BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter XI. FlyGirl and the Rebels

         
XI. FLYGIRL AND THE REBELS

FOR HIM, IT HAD TAKEN SOME GETTING USED TO, GROWING UP IN THE ACADEMY, but kids adapt fast and 9ers adapted the fastest. It also hadn't hurt that his mother was the Governor and had been able to swing him a soft placement in the Paris campus, a privilege that certainly had its benefits as he spent his formative years voxing his 9.02 THz rating to any Parisienne who would receive him; like it was a big deal and made him someone special, literally one in a million.

That was until he met her.

The day his life really began.

The word was that she'd entered the Academy with a 9.97 THz rating, the highest since records had begun, making her one in a billion. And he had been a goner from the first nano-second he focussed the zoom of his gunner-sights on her doe-eyed gaze while out on maneuvers off the Iberian peninsula.

Man, those eyes...

They were like sacred pools beckoning his dive.

It was as if their curve had taken the form of Cupid's own bow, drawn towards the heavens so as to pierce the heart of God Himself (yep, that's how much of a goner he was). And then, in His infinite, unselfish wisdom, He had chosen to share His divine love for this girl, surely the most beautiful of His creations since Eve herself (yep, she was that hot).

In the tiny beat of time it took for his mere mortal heart to leap from his chest to his mouth, he knew without any doubt and perfect clarity of vision that he would do whatever it took to hitch a ride on the tail of this shooting star. To make whatever sacrifice was demanded of him. To pay the fare with his very soul if necessary. And gladly so, without question or hesitation.

Luckily though, ownership of his soul had not been called into question on that particular day. For some strange and wonderful reason that defied all scientific explanation, this stranger's heart had also elected to leap toward his across the chasm that had divided their jets for just a fraction of a second but long enough for his zoom to scan the word 'FLYGIRL' stenciled beneath her cockpit.

Like froth bursting from a shaken bottle, their two jets had soared upwards and apart, leaving the sound-barrier in their wake with an air-shattering blast; conjuring in his mind the combined force of every champagne cork ever to have taken flight during the wine's thousand-year history before the Ozone Crisis had finally killed off the French vines and put paid to such luxuries.

FLYGIRL, IT TRANSPIRED, WAS HIS COUSIN. The daughter of his mother's estranged half-sister to be precise. So did that make it wrong?

As he knew a cadet who knew a cadet in the Patagonian campus where she was based, introductions were arranged at the New Year's Eve party held by her father, the Generalissimo, on the terrace of his hacienda in the foothills east of the base. Polite conversation was then engaged, only further enslaving him to this heaven-sent gift whose birth name was Amelia Castillo, or' Puziashka', as was her childhood nick-name awarded in honor of her belly by her Prussian mother, Gaia, a native of St. Petersburg and technically his aunt.

When he had voxed Amelia his own name, she revoxed on the irony of one of their kind being called Solomon - somehow she knew it was derived from 'shalom', an ancient word for peace.

<I do not see the irony,> he had voxed. <Are we not upholders of the peace?>

<Can not one man's peacekeeper be another man's oppressor?> she replied, probing his mind.

<You do not believe in your role?> he asked, taken aback by her stance.

<I believe in art and music for these are the two things that leave our planet a more beautiful place after we are gone,> she espoused, and then, after pausing for a beat as if to let this soak into his inferior 9.02 THz brain, continued with her train of vox. <I also believe in long walks in the parks that have not yet been desecrated by man. And that you and I can make a difference in our own lifetimes but not by making war.>