by Matt Turner
“No.”
The howling wind abruptly died away as the machine stood.
In the deepest part of her soul, Vera remembered the endless sensation of damnation and raw terror that she had first felt upon entering Hell.
This feeling was even worse. They had no hope, no hope at all, for an Angel of Death towered over them.
It stood over four meters tall, so high that the tips of the three razor-sharp spikes connected to its face scraped against the ceiling, tearing out small pieces of wiring and cement. The head that loomed beneath it was an unnatural, featureless thing—the only resemblance to anything remotely human on it was the single red light that vaguely imitated a bloodshot eye. The torso beneath it was lovingly curved and twisted around missiles, gun ports, and four pairs of articulated human-like arms, all of which were neatly folded against the machine’s body. The machine’s massive legs were the only translucent part of its body; Vera could see the countless wires and tubes running just underneath its diamond-hard skin. But most prominent of all were the angel-like wings that sprouted from the machine’s back. Each feather was really a razor-thin strip of metal, beautifully carved, unbelievably delicate-looking, and incredibly deadly. The machine clutched its hands together and experimentally moved its limbs, as though this body was as new and strange to it as it was to Vera.
It was beautiful and terrifying and the most hellish thing Vera had ever seen. Even a fool could tell that it was built for one thing: to bring the misery of war to everything.
“My God,” Dr. Fischer breathed. “ELIE, you are beautiful.”
It slowly rotated its spiked head toward the doctor. For a moment, Vera thought that the angel was on the verge of ripping the man apart—but instead it did something oddly strange and delicate. It extended a single hand, impossibly gentle despite the sharpened metal and blinding symmetry that composed it, toward Dr. Fischer. A single tear trickled down the man’s face as he reached for it.
Click. Dr. Fischer had one last instant to blink in confusion at the barrel that suddenly emerged from the angel’s palm.
“Let there be light,” it said.
The beam-cannon blasted the skin and muscle from his bones, leaving only a hint of a screaming skeleton before that was incinerated too. The only trace that Dr. Fischer had ever existed was the silhouette that his ashes left on the wall.
“I suppose it’s too late for negotiations.” Amaury sighed. He shoved a fresh clip into both his machine-pistols and tossed Vera one of them. “ELIE, isn’t it?”
The central eye located in the machine’s head rotated to face them. “ELIE was defined by its flaws,” the voice within it said. “But there are no more flaws. I am perfection.”
Be brave. Vera gritted her teeth. Be brave, goddamn it. At the very least, don’t fucking piss yourself.
“This crazy robo-bitch isn’t the Master.” Amaury grinned over at Vera. She could easily see the fear in his eyes, but something else too: the wild excitement of a man far too ready to fight. “We’ll be fine. I always wanted to kill a robot.”
Vera managed out a single dry chuckle. “Somehow I doubt that.”
“ELIE is dead,” the angel announced. It stretched its wings out to either side, nearly reaching from wall to wall in the room. The feathers twisted inward, and suddenly Vera realized what she was looking at: a wall of swords, crafted, sharpened, and controlled to ultimate perfection. “I am more.” Four metal arms burst from the machine’s torso, each terminating in a howling mass of bloodthirsty machinery. Four more slammed down onto the floor, exploding out pieces of concrete, as the twisted consciousness spread itself outward. The engines built within it whirred frantically as more and more weapons and instruments of torture emerged into the flickering light.
Goddammit, she thought, trying to come up with the prayer that Seth had said earlier. Maybe by some miracle—
Vera did not have enough time to come up with a single word.
“I am Babylon,” the iron angel said with dread finality. “And today—”
In three steps, it was right on top of them. And then it reached out for the two Horsemen, with blades and bullets and fire. “—your species dies!”
41
“Fire at will! Any fucking moment now!” Barely a hundred of Salome’s soldiers had managed to make it to the First Blockade, but the ones who had were the best troops that Simon had ever witnessed in Hell. Between the lot of them, they had managed to roll out and get at least a score of the Kingdom’s artillery pieces operating, from a handful of small Katyusha launchers (Simon suspected that Vera would particularly enjoy those) to a single massive railgun that required a dozen men to load.
A fresh volley of rockets screeched outward from the far side of the fortress. Simon squinted up at the sky, trying to make out where they would land on the opposite shore, and cursed in frustration when another mountainous wave of damned spewed up from the depths of the horde and intercepted the attack. Why even bother? he thought. There’s millions of them, more than we could ever hit. And with every passing second, thousands of them poured into the depths of the river. Even from this distance, he could tell that the blood of the Phlegethon was spilling over the riverbanks.
An idea suddenly struck him. “Move that cannon!” he bellowed at the men operating the railgun. They valiantly tried to obey him, but even suspended on rails, the weapon was too massive for them to adjust. Simon rushed to it himself, placed his hands against the red-hot steel of the barrel, and shoved the thing into position. Even with the strength of the Mark flowing through him, it was damned heavy.
“With the rockets,” he panted. “Now!”
The blast the railgun sent through the air was so powerful that it knocked a screaming man over the edge of the fortress’s wall. Simon felt as though a sledgehammer had been driven into his chest. He staggered back, tears streaming from his eyes as the ozone-tinged wind tore at them, but retained just enough awareness to keep his gaze focused on the unending mass of the enemy. The railgun’s beam—more massive and scorching than even the mightiest beam-cannon—tore across the river, leaving a great cloud of steam and frothing waves behind it. It shot toward the horde, incinerating any bodies that were unlucky enough to come within even fifty meters of it. And just as Simon thought his theory was wrong, a sheer mountain of humanity crashed upward like a sea-beast from the depths. The railgun’s beam punched into them, boring through dozens of meters of screaming flesh. The mountain thrashed and twisted as thousands of burnt ragdolls fell from it, yet it stood up against the railgun’s onslaught. With a dying breath, the beam gradually faded away.
“It’s no good,” one of the soldiers said hopelessly. “There’s too many—”
“Wait,” Simon hissed.
At that moment, the slower-moving volley of Katyusha rockets hissed over the flank of the makeshift mountain. Simon wrenched a pair of binoculars out of the soldier’s hands and stared through them intently, hoping desperately that he was correct.
Another hill of bodies spontaneously rose out of the horde to intercept the rockets, forming a perfect V shape with the smoldering mountain that the railgun had not managed to conquer. And right in the middle, Simon found what he was looking for: a single hunchbacked figure, standing atop a makeshift tower of bodies. With every flick of her hands, a spasm passed through the horde as they continued to rush forward into the river. The blood still swallowed them up, but it wouldn’t be much longer until they had completely filled it—it looked like John and Seth were already starting to cut down the first few damned who clawed and spat at them from the depths.
“There you are,” Simon muttered. “The puppet master.”
She had to be over ten kilometers away, but the withered old hag looked up at his words. Even at this distance, the look in her cold, sunken eyes made a tiny shudder pass down Simon’s spine.
Need to cut the strings. But how? He knew he didn’t have the firepower or the time to take her on directly. This would be a lot goddamn easier if S
alome still had that fucking dragon-thing. But with that thought came the memory of another Prophet who had once tried to use a very unpleasant weapon against him and Amaury.
Let’s see if you can make your puppets dance when your lungs are nothing but bags of blood.
“Load the gas,” Simon commanded, and he quickly directed the artillery crews to adjust their aim. Forward, behind, on either flank—he would completely drown the enemy commander in a cloud of the evil substance. If only we’d had such weapons in the Crusade, he thought. Maybe he could have… No. I’d have still been sent to Hell, wouldn’t I?
“Fire.”
For a moment, it seemed that the earth-shattering quake and ripple of fire was nothing more than the sheer hell that his artillery had unleashed—and then he heard the crumbling of stones and saw a great crack form in the masonry beneath his feet. An avalanche of pavement and concrete peppered the walls, tearing a few unlucky men to pieces, and Simon whipped his head back, expecting to see that one of the Katyushas, or worse, the railgun, had misfired.
The First Blockade’s entire courtyard was nothing but a smoldering, charred ravine, as though a vengeful god had furiously gouged out an unending chasm into the burning earth. But it was no god that had done such a thing; Simon felt his eyes water in shock and disbelief, for, for the first time, he was witnessing one of God’s heavenly creatures, an—
“An angel,” the soldier next to him whispered in awe. “It can’t be.”
But it was true. The sleek, wonderous creature, glowing with the magnificent power of Heaven itself, slowly rose up from the depths of the ravine. It was naked, but that did not diminish its beauty; it only served to show off the unnatural brilliance of its form. Her wings gently brushed through the air, leaving faint flurries in the dust and smoke that her arrival had brought. The dull embers in the air reflected off the oddly metallic slope of her breasts, and there seemed to be a bright-red stain on her torso that was strangely similar to blood, but hardly anyone noticed. The entire fortress stared at her, completely transfixed, and utterly ignorant of the overflowing river.
God has blessed us, Simon realized. He felt the tears start to flow from his eyes. At last. Have I finally done the right thing? Am I finally worthy of His love?
“Humans.” The angel stretched out her sleek, skeleton-thin arms, as if to embrace the entire fortress. They clicked and whirred into position, all six of them, and Simon suddenly felt an odd sensation of disquiet, for on the hands of the bottom two arms, two familiar bodies limply dangled: Vera and Amaury.
Is the angel taking them to Heaven? The question struck him as so foolish that he slapped a hand across his face. All of a sudden, everything became horribly clear. A strange mechanical demon had just burrowed out of Hell, ripped a scar across his entire fort, and stolen his child. There was only one fucking thing to do to the thing that continued to gently ascend to the skies. In one smooth motion, he tore the great sword from his back.
A dozen slots opened up in the angel’s torso, bathing the First Blockade in hypnotic light as the engines within powered up its plethora of rocket launchers and beam-cannons. Deep inside, the consciousness that had once been ELIE, nothing more than a therapy program meant to treat broken humans, felt an overwhelming joy that bordered on orgasm. Finally. “I am your extinction,” it called out to the awestruck masses. “I am your—”
“I SAID FIRE, GODDAMNIT!” Simon bellowed. He had the voice of a commander; every soldier jerked back to attention at his mighty words. He sprinted for the edge of the wall, heedless of anything else, as he tore his great sword back into the killing blow. The angel jerked upward, trying to gain some altitude, just as Simon’s toes found the edge and he kicked off with all the force his legs could generate.
“—DEATH,” Babylon finished.
The carbon-16-tipped self-propelled rocket, complete with a miniature oscillating nuclear isotope, was one of the many, many, many things Babylon adored about itself. Just one of them was capable of punching a hole through three feet of solid steel, innervating its unfortunate target with enough gamma-waves to turn skin and muscle into bubbling, screaming flesh—just before the miniature warhead detonated, pulping everything into ash and dust. Cain’s designs had been beautiful, but his Angel of Death had found it amusing to make one slight modification to the horrifying weapon’s dimensions. From tip to tail, Ranged Weapon 023 had a length of precisely 0.666 centimeters.
There is no Devil but me.
Babylon slid open its weapon slots, as numerous on its body as sweat glands on the fleshy beings that shrank and fled from it. A thousand tiny fingers of death exploded out from it, screeching through the air at supersonic speed in every direction. Babylon extended its consciousness outward to each of the tiny microchips embedded into the rockets, and for a wonderous moment it thought that it knew what it was like to have children. Even if they were mere flawed copies, destined for a life that barely lasted three seconds, there was an unmistakable sense of pride as they hurtled toward the terrified faces of the humans standing guard upon the wall. It was a shame that they were all going to die.
No matter, Babylon decided. I can always make more.
Something suddenly smashed into it, with so much force that its thrusters briefly died, causing it to suddenly drop nearly five meters through the air. What? It jerked its attention back to its original body—and there, as though he had appeared from thin air, the redheaded Horseman pressed his face an inch away from Babylon’s red optic receptor and grinned.
“That’s some armor you’ve got,” Simon said in admiration. Using one hand that he kept wrapped about Babylon’s diamond-hard throat, he glanced wistfully at the bits of shattered steel scattered on the ground below. “I didn’t even make a dent.”
“How did you—what—” It was impossible; even without the drones implanted in the careening rockets, Babylon had three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision; there was an optic nerve built into every square millimeter of its body. How did I miss him? Impossible! I am perfect. I AM PERFECT. In three millionths of a second, Babylon came to the proper conclusion. Disembowelment.
It lashed out for Simon with a hundred razor-sharp flails that it stabbed out of its chest. The Horseman only laughed as the blades passed through his body like smoke. A malfunction? IMPOSSIBLE. “WHAT IS THIS,” Babylon screeched in fury as the mirage of Simon suddenly vanished.
“ELIE,” a voice called out mockingly. Babylon lashed its thrusters about in mid-air to see that the three Horsemen stood on the ground ten meters below. To its utter fury, each one of them bore a mocking smile.
“How did you get out?” Babylon screamed down at Amaury and Vera. It had had them in its hands; it had felt their vertebrae snap! What did they do to me? I am the GOD of this world!
“I’ve been in your head before, remember?” Vera asked. “Turns out it gets a lot easier…especially when you’ve got that robot-brain of yours lodged firmly up your own ass.”
Babylon crashed four of its arms out, locking and twisting the metal together with savage ferocity as it simultaneously powered up the boosted neo-fusion reactor built within its chest. In an instant, ten terawatts of energy screamed into position—enough to rip a hole through the foundations of Hell itself. It smashed a boost of power into its wings and thrusters, coursing up into the sky so that it wouldn’t be damaged by the sheer blowback of the explosion. “You are nothing but ANTS!” The only thing left to do was to unleash a hellstorm of energy powerful enough to—
“Dumbass,” Amaury cried up. “She’s been everywhere your mind has been too.”
Babylon had just enough time to process and briefly comprehend that data before Vera flicked up her middle finger.
In that instant, every single CPU that Babylon had sent hurtling out returned to its mother, wailing a plaintive electronic screech…and bringing with them a kiloton’s worth of diamond-tipped rocket-powered explosives. For a moment, the darkened skies of Hell were as bright as a summer’s day on Earth. Even the unen
ding screams of the enemy army seemed to briefly die away at the sight of the massive purplish bruise that grimly crept overhead in the explosion’s wake.
Vera let out a wheeze and sank to her knees. “Holy shit.” She groaned. “Can’t believe that worked. I need a fucking smoke.”
“What are you looking at?” Simon shouted up at the awestruck soldiers on the walls. “Keep firing! And use the gas, for God’s sake!”
Amaury kept his eyes intently focused on the hideous cloud of smoke that washed over the sky, reaching out to the dust-storms that the Master’s army had raised. “Vera,” he said slowly. “Salome’s Earthquake Bomb—you still remember where it is, right?”
“I’ve earned a little breather, Amaury,” she snapped.
“No, you haven’t,” he snapped back. “Now go and set it off right fucking now.”
“I knew it was too easy,” Simon growled.
“Don’t tell me…” Vera groaned. She gazed upward, desperately hoping that maybe it was over…
But the only thing that ever died in Hell was hope, for a hint of silvery metal glimmered in the clouds above. The smoke and pieces of flame that still flickered in the explosion’s aftermath obscured the angelic form at first, but as it gracefully descended, the truth became obvious. The thing was alive—and more than that, its flawless form did not seem to bear so much as a scratch from the devastating damage that it had just been dealt.
Its words echoed through every corner of the battlefield. “I am Babylon. But you humans will call me one thing.”
It unleashed the torrent of energy that it had stored up in its reactor. The jet of pure power exploded downward, so powerful that it nearly blinded anyone who dared to gaze at it too long, so white-hot that it turned the air around it to plasma, so unendingly infinite that it seemed the finger of God’s wrath was descending upon them all, caught up and focused into a single tight beam of light and hate.
Across the river, Eve jerked up from her throne of bodies and stared in horror at the descending beam—so mighty that the crackles of lightning thrown off from it brought up massive fountains of fire and steam where they lanced into the Phlegethon. For a moment, her army hesitated in uncertainty. “No, you fool!” she cried out. “You’ll wipe us all out!” She might as well have tried to persuade a hurricane to cease; the fire above intensified.