The Parafaith War

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Lieutenant Desoll, in the next day or so, we could up your implant and direct-link you to the vette or the troop barge you’re going to be the owner, master, and flunky for, and you’d probably be able to handle just about anything. So why don’t we?”

  “Because just about probably isn’t good enough.”

  “There’s no question about it,” said Commander Torowe. “As far back as decent military training goes, the records indicate that a disproportionate amount of time has been spent training officers in control of vehicles on how to handle situations that happen one percent of the time—or less. Some non-Service efficiency experts still occasionally suggest that such devotion to rarity is the height of cost-inefficiency—unless an emergency occurs on the ship they’re taking.” He smiled. “The problem with emergencies is that most of the time you lose all or part of your normal operating systems, and that’s one reason why we just don’t turn you into part of the machinery—the revvie insults notwithstanding.

  “And, by the way, you’ll also be required to use hard-copy manuals for systems, in addition to on-line tutorials. Do you have any idea why, Lieutenant Schicchi?”

  “No, ser.”

  “Think about it, Lieutenant. How can you figure out how to repair the power system if the information you need can only be accessed through a system powered by the ship and you don’t have power, which was the problem to begin with?”

  “Oh … .”

  “Think! You all need to think more.” Torowe shook his head sadly. “After this indoctrination, you won’t see me for a long time. You’d better hope you don’t.” He offered a slow smile. “Now …” He looked at the five again. “We’re going to disable your implants—just temporarily—and send you back to school. You will learn everything you need to learn to pilot without any on-line assistance. You won’t become pilot officers unless you can. Major Tekanawe, can you tell me why?”

  “Implants or linkages fail under some conditions, and unboosted ability may be necessary to complete a flight or mission,” Ciri Tekanawe answered.

  “That’s the correct long answer. The short answer is that it might save your ass. You’re going to have a class in estimation. Why? With calculators and implants, you can get precise answers. Fine. What’s the square of sixteen? Can you tell me without your implant? How about the square of that?” Torowe’s finger pointed at Lieutenant Aloysia.

  “Sixty-five thousand five hundred thirty-six, but I doubt I could do it in my head.”

  “No, but you’d better be able to estimate the general magnitude in less than a second, because that may be all you’ll have.” The commander turned back to Trystin. “Lieutenant Desoll, try to imagine this. You have the kind of static in your head that’s worse than direct-feed from a badlands storm—yes, I’ve been on the Maran perimeter line—and your implant is down. You have a spread of torps flaring at you, and you have no plots and no input except the visuals on a flat screen. And you have less than a minute to decide. Now what?”

  Trystin winced.

  “I think you might have the vaguest idea of what faces you. Maybe.” He paused. “Then again, maybe not. I said you had a minute to decide, but I didn’t tell you that if you guess—or calculate—wrong, you’ll watch disaster coming for a good stan, and you may not die until your emergency life support blows, and that could be a long time.”

  The commander straightened. “Your first stop is medical for your implant deactivation. That’s right. No reflex boosts, and no cheating by overhearing what you should have gotten the first time. Medical’s in C fifty. After deactivation, report back here, and your packets will be waiting with your schedules for classes and simulators. I won’t be.” He turned and walked out of the room.

  Trystin nodded. No repetitions of directions or instructions. No redundancy. You either got it, or you didn’t. He stood and followed Major Tekanawe out the doorway and back toward the ramps to the lower levels.

  The medical door was marked with the antique red cross.

  “Ah … the latest crop of lost ones …” Trystin picked up the whisper from the tech standing behind the console.

  “Major, you’re first. Lieutenant, take a seat, and you’ll be next.”

  Trystin sat in the battered black seat, and watched as the major walked through an archway and out of sight around a comer. The three other lieutenants slipped into the room and sat, following the age-old dictum of letting the senior and the brave face unfriendly fire first.

  Shortly, a somber-faced Major Tekanawe walked back through the archway.

  “Lieutenant?”

  Trystin stood and followed the woman tech down the short corridor and into a room with little more than what looked to be a dental chair in it.

  “Lieutenant, sit down right here.” The tech gestured to the chair.

  As he slipped into the chair, Trystin looked up at the assembly of electronics that vaguely resembled a folded-back helmet.

  “Don’t worry, ser. It only looks like a torture device. It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t hurt at all.”

  The tech lowered the device and slipped the sections down and around Trystin’s head, fitting the smooth plastic along Trystin’s jawline and around his ears until only his lower forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth remained uncovered. The plastic of the long chair felt clammy against his back.

  The tech touched several keys on the console but said nothing aloud.

  “Can you hear this through your implant?” The words/sounds rolled through Trystin’s implant so loudly that he winced.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re one of the sensitive ones—or you got some high-class work there.”

  The tech touched another key, but Trystin heard or felt nothing.

  “That’s good. No harmonics there.”

  “Let’s try this … .”

  Trystin almost bolted through the apparatus when the white noise knifed through him.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. You’re definitely a sensitive. Pluses and minuses there. This should do it.”

  Trystin shivered as his implant went dead—leaving him completely alone for the first time in years. Even the background static he’d learned to tune out was gone. His skull was indeed silent, and he would be unable to communicate except by impossibly slow words or by physically manipulating console dials, switches, studs, and whatever.

  “That’s it.” The tech began to peel back the equipment.

  He stood slowly and walked out of the medical section, feeling somehow off balance, and somehow as if everything were designed for exactly that purpose.

  20

  “What is this crap?” asked Jonnie Schicchi as the four officers walked toward the lecture room. Trystin shrugged. “You know as much as I do. We’re scheduled for four of these ‘Cultural Ethics and Values’ seminars.”

  “They’re mandatory,” added Lieutenant Aloysia, bobbing her head.

  “Isn’t everything?” Suzuki Yamidori bestowed a smile on Constanzia Aloysia, who ignored it.

  The four were almost the first ones there, and Trystin took the opportunity to sit as far back as he could. The three others took the three chairs in the second row next to him. The room smelled dusty, and Trystin rubbed his nose. He didn’t really want to sneeze.

  Kkhccheww! Suzuki did sneeze. “Sorry.”

  “My nose itches, too,” admitted Schicchi.

  Trystin just watched as other student pilot officers straggled in.

  At 1028, a dark-haired man, slender and wearing dress greens and a commander’s insignia on one side of his collar and a cross and a crossed olive branch as the other collar insignia, stepped into the room and nodded. He set a stack of papers on the table and said quietly, “Handouts for later.”

  “Frigging ethicist …” mumbled Schicchi.

  “A chaplain by any other name,” answered Yamidori in a low voice.

  The chaplain turned to the dozen-odd officers. “Good morning. I’m Commander Matsugi, and I’m the first lecturer in your series of semin
ars on Cultural Ethics and Values.” His dark eyes traversed the room. “This seminar has been called boring. Dull, even. There’s another term for it. Call it necessary. No, you won’t be tested, not here anyway.”

  Several sets of lungs exhaled.

  “I won’t attempt to insist that this will save your life or your career.” A grim smile played across Matsugi’s face. “And I don’t have the marshal’s power or charisma. So you will have to bear with me.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “The Revenants of the Prophet are the declared enemy of the Coalition, but what raised that enmity? That enmity arises from fundamental cultural differences, and those differences arise from religion, from belief systems dating to antiquity … even from basic economic precepts … and from the Coalition’s emphasis on rationality. Rationality is the enemy of any closed faith. What do I mean by a closed faith? One that relies on a dogma that cannot be questioned without the threat of death or exile. The Revenants are closed to what you might call outside truths, and their culture is so stable internally that change from within is highly unlikely. I’ll put it in terms that are simple. Minds, like ancient parachutes, function better when open, but, like fists, they strike harder when closed … call that a cultural parallel …”

  Trystin stifled a yawn, trying to keep his eyes open. Still, he kept missing words, even though what the chaplain said seemed to make sense. But he was so damned tired, and Matsugi’s voice seemed to drone on and on.

  Crack!

  Trystin jerked awake with the sound of the impact, gazing at the front row where one lieutenant struggled into his seat, red-faced, apparently so asleep that he had toppled right onto the floor.

  “ … trouble for Herrintin …”

  “ … wait til Folsom finds out …”

  Trystin swallowed another yawn.

  “I am glad to see you were not hurt, Lieutenant,” the chaplain added. “I would hate to obtain the reputation for injurious seminars.”

  Faint laughter ran through the officers.

  “Now … as I was discussing … the fundamental differences in beliefs between the Revenants of the Prophet and most beliefs within the Coalition lie in two areas. First, the Revenants believe, deeply, in a single set of revealed truths, as expounded by Toren, the Prophet of God, while few belief systems within the Coalition are so rigid as to exclude all possibility of entertaining other truths. Exclusivity is one factor … the second is the participation of a revealed God in the workings of life and the universe … this dates back to Judaism—that’s the forerunner of the old Christian religions that were the forerunners of both Mahmetism and Deseretism, which in turn were the forerunners of neo-Mahmetism and the Prophet—for those of you into history …”

  The commander wiped his forehead. “The participation of God. Even Christianity, which arose from Judaism, believed in a god who cared, who gave his son up to save those who believed … .”

  Trystin stifled a yawn and forced himself to concentrate. Maybe he should read some of the handouts.

  “ … Jesus of Nazareth walked into the Temple of the old Jews, which had taken forty-six years to build, and said that, if the Jews razed it, he would rebuild it in three days … according to old scriptures, he really referred to the temple of his body, which, in the Christian tradition, God resurrected in three days … and on three occasions after that he showed himself to his disciples.

  “Here too God descended to the level of daily living, involving himself. This long tradition of deistic involvement did not start with the fusion of the neo-Mahmets—the so-called white Muslims—and the followers of the Prophet into the Revenant culture. Rather the Revenants affirm and believe that tradition. A daily living God is totally real to them … it permeates their entire culture and value system … .”

  Idly, Trystin wondered how the Revenants would react if some modern-day prophet actually appeared and created miracles. Beside Trystin, Jonnie Schicchi shifted his weight and yawned. Constanzia Aloysia took a long and slow deep breath.

  Commander Matsugi droned on, and Trystin tried to concentrate.

  21

  The warning light on the fusactor systems remained amber, signifying that power output was less than seventy percent. Running at less than ten percent, with all the telltales red, the accumulators were close to burning out.

  The smell of ozone and worn equipment seemed to press in on Trystin, but he checked his closure against the ambient space-dust density, breathing a sigh of relief to learn that he could initiate translation, even as his fingers toggled the sequence.

  “Translation power-up beginning. Four minutes to translation.”

  The representational screen flashed red momentarily, and Trystin glanced from the translation plot to the EDI where the tracks from the revvie system patroller were wider, indicating more power output and a higher closing speed. An amber circle dropped over the center point in the screen—representing the damaged corvette Trystin was trying to get out of the revvie system—and a single ping issued from the screen speaker.

  “Shit …” he mumbled. The rev had a lock-on. Trystin lost a few instants trying to coax an answer from his dead implant before his fingers flickered across the console. Everything seemed to take so long manually.

  Three minutes and ten seconds until the translation systems were on-line and synchronized. System power output was at sixty-five percent and dropping. Full shields would drop the available power level below the fifty-five percent required for translation. The revvie patroller was less than fifty thousand kays away—only a fraction of a lightsecond—and closing, and semitranslation torps ran just below light speed.

  In the half-gravity of the cockpit, Trystin’s stomach was rising into his throat. He pulsed the shields, then toggled them off as the available power dropped to twenty percent. As he watched, the available power level began to climb back … twenty-five percent … thirty-five percent … fortyfive percent … forty-eight percent … .

  “Present free power flow insufficient for translation,” the main console scripted. “Interrogative delay of translation initiation?”

  He ignored the question and wiped his forehead, conscious that the small cockpit smelled of stressed human as well as stressed equipment. Not only was his forehead damp, but his whole body was damp. What could he do?

  He cut the power to the artificial gravity, and felt his body both rise against the straps and be pressed ever so slightly against the pilot’s couch from the continuing acceleration of the in-system thrusters. His guts rose farther up into his throat in the near null-gee.

  “Two minutes to translation.” The mechanical words scripted across the console in front of Trystin.

  The representational screen flashed red, and a series of dotted pink lines flared toward the screen center—toward Trystin.

  Bzzzz! Bzzzz! The power warning light flashed. “Power below fifty-five percent,” scripted across the console.

  Trystiri’s eyes flicked between the screens and the power meter in the corner of the console, and to the digital clock readings, as he tried to calculate his options. Finally, he toggled off the environmental systems, then watched until the power output inched over fifty-five percent. Then he flicked the guard off the emergency translation stud and slammed it down.

  The cockpit flared white, then black, before the entire board powered down with a dull whining sound. The cockpit turned into inert plastic, metal, and electronics, lit only by the faint red emergency lights.

  “Systems Inoperative!” The red words flashed across the top of the screens perhaps three times before they too died in the darkness, burned out by the back-power surge created by translation without accumulators.

  Trystin wiped his forehead, trying not to shake his head. What else could he have done? Dying a slow death in the cold without power or getting incinerated instantly—what a choice. He sighed.

  The door at the back of the cockpit opened.

  “You couldn’t do a damned thing, Lieutenant. Not at
the end. Once you got to the point where the torps had you bracketed with no accumulators and less than enough power for both shields and a translation, you were dead one way or the other. A blind early jump was the best option you had, but you’d still probably end up freezing somewhere in an outer orbit off some system without even enough juice to call for help and not enough heat to survive even if you were heard.” Subcommander Folsom shrugged. “Unstrap. We’ll go to briefing room B.” The slender officer disappeared, leaving the hatch open and Trystin alone in the simulator.

  Trystin unbelted and slipped out of the worn pilot’s couch. Then he eased his gear bag from the locker beside the empty noncom’s couch. After ducking through the hatch and stepping across the gap from the simulator to the fixed platform, he slowly climbed down the ladder to the gray rock floor of the simulator bay.

  By the console stood now-Major Freyer and her instructor, a subcommander Trystin did not recognize who was talking to the simulator tech.

  “How did it go, Lieutenant?” asked Ulteena Freyer.

  Trystin wiped his forehead. “I froze to death in deep space … slowly.”

  “Endgaming.” She nodded.

  Trystin frowned and paused.

  “It’s a old chess term—the game, you know. Look it up. If one player can think a move farther ahead than the other, then he can force the less perceptive player into making apparently logical moves that lead to a trap.” She glanced toward the commander.

  “Head on up, Major.”

  She smiled briefly at Trystin and lifted her gear bag. “Hold tight, Trystin.”

  Trystin nodded back at her and then walked slowly out of the bay and into the corridor off which were the seemingly endless small debriefing rooms. Kind as she was, why did Ulteena always act so superior? He snorted. Probably because she was. Back on Mara, she had figured out how to defeat tanks before they arrived. He hadn’t even figured that the revs might have tanks.