Dawn DeMarco

Cowboy Eighteen

Cowboy Eighteen

Dawn DeMarco (Swan)

By Jack

All of the original Cowboys were born on Earth, but then we started expanding our numbers at Alpha Centauri by recruiting people from more diverse backgrounds.  Dawn was our first Cowboy from the Outer Colonies.  She’d been born on Camelot, the youngest daughter of one of the planetary nobles.  She joined the planetary militia and did good enough while fighting pirates that the United States Marine Corps snapped her up on a headhunting expedition.  They promised her the whole nine meters…travel to foreign stars, meet exotic people…and kill them.  Dawn ended up fighting in many of the numerous brushfire conflicts our government never publicly acknowledged back before The War.  That gave her a wealth of experience in all kinds of warfare that the rest of us Cowboys lacked.  She was a valuable member of my team throughout The War and beyond.

Dawn was very much a daughter of Camelot.  She always had a royal demeanor, and absolutely loved the formal balls the big wigs so often convened.  She was always more at home on a dance floor than in a jungle hunting Chinese troopers, but she did both with equal attention to detail.  She always said that more could be accomplished through diplomacy and kind words than with weapons, though.  That was an odd philosophy for a Marine, let me tell you.  She was always professional enough to shoot when the time came, but she was also always looking for an alternative to going in guns blazing.  Many of our missions went in ways I never would have expected because she was involved.  That’s a good thing, by the way.  She broadened my horizons in more ways than I can count.  And she saved my life a similar number of times.

I first met Dawn DeMarco on Alpha Centauri when we were recruiting new members to replace our battle losses.  The first thing I thought when I saw her is that she was a knock out.  I’m serious.  She is drop dead gorgeous from head to toe, and she knows it.  She grew up in a noble family on a rich colony world that had access to all the best body sculpting.  But more than that, she was raised to act important, and to broadcast a feeling of worth.  She was royalty on Camelot, trained to radiate her importance, her value, from every fiber of her being.  That was the second thing I realized when I met her.  I recognized her act, because I had seen it in hundreds of wellborn vacationers to Northern Minnesota.  I expected to be as annoyed by her as I was by them.  I was wrong.  So very, very wrong.

Once I realized what Dawn DeMarco was, I did not think we would get along.  She was a nobleborn child of Camelot.  I was a human being from Earth.  I was young and stupid back then, and fully expected we would clash.  I was wrong.  Yes, she was royalty, but she consistently failed to trigger even my prejudices against that kind of people.  Using the term “people” generously of course.  I was used to them acting as if others were less worthy or worthwhile than they are.  Us normal people were “the help” who should respect them and nod and do as told.  She never acted like that.  It was amazing to me that she never broadcast that feeling, and more amazing that she truly did not believe it.  I asked.  She told me.  She even let me look into her eyes to verify her words.  They are the windows to the soul, you know.  She bared that soul for me.  That is when I realized I was wrong about her.  That is when I realized I really wanted her on my team.

Dawn DeMarco came directly from the Outer Colonies to help reinforce Alpha Centauri, and that brought an entirely different experience than we had seen.  She grew up with a lot more conflict than those of us who grew up on Earth or Mars ever dreamed of.  She may have been a noble on a distant world with all the comforts of modern technology, but she knew how tenuous civilization was.  She had fought to defend it for years before The War came upon us all.  We needed that experience in the Cowboys, so I was actually very happy when she flew rings around me during my evaluation of her fighting ability.  It gave me an excuse no one could question when I stamped my approval on her paperwork.  It also allowed me to surprise Charles.  He knew how much I disliked the nobility, so he took my recommendation seriously.

An angel’s face with a devil’s sense of humor.  That is certainly one way to describe Dawn DeMarco.  She was the immaculate, bodysculpted noble daughter of a distant world from the tip of her perfect nose to her very flexible toes.  That’s where the angel comes in.  She used those looks to hide a deadly skill with the spoken word, or a knife.  She could twist either into a target with exquisite skill, and step away leaving confusion in her wake.  Her targets rarely realized she was even the one who struck, and often found themselves laughing at the absurdity of their situation with her.  She could make a crowd laugh at anything or anyone, without offending any of them, including the primary target.  That allowed her to step in and out of a situation with a dancer’s skill that rarely left her holding the bag when the cat got out.  And going out on the town with her was always a devil of a good time.

I learned that Dawn DeMarco was amazing at Alpha Centauri, but she really had the chance to show off in the months and years that followed.  Not that most people realized what she was doing.  She was real good at keeping things under the covers, but I had the pleasure of reporting all her very best deeds to Charles.  She grew up hosting all the best parties on her home planet, and so she was a natural at the kind of highclass parties that disguised the very best war profiteering schemes.  She slowly collected a gang of misfits that loved that kind of party as much as she did.  Or at least enjoyed catching the war profiteers in flagrante, with no way to maintain their innocence.  They sent many rich and nobleborn people to prison, and helped save more money than I can count for The War effort.

Dawn DeMarco flew under Ken Banno’s wing back during the War’s early years, but she quickly became the heart and soul of the gang of misfit Cowboys that enjoyed the party scene.  They glomped onto her like birds of a feather and spent years going to rich and fabulous parties throughout Alpha Centauri, Earth, and the other core worlds.  They worked with various and sundry Western Alliance intelligence agencies to stop war profiteering, and those agencies helped keep their involvement under cover so they could continue their good work.  And of course Ken joined her for most of them.  He was famous in his own right, and could fit into those parties just as well as she.  I pulled them out of all that when it came time to send Third Fleet to strike back at the Russians.  That was for the Epsilon Reticuli campaign.  Yeah.  Epsilon Reticuli.

Jesse did not handle losing his wingman at Epsilon Reticuli well.  He was devastated in fact, and I think he was close to giving up.  Maybe he had.  It can be hard to tell with him at times.  He’s good at hiding his cards.  He needed a good mission to perform to keep him going, and he needed a good partner to help him.  That is why I transferred Dawn DeMarco to back him up.  I knew if anyone could bring him out of his funk it would be her, and I authorized her to use extreme measures to do so.  She smiled at me, and started to do exactly that.  She even dragged me, and the redoubtable Captain Wyatt, to some of the first formal balls and more informal parties following the Battle of Serenity.  Serenity needed to celebrate as much as the rest of us did, and the parties especially were good for public moral.  But I’m not really a big party lover, so I was happy when it came time for Wyatt to return home.  It gave me the perfect excuse to get away from those dang parties.

Jesse was in command of the two Cowboys I left on Serenity when it came time to return home to Alpha Centauri.  But Jesse was not feeling confident in his own abilities at the time.  Not that I really realized how bad off he was.  He was doing his typical Kansas farmer stoic routine, and I was mostly falling for it.  But I was worried enough that I left Dawn DeMarco to help him, and Dawn was way smarter than I was.  She did not fall for his stoic act.  She saw the hole he was falling into and she dragged him out of it.  She brought him to all the best balls and parties on Serenity, and never allowed him to be alone to dwell on the people he had lost.  Unless he needed to be alone.  She was real good at knowing when to step back and when to grab him by the arm and drag him after her.  She pulled him out of his depression and saved him in every way that matters.

Dawn DeMarco and Jesse James, no relation to the famous historical figure that I know of, got real close during their time attending balls and parties on Serenity, and generally flying the Cowboy, American, and Western Alliance flags for everyone to see.  It was a mostly a public relations post until they were pulled out, but my plan was to keep him there until he was feeling better.  I didn’t realize it would take as long as it did.  But considering how far down he actually went, she brought him back real quick.  She never got him to love parties or the pomp and circumstance of full-blown balls, but she did show him how useful a weapon of war they could be.  And Jesse was all about being useful.  So she dragged him with her until he started to go with her of his own free will.  And then he started to go with her even when there wasn’t a party to go to.  She gave him new life, and he held on tight.  She let him.

Dawn DeMarco and Jesse James got a lot closer to each other than military regulations approved of during their stay on Serenity.  I recognized that when they linked back up with the rest of us Cowboys after their job was done.  I recognized it and totally forgot to report it.  So sad.  The bureaucrats would have been most cross with me if they learned.  But Serenity had forged them into a powerful team, and I wanted all of that on my team.  So I failed to report the violation.  It wasn’t the first time we Cowboys violated regulations, and it most certainly was not the last.  Dawn had her own set of rules and regulations she trashed over the years, often with great glee.  Sometimes just because someone had to do it.  I didn’t want them caught, so I sent them back out under cover with her gang of misfit Cowboys to find more War profiteers.  Someone had to do it, and she was so very good at it.

If there was ever anyone who loved parties, it was Dawn DeMarco.  She grew up on a colony world devoted to hosting the best formal balls, and her family had been at the pinnacle of that constant contest between Great Families.  Her name could open the most prestigious doors, even when the events were closed to outsiders.  And someone with her pedigree was never an outsider.  Families all over known space would kill, or at least seriously maim an expendable minion, to get an attendee like her in their home, and she could bring as many plus ones as she wanted.  Jesse was almost always one of those plus ones, and she became very diligent at making certain he enjoyed them.

Dawn DeMarco and Jesse James traveled from Alpha Centauri to Sunnydale during their multiyear campaign to send every War profiteer they could find straight to prison.  They and their misfits caught dozens of well-connected conmen who thought they were above the law, and proved that they were not again and again.  And in so doing they liberated more money than I can count, especially during the final months leading up to the Hyades Cluster invasion.  They finished their whirlwind tour of the party scene mere days before we kicked that campaign off, and it was good to have them back if I’m being honest.  My command felt a little light with them flitting around arresting bad guys.  But it was a worthy cause.  And Dawn made up for it when she arrived.

There are not many people who can fly into a major fleet base system like Sunnydale as it was back during The War and bring the party with them.  Dawn DeMarco is one of them.  She arrived in Sunnydale mere days before the big kick off the Chinese had elected to receive, and that started a whole new series of balls and parties.  They spread throughout the system in a matter of hours, and everybody who was somebody wanted to be there to witness the sendoff.  Which meant of course that Dawn was still working.  Literal years of work on her part had uncovered a deep network of war profiteers, and the big wings were coming to Sunnydale.  She wanted them.  She wanted them, she got them, and the War effort was never the same after that.  After Sunnydale.  Disappointingly few of them served actual prison time, but they paid heavy penalties in both money and political clout to stay out, and that kept the fleets flying into the Hyades for years.  It really was the perfect start to the invasion.

One might think that the party scene took a hit when the Hydes invasion started, but anyone who thought that did not know my Cowboys well enough.  We were tasked with winning the hearts and minds of the local population, and Dawn DeMarco was a maestro at winning hearts and minds.  And of course there were always people who had sworn everlasting loyalty to the liberation governments who didn’t actually mean it.  Dawn and her misfits had their choice of people to search for and uncover and catch in the act.  So the official balls and informal parties continued.  Hearts and minds were won.  Bad Actors were sent to prison, or paid massive amounts of money to stay free.  And planet by planet, we advanced into the Hyades one party at a time.  Never thought I would attend so many parties during a war.  It was one of the more surreal parts of the whole campaign, but Dawn made it all fun.

You might think that Dawn DeMarco was all about the parties if you don’t look close.  It’s certainly the image she projected for all to see.  The more people saw her as that, the more dangerous she was to those with ill intent.  We really did think alike in that way, and I loved having her on my team.  Or as it sometimes felt, me being on her team.  She truly was so much more than just the debutant of the ball though.  She had a mind for intelligence that was scary, and her family had trained her to run the family businesses when she grew up.  To managed all the money they made in all the different ventures that made the formal balls of her youth possible.  She was absolutely amazing at understanding money and where it went.  It made her real good at her job.

Dawn DeMarco had a real eye for accounting and other business running skills, which made her real good at being able to find discrepancies.  Show her a financial report and she would know everything that mattered about the company in a minute or three.  Wait another few minutes and she could come up with a way to infiltrate the organization and find out if her instincts were right.  Sometimes she was wrong, and in those cases a report of her studies and how to fix the problems she found would often appear on the owner’s desk in the middle of the night.  It was her way of helping people who were honestly trying their best, and she followed their progress in the years and decades that followed.  I can’t tell you how many companies she shepherded like that.  Seriously.  I really can’t.  It would break a whole lot of privacy agreements.  But I can guarantee that you’ve bought some of their products.  She’s that good.

Dawn DeMarco found many rich and noble traitors to Earth just by looking at balance sheets or a financial reports over the years.  She had a gut instinct better than any cyber I’ve ever known when it came to digging up financial skullduggery, and she never stopped hunting once she was on the scent.  Dawn spent hours every day just pulling records of military contractors and looking to see if she could see any indications of fraud.  Then she would dress up and go to a ball or party at night to maintain her cover as a socialite who went to all the best of each, before coming back the next morning to search through more financial records.  And she pulled in her posse of misfits to help her scan records.  None were as good as her, but she taught them and their cybers what to look for and turned them into probably the best team of forensic accountants in known space.  They literally weaponized math to catch traitors, and that is awesome on every level.

Many of the balls and parties Dawn DeMarco organized or attended had no other reason than to pad her resume as a ball and partygoer.  If people got arrested at all of them, bad actors would get suspicious, so most were completely clean, but she was always on the hunt for clues.  And sometimes she would go in with malice afore thought, making certain to leave some opening for a target to think they were safe doing what she already had proof or suspicions they did.  Then some police officer or interstellar investigator would “randomly” walk in and catch them in the act.  Dawn was always shocked and amazed that anything illegal would go on in a ball or party she attended.  She did such a good innocent act that nobody caught her.  We would all get together for a private party afterwards, sit back, relax, maybe have some good drinks or smokes, and just celebrate another bust.  And then she would go back to work the next morning looking for the next one.  She was an amazing machine.

Dawn DeMarco was absolutely one of our secret weapons during the long Hyades Campaign.  She devoted herself to winning hearts and minds one party at a time, and her parties were legendary.  I don’t know how news traveled in the Hyades, but the locals somehow knew about those parties before we even arrived.  We’d come in, we’d drive off the Chinese garrison, install a new government to start the rebuilding process, and when we asked if the locals had any questions the first question often was when Dawn was planning the liberation party.  They asked about her by name.  And they usually had liaisons ready to work with her when she arrived.  It was amazing.  They could give two hoots about who their new designated overlord was, but Dawn they welcomed like visiting royalty.  And she had a way of treating with them exactly as they wanted to be treated.  She was always amazing like that.

The Western Alliance and the Republic of China wanted to bring the Hyades Cluster into our world of human rights and democratic elections and equality for all.  But they underestimated how foreign those concepts were in the Hyades.  They had forgotten what it was like to be taught from the moment you were born that some people were more equal than others.  Dawn DeMarco was our answer to that.  She walked into their world as a visiting royal, a princess of a high family, and she inhabited a place in the highest caste the locals could accept at a gut level.  Then she valued their opinions and suggestions as if they were equals without requiring that they stand up as equals to people they’d been trained to never stand up to.  Dawn made the first crack in generations of programming by simply treating them well and allowing them to place her in a position they could comfortably stand next to.

Dawn DeMarco grew up on a planet that lived the voluntary illusion that some people were royalty and most were not.  She knew how to act in an environment like that.  The Chinese had filled the Hyades Cluster with billions of people by shipping their excess slave populations out of Greater China to labor in the outer colonies.  Most Western Alliance citizens simply don’t understand how fundamental the difference between the Chinese overlords and their slave populations was.  The locals knew they were being dragged into new and strange worlds when we liberated them, but as much as they wanted that, it terrified them.  Dawn made it easier by playing the illusion with them.  She played the superior their culture demanded had to exist, even as she quietly subverted every teaching of that culture.  And the really interesting bit is that the locals knew what she was doing and helped her at every opportunity.

Dawn DeMarco observed the forms of the master and servant society the Chinese built in the Hyades Cluster because she grew up on a world that lived an idealized version of the concept.  It was a voluntary game to her people, but she used the skills she grew up perfecting to inhabit the role the Hyades Cluster citizens needed her to play.  And she pulled the rest of us along with her.  She introduced us as her compatriots, and the locals quickly put us on the same level as her.  Well, maybe a step or two down.  Especially when those of us who had no understanding of royal or caste systems failed to act the way we were supposed to.  But the locals were surprisingly good at coaching us to correctly play the role when we deviated too far.  Being taught how to play the part of a master by a servant caste learning what it was to be free was one of the more surreal dancing acts I’ve played in my entire life.

Most would-be governors or garrisons in the Hyades Cluster had no concept of how rigid the caste system was, and totally failed to understand the game, or the fact that it wasn’t a game at all to the locals.  The Alliance planned to use our status as Deputies of the Tarrant County Sheriff, through more legal shenanigans than I even want to think about, as a group of peacekeepers to hold the disparate castes together.  Charles got us to wear business suits and trained us to deal with the small but influential caste of business owners.  And Dawn DeMarco and her merry little band of misfits put us in the role of pretend masters over former slaves who could pretend we weren’t overturning every aspect of their lives even as we taught them to do precisely that.  We wore three hats in the Hyades, and we absolutely made mistakes.  Some of them pretty big.  But we navigated that crazy mix of roles and helped an entire cluster of people bootstrap themselves into the modern worlds.

Tarrant County made us peacekeepers.  Charles made us businessmen.  And Dawn DeMarco made us the centers of attention of every ball and party over hundreds of lightyears of space.  They all made us an example to the people of what they could be.  It took flexible minds to play all those roles, and I did not think we were gonna succeed at it.  I’ll never forget that one day Dawn pulled me into a corner and gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.  She said that we would fail and make mistakes.  That there would be many we could never help, no matter how hard we tried.  We simply couldn’t drag the people out of generations of chattel slavery.  All we could do was lend them a hand, and those with the drive to succeed would hold on for dear life and drag themselves out of it.  And they would pull others up with them.  She was so right.  We did not save the Hyades Cluster.  We gave them the tools to save themselves, and oh my God, did they really go off and do that in the end.

Dawn DeMarco made it all the way through The War without dying once, and Jesse kept up with her the whole way.  He was the only one that really managed to do that.  The rest of us went in and out of her life and plans as The War took us to and fro.  But Dawn and Jesse were a matched pair the whole way.  She was a royal princess, he was a Kansas farmer, and they never hid that to the people of the Hyades.  The only thing they hid was how fond of each other they were growing.  From each other, at least.  Everyone watching them knew exactly what was going on, and most of us were taking bets on when they’d notice.  Then one day they looked at each other and realized the truth.  Katy won that bet.  The rest of us just smiled and shook our heads as they both retired and walked away from all of the fighting the moment War’s End came.  They toured the stars for a while, visiting places they had always wanted to see, and went to Camelot for a time.

Camelot was a real trip for Jesse.  Dawn DeMarco was a princess on a planet built to look and feel like a permanent Renaissance Festival, and she took him to all the best places.  Her family was not very impressed with her for dragging a dirt-grubbing farmer home with her, and a rather large number of would-be princeling suitors became highly offended at the whole affair.  A few even challenged Jesse to duels of honor over it.  Jesse may have been a farmer, but he knew exactly how to handle a situation like that.  Ask Dawn if she wanted the princeling beaten or humiliated, and then follow her wishes to the letter.  A lady likes a man who can defend her honor, and so does the family of such a lady.  By the time Dawn and Jesse left Camelot, her family loved him, princelings around the world feared him, and all the princesses wanted a real life Cowboy just like him.  Made for some interesting trips for the Cowboys that followed them.

Dawn DeMarco and Jesse retired to Kansas after their trip around the worlds, but there were some things a princess from Camelot could never truly adjust to.  Midwest farmers tend to be a stoic and practical lot.  Despite centuries of technological progress, it still takes biological humans to maximize the crop yields for the next harvest.  AIs can’t match them, and most cybers avoid the field entirely.  Farmers wake up each morning, put on some rugged clothing, and then go out into the fields to feed America and the worlds beyond.  That old Paul Harvey tribute to the farmer still holds true today.  Dawn DeMarco was not raised to live in that kind of world, but she turned that into a virtue rather than a hindrance.  She decided it was her mission to bring high fashion and classy parties to a world known for barn raising parties and blue jeans.  She is stubborn like that.

Dawn DeMarco spends most of her time on Earth now.  Kansas to be precise.  On Jesse’s old farm.  Their farm now.  She never mastered the art of dressing like a Kansas farm wife, though.  She could if she wanted to, but she has steadfastly remained on the side of holding onto as much of her home culture as she can.  That has manifested in her always dressing up wherever she goes.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in a t-shirt and blue jeans, even when she goes out to do farm work.  She’s got work dresses for that, so she doesn’t tear her dress dresses to ribbons while dealing with a stubborn cow or an angry chicken.  Yes, she knows that blue jeans would be more practical, but there are some things she is just too stubborn to wear.  And she’s infected the local farm wives with her fashion sense, to the mixed annoyance, bemusement, and approval of the local farmers.

Dawn DeMarco is not the kind of person who leaves any world the same after she passes through.  The Hyades Cluster it still a witness to that, and she has certainly changed Kansas.  It was never as grey and plain as that old Wizard of Oz movie made it look, but Kansas was never known as a great pillar of culture and the arts.  Unless you are into the 4H kind of stuff.  Dawn decided it was her job to change that, and she built theatres and art studios and all kinds of other stuff like that.  Then she brought in artists that the locals actually liked, and promoted them with all the energy the princess of an entire world is generally expected to give to a major art project.  She’s smart like that.  Giving people what they want in ways they didn’t know they wanted.

I see Dawn DeMarco and Jesse every time I return to Earth.  They’ve built a private Cowboy Country on their farm more tailored towards their misfits, but the rest of us are welcome to spend time there as well.  Dawn staffed it with people from Camelot, as well as other members of the Society for Creative Anachronism.  They made the farm an official Old West reenactment site, complete with a town church, general store, saloon, and all the other little things you expect to see in an Old West town, surrounded by the fields filled with winter wheat in spring and summer.  They’ve even brought one of the local Indian Tribes into the act, and you can see their traders or raiders in and around town any day of the year.  And yes, they do make money selling the experience to curious vacationers from the modern era.  Dawn is the distinguished matron of the whole affair, and she makes everyone welcome whenever we show up to rest and relax from our travels.

If there is one thing I know about Dawn DeMarco, it is that she takes her play seriously.  She plays a patron of the arts in town, and the matron of an Old West town on the family farm.  And under all of that, she sells her expertise as an auditor to companies in need of a trustworthy number cruncher.  And sometimes she even assembles a whole gang of misfits to go out and hunt down bad men and women.  She is amazing.  A less relaxing and restful retirement is hard to imagine, but she has prospered beyond the wildest dreams anyone I can think of.  And she enjoys it.  What more is there to ask for in a life than that?