First off, understand that I was raised with no wish to be Emperor of Earth. In fact, I was raised with no knowledge of Earth, or this star system you call the Solar System. I was born and raised on Doan U-Beleevit, a place far from Earth, and I was raised to be a hotelier. It was the Civil War on Doan U-Beleevit which changed the flow of fortune and meshed my karma with that of Earth's.
Specifically, it was the Al-Paca Terrorists who changed my destiny so dramatically. Those terrorists, may Kolob roast their hearts into charcoal!, brought the Civil War into our family.
The Civil War of Doan U-Beleevit was a decades-long affair. Our family always stood solidly behind the government -- every father, son, aunt, uncle, nephew and niece. Hoteling is the family business, and we gain nothing from violence, freedom, tyranny, revolution -- any of those exciting political things that are at the heart of a civil war, any civil war. Our family gained from happy people feeling good about traveling, what kind of government provided that happy feeling is not of great concern to our family, but sitting governments are always more stable than those dissatisfied with them, so we are always strong supporters of the sitting government.
In 3408 our family happiness was shattered: the Al-Paca Terrorists raided our flagship hotel on the Uzbak peninsula, commandeered it, and for a week called it their Headquarters of National Liberation. Ah... those fateful words, "our headquarters of National Liberation." In 3408 the government was cracking down harshly on terrorists, and one way of doing that was confiscating suspected terrorist assets. According to the Anti-terrorist Law then in effect, that declaration by the Al-Pacas made our hotel a terrorist asset. When government troops drove the terrorists off a week later, our flagship the hotel became property of the government!!
It was useless to argue about the unjustness of it that year. The fighting was intense, the outcome uncertain, and the government desperate for resources. But three years later, after the terrorists had started fighting among themselves and the government was winning by default, we presented our case to the court. Three years after that, the government offered us a settlement, but, alas, that settlement offer once more brought the Civil War into our family.
Instead of offering to give us our hotel back, or to pay us money for damages done by the confiscation, the government offered us a fully equipped starship -- and "fully equipped" included one thousand prisoners of war in the hold. Now that the war was ending, the government had a lot of former enemies under its control, and it was looking for ways to deal with them. Most were to be sent to reeducation camps of one sort or another. A few were offered -- perhaps ordered -- into the holds of starships to become colonists on distant worlds. Offering us such a starship was a way of killing two birds with one stone: If we accepted the offer, it would solve the lawsuit, and a part of the prisoner problem.
My brother and I liked the proposal. A whole starship in exchange for a claim on a now-rundown 300 room hotel! We could do anything and everything with a starship! But my father and uncles laughed at the proposal. My father said, "We are hoteliers, not star explorers. This land is our land. And, don't be fooled, son, this government negotiator is offering you a solution to a problem he wants to solve, not a solution to our problem."
Ah, but my brother and I were young. We had stars in our eyes, literally, and we were so naive! When we reported back to the negotiator the reluctance of our elders, he said, "I can sweeten this offer, but... only if you take it now! I will recognize you as duly authorized representatives of your family, and if you take this offer now, I will give you a bigger starship, one with not with one... but with three thousand prisoners! In addition, I will have the government reclassify them as 'extra-legals'. That means you can do anything you want with them -- sell them, eat them, throw them out in space -- it doesn't matter, as long as they are taken away from here."
We were not small fools... we negotiated very carefully over what "fully equipped" meant, and what the penalties would be if what we got was substandard. But we were big fools -- that evening we said, "Yes."
Our elders disowned us, of course. At the time, my brother and I were totally surprised by that reaction because we were very proud of the deal we had negotiated. In retrospect, I'm surprised they didn't behead us as well.
Part of the agreement was that the ship would leave within six months, which left my brother and I with a thousand and one details to be taken care of in just six months.
The first and foremost detail was how to guard the ship. We would need marines. When the hotel was confiscated, my brother joined the government military, where he rose to battalion commander. Last year, as the war wound down, his unit was demobilized. We planned on members of his unit becoming the core of the security unit -- the marines -- we would have on the ship. It was a good plan, but, as with many good plans, it didn't come to fruition quite as we expected.
We would need one thousand marines. We were planning on a quarter of his unit -- about 250 men -- agreeing to join us, and hoping it would be more like 500. We weren't too far off on what the men felt and wanted to do, but, alas, we hadn't taken their women into account! To a woman, they said, "No!", and they said it as loudly and clearly as our elders had! In the end, only one man in ten would join us. We would have to search outside his former unit to fill the marine ranks.
The marine problem was a minor setback. A major setback was the bomb that blew my brother apart! This other problem started with a harsh editorial, which was followed by many more. My Goodness! Accepting the government's proposal had put us at the center of a social whirlwind! We had the full support of the government. We had speeches and letters of gratitude from the Ministries of Interior and Economy praising this innovative solution to a difficult problem. But there were some vocal minorities who were dead set against this scheme. "Colonialists!" "Slave Masters!" "Death Merchants!" were some of the milder things shouted at my brother and I by editorial, by phone call, and by our neighbors when we walked down the street. We became a symbol of "Reconstruction Gone Wrong" in the eyes of those who wanted more conciliatory ways of handling the losers of the Civil War. We were already disowned by our family, so this additional verbal onslaught was close to meaningless to us. But one day someone put a bomb behind his threatening words, and my brother ended up in the hospital, in pieces, literally.
This, as you can imagine, nearly stopped the plan. For days my brother's life hung in the balance, and it would be years before he recovered entirely. But, as he recovered, we talked. And while he was recovering, I kept working on the details of the plan. Working was my therapy to cope with my enormous dread and worry. Worry about my brother, worry about the bitterness this plan had brought to him and our family, dread because the violence done to him indicated that -- won war, or not -- our social ills on Doan U-Beleevit were far from cured. As we talked, we realized we both still wanted the dream to come true. When we talked, we were both happiest when we talked about the new worlds we would explore and the goodness we would bring to the lives of all those who came with us. Four weeks after the bombing, I announced, in his name and mine, that we would continue. And, I dropped a bombshell, "My brother will come with us."
"How will your brother get proper medical care?" was the first question asked.
"We had already planned for the ship to be equipped with state-of-the art medical equipment. All that has changed is that Dr. Jacobs, my brother's primary caregiver for this incident, will be coming with us on the ship."
A strange thing had happened during the month that the project was in limbo. Up until the bombing it looked as if getting good people to join us was going to be the most difficult part of the project. The Marine Problem was just the first of a series of personnel problems to surface. Before the bombing I was seriously afraid we were going to end up like the ship in your adventure book Treasure Island -- crewed with dregs and cutthroats ready to turn on their officers with the least provocation. But after the bombing, the stream of people who expressed interest in coming with us grew steadily. At first we attributed it to the publicity. But that was only part of it. As I interviewed people, I realized there was another factor swelling the interest in our project: there were a lot of unhappy "winners" in our society.
The government had won the Civil War, but now the Civil Peace was beginning, and this was uncovering whole new areas of discontent. Those who had won couldn't agree on many things. As Dr. Jacobs put it to us concerning his situation, "This hospital is being run by asses. It always was, but during the war we all had to work together, so they would listen and compromise. Now that the war is over, they don't listen. Instead they say we are "indulging in terrorist thinking" when we say something they don't want to hear. ...And I'm tired of it."
He was not alone. We filled the ranks of our Marines and Professionals with some really topflight people. They were so good, I was seriously worried that either the government or the unhappy media people would accuse us of Brain Drain, but that issue was never as dramatic as calling us Neoslavers, so it didn't come up, and we were low-key in announcing who was coming along.
The ship was outfitted, crewed and launched on schedule. We had some minor complaints, but, by-and-large, the government came through as promised. We had a fully functioning ship, two hundred professionals and crew, one thousand marines, and a hold filled with three thousand prisoners and an assortment of tools and weapons. All we needed now was a new world to explore and exploit.