Jack of Harts

Dawn DeMarco grew up on a planet that lived the voluntary illusion that some people were royalty and most were not. She knew how to act in an environment like that. The Chinese had filled the Hyades Cluster with billions of people by shipping their excess slave populations out of Greater China to labor in the outer colonies. Most Western Alliance citizens simply don’t understand how fundamental the difference between the Chinese overlords and their slave populations was. The locals knew they were being dragged into new and strange worlds when we liberated them, but as much as they wanted that, it terrified them. Dawn made it easier by playing the illusion with them. She played the superior their culture demanded had to exist, even as she quietly subverted every teaching of that culture. And the really interesting bit is that the locals knew what she was doing and helped her at every opportunity.