She caught herself and smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry Captain, it’s a sore point with me I guess.”
“You guess?” Reynolds looked sad for a moment. “None of my family did that, but a few around where we lived did. One memory that I can’t get over, the dogs howling at their owners, trying to make them wake up, fighting the only way they could to try and keep them alive. We took one of them in and the poor thing was so traumatized, he shivered with fear every time one of us had a nap. I tell you this Sophia, if I can get Yahweh under our guns, just once…”
“Sorry Sir. Message from CINCLANT.” The sparker passed the message flimsy to Reynolds.
“Well, that confirms it, I think. Whole east coast is affected by this. Copies from CINCPAC say the west coast is the same. They want us to report in from here and start taking samples. They want to try and identify what this particular algal bloom is. One piece of good news is, its affecting shallow water only.”
“That makes sense.” Sophia thought carefully. “All these prophecies were written in ancient times and the authors knew very little about what was going on. Sailors mostly stuck to shallow water, deep water navigation was almost unknown. So when they saw this happening, they assumed it was all the seas, not just coastal waters. But, this is the second Bowl of Wrath all right.”
Turner Joy slowed down while the crew started trying to gather water samples. It wasn’t long before the first bottles were on board and Reynolds looked at them with disgust. Normally, even in an algal bloom, the water in a sample jar was only slightly tinged but these were saturated with color and the water seemed oily somehow.
“Captain, Doc Samuels here. Warn the men gathering samples to take precautions against contact with the water. It’s causing some of them to blister on their arms and legs and most of them are reporting coughing and sneezing attacks. I’m issuing antihistamines but we’ve only got a limited supply and if the air intakes start pulling in aerosols of that water, we could have problems all through the ship.”
“Thank’s doc. Carry on.”
Reynolds looked at the blood-red sea water again. “Just five minutes under my guns, that’s all I ask. Just five minutes.”
Chapter Eleven
Briefing Room, White House Washington DC, April 2009
“So what did you think of Yamantau Mister President?” Secretary of the Interior Salazar had wanted to go on that visit but he hadn’t.
“It is a most remarkable installation. It comforts me to think that we have something similar here.”
“Actually Mister President, we don’t.” Secretary of Defense Warner spoke sadly. “We have proposed such an installation in the past but funding was always denied. The nearest we have to Yamantau is Cheyenne Mountain and that is in care-and-maintenance status. We have some shallower installations that offer nothing like the protection of Yamantau of course. But, given the threats we face now, Yamantau offers little in the way of protection. As far as we know.”
“You think there is more to Yamantau than the Russians have let us see?”
“Of course. But I was more thinking of the kinds of attack we are facing right now. And what may come next, remember we had no warning of the attacks on Sheffield and Detroit.”
A grim silence ran around the room. The destruction of Sheffield and Detroit still had the power to awe those who saw the fields of cooled lava that now overlay what had once been two thriving cities. Somehow, it was made all the more striking by the knowledge that the cities could not be rebuilt. Usually, no matter how bad the damage, the city inhabitants had picked themselves up and rebuilt. In Sheffield and Detroit, that was impossible and the devastated areas of the cities had been abandoned.
“You think there may be more sky-volcano attacks?” Obama sounded apprehensive as well he might. The winter had been a rough one worldwide and few people believed the storms had been natural.
“I’m saying, Mister President, we don’t know what’s coming.”
“That may not be true Secretary Warner.” General Schatten spoke carefully as befitted a military man in this epitome of civilian control. “Our resident experts in the field believe that there are likely to be seven attacks before Yahweh really begins to engage us. We’ve had two and we can expect the third very shortly. That will see the Algal Blooms spreading to our inland waterways. The fourth is expected to consist of fire and heat, that sounds like more sky-volcano attacks to us. Details on the fifth attack are very indefinite and simply refer to darkness and people gnawing their tongues with pain. The sixth simply says the Euphrates will dry up, well, that’s bad for Iraq but hardly a gruesome disaster while the last speaks of a massive earthquake and a rain of giant stones. That sounds like more portal work.”
“Where does this come from?”
“Book of Revelations, Mister President. Normally we would discount that as a source but the first two attacks do make it look like somebody is sticking to that playbook.”
“And just how long do we have to sit here taking it on the chin like this? We finished off Satan in less than six months once we got rolling, why can’t we do the same with Yahweh?”
“Because we can’t get at him.” Secretary Warner reinserted himself into the conversation deftly. “We have no idea where Heaven is, we can’t find it and we can’t open a portal to it. Our primary hope at the moment is to understand the structure of the space-time continuum in which Heaven exists and then find it by exploiting that understanding. However, I am advised that it is likely we will find that the space-time continuum in question will contain large numbers of habitable entities and even if we can locate them, finding the right one will be very difficult. At worst, we may end up visiting each in turn until we find the right one. President Abigor has said that is how Satan and Yahweh explored our dimension although they obviously had no understanding of the science involved. Somehow, they got through to planets more or less at random.”
“This just is not good enough. We must find a way of launching a counter-attack. So far this war with Heaven has cost us more people and more treasure than the war with Hell did.”
“That is hardly surprising Mister President. In retrospect, we were very lucky with the Curb Stomp War. The Baldricks just opened a portal and came straight at us. Not only that, they did so head-on into the biggest concentration of military power we could deploy and one that was well-stocked with munitions. They, quite literally, couldn’t have made it easier for us if they had tried. It’s fairly obvious that Yahweh watched that debacle and has decided to try a different approach. I must say, Mister President, that it is easy to over-estimate the damage that is being done to us by these attacks. The anthrax attack cost us a third of our sensitives and that’s limited our ability to construct new portals through to Hell. However, we have a contingency plan to deal with the shortage if it becomes critical.”
“And that is?”
“To use Baldricks, especially the naga, as substitutes for our sensitives. We don’t want to do that, the last thing we need is for the Baldricks to think they are actually useful to us rather than something midway between utterly irrelevant and a nuisance. But it is an option. Anyway, we’ve had a rough winter and the rest of the world hasn’t been much better. The problem is, distinguishing between natural bad weather and the enhanced bad weather that constitutes a Yahweh attack. Some of the attacks are quite clearly the latter, the Missouri tornados that destroyed Whiteman AFB for example. Others may simply be normal bad weather. Britain had a very wet winter with severe rain but looking at the weather data, we can’t see any sign of enhancement to that. One thing that is clear from the NOAA studies of the winter, Yahweh can’t create bad weather. He can modify it, intensify it and redirect it but he can’t create it. That’s very encouraging from our point of view.”