Christmas is an interesting holiday. For two millennia, people have protested against celebrating it. Whether it be the highly religious Christians who say it is too secular, or the atheists who say it is too religious, there have always been those who protested against it. But celebrate it we do, even as the centuries go by. And so I wish you a Merry Christmas.
From the births of the human races to the present, religion and a faith in God have been an inherent part of our natures. They’ve given us morals to live by, codes of conduct, and commands to eat healthily. Some have helped us. Some have hurt us. The bad ones teach us to hate others, but the good ones improve the human condition, helping us to want to live up to a better standard. Teaching us to love. What more can we do for our fellow man?
By the end of the century, the member nations of the Western Alliance had consolidated control of nearly the entire Pleiades Corridor. It was a long corridor of stars, and our fleets were spread out to defend them, but we were confident that the Russians and Chinese would hold to the Lunar Treaties that outlawed fighting close enough to planets to threaten them with stray relativistic strikes. It was unfortunate for us all that the Shang did not follow them.
Major George Randalf will always be Cowboy Two. He was an old fart, complete with some actual grey in his hair, probably from training young snots like us for most of his life. We called him Gandalf. He always grumped about it, but I think he actually liked it, not that he’d ever let us know. He died with The Colonel, doing his best to keep the Shang of his back. That left us young snots with no adult supervision. God knows how we survived.
The Alcyone star system is composed of five stars. The two largest giants rotate around a common center of gravity, as close to each other as our Sun is to Jupiter, and no planets remain around either of them, if there ever were any. Their fast spins have resulted in a ring of gases around them, no where near thick enough to breath, but thick enough that starships sail through the rings and refuel on their way in or out of the system.