Pantheocide

by Stuart Slade

  Gaius Julius Caesar sat on an empty fuel drum and watched his helicopter attack unit landing. Five birds were already down, their ground crews closing in on them as the crews dismounted. His heart was dropping slightly because the figure he was searching for hadn’t yet appeared. Two more MH-6s were landing and he scanned them with urgency. Then, he almost sagged with relief. She was there, she was getting out of the cockpit. She had made it.

  “Second Consul. Went the day well?”

  His voice was formal and grave. Her eyes widened slightly, she’d been expecting a more demonstrative welcome home, but she knew he was Roman and stoicism was a cardinal virtue. She drew herself up and tried to match him. Privately she decided she would introduce him to a modern military custom, the post-‘holy crap I can’t believe we’re both alive’ decompression session. But now, they were in public and had an image to uphold.

  “Very well, First Consul. Your Third Legion defeated one wing of the enemy assault and drove it from the battlefield. Then, it crushed their center and relieved an allied unit while putting the enemy to flight. Our casualties are not great, we have lost one helicopter disintegrated by a trumpet blast while another had engine failure and has landed with our ground troops. It will be available as soon as it is repaired. I do not know the losses on the ground. Perhaps we should go and see?”

  Caesar nodded. “Will you fly me?”

  Kim frowned. “That’s not a good idea. There might still be some angels up. We should go by ground or fly in two birds.”

  Caesar looked at her solemnly. “Just this once Jade. I’ve never flown with you before and I’ve never seen a battlefield from the air. We’ll do the separate aircraft bit from now on but just this once.”

  She bit her lip, it was a bad idea but the desire to show off her flying skills was too much. “Very well. But, I’ll get two other birds to escort us.”

  A few minutes later, her Little Bird was skimming over the battlefield again. Caesar spent half his time watching her deft and economical movements as she flew the helicopter, the other time looking at the scene on the ground. He’d never seen anything like it, nor had he realized the appalling carnage modern weapons could wreak on those unwilling to adapt to their presence. In his heart, he wished this was a sight he had never seen.

  They skimmed over a ridge and he saw another sight before him, one that told him his presence was expected. His Legion was drawn up in something equivalent to a parade formation although he did note that guards were out and at least some of the units were in combat deployment. The MH-6 reared slightly, and settled down to land on the shattered ground. The clean purity of heaven had gone, perhaps never to return for the air was laden with smoke and dust and it had the sulphurous stink of explosives, liberally mixed with burned metal, fuel and flesh. Today, Hell had come to Heaven.

  “Tribune Madeuce.” He saw the commander of Third Legion come to attention. He could barely see the man’s rank markings, a subdued dark brown against red. Human officers didn’t like to be distinctive on a battlefield. That was hardly surprising considering what they did to those who were. “How went the day?”

  “Sir, we count an estimated four hundred angels dead and over ten thousand humans. Our losses total eighty one dead and two hundred wounded. We have taken over a thousand prisoners, all humans. Your Legion fought well Sir. Better than the H.E.A. unit that made up our center.” There was a pleased, almost boastful sound to Madeuce’s voice. Or, as Caesar realized, not boastful but proud of how his unit had performed.

  “So I see. Only four hundred angels dead? Out of ten thousand?”

  “They fled Sir. When the battle turned against them, they abandoned their human troops and fled. The fighters from our allies got many but the rest escaped.”

  Caesar nodded. Then he called out, waving the assembled daemons and humans of the Third Legion closer to him. “Soldiers of the Third Legion, your commander tells me that you fought well today. You shall be rewarded for your bravery. Today, your Legion shall be named. Let me explain this. Every Legion gets a number, it arrives with the rations.” A ripple of respectful laughter spread across the ranks. “But a name, now that is something that a Legion must win on the field of battle. From today onwards this unit will be Legio Tertius Laurifer. The Victorious Third Legion. And should anyone ever speak ill of your courage and bravery, there will be no need to take anger. Just tell them that you served with the Laurifer Legion today and they will hang their heads in shame and hold themselves of little account that they were not here beside you.”

  Cheering erupted across the ranks. Caesar grinned broadly at Kim and winked at her. “Now, Legio Primus and Legio Secundus will be desperate to win a battle so they will also be awarded names. And the next group of legions we raise will be even more desperate to do so, so they can show the arrogant first three that they are not the only ones who can fight.

  Kim grinned back. “I see you’ve read Henry Fifth.”

  Headquarters, Human Expeditionary Army, Heaven.

  “Well, they can fight.” General Petraeus looked at the feedback from the Global Hawk circling high over the battlefield. “And it looks like Gaius Julius can still make inspiring speeches. Do you think we can find out what he said?”

  “He’ll probably have put it into a best-selling book by the end of the week.” General Sir Michael Jackson spoke gloomily. He was well aware that Caesar wrote very well and his ‘real histories of Rome’ books had been best sellers. They had better be because the royalties were a significant part of the income of New Rome. HBO had just started their serialization of “The Gallic Wars” made by the same team who had produced ‘Rome’ and the credit at the end ‘Technical and Historical Advisor: Gaius Julius Caesar’ had also been an expensive commodity. “What are we going to do about the main body.”

  Petraeus looked at the operational displays, calculating safety margins and degrees of separation. Yes, it would work. “Sodom, for Gomorrah they die.”

  501st Tactical Missile Wing. Heaven.

  The transporter-erector-launch vehicle groaned as the four-round missile launcher module elevated to the firing position. It paused there for a few seconds, then the whole system rocked as a missile emerged from one of the tubes. Originally a long cylinder with a rounded nose, it changed as soon as it was out of its tube. Wings sprouted from its fuselage, tail surfaces deployed and an air intake dropped out from under the belly. What had once looked like a torpedo now was an unmanned aircraft. With the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile on its way, the TEL lowered its launch module. The deed was done.

  The missile, known officially as the Gryphon but actually called the Glickem by everybody, had its course carefully laid out. It climbed to 100 feet and then set off along the planned route, the radar set in its nose measuring the height of the ground ahead of it and ensuring that the clearance of 100 feet was carefully maintained. By its standards, the missile didn’t have far to go and the task it had been given was insultingly easy. Just fly to the specific point it had been aimed at and then do its thing. A few miles short of that point, another program cut in and the missile began to climb. It was of no interest whatsoever to the missile that the final point on its pre-planned course was directly over the center of a mass of 50,000 angels and more than 450,000 of their human levies.

  It was at this point that warhead signals from both radar and air pressure sensors prompted an electronics package to begin the initiation process. That package sent an electrical impulse down 72 different wires to various points on an explosive shell at the very heart of the W83 warhead at the center of the missile. After 0.003 microseconds those impulses set off a pair of detonators at each of those 72 points, causing the mixture of explosives to converge into a perfectly spherical explosive wave travelling inward. After 10 microseconds the explosive wave had already started to compress successive hollow spheres of various metals. In 3 more microseconds the compression wave had crossed an empty layer to reach the heart of the warhead—a sphere of uranium 5 inches in
diameter. The blast from the explosives crushed that sphere into a fluid mass 2 inches in diameter.

  At that time, 19 microseconds after detonation, a small particle accelerator in the front of the warhead fired neutrons into the uranium sphere. These neutrons were absorbed by uranium atoms and caused them to decay. In the highly compressed mass, there was nowhere for the decay particles to go; they hit other uranium atoms and caused them to decay as well. This chain reaction cycled 60 times in the next microsecond before a small amount of compressed deuterium-tritium gas was injected into a hollow in the center of the uranium core, increasing the cycling rate to 80 times in the next 0.1 microseconds. By then, the uranium core had reached a temperature of 40 million degrees fahrenheit. That didn’t matter too much, what was important was that the gamma rays given off by the nuclear reactions radiated through the exploding mass and were absorbed by the weapon casing, 0.003 microseconds later. The casing was heated and reradiated the energy as x-rays. It was those X-rays that set the next part of the chain into action.

  At the rear of the core of the W83 was a cylinder of lithium-deuteride, 10 inches in diameter and 30 inches long with a radiation shield protecting it from direct radiation from the primary. It was surrounded by an inch-thick layer of depleted uranium; it also had a rod of uranium in the center. The x-rays reradiated from the warhead casing heated and compressed the outer wrapping of depleted uranium. In 0.1 microseconds this crushed the lithium-deuteride to a cylinder only 2 inches in diameter. At this point, neutrons from the primary arrived at that inner rod of uranium, coming through a hole in the radiation shield. These caused a nuclear chain reaction to occur in the rod, super-heating the lithium-deuteride from within. Neutrons from the chain reaction split the lithium atoms into helium and tritium atoms. The colliding tritium and deuterium atoms fused into helium for another microsecond. Then, the force of the fusion reaction crushed the original core of the device so thoroughly that the dying fission reaction was revived and what was left of the original fission fuel was consumed in the inferno.

  At that point, 20 microseconds after initiation, the temperature was 600 million degrees Fahrenheit and yet the outside of the warhead was only just beginning to disintegrate. Gamma radiation from the nuclear reactions had already radiated up to 1,300 feet in every direction. A region of space about the size of a small angel over the main body of the Incomparable Legion Of Light now held the equivalent explosive energy of 1.2 megatons. This enormous release of gamma radiation had been absorbed by the surrounding air, heating it to a point where it released radiation itself. This formed a glowing ball of gas that was already 400 feet across and yet was continuing to expand at many times the speed of sound. Oddly, the center remained extremely hot while the temperature of the outer part fell as it pushed the surrounding air away. The heat radiated by the outer layer had produced an initial flash of light as bright as the Sun to the observers at the Third Armored Division 25 miles away, now it generated a blast wave that separated from the fireball surface. This travelled at ten times the speed of sound and pushed the air away before creating a partial vacuum behind it. The blast wave reflected off the ground and the surrounding hills, reinforcing itself in some areas, cancelling itself in others to produce a crazy-quilt pattern of blast effects on the hapless Incomparable Legion Of Light below.

  A mere 0.08 seconds after initiation the fireball was no longer pushing the blast wave before it and so it began to release the large amount of thermal energy it contained. At 1.07 seconds after initiation it started to rise rapidly as its surface temperature and brightness began to decline. However, it continued to expand until at 8 seconds after initiation it finally reached its maximum size. With a surface temperature of 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the fireball was glowing a dull evil red as it topped the traditional mushroom cloud..

  And so it was that the prophecies were fulfilled. The Sun Of Man was indeed rising over Heaven.

  Chapter Seventy

  Spearhead Battalion, Third Armored Division, Heaven.

  For a brief second, it just didn’t make sense. Keisha Stevenson knew what the wailing sirens and ear-splitting rattle meant but the knowledge didn’t make the needed connection to her brain. Then, the connection was made and the knowledge sent her running for her tank. All around her, the initial shock had worn off the men and women of the Spearhead Battalion and they were heading for the comforting bulk of their armored vehicles. Stevenson reached hers, scrambled up the side on one continuous motion and pushed herself through the cupola on the turret. In doing so, she banged her face on the breech of her .50 machine gun and managed to mash her breasts on the cupola ring. That hurt.

  That didn’t stop her movement, she resisted the temptation to hold herself, instead reaching up to the hatch and pulling it shut. Then she span the locks that held it in place and spun them again to make sure the hatch was tight.

  “This is an exercise, Ma’am, right?” Her gunner was looking at her with eyes wide open. “A dummy drill?”

  She shook her head. “We don’t play games like this in operational zones. This is the real thing. Somebody is about to pop a nuke.”

  “That’s us right?” The voice was trembling.

  “I sure do hope so. Hokay, brace for nuclear initiation procedures.” She leaned forward and cushioned her head on her forearms. Surreptitiously, she rubbed her breasts, quietly wishing she was back with her old tank crew. They’d been a small, self-contained little community, one where the Army had got mixing compatible people up right for once. And hitting herself on the cupola ring had really hurt.

  What happened next was eerie. There was no sound, no warning, no movement, but from every crack and crevice in the tank, a pure, blinding white light poured in beams that had an almost tangible quality to them. Dust mites hanging in the air were brilliantly spotlighted, swirling in patterns that defied any easy analysis. The tank was supposed to be airtight and leakproof but the light was strong enough to show how wrong that belief was, The holes were no greater than pinpoints in size yet there was enough light coming through them to illuminate the whole of the inside of the tank. It caught in people’s hair, making them seem as if they were crowned with halos of pure light. Braced in her Commander’s seat, Stevenson was counting seconds in an effort to work out how far away the initiation had been.

  She’d reached one minute and thirteen seconds when the tank was hit by what felt like an underground sledgehammer. The ground wave, she thought. The egg-heads will learn all sorts of stuff from that. The irrelevance of the thought surprised her. The front of the tank was lifting with the ground shock, then her head slammed forward as it dropped. She hadn’t felt anything like this since she’d been taken to an amusement park for her birthday and had insisted on trying the roller-coaster ride. This had all the characteristics of that ride, only the tank was shaking violently as well. The three-dimensional movement made her feel violently ill, another phenomenon reminiscent of the ride she had taken so many years ago. The only difference was that this time she wasn’t filled up with cotton-candy to make sickness a reality. All around her the air was filling with dust, the red dust from Hell, the yellow sand from Iraq, the brown grit from wherever it was in the States that this tank had come from. Instinctively, with the conditioned reflex of a First-Life human who had spent a lot of time in Hell, she clapped her bandanna over her nose and mouth. Anything to avoid breathing in the pumice. Unfortunately, her gunner misunderstood the movement, decided that if his Colonel could be sick, so could he and vomited all over the main gun.

  “You’ll clean that up.” Stevenson was in no mood for the smell in her tank while the violent shaking continued. Then, to her immense relief, the vicious movement subsided. Her mind was still ticking away the seconds. One minute and forty three seconds since the flash of light, roughly 23 miles from Ground Zero. General Dynamics Land Systems, just how big was the nuke to give a ground wave like that this far out? Then, the air-wave and sound of the blast hit. The 70 ton tank was lifted slightly, the how
ling blast-wave catching the barrel and causing the turret to turn against the gears that rotated it. Stevenson could feel the heat rising in the tank, and the air conditioning laboring to keep conditions under control. Even with that aid, she could feel herself sweating and that was when she realized what she could hear wasn’t air conditioning, it was the tanks positive pressure system trying to ensure that the air pressure in the tank was higher than that outside. Only, the air pressure sensor was trying to cope with conditions that the tank designers had considered only in their worst nightmares and the positive pressure system was working overtime to match. Stevenson felt her ears pop as the pressure climbed.

  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the shockwave was past. The tank radio crackled into life, ordering everybody to remain under cover while the surrounding area was checked for radioactive contamination. Stevenson sat back in her seat, then opened up the tank’s electro-optical system to see what was going on. What she saw made her catch her breath. On the horizon was the familiar mushroom cloud. It was no longer glowing, she’d missed that part of the display but it was still a dull reddish color in hue. Just like Hell, she thought. She couldn’t see the top of the cloud, from her knowledge of nuclear weapons she guessed it was at least 12 miles high, extending well into the stratosphere and far beyond the elevation limit of her equipment. As she watched, she saw the great mushroom cloud slowly turning white as it cooled and started to absorb moisture from the air around it. The thermal currents and winds were already interacting to wrap the mushroom cloud in a strange, impressive and incredibly beautiful system of cloud layers.

  It had all the fascination of a train wreck. Stevenson wanted to look away from the great cloud but couldn’t. For a brief second she thought there had been another initiation and started to duck away to save her sight but then she realized it was just lightning. The massive electrical charges in the atmosphere from the initiation plus all that condensing water vapor was a perfect breeding ground for thunderstorms. There would be tornados as well, all around the blast area. Idly, she wondered if Heaven had ever seen tornados before.