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.I suddenly and intensely regretted my decision to join the Fleet.Chaplain Thomas must have read my facial expression.“God’s will,” he said.“What, sir?” I asked.“God’s will, Harrison.Try to look at it as God’s will—His plan for all of us.”“This is part of God’s plan?” I said, half-incredulous.“Everything is part of God’s plan,” he said.“Sir, I mean no disrespect, but you have to be out of your mind to think that any of this is part of anybody’s plan, except for maybe the mantes.Their plan appears to have worked out quite well.We came here to kick them in the teeth, and instead it seems they’re quite nicely effing us in the ass, sir.If there is a God, then His attention is focused very, very far away from here.”“Faith, Harry,” he said to me, then began coughing and hacking.I decided not to vent my anger any further, as his attempts to remonstrate me were simply causing him pain.I stood up from where the chaplain lay, and walked over to where some technicians from the assault carrier’s crew were trying to use a big hunk of a control panel and a jury-rigged battery connection, to talk to anyone in our vicinity.“Nothing?” I said.One of the specialists looked up at me and shook her head.“Figures,” I said.“We’re blind.Probably, Fleet doesn’t even know where we are.I am surprised those mantis fighters we’ve been seeing haven’t come down on us.”“The day is young,” said a different woman—older, with plain, stern features.Her chevrons indicated a platoon sergeant.“Forget the wireless,” she said to the techs.“We’ve got to scrounge up an anti-air defense.”“With what, Sergeant?” one of the techs asked.“Anything you can salvage.There were a lot of missiles in that assault carrier, and more missiles on some of the tanks.Not all of them have been destroyed.I’m taking a team back to the crash site to look for hardware that we can salvage.Get ready to move in two mikes.You too, church-boy.”“But I’ve got to—”“You’re a soldier first, and there’s nothing you can do for Chaplain Tom right now.We need everybody who’s not pulling security to get on salvage detail.That’s an order.”I did a yessergeant and went to tell the chaplain the plan.Unfortunately he’d already passed out from the pain.With no medics, I had no idea how we’d bring him back around now.With rifles at the low ready and marching in a tactical column, we streamed out beyond the perimeter, around the base of the low hill, and back towards the smoldering, evil-looking furrow our carrier had dug into the planet’s surface.Chapter 45It took them three days to come up with something palatable for me to eat.At which time I was so ravenous I actually thought I might eat a plate of dog shit—just to still the hunger pangs and get rid of the headaches.It wasn’t gourmet by any means, but the engineers had managed to come up with five different “bricks” of edible material which were sufficiently non-gag-worthy that I could put them down.Each of the five pretended to represent one of the human food groups I’d explained to my hosts: meats, vegetables, grains, dairy, and fruits.None of it would have passed muster in any Fleet mess hall I knew.But I packed it away with gusto nonetheless.And was grateful to sleep with a full belly for the first time in weeks.The problem of the clothes washer was remedied after several tries.They ultimately wired up a box with a spinning drum in it, much as I’d advised, with an attached clean water source as well as a waste water receptacle.The detergent provided was adequate for washing hands and doing the laundry alike, though there was little hope of actual fabric softener.Such a concept was simply too foreign for them to grasp, though they promised they’d keep working on it.They also built me a chair, a desk, a small rack upon which to hang my clothes, a chest of drawers for other items from the packs, as well as a holographic stand which allowed me to fill half the room with a starlight exterior view of the ship.“Quite a night light,” I said, regarding the display.“Is that not a contradictory purpose?” one of the technicians said.“It’s a human phrase,” I said.“A night light is usually a soft, small, or dim light you leave on in a bedroom overnight.Usually for children, who are often afraid of the dark.”“Human children…pupa?” said one of the mantes.“Not pupa, no,” I said.“Immature adults.They can think and reason and use tools the way adults do, just not that well because their brains are not fully developed and they are much smaller, with less experience.”The three engineers seemed to consider this a remarkable piece of information.“We had no idea,” they said.“Just what do you know about humans anyway?” I asked.“You are the first live human we have come into contact with, and we know next to nothing.Save for the fact that you are the third sapient species our race has ever discovered, and that the mantis you called the Professor was instrumental in convincing the Quorum of the Select to delay exterminating you.Though it seems your ultimate destiny was only delayed, not avoided
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