The system was shocked and filled with sorrow when only a year into her third term, President Sienna Madira was killed. Following, there were candlelight vigils for months, and the flag flew at half-mast for nearly a year.
Elle, of course, knew the truth of the matter was that Madira and several of her aides had transformed themselves into a movement to change the government of the Sol System in a manner that, in their minds, would be more natural and beneficial for mankind. Madira and her close followers had long begun to fear that America had become a stagnant welfare state that was being ruled by majority vote. Her inner circle had come to the conclusion that a truly successful nation could not be run by majority, as the majority was not necessarily the smartest group for making tough decisions. Of course, Madira and her followers hadn't bothered to ask the general populace their opinions before making the decision to set events into motion that would change humanity's history forever if they were successful.
To the knowledge of the general public, Air Force One had gone down somewhere in the Kuiper Belt. There were no survivors, and only traces of the spacecraft were found. Madira had her body rejuvenated to that of a woman in her early twenties and let her hair grow long and jet black, which was typical of Martian women and of her heritage. The gray hair and wrinkles gone, Madira was no longer the elder stateswoman. She had become Elle Ahmi, a persona that took credit for the assassination of the greatest president since Lincoln,
Roosevelt, or Reagan. This gave Ahmi immediate credibility as a terrorist organization leader.
After several more years of struggle and terrorist actions, Elle's organization grew and absorbed other cells and factions, making her the undisputed leading terrorist within the Sol System. Ahmi was at the top of every Most Wanted list that the Americans had. Although her name was known throughout the system, she had been extremely cunning in keeping her true appearance and identity unknown. Her body and face had been rejuved; therefore, Ahmi was a young woman who was only videotaped or seen wearing a red, white, and blue ski mask. Only a select few had ever been allowed to see her face. Her true identity being unknown to the general public made it easier for her to operate and to move from location to location without being spotted. It also helped that Elle had been a software engineer most of her life as Madira, and she had spent years preparing and stealing new classified technologies for her movement.
She used her technical savvy to enable productivity within the Separatists that rivaled the economic machine of the United States. She used her carisma to become the catalyst of the Separatist movement, which had taken the Martian Reservation and the Separatist Laborers Guild by emotional storm. After several labor disputes, strikes, walkouts, and some very bloody and devastating battles with the U.S. military, she had risen to the top of the Separatist Reservation and become what could only be described as the supreme ruler of, as she called them, the "Free People."
Even now that she was free from the Sol System and effectively the leader of the Tau Ceti System, she maintained her secret identity. There would always be spies and assassins. And she still had plans to complete. Elle didn't want to rule just the Tau Ceti System. Besides, she doubted that America would let one of its colonies fall to the Separatists' rule for long. So rather than wait for the military might of the Sol System to come to her, she planned on taking the fight back across the stars to Earth—and soon. Everything was going according to plans that she had made and followed for decades and decades. There were plans in motion even at the present, on Ares and on Earth.
Elle turned from the windows and sauntered across the cavernous circular penthouse—her bare feet that squeaked against the hardwood flooring echoed in the mostly empty room with each step. Straightening her blouse and unsnapping one of the fasteners at the top, she sat down at her Queen Anne style desk, not sure whether she should keep on working or take a break. For a brief moment, she closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the chair. The DTM information came into her mind fast and furious and continuous even though she made an attempt to relax.
Copernicus?
Ma'am?
Shut off the mindlink for a moment, will you?
Yes, ma'am. The DTM virtual sphere went blank in her mind.
Elle sat quietly and tried to relax her shoulders and her thoughts, but even without the DTM pouring images into her brain at high bandwidth, her mind still raced with anxiety and what-ifs. But exhaustion was slowly taking its toll on her, and after a couple of minutes, she nearly dozed off. Her head slumped forward and startled her awake.
She opened her dark eyes wide and blinked a few times, then rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Elle exhaled between her lips, making a soft motorboat sound. She gazed out the window across the valley at her dominion, at the results of her decades of planning and action, and took the brief moment to smile triumphantly. Once she had taken in all she could from that viewpoint, she ordered her AIC to increase the magnification of the northern portrait window. The scene zoomed all the way to the northern coastline of the New Tharsis Peninsula, which was sixty kilometers or more away. Separatist haulers, frigates, battle cruisers, and mecha were coming and going like a flurry of insects in a very busy colony—like a colony preparing for a full-scale war.
The colony at Ares had already consisted of nearly seven million people before the Separatist Exodus from the Sol System. More than thirty million had teleported from Sol's Oort Cloud to Tau Ceti nearly five years prior. Since that time, the population of the Tau Ceti System had grown to approximately fifty million. All who were old enough were working hard on the war machine.
For the most part, the fifty million Separatist citizens were free to do whatever they wanted as long as it did not interfere with the overall plans that Ahmi had laid out for them. The society was almost completely capitalist and very open although it was predominately run by networks of businesswomen.
From the beginning, Elle had singled out strong women that she could trust and put them in charge of upper echelon terrorist cells. The main goal of those cells was to usurp as much power from the legitimate Reservation businesses as they could. After several decades, there were no businesses within the Martian Reservation that weren't controlled by the Separatist movement. The women managed to maintain their power positions by following Elle's example and by putting other women they trusted in cells as their lieutenants or as leaders of cells adjacent or beneath them. Sometimes men were put in those positions, but most of the women tended to "be like Elle."
After some time, it became clear that the business leaders of the Separatists were women, and a matriarchal culture of multiple wife families arose as the norm around the business society. Men were still equal, but there were just more women who had made it to the top and managed to stay there.
Purposefully, again from the beginning, Elle had placed men in charge of the actual "boots on the ground" terrorist cells. The outcome of that approach had been to generate a military arm that was led mostly by men. Elle had come to believe from her personal experience with men that it was easier to manipulate them into hostile and dangerous action than it was women. Machismo and bravado were emotions that she could readily manipulate. Men were better at war, and women were better at business, she thought. It was her personal preference, whether there was actual truth to her beliefs or not. Her being the head terrorist-in-charge was enough to make the belief embedded in the culture for good.