THE MIRANDA WAR

or

The True Cause of the War for Independence and How the Truth Came Out

(From The Underground History of the ‘Verse)

When the Union of Allied Planets parliament set into motion the Miranda Project (approximately twenty-five years before the recovered Pax intel was uploaded to the Cortex), the long-term goal was to “seed” the independent planets/moons on the rim with “ambassador” worlds that would showcase the best features of Alliance civilization. The rim would also be economically stimulated by the resulting close-by, high-value trade agreements.

It was hoped that by both sterling example and more favorable trade the independent worlds would be drawn over the course of a few generations into closer alignment with the governing philosophy of the richer, more peaceful, better-regulated Alliance planets.

In actual fact, this unification goal had been a mission statement of the Alliance since the earliest days of colonization, when it was discovered upon the arrival of the colonization fleet from Earth that the terraforming of the system had been haphazardly executed.

Terraforming of the system’s satellites was done via robot probes sent decades in advance of the arrival of the colony ships. The automatic terraforming installations adjusted the atmosphere and soil of every satellite that had the best potential for habitation without regard for the economic consequences of higher import/export costs to those planets and moons farther from the core worlds.

Simply-put, the rim planets were doomed to relative poverty because distance from the Core would factor powerfully into the prosperity of any local economy. (Naturally, most colonists opted for the inner planets to avoid this and the resulting concentration of population only accelerated the wealth disparity.)

The robot probes could hardly have taken into consideration the long-term political consequences of this New Great Diaspora of the formerly very congested human race. But any first year political science majo