When The War ended, everyone came home. Soldiers, sailors, spacemen, and marines. After twenty years of War, all of our warriors came home. Old New York partied for an entire year, a celebration that never ended. Ticker tape parades, concerts, and more. As all things do though, the celebrations came to an end, and we all had to learn how to live again. That was the most difficult mission we ever committed to. Life after War.
The Persians are a powerful non-aligned power. They are one of the most ancient civilizations on Earth. They say the oldest. They have ruled the known world, and been ruled by it. They have seen civilizations rise and fall. They have survived every occupation of their land, Greek, Mongol, and even Islam, and risen again. Other young upstarts come and go with the wind, but Persia will stand for all time. They are the superior culture. Such is their mindset.
The Cowboys named me Jester. It was a good name. I earned it. Then the Peloran named me Hart. It took a while for us to make the change. We felt they were trying to take our real names. In time, we realized that the names fit us, often better than the names we were born with. I stopped using my old name altogether. It became the past, the person I was before The War. I am Cowboy Five, and I will be until the day I die. My name is Jack Hart.
Alcyone’s fifth star, Dixie, has a system of three planets and an asteroid belt that is probably the remains of a fourth. They are the only remaining stable planets in the entire Alcyone star system, and humans live on all three of them. Two of them are actually very comfortable. The third, not so much. Dixie and her three worlds are the center of human civilization in the Pleiades Cluster, the heart of power for the entire sector.
The South Americans are the most powerful of the non-aligned powers. They maintained strict neutrality between the Western Alliance, Russians, and Chinese as we expanded into the stars. Their worlds became trading posts where traders of all nations are welcomed, for a small import-export tax of course. And their own freighters carry goods that cannot be acquired through official shipping to all the worlds. They are a vital cog of the interstellar economy.