The Chaplain's War (22 page)

CHAPTER 30

Earth, 2153 A.D.

THE COLA HIT MY THROAT LIKE A COLD WAVE. I SAVORED ITS chilled, fizzy, delightful sweetness, and took another long chug on my bottle, before resting the bottle lightly on the table in front of me.

It was Halfway Day. The official midpoint of IST.

Every recruit in Charlie Company
not
on corrective detail was given an entire Sunday afternoon with a base pass: as long as we didn’t attempt to leave Armstrong Field, we could either walk or catch a bus to the half dozen exchanges and vendor malls that serviced the massive military installation.

Dismissed at 1400, our return formation was at 1900.

It felt like we had all the time in the world.

“Enjoy that while it lasts, Recruit Barlow,” said the recruit directly across from me, a female by the name of Cortez. She tipped her own bottle at me and swigged down a healthy draft, then did a long, drawn out, theatrical “
ahhh,”
while wiping the condensation-frosted bottle across her sweat-beaded brow.

The outdoor pavilion was jammed with recruits. Ours was not the only company at Halfway Day. Since none of us had been able to even look at a soft drink—nor anything else sugary—for almost two months, we were making the most of our limited parole.

“And here I was trying to lose a few pounds in the military,” said recruit Handley, who upended his own bottle. At twenty-nine he was one of the older guys in second platoon. Married, with a child on the way, he’d been one of the first people I’d truly befriended. I sometimes wondered if he had been the one who’d stopped me from trying to hurt Thukhan that one night.

I’d not asked anyone about the incident, nor had anyone come forward and offered to identify himself. Because we’d been mostly whispering at the time, I couldn’t identify the culprit by voice. Hence the event had become something of a very curious mystery to me.

Which was not to say I hadn’t taken the anonymous recruit’s advice.

The truth was, that night had scared the dickens out of me.

I’d let Batbayar get so far under my skin with his head games, I’d almost gone and done something incredibly stupid. But after that night, I’d made a point of warming up to the people who seemed worth warming up to, and together we’d formed a nice little nugget of camaraderie through the following weeks of rifle and marksmanship training.

It hadn’t stopped Thukhan from trying to mess with me, but it had blunted much of the resulting emotional trauma. Now that I didn’t feel so alone against him, it was easier to endure the insults and the petty attacks. Such as the time he got ahold of my laundry bag and filled it full of shaving gel, or swapped my duty boots with someone else’s boots on the other side of the bay, so that each of us was sent scrambling to identify who had the size eights, and who had the size tens, and
could I please have my boots back, oh yes, here’s yours, thanks so much,
followed by a lot of under-the-breath cursing.

With Thukhan not around, and no DSs in sight, I realized that the pavilion was the closest I’d come to experiencing real freedom in a long time.

Recruits Kealoha and Sembeke were the other two in my group. The former female, and the latter male. They each had their mouths full of hamburgers and fries from the pavilion grill.

Only two of us were north American by birth, and only three of us spoke the military’s version of common English as a first language. But we’d gravitated to each other for one reason or another. As the recruits who seemed destined for everything and anything other than an infantry or armor assignment.

“So what do you think?” I said to Cortez, who didn’t need to inquire as to the context of my question. Now that we were on the downhill slope to graduation, one thing was increasingly on everyone’s mind.

“Starship mechanic,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of a fist.

“You got pre-existing training for that?” Handley said.

“No, but I got this,” Cortez said, tapping the side of her head. “You think they let dummies play with the drive cores on the big capital vessels? Nope. As soon as I graduate out of this hole, I’m going to Fleet engineering school. No more DSs. The cadre aren’t NCOs, but officers with degrees in their subject matter.”

“You gonna go
ossifer
too?” I said, deliberately slurring the word.

“Maybe,” Cortez said. “I can think of worse ways to spend a war.”

“Me too,” Handley said. “It’s why I’m hoping for transport pilot.”

Kealoha and Sembeke stopped chewing, and stared at the older recruit.

“For serious,” he said, looking at all our raised eyebrows. “When I got out of high school I put some money into getting a private pilot’s license. I haven’t had the chance to use it much since Kelli and I got married, but it’s in my personnel file. They’d be stupid to ignore it. Like the lovely Recruit Cortez here, I hope to go far away from this place, to a training station where everyone speaks to me in respectful tones and nobody is trying to blow my ears off with sheer screaming.”

“. . . and the skies are blue all day, it’s never hot outside, and they leave chocolates on your pillow after making your bunk for you in the morning!”

Kealoha had said it through a grinning mouthful, and we all laughed uncontrollably for several seconds.

“How about you?” Sembeke said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and pointing a long, bony, coal-black finger in my direction.

“Deck swabber,” Cortez said, grinning wickedly.

“Toilet-scrubber Second Mate,” Handley said, also grinning.

“Yeah, well,” I said, chuckling, “like Cortez says, there are worse ways of spending the war.”

“It would have been nice if they’d let us have a sure choice,” Kealoha said. Like me, she was a volunteer. But not everyone in Charlie Company could say the same. There were the hard cases—like Thukhan—and there were the draftees. Young men and women from all over the world, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Plucked from their ordinary lives by their respective governments and pressed into Fleet service. Whether they liked the idea, or not.

And whether we’d volunteered or been drummed into uniform, none of us had been told upon reporting to Reception what our final destinations would be, in our newfound military careers. We were allowed to pick two options upon filling out our sign-up sheets, but everyone had noticed that there was a third option—always check-boxed and always grayed out—that simply said RECRUIT’S FINAL OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALTY TO BE DESIGNATED PER NEEDS OF THE FLEET.

Theoretically, Fleet had a massive semi-intelligent database that constantly tracked all available Fleet slots and attempted to match Fleet strengths and weaknesses with recruit preferences and aptitudes. Though this was mostly recruit scuttlebutt. I knew for a fact that two of my older friends who’d gotten good grades in school, had been sent directly into marine training out of IST; though both of them had also been on the football team too. Did that have anything to do with anything? I’d not heard from them in the two years since they’d left Earth.

As a matter of fact, none of us who had friends or relatives in Fleet service had heard from
anybody,
once they went to space.

Which I found just a little unsettling. But this was neither the time nor the place to speak of such things. Today was a day for merrymaking.

“So who’s going to get laid?” I said, picking up my cola and tipping it to my lips.

Handley laughed so hard he half-spit out a mouthful of his own drink.

“In just the short amount of time they’ve given us?” Sembeke said. “I think maybe you’re a little too eager, Barlow. Besides, they put chemicals in the food that suppress our libidos.”

“That’s a lot of crap,” Cortez said. “My grandfather was in the military and he said the same spook story was circulating when he was in Basic, all those years ago. God knows nothing is suppressing
my
libido.”

“So you would be the lucky one getting her rocks off, then?” I said, raising my bottle in her direction. “I salute you, madam.”

She reached across and slugged me in the arm.

I almost dropped my drink.

“If I was,” she said, “I certainly wouldn’t be doing it with any lousy recruit!”

“You wound me,” I said.

She raised the same fist she’d punched me with, and erected her middle finger.

I laughed, remembering Tia doing the same to me many months earlier. Through the haze of the past two months, it seemed like another lifetime.

Our eyes flicked to Handley.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Kelli and I already took care of business. We had one final night together, after I signed up.”

“Must have been a good one,” Kealoha said.

“Simply the best,” Handley replied, grinning.

I smiled, and finished the last of my drink.

“I honestly don’t care if I’m mopping the head,” I said. “As long as Fleet lets me go stare out the window once in a while, it’s all good with me.”

“A stargazer,” Sembeke said, smiling. “Me too.”

“Me
all
of us,” Cortez said. “Who hasn’t dreamed about going to space? Maybe touring some of the colonies? None of us could have hoped to afford it on our own, and most of the colonial missions were either closed-shop operations, or had application criteria so severe, you had to be a super-genius or a genetically healthy freak to get onboard. Now look at us. Future spacers, all! In one form or another.”

“You’re mighty right,” I said.

Five fists went into the center of the table and touched, followed by five hands that opened—palms wide, fingers splayed—before withdrawing:
blow it up!

On our way back to Charlie Company, the base shuttle stopped at a little concrete building with a tall spire at one end. A meager handful of recruits slowly stepped aboard. Each of them clutching a small book in his or her hand. They stared at the rest of us as we made jokes and laughed loudly, then they decided to stay up front—apart from us.

“What’s their problem?” I asked quietly.

“Church boys,” Cortez said, snickering loudly.

“It
is
Sunday,” Handley said. “Didn’t you ever go to service when you were a kid?”

“No,” I said. “My parents aren’t religious.”

“And yours were?” Sembeke asked Handley.

“My mom kinda was,” he said. “Lutheran. I think? Though I only went for a little while when I was very young. I remember the meeting house being a very empty place.”

“Looks like that post chapel back there was mostly empty too,” I said as the base shuttle pulled away and resumed its route.

“Why do you say that?” Sembeke asked.

“Look how few there were,” I said, pointing to the five boys and two girls who’d boarded. Their backs were turned and they faced straight ahead, not saying anything as the shuttle rumbled along the road.

“Service runs all day,” Handley said. “Maybe people attend piecemeal? Or didn’t you look at the chapel hours in the IST manual on your e-pad?”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “Why would anyone go waste their time sitting in an empty building on a day when they could be out having fun?”

Cortez loudly voiced her agreement.

One of the recruits up front turned, looking hard at us, and then got up and walked back to where we were sitting. We shut up and stared at him as he came up to us, his hands resting on the backs of the bench seats in front of our group.

“It might seem like a waste to you,” he said, “but there are still a few of us who like to go to chapel on the Lord’s Day. Please, we’re only going to get a few more minutes of peace and quiet before the shuttle drops us off at Delta Company. Do you mind not making fun of us?”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling somewhat sheepish.

He went back and sat down.

I was quiet all the way back to the company area. As we climbed off the shuttle Cortez poked me in the ribs.

“Church boy put you in your place,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, not smiling.

“Did that bother you as much as it seems like it did?” she asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt his feelings. I just don’t get why anyone goes to church in the first place. My family never did. My mom and dad never expected me to. I mean, people can believe whatever they want, but this is the twenty-second century. Church . . . that’s in the past. Haven’t we kinda left that behind us? We’re traveling the stars now!”