Which is why at 2:08 AM, when I saw Thukhan walking back to the head doors at the rear of the bay—far from his counterpart, who sat yawning sleepily at the other end—I became almost spastic with anxiety. If I was successful, it would get Thukhan out of the bay and out of the platoon. Perhaps even out of IST altogether? Failure would leave me more wide open than ever to Thukhan’s depredations, and I had no doubt that once he’d been openly retaliated against, Thukhan would let nothing stand between himself and his vengeance.
At 2:13 AM, I finally forced myself out of my bunk. Thukhan was clearly distracted or otherwise occupied, and the recruit on watch at the other end of the bay had his chin on his chest while a quiet snore issued from his throat.
I padded silently down the side of the Dead Zone—bare feet being forbidden in the bay, but in this instance they were essential—until I was leaning an ear against the head door. There was no sound coming from inside that I could hear. Had Thukhan fallen asleep on the pot? Was he pulling on his pud, PT shorts around his ankles? He’d be in a for a very rude surprise, if so.
I clenched my rifle in my hand.
In addition to shooting, we’d been practicing man-to-man contact maneuvers with our weapons as blunt instruments. Not that these moves would work against a mantis, but there were some military traditions that simply refused to die. Tonight I hoped my training would serve me well enough to put Thukhan out of the picture for keeps.
“Don’t do it, man,” said a whisper to my left.
I nearly jumped off the floor.
The shape in the darkness was impossible to make out. I couldn’t tell which recruit had spoken. So far I’d pretty much kept to myself, and while I’d managed to get along with most people, I’d not exactly become friends with any of them either.
The interloper was unwelcome.
“This is none of your business,” I hissed.
“Eff that,” he said. “You think we’re all blind? You and Thukhan have been spoiling for a fight ever since we got here. You think the DSs don’t know it too? What happens when they find the body? Who do you think they’ll point the finger at?”
“I don’t want to kill him,” I said.
“Then what?”
Our hushed whispering seemed overly loud in my ears. I craned my head over my shoulder to be sure the night watch at the end of the bay was still snoozing. Which he was. Then I turned back to my nameless interrogator.
“I just want him gone,” I said. “A broken arm or leg should do it. Knock him unconscious. Say he slipped on the wet floor, or something? That way he’s recycled, at best, and I don’t have to deal with him anymore.”
“Naw, man, Thukhan is from the street. You’re not from the street. You’ve learned a little bit about fighting from the cadre, but that doesn’t mean you know how to close with a man and put him down. Not yet. Maybe not ever. You don’t seem like the kind of guy who wants blood on his hands.”
I was sweating profusely at this point, despite the cool air from the ventilators.
“I don’t,” I said, swallowing hard.
“Then let it go, bro.”
“He’s going to hurt someone if he’s not stopped.”
“You mean he’s going to hurt you.”
“And someone else after me, and someone else again after them, and so forth. Look, who the eff are you anyway? And why do you care?”
“I’m just someone who thinks you’re about to make a big mistake.”
I had no reply. I simply stared at the dark silhouette to my side, trying to make up my mind whether or not to go through with my plan.
“Look,” said the shape, “you do whatever you want, I can’t stop you. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.”
“So if I do nothing, Thukhan gets to keep on being an asshole?”
“Maybe,” said the shape. “Or maybe assholes have a way of weeding themselves out? So far, Thukhan has been a loner. You haven’t. You’re making friends. He’s not. By doing this you’re letting your focus on him distract you from gaining allies elsewhere.”
“Are you my ally?” I asked honestly.
There was a brief moment of silence.
“Yeah,” said the voice. “Maybe I am.”
More silence.
Then the tell-tale sound of a plastic toilet seat dropping onto its ceramic bowl, followed by the gurgling growl of flushing water.
Without even thinking about it, I hotfooted my way back up the bay and slid into my bunk, the springs bouncing just slightly as I hurriedly covered myself up.
Thukhan emerged from the head a moment later.
If he’d heard either myself or the nameless recruit talking, he didn’t seem to show it. He simply sauntered up the bay, nudged his partner awake, then went back to take a seat for the remainder of his shift.
I stared at the springs to the bunk above me.
When I joined up with the Fleet, I’d simply wanted to do what my friends were doing: get away from home, and go to space. To see the stars. For real. Help the human race survive. Beyond that . . . I’d not put much thought into it. What kind of plan did I have for myself, or my future?
Lying there in my bunk I considered the fact that I’d been on the brink of trying to really hurt another human being—and possibly hurting myself worse in the process. My interrogator was right. I wasn’t from the street. I was from the suburbs in Colorado. Had grown up and been raised by a mother and father who, while firm, had never put a hand to my face in anger.
What did I know about taking anyone to the woodshed—whether they deserved it or not?
With my rifle securely tucked beside me under my blanket, I felt a wave of quick exhaustion sweep over me. With a little luck, I’d still get three hours sleep, before morning reveille started the regimented madness of IST all over again.
CHAPTER 27
CAPTAIN ADANAHO WOKE ME.
“Chief,” she said in a whisper.
“Hmmm?”
“Sun’s coming up. We need to get moving.”
I slowly uncurled—stiff and cold.
At least on Purgatory there had been something akin to trees from which we’d harvested firewood. On this nameless sphere there wasn’t so much as a tumbleweed to burn. I shakily fished some food and water from my pack, the captain and I ate in silence while the mantes watched dispassionately, then we began trudging into the brightening dawn.
The labor of the march warmed me up soon enough, and before long I felt myself sweating as the bright, alien star climbed steadily into the sky.
This time it was the Professor who led. He claimed to have felt the ghost of a flicker of a mantis signal due roughly southwest, and he stretched out a large distance between himself—with the Queen Mother riding on the front of his disc—and Adanaho and I as we walked side by side in their wake.
“Is it true?” she said to me as I put one boot stubbornly in front of the other—we were going too fast; there’d be blisters at this rate.
I yelled for the Professor to slow it up, then asked, “Is what true?”
“That you’re not really a religious person.”
“That was a private conversation,” I snapped.
“The mantis voice system doesn’t do whispers. I heard everything the Professor said.”
I didn’t respond right away. Just kept walking.
“Let me put it this way,” I said, letting my words roll around in my brain a few moments before they came off my tongue, “in my time as an assistant in the Chaplains Corps I’ve been exposed to virtually every systematized form of human religion in existence, and a great many examples of nonsystematized faith—either the do-it-yourself smorgasbord variety, or the deeply personalized, individual one-of-a-kind variety.
“Almost everyone claims to have discovered some unique or otherwise ‘true’ path to God, or the Goddess, or at least to a deep connection with the Cosmic. The more I saw all of it, together, and heard all the insights and the prejudices and could observe the blind eyes being turned to this or
that inconsistency or hypocrisy, the more convinced I became that we’re probably just fooling ourselves.”
“So if it’s all a load of shit,” she said, “why didn’t you quit and do something else?”
“I never said it’s a load of shit,” I replied, my eyes still on the gravel two meters in front of me. “I told you before: I like people. And many people on Purgatory would have withered and died if they’d not had their beliefs to hold on to. Just because I don’t necessarily believe in any of it doesn’t mean I have to doubt or deride its value for other people. That’s one of the problems with our modern society. General Sakumora had it in his eyes and in his voice: obvious contempt.”
“You noticed, huh?”
“How could I not?” I said, throwing my arms out in exasperation. “It practically oozed off the man. He thought I was nuts.”
“And yet you are closer to his view than he ever suspected,” she said, a tiny smirk on her lips.
“No,” I corrected her. “Disbelieving and being openly scornful of belief are not the same thing. I don’t begrudge those with faith. In fact, I admire it. I admire it a great deal. All those people who walked into my chapel all of those years while we were imprisoned? I thought they were impressive. I think one of the reasons why I stuck with my job was because I wanted to find out what made those people tick—how they managed.”
The captain didn’t say anything after that, for several minutes.
“So,” I said, clearing my throat and spitting the grit from my tongue, “what conversation did you and the Queen Mother have? Any groundbreaking heart-to-hearts?”
“I don’t think she understood a word I said,” Adanaho replied.
“The Professor told me it sounded like you were praying. I didn’t ask before, but I want to ask now: are you a Muslim?”
“No,” she said. “Copt.”
I stopped short.
After the purges in Africa in the twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries, many religious scholars doubted that the Coptic Christian religion had survived at all—that any modern Copts extant were “revivalists” trying to reinvent the faith following its literal extinction.
As if reading my thoughts, the captain chuckled.
“Oh, we managed,” she said. “On the down-low, of course. Family legend has it that my ancestors fled North Africa, and went to Australia. Succeeding generations then went to Southeast Asia, then South America, then North America, and finally back to North Africa as part of the resettlement agreement with the Brotherhood. Once the war with the mantes began, our enemies among the Muslims had a new devil to hate, so they left us alone. For a change.”
“Do you believe?” I said. “Are you a Copt in your heart, as well as by birth?”
“I didn’t used to be,” she said as we started up walking again.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You,” she said.
I stopped short for the second time.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever could I have done that reignited your belief?”
I felt my face growing warm again, and not from exercise.
“When I got out of officer school and went to the Intelligence branch, I began studying the roots of the armistice. I read all of your depositions and your final summary. It wasn’t scholarly writing by any stretch of the imagination. But I agreed with you then: the cease-fire was a practical miracle, achieved against all odds. Without it, humanity would have ceased to exist. The mantes had every intention of doing to us what they’d done to previous intelligent competitors in the galaxy. That they did not, and that they did not for the sake of something so utterly beyond their understanding and experience, as religion, spoke to me of a higher power at work.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“You are a modest man, Padre,” she said. “I know you try not to take too much credit. I personally believe you were a tool. And I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense.”
“Others have said as much, before,” I admitted.
“You are uncomfortable with this.”
“Of course I am uncomfortable with it!” I said, almost shouting. “Do you know how many human pilgrims have passed through my chapel in the last decade? All of them wanting to sit at my feet like I’m some kind of effing Buddha? An enlightened one? A savior?”
“To their minds, that’s not far-fetched.”
“No doubt!” I said, facing her directly. We were deep into the weeds of the discussion now, and there was no holding back. “But do you have any kind of idea how much pressure that put on me? How badly I felt when these people—from all over human space—came to my chapel and sat in my pews, and expected some kind of transfiguring or overwhelming experience, and didn’t get it? I saw it in their eyes when they left. Every time: confusion and disappointment. I never wanted to be anyone’s damned prophet. I was never good at preaching. I was never good at teaching. All I was ever trying to do was provide people with a quiet, clean, calming space where they could come and find their own answers. For themselves.”
“Because you made a promise to your Chaplain Thomas,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, breathing heavily.
The Professor had stopped too. Had the mantes overheard? He was chattering for the Queen Mother’s benefit; she seemed intensely interested. I suddenly felt a sharp desire to melt into the ground. Some messiah I’d turned out to be. I’d only delayed the war, not averted it. Things seemed to be more pointless than ever before. I’d have quit right then if I’d not still felt deep down that there was a chance—if only we could get the Queen Mother back to her people, she could make them listen.
“Okay,” I said, waving all three of them off. “Let’s get moving again.”
The Professor and the Queen Mother floated off without protest.
The captain resumed her place at my side.
“Thanks, Chief,” she said.
“For what?” I asked, embarrassed.
“I think I’m finally starting to understand you.”
I grunted, and didn’t say anything more.
We kept walking.
CHAPTER 28
Earth, 2153 A.D.
RANGE FIRING AND SIMULATOR TRAINING PROVED TO BE TWO entirely different things.
For starters, we didn’t have to hike to reach the simulator.
Each morning we were out of our bunks an hour earlier than usual, followed by a four-kilometer tactical march across Armstrong Field to the hills on the southwest side.
Along the way I was able to do plenty of rubbernecking. The Fleet spacecraft landing at and taking off from Armstrong every day were the most advanced, finest pieces of military machinery ever created: sleek aerospace fighters and bulky gunships, as well as wide-body troop carriers and the overly massive destroyers with their missile bays levered open and nuclear-tipped death rockets being carefully fed into the destroyers’ magazines.
Humanity had only been at war with the mantes for a handful of years. Fleet was very proud of the fact that peacetime designs and production had been so thoroughly and quickly converted over to wartime use. The military-contracted starship yards in orbit had run nonstop for the entirety of the conflict, twenty-four hours a day. On the ground, it was much the same. One whole sector of Armstrong was dedicated strictly to a series of kilometer-tall and kilometer-wide Fleet assembly hangars, where the arsenal of Earth was cobbled together in whatever shape and form Fleet desired.
I’d seen still-life pictures of some of Earth’s world wars of the past. Armstrong Field reminded me of the Atlantic and Pacific naval yards of North America in 1943: forever crowded and buzzing with soldiers and civilian workers, all churning out ship after ship for the war effort.
It was a sight to make any recruit proud.
But once we got to the range, business was business. And for some, business was brutal.
Plinking pop cans with a squirrel rifle wasn’t the same as trying to put holes in a mantis warrior who was moving
at speed across broken terrain. Each of the mantis silhouettes was in fact a plate-steel cutout attached to a micro-sized version of the same motors that boosted ships into space. The motors would hiss and zip across the firing lanes, spewing vapor as they burned fuel. Each was controlled from a large houselike control center on top of a five-story tower that overlooked the entire range complex.
When you hit a mantis, the silhouette flipped back and the motor grounded. Until that particular firing sequence was complete, scores were tallied, and the silhouettes were flipped back into place and their motors restarted.
I discovered that the ability to traverse and elevate quickly enough to sight in on and hit targets was not a talent given to all.
With twenty different mantes presenting themselves during a two-minute window, there wasn’t a lot of time to sit back and take stock of the situation. You had to look, aim, and shoot. The men and women with good reflexes and keen eyes did well. The men and women with middling to poor reflexes and bad eyes . . . well, they did what they could to compensate. But by the end of the first day the range cadre had sent some of us back to the re-zero.
Not me specifically. I had qualified early, and grown bored with waiting for the rest to finish. So I volunteered to be somebody’s buddy.
Drill Sergeant Davis shook his head at us as we lay on our stomachs, elbows propped on elbow pads while I sighted through my binoculars, and my struggling partner sighted through his rifle’s scope at the static target twenty-five meters away, and tried to tighten his shot group.
Pang, pang, pang, pang.
Secce had been right. There was precious little fouling. The R77A5 could fire almost endlessly without jamming. But the chemical stench of the vaporized propellant was pungent in the air. Enough so that I began to wonder about any potentially deleterious effects on any recruit who breathed in too much of the stuff.
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