Reflecting Upon RTH -- SPOILER THREAD

brnicholas wrote:My thinking is mul Gurthak was out here because he had hit the glass ceiling that stops everyone but Andaran aristocrats from rising to senior rank. Harshu was out here because his political ineptness was preventing him from rising any higher.

PeterZ wrote:Drindel won't make out of Tajvana. Imperial Security will find him pretty quickly.

I wondered why the rest of the Uromathain assassination team let him live. His was a weak talent and slow intellect. Drindel was a witness that the murderers of the Seneschal were not Arcanan. He is Uromathian and knows the others on the assassination team are also Uromathian. Why let him live? When he is found by Imperial Security, Andrin will know the Seneschal's partner was likely Chava.

As things stand the Ternaithians have been pretty civilized and forgiving about things. After the near success of the assassination of the Emporer, the gloves come off. If Chava is considered the author of that attempt, he will die one way or another. We know Chava has been keeping military units available in Sharona. That won't be enough to keep him alive.

Text suggests that the Uromathian Empire will disintegrate upon Chava's death. That bit of supposition might or might no be right. It does suggest that any transition away from a Chava led government would be chaotic and bloody. Current government officials would see the end of Chava's reign as the likely end of their comfortable(mostly) lives.

If they are confronted with a Ternaithian led Sharonan Empire demanding Chava's head for the attempted assassination of the Emperor, how will those Uromathian officials jump? Will they facilitate the Empire's attempt to peacefully transition the Uromathian Empire away from the Busar dynasty? Will they fight tooth and nail to resist such a move? We don't know. What we do know is if the Sharonan Empire want's Chava's head they will get it one way or another. Those in the Uromathian Empire's leadership will know that too.

Which brings the original question I posed back in full force. Why let Drindel live?

Astelon wrote:Two things about the lack of any checks and balances: 1) the time delay in communicating with the government would likely make any such system unusable, and attempting to use it could court disaster. 2) Checks and balances are not something you normally find within a military formation. The people higher have to provide it, and in this case they are to far away (point 1).

n7axw wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Drindel won't make out of Tajvana. Imperial Security will find him pretty quickly.

I wondered why the rest of the Uromathain assassination team let him live. His was a weak talent and slow intellect. Drindel was a witness that the murderers of the Seneschal were not Arcanan. He is Uromathian and knows the others on the assassination team are also Uromathian. Why let him live? When he is found by Imperial Security, Andrin will know the Seneschal's partner was likely Chava.

As things stand the Ternaithians have been pretty civilized and forgiving about things. After the near success of the assassination of the Emporer, the gloves come off. If Chava is considered the author of that attempt, he will die one way or another. We know Chava has been keeping military units available in Sharona. That won't be enough to keep him alive.

Text suggests that the Uromathian Empire will disintegrate upon Chava's death. That bit of supposition might or might no be right. It does suggest that any transition away from a Chava led government would be chaotic and bloody. Current government officials would see the end of Chava's reign as the likely end of their comfortable(mostly) lives.

If they are confronted with a Ternaithian led Sharonan Empire demanding Chava's head for the attempted assassination of the Emperor, how will those Uromathian officials jump? Will they facilitate the Empire's attempt to peacefully transition the Uromathian Empire away from the Busar dynasty? Will they fight tooth and nail to resist such a move? We don't know. What we do know is if the Sharonan Empire want's Chava's head they will get it one way or another. Those in the Uromathian Empire's leadership will know that too.

Which brings the original question I posed back in full force. Why let Drindel live?

I was interested in Drindel primarily as a link between Chava and the assassination attempt. I hope you're right about him being apprehended.

As for your question, Drindel is in a horrible situation. Once the summons comes from Chava, he can't survive refusing the summons. In fact I see no path for him to survive at all. Either the assassination attempt succeeds or it doesn't. In either event Drindel is killed to cover Chava's tracks. About all he has left is try to get away clean which as you point out is doubtful.

Don

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n7axw wrote:The thing that I find myself thinking is in terms of the decision to attack is that the buck doesn't really stop with Harshu. It stops with mul Gurthak. Not only is he Harshu's senior officer, but he was governor of the region where the encounter with the Sharonions occurred as well. He was the one to set the conditions of the attack, send out the diplomats and then set the diplomacy up to fail and when that was judged to happen, the stage is set. The stage was for Arcana, by the way, not Sharona.

What I am struggling with is the notion of a chain of command without any checks and balances. To be sure in the event of a real attack, mul Gurthak had to defend his area of responsibility. But he had gotten the Sharonians to stand down for negotiations. At that point mul Gurthak should have had to kick the whole situation up stairs to Portalis who then should have sent someone out with the authority of the Union and the commandery to confer with mul Gurthak and Harshu as well as treat with Sharona. My point is that such procedure apparently did not exist, leaving mul Gurthak free to follow his own fancy without any acccountability.

Don

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Howard T. Map-addict wrote:Don,

Yes,
mul Gurthak ought to have passed the buck inwards to
the next level of Authority, as soon as ever he could.

Instead, he stole the buck!!
He literally and figuratively stole it.
I repeat, mul Gurthak took that buck into his own hands,
and used it for (what he deemed to be)
Council Of Twelve purposes.

Whatever Procedures existed in the Arcanan Outworlds
Military, mul Gurthak violated them and did what he
thought that the Council Of Twelve would want him to
do (*In His Own On-the-spot Opinion*)!

In so doing, he ended a deception that he had carried
on since he had learned to think. I have written of
this upthread. So has MIl-tech Bard.

Mul Garthak was not "free to follow his own fancy"
as far as any open Arcanan authority knew.
He rebelled against that authority,
betrayed it,
and took the whole Council of Twelve into that betrayal.
In doing so, he risked the cover, the Deep Cover,
of all the other Council of Twelve agents now on duty.

He began this betrayal before Osmuna saw a Sharonan.

My Map-addict's Deduction is:
The Council Of Twelve had already started to play its
hand, even at the price of revealing that it has one!

But that doesn't prove anything,
except about me and my deductions.
The Authors might be moving the story otherwise.

HTM

n7axw wrote:My question here is do you see any guidelines here which would direct Mul Gurthak to direct the matter to his superiors rather than making the decision on his own? That is really what I'm grumping about.

Otherwise I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis.

Don

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brnicholas wrote:

n7axw wrote:My question here is do you see any guidelines here which would direct Mul Gurthak to direct the matter to his superiors rather than making the decision on his own? That is really what I'm grumping about.

Otherwise I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis.

Don

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I didn't see any guideline in the first two books that would have directed Mul Gurthak to direct the matter to his superiors rather than making the decision on his own. However, I wouldn't expect Mul Gurthak or his accomplices to be worrying about such guidelines, if they existed. So I wouldn't expect to have heard about them.

So the proper question would be, are their guideline that should have told Harshu the orders he understood himself to have received from Mul Gurthak were out of line and ought to be disobeyed?

There appear not to have been. Since Mul Gurthak had manipulated Harshu into believing that the Sharonans were occupying Arcanan territory, holding Arcanan prisoners, and using the negotiations to buy time so they could prepare another attack on Arcana I don't think there were. Given the communications delays the Arcanans have to deal with I don't see them having written orders prohibiting the local commander from launching a preemptive attack as a way of protecting his command and Arcanan interests. (That is what Harshu understood himself to be doing, as crazy as that is.)

Whether or not they should have had such orders is a more general question about the moral validity of the mindset of Arcanan society which I am not interested in discussing again.

Nicholas

n7axw wrote:
Yeah. And in RTH, the issue would have been raised in Portalis had guidelines been an issue. With reference to the attack itself, the question raised is more, "what do the idiots think they're doing?" rather than complaining about regs being violated. By way if contrast, with reference to torture and the killing of the voices, the Korellian Accords are brought up. It was the contrast here that got me to thinking about it.

Don

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PeterZ wrote:

n7axw wrote:
Yeah. And in RTH, the issue would have been raised in Portalis had guidelines been an issue. With reference to the attack itself, the question raised is more, "what do the idiots think they're doing?" rather than complaining about regs being violated. By way if contrast, with reference to torture and the killing of the voices, the Korellian Accords are brought up. It was the contrast here that got me to thinking about it.

Don

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More than just "what do those idiots think they are doing?", Don.

Howard's point is dead on. These are colonels and majors prosecuting a war and setting Union foreign policy with another multi-universal empire. Mul Gurthak is effectively a senior colonel who holds the post of governor for a string a sparsely settled universes at the a$$ end of nowhere. Seriously, these are people that are young but up and coming or senior but unable to rise above the glass ceiling. In other words, the leadership fighting the war don't have the chops as their superiors view things to make it back where things truly matter, Arcana and Portalis.

Even so, why hasn't a set of more suitable commanders been sent to take over? That's really boggles the mind. The Union of Arcana is letting their second string wannabe's run the show and commit the entire Union to a course of action. No mention of replacements have been made.