A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet by Ron Miller

Author:Ron Miller [Miller, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2014-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

-III-

The Patrol was as good as its word. A warrant was sworn out against Herumia Pataskala and she was arrested the day after Judikha’s raid. She was placed in jail from which her attorneys obtained her release on bail only a few hours later. There was no use in fleeing the city, however: her every movement was closely watched and it was made certain that she knew this. Meanwhile, the Patrol made such a good case against her that conviction seemed guaranteed. The Patrol was not terribly surprised when, in spite of their vigilance, Pataskala managed to escape. No special effort was made to either stop her or pursue her. It was only necessary to alert the Patrol bases in the country of her destination, who promptly arrested her the moment she set foot over the border.

The trial was a sensation. While Brabblebott and Woost were no match for the legal resources of the Patrol, and certainly not a Patrol whose pride had been wounded, neither were they fools and managed to obtain a relatively light sentence for their client. It mattered not in the end: Mommy Pataskala was ruined. Her fortune had been reduced to an insignificant fraction of its original size and, while she certainly could afford every necessary amenity, it was nothing like the luxury she had been accustomed to. But with the loss of her fortune had come the loss of her power, which she regretted even more...and with good reason. Within a year, she had been almost entirely forgotten and, ultimately, no one knew what eventually became of her.

As Patrolman Dybbuk had promised, Judikha was duly sworn into the Patrol Academy in Toth. She couldn’t possibly have been happier about this. Toth was the birthplace of spaceflight; it was where the first spaceship had been constructed and launched more than 150 years ago—the epochal flight to the late second moon made by Professor Wittenoom and Judikha’s special hero, Princess Bronwyn.8 To be attending the Patrol Academy in this place was more than she could have ever hoped for. They day she took her Cadet Oath she could recall later only as a kind of colorful whirl. She was given her uniform and shown her place in the barracks. She spent an hour in front of a mirror, admiring herself in the sleek Cadet greys. Musrum! she’d thought for the first time in her life, I look gorgeous! And she did, too.

The Academy officials made no issue of Judikha’s past, of which they were fully aware, of course. They paid their debt to her honorably. So far as her instructors and fellow cadets were concerned she was just another Cadet, neither particularly outstanding nor particularly obscure. Once she had settled into the routine of classes and exercises, she did well enough. Immersed in an atmosphere of intensely directed and controlled mental and physical development, she came to life in a way even she had never expected, like an encysted insect egg that lay buried in the bottom of a dried river bed, just waiting for the first flood to awaken it.

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