Pantheocide

Chapter Sixty Seven

Headquarters, Incomparable Legion Of Light, Heaven.

“Oh man, can’t we all just get along?”

Raphael-Lan covertly raised his eyebrows in despair. “I really wish we could, especially after all the work you put in with the humans a couple of millennia ago. Michael-Lan really admires that, you know. The sheer patience and concentration needed to control that carpenter for so many years, well, it was an achievement he really respects. A pity it all turned out so badly. Anyway, we, or rather you, have a job to do. He Who Must Not Be Named wants you to lead the Incomparable Legion and its human levies against the army invading Hell.”

“Oh crap. Why don’t we just sit down and talk this out with them? Anyway, which one, man? There are human armies all over the place.”

“The nearest one will do.” Which, just by great good fortune happens to be the one best fitted to kill you and wipe out Yahweh’s personal bodyguard. “In any case, The One Above Us All has a personal interest in them. The prison used to hold those who betrayed His Holy Will has been overrun by humans and it must be recaptured. Immediately. Such are the unquestionable commands of The Most High.”

Raphael-Lan watched the figure the other side of the table shake his head. “He really needs to mellow out and smell the roses. My Unspeakable Father has palaces all over Heaven, what’s one more or less to Him?”

“I think it’s the angels within His Omnipotence is worried about. They defied His Holy Will after all.”

“Ominpotence? That’s a joke. What things I could tell you. Still, if the Old Man wants it, I guess it must be done. Keep Him chilled out. Where?” There was something subtly different about the last word, one that made Raphael-Lan look sharply across the table.

“Here. I suggest you take the entire Legion and hit this point just opposite the camp. There’s only a thin skin of human forces there, most of the rest are spreading out to secure their base area. When the Incomparable Legion breaks through here, you can spread out inside and collapse the whole area. You will earn yourself much glory in the eyes of He Who Is Above Us All.”

The snort of laughter surprised Rafael-Lan. “Like sure, man. Like My Eternal Father is going to be cool with anything I do. Thank you, Rafael-Lan, for your wisdom and insight. Pass word to He Who Must Be Obeyed that his Dutiful Son will lead the Incomparable Legion to victory.”

Raphael-Lan made his obeisance and left the tent to fly back to the Eternal City. That was getting more dangerous now there were human aircraft in the skies over Heaven. Their fastest and most powerful could sweep down and take out their target before there was any sign of their presence. Things in Heaven were already changing fast. Less than a week since Lemuel and Maion had opened the doors and already Angelic control of Heaven was slipping.

Back in the headquarters, Enatenael-Lan-Elhmas was staring at the map spread out on the table. “Eternal Lord, do we do as Raphael suggests?”

“Like hell man. Raphael and Michael are good people but they just don’t know humans the way I do. We throw in an assault at the point he suggested sure, but it’ll be a feint. The humans will have to respond to it, they have hordes of human civilians helping out at the hell-hole My Auspicious Father created. They’ll want to protect them, so they’ll pull in units from all around to stop us. Enatenael-Lan, take one cohort of the Incomparable Legion and its human levies. That’ll give you 10,000 angels and five times that number of levies. Keep pushing at the forces the humans throw at you. Once they’ve stripped the rest of their perimeter to stop you, I’ll lead the other nine Cohorts and their levies in. They’ll punch right through the thinned-out human lines. It’ll be rough on you and your Cohort but it’ll cost us less overall.”

“Very good Eternal Lord.” Enatenael-Lan crossed his wings in front of his face and swept out to gather his forces.

Far, far overhead, beyond the ability of Angelic eyes to see or ears to hear, the RQ-4 Global Hawk turned at the end of its reconnaissance run and relayed its pictures of the ground below back to the surveillance center.

Headquarters, Human Expeditionary Army, Heaven.

As a command center, Heaven beat Hell any day. It was, well, heavenly just to be able to open a window and let fresh air enter the building. After almost two years spending most of his time in Hell, General of the Armies David Petraeus appreciated the simple virtues of being able to breath fresh air, unprocessed by filters and electrostatic precipitators.

“Well, they’re on the move at last.” It surprised Petraeus that it had taken the Angelic Host so long to react to his invasion. He didn’t regret it, the most crucial hours of any invasion were those as the first units started to arrive. At first they had been too few and too spread-out to offer a solid defense but the delay in Angelic response had made them miss the opportunity. He had an entire Army in Heaven now with additional portals opening up daily. The Russians and Chinese were pouring in as well, doing the same as he was, establishing a perimeter and making sure it was secure. Back in Hell, Fourth Army Group was ready to move as soon as any news of an Angelic incursion on to Earth was reported. The possibility that the Angelic Host might try an end-run and suck him out of Heaven by threatening Earth had occurred to Petraeus and he had made preparations to allow for it. With Fourth Army Group ready to portal to any point on Earth and human leg infantry and militia there already, Earth was as secure as he could make it.

“Splitting their force too.” General Sir Michael Jackson looked at the displays that dominated the wall of the command center.

“That’s a feint.” Major-General Asanee tapped the smaller of the two forces. “It’s heading for Belial’s concentration camp. I guess the enemy commander knows us well enough to realize we have to protect the civilians there.”

“And he thinks we’ll strip the forces we have on the rest of the perimeter to do so. He doesn’t know us as well as he thinks.” Petraeus thought for a second. “We do need to move up some reserves there though. Michael, where are our First Demonic and Caesar’s Third Legion?”

Jackson flicked through the sheets on his clipboard. “Well-placed David. We can have them up there quickly enough to set up a good defense.” He hesitated briefly, “are you sure you want them to take this on. Neither unit is seasoned and we don’t know if either can actually fight.”

“Then we had better find out hadn’t we?” Asanee was staring at the map, her mind working out distances and times. “This is a golden opportunity to do so. It is a feint so if they crumple, we won’t lose too much and we can restore the situation using my corps and Third US Armored. I wonder if the guy on the other side knows Third has moved south?”

“Probably.” Petraeus was also calculating time and distance. “My guess is that the humans here are funnelling information to him. They’re pretty loyal to their angels. So, we can assume that the opposition have a lot of tactical intelligence on us but very little strategic level stuff. They’re not fighting completely blind the way Satan and his commanders did. We can expect a lot more skill tactically but they still haven’t grasped how fast we can move or how much firepower we can switch around. I must admit, I find the loyalty of the humans here disappointing.”

“I don’t find that at all surprising.” Jackson was interrupted by a snort from Asanee. “Remember we haven’t found any humans here from later than the latter part of the dark ages. We might regard the status of humans here as seriously dire but compared with what they are used to, this place really is paradise. We might even hypothesize that the Gates of Heaven were closed once our expectations exceeded the reality of this place.”

“I’m sure the historians will love discussing that.” As a scholar himself, Pestraeus could understand the fascination of solving such puzzles. But, that was for later. “So, we let the two integrated demon and second life human units take the brunt of this feint.” Petraeus thumbed a button on the intercom system and rapped out a string of orders. The aide on the other end would be taking them down and turning his General’s wishes into military movement orders. “We’ll give them a helping hand of course, there’s a reason why we’ve given priority to moving artillery units into the bridgeheads. Now, that brings us to the main force. Any ideas?”

“Assuming it moves on a direct path to its target, that means it will hit around here.” Jackson tapped the display with a wooden pointer. “The Global Hawk is telling us this push is a really big one, some 90,000 angels and more than 450,000 humans.”

“About the same size as Abigor’s push in Iraq. I wonder how well those humans will fight. If they’re so downtrodden as to think this place is Paradise, do they have the spirit to fight at all?” Asanee was thoughtful. She produced a laser pointer from a pocket and shone the red spot on the display. “They’ll be hitting all along this area. They’re lagging behind the feint though; I’d guess the idea is to draw us off.”

“That’ll play against them. We won’t just be learning how well our own demon units fight, we’ll be learning how the Angelic Host fights. That’s going to be important, according to DIMO(N) the combat strength of the Angelic Host is in excess of 60 million angels and up to 300 million humans.” Petraeus noted the sharp intakes of breath from Jackson and Asanee. “Food for thought isn’t it.”

“Mostly, how come the daemons fought them to a standstill in the Great Celestial War.” Asanee was trying to envisage commanding an Army that big. “They’ve got a weakness, a bad one somewhere.”

“DIMO(N) has an answer for that as well. According to their research, daemons are pretty fertile and their birth-rate replaced their casualties. Angels, not so much. Their fertility and birth rate are low so they are short in replacements. That probably translates into a very casualty-adverse mindset. I think if we study that Great Celestial War we will find that it was mostly skirmishing with the Angels refusing to get too heavily committed for fear of the casualties they’d take while the demons tried to avoid major battles because they knew they’d be heavily outnumbered.”

“So, we hit this army hard. Give them a butcher’s bill that’ll make their eyes water.”

“Exactly right, and when we hit that main force, we have just the tools we need to do it.” Petraeus sighed. “Here we go again. I suppose I’m going to have to write another inspiring order-of-the-day.”

“You are lucky David, you can email it out. If Caesar was sitting there, he would have to give it personally. With the size of our Army, that could take years.”

Angelic Treatment Ward, Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD

The results looked as if they were just about as bad as he had feared. Doctor Daniel Zinder held the x-rays up to the light and peered at the reforming bones. It turned out angels did have the same remarkable healing powers as daemons but in this case it wasn’t helping his patients at all. Maion was the most advanced of them and the bones in her wing joints were indeed recovering. The only problem was, they were fusing into an immobile mass of bone. Flying was out of the question, it would be a miracle of she could fold her wings at all.

“Doctor, there is a fiend from Hell waiting to see you.”

Zinder looked around sharply, Grace was standing in the doorway, smiling broadly. “Nurse, the word is daemon. We don’t want to be charged with racial discrimination or harassment. Anyway, ask him to wait five minutes then trot him in.”

Zinder put the X-rays away and settled down at his desk. Grace returned, bringing the daemon in with her.

“I am Doctor Zinder, how may I help you.” He reflected that was a bit curt but formality was still catching up with the rapid changes in relationships. ‘Half-believed mythological legend’ to ‘hideous reality’ to ‘mortal enemy’ to ‘defeated foe’ to ‘de-facto ally’ in two years took some getting used to.

“My name is Memnon, I am currently Minister of Communications in the Government of President Abigor. I understand that you have large numbers of angels here to be treated?”

“We do.” A horrible thought crossed Zinder’s mind. “You don’t want to eat them do you?”

Memnon laughed, uneasily aware that not so long ago that was exactly what he would have wanted. “No, but I may have some information that may help you. Our information is that the wings on these angels have been broken, crippled. Is this true?”

“It is, some have had their legs broken the same way. We’re doing our best but even with the best reconstructive surgery, we’re not doing so well.”

“This does not surprise me. Breaking the wings of angels was a favorite sport of ours when we held them prisoner during The Great Celestial War. But, I should tell you something. During the invasion by Abigor’s Army, I was attacked by some of your fighters. My colleagues were killed and my wings were badly burned and mutilated by a missile. They grew back, malformed and distorted so that I could not fly. The doctors said that it was because metal fragments from the missile warheads were interfering with the nerves and blood vessels but I think it was because the fragments were iron and iron is poison to us.”

Memnon paused and flared his wings outwards. Zinder was struck by how similar the basic structure was to the angelic wings. They were black and scaled like lizard skin of course, not white and feathered, but even without X-rays, Zinder could see the bone structure was the same. He could also see that Memnon’s wings were fully functional and un-mutilated. “So what happened Memnon?”

“My wings were so bad that the Doctors decided the only thing to do was to amputate them. They did so, and my wings grew back again. With the iron fragments removed from my body, they grew back perfectly. They may also do so on Angels.”

“Do all your limbs grow back if amputated?” Zinder was fascinated. He was also furious that a piece of vital information like this had been concealed or lost. He knew the reason of course; Memnon must have been treated in an Army hospital, this was a Navy facility. Inter-service cooperation would be a wonderful thing if it ever happened.

“They do, although removing a crippled limb to allow a new one to grow in its place had never occurred to us before.”

Kinder thought carefully. He could see several problems with this, not least of which was obvious from Memnon’s wings. Despite the similar structure, Angelic wings were bird-like, Daemonic wings were more akin to those of lizards. And many earth lizards could regrow lost limbs. That didn’t mean that humans could. “Memnon, why are you telling us this? Angels are your enemies, just as they are ours.”

“Why do you treat them in your hospital?” Memnon paused. “For millennia, uncounted millennia, so far back that time itself became misty, we did things that were brutal and cruel beyond limits. We gloried in that cruelty and measured ourselves by it. Then you humans came and you slaughtered us. It was so easy for you that you defeated us and cast us down in a few weeks. By our standards we would have been your slaves and treated as cruelly as we treated our victims. But you didn’t. You healed our wounds, you repaired what had been destroyed. In doing so you showed us the deadliest of all your weapons, compassion. You changed us and gave us a different way of looking at the world. Now, those of us who saw the destruction you can wreak on those you fight, we want to be like you. By changing the environment in which we lived, you changed us. To help the crippled Angels is our first step back from the pit.”

Zinder nodded slowly. It had long been argued whether a foul environment bred crime and cruelty or not, and if it did, whether improving that environment would reduce them. It looked as if he had a substantial part of the answer to that question sitting in front of him.

“Thank you for coming here today, Memnon, we must investigate this carefully. There may be problems and we must be sure that, first of all, we do not harm.” He paused slightly. “Here on Earth, Doctors take an oath before we are allowed to treat patients. One part of that oath, in my opinion the most important, is ‘first of all, do no harm.’ But I think you give me hope for this case that I never had before.”

Bivouac Area, Third Legion. Heaven

Tucker McElroy looked at his command paraded before him. This wouldn’t take long. It had better not because there was a lot of digging to do before the enemy arrived. “Soldiers of the Third Legion. Our Commander, General of the Armies David Petraeus, has issued the following order of the day.

“Our battle against Yahweh now reaches its climax. Never forget that we have turned him away by the force of our arms before. Dare we forget the valor of our ancestors? When the Heroes at Troy wounded the Gods and drove them from the field? When the mortal hand of Rama struck down the demon Ravana after invading Sri Lanka on his bridge of hurled stone? Remember that Yahweh himself quailed and fled before the Iron Chariots of Sisera. Satan might have been the Prince of Hell but it was Yahweh who put him there and it was Yahweh who controlled who was to be tortured and who wasn’t. Daemon and human alike, he oppressed us. Now, this is our moment to break free from the cycle-curse. If we can turn away the strength of Yahweh with Iron, then that is reason enough for us to make common cause and turn on the ruler of Heaven with full fury. The angels choose to make war on us. More fool them; we’ll kill them, and we’ll drive Yahweh from his throne at gunpoint. Then we will exhort the moral in spirit who reside in Heaven to rise against the injustice of a God turned against his own word.”

McElroy looked up. “I’ve just got one more thing to say. First-life humans, they look on us second-lifers as helpless victims who had to be rescued and you daemons as little more than massed targets. It’s time to show them that we can fight as well as they can. So start digging, the spade is brother to the sword.”