Armageddon?? (17 page)

The
system powered down and Julie took her headset off. There was an enthusiastic
round of applause. Randi laid an approving pat on the shoulder. “Impertinence.
That was great. I guess you’ll be taking the job then Julie.”

On
the Shore of the Styx River, Fifth Ring, Hell

The
woman was crouched behind a rocky outcrop on the edge of the Styx in the fifth
circle, watching the scene unfold in front of her. Luck was an amazing thing,
wasn't it? For thousands of years, she'd been purposefully moving through hell,
taking account of the humans who suffered here – some worthy of her attention,
others, weaklings, worthy only of her contempt. Of course, given the billions
of souls – there must be billions, now – she could only rely on her instinct to
guide her. And now, this. Just as she was in the area, some new arrivals had
escaped with apparent ease, had tackled the demonic overseer with impunity,
stabbed and bludgeoned it to death with skill, and had just crucified it to the
rocks in front of her. Such open defiance was unprecedented and dangerous.

In
ten thousand years, she had learned many languages from the screams and
gibbering cries of the tormented, so with only a little difficulty she
recognized what they were saying. The woman was speaking to a man, something
about resistance. She smiled to herself. If only they knew … As they turned to
go, she stepped out from behind the rock.

"Hello!"

The
two newcomers whirled, the bronze spikes they carried up and ready. The woman
smiled and spread her arms, revealing herself unarmed. "I have seen what
you have done. Excellent work."

The
apparent leader of this group was a woman, short, already healing from the gang
rape. She gestured to her companion and he lowered his weapons, though they
still stood cautiously at the ready. All were in excellent physical shape, save
for the quickly-healing wounds and scars. "Who are you?"

"A
fellow resistance member." Suddenly, the woman felt a stab in her back
above the kidneys. She almost fainted with terror, had a demon caught her for
the spikes against her were certainly the bronze of a trident. She turned
slowly, looking over her shoulder. There were more newcomers behind her, one
armed with a cut down trident, the other with a club made from the section of
haft that had been removed. The woman was shocked, she’d been so pleased at
tracking this group, she hadn’t seen they’d spotted her and had set up an
ambush.

Now,
the leader of the group was speaking, her voice hard, cold, suspicious.
"There's already a resistance?"

"Of
course there is. There has been a resistance in Hell since it began."

"Well,
take us to its leader."

The
woman again spread her arms. "I will certainly do that. But first you must
tell me your names."

"When
we meet the leader."

"Okay.
Then follow me; we're going to the rim between the fourth and fifth
circles." And she turned and stepped into the waist-deep muck, wading past
the still-bleeding corpse of Jarakeflaxis. The six newcomers followed her at a
distance. The woman didn’t notice but two of them dropped out of sight,
following from the flanks.

Over
her shoulder, the woman said, "If I duck under the mud, you do the same.
As long as the demons on patrol don't see us, we'll be fine."

The
Tango flight members exchanged glances, that remark was more telling than the
woman had realized. It should be the demons who lived in fear. First rule of
establishing liberated area – those who stayed out of it were safe, those who
entered it, died. Obviously what she meant by resistance wasn’t what they
meant. Kim started to form a mental picture of what the resistance here really
was, probably groups of escapees hiding out, spending their time avoiding
capture. Kim had in mind something far more ambitious.

The
Galaxy Turkish Bath and Massage Parlor, Bangkok, Thailand

The
succubus slipped into the bar carefully, keeping in the dark as much as
possible. Once it had been easy to fool the humans but no more. Now fewer and
fewer of them seemed vulnerable to mind-masking. This group seemed to be
though. All women, that was good, massacring them would cause great alarm and
misery. There were a group of them by a long wooden table at the end of the
room. The succubus kept her self-image clearly in her mind, a young Asian woman
dressed as these were, short skirt, skimpy top, baseball cap perched on their
heads. A couple of women were dancing around a pole on a small stage, under a
sign that said “Coyote Dancing”. Well, they could wait until last.

The
succubus went up to the group by the table, picked the one at the end and drew
back her clawed hand ready to plunge it into her victim’s chest and tear out
her heart. Then she paused, she’d never realized quite how big a half-inch
could look when it was pointing straight at her face.

“Now,
I know what you’re thinking, can you kill me before I pull the trigger? Well,
seeing as this is a .50AE Desert Eagle, the most powerful semi-automatic hand
gun ever made, you have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky?” The
human woman chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

The
succubus looked around carefully. She was the center of a ring of gun barrels,
all aimed at her, all obeying the third law of gun-fighting – calibers measured
in inches should begin with a “.4” or greater. It was pointless, over. She let
her image drop and from the lack of shock on the faces of the women, she
realized her illusion had been just as pointless. These women had recognized
her as soon as she had entered and they’d trapped her.

“So
kill me.” She’d failed, it was hopeless. Death was the consequence of failure.

“Perhaps
not. Sit down. Don’t try anything stupid and we won’t shoot. Why did you do
this?”

“It
was my mission. Deumos sent me to seduce a leader and bend him to our will.”

“So
Deumos is your pimp.” The woman with the Desert Eagle put a mountain of disgust
into the word. “That doesn’t explain why you came here to try and kill us.”

“I
failed, we were told that politicians here were easy to seduce but I couldn’t
make mind-contact with them. I hoped killing you would buy enough favor to save
my life. People here no longer are deceived by our mind mask.” The succubus
thought for a second. “What is a pimp?”

“Somebody
who lives off the money we earn.”

“I
do not get paid.”

“Then
you’re a sex-slave?” The women in the bar were genuinely shocked. They
frequently told their tourist clients they were poor women, tricked into a life
of sin by unscrupulous brothel-owners but that was just a line to get some
sympathy-money. They were all Bangkok girls, born and bred in the city. Country
girls couldn’t compete with them and didn’t try. Not one of the girls in the
bar had ever actually met a real sex-slave.

“Aren’t
you?"

“No!”
Noi, the girl with the Desert Eagle, was horrified and insulted. “We are
business-women. We are free professionals and paid as such. Why last week I
made more money than an office lady makes in a year. Look…. What’s your name?”

“Lugasharmanaska.”

“Look
Lugasharman… do you mind if we call you Luga? Nobody has the right to go around
telling you who you can have sex with. Not unless they pay you for the trouble.
It sounds to me like this Deumos person has been treating you pretty badly. You’d
be better off staying with us that going back to him.”

“Her.
Deumos is a female. A Greater Demon.”

There
was another round of indignant snorts. “That’s disgusting. A woman treating you
like this? A man, perhaps I can understand, they always want it for free but
another woman? That’s sick. You should be free to make your own living. It’s
your body.”

“I
could make a living doing it here?” Lugasharmanaska’s voice was uneven,
curious, confused.

The
women in the bar laughed, although that didn’t affect the way they held their
guns. “You bet. A real demon whore? There’d be men lining up out the door to do
you. You could look like yourself, or like their favorite actress or whatever.
You’d make a fortune. Why a couple of months and you’d own a bar like this.
Less if an American warship pulled into Pattaya.” A chorus of happy sighs ran
around the bar. To the women, an American warship full of Walking ATMs was
their idea of the Great Cornucopia. Noi continued. “Look, Luga, last time one
American carrier pulled in for a week, I made enough money to buy a new pickup
truck. Cash down. Lin over there paid for a whole year’s college tuition for
her younger sister and Dip bought a house for her parents. How do you think we
all ended up with American guns? Tourists are profitable enough, we all make a
good living off them. And this Deumos person makes you do it for nothing. It’s
not just disgusting, its unprofessional.”

“Well
what can I do?” Lugasharmanaska almost wailed out the question.

The
girls did a quick conference. “Come with us, we’ll take you to the Army.
They’ll look after you, they know if they don’t look after our friends, they’ll
never get any in this city again. I’ll get my truck and we’ll go around to the
Cavalry Depot in Thonburi.”

Five
minutes later, one succubus and five ladies of the night were piling into Noi’s
pickup truck, Lugasharmanaska having been strongly cautioned not to scratch the
paint with her claws. A ten-minute drive took them to the depot gates where,
for the second time in an evening, Lugasharmanaska was surrounded by guns.

“Hi
boys.” Noi’s voice was bright and friendly.

“Sisters,
you do know you got a baldrick in the back there?”

“Of
course. Her name is Luga. She wants to surrender so we brought her here. We
don’t trust the police.”

“I
can understand that. I’ll have to call the Officer of the Guard.”

Another
ten minutes and the group were telling their story to the Officer of the Guard,
making it very clear that the succubus was under their protection and if she
was hurt, nobody in the Second Cavalry Division would be welcome in a Bangkok
bar again. Most of the troops had gulped at that threat and mentally promised
to guard their prisoner with their lives. Within 30 minutes, the Thai MoD was
on the telephone to Washington.

Headquarters,
Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Well,
it’s a step forward but it doesn’t really get us that far.”

“I
thought Julie did well.”

“She
did, and we told her she can use the equipment any time she likes to torment
Domiklespharatu. But its one-to-one communication. It’s using a telephone and
we want to use something like radio. We want to transmit to everybody and this
system just can’t do that. It needs a mind-pattern to lock in to, like I said,
it’s one-to-one.”

“But
baldricks can deceive large numbers of people at once.”

“Sure,
but we don’t know how. We’re a long way out from knowing that.”

The
telephone on Randi’s desk rang and he picked it up, mouthing an apology as he
did so. As he listened, his eyebrows lifted.

“Well,
this might change things. That was the Ministry of Defense in Bangkok. We’ve
got a defector.”

Tip
of the hat to Surlethe who wrote the hell section of this installment.

Chapter
Thirteen

The
Royal Dragoon Guards, Al Badiyah Al Janubiyah, Western Iraq

“How
shall a man die better than facing fearful odds?  For the ashes of his fathers
and the future of his buds.  It’s showtime boys”.

Guardsman
Bass put the tank intercom down. Like every good tank commander, he had
anticipated the order, getting his Challenger II ready to move well before the
word came down from Regimental HQ. It hadn’t taken that much anticipation in
fact, just a modicum of skill and experience. Skill and experience was
something that the long-term professionals that made up the British ranks had
in abundance. The spams may have the shiny toys, the British tankers said, but
the Brits knew how to play with them.

In
the valley below, the baldrick army was slowly extricating itself from the
tangle caused by the minefields and wire. What had started as a serried mass of
infantry was being distorted and funneled into a confused mass, made all the
worse by the pounding of the AS-90Ds. The 155mm guns were lobbing their shells
into the mass of infantry still seething through the gap in the wire torn where
the baldrick cavalry had died. They were concentrating on the mass targets but
that meant the infantry was slowly penetrating the first line of defense,
breaking through in a thin, steady stream. They were beginning to move across
the valley floor, making their way towards where the Challengers were sitting
in wait behind the rippling sand and gravel dunes.

Even
with the snarled mess down by the wire holding up the bulk of the baldricks,
Bass was appalled by the sheer number of them coming towards his position.
Intellectually, he had heard the number that was expected, nearly 100,000, but
he had never imagined what 100,000 infantry swarming towards him would look
like. Now, he knew. It was a sight few had ever seen before even where human
armies were concerned. The mass of baldrics were something that belonged out of
human prehistory.