Armageddon

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?”