'Alright, that's good enough for me,' Walsch muttered. He lined up the shot and fired. The round took the baldrick in the throat, blowing out just about everything between his massive deltoids. Pouring blood out all over the packed, burnt earth, he stumbled, staggered, then crashed right at the feet of its target, who watched in befuddlement.
'Chump,' Walsch grinned. DeVanzo clapped him on the shoulder. 'Hey Ori, why don't you go finish it off, and bring the new recruit back up here, OK?'
Ori frowned, but drew his katana nonetheless and began crossing the open ground to reach his feebly-moving target. It was only seventy-five meters, but he covered it quickly and hacked the demon's head off without delay. As he did this, DeVanzo and Walsch took up a new position, fifteen meters to the north.
'Shit,' DeVanzo said suddenly. 'Shit shit shit, another baldrick!'
Walsch swung his rifle around. A baldrick within miles of another sentry was unheard of. The patrols were frequent enough to catch the escapees, and that was all that mattered. That's why they were able to pull this off with a single rifle and a spotter or two. They must be pairing the patrols. They're reacting to what we're doing. This baldrick was not like his now-dead partner. He did not bellow or scream. He stalked forward at an inhuman rate, raising his trident high. Ori didn't see it coming, and the rescued human was still half blind. So Tom Walsch chambered a round, took aim, and fired. The shot was hurried, but it was lucky. It winged off the baldrick's elbow, no doubt shattering bone and shredding muscle. He dropped his trident with a roar of anger and pain and stopped, looking for the source of this new attack.
'OK, Ori, time to go,' DeVanzo hissed quietly. Walsch took aim and shot at the baldrick, who was now scanning the treeline. He must've spotted them, because he was in motion just before the shot rang out. Instead of catching him in the chest, he moved just enough to one side that he took the round in the upper arm-the one that had already been shot. He hit the ground hard but got back up quickly.
But Walsch was quicker. He chambered a round, aimed, fired-and nothing happened.
'Shit, misfire.' Walsch groaned and worked the action of the rifle. It refused to budge. 'Jammed up.'
Now the baldrick had definitely spotted them, and he roared a monstrous battle cry. But before he could take a step, Ori was there, blade at the ready, bellowing his own challenge to the massive beast.
'What is he doing?' Walsch cried out, while working to clear his weapon.
'He's starting to believe,' DeVanzo stated with awe. 'He's The One.'
'Now is not the time for Matrix jokes!' Walsch said.
The baldrick only had one good arm, but that meant he retained eighty percent of his deadly ends. He swiped at Ori, but he dodged with blinding quickness and countered with a slice. The baldrick had the sense to offer his mangled flesh, but he hadn't counted on the blade being of iron. The wound seared as the blade bit deep, and the baldrick reared back in shock, kicking at the offending creature with one foot.
Ori was already in position to meet the incoming appendage, and he held his blade firm. It passed between two toes, cutting the webbing there and carving deep into his foot. When Ori twisted the blade and wrenched it free, the baldrick couldn't help but scream. Now limping, he swiped again with his hand, catching nothing and receiving a flurry of slashes from that wretched iron blade. Ori was without pity or quarter, nor was he stylish. He opened up as many wounds as he could, as quickly as he could, until the demon was attempting to hobble away in retreat.
But there would be no retreat. Ori feigned a lateral slash, and when the baldrick made to block it, he swooped in slow and stabbed up between the plates of his armor, entering at the armpit and piercing to the heart. Ori received three horrendous lacerations across his back for it, but it didn't matter anymore. The baldrick fell to his knees, limp and defenseless. Screaming with the strength of a half a millennium of remembered agony, Ori cleaved the baldrick's head from his shoulders in two savage blows. The entire fight had taken less than twenty seconds.
DeVanzo and Walsch looked at each other. 'Mission accomplished,' Walsch whispered. 'Now let's get outta Dodge.' The leaped from the forest, DeVanzo running to gather up the wounded Ori, and Walsch to fetch the latest rescuee. Overhead, there was a berserk scream, one that neither Ori nor Aeneas could recognize. The Americans did and they looked up with elation at the F-111s making their slow, lazy turn overhead.
Secure Facility, Camp Hell-Alpha, Martial Plain of Dysprosium.
“Got them.” The intelligence officer had the 10x12 inch prints in his hand. More were still coming over but these were the critical ones, the pictures of the Hell-pit itself. The F-111s had landed a few minutes before and the digitally-recorded pictures had been sent over by fiber-optic cable. Another sign of just how much things were changing; Hell now had computer access, or rather the human army fighting there did.
General Petraeus looked at the prints. “It’s a caldera, no doubt about it. A supervolcano caldera. Like the one that’s supposed to be under Yellowstone. Must be bigger though.”
“Yeah, size ain’t a problem for this thing. Explains the foul atmosphere of this place. That thing must be pumping the contaminants upwards. Take a look at these enlargements Sir. Shows what’s going on down there.”
Petraeus looked at the enlargements and then sharply at the third person in the room, the hulking figure of Abigor. “We knew it was bad in there, not this bad. Looks like Dante was spot-on in his description of the place though. More or less.” He paused for a second trying to regain his balance. Then, he addressed Abigor. “How could you, how could anybody do this?”
“We must.” Abigor’s voice was unapologetic. “Our survival depends on it. You kill lower animals to eat, to provide yourselves with food. This is no different, to us you are, were, lower animals to be exploited. So we exploited you to fill our needs.”
Petraeus reflected that Abigor was going to have to be very careful how he spoke in future. Otherwise he wasn’t going to survive much longer. There was an old Western custom involving a tree and a rope that was likely to be reborn. “This isn’t farming for food. This is just inflicting suffering for the sheer joy of it.”
“We do not eat your kind just for food although your kidlings are great delicacies.”
Yup thought Petraeus, he was going to have to be much more careful. “Then why?”
“Because we need the energy. When you humans live, you build up energy in your bodies. When you die, that energy boosts you up from your level to ours. But the energy barrier that separates us from the next level up is much stronger than the one that separates your level from ours. We need much more energy to cross it, energy we generate by prolonging the second deaths of your kind.”
“How do you know this?” Petraeus was genuinely curious, for the first time he was getting a real insight into the mind of Humanity’s greatest enemy.
“Because Satan told us so. Yahweh harvests energy as well for the same reason only he gathers his by making his subjects worship him. He gets the power from devotion.”
“Like the Ori.” The Intelligence officer was an avid Stargate fan.
Petraeus wasn’t but he still got the reference. “And that makes the baldricks like the Goa’uld I suppose. Abigor, you didn’t answer my question. How do you know this?”
“Because it is so. It has always been so. We must harvest energy to cross the barrier to the afterlife. Satan has us do so by the torments of the pit, Yahweh by demanding unending worship.”
“But that doesn’t make any kind of sense. How can two such totally different approaches yield the results you demand? It just doesn’t make sense.” The frustration was creeping through into Petraeus’s voice.
“As I said, it is what Yahweh and Satan both said. Why should they lie? They are Gods, they demand faith,”
“And I’m a General, I demand firepower. And we’ve seen what happens when your faith meets my firepower. The truth is Abigor, you don’t know any of this. You’ve got no proof for any of it. You’ve been sold a bill of goods, just like we were for so many thousands of years. You’ve been fooled, just like we were.”
Abigor stared at the pictures taken by the RF-111C, thoughts churning in his mind. He’d never thought this through before, those to whom he owed allegiance had demanded he accept their words and he had. But now he owed allegiance to humans and humans demanded proof. Those were their eternal replies when somebody claimed something. ‘Prove it.’ “How do you know?’ ‘What’s your proof?’ “If you can’t prove it, then it isn’t so.’ And the answer he could give to all those was ‘I can’t.’ For everything he believed was unproven. And that meant so many things.
Abigor spoke very slowly as the words formed in his mind, breaking the mental blocks of millennia. “No, I don’t know any of this. I just believed it. And if my belief was false.” His great clawed hand waved over the pictures. “Then all of this, all of it, was for nothing.
