The Chaplain's War - eARC Read online

  He left as the last lamp flickered out, leaving me in cold darkness.

  Chapter 5

  Another week passed. Then two weeks. Temperatures in the valley began to drop. Purgatory’s axial tilt wasn’t as pronounced as Earth’s, so the seasons weren’t so well defined. There was no spring, summer, winter, or fall, just a warmer season and a colder season, with reflective growth and decay of alpine vegetation.

  My little garden needed work as a result. I spent time carefully picking through the rows, saving every little root, bulb, and leaf that could be dried or stored for the cool months. Then I razed the rest of the plants to the ground, tilled them under, and set about sowing seeds for the stuff which would be able to survive and grow with the lower temperatures. A trick I’d learned from one of the parishioners who’d grown up on a farm on one of Earth’s interstellar colonies.

  A winter crop, he’d called it. Something I’d not even thought possible, having grown up on Earth, where almost everything anybody ate merely came from the store, three hundred sixty-five days a year.

  One afternoon, when I’d just come inside from working in the soil, Hoff and his boys reappeared in my doorway.

  “You didn’t follow orders,” he said to me as I wiped my hands on my overalls—the pair I saved for outside chores.

  The sharpness in Hoff’s tone caused the four worshippers sitting in my pews to become uncomfortable. They quickly got up and left, brushing past the indignant officer while avoiding his gaze. Which was directly upon me as I stood up from my stool and began to walk up the central aisle.

  “Sir,” I said, feeling a bit more conciliatory since the last time he’d visited, “you asked me to bring you any relevant information. If I had something remarkable to report, I’d have done it already.”

  “You’re a bad liar,” Hoff said. “We’ve been from one end of the valley to the other. We’ve talked to the other religious folk. We know the mantis is some kind of researcher, asking lots of questions about church stuff. Supposedly he’s bringing more mantes—to study us. I’d call that pretty important information. Or are you just a dumbass who doesn’t realize what he’s stumbled into?”

  A hot flush flowed up my neck and into my face.

  “It just didn’t seem relevant,” I said, opening my arms wide and throwing out my hands. “How is this one mantis bringing more mantes to talk to us about our religion going to solve our mutual problem of captivity? Is it going to get us off this planet? Take us back home?”

  Hoff didn’t appear to have a good answer to these questions. I suspected that if he knew the full truth, it might make him more annoying than he already was. Perhaps even dangerous. I was glad I hadn’t revealed a thing to any of the other congregational leaders—though I knew most of them by name. If Hoff had been curious enough to go cross-examine them, he’d have ferreted out the fact of our impending demise one way or another.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think,” Hoff spat. “That’s what officers are for. We do the thinking around here. You just do as you’re told.”

  “Sir,” I said, working hard to remain calm in the face of Hoff’s belligerence, “since you clearly found out as much as I know from talking to the other denominations, what point would there have been in me confirming redundant information? Yes, the mantis says he’s bringing more of his kind to study us. But have you seen hide or hair of that mantis since he made that promise? Neither have I. I suspect maybe we’ve been dealing with an eccentric. He’s the first civilian mantis any of us have ever seen. Maybe he’s serious, and maybe he’s just a quack. I don’t see how it makes a difference since he clearly can’t get us off this world any more quickly than we ourselves can. Frankly, I’m glad he’s gone.”

  Hoff walked up the aisle and met me halfway. I had him by a couple of centimeters, so he actually had to look up into my face. His jaw was clenched and I sensed from him the urge for violence. Much as the Professor had once sensed it from me. With the odds being three to one, I figured I’d get my ass handed to me if the major really wanted to pick a fight. I felt sweat springing out across my skin as we stood there in the middle of the chapel glaring at each other.

  “You’ve been warned,” he finally said. “Screw with me again, and I will make you sorry for it. Understood?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Yessir.”

  Hoff pivoted quickly on a heel and stalked out, his henchman following.

  I braced myself on the backs of two pews, breathing deeply and heavily while the adrenaline of the moment slowly wore off.

  God, I hated pricks like that.

  Not all Fleet officers were as bad as Hoff. But enough of them had rubbed me wrong to make me understand that I had not been, nor would I ever be, a great soldier. Taking orders from people I judged to be idiots just wasn’t my thing.

  With no one in the chapel, I began to wander up and down the rows of stone benches, collecting bits of detritus that had been swept in on the feet of visitors. When noon arrived and I still had no one, I made myself a modest meal and propped a stick-built chair at the front door so that I could get a little fresh air while afternoon wore on into evening.

  Purgatory’s sky was dappled with clouds.

  I suspected there might be rain in our future.

  Heaven knew we needed it. The sparse cold-season snows on the peaks didn’t last long into the warm season. The handful of valley lakes usually began to run dry just a little after the midpoint of the warm months. Thus drought was almost a perpetual state for us, making the rare thunderstorm a welcome thing.

  The chapel had a catchment system which I’d engineered into the roof.

  It would be nice to have fresh, relatively clean water instead of the silty stuff I was always pulling out of the distant creek.

  A figure wearing a poncho and a wide grass hat walked up. The brim of the hat was pulled low so that I couldn’t see the person’s face.

  “Did that major come to bother you?” said a woman’s voice.

  “Hoff?” I asked, recognizing Deacon Fulbright.

  “Yeah, that’s the cocksucker.”

  I chuckled. The Deacon had been a noncommissioned officer—and a gunner—before turning her attention to Christ. She still had her salty mouth. Whether or not she had any actual pastoral bona fides from her previous civilian life was a mystery to me. Not that anyone gave a damn here.

  So much of the valley’s religious fabric was like that. Once the mantes had us beaten and it was obvious we weren’t going anywhere, dozens of would-be congregational leaders sprang up from the ranks.

  Deacon Fulbright and I had been on good terms since the beginning.

  “Come take a load off,” I said to her, going inside and bringing out another stick-built chair.

  She sat, and together we leaned against the wall of the chapel while the sun set.

  “Hoff’s trying to rally as much of the former officer corps as he can,” she said.

  “Is he having much success?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. “There are some colonels who aren’t taking kindly to Hoff’s attitude. I think if he keeps this up there’s liable to be an ass-whippin’ at his expense.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a more deserving man,” I said.

  The Deacon snickered at my sarcastic comment.

  I stared at the sky as the clouds continued to thicken.

  A low rumble, almost so far off we couldn’t hear it, told me my earlier suspicion of rain would turn out to be correct.

  “Harry,” she said—we only used first names when things got candid.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure you don’t know anything more than I know?”

  “What do you know?”

  “What Hoff said I know.”

  “And that’s all I know too,” I replied flatly.

  She stared at me.

  “You’re a bad liar.”

  “And you’re not the first one to tell me that today.”

/>   “Look, fuck the major, this is between you and me. What’s really going on with this mantis and the ‘students’ he says he’s bringing back? I talked to the Mormon Bishop two days ago and he’s all excited about it. Though he said he’d expected the mantes to be here by now. That they’re not here yet has him a little worried.”

  “You seem to think this mantis scholar tells me more than he tells you, or anyone else around here. Why?”

  “Because he came to you first,” she answered.

  “Diane,” I said, “believe me when I tell you that if I had any knowledge I thought would be good for you to know, then you’d be the first to know it. Okay? There’s nothing for me to say. We’re friends. I respect you.”

  “And I respect you,” she said.

  “Then let me be,” I replied gently.

  After a long silence, she whooshed out a frustrated breath.

  “Suit yourself, Harry. I can’t make you say what you don’t want to say. But I trust you. Just please promise me that if you change your mind, my door will be the first one you knock on.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Good. Now I’d better get back before the storm hits.”

  “I think it’s just minutes away,” I said.

  The Deacon stood and we exchanged farewells, before she walked away.

  More rumbling in the sky, and a smattering of tiny drops on the parched soil, told me it was time to go in and close all the shutters.

  Chapter 6

  The storm hit, and hit big.

  Flash flooding kept us all busy for a few days while we cleaned up the mess. Thankfully my chapel didn’t get damaged. This time. I’d not always been so lucky.

  During one particularly violent downpour, a runnel was cut under the northeast corner of the building, causing the wall to crumble. I wound up having to rebuild and repair not only that corner, but the roof above it as well. It took me the better part of two weeks, during which the interior of the chapel was both drafty, and prone to gathering more than its usual layer of noxious dust.

  But now, with our water supply somewhat renewed, the mood in the valley grew optimistic. Funny how our time in this place had simplified our expectations. Even something as mundane as an unusual abundance of water could be a cause for rejoicing.

  Me? I remained quietly anxious.

  Over the next ten days I had half a dozen repeats of the conversation I’d had with the Deacon, only with different people from different congregations around the valley. I told them all what I could—omitting the one big piece of information I dared not reveal—and life went on its merry way.

  The wait become a month.

  Then two months. Then three.

  No sign of the Professor.

  My dread of the inevitable began to deepen. The Professor had never specified when the end might come, so I had no way of knowing if this was a delay in the course of events as he’d described, or merely the running out of the proverbial sand into the bottom of the proverbial hourglass. Since he’d not come back I suspected that any hope I might kindle—and this happened more than once—was a false hope. So I stuffed it down inside and tried to be resigned to whatever fate awaited us.

  If nothing else, the Professor’s visits all over the valley sparked interest among the general population. My chapel’s average attendance grew substantially. I wasn’t sure what to think about that, other than being grateful for the increased donations of goods and food at my drop box by the front door.

  I still didn’t preach—would not have had the foggiest idea what to say to any of them—but I kept the chapel clean, I made sure the altar and all the objects on it were tidy and arranged according to pattern, and I welcomed in everyone who felt the need to come.

  When an entire Purgatorial year passed—perhaps one and a half Earth standard—I began to wonder if the Professor really had been an eccentric. A nutball. Such people existed among humans, why not the mantes? He had been chasing religion, after all, and I had nothing to corroborate what he’d said. Perhaps he’d been the mantis version of a millennial—someone attracted to and fascinated by “end times” myth. Enough to spin me a story?

  The first sign of the inevitable came when the hill farmers reported that The Wall was beginning to close in.

  Deacon Fulbright and I rushed out to the valley rim, hiking for hours up to the peaks so that we could take a look for ourselves.

  Seeing was believing.

  “Christ in Heaven,” she said under her breath. We were less than a meter away from The Wall—silent, shimmering, and deadly. I kicked a couple of stones up to it, one in front of the other. Perhaps three centimeters apart. As we watched, The Wall gradually and inexorably drifted over the top of the first stone, then over the top of the second. Not terribly fast. Maybe a millimeter per minute. But given the fact there was nowhere for anyone to go, it didn’t matter.

  The Deacon stared at me.

  “You knew,” she said. “You knew this would happen.”

  “No,” I said. Which was the technical truth. The Professor had never told me the precise nature of our doom, should it come.

  “You knew!”

  This time she’d yelled it at me.

  My cheeks reddened with shame.

  “Well, okay, dammit, so maybe I did. What was I supposed to do? Go blabbing to every man, woman, and child in the valley? Who would that have helped? Would it have solved anything? It would have caused panic, that’s what it would have caused. And half of them would not have wanted to believe me in any case. I’d have been cast out as a crazy and the chapel would have been shut down.”

  Tears stained the Deacon’s face.

  “I’m sorry, Diane,” I said. “I really am. But I didn’t dare tell anyone. Not even you. How could I?”

  She spun away from me and began marching back down the mountainside.

  “Wait!” I called after her, practically running to catch up.

  When I grabbed her shoulders she threw off my hands with a violent twist of her body.

  “Don’t touch me,” she snarled.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Like it matters?”

  “To me it does. Diane, think about it. We’ve all been trapped here for how many years now? With no sign that there will ever be any escape? People have begun families. It’s not much of a life, but it’s something. People have found ways to get by. And you and I and the rest of the religious leadership, we’ve been part of that. You know we have. Prematurely telling people what I knew about the mantes’ plans would have been a gross betrayal of our service. My job—your job too—is to give everyone a mode for hope. Not all of them use it, but enough of them do that I couldn’t in good conscience let them down by becoming a prophet of death.”

  She’d stopped in her tracks. From the side I could tell that fresh tears continued to leak from her eyes. The shuddering of her back told me all I needed to know about the anguish she must be feeling. I myself merely felt a hollowness in my chest where emotion should have been. If the news had just hit Diane like a baseball bat between the eyes, I’d had to live with it on my heart like a slow corrosive. Insidious and malignant.

  “Well you can’t hide the truth now,” she finally said, her voice cracking. “Word’s already getting around. Even the hardcore doubters will eventually come up here and confirm things for themselves. Just like we did. What’s going to happen, Harry? Are we going to keep blowing sunshine up their asses, or are we going to be straight with them?”

  “Didn’t you once tell me you thought our incarceration was God’s way of testing us?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, snuffling. “It was easy to talk, then. The war was more or less over. The mantes seemed to have left us alone. Now? I guess this means God’s passed judgment.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Is that what you’re going to say on Sunday?”

  “I don’t know yet. All I know is I want to get the hell off this mountain.”

  She began walking again, which l
eft me no choice but to follow her.

  Chapter 7

  For several days, hundreds of fearful and curious people went up to the valley rim. When enough of them had returned with confirmation of the dreadful reality, the mood in the valley promptly shifted to alarm.

  But for me? It was almost a relief. No more carrying around a silent burden.

  I still didn’t let on that I’d had advanced warning. And the Deacon didn’t tell anyone either. Suffice to say that what others didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me or them.

  Whether the Professor had been legit or not, he’d been unable to change the minds on his Quorum. Humanity’s stay on Purgatory was coming to an end.

  In the weeks that followed, attendance in the chapel went through the roof. I was forced to allow people to begin spending the night. Who was I to keep banker’s hours, at a time like this? As long as people didn’t leave a mess—excremental or otherwise—I let them stay as long as they wanted. It’s what the chaplain would have preferred were he still alive and able to give direction. I could think of no better use for the place.

  Occasional scout trips to the hills told us that the contraction of The Wall was accelerating.

  By the time The Wall was in the valley floor, and closing at well over a meter per day, I had more people in the chapel than could possibly fit. I began to wonder if the combination of fear and crowding might cause a riot. But my flock was like me for the most part—calm and resigned. Maybe attempting to make some sort of final peace with the universe? Perhaps, also, we were each of us eager for the ultimate escape. It had been years since we’d walked freely on a human world, masters of our own universe. Life in the valley, controlled utterly by the mantes, had been like a living coffin.

  Now it would end.

  Chapter 8

  Carrying on with business as usual was a strange experience. Knowing what was to come left an aftertaste of dread in my mouth each morning. But there was always the same routine maintenance work on the chapel to be done. Rather that neglect my chores, I hurled myself into them with as much energy as I could muster. Keeping busy on productive tasks was just about the only sober way to take my mind off The Wall.