The Chaplain's War - eARC Read online

  A hand went up meekly, fifty down and third rank.

  “You,” said the first sergeant.

  “We didn’t follow the command correctly?”

  A corporal stepped up to the recruit with the raised hand and began bawling the recruit out for not beginning and ending his sentence with, “First Sergeant.”

  “Wrong,” said Klauski. “Someone else?”

  Another hand went up. “First Sergeant, we ran into each other, First Sergeant.”

  “Wrong.”

  “First Sergeant, the people up front didn’t know what to do, First Sergeant.”

  “Wrong.”

  “…not in unison!”

  “Wrong…wrong…wrong.”

  The First Sergeant put a palm up to his face and wiped it across his mouth in exasperation.

  I finally raised my hand high.

  “You,” said the first sergeant.

  “First Sergeant, we didn’t ask for an explanation of the command, First Sergeant,” I said as loudly and with as much gusto as I could muster.

  He snapped his finger and stepped forward.

  “Abso-effin-lutely correct, Recruit. Did everyone hear that? Finally, someone is paying attention to what I first told you. You never follow a command that you don’t understand first. Two times I stood up here and gave a command that more than half of you didn’t know what the eff to do with. At least one of you should have stuck a paw in the air and respectfully requested clarification on ‘right-face’ and ‘file from the left column left,’ but you didn’t do it. Maybe ’cause you’re scared, or maybe ’cause you’re just stupid, I don’t know. But get it through your skulls, recruits. Whether you’re stupid or scared. You have to understand what the eff it is that you’re doing, or you’re going to fail. And when people in uniform fail, it usually means people in uniform die.

  “Now, I hope this little object lesson has sunk in. Ready to try it again?”

  “YES FIRST SERGEANT,” shouted the formation.

  “Are you sure?”

  “YES FIRST SERGEANT!”

  A hand went up. This time, not mine.

  “What is it Recruit?”

  “First Sergeant, uhhhh, respectfully request—”

  “Who respectfully requests?”

  “Uhh, First Sergeant, I respectfully—”

  An NCO jumped into the speaking recruit’s face and barked about the proper way to self-reference during IST.

  “One more time, Recruit,” Klauski said.

  “First Sergeant, Recruit Trucco requests clarification on ‘right face’ and ‘file from the left column left,’ First Sergeant.”

  “Beautiful, Recruit Trucco.”

  The First Sergeant proceeded to explain: posting NCO demonstrators in order to properly display facing movements and the somewhat more complicated columnar split-off movement known as file-from-the-left-column-left. After which he called the formation once again to attention—the sunlight slamming down on us as Sol rose higher into the blue sky—and repeated his first two commands.

  Right-face went much more smoothly, with only a few people messing it up.

  Filing was more problematic, but after the left-most column—which had been the first row prior to facing right—stumbled through it, the other columns got the idea, and one by one they broke off and filed up the steps and into the reception center.

  Chapter 15

  The Calysta was much more spacious than I remembered Fleet ships being when I’d first signed up. She had wider corridors. Larger compartments. Not nearly as much exposed wiring and piping. Brighter lamps in the ceiling, all spaced at closer intervals. And so on, and so forth. They even had several flavors of ice cream in the galley’s little desert bar.

  I stared at the brightly-colored frozen desert food, and wondered how long it’d been since I’d treated myself to such a delicacy.

  “Life’s a little easier up here this time, isn’t it?” Captain Adanaho said to me as she sat down at my table, watching me take slow, deliberate spoonfuls of Neopolitan into my mouth.

  I swallowed—savoring the taste of the vanilla mixed with strawberry mixed with chocolate—and aimed my empty spoon at her.

  “You could say that, yes ma’am,” I said.

  “Helps that the Fleet has had much more time to refine its various starship designs,” she said, poking at her own tray with a pair of chopsticks. It seemed she had rice and teriyaki beef, plus a vegetable side that looked suspiciously like some form of seaweed.

  “A lot’s changed since I first went to space,” I said. “All of this would have seemed like decadent extravagance in the wake of New America being attacked. Earth was really scrambling then. Can I admit to being relieved that the designers thought to put a few creature comforts into these new ships?”

  “It’s part of Fleet’s long-term plan,” she said. “When the armistice stabilized the situation with the mantes, Fleet turned its focus from rapid counterattack and repulsion, to a more permanent security mission designed to protect both those colonies which had escaped being molested during the war, and those colonies which had been ceded back to us by the mantis Quorum. You can’t keep people in space forever, and expect morale to remain decent, when the living conditions are too Spartan. So, Fleet’s civilian contractors started getting creative with the amenities. Now life aboard ship for long durations is tolerable.”

  “When you’ve just come from the conditions I’ve lived in for the last few years,” I said, “this is more than tolerable. It’s practically paradise. I really should see if it’s possible to import a few of these goodies down to Purgatory’s surface, once we get back.”

  “Yes,” Adanaho said, her eyes losing focus. “Once we get back.”

  I stopped, a fresh spoonful of ice cream halfway to my lips.

  “You’ve got doubts?” I said.

  “Yes, and no,” she said, looking around her quickly, to be sure nobody was sitting within earshot of us. “I don’t like talking about it out in the open like this, but if you’d seen some of the information I’ve seen, you’d realize that things aren’t looking so good. Yes, the armistice is intact. For the moment. But there are strong signs that the mantes are preparing for something. All our data points to that. And we’re not sure if or when the fragile truce is going to break.”

  “I’m going to assume you’re speaking as a strategist who has to plan for worst-case scenarios,” I said to her, putting my spoon down.

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “But me being here is cause for hope?”

  “Also true.”

  “So what does your gut tell you? Which way is it going to go?”

  Adanaho closed her eyes and ran a hand over her forehead, rubbing softly.

  “I just don’t know, Chief. I think that’s the part which is driving me nuts right now. The lack of knowing what the future might hold. What can be planned for, and what’s unknown. I mean, how did you do it, during your years of captivity? How did you know when to relax and just live your life?”

  I chuckled bleakly.

  “I’m not really sure it was anything like a conscious decision,” I said. “We all just kind of went from day to day at the start. Nobody knew anything. We had no contact with the rest of the Fleet. We were beaten, and we knew it, and so far as we could tell, death was going to visit us any day. It got a little easier when The Wall went up. Then it became clear our incarceration was going to be more long term. Which is why news of The Wall’s gradual contraction hit us in the face like a brick. Our hope for a future—any kind of future—crumbled.”

  “That’s what I am afraid of now,” she admitted, continuing to poke at her meal without showing much enthusiasm.

  “You know,” I said, “has anyone in Fleet ever considered the idea that the way to beat the mantes for good, is not to entrench ourselves and hold, but to pull up our stakes and run?”

  She stared at me.

  “There’s no way Earth’s sixteen billion people could ever possibl
y hope to run,” she said.

  “I know that,” I said. “But the galaxy is a big place. The mantes don’t control the whole thing. Hell, they don’t even control a small fraction of it, despite their reach. There is plenty of room for humanity to get lost in. Find new worlds, far, far away from the mantis threat. Put down and settle in. Go dark, maybe. Just kind of fade off the face of the universe. Nobody to bother us if we don’t bother them first. Keep quiet.”

  “If it comes down to it, yes,” she said. “The Fleet is prepared to bundle as many colonists as it can into emergency departure flotillas, and head for unknown territory. But who is to say we won’t just find something or someone even worse than the mantes?”

  “A distinct possibility,” I said, leaning back in my seat and resting my hands across my full belly.

  “Don’t you have family back home?” She asked. “I’m surprised you’d even consider running if you’ve got people you care about back on Earth.”

  “My mother and father are still on Earth. At least as far as I know.”

  “Don’t you ever send them messages? Why didn’t you go back to see them after it became possible again?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said, frowning. “Mom and dad…they kind of took it hard when I told them I’d signed up. They weren’t there to see me off to IST. Dad especially thought I was making a huge mistake. Me, and all my friends.”

  “What about them?” she said. “Your friends?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “None of us were sent to the same IST installations. After graduating high school, we scattered. And once I got stuck on Purgatory, things just kind of went into bizarro mode for me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ve no idea what it was like, existing with the mantis threat all around you every day. Caged. With only enough land under your feet to scratch a minimal living out of. My life back on Earth, before the war…it quickly got far away, and faded out of my thoughts. There were immediate concerns always in my face, every minute of every day. Including my promise to Chaplain Thomas. It took all I had to build the chapel, and by then, I was building new relationships with new friends, and before long, we all had new lives. Not great lives. Not lives I’d recommend to anyone in your position. But lives just the same. Earth…became a bit of a fairy tale for me. And when the armistice happened, I didn’t have a huge desire to go back. What would I do? Where would I go? Would my parents be glad to see me, or would they slam the door in my face?”

  She ate in silence for several minutes.

  “You must feel very, very lonely,” she said, not looking up.

  “I have people back on Purgatory,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said.

  I thought about it for a second, then sat up.

  “If you mean lonely for a wife or girlfriend, yeah, you could say that.”

  “Was there ever anybody? Someone you wanted to make a family with?”

  “The chapel became my home and the congregation became my family. But there was one person. We called her the Deacon. A former gunner.”

  “So what happened to her?”

  “Well, we were good friends, but when the armistice became a reality, she fled back to Earth the second she could catch a ride to orbit. I never saw her again, and never heard from her again either. As much as I hated life on Purgatory during our stint as POWs, I think she hated it even more. I suspect she probably considers me to be part of a long and uncomfortable set of memories she’d just as soon forget.”

  “A shame,” Adanaho said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But what’s your excuse, ma’am?”

  “I’m still under 30,” she said, cracking a little grin at me.

  For the first time since boarding the ship, I belted out a genuine laugh.

  Chapter 16

  Earth, 2153 A.D.

  The rest of the morning was a complete blur for me.

  Immediately inside the reception center, each recruit had a number stamped to the back of his or her hand, with an accompanying barcode. Depending on that number, each recruit was broken off and directed into a different, gymnasium-sized room, where more NCOs waited.

  When about forty people had filed into the room where I once again stood at attention, we were ordered to drop our bags—at last!—and then wait while an NCO came around to each of us and proceeded to dump everything out of our bags into piles on the floor in front of us.

  Then the NCOs proceeded to paw through the piles.

  Almost everything was deemed contraband. Phones, media players, computer pads, hardcopy books and magazines, civilian clothing…it was all unceremoniously shoved back into whatever luggage we recruits had brought with us, then each bag was closed shut with a zip tie to which a tag—with the respective recruit’s number and barcode on it—was attached. The bags were then stacked on several carts, and the carts were wheeled out. No explanation given, other than that the recruits would be seeing their bags again when they left Armstrong Field for Advanced Technical School—or washed out.

  Food and drink of any sort was trashed.

  I grunted at my wasted effort. I had tried to travel light, bringing only those things which had been on the packing list that my recruiter had given me. But I found out quickly that the packing list was next to worthless. Virtually everything I’d carried with me was being taken away, save for a small toiletries satchel and a neutral-colored towel.

  But I was lucky. Some of the other recruits were literally in tears, watching their toys and their games and their Most Favorite Of All Things taken from them and hauled off.

  When the shakedown was complete, numerous recruits appeared to have been hollowed out. And that was just the first personally-invasive violation of the day.

  Next came medical, where males and females were split off into separate lines and funneled into locker rooms where they were ordered to strip to the skin. I deposited both shoes and clothing into a plastic bag, which was zip-tied and tagged just like my luggage—presumably to be disappeared off to wherever it was they were keeping everyone’s stuff.

  Nude, cringing, and clutching my hygiene satchel, I went with the rest of the males—more variously-shaped naked bodies than I had ever seen in one place in my entire life—into a second room that appeared as if it might double as a torture chamber.

  Eyes. Ears. Nose. Mouth. And apertures too sensitive to mention. It all got checked and rechecked by a busy-bodied horde of Fleet personnel in medical scrubs, some of them wielding arcane and sometimes ferocious-looking medical equipment. Beeps and boops from the med computers told the med personnel yay or nay, and a few people had to be directed off to yet another room for a full physician’s inspection.

  Everyone else—myself included—processed through with as much dignity as could be salvaged, right before getting hit with several injector guns that left swelling welts on our thighs, biceps, and butt cheeks.

  Then came the barber.

  One by one, each of us lay down on what looked like a massage table, while an automated hood closed over our scalps. A violent sucking sound, followed by devilish whirring and snipping, and each male emerged with approximately one millimeter of hair on his head.

  I forlornly rubbed at my stubbly scalp while the uniform sizer’s lasers did a quick sweep of my body, and the computer chirped at me that the recruit in question had been correctly measured, and would he please move along and make room for the next person.

  It occurred to me that I was on an assembly line, with people as the product. We were never allowed to stand in one place for too long. The indignity of the process might have been tremendously upsetting to me were it not for the fact that everyone else was going through the exact same form of humiliation. Somehow that made it all right. Though I could tell my sentiment on the matter was far from universal.

  Grown men—with bodies like linebackers—appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  I put their pain out of my mind and tried to pay attention to the n
ext task at hand.

  Past the sizer was a long, windowless and doorless hallway, behind the walls of which could be heard a great deal of automated machinery. At the hallway’s end there was a huge duffel waiting for each man—with a printed number and barcode on it identical to that which had been stamped on our hands. Each man hefted each duffel—some of us staggering to do so—and then we were herded into yet another locker room where a male NCO stood on a stool and ordered us all to ground our duffels and take a seat on the benches.

  “I don’t want to hear any complaining,” said the sergeant, whose name tape read FUJIMORA. “So far today you’ve each received several thousand international dollars worth of clothing and medical attention. And you’ve not even done anything yet. So be grateful for the free stuff, and get ready for what comes next.

  “I can tell that some of you feel like crying. That needs to stop right now. You’re going to be with us in Reception for several more days. Use that time to toughen up and grow some thicker skin. It gets worse from here on out, not better. But for those of you willing to put in the effort, it will be more than worth it. Earth needs you. The colonies need you. Fleet is the only thing standing between your families, and the mantis threat. We can’t afford to fail. Winning is all we care about. Winning is all you will be trained to do. Do I make myself clear?”

  I was one of the loudest when the room yelled, “YES SERGEANT!”

  “Good. Now, let me introduce you to some of the uniforms you’ll be wearing during IST. Everything you have in your duffel is what’s called your Entry Kit. It includes five sets of uniforms that you’ll be using during physical fitness training, and five sets of uniforms that you’ll use during your daily routine. The proper wear and display of each of these things is part of your transformation from civilian to soldier, so pay attention and don’t be afraid to ask questions…”

  * * *

  We were all back in our original rooms where they’d first dumped our bags, males and females remixed together. Everyone’s scalp had been buzzed—even the girls’—so that everyone looked equally unfortunate as a result.