Houdini and its consequences(CoG spoilers)

SO their plans was to kill so many civilians and pin it on seccies, so the free citizens would massacre them in response, to hide the removal of the alignment. WHile this going on their reporter o'hanagan report the story, all about the brutality of the state, and that the ballroom and seccies were behind it all.
The spy gang could not stop the bombs, but made sure that the seccies recieved some warning. If they had not, alot more places would have been hit. BUt the thing is when they would have seen the armed forced wiping out anyone they found, they would have sttod and fought, potentially creeating a united front against them. I can see the mesan forced to stop after a while, due to loss of people, and force to go to orbital projectiles to keep the seccies in line.
Manties want to get the planet on their side, seize the hospitals and offer all seccies and slaves free health care and prologue if they can. That would be a big help and boost to the image.
The bosses of the gangs could become legitamate, as politicians. If they get the seccies and slave backing, that would means a majority of the population. WAnt to really mess with mesa and the alignment, put forward a plan that has mesa asking to join the kingdom of torch. This is a newly freed planet of slaves, who better to join with. Also, all those mesans and alignment people, knowing mesa the planet founded by their genetic founder deitwieller, is now ruled as apart of a kindgom of slaves.
That spy who died due to telling the truth. If they use his genes could they track other alignment agents, they potentially have unique genetic markers.
The reporter is an adrenalin junkie, so she might go too far and be discovered by the alliance.

I wonder if the seccies are skilled enough at construction to build a true tower, for themselves. They get to build their own home that matches anything the free mesans have.

The alignment was hoping for the whole thing to be done before anyone comes along, but the whole massacre thing did not work out perfectly. i think the plan was to shatter mesa turn it into aa war zone, but while damaged it can be restored.

why as zack sent so far away? they were next to the maya sector. sure ships had to be hidden, but why so far. they must know that the attack failed on torch. my guess they were forced to go the long route after the wormhole network is down. my bet is the are heading for darius, via one of the verge terminii.

SYED wrote:...WAnt to really mess with mesa and the alignment, put forward a plan that has mesa asking to join the kingdom of torch. This is a newly freed planet of slaves, who better to join with.

I don't think that would be feasible due to the communications lag. Even if the Torch Wormhole was useable, I don't believe that would reduce the communications lag to make a single polity workable.

There will be a Torch Mesa link. Thandi will see to that. The Crime boss what's his name will take over and work something out in the Erehwon tradition. While an alliance will spring up, this and Torch will likely be encouraged by the Alignment now as the only way that they have had any success in spreading their engineered peoples, welcomed with open arms, is through rescued slaves. Could all be part of the plan. Who knows, besides RFC, how these clones think?

Weird Harold wrote:

SYED wrote:...WAnt to really mess with mesa and the alignment, put forward a plan that has mesa asking to join the kingdom of torch. This is a newly freed planet of slaves, who better to join with.

I don't think that would be feasible due to the communications lag. Even if the Torch Wormhole was useable, I don't believe that would reduce the communications lag to make a single polity workable.

Mesa has been in existence for a long, long time. It's been nearly 500 years since Leonard Detweiler established the colony there. It's a planetary population in the billions, with entrenched cultural traditions and political classes.

Torch is essentially a brand new colony, with an enormous (currently) classless immigrant population, but I doubt they've passed more than a few hundred million.

The time lag involved means those billions would be governed by Torch's tiny government, all those hundreds of light years away. To shorten the communication loop, they would have to rely on using wormhole bridges requiring long term permission from Erewhon, Manticore, Beowulf and Visigoth. Or another more ideal connection may run elsewhere through the League.

Without access to those, it's a thousand light year voyage between Congo and Mesa, according to the prettier maps out there. Didn't Haven need six months to make a round trip to Sol once cut off from the wormhole network? In less than six months(Feb 1922 to June 1922), the Solarian League lost five hundred wallers and pretty much all its wormholes.

Heck, even Manticore(AKA Wormhole Xtreme) isn't silly enough to govern Silesia or Talbott directly and it's got guaranteed control of these links until someone works out a way to drop out of hyperspace totally undetected.

Yes, given the GA's friendly status with Torch, they could attempt it. However, I doubt Prime Minister Du Havel would endorse the attempt, unless the Darius wormhole chain leads somewhere very near Mesa. Then, only if Torch asserted control of all those systems would it stand a chance of being such an extended interstellar polity.

Think of it as the USA of 1800 trying to incorporate China. That's a toughie, even if 50-70% of China fully supported the movement.

The felix junction does have unknown terminii, it might be a far shorter trip in the future.
How many seccies or slaves would want to leave mesa for torh instead of building the world better.

SYED wrote:SO their plans was to kill so many civilians and pin it on seccies, so the free citizens would massacre them in response, to hide the removal of the alignment.

No. The plan was to pin it on the Ballroom, not the seccies. Things got out of control.

SYED wrote:WHile this going on their reporter o'hanagan report the story, all about the brutality of the state, and that the ballroom and seccies were behind it all.
The spy gang could not stop the bombs, but made sure that the seccies recieved some warning. If they had not, alot more places would have been hit. BUt the thing is when they would have seen the armed forced wiping out anyone they found, they would have sttod and fought, potentially creeating a united front against them. I can see the mesan forced to stop after a while, due to loss of people, and force to go to orbital projectiles to keep the seccies in line.

Manties want to get the planet on their side, seize the hospitals and offer all seccies and slaves free health care and prologue if they can. That would be a big help and boost to the image.

No idea what Manticore is going to do. Rather, I have my own ideas, but until RFC tells us, we don't know.

SYED wrote: The bosses of the gangs could become legitamate, as politicians. If they get the seccies and slave backing, that would means a majority of the population. WAnt to really mess with mesa and the alignment, put forward a plan that has mesa asking to join the kingdom of torch. This is a newly freed planet of slaves, who better to join with. Also, all those mesans and alignment people, knowing mesa the planet founded by their genetic founder deitwieller, is now ruled as apart of a kindgom of slaves.

That's one of the most [redacted] ideas I've heard yet. Not gotta happen. Is Torch going to be part of the commission that eventually handles the mess? Yes. Direct annexation and rule? No.

SYED wrote: That spy who died due to telling the truth. If they use his genes could they track other alignment agents, they potentially have unique genetic markers.

RFC already said they're going to do that.

SYED wrote: The reporter is an adrenalin junkie, so she might go too far and be discovered by the alliance.

I wonder if the seccies are skilled enough at construction to build a true tower, for themselves. They get to build their own home that matches anything the free mesans have.

A much better solution is to simply eliminate second class citizenship (seccies) and integrate them into the rest of society, including infrastructure amenities, etc. Much better long-term solution.

SYED wrote: The alignment was hoping for the whole thing to be done before anyone comes along, but the whole massacre thing did not work out perfectly. i think the plan was to shatter mesa turn it into aa war zone, but while damaged it can be restored.

No. The plan was to stealthily vanish, not turn Mesa into a war zone. Too many people being evacuated left too many loved ones behind for that idea to fly.

SYED wrote: why as zack sent so far away? they were next to the maya sector. sure ships had to be hidden, but why so far. they must know that the attack failed on torch. my guess they were forced to go the long route after the wormhole network is down. my bet is the are heading for darius, via one of the verge terminii.

They're playing "shuffle the pea" to throw pursuers off the trail. We have no idea how many more legs were planned before they get to wherever they were going. As far as Zack is concerned, though, I still think the next leg is to Parmley Station. I can't see them leaving Parmley out of their routing plans, so someone interesting was likely to get routed there.

JohnRoth wrote:

SYED wrote:SO their plans was to kill so many civilians and pin it on seccies, so the free citizens would massacre them in response, to hide the removal of the alignment.

No. The plan was to pin it on the Ballroom, not the seccies. Things got out of control.

Not at all. Things worked out quite as planned, with the "authorities" committing mass murder while also demonstrating they were murderously incompetent buffoons.

kzt wrote:

JohnRoth wrote: No. The plan was to pin it on the Ballroom, not the seccies. Things got out of control.

Not at all. Things worked out quite as planned, with the "authorities" committing mass murder while also demonstrating they were murderously incompetent buffoons.

Indeed, and the Inner core of the Onion probably didn't care at all...the chaos, murder and resulting atrocities and devastation were none of their concern. Mesa had served its' purpose to them and what happened to it (provided that no one figured out that they had left (they hadn't planned on Anton)) was none of their concern.

Which does show the utter ruthlessness of the MAlign--for them to reach their goals, if thousands...indeed millions of people had to die on a world they had founded and in effect had ruled for centuries to cover their departure--well, it was only 'lesser' people.

Jack McBryde came to understand that and had the inner fortitude to say 'No More.' (and yes, that is a Dr. Who kudo for any Whovians). The question now is--are their others?

We shall see...eventually.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

Actually all the "pinning" on anyone was only a secondary aspect of Houdini. The core of the plan was to relocate all essential inner core MAlign personnel, and essential contributors in an untraceable fashion.

The use of mass casualty events to do that was a late near-emergency acceleration, which carried risks of its own. The risks were that too many concentrated mass casualty events would be unbelievable to any outside investigator (and they were expecting a Mesan gov't investigation overseen and microscopically examined by the Empire and Manticore), and would provide evidence that might be accepted in galactic public venues that there had been an internally engineered selective evacuation, thus reinforcing the notion of a grand conspiracy. The cover plan to blame it on Ballroom and seccy sympathizers was the plan to mitigate those risks, for long enough, by emotional misdirection and some secondary civil havoc.

It remains to be seen if the plan was successful. Recall - the Mesan public, government, and military, for all of their excessive outlash recation, and the dramatic resistance, and the occupation by a foreign power, still believes that the various explosions and manmade disasters WERE a Ballroom plot, abetted by selected seccy elements. The Mesan general public and many official elements believe it all the more for the unexpected stiffness of the seccy resistance. Those knowledgeable of Houdini are gone, one way or another, or buried very, very deep, and not in any direct relationship to Mesan and transtellar official hierarchies.

The Manticoran and Andermani investigators, aided and abetted by the Torch/Haven deep cover mission, will not believe the cover story. They probably would not have in any case. They will fairly quickly conclude that the Mesan domestic crisis was cover for a MAlign withdrawal of sorts. But...

They will have an extremely difficult time, if not an impossible time, determining the extent of the evac, any detailed profile of the evac'd personnel, and any slightest hint of where they might have been sent (or scattered). More importantly, they WILL NOT be able to sell their convictions on those underlying manipulations to the general publics of the SL and the galaxy at large, without a smoking gun - in the hand of a MAlign agen - who has a tattoo across his forehead saying "MAlign Agent - I Did It!".

It got messy, inevitably, but our heroes survived. However, Houdini succeeded!; and the real chance that there is any short-cut out of galaxy-wide conflagration is STILL named McBryde.

dreamrider

I'm not convinced Houdini succeeded. It was executed in a time frame that was far more compressed than originally intended. In fact the nuclear bombs were set off to cover the disappearance of those who knew about the onion. Even the Detweilers winced at the collateral damage. That was an improvisation. Yet right now we have McBryde and his lady friend without their keeper. Our favorite intel team of Zilwicki/Chachet not only knows about the onion but has correctly deduced the evacuation. Given the level of complexity of Houdini, somebody will be left behind, a computer overlooked, something. In fact it is not clear that Houdini will manage to cover its final destination. To be sure the evacuation was carried out. But Houdini failed in its final goal of disappearing both tracelessly and without notice.

Don