The Chaplain's War (35 page)

CHAPTER 48

Target planet (Purgatory), 2155 A.D.

THE MANTIS CARRIER PUT DOWN IN A MOUNTAIN VALLEY. AS did over a hundred other carriers just like it. We were herded out of the pods like cattle. Thousands of us. The ragged survivors of a once-mighty human flotilla. With only the clothes on our backs, or what we’d been able to salvage in duffels, bags, packs, and satchels. Anything that wasn’t obviously a weapon, but which might still offer some kind of use.

Perhaps a third of us were wounded. Some very seriously, like the chaplain.

With mantis infantry standing watch at the valley rim, we were left to figure ourselves out.

“No escape,” one NCO remarked bleakly.

Chaplain Thomas was looking worse every hour.

A Fleet nurse who’d been trying to do his best to stand in for an actual physician approached me and pulled me aside.

“He’s not going to last much longer.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied tersely. “Is there anything you can do for the pain? He’s hurting bad.”

“I want to save the pain meds for the people I think we can save.”

I wanted to retort in anger, but realized the futility of it. If we’d had the capacity to get Chaplain Thomas to a surgeon, even his present injuries—dire as they seemed—weren’t life threatening. But the nearest surgery center had been back aboard the Fleet starship we’d left behind, and which had now obviously been destroyed, or tucked tail and run when the tide turned.

There would be no help for the chaplain’s injuries.

He chuckled bleakly at me when I told him the bad news.

“Figured as much, all by myself,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was more I could do.”

“You can do something,” he said.

“What?”

“When I’m gone, build me a chapel.”

I stared at him.

“I am completely serious,” Chaplain Thomas said. “If the mantes have let so many of us live, there’s got to be a reason for it. Sounds like they’re not letting anyone in or out of the valley. Which means we’re prisoners of war. And that means these people—all who have survived—are going to need somewhere to come and cry out their sorrows to the Lord.”

“But I don’t know anything about architecture—”

“You don’t have to know,” he said. “Noah built an ark with nothing but the power of God to guide him. Surely you can put together something with four walls and a roof? If you want to do something for me, Harrison Barlow, you will build me a chapel. Keep it clean. Keep it neat. Make sure anyone and everyone is welcome. So that they can come in, sit down, maybe talk about their problems, and seek some peace of mind.”

“I’m not convinced there will be any peace of mind for any of us,” I said. In a matter of days, all our lives had been smashed to ruins. Earth was cut off from us. Our friends, our families. Gone. And we ourselves might as well have been dead, for how much optimism I saw in the expressions on the faces of the people around me. The surviving officers and Fleet NCOs were trying to rally. But the shock still hadn’t worn off. People milled about in little camps and circles: hollow-eyed, flinching at even small sounds, and so very, very afraid.

My dour reverie must have been apparent.

The chaplain snapped his fingers at me.

“Yessir?” I said.

“Boy,” the chaplain said to me, snagging my hand in his, and pressing his fingers into my flesh with as much strength as he could muster. “Tammy swore to me that you were a good one. The kind of fellow who could make a difference in peoples’ lives. Listen to me now. Whether or not you live or die is no longer important. You hear me? Not anymore. That’s completely in the Lord’s hands now. Which means all you need to decide is what you want to do with yourself in the time the Lord’s got left for you. Are you going to sit around and be so frightened that you can’t move or breathe? Or are you going to try to make the world a better place?”

He began coughing terribly, wincing all the while. Bits of blood speckled the front of his armor suit now.

“Ripping up my own lungs,” he wheezed.

“I’ll go bring the nurse back,” I said.

“Forget it. It’s almost over. And I’m sorry, son. I truly am sorry. For me, captivity will be short-lived. I go to my reward. But for you? The Lord’s got a trial in mind for you. And a work to be accomplished. You dodge that, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days. Such as they are. Don’t run away from it, Harry. Time to grow up and take it by the horns. Life is filled with challenges, and you’ve got a big one now. Promise me you’ll build the chapel? Promise me.”

I looked away from him as he started coughing again. It wasn’t fair. The whole thing. The decimation of the flotilla. Getting rounded up in this valley like pigs in a pen. Having everything I’d once considered dear ripped away from me and placed light-years distant. But most of all, it wasn’t fair that a dying man was making me carry out his last wish.

“You know what you have to do,” Chaplain Thomas said.

“Alright, dammit,” I said. “You win. I promise I’ll build it.”

“And keep it clean, and make sure people feel welcome.”

“Yes, yes.”

“No one will be turned away.”

“I’ll see to it.”

“Make it a house where the spirit can dwell.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You will
learn
how.”

And with that, he laid his head back on the stretcher, took one final, shuddering breath, and died. As if he’d chosen that moment to depart. I wanted to call him a few choice names for making me promise to do something I had no desire nor intention of doing. Instead, I simply laid a towel across his face and set about seeking the best place to bury him.

That night I found the spot. It was away from the mass grave—where most of those who’d died since our being deposited in the valley were being put. I didn’t want Chaplain Thomas’s remains moldering with everyone else’s. He’d been a nice officer and an affectionate clergyman. It seemed wrong to just carry him to the hole and up-end him into it, with all the others. So I strapped Chaplain Thomas’s body to the stretcher and began the painstaking task of hauling him towards a high, flat spot perhaps five hundred meters from where the bulk of the Fleet refugees had assembled themselves. The grumbling din of conversation fell behind me as I trudged.

Every ten minutes or so, I set the body down and let my arms rest.

To my surprise, I heard a voice call to me out of the dusk.

“Need a hand?” asked the woman.

“No,” I lied.

“Seems like a big job for one specialist,” she said. As she approached me I noticed she had on a somewhat grimy flight suit. Her name tape said FULBRIGHT, and the patches on her chest and shoulders indicated she’d been a gunner.

I relented, and let her pick up the other end of the stretcher.

“Someone special to you?” she asked as we walked: me in front, her in the rear.

“His name was Chaplain Thomas, and he was a good man.”

“Too good to be put with the rest of the dead?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter, okay? If you’re going to help me, can you do it in peace?”

“Sorry. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to anyone. I came down in an escape pod after the
Seahawk
began to break up in orbit. The mantes found and picked me up earlier today.”

“Did
any
of our ships make it?”

“Not sure. I was blazing away like there was no tomorrow, and none of my shells nor any of the missiles made so much as a dent in the mantis destroyers. They’ve got this kind of shielding that glows when you hit it. Our weapons couldn’t touch them. Would have been nice to know in advance that they had
that
little trick up their buggy sleeves.”

I grunted my agreement. What we hadn’t known, had indeed hurt us.

When we reached the spot I’d picked—the light now all but gone from the valley—I set to work with my small hand shovel.

Gunner Fulbright got down beside me and went to work with a folding spade she’d saved from her escape pod’s emergency supplies.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked.

“Because I need a friend,” she said. “And there’s no better way to make friends than to pick the guy who seems to be doing the most thankless work, and pitch in.”

“Your attitude is far more positive than it deserves to be,” I said.

She laughed at me.

“Maybe,” she said. “But my mama always told me the Lord hates a coward, so I’d rather apply myself to something positive, than run around being afraid of my shadow the way a lot of these other survivors seem to be doing.”

Again, I grunted my agreement.

We dug for hours. By feel. Until we were exhausted. When we slept, we slept on the dirt—something every survivor had rapidly learned to do in the wake of the Fleet’s destruction on-planet.

When light peeked over the tops of the mountains that ringed the valley, we got up and carefully lowered Chaplain Thomas’s remains down into the grave. Neither of us had anything particularly special or meaningful to say, so we said nothing. We simply pushed the soil and sand back over the top of the body, tenderly tamped the layer down, then levered a large oblong boulder into place as a marker.

In fact, the entire area was strewn with stone.

I considered the promise I’d made to my now-deceased boss. What passed for trees on this world wouldn’t be much good for cutting timber. If anything was going to be built, it would be built out of rock and mud.

I used my heel to mark off a largish rectangle in the ground not far from where the chaplain had been buried.

“I’m hungry, and we’d better get back,” Fulbright said.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I want to finish this first.”

“What for?” she asked.

“I made a promise,” I said. “And I don’t want to leave until I’ve left behind something permanent—which I can come back to and build on later.”

“Okay then, I’ll see you back down with the others.”

“Hey, Gunner,” I said to her as she walked away.

“Yeah?” she said over her shoulder.

“You were right,” I said.

“About what?”

“About making friends. Thanks. For being mine.”

She stopped. Then turned and smiled at me.

“Any time, Barlow. Any time.”