by Stuart Slade
“You all right boss?” His sergeant had real concern in his voice, he recognized the symptoms of asphyxia easily enough. The blue shadows under the eyes and around the lips, the constant heaving for breath, the blue-tinged fingertips.
“Will be soon enough.” Madeuce shook himself. He had this last job to do then he would be out of the Army. Total disability for the few months he had left. Then, things would get better. He’d been quietly contacted by some old friends who knew some other friends who were part of the new Roman Army. There were commissions for those who wanted them, who had talents that the new army needed. And it helped that Jade Kim was Second Consul. Madeuce looked back on his work with her with nostalgic affection even though he knew the fighting there had killed him as surely as a bullet, bomb or artillery round. She’d remembered him as well and put in some glowing words on his behalf. So, his Second Life as a Tribune in the Legions was set up. He just had to live out his first one.
“Here he comes. That’s Michael-Lan-Yahweh himself. He’s one big sucker isn’t he.” The Sergeant sounded impressed.
“He’ll be one dead sucker soon.” Madeuce coughed again and wiped his lips. It was getting so that even coughing was wearing him out. “He’s opening the portal now. Is the kit getting all the readings?”
“Sure is Boss. And we’re datalinking them right out of here, back to DIMO(N) field operations. They’re getting everything we pick up.”
“Right. He’s moving down there. Taking his crap with him.” Madeuce reached down and punched a code into a transmitter box, unlocked a keyed handle then lifted it up and twisted it. “Surprise package now activated. It’ll blow in five minutes. Let this be a lesson to the whole team Sergeant, just say no to drugs.”
Down in the palace courtyard, Michael-Lan stopped pulling his cart and looked at Than Shwe with exasperation. The idiotic man was still whining about how Michael had betrayed him and left him to the mercy of the wretched Siamese. While Michael thought he did have some cause to be upset, in the final analysis he had brought all this down on his own head. One of the signs of wisdom was the ability to resist temptation. Michael reached out with his mind and detected the familiar ground he used for his transits to and from Earth. He found it, localized it and then opened up the portal. He waved a cheery farewell to the assembled Myanmarese dignitaries and then pulled his cart through the portal to its destination.
It really was a remarkably heavy cart. Michael-Lan was using a significant portion of his strength to pull it, even with the electric motor helping him. Once the other side of the portal, he paused to catch his breath. It was a blessed relief to be away from that wretched Myanmar junta. They’d spent all their time whining at him, instead of shutting up and listening to the wisdom he could impart. Complaint after complaint, accusation after accusation. Nothing but the constant effort to shift the blame to other shoulders. Self-justifying miserable… .
Michael-Lan stopped suddenly. It was just as if they had spent all their time justifying themselves. Just as if … . .
He found himself looking at the cart he had pulled through the now-closed portal. It really had been incredibly heavy for the load it represented. Neither Number 4 heroin nor methamphetamine pills were that heavy. An idea suddenly came to Michael-Lan and he shook his head in admiration. “Clever, clever little humans.”
It was the work of a moment to start the motor on the cart and fix its towbar so it would move in a straight line. Then he reopened the portal, pushed the cart through and closed it again behind the cargo. He wasn’t quite sure what was in there but he did guess that he wanted to be as far away from it as possible as quickly as possible.
Captain Madeuce and his small team were already beginning to take down their equipment when he saw the portal suddenly reform and the cart loaded with a variety of drugs and a single fifty kiloton nuclear warhead come rumbling back through it. He dived for the weapons control box, trying to slam his hand down on the emergency abort transmitter built into it. He almost made it.
Human Expeditionary Army, Field Headquarters, Yangon, Myanmar.
“Well, we always knew it was a win-win proposition.” General Petraeus looked at the mushroom cloud boiling over Napyidaw on the direct feed from the Global Hawk reconnaissance drone. “If it worked, we got rid of Michael but if it didn’t we got rid of those idiots in Napyidaw. One of the nice things about governments that insist on putting themselves in remote locations with only their closest supporters for company, makes a clean sweep just that. Nice and clean.”
“We lost Captain Madeuce and his team.” General Asanee was looking at the mushroom cloud as well. With the last remnants of the Myanmar military junta gone, the country could be handed over to a reasonable civilian administration again. There was so much rebuilding to do, it would keep them occupied for decades.
“They got the information through though. Complete readouts on the portal Michael-Lan-Yahweh used to get back to Heaven. The DIMO(N) people are ecstatic, they reckon we can duplicate that portal within days. Then we can get the Army into Heaven and start taking that place apart. We did good here General, let’s hope the battles at Los Angeles and Jerusalem go as well.
Chapter Forty One
Israeli General Command Headquarters, Tel Aviv, Israel
There had been a time when Muamur al Zahari had dreamed of getting into this room. Of course, in those dreams he had been wearing an explosive vest and the blast that took him to Paradise would also send the entire command staff of the Israeli defense forces to Hell. Now, he was their guest, an ally of sorts and the whole question of who went to Hell and why had been changed out of all recognition. The implications of that could be confusing, but only a fool refused to recognize the changes brought about by time. Anyway, he was finding the chaos in front of him amusing. Just one question tormented him. If this was the Israeli General Staff in action, didn’t the fact the country they defended had survived so long suggest that his own command staff were even worse? The likely answer to that simple question appalled him.
“Just what the blazes is going on up there?” General Andras Marosy stomped across the operations room floor and stared at the map.”
“It’s bad ground, terrible ground in fact. The inclines are steep, there’s more dead ground than we can shake a stick at, and the valleys all run against us. We’ve got some artillery but it’s all long-range stuff. A Romach battery, some 155s of assorted types. All guns, no howitzers. We can’t lob shots into the valleys. Whoever picked this location knew exactly how to exploit our weaknesses. The only thing to hurt the Scarlet Beast so far was that truck bomb.” The Israeli officers looked at al Zahari with a mixture of respect and resentment. After sixty years of hostility it was hard to admit that they were on the same side, even harder to accept that Hamas had struck the only effective blow against the Scarlet Beast and the Whore so far.
“Well done Colonel, a masterly exposition that completely fails to answer the question. I said, what’s going on up there? Or would you prefer I sent you in a jeep to find out?” General Marosy closed his eyes and muttered some choice epithets under his breath. A classically-trained officer he had long believed that the IDF were a superb example of the concept of lions lead by donkeys. It was significant that there was not a single Israeli officer in multi-national command positions anywhere in the Human Expeditionary Army. They were brave enough, gallant to a fault, but their staff-work was appalling. And, in the final analysis, staff-work won wars.
“The last message we had was 30 minutes ago.” The Colonel glanced sideways at the situation map and, to his relief, saw it had been updated. “It said that the Scarlet Beast had resumed its attack on Jerusalem after breaking off to recover from the effects of the truck bomb. It was reported in the city and was being fought by whatever troops, our own and Hamas, some Fatah as well of course, but they had only small arms. The Beast made a point of getting as close to our people as it could, as quickly as it could. That’s limiting our heavy weapons use. It’s crushing the
city.”
“Crushing it? Is that all we have?”
“Yes General, it is. Not quite, one of the messages from police units inside the city said that the Whore of Babylon riding the Beast is stunningly beautiful.”
“I’m sure that is going to make a great deal of tactical difference.” Marosy spoke with a combination of weariness and anger. “Patch me through to H.E.A. Headquarters.”
The Communications Officer created the communications link. It was a complex one for the relatively short distance it had to go. It went from the HQ to the communications complex, up to a satellite, down to the earth station outside Baghdad, by microwave link to Hellgate Alpha, through the Alpha portal on a fiber optics link, then back to a microwave to the HQ building outside Dis. It took all of 20 seconds to establish.
“Could I speak with General Petraeus please?”
A clipped British accent responded. “General Petraeus is in Myanmar wrapping up operations there. I am his Chief of Staff, General Michael Jackson. You need help with the Scarlet Beast of course?”
“Yes Sir. We have only light infantry here and it’s tearing us apart.”
“I understand. We have portals opening now. We’ve brought in kitten to open them and she’s hard at work. We’ll have five divisions between the Beast and Tel Aviv by morning. The Aussies are sending in some F-111s to do the strike work.”
“General Jackson, we’ve lost eight aircraft already.”
“I know, all old Skyhawks. The Pigs are a different class of aircraft entirely and the Aussie pilots know how to fly them. Very aggressive pilots they are.” Sir Michael Jackson paused, it was the times when people standing on a parade ground had to drop flat as Australian F-111s flew overhead that were the epitome of ‘very aggressive’. And they had made the USAF rue the day they had pulled the F-111 from service. “Just hang on, Jerusalem’s a write-off but we’ll be there to stop any further damage. And don’t send any more troops in without full chemical warfare suits. The Whore sprays something we haven’t identified yet. Whatever it is, it’s lethal.”
“Thank you sir.” Marosy broke the connection before sighing. It appeared the H.E.A. knew more about what was happening few miles away that he did. That did not surprise him.
“Excuse me General.” al-Zahari was standing at one side of the room, looking at the operational display. “I thought you had three submarines at sea?”
“We do. Dolphin and Tekuma were at sea anyway, Leviathan sortied as soon as this attack started.”
“Well there are only two on this map.”
Marosy looked at the map and saw that the Palestinian was right. There were display indicators tagged for Dolphin and Leviathan but no sign of Tekuma .
Over Hacienda Heights, Los Angeles, California.
“Gangway, big boys coming through.” And that was an understatement thought Michael Wong. With the Bones on their way back to base, the YAL-1s were by far the largest aircraft in the battle. They had taken time to join in the wild furball over Los Angeles but now their great shadows were making a beeline for Uriel. It wasn’t hard to miss him. Wong stopped himself there, actually it was very easy to miss him. He guessed that only a small handful of the thousands of cannon shells that had been poured at the archangel had actually hit him. The fighters had stopped using rockets, to Wong’s certain knowledge at least three aircraft had gone down to friendly fire in the chaos. He’d seen them go, an F-15 taken down by an AIM-120, an F-16 by a pair of AIR-120s and a National Guard F-4 that had made the terrible mistake of getting between a Warthog and its target. Going by the fires on the ground, there had probably been others. In a strange way he was glad he had run out of ammunition and was leaving the battle area. Fighting Uriel was one thing but the thought he might accidentally take out a friendly weighed heavily on his mind.
Uriel was floundering, lashing out at the aircraft that swarmed around him. Wong was forced to remember the old King Kong movie with the giant ape trapped on top, his arms clutching at the aircraft flying around it. Uriel kept trying to form portals to escape but the aircraft were constantly forcing him away from each. Nobody had yet tried Wong’s trick of flying through the portal and coming back out on a collision course and that pleased the Commander greatly. That maneuver would give him bragging rights for months. Then he saw something he had never seen before and for the first human to shoot down a daemon and the first living human into Heaven, that said something. A bright red streak of light flashed across the sky and transfixed Uriel.
YAL-1A “Scalpel-One ,” over Los Angeles, California
“Laser is powered up, Sam, we’re ready to shoot.”
“Very good, lock on to that beast with the target designation laser. Main laser, prepare to fire.” There was a problem in using big, powerful lasers in an atmosphere. Microscopic drops of water in the air vaporized when the laser hit them, forming tiny lenses that dispersed the laser beam. It was called blooming and that’s what allowed the otherwise invisible beam to be seen. It also degraded the power of the laser and increasing the energy it contained to compensate didn’t help much. The more power in the beam, the faster the droplets turned into lenses and the greater the energy losses became. On its own, that made for a losing game. The answer had been remarkably simple once somebody had thought of it. Shine a medium power laser at the target first and it would clear all the water droplets out of the way. Then fire the main beam down the channel before they had a chance to reform. It sounded cranky but it worked.
Mickey Jennings had Uriel firmly in his sights. The target designation laser was already pouring data into the fire control system. Then, he initiated the main COIL laser and held the firing switch down for the full four seconds, watching the temperature gauge read-out as he did so. It crept higher as the laser shot stressed the system. Then the beam snapped off.
It had struck Uriel just under his rib cage, between his spine and the side of his body, slicing straight through him. For all four seconds of its life, it tracked backwards, cauterizing the wound as it went, but carving off a great swatch of Uriel’s side. For a fraction of a second, the slice stayed with him, but it quickly peeled away and plummeted to the ground beneath him.
To Uriel, already dazed with pain from the damage done by the fighters and exhausted from his efforts to escape, what had hit him was beyond any form of comprehension. The burning pain of the target tracking laser had been bad enough but the agony from the main COIL laser filled his mind and soul. He could feel it slicing into him, feel it tear at his body but there was nothing there to explain the horror that he knew was ending his life. Just light, clear, pure light. His muscles crippled by the great tear in his body, he started to fall from the sky. In a strange way, that saved his life for a few moments because the sudden change in direction threw the laser beam from Scalpel-Two off. The YAL-1 was an anti-missile system, designed to shoot down targets that moved on a steady, predictable course. The COIL shot just brushed Uriel’s face but that was enough to blind him, the thermal bloom destroying his eyes in a way that even his superb body repair capability couldn’t fix.
“He’s getting away!” Allansen brought his big aircraft around in a tight turn, its airframe creaking and groaning with the G-loads. It was, after all, a converted Boeing 747F and it was designed to civilian standards. Its airframe was flexing in ways that its designers had never contemplated. Nor had the designers of the COIL laser that filled its fuselage. “Hit him again.”
Jennings looked at the temperature gauges, they were still too high but Uriel had slaughtered tens, hundreds, of thousands in this war alone. How many he had massacred in his life was a number nobody else would ever know but Jennings had already decided that there would be no more. He designated Uriel’s falling shape and once again the great laser in the YAL-1 flashed out for its four second burst.
Uriel, blinded, desperate and dying didn’t feel the laser as it carved through his chest and into his neck. He was beyond pain, beyond exhaustion. All he wanted now was some of the peac
e that he had brought to the humans. The humans who had once cowered beneath him but had learned how to resist his will and to enforce their own on him. A fourth laser burst, the second fired from Scalpel-Two, slashed through his wings, finishing any chance he might ever have had of flying his way out of this death trap.
In Scalpel-One, Allansen and Jennings saw Uriel plummeting to the ground far below. The YAL-1 was still turning and Jennings saw the body drifting into his sights. Without having to be given the order, he designated the archangel and squeezed out his third burst from the laser, noting grimly that the temperature gauges were already well into the danger zone. It was a well-aimed shot, one that finally split Uriel’s head and ended his long life. He never heard the explosion that coincided with him hitting the ground.
It was the combination of turns and rising temperature that had done it. The turns, far tighter and faster than authorized had stressed the aircraft and the plumbing of its laser well beyond specifications. The three laser shots, fired in faster sequence than the book permitted, had pushed pressure in the system up to lethal levels. One pipe, not an important one as it happened but in this context that didn’t matter, ruptured and sprayed the volatile laser fuel over the heated laser modules. The flash fire that resulted did the rest by rupturing the fuel tanks and igniting their contents. Scalpel One exploded in mid-air at the precise moment Uriel died.
