Armageddon?? (84 page)

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
initiation 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 come 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.