The Salvation War 2: Pantheocide

by Slade, Stuart

  New York Air Defense Interception Zone Command Center, World Trade Center Site, New York, United States

  “The angel is going down. Portal is stationary. Oh shit, it's right overhead.” James Yan shouted the situation report down the phone, caught by surprise as the gunfire outside ceased. The 76mms had tracked the angel down, continuing to fire until the safety stops had cut them off. The World Trade Center site had been a major building effort until The Salvation War had started. Then, work had stopped, only to be restarted when the partially-complete buildings had been converted to the new defense command center. Yan looked at his instruments again. “Abort that, the portal is drifting slightly. That angel didn’t quite stop it.”

  “Confirm that, Staten Island reports they're picking up very slow movement.” The voice on the other end of the line was concerned; the anti-portal missiles were unguided. They had to be fired precisely through the portal if they were to work at all and a moving target was bad news.

  “Something coming through now.” For a moment Yan thought he could see the evil orange glow of lava as another sky volcano was created over New York. Then, the tracking radar gave him the information he was dreading. It wasn't a lava attack, a solid rock had just come though. And, according to the radar, it wasn't moving away from its current position. That meant it was heading right at the radar set. A radar set that was precisely sixty feet above Yan's head.

  The first rock hit the West Side Highway, approximately 300 yards south of the World Trade Center site. The force of the impact was roughly equivalent to 430 tons of TNT, causing a blast wave almost 500 meters across to devastate everything within its reach. For the second time in a decade, the World Trade Center site was utterly destroyed by an explosion, only this time the effects were instantaneous. Nothing could have survived within the blast radius and nothing did. That left the New York defense zone effectively decapitated. The elaborate operations center was wiped out and all that it controlled left headless. The blast wave punched buildings askew, their glass windows blown out of their frames and showering down on the streets beneath. The ground wave of the impact was that of a small earthquake, shaking and shattering buildings up to a kilometer away. In the South Cove Marina, a mini-tsunami formed that tore boats free from their moorings and hurled them into the city. To the horrified gaze of New Yorkers across the city, a nuclear-like fireball rose over Manhattan leading to wild rumors that the city had, like Tel Aviv, fallen victim to nuclear attack

  The portal was wandering at random, drifting slowly north west when the second rock came through. It caught the edge of the subsiding blast wave from the first strike, adding fresh fire and fury to the devastation that was being wrought in lower Manhattan. That second rock hit the global headquarters of Goldman-Sachs, the fireball from the impact joining the first in towering over the city. A full board meeting had been in progress at the bank at the time, a coincidence that was to have unexpected repercussions in the near future. A few minutes later, the third rock descended, plowing into the New York City Fire Museum. As the third fireball rose into the sky, the air defense sub-sector command station was frantically trying to re-establish communications with the city's defenses.

  While there was still a city left to defend.

  Chapter Fifty Five

  New York Air Defense Interception Zone Secondary Command Center, La Guardia Airport, New York, United States

  “Manhattan is taking a real pounding.” Mayor Bloomberg looked across at the blacked-out island, scarred by the fireballs rising from the multiple impact points. The power over there had failed under the repeated ground shocks and that was adding to the chaos that was developing as people tried to flee the ruthless bombardment. “When can we do something about it?”

  “We're trying to get the system online now. The original control was by way of the World Trade Center complex but that's gone. We're trying to reroute around the holes knocked in the net.” Colonel Mark Gridley was trying to re-assemble the communications net while he spoke. The problem was that the original flurry of rocks had taken down many of the nodes the system depended on and there was no reliable way of finding out which were up other than by ‘binging’ them. The good news was that each time he found a functional node, it opened up new prospects for routing signals. Also, a side issue now but one that would become important when the attack was over, the destroyed nodes formed a map of the wrecked areas of the city. Why knew how many people were trapped in the wreckage.

  Over on the horizon another series of fireballs rose over Roosevelt Island. The fall of the rocks was intermittent, there would be a flurry of hits and then a pause while there were only a few scattered hits. Almost as if work gangs were rolling the 100-ton rocks through. Which, Gridley thought. was probably exactly what was happening. “Mayor, the damage I'm plotting suggests the portal is drifting up the west side of Manhattan. If it continues on its present course, it'll cross over the Hudson between Hoboken and Union City. We'd better get warnings out to New Jersey.”

  “I think they're probably better informed than we are at this point.” Bloomberg spoke drily, disguising the fact he was horrified by how quickly the city's defense systems had become unglued. It had been almost a year since Sheffield and Detroit had been attacked and, during that time, New York had installed a system that was supposed to stop such attacks in their tracks. Yet, faced with its first assault, the new system had collapsed almost completely.

  “Sir, radio message from the Intrepid.” Bloomberg knew that the ship was acting as a forward observation point. During the Mobilization she had been considered for restoration to the active fleet but the old lady was too far gone. Still, she had her radios and with the data communications net shot full of holes, she was performing admirably. “She reports a new group of rocks falling just south of her, working their way north west. She says... I'm sorry sir, she's gone off the air. Very suddenly.”

  Bloomberg's lips twisted. That almost certainly meant the museum ship had taken at least one rock. She might survive it but if she did, she would be a dreadful sight afterwards.

  “Sir, I'm through to the portal intercept missiles at Secaucus. They have a firing solution on the portal.” Gridley listened for a few seconds. “They can fire as soon as the current rock flurry tapers off. They warn us though, if there's a problem, the missiles will come down in Harlem.”

  Bloomberg didn’t hesitate. “They may fire when ready, Mister Gridley.”

  USS Intrepid. New York

  If the ‘Evil Eye’ hadn't already been firmly aground, she would have been sinking fast. The rock had hit two thirds down the length of her hull, ripping straight through he flight and hangar decks before expending its energy blowing a hole in her bottom and excavating a crater in the soft mud underneath. Looking at her, Norman Orwell thought the ship was putting up a hell of a fight but losing anyway. It was the crater more than anything else, it had stripped the support out from under her. By the way her bow and stern were rising, her back was already broken. She was burning as well, the fires from her hangar deck blazing uncontrolled. The city fire brigades had as much as they could do coping with the damage in the main part of Manhattan. The fires there also out of control and people had to be rescued. The Intrepid could cope on her own.

  “Everybody ready?” Orwell looked around at his emergency rescue team. They weren't professional firefighters or emergency medical personnel. They were museum researchers, restorers, administrators, few of them less than fifty and none of them with anything more than rudimentary rescue training. Most of their equipment dated from the Second World War and much of it had seen service when Intrepid had been hit by Kamikaze aircraft off Japan. How well it would work now was an open question. Yet, the people around him nodded and gave thumb's up signs. “Team One, forward, try and get the people there to safety. Team two, with me, we'll go amidships and get the people out of the radio room.”

  “How many Norman?”

  “There should be twelve up front and ten in the radio
room.” The fact that forty people were about to run onto a burning, wrecked aircraft carrier to rescue twenty two didn’t register with anybody. Rescuing those in danger almost regardless of cost was an ingrained human reaction. The same reaction that would cause half a dozen men to risk – and sometimes lose – their lives to rescue one person from a sinking car in a flooded river or trapped on the ice in a frozen winter. In the final analysis, it was why humans were winning The Salvation War.

  Orwell led his group up the gangway that led to the hangar deck abreast of the island. The blast of heat from the fires further aft seemed to engulf him as he entered the hangar and he saw the displays that he had been so proud of were already shattered and broken. That hurt him more than the damage to the ship. As a naval historian, seeing all that history literally going up in smoke was something that cut deep into his heart. “Follow me, we have to get into the island. The radio room is on the second deck. Birkenhead Drill.”

  He stumbled across the deck, feeling his way through the increasingly-dense smoke. For all its age, his protective gear seemed to be working, he could breath at least. Behind him, members of his team were unreeling safety lines so that they could find their way out of the ship once they had the survivors secured. In front of him was the hatch that led to the island over their heads. The dogs unfastened smoothly, one piece of luck in a night where New York's had run out. He and his team had to get one deck up before they would join the route through the ship that had been cleared for tourists. That would lead them straight up to the radio room. If it was still there.

  Under his feet, he could feel the deck still angling as the broken ship settled further into the mud. That mud had almost spelled her doom once, it had been a hell of a job to get her clear of it when she had been towed away for renovation. Orwell scrambled upwards, his feet turning on bits of wreckage that had fallen when the ship had first been hit. Another hatch this one hard to open. The dogs took repeated blows from sledgehammers before they finally sprung open and the hatch was cleared. The good news was, they were level with the flight deck and the way up was easy.

  The radio room was a disaster. Parts of the overhead had caved in and the men and women working on the equipment were down, trapped under the beams and debris. Orwell led the way in and started to check the people. One woman, her blonde hair caked and matted with blood groaned as he touched her. She was a priority, the Birkenhead Drill applied here, women and children first. Two of the rescue team came to his aid and they lifted a fallen equipment locker off her. Once they had her free, she was passed down the line to the people waiting to get her off the ship. It wasn't the way the emergency drills said things should be done but this was a special case. A t the rate the fires were spreading, the island would be engulfed soon.

  The casualties were being passed out, the three remaining women first, then the men as they were freed from the entangling wreckage that had tried to kill them. By the time the last one was on his way out, the smoke in the radio room was so thick Orwell could hardly breathe even with the aid of his mask and oxygen bottle. He grabbed the line and started to follow it out, feeling the heat of the fires on him as he did so. Down the steps, through the hatches, back on to the hangar deck. The way they had come in was impassible, the fire had already spread to block it, so he, his team and the people from the radio room made their way forward until the way down the forward gangplank was clear.

  At least there were some doctors down there now, first aiders anyway. Orwell stood on the top of the gangplank, calling out the names of his team and checking their names off the list as they answered. All twenty accounted for. To his amazement they had been in the ship for less than ten minutes. It had seemed much, much longer. Then, he made his own progress down the brow to the relative safety of the dockside. The men and women from the ship were laid out on the concrete, some sitting up and looking for their rescuers, others laying on the concrete while the first-aiders worked on them. Three were already covered by cloths, for them the rescue had come too late. Orwell looked at the survivors and saw that the blonde woman he had first pulled out of the wrecked radio room was one of those who was able to sit up. She saw him as well, and grabbed his hand. “Thank you. Just, thank you.”

  It was all she needed to say. Orwell walked down the quay to where his people were reassembling. Even as he did so, he felt the ground trembling under his feet as more rocks slammed into Manhattan. He stopped suddenly, feeling desperately short of breath, his chest hurt and his left arm was alternately numb and cramping. Then his vision blacked out and he crumpled to the ground.

  Central Park, New York

  The park was filling up as people from the lower half of Manhattan found refuge from the hail of rocks that were slowly battering the city into submission. The police were trying to shepherd people into the park and then keep order while they were there but both tasks would have been beyond their ability individually. Together, they were impossible. Inside the park, it was the mounted police who were most successful at preventing panic from causing an even greater disaster. From the backs of their horses, they had a viewpoint that allowed them to spot trouble-makers and get to the scene before they got out of hand. One man who'd tried to start a fight had been picked up by two officers, turned upside down and had his head pounded on the ground. “Testing the road surface,” they'd explained to appreciative onlookers.

  Officer Sharon Grimble urged her horse forward and used its weight to push into a knot of people gathered around a woman laying on the grass. “Everything all right here?”

  “Fine officer, she just fainted.”

  “And you are?”

  “Her husband, we were in The Sheep Meadow when the rocks started falling. ” The man handed up two driving licenses and Grimble used her Maglite to check them against the people she was speaking to. They checked out, husband and wife.

  “Do you need a doctor? I can put a call out but it's likely to be a long time before anybody comes.”

  “It's fine Officer, We'll be fine.”

  “Officer, its it true the Empire State has been hit?” The voice had a German accent, a tourist? There were such things even with the war on.

  “No. All the damage is on the west side of the Island. The last four or five hits went into the Hudson so I think we've seen the worst of things here. Just stay calm and everything will be all right.”

  She urged her horse forward and moved along the path, watching out for any signs of trouble. Some people faded away into the shadows when they saw her approach but she had neither the time nor the ability to chase after them. Overhead, there was another streak across the sky as a rock hurtled over their heads. A few seconds later, there was the orange glow of a hit on land. It looked like New Jersey was about to get its baptism of fire.

  Or was it? The orange streak of the falling rock was immediately answered by two brilliant white streaks form the ground. They screamed overhead, the supersonic bang from their passing causing another wave of panic to start forming in the crowds of refugees. The white flashes ended as quickly as they had formed, vanishing through the portal high over New York.

  Plain of Mapheloistamitos, Hell

  Azrael knew that the attack was running into its final stages. His work teams were having to bring the great rounded 100-ton rocks in from further away and that meant an ever-increasing delay between the strikes. Soon, he would have to close down this site and evacuate the area. Still, it had been a highly successful attack, almost a hundred rocks had been dumped on the city the other side of the portal. The seventh Bowl of Wrath had been well and truly poured on the humans below. Now, all that was left was to invade them with the Angelic Host and all would be well. Normality would be restored and the divine order of things returned to its rightful place. What, therefore, happened next was the cause of a very brief episode of cognitive dissonance on his part.

  The Ares missile was a kludge. Basically it took the airframe and engine of the GMD interceptor and armed it with an EBU-6 warhead. This was s
imply a larger and more powerful version of the weapon used to close down Belial's Sky Volcanos Everything non-essential had been stripped out of the system to get the greatest possible payload and that included the guidance system. It was, therefore, good shooting that put both missiles through the portal over Manhattan island.

  The fuzing system was also lightweight, a simple timer that had been pre-set to explode the warhead a few seconds after launch. The ground computers had known to a millisecond how long it would take for the missiles to reach the portal. They'd added a few milliseconds on top of that to let the missile get some height above the portal and that had been that. Both EBU-6 warheads had exploded in the same millisecond. It was as near to simultaneous as could be managed.

  The explosions shut down the portal instantly. They also devastated the arrays of copper rods that had made the portal system possible. The explosions also tore apart the pre-notched steel coil that surrounded the warhead and turned it into a hail of deadly spinning steel fragments that scythed through the work teams that were still gathered around the portal site. Finally, as the metal fragments tore into him, Azrael realized that Michael had been right, it was extremely unwise to underestimate humans. It was a lesson he would need to remember.

  News Studio, KOCO Television, Oklahoma City

  “And the latest news is that missiles fired by the New York Defense System have closed the portal. A total of 98 rocks each weighing an estimated 100 tons have landed on Manhattan and New Jersey, inflicting catastrophic damage on the west side of Manhattan Island. Known casualties are already in the thousands and we will be getting more accurate figures as the dead start arriving in Hell. Already questions are being asked, why did it take so long to fire the missiles that ended the attack? What went wrong with the system that kept the portal from being closed until after this catastrophic damage had been suffered? This is Brandon Breyer reporting from the Bronx in stricken New York City.”