“Yes,” said Father Captain de Soya in the darkness.

Sergeant Gregorius took another breath.

“Anyway, Father, the orders’d been to bring in two samples of everything… adult males, space-adapted, unadapted; adult females, pregnant and not pregnant; a couple of Ouster kids, pre-puberty, and infants… both sexes. So Kluge’s team and ours got busy, stunning and bagging ’em. There was just enough gravity on the inner surface of the rock… one-tenth-g… to keep the bags in place where we left ’em.”

There was a moment of silence. Father Captain de Soya was just about to speak, to bring this confession to a close, when Sergeant Gregorius whispered through the screen and darkness separating them.

“Sorry, Father, I know you know all this. I just… it’s hard to… anyway, this was the bad part, Father. Most of the Ousters who weren’t modified… space-adapted… were dead or dying at this point. From decompression or lance fire or grenades. We didn’t use the deathbeam wands issued to us. Neither Kluge nor I said anything to the lads… just none of us used the things.

“Now those adapted Ousters went angel, their bodies turnin’ all shiny as they activated their personal forcefields. They couldn’t fully extend their wings in there, of course, and it wouldn’t have done any good if they had… no sunlight to catch, and the one-tenth-g was too much for them to overcome if there had been any solar wind… but they went angel anyway. Some of them tried to use their wings as weapons against us.”

Sergeant Gregorius made a rough sound that might have been a parody of a chuckle. “We had class-four fields, Father, and they were batting at us with those gossamer wings… Anyway, we burned them away, sent three from each squad out with the bagged specimens, and Kluge and I each took our remain’ two lads to clear out the caverns as ordered…”

De Soya waited. There was less than a minute before he would have to end confession.

“We knew it was a birthin’ rock, Father. We knew… everybody knows… that the Ousters, even the ones who’ve turned the machines loose in their cells and blood and who don’t look anythin’ like human… they haven’t learned how to have their females carry and bear children in pure zero-g and hard radiation, Father. We knew it was a birthin’ rock when we went in the goddamned asteroid… I’m sorry, Father…”

De Soya stayed silent.

“But even so, Father… those caverns were like homes… beds and cubbies and flatscreen vid sets and kitchens… not things we’re used to thinkin’ Ousters have, Father. But most of those caves were…”

“Nurseries,” said Father Captain de Soya.

“Aye, sir. Nurseries. Wee beds with wee babies in ’em… not Ouster monsters, Father, not those pale, shiny things we fight against, not those damned Lucifer’s angels with wings a hundred klicks across in the starlight… just… babies. By the hundreds, Father. By the thousands. Cavern after cavern. Most o’ the rooms there had depressurized already, killing the little ones where they lay. Some o’ the little bodies had been blown out in the depressurization, but most o’ them were tucked in tight. Some o’ the rooms were still airtight, though, Father. We blew our way in. Mothers… women in robes, pregnant women with wild hair flying in the one-tenth-g… they attacked us with their fingernails and teeth, Father. We ignored them until the windstorms blew them out or they died a-choking, but some of the infants… scores of them, Father… were in those little plastic respirator cases…”

“Incubators,” said Father Captain de Soya.

“Aye,” whispered Sergeant Gregorius, his voice tiring at last. “And we tightbeamed back, what did they want us to do with ’em? With all the scores and scores of baby Ousters in these incubators. And Commander Barnes-Avne beamed back…”

“To continue on,” whispered Father Captain de Soya.

“Aye, Father… so we…”

“Followed orders, Sergeant.”

“So we used the last of our grenades in those nurseries, Father. And when the plasma grenades were gone, we lanced those incubators. Room after room, cavern after cavern. The plastic melted around the babes, covered ’em. Blankets ignited. The boxes mst’ve been fed with pure oxygen, Father, because a lot o’ them went up like grenades themselves… we had to activate our suit fields, Father, and even so… it took me two hours to clean my combat armor… but most of the incubators didn’t explode, Father, they just burned like dry tinder, burned like torches, everythin’ in ’em burnin’ bright like little furnaces. And by now all the rooms and caverns were in vacuum, but the boxes… the little incubators… they still had atmosphere while they burned… and we turned off our outside phones, sir. All of us did. But somehow we could still hear the crying and the screams through the containment fields and our helmets. I can still hear them, Father…”

“Sergeant,” said de Soya, his voice hard and flat with command.

“Aye, sir?”

“You were following orders, Sergeant. We were all following orders. His Holiness has long since decreed that Ousters have surrendered their humanity to nanodevices they release in their blood, to the changes they have made with their chromosomes…”

“But the screams, Father…”

“Sergeant… the Vatican Council and the Holy Father have decreed that this Crusade is necessary if the human family is to be saved from the Ouster threat. You were given orders. You obeyed them. We are soldiers.”

“Aye, sir,” whispered the sergeant in the darkness.

“We have no more time, Sergeant. We will talk about this at a later time. For now, I want you to do penance… not for being a soldier and following orders, but for doubting those orders. Fifty Hail Marys, Sergeant, and a hundred Our Fathers. And I want you to pray about this… pray very hard for understanding.”

“Aye, Father.”

“Now say a sincere Act of Contrition… quickly now…”

When the whispered words began to come through the screen, Father Captain de Soya lifted his hand in benediction as he gave absolution. “Ego te absolvo…”

Eight minutes later, the father-captain and his crew all lay back in their acceleration couches/resurrection créches as Raphael’s Gideon drive activated, carrying them instantaneously to Target System Mammon by way of terrible death and slow, painful rebirth.

The Grand Inquisitor had died and gone to Hell.

It was only his second death and resurrection and he had enjoyed neither experience. And Mars was Hell.

John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa and his contingent of twenty-one Holy Office administrators and security people—including his indispensable aide Father Farrell—had traveled to Old Earth System in the new archangel starship Jibril and had been given a generous four days after resurrection to recover and regroup mentally before beginning their work on the surface of Mars itself. The Grand Inquisitor had read and been briefed enough on the red planet to form an unassailable opinion—Mars was Hell.

“Actually,” Father Farrell responded the first time the Grand Inquisitor had mentioned his conclusion aloud about Mars being hell, “one of the other planets in this system… Venus… better fits that description, Your Excellency. Boiling temperatures, crushing pressures, lakes of liquid metal, winds like rocket exhausts…”

“Shut up,” the Grand Inquisitor said with a tired turn of his hand.

Mars: the first world ever colonized by the human race despite its low rating of 2.5 on the old Solmev Scale, the first attempted terraforming, the first failed terraforming—a world bypassed after the black-hole death of Old Earth because of the Hawking drive, because of the imperatives of the Hegira, because no one wanted to live on the rusty sphere of permafrost when the galaxy offered a near-infinite number of prettier, healthier, more viable worlds.

For centuries after the death of Old Earth, Mars had been such a backwater planet that the WorldWeb had not established farcaster portals there—a desert planet of interest only to the orphans of New Palestine (the legendary Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had been born in the Palestinian relocation camps there, Mustafa was surprised to learn) and to Zen Christians returning to Hellas Basin to reenact Master Schrauder’s enlightenment at the Zen Massif. For a century or so it had looked as if the huge terraforming project would work—seas filled giant impact basins and cycladferns proliferated along River Marineris—but then the setbacks came, there were no funds to fight the entropy, and the next sixty-thousand-year-long ice age arrived.