Neither the Queen Mother nor the technicians were so armed.
“Will they fire?” I asked.
“They would be insane to do it!” the Queen Mother replied.
“What do they want?”
“They say that as long as you are present with a weapon, they cannot trust that I am not under your control.”
“They think you’re my hostage?”
“Something like that,” she said.
“Tell them I am just trying to keep you safe.”
“I did. They refuse to believe me.”
Just then the technician below us made a fatal decision—he rushed the soldiers.
To this day, I am not sure why. Maybe he thought it was the only way to distract the troops before they went after me—and the Queen Mother became a collateral casualty?
When the shooting started, I shouted a choice profanity, then leaned over the edge of the Queen Mother’s disc—my wounded rib hurting me terribly—and began to empty the contents of my rifle’s magazine. It was the first time in all my many years I’d been at war that I actually fired a weapon at the enemy.
While their rounds ripped into the technician, mine went into the soldiers. Sparks flew, and the shaft became a deafening funnel of sound. Within seconds, the three mantis soldiers were lying at the tunnel’s bottom, their destroyed carriages and mangled bodies slowly smoldering. A familiar, acrid, gag-inducing aroma rushed up at us. The dead technician lay on top of the soldiers, his upper thorax blasted open and his fluids spilling out across the lot, making a hideous pattern.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the Queen Mother, barely able to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.
“No,” she said. “It was necessary. I am now afraid that we face enemies on every side. With my official guards gone, and the ship’s watch suspecting that you are compelling me through force, the ship’s command may have concluded that it’s better to ignore or kill me.”
“I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you,” I said.
“I believe that, padre. But unless you can summon an army in our defense, you may not be able to keep your promise.”
“Is there are way for us to get off this ship?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the technician above us. “If we pass down two more decks we can re-enter a secondary corridor that will lead us to one of the hangar decks. We could take an ancillary craft from there.”
“It might be worth the risk,” I said. “Anything is better than waiting here. If the marines find us, we’re dead. If the mantis soldiers find us—especially with the bodies of their comrades heaped at the bottom of this tunnel—we’re also dead.”
“Right,” the Queen Mother said.
We dropped silently to the deck indicated by the technician, reentered the ship proper through a side hatch, and began flying down the corridor outside. With the technician in the lead, we took two right turns, then a left turn—zooming past hurried crews of other technicians—and found our way out into a mammoth hangar even bigger than the one I’d seen when I first came aboard. For an instant I allowed myself to gawk, then I noticed the platoon of armed mantes bursting out of one of the far hatches—followed by what seemed to be a steady flow of humans in armor. All of them shooting at will. Rounds flying every which way.
“Go!” our technician said.
There was a small, slim craft perched on tripod legs. Perhaps big enough for half a dozen mantes. We cruised up and into the open hatch in the craft’s belly.
“I sure hope to hell you’re a pilot,” I said to the technician.
“No,” he said, “but the computer can fly for us.”
“Make it happen,” I said, hearing a little bit better each second as the ringing in my ears diminished. Which just meant that the violence outside in the hangar was all too conspicuous.
The Queen Mother settled to the deck, and I climbed off.
My side still hurt like shit, but there didn’t seem to be much additional bleeding. I permitted myself to place my rifle on the deck, and sat down against one of the bulkheads—a hand clamped over my wound.
“Your face is wet,” the Queen Mother said.
“I’m sweating,” I said.
“Why?”
“Exertion, shock, adrenaline, whatever,” I said, breathing deeply.
“Will you survive?”
“Probably,” I said. “Had the bullet hit any closer to my center of mass, it would have punctured a lung. As things are I will just need some superficial sewing-up. Presuming any of us make it out of this.”
“By leaving, we are abandoning the body of your captain, of course.”
Damn. I hadn’t thought of that. But what else could we do?
“There is a problem,” the technician said as he floated back out of the cockpit.
“What?” I asked.
“All automated functions have been locked down. We cannot order this vessel to depart, nor can we signal the hangar airlock to give us passage.”
“Let me try,” the Queen Mother said.
I stared at the technician while we waited for the Queen Mother, who went into the cockpit to work her royal magic.
“I’m sorry about the two others,” I said to the technician.
“They gave their lives in the Queen Mother’s service. There is perhaps no more noble way for a mantis to die.”
“Would your people really kill the Queen Mother? Rather than let her be taken by humans?”
“Quite possibly,” the technician said. “It would be assumed that she was compromised—such that she could no longer function in her official capacity as the nominal leader of the Quorum of the Select. Even if she were captured alive, her authority would most likely be nullified.”
“Meaning she could give no orders to any other mantes while she was in human custody?”
“That is correct.”
I considered.
“Then I’m a liability,” I said.
“Yes, and also no. You are an insurance token—that armed humans will be less likely to kill the Queen Mother while you remain alive to stand in their way. Yet my own people will consider you a threat. Someone not to be trusted. You saw manifestations of this when you were foolishly left alone to wander the ship unguarded.”
I remembered the look of the soldier who’d had his serrated forelimb to my throat. How much he’d wanted to take my life—yet he’d not be able to do it.
“So it’s a Catch-22,” I said.
“I do not know what that means,” the technician said.
“Old human phrase. It means we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. There is no correct option. We just have to pick a path and hope for the best.”
The Queen Mother floated back to us.
“All of my command codes have been locked out,” she said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I should have full mastery of every system on this vessel. Yet I am denied!”
If she’d been a human woman, she’d have been shouting in apoplexy.
Several extremely loud blasts shook the little craft on its landing legs—grenades.
How long before the fighting ruptured the outer hull? I suddenly longed for a combat suit—with a helmet. Vacuum would kill me as surely as bullets.
Another grenade exploded, this one so close it shook the craft and caused its emergency alarms to begin chirping.
“Well, we’re not safe here,” I said, looking from the Queen Mother to the technician, and back again. “Where else can we go?”
“I do not know,” the technician said.
I remembered our exit from the Calysta.
“Don’t mantis vessels have lifeboats?”
“What is a lifeboat?” the technician asked me.
“Small emergency vehicles. They’re placed throughout the vessel. Spaceworthy. Can stand up to reentry if necessary.”
“No,” the technician said.
“No?” I said incredulously.
“They would be considered superfluous.
”
“What happens if one of your ships is disabled?”
“Our large vessels are constructed such that they always carry sufficient ancillary craft to effect an escape.”
“But not in our case,” I said, exasperated.
The technician simply looked at me.
The sound of human boots slamming across the deck began to echo up through the open belly hatch of our ship.
“Looks like we’re in for it now,” I said. “You two get back into the cockpit. I’ll try to talk to these marines.”
The technician and the Queen Mother did as they were told.
I kept my rifle at the low ready as a trio of space-armored figures pulled themselves up through the hatch.
We all stared at each other for a second.
“I’m Chief Warrant Officer Barlow,” I said. “Fleet Chaplains Corps.”
They continued to stare at me, their face plates still silvered against blast flashes.
“Who’s your NCOIC?” I asked. “I’m here on a vital mission that can potentially end the war. I need to talk to whoever is in charge.”
The three armed and armored marines looked back and forth between them, no doubt communicating via wireless. Then one of them dropped back down out of the hatch. When he returned, there were three other marines with him. They scrambled up into the ship and formed a horseshoe around me, weapons also at the low ready.
One of them had the chevrons and rockers of a platoon sergeant stamped onto his chest.
He walked up to me—confident in his strides.
When we were almost face-to-face, he carefully reached up to his collar and hit the release for his helmet. There was a small hiss, then he one-handed the helmet off his head.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Chapter 53
“Long time no see,” Thukhan said.
“Batbayar?” I said, not quite believing my eyes. Like a ghost, someone I’d not seen since the end of IST was suddenly standing before me. I forgot all about the sounds of fighting and weapons fire outside the ship. For that instant, there was only me—and him. How long had it been? The better part of two Earth decades?
His face was sweaty, and there was an old, ugly scar that ran from his left ear, across his forehead, and up into his much-receded hairline.
“So they made you a chief,” he said, looking me up and down. “I guess life in exile wasn’t all bad for you.”
“Nor you,” I said, pointing to his rank emblem on his chest.
“I earned everything I got,” he said defensively, face stern.
Shit, I thought. Really? Were we going to go right back at it again? Like teenagers?
“No doubt,” I said. “Look, I meant what I told your squad. I’m on a mission that can end the war. I don’t know how Fleet’s managed to spare the manpower for this assault, much less boarding and seizing ships, but we can—”
“We know about the Queen Mother,” he said flatly.
I stopped short.
“How?”
“That escape pod you came down in? From the Calysta? Captain Adanaho left an encrypted text message inside. We spent days combing the planet for you as a result. You’d have been in safe custody except for the fact that a mantis counter-patrol found you in that canyon shortly after Fleet marines found you first. Our response force didn’t get there in time to do much more than pick up the pieces, but when we didn’t find either you or Captain Adanaho, we knew you’d been taken offworld. Based on Adanaho’s information, we used our stealth intel to figure out the closest mantis staging system.”
I wondered how Fleet had managed to make the jumpspace crossing in less time than the mantes themselves—maybe the Queen Mother’s flagship had loitered too long in real space, during one of its periodic stops? I remembered that there had been several. If human ships had rushed headlong, with no interruption…
“It’s vital that the Queen Mother be allowed to initiate the recall,” I said. “That was our whole reason for coming here.”
“Where is Captain Adanaho?”
“Dead,” I said.
“Killed in action?”
“Fratricide, if you must know. The marines who found us in the canyon were shooting indiscriminately, once the mantis counterpatrol dropped down on top of us. Her body’s in stasis on this ship.”
“We don’t have much time,” Thukhan said.
“Tell me about it. Is your objective to claim the Queen Mother as a prisoner—for use as a bargaining chip?”
“Essentially,” he said. “That was Captain Adanaho’s stated desire, and Fleet Command agreed with her assessment. We need the Queen Mother alive.”
“It’s no good,” I replied. “Her own people already consider her to be under my control, and they’ve cut her out of the loop. Unless she’s perceived to be operating according to her own will, they won’t listen to her. Not even their automated systems are responding to her codes.”
“It’s true,” said a vocoded voice.
The Queen Mother floated out of the cockpit.
The marines brought their weapons up, but Platoon Sergeant Thukhan waved them down with a knife-hand sweeping to the deck.
“Queen Mother,” Thukhan said officiously, “I’ve got specific orders from Fleet Command to take you into custody. Please come with me, and you will not be harmed.”
“It’s a dead end!” I shouted. “Didn’t you just hear what I said? She’s no good to us as a prisoner. Her own people won’t care if we have her. Our only hope is to let her go. Let her do what she has intended to do ever since Captain Adanaho died. In fact, I am ordering you to let her go.”
“I don’t have to recognize your authority on this,” Thukhan said.
“Bullshit, Sergeant. Protocol is that you’re obliged to followed the lawful orders of a superior officer, and that’s me. You’re certainly free to file a protest through your company commander, but at this moment I’ve got rank, and I’m using it.”
Thukhan got nose to nose with me.
“I could kill you right now and nobody would say a word,” he breathed.
The hostility in his eyes was oh-so-familiar.
“Yeah, you could,” I said. “But I have to think if you’ve survived this long—reached your current rank—that you’ve learned a thing or two since we were knocking heads back in IST. You don’t respect me and I don’t respect you. But this isn’t about us. This is about the future of Earth. Our survival, as the human race. I don’t know what kind of strategy Fleet thinks will turn the tide against the mantes, but the numbers don’t lie. We’ve caught up to them in terms of some of their technology, but not in terms of population. Way more of them. Less of us. They have more planets, and have had more time to populate them. They also work far better as a society than we do, if what I’ve learned in the last few days is accurate. So I don’t care what kind of tricks intel has cooked up—stealth ships, or whatever—the mantes are the ones who are going to eventually win. Battle by battle. Planet by planet. They will drive us back to the brink, and then push us over it. Unless we help the Queen Mother complete her recall.”
Thukhan glared into my eyes, his jaw flexing.
“Think about it,” I said. “How many battles have you fought on the ground? In space? When could we actually claim to have had an upper hand? Never, that’s when.”
“So we just let her go?” he said indignantly. “A lot of people died for this mission. You always were a pussy, Barlow.”
“And you were always determined to fight the world at every step,” I said, staring him right back in the eyes. “Even fighting people who never had anything against you in the first place.”
“Please,” said the Queen Mother to Thukhan. “I am defenseless. I have no weapons. Your superior officer is correct. In your custody, I can do nothing. I must be allowed to reach the staging base. I can attempt to effect a cease-fire. Without such a cease-fire, I firmly believe that the human species will die. We have thousands of ships and potentially billions of sol
diers at our disposal. How many humans are there in the entire galaxy? How large is your Fleet? Not large enough, I suspect.”
“It’s just a matter of time,” I said, my expression pleading.
Thukhan’s eyes went from me, to the Queen mother, then back to me.
“No,” he said. “My orders were quite clear. Now if you’ll kindly get out of the way, sir, I’m going to carry out those orders.”
“Eff that,” I said, refusing to move.
“Out of the way, cunt—”
“No way,” I said, standing fast. “I’m giving you a direct order to back off and—”
The little craft was rocked by another blast, this time directly against the ship. Everyone inside was thrown to the deck. I fell on my wounded side, and screamed because of the pain.
“My people now respond to yours,” said the Queen Mother.
I pawed my way over to the open belly hatch and peered out. If the marines had achieved a period of shock and surprise, the mantis backlash was that of a relentless wave. Hundreds and hundreds of mantis troops were belching out into the hangar from numerous hatches along the internal bulkheads. Marines were getting mowed down right and left, unable to hold position as the mantes swept across them.
Thukhan came up beside me and looked out as well. He spat curses, and then ordered his squad into motion. They formed up around the Queen Mother, weapons aimed at the open hatch while Thukhan put his helmet back on and resealed the collar.
“You better get ready,” Thukhan said over the external speaker in the side of his helmet. “Something tells me they’re not going to care if you’re a marine or not, when they hit us.”
“No!” I yelled.
I sat up painfully and looked at the Queen Mother.
“Can’t you order them to stop?” I said.
“I’ve been completely cut off from the command nexus,” she said. “Short of trying to face them in person, there doesn’t seem to be much I can do.”
“No way,” Thukhan said. “I’m not letting her go.”
I stared hard at her, then at Thukhan—who had his rifle up, and was clearly prepared to start shooting at whatever came up through the hatch at us. Or the Queen Mother, if she tried to make a break for it.
The Chaplain's War - eARC Page 33
