I’ve been told I should offer up this prologue for the benefit of those who have not yet read the first narrative I penned about the planet-hopping exploits of yours truly, Andromeda Anne Brent, and co. The co. being my siblings, Arlyne and Simon Brent, and my friends, Kirsty MacGregor, and Jipthidovrillavorimvaisse Vor-Zoag. (Yes, I know that’s a mouthful. We call her Jip.)
A few months back, my parents, and Kirsty’s parents, thought it would be a good idea to put us on an edu-tour while they were off on assignments for the expansion department of the Association of United Planets (AUP). And that my sister and brother should go along too. Being an amenable sort, Arlyne didn’t mind too much. Even though the tour only took in AUP–member planets, was boring in the extreme, and was run by a middle-aged termagant who was determined no kid on the tour was going to enjoy the experience. Being much less amenable, Kirsty and I took off on our own. As did—we found out later—Simon.
Long story short, we met a Vorlan girl on the, then, AUP-member planet of Heltiga, did some travelling about on the independent planets of Gethev and Sustra, met back up with Simon, got involved in a plot to overthrow the lawful monarch of the independent planet of Cholar, and managed to thwart said plot. A plot devised by a dissident faction on Cholar and, I regret to say, AUP, which was keen to add the influential, resource-rich, technologically advanced, Cholar to its list and wanted a planetary leader more receptive to the idea.
Unfortunately for AUP, its involvement in what is now known in AUP circles as, ‘That Horrible Cholarian Business’, led to a decrease in membership rather than an increase. A lot of member-planets withdrew from membership, and almost all the independent planets hitherto willing to do business with AUP called off the arrangement. Even the few still disposed to having dealings with it demanded such dealings be modelled along the lines of those of the new ruler of Cholar, who refused to go beyond a mutual defence treaty and a limited (very limited) trade agreement. And AUP wouldn’t even have got that much if the parental Brents and MacGregors hadn’t agreed to let their—what he considered to be, neglected—offspring stay on Cholar with guardians of his choosing whenever they had assignments that took them away from Yaix, their base planet in the Zaidus system.
For a while, they didn’t get any. After it became known AUP had tried to further its own interests by interfering in the affairs of an independent planet, worlds wanting to join the Association were in somewhat short supply, and any recruitment and integration work there was did not come their way. But then, after a tiresomely long period of base duty doing some type of administrative work they all loathed, they were told a seeker patrol had found some new planets that seemed receptive. With their high-level expertise once more in demand, they dispatched us to Cholar as agreed, little knowing we were headed for another side trip — details of which a history buff like myself feels obliged to set down for posterity in the same manner as I did the first time.
Simon and Arlyne are history buffs too, that being something of a family trait on our father’s side. Although, with him, it apparently skipped a generation. He’s always been more into what’s happening in the here and now, and what’s to come, than what went on ages ago. He’s never shown the slightest interest in our Earth ancestry, which admittedly doesn’t include any famous statesmen, explorers, war heroes, or other well-known people, but does include some distinguished historians whose work is still being read by fellow academics today. One of them even took the trouble to follow our own family history all the way back to the eleventh century, AD, where he found some of our predecessors listed in something called the Domesday Book. That book, along with various other public records, gave him the means to follow our lineage to that specific point and even, to a less reliable extent, beyond it.
Few records are completely reliable, of course. Dates concerning births, deaths, and noteworthy happenings did eventually become more accurate, but accounts of the latter (who did what, and why) have always been open to the interpretation of the chronicler.
As is this one, although I really have tried to be as exact and fair-minded as possible.