|
Vince
Vice Admiral
Posts: 1574
Joined: Fri Apr 09, 2010 11:43 pm
|
SWM wrote:We know for certain that the Alignment knew of the Torch wormhole--that's why they placed a squadron of ships on the other side of the wormhole. We have textev that the Alignment intended this wormhole to be their secret backdoor into the Haven Quadrant once they began military operations. They can live without that backdoor; the biggest problem the Alignment has with enemies controlling Torch is that the wormhole also leads indirectly to Darius. It is Darius that the Alignment is desperate to keep hidden from Torch and the Grand Alliance. That's the real secret of Torch that you are referring to. It's not clear how the GA could take advantage of this, even if they figure it out, because David has repeatedly told us that an invasion through a properly defended wormhole is nearly impossible. But the wormhole is clearly an issue for the Alignment.
StealthSeeker wrote:Is this info about the a squadron of ships and Mesa's knowledge of the wormhole in the books? If so, I am greatly disappointed in myself for having totally missed such an important clue to events. I remember the survey ship going through the wormhole and not experiencing anything much out of the ordinary. Other than that there were some non-ordinary features about the wormhole, I think on the far side from Torch. Were there hidden MA ships there keeping an eye on things?
In any case, the way I would write the story, people would be naturally curious about what is on the far side of the Torch wormhole and general exploration would ensue. One of these ships would stumble onto evidence of the MA, after all, everybody is looking for the MA these days, and that ship would become lost/destroyed for it's discovery. Which, after a series of complicated events, would end up with a squadron of heavy cruisers going out to take a look to see what was up. However it gets written, I believe that the domino's will fall, and the discovery of Darius will happen.
SWM wrote:The text about the ships on the other side of the wormhole appears in Torch of Freedom. The Alignment assigned a group of battlecruisers from the Mannerheim System Defense Force to picket the far side of the Torch wormhole. The order to picket the wormhole came when the Alignment learned that Torch was about to send an exploration ship through the wormhole. Only a few people on the Mannerheim ships knew where they were--most of them believed they were protecting Mannerheim's claim to the Felix wormhole junction, which Mannerheim was keeping a secret until they established the claim. In actuality, Mannerheim is part of the incipient Renaissance Factor, and is controlled by the Alignment.
When the exploration ship from Torch came through the wormhole, the Mannerheim battlecruisers blew it to pieces. The exploration ship never even had a chance to see their attackers. The people back on Torch don't know what happened--all they know is that the exploration ship never came back. For all they know, the exploration ship could have been destroyed by natural forces. There is one other known wormhole that no ship has successfully transited. There can be no exploration from Torch until they manage to get a ship through the wormhole, which probably won't happen until the defenses on the other side are defeated.
By now, the Alignment has almost certainly emplaced more permanent defenses on their side of the wormhole. Mines and perhaps some ships can be devastating to a ship transiting a wormhole. David has given several infodumps (available in the Pearls) about how difficult it is to send an invasion force through a well-defended wormhole.
In case you missed the background of the wormhole, here it is. The star system Felix lies near Mannerheim. About ten years ago, Mannerheim explored the system. It has no habitable planets, but does have a wormhole junction with four termini. The Alignment quickly shut down information about the wormhole. Some people in the Mannerheim military and government know that they discovered a wormhole with two termini, which don't lead anywhere particularly interesting. The government is keeping the wormhole a secret, with plans to claim and exploit it sometime in the future. Only a few people on Mannerheim, all deep in the Alignment, know the full story.
The Alignment explored the wormhole. Two termini do lead nowhere currently interesting, as Mannerheim believes. The third led to a system with a habitable planet. The Alignment colonized that planet with genetic slaves and called it Darius. It is the secret headquarters and Bolthole of the Alignment. The fourth terminus from Felix leads to a weird system they called the Twins. There are two wormhole termini in the Twins, both right at the hyper limit, and extremely close to each other. It seems likely that having these two termini close together causes the odd gravitic readings on the Torch terminus. The second terminus in the Twins connects to Torch. It is at the Twins that the Alignment has set up defenses against ships coming from Torch.
There has been some speculation here on the forums that the Twins represents a case where a wormhole bridge by chance intersects with the hyper limit of a star, cutting the bridge and creating two new termini at the two points where the bridge intersects the hyper limit.
Minor quibble: Felix has one "marginally habitable planet". Here's the relevant information on Felix, Darius, and "The Twins": Torch of Freedom, Chapter 50 wrote:"Leaving aside any discussions of our senior officers," Hasselberg said after a moment, "there's still your own point, Admiral. The Manties can't possibly realize what they're dealing with from their end of the bridge."
He glanced at the smart wall bulkhead of Trajan's dining cabin as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze to it. The wall was configured at the moment to show not the Felix System, where Vivienne and the rest of TF 4 were currently conducting "routine training exercises," but what lay at the other end of the Verdant Vista Wormhole Bridge.
It was centered on a single star which looked slightly brighter than any of the others in their field of view. In fact, the only reason for its apparent brightness was that it had been considerably closer to the recording pickup than any of the others. It was actually only a lowly M8 dwarf, without a single planet to its name. Or, rather, to its number, for it had never achieved the dignity of the name all its own. It was simply SGC-902-36-G, a dim little star just this side of a "brown dwarf," of absolutely no particular interest to anyone and over forty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.
It was also, however, home to a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole termini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.
No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the "SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly" (also known as "The Twins") had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing "main" hypotheses.
Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a survey expedition backed by the "Jessyk Combine" and operating (very surreptitiously) out of Mannerheim under direct orders from the Alignment. Jessyk never shared survey information with anyone unless there was an excellent reason for it to do so, and in this case the Alignment had decided there was an excellent reason not to broadcast the Combine's discovery.
Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.
The Republic of Mannerheim openly abhorred and despised the genetic slave trade and the outlaw Mesan transstellars which promoted it . . . which was one of the things that made it so valuable to the Mesan Alignment. The fact that Mannerheim's system-defense force was one of the most powerful of the entire Solarian League, and that there was absolutely nothing to associate it with Manpower or the Mesa System's government, didn't hurt, either. As such, it would have been handy, the Alignment had thought, to tuck its secret arsenal away someplace everyone knew was absolutely useless yet was simultaneously close enough to Mannerheim for the MSDF to keep a protective eye on it. Of course, there had been downsides to the proposition, the worst of which was that it would also have been close enough to Mannerheim for someone to innocently stumble across things the Alignment didn't want anyone stumbling over. The chance of someone actually doing that had been remote, to say the least, of course. When it came to concealing things, ten light-years might as well be ten thousand, unless there was something to prompt some busybody into making the trip in the first place.
What no one had expected—until the survey team the Alignment had sent to Felix under cover of the Jessyk expedition completed a thorough analysis of the system primary's emissions—was that there would have been plenty of reason to make the trip, if only anyone had known that Felix was associated with a major wormhole junction. Not on anything like the scale of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, perhaps, but still considerably larger than most, with no less than four secondary termini.
They led to several interesting places (including the Darius System, which actually had been chosen as the site for the MAN's arsenal), and the Alignment had kept the Felix Junction's existence as "black" as they had the entire colony in Darius.
In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was concerned, however, Mannerheim had discovered the junction only eight and a half T-years ago, and the decision had been taken to keep its existence a secret because it had only two secondary termini . . . and because the Republic intended to make sure that when its existence became generally known, it was also firmly established as belonging to Mannerheim.
Fortuitously, from the Alignment's perspective, establishing that ownership was going to be complicated and (even better) time-consuming. Useless as the Felix System had turned out to be, colonization rights to it had been purchased by a Solarian corporation better than five hundred T-years ago. Since then, they had passed through the hands of at least a dozen levels of speculators—always trading downward, once the newest owner discovered how difficult it would have been to attract colonists to the system when there were so many other, more attractive potential destinations. By now, there were actually four separate corporations which claimed ownership, and none of them were likely to relinquish their claims without seeking at least some compensation to write off against their bad debt.
If Mannerheim suddenly showed an interest in the system, someone was going to wonder why. Aside from the Jessyk survey (which had been poaching on someone else's property, not that one would have expected that consideration to weigh heavily with Jessyk, of course), no one had ever bothered to update the original survey of the system. But if Mannerheim started offering to acquire the colonization rights, that was almost inevitably going to change, since the contending "owners" would certainly suspect (correctly) that Mannerheim knew something about it that they didn't. So they'd go and take a look for themselves, in the course of which they would discover the junction for themselves. At which point all manner of litigation, claims, counterclaims, and demands for immense compensation would come frothing to the surface.
So Mannerheim had the perfect cover for keeping the junction's existence under wraps while it very carefully and quietly, through a web of agents and arm's-length associations, sought to acquire ownership of Felix for itself without anyone's noticing. Those members of the MSDF who were not themselves Mesans but who were aware of the Felix Junction's existence knew exactly why they were supposed to keep their mouths shut about it. And they didn't know that the "official" survey information which had been shared with them didn't include the Darius Terminus . . . or the SGC-902-36-G Terminus.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis. -------------------------------------------------------------
History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
|
