“I’ll tell my Prime Minister we’ll have all five divisions assembled at Kanchanaburi within 24 hours. That will please him greatly. We can seal this incursion off and drive it back.” General Asanee thought for a second. “Then what? The Myanmar regime is a pretty nasty one and they just let their people starve after Cyclone Nargis. That was a Yahweh hit and they are still siding with him. This invasion is a betrayal of us humans, they should be punished for that.”
“And it’s a chance to pay off a few old scores right?”
General Asanee kicked herself, she forgotten this General was a military history scholar of notable repute. “Of course, but even so, it’s still the right thing to do. And it’ll give Kim Jong-Il something to think about as well.”
“I agree, in many ways we’re using this fight as a test-bed. To see how commanding Hell affects strategy here on Earth.”
“So we invade then.” The satisfaction in the General’s voice was obvious.
“Why? We don’t have to invade, not any more. We can open a portal and just position troops close to Naypyidaw and by close to I mean on top of the place. We don’t have to fight our way up to a capital any more, we just arrive there. That makes Hell the most commanding piece of territory there has ever been. But, before any of that, you need to get your command problems in Kanchanaburi straightened out. An entire mechanized corps arriving in one place needs a lot of good staff-work.”
“I’ll be on it Sir.” General Asanee thought for a second. “You’ve been thinking a lot about the use of portals in warfare haven’t you?”
“General, since taking this job, I’ve thought about very little else.”
Chapter Sixteen
Michael-Lan’s Private Estate, Heaven.
“You got chopped up a bit didn’t you?” The level of concern in Michael-Lan’s voice was inversely proportional to the concern he actually felt for Uriel.
“I am lucky to be alive at all Michael-Lan. The humans fought back over El Paso and attacked me with their aircraft and missiles. I managed to duck through a portal in time to dodge their missiles but the portal was small and my wing caught one edge. It is badly broken and is slow to heal. Then there were fragments from the human missiles. A few got through the portal just as it closed and their wounds also are slow to heal.”
I could offer you a stiff drink to take your mind off your wounds but I doubt if you’d understand the gesture. “Uriel-Lan, I have to tell you, the All-Seeing Father is not well-pleased with the attack on El Paso. Only a tiny proportion of the humans who live there died. This was far from the erasure of the whole city that he wished.”
“I did what I could, the humans have changed Michael-Lan. Once my touch dropped them by the hundreds and the hundreds of hundreds but now it is hard to touch them at all and even when they feel it, they resist me. It takes time to bring my peace to them and their missiles and aircraft do not give me enough. I must take those I can and be satisfied.”
Oh boy, that’s going to sound good when I repeat it to Yah-yah. Michael-Lan thought with great satisfaction. ‘Uriel-Lan says he’ll do what he wants and you will have to be satisfied with it.’ That should get him going nicely.
“We are at war, Uriel-Lan, The One Above All understands that.” Michael-Lan managed to get the words out without choking on them. Yahweh had as little idea of what war against the humans meant as Satan had, less in fact despite the fact that Heaven had kept up to date with human progress and Hell hadn’t. It was an old problem, one that went back uncounted millennia, there were people who just refused to hear anything that didn’t suit their pre-existing beliefs. Yahweh still had a mental picture of humans as trusting, thoughtless sheep and he allowed nothing to interfere with it. The idea that the sheep had turned into ruthless killers simply did not register with him. Michael-Lan took the train of thought further. Even if Yahweh woke up and smelled the coffee, it wouldn’t help him. It was one thing to read about what human weapons could do, quite another to see the reality and the meaning it imposed. The way humans filled a battlefield with fire and steel had no equivalent in Angelic memory.
“Michael-Lan, you know humans. Where should I strike next?” Uriel asked the advice, half-hoping he would be told to drop the whole idea.
Michael-Lan thought it over carefully. Texas? Where people were trigger-happy and armed to the teeth? Uriel wouldn’t fall for that again. He thought briefly about sending Uriel within striking distance of Nellis Air Force Base and the Tonopah test range where the humans had killing machines advanced even beyond their standards. The problem there was that the only viable target in Nevada was his beloved Las Vegas and no way was he going to let Uriel loose on that city. California? Now there was a thought. Suddenly inspiration hit him. A city full of Marines, surrounded by fighter bases and missile batteries and home to a large proportion of the U.S. Navy. Perfect.
“Uriel-Lan, rest here for a while. When you are fit again, I recommend you strike at San Diego.”
Michael-Lan took a courteous leave of his convalescent guest, inflated his flying sacs and took off, heading for The Eternal City and his working offices. He had to make another visit first of course, one that Michael was looking forward to. On the way, his mind returned to the problem that was nagging at him, the second conspiracy that Lemuel-Lan-Michael had discovered. It was fortunate that Lemuel didn’t know humans nearly as well as he thought he did, for if he had, he would have recognized the pattern that his charts had revealed. A pattern that Michael-Lan had recognized instantly.
This second conspiracy was very different from his own. Michael-Lan’s objective was simple, he was creating a situation where the ruling elite of Heaven was so rotten with corruption that one good kick would bring it down. His club and the activities that were centered on it had that as its primary aim. By addicting its members to the pleasures he offered, pleasures that were strictly and absolutely prohibited by Yahweh, he was creating a group that was united by its enjoyment of those pleasures and isolated from the rest of Heaven by that fact. When Michael struck, he would decapitate the leadership of Heaven and take over. It was a classic top-down takeover.
This new conspiracy didn’t work that way at all. While Michael-Lan was creating a new society, one that was slowly spreading out across the top tiers of Heaven, his unknown rival was building an underground army. La Resistance thought Michael. It was divided into watertight cells, with only those in the cells knowing who else was involved. In theory anyway, in reality things were never that close and the cells always had a degree of leakage between them. The point was, the intent of such an organization was to challenge the leadership tiers, to face them with a mass insurrection. This new plan was a bottom-up replacement of the whole system. It would mean a civil war in Heaven, the one thing that Michael was trying to avoid. Other than seeing human tanks in the streets of the Eternal City of course. Avoiding that took priority over everything else. He had to keep the humans tied up, chasing their own tails down on Earth for if they turned their full attention to gaining access to Heaven, it would only be a matter of time before the tanks arrived.
Beneath him, Michael-Lan saw a bronze-covered lodge, one of his smaller resorts that he had modified specifically for its one occupant. He back-winged, settled neatly on the landing porch and allowed his sacs to deflate. Then, he went inside.
“Belial. How do things go with you?”
The great demon, once a Grand Duke of Hell and the only one of Satan’s crew to strike a solid blow at the humans, looked up at his visitor with petulance.