Mercifully, I’d not drawn any short straws. I was just another rifleman, nestled in amongst the crowd.
Lying in my bunk and listening to the little fidgets, clinks, and whispers that were going on after lights-out, I thought about Senior DS Malvino’s threat that anyone found wanting on the LCX would be summarily drummed out, or kicked planetside for a landlocked tour. Which had, to be honest—and after so many weeks of space training—appeared to offer advantages. After all, I didn’t actually want to see the stars run with blood. That wasn’t why I’d signed on specifically. And I’d definitely proven throughout training that I was nobody’s idea of a steel-and-guts hero. I didn’t have the reflexes nor the tactical mind for it. I could perform drill and ceremony with crispness, ensure my bunk and locker were squared away to perfection, but during battle drills and combat-applicable training, I was average at best. Never quite bad enough to get kicked out, but never good enough to rank with the more razor-edged go-getters who were obviously spoiling for a stand-up fight with the mantes. In whatever form that happened to take: ground, orbital, ship-to-ship, and so forth.
Could I lurk my way through the LCX? How many of the rest of us had the same game plan? Quite a few, I reckoned.
I must have dozed off, because suddenly I felt a fist slug me in the shoulder.
I popped my eyes open to see a shape looming in the semi-dark of the bay.
“Up, cunt,” Thukhan said in his usual tone. “You should have been on watch five mikes ago.”
“Roger that,” I said, realizing that in the commotion of pre-LCX prep I’d forgotten to set my e-pad alarm for night watch duty—in my case, the dreaded midnight to 3 AM slot that kept a man from getting anything even approaching decent sleep.
I struggled up and put my flip-flops on my feet, securing my weapon and trudging for the chair where I’d be forced to sit awake—or at least semi-awake—for the next three hours.
Thukhan stopped me halfway back.
“In my office,” he said. Pointing.
I shrugged and we went into the head, leaving my chair empty.
“What’s the issue?” I asked, remembering that the last time I’d considered going into the head alone, with Thukhan, I’d been contemplating doing a fair amount of evil to the man. He’d had me spooked halfway out of my mind. Now I merely felt a spongy kind of buffered contempt. We’d both made it through IST it so far, for different reasons, and the rigor and grind had helped me focus on things other than my foe.
Which was not to say the man didn’t still piss me off. I considered Thukhan to be a menace. But he was a managed menace. Someone I could compartmentalize, and push out of my lane of consciousness whenever I wanted or needed to.
Until tonight.
“Malvino says there’s one slot on the Charlie Company LCX duty roster that’s been left open, and someone from second platoon’s gotta fill it. I didn’t find out until tonight, and I have to have the roster ready in the morning when we roll for the flight line. So you’re my pick.”
“What’s the detail?” I asked.
“Not a detail. A role. You know anything about effing church?”
I blinked, remembering the day when the recruits from the chapel had climbed aboard the base shuttle.
“Not a thing,” I said honestly.
“Good, because you’re the Recruit Chaplain now. Congratulations. That means you get to play ossifer like the other cunts. I even have to call you sir.”
“Well, I could say thank you,” I said. “But then I have to wonder why you didn’t volunteer for the job, since as far as I know a chaplain does zip-diddly-squat during live-fire exercises. It’s your big chance to sit on your ass and waste time.”
“Listen Barlow,” Thukhan said, leaning in close. “I never liked you. From the moment you came sauntering into the bay back in Reception. You looked soft, you talked soft, and you are soft. They told me I don’t have the option of getting out of Recruit Platoon Sergeant. So as long as I have to run this stupid platoon during the LCX, I want as few headaches as possible. Which means getting you the hell out of my way.”
The insult was clear. He considered me dead weight. And if I’d not already gauged myself to be about as useful in a real fight as boxing gloves on an eighty-year-old, I might have wanted to argue the point. As it was I was too tired, and too ready to just get the LCX over with, to care. I mock saluted and snapped the heels of my flip-flops together.
“I’m honored to have been promoted to the position of Recruit Chaplain. And now If you’ll excuse me, Recruit Platoon Overlord, I have to go sit in my chair like a good peon and ponder what the hell I’m going to do with myself for the next twelve days.”
“Read,” he said. “The DSes will push a bunch of files at you in the morning before we move out.”
I spun around the went out the head door.
Come morning, there was no chow.
We fell out of our bunks, stripped them of bedding, dumped the bedding into huge sacks bound for Armstrong Field’s central laundry facility, and did some last-second tidying of the bay, before the recruit squad leaders and recruit platoon sergeants—not the DSes—filed us downstairs into the company common area with our space-duty uniforms on our bodies and our space duffels on our backs. The armor suits in the duffels wouldn’t be worn until we’d actually reached the preflight formation zone which lay in the shadow of our assault carrier on the flight line. Putting them on now would be like walking a mile in the sun with an arctic coldsuit on. And the armor was going to wind up chafing and stinking enough without each of us filling ours with a gallon of perspiration—before we’d even reached the edge of the atmosphere.
Huge cargo trucks—not busses—waited for us when we route-stepped from the Charlie Company barracks, across the PT field, to the edge of the tarmac. We filed up into them, jostling until we’d packed ourselves in like hot dogs, then the doors on the trailers were slammed and we waited several long minutes as the trucks drove us across the long, wide flight line to our intended destination.
When we got there the recruit leadership—not the DSes—filed us off and formed us up again by platoon, for total company-level accountability and last-minute equipment inventory. With the sun still behind the horizon we all had to walk and work by muscle memory, as much as by sight. And because we’d rehearsed the whole routine during the five previous spaceflights aboard the assault carrier, there was no first-flight baloney about people missing equipment nor not having their crap in order.
Accountability was crisp, efficiently called, and by the numbers.
Standing at the position of attention and scanning my eyes about, it occurred to me that we’d actually gotten the trick of it all. The protocols. The beat. Without a single prompting from our DSes, who hung back away from the formation a fair distance, each of them toting a space duffel of his or her own.
Charlie Company was moving and talking and executing like a real-live unit of real-live effing soldiers.
As had occasionally happened before, I suddenly felt a quiet surge of near-euphoric pride. Sure, the training wheels might be coming off soon. But we were ready. By hell!
A crew chief from the assault carrier trotted down one of the long ramps that emptied out of the side of the ship. He approached the recruit officer leadership at the rear of the formation and had a conversation with the recruit captain. Since I’d been assigned as recruit chaplain I now fell in with this bunch, and listened intently as the crew chief told the captain that we’d be a good forty-five minutes on the ground, still, as he and the others in the ship took care of a few preflight checks on the computers and engines.
This information was relayed to the recruit lieutenants, who relayed it to the recruit platoon sergeants, and so on and so forth. With the recruit first sergeant barking orders, all of the platoons dropped their duffels in-place, where we were ordered to prep for donning of armor. Otherwise, stand fast and await further orders.
I unloaded myself and extracted the pieces of my suit from my bag, laying th
em out on the ground in sequence. The space-duty uniform was like a set of long underwear, only with a series of fluid-filled cooling tubes skeined throughout the fabric, and an extra tube sealed onto the business end of a man’s penis. All of which would be hooked into the suit’s internals once it came time to put the armor on.
And if the dick-tube had seemed at first to be embarrassing and uncomfortable for the men, we didn’t complain. The women had it much worse.
As in all things IST, you learned to get over it.
I sat down on my duffel—now mostly empty—and pulled out my abused e-reader.
Thukhan was right. They’d pushed me some files.
With the sun and the heat coming up, I tried to ignore the prickling sensation of sweat breaking out all over my body, and focus on what I’d been given to read. Of all the things I could have potentially been assigned, either in training or in reality, chaplain definitely seemed the most unlikely. Didn’t you have to have a degree as a minister or a priest or something?
“Recruit Barlow?” said a woman’s voice.
I reflexively stood up and faced in the direction the voice had come from.
An older Fleet officer, with the color of steel in her hair and a lieutenant colonel’s tabs on her GFF, approached me.
“Ma’am,” I said, snapping a crisp salute, which she returned.
Her name tape said JICERSKI.
“You can call me Chaplain J,” she said with a slight smile.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. It was rather unheard of for a lowly recruit to be addressing or dealing with someone of such high rank.
“At ease, at ease,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” I said, snapping to parade rest.
“No, I mean relax, kid. Relax. I need to talk to you for a minute and I’d like to do it without you leaving a brick in your undershorts. Can we do that?”
“Yes ma’am. I mean, uhhh, sure.”
I let my arms hang at my sides.
“First Sergeant Chau tells me you drew this cycle’s straw as the Recruit Chaplain. Is that right?”
“Correct, ma’am,” I said.
“Know anything about the job?”
“Not really, ma’am.”
“Have you been attending service while you’re in IST?”
“Uhhh, no ma’am.”
“Figures. Every cycle they find a way to pin the job on someone who’s not interested. Just once, Lord, I’d like to see them find a recruit who’s actually requested Chaplain’s Assistant on the entry form. Okay, Barlow, let’s you and I sit down for a minute.”
She sat down cross-legged on the tarmac, and I followed suit. She took her soft cap off and dropped it in her lap—unusual, in that the GFF was strictly forbidden to be worn outdoors without the soft cap. Did the rules get bent for chaplains?
“During this training exercise,” Chaplain J said, “you’re going to be acting the role I’d occupy if this were an actual battle deployment. Have you had a chance to read any of the literature I sent Drill Sergeant Malvino?”
“I was just about to,” I said.
“Good. That will help. In your civilian life, do you go to church or synagogue or mosque or temple?”
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“Is the idea of God utterly foreign to you. Are you not a believer in Him?”
“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”
“Do you believe in a higher power? A supreme being? Or anything along those lines.”
I had to think about it for a minute. Spiritual questions had been about as far from my mind as possible during IST. It wasn’t exactly an environment that fostered deep contemplation. I stared at her eyes and saw crow’s feet at the corners. This was a woman who was used to smiling a lot. I decided that I liked her.
“I’m not sure if I believe, or if I don’t,” I said. “In my family, church wasn’t on anyone’s priority list. My mom and dad were busy with other stuff, and liked to sleep in on the weekends.”
“Seems sometimes like it’s not on anybody’s priority list these days,” Chaplain J said. “But the war’s changing this, I think. People are remembering the value of spirituality—at a time when so much else seems uncertain. And frightening. Tell me, Barlow, why did you sign up with the Fleet?”
“My friends and I, we sort of had this deal between us. That, and I really wanted to go to space. Plus when New America got attacked, well…I didn’t want to be the only guy I knew who wasn’t doing his part for the war effort. Even though my parents thought it was a big mistake.”
“You’ve done a brave thing, Barlow. I hope your parents realize that some day. What do you hope they slot you for when you graduate IST?”
“I didn’t pick anything in particular. I left the lines blank. I figured the Fleet would find a job for me, in whatever capacity I was needed. Beyond that, I didn’t have much preference. I just want to see the stars, and to serve.”
“Not a bad way to go, son, but now I’m going to ask you get a little more serious, okay? Being the chaplain, for any unit of any size, is a pretty serious responsibility. You’re sort of expected to be part pastor, part counselor, and part bartender.”
“Bartender?” I said, startled.
“A soldier will tell the barkeep stuff she’d never tell her priest,” Chaplain J said. “And let me tell you, when you’re a chaplain, you get to hear it all. The good, the bad, and the ugly.”
“I’m going to have to listen to the other recruits tell me their woes?” I asked.
“No, hopefully not,” she said, chuckling. “I’m just trying to let you know what your job is. There are numerous ways to soldier in the Fleet. Everyone has a role, and everyone has to know that role and execute to standard. Some people make great marines. Some people make great pilots. Some people make great technicians, or great administrators. And once in a while, some people make good clergy.”
“What will I be doing throughout the LCX?” I asked.
“I’ll nurse you through it,” she said.
“You’re coming along?”
“I have to. It’s required by regulation.”
“Why?”
She looked around pensively, then leaned in closely.
“Recruits occasionally die during LCX. Not often. Not many. But it does happen. This will be a live-fire exercise on the Moon, after all. Not exactly the safest thing a person can be doing. In the event that someone gets hurt or killed, they like to have at least one chaplain around.”
“So why do they assign a recruit to do it, when one of you comes up on the LCX anyway?”
“The LCX regulations require that all trainee officer and NCO positions be filled with recruits. And in the case of the chaplain, that’s you. Don’t sweat it, Barlow, you and I are going to make this the quickest twelve days of your entire IST. Drill Sergeant Davis said you’re a mature troop who tries hard. He also said something else that I thought was important.”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“He said you like to help.”
“Ma’am?”
“He said he’s noticed you’re usually helping people. Other recruits. In big ways, and small.”
“Isn’t that the whole point?” I said. “For us to all work as a team?”
“Some people work as a team better than others,” she replied. “Malvino and Davis both think you’re easier-going than most. And I like that. It tells me you’re a people person. Someone who can go along to get along. That too is essential for a chaplain. We carry officer rank, but we don’t boss people the way your company captain or battalion colonel boss people.”
I nodded my head, genuinely intrigued. “Sounds cool.”
“It can be,” she said. Then her gaze went far away. “And then there are times when it’s not.”
She came back to the present when she noticed me silently staring at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just stick with me, Barlow, and it’ll be a snap.”
She held out a hand—which I hesitantly took, and shook.
Smiling, she pointed to my e-reader.
“Open the files,” she said. “Let’s use the time on the ground while we have it.”
Chaplain J was right. The time in transit to the Moon passed much more quickly than I’d anticipated it would. I followed her around in “no recruit country” up on the assault carrier’s crew decks, and she gave me the low-down on what the chaplain’s job entailed. And while I was a little reluctant to dive deeply into the nature and meaning of some of the religious rituals—it turned out that Chaplain J had a masters degree, and was a former instructor at a religious college—I warmed to the idea of the chaplain serving as a shoulder for Fleet troops to cry on.
Lord knows I’d already seen a hot mess of troubled souls during IST. Many people barely holding it together under duress. Their carefully-crafted shells of control occasionally leaking bits and pieces of truer vulnerability when they hit their max stress points.
Sometimes talking was the best medicine. A friendly conversation, about something other than the immediate task thrust in front of your face.
When we reached lunar orbit and I was ordered back down to the troop deck to suit up and prepare for vacuum-pressure operations, I was feeling so good about things that I almost dropped my formality in front of DS Schmetkin, who coldly reminded me in no uncertain terms that I’d not gawtdamned graduated yet, so I’d better get myself right and stay right for the rest of the LCX, otherwise she was going to wash me out.
With the assault carrier going in “simulated hot” I sat on the bench next to the other recruit officers—our helmets on and our suits gradually reducing the internal pressure while elevating the oxygen percentage in our air—and contemplated dealing with simulated casualties. Could I give simulated Last Rites? Offer a simulated prayer? Chaplain J hadn’t yet covered it, but as the assault carrier began to jink and swerve, throwing us this way and that as it “dodged” simulated missiles, I felt a little tickle of excitement in my stomach.
LCX might actually be fun.
Chapter 35
“We have to get up and go. Now.” It was Adanaho’s voice.
“Why?” I said, suddenly coming up off the sand, despite the aching stiffness in my joints. We were two weeks from landing, our food stores almost gone, but still no closer to finding a mantis base than we’d been before. We’d stayed in the canyon for the water supply, yes, but also to give us shelter from the sand storms that hit every third or fourth day.
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