THIRD GENERATION - CHAPTER FOUR
GREG SOLOMON SAT QUIETLY in the small chapel next to the main sanctuary where Rose’s funeral was about to be held. He was seriously “jet lagged” due to three days of high G flight to the planet Eretz from the space craft transportation hub at New St. Louis where he had been intercepted on his way to Earth. The inertial compensator, which made the rapid transit possible, worked, but its side effects were debilitating. He felt much older than his ninety-two years. He felt like an old man, but he knew that unless he died in combat, he could expect another twenty or more years of active service. The presence in this small room of both of his sons-in-law and four of his eight grandchildren did not ease his pain in spite of his pleasure at having them all together. His mother-in-law’s death had come as much of a shock to him as it did to the children in the day care center who witnessed her passing. Greg might be the patriarch of the clan that gathered that day and his wife, Avi, might be the matriarch, but Rose, Avi’s mother, was its heart and soul.
“Grandfather?”
Greg looked as Moses, his eldest grandchild, sat beside him. He knew enough about how the boy thought to know the formal greeting preceded a question he did not want to answer. “Yes?”
“We have time before the service. We don’t often get the chance to sit and talk. We’ve read about you and Grandma in our history classes, but sometimes we won’t know what to believe. Did you and Grandma kill hundreds of pirates?”
“Moses, mind your manners,” Isaac sputtered.
“But Dad,” Moses started to challenge.
“Isaac, he has a right to know,” Greg rested his hand on his grandson’s shoulder.
“Greg, I usually trust your judgment,” Isaac countered, “but this time I disagree. This is neither the time nor the place.”
“My grandchildren have a right to know the truth about the family they were born into. They will bear its legacy for their entire lives. This is both the right time and the right place.”
Joshua, Isaac’s brother, interrupted. “Maybe this isn’t the ideal time or the ideal place, but I suspect that we are not likely to be together again for a long time. We are together now. I agree, the children need to know. My Rebecca and Bobby are old enough to understand. Moses is to the point that if he does not learn the truth from us he will find out from the wrong people on his own. Please, Isaac, let Greg answer the question.”
He turned to Greg and said, “Perhaps after you answer the initial question, you should tell them the whole story going all the way back to Homestead.”
Greg shook his head. “We don’t have that much time.”
“We’ll go as far as we can,” Joshua continued. “After the funeral, we will find a way to bring the children to you. We can finish the story if it takes all night. For two decades we have lived in peace. Peace that you helped create. The winds of war blow over us again. We may not have another opportunity. The children need to understand what lies ahead. I could tell them the same things with the same words, but it will mean nothing coming from me and everything coming from you.”
“He’s right,” Isaac admitted. “I am sorry I interrupted.”
Greg took a deep breath before starting, “Yes, your Grandmother and I killed pirates. A hundred perhaps. Maybe more. We lost count. At some point it doesn’t matter. The more you kill, the more there are. It goes on forever.”
“Did my mom kill pirates?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, but mostly your mom and your Aunt Rachel fought the Swordsmen.”
“Who killed more, Aunt Wendy or my mom?” Saul asked.
“I don’t know, but you need to understand that once they finished Space Flight Academy, their missions were different. Rachel commanded the combat hospital ship. Wendy commanded her fighter wing. It’s not the same thing.”
“After they got out of the Space Force did they fly against pirates?” Bobby looked up from his furiously scribbled notes.
“Yes, they were pilot instructors here at Eretz and more than one of their training squadrons was ambushed by pirates when they ventured outside the protection of the system’s defenses.”
“So we really are a warrior clan,” Rebecca said proudly.
Greg shook his head. “One side of the family is. Your grandmother and I are warriors. Your mothers are warriors, but your fathers are healers.”
“What does that make us?” Saul asked.
“It gives us freedom of choice,” Moses offered. “We get to be who we want to be. Grandpa, please start at the beginning. Start at Homestead.”
“Let me go back before that. Your grandmother and I were students together at the Space Flight Academy. There were very few Jews in the Force at the time, and I ran into her at the chapel early in my Freshman year. She had transferred from the Federation Air Force enlisted ranks. I was straight in from civilian life. I grew up on a Federation Space Force installation and that helped me get in early. I was the youngest cadet in my class. Even then she had a reputation for violence against men who bothered her. There were stories about a couple of guys at Air Force basic training who suddenly found themselves in the hospital after trying to get a little too close. I have to admit that when I first met her, she intimidated me. I was well trained in martial arts, but I didn’t think I was as well trained as she was, and I really didn’t want to find out. Besides, she was bigger than me. A couple of days later I was working out a defensive maneuver in the gym with one of the Marines who ran the martial arts classes when she challenged me to a match. I have to tell you I was scared.
“The Marine looked at me and sneered. He challenged me to take her on. She was taller than me and heavier. He named a style of combat and a set of tournament rules. He offered to referee. Even when I faced pirates later, I was never so scared as the first time I stepped on to the mat and faced her. I was terrified. This was a well known man hater and she was picking on me. We sparred for an hour. Neither of us ever had the clear advantage. At the end of the hour the Marine stepped between us and declared the match a draw. I had never hurt so much in my entire life. I couldn’t even imagine how she felt. We were both bleeding from small cuts all over our faces, arms and legs.”
“Your first date with Grandma was a fight?” Rebecca asked, incredulous.
“I would hardly call that a date,” Greg laughed. “But after Friday night services the next weekend we did go for a long walk together in the moonlight.”
“How romantic,” Rebecca effused.
“It would have been if we hadn’t run into trouble. Evangelical Christians have been harassing Jews a lot longer than the Swordsmen. We found ourselves surrounded by a group of a dozen or so. I usually try to talk my way out of trouble, but I didn’t get a chance. That was the first time I realized exactly how dangerous your Grandmother could be. I don’t know who made the first move, but suddenly there were two guys on the ground screaming in pain. I didn’t have any choice but to join the fight. When it was over we were the only ones standing. After that, people left us alone. I tried dating other women, but they refused to go out with me because they were afraid of Avi. I finally gave up.”
“Is Grandma the only woman you dated?” Moses asked.
“No, but she was the first. There weren’t any girls my age on the Space Force outpost where I grew up.”
“But there were other women?” Saul asked. “Didn’t you marry someone other than Grandma?”
“Yes, but all that was later. Avi and I spent our summers in a voluntary Marine training program designed for Academy students. Our sparring partners became our life-long friends. We still visit them when we return to Earth. We were driving across country returning to the Academy at the end of our summer before our last year with our Marine friends. A fight broke out in the bar where we had stopped to eat. When the fight was over there were three dead guys on the floor. Your grandmother took one of their heads off with her throwing knife. I killed one, and I can’t honestly tell you who killed the third.”
“Grandm
a cut off a guy’s head with her throwing knife?” Moses sputtered. “How did she do that?”
“From behind. It was pretty gruesome. When we got back to the Academy I was terrified of her. I avoided her that whole year. After graduation, we were assigned to the same Pirate Interdiction task force, and we began talking again. We really didn’t get much time together because we spent weeks out on patrol. One time while I was on patrol I had an accident and left the Force.”
“What happened?” Bobby asked thinking, correctly, that he already knew the answer.
“I killed an innocent ship with fugitives thinking they were pirates.”
“Is that why you left the Force?” Bobby pressed.
“Yes.”
“I wondered about that,” Bobby continued. “There’s a scenario in the first release of your Pirate Interdiction game that alludes to that. I wondered why you removed it from later releases. That also explains your strict policy of not shooting first.”
“So, let me guess,” Rebecca said. “You left the Force depressed and upset. Rock bottom looks like up. Some smart chick shows up thinking she has her hands on a bright young pilot who will be her meal ticket for the rest of her life. She lifts you out of your depression. You get married. You get a job that takes you off planet for long periods of time. She cheats on you. You find out what she’s really like, and you divorce her.”
“Very astute!” Greg smiles.
“So, you’re free again. Where do we go from there?” Saul asked.
“I got a job ferrying animals to a secret planet for resettlement. I got delayed and can’t leave because the shuttle pilots who brought up the cargo can’t land because of a hurricane.”
“Male pilots or female?” Rebecca asked.
“Female.”
“Did you have sex with them?”
“Yes.”
“And Grandma was nowhere around.”
“She didn’t show up again for a year.”
“So then what happened.”
“On my next trip back to Earth the same pilots hijacked me and my ship into taking them and a bunch of people fleeing the Swordsmen to the planet that we later named ‘Homestead’.”
“Was the ship Peter?” Saul asked.
Greg smiled, “Yes, but he wasn’t quite so smart then. It was pretty tough in the beginning. We didn’t have the money we needed to buy equipment or supplies. I wrote the Pirate Interdiction game, and we sold it. We made pornographic propaganda videos and sold them. One of our people wrote an expose’ of the Swordsman church, and we sold that as well.”
“Is that why the Swordsmen hate you so much?” Moses asked.
“That’s what started it, but that’s only part of it. They attacked us twice. I defeated them twice in battle, once at Homestead and once here. That’s not a good way to win friends.”
“Didn’t our mothers fight in those battles?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, they did.”
“And Grandma too?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill a lot of Swordsmen?”
“In the battle at Homestead we killed fifteen thousand Swordsmen.”
“What about the battle here?”
“We killed less than a hundred, but we captured their entire force.”
“But you didn’t kill them?”
“No, what we did was worse. We took their honor. We showed them that we could have killed them as they would have killed us, but we didn’t. We let them live. When we negotiated the Swordsmen secession agreement, we reminded them that we let their soldiers live, and in return we asked that they let us live.”
“And they agreed?” Moses asked.
“Actually, they had a little coercion working against them. Of course it was working against us too. There is someone who we call the Third Force. We don’t know who they are, but they strike military installations on both sides. In the time of the negotiations they were more active than before or since. They had inside information on the progress of the negotiations. Every time one side or the other impeded the negotiations, that side would find one of its military facilities destroyed by a swarm of robot missiles. After each attack, the news services would receive a message explaining why the facility had been attacked. The attacks continued for a while after the secession agreement was signed. Then suddenly, the attacks stopped.”
“Do we know why they stopped?” Saul asked.
“Not for sure. We have our suspicions,” Greg replied.
“What do you suspect?” Moses asked
“That’s a tough one. How about we finish this after the service?” Greg suggested.
They filed out of the chapel and down the hall and into the sanctuary for Rose’s funeral.
THIRD GENERATION - CHAPTER FIVE
ROSE’S FUNERAL SERVICE was longer than anyone anticipated.
After the Rabbi finished the formal part of the service, he invited those who wished to pay their final respects to the podium. Avi, Rose’s older daughter, spoke first. Tanya, Rose’s youngest child, spoke next. Avi and Tanya had reconciled years earlier after a bitter estrangement. Rose’s two sons, who had moved to Eretz in semi-retirement to teach at the university in New Boston, took their turns. Greg spoke briefly. Wendy and Rachel spoke as did each of the other grandchildren who were present. Not all of them could make the journey in time for the service. Of the great-grandchildren, only Moses stood up.
Community leaders and close friends stood and shared some kindness Rose had done for them. Rose had touched many lives in the three decades she had spent on this planet.
Almost thirty years before this service, six students had left this planet together headed for the Space Force Academy. For the first time in several years, all six of them, accompanied by their spouses and children, were together in one place. Rachel and Wendy had already spoken when the other four took their turns. Reuben and Rashi Abrams were the engineers of Rachel’s combat group. Faye Anne Sherman had covered intelligence, and David Shapiro had been their legal counsel and chief negotiator. They were still friends even if their respective jobs kept them apart more than they liked.
After the service and the internment, the extended family met at the equestrian center’s club house where they often gathered for more pleasant occasions. The assembled family was unusually quiet. Even the smallest of the children was well-behaved. Anxious to relay the news of the cause of the catastrophic reactor failure, Wendy was about to gather the “battle group” together and move to a separate room when a distressed looking young woman wearing a flight suit entered the room.
“Captain Solomon?”
Rachel turned to face the young woman who had recently been one of her students. “Yes?”
The woman took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Elizabeth says she needs your help.”
On the mention of Elizabeth’s name all conversation in the room stopped.
The woman took another deep breath and said, “She says she is hurt and needs to see you.”
“Are you sure?” Rachel’s voice trembled.
“Yes, Ma’am.” She handed Rachel a photograph.
Rachel handed the photo to Wendy who passed it along. “Dad, where’s Peter?”
“In dry dock having his reactor overhauled.”
“Wendy, what other ships are available?”
“Buddy is due in from patrol in two hours.”
“Reuben, you and Rashi go to the shipyard. See how fast you can get Peter operating.”
“Aye, Aye Captain!” Reuben exclaimed. “Just like old times!”
Rachel looked at her parents. “You out rank me, I should be taking orders from you.”
Greg laughed. “Elizabeth is your ship. We thought she was dead. You go. We’ll gather reinforcements and be right behind you.”
Avi put her hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “Be careful. We don’t want you falling into a trap.”
“Yes, Mom.” Rachel grabbed the young pilot’s hand, and they raced out of the room.
Moses
leaned over to Isaac, “Dad, did what I think just happened just happen?”
“Yes, son, I think it did.”
“Now what?”
“Depending on how quickly Reuben and Rashi can get Peter flight worthy, I suspect we are taking a visit to the ship we should probably rename Phoenix since this will be the second time it has risen from the dead.” Isaac slowly shook his head.
Joshua sat down beside his brother. “I shudder to think what condition the operating suites are in after twenty years in space.”
Isaac stared in amazement. “You can’t be thinking of making the ship operational?”
“Yes,” Joshua smiled, “I’m an engineer. You’re the doctor. It is what we do. It would be good for the kids to understand what we did and how we did it for the four years we bounced around the galaxy saving lives and rescuing people.”
Isaac returned the smile and rested his hand on his son’s shoulder. “I think you’re about to learn what they don’t teach you in school.”
Moses looked back and forth between his father and his uncle not sure if he believed what he was hearing.
Isaac grabbed Greg as he was about to get out the door. “I think you better arrange transport for all of us. I don’t think there’s a man, woman or child in this room who wants to be left behind.”
Greg quickly scanned the room. “Roger that! Meet us at our hangar.”
Greg and Avi sprinted out the door together.
Isaac turned back to the group and announced, “Everybody who is up for an adventure get your flight suits and enough underwear for a week. Meet us at the spaceport at Greg and Avi’s private hangar. If you’re not there when the ship is ready we’re leaving without you!”
Suddenly Isaac remembered something. “Wendy, what were you about to tell us?”
“It’ll be better when we’re standing on Elizabeth’s bridge. Let’s go!”
Reuben’s wife, Suwanee, who had been a Marine Lieutenant when he married her, caught up in the moment, stood and shouted, “Detail! Move out!”
The room emptied immediately.
THIRD GENERATION - CHAPTER SIX
Solomon Family Warriors II Page 98
