Armageddon?? (79 page)

“Bratischka,
many times we have said that the spirits of our ancestors look down upon us but
this time, it is true. They are there, Bratischka, there beyond the river.
There, the heroes who defended the Bagration flèches, who fought to hold Port
Arthur, who defended the Rodina against the Germans, they wait for us. There
our gallant comrades who held the ruins of Stalingrad, who broke the fascist
beast on the fields of Kursk and who chased him all the way back to his lair in
Berlin, they wait for us. Everything we have we owe to them, everything we are,
is because they sacrificed everything for us. Now it our turn to fight and make
whatever sacrifices we must in order to repay our debt to them. Now it is our
turn to break the armies of hell on our armor and send them scurrying away under
the lash of our guns. Bratischka, the Americans won a great victory in the
desert of Iraq fighting these same enemies. Can we show ourselves to be less
than them? I say no! I say we should show the Americans how a Russian Army
fights! I say we should score such a victory today that the world will be in
awe of our power and the enemy shall tremble at the thought of fighting us
again!”

Lieutenant
Anatolii Ivanovich Pas'kov, standing on the back of the BMP-2 armored personnel
carrier, looked down at the cheering men in his little command. Three BMP-2s,
one Tungaska air defense system. Not so much as things went but one of hundreds
of dug-in strong points that defended the front. Miles deep, each strongpoint
covering the others so not one inch of ground was left unswept by heavy
automatic weapons. The BMPs had been modified, they each had two AGS-17 grenade
machine guns mounted on their rear decking to provide that extra bit of
close-in firepower. Outside the earth banks, the ground was covered with wire
entanglements and under them were the mines, hundreds of thousands of them. As
a final thought, the river banks were criss-crossed with trenches, each
carefully calculated to be deep enough and wide enough to catch a
rhino-lobster’s hooves and send it sprawling on to the ground.

And
far to the rear was the Final Argument. Artillery. Guns were lined up in a
density unheard of since Zhukov and Koniev had raced to capture Berlin. In
fact, some of the guns had fought at the Battle of Berlin and had been taken
out of the storage where they had slept for so many years. Guns, 122mm and
upwards, salvo rocket launchers and the short range ballistic missiles that
could deliver their own special kind of hell. Further behind them were the
aircraft, British, American, Russian, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, other nations
too many to remember. All brought together to do one thing. To turn this
stretch of the river into a killing ground the like of which had never been
seen before.

Piquette
Street, Detroit, Michigan

The
tremors, the voices, the migraines; Donnie Cook was used to all of these.
Indeed in the long, agonizing periods between hits, he had often fancied
himself to already be in hell. For three years now heroin had been his demon,
the black tar forcing him to beg, to steal, to prey on the unwary, whatever it
took to keep the craving at bay. Now all that seemed like just the warm-up.
Hell had come to him and made him its own.

Donnie
stumbled through the abandoned factory, his emaciated body moving with the jerkiness
of a puppet. In truth Baron Zatheoplekkar was having some trouble controlling
the human; its whole nervous system seemed to be warped and damaged by the many
cocktails of poisons it had consumed. To the demon it almost seemed that to
kill this pathetic creature would be doing it a favor, and that quite took the
fun out of it.

The
man’s wasted form jerked to a halt in the centre of the ground floor, the
puppet-master seemingly satisfied that the ruined building was deserted. For
over a minutes he just stood there, twitching and staring wildly. At last the
black disc of the portal swelled into existence, briefly surrounded by a carpet
of tiny sparks as the wash of energy hit the rusting junk littering the floor.
The gorilla-like forms of lesser demons began to emerge from the blackness,
their tridents held low as they fanned out through the structure. Another
minute passed before a single final creature emerged, closer to human in form
if one could ignore the writhing hairlike tentacles and great folded wings.

To
Donnie the creature seemed anorexically thin, yet moved with a flowing grace
that only heightened the sense of being faced by a deadly humanoid snake. The
female demon was within an arm’s length of him now and her stare bored into
him. Fight fought flight as he alternately wanted to scream and run, or club
and stab the monstrosity, but all he managed was a series of low moans. Animal
yelps and screams echoed off the crumbling walls before cutting off sharply.

Megaaeraholrakni
cocked her head at the approach of the strike leader. “I ssee that they are
jusst as pathetic on thiss plane as they are in the miness.” Her imperious gaze
switched from the possessed human to the demon. “No others witnesssed my
arrival?”

“No
humans here, gorgon. Just those.” He gestured at a pair of his demons
approaching with the broken bodies of stray dogs dangling from their claws.
Their expressions showed a clear disappointment at the lack of fresh human meat
on this mission, but a determination to make the most of it anyway. “A fitting
audience for your grand entrance.”

The
gorgon hissed and thrust out her arm at the insolent demon. A bright bolt leapt
from her claws and stuck the strike leader, leaving him reeling and roaring
defiance. “Go! Before I fry the lot of you!” Megaaeraholrakni screamed, her
form glowing with witchfire. She exchanged a long stare with her opponent
before he decided that it wasn't worth risking the count's wrath. At a silent
signal from their commander the growling lesser demons began to file back
through the black disc and disappear. “And take that wretch with you!” The last
demon in line dragged the human through the portal, which promptly shimmered
and vanished.

Her
flickering aura relaxed as Megaaeraholrakni released the psychic force. In
truth, she could not have done much more; her kind were not built to fling
lightning the way the naga were and it had taken her millennia of practice just
to achieve the limited aptitude she had. No need for lesser beings to know that
of course. She made her way to the staircase and from there to the highest
floor of the crumbling building (a disused storehouse perhaps? she couldn’t
tell and didn’t particularly care). A large section had collapsed completely,
revealing a panorama filled by more nondescript boxy buildings, all made of the
humans' odd artificial stone and many in a similar state of disrepair.

Like
Lakheenahuknaasi before her, she recoiled in distaste from the telepathic
clamor which filled the humans realm. Megaaeraholrakni was undeniably the
superior witch though, or perhaps just less interested in comprehending the
human babble, for within ten seconds she had pushed through the barrier to
contact her waiting queen. It was time for this place to burn, so that this
silly rebellion could end and she could get back to her studies.

Free
Hell, Banks of the River Styx, Fifth Circle, Hell

You
Are Now Entering Free Hell

The
sign meant that they’d done it. For the first time in its history, there was an
area of Hell where humans ruled. After the assassination of Asmodeus, the
baldricks had stopped their advance and dug in. A de-facto border now existed,
on one side of it the Baldricks continued their network of fortifications, on
the other, humans had established their own administration. An uneasy truce
existed between them, one that could be summarized from the human point of view
as “don’t put your hoof over the border and we won’t blow it off”. It seemed
like a small, practical agreement but in an insurgency there was no such thing
as a small agreement between the government and the insurgents. Any agreement
at all reflected a level of equality between insurgents and authorities and
that made it an epoch-defining defeat for the baldricks. They’d been forced to
deal with the dead humans as equals and concede ground to them.

“Friend,
if I could speak with thee for a moment. I have a request for thine attention.”

The
archaic language snapped Captain (deceased) Jade Kim's attention back to the
reality of Free Hell. For a moment, she thought that it was one of the
recovered dead, but the breathing mask showed it was a volunteer from Earth,
one who had come to help with the task of finding the victims of this place and
rescuing them. Behind him she could see another one of the crosses being hauled
out of the swamp and figures starting to work, freeing the poor soul attached
to it. Kim remembered her own time nailed to a cross and drowning in sewage and
she shuddered.

“There’s
a problem?”

“There
is friend. Many have been rescued from the swamps and have recovered enough to
travel. Some wish to stay here with thee to fight.” The speaker’s voice showed
his dislike of that concept. “Others, they wish to leave this place. Can thou
contact earth and arrange a way out for them?”

Kim
relaxed, this had been anticipated. “Some don’t like our company huh? They know
they can’t survive on Earth, right?”

“They
have been told this, yes. And they understand but still wish to leave.”

“Well,
they can. The plan is we’ll portal them back to Earth and then they’ll be relayed
straight back to an area of Hell that’s under human control.” To her amusement,
her companion looked around in alarm. “No, not like this one. We’re holding a
pretty big area between the Phlegethon River and the sea, its called the
Martial Plain of Dysprosium. There’s refugee camps being set up in there for
the people we rescue. They’ll be looked after until we’ve won. I have no idea
what will happen then, I don’t think anybody has. The catch is, I can’t contact
out, DIMO(N) has to contact me. We have a schedule for that. Next contact is in
a few hours, get the evacuees ready to move then.”

“Thou
are kind. Thank you.”

The
man turned to leave but Kim was seized with curiosity. “Excuse me, but could I
ask a question of you. A personal one?”

“Certainly
friend. I will answer if I can.”

“How
come you people didn’t just die when we got The Message. A lot of religious
people did, too many of course. But none of your people. Why?”

He
smiled gently beneath his mask. “Friend, hast thou ever heard of Testimony of
Integrity?” Kim shook her head. “It is one of our central beliefs. It says that
we should always tell the truth but it means more than that. It means we should
always deal fairly with people, we do not believe we should trick others by
making statements that are technically true but whose meaning is false. It is
our belief that this is how God deals with us and we deal with others. When The
Message came, it did so as an inner revelation at our meetings. Those who
received it stood to testify but at once there were doubts as to whether this
was a true revelation for it ran against the Testimony of Integrity. How could
a God who had for so long demanded we base our lives around the concept of fair
dealing countenance such an enormous betrayal? Surely this could not be so and
The Message was a trick, perhaps by Satan himself. So our meetings all decided
to wait and see what would happen. Then the fighting started, we saw the
baldricks invade and we heard what they did. We still do not believe that The
Message came from Our God but it does not matter. The Message was true and we
must wait to see what the whole truth is. Before then, our beliefs, the
Testimony of Peace does not allow us to fight but it does allow us to come here
and aid those who have suffered for all too long. So here we are.”

Rather
you than me Kim thought to herself. Better to fight baldricks that spend the
time here scrambling around in the mud, finding the souls in torment here then
rescuing them. Unconsciously she shifted the M115 on her shoulder. Especially
since modern weapons gave her such an enormous advantage over her enemies. The
baldricks had numbers but even that advantage would fade as more and more souls
were liberated from the torment in which they were held. And that, of course, raised
issues all of its own.

Her
thoughts were interrupted by a long rolling thunder, one that was very far away
yet she could still feel the vibrations through her feet. Her companion was
standing politely beside her, waiting for her to speak again, but the sound
made him glance up.

“I
did not know that there were thunderstorms in this place.”

“There
are not.” Kim spoke absently. “That’s artillery fire.”

Chapter
Fifty Six

Command
Post, Northern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge, Hell

“My
Lord, this is against all our traditions.”

“And
humans fighting back is not? If they defeated Abigor, then they are adversaries
worthy of note. Abigor’s description of the great battle was quite clear, the
Beast charge at the start of the fighting was a disaster for his cavalry. We
must learn from those mistakes. Even if we can never admit the source of our
learning.”

Lapradanultrox
looked out across the array of forces now moving down on the northern flank of
the great bulge in the Phlegethon river. The sight was a strange one to demonic
eyes, the great square blocks of the legions divided into much smaller groups.
Even more oddly, the cavalry legions had been completely broken up, dispersed
amongst the infantry. One Beast supporting each group of 27 foot-soldiers.
Behind the hills that ranged along the river, the great flock of harpies,
almost 180,000 of them were waiting to launch their attack. This was also
unprecedented, the mores of demonic warfare were clearly established. The
Harpies reconnoitered to find the enemy, the Beasts charged to crack a hole in
the enemy defenses, the infantry closed to destroy the broken army.