Believe in the Blue God
Apr. 16th, 2011 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolI chose to fly Uplifted! Air to Mogradino to see Kitty and the grandbabies. Kitty's husband Attainment just got back from his Pilgrimage in the Fire States, and together we were all going to spend three days at the beach and two at the Spiritual Reinvigoration Center for a nice vacation.
They scanned my ticket and reviewed my papers as we were boarding. The worshippers of Mhau the Red God have been causing trouble lately, and security at the airport was really on edge. I didn't get a second glance, though, because I wore my upside-down question mark openly. Nobody believed for one minute that I was anything other than a righteous believer in Dhiu, the Blue God.
"Is this trip secular or spiritual, sir?" asked the nice young lady at the check-in desk.
"Oh, some of both I guess," I chuckled. "But let's call it secular for the books, shall we?"
"All right, sir," she laughed lightly. "By the Blue go you."
"And also you," I replied and, stashing my ticket in my blazer pocket, boarded the plane.
I got settled into my seat and we took off smoothly enough. One of the preachers got on the PA and told us we would have a routine flight, good weather, and an on-time arrival was expected by the Will of the Blue God. Then we were told to put away our books or meditative devices until the cabin light was illuminated, and after waiting our turn we were rolling on down the tarmac.
They leveled off around twenty-five thousand feet. Drinks and communion were served. I looked out the window and listened to some music. It was, for the first part at least, an uneventful flight. At some point I nodded off.
Loud noises woke me – muffled explosions, screams. The lights in the cabin were out, and the people around me were panicking. We were still aloft, but the plane seemed to list at an odd angle.
"What's going on?" I asked the man sitting next to me.
"I don't know. I don't know. Some kind of attack. Save us, Dhiu, Great Blue God." He bent his head in prayer and I couldn’t get any more out of him.
One of the stewardesses came running down the aisle carrying a flashlight. "Everybody, listen to me!" she shouted. "I need to know if anybody is a preacher! Do we have a preacher on the plane? Any kind of preacher?" She looked from face to face desperately.
Reluctantly I raised my hand. "I did some preaching in the war," I said. "But I only piloted an Inquisitor, short-hop stuff."
"Doesn't matter," she said hastily, waving me over. "Come with me to the pulpit."
I ran behind her, protesting. "Look, that was a long time ago," I said, regretting having opened my mouth. "I don't know how I can…"
The stewardess whirled to face me. "Listen, mister," she said quietly. "We need you up there, need you bad. We have a serious emergency. I don't care what you did or how long ago it was. If you don’t get into that pulpit and preach your back end off, this plane is going to crash."
I saw the truth of it in her eyes. "Okay," I said. There wasn't anything else to say. I followed her to the pulpit.
The door to the cabin was hanging loosely in its frame, the edges of it scorched, the lock mechanisms fused by some strange blasphemous invocation. The stewardess pulled it open with the tips of her fingers, let me inside, and pulled it shut behind her.
I gaped. The pulpit of a modern aircraft is supposed to be a place of order, full of dials and gauges and controls and altar-ware. But the compartment was a place of chaos. It looked like some kind of explosion had gone off. The instrumentation was blasted; the glass of the forward windows was intact but cracked; the four chairs of the preachers – one per engine – were skewed about. Of those chairs, two were empty, the remains of their occupants blasted forwards and under the control panels. A third, just to my right, still held most of a preacher; sadly, the part that was missing was the top half of his head. He still clutched his upside-down question mark, his Obvertrix, in his hand. The fourth chair still held a preacher, but he wasn't in very good shape. Blood flowed slickly out of his ears and nostrils, staining his white preacher's uniform with the rector's collar. His arms hung loosely at his sides. But he was still alive, and his staring eyes rolled over to me as I looked down at him.
"I hope you've flown before," he panted. Sweat beaded his forehead.
"I preached an Inquisitor," I said helplessly. "I tried to explain…"
"An Inquisitor?! Preserve us, Blue God," said the preacher bitterly. I flushed. I didn't want to be there either.
"Look," he continued, "I'm in bad shape. I can't hold up this plane by myself. You aren't ideal, but you're going to have to do. You're going to have to learn to preach a plane to the ground. I need to know if you can do that, and I need the answer to be yes."
My heart said no, but my heart wasn't thinking about all the people on the plane. "Yes," I said. "I don't know if I can do it, but I'll try."
"You'll do it, with the Blue God helping us both," said the wounded preacher. "Molly, push Father Ineffable out of that chair to make room for Father, er…"
"…Divine Ordeal," I answered.
The preacher smiled. "That's a good name given the circumstances," he said. "I'm Father Glory. Have a seat, and watch out for the animal."
It wasn't until after I had sat down in the dead preacher's chair – still warm and a little bloody – when I saw the terrorist. He was small and dark, with black flyaway hair spraying back from his face. He had been mortally wounded during the attack on the pulpit; he had leaked most of his lifeblood out on the floor, and he was just leaning up against the bulkhead, panting, and watching me. I stared at him. Clearly he was a Gurwani. Our eyes met, and
once again I was back in Dham Dhwa, in the Gurwani delta, during my first tour. The scream of the Inquisitor made it hard to hear Sheepy and The Blur bickering behind me, which was a blessing of the Blue God right there. The trees whipped by below us as we paralleled the Gur looking for Mhau outposts.
Suddenly streaks of red flew up from the trees – tracer orisons interspersed with dark curses. I murmured prayers as I clutched my Obvertrix, and the warding hand of the Blue God interposed between us and the enemy fire. The Inquisitor banked under my whispered invocations, and we dove below tree cover after the heathens who dared oppose the will of Dhiu and all who wear the Blue.
I saw them then, exposed to fire now that we were under the canopy. Most of the Gurwani insurgents scattered, but the curate who was throwing the fire at us was too brave or too stupid to run. He continued to pour malefictions our way, and the Inquisitor shuddered, but my faith in the Blue God was strong back then, and the serpent-tongues of green fire never touched us. I saw him then in my sights – a Gurwani wearing khakis and a red sash, dark like the terrorist, and very young, insane with rage and religious fervor, howling his deviltry even as the impregnable Inquisitor bore down on him. I locked in on him with a Reckless Angel, and the tracking program sounded with a clear tone.
"I claim thy soul in the name of the Blue God," I whispered, and willed him to die. The Reckless Angel shot out of the mouth of the Inquisitor and enveloped the Mhau charlatan in cleansing blue flames. I rapped on Sheepy's helmet.
"Get down there with The Blur and BigBear and mop up," I shouted. "Kind of weird for them to shoot at us; even weirder for that one not to run. Go see what's up."
Sheepy nodded, and while my will held the Inquisitor in hover, he and his squadmates climbed down the ratlines and fanned out into the enemy encampment. Of course back then holding thirty tons of steel and aluminum motionless in the air by faith alone was easy, whereas
the preacher's slick chair felt unfamiliar and daunting to me. I didn't feel I belonged there.
"All right now," said Father Glory, his body turned as far towards me as he could angle it, "comfortable in that chair? Yes? Now we're going to take up the burden of the plane together with our belief. Ready? Take your Obvertrix in your hands and… let's… pray."
The familiar words of the recitations came back to me, and I echoed them alongside Father Glory. Distilled down of their meaning from the original Dhiu Cant, they said: you are the One True Blue God, and by your will we humbly exist. Now we exhort you, take up our burdens, defy gravity, and by the power of Dhiu the Blue God, we believe that we shall fall no more…
For a moment – for just a moment – I felt the weight of the plane pressing down on my mind. For a moment I had reassumed the burden that a preacher carries by proxy when they take their carriage and cargo in hand, and hold it there with the Blue Hands of Dhiu helping out. But then my strength failed me – failed me just as it had twenty years ago when I came out of that chaplaincy hospital in Dham Dhwa, physically whole but incapable of praying aloft a paperclip, let alone an Inquisitor. I felt my faith waver and crumble, saw the field bishops once again shake their heads in the review boardroom and demand I withdraw my commission, with honors – or have it stripped from me.
Father Glory screamed then, screamed at the agony of having a terrible weight lifted for a moment, only for it to crash back in place again. The plane lurched, and I
was jostling from side to side as the Inquisitor forced its way straight up through the canopy, branches be damned. My men were dying two hundred yards to the southwest, having run into some kind of opposition deep in the heart of the Gurwani encampment – something unexpected. They needed me to come and bail them out. I hit clear air and shot over the treetops. There was something sticking up out of the foliage, something bulky and red. It turned in my direction.
The Gurwani had an avatar of the Red God. It was blocky and humanoid, and it stood thirty feet tall. Its arms ended in tubes from which a barrage of curses emerged. My squad was pinned down behind some menhirs; the avatar was hosing the area with cherry-red fire while the Gurwani irregulars peppered them with small-arms fire. Sheepy was on the ground and several others were wounded. They needed help badly.
Through the pulpit screen in the avatar's head, I could see the dim form of the Gurwani preacher gesticulating. The only way I could get my boys out would be to take him on. I willed the Inquisitor to take on its own avatar mode; the wings hinged up and the six grasping limbs folded down, and now the Blue God's form hung in the air above the Red God's. I swooped down to the attack.
The lower two pairs of limbs wrapped up the Red God's upper torso. I used the top pair with its fighting-spikes to claw at the Red God's pulpit, trying to hole the glass and impale the pilot. Somehow the Red Avatar got its curse-tubes up under my thorax and fired; the impact sent me across the clearing. I bounced off an ancient banyan, protected by the Blue God's blessings, and rolled the Inquisitor to its many feet. Two Reckless Angels fired from the stinger area of my abdomen, striking the Red God mid-chest. When the cloud cleared, the enemy avatar was still standing. Worse, he had some kind of a lance with a glowing tip.
I was close to a squad of Gurwani who were shooting at my squad. Worse, they had an acolyte who was preparing to do something with a gong. I prayed to the Blue God and set off a shockwave that leveled the exposed insurgents. Turning back to where the Red avatar had been, I saw it was gone; then the Inquisitor lurched, and I realized
that the plane was going down. Father Glory had slumped in his chair; the stewardess was shouting and trying to slap him awake. I heard a low chuckle from the other side of the room, and I realized the Gurwani terrorist was grinning.
"I thought we had failed," he said. "I thought you were going to rescue the plane, bring it down, ruin all our works and those of the Red God. But you're not, are you." The light of insanity glowed palpably within his eyes. "You're too weak. The Red God is more powerful than the Blue God."
"Shut up," I said. I took up the Obvertrix in my hands once more and tried to focus my concentration. It was difficult to do because the nose of the plane was angling further and further down, and my stomach was rising into my throat, and the screaming of the plane's passengers came through loud and clear from behind the pulpit door.
"All blessings to the Red God, who makes us strong," chanted the terrorist, his eyes glazing over. "You preserve us when we are weak, give us weapons, allow us to fight back against the destroyers and the infidels. Witness now that we give unto you these pitiful slaves of the Blue God, as you have commanded…"
"Shut UP!" I shouted, then closed my eyes. The pulpit seemed to reel as
the Red avatar lifted the Inquisitor bodily, holding my many legs flailing overhead and away from it. Then it turned and dashed me into the cluster of menhirs that were sheltering my squad. The Blur was crushed under my abdomen, and several of the stones toppled, forcing my men to scramble for new cover. Then the enemy craft was on top of me, one knee pinning my thorax to the ground, and one of its firing tubes placed on the back of my canopy for a final coup.
The adrenaline rose in me, and with a hurried prayer the Inquisitor snapped its razor-sharp wings shut. This scissored the end off the Red Avatar's firing tube. A moment later that tube fired, but it merely belched out a red gout of flame from the damaged weapon that rolled harmlessly off the wards of the Blue God. I twisted around and hooked under the Red God's leg, then threw him off of me. I pounced onto him, pinning his remaining firing arm with one pair of legs, and picking up a menhir with another.
I drove the pointed end of the stone down onto the head of the Red God. The pulpit canopy cracked, and I could see the form of my opponent frantically thrashing out desperate prayers and wards. I brought the stone down again and again onto the head of the Red God, shattering the glass and twisting the metal, exposing the preacher to view.
And that was when my faith left me, because the now-unconscious person helming that craft was only a boy, a child no older than ten. The horror of the war in the Gurwani Delta came over me then, a war where the Red God insurgents were the same people as the Blue God establishment, and we could walk down the streets of any Dham Dhwa town and see children waving blue flags, but at any time one might dart out with a red flag and throw a grenade in our midst. I realized then that my faith in the Blue God was not strong enough, because I did not want to kill a child in his name.
I looked down at my Obvertrix, and
I thought about what it was for. An Obvertrix is an upside down question mark because, when you have faith in the Blue God, you DO NOT QUESTION. And then I thought about all the people in the plane, many of them children, and I realized that I might not have wanted to kill a child, but the infidels who worship the Red God certainly wanted to kill ours. A great anger rose within me, a righteous anger, and the spirit of the Blue God came back to me stronger than ever.
"Arise!" I shouted. The diving airplane began to shriek as it rushed down towards the heaving waves of the ocean. A blue glow began to suffuse the craft.
"Arise!" I commanded again. My will scrambled for purchase on the aluminum frame of the airplane; my faith battled the forces of physics; the falling craft's downward progress began to slow.
"In the Name of the Blue God, greatest of Gods, I command you: ARISE!!" The Obvertrix in my hands burst into a bright blue-sky radiance.
The stewardess was slammed to the floor of the pulpit. The plane had stopped suddenly, suspended a hundred feet above the ocean, the windows of the pulpit staring straight down into the choppy sea below us. We hung motionless, safe in the hands of the Blue God.
I turned to look at the terrorist. His mouth was open and he was dead. I thought that perhaps witnessing the rescue of the plane was the last thing he had seen in life, and I rejoiced.
I believe in the Blue God. The world is not always safe, and the things that happen in it are not always right. But in the Blue God I have a great ally, and when I have faith in Dhiu, I want for nothing.
They scanned my ticket and reviewed my papers as we were boarding. The worshippers of Mhau the Red God have been causing trouble lately, and security at the airport was really on edge. I didn't get a second glance, though, because I wore my upside-down question mark openly. Nobody believed for one minute that I was anything other than a righteous believer in Dhiu, the Blue God.
"Is this trip secular or spiritual, sir?" asked the nice young lady at the check-in desk.
"Oh, some of both I guess," I chuckled. "But let's call it secular for the books, shall we?"
"All right, sir," she laughed lightly. "By the Blue go you."
"And also you," I replied and, stashing my ticket in my blazer pocket, boarded the plane.
I got settled into my seat and we took off smoothly enough. One of the preachers got on the PA and told us we would have a routine flight, good weather, and an on-time arrival was expected by the Will of the Blue God. Then we were told to put away our books or meditative devices until the cabin light was illuminated, and after waiting our turn we were rolling on down the tarmac.
They leveled off around twenty-five thousand feet. Drinks and communion were served. I looked out the window and listened to some music. It was, for the first part at least, an uneventful flight. At some point I nodded off.
Loud noises woke me – muffled explosions, screams. The lights in the cabin were out, and the people around me were panicking. We were still aloft, but the plane seemed to list at an odd angle.
"What's going on?" I asked the man sitting next to me.
"I don't know. I don't know. Some kind of attack. Save us, Dhiu, Great Blue God." He bent his head in prayer and I couldn’t get any more out of him.
One of the stewardesses came running down the aisle carrying a flashlight. "Everybody, listen to me!" she shouted. "I need to know if anybody is a preacher! Do we have a preacher on the plane? Any kind of preacher?" She looked from face to face desperately.
Reluctantly I raised my hand. "I did some preaching in the war," I said. "But I only piloted an Inquisitor, short-hop stuff."
"Doesn't matter," she said hastily, waving me over. "Come with me to the pulpit."
I ran behind her, protesting. "Look, that was a long time ago," I said, regretting having opened my mouth. "I don't know how I can…"
The stewardess whirled to face me. "Listen, mister," she said quietly. "We need you up there, need you bad. We have a serious emergency. I don't care what you did or how long ago it was. If you don’t get into that pulpit and preach your back end off, this plane is going to crash."
I saw the truth of it in her eyes. "Okay," I said. There wasn't anything else to say. I followed her to the pulpit.
The door to the cabin was hanging loosely in its frame, the edges of it scorched, the lock mechanisms fused by some strange blasphemous invocation. The stewardess pulled it open with the tips of her fingers, let me inside, and pulled it shut behind her.
I gaped. The pulpit of a modern aircraft is supposed to be a place of order, full of dials and gauges and controls and altar-ware. But the compartment was a place of chaos. It looked like some kind of explosion had gone off. The instrumentation was blasted; the glass of the forward windows was intact but cracked; the four chairs of the preachers – one per engine – were skewed about. Of those chairs, two were empty, the remains of their occupants blasted forwards and under the control panels. A third, just to my right, still held most of a preacher; sadly, the part that was missing was the top half of his head. He still clutched his upside-down question mark, his Obvertrix, in his hand. The fourth chair still held a preacher, but he wasn't in very good shape. Blood flowed slickly out of his ears and nostrils, staining his white preacher's uniform with the rector's collar. His arms hung loosely at his sides. But he was still alive, and his staring eyes rolled over to me as I looked down at him.
"I hope you've flown before," he panted. Sweat beaded his forehead.
"I preached an Inquisitor," I said helplessly. "I tried to explain…"
"An Inquisitor?! Preserve us, Blue God," said the preacher bitterly. I flushed. I didn't want to be there either.
"Look," he continued, "I'm in bad shape. I can't hold up this plane by myself. You aren't ideal, but you're going to have to do. You're going to have to learn to preach a plane to the ground. I need to know if you can do that, and I need the answer to be yes."
My heart said no, but my heart wasn't thinking about all the people on the plane. "Yes," I said. "I don't know if I can do it, but I'll try."
"You'll do it, with the Blue God helping us both," said the wounded preacher. "Molly, push Father Ineffable out of that chair to make room for Father, er…"
"…Divine Ordeal," I answered.
The preacher smiled. "That's a good name given the circumstances," he said. "I'm Father Glory. Have a seat, and watch out for the animal."
It wasn't until after I had sat down in the dead preacher's chair – still warm and a little bloody – when I saw the terrorist. He was small and dark, with black flyaway hair spraying back from his face. He had been mortally wounded during the attack on the pulpit; he had leaked most of his lifeblood out on the floor, and he was just leaning up against the bulkhead, panting, and watching me. I stared at him. Clearly he was a Gurwani. Our eyes met, and
once again I was back in Dham Dhwa, in the Gurwani delta, during my first tour. The scream of the Inquisitor made it hard to hear Sheepy and The Blur bickering behind me, which was a blessing of the Blue God right there. The trees whipped by below us as we paralleled the Gur looking for Mhau outposts.
Suddenly streaks of red flew up from the trees – tracer orisons interspersed with dark curses. I murmured prayers as I clutched my Obvertrix, and the warding hand of the Blue God interposed between us and the enemy fire. The Inquisitor banked under my whispered invocations, and we dove below tree cover after the heathens who dared oppose the will of Dhiu and all who wear the Blue.
I saw them then, exposed to fire now that we were under the canopy. Most of the Gurwani insurgents scattered, but the curate who was throwing the fire at us was too brave or too stupid to run. He continued to pour malefictions our way, and the Inquisitor shuddered, but my faith in the Blue God was strong back then, and the serpent-tongues of green fire never touched us. I saw him then in my sights – a Gurwani wearing khakis and a red sash, dark like the terrorist, and very young, insane with rage and religious fervor, howling his deviltry even as the impregnable Inquisitor bore down on him. I locked in on him with a Reckless Angel, and the tracking program sounded with a clear tone.
"I claim thy soul in the name of the Blue God," I whispered, and willed him to die. The Reckless Angel shot out of the mouth of the Inquisitor and enveloped the Mhau charlatan in cleansing blue flames. I rapped on Sheepy's helmet.
"Get down there with The Blur and BigBear and mop up," I shouted. "Kind of weird for them to shoot at us; even weirder for that one not to run. Go see what's up."
Sheepy nodded, and while my will held the Inquisitor in hover, he and his squadmates climbed down the ratlines and fanned out into the enemy encampment. Of course back then holding thirty tons of steel and aluminum motionless in the air by faith alone was easy, whereas
the preacher's slick chair felt unfamiliar and daunting to me. I didn't feel I belonged there.
"All right now," said Father Glory, his body turned as far towards me as he could angle it, "comfortable in that chair? Yes? Now we're going to take up the burden of the plane together with our belief. Ready? Take your Obvertrix in your hands and… let's… pray."
The familiar words of the recitations came back to me, and I echoed them alongside Father Glory. Distilled down of their meaning from the original Dhiu Cant, they said: you are the One True Blue God, and by your will we humbly exist. Now we exhort you, take up our burdens, defy gravity, and by the power of Dhiu the Blue God, we believe that we shall fall no more…
For a moment – for just a moment – I felt the weight of the plane pressing down on my mind. For a moment I had reassumed the burden that a preacher carries by proxy when they take their carriage and cargo in hand, and hold it there with the Blue Hands of Dhiu helping out. But then my strength failed me – failed me just as it had twenty years ago when I came out of that chaplaincy hospital in Dham Dhwa, physically whole but incapable of praying aloft a paperclip, let alone an Inquisitor. I felt my faith waver and crumble, saw the field bishops once again shake their heads in the review boardroom and demand I withdraw my commission, with honors – or have it stripped from me.
Father Glory screamed then, screamed at the agony of having a terrible weight lifted for a moment, only for it to crash back in place again. The plane lurched, and I
was jostling from side to side as the Inquisitor forced its way straight up through the canopy, branches be damned. My men were dying two hundred yards to the southwest, having run into some kind of opposition deep in the heart of the Gurwani encampment – something unexpected. They needed me to come and bail them out. I hit clear air and shot over the treetops. There was something sticking up out of the foliage, something bulky and red. It turned in my direction.
The Gurwani had an avatar of the Red God. It was blocky and humanoid, and it stood thirty feet tall. Its arms ended in tubes from which a barrage of curses emerged. My squad was pinned down behind some menhirs; the avatar was hosing the area with cherry-red fire while the Gurwani irregulars peppered them with small-arms fire. Sheepy was on the ground and several others were wounded. They needed help badly.
Through the pulpit screen in the avatar's head, I could see the dim form of the Gurwani preacher gesticulating. The only way I could get my boys out would be to take him on. I willed the Inquisitor to take on its own avatar mode; the wings hinged up and the six grasping limbs folded down, and now the Blue God's form hung in the air above the Red God's. I swooped down to the attack.
The lower two pairs of limbs wrapped up the Red God's upper torso. I used the top pair with its fighting-spikes to claw at the Red God's pulpit, trying to hole the glass and impale the pilot. Somehow the Red Avatar got its curse-tubes up under my thorax and fired; the impact sent me across the clearing. I bounced off an ancient banyan, protected by the Blue God's blessings, and rolled the Inquisitor to its many feet. Two Reckless Angels fired from the stinger area of my abdomen, striking the Red God mid-chest. When the cloud cleared, the enemy avatar was still standing. Worse, he had some kind of a lance with a glowing tip.
I was close to a squad of Gurwani who were shooting at my squad. Worse, they had an acolyte who was preparing to do something with a gong. I prayed to the Blue God and set off a shockwave that leveled the exposed insurgents. Turning back to where the Red avatar had been, I saw it was gone; then the Inquisitor lurched, and I realized
that the plane was going down. Father Glory had slumped in his chair; the stewardess was shouting and trying to slap him awake. I heard a low chuckle from the other side of the room, and I realized the Gurwani terrorist was grinning.
"I thought we had failed," he said. "I thought you were going to rescue the plane, bring it down, ruin all our works and those of the Red God. But you're not, are you." The light of insanity glowed palpably within his eyes. "You're too weak. The Red God is more powerful than the Blue God."
"Shut up," I said. I took up the Obvertrix in my hands once more and tried to focus my concentration. It was difficult to do because the nose of the plane was angling further and further down, and my stomach was rising into my throat, and the screaming of the plane's passengers came through loud and clear from behind the pulpit door.
"All blessings to the Red God, who makes us strong," chanted the terrorist, his eyes glazing over. "You preserve us when we are weak, give us weapons, allow us to fight back against the destroyers and the infidels. Witness now that we give unto you these pitiful slaves of the Blue God, as you have commanded…"
"Shut UP!" I shouted, then closed my eyes. The pulpit seemed to reel as
the Red avatar lifted the Inquisitor bodily, holding my many legs flailing overhead and away from it. Then it turned and dashed me into the cluster of menhirs that were sheltering my squad. The Blur was crushed under my abdomen, and several of the stones toppled, forcing my men to scramble for new cover. Then the enemy craft was on top of me, one knee pinning my thorax to the ground, and one of its firing tubes placed on the back of my canopy for a final coup.
The adrenaline rose in me, and with a hurried prayer the Inquisitor snapped its razor-sharp wings shut. This scissored the end off the Red Avatar's firing tube. A moment later that tube fired, but it merely belched out a red gout of flame from the damaged weapon that rolled harmlessly off the wards of the Blue God. I twisted around and hooked under the Red God's leg, then threw him off of me. I pounced onto him, pinning his remaining firing arm with one pair of legs, and picking up a menhir with another.
I drove the pointed end of the stone down onto the head of the Red God. The pulpit canopy cracked, and I could see the form of my opponent frantically thrashing out desperate prayers and wards. I brought the stone down again and again onto the head of the Red God, shattering the glass and twisting the metal, exposing the preacher to view.
And that was when my faith left me, because the now-unconscious person helming that craft was only a boy, a child no older than ten. The horror of the war in the Gurwani Delta came over me then, a war where the Red God insurgents were the same people as the Blue God establishment, and we could walk down the streets of any Dham Dhwa town and see children waving blue flags, but at any time one might dart out with a red flag and throw a grenade in our midst. I realized then that my faith in the Blue God was not strong enough, because I did not want to kill a child in his name.
I looked down at my Obvertrix, and
I thought about what it was for. An Obvertrix is an upside down question mark because, when you have faith in the Blue God, you DO NOT QUESTION. And then I thought about all the people in the plane, many of them children, and I realized that I might not have wanted to kill a child, but the infidels who worship the Red God certainly wanted to kill ours. A great anger rose within me, a righteous anger, and the spirit of the Blue God came back to me stronger than ever.
"Arise!" I shouted. The diving airplane began to shriek as it rushed down towards the heaving waves of the ocean. A blue glow began to suffuse the craft.
"Arise!" I commanded again. My will scrambled for purchase on the aluminum frame of the airplane; my faith battled the forces of physics; the falling craft's downward progress began to slow.
"In the Name of the Blue God, greatest of Gods, I command you: ARISE!!" The Obvertrix in my hands burst into a bright blue-sky radiance.
The stewardess was slammed to the floor of the pulpit. The plane had stopped suddenly, suspended a hundred feet above the ocean, the windows of the pulpit staring straight down into the choppy sea below us. We hung motionless, safe in the hands of the Blue God.
I turned to look at the terrorist. His mouth was open and he was dead. I thought that perhaps witnessing the rescue of the plane was the last thing he had seen in life, and I rejoiced.
I believe in the Blue God. The world is not always safe, and the things that happen in it are not always right. But in the Blue God I have a great ally, and when I have faith in Dhiu, I want for nothing.
