Spoilers - Thoughts concerning the revelations of St Kody

Pardon if this has been mentioned before.

Looking at the info on Seijin Kody and the War Against the Fallen, something hit me. Please follow the bouncing ball of illogic.

1) The rebels had hidden industrial units
2) The rebels used armed servitors built at said units
3) The Archangels built armed servitors to combat the rebel's units
4) The Archangels believed they destroyed all the rebel industrial units and servitors, and won the war.

and later...

5) Seijin Dailid Mab used armed servitors in raids on the church.

My Thoughts:

1) Obviously Langhorn et al was never trusted by the military portion of the crew. Alexandria was supposed to be the official knowledge enclave. Either another, hidden enclave was established, or the military crews independently stashed weapons and industrial units in the event they would be needed. Either of which suggests an EXTREMELY deep rift in the crews from before the planet was founded.

2) Whoever wins a war (or battle) usually has troops at the end of it - in this case, ARMED robotic servitors. Chances are, somewhere there is a repository of for a robotic army - unless there were destroyed with the Hamilcar.

3) No military leader places all their eggs in 1 basket. chances are the Archangels built multiple industrial plants to back the Hamilcar. Of course they were not military minds, but someone had to bring up the point that the Hamilcar was the weak link in the Church's military strategy and a dispersed industrial plant would be safer. So, there is a possibility there is/was a Church industrial plant on the planet.

4) Were all the rebel industrial facilities/servitors destroyed - or were all the rebels killed? One does not equal the other, and without the rebels, the chances are any surviving industrial plant and/or the army it built merely shut down in place due to no orders. And if they could ever be hidden from the Church's sensors, a powered down facility surely could last a millennia in slumber.

Theemile wrote:Pardon if this has been mentioned before.

Looking at the info on Seijin Kody and the War Against the Fallen, something hit me. Please follow the bouncing ball of illogic.

1) The rebels had hidden industrial units
2) The rebels used armed servitors built at said units
3) The Archangels built armed servitors to combat the rebel's units
4) The Archangels believed they destroyed all the rebel industrial units and servitors, and won the war.

and later...

5) Seijin Dailid Mab used armed servitors in raids on the church.

My Thoughts:

1) Obviously Langhorn et al was never trusted by the military portion of the crew. Alexandria was supposed to be the official knowledge enclave. Either another, hidden enclave was established, or the military crews independently stashed weapons and industrial units in the event they would be needed. Either of which suggests an EXTREMELY deep rift in the crews from before the planet was founded.

Yeah, that deep rift can be taken as a given. Langhorne and Bedard's surprise redirection of human history and megalomania can't have made a lot of friends. Pei Kau-yung may have distanced himself from Shan-wei and played along with Langhorne, but I'm confident that his junior officers shared his sentiments and clued in on his signals without having to be told anything.

There's a third option here though: in the chaos of the period right after Kau-yung's thermonuclear office meeting, the military and police forces and other rebels moved assets out of sight. The blast itself and various civil disturbances would offer a lot of cover for things being "destroyed", and the records of what and where they were lost. (Same with personnel, for those needed to go underground to operate it.)

I doubt another effective hidden enclave was established. Alexandria wasn't small, and the rebels would have had to split their resources dangerously trying both to fight the War and to set up and hide a working Alexandria 2.0. And if they had, I think it would have made an appearance by now, unless maybe it's petered out into "merely" another secret society ushering along change as best it could.

2) Whoever wins a war (or battle) usually has troops at the end of it - in this case, ARMED robotic servitors. Chances are, somewhere there is a repository of for a robotic army - unless there were destroyed with the Hamilcar.

That's entirely plausible: they were trying to fight the war so as to allow the bystanders to frame it as demons, angels, people assisted by demons, and seijins. Leftovers in operation, or available to be found and studied later, would have thrown a terrible spanner in the works.

3) No military leader places all their eggs in 1 basket. chances are the Archangels built multiple industrial plants to back the Hamilcar. Of course they were not military minds, but someone had to bring up the point that the Hamilcar was the weak link in the Church's military strategy and a dispersed industrial plant would be safer. So, there is a possibility there is/was a Church industrial plant on the planet.

It's not exactly a "Church" one in that case - it'd've been Chihiro's. And if it's supposed to be safe, putting it on the planet would have been the last option one would have wanted. With the Hamilcar and (presumably) the earliest stages of the current OBS, space is their's and Safehold was the site of conflict. Slap that thing on the moon, build up your orbital infrastructure, mine asteroids. Locating it on the planet would be creating something you would have to destroy before any of the bystanders saw it, and something the other side could get at to destroy prematurely.

And, if they did put it on the planet, again, they'd've destroyed it thoroughly. If it's something they could be sure would be forever safe from Safehold's eyes and tinkerers, it may have been left as a resource for the Thing in the Basement, but that'd be something off-planet.

4) Were all the rebel industrial facilities/servitors destroyed - or were all the rebels killed? One does not equal the other, and without the rebels, the chances are any surviving industrial plant and/or the army it built merely shut down in place due to no orders. And if they could ever be hidden from the Church's sensors, a powered down facility surely could last a millennia in slumber.

It might. On the other hand, Chihiro and his followers would be using every sensor they could deploy and a lot of effort to make sure the job was done before decommissioning their seijins, packing up shop, and shutting down all the suspect stuff with which they themselves fought the war. Given that presumed effort, they may well have actually succeeded in nailing all the industrial facilities the rebels had, along with so much of the rebels themselves that it really did die out without issue lingering to this day.

I've thought about this one a bit. There is probably another industrial module in the basement of the Temple beside what we have in Nimue's cave.

Also, the industrial modules the Fallen had were scattered around. So it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility for Chihiro's people to have missed one and for there to be another secret society protecting it.

Don

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n7axw wrote:I've thought about this one a bit. There is probably another industrial module in the basement of the Temple beside what we have in Nimue's cave.

Also, the industrial modules the Fallen had were scattered around. So it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility for Chihiro's people to have missed one and for there to be another secret society protecting it.

Don

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We know there are robotic servitors in the Temple - what if they are the remnants of the Church's army - and the surprise in the basement can switch their programming back to their use in the war against the fallen.

Theemile wrote:1) ... Alexandria was supposed to be the official knowledge enclave. ...

Quibble: Alexandria was planned as one of two technology repositories. Zion was the other, IIRC.

There was a mention of the war ending with "demons" retreating to their fastnesses in the Mountains of Desolation. That's tantalizingly different from saying they were wiped out.

Space-based assets are utterly plausible. We know of one already. Logically there should be a spare-parts factory for it.

Expert snuggler wrote:There was a mention of the war ending with "demons" retreating to their fastnesses in the Mountains of Desolation. That's tantalizingly different from saying they were wiped out.

It is, but that last report was from near the end of the war, not THE end. I don't think they quit fighting after Kohdy's Last Interview, or with the demons merely driven back on nasty real estate.

It's another snapshot. We speculate from there, but figuring that they kept fighting til they were satisfied the demons and all their works were dust seems solid.

Space-based assets are utterly plausible. We know of one already. Logically there should be a spare-parts factory for it.

Well - logically, there was. Whether there still is, that's speculative. I figure it's either gone and out of reach, or left around but still out of reach.

That said - the OBS itself likely has indefinitely self-sustaining repair systems, with support to keep them running, all the way down. That is: it's the payload for an entire orbital infrastructure, an automated economy.

And I dearly, dearly hope the maniacs who set it up set up that monster carefully enough that it hasn't ever spawned signals the Gbaba may pick up. I strongly suspect they did, but in their place, if I were sane, I'd've reconsidered the whole horrific plan if the robo-warden involved the least such risk, but then, they weren't sane.

Based on what was revealed in HFQ regarding St. Kohdy and the War Against the Fallen, as well as things that were established in OAR, the War Against the Fallen was essentially a guerrilla campaign, launched against the command crew from a position of inferiority. We now know that it was two years after the destruction of Alexandria and the first command HQ, that the war began which gave the "Fallen" at least some time to prepare. Had Schueler not figured out what was happening - the industrial capacity was being diverted elsewhere for an unknown reason - they might have been able to launch a coup quickly and eliminate the command crew and seize control of Hamilcar. Since they were found out, the rebels had to rely on guerrilla tactics. And at the heart of any such campaign is the struggle over the hearts and minds of the population. They had to hide among the civilian population (that had to be willing to give them shelter) because they knew the command crew would not dare wipe out entire enclaves just to get at two or three rebels. After all, there were only 8 million colonists originally and they were trying to save the human race (not slowly self-destruct).

So we know there was passive resistance at least initially. We also know that the military units under Kau-Yung has served as the planetary police force. So what happens when a lot of trained military personnel, who serve as the police force, decide to rebel against the planetary civil authority? Aside from putting well trained troops against the government, it also creates quite a hole in that government's ability to enforce the law. The Seijin were the command crew's response to this problem and to the passive resistance from the colonists. They were not only the "mortal interface" between the "archangels" and the colonists, they also stepped into the law enforcement roles that had become vacant due to so many defections (and it was probably the way in which they won back the trust of the colonists). Under such conditions, the rebels eventually lost.

Yet there is still that cryptic mention in the Holy Writ about "angelic intervention" in the event of the appearance of demons. There is also the measures Schueler took - the Verifier, the "Key" and his message to his descendants. The biggest threat Schueler and Chihiro had to fear was that they missed a few rebels and one or two industrial modules. They would therefore need to take precautions for such a situation. I doubt they even conceived of the possibility that a PICA was hidden underground and set to activate only 750 T-years after Alexandria - which where I feel the series is going. That and the fact that if and when the "archangels" do return, they will be faced with a radically different situation than the one they faced during the War Against the Fallen.

By the time of their supposed return, Merlin & Co. will have had 25 years to prepare. That's two and a half decades of spreading out Charis' industrial capacity throughout the empire (Housmyn built the Delthak Works in around 5 years) and beyond, graduate an entire generation of children without Schuelerite priests dictating the curriculum, increase the size of the Inner Circle, build additional royal collages, establish a far more righteous church throughout the empire and encourage a mindset (among most Charisians at least) that if the archangels side with the repressive Church of God Awaiting they will reject the archangels. Obviously Merlin would have preferred to have at least a century to work with (and for the old orthodox generation to die out) but he doesn't have that. Yet if the "archangels" awaken and attempt to use the same tactics they used in the War Against the Fallen, they will find a far less pliant population, no available candidates from which to create new "Seijins" who would fight from them, and be forced to consider using the OBS far more than they would have 900 years before. Yet the wholesale massacre of all of Old Charis, while spectacular, would likely fail at getting the people they really wanted to kill and turn the population as a whole against them. And without Seijins to serve as "mortal conduits to the divine", it would be hard to explain why every temple loyalist in Cherayth (for example) had to die just to eliminate the "true sinners".

n7axw wrote:I've thought about this one a bit. There is probably another industrial module in the basement of the Temple beside what we have in Nimue's cave.

Don

There has to be an industrial node in the basement, as well as some presumable stealthy servator units to fix anything that fails in the temple. If a light fails, the thermostat for a room breaks, a door stops working, then something needs to be able to fix it, and I can't imagine there are staff in the Temple who replace and repair parts.

-- Bob G

BobG wrote:

n7axw wrote:I've thought about this one a bit. There is probably another industrial module in the basement of the Temple beside what we have in Nimue's cave.

Don

There has to be an industrial node in the basement, as well as some presumable stealthy servator units to fix anything that fails in the temple. If a light fails, the thermostat for a room breaks, a door stops working, then something needs to be able to fix it, and I can't imagine there are staff in the Temple who replace and repair parts.

-- Bob G

Possibly yes. Though given the advancements in nanotechnology that are implied in the series - Nimue is constructed using nanites, for instance - it stand to reason that the temple's maintenance is handled by nanites, that scurry around its systems, extracting the necessary raw materials from the surface, synthesizing the necessary compounds and effecting repairs at the molecular level. Bigger repairs would probably require some sort of maintenance remote but those would likely be out of sight, beneath the surface.