manty5 wrote:Thoughts:
"And they have finally killed too many of the people Honor Harrington loves." But where THEY refers to the SLN, which hasn't yet killed many people, not for a lack of trying. So there will be fresh deaths to people Honor cares about. This could be on Beowulf.
About the EE violation, I think the most likely scenario is that the Houdini incident leads the SLN to declare the GA violators of the EE, accusing them of nuking Mesa. They could then massacre:
1. Less-protected Republic worlds.
2. Minor bit-players like Talbott cluster worlds or verge worlds as demonstrations that anyone cozying up to the GA will be considered party to the GA's supposed violations of the EE.
3. The Mesan alignment turns the invasion of Beowulf to a massacre at Beowulf, which the mandarins then retroactively justify as being retaliation for the supposed infractions by the GA.
Finally, about the SLN losing worlds: Isn't that the whole prearranged plan of The Factor? I'd be more surprised if they didn't have defections.
The Edict calls for execution of the people responsible, military and political, for the massacre NOT a genocidal retaliatory strike. The Edict is supposed to prevent people resorting to MAD and genocidal strikes! So the Edict could justify killing some surrendering or captured enemy soldiers, politicians etc. but it would NOT justify any sort of planetary scale massacre. Of course, that's all in blatant violation of the Deneb accords.
However, if Manticore demonstrates that it can go unpunished despite (apparently) violating the Edict, the Edict will no longer have any value and we will get a return to MAD. Which will mean everyone goes back to "Invade us and we bombard your planet, now scram. Your fancy ships won't save your worlds from our stealth doomsday devices." This has a strong leveling effect when it comes to military power. We see this in real life with the N.K. vs. U.S.A. standoff. Honestly, its even worse in Honorverse because the leadership of a world could easily get themselves a well-equipped colony ship and bugger off if things go MAD.
This bodes
very badly if any of the Mesa SDF was off on training exercises or the like. Or if Mesa has a rogue bio-engineer who can whip up a biological superweapon.