The Chaplain's War - eARC

by Brad R Torgersen

  Chaplain Thomas’s words sounded gradually more frustrated and tired as he said the last part.

  I’d not thought much about the state of affairs back on Earth when I’d joined the Fleet. But I realized that for men older and more experienced than I was, the state of affairs now was perhaps very odd, compared to the state of affairs as it had been when they were young.

  “Are the Muslims dangerous?”

  “Oh goodness, Specialist, no, not all of them. A few extremists here and there. Fleet tries hard to screen for them so that we don’t have really dangerous people getting their hands on Fleet weaponry that might be turned against Earth. Most Muslims in the Fleet have no love for Jews or Israelis, I can tell you that much. But then this is the way it’s always been. And you’re going to find, the longer you do your job, that it’s not necessarily your place to try to enlighten some of these folks—Jew or Muslim or Mormon—to what you think is the proper attitude. As long as they can salute and march and execute to standard, that’s all Fleet asks. Everything else is…details.”

  “Thank you sir,” I said, flipping pages in the book with the trumpet-playing silhouette on the front. The pages were amazingly thin, and the print very small. It was obviously a compact version, for service member use. Much like the standard twenty-second century edition bibles that Chaplain Thomas had me keep in boxes—for those few troops who actually came to Sunday service.

  I thought it odd that the Mormons needed their own scripture, apart from that which seemed to suffice for all the other Christian denominations. But then the Buddhists and the Hindus and the Muslims all had their own books too. Some of them overlapping in content with each other, but not always. And I figured as long as nobody was trying to beat anyone else up for it, those differences ought to be harmless.

  Chapter 43

  I awoke to find a tray sitting on a table at the side of the bed.

  When I leaned over to see what was on it, my nose was assaulted by a most unpleasant smell.

  “Oh boy,” I said.

  Though my stomach was a gnawing pit, I wasn’t sure I could hold my nose for whatever it was the mantes had concocted for me. It was a solid square of…something. Roughly ten centimeters on a side and two centimeters thick. I couldn’t tell if it was raw, nor could I tell if it was cooked, nor could I even be sure if it was animal or vegetable—or both.

  I stared at it for the longest time.

  After using the toilet and refreshing myself at the wash basin, I sat back down on the edge of the bed, my disgust with the square’s smell competing with my body’s demand for fuel. It had easily been forty-eight hours since I’d put any food in my face, and though this didn’t seem the least bit appetizing, I wasn’t sure I had anything better to work with—besides one or two half-eaten ration bars that may or may not have been squirreled at the bottom of the packs.

  There were utensils in the pack’s unused mess kit. I fished them out. Steeling myself, I stabbed into the square and forked up a sizeable hunk of what appeared to be pureed dog shit. I stuffed it into my mouth. And promptly gagged the contents back up onto the tray. At which time I retched repeatedly.

  I took the tray to the toilet and upended the contents. Then I washed it, as well as my mouth, and went to the packs. I tossed out everything I could—until the packs were empty—and upended them vigorously.

  A single, lonely, mostly-eaten ration bar tumbled out. Sans wrapper.

  I fetched it up and plopped it into my mouth. Ignoring the gritty dust that covered it as I chewed several times, then swallowed.

  The door to my compartment opened, and the Queen Mother floated in. I noticed that she no longer rode the small emergency disc. This time she had a full carriage identical to the one I’d originally seen her use when I’d come to meet her aboard the Calysta. It was polished and sparkled in the overhead lights, though the Queen Mother’s body posture indicated she was not particularly pleased.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “By your internal time keeping, perhaps,” she said. “But not by ours. Was the meal satisfactory?”

  “It was not,” I admitted. “I managed just a mouthful before I threw it up. Whatever your ship’s refectory thought it was creating for me, I found it entirely inedible.”

  “It contained all of the calories and nutrients you might need,” she said. “What was the problem?”

  “As I explained to the younger mantes who helped me set up this compartment with amenities comfortable for humans, there is more to human food than raw nutrients such as proteins and sugars.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “It’s the way in which those raw nutrients and proteins are put together. And especially the way in which the raw food is prepared. Consider a sirloin steak.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a choice cut of meat from a human livestock animal called a cow. Most humans would never eat a sirloin steak when raw. Even if rubbed with herbs and salt, most humans would never touch it. But take the steak and prepare it with sea salt and ground peppercorn, then broil it over the bare coals of a fire made with pine and mesquite wood, then serve it with a baked potato, fresh corn on the cob, butter, sour cream, bacon bits, chives—”

  “I believe I have the idea,” she said. “My refectory examined your ration bar at length and attempted to reproduce it in quantity. Perhaps they took the task too literally?”

  “Yes, perhaps. What was offered to me on the tray looked very little like something I’d want to put in my mouth twice. Rather, it seemed to have more in common with what comes out the other end.”

  Her wings did not flutter at my joke. Was I being a bad guest?

  “You are bothered,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I am sorry if I am being too blunt in my appraisal of the food.”

  “I care not for your appraisal. My technicians and the refectory have been instructed to appease your every desire, where eating and comfort are concerned. Instruct them as you will. Throw away what you do not like.”

  “Then what is the issue?” I asked.

  “I am bothered because…because…”

  Her forelimbs were tapping on the new disc she rode, while her mouth opened halfway and her tractor teeth began to vibrate in annoyance.

  “Are there problems with the carriage?” I asked.

  “No. The carriage is perfect. It is I who am the problem.”

  “Was the Professor right? Can you not be wholly reintegrated with a new disc, as he suspected when you were pulled out of the old one?”

  “No, the issue is not physiological. Assistant-to-the-chaplain, my world has become…flat.”

  “Flat?”

  “Yes, that is the best way I can put it in your language. Flat. I perceive in full the ship around me, and everyone in it, and my senses have regained the crisp articulation and range afforded by carriages for many generations of our people. And yet, the experience is…flat. There is a quality that is missing which I cannot precisely put into words. I have struggled with this for several of your hours, believing it was merely the new carriage’s software and interfaces having to adapt to my particular biological signature. When the newly-born adult emerges from the chrysalis, it takes time for the carriage to learn its master, while the master must learn her carriage.”

  “So give it a few days,” I said.

  “No,” she replied. “I detect not even a subtle change. Not in the specific way I would expect. The essence of what I saw and heard and felt while apart from my original carriage…it is lost. I cannot account for this, save for the fact that some kind of permanent damage may have been done to me during the hasty egress from my ruined carriage.”

  I sat on the bed and thought for a moment.

  “Captain Adanaho told me she suspected that life without the carriage was a significant revelation for you.”

  “It was.”

  “Then why are you surprised that upon returning to disc-integrated life, those revelatio
ns—the quality you spoke of—is gone? For many days you were forced to rely only on your own eyes, your own ears, your own nose—”

  “Mantes do not have ears or a nose as you call them—”

  “I know that, but consider: while you relied solely on your biological senses, your entire range of perception was significantly altered.”

  She still showed annoyance. So I tried a different approach.

  “Consider this,” I said. “It has long been noted among humans that if one of us loses a major sense—say, sight, for instance—that the other senses become more acute. Sometimes, dramatically so. Therefore the blind man may suddenly find himself tasting more subtly than ever before, his ability to perceive through touch will improve, along with his hearing, and so forth. They all become accentuated. It is the natural way in which the human body and mind compensate for the loss of a very important faculty.”

  “But I was not made blind, nor deaf,” she said. “I could see and hear just as well without the disc, as with it.”

  “I would wager not,” I said. “Otherwise you’d not be so perturbed now that you’ve regained your biomechanical augmentation. By reintegrating with a carriage you have most probably muffled your raw, instinctive senses by a significant percentage. You just never noticed before because you’ve never, ever lived without a disc. You said it yourself: the adult mantis never lives without a carriage.”

  The shape of her antennae told me I’d intrigued her, but her vibrating teeth told me she was still vexed.

  “There must be a way to compensate,” she said. “I cannot believe that the carriage is a limiter. We cannot survive without them. They are the foundation of our civilization.”

  “That may be true,” I said. “But does this change the ‘flatness’ you perceive now? Does believing in the absolute necessity of the carriage make it any less bothersome?”

  She paused a long time, then said, “No.”

  “Then I am afraid I don’t have an answer for you,” I said. “Other than to do voluntarily what you did originally out of necessity. Separate yourself from your disc. See if the depth you’re missing, returns. Perform this experiment as many times as it takes to be satisfied with an answer. Or…learn to live as you once did. In a ‘flat’ world of technologically purified perception.”

  Her mouth opened all the way and she almost frightened me with how much her unhappiness manifested.

  She fled the room without a word.

  Swallowing hard, I let the door slide shut and decided there was no sense chasing after her. She’d have to figure it out on her own one way or another. Best for me to just stay put, inventory and organize what little human equipment I still had with me, and hope that I’d get a chance to talk to the technicians about additional improvements to my quarters.

  They arrived thirty minutes later.

  I explained the problem with the food, and I also explained to them my desire for soap. Both for bathing, and also for washing my clothes, not to mention the sleeping bag.

  “You do this by hand?” one of them asked me, his posture surprised.

  “Not ideally, no,” I said. “We have machines to do this work. Though I can’t imagine you have a laundromat onboard, do you?”

  “Describe this laundromat,” they said in unison.

  Which required me to explain how an electric washer and dryer worked: the filling with water, the injection of the soap, the wash cycle, the rinse cycle, drying, and fabric softener.

  “Why softener?” one of them asked.

  “Without it, the dried material is rough to the touch, and it does not smell so good.”

  “Can you provide us with examples of these things?”

  “I am afraid I can’t. Look, don’t the mantes ever use fabric for anything?”

  “For some applications, yes.”

  “Then there must be some way you keep such fabric clean.”

  “Fabric is regarded as disposable,” one of them said. “We do not generally clean it.”

  I put my head down and puffed my cheeks out with frustration.

  It was going to be a long trip.

  Chapter 44

  Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.

  The assault carrier’s descent during LCX hadn’t done an actual combat landing justice. The bench to which I was strapped was rattling so hard, I felt like it was going to shake my teeth out of my head. Despite the relative cushioning provided by my armor suit—new, this time, and built to the latest specs. Lighter. Supposedly tougher too.

  Chaplain Thomas was in the same state next to me: rattled to distraction.

  All of us on the troop deck bucked and swayed in unison as the carrier made its way pell-mell down through the atmosphere of the world we were about to take from the enemy.

  My old friend nausea lurked in the center of my stomach as the rumbling and jerking of the ship threatened to turn into a full-blown carnival ride of sideways-up, downwise-side, upways-down.

  I saw the looks on the faces of the marines as they hunched with their rifles and other weapons—ready to go the second the loadmaster gave the signal. Unlike during LCX, we also had tanks and mobile artillery nestled in our belly. They’d deploy almost the instant we hit the ground—growling out onto the planet’s surface, and hosing down any immediate mantis threats. With automatic cannon fire and missiles.

  Outside, somewhere in the stratosphere, aerospace fighters were also going in hot—their threat sensors now coming on-line after the short black-out period caused by reentry. If there were mantis fighters in the air waiting to pounce on the assault carrier, our fighters were ready and prepared to ruin the mantes’ day.

  Suddenly the assault carrier crashed and shook. Flashing orange alarm lights told us something had gone very wrong.

  “Missile hit,” I heard someone say over the wireless.

  BOOM!…BOOOOOOM!

  Two more, in relatively rapid succession. How effective was the assault carrier’s armor, anyway? I suddenly realized we were all going to find out. For better, or for worse.

  Slowly, the troop deck began to spin. Or, rather, I could feel that the assault carrier was revolving over onto its back—not a prescribed flight profile for the big, wallowing ship in anybody’s anti-aircraft evasion manual.

  Those few marines who’d been keeping straight faces finally broke and showed their fear. Our assault carrier was clearly in trouble, and we were nowhere close enough to the ground yet to feel like we’d made it to relative safety.

  BOOOOOOOOM! Unnggggkkkkktttktktkttttt!!

  “Shit,” I heard Chaplain Thomas say.

  The man usually worked very hard not to curse. That he’d cursed told me all I needed to know about the situation, as the sounds of ripping and tearing metal became more pronounced. For an insane instant, I recalled clearly that the prelaunch briefing had said we’d be expecting moderate resistance.

  So much for that.

  The prelaunch briefing had also spent far more time dwelling on perimeter security and establishing ground-based hardened defensive positions—after we landed—than it did on what to do in case the assault carrier we were riding in was being shot to pieces right beneath our feet.

  We had no parachutes. Would not have tried them, even if we did. So far as we knew the assault carrier was still moving at supersonic speed high over the alien planet’s desertlike terrain. Anyone fool enough to bail out in those conditions was signing his own death certificate, regardless of how tough the new armor suits happened to be.

  Suddenly the carrier righted itself—to our relief—but then the bottom dropped out of our stomachs as we felt ourselves begin to fall precipitously.

  “BRACE FOR IMPACT! BRACE FOR IMPACT!” the loadmaster began to yell on the company-wide wireless.

  There was little to do but cringe and hope. Many seconds ticked by in virtual free-fall. When the crash came, it came as a whirling, end-over-end chaos of benches coming loose from the troop deck and whole squads of marines and support personnel being hurle
d across my field of view like rag dolls.

  The collision damping system suddenly flooded the entire deck with massive jets of thick foam that began to solidify the moment it touched air. I felt myself scream as I rolled, and rolled, and rolled, and kept rolling. Until finally, I was resting upside down, my vision entirely blocked out and the company wireless hissing vacantly.

  Were we down? Had we made it?

  I couldn’t tell. For a long time, the world around me was nothing by stiffened crash foam. Until suddenly the wireless came alive again—helmet to helmet this time, with no assistance from the shipboard system.

  Things were grim. Only one hundred and five people survived, out of almost three hundred on my assault carrier. This included Chaplain Thomas, though the poor man was busted up something awful. After clawing my way out of the collision foam, I had to search far and wide across the impact zone to find him. The carrier had burst apart, its engines, flight decks, and other vital parts scattering to the wind. How or why the reactors hadn’t gone up was a mystery, but I wagered we didn’t have much time. So I frantically searched for survivors—many of whom were wounded—helping them to walk, or limp, or even be dragged, over to a far hill. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to offer at least some protection from the potential blast, if or when the reactors finally melted down.

  In the sky overhead, it was obvious that we—the Fleet—were getting our asses kicked. Mantis fighters zipped lithely to and fro, seemingly impervious to the missiles spat at them by the few Earth fighters that still prowled the air. Occasionally one of those Earth fighters burst in a white fireball, followed by a thunderous report. And then silence.