What's Next?

Haven has a lot of ship construction capability spread over a dozen or more systems. Bolthole is the one that hasn't yet been located.

There was a very large subplot in CoG that didn't really go anywhere - that ofvthge escape of Zach to MAlign planet. I suspect that they forgot that the increased traffic though one station is going to be a pointer to their new planet. The only question is when the GA will put the pieces together.

fallsfromtrees wrote:There was a very large subplot in CoG that didn't really go anywhere - that ofvthge escape of Zach to MAlign planet. I suspect that they forgot that the increased traffic though one station is going to be a pointer to their new planet. The only question is when the GA will put the pieces together.

Concur. And situated between Anton's research on Mesa showing people leaving and the RTN reports is a very, very smart Princess....

Some people have already given the next book its own tentative "fan-title" ... 'Honor amidst Chaos' (someone please correct me if I am wrong). Given this and my own theories the book will most likely feature several of the following plot lines and lead-on's:

1) Summarizing the events of Cauldron of Ghosts, the Mesan Seccy uprising, and Mike Henkes fleets arrival >> leading to the realization that the Alignment has run off.

2) An all out open galaxy-wide hunt for Manpower and other Mesan connected people/equipment/money/resources, in hopes of finding an MA connection.

3) The Succession of Beowulf from the Solarian League, and the Mandarins response to it >> Potentially involving a very unwise military action on the SLN's part (and the MA getting involved too).

4) The investigation of Al-Fudanni and his co-conspirators in the SLN's intelligence department >> potentially uncovering the MA's involvement with Rajampet and the Manti/Sollie conflict.

5) The growing rebellion and uprisings in the Verge and Shell, both egged on by the MA and those kicking off on their own >> Possibily leading to the identification and capture of 'Firebrand'.

6) The beginning of the next stage of the Mesans plan involving sowing chaos in the the Leagues core worlds and encouraging further breakups in wake of Beowulfs departure. >> Concluding with the launch of the Renaissance Factor.

7) The arrival on Darius of Zack MacBryde and a potential spread of dissatisfaction within the Alignments lower ranks?

Let me know if I have missed any other major potential plot lines.

Valen123456 wrote:Some people have already given the next book its own tentative "fan-title" ... 'Honor amidst Chaos' (someone please correct me if I am wrong). Given this and my own theories the book will most likely feature several of the following plot lines and lead-on's:

*raises hand* I know I suggested that title, but there are at least a dozen or more floating around (there is a thread I'm too lazy tochase down with those speculative names, IIRC....

1) Summarizing the events of Cauldron of Ghosts, the Mesan Seccy uprising, and Mike Henkes fleets arrival >> leading to the realization that the Alignment has run off.

I suspect we'll pick it up with Mike Henke reviewing things with Victor and Anton, thus dodging all the interesting but page-consuming stuff in-between.

2) An all out open galaxy-wide hunt for Manpower and other Mesan connected peopee, equipment/money /resources, in hopes of finding an MA connection.

Most certainly.

3) The Succession of Beowulf from the Solarian League, and the Mandarins response to it >> Potentially involving a very unwise military action on the SLN's part (and the MA getting involved too).

IMHO, I think a lot of that will be off-camera, i.e., we'll learn about the "Battle of Beowulf" and it's repercussions from discussion held aftr the fact. If the MWW wants to finish in a couple of books, he's going to have to compress things somewhere....

4 The investigation of Al-Fudanni and his co-conspirators in the SLN's intelligence department >> potentially uncovering the MA's involvement with Rajampet and the Manti/Sollie conflict.

That and possibly much, much more....if they aren't killed off, as the MWW is wont to do...

5) The growing rebellion and uprisings in the Verge and Shell, both egged on by the MA and those kicking off on their own >> Possibily leading to the identification and capture of 'Firebrand'.

Agreed, we'll get the 'flavor' of those, and I do hope to find out how Indiana Graham and his sister/Floyd Allenby and his clan fare, but how much will be given over to them we'll have to see. And 'Firebrand' still doesn't know (as of the close of CoG) that the Manites have taken Meyers....which may cause an 'oops' by him.

6) The beginning of the next stage of the Mesans plan involving sowing chaos in the the Leagues core worlds and encouraging further breakups in wake of Beowulfs departure. >> Concluding with the launch of the Renaissance Factor.

I think we can take it as a guarantee that this will be in the next book--might even get a reveal of who (if any) is the MAligment mole in the mandarins (my money is on Abruzzi).

7) The arrival on Darius of Zack MacBryde and a potential spread of dissatisfaction within the Alignments lower ranks?

Interesting. We shall have to see.

Let me know if I have missed any other major potential plot lines.

I think there will be at least some combat action, perhaps the attack on Yildun other actions, and GA/SDF interactions (mainly "we have no quarrel with you, so if you stay at home and protect your system and don't play with the SLN, we won't shoot your nuts off).

And perhaps some scenes of SEM/RH/Grayson units working together (albeit uncomfortably at the start) as the GA begins to take hold.

Anyway you look at it, if RFC plans to comeplete this arc in two more books as he's planning, the stories will bave to be fast-paced and action-filled to cover the ground.

I can't wait (but I must).

The Alignment was pulling several thousand people out of Mesa in Houdini. I don't see them running them all through that station where McBride landed for a while.

Yes, there will be indications of where some of these ships went but there is NOTHING to say that the actual next place any of these ships go will be in a list or a database anywhere.

I suspect that most of the initial and then randomly more at each ships scheduled stops will be to make transfers of slaves (and some of the Houdini people) to other ships but eventually there will be a rendezvous involving any/most of the Houdini people with a ship that does not involve a system or station, just a point in space as a drop to take them onward.

Darius is way too important to the Alignment for any of the sets of non-Alignment crewed ships to go there. There is also the difficulty that we have been shown Houdini people put on slave ships and unless the Alignment is going to just kill all those slaves (and possibly the crews) they are not going to take them to Darius. Remember that the vast majority of the population of Darius are "slaves" that don't have any idea or even the concept that they are slaves. Much more likely that the live cargo on those slave ships are going somewhere they have been ordered or just sold off to intermediate slave trader. That will further muddy the trails since it will be next to impossible to track the "un-named supercargo" as these ships go off in multiple directions.

It is also quite possible that some sizable number of the Houdini people are not going to Darius but to other places either within the RF or just another unknown Alignment planet.

Hutch wrote:

Valen123456 wrote:3) The Succession of Beowulf from the Solarian League, and the Mandarins response to it >> Potentially involving a very unwise military action on the SLN's part (and the MA getting involved too).

IMHO, I think a lot of that will be off-camera, i.e., we'll learn about the "Battle of Beowulf" and it's repercussions from discussion held aftr the fact. If the MWW wants to finish in a couple of books, he's going to have to compress things somewhere....

Seems likely. Especially since the SLN shouldn't have any new tech.

So the "Battle of Beowulf" might be as anticlimactic as "Beowulf's SD ordered the SL units to withdraw or surrender, when they refused the Terminus picket microjumped behind them and make a demonstration Apollo strike from beyond the hyper limit... The survivors surrendered"

Not really worthy of screen time. (And even if there's another nanotech suicide idiot that's well enough established that we don't need the on-screen repeat of Fileretta's bridge, that can be another sentence or two of after the fact discussion "Can't imagine why they were crazy enough to...")

Nanotech 'suicide' could also lead to the complete trashing of the Beowulf planetary surface and/or orbital manufacturing. I thought it was a pretty telling plot point that the system defense pods they were going to set up in huge numbers weren't in place yet... a pretty obvious Checkov's Gun there.

It would be hugely in the MA's favor for a SL fleet to cause an Eridani violation against Beowulf. The obvious 'lets stick it Beowulf' is the least of them, though perhaps the most viscerally satisfying for Detweiller and co. It would shock even the core worlds establishments and get them thinking the Mandarin-run central government might not be the sanest or safest thing to have running the show anymore, and it would hasten the Verge and Shell going up in flames.

We've already seen that scene played out in Yawata, though, so I'm hoping the Mad Wizard uses something like this to show us the first real failure of the nanotech. It's worked almost too well so far... given the required simplicity of the trigger event and subsequent muscle memory instructions, it's got to mis-fire somewhere.

I think it highly unlikely at this point that Zack McBride will EVER arrive at Darius.

Recall that the captain of the quasi-independent slaver he is on does not know the rest of Zack's multiple cutout evac route, in fact does not even know that it is an "evac" trip. He probably doesn't even know who Zack's next conductor is supposed to be, just a destination...maybe. He may only know that Zack's 'minder' was going to take them off at one of the slaver's stops...unspecified.

Further recall that at this point it is highly unlikely that Zack and his companion even WANT to continue to their original intended destination.

They probably don't know with clarity what that destination is, other than "new Mesan Alignment center of operations" or "Mesan Alignment secret relocation base". From context we can be pretty sure that THEY do not know who their next contact/conveyance on their 'underground railway' is supposed to be.

They probably DO have a pretty good sense of what will happen to them if they are ever handed off to any MAlign rep with any authority within the evac plan. They have to figure, once they come down from gibbering, that just the fact that their original minder had decided that they were now disposable is likely to be a continuing dead warrant.

And they will be right. Any MAlign security op overseeing portions of the evac will consider that just the fact that their passage plan was so corrupted/screwed up is inherently a threat to the overall op. Heck, they killed hundreds of thousands (millions?) of minor 'friendlies' to make the cover of this op impenetrable. Since they will not have perfect knowledge of what exactly went down with this scrap of the plan, they will burn off the dangling threads ruthlessly.

If that slaver ship is not interned somewhere (like Parmlee Station, perhaps?), it is going to have a fatal accident after its next port of call. I am waiting to see just how Zack and Gail get off the ship, if they do, and whether they end up on Parmlee, Beowulf, Erewhon, Torch, or Smoking Frog.

dreamrider

NervousEnergy wrote:Nanotech 'suicide' could also lead to the complete trashing of the Beowulf planetary surface and/or orbital manufacturing. I thought it was a pretty telling plot point that the system defense pods they were going to set up in huge numbers weren't in place yet... a pretty obvious Checkov's Gun there.

It would be hugely in the MA's favor for a SL fleet to cause an Eridani violation against Beowulf. The obvious 'lets stick it Beowulf' is the least of them, though perhaps the most viscerally satisfying for Detweiller and co. It would shock even the core worlds establishments and get them thinking the Mandarin-run central government might not be the sanest or safest thing to have running the show anymore, and it would hasten the Verge and Shell going up in flames.

We've already seen that scene played out in Yawata, though, so I'm hoping the Mad Wizard uses something like this to show us the first real failure of the nanotech. It's worked almost too well so far... given the required simplicity of the trigger event and subsequent muscle memory instructions, it's got to mis-fire somewhere.

nitpic:
There is no textev that the SD missile pods are not in place yet. Honor is specifically worried that the Mycroft CONTROL SYSTEM is not in place yet.

I agree that an EE violation of Beowulf, attributable to the SLN, would probably be in the MAlign/RF favor as far as accelerating the breakup of the League that they want, especially with the systems that they have 'prepped' as RF amalgamation targets. However, they don't need anything fancy for that. Just an SLN TF in system, and a missile pod dropped way out by a Shark for the contingency. No one is going to be stopping a clutch of .9+c missiles coming in ballistic from roughly the vector of the SLN TF.

The GA command will probably know that it wasn't the SLN, the surviving Beowulf gov't will probably know, the SLN TF command staff will know (if they survive the adventure), but it won't matter insofar as the impact on Solarian League populace and political blocks opinions are concerned.

However, I am not convinced that, given the changes that have occurred in the political landscape (mainly, the formation and solidification of the GA) that such an attack will now be viewed by the MAlign as an optimal lever to pull. It might actually accelerate the break-up TOO FAST, and push significant SL elements that the MAlign want to gain control of toward the GA. Albrecht might want it, and the ship might be in place, but if so I wouldn't be surprised to see Benjamin and Colin (who, after all, are more rational than their father) talk him out of it.

dreamrider