harpies were in short supply after that terrible mage-blast. It was an unfamiliar feel for a Lord who had built his forces around his harpy-flock. He needed this one alive. Snacks could wait. Anyway, his foot-soldiers were right, the human magery was lingering, he had seen some of them flee forward to escape the mage-fire, across the river and they had died convulsing and twitching just as the harpies had done. The human defenses were still there, he adjusted his vision to long range and saw the hole torn in their lines, a hole that barely scratched its depths and one that new Iron Chariots were already moving in to fill. He knew what would come next, the chariots would charge and crush his force. It suddenly dawned on him that his 40 surviving legions were the only organized military force between the humans and Dis.
“Go to Pritograshnaris, tell him to suspend the attack. Form a defense line on the, no, behind the hills. If the humans can fight from behind hills, then so can we. Dismount the naga from their beasts and get them ready to fire on the human attack. Human magery and mage-fire have broken this attack, now we must break theirs. After you have delivered that message fly south and see Chiknathragothem. Tell him that our attack here has stalled due to magery of unprecedented power. It is now down to him to break through the human defenses and repel their army. We shall block the road to Dis. He must be the hammer and we shall be the anvil with the humans crushed between us. Now go.”
Thankful to be alive, the harpy left. Beelzebub stared after him, then concentrated on the area in front of his position, where the first five line of his army had once been. Incredibly, survivors were moving down there, pulling themselves out of the very earth itself. They were picking themselves up, retreating, staggering would be a better word, back to where his new defense line was forming. His decision to end the attack was the right one, but even if he hadn’t made it, what was left of his army would have made it for him. For the first time in his long life Beelzebub knew the full meaning of defeat. It didn’t mean that the benefits of fighting on did not match the costs, it meant that an army could no longer fight. In his heart, Beelzebub knew that this war was lost, that it had been lost before it had even started.
“Sire.” A Greater Herald was landing. Beelzebub was shocked, the creature was gray and visibly shaking. “Sire, something terrible had happened.”
Satan's Palace, City of Dis, Fifth Ring, Hell
The four B-1s had already made three runs over the target area, assembling their radar picture and ensuring the primary drop point had been properly identified. Their fourth run was the real thing. At almost the same instant, the four B-1Bs released the MOPs. The four massive bombs began accelerating at 0.8 Gs and quickly turned nose- down, presenting a small, hardened cross-section to the granite they were about to strike. As they fell, the radar in the nose of each B-1B tracked the fall and the approximate trajectory, and automatically radioed small corrections to each corresponding bomb, causing the fins to slightly turn, adjusting its course. In just under forty-seven seconds, the four bombs had all covered the five-and-a-half mile drop, and at precisely the same time they struck the bronze roof of Satan's palace in a square twenty meters across.
As it happened, an unlucky orc was standing directly beneath one of the bombs, which was now hurtling down at more than 1,250 miles per hour; he was crushed into a paste before he realized what had hit him, and his remains were carried down in front of the bomb as it crashed through the floor into the basement, and then through the basement floor into the rock foundation of Satan's palace. Each of the four bombs traveled approximately 130 feet into the granite underneath Satan's palace before the fuses in their tails initiated. The combined 120,000 pounds of steel and high explosive detonated an instant thereafter.
Because granite is far denser than air, the speed of sound in the rock is much higher than the speed of sound in air. In fact, the speed of sound in granite is approximately 19,500 feet per second. As the bombs detonated, a shockwave formed in the explosive material and hit the surrounding rock at more than 20,000 miles per hour, driven by the gas products of the reaction. Impact from the shockwave vaporized the granite surrounding the bombs, creating a core of superheated rock vapor which followed the pressure wall as it continued at half again the speed of sound through the granite, vaporizing rock which it encountered.
The four roughly spherical shockwaves met each other in less than four thousandths of a second. If an observer could have seen the meeting in a cross-section of the granite foundation to Satan's castle, he would have seen the four spheres of superheated gas seem to merge as they encompassed each other, merging into what would appear to be a flattened pancake, centered at the center of mass of the four bombs and traveling outward at mach 1.5. Looking up, he would see Satan's castle – and he would focus on the single wavefront traveling upward, about to reach the surface.
The rock holding back the volume of gas melted under the onslaught of the shockwave, draining energy from it and slowing it until it slipped under the shockwave threshold and became a particularly large and destructive pressure pulse, traveling at just under the speed of sound. Just under six thousandths of a second after the bombs first initiated, the pulse from the blast reached the surface. When it did, several things happened at once. Where it touched the foundation rocks, the stone out of which Satan had built his palace transmitted the pulse upward, buckling and crushing the huge building blocks where they stood. Where it touched nothing but air, the spalling effect threw huge chunks of rock into the air, jarring from the spur and turning them into missiles that arced upward and outward to descend in a ghoulish hail onto Dis.
As the pressure pulse reached the edge of the spur, the energy had nowhere to go. If the spur had been made of some extremely ductile metal, it would have sprung out and then back, reflecting the pressure wave back into the interior and causing it to ring like some gigantic, unimaginably deep bass gong. As it stands, granite is nowhere near as flexible; therefore, the pressure wave fragmented the surface of the spur into house-sized boulders and threw them out into the surrounding caldera like pebbles.
Meanwhile, at the top of the spur, the pressure pulse traveled up through Satan's palace until it reached the roof, which popped off like an immense champagne cork, jumping several feet before it started to fall back down into the interior as the support columns buckled. Seven thousandths of a second after the detonation of the four MOPs, Satan's sprawling, magnificent fortress, built over a period of scores of millennia, began to crumble, its hard granite rock left with no more structural integrity than a sand castle facing an incoming tide.
Out on the long causeway that lead along the spur from the main circle of Dis to the promontory of Satan’s palace, Belial lay stunned by the bombs that had demolished the work of millennia. The rolling, heaving shockwaves had thrown him off his feet and tossed him around on the ground as if he was of no more account than a kidling. Once, in the great feasts at Tartarus, one of his minions had said that nobody could call themselves drunk unless they couldn’t lie on the floor without holding on. Now, Belial knew what that meant, he’d tried to hold on to the ground under him but he had failed and it had evaded his grasp at every turn. He was dazed, half-blinded by the great cloud of dust that was enveloping the whole area. Beneath his taloned feet, the ground was still shaking as the after-shocks reverberated in the structure or the rocks thrown high in the sky made their way back down. He tried to stand but the ground was too unstable, too riven by the blasts to allow him to do that. Instead he crawled, trying to find some cover from the rain of fragments that descended around him. In one corner of his mind, he realized that this was the human response to his attacks on Sheffield and Dee-Troyt. Abigor had said that when the humans fought, they went for the top first, decapitated their enemy and cut away his ability command. The humans had done as Abigor had warned, they had gone straight for the top. Then, another part of his brain told him that this was an insight he had better keep to himself. Speaking of it would mean a hideous death.
He tried to get to his feet again, this time making it as the rolling aftershocks faded away. The causeway in front of him was crumbling, even as he watched, another section broke away and fell into.. what? He needed to see, to assess what damage had been done. It had to be huge, incomprehensible. Belial was beginning to know his enemy and when humans wrought destruction on their enemies, they tended to go for the huge and incomprehensible.
Slowly, carefully he made his way along the causeway, to where the crumbling lip marked the edge of the crater where the bombs, oh Belial knew the right words now, a bomb dropped by aircraft, not a magebolt from a sky-chariot, had landed. Back in Tartarus, a few humans had turned their coats and told what they knew of human destructive powers. In some cases, they knew just the names, in others a bit about how the weapons worked. But this? None of them had mentioned this.
Nearer to the rim, the sentries that had guarded the entrance to Satan’s palace were dead, blood trickling from their noses and mouths. Other than that there was no reason why they should be dead, there were no obvious wounds on their bodies. Had the bomb been poison? And if it was, why had Belial himself survived. There was much here to think upon and for a brief moment Belial wished that Euryale was with him. The gorgon would see a pattern in this, somehow.
