The Parafaith War

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “While it can be and has been argued that all people are created equal, genetics and environmental analyses have verified that such equality ceases at birth, perhaps even earlier.

  “With unequal power and unequal ability the lot of humanity, religion has sought to establish a common ground by subsuming all to a mightier god, yet reason and technology have conspired to communicate that no such god exists—or that such a god does not interfere—and that some form of might makes right. And no god has, in recent historical times, destroyed the side with the bigger battalions and mightier technology.

  “So … how can a rational individual confront the problem of power? In the same way that all the faithful have throughout history—by sharing a set of ideals and a spirit of community more highly valued than individual application of power … .

  “One of the cries of the true believer is that there are moral absolutes that can only be set forth by a deity. Yet if life is sacred, as many deities have proclaimed, how can a deity command people to kill in his name, as most deities have done? How can we even exist, since we must consume, in the natural state, some other organism, and that means killing? Likewise, if life is not sacred, then the injunction to be fruitful and multiply is a military command, not a deistic one … .

  The Eco-Tech Dialogues

  Prologue

  39

  “Prepare for power changeover.”

  “Standing by for changeover.”

  Trystin tensed slightly as the lights flickered and the gravity dropped to point five, but over the years his guts had learned to flip around a lot less with the switch from station normal gravity to ship grav.

  The humming hiss of the ventilators stopped, then picked up, and Trystin proceeded with the checklist, running down the mental screens called up through the implant, only occasionally cross-checking the manual screens before him to ensure that the manual controls still worked—or that his implant wasn’t malfunctioning.

  “Ready to separate, ser,” Trystin added.

  “Stet.”

  “Outer Control, demagnetizing this time.” James flashed Trystin the boyish grin after reporting to station control.

  “Iron Mace two, understand demagnetizing. Cleared for separation this time. Maintain low thrust for three.”

  “Iron Mace two, separating this time. Will maintain low thrust for three.” Sweat still beaded up on the captain’s forehead.

  The representational screen depicted the separation as the amber point that was the Willis began to move away from the red square of the station.

  “You have the con, Lieutenant.”

  “I have it, ser.” Trystin monitored the power flows, trying to check the new accumulators while phasing in power from the fusactor. The sooner the accumulators were carrying a full load the happier he’d be.

  “Steady on zero one five, red,” ordered James.

  “Stet.”

  Neither spoke as Trystin eased the Willis away from already distant Parvati and toward the pulsing blue globe on the representational screen.

  “Weapons, loader status?”

  “The new loaders and fixes seem to be holding, Captain.”

  Trystin nodded to himself. Once again, contacts helped. James had managed to get the new high-speed loaders installed on the Willis. That just might have been because they were Sasaki loaders. Now they had the first upgrades, since the initial version had had a tendency toward jamming—not exactly wonderful in combat.

  “Let’s hope so.” James’s voice was calm, as if testing new systems in combat were expected of him.

  Trystin pursed his lips. For James, such tests were—part of the parashinto honor concept. Trystin was still discovering how complicated the man was.

  “Sledge team, this is Sledge Control. Datadump follows.”

  After the net picked up the data burst and arrayed it, both Trystin and James sat silently, using their implants to scan and digest the information and the plans sent from the Tokugawa and Marshal Guteyama.

  “Too complex,” James finally announced.

  Trystin nodded, and the Willis accelerated toward the orbit of Krishna.

  “This is deadly . . . and boring,” reflected James into the near silence of the cockpit.

  “Boring?” How could anything that could kill you be boring?

  “The revs send a troid and scouts. The scouts and troid want to destroy our defenses and take over the system so they can raise more little revs to take over other systems. We go out and kill them, and they kill some of us, and we destroy the troid. Then we build more ships and train more people, and they send another troid, and we do it again. For us, it’s even more predictable. A few hours of stress and excitement and then more days or months of waiting. All very predictable. All very boring.”

  Trystin tried not to frown. Was James testing him again? “Is there some way we could get out of the pattern?”

  “If you—or I—could find it, I’m sure Headquarters would like to know. We can’t squander resources the way they can in trying to attack their systems, and they don’t seem inclined to stop attacking ours. Somehow, you’d have to shake their faith to its foundations, and I don’t see that happening.” James laughed. “Or we’d have to change, and that’s about as likely as the revs giving up their faith.”

  That wasn’t likely, thought Trystin, not after what he’d seen of the revs on Mara. And what could the Eco-Tech Coalition change? It wasn’t as though the Coalition wanted anything that belonged to the revs.

  Still, he couldn’t think of any other logical response to James’s declaration that war was essentially boring. But he wasn’t sure that he’d call anything where he could get killed boring. The weeks or months of waiting between troids were boring—except for the occasional long-range rev scouts. He shook his head and concentrated on integrating the data and the ops plan.

  Nearly a standard hour passed before the representational screen showed the six cruisers forming a semicircle to face the oncoming troid. In the two center positions were the Tokugawa and the Mishima. The Willis was at the left end, the Muir at the right. At the right middle position was the Izanagi, while the Morrigan held down the left middle position. Twenty fast corvettes, split into five groups of four with overlapping shields, moved ahead of the cruisers and toward the troid. Fifteen revvie scouts comprised five triplets that sped toward the corvettes.

  Abruptly, the revvie triplet groups split—each of the five accelerating into a curving course designed to arch over the oncoming corvettes.

  As they accelerated, the ports on the troid opened, launching, and spewing forth in rapid succession, paraglider after paraglider.

  “Shit …” mumbled Trystin. As usual, by the time the Coalition ships were free, the paragliders would be cold and inert, drifting at high speeds toward Mara, ready within days, or at the most, weeks, to emerge from their cocoons and assault the perimeter lines. Space was just too big to find all of the paragliders, and ships could cruise within kays of one of them and not even spot it because there were no energy emissions, no reflections, and almost no heat radiation.

  Data bursts flared across the net, and Trystin responded, driving the Willis in toward the Tokugawa. He was too busy to shake his head, but that was his feeling, between the troid, the scouts, and the paragliders.

  The central quad of corvettes intercepted the middle revvie triplet, and torps flared. The corvettes’ overlapped shields held; those of the revs did not, and four converted to energy, leaving a single rev, screens pulsing amber, curving outward before vanishing from the screen.

  Trystin noted the location of the vanished rev, but could detect no energy radiation as he eased the Willis closer to the Morrigan, until their screens flicked across each other.

  Two groups of the revvie scouts joined in an attempt to wedge between two other corvette quads, doubling shields and arrowing toward the far side of the cruiser line, straight toward the Muir, which was joining shields with the Izanagi.

  The remaining two r
evvie groups combined and drove toward the Willis and Morrigan. In turn, one of the Coalition corvette groups peeled down to intercept the revs headed toward the Willis.

  The three corvettes remaining from the first attack and the other quad headed to intercept the triplets aimed at the Izanagi and Izanagi.

  Trystin waited, since any torp he fired might well home on the energy emissions of one of the corvettes before it could seek out a scout. Space was so big that without energy-searching or a very precise location, no single torp would likely hit anything.

  Three of the revvie scouts heading toward the Willis veered toward the intercepting corvettes; the other three toward the Morrigan.

  Torps began to flash, and the representational screen was filled with blue- and green-tinged energy dashes. Two scouts flared into energy, as did one corvette, and then another.

  Another scout went up, and then there were two scouts between the corvettes and the Morrigan.

  Trystin calculated, and pulsed his commands across the net. “Fire one! Two!”

  Both torps were aimed at the revvie scout closest to the Morrigan. Two torps from the Morrigan followed.

  Trystin turned the Willis into a head-on-head course, and, once the tubes were reloaded, fired two more torps, this time at the trailing rev, followed by two more salvos of two each.

  Again, the Morrigan lagged in releasing torps.

  Two revvie torps flared against the Morrigan’s shields, but, though they pulsed amber, the shields held.

  Those of the revs did not, and the scouts vanished into dust and energy.

  The troid ship lumbered on, and one of the corvettes, apparently trying to avoid something, veered toward the troid. A flash of energy jabbed outward from the mass of nickel-iron, and the corvette vanished.

  Trystin got the readouts, even as he kept the Willis turning.

  “Modified thruster—they’ve got enough power on the troid to handle that sort of deviltry,” said James.

  A thruster that could deliver enough punch to blow a corvette’s screens at four hundred kays?

  The two groups of cruisers edged forward as the troid inexorably bore down on them.

  “Approaching launch point in one minute ship time,” Trystin announced.

  “Stet.” James pulsed back to Liam. “Regular torps on standby; load and arm the reds.”

  “Loading red one, and two, at this time, Captain. Three and four standing by.”

  On the screen, while the Willis seemed to move toward the large pulsing blip that was the revvie troid, the actual data showed the asteroid ship was the one doing most of the moving.

  “Point five,” Trystin announced.

  “I have the con.”

  “You have it, ser.”

  “Red one is ready.” Liam’s voice was tinny and calm.

  “Ignite red one.”

  “Red one is go,” responded Liam.

  “Red two!”

  “Red two is go.”

  Again, there was the pause for reloading.

  “Red three!”

  “Red three is go!”

  “Red four!”

  “Red four is go.”

  “Changeover to standard torps.”

  “Changing over this time.”

  “Shields!”

  “Shield in place, Captain,” Trystin responded.

  “Desensitize.”

  “Desensitized.”

  Although the ship grav remained, Trystin could sense the stresses as the Willis turned and accelerated away from the troid. The cockpit remained a ventilated coffin, and Trystin focused on the implant’s simulation of the troidbusters’ course line toward the rev.

  “Calculate,” he direct-fed, asking the mainframe for wave-front clearance after the moment of impact had passed.

  “Wave front has passed.” The words flicked across his mental screen.

  Trystin waited for a time before announcing, “Plus three after impact.”

  “Remove desensitizing. You have the con, Lieutenant.”

  “Receiving input. I have the con.”

  The screen showed ten corvettes boxing in the last two revvie scouts near the orbit of Kali—and a faint point of energy inside the screens of the Tokugawa.

  Trystin triggered the impiant—too late.

  EEEEEEEeeeeee …

  The eruption of white energy that had been the Tokugawa blasted across all wavelinks and shivered right through Trystin. For a moment his thoughts froze, and his nerves burned, even down to his fingertips.

  The rev that had dropped off the screen had just stayed put, totally shut down, hoping for a shot from inside a ship’s screens. And he’d gotten it.

  The revvie scout went up in energy at the impact of three torps from the Mishima and the Muir.

  “Guess we’ll have a new marshal.” James shook his head.

  Trystin tried not to frown, instead scanning the screens. No revvie scouts remained, and only warm chunks of fragmented nickel-iron registered on the cruiser’s screens.

  “Sledge team, this is Sledge Control Alternate, return to base. Return to base.”

  Trystin eased the Willis into a thirty-degree turn and backed off the thrusters, automatically checking the accumulators. They were fine, no roughness or hiccuping or roughness in power transfers in either direction. He nodded to himself.

  “That was better,” announced James. “It helps to have a few more ships.”

  “This time.”

  “They’ve got a twenty-year lag,” the captain added.

  “I thought that when I was down on the perimeter, too.”

  “You think they’ll keep escalating the amount of force they throw at us?”

  “One way or another.” Trystin rechecked the accumulators as he spoke. The power flows remained smooth. He eased the thrusters back even farther, since the Willis was the last cruiser in the formation, and there would be an approach bottleneck anyway.

  “Iron Mace two, this is Sledge Control Alternate, interrogative status.”

  Trystin flicked across the maintenance boards. Outside of two marginal sensors, the Willis was in relatively good shape—except for having only eight torps left. Logistics was not letting Liam overstock torps, one Major Sasaki or not, not after the rather hurried and unpleasant departure of Commander Frenkel. The Willis now got everything it rated—immediately—but not one thing extra.

  Trystin pulsed the status information to James. “Green, ser, except for sensors and torps.”

  “Sledge Control, Mace two here. Status is green beta—armament.”

  “Stet, Mace two. Interrogative status upon resupply.”

  “Sledge Control, this is Iron Mace two. Anticipate status will be green upon resupply.”

  “Thank you, two.”

  Trystin looked at the captain.

  “They’re trying to figure out the standby duty rotations. Probably all that went up with the Tokugawa.”

  Trystin wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. Why was it he sweated so much and James, except when piloting in and out of locking status, seemed so cool?

  After waiting for the other cruisers to complete their approaches, the Willis crept in toward outer orbit control, slipping up beside the wall of metal and composite—slowly, slowly, until, with a faint clunk, she melded with the station.

  “We have lock-on. Apply mechanical holdtights and prepare for power changeover.” After magnetizing the holdtights, Trystin called up the shutdown list.

  “Accumulators …”

  “ … discharged.”

  “Fusactor …”

  “ … stand by.”

  “Compensators …”

  “ … open.”

  Trystin cleared his throat of the dust that never quite seemed to leave the ship, no matter how scrupulous the cleanup.

  “Senior tech … power changeover.”

  “Changeover, ser.”

  As the full grav of orbit control pressed Trystin into his couch, he took a deep breath.

  �
�Time to go up to ops and debrief. It should be short this time.”

  Trystin slowly pried himself and his damp shipsuit out of the couch.

  40

  Trystin’s boots whispered on the heavy plastic of the locking tube. He glanced back past the automatic locks that would close if the pressure dropped, but the lower corridor was almost empty, except for a young tech headed back to the Mishima.

  Trystin wiped his forehead, still warm, even though he’d had a cool-down and a shower after his exercise in the outer orbit station’s high-gee workout room. At times, he wasn’t sure whether the downtime of two to six months between troids was better or the busy times when the revs were attacking. He didn’t run the risk of getting killed in downtimes, just being bored. The outer orbit station’s facilities were limited, and strained by the force buildup, and James had a tendency to philosophize too much about the old Shinto times.

  Since Mara inner orbit control hadn’t ever been built to support large numbers of Service craft, most ships had to dock at Parvati outer orbit control, although they were all rotated through Mara orbit station for relief.

  Trystin sniffed. The corridor, like all station corridors, smelled faintly of plastic, metal, and ozone, with an underscent of oil. He paused at the lock as Muriami, wearing the duty stunner, stepped toward him.

  “Lieutenant?” asked Tech Muriami. “The captain was asking for you earlier. He’s in his stateroom.”

  The tech’s careful tone alerted Trystin.

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “No, ser.”

  “Thank you, Muriami.”

  Trystin carried his exercise bag to his stateroom and dumped it next to the console. Pretty soon, he’d have to do more laundry, and that was a pain. He went back into the passageway, closing his door.