little bit, casting a slightly dimmer glow. The man looked familiar, then Abigor placed him: he'd come a few days earlier to interrogate Abigor about the city of Dis and possible military targets.
“General Abigor, I'm pleased to see you again.” The voice was flat, uninflected, almost disinterested.
“Likewise.”
The visitor took a thick piece of rolled parchment from under his arm and spread it out on the table. “General, would you mind coming here to look at this?” Phrased as a request, there was no doubt it was a command.
Abigor rose and stepped over to the table, looked down. It was a copy of the map of Dis he'd looked at earlier, but now there was a set of red concentric shapes drawn on it, basically circles but strangely distorted. The shapes were colored successively darker toward the center but the relationship was strange, distorted, darkening quickly where they overlapped, sometimes dramatically so. Some of the shapes were arranged in neat triangles. And in the center of those formations, the area of darkest red was horribly large and terrifyingly dark.
His hair was standing on end as he looked down at the map. The shapes and patterns went on and on, so that the city was completely covered by the circles. Satan's palace, on the fortified spur that stuck out into the Pit, was invisible under the triangles of overlapping circles. What could the circles mean? There was only one explanation – and it came from the DVD he had just watched and Abigor suddenly knew why it had been given to him. It made all the pieces began to fall into place. The humans could destroy whole cities with single bombs, and they had shown they could do so without any compunction. Dis wasn’t the only city in Hell, but it was the largest and it was the administrative center for the whole of Hell. Why would a city be a target? Hadn’t Belial just destroyed a human city with his party tricks? Was this to be the human revenge? With a rising wave of bile in his throat, Abigor began to suspect what the shapes and colors meant.
“General Abigor, what do you make of this map?” asked the Targeteer.
“It seems that… that this is a map of the destruction caused by the explosion of atomic bombs to the city of Dis.”
The visitor raised one eyebrow. “Very good, General, though we call them 'devices', not 'bombs' and they ‘initiate’ not ‘explode’. Technically, a nuclear initiation isn’t an explosion. These circles represent the overpressure radii of each individual initiation, they’ll all be taking place at once by the way. As I'm sure you learned, one way our devices bring about the destruction of their targets is shockwave caused by the initiation; the shockwave is measured by over-pressure. Where patterns overlap, the over-pressure increases dramatically. Terrain is critically important as well, the shockwave will be channeled by some features, reflected by others. Where it is channeled, it will extend further in one direction at the expense of others. Where it is reflected, it will cause no damage beyond the point of reflection but destruction before that point will be multiplied many times over.
“As is our way, we targeted only military installations – the barracks, production centers, command and control points, administrative buildings and so on – but you can see that the installations are so densely concentrated in the city, the city would be destroyed by such an attack. No part of the city is subject to a shockwave of less than 5 psi overpressure; such strength guarantees the destruction of all but the most hardened targets. Most of the city, more than 90 percent of that will suffer from overpressures an order of magnitude greater.
“We did need to use very high-yield devices in ground bursts to destroy the most hardened targets. These are the earthworks and the walls which surround the city. We suspect that the construction of the buildings is so poor that the ground wave caused by the destruction of the walls would destroy the city anyway. Of course, blast is just one way a nuclear device destroys its target. There is also light flash which will blind every unprepared person for tens of miles, and fire. Another map for you, this one shows the anticipated firestorms. You’ve seen those films of what a firestorm in a city can be like? You can expect winds approaching 200 miles per hour, heat levels so high that it will melt steel let alone bronze, the fires will suck all the oxygen out of the air and the people trapped in the wreckage of Dis will asphyxiate. Finally, there’s direct radiation as well, but that isn’t a factor, after somebody has been reduced to the size, shape and appearance of a McDonald’s hamburger by blast, fire and debris, irradiating them as well is a mere technicality. Of course, that doesn’t cover fallout. The ground bursts will create horrible levels of contamination. Normally we wouldn’t worry too much about fallout from air bursts but the atmosphere here is so dusty, even air bursts are going to generate a lot of fallout as well.”
“So,” said Abigor flatly, “you will destroy Dis.”
“No, we needed to create a plan to destroy Dis, but it is just a contingency plan.”
“Then why are you showing this to me?”
“Because, General, you need to know what we can do – what we are willing to do. The destruction of Dis would take the lives of nearly every demon living there. It would leave no building standing, and in its wake there would be giant radioactive firestorms. After the fires died, there would be nothing of Dis left save craters; what was once a city would become a charred, radioactive wasteland. Nobody, human or demon, would live there for ten thousand years.
“We can do that, General. And we would be right to do that, after how your people have treated us in the past. Demons have enslaved humans, treated them as cattle, eaten them, and tortured them for thousands of years. As a professional, its not my job to make moral judgments on the people whose destruction I plan. But, just for once, I’m going to indulge myself. A quick death in nuclear fire is the least that your race deserves.
“But we are magnanimous in victory, General, as you know. We fight to win, but once we have won we strive for peace. If there are other options that make this plan as superfluous as all the others I have drawn up over the years, then we will prefer to use them. But I warn you, we can be pushed too far for that. This map.” He tapped it with a finger. “Is still not the worst we can do. General, if you really anger us, we will try and bring democracy to your country.”
“I see.” Abigor frowned down at the map, trying to picture the bustling city he'd known for dozens of thousands of years as a charred, smoking wasteland, trying to picture the city vanishing in a series of impossibly bright flashes. And if that was so, what was this other hideous threat? Yet he had a strange feeling there was something he didn’t quite understand because the last remark had made the two soldiers in the room grin broadly. “Who are you. What are you.”
“People call us many things. Targeteers, Contractors, The Business, The Wizards of Armageddon. The last was intended as an insult but we rather like it. And, of course, it has turned out to be a much more accurate description than its author realized.”
Abigor sighed. “You must be a great General then.”
“Actually, I’m not in the armed forces at all, in fact I never have been. I’m a civilian who is employed by a consultancy company, something we call a think-tank, to do analytical work. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for more than 25 years.”
“To do this for years. Then I can assume your plans are…. complete.”
“Then you understand.” A statement, not a question. The Targeteer began to roll up the map. “Thank you for your time, General Abigor. I am sure we will meet again.” The two soldiers escorted him from the room, and Abigor's hair began to lay down. Outside the room, the thunder of artillery had never ceased but now Abigor put it into its true perspective. It was indeed just a pale shadow of what humans could do when they wanted to. He glanced at the door after the man, then looked again. He could have sworn those plants were green and flowering before the man had come in.
Thank's to Surlethe for these two sections. Now, back to the battles…
Chapter Fifty Nine
Coach Insignia Restaurant, Renaissance Center, Downtown Detroit
Gloria Hurst clearly remembered her first trip to Renaissance Center, three decades ago. The gleaming complex of glass and metal towers had promised a fresh start for the city, still struggling to get over the stigma the 1967 riots had created. The 80s rolled around and the dreams of a regenerated Detroit never came to pass; outside of the little oasis of ‘civilization’ the corporations had built, the slums had just continued to decay. Jobs kept leaving and never seemed to come back, buildings crumbled and the criminals seemed to multiply . So many times she’d thought of selling up and moving out, but somehow she’d never had the heart to leave. Her children had never understood that, particularly after her house had been robbed twice in the same month.
The war had almost come as a relief. All the plants still open were running at full capacity and many of the
