Read The Chaplain's War Online
Authors: Brad R Torgersen
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General, #Space Opera, #Action & Adventure
The Chaplain's War (28 page)
But the red-yellows couldn’t move on their own.
So I wound up doing stretcher duty—thankful for the low gravity, and resentful of the bulkiness and clumsiness of the armor suit.
DSs—also in armor suits—had clustered near the ad hoc aid station, and were seemingly making remarks to each other on the secure cadre wireless while half a dozen medics were putting hole patches on suits or inflating balloon bandages around limbs too imaginarily mangled for hole patches. The vital signs monitors on each of the wounded were carefully checked and integrated into a closed medical wireless loop, to which I was summarily added without my consent. Suddenly eight different waving sets of vitals appeared in my field of vision, each with a name next to it.
I noted that one of the wounded was a recruit platoon sergeant from fifth platoon.
“Are we winning?” I asked her as I pulled out a patch, per the DS nearest her pointing at her leg and informing us she had a hole in it.
“Can’t quite tell,” she said. “Fifth platoon was split and I was trying to get us formed up on our weapons squad when a fat wad of mantes came over the top of a low rise and creamed us. Most of my squad were blue-lined immediately. The rest grabbed me and hauled it for the back of the battle. And dropped me here.”
I looked around and noticed more red-yellows being dropped off.
“How many casualties in all?” I asked the recruit platoon sergeant.
“Uhhh,” she said, tapping keys on her suit’s wrist while I applied the patch to the imaginary hole where the drill sergeant had pointed.
“Sixty-eight,” she said.
“Dead?” I said.
“Not all. Command stats wireless shows twenty-one wounded, the rest permanently out of action.”
Heavy casualties, considering the fact that the fight was only about twenty minutes old. Charlie Company was down roughly a quarter of its total strength.
I keyed my way back into the command wireless. Things still seemed chaotic.
Once I was convinced my patch job would hold, I slapped the recruit platoon sergeant on her shoulder and went to work on others.
Then I was summarily called away as a squad from first platoon began howling for medical support.
I bounded behind the two medics who went with me, Chaplain J, and our four assigned guards.
One of whom became a blue-liner along the way. One more was blue-lined on the way back. For the sake of three more simulated wounded.
Back and forth. Forward, and out.
I found blue-liners and red-yellows and reds-soon-to-be-blue. When the cluster of casualties at the aid station had passed thirty, I was sweating profusely and growing quite exhausted. Even in the weak lunar gravity, carrying someone—or assisting someone in the process of being carried—was strenuous work. Such that by the time the fight was over an hour old, I was trudging my way forward, not always looking where I was going, and allowing myself to be led by Chaplain J, who exhorted me forward with every new call for help.
“Might as well be a corpsman,” I said, huffing.
“We do a lot of that,” Chaplain J said, bouncing her way in front of me. “Since chaplains don’t carry weapons—we have chaplains’ assistants for that—we pretty much try to find ways to keep ourselves useful. One thing we didn’t do back on the carrier was have a pre-battle service.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“If there had been time, and if we’d have been headed for a real fight, I’d have spared time to set up something on one of the assault carrier decks—where people could come and get a last dose of spiritual pick-me-up. Even offer confession, if I were ordained and authorized to hear it.”
“Confession?”
“Catholic stuff. Didn’t you look that up too?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Anyway, as the chaplain you don’t send your flock into battle without a last bit of hope and a prayer. Doesn’t matter whether those who come to hear it are truly believers, or just the kinds of atheists and agnostics who temporarily find faith when it suits them. The Fleet chaplain’s job is to support the spiritual well-being of the Fleet soldiers. Before, during, and after the battle.”
“I doubt I’ll have any energy left over, even to tend to my own bladder,” I said, becoming annoyed by the fact that any sweat that ran into my eyes could not be wiped away—with my hand hitting the transparency of my helmet’s face plate.
“Just be glad these wounded and dead are all simulated,” she said. “If they were real . . .”
She didn’t finish her thought.
CHAPTER 37
MY HEART RATE WENT TO TRIPLE-TIME.
The war—humans versus the mantes, round two—had suddenly become real again.
The burning remnants of human aircraft lay scattered across the canyon, or steaming in the river itself. Marines were firing their rifles indiscriminately into the air. Whatever had attacked and destroyed the gunships was momentarily gone. Though I suspected they would return, probably with drop pods loaded with mantis shock troops. I’d seen such in action on Purgatory. The canyon was about to become a slaughterhouse.
I saw the Professor with the Queen Mother half aboard his disc. They’d been pushed far out into the river by a trio of marines who were shouting at them, rifles raised and aimed dead-center.
Captain Adanaho was between the marines and the Professor, water up to her waist. She’d pulled out her sidearm and pointed it at the marines.
Humans hurled incomprehensible commands at each other.
One of the rifles went off.
Captain Adanaho was pitched backwards into the water.
Alien jets howled down on us. The water around the trio of marines suddenly erupted with hundreds of little fountains. What was left of the trio began to drift down stream.
Not caring whether I was next to be fragged, I plunged into the river and strove mightily to reach the captain. Her body was limply drifting with the current, and the Professor stared dumbly at it as it passed both him and the Queen Mother, who also stared dumbly.
I threw myself forward and began to breaststroke, the water chill and electric on my skin. My hand finally hit something soft. I knotted my fist into the fabric of the captain’s uniform and began to beat back towards the shore.
When I came out, my chest heaved for air.
I dragged the captain’s limp body onto the sand at the river’s edge.
Turning her over, I observed the bloody hole in the front of her uniform. A liver shot? Warm blackness flooded from the wound and the captain’s eyes blinked furiously as she tried to draw breath. Whispered gasps were all she could manage.
“Oh God, no,” I said, wishing madly for one of the med kits in our packs. Which were who knew how far away. The current had taken us downriver too quickly for me to correctly reckon where camp might be. And there was still shooting happening, though from whom and towards whom I could not be certain. Lacking a better idea, I pressed my hand hard on the wound and willed the bleeding to stop.
The captain groaned loudly and clutched at my arm with both hands. Her eyes were wide and she stared up at me.
“Chief,” she spat. I read her lips more than I heard her.
“Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound calm, “you’re hurt bad, and I have to stop the bleeding.”
“Chief,” she said again, our eyes locked. I quickly lowered my ear to her face. Her voice rasped and sputtered.
“The Queen Mother,” Adanaho said, “you’ve got to protect her. She is the key, Chief. She has been . . . chosen. Like you. Padre . . .”
I started to blubber my incomprehension, then looked up to see the Professor hovering almost directly above us. The Queen Mother slid off the front of his disc and came to Adanaho’s side—her forelimbs framed Adanaho’s young face as the captain fought to draw additional breath, but could not.
I pressed harder, to combat the gushing blood, but felt in my heart that it was no use.
“We must flee!” The Professor commanded. “Caught in the crossfire, we will all die.”
“We can’t move the captain!” I hollered, looking up at my friend with a sense of panicked helplessness ripping me up inside.
A trail of bullets spattered across the sand near us.
The Professor spun on his vertical axis to face the four marines who advanced with rifles up. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them splashing through the river shallows. Automatic fire stuttered and suddenly I was flattened across Adanaho’s body as the Professor lowered his disc right down on top of us: me, the captain, and the Queen Mother.
“My friend,” the Professor said, “I regret to inform you that—”
He never finished his sentence. Bullets
pinged
and
panged
off his disc. Some tore through chitin, slicing mantis organs and soft tissue. The Professor’s disc moved forward three meters, then gouged its bow into the wet sand—the disc proper tilting up like a shield. I looked up to see the silhouette of his thorax and limbs flailing around the disc’s black edge, bits and pieces of him coming off and mantis blood splattering.
Then I put my head down as a concentrated series of bursts from the advancing marines shredded the Professor’s disc completely.
It split in two and burst into flame, sparks and electrical arcing lighting up the horrific scene of the Professor’s dismantled body.
The sky roared. Mantis fighters overhead. Making a third sweep of the canyon. The marines in the shallows vanished in a blinding display of pinpoint antipersonnel rocketry.
I flattened across Adanaho’s body. Long moments of silence followed.
The Professor’s disc slowly smoldered, so close I could smell the cooking flesh. I turned my eyes back to Adanaho’s face. She stared up at me unblinking, her mouth half open but not drawing breath.
I began to hurl obscenities at the cosmos. Towards any deity or deities that would listen. I damned the Professor. I damned the Queen Mother, and the mantes, and the marines, and the awful stupidity of precious lives cut short. I damned Earth. I damned the Fleet. I even damned Adanaho for being young and idealistic and coming to me as if I had some power over circumstances; enough to alter the course of history. Such idealism had gotten her killed, and all I could do was sit there, soaked and cold and clutching the captain’s lifeless hand in my own.
A slow build of tortured sobs burst out of me as I lowered my forehead to Adanaho’s chest and shook with grief. For her. For my alien friend. For the fate of two species apparently committed to annihilation.
After a few moments I heard the Queen Mother suddenly rise up, her wings unfolding and extending to maximum width. I opened my eyes and looked. Enough light was coming down into the Canyon now that I could see her clearly. She watched the sky.
A loud, thunderous, mechanized whining to my rear me told me that the drop pods had finally come. Multiple buzzing sounds told me the shock troops—their armored discs studded with a variety of lethal weapons—were on top of us.
Perhaps it was for the best. To end things in this manner. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live to see the mantis war machine slowly grind the planets of human space to powder. Instead of a quick termination, now there would be a long, drawn-out, dreadful fistfight as the Fleet contracted and toughened its defensive circle. World after world would be
cleansed
of humanity. Until at last Earth would fall under mantis crosshairs.
The final stand.
And then . . . humanity would join the handful of other extinct races in the mantis archives. A dead people, wiped from the face of the galaxy by a species determined to have the stars to itself.
I kept my eyes closed and held the captain’s hand tight.
The buzzing was loud now. They had to be just meters away.
A sharp hissing cut through the mechanized sound. It was a shrill, painful sound, almost like fingernails on a chalkboard. I reflexively looked up to see the source, and saw the Queen Mother hovering over myself and Adanaho, her wings fluttering and beating the air ferociously. Her mouth was open as wide as possible and her tractor teeth were vibrating so quickly they were a blur. It must have taken an astounding effort for her manage the display, but it had gotten the attention of her subordinates.
Several dozen mantis soldiers surrounded us, looking unsure of what to do. Those in the front rank were recoiling at the sight of the Queen Mother: a mantis without her carriage, unchained, feral, her insect eyes adamant.
Her hiss slowly died in her throat, followed by a rapid series of clicks and clacks as she spoke to her people in their own language. I couldn’t be sure what she was saying, but their reaction was immediate. A path opened through the mass of soldiers allowing four other mantes to maneuver forward. I didn’t see weapons on their discs. In fact, their discs seemed like the Professor’s.
Were these medics? I could only guess.
Two of them converged on the remains of the Professor. The other two on the Queen Mother herself, who settled onto her small lower legs and began to instruct the lot of them, her forelimbs waving and pointing with the distinct authority of one bred to rule.
None of them touched me. Nor the body of the captain. The troops moved back, then began to disperse. Securing the area, no doubt.
I slowly sat up, tears and mucus down the front of my wet uniform, and glared at the Queen Mother. She sat on the sand, her wings folded tightly and her beak shut. She glared right back, her eyes alien but her posture erect and dignified.
Eventually the medics returned with what appeared to be a small disc—a carriage without an owner. Though I guessed by size that it was only temporary, for the Queen Mother’s benefit. She looked at me for a long while, not saying anything, and me not saying anything to her. Then she slowly climbed aboard the disc and settled into the saddle. A series of squeaking and mechanical snapping sounds told me she was being re-integrated. She shuddered once and her mouth opened in irritation, then the disc rose off the ground.
Hovering over to myself and the body of the captain, the Queen Mother announced, “Pick up your captain. There is a transport waiting for us. I have a truce to call!”
