Faith & Empire: Book One of The Holy Terran Empire

11. Homeward Bound

Long hauls through space were everyone's least favorite part about being an Imperial Marine. The eight-month journey to Muvuru certainly bore that out. It was certainly the longest trip through space I had ever endured. The ten-week trip from Earth to our Regiment's HQ on Saint Ambrose was the most time I had spent canned up aboard a starship until then. The memory of it felt like a weekend jaunt compared to the time we spent searching for Muvuru.

Officers and marines with many years under their belts warned us a long stretch of travel aboard a starship, whose sleeping quarters made our regimental barracks feel spacious, would become a purgatory of tedium if we let it.

We did not.

Daily Mass and the Liturgia Horarum provided us with structure to regulate our days and nights. The scheduled, shared prayers enhanced the discipline that made for the smooth running of the ship. All of us took advantage of the free time between prayers as best we could. We caught up on our studies, our reading, sent holos to loved ones, spent long sessions at the gym, working out, sparring and fencing.

To relax, the hangars could accommodate make-shift volley and hoop ball courts. We also played cards and other games and watched the occasional holoflix.

On this particular trip, we also had us a boatload of civilians to interact with. On the Lepanto, we had two hundred and fifty civvies to be exact.

Fifty of them were prisoners and they didn't interact with anyone but their jailers and the ship Inquisitor.

The other two hundred were our guests, the majority of which, being pilgrims on their way to Earth when they were kidnapped, were somewhat familiar with our ways. They had mostly done their due diligence as thoughtful tourists and learned what they could about their destination beforehand.

Yet despite that, for them and the others, living among us was an awkward affair, especially those first few weeks while the battle group repaired its ships. The civvies were genuinely grateful to us for rescuing them from the pirates, but initially, most of them were also rather guarded around us and generally kept to themselves. Their initial aloofness struck me as an uneasy admixture of personal deference for their saviors and the general prejudice against our Empire so ubiquitous beyond our borders.

We were bemused by it all as we carried on with our duties and our lives. Here and there we gently prodded those passengers we came across into friendly conversation as Izzy and I had done with the three UDW boys, who having lost their parents developed something of a brotherly bond between them.

Aloofness gave way to curiosity before too long. Our guests finally opened up and began initiating the conversations, making polite inquiries about all manner of matters concerning both our Faith and our Empire. We answered their questions to the best of our ability and encouraged them to access our library files for any further research they cared to pursue.

Starting around the third month, a few civies could always be found sitting in the back of the ship's chapel curiously observing our liturgy.

Menenius, Timon and Kori sought out Izzy and/or me whenever either or both of us found ourselves in the mess hall. When not with us, the boys could sometimes be found with the Operations Specialists, Hassan and Bourne or gathered under First Sergeant Hayes wing in our gym, studiously applying themselves to his self-defense lessons.

Other marines and ship's crew formed similar fledgling relationships with our guests.

The most striking of these relationships was between a young couple, practitioners of a new noosophic cult gaining popularity on the Union capital world of Ursong and Chaplain Egan.