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 insectlike 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 sheared 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 desperately 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.
“Here,” she finally said. We emerged into what I might best describe as an observation deck. A transparent dome in the side of the ship, into which a platform projected. I walked out onto it with the Queen Mother leading the way, and we stopped at the very end. I noted that the stars were fixed. No relativistic compression of light.
“Is there a problem? We’re at sublight velocity.”
“We have dropped to conventional propulsion for a routine navigational calibration. I am using the opportunity to seek your counsel. Look into the universe and tell me what you see,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
She aimed a forelimb into the inky depths of the cosmos, pinpricked a hundred thousand times by tiny, bright stars.
“Look, and tell me the knowledge of your heart.”
A very curious choice of words, I thought.
But I caught her drift. The Professor and I had played this game many times while stargazing back on Purgatory.
“If you’re asking me for a metaphysical answer, I can tell you that when I view the galaxy—especially a view as magnificent as this—I am overcome with a sense of humility.”
“You are humble?”
“Yes. The galaxy is vast, and yet it is only one of a countless number of galaxies spanning a virtually endless ocean of space.”
“An ocean,” she said somewhat dubiously.
“Not literally,” I said. “It’s metaphor.”
“I see. So you look upon space the way your ancestors once viewed the seas of your home world. A liquid medium across which to explore and travel, seek new lands, coloni
ze, and expand.”
“You see it differently?”
“No, the traditional mantis view is much as yours. I speak to you now only of my particular struggle. When we were marooned on that nameless world onto which your human lifeboat landed, I was struck by the fact that while each of our peoples pretend to ‘own’ space, this ownership is an illusion. The distances between stars are immense. It would take lifetimes to travel at sublight speeds. Both our races have been primarily focused on those planets and resources concentrated nearest the stars themselves. But we know from study that there is a great deal between the stars too—planets without stars, as well as gases, whole clouds of minute rock and dust particles, all swirling in an immense gravitational dance according to the specific masses of the aggregate whole.”
“Indeed,” was all I said. I caught the gist of her pontification, though it seemed to me she was expressing much of it for the sake of prefacing a deeper argument.
“For perhaps the first time,” she said, “I asked myself, what is it all for? The universe, I mean. If not for the boundless expansion and dominance of the mantis people, then what? Sharing this universe with humans is not merely a question of territory, Padre. A long-term peace means sharing space with humans in our collective consciousness. We will be admitting that we are no longer alone. That there is a type and kind of mind in the universe that is equal to our own. If not precisely in function or capacity, then at least in value.”
I watched the stars intently, not looking at her as I spoke.
“On my world, many hundreds of years ago, the dominant nations faced a similar question. Indeed, we have been forced to face that question in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomics, whatever way in which one human can be different from another human, we’ve been forced to adapt to the fact that there are people different from ourselves, that they exist with the same rights and fundamental freedoms, and that no one human group or collection of groups has the authority to revoke those rights or freedoms. Despite the fact that values and perceptions of values continue to clash.”
“I do not understand,” the Queen Mother said. “Are you telling me that it is common for humans to fight other humans?”
“Precisely,” I said. “Because the raw truth of it is that many humans cannot tolerate sharing the universe with many other humans.”
“Example,” she said, in a most demanding tone.
I considered for a moment.
“Consider the captain. She was of a religious order known as Copts. Not generally the same as an ethnicity, the Copts were persecuted and driven practically to extinction by the Muslims. Another religious group which believed both similarly and also very, very differently from the Copts.”
“Yes,” she said. “This I know of from the archives: the races we discovered previously also warred in this way. I am perhaps surprised to learn of such human conflict occurring recently.”
“It’s still ongoing,” I said. “Before the mantis threat was discovered and the original war begun, Earth itself—and its colonies—were divided. In fact, several of the colonies were established precisely as a way for certain humans to flee the persecution they’d experienced as a result of coming into conflict with other humans.”
“Remarkable,” the Queen Mother said.
“Unfortunate,” I added. “Had we spent the last few thousand years as a unified people—as the mantes have—I wager that when our races met, we might have been on par with yours. With an equally enlarged footprint in the galaxy proper. Instead, we were caught by surprise. And though we learn and adapt quickly, I believe very much that our ultimate fate still rests in mantis hands.”
“You say this without shame,” she said.
“I was ashamed once,” I told her. “The Professor saw that, when he first went to Purgatory to talk to me. I was ashamed, and I was angry. At the mantes. At humanity too. So much so that I attempted to provoke the Professor on more than one occasion.”
“Provoke,” she said. “I can’t imagine how.”
“It doesn’t matter. After the armistice I grew to accept the situation for what it was. To borrow terms from an ancient human game, the mantes held all the face cards. We might resist you for a while. We might put up a brave and extended fight. But there are simply too many of you, and too few of us. Sooner or later, humanity will be overwhelmed.”
“Something I am afraid I was only too eager to prove,” she admitted. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flush form along the semi-soft portions of her carapace.
“You are embarrassed by the new war,” I said.
“Yes. But not just that. I am growing more horrified every moment at the thought that somewhere out there right now, mantes and humans are killing each other. And I caused it. I prepared the way, and I started the fight. Because I had no room in my imagination for a universe with humans.”
“Many humans have no room in their imaginations for a universe with mantes,” I said, trying to balance the scale.
“If that is a crime,” she said, “then it is a small thing compared to what I have done. Padre, what reckoning can I hope for? Even if I am able to establish an understanding with my successor, and get the Quorum to recall all of our forces . . . how can I hope to mend the damage? I cannot resurrect the many lives lost. I cannot give to the kin of the dead—to the family of Captain Adanaho—any apology sufficient to the enormity of their suffering.”
Now I turned to look directly at the Queen Mother. The semi-soft portions of her carapace had become so discolored I realized I’d never seen a mantis this sorrowfully emotional before. Had she been a human, I imagine she’d have been sobbing.
“Stopping the war is all that matters now,” I said.
“No,” she said, her speaker box failing to translate the bulk of her distress, though it clearly showed on her. “I must find some way to mend what I have done. This war I’ve created—”
“You didn’t create it alone,” I said. “General Sakumora and the other officers of Fleet Command were also eager for the fight. Having been beaten and humiliated in the first war, they wanted a second crack at you. Though anyone with eyes and a brain could have told them it was futile.”
“Pride,” the Queen Mother said. “My pride. Your general’s pride. And blindness. Both of us, so blind . . .”
Her head hung and her forelimbs lay limply on the front of her disc. I hesitantly reached out a hand and touched one of those forelimbs. The chitin was hard, but not cold. She was as warm as the Professor had been.
“What you’re seeking is something we humans call absolution,” I said.
“I do not understand that word.”
“It means you’re feeling the full weight of your . . . wrong choices, and you are trying to find a way to make up for them. Because it . . . hurts inside when you think about those wrong choices.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, suddenly rearing up. Her forelimbs tapped at the center of her thorax. “It hurts, Padre! I hurt, and the world is flat, and I cannot see how any of this will change!”
I suddenly remembered a midnight conversation the Professor had had in my chapel, with a couple of folk from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day saints. They’d been specifically discussing the standard Mormon practice of immersing people fully in water, prior to making them members of the church. The Professor had been engrossed in the concept, because no such concept had ever existed in mantis culture: a cleansing of the soul, for an accumulated lifetime of errors.
Had it, the Queen Mother could seek the mantis equivalent of a priest, a rabbi, a shaman, someone capable of understanding what she was going through, and either assign proper penance in the Catholic fashion, or perhaps give the Queen Mother a framework in which to grapple with her growing sense of self-horror.
Were it also that men of Earth’s history—Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Osama Bin Laden—had found their consciences as readily as the Queen Mother had apparently found hers, perhaps there might have been a lot less blood s
hed during the so-called birth of the modern human age.
“I’m not sure I can do you much good,” I said. “I told the Professor this again and again. I am not a chaplain, just the assistant. I do not preach nor do I pretend to hold any kind of moral or spiritual authority.”
“But you must believe in something,” she said. “Otherwise why did you build your chapel at all? Why did you let Captain Adanaho talk you into coming with her to the summit meeting between myself and your General Sakumora?”
Now it was my turn to flush. Dammit, why did this keep coming up? Why did things always find a way of circling back around to what I believed? As if what I thought was true had any bearing on this mantis or her people?
The Mormons had once told the Professor that their version of Heavenly Father was the God of all—human, mantis, and any other sapient life in the universe. The Professor had found the idea rather extraordinary. I’d thought it a gross presumption on their part. Even I would not have pretended to make such statements no matter how strongly I felt about my beliefs.
Now I actually regretted not having such faith. The Queen Mother was in pain. She needed answers. And I was ill-equipped to give them because I’d never sought out such answers in my own life—had not demanded them of myself. Easier to hide behind a veneer of benevolent neutrality. Play at being a facilitator for the spiritual progression of others, while ignoring my own.
I realized for the first time how much of a coward I’d been. Tears leaked down my face.
“For me?” The Queen Mother asked.
“Yes,” I said. “And for myself as well. Were I a better man, I believe I could give you some of what you seek. Or at least point surely to a way of gaining clarity. But your predicament—this new war, and all that’s come with it—has exposed me to the fact that I have been deluding myself.”
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