The applause was deafening.
Greg looked at Avi. “I don’t know about you, but my traveling days are over. I think I would like to stay here.”
Avi took his hand with both of hers. “I think me and my old man are going to set here a spell.”
“Rose, Ellie Mae and Elvira have invited you to come visit any time you get bored.”
“I might take them up on that,” Rose answered.
Admiral Sherman continued. “The Smithsonian Institute has offered to purchase your P I ships less their reactors and weapons for a new exhibit they are preparing on the Swordsman wars. If you want to do this, I think we can spring for two new ships for you to fly.”
“I think we could do that,” Greg said.
Avi agreed.
“In return for the business you have sent them in the past, particularly the rescue system, Saturn Space Industries has offered to dry dock your cargo ship and outfit it with the latest amenities, hardware and software at no cost. They promise not to tamper with your computer friend’s personality. The job should take six months.”
“How will we get the ship there?” Greg asked.
“That’s the best part,” he grinned. “I saved the best for last.” He handed each of the young adults standing before him a letter on stationary from the Chief of Staff of the Federation Space Force. Commendations generally came in envelopes like these, and the six were genuinely excited. “Open them please,” he said proudly.
As they ripped open the envelopes he said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, you have been accepted to the Federation Space Flight Academy. You will find your uniforms in the foot locker at your feet.”
Pandemonium reigned as the foot lockers were opened and their contents displayed.
“Technically, since I am not an active duty Federation officer, I can't administer the oath. Admiral Dankese has graciously agreed to perform the ceremony.”
Admiral Dankese entered the room. She was dressed in formal whites and carried a ceremonial sword. The six new inductees lined up and repeated the oath as she recited it to them. She drew the sword and held it in vertically front of her face.
“This was Admiral Davidson’s sword, he had it made against the day when he could personally give you the Academy oath. He lived long enough to learn of your resounding defeat of the Swordsmen. He knew he would not survive the voyage and asked me to use his sword for the ceremony. He followed your careers and was very proud of you. It is in his name that I pronounce you Space Flight Cadets.”
She tapped the sword once on each of their shoulders before returning it to its scabbard. She removed the belt and offered the sword to Greg. “He wanted you to have this. You earned it.”
Tears flowed down Greg’s face. He bowed as he took the sword.
After a discrete wait, Rachel asked, “So how do we get there?”
“In the cargo ship, dummy!” Wendy answered. “You can be so slow sometimes. We take the ship to Saturn Space Industries ship yard and hop a shuttle from there. Right?”
“Right,” Admiral Sherman answered.
“How does the ship get back here?” Reuben asked. “We can’t take long enough in the summer break to ferry it back.”
“One of our students will graduate from the Federation Institute of Technology in Boston and one will come from Federation Tech in Atlanta shortly before you arrive. They will meet you at the ship yard and supervise the cargo ship’s overhaul and the delivery of the two P I ships to the Smithsonian. They will bring the cargo ship home.”
“We better hurry, we have a ship to catch!” Rachel exclaimed.
“Rachel, you are the captain for the voyage and due to the nature of your cargo you will have a Space Force escort. The P I ships attached to the cargo ship will be fully armed for the trip should you find the need to defend yourselves. You are carrying the first shipment of Disruptor missiles for delivery to the Space Force. Two of the new light attack destroyer prototypes will go with you.”
They departed two days later. Holding tight to her mother and grandmother in a flood of tears, Rachel said, “I wish you were coming with us.”
Wendy nodded, unable to speak through her tears.
Avi held her daughters and said, “We’ll come to graduation. It’s time you had your own adventures.”
ACADEMY - CHAPTER ONE
RESPLENDENT IN THEIR DRESS WHITES, with their blue berets emblazoned with gold six pointed stars, six cadets stood in the front left corner of the formation of freshmen on the flight line at the Federation Space Flight Academy in Academy Village, Utah. Alone among the students, they were authorized to wear the white dress uniform of the Eretz Defense Force. The cadets proudly displayed combat ribbons above their breast pockets. The three women of the group were Aces having killed five or more enemy craft in battle. Two of the women also displayed a second ribbon that came from a battle they had fought along with their parents when they were still teenagers.
Normally this ceremony was covered by limited numbers of reporters and media personalities. Due to the presence of the six distinguished combat veterans who had come to the Academy as students and not as instructors, special arrangements had been made to accommodate the media who suddenly took an interest in Academy activities. Once this ceremony was over, however, the grounds would once again be closed to civilians and Academy life would return to normal.
Many of the other cadets wore uniforms of the services from which they had come. Earth’s Navy, Air Force, Army and Marines were well represented by officers and enlisted personnel seeking advancement to their space traveling allies. A smattering of other planets were represented and the brightly colored uniforms stood out in the ranks of the new cadets. Every race, religion and major ethnic group could be found represented among the student body at the academy. The diversity of the group was evident in the faces that proudly arrayed in front of the reviewing stand.
The six cadets in whites had already been administered the oath that the others would take this bright windy afternoon on the open flight line at the Academy. All six were certified spacecraft pilots. They could pilot unarmed spacecraft on their current certifications in the tightly regulated central system, but without having been officially inducted into the Federation Space Force could not legally pilot the warships they had carried as cargo into Earth’s defense perimeter.
Admiral Seamus O’Leary, the Academy’s Commandant, sat on the reviewing platform next to Commodore Tejbir Singh, Dean of Students. “Are you ready for a tough four years?” the Admiral asked his good friend.
“Why do you say that?” the Commodore asked. “This looks like a very good class. Their numbers are quite impressive.”
The Admiral focused on the six white uniforms. “Look at the six in white in the front row. Do you know who they are?”
“They are from the Jewish settlement on Eretz,” the Commodore replied. “I heard they are fairly intense. They’re what the press is here to see.”
“That’s putting it mildly. The one on the extreme end is Rachel Solomon. The one next to her is her sister Wendy. I can’t remember the last time we had sisters in the same class. Between the two of them, they have more combat victories than the entire rest of the class put together and that includes the four next to them. They were in the first flight that used the Disruptor in combat. The third woman, Faye Anne Sherman has five kills, not counting her Disruptor victories. The man on the end, David Shapiro has one. The other men are brothers, Reuben and Rashi Abrams and have two each.”
“Impressive combat records, but their test scores put them at the third quartile. It’s not like they will be our top students.”
“Perhaps, but they will be a challenge more for you than for me.”
“How so?”
“They are female and Jewish so the Swordsmen have declared open season on them. Their father has an outstanding warrant for his arrest for murder. We have Swordsman and evangelical Christian cadets who will seek them out for special attention. They have more combat
experience than our instructors. I wonder how our staff will feel about teaching tactics to students who may know more than they do. Their hand-to-hand combat skills are very good. Is there anyone in the Federation who hasn’t seen the video of them killing those Swordsman Marines? Every two-bit over-sexed man on campus with a self image problem is going to try and prove he is better than they are.”
“Do you see the trouble coming from them or from people around them?”
“That’s the part I don’t know. I don’t know how much they are aware of the challenge they present us. The Solomon girls’ mother and father both graduated here as did the Sherman girl’s father and I hope they had the sense to fill the girls in on what to expect, but there is no way to know.”
“I like to be proactive about these things. Perhaps I should call them to my office and chat with them.”
“No, ‘Bir, I think that’s a bad idea which is why I brought it up. I know that’s what you like to do, and I don’t want you to do it. I knew the parents when they were here. We need to leave them alone. We don’t pull them out for anything special. We treat them the same as any other cadet. Keep a close eye on their class reports, and let me know weekly how they are doing. Their parents were brilliant but difficult students. I wonder if the daughters will be the same.”
“Very good, sir.”
Demographics had hit the Federation Space Force hard. Officers who had been recruited at the beginning of the Pirate Interdiction campaign had reached retirement age and were retiring in droves. Commercial interests were paying impressive salaries to people who could explore and prospect new systems that had become accessible due to the advances in hyper drive. Former Space Force officers were prime candidates. When the officers left for the private sector they often took many of their subordinates. The Force was severely short of experienced officers and enlisted personnel.
In order to fill shortages in the officer ranks, the Force recruited from other planetary services. This recruiting drive came to a bottleneck at the Academy. The Academy was so over crowded that dormitory rooms that were normally doubles were converted to triples. Rachel, Wendy and Faye Anne were assigned to a room normally occupied by two students, as were Reuben, Rashi and David. They found, as did most of the other students of that class, that studying in their rooms was impossible. The library and normal study areas were at capacity. Fortunately, the Jewish chaplain arranged for them to use one of the Chapel’s conference rooms in the evenings and they studied there as a group.
The Jewish chaplain was thrilled to have so many Jewish cadets. For the first time in his career he had more than a handful of Jews attending his services. The success at Eretz had broken the long-standing Jewish stigma against joining the military.
Services for the Jewish cadets were every Friday night. The cadets, regardless of their religion, were strongly encouraged to attend services of their choice in every week. “Strongly encouraged” was an understatement. While they could not be forced to go to services, the squadron commanders of those students that did not participate in religious activities generally found onerous tasks for them to do when they would have been going to services if they had gone to services. The cadets found that it was safer to be religious than to not be religious, so the greatest majority became involved with religious activities even if they had never been religious before.
The Rabbi greeted the group of six friends warmly as he stood at the entrance to the chapel with his wife and two small children. He greeted them by name as if he really knew them or at least knew of them. The service that evening was as light and breezy as a Jewish Sabbath Eve service can be. The melodies chosen for the prayers were picked from among the more up-beat selections. The idea of was to make the cadets feel as much at home and as welcome as they could. After the service, the Rabbi invited all of the cadets to the traditional after the Sabbath reception, the Oneg Shabbat. He greeted them individually as they filed from the chapel into the reception room. He shook their hands and he asked how they were and how they were adjusting to life at the Academy. He made some notes to follow up with a few of the cadets.
After the reception was underway the Rabbi’s wife pulled Rachel and Wendy aside and said, “You’re the Solomon girls, aren’t you?” Wendy replied, “Yes, we are.”
“Your mother saved my life,” the Rabbi’s wife said.
The girls were speechless. After all, what can someone say at a time like that? They had witnessed their parents rescue a convoy from pirates, but had stayed on their own ships and had not mixed with the survivors.
The Rabbi’s wife continued. “Your mother probably saved thousands of people’s lives, and I’ll bet she doesn’t even know who they are but we owe her a debt of gratitude we can never repay. I guess to her she was doing her job. Her job was to run around saving peoples’ lives and move on. Does she know how special she is for what she did for so many of us?”
Rachel said, “Maybe, but I don’t think she ever looked at it that way. She did what she did. That was all. She liked her job, but it was her job. Like you said, it was her job just like being a Rabbi is his job. Saving people’s lives was a bonus.”
“Let me tell you the story. My father was a mining engineer, and we traveled from system to system. He built new mines all over the galaxy. Most of the mines were in inhospitable, dreadful places. Sometimes we lived in the ships which we docked together to form a space station. Sometimes we lived on the planet’s surface in an enclosed outpost. We never stayed anywhere more than a year. Some of the mines were iron mines. Some were coal mines. Some were heavy metals. We opened a gold mine once. We did one that mined semi precious metals. My whole family traveled with him. We were in a convoy headed to a new location. We left from Earth with a load of mining equipment, miners and their families to open a new mine on a new planet. The pirates were waiting for us when we dropped out of hyper drive. They boarded the ships and started killing people and stealing things to carry back to their ships. It was the most horrible two days of my entire life. They killed my father when he fought them. They raped my mother. I hid in my clothes locker, and the pirates didn’t find me. Then simply out of nowhere your mother appeared with this ship, this amazing ship! They fired at her as soon as she appeared. I saw her from my view-port. She flitted around like a butterfly firing missiles. They fired back, but nothing could hit her. She shot missile after missile all by herself. She would appear somewhere, shoot her missiles, and she would disappear. She destroyed a dozen pirate ships in an hour. I watched it happen. After she destroyed the pirate ships, she boarded the captured ships one at a time. She boarded our ship first. I remember her standing there in her space suit with two laser pistols, one in each hand and that big battery pack on her back just blasting away. It made a funny noise every time she fired. Anything that tried to stop or challenge her she blasted. If you put your hands up, she passed you by. She lifted her face mask and smiled at me when she walked by my room. She shot all the pirates that had boarded the ship. She shot one right in my doorway. He tried to shoot her, but she was too fast for him. She didn’t say anything to anybody. She just shot and moved on. When it was over and she was sure we were all safe, she got in her ship and she left. There was no time to thank her. It was like she was done here and she was gone. No goodbye or anything, just gone. She’s the most amazing woman I ever met. Growing up I wanted to be like her.” The Rabbi’s wife smiled. “There are so few people I tell that story anymore.”
“I’ll bet there are a lot of people who’d like to be like our mother,” Rachel said. “Sometimes we would like to be more like her, too.”
“Your mother is an amazing woman and some of the gratitude that she earned will come to you. Use it wisely.”
Wendy smiled and said, “We will.”
The Rabbi approached, reached around his wife’s shoulders and said, “We would like to invite you and your companions to our home after the reception. It would be my honor to invite you for a little coffee and light chatter for the rem
ainder of the evening.”
The girls agreed, and after the reception was over they piled into the Rabbi’s personal vehicle and drove to his quarters. The conversation was light and amiable and the Rabbi’s two children stayed up way past bedtime to be part of the party. That evening began a tradition that lasted for the rest of the time the six cadets were at the Academy. Every Friday night they went to services. After services they went to the reception, and after the reception the six of them went to the Rabbi’s house. This was the only time other than the school’s breaks that they allowed themselves time away from their school related activities and academics. Other than the time at the Rabbi’s and the required sporting activities, they devoted their entire day to academics. This was the hardest work they had ever done, and they struggled to maintain the grades that they felt they needed to achieve.
During winter break most of the other students left the Academy to go home except for those for whom the distance to wherever they needed to go was so great that they could not get there and back in the length of the winter break. Concerned that leaving campus was too risky, the six Jewish students from Eretz stayed behind and studied over the winter break. Several of Greg’s and Avi’s old friends stopped by during that break to see them, visit for a while and have lunch, tell war stories about their parents and move on.
Several of Admiral Sherman’s friends stopped by to visit Faye Anne. One retired Space Force Intelligence officer stopped by and after spending a lively animated evening with the group, gave Faye Anne a business card. He told her if she needed information to call him. He still liked the odd intrigue from time to time. It kept his hand in. There was a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye when he gave Faye Anne the card. The number was an answering machine and he only checked it once a day and not to be alarmed if he didn’t get back right away. Several times during the next semester Faye Anne would come up with some arcane piece of information that the others had been unable to find. While she never said anything, the others suspected that her father’s old intelligence friend had been involved somehow. Rachel and Wendy suspected that the old man appreciated the attentions of the younger lady and they certainly did not disapprove.
Solomon Family Warriors II Page 44
