No sooner had the fighting of World War III ended then the long, bitter cold war between EastHem and WestHem began as each vied for superior resource development and strategic positioning. The cold war was marked by an intense space race as each half of the world tried to secure precious resources that were only available in space. It is one of the cruelest ironies in history that World War III, aside from depleting the supply of exploitable iron ore, also depleted the very resource that it had been fought over in the first place. After ten years of all-out mechanized warfare the world's supply of petroleum had been reduced to almost nothing. Thus fusion power for electricity and space flight and hydrogen combustion engines for propulsion became the rage of the future. Huge platforms were built in low Earth orbit and large, interplanetary ships — at first only for cargo and personnel, but later, warships — were constructed. An entire new method and theory of warfare developed along with the spacecraft as each side theorized and planned for the best way to fight the other if it came to that.
It was the need for iron ore to convert into steel that led WestHem corporations to Mars in the first place. Though the moon had a significant supply of iron ore beneath its surface, EastHem had had the foresight to claim the lunar surface as its own first by establishing a large mining colony there. With the development of artificial gravity and the second generation of fusion powered spacecraft, the trek across the solar system to Mars became a cost-effective endeavor. Triad Steel Mining and Refining was the lead company that struck out for the red planet. They established the beginnings of the Triad orbiting city in geosynchronus orbit to serve as an interplanetary shipping platform. On the surface of the planet, they founded New Pittsburgh, the first of four mining cities that would eventually develop.
It was only after the New Pittsburgh mines were up and running and the settlement itself was a thriving city of more than a million souls that the great experiment of Martian agriculture was attempted. A water supply was quite easy to secure on Mars since huge underground aquifers existed nearly everywhere on the planet. But food was a different story. Shipping enough food across the expanse of space to feed more than a million people was a very expensive operation. Particularly since most of what had once been prime farmland in WestHem territory had long since been converted to cities and suburban areas, leaving the entire half of the planet perpetually short on food stocks to begin with. The settlement of Eden was begun modestly, with only a few buildings and living areas made out of castaway pre-fabricated construction materials. The first greenhouses were built just to see if there was any possibility of raising Earthly crops on the surface. It was an experiment that was very controversial at first since a lot of money had been spent for it with little hope of success.
To the surprise of everyone involved, it was discovered that crops of all kinds grew extremely well in the iron rich Martian soil when supplemental nutrients were added. The greenhouses made it possible to simulate the perfect conditions for whatever was being grown. Wheat could be given a hot, low humidity environment with just the perfect amount of irrigation. Apples could be given the damp, cool, high humidity environment they favored. No matter what kind of weather, humidity, or temperature was needed, it could be provided for. No matter what the Martian soil was lacking as far as nutritional content, it could be added. Pests, if they managed to infest a particular greenhouse — something that happened from time to time — could easily be eliminated by flooding the greenhouse with carbon dioxide and displacing the oxygen. Gone was the need for fumigation. Gone was the need to worry about an out of season frost or monsoon wiping out entire crops. For the first time in the history of mankind, farmers could be almost completely assured that whatever crops they planted, they were going to harvest.
Naturally, once the profit potential of the Martian agricultural project was realized, investors immediately bought it out. Thus, the great and powerful Agricorp was born and the Martian Agricultural rush was begun. Greenhouses began to spring up as fast as the materials to construct them could be produced. Immigrants from WestHem, most of them from the ranks of the hopelessly unemployed, climbed aboard cargo ships and made the nine to twenty-seven week trip across space, lured by the promise of jobs in construction, engineering, or agriculture. Eden, in less than ten years, went from a makeshift settlement with a few thousand botanists and manual laborers to a city of five million. Soon, other cities such as Libby, Proctor, Paradise, and Newhall began to spring up along the equatorial region of the planet; each one the center of a rapidly growing expanse of greenhouses. All of this construction required extensive supplies of steel, glass, synthetics, and a thousand other resources. New Pittsburgh was simply not large enough to provide it all. And so the cities of Ironhead, Vector, and Ore City were born, popping up one by one over the next thirty years in the high latitudes to supply the mining and manufacturing demands.
For the longest time Mars was a complete paradise. It was true that an Earth-based corporation of one kind or another owned everything, but that was no different than life on Earth. On Mars, at that time, there had been no such thing as unemployment. Shipping a person through space was expensive for the corporations involved so they only did it if a job was available for that person. With no unemployment to worry about, crime was almost non-existent as well. There were the occasional fights in the bars and the occasional domestic problems, but street gangs, robberies, random beatings, drug dealing, and sex crimes were very rare. The Martians, as they began to call themselves, were living in the most modern of surroundings and participating in one of mankind's greatest endeavors. Most importantly, they were employed and making money of their own instead of living off of welfare handouts and public assistance food. To the type of person that took the rather drastic step of leaving their home planet and traveling to another in search of a job, this was a very important distinction.
But gradually, over the space of a few decades, the so-called Agricultural Rush petered out as equilibrium was established. The greenhouse construction slowed and finally came to a virtual halt as the point was reached where there was enough farmland to produce all of the crops that needed to be produced for the maximum amount of profit. To make any more greenhouses, to produce any more crops would shift the delicate balance of supply and demand upon its axis and drive down the bulk prices. And so, those in the construction and engineering fields were the first to face mass layoffs as construction company after construction company went bankrupt and closed their doors. Their former office buildings, which had once ruled empires of men, materials, and equipment were converted into the first of the public housing buildings that would soon become the ghettos of Mars. Other industries quickly followed. Though ore mining would always be a very important staple of Martian society, the end of the construction boom had caused mass layoff among mine workers and support personnel as the demand for iron ore was slashed to nearly a third of what it had once been.