Eridani Edict Violation of the most Dismissive Kind...

cthia wrote:Jonathan, I think you're mixing the Detweilers. Leonard was the original thinker and in his mind was the whole encompassing centuries old plan conceived. A strategy encompassing centuries is certainly grand. And looking centuries ahead in chess moves is a great strategical thinker, at least. At most, at best. I think my niece is correct in placing him on the top ten strategists list. Albeit Grand Strategy, in her bout with the college students, further expanding "strategy" would not have been feasible. She never insisted on him as a tactician. Leonard never needed tactics. His was the overall design -- strategy. Now Albrecht, he was a horse of a different color. And an argument for him as a tactician may be solid by proxy, since he would have had to authorize every chess move, even those suggested by Anisimovna.

MoH Ch. 35 wrote:"All right," she said. "I take your point. And I won't even try to pretend I don't want to see Emily as badly as she wants to see me. Or as badly as I want to see the kids, for that matter. But I think you're forgetting I can taste mind glows, Hamish."

His eyes darkened, as if shutters had just come down behind them, and her fingers stroked his cheek gently.

"Whatever it is, you can't protect me from it forever," she said very softly.

"I—"

He stopped, looking into her face, then exhaled.

"I know," he said, and she tasted the pain behind the words, the realization that despite how desperately important to him she was, she was also only one of literally millions of people who couldn't be "protected from it forever." Not that realizing that kept him from wishing with all his heart and soul that he could.

"So tell me," she said.

He looked at her a moment longer. She felt him steel himself, felt him gathering himself the way both of them had gathered themselves as missiles began to fly and people under their command began to die.

"Debris from the strike on Vulcan got through to the planet," he said, and his voice was flat, harsh, the words quick and unflinching, offering her the stark honesty of one professional officer to another, now that the moment had finally come. "One of the tugs—the Quay—did her damnedest, but she couldn't catch it all. One of the strikes, a big one, probably up in the multi-hundred thousand-ton range," he looked straight into her eyes, "took out Yawata Crossing, Honor. The entire city."

Someone punched Honor squarely in the chest. She stared at him, literally unable for several seconds to process the information. Then she sucked in a deep, agonized breath, and he reached out to take her face between both his hands and leaned forward until their foreheads touched.

"All three of your aunts," he said, and his voice was soft, now, the voice of her lover and husband, shadowed with his own grief at inflicting this upon her. "Your Uncle Al was away on business, but Jason and Owen were both at home. So"—he inhaled deeply again—"were all the kids. And your cousin Devon, and his wife, and two of the children. Matthias and Frieda. Holly and Eric. Martha." He closed his eyes. "Al is all right—or as close to it as a man can be when his wife and kids are. . . And Devon's daughter Sarah, and your cousin Benedict and cousin Leah, were all away. But the rest were all there. It was your Aunt Claire's birthday, and . . . ."

His voice died, and tears trickled down Honor's cheeks as the list went on and on in her mind, adding the other names. All the names. The Harrington clan was a large one, but most of its members had always lived in and around Yawata Crossing, and family affairs—like birthdays—were important to them. They always gathered for moments like that, all of them who could, and she pictured them there, laughing and teasing the guest of honor as they always did. Her father's sisters, their husbands, their children—their grandchildren. Cousins and in-laws .

"I'm sorry, love," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."

She tasted his love, his shared grief, the pain he felt for her pain and the special guilt he felt for having inflicted it upon her. She knew, now, what monster had ridden his shoulders . . . and why there'd been no mention of collateral damage to Sphinx in any of the official correspondence which had accompanied her recall. Hamish Alexander-Harrington was the First Lord of Admiralty, and whether it had been an abuse of his position or not hadn't really mattered to him. She was not going to learn about something like this through some cold letter or recorded message. No, he'd taken that crushing task upon himself, in person. She knew that now, just as she knew he wasn't done yet.

"Tell me the rest," she said, and her voice was just as harsh as his had been, ribbed with the steely self-control fighting to hold back the darkness.

"Andrew and Miranda were taking Raoul to Claire's party," he said, and her heart seemed to stop. "Your dad and the twins were supposed to be there, too, but there'd been some kind of delay. They were in transit between Manticore and Sphinx when the attack hit. They came through it just fine, and Andrew, Raoul, and Lindsey had swung by your parents' place to pick up your mom. They hadn't gotten to Claire's yet, either, but Miranda—"

He shook his head, and she closed her eyes. Not Miranda, too, God, she prayed. Not Miranda, too!

She heard both 'cats keening their own lament, and a fresh spasm of anguish went through her.

Of course, she thought. Of course Farragut was with her. And no wonder Toby saw to it that Hamish and I could be alone when he told me.

"Andrew?" she heard her own voice ask. "Raoul and Mother?"

The look he gave her filled her with terror. Her own shocked grief and pain threatened to drown the universe, yet even through it, she tasted his mind glow. Knew he would rather have had his own heart ripped out than bring her this news.

"Raoul and your mother are fine," he said quickly, then made a harsh, ugly sound deep in his throat. "Well, as fine as they can be. But they were too close to the Yawata strike. Andrew got the two of them—and Lindsey—punched out in time, and they're all fine, although Lindsey came out of it with a badly broken collarbone. But—"

His hands slid down from her face, and his arms went back around her.

"He ran out of time, love," he whispered. "He got the three of them out, but he and Jeremiah were still in the limo when the blast front hit it."

Honor Alexander-Harrington had forgotten there could be that much pain in the universe. She knew it was a miracle her mother and her son had survived, and she knew she would never be able to express how unspeakably grateful she was for that incredible gift.

Yet that gift came at the price of a dark and personal agony, for it was the last gift, the last miracle, Andrew LaFollet would ever give her. And now, the last—and the most beloved—of her original Grayson armsmen was gone.

I made him Raoul's armsman to keep him safe. To keep him away from me, from the way people keep dying for me. The thought trickled through the tearing anguish. I tried. God, I tried to keep him safe.

But she'd failed. Even then, she knew it wasn't truly her fault, just as she knew that if Andrew had known exactly what was going to happen, he would have done exactly the same thing. That her armsman had died knowing precisely what he was doing and knowing he'd succeeded. That was something. In time, it might actually help her deal with this numbing sense of devastation, but not now. Not yet.

"Your mother insisted that all of them—including your father—go to White Haven, to be with Emily," Hamish's voice went on after a moment from the dark void which surrounded her. "That was her official argument, anyway. Mostly, though . . . Mostly, I think, it was an excuse to get your father away from Yawata Crossing. It wasn't as if there was anything they could have done there, Honor. Not after something like that."

"Of course not." She felt the tears flowing, and the guilt she'd felt before, the sense of failure, was a knife in her heart. "Mother was right. She usually is."

"I know," he said quietly, changing position to pull her face down against his shoulder while Nimitz and Samantha cuddled tightly against her.

"Somehow," she heard herself say, and the steel had gone out of her voice, replaced by dead, defeated flatness, "I never thought about this. Never worried about it—not really. I thought I had, but I know better now. I never really let myself think that it could have happened. That I could have let it happen."

"You didn't!" he said softly, fiercely. "There wasn't one, solitary damned thing you could have done to stop this Honor."

"But we should have. We were supposed to. It's our job, Hamish, and what use are we if we can't even do our jobs?"

Hamish Alexander-Harrington heard the grief, the pain, in that dead soprano voice, and he understood it. Better than he'd ever understood anything in his life, in that moment, he understood exactly what his wife was feeling, for he'd felt it himself. But his arms tightened around her, and he shook his head hard.

"You aren't thinking a single thing I haven't already thought," he told her. "If it was anyone's 'job,' Honor, it was the Admiralty's. So, trust me, love, there's not one single, ugly, hateful thing you can think about yourself that I haven't already thought about myself. But we're both wrong. Yes, keeping this from happening is what our lives have been about ever since we put on the uniform. But you weren't even here when it happened, and nobody saw it coming. Nobody was asleep at the switch, Honor. Nobody ignored anything. Every damned one of us did our jobs, exactly the way we were supposed to, and this time, it just wasn't enough. Somebody got past us because they came at us in a way no one could have predicted."

She stiffened in his embrace, and even without her own empathic ability, he could literally feel her effort to reject what he'd just said, to continue to punish herself. But he wouldn't let go—not with his arms, not with the fierce embrace of his heart. He held her ruthlessly, knowing she could feel what he felt, knowing she couldn't escape his love.

For a long, long moment the tension held, and then she sagged against him, and he felt the deep, almost silent sobs shuddering through her. He closed his eyes again, holding her against himself, cradling her in his arms and his love.

He never really knew, later, how long they sat there. It seemed to last forever, yet finally, she shifted slightly, pillowing her head on his shoulder, and he tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and dried her eyes.

"Better?" he asked very quietly.

"Some," she replied, although she wasn't at all certain that was actually the truth. "Some."

"I'm sorry, love," he said again, softly.

"I know." She patted the arm still around her gently. "I know."

There was another long moment of silence, and then she inhaled deeply and sat up straight.

"I'll miss them," she told her husband, and her voice remained soft, but her eyes were not. They glittered, still bright with tears, yet there was a darkness beneath that glitter, a hardness beneath those tears.

Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury, with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring" spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords, with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own murdered steaders at her back.

But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances.

And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty, and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met.

In fact, at this moment, she was.

It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a determination which would not—could not—relent or rest.

"I'll miss them," she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, "but I won't forget. I'll never forget, and one day—one day, Hamish—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them."

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Jonathan, I think you're mixing the Detweilers. Leonard was the original thinker and in his mind was the whole encompassing centuries old plan conceived. A strategy encompassing centuries is certainly grand. And looking centuries ahead in chess moves is a great strategical thinker, at least. At most, at best. I think my niece is correct in placing him on the top ten strategists list. Albeit Grand Strategy, in her bout with the college students, further expanding "strategy" would not have been feasible. She never insisted on him as a tactician. Leonard never needed tactics. His was the overall design -- strategy. Now Albrecht, he was a horse of a different color. And an argument for him as a tactician may be solid by proxy, since he would have had to authorize every chess move, even those suggested by Anisimovna.

Sorry, yes I got my Detweillers mixed up

As long as we're only talking strategy and not tactics I can see an argument that Leonard belongs on the list.

Mind you I think there's a counter argument to be made that he took a bad strategic wrong turn in selecting the methods to achieve his stated ends. Even a fraction of the time and effort the MAlign put into building Manpower and genetic slavery, infiltrating dozens of worlds, and setting up Darius, could have eroded away the limits Beowulf advocated on generations engineering and de-stigmatized "genies". Heck a good part of what kept the stigma fresh was Manpower and their genetic slavery.

But even so he had a grand strategic vision and was able to set up a surprisingly resilient and effective multigenerational conspiracy of interplanetary scale. That might outweigh the fact that he prioritized (his presumably unconscious goal of) forcing Beowulf to lose over his stated goal of improving the human race through acceptance of exotic genetic engineering.


Again sorry for the mix-up and the consequently totally non sequitur response.

Revenge by virtue of a dish served ice-cold warms our cold-hearted belly. —cthia

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Jonathan, I think you're mixing the Detweilers. Leonard was the original thinker and in his mind was the whole encompassing centuries old plan conceived. A strategy encompassing centuries is certainly grand. And looking centuries ahead in chess moves is a great strategical thinker, at least. At most, at best. I think my niece is correct in placing him on the top ten strategists list. Albeit Grand Strategy, in her bout with the college students, further expanding "strategy" would not have been feasible. She never insisted on him as a tactician. Leonard never needed tactics. His was the overall design -- strategy. Now Albrecht, he was a horse of a different color. And an argument for him as a tactician may be solid by proxy, since he would have had to authorize every chess move, even those suggested by Anisimovna.

Sorry, yes I got my Detweillers mixed up

As long as we're only talking strategy and not tactics I can see an argument that Leonard belongs on the list.

Mind you I think there's a counter argument to be made that he took a bad strategic wrong turn in selecting the methods to achieve his stated ends. Even a fraction of the time and effort the MAlign put into building Manpower and genetic slavery, infiltrating dozens of worlds, and setting up Darius, could have eroded away the limits Beowulf advocated on generations engineering and de-stigmatized "genies". Heck a good part of what kept the stigma fresh was Manpower and their genetic slavery.

But even so he had a grand strategic vision and was able to set up a surprisingly resilient and effective multigenerational conspiracy of interplanetary scale. That might outweigh the fact that he prioritized (his presumably unconscious goal of) forcing Beowulf to lose over his stated goal of improving the human race through acceptance of exotic genetic engineering.


Again sorry for the mix-up and the consequently totally non sequitur response.

cthia wrote:Jonathan, I cannot tell you how many times I got the Detweilers mixed up, in fact they are never straight in my head. I suspect that everyone on the forum has been guilty of the same faux pas on more than one occasion. If they deny it around a treecat...

<Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!>

The interesting and humorous thing is, I suspect that that is a built in security feature of the Detweiler design. Inherent anonymity through unfamiliarity. Sort of a...

"Which Detweiler is it?"

"I don't know, if you've seen one you've seen them all."


As per the bolded part of your post that I was so bold to take the liberty to emblazon, perhaps you should elaborate. Not that I disagree, but want to ensure that we're on the same page, because I would bet that everyone agrees on that fact in some manner or another. Like 'Why didn't the MA simply set up their own hidey-hole of a harmonious beehive somewhere on the far fringes of unexplored space and simply exist in complete freedom and isolation without going to all of the trouble of antagonizing the establishment. Thus, centuries upon centuries later when and if they are finally discovered or are ready to reveal themselves then they would truly be prepared, emotionally and militarily. They would have effectively pulled off their own version of Russia's attempted fait accomplis during the Cuban Missile Crisis.' The English equivalent, "done deal." However, the methods they partook was part and parcel to the delusions of a border-line mad man.

But really, I thought it was to premeditatedly keep the notion prevalent and to incessantly serve spite in Beowulf's eye as a dish best served cold.

Which probably fails to adopt the best possible strategy overall. Nonetheless, revenge served cold is its own strategic reward of warm emotional fulfillment. The notion is prevalently part and parcel as the underlying fuel in many movies.

"Come on, let's go! We got what we need! We don't need to take any more chances!"

"NOOO! I must see him squirm! I must see him suffer! I will have my revenge!!!" Essentially, it is the primal human need born out of drunken human emotion to look your quarry in the eye before the kill.

It is the same notion that was ultimately Khan's downfall in "The Wrath of Khan." On so many occasions Khan and his crew could have gotten away scot-free, but for the emotional need of serving the dish cold.

Full serving for those with a bigger appetite or a need to get a better taste.

Khan's actual downfall trying to serve the dish cold and the subsequent warning of his error by a crewmember and Khan's emotionally drunken retort.

Revenge by virtue of a dish served ice-cold warms our cold-hearted belly. —cthia

"The GA's approach toward stealth may be more difficult for the MAlign to achieve if it went that route. But they are not playing by the GA's stealth paradigm. They are playing by their own tech and their own solution to the objective of hiding a ship. Considering the absolute objective of ship concealment, the Manticoran's lose.

And if the MA were to be successful in designing probes with their ship's capability, then..."

cthia wrote:From one of my previous posts...

"The GA's approach toward stealth may be more difficult for the MAlign to achieve if it went that route. But they are not playing by the GA's stealth paradigm. They are playing by their own tech and their own solution to the objective of hiding a ship. Considering the absolute objective of ship concealment, the Manticoran's lose.

And if the MA were to be successful in designing probes with their ship's capability, then..."

As a matter of fact, if the MA could design missiles with their stealth capability, it would tip the balance of power decidedly so, for that matter. RFC designed the Lenny Dets after wet navy submarines. Stealthed missile launches would bring the design full circle.

It is the same thing the RMN achieved, they shoehorned Apollo's stealth into their probes, catching the Peeps with their pants down, after first implementing the stealth into their missiles.

cthia wrote:From one of my previous posts...

"The GA's approach toward stealth may be more difficult for the MAlign to achieve if it went that route. But they are not playing by the GA's stealth paradigm. They are playing by their own tech and their own solution to the objective of hiding a ship. Considering the absolute objective of ship concealment, the Manticorans lose.

And if the MA were to be successful in designing probes with their ship's capability, then..."

As a matter of fact, if the MA could design missiles with their stealth capability, it would tip the balance of power decidedly so, for that matter. RFC designed the Lenny Dets after wet navy submarines. Stealthed missile launches would bring the design full circle.

It is the same thing the RMN achieved, they shoehorned Apollo's stealth into their probes, catching the Peeps with their pants down, after first implementing the stealth into their missiles.

Vince wrote:Apollo is not stealth. Apollo is 2 way FTL communication with the command and control missile, which in turn sends instructions to the attack missiles.

Both the increased stealth and Apollo came out of the Ghost Rider program, which also yielded other war fighting benefits.

cthia wrote:From one of my previous posts...

"The GA's approach toward stealth may be more difficult for the MAlign to achieve if it went that route. But they are not playing by the GA's stealth paradigm. They are playing by their own tech and their own solution to the objective of hiding a ship. Considering the absolute objective of ship concealment, the Manticoran's lose.

And if the MA were to be successful in designing probes with their ship's capability, then..."

As a matter of fact, if the MA could design missiles with their stealth capability, it would tip the balance of power decidedly so, for that matter. RFC designed the Lenny Dets after wet navy submarines. Stealthed missile launches would bring the design full circle.

cthia wrote:From one of my previous posts...

"The GA's approach toward stealth may be more difficult for the MAlign to achieve if it went that route. But they are not playing by the GA's stealth paradigm. They are playing by their own tech and their own solution to the objective of hiding a ship. Considering the absolute objective of ship concealment, the Manticoran's lose.

And if the MA were to be successful in designing probes with their ship's capability, then..."

As a matter of fact, if the MA could design missiles with their stealth capability, it would tip the balance of power decidedly so, for that matter. RFC designed the Lenny Dets after wet navy submarines. Stealthed missile launches would bring the design full circle.

Jonathan_S wrote:That's exactly what the MAlign did, which is how they designed the graser torps.
That was applying the stealth capabilities, including the spider drive, to an expendable missile-like platform.

Now limitations of the spider drive meant that they were big, and also a lot slower than a missile, or even a ghost rider recon drone. But they're damned stealthy - presumably even more fiendishly hard to detect or localize than a Detwieller, Shark, or Ghost.

How the size also led the MAlign to beef up the warhead - hence the one-shot graser with more damage per second, and more seconds of operation, than any laserhead. It's not a patch on the grazer of even a destroyer, but it's vastly closer firing range seems to largely offset that.


But, as far as we know, there's no way to design stealth into anything with a classic missile drive because the grav signature of a 40,000+ g drive is blatantly visible - but in the right circumstances a graser torp is a potent alternative.