“Well, you could pay them. Or you could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That would mean you have to hire some lawyers though and most of them work for the Eternal Enemy. Or you could ignore them but then the humans might send an Army to collect it.”
This time the lightning flashes were multi-colored and went on for a long time. “My patience is at an end. Uriel’s plans are laid, the cups of wrath are ready to be poured. We will inflict tribulations on the humans that they cannon imagine even in their wildest nightmares. Order Uriel to set forth without further delay. The humans will weep for their insults to me.”
“Your will be done Eternal Father.” Michael took a step backwards and headed out of the palace. He’d been right, it had been a tricky meeting but he’d pulled it off. Uriel would set forth and, if Michael was any judge of the way things were going, he wouldn’t find it a happy experience. Anyway, that was for the future and, contrary to Yahweh’s frequently voiced opinions, the future could be trusted to take care of itself. In the immediate present, Michael planned to get stoned.
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.
“Are we all set up?”
“Yes Mister President. The equipment we asked for has arrived, four AN-124 transports landed with them on board a few hours ago. Putin sent the crews as well, so we wouldn’t have to waste time training our own people. So, all we need is the word and we’re set to go.
“Apart from that, everything is going well. The last organized demonic armies in hell have been dispersed, the city of Dis is cut off. We’ve seized the reception area for our dead and redirected them towards our own territory. That’s going well, Expedia. com are even advertising trips to our refugee and recovery area in hell so grieving relatives can welcome their deceased family members into the next life. Bit pricey but if that’s what the market demands… Anyway, as long as they don’t interrupt the logistics streams into Hell, that doesn’t worry us. The sky volcanoes have been shut down and the source of them bombed.”
“An interesting thing there Sir.” Doctor Surlethe cut across Secretary Warner when the Senator paused to catch his breath. “As far as we can make out, Tartarus is the contra-coup from the Hell Pit.”
“What?” President Bush looked confused. That was the sort of statement that made his head ache.
“Its like this Sir.” Surlethe produced a strip of paper, gave it a half-twist and stuck the ends together with tape. “Any dimension in hell is like this a Moebius Strip. The whole of hell is like this, we can’t visualize it because it needs extra dimensions but it does. Now, look at this.” He took a pencil and drew a line on the paper, around the circle. It kept going, without the point being lifted from the paper, until eventually it reached its starting point. “You see Sir, the paper only has one surface, a loop without the twist has two,. Hell is like this Sir, no matter which way you go, we always end up where we started, in every dimension. Now, the bombers flew to Tartarus and back, its exactly half way around the world from the Hell Pit. So if we draw that in the Moebius Strip, we see that half way around is exactly where the Hell Pit is on the other side of the dimension. Mathematically, that’s fascinating.”
“I’m sure Doctor. Secretary Warner, in spite of all the good news and the progress we have made, I trust nobody is going to declare that we have reached the end of major combat operations?”
“No Sir. That caused enough trouble the last time.”
“Good. Thank you for the briefing. Oh, Doctor Surlethe. You said this Moebius Strip effect works for all dimensions in the Hell-dimension? So surely it should apply to time as well?”
Chapter Seventy Nine
Bravo Portal, Off Bermuda, Earth
The black ellipse had mushroomed open and now dominated the Great Sound of Bermuda. The shipping channel into the ellipse was guarded, for what came one way through the hellgate could be matched by what came in the opposite direction. Naval Base Hell-Bravo was as much a defensive installation as an offensive one.
Out in the shipping channel, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, CVN-75, was making her way slowly up towards the hellgate, surrounded by a bevy of tugs that were working overtime to keep her within the strict navigational limits. She was a big ship, she drew a lot of water and the last thing anybody needed was an unexpected accidental grounding. Up in front of her, two fire tugs were directing their hoses into the sky, the brilliant sunshine turning the spray of water into a myriad of colors. It was incredibly beautiful. Once again, Captain Herman A. Shelanski reminded himself that pulling into a foreign port was an experience that made all the sacrifices of living in the Navy worthwhile.
“Give ‘Em Hell Harry!” The woman was speaking through a bullhorn from a speedboat that was racing alongside the great carrier. A Cyclone class PC was keeping between her small craft and the side of the carrier, this may be the Salvation War but nobody had forgotten what had happened to the USS Cole. That wasn’t going to be the case here though, the speedboat curved away then made another run alongside the Truman. This time, the girl in the back pulled the bra of her bikini down and did as good an imitation of a pole-dance as was possible under the circumstances. The roar of cheering from the seamen manning the rails on the carrier drowned out the diesels on the tugs. Once again, the speedboat peeled away, this time it was for good because the ellipse was near and the girls wanted to repeat their performance on the John C Stennis following behind. Idly, Shelanski wondered what the Russian crew on the Piotr Veliky, third in line, would make of the display.
“Ready for hell Transit.” It was an order, not a question.
“Aye Aye Sir. Ready for Transit.” Master Chief Walker glanced out at the deck beneath him. The Truman was up to her full complement of aircraft for the first time in many years even if some of them were refugees from the boneyard or a museum. The backbone of the group was the 54 F-18 Electric Bugs, backed up by 18 F-4 Rhinos. Then there was the new addition to the group, the 18 AT-45s, a single-seat strike version of the T-45 Goshawk. They’d only just arrived in time for the transit, the last had made it on board just as Truman swung to enter the navigational channel. With her six E-2 Hawkeyes and eight SH-60R helicopters, the big carrier had 104 aircraft on board. Too many, her decks were cramped and Shelanski had already decided to off-load nine of the AT-45s to the Stennis
“They’re going to be worn out by the time the group’s through.” Shelanski’s Exec, Captain Ronald Reis waved at the cheering crowds on the jetties that separated the Little Sound from the Great Sound. It looked like the whole population of Bermuda had turned out. As Truman’s bow started to touch the great ellipse, a burst of fireworks exploded overhead. Then, the clear blue sky of earth was replaced by the filthy red murk of Hell.
The tugs had peeled away at the last moment but the Truman was not alone. Six DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers and a pair of CG-47 Ticonderoga class cruisers were waiting for her with another, similar group waiting to screen the Stennis. They were making the air crackle with the power output from the SPY-1 radars of their AEGIS systems and their sonars were lashing the water at full power. Here in Hell, there was no worry that the sonar emissions would harm the local wildlife, in fact creating as much havoc as possible was the reason why the big SQS-53s were cranked up to maximum power. The early battle Astute had fought against one of the Greater Heralds so many months ago had shown just how effective low-frequency sonar pulses could be against the Baldricks.
“Clearing transit area now, Sir.” Navigation passed confirmation up to the bridge.
“Screen forming around us. Johnny Reb is emerging from the portal.” Behind them, the Stennis was half through Hellgate Bravo and Shelanski wondered what would happen to her if the portal shut down for some reason at this precise moment. Anyway, it was a pointless speculation since CVN-74 was already emerging from the gate.
“She’s through Sir. Piotr Veliky will be next. As soon as she’s arrived, we’ll be on our way.”
Shelanski nodded. On the bridge above his, the Admiral was doubtless working out the routing that would take the two carriers all the way north to Tartarus. They wouldn’t be the first human naval assets on their way there; all three Seawolf class submarines had transited the portal days earlier and were already heading for Tartarus at maximum speed. They’d already be almost half way there and they had a load-out the featured a lot of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Nor would the two carrier battle groups be the last. Once they had finished transiting Hellgate Bravo, the long line of amphibious warfare ships and their screens would start. A Marine division, rich in helicopters, Harrier aircraft and armor, aboard an imposing array of LHDs, LPDs and LSDs, a British brigade group with their LPH and
