Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote:Shadow of Saganami

"I wouldn't exactly be heartbroken if the Manties suffered a mischief." Anisimovna's tone's mildness fooled no one. "God knows they've been a big enough pain in the ass for as long as I can remember, even leaving aside our recent little misfortunes in Tiberian and Congo. But it's not as if the damned Peeps aren't just as a big a pain."

"For that matter, it was even more Haven than the Manties who engineered the Congo fuck-up," Bardasano said sourly, her smile of a moment before disappearing. The loss of the Congo Wormhole Junction before it could even be adequately surveyed had been almost as upsetting to the Jessyk Combine as the loss of Verdant Vista's slave-breeding facilities and pharmaceutical industry had been to Manpower.

"Agreed," Anisimovna

It seems like the stock in the remaining slaves would shoot up drastically. Law of supply and demand.

And the remaining slaves are probably shuttled around and bartered out to the highest bidder. I wonder what system, or system, has the largest population of slaves?

This suggests that there are still slaver ships running about. And if slaves are becoming the centerpiece of supply and demand then perhaps even Darius imports or exports slaves - a possible weak link in their veil of secrecy?

Cthia, you may have come up with a way for the GA to find out more about Darius and the other end of the Torch wormhole, there just may be some evidence which is not destroyed in the Jessyk combine records.

Basically, if you arrive on Darius you are never leaving unless you are crew on a MAN vessel or extremely important to the whole MA. In either case I suspect that deciding to talk to someone about Darius would have highly detrimental impact on your chance of having dinner that evening.

I could be wrong, but IIRC there are no slaves on Darius.

kzt wrote:Basically, if you arrive on Darius you are never leaving unless you are crew on a MAN vessel or extremely important to the whole MA. In either case I suspect that deciding to talk to someone about Darius would have highly detrimental impact on your chance of having dinner that evening.

darrell wrote:I could be wrong, but IIRC there are no slaves on Darius.

You do not recall correctly. there is explicit textev that the population is ~~60% slaves.

Weird Harold wrote:You do not recall correctly. there is explicit textev that the population is ~~60% slaves.

Uhh, not quite. Straight from the text:

By now, the Darius System's total population was in the very near vicinity of 3.9 billion, of whom just under two billion were representatives of one of the alpha, beta, or gamma genomes the Alignment had worked to improve for so long. The remainder of the system population were genetic slaves, but the conditions of their slavery were very unlike those which obtained elsewhere. For one thing, they were treated far better, without the often savage discipline slaves often received elsewhere. In fact, the Darius System was one of the very few places where the Mesan Constitution's official legal protections theoretically intended to protect slaves from gross mistreatment were actually enforced. For another, they had a much higher standard of living. And for yet another, they formed the backbone of a highly trained, highly skilled labor force which had earned the respect of its supervisors.

Every one of those slaves had been born here in Darius, and not one of them had ever left the system. Their knowledge of what was happening elsewhere in the galaxy, of the history of Mesa, or of their own history had been carefully controlled for generations. They'd been aware for those same generations that they and their parents and grandparents had been laboring to build first the basic industry and then the specialized infrastructure to support a massive navy, but they were convinced it was intended as a defensive fleet.

darrell wrote:I could be wrong, but IIRC there are no slaves on Darius.

kzt wrote:Basically, if you arrive on Darius you are never leaving unless you are crew on a MAN vessel or extremely important to the whole MA. In either case I suspect that deciding to talk to someone about Darius would have highly detrimental impact on your chance of having dinner that evening.

Slave or not, it's Hotel California. You can't ever leave.

Duckk wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:You do not recall correctly. there is explicit textev that the population is ~~60% slaves.

Uhh, not quite. Straight from the text:

By now, the Darius System's total population was in the very near vicinity of 3.9 billion, of whom just under two billion were representatives of one of the alpha, beta, or gamma genomes the Alignment had worked to improve for so long. The remainder of the system population were genetic slaves,

So that makes it more like 34% [edit: Oops, more like 51% slave; I misread the numbers] should be slaves. Though kzt has a point; even the non-skave residents aren't very free.

I doubt that very many people from Havens bolthole are galaxy travelers either.

The Alignment shouldn't be letting anything from Jessyk or any of the Mesa involved companies anywhere near Darius. Jessyk people may know about the secret wormhole network (they seem to have been involved in discovery and exploration, probably in a compartmented operation) as do people from Mannheim but NOT about Darius and the leg of the network that leads there. Sure, some people know or there would be no traffic to or format, but it would be very tightly controlled.
The Ghosts, Sharks and the transfer ships involved in OysterBay have/had people with some knowlege. But the military crews would be primarily from and based there and were returned there after the mission. They will be training the expanded crew base for the Detweilers etc.

We see part of the operations and thinking for Houdini. The Alignment is getting people (and presumably equipment/data) it needs to disappear. The crews of the various ships involved know only as much as nessisary to compleat their portions of the transport. Actually, they- at least the officers etc- may know quite a lot about the slaving trade and all sorts of less than legal shipping, trade routes, slaving trade and service base operations, etc. but for the most part once they get item(s) x to point b, it is out of their hands and just one more cargo or passenger departure.
We also see involved people, such as the traffic control people and manager at the base where the Torch frigates raid, comming to all sorts of conclusions about at least something odd is happening but primarily deciding that they had best appear to NOT notice or ask anything and stay below anyone's radar. People will notice stuff that is "different" about movements and changes in routines they deal with on a regular basis. Along with the draconian orders to the GAULS for the lengths they must go to keep things secret and destroy the "assets" rather than let them be lost to unfriendly hands or just escape, it is clear the Alignment preferes the eveidence be destroyed if about to be compromised.

You are dealing with an entire starsystem in Darius. Dam few individuals are going to be allowed to leave there and not come back in what should be a closed loop (like the Oyster Bay strikes).

Jonathan_S wrote:

Duckk wrote:You're missing the point I'm trying to make. There is no traffic to or from Darius except for military traffic. That's the whole point of having a secret base. You don't want imported slaves from outside Darius to to contaminate the local population with foreign ideas about what Mesa is really doing. And you definitely don't want anyone from Darius being exported out where they can talk about some world no one has ever heard about engaging in mighty suspicious activities. Again, this is very clearly spelled out in the text, specifically MoH.

Furthermore, genetic slavery was a means to an end; it was never an end in itself. Genetic slavery is simply a tool to the Alignment. It gives them cover for their genetic experiments and their covert operations. The slave trade itself never mattered to their goals. The money never mattered to them - part of the reason Cachat and Zilwicki went to Mesa the first time was that the slave trade didn't make financial sense. So the Alignment isn't going to compromise Darius' security for something as irrelevant (to them) as the slave trade.

To expand slightly on this, there were people the money in genetic slavery mattered to, but they'd have been in Manpower and way, way, outside the onion. The existinance of Darius has been carefully compartmented away from them; they've no clue it might even exists.

So all the profit motive in the galaxy can't cause them to try to sneak slaves out of a place they don't know exists; and have no access to.

They may try to set up breeding centers in former distribution sites; or attempt to acquire the tools on the black market to continue growing custom designed slaves. (Or even try to sneak such equipment; or the DNA libraries of existing slave lines off of Mesa before the GA fully locks it down). But none of that should be able to lead the GA to the true MAlign.

No no no. I'm not missing the point inasmuch as I failed to make my stance clear. I know how Darius' overall plan is supposed to work on paper. I just have a 'bit much-less' confidence in the realistic expectations of a successful tenet which amounts to no less than a system-wide imposition of martial law attempting to enforce an "iron curtain."

Human nature is at odds with such a thing. Only military operations are entering or leaving the system? Are these military vessels bereft of slave abuse - personal slaves doing the bidding of Pavel Young-like MAlign officers of grandeur? What makes the MAlign immune to their own ships named Francis?

The human element, the most affluent element in nature is what I'm getting it. MAlign officers can grow bored from life behind an iron curtain. And surely they have contact with someone outside of their veil of secrecy. And what is preventing them from doing a few "favors" for old contacts, off the books and under the radar typical of that very same and prevalent human element?

Areas outside of Darius has become accustomed to a workforce of slaves. What happens when that workforce suddenly dries up? What happened in the US when the readily available highly exploitable human resources, which slaves represented, disappeared?

All in all, I'm less optimistic in the ability to defeat the much too abundant human element.

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