Armageddon??

by Stuart Slade

  “On your word Tovarish General, just give us the word. Good news, the air is clear up where they are, they can hold up there for longer than we thought. And in the South?”

  “Bad. The enemy there are half way through our defense zone. They are paying a terrible price but they have naga carried by Rhinolobsters that are very effective and the Wyverns have done us some harm. But our artillery hit the nagas with white phosphorus and the Wyverns are no match for fighters. The advance there will run out of power soon. But we might need to counter-attack them before they can break through. It will be a finely-judged thing, whether their advance runs out of energy before we stop them.”

  “The German and Israeli armored divisions are well placed for that. Order them to make the attack.” Petraeus hesitated for a brief second. “Make sure the Israeli unit has plenty of space around it.”

  Dorokhov frowned. “You expect treachery? Surely not.”

  “Not treachery, stupidity. The Israelis are too trigger-happy for their own good. They will not shoot up one of our own units deliberately but they are all too likely to do so by accident. We know that to our cost. It would be best to give them an end-run so they are well clear of the rest of your forces. Get them over the Phlegethon so the rest of us are safe.”

  The Russian General laughed. “Good advice Tovarish David. You heard the enemy used burning brimstone on our troops? Well, know we will show them what we can do when we wish.”

  “Weapons Are Free General. And give us the word when you want the Gray Lady to come calling.”

  Over the Northern Front, Phlegethon River

  It had many names. Some called it 2-(Fluoro-methylphosphoryl)oxypropane, others preferred O-isopropyl methylphosphonofluoridate. The military eschewed such long-winded nomenclatures and just called it GB. The world at large knew it as Sarin.

  The great black rockets with their gaudy yellow markings had been launched all down the line. This is what they had been waiting for, when their ability to saturate an area with fire could be turned to best advantage. As the rockets had started to descend, the outer casing had been discarded and the ranks of submunitions had been exposed. Further down, those submunitions had started to be launched and they had formed a spreading pattern that resembled a great shotgun blast. It was the same mechanism that the Americans had used to bring down the hideous steel rain that had destroyed Abigor’s Army. Only this time, when the submunitions detonated they didn’t bring down a curtain of steel fragments or blast from shaped-charge munitions. First they started to spin and the action mixed the charges of methylphosphonyl difluoride and a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and isopropyl amine. They reacted to form the Sarin and then the submunitions burst to release a fine gentle rain, one that none of the screaming hordes of harpies below even noticed for the liquid was colorless and odorless. The only thing that Beelzebub and his Army did notice was that the human mage-fire that was pounding the bank of the Phlegethon furthest from the Russian positions had ceased.

  Every so often, in a battle, for no apparent reason, the noise stops. The gunfire, the roar of the artillery, the growls, whines and snarls of engines, the demented shriek of depleted uranium bolts hitting steel armor, the crackling grumble of fires, the screams of dying men stop and there is an eerie silence. So it was as the Sarin descended on the positions under harpy attack. The Russian guns stopped firing so that the passage of their shells through the air would not disturb the blanket of chemical warfare agent that had been so carefully calculated. Beneath, the Russian motor rifle units were sealing down, hoping that the overpressure systems on their vehicles had survived the harpies and that their chemical warfare suits were proof against the gas. In case it wasn’t they had their atropine injectors ready but the truth was that even if they used them the gas would wreck their bodies. With atropine they would survive but they would never again be the men they had been once.

  Uxaligantivaris concentrated on the Iron Chariot that was under her claws. She and her companions were ripping at it with their claws and breathing fire over it as fast as their bodies could recharge their gas sacks. They had used so much of the fire-gas that they had lost the ability to fly but it didn’t matter that much. All that mattered was to keep the Iron Chariots under attack so that the foot soldiers following them could destroy the defenses. Then she shook her head slightly, Hell was a dim place, its light levels low and subdued but suddenly she could see everything was becoming bright and clear to her. So bright that the light was hurting her eyes in a way that she had never experienced before. She looked at another harpy that had stopped ripping at the iron projections on the chariot and saw that her flight-mate’s eyes were strange, the slitted black pupil had contracted to a fine line, almost invisible in the yellow of her eyes. Her nose was running, mucus streaming out of it and coating her chest. Uxaligantivaris touched her own nose and realized that she too was streaming fluids from her nose and that there was a strange tightness in her chest, as if she was having problems breathing. In fact, she realized, that was exactly it, she was having problems getting her ribs to suck air into her lungs. The effort was making her feel sick and she could feel herself drooling uncontrollably. She couldn’t help herself, she vomited helplessly and felt her body loosing strength. Across from her, the other harpies were collapsing as well, vomiting on to the Iron chariot that was now forgotten as the agony took hold of them. Her flight-mates were defecating and urinating like helpless kidling, their bodies twitching and jerking as they tried to escape the unseen thing that was inflicting this terrible end on them. Uxaligantivaris felt her muscles become paralyzed and she slipped down the side of the Iron chariot to lie on the ground spasming and writhing as the Sarin destroyed her nervous system. Eventually, what seemed like an age later, she found herself slipping into unconsciousness and never felt the series of massive convulsions that fractured her bones and tore her muscles while she died of suffocation.

  Command Post, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

  Beelzebub looked at the horrific scene with utter bewilderment. When the human magebolts had stopped hammering his forces, he had thought the battle was reaching its turning point, that the human mages had run out of their magic and that now the humans would have to fight on even terms. He’s even welcomed the eerie silence that had descended on the battlefield. He wouldn’t make that mistake again, nor would he ever forget what he was seeing. The silence was part of a human magery that went beyond anything he could even imagine, more than he had ever experienced. Not even Uriel could do what the humans had done to his harpies for in the few seconds that the silence held, his great flock, still far more than 100,000 strong started to die. Not just die, but die in horrible, unspeakable ways, twitching and convulsing in a pool of their own body wastes. Where a few second earlier the human Iron Chariots had been swamped in a sea of harpies that were slowly reducing them to burning hulks, now they stood clear, surrounded by the dying remnants of Beelzebub’s prized force of Harpies.

  That was when the silence broke for the iron chariots opened fire again, the magebolts pouring from the long staffs they carried, sending the orange-red fireflies lashing at Beelzebub’s foot soldiers on the other bank. They’d taken the quiet, the sudden end of the magebolts to try and rush the river. The forces at the back had pushed hard as they surged forward but those at the front had seen what was happening to the harpies, the terrible death that was engulfing them and they were reluctant to move. No warriors were braver or more contemptuous of death that the foot soldiers of Hell yet this magery that inflicted a silent convulsing death on its victims was hideous in a way nothing they had previously experienced could be. They hesitated and the combination of their immobility and the advance of those behind was squeezing the foot soldiers of Beelzebub’s army into a dense mass alongside the river.

  The crackle of fire from the Iron Chariots was suddenly drowned out by the roar of human magebolts slamming into his force. For a moment, Beelzebub thought that the mage barrage had started again but he w
as wrong. For off to his left, a line of eighteen great explosions had torn into one flank of his Army. They were magebolts all right but their size was greater by far than any he had seen to date. Even as he watched the first bolts swelling and bursting, another salvo landed just in front of them, and then another line just beyond them. Then, Beelzebub saw something that had never been seen in hell before, ahead of the great magebolt blasts, a shimmering wall was starting to form, a faint whitish-blue cloud that strengthened with every salvo of bolts that landed and started to race across the crowded mass of his foot soldiers. The great orange and black balls of fire and smoke marched along behind the blue cloud. When both wall and bolts had passed, there was nothing left but bare ground and chewed soil.

  It wasn’t magical of course, it was just a matter of physics and the great bomb bays of the Gray Lady. The first of the 750 pound bombs that had poured from them had hit the ground more or less where they had been aimed, hell’s atmosphere was dust-gorged and murky but it also lacked the strong winds that distinguished Earth. For the Gray Lady, this was an easy assignment. The bombs had exploded and created a blast wave that had spread out in a hemispherical pattern from the impact point. Sideways, each blast wave had merged with the other 17 in that particular line to form a long cylinder, fronted by the shockwave and centered by a whirlwind of fire and steel fragments. Normally, with a few bombs, the blast wave would spread and dissipate but this was the Gray Lady and her wrath was terrible. The next salvo of 750 pound bombs, released by the intervalometers in the B-52s at a carefully chosen interval, hit the ground just behind that advancing shockwave, adding its own fury to the wave that was racing across the ground. The third salvo did the same, each series of blasts adding its own power to the shockwave that built up in power with every series of bombs that pounded Beelzebub’s helpless foot soldiers. The shock wave wasn’t just the power of one bomb, it was the power of all of them added together, a cumulative effect that turned blast into a solid, irresistible and strangely beautiful wall that nothing human or demon could withstand. By the tenth bomb, the blast wave was invincible and there were seventy more to come before the second wave of B-52s took over and added their loads to the holocaust that was consuming Beelzebub’s army.

  High overhead, so high where she couldn’t be seen or heard from the ground, the Gray Lady wrought death and destruction on the forces gathered below, an apocalyptic catastrophe that hell and its inhabitants had never even conceived. Watching from his hilltop as his army was consumed, Beelzebub at last understood what humans could do when they decided to stop playing with their enemies.

  Chapter Sixty Four

  Free Hell, Swamps by the River Styx, Fifth Ring of Hell

  Human laughter was not a common commodity in hell. Demonic laughter was, but human mirth was rare in the extreme. So, the sound of three humans laughing uproariously struck Lieutenant (deceased) Jade Kim as worth investigating. Even as she made that decision, it struck her that she too had not laughed for a very long time.

  “Whoever these people are, they certainly got you right eh Titus?” Caesar was wiping his eyes clear of the tears that helpless laughter had caused. The three men were gathered around a small portable DVD player, one whose eight-inch screen was showing the end credits from an episode of the HBO series ‘Rome”.

  “Yeah, but Atia? She was to busy praying and trying to be sanctimonious to get up to any of that stuff. Now, if they’d said she was Fulvia….”

  “Enjoying the show gentlemen?” Kim’s voice cut through the end music.

  “Very much thank you. I was quite flattered by my depiction.” Caesar leaned back and started to sort through the disks for the next episode.

  “I wasn’t. Bit harsh I thought.” Pullo’s expression belied his words, Kim got the impression he also was impressed by the television show. “And it got my army life really wrong.”

  “That’s true Titus, you didn’t need to get drunk to do some really stupid things. You nearly got us both killed over and over again without the aid of bad wine.” Lucius Vorenus wasn’t laughing, his voice was quiet and melancholy.

  “Yeah, but if we hadn’t kept going, the gods wouldn’t have taken a fancy to us and we wouldn’t have gained their protection here would we.” Pullo’s chin jutted out, then his voice softened. “They got Niobe right didn’t they.”

  Vorenus nodded. “She didn’t have to do it. If I hadn’t lost my temper, she’d would have lived.”

  “And so would I, Lucius.” Caesar’s voice was shot with mock severity. “Getting killed wasn’t in my plans for the day you know.”

  “She’s down here somewhere Lucius.” Kim tried to sound comforting. “She would have ended up here anyway as far as I can tell. We’ll find her and then you two can make your peace. If you want to.”

  That was a good point and everybody around knew it. Sooner or later it was going to have to be addressed, what would happen when couples who had been married were reunited. Would they want to be? Kim quickly considered the problems Henry VIII was likely to face and shuddered. Then she was aware of Caesar sitting close to her in an uncomfortably familiar way. That fitted what she knew of him from the histories, ‘every woman’s husband and every husband’s wife’ had been one of the ancient barbs thrown in his general direction.

  “What happened to Servilia? Did she really die like that?”

  “Nah, she outlived the lot of them.” Kim paused. “Gaius, you know what happens to women when they arrive down here?” Caesar nodded, guessing where this was going. “Well, I got all torn up inside.”

  “We all heal fast down here Jade. We’re not the same bodies we had on Earth, look the same but we’re not. Your wounds have healed.”

  “Not the ones up here.” She tapped her head. “I still feel all torn up. So, Gaius, no. Thank you, but, just, no.” Then she smiled quickly. “But I do have one thing to ask of you, personal favor?”

  “Anything for the beautiful woman who has brought hope to hell.”

  “I got my copies of ‘The Gallic War’ and ‘The Civil War’ brought through when I heard you were coming. Could you sign them for me?”

  Caesar chuckled. “Of course. I….” Then he was interrupted by McInery entering the cave, very fast.

  “Ell-tee, got a radio message came in, top urgency.” He handed over a slip with the message printed on it. Kim read it and went white.

  “Gaius, we got a problem. One of the Spec Ops teams down in the Sixth Circle has sent in a sighting report. There’s a major force of Baldricks, some 30,000 strong with about 1,500 harpies, moving along the Sixth Circle boundary towards us. They’re the other side of the wall at the moment but they can pass through the gates any point they want to. They’ll be here in two days, perhaps three.”

  The amiable smile fell from Caesar’s face and suddenly he was the military commander known to history. “They’re coming here?”

  “Pretty sure of it, nowhere else they could be going with a force like that. If they link up with the forces we have on either side of us, we got real problems.”

  “Why would they want to do that? You’ve already stalled the demons there. They’ll hit the river flank. How many men do you have?”

  “I’ve got about a hundred soldiers trained to handle modern weapons. That’s it.”

  Caesar smiled at the emphasis on ‘soldiers’ rather than ‘men’ but let it pass. “So you can’t fortify the river boundary properly. I can get some people here, a thousand or more in a day or so and five thousand in two or three, but they won’t help much.”

  “They won’t help at all, we haven’t a chance to train them to use rifles and we haven’t got the equipment for them even if we could. Humans don’t stand much of a chance against baldricks without them. Still, the river’s still on our side.”

  The comment made Caesar’s mouth twist in despair. He kept forgetting that this woman was a Lieutenant only, she was a junior officer and had the training to match. In other words, not very much. “Jade, in Gaul I threw
a bridge over the Rhine in a couple of days. The Rhine is bigger and faster flowing that the Styx. This river barrier you’re putting so much hope on counts for very little in the scheme of things. You need all your ….. soldiers …. to hold the two end flanks. You can’t defend that river as well. If the enemy has 30,000 troops coming in, you’re done. Time to get out of here.”

  “Can’t do it. We’ve got civilians here now, we have to get them out, and the dead we’ve rescued, we can’t hand them over”

  “Ell-tee, the British want a word with you, they ran the special ops team that got this warning to us. They say they have some suggestions.”

  British Expeditionary Force HQ, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

  “Are you sure this is a good idea Sir?”

  “Can you think of a better one?”

  “Honestly Sir, yes. We’ve got the lift, evacuate the place.”

  “Not good enough. Look, Colonel, Free Hell and the PFLH is about the only successful insurgency we’ve got running in Hell. Oh, the other groups are operating there, but they’ve all got tied down rescuing the prisoners and so on. Very estimable and good work but it isn’t actually fighting Hell. Only the PFLH have done that and they’re entirely an American operation. So, while the Spams run around making decisions, we do something to help the people on the sharp end. That way we get to muscle in on their operation, even take it over if everything goes right. The PFLH is run by a Lieutenant, so we send in 2 Para and its got a Colonel, you, in charge. That makes you the ranking officer on scene and puts you in command. And, once we’re in we stay in – with you in command. We’re doing them a big favor inside, that Lieutenant has done well but she’s way out of her depth. They need military expertise in there if they are going to survive.

  “We’ve got Chinooks and Merlins to lift your battalion in. You’ll have Typhoon and Tornados for escort, more Tornados and Jags to give air support one everything drops in the pot.”