The Chaplain's War
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Authors: Brad R Torgersen
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General, #Space Opera, #Action & Adventure
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
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
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