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.
Constantinople is the last great non-aligned power. The City stretches from the Mediterranean to the Black Seas, and has been a major center of trade for thousands of years. When humanity went to the stars, The City sent scouts to find stars they judged to be in good locations for future trade. They colonized very few, but those few are the richest trading centers in all of Terran space. Any trader that ever lived has been to at least one of those worlds.
Jessie James was my second wingman in the early months of The War. And yes, that is the name he was born with. We called him Cards at first because he’s always shuffling them, but after he somehow managed to get ejected into space during training he got the name Dutchman. He’s one of those real good friends that you can meet after five years and pick up the last conversation where it ended. The Peloran named him Fox. He is Cowboy Seven.
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