Family

by on September 15, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter and her friends from Singapore could not break through centuries of animosity and a couple decades of total War to turn all of us into friends. But we weren’t blood enemies by War’s End either. Most people didn’t have a reason to fight once the Shang left. We have Grandma and her friends from Singapore to thank for that. We mostly went back to our own corners of space and rebuilt. The Hyades Cluster was a special case. We wouldn’t give it back. But Grandma and her friends helped bring together a deal that we could all live with. And more importantly stop killing over. They brought Peace. And that is no small task.

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Family

by on September 14, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter was busy cooling The War down throughout the Core Worlds while I was driving a war to the knife in the Hyades Cluster. Guess we were playing bad cops to her good cop. But there were some real good reasons to hit the Hyades so hard. The Shang were strongest there. And China sent most of their undesirables there. It was a lot easier to liberate slave populations than patriotic Han Chinese. Grandma made certain all her Singapore friends understood all of that and it made a difference. They still fought like demons to stop us, but they rarely fought to the last man and retreated in good order when we had them on the ropes. And sometimes they warned us away from systems where the Shang were strongest. So sad. We Cowboys never did listen to them.

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Family

by on September 13, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter defended a lot of worlds throughout The War. Russia and China wanted to take us down a peg or three and take our territory. The Shang just bombarded our worlds into the ice age. It only took Grandma a few years to pound it into Western Alliance high command’s collective skulls that the Shang were a far bigger threat than her friends from Singapore. Once command got a clue, they sent their own veterans of Singapore to command the defenses of our most central and important industrial systems. Grandma, her friends, and their friends from the other sides managed to cool their parts of The War down as time went on. We would have lost a lot more of everything if it weren’t for their behind the scenes work.

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Family

by on September 12, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Grandma Carter got in trouble with Western Alliance high command for not attempting to destroy the invasion forces that left the worlds she defended. Command wanted her to KILL the enemy, so they restructured her orders to demand she ENGAGE the enemy. She added those orders to her opening transmissions to future invasion forces when she told them what she was going to defend with. That garnered more polite conversations, and old friends from Singapore absolutely avoiding any of the trigger conditions in her orders. One of those conversations absolutely did not mention the imminent arrival of a Shang fleet that intended to bombard her world into a new ice age. There was no talking when they showed up. She shot them. A lot. Command got a lot quieter after that.

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9-11

by on September 11, 2023 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I went home from my new job twenty-two years ago in time to find out that a plane had hit one of the Trade Towers. I watched the second plane hit. The third at the Pentagon. The fourth in a field. I watched people jumping from the buildings. Towers collapsing. And when I went to say something on the website I was an admin at, I found my admin access revoked and the forum locked down. When I asked the other admins, they said they didn’t want Americans talking about it on their website. 9-11 will forever be a reminder to me that some people hate us enough to literally spend their lives to kill the least dangerous of us. And that others hate us enough to stop us from even talking about it. Hate makes people do crazy things. Never forget.

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