Suzanne Fielding: the fall of the American empire was disastrous for the entire continent. Decades of political sclerosis in the face of cascading ecological, economic, and social breakdowns weakened of the entire edifice. The United States of America transformed into a spiderweb of fault lines, some fragments breaking off, others on the verge of secession. A heavily armed populace coupled with highly radicalized ideologies in the face of global crisis meant inevitable balkanization. The Pacific coast was embroiled by multiple revolts. Dire drought conditions in Southern California birthed an ongoing insurgency as law and order broke down in the sprawling megalopolis of New Los Angeles and its environs. Leftist, anti-internationalist, and green anarchists began massive anti-government riots and seized control of the Seattle conurbation, followed by copycat uprisings throughout Cascadia from Vancouver to Salem. Hyper-survivalist movements spread across the heartland; while most militiamen retreated into compounds and bunkers, some welcomed doomsday, committing terrorist strikes against the besieged federal government.

This chaotic situation culminated in biological attacks on the massive subway and subterranean railway systems that choked the BosWash sprawl, devastating the entire Eastern Seaboard as rodents became potent vectors that spread the engineered diseases as far north as Portland and even Halifax, and as far south as Richmond and even Atlanta. The true culprits of the Acela Plague were never determined. But the U.S. government launched its self-destructive campaign against the militias anyway, drastically increasing the security state as federal troops headed into the nation's interior in search of terrorists.

Failed domestic counterinsurgency, the proliferation of category 4 and 5 hurricanes and super-tornados from worsening weather, outbreaks of more mundane diseases such as dengue and Zika from the swarms of mosquitoes that blanketed the warming land; all led to an attempt in the 2040s to rally round the flag. The subsequent disastrous Pax Decay Wars wrecked everything from Hudson's Bay to the Caribbean, obliterating all three North American governments as a cohesive force. The American military-intelligence complex unravelled as personnel abroad mutinied, defecting to nations that would give them citizenship, selling their services to the highest bidder, or going warlord. U.S. Western Command forces in the Pacific attempted to set up narco-states of their own in Laos, Myanmar, and islands in the Philippines and Indonesia, spurring tensions with both Great China and the Oceanian Alliance.

By the time religious fundamentalists, preaching that Armageddon was nigh, approached D.C. with a declaration of independence, the sitting government decided to seriously consider their request instead of waging another costly war. A hasty emergency session was held in Congress, the Constitution was amended, and lo and behold the Christian States of America was formed. Considered an "associated commonwealth" within the Union, this polity was technically a dependency but for all intents and purposes independent with its own laws and norms. This distributed non-contiguous not-country comprised of much of the South and included enclaves like Indiana, Colorado Springs, and the part of New England that had revived the Puritan tradition during the Seventh Great Awakening. "If you can't beat 'em, leave 'em" was the watchword at that point, and ironically the Evangelical Fire that governed the virtually sovereign Christian States proved to be quite friendly to Washington. More than if they had stayed, at least.

But American business stayed strong. With its substantial population, breathtakingly friendly deregulated environment, and plenty of empty land for all sorts of economic activities, the U.S. was still a land of opportunity. Corporate powers held sway over the nation's bountiful natural resources and talented labor pool. As the government privatized crucial services- like the freedom of not getting pillaged by survivalist raiders- corporations began to provide them to the people. Disaster capitalism proved most profitable. The Amalgamated Resource Company undertook herculean efforts to salvage large parts of the countryside after various climate change storms and intermittent warfare had wrecked it. All they asked from local governments and the residents themselves were their deeds and titles, converting residents into permanent tenants of ARC's new private holdings. And Suzanne Fielding was the woman who appraised those territories, calculated the max cost-benefit ratios, and determined which areas were to be saved. A business prodigy, she had made her claim to fame as the Resource Company's controller before trading her bookkeeping software for field work. With an academic background in chaos theory economics and avant-garde modernist accounting, a childhood growing up in a Texas half drowning and half desertifying, she made a beeline for ARC's environmental salvage operations.

As the Earth lay dying, waterways overflowed and once-fertile farmland dried into husks. Thus the U.S. government had hired the Resource Company. With long histories of managing many different natural resources as previously separate firms, this umbrella corporation formed gradually as they merged with one another to become the present conglomerate. Work was extremely dangerous for the Company's civil engineers, environmental readjusters, and clean-up crews. Beyond dealing with runaway rivers and fierce dust storms, domestic militants hounded ARC staff at every turn, demanding them to get off of their property or to hand over their valuables. These militias and survivalists reminded Fielding of the very same renegades who had attacked her father's hardware stores when she was growing up and torched communities in search of supplies to hoard. Seizing command of the Resource Company's troop deployments, she augmented ARC private security with the best PMCs fresh from the killing fields of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Deciding that Morgan Industries was too much of a competitor in other verticals, she signed Empire Management, known best for their crack brigades' success at putting down post-nuclear "aftershock" uprisings following the end of the Crusader Wars. This contract was one of the seeds from which Empire eventually blossomed into Imperium Military Solutions.

With ARC's generous resources, Empire's forces wiped out survivalist cells across the American Southwest ahead of the Company's geological engineering teams, pacifying the populace so they could be saved and they sold as Fielding's fixed assets. She delegated tactical command to Lieutenant Colonel James Heid, a career mercenary born and raised by a pair of Empire contractors in the Third Liberian Civil War. The collaboration had good synergy- while Heid had direct military control, Fielding determined where they were to go, pouring through reams of daily intelligence and carefully analyzing militia movements. Together, their cleanup was quite effective.

Fielding's greatest feat at the end of her tenure was Operation Gold Rush, a joint Empire-U.S. military campaign under her supervision. With Heid's combat leadership and her scrutiny of the cutthroat Greater New Los Angeles underworld power structure, this operation destroyed the major hydro gangs in the area. This allowed ARC to install their proprietary desalination plants and to construct huge seawalls along the coast, to the acclaim of a long-suffering citizenry. As a token of their gratitude, the provisional mayor of New Los Angeles signed over the city's water rights in perpetuity. Fielding's retainer bonus for the Op, and the real estate options she received from the territorial acquisition (equivalent to multiple districts across New L.A.), made her a multimillionaire. And her reputation spread beyond the Resource Company and the megacorporate world all the way to the halls of government.

Note: The bio-attack on U.S. East Coast cities is an event briefly mentioned in Centauri Dawn.