Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  What is truth? someone had said a long time ago, and washed his hands. Sal wished she could do the same. “None of us know,” she said. “All we can do is go on as we’ve done in the past, and look for new answers. We thought—I hoped you might have some new answers for us.”

  H’ewa bared his teeth suddenly. It was an alarming expression, and Sal stepped back involuntarily, then stopped, seeing the desperation still in his eyes.

  “I was sent to find out what I can,” H’ewa said. “I must try to do so, even if you don’t know. But we thought you did—about this First Cause: this God. It is a great disappointment.”

  He sighed. “Show me the rest,” he said.

  Sal opened the door and showed him out, her mind in an uproar too great even for prayer.

  Several hours later Sal had shown him the hospital wards, and what a chaplain did there, visiting the sick. She had also done two or three counseling sessions that she really didn’t need to do, but scheduled gladly enough, to give her some kind of routine to fall into while that golden-eyed regard was with her. With the counselees’ permission, H’ewa had sat through the sessions, his handsome ears swiveling to follow the conversations, eyes blinking gently. Sal wondered if it was her imagination that her counselees were being a little more forthcoming about their own troubles than usual. Maybe it was the fascination of the stranger: or maybe that H’ewa was an uncommonly good listener, in the way of someone very uncertain of what they’re hearing, who therefore concentrates on every passing word.

  They broke for a meal after a while, H’ewa going off to his quarters—apparently the Emry preferred to eat in private. Sal, for her part, went straight off to Frank’s office. He was eating, again, or still. He looked up at her as if she were excessively unwelcome, but that was par for the course with him.

  “I don’t think the Emry have a religion,” Sal said before he could get started. “Who put that creature in a chaplain’s uniform? Was it some kind of joke?”

  “If it was a joke,” Frank said, putting down one of the eternal food bars, “it was a big one. Right from the top, that lad came. Some relative of one of the people who run the planet, sent here at their orders. And the orders specified chaplain—it was a six-sigma translation, so don’t blame it on an error in syntax.”

  “But they don’t have any religion,” Sal said again, feeling helpless. “They don’t know what God is, or gods, any gods, as far as I can tell! They don’t know what religious services are, or priests or ministers of any kind!”

  “Maybe they want to find out,” Frank said heavily. “Possibly they think they’re missing something, seeing that so many of the other species in the Alliance have such things. Who knows how they think of it. A weapon. An advantage.”

  Sal’s eyebrows went up. That struck her as a very inappropriate way to consider religion.

  “And don’t you go getting judgmental,” Frank said. “I know that look. Sal, all I’m sure of is that this situation is politically provocative. Apparently our lad has orders to go back to their high council, or whatever it is, and report to them after his visit—and I hear rumblings that what he says will make some kind of difference to their alliance with us and with the other Indies. This is too important a matter to screw up, so whatever you do, you’d better do a good job of it, Sal, or by whichever God’s turn it is in the rotation today, I’ll have your butt in a sling. Now get out of here and let me finish my dinner.”

  Sal smiled thinly, thinking (and tempted to say) that no one had ever seen Frank finish a meal before, and it was unlikely to start happening now. But she thought better of it—the remark was uncharitable, anyway: how he handled stress was his own business. She went away to see about the evening service.

  There was no one there for it, which was a common enough variation when Hawking was in battle. The other main variation was that a given service was filled to overflowing, whether the people attending were of that denomination or not. The need for reassurance, for consolation, sometimes seemed to flow through the station like a wave. Other times, like now, people were just too busy. At such times, Sal particularly remembered the old prayer attributed to Cromwell before battle—though she herself doubted that that cold young man had ever said any such thing: “O God, Thou knowest how busy I must be today: if I forget Thee, yet do not Thou forget me.” She made it her business on such days to remember God on behalf of all the people who didn’t have time.

  The rotation said that today should have been the Zoroastrian service, but plainly no one would care, and Sal was feeling shaken: so she went back to the old familiar, the C of M service, which would console her, if no one else. The holography installation had filled the chapel with the pale, cool, rose-tinged light of one of the old Martian underground sun temples, one shaft of light coming down from the pierced ceiling to fall on the altar, which now looked like a plain slab of sandstone. The cup and plate were of stone as well, not ornamented, not polished. Only the bread and wine had not changed. She was just in the act of lifting the cup up into the light and pronouncing the words celebrating the Change when the door opened.

  Sal had long learned to ignore such things. She kept herself where she belonged, in the moment of miracle, until it was finished, paying no attention to the silhouette in the doorway. It vanished, the door closing. Only a short shadow, standing back there in the reddish darkness, watched her she caught the gleam of golden eyes.

  Sal finished the service as she had done for some time now, with the old optional prayer for use “in times of War and Tumults”—not that most times aren’t that, one way or another, she thought. “King of Kings and Governor of all, whose power no creature can resist, to whom it belongs to justly punish wrongdoers, and to show mercy to the repentant: Save and deliver us, we beg You, from our enemies: abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices: that we, being armed with Your defense, may be preserved evermore from all perils, to glorify You, the only Giver of victory—”

  “Does anyone truly have such power?” came the quiet voice from the shadows, the beast’s voice. Sal shivered a little for the pain in it.

  She finished what she was doing, took off her stole, and made her way back into the shadows herself. “So I believe,” she said, folding the stole up, “but that won’t be good enough, will it?”

  There was a moment’s silence. “We have need of certainties,” H’ewa said. “Now more than ever.”

  “A lot of us have been looking for them, too,” Sal said, “for a long time. Without much success.”

  Frank’s words were much with her at the moment. She had been trying to figure out for the past little while exactly what she could do to be of help to H’ewa, to the allied species, to the Independents . . . and had found no answers. Frank is on his own this time, she thought.

  “But some success,” said H’ewa.

  “It depends on who’s judging it.”

  H’ewa sighed. “Our world,” he said, “needs saving. All the ships, even this one—with all its power—seem able to do little. The Ichton fleets are all over this part of space, and all your might is only able to barely hold them away from us. What kind of civilization is it that can only survive with the help of aliens and strangers?”

  Sal sighed, too. “Ours has been that, on occasion,” she said. “If one thing that’s been lost in the past years in our sense of ourselves as being competent to deal with the world . . . maybe that’s not a terrible loss. Certainly those of us who believe that there is a Master of the universe also believe that our sense of ourselves as surrogate masters sometimes gets in the way of any real interaction with It. . . .”

  “But you have not interacted with it,” H’ewa said, “at least, not to any effect.”

  “We think we have,” Sal said. “But our idea of effect, and Its idea of effect . . . are two very different things.”

  H’ewa shook his head again. “These are not the answers I came looking for,” he said “I need to know; where can help be found, if not in all t
hese ships and armaments? We had hints, from other people like you, that help might be found in other ways. Spiritual ways.”

  “It depends on what you mean by help,” Sal said. “Victory? Triumph over one’s enemies? I have no guarantees of help from the First Cause, the Powers, whatever you prefer to call them—on that account.”

  “Nothing like that. Just peace,” H’ewa said, and that terrible pain was in its voice again, like the voice of a beast caught in a trap. “Just to be left alone.”

  Sal shook her head. “As for the second, whether it’s available in the universe anymore, if it ever was,” she said, “is a good question. You can ask an all-powerful God for things, but even the omnipotent is helpless against simple nonsense. Like saying, ‘Oh, God, please turn blue into yellow.’ Were we ever, any of us, really alone—in a universe in which every part affects every other—to be left that way again? By each other, let alone by other species—however mindless or well intentioned?” Sal breathed out. “As for peace—we keep asking. We’re told, in most religions, that someday we’ll get it. Or it will get us. But rarely while we’re breathing. Life seems to be mostly about problem-solving, the way most species see it—and the more problems you solve, the bigger and more complex they get.”

  They were quiet for a moment as the shaft of sunlight slid away from the altar. “You spoke just now, up there, of a coming again,” H’ewa said. “One of these—Powers—saying it would come back. That evil would die.”

  “But not when,” Sal said, shaking her head. “Never that: no data on the future. As for the rest of it . . . all the stories of the Powers coming into the world, actually into it, to intervene . . . are in the past, a long time ago. Very old. Increasingly, we seem to be the ones who do the intervening. The Powers may speak . . . but they don’t do much. We seem to be the ones who do the doing.”

  “We are not doing it very well, it would seem,” said H’ewa.

  Sal laughed, not as bitterly as she might have. “We never have,” she said, “but we do what we can with what we’ve got. You’re quite right, about the weapons not being enough. It’s hard to stop using them, though. Right now, we don’t seem to have much choice. If we stop shooting at the Ichtons, they’ll roll over us and dome us over in a matter of minutes.”

  H’ewa bared his teeth again. This time Sal felt no need to step back. “I think we will not let them do that,” he said. “And in the meantime . . . we will not wait for the Powers, either.”

  “It’s not recommended,” Sal said. “ ‘The gods help those who help themselves’; that’s a popular refrain in a lot of places. They may not help with hardware, or logistical support . . . but there are other ways.”

  H’ewa looked at her a moment, eyes glinting gold. Then he moved toward the door and went out.

  Sal went to her prayers, distressed, and not knowing what else to do about it.

  The next morning, when she went by the address H’ewa had given her for his quarters, she found the door standing open, and a cleaning robot working busily inside. “Where is the occupant, please?” she said to it.

  “Vacated,” the robot said, and kept dusting under a chair.

  Sal put her eyebrows up and went off to Frank’s office. He was eating at his desk and barely looked up at her. “What did you say to him?” he growled. “He was up all night in the library, ransacking the computers. Then left on the shuttle about half an hour ago, back to Emry.”

  “Nothing offensive, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Sal said. “I gave him the truth—as much of it as I could find in such a short time, anyway. It seemed to be what he wanted.”

  “You’d better hope so,” Frank said, looking, at least on the surface, relieved. “Well, go on, do you think I have all day to sit here jawing?”

  Sal smiled at him and went off to the wards to visit some of the people she had missed yesterday—some of them missed on purpose, because they were a touch xenophobic and wouldn’t have cared for the presence of an alien while Sal was ministering to them. She couldn’t get rid of the memory of those golden eyes, blinking at her conversations, listening to the people she had been talking to; the comical swivel of the ears, but also the intensity. . . .

  “Sal, they’ve got incoming in OR, a lot of it,” said one of the nurses from the doorway as Sal got up from the last bedside. “You free? Some of them may need you.”

  “On my way.” She pulled her stole out of her pocket and headed for the lift—OR was one level down. It was a madhouse when she got down there, but that was nothing new. The scorched-bacon smell was nothing new, either—she knew it of old, and hated it. More burn cases. At least they’ll be alive. But will they like it—

  As usual for large emergencies, Sal took herself into the prep room, where triage was taking place. There was already a sad row of plastic-sheeted shapes over on the side of the room; dead, or soon to be: too hurt to waste time with, in any case. The second group, those awaiting surgery but not critically enough wounded to need it right away, was fairly large. Sal deafened herself for the moment to their cries and stopped long enough to pronounce the general absolution over those already dead, then turned back to see to the cat-two people—trying to make out who was conscious, who needed a hand to hold, who was dealing with their pain sufficiently to notice someone with them.

  She was almost past him before she saw the sheen of the dark pelt, the darker spots, and the flesh under it, startlingly pale, except where the burns blistered it. His jaw worked, but no sound came out.

  Stricken, Sal dropped to her knees beside him. For some time he didn’t notice she was there, just worked his jaw. A slight, slight moaning came from him: not the sound of the beast, now, not at all, but that of a child in pain too great to otherwise express. After a while, this stopped, and one eye opened. The other was burned closed, or burned away entirely—there was no telling, nothing but a mass of blistered, furless flesh all down that side of his face.

  It took a while for the eye to see her, for the sight to register. She was already speaking the words softly, whether he would understand them or not; in the middle of the prayer he said, rough-voiced, halting: “Who are you talking to?”

  “You and God,” she said. “Now shut up!” She was horrified at her own tears as she went on with it. “ ‘Lord, visit and relieve Your servant here, for whom we pray. Restore him, if it be Your pleasure, to his former health—’ ”

  “One of us at least is here,” H’ewa said, his jaw dropping briefly. “Not for long, perhaps. They caught us—halfway—”

  He coughed bloody froth, could not go on for a moment. “No matter,” he said. “I had made my report: last night.”

  Sal stopped praying and stared at him. “On what? The existence of God?” She was tempted to laugh through the tears.

  H’ewa hissed—maybe it was laughter, too, or pain. “Just so.”

  “And what conclusions did you come to?”

  “Noncombatant,” H’ewa said. “But possibly available for discussions.”

  She shook her head, in amusement and bitter rue. “What will this mean for your people?”

  “In the war? Nothing. But after we have all survived it—we will have one more thing to talk about, perhaps. For a long time. We have been looking— We thought we were the only ones—”

  There was more blood, this time, and less froth. Sal knew this sign. It meant lungs that had had more vacuum than was good for them: many vessels ruptured, maybe a big one. “I need a reassessment here!” she cried, but all the staff were busy, running around like mad people: and those golden eyes met hers, stilled her.

  “Now that I have done some of the doing—” said the voice of the beast, calm, as if speaking to a child. “Talk to these Powers for me, so that I can—see how it is done. It is practice. You will have to—do the same again, for others will come looking, in a while. You will have—quite a few visitors.”

  Sal swallowed, and on the impulse of the moment changed prayers. “ ‘God, giver of all good gifts, who
has made varying Orders in Your scheme of things, give Your grace to those called today to Your service, replenish them with the truth, so that they can faithfully serve You—’ ”

  Much too much blood, this time. “Junie!” she shouted, trying to get the attention of the only nurse she knew well, but no one came. H’ewa turned his head, and exhaled blood, and nothing else. His eyes did not close, but their gold began to tarnish.

  Sal wiped her eyes and went on with it, even to the last line, for though breathing might stop, the nurses had always told her that hearing was the last thing to go. “ ‘You are a priest forever,’ ” she said, “ ‘even after the order of Melchisidech.’ ”

  She stood up then, as one of the other nurses came along, knelt down by the body, touched the control on the stretcher, and steered it into the OR. Sal watched them take H’ewa’s corpse away, and knew it was hopeless; but at the same time, could not lose an odd feeling of anticipation. Apostle to the Emry? Not apostle, that’s too high. Missionary?

  “ ‘I am the handmaiden of the Lord,’ ” it said in the documentation. Sal smiled a sad smile. “ ‘Let it be done to me as you say,’ ” she whispered.

  Meantime—

  She went off to kneel by a man whose arm had been blown off, checked the tourniquet, and began to pray.

  IN DANGER’S WAY

  As the two opposing fleets converged on Emry, the intensity of the battle grew. Enough Fleet ships had been eliminated to force lulls in their attack that allowed the Ichtons to regroup. The Ichtons had themselves suffered heavily enough that they were finding it difficult to protect the mother ships and the tens of thousands of soldiers and millions of eggs they carried. But no one could fight harder than an Ichton protecting those eggs.

  The Hawking arrived at Emry to find the planet already under attack. Anton Brand held the battlestation in the system’s Oort cloud, where it could hide among the cometary debris. Even so the constant parade of ships to and from the station would soon divulge its location. Nonetheless, Brand made every effort to disrupt the Ichton attack. Fierce battles erupted as the Fleet and their allies tried to tear their way through the more numerous Ichton attackers and destroy the mother ships. On the second attempt a sortie from the surface of Emry actually succeeded in tearing apart one of the massive Ichton vessels. This made the remaining Ichtons meet the next incursion in an almost suicidal frenzy. Two days later the siege of Emry continued unabated.