Walls of Dis, Hell
This wasn’t like normal sieges. The rules of a siege were well-established; the defenders mounted guard on the walls of the besieged fortress, the attackers started to build their own fortifications around that fortress. Their aim was to cut supplies to the besieged garrison and eventually bring about its surrender. If that didn’t seem likely, they would concentrate on the weakest point of the line and break through there. Or try to, a wise garrison commander kept a force in reserve for exactly that eventuality. The reserve force could be used another way, if food was running out, it could launch an attack on the weakest point of the fortifications and break out. If there was a reserve.
Nobody had ever besieged Dis before, not even during the Great Celestial War. It was too big, its walls too long. It would require more than the total armies of Hell, even before the humans had set about decimating them, to set up a proper siege. Garrisoning Dis was even more impossible. Dagon had 243 legions, of whom 24 were Krakens and 16 cavalry. That left him with 203 legions of foot soldiers, 1,350,000 in total. That meant he had one soldier for every 50 feet of wall. That wasn’t a garrison, it was a fig-leaf. Dagon snorted at the use of the old Earth religious reference. These humans weren’t the blind, foolish followers of superstition that the Demons had known. They were supremely logical, supremely practical, utterly ruthless killers. And nobody had told them that putting Dis under siege was impossible so they had gone ahead and done it.
At first, Dagon didn’t even believe that the city had been put under siege. There were no earthen walls being thrown up, no garrison surrounding the city. The humans had started to arrive and set up their camps, scattered around the city, wherever they felt the ground suited them. Isolated encampments, just their tanks and mickvees parked on the plains, surrounded by a wall of earth. And their artillery of course, Briefly Dagon wondered at how Belial had got to know all the names for the human weapons, was he in league with them? That was a question better not asked because Belial was now Satan’s favorite and to criticize him meant death. Anyway, the names were good, ‘aircraft’ made much more sense than ‘sky chariot’ and few now used the original demon names. That was good for the old names implied magic and there was no magic in the human’s arsenal. They used machines instead. Engineering had met magic and engineering’s victory had been absolute. Dagon knew Dis would fall, his paper-thin screen of soldiers couldn’t stop the human onslaught.
Dagon shook his head and returned to the problems of the siege. He had more soldiers, more by far than the humans. The human encampments hadn’t linked up, they were still separate entities. Last night, some demons outside had tried to get caravans of supplies through to the city, knowing that prices within the walls were already soaring. The great camps between the human positions had seemed an open invitation and that was just what they had been. An invitation to destruction. The caravans had set out and died under a hail of mage bolts – Dagon stopped himself and carefully used the right words. A hail of artillery fire. The caravans had been destroyed, when the light had returned, all that was left of them was charred wreckage. The siege was as tight as if the humans had surrounded Dis. How they’d done it, Dagon didn’t understand but they had and that was all that mattered.
“Keep down My Lord.” One of the foot soldiers near him whispered urgently. That was something else Dagon had noted. The soldiers up here crouched behind the stone crenellation and spoke in whispers. They were afraid, mortally afraid and once more Dagon knew that the fall of Dis was inevitable.
“You fear the humans?” Dagon’s voice was silky as he asked the question that was also a threat.
“Humans, no. Their magery yes. “ The new words hadn’t spread down to the rank and file yet. “My Lord, if they see you, you will die. They can see in the dark and strike without warning.”
The ranker measured distances and the route that Dagon had used to approach. “My Lord, they are watching now for you. They saw you come to us and now they wait for you. When you appear again, if you appear again, you will die. Watch this.”
The soldier placed a spare helmet, Dagon didn’t like to think of how the helmet had become a spare, on a trident and lifted it where Dagon’s head would be if he stood up. There was a dull thud and the helmet lurched and spun. When Dagon looked at it, there was a hole the size of his talon punched in the front but the back was a gaping void, its edges hot and singed.
“Three soldiers we’ve lost tonight to that magery, on just this section of the wall. How many more, I don’t know but if the rest of the walls are like this…”
The soldier didn’t need to finish the thought but Dagon did it for him, silently, in his head. If this rate of attrition kept up, he wouldn’t even have a paper-thin defense when the assault came. He had a mental picture of what that would mean, the humans breaking through the walls, their tanks and mickvees plowing through the streets, their artillery devastating the city and they took in by storm. Every demon knew what happened when a fortress fell to attack by storm, a days-long orgy of looting, rape, pillage and torture than would only end when there was nothing left to kill and destroy. If the humans were as efficient at storming fortresses as they were at destroying armies in the field, and there was no reason why they should not be, then Dis was indeed doomed. And with it the whole demon race.
Dis could not be stormed, its surrender had to be negotiated before the humans got to work. Deumos had been right, somebody had to contact the humans and ask for terms. But, nobody could do that while Satan still lived. The answer was obvious although millennia of loyalty screamed in protest at the inevitable conclusion. Satan had to go. That meant Dagon had to see Deumos and throw his lot in with her plan. Now, quickly because the humans would attack soon and then it would be too late for Dis and everybody who lived within it.
B-1B “Strawberry Bitch” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Over Tartarus
“I guess that must be the first target?” Major Andrea Czernick swung Strawberry Bitch around in a wide circle, looking at the great black ellipse beneath them. “Sheffield or Detroit do you reckon?”
“No way of knowing is there? Hang on a minute, Sheffield’s lava outfall has stopped, Detroit’s hasn’t. The portal is that crater is clear of lava. Looks like its building up though and will lap over again soon but its clear now. So that must be Sheffield. Damn.”
Strawberry Bitch had been allocated the southern portal, a few miles away, Shoo Shoo Baby was lining up on the other. It looked like Shoo Shoo Baby had got lucky and drawn the Detroit portal.
“Look on the side Jim, at least if this thing works, we’ll stop the Sheffield attack resuming.”
“If it works, I hear the first test was a flop. Lining up Andy?”
“Lined up. Bomb-nav system on, target designated, approach height 29,000 feet, speed 454 knots. All data entered. Take it from here, Strawberry Bitch.”
The B-1B settled into its bomb run, the attack-navigation system taking data from the flight computer and bombing radar and transforming it into precise flight commands. Humanity had come a long, long way from the crude Norden bomb sight in the B-24 whose name the B-1 carried. At a precisely calculated moment, the aircraft lurched as the EBU-5 dropped clear of the bomb bay and arced downwards. Czernik held her breath as she watched it fall in a perfect ballistic arc that terminated in the center of the portal. There was a brilliant flash, one that seemed unnaturally bright against the black of the portal, a flash that seemed to grow out of all proportion to the size of the bomb she had just dropped. The black ellipse of the portal seemed to flicker, its edges pulsating as they absorbed the blast from the bomb. Then the portal started to swell outwards, doubling or tripling in size, before it collapsed and vanished.
“Yee-hah!” Czernik’s scream of triumph was echoed throughout Strawberry Bitch as her crew looked at the featureless crater that now lacked its black crown. A split second later a similar scream of triumph came over the radio from Shoo Shoo Baby. Obviously the Detroit sky-volcano had just been shut down as well. Czernik pulled the control column back, bringing Strawberry Bitch into a gentle climb away from the target location. First responsibility was to clear the target area for the formation of four B-1s that were targeting Belial’s fortress. Second was to send a message home. She thumbed the button on the radio that selected long-range communications and composed her voice into its best neutral-official tone. “This is Foxhound-Electric-Leader to Rivet Crown. Do you read me?”
“Rivet Crown here. Receiving you.” That was a relief, there were no satellites in Hell and the egg-heads seemed to believe there never could be so relay aircraft were being used. Rivet Crown was an old EC-121 that had been ‘borrowed’ from a museum and pulled back into service while Boeing 747s were converted to take her place. She had last directed air intercepts over the Gulf of Tongkin more than forty years before. Another old lady doing her best.
“Report Operation Electric Strike successful. Repeat Operation Electric Strike successful. Both portals hit by bombs and closed down. Both portals shut completely. No sign of further sky volcano action here.”
“Confirming that Electric Strike Leader. Both portals shut down. Wait one.” There was a long humming crackle
