The God Engines Read Online Free PDF

god as it passed by. The guards at the gate nodded to the captain; the gate was now fully open.
    Tephe took a deep breath, jammed a hand into his bag of coppers, and stepped forward toward the street, and toward the godhold.

    “Are you well, Captain Tephe?” asked Bishop Major Chawk. Chawk and two other bishops sat at a long, curved table of dark soapwood, sheaves of documents in front of each. Tephe stood in front of the desk, in a meeting room in the sprawling Bishopry, which in itself was nearly as large as the city which putatively contained it. “You appear distracted,” the Bishop said.
    “My apologies, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I was recalling the parade upon our arrival.”
    “Ah, yes,” Chawk said. “Did you enjoy it, Captain?”
    “It is always an honor to show to the faithful the power of Our Lord, to whom even the gods submit,” Tephe said.
    Chawk chuckled. “A very politic answer, Captain. But you do not need to be politic here.”
    “Yes, Eminence,” Tephe said, and kept his true opinion about that statement to himself.
    “We have read your report on the events surrounding your defeat at Ament Cour,” said another of the bishops, whom Tephe recognized as Stei Ero, the Bishopry’s Vicar of Archives, charged with intelligence gathering. “Also your late addition of the incident with the god. And it will come to you as no surprise that we have collected additional accounts of both incidents, both from your ship’s priest and from other sources.”
    “You have a spy aboard the
Righteous
,” Tephe said.
    “Does this offend you, Captain?” Ero asked.
    “No, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I hide nothing from the Bishopry Militant, or the Bishopry in general. Your spy will not tell you anything I would not. Therefore he is no harm to me or to my ship.”
    “You are indeed an honest captain,” murmured Ero, who patted his stack of documents. “If perhaps not always a wise one. We might have expected better from the captain of a ship of the line than your withdrawal at Ament Cour. What do you say to that, Captain Tephe.”
    Tephe held himself very still. “I would say to you that we were engaged by three ships of equal strength to the
Righteous
, and at close quarters, and with a god who had lately brought us to Ament Cour and who was not at full strength, either to deflect attack or to aid us in escape,” he said. “Through the grace of Our Lord we were able to destroy one of those ships and disable a second, all the while drawing the ships away from the planet itself and giving the faithful there time to fortify themselves against attack, and to call for additional ships to defend them. We left Ament Cour space only when the
Righteous
’ wounds were too grave to sustain another attack, and even then our god had strength only to bring us as far as the outer planet in Ament Cour’s system. We hid in that planet’s rings, running dark and cold, until both ship and god were recovered well enough to travel once more.”
    “You provide us with a rationalization for your failure,” Ero said.
    “I provide you with an accounting, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I stand here for my choices and will suffer any judgment they provoke. I chose within my power the wisest course of action for my ship and for the people of Ament Cour. Perhaps another captain would have done other, and better. These were my choices.”
    “Well said,” said Chawk. “And in all, well done. You defended your ship and the faithful as far as you were able, and better than most would have done. This is nevertheless of bitter comfort. Before more of our ships could drive off the one ship the
Righteous
had been unable to defeat, it destroyed three cities on Ament Cour. Hundreds of thousands of souls lost in all.”
    “They did not land troops?” Tephe said. “Nor raid the cities?”
    “Such was not their goal,” Chawk said.
    “What was their goal?” asked Tephe.
    “Genocide!”
    The word blasted from the third bishop,