by Stuart Slade
Her preparation work finished, Howarth walked back to the center of her room and sat down with her dog, wrapping her arm around his thick neck. She knew something that Rex didn’t, at El Paso, only a tiny handful of pets had survived the attack. She just hoped that she’d done enough to save hers.
USS Normandy, CG-60, Off San Diego, California, Earth
“Closed up, ready for action Sir.”
Captain Pelranius nodded in acknowledgement. “Any sign of him?”
“No, Sir. Last report is still El Capitan. He must be using the hills as cover. Upping transmission power won’t help, it’ll just increase reflections of those hills. We could lob an SM-2 into the general area and see where it’s terminal homing in on but it would be just as likely to hit a CAP bird or a fast-moving car. And if he’s sitting on the ground, it’ll just go ballistic and could end up anywhere.”
Pelranius looked at the map, trying to visualize the terrain. Guessing what he was trying to do, Serafina put up a tactical air navigation chart on one of the giant screens. Pelranius nodded in appreciation. “I’m trying to imagine what he’s thinking. We think he nearly got wasted by a quartet of PAC-3s over El Paso, let’s assume he knows or guesses the missiles have to have a direct line of sight to their target.”
“With respect Sir, PAC-3s do, we don’t. Not with our 156s. We can hit things way over the radar horizon. And we’ve got test 174s in the aft VLS nest.”
“I know that, but he won’t. He’s never fought an AEGIS cruiser. Get the 156s and 174s warmed up. We want to have the best of the best on the line.”
“Roger that, Sir. The Army pukes let him get away, we don’t want to do the same now do we?”
“We surely do not. Now, if I was him, and I wanted to wipe out Sunny Dee, I’d come in from the north. Use these ridges as cover and ride in behind them. Around University City and Serra Mesa?”
“Bit close to Miramar for my taste. The bastard knows what our fighters can do.”
“True. So a little further south. How about Lakeside and Santee?”
“Works for me Sir.”
“Very good Senior Chief.” Pelranius turned around to the rest of the watch crew in the Pit. “We’re going to be attacked by Uriel. I expect him to emerge around the towns of Lakeside or Santee. Don’t neglect other areas but keep those two under tight watch. When we start shooting, we’ll have to shoot fast and well so everybody on your toes. Let’s get the piece of shit before he wipes any more of our people out.”
Eucalyptus Hills, East of Santee, California
Uriel could hear the wailing down on the ground. At first he flattered his vanity by trying to persuade himself that the sound was humans crying in fear at his approach but the noise had a strange, dead quality to it. That told him the sound was one of the human’s machines, doubtless telling of his arrival. He was keeping down low, using the ground for cover but that couldn’t last for long. Soon, he would have to crest the ridge ahead of him and skim over the community the other side. Then, and only then, could he bring them peace.
For a brief second he paused, remembering the lash of the steel fragments that had followed him through the portal over El Paso before it slammed shut behind him. But then his duty was remembered and the need to use the awesome sense of power that he had been granted. He soared over the ridgeline, seeing the lights of the town below him around him, and he sensed the activity below starting to slow down and soften as if the world were pausing out of respect for his presence. Uriel smiled down at the little creatures below him and his hands moved in his eternal benison. “Peace be with you and my peace I grant you.”
Home of Caroline Howarth, Eucalyptus Hills, California.
It felt like a blow, one that drove the breath out of her body and tried to still her heart. Caroline Howarth screamed in protest, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t logical, she was a young woman, still in her mid-thirties. She lived a healthy lifestyle, she looked after herself, her condition was as good as any and better than most. There was no logical reason why she should die. She summoned every ounce of willpower she could find, drove her lungs to expand and contract, forced her heart to keep pumping. The burden on her was crushing, smothering, driving darkness into her soul yet she kept fighting it, willing herself not to die. This was Uriel, she knew the name from the attack on El Paso, knew that somehow he willed people to die and then stole their souls. Caroline Howarth raged against that fate, summoning reserves of strength that she never knew she had. Then, she glanced down and saw the brown eyes of Rex staring up at her, confused and pained, but grimly determined not to desert her. She drew strength from that, knew that she could not die because to do so would be to condemn the dog who had trusted her. And so she fought.
Beside her, Rex couldn’t understand it. Something was crushing him, squeezing the life out of his body, His lungs, his heart seemed paralyzed and blackness was spreading through him. He growled, knowing this was the danger he had sensed and it had come from outside. He sensed his human fighting to stay alive and knew that he had to stay with her to protect her when the enemy came to their house. That sense of purpose allowed him to push the darkness back, to force air into his lungs to keep his heart pounding. There was another reason as well, he was bigger and stronger than his human and it would be embarrassing to die when she had fought for her life and won. He looked up at her and saw his human return the look and try to smile encouragingly. He felt her squeeze his paw, and the contact gave him yet more strength. Between them, the woman and the Rottweiler gave each other strength as they fought their lonely battle against Uriel. And so, across the town of Eucalyptus Hills, did all the other residents, drawing strength from each other, from family and friends, or strangers who had sought shelter when the sirens sounded. They called on courage, on the knowledge that there was no need for them to die, on a sheer mule-headed determination not to let Uriel win. Whatever it was, they fought the strange influence that would stop their hearts and empty their lungs.
Eucalyptus Hills, East of Santee, California
Uriel concentrated all his power on the small group of people beneath him. He knew now his mistake, the error that had cost him so dearly. He had been so used to the merest touch of his power being fatal to the humans that he had never thought about the numbers he was handling. Humans had spent most of their existence in small communities, a few dozen or a few hundred at most, and those he had wiped out without a thought. But in the last two centuries, while he had spent his time in Africa, human cities elsewhere had exploded in size and now contained hundreds of thousands or even millions. They spread his power too thin and the new-found ability they had developed to resist his power prevented him from wiping them out.
But, this community beneath him was different. It was small, he guessed around eight thousand souls, and he was concentrating every last drop of his power he could find on them. They were resisting hard, there was the barrier there, the one that shielded them from him and when he penetrated that, he found there was another, special to each one of them. His power washed down in great waves, pounding on the barriers, battering their resistance down. Somehow he sensed this struggle was titanic, of epoch-making importance. It was a battle he had to win for if the humans could fight and resist him on these terms then his power was done. So, Uriel basked in the cold glow of entropy as he tried to force his peace on the people below.
USS Normandy, CG-60, Off San Diego, California, Earth
“GOT HIM! Over s small town called Eucalyptus Hills. Right where you said he’d be Sir.” The last bit was said loud enough to echo around the Pit. One of the functions of the Senior Chiefs was to make sure that their Captains had the undiluted respect of the enlisted men. When a new Captain was on board, it did no harm to spread news of their achievements. Serafina glanced around, saw the Pit crew nodding. Work done.
“Right, Senior Chief, let’s take him out. Get a target designation beam on him and ready the 156s for launch.”
“156s Sir?”
“RIM-
156. We’ll keep the 174s for when we lose line-of-sight. You can bet we will.”
Senior Chief Operations Specialist – Air Warfare Annette Serafina leaned forward and her hands started to run over the SPY-1D controls. USS Normandy was about to enter the Battle of Eucalyptus Hills.
Chapter Twenty Four
Eucalyptus Hills, East of Santee, California
Uriel was stunned by the realization that the humans beneath him were fighting back. His mind and body were aching with the effort of keeping the pressure on them, fulfilling his eternal mission of blotting out their lives and snatching way their souls. And yet they were fighting back, defying him by keeping on living. Beneath the shelter of their shields, they were defying the Sword and Scythe of The One Above All. Even worse, Uriel could sense animals in there with them and they were fighting back too, as if they were following the lead of the humans and defying the judgment of the Great Father Above All. It was beyond Uriel’s understanding, the humans had brought their animals in under cover with them, their love for their pets exceeded their duty of obedience by a margin that Uriel couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
He was tiring, the need to continue his assault, maintain the effort to wipe out those beneath him, was already draining his last reserves of strength. He had never fought this way before, in the past his merest touch had been enough to drop the humans in their tracks before they even realized their time had come. Those days were long past and over South America and Mexico, he had sensed resistance, felt the effects of the shielding every human seemed to have. But this, this was different. The shields were much stronger and the time taken to push through them had allowed the humans below to prepare for the assault. They were refusing to die and, to Uriel, that was a thing beyond understanding.
The human resistance may have been beyond Uriel’s ability to comprehend but what happened to him next was all too familiar. His skin started to irritate, to itch madly with pains that jabbed deep into his skin. He knew what that meant, the humans were on to him and were tracking him. He looked down to see if any of the missiles that they loved so much were coming his way. That was Uriel’s first mistake. If he’d invested in a copy of World Naval Weapons, he would have looked up, not down. But he had never read a human book and the idea of looking up never occurred to him.
USS Normandy, CG-60, Off San Diego, California, Earth
Annette Serafina played the radar controls in front of her, manipulating the systems at her command, her electronic fingers reaching out through the darkness to find the monster who was trying to slaughter her people. “Got him! We have SPS-49 contact, tracking now. Sir, how about some music down here?”
“On its way.” Pelranius thought for a second and got the channel to the Comms Suite. “Put on Mars, The Bringer of War, Gustav Holst.”
Serafina listened to the opening bars while her computers established the target track. “Good choice, Sir.” SPS-49 operating full power. Hope there was nothing good on television over at Sunny Dee.”
Captain Pelranius nodded. The SPS-49 had a peak transmission output power of 2,400 kW. Once, when a cruiser had accidentally gone to full transmit power off Norfolk, it had blacked out television reception in Newport News and interfered with radio as far inland as Richmond. The incident coming to mind jogged his memory, there was a vital duty he had to perform. He took a key, inserted it in a slot on the console and turned it. “Senior Chief Serafina, I am authorizing you to utilize full war emergency power on the SPY-1.”
“Very good Sir.” Her voice was neutral, despite the implications of the words she had just heard. Even if she hadn’t been aware of them, the rumbling under her feet as the ship’s four LM-2500 gas turbines picked up speed and started to generate more electrical power would have told her. “I have Uriel locked in using the Spoogs. We’ll track using SPS-49 and designate with SPY-1. Firing RIM-156 now.”
The ship started to shake as the first of the salvo of RIM-156 anti-aircraft missiles left the silos. Within a second, four missiles were arching up from the ship, heading northwest towards the town of Eucalyptus Hills.
“I hope Uriel doesn’t see them and get behind the ridgeline again.” Pelranius looked at the air warfare crew and picked up a slight note of disdain that surprised him. What had he said?
“Won’t save him Sir. The 156s are on their way now and they have active terminal radar homing. All we have to do is get them into the acquisition basket and they’ll do the rest. They’ll even relay their radar pictures back to us to tell us what they’re doing.” Serafina dropped her voice to confidential levels. “ Don’t worry Sir, everybody makes that mistake, assuming we can’t hit a target that’s over the radar horizon. Been times when that was the last mistake they ever made.”
In an educational video, seen from above, Normandy would have looked as if she was surrounded by four great fans of radar energy from the planar arrays of the SPY-1 system. Then, as Serafina’s expert fingers played the controls and switched the system from surveillance to target designation mode, the fans started to split into narrow beams that coalesced into thin lines. Then, the lines started to merge as she combined their output into a single beam per face.
“How much power are you pushing down that beam?” Pelranius’s voice was awed.
“All of it, all our generators can give us.” Serafina’s voice was still neutral. The pencil beam she was generating was capable of tracking an object two feet across at a range of far over a thousand nautical miles and detecting the tiny variations in its trajectory caused be variations in earth’s gravity. At under a hundred miles, the power of that beam was ferocious. The textbooks said SPY-1 had a peak power output of 4,000 kW, a figure that caused great amusement to the AEGIS community. It was true enough, or had been in the days of a prototype system on board the old Norton Sound. Now, it was long obsolete, far surpassed by that of later versions, and that had been before the key had been turned to enable war emergency power. The target designation beam of an SPY-1 was a powerful weapon in its own right.
Home of Caroline Howarth, Eucalyptus Hills, California.
Caroline Howarth sat, curled up in the center of her refuge room, her arms around the dog beside her. She was tired, exhausted by the effort of keeping her body working against the constant assault of blackness that was trying to shut her down. She was frightened, terrified even for she knew she was just buying time. The blackness was spreading, it was getting more difficult to breath and her head ached from the effort of keeping her heart beating. She looked at Rex, saw the misery and exhaustion in his eyes, saw the long strings of drool running from his mouth. She squeezed him gently, encouragingly, to reassure him that they would win this one. All they had to do was hang on long enough, until the Air Force or the Navy got help here.
Beside her, Rex’s whole body ached with the effort he was making. It was all so very hard to understand, there was something out there that wanted him and his human to die but it wouldn’t come in and fight like a dog. It just hung around outside and tried to squeeze the life out of them. He could feel his human weakening, feel her body running out of reserves of strength. Carefully, using as little of his remaining reserves as he could, he licked her face, trying to transfer some of what little energy he had left into her. Then, as if responding to his gesture, he felt a tiny weakening in the pressure that was killing them. They were winning, they were outlasting the thing outside. Then, he heard thunder in the skies overhead and the pressure was gone.
Eucalyptus Hills, East of Santee, California
The burning irritation of his skin had reached almost unendurable levels but Uriel couldn’t see any of the missiles coming in at him. Nor were there any aircraft coming in to the attack. It was all very, very confusing. For the first time, Uriel was actually beginning to hate the humans who were causing him this trouble. Why couldn’t they just die the way they were supposed to? That was when the burning pain on the top of his body told him that he was in the worst danger of his life.
Uriel never st
ood a chance of evading the RIM-156 missiles that were streaking down upon him from above. They had tipped over at 150,000 feet and were now heading down in a Mach 6 dive. Their radar sets were fully active and they had locked on to the figure below them. They didn’t need designation any more, They had Uriel in their sights and they were going to blow him up. Uriel barely had a chance to register their presence before they exploded around him.
The only thing that saved Uriel’s life was that the missiles had proximity fuzes. He was a big angel and the computers in the fuzes calculated distances based on that. He also had a large radar image and that increased the distance away from him that the missiles detonated. Finally, he was slow, and the RIM-156 was designed to handle supersonic and hypersonic targets. The fuze simply wasn’t programmed for a target that moved at Uriel’s speed. None of those factors would have saved Uriel on their own, but put together, they just about made the difference between a living angel and a dead one.
Uriel screamed as the tungsten carbide fragments slashed into his body. They ripped into his skin, splattering silver blood into the air, tore at his wings, shredding the flying surfaces and cracking the bones open. His vision suddenly shrank as fragments tore out one of his eyes and scoured across his body. He staggered in the air, hurt worse than had ever happened to him before. Not even in the Great Celestial War had he taken punishment like this. He started to drop, frantically beating the sky with his injured wings in an effort to avoid plummeting to the ground. He knew that his attack on the people below had ended, that those that had not died would live. He had used too much of his strength, he was too badly injured to start the assault again. He would have to escape, retreat to heaven and heal his wounds. Above all, he would have to speak with his friend Michael-Lan who knew humans better than any other angel. Michael-Lan would help him, Michael-Lan would give him wise counsel. He desperately tried to form the portal that would allow him to escape but something disrupted his efforts. The air itself seemed to be crackling round him, swamping his efforts to open an escape route.