History of the Christian Draka and the Draka Church Militant
Posted: 2005-11-16 05:01pm
History of the Christian Draka and the Draka Church Militant
This timeline diverges from the timeline of the "Stirling Draka" (hereafter STL ) in the early 1800's, when Draka society was already well-launched on the road of an expanding slave society but its culture and ideology were still in a state of flux. The defining event was the arrival in Drakia of several hundred members of The Holy Ghost Brethren, a completely obscure British sect, hoping to gain more converts.
In the STL they emigrated to Australia instead, where they remained obscure and never achieved more than a thousand members, and their descendants were eventually engulfed with the rest of the Australians in the aftermath of the Final war and killed or made into serfs. But in the CTL (Christian Draka Timeline) they landed at Capetown, where their influence was to be eventually profound.
The original religious immigrants, like many Britishers of their time, were quite opposed to slavery, horrified by what they found in Drakia and tried to agitate for abolition. They made no headway, however, their efforts encountering less hostility than indifference and ridicule.
After some fifteen years of this, they decided to concentrate on evangelising the "indentured servants" and bringing them to the fold of Christ. The provincial authorities granted them permission to do this, after thoroughly checking the content of their preachings to ensure that it contained no "inflammatory" items and that they would tell servants to obey their masters.
The Brethren encountered little competition from other missionaries in the hard and thankless job of going up to the expanding frontier and dealing with the contempt and obstruction of estate owners. That was mainly work for young, vigorous people, the original founders' descendants or locally-recruited adherents.
Over some two to three decades, the sect's basic orientation and doctrine underwent profound changes. From regarding slavery as an evil which would one day be abolished but which must be endured for the present, the missionaries gradually came to see in it some positive aspects, as "it gave Heathens the chance to See the Light". Later, slave-taking came to be seen as a positive good, and all references to even a theoretical abolition in the far future were deleted from the Brethren's doctrines.
Finally, any wish even for betterment of the salves' daily treatment was gone from the sect's doctrines and daily practices. The conquest of the whole of Africa and the enforced conversion via enslavement of its Pagan and Muslim inhabitants came to be regarded as a supreme Divinely Ordained Goal, a Goal which had to be furthered at all costs and which justified every sacrifice and "any act which may seem otherwise callous or cruel".
The still-living remnants of the original founders were horrified by the direction their Brethren were developing, but by this time they had completely lost control and were submerged and drowned out in the waves of young new adherents.
All along the frontier, what was now known as the Draka Church Militant proved highly attractive to landowners, overseers, soldiers and slave-takers, all welcoming a faith sanctifying as a glorious Divine Mission what they were busily doing anyway. From the frontier the Church gradually expanded backwards to the heartland, despite the increasingly frantic efforts of the Anglican Bishopric of Capetown to stop its spread.
Eventually it became an organized political force to be reckoned with, with Church adherents winning an increasing number of seats in the Provincial Assembly and demanding more and more vociferously to let the Church have "A Decisive Moral Voice" in Drakian affairs. Young Church stalwarts adopted the rule of emerging from worship on Sundays to range through the streets, assaulting all who refused to recognize the Church's supremacy. Eventually, they embarked on systematically sacking and setting on fire the places of worship of all other faiths and denominations, with the police - itself increasingly infiltrated by Church adherents - doing little to stop them. After three Anglican Bishops in succession died in highly suspicious "accidents", Canterbury found no more candidates willing to fill the post.
After a decade of having a majority on the Provincial Assembly, and having an increasing majority among the Draka Free population, the Church Militant carried out a quasi-legal coup. With tens of thousands of Church stalwarts thronging the square outside, the Assembly was permanently self-dissolved with all its powers handed to the Draka Church's Grand Synod, while the office of Governor was united with that of the Church's Arch-Shepherd, who would henceforward unite secular and spiritual power and whose every word was deemed to echo God's. All remnants of a secular state were abolished and the Draka Church became the state, for all intents and purposes.
The armed forces, where Church influence had long been paramount, became known as The Sword of the Church and stood ready to defend the new order against internal dissenters as well as against the British with whom all ties were formally severed. As the Grand Synod proclaimed that "The Draka Church Militant is a fully sovereign entity, brooking no interference with the performance of its Holy Mission and aknowleging no superior save God".
All non-believers and members of other denominations and faiths were given half a year to convert of depart, with obdurates who remained after the specified period being killed or reduced to serfdom. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, an emigrant from Germany notorious for his assertion that "God is Dead" barely got out alive, after a mob of Church stalwarts stormed his house and made a bonfire of his writings. Nietzsche and his few surviving disciples found refuge in the United States - as did many other victims of the Drakan Persecutions.
The other Christian denominations of the world became increasingly angry and scandalized at the news from Drakia. After canonizing at record speed two priests martyred at Capetown, the Pope issued an unprecedented joint declaration with the heads of major Protestant churches, denouncing the Drakan Church as "a blasphemous pseudo- church, serving Satan rather than Christ" - a proclamation which later gained the adherence of leading Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist leaders as well.
In response, the Grand Synod and Arch-Shepherd at Capetown ceremoniously castigated all other religious bodies on the globe as being either Idolatrous (if believing in more than one God), Infidel (if non-Christian Monotheists) or Heretical (if non-Drakan Christian). In all three cases, any and all such faiths and religious bodies were to be totally destroyed and extirpated in a Grand Holy Crusade, which would end only when the whole of Mankind without exception was brought under the wing of the One True Faith. All clergy of whatever religion captured by the Sword of the Church were to be either burned at the stake or hanged, drawn and quartered. Soon afterwards, it was proclaimed that the ranks of the Elect were closed, and that except in very few and rare cases needing the approval of Arch-Shepherd and Synod, all new adherents to the ranks of the Church would be admitted in the status of Sheep (i.e. "Indentured Servants" or "Serfs" under the by-now obsolete Drakan Legal Code).
Religious terms pervaded each and every sphere of Draka life. The slaves being bought and sold on the markets, an increasing proportion of them white-skinned, came to be known as "Sheep", and rebellious ones needing punishment - as "Black Sheep" or "Goats". Use of the term "Janissary", formerly denoting slave soldiers, was expressly forbidden as being derived from the practice of the Infidel Ottomans, and the slaves conscripted to fight the Church's multitude of enemies were to be known as "The Lord's Sheepdogs" - in common speech "Dog Troops" or simply "The Dogs". Free Drakan troops were "Crusaders" or "Warriors of Christ" and free Draka as a whole were interchangeably "The Shepherds" or "The Elect".
In the Church's legal theory, what changed hands at auctions was not ownership of the Sheep's person, as that was vested in the Church on behalf of God, but "The Right to Provide Pastoral Care". Such "Pastoral Care" mostly consisted of of the Owner-Shepherd gathering the Sheep together on Sunday and haranguing them, reminding them that God had His eye on them always and could read their inmost thoughts, and that any transgression against their Shepherd's authority which was not discovered and punished by the overseers in This World would be punished millionfold by the Demons in Hell.
For the Draka in CTL the favourite method of executing rebellious "Goats" was not impalement but crucifiction, with Church doctrine holding that being thus made to imitate Christ would absolve the sin of rebelliousness and save said Goat from terrible torture in Hell for all eternity. Therefore, the imposition of crucifiction came to be known as "The Ultimate Mercy" and the Shepherd imposing it upon his Flock would get much merit in Heaven.
In contrast to the Draka of STL, those of CTL came to be extremely puritanical, with any instance of extra-marital sex or or one between same-sex partners being punishable by death, while a sexual act involving "Sheep" was defined as "A form of Bestiality" and entailed particularly gruesome and prolonged forms of execution.
All such matters fell under the purview of the Morality Brigades, which maintained an extensive network of spies to ferret out any departure from Church Doctrine and Prescribed Behaviour, and which consciously sought to model themselves - and constantly improve upon - the Spanish Inquisition. They also dealt, of course, with all matters which the STL Draka entrusted to their Security Directorate.
(In principle, the prohibition on extra-marital sex also referred to the rape of captive enemy women, but even the fearsome MB knew better than to interfere with one of the Draka soldiers' immemorial perquisites - the one thing which might have caused the army to crush the pesky inquisitors once and for all.)
Puritans though they were, the CTL Draka like their STL counterparts were faced with manpower shortage for their armed forces and forced to admit women to combat duties. Unmarried men and women were taken into completely segregated units, allowed to keep contact with each other only by radio (through that rule sometimes proved difficult to enforce on the battlefield), while married couples were often placed together in the same units, trained to fight as a team and expected to react with a murderous berserk fury to the death of a spouse - with surviving into wodowhood under such circumstances being considered the worst of disgraces.
Throughout the Twentieth Century the Draka Church Militant proceeded on a course of wars, conquests and the reduction of ever-new hundreds of millions to the status of Sheep - roughly parallel to the exploits of the Domination in STL - with every new victory increasing their religious fervour and confidence in the Divine Destiny of the Elect.
In principle, the Draka Church Militant did not recognize the existence of any other states and therefore refused to establish diplomatic relations with anybody. Still, at various stages in its course of world conquest the Church did need to conduct negotiations and make some agreements - even if it never intended to keep for long any of the commitments made. The very act of making any kind of deal with Infidels or heretics was rather sinful, only made when absolutely unavoidable and under Special Dispensation. Breaking the agreement and Resuming the Crusade, on the other hand, was an eagerly-awaited Righteous Act.
For that purpose of such negotiations and agreements, the Church did maintain a kind of de-facto diplomatic corps, whose members were officially Missionaries going to various countries with the purpose of "Spreading the True Word of God". In fact, they had little hope of finding any willing adherents and did not seriously try. Rather, they were careful to preface any meeting with officials of the host country by calling upon their interlocutors to convert and making a dire warning of the waiting Fires of Hell. In practice, the case-hardened Draka missionaries- diplomats soon made this into a ritual formula, quickly disposed of so that they could settle down to the concrete matter at hand.
On numerous occasions, the Sacred Interrogators of the MB reported - on good evidence! - that members of the Missionary Service were maintaining relations of "professional respect" and even actual friendship with Idolater/Infidel/Heretic/Atheist diplomats representing such powers as the British Empire, the Unites States, The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In meetings with such diplomats, it was asserted, the Draka Missionaries made no effort to perform their assigned function. In fact, in certain conversations with foreign diplomats they were rumoured to make cynical remarks about the Church's most sacred teachings! Still, on one occasion after the other, the Arch-Shepherd kept his hand over the Missionaries, who were too useful to be harmed.
The biggest and last achievement of the Draka missionaries/diplomats came at the aftermath of Armageddon (also known as the Gog and Magog War) in 1997. The Draka Church Militant emerged victorious from the nuclear exchange it had initiated, leaving radioactive rubble where most population centres and military bases had been of its last remaining foe, the American-led Religious Freedom League. The Church's own territory had sustained "grievous but acceptable" losses. However, above Earth continued to hover the sinister system of the League's Weather Control Satellites, whose broadcasts roused a ceaseless series of artificial tornadoes and hurricanes tearing at Africa, Europe and Asia and causing untold death and destruction. Any attempt to dismantle or destroy the satellites only resulted in an increased intensity of the storms induced.
It was at this extremity that Arch-Shepherd Von Starkenberg authorized the Missionaries to approach the remaining League forces holed up in the Asteroid Belt and around the Jovian Moons, and reached a deal where the Storm Satellites were disarmed in exchange for the uninterrupted departure from the Solar System of "The New Noach's Ark", a huge League starship with more than a 100,000 passengers.
At first, the Missionaries were perceived as heroes, who had saved the lives of untold millions. But a few months later a cache of documents unearthed in the ruins of the League Capital at Denver turned out to be the Ark's full passenger list and cargo manifests.
It was revealed, to the boundless fury of the Church Militant's doctrinaire hard-liners, that the League had taken care care to have on board its Ark the leaders of and a Representative Community from all known religious faiths and denominations, carrying with them their their scriptures and the most sacred of their relics of objects of worship, so as "To give all these religions a new chance to flourish under the free skies of Star Haven, circling Alpha Centauri" - as the last League Praesidium put it.
Even some of the remaining followers of Nietzsche, whose name was ritually execrated at any service of the Draka Church, were given a berth on board the Ark, so that they could continue in another solar system their rather Quixotic attempt to revive the Old Norse religion. Also on board had been quite a few well-known philosophers - atheists, agnostics and free-thinkers - on whom the Church would have loved to lay its hands.
It eventually turned out that the Arch-Shepherd had more or less known all this, but concealed it from the Synod and the MB - knowing that the more fanatical members of the Church would cheerfully endure endless destructive storms rather than let all these hated religions survive. The resulting scandal caused the disgrace and downfall of the Von Starkenberg Dynasty, and MB had their wish at last with the Missionary Service being disbanded and all its members being summarily put to death.
Soon after the Church proclaimed the beginning of the Millennium (also known as Christ's Kingdom on Earth), the biological researchers at the Church's Wisdom Department at last presented the Grand Synod with the long sought Pondering of the Creator's Deepest Mystery - i.e. the possibility of dividing the Sheep and the Shepherds into two biologically separate species.
The plan, considered to be Divinely Inspired and Guided and carried out over the next decades, resulted in a race of Meek Sheep (in short the Meeks) who would recognize and defer to any Shepherd they met, simply by the sense of smell. It was also asserted that they were generically unable to believe any but the teachings of the Draka Church Militant. (Some scoffers still dared whisper that they were simply incapable of shaking off any propaganda drilled into them at a young age). And the new type of Shepherds, equipped with awesome bodily power to crush any remaining enemies of the Church and given an indefinite lifetime barring accidents or violence, came to be known as "Guardian Angels on Earth" or simply Angels.
One of the Angels' many attributes was a greatly enhanced eyesight, enabling their unaided eyes to discern quite easily the dim speck of Alpha Centauri in the night sky. There soon developed the Perpetual Vow of Hatred, with Angels en mass waking before dawn and gathering in city squares or open fields to wave their fists at the star and vow death and destruction upon the Idolaters, Infidels, Heretics and Atheists holed up in orbit around it. But there was little that they could do in practice to keep their Vow. Nearly every new Arch-Shepherd, upon assuming office, ordered the heads of The Sword of the Church to present him with plans for interstellar war and conquest, only to fume upon being told that it was unfeasable without developing faster-than-light starships.
There were, naturally, no commercial relations between the planet Paradise (as Earth was renamed after Jesus' Victory Over the Unbelievers) and Star Haven, nor the form of diplomatic contacts which the long-gone missionaries/diplomats had maintained. Still, even the most bitter of enemies sometimes need to contact each other, and by tacit agreement the custom developed of not attacking each other on the surface and in the immediate vicinity of a certain dark asteroid floating deep in interstellar space, about half-way between the two systems. Most Angels would have been schocked and scandalized to hear of such contacts, but the top Church Hierarchy knew and approved of them - since they might yet provide "a means of furthering God's Plan, though in tortuous and mysterious ways".
This wisdom of the Church heads seamed vindicated on the 442nd Year of the Second Coming, when a Haven captain encountered a Draka colleague at the nameless asteroid and after concluding some mutually profitable illicit deals, transmitted the offer of a certain high-ranking officer in his planet's armed forces to defect to the Church, provided that certain conditions were met. The offer was passed on when the Draka ship went back to Paradise, and seemed important enough to need the Arch-Shepherd's personal approval - which was duly granted.
Following the years-long time-lag of interstellar flight, the defector arrived at Paradise orbit in a stolen spaceship. At a sumptuous though top secret ceremony he was received into the ranks of the Elect, the first such occasion in more than two centuries. There was no way to make of him physically an Angel, but as promised the Church's medical facilities were able to ensure him of a more than doubled lifetime, and he was given an enormous estate at New Zealand (where his ancestors had come from) and the Pastoral Care over more than ten thousand Sheep.
In return, the defector brought with him the full plans for the Inter- Dimensional Portal recently developed on Star Haven, which in possesion of the Draka Church Militant would give access to countless alternate timelines where countless billions of "Wild Sheep" languished in ignorance of the True Church, waiting for deserving Angels to come and enclose them in wide estates under a proper Perpetual Pastoral Care. The Church had in fact been on the verge of developing such a portal for itself, but the defector's information saved at least a decade of work.
A scouting team, crossing over into the timeline which according to the defector's diagrams was the most easily accesible, found itself deep in an African jungle hardly distinguishable from the one in their own world. Lying low and monitoring broadcasts in order to analyse the local culture and mores, it took the scouts only a few hours to become literally berserk with anger. As they reported on their return, they had had great difficulty in restraining themselves from launching an attack on the unspeakable locals all by themselves.
The same fury became general among all good Angels when the scouts' report with its unspeakable horrors became public. Obviously, it was God's will to point the Church's Sword at precisely this blasphemous world - so that The Soldiers of the Faith could immediately start upon the Holy Work of utterly wiping out these disgusting creatures brazenly calling themselves "Draka" while worshipping idols and the unspeakable Nietzsche. And the so-called "Homo Servus Serfs" must be rescued froim the rule of these monsters and transformed into proper, God-Fearing Sheep.
What was unknown to the scouts and their superiors, however, the SLI world which they had just left had at the very same time sent scouts of its own into their world's jungles, and these scouts had gone back filled with just the same kind of berserk fury. Just as the Church was girding its loins for the campaign to conquer and totally eradicate the blasphemous pagan parodies of the Draka, these parodies were making the same kind of effort, accompanied with voluminous invocations of the Norse Gods' private parts and curses at the temerity of these perverts who dared to couple the very name of Draka with "Christian" and "Church".
This simultaneity was by no means a coincidence. Nor was it an act of the Draka Church's fierce God, unless He moves in mysterious ways indeed. Rather, it was in fact the result of the CTL Star Haven and STL Samothrace making contact with each other and cementing an alliance across the dimensional divide some twenty years previously. After comparing notes about their respective histories of escaping an Earth which had fallen to the Draka and sharing all they knew about the cultural attitudes of these enemies, the two inter-diemnsionald allies concluded that these two kinds of Draka would jump at each other's throats, as soon as they became aware of each other. Ensuring that both would make the discovery at precisely the same time took more than a decade of intricate operations by the best double agents which the two Alpha Centauri nations could field.
Knowing none of this, the Sword of the Church launched the most massive invasion in their world's history, a little more than a year after first discovering the existence of this New Enemy of the Faith. Tens of millions of troops were transported across, nearly denuding their world of defenders. They found the invaded STL world strangely empty of troops. Just as the CTL forces were starting to get the hang of things on the STI workd and wonder about that absence, when confused reports arrived of a massive invasion of their own world - cut off by the destruction of the portals.
Captured enemy portals could have provided them a return route - except that they had destroyed these portals in their first surprise attack on the STL line's main installations. And meanwhile, back on CTL the marooned forces from PLI found themselves in a mirror-image situation
So, two massive Draka armies were marroned and besieged on a world not their own. Construction of new portals would have taken about a year, but neither set of Draka militaries had even a fraction of that time left. As both found to their cost, the genetic conditioning of "Homo Servus" and "Meek Sheep" got strained to the breaking point and beyond when faced with two conflicting sets of masters who smelled nearly - but not quite - the same, each of whom insisted the other was a hated enenmy to be killed on sight. More and more Janissary and Dog troops, firmly ordered to shoot and kill the one variety of Draka, started killing both - shocking and bewildering military commanders who for hundreds of years believed that a mutiny by such troops had been rendered totally impossible. And there was also the completely unprecedented dilemma: with whom to side, if at all, when encountering an enemy type of Draka fighting their own rebellious subjects?
In the confused multi-sided fighting which broke out on both timelines, the superb physical advantages of Angels and Homo Drakensis were just starting to tell, with captured mutineers being impaled, crucified and otherwise put gruesomely to death - when the combined Star Haven/Samothrace fleets established unopposed commanding orbits around both versions of the Draka Earth. Then their ground troops started arriving via portal on all major scenes of fighting - together with considerable reinforcing contingents from several other timelines whose own versions of the Draka had been defeated, but by no means forgotten...
(CURTAINS)
This timeline diverges from the timeline of the "Stirling Draka" (hereafter STL ) in the early 1800's, when Draka society was already well-launched on the road of an expanding slave society but its culture and ideology were still in a state of flux. The defining event was the arrival in Drakia of several hundred members of The Holy Ghost Brethren, a completely obscure British sect, hoping to gain more converts.
In the STL they emigrated to Australia instead, where they remained obscure and never achieved more than a thousand members, and their descendants were eventually engulfed with the rest of the Australians in the aftermath of the Final war and killed or made into serfs. But in the CTL (Christian Draka Timeline) they landed at Capetown, where their influence was to be eventually profound.
The original religious immigrants, like many Britishers of their time, were quite opposed to slavery, horrified by what they found in Drakia and tried to agitate for abolition. They made no headway, however, their efforts encountering less hostility than indifference and ridicule.
After some fifteen years of this, they decided to concentrate on evangelising the "indentured servants" and bringing them to the fold of Christ. The provincial authorities granted them permission to do this, after thoroughly checking the content of their preachings to ensure that it contained no "inflammatory" items and that they would tell servants to obey their masters.
The Brethren encountered little competition from other missionaries in the hard and thankless job of going up to the expanding frontier and dealing with the contempt and obstruction of estate owners. That was mainly work for young, vigorous people, the original founders' descendants or locally-recruited adherents.
Over some two to three decades, the sect's basic orientation and doctrine underwent profound changes. From regarding slavery as an evil which would one day be abolished but which must be endured for the present, the missionaries gradually came to see in it some positive aspects, as "it gave Heathens the chance to See the Light". Later, slave-taking came to be seen as a positive good, and all references to even a theoretical abolition in the far future were deleted from the Brethren's doctrines.
Finally, any wish even for betterment of the salves' daily treatment was gone from the sect's doctrines and daily practices. The conquest of the whole of Africa and the enforced conversion via enslavement of its Pagan and Muslim inhabitants came to be regarded as a supreme Divinely Ordained Goal, a Goal which had to be furthered at all costs and which justified every sacrifice and "any act which may seem otherwise callous or cruel".
The still-living remnants of the original founders were horrified by the direction their Brethren were developing, but by this time they had completely lost control and were submerged and drowned out in the waves of young new adherents.
All along the frontier, what was now known as the Draka Church Militant proved highly attractive to landowners, overseers, soldiers and slave-takers, all welcoming a faith sanctifying as a glorious Divine Mission what they were busily doing anyway. From the frontier the Church gradually expanded backwards to the heartland, despite the increasingly frantic efforts of the Anglican Bishopric of Capetown to stop its spread.
Eventually it became an organized political force to be reckoned with, with Church adherents winning an increasing number of seats in the Provincial Assembly and demanding more and more vociferously to let the Church have "A Decisive Moral Voice" in Drakian affairs. Young Church stalwarts adopted the rule of emerging from worship on Sundays to range through the streets, assaulting all who refused to recognize the Church's supremacy. Eventually, they embarked on systematically sacking and setting on fire the places of worship of all other faiths and denominations, with the police - itself increasingly infiltrated by Church adherents - doing little to stop them. After three Anglican Bishops in succession died in highly suspicious "accidents", Canterbury found no more candidates willing to fill the post.
After a decade of having a majority on the Provincial Assembly, and having an increasing majority among the Draka Free population, the Church Militant carried out a quasi-legal coup. With tens of thousands of Church stalwarts thronging the square outside, the Assembly was permanently self-dissolved with all its powers handed to the Draka Church's Grand Synod, while the office of Governor was united with that of the Church's Arch-Shepherd, who would henceforward unite secular and spiritual power and whose every word was deemed to echo God's. All remnants of a secular state were abolished and the Draka Church became the state, for all intents and purposes.
The armed forces, where Church influence had long been paramount, became known as The Sword of the Church and stood ready to defend the new order against internal dissenters as well as against the British with whom all ties were formally severed. As the Grand Synod proclaimed that "The Draka Church Militant is a fully sovereign entity, brooking no interference with the performance of its Holy Mission and aknowleging no superior save God".
All non-believers and members of other denominations and faiths were given half a year to convert of depart, with obdurates who remained after the specified period being killed or reduced to serfdom. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, an emigrant from Germany notorious for his assertion that "God is Dead" barely got out alive, after a mob of Church stalwarts stormed his house and made a bonfire of his writings. Nietzsche and his few surviving disciples found refuge in the United States - as did many other victims of the Drakan Persecutions.
The other Christian denominations of the world became increasingly angry and scandalized at the news from Drakia. After canonizing at record speed two priests martyred at Capetown, the Pope issued an unprecedented joint declaration with the heads of major Protestant churches, denouncing the Drakan Church as "a blasphemous pseudo- church, serving Satan rather than Christ" - a proclamation which later gained the adherence of leading Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist leaders as well.
In response, the Grand Synod and Arch-Shepherd at Capetown ceremoniously castigated all other religious bodies on the globe as being either Idolatrous (if believing in more than one God), Infidel (if non-Christian Monotheists) or Heretical (if non-Drakan Christian). In all three cases, any and all such faiths and religious bodies were to be totally destroyed and extirpated in a Grand Holy Crusade, which would end only when the whole of Mankind without exception was brought under the wing of the One True Faith. All clergy of whatever religion captured by the Sword of the Church were to be either burned at the stake or hanged, drawn and quartered. Soon afterwards, it was proclaimed that the ranks of the Elect were closed, and that except in very few and rare cases needing the approval of Arch-Shepherd and Synod, all new adherents to the ranks of the Church would be admitted in the status of Sheep (i.e. "Indentured Servants" or "Serfs" under the by-now obsolete Drakan Legal Code).
Religious terms pervaded each and every sphere of Draka life. The slaves being bought and sold on the markets, an increasing proportion of them white-skinned, came to be known as "Sheep", and rebellious ones needing punishment - as "Black Sheep" or "Goats". Use of the term "Janissary", formerly denoting slave soldiers, was expressly forbidden as being derived from the practice of the Infidel Ottomans, and the slaves conscripted to fight the Church's multitude of enemies were to be known as "The Lord's Sheepdogs" - in common speech "Dog Troops" or simply "The Dogs". Free Drakan troops were "Crusaders" or "Warriors of Christ" and free Draka as a whole were interchangeably "The Shepherds" or "The Elect".
In the Church's legal theory, what changed hands at auctions was not ownership of the Sheep's person, as that was vested in the Church on behalf of God, but "The Right to Provide Pastoral Care". Such "Pastoral Care" mostly consisted of of the Owner-Shepherd gathering the Sheep together on Sunday and haranguing them, reminding them that God had His eye on them always and could read their inmost thoughts, and that any transgression against their Shepherd's authority which was not discovered and punished by the overseers in This World would be punished millionfold by the Demons in Hell.
For the Draka in CTL the favourite method of executing rebellious "Goats" was not impalement but crucifiction, with Church doctrine holding that being thus made to imitate Christ would absolve the sin of rebelliousness and save said Goat from terrible torture in Hell for all eternity. Therefore, the imposition of crucifiction came to be known as "The Ultimate Mercy" and the Shepherd imposing it upon his Flock would get much merit in Heaven.
In contrast to the Draka of STL, those of CTL came to be extremely puritanical, with any instance of extra-marital sex or or one between same-sex partners being punishable by death, while a sexual act involving "Sheep" was defined as "A form of Bestiality" and entailed particularly gruesome and prolonged forms of execution.
All such matters fell under the purview of the Morality Brigades, which maintained an extensive network of spies to ferret out any departure from Church Doctrine and Prescribed Behaviour, and which consciously sought to model themselves - and constantly improve upon - the Spanish Inquisition. They also dealt, of course, with all matters which the STL Draka entrusted to their Security Directorate.
(In principle, the prohibition on extra-marital sex also referred to the rape of captive enemy women, but even the fearsome MB knew better than to interfere with one of the Draka soldiers' immemorial perquisites - the one thing which might have caused the army to crush the pesky inquisitors once and for all.)
Puritans though they were, the CTL Draka like their STL counterparts were faced with manpower shortage for their armed forces and forced to admit women to combat duties. Unmarried men and women were taken into completely segregated units, allowed to keep contact with each other only by radio (through that rule sometimes proved difficult to enforce on the battlefield), while married couples were often placed together in the same units, trained to fight as a team and expected to react with a murderous berserk fury to the death of a spouse - with surviving into wodowhood under such circumstances being considered the worst of disgraces.
Throughout the Twentieth Century the Draka Church Militant proceeded on a course of wars, conquests and the reduction of ever-new hundreds of millions to the status of Sheep - roughly parallel to the exploits of the Domination in STL - with every new victory increasing their religious fervour and confidence in the Divine Destiny of the Elect.
In principle, the Draka Church Militant did not recognize the existence of any other states and therefore refused to establish diplomatic relations with anybody. Still, at various stages in its course of world conquest the Church did need to conduct negotiations and make some agreements - even if it never intended to keep for long any of the commitments made. The very act of making any kind of deal with Infidels or heretics was rather sinful, only made when absolutely unavoidable and under Special Dispensation. Breaking the agreement and Resuming the Crusade, on the other hand, was an eagerly-awaited Righteous Act.
For that purpose of such negotiations and agreements, the Church did maintain a kind of de-facto diplomatic corps, whose members were officially Missionaries going to various countries with the purpose of "Spreading the True Word of God". In fact, they had little hope of finding any willing adherents and did not seriously try. Rather, they were careful to preface any meeting with officials of the host country by calling upon their interlocutors to convert and making a dire warning of the waiting Fires of Hell. In practice, the case-hardened Draka missionaries- diplomats soon made this into a ritual formula, quickly disposed of so that they could settle down to the concrete matter at hand.
On numerous occasions, the Sacred Interrogators of the MB reported - on good evidence! - that members of the Missionary Service were maintaining relations of "professional respect" and even actual friendship with Idolater/Infidel/Heretic/Atheist diplomats representing such powers as the British Empire, the Unites States, The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In meetings with such diplomats, it was asserted, the Draka Missionaries made no effort to perform their assigned function. In fact, in certain conversations with foreign diplomats they were rumoured to make cynical remarks about the Church's most sacred teachings! Still, on one occasion after the other, the Arch-Shepherd kept his hand over the Missionaries, who were too useful to be harmed.
The biggest and last achievement of the Draka missionaries/diplomats came at the aftermath of Armageddon (also known as the Gog and Magog War) in 1997. The Draka Church Militant emerged victorious from the nuclear exchange it had initiated, leaving radioactive rubble where most population centres and military bases had been of its last remaining foe, the American-led Religious Freedom League. The Church's own territory had sustained "grievous but acceptable" losses. However, above Earth continued to hover the sinister system of the League's Weather Control Satellites, whose broadcasts roused a ceaseless series of artificial tornadoes and hurricanes tearing at Africa, Europe and Asia and causing untold death and destruction. Any attempt to dismantle or destroy the satellites only resulted in an increased intensity of the storms induced.
It was at this extremity that Arch-Shepherd Von Starkenberg authorized the Missionaries to approach the remaining League forces holed up in the Asteroid Belt and around the Jovian Moons, and reached a deal where the Storm Satellites were disarmed in exchange for the uninterrupted departure from the Solar System of "The New Noach's Ark", a huge League starship with more than a 100,000 passengers.
At first, the Missionaries were perceived as heroes, who had saved the lives of untold millions. But a few months later a cache of documents unearthed in the ruins of the League Capital at Denver turned out to be the Ark's full passenger list and cargo manifests.
It was revealed, to the boundless fury of the Church Militant's doctrinaire hard-liners, that the League had taken care care to have on board its Ark the leaders of and a Representative Community from all known religious faiths and denominations, carrying with them their their scriptures and the most sacred of their relics of objects of worship, so as "To give all these religions a new chance to flourish under the free skies of Star Haven, circling Alpha Centauri" - as the last League Praesidium put it.
Even some of the remaining followers of Nietzsche, whose name was ritually execrated at any service of the Draka Church, were given a berth on board the Ark, so that they could continue in another solar system their rather Quixotic attempt to revive the Old Norse religion. Also on board had been quite a few well-known philosophers - atheists, agnostics and free-thinkers - on whom the Church would have loved to lay its hands.
It eventually turned out that the Arch-Shepherd had more or less known all this, but concealed it from the Synod and the MB - knowing that the more fanatical members of the Church would cheerfully endure endless destructive storms rather than let all these hated religions survive. The resulting scandal caused the disgrace and downfall of the Von Starkenberg Dynasty, and MB had their wish at last with the Missionary Service being disbanded and all its members being summarily put to death.
Soon after the Church proclaimed the beginning of the Millennium (also known as Christ's Kingdom on Earth), the biological researchers at the Church's Wisdom Department at last presented the Grand Synod with the long sought Pondering of the Creator's Deepest Mystery - i.e. the possibility of dividing the Sheep and the Shepherds into two biologically separate species.
The plan, considered to be Divinely Inspired and Guided and carried out over the next decades, resulted in a race of Meek Sheep (in short the Meeks) who would recognize and defer to any Shepherd they met, simply by the sense of smell. It was also asserted that they were generically unable to believe any but the teachings of the Draka Church Militant. (Some scoffers still dared whisper that they were simply incapable of shaking off any propaganda drilled into them at a young age). And the new type of Shepherds, equipped with awesome bodily power to crush any remaining enemies of the Church and given an indefinite lifetime barring accidents or violence, came to be known as "Guardian Angels on Earth" or simply Angels.
One of the Angels' many attributes was a greatly enhanced eyesight, enabling their unaided eyes to discern quite easily the dim speck of Alpha Centauri in the night sky. There soon developed the Perpetual Vow of Hatred, with Angels en mass waking before dawn and gathering in city squares or open fields to wave their fists at the star and vow death and destruction upon the Idolaters, Infidels, Heretics and Atheists holed up in orbit around it. But there was little that they could do in practice to keep their Vow. Nearly every new Arch-Shepherd, upon assuming office, ordered the heads of The Sword of the Church to present him with plans for interstellar war and conquest, only to fume upon being told that it was unfeasable without developing faster-than-light starships.
There were, naturally, no commercial relations between the planet Paradise (as Earth was renamed after Jesus' Victory Over the Unbelievers) and Star Haven, nor the form of diplomatic contacts which the long-gone missionaries/diplomats had maintained. Still, even the most bitter of enemies sometimes need to contact each other, and by tacit agreement the custom developed of not attacking each other on the surface and in the immediate vicinity of a certain dark asteroid floating deep in interstellar space, about half-way between the two systems. Most Angels would have been schocked and scandalized to hear of such contacts, but the top Church Hierarchy knew and approved of them - since they might yet provide "a means of furthering God's Plan, though in tortuous and mysterious ways".
This wisdom of the Church heads seamed vindicated on the 442nd Year of the Second Coming, when a Haven captain encountered a Draka colleague at the nameless asteroid and after concluding some mutually profitable illicit deals, transmitted the offer of a certain high-ranking officer in his planet's armed forces to defect to the Church, provided that certain conditions were met. The offer was passed on when the Draka ship went back to Paradise, and seemed important enough to need the Arch-Shepherd's personal approval - which was duly granted.
Following the years-long time-lag of interstellar flight, the defector arrived at Paradise orbit in a stolen spaceship. At a sumptuous though top secret ceremony he was received into the ranks of the Elect, the first such occasion in more than two centuries. There was no way to make of him physically an Angel, but as promised the Church's medical facilities were able to ensure him of a more than doubled lifetime, and he was given an enormous estate at New Zealand (where his ancestors had come from) and the Pastoral Care over more than ten thousand Sheep.
In return, the defector brought with him the full plans for the Inter- Dimensional Portal recently developed on Star Haven, which in possesion of the Draka Church Militant would give access to countless alternate timelines where countless billions of "Wild Sheep" languished in ignorance of the True Church, waiting for deserving Angels to come and enclose them in wide estates under a proper Perpetual Pastoral Care. The Church had in fact been on the verge of developing such a portal for itself, but the defector's information saved at least a decade of work.
A scouting team, crossing over into the timeline which according to the defector's diagrams was the most easily accesible, found itself deep in an African jungle hardly distinguishable from the one in their own world. Lying low and monitoring broadcasts in order to analyse the local culture and mores, it took the scouts only a few hours to become literally berserk with anger. As they reported on their return, they had had great difficulty in restraining themselves from launching an attack on the unspeakable locals all by themselves.
The same fury became general among all good Angels when the scouts' report with its unspeakable horrors became public. Obviously, it was God's will to point the Church's Sword at precisely this blasphemous world - so that The Soldiers of the Faith could immediately start upon the Holy Work of utterly wiping out these disgusting creatures brazenly calling themselves "Draka" while worshipping idols and the unspeakable Nietzsche. And the so-called "Homo Servus Serfs" must be rescued froim the rule of these monsters and transformed into proper, God-Fearing Sheep.
What was unknown to the scouts and their superiors, however, the SLI world which they had just left had at the very same time sent scouts of its own into their world's jungles, and these scouts had gone back filled with just the same kind of berserk fury. Just as the Church was girding its loins for the campaign to conquer and totally eradicate the blasphemous pagan parodies of the Draka, these parodies were making the same kind of effort, accompanied with voluminous invocations of the Norse Gods' private parts and curses at the temerity of these perverts who dared to couple the very name of Draka with "Christian" and "Church".
This simultaneity was by no means a coincidence. Nor was it an act of the Draka Church's fierce God, unless He moves in mysterious ways indeed. Rather, it was in fact the result of the CTL Star Haven and STL Samothrace making contact with each other and cementing an alliance across the dimensional divide some twenty years previously. After comparing notes about their respective histories of escaping an Earth which had fallen to the Draka and sharing all they knew about the cultural attitudes of these enemies, the two inter-diemnsionald allies concluded that these two kinds of Draka would jump at each other's throats, as soon as they became aware of each other. Ensuring that both would make the discovery at precisely the same time took more than a decade of intricate operations by the best double agents which the two Alpha Centauri nations could field.
Knowing none of this, the Sword of the Church launched the most massive invasion in their world's history, a little more than a year after first discovering the existence of this New Enemy of the Faith. Tens of millions of troops were transported across, nearly denuding their world of defenders. They found the invaded STL world strangely empty of troops. Just as the CTL forces were starting to get the hang of things on the STI workd and wonder about that absence, when confused reports arrived of a massive invasion of their own world - cut off by the destruction of the portals.
Captured enemy portals could have provided them a return route - except that they had destroyed these portals in their first surprise attack on the STL line's main installations. And meanwhile, back on CTL the marooned forces from PLI found themselves in a mirror-image situation
So, two massive Draka armies were marroned and besieged on a world not their own. Construction of new portals would have taken about a year, but neither set of Draka militaries had even a fraction of that time left. As both found to their cost, the genetic conditioning of "Homo Servus" and "Meek Sheep" got strained to the breaking point and beyond when faced with two conflicting sets of masters who smelled nearly - but not quite - the same, each of whom insisted the other was a hated enenmy to be killed on sight. More and more Janissary and Dog troops, firmly ordered to shoot and kill the one variety of Draka, started killing both - shocking and bewildering military commanders who for hundreds of years believed that a mutiny by such troops had been rendered totally impossible. And there was also the completely unprecedented dilemma: with whom to side, if at all, when encountering an enemy type of Draka fighting their own rebellious subjects?
In the confused multi-sided fighting which broke out on both timelines, the superb physical advantages of Angels and Homo Drakensis were just starting to tell, with captured mutineers being impaled, crucified and otherwise put gruesomely to death - when the combined Star Haven/Samothrace fleets established unopposed commanding orbits around both versions of the Draka Earth. Then their ground troops started arriving via portal on all major scenes of fighting - together with considerable reinforcing contingents from several other timelines whose own versions of the Draka had been defeated, but by no means forgotten...
(CURTAINS)
