Mission of Honor eARC - is Sandra Crandall's death missing?

WRT the recorders, there's an unfounded assumption here: that she died within the area covered by the recorders. There's nothing in the text to indicate that that was the case. To me, the lack of witnesses suggests that it was not on the bridge, since the only way to hide there is to crawl under one of the consoles. I'd be rather surprised if her staff didn't take note of their admiral doing that, and at least mention it to someone. [Come to think of it, Crandall being described as a rather large person, she might have had trouble hiding under a console anyway.] It may be that the bridge was open to vacuum, but that's the only way they would have been unaware of any shots being fired. Not even StateSec recorded what was going on on every square metre of deck space.

One thing that is certain is that however she died, Crandall's passing was part of the Alignment's after-action tidying up - it was made very clear that she was not to be able to answer any questions about how she came to be where she was when she was. Ditto for Filareta, but in his case it was possible to arrange for an appropriate amount of bloodshed to accompany his exit. Although it occurs to me that unless the entire ship was blown up somebody was taking a huge chance on setting that bomb off on his flag bridge: there was no guarantee that the ship would take damage that would explain the destruction. And if you were going to blow the ship, why blow the bridge first?

munroburton wrote:Crandall's is one of the most perplexing deaths in the Honorverse thus far, as flag bridge recordings(which both the RMN and PRN maintained) appeared to be unavailable and us readers weren't provided with a direct scene.

All we know is she was shot through the back of her head with her own sidearm. It's possible this was done through nanite programming to somehow implicate her flag staff or cause command confusion as Tenth Fleet's missiles struck - but those recordings(and witnesses) should still show her doing it to herself in the former case and in the latter, a shot to the side of her head would have been far less questionable. Perhaps the nanites did not prevent Crandall turning her face away from the gun.

Or one of the crew drew on her, demanded her weapon and shot her with it.

Being a decent playwright (who didn't release for various but good reasons, mostly economic) this is simply a plot device, and can either be a faux pas or a good one. It's called "offstage".

In theater terms, suppose that in the first part of a scene in a play you hear a gunshot sound effect "backstage right", an actor or actres runs on to the stage from that direction and says character X is dead!

We'd naturally assume gunshot, but it could be that the actor playing character X dropped dead, they were dead but hung by the Phantom, and the gunshot was aimed at the villain, or someone dropped a clapper and it has nothing to do with character X who was strangled whilst choking on baked crispy broccoli delivered at intermission by a Tasmanian Buddhist Hippie. Or maybe the actor running onstage did the deed.


Then later we get the rest of the story.

Louis R wrote:One thing that is certain is that however she died, Crandall's passing was part of the Alignment's after-action tidying up - it was made very clear that she was not to be able to answer any questions about how she came to be where she was when she was. Ditto for Filareta, but in his case it was possible to arrange for an appropriate amount of bloodshed to accompany his exit. Although it occurs to me that unless the entire ship was blown up somebody was taking a huge chance on setting that bomb off on his flag bridge: there was no guarantee that the ship would take damage that would explain the destruction. And if you were going to blow the ship, why blow the bridge first?

If you blow the whole ship everyone sees the ship explode without any incoming fire, that looks very suspicious.

Blowing the bridge screws up their defense, the ship probably dies. I do agree the MAlign took a chance there but not that big a one. Furthermore, they had to blow the bridge at that point otherwise Filareta would have sent the destruct command to the missiles and grabbed the radio and said "Sorry, my ops officer went nuts and flushed the pods without orders!"

Loren Pechtel wrote:If you blow the whole ship everyone sees the ship explode without any incoming fire, that looks very suspicious.

Blowing the bridge screws up their defense, the ship probably dies. I do agree the MAlign took a chance there but not that big a one. Furthermore, they had to blow the bridge at that point otherwise Filareta would have sent the destruct command to the missiles and grabbed the radio and said "Sorry, my ops officer went nuts and flushed the pods without orders!"

Since as it is always possible for a bomb to fail to detonate that would be interesting possibility too. Especially if that ops officer had no other programing and suddenly was able to explain that they had no control over their body when they where entering thous codes.


All sorts of interesting questions would start being asked. Almost all of them MAlign would not have liked being asked.

Hmmm... something that I completely forgot about: unlike Crandall, Filareta's survivors were dealt with entirely off-stage. Which means that we have no idea whether his flagship survived even remotely intact. It could well be that it was rigged to blow, and its destruction attributed to the missile fire it took. The natural assumption would be a golden BB, even if both sides records suggested that it hadn't actually been hit hard enough that it would blow up.

Still risky, even though it's a reasonable assumption that the Manties would shoot back under the circumstances.

pnakasone wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:If you blow the whole ship everyone sees the ship explode without any incoming fire, that looks very suspicious.

Blowing the bridge screws up their defense, the ship probably dies. I do agree the MAlign took a chance there but not that big a one. Furthermore, they had to blow the bridge at that point otherwise Filareta would have sent the destruct command to the missiles and grabbed the radio and said "Sorry, my ops officer went nuts and flushed the pods without orders!"

Since as it is always possible for a bomb to fail to detonate that would be interesting possibility too. Especially if that ops officer had no other programing and suddenly was able to explain that they had no control over their body when they where entering thous codes.


All sorts of interesting questions would start being asked. Almost all of them MAlign would not have liked being asked.

pnakasone wrote:Since as it is always possible for a bomb to fail to detonate that would be interesting possibility too. Especially if that ops officer had no other programing and suddenly was able to explain that they had no control over their body when they where entering thous codes.


All sorts of interesting questions would start being asked. Almost all of them MAlign would not have liked being asked.

We don't seem to have much in the way of technological malfunctions in the modern-day Honorverse.

Louis R wrote:Hmmm... something that I completely forgot about: unlike Crandall, Filareta's survivors were dealt with entirely off-stage. Which means that we have no idea whether his flagship survived even remotely intact. It could well be that it was rigged to blow, and its destruction attributed to the missile fire it took. The natural assumption would be a golden BB, even if both sides records suggested that it hadn't actually been hit hard enough that it would blow up.

Still risky, even though it's a reasonable assumption that the Manties would shoot back under the circumstances.

IIRC, there is textev somewhere that SLNS Philip Oppenheimer(Filareta's flagship) was destroyed with all hands during the battle.

It's unclear whether there was a second component to the MAlign sabotage - they could have set one of the fusion reactors to blow as soon as enemy fire hit, for example.

as RFC showed us the planting of the bomb on the flag bridge do you think he would have the reactors rigged to blow without telling us?

these little details are not the sort of thing he often leaves out

Loren Pechtel wrote:Blowing the bridge screws up their defense, the ship probably dies. I do agree the MAlign took a chance there but not that big a one. Furthermore, they had to blow the bridge at that point otherwise Filareta would have sent the destruct command to the missiles and grabbed the radio and said "Sorry, my ops officer went nuts and flushed the pods without orders!"

Filareta was on the flag bridge, not the ship's bridge. Unless the sensor sharing and fire allocation functions of the division/squadron/fleet tactical network all went through the fleet flag bridge, having the flag bridge blow up should not adversely affect the ship's defense.

Dauntless wrote:as RFC showed us the planting of the bomb on the flag bridge do you think he would have the reactors rigged to blow without telling us?

these little details are not the sort of thing he often leaves out

And yet he didn't show us Crandall's death.

I was speculating as to what arrangements the MAlign might have made in case the GA specifically exempted Filareta's flagship from return fire. From Manticore's perspective, attempting to take him prisoner and stick him with responsibility for killing 11th Fleet's personnel isn't a bad idea - not to mention the data aboard the flagship's computers(and Byng's task force was surrendered without a data purge) and any interrogation of Filareta himself would be a bonus.

Obviously, the MAlign dealt with that last possibility firmly. But had Manticore captured SLNS Oppenheimer intact? Recordings would show Filareta about to surrender, then his ops officer fires the pods, then Filareta reacting to that before the cut-off. Any engineer would identify the damage to the flag bridge as caused by a bomb immediately. ONI would pick over Filareta's orders, received messages and fleet files - perhaps even discovering what the doomed Admiral did: that his missiles came from Mesa.

Consider the effect of that evidence dropped onto Kolokeltsev's desk. And followed up by media and public release.