-SPOILER- Uncompromising Honor - Likes and Don't Likes

runsforcelery wrote:I didn’t say the SLN actually killed the 43,000,000. The death toll was, however, part of an attack in which the SLN was complicit. There’s not too much question about that. More to the point, for purposes of explaining the Alliance’s policy and the reason for Honor’s attack, those deaths occurred during an attack launched by the SLN. There is a plsusible connection between them, and – in fact — the bombs in the platforms would not have detonated without the Naval attack. The signal to detonate them, was transmitted only because the attack had taken place. Honor’s position statement was very carefully crafted. It didn’t save that the Mandarins had ordered the attack on the platforms; it said the mandarins had enabled the attack, which was true. My point is that war is a psychological exercise, Not just a “kill everybody on the other side” exercise. What happened at Beowulf provided the necessary psychological hook to launch Operation Nemesis and do it in a way which probably wouldn’t lead to the Leavue’s coming back for revenge in 15 or 20 years.


I might also point out that at the beginning of this conflict, the Alliance itself didn’t realize just how outclassed the SLN was. It took a little while for them to realize how much audacity they could a tualy get away with!

It occurs to me that the Beowulf attack suports the GA assertion that the "Other People" are associated with Mesa somehow. Kingsford knows they exist. He also knows they have guided/influenced Solarian policy against the SEM. That they have encouraged the SL to become more hostile to the SEM/GA.

Kingsford's suspicions would direct him to think the "Other People" launched the Yawata strike. If they could send in large numbers of invisible graser platforms and stealthy missile pods into Manticore,they could send in invisible graser platforms into Beowulf to knock out the Mycroft. Further, if they knew enough to do that, they would know that the SLN was totally outclassed by the SEM from the start.

The "Other People" have encouraged both sides of the conflict towards destruction of their enemy. The sheer destruction and loss of life involved would encourage a scorched earth policy on both sides. That would lead to a massive amount of chaos for some other organzed group to step into.

How similar is that description to who the GA asserts is behind all of this as well as why they seem to be doing it? Before Beowulf, the SEM was simply deluded. Had the SLN launched Fabius and achieved the same results without the MAlign's bombs blwing up the habitats, the SEM's assertions would have remained delusions. Even with the Ghost Hunters contributions, there would not have been that devastatingly obvious example that the SEM/GA's assertion may not be delusional.

Hubris, thy name is MAlign.

MilSF wrote:But what stage had they gotten to? How exactly is basically sieging the entire League into economic collapse kinder or gentler than a quick, definitive strike that no one could mistake that (as we saw) could be done with little to no casualties?

Take an example from History:

The Japanese started what would become WWII with an invasion of Manchuria in around 1936. Things like the "Rape of Nanking" followed over the next five years, but nobody in the US felt that it was "our problem" in either Europe or Asia.

Then December 7, 1941 came along and the entire US was motivated and mobilized for war.

RFC may have named the Yawata Strike for Pearl Harbor, but the analog for a surprise attack on the "homeland" (aka Core worlds) was the deaths at Beowulf.

Would anyone have known or cared if Nazi sympathizers/spies took advantage of the Japanese attack to firebomb a few Jewish businesses and homes? The IJN would have been blamed for anything that happened on Dec 7th.

MilSF wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:Honor’s position statement was very carefully crafted. It didn’t save that the Mandarins had ordered the attack on the platforms; it said the mandarins had enabled the attack, which was true.

I noticed that. Very subtly and nicely done.

I'm still not sure, however, why the GA thought that the attack enabled anything. They didn't know that "only" an SLN attack would set things in motion. Only the MA knew that. The high-level JSC meeting would be a better reason to glom onto why it happened when it did. Yes, they figured out quickly that the League was being used as the scapegoat, by why would that make them then kill that scapegoat? I may have missed or can't remember a conversation that was cold blooded enough to say, "Let's use the deaths of these 40+ million people to further our political aims". Maybe HH and the others were furious enough to just lash out at the visible sacrifice rather than the invisible enemy.

I think you did miss something, although I didn't try to hit anyone over the head with it. (Not a snark! )

(1) Honor and the other GA leadership were agreed that they needed, if at all possible, to avoid a war which inflicted mega civilian deaths and general destruction if they wanted to avoid another war down the road which they would lose.

(2) They knew the MA was manipulating both sides, whether or not the SL leadership wanted to admit it.

(3) They knew SL public opinion was at best lackadaisical where support for the Mandarins' war policy was concerned but effectively nonexistent where opposition to the Mandarins' war policy was concerned.

(4) They knew that the Beowulf attack was clearly coordinated with the SLN's attack from the use of the Silver Bullets. There was general agreement on that point among the intelligence services. What they didn't know was whether the SLN — or someone within the SL, working for the Alignment — had attempted a closer coordination than had actually been achieved. That is, they didn't know if all of the coordination was coming from the Alignment's end, or if there was a Solarian League component, as well. Under the circumstances, they were certainly justified in adopting the worst-case assumption that there was a League component.

(5) It followed from (4) above that they had no way of knowing what else might be in the Alignment's pipeline to coordinate with future SLN attacks.

(6) As Sonja and Shannon's discussion indicated, they had already been worrying about/aware of the Solarian potential to come up with new weaponry. Hasta failed to accomplish what the SLN hoped to accomplish at Beowulf, but not because of the failure of the system, and not because it was detected. In fact, it got in undetected and would have been highly effective if not for the block ships. As such, it confirmed the Grand Alliance's concerns about recovering Solly inventiveness.

(7) There was absolutely no sign that the Mandarins were going to change their strategic stance, which meant that if there were additional coordinated attacks in the pipeline, the Grand Alliance could lose millions upon millions of additional civilians. And it also meant that if there were additional new Solarian weapons coming along, the task of defeating those weapons might become significantly more difficult.

(8) Because of the above, and completely irrespective of any psychological advantages the Beowulf casualties might have given them in addressing Solarian public opinion, they had to conclude hostilities before additional coordinated attacks killed all of those millions upon millions more additional civilians.

(9) The casualties of the Beowulf attack, which were clearly suffered in the course of a Solarian attack on the system, provided a psychological hook that wasn't there before and which could be used as leverage on Solarian public opinion. But Operation Nemesis would have been launched even if the Grand Alliance had known going in that the Solly man-in-the-street would reject any Solarian culpability out of hand, because at that point, terminating hostilities and depriving the Alignment of any future cover, or the belief that it might still possess such cover, was the driving factor in the decision.

(10) The fact that Kingsford believed al-Fanudahi, Gaddis, and the other Ghost Hunters was icing on the cake that no one could have logically anticipated from the Grand Alliance's side. It's highly probable that even without Gweon's dropping dead in Kingsford's office, the ultimate outcome of Operation Nemesis would have been similar to the one which actually obtained. It was made much more decisive because Kingsford was already looking desperately for a way out of the untenable position into which his star nation had been maneuvered, courtesy of its nonelected leadership.

* * * * * * * * * *

A point which may need a little additional emphasis, although I tried to make it clear in the novel, is that up until the Beowulf attack, Grand Alliance casualties inflicted by the Solarian League were minuscule, both by the standards of the Havenite Wars and, even more so, by the immensely one-sided casualty ratio between the Grand Alliance and the SLN. The civilian deaths which had been suffered in Beowulf were a consequence (as the Alliance knew perfectly well) of an attack by the Mesan Alignment, not the SLN. In that regard, until such time as the Sollies came up with new, more threatening weapons technology, the Grand Alliance had complete military superiority. It literally didn't need to pursue active offensive operations against the League.

Another point which has come up is the amount of scorn which has been heaped upon the Detweiler Boys' judgment, most of which is fairly well justified. After all, I meant for their judgment to have been . . . impaired by their parents' deaths. But they weren't quite as clueless in that regard as they may have seemed.

The important point in that regard (which I clearly did not emphasize sufficiently in the original draft) was that the bombs were supposed to be triggered in very close coordination with the missile attack. The actual timing of the explosions after the attack is the result of a combination of factors, one of which is the Detweilers' determination to let Beowulf and the Grand Alliance know it was an attack by the Alignment which was deliberately designed to inflict maximum casualties. And to inflict the maximum possible psychological revenge by stretching it out. But that was only supposed to happen if the coordination with the missile strike failed.

This was always clear in my own mind, but I didn't make it adequately clear in the original submission draft, which is the one the earc is based on. I tweaked the scene slightly in the final manuscript (not the one I was snippeting from originally or the earc [remember how I mentioned elsewhere that changes happened between earc and final publication? ]) to unpack my original thinking. It wasn't clear the first time around because it was one of those vague "I know this is going on in the underbrush" sort of thought processes on my part, and I hadn't thought its implications through clearly enough to realize (initially) that it required further explication for the reader.

As I say, the Detweilers realized that if they missed the Hasta window, the Grand Alliance would know exactly who was responsible for it. In that respect, the staggered timing was meaningless . . . aside from the vengefulness involved in the deliberately stretched out sequence. The staggered timing is still a significant mistake on their part, of course, but not where the Alliance is concerned. The Detweilers' thinking was "in for a penny, in for a pound," in that regard. Where it could have had an immediate consequence — and still may have serious negative consequences down the road, who knows? — is on the Solarian League's willingness to believe in the Other Guys.

Thanks, that sounds good.

I'm still a bit confused about why the MA choose the attack scale they did. Given what they were capable of they could have delivered similar scale bombs to pretty much every populated place or industrial facility in Beowulf, including the major cities on the planet. Or flown frac C torpedoes into the planet. If you are going to go for the mustache twirling villain genocidal approach why limit yourself to the 3 habs?

And if you are going to go for the habs only to somehow indict the SLN it would seem to be useful to at least try to point a finger at the SLN.

kzt wrote:Thanks, that sounds good.

I'm still a bit confused about why the MA choose the attack scale they did. Given what they were capable of they could have delivered similar scale bombs to pretty much every populated place or industrial facility in Beowulf, including the major cities on the planet. Or flown frac C torpedoes into the planet. If you are going to go for the mustache twirling villain genocidal approach why limit yourself to the 3 habs?

And if you are going to go for the habs only to somehow indict the SLN it would seem to be useful to at least try to point a finger at the SLN.

The bombs where in crates that where waiting for pickup so getting them delivered to other places where no transshipment occurs would be problematical.

Why they choose the targets they did, I would guess it was easy to set up from an operational standpoint - very few things that could go wrong. Just set up the packages to be delivered for transshipment since they already had an agent in place who could trigger them.

kzt wrote:Thanks, that sounds good.

I'm still a bit confused about why the MA choose the attack scale they did. Given what they were capable of they could have delivered similar scale bombs to pretty much every populated place or industrial facility in Beowulf, including the major cities on the planet. Or flown frac C torpedoes into the planet. If you are going to go for the mustache twirling villain genocidal approach why limit yourself to the 3 habs?

And if you are going to go for the habs only to somehow indict the SLN it would seem to be useful to at least try to point a finger at the SLN.

The finger pointing is why the attack was supposed to coincide with the Hasta attack. In fact "at least try" is precisely what they were doing, with the full awareness that they very well might not succeed.

They were after 2 things, mainly:

(1) Continuing to stoke the fire in the hopes that the GA would buy the theory that the SLN had known about the bombs and been a party to the attack. (Remember that they'd already sort of played Elizabeth this way once before.) If they could engender enough hatred in the GA, then Honor might have turned up in Sol and done exactly what a part of her wanted to do and inflicted mass casualties as a reprisal on the theory that reprisal was the only way to stop the Mandarins. Had the GA done that, it would have gotten the worst of all worlds and the Mandarins would have been voted all the funding they needed to burn Manticore and Haven to the ground, however long it took. For that matter, the SL still would have been after the GA's scalp even if the Mandarins (or their replacements) eventually concluded the Alignment really existed. After all, it would've been the Grand Alliance which had been so bloodthirsty --- or so frigging stupid --- it had let the MA manipulate it into killing all those innocent Solly civilians! (Pay no attention to that man behind the screen and all the casualties we got manipulated into trying to inflict in places like Hypatia!) I'm not saying the boys were confident they could actually pull this off, only that they figured it was worth a try, and what's a few score million dead Beowulfers, one way or the other?

(2) Punishing the GA, and specifically the part of it they most blamed for the deaths of their parents. (I trust it's apparent that I don't think this was an entirely rational response on their part?)

They didn't need to kill an entire planet to accomplish either of those goals, nor did they need to take out multiple habitats. And each bomb they planted increased the chances of all of the bombs being located. They had really, really good covers for the bombs they'd actually stashed aboard the habitats, but no cover is going to stand up forever when the freight inventory managers start calling companies to ask why they haven't picked up the freight that's tying up valuable space in the warehouse. The habitats have their own security fences in place, as well, and while they aren't really equipped to stop a state actor's covert services cold, they'd have a darned good chance of spotting something if bombs were going aboard bunches of habitats.

To be honest, in some ways the habs were "softer" targets than the production facilities, because the security people anticipated sabotage/attacks there. It never occurred to anyone that even the MA would deliberately target 40 or 50 million civilians. Perhaps it should have, but it didn't. That didn't mean that the habitats could be seeded with bombs with impunity, however.

And one part of this is that even in their rage, they weren't truly genocidal. They were't trying to sterilize Beowulf (which even they recognized would be A Really Bad Idea if anyone ever figured out the MA had really existed and caught up with the people behind it). And something like that, on top of Oyster Bay, almost certainly would have forced even the Mandarins to wake up and smell the coffee.

runsforcelery wrote:I think you did miss something, although I didn't try to hit anyone over the head with it. (Not a snark! )

Snark away. I’m the relatively anonymous schmo criticizing something I read probably too early in the morning!

runsforcelery wrote:(4) They knew that the Beowulf attack was clearly coordinated with the SLN's attack from the use of the Silver Bullets. There was general agreement on that point among the intelligence services. What they didn't know was whether the SLN — or someone within the SL, working for the Alignment — had attempted a closer coordination than had actually been achieved. That is, they didn't know if all of the coordination was coming from the Alignment's end, or if there was a Solarian League component, as well. Under the circumstances, they were certainly justified in adopting the worst-case assumption that there was a League component.

(5) It followed from (4) above that they had no way of knowing what else might be in the Alignment's pipeline to coordinate with future SLN attacks.

This would be the logic I think I missed. In the minds of the GA, the League has gone from being a fellow victim of manipulation to potentially a co-conspirator. Even if they weren’t sometimes you have to fight through the fullback’s block to get to the running back with the ball.

runsforcelery wrote:(6) As Sonja and Shannon's discussion indicated, they had already been worrying about/aware of the Solarian potential to come up with new weaponry. Hasta failed to accomplish what the SLN hoped to accomplish at Beowulf, but not because of the failure of the system, and not because it was detected. In fact, it got in undetected and would have been highly effective if not for the block ships. As such, it confirmed the Grand Alliance's concerns about recovering Solly inventiveness.

But would the effectiveness been because of Hasta, or Silver Bullet? I would be curious to know if Hasta would have been effective in any future encounters. The GA spent 20 years doing new weapon/new defense games. Few new surprises ever worked twice for either side.

runsforcelery wrote:But Operation Nemesis would have been launched even if the Grand Alliance had known going in that the Solly man-in-the-street would reject any Solarian culpability out of hand, because at that point, terminating hostilities and depriving the Alignment of any future cover, or the belief that it might still possess such cover, was the driving factor in the decision.

So the risk of revanchist policy down the line was now worth it to remove that threat. I get it.

runsforcelery wrote:It's highly probable that even without Gweon's dropping dead in Kingsford's office, the ultimate outcome of Operation Nemesis would have been similar to the one which actually obtained.

So would I have been right to say that the Kingsford would have surrendered had Nemesis happened right after the Second Battle of Manticore? Or were the additional drummings necessary to get the point across to him? Just curious. I’ve never written my thoughts on a novel like this before. Much less had the actual author rebut my criticisms!

runsforcelery wrote:until such time as the Sollies came up with new, more threatening weapons technology, the Grand Alliance had complete military superiority. It literally didn't need to pursue active offensive operations against the League.

True, though Lacoon Two was pretty darn offensive. I’ve just never really heard of a side in a war basically saying, “Well, they can’t hurt us now. We’ll wait till they possibly can before ending this”. Maybe because I can’t (of the top of my head) think of a similar historical situation.

runsforcelery wrote:Another point which has come up is the amount of scorn which has been heaped upon the Detweiler Boys' judgment, most of which is fairly well justified. After all, I meant for their judgment to have been . . . impaired by their parents' deaths. But they weren't quite as clueless in that regard as they may have seemed.

The important point in that regard (which I clearly did not emphasize sufficiently in the original draft) was that the bombs were supposed to be triggered in very close coordination with the missile attack. The actual timing of the explosions after the attack is the result of a combination of factors, one of which is the Detweilers' determination to let Beowulf and the Grand Alliance know it was an attack by the Alignment which was deliberately designed to inflict maximum casualties. And to inflict the maximum possible psychological revenge by stretching it out. But that was only supposed to happen if the coordination with the missile strike failed.

This was always clear in my own mind, but I didn't make it adequately clear in the original submission draft, which is the one the earc is based on. I tweaked the scene slightly in the final manuscript (not the one I was snippeting from originally or the earc [remember how I mentioned elsewhere that changes happened between earc and final publication? ]) to unpack my original thinking. It wasn't clear the first time around because it was one of those vague "I know this is going on in the underbrush" sort of thought processes on my part, and I hadn't thought its implications through clearly enough to realize (initially) that it required further explication for the reader.

As I say, the Detweilers realized that if they missed the Hasta window, the Grand Alliance would know exactly who was responsible for it. In that respect, the staggered timing was meaningless . . . aside from the vengefulness involved in the deliberately stretched out sequence. The staggered timing is still a significant mistake on their part, of course, but not where the Alliance is concerned. The Detweilers' thinking was "in for a penny, in for a pound," in that regard. Where it could have had an immediate consequence — and still may have serious negative consequences down the road, who knows? — is on the Solarian League's willingness to believe in the Other Guys.

Thank you for clearing that up. It’s unusual to see the onion core of the MA make a “blunder” in their strategic thinking. I guess even chess grand masters have been known to make a wrong move now and then. I still think a scene with Mayhew’s armsmen going full Terminator to get him off Alpha would have been nice. We’ve had many heart rending scenes of them willing to lay down their own lives for their principle, but none recently of their unashamed willingness to lay down everyone else’s lives for that same cause.

MilSF wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:I think you did miss something, although I didn't try to hit anyone over the head with it. (Not a snark! )

Snark away. I’m the relatively anonymous schmo criticizing something I read probably too early in the morning!

runsforcelery wrote:(4) They knew that the Beowulf attack was clearly coordinated with the SLN's attack from the use of the Silver Bullets. There was general agreement on that point among the intelligence services. What they didn't know was whether the SLN — or someone within the SL, working for the Alignment — had attempted a closer coordination than had actually been achieved. That is, they didn't know if all of the coordination was coming from the Alignment's end, or if there was a Solarian League component, as well. Under the circumstances, they were certainly justified in adopting the worst-case assumption that there was a League component.

(5) It followed from (4) above that they had no way of knowing what else might be in the Alignment's pipeline to coordinate with future SLN attacks.

This would be the logic I think I missed. In the minds of the GA, the League has gone from being a fellow victim of manipulation to potentially a co-conspirator. Even if they weren’t sometimes you have to fight through the fullback’s block to get to the running back with the ball.

runsforcelery wrote:(6) As Sonja and Shannon's discussion indicated, they had already been worrying about/aware of the Solarian potential to come up with new weaponry. Hasta failed to accomplish what the SLN hoped to accomplish at Beowulf, but not because of the failure of the system, and not because it was detected. In fact, it got in undetected and would have been highly effective if not for the block ships. As such, it confirmed the Grand Alliance's concerns about recovering Solly inventiveness.

But would the effectiveness been because of Hasta, or Silver Bullet? I would be curious to know if Hasta would have been effective in any future encounters. The GA spent 20 years doing new weapon/new defense games. Few new surprises ever worked twice for either side.

runsforcelery wrote:But Operation Nemesis would have been launched even if the Grand Alliance had known going in that the Solly man-in-the-street would reject any Solarian culpability out of hand, because at that point, terminating hostilities and depriving the Alignment of any future cover, or the belief that it might still possess such cover, was the driving factor in the decision.

So the risk of revanchist policy down the line was now worth it to remove that threat. I get it.

runsforcelery wrote:It's highly probable that even without Gweon's dropping dead in Kingsford's office, the ultimate outcome of Operation Nemesis would have been similar to the one which actually obtained.

So would I have been right to say that the Kingsford would have surrendered had Nemesis happened right after the Second Battle of Manticore? Or were the additional drummings necessary to get the point across to him? Just curious. I’ve never written my thoughts on a novel like this before. Much less had the actual author rebut my criticisms!

runsforcelery wrote:until such time as the Sollies came up with new, more threatening weapons technology, the Grand Alliance had complete military superiority. It literally didn't need to pursue active offensive operations against the League.

True, though Lacoon Two was pretty darn offensive. I’ve just never really heard of a side in a war basically saying, “Well, they can’t hurt us now. We’ll wait till they possibly can before ending this”. Maybe because I can’t (of the top of my head) think of a similar historical situation.

runsforcelery wrote:Another point which has come up is the amount of scorn which has been heaped upon the Detweiler Boys' judgment, most of which is fairly well justified. After all, I meant for their judgment to have been . . . impaired by their parents' deaths. But they weren't quite as clueless in that regard as they may have seemed.

The important point in that regard (which I clearly did not emphasize sufficiently in the original draft) was that the bombs were supposed to be triggered in very close coordination with the missile attack. The actual timing of the explosions after the attack is the result of a combination of factors, one of which is the Detweilers' determination to let Beowulf and the Grand Alliance know it was an attack by the Alignment which was deliberately designed to inflict maximum casualties. And to inflict the maximum possible psychological revenge by stretching it out. But that was only supposed to happen if the coordination with the missile strike failed.

This was always clear in my own mind, but I didn't make it adequately clear in the original submission draft, which is the one the earc is based on. I tweaked the scene slightly in the final manuscript (not the one I was snippeting from originally or the earc [remember how I mentioned elsewhere that changes happened between earc and final publication? ]) to unpack my original thinking. It wasn't clear the first time around because it was one of those vague "I know this is going on in the underbrush" sort of thought processes on my part, and I hadn't thought its implications through clearly enough to realize (initially) that it required further explication for the reader.

As I say, the Detweilers realized that if they missed the Hasta window, the Grand Alliance would know exactly who was responsible for it. In that respect, the staggered timing was meaningless . . . aside from the vengefulness involved in the deliberately stretched out sequence. The staggered timing is still a significant mistake on their part, of course, but not where the Alliance is concerned. The Detweilers' thinking was "in for a penny, in for a pound," in that regard. Where it could have had an immediate consequence — and still may have serious negative consequences down the road, who knows? — is on the Solarian League's willingness to believe in the Other Guys.

Thank you for clearing that up. It’s unusual to see the onion core of the MA make a “blunder” in their strategic thinking. I guess even chess grand masters have been known to make a wrong move now and then. I still think a scene with Mayhew’s armsmen going full Terminator to get him off Alpha would have been nice. We’ve had many heart rending scenes of them willing to lay down their own lives for their principle, but none recently of their unashamed willingness to lay down everyone else’s lives for that same cause.

Chapter 7 wrote:Harold Simmons-Gilchrest listened to the cheering all around him and tried not to spit on the deck. His instructions had been unambiguous, but his control hadn’t told him—or hadn’t been able to tell him, perhaps—exactly when the Sollies would get around to attacking, and he’d been away from his station at the critical moment.

There’d always been a possibility—a probability, really—of that happening, but Simmons-Gilchrest was the third-shift cargo master for the Beowulf Gamma habitat’s number seven freight hub. It would have taken someone pretty damned senior to get in his way when he insisted on reporting for duty in the face of such an unanticipated emergency. It was just his misfortune that it had taken over an hour for him to physically get here, which meant he hadn’t been able to send the signal at the moment he was supposed to. Still, while his control had emphasized that it would be far better to transmit it while Solly missiles were actually flying, she’d also said it wouldn’t be the end of the universe if Simmons-Gilchrest was off a little.

He reminded himself of that now as he unlocked the number pad and entered the long, complicated command on his console. ...{SNIP]
Even if they never knew he was the one who’d done it…whatever the hell it was!

He smiled at that thought and hit the transmit button.

* * *

Cargo Container H&L 1007-9-463(h) received the command and implemented it.

Twenty-seven seconds later, Beowulf Gamma, the third largest orbital habitat in the Beowulf System, ceased to exist, along with 9.5 million human beings…including a Mesan gamma line named Harold Simmons-Gilchrest.

Far from me to disagree with the author but that seemed pretty clear to me, And had the missile attack been at all successful, perhaps an hour's delay would have made no difference.

As far as evacuating the orbital platform, it would have been so very unSaganami of the serving officers of [at least] the RMN to evacuate to safety while leaving all the civilians of their oldest ally to die. The Honor of The Queen and all.

I think what has not been absorbed by some is that War is an extension of diplonacy which is the political resolution of a conflict. YES militarily Honor, heck even Michelle's 10th fleet without Tourville's contingent could have ripped through Earth's defenses and accomplished what Honor did.

Politiccallythey could not have. Until the political objective can be accomplished through the military option, one risks escalation of the conflict to the point of it spiraling out of control aka revanchism ( A policy of retaliation). The size of the league would eventually produce enough almost decent weapons by the gazillion to swamp any possible defense Manticore, Haven, and Grayson could muster. Which is what the GA was trying to avoid which is why they could not militarily attack Sol even though they possessed the military capability since Byng blew all those bare nekkid destroyers into orbital debris at New Tuscany.

roseandheather wrote:
You're mine now. I've just adopted you. No takesies-backsies.

I have been pushing for a Havenite to get adopted for.... literally the last half a decade now, and I fully intend to turn up at Sphinxcon later this year and beg, plead, cajole, threaten, pout, whimper, and possibly cry to get RFC to give me my way on this.

That said, His Celeryness has made it pretty clear that there are more stories yet to tell in this 'verse, so I'm still holding out hope... but GODDAMMIT RFC WHERE IS MY HAVENITE TREECAT ADOPTION???? ::crumples into artistic storm of tears, complete with sniffles::

You have my full support, although I may not be as good at theatrical demonstrations of emotion. I suppose I could just skip straight to quiet menacing?

Also, more on topic, I found myself reminded of another set of like and dislike, related to each other. This is super, SUPER nitpicky, but I wish there had been a brief paragraph or three about the fate of the "Mandarins". It was stated that Kingsford and the League complied with all of the surrender demands, which means they were turned over to Honor's fleet. Everything else was wrapped up so well, as far as the Constitutional convention and the explanation of the upcoming attempts to further entwine Manticore and Haven. I would have loved a brief mention of the surrender of Kolokoltsov and his merry band of criminals to Manticoran custody, perhaps a mention of the upcoming trial or of the discussion between Manticore/Haven/Grayson about whose jurisdiction gets to try them. I know, I know, but I really loved this book and most of my dislikes are small things like this.

On the like side, I enjoyed Wodoslawski escaping arrest at the hands of the Ghost Hunters. I'm hoping this means in future novels or short stories she will show up again to cause trouble, or at least end up nanoteched or pulsered to pieces at the hands of the MA on some Verge planet hideout.

Jacob Zavala wrote:On the like side, I enjoyed Wodoslawski escaping arrest at the hands of the Ghost Hunters. I'm hoping this means in future novels or short stories she will show up again to cause trouble, or at least end up nanoteched or pulsered to pieces at the hands of the MA on some Verge planet hideout.

My brain goes the other way. She was never strongly supportive of Kolokoltsov's Machiavellian machinations, IIRC (probably not ). I can see her grabbing her lawyer and Government motorpool issued shuttle and broadcasting a mayday as loud as she can, surrendering herself to Honor and turning states evidence on her cronies.