seasoned and we don’t know if either can actually fight.”
“Then we had better find out hadn’t we?” Asanee was staring at the map, her mind working out distances and times. “This is a golden opportunity to do so. It is a feint so if they crumple, we won’t lose too much and we can restore the situation using my corps and Third US Armored. I wonder if the guy on the other side knows Third has moved south?”
“Probably.” Petraeus was also calculating time and distance. “My guess is that the humans here are funnelling information to him. They’re pretty loyal to their angels. So, we can assume that the opposition have a lot of tactical intelligence on us but very little strategic level stuff. They’re not fighting completely blind the way Satan and his commanders did. We can expect a lot more skill tactically but they still haven’t grasped how fast we can move or how much firepower we can switch around. I must admit, I find the loyalty of the humans here disappointing.”
“I don’t find that at all surprising.” Jackson was interrupted by a snort from Asanee. “Remember we haven’t found any humans here from later than the latter part of the dark ages. We might regard the status of humans here as seriously dire but compared with what they are used to, this place really is paradise. We might even hypothesize that the Gates of Heaven were closed once our expectations exceeded the reality of this place.”
“I’m sure the historians will love discussing that.” As a scholar himself, Pestraeus could understand the fascination of solving such puzzles. But, that was for later. “So, we let the two integrated demon and second life human units take the brunt of this feint.” Petraeus thumbed a button on the intercom system and rapped out a string of orders. The aide on the other end would be taking them down and turning his General’s wishes into military movement orders. “We’ll give them a helping hand of course, there’s a reason why we’ve given priority to moving artillery units into the bridgeheads. Now, that brings us to the main force. Any ideas?”
“Assuming it moves on a direct path to its target, that means it will hit around here.” Jackson tapped the display with a wooden pointer. “The Global Hawk is telling us this push is a really big one, some 90,000 angels and more than 450,000 humans.”
“About the same size as Abigor’s push in Iraq. I wonder how well those humans will fight. If they’re so downtrodden as to think this place is Paradise, do they have the spirit to fight at all?” Asanee was thoughtful. She produced a laser pointer from a pocket and shone the red spot on the display. “They’ll be hitting all along this area. They’re lagging behind the feint though; I’d guess the idea is to draw us off.”
“That’ll play against them. We won’t just be learning how well our own demon units fight, we’ll be learning how the Angelic Host fights. That’s going to be important, according to DIMO(N) the combat strength of the Angelic Host is in excess of 60 million angels and up to 300 million humans.” Petraeus noted the sharp intakes of breath from Jackson and Asanee. “Food for thought isn’t it.”
“Mostly, how come the daemons fought them to a standstill in the Great Celestial War.” Asanee was trying to envisage commanding an Army that big. “They’ve got a weakness, a bad one somewhere.”
“DIMO(N) has an answer for that as well. According to their research, daemons are pretty fertile and their birth-rate replaced their casualties. Angels, not so much. Their fertility and birth rate are low so they are short in replacements. That probably translates into a very casualty-adverse mindset. I think if we study that Great Celestial War we will find that it was mostly skirmishing with the Angels refusing to get too heavily committed for fear of the casualties they’d take while the demons tried to avoid major battles because they knew they’d be heavily outnumbered.”
“So, we hit this army hard. Give them a butcher’s bill that’ll make their eyes water.”
“Exactly right, and when we hit that main force, we have just the tools we need to do it.” Petraeus sighed. “Here we go again. I suppose I’m going to have to write another inspiring order-of-the-day.”
“You are lucky David, you can email it out. If Caesar was sitting there, he would have to give it personally. With the size of our Army, that could take years.”
Angelic Treatment Ward, Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD
The results looked as if they were just about as bad as he had feared. Doctor Daniel Zinder held the x-rays up to the light and peered at the reforming bones. It turned out angels did have the same remarkable healing powers as daemons but in this case it wasn’t helping his patients at all. Maion was the most advanced of them and the bones in her wing joints were indeed recovering. The only problem was, they were fusing into an immobile mass of bone. Flying was out of the question, it would be a miracle of she could fold her wings at all.
“Doctor, there is a fiend from Hell waiting to see you.”
Zinder looked around sharply, Grace was standing in the doorway, smiling broadly. “Nurse, the word is daemon. We don’t want to be charged with racial discrimination or harassment. Anyway, ask him to wait five minutes then trot him in.”
Zinder put the X-rays away and settled down at his desk. Grace returned, bringing the daemon in with her.
“I am Doctor Zinder, how may I help you.” He reflected that was a bit curt but formality was still catching up with the rapid changes in relationships. ‘Half-believed mythological legend’ to ‘hideous reality’ to ‘mortal enemy’ to ‘defeated foe’ to ‘de-facto ally’ in two years took some getting used to.
“My name is Memnon, I am currently Minister of Communications in the Government of President Abigor. I understand that you have large numbers of angels here to be treated?”
“We do.” A horrible thought crossed Zinder’s mind. “You don’t want to eat them do you?”
Memnon laughed, uneasily aware that not so long ago that was exactly what he would have wanted. “No, but I may have some information that may help you. Our information is that the wings on these angels have been broken, crippled. Is this true?”
“It is, some have had their legs broken the same way. We’re doing our best but even with the best reconstructive surgery, we’re not doing so well.”
“This does not surprise me. Breaking the wings of angels was a favorite sport of ours when we held them prisoner during The Great Celestial War. But, I should tell you something. During the invasion by Abigor’s Army, I was attacked by some of your fighters. My colleagues were killed and my wings were badly burned and mutilated by a missile. They grew back, malformed and distorted so that I could not fly. The doctors said that it was because metal fragments from the missile warheads were interfering with the nerves and blood vessels but I think it was because the fragments were iron and iron is poison to us.”
Memnon paused and flared his wings outwards. Zinder was struck by how similar the basic structure was to the angelic wings. They were black and scaled like lizard skin of course, not white and feathered, but even without X-rays, Zinder could see the bone structure was the same. He could also see that Memnon’s wings were fully functional and un-mutilated. “So what happened Memnon?”
“My wings were so bad that the Doctors decided the only thing to do was to amputate them. They did so, and my wings grew back again. With the iron fragments removed from my body, they grew back perfectly. They may also do so on Angels.”
“Do all your limbs grow back if amputated?” Zinder was fascinated. He was also furious that a piece of vital information like this had been concealed or lost. He knew the reason of course; Memnon must have been treated in an Army hospital, this was a Navy facility. Inter-service cooperation would be a wonderful thing if it ever happened.
“They do, although removing a crippled limb to allow a new one to grow in its place had never occurred to us before.”
Kinder thought carefully. He could see several problems with this, not least of which was obvious from Memnon’s wings. Despite the similar structure, Angelic wings were bird-like, Daemonic wings were more akin to those of lizards. And many earth lizards could regrow lost limbs. That didn’t mean that humans could. “Memnon, why are you telling us this? Angels are your enemies, just as they are ours.”
“Why do you treat them in your hospital?” Memnon paused. “For millennia, uncounted millennia, so far back that time itself became misty, we did things that were brutal and cruel beyond limits. We gloried in that cruelty and measured ourselves by it. Then you humans came and you slaughtered us. It was so easy for you that you defeated us and cast us down in a few weeks. By our standards we would have been your slaves and treated as cruelly as we treated our victims. But you didn’t. You healed our wounds, you repaired what had been destroyed. In doing so you showed us the deadliest of all your weapons, compassion. You changed us and gave us a different way of looking at the world. Now, those of us who saw the destruction you can wreak on those you fight, we want to be like you. By changing the environment in which we lived, you changed us. To help the crippled Angels is our first step back from the pit.”
