by Stuart Slade
“It’s like Aberfan.” Beck muttered, deeply shocked.
Langley stepped out of the car, putting on her wet weather gear, though by the time she had done so she was almost soaked to the skin. The three fire appliances from Baccup Fire Station had already arrived, as had a couple of ambulances and some vehicles from the re-established Civil Defence Corps. The firemen and civil defence workers had already started to dig amongst the rubble at the edge of the landslide, hoping to find someone alive. As the fire service would have primacy in this case Langley sought out the senior fire officer to offer what help she could.
“What can we do to help, Derek?”
“It’s a damn disaster, Kate.” Station Officer Derek Clarke, commander of Red Watch, replied. “I don’t think there is much you can do here, other than traffic control. I’ve requested that the brigade’s Urban Search and Rescue Unit be sent to us, but I don’t think that they will be doing anything other than pulling out bodies.”
Clarke paused to take a look at the bare hillside; it didn’t look too stable.
“Bronze Command to all units, withdraw now. The hillside looks like it’s about to go again. Over.” He said into his Personal Radio. “Kate, there is one thing you can do.” He said turning back to Langley. “This slip is going to be even bigger by the looks of things, we’ve got to get people out from under its path.”
Langley nodded and sprinted back to the car as she would get better reception from its radio than from her PR.
“Juliet Bravo to Control, urgent message, over.”
“Go ahead, Juliet Bravo.” The voice of Sergeant Parrish said from the radio handset.
“There’s going to be an even bigger landslide, Sergeant and we need to evacuate everyone who may be in its path immediately. Get every spare body onto it immediately, and see if Captain Morrison can spare some of his Home Guards to help out. Over.”
“Understood, Juliet Bravo. Out.”
Inspector Langley held on to the radio handset for a moment, rain running down her face. She looked skywards, oblivious to the rain now running down her neck.
“Damn you!” She called out. “Don’t think you’re going to get away with this! First, we’re going to get up there somehow then we’ll kick your arse.”
Chapter Nine
Headquarters, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City, Heaven
The Eternal City, the heart of Yahweh’s great empire was a gleaming translucent rectangular pearl that dazed the eyes of newcomers with its rainbows of refracted light. The buildings were made of vast sheets of precious and semi-precious stone, the streets calcite alabaster, polished smooth first by trained crafts-angels uncounted millennia ago and then by the tread of millions of sandal-clad feet over the years. Together, buildings and streets glowed as Heaven’s pure white light reflected and refracted from structure to structure in a myriad of interlocking multihued spectra that constantly shifted and changed with every slight movement of the inhabitants therein
That was within the sight of Yahweh’s great white throne, in the Ultimate Temple of the Eternal City. Beyond the glittering jasper walls of the inner city, which a discerning angel’s eyes could see shimmering in the distance from the steps of Yahweh’s stronghold at the top of the temple mount (although the angel wouldn’t look so far for so long, because it would strain his eyes and because lines did strange things far away), things were different. The wide main boulevards of the Eternal City and the palaces of the most powerful archangels led to the twelve great gates that led out the Eternal City’s to the great slums where the humans who served the angels lived. A realm of mud huts and straw-thatched roofs built closely together in an unplanned, interlocking ring about the Eternal City, the slums could not differ more greatly from the marble, semi-precious stones and black alabaster that formed the Palaces where the angels lived.
It was these slums that Lemuel-Lan-Michael, a captain of Michael’s choir and a senior investigator in the ranks of the League of the Holy Court, spent his working hours. It was the duty of the League to detect apostasy, heresy and sacrilege and to stamp them out before they contaminated the rest of the millions of humans who lived only to serve the angels. With that divine duty to drive him, Lemuel spent an inordinate amount of his time in the slums.
And so it was that, when one of his subordinates had reported that a contact had a lead in the Ishmael sacrilege case out in the slums, it fell upon him to lead the investigation. He knew the case well, it was one of the oldest on the books. Ishmael had dared to suggest that there were groups of creatures that had all developed from common ancestors and were thus related. This was blackest blasphemy for Yahweh had made it clear that he had personally created each kind of creature himself, perfect in each of its details. For his ill-chosen words, Ishmael had been hunted for decades but always managed to stay ahead of his pursuers. Today, it was different and Lemuel had, earlier that day, flown to the gates (being old enough and high enough to be permitted the privilege of flight within the walls of the Eternal City) and from there commandeered a chimera to ride out into the slums, so as not to attract any more attention to himself than his size naturally would.
After rendezvousing with a few hired men and coming to the address - a tall wooden apartment in a (relatively) nice district - it was over pretty quickly. Ishmael had been taken into custody and would be moved to the League headquarters where he would be made to answer for his crimes. They even managed not to get any blood on the apartment floor. After he had paid the thugs with golden pieces taken from the League’s slush fund, he found himself walking back through the massive onyx arch of the fifth gate on his way to the headquarters of Michael’s choir.
The headquarters was within a spire in the lower part of the city that reached nearly as high as the temple mount itself, a reflection of Michael-lan’s exalted status. Lemuel had worked for Michael before the Great Celestial War, and afterwards had overseen the erection of the tower as a monument to the archangel’s brilliant generalship. When the Eternal Enemy’s rebellion had threatened to lap over even the great jasper walls, Yahweh himself had fought, nearly single-handedly turned back the tide with his rod of iron. Or so the story went and there were none who would argue with it. Nevertheless, it had been Michael’s leadership in the grinding war that had eventually brought the victory, or as close to a victory as it had proved possible to come. It was his leadership that had been the more prominent, and stuck in angels’ minds.
Lemuel-Lan-Michael launched himself up, feeling himself inflate slightly and enjoying the tightening of his back and breast muscles as his pure white wings beat the air behind him, lifting him off the pavement. The offices of the League were in the second ring of the tower, beneath only those of Michael himself. Two centuries ago, that would have been - had been - a measure of their importance in the choir and the esteem in which Michael held their leader. Now, things were slightly different in the political climate, and Lemuel had spent the last several decades on and off trying to put his finger on it. Part of it was the changes Michael had slowly introduced from the top - foreign changes, but on the whole the choir now ran more efficiently than it had even in the Celestial War, but he wasn’t quite sure just what those changes had been, or even whether Michael had intentionally made them.
Generally, though, he shrugged and did his job. And right now, that involved making sure he didn’t bump his head or scrape his wings on the frame as he alighted in his office with a graceful swoosh. It wasn’t cluttered; he had scrolls neatly lining a shelf in the corner - open cases involving powerful people - and one open on his desk, his daily schedule. Writing and record-keeping, one of the bigger changes, had made life both easier and more complicated.
But he didn’t need to check his schedule to know what was next on his agenda. He went to the shelf and pulled down a scroll, unrolled it on his desk. When Ishmael had been arrested, the League had searched his hideout in hopes of finding the scrolls that proclaimed his blasphemy. They hadn’t found any, something that had
disappointed Lemuel severely, but they had found something very peculiar. A glass bottle full of a strange brown substance, one Lemuel had never seen before. He reached for the bottle and looked at it, a strange elixir to be certain. There was a label on it, one in English and it read “Southern Comfort. 100 Percent Proof.”
It was strange, strange beyond measure and Lemuel puzzled over the label. It was obviously an elixir that gave absolute proof of something but what? That the answer to a problem lay in the South? He shook his head, there was nothing down there but farmland. Lemuel rolled the bottle around in his hands, then put it up on the marble shelf to study later. His troubled thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. He opened it, and there was the towering form of Michael-Lan, pure-white wings folded casually across his back.
“Hey, Lemuel, I’m on my way to run an errand for the Almighty. He has a message for his Son.” Lemuel nodded. Michael’s close friendship with Jesus was not unknown within the Eternal City. It seemed a breach of the divine order somehow, the seven Archangels of the First Order might be the highest of The One Above All’s servants but they were servants none the less. For Michael-Lan to be friends with the Eternal Father’s only son seemed, disrespectful somehow. It wasn’t the first time that Michael-Lan had done the unexpected though. Many times, during the Great Celestial War, Michael had wanted to try some unorthodox tactics and Lemuel had advised against them as violating the code of honor, then later as they’d grown into friends. Lemuel always argued against bending the rules - if one started, where would one stop? - and generally prevailed, but the several occasions when Michael had directly overruled him, he’d had to admit that it generally provided results, such as Michael’s stunning defeat of Satan at the Battle of Megiddo Valley.
“What do we have here?” Michael-Lan was staring at the bottle on the shelf. Lemuel felt a sudden surge of guilt that cleared as he looked at the records he had just filled out. A light came on in his head at that point, records didn’t just preserve information, they protected those who kept them.
“We took down Ishmael this morning. We found that in his belongings and I was going to investigate it. Do you know what that is?”
Michael-Lan picked the bottle up and peered at it. “It looks human?”
“That’s what I thought, I thought it might be one of their potions. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t be here.”
“I’ll agree with that.” Michael-Lan looked at the bottle again and carefully put it back on the shelf. “This is serious. Lemuel, I want you to investigate this in depth. Keep the information to yourself, but I want a briefing every day on this. More often if there is something important discovered. Make sure only your most trusted agents are employed and as few of them as possible, telling each of them as little as possible. But, I must know everything, is that clear? You have no idea how important this could be.”
Lemuel bowed his head and swept his wings forward in assent. Michael-Lan nodded in acknowledgement and left, brushing his wings on the passage walls as he passed. Then Lemuel closed the door and stepped out into midair, his heart rising into his throat as he expanded his sacs and spread his wings to catch the fall. The four joints on his back where they hinged to his spine and scapulae strained, and felt as though they were about to tear, but - as always - he slowed and began to glide.
The Eternal City was built on a smooth basalt plain around the temple mount, the stones of the city quarried from far away - other dimensions, even - and beneath its foundations the basalt still stood. There were tunnels in the rock, tunnels that were older than the first angelic settlements here, and though most had forgotten, some, like The League of Holy Court, still used them when there was a need. Generally, that need turned out to be when someone had to disappear quickly, quietly, and efficiently, and then, after disappearing, needed to answer questions.
Lemuel glided around the tower before alighting at its base, then entered through the crowd of angels - craftsmen, lawyers, merchants, and more - going to and from work. Once inside, he slipped off into a little-used passage and took a lantern from a sconce to light his way as he descended the steps, preferring the artificial light to wasting his own magic.
As he spiraled down the staircase, the stone around him changed from translucent white to dusty white to red flecked with white and gray to dull black. At the base, the stair emptied into a passage wide enough for Michael to fit through, and Lemuel turned left. After navigating another maze of tunnels, he came into a room where the unlucky Ishmael was strapped down to a table. There wasn’t any blood spattering the walls or pooling on the floor yet - that would come later - but Ishmael was sobbing already. Lemuel noticed a couple of fingernails stacked neatly nearby on the table.
Two of his interrogation specialists were already in the room. As Lemuel entered, they both looked up and snapped to attention. “At ease,” he said. “What’s the scoop?”
“Sir, he’s not admitted to anything yet,” said one. Lemuel raised an eyebrow, then stepped forward. “I know all about your blasphemy Ishmael. That alone is enough to condemn you. But, I need to know where you got that bottle of elixir from. “
Ishmael’s eyes were wide open, wildly flicking back and forth from Lemuel’s face to the ceiling behind him. “I - I - I can’t -“
Lemuel sighed. Time for the usual act, he thought, as he shrugged and stood up. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. He turned his back and walked to the entrance of the room as one of the angels wrung out a wet cloth and fitted it over Ishmael’s face, the other raising a bucket of water. There was a second of splashing, then a howl of terror. Lemuel frowned; this wasn’t necessary; the prisoner had been pretty much broken already, and all he needed was a push in the right direction. He turned around, intending to stop them, but they were done: Ishmael had already broken, he was gibbering and sobbing with raw, undiluted terror.
As he quietly noted down the information Ishmael was pouring out, the names of family, friends, acquaintances, contacts identified from surveillance, and where he’d been in the last week, Lemuel was aghast at the potential scope of the treachery. What had started out as the pursuit of a heretic had turned into something much larger. For a moment, Lemuel understood why Michael-Lan held the position he did; he must have realized the full enormity of the threat as soon as he’d seen that human bottle. Michael had always said if the humans on Earth could get a foothold in Heaven for their armies, the war would be over. He must have realized the potential of that bottle to be such a foothold. That sublime insight made Lemuel proud to be his friend.
Underground Command Facility, Yamantau, Russia, March 2009
There was a time when no American President had entered the complex deep underneath the granite monolith of Yamantau. In those days, ones that seemed long ago but were only measured in months rather than years, the only thing that American Presidents had known of Yamantau was its presence on the targeteering plans for nuclear strikes on the Russian Homeland, for it appeared on every such plan and it was marked as one of the targets that had to be destroyed. If it survived the initial blows, assets were diverted from other, less important targets until Yamantau ceased to exist.
Now, President Barak Hussein Obama had disembarked from Air Force One and was on his way into the massively protected command post. His limousine sped along the straight road that appeared to run parallel through the snow-covered pine trees to the mountain that towered over them. As the car swept along the road, Obama saw the installations that littered the countryside around them. His host leaned forward. “Yamantau is quartz-containing crystal Mister President. It blocks radio, indeed any electromagnetic, transmission completely. That makes it the safest place in the world when Baldricks and Angels are on the loose. Of course, it means we cannot transmit out either so the transmission stations have to be on the outside. It is the one advantage Cheyenne Mountain has over us here. Mind you, your engineers made a bad mistake with Cheyenne Mountain.”
“What was that, Minister?”
�
�They built the command complex in the mountain. They should have built it under the mountain. That’s what we did, there are 6,000 feet of quartz-laced granite on top of our national emergency command post. And even now, our engineers feel the urge to dig still deeper.”
The car turned off the main road on to a side-track that seemed little more than a logging trail. It wound through the trees into a fold in the mountain where the snow drifted high against the rock walls that towered high on either side. Ahead of them was an entrance, for all the world looking like that of an old-fashioned mine. Obama didn’t notice how the fold in the ground curved around so that any blastwave travelling down the valley wouldn’t impact directly on the entrance. He did note that, once inside, massive blast doors closed behind him. The S-shaped curves continued inside the mountain, each one designed to mitigate the effects of a near-miss from the most powerful nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. There was only one way to destroy this massive underground fortress and that was to make repeated passes, each dropping a nuclear weapon into the crater from the one before. It was that job that had once been assigned to the B-52s and then to the B-2s.
Obama left his limousine and was escorted to the elevators that led down into the bowels of the mountain. Even here, the paths were not direct, one elevator would take them part of the way, then there would be more S-curves before another took them further down. Eventually, the lifts and corridors ended in the lowest, safest levels of the complex.
“Welcome Mister President. This is your first visit to Yamantau I believe.”
The conference room had a table, a circular one, that occupied most of the floor. There were 15 seats around the table, one for each member of the council. Fourteen were identical, the 15th was subtly larger and more imposing. Obama had already been briefed on that, in this room, the Chairman of the Council was just the first amongst equals. Nations had gained their place in this room in one of two ways. Either they had the military and economic power to demand it or they had simply been in the right place at the right time to earn it. The United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, Iran, Israel, Brazil, Italy, Thailand and Singapore. The countries that had been in the fight since the beginning and had scored the first kills against humanity’s enemy. There was one great advantage of this council, since it met in secret and its existence was largely unknown, its membership was free of politics. Mostly.
