Free Throne of Stars by David Weber, John Ringo

into the troops’ helmets would have been a potent training device all by itself, and its ability to interface with the Marines’ toots was sufficient to make the illusion perfect. Now Macek smoothed thin air as he emplaced a “breaching charge” on the fictitious door he could both “see” and “feel” with total fidelity, then stepped to the side and back. As far as he could tell, he was squatting, nearly in contact with a wall; to everyone else, he looked as if he were getting ready to go to the bathroom on the deck.
    The sergeant major next to Roger snorted softly.
    “You know, Your Highness, when you’re doing this, one part of you knows how stupid you look. But if you don’t ignore it, you’re screwed. I think this is one of His Wickedness’ little jokes on Marines.”
    Roger smoothed his ponytail and opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.
    “Yes, Your Highness?” Kosutic said softly. “I take it there’s something about that statement that bothers you?”
    “Not about your observation,” Roger said as Bebi triggered the notional charge and rushed through the resulting imaginary hole. The prince had set his helmet to project the “shoot house” in see-through mode, and the team seemed to be fighting phantoms in a ghost building as he watched. Combined with his question, the . . . otherworldly nature of their opponents sent something very much like a shiver down his spine.
    “It was that last comment,” he said. “I’ve been wondering. . . . Why is Satanism the primary religion of Armagh? I mean, a planet settled by Irish and other Roman Catholic groups. That seems a bit . . . strange,” he finished, and the sergeant major let out a chuckle that turned into a liquid laugh Roger had never heard from her before.
    “Oh, Satan, is that all? The reason is because the winners write the history books, Your Highness.”
    “That doesn’t explain things,” Roger protested, pulling at a strand of hair. “You’re a High Priestess, right? That would be the equivalent of—an Episcopal bishop, I guess.”
    “Oh, not a bishop !” Kosutic laughed again. “Not one of those evil creatures! Angels of the Heavens, they are!” Roger felt his eyes trying to cross, and she smiled at his expression and took pity on him.
    “Okay, if you insist, Your Highness, here’s the deal.
    “Armagh was a slow-boat colony, as you know. The original colonists were primarily from Ireland, on Old Earth, with a smattering from the Balkans. Now, Ireland had a bloody history long before Christianity, but the whole Protestant/Catholic thing eventually got out of hand.”
    “We studied the nuking of Belfast at the Academy as an example of internal terrorism taken to a specific high,” Roger agreed.
    “Yes, and what was so screwed up about those Constables was that they killed as many—or more—of their own supporters as they did Catholics.” She shrugged. “Religious wars are . . . bad. But Armagh was arguably worse, even in comparison to the Belfast Bomb.
    “The original colonists were Eire who wanted to escape the religious bickering that was still going on in Ireland but keep their religion. They didn’t want freedom from religion, only freedom from argument about it. So they took only Catholics.
    “Shortly after landing, though, there was an attempted religious schism. It was still, at that time, a purely Catholic colony, and the schismatic movement was more on the order of fundamentalism rather than any sort of outright heresy. The schismatics wanted the mass in Latin, that sort of thing. But that, of course, threatened to start the arguments all over. So, as a result, to prevent religious warfare from breaking out again, they instituted a local version of the Papal College for the express purpose of defining what was religiously acceptable.”
    “Oh, shit,” Roger said quietly. “That’s . . . a bad idea. Hadn’t any of them studied history?”
    “Yes,” she said sadly, “they had. But they