Challenge #03010-H087: Secrets of the Network

They were the sons of the owner of a DeRegger system. Their father was the CEO above all other CEO's, and his word, and theirs by extension, were law. However, seeing all the degradation in the worlds their father commanded, they decided to change things. They'd had the best education money could buy, even being allowed to get a higher education in the Alliance worlds, "to know their infidelities, insanity, godlessness, and excess my sons" was their father's reason. However, that education gave them something their father didn't expect. Compassion. -- Lessons

Just as you don't know you're on a Deathworld until you leave it, you also don't know you're on a Deregger colony until you hit Alliance space. So it was for the sons of Nigel Lodalute. He had had enough of the Alliance winning all the time, and demanded that his heirs learn the secrets of the alliance so that the Fiscal Empire of Lodalute Incorporated could prove their true economic strength and get one up on those evil socialist overlords trying to overtake the one true way.

Nigel did what he always accused the Alliance of doing, and sent his young to take advantage of the other education system to learn the secrets and use them back home. He insisted that they return, and had an unbreakable contract to prevent them from defecting. Even the CRC said it was a perfectly amenable agreement.

So they went. Nigel VI and his younger brother Steve III. There was a mandatory period of culture shock where they kept wondering how the system held itself together. Their chief concern was who had to pay for all of it, and how the administration managed to manage everyone's Time. They were encouraged to dig deep, and what they found shocked them.

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