MAlign's Houdini evacuation order?

tlb wrote:It may be in several books, but chapter 17 in A Rising Thunder has Albrecht saying "Well, it's not the end of the universe. And at least we've had time to get Houdini up and running" when he is first told that Herlander Simões is alive and talking about these things in the company of Zilwicki and Cachet. So Simões was NOT the reason for the start of Houdini.

PS: I cannot find mention of "Houdini" in Mission of Honor.

Mycall4me wrote:I think that you're right. A Rising Thunder was probably the first. Then that same chapter was repeated verbatim in Storm From the Shadows, and again in another book (don't remember which, just that it's repeated 3 total times) also you're correct that in that chapter Albrect tells Colin that Houdini was up and running or at least getting ready to be implemented, but the knowledge that Zilwicki survided and all the downsides of that, gets them talking about jumping on Houdini quickly and accelerating it.

I think the main thing that accelerated the Houdini process was the ending of the war between Haven and Manticore. However you are correct, because the reason for the resulting alliance was the testimony brought back by Zilwicki, Cachet and Simões.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Mycall4me wrote:Now to me, this argues that critical but less important members inside the onion went first, whearas the most important ones were able to travel as vip's.

By that, we must assume only super VIPs. Even important but otherwise THAT important Onion members were sent in improvised shipping.

In any case, it appears the problem was the departure from Mesa, not the arrival in Darius or Galton. The MAlign couldn't hide a sudden uptick in transports or even freighters in Mesan orbit, even with a control of the traffic control databases. Too many other people would be around and notice things. So they had to make the extraction from Mesa with ships that would have been there anyway or, at worst, a few extras that wouldn't stand out.

I have to question this. We are talking about Mesa. I would assume noticing an uptick in freighters in the Mesa system would be akin to noticing an uptick in traffic on one of the most congested thoroughfares in the world. The Sandiego Freeway. I-405. And even if there is an uptick, I doubt that that would ring any alarm bells. We are talking about Mesa where a lot of pleasure slaves and the like were being shipped out on a regular basis.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:In terms of extraction order, I disagree that the most important would go last, despite Albrecht being the last. The fact that they realised there was a risk in delaying implies they couldn't afford to wait to extract the most important members at all. Those would need to go as early as practical.

Why would you wait to extract your most important assets if time is of the essence? Illogical.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:

MyCall4Me wrote:So the thing that I'm wondering about is if the Alignment has taken a hit, in that a lot of the most important, critical people didn't make it out. And does this possibly mean that some of their long term plans are going to have problems or require major revisions to bring them off as per the original Operation Odyseus (MAlign's master plan for galactic domination) calls for?

Which is all good for all the rest of us normals.IMHO

Yes but no.

Yes, the plans have taken a hit, there's no question about it. You'll read in TEiF that they realise this, with a musing from Benjamin Detweiler himself on the subject. But he does not ponder about missing people, but instead of other decisions that did set The Plan off the rails, some of which he was responsible for.

That's probably because the knowledge base of the Alignment secrets was distributed and compartmentalised. There was no one that was irreplaceable, not even Albrecht. Those that were extracted are going to be asked to pick up the slack on those that didn't make it, plus the native populations of Darius and (previously) Galton. They won't hit the ground running, but the MAlign probably thinks that's only a temporary setback. And it truly is.

In fact, they don't seem to have anyone that is heads-and-shoulders much brighter than everyone else. They don't have a Honor Harrington or Hamish Alexander or Sonja Hemphill or Susan Foraker, or Elizabeth Winton and Eloise Pritchart. They have a higher average, but the standard deviation seems to be fairly small.

Penny will probably disagree with my characterisation of the Alphas.

Well, if you think about it, if the entire genetic uplift thing is a success, it seems intuitive that the gap in IQ would be very small. There has to be a ceiling in achievable IQ.

But yes, Thinksmarkedly. IMO, Aldona Anisimovna is Honor's doppelganger. Dunno what plans the author has for her. But he has a gold mine in her if he wants to mine it. Unless he gets jealous when he finds out that I am sleeping with her!

As far as Houdini, there are a few things I find difficult to suspend disbelief. First, Alphas are responsible for the plan. And they had quite a lot of time -- and resources -- to build the "underground railroad." If as few people that participated in the underground railroad could hide black people in a white city, why shouldn't it have been a piece of cake to hide members of the Onion? Even those who couldn't escape should have had host families and identities ready to assume.

Even Albrecht. Why did he have to commit suicide? With his money and the genetic resources of the Onion, I find it difficult that there were no other options. Heck, you mean the Detweiler Family does not have genetic contingency plans that will enable their bodies to completely change appearance? Why assume he can't get out? If he truly can not, he can simply bite his tooth.

On a planet as large as Mesa, why couldn't he have simply blended in? How long could the RMN have blockaded an entire planet, killing their economy? And were we to assume every citizen on Mesa would be interrogated?

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Do disregard this double post of the same content.

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penny wrote:As far as Houdini, there are a few things I find difficult to suspend disbelief. First, Alphas are responsible for the plan. And they had quite a lot of time -- and resources -- to build the "underground railroad." If as few people that participated in the underground railroad could hide black people in a white city, why shouldn't it have been a piece of cake to hide members of the Onion? Even those who couldn't escape should have had host families and identities ready to assume.

I'd point out a few of major differences.

1) Scale. The underwound railroad (which did fail its escaped slaves found a fair bit of the time - best estimates are that a majority of them were recaptured; though I suspect a lot of that was very early on before they'd found the first safehouse) but it would have been impossible to hide if it the volume of escapees had suddenly and unexpectedly double, quadrupled, etc. The safehouse hiding spots wouldn't be able to accommodate them so they'd need to find other places to hide during the day

2) The underground railroad didn't have to operate in a post electrification (so people are out way more after dark) modern information and surveillance state. Houdouni has to deal with the fact that there are electronic records of the people it's moving, sensor records of the ships (both at Mesa which they might screw with, and in the databanks of passing ships, at at the stations they might need to visit), and it would be possible to look at when ships departed and arrived at their next known stop and realized there is unaccounted for time. People who are supposed to be dead, or out of the system, are caught by somebody's surveillance camera. All those digital records, many of which you can't know were caught, nor by whom, that might be found to start picking apart your evacuation strategy by a sufficiently motivated and resourced set of searchers.

You couldn't do that to kind for the underground railroad - first because they weren't being moved in large vehicles; and second because that kind of routine automatic logging of every passing thing wasn't possible back then.

3) Houdini was trying to hide not just where the escapees went; but for the most part that they'd gone anywhere at all. The underground railroad didn't have to try to convince every plantation owner "that, no, no, your slaved didn't escape. See, they died, no reason to even start looking." Nor did they have to hide the escapees final destination (Canada). They just had to try to help them evade recapture for the few weeks it took to smuggle them over the border to sanctuary.




And it seems like the problem with Houdini is that the original plan was a vastly slower gradual phase-over from working on Mesa to working on Darius/Galton. So it was designed for making maybe a thousand people a year, planet-wide, to disappear. That's a level where much of that can be hidden by folks taking off-world job offers, retire or take sabbatical and start 'traveling the galaxy', or one-off "accidents", etc. It doesn't require filling whole ships worth of evacuees. So when it got wildly accelerated and they probably had to up the number of annual evacuees by a factor of at least 100 their careful prior planning was basically out the window and they were now flying by the seat of their pants without any usable prep.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:As far as Houdini, there are a few things I find difficult to suspend disbelief. First, Alphas are responsible for the plan. And they had quite a lot of time -- and resources -- to build the "underground railroad." If as few people that participated in the underground railroad could hide black people in a white city, why shouldn't it have been a piece of cake to hide members of the Onion? Even those who couldn't escape should have had host families and identities ready to assume.

I'd point out a few of major differences.

1) Scale. The underwound railroad (which did fail its escaped slaves found a fair bit of the time - best estimates are that a majority of them were recaptured; though I suspect a lot of that was very early on before they'd found the first safehouse) but it would have been impossible to hide if it the volume of escapees had suddenly and unexpectedly double, quadrupled, etc. The safehouse hiding spots wouldn't be able to accommodate them so they'd need to find other places to hide during the day

2) The underground railroad didn't have to operate in a post electrification (so people are out way more after dark) modern information and surveillance state. Houdouni has to deal with the fact that there are electronic records of the people it's moving, sensor records of the ships (both at Mesa which they might screw with, and in the databanks of passing ships, at at the stations they might need to visit), and it would be possible to look at when ships departed and arrived at their next known stop and realized there is unaccounted for time. People who are supposed to be dead, or out of the system, are caught by somebody's surveillance camera. All those digital records, many of which you can't know were caught, nor by whom, that might be found to start picking apart your evacuation strategy by a sufficiently motivated and resourced set of searchers.

You couldn't do that to kind for the underground railroad - first because they weren't being moved in large vehicles; and second because that kind of routine automatic logging of every passing thing wasn't possible back then.

3) Houdini was trying to hide not just where the escapees went; but for the most part that they'd gone anywhere at all. The underground railroad didn't have to try to convince every plantation owner "that, no, no, your slaved didn't escape. See, they died, no reason to even start looking." Nor did they have to hide the escapees final destination (Canada). They just had to try to help them evade recapture for the few weeks it took to smuggle them over the border to sanctuary.




And it seems like the problem with Houdini is that the original plan was a vastly slower gradual phase-over from working on Mesa to working on Darius/Galton. So it was designed for making maybe a thousand people a year, planet-wide, to disappear. That's a level where much of that can be hidden by folks taking off-world job offers, retire or take sabbatical and start 'traveling the galaxy', or one-off "accidents", etc. It doesn't require filling whole ships worth of evacuees. So when it got wildly accelerated and they probably had to up the number of annual evacuees by a factor of at least 100 their careful prior planning was basically out the window and they were now flying by the seat of their pants without any usable prep.

The underground railroad did not fail. It did its part. A lot of the slaves were captured because of many different factors. Slaves were illiterate. They couldn't read or write and they had no sense of direction. North, South, East and West meant nothing to them. Many of them had never been off the plantation. When they ran, they ran in the dark looking for unfamiliar landmarks that they had never seen. And many of them ran with bare feet. Many of them got caught when trying to get food. There is no way the people who were hiding them should have been expected to feed them. Constantly ordering so much food would have been a dead give away.

Another of the problems was the difficult logistics of even hearing about the railroad. It was illegal to operate the railroad so the white people who were involved couldn't just advertise it. And if a slave did hear about it, they could only tell the three or four other slaves they bunked with. The slaves were not allowed to go into another slave's quarters. There would be no planned uprisings.

The only way information about the railroad could be disseminated was through songs and patchwork. And the songs were very vague so that the slave owners would not know what the songs were saying. Sometimes too vague for the slaves. The only advertising done was by the patchwork pattern sewn on the quilts when they were hung out to dry, or displayed on beds, etc. And of course by the lanterns that were hung in strategic places to symbolize freedom and mark safe houses.

None of that should have been a problem for Houdini. Everyone knew about the plan beforehand. And a lot of resources should already have been put in place.

And I don't see why a planet like Mesa, who isn't exactly on the up and up, would cater to so much paranoia and make movement so difficult. But still. We are talking about the MAlign, where agents should have been inserted all over the whole of Mesa in every organization up to and including the Scouts. They also have benefit of their compulsion. They certainly could have taken down any security measures at a moments notice.

If the number of slaves trying to escape was multiplied by ten and the logistics were the same as Houdini, it would not have been a problem. Houdini's escapees were not visibly discernible. They were allowed to leave any time of the day or night. They were literate, and lots of resources were already put in place. So the numbers should not have been a problem. As far as masking the mass exodus. Why should that have been a problem? People don't go on vacation, business trips, visiting family and friends on other planets, weddings, etc? One can buy a ticket to California from the East Coast, but take a detour anywhere along the route.

penny wrote:Houdini's escapees were not visibly discernible. They were allowed to leave any time of the day or night. They were literate, and lots of resources were already put in place. So the numbers should not have been a problem. As far as masking the mass exodus. Why should that have been a problem? People don't go on vacation, business trips, visiting family and friends on other planets, weddings, etc? One can buy a ticket to California from the East Coast, but take a detour anywhere along the route.

Part of the problem is that Houdini is taking some family members and leaving others behind. So you have the case of a husband going to a conference, thinking his wife will be there, and the conference site gets blown up in a "terrorist" attack. According to the "evidence", both husband and wife died; but she is actually on an extraction ship. So multiply that by ten or a thousand to get a feel for what Houdini needed to do. As Jonathan_S wrote Houdini has to provide a documented explanation for what happened to these people, that does not just say that they got on a ship and flew away.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Houdini's escapees were not visibly discernible. They were allowed to leave any time of the day or night. They were literate, and lots of resources were already put in place. So the numbers should not have been a problem. As far as masking the mass exodus. Why should that have been a problem? People don't go on vacation, business trips, visiting family and friends on other planets, weddings, etc? One can buy a ticket to California from the East Coast, but take a detour anywhere along the route.

Part of the problem is that Houdini is taking some family members and leaving others behind. So you have the case of a husband going to a conference, thinking his wife will be there, and the conference site gets blown up in a "terrorist" attack. According to the "evidence", both husband and wife died; but she is actually on an extraction ship. So multiply that by ten or a thousand to get a feel for what Houdini needed to do. As Jonathan_S wrote Houdini has to provide a documented explanation for what happened to these people, that does not just say that they got on a ship and flew away.

Houdini didn't need to do that in such an expedited timeline. Why couldn't the wife simply leave him as if to file for divorce. The problem was not being able to find these people. Each of them could have simply written a Dear John or Jane letter. "It is over. Bye."

The problem was, in its original plan, of trying not to alert the wrong people that people were disappearing right in the middle of the mass exodus causing people to investigate. Which is also related to the question of why the people didn't just leave legally. "Hey, I want out of this marriage and off of this planet. I will send you divorce papers." All problems are solved, simply, easily, no fuss no bother.

If they take the kids that could be a problem. But then, an investigator has to find them. That won't happen. The only reason I can conclude faking death is for benefit of the insurance payout for the loved ones left behind. Even that could have been replaced with planning ahead. Stocks, investments, etc.

penny wrote:The problem was, in its original plan, not alerting the wrong people that people were disappearing right in the middle of the mass exodus causing people to investigate. Which is also related to the question of why the people didn't just leave legally. "Hey, I want out of this marriage and off of this planet. I will send you divorce papers." All problems are solved, simply, easily, no fuss no bother.

Yes, the highlighted part IS the initial problem and remained the problem through the end. The Malign did not want anyone to know that people were disappearing; they definitely did not want anyone to think that people were moving to an unknown planet. Getting a divorce and moving to a known planet is NOT disappearing. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish this; but the Malign decided that the best thing would be to fake the deaths of the extracted people and as additional cover, to bury those deaths in a bunch of other deaths.

Now maybe if Houdini did not have to be expedited, there would not have been as many major death events. I believe it is stated somewhere in the books that the Green Pines explosion gives them cover to use a lot of other "terrorist" explosions to expedite the extractions. But even before the schedule was accelerated, the Malign wanted the extracted people to be considered dead.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:The problem was, in its original plan, not alerting the wrong people that people were disappearing right in the middle of the mass exodus causing people to investigate. Which is also related to the question of why the people didn't just leave legally. "Hey, I want out of this marriage and off of this planet. I will send you divorce papers." All problems are solved, simply, easily, no fuss no bother.

Yes, the highlighted part IS the initial problem and remained the problem through the end. The Malign did not want anyone to know that people were disappearing; they definitely did not want anyone to think that people were moving to an unknown planet. Getting a divorce and moving to a known planet is NOT disappearing. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish this; but the Malign decided that the best thing would be to fake the deaths of the extracted people and as additional cover, to bury those deaths in a bunch of other deaths.

Now maybe if Houdini did not have to be expedited, there would not have been as many major death events. I believe it is stated somewhere in the books that the Green Pines explosion gives them cover to use a lot of other "terrorist" explosions to expedite the extractions. But even before the schedule was accelerated, the Malign wanted the extracted people to be considered dead.

How in the hell can you hide that fact? There are other family members. Love interests. Friends. Employers. Neighbors. Yada yada yada.

That part of the plan I never understood. How it was handled would call attention to itself. Come on, using explosions to hide the fact? Explosions? Like I said, the simplest solution was the most obvious. Use perfectly legal and normal reasons to disappear. I don't suppose it is illegal to just say I have had enough of this life and this planet. Put in for a vacation. A business trip, etc., and just never return. Send a Dear John letter to whomever. At the end of the day, the fact that people are missing will be known anyway.

And I would imagine that investigating and finding someone in the whole of the Honorverse takes years, at least. It can take that long here on Earth. So if not for the life insurance payout for the loved ones left behind, the MA overthought that aspect of the plan.

And if it were done by legal means such as an excuse that they were leaving an unhappy marriage seeking divorce, they would never even be looked for. Sign all necessary legal papers over to the spouse with a notary public witnessing it and then ... skedaddle.



PS

Internet: plantations were often some 500 to 1,000 acres (2.0 to 4.0 km2) or more. Slaves ran in the dark without a sense of direction, oftentimes chased by dogs, whereas the terrain was unfriendly. They oftentimes got lost. Some of them didn't realize that they had been running around in a circle for hours.

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tlb wrote:

penny wrote:The problem was, in its original plan, not alerting the wrong people that people were disappearing right in the middle of the mass exodus causing people to investigate. Which is also related to the question of why the people didn't just leave legally. "Hey, I want out of this marriage and off of this planet. I will send you divorce papers." All problems are solved, simply, easily, no fuss no bother.

Yes, the highlighted part IS the initial problem and remained the problem through the end. The Malign did not want anyone to know that people were disappearing; they definitely did not want anyone to think that people were moving to an unknown planet. Getting a divorce and moving to a known planet is NOT disappearing. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish this; but the Malign decided that the best thing would be to fake the deaths of the extracted people and as additional cover, to bury those deaths in a bunch of other deaths.

Now maybe if Houdini did not have to be expedited, there would not have been as many major death events. I believe it is stated somewhere in the books that the Green Pines explosion gives them cover to use a lot of other "terrorist" explosions to expedite the extractions. But even before the schedule was accelerated, the Malign wanted the extracted people to be considered dead.

It wasn't just that the MAlign didn't want the disappearances detected in the middle. They didn't want them to be discovered even after the evacuation was complete -- as that would give an enemy intelligence on who had been evacuated, thus who had been working for the MAlign, and by looking into each one's specialties, movements before disappearing, friends and (remaining) family too many pieces might be reconstructed.

The rate at which you can disappear people without it becoming apparent, even with hindsight, that the people had been disappeared is vastly lower (baring mass casualty events to "kill" them in in shiploads) than the rate at which you can disappear people if you only need it to remain undetected until the last of them hyper out of the system.

For the later short term explanations for why they're not around is sufficient, vacation, work travel, etc. might only need to delay suspicion by weeks or months -- but if you need to keep everyone from realizing mass disappearances happened then those aren't sufficient because when suddenly lots of people took trips they inexplicably didn't return from that makes them stand out as a group. (Exactly what the MAlign didn't want)

If a handful of people send a Dear John letter and take off without further communications to their friends or family that's concerning to those involved but not anything that would attract intelligence organizations. After all there's a certain natural average background level of that happening. But if there was suddenly an excess 10,000 of those in a month that kind of statistical anomaly will stand out like a sore thumb and invite closer scrutiny by those trying to find the MAlign's secret organization.