"Archprelate Felicity," the Knight protested, "we cannot simply seize this fleet!"
Felicity Springs sighed. The Knight's training was solid but his grasp of politics limited. He was not wrong, but he was also very wrong.
"Knight Perseverance, heed my judgment and come to my aid."
Perseverance inclined her shaved head. Unlike many warriors, she took the ancient concept of the warrior-monk extremely seriously. Far too seriously for my comfort, if one spoke the truth in private, she mused to herself.
"We must seize this fleet. I recognize that the Pathers are not wholly wrong. And some within our Church believe that we must act in coordination with them if possible. This creates the impression that the Path is an arm of disposable fanatics taking orders directly from the Church, while we hide behind plausible deniability."
The Knight blustered, but the Archprelate motioned her to silence.
"That the leading Pathers, in point of fact, cooperate as much with the Hegemony as with some of our more-easily-swayed prelates and knights means nothing. Perception matters, Knight. And here, what do we have? A half-dozen tankers, not just tankers, but mega-tankers, butchered and armed for the sole purpose of erasing life from the Sector. If we return these to Chalcedon, what will those who do not understand the Faith say about Holy Church? That we support plebicide? This fleet was to be sent against a world which was half famers. Can we condone the murder of "
"Of course we don't," Perseverance snorted. "Our existence is the fight against precisely that, quickly in a fleet, or slowly in the replacement of humans with... steel-and-hydrocarbon algorithms."
"Precisely, Knight," Felicity nodded, her gown rustling a little. "Do you remember the so-called 'Luddic Crisis' The Upstart faced when he began building his serious of badly-run farmworlds?"
Perseverance nodded.
"You may not be aware that The Upstart offered us a planet-killer found far beyond the Core. We turned him down, of course. But in all seriously, how does this fleet differ from the horror of a planet-killer weapon?"
"A PK," the Knight murmurred, astounded. "Better to have thrown it into a black hole. Why would The Upstart even think we would want possession of such a thing?"
"We are," Felicity insisted, "in possession of such a thing now. And we must use it in a way which is publicly superior in every way to what the Pathers intended."
Perseverance nodded her head in obedience. "How?"
"I have something in mind, good Knight. The Church can adapt itself to new times, within moral and ethical limits. And the so-called 'Luddic Crisis' sounded in my ears like a great gong."
"How so, archprelate?"
"Many of our flock desire greater freedoms than we can offer them. And they are not inherently wrong to desire this. Much of the legal construct of our Church's societies were made to survive the barbarism of the Collapse and the struggles of the AI wars. In better times, might not the complex web of labor quotas and guilds loosen a bit?"
"And enter Mammon," the Knight snorted.
"It is not prosperity which is Mammon," Felicity Springs countered, "but the enslavement to profit which is Mammon. You are a Knight of Ludd. You have no children, nor will until your term of service ends, if it does. Without children, Moloch wins - we are replaced by Soulless Algorithm, for all eternity."
The Knight nodded slowly. "You are saying I am professionally inclined to forget the actual day to day needs of those I forget, because of the habits I don in performing my role. But you're too polite to say it to my face."
"Nor do I need to," she smiled. "You are familiar with ship design. Aid me."
"How?"
"These large and pointless missiles, they can be removed, as can a large amount of the internal fuel reservoirs, correct?" Felicity struggled to make the screen show what she wanted, but fortunately, Perseverance was far more adept with the controls.
"Yes, we can strip the arms fairly easily in fact, though some lightweight defensive turrets are always advisable, perhaps on the pylons for greatest firing angles. What would you have placed inside the internal void, then, if the fueling were to be halved? Hopefully not large bastions of armament. We have actual warships we can field." Perseverance looked at the Prometheus schematic with revulsion and disdain.
"I want to build in passenger compartments the likes of which the Sector has never seen. Surveying equipment and dedicated equipment bays for stripping down ruins and repurposing those portions which are sanctifiable, burning those deemed unholy."
The Knight squinted at her, nodding. "I think I see where you're going here. A flagship capital has a crew of four thousand, and can hold half that again if need be. And that manning weapons stations. You want a fairly minimal crew complement, but enough empty space... on an Invictus, if I had reason to do so, I could make special, permanent modifications to bring the maximum crew and passenger complement up to ten thousand. Nobody has ever made a Capital-class transport before. Not since the Collapse at least. But I think we could get that volume of passengers, if some of them are friendly, or at least, stoic."
"We will have to lose most of the fuel to do so, I imagine," the Archprelate mused.
"Without doubt," Perseverance nodded. "But in this case the Pathers have already done our work for us, chopping fuel capacity by two-thirds to make room for all that weaponry. So you wish to house people on these ships. Why?"
"I wish to make cathedrals in space," Felicity intoned. "Cathedrals which can find the sacred living worlds of the Collapsed Sector and make them whole again. Cathedrals which, should they find themselves with barren, awful worlds, have the mass to let people plant a world of greenhouses and labor so that we bring life at least to the insides of said worlds, if not the surface."
"You want an escape hatch for dissidents," the Knight countered.
"I want to issue privileges for those willing and able to risk all, in order to bring life to where no life survives now... with enough material support on board to guarantee at least a couple of choices of profession for those taking such risks. After all, is that not our holy purpose, Knight? To preserve life wherever it is found, and to protect it from the encroachments of Mammon and Moloch both?"
Perseverance wried her mouth, amused. "and to announce to the Sector that it's not just The Upstart who can build worlds, rather than little battle stations inhabited only by half-starved raiders and fanatics?"
"Why, Knight," the archprelate purred. "I would never think to stoop so low as to compare Holy Church to one serial entrepreneur with an itchy trigger-finger and highly-questionable morals. We shall, in fact," she said, looking over the half-dozen hulking orange blasphemies at the dock, "build six such worlds. And soon, before Cotton does something to further humiliate the Faithful in the eyes of the Sector."