11.24-The Trial of the Earthworms

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.24, The Trial of the Earthworms

On April 30th, 2251, the Martian Navy departed for Earth.

The fleet was a mix of security vessels from the oil container fleet, former civilian cargo ships now armed and armored for combat, as well as other ships in support roles, maintenance, supply, and hospital ships.

There were also several warehouse ships that had been turned into prison barges now filled with earthlings who'd been sentenced to deportation.

At the head of this fleet was a converted passenger liner-turned flagship that Admiral Cartwright rechristened the Nemesis, as in the Greek goddess of retributive justice, in case anyone was concerned Cartwright lacked for subtlety.

The trip to Earth would take roughly eight weeks, and those eight weeks would be the last peace they could expect to enjoy before joining the fray of the corporate war, which was no longer just heating up, but had instead turned into a blazing fire.

As the fleet traversed the space between Mars and Earth, the Martians turned their attention back to their final reckoning with the events of the Independence Days.

The trial of the Earthlings resulted in the deportation of all those prisoners back to Earth, as well as the execution of the loyalist ringleaders, most notably Bruno October.

Now Mars turned its attention to the smaller but more emotionally charged matter of the Martians, who'd been held in custody since the Independence Days.

Mabel Dorr was obviously the most prominent among them, although former head of personnel Kinder James had recently leapfrogged her in notoriety after being exposed as a traitor.

Also now in custody were several prominent Martians like Dorr's husband Royce Sato and the former head of finance Clarice Bow.

both of whom had been arrested on the assumption that they couldn't not have known about the crimes those closest to them were committing, as opposed to any tangible proof they'd done anything wrong.

Under the new Martian Constitution, all of these defendants were afforded their rights as citizens to present a meaningful defense.

And though they were reviled in the increasingly overheated public forums, there was a determined cadre of former A and B class advocates who were upset about the direction of the revolution and who were appalled at the treatment of Mabel Dorr and her fellow prisoners, up to and including the fact that they were called earthworms.

Imagine calling Mabel Dorr, the most dedicated Martian of them all, an earthworm.

So Dorr herself would be represented by a woman named Sunari Gann, an A-class advocate who joined the Society of Martians way back in 2245.

Her revolutionary credentials were as strong as anyone's, and she joined a larger group of advocates who took on the task of defending the quote-unquote earthworms from the litany of scurrilous charges against them.

Now the best place to go to get the whole picture on all this is a book called The Trial of the Earthworms by Blanning Salam.

Salam will walk you through comprehensively what I am about to run you through quickly and concisely.

The first batch of defendants to face trial, though, were the 14 members of the Martian Guard who'd been protecting Mabel Dore on the fields of Earth during the Independence Days.

One week after the departure of the Martian Navy, they were brought before the tribunal.

For the crime of firing on the crowd and causing a stampede, they were each charged with the murder of all 156 Martians who had died that day.

The prosecution's case rested on vid footage showing without a doubt that they had fired on unarmed Martians at point-blank range, which caused a fatal stampede.

But it also rested on entering as evidence heartfelt testimonials from friends and family of the victims, not so much tugging at the heartstrings as yanking on them as hard as they could.

The defense offered contrasting vids showing Dorr and her guards being heckled and menaced and encroached upon by the crowd.

They argued that the guards had fired their weapons, which were set to stun, by the way, in self-defense.

The events of that day were a tragedy, but they were not a crime.

What the prosecution said during these tribunals was echoed out on the networks by Kenji Grew, who was now leading a whole cadre of like-minded posters.

He and his followers pivoted from denouncing the Earthlings to denouncing these Earthworms.

They were the worst thing you could possibly be, a Martian who betrayed Martians.

No true Martian would ever do that.

And this revived the whole business of what it meant to be a true Martian, and it leaned heavily on the no true Martian fallacy where the meaning of Martian was detached from geographical, biological, or legal anchors, and left up to ideological and political definitions that could change from one day to the next.

Today's Martian could become tomorrow's earthworm.

Kenji Grew and his followers pumped the networks full of stirring tributes to the victims of the massacre of the fields of Earth and screeds against these earthworm assailants.

Grew himself now maintained a practically round-the-clock schedule of posting.

He would put things up at all hours, largely thanks to a heavy intake of stems.

It was in this condition that Grew started posting conspiracy theories about the death of Omar Ali.

Two of the defendants now on trial had also been in the company of guards present when Omar Ali was assassinated way back at the end of 2249.

That was when their neutron guns had been inexplicably set to fatal rather than stun.

A convenient way to instantly dispatch a hired assassin so they couldn't talk, wouldn't you say?

So why would someone kill Omar Ali?

Who had the motive and the means and the opportunity?

Well, Grew now tied the death of Ali to the charges against these earthworms generally.

That Ali had to die because he found out about a plan to hand Mars back to Omnicore and was threatening to expose it.

Grue would post elaborate webs of connection and identify the names and faces and records of of those believed to be involved.

And Mabel Dore was at the center of it all.

On the fifth day of the trial of the guard, this conspiracy theory is brought into the tribunal.

The two guards were brought in for a special line of questioning and grilled about what had happened with Ali and what were their deeper connections to figures like Mabel Dore.

Pretty soon it stopped being about these two guys at all, really, and just served as a springboard to turn discrete incidents into a single grand conspiracy, setting the stage for the trials of Kinder James and then Mabel Dorr.

This turn in the proceedings annoyed Marcus Leopold, who had designed this tribunal system.

He thought all of this was way out of bounds and prejudicial to the defendants, which it was.

But the three tribunal judges ruled two to one to allow it all, and according to Leopold's own rules, that's how these questions were decided.

So all that additional evidence and testimony was allowed.

It was also the first sign that two of the judges harbored redcap sympathies that would lead them time and again to rule in ways that, at least in Leopold's eyes, started to turn the tribunals into a farce.

So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that in the end, all 14 defendants were found guilty of 156 counts of murder.

Sentence pending.

After convicting the guards, the tribunal moved along to one of the main attractions, Kinder James.

His trial began on May 13, 2251.

Now James was guilty as hell.

He did it.

Everybody knew he did it.

He had tried to hand the keys of Mars to Omnicore.

The evidence establishing this had been widely disseminated.

So James's defense was not going to be that he was innocent, but rather that he was the pawn of Mabel Dore.

So if Kinder James had already done a heel turn, What he's about to do here is a heel jumping spin double forward flip where he pops up and says, ta-da, I'm actually the worst person you've ever met.

And that's kind of what he was.

And that's why Kinder James isn't just an earthworm, he's the earth snake.

And why to this day you can still hear Martians saying, James, as they stub their toe or something bad happens in a court or hockey match.

God james it.

Now it's not clear whether his subsequent testimony was his own idea or whether it was suborned by Jose Calderón.

But James clearly believed there was some quid pro quo that if he perjured the hell out of himself in order to paint Mabel Dore in the worst possible light, that he would get a more lenient sentence.

And so when his trial started, he gave dramatic testimony that basically confirmed everything Kenji Grew had been saying.

He said that everything he had done was at the direction of Mabel Dore,

that she did not believe the Martians could ever govern themselves, and that her principal political goal was steering Mars back towards Omnicore.

He said records had been systematically erased to cover it up, and he said that he believed Omar Ali had been killed because he was about to expose the plot.

To muddy the water still further, James also implicated Clarice Beau and Royce Sato and others already in custody, claiming that he had coordinated various aspects of the plot with all of them.

None of it was true, but that hardly mattered.

When his tribunal wrapped up a week later, James was himself convicted of treason, as everyone expected.

Sentence pending.

Kendr James' testimony was breathlessly trumpeted across the networks by Kenji Crew and his followers.

They pounded the message into people's minds that these people weren't true Martians.

They were earthworms.

But they also pounded home the message that anyone could turn out to be an earthworm.

Even Mabel Dorr.

And that is why it was every Martian's duty to distinguish true Martians from earthworms.

We must always keep vigilant lookout and report all suspicious activity to the Martian guard.

Stripped of specifics, The underlying message from the trial of the earthworms was, distrust your friends, distrust your family, distrust your neighbors, all of which ran counter to the Martian way, which had always emphasized communal trust and mutual support.

But if you pointed that out, you were likely to be labeled an earthworm.

All of this drove a further wedge between the red caps and the black caps in the Martian Guard.

The black cap perspective is that if you actually believed in Mars and the revolution that you would oppose all this paranoid distrust.

It was toxic and it was corrosive.

No true Martian would support it.

True Martians trusted each other.

True Martians worked together.

So black cap members of the Guard objected to being used to encourage informance and sow division within Martian society.

And just in general, they opposed Calderon's increasingly centralized command structure, where orders came from the top and were followed down below without question or hesitation.

Calderone was imposing on the Martian Guard an authoritarian apparatus built on constant surveillance and harassment of the population.

Were there bad actors out there?

Yes, clearly.

But did that justify the noxious invective of Kenji Grew, or the abuses Calderon was ordering them to carry out?

Absolutely not.

And so that brings us to the trial of Mabel Dorr, which commenced on June 3, 2251.

Once the indispensable woman of the revolution, now cast in the role of villain by political forces hell-bent on destroying her.

In addition to her role role in the massacre of the fields of Earth, suppression of the Gemini Vids, and interference with the Martian Guard in order to protect the enemies of Mars and the Revolution, she was also now charged with being the ringleader of a plot to hand the Martians back to Omnicor.

Kinder James' testimony was held up as damning proof.

Now Mabel Dore made mistakes, that's absolutely true.

But the things she's about to be convicted of, it's a frame-up, no doubt about it.

Over the course of the trial, the prosecution laid out all the evidence they had.

This included the censoring of the Gemini vids and testimony that she ignored advice from Calderone and others that Convoy Group 11 was a real threat.

There was also evidence that she had gone out of her way to protect Earthlings at the expense of Martians.

She had dismissed members of the Martian Guard because they had been too hard on Earthlings.

But of course, there wasn't anything substantial about the grand conspiracy because there was no grand conspiracy.

So when it came time to Mount Dorr's defense, Sunari Gan denounced the the entire proceedings as a farce.

She said they had no real proof Mabel Dore had done anything treasonous because no such proof existed.

People needed to wake up to what was really going on here.

But while the prosecution poured through Mabel Dore's records and logs looking for evidence that did not exist, they discovered juicy gossip that very much did.

They found it in Dorr's private chat logs with her husband and closest friends.

By late 2249 and early 2250, Dorr was venting about the attacks she was enduring from both the Mons Café group and from Calderón's red caps.

In the midst of this venting, she called Marcus Leopold a pedantic pest.

She called Ivana Darby a loudmouth blowhard.

Zhaolin was a dishonest propagandist.

She typically referred to Jose Calderón as that fracking lunatic, sometimes abbreviated just to TFL for short.

She also had disparaging words for Alexandra Claire.

After Claire had rebuffed her advances, Dorr said Claire had a weak mind and just did whatever Zhaolin told her to do.

And then, of course, there was the line Kenji Grew made so much hay out of.

While she was complaining about the conflicts among the Martian leaders, Mabel Dorr said, quote, I miss Timothy Werner, end quote.

She clearly meant this in the sense that when he was the enemy, things were simple and the Martians were unified.

But taken out of context and just blasted around, it looked like she was saying, well, I missed Timothy Werner.

All of this combined to paint a terrible picture.

But still, once you brushed away all the gossip, there still wasn't anything there.

The prosecution had ran with all these titillating chat log quotes because they didn't really have any proof that Mabel Dorr had conspired against Mars, which didn't seem to matter much anymore.

In the third and final week of Dorr's trial, Alexandra Clare paid a a visit to Dor, gaining access because she was Alexandra Claire, and the guards on duty weren't going to argue with that.

Claire later recounted in One Red Life that Dorr said she was surprised to see Claire after what she had said.

So Claire asked, Is that what you think of me?

And Dorr said, No, I was hurt, I was exhausted, and I was coping.

Dorr then asked if Claire thought that the charges against her were true, that she had conspired against Mars.

And Claire said, no.

And that is why she had come.

That yes, Dorr had made mistakes, but conspired against Mars?

Not the Mabel Dorr Alexandra Claire knew.

And she had seen no proof whatsoever that the charges were true.

Claire said that she offered to stand as a character witness, to go on record saying, I don't believe any of this is true.

But Dorr said, no,

don't do that.

Don't you see, it's hopeless.

It's rigged.

Calderón has orchestrated this, abetted by Leopold and your friends in the Mons Cafe.

If you put your authority and clout on the line for me now, it won't save me.

It will ruin you.

And you will need all that authority in clout if you're going to stop Jose Calderón and Kenji Grew from taking the revolution in their toxic direction.

Dor was right to be fatalistic about her chances.

When the proceedings concluded, the three judges of the tribunal met in close conference for less than a day before they emerged and voted to convict her on all charges.

The vote was 3-0,

though there is speculation one of the judges had serious reservations, and their vote was secured thanks to red-capped threats against their family.

So on June 23, 2251, Mabel Dore was found guilty of treason.

Sentence pending.

This was then followed by the rather anticlimactic trials of her husband and a few other associates who were easily convicted on the strength of James's testimony now taken as gospel, and the fact that Dorr herself had already been found guilty, so how could they not be?

All that was left now were the sentences.

But before we get to the sentences, the trial of the earthworms wrapped up just as the Martian Navy approached Earth.

So I want to get caught up with them before we come back to finish off the Earthworms.

As the Martian Navy approached, the space around Earth and Luna was jammed with orbital platforms and satellites and ships.

After the Battle of Luna Port, both OmniCorps and 3 Corps had pulled back to cover their own holdings.

3 Corps' ships were more advanced, but there were fewer of them.

OmniCorps were now outdated, but they had many, many more of them.

So, as the corporate war blew up down on the surface, both sides focused on making sure their holdings in space remained secure.

But when the Martian Navy launched, The competence now running OmniCorps concluded they needed to launch an offensive to take out 3 Corps before the Martians arrived.

And Booth Gonzalez spent the trip to Earth aboard the Nemesis, getting a crash course in military history, tactics, and strategy.

Admiral Cartwright worked assiduously to cultivate Gonzalez and turn this into like a mentor-protege relationship.

And as long as Cartwright was useful, this was fine with Gonzalez.

When Cartwright said, read this or read that, Gonzalez did.

When he wanted to sit around and pontificate about history and philosophy, Gonzalez listened.

But Gonzalez found that he could hold all of this in his head very easily, and he wanted much more than Cartwright was giving him, and so he read far beyond what Cartwright pointed him to during these eight weeks in space.

So despite Cartwright's efforts, he did not become Gonzalez's mentor, so much as one part of a larger syllabus.

Gonzalez's official role inside the fleet was to be the liaison between the flagship and the old civilian cargo shippers.

Most of them were more difficult and independent-minded than a strict military chain of command tended to demand.

Everyone was used to being their own captain, calling their own shots.

If they wanted to do something, they did it.

If they didn't, they didn't.

Gonzalez was tasked with convincing them to follow whatever plan the admirals came up with, and so he sat in on all the final planning sessions so he himself could be intimately familiar with the plan and why these ships needed to do this and those ships needed to do that.

The Omnicore offensive, meanwhile, just stalled out.

It never really got going.

Both sides dealt with a recurring problem that we already saw at the Battle of Phobos.

The offensive drone bombs and the defensive scramblers wound up too evenly matched and they effectively canceled each other out.

So, when there was an engagement, drone bombs would whir and buzz and swoop, and only occasionally land a hit on the enemy.

So, the fighting turned into a stalemate as OmniCorps tried to push on 3 Corps holdings, while 3 Corps kept them successfully at bay.

When the Martian Navy arrived on July 2, 2251, OmniCorps was was forced to break off a portion of their fleet to face them.

The initial plan for the Martian Navy was to make good use of the spaceshipper's drive to liberate Lunaport and rescue their loved ones.

The plan was for the Navy to attack Lunaport while III Corps pushed back against OmniCorps' lines, now weakened by having to face two fronts at once.

It was the best possible use of the Martian Navy.

especially because if they'd been told to do anything but go directly to Lunaport, they probably would have mutinied.

Okay, so now that we've got the Martian Navy to the eve of battle, we can get back to Mars and the sentencing of the earthworms.

All of them had been convicted of their various crimes, but the sentences were still pending.

The three judges of the High Tribunal entered a closed session, and this time they met for a week as the three of them argued about what should happen to who.

You may have in fact seen the famous drama vid by Jürgen Stansen called A Week is Forever, which dramatizes the three of them debating the fates of Mabel Dorr and the rest.

It's really good, though I must warn you that the best review of it calls it, quote, a dark rumination on the futility of existence, just so you know what you're getting yourself into.

While the Martians waited for the verdict, discourse on the networks divided between those calling for executions and those arguing the convicted should merely be confined for life.

And this question actually wound up scrambling the political lines a little bit.

There were red caps who still had lingering sympathy for Dorr and didn't want to see her killed.

They didn't want her released, but they didn't want her executed.

There were also black caps who were like, you know what?

They betrayed us.

Get rid of them all.

The Mons Cafe set was also divided.

Some said these people wanted to keep the employment class.

They opposed independence.

As long as they're around, they'll try to undo whatever we're trying to accomplish here.

But others pointed out the holes in some of the cases.

They were obvious.

The bodyguards had clearly acted in self-defense, and wasn't it more likely Kinder James was a liar and a fabulist than the elaborate conspiracy theory that he was selling?

There were a few brave souls out there who even stood up for Dorr's innocence.

They still had their Mabel Doran 44 merch, and they wore it defiantly.

The sentencing of the earthworms also caused a fatal rift between Alexandra Clare and Zhao Lin, a rift so bad it ended their relationship.

Zhao was a radical vid producer who had been staunchly anti-class and pro-independence.

Mabel Dorr and her friends had opposed all that, so he was not a fan.

Now he understood the case against her was probably exaggerated, and he didn't think she posed such a threat now that she needed to die.

And so Claire said, well, why don't you use your vaunted skills to turn public opinion away from Grew's demagoguery and call for sparing the convicted?

But Zhao said, Dor is right.

She's done for.

We gain nothing by tying ourselves to her.

The argument fed into Claire's stewing resentment that people thought she was merely Zhao's cipher who couldn't form her own thoughts.

And here now it burned her that Zhao and Dor were probably right.

Defending her in the present atmosphere would be suicide.

But this argument was heated enough that Claire decided to accept an offer from Martian Guard companies in Elysium to go mediate an internal dispute among them because both sides trusted her.

Little did she realize that when she walked out the door and then left Olympus, she would never see Zhao again.

On June 30th, 2251, the tribunal announced its decisions, and once again they were unanimous.

The crimes of the earthworms were too heinous and too dangerous to deliver anything but the maximum punishment.

The convicted would all be executed.

These executions were set to be carried out on the fourth anniversary of the three days of red in just a few weeks' time.

The condemned all responded in their own ways, anger, disbelief, resignation.

Kinder James famously freaked out.

He believed he'd been promised that he would be spared if he gave all that testimony.

And when his sentence of death was read, he went nuclear and started shouting, it was all a put-up job.

They promised me I could live if I went out and told a bunch of lies.

I was weak, and I said, yes, you can't kill me.

But at this point, nobody really cared what he said.

Mabel Dore took her sentence with stoic resignation.

She understood what had happened.

that the whole point was to lay her upon some revolutionary altar as a human sacrifice, to fit her into some twisted morality play cooked up by Calderone and Grew about the importance of Martians not trusting each other.

Which is not to say she went quietly.

Dorr wrote a statement that has become known as the last words of Mabel Dorr.

She said, I have given my whole life to the Martian people, and now I will give my only life to the Martian people.

And I die here now, not to remind them of their greatness, but to remind them of their folly.

She said, it was okay.

The Martians were young, and when they matured, they would come to regret regret what they had done to her, and that should be the lesson of her death.

Not that Martians should be afraid of other Martians, but rather that they should never do anything like this ever again.

On July 21, 2251, the bodyguards were executed one by one.

The next day Kindred James, Clarice Beau, Royce Saito, and a handful of others were executed.

Mabel Dore was not even afforded the dignity of dying alongside her husband and friends.

Instead she had to wait one more long night knowing they were dead, and that she was next.

So on july twenty third, twenty two fifty one, in a cell in the headquarters of the Martian Guard in the Prime Dome, Mabel Dore was let in for her execution.

The room was packed with witnesses.

Calderone, Leopold, and Darby were all there.

They watched as Mabel Dore was led into a cell they watched as she was strapped to a chair they watched as the air was sucked out of the cell then they watched as Mabel Dore struggled for breath, then passed out, then passed away.

As much as any other figure, Mabel Dore defined what the Martian Revolution meant and what it was all about.

Ever since she had attended school on Earth, she resolved to stand up for Martians always and everywhere.

She used her family's wealth to philanthropically support Martians during the final years of Vernon Byrd.

She fought tenaciously through the new protocols, first trying to get Timothy Warner to see reason, then taking the reins of autonomous Mars after the three days of red.

In those years, she was the only one known enough and trusted enough to lead the Martians into an unknown future.

There were years, years,

where you could say that Mabel Dorr was the Martian Revolution.

But in the end, she made some fatal mistakes, probably out of a mixture of exhaustion, resentment, and mistrust.

The Gemini vids were obviously a costly error.

Dorr and Jin Wong both believed the claims about the nukes in Convoy Group 11 were a hoax.

Jose Calderón had brought her all kinds of false leads and fake plots and they hadn't panned out.

So I think she probably fully expected Convoy Group 11 to be inspected and there would not be any nukes on board.

When they refused that inspection and instead the Battle of Phobos broke out, even she knew she was fatally discredited.

Now clearly, I think Mabel Dorr was done extremely dirty here in 2251, and I certainly don't think she needed to die.

But that's revolution for They are defined by pressure and stress, and sometimes roll according to forces no one controls.

And as much as Mabel Dore advanced the Martian Revolution, she also tried to hold it back.

She stood in the way of the dismantling of the class structure, she stood in the way of full independence.

And as the social forces pushing in those directions pushed hard, it's not totally unexpected that rather than holding it all back, Dorr was crushed under its weight.

But right or wrong, success or mistake, Mabel Dore never betrayed the Martians.

And her last words were not wrong.

When she died, the Martians were gripped by inflamed passions.

In the fullness of time, she would take her place in the pantheon of Martian history, where she obviously remains to this very day.

Next week, the revolution will roll on.

The Martian Navy will enter the fight against Omnicor, and at least at the beginning it will seem like the plan to fight OmniCore on Earth, so they did not have to fight them on Mars, was working.

And it will keep working.

Right up until the disaster

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