abrax894 wrote:Did I at any time say that it wouldn't react? I said it would not react by randomly destroying the most advanced city or nation on the planet. DEFENSIVE action yes, seek and destroy, no.
Okay, the problem here is that no one
knows what the bombardment system will do. For that matter, they don't know that it won't put in a wake-up call to Dad (or whatever's under the Temple, assuming something is). In short, there is absolutely no way to be sure it would react
defensively by simply shooting down the incoming rocks (or whatever). Federation AIs were fully capable of exercising discretion after analysis of very complex data. If there's a military-grade AI up there, it would
definitely recognize what you have suggested as a hostile act. It would then begin tracing back its origins, looking at its sensor data to determine who could have launched it. It will know it damned well wasn't the Gbaba, who wouldn't be bothering with throwing rocks at it, and that means it had to be a human agency. That means there is a hostile
human force, a successor to the Alexandria Enclave and Commodore Pei, with access to advanced technology and obviously intend on destroying the OBS and, by implication, Langhorne's master plan.
How is Merlin or anyone else supposed to know what its instructions are in that sort of situation? Remember that when it was put in place it was also equipped with a highly sophisticated and capable defensive capability. Are they supposed to assume that the same paranoid type who gave it defensive weaponry --- which obviously meant that paranoid individual was contemplating the possibility of an attack upon it which might make those defenses necessary --- didn't also give a little thought to response hierarchies if a new human enemy of The Plan emerged to claim Shan-wei's mantle?
There are all sorts of ways the bombardment system
might be attacked, assuming Merlin has the resources for them. He does not, BTW, have the resources for most of the suggestions which have been bruited about. Unfortunately, he has no idea how capable the software running the system really is. He knows it's good enough to keep the system up and running, with repairs as needed, for the better part of a thousand years. He knows it was good enough to take out the Alexandria Enclave (presumably under human control), and he will shortly (in HFQ) receive evidence that it could be used for something rather smaller than smashing entire enclaves.
The thing is, waking up a stored electronic "archangel" under the Temple, or crossing the threat perimeter of the OBS, is the sort of mistake he probably gets to make only once. If he and the inner circle make the wrong move
one time, it's game over. And if it's game over for Charis --- and if Merlin and Nimue are hunted down and taken out --- then it's game over for humanity the next time they run into the Gbaba.
I think that's what a lot of people are missing here. A lot of readers have pet projects they would like to see Merlin & Co. pursuing, pieces of technology they would like to see used, sneaky ways the system
might be evaded or worked around. They are, however,
readers, outside the paradigm Merlin faces in the books. He is going to be
insanely cautious, and as long as Charis is winning anyway, he is most definitely not going to try to jumpstart or rush the process. There might be only a 2% chance that sending a swarm of rocks at the OBS (which, by the way, would
not get through its defenses) assuming he had the capacity to do so (which he doesn't), would cause the OBS or the command station under the Temple or whatever to pull the trigger and reduce Safehold to the Stone Age. Do you really think a rational person would run that 2% risk
unless he absolutely had to? There's a reason he wouldn't even allow steam power until he'd set up a test target on an uninhabited island thousands of miles away from any human settlement.
There are things he can do without leaving footprints that would
necessarily point to advanced technology, and he's done some of them. He's doing more of them in the more recent books, as well. He is not going to start dipping into his bag of god weapons with gay abandon, however, for reasons which I've laid out repeatedly. You may disagree with his decisions, and that's your prerogative, but that isn't going to change the fundamental logic under which he is proceeding.
There may well come a time when his hand is forced. Until that time arrives, however, he is going to proceed exactly as he has to this point. While he would love to get a look inside the Temple --- assuming that could be done without his own electronic gizzards setting off all sorts of alarms --- he isn't going to poke his nose into it until/unless he has to. Instead, he will continue his plan to so fundamentally change Safehold --- and the Church --- that even if an "archangel" wakes up, the "rot" will have spread so deeply that the archangel in question really
would have to blast Safehold into the Stone Age to reset the clock. Indeed, he fully intends to push matters so far that the truth is revealed to all of Safehold before the deadline for the millennial return. In the meantime, he is also perfectly willing to make a suicide run into the Temple with a nuke strapped to his back
if that's the only way to prevent it from waking up prematurely. It's not something he wants to do, for all the reasons I've enumerated (repeatedly), but he's
willing to do it
if he has no other option.
I suspect that the people who think he's being too cautious haven't really fully succeeded in putting themselves in his place.
