The Chaplain's War (6 page)

CHAPTER 11

“CHIEF BARLOW,” SAID THE FEMALE VOICE THROUGH THE WOODEN door.

Lost in thought, I didn’t answer right away.

She cleared her throat, and tried again. “Warrant Officer Harrison Barlow?”

I sighed, and slowly got up from my seat at my desk in the tiny pastor’s quarters of my chapel.

She’d called me chief. I wasn’t used to the new rank. There had been a time when I’d happily watched my military days fade into memory. But the recent return of Earth ships to Purgatory orbit meant that many of us former prisoners of war had again been pressed into service—whether we wanted our old jobs back, or not.

I was a prior enlisted man. They could have just slapped my stripes back on me. But my apparently pivotal role—as interlocutor between humanity, and our former enemies, the mantis aliens—had necessitated something a bit more lofty.

Not like I needed the shiny silver bar on my collar. I commanded no one. The chapel, built with my own hands in the early days of my former captivity, had never needed any hierarchy. I’d constructed the place in the spirit intended by its original designer, Chaplain Thomas:
all are equal in God’s sight.

I’d have refused promotion if I’d thought Fleet Command was giving me a choice.

I opened the door.

She was young, with a startlingly beautiful face. I guessed Nile Egyptian heritage, but with something else mixed in. Not European. Southeast Asian, perhaps? Her fluent use of commercial English—that hoary old offshoot of British and American English which had dominated international human affairs for hundreds of years—gave me no hint of her nation of origin.

I looked at the captain’s clusters on her collar, and tipped my head.

“Ma’am, what may I do for you at this early hour?”

“General Sakumora sent me,” she said, her wide eyes staring up at me.

“And of what use may I be to the general?”

“You’re the one who brokered the original cease-fire,” she said. “The general is hoping you can do so again.”

An instant prickling of alarm went up my spine.

“Have the mantes attacked?” I asked, not blinking.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nobody told you what’s happening?”

“Ma’am, in spite of my appointment and what this starchy new uniform might indicate, I’m just a chaplain’s assistant. Nobody tells me much of anything. Certainly I don’t pretend to understand what Fleet Command worries about when it goes to bed at night. All I care about are the people still here, on this planet.”

“And the mantis converts who come to you for religious indoctrination,” she said.

“Instruction,” I corrected her. “And it’s not even anything so formal as that. You ought to know as well as anyone, if you’ve earned your commission recently, that the mantes are an utterly atheistic people. They cannot even conceive of a God, nor a soul, nor do they understand anything about Earth’s varied and flavorful religious history.”

Flavorful.
A deliberate euphemism on my part. The mantis university Professor who’d first approached me ten Purgatorial years earlier, to study Earth’s major systems of belief, had often used that word to describe our faiths. He’d considered them fascinating—a key to the utterly alien mentality of the human being.

But that had been a long time ago. The Professor, and most of his students, had gone. As had many of my parishioners, once the ships from Earth returned and it became possible for humans to go home again.

I’d chosen to remain. Despite Purgatory’s hard, arid climate and the chapel’s crude rock-and-mud-walled simplicity. A part of me had become invested in this place. I looked over the lovely young officer’s shoulder to the chapel’s lone altar, where various human religious symbols and objects were carefully placed for all to see. This early in the morning I had no flock to attend to. But soon they’d begin to trickle in, a few here and a few there. Most of them human. But not all.

“It’s the mantes’ difficulty with religion that brings me here now,” she said. “It’s been almost ten Earth years since the armistice. Fleet stealth missions indicate that the mantes are moving some of their own ships. Renewed battle exercises. The truce you won may not last much longer. Not unless someone can help the mantes get what they came here for. From you specifically.”

I laughed coldly.

“I labored with the Professor,” I said. “For years. He read every last line of holy text I could put in front of him. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, you name it. He soaked it up like a sponge. We engaged in various rituals, both for demonstration and also to see if he’d take to any of them. But he was as deaf to the spirit as the next mantis. They’re all like that—biologically incapable of feeling what you and I might call ‘faith.’ The Professor eventually withdrew in confused futility.”

“What about the ones who still attend?”

“They are young,” I said. “Grad students. They come to the chapel for objective study, no more. Working on their equivalent of thesis papers, probably.”

“General Sakumora was adamant. You must help.”

I wanted to keep protesting, but the earnestness in her expression told me that there wouldn’t be any point. I reached a hand up and felt the non-regulation stubble on my face. I hated shaving every day. But it looked like I was going to have to start again.

“Orders are orders, ma’am?” I said, straightening my duty topcoat.

“That’s right, Chief,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. And if it’s all the same to you, nobody around here calls me that.”

“Then what do they call you?”

“Padre. One of my former parishioners hung that on me shortly after the cease-fire.”

“Father Barlow,” she said, testing it out.

“No,” I said sheepishly, “just padre.”

“Well,
Padre,
I’m putting us on the next flight into orbit. The General is getting ready for a summit with his counterparts in the mantes’ chain of command. You and I have both been instructed to cooperate in every way—to ensure that the summit is productive.”

“Are you part of the Chaplains Corps?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Fleet Intelligence.”

I repressed the urge to scoff. If the military’s blind hurling of the original human flotillas against Purgatory’s impervious mantis defenders had been any indication, intelligence was the one thing we’d been sorely lacking.

“I don’t think it will do any good,” I admitted. “I tried to tell the Professor, when he started to give up hope. If mantis curiosity about human faith is the only thing holding back their war machine, then our fates truly do rest in God’s hands.”

She stared at me.

“But,” I said, “I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all anyone can ask,” she replied.

I spent a few minutes getting word out that I would be leaving. Fleet business. The flock would have to take care of the chapel for a change. Which was fine. Some of the regulars were people I trusted implicitly. But as I walked outside to join the captain, there was a sinking feeling in my stomach. I turned my head to look at the building which had been my home for so many years, and I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

The sensation was unpleasantly familiar.

One old memory swam up from the depths of my life as I trailed the captain to the four-by-four truck that would take us to the only place on Purgatory where human spacecraft were allowed to land and take off from.

“Here we go again,” I said under my breath.