Chapter Seven: --continued--

That was not the end of the war, however. Many people, indeed, most people on Earth were dead. The survivors I'll get to in a minute.
First, I have to deal with the colonies. The moon was destroyed by Franklin Greene, nobody on it survived, if they had lasted past the Apocalyptist conquest. The colonies left included considerable population on Mars, a few mining colonies (we don't know exactly how many) in the asteroid belt, Io, Ganymede, Titan and possibly one on the surface of Venus. The last one may have been abandoned by this point; it took quite a lot of energy to keep the colony cool enough to be habitable.
the colonies saw what had happened on Earth, and although it seems illogical, instead of quitely tolerating each-other as they had for all the years of the war, they began to fight. Each power, the USNA and the EAC had colonies on all of the listed worlds (except Venus, that was solely a USNA venture). Most of the colonies had few, if any, weapons. It turned into a war of makeshift weapons fought in places that were never meant for human habitation. It started when the martian colonies started to sabatoge each other. The basic first act of each side was to ground the ships of the other. Joshua Murawski, a simple loading dock operator is generaly lauded as the hero of the colonial battles. He lead the first actual battle on the surface of Mars with a cutting torch and a lead pipe. We have much better records of the colonial battles from the survivors - their electronic systems were not wiped out entierly.
It took a long time, but the USNA's forces won in a general way in space. On the moons of the outer planets, it was a war of attrition. Each side only had so many supplies. Few people actually fought that far out. They mostly just destroyed each other's ships, leaving no avenue of retreat. When the food and air started to grow short, the USNA's colonies brought out hidden ships and left the EAC behind. the retreated to Mars. The influx of population from the outer system, although only a few hundred individuals, was enough for the the USNA to gain the upper hand on mars. All of the mining operations in the asteroid belt had long since retreated back to Mars. If the colony on Venus was active at the time, they must also have gone to Mars.
The war with the EAC on Mars was a brutal one. As I mention, Joshua Murawski was a hero of the USNA, but he was no tactical genius. The people followed him because of his charisma and his fervor for victory, if nothing else.
Teh battles raged for years, and eventually, each side had retreated to one major colony each. Murawski knew that he had the upper hand, he had a slight edge with the few real weapons he did posses, and his enginers had altered one of the few remaining rovers into what was basically the only peice of artilary on mars. Although it only ever had seven rounds of amunition, this was enough to give the USNA a definte edge. Murawski also knew that he had more manpower.
In what would become the last battle on the during the war, which had seen three major contributors, the USNA, the EAC and the Apocalypists, Murawski made one final fatal error that helped to destroy human civilisation.
It was a tactical error. He knew he needed a superior force to take the EAC's colony. even with his artilary, the colony would still be well defended.
Wearing pressure suits, his makeshift army marched on the EAC's colony - or, at least, what he thought to be the EAC's last colony. Although Joshua Murawski won the battle, he incured heavy losses and returned to his own colony to find it severly damaged, nearly in ruins.
The EAC still had one small outpost active, adn they had struck from it when Murawski had attacked their main colony. Although the USNA was victorious overall on Mars, they were left with barely any resources and a damaged colony. For all intents and purposes the records showed that the survivors of the colonial battles tried to survive as best they could.
In fact, their colony, when rebuilt from scraps and left overs from the battles, was thriving. The people had become very good at engineering makeshift contraptions, they had been making weapons for years.
Unfortunetly, it teh records seem to show that about 70 years after the end of the war, when the colonists were trying to build a ship to return to Earth to see what had happened there, some sort of cataclysm occured. Everyone on mars, and thus, from all the colonies, was killed.
The last stronghold of humanity was in what used to be called the Middle East on Earth. Somehow, it seems appropriate that the birthplace of civilisation would be on of the few locations that would let it survive.