Armageddon

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.