HEAVY SKY - Mars, the Failed Refuge & The Martian Civil War

Mars was the first planet to see massive terraforming efforts in the late twenty-first century. While Mars is a big place, most people there are concentrated in the cities built into the Labyrinth. The steep canyons provided the early colonies with shelter from the harsh storms caused by the initial terraforming efforts. The Martian colonies are divided by nationality. The Chinese have by far the largest and oldest presence on the Red Planet. Due to the Interplanetary Land Swap performed in 2115, the second-largest presence in terms of footprint is the Chelyabinsk Rus. The third presence are the United Cities of the Arctic Circle in their role as successor to the United States of America.

The true rulers of Mars are however corporations, first among them Hexacorp. The Red Planet attracted corporate governments who set up massive mining and factory operations there. Both state- and corporate governments saw to it that large numbers of workers were shipped to Mars as a cheap labor force, and this labor force has in the centuries since grown to a thriving, if embattled, assortment of colonies.

 

The biggest Martian settlement, Tharsis City, is located inside the Noctis Labyrinthus canyon system in the western reach of the Valles Marineris canyon system. The vertical city sprawls throughout the western part of the labyrinth, where it is relatively safe from the Martian storms' wrath. Most of the Martian mining projects are either located in the relative vicinity of Tharsis, or are connected to the city by hardened monorail.

 

Most of Mars’ interplanetary travel is handled through a cluster of spaceports surrounding Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

 

While different nationalities claim to represent different parts of Mars, the planet is governed by a unified body, the Mars Board. The powers present on the Red Planet realized it would be beneficial for all if instead of disparate colonies, all human efforts on Mars were centralized and run through one representative government. The Mars Board seats representatives from all nation-states as well as from corporate entities with substantial interests and investments in the Red Planet.

 

Most of the resources extracted from Mars do not stay there, but were shipped to the Venusian orbit, to construct the Seramis colonies in orbit, and also to Earth's moon to fuel the colonization there.

 

As a prospective colony world, Mars’ biggest disadvantage is the planet’s lack of gravity. Humans were not made for Martian gravity. Another is the lack of Earth’s magnetic field and the resulting much higher ambient radiation. Genefixing did help some with those issues, but even today those artificial genes have by far not permeated the majority of the Martian population, and the average life expectancy of Martians is rather low compared to that of Earthling humans.

 

 

Similar to the situation on Luna, gravity serves as a tool of social discipline on Mars. Most Martian workers have no access to expensive gene therapies. Instead they rely on a steady supply of medical nanomachines that constantly fix the damages wrought upon their bodies by lack of gravity. While this problem is not quite as severe on Mars as it is on the Moon, Martian workers still require frequent, bi-annually injections to arrest the effects of living in a gravity well that is weaker than Earth’s. The supply of these nano medicines was severely threatened after the Bracer war. But the colonists helped themselves: a couple of Russian engineers reverse engineered the cure, and spread it freely among the population, alongside with instructions for how to manufacture the cure themselves – which is not as easy as it sounds, as it requires access to nano assembly equipment, which is expensive and rare.

 

The success of the Seramis colony on Venus proved another nail in the coffin of the Martian colonies. The initial plan was to have Mars be an extractive productive colony world first, working towards a fully terraformed planet, welcoming more affluent citizens after the completion of the terraforming project. But transforming the Martian landscape and atmosphere was more expensive than the initial projections predicted, and the labor force turned out more unruly and less prone to willingly indulge absentee rule than Earth's corporate masters thought. With the Martian terraforming project stalled, the Red Planet's atmosphere is thrown in a violent turmoil, plagued by frequent, violent dust storms, rivaling those of the Terran stormlands in intensity, if not frequency.

 

The Martian Civil War

 

Earth was physically cut off from the rest of the solar system for fifty seven years. During that time, Earth’s colonies did not receive any sort of supply runs or personnel reinforcements. The colonies were on their own. Mars was relatively well off in this scenario, since the Red Planet’s terraforming efforts had brought at least some preliminary results. Of all inner planet colonies, Mars was the only place that could pivot to the production of foodstuff for everyone. All colonies can produce their own oxygen, all colonies can produce their own water. They can also provide a bare minimum in terms of nutrition for their citizens for some time, but at the time of the Bracer War, colonies had not yet become fully autonomous in that regard. The Mars Board commandeered large parts of the Martian industry – to the protestations of some corporations – to pivot to food production. Within an Earth year Mars was exporting more food than it had been importing before the destruction of the Bracelet.

 

Turning Mars into a food exporter, and the Martian population engineering their own gravity medications lent Mars a much greater sense of autonomy. During the aftermath of the Bracer War, the disparate national colonies on Mars moved much closer together, and began to cultivate an identity of their own.

 

Things turned ugly when Earth’s isolation ended. The Earth Trade Organization sent in agents that began to crack down on the spread of unlicensed gravity medication, arresting hundreds. With Earth open again, Martian food production was ordered shut down. The Bracers who ran the corporations in control of Mars felt the need to re-assert their dominance. But the Martian people disagreed. Strikes broke out. The corporations sent in bioroids as strikebreakers, and cracked down on the movement. This then resulted in the emergence of a call for Martian independence – and a subsequent crackdown on all dissidents living in the colonies.

 

In the year that followed, the Martian rebels committed acts of sabotage against targets across the solar system. On Mercury, Martian commandos took over the biggest spaceports, and threatened to blast every approaching ship out of the sky until imprisoned activists on Mars and Earth were released. This disrupted commercial space travel significantly – most inner system ships use Mercury as a gravity slingshot, regardless of their final destination. Corporate commandos telecast into the Mercury mining operations and but a bloody end to the occupation by explosively decompressing the captured facilities, killing thousands. But commerce resumed unabated after. In the chaos, a mass driver on Mercury deployed a mining payload that crashed into and completely destroyed the Boltzmann Crater settlement on Luna, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties.

 

Corporate PR spun the Boltzmann incident as an act of Martian terrorism, proof that only strict corporate oversight and discipline can prevent the weaponization of space-borne traffic. Due to the horrendous death toll, the Martian resistance movement lost its foothold in the population. Corporate security troops flooded the Martian colonies, rooting out whatever pockets of resistance they could find. What followed was a tense period in which the remaining Martian resistance sporadically struck out with acts of sabotage again, but nothing on the previous scale. The Mars Board employed collective punishment techniques, withholding anti-gravity and anti-radiation medications from sectors that were caught harboring rebels. This put an end to the Martian Civil War, however the resistance movement still exists in the underground.