Touring the Grand Canal of Mars (Part 4)
Добавлено: 20 апр 2009, 09:27[5 Feb 3072; VOTW] At its peak in 2765, Mars hosted over 70 million people: a few hundred thousand in the highly automated mining industry, a few thousand of the richest people in the Inner Sphere, and tens of millions who catered to the ultra-wealthy. That population plummeted after 2778 when the Terran system was liberated because Mars had become an enclave for Amaris’s supporters. With no customers, the Martian service industry disintegrated, leaving about 1 million miners and their families to feed Terra’s mineral needs by 2800AD.
My tour of the Grand Canal lingered over the terraced wonder of the Windsor-Small Estate, which included multitudes of isolated palaces for differing family members that adhered to a coherent Greco-Roman Revival architecture. The highlight of the tour was not the grounds. Rather, it was the Terran University of Harvard archeological excavation in a garden overlooking a sheer, 500-meter cliff to the canal below. An estimated five dozen skeletons had been found in a mass grave dating to 2781, apparently the result of vengeful Rigil Kentarans. These war crime hunters sought the Windsor-Smalls for the wholesale looting of their planetary economy at the hands of Reginald Windsor-Small V, a planetary governor installed by Amaris.
This was typical of the era. Vengeful mobs and the restored Hegemony government were merciless to Amaris’s supporters. While this was necessary in some cases (no one would leave Amaris’s handpicked planetary governors in power), the craving for vengeance in the Hegemony reached the point where all of the elected officials and professional civil servants who had been in government during Amaris’s tenure were banned from office, as were many professionals of all stripes who had joined Amaris’s pet political parties simply to keep their jobs. (This left the Terran Hegemony government so dysfunctional that ten years after Terra’s liberation the Successor States were able to walk over the failed state. They encountered much more resistance from fellow Houses than the Terran Hegemony, and more than a few Hegemony worlds – Towne being a notable example – actively sought House suzerainty.)
ComStar largely ignored Terra’s sibling for the next two hundred and fifty years, treating it as nothing more than a sleepy mining world. But this neglect came with unplanned, undesirable evolution in the terraformed environment. Upon inheriting Mars, the Word of Blake found a low-cost means of securing the loyalty of Martians.
My tour of the Grand Canal lingered over the terraced wonder of the Windsor-Small Estate, which included multitudes of isolated palaces for differing family members that adhered to a coherent Greco-Roman Revival architecture. The highlight of the tour was not the grounds. Rather, it was the Terran University of Harvard archeological excavation in a garden overlooking a sheer, 500-meter cliff to the canal below. An estimated five dozen skeletons had been found in a mass grave dating to 2781, apparently the result of vengeful Rigil Kentarans. These war crime hunters sought the Windsor-Smalls for the wholesale looting of their planetary economy at the hands of Reginald Windsor-Small V, a planetary governor installed by Amaris.
This was typical of the era. Vengeful mobs and the restored Hegemony government were merciless to Amaris’s supporters. While this was necessary in some cases (no one would leave Amaris’s handpicked planetary governors in power), the craving for vengeance in the Hegemony reached the point where all of the elected officials and professional civil servants who had been in government during Amaris’s tenure were banned from office, as were many professionals of all stripes who had joined Amaris’s pet political parties simply to keep their jobs. (This left the Terran Hegemony government so dysfunctional that ten years after Terra’s liberation the Successor States were able to walk over the failed state. They encountered much more resistance from fellow Houses than the Terran Hegemony, and more than a few Hegemony worlds – Towne being a notable example – actively sought House suzerainty.)
ComStar largely ignored Terra’s sibling for the next two hundred and fifty years, treating it as nothing more than a sleepy mining world. But this neglect came with unplanned, undesirable evolution in the terraformed environment. Upon inheriting Mars, the Word of Blake found a low-cost means of securing the loyalty of Martians.
местным ополчением и гвардией феодала, где хорошо если ленс Мехов набирался бы?
