Armageddon?? (114 page)

Yahweh
exploded with rage, his fury causing the clouds of incense to roll back and forth.
“They have done what? It was my eternal will that humans should suffer for all
eternity save those I thought worthy of salvation. And none now are worthy of
that. You tell me they have once more rejected my divine commands?”

Oh,
this was good thought Michael. Brightens up a dull millennia perfectly. He
hadn’t had so much fun since he’d slipped Saint Peter a large dose of LSD he’d
obtained on a trip to ‘Vegas.

“There
is more O Immaculate One. The human church has repudiated you. They have
excommunicated you. They have declared you a false god and affirmed that their
beliefs apply to a true god whom you usurped.”

That
did it. To Michael’s unrevealed delight, Yahweh went ballistic. Lightning bolts
flashed around the throne room of the UltimateTemple and ricocheted off the
walls, sending showers of pristine diamond flakes spiraling through the air.
Thunder racked and rolled the air of heaven, sending people scurrying through
the alabaster streets, seeking cover from the wrath that all too obviously centered
on the Ultimate Temple. Eventually, the air calmed down and Yahweh started
making sense again.

“Which
church did this?”

“The
Christians Eternal Father.”

“The
one that idiot son of mine invented? Is he involved in this? What is the stupid
moron up to now anyway?”

“I
believe he is in retreat Eternal Father. Meditating on his existence in an
effort to improve himself. By which I mean mentally added Michael He is getting
ready to try out some really good grass I scored on my last trip to Earth. And
I’ll be joining him as soon as I’ve got this tiresome chore out of the way.
Anyway, blaming him for this mess is quite unreasonable, we all told you that
the humans were advancing faster than anybody could expect but did you listen?
Oh no, you had to know best didn’t you?

Yahweh
nodded, his rage subsiding. “Is there anything else?”

“Not
much O Heavenly Father. Only that some humans called lawyers have sued you in
the Louisiana Supreme Court for damages resulting from Hurricane Katrina’s
destruction of New Orleans. The Church described that as being ‘an act of God’
and that’s been taken as an admission of guilt. According to the judge, you owe
the State of Louisiana eighty billion dollars.”

That
did it, more lightning flashes battered the already-scarred walls of the throne
room. For a moment Michael thought Yahweh was going to have a seizure but he
controlled himself. “And what am I expected to do about that?”

“Well,
you could pay them. Or you could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That would
mean you have to hire some lawyers though and most of them work for the Eternal
Enemy. Or you could ignore them but then the humans might send an Army to
collect it.”

This
time the lightning flashes were multi-colored and went on for a long time. “My
patience is at an end. Uriel’s plans are laid, the cups of wrath are ready to
be poured. We will inflict tribulations on the humans that they cannon imagine
even in their wildest nightmares. Order Uriel to set forth without further
delay. The humans will weep for their insults to me.”

“Your
will be done Eternal Father.” Michael took a step backwards and headed out of
the palace. He’d been right, it had been a tricky meeting but he’d pulled it
off. Uriel would set forth and, if Michael was any judge of the way things were
going, he wouldn’t find it a happy experience. Anyway, that was for the future
and, contrary to Yahweh’s frequently voiced opinions, the future could be trusted
to take care of itself. In the immediate present, Michael planned to get
stoned.

The
Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.

“Are
we all set up?”

“Yes
Mister President. The equipment we asked for has arrived, four AN-124
transports landed with them on board a few hours ago. Putin sent the crews as
well, so we wouldn’t have to waste time training our own people. So, all we
need is the word and we’re set to go.

“Apart
from that, everything is going well. The last organized demonic armies in hell
have been dispersed, the city of Dis is cut off. We’ve seized the reception
area for our dead and redirected them towards our own territory. That’s going
well, Expedia.com are even advertising trips to our refugee and recovery area
in hell so grieving relatives can welcome their deceased family members into
the next life. Bit pricey but if that’s what the market demands… Anyway, as
long as they don’t interrupt the logistics streams into Hell, that doesn’t
worry us. The sky volcanoes have been shut down and the source of them bombed.”

“An
interesting thing there Sir.” Doctor Surlethe cut across Secretary Warner when
the Senator paused to catch his breath. “As far as we can make out, Tartarus is
the contra-coup from the Hell Pit.”

“What?”
President Bush looked confused. That was the sort of statement that made his
head ache.

“Its
like this Sir.” Surlethe produced a strip of paper, gave it a half-twist and
stuck the ends together with tape. “Any dimension in hell is like this a
Moebius Strip. The whole of hell is like this, we can’t visualize it because it
needs extra dimensions but it does. Now, look at this.” He took a pencil and
drew a line on the paper, around the circle. It kept going, without the point
being lifted from the paper, until eventually it reached its starting point.
“You see Sir, the paper only has one surface, a loop without the twist has
two,. Hell is like this Sir, no matter which way you go, we always end up where
we started, in every dimension. Now, the bombers flew to Tartarus and back, its
exactly half way around the world from the Hell Pit. So if we draw that in the
Moebius Strip, we see that half way around is exactly where the Hell Pit is on
the other side of the dimension. Mathematically, that’s fascinating.”

“I’m
sure Doctor. Secretary Warner, in spite of all the good news and the progress
we have made, I trust nobody is going to declare that we have reached the end
of major combat operations?”

“No
Sir. That caused enough trouble the last time.”

“Good.
Thank you for the briefing. Oh, Doctor Surlethe. You said this Moebius Strip
effect works for all dimensions in the Hell-dimension? So surely it should
apply to time as well?”

Chapter
Seventy Nine

Bravo
Portal, Off Bermuda, Earth

The
black ellipse had mushroomed open and now dominated the Great Sound of Bermuda.
The shipping channel into the ellipse was guarded, for what came one way
through the hellgate could be matched by what came in the opposite direction.
Naval Base Hell-Bravo was as much a defensive installation as an offensive one.

Out
in the shipping channel, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, CVN-75, was
making her way slowly up towards the hellgate, surrounded by a bevy of tugs
that were working overtime to keep her within the strict navigational limits.
She was a big ship, she drew a lot of water and the last thing anybody needed
was an unexpected accidental grounding. Up in front of her, two fire tugs were
directing their hoses into the sky, the brilliant sunshine turning the spray of
water into a myriad of colors. It was incredibly beautiful. Once again, Captain
Herman A. Shelanski reminded himself that pulling into a foreign port was an
experience that made all the sacrifices of living in the Navy worthwhile.

“Give
‘Em Hell Harry!” The woman was speaking through a bullhorn from a speedboat
that was racing alongside the great carrier. A Cyclone class PC was keeping
between her small craft and the side of the carrier, this may be the Salvation
War but nobody had forgotten what had happened to the USS Cole. That wasn’t
going to be the case here though, the speedboat curved away then made another
run alongside the Truman. This time, the girl in the back pulled the bra of her
bikini down and did as good an imitation of a pole-dance as was possible under
the circumstances. The roar of cheering from the seamen manning the rails on
the carrier drowned out the diesels on the tugs. Once again, the speedboat
peeled away, this time it was for good because the ellipse was near and the
girls wanted to repeat their performance on the John C Stennis following
behind. Idly, Shelanski wondered what the Russian crew on the Piotr Veliky,
third in line, would make of the display.

“Ready
for hell Transit.” It was an order, not a question.

“Aye
Aye Sir. Ready for Transit.” Master Chief Walker glanced out at the deck
beneath him. The Truman was up to her full complement of aircraft for the first
time in many years even if some of them were refugees from the boneyard or a
museum. The backbone of the group was the 54 F-18 Electric Bugs, backed up by
18 F-4 Rhinos. Then there was the new addition to the group, the 18 AT-45s, a
single-seat strike version of the T-45 Goshawk. They’d only just arrived in
time for the transit, the last had made it on board just as Truman swung to
enter the navigational channel. With her six E-2 Hawkeyes and eight SH-60R
helicopters, the big carrier had 104 aircraft on board. Too many, her decks
were cramped and Shelanski had already decided to off-load nine of the AT-45s
to the Stennis

“They’re
going to be worn out by the time the group’s through.” Shelanski’s Exec,
Captain Ronald Reis waved at the cheering crowds on the jetties that separated
the Little Sound from the Great Sound. It looked like the whole population of
Bermuda had turned out. As Truman’s bow started to touch the great ellipse, a
burst of fireworks exploded overhead. Then, the clear blue sky of earth was
replaced by the filthy red murk of Hell.

The
tugs had peeled away at the last moment but the Truman was not alone. Six
DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers and a pair of CG-47 Ticonderoga class
cruisers were waiting for her with another, similar group waiting to screen the
Stennis. They were making the air crackle with the power output from the SPY-1
radars of their AEGIS systems and their sonars were lashing the water at full
power. Here in Hell, there was no worry that the sonar emissions would harm the
local wildlife, in fact creating as much havoc as possible was the reason why
the big SQS-53s were cranked up to maximum power. The early battle Astute had
fought against one of the Greater Heralds so many months ago had shown just how
effective low-frequency sonar pulses could be against the Baldricks.

“Clearing
transit area now, Sir.” Navigation passed confirmation up to the bridge.

“Screen
forming around us. Johnny Reb is emerging from the portal.” Behind them, the
Stennis was half through Hellgate Bravo and Shelanski wondered what would
happen to her if the portal shut down for some reason at this precise moment.
Anyway, it was a pointless speculation since CVN-74 was already emerging from
the gate.

“She’s
through Sir. Piotr Veliky will be next. As soon as she’s arrived, we’ll be on
our way.”

Shelanski
nodded. On the bridge above his, the Admiral was doubtless working out the
routing that would take the two carriers all the way north to Tartarus. They
wouldn’t be the first human naval assets on their way there; all three Seawolf
class submarines had transited the portal days earlier and were already heading
for Tartarus at maximum speed. They’d already be almost half way there and they
had a load-out the featured a lot of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Nor
would the two carrier battle groups be the last. Once they had finished
transiting Hellgate Bravo, the long line of amphibious warfare ships and their
screens would start. A Marine division, rich in helicopters, Harrier aircraft
and armor, aboard an imposing array of LHDs, LPDs and LSDs, a British brigade
group with their LPH and transports, an equivalent French force and another
made up from the smaller European Navies. Even the Peruvian Navy was
represented, they’d sent the cruiser Almirante Grau, with her six inch guns,
she had the heaviest battery in the fleet.

The
Baldricks had all their remaining armies bottled up in Dis, besieged and
isolated. They had no idea of the amphibious hammer blow that was about to land
on the far north of the land they had once claimed as their own. Shelanski felt
the vibration building up under his feet. His ship was picking up speed for the
long run to Tartarus.

1/33
Battalion, Third Brigade, Third Armored Division, Ninth U.S. Corps. North of
Dis.

The
Third Armored was officially designated as the Spearhead Division although it
was less formally known as the “Third Herd”. And a herd it was, thundering
north as fast as its tracks could carry it, modified only by a degree of
prudence. The baldricks had nothing that could stop a tank, nothing that was
known, anyway. Still, it paid to be prudent.

Keisha
Stevenson looked around at the array of armored vehicles sweeping across the
countryside. Things had changed since her first tentative forays into Hell
months before. A handful of vehicles she’d had then and they were all of human
forces in hell, stepping gingerly into unknown and hostile terrain. Now she had
a full combined arms battalion, two companies of Abrams tanks, two of
mechanized infantry in Bradleys and a battery of the new 57mm armed anti-harpy
vehicles. A force that dwarfed her previous command and yet was a tiny part of
the armored avalanche descending on anything that dared to get in its way. It
wasn’t just Third Armored; alongside them and off to the east was Sixth Armored
and to the West was the Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division with the 30th
Mechanized Infantry following as Corps reserve. Just to complete the formation
was another reformed unit, the 26th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Stevenson shook
her head, four whole divisions and an armored cavalry outfit that was called a
regiment but was closer to a small division all by itself. Times had surely
changed.