A shudder ran around the room. Humans and human weapons were bad enough but demons with human weapons and human war-fighting methods? It was worse than a nightmare.
“Even Dis itself is not secure. The orcs are rising. Many areas of the city are such that a single demon cannot walk alone. Those that try are found beaten to death in the alleys. Even broad daylight is no defense, many of those who died, did so in the full light of day. Your Majesty, we have lost the war. It is time we sued for peace.”
“This will not be!” Satan’s demented scream rang around the chamber, echoing off the roof so that it seemed like a great choir was raging at the security report. “Belial burned their cities, we will burn more. It is your cowardice Dagon that is costing us this war.” Satan summoned himself to swat Dagon, to reduce him to pulp on the floor. Before he could do so, Deumos’s voice cut across his scream.
“Dagon speaks the truth. We must sue for peace. Terms have been discussed with the humans, we demanded a third of their dead for our energy. They said they would make their response clear to us and they have. By seizing the Plateau of Minos, they have shown us they will comply with our demand. They have taken all their dead so they can give us the third they demand.”
Deumos looked around, in this confined space, her miasma was effective and people were listening to her. She had spent her time well, bringing Duke after Duke into her web, each with the promise that, once Satan was deposed, they would be the one she supported for his successor. They would fight over the succession and she could step forward as the compromise candidate that nobody really liked but one that was better than interminable fighting. And a Succubus could reign in Hell at last. She glanced around, looking at the painfully-thinned ranks of Dukes. What was left of Hell, anyway. Then she became aware of a tickling sensation in her mind. She sensed it, it was Lugasharmansaka trying to make contact. Not now child, affairs of state are in progress.
Dagon still stood, defying Satan’s wrath. “Sire, if you cannot make peace with the humans to save what is left, then you must stand aside and let those of us who can rule!”
There was a gasp, of shock, horror and fear. The idea of a direct challenge to Satan was unimaginable to those not already in the plot. Even Satan was momentarily taken aback by the challenge.
Watching in the audience, Deumos felt the tickle in her mind again. I said, not now she thought irritably. Then the tickle changed to cold, lifeless, impersonal fingers that sank deep into her mind and took hold, twisting her brain around as they established a grip that even her powers were helpless to break. There was a shadow of Lugasharmanaska in the fingers but only that. As if she was steering the power that held Deumos’s brain captive. She howled with the pain, saw her vision blurring and saw the black ellipse of a portal forming.
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.
“We’re through.” General Schatten’s cry of triumph overwhelmed the rumble of the diesels in the four large trucks far behind him. They looked like fuel bowsers with the great cylinders on their backs but they weren’t. Anyway, all the real fuel bowsers were in Iraq, supplying the armored forces in Hell. In front of him, a black ellipse was forming, poised between the antennas that directed their effort. Off to one side, Lugasharmanaska was writhing on a couch, whimpering, mucus pouring from her nose and mixing with drool from her mouth.
“Hang on, we’re getting there.” James Randi looked at the succubus on the couch, she was certainly proving her new loyalty the hard way. She was in agony and would stay that way until the other side of the portal was secure enough to get a sensitive through and punch a gate from that side back to here. He shook his head quietly to himself, when he had been asked to use his foundations expertise in exposing fraudulent psychics, he’d had no idea it would lead to this.
Behind him the trucks gunned their engines and the great cylinders on their backs started to rise, elevating until they were at a 35 degree angle. Their crews were already lifting metal screens over the glass in the truck cabs. Behind them. In the control cabin, the launch crews were already waiting for the final order.
“Fire Missile One.” The button was pressed, the booster rockets fired and the missile left its launch tube, slowly at first but with increasing speed. Then the turbojet on the Progress anti-ship missile cut in and the missile arched upwards towards the gate that was almost five miles away. In the control cabin, the operator acquired it with his command guidance system and steered it for the very center of the black ellipse. He had little time but he managed it and the missile flew straight through the gate, parallel to the ground.
The Amphitheater of Tranios, Underneath the City of Dis, Hell
The great green monster flew through the gate, its roaring flames filling the chamber with smoke and heat. A few feet from the gate, Deumos felt the blast from the engines shriveling her skin, burning her with an agony that made the pain in her head seem inconsequential. She was blinded by the blast so she didn’t see what the missile did next nor did she see the fine fiber-optic wires it was trailing behind it.
Satan saw it and he saw that the missile was coming straight at him. He tried to summon up the magic needed to throw the missile away. It just needed a second or so to summon up the power but that was time he just didn’t have.
The Progress missile was doing more than 600 miles per hour when it hit Satan in the chest. The kinetic energy of the blow alone was enough to send Satan reeling backwards but that was inconsequential. The missile also had a 3,300 pound explosive warhead that was configured as a shaped charge. Normally it had a copper lining but this one had been modified with an iron liner and sintered iron powder in the cavity. One thing hadn’t changed; the warhead on Progress was behind the main fuel tank and that tank was filled to capacity with jet engine fuel.
The explosion as the warhead went off was powerful enough to bring rocks down from the ceiling and enough even to roil the lava far below. It blasted a mixture of iron plasma, powdered iron and blazing jet fuel deep into Satan’s chest, leaving him blasted burned and poisoned. The great figure, its chest ripped open and splayed apart staggered backwards, slumping down to the floor to sprawl out in a pool of boiling purple blood. Incredibly, the body was already beginning to repair itself when a second missile erupted through the portal.
The operator had done a fine job with the first missile, he’d hit a small moving target with a weapon never designed for the task and which had been hastily modified. The second shot was much easier. Satan’s body was almost still and the few twitches it made didn’t affect the firing solution. The second Progress missile plowed straight into Satan’s head, vaporizing it completely. The great body gave one more jerk and was still. Satan was dead.
As the echoes following the scream of the missiles and the terrible blasts, a great silence fell on the Amphitheater of Tranios. It was interrupted by only the falling of the rocks shaken loose from the roof and the whimpering of those burned by the blast of the missile engines. Shock paralyzed and silenced every demon present, even those in the plot to remove Satan from power had never contemplated this. Dagon was first to recover his senses although his head felt stuffed with mud and neither his eyes nor his ears were working right.
“By right of succession I clai….” He got no further for another roar filled the chamber, this time one which too many demons knew all too well. The roar of human diesel engines.
A strange vehicle emerged from the portal, one with tracks like the tanks but with high sides and an open back. Actually, it had been built as a carrier for Lance missiles but that weapon had been declared obsolete and the M667 carriers built for it had been in storage for years. Then, they’d been found and it had been realized they made perfect armored carriers for Abigor’s troops. In it were sitting figures, large ones and definitely not human despite their similar equipment. More vehicles followed the first, one occupied by a single very large figure that the Dukes recognized instantly. Despite his human-design (if greatly enlarged) battledress helmet and body armor, the figure was known to them all. It was Abigor, commander of the Free Hell Army.
In the background, unnoticed, a Humvee skidded through the portal and a single small figure climbed out, awkwardly and unsteadily. kitten was still recovering from her surgery and was technically unfit for duty but this operation had needed the best sensitive DIMO(N) had and she was it. So, for the first time, kitten was standing in the hell her visions had warned her of so often and now she was instrumental in destroying it.
“OK Luga, I’ve got the portal. I’m punching it through from this side.”
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.
The portal shivered slightly then enlarged. Punched through from Hell-side it was much more stable than before. It would have to be, in addition to Abigor’s armored personnel carriers, an entire Marine battalion task group was ready to roll in. The two companies of tanks and a company of infantry in AAV-7s would be the punch backing up Abigor.
Over by the gate, Luga was being disconnected from the equipment that created and amplified the portal. She was so gray that she seemed almost white and was too weak to stand. Medics surrounded her, working to help her recover from the tremendous strain she had been other. Quietly, General Schatten made his way over to the scene.
