The Parafaith War (32 page)

the oncoming torps. “Fire one! Fire two!”

He waited only until the tubes were reloaded. “Fire three Fire four!” Then the shields went full up, and he waited, watching,

without desensitizing for a moment. “Control, Weapons. Loader on tube two is jammed.

Tube one will fire at twice normal rate.” “Stet, Weapons.” More sweat poured down Trystin’s

face, and he wiped the dampness away from his eyes.

After another moment, Trystin dropped the shields momentarily-firing through shields was usually fatal. “Fire one!” He waited. “Fire two!” He raised the shields - . . and waited, conscious that the

hiccuping from the accumulators was becoming a stutter. The accumulators began to grab for power, and Trystin

dropped them off-line. The acceleration dropped to point seven, all the fusactors could maintain. Trystin held his breath, releasing it as two and then four

torps flared past the Willis. The right rev flared into energy. Dropping shields, Trystin fired another torp, hoping

another wouldn’t be necessary. It wasn’t. After a moment, he wiped his forehead. “Rather effective. Lieutenant.” Trystin wiped his forehead again. His shipsuit was

soaked. “Thank you, ser.”

“Clear to lift restraints,” the captain announced. Trystin flushed. That was something he always forgot. Liam Akibono stood in the cockpit hatch. He had a

bruise on his forehead. “Sorry,” Trystin apologized, with a quick look at the

weapons officer. His senses went back to the screens, but

the system seemed clear. From what he could tell, only two

corvettes, the Mishima, and the Willis were left from the

original Coalition strike force. “Don’t be. I’d rather be battered than dead.” Liam looked at the captain. “The number one new loader needs a lot of work. The second one might last another mission. Maybe.”

“There’s another set at the station. See if you can get them installed. The company’s getting its field test.” James grinned wryly. “We have a few other repairs to take care of. So we’re not going anywhere soon.”

The weapons officer glanced at the screens. “Those revs are crazy. Head-to-head?”

Crazy? Trystin thought not, but offered nothing, knowing James was watching.

“I don’t think so, Liam,” said James. “One could almost respect them for doing the honorable thing.”

Trystin shivered. Honor was cold comfort, sometimes, and the captain’s words bothered him. So did the red telltales. “Captain, accumulators are shot. So are the right rear sensors.” He wondered how and when that had happened. “Take us home. Lieutenant.” “Yes, ser.”

“If we have a samovar left, Keiko, could you send someone up with some tea?”

“It might take a moment, ser, while we put it back together.”

Running on fifty-percent power, with no accumulators, the Willis limped back toward Parvati outer orbit control.

James sipped green tea, hair unmussed, apparently unruffled.

Trystin also sipped tea, but his hair stood on end, and he smelled like he’d been working out on the high-gee treadmill for days. He tried not to shiver in the damp shipsuit, after he finally docked the Willis firmly in place at lock epsilon four,

He wiped his forehead again. He was still sweating more than an hour after the last torp had fired.

“Let’s get to the debriefing. Lieutenant. After that, I’ll be gone for a while,” announced James. “You did file that last report on the accumulators, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ser. I’ve filed one after every mission. Isuki doesn’t ever want to see my face again.” “Good.” James offered a smile, not the boyish one. Trystin raised his eyebrows.

“After the ops debriefing, I’ll be seeing Senior Marshal Kovalik. So I might be a while. You need to get back here and relieve Liam. He’ll have to work fast to get the loaders replaced and to get us resupplied.”

“Yes, ser.” Trystin had an idea what Major James Sasaki was about to do with the commander of the outer orbit control station, and he was just as glad he wasn’t going to be around. Commander Frenkel might not be around much longer, either.

The torp loaders were another question. Trystin wondered what else lay hidden on the Willis.

“… As cultures advance in knowledge and power, the conflict between reason and faith becomes apparently greater. Not only have people attained through technology the powers of old gods to cast thunderbolts or to heal or to destroy, but they have exercised those powers, and they know that divinity is not required. They can determine that sufficient power determines destiny. .

“The problem with technology is that it rewards the able while also empowering those who are less able. A man who cannot fathom a computer or an infonet can destroy those who can, and who have been rewarded for their skills.

“Yet, if each individual obtains and wields the power within his or her scope, few individuals will survive. By placing power in a greater being, a deity, in some force. greater than the individual, or even into a belief that the community is greater than the individual, an individual is expressing a faith in the need for an entity greater than mere personal ambition or appetite. That faith … allows the individual to refrain from exercising power, yet it also places such an individual at the mercy of those without such faith.

“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

“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 crosschecking 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 highspeed 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 lzanagi, 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 lzanagi.

The remaining two revvie 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 Muir and lzanagi.

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!”