[SPOILERS] _Uncompromising Honor_ Commentary

One of the reasons for Houdini was that there is a practical limit to how many people that the Alignent could disappear from Mesa to Darius by "natural causes" deaths, airfare crashes, emigration, corporate transfers etc.
They were still going to set up things like Terrorists attacks (by the Ballroom etc) to cover the departure of lots of people but when it became clear that Manticore was both blunting the operations/relationships in the Talbot Sector for Alignment/Mesa's clients, going to be blocking OFS activities and clients and had started the effecive mop-up of the Firebrand style revolts (in favor of the rebels). Things had gotten too hot.
See the situation as Albrect can precive it. Manticore has been turning over lots of rocks, discovering the Alignment and OFS under them. Most of the big problems in the quadrant are NOT home grown. The eveidence is mounting that this stuff is being controlled from somewhere other than the SL and by persons who can affect the movements of entire fleet who's target is Manticorian interests and to take control of all sorts of systems who are either independt (as opposed to OFS clients) and crush Manticorian forces.

Look at the way the revised version of Houdini works. Massive overkill of civilians rather than, perhaps, high casualty attacks on various Manpower and related operations which would bring a higher perecentage of Alignment people out under cover. This is litteraly burning a lot of the village to pull out a timy percentage of covert operatives.
So, put Houdini on RUSH, make it as bloody as possible- don't worry about creating a plausable scenario where the Ballroom and a Seccie civil war trash the planet over a couple of years, just lay about with a lot of massive hammers and scream "terroists".

As far as sending a RMN fleet through the Sigma Draconis terminus, that would trigger all sorts of havoc and reactions through the SL......remember that Manticore really didn't want to go to war with the SL and were still attempting a diplomatic solution even while defeating actual massive attacks on it's forces in Talbot.
The SL would have had respond- and claim that Manticore was attacking them even if the fleet never showed up at a SLN member system.
A couple of RMN warships trickle through the Beowulf end of the terminus, not much news there. 40+? Oh-My-God, the idiots have declared war.
Never mind that unless you are actualy leaving from something like a parked positions like planitary orbit, leaving a terminus and getting to it's hyperlimit bears no actual relationship to where you are going once you go into hyper. So you exit the terminus and accellerate (no bending your course in normal space) and once you hit the hyper limit THEN you change course. If you are in planitary orbit you head in the direction- in system- of your destination- and then jump once you hit the hyper limit in that direction.

Not that the SLN could probably stop you getting to Mesa from Beowulf. 1st someone would have to send a courier ship to SLN HQ to tell them a massive force had shown up and then hypered out. Where they are going is unknown but, given all the things the SLN has been up to they will have to assume it involves the SL. So why would they send a squadron, let alone a fleet (which they would have to assemble and then send) to Mesa- an outlaw pariah- when there are so many intersting targets in the SL.

Sending said SLN fleet to Mesa based on a RMN fleet comming through by Beowulf JUST MIGHT give the impression that somebody on Mesa with way too much power in the League needed their asses saved.

I think the Malign did a fairly good job of getting out on time. If they knew when Gold Peak would intervene they should have left sooner, but ultimately their super genius worked out pretty damn well.

Also Gold Peak intervening like she did was arguably stupid. Quite frankly, I think things went really well for her and all she got was framed for murdering hundreds of millions of people. She's really lucky the Malign didn't have some sort of insidious bioweapon.

Hell, it still could happen. She pissed off the biggest concentration of black biohackers in human controlled space! Was she trying to answer the question "How many strains of probiotic bacteria does it take to undo the Oxygen Catastrophy?" and "Is it possible to design a virus that kills a nation without them ever realizing something is wrong?"

Here is the question I'm left with after UH: why doesn't the Malign just do Oyster Bay II: Everyone Dies? I know Haven and Manticore have a plan to prevent the Malign from getting good targeting data or launching closes, but they don't need good targeting data to hit a planet and they don't need to launch from close range if their willing to wait a few years for the attacks to land.

Why can't they just build up their oversized spider ships, fill them full of spider drive weapons, pop out a light yearish away from their targets, accelerate to .2c and release. At that point just hitting the planet will be devastating, but you can mix in stuff like those graser torps, ball bearings and impeller missiles. How many missiles wedges would it take to kill a planet?

In the first Oyster Bay they were worried about the EE Edict, but that's a dead law after the "Grand Alliance" nuked Mesa. As far as everyone is concerned MAD is the order of the day now. Besides they already have gone that far with Beowulf. So just finish off the Grand Alliance.

quite possibly a cat wrote:I think the Malign did a fairly good job of getting out on time. If they knew when Gold Peak would intervene they should have left sooner, but ultimately their super genius worked out pretty damn well.

Also Gold Peak intervening like she did was arguably stupid. Quite frankly, I think things went really well for her and all she got was framed for murdering hundreds of millions of people. She's really lucky the Malign didn't have some sort of insidious bioweapon.

Hell, it still could happen. She pissed off the biggest concentration of black biohackers in human controlled space! Was she trying to answer the question "How many strains of probiotic bacteria does it take to undo the Oxygen Catastrophy?" and "Is it possible to design a virus that kills a nation without them ever realizing something is wrong?"

Here is the question I'm left with after UH: why doesn't the Malign just do Oyster Bay II: Everyone Dies? I know Haven and Manticore have a plan to prevent the Malign from getting good targeting data or launching closes, but they don't need good targeting data to hit a planet and they don't need to launch from close range if their willing to wait a few years for the attacks to land.

Why can't they just build up their oversized spider ships, fill them full of spider drive weapons, pop out a light yearish away from their targets, accelerate to .2c and release. At that point just hitting the planet will be devastating, but you can mix in stuff like those graser torps, ball bearings and impeller missiles. How many missiles wedges would it take to kill a planet?

In the first Oyster Bay they were worried about the EE Edict, but that's a dead law after the "Grand Alliance" nuked Mesa. As far as everyone is concerned MAD is the order of the day now. Besides they already have gone that far with Beowulf. So just finish off the Grand Alliance.

Because that doesn't make for a good story.

Seriously, what some people seem to be missing is "The Plan." Things were supposed to unfold in a certain order. The SL was supposed to disintegrate, eliminating Beowulf's influence, then Mesa, Manpower and genetic slavery were supposed to be eliminated, then the uplift portion of The Plan was supposed to be implemented. In that order.

What the Detweiler kids are left with is a plan in a shambles. The SL still exists and Beowulf still has a lot of moral influence. There's a huge additional power center in the Haven sector. Manpower is probably going to be eliminated with extreme prejudice.

And none of the kids were really trained to take over from Albrecht.

Activating Houdini was an admission that The Plan had failed. Once the Detweiler kids get over their temper tantrums, they've got to decide whether to continue with the Detweiler Vision and build a new plan to make it happen, or simply throw the entire enterprise out the window and go do something else.

In any case, while this was Honor's last book as a major player, there's probably at least one more in the arc: the Weber-Flint collaboration that has Victor, Anton, Firebrand and the other guy heading to Mesa.

Brigade XO wrote:One of the reasons for Houdini was that there is a practical limit to how many people that the Alignent could disappear from Mesa to Darius by "natural causes" deaths, airfare crashes, emigration, corporate transfers etc.

That's only true if you're trying to do it fast. Withdrawing over a period of several years can have few enough people in any time frame that it's buried in statistical noise.

Especially if the plan is to instigate a slave revolt as the final act, and enjoy watching the planet burn from a distance with a can of beer and a bowl of popcorn.

JohnRoth wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:I think the Malign did a fairly good job of getting out on time. If they knew when Gold Peak would intervene they should have left sooner, but ultimately their super genius worked out pretty damn well.

Also Gold Peak intervening like she did was arguably stupid. Quite frankly, I think things went really well for her and all she got was framed for murdering hundreds of millions of people. She's really lucky the Malign didn't have some sort of insidious bioweapon.

Hell, it still could happen. She pissed off the biggest concentration of black biohackers in human controlled space! Was she trying to answer the question "How many strains of probiotic bacteria does it take to undo the Oxygen Catastrophy?" and "Is it possible to design a virus that kills a nation without them ever realizing something is wrong?"

Here is the question I'm left with after UH: why doesn't the Malign just do Oyster Bay II: Everyone Dies? I know Haven and Manticore have a plan to prevent the Malign from getting good targeting data or launching closes, but they don't need good targeting data to hit a planet and they don't need to launch from close range if their willing to wait a few years for the attacks to land.

Why can't they just build up their oversized spider ships, fill them full of spider drive weapons, pop out a light yearish away from their targets, accelerate to .2c and release. At that point just hitting the planet will be devastating, but you can mix in stuff like those graser torps, ball bearings and impeller missiles. How many missiles wedges would it take to kill a planet?

In the first Oyster Bay they were worried about the EE Edict, but that's a dead law after the "Grand Alliance" nuked Mesa. As far as everyone is concerned MAD is the order of the day now. Besides they already have gone that far with Beowulf. So just finish off the Grand Alliance.

Because that doesn't make for a good story.

I think that doom from the heavens would have made a good Finale for UH. Epilogue: Five Years later - <DOOM!>

That would make the Grand Alliance significantly more manageable. Haven and Manticore would be ashes, but Grayson, Bolthole, assorted friends, Beowulf etc. would all be intact. Plus the spaced based infrastructure of the GA would probably be partially intact.

ldwechsler wrote:
I think everyone has forgotten that Mesa is NOT a part of the League. It does business with League and we should note that some of the planets attacked in UH were also not in the League and doing business.

The real difference between them and Mesa was that Mesa had corrupted the League. They had helped make many transstellars into billion dollar corporations and had enriched many key individuals as well.

The Mesan "ghosts" found a lot of their agents in key positions. So there was plenty of influence.

HOWEVER: Mesa still had the awful reputation. Sending ships to defend it would really offend a lot of people inside the League. Yes, the government and its controlled media would defend it but most people would really hate losing a lot of sailors to defend slavers.

Many countries in the our world have unsavory allies. While providing certain kinds of support, they don't go to defend them...or at least don't do it anymore.

That's part of what I was thinking - that Mesa's reputation would be bad enough to discourage the League from reversing a fait accompli seizure.

I overlooked that the League has an (at least information) version of the Monroe doctrine. The US might not have bothered to intervene against a given corrupt Caribbean or South American dictator who is, say, making massive human rights abuses and providing money laundering services for all kinds of really evil scum -- but we're damned if we'll let anybody else do so in our place. The principle that that is our pond is far more important than that we might be seen as defending some evil government - after all we can always put in a new puppet government after we kick out whatever upstart country thought they could play in our pond.



Though to be far that risk seems almost equality high no mater what route Manticore might take to Mesa. (Let's say in the 20's Japan intervened against Haiti. I don't know that the US would have been even more forceful about applying the Monroe doctrine if they'd used the Panama canal on their way rather than sailing around the Cape. Lynx does, as David pointed out to me, put Manticore in closer contact with Mesa transtellars and their plots - so it does raise the risk of Manticore getting pissed off enough to choose to intervene. But once they decide to risk a confrontation with the League I don't know that the marginally shorter distance from Lynx would be a deciding factor on their willingness to send forces. I still have trouble seeing that usable warning would reach Mesa if the invasion had come by way of Beowulf.

After all look how little warning their was about the Manticoran SD(P)s hanging out near the terminus when Raging Justice's left hook came to call. Those RMN forces could just as easily have slipped into hyper as hung around in stealth -- and it seems that fairly significant fleet had escaped League notice...


Still even if it isn't that much better an invasion route David certainly pointed out that I'd overlooked that simple by unexpectedly crashing into established Mesan schemes in Talbott Manticore's annexation of the area did significantly raise the risk they'd decide enough was enough of Mesa.

quite possibly a cat wrote:
That would make the Grand Alliance significantly more manageable. Haven and Manticore would be ashes, but Grayson, Bolthole, assorted friends, Beowulf etc. would all be intact. Plus the spaced based infrastructure of the GA would probably be partially intact.

You know, it you plan to jump out a light year or so, you can probably pop the entire GA. You have time for a LOT of trips. And you can rearm from freighters. So at 2 months to set up and a month per target you can easily get 24 and still be so far out that it’s impractical to spot you. No recon, just really stealthy cold boxes using inertial and stellar navigation to come down out of the plane of the ecliptic for a high speed rendezvous.

Jonathan_S wrote:I still have trouble seeing that usable warning would reach Mesa if the invasion had come by way of Beowulf.

After all look how little warning their was about the Manticoran SD(P)s hanging out near the terminus when Raging Justice's left hook came to call. Those RMN forces could just as easily have slipped into hyper as hung around in stealth -- and it seems that fairly significant fleet had escaped League notice...

That's because Beowulf was helping them sneak through one by one, disguised as freighters with bogus flight plans, in direct response to Raging Justice. They had help from Beowulf Astro Control to do this, as well as approval from the entire Beowulf government.

There is no way Beowulf can "not know" a Manticoran task force has transited. Total complicity is therefore needed to maintain the secret.

That means the League could be as pissed off with Beowulf as they were when they let Manticoran ships through to block Tsang. Even if Manticore's task force reaches Mesa and achieves full surprise, there would be serious lasting consequences for both Beowulf and Manticore as far as the League was concerned.

munroburton wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I still have trouble seeing that usable warning would reach Mesa if the invasion had come by way of Beowulf.

After all look how little warning their was about the Manticoran SD(P)s hanging out near the terminus when Raging Justice's left hook came to call. Those RMN forces could just as easily have slipped into hyper as hung around in stealth -- and it seems that fairly significant fleet had escaped League notice...

That's because Beowulf was helping them sneak through one by one, disguised as freighters with bogus flight plans, in direct response to Raging Justice. They had help from Beowulf Astro Control to do this, as well as approval from the entire Beowulf government.

There is no way Beowulf can "not know" a Manticoran task force has transited. Total complicity is therefore needed to maintain the secret.

That means the League could be as pissed off with Beowulf as they were when they let Manticoran ships through to block Tsang. Even if Manticore's task force reaches Mesa and achieves full surprise, there would be serious lasting consequences for both Beowulf and Manticore as far as the League was concerned.

Let's make it simple. There was no sane reason for the League to be pissed off. Even Tsang recognized that by blocking the junction Beowulf had saved a real lot of their personnel.

They could have simply let them go through and watch them as they disappeared. At some point, someone might have said "Stop" but it's also possible that every one of those ships would have been destroyed. In UH we saw that happen at a wormhole.

What happened was that politicians controlled the media which controlled the structure of the story.