Corps. None of them were complete yet of course, the units reflected nationalities, equipment standards, operational doctrine rather than actual numbers. But, one day, they would represent numbers as well. Over three thousand divisions, more than 39 million men. All in armored units, fully mechanized, fully outfitted with tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and salvo rocket launchers. Supported by air forces to match. The factories were humming, the production lines churning out equipment at a rate not seen since the Second World War. Already the museum-pieces were leaving the ranks, sent back to the retirement they had earned yet again.

Petraeus smiled at that, on his desk was a brief note. A unit that had been flying F-105s had just finished converting to F-22s and its aircraft, those that had survived, were going back to their museums. It was a good thing, the losses of the F-105s and all the other old aircraft had been high. Very few had been shot down but they were tricky to fly by modern standards and their structures had been old and tired. The number of crashes due to structural failure and pilot error had been far too high.

“Sir, a letter for you.” A letter thought Petraeus, now that was unusual. The reason why an American General was commanding this Army was that only the United States Army had the communications and command-control facilities needed to run a force this size. Everything was done by email and datalinks, nobody wrote letters any more. He picked up the envelope, noting the script on it. It was beautiful, clear, precise, easily legible yet also beautiful and a pleasure to see. Petraeus was aware, rather guiltily, that his own handwriting was an almost indecipherable scrawl. The art of penmanship and calligraphy were long lost, and this beautiful copperplate showed him just how tragic that loss had been.

The letter inside was equally beautifully written and Petraeus read it with pleasure. Then he re-read it with shock although it was something he should have anticipated. Now this, he thought was a problem, and he started to re-read the elegant letter for a third time.

September 11th, 2008

To General of the Army David Petraeus, U.S,

I regret that ill health caused by my confinement has delayed my communication with you but I have pleasure to report that I am now fit for any duty to which I may be assigned.

I therefore respectfully offer my services to the country and flag once more again.

Very respectfully, your ob'dt servant,

R.E. Lee

Epilogue

Heavengate, Hell

Belial looked at the great fortress that guarded the one single gate that led directly from Hell to Heaven. The guards were sloppy, ill-disciplined and this compared badly with the days under Satan’s rule. The humans hadn’t found out about this place yet and their machines were not surrounding it. To Belial, it looked as if the whole place was about to fall apart. That was an insult of course, Belial knew this place, knew how solidly it was built, in fact he knew it far better than anybody suspected. He knew there was a way in that by-passed the narrow twisting tunnel that the guards here used.

In the darkness, he slipped over the wall, making his way down the stairway towards the entrance. It was tiny, too small by far for him to use. But, once he had found it, he was able to orientate himself. He had to go one hundred blocks to the left, ten blocks up, then five back to the right. It was a measure of how cunningly this place had been built that going 95 blocks to the left and then five up would not take him to the same place. In any case, climbing at anywhere other than the right place was impossible.

“Sire, what are you doing here?” The demon guard had come on him unexpectedly. Belial cursed himself for being so distracted that he had allowed a traitor to some so close. Had Euryale sent him? Or the humans? It didn’t matter. Belial swung around and fired the modified human shotgun that had been made at Palelabor, watching the iron fragments blast the unfortunate demon into wherever came next.

Belial know the blast would attract attention and he had to work fast. His talons found the holes and he started pressing the keys inside, in the right order, hearing the panels drop inside as he did so. With the last one, the stone block was free to move. Belial pushed it, sending it pivoting backwards. He was getting feverish with hurry, he could hear the guards approaching but the second block was free to pivot. He was inside the secret tunnel and the blocks pivoted back in time to conceal him from the approaching guards.

The tunnel was still cramped for a demon as large as Belial but he scrambled down, feeling the undressed stone tearing at him. It was utterly dark, and the sudden end caused him a heavy blow to his head. Now, he had to find the correct sequence again and this time his life hung in the balance. Get this wrong and the stones would swing to close the tunnel completely, crushing him out of existence.

Finally, the slabs were free and Belial was able to drop into the Heavengate chamber. It was empty, the guards had gone. He took a deep breath and stepped through the gate, into the Heavengate Chamber the other side. The guards there had gone as well and there was but a single figure sitting on a convenient stone.

“Don’t shoot! I am the Grand Duke Belial, seeking refuge from the humans. Hell has fallen, the Humans rule everything.”

“And why should we take you in?” Michael’s voice was teasing, condescending.

“Because I know how to beat the humans.”

“So do we.” Michael stared at Belial. He’d been expecting the former Great Duke for some days and had been getting to the point where he assumed the demon wouldn’t make it.

“No, the humans have weapons that outclass anything we have. Remember in the Great Celestial War, we fought for eons without gaining an advantage? Yet the humans crushed us utterly in a few of their months. Heaven cannot stand any more that hell could. Not without the weapons I have built.”

Michael nodded. He would take Belial to Yahweh, perhaps the idea of a refugee in Heaven would amuse him. Or, at least, keep him out of the way while Michael got on with his own plans.

Bush Ranch, Crawford, Texas

“I am pleased to report that we now have six divisions fully formed and a second corps headquarters is now operational. We believe that the British Army will soon be able to contribute twelve full divisions to the First Army Group. With our allies in Canada contributing two divisions, Australia three divisions and New Zealanders putting in another full division, we’ll be up to 18 divisions, organized as three whole Corps. We’re expanding our marines to a whole division as well, bringing us up to 19 divisions. That’s nearly a whole Army and with the four American armies in the First Army Group, we believe we can hold our heads up high. Then of course, there’s all the troops we’re holding back for home defense, I’d say we have nearly two million people under arms at the moment. Proud moment for us all, I can tell you.

“May I ask who will be commanding the Commonwealth Army?”

“Yes indeed. We’ve appointed Sir Mike Jackson to take on the job, he’s the most experience senior officer we have who is still fit and healthy enough to take on such an arduous job. He’s used to serving with and under our allies, so I doubt we have much to worry about. I’m more worried about our equipment problems, we’ve still got units armed with SA-80 rifles but at least new aircraft are coming off the production lines to replace the museum pieces and the six Type 45 destroyers cancelled by the government have been reinstated.”

“Thank you for your time Admiral.” The television reporter turned to face camera and resumed “That was Admiral of the Fleet Lord West who kindly agreed to share his insights into the British contribution to the new Human Expeditionary Army. Back to you Greta.”

“Thank you Brian. Now, recapping our main news stories again, Hurricane Ike continues to batter the Houston area although it is now moving off to the North East. Meteorologists are puzzled at the way the storm seemed to pause over the Houston/Galveston region for several hour. However, President Abigor of Dis has offered work teams of demons to help with rescue and repair efforts. He said that the demon teams were a first effort to help heal the breech between humans and demons caused by Satan’s insane conduct.”

“I don’t think we need to see any more of that,” President Bush used the remote to flip the channel over to the CBS network. He was just in time to catch a fanfare of music.

“And now, CBS is proud to present the first in our new series of our late-evening current affairs debating programs hosted by Luga ‘You can’t lie to a succubus’ Sharmanaska.” The music swelled up and the familiar figure of Lugasharmanaska appeared at the back. She was wearing her usual black robe but in deference to CBS decency standards she had a red evening gown on under it. She took her seat beside the coffee table and her yellow eyes swept over the crows, the black vertical slit of her pupils contracting under the spotlights. The applause from the audience was enthusiastic if slightly restrained.

“My guest tonight is Michael Vick.” She paused as a string of hisses went around the theater. “As you all know, he was arrested and sent to prison for his part in a dog fighting ring. He has been released on temporary liberty for tonight’s show. Hello, Michael thank you for coming.”

“Why hello Luga. May I say….”

“No. We will ask the questions. Firstly, Michael, can you give us any good reason why we should not throw you into a ring full of rabid pit-bulls?

A thunderous burst of cheering echoed around the theater, the audience was beginning to warm to Lugasharmanaska and the show’s promoters relaxed. Selling this concept to the network bosses had been a hard deal to make. Still, Luga was turning out to be a hit. In many ways, they thought, it was a pity they couldn’t throw Michael Vick into a ring full of rabid pit-bulls, it would make excellent television. And their new chat-show host was just the person who could organize it.

Back in Crawford, Bush thumbed the remote control switch again. This time, he missed the program and hit an advertisement break instead. A picture of an office in New York with an urgent package while the manager berated a delivery organizer for not getting the package to Japan on time. Then, mid-tirade, he stopped as a black ellipse formed on his desk and a hand came out to tale the box. As it disappeared into the ellipse, the screen split to show a desk in Tokyo, with another ellipse forming there. The hand emerged with the package in it and deposited it’s cargo on in front of the recipient. The voice-over was a seductive contralto.

“Any where, any time, use the Yulupki Express Delivery Service. We go through hell to get your deliveries through on time.”

President Bush hastily changed the channel again. “Well, at least those naga things have found a non-destructive use for their talents.”

Ensconced in an arm chair, Condi Rice nodded. Then her attention was caught by another advertisement just starting. The voice-over was a dramatic baritone.

“Yes, you can take it with you! You’ve worked hard for your wealth, a life-time’s effort and sacrifice. Why should your children waste the products of your thrift and industry while you live here.” The scene cut to one of the refugee camps in the Phelan Plain. The huts were neat, clean and comfortable but small and there were a lot of them cramped together. That was inevitable of course, with Earth’s normal death toll and the humans being rescued from the pit, demand for housing far exceeded supply.

“Let your children stand on their own two feet, that’s what you did wasn’t it? Right, of course you did, now you can do it again. In partnership with the Government of the New Roman Republic, the Euryale Real Estate Company is proud to offer these beautiful plots of land along the banks of the Askaris River in the Elysium Fields.

“Yes, you too can live in the Elysium Fields, once the chosen homes of the gods and now the scene of an exciting new second-life community development. Chose one of three types of Villa. We have the Augustus, our top of the line atrium-style villa with four bedrooms and all modern conveniences. Then we have the Tiberius for the young-at-heart, slightly smaller but with great recreation and playtime facilities. And for those looking for a little more economy, we have the Nero, just perfect for the smaller family. All our villas have metal-lined walls and dust-filters so your living relatives can come and stay. If you want them to of course. And remember, property ownership brings citizenship in the New Roman Republic. So call us today on 1-800-EUR-YALE and get set up for the second life of your dreams.”

“Isn’t that the Euryale who was somehow involved with the attacks on Detroit and Sheffield.”

“It was, but she and Caesar got together and set this up. He got a huge land grant from her and that’s his New Rome.”

“Can he do that Condi?”

“Who, Caesar? Sure he can. He’s even been recognized as an independent state in hell, by the Italians of course. From the Army’s point of view, he’s set up a nice little well run state that’s keeping order and not causing trouble. He’s even building roads. Straight ones of course.”

George Bush shook his head. “Condi, I thought we’d won this war.”

End

Next, Book II…The Salvation War