The Two General's Problem

tlb wrote:What would it have hurt if Gail Weiss, for example, had just traveled to the Sol system to meet her pickup there? Why did people have to die to cover her going away? Why couldn't several passenger ships just taken people away? What was gained by trying to hide the evacuee list, when only the Detweilers and a few others really needed the anonymity?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:They didn't need anonymity, but they needed family and loved ones to not look for those people, because that would tip authorities that a lot of people had disappeared. Even the old corporate government with Manpower leading would have had a hard time to dismiss all those investigations because those were prominent families in Mesan society.

But in thinking about the expedited Houdini Plan, even if everyone knew that this was the Onion leaving, what would have been lost compared to the actual death and destruction? If everyone just left a note saying I am going away and not coming back, what would be different (aside from all the people that did not die)?

The fundamental question is what was gained by the Onion by trying to hide the evacuee list (excluding people like the Detweilers)?

penny wrote:It does not matter if you and I don't think Henke is a loose warhead. I am paraphrasing one of the Detweilers.

"Daddy would still be alive if it weren't for that loose warhead Henke noseying about at Mesa."

Can't remember which book or the exact words, but then the Detweiler in the passage goes on to say that he warned his daddy to get out sooner.

Agreed, which was not very smart. All the meddling that the Malign had done in the Talbott Quadrant, where their involvement was blazingly obvious, meant that the problem of Mesa could not be put off by Manticore. All that meddling adds to list of Malign plans that were not well thought out and not well executed.

tlb wrote:But in thinking about the expedited Houdini Plan, even if everyone knew that this was the Onion leaving, what would have been lost compared to the actual death and destruction? If everyone just left a note saying I am going away and not coming back, what would be different (aside from all the people that did not die)?

The fundamental question is what was gained by the Onion by trying to hide the evacuee list (excluding people like the Detweilers)?

Whoever went looking for the Onion not knowing who is alive and who was evacuated. Even when the original Houdini was being planned, the Onion had the GA and the Ballroom for enemies. Torch had declared war on Manpower. If there was a list, those would start looking for the people on the list and wondering where they'd ended up. It would further confirm the existence of the MAlign and it was a lead they couldn't afford to leave behind.

Because Galton was vulnerable to being found. And it was found: if there was a list of who was evacuated and those people hadn't come to Galton, the investigators would further know there was another site.

Which is exactly where we stand right now after the end of TEiF. That means that even with the precaution of pretending those people had died didn't work, in the end. But I can't fault them for attempting to mitigate that risk.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Or possible, in part to atone for the mega-deaths that the expedited Houdini Plan had required.

They may not have felt they deserved to live after directly killing so many Mesan innocents to cover the tracks of those who'd already evacuated; and then having to kill the remaining planned evacuees.

After all they could have attempted to hide and sneak away from Mesa later, only killing themselves if capture seemed likely. An entire planet is a vast place to disappear into. Even if they thought that island base compromised they didn't have to go out in a nuclear fireball with it. They chose to stand there and die -- and that isn't necessarily just because the revised plan wasn't 100% successful.

I am not sure that there is a great difference between what you and I stated. If it were possible to emigrate after the conquest of Mesa and there was no clear way to mark many of the planned evacuees as being members of the Onion, then the mega-deaths were unnecessary and a failure of the expedited Houdini Plan as such.

What would it have hurt if Gail Weiss, for example, had just traveled to the Sol system to meet her pickup there? Why did people have to die to cover her going away? Why couldn't several passenger ships just taken people away? What was gained by trying to hide the evacuee list, when only the Detweilers and a few others really needed the anonymity?

I agree that Albrecht and his wife committed suicide partly to atone for the deaths. I just think that many of the deaths were due to a failure to plan something better. Just like the destruction of the forts at Galton, it was also to demonstrate defiance to the people that stood in their way.

I guess the difference would be whether they'd have been willing to live if everybody (else) on the sped-up Houdini evacuation list had gotten away before the planet was interdicted.

At that point the plan would have met its (revised) goals, and so arguable have been successful, but there still would have been mega-deaths of innocent Mesans (and quite a few deaths of those in the Onion but not deemed worthy of evacuation).
So, in that event, would Albrecht and Evelina still feel they couldn't live with what they'd done?

I was left with the impression that they still wouldn't have been able to live with themselves. But, unless RFC feels like sharing I guess we'll never actually know.

tlb wrote:I agree that Albrecht and his wife committed suicide partly to atone for the deaths. I just think that many of the deaths were due to a failure to plan something better. Just like the destruction of the forts at Galton, it was also to demonstrate defiance to the people that stood in their way.

Jonathan_S wrote:I guess the difference would be whether they'd have been willing to live if everybody (else) on the sped-up Houdini evacuation list had gotten away before the planet was interdicted.

At that point the plan would have met its (revised) goals, and so arguable have been successful, but there still would have been mega-deaths of innocent Mesans (and quite a few deaths of those in the Onion but not deemed worthy of evacuation).
So, in that event, would Albrecht and Evelina still feel they couldn't live with what they'd done?

I was left with the impression that they still wouldn't have been able to live with themselves. But, unless RFC feels like sharing I guess we'll never actually know.

My reading of the books suggests that it was only those deaths of the failed evacuees that concerned them. If they were going to be concerned about the collateral deaths of innocents, then the Detweiler Plan would be completely different.

tlb wrote:But in thinking about the expedited Houdini Plan, even if everyone knew that this was the Onion leaving, what would have been lost compared to the actual death and destruction? If everyone just left a note saying I am going away and not coming back, what would be different (aside from all the people that did not die)?

The fundamental question is what was gained by the Onion by trying to hide the evacuee list (excluding people like the Detweilers)?

Fair. They were evacuating because the existence of the Onion had been publicly exposed.

The original plan was to slip them away so invisibly that nobody would ever realized they'd been evacuated. Some would still 'die' in explainable accidents. Others would probably move to other worlds and stay there long enough to plausibly drift out of touch with their friends and family back home. And all of this spread over enough time that it would be lost in the background noise of normal deaths, estrangements, etc. So that even if someone did deeply investigate Mesa nothing would tie these particular people together - no confirmation of a conspiracy.

But with the exitance of the conspiracy blown it doesn't seem like it needed to be that invisible.

So why go to all the trouble to try to disguise who was evacuated vs who was killed?

I guess one remaining reason would be concern that the evacuees might have, over the years, shared a bit more with their families and friends than they should have about what they did. Enough breadcrumbs that if an investigation could hone in on just those who the MAlign had evacuated they might get useful intel from digging to their friends and families who stayed behind. (And of course they'd already triaged their personnel lists and determined some folks weren't going to be evacuated -- so they'd already be killing them to keep them from talking)
But I guess if they go ahead and hide the evacuations in mass casualty events then any investigation has to deal with a lot more noise as they now have a bunch of innocent bystanders to investigate as well. Plus arrange for some of those friends and family of the evacuees to be the the blast radius and you simultaneously tie off those potential loose ends.

Still, it seems that some what drove them to still try to hide exactly who had been evacuated was a failure to reassess base assumptions when circumstanced changed. The plan was always to hide who had been evacuated so "of course" when you speed up the plan you still unthinkingly assume that core requirement applies.

tlb wrote:The fundamental question is what was gained by the Onion by trying to hide the evacuee list (excluding people like the Detweilers)?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Because Galton was vulnerable to being found. And it was found: if there was a list of who was evacuated and those people hadn't come to Galton, the investigators would further know there was another site.

Which is exactly where we stand right now after the end of TEiF. That means that even with the precaution of pretending those people had died didn't work, in the end. But I can't fault them for attempting to mitigate that risk.

But it would easy enough to add a list of people who arrived and were on the demolished forts; which could include everyone that left Mesa, not just limited to those that really arrived at Galton. All that would be necessary would be to mark it for "commander's eyes only" and encrypt it enough to make the Grand Alliance work hard to read it.

Alternatively, make sure there is NO list of anyone who arrived from Mesa, so the GA could not know who was missing.

tlb wrote:But it would easy enough to add a list of people who arrived and were on the demolished forts; which could include everyone that left Mesa, not just limited to those that really arrived at Galton. All that would be necessary would be to mark it for "commander's eyes only" and encrypt it enough to make the Grand Alliance work hard to read it.

Alternatively, make sure there is NO list of anyone who arrived from Mesa, so the GA could not know who was missing.

The latter they did indeed try to do. But there was a list despite their attempts to not make one, albeit an incomplete one. It was an unexpected backup of data, one that wasn't accounted for.

As for the former, we may yet find out they attempted to do that too. The problem is that a lot more people survived the Liberation of Galton than the plans probably expected, so cross-referencing survivors' interactions may yield there were ghost names of people who should have arrived but were never seen or heard from. Did they never go down to the planet for R&R? Did they never visit with acquaintances in the habitats? Did they not have housing in the habitats in the first place?

This is of course only possible because there is such a list. Otherwise, there would be nothing to cross-reference with, just a lot of noise of who may have died in the fighting.

Moreover, it's entirely possible the MAlign-at-Galton did not prepare for this eventuality at all, thinking the OpSec in the evacuation had held and/or they had more time to achieve the insertions. They might have needed sufficient time to also insert deaths by accident or reassignments, so people's memories would be murkier. Benjamin Detweiler's visit was prophetic, but I don't think he or Adebayo thought the GF was going to come calling that soon.

I fully expect the next book in the mainline to involve Cachat, Zilwicki, and Ruth Winton finding that the MAlign was not defeated. Though it's also possible we'll only be told this happened offscreen, like the Liberation of Trevor's Star was.

tlb wrote:But it would easy enough to add a list of people who arrived and were on the demolished forts; which could include everyone that left Mesa, not just limited to those that really arrived at Galton. All that would be necessary would be to mark it for "commander's eyes only" and encrypt it enough to make the Grand Alliance work hard to read it.

Alternatively, make sure there is NO list of anyone who arrived from Mesa, so the GA could not know who was missing.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The latter they did indeed try to do. But there was a list despite their attempts to not make one, albeit an incomplete one. It was an unexpected backup of data, one that wasn't accounted for.

As for the former, we may yet find out they attempted to do that too. The problem is that a lot more people survived the Liberation of Galton than the plans probably expected, so cross-referencing survivors' interactions may yield there were ghost names of people who should have arrived but were never seen or heard from. Did they never go down to the planet for R&R? Did they never visit with acquaintances in the habitats? Did they not have housing in the habitats in the first place?

This is of course only possible because there is such a list. Otherwise, there would be nothing to cross-reference with, just a lot of noise of who may have died in the fighting.

Moreover, it's entirely possible the MAlign-at-Galton did not prepare for this eventuality at all, thinking the OpSec in the evacuation had held and/or they had more time to achieve the insertions. They might have needed sufficient time to also insert deaths by accident or reassignments, so people's memories would be murkier. Benjamin Detweiler's visit was prophetic, but I don't think he or Adebayo thought the GF was going to come calling that soon.

I fully expect the next book in the mainline to involve Cachat, Zilwicki, and Ruth Winton finding that the MAlign was not defeated. Though it's also possible we'll only be told this happened offscreen, like the Liberation of Trevor's Star was.

Yes, there is some sort of list of those that left based on the data from Mesa's orbital. How complete it is we do not know. But the question is what documentation exists of those that were delivered to Galton? If a list is found at Galton with the names of Zachariah McBryde and Gail Weiss, then would the GA be able to definitively say they were not transported there?

The Malign knew that Honor was in charge of a fleet to go to a Mesan Alignment planet, Audrey O'Hanrahan was even briefed by her handler. Since the Malign still had the monopoly on the streak drive, warning could have been given. But even without warning this is something could, and maybe should, have been done as part of the lead up to the Alamo Contingency.

tlb wrote:Yes, there is some sort of list of those that left based on the data from Mesa's orbital. How complete it is we do not know. But the question is what documentation exists of those that were delivered to Galton? If a list is found at Galton with the names of Zachariah McBryde and Gail Weiss, then would the GA be able to definitively say they were not transported there?

Definitely? Unlikely.

One person or two who barely interacted with anyone else we can understand. Some people are just socially awkward or prefer solitude. Some others may have found the transplantation difficult and were just burying themselves at work. I can even relate in both cases.

But I expect there will be enough names that can't just be explained away. The proportion of people who have never interacted with any of the survivors will be too high. Moreover, the families of many of those will still be alive on Mesa, for interview and confirmation that they were not socially awkward. So I expect there will be a lot of circumstantial evidence that those people never arrived.

Add to that the other discrepancies in the story, like the lack of a stealth drive system or the insufficient graser technology that they thought was used for Oyster Bay.

The Malign knew that Honor was in charge of a fleet to go to a Mesan Alignment planet, Audrey O'Hanrahan was even briefed by her handler. Since the Malign still had the monopoly on the streak drive, warning could have been given. But even without warning this is something could, and maybe should, have been done as part of the lead up to the Alamo Contingency.

Indeed, but inserting those backstories in a way the survivors would not contradict takes time. Remember that no one in Galton other than Adebayo and the other Inner Onion even knew that Darius existed. The survivors, even the most zealots, wouldn't know there was a secret to be protected in the first place, so they wouldn't know that they needed to lie at all. And don't forget that the GA investigators are coming with furry, six-legged lie detectors, so even a lie would have legs shorter than a treekitten's.