The War in Heaven (40 page)

From the ground, Abaddon watched the proceedings. He again examined the silly looking goggles with dark tinted glass. He shook his head. Tesla seemed to be having fun with this whole operation; he was sure of it. He was eager to use the largest, most powerful toy he had ever had. But Abaddon just wanted to get it over with and get everyone back to Refuge safely. Right now, he was concerned about Lenar.

Abaddon turned to the side; he was certain he had heard something. It sounded like a voice. He looked down the ridge to pick out something moving amid the rocks. He turned to Nikola. “Hand me the binoculars, if you please.”

Totally absorbed, Nikola didn’t so much as look away from the readings on his gray box as he gave the binoculars to Abaddon.

Abaddon turned the binoculars on the moving form. “It looks like a person,” he said, focusing on the mysterious figure. “It’s a woman. I think it is Bedillia.”

“Bedillia?” asked Nikola. “What would she be doing out here?”

“I will find out,” said Abaddon moving several steps away, and preparing to take flight.

“Get back right away,” warned Nikola. “I don’t want you in flight when the bomb goes off.”

“Why not?” asked Abaddon, “Lenar will be.”

With those words he took to the air, heading in Bedillia’s direction. Nikola glanced away from his readings for just a few seconds before focusing upon them once more.

Bedillia held her breath as one of the two figures took flight and headed her way. She was relieved to see that the flying beings wings were like those of a bird and not a bat.

“Bedillia, what are you doing here?” asked Abaddon, landing but a dozen feet in front of her. “We are only minutes from exploding this bomb of Tesla’s.”

“That’s the thing,” said Bedillia, who by now was both breathless and shivering. “We have to call it off. David said something was wrong. There is no time to explain; we have to stop this.”

“OK,” said Abaddon, “we call it off.” He took Bedillia in his arms and bolted skyward. He prayed that it was not too late.

It took only 30 seconds to make the flight back to Nikola. He looked at Abaddon incredulously when he heard the news.

“David has opposed this mission since yesterday,” he objected. “I don’t see why, nor do I agree with his conclusion. This is going to work, trust me.”

There was a moment of hesitation. “As the leader of Refuge, it is my duty to weigh the merits of all points of view. We might decide to do this mission later, but for right now we are calling Lenar back … calling this thing off. That is my decision.”

Nikola appeared disappointed but did not press the issue. He pressed the transmit button. “Lenar, we need you to abort the drop, I repeat, abort the drop. Return to the extraction point and gate out.”

He released the button. All he heard was static. He repeated the order still nothing.

“What’s wrong?” asked Abaddon.

“It must be the ionization in that plume about the city,” replied Nikola. “The signal isn’t getting through.”

“So what’s he going to do?” asked Bedillia, scanning the sky, trying to make out the form of a dark angel.

“We’d anticipated this,” continued Nikola. “In the event that Lenar lost contact, he was to drop the device on schedule. Don’t even think about it, Abaddon, you’d never reach him in time. I’m sorry. But I assure you, nothing is going to happen except the destruction of that city. I’ll keep trying to reach him, but I don’t think it will do any good.”

High above the city, near the brightest region of the glowing plasma, Lenar prepared to make the drop. He was in considerable pain. His skin burned as the electricity coursed through his body. Again he tried to contact Tesla, but with no success.

He was losing altitude. He was 300 feet below the agreed upon drop altitude, but he didn’t have the strength to climb. Indeed, he couldn’t even maintain this altitude. He banked hard to the left, pirouetting 180 degrees, before returning to level flight. He put the radio away and took the bomb in hand. This was it.

It was so difficult to see. He lined up the shot and released the bomb. It plunged swiftly into the lights of the city, vanishing from sight. He increased his angle of descent to gain speed and flapped his wings with all of his might, what was left of it.

“The bomb is away,” announced Nikola, staring at the display on the gray box. “There is nothing we can do now. But I assure you, nothing out of the ordinary is going to happen. This is going to work. Within minutes of the detonation, angels will be able to move freely between Earth and Heaven.” He turned to Bedillia. “I’m afraid I don’t have an extra set of glasses for you. You’ll need to look away when it detonates.”

Tense minutes passed. The bomb would detonate a mere 500 feet above the city to maximize the effect of the blast. The group took cover behind a nearby set of boulders. It was almost time.

Bedillia felt a sense of terrible dread. She couldn’t explain why, but she believed David totally.

“Ten seconds,” announced Nikola, putting his dark glasses on.

Abaddon held Bedillia close in an attempt to keep her warm as the last seconds went by. Then there was a flash, the likes of which had never been seen in Hell. For a moment, this realm of eternal night became as bright as day. There was no sound, at least not immediately, just light and intense heat.

Nikola stood there, most of his body protected from the heat by the boulders. Never in his life had he seen such a sight. A billowing mushroom-shaped cloud whose stem was as bright as the sun, rose into the sky. Along the ground, an ever expanding luminous fog spread out in all directions, blasting then melting everything in its way amid unimaginable heat.

As the cloud expanded, its luminosity slowly diminished. Nikola removed his goggles to see the work of his own hand in all its splendor. The glowing mists that had emanated from the city were gone, as was the city for that matter, hidden from end to end in a hot cloud of radioactive dust.

Abaddon scanned the destruction in amazement. “It is a fitting end for a place intended to promote the fall of humankind to damnation. I never thought I would see a day such as this.”

Then the sounds of the apocalyptic demolition reached the trio as a deep ground shaking rumble. By this time, the mushroom cloud had risen a full four miles into the air. Nikola scanned the destruction with his binoculars. Here and there he saw fires burning beneath the fading clouds of destruction rolling along the ground. Secondary explosions of an unknown nature erupted here and there within the city. Then he went for his radio. He tried several times to contact Lenar, but the airwaves were crammed with static.

Fear gripped Bedillia’s heart as Nikola called out to him on the radio again and again. She had heard that Lenar was having trouble just before the bomb drop. Suppose he hadn’t made it?

A somber atmosphere had fallen over the group. They didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that something had happened to Lenar, something very bad. However, it was looking grimmer by the second. Nikola turned up the volume of the radio.

“Lenar calling Tesla,” said a breathless voice through the relentless static of the radio. “You never told me that blast wave would be that hot. I don’t think my wings will ever be the same.”

The whole group moved closer to the radio. It seemed like a miracle.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” said Nikola who barely hid his emotions. “Sorry about the heat. Where are you?”

“Above the valley between the first and second ridge,” came the reply. “I’ve been trying to call you, but I couldn’t get through. My strength came back quickly after I got away from those glowing mists, or whatever you want to call them. I don’t think I’ve ever flown as fast as I have these past two minutes. I should be at the extraction point in about ten minutes or so. I will probably lose contact with you once I cross the mountains.”

“Right,” replied Nikola. “We’re going to stay here for a short while to see if there are any strange aftereffects from the blast. We’ll meet you back at Refuge in about half an hour.”

“See you then,” replied Lenar. His voice was fading as he drew close to the limit of the range of the radio. “By the way; congratulations on your accomplishment.” There was another message after that, but it was hidden by the static.

The three remained for 20 minutes as the fires faded and the cloud dispersed. It was the rising radiation level that finally compelled Nikola to abandon their position.

“An unusual amount of radiation,” noted Nikola, “a bit more than I would have expected … and of a different type too. We might want to monitor this over the next few days.”

“I guess David was wrong after all,” said Bedillia, as the team gathered up their equipment. “I was so sure he was right. Maybe I was foolish coming here.”

“No, you were being prudent,” said Abaddon. “I think we were just lucky today.”

The three travelers vanished into the starry mists, leaving a smoldering radioactive city in their wake. But amid the radioactive wasteland something was happening. In the midst of growing electrical discharges around ground zero, a strange breeze was blowing straight into the center of the blast from all directions.

It was 1452 hours when a continuous stream of angels from Earth began to pour through the gate at Elesia. Still others entered the second level of Heaven through the hastily prepared gate that Johann and his collaborators had brought from his house before it had been destroyed. Tesla’s plan had succeeded.

An hour later, Nikola Tesla contacted the war council by telesphere from Abaddon’s audience chamber in Refuge. The bomb had been successful; Sheol had been destroyed. He was the hero of the day.

When David Bonner was called before the 20-member war council several hours later, he realized that he had much to answer for. He had nearly jeopardized the angelic position in Elesia, based on what might well have been nothing but a dream.

“You didn’t even consult us,” objected Michael.

“There wasn’t time,” replied David, who seemed totally unrepentant for his actions, “and I’m afraid this isn’t over yet. You had better get as many angels through from Earth as you can…while you can.”

“And why is that?” asked another angel.

“Because the gate is going to shut down again,” replied David. “Still, you might have enough time to get the angels across. After that, the bomb that was dropped on Sheol is going to change everything.”

“Because?” asked Michael.

“Because that was not a normal nuclear bomb that was detonated,” replied David. “The explosive radius of that bomb had hyperdimensional characteristics. It exceeded the mean cohesive strength of the space time continuum in the region of Sheol.”

“Please,” interrupted Washington. “Would you tell us what you think is going to happen in a language we might all understand?”

“OK,” said David. “The bomb destroyed Sheol, but now you have a different problem, one that is potentially far more serious. In a normal explosion, like those you are familiar with general, the blast extends out, up, and across from the point of the explosion in three dimensions, but not this one. This blast extends across all of the extra dimensions of the known universe, all thirteen of them. That makes this explosion vastly more destructive. The worst place in the universe to use it was Sheol.”

“But why?” objected Gabriel.

“I was wondering the same thing,” admitted Johann. “We’ve known that Sheol was special, that it was the departure point for demonic spirits on their way to Earth, but we never understood why. I suppose you are going to tell us.”

“I am,” confirmed David. “Sheol was built at a natural weak point in space time, the magnetic south pole of the universe. In that way, demonic spirits could easily make the trip from Hell to any place within the universe
by simply riding the lines of force. It is one of only two places in the universe from which it is possible.”

“I assume that the other would be the north pole of the universe,” replied Washington.

“Yes,” confirmed David. “Think of space time as a thick pane of glass holding water in a huge aquarium. What we have just done in setting off that bomb is to go off and strike that pane at its thinnest point with a sledge hammer. It sent a radiating set of cracks all around the point of impact, and at the point of impact is a hole, not a big hole, not yet, but it is growing. Ever more water is rushing out of the aquarium. What is worse is that the environment beyond the aquarium reacts violently with water. That is why the glass was there, to keep them apart.”

The blank look David got from the council, told him that he still hadn’t got his point across. They still didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

“Hell itself is going to be consumed at an increasing rate,” said David, “pulled into hyperspace ever more rapidly. As it falls into the hyperspace, it will be converted into a stream of high-energy particles. Satan had been blocking the route of the angels between Earth and Heaven by injecting a stream of gravitons into hyperspace, a beam directed at Earth. The high energy particles entering this hole will follow that same route. They will eventually irradiate the Earth to such a degree as to strip off its atmosphere and sterilize all life on its surface. That is what we are looking at. That is what I was trying to prevent.”