The Chaplain's War - eARC Read online

  But the planet Marvelous had been explicitly attacked. A planet which had shown no hint of harboring intelligent life. A threat from the stars had savaged her, leaving Earth and the other colonies scrambling to put together some kind of effective defense.

  War news was something that came only in irregular bits and pieces. Since Earth itself had not been hit, what went on out in the colonies, many, many light-years from home, wasn’t exactly front-page news. Once the initial furor over the alien threat had died down, most American families had gone back to business as usual. What else could be done? We watched our thinscreens and we checked the internet and we speculated about what might happen next. But for most of us, the war was a thing happening far away, out of the realm of ordinary experience.

  Tia leaned close, speaking in a whisper only the four of us could hear.

  “They want troops for the colonial counteroffensive,” she said.

  “Who told you that?” I asked, also in a whisper.

  “Nobody,” she said. “But what else could it be?”

  I wondered. The Fleet recruiters had been getting more numerous as our senior year at school drew to a close. One of my cousins who lived in Rhode Island and who occasionally gamed with me on-line said that she’d noticed the same thing at her school. Was it true that the Fleet was going to strike back? What did that mean for those of us who’d never even seen the alien threat up close?

  We’d all been shown pictures, of course. The aliens individually looked for all the world like a grotesque, outsized mutation of an ordinary praying mantis. Only each one rode a man-sized flying saucer not terribly different from the kind I’d seen in some of the very archaic two-dee movies of the previous century. The images which had been brought back from Marvelous and were pretty horrible. So much so that even the scientists and politicians who’d been loudly advocating for peace talks gradually piped down.

  The threat was real, it was ugly, and the only question that remained was: what were humans going to do about it?

  The Fleet recruiter noticed us, and beckoned us over.

  We hesitantly complied.

  “How are y’all doin’ today?” she said, smiling. Her hair was red, and she had freckles across her cheeks.

  “Okay I guess,” Ben said.

  “Y’all seniors?” the recruiter asked; her name tape on her uniform read O’DONNELL.

  “Yeah,” Tia said.

  “Got plans for after school? You know the Fleet’s got countless opportunities for healthy, able-bodied young men and women like yourselves. The president’s authorized nice bonuses for anyone willing to sign up with me today. You’d ship out when you graduate.”

  Money. That was a definite enticement. Prior to the mantis aliens making their existence known, the American economy had been locked in a rather pernicious stagflationary cycle. The advent of the interstellar jump system, and the establishment of the colonies, had destabilized most of the international stock markets. Earth’s economic ship-in-a-bottle approach to commerce was being disrupted now that thousands of people were disembarking on colony boats every day, while freighters returning from the colonies were bringing goods and materials back. The United Nations had been trying to slap together an interstellar monetary committee when ships fleeing Marvelous brought word of the alien attack.

  Now, things were worse. The dollar was really struggling. And jobs—any kind—were not that easy to find. Not when computers and machinery did so much of the manual labor all over the country. Many people were either technicians servicing those computers and machines, or developers, engineers, and programmers who worked on improving and refining the technology that kept much of the human race fed, housed, and clothed.

  “What do you do in the Fleet?” I asked O’Donnell.

  “Well, before I was Fleet, I was Navy, and when I was Navy, I was a maintenance expert out on one of the submarines. Submarine life is a lot like life on the starships, you know. They snatched up as many of us submariners as they could get their hands on, when the Fleet was initially launched. I did some time converting my skills over to spacecraft, and then I got put into recruiting.”

  “Sounds like you don’t stay in one spot too long,” Kaffy said.

  “Not so far,” O’Donnell said. “So, can I show you a few videos? Interest you in what the Fleet has to offer?”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “We’re going to be late for class if we don’t get something to eat, and soon.”

  “Well, that’s fine, but here, let me give you these,” O’Donnell said, handing us all thin little pieces of plastic about the size of a standard credit or debit card. The card was silver, with a holographic logo on it that moved when you faced the card in different directions. The logo appeared to be a hawk or eagle, stylized of course, with its eyes and beak looking fierce. Under the bird was a small globe of Earth, shielded from above by the bird’s protectively-arched wings. The bird’s talons held what appeared to be a sword on the left, and a cluster of rockets on the right.

  We mumbled our thanks, and went to sit at a table.

  “No way,” Ben said as he slipped bites of school lunch spaghetti into his mouth.

  “You’re not interested in going to space?” David asked.

  “Not like that,” Ben said, shaking his head.

  “I’ve got an older cousin who signed up,” Kaffy said. “He left home three weeks ago. My aunt and uncle don’t hear from him much, though they say he says the training is tough.”

  “Military training is always tough,” I said, chewing on a piece of cold garlic bread.

  “How would you know?” Tia teased. “Playing war hero in VR isn’t like the real thing, you know.”

  I scowled at Tia, and flipped her my middle finger.

  She laughed, and up-ended her bottle of fruit juice with her right hand, flipping me back with her left.

  “Too bad the mantis aliens aren’t just VR,” David said, his face growing sober. “I mean, really, what do any of us know about the aliens anyway? Two colonies have been attacked, so far. How many of the others will be attacked? Maybe they’re under attack right now?”

  “If it were that bad,” Kaffy said, “Don’t you think they’d be here already? Invading Earth?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe we just happened to settle some planets that the aliens thought were theirs to begin with.”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” Ben said. “War is war. We fight, or we lose.”

  “Spoken like a man who just said he’d never go to space as a soldier,” Tia said, turning her sarcasm on our mutual friend.

  “Hey, if the battle comes to Earth, I’ll do what I have to, just like everyone else,” Ben said defensively. “I’m just not in a hurry to go up and be roach food, you know what I mean?”

  We all nodded our heads.

  It was easy to talk options, with the mantis threat almost entirely removed from our daily lives.

  Still, I kept looking over my shoulder at the Fleet recruiter.

  When I went home that night, I sat on the family living room couch and flipped the recruiter’s card over and over and over in my fingers. Mom and dad were still at work, and wouldn’t be home until later. I noticed that the card had a chip in it.

  I eyed the Total Entertainment System in the corner of the living room.

  Like most Virtual Reality units on the market, the TES looked a lot like a huge egg, with two steps leading up to the hatch in the side. I got up and slowly went over to the unit, eyeing the small slot on the TES’s control panel—a slot just big enough to accept the card the recruiter had given me.

  I looked up through the numerous clear windows that made up the arched ceiling above my head, and noticed the moon was just starting to come out. The Fleet often did training exercises there now. Spacesuited infantry and armor units, practicing for the day when they might be hurled into battle against the mantis hordes.

  I slipped the recruiter’s card into the slot on the TES, climb in, sat down, and shut the hatch. />
  It was a little unnerving, being in the TES unsupervised. Mom and dad had very strict rules about that. I’d been punished more than once. It was easy to get lost in the virtual environment. For hours, or even days. VR had become so realistic that habitual users risked drifting over into disconnect: a clinically diagnosed condition, which left the user believing that not only was the VR experience more real than real, it was also preferable to real.

  I inhaled once, then use my fingers in the air to swipe and drag the VR digital menus until the TES booted up whatever program was on the card in the exterior slot.

  Almost instantly, I was plunged into a total surround starscape, with impressive full orchestra music that piped through the stereo speakers on either side of my head rest.

  “A challenge awaits,” said a deep baritone voice. “The galaxy needs men and women who can meet that challenge.”

  A planet appeared, then grew larger. It was Earth, if I had the shapes of the continents right. Then the view zoomed down into Earth orbit, where several asteroids from the asteroid belt had been artificially inserted. The view zoomed in again, and showed the shipyards on the surfaces of the asteroids. The spines and ribs of numerous, large vessels were being busily constructed, while other ships—further along in the construction process—were being detached and floated into formation for their final fittings.

  “The Fleet is humanity’s sword and shield against all dangerous life before us,” the voice boomed. “Millions of men and women from across the solar system, and also the colonies, are doing their part to ensure that humanity is protected. Our lives kept safe and secure.”

  Suddenly the view rapidly dropped past the asteroid shipyards, down a dizzying number of kilometers, through the clouds, and right up to the tarmac of a nameless spaceport. There were people standing in four rows—what appeared to be a rectangular formation. They were of generally young age, both genders, and varying ethnicities. They stared straight ahead of them, chins out and eyes steely. One by one their civilian clothes were computer morphed into uniforms not too different from the one I’d seen the recruiter wearing at school earlier in the day.

  “Pilots, technicians, computer programmers, military police, infantry, armament and weapons specialists, they’re all needed, and the Fleet needs you to do your part for humanity’s future.”

  It felt as if I was sitting directly in the midst of the formation with them. The sun was bright, and I could hear a seagull crying in the distance. From where the view had dropped down from orbit, I guessed that this particular spaceport was supposed to be on the California coast?

  The image of the people standing in formation grew still, while a menu popped up. The menu listed dozens and dozens of different kinds of jobs.

  I hit the first one that looked interesting to me: weapons maintainer.

  One of the people standing in formation stepped out of line and smiled at me, saying, “Good choice! Come on, I’ll show you what I do!”

  And suddenly I was being given a five-minute guided tour of that particular Fleet troop’s responsibilities and assignments. I was shown the tools she used, the programs she had to know, the kinds of weapons she worked with, how long the training would be, what kinds of opportunities there were in the Fleet for people in her occupational slot, and so forth. All of it as real as could be, rendered through the TES’s ultra-immersive VR environment.

  One by one, I started swiping and selecting, letting the different virtual troops take me on tours of their jobs.

  Much of it looked potentially interesting. Even the more macho stuff like infantry, gunnery, and flying. Which was a bit outside my particular taste, since until that afternoon I’d not seriously given the military—Fleet, or otherwise—any serious consideration.

  But the recruiting program did have a point: if the mantis aliens were as dangerous as they seemed, who was going to protect the rest of us? What was it going to take, on the part of ordinary soon-to-be HS grads like me, to ensure that the Earth remained relatively safe?

  Suddenly the program prematurely terminated, and the hatch to the TES popped open.

  I was so jarred, I gave off a little yelp.

  My dad leaned his head in.

  “You know you’re not supposed to be using this thing when your mother and I aren’t home, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But there’s a good reason.”

  “I already know the reason,” my dad said, tapping the silver recruiter’s card on the edge of the hatch.

  “Out,” he said. “Let’s talk about this.”

  I climbed through the hatch, suddenly grateful to be free of the small space. I’d been in there much longer than I’d initially thought. I stretched and bent my back from side to side, yawning.

  “Come on,” my dad said.

  I followed him into the kitchen where my mom had already started up the dining computer station which was rapidly taking the raw contents of that day’s grocery shopping and whipping them into something edible. I wasn’t sure what menu choice my mom had selected. I could only see the little robotic waldos inside the machine moving about rapidly, making shadow-box silhouettes on the unit’s frosted glass window.

  “Recruiters are really pressing hard these days,” my mom said. “Frankly, Harrison, I was surprised to see that you’d actually talked to one of them. You never told your father nor I that you had any interest in the military.”

  “It’s just a recruiting thing,” I told them. “Me and my friends all got a card today. I figured it couldn’t hurt to examine my options. I mean, I am going to graduate next month.”

  “And your grades are good enough to get you into a college,” my dad said firmly. “This whole Fleet thing…it seems like a good option for kids who don’t really have a lot of options. But you, Harry? You’ve got to think bigger than this.”

  I felt my back starting to go up. Here it came again. The grand lecture.

  “Dad—” I started, perhaps a bit more petulantly than I’d intended.

  “Don’t,” he said, putting a hand firmly on my arm. “We’ve been over this and over this, and we’ll keep going over this until we’re clear. You’re only going to be eighteen once. The decisions you make in the next few months are going to resonate throughout your entire life. Don’t be impulsive. Think about the path you want to take. Think about the kind of life you want to live.”

  “You mean, the life you want me to live,” I said to him.

  “Now Harry,” my mom said, “that’s not fair to your father, or to me either. We’re still your parents. We want you to be happy.”

  “Do you really?” I said, my irritation growing every second that this too-familiar conversation carried on. “Because what it often seems like to me is that you’re more interested in me living the kind of life that will make you happy. Something nice, and plain, and ordinary.”

  Dad’s grip on my arm tightened.

  “Do you have any idea how much hard work it takes to build and maintain the sort of life we all enjoy here, in this house? Do you? No, of course you don’t. Which is really my fault. I should have made you get a job when you were old enough to work and still carry a class load. But your mother was afraid it would interfere with your studies. Now you listen to me, Harry. In this life, everything takes effort. Nothing is given to you. You look around at our life here and you think it’s boring. Well, that’s the opinion of a teenager. Your mother and I? We put in long hours every week to make sure it stays that way. Because you don’t want to find out what a not-boring life looks like. Trust me.”

  I’d heard it before—just variations on a tired theme. My dad had grown up poor, the child of a single mother struggling with addiction demons. My grandmother had died before I was old enough to really remember her, but my dad always talked about his childhood being a rather barren thing, compared to mine.

  “You think the only alternative to boring, is recklessness,” I said to him. “I don’t want to be reckless. I just want…I want to find out what more
is there in the world, than here. Why is that so bad?”

  His grip slowly released. His eyes—with bags under them—grew soft.

  “No, that’s not bad, son. I remember feeling that way when I was your age. Just…this Fleet thing, you don’t really know what you’d be getting into. Nobody does.”

  “The mantis aliens are real,” I said. “Fleet seems to be the only thing capable of doing anything about them.”

  “True,” my mother said. “But like your father just told you, a military career is one of those choices best suited for people who don’t have many options. You do have options.”

  “If I had the option I wanted,” I said, “I’d sign up for one of the colony expeditions. Go to the stars.”

  “If you work hard and get an advanced degree,” my dad said, “maybe that will be something you can look into. In time. Seems to me Fleet’s just a shortcut to that goal. You’ve lived an easy life so far, Harry. You won’t like the military. Trust me.”

  “How do you know, Dad? You never served.”

  “I know,” he said, staring intently at me. “You’ll hate it.”

  I stared right back at him, quietly fuming. Part of me wanted to go back to the cafeteria and sign up with the Fleet tomorrow, just to lock myself in and make it so that Dad couldn’t say another word otherwise. I was already of age. I could make the choice for myself.

  But then, a little lingering voice in the back of my mind wondered if Dad wasn’t right? Maybe I would hate it? Worse yet, what if I hated it so much that I just couldn’t take it, and I washed out? What kind of face would I be seeing in the mirror then?

  I looked at the recruiter’s card, still clutched in Dad’s other hand.