The Chaplain's War - eARC

by Brad R Torgersen

  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 45-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 the 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 to call for reinforcement, nor 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.

  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.

  Or did it?

  I let myself wonder if maybe the lack of alien air patrols was a sign that our guys had slowly pruned the mantes out of the air, and that a recovery effort would soon be underway to retrieve survivors. If only the tank’s damned communications equipment worked. If only the Fleet people in orbit would respond to the emergency distress calls!

  One day later, we got our definitive answer.

  An alien craft—far bigger than an aerospace fighter—thundered down out of the sky. It opened up with a chain gun, slicing our anti-air tank to ribbons, along with the men and women who’d rushed to hastily crew the thing. Those not killed by the blast lived to see the huge ship deploy massive ovoidal pods around our perimeter, out of which poured hundreds of alien troops.

  The mantes. Face to face. At last.

  Or, rather, face to beak.

  They were far more hideously insect-like than their reputation made them out to be. As we’d been shown in the video footage from Marvelous, their lower halves were connected to what could only be described as miniature flying saucers: discus-shaped devices perhaps three meters in diameter, each floating above the ground by a means none of us could determine.

  When the marines on the perimeter started cracking off shots, the mantis infantry went to work. It was a horrid display. Not only did each of the discs contain automatic slug-throwing weaponry similar to our R77A5s, they also contained anti-personnel rocketry and, failing that, the mantis soldiers would simply swoop in and swing at a man with one of their long, vicious-looking, serrated-chitin forelimbs.

  Heads and arms popped off like corks.

  Flesh was sheered and devoured in the aliens’ ferociously fanged mouths, the inner teeth working like that of some Earth snakes: tractoring backward with each bite, to pull the victim—or what was left of the victim—deeper into the mantes’ gullets.

  I stayed near the chaplain, but kept my rifle down as the mantes demolished the perimeter and drove the survivors back into a huddled cluster around Chaplain Thomas.

  “Throw down your arms,” the chaplain wheezed.

  “Beg pardon, sir?” one of the corporals said, his face tight and his armor covered in the blood of his comrades.

  We numbered just thirty-five now, while barely a dozen of the enemy had been killed—their floating discs ruined and their corpses slowly cooking in the thin air as the discs burned.

  “If they wanted us all dead, they’d have done it by now,” Chaplain Thomas said with as much force as he could muster. “Obviously they have orders to disarm and detain us. Notice that nobody who hasn’t fired a weapon yet has been harmed.”

  I remembered the LCX on Earth’s Moon. The last stand. I’d been out of action when it had happened, but I’d heard about it. The simulated mantes had come in hard. Relentless. Chipping away at defenses until only a few survivors were left, and then they too were destroyed. The entirety of the company overwhelmed.

  Only, now it wasn’t a simulation anymore. I itched to put my rifle to my shoulder and start firing. I’d fire until I made them kill me. Better a quick death on my feet than a slow death on my knees. But Chaplain Thomas’s stern hand on my wrist stopped me from committing suicide.

  “No, Specialist Barlow,” he said. “I will not permit it. We have been spared. For what reason I cannot yet say, but we have been spared. Do not look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “They’re demons,” I said. “Look at them!”

  “I see them,” he said. “I see the visage of a people so utterly unlike us that they may very well be beyond our comprehension. But I also see that they have stayed their hand. I beg of you, men and women of Earth, lay down your arms. To fight at this point is hopeless. We are outnumbered and outgunned. We came to this world puffed up in pride: the pride of our hearts, of ourselves, of our weaponry and our mighty Fleet, and we have been summarily defeated. We can die in pride, and be damned for it. Or we can be patient, and see what the Maker of All Things has yet in store for us.”

  It was the closest I’d ever heard Chaplain Thomas come to doing any bona fide fire-and-brimstone preaching. The force of his words must have hurt him terribly—to speak them while in such pain. But he’d spoken them just the same, and he’d gotten our attention. Both because he was the last officer alive, and also because I think—to this day—that each of us in that little circle despera
tely wished to stay alive. If only for a little while longer.

  One by one, we slowly laid down our rifles. Then we put our hands and arms into the air. Not that the mantes would have any idea what that meant. Old human habits die hard.

  The mantes did not speak, yet communication between them was apparent. I guessed it had something to do with those damned discs.

  An armed corridor of mantes suddenly formed, aiming away towards one of the giant pods the mantis ship had deposited.

  A mantis near us aimed a forelimb down the length of the corridor and then stared at us, as if to say, go now.

  Forgetting our weapons, we stumbled forwarded.

  In the chaplain’s case, we had him on a stretcher—which I carried at the rear, and a burly marine carried at the front. The chaplain winced and coughed with every move we made, but before long he let himself lay still and stared up into the alien planet’s dimly blue sky.

  “Not like home,” he said as I walked, my cheeks puffing with effort.

  No, I thought, definitely not.

  Chapter 47

  The next morning the Queen Mother met me at my door.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  Having eaten and dressed, I raised an eyebrow and followed her out of the compartment and into the corridor. Mantes passed us moving to and fro, their discs humming softly. If they thought a human remarkable aboard a mantis vessel, they didn’t show it. In fact they all seemed to be making a point of ignoring me. Or was it the Queen Mother? I remembered the old Earth traditions of the monarchists. To look a king or queen in the eye had been a forbidden thing in some courts. I wondered if this was something similar?

  I walked while the Queen Mother floated. We passed through numerous passageways and connecting corridors, each of them arranged in what seemed to be a very definite geometry. The ceilings were high and the bulkheads were all coated in a somewhat translucent, plasticlike substance that seemed both harder and more durable than plastic—at least when I stole a moment to rap my knuckles on it.