Deliverance (a sermon)

In the old time under the Green Men, those vicious monsters of space, the last of Earth’s authority came together. The armies of the world were long since made rubble and corpses, human science a thing of legend, so the only avenue left those former kings and merchant princes was religion. Clergy from all faiths urged their people to join in prayer, a fervent appeal to their Higher Power to deliver them from the invaders. This global clergy, united for the first time in history in the face of this universal Other, poured over their texts and sacred books, seeking the means to call down that deliverance.

It was a Muslim cleric and a Wiccan high priestess who found the incantation, in a book buried deep beneath the Vatican; an incantation that would summon a holy warrior, one that would bring the great and terrible Wrath of the Divine. With the incantation they’d found, humanity could call down God’s Worst Bastard.

And when he came among the last humans, he was known as Pope Adam the Destroyer. His was a hunger of infinite measure, satisfied only by the souls of aliens. With each soul devoured, Pope Adam the Destroyer added one more mindless drone to his growing army. They swept across the globe, the remaining aliens fleeing before such a fate. When the last of the invaders had gone, humanity’s savior presented them with the God Factory, a vast industrial complex fueled by the souls he’d taken, worked by the bodies those souls had once inhabited. The God Factory made the machines that made everything the recovering human race could need, bringing about a paradise from their blasted and blighted Earth.

And so it is, in this, the year of the Destroyer 117, a century since our deliverer had left us, that we are recovered enough to think on vengeance. We go now to the God Factory to build new machines, sacred machines that only the Mechanics of the Holy Order can operate; machines to find the aliens’ homeworld and machines we can use to kill everything we see once we get there.

Blessed, blessed, thrice blessed are the warriors in the Destroyer’s armies, for theirs is the right and the power of the Divine.

Praise Be.