Jack of Harts

The Wolfenheim Project really was a good idea. Charles wanted to tell the Aliens that we could get to them. That we wouldn’t always be stuck in our little corner of the galaxy forever. That we could come for them. That we would always be coming for them. It was both a promise and a threat, and a statement of what we could do. Most of our colonies were no more than a few hundred lightyears from Earth back then. Barely a blip on a galactic scale, for Aliens that flew thousands of lightyears to do a flyby over Earth and wave at us stupid monkey boys. He planned go thousands, just like them. He finally picked a world five thousand lightyears from Earth and it was a good one. The Peloran said it had recovered from the devastation of the last war, but nobody lived there. So we could have it all to ourselves. Charles picked good.

Charles was part and parcel of the Peloran program to Uplift our industrial and fighting technologies. We all knew they couldn’t completely change our tech base in the time we had before the Shang could overwhelm us, but Charles had connections all over America and beyond. He used those connections to spread everything he learned throughout the industries that would help us stop that otherwise-inevitable result, and that helped America bootstrap ourselves through another major technological renaissance. Charles and his connections spread the new tech farther, wider, and faster than the government could on its own. They placed America in a position to launch forward into a new economic surge when The War ended, and that changed all of our worlds. Charles was integral to that effort.

Charles kept us Cowboys working after our commanders were blown out of the sky. He stepped up, took command, and managed to forge links with all the other units still defending Fort Wichita. The Shang had us on the ropes, but Charles took us out on a flanking maneuver that relieved the Peloran squadron. And that allowed the Peloran to pull out of the line and do what they did best. Hit and fade and hit again. And since we had hyperdrives, Charles got us brought into their datalinks so we could follow them. We about burned up our hyperdrives trying to keep up with them, but we helped them break the Shang’s flanks. That forced the Shang to reconsider their attack. They could still destroy Fort Wichita, but then we would cripple them. They chose to withdraw. That made us the victorious heroes and earned all of us some serious brownie points.