Throne of Stars Read online

“Bead,” Pahner corrected. Julian looked at him, and the captain waggled one hand palm-down above the table. “Those things get too close for a plasma cannon. We’d torch the ship.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Julian nodded. “I’ll get it set up,” he said, then wiped his mouth and looked unenthusiastically down at the chunk of meat still sitting on his plate. “You want me to break out some ration packs?” he asked in a decidedly hopeful voice.

  “No.” Pahner shook his head. “We need to eat what we’ve got. Until we know how long this journey is going to be, we still need to conserve our off-world supplies.” He paused and took a breath. “And we also need to shut down the radios. We’re getting close enough to the ports that we have to worry about radio bounce. They’re low-intercept, but if the port has any notion that we’re here, we’re in the deep.”

  “So how do we communicate between the ships, Sir?” Despreaux asked. The sergeant had been particularly quiet all evening, but she was one of the two NCOs in charge of maintaining communications. With Julian setting up the weapons, it was her job to plan a jury-rigged replacement com net for the flotilla’s units.

  “Com lasers, flags, guns, flashing lights,” Pahner said. “I don’t care. But no radios.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Despreaux said, making a note on her toot. “So we can use our tac-lights, for example?”

  “Yes.” Pahner paused again and slipped in a strip of bisti root while he thought. “In addition, the sailors in K’Vaern’s Cove reported that piracy is not an unknown thing on Marduk. Now, why am I not surprised?”

  Most of the group chuckled again. Practically every step of the journey had been contested by local warlords, barbarians, or bandits. It would have been a massive shock to their systems if it turned out these waters were any different.

  “When we approach the far continent, we’ll need to keep a sharp lookout for encroaching ships,” Pahner continued. “And for these fish. And for anything else that doesn’t look right.”

  “And His Dark Majesty only knows what’s going to come next,” Kosutic agreed with a smile.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Land ho!”

  The lookout’s cry rang out only two days after the attack by the giant coll. No one was really surprised by it, though. The evidence of an approaching landfall had been there for at least a day—a thin gray smoke on the horizon, and a golden alpenglow before dawn.

  Julian swarmed up the ratlines to Hooker’s fore topmast crosstrees with an agility which might have seemed at odds with his determinedly antiseaman attitude. He took his glasses with him. They were considerably better than his helmet visor’s built-in zoom function, and he spent several minutes beside the Mardukan seaman already perched there, studying the distant land. Then he zoomed the glasses back in and slid back down to the deck.

  “Active volcano, sure enough,” he reported to Pahner. “The island looks deserted, but there’s another in the chain just coming over the horizon.”

  Pahner consulted his toot and nodded. “It doesn’t appear on the map,” he said, “but at this resolution, it wouldn’t.”

  “But there is a line of mountains on the eastern verge of the continent,” Roger pointed out, projecting a hologram from his pad. He pointed at the light-sculpture mountains for emphasis. “They could be volcanic in nature. Which would probably make this a southern extension of that chain.”

  “Hullo, the deck!” the lookout still at the crosstrees called. “’Nother to the south! We’re sailing between them.”

  None of the islands were visible from deck-level, yet, but Captain T’Sool, more accustomed to the shallow, relatively confined waters of the K’Vaernian Sea than the endless expanse of the open ocean, looked nervous.

  “I’m not sure I like this,” he said. “We could hit shoals anytime.”

  “Possibly,” Roger conceded, with a glance at the azure water over the side. “It’s more likely that we’re still over a subduction trench or the deep water around one. Water tends to be deep right up to the edge of volcanic formations. I’m glad to see our first landfall be volcanoes, actually. You might want to slow the flotilla and get some depth lines working, though.”

  “What are these ‘volcanoes’ you keep speaking of?” T’Sool asked. Roger checked his toot and realized that it had used the Terran word because there was no local equivalent.

  “Have you ever heard of smoking mountains?” he asked.

  “No,” the seaman said dubiously.

  “Well, you’re in for a treat.”

  “Why does smoke come from the mountain?” Fain asked in awe.

  The flotilla had slowed as it approached the chain, and now it proceeded cautiously between two of the islands. The one to the south was wreathed in thick, leafy, emerald-green foliage that made it look like a verdant paradise. Of course, as the Marines had learned the hard way, it was more likely to be a verdant hell, Mardukan jungles being what they were.

  The island to the north, however, was simply a black hunk of basalt, rising out of the blue waters. Its stark, uncompromising lines made it look bigger than it actually was, and the top—the only portion formed into anything resembling a traditional cone—trailed a gentle plume of ash and steam.

  “I could tell you,” Julian replied with a grimace. “But you’d have to believe me rather than your religion.”

  Fain thought about that. So far, he’d found nothing that directly contradicted the doctrines of the Lord of Water. On the other hand, the dozens of belief systems he and the other infantry had encountered since leaving Diaspra had already indicated to him that the gospel of the priests of Water was not, perhaps, fundamentally correct. While there was no question that the priests understood the science of hydraulics, it might be that their overall understanding of the world was less precise.

  “Go ahead,” he said with a handclap of resignation. Then he chuckled. “Do your worst!”

  Julian smiled in response and gestured at the vast expanse of water stretched out around the flotilla.

  “The first thing you have to accept is that the priests’ description of the world as a rock floating in eternal, endless waters isn’t correct.”

  “Since we’re intending to sail to the far side, I’d already come to the conclusion that ‘endless water’ might not be exactly accurate,” Fain admitted with another handclap.

  “What the world really is, is a ball floating in nothingness,” Julian said, and raised both hands as Fain started to protest. “I know. How is that possible? Well, you’re going to have to trust me for now, and check it out later. But what matters right now is that the center of the ball—the world—is very, very hot. Hot enough to melt rock. And it stays that way.”

  “That I have a hard time with,” Fain said, shaking his head. “Why is it hot? And if it is, when will it cool?”

  “It’s hot because there’s . . . stuff in there that’s something like what makes our plasma cannon work,” Julian said, waving his hands with a sort of vague frustration as he looked for an explanation capable of crossing the technological gulf yawning between his worldview and Fain’s. “Like I said,” he said finally. “You’ll just have to trust me on some of this. But it is—hot, I mean—and somewhere under that mountain, there’s a channel that connects to that hot part. That’s why it smokes. Think of it as a really, really big chimney. As for when the inside of the world will cool, that won’t happen for longer than I can explain. There will no longer be humans—or Mardukans—when it starts to cool.”

  “This is too strange,” Fain said. “And how do I explain it to my soldiers? ‘It’s that way because Sergeant Julian said so’?”

  “I dunno,” Julian replied. “Maybe the sergeant major can help you out. On the other hand . . .”

  Roger watched Bebi’s team begin the entry. The team had already worked on open area techniques. Now they were working on closed . . . and they looked like total dorks.

  There was nowhere to create a real shooting environment on the flotilla’s ships, so the troop
ers were using the virtual reality software built into their helmet combat systems and their toots. The “shoot house” was nothing more than the open deck of a schooner, but with the advanced systems and the toots’ ability to massage sensory input, it would be as authentic to the participants as if there were real enemies.

  But since their audience could see that they were standing on nothing more than an unobstructed stretch of deck planks, the “entry team” looked like a group of warrior-mimes.

  The virtual reality software built into the troops’ helmets would have been a potent training device all by itself, and its ability to interface with the Marines’ toots was sufficient to make the illusion perfect. Now Macek smoothed thin air as he emplaced a “breaching charge” on the fictitious door he could both “see” and “feel” with total fidelity, then stepped to the side and back. As far as he could tell, he was squatting, nearly in contact with a wall; to everyone else, he looked as if he were getting ready to go to the bathroom on the deck.

  The sergeant major next to Roger snorted softly.

  “You know, Your Highness, when you’re doing this, one part of you knows how stupid you look. But if you don’t ignore it, you’re screwed. I think this is one of His Wickedness’ little jokes on Marines.”

  Roger smoothed his ponytail and opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

  “Yes, Your Highness?” Kosutic said softly. “I take it there’s something about that statement that bothers you?”

  “Not about your observation,” Roger said as Bebi triggered the notional charge and rushed through the resulting imaginary hole. The prince had set his helmet to project the “shoot house” in see-through mode, and the team seemed to be fighting phantoms in a ghost building as he watched. Combined with his question, the . . . otherworldly nature of their opponents sent something very much like a shiver down his spine.

  “It was that last comment,” he said. “I’ve been wondering. . . . Why is Satanism the primary religion of Armagh? I mean, a planet settled by Irish and other Roman Catholic groups. That seems a bit . . . strange,” he finished, and the sergeant major let out a chuckle that turned into a liquid laugh Roger had never heard from her before.

  “Oh, Satan, is that all? The reason is because the winners write the history books, Your Highness.”

  “That doesn’t explain things,” Roger protested, pulling at a strand of hair. “You’re a High Priestess, right? That would be the equivalent of—an Episcopal bishop, I guess.”

  “Oh, not a bishop!” Kosutic laughed again. “Not one of those evil creatures! Angels of the Heavens, they are!” Roger felt his eyes trying to cross, and she smiled at his expression and took pity on him.

  “Okay, if you insist, Your Highness, here’s the deal.

  “Armagh was a slow-boat colony, as you know. The original colonists were primarily from Ireland, on Old Earth, with a smattering from the Balkans. Now, Ireland had a bloody history long before Christianity, but the whole Protestant/Catholic thing eventually got out of hand.”

  “We studied the nuking of Belfast at the Academy as an example of internal terrorism taken to a specific high,” Roger agreed.

  “Yes, and what was so screwed up about those Constables was that they killed as many—or more—of their 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.”