The Chaplain’s Legacy

by Brad Torgersen

  The Chaplain’s Legacy

  Chapter 1

  Chief Barlow,” said the female voice through the wooden door.

  Lost in thought, I didn’t answer right away.

  She cleared her throat, and tried again. “Warrant Officer Harrison Barlow?”

  I sighed, and slowly got up from my seat at my desk in the tiny pastor’s quarters of my chapel.

  She’d called me chief. I wasn’t used to the new rank. There had been a time when I’d happily watched my military days fade into memory. But the recent return of Earth ships to Purgatory orbit meant that many of us former prisoners of war had again been pressed into service—whether we wanted our old jobs back, or not.

  I was a prior enlisted man. They could have just slapped my stripes back on me. But my apparently pivotal role—as interlocutor between humanity, and our former enemies, the mantes aliens—had necessitated something a bit more lofty.

  Not like I needed the shiny silver bar on my collar. I commanded no one. The chapel, built with my own hands in the early days of my former captivity, had never needed any hierarchy. I’d constructed the place in the spirit intended by its original designer, Chaplain Thomas: all are equal in God’s sight.

  I’d have refused promotion if I’d thought Fleet Command was giving me a choice.

  I opened the door.

  She was young, with a startlingly beautiful face. I guessed Nile Egyptian heritage, but with something else mixed in. Not European. Southeast Asian, perhaps? Her fluent use of commercial English—that hoary old offshoot of British and American English which had dominated international human affairs for hundreds of years—gave me no hint of her nation of origin.

  I looked at the captain’s clusters on her collar, and tipped my head.

  “Ma’am, what may I do for you at this early hour?”

  “General Sakumora sent me,” she said, her wide eyes staring up at me.

  “And of what use may I be to the general?”

  “You’re the one who brokered the original cease-fire,” she said. “The general is hoping you can do so again.”

  An instant prickling of alarm went up my spine.

  “Have the mantes attacked?” I asked, not blinking.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nobody told you what’s happening?”

  “Ma’am, in spite of my appointment and what this starchy new uniform might indicate, I’m just a chaplain’s assistant. Nobody tells me much of anything. Certainly I don’t pretend to understand what Fleet Command worries about when it goes to bed at night. All I care about are the people still here, on this planet.”

  “And the mantes converts who come to you for religious indoctrination,” she said.

  “Instruction,” I corrected her. “And it’s not even anything so formal as that. You ought to know as well as anyone, if you’ve earned your commission recently, that the mantes are an utterly atheistic people. They cannot even conceive of a God, nor a soul, nor do they understand anything about Earth’s varied and flavorful religious history.”

  Flavorful. A deliberate euphemism on my part. The mantis university Professor who’d first approached me ten Purgatorial years earlier, to study Earth’s major systems of belief, had often used that word to describe our faiths. He’d considered them fascinating—a key to the utterly alien mentality of the human being. If the mantes had thoughtlessly obliterated other species, each of them also displaying the telltales of belief, the insectoids had stopped short at exterminating humanity.

  Thanks to me.

  In a moment of desperate inspiration, with the fate of all mankind seemingly on the line, I’d been the one to make the bargain: in exchange for the survival of humanity, I would do all I could to assist the Professor—and his students—in studying and understanding religion.

  But that had been a long time ago. The Professor, and most of his students, had gone. As had many of my parishioners, once the ships from Earth returned and it became possible for humans to go home again.

  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 a long time 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.”

  Chapter 2

  It had been a long time since I’d ridden a shuttle. I forgot they don’t come with gravity. I almost threw up my breakfast when we hit space. I spent the ride—to the awaiting frigate—turning several shades of green. Once onboard the mothercraft I breathed a great breath of relief, then gratefully took a small hand towel from the captain and mopped the perspiration from my face.

  The young marines who’d ridden up with us, the
y seemed to find me funny. Until they saw my expression, and rank. They snapped to as I walked past.

  I guess being the chief is good for a few things after all?

  The captain—whom I’d learned to address by the last name of Adanaho—gave me 20 minutes to clean up in the frigate’s cramped guest officers’ quarters. As an enlisted man, I’d only ever gotten bay accommodations. Zero privacy. My little single-man compartment seemed palatial by comparison.

  The hair on my cheeks and neck came off, and a fresh undershirt and topcoat came on. Then I used the tiny computer guide in my newly-issued PDA to walk me through the frigate’s innards—to the command deck, where I was to meet Adanaho’s boss.

  Fleet was unique in the history of modern human warfare in that it blended all of the traditional branches—air, sea, land, and now space—into a unified whole, with a unified hierarchy. No more confusion over rank. A captain was a captain, a lieutenant was a lieutenant, and a sergeant was a sergeant. Admirals, commanders, and petty officers lived only in the history books.

  Sakumora was a short, muscular, stern-faced flag officer who neither smiled, nor offered any pleasantries as I entered the room. Two lieutenants attended to his needs, while the captain sat at his side, and two marines guarded opposite corners of the space. Against what, I had no idea. But protocol was protocol, and some things never change.

  “Sir,” I said, approaching his desk and saluting, “Serg-ahhh, I mean, Warrant Officer Barlow, reporting as ordered.”

  “Sit down,” was all he said.

  I took a chair which had been offered to me by one of the general’s attaches. For the first time, I noticed the captain’s expression. Her eyes were turned down and staring at the space in front of my knees.

  “I’ll get to the point,” said Sakumora gruffly. “We’ve got compelling evidence that the mantes are building strength for a renewed offensive. Everybody knows the generalities of what you did here, on this little dustball of a world. I’ve reviewed the records, your own file, and the reports given to me by my officers who’ve been to Purgatory. There was never any guarantee that the mantes would hold off on their so-called Fourth Expansion indefinitely. I’m afraid time’s up.”

  My feet and hands went cold.

  When the Professor had first come to me, the entire human population of Purgatory had been sealed behind an energy barrier that was lethal on contact. The mantes had been using it to slowly annihilate us when the Professor—through what passed for a higher education network in mantis culture—had effected a compromise: as long as he and his fellows in mantis academia needed humans for cultural study, the mantes as a whole would delay the annihilation of humans on Purgatory, as well as their planned final conquest of human space.

  If the general was correct, the academic stay had been overruled, and humanity’s reprieve was drawing to a close.

  So far as I knew, we were as defenseless as ever. The mantes were a much older and technologically superior race. Human ships and weapons amounted to little against mantis shields. For the sake of morale, when the war had been hot, the Fleet hadn’t broadly revealed its numerous and inevitable defeats—human colonies seized by the mantes and cleansed of all ‘competitive’ life. Only after the armistice and the Fleet’s slow return did anyone come clean about the truth.

  I cleared my throat.

  “What do you expect me to do about it, sir?”

  “Do what you did before,” he said matter-of-factly. “Get this collective of…scholars, or whatever they are, to talk to their political leadership. Stage protests. Sit-ins. Anything that can hold the mantes for a few more years.”

  “Assuming I could do it,” I said carefully, “would it make that much of a difference? I don’t think we’re any closer to fending them off than we were before.”

  The general looked over to Captain Adanaho. She raised her eyes to me. “Few people have been told this, so I’m ordering you to keep it secret, but we’ve managed to develop a working copy of their shielding technology—what I think you referred to in your notes as The Wall. In the process we think we’ve found a way to penetrate those same shields.”

  I startled.

  “Is that so?” I said. “How exactly did we make this extraordinary breakthrough?”

  “That’s none of your concern,” the general snapped, “all you’re here to do is get the damned mantes to delay their attack. Until we’re ready.”

  “Sir, what makes you think I have any more influence on the mantes than the Fleet’s team of expert diplomats?” I said, throwing my hands out in exasperation. “It’s not like I’m some kind of genius about this stuff. The Professor—the first mantis I dealt with, ten years ago—just happened to reveal certain information that wound up being important. And I had nothing to lose. That my bargain convinced him, and that his compatriots had the leverage and coordination to affect Mantis Quorum policy, were flukes.”

  “Nevertheless,” said the general, “you will try.”

  “We depart in one hour,” Adanaho said. “You’ll have a few days to prepare, before we meet the mantis delegation.”

  Chapter 3

  We met them in orbit around a nameless terrestrial planet, far from the boundaries if human space. The mantis ships were shaped like mammoth footballs, their surfaces studded with sensors and weaponry. I watched the alien vessels through the portholes of the Fleet frigate, Calysta. We’d brought some big stuff too. Opposite the cluster of mantes vessels—across the black expanse of space—was a squadron of Earth dreadnoughts unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Not that size and armament would do a lick of good if those new ships couldn’t break through the mantis shields, as Adanaho had suggested. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to find out, though I still wasn’t sure anything I did or said could make a difference otherwise.

  I looked over to Captain Adanaho, who had followed me to the observation deck.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “That means the general wants us there in five,” I said.

  She smirked at me.

  “Always arrive ten minutes before you’ve been told,” I said with a slight smile, “and then it’s hurry-up-and-wait.”

  “The years on Purgatory haven’t completely dulled your memory,” she said. “Though it’s obvious you’re not happy about your current position.”

  I looked down at my uniform.

  “No, ma’am, not really. I was nineteen when I signed up. The Fleet tried to take Purgatory a couple of years later, and then I spent the rest of my time either as a prisoner, or trying to follow through on a promise I made to my old boss before he died.”

  “It must have been an important promise,” she said.

  “I thought so,” I said.

  “But didn’t you consider that promise fulfilled, once the armistice was reached?”

  “Not really, because by then the Professor and his school kids were showing up all the time. Plus, I had more human customers coming in the door than I’d ever had before. People seemed to think the chapel was special. Significant. It grew to be a landmark in the valley. Somebody had to stick around and sweep up. And it’s not like I had anything more important to do. Maybe if the Fleet had returned right away, I’d have jumped at a chance to go home. But when a couple of years went by and it was obvious that Fleet wasn’t coming back to Purgatory any time soon, I decided to make my plans for the chapel into long-term plans.”

  “And yet our research shows that you don’t hold services there,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Like I said, I’m not a chaplain. I’m just the assistant. This little silver bar you guys put on my collar, it doesn’t make me a chaplain either.”

  “Would you like to be?”

  I thought about it, still looking outside into deep space. Something I had not seen in many years.

  “No,” I said, slipping my hands into my pants pockets. Like having facial hair, hands in pockets was also against regulation. But screw it, certai
n rules are made to be broken.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I’m not a preacher,” I admitted. “I’m also not a theologian.”

  “So why even become an assistant? Of all the jobs in the Fleet available to you?”

  “Seemed like the best fit,” I said. “I’m not a tactical guy, and I’m not that great with equipment either. But people? I like people. When hostilities with the mantes broke out, some of my friends signed up immediately. I kind of went along for the ride. It was a chance at to go to space. What kid doesn’t dream about that? But I didn’t want to kill stuff nor fix stuff nor do a lot of the other work on the list the recruiter showed me.”

  She shook her head.

  “And yet you were the one who managed to use the single piece of leverage we needed to stop the mantes.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “dumb luck, that.”

  She checked her watch.

  “Well, it’s time to see if you can’t scare up a little more, padre.”

  We walked from the porthole to the nearest lift car, went down three decks, and wound our way to the frigate’s largish main conference room. Marines in freshly-pressed uniforms guarded the hatches, with rifles at port arms. There were some mantes guards as well, their lower thoraxes submerged into the biomechanical “saddles” of their hovering, saucer-shaped discs.

  Every mantis I’d ever seen was technically a cyborg. Their upper halves were insectoid—complete with bug eyes, fearsome beaks, antennae, wings, and serrated-chitin forelimbs. Their lower halves were integrated into their mobile, floating saucers. It was the saucers—the computers and equipment in them—which allowed the mantes to speak to humans, and have our own speech translated back into their language, among many other things.

  The mantes guards all raised forelimbs in my direction as we approached, though they seemed to be ignoring the captain.

  I blushed in spite of myself, and raised a hand in return.

  Was I that well known among the aliens?

  We entered the conference room, and I stopped short.

  There was the Professor—whom I considered a friend, and whom I’d not seen in a long time—and a larger, much older looking mantis on whom all human eyes were focused.