11.27-The Revolutionary Underground

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.27, The Revolutionary Underground

Last week was a truly explosive episode in the Martian Revolution.

And then it says here, pause for laughter.

Anywho, after OmniCore dropped the bomb on Elysium on January 16, 2252, the Elysians were buried under a smoking and radioactive crater.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, someone, or something, had detonated the last Martian bomb in that orbital platform above Olympus.

That blast wiped out satellite arrays and orbital installations and took out half the OmniCore ships in the vicinity.

On top of that, the EMP triggered by the explosion was so intense, it blew out Olympus' surface power grid.

So even though the physical infrastructure of the colony was intact, the mass power outage in the domes and upper levels crashed all communication systems.

Between the vaporized satellites and the surface blackout, Olympus was totally cut off from the outside world.

Tharsis was the only city left that could get signals out, as they were the only city not directly impacted by a nuclear explosion.

And they wanted to keep that distinction, so the Tharsian leadership put that surrender signal out on repeat and hoped they would be heard before any more bombs were dropped.

As I just said, the explosion of the last Martian nuke above Olympus had not only taken out the satellite arrays and orbital installations, but also half the Omnicore ships in orbit.

The other half were in various states of damage to stress, either from peripheral blast damage or power failures caused by the EMP.

Commander Barlow's flagship was among those that survived but had been knocked offline.

With the Olympus group in post-explosion disarray, the fleet groups above Tharsis and Elysium redeployed vessels to engage in immediate rescue and repair operations.

Now most of the armed fighting ships had been sent off to hunt down the last remnants of the Martian Navy, so what was left around Mars were ships that were meant to support the reacquisition of Mars and the reconstitution of Mars Division.

But now every ship that could be spared raced over to Olympus to help with the post-disaster relief.

The two classes of ships that were not redeployed were those directly involved with the reacquisition of Mars by Mars Division.

The first class were large cargo barges, carrying all kinds of heavy machinery and new computers and all the extra grab units and oxygen scrubbers, flex cells, biomass units that might be required if the colonies were excessively damaged and the Omni Corps personnel had to supply their own equipment and necessities.

And the colonies were now excessively damaged.

The other class of ship that didn't budge were troop transports that were carrying in total about 30,000 security personnel who would be tasked with re-establishing a beachhead of control over the colonies in order to get the FOSS-5 moving again.

Although that number was now down to 25,000 after the loss of several transports above Olympus.

About 36 hours after the explosion, Barlow's ship was recovered, and the commander was evacuated to a more functional vessel.

Plenty of officers in the OmniCorps fleet now expected him to order further nuclear bombardment of at least Olympus in retaliation.

But instead, when Barlow got back on comms, he ordered the officers above Tharsis to accept the surrender at once and begin landing forces on the ground.

He ordered the officers above Elysium to begin landing their heavy machinery and drone bots and engineers to start digging down through the rubble towards the remaining habitable levels hidden underneath, if any habitable levels remained underneath.

Meanwhile, for Olympus, he declined to drop a bomb, and instead ordered a force of security services to land, re-establish communications with the surface, and report back how bad things were.

Because as it turned out, at least one small part of the recent OmniCorps negotiating ultimatums had been a bluff.

Commander Barlow was under orders not to bomb Olympus, as the Olympian infrastructure was too valuable to lose.

The first OmniCore forces landed on the surface at Tharsis on January 23, 2252.

The Tharsian leaders had been told to clear the Tharsian main dome and allow OmniCore security services to come in and retake control.

The Tharsian leaders were told the security services would consider the area a free fire zone and any Martian they saw would be shot on sight.

Now this wasn't too hard to comply with as the population had already evacuated themselves down to the lower levels of the colony.

So the security services landed and secured the main dome with no resistance, just about the last time they would enjoy such an easy time of things.

With that accomplished, Omnicore executives, administrators, and supervisors started arriving, led by Jan Gilliand, an A-class executive who was not just a Martian, but a Tharsian Martian.

He'd been born and raised in Tharsis.

Gileand had served Omnicore loyally his whole life, and he'd joined the Martians that exiled themselves to Earth after the Revolution of 47.

Well, now he was back home, with a brief to do one thing and one thing only, get FOSS-5 flowing back to Earth.

And with Elysium and Olympus now both out of commission thanks to those nukes, Omnicor's access to Phos 5 rested entirely on Gillian's ability to get Tharsis back up and running.

On the other side of the planet, OmniCore landed their first personnel at Elysium on February 1, 2252.

Unlike Tharsis, they did not have any ability to communicate with those under the crater.

Nor did they need much worry about Martian resistance or attacks.

The Elysians were fully buried.

So at first, Omnicore landed heavy machinery, drone bots, and engineers.

They commenced digging down through the rubble at the former spot of the Elysian Center Dome.

The plan was to dig down until they found intact levels of the colony, make contact with the survivors, and force them to submit to Omnicore or face further death and destruction.

And I should mention here that though radiation from the blast had mostly cleared and all the crews on the ground followed decontamination protocols, incidence of cancer in those crews wound up being 500% higher than the general population.

Omnicor was pretty well done with caring who got hurt in their drive to regain control of the FOSS-5.

Beneath this digging, the Elysians were alive, but they were not exactly well.

They had survived the initial blast, but they had all been traumatized by the explosion.

Now the good news was that deep in the Warrens, the backup flex cell batteries seemed to be working, and most systems had reverted to local manual controls when the the central servers were destroyed in the blast.

So down in the Warrens, grab units and oxygen scrubbers and biomass units were still mostly functional.

Doors and lift shafts had to be controlled manually from direct interface panels, but they did work.

Not that anyone was super eager to get into the lift shafts.

But the bad news was that they lived in round-the-clock fear of further catastrophes, and this was not an irrational fear.

In the days and weeks after the bomb, the Elysians dealt with random cave-ins, power outages, and equipment equipment failures, all of which helped drive the death and injury toll from the bomb ever upward.

It was in the midst of this trauma, chaos, and fear that Alexandra Clare emerged as the primary Martian leader during the siege of Elysium.

She had been in the main Martian Guard station in the Upper Warrens when the bomb was dropped, and as soon as it hit she and her lieutenants immediately set to work organizing a response to the disaster.

Internal colony communications were re-established as best they could, and and she put out orders for the Martian Guard to mobilize and spearhead rescue, repair, and relief efforts.

And that included anyone who'd been recently dismissed in Calderone's purge of the black caps.

This was no time for politics.

She also called on engineers and medical teams and SysTex to present themselves to local Martian Guard stations.

They would all then fan out in teams assessing structural damage and looking for injured survivors.

Critical components at every level were checked for structural integrity and power system functionality, and if anything was deemed unsafe, the people there were herded towards areas that had passed these initial inspections.

In some places, they found that grav units or oxygen scrubbers had failed, and always, always, they found more dead bodies to identify, mourn, and then dispose of.

Through these stressful initial weeks, Claire also provided invaluable moral support to the traumatized Elysians.

They all knew who she was, they knew her face, they knew her voice, and every day she released updates and messages, keeping everyone informed of what was happening, and trying to dispel fear of the unknown with concrete information.

In her mind, the best way to avoid panic was by sharing information, not withholding information.

And she was right about that.

Claire also hammered the message that everyone was in this together.

During the immediate crisis period, the distinctions between red caps and black caps and Martians and Earthlings went out the window.

They were all trauma-bonded by a shared hatred of Omnicore for what they had just done.

As I said last time, Elysium was the colony with the highest population of Earthlings, and while there was some lingering red-capped Martian chauvinism, it was clear that whatever they thought about the Earthlings on Mars, Omnicore didn't care about them at all.

Omnicore had been as willing to kill the Earthlings on Mars as the Martians on Mars.

Besides, when it came time to rescue, salvage, dig, help, solve, resettle, whatever, everyone got jumbled up and there there wasn't time to ask if the person next to you was born on Mars or on Earth.

And so it was that the future of the post-revolutionary Republic of Mars was born first here in Elysium, rather than in the capital city of Olympus.

Meanwhile, over in the capital city of Olympus, the present leaders of the Republic of Mars were also sitting in the upper level of their warrens when their bomb had gone off.

The triumvirate of Marcus Leopold, Ivana Darby, and Jose Calderón wielded emergency executive power.

And while they did not have to deal with anything like Alexandra Clare and the Elysians were dealing with, they were still all reeling from the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.

Although, due to the instant collapse of the surface power grid, and with it all external sensors and communications, they had no clear idea what had happened or why.

But they were absolutely convinced that Omnicore had done something aggressive and malicious to knock out the power, even after the Olympians had tried to surrender.

And so, while they had been willing to surrender, their resolve now fully stiffened.

If OmniCorps was going to attack them no matter what, why not fight back?

The first battalions of OmniCorps security services and auxiliary personnel landed at Olympus on February the 5th.

Their experience wound up looking like a combination of their brethren at Elysium and Tharsis.

As at Tharsis, the surface infrastructure of Olympus was intact, so there was no need to start with heavy excavation.

But as with Elysium, they were unable to communicate with the Olympians underground and were just going in blind.

Their primary mission was to get into the Primedome, establish a base of operations and communication, and re-establish contact with the Olympians to tell them the good news that they had been returned to the Omnicore family.

With all the power down on the surface, when the Omnicore forces landed, everyone had to wear environmental suits and heavy boots, and those who first entered the Primedome came in loaded with neutron guns, small drone bombs, and fortification material to ensure a total security lockdown.

They were half expecting to find armed Martians there ready to attack, but instead they found the Prime Dome eerily deserted.

Most of the A-levels were also without power, gravity, or breathable air, and so unbeknownst to the OmniCorps occupation forces, it created a difficult membrane for the Martians to penetrate on their way up to the surface.

So the OmniCore security forces established defensive perimeters and signaled to the ships up above that it was safe to send down engineers and cis techs who would come to repair the grid and re-establish control over the main central Martian servers.

Hopefully they would also be able to re-establish atmosphere and gravity controls so they could get out of their dang environmental suits and take off these dang heavy boots.

One of the first things they did once they got into the Prime Dome was set up a mobile communications array that started broadcasting a message downward.

This message said, People of Olympus, OmniCorp has accepted your acknowledgement that Mars division has full authority over Mars.

We are presently working to restore power and communications on the surface.

Please respond to this message on this frequency, acknowledging our authority and prepare to be fully and peacefully reintegrated into OmniCore.

Six hours after this message started broadcasting, a faint and static-filled return signal came up from below.

And it was the voice of Ivana Darby and she said, OmniCorps, the people of Olympus acknowledge acknowledge your authority and await peaceful reintegration with Omnicore.

But guess what?

This was an absolutely bald-faced lie.

By the time they picked up the signal from the surface, the Triumvirs had already settled on a plan to resist and fight until they were truly out of options.

The advanced Martian Guard forces they had sent up had gotten stalled out trying to get through the A-levels, and so the message from Omnicore was the first sure sign they had that some kind of occupation force had already landed.

So for the Triumvirs, the message from OmniCorps was an opportunity to lull them into a false sense of security.

Instead of waiting patiently for peaceful reintegration, Calderon mobilized the rest of the Martian Guard and ordered them to advance to the uppermost levels to prepare for a fight to save Mars and the Revolution.

They were ordered to mass in the upper B levels, the last levels still powered up and fully functional.

While the Olympians waited for their chance to attack, the first shots of the occupation of Tharsis rang out on February twelfth.

To prepare for the arrival of OmniCorps the Martian Guard in Tharsis had been ordered to stand down.

Many in the Guard followed this order under the impression that they really didn't have much of a choice.

There was yet no word from Elysium or Olympus, and for all they knew they were the last colony still standing.

Let's face it, if OmniCorp is willing to destroy what it cannot have, then what's the point of resisting?

So after they arrived, OmniCorp's security slowly took over control of key areas of the colony, colony, including everything directly related to Phosph extraction and delivery.

Jan Gillian helpfully delivered regular messages to the population that ironically emphasized many of the same themes as Alexandra Clare over in Elysium.

We are all in this together.

We will all get through this together.

And together, we will get the Phosph moving again.

But as the occupation settled in, Gillian and the security services discovered not everyone in Tharsis was submissive.

Plenty of members of the Martian Guard, red cap and black cap alike, kept their weapons and disappeared down into the Warrens where they plotted resistance.

But critically, they did not come together.

The Black Caps organized black caps and the red caps organized red caps.

The black cap mode of resistance tended to focus on organizing all kinds of work site problems.

Many black caps had feigned submission to Omnicore and were now embedded with work crews where they orchestrated and spread accidents and malfunctions that would slow or even stop work and drive Omnicor administrators crazy.

Meanwhile, the Red Caps tended to be more confrontational and combative.

On February the 12th, Gillian came down to inspect an extraction site, and his team was ambushed on the way back up by a small group of Red Cap Resistance fighters.

Gillian himself got away from the resulting firefight, but it was the first sign that things were not going to be as easy as he hoped.

And indeed, it would only get worse from here as the Red Cap Resistance was about to embark on a campaign of bombings and assassinations that would lead to serious discussions of whether Gillian should pull all the Omnicore forces out and just bomb Tharsis into submission.

But by the time those discussions were being had, Omnicore was in a real bind as Tharsis remained the only functional producer of FOSS5,

and Olympus was about to turn into a huge mess.

As the Olympian Martian Guard massed in the upper B levels, the first and most critical mission they had was to secure the central servers before Omnicor crews got them back up and running.

Because if Omnicore got control of those servers back, that's a scenario where the Martians would be pretty much out of options because it would mean Omnicore controlled everything.

The central servers were housed inside secure facilities on the lower A levels in an area currently without power, grab units, or oxygen scrubbers.

Omnicore also knew how important these servers were, so once they had taken back control of the Prime Dome, several companies of security service personnel were ordered to go down and secure them.

Martian Guard squads, handpicked by Cal Darone, meanwhile, put on their environmental suits and heavy boots and went up to secure the servers, while the OmniCorps forces came down to secure the servers.

On February 19th, these two forces converged on the server facilities.

The Martian Guard got there first and were working on getting the lock doors open when the OmniCore forces crashed down on them from above.

The resulting firefight was intense and forced the Martians to retreat back down a level.

But though they had been driven back, the security services could not advance forward, as any of their attempts to reach the server door was met with heavy fire from the Martians below.

So a standoff ensued, with the Martians controlling the floor below the servers and the security services the floor above.

And in this standoff, the Martians had two key advantages.

First, at this moment, it was far more important that OmniCorps not gain control of the central servers than it was protecting the servers themselves.

The security service personnel meanwhile had to worry about doing anything that might damage them.

The other advantage was the advantage every desperate people fighting for their homes enjoys.

The security service personnel were there doing a job.

The Martians were literally fighting for their lives.

Meanwhile, another Martian Guard squad had been sent up on a longer mission to make their way up to the main landing platforms of Olympus.

If those could be rendered inoperable and unusable, OmniCorps would have great difficulty sending down further supplies, equipment, or reinforcements.

And perhaps more importantly, the OmniCorps personnel already on the ground would be stranded, which would hopefully make Commander Barlow up there in the sky think twice about solving the problem of Olympus with a bomb.

The Martians did not know, of course, that that option was not on the table.

So two days after the fighting broke out around the central servers, a squad of suited-up Martian guard completed their trek up through the blacked-out A-levels and reached the corridors right under the control rooms of the landing platforms.

On February 21st, they burst up through multiple shafts and hatches they had pried open and mobbed out with a simple mission to destroy as much as possible as quickly as possible.

The security services were taken by surprise and suddenly found themselves taking fire from every direction.

When the invading Martian guard started lobbying explosive devices in every direction to blow up computers and equipment and wreck the physical infrastructure, these explosions triggered more explosions, and within minutes the landing bays and control rooms were consumed by fire and smoke.

The security services were totally overwhelmed, but it was a costly victory for the Martians.

Most of the Martian guard who went up that day never came back down.

It was effectively a suicide mission, but they accomplished the mission.

Olympus' main landing platforms were now unusable, fiery shambles.

Omnicore could still potentially land at other auxiliary platforms, but their main way in and out of the Prime Dome and all of Central Olympus had been knocked out.

The personnel in the Prime Dome were, at least for now, stranded on the surface.

In response to all this, Omnicore sent further messages down into the depths of Olympus.

This is unacceptable.

You must cease and desist at once.

You are putting everyone's lives at risk.

If you do not cease, we will not be held responsible for the consequences, etc., etc., etc.

The Martians down below did not respond to a single one of these messages.

Over in Olympus, meanwhile, OmniCorp was also discovering that nuclear bombs were not even enough to break the spirit of the Martians.

After weeks of round-the-clock digging, the OmniCore heavy excavators finally approached the relatively intact levels of the colony around what used to be the lower B levels.

The Elysian Martian Guard had pushed up and explored the upper bounds of the surviving levels, and even though the external sensors and communications array obviously did not exist, they knew something was going on up there because they could hear it.

Something big, something mechanical, and something that was getting louder.

They correctly surmised that Omnicore was digging down into them.

These reports set off a furious debate among the leaders in Elysium who had gathered around Alexandra Clare.

Some said, this is great.

Now we can say, we don't pose a threat to you.

We need all the engineering, medical, and humanitarian relief you can get down here, and we need it right away.

But others said, no, absolutely not.

I would rather die than go back to OmniCore.

If we surrender, we'll just return to miserable lives as Phosphide wage slaves from now until the end of time.

No, either the revolution lives or the revolution dies, but the revolution does not give up.

And then the OmniCore excavators got close enough that the Elysians got their first signal from the outside world since the bomb had been dropped.

It was basically the same message that had been delivered to the Olympians.

People of Elysium, Mars Division has achieved full authority over Mars.

We are working to dig down and deliver humanitarian relief.

Please respond to this message on this frequency, acknowledging our authority and prepared to be fully and peacefully reintegrated with OmniCorps.

But as with the Olympians, the Elysians came to the conclusion that OmniCore had already shown their true colors.

As likely as not, if they passively allowed OmniCorp to retake control of the colony, the reprisals and reckoning would be vast and deep.

Every Martian in any position of authority had to assume they'd be summarily executed if they fell into Omnicor's hands.

Hell, for all they knew, at this point Omnicor's plan was to wipe them all out in one genocidal wave and then repopulate the colony with new workers from Earth.

So they did not respond to Omnicor's message at all.

Instead, Alexandra Clare ordered everyone to pull back to the Warrens, and they started building barricades to block all access to the levels above.

They had power, they had food, they had water, they had air, they had gravity, and if they had to, they would stay there forever, or at least until Omnicore decided to do something drastic like nuke them again.

But it was real better to die on your feet than live on your knees time in the Martian city of Elysium.

When the Omnicore excavation crews took sensor soundings, they discovered they'd finally hit intact levels of Elysium, Elysium, and they could stop digging.

They switched to more sensitive machines and located a suitable entrance point above an intact five-way, and they punched a hole in the ceiling.

Advanced scout teams in environmental suits and heavy boots went down to look around, but they found it dead, dark, and deserted.

Once they secured this position, the fleet above started sending down security service personnel.

to enter the five-way and start fanning out looking for anyone.

But as these units fanned out, they found all the B-level corridors totally empty.

Then they started moving down through the C levels and found them deserted too.

The corridors and five ways and establishments were intact, but the people were nowhere to be found.

It was as if they had just vanished.

They were sending out signals and messages, but nobody ever responded.

Finally, they got down to the divide between the C and D levels, the beginning of the Warrens.

Now when they opened up hatches and shafts, they found them blocked up, jammed with all kinds of equipment, debris, and remnants of collapsed structures.

There didn't seem to be any way to keep going down, and no matter how often or how hard they tried to make contact with whoever might still be alive down there, it was just silence.

At least a few people floated the theory that the reason they couldn't go deeper is that it had all collapsed in on itself and there was no one left alive down there.

But on march fourth, twenty two fifty two, they finally spread out wide enough that they located a shaft the Elysians had not yet completed barricading.

In fact, when they opened it up, they could hear and see people below.

And according to the oft-told tale, when the commander of the Security Service Unit called down to say, Hey, we're here to rescue you, one of the Elysians shouted back clearly and distinctly, Go away,

which, according to tradition, marks the official beginning of the siege of Elysium.

Meanwhile, in the biggest and greatest meanwhile of them all, millions and millions of miles away, dramatic events unfolded that would fast bring a close to the revolutionary period of Martian history.

And it is a moment that we can really see how inextricably linked all of human civilization is, no matter where you live in the solar system.

Because the corporate war currently consuming Earth only started because of events on Mars.

And now it would be events on Earth that finally set the Martians free, once and for all.

After their smashing victory in what is officially called the Battle of Luna, but which is better known to us as the disaster, it looked like OmniCorps was on its way to winning the corporate war.

3 Corps' space facilities had been wiped out or captured.

Their satellite arrays had been targeted and destroyed, which seemed like a fatal blow to their war effort down on Earth.

And so it would have been.

3 Corps was getting routed in all three of the major theaters in early 2252 when suddenly Omnicor was forced to stop dead in their tracks.

Why?

Well, the critical data processing servers that underpinned Omnicor's entire network of computer systems was located in heavily fortified server farms in Nairobi.

These were some of the most impregnable facilities on planet Earth and were basically impossible to capture by force.

at least by an outside force.

Because inside these server farms were not just miles and miles of servers, but miles and miles of African cystecs hunched over workstations performing the actual human labor these servers needed to continue functioning and processing the data Omnicor needed them to process.

These African CISTECs were not D-class employees, they were a class of employee that did not even exist on Mars.

The F-class.

In the old-style parlance, we would have called them slaves.

The vast majority of them had inherited their employment status from contracts signed under coercion by their grandparents and great grandparents, locking them and their descendants into lives of pure servitude inside the server farms.

But with the advent of the corporate war and the destructive chaos that ensued, management of the Nairobi server farms became simultaneously sloppier and crueler.

The F class, African CISTECs were forced to work harder than ever to support the war effort, but they were being overseen by administrators who were themselves being pushed to the limit and who were exhausted and resentful.

But more than anything else, they were careless.

On March 30th, 2252, a group of CISTECs around a leader named Yovanga Nainya rose up in revolt inside the Nairobi server farms.

The F-class uprising would quickly spread throughout the farms in waves of insurrectionary violence.

All work stopped and the servers themselves were knocked offline or destroyed.

It was as if OmniCorps' brain suddenly fell into a coma, and just like that they were as blind and deaf as 3Corp, unable to move or function or do anything really, let alone fight a war.

Now the full and complete story of the Nairobi Revolution will have to wait for another day, because I just compressed an awful lot of history into a handful of sentences.

And obviously the Nairobi Revolution basically marks the beginning of the end of the corporate age on Earth.

But for now we must stay focused on what this will mean for Mars.

And what it will mean for Mars is that OmniCorps invasion forces will be left completely stranded.

They will have no hope of resupply, reinforcement, and pretty soon, no hope of any communications from Earth at all.

So caught out there alone fighting hostile Martians for God knows now what purpose, morale will drain from the occupation forces.

and give the Martians the final opening they will need to complete their revolution.

But the successful end of the Martian revolution will not be all happy celebrations, because with the end of Omnicore coming nigh, the Martians will have to decide who is going to lead Mars into their new free and independent future.

And this will prove to be a prize very much worth killing for.

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