“The humans are running it. We explained what was going on and why. Told them what we wanted to achieve. What you were trying to do and what you were risking to do it. So, they took over there. Glen’s officially in charge by the way. That freed us up to come here. They aren’t leaving either by the way. They’re going to keep playing until we win or Yahweh pulls the roof down on their heads. More of our high-ranking clients are on their way here….”
“Get ready.” Michael suddenly remembered why he was here and what the battle with Yahweh was like. “Yah-yah’s got a habit of throwing attacks without warning.”
“Nasty of him.” Leilah-Lan sounded most disapproving. “I’ll have to……”
She was interrupted by a massive blast of power from Yahweh. This time, the response was different. With his most trusted allies around him, Michael didn’t have to worry about drawing power from his network. They were pouring it into him and the difference was more than significant. This time, he stalled the blast half way towards him and held it there. The pressure was immense but for the first time since the battle began, he felt as if he was in control of the situation. He was aware of something else as well. The choir outside the room were no longer singing hymns of praise. They were singing in tune with the broadcast from the Montmartre Club.
That was when Michael felt his power slacken slightly. Leilah had pulled herself out of the net, stepped slightly to one side and hurled all the energy she could muster at Yahweh. The discharge cracked with the flat vicious noise of her whip as it flailed across the room and struck Yahweh full in the chest. It pushed him hard back against the throne and sent splinters of marble flying through the air. It was a one-shot tick-pony shot and Michael knew it but, once again, Yahweh’s poor power management had left him open to it. For a few seconds, his assault stopped and the blast of power from Michael flooded across the room and besieged Yahweh in his throne. Leilah had slumped to her knees, exhausted by the effort needed to generate the blast but she had made a historic mark, one that would never be forgotten in Heaven. For she, an Erelim, had managed to attack and hurt Yahweh. From within the shield of energy that surrounded them, Charmeine reached out and pulled her into the protection of the shield.
For a moment, the initiative was in Michael’s hands. He poured power at Yahweh, exhausting himself and his allies in the process, but he had Yahweh on the defensive at last. Now it was Yahweh who was struggling to hold back the assault, it was Yahweh who was fighting to prevent the energy breaking through and crushing him. Concentrating on managing the assault, Michael was only dimly aware of other angels from his club entering the room and joining the group around him. He just felt their energy joining his and supporting the streams of power that mixed and blasted inside the shattered throne room.
Never in the memories of anybody present had there been anything like the displays that now saturated the throne room. The scintillating, interacting arcs of light had gone far beyond white and multicolor. Now they shimmered with iridescent hues beyond the imagination of those watching in awe. The confrontation left that between Yahweh and the Morningstar pallid by comparison, pallid and lackluster for the brilliance of the light battle was enough to blind those unprepared for it. Just as Michael had clawed his way back from the brink of defeat just a few minutes earlier, now Yahweh tried to do the same. He also poured power into his defense and saw the assault on him slowly forced back. Watching him, Michael realized that, for the first time in uncountable millennia, Yahweh was actually running out of energy.
The battle was deadlocked. The two great shimmering walls of light energy were stationary in the middle of the room, their interface twisting with wild, unknowable colors and were beyond any mind to describe. Neither side could disengage now, both were locked in a death-grapple that could only end with the defeat and utter destruction of one. Or both thought Michael. That’s an outcome I hadn’t considered before. He looked behind him and saw another thing he had not expected. There was a disturbance around the entrance to the mason’s bunker, now stained, blackened and scarred by the battle. The mason himself pulled free of the crowd inside and walked across the room to stand with Michael and his allies. The added energy pushed the wall a little bit further back towards Yahweh
Michael-Lan-Michael looked around, quickly assessing the situation. Leilah-Lan was back on her feet, tapping the palm of her left hand with her riding crop as she poured her recovering energy reserves into the battle. He had more than a dozen allies around him now, including at least five Chayot Ha Kodesh of the first and second degrees. For all that, he still hadn’t quite got the edge to finish off Yahweh. They were evenly balanced, Yahweh on one side, Michael and his allies on the other and that was it.
There was one question Michael needed to know the answer to. That one question would be decisive in the titanic struggle that was now reaching its conclusion. Michael asked it of himself time and time again, his mind searching desperately for the answer. How would the humans handle this situation?
Chapter Seventy Six
Headquarters, Human Expeditionary Army, Heaven.
“Two kilometers?” General Asanee spoke carefully. She’d measured the pictures taken by the Global Hawks for herself and come to the same conclusion as the analysts. The main streets carving The Eternal City into sections were that wide.
“Two kilometers wide and dead straight. Three run north and south, three run east and west. They join the gates, or rather the flanking ones do. The one down the middle is blocked by Yahweh’s palace here in the middle. They cut the city into sixteen blocks with the palace area forming the seventeenth.” The analyst sounded displeased; he didn’t like having his work checked so carefully. The great model of The Eternal City was largely his work. He had a feeling it was the supreme achievement of his lifetime. After all, where could he go from making this?
“So each block is 375 kilometers on a side? And these are 20 kilometers wide?” General Petraeus tapped the corner redoubts on the outer walls of the city.
“That’s right, Sir. The gatehouses are twenty kilometers wide as well. Each flanking tower is nine kilometers across. How they swing a gate a kilometer wide open and closed is beyond me. No matter how carefully counterbalanced they are, the inertia must be enormous.”
“They probably don’t open the whole gate. I bet you’ll find there are small doors set in the face of the giant ones.” Asanee smiled. “That’s how we did it in our walled cities.”
“Each of the city blocks duplicates the structure of the city as a whole. Cut into 16 sections, each a little under 95 kilometers square, by roads about a kilometer wide. Then each sub-block divided into 16 sub-sub-blocks by roads 500 meters wide. Each sub-sub-block is around 20 kilometers on each side. Populations seem to vary. Some just have four palaces, others have dozens. There are what appear to be temples all over the city. That’s hardly surprising of course. We’ve done a rough estimate of the city population. We think there’s around 200 million angels living in the City itself.”
“Two hundred million.” Petraeus seemed haunted by the number. “This has all the makings of a nightmare.”
“We can chop the City up into isolated blocks using the roads and then take down each sub-sub block individually. It’ll be one hell of a street fight though.” Asanee was measuring the likely cost of doing so while she spoke. The answer wasn’t one she liked.
“We’re better equipped for fighting Angels and Daemons than we were at Hit. We’ve got rifles that can actually hurt them now.” Jackson looked depressed, he was calculating losses as well. His answer varied from Asanee’s, reflecting the difference in their characters. “And Angels don’t have the bloody-minded guts of the daemons.”