They also had good meals, good tasting drinks, and ice cream and candy. Heck, the kids were in a little heaven and probably mostly worried that it was all going to end too soon.
These moms and grandmas, though, they didn’t know that, and that was what kept him firm, stern, and all business.
“Stop all this wailing!” he shouted to them in that Voice of the Almighty he could call upon when preaching and teaching. Most of them stopped, or at least wound down to sniffles.
“Now, the first thing we’re gonna do here is get some things straight,” he thundered. “Over eighty of my people were kidnapped last night, kidnapped even though they’d done nothing but help you and your villages and shown you kindness and Christian charity. For all I know they may be dead, or tortured, or worse. And some of it was with your doing. Village women, not these Pirates of Belial! Laughing village women at that! Want to see the recordings? Maybe I can match faces to faces here. Didn’t know our cameras saw in the dark, did you? I can see it in your faces! So, I wondered, if they can take my young people and laugh, then what can I take from them to shut off this laughter? And then it struck me! I can take their children to replace the ones you’ve taken!”
There was more wailing and gnashing of teeth and sobbing; he almost felt like he was in some kind of Biblical scene. What he didn’t hear was confession, contrition, or much else.
“Now we can trade them back, or not. Your choice. And your problem. You have no concept of how huge a ship I’ve got up there. This is a mere lifeboat!” That wasn’t true, but it was only a tenth of the complex. He and Cromwell and the rest of the Elders had spent all of the night before praying that they didn’t blow this, that they did it right, that there would be no loss of life and that they would foil Satan’s attack. He had to trust God after that, and play it out, have faith that his actions were God’s directions. Otherwise, he would have been living a lie.
Nevertheless, no matter how it turned out, Not my will, but thine, O Lord.
“Now, then,” he continued. “Let’s stop all the games. You and this planet have descended into the grip of Satan, who is wherever air is, as he is the Prince of the Power of the Air. You’ve sold your souls, and now you don’t seem to like living with the consequences. So, if you acted on instructions of the Father of Lies, then who gave you those instructions? The truth, now, and none of this minding my own business crap. We minded our own business and you attacked. Very well. Now you, your children, maybe this entire foul planet are my business. So you tell me exactly what I want to hear. You tell me who your people are, how they came here, why, and then why you threw in your lot with a bunch of shipwrecked pirates. Pick a spokeswoman and let her speak for all of you. You have certainly learned nothing from me or from God in the past week, else you would have approached me very differently. Now you stand before me as my enemy, both physical and spiritual. I will hear the truth!”
And, eventually, that’s what he believed he received.
They were called the Seeders. A few of the original members, now very old, were still alive, but most of them had been born later, after the group had raised just enough money for supplies and paid a none too reputable independent freighter for passage to a habitable region not on the standard charts.
This world, which they called simply the Foundation, was where their group had been brought. Quasi-religious, they were not truly of any specific faith but rather a generalized gathering of like-minded and unhappy souls looking for some way to start over and forget the rest of the universe. Their group was of a type historians called the Naturalist Movement, in which much of the advances of humankind over the ages was viewed as evil, negative; having virtually used up and fouled up the mother planet Earth beyond nature’s ability to repair, they saw the colonization movement as simply an extension of the same, to find all the pretty, natural worlds and screw them up, probably destroy them, as well. They would raise their families there in a natural way, promoting natural ways and harmony with the land and raising their children to think that way as well.
Like most such groups, they had been organized around a charismatic leader whom they called Mother Tymm. She must have been, in her own way, quite a character and dominant personality, and she received her marching orders through visions and dreams and trances. It was a curious mixture of traditional religions, old shamanlike spiritualism, and Oriental mysticism. It was said that she’d given the captain of that first freighter precise coordinates for them to have popped out here, even though this was at the end of a genhole network and had been forgotten and uncharted because it was established just as the Great Silence fell and things fell apart. That, too, Mother Tymm was supposed to have foreseen.
They set up the space defenses as best they could, but they’d even bought those on the economic level where they had no idea what they were getting or whether any of it would work or last. Then they’d established the main landing station, just to get things up and running, and Mother Tymm and a few of her councillors had left with the freighter promising to return quickly with additional seed and livestock and full title to this place as well as sufficient spare parts to keep the landing center active.
But she’d never returned, and, for almost a century, neither did anybody else. Without their leader and her closest advisors there wasn’t even a lot of organization, but they had a firm belief that, like Jesus and the Second Coming, Mother Tymm would someday, somehow, return. Until then, they abandoned what they could not support and ran the towns and the cottage industries and the farms the way she’d set them up.
They ultimately were discovered, but by a ragtag old tent evangelical group out wandering the stars and searching for Heaven. They hadn’t paid the group very much attention or taken them very seriously, and the ship they’d come in was much too small for any practical uses, and the evangelist hadn’t even heard of Mother Tymm, so they let him show up, gave him the cold shoulder, and he eventually took the hint and left. When that happened, somebody found and turned on the defense grid, such as it was.
Only a few years later a Franciscan priest and two nuns showed up in a ship even smaller and more austere than the evangelist’s. They refused to even allow them to land, but they tried coming in anyway. One of the defensive units managed to target them, and while it didn’t destroy them it made their ship inoperable. It came in at the wrong angle and burned up in the atmosphere. Those who’d warned them away said they heard them praying all the way down, and then they heard the screams before they were cut off. At that point several muscular types smashed the last of the system communications equipment.
That’s why they didn’t even know about the pirate vessel until it screamed through the atmosphere and overhead a bit over thirty years ago and crashed into the lake. Locals assumed, though, that the ship had been downed and destroyed by the same defense grid and felt a great deal of guilt about that.
But the ship hadn’t been harmed by the defense grid; its shields were in fairly good shape and the defense grid by that point was not. They also had begun to believe that the only people left with interstellar spacecraft were preachers and missionaries. They quickly found out that this latest group to come in had survived the crash, but not by prayers and hymns.
In point of fact, the newcomers’ ship had been badly shot up, and it was clearly on the run. Down and unable to repair it or get it back up, they had no choice but to sink it in the lake and then set up here until somebody else came along to get them out of there. They had no idea how long it would be.