March To The Stars

own supporters as they did Catholics.' She shrugged. 'Religious wars are ... bad. But Armagh was arguably worse, even in comparison to the Belfast Bomb.

'The original colonists were Eire who wanted to escape the religious bickering that was still going on in Ireland but keep their religion. They didn't want freedom from religion, only freedom from argument about it. So they took only Catholics.

'Shortly after landing, though, there was an attempted religious schism. It was still, at that time, a purely Catholic colony, and the schismatic movement was more on the order of fundamentalism rather than any sort of outright heresy. The schismatics wanted the mass in Latin, that sort of thing. But that, of course, threatened to start the arguments all over. So, as a result, to prevent religious warfare from breaking out again, they instituted a local version of the Papal College for the express purpose of defining what was religiously acceptable.'

'Oh, shit,' Roger said quietly. 'That's ... a bad idea. Hadn't any of them studied history?'

'Yes,' she said sadly, 'they had. But they also thought they could do things 'right' this time. The Inquisition, the Great Jihad of the early twenty-first century, the Fellowship Extinction, and all the rest of the Jihads, Crusades, and Likuds were beside the point. The worst of it was that those who founded the Tellers were good people. Misguided, but good. The road to Heaven is paved with good intentions, after all. Like most ardent believers, they thought God would make sure they got it right. That their cause was just, and that the other people who'd screwed up exactly the same idea before them had suffered—unlike them—from some fundamental flaw in their vision or approach.'

'Rather than from just being human.' Roger shook his head. 'It's like the redistributionists that don't see the Ardane Deconstruction as being 'what will happen.' '

'The one thing you learn from history, Your Highness, is that we're doomed to repeat it. Anyway, where was I?'

'They set up an Inquisition.'

'Well, that wasn't what they'd intended to set up, but, yes. That was what they got.' Kosutic shrugged grimly. 'It was bad. That sort of thing attracts ... bad sorts. Not so much sociopaths—although it does attract them—but also people who are so sure of their own rectitude that they can't see that evil is evil.'

'But you're a Satanist. You keep referring to 'His Wickedness,' so why does the concept of evil bother you?' Roger asked, his tone honestly perplexed, and Kosutic shrugged again.

'At first the organized opposition to the College was purely secular. The Resistance actually had a clause in its manifesto calling for an end to all religion, always. But the planet was too steeped in religious thought for that to work, and the Tellers, the Determiners of Truth, insisted on referring to anyone in the Resistance as 'minions of Satan.' '

'So instead of trying to fight the label, you embraced it for yourselves.'

'And changed it,' Kosutic agreed. 'We won eventually, and part of the peace settlement was a freedom of religion clause in the Constitution. But by that time, the Satanists were the majority religion, and Christianity—or, at least, Armagh's version of it—had completely discredited itself. There's a really ancient saw that says that if Satan ever replaced God, he'd have to act the same. And to be a religion for the good of all, which was what we'd intended from the outset, we had to be good. The difference between Armaghan Satanism and Catholicism is a rejection of the supremacy of the Pope, a few bells and whistles we stole from Wicca, and referring to Satan instead of the Trinity. It really is Episcopalianism, for Satanists, which makes your bishop comparison even more humorous.'

She'd been watching the training entry team as she spoke, and now she grimaced as Bebi flinched. The exercise was simple, 'baby steps' designed to get the Marines back into the close-combat mode of thinking. But despite that, the team hadn't taken the simple security precaution of checking all corners of the room for threats, and the 'enemy' hiding behind a pillar had just taken out the team leader.

'It's the little things in life,' she muttered.

'Yep,' Roger agreed. 'They don't seem to be doing all that well.'

He watched as Macek 'responded' to the threat by uncovering his own area. At which point another hidden enemy took advantage of the lack of security to take out Berent. Kosutic's nostrils flared, and Roger grinned mentally as he pictured the blistering critique of the exercise she was undoubtedly compiling. But the sergeant major was one of those people for whom multitasking came naturally, and she resumed her explanation even as she watched Berent become a casualty.

'One of the big differences between the Church of Rome and Armaghan Satanism is our emphasis on the Final Conflict and the preparations for it,' she continued, her expression now deadly serious. 'We believe that the Christians are dupes, that if God was really in charge, things would be better. It's our belief that Lucifer was cast out not by God, but by the other angels, and that they have silenced The One True God. It's our job, in the Final Conflict, to uphold the forces of good and win this time.'

She turned to face the prince fully, and smiled at his widened eyes. It was not an especially winsome expression.

'We take that belief very seriously, Your Highness. There's a reason that Armagh, a low-population planet, supplies three percent of all the Imperial Marines, and somewhere around ten percent of all the elite forces. The Precepts of the Elders call for all good Satanists to be ready for the Final Conflict at all times. To uphold good in all their doings, and to be morally upright so that when the time comes to free God from the Chains of the Angels, we won't be found wanting.'

She turned back to watch the training and shook her head.

'I mention this only to note that the Brotherhood of Baal would eat Bebi's team for lunch. The Brotherhood has used the Imperial freedom of religion clause to perform some tinkering on themselves that gives most of the rest of us Satanists cold chills. I doubt that any court would consider an abbott of Baal human if he or she didn't have documents to prove it. But you have to see them to believe it.'

Roger watched as Bebi collected his 'dead' and 'wounded' and started the debrief.

'I imagine that Christians are ... somewhat ambivalent about that approach.'

'We don't preach,' Kosutic said. 'We don't proselytize. We certainly don't discuss our beliefs around the general public. And, frankly, we believe that as long as Christians and Jews and Muslims are being 'good,' they're violating the intent of their controllers. So we applaud them for it.' She turned and gave him a truly evil smile. 'It really confuses them.'

Roger chuckled and shook his head as Despreaux began enumerating the team's faults. The plan had been good, but when they'd hit the door, they'd forgotten it and fought by the seat of their pants. They had, in fact, been fighting the way they would have fought Mardukans. But the next major conflict would probably put Bravo Company—what was left of it—up against humans. True, those humans would probably be pirate scum and garrison troopers, but standard colonial defenses called for space-intercept capable plasma cannon, monomolecular 'twist' wire, and bunkers with interlocking fields of fire. And then they had to capture a ship.

It wasn't going to be a walk in the park.

'Well,' Roger said with a sigh. 'I just hope whoever the 'good guys' are, they're on our side.'

* * *

Captain Pahner looked around the cramped cabin. The one fault of Ima Hooker's design, which no one had considered in advance, was that the schooner had never been intended as a command ship. Poertena had recognized the necessity of designing around higher deckheads to allow more head room for the towering Mardukans of her crew. There was a limit to what he could do, but the final result—however claustrophobic the natives might still find it—was that even the tallest of the humans could stand upright without worrying about hitting his head on a deck beam. But however the ship might have been stretched vertically, there was only so much that could be done horizontally in a hull of Hooker's length and beam. Despite the fact that Pahner, or Prince Roger, rather, had a minimal 'staff,' its members packed into the wardroom of the command schooner only with difficulty. Especially the Mardukans.

And that was before adding Roger's pet. Or his asi'bodyguard.'

'All right,' Pahner said with a grim smile. 'We need to keep this meeting short, if for no other reason than so that Rastar can unbend his neck.'

He looked over at Rastar Komas Ta'Norton, who stood hunched forward with his horns banging on the ceiling. The former prince of the Northern League wasn't large for a Mardukan, but he still towered over the humans.