Starfist: Kingdom's Fury Read Online Free PDF Page A

collect the bodies of the dead and escort them back in.
    As near as could be determined from the debriefings, first platoon had killed between twenty-five and thirty Skinks. The Marines had lost three dead and five severely wounded, and held the ground at the end of the firefight. By any conventional measure, it was a victory. But the way the Marines of first platoon, Alfa Company, 26th FIST saw it, they'd just gotten their asses kicked.

CHAPTER TWO
    "Father? Shall we ever be able to go home?"
    Zechariah Brattle shook his head sadly. "Not as long as evil lurks out there on our land, Samuel." He nodded toward the hills above the Achor Marshes on the shores of the sea of Gerizim. "New Salem anymore, son, is as far away as—as Earth."
    None of the families that had somehow survived the massacre of their camp above the sea wanted to think about the horror of that night. Only two weeks in the past, it was too fresh in their minds. They were concerned now with simple survival.
    "Why did God allow this to happen to us, Father?" The question was not an accusation, just a young boy asking someone he respected for an explanation of something monstrous: Why had a decent and righteous people been destroyed?
    Zechariah massaged the back of his neck for a moment. "It is not given to us always to understand why the Lord does things, Sam. This is not the first time our people have suffered woe. I believe God is punishing us now for allowing our ministers to lead us into sin." He sighed and gazed silently at the far-distant bluish smudge for a brief instant, remembering that dreadful night. He shook his head to clear it of those memories. "But Sam, instead of dwelling endlessly upon what happened back there," he nodded toward the distant blue line on the horizon, "we should ask what lesson is in all this for us. We have been spared for a reason. We must be brave now and face the future."
    But Zechariah was ashamed of himself, ashamed of the way he and the other survivors had fled the scene of the massacre pell-mell, stumbling through the darkness that night, concerned only for their own survival. Neither he nor any of the other men among the survivors had mustered the courage since to go back to the site and search for survivors.
    The Brattles, Hannah Flood and her children, and five other families—forty souls in all—had made it to some caves on the south end of the Achor Marshes and had remained hidden there for a week now. During the day, they could barely make out the dark line on the horizon that was the hills above the sea, the place where the City of God sect had been wiped out by . . . None among the survivors was sure who had slaughtered their friends and neighbors, but they all agreed that the killers could not be of this world.
    The Brattles and Hanna Flood's family were among the several that departed the City of God camp the night it was revealed how the sect had commissioned an act of terrorism—the destruction of the deep-space starship Cambria , its crew, passengers, and cargo—to focus attention on the sect's persecution by the rulers of Kingdom and, they believed, the Confederation of Worlds. The terrorists called themselves the "Army of Zion," which to Zechariah and other faithful communicants smelled of blasphemy. Murder was not a tenet in the beliefs of the neo-Puritan sect that called itself the City of God. In fact, as the survivors now knew, the removal of the sect to the Sea of Gerizim had been a preventive measure, engineered by their leaders to avoid retaliation when their sponsorship of the deed became known. The only good thing to come out of the attack was that, presumably, Minister Increase Harmony and his cronies perished along with the thousands of innocents.
    The Brattle family had only proceeded a few kilometers along the road back to their home in New Salem when the attack took place. None of them would ever forget it. An earth-shaking roar had suddenly descended upon them from the night sky, a tidal