War and Love in Three Worlds - A prologueMy name is Kinnison Smith. When all this started my mother was two years old.
Spring was just a new thing, my mother told me, when in that day of May 1850 the falling stars filled the skies of two continents. It was a strange new thing and nobody understood how the falling starts could descend so slowly from the skies. Stranger even was the fact that no impact crater was found. My father was an Englishman and my mother a Portuguese woman. They were trying a new life in the United States of America. They met when she was thirteen years old at the start of the American Civil War.
In 1864, my father decided that they should return to Europe and settle in England. The sheer violence and killing of the war scared them enough to make them leave. They married in New York and sailed back to London. It took four years of war to reshape the American continent politic geography. A treaty of peace was signed in 1865. Two new nations emerged from the war. The American Union of the North and the Federation of America.
In 1866 a strange and scary thing happened. The crash sites of the falling stars underwent a strange transformation. The people, fauna and flora died away slowly. Only those who ran way survived. A new, strange and reddish flora emerged. The Dead Zones were sealed, their frontiers scorched to the ground and entire populations were moved away, some of them hundreds of miles.
I was born in 1868. It was, my mother said, a cold February. In that same Summer giant slow meteors fell in the Dead Zones across the world. From that moment on everybody understood that it wasn’t a coincidence. It was an invasion. Two days later the Hexapods attacked several nations. Canada, American Union of the North, Federation of America, France, Germany and China were attacked. The Martian Invasion had began.
The war last for seven years. During those years, Humanity learned two things. That the invaders were some sort of Octopus and how to scavenge their Hexapods to retrieve their lighter than air metal. After seven bloody years, the Martians were defeated. I was eight years old when a joined fleet of Aether ships was built to take the war to them!
In 1876 three hundred Aether ships invaded Mars. The surprise was bigger than anything Humanity was expecting. We found no Octopus people but other races living in a world slowly dying for thousands of years. The Octopus, that the other Martian races called “The Greys”, lived in secret underground cities and were almost a myth to the other Martians. The Red and Blue Martians were almost like Humanity and the Greens were four armed giant barbarians.
From United Invasion Fleet to national colonization fleet, the change took a few days. Each nation moved in to “help” a Red Martians city state of their choosing. Colonialism arrived to Mars. The Red Martians, city dwellers, the still most advanced of the Martian races, accommodated to the Earthmen with relative ease. The Blue Martians didn’t and a state of war erupted. For the Green Martians one more or one less race was unimportant. The Grey Martians were nowhere to be seen.
One year after, the British fleet cleared thing up by conquering the Red Martian city of Reubah’narat. The British annexed the two closest city states in the same year, Sahnarth and Sholl and declared that territory as British territory. Her Majesty new Jewel of the Crown was now in another planet. Following Britain lead, the French, German and Russian Empires did the same.
From 1878 to 1883 the Major Earth Powers strengthen their presence in Mars. Belgians, Spaniards, Canadians and the two new North American States, conquered, traded, fought and stole the Martian precious wonders. The major trade with the Martians is transteel, the lighter than air metal against water, the most precious commodity in Mars. Large Human Aether ships mine water from the ice asteroids in the asteroid belt and deliver it to Mars.
I arrived Mars in 1888 under the orders of Her Majesty’s Army. For an year, I’ve seen the wonders of Mars, fought German and Blue Martians, monsters and Green barbarians in the steam tank I command. Today is the February 23, 1889 on Earth, I’m twenty one years old and it is the 43th Day of Ohmah, the fourth month of the year 22.659 of the Red Martians calender and everything will change for me.
01 April 2007, 08:39:50 PM