Subspace. Slipspace. Hyperspace. Speculative science fiction gave us many names, and picking one was not easy. The science fiction fans had vested interests in getting the name “their” universe used accepted, and the “debate” was energetic. Submariners picked subspace, and it gained early acceptance. Hyperspace was most popular when the US Navy began to expand, and the new sailors used it to annoy the submariners. God bless inter-service rivalry.
There’s fewer of us as the decades go by. The first Cowboys. Only six survived The War. We’ve lost another brother since then. But there’s more of us too. Every year, more people volunteer to serve in the Cowboys, and every year more of us retire and go on with our lives. There are thousands of us now. They’re my brothers and sisters, alive or dead, in service or not. We have a tradition you see. There’s no such thing as a former Cowboy.
For two centuries, the Western Alliance and the Chinese vied for control of New Earth through their surrogates in Landing City and Xin Xiang. They fought not with bullets but with land grabs, resource hoarding, and old-fashioned economic warfare. Both cities understood that war would be devastating, and signed the Centauri Treaty. When The War came, they held to the treaty, undoubtedly sparing every city on New Earth a truly brutal War.
Because of the submariners that built the space navy, even the modern navy “dives” into hyperspace and “rises” into normalspace. The clarion call of a commanding officer to “prepare for surface action” is still the standard. But not all their terms survived. When the navy began building carriers and their escorts, they called on surface fleet sailors to man them. And no true sailor would be caught dead living on a “boat.” And subspace? No. Just no.
Peter White was the last of the original Cowboys. And we were so imaginative in our callsign creation that of course we named him Rabbit. And to make it worse, he was so compulsively punctual that we kept ribbing him about being late. He was a rather serious fellow. And he was always Cowboy One Two, never Cowboy Twelve. He died providing cover for a Marine orbital drop at Eudora during the Hyades Campaign.
Forge of War on Amazon
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Angel War on Amazon
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Wolfenheim Emergent on Amazon