Chapter 10: A Brief Explanation of the Fort South Backstory

I'm guilty of many odd habits and one of those that I love the most is extensive backstories for my writing. Yes, it's true -- I love to build entire worlds.

Fort South and my earlier story, On the Mountain are set in a universe where shortly after today a means of creating wormholes was discovered. The wormholes didn't have nice little Stargates that could be dialed to some address so that people could travel wherever it was the pleased; they open at random locations in the universe ... without the toilet flushes. So long as the wormhole is maintained, the two locations remain in contact, but if the wormhole is terminated they are forever sundered.

Since the universe is a large place, having the wormhole close behind you means permanent exile.

It took opening a good many wormholes (many million) before humanity (well, at least the Americans) opened a gate a few feet above the surface of an Earth-like planet. Exploration was tentative at first, but from the first day people walked on it's surface it was realized that humanity no longer had to keep its eggs in one basket. After less than a week, there were several hundred men and women in the age group of 20-40 through and tons of supplies.

I have stories I've written about the early days of wormhole travel and now and then I work on them. They were, from the very beginning, fragmented in time. I have a great collection of rejection letters from Analog, Asimov's and other magazines in the file ... these were the first stories I submitted for publication and those rejection slips -- with not one of the legendary words of encouragement -- were daunting.

Anyway, I digress ... back to the backstory:

In these stories, within a few years the US was sending significant numbers of people through the wormhole. Millions. Initially, the trip was expensive. People had to pay for two years worth of food and other supplies, tools and equipment on the other side.

It wasn't obvious at first, but obviously the best, brightest and boldest were the ones heading for the new frontier. Parents who'd saved and scrimped their entire lives cheerfully hocked their assets to give their children places on the new world.

Again, at first, the US offered a limited number of spots to it's international allies, but as the pressure to ship more and more people through the wormhole increased, fewer and fewer foreign nationals were permitted, causing friction even with allies and heated acrimony from countries that had never been friendly.

After about five years and ten million people, the US government changed how things worked, creating a lottery where "average" Americans could "win" trips through the wormhole. Several problems, minor before, became serious. In order to move millions of people through a hole in space that was described by wags as "almost the whole pi" travel was essentially in one direction, from Earth to the new planet. People couldn't be sent back home. Which meant that the best and brightest weren't coming -- and neither were the fruits of their labor.

I could go on and on ... but what happened was that six years after the wormhole opened, terrorists, armed with a Russian thermonuclear weapon, destroyed the wormhole, housed on a West Texas air base.

The Russians thought they had plausible deniability, but H-bombs don't grow on trees and weapons tests of the fifties and sixties had given the US the Russian weapon's isotopic signatures and the US had known where and even when the weapon had been built. A brief nuclear exchange with Russia followed, with the Russian Strategic Forces showing the effects of twenty years out from under the Soviet thumb and the plentiful availability of really cheap vodka. Few missiles got off the ground and fewer bombers. The first Russian nuclear submarine that attempted to fire a missile vanished in a non-nuclear explosion as the warhead explosives and rocket fuel aboard detonated.

China intervened when the US demanded unconditional surrender of what remained of Russia. What the US would have done with it, had the Russians actually surrendered, was problematical -- the demand was for internal political consumption after one Russian weapon took out Denver.

The Chinese weren't vodka-sodden alcoholics who had a nearly hundred year history of poor quality control. They took out the major US West Coast ports and then discovered the difference between having a few hundred deliverable nuclear weapons and nearly twenty thousand. Five thousand Chinese cities, towns and villages took nuclear strikes.

The world lapsed into a sullen truce, dominated by the bully on the block who had never wanted to be anything other than left alone. The American people were bewildered at the sacrifices they were being asked to make, versus what had happened.

The world had been, before then, tightly interconnected. Islamic terrorists had used the distraction of global thermonuclear war to good effect, crippling most of the Middle East's oil production capabilities. The West's economies slowed and slowed and slowed. It was a global depression that dwarfed the depression of the 1930's. Third world governments, unable to pay their soldiers vanished into warring fiefdoms of warlords. Guns and ammunition were cheap, and there were a lot of people available to use them and to use them on.

Developed nations began to fracture and split. Europe vanished almost overnight in bitter racial conflicts with virtually every color of skin and religion waging war against all of the others. Even Japan, a country without significant racial strife, collapsed, no longer able to sustain itself when global trade had gone to zero and there were no ships to transport foodstuffs, and no foodstuffs available to transport.

The US teetered along for a few more years, gradually disintegrating. Racial fault lines played a big part, with religion playing the rest. A lot of liberals or progressives were worse than mugged and that sort of thinking vanished in a few months.

A group of people, led by a charismatic army officer, got a couple of wormholes working again, desperately trying to find a place that they could evacuate the remnants of the geeks and nerds of the America. Evan Riley was his name, and early on, after the nuclear destruction of Los Angeles, he was joined by Story Taylor -- a young woman who had never imagined herself in the position she achieved.

They found a place to go, but the wormhole terminus started off nearly four miles above the surface of the planet they found. There was no way to push thousands of people and a million tons of supplies through a three foot plus hole and drop them four miles straight down.

Heroic research found a way to slightly move the wormhole, without shutting it down. The best they could do, however, was two hundred and fifty feet above ground level -- just about level with some of the higher trees in the area. That's another story, though, for another time.

They found themselves on a planet significantly larger than Earth, with a lower density -- a good part of that made of water. With a radius of nearly 6200 miles, as opposed to the Earth's less than 4000, meant the planet had a surface area significantly greater than Earth's 200 million square miles -- two and a half times greater, nearly 500 million square miles, with a significantly greater surface area covered with water, although a lower percentage of total surface ocean, 65% instead of 70% on Earth. Earth's total land area was 59 million square miles, while the new planet's land area was 168 million square miles. Of course, the new arrivals weren't to learn those numbers for nearly a thousand years.

Iron abundance at the surface was significantly lower than Earth's, but for reasons not fully understood, there was relatively more copper, zinc and tin. Aluminum was common, as was titanium, but both required a lot of energy to work, and alloying metals weren't very abundant on the new planet.

In fact, most iron was ground up and plowed into the soil to make sure that there was sufficient iron to meet human dietary requirements. Crops were developed that concentrated iron from the soil to a much higher degree than even spinach back on Earth.

Humanity had arrived on a continent about three times the size of Asia, in the northeastern corner, about a hundred miles from the ocean which was to the north and the ocean was about fifty miles to the east.