by Stuart Slade
“I am sorry to have to tell you, Colonel, that within the last few minutes, Heaven has surrendered unconditionally. There is, apparently, no longer a need to breach the walls of the Eternal City.”
Colonel Cleeve looked both downcast and like a man who had just seen the bottom of his world fall out. It looked like it was back to the training depot for him.
“No, I, ah…hadn’t heard that, Sir.” He said quietly.
“Cheer up, Colonel.” Jackson said. “I’ll need to speak to Major General Maxwell, but I am sure we can find a place for the howitzer once it is on a proper mounting. We may have to open the Gates on the City ourselves. The Angels are not certain they can throw open the gates themselves. Also, we may well have won the war against Hell and Heaven, but there is a lot of occupation duty in front of us. There is also the matter of what other nasties might lurk out there.”
Cleeve brightened up considerably at this.
“Of course we will also need a knowledgeable officer to oversee this particular project. I am sure we can spare you from the training depot to take this on.”
“Thank you very much, Sir. You will mention this to General Petraeus?”
“I’ll make sure he hears about it, Colonel.” Jackson told him. “I’m sure he will find this very interesting. I believe the Americans still have some railway guns in preservation, so they may follow your lead if you can pull this off.”
Underground Command Facility, Yamantau, Russia, July 20, 2010
“And so, contingent upon Michael-Lan-Michael’s surrender being effective, resistance ceasing as per his promise and on this council’s agreement with our acceptance of his unconditional surrender, all major combat operations will cease. The occupation of The Eternal City will take place as soon as we can get troops into position. That should be within a few hours.” General of the Armies David Petraeus swallowed two more Motrin tablets and sat down.
All fifteen members of the Yamantau Council were present in person, an achievement that would have been impossible before the spread of portal transportation. Now, Yamantau had its own portal room and its own staff of sensitives. The applause from the assembled Council Members was deafening.
Chairman of the Yamantau Council Vladimir Putin waited until the noise quieted of its own accord. Then he spoke softly, relying on the sound system to ensure his voice carried to every corner of the room. “I formally propose the motion that the declaration of unconditional surrender proposed by Michael-Lan-Michael be accepted.”
“Seconded!” President Sarkozy of France emphatically agreed. The roar of acclamation was convincing.
“I would like to make a another proposal.” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil spoke as soon as the applause wound down. “That we declare this day to be Salvation Day, a worldwide holiday forever to be celebrated as an affirmation of humanity winning its freedom and liberty from an age-old curse. And let us not forget that in doing so, we have freed the daemons and angels from those who would oppress them also. Today is indeed Salvation Day for us all.”
Chapter Seventy Nine
SAS Detachment, Eternal City, Heaven
“We’ve just got word. The excitement in Dempsey’s voice was obvious. “Michael-Lan is surrendering unconditionally. The war is over.”
“Don’t jump to that conclusion lad.” Crowleigh was very cautious. “The Septics made that mistake back in the old world. What you mean is that major combat operations are over. We and our children will be sorting out the mess up here for generations. And not everybody will be honoring that surrender, you mark my words. There’ll be a lot of shooting yet. What are our orders?”
“We’re to get into uniform and make ourselves obvious. Start patrolling around this area, make sure everybody sees armed humans on the streets. And we’re to make it obvious we’re in charge. The message says, don’t throw our weight around but make it clear our word is the one that counts. Got the message flimsy here.” Dempsey passed the yellow paper over.
Crowleigh nodded. Dempsey had summarized the message very well. Time to give orders. “Right lads. Into uniform and pick up our arms. You heard Dempsey, we’re to patrol our patch in a military manner and take no shit from anybody.” There was a chuckle around the team. Crowleigh’s Scottish burr had added a note of class to the orders he had summarized.
Street of Ceaseless Exaltation, Eternal City, Heaven
“This can’t be happening.” Rubibael-Lan-Dasarapael didn’t actually know who he was speaking to, if anybody at all. He wasn’t even sure if he was speaking to himself. He was simply trying to comprehend the unbelievable sight that was now unfolding before him. It was as if saying the words was enough to bring them into a reality in which he had a place. As a humble Ishim, he had never had any ideas above his station but, lowly as he was, he had always had the humans to look down on. The doors set in the massive gate before him were open and humans were pouring in as if they owned the place. That was when Rubibael-Lan had expressed his disbelief. Only, it wasn’t an expression, it was a howl of anguish.
“Move back. Get away from the gates.” The human spoke sharply, without much attempt at friendliness. The steel helmet that covered his head and the nape of his neck gave him a ferocious look that was out of place in the Eternal City.
“I cannot. It is my place to y. o.. o.. o.. o.. w.” Rubibael jumped in the air and howled with pain as a rifle butt slammed down on his foot. He hopped up and down on one leg, trying to nurse his bruised toes with his hands. His wings fluttered as he used them to stay balanced.
“When I tell you to move, you move. Understand? We’re going to blow the gates and you don’t want to be here when they come down.”
Rubibael nodded and hobbled off down the street, abandoning his position as marker distributor for the Mahatalabhuva Gate. He looked behind to see if the human was laughing at him but the man had seemingly forgotten all about him and was doing some of the mysterious things that these humans did. Somehow that made it all the more humiliating.
USS Turner Joy, DD-951 AUTEC Transition Point, Earth
“It’s really all over?” Sophia Metaxas was hanging on the hatch leading to the comms room, listening to the roar of cheering and singing that was spreading throughout the ship. If the news was false, there would be a very unhappy crew.
Commander Reynolds was already in the crowded compartment. “Hi Sophia. It’s true. It hasn’t been announced over the civilian networks yet, not officially anyway, but it is confirmed. We won. Heaven’s folded. Yahweh is dead, Michael is in charge. Temporarily at least.”
Sophia gave a piercing scream of delight and her hat hit the overhead. Halfway through the celebration, the comms equipment started to rattle again. The message came in and was spooled out. Reynolds tore it off and read it carefully. “Uh-oh.”
Her stomach clenched as the words came out. Surely it wasn’t going to be revealed as a hoax or simply denied was it? “Problems? Please don’t tell me the war is still on.”
“It isn’t. It’s over all right. But there’s a portal being punched through from Heaven to here. We’re to be first through.”
“You mean we’re going to lead the fleet into Heaven?” Rochelle Emerson had just come up from the engine rooms. “That’s wonderful.”
“No, it isn’t. Reynolds was profoundly cynical. “They’re sending us in because we’re an old, steam powered destroyer with a crew of hired misfits that nobody will really miss if everything goes sour. Oh yes, and because we still have our spray equipment on board so if we run into the crap that killed off the seas around here, we can start to get rid of it.”
Sophia looked around at the wreckage that had once been a near idyllic tropical island. The island was a brown wasteland, scoured of life. The beautiful green trees and parks, the white-roofed houses, they had all gone. Swept away or shattered into fragments by the succession of super-hurricanes that had devastated Bermuda. The one-beautiful beaches were scarred by the wrecks of ships that hadn’t made it to the Hellgate
before being overwhelmed by the storms. Just off Turney Joy’s port bow was the wreckage of a Spanish destroyer that hadn’t made it through. She was red with rust now and had rolled over, partly crushing a French corvette alongside her. The seas themselves were dead, the Red Poison had killed nearly everything in the area off and the sealife was taking a long time to recolonize the area. In a way, Bermuda was symbolic of Earth after the Salvation War. Battered, bloody and hurt so badly it would take a long time to recover. But, recover it would and it was something else as well. Victorious. Bermudans would come back and rebuild their homes, Sophia knew it and in a way she envied them. This old destroyer was just about the only thing left of her life. When it was gone, she really would have nothing.
“Where are we going?” Her voice was subdued as the realization of what this victory had cost sank in.
“A place called Lake of Placid Contemplation. Apparently, it’s right in the middle of the Eternal City. If we get there and rule it safe, then all of these will be following us.” Reynolds waved at the ships surrounding them. The aircraft carriers George H.W. Bush, Enterprise and Harry S Truman, the cruisers Pyotr Veliky, Sejong Daewang, Cowpens, Port Royal and Almirante Grau. Two dozen destroyers at least, most of them AEGIS ships or their equivalent. Then there were the amphibs. There hadn’t been a collection of amphibious warfare ships like this since Inchon more that half a century before. At least six LHDs, a dozen or more LPDs and LSDs, two French LHAs, the Mistral and Tonnerre, a seven-ship British amphibious squadron, some of the big Russian amphibious hovercraft. Those were just the ones she could see. The sea was studded with ships and Sophia realized they were all waiting to go to the Lake of Placid Contemplation. She hoped it was a big lake.
“We’ve got a picture of the lake coming through now.” Reynolds held it up and Sophia sighed with relief. It looked as if it was indeed a big lake.
Just Inside The Himilheothon Gate, The Eternal City, Heaven
“Who the hell are you? We’re trying to decide how to blow this thing up.” The Officer of Engineers was irate for a number of reasons, one of which was he’d had a conversation with his doctor a few hours before. The lump in his tongue was cancer, a fast-growing, very malignant cancer. It was already spreading and it was far too late to operate. It always had been, this type of cancer was a killer. Lieutenant Chard would be going home soon, to spend the last couple of months with his family before the cancer got so bad there would be no point in going on. He had already decided to sign out when that happened.
Another thing annoying him was the task he had been set. Blowing this gate open. The problem was, if he just blew the hinges, the gate would fall down all right. Only it weighed somewhere between 38,000 and 88,000 tons and that weight of door hitting the ground in a 100-meter arc would cause a fair earthquake. From what he had seen of the buildings around here, it wouldn’t take much of a shock to bring them down as well. So, he was going to blow the gate in a series of sections using linear shaped charges to carve off large sections of the meter-thick wood. That was another part of his forward planning. He already had a truck waiting and it would rush some of the wood back to Earth where he could spend his retirement carving it into furniture. After all, a man had to leave some heirlooms to his descendants.
The final straw was this man who had suddenly appeared in front of him, waving documents that gave him permission to film something or other using this gate. Just what he needed when he was running against the clock. Every kind of clock.
“We’ve been given permission to film an episode of our show here.” The man with the moustache seemed to have enormous patience. “If everything goes the way we plan, we should be finished in a few minutes.”
“And how often does everything go the way you plan?” Chard was not a patient man.
“This is a quite simple test. Nothing much can go wrong with it. We just need to have some people go backwards and forwards through the gate and that’s it. We’ll be out of your way in…” The man hesitated slightly. “Thirty minutes?”
Chard nodded. “Very well. You have thirty minutes. Not a minute more. Then we’re going to start demolishing the gate.”
The man with the moustache looked up at the huge gates with interest. “Now that will be a really big boom.”
Shin Meiwa US-2 Flying Boat, Atsugi Air Base, Japan.
“Welcome to our aircraft, kitten.” Captain Oushi Terukata bowed respectfully as the couple stepped on to his aircraft. “We have set your portal generation equipment up in the stern of the aircraft. It will be ready for you to use as soon as we transit to Heaven. Before then, the forward cabin is quite comfortable. Our flight plan is quite simple. We will take off from here and fly through the Heavengate at Yokosuka. This will bring us out over our Third Army Group. There may be some delay there due to portal movements. We have yet to hear from the Chinese air traffic control. After we have transited to Heaven, we will fly to The Eternal City and land on the lake in the middle. Our estimated flight time is two hours.”
“Thank you Captain.” As usual Dani spoke for kitten. “You have an interesting aircraft here, I’ve never seen a flying boat before.”
“There are very few large ones like this left now. We have less than ten and the Chinese have five. They are the last of their kind.” Oushi paused for a second. “kitten, we understand you like ginseng tea? His Imperial Majesty has sent some from the Palace’s own stocks for you. If you would like a cup now?”
Dani glanced at kitten then nodded. “That is very kind of you Captain. I know kitten will enjoy that.”
Outside The Himilheothon Gate, The Eternal City, Heaven
“Of course, what we really need are those two maniacs on television who spend their lives finding different things to blow up.” Colonel Paschal looked at the massive structure with something close to trepidation.
“They’re already here. Apparently their viewers asked them about the myth that rich people can’t get into the Kingdom of Heaven. So they’ve got Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Paul Allen and Larry Page plus four street people they found in San Francisco wearing accelerometers and walking backwards and forwards through the doors in that gate. Seeing if there is any difference to the resistance they experience when entering the City.”
“Gonzo science.” Doctor Kuroneko spoke dismissively.
“Better than no science at all.” Doctor Surlethe protested. “It may not be science as we know it but they are teaching people to think about problems logically and carry out experiments to test their conclusions. And put proper controls on those experiments. That’s a big step forward from making assertions and then repeating them.”
“Apparently Gates asked the one with the moustache whether they were going to blow the gate open and the only reply he got was ‘Jamie want big boom.’ You’ll note they don’t actually handle the explosives themselves on the show.” Colonel Warhol shook his head. “Those gates are a real problem though. The demolition teams are having fits all around the city. Their consensus is to bring them down in sections.”
The DIMO(N) team got into their Humvees and set off for the Himilheothon Gate. They were strangely aware that this was likely to be the last time their team would get a chance to come together like this. With the war ending, DIMO(N) would be losing its primary reason for existence and would be wound up. James Randi’s team was already being demobilized, its primary function of finding sensitives who could contact the Netherworld was already obsolescent. Warhol sighed gently to himself, remembering the frantic early days of the war. Then, everything had been thrown together, haste being the over-riding driver. It hadn’t mattered how much something had cost or how jury-rigged the system had been, if it happened quickly and got results, it had been funded. Then had come the jarring feeling of disbelief as Abigor’s army had crumpled under the massive firepower of the human armies in Iraq. Somebody ought to write a history of DIMO( N), Warhol thought. We lost so much of our heritage in this war, we need more to replace it.
His thought tr
ain was interrupted by an excitable red-headed man addressing the television cameras around the gate. “And our data set is quite conclusive. Some of the richest and some of the poorest people in America have been through the gates of Heaven and there was no difference in the resistance they experienced. None at all. I love consistent data. So the myth that rich men can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven?”
“Busted.” The entire TV crew echoed the verdict with relish.
Shores of the Lake of Placid Contemplation, The Eternal City, Heaven.
There was much to think about. Ohalam-Lan-Derepael looked out at the great lake and shook his head. The great storms of thunder that had made the whole city shake had dispersed and everything was tranquil again. Except for the great splash that had been seen in the middle of the lake a few hours ago. For the first time in countless millennia, Yahweh was no longer resident in the Eternal City. Ohalam hoped that he would enjoy his vacation, wherever it was. The Great General Michael-Lan was now in charge of Heaven until Yahweh returned. That was what puzzled him. Why had Michael-Lan surrendered so quickly? Could not the Great General think of a way to defeat the humans the way he had defeated the fallen Ones and driven them from Heaven.
Humans. Ohalam had great difficulty getting his mind around the problems they were causing. They had been menial servants, of little account for so long. How had this happened? How had they become the ruthless killers who had destroyed The Morningstar and cast down The Fallen Ones and then proceeded to do the same here? It made no sense.
The drone of turboprop engines interrupted Ohalam’s train of thought. It was a human aircraft, one of the steadily increasing number that were passing over the City. Ohalam adjusted his eyes for long-distance vision and looked at it. A white aircraft with a blue stripe down its fuselage and its nose and tail painted bright orange. Quite different from the blue or dark red paint scheme the human aircraft usually wore. He watched as the aircraft circled around, obviously inspecting the area. In awe of the glories of the Eternal City, he thought.