Lights in the Deep (26 page)

Sakumora was a short, muscular, stern-faced flag officer who neither smiled, nor offered any pleasantries as I entered the room. Two lieutenants attended to his needs, while the captain sat at his side, and two marines guarded opposite corners of the space. Against what, I had no idea. But protocol was protocol, and some things never change.

“Sir,” I said, approaching his desk and saluting, “Serg-ahhh, I mean, Warrant Officer Barlow, reporting as ordered.”

“Sit down,” was all he said.

I took a chair which had been offered to me by one of the general’s attaches. For the first time, I noticed the captain’s expression. Her eyes were turned down and staring at the space in front of my knees.

“I’ll get to the point,” said Sakumora gruffly. “We’ve got compelling evidence that the mantes are building strength for a renewed offensive. Everybody knows the generalities of what you did here, on this little dustball of a world. I’ve reviewed the records, your own file, and the reports given to me by my officers who’ve been to Purgatory. There was never any guarantee that the mantes would hold off on their so-called Fourth Expansion indefinitely. I’m afraid time’s up.”

My feet and hands went cold.

When the Professor had first come to me, the entire human population of Purgatory had been sealed behind an energy barrier that was lethal on contact. The mantes had been using it to slowly annihilate us when the Professor—through what passed for a higher education network in mantis culture—had effected a compromise: as long as he and his fellows in mantis academia needed humans for cultural study, the mantes as a whole would delay the annihilation of humans on Purgatory, as well as their planned final conquest of human space.

If the general was correct, the academic stay had been overruled, and humanity’s reprieve was drawing to a close.

So far as I knew, we were as defenseless as ever. The mantes were a much older and technologically superior race. Human ships and weapons amounted to little against mantis shields. For the sake of morale, when the war had been hot, the Fleet hadn’t broadly revealed its numerous and inevitable defeats—human colonies seized by the mantes and cleansed of all ‘competitive’ life. Only after the armistice and the Fleet’s slow return did anyone come clean about the truth.

I cleared my throat.

“What do you expect me to do about it, sir?”

“Do what you did before,” he said matter-of-factly. “Get this collective of…scholars, or whatever they are, to talk to their political leadership. Stage protests. Sit-ins.
Anything
that can hold the mantes for a few more years.”

“Assuming I could do it,” I said carefully, “would it make that much of a difference? I don’t think we’re any closer to fending them off than we were before.”

The general looked over to Captain Adanaho. She raised her eyes to me. “Few people have been told this, so I’m ordering you to keep it secret, but we’ve managed to develop a working copy of their shielding technology—what I think you referred to in your notes as The Wall. In the process we think we’ve found a way to penetrate those same shields.”

I startled.

“Is that so?” I said. “How exactly did we make this extraordinary breakthrough?”

“That’s none of your concern,” the general snapped, “all you’re here to do is get the damned mantes to delay their attack. Until we’re ready.”

“Sir, what makes you think I have any more influence on the mantes than the Fleet’s team of expert diplomats?” I said, throwing my hands out in exasperation. “It’s not like I’m some kind of genius about this stuff. The Professor—the first mantis I dealt with, ten years ago—just happened to reveal certain information that wound up being important. And I had nothing to lose. That my bargain convinced him, and that his compatriots had the leverage and coordination to affect Mantis Quorum policy, were flukes.”

“Nevertheless,” said the general, “you
will
try.”

“We depart in one hour,” Adanaho said. “You’ll have a few days to prepare, before we meet the mantis delegation.”

Chapter 3

We met them in orbit around a nameless terrestrial planet, far from the boundaries if human space. The mantis ships were shaped like mammoth footballs, their surfaces studded with sensors and weaponry. I watched the alien vessels through the portholes of the Fleet frigate,
Calysta.
We’d brought some big stuff too. Opposite the cluster of mantes vessels—across the black expanse of space—was a squadron of Earth dreadnoughts unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Not that size and armament would do a lick of good if those new ships couldn’t break through the mantis shields, as Adanaho had suggested. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to find out, though I still wasn’t sure anything I did or said could make a difference otherwise.

I looked over to Captain Adanaho, who had followed me to the observation deck.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

“That means the general wants us there in five,” I said.

She smirked at me.

“Always arrive ten minutes before you’ve been told,” I said with a slight smile, “and then it’s hurry-up-and-wait.”

“The years on Purgatory haven’t completely dulled your memory,” she said. “Though it’s obvious you’re not happy about your current position.”

I looked down at my uniform.

“No, ma’am, not really. I was nineteen when I signed up. The Fleet tried to take Purgatory a couple of years later, and then I spent the rest of my time either as a prisoner, or trying to follow through on a promise I made to my old boss before he died.”

“It must have been an important promise,” she said.

“I thought so,” I said.

“But didn’t you consider that promise fulfilled, once the armistice was reached?”

“Not really, because by then the Professor and his school kids were showing up all the time. Plus, I had more human customers coming in the door than I’d ever had before. People seemed to think the chapel was special. Significant. It grew to be a landmark in the valley.
Somebody
had to stick around and sweep up. And it’s not like I had anything more important to do. Maybe if the Fleet had returned right away, I’d have jumped at a chance to go home. But when a couple of years went by and it was obvious that Fleet wasn’t coming back to Purgatory any time soon, I decided to make my plans for the chapel into long-term plans.”

“And yet our research shows that you don’t hold services there,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Like I said, I’m not a chaplain. I’m just the assistant. This little silver bar you guys put on my collar, it doesn’t make me a chaplain either.”

“Would you like to be?”

I thought about it, still looking outside into deep space. Something I had not seen in many years.

“No,” I said, slipping my hands into my pants pockets. Like having facial hair, hands in pockets was also against regulation. But screw it, certain rules are made to be broken.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I’m not a preacher,” I admitted. “I’m also not a theologian.”

“So why even become an assistant? Of all the jobs in the Fleet available to you?”

“Seemed like the best fit,” I said. “I’m not a tactical guy, and I’m not that great with equipment either. But people? I like people. When hostilities with the mantes broke out, some of my friends signed up immediately. I kind of went along for the ride. It was a chance at to go to space. What kid doesn’t dream about that? But I didn’t want to kill stuff nor fix stuff nor do a lot of the other work on the list the recruiter showed me.”

She shook her head.

“And yet you were the one who managed to use the single piece of leverage we needed to stop the mantes.”

“Yeah,” I said, “dumb luck, that.”

She checked her watch.

“Well, it’s time to see if you can’t scare up a little more, padre.”

We walked from the porthole to the nearest lift car, went down three decks, and wound our way to the frigate’s largish main conference room. Marines in freshly-pressed uniforms guarded the hatches, with rifles at port arms. There were some mantes guards as well, their lower thoraxes submerged into the biomechanical “saddles” of their hovering, saucer-shaped discs.

Every mantis I’d ever seen was technically a cyborg. Their upper halves were insectoid—complete with bug eyes, fearsome beaks, antennae, wings, and serrated-chitin forelimbs. Their lower halves were integrated into their mobile, floating saucers. It was the saucers—the computers and equipment in them—which allowed the mantes to speak to humans, and have our own speech translated back into their language, among many other things.

The mantes guards all raised forelimbs in my direction as we approached, though they seemed to be ignoring the captain.

I blushed in spite of myself, and raised a hand in return.

Was I
that
well known among the aliens?

We entered the conference room, and I stopped short.

There was the Professor—whom I considered a friend, and whom I’d not seen in a long time—and a larger, much older looking mantis on whom all human eyes were focused.

The human contingent was arrayed around a half-moon table with chairs and computers and various recording devices.

The two mantes merely floated in the air, about waist high.

I smiled, and in spite of protocol walked quickly up to the Professor.

“Hello,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to see you again.”

“You would have not, Harry,” said the Professor, “had circumstances evolved differently.”

If the Professor had a name, it was unpronounceable for humans. The skitter-scratch mandible-against-mandible language of the aliens was incomprehensible for us. And he’d always been addressed by title, even though he’d asked permission to be on a first-name basis with me.

A familiar throat was cleared to my rear.

I turned to Adanaho, who’s expression told me I was erring without knowing it. Behind her sat the general—staring hard.

“Sorry sir,” I said, then nodded knowingly to the Professor, and walked quickly to a seat that was offered to me. The captain sat down at my side, and after the general gave me one last lingering look, he ordered the doors closed, leaving us alone with our guests.

I checked my PDA. The captain and I were as early as we’d planned to be. Yet it appeared things were already well in motion.

Not good.

“Well,” the general said, “he’s here now. Since nothing me or my staff say seems to be worth anything to you, maybe you’ll listen to
him.
”

The old mantis behind the Professor floated forward.

“Padre,” it said to me, its vocoded speaker-box voice coming from the grill on the front of its disc. The creature’s beak did not move. The translator was tied directly into the mantis’s nervous system.

“That is what some call me,” I said. “May I ask who you are?”

“This is the Queen Mother,” said the Professor, his manner deferential as he introduced her. “She is the highest of the Select who rule our people. Her voice carries supreme authority within the Quorum of the Select.”

“She is your sovereign,” I said.

“Yes and no,” said the Professor. “She is elected, but she also shares a tremendous lineage, biologically. Her genetics run through countless mantes, over many of your generations.”

In other words, she was fecund, in addition to being old.

I sat up a little straighter.

“Ma’am,” I said to the Queen Mother, “of what service can I be to you?”

The Queen Mother floated forward a bit more, while the Professor floated back.

“Your name is spoken in my Quorum,” she said. “It is the only human name that has ever reached such height. When the one you call the Professor first came before me, many of our cycles ago, and petitioned for us to halt our Fourth Expansion, I considered him obtuse. Your superstition is of no consequence to me, nor do I have any use for it. And yet, the Professor had convinced a good many of his contemporaries that the elimination of your species—of your numerous modes of religion—would be detrimental to the advancement of mantes knowledge. And his colleagues had convinced many on the Quorum. Rather than force a contentious vote on the issue, I acquiesced, believing that the merit of the Professor’s proposed observation and research would become obvious in time. Even if I could see no value in it in the moment.”

She let a tiny silence hang in the air.

“I no longer feel the need for such forbearance.”

The room was dead silent, but the Queen Mother’s words had hit me like a thunderclap. It was one thing to hear the captain talk about a possible end to the peace. It was quite another to have the nominal leader of the
enemy
in front of me declaring that she was going to drop the hammer. I felt a slithering surety in my stomach: the Queen Mother would not bluff.

I cleared my throat experimentally, trying to shake off the dread I felt. The eyes of the officers behind me began to drill virtual holes in my back as I left my seat. The Queen Mother remained where she was.

“I have to think,” I said, voice shaking just a bit, “that your mind isn’t entirely made up. Otherwise why agree to this meeting at all? You could just as easily declare the ceasefire dead, launch your war armada, and have done with it.”

“There are still some,” she said, her triangular insect’s head tilting back in the Professor’s direction, “who petition me for further amity. I am not a hasty being. I listen to my intellectuals. If they say there is additional merit in long-term conciliation between our races, I am habitually obliged to entertain the notion—whether I agree with it or not. So rather than send a delegate, I came here myself. To meet the one human who has managed to alter the inevitable course of my empire. I had expected someone more impressive.”

“My apologies,” I said, “if my presence does not meet that expectation. As for what I can say or do to change your mind, I am not sure I can offer you much more than what I’ve already been able to offer to the Professor and his students. I am the chaplain’s assistant. I’ve counseled the Professor that he’d do well to seek out a bona fide
chaplain.
Or, if a military man is not in order, then there are the finest theologians, scholars, religious teachers, and clergymen Earth has to offer. If I have failed to provide enlightenment, surely someone else might be better suited.”