11.23-The Trial of the Earthlings

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Hello, friends.

Before we get going this week, I have some good fun things to say.

We are coming up on the final run of episodes in The Martian Revolution.

After this week, I will be taking a week off, so there won't be an episode next week.

But when I come back, it will be for the final six episodes of the Martian Revolution.

That's right, there's only six episodes left.

We are officially approaching the endgame.

But what I want to do right now is put a few things on your collective radar.

First, there will be Martian Revolution merchandise available at cottonbureau.com slash Mike Duncan.

We are finalizing the designs as we speak, so is it available yet?

No.

but I do want you to get hyped for it.

In the meantime, you can right now go to cottonbureau.com slash Mike Duncan for all of your revolutions and history of Rome merchandise needs.

The other thing is that I've got this notion that what I really want to do is a live in-person reading of the final episode of the Martian Revolution right before it drops into the podcast feed.

So I'm going to be in New York the last weekend of May and that is when the final episode of the Martian Revolution is set to drop.

I have no idea how many of you out there would come to such a thing, but to help me gauge interest, I have set up an Eventbrite page.

So if you'll be around New York the last weekend of May and think you can come to such a thing, let me know and we'll try to secure an appropriate venue to fit everyone who wants to come.

So the link to that Eventbrite page is in the show notes.

I'm not going to say it because it's just a bunch of like random numbers and symbols.

Finally, I want to once again say thank you so much to everyone who has become a patron at Patreon.

And if you go to patreon.com slash revolutions, or I should mention patreon.com slash thehistory of Rome, you'll be able to get all these episodes ad-free for smooth listening.

Thank you so much for supporting me.

I know you all just want me to keep doing this forever, and if I can, I will.

So, go to patreon.com/slash revolutions.

Thank you so much.

And now, let's get back to Mars.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions:

Episode 11.23 The Trial of the Earthlings

We left off last time with the ratification of the first Martian Constitution on December the 11th, 2250.

Marcus Leopold was the principal author of the Constitution, except in one critical area.

Jose Calderón got the Assembly to carve out a constitutional exemption for the Martian Guard to pursue the enemies of the Revolution, which I'm sure will be fine.

Meanwhile, up in orbit around Mars, newly minted Admirals Axel Cartwright and Lee Wei began organizing the ships and shippers in the environs of the Red Planet into the Martian Navy.

This week they will finish that job and then point themselves toward something to fight.

So the Martian Constitution set a date for elections six weeks after the ratification of the Constitution.

The so-called stewards continued to preside over Mars in the meantime, but there wouldn't be much of a change in personnel when the elections finally happened.

All of the stewards save two entered themselves as candidates for the ministries they had been running since the independence days.

One dropped out because they were quite sick.

The other didn't run because she had only agreed to serve temporarily until a proper constitution took effect and then she would resign.

I won't trouble you with either of their names because they just came and went pretty fast.

But the rest of the stewards put themselves forward to stay on in their positions.

It was practically a foregone conclusion that they would all win.

I mean, these were some of the most famous names and faces in the revolution.

But the Stewards did not run unopposed, and in the election of 2251, we see candidates appearing who represented the budding shoots of new ideological species emerging from the recently tilled political soil of Mars.

There were candidates from Tharsis and Elysium, running to ensure that the drift towards Olympian supremacy did not go unchallenged.

A few ran on platforms that cranked up red-cap tendencies to the max.

They were aggressively pro-Martian, anti-earthling, and now isolationist to boot.

They advocated cutting all ties with Earth completely.

And then there was also a clique forming in the old A-class, running on a platform of divvying up and privatizing huge swaths of Martian society.

None of these fringe candidates got more than 5% of the vote, but this was their first showing, not their last.

On January 27, 2251, the the first government of the Republic of Mars took up their offices and got to work.

Each of the new ministers set about trying to reshape and reorganize their ministries to fit the Constitution, which obviously included the abolition of the employment class system upon which so much of the previous social, legal, and economic administration of Mars had been based.

Now, as I said, most of the faces were the same.

Marcus Leopold was now Minister of the Law, José Calderón was still commander of the Martian Guard.

Ivana Darby, I should mention, was now elected minister of personnel, as the role of director had been abolished by the Constitution and replaced with that rotating executive consulship.

I don't have the time to dig into the details of all the other ministers, so I will just say that if you're looking for a nice gift for the Martian Revolution enthusiast in your life, there is a pretty great vid series called The First Ministers.

and each episode is a full biography of each one of them.

Because I'm here trying to tell you the entire story of the the Martian Revolution, and so I can't really stop and spend a ton of time on what Aster Jubin was doing with the Ministry of Sports and Recreation, but it is a great story.

The fact that corridor hockey never missed a season, even during the sieges, is a testament to their efforts to keep up morale even in the worst possible conditions.

But I can't stop and talk about that because I do need to talk about the newest part of the Republic of Mars, the Martian Navy.

Since the dramatic events of the Independence Days on Mars and the evacuation of Lunaport back around Earth, no spaceshipper could sit in the middle any longer.

During the second sorting of ships, you either rendezvoused with the anti-Omnicorp shippers at Mars or heeded an OmniCore order to return to Earth.

For those who chose Mars, there was no hope of reconciliation or reintegration with OmniCorps.

Those days were over.

And the only way they were going to survive was to join the Martians and defeat OmniCore together.

So the Martian Constitution created the Martian Navy and declared an open recruitment policy.

Any shipper who wanted to join could join, and as incentive they were promised equipment, parts, technicians, financing, and benefits.

For most of the shippers, the decision was easy.

Not only would they need the equipment, parts, technicians, financing, and benefits, but after the evacuation of Lunaport the fight was now deeply personal, and none of them wanted to sit on the sidelines.

As they organized the ships and personnel into chains of command and logistical groupings, Admirals Cartwright, Way, and a handful of other trusted officers did a strategic survey of the situation to determine what the Martian Navy would be used for.

The first thing they concluded is that the container ships needed to be protected at all costs.

They were what Mars and III Corps had to get FOSS-5 back to Earth.

So until such time as it was safe to send them back to Earth, they would remain in the environs of Mars.

Their former security escorts, meanwhile, would form the core of the the fighting fleet.

They would be supported and augmented by cargo ships, they could either themselves be shielded and armed for battle, or put to use serving in some logistical support capacity.

In the end, they numbered 287 security gunships and 515 civilian ships.

In terms of raw numbers, they could really tip the balance against OmniCorps.

The second thing they concluded was that there was nothing for them to do around Mars.

OmniCorps had ordered all of their ships to return to Earth to support the war effort against 3 Corps.

They had been embarrassed and forced to retreat at Lunaport, but they would command a numerical advantage if they brought their entire fleet to bear.

Since that order went out in August 2250, there was zero indication the new leaders of OmniCorps had any intention of sending a fleet to Mars.

No signals, no movements, no orders that anyone on Mars could detect.

OmniCorps was concentrating all their efforts at home.

For now.

As I've mentioned previously, Admiral Cartwright had been in regular contact with high-level executives over in the III Corps Coalition for years, and they all agreed that the best use of the Martian Navy would be to sail it back to Earth and engage directly in the effort to win control of the space around Earth.

Three Corps was presently outnumbered and badly needed reinforcements.

It would be stupid to have the Martian Navy sit back in a purely defensive crouch around Mars.

If they did that, they would help guarantee that they would have to face an OmniCorp invasion fleet at some point, because OmniCorps would win the war.

Cartwright was totally amenable to this plan, as were the officers around him, and they were all quite confident there would be zero dissension in the ranks for a plan to fly back home to Luna and kick the frack out of the bastards of Omnicore.

And they were right about that.

Cartwright and Way formalized their strategic analysis and recommendations and took it to the Martian Ministry.

There was heated debate among the Martian leaders over whether it would be wise to have the ships depart for Earth and leave Mars itself vulnerable to future attacks.

It was the Martian Navy after all.

But once everyone had their say, Cartwright reminded them that the shippers who now formed the Martian Navy were mostly from Luna, and that not only did he believe this was the best strategy, but if the ministry didn't approve the plan, it was not going to go over too well with the officers and crew of the Martian Navy.

He hinted that there may in fact be a mutiny right out of the gate if they were told to sit here on Mars while their loved ones back home were in danger.

So the ministry agreed rather than trigger a fatal mutiny right out of the gate.

Cartwright and Way were ordered to, quote, construct and lead a fleet to Earth and enter the war against Omnicore in such capacity as presents itself.

And then they got to work organizing, supplying, arming, and training the Martian Navy.

Booth Gonzalez signed the Dapple up for service in the Navy as soon as enlistment started.

On paper, he was just another captain of a cargo ship, but Gonzalez was a special case from the beginning.

He was, after all, one of the most famous people on Mars.

He was the hero of Phobos.

In the months since that battle, his social calendar was full practically every single day.

He was a living symbol who sometimes triggered rapturous reactions from people he met.

He was the man who had saved them from nuclear fire.

People wept when they saw him.

These extreme reactions made him a bit uncomfortable, but in general, Gonzalez enjoyed himself mightily during these months, especially as he made a more formal acquaintance with Helena Wells at a reception in his honor in a horticulture garden.

That night was the beginning of their rather mm stormy relationship.

But that much socializing on the surface was eventually exhausting, and by the time the Martian Navy was recruiting, Gonzalez signed up and was ready to go.

He was a shipper, after all.

His home was space.

But even here he presented a special problem.

Gonzalez himself just wanted to be the captain of the Dapple.

He did not want a high rank.

He didn't know anything about military strategy or tactics.

He had never been in charge of anything more than his own ship.

His mother, Val Gonzalez, ran the business, not him.

But Cartwright and Way felt they would be wasting a valuable resource if he was merely the captain of one ship.

They assigned his sister Victoria to command the Dapple during the voyage back to Earth, while Captain Gonzalez would be assigned to the Admiralty staff.

There he could serve as an officer inside the high command that other cargo shippers trusted.

But mostly, his public relations utility far outweighed anything else, and that's why he was with the Admiralty.

So they could keep him safe, and so they could keep an eye on him.

Gonzalez chafed at the idea, but even Marco and Victoria said, yeah, you're more valuable to them than over here with us.

So he boarded the flagship when it was time to leave, and he would spend the trip to Earth in the company of Cartwright, Way, and the Admiralty staff.

Now of the civilian shippers who joined the Martian Navy, and who were among those happy that one of their own was so close to the Admirals, three deserve special note.

The first is Coyote O'Hara, who was a third-generation shipper born in Lunaport in the year 2221.

She and Booth Gonzalez were nearly the same age and they had known each other for years.

O'Hara had been among those who joined the mutiny in 2247 and later joined the anti-Omnicore Underground with the Gonzales family during the era of the Agreement of 2248.

O'Hara had been en route to Mars in August 2250 and so she missed both the Battle of Phobos and the evacuation of Lunaport.

She was now eager for the chance to finally see some action.

The best biography of Coyote O'Hara is Firestarter, The Life and Battles of Coyote O'Hara by Niels Crum.

The second was a former container fleet lieutenant named Billy Shrimps.

Shrimps was born on an orbital platform in 2209.

He attended the Fleet Academy and joined the service in 2231.

He had served as a supply officer in the fleet for the next 12 years.

His performance reviews were middling, but that was because he was mostly focused on being one of the most adept smugglers in container fleet history, a real wizard when it came to faking cargo manifests.

He knew how to exploit every aspect of the sloth and neglect of the later bird years.

In 2243, he decided to drop out of the service for reasons that are still unclear and start his own independent shipping operation.

This was an exquisitely timed decision as it was right before Timothy Werner and the new protocol screwed up everything.

So instead of settling into an easy life as an expert smuggler, Shrimps struggled for the next three years just to hang on.

He too was a mutineer in 2247, but unlike O'Hara, he had fought at the Battle of Phobos.

The best biography of Billy Shrimps is by Cecile Gonsalves.

It's called An Officer and a Pirate, The Several Lives of William Q.

Shrimps.

Finally, we have Abilene Wren.

Wren was born on board a ship at a date that was never actually recorded.

She, in fact, does not appear in any official records at all until she's four or five years old when it was noted that an orphaned child was living on board a ship called the Black Forest under the care of its first officer.

Wren's parentage and true age remain totally totally unknown despite many attempts by historians to track it all down.

Wren grew up aboard ships and rarely came down to any surface for any reason.

Even orbital platforms were too stationary for her tastes.

So she too was a mutineer in 2247, and in August of 2250 she was halfway back to Earth when news of the evacuation of Lunaport broke.

and she turned around and headed right back to Mars.

The best biography of Abilene Wren is Rogue Warrior, The Revolutionary Life of Abilene Wren by Linger Bellow.

But at the moment, none of these three had done anything to deserve biographies.

They were just captains of cargo ships being folded into the mid-level of the Martian Navy's chain of command.

But as you probably know, they will soon become much more than that.

And if you don't, then you will, because they do.

Before the Martian Navy could leave for Earth, however, they were sucked into Martian politics.

Because now that the Constitution had taken effect, they could move forward with tribunals to deal with the prisoners they had in the stockades.

Bruno Octoper and the Loyalist Insurrectionaries, Randoz, who had been swept up by the Martian guard in the aftermath, and also don't forget about the officers of Convoy Group 11 still being held in orbit on a converted passenger ship.

And then finally, Mabel Dorr, Kendr James, and the alleged traitors in their orbit.

The Navy got caught up in this because Jose Calderon and a lot of other people wanted wanted to quickly process the Earthlings and sentence them to deportation back to Earth.

He wanted to load them onto vessels and deport them from Mars on ships that would accompany the fleet back to Earth.

But Marcus Leopold was not just going to let Jose Calderon deport everyone back to Earth.

Instead, his Ministry of Law organized a tiered tribunal system to evaluate, judge, and process detainees properly, legally.

There were at this point about a thousand detainees in all.

To staff the tribunals and deal with all these detainees, Leopold recruited from the ranks of the veteran advocates of Omnicor's old legal division.

He brought them in and assigned them to roles as judges, defense advocates, and people's advocates.

At the lowest tier, three judge panels would do a first-pass evaluation of individual cases.

The accused would have the right to present a defense, produce evidence, and were at least technically presumed to be innocent.

In the sense that they did not have to prove they were innocent, the people's advocate had to prove they were guilty.

Then the tribunal would render a verdict.

This is how most of the cases would be dealt with, as most of the cases were open and shut.

Difficult cases could be kicked up a rung to a panel of intermediate judges who would either investigate further and render a verdict, or kick it up to the final arbitrator, the high tribunal.

So, what might happen to these people?

Well, for Earthlings, the best case is that they were found innocent.

Plenty of detainees had just been swept up in raids or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With any luck, now would be the time the mistakes would be revealed and they would be released.

If you were found guilty of a crime against the Martian people, of which there were several varieties, then yes, the sentence would indeed be deportation back to Earth.

But one thing I need to make very clear is that though deportation was an option, perhaps even the preferred option, option, for Earthlings, not so for Martians.

One thing that came out of the revolution, something that was now almost irrationally seared into the Martian psyche, is that no Martian would ever be deported ever again.

That's just no longer an available option.

We do not deport Martians.

Earthlings can be deported, fine, but not Martians.

For Martians, Punishments included service, fines or other financial penalties, temporary confinement, prolonged confinement, but beyond that deportation was out of the question.

They would not even consider voluntary exile as an option because it would be so easy to turn voluntary exile into quote-unquote voluntary exile, if you know what I mean.

But some cases were so bad that the other punishments did not fit the crime, and that meant there was only one punishment left.

Death.

Executions had been rare on Mars, though not unheard of.

Usually people who committed heinous crimes weren't killed, they were sent to Saturn.

But there had been a few.

And of course, there was also execution-adjacent stuff, like what had happened to Jose Dipetrov in the original Red Caps back in 2229.

But just so you know, when it comes to these tribunals, death is now on the table.

As the trials were set to begin in late February 2251, Kenji grew.

really caught fire.

He posted daily, whipping up anger against the Earthling prisoners.

They didn't belong here.

They weren't Martians.

This is who they are and this is what they do.

They relentlessly plot to hand us back to Earth.

So let's hand them back to Earth.

Or kill them.

Doesn't matter to me.

And this is when the phrase Earth or Death entered the lexicon of red cap phraseology.

Those were the two options for Earthlings on Mars.

Earth or death.

All of this had an effect.

As the tribunal started incidents of harassment, assault, vandalism, and property damage against earthlings earthlings who weren't even involved, mind you, jumped markedly.

Jose Calderon, meanwhile, continued to add to the stockade population as he hunted the enemies of the Martian people.

His tactics were increasingly offensive to Alexandra Clare.

Technically, she was just a captain in the Martian Guard, but obviously she was more famous than Calderón was, and so there was no way for him to maneuver her out of her position without her kicking up a massive fuss.

And this is how she held on to her rank and post while more and more openly becoming the hub of proto-black cap descent, the people who wanted to prevent the Martian Guard from turning into some xenophobic paramilitary force.

Now, though these were difficult and dangerous times, This turned out to be the period of the most fruitful collaboration between Claire and Zhaolin.

They were at this moment totally synced up on their vision for an egalitarian, communal, and universal revolution.

Every Martian mattered.

So while Claire and her black-capped comrades in the guard discussed how to defend these ideals, Zhao Lin went to work to spread the ideas to the broader public.

Zhao was already the most influential videographer of the revolution.

His work both shaped events as they were happening and continued to shape our own understanding of the revolution here some 250 years later.

From Red Justice, Red Freedom, to Every Martian Matters, to the packaging and presentation of the Gemini vids, Zhao's work practically is the revolution.

Here in February 2251, he expanded on the Every Martian Matters project, now focusing on the testimony of Earthborn Earthlings who had fought in the Revolution, or Martians who could testify for Earthlings who had died for Mars during the Revolution.

The fundamental proposition that they all deserve their spot on Mars as much as anyone else was becoming one of the core pillars of black cap ideology.

The trial of the Earthlings, as these tribunals were collectively dubbed, began on February 22, 2251.

The judges opened their chambers and started churning through cases.

Most of them were easy.

The people's advocate would present unambiguous video footage of the defendant firing their gun in some corridor or five-way during the Independence Days, and it would be a unanimous 3-0 guilty verdict.

Sentence forthcoming, next case.

But others were not so clear, especially for people who had been picked up in the aftermath of the Independence Days.

Many were being held on very flimsy pretexts, or in at least several cases, they were supposed to have already been released, but due to some error or oversight, they were still being held in the stockade.

When the lowest rung of the tribunal stumbled into such cases, and the people's advocate offered no compelling reason to convict them or keep them in custody, they were let go.

Cases that were sticky or complicated one way or the other were kicked up to the higher tier panel of judges and left to them to sort out.

Leopold paid close attention to the proceedings and was satisfied with the course they were taking.

Bakenji Grew was posting angry polemics every day against letting these dangerous earthlings walk free.

If the tribunal had found them innocent, then that didn't mean they were innocent.

It meant there was something wrong with the the tribunal.

He published the faces of earthlings who had been let go next to conveniently poor-resolution face shots of loyalist insurrectionaries during the independence days and saying, see, this is them, and they've been allowed to walk free.

We need to stop this ridiculous theater and deport them en masse and be done with them all.

Eventually, the tribunal got to Bruno October.

When he walked in, he was immediately flagged to be kicked up a rung.

The Martian Guard had induced several suspects in custody to name the ringleaders of the insurrection, and the name Bruno October kept coming up.

So October was sent up to the higher panel who immediately kicked him up to the High Tribunal.

But the problem for the High Tribunal was that proving Bruno October was the mastermind of the insurrection was harder than they thought.

Now just to refresh our memories, October had been taken into custody after his own men stunned him and handed him over to the Martian Guard in exchange for leniency.

And while those men had said October was the principal leader of the whole thing, none of them had actual proof of this.

Now he was objectively guilty of being caught under arms, no one disputed that, but how did anyone know he was the ultimate mastermind?

Witness statements invariably said, oh, I heard it from a friend, or they couldn't remember who they heard it from.

In one fun exchange, Witness A said they heard it from Witness B, and then Witness B was interviewed and they said, no, no, no, you've got it backwards.

I heard it from Witness A.

And beyond these claims that seemed like a bunch of people reporting rumors they didn't have first-hand knowledge of, there did not seem to be any hard evidence proving October was the ringleader.

He was obviously much better at covering his tracks than Kinder James.

When October himself was questioned by the tribunal, he muddied the water still further by simultaneously denying everything he was accused of, while also taking credit for things there's no way he could have done.

And I mean, wild stuff.

He said that he invented corridor hockey, that he created Flamin' Hot Maven's infamous biomass recipe, but it had been stolen from him.

He also said that he was a quadruple agent actually working for separatists on Saturn.

You mean the moons of Saturn?

No, no, no, Saturn, the planet itself.

Saturn for the Saturnians.

It was all transparent nonsense, but it did make him seem like a crazy fabulist who might tell people he was the mastermind of the loyalist uprising.

and that's why everyone was repeating it.

These tribunal sessions were open to public vid channels to encourage transparency and avoid the tribunals becoming secret, unaccountable star chambers.

But that meant people like Kenji Grew could feast on the proceedings.

For him, there was no doubt.

October was guilty and he was playing crazy.

There was more than enough witness testimony to convict him and the fact that it was all unreliable and there was no corroborating proof did not matter to Grew at all.

And he made it very clear that if October wasn't found guilty, that it would spark a riot to rival the three days of Red itself,

because he would make sure of it.

As Grew inflamed public opinion, the trial of the Earthlings, and October in particular, deepened divides inside the Martian Guard.

Calderone obviously set the tone from the top and he continued to encourage invasive surveillance and harassment of Earthlings.

Kenji Grew's posts were left open for all to read at Martian Guard stations throughout Mars.

This, to the mounting horror and disgust of the proto-black caps.

This was all pushed right to the edge on March 29, 2251, when one of the Earthlings who had been acquitted by the tribunal, his case was dismissed because he wasn't the guy, he just had the same name as the guy, was found dead by a Martian Guard patrol.

Except when other guards showed up, including a few blackcaps, It was clear the patrol had not so much found him dead as found him alive and then killed him.

The black caps on the scene reported this to Claire who took it to Calderone who shrugged and said, who can tell what happened and there's nothing we can do.

What's really concerning frankly is the dissension in the ranks you are fostering with your malicious gossip and unfair characterizations of what I am trying to do here.

The shape of their forthcoming conflict was coming into focus.

Meanwhile, in the first week of April 2251, the tribunals handed down all their final verdicts.

The vast majority of those earthlings found guilty were indeed sentenced to deportation back to Earth.

But 23 individuals were found guilty of being leaders, not just followers.

And among them was Bruno October.

After much internal debate, the three judges of the High Tribunal eventually decided to give weight to all the circumstantial evidence against him and find him guilty of organizing and leading an insurrection against the Martian people.

The announcement set off a wave of cheering from those Kenji Gru had promised would would riot if October was acquitted, which I must say the tribunal was very aware of when they handed down their verdict.

October's was a weird case because the tribunal got it right.

October was guilty of sin, but the decision was not great from a legal point of view, and it did not set a great precedent for future tribunals.

October and these other convicted ringleaders would not be deported back to Earth, though.

Their crimes against the Martian people were too great for that.

Instead, they were sentenced to death.

The 23 ringleaders were held in a stockade on the old B levels for a week, and then on April the 15th, their sentences were carried out.

They were removed from their cells in groups of five, taken to an interrogation room where they were secured in chairs.

The final decree sentencing them to death was read aloud again.

Then the oxygen was sucked out of the room.

Deprived of oxygen, they passed out, and then they died.

After that, the bodies were removed, oxygen was pumped back into the room, and the process repeated itself.

Bruno October was a part of the last group.

It was just him and two other remaining ringleaders.

But after October was let in and secured, he managed to get in one last dig on his way out of this life.

As the air was being sucked out, Just before he passed out and died, he said very clearly for all to hear, Pity you're killing me.

I know where the bombs are hidden.

Then he passed out, and then he died.

It was too late for anything to be done or to find out what he meant.

Jose Calderon was there to witness this execution, and he did not like what he heard one bit.

The trial of the Earthlings showed two possible future paths for Mars and the revolution.

On the one hand, they had mostly successfully run a fact and evidence-based legal proceeding that had mostly successfully separated the guilty from the not guilty.

That was good.

But the tribunals also showed that public pressure and rabble-rousing could get the facts and evidence suspended if people just felt like the defendant was guilty.

That was not so good.

In October's case, it was a happy coincidence that he was actually guilty.

Future tribunal defendants would not be so lucky, as all of this is about to be cranked up a notch when we turn our attention next week to the trial of the Earth Worms.

Meanwhile, Admirals Cartwright and Way had told the Martian ministry in mid-March that the Navy was ready to sail, but they were told to wait until the trial of the Earthlings was completed, because there would be hundreds of deportees who would need to be sent back to Earth.

Cartwright and Way grumbled a bit about being saddled with these prisoners, but even they could see that if the Earthlings were not deported, it probably would trigger some kind of riot on Mars, and that was the last thing anyone needed.

So instead, they identified some suitable ships, worked out the logistics, and in mid-April loaded the deportees aboard.

These included, I should mention, the officers of Convoy Group 11, who, because they had never stepped foot on Mars, were not afforded citizenship and had no rights, and so the ship they had been on since the Battle of Phobos was added to the prisoner ship convoy.

It was not clear what would happen to any of these people when they got back to Earth.

They just had to go.

They could not stay here.

On April 30th, 2251, the Martian Navy departed for Earth in three fleet groups.

Next time, they will indeed tip the balance of the scales back on Earth and help III Corps gain the upper hand against Omni-Corps.

That is, until a catastrophic failure of leadership, coordination, and execution tipped the scales right back.

Tip the scales over, really.

Knocked the scales over and smashed them.

And what that did was leave the road back to Mars wide open for any who may care to make make the trip.

Like, for example, an Omnicore invasion fleet.

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