The Chaplain's War - eARC

by Brad R Torgersen

  “Then the male is in for a delightfully stupid time of physical pleasure, followed by a lengthy period of slumber.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling, “at least one thing is shared between human males and mantis males.”

  “Still,” said the Professor, “with Adanaho, if she is available to you and there is the possibility of sex, are you not…desiring?”

  “Of course I’m desiring,” I snapped. Then apologized for being harsh. “It’s been at least a dozen or more years since I had a woman in my arms like that. But when a human male gets excited, he’s still in full command of his faculties. He can still choose. Or at least he’s expected to behave as if he has a choice. Personally, I think it’s one of the few things that actually makes us different from mere animals. We can deny our lusts, even during moments of opportunity.”

  “So you chose to abstain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she not attractive?”

  “Yes, she’s attractive.”

  “Forgive me Harry, I am still struggling to understand.”

  “Look,” I said, my hands on my hips as I walked slowly over to the rocks where my uniform and boots were spread out, “attraction is only part of it. There’s other factors too. Like, she’s too young. Much younger than I am. I’d feel like I was taking advantage of her. Plus, she’s my superior officer in the Fleet. It’s against the rules for a superior and a subordinate to engage in sexual congress.”

  “Why?”

  “Bad for discipline in the chain-of-command, among other things.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “No,” I said, testing the fabric between my fingers. It felt dry enough. I started to put my undergarments on. “The male and the female should really love each other first, before they have sex. When sex happens before love, or without love, it gets…complicated.”

  “Also immoral,” said the Professor.

  “If the man and the woman subscribe to certain ‘flavors’ of religious or moral tradition, yes. That too. Though most religious proscriptions surrounding intercourse simply involve matrimony, not love. A few centuries ago, before humanity went into space, it was quite common for young men and women to be married off by their families. For political and social reasons, among other things. Love didn’t really enter into it.”

  “Fascinating,” said the Professor. “Among my people we mate for genetic enhancement and advantage. Many, many males. A few females. In the far distant past males engaged in mortal combat to determine which ones would mate during a given cycle of estrus. Now we select for genetic traits we consider positive and bar those who don’t meet the standards. Those of us who meet the standards are then chosen via lottery to attend to the females when they are ready. I have copulated six times in my life. I am considered somewhat fortunate in this regard.”

  “Because you’re smart?” I said, sliding on pants, then socks, then boots.

  “Intelligence is key,” he said. “But chance rules the final selection process, yes.”

  “Assuming you win the lottery,” I asked while buttoning up my topcoat, “do you choose the females or do the females choose you?”

  “The females choose us,” he said. “In descending order of matriarchal seniority.”

  “Did you ever mate with the Queen Mother?”

  The Professor paused. A small flush of color along the semi-soft portions of his chitin told me I had embarrassed him.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry if I intruded into a private area where I should not have,” I said honestly.

  “No, Harry, it is I who began this conversation. The discomfort comes from knowing that no female of the Queen Mother’s stature has ever selected a scholar for mating. They prefer warriors to thinkers.”

  “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  The sun’s first rays peaked over the horizon.

  I observed the Queen Mother’s silhouette in the distance. Just like the day before. She was immobile, faced directly into the growing light as it slowly bathed the landscape. The Professor and I watched her for a time, then I asked, “Penny for her thoughts.”

  “If by that you mean to say you wonder what’s in her mind at this time, I wish I knew. I have inquired, and she will not tell me. I sense in conversation with her that the Queen Mother is both fascinated and troubled by her experience living without the disc.”

  A rustling to our left told me the captain was arising.

  “Clothes are dry,” I called, deliberately loud.

  “Roger that,” she said, her nose sounding stuffed up.

  I walked away from the rocks where her uniform still lay, and kept my back turned while she shuffled up and slowly put on her uniform in silence.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I turned around.

  “You look like shit, ma’am,” I said.

  “I feel sick,” she admitted. Wiping her nose on her sleeve.

  “We should have checked your bag sooner. We’ll have to let it dry out before nightfall if we don’t want a repeat of last night. Meanwhile, perhaps the Professor can spare room on the back of his disc for you while we travel today.”

  “I’d be grateful for that,” she said, eyes drawn and puffy-looking.

  “It could be managed,” the Professor said, after looking down at the captain—his antennae moving thoughtfully.

  The captain and I did what we could with the ration bars still in our packs, chewing because we needed the fuel, not because it tasted good. I’d never been a heavy chap. I realized that too much time on this nameless world would thin me down even more.

  When we’d collected our gear and secured our packs, I helped Adanaho climb onto the back of the Professor’s disc—following his having helped the Queen Mother climb onto the front. The Queen Mother and Adanaho both seemed unusually quiet this morning, and I shouldered my burden wondering what the day would bring. The captain had taken some pills from her pack’s emergency medical kit, and wrapped her sleeping bag around herself inside-out so as to let the liner properly dry. Her belt had been looped into a small cleat on the back of the disc so that she wouldn’t slide off.

  A cool breeze started up.

  We moved out, due southwest in the direction of the hinted-at mantis signals the Professor had previously detected.

  Plodding through the gravel and sand I thought about the one time I’d been to the Mojave, back on Earth. At least there, I’d had some mountains to look at in the distance, along with a few Joshua trees, and the occasional rattlesnake. On this world, everything had been worn flat and made unremarkable. Without the Professor’s telemetry to guide us, I suspected it would have been supremely easy to wind up meandering in circles. One dune or low bluff looked like the next.

  After a while I noticed that the captain’s eyes had closed. She was slumped against the Professor’s back. If either she or he were bothered by such close contact, neither of them showed it.

  “Military is as military does,” I said under my breath. Sleep anywhere you can, when you can.

  Good for her.

  I kept walking.

  Chapter 32

  Earth, 2153 A.D.

  Microgravity training was a complete horror show.

  No baby steps in jets performing parabolas, like in the old astronaut times. We took a straight shot to orbit, all of us in Charlie Company packed into a single company-sized assault carrier. If at first it had seemed like a whale of an amusement ride, the fun stopped for me once the falling sensation became ever-present.

  “You’re going pale on me,” Cortez said. Like me, she was in her training-issue combat vacuum armor suit. We were strapped into opposing benches that ran up and down the length of the carrier’s main troop deck. Our helmets were strapped down in our laps, and for good reason too. Next to each helmet was a plastic bag into which we could hurl the contents of our stomachs, if the need so arose.


  And it arose.

  Again, and again, and again.

  After several minutes of anguished upchucking, I pulled the opening of my bag away from my face and chanced a look around the immediate area. To my relief, I wasn’t the only one who’d tossed his cookies. Though I could see from the evil smirks on the faces of our DSes that certain people were enjoying the show just a little too much.

  “You gonna feel a lot worse if even one piece o’ bahf touch the inside o’ my carrier,” the first sergeant said. “Some of you act like you never been to space before. You mean nobody take a transcontinental flight? Not even once? My drill sahjeens gonna enjoy watching you all get sick over the next two weeks. We have four more flights coming and those of you who can’t adapt, you’re out. Grounded. You’ll be stuck scrubbing gah-bage cans at a Fleet mess facility.”

  Right about then I think I’d have been perfectly happy to see the business end of a mess hall trash barrel. It certainly couldn’t get any greener nor smell any worse than I did.

  A few seats away, a male recruit who’d been playing tough guy let loose. No bag on his mouth. The female recruit across from him shrieked as she took the blast full force.

  A collective cry of, “Eeewwww,” went up from Charlie Company.

  Second platoon’s trio of DSes were all doing their best to suppress laughter, and failing. Then they put on their helmets—something we recruits had been strictly forbidden to do during this first flight. With faces and noses safely behind transparent faceplates, Senior Drill Sergeant Malvino, Drill Sergeant Davis, and Drill Sergeant Schmetkin all began to shake with mirth. I guessed that they’d seen and experienced this many times. I guessed also that once a man got used to microgravity, such scenes could become funny. In a gallows humor sort of way.

  More stomachs were emptied around the deck. Some people were smart enough to employ bags. Some were not. Fluid and bits of half-digested food began to float freely.

  After we landed—just one orbit on the initial run—it took all six platoons working in shifts two whole days to get all of the gack off our suits, out of the cracks and crevices of the equipment, and out of the carrier’s ventilation system; to say nothing of cleaning and disinfecting the troop deck proper.

  Ample incentive to develop an iron digestive system—for those who’d not had the sense to use their bags as intended.

  The next orbital sortie was longer in duration, resulting in fewer sick cases, and had absolutely zero projectile events.

  After the second orbit—when the DSes were convinced that all of us who could get sick, had sufficiently emptied ourselves—we were ordered to go vacuum tight. Which meant helmets on, and sealed. Having spent many days on the ground going through the complexities of our armored space suits, their computer systems and oxygen generators, CO2 filters, hoses, emergency patches, etc., now was our chance to put that knowledge to the test.

  The first sergeant’s voice was patched into our helmet speakers via the Charlie Company wireless, and we listened as she instructed one of the fifth platoon DSes to activate the lock cycle that would evacuate the entire troop deck’s atmosphere, and clamshell-open the massive troop deck bay doors at the tail end of the carrier.

  There was an extremely loud hiss—which died quickly.

  In my helmet’s virtual display I saw the atmosphere bar rapidly drop from green, to yellow, to orange, to red, and then blink an angry crimson at me.

  Still strapped to our benches, we all craned our necks as best we could to get a glimpse out the back of the carrier as the doors gradually opened, and revealed a rather spectacular view of the Earth.

  At several hundred kilometers altitude, all of humanity’s worldly achievements were dissolved into the swirling natural blues, browns, greens, and whites of land, air, and sea.

  A collective exclamation went up from the lot of us, even the ones like me who were still wrestling with the silent physical terror of weightlessness.

  “That’s right,” First Sergeant Chau said. “Take a good look, Chah-lee. Our home. Yours and mine. Only it might not be for much longer if we don’t do the job Fleet asks us to do. The mantes aren’t human. They don’t think human. They don’t feel human. They don’t care human. All they want is to see humans die. Are we gonna let that happen, Chah-lee?”

  As a company: “NO, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “Are we gonna let the insects take our home, or our colonies?”

  “NO, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “That’s damned good, Chah-lee! We are what stands between the mantes and Earth’s destruction. You are all training to be part of humanity’s first, best defense against the mantis threat. Up until now you’ve spent most of your time on the ground, learning how to so-jah the way so-jahs have learned for hundreds of years. Now we gonna teach you to fight twenty-second-century style. Drill sah-jeens, prepare for EVA!”

  My heart leapt in my throat.

  There’d been nothing on the company white board that said anything about us actually going outside on this trip. Just a longer case of up-and-back. Not so long that I thought I couldn’t hold it together until we landed. But the idea of actually getting up off the bench and floating free, much less going beyond the confines of the troop deck, seemed like a unique kind of torture.

  Senior Drill Sergeant Malvino was up and out of his seat, the bottoms of his boots magnetically locked to the deck. He began shouting at us to hook our tie lines to the cables that ran up and down the length of the troop deck. We’d move aft in an orderly fashion—pulling ourselves along the backs of the benches by the railings we found there. One squad at a time, in sequence.

  As with everything else we’d experienced in space to date, much ground practice had gone into this moment. Rehearsals which had looked rather comical when performed on the PT field now came back to us as we mimicked our ground training.

  At the end of the cable we began to daisychain ourselves in a human strand: each squad stretched out with troops hooked to troops, which in turn formed spokes off of platoons, and the platoons spoked off of the company proper. All of us spread out to the limits of our tethers. Tiny reaction control thrusters in each suit allowing us a limited amount of extravehicular maneuverability.

  I found I did best by not looking down.

  Some astronauts and supersonic skydivers have reported no fear, upon stepping into the void of space. Because the ground is so impossibly far away, falling towards it feels abstract and unreal.

  I, on the other hand, found it excruciating. So I faced away, into the blackness of interplanetary space, and focused on my breathing, trying to pay attention to the commands being given on the squad, platoon, and company wireless networks.

  By the fifth sortie, I’d gotten used to it. Not immune. Just…used to it.

  And we were practicing limited EVA squad tactics using individual maneuvering units, as well as squad-level “pushers” which were basically automobile-sized devices that allowed eight to twenty people to clamp on, latch on, or grab hold, and zoom around in microgravity.

  The assault carrier’s troop deck was stocked with a maze of temporary barriers, where we practiced mock shipboarding, our R77A5s outfitted with small lasers that activated upon trigger-pull. The training-issue armor suits would blip at you when you got hit. Depending on where you got hit, the suit would relay your injury information back to the DSes running the mock fight. Torso shots were often judged to be fatal—making some of us wonder what was the point in wearing extra-bulky space armor if said armor was not, in fact, capable of absorbing and deflecting rounds. But an extremity shot was deemed survivable. In the event that the armor was punctured, sealant gel would pour from a liner in the outer layer and into the hole, while a specialized non-toxic, anesthetic, blood-clotting foam would fill around the arm or leg from the inner layer, causing the affected area to stiffen and immobilize, like a cast.

  For our purposes the sealant and the foam were kept dormant. The DSes would yell out that your left arm or right left was officially useless,
and if you got caught using it during the fight your name went onto the punishment detail roster. Something many of us had experienced, more times than we cared to admit, so we tried to err on the side of caution, going limp as dish rags any time we got tagged by a rival squad’s or platoon’s laser beams.

  “Live fire is for the LCX,” Drill Sergeant Schmetkin said to me as she worked with my squad, marshaling us through exterior hull movement drills—the bottoms of our boots clomping across the heat-absorbing tiles that covered the entire assault carrier. Magnetism in our boot soles was just strong enough to keep us glued to the exterior, assuming we didn’t jump or push off too hard.

  The LCX was the Lunar Combat Exercise: a twelve-day final trial wherein all of us who’d survived IST thus far would take everything we’d learned about soldiering and put it to the test—on the surface of the Moon. When I’d first heard about the LCX it had sounded like a blast. But now that we were coming up on it, I realized that it was going to be a combination of tedium and frenzy. Four days to reach the Moon, four days to bust our butts taking and holding a mock mantis outpost, then four days back. All carried out under as real of conditions as could be managed. Which, in space, where even tiny mistakes could be fatal, was pretty damned real.

  Following hull drills, and after we’d all clambered back inside and resumed our seats on our respective benches, I wondered just how the LCX would compare to an actual combat assault. Assuming such things were even conducted? So much of what we’d been doing and training for seemed theoretical. Centuries of infantry tactics and knowledge adapted to conditions and terrain where no human soldier had ever soldiered before. Would we be any good at it, when the situation mattered? Or were we just fooling ourselves?

  I chose to keep such wonderings to myself.

  Chapter 33

  Afternoon brought us to the edge of a narrow, deep canyon. A small river wound its way across the bottom headed northwest to southeast. The water tumbled and rushed against the rocks below, and a rumbling echo drifted out of the canyon as the Professor and I considered our options. I reluctantly woke the captain, helping her down off the back of the Professor’s disc, while he helped the Queen Mother down too. The two aliens spoke briefly in their insect language, then she scurried off to the Canyon’s edge, peering out over it while the captain and I counseled with the Professor.