The Chaplain's War (44 page)
Read The Chaplain's War Online
Authors: Brad R Torgersen
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General, #Space Opera, #Action & Adventure
“Not if I don’t have to,” I said, looking at the general.
“I think I’ll allow for some personal time,” he said. “Since you’ve got one last evening on Earth, it’s up to you to decide how you want to spend it. Report to the flight line at ten-hundred tomorrow, ready to climb aboard the Queen Mother’s ship.”
I
yessirred,
saluted, he saluted back, then Diane and I bade farewell to the Queen Mother and looked for a quick exit.
CHAPTER 59
OAK HARBOR WAS LIT UP LIKE A CHRISTMAS TREE. FOR A HISTORICALLY military town, the mood was quite festive, with Fleet personnel and civilians alike mobbing the sidewalks and chattering happily amongst themselves. To look at the place you’d not have guessed that until very recently, humanity was at war.
Diane and I had agreed to dine at the Crestwood, a somewhat upscale establishment on the roof of one of the newer residential towers. Which was fine, as we’d stayed in our dress uniforms.
The
maître d’
showed us to our table. Much of the roof had been covered in hydroponics equipment so that trees and bushes grew at regular intervals. Artistically designed modern fountains were spaced among the trees, their gurgling making a gentle chorus while shimmering bouquets of multicolored light emanated from the fountain bottoms.
“Magical,” Diane said as she looked this way and that.
“I asked around: where was the best place to take a lady to dinner?”
“Do you always try to impress a girl like this?”
“Actually, I’ve never tried to impress a girl, period.”
I laughed at my own joke. Diane didn’t.
“Sorry,” I said. “My date humor’s a little rusty.”
“When’s the last time you even went on a real date? Like, with a girl you’d like to take home with you when it’s over?”
I blushed.
“A long time ago.”
“You mean to tell me that all through the armistice, you never even—”
“No,” I said. “And to be totally honest about it, I’m not sure I missed much. The bulk of the women went home once The Wall was gone and Fleet ships came back to Purgatory. Just like you, they couldn’t wait to get back to civilization. The few that stayed, already had families.”
“What about visitors?”
“What about them? I’m not exactly one-night-stand material.”
She looked at me with her head cocked to the side.
“No,” she said, appraisingly, “I guess you’re not. You always were a nice guy. Earnest. You seemed more devoted to Chaplain Thomas’s wish for the chapel than anything else. Some of us used to joke that you were like a monk or a nun in that way. Married to the church, so to speak. And yet, you’re still unsure of your convictions. Even after all you’ve been through.”
“Which is exactly why I wanted you to come with me,” I said.
She looked away.
A table waiter arrived and we placed our orders: grilled chicken and vegetables for Diane, a small sirloin with baked potato for me. And a bucket of ice with a wine bottle in it. Not that either of us intended to get tipsy. It just seemed appropriate for the occasion.
When the waiter left I turned the tables.
“So why did you pick the Chaplains Corps?” I asked.
“Well,” Diane said, swirling a bit of wine around in the bottom of a long-stemmed glass, “it seemed like a good way to put my money where my mouth is. I am the Deacon, after all.”
I gazed at the other Crestwood clientele: men and women, well heeled, affluent, or at least not hurting for means. They laughed and talked and ate, and seemed to be carrying on without a care in the world. I immediately felt more like an outsider than I ever had among the many weeks I’d tarried on the Queen Mother’s ship—bound for the treaty signing in Earth orbit. The mantes were elegantly simple in their own way. A logical and deliberate people. Not frivolous.
“What’s wrong?” Diane asked, noticing my expression.
“Sorry, I was woolgathering.”
“I could see that. But what about?”
“It’s just . . . well . . .”
Our food arrived before I could complete my thought, and soon we were bantering over mouthfuls: about the whereabouts of mutual military acquaintances, family members, old school buddies, and what was in store for us in the future. Diane had retrained through Fleet education assistance to do data analysis in hospital administration. Not the most glamorous profession in the world, but she had a knack for it—or so she said—and it paid the bills. When she wasn’t drilling with Fleet Reserve in her other capacity.
I talked mostly about recent events. How close I’d come to dying several times onboard the Queen Mother’s ship. Diane just nodded and listened, occasionally sipping at her glass.
Then the conversation sort of died out.
My half-finished thought hung uncomfortably in the air. Both of us knew it. I cleared my throat and tried to speak, but as if on cue, my phone buzzed in my uniform’s jacket pocket.
“Hold on,” I said.
I put the device to my cheek.
“This is Ch—I mean, Captain Barlow,” I said.
“This is the Queen Mother,” said a computer voice.
“Yes, ma’am, I was just talking about you.”
“With the officer named Fulbright?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Tell her I want to talk to her.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Oh really?”
“Please pass your device to her now.”
I slowly handed the phone over to Diane. Her brow was knit and she looked at me with a questioning expression, I mouthed the words
Queen Mother
and shrugged.
Diane took the phone, “Yes, this is Captain Fulbright, how can I help you, Queen Mother?”
Diane listened for several moments, then pressed the HOLD button.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“What did you
tell
her about me?”
“Nothing,” I said. “All I told her was that maybe I might have an old friend coming back to Purgatory with me. It wasn’t a sure thing. I just wanted to make sure the Queen Mother was cool with it.”
Diane looked at me for a long moment.
“I think the Queen Mother expects an answer,” I said.
Diane kept looking at me. I reached across the table and grabbed one of her hands in mine. I squeezed tightly.
“Only, when we go back together,” I said, “let’s do it
right.
Okay? The way you’re supposed to. Diane . . . Diane, I want you to be my wife. I know it’s crazy. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. But being here, talking to you, I’m just thinking about how a man only gets to have so many second chances in this life. I should have proposed to you back on Purgatory, before the armistice. I told myself then it wouldn’t be worth it. I thought you’d turn me down anyway. We were just friends. But this thing with the Queen Mother, and all that’s happened to me . . . Diane, it’s time I stopped hiding from what I know to be true in my heart.”
If I’d shocked her, she didn’t show it. Her expressive eyes—touched with just enough shadow and liner—examined me across the table. Evaluating carefully. Her lips barely moving while we stared at each other’s faces.
From out of my cell phone’s tiny speaker I heard the Queen Mother’s voice ask, “Hello, Captain Fulbright, are you still there? What’s your final answer?”
Diane looked silently at me for a second or two more, then she pressed the TALK button and put the phone back to her cheek.
“Yes,” she said, smiling widely.
CHAPTER 60
FLEET PUT DIANE AND ME BOTH ON INDEFINITE ORDERS. AS official attachés for the duration of our trip to Purgatory. We were deemed
cultural
exchange officers. Many mantes had remained behind on Earth in a similar capacity. The Queen Mother and her official party had been the first mantes to ever see any portion of Earth society—in an informal setting—and a small group of them had been left behind, to form the first official mantis embassy to another sapient race, in the entire history of their species.
Meanwhile, on Purgatory, we were starting over from scratch. My chapel, and everything else in the mountain valley, had been razed to the ground when hostilities were renewed. There was nothing left. Not even bodies. The mantes had dropped a very small asteroid right down into the middle of the valley proper, and that was the end of that.
Now, two former human residents of Purgatory had returned. This time, to a different valley altogether.
Our new home was quite a bit different from our last on this world. A beautiful mountain lake spanned the bottom of the valley, with healthy meadows of Purgatory grass stretching into the foothills on all sides.
The drop pod from the drop pod carrier made a decent enough shelter, until Diane and I could get the new chapel built. And we had crates filled with Earth seed to begin growing crops. Plus some Earth livestock to boot. Tending them was certainly a learning process, as neither Diane nor I had ever been farm kids back home. But we managed.
With the Queen Mother’s help, of course.
That wasn’t her official capacity anymore. The exchange of power at the Quorum of the Select had been as similarly officious—in mantis terms—as the signing of the treaty had been in human terms. Much speaking and acting-out of formal ritual. Though Diane and I had been forced to use a translator to tell us what was going on, as everything had been done silently—mind to mind.
When I asked her what we should call her now, the former Queen Mother was at a loss for words. Even she had no idea.
“You’ll need a name eventually,” I said.
She thought about it.
“I should use the station in which I function,” she said. “Much like you called the Professor by his function.”
“So what’s your function now?” Diane asked.
The former Queen Mother considered at length.
“I think we shall call me . . . Pilgrim.”
Which was good enough for all three of us.
Pilgrim’s new arm was growing back rather rapidly. She looked comical with this little pee-wee version of her big forelimb, waving about and gesticulating, its chitin looking fresh whereas all the rest of her was well-seasoned.
I took it as a good omen. But it wasn’t the only one.
Diane and me, well . . . we were getting to know each other like never before. And for once in my life I didn’t feel like I was the only one being expected to answer all the questions. Of which Pilgrim still had many.
For relaxation and exercise, we all spent about as much time as we could hiking around the valley. If the planet had a garden spot, this seemed to be it. And by day, work meant assembling the chapel proper, or tending the little farm that surrounded the growing chapel walls. If Pilgrim was annoyed at having to exert herself with so much physical labor, she didn’t show it. In fact she appeared to rejoice in it every bit as much as Adanaho had rejoiced in the challenge of her own toil—liberated from VR.
Occasionally Pilgrim explored her flight envelope with her wings. We’d all climb up to the top of a bluff or other high point at the valley’s edge, and she’d go running as fast as she could, shooting off into the air and spiraling elegantly around and around, back down into the valley floor, sometimes even getting as far as the shoreline of the lake before she’d put down.
It was a beautiful thing to see.
At night, Diane and I would go to our bed, and do some exploring of our own. Newlyweds that we were, it was clumsy stuff, at first. But there was time enough for learning. And when we were lying in the rumpled blankets, we’d look up through the drop pod’s portholes at the stars in the sky above.
Bright, and pure, and promising as they’d never been before.
“So, Chaplain Barlow,” Diane said to me as I felt myself sliding towards slumber.
“So . . . Missus Chaplain Barlow,” I said in reply, smiling in the dark.
She giggled, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders while snuggling up to my ear.
“Back on Earth,” she said, “you told me you were done hiding from truths you knew in your heart. I’m pretty sure at this point I know what that means.”
“That I’ve always loved you?” I replied. “Yes.”
“No, silly. That you’ve finally accepted God.”
I lay there, feeling her warmth next to me, and thinking that it was pretty difficult to remember any time when I’d felt quite so content. An old and reflexive part of my brain wanted to reject her words. But that part had steadily grown more quiet over the days since we’d returned to Purgatory.
“Chaplain Thomas seemed to think there was a reason we got spared, back during the first war,” I said. “He thought it was part of God’s plan. I said he was talking nonsense at the time. But now . . . what else am I to think? Yes, I’ve accepted God. More than that, I’ve accepted the idea that forging peace with the mantes was only the first step. I’ve got to help Pilgrim find and accept God too. She’s just the first. There will be others like her. Other mantes. I am sure of it.”
“I am too,” Diane whispered, kissing my ear. “You know, you were always in the back of my mind, Harry. The one guy I kept wondering about, when the nights got lonely. I thought I’d never see you again, especially when the war cranked up a second time. Watching you walk into my place that afternoon in San Francisco . . . I knew it wasn’t an accident.”
“No, I don’t think it was either,” I said.
We kissed deeply, then pulled the blankets over us—the distantly gentle lapping of the lakeshore serenading us to sleep.
— THE END —