The brutality of her recent memory had tapped turbid reserves of fear, and carved new realizations out from hardcoded alcoves of human resilience. Her ancestral lineage and lived experience had built a fierce calmness in Myra; the whir of propulsors, cycling to carry the aerial along, was loud enough to make dialog difficult, and no one tried, so the rugged landscape of interior Alaska fully occupied the oculars of the occupants of their autonomous transport. It skimmed a few meters above the surf and began to rise to enter the airspace over Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER).
She felt as secure as she could remember ever feeling; the Advanced Energy Weapons Division (AEWD), where Myra was conducting operations, had been thoroughly tested and proven effective in the Failed Reclamation, where they reduced a thousand Martian drones to rubble. She entered the command center and colleagues expressed relief for seeing her safe; a few years before, they worked together in the same space to repel the active adversary, through the 1st major offensive of the 1st Inter-World War.
That night, as she rode her bicycle back to the barracks, the raid alarm sounded and ordered her return; she still remembered it like it had just happened, and remembered her friends and family who were killed in the area and elsewhere around the world. She kept those three days, locked-down in the command center, foremost in her rearview; all of her work since then was determined to never see it happen again.
The Armed Forces of Earth had been preparing for decades, since the mass revolt and strategic coup; global elites jettisoned to Mars to avoid the Long Valley volcanic winter unrest. They had planned it for decades beforehand, and gave no advanced warning to the public. The military personnel and machinery left behind were supposed to secure strategic assets for them, yet a clandestine cabal made new plans.
Long Valley Super Volcano caused a disastrous cataclysm to most humans and other organisms, yet there were tens of thousands of families, all connected by a social app that had developed a global cooperative of lifeboat prepper villages, funded by NFT passport sales, equipping many groups to survive such scenarios around the world.
It was, in fact, a CIA front; they had cultivated assets through psyops for decades, as prelude to a coup, to reject idealistic capitalism, having rejected the elite intent to exploit and sacrifice soldiers, to leave friends and families behind without adequate resources to survive, let alone recover. The monikers, “Martians, Aliens, Foreigners,” had become casual expressions against the evacuating, absentee landlords.
Martians absconded with an extensive fleet of military orbitals, industrial payloads, mining and manufacturing equipment, raw resources, and everything for militarizing, evermore; fleets of smelters and transports dotted the asteroid belt, out collecting metals from swarms of miner drones; the mining fleet autonomously organized to maximize output efficiency, to increase profits for the corporate owners.
Uppermost-classist Martians were obsessed with training AIs to analyze war data, and conducting psyops to supply data APIs; with these, middle class Martians would train their own AIs to better speculate on futures price trends in Earthly resource markets.
Deimos had been hollowed, leaving a one kilometer thick shell, reinforced by metals from the belt, and refilled with machinery for refining and manufacturing. A pulsed fusion reactor, the size of a skyscraper, steadily hummed at its core. Both moons of Mars were corporate bases, defended by a large laser to wreck large ships, and myriad smaller lasers that could efficiently eliminate smaller ships, or almost any nonphotonic projectile, faster than a blepharospasm, and at a vast distance.
Earthers were likewise defended by Earth Space Force (ESF) installations on their moon, and orbital and terrestrial arrays, and defense systems at sea; Mars Space Force (MSF) routinely tested new advancements against ESF defenses, yet Martian stealth ships rarely reached the thermosphere, and none had breached the tropopause since the First Reclamation attempt, until the previous day.
Myra feared the Fairbanks factory was just the beginning of the 2nd offensive of the Inter-World War; aside from military, they had managed to create a mostly free and frequently happy society. The socialist legal code of Earthers had empowered rights for consent, defense, and ecological resource maximalism; energy credits were distributed evenly, routinely to everyone in Earther society, as the Civilian Energy Supply (CES).
CES credits were spent to cover the inclusive energy cost (raw materials acquisition, processing, and distribution) of things people needed and wanted, and to vote for public initiatives directly; CES empowered initiatives literally. It was liquid, adaptive and engaging, for an economic system. Voter proxies were individually delegated to expend energy on behalf of other voters, and projects were initialized if resource requirements were met. It was a nimble mix of cyberocracy, donorocracy and resource socialism.
People on both worlds applied skills to solve for survival, yet essential systems to supply the needs of every Earther, plus a bountiful buffer, were automated to eliminate the distractions of hunger and housing insecurity from minds that would better be focused on defending Earth from dictatorial Martian exploiters. Mars was a free market corporatocracy, which had almost no complimentary access to resources for workers.
Her debrief was scheduled to happen on the morning of the following day, so after a few hugs and shrugs in the command center, Myra retired to the bunker barracks, snugly buried deep in the basement of the base. It would be at least two days until threat assessment concluded, before she could leave the base, yet it could be much longer if another offensive wave was inbound.
