“All systems ready for departure, sir.”
“Please display the cargo manifest.”
The manifest included heavy machinery, sophisticated research equipment, machine tools and medical equipment. Attached to the manifest was Federation Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorization documentation for the ten new, yet to be fueled, nuclear reactors listed on the manifest. Had Greg examined the documentation more closely, he would have seen that these reactors were the same model as the reactors in his and his wife’s P I ships. This certainly was a strange cargo. Greg was surprised that there were no munitions and no weapons other than their two warships. The lack of agricultural products in the cargo seemed odd. Wherever they were going was an unusual place.
“How soon can we depart?” Greg asked the computer.
“As soon as you are ready. The sooner the better.”
Greg verified that everyone was in their flight seats and requested clearance from the traffic controller. Once the protocols had been observed, Greg said, “Shall we light the candle and blow this pop stand?”
Avi leaned over and took her husband’s hand. “Onward and upward,” she smiled.
Greg engaged the reactor and headed for the quiet of open space. Once they were clear of local traffic, the ship jumped into hyper drive and sped towards its destination. Greg was accustomed to traveling between stars within the same arm of the galaxy, but this was the first time he had jumped between the arms. Even in hyper drive, this was a long trip. Running at two G acceleration and subsequent deceleration, the trip would take three months, thirteen weeks, exactly ninety-one days. That is a long time for five people to be locked up in one very tiny spacecraft with precious few ways to escape each other’s company. While the trip from their previous home, “Homestead”, to Earth took three months, it was generally done at one G and was therefore much less stressful.
For most of the first two weeks of the voyage, everyone slept when they were not on watch. Greg had divided the day into four six-hour watches. The watches were redundant. The ship flew itself and needed no human intervention once hyper drive was established. Changing the course once the transition to hyper drive had been made was extremely difficult and, barring a mechanical failure, there was nothing to do that the ship’s computer could not handle on its own.
With the psychological weight of the battles fought in the previous few months and the physical weight of two G of acceleration, sleep was a welcome relief. A third of the way into the voyage, Rachel went looking for her grandmother and could not find her. “Computer, where is Rose?”
“Rose is in your mother’s ship,” the computer answered.
“I thought it was shut down.”
“She asked me to turn it on so she could go there to be alone.”
Rachel did not like the thought of her grandmother alone in a warship designed to challenge a fleet of warships and survive. Pirate Interdiction ships and the people who flew them were a breed apart. Both Rachel’s parents were P I pilots. “One of the coolest, meanest, nastiest, toughest, most heavily armed little warships ever built,” was how her mother described her ship.
In a desperate attempt to stem the wave of space borne piracy that threatened the stability of the Federation, the “PI” ship had been designed as a sort of “Lone Ranger” in space. The Space Force essentially gave a band of people with recognized homicidal psychopathic tendencies a license to kill and the weapons with which to do it. With the controls activated, there were entirely too many ways Rose could accidentally hurt herself or them. Rachel made her way through the airlock to the other ship and found the combat displays around the fire control position almost completely closed. Rose was inside the sphere of displays and, short of damaging one of them, there was no way to get her out. In full combat mode, the displays formed an air tight seal which could protect the fire control officer from a hull breach that would kill the crew on the flight deck. Rachel thought she heard a sob and a sniffle. Rachel was good at many things, but dealing with people crying was not one of them. It was time to go for help.
“Mom, Grandma’s in your ship. She’s in the back seat and has the displays closed. What do we do?” Rachel said when she returned to the cargo ship’s control room.
“Computer, how long has Rose been in my ship?”
“Thirty six hours.”
“Have you disabled the fire control systems?”
“Yes. All systems except life support have been disabled.”
“Can you report on what she has been doing in there?”
“She exercised a little, slept fitfully and mostly she has been crying. I tried to distract her with movies, but I think I made matters worse. She must have loved him very much.”
“Who?” Avi asked.
“Your father. She called his name several times.”
“That’s not good,” Rachel commented, “why would she be doing that?”
Avi sighed. “My mother has always been a pacifist. She and my father went to peace rallies when they were dating. She hated the idea of war and the destruction it caused. She longed for peaceful resolutions. Even in the family she tried to maintain peace. Being here with us under these conditions must be quite a shock. Look at what her life has become in just the last few months. She killed how many men in combat? Three? Four? Five? There’s the one she shot on the foot bridge. Will we ever know how many of those Marines she killed when she was hiding in the bottom of the pond? And then there’s the one she shot at point blank range.”
“The one that raped Lonnie,” Rachel added.
“Yes, she looked him in the eye and shot him in the face. I thought she was going to spit on him. I had no idea she’d shoot him. If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have believed it. She hated the fact that I entered the military. She most certainly did not want me killing people. It bothered her that we had turned you girls into fighters.”
“Yes, I know,” Rachel said. “She told me.”
“Now look what her life has become. She is a warrior. She is what she did not want to be.”
“Is she really?” Rachel asked. “The guy that raped Lonnie, she shot him in anger. The guy on the bridge, she shot him in anger because he destroyed our house. The other guys she shot because they would have killed her. She had reasons to do what she did. It was personal. For us it’s not. It’s cold. There are no faces. There are no names. Well, except for Stonebridge and his guards, but that was self-defense. For her, these are real men with real faces. Kind of like that guy Helen killed by kicking him in the throat. She never really got over that.”
“Helen had to kill him, or he would have killed Myra.”
“I know that, and she knows that, but her emotions won’t let her forget it.”
“The question is what do we do about it?”
“Do about what?” Wendy asked sleepily as she wandered out of her quarters to the flight deck.
“Grandma locked herself in Mom’s ship and won’t come out.”
Wendy rubbed her eyes and stretched. “I wondered how long it would take. I’ll get her. Give me a couple of hours. I can take care of this.”
Wendy yawned and headed back to her room. A few minutes later she emerged looking only slightly more awake than she was before, but she was wearing her flight suit instead of her pajamas. She wandered back to the galley and after a brief search of the freezer found what she was looking for. She yawned again and with an armload of prepared food, scratched the back of her head and meandered off in the direction of her grandmother holed up in her mother’s ship.
Wendy entered the ship through the air lock and proceeded to the crew compartment behind the flight deck. The P I ship’s flight deck was much smaller than the cargo ship’s. It had two seats, where the cargo ship had three, and it only had one bunk where the cargo ship had two crew cabins and six passenger cabins, one of which Wendy was using. Designed for a crew of two, but usually operated solo, the P I ship’s crew accommodations were cramped at best. Wendy paused to look out
the view port at the blackness of space. The few galaxies she saw in the darkness were unimaginably far away. The other side of the ship faced the center of the galaxy they were traveling around.
Wendy popped open the oven and slid in one of the containers she had taken from the cargo ship’s freezer. The remainder she put in the freezer in the P I ship’s galley. Within a few minutes, the faint scent of cinnamon wafted out of the oven.
Wendy heard rustling noises inside the display shell and knew she was on the right track. Her grandmother had not eaten for a couple of days, and cinnamon buns were her favorite snack. Wendy stretched out in the bunk at the back of the crew compartment while she waited.
“How do you open this?” Rose asked quietly.
“Push the yellow handle away from you slowly.”
“Oh, there it is.”
Wendy stood as the servos opened the shell formed by the displays. Rose took a few tentative steps and fell into Wendy’s arms. Wendy picked her grandmother up like a child and set her on the bunk. She opened the oven and broke apart the package of rolls. “Share?” Wendy asked in her most childlike voice.
Rose smiled, “Share.”
They ate the rolls in silence for a few minutes. Wendy wandered to the pilot’s seat. “What are you doing?” Rose asked.
“Disabling the monitoring equipment. This way no one can hear what we say,” Wendy replied.
“That’s kind of you.”
“Well, you are my grandmother, and I do need to take care of you.”
“I thought I was supposed to take care of you.”
Wendy laughed and cut off the system. The only information about their activities available to the remainder of the family anxiously waiting in the cargo ship’s control room came from the motion sensors incorporated in the cargo ship’s navigation systems. For twenty-four hours, Avi, Rachel and Greg stood watch to see when Wendy and Rose would emerge.
Wendy arrived on the cargo ship’s flight deck first. “She’ll be fine. She needs lots of TLC and she’ll get used to the idea of what happened. She needed to understand she is still the same person she was before only different.”
Rachel made a face that said “I don’t understand.”
“Just love her like before and everything will work out.”
Laboring under the stress of the two G acceleration, Rose entered the cargo ship’s flight deck. Rachel and Avi ran to her. Even Greg, who was not normally as demonstrative as his wife or daughters, hugged Rose protectively. Together they settled her in the flight engineer’s seat.
“Are you all right?” Avi asked. “We can slow down to one G if it will help.”
“Avi, the last time you asked me that question, what did I tell you?”
“That was then, and this is now.”
“The answer is the same. We need to get where we’re going.”
“I’m worried about you,” Avi said.
“We all are,” Greg added.
“Don’t be. Thanks to my brilliant granddaughter, I will be just fine.”
All eyes turned to Wendy. “What did you say?” Rachel asked.
“I said a lot of things.” Wendy ducked the question, “but I don’t spill secrets. Unlike someone else I know.” She elbowed her sister.
Rose smiled. “Wendy! Be nice to your sister for a change.”
Rose turned to face Avi. “She offered to take me anywhere I wanted to go. She said she could split the small ship off from the big one and take me anywhere in the galaxy I wanted to go. I’m not sure I believed her, but I wanted to believe her. We talked about where we would go and what we would do when we got there. We decided that anywhere we went together was probably better than where we might go apart and since we were all going this way now, we might as well keep going and see what we found.”
Unable to follow the logic, Rachel shook her head. “Amazing.”
Rose looked at Rachel and then to Wendy. “This is why the two of you must always work together. You are so different and yet so alike. If you work together you could rule the galaxy. Apart, well, we won’t go there, will we Avi?”
“No, mother, some things are best left alone.”
ERETZ - CHAPTER TWO
TWELVE YEAR OLD EMERSON Winthrop III went to the post office to pick up the package. He carefully shook the snow off his boots before entering the building. Small for his age, his head barely cleared the counter. He handed the attendant the card he found in his mailbox when he arrived home from school. His mother worked second shift at the fabric mill, and somehow she could never remember to check the mail before she left for work.
He knew what the package was before the attendant gave it to him. He had not heard from his father in a year. The Swordsmen had been crushingly defeated in a battle, and his father’s unit had been part of the battle. The box looked like the type that electronic games come in. “Merry Christmas,” the attendant had said. Emerson had smiled at the man even though Swordsmen do not celebrate Christian holidays.
Emerson did not cry until he opened the box. The box contained his father’s effects. There was a letter addressed to him. His father always called him “Runt” because he was so small.
“Hey, Runt, I must be dead if you are reading this letter. If I am dead I know I died in the service of the Shogun, our Warrior Lord. He lifted me up and gave me forgiveness for my sins. I was dirty, and he made me clean. It is a great honor to serve Him. I know you will become a great soldier in His name like me. Take care of your mother. Do not let her marry outside of the religion. Find who killed me, and kill them for me. Whoever killed me is a heathen infidel and deserves to die a painful death. Make them suffer and understand the power of the mighty Shogun. They should die knowing the error of their ways as the Shogun has spoken. You are the point of the sword. Let the Shogun’s teachings guide your path. Your loving father.”
Emerson left his homework and the box on the kitchen table and went to bed. He had been taught to honor his father and do as he had been told. He did not remember a loving father. He remembered a father who hated him. He remembered a father that was angry because his seed produced a son that was not big and strong, but small and weak. Emerson wanted his mother to remarry. He wanted her to marry a man that would love her and take care of her and not yell at her all the time. He hoped she would not marry another Swordsman like his father.
Emerson awoke to the sound of his mother screaming. She had found the box when she arrived home from work. He tried to comfort her but she pushed him away. There were two letters open on the table that had arrived with the mail. He read the first one. It was addressed to his mother.
“It is with heavy heart that I must inform you of the death of your husband / father / brother / son. Rest assured that he died valiantly in the service of the Shogun, our Warrior Lord, and has risen to him in glory. His place in heaven is his reward for his valiant service. Attached please find the final payment for the services he has rendered to the Swordsman Church. As this concludes our obligations to you, the elders of the Swordsman Church wish that you may live in the favor and light of the spirit of the Shogun all the rest of your days.”
The one from the Federation Joint Military at least had her name spelled correctly.
“Your husband has been confirmed to have been killed in combat at the planet of Homestead. The exact circumstances of his death are still being determined. His helicopter was shot down, but he survived the crash. His body was found some distance away from the helicopter. He had been shot at close range and died of the gunshot wounds. Due to the fact that your husband died in combat in the service of a military force other than the Federation on a planet other than the one his unit was authorized to protect, there will be no survivor benefits. If you feel that you are deserving of survivor benefits, you may send an appeal in writing to the address above.”
Emerson stood in the semi-darkness of the kitchen. Without his father’s military pay and no survivor benefits, how were they going to have enough money to eat? No wonder his
mother had screamed. What were they to do? Emerson went to bed and slept fitfully. He heard his mother arise several times during the night. When Emerson went to school, his mother was in her room. He dared not wake her for fear of her anger after not being able to sleep the night before. His mind was not on his schoolwork that day. He told no one of his father’s death. When he returned from school, his mother’s coat was still on the back of the door. Slowly, fearfully, he opened his mother’s bedroom door. He could not hear her breathing. He reached out to touch her and she was cold.
“Overdose of sleeping pills,” the policeman said. Before the night was over, Emerson was in a city-run orphanage with only the clothes from his closet in a locker at the end of his bed. Everything else had been taken to pay their debts to their landlord.
The orphanage was too far from his old school for him to walk so he went to a new school that was not as good as his old school. Big boys beat him up after school so he took to staying late in the library. As long as he was back in time for supper, no one in the orphanage cared where he went or what he did. Every night after supper he hid in a small store room and read until it was time for bed. He did not associate with the other children even though many of them were orphans of Swordsman soldiers. Every Sunday a Swordsman minister came to give services for the Swordsman children. The minister reminded Emerson of his obligation to carry on his father’s legacy.
Too small to pass the physical for the Swordsman Marines, Emerson searched for another solution. A recruiting poster for the Space Force implied that people of smaller stature were welcome to apply for positions as pilots and flight engineers. Emerson used the public school’s computers in the media center to research the Space Force and found out that many of the Space Force’s officers were as small as he was. There was no way he could pay for college on his own, but there was money in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. In two years he would be old enough. There was a chapter at his school. He would need to bring his grades up, but he would be able to do that if he studied enough. The best part was that the Federation would pay for his education and he could then use that education against them as a Swordsman Space Force officer.
Solomon Family Warriors II Page 33
