I did the crossword, I donated blood, and I wrote this on a free-writing prompt:
“There are no spaceships in the Bible.”
Praetor Corothas says this angrily, the menace unmistakable in his voice, and the young woman who has brought him the early-morning reports from the front backs away slowly. I wouldn’t have pegged him for a believer, much less one so quick to bristle at a perceived blasphemy, but he’s clearly struggling to contain what I think would — outside the burden of my presence, of course — be a white-hot, blinding rage. He knocks a half-empty coffee cup on its side and curses.
I’ve seen these reports, the missives the generals under the Praetor’s command have radioed in overnight, and the news is not good. Rebels attacking the northern cities, several dozen more Alliance troops dead, the command gates on Mount Aronson for the first time in a half-century breached. And yet what Corothas has decided to focus on, to the exclusion of all else, is this one tiny footnote: a small rebel encampment, three days hover-travel from central command, where Frank Bane and his followers have set up what from all accounts is their own private religion.
I shake my head at the nonsense of it all. Not at the religion, which for all I know is no more harmful than the Christianity of the planet’s original settlers (and which Corothas has apparently inherited), but at the thought that this tiny sect is even worth worrying about. Frank Bane is nothing. Charismatic, of course, and prone to violence; as a former soldier in the Alliance command he will bear watching — but that’s the only reason he’s in the morning’s reports at all. He left his commission with nothing, no allies, no support; so what if he’s scrounged together a few tundra-rats during his subsequent exile in the north? He’s sold them a bill of goods on which he can’t possibly deliver, and moreover I think everyone involved knows it. Everyone except for Corothas, that is. Our ships are secure, and we will honor our treaty with the Alliance. If a handful of rebels sees our ships as emissaries of God rather than the death that they are, doesn’t that make them less dangerous, not more?
It wasn’t a bad day.
