Chapter 19

Dammit, Mars Enterprises and the human race were getting to be too fucking important throughout the galaxy. Nowadays, for practical purposes, Mars Enterprises, through Interstellar Traders, controlled the entire realm of interstellar commerce. Oh, sure, there was some competition, but the few other types of FTL travel just could not compete with ours. We were unlimited in the size of our spaceships and it cost practically nothing for us to move anywhere we wished within the galaxy. Some of our teams were even looking at the possibility of intergalactic travel, but we had not gotten serious with that, yet, because there were still billions of planets within our own galaxy that we had not yet visited.

Auburn, Mars, had not grown very much on the surface, since we were still limited to domes, but we had been tunneling for living space. We had opened great caverns under our original city, and we now had almost 100,000 humans living on Mars.

Auburn, Mars, was truly a company town. There were a few small service operations and a few pizza parlors, but all external commerce had to go through the company, simply because there was no other way to travel to other planets. Personally, I would like to see the monopoly end, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without giving the fanatical hate groups like The True Believers access to interplanetary or interstellar travel.

We'd even had to resort to clandestine operations against several groups, The True Believers being the most significant, but we still were not safe, and I doubted if we ever would be. Mars Enterprises ruled Mars, and was close to ruling Earth in all really important matters. I was dead set against that, but I was now the de facto ruler of Earth and Mars, and I had a tremendous amount of influence with our friends on Venus.

So far, my rule of Earth had been limited to halting a few wars that had broken out, and I had been able to dump four oppressive dictatorships. In the 22 years since we had come to Mars, I had been able to establish a single currency, the International Dollar, and Basic English had become the official language. The francophones were still pissed at that, but I had not had anything to do with that directly, it just happened. World government was almost fully established, and it was running pretty well. There were a few holdouts, but I didn't thing they would last another 10 years.

Of course, I did not rule the galaxy. That would have been impossible, even if I had wanted to do that. You would literally have to be crazy to try for that; there were over 20 billion different races in the galaxy, and only about half of them were oxygen breathers. The sheer red tape involved in trying to govern such a diverse group would have ground everything to a halt.

Of course, the sheer impossibility of ruling the galaxy did not keep some people from trying. Right now, we were involved in a war with a group of people with a fanatical religious zeal. They were convinced that anyone who did not depend on ammonia as his atmosphere was unequivocally evil. I have no idea where this idea came from, but there was no way to change their mind.

The use of the singular noun in this case was literally correct. These people had a group mind that depended on some sort of mental telepathy. It was truly FTL communication and seemed to be unlimited in range. Every member of the race contributed equally to all decisions. Don't ask me how that was possible, just accept it as fact and live with it.

The upshot was that we were now engaged in a fight for our very lives, and there was no way to achieve a peace except by eliminating every one of the enemy. That's harsh, I know, but it's an unarguable requirement. We have finally located their home planet, and we are hoping that destroying it will stop the war, but that is probably a forlorn hope.