I'm curious about that, too. Very curious.
Actually, what I'm curious about is whether Damien Harahap will die under interrogation. I'm confident that John Q. Malignop would. Damien, though, may not be as prepped as he's assuming himself.
The devil, as they say, is in the details - and it just so happens that one detail surfaced in a discussion on the subject of Damien. Between Colin and his father, as it happens. To whit: the suicide nanotech, like the assassination tech, has to be gene coded [In fact, I suspect they are the same or closely related]. Now, Colin thinks it was implanted, but Damien was told he had to come back for some 'medical' nanos that had to be DNA coded for him. Given just how sensitive Gamma Centre was, nobody would be inviting him for a return visit if they didn't absolutely have to. Most certainly not just to provide better medical support to an outsider. Add to that the fact that, assuming the medical nanos are genuine and distinct from the suicide protocol nanos, I can't see any good reason why they'd take longer to program than the suicide set, requiring a second visit to start with, and I'm seriously wondering what was, and wasn't, implanted on that visit.
I'm confident that the delay was reported to Isobel, but would Chernyshev hear? She'd be the one making any decisions, so the medics would probably have gone straight to her - and not have confused Chernyshev with details he didn't particularly need to know at that point. It seems that Isobel was in enough of a rush to have Damien taken to the Gamma Centre to begin with - he may be the only non-member ever allowed into the place - and
that could mean that she was pushing hard enough to let him off-planet without the full set in place. Particularly if, as seems very likely, he was in the care of an _MAN_ crew with instructions to bring him back with his shield or on it.
McGuiness wrote:I'm curious whether the Mesan nannites they check during his periodic doctor visits will kill him if he's interrogated. After all, he could save the GA a lot of time simply by telling them which systems he was working in.
And the nanotech IS a killer. It's possible that everyone inside the onion has been injected with it, so they're always on a countdown to death... Certainly all the agents working on "Final Flourish" had been injected with a lethal nanotech.
"He [Chernyshev]found it fitting that Marinescu herself had seen to the elimination of virtually all of her Final Flourish operatives. The ones she hadn’t shuffled off to the nuclear fireballs of the “evacuation centers” to await the shuttles that would never come would die of a plethora of “natural causes” when their nanotech didn’t receive its next reset signal."Harahap has also been a somewhat unhappy savior of a few star systems who rebelled and won their independence, including the one where he couldn't get off planet before the balloon went up. Of course most of those revolutions would have failed without a Mantie squadron showing up overhead. OFS killed millions in one of his failed revolutions, but the rebels were less than a
week from succeeding. One more arms shipment would have turned the tables.
The people in the OFS who targeted cities and towns and pushed the buttons to drop KEWs on them deserve to go up against the wall. Plus all of their commanding officers on the ships. And the officials in the planetary government who sent for OFS aid. Come to think of it, pretty much the entire OFS from top to bottom needs to go. Stop accepting surrenders and blow them away in their ships without a court martial. Had Captain Tremaine seen what OFS did to a few places where they'd been requested to help end revolutions, I bet he wouldn't have merely blown up one ship!
Yeah, Harahap lied about Manticore helping, but he gave most of the planets he worked with enough help that with just a bit more luck or time, they'd have succeeded, and some of them did.
He's dead no matter what, so I just hope he spills his guts before his nanotech does it for him!
