Armageddon

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)