The Chaplain's War (36 page)

CHAPTER 50

Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.

THE WALLS OF THE CHAPEL WERE ABOUT A METER HIGH WHEN I first noticed it: a translucent curtain that seemed to shimmer in the air right at the crests of the mountains around the valley’s edge. Where once the enemy had kept companies of troops endlessly patrolling the rim, now there was simply the energy barrier.

“Remember the shields I told you about?” Fulbright said to me during one of her routine visits to the gradually-growing chapel.

“Yeah,” I said, hefting another stone into place. My mortar wasn’t construction-grade by any Earth standard. But it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I’d once helped my father build a river rock wall along the back edge of our property. This kind of work wasn’t much different. Each day I brought several buckets of silt-laden water from the shallow creek that ran about a kilometer away, dumped pieces of clay and other appropriate-seeming soil into the buckets, then mixed until I felt I had the right consistency. Onto the existing walls went the mortar, then the new batch of rocks, and though it had taken me almost six local months, I had to admit I was proud of what I’d accomplished. Little by little, the chapel was taking shape.

With occasional help from friends like Fulbright, of course.

I stopped what I was doing and looked at the valley rim.

“Not to protect us,” I said, speculating.

“No,” she said. “To keep us in.”

I thought about it for a moment.

“Makes sense from their point of view. Since it’s obvious they’ve not got much interest in us, other than to keep us here. Why have troops on guard round the clock when you can just tighten the cap on the bottle, and call it good?”

Fulbright’s expression was dour.

“It bothers you,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Only because of what I’ve seen that energy barrier do. I wonder how it works?”

“I wonder how a
lot
of their shit works,” I said. “Do you ever get the feeling that we came here with sticks and bones, and found the bad guys using automatic cannon?”

“All the time,” she said.

“Well, try not to let it bother you too much. Where’s that enthusiasm from the first day we met?”

“Even I get tired,” she said, and sat down, her head resting against one of the dry parts of the chapel wall.

I kept working for a little while, slapping on gobs of mortar, then piecing rocks together as they seemed to fit, followed by more mortar. Once I was done with that day’s section, I’d go out and help forage in the foothills for food. All of us had lost an average of five to seven kilograms since our incarceration in the valley. Local food sources were few and far between, and we had no Earth seeds with which to plant gardens. What little wildlife there was had proven small, and horribly gamey when eaten. Enough so that I was seriously considering becoming a vegetarian for the first time in my life. Except there weren’t many veggies on hand, either.

“How’s it going around the rest of the valley?” I asked.

“It’s going,” she said. “You’re not the only one building. People are busy. It’s the only thing they have right now, to distract them from our mutual predicament. You should know that there are other chapels going up.”

“Good,” I said. “Because there’s no way this one would be able to accommodate the thousands of people who’d potentially come. Assuming anyone does come.”

“Oh, you’ll get people,” she said. “Word’s out that you’re carrying on in Chaplain Tom’s name. A lot of the marines liked him. His good reputation is doing you favors. Enough so that a small bunch of them have even started talking about coming out to help you. Once there’s time.”

I laughed softly.

With no infrastructure and no guarantee that we’d be able to scrape up enough food for us to last the cold season that seemed to be creeping over this hemisphere of the planet, time suddenly seemed to be the one thing that was in short supply. All of us were working hard on our separate tasks. And not always with the blessing of the Fleet leadership that was trying—and, daily, failing—to maintain control in the valley. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d allowed his military bearing to lapse in the wake of being captured. If I was going to be stuck here for a long duration, I damned well wasn’t going to let myself stay locked into a military regimen. There just didn’t seem to be much of a point. We had no more weapons nor any ability to fight. Nor, apparently—now that the mantes had put up the barrier at the valley rim—anyone to fight against.

We were an island colony, unto ourselves.

And I sure as hell wasn’t going to worry about showing up for accountability formations. Nor did I have any interest in any of the other claptrap the Fleet had drilled into me since joining. Maybe aboard ship it had become easy to lapse into the routine. But here, now, all routine had been thrown out the window. There was simply survival. Scratch life out of the dirt—every day, all day.

I looked at Fulbright as her chin sat on her chest.

“Try not to get too down about it,” I said.

She stayed silent, staring at the dirt.

A small gust of wind swept over us, tossing up dust.

“Do you think they’ll send a rescue mission?” she asked.

“Fleet?” I said.

“Yes.”

“I guess it all depends on whether or not they think there is anyone left alive worth rescuing, and whether or not a rescue squadron could have any better chance against the mantis defenders than we did. For all we know a rescue squadron
did
come, and got blown out of space without our even noticing.”

She put her fists to her eyes and rubbed. Suddenly, I felt bad for speaking my mind.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. I agree. But now I’m wondering, what are we being saved for?”

“The mantes, you mean?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up at me with red, tear-soaked eyes. “Are they keeping us alive just because they think it’s
fun?
”

I tried to remember my military history from Earth. Traditionally, military prisoners were kept for three reasons: extraction of military information, collateral for prisoner exchange, or in accordance with treaties and rules of war. In our case almost none of these situations applied. So what value were we—if any—to the mantes? Beyond objects of curiosity?

During one of Earth’s worst world wars, one of the European armies had put people into extermination camps based on religious or ethnic affiliation. Many of these poor prisoners had become subjects for horrific medical experimentation. I shuddered at the thought of all of us being used as the human equivalent of lab rats or dissection frogs.

“Who knows how the mantes think,” I said. “They’re as different from us as we are from them. Maybe they have some kind of ethic about total annihilation being wrong?”

“Being stuck here forever doesn’t seem much better than being dead,” she said.

“I guess that’s why Chaplain Thomas wanted me to build this,” I replied, motioning with my hands to the walls I was constructing.

She pulled her knees to her chin and returned to staring at the dirt.

In the two local years that followed, the walls of the chapel got higher, and higher, until finally I was forced to contemplate a roof. Several enterprising people in the valley had built kilns, and were firing bricks as well as tiles. I bartered work for materials, and had to put in several stone-and-mortar pillars to hold the ceiling up. With rainstorms occasionally blowing through, I found out very quickly where the leaks and holes were. I also found out that my tile-laying technique needed work, such that by the warm season of the third year I’d replaced the roof almost entirely with a much more durable, long-lasting patchwork.

This had not deterred attendance. Even before the roof was on, I was getting people coming in the door. Or rather, the frame where I eventually built a door. They sat on the floor until I bartered for some roughly-quarried benches.

If ever the attendees expected any kind of sermonizing from me, they didn’t show it. And I didn’t offer. Chaplain Thomas had been very specific: build it, keep it clean, and welcome all who wish to enter. Which was precisely what I did. Including the collection of several religious symbols and statuary from people who offered to make donations—which I then arrayed on a stone table at the front of the chapel. The table eventually began to serve more or less as a multidenominational altar.

For light, we had to get creative. Without electricity we couldn’t use or recharge our flashlights. One of the native plants had inedible roots that, when their pulp was crushed and pressed, yielded a thick sweet-smelling oil. All of us began using it in small clay lamps, so that the chapel remained open sometimes long after sundown.

For myself, I had just one small room in the rear with a clumsy door made of salvaged native wood. My cot was actually the same stretcher Chaplain Thomas had been carried on—now with clay blocks at the feet and the head to hold it knee high above the ground.

Life in the valley assumed a kind of surreal normalcy.

With the rigidity of military regimen practically dissolved down to a small core of stalwart officers and older NCOs, people formed their own small communities and townships. Roads sprang into being where feet crossed between the villages. A civilian constabulary of former MPs and several volunteers formed up to take care of the few actual crimes anyone might recognize as being worth policing—namely, theft and murder. Which was extremely rare. With so much room in the valley and only a few thousand of us to go around, anyone who didn’t much like his neighbors could easily move away.

Farms sprang up wherever there was water to be had. People with green thumbs quickly began to figure out how to coax some of the native plants and even a few of the smallish animals into domestic capacity. There was talk of formalizing plans for an elaborate series of canals and ditches that would divert water from the streams and small ponds in the foothills, down to the thirsty valley floor.

It wasn’t an easy existence, but it was an existence all the same.

And since the mantes had practically vanished—save for the occasional patrol that passed through now and again, just to remind us who was in charge—we could almost forget ourselves.

Almost.

Fulbright surprised me when she went into the preaching business. In addition to my chapel, there had been at least a dozen other structures built in the valley that were dedicated to some religious purpose. And people who’d never given religion much thought during their lives on Earth suddenly began picking and choosing which churches or religions suited them best.

While I went with a soft hand, some others were pounding the pulpit. Which was fine. Whatever people needed to hear to get them through the to the end of each day, and to the tail of every week.

And while I was still technically only the Chaplain’s Assistant, people had begun to more or less treat me as if I was Chaplain Thomas’s surrogate: rendering me the same deference and respect that they might have rendered him. I’d have objected to such treatment if I’d not realized that the behavior had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the fact that many people simply needed to revere someone or something other than themselves. Who I was was not as important as what I represented—as the personification of the chapel itself.

I never got the big crowds that Fulbright—Deacon Fulbright—sometimes got. But the regulars were friendly, and of all manner of belief. From the hesitant agnostics to the devoutly theistic. Mine was the building that became known as the quietest space in the valley.

To come and hear with your heart, not with your ears.

Until that morning almost five years after the invasion, when my chapel door yielded a surprising and unlikely inquirer . . .