The Chaplain's War

by Brad R Torgersen

  I’d chosen to remain. Despite Purgatory’s hard, arid climate and the chapel’s crude rock-and-mud-walled simplicity. A part of me had become invested in this place. I looked over the lovely young officer’s shoulder to the chapel’s lone altar, where various human religious symbols and objects were carefully placed for all to see. This early in the morning I had no flock to attend to. But soon they’d begin to trickle in, a few here and a few there. Most of them human. But not all.

  “It’s the mantes’ difficulty with religion that brings me here now,” she said. “It’s been almost ten Earth years since the armistice. Fleet stealth missions indicate that the mantes are moving some of their own ships. Renewed battle exercises. The truce you won may not last much longer. Not unless someone can help the mantes get what they came here for. From you specifically.”

  I laughed coldly.

  “I labored with the Professor,” I said. “For years. He read every last line of holy text I could put in front of him. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, you name it. He soaked it up like a sponge. We engaged in various rituals, both for demonstration and also to see if he’d take to any of them. But he was as deaf to the spirit as the next mantis. They’re all like that—biologically incapable of feeling what you and I might call ‘faith.’ The Professor eventually withdrew in confused futility.”

  “What about the ones who still attend?”

  “They are young,” I said. “Grad students. They come to the chapel for objective study, no more. Working on their equivalent of thesis papers, probably.”

  “General Sakumora was adamant. You must help.”

  I wanted to keep protesting, but the earnestness in her expression told me that there wouldn’t be any point. I reached a hand up and felt the non-regulation stubble on my face. I hated shaving every day. But it looked like I was going to have to start again.

  “Orders are orders, ma’am?” I said, straightening my duty topcoat.

  “That’s right, Chief,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. And if it’s all the same to you, nobody around here calls me that.”

  “Then what do they call you?”

  “Padre. One of my former parishioners hung that on me shortly after the cease-fire.”

  “Father Barlow,” she said, testing it out.

  “No,” I said sheepishly, “just padre.”

  “Well, Padre, I’m putting us on the next flight into orbit. The General is getting ready for a summit with his counterparts in the mantes’ chain of command. You and I have both been instructed to cooperate in every way—to ensure that the summit is productive.”

  “Are you part of the Chaplains Corps?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Fleet Intelligence.”

  I repressed the urge to scoff. If the military’s blind hurling of the original human flotillas against Purgatory’s impervious mantis defenders had been any indication, intelligence was the one thing we’d been sorely lacking.

  “I don’t think it will do any good,” I admitted. “I tried to tell the Professor, when he started to give up hope. If mantis curiosity about human faith is the only thing holding back their war machine, then our fates truly do rest in God’s hands.”

  She stared at me.

  “But,” I said, “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all anyone can ask,” she replied.

  I spent a few minutes getting word out that I would be leaving. Fleet business. The flock would have to take care of the chapel for a change. Which was fine. Some of the regulars were people I trusted implicitly. But as I walked outside to join the captain, there was a sinking feeling in my stomach. I turned my head to look at the building which had been my home for so many years, and I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

  The sensation was unpleasantly familiar.

  One old memory swam up from the depths of my life as I trailed the captain to the four-by-four truck that would take us to the only place on Purgatory where human spacecraft were allowed to land and take off from.

  “Here we go again,” I said under my breath.

  CHAPTER 12

  Earth, 2153 A.D.

  THE WOMAN SAT AT A SINGLE TABLE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA. There was a wide, tall thinscreen behind her, and on the thinscreen there was a slowly revolving interstellar map. A bright blue point glowed cheerfully at the center, signifying Earth and Sol System. Smaller, green points were Earth’s growing number of successful colonies around other stars. One of those colonies had a harsh red halo that throbbed ominously. A computer graphic of an extremely large starship soared slowly through the scene, towing a stylized banner that said, THE FLEET WANTS YOU!

  Myself and my friends Kaffy, Ben, David, and Tia stopped short, our small trays of food momentarily forgotten. The woman in front of the star map was talking animatedly with several other students who’d come to chat her up. She wore a uniform unlike any I’d seen before. From the sound of her accent, she was from the Southeast—a bit of a drawl, worn flat by years spent living outside her home state.

  Up until very recently, she’d probably been Army or Air Force. Maybe Marine Corps? I’d been barely fourteen years old when the president went on the air to tell the whole country that by joint Senatorial and Congressional order, the whole of the armed forces of the United States were being used to form the backbone of a new multinational force that would be explicitly created for fighting in outer space.

  Small wonder. News of the aliens had been both exciting and disquieting. We’d always suspected they might be out there. With the new colonies putting down fresh roots since the invention of the interstellar jump system some twenty years prior, many of my middle school teachers had speculated that we’d run across nonhuman intelligence eventually. Probably in the form of primitives living a stone-age existence. As homo sapiens, and its cousins on the primate family tree, had done for millions of years.

  But the planet Marvelous had been explicitly attacked. A planet which had shown no hint of harboring intelligent life. A threat from the stars had savaged her, leaving Earth and the other colonies scrambling to put together some kind of effective defense.

  War news was something that came only in irregular bits and pieces. Since Earth itself had not been hit, what went on out in the colonies, many, many light-years from home, wasn’t exactly front-page news. Once the initial furor over the alien threat had died down, most American families had gone back to business as usual. What else could be done? We watched our thinscreens and we checked the Internet and we speculated about what might happen next. But for most of us, the war was a thing happening far away, out of the realm of ordinary experience.

  Tia leaned close, speaking in a whisper only the four of us could hear.

  “They want troops for the colonial counteroffensive,” she said.

  “Who told you that?” I asked, also in a whisper.

  “Nobody,” she said. “But what else could it be?”

  I wondered. The Fleet recruiters had been getting more numerous as our senior year at school drew to a close. One of my cousins who lived in Rhode Island and who occasionally gamed with me online said that she’d noticed the same thing at her school. Was it true that the Fleet was going to strike back? What did that mean for those of us who’d never even seen the alien threat up close?

  We’d all been shown pictures, of course. The aliens individually looked for all the world like a grotesque, outsized mutation of an ordinary praying mantis. Only each one rode a man-sized flying saucer not terribly different from the kind I’d seen in some of the very archaic two-dee movies of the previous century. The images which had been brought back from Marvelous were pretty horrible. So much so that even the scientists and politicians who’d been loudly advocating for peace talks gradually piped down.

  The threat was real, it was ugly, and the only question that remained was: what were humans going to do about it?

  The Fleet recruiter noticed us, and beckoned us over.

  We hesitantly complied.
>
  “How are y’all doin’ today?” she said, smiling. Her hair was red, and she had freckles across her cheeks.

  “Okay, I guess,” Ben said.

  “Y’all seniors?” the recruiter asked; her name tape on her uniform read O’DONNELL.

  “Yeah,” Tia said.

  “Got plans for after school? You know the Fleet’s got countless opportunities for healthy, able-bodied young men and women like yourselves. The president’s authorized nice bonuses for anyone willing to sign up with me today. You’d ship out when you graduate.”

  Money. That was a definite enticement. Prior to the mantis aliens making their existence known, the American economy had been locked in a rather pernicious stagflationary cycle. The advent of the interstellar jump system, and the establishment of the colonies, had destabilized most of the international stock markets. Earth’s economic ship-in-a-bottle approach to commerce was being disrupted now that thousands of people were disembarking on colony boats every day, while freighters returning from the colonies were bringing goods and materials back. The United Nations had been trying to slap together an interstellar monetary committee when ships fleeing Marvelous brought word of the alien attack.

  Now, things were worse. The dollar was really struggling. And jobs—any kind—were not that easy to find. Not when computers and machinery did so much of the manual labor all over the country. Many people were either technicians servicing those computers and machines, or developers, engineers, and programmers who worked on improving and refining the technology that kept much of the human race fed, housed, and clothed.

  “What do you do in the Fleet?” I asked O’Donnell.

  “Well, before I was Fleet, I was Navy, and when I was Navy, I was a maintenance expert out on one of the submarines. Submarine life is a lot like life on the starships, you know. They snatched up as many of us submariners as they could get their hands on, when the Fleet was initially launched. I did some time converting my skills over to spacecraft, and then I got put into recruiting.”

  “Sounds like you don’t stay in one spot too long,” Kaffy said.

  “Not so far,” O’Donnell said. “So, can I show you a few videos? Interest you in what the Fleet has to offer?”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “We’re going to be late for class if we don’t get something to eat, and soon.”

  “Well, that’s fine, but here, let me give you these,” O’Donnell said, handing us all thin little pieces of plastic about the size of a standard credit or debit card. The card was silver, with a holographic logo on it that moved when you faced the card in different directions. The logo appeared to be a hawk or eagle, stylized of course, with its eyes and beak looking fierce. Under the bird was a small globe of Earth, shielded from above by the bird’s protectively-arched wings. The bird’s talons held what appeared to be a sword on the left, and a cluster of rockets on the right.

  We mumbled our thanks, and went to sit at a table.

  “No way,” Ben said as he slipped bites of school lunch spaghetti into his mouth.

  “You’re not interested in going to space?” David asked.

  “Not like that,” Ben said, shaking his head.

  “I’ve got an older cousin who signed up,” Kaffy said. “He left home three weeks ago. My aunt and uncle don’t hear from him much, though they say he says the training is tough.”

  “Military training is always tough,” I said, chewing on a piece of cold garlic bread.

  “How would you know?” Tia teased. “Playing war hero in VR isn’t like the real thing, you know.”

  I scowled at Tia, and flipped her my middle finger.

  She laughed, and up-ended her bottle of fruit juice with her right hand, flipping me back with her left.

  “Too bad the mantis aliens aren’t just VR,” David said, his face growing sober. “I mean, really, what do any of us know about the aliens anyway? One colony has been attacked, so far. How many of the others will be attacked? Maybe they’re under attack right now?”

  “If it were that bad,” Kaffy said, “Don’t you think they’d be here already? Invading Earth?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe we just happened to settle some planets that the aliens thought were theirs to begin with.”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” Ben said. “War is war. We fight, or we lose.”

  “Spoken like a man who just said he’d never go to space as a soldier,” Tia said, turning her sarcasm on our mutual friend.

  “Hey, if the battle comes to Earth, I’ll do what I have to, just like everyone else,” Ben said defensively. “I’m just not in a hurry to go up and be roach food, you know what I mean?”

  We all nodded our heads.

  It was easy to talk options, with the mantis threat almost entirely removed from our daily lives.

  Still, I kept looking over my shoulder at the Fleet recruiter.

  When I went home that night, I sat on the family living room couch and flipped the recruiter’s card over and over and over in my fingers. Mom and Dad were still at work, and wouldn’t be home until later. I noticed that the card had a chip in it.

  I eyed the Total Entertainment System in the corner of the living room.

  Like most virtual reality units on the market, the TES looked a lot like a huge egg, with two steps leading up to the hatch in the side. I got up and slowly went over to the unit, eyeing the small slot on the TES’s control panel—a slot just big enough to accept the card the recruiter had given me.

  I looked up through the numerous clear windows that made up the arched ceiling above my head, and noticed the moon was just starting to come out. The Fleet often did training exercises there now. Spacesuited infantry and armor units, practicing for the day when they might be hurled into battle against the mantis hordes.

  I slipped the recruiter’s card into the slot on the TES, climbed in, sat down, and shut the hatch.

  It was a little unnerving, being in the TES unsupervised. Mom and Dad had very strict rules about that. I’d been punished more than once. It was easy to get lost in the virtual environment. For hours, or even days. VR had become so realistic that habitual users risked drifting over into disconnect: a clinically diagnosed condition, which left the user believing that not only was the VR experience more real than real, it was also preferable to real.

  I inhaled once, then used my fingers in the air to swipe and drag the VR digital menus until the TES booted up whatever program was on the card in the exterior slot.

  Almost instantly, I was plunged into a total surround starscape, with impressive full orchestra music that piped through the stereo speakers on either side of my head rest.

  “A challenge awaits,” said a deep baritone voice. “The galaxy needs men and women who can meet that challenge.”

  A planet appeared, then grew larger. It was Earth, if I had the shapes of the continents right. Then the view zoomed down into Earth orbit, where several asteroids from the asteroid belt had been artificially inserted. The view zoomed in again, and showed the shipyards on the surfaces of the asteroids. The spines and ribs of numerous large vessels were being busily constructed, while other ships—further along in the construction process—were being detached and floated into formation for their final fittings.

  “The Fleet is humanity’s sword and shield against all dangerous life before us,” the voice boomed. “Millions of men and women from across the solar system, and also the colonies, are doing their part to ensure that humanity is protected. Our lives kept safe and secure.”

  Suddenly the view rapidly dropped past the asteroid shipyards, down a dizzying number of kilometers, through the clouds, and right up to the tarmac of a nameless spaceport. There were people standing in four rows—what appeared to be a rectangular formation. They were of generally young age, both genders, and varying ethnicities. They stared straight ahead of them, chins out and eyes steely. One by one their civilian clothes were computer morphed into uniforms not too different from the one I’d seen the recruiter wearing at sch
ool earlier in the day.

  “Pilots, technicians, computer programmers, military police, infantry, armament and weapons specialists, they’re all needed, and the Fleet needs you to do your part for humanity’s future.”

  It felt as if I was sitting directly in the midst of the formation with them. The sun was bright, and I could hear a seagull crying in the distance. From where the view had dropped down from orbit, I guessed that this particular spaceport was supposed to be on the California coast?

  The image of the people standing in formation grew still, while a menu popped up. The menu listed dozens and dozens of different kinds of jobs.

  I hit the first one that looked interesting to me: weapons maintainer.

  One of the people standing in formation stepped out of line and smiled at me, saying, “Good choice! Come on, I’ll show you what I do!”

  And suddenly I was being given a five-minute guided tour of that particular Fleet troop’s responsibilities and assignments. I was shown the tools she used, the programs she had to know, the kinds of weapons she worked with, how long the training would be, what kinds of opportunities there were in the Fleet for people in her occupational slot, and so forth. All of it as real as could be, rendered through the TES’s ultra-immersive VR environment.

  One by one, I started swiping and selecting, letting the different virtual troops take me on tours of their jobs.

  Much of it looked potentially interesting. Even the more macho stuff like infantry, gunnery, and flying. Which was a bit outside my particular taste, since until that afternoon I’d not seriously given the military—Fleet, or otherwise—any serious consideration.

  But the recruiting program did have a point: if the mantis aliens were as dangerous as they seemed, who was going to protect the rest of us? What was it going to take, on the part of ordinary soon-to-be HS grads like me, to ensure that the Earth remained relatively safe?