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.
We colonized Alcyone to act as a diplomatic mission to the Peloran while we placed more refueling colonies between it and Earth. By 2250, the trip only took two years, even including the transit through The Wall. We scattered the Pleiades Corridor with colonies big and small, and the Alliance colonies were the largest of all, fortified islands of civilization across the four hundred lightyears to the Pleiades. It was a good thing. We needed them later.
The original Cowboy One was Lieutenant Colonel Mathew Johanson. He was one of the guys that…well…he was real nice, but real hard too. He had to be to get all of us into fighting shape and that wasn’t easy. We never really called him anything but Colonel, because…well…he was The Colonel. He died at Fort Wichita, like a lot of other pilots and ships did. That was a real bad day for us all. We never could have survived many more wins like it.
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