The Early Mars Series
Mars is hard. It's always looking for new and exciting ways to kill you. If you're careful and you stick to the plan and your luck holds, maybe not today- but it's always waiting and it only needs to win once.
It's also big, and it's beautiful. It has mountains so high they stick up into space, and canyons that make the Grand Canyon look like something a kid scratched out with a stick. Every time you turn a corner, there's something new. And the sunsets, don't get me started about the sunsets.
Whoever gets there first and figures out how not to die will own a little piece of it, and their children will inherit a planet. Company colonists have been there for twenty years now, and they're getting the hang of it. The Colony is growing fast and has started up a second community. It looks more and more like they're going to make it. Unless someone else shows up and takes it from them...
Humanity will colonize Mars. It's what we do. From every corner of Earth, people will line up to abandon their settled lives and make the hazardous journey to an unknown and unforgiving land, hoping to build a better life for themselves and their children. Untouched resources. Land. An opportunity to prosper, to thrive, even to become one of the great families in a new world.
But when the red Martian dust settles, who will own it? Who will decide how the Martian people will live together, and what they can and cannot do, say, think? The corporations that brought the first settlers and built the first communities? The Earth governments that followed, bringing their laws and their cultures and their old hatreds? Or the Martian settlers, who see no reason to take direction from strangers who know nothing about them and care even less?
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The answers to these fundamental questions have always been determined in one way by humans, through armed struggle. "To the victors belong the spoils." Mars will be no different. Or will it?
July 29, 2116.
That's the day the vested interests back on Earth, the corporate heads, the union bosses, the political heavyweights, woke up and smelled the methane. Mars is no longer a convenient and dependable revenue source, a cost-plus project funded by the taxpayers. It's a competitor.
The Alliance, a partnership of convenience between the Western nations, is engaged in a planet-wide struggle with the Islamic Republic of the Mediterranean. They're holding their own, but it's a precarious alliance at best, and the last thing they need is a brash young competitor like Mars upsetting the complex web of obligations that keeps the member nations together. Better they quickly squish the Martian upstarts like a bug so that they can get back to fighting each other.
Mars doesn't see it that way. Well, at least some people on Mars don't, and they're prepared to defend their interests by force. Somehow, a simple commercial transaction threatens to precipitate a civil war on Mars, a shooting war between Mars and Earth, and a world war back on Earth, possibly all at the same time.
Can anyone unravel this? Find some way to get everyone to go sit in the corner and think about what they have done? And if not, will anyone survive?