Brigade XO wrote:For operational security, Manpower probably routinely used cover desitinations for ships Mesa and it's assorted major logistic points in the shipment of genetic slaves. You leave Mesa and go to any one of several places -per the record - but beyond jusing the Visigoth Wormhole to get in that direction, none of the records would be correct.
[there becomes a HUGE challange of payments/allocation of expences for the crews and ships involved because you need some level of accuracy in paying people and subcontractors but it is possible if you work at it]
The actual ship logs would be interesting along with the maintenance records and expenses/receipts for work done/supplies purchased. Same with the transfer of funds for payment of slaves and other things delivered. Again, you can set up multiple sets of records and pray that none of the originals become compromised. Having a slaver captured and not able to obliterate it's actual logs and records is a major concern.
Houdini moves the balance of the people the Alignment considers necessary off to at least Darius. You have to guess that the majority of the Alignment production needs have long since been duplicated or outright moved to Darius and other locations which are now fully staffed.
You don't use Streak Drives between non-Alignment locations where it can be tracked. At worst, you doctor your records to change the departure time and place before you go somewhere. All of that running around in Talbot and related areas does NOT mean giving you actual point of origin (for the inbound) trip to local authorities. When you leave a system- if you tell them where you are going- you head out in the "normal" flight path out of system for the normal route to X but then change once you go to hyper.
While not impossible, tracking back the course of any given ship is going to be a nightmare. Even if they don't have several lies in the officlal logs (and hence local records) you have to either send questions or people back along the track and are probably going to run into some reluctance of local authorities to provide that type of information. Presuming that what they give you- which they got from the ships themselves- was not originaly false.
Recall that the Alignment has at its disposal a lot of people and experience in essentialy smuggleing slaves from point of production to points of sale and thorugh any manner of laberenth of midpoints. Look at what the Houdini plan was doing to get people off Mesa as far as shipping them out to lose them in changes of ships, variations of where they actually went etc.
The gross volumes of records for Manpower and subsidiary/related companies may indicate that there was a lot more production and business going on than can be accounted for in final sales and expences but finding what was actual done is harder. The slaves are not typically going to be trackable to final destination and the payments are going to be laundered.
Besides, even if surviving member of Manpower and related companies knew about various high-security or off the books operations withing those companies, the actual records should be so much plasma and shattered quipment now with few- if any- of the employees alive to be questioned.
Perhaps if Manticore's ONI, with the help of others, gathered years of records of ships emission signatures (combined with the more mundane info such as name/registry/travel history and filed destinations and crew (with positive ID) you MIGHT be able to track down various ships used as slavers or participated in operations (such as Abrasanover-spelling) in the Talbot area plans and get some idea of where they had been as points in time. Putting that together into something usable is more challanging than gathering the info. Seeing a warship in Talbot catching the same emissions off "different" freighters when they are dealing with a very limited number of places and happening to be patroling in the same circuit as their target when they area already concerned with who is showing upis not the same as demanding records from hundreds of star systems and wormhole termini astro control stations then looking for a pattern in emissions and ship traffic.
At this point all the information the Alignment needed to move to Darius is probably there. The remaining/surviving records on Mesa are going to be a gigantic mass of data with mostly holes or gaps where things have been destroyed or just erased (very carefully eraced and covered over) so as wipe the trail as if it had never been.
I would suspect that ALL of the Oyster Bay ships and weapons were built at Darius. The Alignment would want to have all of it's shipyards plus component manufacture at the Darius system. Even if they were buying parts (normal parts) from places like Mannheim though shell companies and appeared to be little more than people buying spaires or components for ships and stations, they would need to have the bulk of their production FOR EVERYTHING at Darius. Sure, they could have been ordering normal ships from SL locations to build up capacity in things like regular transport but they have to have all the capacity to build, modify, repair and advance the designers at Darius. They might even have a fleet base at one of the systems in the shadow wormhole net rather than at Darius to keep people away from the I-don't-know-I'm-a-slave population of Darius.
I also suspect that by this time, the termini on the shadow side of the wormhole network leading to Darius are getting at least forts along with BC and above sized ships defences and minefield.
Quite an interesting post Brigade XO.
I am interested in the planet Mesa's economic system. I cannot let loose that thread. Which also leads me back to something in which I've always been curious.
Considering how present day business works with all of the various entities that must receive fiscal year earnings reports, it seems that many financial records for decades upon decades are floating around that were not slagged by the MAlign. These fiscal year end reports allow checks and balances both to a business's smooth, profitable and legal operation and as a safety net to catch unsavory employees. It also assists government agencies, partners and other organizations in the same.
Surely Mesan businesses does not operate in a vacuum. Consider this...
Manpower should still be a rather powerful entity, with 30 % holdings in Cybercom Inc., a Mesan technology company and Noroguchi Nanotech.
Who holds the other 70 % of Cybercom Inc.? Are there any shares owned by offworld companies or subsidiaries? Does Manpower have any companies in any other systems or own shares thereof? And this brings me to something I've always wondered about in the Honorverse business world. What organization/entity becomes the default checks and balances for businesses. Who catches embezzling schemes? Who audits? Surely there are banking disputes, profit disputes, etc. The IRS does it here on Earth in tandem with other countries' agencies. Is their a Galactic IRS (G-IRS) in the Honorverse? There has to be financial records of Manpower businesses in some entity's hands that couldn't be slagged. In fact, I'm surprised that Manpower hasn't been audited by this entity and the G-IRS, insurance agencies and personal detectives are out looking for the MAlign as well.