The Parafaith War (23 page)

“Not unless you’re an engineer and you’ve locked the ship and frozen the internal comm nets so that no one can play with the power. Even then, I wouldn’t do it. The ECR of even stray boosted ions is enough to scatter you and your armor across a very large system. Besides, what would it tell you?”

Trystin nodded inside the helmet. Dumb question, but sometimes he did ask dumb questions, no matter how hard he tried.

After the preflight, they used the lock back into the access tube and then the ship’s lock, still in full armor. Trystin released the mechanical holdtights, leaving the ship only held in place by the magnetic holdtights.

Once he confirmed that the ship’s pressure was sound, he flicked on the heater switch and cracked his helmet. His breath steamed in the cold air, and he could hear the whine of the ventilators as they forced slowly warming air through the ship.

He unsuited and racked the armor. The commander racked hers in the second rack, the one used by the tech noncom in a standard corvette.

Trystin began the interior preflight by walking to the rear of the corvette and sliding open the lower-deck access panel.

“What happens if the panel jams?” asked the commander.

Trystin looked blank. He hadn’t read or heard anything about jammed access panels. Then he looked at the half-open panel. There were four heavy recessed hex sockets around the door. He peered underneath. “I don’t know, ser. It looks as though you could lift the whole assembly if the hex nuts were removed.”

DuValya smiled. “You get one for quick thinking, but that’s about it. This isn’t something that’s on exams, but it happened to me once. Very embarrassing. I did just what you suggested. I even carry a hex socket.” She pulled the socket wrench from her thigh pouch. “I suggest you get one. Not for this, though. If you have any gravity, the assembly will fall straight down on the converter. If you don’t, it masses too much to move quickly and has a tendency to slide aft under pressure, where it will crimp or slice the supercon cables.” Trystin winced.

“The best thing to do is call for overhaul, because any ship where the hatches are jamming is a mess. Of course, you can’t do that in real life. So, what do you do?” Trystin waited.

“You leave it alone and use your handy hex socket to undo the vent-duct access cover here. It comes out right between the translation engine and the converter for the accumulators.” She pointed to a plate on the deck forward of the access hatch. “Then you slice through the duct tubing-it’s just plastic-and remove the access cover from the back on the other side. An old tech showed me that.” She paused. “Go ahead. Lieutenant.”

Trystin slid the access plate back and down into the grooves, then pulled himself down into the space below. The BCT-10 felt tired, even more tired than the worn simulators. Tired, and bigger, more real. The odor of heated and cooled plastic, of ozone cooked into walls and equipment, and the faintest odor of once-hot machinery and oil seeped into his nostrils. Although the main systems had virtually no moving parts, lots of the subsidiary systems did, like heating and ventilation, or the loaders for the single torp tube.

Trystin glanced around the power center, then began by inspecting the supercon lines, especially noting the line from the accumulator was dust-free.

The commander said nothing, just watched as he methodically went through all the steps of the internal preflight beginning with the aft power section and heading forward until they reached the cockpit.

“Go ahead. Strap in.” Commander duValya stood beside the noncom’s couch, rigged in the training corvettes to combine both override controls and technical boards. Trystin didn’t see how the instructors managed the instructing, the overseeing, and the tech inputs. He’d been having enough trouble just piloting a simulator, and now he had to do it for real.

As Trystin strapped into the pilot’s seat, the commander pulled out a data cube. “This is a typical mission cube, with all the information you’ll need. It’s the same information that you found in the simulator system, and the displays are the same, but, obviously, corvettes can’t be hardwired into the simulator training bay.

“Now the one thing we don’t do until your last training flight is to have you do a real translation. There’s nothing special about translation, except the setup, and if we did many translations in training, we’d never get you trained, not without taking three times as long in elapsed Chevel time.

“In the real world, you may get a mission cube days in advance and have time to study it, or you may get it just before you strap in. We assume the worst-that you’ll never get time.” She handed him the cube. “You have fifteen minutes before separation.”

Trystin slipped the cube into the reader, fumbling a bit in the nearly null-gee of the corvette and wishing his guts were a little more settled.

Then he went through the power-up sequence, step by step, relaxing when the half-gee of ship norm hit and his stomach settled.

After that, he studied the cube … and managed not to groan. In order to save fuel and extend the fusactor’s range, for the entire mission, ship gee was to be at point two gees. He had to take the corvette to the inner Oort belt and find an abandoned rev hulk. The hulk was real, probably placed there for training purposes.

As he studied and began setting up the board and the computations, the commander strapped into the noncom seat. Unlike the ancient aircraft or ships or modern flitters, it made no difference where the commander sat, not since all navigation and observation data were relayed from the sensors and through the ship net.

“Ready, Lieutenant?” “Ready, ser.” “Then let’s get out of here.”

“Beta Control, this is Hard Way ten. Requesting clearance for separation.” Trystin called up the docking module into his mental screen, waiting for clearance to demagnetize the last holdtights.

“Hard Way ten, cleared for separation upon submission of mission profile.”

Trystin grimaced. At least control was giving him a polite reminder. He scrambled through the profile assembly and zapped the profile through the net. “Control, this is Hard Way ten. Mission profile is filed with commnet, key Beta Charlie one zero three one four.” “Hard Way ten, cleared for separation this time.” Trystin felt like wiping his forehead, but didn’t, instead demagnetizing the holdtights, and pulsing the orientation jets to separate the corvette from the docking cradle.

The nav signals poured into the representational screen before him and into the one in his head, creating a doubled image, before he scanned the power flow and the accumulators . Recalling Commander Folsom’s advice, he let the reactor output build rather than pumping power from the accumulators.

Through the direct-feeds, he could feel the BCT-1O lifting/floating/separating from Chevel Beta. He could also feel the dampness of his shipsuit, and he had barely begun.

“Why do we have to do another one of these?” As they walked toward the large lecture room, Jonnie Schicchi turned toward Trystin. “You’re on top of things. Do you know?”

They’ve scheduled four of these ‘Cultural Ethics and Values’ seminars. We’ve only had two so far,” Trystin said, hoping that there weren’t too many more handouts. He barely finished reading the last set, struggling through the selected excerpts from the Book of Toren.

“Both were boring,” added Suzuki Yamidori, brushing short heavy hair back off her forehead, “mandatory or not.”

Ahead of them Major Tekanawe stepped through the lecture-room doorway.

“Even the major has been at every one,” added Schicchi. “It must be even more boring for her.” “She never lets it show,” observed Suzuki. “She doesn’t let much show,” Trystin said. The three took the remaining chairs in the second row and waited. Trystin rubbed his nose, trying not to sneeze. His nose kept itching, reacting to something in the air, or the fine dust that even the most effective filters couldn’t remove from a closed recycling system. The dust was worse in the lecture rooms, or maybe it just felt worse there.

At exactly 1030, a white-haired man, stocky but apparently solid, walked into the room and stopped in the open space before the dozen chairs. He wore a black tunic and trousers, without rank insignia or decorations. “Good morning. I’m Peter Warlock.” He glanced around the lecture room at the dozen or so officers with an amused smile that quickly faded. “Although the seminar is on Cultural Ethics and Values, and even though you have already had two sessions. I’d like to start with my reasons why these seminars are necessary. There are two great commandments in warfare. The first and greatest commandment is to know thyself, and the second is like unto it. Know thine enemy.” Warlock laughed easily. “I apologize for the antique rhetoric. Attribute it to my own antiquity. In these few seminars we have been trying to deal with the second great commandment-knowing the enemy. In the past, all too often people have fought wars through ignorance, through creating simplified stereotypes of their enemies, or even, in some twentieth-and twenty-first century-old-style calendar-conflicts, becoming so involved with trying to understand the enemy that they lost the motivation to fight.”

Trystin tried to stifle a yawn. Like the others, this seminar promised to be long, and interesting as some of the material was, he was so tired that if he sat in a classroom too long he wanted to sleep.

“Too little understanding or too much ill-founded sympathy-it doesn’t matter which-lead to the same problem, and that is reduced motivation and mechanical performance of arduous duties. One sure result of mechanical performance is death.” Warlock paused.

“Now, as an ancient and now-obscure author said. It is far easier to mourn the dead than to protect the living.’ What Levinson meant by this goes beyond the significance of the mere words …” Suzuki looked at Schicchi and rolled her eyes. “…it’s a lot easier to say I’m sorry that a comrade died or a ship got totaled than to roll up your sleeves and work at understanding what makes the revs tick.” “Who’s he to say?” whispered Schicchi. The amused smile returned even as Warlock continued to speak.

“… why do the revs let themselves be sent on their so-called military missions? To be crowded into asteroid ships in cold storage for decades? Why did they pick the Coalition as the target for their so-called missions? In our terms, it doesn’t make sense. But what about their terms? Why do they have virtually no crime on their home planets? And few police officers? A value system exists because it works. How does the Revenant system work? How does it control behavior? Whether you approve or not, you need to understand.” Warlock’s cold black eyes raked across the junior officers, and Trystin felt like shivering, without knowing exactly why. Did he really want to understand? Maybe it was better to adopt Quentar’s philosophy that the only safe rev was a dead rev. Then … Quentar was dead. Trystin bit the inside of his cheek to try to remain alert. Beside him, Schicchi shifted his weight and yawned.

“All right. I want you to put the ship behind that rock-the nickel-iron one. Set it up so that you’re

shielded from EDI detection from two six zero to zero eight zero off the outbound solar prime.” Subcommander Folsom coughed, then added, “Then cut all thrust and attitude adjustments and shut down. The ship should stay in the envelope.”

That left only a ton-degree latitude on each side of the too-small asteroid, and Trystin had to put the corvette behind the asteroid so it stayed, without constant course or attitude adjustments. After nearly six months of practice runs through the Chevel system, that sort of accuracy was supposed to be the norm, but on a full check-ride it was usually harder.

Trystin studied the asteroid-not much bigger than the BCT-15. Of course, that was the idea-to see how precise his piloting really was. Then he calculated the angles off the sides of the irregular rock.

For the training corvette to be shielded, according to the commander’s specs, he’d have to bring it within four meters, sideways. And he’d have to do it gently, because too much thrust from attitude jets would either push the small asteroid away from the ship or result in a collision.

Trystin frowned, then nodded to himself, slowly feeding power to the thrusters and edging the ship around so that it lay barely “behind” the asteroid’s orbit, not that anything but the most sensitive detectors would have shown such motion so far from the sun. Then he edged the corvette forward.

The detectors showed an eight-meter separation as the nose crept past the metallic mass. Trystin gave the outboard jets a puff, the tiniest of pulses, forcing himself to wait for a moment, then followed that with a quick decel pulse, so tiny that the instruments barely showed it. Seven meters of separation … six … five… Another millisecond pulse. Five … four and a half …

Trystin waited, checking his fore and aft clearances, but the ship seemed stationary behind the asteroid… . four and a third …

Trystin decided against any further attempts, although he continued to check the separation, holding at a shade over four meters. The perspiration oozed across his forehead. “We’re shielded, ser.” “We are?” “Yes, ser.”

Trystin could sense the commander’s presence on the net, but he just sat and waited … and waited … and sweated … and waited … … and waited.

“All right. Lieutenant. We could sit here for days, and we wouldn’t move, it looks like. But I don’t like that much nickel-iron that close. So pull us off to a more comfortable distance.”

Again, checking the separation, Trystin eased the corvette to a position a good two hundred meters from the asteroid and checked the sensors. Nothing else registered. Trystin wiped his forehead and waited. Beep’.

He pulled up the warning, tracking it to the EDI and then the representational screen. A series of dashed lines appeared on the representational screen, confirmed by the EDI, but the dashes were spaced far differently from anything he’d seen and bore a reddish overlay. “Incoming ship, ser. I can’t identify the type.” A moment passed.

“That’s a Farhkan, one of their fast couriers, I’d guess,” the subcommander explained. “You haven’t seen that track before?”