Speculating on the GA-MAlign Conflict

Amaroq wrote:I've looked at various maps but I can't find where Darius is. Do we have any idea where in the Verge it's located? I remember from MoH that Detweiler comments it is not an easy voyage from Mesa even with the streak drive. I assume that means it's a lengthy distance away and maybe on the opposite side of the SL's volume.

I don't think there's any textev, other than that one terminus of the Felix junction goes there. Given that the maximum distance a wormhole bridge has covered in the Honorverse is 900 light years or so, it could be just about anywhere in human space (or way off in the middle of nowhere).

Amaroq wrote:I've looked at various maps but I can't find where Darius is. Do we have any idea where in the Verge it's located? I remember from MoH that Detweiler comments it is not an easy voyage from Mesa even with the streak drive. I assume that means it's a lengthy distance away and maybe on the opposite side of the SL's volume.

No, we have no idea at all where Darius, Felix, or the Twins are. Nor do we know where any of the RF members are, except the fact that Visigoth is 60 light-years from Beowulf.

Odd thing that caught my attention, the GA.MA acronym.

Reminds me of a toad...

Now, if only I could summon the reason why...

We the readers do know that the area on the other side of the Torch wormhole is covered by Mannerheim's SDF since it was one of their warships that took out Harvest Joy. That implies that one of the wormholes is close enough to Mannerheim to make that practical. We also know from textev that another wormhole in the same area leads to Darius.

While we don't know the actual distances in hyperspace, the time of travel through wormholes from Mannerheim to Darius shouldn't be all that bad.

Don

n7axw wrote:We the readers do know that the area on the other side of the Torch wormhole is covered by Mannerheim's SDF since it was one of their warships that took out Harvest Joy. That implies that one of the wormholes is close enough to Mannerheim to make that practical. We also know from textev that another wormhole in the same area leads to Darius.

This is the Felix junction, in the Felix system, which is 10 ly from Mannerheim. The junction has four termini, including Darius, the Twins and two others, none of which we know the locations of.

Knowing this doesn't help, because we don't know where Mannerheim is, either.

n7axw wrote:While we don't know the actual distances in hyperspace, the time of travel through wormholes from Mannerheim to Darius shouldn't be all that bad.

Don

Since the Felix Junction is only 10 ly from Mannerheim, it's only a couple of days away.

Amaroq wrote:I've looked at various maps but I can't find where Darius is. Do we have any idea where in the Verge it's located? I remember from MoH that Detweiler comments it is not an easy voyage from Mesa even with the streak drive. I assume that means it's a lengthy distance away and maybe on the opposite side of the SL's volume.

Darius is one of the termini of the Felix Junction, which is 10 ly from Mannerheim. The critical bits of textev are Chapters 38.2 and 39 of Mission of Honor which see Albrecht at Darius and Mannerheim, and then MoH 41.1 where Albrecht records the next steps for distribution to the RF. The first takes place in April, the second in May.

Mission of Honor, Chapter 41.1 wrote:"Good morning," Albrecht Detweiler said, looking into the camera. "I know it's only been a couple of weeks since we last met, but since then, we've received confirmation the Sollies are going to employ Filareta as we'd hoped."

This scene very specifically doesn't say where Albrecht is at; he could be on Darius. If he's on Mesa though, it's only two weeks from Mannerheim.

The next time we absolutely know he's on Mesa is in ART-17 (SoF-20, CoG-19) which occurs in June.

Do we know if felix is the only wormhole they hid from the universe?
Was it not a mesan company that first realised there was a junction or at least a bridge in manticore?

mannerheim is guessed as part of the league, so shell or core location.

SYED wrote:Do we know if felix is the only wormhole they hid from the universe?
Was it not a mesan company that first realised there was a junction or at least a bridge in manticore?

mannerheim is guessed as part of the league, so shell or core location.

At the moment we know that Mesa has hidden the existence of the Felix Junction, the Darius terminus, and the Twins. If there are other wormholes they've discovered and kept secret we haven't been told about them.

The company that realized there might be a wormhole junction in Manticore was Axelrod of Old Terra. If you've read the short story "A Call to Arms" in the Beginnings anthology it depicts the incident in more detail.

Weird Harold wrote:Since not everyone with MAlign genetics is a sleeper agent, knowing the MAlign genotype would just engender pointless discrimination; in effect, turning MAlign hunters into MAlign clones.

I want to offer an amendment to that statement. Not everyone with a Mesan genetic signature is a member of the Alignment. However, since everyone with an Alignment genetic signature (Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-lines) is a member of the Alignment, and since the Alignment has removed all of its members who are not intelligence agents to Darius, I think it'd be fair to argue that any individual both on Mesa and elsewhere whose genome corresponds to that genetic signature is either an Alignment intelligence operative or a sleeper agent.

Crown Loyalist wrote:Darius being found is inevitable, it's necessary for the story to continue (assuming the good guys win). How, when isn't so clear; it depends on the pace of the story.

If I were the Malign, I'd sacrifice Darius ASAP, though. I'd let the Manticorans find it, preferably after I'm sure that the Renaissance Factor has managed to turn itself into one of humanity's great star nations (which, frankly, it should manage without great difficulty).

Once that is done, Darius isn't important anymore. It's just not. You can get Mesa's end goal - a reconsideration of the acceptability of genetic engineering - within the RF. With the RF as one of humanity's great states, a slow and steady reconsidering of that particular moral prohibition would be easy enough to pursue over time. It would be slow and take generations, and generations are long affairs now, but it's not hard by any means to accomplish.

The Alignment CANNOT sacrifice Darius. Unless the RF worlds come out in the open as the Alignment's 'public face', Darius remains its only industrial base. The Alignment's entire military industrial complex on Darius took centuries to build, and even now it is still not even close to Manticoran or Havenite standards wrt construction capacity or construction rates. I rather doubt that the Alignment would want to start all over again someplace else, now that knowledge of its existence has leaked out. For that matter, it'd be impossible to remove enough of Darius' freeborn and slave population to some other unknown world to start over again once the GA discovers Darius' location, before the GA's forces arrive in Darius' orbit.

Unless, of course, the Alignment has yet another existing bolthole somewhere, and given the effort and resources it took just to build Darius' industrial base to its present and as yet insufficient level, I find that extremely unlikely.

However, should it become necessary for the Alignment to abandon Darius, I suspect that it will subsume itself in the societies of the RF - effectively removing its freeborn population to the RF's worlds, where they would blend the Alignment genetic signature into that of the RF worlds' populations, and continue their work right under everyone's noses.