The Chaplain's War (11 page)

CHAPTER 17

WE MET THE MANTES IN ORBIT AROUND A NAMELESS TERRESTRIAL planet, far from the boundaries of human space. The mantis ships were shaped like mammoth footballs, their surfaces studded with sensors and weaponry. I watched the alien vessels through the portholes of the Fleet frigate,
Calysta.
We’d brought some big stuff too. Opposite the cluster of mantis vessels—across the black expanse of space—was a squadron of Earth dreadnoughts unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Not that size and armament would do a lick of good if those new ships couldn’t break through the mantis shields, as Adanaho had suggested. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to find out, though I still wasn’t sure anything I did or said could make a difference otherwise.

I looked over to Captain Adanaho, who had followed me to the observation deck.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

“That means the general wants us there in five,” I said.

She smirked at me.

“Always arrive ten minutes before you’ve been told,” I said with a slight smile, “and then it’s hurry-up-and-wait.”

“The years on Purgatory haven’t completely dulled your memory,” she said. “Though it’s obvious you’re not happy about your current position.”

I looked down at my uniform.

“No, ma’am, not really. I was nineteen when I signed up. The Fleet tried to take Purgatory a couple of years later, and then I spent the rest of my time either as a prisoner, or trying to follow through on a promise I made to my old boss before he died.”

“It must have been an important promise,” she said.

“I thought so,” I said.

“But didn’t you consider that promise fulfilled, once the armistice was reached?”

“Not really, because by then the Professor and his school kids were showing up all the time. Plus, I had more human customers coming in the door than I’d ever had before. People seemed to think the chapel was special. Significant. It grew to be a landmark in the valley.
Somebody
had to stick around and sweep up. And it’s not like I had anything more important to do. Maybe if the Fleet had returned right away, I’d have jumped at a chance to go home. But when a couple of years went by and it was obvious that Fleet wasn’t coming back to Purgatory any time soon, I decided to make my plans for the chapel into long-term plans.”

“And yet our research shows that you don’t hold services there,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Like I said, I’m not a chaplain. I’m just the assistant. This little silver bar you guys put on my collar, it doesn’t make me a chaplain either.”

“Would you like to be?”

I thought about it, still looking outside into deep space. Something I had not seen in many years.

“No,” I said, slipping my hands into my pants pockets. Like having facial hair, hands in pockets was also against regulation. But screw it, certain rules are made to be broken.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I’m not a preacher,” I admitted. “I’m also not a theologian.”

“So why even become an assistant? Of all the jobs in the Fleet available to you?”

“Seemed like the best fit,” I said. “I’m not a tactical guy, and I’m not that great with equipment either. But people? I like people. When hostilities with the mantes broke out, some of my friends signed up immediately. I kind of went along for the ride. It was a chance to go to space. What kid doesn’t dream about that? But I didn’t want to kill stuff nor fix stuff nor do a lot of the other work on the list the recruiter showed me.”

She shook her head.

“And yet you were the one who managed to use the single piece of leverage we needed to stop the mantes.”

“Yeah,” I said, “dumb luck, that.”

She checked her watch.

“Well, it’s time to see if you can’t scare up a little more, Padre.”

We walked from the porthole to the nearest lift car, went down three decks, and wound our way to the frigate’s largish main conference room. Marines in freshly pressed uniforms guarded the hatches, with rifles at port arms. There were some mantis guards as well, their lower thoraxes submerged into the biomechanical “saddles” of their hovering, saucer-shaped discs.

Every mantis I’d ever seen was technically a cyborg. Their upper halves were insectoid—complete with bug eyes, fearsome beaks, antennae, wings, and serrated-chitin forelimbs. Their lower halves were integrated into their mobile, floating saucers. It was the saucers—the computers and equipment in them—which allowed the mantes to speak to humans, and have our own speech translated back into their language, among many other things.

The mantis guards all raised forelimbs in my direction as we approached, though they seemed to be ignoring the captain.

I blushed in spite of myself, and raised a hand in return.

Was I
that
well known among the aliens?

We entered the conference room, and I stopped short.

There was the Professor—whom I considered a friend, and whom I’d not seen in a long time—and a larger, much older-looking mantis on whom all human eyes were focused.

The human contingent was arrayed around a half-moon table with chairs and computers and various recording devices.

The two mantes merely floated in the air, about waist high.

I smiled, and in spite of protocol, walked quickly up to the Professor.

“Hello,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to see you again.”

“You would have not, Harry,” said the Professor, “had circumstances evolved differently.”

If the Professor had a name, it was unpronounceable for humans. The skitter-scratch mandible-against-mandible language of the aliens was incomprehensible for us. And he’d always been addressed by title, even though he’d asked permission to be on a first-name basis with me.

A familiar throat was cleared to my rear.

I turned to Adanaho, whose expression told me I was erring without knowing it. Behind her sat the general—staring hard.

“Sorry, sir,” I said, then nodded knowingly to the Professor, and walked quickly to a seat that was offered to me. The captain sat down at my side, and after the general gave me one last lingering look, he ordered the doors closed, leaving us alone with our guests.

I checked my PDA. The captain and I were as early as we’d planned to be. Yet it appeared things were already well in motion.

Not good.

“Well,” the general said, “he’s here now. Since nothing I or my staff say seems to be worth anything to you, maybe you’ll listen to
him.
”

The old mantis behind the Professor floated forward.

“Padre,” it said to me, its vocoded speaker-box voice coming from the grill on the front of its disc. The creature’s beak did not move. The translator was tied directly into the mantis’s nervous system.

“That is what some call me,” I said. “May I ask who you are?”

“This is the Queen Mother,” said the Professor, his manner deferential as he introduced her. “She is the highest of the Select who rule our people. Her voice carries supreme authority within the Quorum of the Select.”

“She is your sovereign,” I said.

“Yes and no,” said the Professor. “She is elected, but she also shares a tremendous lineage, biologically. Her genetics run through countless mantes, over many of your generations.”

In other words, she was fecund, in addition to being old.

I sat up a little straighter.

“Ma’am,” I said to the Queen Mother, “of what service can I be to you?”

The Queen Mother floated forward a bit more, while the Professor floated back.

“Your name is spoken in my Quorum,” she said. “It is the only human name that has ever reached such height. When the one you call the Professor first came before me, many of our cycles ago, and petitioned for us to halt our Fourth Expansion, I considered him obtuse. Your superstition is of no consequence to me, nor do I have any use for it. And yet, the Professor had convinced a good many of his contemporaries that the elimination of your species—of your numerous modes of religion—would be detrimental to the advancement of mantis knowledge. And his colleagues had convinced many on the Quorum. Rather than force a contentious vote on the issue, I acquiesced, believing that the merit of the Professor’s proposed observation and research would become obvious in time. Even if I could see no value in it in the moment.”

She let a tiny silence hang in the air.

“I no longer feel the need for such forbearance.”

The room was dead silent, but the Queen Mother’s words had hit me like a thunderclap. It was one thing to hear the captain talk about a possible end to the peace. It was quite another to have the nominal leader of the
enemy
in front of me declaring that she was going to drop the hammer. I felt a slithering surety in my heart: the Queen Mother would not bluff.

I cleared my throat experimentally, trying to shake off the dread I felt. The eyes of the officers behind me began to drill virtual holes in my back as I left my seat. The Queen Mother remained where she was.

“I have to think,” I said, voice shaking just a bit, “that your mind isn’t entirely made up. Otherwise why agree to this meeting at all? You could just as easily declare the cease-fire dead, launch your war armada, and have done with it.”

“There are still some,” she said, her triangular insect’s head tilting back in the Professor’s direction, “who petition me for further amity. I am not a hasty being. I listen to my intellectuals. If they say there is additional merit in long-term conciliation between our races, I am habitually obliged to entertain the notion—whether I agree with it or not. So rather than send a delegate, I came here myself. To meet the one human who has managed to alter the inevitable course of my empire. I had expected someone more impressive.”

“My apologies,” I said, “if my presence does not meet that expectation. As for what I can say or do to change your mind, I am not sure I can offer you much more than what I’ve already been able to offer to the Professor and his students. I am the chaplain’s assistant. I’ve counseled the Professor that he’d do well to seek out a bona fide
chaplain.
Or, if a military man is not in order, then there are the finest theologians, scholars, religious teachers, and clergymen Earth has to offer. If I have failed to provide enlightenment, surely someone else might be better suited.”

“Enlightenment,” the Queen Mother said, her mouth hinged open and her serrated, vicious teeth vibrating—the mantis display of annoyance. “This is a phrase that I find utterly preposterous. I have studied what little of your planet’s history is available to me and determined that we mantes were building starships when humans were still scuttling about in caves. Enlightenment. Ridiculous. Does the larva
enlighten
the adult?”

I’d learned from the Professor that the mantes had two stages in their life cycle. Upon hatching from their eggs, they were mindless herbivores, consuming vegetable matter over a period of months until entering their transformative pupa stage. Only upon emergence from the chrysalis did a newly-carnivorous mantis achieve actual sapience. Prior to that, the larval mantis was about as intelligent as a box of rocks.

“Nobody questions your technological prowess,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I looked quickly behind the Queen Mother to see the Professor floating dead still, his gaze locked on her.

“When the Professor and I first met, it was shocking to discover that you mantes cared anything at all about how or what a human believed. I didn’t think it was possible. I’d only ever seen your people maiming and killing my people. And yet, the Professor showed me you are a complex race. Old and powerful, but also with a history of patient curiosity. Such that on prior occasions—when you’ve let your thirst for expansion overrule your prudence—you’ve genuinely regretted those choices.”

“Some of us have,” said the Queen Mother, her beak snapping shut. “But not all.”

“What would be gained,” I said, “by throwing away the armistice? It’s been a long time since humans shed mantis blood, and vice versa. I think the cease-fire is pretty good evidence that our two societies can learn to share the galaxy. Sometimes, we may even share the same planet, if after a fashion.”

Purgatory was still technically mantis property. Myself and the few hundred humans who’d stuck around after the return of the Earth ships, had more or less managed to stay out from under mantis feet. It wasn’t an equal partnership. More like,
keep the noise down so the landlords don’t show up with artillery.
But it was a persistent peace, and the more time I’d spent around the Professor—and later, his students—the more I’d become convinced that humans and the mantes had more in common than either they or we suspected.