Teerakaar wrote:
Right at the beginning of UH, it's mentioned that Honor's missiles had a flight time of 160 seconds. Even though Honor didn't fire until after the bomb went off, let's say they were concurrent. Is the Flag Captain just gonna sit there for 2 minutes and 40 seconds saying "Damn, someone blew up the flag deck! What am I gonna do now?!?" Perhaps I shouldn't make that bet with a Solly, but still. So how is it that the only information about Filareta's flag deck is coming from a clandestine conversation between relatives?
<SNIP>
Just had to get that off of my chest. Anyone got any thoughts or ideas? Thanks for reading.
Nobody ever said that the Sollies didn't know that "something bad" happened to the flag deck aboard
Oppenheimer. What they
said was that no one
outside the flagship knew precisely what the "something bad" was, and that the flagship didn't survive. In fact, was lost with all hands.
You've got 160 seconds. There's an explosion inside a massively armored compartment, powerful enough to kill everybody in it but nowhere near powerful enough to inflict damage
outside it. Everyone inside is dead; no one outside knows what happened; and you have less than three minutes to figure out what happened. Even if you manage it aboard the flagship, what are the odds of finding out, passing it to communications, and getting the word out in that timeframe? And that presupposes that you don't have
anything else to do in those same less than three minutes.
Your fleet has just fired on the enemy. The enemy is in the process of returning fire. You are the flag captain who now knows that something's happened to the flag deck but not what. You spend — what? Thirty seconds? Trying to figure out what the hell just happened. At that point, you either pass command to the next senior admiral — who sorta has to start from scratch figuring out exactly what's going on — or you decide there's no time for that and retain and exercise tactical control yourself. You decide to retain it yourself? Good, Captain! Gutsy move! And now what's your
next move? Are you going to order your entire fleet to strike its wedges when you don't know if that kill-crazy bitch Harrington is going to honor your surrender, don't know if there will even be
time for those incoming missiles to self-destruct if the other side
does decide to honor your surrender, and you have no confirmation that those weapons coming at you are exponentially more dangerous than any you possess? Or are you going to decide that the ball has already been opened, that the other side probably isn't real interested in accepting your surrender at this point, and that the only possibility of survival for your fleet is to hope like hell the weapons coming at you
aren't exponentially more dangerous than your own because you're stuck in a fight to the finish.
That decision making is going on
internally aboard the flagship. Presumably, no one
outside the flagship is privy to it. Orders come from the flagship over the tactical net to fire. Okay, everybody fires. In the meantime, it's becoming apparent to at least some of the other ships — probably because they were tied into a tactical net controlled through
Oppenheimer from which Filareta and his staff had suddenly disappeared — that Something Bad™ has taken place aboard
Oppenheimer. So the units of the fleet are trying really, really hard to find out what the
hell is going on, but to be totally honest, that's kinda secondary to fighting the battle and then getting as many as possible of your people off the wrecks.
There was never any doubt that something significant had happened aboard
Oppenheimer. The problem was that no one
who survived the battle knew what that something significant was or could even
positively confirm that anything truly had. The scrap of com traffic between the com officers aboard
Oppenheimer and
Leonard Euler is important because even though it wasn't part of the official communications record,
it was taking place at the very moment flag bridge blew up. That is, it confirms (a) that Filareta intended to surrender, (b) that he gave the
order to surrender, (c) that something sufficiently catastrophic to make him demand to know what was happening —
and to cut him off in mid-syllable — prevented that from happening.
They still don't know exactly what the something was. But they do know that it happened and that the final battle wasn't Filareta's idea. That is undoubtedly all they will ever know unless someday they run the Alignment to ground and get their hands on its covert ops files.
But it confirms a heck of a lot of stuff they'd already suspected and possibly points them in a new direction or so. And the only reason they know is because of that very brief record of a conversation between relatives in which Filareta's orders are overheard at the critical moment.
