The Abandoned Frontier
Devastation and Reconstruction on the Colonies
2627 - 2670
E is for Earth,
which is pretty and blue. Don't trust the Earthborn,
they're greedy as glue"Red Letters" A Martian primer under Imperial sanction.
The Fire had devastated colonial humanity. On Venus, surviving settlements fought each other in desperation for food and parts. On Mars, destruction of terraforming apparatus cooled the planet by several degrees, and Martians faced starvation and the perilous degradation of their fragile ecosystem. Luna and the belt colonies simply perished.
Venus became a graveyard. Lack of supplies weakened the colonists to exhaustion. They struggled to maintain equipment needed to keep their bulkheads intact. The absence of help from Earth embittered Venusians, who had watched loved ones die during a time when it was technically possible for rescue forces from Earth to provide assistance.
The war likewise wrecked the fledgling Martian ecology. Survivors suffered battle-shock and food was scarce. Desperate colonists focused on food production and repair of the atmospheric converters that facilitated their tenuous grip on life. Earth offered no aid, despite numerous pleas for help. Thousands starved. But Martians were hardy stock, and those that survived gained strength from their travails. They dug in and rebuilt, all while watching the Terran broadcasts celebrating victory over Prometheus and the establishment of a "Great Human Empire."
Hard Lessons Learned
When help came at last in the 2660s, the colonists welcomed their "rescuers" eagerly in spite of the long delay. Sentiments changed however as corporations reclaimed old territory without regard for colonial efforts, as new police settled in under the Emperor's authority, and as Terran workers streamed in to work in newly dug mines. Stunned colonists quickly grew resentful of "dirtborn" arrogance, and permanent immigrants to the red planet eventually adopted this native view as they, too, suffered from Imperial prejudice.
Earth though was in desperate need of raw materials, so Venus and Mars once again boomed. As arks and atmospheric converters went up again, however, colonial veterans of The Fire quietly stockpiled equipment, food, and weapons. They taught their children the harsh lesson they had learned from the Cybrid Wars: Dirtborn could not be trusted. Earth would forsake her colonies again.
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