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 21st and early 22nd 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 effng 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 o
nly 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 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 rezero.
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.
“Damned shame to see a recruit wash out because he can’t hit his twenty required targets on the silhouette range,” Davis said to my partner, a now beleaguered and nervous Recruit Sanchala.
Like all of us recruits on the range, the DSes wore their body armor jackets and helmets, though each helmet had a bright band of orange reflector tape around the brim. Snap-down eye protection, from inside the helmet itself, kept any dust or kickback particles from causing us grief. And the lenses themselves were light-activated such that the glare of the afternoon sun wasn’t overly bothersome.
Sachez simply couldn’t swing his rifle back and forth in time to hit more than twelve or thirteen of the moving silhouettes, regardless of how well he’d rezeroed his weapon.
Davis continued to shake his head.
I didn’t want to think about the expressions on the faces of the range cadre to our rear. Three different NCOs had been called down from the tower to help Sanchala specifically, and in each case I’d done my best to be a cheerleader and fellow troop, assisting Sanchala to implement the advice given. But what sounded like easy work during bull sessions with the cadre, proved to be entirely more difficult once it was just Sanchala out there on the silhouette range, four sandbags at his disposal for support, and two 15-round magazines slipped into the pouches on his vest.
Pang, pang, pang, pang.
Sanchala slipped the empty magazine out of the shoulder stock of the rifle—the R77A5 having been configured in what one of the range cadre had called bullpup style—and stood up, to walk down to his target with Drill Sergeant Davis in the lead. I followed obediently. When we got there Davis examined Sanchala’s shot group—four holes neatly contained within a constricted circular space the range cadre had already deemed adequate—and tsked at Sanchala.
“Boy, if the mantes stood still and didn’t move, you’d be a crack troop. Unfortunately for you those sumbitches move, and move fast. I hate to say it, but because Fleet needs all the able hands it can get, we’ve been dumbing these ranges down about as far as we dare. So that even someone as clumsy as you can pass, Sanchala. But there’s no doubt about it: you can’t shoot for shit, son.”
“Drill Sergeant,” Sanchala said, “what happens to me if I can’t pass the range, Drill Sergeant?”
“What happens if you can’t pass any other test in IST: you’re a no-go, Recruit,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Doesn’t matter what Fleet job they select you for, in the end, if you can’t shoot, you can’t shoot. You’ll be dumped back out into the civilian world with a section forty-six-dash-bee in your file. Failure to achieve minimal military competency. You seem to get the fundamentals of most everything else we’ve showed you so far. What the eff is your problem now?”
Sanchala didn’t have an answer to that.
Again, sniping at aluminum with a relative’s .22 was a lot different from trying to place head shots on simulated aliens as they bore down on your hasty fighting position—at ranges anywhere between 25 meters, all the way out to 450 meters.
Always, Sanchala was just a touch too slow. And the bullet would go high, or wide, or spit up dirt and grass as it ate the turf where the motorized silhouette had just been a split second earlier. I looked at Sanchala’s despairing expression, and tried to figure out how I could possibly help. I’d more or less been telling Sanchala the same things the cadre had been telling him, and it wasn’t doing much good.
We trudged back to where we’d been laying on the ground, and as Sanchala readied himself to make another go at the next shot group, Davis stared down at us. I looked at the target, then at Sanchala, and back at the target, then held a palm up for Davis to see.
“Hold up,” Davis said, raising a paddle into the air.
One side was red and the other white. The red side, when waived at the tower, indicated that the NCO on the ground had noticed a problem.
The tower acknowledged, and waited for the paddle to be white.
“What’s the issue, Recruit Barlow?” Davis asked.
“Drill Sergeant, I want to try something, Drill Sergeant,” I said. Then I snuggled right up against Sanchala and spoke low and clear.
“You right-handed?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You ever shoot with your left?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Without corrective lenses, it shouldn’t really matter, but at this point anything’s worth trying. Swap over to left shoulder and let’s rezero your scope.”
“But that will just take more time.”
“As if you’ve got anything to lose now? Just try it.”
“Okay,” Sanchala said.
And I explained the plan to Davis, who simply nodded his approval.
Sanchala did as instructed, with Davis leaning down and fiddling with the manual studs on Sanchala’s weapon’s scope as I awkwardly helped Sanchala move the rifle butt to his left shoulder.
Of course, the first two groupings were way off.
But the third grouping was better and, with a bit more tweaking of the scope, Sanchala achieved two final groupings that were even tighter than any he had done at any earlier time in the day.
“Alright,” Davis said, slapping the back of Sanchala’s vest as he pulled down Sanchala’s static target and handed it to me to go present to the range cadre. “Let’s get your clumsy ass back to the silhouette range and do this thing.”
If Davis had been ferocious at other times, strangely, he was practically human now. Not that either myself or Sanchala made the mistake of getting lax in our formality. But for once, the Senior Drill Sergeant wasn’t half scaring the piss out of us. He was almost friendly.
With muzzle aimed at the dirt and no magazine in the breach, Sanchala walked with Davis and me back three hundred meters to the silhouette range, where a few strugglers like Sanchala were still going through their next iteration. The muffled popping of the rifles was dampened by my helmet’s ear protection; which also contained speakers for the wireless communication network that tied us together by squads or platoons for group battle-rush exercises. Of which we’d done several, while waiting for rotation through the silhouette range.
The Chaplain's War - eARC Page 16
