Pantheocide

Chapter Sixty Nine

Lead Elements, Third Legion, Heaven.

It didn’t look good. That much was obvious to Dripankeothorofenex as he looked over the metal wall of his armored personnel carrier at the battlefield opening up in front of Third Legion. Below them, 1st Mechanized Infantry Battalion (Demonic) was obviously in trouble. Their front line was being enveloped by the leading edge of the Angelic Host advance. Some of their infantry positions were being overwhelmed while others were being outflanked and engaged from the sides and rear. Most disturbing of all were the black columns of smoke that marked the spots where the battalions armored personnel carriers were being knocked out. He could see where most of the problem lay; the angels had got in close enough to severely limit how much the battalion could use its artillery support.

“Right lads.” Their officer had turned to face the crew and passengers of his APC. “Time to pull First Demonic’s nuts out of the fire. We’re to advance down the slope and hit the angels in the flanks and rear. Then, we’ll roll their entire formation up. The APC gunners will do most of the work, the rest of you get ready to debus and take out any survivors. Those of you who haven’t used your bayonets yet, watch Drippy at work. He’s got it down to a fine art.”

Dripankeothorofenex saw the other daemons in the back of the APC look at him with a mixture of respect and envy. They all knew that to catch the eye of an officer was the key to a successful career while to win praise from a human was reward indeed. He guessed what some of them were thinking, why should he have had the luck to be attacked by three angels while they had not. They didn’t know how close that little battle had been to killing him. Then, he felt the APC lurch and its engine start to race as the wave of armored carriers started to accelerate down the slope.

Ahead of him, the Angleic Host was pushing in against the crumbling resistance offered by the First Demonic. They could see nothing else, they were so focussed on turning the impending defeat of the battalion into a complete rout that they simply didn’t see Third Legion cresting the ridge to their left. Nor did their commander who was in the forefront of their lines. Dripankeothorofenex could see him clearly, his armor gleaming in the brilliant light, his mighty sword flashing as he drove through the defensive positions, his trumpet blasts scouring the ground before him. Dumbass, he thought. To make a target of himself like that. Then, with what amounted to extreme shock, he realized that he was thinking like a human.

How much so quickly became apparent. He heard the rhythmic beating sound again and looked behind him. Three helicopters of the Third had lifted up from behind a forested hill and their missiles streaked overhead. The great angel leading the charge was surrounded by their blasts and went down, his body torn in ways that were all too visible even from this distance. He tried to raise himself but another quartet of Hellfire missiles finished him off completely. Without its leader and greatest champion, the Angelic Host was decapitated.

That wasn’t altogether a good thing though, Dripankeothorofenex could see that. The missile salvoes had attracted the other angel’s attentions and revealed the threat that was descending on their left flank. They reacted by starting to shift backwards and to their right, away from the charge of Third Legion while ordering their human levies to about-face and move against the new enemy. They were slow though, they didn’t have the speed or coordination that the human units took for granted. They were still only partially through the process of refacing when Third Legion’s APCs opened fire, their 23mm cannon lashing out with streams of tracer at the combined force of angels and humans before them. For a few seconds, the Angelic Host was frozen by shock, the ferocity of the attack and the sheer massed firepower being thrown at them caused them to just stand and die. Then, when feelings returned to them, when they realized that the armored carriers were not going to stop, they broke. Angel and human alike they broke and ran, their formation crumbling and their ranks scattered.

By the time the massacre was over, the ground was carpeted with bodies. Dripankeothorofenex saw human warfare from a new perspective now. Before now the daemons had only been the victims of massed firepower, they had been the ones cut down in swathes by the relentless armored vehicles and their fast-firing guns. Now he, and the other daemons in Third Legion had seen that firepower from the other side, how it had enabled them to fight a force many times their own number and reduce that force to bloody, slaughtered chaos. He understood well at last, the humans were not gods possessed of unfathomable power, they were simply very good at what they did. And others could be just like them. In Dripankeothorofenex’s mind, hero-worship was suddenly replaced by ambition. If he wanted to, he could be just like them. All he had to do was learn how.

His reverie was interrupted by the tail ramp of his armored carrier dropping. “Hey Drippy, come with me, there’s some people I want you to meet.” His officer was calling him and like any good legionary, he obeyed the call.

1st Mechanized Infantry Battalion (Demonic) was a mess. Its ranks were collecting their casualties, pulling them out of the foxholes and wrecked vehicles where they had fought and sorting the dead from the wounded. Another change, Dripankeothorofenex noted, the care for the wounded. Something almost unknown to daemonic armies. Scattered amongst the groups were figures in white, their hands held above their heads. He could here their words, ‘kyrie eleison’, no longer an arrogant battle-cry screamed out in the frenzy of attack but a plea for mercy, chanted amidst weeping in the hope of survival. Once, Dripankeothorofenex, would have seen them as an opportunity for an afternoon’s entertainment as they were tortured but he knew that was not what humans would do and he had to learn from them. Humans were merciful to those they defeated. So would he be. He made the decision out of a simple desire to copy humans but then the realization hit him. Treat prisoners well and others will be more likely to surrender.

His officer was searching through the scene, looking through the dead and hunting through the groups of living. Eventually, Dripankeothorofenex saw his face brighten and he called out in a voice that rang across the battlefield. “Yo! Aeneas! Ori! Over here.”

Two humans turned around and saw the figure running towards them. The three met in an exchange of hugs and back-slaps. “Tucker, I heard you had joined the Eagles. How goes it old friend?”

“Well, Caesar’s a good boss and we’re getting our legions put together. Hey, have I got somebody you two want to meet. Drippy, over here.” His officer called him and he doubled over to where he stood with his friends. “Drippy, this is Aeneas, a Spartan, and Ori a Samurai. Old friends of mine from the pit. Aeneas, Ori, I’d like you to meet one of my Legionnaires. His name’s quite unpronounceable so we all call him Drippy. Don’t be fooled by his gentle demeanor, I saw this guy take down three angels in thirty seconds with the bayonet. He’s getting to be one of us.”

Dripankeothorofenex saw the other two humans staring at him with an expression he knew well. The way most humans rescued from the pit looked at the daemons. A mixture of anger and desire for revenge, in this case overlaid by the fact he was one of their friend’s soldiers and he had spoken highly of him. His mind was in turmoil, he knew that the correct daemonic response would involve genuflection and prostration but he had quickly learned that such displays did not go down well with humans. He would try and be a human instead. “Sirs, I am pleased to meet you. Do not let my officer mislead you, they were very small angels. But, you have wounded here, how can I help you with them?”

He held his breath and looked at the two humans. Their expressions softened slightly, the anger fading quickly. One of them, the one who carried a sword as well as his rifle nodded. “You are right Tucker. He is indeed one of us.”

Helicopter Base, Third Legion. Heaven

Gaius Julius Caesar sat on an empty fuel drum and watched his helicopter attack unit landing. Five birds were already down, their ground crews closing in on them as the crews dismounted. His heart was dropping slightly because the figure he was searching for hadn’t yet appeared. Two more MH-6s were landing and he scanned them with urgency. Then, he almost sagged with relief. She was there, she was getting out of the cockpit. She had made it.

“Second Consul. Went the day well?”

His voice was formal and grave. Her eyes widened slightly, she’d been expecting a more demonstrative welcome home, but she knew he was Roman and stoicism was a cardinal virtue. She drew herself up and tried to match him. Privately she decided she would introduce him to a modern military custom, the post-‘holy crap I can’t believe we’re both alive’ decompression session. But now, they were in public and had an image to uphold.

“Very well, First Consul. Your Third Legion defeated one wing of the enemy assault and drove it from the battlefield. Then, it crushed their center and relieved an allied unit while putting the enemy to flight. Our casualties are not great, we have lost one helicopter disintegrated by a trumpet blast while another had engine failure and has landed with our ground troops. It will be available as soon as it is repaired. I do not know the losses on the ground. Perhaps we should go and see?”

Caesar nodded. “Will you fly me?”

Kim frowned. “That’s not a good idea. There might still be some angels up. We should go by ground or fly in two birds.”

Caesar looked at her solemnly. “Just this once Jade. I’ve never flown with you before and I’ve never seen a battlefield from the air. We’ll do the separate aircraft bit from now on but just this once.”

She bit her lip, it was a bad idea but the desire to show off her flying skills was too much. “Very well. But, I’ll get two other birds to escort us.”

A few minutes later, her Little Bird was skimming over the battlefield again. Caesar spent half his time watching her deft and economical movements as she flew the helicopter, the other time looking at the scene on the ground. He’d never seen anything like it, nor had he realized the appalling carnage modern weapons could wreak on those unwilling to adapt to their presence. In his heart, he wished this was a sight he had never seen.

They skimmed over a ridge and he saw another sight before him, one that told him his presence was expected. His Legion was drawn up in something equivalent to a parade formation although he did note that guards were out and at least some of the units were in combat deployment. The MH-6 reared slightly, and settled down to land on the shattered ground. The clean purity of heaven had gone, perhaps never to return for the air was laden with smoke and dust and it had the sulphurous stink of explosives, liberally mixed with burned metal, fuel and flesh. Today, Hell had come to Heaven.

“Tribune Madeuce.” He saw the commander of Third Legion come to attention. He could barely see the man’s rank markings, a subdued dark brown against red. Human officers didn’t like to be distinctive on a battlefield. That was hardly surprising considering what they did to those who were. “How went the day?”

“Sir, we count an estimated four hundred angels dead and over ten thousand humans. Our losses total eighty one dead and two hundred wounded. We have taken over a thousand prisoners, all humans. Your Legion fought well Sir. Better than the H.E.A. unit that made up our center.” There was a pleased, almost boastful sound to Madeuce’s voice. Or, as Caesar realized, not boastful but proud of how his unit had performed.

“So I see. Only four hundred angels dead? Out of ten thousand?”

“They fled Sir. When the battle turned against them, they abandoned their human troops and fled. The fighters from our allies got many but the rest escaped.”

Caesar nodded. Then he called out, waving the assembled daemons and humans of the Third Legion closer to him. “Soldiers of the Third Legion, your commander tells me that you fought well today. You shall be rewarded for your bravery. Today, your Legion shall be named. Let me explain this. Every Legion gets a number, it arrives with the rations.” A ripple of respectful laughter spread across the ranks. “But a name, now that is something that a Legion must win on the field of battle. From today onwards this unit will be Legio Tertius Laurifer. The Victorious Third Legion. And should anyone ever speak ill of your courage and bravery, there will be no need to take anger. Just tell them that you served with the Laurifer Legion today and they will hang their heads in shame and hold themselves of little account that they were not here beside you.”

Cheering erupted across the ranks. Caesar grinned broadly at Kim and winked at her. “Now, Legio Primus and Legio Secundus will be desperate to win a battle so they will also be awarded names. And the next group of legions we raise will be even more desperate to do so, so they can show the arrogant first three that they are not the only ones who can fight.

Kim grinned back. “I see you’ve read Henry Fifth.”

Headquarters, Human Expeditionary Army, Heaven.

“Well, they can fight.” General Petraeus looked at the feedback from the Global Hawk circling high over the battlefield. “And it looks like Gaius Julius can still make inspiring speeches. Do you think we can find out what he said?”

“He’ll probably have put it into a best-selling book by the end of the week.” General Sir Michael Jackson spoke gloomily. He was well aware that Caesar wrote very well and his ‘real histories of Rome’ books had been best sellers. They had better be because the royalties were a significant part of the income of New Rome. HBO had just started their serialization of “The Gallic Wars” made by the same team who had produced ‘Rome’ and the credit at the end ‘Technical and Historical Advisor: Gaius Julius Caesar’ had also been an expensive commodity. “What are we going to do about the main body.”

Petraeus looked at the operational displays, calculating safety margins and degrees of separation. Yes, it would work. “Sodom, for Gomorrah they die.”

501st Tactical Missile Wing. Heaven.

The transporter-erector-launch vehicle groaned as the four-round missile launcher module elevated to the firing position. It paused there for a few seconds, then the whole system rocked as a missile emerged from one of the tubes. Originally a long cylinder with a rounded nose, it changed as soon as it was out of its tube. Wings sprouted from its fuselage, tail surfaces deployed and an air intake dropped out from under the belly. What had once looked like a torpedo now was an unmanned aircraft. With the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile on its way, the TEL lowered its launch module. The deed was done.

The missile, known officially as the Gryphon but actually called the Glickem by everybody, had its course carefully laid out. It climbed to 100 feet and then set off along the planned route, the radar set in its nose measuring the height of the ground ahead of it and ensuring that the clearance of 100 feet was carefully maintained. By its standards, the missile didn’t have far to go and the task it had been given was insultingly easy. Just fly to the specific point it had been aimed at and then do its thing. A few miles short of that point, another program cut in and the missile began to climb. It was of no interest whatsoever to the missile that the final point on its pre-planned course was directly over the center of a mass of 50,000 angels and more than 450,000 of their human levies.

It was at this point that warhead signals from both radar and air pressure sensors prompted an electronics package to begin the initiation process. That package sent an electrical impulse down 72 different wires to various points on an explosive shell at the very heart of the W83 warhead at the center of the missile. After 0.003 microseconds those impulses set off a pair of detonators at each of those 72 points, causing the mixture of explosives to converge into a perfectly spherical explosive wave travelling inward. After 10 microseconds the explosive wave had already started to compress successive hollow spheres of various metals. In 3 more microseconds the compression wave had crossed an empty layer to reach the heart of the warhead-a sphere of uranium 5 inches in diameter. The blast from the explosives crushed that sphere into a fluid mass 2 inches in diameter.

At that time, 19 microseconds after detonation, a small particle accelerator in the front of the warhead fired neutrons into the uranium sphere. These neutrons were absorbed by uranium atoms and caused them to decay. In the highly compressed mass, there was nowhere for the decay particles to go; they hit other uranium atoms and caused them to decay as well. This chain reaction cycled 60 times in the next microsecond before a small amount of compressed deuterium-tritium gas was injected into a hollow in the center of the uranium core, increasing the cycling rate to 80 times in the next 0.1 microseconds. By then, the uranium core had reached a temperature of 40 million degrees fahrenheit. That didn’t matter too much, what was important was that the gamma rays given off by the nuclear reactions radiated through the exploding mass and were absorbed by the weapon casing, 0.003 microseconds later. The casing was heated and reradiated the energy as x-rays. It was those X-rays that set the next part of the chain into action.

At the rear of the core of the W83 was a cylinder of lithium-deuteride, 10 inches in diameter and 30 inches long with a radiation shield protecting it from direct radiation from the primary. It was surrounded by an inch-thick layer of depleted uranium; it also had a rod of uranium in the center. The x-rays reradiated from the warhead casing heated and compressed the outer wrapping of depleted uranium. In 0.1 microseconds this crushed the lithium-deuteride to a cylinder only 2 inches in diameter. At this point, neutrons from the primary arrived at that inner rod of uranium, coming through a hole in the radiation shield. These caused a nuclear chain reaction to occur in the rod, super-heating the lithium-deuteride from within. Neutrons from the chain reaction split the lithium atoms into helium and tritium atoms. The colliding tritium and deuterium atoms fused into helium for another microsecond. Then, the force of the fusion reaction crushed the original core of the device so thoroughly that the dying fission reaction was revived and what was left of the original fission fuel was consumed in the inferno.

At that point, 20 microseconds after initiation, the temperature was 600 million degrees Fahrenheit and yet the outside of the warhead was only just beginning to disintegrate. Gamma radiation from the nuclear reactions had already radiated up to 1,300 feet in every direction. A region of space about the size of a small angel over the main body of the Incomparable Legion Of Light now held the equivalent explosive energy of 1.2 megatons. This enormous release of gamma radiation had been absorbed by the surrounding air, heating it to a point where it released radiation itself. This formed a glowing ball of gas that was already 400 feet across and yet was continuing to expand at many times the speed of sound. Oddly, the center remained extremely hot while the temperature of the outer part fell as it pushed the surrounding air away. The heat radiated by the outer layer had produced an initial flash of light as bright as the Sun to the observers at the Third Armored Division 25 miles away, now it generated a blast wave that separated from the fireball surface. This travelled at ten times the speed of sound and pushed the air away before creating a partial vacuum behind it. The blast wave reflected off the ground and the surrounding hills, reinforcing itself in some areas, cancelling itself in others to produce a crazy-quilt pattern of blast effects on the hapless Incomparable Legion Of Light below.

A mere 0.08 seconds after initiation the fireball was no longer pushing the blast wave before it and so it began to release the large amount of thermal energy it contained. At 1.07 seconds after initiation it started to rise rapidly as its surface temperature and brightness began to decline. However, it continued to expand until at 8 seconds after initiation it finally reached its maximum size. With a surface temperature of 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the fireball was glowing a dull evil red as it topped the traditional mushroom cloud..

And so it was that the prophecies were fulfilled. The Sun Of Man was indeed rising over Heaven.