The Chaplain's War (8 page)

The image of the people standing in formation grew still, while a menu popped up. The menu listed dozens and dozens of different kinds of jobs.

I hit the first one that looked interesting to me: weapons maintainer.

One of the people standing in formation stepped out of line and smiled at me, saying, “Good choice! Come on, I’ll show you what I do!”

And suddenly I was being given a five-minute guided tour of that particular Fleet troop’s responsibilities and assignments. I was shown the tools she used, the programs she had to know, the kinds of weapons she worked with, how long the training would be, what kinds of opportunities there were in the Fleet for people in her occupational slot, and so forth. All of it as real as could be, rendered through the TES’s ultra-immersive VR environment.

One by one, I started swiping and selecting, letting the different virtual troops take me on tours of their jobs.

Much of it looked potentially interesting. Even the more macho stuff like infantry, gunnery, and flying. Which was a bit outside my particular taste, since until that afternoon I’d not seriously given the military—Fleet, or otherwise—any serious consideration.

But the recruiting program did have a point: if the mantis aliens were as dangerous as they seemed, who was going to protect the rest of us? What was it going to take, on the part of ordinary soon-to-be HS grads like me, to ensure that the Earth remained relatively safe?

Suddenly the program prematurely terminated, and the hatch to the TES popped open.

I was so jarred, I gave off a little yelp.

My dad leaned his head in.

“You know you’re not supposed to be using this thing when your mother and I aren’t home, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But there’s a good reason.”

“I already know the reason,” my dad said, tapping the silver recruiter’s card on the edge of the hatch.

“Out,” he said. “Let’s talk about this.”

I climbed through the hatch, suddenly grateful to be free of the small space. I’d been in there much longer than I’d initially thought. I stretched and bent my back from side to side, yawning.

“Come on,” my dad said.

I followed him into the kitchen where my mom had already started up the dining computer station which was rapidly taking the raw contents of that day’s grocery shopping and whipping them into something edible. I wasn’t sure what menu choice my mom had selected. I could only see the little robotic waldos inside the machine moving about rapidly, making shadow-box silhouettes on the unit’s frosted glass window.

“Recruiters are really pressing hard these days,” my mom said. “Frankly, Harrison, I was surprised to see that you’d actually talked to one of them. You never told your father or I that you had any interest in the military.”

“It’s just a recruiting thing,” I told them. “Me and my friends all got a card today. I figured it couldn’t hurt to examine my options. I mean, I
am
going to graduate next month.”

“And your grades are good enough to get you into a college,” my dad said firmly. “This whole Fleet thing . . . it seems like a good option for kids who don’t really have a lot of options. But you, Harry? You’ve got to think bigger than this.”

I felt my back starting to go up. Here it came again. The grand lecture.

“Dad—” I started, perhaps a bit more petulantly than I’d intended.

“Don’t,” he said, putting a hand firmly on my arm. “We’ve been over this and over this, and we’ll keep going over this until we’re clear. You’re only going to be eighteen once. The decisions you make in the next few months are going to resonate throughout your entire life. Don’t be impulsive. Think about the path you want to take. Think about the kind of life you want to live.”

“You mean, the life
you
want me to live,” I said to him.

“Now, Harry,” my mom said, “that’s not fair to your father, or to me either. We’re still your parents. We want you to be happy.”

“Do you really?” I said, my irritation growing every second that this too-familiar conversation carried on. “Because what it often seems like to me is that you’re more interested in me living the kind of life that will make
you
happy. Something nice, and plain, and ordinary.”

Dad’s grip on my arm tightened.

“Do you have any idea how much hard work it takes to build and maintain the sort of life we all enjoy here, in this house? Do you? No, of course you don’t. Which is really my fault. I should have made you get a job when you were old enough to work and still carry a class load. But your mother was afraid it would interfere with your studies. Now you listen to me, Harry. In this life, everything takes effort. Nothing is given to you. You look around at our life here and you think it’s boring. Well, that’s the opinion of a teenager. Your mother and I? We put in long hours every week to make sure it stays that way. Because you don’t want to find out what a not-boring life looks like. Trust me.”

I’d heard it before—just variations on a tired theme. My dad had grown up poor, the child of a single mother struggling with addiction demons. My grandmother had died before I was old enough to really remember her, but my dad always talked about his childhood being a rather barren thing, compared to mine.

“You think the only alternative to boring is recklessness,” I said to him. “I don’t want to be reckless. I just want . . . I want to find out what more
is
there in the world than here. Why is that so bad?”

His grip slowly released. His eyes—with bags under them—grew soft.

“No, that’s not bad, son. I remember feeling that way when I was your age. Just . . . this Fleet thing, you don’t really know what you’d be getting into. Nobody does.”

“The mantis aliens are real,” I said. “Fleet seems to be the only thing capable of doing anything about them.”

“True,” my mother said. “But like your father just told you, a military career is one of those choices best suited for people who don’t have many options. You
do
have options.”

“If I had the option I wanted,” I said, “I’d sign up for one of the colony expeditions. Go to the stars.”

“If you work hard and get an advanced degree,” my dad said, “maybe that will be something you can look into. In time. Seems to me Fleet’s just a shortcut to that goal. You’ve lived an easy life so far, Harry. You won’t like the military. Trust me.”

“How do you know, Dad? You never served.”

“I know,” he said, staring intently at me. “You’ll hate it.”

I stared right back at him, quietly fuming. Part of me wanted to go back to the cafeteria and sign up with the Fleet tomorrow, just to lock myself in and make it so that Dad couldn’t say another word otherwise. I was already of age. I could make the choice for myself.

But then, a little lingering voice in the back of my mind wondered if Dad wasn’t right? Maybe I would hate it? Worse yet, what if I hated it so much that I just couldn’t take it, and I washed out? What kind of face would I be seeing in the mirror then?

I looked at the recruiter’s card, still clutched in Dad’s other hand.

“Look,” I said, “it was just a thing, okay? I was curious. I didn’t put my signature on any dotted lines.”

“Good,” my mother said. “See that you don’t. You’re not even out of school yet. You have to focus on these last few weeks. Now help me set the table, because dinner’s going to be ready very soon.”

I did as I was told, and went to bed after the late meal—still wondering about what I might do.

The next morning, during first period, class was interrupted for a breaking news bulletin. The president and the secretary of defense were both shown at the White House podium, somberly reporting that the colony of New America had also been attacked. Again, by the mantis aliens. It was unknown whether there were any human survivors. Plans for a counteroffensive in the wake of the attack on Marvelous were now being redoubled, because it was clear the entirety of human space might be under imminent threat. The secretary of defense made a plea to the people of the United States for volunteers. The Fleet needed everyone it could get. Before any more of Earth’s colonies fell.

That afternoon, myself, Tia, David, Kaffy, and even Ben, stood in a long line of students at the Fleet recruiter’s table. One by one, we put our names and our thumbprints on the enlistment documents. As a mass group, we took an oath in front of the U.S. flag and a Fleet flag both. None of us had much of an idea what we wanted to do, once we were in. We just knew that this was one of those moments in human history when caution was not the better part of valor.

Something had to be done. And we were the ones who were going to do it.