In AY -2, a colony ship funded by a megachurch on Earth fell out of warpspace as the Pedro Cabral’s warp field collapsed. They found themselves in the vicinity of a habitable planet with lush, edible vegetation, and took it as divine providence to settle there. For about two hundred years, they prospered and their population grew at a phenomenal rate; the combination of a safe, abundant ecosystem and their church’s commandment to go forth and multiply until their population rivaled that of the rest of the Alliance.
Sonoziel’s society had draconian laws based heavily on the Quran and Old Testament. Many minor offenses were capital crimes on Sonoziel, often by stoning or worse. They also had a de facto caste system dictated by the belief that God put you where you belonged and to question this was to question the Word of God, especially where upward mobility was concerned. If a citizen was born into a farming family, he was almost guaranteed to spend his life in the fields with no real chance of ascending to factory work or science.
They were visited by an Alliance survey ship looking for people (almost) exactly like them in AY 178. It was backtracking along the Pedro Cabral’s route, trying to find survivors among the colonists that had been lost. Contact was made, and Sonoziel was welcomed into the Alliance of Independent Worlds. Relations were peaceful and trade thrived. Contact with outsiders also started to relax the most excessive abuses of the law, and upward mobility became much more possible, especially for people who went off-planet for schooling. Within a few decades, Sonoziel had become much less of a repressive theocratic dominion and was well on its way to full Alliance membership.
Then in AY 206, a charismatic preacher started a new religious movement known as the Celestial Host. They believed the Alliance was a corrupt, decadent, godless society desperately in need of guidance. At first, they merely preached isolation from the Alliance and the rest of Sonoziel’s society, establishing enclaves. These enclaves started as small semi-independent towns in the countryside and ghettoes in major cities. These separatists were also setting up their own asteroid mining operations. At first, nobody cared. Sonoziel was a big planet for its population, and resources were plentiful. If some weird isolationists wanted to hide from society, so be it. They weren’t breaking God’s Law, and if anything they were even more devout than everyone else.
Unknown to the rest of Sonoziel’s people, the Host had acquired several laboratories and had made astonishing advances in genetic engineering. Certain alterations were decreed holy, and parents lined up to have their children modified to bring them closer to God. Within two generations, the average Celestial Host layperson was taller, stronger, and much more attractive in general than the average human. Their bodies had been reshaped to make them as close to the Host’s view of angels as could be engineered with their technology.
Another trait they shared with this view of the Lord’s servants was a deeply-ingrained fanaticism. They didn’t see themselves as individuals as much as extensions of God’s will. Whether this was achieved through some exotic form of brain modification, cultural conditioning, or both was never discovered by Alliance scientists. Even if it had been, the Council would likely have had it expunged from public record and sealed in the data vaults at Mezhgorye.
The Host had also acquired modern manufacturing facilities. Combined with their already impressive asteroid mining, this allowed them to set up numerous factories spread throughout the system; they quickly learned to set up production lines dedicated to making more factories. As their mining operations grew, they planted more and more factories and ore processing facilities throughout the system. While they produced enough consumer and trade goods to keep the population happy, the bulk of their manufacturing was completely hidden from Sonoziel and the Alliance at large. For every factory satellite in Sonoziel orbit producing perfectly mundane things, there were several more hiding in the asteroid belts and local equivalent to Kuyper Belt and Oort Cloud.
Those factories weren’t producing ovens and shoes. They were producing weapons and other military gear in terrifying amounts. Analysis by Alliance economists later placed the Celestial Host’s hidden military spending at 15% of the system’s GDP during this period. When combined with hidden cloning facilities, this made the Host’s Guard one of the largest armies in the Alliance.
Eventually, their leadership decided the people of Sonoziel were just as corrupt as those of the rest of the Alliance. Their conversion efforts were ramped up and they began a campaign of evangelism unrivaled since. Within fifteen years, they had enough legislative influence to outlaw non-Host religious practices on Sonoziel and use the Planetary Defense Forces – heavily infiltrated by their own Guard – to convert the population by force. Outgoing communication was heavily censored, with all outside contact rigidly controlled by a special corps of missionaries whose sole purpose was to keep outsiders from realizing what had happened.
Once Sonoziel was in their grasp, they set their sights on the Alliance at large. To that end, they spent sixty years building an armada of planetary assault craft, each the equal of an entire well-equipped Patrol group of the time. These ships served as not just battleships, but transports as well – each carried a reinforced regiment of cloned, genetically-engineered supersoldiers with the best gear available. They were known to the Celestial Host as the Umael class. The Patrol had other, less polite names for them.
Host missionaries changed their focus from basic public relations, to active recruitment. They preyed upon the lowest rung of Alliance society, often the desperate populations of major cities. People who felt like they got a raw deal, or they weren’t listened to by a government failing to cater to their every whim and keep those people in check. Those people who were hogging the precious resources and getting ahead while the potential recruit languished. Others just didn’t feel like there was a place in the Alliance for them and were unwilling to find such a place. Or things just didn’t work out for a variety of reasons. The common thread with these converts was an utter unwillingness to accept responsibility for their circumstances – if they were willing to take responsibility they would take advantage of the vast resources of the Alliance and make things better.
The Host had all of them covered, according to the missionaries. They were more than happy to arrange transportation to Sonoziel and lodging and even a stable job once they arrived. Of course, the transportation was one-way. Part of the interview process when feeling out a new convert involved skills testing. Based in part on this testing, their place in Host society was determined. Most converts wound up in low-end manufacturing jobs, working the farms, or in the Host Guard as cannon-fodder. If they were really lucky, they could be promoted to a regular unit, but that was based largely on fanaticism rather than talent.
The Alliance would know nothing of this until war broke out – another quirk of the Celestial Host was a lack of contact with the galaxy at large except for carefully curated propaganda.
Next week, we’ll cover the Celestial Host War.