The History of Civilised Mars

Even before the Red Conquest, Mars had deep links with Earth. The nature of these links have only been rediscovered since the Soviet Conquest in the 1970s, and it is these known links which will be explored here.

The current Martian race is not the same people as the Ancient Martians. Several millennia ago, as the Egyptian civilisation emerged around the Nile, several Ancient Martian civilisations were entering their space age. At the time, Mars was a much wetter, greener world. Little is known about the Ancient Martian race, but a few things are certain. First, the Ancient Martians were humanoid, but differed markedly in appearance to humankind, right down to vital details like orientation and number of limbs. Second of all, shortly after their forays into space, they suffered a series of awful plagues.

These plagues decimated the Ancient Martians, and not long after, brutal wars broke out which divided the planet into two blocs, facing off against one another. One bloc, named the Blacks, were deeply religious and hyper-conservative, and blamed the plagues on spaceflight, and called for isolation of Mars. This knowledge has led to speculation that Ancient Martians may have made contact with Earth prior to later events, and human disease may have caused the plagues. The other bloc, named the Reds, presented a vision of new order, to sweep away the ossified structures that had allowed the plagues to occur and bring order, stability and accountability to Mars.

While the Blacks isolated themselves and attempted to rebuild their ashen cities and the traditional religions and governments, the Reds were much more radical. They sent spacecraft to Earth, and here did things that would forever reshape Mars. They acquired slaves from Earth, and used human labour to fill the void which had been left by the plagues and wars. With human hands and backs, they rebuilt broken cities in a fraction of the time that it took their opponents. The pursuit of previously forbidden sciences to gain advantage also gave them an advantage.

For roughly a century, the Reds continued to take slaves from Earth, breeding them and isolating them on Mars. They built colonies on Phobos and Deimos and outposts on the Moon, and ranged into the Asteroid Belt. By the end of this period, they had completed The Restoration. While the Blacks had also rebuilt, they were a shadow of the pre-plague Ancient Martian civilisations. The Reds had built a caste system, designed to keep the human slaves in order, and to achieve ultimate victory over the Blacks. The Ancient Martians and humans were kept strictly separate with a class of overseers-soldiers, with mixed ranks of Ancient Martians and humans keeping order.

The notion of Martian supremacy became key to the Red ideology, and they used genetic manipulation to make the caste system permanent. What spurred this on was a major slave rebellion which spread far before it could be crushed. Religion from Earth was clearly to impactful on slaves. They halted slave raids, and created two mutagens, to turn the castes into distinct species.

The slave caste were transformed into the race now known as the Brittlemen. Part of the reason the slave rebellion had been so successful was humanity's stronger muscle and bone mass borne from evolution in Earth's gravity. The Brittlemen had much weaker bones and muscles, hence their name. Their intelligence was dulled, and they were made docile, inclined to instinctively follow the orders of superior castes, but with enough intelligence for sophisticated tool use, excellent learning capabilities and the ability to execute orders to a tee. Above them, a cross-breed of Ancient Martians and humans was created. Retaining both their Ancient Martian intelligence and the attributes of human strength, and a mixture of Ancient Martian and human physiologies, they were a warrior race, born to keep the slaves in their place and to command them, and to compose and lead armies to victory. At the top was a mildly tweaked Ancient Martian caste, the rulers. Their changes were mostly predicated on making them automatic superiors to the slaves beyond the obvious physical superiority of the warrior caste.

After this, a new war broke out between the Reds and Blacks. As was to be expected, the Blacks were defeated, broken by the highly disciplined and far more numerous armies of the Reds. A united Martian empire was born, and the Golden Age of Mars began. While they won the war with the Blacks, the costs of it and the aftermath of entirely exterminating the Black culture stifled their space programme, and the colonies on the Moon, Phobos and Deimos were allowed to go to seed. Their social order remained stable for a very long time indeed before the Great Mutiny occurred. After a while, the warrior caste began to be treated as relics. The elites grew complacent. The Red ideology fell apart, and the space programme was never picked back up again in a serious way. The elites treated the warriors similarly to the slaves, and the sheer pliability of the slaves meant that an overseer caste was considered unnecessary. It was when rumours of killing off the warriors to cast off the last strictures of the pre-plague society circulated that the trouble began.

The Great Mutiny was a planetwide rebellion by the warrior caste, led by their elected generals. As a highly martial race, by training, instinct and breeding, they had long been allowed to run their own internal affairs and aspects of Ancient Martian and human religions had produced a great reverence for their warlike aspects, and had also created a clan system. The leaders of clans were elected, and it was these clan leaders who led the rebellion. With their access to the planet's weaponry, to all soldiers, and their natural physical prowess they conquered the planet. They isolated and wiped out 'The Masters'. For a time, an Emperor reigned over one Empire of Mars. It did not last long. After their death, the planet divided into multiple petty kingdoms, divided on the basis of clan.

The Dark Age of Mars began. Scientific learning fell by the wayside as the various warrior-kings waged eternal religious war on one another. Medicine and technology became ritualised action where little knowledge of the actual process existed. Progress became impossible, as no-one understood what the rituals did or how their machines worked. The warrior-kings descended into decadence, and ruled over their fiefs, with their Brittleman serfs to serve them. It was this Mars that mankind encountered in the 20th century. As the centuries went by, the seas of Mars whithered and the unscientific Martians didn't known what to do. They dug through ancient ruins to uncover some long forgotten relic which might help them turn the tide, literally. Instead, they found the long forgotten spaceports, buried beneath a millennia of dust. The Ancient Martians built their spacecraft to last, and it was with this fleet that the Martians determined to conquer 'The Sister World' of Earth.

In the present day, Mars is mostly populated by humans and Brittlemen. For the Brittlemen, life is much the same as it has always been. For the Martians, they find themselves a minority on their own planet, their kingdoms reduced to the northern wastes of the planet. The scientific method has been rediscovered with the help of Comintern scientists and the secrets of Ancient Martian technology, long thoughtlessly maintained, may now be unlocked.