The Chaplain’s Legacy Read Free Page B

adult?”
    I’d learned from the Professor that the mantes had two stages in their life cycle. Upon hatching from their eggs, they were mindless herbivores, consuming vegetable matter over a period of months until entering their transformative pupa stage. Only upon emergence from the chrysalis did a newly-carnivorous mantis achieve actual sapience. Prior to that, the larval mantis was about as intelligent as a box of rocks.
    “Nobody questions your technological prowess,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I looked quickly behind the Queen Mother to see the Professor floating dead still, his gaze locked on her.
    “When the Professor and I first met, it was shocking to discover that you mantes cared anything at all about how or what a human believed. I didn’t think it was possible. I’d only ever seen your people maiming and killing my people. And yet, the Professor showed me you are a complex race. Old and powerful, but also with a history of patient curiosity. Such that on prior occasions—when you’ve let your thirst for expansion overrule your prudence—you’ve genuinely regretted those choices.”
    “Some of us have,” said the Queen Mother, her beak snapping shut. “But not all.”
    “What would be gained,” I said, “by throwing away the armistice? It’s been a long time since humans shed mantes blood, and vice versa. I think the ceasefire is pretty good evidence that our two societies can learn to share the galaxy. Sometimes, we may even share the same planet, if after a fashion.”
    Purgatory was still technically mantis property. Myself and the few hundred humans who’d stuck around after the return of the Earth ships, had more or less managed to stay out from under mantes feet. It wasn’t an equal partnership. More like,  keep the noise down so the landlords don’t show up with artillery.  But it was a persistent peace, and the more time I’d spent around the Professor—and later, his students—the more I’d become convinced that humans and the mantes had more in common than either they or we suspected.
    I waited while the Queen Mother’s antennae wove a thoughtful pattern in the air.
    “You are dangerous to us,” she said. “Or is the squadron of warships that greeted my delegation your idea of a friendly gesture?”
    I looked behind me: at the general, and the captain.
    “She has a point, sir, and ma’am,” I said.
    “I’m not a fool,” Sakumora retorted sourly. He looked past me to the Queen Mother, and his tone got sharper when next he spoke. “Who is more threatening to whom? What are my staff and I supposed to think about those battle exercises your ships have been conducting? For the first time in several years, eh? What have you got to say about that?”
    The Professor seemed to visibly shrink in on himself.
    I guessed that even the mantes never spoke that way to their leader. Much less a human. The Queen Mother’s posture was erect, and motionless. For an instant I recalled visceral memories of mantis troops striking with lightning lethality, carving into human flesh. I raised my hands instinctively in the air between the two leaders, trying to physically damp down the mood, which had grown dangerously electric.
    “You both asked me to come here,” I said, swiveling my head from one party to the next, and back again. “But if both of you are determined to see evil in the actions of the other, no matter what I say, there really isn’t anything I can do. A new war is inevitable.”
    “A war we would absolutely win,” the Queen Mother said.
    “Are you that sure?” the general replied.
    “Stupid human, you would do no better against us than you did the first time.”
    Now it was Sakumora who remained motionless. He seemed to be deciding something. I stared at him, feeling altogether uncomfortable. Before I could shout for him to stop, his left hand reached out and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of him. The lights in the chamber dimmed, and went