In the middle of the Alcyone quintuple star system, between the stars Ace and Deuce, is the reason we came to the Pleiades Cluster in the first place. It’s the reason the Peloran came here too. We’ve traveled thousands of lightyears and never found anything like it, the rarest natural phenomena we know of. At least we think it’s natural. Gateway. Stargate. Wormhole. Science fiction gave us dozens of names for phenomena like it. We call it the Taurus Gate.
When Americans first went to space, the old Air Force led the way. NASA became the civilian face of our space program, but the Air Force continued their efforts. The resulting Air and Space Force became the primary Earth-based defense of America. We lost most of it during the Second Great Depression, but the Star Wars network proved instrumental during the Mexican Drug War, and the larger Islamic Jihad as well.
Cowboy Eight was a real good dancer. She was Hawaiian, so we came up with the amazing name of Hula. Yeah. We weren’t the most imaginative, but she liked it. She died and I helped her cyber live with the loss. Literally. They don’t take the loss of their partners well. Most die. Next thing I knew, her cyber created another cyber in her image. That was slightly against the rules you see. Still is, actually. Her name was Drew. Is Drew. It’s complicated.
Hades is the last inhabited world around the Alcyone system’s fifth star. It’s a sulfur-rich world, but despite the name, it’s extremely cold on average, with ice sheets stretching from the poles to near the equator. Constantinople used the ice to their advantage and turned it into a major transshipping center, the central storage facility for trade in the Pleiades Cluster and into Peloran space. Not surprisingly, the locals have mastered the winter sports.
After The War, all we wanted to do was rest, relax, and never have to worry about fighting ever again. It was not meant to be though. They did not want to let us retire. They wished us always there to enforce the new peace under their orders. Cybers. Pilots. All of us. We opted instead for eternal vigilance on our own terms. It was the harder road, and many of us have died on it. But it has defined who we are now. We are Cowboys. We are eternally vigilant.