The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Shroom Man 777]

Yeah... but the North Koreans are still able to develop new weapons despite resource shortages. I wasn't really thinking about Heaven achieving any technological advancement, since none was shown, but I was guessing that those Angel Screams could've been a weapon/ability relatively new and recently developed in the Heavenly Arsenal.

Because from what we've seen from the Baldricks, if it's routine for Angels to have weapons/abilities to take down modern fighter planes and if that weapon/ability was present for a long time, then really Satan and his infernal minions should've gotten their asses kicked and killed back in the Celestial War.

I'm thinking that the Angel Screams were developed some time after the Celestial War.

[EdBecerra]

It could just be kinetic transfer.

I recall - gods, from nearly 40 years ago! - a book republished by the now-defunct Avalon press. The central character was a hillbilly prodigy, creating inventions he didn't understand, to do jobs that he was too lazy to do himself.

One of these was that, when his fishing boat became too leaky and he didn't want to go to the trouble of re-caulking it, he invented a device that converted heat into motion, directly. That is to say, once the device was applied to a hot bit of metal, the heat, ie, random movement of molecules, would become the purposeful movement of all the molecules in the same direction.

And tah-dah, the block of metal would start moving in one direction. Instant flying fishing boat. (After all, UP is a direction...)

That's de facto telekinesis. Conservation of momentum stops you from doing it by "converting heat into motion." Even though the air in the room has a total mass of a hundred kilograms or more, and the individual air molecules are zipping around at the speed of pistol bullets, the net momentum is still zero, and there's no place to get it from.

You'd need telekinesis to make it happen, or some other way of acting on air molecules at a distance.

Agreed, but that was the basis of the story. The idiot savant kept inventing devices that defied the laws of thermodynamics. Example being one device that, for all intents and purposes, converted ionizing radiation into heat directly. Stick radioactive waste within the limits of the area affected, switch the damned thing on, and you got a small pond of magma - red hot from heat, but non-radioactive.

Another could invert that process - when that was used, the US government wound up with a few square kilometers of land that was converted into highly radioactive ore.

Lots of other silly inventions... gimme a bit and I'll find the title. Avalon was famous in the 50's and 60's for reprinting sci-fi from earlier eras and I have a list of their stuff somewhere. (Wowio.com reprinted six of them as pdf's this year.) Might have been "Out Of This World" by Murray Leinster, but I can't be sure. It HAS been 40 years...

Ed.

[Darth Wong]

Yeah... but the North Koreans are still able to develop new weapons despite resource shortages. I wasn't really thinking about Heaven achieving any technological advancement, since none was shown, but I was guessing that those Angel Screams could've been a weapon/ability relatively new and recently developed in the Heavenly Arsenal.

Because from what we've seen from the Baldricks, if it's routine for Angels to have weapons/abilities to take down modern fighter planes and if that weapon/ability was present for a long time, then really Satan and his infernal minions should've gotten their asses kicked and killed back in the Celestial War.

I'm thinking that the Angel Screams were developed some time after the Celestial War.

I think you need to keep in mind that a modern fighter plane is actually fairly fragile. It's not an airborne tank. The stone walls of Jericho were undoubtedly much more durable than a modern fighter plane.

[Shroom Man 777]

Which makes the Angel Screams and other form of sonic weapons even potentially deadlier. Could a Harpy survive the blow that downed the fighter planes?

[Darth Wong]

Which makes the Angel Screams and other form of sonic weapons even potentially deadlier. Could a Harpy survive the blow that downed the fighter planes?

Perhaps not (although it's worth pointing out that the pressure wave from a torpedo explosion can buckle a ship's hull without necessary killing men floating in the water next to it). But if the harpies outnumber such high-level angels a thousand to one, that won't make much difference in a Celestial War anyway, will it? Why are you assuming that the number of angels of the same power level as the ones seen so far must be the same as the number of harpies?

You seem to be assuming that the angels are vastly more powerful than the demons and then asking why they didn't crush them in the Celestial War, instead of taking note of the fact that they did not crush them in the Celestial War and then looking for possible explanations.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe the Angels were outnumbered by the Harpies by a lot, or maybe not all Angels have such powerful abilities. Yeah, I was kind of grasping at straws, but there's nothing saying that the Clopatrion was exceptionally powerful. Though sending naive but exceptionally powerful Angels to their ultimate doom would be perfectly reasonable of that asshole Micheal.


Going back to the Celestial War, it was Baldricks versus Angels, right? But it was also a secession of Satan from Heaven's Rule, from Yaweh's Rule. Where did the Baldricks come from? If it was just a secession, then it would be Angel versus Angel - not Angel versus an entirely different subspecies of humanoid with cloven hooves and entirely different physical features. If Satan was also a Fallen Angel, then he wouldn't be all that different physically from Micheal and the others.

Were the Baldricks just another species of slave-class untermenschen ruled by the Angels, before Satan rebelled and "freed the slaves"? How convoluted does the trail of these human offshoots get?

If Baldricks are a whacko offshoot of humanity, then where do the Angels come in in the evolutionary tree?

[Junghalli]

Going back to the Celestial War, it was Baldricks versus Angels, right? But it was also a secession of Satan from Heaven's Rule, from Yaweh's Rule. Where did the Baldricks come from? If it was just a secession, then it would be Angel versus Angel - not Angel versus an entirely different subspecies of humanoid with cloven hooves and entirely different physical features. If Satan was also a Fallen Angel, then he wouldn't be all that different physically from Micheal and the others.

Were the Baldricks just another species of slave-class untermenschen ruled by the Angels, before Satan rebelled and "freed the slaves"? How convoluted does the trail of these human offshoots get?

If Baldricks are a whacko offshoot of humanity, then where do the Angels come in in the evolutionary tree?

I think (I'm just repeating something I heard on the internet, mind you, so take it with a large grain of salt) that according to Muslim tradition Satan was not an Angel. As I remember, the story was that God first created the djinn, who had great power and free will but no reverence to God, so He destroyed them except for Satan and made the angels, who had great power and reverence to God but no free will.

It sounds then like the Baldricks might have been an earlier attempt by God to create a servant race, but it didn't work out too well and so he made the Angels. Maybe that was the reason for the rebellion: God was sidelining the Baldricks in favor of the Angels.

[Surlethe]

I think you need to rethink the assumption that Yahweh (not God) is any different from the angels. This may turn out to be more like Pullman's universe, where "God" is simply the oldest and most powerful of the angels.

[Guardsman Bass]

Does God have wings, though? We really haven't had a good physical description of him.

The USAF have sent birds above the clouds to discover the weird lighting situation, but I don't recall a mention of the 'ceiling'. But essentially, no, Hell does not have a solar system. It is a world that exists in a Klein Bottle. It is on the interior surface of a realm, not the exterior surface of a body, as with out dimension.

That's pretty much it - if you continued flying "upward" in Hell (remember that the geometry in hell is really funky due to the whole "small klein bottle" shape), you'd eventually hit the ground somewhere else in hell. I'm guessing it's the same thing if you drilled down deep - you'd simply drill up somewhere else (and not in a straight line).

If I recall correctly, the USAF didn't really discover anything above the clouds, other than that once you get above a certain point, you get above the dust layer that makes Hell so treacherous for un-modified war machines.

[Richard Sharpe]

Does God have wings, though? We really haven't had a good physical description of him.

The USAF have sent birds above the clouds to discover the weird lighting situation, but I don't recall a mention of the 'ceiling'. But essentially, no, Hell does not have a solar system. It is a world that exists in a Klein Bottle. It is on the interior surface of a realm, not the exterior surface of a body, as with out dimension.

That's pretty much it - if you continued flying "upward" in Hell (remember that the geometry in hell is really funky due to the whole "small klein bottle" shape), you'd eventually hit the ground somewhere else in hell. I'm guessing it's the same thing if you drilled down deep - you'd simply drill up somewhere else (and not in a straight line).

If I recall correctly, the USAF didn't really discover anything above the clouds, other than that once you get above a certain point, you get above the dust layer that makes Hell so treacherous for un-modified war machines.

That could be an interesting method of attack if Heaven worked the same way. Just calculate the antipodes of the Eternal City and commence shooting missiles.

[Guardsman Bass]

It's only been two days, and I'm already starting to feel withdrawal symptoms again. Only they're worse than with Armageddon, because I started Armageddon when it was really late into the story.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Shroom, I think you're forgetting something, angels and baldricks don't look much different to people wearing tin-foil hats. Remeber the first angel we see in Armegeddon???, the one who threw Memnon around like a rag doll and then caught a canister round from an Abrams? The tank commander there mistook it for a baldrick at first, didn't realize it was an angel until after the fact.

[MarshalPurnell]

That section is rather confusing, but I'm not sure that interpretation of what happened is entirely correct. If the angels and baldricks looked alike, then it would not have been obvious that she'd killed an angel after Apollyon was laid out. And why would the angels take humanoid shape for the Baldricks and for themselves? Memnon saw a human-looking figure with Apollyon, and Michael-Lan appeared that way before Abigor, and Lailah was described as a classic angelic form by Michael in his speakeasy, etc. I suppose it might be their particular form of identity glamour never turns off and neither angels nor demons have any shielding from it, but that seems... not less odd than angels having human forms to begin with.

And on checking the section again, it said Apollyon's body reverted to its "true form" as a white humanoid figure with wings. I think that meant "classic angel archetype" rather than Baldrick style figure.

[Sute]

All this talk about the disparity between angels and baldricks has gotten me thinking. I might have an explanation.

Heaven has been portrayed as really repressed, sexually speaking. This means that very few new angels were probably being born. What few were born were born under the same conditions as their parents, so the traits that encourage their survival were the same and we'd just get more angels. Hell, on the other hand, had a lot more breeding going on, under conditions different than those the original rebels would have been born into. Thus the traits that encourage survival were different, and different mutations survived. Over time this could have led to rebel angels giving birth to the baldricks we met during the war.

What happened to the originals who rebelled alongside Satan? They were killed in power struggles as a bunch of the new, more-numerous-but-weaker baldricks occasionally formed alliances to kill a rebel angel and divvy its power between them. This led to the deaths of all of the original rebels except for Satan himself. So it isn't that Heaven has gotten stronger; Hell got weaker.

If course, this only works if the line in Armageddon?! about even the Great Celestial War not having resulted in the death of an Abigor-class demon can somehow be explained away.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

I could've sworn that when the tank commander spotted Apollyon she yelled somthing like "Baldrick! Nine o'clock!" But it was a tense situation, and I don't feel like looking it up right now, so I'll concede that I could be wrong. Also, I never said that Angels and Baldricks looked identical, just similar.

[Darth Wong]

It's possible that she just yelled "baldrick" because it was obviously non-human. I don't think she would bother differentiating between one kind of alien lifeform and another at that point. The only thing that matters is that it's obviously not from around here.

[Simon_Jester]

Shroom, I think your problem is you're thinking Angels and Demons conduct war the same way Humans conduct war. IIRC, in the first book, two armies would meet, send each other Heralds, maybe engage once or twice, and then whichever army thought they were going to lose would surrender. MAybe every once and a while, both sides would break an army killing each other, but for the most part, they didn't engage.

Also, doesn't Hell have a much larger manpower supply? That might have also contributed.

Supposedly, only one third of the angels rebelled and joined Satan. The war dragged on long enough that supplies of things like harpies might depend on factors other than how many you had to start with (one side literally being able to outbreed the other, which would most likely benefit Hell), but with that key initial factor, I suspect that no, Hell did not have a vastly larger manpower supply.

As for the model of warfare, Shroom has a point even on the medieval model of how armies fight each other. If, relative to the numbers both sides have, angels are vastly more effective in the air, then that should be deciding most of the battles. Whenever the two sides fight, the angels shout down the devil-army's harpies, then starts harassing the demonic phalanx from above. Battle ends in Heaven's favor.

So my guess would also be that the angelic trumpeting is either:
1) Less effective against a biological traveling at relatively low airspeed than they are against a riveted-frame aircraft traveling at high subsonic speed, or
2) Available in far lower numbers than the harpies, so that the harpies have a reasonably good chance of overwhelming any given angel force and getting into flamethrower range.
________

Those are formalized battles conducted by Demon Lords on each other in ritualistic martial attempts to increase personal stature, influence and power at the expense of their foot soldiers who get killed, enslaved and/or eaten. Traditional wars in Hell are basically done to determine the pecking order of the Demon Nobility.

The conduct of the Celestial War, on the other hand, which was a full battle for freedom, survival and secession by Satan against Yaweh, would be another matter entirely. Do you think Yaweh would give a fuck about ritualized rules of warfare, judging by how much of an omnicidal fuckopath he is? I don't think so. The Celestial War would be nothing like the normal Hell Wars.

Don't be so sure.

In human history, even rulers who were immensely cruel and who thought they were gods would often obey certain conventions of war that preserved the formalism of the battlefield. It wasn't just something they did because they were nice people; it was something they did because that was how they thought. That was the way wars were fought. You wanted to secede from your ruler? You mustered an army, you denounced his rulership, you fought his army according to conventional rules.

You wouldn't something creative like switching from open-field battles to guerilla warfare, because guerilla tactics hadn't been invented yet. The idea that when your army has been badly beaten, you can break up and fade into the background to keep launching nuisance attacks was foreign to pre-industrial society. The concept of nuisance attacks existed, but as a practical matter it just meant that the most loyal followers of the defeated rebel had now formed a bandit troop with him as the leader. It didn't represent a new phase of an ongoing struggle the way that something like the resistance movements of occupied Europe did.

And the old ruler would play along, because just as you'd never heard of guerilla warfare, he'd never heard of mass internment camps or any of the other particularly nasty tactics dreamed up to fight guerillas. Things like the treatment of prisoners might vary depending on how the ruler regarded the rebel, but the basic parameters of how "warfare" got defined did not.
_______

I don't think Mike would've bothered upgrading those Angels since he sent those Angels to Earth to die specifically because they were Yaweh supporters and he didn't like them.

Yes, but:
1)He was trying to eliminate powerful Yahweh-supporters, not a bunch of wussy random cherubs. They may have been sent because of how powerful they were, not just upgraded for the mission at hand.
2)Michael doesn't want to have to explain to the boss why he sent a bunch of wussy cherubs to do a job that should have been done by more powerful angels. So he may have to upgrade or empower them, because it's more important that Michael make a visible good faith effort to follow orders than that all the angels on the mission get killed.
________

The same cannot be said for Heaven. While Yaweh does rule like a tyrant, Heaven is not an overpopulated hole with an industry focused on human torture. It's more centralized, its government is NOT a feudal Dark Ages joke. In fact, it's more akin to Nazi Germany or other modern technologically-progressive regime.

Maybe. I'd say it's more like an ancient centralized autocratic state, like the Mesopotamian city-states or Egypt of the pharoahs, where essential resources are controlled by a very old, well established hierarchy ruled by a god-king who acts as both secular and temporal ruler.

Which is not a coincidence; any details the Israelites could imagine about how Heaven would operate would be "like Babylon or Egypt, only bigger and more awe-inspiring, because God is way more powerful than the Pharoah."
_______

What makes you say that? There is no indication whatsoever that they have achieved technological advancement of any kind. Michael is aware of human technology, but that's it: he's aware, and most of his peers aren't.

If you want to draw an analogy between Heaven and a real-life government, you might want to try North Korea, not the Nazis. Backward, regressive, and run by a massively self-indulgent dictator who seems to think his empire exists primarily for his own ego gratification, and who is paranoid about traitors.

As Shroom Man points out, even ancient societies, or countries run by massively self-indulgent dictators, can try to improve their weapons and battle tactics. There's never been an army that couldn't make itself (slightly) better by working on the tactics and equipment it already has, within the technological framework that already existed. It's like the science/engineering divide. Even with no breakthroughs in the "science" of warfare (the basic methods and the broad nature of the weapons), there's enormous room for advances in "engineering" (training your troops harder, fiddling around with the existing weapons).

[tim31]

Either way, they marked the 120 barrel with a white kill stripe that stood apart from scores of black ones.

[Surlethe]

Does God have wings, though? We really haven't had a good physical description of him.

We haven't, but just lacking a good physical description does not give license to assume he's the actual creator of both angels and baldricks.

[Shroom Man 777]

Anyway, even if Heaven is just as stagnant as Hell in terms of developing new stuff, it still seems as though Heaven is still more forward-thinking. I mean, come on, Yaweh and Co. hatched up that scheme to basically forsake humanity to the Baldricks as part of some Heavenly Xanatos Gambit.

Was there a detailed physical description of Apollyon? Any post-mortem?

[Simon_Jester]

Either way, they marked the 120 barrel with a white kill stripe that stood apart from scores of black ones.

Yes. But we already knew that Apollyon was visually distinct from the demons. We got that from Memnon's point of view. So I'd chalk up the reference to an angel as a "baldrick" as a heat-of-combat thing. Or slang in the process of formation- assuming humanity survives the Salvation War, will they have different names for angels and demons?
_______

Anyway, even if Heaven is just as stagnant as Hell in terms of developing new stuff, it still seems as though Heaven is still more forward-thinking. I mean, come on, Yaweh and Co. hatched up that scheme to basically forsake humanity to the Baldricks as part of some Heavenly Xanatos Gambit.

That's not really evidence of a non-stagnant society.

Remember, the fact that a civilization is "stagnant" or "decaying" or "old" does not mean that all the individual members of the civilization match those description. Civilizations so stagnant that they're on the brink of total collapse continue to produce dynamic and competent people right up until the end; the problem is that those people are unable to change the system because of all the crud that gets in the way.

And even the rulers who are responsible for making the society stagnate are still capable of having ideas, fighting battles, and setting up elaborate political schemes. They're still people with brains, even if they aren't using those brains as well as they ought to be.

In this case, Yahweh's plan involving forsaking Earth doesn't mean that the society he rules is significantly more adaptable than Hell was. Or that conditions in Heaven are changing in any meaningful way- Yahweh has just about everything exactly as he likes it. The only real change we know of is the stuff Michael is introducing on the sly by creating a black market.

We might want to compare Michael to Belial in Hell. Michael is the single most change-friendly being we know of in his entire culture, the only one we see thinking even a short distance outside the box. It's possible that given ten thousand years for his schemes to achieve fruition, he might effect some major changes. But he won't change anything truly important on a human time scale (except insofar as humans get involved).

Belial was in the same position. He had his little industrial Mordorscape going, and he was making some small degree of technological progress (sort of). but without the intervention of humans triggering his meteoric rise and equally meteoric fall, he could have stayed in almost exactly the same situation for eons.

[tim31]

So I'd chalk up the reference to an angel as a "baldrick" as a heat-of-combat thing. Or slang in the process of formation- assuming humanity survives the Salvation War, will they have different names for angels and demons?

Someone on here suggested Percy for angels, but I don't think it stuck at all.

[Gil Hamilton]

We haven't, but just lacking a good physical description does not give license to assume he's the actual creator of both angels and baldricks.

He might look alot like an angel, actually. In ancient Jewish tradition, there is a story about a guy who was taken straight up to God's court and saw the host. He noted that no one in Heaven was allowed to sit down EXCEPT God. Then he saw the Metatron, God's scribe and messanger, sitting down, and declared that there were two Gods in heaven. He made this determination because the Metatron and Yahweh looked the same sitting.

Of course, in a funny way that actually lines up with the Salvation War, to prove to Elisha that the Metatron wasn't a god, Yahweh had the Metatron beaten with a fiery whip to prove that he could be punished and thus wasn't a diety.

Yahweh is kind of a dick, neh?

[Stuart]

Headquarters, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City, Heaven
The Eternal City, the heart of Yahweh's great empire was a gleaming translucent rectangular pearl that dazed the eyes of newcomers with its rainbows of refracted light. The buildings were made of vast sheets of precious and semi-precious stone, the streets calcite alabaster, polished smooth first by trained crafts-angels uncounted millennia ago and then by the tread of millions of sandal-clad feet over the years. Together, buildings and streets glowed as Heaven's pure white light reflected and refracted from structure to structure in a myriad of interlocking multihued spectra that constantly shifted and changed with every slight movement of the inhabitants therein

That was within the sight of Yahweh's great white throne, in the Ultimate Temple of the Eternal City. Beyond the glittering jasper walls of the inner city, which a discerning angel's eyes could see shimmering in the distance from the steps of Yahweh's stronghold at the top of the temple mount (although the angel wouldn't look so far for so long, because it would strain his eyes and because lines did strange things far away), things were different. The wide main boulevards of the Eternal City and the palaces of the most powerful archangels led to the twelve great gates that led out the Eternal City's to the great slums where the humans who served the angels lived. A realm of mud huts and straw-thatched roofs built closely together in an unplanned, interlocking ring about the Eternal City, the slums could not differ more greatly from the marble, semi-precious stones and black alabaster that formed the Palaces where the angels lived.

It was these slums that Lemuel-Lan-Michael, a captain of Michael's choir and a senior investigator in the ranks of the League of the Holy Court, spent his working hours. It was the duty of the League to detect apostasy, heresy and sacrilege and to stamp them out before they contaminated the rest of the millions of humans who lived only to serve the angels. With that divine duty to drive him, Lemuel spent an inordinate amount of his time in the slums.

And so it was that, when one of his subordinates had reported that a contact had a lead in the Ishmael sacrilege case out in the slums, it fell upon him to lead the investigation. He knew the case well, it was one of the oldest on the books. Ishmael had dared to suggest that there were groups of creatures that had all developed from common ancestors and were thus related. This was blackest blasphemy for Yahweh had made it clear that he had personally created each kind of creature himself, perfect in each of its details. For his ill-chosen words, Ishmael had been hunted for decades but always managed to stay ahead of his pursuers. Today, it was different and Lemuel had, earlier that day, flown to the gates (being old enough and high enough to be permitted the privilege of flight within the walls of the Eternal City) and from there commandeered a chimera to ride out into the slums, so as not to attract any more attention to himself than his size naturally would.

After rendezvousing with a few hired men and coming to the address - a tall wooden apartment in a (relatively) nice district - it was over pretty quickly. Ishmael had been taken into custody and would be moved to the League headquarters where he would be made to answer for his crimes. They even managed not to get any blood on the apartment floor. After he had paid the thugs with golden pieces taken from the League's slush fund, he found himself walking back through the massive onyx arch of the fifth gate on his way to the headquarters of Michael's choir.

The headquarters was within a spire in the lower part of the city that reached nearly as high as the temple mount itself, a reflection of Michael-lan's exalted status. Lemuel had worked for Michael before the Great Celestial War, and afterwards had overseen the erection of the tower as a monument to the archangel's brilliant generalship. When the Eternal Enemy's rebellion had threatened to lap over even the great jasper walls, Yahweh himself had fought, nearly single-handedly turned back the tide with his rod of iron. Or so the story went and there were none who would argue with it. Nevertheless, it had been Michael's leadership in the grinding war that had eventually brought the victory, or as close to a victory as it had proved possible to come. It was his leadership that had been the more prominent, and stuck in angels' minds.

Lemuel-Lan-Michael launched himself up, feeling himself inflate slightly and enjoying the tightening of his back and breast muscles as his pure white wings beat the air behind him, lifting him off the pavement. The offices of the League were in the second ring of the tower, beneath only those of Michael himself. Two centuries ago, that would have been - had been - a measure of their importance in the choir and the esteem in which Michael held their leader. Now, things were slightly different in the political climate, and Lemuel had spent the last several decades on and off trying to put his finger on it. Part of it was the changes Michael had slowly introduced from the top - foreign changes, but on the whole the choir now ran more efficiently than it had even in the Celestial War, but he wasn't quite sure just what those changes had been, or even whether Michael had intentionally made them.

Generally, though, he shrugged and did his job. And right now, that involved making sure he didn't bump his head or scrape his wings on the frame as he alighted in his office with a graceful swoosh. It wasn't cluttered; he had scrolls neatly lining a shelf in the corner - open cases involving powerful people - and one open on his desk, his daily schedule. Writing and record-keeping, one of the bigger changes, had made life both easier and more complicated.

But he didn't need to check his schedule to know what was next on his agenda. He went to the shelf and pulled down a scroll, unrolled it on his desk. When Ishmael had been arrested, the League had searched his hideout in hopes of finding the scrolls that proclaimed his blasphemy. They hadn't found any, something that had disappointed Lemuel severely, but they had found something very peculiar. A glass bottle full of a strange brown substance, one Lemuel had never seen before. He reached for the bottle and looked at it, a strange elixir to be certain. There was a label on it, one in English and it read "Southern Comfort. 100 Percent Proof."

It was strange, strange beyond measure and Lemuel puzzled over the label. It was obviously an elixir that gave absolute proof of something but what? That the answer to a problem lay in the South? He shook his head, there was nothing down there but farmland. Lemuel rolled the bottle around in his hands, then put it up on the marble shelf to study later. His troubled thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. He opened it, and there was the towering form of Michael-Lan, pure-white wings folded casually across his back.

"Hey, Lemuel, I'm on my way to run an errand for the Almighty. He has a message for his Son." Lemuel nodded. Michael's close friendship with Jesus was not unknown within the Eternal City. It seemed a breach of the divine order somehow, the seven Archangels of the First Order might be the highest of The One Above All’s servants but they were servants none the less. For Michael-Lan to be friends with the Eternal Father’s only son seemed, disrespectful somehow. It wasn’t the first time that Michael-Lan had done the unexpected though. Many times, during the Great Celestial War, Michael had wanted to try some unorthodox tactics and Lemuel had advised against them as violating the code of honor, then later as they'd grown into friends. Lemuel always argued against bending the rules - if one started, where would one stop? - and generally prevailed, but the several occasions when Michael had directly overruled him, he'd had to admit that it generally provided results, such as Michael's stunning defeat of Satan at the Battle of Megiddo Valley.

“What do we have here?” Michael-Lan was staring at the bottle on the shelf. Lemuel felt a sudden surge of guilt that cleared as he looked at the records he had just filled out. A light came on in his head at that point, records didn’t just preserve information, they protected those who kept them.

“We took down Ishmael this morning. We found that in his belongings and I was going to investigate it. Do you know what that is?”

Michael-Lan picked the bottle up and peered at it. “It looks human?”

“That’s what I thought, I thought it might be one of their potions. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t be here.”

"I'll agree with that.” Michael-Lan looked at the bottle again and carefully put it back on the shelf. “This is serious. Lemuel, I want you to investigate this in depth. Keep the information to yourself, but I want a briefing every day on this. More often if there is something important discovered. Make sure only your most trusted agents are employed and as few of them as possible, telling each of them as little as possible. But, I must know everything, is that clear? You have no idea how important this could be.”

Lemuel bowed his head and swept his wings forward in assent. Michael-Lan nodded in acknowledgement and left, brushing his wings on the passage walls as he passed. Then Lemuel closed the door and stepped out into midair, his heart rising into his throat as he expanded his sacs and spread his wings to catch the fall. The four joints on his back where they hinged to his spine and scapulae strained, and felt as though they were about to tear, but - as always - he slowed and began to glide.

The Eternal City was built on a smooth basalt plain around the temple mount, the stones of the city quarried from far away - other dimensions, even - and beneath its foundations the basalt still stood. There were tunnels in the rock, tunnels that were older than the first angelic settlements here, and though most had forgotten, some, like The League of Holy Court, still used them when there was a need. Generally, that need turned out to be when someone had to disappear quickly, quietly, and efficiently, and then, after disappearing, needed to answer questions.

Lemuel glided around the tower before alighting at its base, then entered through the crowd of angels - craftsmen, lawyers, merchants, and more - going to and from work. Once inside, he slipped off into a little-used passage and took a lantern from a sconce to light his way as he descended the steps, preferring the artificial light to wasting his own magic.

As he spiraled down the staircase, the stone around him changed from translucent white to dusty white to red flecked with white and gray to dull black. At the base, the stair emptied into a passage wide enough for Michael to fit through, and Lemuel turned left. After navigating another maze of tunnels, he came into a room where the unlucky Ishmael was strapped down to a table. There wasn't any blood spattering the walls or pooling on the floor yet - that would come later - but Ishmael was sobbing already. Lemuel noticed a couple of fingernails stacked neatly nearby on the table.

Two of his interrogation specialists were already in the room. As Lemuel entered, they both looked up and snapped to attention. "At ease," he said. "What's the scoop?"

"Sir, he's not admitted to anything yet," said one. Lemuel raised an eyebrow, then stepped forward. "I know all about your blasphemy Ishmael. That alone is enough to condemn you. But, I need to know where you got that bottle of elixir from. "

Ishmael’s eyes were wide open, wildly flicking back and forth from Lemuel's face to the ceiling behind him. "I - I - I can't -"

Lemuel sighed. Time for the usual act, he thought, as he shrugged and stood up. "Then I'm afraid I can't help you. He turned his back and walked to the entrance of the room as one of the angels wrung out a wet cloth and fitted it over Ishmael’s face, the other raising a bucket of water. There was a second of splashing, then a howl of terror. Lemuel frowned; this wasn’t necessary; the prisoner had been pretty much broken already, and all he needed was a push in the right direction. He turned around, intending to stop them, but they were done: Ishmael had already broken, he was gibbering and sobbing with raw, undiluted terror.

As he quietly noted down the information Ishmael was pouring out, the names of family, friends, acquaintances, contacts identified from surveillance, and where he'd been in the last week, Lemuel was aghast at the potential scope of the treachery. What had started out as the pursuit of a heretic had turned into something much larger. For a moment, Lemuel understood why Michael-Lan held the position he did; he must have realized the full enormity of the threat as soon as he’d seen that human bottle. Michael had always said if the humans on Earth could get a foothold in Heaven for their armies, the war would be over. He must have realized the potential of that bottle to be such a foothold. That sublime insight made Lemuel proud to be his friend.

Underground Command Facility, Yamantau, Russia, March 2009

There was a time when no American President had entered the complex deep underneath the granite monolith of Yamantau. In those days, ones that seemed long ago but were only measured in months rather than years, the only thing that American Presidents had known of Yamantau was its presence on the targeteering plans for nuclear strikes on the Russian Homeland, for it appeared on every such plan and it was marked as one of the targets that had to be destroyed. If it survived the initial blows, assets were diverted from other, less important targets until Yamantau ceased to exist.

Now, President Barak Hussein Obama had disembarked from Air Force One and was on his way into the massively protected command post. His limousine sped along the straight road that appeared to run parallel through the snow-covered pine trees to the mountain that towered over them. As the car swept along the road, Obama saw the installations that littered the countryside around them. His host leaned forward. “Yamantau is quartz-containing crystal Mister President. It blocks radio, indeed any electromagnetic, transmission completely. That makes it the safest place in the world when Baldricks and Angels are on the loose. Of course, it means we cannot transmit out either so the transmission stations have to be on the outside. It is the one advantage Cheyenne Mountain has over us here. Mind you, your engineers made a bad mistake with Cheyenne Mountain.”

“What was that, Minister?”

“They built the command complex in the mountain. They should have built it under the mountain. That’s what we did, there are 6,000 feet of quartz-laced granite on top of our national emergency command post. And even now, our engineers feel the urge to dig still deeper.”

The car turned off the main road on to a side-track that seemed little more than a logging trail. It wound through the trees into a fold in the mountain where the snow drifted high against the rock walls that towered high on either side. Ahead of them was an entrance, for all the world looking like that of an old-fashioned mine. Obama didn’t notice how the fold in the ground curved around so that any blastwave travelling down the valley wouldn’t impact directly on the entrance. He did note that, once inside, massive blast doors closed behind him. The S-shaped curves continued inside the mountain, each one designed to mitigate the effects of a near-miss from the most powerful nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. There was only one way to destroy this massive underground fortress and that was to make repeated passes, each dropping a nuclear weapon into the crater from the one before. It was that job that had once been assigned to the B-52s and then to the B-2s.

Obama left his limousine and was escorted to the elevators that led down into the bowels of the mountain. Even here, the paths were not direct, one elevator would take them part of the way, then there would be more S-curves before another took them further down. Eventually, the lifts and corridors ended in the lowest, safest levels of the complex.

“Welcome Mister President. This is your first visit to Yamantau I believe.”

The conference room had a table, a circular one, that occupied most of the floor. There were 15 seats around the table, one for each member of the council. Fourteen were identical, the 15th was subtly larger and more imposing. Obama had already been briefed on that, in this room, the Chairman of the Council was just the first amongst equals. Nations had gained their place in this room in one of two ways. Either they had the military and economic power to demand it or they had simply been in the right place at the right time to earn it. The United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, Iran, Israel, Brazil, Italy, Thailand and Singapore. The countries that had been in the fight since the beginning and had scored the first kills against humanity’s enemy. There was one great advantage of this council, since it met in secret and its existence was largely unknown, its membership was free of politics. Mostly.

Vladimir Putin spoke from the Chairman’s seat. With the departure of George Bush, he was the most obvious candidate to take over the Chairmanship. The blood shed by the Russian Army along the Phlegethon River saw to that.

“First order of business. The angels. What do we know of them?”

At a side table, Doctor Surlethe stood up. The United States might no longer be Chairman here, but the country still overwhelmingly dominated the research and development effort and, of course, General Petraeus still commanded the Expeditionary Army. That made the American position still dominant.

“We have autopsied the Angels killed in the Anthrax attack on our Nephilim. The Angels have similarities with both us and with the Baldricks, enough to suggest that at one time we had a common ancestor. The Angels are much more humanoid than the Baldricks, they look human, they have human features, they lack the weird and surreal mutations of the Baldricks. They do, however, have the battery of electrocytes that distinguish the Baldricks and can generate bioelectricity in much the same way. There are notable differences between Angel and Baldrick though. The most obvious is that Angels are white, most Baldricks black. Angels have feathered wings like birds, Baldricks scaled leathery wings like bats. Angel blood is white or silver, Baldrick blood can be any one of a dozen colors, except white.”

Doctor Surlethe spoke for about twenty minutes describing the anatomical and other lessons that had been learned to date. Eventually, he got around to the subject of weapons. “It appears that Angels cannot throw lightning bolts, we don’t know why. They have a sound weapon, at first we thought it was a sound beam but we’re rethinking that. However, it is a sound pulse of some sort, in the air battle of Khabarovsk, an Su-35 actually outran it.”

“Do we have any concept of how this weapon works? Is it a threat.” The Indian Prime Minister spoke with a beautifully precise intonation.

“It is yes, precisely because we don’t know how it works. It caught our pilots by surprise, they’d got over-confident flying against the Baldrick Harpies that were virtually defenseless against them. I understand they’re evolving tactics to cope with the situation as we speak. But this brings us to a very important point. Let me show you a film. This comes from some experiments we performed here on Earth. We took one of Belial’s best tridents and copied it, then hooked it to one of our generators. The idea was to generate a super-bolt. Could have all sorts of uses. Watch what happened.”

One of the great screens flared into life and showed what looked like a Baldrick trident being charged up by a generator. The contacts were closed but instead of a bolt arcing downrange, the charge short-circuited to the ground.

“You see that? We can’t get an earth-made trident to fire a bolt, they arc to earth every time. Oh, by the way, guns made in hell work perfectly. This is a very important conclusion that we are impressing on our people. We used to think that the theories and laws of science that existed here on Earth are universal, well the tridents show quite simply that they are not. They are similar, very similar indeed, but they are not the same. Build a trident in Hell, power it by electricity made in Hell and it throws a bolt for up to two miles. Build a trident on Earth, power it with electricity made on Earth and it arcs to ground within a few inches. We now believe that the rules of physics here on Earth and the subtly different rules in Hell are both special cases of a general rule that sits above them. It is by understanding science in Hell and science on Earth that we can comprehend those differences and quantify them. By doing that, we can understand the general rules that previously we have only seen as our own special cases.”

A patter of applause from fifteen Presidents and Prime Ministers followed the presentation. Putin tapped the table in front of him and smiled benignly at the conference. “Now, we come to the next point of the agenda. How do we blow Heaven up?

(First section was submitted by Surlethe)

[Surlethe]

Great nod to Mike's point about arcing. A point: if the laws of physics between dimensions are different, baldrick electricity ought to behave the same as any other electricity on Earth - i.e., in Armageddon, they shouldn't be able to make ball lightning, right?