Alan Scarlett and the Scarlett Virus

The colony building frenzy on Venus, Luna, and Mars of the 2060s ended with the wars of 2080. In 2083, the wars ended with a series of atomic blasts in both Russia and North America. Central Ohio was turned into a desert, a bomb set off underwater in Lake Erie destroyed Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo and half of Detroit with a tsunami that nearly emptied the lake. It was over a year before water returned to Niagara Falls. Wide swaths of Russia and China were ripped off the earth, yet it wasn’t the west who attacked the east and vice versa. It was colonial separatists.

At the start of the wars, thousands of men were dragged from their home colonies on Mars, Luna, and Venus and slaughtered on the killing fields of an Earth gone crazy. The population of Venus didn’t survive, the remaining colonists of Venus left for orbital stations. Luna and Mars were left with a population of up to 90 percent women. They abandoned colonies they couldn’t support and merged their population in the larger colony cities, and each fought for survival. The colonies on Luna and Mars concentrated on rebuilding their population and both settled on different solutions.

The Western Alliance Navy, the largest fighting force in the Western Alliance, made political friends with Luna and assisted in their recovery. At the same time, the only thing that the squabbling remaining colonies of Mars could agree on was that the Military wasn’t welcome on Mars and that if Earth wanted some of Mars’ high grade iron ore, they were going to pay for it in water.

Colonialism replaced racism in society. Martian women were considered eggheads, nerds and cold. They had a reputation for being ugly (not true) and they were often called “too arrogant to fuck.” Lunar women were all considered whores, sluts, and they all probably carried an STD, regardless of how long they lived on Luna. Martian men were all considered impotent and weak, while Lunar men were considered cuckolds and weak.

In 2031 at Bradbury Canal, the first and most famous colony on Mars, events were lining up that would change those perceptions forever.