The Chaplain's War

by Brad R Torgersen

  The universe had suddenly reminded me just how hostile and unforgiving it really is. My little philosophical conversation with the Queen Mother had made me complacent. Of course these mantes were still hostile. Just because they were following orders didn’t mean they wouldn’t seize an opportunity to act.

  I told myself I’d get my technician friends to provide me with a way to lock my compartment against outside intrusion. I suddenly felt very, very vulnerable without it.

  CHAPTER 50

  Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.

  THE WALLS OF THE CHAPEL WERE ABOUT A METER HIGH WHEN I first noticed it: a translucent curtain that seemed to shimmer in the air right at the crests of the mountains around the valley’s edge. Where once the enemy had kept companies of troops endlessly patrolling the rim, now there was simply the energy barrier.

  “Remember the shields I told you about?” Fulbright said to me during one of her routine visits to the gradually-growing chapel.

  “Yeah,” I said, hefting another stone into place. My mortar wasn’t construction-grade by any Earth standard. But it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I’d once helped my father build a river rock wall along the back edge of our property. This kind of work wasn’t much different. Each day I brought several buckets of silt-laden water from the shallow creek that ran about a kilometer away, dumped pieces of clay and other appropriate-seeming soil into the buckets, then mixed until I felt I had the right consistency. Onto the existing walls went the mortar, then the new batch of rocks, and though it had taken me almost six local months, I had to admit I was proud of what I’d accomplished. Little by little, the chapel was taking shape.

  With occasional help from friends like Fulbright, of course.

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at the valley rim.

  “Not to protect us,” I said, speculating.

  “No,” she said. “To keep us in.”

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “Makes sense from their point of view. Since it’s obvious they’ve not got much interest in us, other than to keep us here. Why have troops on guard round the clock when you can just tighten the cap on the bottle, and call it good?”

  Fulbright’s expression was dour.

  “It bothers you,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Only because of what I’ve seen that energy barrier do. I wonder how it works?”

  “I wonder how a lot of their shit works,” I said. “Do you ever get the feeling that we came here with sticks and bones, and found the bad guys using automatic cannon?”

  “All the time,” she said.

  “Well, try not to let it bother you too much. Where’s that enthusiasm from the first day we met?”

  “Even I get tired,” she said, and sat down, her head resting against one of the dry parts of the chapel wall.

  I kept working for a little while, slapping on gobs of mortar, then piecing rocks together as they seemed to fit, followed by more mortar. Once I was done with that day’s section, I’d go out and help forage in the foothills for food. All of us had lost an average of five to seven kilograms since our incarceration in the valley. Local food sources were few and far between, and we had no Earth seeds with which to plant gardens. What little wildlife there was had proven small, and horribly gamey when eaten. Enough so that I was seriously considering becoming a vegetarian for the first time in my life. Except there weren’t many veggies on hand, either.

  “How’s it going around the rest of the valley?” I asked.

  “It’s going,” she said. “You’re not the only one building. People are busy. It’s the only thing they have right now, to distract them from our mutual predicament. You should know that there are other chapels going up.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because there’s no way this one would be able to accommodate the thousands of people who’d potentially come. Assuming anyone does come.”

  “Oh, you’ll get people,” she said. “Word’s out that you’re carrying on in Chaplain Tom’s name. A lot of the marines liked him. His good reputation is doing you favors. Enough so that a small bunch of them have even started talking about coming out to help you. Once there’s time.”

  I laughed softly.

  With no infrastructure and no guarantee that we’d be able to scrape up enough food for us to last the cold season that seemed to be creeping over this hemisphere of the planet, time suddenly seemed to be the one thing that was in short supply. All of us were working hard on our separate tasks. And not always with the blessing of the Fleet leadership that was trying—and, daily, failing—to maintain control in the valley. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d allowed his military bearing to lapse in the wake of being captured. If I was going to be stuck here for a long duration, I damned well wasn’t going to let myself stay locked into a military regimen. There just didn’t seem to be much of a point. We had no more weapons nor any ability to fight. Nor, apparently—now that the mantes had put up the barrier at the valley rim—anyone to fight against.

  We were an island colony, unto ourselves.

  And I sure as hell wasn’t going to worry about showing up for accountability formations. Nor did I have any interest in any of the other claptrap the Fleet had drilled into me since joining. Maybe aboard ship it had become easy to lapse into the routine. But here, now, all routine had been thrown out the window. There was simply survival. Scratch life out of the dirt—every day, all day.

  I looked at Fulbright as her chin sat on her chest.

  “Try not to get too down about it,” I said.

  She stayed silent, staring at the dirt.

  A small gust of wind swept over us, tossing up dust.

  “Do you think they’ll send a rescue mission?” she asked.

  “Fleet?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I guess it all depends on whether or not they think there is anyone left alive worth rescuing, and whether or not a rescue squadron could have any better chance against the mantis defenders than we did. For all we know a rescue squadron did come, and got blown out of space without our even noticing.”

  She put her fists to her eyes and rubbed. Suddenly, I felt bad for speaking my mind.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault. I agree. But now I’m wondering, what are we being saved for?”

  “The mantes, you mean?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking up at me with red, tear-soaked eyes. “Are they keeping us alive just because they think it’s fun?”

  I tried to remember my military history from Earth. Traditionally, military prisoners were kept for three reasons: extraction of military information, collateral for prisoner exchange, or in accordance with treaties and rules of war. In our case almost none of these situations applied. So what value were we—if any—to the mantes? Beyond objects of curiosity?

  During one of Earth’s worst world wars, one of the European armies had put people into extermination camps based on religious or ethnic affiliation. Many of these poor prisoners had become subjects for horrific medical experimentation. I shuddered at the thought of all of us being used as the human equivalent of lab rats or dissection frogs.

  “Who knows how the mantes think,” I said. “They’re as different from us as we are from them. Maybe they have some kind of ethic about total annihilation being wrong?”

  “Being stuck here forever doesn’t seem much better than being dead,” she said.

  “I guess that’s why Chaplain Thomas wanted me to build this,” I replied, motioning with my hands to the walls I was constructing.

  She pulled her knees to her chin and returned to staring at the dirt.

  In the two local years that followed, the walls of the chapel got higher, and higher, until finally I was forced to contemplate a roof. Several enterprising people in the valley had built kilns, and were firing bricks as well as tiles. I bartered work for materials, and had to put in several stone-and-mortar pillars to hold the ceiling up. With rainstorms occasi
onally blowing through, I found out very quickly where the leaks and holes were. I also found out that my tile-laying technique needed work, such that by the warm season of the third year I’d replaced the roof almost entirely with a much more durable, long-lasting patchwork.

  This had not deterred attendance. Even before the roof was on, I was getting people coming in the door. Or rather, the frame where I eventually built a door. They sat on the floor until I bartered for some roughly-quarried benches.

  If ever the attendees expected any kind of sermonizing from me, they didn’t show it. And I didn’t offer. Chaplain Thomas had been very specific: build it, keep it clean, and welcome all who wish to enter. Which was precisely what I did. Including the collection of several religious symbols and statuary from people who offered to make donations—which I then arrayed on a stone table at the front of the chapel. The table eventually began to serve more or less as a multidenominational altar.

  For light, we had to get creative. Without electricity we couldn’t use or recharge our flashlights. One of the native plants had inedible roots that, when their pulp was crushed and pressed, yielded a thick sweet-smelling oil. All of us began using it in small clay lamps, so that the chapel remained open sometimes long after sundown.

  For myself, I had just one small room in the rear with a clumsy door made of salvaged native wood. My cot was actually the same stretcher Chaplain Thomas had been carried on—now with clay blocks at the feet and the head to hold it knee high above the ground.

  Life in the valley assumed a kind of surreal normalcy.

  With the rigidity of military regimen practically dissolved down to a small core of stalwart officers and older NCOs, people formed their own small communities and townships. Roads sprang into being where feet crossed between the villages. A civilian constabulary of former MPs and several volunteers formed up to take care of the few actual crimes anyone might recognize as being worth policing—namely, theft and murder. Which was extremely rare. With so much room in the valley and only a few thousand of us to go around, anyone who didn’t much like his neighbors could easily move away.

  Farms sprang up wherever there was water to be had. People with green thumbs quickly began to figure out how to coax some of the native plants and even a few of the smallish animals into domestic capacity. There was talk of formalizing plans for an elaborate series of canals and ditches that would divert water from the streams and small ponds in the foothills, down to the thirsty valley floor.

  It wasn’t an easy existence, but it was an existence all the same.

  And since the mantes had practically vanished—save for the occasional patrol that passed through now and again, just to remind us who was in charge—we could almost forget ourselves.

  Almost.

  Fulbright surprised me when she went into the preaching business. In addition to my chapel, there had been at least a dozen other structures built in the valley that were dedicated to some religious purpose. And people who’d never given religion much thought during their lives on Earth suddenly began picking and choosing which churches or religions suited them best.

  While I went with a soft hand, some others were pounding the pulpit. Which was fine. Whatever people needed to hear to get them through the to the end of each day, and to the tail of every week.

  And while I was still technically only the Chaplain’s Assistant, people had begun to more or less treat me as if I was Chaplain Thomas’s surrogate: rendering me the same deference and respect that they might have rendered him. I’d have objected to such treatment if I’d not realized that the behavior had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the fact that many people simply needed to revere someone or something other than themselves. Who I was was not as important as what I represented—as the personification of the chapel itself.

  I never got the big crowds that Fulbright—Deacon Fulbright—sometimes got. But the regulars were friendly, and of all manner of belief. From the hesitant agnostics to the devoutly theistic. Mine was the building that became known as the quietest space in the valley.

  To come and hear with your heart, not with your ears.

  Until that morning almost five years after the invasion, when my chapel door yielded a surprising and unlikely inquirer . . .

  CHAPTER 51

  “I WAS TOLD WHAT HAPPENED,” SAID THE QUEEN MOTHER.

  It was the next day, following my near-miss with death at the hands of the mantes onboard the Queen Mother’s flagship.

  She was in my quarters, alone. Though I could tell by looking at it that she’d already begun the process of dismantling her disc. Several compartments appeared to have been evacuated, leaving nothing but gaping holes. Though this hadn’t affected the disc’s impellers, which allowed it to float and travel freely.

  “I was stupid,” I said, “And it almost cost me. If I’d been thinking more clearly I’d have stayed put until you or someone I knew came back for me. I should not having been wandering through the ship alone.”

  “And my people should not have been seeking to harm you in direct violation of my orders,” she said. Her speaker grill mechanism was still working too—I thought I detected anger in the mechanical tone.

  “They will be dealt with,” she said.

  “Not too harshly, I hope,” I said.

  “They would have killed you,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “It definitely seemed like it in the moment. But that lead trooper—the one around whom the others seemed to have rallied—he hesitated in the end. I got the sense from him that even though he didn’t like me, he wasn’t quite prepared to do cold-blooded murder. Had I been an armed human on the field of battle, I have little doubt he’d have tried to cut me down. He wasn’t prepared for me to offer no defense, save a challenge to his conviction.”

  “Boldly played,” she said.

  “Or stupidly,” I said. “Sometimes the dumbest move is the move that gets the best results.”

  “Just so,” she said. “I am currently engaged in some dumb moves of my own. As you can see, I have begun the process of deconstructing my carriage. It is an uncomfortable and not altogether orthodox process. I have had to reassure my flag officers several times that I am not ill—either in body, or in mind. I tell them it is an experiment, nothing more.”

  “And if they decide you are compromised to the point they can’t trust your authority?”

  “No mantis has ever usurped the Queen Mother,” she said. “We have had quarrels. Even on very rare occasions, violent ones. But nobody has ever removed a Queen Mother without her consent. As long as I live, my word is law on this vessel, and throughout mantis space. Rest assured. And any who transgress my word . . . as I said, they will be dealt with.”

  I cringed, imagining what that could possibly mean for the dozen or so aggressive and aggravated mantes who’d molested me in the corridor the day before.

  “But aren’t we basically usurping the new Queen Mother’s authority?” I asked. “So far as we know, this is the only ship on which you have any actual control. What if when we get to this staging area you’ve spoken of before, the new Queen Mother orders you stripped of your power? Or even killed?”

  “As I said,” she said, “there have been quarrels. I am hopeful that because of my successor’s relative youth in her new role, and because of the unexpectedness of my return, that both she and the Quorum will acquiesce.”

  “But will they let you actually halt the war, when you were the one who was pushing for it in the first place?”

  “My newfound position on the matter of the war will take some explaining. Of that there can be no question. I have been trying to formulate my plan. For when I must ultimately stand before the Quorum of the Select itself, and make my argument. Where once the mantis you call the Professor came to me, and persuaded me to halt the Fourth Expansion, now I must do the same. But not for the sake of mere research or curiosity. I must convince the Quorum that a permanent peace with humans is not only the most pragmatic co
urse of action, but also the most moral course.”

  “Moral,” I said, testing the word on my tongue. “I’ve never heard either you or the Professor use it like that before. Do mantes even have morals?”

  “We have what you humans understand to be ethics, and we pride ourselves on our logic. But yes, underneath it all, there are rules by which our society operates. We need them to function, much as you do. We believe in . . . I think you humans call it, right and wrong? Though there is no spiritual component to these decisions. We do not fear for the future of our souls should we make wrong choices. Or . . . we didn’t used to.”

  I looked at her, and saw the flush returning to the soft places on her body. Her shame was welling up again, just like it had before.

  “I’d like to be able to lock my door,” I said, trying to distract her.

  “I . . . Yes. Yes, your technical assistants have already been told, and I have authorized it. It will be done.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “No need to thank me. It was my fault I exposed you to potential harm in the first place. Here again I have caused hurt. In fact, everywhere I look lately—my choices, my own actions—I cause hurt. This hurt does not seem to be connected to any physiological problem of any sort. I have researched this phrase you used—absolution—according to the Professor’s own notes. I am afraid I do not see much use in any of the Earthly rituals he was aware of, as a result of his lengthy study on Purgatory. Save one. Confession—talking about my wrongdoings with someone else. That does seem to make a difference.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes. After we had our conversation in the observation bubble yesterday, I felt reenergized. Not relieved, per se, but I felt as if I had discovered a possible direction. There was work to be done. And I was determined to do it. So much so that I am afraid I took leave of my senses and left you to fend for yourself.”