The Chaplain's War (33 page)

CHAPTER 44

Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.

THE ASSAULT CARRIER’S DESCENT DURING LCX HADN’T DONE AN actual combat landing justice. The bench to which I was strapped was rattling so hard, I felt like it was going to shake my teeth out of my head. Despite the relative cushioning provided by my armor suit—new, this time, and built to the latest specs. Lighter. Supposedly tougher too.

Chaplain Thomas was in the same state next to me: rattled to distraction.

All of us on the troop deck bucked and swayed in unison as the carrier made its way pell-mell down through the atmosphere of the world we were about to take from the enemy.

My old friend nausea lurked in the center of my stomach as the rumbling and jerking of the ship threatened to turn into a full-blown carnival ride of sideways-up, downwise-side, upways-down.

I saw the looks on the faces of the marines as they hunched with their rifles and other weapons—ready to go the second the loadmaster gave the signal. Unlike during LCX, we also had tanks and mobile artillery nestled in our belly. They’d deploy almost the instant we hit the ground—growling out onto the planet’s surface, and hosing down any immediate mantis threats. With automatic cannon fire and missiles.

Outside, somewhere in the stratosphere, aerospace fighters were also going in hot—their threat sensors now coming on-line after the short black-out period caused by reentry. If there were mantis fighters in the air waiting to pounce on the assault carrier, our fighters were ready and prepared to ruin the mantes’ day.

Suddenly the assault carrier crashed and shook. Flashing orange alarm lights told us something had gone very wrong.

“Missile hit,” I heard someone say over the wireless.

BOOM! . . . BOOOOOOM!

Two more, in relatively rapid succession. How effective
was
the assault carrier’s armor, anyway? I suddenly realized we were all going to find out. For better, or for worse.

Slowly, the troop deck began to spin. Or, rather, I could feel that the assault carrier was revolving over onto its back—not a prescribed flight profile for the big, wallowing ship in
anybody’s
anti-aircraft evasion manual.

Those few marines who’d been keeping straight faces finally broke and showed their fear. Our assault carrier was clearly in trouble, and we were nowhere close enough to the ground yet to feel like we’d made it to relative safety.

BOOOOOOOOM! Unnggggkkkkktttktktkttttt!!

“Shit,” I heard Chaplain Thomas say.

The man usually worked very hard not to curse. That he’d cursed told me all I needed to know about the situation, as the sounds of ripping and tearing metal became more pronounced. For an insane instant, I recalled clearly that the prelaunch briefing had said we’d be expecting moderate resistance.

So much for that.

The prelaunch briefing had also spent far more time dwelling on perimeter security and establishing ground-based hardened defensive positions—after we landed—than it did on what to do in case the assault carrier we were riding in was being shot to pieces right beneath our feet.

We had no parachutes. Would not have tried them, even if we did. So far as we knew the assault carrier was still moving at supersonic speed high over the alien planet’s desertlike terrain. Anyone fool enough to bail out in
those
conditions was signing his own death certificate, regardless of how tough the new armor suits happened to be.

Suddenly the carrier righted itself—to our relief—but then the bottom dropped out of our stomachs as we felt ourselves begin to fall precipitously.

“BRACE FOR IMPACT! BRACE FOR IMPACT!” the loadmaster began to yell on the company-wide wireless.

There was little to do but cringe and hope. Many seconds ticked by in virtual free-fall. When the crash came, it came as a whirling, end-over-end chaos of benches coming loose from the troop deck and whole squads of marines and support personnel being hurled across my field of view like rag dolls.

The collision damping system suddenly flooded the entire deck with massive jets of thick foam that began to solidify the moment it touched air. I felt myself scream as I rolled, and rolled, and rolled, and kept rolling. Until finally, I was resting upside down, my vision entirely blocked out and the company wireless hissing vacantly.

Were we down? Had we made it?

I couldn’t tell. For a long time, the world around me was nothing but stiffened crash foam. Until suddenly the wireless came alive again—helmet to helmet this time, with no assistance from the shipboard system.

Things were grim. Only one hundred and five people survived, out of almost three hundred on my assault carrier. This included Chaplain Thomas, though the poor man was busted up something awful. After clawing my way out of the collision foam, I had to search far and wide across the impact zone to find him. The carrier had burst apart, its engines, flight decks, and other vital parts scattering to the wind. How or why the reactors hadn’t gone up was a mystery, but I wagered we didn’t have much time. So I frantically searched for survivors—many of whom were wounded—helping them to walk, or limp, or even be dragged, over to a far hill. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to offer at least
some
protection from the potential blast, if or when the reactors finally melted down.

In the sky overhead, it was obvious that we—the Fleet—were getting our asses kicked. Mantis fighters zipped lithely to and fro, seemingly impervious to the missiles spat at them by the few Earth fighters that still prowled the air. Occasionally one of those Earth fighters burst in a white fireball, followed by a thunderous report. And then silence.

Our impact zone was in a wide valley dominated by several rough-rock bluffs trailing off towards what seemed to be our east. It was difficult to tell, given the foreign sun’s position overhead. We’d come in about midday, and wouldn’t know true directions until much later. Assuming we lasted.

The few officers and NCOs who could stand and give orders arranged us into a hasty defensive perimeter—with the wounded in the center—while they tried to use their suit wireless to contact anyone in orbit.

Fruitless.

I gazed up into the thin air and wondered if there was anyone
left
in orbit to talk to? If my introduction to this charming little planet had gone badly, who was to say things hadn’t been as bad—or worse—for the big capital ships in space?

Such thoughts depressed me as I held Chaplain Thomas’s hand and tried to keep him from slipping into a coma. Our helmets were off. The air here had oxygen. If we were scared of germs, we figured it best to chance the native atmosphere—lest we rapidly deplete our own. I had Chaplain Thomas propped against a rock, at a more or less forty-five-degree angle, his legs limp from the spinal injury he’d suffered in the crash.

“Hell of way to join the fight,” he said in a small, pained voice as I tried to give him water from his suit’s hydration tube. He ignored the tube and simply stared past me—through me?—out to where the alien sky met the alien earth at a lumpy horizon.

“What have we got left?” the chaplain asked.

“Not much, sir,” I said. “Armor assets have been totally obliterated. We’ve got rifles, and have a fair bit of ammo. But we’re nowhere close to the planned objective—hell, we’re not even sure we’re on the same
continent
as the planned objective. No sign of mantis ground patrols, yet. But they’ve got fighters all over the air. And we can’t reach orbital for a situational analysis, nor call for reinforcement or an evac.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “When the carrier came apart around us, I knew we’d come to this world woefully unprepared. No doubt the enemy fortified themselves in anticipation of our arrival. I just hope the assault missions elsewhere on this planet—on
any
of the other planets—are going better than ours.”

He coughed a bit, then grimaced.

“Broken ribs,” he guessed.

I didn’t have the heart to second-guess him. All of our medics were gone. Pulverized and strewn over the impact site like toy soldiers tossed from a car that’s rolled several times on the interstate. I suddenly and intensely regretted my decision to join the Fleet. Chaplain Thomas must have read my facial expression.

“God’s will,” he said.

“What, sir?” I asked.

“God’s will, Harrison. Try to look at it as God’s will—His plan for all of us.”

“This is part of God’s
plan?
” I said, half-incredulous.

“Everything is part of God’s plan,” he said.

“Sir, I mean no disrespect, but you have to be out of your mind to think that any of this is part of
anybody’s
plan, except for maybe the mantes. Their plan appears to have worked out quite well. We came here to kick them in the teeth, and instead it seems they’re quite nicely effing us in the ass, sir. If there is a God, then His attention is focused very, very far away from here.”

“Faith, Harry,” he said to me, then began coughing and hacking.

I decided not to vent my anger any further, as his attempts to remonstrate me were simply causing him pain. I stood up from where the chaplain lay, and walked over to where some technicians from the assault carrier’s crew were trying to use a big hunk of a control panel and a jury-rigged battery connection, to talk to anyone in our vicinity.

“Nothing?” I said.

One of the specialists looked up at me and shook her head.

“Figures,” I said. “We’re blind. Probably, Fleet doesn’t even know where we are. I am surprised those mantis fighters we’ve been seeing haven’t come down on us.”

“The day is young,” said a different woman—older, with plain, stern features. Her chevrons indicated a platoon sergeant.

“Forget the wireless,” she said to the techs. “We’ve got to scrounge up an anti-air defense.”

“With what, Sergeant?” one of the techs asked.

“Anything you can salvage. There were a lot of missiles in that assault carrier, and more missiles on some of the tanks. Not all of them have been destroyed. I’m taking a team back to the crash site to look for hardware that we can salvage. Get ready to move in two mikes. You too, church-boy.”

“But I’ve got to—”

“You’re a soldier first, and there’s nothing you can do for Chaplain Tom right now. We need everybody who’s not pulling security to get on salvage detail. That’s an order.”

I did a
yessergeant
and went to tell the chaplain the plan. Unfortunately he’d already passed out from the pain. With no medics, I had no idea how we’d bring him back around now.

With rifles at the low ready and marching in a tactical column, we streamed out beyond the perimeter, around the base of the low hill, and back towards the smoldering, evil-looking furrow our carrier had dug into the planet’s surface.