The Chaplain's War - eARC

by Brad R Torgersen

  Malvino stopped, though it seemed he had a lot more on his mind that he wanted to say. He extended his palm like a meat-cleaver and rapidly “chopped” his way down the platoon, counting columns of heads. When he was satisfied he had a number, he ordered, “Recover, squad leaders,” then spun around and faced to the front. First, second and third’s squad leaders quickly got back to their feet, and I waited silently, glad that I hadn’t been stuck with any kind of recruit “authority,” as had happened in Reception.

  First platoon’s platoon sergeant sounded off with their accountability, saluted the first sergeant, and then the first sergeant’s head turned towards Malvino, who shouted while saluting, “Second platoon, thirty-four recruits assigned, thirty-four recruits present for training,” then dropped the salute after the first sergeant had dropped hers.

  When all of the platoons had performed this ritual, the first sergeant looked at her chronometer and gave Charlie Company an at-ease.

  “Oh-kay, Chah-lee,” Chau said, “lets rub sleepee sand from eyes and wake up. Yesterday was day zee-roh, and today it’s gonna be on. You know what I mean?”

  As a company, Charlie weakly sounded, “YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  Boos and hisses from the line of drill sergeants in the back.

  “Wow,” Chau said, taken aback, “that was really half-ass, Chah-lee. Makes me think I should have gone on sick call, not come out here to be with you. ’Cause if you no wanna be here, I no wanna be here. You wanna be here?”

  Company: “YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “You mean it?”

  “YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “’Cause I don’t believe you, recruits. We are soooo fah behin’ schedule today. So fah. So fah I don’ even wanna talk about it. You gonna learn, recruits, the longer you in my company, the tighter I expect you to be. Time hacks especially. You gotta be on time every time, because as some of my drill sah-jeens already say, we have a lot to do, and if we get behind schedule, we gonna take it out of your time, recruits. Not ours. And not mine. Is that understood?”

  “YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “Oh-kay…Companeeeee!”

  “—Platoon!”

  “Ah-ten-SHIN! Drill sah-jeens, take charge of da platoons and move ’em out for physical fitness training.”

  The six platoon sergeants saluted, while the Top saluted back, then she dropped her salute, spun, and marched back through the double doors.

  Platoon sergeants spun—Malvino looking particularly murderous—and began snapping commands. Before long I was trailing off in-file with the other recruits, out from underneath the overhead cover afforded by the stacked-block structure of the bays—each of which radiated out from the battalion’s administrative core building, like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Off in the distance Charlie Company could see several of the other companies already arrayed on the massive expanse of grass—acres upon acres—that fell back from Charlie’s east side. Beyond that were the towers, cranes, and sky-scraper-like hangars and buildings of Armstrong Field’s tremendous aerospace works. All of which appeared as black silhouettes against the early morning sky, which was now beginning to color.

  Sweat came instantly. I gritted my teeth.

  Technically, this was the Midwestern portion of North America. Not the Mississippi Delta. But the air was already uncomfortably moist, as well as warm. Despite the early hour. I suspected there would be no relief in store for me, as the sky continued to brighten towards actual daybreak. Once the sun was fully up, things would get even more hot, and more humid.

  Charlie eventually arrayed itself around a cement platform in the middle of the gargantuan grass field—Alpha and Bravo companies already sounding off as they entered their warm-ups—with all six platoons in a circle facing inwards towards the platform. Several of Charlie’s DSes—Malvino among them—mounted the platform and began to call off additional commands. As in Reception, you couldn’t just blow right into PT, they thought someone might get hurt that way. So once each platoon had been broadened and extended—to give each recruit some real-estate on which to ponder his or her own personal physical suffering—the drill sergeants ran us through stretches, in-place calisthenics.

  The grass was mildly damp, and our shoes had become wet. The cloying air smelled of lawn clippings.

  We unrolled our mats next. Each recruit’s mat had to remain on his or her right, and each recruit’s mat had to line up more or less with the mat of the person on his or her right. Canteens—large, pliable, liter-sized squares with shoulder straps on them—came off and were placed in the upper right corner of each mat, stenciled name tape facing up. Before the drill sergeants on the platform went any further, the other drill sergeants quickly made their way down each rank, picking up and hefting each canteen.

  “Where is the rest of your water, Recruit Gerome?” said Drill Sergeant Schmetkin as she picked up the canteen of the male directly to my front. “Were you not instructed to completely fill your canteen prior to morning accountability?”

  “Drill Sergeant,” Gerome sputtered, “I wanted to fill my canteen, but—”

  “But nothing, Recruit Gerome.”

  Schmetkin stepped up to Gerome’s face and, one-handedly unscrewing the cap on the canteen, used the other hand to up-end the canteen over Gerome’s head. His mouth hung open in shock as the water flooded across his face and down his chest and back. She slapped the dripping canteen to his chest and said, “You have sixty seconds to run back to the company common area and fill your canteen, then be right back here. Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight…”

  I resisted the urge to watch as Gerome fled, though I could see many other recruits from the other platoons doing the same. I stood still while the platform and the drill sergeants on the ground waited. And waited.

  There wasn’t enough time. There never was enough time.

  When all of the now-wet and terribly flustered recruits returned to the PT formation, the drill sergeant leading from the platform ordered everyone into the front-leaving rest, and our PT session for the day officially began.

  I couldn’t really tell the difference between morning PT, and a good smoking. The commands were the same, some of the exercises were the same, and everyone felt brutalized by the time it was over. Whatever comfort the PT mat was supposed to provide was quickly lost to the fact that centimeter-thick foam could not prevent lumps in the grass from inevitably sticking into a recruit’s butt and back. When it was over, we were each drenched from head to toe, our canteens drained to within a gulp, and the sun was obscured by gathering clouds—the first threat of rain I had seen since arriving at Armstrong Field.

  Warm-down was a repeat of warm-up, then we rolled our mats and trooped in-file back up to the company common area, where we again formed by platoons, again took accountability, and then were dismissed up the stairs for what should have been twenty minutes of shower time—now reduced to five, because of all that morning’s screw-ups.

  Chapter 23

  We walked.

  On rock, when we could find it. The sand and pebbles proving to be a lot of work despite our best efforts. I envied the Professor with his disc, floating effortlessly above the ground. Occasionally I dropped back to talk to him as he kept the Queen Mother securely held.

  “Will you be able to sense it?” I asked. “If we get near any other mantis troops or equipment?”

  “Yes,” said the Professor. “Though I must warn you that my connection to my people has been nonexistent since our landing. I am beginning not to trust my own machinery. Perhaps there has been damage I cannot ascertain? Or perhaps your military has devised some way of blanketing or cloaking mantis communications—such a thing would prove very useful against us, in a pitched battle. Our coordination is our greatest strength. Forced to fight singly, we might not be nearly as effective.”

  “If we did have such a weapon,” the captain said, overhearing, “I am sure I’d have known about it.”

  “I think we’ll have to trust that your readings are
accurate,” I said to the Professor. “Meanwhile, we will go south, and hope that both terrain and climate are favorable.”

  It seemed like a vain hope. All I could see on the horizon were rocks, more stony, broken bluffs, and sand dunes. Not a tree nor a bush in any direction. Nothing running, flying, squirming, or jumping. It occurred to me that when we’d entered orbit, the seas of the planet had appeared small, and tinted green. Local evolution might not have gotten much beyond the microscopic level, and then only in the shallow oceans. Enough photosynthesis to turn the sky a pale blue.

  Which was both good and bad. Stranded for too long without rescue, we’d starve. Or die of thirst. Purgatory suddenly seemed a lot more homey.

  We plodded, and I stretched out the distance between myself and our little group. I scanned relentlessly for gullies or creek beds—any sign of fresh water. Adanaho and I only had enough for a few days, even with rationing.

  A wind began to whip. The captain jogged to catch up with me.

  “I do not like this,” she said. “I feel a sandstorm is coming.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I grew up part of the time in North Africa,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “Look!” said the Professor, his speaker grill yelling the word.

  We stopped and turned. An ominous, dark wall of billowing dust was moving rapidly upon us from the rear. It seemed to stretch into the sky for a kilometer or more. I swallowed hard, then began to frantically search for shelter. The captain pointed, and we ran for a nearby hill with a small overhang. When we got there we discovered a water-worn hollow at the hill’s base. We pushed ourselves into it, huddling together, emergency jackets pulled tightly over our heads. The Professor landed his disc and used both the disc and his body to shield the Queen Mother.

  If it was possible for a mantis to look more pathetic, I wasn’t sure how. Her limbs were curled tightly against her body and dried blood dribbled away from the fresh scabs where her lower thorax had formerly interfaced with her disc. Her lower limbs were small and feeble looking, compared to the impressive forelimbs, and I wondered just how long it had been since any mantis had walked under its own power?

  Without her carriage, the Queen Mother had been made small.

  I experienced a moment of unexpected pity. Then the rushing cloud of detritus swept over us. I closed my jacket across my face as tightly as I could make it, listening to the muffled howling of the wind as it broke across the top of the hill.

  Chapter 24

  Earth, 2153 A.D.

  By the second week of IST, the morning routine had straightened itself out. Nobody was late getting out of the head anymore, and we’d had enough individual and group smokings over the details of accountability formation that the squad leaders—two of whom had already been fired and replaced—knew their lines. Second platoon’s drill sergeants—Malvino, Davis, and Schmetkin—weren’t bellowing as much as they had the first week, and I and the others were beginning to find the “beat” as Top had called it, back in Reception.

  Training was hard, of course. Week one focused almost entirely on immersive drill and ceremony, where we marched as squads and as a platoon, around and around and around the huge grass field. Column-right, column-left, right-flank, left-flank, rear-march, and so on and so forth, until we’d all begun to respond to the commands with an almost subliminal quickness. Otherwise, the DSes PTd us to death, and we drew additional training equipment in between numerous and mindlessly boring briefings about military protocol, aspects of Fleet’s complex, internationally-oriented military justice code, and a weekend computer exam on same.

  Which surprised me. Book work? In Basic? But book work there was, and a surprisingly large amount of it, too. In addition to helmets and body armor and field packs, each recruit was given a use-worn e-pad with a built-in library of Fleet manuals, pamphlets, regulations, and so forth. Including an all-in-one quick guide to IST, which I found myself referencing quite often for general orders and reminders on Fleet jargon, in addition to bits of recent history about the Fleet, and the war with the mantis aliens.

  All of us recruits were required to carry the e-pad on our person—as part of our uniform—and if at any point the platoon was stopped for any moment, be it waiting in line for chow or waiting out on the field as the DSes switched out for the afternoon, we were to pull out the e-pad and study. Study, study, study. Which made even my eyes glaze over—and I’d been pretty good in school. But I’d never had to read and memorize while functioning on this little sleep and doing this much daily physical work.

  Of course the e-pad became an easy thing to lose, too. And it was apparent that losing anything became a guaranteed ticket to discipline. Our names were on every scrap of clothing and piece of equipment. If ever a DS found anything with your name on it not secured in your locker or on your person, you were suddenly in a personal world of hurt.

  On three separate occasions, I ran across e-pads which had been left in the head, left on the floor, or in one case, left on one of the bench seats in the cafeteria-like mess hall where we ate three times a day. Rather than stare dumbly at the things, I scooped them up each time and surreptitiously sleuthed out the owners.

  “Thanks,” said one of the other platoon’s troops, named Zaratanski, when I found her one afternoon while we filed up the stairs to our separate bays. The e-pad passed quickly between us. “I was almost sick thinking about where I could have put it. I appreciate you getting it back to me.”

  “No problem,” I said, smiling. “If we don’t look out for each other, who will, right?”

  She smiled back at me, and I knew I’d made an instant friend.

  Before I headed into the bay, I thought I caught DS Schmetkin watching me out of the corner of her eye. Had she seen what I’d just done? If she had, she gave no hint that it mattered to her.

  Going into week two we each had a heavy batch of required reading to prepare for the next exam. So much so that most of us stole an hour or more after lights-out, our heads and e-pads carefully concealed beneath our blankets while we caught up on all the crap that we hadn’t been able to get to during the day.

  Which was pretty much Standard Operating Procedure—SOP—for the third week as well. Never enough time. Never, ever enough. The single hour at night—the hour the recruiters had promised us would be for personal business—was gone. It invariably wound up being the only time some of us could reasonably find to thoroughly shower and get the salt, oil, and dirt out of the cracks of our bodies, not to mention prepping equipment for the next day’s training.

  The e-pads were equipped to send and receive monitored e-mailed once an evening through the battalion centralized wireless server, but I only had enough time to jot my mother a quick hello, letting her know I’d arrived and was up to my eyebrows in training, before I was either studying for the exams or doing something else that I’d rather not have to be doing.

  Meanwhile I kept feeling Thukhan’s eyes on me. During odd moments, when I thought nobody in the bay or in the platoon could possibly care enough to pay attention to me. I’d look up, and there Batbayar would be, watching without saying anything, and I would just turn away and silently feel angry that I was letting the asshole psych me out.

  After ten days of such mind games, I decided I’d had enough.

  It was our first visit to the armory, and as the platoon filed up onto some bleachers for our initial introduction to our assigned weapons, I deliberately sat next to Thukhan.

  Batbayar looked at me, but I deliberately didn’t look back. I stared straight ahead as one of the range cadre—sergeants without campaign hats, and remarkably nice people, too—began to explain the functions of the R77A5 automatic rifle.

  “Each of you,” said the cadre member, a female sergeant first class named Secce, “will become intimately familiar with this weapon.”

  Secce held it up: a longish metal tube with an attached fiberglass stock.

  “The first thing you need to remember is that w
hile you might not always have ammunition for this rifle on your person, the rifle itself will be on your person for the rest of the time you’re in Induction Service Training. Your rifle will go with you when you go to sleep. Your rifle will be with you when you go to PT in the morning. Your rifle will be with you as you train each and every day. Your rifle is the thing that makes you valuable as a fighter in the modern arena of battle.

  “Some of you may have already had experience with firearms, especially pistols, but you’ll notice that nobody in IST ever carries a pistol. The reason for that is because the pistol is a very specialized weapon that is practically useless in open terrain, or across long distances. A pistol lacks the power of a rifle cartridge—the ability to hit and knock a mantis out of the fight—and this is what learning to handle and use the R77A5 is all about.”

  I felt Thukhan’s eyes on me, but ignored him and kept watching SFC Secce.

  “If you’ve done your homework,” said Secce, “then you should already know a lot about this weapon, even before you’ve handled it. Unlike some other kinds of rifles you might have fired, this one is built to operate aboard spacecraft. It uses caseless ammunition, which does not employ traditional powder explosives, but rather a split mixture of chemical propellant. This propellant is not active until the round has been discharged in the rifle’s firing chamber. Which means the ammunition is extremely resistant to heat and moisture, and will seldom cook off or prematurely fire under adverse conditions.”