Eagleeye wrote:Thanks for the explanation, RFC, but I still have a question. The news of Operation Beatrice hit the Alignment unexpected. I think, that's safe to say. They reacted to that news by activation of Oyster Bay; even if they knew the Oyster Bay they could manage wasn't the operation they intended initially. They planned to wait, because they wanted to use the Detweilers, if I remember correctly.
But if things are rushing - and do it in a way they're not expected to - should that not ring some alarm bells? Why not analyze the new situation and adapt their plans as far as possible?
Or is the ... age of this conspiracy somewhat like a mental rock? Is the MAlign simply not on the right mental footing for making such drastic decisions in time - even if they think they are?
What make you think they haven't?
The alignment was nearing the point at which they were supposed to begin engineering the breakup of the Solarian League.
Previously, the main threat to their plan had been seen as the Republic of Haven (pre-People’s Republic of Haven), which would have offered a countervailing source of authority, security, and legitimacy to challenge their own Renaissance Factor. So, a couple of centuries earlier, they set about accomplishing the triple purposes of crippling the Republic of Haven’s economy, delegitimizing it in the eyes of the galaxy's neutrals, and creating the tool they needed to smash the League when the time came. The way they decided to do that was to get behind the creation of the
People’s Republic of Haven and push.
The primary
secondary threat to the Renaissance Factor’s planned dominance was the Star Kingdom of Manticore, which was supposed to be eliminated by the People’s Republic of Haven. Under this subhead of the plan, there would
be no Star Kingdom and the PRH would be a very large — and very distrusted — star nation with lots of territory, lots of military muscle, and probably still in straitened economic circumstances. The conflict needed to break up the League would be engineered against the PRH, and the People’s Republic would not be very attractive to neutrals as an alternative to the League, especially with the Renaissance Factor waiting in the wings. In other words, they’d be back to the master plan, and — working through their contacts with Technodyne — they could make sure that the League’s military capabilities were at least in shouting range of the PRH’s when the nickel dropped.
Unfortunately, King Roger ushered in an entirely new era in war-fighting technology, the Star Kingdom of Manticore turned into a military powerhouse, and with the discovery of the Lynx Terminus, the Star
Empire of Manticore looked like being an even greater threat. It had certainly supplanted the original Republic of Haven as a long-term threat to the master plan, and its extension into the Talbott Sector posed a short-term and immediate threat to the Mesa System.
In short, the emergence of the SEM was an existential threat that had to be seen too. So, how did they do that? They did it (hopefully) by taking out the Manticore Binary System and the Grayson shipyards through Oyster Bay. Remember that at this point Eloise Pritchart was still very much an unknown quantity,
but she had gone back to war against the Star Kingdom and she
had rolled the dice in Operation Beatrice. Yes, she’d been trying to negotiate an end to the fighting, but they’d clearly spiked that wheel, and if they presented her with an opportunity for outright victory in the wake of Oyster Bay — and after the losses that the Republic had taken in Operation Beatrice — it really wasn’t unreasonable to expect her to take it. However altruistic she might be, she was the chief executive of a star nation which had been on the very brink of defeat for a second time and who’d clearly been willing to risk thousands —
hundreds of thousands — of combat deaths to prevent that.
Setting up the planned war between a post-Pritchart Haven and the Solarian League might be more difficult following the elimination of the SEM, but remember that the Alignment had been . . . meddling significantly in the PRH’s domestic politics for a long time and that Eloise and Tom Theisman were still trying to ride a rather skittish mount, as Giancola’s machinations demonstrated. It was entirely possible that it would be possible to engineer the departure of Eloise Pritchart/Boris Yeltsin and replace her with Arnold Giancola Mark II/Vladimir Putin, at which point they could be off to the races once more. In fact, a Republic of Haven which returned to the model of the
People’s Republic of Haven after having acquired the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and ingested Manticore’s tech would be an even more dangerous threat to the League in the fullness of time. And, of course, the Alignment could go right ahead with its plan to feed the League the amount of tech needed to be sure that the war between it and Haven was as mutually destructive as necessary.
The problem was that Pritchart didn’t bite. And, to be honest, the main reason that she didn’t was Jack McBryde’s conscience.
She didn’t
want to hit Manticore again, and one of the reasons she didn’t was to avoid giving any encouragement to the elements in the ROH that wanted to go back to the old ways. But she would have been derelict in her responsibilities if she hadn’t at the very least used Oyster Bay and its consequences as a spiked club to bludgeon the Manties into a peace settlement, and probably one that would favor the Republic significantly and have at least some of the effect that the outright conquest of Manticore would have had. And, just in case Pritchart didn’t come up to scratch, they set the Crandall/Filareta strand of their operation into motion in order to use the League to crush Manticore. That was definitely their second choice, however, because they
really didn’t want the League getting its hands on the full panoply of Manticoran war-fighting capability. Still and all, the most probable outcome was that Filareta would get beaten, he’d take a further bite out of the Manties, and at that point the Republic of Haven – who really,
really wouldn’t want the
League controlling the Manticore Junction — would be under even more pressure to swoop in and snap up Manticore.
But then Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat turned up with Herlander Simões in tow and evidence of something called the “Mesan Alignment,” and Pritchart saw a third way. "Since we have a common enemy, why don’t we make peace by becoming
allies instead of by one of us conquering the other one and go break the bastards’ kneecaps together?” Eloise Pritchart is a very nice person; she is also a hardened assassin and as pragmatic as they come. She didn’t propose her alliance to Elizabeth Winton just because she was that “nice person.” She did it because she wants the toughest bitch in the galaxy — after her, perhaps — watching her back while the two of them figure out why this “Alignment” wants to destroy both of them. The fact that she
is a good person and that she and Elizabeth hit it off like a house on fire was icing on the cake, not something she counted on.
So the point at which the Alignment’s “master plan” truly broke down was Jack McBryde. Oyster Bay probably would have put it back on the rails if Pritchart hadn’t been handed the silver bullet that would let her propose an alliance with her star nation’s most bitter enemies
and have it accepted.
As of the activation of the expedited Houdini, it’s been
less than four months since Oyster Bay was launched and
24 hours since Albrecht Detweiler found out that (1) Anton Zilwicki wasn’t dead; (2) Herlander Simões wasn’t dead; (3) Jack McBryde had sold out the fact of the Alignment’s existence; and (4) the star nation they’d been planning to use to destroy the Star Empire was now its
ally, instead.
I think you’re probably expecting just a little too much for even the most brilliant conspirators in all of human history (which I’m not saying the Detweilers are) to do any fundamental “reanalysis” and adaption in that brief a time window.
For that matter, I’d argue that Oyster Bay and Operation Janus themselves represented a significant amount of adaptation in the face of changing parameters. And don’t forget that the key element in their recognition that they had an
immediate problem was really the emergence of Apollo. The danger of a negotiated settlement between Manticore and Haven was bad enough, and the extension of the Star Kingdom into the Talbott Quadrant made it still worse, but up until the Manties deployed Apollo, there was no indication that the war was about to come to a screeching stop, especially after their assassinations had succeeded in derailing Pritchart’s bid for face-to-face negotiations with Elizabeth.
In my own opinion, Albrecht’s biggest mistake was to order Honor’s assassination. He had all kinds of eminently logical reasons, by his lights, for doing it, but there was another element — which you’ll find out about in
Uncompromising — in his thinking which was just a tad more personal. It should have worked, however. In fact, it
would have worked if not for the serious paranoia of Doctor (ex-Commander, ex-Sergeant) Harrington, which led him to embed a
gun in his daughter’s artificial hand. For that matter, there was very little evidence of the “killer nanotech” even in Haven when Grosclaude flew his air car into the wall of the gorge. If Honor hadn’t been able to “taste” Timothy Mears’ emotions — if she hadn’t
known that he was trying desperately
not to kill her — it's highly unlikely that the investigation would have been pushed beyond the attitude of the CID officer she kicked off of the case. And in that case, the assumption would have been that either Mears went off his rocker or that he’d somehow been suborned. Certainly nobody in
Manticore would have been looking for evidence to support the ludicrous conspiracy theories of a
Havenite ex-spy and current policeman! It was not so much the attempt to
kill Honor that was the mistake. The mistake was
failing to kill someone who the Alignment had no way of knowing was a functional empath who would therefore know that
something could compel an otherwise devoted subordinate and “honorary nephew” to murder her. And even that wouldn’t have been fatal if the McBryde/Simões revelations hadn’t led to Kevin Usher effectively comparing notes with Patricia Givens.
I think there’s a bit of a tendency to assume that because — as I’ve said myself, on more than one occasion — the Alignment’s fundamental goal is irrational that the people trying to
achieve that goal are also irrational.
Given their starting assumptions (which is always the only legitimate starting point for evaluating someone’s objectives and capabilities), they are smart, imaginative, rational, and very, very dangerous. The fact that they are also raving lunatics because of that goal’s irrationality doesn’t change that any more than the fact that Hitler’s irrational views on racism prevented him from being a deadly threat to Europe and the world.
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