11.28-Bloody Sunset

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This was the 239 ships left over from the disaster, 167 FOS-5 container ships, plus 51 assorted other ships, that had stayed behind when the Martian Navy set course for Earth under Admiral Cartwright back in April of 2251. Five days after Gonzales left, a quarter of the Omnicore invasion fleet, and most of the armed fighting vessels, took off in pursuit. Gonzales' main concern was keeping all his ships safe from that pursuit fleet, which absolutely outclassed them in weaponry. All they could do was hope to stay out of reach. Knowing that they might be on the run for a very long time, the Martian Navy had energy, fuel, and food to last about 20 weeks in space, which was more than twice as long as a regular journey between Earth and Mars. There was nothing to do but run, and hope they figured something out before they ran out of supplies and power. Pursuing the Martian Navy were 53 Omnicore ships led by Commander Himari Tagata. Tagata had every reason to believe she would make short work of the Martian Navy when she caught up to them. She had fought at the Battle of Lunaport and made quick and easy work of every ship she targeted. For her, the disaster was not a disaster. It was a quick and easy victory. Tagata's instructions were to catch up to the fleeing Martian Navy and recover as many of the FOS-5 container ships as she could. Those ships were big, expensive and valuable, and on the whole, the competence running Omnicore would rather not have to rebuild their FOS-5 container fleet after they won the corporate war. As for the other ships in the Martian Navy, it was left to her discretion whether to try to capture them or just blast them out of space. But she was not to risk any of her own ships on their account. The container ships were all that really mattered. Now I'm getting all this information, by the way, from Bazarine Halifax's to the Beltonbeck, about these months of flight and pursuit. A lot of it recapitulates stuff that can be found in biographies of Gonzales or Coyote O'Hara or Billy Shrimps, but Halifax published for the first time the patchy logs from Omnicore's pursuit fleet, which gives us some insight into what they were doing and thinking, which is nice because obviously they're about to become a bit of a black hole of information. Between the long journey from Earth back to Mars after the disaster, and now from Mars out towards the asteroid belt, Gonzales had plenty of time to study what had gone wrong at Lunaport. He and his fellow spaceshipper captains, who formed an informal brain trust, including O'Hara Shrimps and Abilene Wren, had long since recognized Omnicore had dumbed down their weapons to seek heat or energy, and that's why they evaded the scramblers. So it was simple enough to then say, okay, let's do the same thing. But this turned out to be a tricky problem, because the nav circuits of the drone bombs were so complex that they resisted efforts to simplify them to something as basic as Seek Heat. So even though they'd been working on this for months, no one had hit upon a solution. But about three weeks after leaving Mars, a SysTech engineer on Coyote O'Hara's ship named Hamish Albin finally hit upon a way to make this thing that was too smart for its own good dumb and simple. Now, I am not remotely qualified to explain the technical details of all this, but that's okay, because all we really need to know is that Albin made it work. When initial testing proved successful, Gonzales ordered the mass reprogramming of every drone bomb in the fleet, which would be a slow process, as they'd have to do them one at a time. While they worked, the Martian Navy kept running towards the vast expanse of the belt, not for any other reason than it was a place to run to. But with the weeks ticking by, they would soon hit the point of no return when they'd have to turn around and head back to Mars or risk being lost in space forever. And that would mean a guaranteed confrontation with the Omnicore pursuit fleet. So nine weeks out, they had reprogrammed about half the drone bombs, and Gonzales decided that would have to be enough. And so he and his fellow captains laid a trap. Correctly surmising that the FOS-5 ships were the most valuable prize, Gonzales designated 33 container ships to experience technical malfunctions, forcing them to cut their engines. Why 33? Well, you'll see in a second. Gonzales also designated 99 ex-civilian cargo ships loaded with reprogrammed drone bombs to stop with them and pretend that they were desperately trying to effectuate repairs or evacuate personnel from the apparently disabled and drifting container ships. Now that's certainly how it looked to Commander Tagata when their sensors recognized a chunk of the Martian navy, including a bunch of container ships, had suddenly stopped dead. As the pursuit fleet approached, the 99 ships buzzing around the containers disengaged and ran off. Tagata was unable to raise a channel to the container ships left behind, but they were clearly suffering from some kind of mass power failure. When the Omnicore fleet finally arrived on March 28, 2252, there was no reason for Tagata to believe she faced any threat more dire than having to figure out crew and officer assignments to recover the derelict containers. But not wanting the rest of the Martian Navy to just get away, Tagata broke her pursuit fleet in two. She left 23 ships to take possession of the abandoned container ships, while the remaining 30 continued the pursuit of the Martian Navy under her personal command. The 99 ships that were appearing to be fleeing the scene included Gonzales and the Dapple, as well as O'Hara and Shrimps and Wren. But they were not really fleeing, and they intentionally moved slow enough to let Tagada catch up to them, which she did just a few days later on April 1st, 2252. And that is when Gonzales sprang the trap. As the 30 pursuit ships closed the final gap and got within firing range. Every Martian Navy vessel let loose a swarm of drone bombs and then cut all power to their own ships except minimum life support. Tagada ordered her scramblers to deal with the drone bombs coming in and then ordered missiles to take out all these troublesome little Martian Navy vessels. Or at least that's what we can piece together because obviously we don't really know what was happening inside of her ship because the scramblers had no effect on the reprogrammed drone bombs, and the missiles the Omnicore ships fired just kept going in a straight line, because with the engines and power cut to all the Martian Navy ships, the missiles had nothing to latch onto or smash into. So as the missiles sailed away harmlessly into the void, the unchecked Martian drone bombs came swarming in on the Omnicore fleet and crashed into target after target. We'll never know what Commander Togada thought of all this, because of the 15 ships destroyed outright by these drone bombs, hers was the third to go. Ten other Omnicore ships that were not destroyed were disabled and couldn't move. Only five escaped without any apparent damage. Those five ships got out of there as fast as they possibly could. Presumably, those five ships were planning to head back to their comrades who were taking possession of the derelict FOS-5 containers, but they would soon discover that there was nothing back there to rendezvous with. As soon as Gonzalez ordered the attack on the Omnicore fleet, he also sent a signal that would spring the other half of the trap. He had settled on leaving behind 33 container ships because it seemed like a number big enough to force the Omnicore pursuit fleet to stop and try to recover them, but small enough that the Martians would still have enough containers left after the second part of the trap was sprung, because those containers were there to be sacrificed. All personnel had been evacuated, and by the time Omnicore had reached them, they were really just ghost ships drifting in space. They had all been rigged with self-destruct sequences that could be triggered by a remote signal broadcast by Gonzalez from the DAPL. The Omnicore officers and crew back at the derelict container ships never would have known what killed them, because all at once, the 33 containers self-destructed in a huge combined explosion that consumed everything in the vicinity. Every single one of the 23 Omnicore ships that had been left behind was lost. So this has all gone down in Martian Navy lore as the trap. And when the dust cleared from the trap, it was clear it had been a total success. It had left the Martian Navy, minus 33 container ships, free to turn around and come back to Mars. They were just under 10 weeks out and would have just enough power and supplies to make it back to the Red Planet. and along the way, they would reprogram the rest of their drone bombs. Back on Mars, each of the three Martian cities endured a slightly different ordeal. The Elysians bombed, driven underground, and presently telling Omnicore to go away. The Tharsians, allegedly back under Omnicore control, but with a growing and multi-pronged resistance movement growing by the day. Meanwhile, in the capital of Olympus, the Omnicore occupation force had occupied the Prime Dome, but were unable to move any further down. The only other beachhead they controlled were the levels above the central servers, where a stalemate persisted with the Martians who controlled the levels below. And thanks to the destruction of the main landing platforms, those forces in the Prime Dome were cut off from reinforcement and resupply. But the Olympians found it difficult to penetrate the Prime Dome because the Omnicore security services had fortified their positions and rigged explosives to every way up that they could find. As this military stalemate persisted in Olympus, political pressure inside the Martian population mounted. The three triumvirs, Leopold, Darby, and Calderon, agreed on many things, principally that Omnicore would be resisted at all costs and surrender was out of the question. The Martian Guard was fully mobilized and occupying the A-levels just below the Prime Dome. Probes of the Dome had demonstrated Omnicore security services had mined everything. So conceivably, they could send up drone bots to trigger all the explosives, and then they could rush in after them, but the Martians had to live here after they won, and it would be a lot nicer if the Prime Dome was still intact when they retook possession. So for the moment, they waited. But the Triumvirs did decree mass conscription of all able-bodied Martians into the Martian Guard. in case a mass push into the dome was required. But the Triumvirs got into arguments about the Earthlings. Calderon wanted to exempt them from the mass conscription order because he didn't want Earthlings serving in the Martian Guard. Calderon thought this invited seditious fifth columnists into the Guard, where they would do real damage to the Martian resistance. But Leopold and Darby refused those terms. We actually do need everyone, so the conscription order went out for able-bodied people. Calderon also proposed concentrating all earthlings in designated zones where they would be less dangerous because they would be unable to physically access sensitive places, information, or people. Leopold and Darby also rejected this as both impractical and as a recipe for further trouble, to say nothing of the fact that they were awfully wary of Calderon's ultimate intentions. His segregation plan blocked, Calderon simply stepped up internal surveillance, and he now made sure that internal patrols were all die-hard redcaps, membership in the Third Society of Martians being the easiest barometer to figure out who was a die-hard redcap and who wasn't. Blackcaps or unaffiliated guards were kept out of it. These internal security squads were at first tasked with keeping an eye on the Earthlings, but they also started encountering issues with Martians who opposed resisting, who said, they've already bombed Elysium. We know they probably bombed us too. Why are we fighting? This is suicidal. Calderon insisted that such talk be considered criminal and grounds for intervention by the Martian Guard, but Leopold and Darby argued people should be allowed to speak their minds. Calderon said, well, I'm going to consider it treason and treat it accordingly. Aware Calderon would likely do what he wanted to do anyway, and wanting to maintain the legitimacy of the Triumvirate, Leopold and Darby acquiesced to a decree that any talk of surrender would be considered seditious, and they implored Martians to hold fast and not spread despair or defeatism. Meanwhile, on the Olympian internal communications networks, the ideological heirs of Kenji Gru were more than able to speak their minds freely without fear of punishment or reprisal. Their opponents derisively dubbed them the Spawn of Gru, which they then proudly co-opted as their collective moniker. The Spawn of Gru pushed the line that true Martians were threatened by Earthlings and surrenderists. No true Martian would ever surrender to Omnicore They also publicly argued in favor of the very Earthling segregation plan that Leopold and Darby had just rejected A Zhao Lin and the old Mons Caf group tried to use their reach and influence to combat this paranoia by preaching courage, resiliency, and unity. The Martians should not let fear take over their minds. They should not turn on each other. But Zhao and the Mons Café group were tripped up because they too supported the resistance, and they would get stuck defending themselves against charges that they were all secret surrenderists at heart. By the end of March, things were getting ugly in Olympus, and people were increasingly at each other's throats. But on March 25th, 2252, the Olympians were finally able to get external communications back up and running. Engineers and SysTex, who had successfully accessed an auxiliary dome, managed to get a bank of transmitters and receivers back online. But when they tapped into the signal traffic, all they could pick up was stuff coming from the Omnicore fleet up above, or over in the city of Tharsis. And all of it appeared to be Omnicore-coded signals. Meanwhile, they weren't getting anything at all out of Elysium. The Olympians would in fact remain totally ignorant of anything that was happening over in Elysium until the end of the invasion. But for now, they were faced with the grim realization that they were probably in this alone. Now what was happening over there in Elysium was that the Elysians continued to stubbornly resist. They had not given up yet. Unlike at Olympus, where the Omnicore security services planted explosives to prevent Martians from coming up into the Prime Dome, at Elysium, it was the Martians who planted explosives to keep Omnicore from coming down into the Warrens. Now since the bomb had been dropped, an informal emergency committee had formed around Alexandra Clare, because she was the highest-ranking officer in the Martian Guard, and since the day of the bomb, the Martian Guard had been the organizational backbone of daily life in Elysium, at the same time acting as medics, engineers, administrators, police, and relief workers. This council included a mix of Martian Guard officers and a few prominent Elysian civilians. Some were black-capped, some were red-capped, some had no affiliation one way or the other. Several were earth-born earthlings. Claire had gotten them all to set aside their differences, and amidst the horrors they had all shared together, that was actually not very hard to do. Now according to signals broadcast by Omnicore, the Elysians were told they were the last holdouts. Olympus and Tharsis had both fallen, the Republic of Mars had been overthrown, its leaders were dead. Now Claire and the leaders around her were committed to resisting, But Claire herself did not want to make that decision for everyone. She wanted to put it to some kind of a vote. But the other members of the council finally talked her out of it, because the actual logistics of running some kind of democratic plebiscite at this point were just too unwieldy. People were still just trying to survive. But they did agree that if the Republic of Mars was gone, and they were going to continue to resist, they needed to continue to resist as something. And that is how they decided to formally reconstitute themselves as the Elysian Commune. There are several great books about the Elysian Commune. The Elysian Commune, A History by Baltar Krogh is the best single-volume work if you want an overview of the whole story. But The First Days of the Last City on Mars by Jinker Poloni has also proved invaluable to me as it covers the early period when the Elysians really thought they were the last free Martians left. And then I would also strongly recommend Underground Phoenix, Voices of the Elysian Commune, a collection of oral histories and first-hand accounts of people who lived through it. The ethos of the Elysian Commune combined the Martian way, the oldest communal tradition the Martians had, with the incredibly recent shared trauma of the bomb and the weeks of emergency that followed. The Elysians had just collectively fought a war against death itself. And so whatever else you might say about how an Earthling can't be a true Martian, well, I just went through hell with him or with her, and so I'm not interested in having problems with Earthlings anymore. We are all in this together. Now, there were, of course, people in Elysium who were like, shouldn't we just give up? Omnicore dropped a nuclear weapon on our heads. Olympus and Tharsis have already surrendered. What is the point of resisting? And while Elysian tradition has it that they all wanted to resist and everybody was in it together and nobody wanted to surrender, that wasn't 100% true. The reason you didn't see many people advocating surrender is because that could be very hazardous to your health. There were strong social pressures against surrendering. The Martian Guard itself was heavily pro-resistance, as was the Third Society of Martian Networks that had been steeped in red-cap ideology before the bomb and who now acted as a patriotic mutual aid network that stopped caring about the difference between Martian and Earthling, but still cared a lot about the difference between Martian and Omnicore. So on March the 10th, 2252, Commander Barlow finally received a response to the messages to the people of Elysium. Well, other than that one guy who shouted, go away. The message said, My name is Alexandra Clare, and I speak for the Elysian Commune. Do not attempt to come any deeper into our city. Cease your attempt to take us over. We have mined all the levels beneath you and your equipment, and we will destroy you and your equipment if you try to advance on us. We demand humanitarian aid, reconstruction materials, and expect those to be given freely. We consider this to be the beginning of a long and probably endless road of repayment for what you have done to us. Now had circumstances been different, Commander Barlow might have responded to this message by dropping another bomb on their heads But by this point, circumstances made him hesitate before pushing that particular button again When Barlow and the Omnicore invasion fleet arrived in Mars in January 2252 He expected to quickly force the capitulation of all three Martian cities and retake possession of their Phos-5 extraction But instead they had resisted Now, Barlow had bombed Elysium as a show of force, and that meant he wouldn't be getting any Phos-5 out of Elysium anytime soon. But he expected the other two to be fully functional and operational. But then Olympus had been knocked out by a second unplanned bomb, which meant that he wouldn't be getting any Phos-5 out of Olympus anytime soon either. So this left only Tharsis as a functional supplier of Phos-5, and by mid-March, things were getting very messy there too. Initially, the cowed and shocked population of Tharsis acquiesced to the Omnicore occupation directed by Jan Gilliand. Gilliand himself had been born and raised in Tharsis, and he implored his fellow Martians to get along with the program and not fight back. It just wasn't worth it. Now, as we discussed last week, the Tharsians didn't put up much of a fight at first, and Omnicore security services quickly secured everything that was involved in Phos-5 extraction and delivery. But because the security services only had a limited number of personnel, and because they were so laser-focused on controlling extraction and delivery of FOSS-5, they were forced to neglect most other parts of the city. And in those areas, people were fairly free to gather, to talk, to discuss, to plan, and to plot. Gillian next attempted to reintroduce the class system by reactivating old employee and skinship records. But when his SysTex tried to access the controls, they found that after the Independence days, Martian SysTex had completely obliterated everything related to class distinctions. So, the Omnicore SysTex would have to rebuild everything from scratch. As a result of this news, Gillian magnanimously announced that the class system would not be reintroduced at this time. See, it's not so bad to live under Omnicore. But please, don't abuse our goodwill. Don't abuse the freedom we are allowing you to have. But you know what the Martians did. That's right. They abused the hell out of that freedom. Right away, more extremist redcaps and blackcaps had formed a resistance movement. And as we talked about last week, the redcap resistance pushed back violently, both orchestrating a bombing campaign as well as a run of assassinations, mostly targeting Tharsian collaborators who worked with the occupation. Bodies would be dumped in public places as warnings that working with Omnicore was a good way to wind up dead. The Blackcaps, meanwhile, kept pushing workplace accidents and delays. They encouraged absenteeism and tardiness. All of it meant to slow the rate of Phos-5 extraction to leverage concessions from Omnicore. What concessions were they after, you ask? Well, the big thing about the Tharsians at this moment is that they were the only Martians who had any idea what was happening outside of their own city. And so the Tharsians knew they were the only source of phosphide left in operation on Mars. It meant that all their physical equipment and infrastructure, as well as their human labor, were incredibly valuable. So it was highly unlikely a bomb was going to get dropped on their heads just for misbehaving. And even short of that, they suspected Gillian would not want to squeeze the Tharcians so hard that he broke something permanently, and then there would be no Phos-5 coming out of Mars. That would get him in big trouble with his bosses, for sure. So the Tharcians figured, hey, if we're the only thing left making Phos-5, we have a very good shot at forcing Omnicore to make significant concessions to us about how they treat us and about how we live. So as the weeks passed, resistance organizing grew bolder, and the numbers in the resistance, both active members and passive supporters, grew along with it. And they were right in their diagnosis. Gilliand was under a lot of pressure to churn out FOS-5, because they were right. He couldn't afford to have equipment get wrecked or trigger some mass uprising that would shut down production. So he was caught in a bind as the Martians continued to push the envelope. He had to push back, but knew there were limits to how far and how hard he could push back. Because if it all blew up in his face, where would the Phos-5 come from then? What would his bosses say? So Gillian tried to just put his head down and keep working. And I will say that in the end, he managed to load one single container ship in orbit above Mars with Phos-5 before the worlds came falling down on his head. Because they were still plugged into the outside world, the Tharsians were the first Martians to get wind of rumors in early April 2252 that something had happened back on Earth. Resistance spies picked up Omnicore chatter about communication delays from headquarters. Then parts of the Omnicore computer networks that link back to central systems on Earth started to become buggy and dysfunctional. And then they became non-functional. For weeks, no one in the invasion fleet or the occupation forces on the ground knew what was going on. Even Commander Barlow was kept in the dark by his own superiors. All he was told is that there were some computer issues that would be fixed shortly. Maintain your position and mission. Bring us back FOS-5. Absent real information to go on, all kinds of rumors started floating around. That there had been a nuclear war back on Earth. or that III Corps had somehow turned the tables and done some real damage to Omnicore. Although, most likely, it was just computer issues. As of the end of March 2252, Omnicore was in a commanding position back on Earth. They were dominant in space, they were winning the war on the ground, so it's not like there was any reason to believe a major catastrophe was imminent. And then one day, it happened. Specifically, on May 15, 2252, all communication from Earth ceased. Just like that. No more signals, no more communication, no more anything. Just dead silence. For several days, Commander Barlow carried on hoping that this was just a particularly long disconnect with Earth. It had happened before over the past few weeks, just not for this long. But after a week, it was clear something had gone dangerously wrong. Barlow never would find out what happened back on Earth. No one on Mars would find out what happened back on Earth for a very long time. All anyone knew is that Earth was now blacked out. And boy, did that ever massively shift the dynamic of the occupation of Mars. It quickly leaked to the Tharsians that the occupation forces no longer received communications from Earth. Pretty soon it was all anyone could talk about. The Tharsians had only surrendered because it really looked like they had been checkmated. But now, it looked like the occupation was not as powerful as it seemed. If Earth really had gone dead, the occupation forces were not the first wave of a larger takeover. They were possibly the last survivors of a defeated company. The Tharsians taunted the occupation personnel by spreading rumors that Omnicore had lost the war, that Earth had annihilated itself in nuclear war, that the occupation forces were out here alone, trapped on a planet with a bunch of people who did not want them there. Throughout May and into June 2252, the worksite stoppages and accidents and sabotage increased in Tharsis as Jan Gillian tried to hold the line without any orders from his superiors about what he was supposed to be doing. All Barlow would tell him is that it was more vital than ever that they maintain the supply of Phos-5. Gee thanks. Gillian tried to hold this line even as morale inside the occupation forces started to flag There was a lot of grumbling and resentment What going on Has Earth been destroyed Are we ever going to be able to go home Some started lashing out in anger and frustration at the Martians, which led to recurrent clashes and conflicts. Full-on firefights broke out in corridors and fiveways as the occupation buckled and the resistance grew. Meanwhile, over in Elysium, Omnicore Security Services had moved in and occupied the lower sea levels right above the Warrens. They had restored power to those levels and put up a defensive perimeter in case the Elysians tried to flank them. But after initial contact had been made, the Elysians made it very clear that trying to go any further down would mean massive amounts of further destruction. They had barricaded everything and they had stuck explosives in everything. But because Commander Barlow was now uncertain how much further destruction he could afford to take, he ordered the Elysian security services to sit tight and not make a move until they received further instructions. Except that's pretty much right when Earth stopped sending him further instructions. The security services occupying the sea level started hearing rumors about something happening back on Earth by the first week of April. Then it became hard not to notice that key systems were going down. Then, the officers held a series of meetings where they assured everyone that the rumors are false and everything is fine. And it is never good when your bosses convene a meeting to say that the rumors are false and everything is fine, because that means the rumors are true and everything is not at all fine. And that brings us to the Polynesian Battalion. Inside the Omnicore Security Services currently occupying the sea levels was a battalion composed of conscripts from a Polynesian diaspora community that had been living in what used to be Alaska. Amidst the climate disasters of the 21st century, the Polynesians had become a refugee population, forced to relocate to marginalized enclaves around the Pacific Rim. This particular group had resettled in Anchorage, and most of them now worked in Omnicore fish farms. When the corporate war started, they had been pressed into service against their will. They didn't want to join, but Omnicore made it very clear that this was not a choice. And so they had been conscripted into the security services. They had been trained, and then they were loaded onto ships. And then the next thing they knew, they were on their way to Mars, where they now sat in a giant hole in the ground. And since the Elysians were not coming up and Omnicore was not going down, the Polynesian battalion was mostly idle. And since it got boring keeping vigil over the front lines, Sometimes they would open up hatches and trade jokes and funny stories with the Martians down below. Mostly it was just to kill time because everyone was just sitting around. But jokes and funny stories advanced to the Polynesians and Martians comparing notes about what it was like to live under Omnicore. And they discovered that they had an awful lot in common. Oh, you had to deal with that? Oh, well this is our version of that. But then when the Martians started talking about the new protocols, the Polynesians were like, what are the new protocols? We've never heard of that. And so the Martians described what life was like under Timothy Warner and the new protocols. And the Polynesians were like, you have got to be kidding me. That sounds awful. And the Martians were like, yes, we know that's why we had a revolution. And the Polynesians were like, yeah, that makes sense. So everyone in the occupation force, not just the Polynesians, were concerned about the problems with communicating with Earth and morale was sinking in Elysium too. Then it sunk to the bottom at the end of May when it became a widely known open secret that there had been no communication from Earth at all since May the 15th. The Polynesians helpfully passed this along to the Martians. We've been totally cut off from Earth and have no idea what's happening back there. So they passed this information along with the message, look, if things go south around here, we do not want any trouble. In fact, if things go south around here, we're on your side. And the Martians said, great, let's talk more about that. The last to find out about the blackout were the Olympians. All they knew is that something weird was happening because they could see signals from Earth were getting constantly interrupted, but they didn't know why. But while they waited in the dark, Jose Calderon's paranoia started to get the better of him. Though he never took stims the way Kenji Gru did, Calderon had been operating on a mix of stims and drags for years now, and in the present emergency it had been far more stims than drags, and it seems reasonable to point out that the amount of stims Calderon was taking absolutely warps your judgment. Calderon was obsessed with the idea that Earthlings and Earthworms would conspire to surrender Olympus to Omnicore. He also started forming visions of what Mars would look like after the Martians had expelled Omnicore from the planet. And so for him, his plan to segregate the Earthlings not only made sense on an immediate military level, but also on a larger social level. He wanted a fresh start for Mars, a Mars free of threats from Earth, and that meant deporting not just some Earthlings, but all of the Earthlings, so that Mars could finally be for the Martians. On May the 7th, 2252, about a week before the Earth blackout started, the Olympian Redcaps carried out a raid on a group of seven Earthlings found in possession of bomb-making equipment and detailed layouts of the levels around the central servers. It has never been entirely clear what was true in this exposed plot and what was not. For sure, we know that the seven individuals were all earthlings and that they had all shown surrenderist sympathies. But one of them also shows up elsewhere on the Martian Guard payroll as an informer and that guy is the one who acquired the bomb making equipment and the maps. So it's entirely likely this whole thing was a frame-up job from start to finish. Regardless, these accused Earthling conspirators also had connections to the Mons Cafe group. They had been part of the Earthling Rights Movement, and the leaders of the Mons Cafe group had been sympathetic to their plight, especially after the Independence days when Kenji Gru started catching fire. So after they exposed the plot, the Martian Guard found old communications between these conspirators and Zhao Lin and Ivana Darby and Marcus Leopold, who had actually served as an advocate for one of them once. These connections set off alarm bells for Jose Calderon. His triumvir colleagues had been resisting his efforts to properly deal with the Earthlings. Were they in league with the Earthlings to betray Mars? It seemed preposterous. So it's also not clear here how much Calderon actually believed any of this, and how much of it was just a cynical pretext to seize power. Probably it was a mix of both, with Calderon's ambition climbing aboard his paranoia and riding it to the end of the line. There is also a lot of debate over whether Calderon planned his coup in advance. Some say that it's absurd to doubt that it was not one single plan all along. The bomb plot was an obvious frame-up job designed to give Calderon the pretext he needed to stage his coup 48 hours later. But others say the exposed plot had grown organically from Calderon's orders to find and root out Earthling terrorists, that some overzealous underlings had made up what they could not find, and everything that happened after that was just Calderon responding to events. He didn't so much stage his coup as scramble towards it across a rickety bridge. With the plot exposed, though, Calderon went back to demanding the segregation of the Earthlings, at least until the emergency pass. Both Leopold and Darby believed this was totally unnecessary, and it would be far more disruptive and dangerous than just leaving the population where they were. So they said, no, we are not going to segregate the Earthlings. And that's when Calderon revealed that he had evidence of their connection to the bomb plot. Leopold and Darby said, that's crazy, we have no idea what you're talking about. Calderon got angry and said, you're lying, I know you're lying, you're not true Martians and you never have been. So this meeting ended in a shouting match and everyone storming out on everyone else. Now when he agreed to the Triumvirate, Calderon knew his power came from being commander of the Martian Guard. For him, the Triumvirate was useful as long as they provided him with political cover. If they stopped doing that, then they were no longer useful. And now he could see that Leopold and Darby were not just obstacles, but possibly enemies. That could absolutely not be tolerated. So on May the 9th, Jose Calderon issued arrest warrants for 27 people. At the top of this list were his two fellow triumvirs, Marcus Leopold and Ivana Darby. The list also included most of the prominent members of the Old Mons Café group, most especially Zhao Lin. This was a group that had come together even before the arrival of Timothy Werner and the New Protocols. Back when they were students together, watching Zhao's bootleg copy of Jose de Petrov's Forces of History. Back then, the Mons Café had not been a byword for a political tendency, but just a café. A place to come and enjoy the company of friends and bandy about ideas and jokes in the face of this endlessly absurd situation we call life. And now, they were all being arrested together. After the arrests were carried out by loyal redcaps, Calderon took to the networks to regretfully announce that he had uncovered a plot to surrender to Omnicore, and that it was with a heavy heart that Marcus Leopold, Ivana Darby, and Zhao Lin were a part of it. Great heroes of the revolution have betrayed us, and that sin of betrayal will always mark them as enemies of true Martians, now and forever. The spawn of Gru backed up Calderon's accusations on the networks, but the arrest still set off waves of indignation. Lots of Martians were not Red Cap ideologues. For them, Calderon's behavior was outrageous. He had unilaterally ended the triumvirate by locking up some of those prominent leaders of the revolution. Calderon's coup also split the Martian guard, as Black Caps started resigning en masse. Leopold, Darby, Zhao, and the rest, meanwhile, wound up sitting in cells on a stockade run entirely by red-capped Martian guards They, of course, protested and protested and protested But the fact is, if you're locked in a room surrounded by armed guards who are not interested in letting you out or speaking to anybody Then that's the way it is You're not getting out, and you're not speaking to anybody After the coup, Calderon ruled directly through the Martian guard He never spent much time formalizing the arrangements lending some credence to the idea that he had not in fact planned all this in advance. But in effect, he brought Olympus under military dictatorship. Using this authority, he was first going to carry out his plan to segregate the Earthlings, and then once he was safe from their interference, he would lead the charge into the Prime Dome to retake it from Omnicore. Once that was done, he would load all the Earthlings onto ships and send them back to where they came from. While all of this was going on, Booth Gonzalez and the Martian Navy were still driving back towards Mars. This was another thing looming over Commander Barlow's head. Gonzalez had sprung his trap at roughly the same moment communications with Earth started faltering. So just as that started up, Barlow received long-range transmissions from an obviously stressed-out captain in the pursuit fleet saying the Martians figured something out, they've destroyed us, we've only got five ships left, everyone else is dead. So the whole time Barlow was dealing with very worrisome communications issues and declining morale in his occupation forces, he also kept one eye on the long-range scanners that showed the Martian Navy now on a direct course to re-intercept Mars by the second week of June. As the Martian Navy made its way back, Gonzales settled on a plan for what to do when they got there. If the original scans they'd taken when the Omnicore fleet was approaching Mars in the first place were true, Barlow did not control more than a dozen armed fighting ships. Gonzales had 239. So the plan was to make the final approach to Mars from three angles, each group closing on a separate city, over all the remaining Omnicore ships into surrendering, and if they did not, then blast them out of space. Gonzales was cognizant, though, of not wanting to destroy satellites and orbital installations, those he wanted to keep intact. But the Omnicore ships? For them, it would be surrender or die. Now, Commander Barlow would have tried to replicate the long-range nuclear shot the Martians had taken at him, but he could already see they were spread out to avoid just such an attack, and so they just kept coming. Right on through and past the Earth blackout, the Martian navy just kept coming. Barlow was now cut off and alone and starting to crack a little under the pressure. On June 15, 2252, the Martian Navy timed a three-pronged arrival to Mars. Three groups of 50 fighting ships would each approach one of the three Martian cities, while the rest would be held back in reserve. As they neared, Gonzales issued a broadcast calling on Omnicore to surrender. We have already destroyed the ships you sent after us, we absolutely outnumber you, and we will have no trouble destroying you if you try to fight us. So surrender, and we will be merciful and allow you safe passage back to Earth. Resist, and you will die. Barlow rejected this offer, and instead he counter-offered. He said, we control all three cities on Mars. They are ours now. But if you come any closer, I will drop all the remaining nuclear devices I have on them and turn Mars back into a lifeless desert. We will not surrender. You will surrender. To which Gonzalez responded with an ice-cold rejoinder that worked at the time but would cause a fair amount of cringing Apologia from his Martian friends and admirers in the years to come Because Gonzalez said We not Martians We space shippers We come from Maluna So do what you want But I promise if you drop bombs on Mars I going to kill every last one of you because I in this to destroy Omnicore not save Martians Every Gonzales biographer has to wrestle with this counter ultimatum, and his claim not to care about the fate of the Martians. Some say that it was a bluff, others that for the first time he was revealing where his true loyalties lay. personally i am inclined to believe that he was bluffing that he was just trying to rattle barlow and that's not because i'm in some booth gonzalez fan club but because there's ample evidence from both before and after this that gonzalez cared a lot about the fate of the martians but he did say what he said and it is pretty cold-blooded it also left barlow in a bind His bluff had now been called. The Martian Navy ships were still incoming. And as he hesitated to press the nuclear button, he ordered the remaining fighting ships he had to go out, meet the incoming Martians, and stop them. But this was nuts. When I say there were only a dozen remaining fighting ships, I mean that's it for the whole planet. Twelve ships. Well, I guess the five ships that had come back from the Pursuit Fleet and returned to Mars by that point. So they're up to 17 now, but you get my point. There's not very many of them. So when this order came in, the crews over at Elysium, they had four ships, that was it, four ships. They got ordered to mobilize and go out and attack 50 ships. And when they said, that's insane, they were told it would be just like at Lunaport, where a few ships could mow down dozens. But the crews knew that wasn't true anymore because something had happened to that pursuit fleet. So the Elysian crews refused to go out. The Tharsian crews, at least, left orbital dock and flew out on an intercept course. But as the Martians approached and ordered them to surrender, the group captain lost his nerve. What was the point of dying for Omnicore? For all he knew, there wasn't even an Omnicore left. At Olympus, Barlow ordered the nine fighting ships left to advance and stop the Martian navy. But this group included the five surviving crews of the Pursuit fleet, and like the Elysian said, hell no, we are absolutely not going back out there. We did not spend the last 10 weeks trying to get away from them, just to turn around and run back into them. Both the officers and the crews refused to go. This mutiny then spread to the other ships because the other officers had heard the stories from the survivors and understood that they were being sent on a suicide mission. The fact was they were beaten. The only question now was how many would die before Barlow admitted it. So Commander Barlow watched helplessly as the last line of defense he had crumbled to ashes in his hands. Earth was still blacked out. The situation really did seem hopeless. His options now were either surrender or carry out his threat to unleash all his nuclear devices and turn Mars back into a lifeless red desert. Instead, he chose option three. On June the 16th, 2252, Commander Barlow went into his cabin and he shot himself in the head. With the Omnicore fleet surrendering and Commander Barlow suddenly absent from the scene, it wasn't yet public knowledge he was dead, the will went out of the forces down on the ground. In Tharsis, the news that Booth Gonzalez had led the Martian navy back and delivered them from Omnicore was met with jubilant celebrations. The security services had very little chance of keeping a lid on things, and the Tharsians just kind of ran wild. In fact, far from trying to contain anything, Yang Gillian ordered the security services to withdraw up to the main dome, where they would reconsolidate a defensive position. Within 36 hours of the Martian Navy's victory, though, it was clear there wasn't much worth defending. The Omnicore fleet had surrendered. There was still no contact with Earth, so there were just a few thousand troops in a city of millions. They all knew that at any moment the Tharsians could erupt and just totally overwhelm them. Neither the officers nor the rank and file had much appetite for resistance. Getting out of this alive was now really the only thing on anyone's mind. So on June 17th, Gillian announced that the security services in Tharsis would lay down their weapons and surrender. Our only demand, he said, was that our lives be spared and you allow us to return home to earth peacefully. So the Tharsian leaders, who had capitulated five months earlier, returned to the main dome and took back administration of the city. The Martian Guard oversaw the disarming of the security services. These prisoners were then quartered down in the sea levels, where they were kept under surveillance, while arrangements were made to send them back to Earth. Over in Elysium, the officers in charge of the forces on the ground actually attempted to hold out. They said, our job is to keep doing our jobs until we are relieved, and we have not been relieved. But this was never going to fly. The rank and file were like, no one is coming to relieve us. Not ever. There is absolutely no point in continuing to fight. We should surrender. The officers managed to keep this up for two days before the Polynesian battalion finally had enough. With the help of Martians on the other side of the line, they all cleared a path for the Martian guard to come up and into the Omnicore controlled levels. On June 18th, The Polynesians turned their weapons on their superiors. They disarmed their officers and signaled to the Martians that it was safe to come up. So up came the Elysian Martian Guard, and together with the Polynesian Battalion, they called for the rest of the rank-and-file security services to throw down their weapons and surrender. The officers tried to stop them, but morale was already in the toilet, and so the sound of neutron guns hitting the floor echoed throughout the corridors. Within an hour, the entire occupation force had capitulated. The officers were disarmed and rounded up. The rank and file, meanwhile, were offered food and fuel and feels. Guess you guys don't work for Omnicore anymore, and that calls for a celebration. And that party marks the end of the Siege of Elysium. But in Olympus, things took a darker turn. After the victory of the Martian Navy, Calderon immediately demanded the surrender of Omnicore forces in the Prime Dome. He said, you're stranded. You're alone. but we mean you no harm if you lay down your weapons and wait patiently for a suitable vessel to take you back to earth. The senior security officers discussed this for six hours and then came back and said, okay, we surrender. But having a flair for the dramatic, Calderon went up to the prime dome alone on June the 17th, flanked by just six Martian guard. So he stood there in front of thousands of self-disarmed Omnicore security services, and it looked for all the world like this entire army was surrendering to Calderon and Calderon alone. And whether we like it or not, one of the indelible images of the Martian Revolution is a giant 4D painting called Calderon Accepting Omnicore Surrender by the neo-post-romantic conceptual artist Vers Vers. Having accepted this surrender, Calderon was now at the peak of his popularity. and like in the other cities, Olympus exploded into a non-stop party. And it was amidst this party that Calderon moved against his political enemies. He clearly recognized that one chapter was at an end and a new chapter was set to begin. Calderon had a vision for the future of Mars, and the likes of Leopold and Darby and Zhao were only going to get in his way. Left alive, they would always serve as a powerful check on Calderon's ambitions. So, better to just slit their throats here and now, rather than let them appear at all in the next chapter in the story. Calderon wanted that chapter to be about him and him alone. Unlike the grand spectacle of Mabel Dore and the Trial of the Earthworms, the Trial of the Mons Café group was held in secret. No one was told about it. While Olympus was engulfed in their non-stop victory party, Red Cap guards fetched the 27 prisoners from the stockade. Well, 27 plus 1, because Calderon decided to dispatch our old friend Commander Axel Cartwright along with the Mons Cafe group. The prisoners had no idea what was happening, nor did they know what was happening outside the stockade. They had been deliberately kept in the dark. So they were just led into a chamber where a three-judge tribunal sat. Once they had all settled in, the judges read the charges against the accused. Treason. Conspiracy. Attempted murder. Then, after the charges had been read, the judges waited one beat before they said, We find the accused guilty of all charges. The sentence is death to be carried out immediately. This shocking declaration came as a surprise to everyone in the room. It triggered outraged outbursts from the accused, But even the guards in the room had no idea what was going on. They had just been doing what they were told to do, and then discovered what they were doing was carrying out the secret executions of some of the most prominent revolutionaries on Mars. While the Olympians continued their non-stop party on June the 18th, the 27, plus one, were led down a hallway and told to wait in a corridor. Then, they were led three at a time into a chamber, where they were secured in chairs, and then the air was sucked out of the room, and then they died. Unlike previous executions, only the guards and the operators carrying out the task were present. There was no press, no witnesses, no prominent officials. Just three by three led into the chamber and killed. The secret executions of so many prominent revolutionaries, coming just as the Martians celebrated victory over Omnicore, led these deaths to be dubbed Bloody Sunset, one last sacrifice to the gods of revolution who'd been awakened five years earlier during Bloody Sunrise. Some of the condemned sobbed. One guy, whose name I won't tell you, just lost his mind. You can find his name if you want to, but I figure there's no reason to drag a good man's name through the mud just because he got a little hysterical about his own impending death. Commander Axel Cartwright was in the third to last group. Cartwright had always fancied himself one of the agents of historical change, and he could legitimately claim to have been just that. He'd been instrumental in the mutiny of 2247 that secured autonomy for Mars, and then later been instrumental in the formation of the Martian Navy, and securing a formal alliance with III Corps. But his record as Admiral of the Martian Navy was pretty terrible. He had gone back to Earth, failed to liberate Lunaport, and then presided over the massacre of most of the ships under his command. To add insult to injury, he'd run back to Mars as fast as possible and let the survivors defend for themselves. Was he guilty of treason or any of the other things he was accused of? No, of course not. But he had played his role in history, and now it was time for him to exit the stage. Unfair? Yes. But a student of history like Cartwright surely understands that sometimes life is just plain unfair. The last group of three was Marcus Leopold, Ivana Darby, and Zhao Lin. The three of them had been together since they were students back in the late 2230s, which felt like several lifetimes ago, but in fact, Leopold and Darby had only graduated from Olympus University in 2240, a scant 11 years earlier. Through sheer force of will, determination, creativity, passion, and ambition. They had risen together and turned their favorite cafe into the headquarters of a revolution that changed the course of human history forever. Leopold had put his stamp all over the political and legal structure of Mars. Darby had been the face and voice of some of the most dramatic moments in the revolution. She'd been the one to first declare independence after the three days of red, and she had given more speeches in front of the Martian assembly than anyone else. Zhao Lin, meanwhile, is quite simply one of the most important and influential Martian artists ever, not just of the revolution, but in the whole history of Mars. His vision crafted the narrative around some of the most important turning points in Martian history, and even his final great work, No True Martian, which caused him so much trouble at the time, has gone down as one of the greatest expressions of the Martian way, of the true Martian way. After a lifetime of plans and plots and hopes and dreams and hard work and long nights and love and loss and sacrifice and reward, the three of them wound up here, in this bare corridor. Then, led into a sparse chamber where they were secured in chairs. And for the crime of posing a political threat to the wrong man at the wrong time, the air was sucked out of the room, and three of the greatest Martians who ever lived died secretly, while all around them Olympus celebrated the final victory over Omnicore, which they had made possible, but which they would not live to see. Next week will be the final episode of our series on the Martian Revolution. We have now come to the end of the line. The revolution is fast approaching its final conclusion. And even though today we know what happened in the end, like the fact that the revolution is fast approaching its final conclusion, the fate of Mars and the revolution was unknown to the Martians there at the time. They did not know who would win or lose. They did not know who would go down a hero and who would go down a villain. They did not know who would live and who would die. Thank you.