Armageddon?? (46 page)

Okeraphluxos
was still sitting in his chamber and thinking when he heard a series of loud
pops from the window. The sounds were entirely unfamiliar; curious, he stood up
and went over to the window as the cracks continued. The sight that greeted him
was entirely unexpected: at the gate, his demons were milling about; some were
yelling and screaming, and some were running back toward the barracks. With
each pop, another demon yelled and dropped; once or twice, heads literally
exploded. The foodbeasts below were panicking, and stampeding straight for the
back of the compound. He saw several demons trampled beneath their hooves as
the small herd ran in blank terror. Several more cracks, and the remaining
demons were also heading back into the compound, abandoning their injured
comrades.

Abruptly,
the walls around his castle just disintegrated. An instant later, a deafening
concussion physically knocked him backward, and a shower of stone fragments
flew through the window, lacerating the duke's face. In shock, he felt his
face, felt the blood oozing out, then crawled back to the window. The room was
still spinning around him, and he fought the urge to retch on the windowsill.

Outside,
his castle was a complete wreck. The retaining wall had entirely vanished, the
causeway leading through the swamp toward the Dis-Dysprosium road had
disappeared, and two of the barracks buildings had collapsed. At first, he
thought there was nothing left of the demons who had so recently been busy
about their business in the castle, but then, looking more closely, he saw,
strewn about the jagged rubble coating the ground, lumps that were smoother and
darker than the rock fragments. Then, he did vomit on the windowsill.

It
was that move that saved his life. As he ducked to vomit, the stone just behind
where his head had been exploded in a vicious arc of fragments as something hit
it. Okeraphluxos continued downwards, landing on the floor below the windowsill
and crawled away. Just what was happening? Obviously his castle was under
attack but he’d never seen a siege start like this before. Oh, sieges were
known events, a property might be disputed or perhaps seized as a bargaining
chip for some other issue but they ran to a set pattern. The besieging
commander would pull his army up and display it in front of the target castle
so that the besieged commander could see what he was up against and compare his
own forces to them. Then besieger and besieged would meet and decide if the
balance of forces made resistance practical. If it was, then the siege was on,
if not then the defending garrison would surrender. This sort of sudden attack
was unheard-of. And what had destroyed his outer walls?

Okeraphluxos
decided to take a better look and was about to do so through the window he had
just used when it occurred to him that doing so would be a terminally bad idea.
He crawled out of the room, then went to another and used the window there.
What he saw appalled him, the remainder of his troops were sprawled on the
ground, dead or dying. Yet, across in the swamps, he saw a group of figures
moving, six of them, humans by the look of them but colored so they were
virtually invisible against the ground and mists of Hell. The six figures ran
forward to new positions, spread out in front of his massacred men then dropped
to the ground. Okeraphluxos took his eyes off them because as they dropped
flat, four more humans, colored the same way, emerged from hiding places and
ran across the ground.

One
surviving member of Okeraphluxos’s garrison stood up to take a shot with his
trident but before he could do so, there was a rapid series of small thuds and
he fell down. They’d come from the area where the first group of six humans had
gone to ground. He could hardly see them when he tried to make them out and by
the time he spotted the first, the second group had taken cover as well. Then,
the first group got to their feet and closed in on the large house that formed
the keep of Okeraphluxos’s castle. They did something to the door and then
retreated. Watching carefully, Okeraphluxos was bewildered, there was no
precedent for what was happening. Sieges took a long time, even for a small
castle like his. But this time his defenses were collapsing as if they didn’t
exist. It was barely a few minutes since the first explosions had taken down
his outer wall and now his keep was under attack. The destruction of his keep
gate seemed tame compared with the series of blasts that had destroyed his
walls but Okeraphluxos new it was the death-knell for his defense.

Outside
the keep, Kim couldn’t help but feel smugly satisfied. The sudden, violent
assault was doing its work, the baldricks inside the defenses couldn’t adapt to
the speed at which the situation was changing. By the time they responded to
one development, it was already history and the course of the battle had moved
on so their attempted response just led to an even greater disaster. It was a
classic blitzkrieg, something that the trackheads in their armor thought they
monopolized. They didn’t, infantry could do it as well.

If
the baldricks had kept their heads, if they’d been able to respond fast enough,
they should have turned the remaining parts of the outer defenses into
strongpoints, each of which would have had to be reduced individually. That
would have broken the momentum of her attack and allowed the rest of the
garrison to stage a counter-attack that would have destroyed her puny force.
But, they’d never had the chance, by the time they’d overcome their initial
reactions to the unprecedented violence and speed of the attack and started
thinking, the opportunity was gone. The outer defenses had fallen and the keep
was on its own – and now its gates were gone.

Kim
looked hard through the mists. The baldricks were starting to react logically
and she would have to stop that. They’d piled timber, carts and furniture up
inside the gates to form a secondary barricade and were waiting behind it. Not
bad she thought, a viable countermove against the sort of attack they were used
to. Only, this wasn’t one. Quite apart from their superior weaponry and
military tactics built a round those weapons, Kim and her men had the
experience of two thousand years of warfare engrained within them. It wasn’t
conscious knowledge, none of them had ever trained to take down a castle
defended by medieval or older weapons, but they’d seen it done in the movies,
read about it in history books. There wasn’t a move the baldricks could make
that they didn’t know about and counter.

Countering
the barricade was easy and Kim didn’t even have to give the orders. From his
overwatch position, Madeuce had anticipated the barricade and was ready for it.
He and his men each had an AT-4 anti-tank rocket launcher ready. The
orange-white fire and streak of white smoke began with them and ended in
rolling explosions that tore the barricade and its defenders apart. The explosions
had barely subsided when Kim’s team charged forward, spraying the remaining
defenders with bullets from their M4s. Madeuce waved and his men joined the
assault, slower because they were the support team, loaded with heavy
equipment, but still fast enough to get through the gates before Kim and her
people vanished inside the keep. There were sounds of intermittent burst of
gunfire from the rooms inside and then silence.

Okeraphluxos
had seen the destruction of the last of his garrison at the barricade and knew
it was all over. The humans hadn’t even bothered to ask him whether he wanted
to surrender and it was pretty obvious that they weren’t about to. There was a
trident hanging on the wall, not the run-of-the-mill cast one, a Tartaruan
trident that had been forged with care by Belial’s best craftsmen. It could
hold a charge better than the normal ones and its prongs would stab deeper and
break less. It would be a good weapon to die with. His grip as he took hold of
it was careful, he concentrated his magic into charging it up, ready for the
burst of power that would open the fight.

He
never got the chance. Kim’s men were already in the corridor when he stepped
out of his room and the short, stubby M4s were far better suited to fighting in
confined areas that the unwieldy tripod. The last thing that Okeraphluxos ever
heard was the thudding of the gunfire and the last thing he felt were the
bullets that killed him.

Ten
minutes later, Kim was settled down in a comfortable chair, waiting for the
scheduled contact. It came, right on schedule. Jade, this is kitten. Is it safe
to open up?

Sure
is kitten. Got a surprise for you too. We’ve just taken a baldrick castle. Not
an impressive one but still a castle

Oooh,
well done. Opening now.

The
familiar ellipse started to open. “Madeuce, get ready to go through, its been
good to have you with us.” Kim reached into a pocket and fished out a piece of
jewelry she’d found as she’d been searching the building. “Give this to kitten
for me will you? It’s the least we can do for her. And take the cameras with
the pictures the brass wanted back as well.”

Madeuce
nodded and stepped through the ellipse followed by his special forces team. As
soon as they were clear, the barrage of supplies and ammunition came the other
way. Then the ellipse closed off.

Twenty
minutes later, Kim and her team had evacuated the castle. They’d left the
bodies of the dead baldricks piled up in the courtyard, under a message that
was much more detailed than the usual four letters. It read They oppressed the
people. They faced the people’s justice. Fear Us. Popular Front For The Liberation
of Hell

Rahab
ran the words over in her mind. They were succinct, merciless. One side of her
was appalled by the destruction and violence, another was fearful of the
consequences that would result from the destruction of even a minor duke and
his fortress. But there was another emotion as well, one she had forgotten
could exist. It was called hope and she had felt it as she had watched the
almost-casual destruction of the castle. She needed to discuss what she had
seen with a military expert and fortunately she knew one who could help her.

417th
Flight Test Squadron, Edwards Air Force Base, California

“How’s
it going Sammy?”

Samuel
Allansen looked up at the mis-shapen Boeing 747-400F behind him. “Well, its
going.”

That
was something of an understatement; the Boeing wasn’t really a -400F at all, it
was something much more interesting, a YAL-1A Airborne Laser aircraft. The real
distinguishing feature was the turret in the nose that controlled the Chemical
Oxygen Iodine Laser, or COIL installed in the aircraft’s body. Originally the
YAL-1A had been designed to shoot down tactical ballistic missiles but it
looked like that role was already history. It didn’t matter too much, after
years of parsimony, the Salvation War was making funding available for all
sorts of programs and the ABL was one of them. Nobody knew what was coming out
of hell next and the capability of the ABL was just too delicious to give up.
The test program had been accelerated by almost a year and three more YAL-1As
were already being built at Boeing’s facility in Wichita. Once they joined the
test program, things would really start to move.

“Shot
down any baldricks yet?” Mickey Jennings was poking fun at his old friend but
there was an element of frustration in it for them both. They were stuck here
at Edwards on the ABL test program while other Air Force pilots were making
sky-high scores downing harpies.

“Nah,
can if any show up though. We’ve got the COIL installed and we’re doing systems
integration stuff at the moment. The brass has ordered us to cut short the
systems level ground and flight tests and bring the intercept tests against
in-flight targets forward. They’d be happy if we could do them last week but
yesterday will be soon enough for them.”

Jennings
nodded sympathetically. The ABL had been a source of frustration to the people
working on it, not for technical reasons although the program had been, to put
it mildly ‘challenging’ but for finance. The budget had never been enough to
work at optimum speed and there was always the threat of it being cut
completely. At least that had gone, but the problem was now the constant push
to get the program operational.

“And
its not as if we don’t have things to work out yet.” Allansen was still
talking. “The laser has a tendency to overheat and we’re not sure if the fire
control system will be good enough to take on a baldrick. It’s infra-red and
was designed to lock on to the flare from the end of a ballistic missile.
That’s a whole world hotter than a baldrick and the egg-heads aren’t sure it’ll
work against them.”

“The
fighter jocks are complaining about the AIM-9 as well. Apparently it has real
difficulty locking on to a baldrick. Still the 120s are doing well.”

“Yeah,
but we don’t carry them. I’ve been on about that. What’s the point of building
a critical bird like this and then giving us nothing to defend ourselves with?
To do our job, we’d have to be within 300 klicks of an enemy missile base and
you can’t tell me the bad guys will be happy about that. Yet here we are, the biggest,
most expensive clay pigeon in the world.”

“Harpies
ain’t no skeet-shooters, that’s for sure?”

“No?
They took down enough helicopters for the Army to stop using them until the
fighter jocks could clear the sky. OK, we’re safe enough from harpies at 40,000
feet but who knows what we’ll be facing next time around. And there is a next
time coming, everybody knows it. Anyway, Mickey, that’s not why I asked you
over. My copilot, Jimmy Grainger, is being assigned to one of the new birds
Boeing is building. He’s leaving end of the month and I won’t be seeing him
much in between. Want to join the crew? It’ll get you out from behind that
desk.”