The Persians took Zoroastrianism with them into space, much like American Christianity and Israeli Judaism. It’s simply there, wherever you look. Printed on money, built in the hearts of their colonies, heard in the music, and everything else that makes a culture. Nobody is forced to believe anything. Religious liberty is the bedrock of their constitution after all. No surprise after the Jihad. But Zoroastrianism is just part of life in the Persian worlds.
Defiance is the outer planet in the Independence system. It’s a very appropriate name. A tiny little toxic, corrosive ice ball with only trace atmosphere, it takes a particularly defiant individual to live there. We probably never would have bothered with the place if it weren’t full of valuable minerals and if her low gravity hadn’t made it easy to mine. But those factors make Defiance a surprisingly attractive world. For certain definitions of the term.
There were two main winners in the Revolutionary War. The Colonies of course. The French as well. They weakened the British Empire by helping tear the Colonies away. Unfortunately, a century of on and off war with the British had strained the French economy to the breaking point. My family in Normandy had done well for themselves, but the rest of the nation was troubled. Those troubles soon rolled into a full-scale Revolution that changed everything again.
Most Persians follow Zoroastrianism ever since the Islamic Jihad. It was a big religion native to the area back before the original Islamic conquest, and it’s made a big comeback. Looking from the outside, the faith seems fairly simple. Creator God that’s good, beware that nasty guy that wants to destroy everything, and the best way to beat him is doing good onto others. Seems a bit familiar to me. I’m rather in favor of starting out by being nice to others.
Pre-space scientists would have considered our colonization of Independence to be a remote possibility. You see, Tau Aurigae is a G8 III, a yellow star whose surface is cooler than Earth’s sun. But she is a giant star, one that reached the end of her previous life cycle long ago, expanded, and presumable burned her habitable planets away. But when Independence Seven arrived in system, she found three planets orbiting the star. One of them was a paradise.
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