Armageddon?? (47 page)

“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.