Jack of Harts

The important thing to remember about the fall of Mobile during the Second Great Depression is that the city leaders were on the side of the looters and the rioters. They ordered the police to allow the looting and rioting to continue, and ordered the arrest of anyone caught defending their property. The Port of Mobile, the Aeroplex, and the other industrial centers literally broke with Mobile over those policies and declared their own autonomous zones where the Mobile police were not allowed. They did not want their own security teams arrested for defending their property after all. They officially formed their own small towns in time, with the corporations picking the town councils to make certain they supported corporate policies. Mobile tried to close them down of course, but the corporations defended their industrial centers with every option available to them.

Anyone who has studied Alabama history knows about the fall of Mobile during the Second Great Depression. The stand down of the police. The riots. The looting. The uncontrolled fires. Decades of corrupt government left the city ripe for the kind of chaos and death that occurred in many of America’s larger cities in that time. What saved Mobile in the end was also what had always made it great. The Port of Mobile. The Aeroplex. The various shipyards. Mobile was the center of trade and production for both the civilian and military industries, and the various yards and industrial parks in the region simply could not allow the riots and looting to destroy their infrastructure. They had been hiring retired veterans for their private security for decades, and when the looters and rioters came to burn it all down, the security teams saved one of the richest and most important concentrations of industrial and economic might in Alabama.

I should note that the Georgian Navy and the Cowboys often worked with each other throughout The War and beyond. Both organizations practiced asymmetrical warfare, especially during the Hyades Campaign, and Georgian boats softened up many planetary defense grids before the Cowboys moved in to secure the way for invasion forces. That cooperation continued in the decades that followed, with Cowboys often operating off Georgian boats or bases. The Georgian Navy also participated in numerous Cowboy interventions over the decades, most often against raider bases that had escaped the attention of the larger Western navies. Georgian torpedoes have often heralded the start of such an action by sweeping in from the dark without warning to shatter the orbital defense grids. The Georgian Navy may be a squirrelly lot by the standards of other navies, but the Cowboys found them to be valuable allies, and perhaps even kindred spirits when patrolling the dark of space against those who would unravel civilization if given the chance.