“You do this by hand?” one of them asked me, his posture surprised.
“Not ideally, no,” I said. “We have machines to do this work. Though I can’t imagine you have a laundromat onboard, do you?”
“Describe this laundromat,” they said in unison.
Which required me to explain how an electric washer and dryer worked: the filling with water, the injection of the soap, the wash cycle, the rinse cycle, drying, and fabric softener.
“Why softener?” one of them asked.
“Without it, the dried material is rough to the touch, and it does not smell so good.”
“Can you provide us with examples of these things?”
“I am afraid I can’t. Look, don’t the mantes ever use fabric for anything?”
“For some applications, yes.”
“Then there must be some way you keep such fabric clean.”
“Fabric is regarded as disposable,” one of them said. “We do not generally clean it.”
I put my head down and puffed my cheeks out with frustration.
It was going to be a long trip.
CHAPTER 44
Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.
THE ASSAULT CARRIER’S DESCENT DURING LCX HADN’T DONE AN actual combat landing justice. The bench to which I was strapped was rattling so hard, I felt like it was going to shake my teeth out of my head. Despite the relative cushioning provided by my armor suit—new, this time, and built to the latest specs. Lighter. Supposedly tougher too.
Chaplain Thomas was in the same state next to me: rattled to distraction.
All of us on the troop deck bucked and swayed in unison as the carrier made its way pell-mell down through the atmosphere of the world we were about to take from the enemy.
My old friend nausea lurked in the center of my stomach as the rumbling and jerking of the ship threatened to turn into a full-blown carnival ride of sideways-up, downwise-side, upways-down.
I saw the looks on the faces of the marines as they hunched with their rifles and other weapons—ready to go the second the loadmaster gave the signal. Unlike during LCX, we also had tanks and mobile artillery nestled in our belly. They’d deploy almost the instant we hit the ground—growling out onto the planet’s surface, and hosing down any immediate mantis threats. With automatic cannon fire and missiles.
Outside, somewhere in the stratosphere, aerospace fighters were also going in hot—their threat sensors now coming on-line after the short black-out period caused by reentry. If there were mantis fighters in the air waiting to pounce on the assault carrier, our fighters were ready and prepared to ruin the mantes’ day.
Suddenly the assault carrier crashed and shook. Flashing orange alarm lights told us something had gone very wrong.
“Missile hit,” I heard someone say over the wireless.
BOOM! . . . BOOOOOOM!
Two more, in relatively rapid succession. How effective was the assault carrier’s armor, anyway? I suddenly realized we were all going to find out. For better, or for worse.
Slowly, the troop deck began to spin. Or, rather, I could feel that the assault carrier was revolving over onto its back—not a prescribed flight profile for the big, wallowing ship in anybody’s anti-aircraft evasion manual.
Those few marines who’d been keeping straight faces finally broke and showed their fear. Our assault carrier was clearly in trouble, and we were nowhere close enough to the ground yet to feel like we’d made it to relative safety.
BOOOOOOOOM! Unnggggkkkkktttktktkttttt!!
“Shit,” I heard Chaplain Thomas say.
The man usually worked very hard not to curse. That he’d cursed told me all I needed to know about the situation, as the sounds of ripping and tearing metal became more pronounced. For an insane instant, I recalled clearly that the prelaunch briefing had said we’d be expecting moderate resistance.
So much for that.
The prelaunch briefing had also spent far more time dwelling on perimeter security and establishing ground-based hardened defensive positions—after we landed—than it did on what to do in case the assault carrier we were riding in was being shot to pieces right beneath our feet.
We had no parachutes. Would not have tried them, even if we did. So far as we knew the assault carrier was still moving at supersonic speed high over the alien planet’s desertlike terrain. Anyone fool enough to bail out in those conditions was signing his own death certificate, regardless of how tough the new armor suits happened to be.
Suddenly the carrier righted itself—to our relief—but then the bottom dropped out of our stomachs as we felt ourselves begin to fall precipitously.
“BRACE FOR IMPACT! BRACE FOR IMPACT!” the loadmaster began to yell on the company-wide wireless.
There was little to do but cringe and hope. Many seconds ticked by in virtual free-fall. When the crash came, it came as a whirling, end-over-end chaos of benches coming loose from the troop deck and whole squads of marines and support personnel being hurled across my field of view like rag dolls.
The collision damping system suddenly flooded the entire deck with massive jets of thick foam that began to solidify the moment it touched air. I felt myself scream as I rolled, and rolled, and rolled, and kept rolling. Until finally, I was resting upside down, my vision entirely blocked out and the company wireless hissing vacantly.
Were we down? Had we made it?
I couldn’t tell. For a long time, the world around me was nothing but stiffened crash foam. Until suddenly the wireless came alive again—helmet to helmet this time, with no assistance from the shipboard system.
Things were grim. Only one hundred and five people survived, out of almost three hundred on my assault carrier. This included Chaplain Thomas, though the poor man was busted up something awful. After clawing my way out of the collision foam, I had to search far and wide across the impact zone to find him. The carrier had burst apart, its engines, flight decks, and other vital parts scattering to the wind. How or why the reactors hadn’t gone up was a mystery, but I wagered we didn’t have much time. So I frantically searched for survivors—many of whom were wounded—helping them to walk, or limp, or even be dragged, over to a far hill. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to offer at least some protection from the potential blast, if or when the reactors finally melted down.
In the sky overhead, it was obvious that we—the Fleet—were getting our asses kicked. Mantis fighters zipped lithely to and fro, seemingly impervious to the missiles spat at them by the few Earth fighters that still prowled the air. Occasionally one of those Earth fighters burst in a white fireball, followed by a thunderous report. And then silence.
Our impact zone was in a wide valley dominated by several rough-rock bluffs trailing off towards what seemed to be our east. It was difficult to tell, given the foreign sun’s position overhead. We’d come in about midday, and wouldn’t know true directions until much later. Assuming we lasted.
The few officers and NCOs who could stand and give orders arranged us into a hasty defensive perimeter—with the wounded in the center—while they tried to use their suit wireless to contact anyone in orbit.
Fruitless.
I gazed up into the thin air and wondered if there was anyone left in orbit to talk to? If my introduction to this charming little planet had gone badly, who was to say things hadn’t been as bad—or worse—for the big capital ships in space?
Such thoughts depressed me as I held Chaplain Thomas’s hand and tried to keep him from slipping into a coma. Our helmets were off. The air here had oxygen. If we were scared of germs, we figured it best to chance the native atmosphere—lest we rapidly deplete our own. I had Chaplain Thomas propped against a rock, at a more or less forty-five-degree angle, his legs limp from the spinal injury he’d suffered in the crash.
“Hell of way to join the fight,” he said in a small, pained voice as I tried to give him water from his suit’s hydration tube. He ignored the tube and simply stared past me—through me?—out to where th
e alien sky met the alien earth at a lumpy horizon.
“What have we got left?” the chaplain asked.
“Not much, sir,” I said. “Armor assets have been totally obliterated. We’ve got rifles, and have a fair bit of ammo. But we’re nowhere close to the planned objective—hell, we’re not even sure we’re on the same continent as the planned objective. No sign of mantis ground patrols, yet. But they’ve got fighters all over the air. And we can’t reach orbital for a situational analysis, nor call for reinforcement or an evac.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “When the carrier came apart around us, I knew we’d come to this world woefully unprepared. No doubt the enemy fortified themselves in anticipation of our arrival. I just hope the assault missions elsewhere on this planet—on any of the other planets—are going better than ours.”
He coughed a bit, then grimaced.
“Broken ribs,” he guessed.
I didn’t have the heart to second-guess him. All of our medics were gone. Pulverized and strewn over the impact site like toy soldiers tossed from a car that’s rolled several times on the interstate. I suddenly and intensely regretted my decision to join the Fleet. Chaplain Thomas must have read my facial expression.
“God’s will,” he said.
“What, sir?” I asked.
“God’s will, Harrison. Try to look at it as God’s will—His plan for all of us.”
“This is part of God’s plan?” I said, half-incredulous.
“Everything is part of God’s plan,” he said.
“Sir, I mean no disrespect, but you have to be out of your mind to think that any of this is part of anybody’s plan, except for maybe the mantes. Their plan appears to have worked out quite well. We came here to kick them in the teeth, and instead it seems they’re quite nicely effing us in the ass, sir. If there is a God, then His attention is focused very, very far away from here.”
“Faith, Harry,” he said to me, then began coughing and hacking.
I decided not to vent my anger any further, as his attempts to remonstrate me were simply causing him pain. I stood up from where the chaplain lay, and walked over to where some technicians from the assault carrier’s crew were trying to use a big hunk of a control panel and a jury-rigged battery connection, to talk to anyone in our vicinity.
“Nothing?” I said.
One of the specialists looked up at me and shook her head.
“Figures,” I said. “We’re blind. Probably, Fleet doesn’t even know where we are. I am surprised those mantis fighters we’ve been seeing haven’t come down on us.”
“The day is young,” said a different woman—older, with plain, stern features. Her chevrons indicated a platoon sergeant.
“Forget the wireless,” she said to the techs. “We’ve got to scrounge up an anti-air defense.”
“With what, Sergeant?” one of the techs asked.
“Anything you can salvage. There were a lot of missiles in that assault carrier, and more missiles on some of the tanks. Not all of them have been destroyed. I’m taking a team back to the crash site to look for hardware that we can salvage. Get ready to move in two mikes. You too, church-boy.”
“But I’ve got to—”
“You’re a soldier first, and there’s nothing you can do for Chaplain Tom right now. We need everybody who’s not pulling security to get on salvage detail. That’s an order.”
I did a yessergeant and went to tell the chaplain the plan. Unfortunately he’d already passed out from the pain. With no medics, I had no idea how we’d bring him back around now.
With rifles at the low ready and marching in a tactical column, we streamed out beyond the perimeter, around the base of the low hill, and back towards the smoldering, evil-looking furrow our carrier had dug into the planet’s surface.
CHAPTER 45
IT TOOK THEM THREE DAYS TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING palatable for me to eat. At which time I was so ravenous I actually thought I might eat a plate of dog shit—just to still the hunger pangs and get rid of the headaches.
It wasn’t gourmet by any means, but the engineers had managed to come up with five different “bricks” of edible material which were sufficiently non-gag-worthy that I could put them down. Each of the five pretended to represent one of the human food groups I’d explained to my hosts: meats, vegetables, grains, dairy, and fruits. None of it would have passed muster in any Fleet mess hall I knew. But I packed it away with gusto nonetheless. And was grateful to sleep with a full belly for the first time in weeks.
The problem of the clothes washer was remedied after several tries. They ultimately wired up a box with a spinning drum in it, much as I’d advised, with an attached clean water source as well as a waste water receptacle. The detergent provided was adequate for washing hands and doing the laundry alike, though there was little hope of actual fabric softener. Such a concept was simply too foreign for them to grasp, though they promised they’d keep working on it.
They also built me a chair, a desk, a small rack upon which to hang my clothes, a chest of drawers for other items from the packs, as well as a holographic stand which allowed me to fill half the room with a starlight exterior view of the ship.
“Quite a night light,” I said, regarding the display.
“Is that not a contradictory purpose?” one of the technicians said.
“It’s a human phrase,” I said. “A night light is usually a soft, small, or dim light you leave on in a bedroom overnight. Usually for children, who are often afraid of the dark.”
“Human children . . . pupa?” said one of the mantes.
“Not pupa, no,” I said. “Immature adults. They can think and reason and use tools the way adults do, just not that well because their brains are not fully developed and they are much smaller, with less experience.”
The three engineers seemed to consider this a remarkable piece of information.
“We had no idea,” they said.
“Just what do you know about humans anyway?” I asked.
“You are the first live human we have come into contact with, and we know next to nothing. Save for the fact that you are the third sapient species our race has ever discovered, and that the mantis you called the Professor was instrumental in convincing the Quorum of the Select to delay exterminating you. Though it seems your ultimate destiny was only delayed, not avoided.”
“There’s still time to avoid it,” I said, the hope in my heart making my words a bit more forceful than they’d otherwise have been. I wanted it to be true so badly—for myself, sure, but also to bring honor and purpose to the deaths of both Captain Adanaho and the Professor.
“Do you have children?” one of the technicians asked.
“No.”
“Ah, you have never been fortunate enough for selection,” he replied.
“No. Or perhaps yes. I tried to explain this to the Professor before he died. Human procreation doesn’t work exactly the same way as mantis procreation. There are many . . . complicating factors . . . involved.”
“When we have more time to query you, can you tell us of these complicating factors?” they said in unison.
“Sure,” I said, suddenly feeling sheepish.
They bid me farewell and exited the compartment—my quarters, now that there was sufficient furniture and accoutrements.
That night I let the holographic stand fill most of the space above the bed with an image of the stars. They were smeared and shifted blue at one end, as well as smeared and shifted red at the other—relativistic effects of our faster-than-light state. I guessed that I was now farther from Earth than any human had ever been before. Plunging into the heart of enemy territory.
If I’d been afraid on the day I stepped off the drop pod carrier’s ramp, that fear had slowly diminished as the Queen Mother and especially her technicians had sought to care for my needs.
But there were still so many uncertainties.
I decided the best I could do was take it day by day.
&n
bsp; CHAPTER 46
Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.
AS IT WAS, THE MANTIS FIGHTERS LEFT US COMPLETELY ALONE.
For almost two whole days, we saw nothing. No human aerospacecraft, no mantis aerospacecraft, nor even a hint of life larger than the scraggly little insects that burrowed here and there in the sand.
The techs had managed to jury-rig the chassis of an anti-air tank that had been recovered from the rubble, and driven it slowly on its damaged tracks back to our little AO. Now its generators provided electricity and light and a potentially secure communications link to orbit. Though we still detected nothing—not the big ships, not the small ships.
The mood was grim as a result.
Like a collection of terminal cancer patients, all of us waiting for the end.
“Why don’t they finish it?” one corporal said to me as I helped him fix the splint on his leg.
“Maybe they don’t have to bother,” I said. “Look at where we are. This is like Death Valley in the winter. Dry, almost lifeless, and not a living soul for kilometers on end. Unless we get a thunderstorm soon, we’re going to be hurting for water. And without water—”
“I get it, I get it,” the corporal said, shushing me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not your fault, Barlow. It’s just that . . .”
“What?” I asked.
“I never thought I’d go out like this. Without even firing a shot. I mean, I knew the mantes were dangerous, but that was part of the challenge. When I joined, I wanted to get a piece, if you know what I mean? Instead we got our asses handed to us before we ever touched the ground. And now it’s like they’re ignoring us. We’re not even worth coming out to get. The assault carrier’s reactors have gone cold, so they know we’re finished if they just leave us alone. Some war this has turned out to be. I wanted to go down with my rifle on full auto. You know?”
I nodded my head.
Yeah, I suppose I knew.
My sense of anger and frustration was as great as anyone’s. The heady days of signing up with the Fleet to see the stars had been replaced with the painful, ever-present reality of the world around us. A desolate, barren little ball of rock and sand that appeared to offer almost nothing of value to humankind. Beyond the fact that it belonged to the mantes.
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