by Rick Shelley
Lon, Junior, waited six weeks before resigning his commission. He had served on only one combat contract after Elysium. Two months after he left the Corps, Junior left Dirigent to attend the university on Elysium—a week after his sister Angie married … a civilian with no intention of ever becoming a soldier.
That was not, however, the end of the Nolan family’s connection to the Dirigent Mercenary Corps. Even after Lon and Sara moved to Bascombe East with the twins and gradually took over running the Winking Eye, Lon went off on a couple of diplomatic missions, including one to Buckingham, the capital of the Second Commonwealth, that lasted nearly six months. He also continued to serve as an adviser to the Council of Regiments.
In the next six generations, twenty-seven descendants of Lon and Sara Nolan served in the Corps, and three of them became General—one great-grandson serving three terms. And, more than three thousand years later—long after the Dirigent Mercenary Corps, the Second Commonwealth, and the Confederation of Human Worlds had all passed into ancient history—a direct descendant of Lon and Sara Nolan commanded the security detachment aboard the Exoprise, a converted asteroid fitted out to be the first ship to try to reach the great galaxy in Andromeda, hoping to find, finally, another sentient species in the universe.
