Chapter 25

Medina

Jonaz, Humble-Before-God studied the anomalous image on his display. That speck raised more questions than he could answer.

In the terrible hours after the attack on God’s Chosen World, automatic machinery in many locations had recorded images and vectors of all arriving and departing ships. Jonaz had worked steadily to analyze and archive this precious data. While he worked, his thoughts cycled endlessly through the questions on all of their minds. Why? What path of Ultimate Darkness had they followed to this hideous waypoint? Were they still treading that deadly path? Was there worse yet to be revealed?

All the Faithful on the tiny outpost were in shock. It was a perverse nightmare that greeted them anew each day. Discipline, prayer, and work were their only escape. Jonaz was grateful for the simple, repetitive details of his task. In this duty, he could find moments of peace when he was fully occupied with the details of copying and storing. Every hour, he moved a copy of his work into the analysis directory, and then he moved on to the next satellite, copying and storing the data recorded there.

In material goods, the Faithful were a poor people, not that they cared. They could not afford ships to guard every approach to God’s Chosen World. Instead, satellites with passive sensors recorded the movement of ships in and out of the Blessed System. Transmitters kept them in continuous communication with the computers and analyzing equipment on the Station that orbited above God’s Chosen World. That communication link was no more. The computers and equipment to analyze and direct that traffic were no more. The analysts themselves and the entire station were no more. All had been destroyed in The Attack.

Without that automated equipment, the data recorded by those satellites had to be retrieved and stored by hand. Jonaz and the others had to hurry, for the satellites had only a limited storage capacity. New data constantly overwrote old. While the cycle was 120 days, there were a lot of satellites. Fortunately, a safe archive center already existed—the outpost where Jonaz worked.

Years before, when The Faithful had first built what was needed to monitor traffic in the Blessed System, crewed outposts were required to provide repair and other support functions for the monitoring equipment. Those outposts had been constructed just beyond the orbit of the farthest of the gas giant planets. Over the years, the other outposts had been retired, leaving only this one. For more than three decades, its small staff of The Faithful had directed their prayers towards God’s Chosen World even as they raised their eyes and their instruments to study the infinite wonders of God’s Universe. This was the most remote human-occupied place still physically within the Blessed System. Only those who traveled to other star systems were further from the City of His Word.

The equipment in the outpost and the original satellites had all been built years before by The Faithful. Then, newer satellite equipment had become available, equipment purchased elsewhere in the Galaxy. This new equipment was installed on the Station, but The Faithful had kept redundant channels to link this outpost to the system-wide network. The old satellites had been retained, continuing to observe traffic in and out of the Blessed System. The outpost remained also. It was both a training system and a useful backup to the newer systems, as faithful and utterly reliable as those who served there.

In the aftermath of The Attack, the outpost had been identified as the only place where large volumes of satellite data from both the old and the new systems could be downloaded, processed, and stored. Everywhere else, everywhere that had survived, was still dealing with lingering effects of the enormous electromagnetic pulse from The Attack. Thus, it was to this outpost that the flows of data were directed, and it was here a mysterious image was finally revealed, an image taken after The Attack.

Rumors about who had struck the fearful blow filled every conversation. Some thought it was one of the other single-planet systems wanting to destroy Medina as a trade competitor, and hoping the attack would be overlooked by others in the chaos of the war that raged among the nearby stars. Most thought it was the Empire, punishing The Faithful for some transgression not yet revealed. Now Jonaz knew. His fingers trembled as he focused on the image in front of him.

He had wanted to quit. It was the end of his shift, and he had even considered leaving, but he had only one more set of images to work through, and so despite the temptation of the evening meal, he had stayed at his console. Ten minutes after that, he found the anomalous streak on his screen.

Jonaz isolated the image in its own file and made numerous copies. He tested one of those copies with every tool at his disposal. He tested the validity of his data. He tested the reliability of his equipment. His eyes told him this testing was a waste. The image was crystal clear, even at extreme magnification. He repeated his tests, even when his mind told him that no test was ever truly a waste. A single digit of error, or even simple corruption, might change the time stamp his equipment had assigned to this image. He must be absolutely certain of the factual components of his information because the facts revealed by this image directly contradicted what he had been told by his mentors.

The image revealed that the blow that had killed thousands, the blow that had ripped the heart out of the space-borne enterprises of The Faithful, the blow that still echoed in the very soul of the Church of His Name, was not struck by the Empire, or even Blue Water or Prenger. No, it was a Families ship that had attacked them.

Jonaz, Humble-Before-God, was sorely troubled by this. He analyzed the image again and again. There was no change. Through the tattered remnants of what appeared to be a disguise, the outlines of a Families ship were visible, a Families Scout, the least of all of the ships of the United Families.

Jonaz consulted the outpost’s computerized catalog of ships’ images. The image in the catalog matched the image on his display. And beside that picture was a notation that this ship carried no weapons at all.

This was a contradiction, one more question that had yet to be answered. How had an unarmed ship struck such a blow? Reason said it was impossible, but could he doubt the image extracted from equipment that had worked flawlessly for 52 years?

Jonaz put this contradiction before his religious mentor, the Lay Brother of The Word assigned to the Outpost. The Lay Brother, an older man whose silver hair emphasized his many years of service to the Lord of All, instantly understood Jonaz’s question.

“Perhaps we are both mistaken,” the Lay Brother said after examining the picture. “We are but men, after all, and men make mistakes.”

Jonaz nodded. “But this was produced by a machine,” he answered, his expression worried. “A machine does only what it is designed to do. It does not interpret, only record.”

“A machine does what we tell it to do,” the Lay Brother corrected, “but were our instructions in error?”

“It has been correctly executing these instructions every day for at least 50 years,” Jonaz said. “And those instructions have been reviewed constantly in all those years. Surely--”

“Surely any error in the programming would have been found by now,” the Lay Brother finished, nodding slightly. “I, too, am troubled by this image. Perhaps our understanding is incomplete. I will pass your report and this image to our technically skilled brethren and seek guidance.” He smiled slightly. “Perhaps we will both be the better for these questions. Perhaps it will illuminate some part of The Path that has hitherto remained shrouded in darkness.”

“I pray that it shall be so.” Jonaz, Humble-Before-God, bowed. “I will review the maintenance logs for all of this equipment. Perhaps I missed something. Perhaps there is an error with the equipment, and I have simply not found it.”

The Lay Brother nodded his dismissal. He gave a copy of the image and the data analysis to a Brother who served as a courier between the Station and God’s Promised Land. The Lay Brother was very precise in his instructions. The packet was to be delivered by hand directly to the Lay Brother of Records in the City of His Word.

Seventy-two hours after sending the packet, the Lay Brother of the Outpost received a message directly from the City of His Word. After reading the message, he summoned Jonaz, Humble-Before-God.

“We are called home,” the Lay Brother told him. “We are to report to the City of His Word in four days.”

Jonaz looked in both directions before softly asking, “The image?”

“I believe so,” the Lay Brother replied.

Upon arrival, they were escorted to the Lay Seat of the Holy Church. The plain, unadorned buildings set in a grassy swale in the heart of the City of His Word looked no different than a regional school or an office building. But Jonaz could feel his heart pounding. These simple buildings housed the heart of the Faith, the divine center to which all the Faithful looked for guidance. These simple buildings housed the Senate of the Gnostic Princes, the Schools of the Lay Brethren, and, most important of all, the Prophet himself.

As they approached the Lay Seat, Jonaz found himself sweating. It wasn’t a hot day, not for these latitudes, and a gentle breeze from the orchards beyond the city refreshed the air. Surreptitiously, he tried to wipe the palms of his hands on his pants. He’d thought they were going to one of the laboratories, or perhaps to the school where he’d been trained. There he could watch the very best technicians of the Faithful as they dissected the image he’d found, and they could show him what error he’d made in the handling of his equipment. The Lay Seat of the Faithful was the last place he’d expected to come.

Once inside, they were whisked through office after office until, finally, they were shown into a small, undistinguished room, no larger and no different than the rest save that it had a table and chairs in addition to a desk. When they entered that room, a middle-aged man in the simple vestments of an itinerant priest stepped around his desk, hands outstretched in greeting.

“Brothers,” he said quietly. “I wish to thank you for showing me this picture.” He gestured at a copy of the image lying on his desk.

“Your G-G-Grace?” Jonaz stammered. He almost did not recognize the Prophet. Surely the Prophet was not thanking Jonaz, Humble-Before-God, for presenting him with this conundrum?

“God’s Will has manifested itself through you,” the Prophet assured Jonaz. “God has shown us the true path. Through you, His servant, He has illuminated a portion of His path for us to see clearly. I thank you for helping us to this greater understanding of His Purpose.”

“B-b-but Your Grace, all I did was process a picture. When I looked upon it, I was afraid I had made a mistake processing it.”

The Prophet smiled, his square features lighting up in a reassuring expression. “Given the right training, any man could process a picture. But you persevered in your duties when others would have gone to the evening meal and then bed. You recognized the importance of this picture the moment you saw it, and you took the time to assure yourself and all of us of the accuracy of this picture. You made sure it was no trick, no false image that might have led us further down the path of darkness. You understood the meaning of this information, and you immediately brought it to the attention of your mentor, who sent it on to his mentor and thus to me. I thank you for this precious fact that allows me and all of the Brethren to improve our understanding of His Path.

“Sometimes the humblest tasks have the greatest rewards in His eyes,” the Prophet reminded Jonaz. He guided Jonaz to a chair at the table and bade him sit, sit with the Prophet himself. Jonaz swallowed. This was ... this was ... in all his life, he had never imagined such a thing. Surely the Prophet was far too important to pay attention to a humble man such as he.

“We have here a picture, an image of what appears to be a Families ship,” the Prophet continued. “When I first saw this picture, I questioned whether those inside were actually of the Families. We cannot know that with certainty. It would be very easy for those of the Empire who wish us harm to build a copy of a Families ship. Yet it was equally easy for me to believe this ship and its crew could be entirely of the Families.”

“B-b-but Your Grace, the Families? They--”

“The Families,” the Prophet said. “The Lay Brethren and the Gnostic Princes have counseled me that we have given the Families grievous cause to strike at us. I was also counseled that the Empire seeks even now to enmesh us further in their coils. I have prayed day and night for some sign, some clue that would relieve my mind of the confusion created by these conflicting possibilities. And then, as a sign from Him, your picture arrived. Your picture resolved this quandary for me.”

“M-m-my picture, Your Grace? But--but--the image--it--it’s--”

“Yes. Your picture removed all doubts about the author of The Attack. Before this picture, we had but indirect evidence. We were left groping in the dark, stumbling down the Path blindly, looking for answers to questions we did not know how to ask. What had we done that brought us to this time and place? And then your picture arrived. God reached through you to illuminate His Path for us. God knew what we needed to find the right Path, and He guided you to that evidence.

“We have committed barbarous acts against those to whom the light has not yet been given, those known as the United Families. This picture tells me that someone of the Families is now aware that we have sinned against them. Now I pray we can convince the Families that we have seen the error in the False Prophet’s Path and that we truly seek to return to God’s Path.” He paused as if struck by some unpleasant thought. “Your equipment, Brother, is it foreign-made, or is it something we created?”

“It was designed and made here in God’s Blessed Land, not equipment we bought from some far-away place.”

The Prophet closed his eyes, his face still. “Then strangers would not know how to confuse this equipment, would they?” he asked, his voice soft with relief.

“No, Your Grace. Very few of The Faithful even know that our old system still functions.”

“And what they do not know exists, they could not seek to fool.” The Prophet sat motionless for a moment longer, as if resting, and then he opened his eyes. “We, His Faithful, have sinned mightily. We have involved ourselves in the Empire’s wars. We have fought for others without concern for their greed, without awareness of what they sought to gain, without concern for those our actions have harmed. We have fought not God’s War, but the Emperor’s. God, through this Families Scout ship, the tiniest vessel in their Fleet, the weakest ship they own, has struck us down for our acts. He did not choose a warship, a battleship, or some other ship of power. No, he chose this humblest of ships, and by smiting us with it, God has shown us His Power.”