The Chaplain's War (27 page)

CHAPTER 36

Earth (the Moon), 2153 A.D.

WE BOILED FROM THE ASSAULT CARRIER LIKE A SWARM OF ANTS, all of us bounding across the regolith in carefully orchestrated formations that were broken down by platoon and squad. As part of the rear detachment of the command party that was officially detailed to “support” the mock offensive, I hung back with a few other recruit officers and observed the lot of us leapfrogging over the lunar surface: weapons at the ready, arms pantomiming signals as the Charlie Company wireless came alive with the excited but controlled chatter of recruit leadership directing their different elements forward.

In the far distance was a lumpy white and gray mountain. Supposedly that mountain was crawling with mantes. Why we’d not landed closer—or even right smack on top of it—was a mystery to me. Why waste time and potential lives crossing the distance when we could have just pancaked down on them, and gone for the throat?

Chaplain J informed me that simulated anti-ship missile fire from the mountain had necessitated our grounding well short of the objective. Now it would be up to the recruits to go in “old school,” using infantry tactics and techniques which had not changed much in hundreds of years. I loped quietly forward with my little group and looked on as our overwatch elements suddenly became pinned down by hostile fire.

In the middle distance, the silhouettes of mantis warriors—not too different from the ones we’d shot at on the qualification ranges—were maneuvering against us in defensive bundles that were not unlike Charlie Company’s groups. It occurred to me that we were training against human-controlled, simulated aliens—which were going to fight us like
humans
would. Didn’t anybody think that was a bad idea? Wasn’t there any record of prior Fleet battles with the mantes, from which to draw sufficient analysis?

Again, Chaplain J filled me in: nobody was entirely sure
how
the mantis infantry fought. But training against something was better than training against nothing.

I voiced my hesitant agreement as Charlie Company began to take casualties.

Recruits tagged by the enemy training lasers were given a warning gong in their speakers, followed by red lights on their helmets coming alive, at which point said recruits were expected to fall in place. Those few who did not fall in place and kept maneuvering were screamed at over the wireless by the DSs, and threatened with punishment detail when we got back to Earth. Presently, everyone with red lights on his or her helmet, flopped immediately into the lunar dust.

“Okay, here we go,” Chaplain J said.

I followed her as we broke from the rear and began our own bounding maneuver, with four armed guards as our guides. Occasionally one of them raised a weapon and popped off a shot down range: towards the mantes and their mountain fortress. It occurred to me that our own people were shooting over the heads of our own people, and I remembered how Chaplain J had said Fleet occasionally lost recruits during live-fire exercises.

Once in a while, a mantis silhouette flipped over. Simulated dead. One less bad guy to molest us during the fight.

Chaplain J and I arrived at a squad of recruits from sixth platoon. They’d bunched up behind a small boulder just big enough to protect them from the enemy lasers. Two of the squad had red lights illuminated.

“Dead, or hurt?” I asked.

“Dead,” one of them said, while the other said, “hurt.”

One of the DSs cut in over the wireless, “Badly wounded, both.”

My instinct was to call for the medic and an evac, but then I realized there would be no medic nor any evac. The assault carrier had lifted into the blackness of the sky and was slowly maneuvering away from us, out of the fight. We’d been summarily dumped into the situational meat grinder, and there would be no do-overs now.

I looked at Chaplain J.

“I can’t give aid through the suit,” I said.

“No, you can’t,” she said. “If these were real hits, the suit would be doing that automatically. You have to assume these two are severely hurt and your job is to offer comfort.”

I looked at the unlucky victims, who merely looked back at me. Their faces were vaguely familiar. People I’d passed in the chow line or on one of the endless number of details to which I’d been assigned.

“Uh, how do I tell their affiliation? I can’t even see their ID tags.”

“Ask,” she said firmly.

“Uhh, right. Guys, do either of you, uhhh, you know, belong to a church?”

They each cracked grins and seemed to find me supremely funny.

“Eff this,” I said under my breath. “It’s stupid.”

Chaplain J cuffed the side of my helmet.

“Nothing stupid about it, recruits,” she said to all of us on the squad wireless. “You two wouldn’t be laughing if you had holes in your torsos and were slowly bleeding out. Now answer the Recruit Chaplain’s question before I put all of you on the detail list.”

Their smiles disappeared.

“Catholic,” one of them said.

“Nothing,” said the other.

“Atheist?” I said.

“Uhhh, no, just, well, hell, Rastafarian.”

“I didn’t bring you any weed,” I said.

“Eff you,” the joker replied.

I turned to the Catholic. At least here there was something I could work with. I’d done enough reading to understand that for Catholics, there was a last rite involved. I tapped a couple of small keys on the left wrist of my suit and called up the block of text I’d preloaded into the suit’s memory. The text hovered in my helmet display: a glowing sequence of words preserved in my field of vision.

Mumbling my way through it, I felt fantastically uncomfortable. When I was done, the recruit—Jones—had a surprised look on his face.

“That’s not in the reading I gave you,” Chaplain J said.

“I looked it up online while we were en route,” I replied.

“Problem is, you’re not an ordained priest in the Catholic church.”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“It might matter to
him,
” she said, pointing at Jones.

He smiled at me. “Thanks anyway, bro. My mom would have liked that. Priest or no priest.”

I chanced a look around me—at the tense faces of those squad members who were still fighting—and wondered why God would even care whether or not I was a Catholic, assuming Jones were in fact dying. I decided for the purposes of the LCX any kind of effort on my part was better than no effort at all. So I refocused my attention on the joker.

“Seriously,” I said. “No affiliation?”

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nope.”

“Okay then. Well, you and, uhhh, Jones here, are both hurt plenty bad. And I don’t know if you’re gonna make it. But I’ll stay right here until we either get an evac, or until, uhhh, well, you know, uh—”

“Right,” he said.

I reflexively grabbed his hand through his suit’s gauntlet.

We each squeezed tightly.

And we stayed that way, just looking at each other, until forty-five seconds later the lights on his helmet went from red to blue.

“Recruit Sungh, KIA,” said a DS over the wireless. “Don’t move a muscle, and enjoy the rest of the show.”

Sungh let his hand fall to his side.

He smiled up at me and tried to speak, but I suddenly discovered I couldn’t hear him.

Oh yes, I’d forgotten. Killed-In-Action troops were cut out of the wireless entirely—so as to make them as dead as could be to those of us around them.

I tipped my finger to my helmet and dropped it in his direction. Sungh nodded at me and laid back calmly, staring up into space.

Jones was still red.

I held his hand for a good three minutes before his lights went blue.

“Recruit Jones, KIA,” said the same DS.

I imagined that the DSs were keeping tabs on all the Charlie Company casualties via computer roster. I wondered how many we’d lost, or were losing. Were things going well? Since arriving at this particular squad’s position I’d dropped out of the recruit command wireless entirely.

Tapping more keys on my suit’s wrist, I plugged back in.

Recruit command wireless was frazzled. People were dropping orders over the top of other people. Frago this and frago that. So many fragmentary orders at once, I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. Suddenly a couple of mantis dummies appeared over the top of the rock I was crouched behind.

The entire squad screamed in unison—a very real sound—and opened up with their rifles. Rounds—also very real—chewed into the steel mantis silhouettes, which flipped backwards and drifted to the soil. Their maneuvering units automatically grounded.

In prep for the LCX we’d all done practice maneuvers using “rubber duck” weapons equipped with CO
₂
canisters and firing semi-hard pellets filled with red jelly. Those pellets had hurt like the dickens. So that we’d all learned fairly quickly that carelessness with friendly fire was a good way to bruise up your buddies. Which might lead to a bruising of a different kind if certain people didn’t watch their sectors of fire, and use discretion.

Now, things had gotten serious. About as serious as they were liable to get, short of an actual combat action.

I stared at the bullet holes in the mantis silhouettes and imagined what a real mantis might look like. Were they green and disgusting on the inside, like when I’d stepped on a grasshopper back home? Or did they have blood the way we humans have blood? Was it warm?

Suddenly the squad was up and moving. Me and mine just sat and watched them go. I was still hearing the chaos of the command wireless, but apparently that particular squad had been ordered forward.
 

I waved goodbye to Sungh and Jones—who looked halfway to falling asleep as they lay in the boulder’s protective shade—and followed Chaplain J out into the hard sunlight. Our face shields immediately deployed. Their one-way mirrored surfaces would protect us from going blind or getting burned by the sun’s intense rays. Without atmosphere or an ozone layer, the sunshine on the Moon could get mighty hot and dangerous.

There, another squad clustered around a couple of wounded—taking refuge behind another small boulder.

Again, I asked the requisite questions. This time, I found a Buddhist and an agnostic.

I had to ask, “What’s the difference?”

The Buddhist rolled her eyes at me while the agnostic laughed.

I held their hands and scoured my mind for words of comfort, forcing them out hesitantly and with no small degree of embarrassment. Eventually their helmet lights turned blue, they were ordered to lie still, and I could no longer hear them as they were cut out of the wireless.

Their squad also advanced, leaving me to look at Chaplain J as she looked over the top of the boulder at the simulated battle going on beyond.

“One person couldn’t possibly keep up with it all,” I said.

“Pardon?” she said, coming back from her far-gazing reverie.

“One chaplain,” I said. “If the casualties were piling up fast, no single chaplain could handle everyone all at once.”

“In a real fight,” Chaplain J said, “you wouldn’t be the only one. Though the chances of you finding each of the casualties still conscious, or even living, wouldn’t be as good as it is for us today. You’d be finding corpses, not wounded. Perhaps seven times out of ten. Even given how advanced these armor suits are, the weaponry of the enemy is very efficient. And space is very deadly, even when we’re not getting shot at. Most of the time you’d be getting to the dead long after the fact. Or hauling the less critically wounded back to the rear, with the medical people.”

Which is precisely what I wound up doing a few minutes later.

Some of the recruit medics—assigned to their roles, like all of us—had set up a makeshift aid station to the rear of the fight. When next Chaplain J and I bounded out to check on a squad with recruits who had red lights, those lights were flickering between red and yellow, back and forth. Hit, but not doomed. Not yet. And someone had to help get them back to where they could maybe have more done for them? Whatever that might be. Without a vacuum shelter there was no way to peel a person out of his or her armor without sentencing the troop to instant death.