The Chaplain's War (7 page)

CHAPTER 12

Earth, 2153 A.D.

THE WOMAN SAT AT A SINGLE TABLE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA. There was a wide, tall thinscreen behind her, and on the thinscreen there was a slowly revolving interstellar map. A bright blue point glowed cheerfully at the center, signifying Earth and Sol System. Smaller, green points were Earth’s growing number of successful colonies around other stars. One of those colonies had a harsh red halo that throbbed ominously. A computer graphic of an extremely large starship soared slowly through the scene, towing a stylized banner that said, THE FLEET WANTS YOU!

Myself and my friends Kaffy, Ben, David, and Tia stopped short, our small trays of food momentarily forgotten. The woman in front of the star map was talking animatedly with several other students who’d come to chat her up. She wore a uniform unlike any I’d seen before. From the sound of her accent, she was from the Southeast—a bit of a drawl, worn flat by years spent living outside her home state.

Up until very recently, she’d probably been Army or Air Force. Maybe Marine Corps? I’d been barely fourteen years old when the president went on the air to tell the whole country that by joint Senatorial and Congressional order, the whole of the armed forces of the United States were being used to form the backbone of a new multinational force that would be explicitly created for fighting in outer space.

Small wonder. News of the aliens had been both exciting and disquieting. We’d always suspected they might be out there. With the new colonies putting down fresh roots since the invention of the interstellar jump system some twenty years prior, many of my middle school teachers had speculated that we’d run across nonhuman intelligence eventually. Probably in the form of primitives living a stone-age existence. As homo sapiens, and its cousins on the primate family tree, had done for millions of years.

But the planet Marvelous had been explicitly attacked. A planet which had shown no hint of harboring intelligent life. A threat from the stars had savaged her, leaving Earth and the other colonies scrambling to put together some kind of effective defense.

War news was something that came only in irregular bits and pieces. Since Earth itself had not been hit, what went on out in the colonies, many, many light-years from home, wasn’t exactly front-page news. Once the initial furor over the alien threat had died down, most American families had gone back to business as usual. What else could be done? We watched our thinscreens and we checked the Internet and we speculated about what might happen next. But for most of us, the war was a thing happening far away, out of the realm of ordinary experience.

Tia leaned close, speaking in a whisper only the four of us could hear.

“They want troops for the colonial counteroffensive,” she said.

“Who told you that?” I asked, also in a whisper.

“Nobody,” she said. “But what else could it be?”

I wondered. The Fleet recruiters had been getting more numerous as our senior year at school drew to a close. One of my cousins who lived in Rhode Island and who occasionally gamed with me online said that she’d noticed the same thing at her school. Was it true that the Fleet was going to strike back? What did that mean for those of us who’d never even seen the alien threat up close?

We’d all been shown pictures, of course. The aliens individually looked for all the world like a grotesque, outsized mutation of an ordinary praying mantis. Only each one rode a man-sized flying saucer not terribly different from the kind I’d seen in some of the very archaic two-dee movies of the previous century. The images which had been brought back from Marvelous were pretty horrible. So much so that even the scientists and politicians who’d been loudly advocating for peace talks gradually piped down.

The threat was real, it was ugly, and the only question that remained was: what were humans going to do about it?

The Fleet recruiter noticed us, and beckoned us over.

We hesitantly complied.

“How are y’all doin’ today?” she said, smiling. Her hair was red, and she had freckles across her cheeks.

“Okay, I guess,” Ben said.

“Y’all seniors?” the recruiter asked; her name tape on her uniform read O’DONNELL.

“Yeah,” Tia said.

“Got plans for after school? You know the Fleet’s got countless opportunities for healthy, able-bodied young men and women like yourselves. The president’s authorized nice bonuses for anyone willing to sign up with me today. You’d ship out when you graduate.”

Money. That was a definite enticement. Prior to the mantis aliens making their existence known, the American economy had been locked in a rather pernicious stagflationary cycle. The advent of the interstellar jump system, and the establishment of the colonies, had destabilized most of the international stock markets. Earth’s economic ship-in-a-bottle approach to commerce was being disrupted now that thousands of people were disembarking on colony boats every day, while freighters returning from the colonies were bringing goods and materials back. The United Nations had been trying to slap together an interstellar monetary committee when ships fleeing Marvelous brought word of the alien attack.

Now, things were worse. The dollar was really struggling. And jobs—any kind—were not that easy to find. Not when computers and machinery did so much of the manual labor all over the country. Many people were either technicians servicing those computers and machines, or developers, engineers, and programmers who worked on improving and refining the technology that kept much of the human race fed, housed, and clothed.

“What do you do in the Fleet?” I asked O’Donnell.

“Well, before I was Fleet, I was Navy, and when I was Navy, I was a maintenance expert out on one of the submarines. Submarine life is a lot like life on the starships, you know. They snatched up as many of us submariners as they could get their hands on, when the Fleet was initially launched. I did some time converting my skills over to spacecraft, and then I got put into recruiting.”

“Sounds like you don’t stay in one spot too long,” Kaffy said.

“Not so far,” O’Donnell said. “So, can I show you a few videos? Interest you in what the Fleet has to offer?”

“Maybe later,” I said. “We’re going to be late for class if we don’t get something to eat, and soon.”

“Well, that’s fine, but here, let me give you these,” O’Donnell said, handing us all thin little pieces of plastic about the size of a standard credit or debit card. The card was silver, with a holographic logo on it that moved when you faced the card in different directions. The logo appeared to be a hawk or eagle, stylized of course, with its eyes and beak looking fierce. Under the bird was a small globe of Earth, shielded from above by the bird’s protectively-arched wings. The bird’s talons held what appeared to be a sword on the left, and a cluster of rockets on the right.

We mumbled our thanks, and went to sit at a table.

“No way,” Ben said as he slipped bites of school lunch spaghetti into his mouth.

“You’re not interested in going to space?” David asked.

“Not like that,” Ben said, shaking his head.

“I’ve got an older cousin who signed up,” Kaffy said. “He left home three weeks ago. My aunt and uncle don’t hear from him much, though they say he says the training is tough.”

“Military training is always tough,” I said, chewing on a piece of cold garlic bread.

“How would you know?” Tia teased. “Playing war hero in VR isn’t like the real thing, you know.”

I scowled at Tia, and flipped her my middle finger.

She laughed, and up-ended her bottle of fruit juice with her right hand, flipping me back with her left.

“Too bad the mantis aliens aren’t just VR,” David said, his face growing sober. “I mean, really, what do any of us know about the aliens anyway? One colony has been attacked, so far. How many of the others will be attacked? Maybe they’re under attack right now?”

“If it were that bad,” Kaffy said, “Don’t you think they’d be here already? Invading Earth?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe we just happened to settle some planets that the aliens thought were theirs to begin with.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Ben said. “War is war. We fight, or we lose.”

“Spoken like a man who just said he’d never go to space as a soldier,” Tia said, turning her sarcasm on our mutual friend.

“Hey, if the battle comes to Earth, I’ll do what I have to, just like everyone else,” Ben said defensively. “I’m just not in a hurry to go up and be roach food, you know what I mean?”

We all nodded our heads.

It was easy to talk options, with the mantis threat almost entirely removed from our daily lives.

Still, I kept looking over my shoulder at the Fleet recruiter.

When I went home that night, I sat on the family living room couch and flipped the recruiter’s card over and over and over in my fingers. Mom and Dad were still at work, and wouldn’t be home until later. I noticed that the card had a chip in it.

I eyed the Total Entertainment System in the corner of the living room.

Like most virtual reality units on the market, the TES looked a lot like a huge egg, with two steps leading up to the hatch in the side. I got up and slowly went over to the unit, eyeing the small slot on the TES’s control panel—a slot just big enough to accept the card the recruiter had given me.

I looked up through the numerous clear windows that made up the arched ceiling above my head, and noticed the moon was just starting to come out. The Fleet often did training exercises there now. Spacesuited infantry and armor units, practicing for the day when they might be hurled into battle against the mantis hordes.

I slipped the recruiter’s card into the slot on the TES, climbed in, sat down, and shut the hatch.

It was a little unnerving, being in the TES unsupervised. Mom and Dad had very strict rules about that. I’d been punished more than once. It was easy to get lost in the virtual environment. For hours, or even days. VR had become so realistic that habitual users risked drifting over into disconnect: a clinically diagnosed condition, which left the user believing that not only was the VR experience more real than real, it was also preferable to real.

I inhaled once, then used my fingers in the air to swipe and drag the VR digital menus until the TES booted up whatever program was on the card in the exterior slot.

Almost instantly, I was plunged into a total surround starscape, with impressive full orchestra music that piped through the stereo speakers on either side of my head rest.

“A challenge awaits,” said a deep baritone voice. “The galaxy needs men and women who can meet that challenge.”

A planet appeared, then grew larger. It was Earth, if I had the shapes of the continents right. Then the view zoomed down into Earth orbit, where several asteroids from the asteroid belt had been artificially inserted. The view zoomed in again, and showed the shipyards on the surfaces of the asteroids. The spines and ribs of numerous large vessels were being busily constructed, while other ships—further along in the construction process—were being detached and floated into formation for their final fittings.

“The Fleet is humanity’s sword and shield against all dangerous life before us,” the voice boomed. “Millions of men and women from across the solar system, and also the colonies, are doing their part to ensure that humanity is protected. Our lives kept safe and secure.”

Suddenly the view rapidly dropped past the asteroid shipyards, down a dizzying number of kilometers, through the clouds, and right up to the tarmac of a nameless spaceport. There were people standing in four rows—what appeared to be a rectangular formation. They were of generally young age, both genders, and varying ethnicities. They stared straight ahead of them, chins out and eyes steely. One by one their civilian clothes were computer morphed into uniforms not too different from the one I’d seen the recruiter wearing at school earlier in the day.

“Pilots, technicians, computer programmers, military police, infantry, armament and weapons specialists, they’re all needed, and the Fleet needs you to do your part for humanity’s future.”

It felt as if I was sitting directly in the midst of the formation with them. The sun was bright, and I could hear a seagull crying in the distance. From where the view had dropped down from orbit, I guessed that this particular spaceport was supposed to be on the California coast?