“Safe for troop movements?”
The Targeteer thought for a second. “If we have to. Armored forces anyway. However, I would urge that we keep out troops away from the area around Ground Zero and that fallout plume. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.”
Petraeus nodded vigorously “I agree. There’s no reason to take chances with the long term health of our troops. There’s enough good ground up here to give us plenty of other options. In fact, we’ve got nothing but options. There’s no real bottlenecks we have to go through that I can see. Thank you gentlemen, I’ll study your reports in detail later. Please be available if I have any questions to ask.”
Survivors, 23 miles West of Ground Zero. Heaven
Uxhalar-Lan-Sarael stopped to vomit but his stomach was already empty and ached from the constant retching. He had suffered from diarrhea as well but now his intestines were cramping as they tried to drive non-existent waste from his body. Walking was becoming more and more tiring and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could carry on. Members of the group he had joined were dropping out all the time, collapsing by the side of the path they had been following. One of them had been the angel he had first spoken with, Ursais-Lan-Anadiel. He had seemed to have survived except for his burns and the deep lacerations from his wounds, but the white blood from his veins had continued to flow despite all efforts to stop it. The wounds had been joined by bleeding from inside when Ursais had started to vomit blood and it had seeped from his ears, nose, eyes and back passage. The constant bleeding had weakened him fast and he had collapsed by the roadside. Uxhalar had wanted to stay with him but he had died almost immediately.
Overhead, a sharp, rolling clap of thunder caused the column of survivors to look up in fear. That fear faded when they saw it was not another flash-bang weapon but simply a pair of human aircraft flying overhead. The scream of their jets followed the boom of their passage and Uxhalar saw them disappear into the distance with dull disinterest. It was a measure of the times that the human aircraft were now less of a threat than the misery they now faced. As his stomach cramped again, he seriously started to regret that the passing aircraft hadn’t turned around to bomb and strafe them. That would have been a quick release from this slow, lingering death.
“Exalted One, please do not give up. Come, we will help you.” Uxhalar felt himself being lifted up. He didn’t remember having fallen or laying in the grass but he had. A group of four humans were struggling to get him to his feet again. They lacked the strength to really help, but their devotion and the effort they were making inspired him and he staggered to his feet again. It was unbecoming for a member of the Angelic Host to thank a mere human for efforts performed on his behalf so he left them behind and once again began the laborious effort of raising his feet and taking steps further away from the horror that had destroyed this army.
He didn’t get that much further. A few hundred paces more and a fit of coughing racked his body. He made a great effort and raised his hand to his mouth, seeing on it the traces of white blood that he had coughed up. There was more splattered on the path beneath him and his mind flickered back to Ursais-Lan-Anadiel. He felt dizzy, the coughing fit had disturbed something in his mind and he tried to walk further. It was too late, his legs were no longer strong enough to support him and he collapsed again. By the time some humans tried to help him, he was dead.
Presidential Palace, City of Dis, Hell
The problem with being a Lordly Daemon was that computer keyboards were simply not large enough or strong enough to survive his use. Abigor had destroyed six keyboards before he had learned to restrain his strength sufficiently to protect them. Then, he had managed to have some keyboards made that were actually large enough so that he didn’t press all the keys down at once with a single talon-stroke. Now, with a large monitor, his own keyboard and a small but growing knowledge of what computers could do, he was beginning to learn his way around cyber-space. He even had his own webpage, created for him by a friendly human, where he could post news about the daemonic community in Hell. He particularly enjoyed reading a page called “Ask Abigor” where humans could post questions to him about Hell and its inhabitants. He had a staff to find the answers of course but it was all part of his long-term plan to rebuild the image of daemons in human minds.
In his wanderings around the internet, Abigor had also discovered the vast variety of web communities where humans met with others of their kind. They had been confusing at first for what one group took as the undiluted and indisputable truth was viciously derided as imbecilic nonsense by the rest. Then, he had realized that disagreements were actually part of human strength for in the battle to prove “their” side right and “the other” side wrong their search to find the unanswerable argument had led to ever-deeper understanding of the world that surrounded them. On the other hands, some of the people on such sites were obviously completely nuts. Abigor had just finished reading a long dispute with somebody claiming that shooting people in the head wasn’t an efficient way of killing them. Abigor would have liked to introduce the writer to Asmodeus who had been killed very effectively by repeated rifle shots to the head. Unfortunately, nobody knew where daemons, angels or second-life humans went when they died. If, indeed, they went anywhere when they died.
His break over, it was time to get back to work. Abigor closed the discussion site down, wondering briefly if humans really thought they could destroy stars, and went back to the news pages. Yahoo now had a separate section for news from Hell and from Heaven. He opened up the Hell section, and wondered, equally briefly, why it was that he got all the best information on what was happening in his own country from a computer website based on Earth. There was nothing really spectacular happening, the Orcs were rioting again, demanding to be restored to their ancestral lands and possessions. Abigor sighed at that, it meant another morning negotiating with them, the humans and the other surviving Lordly Daemons in an effort to find a solution to the Orc problem. In a way, things had been much simpler in Satan’s day.
Out of curiosity, he opened up the heaven page to see what was happening in the human invasion of Heaven. Was Yahweh having as bad a time of it as Satan had? The first headline gave him all the information he needed on that. Yahweh had sent a force to attack the humans as they invaded Heaven. The humans had destroyed it, totally. That was no surprise, Abigor would have been more surprised if they hadn’t. What did shock him, on reading the story, was that they had done it with a single weapon. His mind flashed back to an afternoon two years earlier where he had watched the human film on the making of the atomic bomb and had met with one of the humans who planned its use. He had gained the distinct impression that humans were very reluctant to use those weapons but they had dropped one on Yahweh’s force with almost no hesitation.
Idly, Abigor wondered which of the Angelic forces had been destroyed. He was prepared to bet that it had been Yahweh’s personal guard, the Incomparable Legion of Light. Abigor had fought them once, when they had been commanded by Michael-Lan in the great charge that had swept the daemonic armies out of Heaven. Now, they were gone, swept away by humans. Did that mean that Michael-Lan himself was dead? Every so often, Abigor had been kept awake at nights, wondering if his decision to surrender to the humans had been correct. Looking at the story on his screen and the pictures of the place where the humans had struck, Abigor knew he would never have to ask himself that question again.
Chapter Seventy Two
Montmartre Club, Eternal City, Heaven.
The Incomparable Legion of Light was gone. The unit that had been his personal command during The Great Celestial War had been wiped out, literally within the blink of an eye. Michael-Lan knew the destructive power that humans had at their command but this stunned even him. The Incomparable Legion of Light had fought throughout the Great Celestial War right from the first days when Satan had broken into the Eternal City itself. Michael remembered the vicious streetfighting that had taken place, how he had thrown civilians into the battle against the daemonic army in an effort to prevent them taking over the city. Then, The Incomparable Legion of Light had been the only trained body of troops he had. He had used them as a fire brigade, throwing them in piecemeal wherever the daemons had appeared to be breaking through. When the tide of the battle had turned, they had been the spearhead of his attacks that had finally driven The Eternal Enemy out of the city.