Life's not a cabaret. It's more of a side show at the faire

It's hard sometimes to keep track of all the things that are going on out here on the Rim. Proportionally, lifes a lot more interesting out here than people in the Core ever realize. Go to some place like Sihnon, or Ariel, or Londinium, and you've got everything civilization can offer, even the bad sides. But per-capita, you're a lot more likely to encounter something "interesting" out on the Rim than you ever will on a core world. Oh, sure, the capital city of Sihnon sees more murders in a night than we've got citizens. But they've got more citizens on their northern continent than we have people living on the worlds around Kalidaza. Your chances of getting murdered there are a lot less than your chances of having to run from a Reaver are out here.

Still, I've tried to keep track of all that's going on, even when things get a little quiet like they are now. Blessedly, fleetingly, quiet.

So much in life comes down to priorities. If it was just me and mine, we'd have clawed sky for Ariel weeks ago to finally get married and then taken some time to just be together. Me and Sabrina. But it wasn't just me and mine. Or, rather, "mine" wasn't just Sabrina and Lily and Aurora and Kren and Bel and the handful of other people who made up the unconventional family I had out here. No, "mine" consisted of family and three hundred off colonists who'd elected me leader. Unfortunately, sometimes, what mattered to them was more important than what mattered to me.

What mattered to them, beyond the daily concerns of day to day life on Hale's, still boiled down to three things. Surviving raides by Reavers or Warbots. Surviving raids by Raiders or Loyalists. And how to deal with the political turmoil everyone knew was coming, but no one knew enough about to deal with.

The Reavers and Warbots were a fairly straightforward issues from what I could tell. From the prespective of a colonist, they were a predictible enemy. The Reavers would try and eat everyone they could find. The Warbots would try and kill everyone they could find. There might have been deeper motivations in both cases, but when one or the other was bearing down on you like some maniakku, you didn't really care about the motivations.

Raiders and Loyalists were different animals. They might just kill you, but they were usually more interested in stealing your shit than just killing you. You could reason with a hidan. Safer to deal with. In both cases, we could see a solution. We were working on tracking down the Raiders to their home. The Loyalists had received an ultimatum - lay down arms and accept amnesty, or become on with Hale's deserts.

Both problems with obvious and near term solutions.

The Hardliner problem was harder to get a handle on. The Loyalists we'd been fighting here were just a tiny fraction of a much larger problem. Like the garrison who'd had control of Shadow and an entire company of the 1st Marine Raiders who's company commander was a Loyalist plant, there were elements of the Hardliner faction spread throughout the entire Alliance command structure. It was only by sheer luck Colonel Silvermane was as devoted to the principals of the Alliance rather than the hardline interpretation.

Most of the folk here only had a glimmer of an idea of what was actually going on behind the scenes, which was probably a blessing. What they did know, was that the Loyalists had managed to stir up anti-Alliance sentiment on at least a dozen rim worlds and Shadow wasn't the only one ready to declare independence.

Had we already seen the opening salvo in the Second Indenepdence War fired on Shadow? While I honestly sympathized with them, I had to hope we weren't about to plunge into another ugly war out on the Rim. I knoew, for their part, the folks here were an independent minded lot, but they weren't about to go off half cocked and call down the wrath of a regiment of Alliance regulars. No, Hale's would stay officially Neutral. While our sympathies may lay with the Indendents, we know, as a group, that openly taking up arms against the Alliance would lead to the kind of hurt we didn't want to feel.

We'd stay neutral to both sides. Provide humanatarian aid where we could to the Indies, and at the same time not antagonize the Alliance Regulars. We could play nice to both sides. We had our own worries to deal with. No reason for us to take on other people's problems when we didn't have to. We could help without making their issues our own.

That, I guess, was about all I could hope for.