Hello and welcome to revolutions.

Episode 11.14, the mutual blockade.

Less than a week after the standoff and Stockade 7 began, the order of the solar system was completely

upended. On July 26, 2247, Earth and Mars exchanged final defiant transmissions. Mars had a list

of demands and swore they would send no more phosphide back to Earth until those demands were met,

and Earth refused to even discuss those demands until the Martians handed back control of Mars.

Neither side had any intention of backing down, and so after a week of rapid fire events,

the trajectory of the Martian Revolution ground to a sudden screeching halt.

They transitioned from chaos and confusion to a

permanent state of anticipatory stasis. Surely the other side was about to see reason and break down.

Will today be that day? No? Okay. Well, let's keep sweating them. Surely they will crack

tomorrow. But then tomorrow would become

today, and neither side would back down. And then another tomorrow would become another today,

and so on, and so on, and so on. And they crawled through this series of tomorrow's becoming

to-days with nobody breaking for eight long months. The breakdown of negotiations, or should I say the non-commencement of

negotiations, led first to what we call the sorting of ships. When all this broke out in July 2247,

there were spaceships in orbit around Mars, spaceships in orbit around Earth, and spaceships

traversing

the space in between. As Omnicor swore no more deliveries would ever reach Mars until the Martians

capitulated, Timothy Werner issued a blanket order for all spaceships to return to Earth, and forbade

any ship around Earth from departing from Mars. This order was heated by most of the

Phosphiens and a good number of the civilian cargo shippers. Now those cargo shippers were far

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