The Salvation War 2: Pantheocide Read online

  “Make it so, Captain. But steer well of storm fronts if one starts to form. And don't take the fact you are clear for granted. This one turned through 90 degrees and doubled in power in just a few seconds.”

  “Sir, word from the base housing.” Harmsworth was looking grim. “It's gone, all of it. I don’t see how many people can have survived in there. Some in the basements and shelters perhaps, but I don't know, the houses are so thoroughly destroyed, its hard to tell where they were. Even the roads are all ripped up. The men are digging but it's looking pretty bad in there.”

  Cochrane sighed. “Anything else?”

  “Local police and emergency services are tied down at Warrensburg, the situation is as bad there as it is in Base Housing. Streets are all blocked or torn up or both, all the buildings are down. They're expecting thousands of dead, nobody even can guess how many severely wounded. Total population minus the dead is their best guess. So, they're telling us, we're on our own resources for a while.”

  “No, we're not. We need to get through to SecDef now.”

  “Comms are down Sir. As far as we can make out, our communications tower is somewhere in the Knob Noster National Park. It should be easy to find Sir, there isn't a tree left standing over there.”

  “Then find another way to get through. We need help down here. Is there any good news?”

  “The storm front dissipated before it hit Kansas City. They got heavy rain and strong winds but that's all.” Harmsworth was interrupted by the sound of an A-10 taxying out on to the wrecked hardstand, three ground crew helping it to steer around the worst of the damage. “And, Sir, it looks like we're back in business.”

  Half an hour later, Cochrane was on the telephone to Washington, speaking directly with Defense Secretary Warner.

  “And so Sir, Whiteman is out, we can fly an A-10 or two but that's it. The B-2 force is history, there isn't even scrap metal left. Our personnel have mostly escaped, but their families have been hit hard. The base housing is like the B-2s, just tiny pieces of scrap being blown in the wind. We're going to need emergency services, disaster teams, you name it. From what we've been able to put together, we're looking at twenty or thirty thousand dead. This could be as bad as Detroit or Sheffield.”

  “That squares with our estimates General. I'm speaking with FEMA right now.”

  “Mister Secretary, please, not FEMA. We've had one disaster here today already.”

  Cochrane could almost hear the drumming of fingers at the other end of the phone. “That's changed, the problem that caused the mess back then isn't even here now. And there are things about this storm they need to see. I understand it changed direction and speed without warning?”

  “That's correct Sir. Was heading north-east, it suddenly turned west.”

  “That fits some other pictures we have. General Cochrane, you hang in there. Help is on its way. President Abigor has a standing offer to send help for disasters like this. I've got a feeling he was expecting something along these lines.”

  “Sending Baldricks Sir?”

  “That's right General. They're good at digging and shifting wreckage. And I guess you need all the help you can get.”

  Chapter Two

  Cruise Liner “Carnival Triumph” Hellgate Bravo, Hamilton, Bermuda, November 2008.

  “I can't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but thee

  For there is no secret lover that the draft board didn't discover

  They're either too young or too old

  They're either too gray or too grassy green

  The pickings are poor and the crop is lean

  What's good is in the Army, what's left will never harm me

  They're either too old or too young.”

  The singer in the Rome Lounge finished her song with a flourish as the Carnival Triumph edged through the ellipse that marked the boundary between Earth and Hell. Captain Olsen sighed in relief as the dim, swirling red-gray skies of Hell were replaced by the clear blue of his native earth. Then, his own sense of relief brought down a crash of guilt on his head. For at least half the passengers on his ship, this wasn’t going to be a happy return home or a joyful visit to a foreign port. They were evacuees from Hamilton and if the weather reports and news bulletins had been anything to go by, they didn’t have homes left to return to. It sounded like Bermuda had been swept clean.

  “Any sight sir? Any sight at all?” The Right Honorable Jenny Smith’s voice was a weird, strange mix of urgent, plaintive and wary, she was asking the question but she really didn’t know whether she wanted to know the answer.

  “Not yet, Madame, but the damage on shore looks terrible. The weather reports say this was the worst hurricane the North Atlantic has seen since records started being kept.”

  “Sir, off the starboard bow.” First Officer Carsten pointed to the shoreline. Olsen looked through his binoculars and was hard put to avoid gasping in shock. Two warships were hard aground, one almost clear of the water and twisted in a way that made it clear her back was broken. The other, larger, ship was still in the water but was on her beam ends and she was sagging midships in a way that showed her damage too was beyond critical.

  Carsten was already flipping through his copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships. “Sir, the big one is the Alvaro de Bazan, Spanish destroyer. The other one is the Nivose, a French surveillance frigate. The hurricane must have got them while they were trying to escape through the Hellgate.”

  Olsen stared at the two wrecked ships. “Make to both ships, offer them any assistance within our power. If they have wounded in need of care, we will take them in.”

  That could have been the Carnival Triumph’s motto for the last few days. “We will take them in.” What had started as a routine visit on one of Carnival’s “special” cruises had quickly turned into something else. The visit to Hamilton had been a familiar trip, one where Olsen had captained a variety of cruise liners over the years. The last visit had included a new innovation, a quick trip through Hellgate Beta that gave access to Naval Base Hell-Bravo so the passengers could truly say that they’d been to Hell and back. That one had gone smoothly if one excluded the red dust that had covered the superstructure and been – literally – hell to clean off.

  This one had been different. The weather picture had started the same as usual, the familiar procession of low pressure areas marching across the South Atlantic. Mostly they either were dissipated by windshear or faded away. Only a few would reach the standard of a tropical storm and fewer still would gain the status of a fully-fledged hurricane. Few indeed, but one of them had, it had started to swing north, taking it over the warm waters of the South Atlantic, picking up strength as it went. The hurricane chasers had plotted its path and projected it would make landfall somewhere in Georgia as a Category Two or, just possibly a Category Three. They had named it Hurricane Paloma and the WP-3s and satellites had kept a close eye on it. It was lucky they did, because it had made an unexpected northwards swing and picked up speed. So much so that Bermuda had received only a few hours warning that the storm was inbound and that its strength was unprecedented.

  Olsen remembered those few hours vividly, fortunately the shore excursions hadn’t started so all the passengers were still onboard. Instead of taking the ashore, the ship’s boats had been used for a frantic evacuation of the inhabitants of Hamilton, all 1,500 of them. To make it possible, Olson had brought his ship dangerously close inshore and dropped scrambling nets over the side. He’d got the refugees on board and then, with the winds already howling round him and the rain coming down in sheets, Carnival Triumph had fled for the Hellgate and shelter.

  Olsen knew that the memory of that voyage would stay with him until they day he died, and well beyond that. It was a memory he would rather forget but he knew, as all humanity now knew, death was no escape from bad memories. That was a knowledge already being reflected in crime and suicide rates. His ship had been fighting the winds and seas all the way to Hellgate Beta. His bridge still had two
smashed windows, now boarded up of course, from where the anemometer had been torn from its bearings and flung into the bridge. It had been reading 155 knots before it had been destroyed and that had been on the edge of the storm. His ship had been listing from the wind pressure on its high sides and swerving almost out of control as the violence of the storm nearly overwhelmed her steering gear.

  Almost, nearly, those were the key words. Few other ships could have survived such a hurricane striking in restricted waters and the mute evidence of the two wrecked warships and the unidentifiable debris that had once been private yachts, fishing boats, pleasure launches and all the other maritime inhabitants of a resort island and a naval base testified to the ferocity of the storm. Carnival Triumph had been uniquely fitted to survive the cataclysm although that fact was purely coincidental. She had been designed to maneuver her way into small ports, to dock without assistance from tugs and never to rely on local facilities when she made her visits. As a result, she had been equipped with bow thrusters and her screws were mounted in steerable pods that let her put all her considerable engine power into pushing her around. She could almost stop dead in the water and she could make a complete 360 degree turn in her own length.

  That’s what had saved her, that and Captain Olsen had trained in the Coast Guard and had performed his tour of duty on the sailing ship Eagle. There he had learned more about the waves, the wind and the sea than any cadet could ever have achieved on a gas-turbine or steam powered training ship. Every bit of that knowledge had been called on to save the Carnival Triumph. He had stood, staring out of the bridge, watching the waves and the winds, sensing their patterns, how they interlocked, how they would push his ship this way and that. As he sensed them, he had snapped out the orders to counter their attempts to murder his ship, playing the bow thrusters and the stern engine pods, sometimes pushing the ship sideways, sometimes spinning her, always keeping their bows pointed at the black ellipse that offered a bare hope of safety.

  Sometimes, he had looked at the track chart and marveled at how the computer had made some kind of sense out of it all. His own memories were of nothing but chaos, his ship swerving and skidding before he had suddenly realized the Hellgate was but a few meters away and a surge of engine power had taken them through. Even there, the other side of the gate, the seas were ferocious and the wind still howled from the energy passing through the gate but here at least he had sea-room and not the ever-present danger of being trapped on a lee shore. He had turned his bows to the wind and seas and as he did so, he saw that he was not alone. Somehow, somebody had radioed a warning that a civilian cruise ship was coming through and would be in desperate need. Had it been one of the two wrecked warships? Their radio operators, knowing their own day was done, attempting at least to give a more fortunate mariner a better chance of survival? Olsen didn’t know. What he did know was that there were two warships there, one of the massive Russian nuclear-powered cruisers and a French amphibious warfare ship, and they had said they would stand by Carnival Triumph until the storm was done. He had watched while the Russian cruiser took green water over her bows, flooding all the way to her bridge, and then had fought herself free.

  And so it had gone on for sixteen long hours, until the fury of the storm had faded and the seas returned to tranquility. Eventually he had bidden his protectors farewell and limped back through the Hellgate, his ship battered and torn by the violence of the storm but afloat with all her passengers, crew and refugees still alive. Seasick, mostly, but still alive. They’d even tried to restore the routine of a cruise ship, Olsen knew for a fact that the glamorous singer in the Rome Lounge had still been heaving the contents of her stomach into a bucket ten minutes before her act, but had managed to clean herself up, change into her stage gown and give the best performance she could, before running back and continuing to try and purge the effects of a ride the cruise liner’s designers had never anticipated.

  “Madame, Hamilton is off the port bow.”

  The Right Honorable Jennifer Smith shook herself and tried to summon up the courage to look at the devastation that had once been Bermuda’s capital. When she finally managed it, devastation didn’t even begin to cover it. There was not a building or a tree standing, even the massive walls of Fort Saint Catherine were tumbled. The island, once lush and green, studded with white houses, was now bare, brown and desolate. Smith picked up the bridge binoculars, swinging them on their stabilized mounting and pointed them at the center of Hamilton. It was not hard to see where the Parliament building and Cabinet Office had been, although the buildings themselves were gone and even their sites were hidden by a massive Japanese car-carrier that had been driven ashore. With her single screw and huge, flat sides, she had stood no chance, no chance at all. Then she gave a shocked gasp.

  “Captain, there are Baldricks in the ruins!”

  Olsen took the binoculars and surveyed the scene. The hulking black figures of the Baldricks were crowded in the shattered town. Even as he watched, they swung the main walls of a refugee hut into place while another group lifted up the roof to slide it into place. He looked a little more closely, there were television crews filming them at work. “It’s all right Madame. They’re helping with the disaster relief.”

  “Over here Madame. You’ll see what they’re doing on CNN.” Most non-mariners didn’t realize that ships had commercial television receivers on their bridges. There were things on television that sailors needed to know and often couldn’t get from anywhere else with anything like the speed and efficiency. The news was one of them.

  “for the survivors. The scale of the disaster in Bermuda is only now beginning to sink in. It is believed that as many as 40,000 of the island’s population have died in the disaster inflicted by Hurricane Paloma. The death toll might well have been higher had it not been for an emergency disaster team who portalled in directly from Hell under the command of Arch-Duke Dagon. The daemons started to clear the wreckage while the storm was still blowing and have shown an uncanny ability to find humans trapped in the wreckage. Of course their added strength and endurance has made their efforts on behalf of the victims more effective. Asked about the prompt response to the disaster, President Abigor said ‘To provide aid is the least we can do for the humans who have rescued us from millennia of slavery.’

  “And now, for a report of the Bermudan disaster from one of the victims, we now go to our correspondent in Hell who has been allowed to interview some of those killed in the catastrophe. David, are you there?”

  First Officer Carsten leaned quietly towards Olsen. “I don’t feel easy in my mind about this Sir.”

  “About the Baldricks helping out? Like they did after the tornados in Missouri last month? Or after Ike hit Houston?”

  “Sort of Sir, the way Abigor is sending them to Earth and refusing to accept payment for them. It’s a bit like slavery if you ask me. We took Hell to stop that kind of thing.”

  “Abigor is getting paid Knut, not in cash but he’s getting paid. He’s reconstructing the Baldrick image, reconciling humans and daemons to living together. Every time there’s a disaster, the Baldricks are there, helping out. One day, he’s hoping, we’ll be comfortable with each other. That day, there’ll no longer need to be a human army of occupation in Hell. You know as well as I do what the people we’ve rescued from the Hell-Pit think of the Baldricks. If we pulled the Army out today, there’d be a massacre of hideous proportions in there and it wouldn’t be the humans who were doing the dying. The Human Expeditionary Army stand between the surviving Baldricks and the deceased humans they spent millennia tormenting. Sending some baldricks to help is a good way of buying back acceptance. And also making us feel guilty by the way.

  Carsten nodded. The people on Earth had been cheering their armies on, and still were in some senses, but the film of the battlefields in Hell had stunned them. Especially the scenes along the Phlegethon River with the piles of mangled Baldrick corpses that went on for square mile after square mile. For perha
ps the first time, they realized the incredible disparity of firepower that had existed between the human armies and the Baldricks. The sight of the dead where the Baldricks had tried to fight tanks with bronze tridents had changed opinions in a subtle but very marked way. Humans now pitied the Baldricks who had stood so little chance and had died not even understanding what it was that was killing them. It was rumored that change in attitude was also causing trouble in Hell, with the refugees from the pit unable to understand why the newly-dead from Earth should be sickened by the slaughter they’d inflicted.

  “Madame, radio room here. We’re receiving message from Prime Minister Ewart Brown. He says that some of the Cabinet and Parliament are in a deep shelter underneath the Cabinet Office. They can’t get out because, and I quote ‘some damned great ship is sitting on top of us’ but they’re safe and the Baldricks are tunneling down towards them. As apparently you are the only surviving member of the Government in the open, he would like you to assume responsibility for the Government until, and again I quote, ‘the daemons get their fingers out and finish digging us out of here’.”

  “Thank you, is he still on the air?”

  “He is indeed Madame. I took the liberty of asking him to keep the communication line open.”

  “Very well, I had better speak to him.”

  “We can patch you in from the bridge, Madame, if you so wish?” Olsen made the offer tentatively, he had a lot to do and a politician on the bridge was the worst form of getting in the way.

  Smith grinned, she knew exactly when the cruise liner Captain was thinking. “I’ll go down to the radio room Captain. Once you are docked, we may need this ship for accommodation and as an emergency hospital. Will your company allow that?”

  “I see no reason why not Madame. Emergency disaster relief considerations were built into these ships although I do not think they have ever been properly used. I will ask Head Office, but you can assume the answer will be positive.”