Mesa--Seven Headed Serpent

I admit.
I just do not understand all of the intricate threads of the MAlignment.

You have the Detweiler Consortium which is essentially Manpower Inc.
There's Manpower Inc.
There's the Renaissance Factor.
The Mesan Alignment.

Dealings with the Audubon Ballroom.

Cybercom of Mesa.
Noruguchi Nanotech.
Jessyck Combine.

On and on and on...

My head hurts.

For six hundred years they've plotted planned and existed.
Their operational security makes Bolthole look like a joke.
How could they have operated, so in the dark, under the radar, eluding intelligence entities for several centuries?


They had a production line of genetically created people-types!

Ultimately what are their goals?
Other than toppling the League, Manticore and Haven.
Even if that happened do they have the naval strength to rise to power?

If the League gets out of their conflict with the GA, shouldn't The MAlignment fear the inexorable juggernaut that is everyone that they've royally screwed coalescing and heading in their direction with blood in their eyes?

And where is the MAlignment's bolthole? Where is their technology base located?

Where is the main head of this many headed serpent that is the MAlignment?

I don't like politics and I've tried to maintain my innocence, but it seems I'll have to lose my fruit if I'm to fully understand the Mesan element. So, I may be giving it up for the first time...virgin no longer.


Which head should be severed!?!

Detweiler has at least seven sons. How many daughters, if any? Can you clone daughters from a male? I think there have been hints that there are even more many secret layers inside this onion.

I think the Mesa star system has a secret junction wormhole. Known only to a few. That is what made the place so valuable to begin with. I do not think we have seen anything yet! HB of CJ (old coot)

cthia wrote:How could they have operated, so in the dark, under the radar, eluding intelligence entities for several centuries?

By making sure their diversions were very visibly the big bad evil guys of the neighbourhood.

By giving their "fronts" lots of reasons to operate under cover and illegally, there´s an endless expanse of opportunities to bury their real operations under the garbage produced by their fronts.

Similar to how i mess with NSA because i detest their spying on everyones internet traffic.

So, i intentionally send suspicious looking data, heavily encrypted of course so as to waste the maximum amount of computer power to decrypt, but i do in the form of things that can hide data beyond the encryption, which means you can never be REALLY sure that you found everything in the data.

And like now, i´m being completely open about doing this online.
Which means that by any rational counter espionage thinking, i must be an evil mastermind hiding my nefarious scheming within this hidden data.

And this is where it gets really funny, because it becomes impossible to tell if i´m being 100% honest, or if i´m doing some sort of doublecross, triplecross, quadruplecross or worse.

Meaning that if they found my data, they simply can´t just ignore it as harmless, because hey, what if it´s not?

Obviously, it´s completely harmless...


Mesa is doing the same thing except from a different perspective, causing lots of "traffic" to make sure their REAL and important "data" gets overlooked even if it is ever discovered.

It just gets dismissed with a shake of the head and "those damned Mesans".

cthia wrote:Even if that happened do they have the naval strength to rise to power?

I doubt they expect to take control through military force.

cthia wrote:If the League gets out of their conflict with the GA, shouldn't The MAlignment fear the inexorable juggernaut that is everyone that they've royally screwed coalescing and heading in their direction with blood in their eyes?

They don´t care about Mesa remember? They just up and leave for destinations unknown.
They have their hidden supporters in the RF, they have that secret planet, and i expect they probably have at least a few more hidey holes.

Heck, with their resources they could even have pulled a fullscale Thrawn and built a whole freakin EMPIRE somewhere, the outer edge of which might be months of travel away from the edge of known settled space.
Cloning has some really nasty potential when combined with largescale space travel.

cthia wrote:They had a production line of genetically created people-types!

More likely HAVE a production line. Also likely more than one line as they seem to specialise somewhat.

HB of CJ wrote:Detweiler has at least seven sons. How many daughters, if any? Can you clone daughters from a male? I think there have been hints that there are even more many secret layers inside this onion.

Indeed.

With todays tech, you can sort of do it. By doing a "pseudo clone", using eggcells/sperm to get the genetic material rather than taking directly from a regular cell.
Male from female is drastically harder this way(cant say for sure but i don´t think it´s possible at all at the moment) due to the complete absence of Y-chromosomes.

But with the time for development given, i expect that Mesa can probably manage both, even as direct clones.

HB of CJ wrote:Detweiler has at least seven sons. How many daughters, if any? Can you clone daughters from a male?

Yes, all you have to do is get rid of the Y chromosome and duplicate the X chromosome. Even easier would be to simply inactivate the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, thus producing an XY female. Heck, they could do that today using CRISPR, if they could actually get cloning to work, although they'd probably have to do some other stuff to avoid Swyer syndrome.

Cloning a male from female cells would be harder since there are essential genes on the Y chromosome needed for functional sex organs.

HB of CJ wrote:I think there have been hints that there are even more many secret layers inside this onion.

Could be. They've certainly got it compartmentalized, which isn't the same thing as another "layer."

HB of CJ wrote:I think the Mesa star system has a secret junction wormhole. Known only to a few. That is what made the place so valuable to begin with. I do not think we have seen anything yet! HB of CJ (old coot)

According to the basic information for the Honorverse, there are no, let me repeat that, no hyper bridges which link two junctions, so the Mesa terminus is not a hidden junction. "The Twins" are sort of an exception, but they aren't actually a junction, just a system with two separate termini. I doubt if there are any others.

HB of CJ wrote:I think the Mesa star system has a secret junction wormhole. Known only to a few. That is what made the place so valuable to begin with. I do not think we have seen anything yet! HB of CJ (old coot)

To reiterate and add to JohnRoth's point. We definitely know that the Mesa system does not have a secret junction as they have a publicly known junction (which was known when the system was first colonized) and right up until the discovery of The Twins all the best theories predicted that it was impossible to have two separate (ie not part of a junction) wormholes in one system. The possibility of the Mesa junction having one or more hidden termini exists but is unlikely as the junction seems to get enough traffic that hiding the use of additional termini would be very difficult.

OTOH the Alignment definitely does have at least one secret junction in the form of Felix and others are not out of the question (though IMO are unlikely)

Grashtel wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:I think the Mesa star system has a secret junction wormhole. Known only to a few. That is what made the place so valuable to begin with. I do not think we have seen anything yet! HB of CJ (old coot)

To reiterate and add to JohnRoth's point. We definitely know that the Mesa system does not have a secret junction as they have a publicly known junction (which was known when the system was first colonized) and right up until the discovery of The Twins all the best theories predicted that it was impossible to have two separate (ie not part of a junction) wormholes in one system. The possibility of the Mesa junction having one or more hidden termini exists but is unlikely as the junction seems to get enough traffic that hiding the use of additional termini would be very difficult.

OTOH the Alignment definitely does have at least one secret junction in the form of Felix and others are not out of the question (though IMO are unlikely)

Mesa is actually just a terminus of the Visigoth junction. If there are more termini, they will be from Visigoth, not Mesa.

cthia wrote:And where is the MAlignment's bolthole? Where is their technology base located?

Much of their technology base was developed on Mesa, in the several dozen corporations based there, including Manpower, Jessyk, and Technodyne. More recently, the secretly discovered planet Darius has become their Bolthole.

cthia wrote:Where is the main head of this many headed serpent that is the MAlignment?

Given that Darius is where the inner core of the Onion is being evacuated to, including the Detweilers, it is reasonable to conclude that Darius is where the main head of the hydra is.

Detweiler has at least seven sons. How many daughters, if any? Can you clone daughters from a male?


Yes, all you have to do is get rid of the Y chromosome and duplicate the X chromosome. Even easier would be to simply inactivate the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, thus producing an XY female. Heck, they could do that today using CRISPR, if they could actually get cloning to work, although they'd probably have to do some other stuff to avoid Swyer syndrome.

Cloning a male from female cells would be harder since there are essential genes on the Y chromosome needed for functional sex organs.

Male to female. Piece of cake with Mesan level biotechnology. As posters have said all you need to do is duplicate the X.

Female to male. I would remove one X and replace with a donor Y from another individual. But if they are too egotistical to do so, with Mesan level technology, they could probably build a Y chromosome from scratch utilizing the "best" genes for each gene contained on it. One note of caution though. They would need to carefully examine the remaining X chromosome for problematic recessives. There are any number of genetic diseases that usually only show up in males because they are carried on the X chromosome. Females are protected with a good gene on their second X. Color blindness is the best known of these.

I tend to agree with cthia that in reality a centuries long conspiracy such as this involving this many people is unlikely to remain undiscovered this long. MAlign's technique of increasing the background noise is a good one. Signal to noise is always a problem in intelligence work.

Some of the problems I see are:

1. Individuals with a crisis of conscience similar to Jack McBride. We're talking generations of individuals with 1000s individuals each generation knowing something about the onion. Not as much as McBride knew but still enough to give the Beowulf authorities a starting point. To keep this a secret Mesan counter intel would need to catch ALL of them. Similar to the problem of terrorists. The FBI needs to be right 100% of the time, the terrorists only need to get it right once.

2. Individuals who act stupidly and get caught. I have known any number of people with high level intellects (similar to alpha line) who act as dumb as a rock regardless of their genetic gifts. With the sheer number of people who know enough about the onion, there are bound to be some meeting this description.

3. Murphy's law. Centuries of time have pasted and Murphy's law hasn't kicked in once?