—-unnamed Irish poet
The Irish planet-colony of New Belfast was rich and fertile. The air was infinitely breathable and sustaining, the vegetation lush, with roots that went deep into the ground. It was a land and sea that men could be proud to die for, a place where family could mean something, and women grow old without feeling lost. To watch a young maid walk here among the fields, to see the depths in her eyes that reflected the melancholy of her soul, and hear the Gaelic accent touch lightly on the stones of moss-covered walls, was to know that God gave love to Man. Life flowed in its every vein, and the minor modes of Baroque ballads seemed to form a living chain to many pasts.
It was also a place coveted by the French Elite, who knew all that the Irish knew of love and land and harvest, but knew it better, and therefore contrived to take from these coarse, uncultured folk what could more fruitfully be employed by themselves.
And so a siege was laid, in which the Free French took no part, and even loudly decried. But due to a peculiar Dual Constitution enacted late in the twenty-first century—-at which time the French, desiring to show their independence, frank difference, and superiority to the rest of the world, had created a political structure wholly new and untried—-their approval was not needed for a military venture utilizing French Elite forces.
New Belfast was surrounded and cut off. And as the Irish had only one other major holding, the green homeland of Earth, and few outposts close at hand, it was unlikely that sufficient help would arrive before the colonists were overthrown and new, foreign defenses erected—-new, foreign erections defended.
And United Ireland* as well, for reasons no foreigner could quite comprehend, had established few ties or alliances with the vast expanse beyond its islands, except for a continuing dialogue with their many descendants living in the Commonwealth, which they had always, until now, considered protection enough.
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*The province of Northern Ireland had been restored in time by the British not because the mindless violence of the IRA had succeeded, but because it had failed. The bitter cycle of hatred had finally, toward the mid 22nd Century, diffused, and both sides forgotten their indisputable righteousness long enough to come to the bargaining table, where a mutually acceptable agreement had been reached.
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But at the moment the Americans had other things on their minds. Hayes was still on the loose, the Soviets were brewing mischief of their own, and Stone had been assassinated.