For the Martian workers, the most devastating effect of the **Bracer War** was being cut off from the supply of anti-gravity disease and anti-radiation treatments. But the colonists helped themselves: a couple of Russian engineers reverse engineered the cure, and spread it freely among the Martian population, alongside with instructions for how to manufacture the cure themselves – which was not as easy as it sounds, as it required access to nano assembly equipment, which is still expensive and rare today.

**Earth** was physically cut off from the rest of the solar system for fifty seven years. During that time, Earth’s colonies did not receive any sort of supply runs or personnel reinforcements. The colonies were on their own. Mars was relatively well off in this scenario, since the Red Planet’s terraforming efforts had produced at least some preliminary results. Of all inner system colonies, Mars was the only place that could pivot to the production of foodstuff for everyone with ease and in time. All colonies can produce their own oxygen, all colonies can produce their own water. They can also provide a bare minimum in terms of nutrition for their citizens for some time. But at the time of the Bracer War, it turned out the feeding millions of people a bare minimum of nutrients was not a solution that any society could survive for long. The Mars Board commandeered large parts of the Martian industry – to the protestations of some corporations – to pivot to food production. Within an Earth year Mars was exporting more food than it had been importing before the destruction of the Bracelet.

Turning Mars into a food exporter, and the Martian population engineering their own gravity medications lent Mars a much greater sense of autonomy. During the aftermath of the Bracer War, the disparate national colonies on Mars moved much closer together, and began to cultivate an identity of their own.

Things turned ugly when Earth’s isolation ended. The Earth Trade Organization sent in agents that began to crack down on the spread of unlicensed medications, arresting hundreds. With Earth open again, Martian food production was ordered shut down. The Bracers who ran the corporations in control of Mars felt the need to re-assert their dominance. Their money had built Mars, the Martian population was theirs to command. But the Martian people disagreed. Strikes broke out. The corporations sent in bioroids as strikebreakers, and cracked down on the movement. This then resulted in the emergence of a call for Martian independence – and a subsequent crackdown on all dissidents living in the colonies.

In the year that followed, the **Martian rebels** committed acts of sabotage against targets across the solar system. On Mercury, Martian commandos took over the biggest spaceports, and threatened to blast every approaching ship out of the sky until imprisoned activists on Mars and Earth were released. This disrupted commercial space travel significantly – most inner system ships use Mercury as a gravity slingshot, regardless of their final destination. Corporate commandos **farcasted** into the Mercury mining operations and put a bloody end to the occupation by explosively decompressing the captured facilities, killing thousands. But commerce resumed unabated after. In the chaos, a mass driver on Mercury deployed a mining payload that crashed into and completely destroyed the Boltzmann Crater settlement on Luna, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Corporate PR spun the Boltzmann incident as an act of Martian terrorism, proof that only strict corporate oversight and discipline can prevent the weaponization of space-borne traffic. Due to the horrendous death toll, the Martian resistance movement lost most of its foothold in the population. Corporate security troopers flooded the Martian colonies, rooting out whatever pockets of resistance they could find. What followed was a tense period in which the remaining Martian resistance sporadically struck out with acts of sabotage again, but nothing on the previous scale. The Mars Board employed collective punishment techniques, withholding anti-gravity and anti-radiation medications from sectors that were caught harboring rebels.

This put an end to the Martian Civil War, however the resistance movement still exists in the underground.