Matt Guice

Beta Matt Guice

Time to open up the galaxy. It AE 132, is over a hundred years after the New Outreach settlement of the galaxy began, and the time has come to assimilate into that expansive process the last isolated dregs of the British Empire. This means it's time to power down the Fletcher Field keeping the population of the British Isles quarantined behind the Tech Curtain, even if this brings renewed threats of Greenie terrorism, but also it's time to make contact with the lone colony which the Windsor Royals had launched on planets orbiting the three stars of the Alpha Centauri system, before the victory of the Outreach Council. Representatives of the growing movement for a Galactic Republic need to see if people there can be re-united to the main stream of the human race. Admiral Tse Deng, a famous explorer of the New Outreach Navy, takes on this mission, finally setting course for Alpha, instead of bypassing it without communicating, as had previously been customary. He brings his old Academy room-mate, the spy Joachim Bolstrom, and his warrior colleague Tschombe N'Kata. Despite plots against him on Earth, to weaken his influence within the rising movement for a Republic, or to remove him from the forefront of the settlements program, thus preventing the formation of a new Survey Corps he envisions, Tse Deng answers this call of duty. Cats in space! Swordplay!There, on Alpha, they find a strange Malthusian culture, where use of technology is gradually being withered away, ruled by a Viceroy, Prince Richard Edgar Woolsey Windsor, who has dreams of galactic conquest for his line, even though his Space Navy consists of only a few small ships. Can the Alphans be brought into alliance with the rest of human civilization, or will Tse Deng and his friends become mere pawns in a power struggle internal to that lost colony?Rhyming couplets! Love and dalliance!What more could you want? A Future empty of Empires?Nothing can be held back.