shower thought: Could the fall of galton exposed bolthole?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I wouldn't do it that way. It's too easy for the transfer crews to let something spill while they're on leave on the base. They will interact with the regular crew of the base, whether they're allowed to or not. Remember how Shannon Foraker managed to get messages through to the other Navy ships under the eyes of the StateSec, before the "oops" moment?

Then don't give them leave. Each transfer of a group of ships can be accompanied by a passenger liner. Once the ships are stopped and any navigation information cleared, the crews are shuttled to the liner to return to Bolthole. Best if the crews are natives of Bolthole, so when they get leave, it is on their native planet.

That's what I tried to get ahead of when I referred to the secret communication channels. You can't prevent all communication from going out. And the temptation is too high at a regular fleet base for them to communicate. Or, worse, attempt to go AWOL and visit some establishments that cater to spacers.

Especially if you consider this ferry wasn't just a 3-day trip to J-156-18(L) and back. This was probably at least 3 weeks, which requires a bigger crew and also more personnel to effect these transfers.

Add to it that in a populated system, a spy could smuggle him/herself aboard the ship bound back to Bolthole, and smuggle themselves again out when a new transfer happened (if they didn't manage to become part of the transfer crews). In J-156-18(L), with no other traffic except those transferring to Bolthole, a spy would have a much harder time finding an outbound flight to smuggle themselves into.

Of course, the single most likely ship to escape on is the one being transferred. Especially as they are the biggest ships around (SD(P)s) with a skeleton crew. Someone could easily stow away in one from Bolthole and remain completely undetected until reaching a fleet base anyway. Handing over in J-156-18(L) doesn't help in detecting these cases, but why make it easier for spies?

Realistically, it is not the transfer crews that are the problem, since their contact can be minimized. It is that foreign technicians and other personnel are eventually going to be rotated out of Bolthole and they are going to know things that could provide clues to the location.

Yeah, RFC has been quiet about this. Refuge did not have the technology to start Bolthole nor the time to teach the native population, so the Peeps had to send a lot of people there. In an un-democratic system, maybe those people weren't given a ticket back and wouldn't be expected to ever come back, but that's not Pritchart's way of working.

How is then the Republic handling the return of those technicians and personnel?

Even if the Republic can keep the exact coordinates unknown, the simple fact that Sanctuary is populated by a lost colony cannot be contained. The Sanctuarians might have forgotten until the time of contact that they were the descendants of the Calvin expedition, but the tale of the Dark Fall was well known and now they do know.

If Calvin's Hope had ended up somewhere far from the intended destination, it wouldn't matter. But they ended up only 12 light-years away. And the J-156-18(L) wormhole arrives in the Calvin System, which is the starting point for search once the Sanctuarian's heritage becomes known.

tlb wrote:Realistically, it is not the transfer crews that are the problem, since their contact can be minimized. It is that foreign technicians and other personnel are eventually going to be rotated out of Bolthole and they are going to know things that could provide clues to the location.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Yeah, RFC has been quiet about this. Refuge did not have the technology to start Bolthole nor the time to teach the native population, so the Peeps had to send a lot of people there. In an un-democratic system, maybe those people weren't given a ticket back and wouldn't be expected to ever come back, but that's not Pritchart's way of working.

How is then the Republic handling the return of those technicians and personnel?

It is not just people from Haven now, there are also people from Manticore there.

PS: In the scenario I presented with the transfer crews cleared out before outsiders enter, I do not see how someone could smuggle themselves aboard the return ship nor remain hidden until that particular ship is once again someplace where they could disembark. It is easier to imagine a recording device attaching iself to an out of the way place on the hull.

That's an interesting question. The same could be asked about whether the fall of Galton could lead to the location of Darius. I think both answers is... it is at least one step closer. Is that one step a baby step or a giant step is the question. Every government secret has a weak link. Some links are weaker than they should be because human beings can not properly follow protocol. Sex, drugs and more sex compromises rules. Factor in a little profit and the bet is off. Then there is that Demon Murphy who wants to have his say as well.

I think we have to consider the possibility that the author introduced the fall of Galton to have a way to explain finding Darius.

So, Bolthole can be exposed as well. Good question.

penny wrote:That's an interesting question. The same could be asked about whether the fall of Galton could lead to the location of Darius. I think both answers is... it is at least one step closer. Is that one step a baby step or a giant step is the question. Every government secret has a weak link. Some links are weaker than they should be because human beings can not properly follow protocol. Sex, drugs and more sex compromises rules. Factor in a little profit and the bet is off. Then there is that Demon Murphy who wants to have his say as well.

I don't think so. There were very, very few people in Galton who even knew of Darius' existence. Literally a handful, because you could count them in the fingers of one hand. Those were also zealots, so they would commit suicide in some way or another before even hinting that Darius existed. And they did.

Those people who go to Darius involuntarily never leave. The few who frequently leave are either zealots too (members of the Inner Onion) or agents implanted with suicide nanites, or both. The interesting exception to this is military personnel.

That's different from Peep conscripts, or regular technicians shipped there during the early years of the Pritchart administration. There's a lot more people, and with that you get a lot more variation in motives and possibilities of leak, bribe, or coercion.

I think we have to consider the possibility that the author introduced the fall of Galton to have a way to explain finding Darius.

It doesn't feel that way to me.

The only hint at all in TEiF that TheGoodGuys found about Darius was that 2 of the slave ships that transited the Warner-Mannerheim wormhole but never returned. Frankly, this could also be nothing: engineering incidents happen, and slave revolts taking the ship but resulting in its destruction.

So that and Cmdr. Jessica Milliken are the two hints that Darius exists.

tlb wrote:It is not just people from Haven now, there are also people from Manticore there.

Indeed, but I get the impression that the Manticore and Andermani personnel who go there are high-level officials, who know what's at stake, and have chosen to go there or have a dated return ticket in a few months anyway. It's much easier for the intelligence services to keep tabs on a few people than on the masses of technicians, especially those who didn't go voluntarily.

PS: In the scenario I presented with the transfer crews cleared out before outsiders enter, I do not see how someone could smuggle themselves aboard the return ship nor remain hidden until that particular ship is once again someplace where they could disembark. It is easier to imagine a recording device attaching iself to an out of the way place on the hull.

I'm thinking of a stowaway. In a superdreadnought with 10 million cubic meters of internal volume with a sub-skeleton crew only for passage, it's easy to get lost inside. They need to have smuggled in food for weeks and one tablet to keep from getting bored (we can assume the water system is working), that's all. Once the ship arrives at the final shipyard for the regular crew to start embarking, there will be a lot of people going in and out, most of whom don't know each other - even assuming you could know everyone in a 6,000 strong crew - not to mention yard technicians who are coming aboard to complete final fitting or load supplies.

You're right that leaving a tracker on the hull is easier, but this means the spy hasn't left Bolthole at all. I was thinking the spy would have wanted to get away too. Though maybe they have an on-going mission to capture more plans and send continuous reports, maybe even insert viruses and sabotage equipment.

penny wrote:I think we have to consider the possibility that the author introduced the fall of Galton to have a way to explain finding Darius.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:It doesn't feel that way to me.

The only hint at all in TEiF that TheGoodGuys found about Darius was that 2 of the slave ships that transited the Warner-Mannerheim wormhole but never returned. Frankly, this could also be nothing: engineering incidents happen, and slave revolts taking the ship but resulting in its destruction.

So that and Cmdr. Jessica Milliken are the two hints that Darius exists.

There is another clue that something other than Galton exists: the people that were known to have left Mesa as part of Houdini (such as Zachariah McBryde), but never came to Galton. If they can catalog enough of them, then engineering incidents to account for all become less probable.

Galton offers no clues to finding either Bolthole or Darius, because of the wormholes that could lead anywhere. At least with Bolthole there were strong clues that it existed, but Galton fell to hide the existence of Darius.

tlb wrote:There is another clue that something other than Galton exists: the people that were known to have left Mesa as part of Houdini (such as Zachariah McBryde), but never came to Galton. If they can catalog enough of them, then engineering incidents to account for all become less probable.

Galton offers no clues to finding either Bolthole or Darius, because of the wormholes that could lead anywhere. At least with Bolthole there were strong clues that it existed, but Galton fell to hide the existence of Darius.

Ah, yes, of course. That evidence points to there being a second hideaway that they need to find. Plus the fact that there will be no spider drive plans found at Galton, and the plans for what Galton did ship for Oyster Bay won't match the readings of what was used.

But none of that points to where Darius is or how it can be found. The ships would indicate it's somewhere accessible from Mannerheim, but since Felix is actually so close to it and the ships never returned, it's a dead end clue.

Jessica Checkova... I mean, Milliken is the only real clue.

I'm actually wondering if the other Felix termini will come into play. The fact that only two Jessyk ships used the Warner-Mannerheim warp bridge to get to Felix probably indicates the other ships that were used to seed Darius didn't. The first two might have been necessary when the other termini hadn't been mapped, or they may have been diverted out of convenience.

Though we're also told that the Darius Gamma population, though de facto slaves, don't think of themselves as such. Therefore, they may be fast-grown clones raised locally, with the initial slave population only needed for that first phase before the clones took up their positions.

Either way, population alone wouldn't make Darius the powerhouse it is. The MAlign must have shipped a lot of equipment, like fabricators.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Though we're also told that the Darius Gamma population, though de facto slaves, don't think of themselves as such. Therefore, they may be fast-grown clones raised locally, with the initial slave population only needed for that first phase before the clones took up their positions.

Either way, population alone wouldn't make Darius the powerhouse it is. The MAlign must have shipped a lot of equipment, like fabricators.

Is Gamma the worker bee class? I thought the elite classes were Alpha, Beta AND Gamma; with the workers being lower.

From Storm from the Shadows:

Chapter 51 wrote:Coleman nodded her head in the direction of Commander Felicidad Kolstad, Topolev's operations officer. It was odd, a corner of Topolev's thoughts reflected for far from the first time, that three of the four most important officers on his staff were not only all female, but all quite attractive, in their own very distinct ways. Although, perhaps, that attractiveness shouldn't have been such a surprise, since all of his officers were the products of alpha, beta, or gamma lines.

From Torch of Freedom:

Chapter 50 wrote:All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:It is not just people from Haven now, there are also people from Manticore there.

Indeed, but I get the impression that the Manticore and Andermani personnel who go there are high-level officials, who know what's at stake, and have chosen to go there or have a dated return ticket in a few months anyway. It's much easier for the intelligence services to keep tabs on a few people than on the masses of technicians, especially those who didn't go voluntarily.

They moved a lot of Manticore's R&D out there (at least the Wayland staff who were all lucky enough to be off-station on a drill when it was destroyed during OB. They can't all be high-level officers.

However as people who were already long-duration black R&D programs, and who presumably were given a choice about moving to an locked-down and isolated undisclosed location even the more junior staff who agreed are presumably bought in and dedicated to keeping the systems location a secret (in addition to all the secrets they're already keeping about the work they do)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'm thinking of a stowaway. In a superdreadnought with 10 million cubic meters of internal volume with a sub-skeleton crew only for passage, it's easy to get lost inside. They need to have smuggled in food for weeks and one tablet to keep from getting bored (we can assume the water system is working), that's all. Once the ship arrives at the final shipyard for the regular crew to start embarking, there will be a lot of people going in and out, most of whom don't know each other - even assuming you could know everyone in a 6,000 strong crew - not to mention yard technicians who are coming aboard to complete final fitting or load supplies.

I guess that might work for sneaking out of Bolthole; if you wanted to go AWOL. But I don't think they'd be using a skeleton crewed SD, or any SD, to shuttle transfer crews back to Bolthole after they'd delivered the ships to their navy crews. And it's that transfer to the navy that seems like it'd be the higher risk location for infiltration attempts.

But there you could keep the military personnel transport (or whatever) used to take the transfer crews home well clear of whatever ships or stations are used for the transfer.
Bring the returning transfer crews back in shuttles and rigorously check the ID of everyone boarding the shuttles and then again as they get off onto the transport. It's way, way, harder for someone to sneak aboard and find a place to hide in a shuttle or pinnace than it would be in the minimally crewed SD you were talking of.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Though we're also told that the Darius Gamma population, though de facto slaves, don't think of themselves as such. Therefore, they may be fast-grown clones raised locally, with the initial slave population only needed for that first phase before the clones took up their positions.

tlb wrote:Is Gamma the worker bee class? I thought the elite classes were Alpha, Beta AND Gamma; with the workers being lower.

Sorry, ambiguous language here. I was referring to the population of the planet called Darius Gamma, which I assume from the name is the third rock from the sun. We've also heard about the "shipyards at Darius Prime", but whether that's the first planet or the star itself is unclear. Star Trek uses "Prime" for the first planet.