who saw the fields of cooled lava that now overlay what had once been two thriving cities. Somehow, it was made all the more striking by the knowledge that the cities could not be rebuilt. Usually, no matter how bad the damage, the city inhabitants had picked themselves up and rebuilt. In Sheffield and Detroit, that was impossible and the devastated areas of the cities had been abandoned.
“You think there may be more sky-volcano attacks?” Obama sounded apprehensive as well he might. The winter had been a rough one worldwide and few people believed the storms had been natural.
“I’m saying, Mister President, we don’t know what’s coming.”
“That may not be true Secretary Warner.” General Schatten spoke carefully as befitted a military man in this epitome of civilian control. “Our resident experts in the field believe that there are likely to be seven attacks before Yahweh really begins to engage us. We’ve had two and we can expect the third very shortly. That will see the Algal Blooms spreading to our inland waterways. The fourth is expected to consist of fire and heat, that sounds like more sky-volcano attacks to us. Details on the fifth attack are very indefinite and simply refer to darkness and people gnawing their tongues with pain. The sixth simply says the Euphrates will dry up, well, that’s bad for Iraq but hardly a gruesome disaster while the last speaks of a massive earthquake and a rain of giant stones. That sounds like more portal work.”
“Where does this come from?”
“Book of Revelations, Mister President. Normally we would discount that as a source but the first two attacks do make it look like somebody is sticking to that playbook.”
“And just how long do we have to sit here taking it on the chin like this? We finished off Satan in less than six months once we got rolling, why can’t we do the same with Yahweh?”
“Because we can’t get at him.” Secretary Warner reinserted himself into the conversation deftly. “We have no idea where Heaven is, we can’t find it and we can’t open a portal to it. Our primary hope at the moment is to understand the structure of the space-time continuum in which Heaven exists and then find it by exploiting that understanding. However, I am advised that it is likely we will find that the space-time continuum in question will contain large numbers of habitable entities and even if we can locate them, finding the right one will be very difficult. At worst, we may end up visiting each in turn until we find the right one. President Abigor has said that is how Satan and Yahweh explored our dimension although they obviously had no understanding of the science involved. Somehow, they got through to planets more or less at random.”
“This just is not good enough. We must find a way of launching a counter-attack. So far this war with Heaven has cost us more people and more treasure than the war with Hell did.”
“That is hardly surprising Mister President. In retrospect, we were very lucky with the Curb Stomp War. The Baldricks just opened a portal and came straight at us. Not only that, they did so head-on into the biggest concentration of military power we could deploy and one that was well-stocked with munitions. They, quite literally, couldn’t have made it easier for us if they had tried. It’s fairly obvious that Yahweh watched that debacle and has decided to try a different approach. I must say, Mister President, that it is easy to over-estimate the damage that is being done to us by these attacks. The anthrax attack cost us a third of our sensitives and that’s limited our ability to construct new portals through to Hell. However, we have a contingency plan to deal with the shortage if it becomes critical.”
“And that is?”
“To use Baldricks, especially the naga, as substitutes for our sensitives. We don’t want to do that, the last thing we need is for the Baldricks to think they are actually useful to us rather than something midway between utterly irrelevant and a nuisance. But it is an option. Anyway, we’ve had a rough winter and the rest of the world hasn’t been much better. The problem is, distinguishing between natural bad weather and the enhanced bad weather that constitutes a Yahweh attack. Some of the attacks are quite clearly the latter, the Missouri tornados that destroyed Whiteman AFB for example. Others may simply be normal bad weather. Britain had a very wet winter with severe rain but looking at the weather data, we can’t see any sign of enhancement to that. One thing that is clear from the NOAA studies of the winter, Yahweh can’t create bad weather. He can modify it, intensify it and redirect it but he can’t create it. That’s very encouraging from our point of view.”
“What about this Red Tide? Tom?”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack leaned forward in his seat. “I’ll echo what John said, Mister President. It’s a bad blow but we shouldn’t overestimate it. The Algal Bloom is confined to continental shelf areas and then only to isolated parts of that shelf. Those parts make up a substantial proportion of the total maritime area but by no means all of it. The bad news is, we’ve lost the fisheries in the continental shelf areas and that’s hit shellfish production, especially shrimp and lobster, and put the short-range fishing boats out of business. However, deep-sea fisheries and fish-farming are not affected so we’ve got a substantial proportion of our fish supply maintained. It’s the same around the world, shallow-water fishing is hammered but deep sea fishing and fish farming is all right. It’s a blow but its survivable.”
“How did this happen?”
General Schatten glanced at Secretary Vilsack who deferred to him. “At first we thought it was another case of seeding by angels but we’ve ruled that out. The Algal Bloom is a natural phenomena that is kicked off by excess nutrients in the water. Our current hypothesis is that an underwater gate was opened in various areas and a large volume of nutrient-rich sea water was injected into the areas affected. We think, and this is a guess Sir, that other attacks were made on deep-water areas but even with the extra nutrients the conditions there weren’t suitable and those parts of the attack failed. Another encouraging sign for us, Yahweh is nowhere near infallible.
“We know that no angels were responsible for this. We have a nation-wide portal detection network, we set that up as part of the response to the sky-volcano attacks. Now and then, it’s detected portals forming and fading away, we are more or less certain they’re the result of angels arriving and departing. Oddly there are concentrations of such formations around San Francisco, Las Vegas, El Paso and New Orleans. Why that is we do not know. One last thing Sir, the Uriel attacks, the mass die-offs? They’re moving north, towards us. One was reported in Honduras three days ago. Eight thousand dead.”
“Thank you.” Obama glanced around the room. “Now, the economy. Tim?”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laughed a little desperately. “What economy Sir? We don’t have one any more, we’ve got a train wreck instead. What most people don’t realize is that the economy was heading for a major crash before all this happened. People had borrowed too much money and couldn’t repay it, the banks had loaned money they had little or no hope of collecting and the whole house of cards was about to come down. As a matter of fact, it would have collapsed by now if it hadn’t been for the mobilization. We’ve been printing money like mad to pay for it, we’ve pumped trillions into the economy, nearly all of which has stayed here in the United States. The result, of course, is inflation which is only being stopped from reaching runaway proportions by price controls and rationing. The overall effect has been to devalue people’s debts. Also, because of triple-shift working at all the mobilized industries, the reopening of shuttered factories and so on, people have more money in their pockets. Rationing means there aren’t many things they can spend it on so they put it in the banks and that’s recapitalized them. After all, they can’t buy cars because no cars are being made for the civilian market, they can’t buy houses because the contractors are building defense installations instead. In economic terms, the mobilization is a massive stimulus program. The problem is, its all just building problems up for the future. When the controls come off, all economic hell will break loose.”
A grim silence ran around the conference room. At last Obama broke it. “Janet, internal security?”
“There, Barry, the situation is pretty good. Crime-rate is way, way down. Spree killings and so on have virtually stopped, it seems like the majority were the direct result of demonic possession. Street crime is way down as well, partly because everybody is working all hours of the day and are simply too tired and partly because the police, U.S. Volunteers and armed citizens are on the streets all the time. Street crime has just got too dangerous. We do have problems with what was called ‘the fifth column’ back in World War Two. Mostly, the remnants of the extreme religious groups who didn’t lie down and die with the rest. There have been some acts of obstructionism, trying to get in the way of military convoys and so on. A few cases of family members of serving military personnel being harassed. Most, all pretty short-lived, the perpetrators have no popular support and in a lot of cases, they’re lucky if the police get to them before the local citizens. You heard what happened to a guy called Phlops?”
The Cabinet shook its collective head.
“Well, he was the self-appointed leader of an extreme religious cult down south somewhere. Offshoot of the Baptist church although they disowned him a long time ago. Anyway, he and some members of his congregation started disrupting the funeral of some troops who got killed on active service. Yelling abuse at the family of the
