“He asked Luga why, didn’t get an answer. There was something she didn’t want to speak about and didn’t. But, Baylor says, she was frightened. Even talking about why scared her. Just the way daemons are scared of us.”
“I think I can offer an opinion there.” Hillary Clinton spoke up for the first time at one of those meetings. “I was speaking with President Sarkozy during the recent summit, when he wasn’t preoccupied with checking out some Brazilian girl of course, and he told me something curious. Apparently some of the French and German troops in Hell, either referred to Satan as “the Devil” or called daemons, devils. The result was strange. The baldricks made themselves absent, very quickly. Strong negative reaction.”
“Could it have been an abusive nickname, you know like Hun or Frog?”
“That would imply anger or offense and we know Baldricks react strongly to that. This was something else, it was fear, as if even mentioning the word could bring about a disaster.” Clinton drew breath. “I don’t think daemons and devils are the same.”
“All the books say they are.”
“And all our books are wrong, we know that. How much mythology is standing up to the discoveries we’re making every day? I think that Daemons and Devils are separate things and whatever the Devils are, the Daemons are afraid of them.”
“A threat to us?”
General Schatten thought for a second. “I doubt it, if they were then they’d have taken down the Baldricks as quickly as we did.”
“Can we rely on that?”
Schatten thought again. “No, but it’s the best way to bet given what we know. Look, in intelligence and knowledge terms, we’re way out of our depth here. We’re crossing a river blindfold, feeling a way with our feet and hoping we don’t step into a pothole or a nest of cottonmouths. All we can do is play the odds.”
“So there might be a third force out there we’ll have to deal with in due course?”
“Third? There may be dozens. The cosmology Doctor Kuroneko is developing suggests that there might be millions of bubble-worlds like Hell out there. All of different ages, just like the stars in our Universe are all of different ages. By the way, he’s come up with a fascinating theory that might explain a lot. Our Universe is expanding, everybody knows that. But he thinks that the dimension, the next stage of existence, whatever we want to call it, that contains Heaven, Hell and all those bubble worlds is shrinking. He thinks that explains where the light in Hell and the energy that keeps the human souls alive there comes from. That’s why they don’t have to eat.”
“But Daemons eat.” A slight shudder swept around the room at the thought of Luga’s table manners. A few of the participants grinned sympathetically at Paschal. The Colonel thought about the rumors of Luga’s combined eating and mating habits. The recollection made his testicles scream in terror and try to climb inside his body for protection.
“And that means that… “
“Baldricks – and presumably Angels – aren’t native to the bubble-worlds either. They come from somewhere else as well.”
“That might change a lot of things.” Schatten thought carefully. “Could they come from other bubble worlds?”
“We can’t tell.” Surlethe thought carefully, the whole situation had aspects buried within aspects. “It may be that the no-eating rule only applies within their native bubble. Or it may be they come from outside the bubble-level completely. But all that’s getting away from the point. We have some evidence that there’s a third group of beings out there and we may run into them at any time.”
“Third?” Hillary Clinton’s voice was derisive. “There could be hundreds of them, thousands even. Have you any idea how many religions there have been? Or are now? Suppose they are all correct, suppose at one time or another, beings found their way here from other bubbleverses and got worshipped as Gods. And Yahweh and Satan were the two that eventually won out down here? They got the upper hand over the rest, perhaps by means of the portal warfare that Lugasharmanaska talked about, and drove them out. The ‘devils’ that we’ve been talking about may just have been one of those other groups, probably the one that was the most difficult to defeat. If we consider continuing to explore the bubbleverses, we’re going to run into them.”
“And that raises another question, an important one. When we do, how do we react?”
“That’s for the council of 15 to say. They’ll make up their mind.”
“Not the United Nations?” The question came from a corner of the table, the speaker unidentified. The response was a contemptuous guffaw from the main participants.
“No, not the United Nations. They’re irrelevant, been ever since Wong shot down the first Daemon Herald. They’re still there but they’re just the talking shop for people who can’t contribute to the HEA. The real decisions are taken at Yamantau.” Clinton thought carefully. “My guess will be, and this will be the position of the United States at Yamantau, we’ll work on a do-as-they-do basis. If they approach us with friendship and respect, we’ll do the same to them. If they make war on us, we’ll do it to them. With every weapon we have.”
“General Petraeus, do you have any comment on that?”
General Petraeus, present only on the view-screen at the end of the room looked up from the display he was consulting. It was showing the developing situation on the Thai-Myanmar border and he found it professionally fascinating. The Thai Army simply didn’t fight the way the U.S. Army did. What they were doing was, to his eyes, downright weird. “We’d be advised to keep as many options open as possible but in essence, I agree with the Secretary of State. If we run into any such bubbleverse groups that are friendly, we get friendly. If not, then we defend ourselves. And that means eliminating our opponents.”
“That’s genocide.” It was the same unidentified voice that had spoken about the United Nations.
Hillary Clinton looked back contemptuously. “No. That’s pantheocide.”
Chapter Twenty One
DIMO(n) Briefing Room, Pentagon, Arlington V.A.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Norman stammered, nervously. “I was trying to get all the data together since the attack on Fort Bragg.” The past twenty-four hours had been a blur for him. After the creature had been dead, before the body was even cool, DIMO(N) science teams had started going over the body and sending all the information they could back to the Pentagon. All of that information had been crunched and processed by Norman and his team, and fitted in to a briefing that the military brass was very interested in hearing. It hadn’t helped that the garrison of Fort Bragg were demanding that the corpse of the Leopard Beast be stuffed and mounted outside their front gate. It was rumored that at least two taxidermists had taken a horrified look at the size of the Beast and turned the job down. That was a pity, because it would, as the Base Commander had said, make a nice entrance arch.
General Schatten waved Norman on. “It’s quite alright, Baines. Just give us what you have.”
“Yes, well, ok.” Norman turned to the screen as his power point started up. “Prior to the attack on Fort Bragg, we had put together a lot of data about the various beasts, angels, captains, and armies discussed in John’s Revelation. The problem is, based on what we’ve learned from hell, some of it didn’t fit and we were hoping that the beasts were in fact Satan’s constructs, similar to his golden hydra.”
The screen displayed the hulking corpse of the thing that attacked Bragg. “This is the first beast. Notice the coloration, and spotting. We believe it to be the ‘Leopard-Beast’ mentioned in Revelations 13. The good news is, the creature was just as vulnerable to conventional weaponry as anything else, in sufficiently large doses. The bad news, is that this was the first of four beasts. The even worse news…” He paused as he clicked over to a fresh dispatch from Crystal City “… is that shortly before the creature died, the cell-phone tower detection system recorded a minor aberration that looked a lot like a portal formation, just underpowered.” He looked at the people in the room. “Allowing for the fact that that the portal did not form, but also noting that no ‘animal handler’ was found nearby, the implication is that these things are capable of opening their own portals, which is an ability we have not observed in any non-sentient infernal life-forms.”