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.
Christian was Cowboy Four in the old days. Christian Mack his name was. We called him The Knife after some old song. The Peloran named him Ram. He’s real loyal and real determined, and he stood with Charles when it wasn’t shiny. I think both names fit him good. He became Cowboy One when Charles retired, and has commanded the Cowboys real good since then. Without him, the little disagreement we had with Charles’ family after The War would have ended way worse.
Alcyone has five stars. The blue giants, Aa and Ab, have fancy scientific names. The locals call them Ace and Deuce. The white dwarfs, B and C, our astronomically huge mines of star stuff, we call Buck and Cash. And then there’s Alcyone D. It’s a little hotter than our sun, and it’s in a pretty screwed up neighborhood. Most of the planets are long gone, but the three survivors are all habitable. Lots of people live under the never-ending light of Dixie.
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