11.25-The Disaster

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.25: The Disaster

The death of Mabel Dore marked the end of an era in the Martian Revolution.

How could it not?

For years she was practically synonymous with the Revolution.

The course of Martian history and her personal biography are practically indistinguishable.

And now she was gone.

And not just gone, but disgraced and vilified.

No longer their heroic leader, but instead a despised villain, and then ultimately a literal human sacrifice.

Now the Martian revolutionaries who had overthrown her, condemned her, and then killed her, were left looking at each other over her dead body.

When Dorr was still alive, their differences could be papered over in the name of fighting a common enemy, but now that she was gone, those differences were laid bare for all to see.

And so the victors of the independence days will turn on each other just in time for them to all face the greatest crisis of the revolution, and arguably the greatest crisis in Martian history.

But before we get going, I do need to correct something.

Last time I mentioned that drama vid, A Week is Forever, and said it was made by Jürgen Stansen.

But it turns out I mispronounced his name.

Even though it's spelled like Stansen and looks like Stansen, it's actually pronounced Jürgen Stunsein.

So apologies to Jürgen Stunsine and the vid files out there who love him and are clearly very protective of his legacy.

Sorry about that.

But moving on, Marcus Leopold was deeply vexed about the course of the trial of the earthworms.

He had designed the system of tribunals to process all the prisoners from the Independence Days with judicious resolve.

If they were guilty of launching a violent insurrection, of committing treason, of trying to undo the revolution, they must be punished.

That was only fair and right, and Leopold had no doubt most of those in custody were guilty.

But others were clearly innocent, and it was important to separate them out.

In the early stages of the trial of the earthlings, defendants were acquitted and released.

Which, great, that's how it was supposed to work.

But by the time they got to the trial of the Earth Worms, the judges of the tribunal seemed to have a predetermined verdict and were going to reach that verdict no matter the facts or the law.

Leopold had of course soured on Mabel Dorr a long time ago, but when the prosecution was done making their case against her, he himself seriously doubted Dorr did all she was accused of, at least given the evidence as presented.

But he remained publicly quiet about these doubts because he was worried about the backlash if he suddenly came out and denounced the tribunals he himself had designed.

But it was real cognitive dissonance for a guy who had been committed to facts, the law, and justice his entire life.

He didn't like Mabel Dore.

She had vehemently opposed things Leopold was passionately committed to.

But her execution would haunt him to the end.

Meanwhile, Jose Calderón and his red caps were riding high.

The Martian public had been whipped into a proper lather by Kenji crew, and Calderón's vision for the revolution was ascendant.

Not only that, Calderone had a totally legitimate claim to being the standard-bearer for all that had originally animated the revolution.

His vision was not an aberration or a detour.

His red caps proudly proclaimed the original slogans of the revolution, Mars for the Martians.

It was practically the oldest slogan of them all.

But by Martians, he, of course, meant true Martians.

For true Martians, there would be the support, camaraderie, and protection of being a part of an independent people, proud, noble, industrious, and resilient.

But Earthlings and Earthworms were not a part of that, and they were despised as weak, stupid, and dangerous.

More extremist red caps even took this vision further and believed they should cut ties with Earth completely.

Who needs them?

Good riddance to Earth rubbish.

Kenji Grew had been instrumental in spreading and cementing these ideas.

In attacking the Earthlings, he gave Martians a common enemy and a common identity.

We are us and they are them.

That part was a binding agent.

But in attacking the Earthworms, the line grew pushed was a dissolving agent.

Because what was an earthworm but a Martian?

It could be any Martian.

And by now, the Martians had been traumatized by the loyalist uprising, the attack on the Martian servers, Mabel Dorr and Kindred James turning out to be traitors.

As it turned out, being born on Mars wasn't enough.

Anyone could be an earthworm.

And so it started to sneak into the backs of people's minds as they looked around at each other.

Who could they trust?

And so while Calderone grew and their respective followers united the Martians, they also divided them from each other.

To give true Martians an institution they could trust in these untrustworthy times, Calderon revived the atrophied remnants of the old society of Martians that had fallen into neglect.

Once the activist revolutionary Martians had taken over the organs of administration and government back in 2247, there wasn't much need for a secret society anymore.

But after the independence days, Calderon brought the Society of Martians back.

And though it was called the Society of Martians at the time, we now call it either the Third Society of Martians or the Society of True Martians to distinguish it from its predecessors.

This latest Society of Martians was led by a woman called Shanabala, who'd been in the last Society of Martians and was a self-described acolyte of Jose Depetrov, the original Red Cap.

For the past six months or so, she had been organizing branches across the three colony cities at all levels, using local members of the Martian Guard to help with logistics and recruitment.

In this revived society, true Martians would find ways to patriotically bond with each other.

They could meet regularly, there were scheduled recreational activities and concerts, they would hold festivals in the five ways.

They were also heavily encouraged to root for the alphas in the corridor hockey league.

There would be watch parties for every match and they would bond still further.

Kenji Grew and his followers pumped out the message that membership in the society was open to everyone who had been born on Mars, and it was heavily implied that those who did not join were frankly suspect.

It was not guaranteed that somebody who wasn't in the society of Martians was just an earthworm, but certainly they were not a true Martian.

Membership grew continuously, as nothing encourages joining something more than the idea that not joining it might be harmful to your health.

Earthlings were of course barred from membership completely.

And since we're here, let's talk about how the Earthlings are doing.

Obviously, the loyalist insurrectionaries had either been executed or put on prison barges back to Earth.

But that still left a large population of Earthlings in Olympus, Tharsis, and Elysium.

With Calderone and Grue and the Red Cap's ascendant, the Earthlings were now in a very uncomfortable position.

There were plenty of calls to just deport them en masse.

The horror of arbitrary deportation was an affront to God if done to a Martian, but a perfectly logical thing to do to Earthlings.

I mean, we're not taking them from their homes and sending them to another planet they've never been to.

We're taking them off that other planet that they had never been to and sending them back to their homes.

But at the moment, that wasn't feasible.

All the ships had already gone back to Earth to join the corporate war.

So there was no one to take them and no one to receive them.

So here the Earthlings sat, targets of a whole political movement, and no place to go.

So life was pretty miserable for the Earthlings.

If you'll remember from back when we talked about unscrupulous Martians taking advantage of them, like extorting them with protection rackets, diverting resources meant for Earthlings into their own pockets, we see all of this revived on a much larger scale.

And then if you'll recall, one of the early permanent changes brought about by the revolution was the introduction of a concept called days off.

And days off remained in place, of course.

But now days off were only for Martians.

Earthlings, meanwhile, were forced to work extra days to give Martians more days off.

This was enforced with threats and intimidation, and you couldn't complain to the Martian Guard about it because they were likely doing the threats and intimidation.

The Earthlings tried to start their own organizations and support groups to resist red cap abuse, but the Martian Guard was quick to crack down on any Earthling organizing.

as it was obviously loyalist treason.

So if the Earthlings could not self-organize, they would need someone to stand up for them.

And that is where the Black Caps come in.

Their initial organizing principle had been trying to check the abuses of their quote-unquote comrades in the Martian Guard.

Technically, the Black Caps were there to protect anyone, as their actions were driven by an egalitarian belief in universal rights and dignity that was clearly being violated by the Red Caps.

But in practice, this meant Earthlings.

Now, an Earthling might be a loyalist traitor, sure, many such cases.

But Earthlings were not a subspecies or inferior.

They were just people, that's all.

They were people, and they deserved to be treated as such.

Workplace abuses and constant harassment by the Martian Guard was reprehensible, and Calderone, Grew, and the rest, should be ashamed of themselves.

So when the Third Society of Martians got going, black caps refused to join.

Not just because of the exclusionary policy against Earthlings, but because it was so obviously a tool of Calderone to further entrench his own position, authority, and beliefs.

So they stayed away from the Society of Martians, even as it meant they would be automatically targeted because they were not members and thus not true Martians.

When they stayed away from Society of Martian functions, it meant they had to find their own places to go, drink holes, food bars, five ways, whatever.

Places where people could go if they were disinclined to red cap ideology.

And so while nothing was ever formalized, these gatherings formed what historian Vivich Trin dubbed the Counter-Society of Martians.

And of course, since the Red Cap Society of Martians was rooting for the Alphas in the Corridor Hockey League, the Black Cap Counter-Society of Martians rooted for the Omegas.

And frankly, it is lucky the Alphas did not play the Omegas in the championship of 2251, because that might have sparked a full-blown civil war right then and there.

But the Black Caps did not just stand against the Red Caps.

Though many of their core tenants were solidified by contrasting themselves with the Red Caps, they did hold positive beliefs.

There was a reason the red caps offended them.

Like I said, they had an egalitarian and universalist understanding of individual personhood.

It didn't matter where you came from.

It just mattered that you were here at all.

They also believed that rights were rights, regardless of what you may or may not have done.

So they wanted to remove that line from the Constitution that allowed the Martian Guard to pretty much do whatever they wanted if they said, oh, we're investigating treason.

They were also opposed to Calderón's authoritarian grip on the Martian Guard.

As the red caps became regimented and hierarchical, the black caps stood for that part of the revolution that was about kicking out the bosses.

We don't need Timothy Warner telling us what to do.

We don't need some C-class petty tyrant supervisor telling us what to do.

We don't need anyone telling us what to do.

So why is Calderone trying to be the boss of everyone?

They said he was Timothy Werner in miniature, and in fact they started calling him Minnie Timmy, which, let me tell you, Calderon absolutely lost his mind when he found out about that.

When Calderone forbade non-regulation marks on uniforms or caps, they marked their ears and fingernails.

As the Third Society of Martians led to a stronger sorting, about two-thirds of the guard joined, but one-third did not.

And Calderón realized that these black caps were not a problem that could just be isolated or suppressed.

He might have to do something more serious.

The Black Caps did not have a leader per se, the way Calderon was clearly the leader of the Red Caps.

But they did have Alexandra Claire, who was the most prominent and well-known revolutionary with Black Cap beliefs.

But the Black Caps were inherently more decentralized, and even Claire herself emphasized local personal networks as the basis for organization and action, not recreating a hierarchical class system like Calderon.

What was the point of the revolution if we're going to wind up right back where we started?

But though she shied away from formal leadership, Claire's stature and popularity meant that she could say and do things other people couldn't.

And so she did speak out both publicly and inside the ranks of the Martian Guard.

This irritated Calderone to no end, but he couldn't go straight at Claire because she was at least as popular as he was.

But her ongoing public resistance to Calderone's commands and demands were becoming incompatible with remaining a part of the Martian Guard.

Her behavior could easily be characterized as mutinous.

After the execution of Mabel Dorr, Claire accepted an invitation from members of the Martian Guard in Elysium to come mediate a dispute.

Elysium had more Earthlings per capita than the other two cities, because it was the youngest, and it's where new arrivals were most often directed.

In Elysium, cohesion in the Martian Guard was breaking down, as there was a stronger black cap presence resisting Calderon's orders to just keep playing the role of red-capped thugs, even though the crisis seemed to be over.

All the active loyalists have long since been rounded up, so what are we even doing here?

The Elysian black caps wanted Claire's support to end these practices.

But like I said, she was also well known to the Martians as one of the greatest Martians who ever lived, and even red-capped Martians couldn't help but see her as maybe the truest Martian of them all.

They would at least listen to what she had to say.

Calderone, meanwhile, approved this quote-unquote temporary transfer of Claire to Elysium.

as a great way to get her out of Olympus.

But while Calderone wanted her out of Olympus, Zhao Lin deeply regretted their argument and wanted her to come back.

He still believed it had been too late for Mabel Dorr, but he did take Claire's point that he was not doing enough to push back against the ascendant red-cap fever.

Zhao had been on the leading edge of the revolution this whole time, going all the way back to his youthful dissemination of contraband Martian way material.

He'd been working around the clock for years in extremely difficult and stressful circumstances, and the work he produced was legitimately brilliant.

But since the independence days, he had grown somewhat lax.

He was tired.

He was exhausted.

He had done so much, achieved so much, and frankly, wanted to take a break.

But Zhao's mental hiatus was partly what allowed Kenji Grew to grab hold of the revolutionary narrative.

Sucla was right.

He needed to get back to work.

And so he heaved a great sigh and got back to work.

Zhao spent several weeks in total isolation before emerging on September 5th, 2251 with a new vid provocatively titled, No True Martian.

This was a direct blast against Cal Derone, GRU, and the Red Caps in the most visceral framing possible, because what he had done over those weeks was organize harrowing footage of abuses by the Omnicore security forces in 2245 and 246 and 47, and then intercut them with footage of what the Red Caps were doing right now today.

Often this footage was indistinguishable from each other.

It was practically the same frame for frame.

A group of armed guards surrounding and carrying someone off, people rounded up in restraints, stockades bulging with prisoners.

In several instances, he laid video of an Omnicore Security Service raid over video of a Martian guard raid, and they lined up exactly.

The positioning, the movements, the action.

It was literally the same thing.

The Red Caps were not true Martians.

They were just Omnicore Security Service with a different patch on on their sleeve.

And if there was one thing no true Martian could support, it was Omnicore.

When he uploaded this video on September the 5th, the networks exploded.

Now up until now, Zhao's work had always been greeted with rapturous applause by the Martian people.

Every new project he released was a hit.

The work had always been so well received it literally shaped the course of the revolution.

And though no true Martian is arguably Zhao's most compelling work, he released it into a different environment.

and for the first time Zhao faced real criticism and public attacks.

Kenji Gru lambasted Zhao, said he had gone soft.

He doesn't have what it takes anymore.

His old stuff may have been great, but this new stuff is awful.

More than awful.

It's dangerous.

Because the main message of no true Martians was that the Martians should not be allowed to defend themselves against the enemies of Mars and the Revolution.

If Zhao couldn't distinguish between the noble Martian victims of Omnicore and the treasonous earthlings and earthworms being policed by the Martian guard, then he had truly lost his mind.

In the early morning of September the 17th, 2251, Gru was in the midst of an overnight condemnation of Zhao when he suddenly stopped posting.

He had posted continuously through the night, but then abruptly left off at 3.47 a.m.

with the line, there are three major reasons to think this.

So clearly, he was about to post three major reasons to think this.

But then those reasons never came.

It just hung out there.

People thought their screens had malfunctioned or that the network had malfunctioned.

It seemed odd and mysterious.

Those in a position to contact Grew directly tried and failed.

That was odder and more mysterious.

And so finally, the Martian guard went and checked on Kenji Grew in his quarters and they found him lying dead on the floor with the chair knocked over.

There was no blood, no wounds.

He was just dead.

The sudden death of Kenji Grew set off a massive uproar.

Given the tenor of the Times and the tenor of the man himself, it was basically impossible not to jump to the conclusion that he had been murdered.

It was some earthling, some earthworm, some black cap.

Kenji Grew had a lot of enemies.

But there was no blood, no bruises, no forced entry, just a dead guy on the floor.

When the body was examined by the coroner, it was instantly obvious he'd had a brain embolism caused by an overdose of stems.

The toxicology report showed that Grew had five times as many stem chemicals in his blood as was considered the very upper bound of safe.

But even the story of the stem overdose was fed into the conspiracy machine because it just meant someone had tampered with his supply or poisoned him somehow.

It was easy not to believe a stem addict simply dropped dead of a stem overdose one day, if you were determined to.

At the moment of his death, Kenji Grew was considered a hero of the revolution.

He was certainly a hero to the Red Caps.

On October 15, 2251, he was given a massive funeral in the fields of Earth, jammed with mourners and presided over by the Martian Guard.

For Jose Calderon, Grew's death meant losing a valuable ally and propagandist, but he quickly realized Grew could perform one last act of service.

Saying he wanted to get to the bottom of things, Calderón opened an investigation into the murder of Kenji Grew.

It was yet another reason to harass Earthlings by searching for mysterious assassins and accomplices.

But Calderone also turned his attention to black caps inside the Martian Guard, and he would use Grew's death as a pretext for forcing people out of the service.

Anyone who hindered or undermined the investigation by saying things like, there's nothing to investigate, he was a STEM addict, he died of a STEM overdose, were dismissed from the service.

This created a little cascade where some black caps were summarily dismissed, while others resigned in protest.

The upshot was that Calderone was successfully purging the Martian Guard of all the black caps.

It was on the day of Kenji Grew's funeral that he made his boldest move.

He quietly labeled Alexandra Claire a person of interest in the investigation.

He suspended her from the Martian Guard while the investigation was ongoing.

She was also ordered to remain in Elysium and was forbidden to return to Olympus.

Stripped of her official authority, Claire was unable to secure regular transport out of Elysium anyway, and so she stayed rather than push the issue by trying to to like smuggle herself back to Olympus.

There were other ways and other places to fight.

As for her suspension, Claire countered and announced that she was resigning from the Martian Guard.

How do you like that?

But with the network saturated with Kenji Gru's funeral, it would be quite a while before many Martians found out that Alexandra Claire was no longer in the Martian Guard.

Now the old Mons Cafe leaders remained in positions of authority through all this.

Ivana Darby was wrapping up a term as consul, and Marcus Leopold was actually set to succeed her in December.

But while they could protest Calderon's actions, everything he did, the purge of the guard and especially Alexandre Clare, he was doing under the constitutional pretext that the assassination of Kenji Grew had been an act of treason, even if Grew himself was just a private citizen with no official role in government.

By invoking his special little constitutional clause, Calderón had a free hand to do as he saw fit, and there was no legal or political mechanism to stop him.

But while Calderone made this move to consolidate power, and he was clearly making a move to consolidate power, troubling news arrived from Earth.

No, not troubling news, terrible news.

No, not terrible news, disastrous news.

And so, to bring us up to speed, we must wind back to July 2251 when the Martian Navy arrived at Earth.

The Martian Navy sailed in 800 ships strong, about half of which were armed and ready for combat.

They had been drilling and training, and when they arrived, their mission was to crash down on OmniCorps forces at Lunaport like a hammer.

They had been anticipating this for months.

They couldn't wait to get into action.

But what they sailed into was an array of ships, orbital platforms, satellites, and surface facilities set up by OmniCorps to defend against them.

OmniCorps commanded about a thousand ships total.

They had attempted to overwhelm 3 Corps space spaceholdings before the Martians arrived, but III Corps had the same array of ships, orbital platforms, satellites, and surface facilities.

And so even though they only commanded about 350 fighting ships, they had made a heroic stand against Omnicorps' offensive and held them at bay until the Martian Navy arrived.

On August 1, 2251, Admiral Cartwright ordered an attack on Lunaport.

But they ran into the same problems we've seen at the Battle of Phobos and the same problems OmniCorps had when they launched their offensive against 3 Corps.

Drone bombs were launched, drone bombs were scrambled, and it was just incredibly difficult to land clean hits on each other.

So as this group moved into position here and that group tried to flank them over there, no one was able to get the better of anyone.

The civilian shippers faced the worst of it, being the most inexperienced, but even they weren't too badly done in.

Ships and lives were lost, yes.

But the Martian Navy could not crack OmniCorps defenses, and Omnicorp could not crack the Martian Navy.

Over on the other side, III Corps fared little better in their attempt to push away the Omnicorps fleet that was trying to keep them contained.

No one was having much luck, and more often than not, an attempted barrage just resulted in the drone bombs being recalled undetonated.

So the Battle of Lunaport became the Siege of Lunaport.

The Martian Navy managed to secure supply lines, both the III Corps on Earth and also back to Mars if need be.

But after all the anticipation of the voyage and the intense stress of the initial battle, they now had to settle into unsatisfying inactivity.

Inactivity that went on for weeks and then months.

Eventually, Booth Gonzalez requested a transfer back to the DAPL because there wasn't much for him to do on the Nemesis, and on the whole, he'd rather just spend this time on his own ship.

Cartwright approved this transfer in early September 2251.

With drone bombs clearly an ineffective weapon, both sides began experimenting with other options.

And unfortunately for 3 Corps and the Martian Navy, OmniCorps reached a deadly solution before anyone else.

They concluded that if these smart bombs were useless, then maybe they should be looking not for a newer, fancier technology, but instead look backward to an older and dumber technology.

So throughout the siege of Lunaport, OmniCorps began secretly retrofitting ships with old-style weapons, specifically missiles and exploding shells that could be fired out of tubes.

The missiles were outfitted with super basic heat seekers that were too rudimentary to be scrambled.

The shells would just be point, aim, and shoot.

By October 2251, they had outfitted about 200 ships at Lunaport and another 200 facing three corps side of the line.

This, they determined, would be enough to wreak havoc.

And they were right.

On october 29th, 2251, these ships were deployed.

At first, Admiral Cartwright couldn't understand why these ships were being sent out, especially as they started in with the old drone bomb routine they'd all concluded was useless.

What are they doing?

Like, is it some live-fire training exercise?

But then the ships just kept coming closer and closer, and then suddenly new blips started appearing on the screen, and when the crews tried to scramble lock them, they just kept coming.

Cartwright instantly recognized that something had gone terribly wrong.

He didn't know what it was, but something had gone terribly wrong.

But by then it was too late.

The blips, which turned out of course to be heat-seeking missiles or exploding shells, started smashing into Martian Navy ships in rapid succession, and suddenly ships were exploding everywhere.

Cartwright still didn't know precisely what was going on, but he knew they were getting massacred and he ordered a general retreat.

But even as they fired up their engines and fled Lunaport, the Omnicore ships pursued, firing more missiles and hitting more ships.

The retreat was a disorganized mess, it was every ship for itself, and they broke in every direction, still getting picked off as they tried to get away, and without any means of fighting back.

And to somehow make matters worse, as the Martian Navy was getting massacred, the same thing was happening over on the III Corps side of the line.

Their ships, too, were getting blasted to bits.

In all, the Martian Navy lost close to two-thirds of its ships 250 disabled and inoperative, 350 destroyed outright.

It was a disaster.

It was THE disaster, and it would leave Omnicor in charge of the space around Earth and Luna.

The news of the disaster was horrifying to the Martians.

It was a complete and total wipeout.

But even worse, it effectively cleared a path for Omnicor to return to Mars.

The Martians did not have the ability to produce conventional weapons and then retrofit them to fight the kind of battle that Omnicor had just introduced.

And with Omnicor emerging totally triumphant in the space theater of the corporate war, the Martians were not going to get any help from 3 Corps.

And OmniCorps appeared to be well aware of all of this.

With the remaining Martian Navy ships scattered far and wide, some not even on a trajectory to return to Mars, the Martians watched in horror two weeks after the battle, as a mass of OmniCorps ships around Lunaport separated itself out and then started clearly moving on a plotted course to Mars.

OmniCorps was coming back, and there was nothing the Martians could do to stop them.