I had been thinking about this next point for a while when I got an e-mail from that friend of mine you've all probably heard of. She was a hero of the last war and is an outspoken proponent of immigration out to the Big, even though she still lives down there on the Dirt. She asked me to talk about the Wars.


Now, I had been hoping to put off writing about the Wars specifically for as long as possible. It was a strange time for many of us, even surreal. Nobody with a practical soul (and to survive in the Big you have to be ice-cold practical a lot of the time) ever thought that we would find ourselves engaged in a guerilla/territorial war with an alien species that basically blind-sided and sucker-punched us. Everything we had ever read or learned about the Big stated that chances were we'd never see another intelligent technological species and likely never actually hear from one either. Well, I looked one right in the face out at Mimas.


"Straighten them out" she wrote. "Tell them where the Fleet came from. Tell them it wasn't all Star Wars and Independence Day or even Ender's Game.Tell them how cold and boring our patrols were. Tell them what it was like to stare for months into the Big Empty and end up just hurting for company, even an dark-eyed enemy ship." Bit of a poet, our admiral.


And so I will. I was there too, so I know exactly what she means. She was an officer, and I was infantry on a different ship, but what we both went through and came out the other side was a whole lot of nothing, interspersed with severe jolts of making history.

I'm going to explain to you about police navies, lost colonies, pirates & privateers, daring rescues, magic cities, seven league boots. (Only some of that is a joke.)

The place to start, I suppose, is how we conquered the tremendous distances from point A to point B. The ones I think about. Remember?

The single most important factor in the human colonization of the solar system deserves to be written like this:


FUSION POWER!

Like television, functional fusion power came about by the happy meeting of several different little theories and technologies and innovators. In fusion's case, it was in a lab on Luna in 2032. I don't know the particulars and don't ask me how fusion works, but it does, and OR/Aeneid keeps making it better. If you really need/want to know, then do the research. It's all out there, everything from the basic ABCs to <insert something impressively scientific here yourself.>

So at that point, we had cheap, easily controlled, very efficient and highly productive fusion power.

That was in the ivory towers of science.

Out in the real world...

A few years before, a small geospace startup called Ohi-Ridpath (first initials sound familiar? It's the same OR as in OR/Aeneid, and everybody knows who they are) had got hold of the metallurgical assay of an NEA called Gamma 2016. One of the crew on the actual team on the asteroid had e-smuggled the data, encrypted, to an accomplice at NASA, and it got out on the web from there.

The assay (and again, all this is public knowledge) showed the usual and expected high levels of iron, nickel, some carbon, with the added bonus of half the surface of the asteroid was encrusted with mostly water ice, likely from a fairly recent brush with a comet or cometary fragment.

OR landed a cobbled together refinery/rolling mill on Gamma 2016 and basically started to build ships. The plan was to build them cheap but sturdy, sell them to the pioneers, and float back and collect the rewards. And that's exactly what they did for a while.

Then when it became possible to lease the rights to the new fusion patent, OR was rich enough to outbid everyone, even most governments. (This was during the period when the most critical national priorities were rising sea levels and protecting humans and animals from the rapidly increasing ozone depletion. The same reasons why you probably live in an arcology or a mall-city.)

OR had originally planned to lease the best NEAs that came into the Inner System. They would mine them up to a certain allowed percentage of mass, build their ships (and later stations) then go on to the next. But the unlimited energy, high speed and time-savings that fusion power offered got them thinking really hard about the original business plan.

Finally someone on staff thought to take Mohammed to the mountain. They moved the whole project out to Ceres. All the rocks they would ever need were right there and being at the frontier was useful for many reasons. At Ceres, OR established the colony that would one day become the fabled city called Zion-in-Starlight. I have been there, oh my readers, and I will never forget what beauty humans are capable of building with space-rock, clunky robots and cometary ice.

OR became OR/Aeneid and would be instrumental in us winning both wars against the Thaiax, due in part to their eccentric maintenance contracts and lifetime replacement policies..

And it's just been announced as I write this that - surprise, surprise - OR/Aeneid has won the UN's contract to build your space elevator. Now ain't that somethin'?

The fact that they are richer than half the human race combined and that most of the spaceships in existence come from Ceres is just a minor historical footnote. =;]