The Chaplain's War

by Brad R Torgersen

  “Proceed,” he said.

  I beckoned the captain over, and her face went from an expression of utter misery to utter amazement as she put her hands into the zone of pleasant heat directly below the Professor’s disc.

  We quickly huddled up close and stuck both arms and legs under the shadow of the disc, our ponchos over our heads and backs while our rear ends remained cold and soggy on the damp stone.

  For a while, I dozed. Between the lack of adequate food and walking many kilometers every day, I was definitely feeling the physical toll. Eventually I felt the captain slump against me, and I allowed myself to do likewise, my head balanced on top of hers, a little patch of protected warmth growing between us. I closed my eyes.

  They didn’t come open again until hours later.

  The storm had passed, and the sun was out again: still brighter and cooler than either Purgatory’s star, or Earth’s own Sol, but a welcome sight just the same. It was midday, and there was a bit of a breeze, which meant the captain and I might be able to dry our clothes out—essential, if we were going to survive the night without further draining the Professor’s energy reserves.

  The Queen Mother had drawn herself out from under the Professor’s disc and was perched on a boulder a few meters away. Her wings were spread widely and she appeared almost frozen in place, forelimbs outstretched and her head tilted back. She seemed to be soaking in every last ray she could get.

  The sound of running water nearby reminded me that we’d best replenish our own water supply while we had the opportunity. I regretfully roused the captain, who jumped at the chance to refill our bottles. We located a formerly dry creek bed—now swollen with slowly running, very soiled water—and began to fill up. The mouth of each bottle had a micro filter on it that screened out the bulk of the soil. Leaving only the thinnest of hazes. Unsure of the bacterial hazard, we unscrewed the filters and dropped survival tabs into each bottle—the tabs made the water taste chemically nasty, but it would be safe to drink.

  Returning to where the Professor kept watch on the Queen Mother, the captain and I each did an about-face and stripped to the skin. Our emergency packs had one-piece smocks in them, which we quickly donned, then we laid our uniforms, underwear, boots, and socks out on the rocks as best we could, hoping that the strong daylight and fresh breeze would be enough to dry things out. The smocks weren’t nearly as sturdy as we needed them to be, and the slip-on shoes that came with them would quickly disintegrate on this planet’s rough, unforgiving terrain.

  With nothing better to do, Adanaho and I ate a little, drank a little more, went and did our business as far away from each other as possible, then returned and stared at the Queen Mother—who’d remained motionless as a statue the whole time.

  I did notice that her lower limbs—which had seemed almost useless when the Professor had first removed her from her disc—appeared to be getting stronger. She was balanced on them now, with just a hand’s width of space between her belly and the stone on which she perched.

  “How is she doing?” I asked the Professor.

  “I do not know,” he said. “She has not spoken to me since the storm passed. I am suspecting that she is manifesting an instinctual behavior of our species, from the time before we had carriages to provide for our needs.”

  “What about food?” I said.

  “The carriage provides that too, though we can ingest nourishment with our mouths for the pleasure of it.”

  I shuddered a bit, remembering mantis warriors devouring human flesh during the initial fighting on Purgatory.

  “Can the Queen Mother eat our food?” the captain asked.

  “I do not think it wise,” the Professor said. “Our nutritional requirements are not the same as yours. Besides, we have the ability to store a reserve—naturally—which should suffice for the Queen Mother’s needs for some time yet. Assuming she gets water.”

  “She should go drink while the drinking’s good,” I said, pointing back to the creek bed, the water in which had begun to wane as the sun gradually began to drop towards the western horizon.

  “I have already purified a supply for her,” the Professor said. “For now, I simply watch, and wait. The Queen Mother’s behavior is unusual and fascinating. I have never seen any of my people forced to live without a carriage. The Queen Mother’s actions speak to me of how my people must have lived, eons ago in the distant past, before we ourselves even had fire, or tools. Before we took to the stars.”

  As the angle of the sun’s light shifted, so did the Queen Mother. Like a solar panel, she made sure her wings caught the maximum amount of direct light.

  Occasionally the captain or I would get up to go check on our clothes, flapping them vigorously to try and get out every drop of remaining moisture. When evening came and the sun began to dip into the far horizon, we pulled out our emergency sleeping bags and prepared to make do on the hard stone.

  “I’ll be back,” Adanaho said.

  “Nature calls?” I replied.

  “No.”

  “Oh . . . well, find privacy and peace then.”

  To my surprise, she went to join the Queen Mother, who’d folded up her wings, but remained staring in the direction of the setting sun.

  Adanaho sat cross-legged and appeared to hold something in her hands as she bowed her head. The Queen Mother’s own head tilted just a little, her antennae moving ever so slowly, as if entranced by the captain’s soft, slow words of supplication. The Professor was listening too—I could see him alert. Like before, I was too far away to make out what was being said. And, I suddenly realized, I was a little bit jealous that the captain felt perfectly fine sharing her prayer with the mantes, but not with me. A tiny spark of anger flared, and quickly died as I realized that maybe she was just doing what I’d done with the Professor many times: giving the mantes a demonstration, so that maybe the Queen Mother might enjoy a degree of understanding.

  Though I couldn’t be sure what progress Adanaho hoped to make, which I hadn’t been able to make with the Professor or his students in all the years of trying back on Purgatory.

  Eventually the sky faded from blue to purple, and from purple to black. Adanaho returned, and I was already in my bag, my one-piece rolled up under my head for a pillow. I averted my eyes as the captain stripped, rolled her one-piece up for a pillow, then slipped into her own bag.

  I didn’t stay awake long enough to see what arrangements the Professor and the Queen Mother had made between them.

  Sometime in the night I felt a hand nudging my shoulder.

  “What’s happening?” I said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I can’t sleep, Chief,” Adanaho said. “There’s a hole in my bag and it got damp inside, and I am freezing.”

  My eyes popped open. I could barely make out the black silhouette of her shoulders and head against the perfect expanse of stars that stretched across the night sky. Clear sky meant frigid temperatures, and I could feel the cold night air on my face. I reached out and felt Adanaho’s hand in mine. Her fingers were icy.

  Not even thinking about it, I unzipped my bag and beckoned her in. She slid down beside me and zipped the bag up to our chins. Not designed for comfort, as an emergency bag it could hold two in a pinch—and I certainly was glad for it, as the captain felt dangerously cold, her body shuddering next to me.

  “Ma’am,” I said, “why didn’t you come earlier? You’re a popsicle.”

  “I feel like a popsicle,” she said, her nose stuffed.

  “Here,” I said, and closed my arms around her. Despite the frigidity of her skin, it was smooth, and womanly, and all of a sudden I realized I hadn’t lain in bed with a girl since shortly after IST, and that had been a long, long time ago.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, clearing my throat.

  “For what?” She said. And then, because of the impossibly close quarters of the bag, she said, “Oh. I get it.”

  I felt a rush of blood to my face.

  “It�
�s okay, Chief,” she said, sensing my mortal embarrassment.

  “I hope you’re not married,” I said. “Explaining to your husband how you spent the night naked in a sleeping bag with another man who was unable to contain his . . . ahhh, excitement, could be problematic.”

  “No, I am not married,” she said, laughing a bit. Then began to cough.

  I suddenly realized that pneumonia could kill as easily as low temperatures, and held her tighter. She squirmed in my grasp and was suddenly face to face with me, her nose like a cold, damp button in the nape of my neck. She coughed a few more times, snuffling, and clung tightly to me. I rubbed my hands vigorously along her bare back to try and accelerate the process of warming. Gradually, her body relaxed. I then heard a small, quiet snore.

  I shifted and repositioned my rolled-up smock so that her head rested on it, not mine, crooked an elbow up to my ear, kept my other arm wrapped tightly around her, and let myself drift off.

  CHAPTER 30

  Earth, 2153 A.D.

  THE COLA HIT MY THROAT LIKE A COLD WAVE. I SAVORED ITS chilled, fizzy, delightful sweetness, and took another long chug on my bottle, before resting the bottle lightly on the table in front of me.

  It was Halfway Day. The official midpoint of IST.

  Every recruit in Charlie Company not on corrective detail was given an entire Sunday afternoon with a base pass: as long as we didn’t attempt to leave Armstrong Field, we could either walk or catch a bus to the half dozen exchanges and vendor malls that serviced the massive military installation.

  Dismissed at 1400, our return formation was at 1900.

  It felt like we had all the time in the world.

  “Enjoy that while it lasts, Recruit Barlow,” said the recruit directly across from me, a female by the name of Cortez. She tipped her own bottle at me and swigged down a healthy draft, then did a long, drawn out, theatrical “ahhh,” while wiping the condensation-frosted bottle across her sweat-beaded brow.

  The outdoor pavilion was jammed with recruits. Ours was not the only company at Halfway Day. Since none of us had been able to even look at a soft drink—nor anything else sugary—for almost two months, we were making the most of our limited parole.

  “And here I was trying to lose a few pounds in the military,” said recruit Handley, who upended his own bottle. At twenty-nine he was one of the older guys in second platoon. Married, with a child on the way, he’d been one of the first people I’d truly befriended. I sometimes wondered if he had been the one who’d stopped me from trying to hurt Thukhan that one night.

  I’d not asked anyone about the incident, nor had anyone come forward and offered to identify himself. Because we’d been mostly whispering at the time, I couldn’t identify the culprit by voice. Hence the event had become something of a very curious mystery to me.

  Which was not to say I hadn’t taken the anonymous recruit’s advice.

  The truth was, that night had scared the dickens out of me.

  I’d let Batbayar get so far under my skin with his head games, I’d almost gone and done something incredibly stupid. But after that night, I’d made a point of warming up to the people who seemed worth warming up to, and together we’d formed a nice little nugget of camaraderie through the following weeks of rifle and marksmanship training.

  It hadn’t stopped Thukhan from trying to mess with me, but it had blunted much of the resulting emotional trauma. Now that I didn’t feel so alone against him, it was easier to endure the insults and the petty attacks. Such as the time he got ahold of my laundry bag and filled it full of shaving gel, or swapped my duty boots with someone else’s boots on the other side of the bay, so that each of us was sent scrambling to identify who had the size eights, and who had the size tens, and could I please have my boots back, oh yes, here’s yours, thanks so much, followed by a lot of under-the-breath cursing.

  With Thukhan not around, and no DSs in sight, I realized that the pavilion was the closest I’d come to experiencing real freedom in a long time.

  Recruits Kealoha and Sembeke were the other two in my group. The former female, and the latter male. They each had their mouths full of hamburgers and fries from the pavilion grill.

  Only two of us were north American by birth, and only three of us spoke the military’s version of common English as a first language. But we’d gravitated to each other for one reason or another. As the recruits who seemed destined for everything and anything other than an infantry or armor assignment.

  “So what do you think?” I said to Cortez, who didn’t need to inquire as to the context of my question. Now that we were on the downhill slope to graduation, one thing was increasingly on everyone’s mind.

  “Starship mechanic,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of a fist.

  “You got pre-existing training for that?” Handley said.

  “No, but I got this,” Cortez said, tapping the side of her head. “You think they let dummies play with the drive cores on the big capital vessels? Nope. As soon as I graduate out of this hole, I’m going to Fleet engineering school. No more DSs. The cadre aren’t NCOs, but officers with degrees in their subject matter.”

  “You gonna go ossifer too?” I said, deliberately slurring the word.

  “Maybe,” Cortez said. “I can think of worse ways to spend a war.”

  “Me too,” Handley said. “It’s why I’m hoping for transport pilot.”

  Kealoha and Sembeke stopped chewing, and stared at the older recruit.

  “For serious,” he said, looking at all our raised eyebrows. “When I got out of high school I put some money into getting a private pilot’s license. I haven’t had the chance to use it much since Kelli and I got married, but it’s in my personnel file. They’d be stupid to ignore it. Like the lovely Recruit Cortez here, I hope to go far away from this place, to a training station where everyone speaks to me in respectful tones and nobody is trying to blow my ears off with sheer screaming.”

  “. . . and the skies are blue all day, it’s never hot outside, and they leave chocolates on your pillow after making your bunk for you in the morning!”

  Kealoha had said it through a grinning mouthful, and we all laughed uncontrollably for several seconds.

  “How about you?” Sembeke said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and pointing a long, bony, coal-black finger in my direction.

  “Deck swabber,” Cortez said, grinning wickedly.

  “Toilet-scrubber Second Mate,” Handley said, also grinning.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, chuckling, “like Cortez says, there are worse ways of spending the war.”

  “It would have been nice if they’d let us have a sure choice,” Kealoha said. Like me, she was a volunteer. But not everyone in Charlie Company could say the same. There were the hard cases—like Thukhan—and there were the draftees. Young men and women from all over the world, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Plucked from their ordinary lives by their respective governments and pressed into Fleet service. Whether they liked the idea, or not.

  And whether we’d volunteered or been drummed into uniform, none of us had been told upon reporting to Reception what our final destinations would be, in our newfound military careers. We were allowed to pick two options upon filling out our sign-up sheets, but everyone had noticed that there was a third option—always check-boxed and always grayed out—that simply said RECRUIT’S FINAL OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALTY TO BE DESIGNATED PER NEEDS OF THE FLEET.

  Theoretically, Fleet had a massive semi-intelligent database that constantly tracked all available Fleet slots and attempted to match Fleet strengths and weaknesses with recruit preferences and aptitudes. Though this was mostly recruit scuttlebutt. I knew for a fact that two of my older friends who’d gotten good grades in school, had been sent directly into marine training out of IST; though both of them had also been on the football team too. Did that have anything to do with anything? I’d not heard from them in the two years since they’d left Earth.

  As a matter of fact, none
of us who had friends or relatives in Fleet service had heard from anybody, once they went to space.

  Which I found just a little unsettling. But this was neither the time nor the place to speak of such things. Today was a day for merrymaking.

  “So who’s going to get laid?” I said, picking up my cola and tipping it to my lips.

  Handley laughed so hard he half-spit out a mouthful of his own drink.

  “In just the short amount of time they’ve given us?” Sembeke said. “I think maybe you’re a little too eager, Barlow. Besides, they put chemicals in the food that suppress our libidos.”

  “That’s a lot of crap,” Cortez said. “My grandfather was in the military and he said the same spook story was circulating when he was in Basic, all those years ago. God knows nothing is suppressing my libido.”

  “So you would be the lucky one getting her rocks off, then?” I said, raising my bottle in her direction. “I salute you, madam.”

  She reached across and slugged me in the arm.

  I almost dropped my drink.

  “If I was,” she said, “I certainly wouldn’t be doing it with any lousy recruit!”

  “You wound me,” I said.

  She raised the same fist she’d punched me with, and erected her middle finger.

  I laughed, remembering Tia doing the same to me many months earlier. Through the haze of the past two months, it seemed like another lifetime.

  Our eyes flicked to Handley.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said. “Kelli and I already took care of business. We had one final night together, after I signed up.”

  “Must have been a good one,” Kealoha said.

  “Simply the best,” Handley replied, grinning.

  I smiled, and finished the last of my drink.

  “I honestly don’t care if I’m mopping the head,” I said. “As long as Fleet lets me go stare out the window once in a while, it’s all good with me.”

  “A stargazer,” Sembeke said, smiling. “Me too.”