She shifted her position on the tank again. “Hokay, so we admit we don’t know what to expect. That’s one thing we have to find out. What’ll humans do up there when they see us? Fight us? Fight for us? Take cover and hide? We don’t know. We hope it’ll be one of the first two, that way we learn something.”
“Won’t be Boss.” One of the enlisted crewmen spoke up. Stevenson smiled under her mask. In the old days an enlisted man would never have dared interrupt a full Colonel in the middle of his or her flow. But, with the massive expansion of the Army had come different attitudes. The enlisted man glanced around and continued. “Heaven’s been closed for centuries while Yahweh lied to us. Humans in it will be old-timers. To them, we’re as alien as people come. They’ll run and hide. And when we kick Angel ass, they’ll take note of it.”
Stevenson nodded. “Sounds right. Hokay then, we assume they take cover. If they don’t, watch what happens when we start to blast the Angels. If they join in our side, fine, if they do the opposite, mow’em down. Otherwise try not to hit them. If they get in the way, well, that’s the way it goes. One last thing. Angels use sound weapons, DIMO(N) call it trumpeting. Everybody wear your active noise cancellation earphones all the time. We don’t know if they’ll counter trumpeting if we wear them but we do know they won’t if we don’t. And don’t forget your tinfoil beanies. Mount up.”
A laugh ran around her group. These days, no thinking person was seen without their metallic helmets. There was a reason why the H.E. A had gone back to World War Two style steel helmets. Yet another item that had been emptied from the world’s museums before new production had caught up with demand. Her troops made a great play of adjusting their helmets before swinging into their vehicles. Once securely inside their vehicles, they were safe of course. Daemonic thought control couldn’t penetrate a thin layer of aluminum, it stood no chance against inches-thick rolled steel armor. Ahead of her tank, the black ellipse of the portal to Earth opened up.
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.
“We’re through.” General Schatten’s cry of triumph masked a slight sense of surprise that the portal to Heaven looked so like the ones to Hell. Just a plain, black ellipse, this one large enough to take a pair of tanks side-by-side. A few yards away from his control post, a battery of M-109 155mm self-propelled guns had their tubes trained on the shimmering ellipse. There had been a fear that, when it opened, an attack group of angels would come pouring through. If that had happened, they would have been on the receiving end of a barrage of artillery fire. But, the ellipse was quiet.
A hundred yards away, another portal opened, this one driven through from Hellside. A battlegroup of 22 vehicles made its transit, moved to Shatten’s position and formed up on the concrete. Five groups of four vehicles and a two-vehicle command groups. To his eyes, this one was slightly odd in that most battalion combat group commanders preferred to use Bradleys as their command tracks, but this group was headed by a pair of Abrams tanks. A very experienced pair given the number of kill rings circling their barrels.
“General Schatten, Sir.” The battalion commander was a woman, a very well-endowed one. She’d already peeled off her breathing filter and goggles and was blinking in the bright sun.
Schatten returned her salute. “Colonel Stevenson, pleasure to meet you. I remember your account of blasting that angel. We believe his name was Appoloin-Lan-Gabriel by the way. You did good that day.”
“Thank you sir. We ready to go?”
“All set, we’ve punched a portal through using the signal intercepted in Myanmar. Good luck Colonel and kick some ass over there. We’ve been putting up with enough down here for too long now.”
Schatten retired to his command post and watched the tanks maneuver into position for the first push into Heaven. Stevenson was taking her two-tank HQ section and a platoon of tanks through first as the spearhead. Very wise he thought. To his critical eye, the way the tanks were being handled wasn’t as precise and skilled as he would have wished. Too many new recruits, the old prewar divisions had been pruned over and over again to provide cadres for newly-forming units and the dilution of quality showed. Then, the six selected spearhead tanks accelerated and vanished through the ellipse.
The silence of the communication channel seemed to stretch time out as Schatten waited for the first report in. Eventually, there was a crackle of static. For some reason, radio interference was greater when transmitting through a portal and, of course, there had to be a line-of-sight from the transmitter through the portal to the receiver. That was why all the permanent portals were fitted with high-capacity fiber-optics communications links.
“Hokay, so we’re here.” Stevenson’s voice on the radio had an amused note in it that confused Schatten slightly.
“Colonel, what do you see?” Schatten wasn’t amused, he was annoyed at the obvious levity.
“Well, we’ve got a nice, red-gray sky and everything else seems red and dirty. Oh, there’s a river not far away, that’s red too.”
A horrible presentiment passed through Schatten’s mind. “What do you mean red? Heaven is supposed to have white light.”
“For sure, Sir. And it may well have. But we ain’t there, we’re in Hell. We’re off Loran coverage but I think we’re about a thousand miles east of Dis. Far outside anywhere we’ve occupied to date. We’re been snookered, Sir. Want us to hang around here or back out?”
Schatten thought for a second. “Anything else you can see?”
“Grass here is all chewed up and looks like there’s a lot of dried blood around. Silver and red I think. That’s all. Otherwise, pretty empty here Sir.”
“Stevenson, might as well evacuate out of there. We’ll debrief you on your return.”
Schatten sat back down in his seat and shook his head. Michael hadn’t gone directly from Earth to Heaven, he’d used Hell as a staging point, then gone back to some deserted location on Earth for the trip back to Heaven. Antactica perhaps? Or the wilds of the Amazonian rain forest? Who knew? By the look of it, he made all his people do the same, no matter how critical the situation was for them. Then, he shook his head again and sighed. “Damn, that guy’s good.”
Refugee Camp, Bath-Edie, Georgia, USA
“I am sorry about the conditions here, but this is the best we can do.” President Obama looked at the emergency accommodation that had been provided for the family in front of him. It really was about as basic as it could be. He felt acute guilt that his administration couldn’t do better for these people, but with Bermuda being left uninhabitable by the repeat impact of storms and most of the Carolina/Georgia coast in barely better condition, it was a question of what could be achieved, not what he would like to achieve.
The scale of the weather attacks on the east coast and the Carribean Islands hadn’t been as bad as the weather experts had feared. For some reason, it had been a quiet hurricane season and, they believed, had it not been for Heavenly interference, probably not one hurricane would have made it ashore. Even with the tropical disturbances being artificially pumped up and steered, the disasters had been limited. Everybody had expected Florida to have been hammered as badly as Bermuda yet the state had escaped virtually unscathed. Yet, for all that, there were still more refugees needing help than resources available to aid them.
“We’ll make out Mister President.” The man’s English accent sounded far out of place in this location. “We’re better off than many thanks to you.”
“And to everybody else Philip.” The man’s wife spoke reprovingly. “Think of everybody who is helping out.”
That was true. Food packages and other aid were coming in from all over the world. This camp had just received a big shipment of Vietnamese rice and there were Vietnamese troops helping unload it while this tour went down. That thought made Obama smile. I wonder what the Vietnam vets here think of Vietnamese troops on American soil. “That’s true ma’am. We’re all pulling together now.”