The Battle for Armageddon

The Battle for Armageddon


You know, it's hard to maintain any sort of meaningful approval rating when the laws of physics are suspending themselves just to dick you over. I understand that. I used to feel sorry for Nikola Karsus.

Of course, I know it's not him in there anymore.

So, what happened? The Rapture, the Tribulation, all that nonsense. Well, not quite as the Left Behind books describe it of course; I'm fairly sure that the nuclear attacks were caused by USAF fundamentalists thinking that it was some other kind of rapture, and they didn't want to be left out of the fun.

Anyway, so yeah. God decided it's judgement day. Doesn't show up himself, of course, but things start happening according to some lunatic's interpretation of Revelations.

That was seven years ago. Three years earlier, Nikola was shot by some Australian sniper, and made a miraculous recovery. The nutbars calling themselves the Tribulation Force say that he came back because his body is now controlled by Satan.

I think the problem was simply that the Global Defence Initiative was doing too well: plague of locusts? Lift all restrictions on GMOs, but also lift all patents. Seas red with blood? Bring in nuclear submarines and hook them up to insanely huge and inefficient reverse osmosis filters. I have to say, if random crap like people bursting into flames for no good reason didn't happen to you, it has been a good time to work in nautical emergencies.

Anyway, he's been acting a lot more on script since. He actually cackles on TV, started making stupid decisions, things like that. I think people are just going along, at this point. Quite a lot of the survivors have actually converted to some mad bloodthirsty christianity-lite and the "oppression" largely consists of GDI troops trying to make sure they don't make with the cultural cleansing.

So when the GDI was officially defunded, they had a meeting, said "screw that", and kept going. It means I get paid less, but at this point, knowing that I'm eating next week is a good deal.

So, the next thing that happened at the meeting was that they got a big pile of 1990s apocalyptic fiction and did symbolic analysis at it.

Hence, the endgame. The Battle of Armageddon. Funny how nobody calls it Megiddo anymore.

The Antichrist has assembled his armies. We're part of that, technically, so we answered the clarion call -- seriously, the announcement was made by some guy in North Korean dress uniform with a goddamn trumpet -- and moved on over.

I've done my job; lots of ditch digging. Hey, it's an army and I'm an engineer, right? A good thing is that I didn't have more hair to lose; I got nice and zapped by lightning a while ago -- guess I was one of those pawns that actually mattered. I know electricity a little too well for it to hurt me, and I have to say, it's one hell of a way to get a permanent shave.

The Plain of Megiddo. Armageddon. Looks desertic; it's surprisingly colder than one would say from a postcard, which is good, because this Soviet-era NBC gear is drenching me in sweat as it is.

Mine-remover crawlers, combat engineers in NBC gear,
a couple folks on mule-back because we were out of APC's, scrap-built drones circling overhead like buzzards on mismatched motors -- a few are my design, even. We look like some sort of nightmare WW1 army if the war had gone on for a century. Hey, the modern stuff was all taken by the Unity Army -- we're just the Global Defense Initiative Science Division, who cares about science anymore? I guess we look like we belong enough that it doesn't matter that we're not on the books anymore; the fact that operational security has recently gone down to Bronze Age doctrine probably helps.


So, the nutcases, I mean believers -- I guess we'll find out who is nuttier -- have clustered around the old town of Petra, which is fucking stupid since the place has the tactical defensibility of cheese, but that's what the book says. We think they're waiting for a portal to open. The portal starts happening; it's cross shaped, of course. Switches move. EMP shields go up. We're recording. The boss is a particle physicist, he'll tell us which of the contingency plans to use, I hope. I look at the spots on my hand as I activate my part of the analysis  rig, and shrug.

And so, inevitably:

At this point, Nikola Karsus joins with Leonid Fortunae to lead the Unity Army troops around Petra to storm the city and overtake the believers. As they begin to advance upon the city, the cross disappears from the sky and suddenly immobilizes the troops, causing them to be stuck with their vehicles and weapons and lights inoperable. But seconds after that, a bright thick blinding shadowless light covers the land, and everyone sees that coming out of heaven is Jesus Christ with His army of saints following behind Him. He speaks, "I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the Almighty", and as He speaks, the Global Community troops around Petra all die. Nikola and Leonid flee to Bozrah, hoping that the troops stationed there will prevail against Jesus and His army, but the same thing happens there: Jesus speaks, and all the troops and GC resources are destroyed, their corpses becoming food for the birds of the air.

Well, that was The Divine Plan. We go with Plan D.

TurboJesus would have taken about twelve seconds to cast his "I Win" incantation. You can't proclaim jack shit if there's no air.

The boss quickly calls D through our low bandiwdth shielded redundant links -- we had five ready, and I'm not a big fan of the last three -- and we hit the appropriate knife switches. Rings of nuclear mines go off to toast the air, mass-murdering a million believers who probably went to whatever passes for their heaven without going through security. With nearly perfect ballistic timing, the smoke streams of Davy Crockett recoilless rifles from the sixties cross just ahead of the blast wave. The space around the portal is so saturated with radiation that for a handful of moments any fissile material injected into the area would go off... like all the spent nuclear fuel we could scrounge, dropped from cargo planes rigged with mechanical autopilots to survive the EMP. A few couldn't be rigged on time, and a few men braver than I go meet their doom.

By divine magic, by sheer rape of the laws of physics, we hear the proclamation that condemns us all to hell, right as the projectiles fall or fly. Right before they hit in burning fearful symmetry.

"I AM the ALPHA" particles. The air is now protons.

If I'd been fifty meters ahead, so would I. As it is, I'll just get cancer of the everything, NBC gear or not. We can fix that later.

After thirty seconds of white noise, some of the wide-angle camera feeds come back up. Armageddon is literally a glass crater. Inside, we see a dying god crumble to dust with a supernatural howl.

"HOOoooowwwwww........"

How? Science, bitch. It works.

The return of sanity is sanctioned by the low-bandwidth shielded redundant link comes back up, 8-bit audio and a grainy monochrome image. It's the director.

"Just so you know, this mic isn't two way. Can't hear a damn thing you're saying, so don't waste any oxygen trying to talk. Preliminary testing shows that our Total Protonic Reversal Sphere experiment has worked, and we seem to have gotten rid of the supernatural infestation that has made such a mess these past few years. Now, this required some fairly novel thinking. They say great science is built on the shoulders of giants. Not here. At Armageddon, we do all our science from scratch. No hand holding. Anyway, we urge any Global Community or Unity Army survivors to get the hell away from the radiation, then report to the nearest GDI Science Division personnel and wait for orders, civilization won't rebuild itself. Cave Johnson, we're done here."