1) The woman who was afraid of being killed at Darius. A Houdini relocation. She's a strategy and tactics person....she KNOWS about the spider drives, the GTorps and all sorts of other things and she was tasked to game out on the computer in that giant simulator how to DEFEND as system which is clearly a vast industrial operation and weapons producer but is specifically NOT ALLOWED to have ANY of the Alignments most advanced weapons and ships. NONE
She has all sorts of info the Alignment has on the GA so far and she is not just hamstrung with lack of spider drives and the GTorps, we don't see any Ghost type ships and nothing beyond the Hasta. Ok, I don't recall if she knew what Galton was able to do with Hosta.
WHY was she afraid? She had figured out that she was gaming this out and this was a major unknown system and they were going to get devastated regardless of what they did unless they at least had the existing depleted advance ships and weapons. And there was NO planning for getting anybody out. She (and she thinks about it we got to read it) is now afraid to even think about what she knows what all of this means because then she will become a security risk and she has seen (watched the other Houdini freighter suicide and the GAUL who was the guard on her ship was going to kill her and McBride.
I believe she is hoping that she doesn't just get killed when the project is finished because the Alignment is letting all sorts of desperate tactics get used in her scenarios and they won't allow her to use the only things that might give a chance that it won't be hammered to bits.
As far as the GA not doing anything about the AlignmentsOyster Bay weapons, they are, just they don't know enough about what they are facing. We listen to Hamish walkabout the new stations being built with either full time sidewalls or various shielding schemes. But nobody can yet detect either the wepons (primarily the GTorps ) or the ships that launched them. Hamish also brought up the idea that, as devastating as the attack at Grayson and Manticore was, it wasn't what it could have been........nothing else was hit....no other SEM systems, not the Peeps, not the SLl, not the Andies. So this was a sneak attack of an unknown entity that doesn't appear to have been ready. Sure, Manticore etc don't know what the Alignment's plans are, but SEM and Grayson really worried them so they struck with and where they could with probably as much as they were able to do at the time.
The other thing the GA -and now the SLN- along with Beowulf is doing is actively hunting for "the other guys". Stealthily hunting and working though leads to track down what they know exists even if it's not clear exactly what the other side wants.
There are other things that now look odd to the Ghost Hunters and the GA teams.....just like the Genetic Slave business didn't ultimately make any sense in terms of money, now that Manpower and some other pieces have been swept away, what is it that the "Alignment" actually wants. They don't actually seem to want to capture systems and build an empire because so much of what they were doing was ultimately just corrupting governments (or feeding their corruption and localized holding systems as petty dictators for life. This isn't politics and military aggression, it's .............unclear what the motivation is.
When the GA finds Darius? Probably the best thing would to slip a Nova Device into the star and sterilize the system but RFC doesn't do things like that so nobody in the Honorverse has anything like that. But after all that has gone on and now what happened at Galton with the fake surrender.....who is going to trust anything done by a group who outfits anybody they deal with with nanite suicide divics (a lot of these are equipped without their knowledge or consent) and routinely destroys almost anything to hide it's tracks.
No clue how this is going to work out.
