Spring, 2183
Throughout the first half of 2183, the Offworld Colonies began making plans that, with hindsight, clearly pointed in the direction of independence from the Terran Federation. Historians today continue to debate whether Colonial leaders intended to move toward independence, or fully realized the implications of the measures they took during those months. Certainly no one at this time spoke openly about breaking with the Federation; even the recorded transcripts of closed-door meetings show a focus only on the practical requirements of dealing with the stoppage of lifesystem supplies from Earth.
What people might have said outside the scope of official government meetings and their record-keeping requirements is a matter of speculation. It’s not implausible to imagine that Colonial leaders knew that preserving the Offworld Colonies would require more than withstanding supply shortages.
On Earth, President Monroe had made no secret that his executive order halting supply shipments was only a first step. His explicit goal was to end the offworld presence altogether, and all through that spring his Born to the Earth party pushed for legislation in the Terran Parliament that would close down the Colonies entirely.
It was as plain to observers at the time as it is to historians today that Alexander Monroe and his Born to the Earth party had no governing agenda beyond ending offworld settlement, and no plan even to handle the ramifications of that in any organized way. Legal authority over offworld assets was a hash of complex and overlapping jurisdictions that had evolved haphazardly and largely functioned only while the status quo held. Monroe’s executive order against supply shipments to the Colonies had prompted a flurry of court cases as various parties tried to figure out where they stood and whether the order applied to them. Ninety percent of the offworld industrial platforms were owned by Earth-based corporations, which shipped raw materials and manufactured goods to and from the planet by private shipping. The O’Neill Colonies were owned by the Continental Directorates, which shipped lifesystem supplies and (when needed) infrastructure materials through their various space agencies. The Federation itself owned nothing offworld, but exercised the same legal and regulatory jurisdiction as it would over any planetside territory.
So— did Monroe’s order apply to the private shipment of industrial materials, or only to government shipment of lifesystem supplies? Who was responsible for the losses should the offworld industries fail as a result of a blockade? What would be the consequences to a planetary economy already reeling from the environmental damage caused by the Sun’s irregularity? The Born to the Earth party had never considered these issues and never bothered to: they were plainly motivated solely by a fanatical determination to achieve their desired goal of shutting down the Colonies. But Monroe was a successful enough demagogue that even as his ruling party’s actions worsened the chaos both on Earth and off it, polls continued to show his success at shifting blame, in popular opinion, onto the Colonies. In a paradox frustrating to his opponents of the time, the worse he made things the more popular his anti-Colonial stand became.
With all this going on, it’s hard to imagine that Colonial officials did not privately realize that in the end a clean break with the Terran government would be the only way to survive. But such a move would not be without cost to the Colonies. Their economies revolved entirely around their industrial productivity, and the Earth was the market for their manufactures. Many of the same questions raised by Monroe’s actions would come into play if the Colonies declared independence. Would Terran corporations still own the industries? Would the constant trade of raw materials for manufactured goods continue? Throughout that spring, Colonial officials continued to look into legal options within the Federation system rather than openly suggesting independence, while focusing their main energies on the engineering goal of adapting Colony lifesystems to work without outside supplies.
As that spring passed into summer, only one thing was certain: something would have to break, and soon.
TO BE CONTINUED
