Mars the Divine (Empire of Time Series) by John Argo

Page 45.

Chapter 20. London Transfer

What a different scene we found about 600 years later as we parted company with Wells and Tatnall!

If the Faraos were aware of us as we stood on the concrete deck of London Transfer, they didn't let on. But that was typical from what we were told. The Faraos arrived one day in a small fleet of ships and informed the world they were now in charge in the name of some distant ruler. Nothing new there—humans had been doing this to each other for zeons—so the world fell into line. It was not immediately clear what the Faraos wanted, or even what they looked like. They stayed in their orbiting stations, or in dark, saucer-like additions they placed atop the highest sky scrapers in Earth's largest cities. Sure they knew about the Temporale, the Membrane, the whole bit. They may have known about our time travel stunt in the green machine and just hung back to see what we were up to. Or they may not have cared. Occasionally some macho fighter plane jockey would take his F-300 up on afterburners, planning to unload his rockets on one of the hovering saucers above New York or Beijing—he'd vanish in a puff of smoke as a ray of pinkish light zapped down out of the saucer. The Faraos were on top of everything. They missed very little. So there had to be a reason why they let us get in and out.

Wells and Tatnall were still experimenting with their new toy. We, on the other hand, were eagerly following the development of Mars exploration. The first flights started in the 2010s. The first permanent domes were in place by the 2050s. Some of the motivation was commercial. Mostly it was competitive. The world had been taken over by global corporations that employed millions, spied on each other, and even had their own private armies. National governments had become all but meaningless, reduced to cultural museums and labor unions for their citizens in the face of powerful global Korps. I understood much suddenly when I learned that the main driver behind the colonization of Mars had been religious. It was not an arms race or a show of national pride. It was minerals and money for the corporations, and souls for the Temple. Terraforming began after 2200 in the Common Calendar (from which it turns out our Martian dating system is derived, via the nuns' menses which had stayed remarkably on track because it was based on the most regular sisters).

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