by Stuart Slade
The DVDs he'd seen had been particularly illuminating. He'd had no idea how ferocious humans were to each other, and the scale of the battles that had raged across the human world even in the last century – the last few days, to him – stunned him. How had they come so far in so little time? He'd seen lines of chariots – trucks – stretching for miles, throwing their projectiles into the air all at once. The sound was familiar to him, the thumping of artillery and the scream of inbound shells and rockets. They still took him back to the battlefield in the human world, where he'd watched his army disintegrate around him; he still had nightmares about that.
He'd seen lines of trenches, with humans running about in them – and in between them, a charred, muddy, churned-up wasteland that was as bad as anything in the Pit. Coils of razor wire criss-crossed that little hell, and guns crashed and chattered across while artillery lobbed back and forth. Once, he saw a flood of humans boil up out of one trench and charge into the hell, only to be scythed down. One had made it back to the trench.
He'd seen a coastline lined by razor wire and huge guns, and the dawn bring with it a sea of iron – boats as far as the eye could see, all firing at once, as people once more charged bravely into the crossfire from small boats that scuttled like beetles up to the beach.
He'd seen the view from above of a jungle wasteland with craters evenly spaced as far as the eye could see, as a line of explosions marched up the screen. The trees looked like grass, and the people running about looked like ants.
Abigor shook his head again. The myriad, creative ways humans had found to destroy their enemies were mind-boggling. Then a strange thought came to his mind, based around the way the humans had suddenly changed from a primitive mob that was just walking meat to a demonic army to the pitiless killers against whom no demonic army could stand. Oh, Abigor had heard the guns thundering, tens of leagues away as a human army stood against the sledgehammer blows of the combined armies of Asmodeus and Beelzebub, and in his mind’s eye he could see what was already happening, the demonic horde screaming and dying under the pounding of the human guns. One of his books had expressed it so well, ‘Artillery is the King of War, Infantry is the Queen of the Battlefield. And it is well known what the King does to the Queen.’
Abigor shook his head, it had all happened so suddenly. Three centuries from helpless victims to the Lords of War. Unnaturally quickly. Had there been another hand here? The way the humans had fought each other, each set of wars driving their weapons technology further forward and setting the conditions for the next set. As if humans were being trained to fight, bred to destroy both Satan and Yahweh. Abigor could see now why Yahweh had washed his hands of them, the human’s driving need to know had caused them to reject his teachings and ready-made answers in favor of finding their own. They had even laughed at Yahweh’s pronouncements, and dared his prophets to “prove” their doctrine. When the prophets and true believers had repeated Yahweh’s rulings, they’d been faced with the human battle-cry ‘prove it’ and ridiculed the prophets with evidence of the truth. There was even a slogan they used for such contests, one Abigor had spotted somewhere. “Science, and mockery of stupid people.” It was quite clear who they meant by the stupid people bit, Yahweh himself. No wonder he had been annoyed with them
Humans couldn’t have done it by themselves could they? Surely they must have had help. Were there others whose hands were involved here, perhaps the others who had once held sway on Earth but had been driven out by Yahweh and Satan? Their hand was still present, Abigor knew that, there were a small number of humans who were protected by them, who lived in Hell but were free of its torments. Had they trained humanity to become the Lords of War who would drive both Satan and Yahweh away from Earth?
This was worth further thought, but one thing was bothering him. This artistic destruction, he had all experienced. All save the use of aircraft, but that did not create much more destruction than the pounding artillery had. What had the Colonel meant when he'd said that Abigor had not even begun to see what humans could do when they put their minds to it? On his right lay a single DVD case. He picked it up, delicately opening it with his claws, and popped the DVD into the player. The large screen in front of him went from off to blue to black with white letters: THE MANHATTEN PROJECT.
The first part of the video, Abigor didn't understand. It was about things called “Adams” – wasn't Adam the first human to come to hell? He was still in Satan's palace in a little cage, if Abigor remembered correctly.
Then came the first pictures of what humans did with these Adams, and Abigor became very interested. He became very interested indeed.
An hour later, Abigor was sitting on his couch, mouth agape, staring at the screen as the credits rolled by. What sort of gods were the humans, to be able to destroy a city with a single bomb? He closed his mouth, then shook his head. A single bomb, capable of annihilating an entire city. An entire army would be nothing. They had played with him, when they could have destroyed him and everyone with him with ease.
Suddenly, the part of his mind that had been bothering him since his defection, the part that continually accused him of treason, became quieter and smaller. A lot quieter, and a lot smaller. There was no doubt that the humans were going to win this, no doubt at all. He saw it now: the humans were deploying just enough firepower to utterly destroy whatever was sent at them, waiting, keeping their cards in reserve, watching their enemies to see how they reacted. So simple, so logical, so utterly unconventional.
There was a knock at the door, and Abigor looked up. It opened, and a languid man walked in, flanked by two soldiers carrying nasty-looking guns – shotguns, Abigor recognized now. The lights in the ceiling seemed to flicker a little bit, casting a slightly dimmer glow. The man looked familiar, then Abigor placed him: he'd come a few days earlier to interrogate Abigor about the city of Dis and possible military targets.
“General Abigor, I'm pleased to see you again.” The voice was flat, uninflected, almost disinterested.
“Likewise.”
The visitor took a thick piece of rolled parchment from under his arm and spread it out on the table. “General, would you mind coming here to look at this?” Phrased as a request, there was no doubt it was a command.
Abigor rose and stepped over to the table, looked down. It was a copy of the map of Dis he'd looked at earlier, but now there was a set of red concentric shapes drawn on it, basically circles but strangely distorted. The shapes were colored successively darker toward the center but the relationship was strange, distorted, darkening quickly where they overlapped, sometimes dramatically so. Some of the shapes were arranged in neat triangles. And in the center of those formations, the area of darkest red was horribly large and terrifyingly dark.
His hair was standing on end as he looked down at the map. The shapes and patterns went on and on, so that the city was completely covered by the circles. Satan's palace, on the fortified spur that stuck out into the Pit, was invisible under the triangles of overlapping circles. What could the circles mean? There was only one explanation – and it came from the DVD he had just watched and Abigor suddenly knew why it had been given to him. It made all the pieces began to fall into place. The humans could destroy whole cities with single bombs, and they had shown they could do so without any compunction. Dis wasn’t the only city in Hell, but it was the largest and it was the administrative center for the whole of Hell. Why would a city be a target? Hadn’t Belial just destroyed a human city with his party tricks? Was this to be the human revenge? With a rising wave of bile in his throat, Abigor began to suspect what the shapes and colors meant.
“General Abigor, what do you make of this map?” asked the Targeteer.
“It seems that… that this is a map of the destruction caused by the explosion of atomic bombs to the city of Dis.”
The visitor raised one eyebrow. “Very good, General, though we call them 'devices', not 'bombs' and they ‘initiate’ not ‘explode’. Technically, a nuclear i
nitiation isn’t an explosion. These circles represent the overpressure radii of each individual initiation, they’ll all be taking place at once by the way. As I'm sure you learned, one way our devices bring about the destruction of their targets is shockwave caused by the initiation; the shockwave is measured by over-pressure. Where patterns overlap, the over-pressure increases dramatically. Terrain is critically important as well, the shockwave will be channeled by some features, reflected by others. Where it is channeled, it will extend further in one direction at the expense of others. Where it is reflected, it will cause no damage beyond the point of reflection but destruction before that point will be multiplied many times over.
“As is our way, we targeted only military installations – the barracks, production centers, command and control points, administrative buildings and so on – but you can see that the installations are so densely concentrated in the city, the city would be destroyed by such an attack. No part of the city is subject to a shockwave of less than 5 psi overpressure; such strength guarantees the destruction of all but the most hardened targets. Most of the city, more than 90 percent of that will suffer from overpressures an order of magnitude greater.
“We did need to use very high-yield devices in ground bursts to destroy the most hardened targets. These are the earthworks and the walls which surround the city. We suspect that the construction of the buildings is so poor that the ground wave caused by the destruction of the walls would destroy the city anyway. Of course, blast is just one way a nuclear device destroys its target. There is also light flash which will blind every unprepared person for tens of miles, and fire. Another map for you, this one shows the anticipated firestorms. You’ve seen those films of what a firestorm in a city can be like? You can expect winds approaching 200 miles per hour, heat levels so high that it will melt steel let alone bronze, the fires will suck all the oxygen out of the air and the people trapped in the wreckage of Dis will asphyxiate. Finally, there’s direct radiation as well, but that isn’t a factor, after somebody has been reduced to the size, shape and appearance of a McDonald’s hamburger by blast, fire and debris, irradiating them as well is a mere technicality. Of course, that doesn’t cover fallout. The ground bursts will create horrible levels of contamination. Normally we wouldn’t worry too much about fallout from air bursts but the atmosphere here is so dusty, even air bursts are going to generate a lot of fallout as well.”
“So,” said Abigor flatly, “you will destroy Dis.”
“No, we needed to create a plan to destroy Dis, but it is just a contingency plan.”
“Then why are you showing this to me?”
“Because, General, you need to know what we can do – what we are willing to do. The destruction of Dis would take the lives of nearly every demon living there. It would leave no building standing, and in its wake there would be giant radioactive firestorms. After the fires died, there would be nothing of Dis left save craters; what was once a city would become a charred, radioactive wasteland. Nobody, human or demon, would live there for ten thousand years.
“We can do that, General. And we would be right to do that, after how your people have treated us in the past. Demons have enslaved humans, treated them as cattle, eaten them, and tortured them for thousands of years. As a professional, its not my job to make moral judgments on the people whose destruction I plan. But, just for once, I’m going to indulge myself. A quick death in nuclear fire is the least that your race deserves.
“But we are magnanimous in victory, General, as you know. We fight to win, but once we have won we strive for peace. If there are other options that make this plan as superfluous as all the others I have drawn up over the years, then we will prefer to use them. But I warn you, we can be pushed too far for that. This map.” He tapped it with a finger. “Is still not the worst we can do. General, if you really anger us, we will try and bring democracy to your country.”
“I see.” Abigor frowned down at the map, trying to picture the bustling city he'd known for dozens of thousands of years as a charred, smoking wasteland, trying to picture the city vanishing in a series of impossibly bright flashes. And if that was so, what was this other hideous threat? Yet he had a strange feeling there was something he didn’t quite understand because the last remark had made the two soldiers in the room grin broadly. “Who are you. What are you.”
“People call us many things. Targeteers, Contractors, The Business, The Wizards of Armageddon. The last was intended as an insult but we rather like it. And, of course, it has turned out to be a much more accurate description than its author realized.”
Abigor sighed. “You must be a great General then.”
“Actually, I’m not in the armed forces at all, in fact I never have been. I’m a civilian who is employed by a consultancy company, something we call a think-tank, to do analytical work. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for more than 25 years.”
“To do this for years. Then I can assume your plans are…. complete.”
“Then you understand.” A statement, not a question. The Targeteer began to roll up the map. “Thank you for your time, General Abigor. I am sure we will meet again.” The two soldiers escorted him from the room, and Abigor's hair began to lay down. Outside the room, the thunder of artillery had never ceased but now Abigor put it into its true perspective. It was indeed just a pale shadow of what humans could do when they wanted to. He glanced at the door after the man, then looked again. He could have sworn those plants were green and flowering before the man had come in.
Thank's to Surlethe for these two sections. Now, back to the battles…
Chapter Fifty Nine
Coach Insignia Restaurant, Renaissance Center, Downtown Detroit
Gloria Hurst clearly remembered her first trip to Renaissance Center, three decades ago. The gleaming complex of glass and metal towers had promised a fresh start for the city, still struggling to get over the stigma the 1967 riots had created. The 80s rolled around and the dreams of a regenerated Detroit never came to pass; outside of the little oasis of ‘civilization’ the corporations had built, the slums had just continued to decay. Jobs kept leaving and never seemed to come back, buildings crumbled and the criminals seemed to multiply . So many times she’d thought of selling up and moving out, but somehow she’d never had the heart to leave. Her children had never understood that, particularly after her house had been robbed twice in the same month.
The war had almost come as a relief. All the plants still open were running at full capacity and many of the closed ones were being reopened. The roads were clogged with buses (only the gas rationing had forestalled gridlock) and downtown the crowds were thicker than ever. Still, Gloria’s own neighborhood had hardly changed. All the attention was on places like Sterling Heights and Livonia, where the remaining plants were. As for the suburbs, she’d heard that the government had been requisitioning all the foreclosed McMansions and subdividing them to create cheap worker accommodation. She imagined the look on the faces of the homeowners association and laughed.
However the ring of slums between downtown and the industrial belt was being ignored, if anything there was even less interest in regenerating it now that war production was at the top of everyone’s minds. Gloria sighed. At least the muggers were keeping a low profile. The cops weren’t playing catch-and-release any more, the ones who got arrested tended to be drafted and the ones who fought back usually got splattered by the huge guns all the cops were carrying now.
“Granny!” The young boy’s voice roused Gloria from her thoughts. Ah, there they were, her eldest son and his family, come to visit her at last. “Granny, what’s that?” Her grandson was staring out the windows, which had a fine view of the city due to their location near the top of the city's tallest skyscraper. The boy seemed to be pointing at something near the horizon. Gloria turned stiffly in her chair and strained to focus on the distant buildings. There was an odd flickering over an intersection, perhaps two miles to the north, and a glint that seemed to co
me from something falling out of the sky. Her heart beat faster as she realized that the irregular, chattering roar that had been slowly building was the sound of many, many guns being fired. Was it the demons? Had the army shot down a demon? The sound of gunfire died away. Several people were standing at the windows now, asking out loud the same questions she was thinking.
The molten rock literally exploded out of nowhere, the unstable portal hurling great sprays of magma in every direction. Many who’d seen the images of the portal opening over Sheffield had remarked on the eerie beauty of the hellish fountain, unfolding in its first few seconds like a giant deadly firework. This attack was different, a raging beast that seemed to lashed out at random without symmetry or reason. Gloria winced as the first gouts of lava reached the bottom of their arcs, smashing into buildings with a spray of fire and rubble. The freeway intersection collapsed and disappeared in a vast cloud of smoke, peppered with tiny gouts of fire as gasoline flash-vaporized and exploded. For a full ten seconds the scene unfolded in silence, save for the screams and yells of the people in the restaurant. Glasses and plates began to rattle and fell as the first seismic vibrations made their way up the building. Then the shockwave hit, an overpowering roar overlaid on a deep rumble that seemed to grab Gloria’s guts and shake them in her torso.
“We’ve got to get out of here! Mom, come on, let’s go!” Her son had grabbed her shoulders and was trying to pull her up.
“Lawrence. Lawrence! Look at that crowd.” Lunchtime was the busiest period for the Coach Insignia and now it seemed that nearly everyone was trying to jam themselves through the doors at once. Some of the staff were shouting, gesturing, trying to control the flow but without much success.