Thanks for the comments! Yeah, I agree with the Tau Ceti thing a little, but I wanted to give their history somehow, and that seemed to be the most appropriate place. Maybe I'll add a passage with Ryp making a deal with the Tau Ceti and explain it there, or a passage where Two Moons is preparing the fleet.
I'm going to write more stories that follow up on this, but they won't neccesarily follow a straight narrative, in other words Adelaide, Ryp, Two Moons, and Orion will be recurring characters in my stories, but not every story will be about them.
I sort of like the short story format because I can have a mini-plot but sew in much bigger stuff happening around everyone. That is what I really like about westerns, there are small personal level stories going on in the midst of much bigger things. You can end up using those bigger things as Deus Ex Machina to resolve certain passages. Such as in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly where Tuco is about to kill Blondie and a cannonball hits the hotel room.
Krastian, I see what your fiction teachers meant. I wrote all of this story last night, and I spent half the time trying to decide how I should use all the planets in this little map of the 47.2 lightyear radius
http://www.solstation.com/47ly-ns.htm
The hardest thing is that you have to make up a history and really stick to it. I'm going to actually have to make a timeline before I write the next story just to get things straight in my head. I also have to check some of this story for continuancy. I think ultimately readers are becoming more attuned to science fiction than they used to, that is why shows like Battlestar Galactica and Cowboy Bebop are possible. I also think readers are at the point where they don't need to know everything, as long as they have some understanding of the events at hand.