Armageddon?? Read Online Free

them the message that informed them of their fate.
Not that their fate was ever in any doubt but it seemed as if the powers higher
up had got bored with playing their little games with this dimension and
decided to wrap things up. Ralaraspanathsis actually slightly regretted that,
this wasn’t the first time he’d been on this planet and he’d rather enjoyed the
way the humans had cowered before him on his first visit. Still, perhaps his
master would allow him to play with some once they were all in his domain.
    It
was half way through that pleasurable thought that the pain hit Ralaraspanathsis.
His head seemed to explode, his ears crushed by a terrible pressure that
shattered the bones in his inner ears. His forearms moved, almost of their own
accord, covering his eardrums, trying to shut out the dreadful crushing noise.
Then, almost before he could think again, the terrible noise was gone.
    “Wow,
will you look at that.” Atkin’s voice was awed. The contact was spinning in
circles, threshing in the water creating a maelstrom of flow noise emissions.
“It didn’t like that at all.”
    “Hit
it again. Full power to the forward sonar transducers.” The contact had been
settling down when the second pulse hit it. If anything the threshing was even
worse than with the first pulse. “That’s a Baldrick, no doubt. Weapons, fire
tubes one and two. Target that thing.”
    Taking
four tons off the extreme end of the moment arm caused Astute’s bow to dip. It
didn’t matter to the torpedoes, they were already out and climbing to the
shallower water near the surface. Once there, they kicked up to 81 knots and
ran out to the estimated position of the target. At that point they dropped
their guidance wires and dived vertically on the contact below them.
    A
shaped charge can penetrate six times its diameter; that gave the pair of
Spearfish torpedoes a theoretical penetration of 126 inches. In fact, they did
a bit better than that, blasting deep cavities in Ralaraspanathsis’s back,
severing his spinal column and burning deep into his vital organs. His body
tissues, vaporized by the blast, sprayed out and down, searing and cooking his
internal organs and bursting open the swim bladder that kept him afloat.
Crippled and dying, he felt himself floating upwards towards the surface.
Confusion filled his mind, he was a herald. How could they have done this?
    “Well,
there’s no doubt about, we just scored a Baldrick.” A cheer went up around the
control room. Ever since Prime Minister Gordon Brown had quoted ‘Blackadder’ in
his initial announcement, the British had taken to calling the denizens of
hell, ‘Baldricks’. It had a nice, contemptuous air about it, one that was
beginning to catch on. “Number One, take the boat to the surface, we need to
collect samples.”
    Phillips
looked through the periscope again. “In fact, if we can tow that wreck in, so
much the better. Environmental, keep a check on water conditions, the Spams
said the ones they shot down had acid blood. We don’t want our hull plating
corroded, the taxpayers would get perturbed.”
    Tamanskoya
Motor Rifle Division, Outskirts of Moscow
    “Remember
Bratishka. Rodina, chest, slava! Let the name of the Chertkovsky Tank Regiment
chill the very fires of hell!”
    The
Americans had killed four of the demons, others had killed one each. Now it was
time for the Rodina to strike its blow against these arrogant beasts who had
dared to declare their dominion over humanity. The demon had appeared an hour
or so earlier and was walking across the countryside towards the Kremlin. If
the pattern from earlier encounters was holding true, it was making for Russia’s
capital. Well, it wouldn’t get there, not if the Chertkovsky Tank Regiment had
its way. Colonel Mikhail Suranov had worked on the presumption that the beast
was heading for the city and set up a neat L-shaped ambush. The kill zone was
covered by the 125mm guns on his tanks and, just to make sure, he