The Chaplain's War Read online

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART TWO CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  PART THREE CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  The Chaplain’s War

  Brad R. Torgersen

  The mantis cyborgs: insectlike, cruel, and determined to wipe humanity from the face of the galaxy.

  The Fleet is humanity’s last chance: a multi-world, multi-national task force assembled to hold the line against the aliens’ overwhelming technology and firepower. Enter Harrison Barlow, who like so many young men of wars past, simply wants to serve his people and partake of the grand adventure of military life. Only, Harrison is not a hot pilot, nor a crack shot with a rifle. What good is a Chaplain’s Assistant in the interstellar battles which will decide the fate of all?

  More than he thinks. Because while the mantis insectoids are determined to eliminate the human threat to mantis supremacy, they remember the errors of their past. Is there the slightest chance that humans might have value? Especially since humans seem to have the one thing the mantes explicitly do not: an innate ability to believe in what cannot be proven nor seen God. Captured and stranded behind enemy lines, Barlow must come to grips with the fact that he is not only bargaining for his own life, but the lives of everyone he knows and loves. And so he embarks upon an improbable gambit, determined to alter the course of the entire war.

  THE CHAPLAIN’S WAR

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Brad R. Torgersen

  Portions of this text appeared previously in slightly different form in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine as “The Chaplain’s Assistant” and “The Chaplain’s Legacy.”

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3685-3

  Cover art by David Seeley

  First printing, October 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Torgersen, Brad R.

  The chaplain’s war / Brad R. Torgersen.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3685-3 (paperback)

  1. Science fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.O587485C48 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2014020256

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-315-7

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To the Chaplains Corps of the United States Armed Forces, all branches; brave men and women tasked with preserving both God and hope in some of the world’s most godless, hopeless places.

  To my friends Larry Correia, Chuck Gannon, Mike Resnick, and Kevin J. Anderson; without whom this book would not have become a Baen book.

  To editors Stanley Schmidt and Trevor Quachri; who first brought these stories to life in the pages of Analog magazine.

  To mentor Allan Cole and also to (the late) Chris Bunch; because I was there when, “Death came quietly to The Row.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A fix-up novel is a long series of stumbling steps aimed (more or less) towards an ever-shifting set of goal posts. When I wrote “The Chaplain’s Assistant” in 2010 I did not plan to make a book out of it, nor had I yet conceived of the sequel novella, “The Chaplain’s Legacy.” Harrison Barlow (at that time) did not even have a name. He was just a guy. Someone who’d have fit right in on an episode of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.

  Ideas for expanding the story came later, in fits and starts. Largely because I liked Barlow, and I liked the central conceit of the human vs. mantis conflict. I thought it somewhat original, given the vast number of man-against-alien war stories which have been written over the years.

  Eventually I had a large project on my hands, which even in its finished form needed some expert eyes to make it better. I want to thank Toni Weisskopf for providing those eyes. Toni saw what I was trying to do with this book even better than I did, and challenged me to make explicit that which I’d only previously dared to point at with a lot of prosaic road signage. I was never really sure how traditional SF audiences would react to a “church story” like this. But the fact that “The Chaplain’s Assistant” scored well on the Analog magazine readers’ choice ballot—the Analytical Laboratory, or AnLab award—and that “The Chaplain’s Legacy” got me a lot of kind reader mail, told me I was on the right track. Toni simply demanded I take Harrison’s journey to its logical (and inevitable) conclusion.

  Better yet: since turning in the final revision for this book, “The Chaplain’s Legacy” has gone on to win the AnLab award for best novella, and was also nominated for the genre’s best-known award: the Hugo.

  Apparently my initial misgivings about delving explicitly into the purpose and value of religion—in an ostensibly secular, post-religious, high-tech society—weren’t necessary. People have told me that this is some of my best work. I hope that readers (who’ve read the short story and the novella both) found this expansion to their liking. I risked trying to have too much of a good thing, by enlarging 30,000 words of short fiction into almost 120,000 words of book. Along the way I not only gave Harrison Barlow a history, I also gave him a love interest. Things which were suggested by the original Analog magazine stories, but which never saw print until this novel came into being.

  Thanks to everyone at Baen for helping me to make this book what it is. And thanks to Dave Seeley for a truly eye-popping cover!

  Also, thanks to the men who worked on my behalf to not only introduce me to Toni Weisskopf, but impress upon her my bona fides as a writer worthy of investment: Larry Correia, Stan Schmidt, Mike Resnick, Kevin J. Anderson, and Chuck
Gannon. Accomplished authors, all. It’s been a privilege having the advice and assistance of such wonderful people.

  PART ONE

  THE CHAPLAIN’S ASSISTANT

  CHAPTER 1

  I WAS PUTTING FRESH OIL INTO CLAY LAMPS AT THE ALTAR WHEN the mantis glided into my foyer. The creature stopped for a moment, his antennae dancing in the air, sensing the few parishioners who sat on my roughly-hewn stone pews. I hadn’t seen a mantis in a long time—the aliens didn’t bother with humans much, now that we were shut safely behind their Wall. Like all the rest of his kind, this mantis’s lower thorax was submerged into the biomechanical “saddle” of his floating mobility disc. Only this one’s disc didn’t appear to have any apertures for weapons—a true rarity on Purgatory.

  Every human head in the building turned towards the visitor, each set of human eyes smoldering with a familiar, tired hate.

  “I would speak to the Holy Man,” said the mantis through the speaker box on its disc. Its fearsome, segmented beak had not moved. The disc and all the machines within it were controlled directly by the alien’s brain.

  When nobody got up to leave, the mantis began floating up my chapel’s central aisle, the mantis’s disc making a gentle humming sound.

  “Alone,” said the visitor, his vocoded voice approximating a commanding human tone.

  Heads and eyes turned to me. I looked at the mantis, considered my options, then bowed to my flock, who reluctantly began to leave—each worshipper collecting handfuls of beads, crosses, stars, serviceman’s Bibles, and various other religious items. They exited without saying a word. What else could they do? The mantes ruled Purgatory as surely as Lucifer ruled Hell.

  I waited at the altar.

  “You are the religious officer?” said the mantis.

  “The chaplain is dead. I am—was—his assistant.”

  “We must speak, you and I.”

  Again, I noted the mantis’s lack of armament.

  “What can I do for you?” I said.

  “I wish to understand this entity you call God.”

  I stared at the alien, not quite sure if I should take him seriously.

  “To understand God,” I said slowly, “is a skill that requires ongoing mastery.”

  “Which is why the other humans come here, to this structure? To learn from you.”

  I blushed slightly. In the two years since I’d completed the chapel—some five years after our failed invasion and subsequent capture—I’d not given so much as a single sermon. Preaching wasn’t my thing. I built the chapel because the chaplain told me to before he died, and because it seemed obvious that many humans on Purgatory—men and women who had landed here, fought, been stranded and eventually imprisoned—needed it. With the fleets from Sol departed, and our homes many thousands of light-years away, there wasn’t much left for some of us to turn to—except Him.

  “I don’t teach,” I said, measuring my words against the quiet fear in my heart, “but I do provide a space for those who come to listen.”

  “You are being deliberately cryptic,” the mantis accused.

  “I mean no offense,” I continued, hating the servile tone in my own voice as I spoke to the beast, “it’s just that I was never trained as an instructor of worship. Like I said when you asked, I am only the assistant.”

  “Then what do the humans here listen to, precisely?”

  “The spirit,” I said.

  The mantis’s beak yawned wide, its serrated tractor teeth vibrating with visible annoyance. I stared into that mouth of death—remembering how many troops had been slaughtered in jaws like those—and felt myself go cold. The chaplain had often called the mantes soulless. At the time—before the landing—I’d thought he was speaking metaphorically. But looking at the monster in front of me I remembered the chaplain’s declaration, and found it apt.

  “Spirit,” said the mantis. “Twice before has my kind encountered this perplexing concept.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Two other sapients, one of them avian and the other amphibian.”

  Other aliens . . . besides the mantes? This was news.

  “And what could they tell you about God?” I asked.

  “Gods,” my visitor corrected me. “We destroyed both species before we could collect much data on their beliefs.”

  “Destroyed,” I said, hoping the alien’s ears couldn’t detect the shaking dread in my voice.

  “Yes. Hundreds of your years ago, during what we call our Third Expansion into the galaxy. We thought ourselves alone, then. We had no experience with alternative intelligence. The homeworld of the avians and the homeworld of the amphibians were pleasing to the Quorum of the Select, so those worlds were annexed, cleansed of competitive life forms, and have since become major population centers for my people.”

  I took in this information as best I could, unsure if any human ears had ever heard anything like it. I thought of the Military Intelligence guys—all dead—who would have given their years’ pay to gain the kind of information I had just gained, standing here in the drafty, ramshackle confines of my makeshift church.

  I experienced a sudden leap of intuition.

  “You’re not a soldier,” I said.

  The mantis’s beak snapped shut.

  “Certainly not.”

  “What are you then, a scientist?”

  The mantis seemed to contemplate this word—however it had translated for the alien’s mind—and he waved a spiked forelimb in my direction.

  “The best human term is professor. I research and I teach.”

  “I see,” I said, suddenly fascinated to be meeting the first mantis I’d ever seen who was not, explicitly, trained to kill. “So you’re here to research human religion?”

  “Not just human religion,” said the mantis, hovering closer. “I want to know about this . . . this spirit that you speak of. Is it God?”

  “I guess so, but also kind of not. The spirit is . . . what you feel inside you when you know God is paying attention.”

  It was a clumsy explanation, one the Chaplain would have—no doubt—chastised me for. I’d never been much good at putting these kinds of concepts into words that helped me understand, much less helped other people understand too. And trying to explain God and the spirit to this insect felt a lot like explaining the beauty of orchestral music to a lawnmower.

  The Professor’s two serrated forelimbs thoughtfully stroked the front of his disc.

  “What do the mantes believe?” I asked.

  The Professor’s forelimbs froze. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “We detect neither a spirit nor a God,” said the Professor, who made a second jaw-gaped show of annoyance. “The avians and the amphibians, they each built palaces to their gods. Whole continents and oceans mobilized in warfare, to determine which god was superior. Before we came and wiped them all out, down to the last chick and tadpole. Now, their flying gods and their swimming gods are recorded in the Quorum Archive, and I am left to wander here—to this desert of a planet—to quiz you, who are not even trained to give me the answers I seek.”

  The Professor’s body language showed that his annoyance verged on anger, and I felt myself pressing my calves and the backs of my thighs into the altar, ready for the lightning blow that would sever a carotid or split my stomach open. I’d seen so many die that way, their attackers reveling in the carnage. However technologically advanced the mantes were, they still retained a degree of predatory-hindbrain joy while engaged in combat.

  Noticing my alarm, the Professor floated backwards half a meter.

  “Forgive me,” said the alien. “I came here today seeking answers from what I had hoped would be a somewhat reliable source. It is not your fault that the eldest of the Quorum destroy things before they can learn from them. My time with you is finite, and I am impatient to learn as much as possible before the end.”

  “You have to leave . . . ?” I said, half-questioning.

  The
Professor didn’t say anything for several seconds, letting the silence speak for him. My shoulders and back caved, if only a little.

  “How many of the rest of us will die?” I asked, swallowing hard.

  “All,” said the Professor.

  “All?” I said, at once sure of the answer, but still needing to ask again anyway.

  “Yes, all,” said the Professor. “When I got word that the Quorum had ordered this colony cleansed of competitive life forms—prior to the dispatching of the Fourth Expansion towards your other worlds—I knew that I had a very narrow window. I must study this faith that inhabits you humans. Before it is too late.”

  “We’re no threat to you now,” I heard myself say with hollow shock, “all of us on Purgatory, we’ve all been disarmed and you’ve made it plain that we can’t hurt you. The Wall sees to that.”

  “I will return tomorrow, to study your other visitors in their worship,” said the alien as his disc spun on its vertical axis, and he began to hover towards the exit.

  “We’re not a threat—!”

  But my shouting was for naught. The Professor was gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  I DIDN’T SLEEP AT ALL THAT NIGHT. I KEPT THINKING ABOUT WHAT would happen. There were approximately six thousand of us left from the invasion, mostly men, but some women too—and now, here and there, children. All of us confined to a single semi-arid mountain valley by what we’d come to think of as The Wall—a slightly opaque curtain of energy that ringed us on all sides, with an indefinite height that faded into the sky. Rain, wind, snow, and air fell into and through The Wall, but every man or woman who had approached and touched it had been reduced to ashes.