When we meet Joe, he’s a 22 year old community college drop out. He was studying to be an automobile mechanic, but he got lucky in that his aunt Grace was the first person from Earth to become a trained Guardian.
The family is mixed race. His Anglo father was a retired Senior Chief in the US Navy who worked at a defense contractor, his Mexican-American mother was a homemaker who recently got her real estate license as her youngest was getting close to graduating high school. Joe is the third of five children, three boys and two girls. The family has lived in Temecula, California for about the past five years since his father retired from the military.
When his aunt started a business shipping dogs back to the Empire as pets, Joe was one of the first to sign on, ditching his community college classes and part-time job. She taught him and other members of the family what it takes to be a crewman on an Imperial cargo vessel, and he spent about a year working the dog business, both working with the dogs on the ground and as a crewman on her ships. As a consequence, when the Empire made official contact with Earth about six months ago in the wake of a nuclear war between Russia and China, the family is about the only place interested parties on Earth can find people who know anything about Imperial technology. He is sought out and offered a post on Earth’s first interstellar mission. His cousin Adela also gets a berth, but on the other ship.
Joe is a fairly typical young man who has been raised well, but not in a particularly genteel fashion. He’s used to being middle class, but he’s not a gentleman by any stretch of the imagination. For all of that, however, he’s a good human being, and he tries to do the right thing when he realizes what it is. He doesn’t realize how much his father’s military attitude rubbed off on him, despite his father’s frequent absences on deployment while he was growing up. The family might well be the richest on Earth under the new Imperial economy (dogs are one of the few things Imperials are willing to pay for, and they own the largest dog rescue operation and control the transport mechanism), but they still act middle class as they haven’t had opportunity to adjust their thinking.
You can read about Joe in the Preparations For War series. Amazon Books2Read (Series is four books and complete)
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