The Chaplain's War by Brad R. Torgersen Page B

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