Armageddon

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.