Houdini/MA

Annachie wrote:The rushing of Houdini changed it from trying to stop people from looking, to making damn sure there was nothing to find.

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Exactly! Annachie, my supply of gold stars hasn't arrived yet. Will you take a raincheck?

I love the way this woman thinks!

The thing is the manties can guess the alignment is leaving Mesa, so what ever plan the alignment thought the manties would carry out if they visited will be gone. I don't see the alliance ever surrendering the wormhole terminus. Also, the alliance will likely aid the sexiest and slaves into creating a government and society against the alignment.
The alignment likely planned to destroy any data that might reveal the existence of themselves to some one not looking. But to some one aware they are hiding, then they would need o destroy far much more. Their original plan likely would draw them to what they were trying to hide.

cthia wrote:They can't possibly hope to leave an impression that they hadn't disappeared, but could only hope that they were not noisy enough to get caught in the act.

IOW, the jig was up, flee. Quietly, or noisily, the necessity became to simply flee. W/O leaving tire tracks that lead anywhere.

IMO.

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1) If they can't hope to hide the fact they disappeared there's no reason to kill all those people to cover their trail. They would have been better served by simply loading the people onto ships, all that can be hidden is the destination.

2) So long as the GA knows they're out there they're going to keep looking. They have the depths of space to hide in but the GA isn't going to give up and a basically slave society isn't going to be nearly as innovative as a free one.

Jonathan_S wrote:Without Simoes, and the info Jack McBride leaked via him, the GA wouldn't know to begin looking at Mesa. (Except in a cursory manner, as a group that would wish Manticore harm. But they'd pretty quickly get discarded as a viable suspect due to lack of capability).

I disagree. They were already wondering about Mesa before the Simoes incident. Of course they didn't know about the Alignment but eventually they would go have a look at Mesa.

Either they find Mesa wrecked without apparent cause (which says there's still a puppetmaster out there) or they find it intact enough that they figure out it was a puppet, not the puppetmaster.

In either case they know there's a puppetmaster. Simoes only gave them a name and the nanotech assassinations.

Houdini was supposed to ensure that if/when Manticore got around to focusing on Mesa (or knocking them off on general principle to clean up the genetic slave trade) that there would be no loose strings leading from Mesa to the deep onion of the MAlign (or to Darius).
It was supposed to be more of a long term precautionary solution to avoid ever becoming suspicious in the first place.

And had it been done as a long term precautionary move it would have worked. However, the plan was to get out before things got too hot--and that's too late.

However, by the time Oyster Bay was actually executed the Detwillers already knew their secret had partially leaked - so they probably should have rethought Houdini because with Manticore already talking about a long running conspiracy using Mesan Transtellars for cover the chance that Oyster Bay wouldn't lead to so very quick blow-back against Mesa was practically nil.

Actually, I think the cutoff was more likely their meddling in Talbott. Oyster Bay certainly spelled doom for Houdini if it wasn't already dead, though.

Annachie wrote:The rushing of Houdini changed it from trying to stop people from looking, to making damn sure there was nothing to find.

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But the most important thing to find is that there is a hidden group that escaped--and Houdini made that quite clear.

The ones left behind didn't know anything anyway, talking to them would produce nothing more than the knowledge that a group had gone into hiding.

With or without Houdini the GA knows:

1) A group disappeared off Mesa.

2) Mesa shows no signs of the Oyster Bay tech.

Conclusion: There's another base of the scale of an at least moderately colonized planet somewhere.

Leaving the families gives the GA a bunch of names. So what??

Loren Pechtel wrote:

cthia wrote:They can't possibly hope to leave an impression that they hadn't disappeared, but could only hope that they were not noisy enough to get caught in the act.

IOW, the jig was up, flee. Quietly, or noisily, the necessity became to simply flee. W/O leaving tire tracks that lead anywhere.

IMO.

.

1) If they can't hope to hide the fact they disappeared there's no reason to kill all those people to cover their trail. They would have been better served by simply loading the people onto ships, all that can be hidden is the destination.

2) So long as the GA knows they're out there they're going to keep looking. They have the depths of space to hide in but the GA isn't going to give up and a basically slave society isn't going to be nearly as innovative as a free one.

I haven't purchased and read the current book yet.

Again, there's simply no way they can hide the fact that they've disappeared. You don't kill that many people and hang around the scene of the crime.

IMO, the deaths were not so much to mask the fact that they had disappeared (rather than to kill loose lips that can sink other ships). In Hollywood, that is called a professional "cleaning" to tie up loose ends. The MAlign were more interested in killing witnesses, so to speak. But witnesses to "who" and "what" and possibly even "where" they are. Not that many of the people killed knew the dirtiest of the dirt, but taken altogether collectively, a thread here and a thread there adds up and can be rather detrimental to a criminal's overall plans.

Again, the fact that they've disappeared will become quite obvious on its own soon enough. And they certainly couldn't think that anyone, even if it were the retarded League, would be dumb enough to think that the perpetrators of the killings would be psychotic enough to hang around the crime scene. They were trying to protect their "identity" and not the fact that they've flown the coop. You wouldn't kill that many people to accomplish the obvious.

Again, as in Hollywood, this was a cleaning. Hollywood uses "professional" cleaners to erase all evidence, even of the cleaning. Since this was a rush job...

IMO.

Am i the only one who thinks that felix or darius will be revealed when that slaver ship carrying alignement scientists get captured. I bet it would be at parmley station. The ships there while tough need to be dealt with. The alignment can clqim it is all a mqntie conspiracy but a hidden junction and slave world would be next to impossible to explai n away.
the torch bridge was going to be a eilver minr, now a gold mine. Leads to not onky multiple verge locations but the league core.

No SYED, you're not.

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You are going to be _soooo_ disappointed...

Annachie wrote:No SYED, you're not.

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Something has occurred to me. Besides Haven and Manticore, there should be lots of scorned Mesans out for revenge as well, also having been played the fool on the end of a string. The MAlign would have had to deal with them before departure to keep them from gladly volunteering information out of spite - after the fact.

In the aftermath of the disaster, that goes doubly for the scorn. There should have been many a native enemy made on Mesa who will search their diaries, their minds, their hearts and any seemingly incidental "innocent and innocuous" data to assist the GA.

But we haven't heard of any distressed Mesans as of yet???

They should feel really slighted — used, abused and handily discarded like so much unwanted trash.