Hmmm... let's see if I can do this with minimal spoilers...
Yes, I can see this in CoG, possibly not quite this clear-cut:
First, it looks like the Alignment's plans have been pushed forward by pretty much the 25-30 years Himself chopped out of the timeline - but he hasn't given them any more warning than anyone else was given. That means that at this point they've been scrambling madly for the last couple of years and things are rather badly out of sync. As a result it looks very much as if Houdini and Oyster Bay did get executed out of order. However...
I doubt that Houdini was ever part of the primary plan in the first place. If everything was going well, there would never have been any reason for them to disappear from Mesa, tracelessly or otherwise, because nobody would have been looking for them to start with. When Oyster Bay did strike - and it could as easily have been the League as Haven that became the primary target, depending on how that confrontation seemed to be proceeding in terms of the Plan - it would have appeared completely out of left field and disappeared right back there again. There's no reason why anybody would have paid any attention to Mesa in all the confusion until Albrecht started jumping up and down and shouting "over here! line up to welcome your new overlords!" Houdini would serve no purpose in that scenario and wouldn't be executed. So Houdini was a fall-back op for use if people started scratching their heads and wondering exact _how_ rotten things were in the State of Mesa. Publicly, and with a pretty slow build up, or privately, but in places thoroughly penetrated by the Alignment, with equally slow build up. Leaving plenty of time to activate Houdini if needed and run it, probably, on a 3-5 year time frame. Which, BTW, I'm not convinced would have avoided the kind of statistical blip that would tell a sufficiently suspicious investigator that _something_ had been going on. Of course, it's quite possible that the plan always called for the public chastisement of Mesa as a demonstration of virtue, in which case getting out of the line of fire would be advisable. But, in that case, Houdini could have been executed on the long time scale suggested by the OP.
And it probably wouldn't have been called Houdini in the first place. Houdini didn't disappear, as some people keep saying. He _escaped_. The small amount of textev we have on the nature of Houdini seems to suggest that that is what the Alignment had in mind: "Being completely cold-blooded about it, Zachariah understood the logic. The whole purpose of Houdini was to remove anyone from Mesa who could reveal anything about the onion’s inner layers and inner workings. They either left the planet by evacuation or they left it by shuffling off their mortal coil.
"There was no third alternative. Houdini had always been just a possibility, and one he’d never spent much time dwelling on. Now it was here. For real. As serious as the proverbial heart attack." [CoG ch21]
So, consider Houdini as actually executed. More precisely, consider the casualty list, or rather who was on it. There are 3 components, the essentials, the culls and the noise. Essential personnel were slated for evacuation because they were needed for the further prosecution of the Plan, suggesting that they also know enough that successful interrogation will produce more than enough info to stymie the Plan. And after the first couple of hundred drop dead during questioning people are going to figure out ways of doing it successfully. Even having them fall over after being rounded up leaves way too much information lying around, simply because it becomes possible to figure out who they were and what, in broad terms, they were doing. And that assumes that all of them _would_ fall over, which they probably wouldn't. In fact, it's clear that the ones who escaped the final cataclysm were left uncollected _because_ they had the New Model Medical Package and could be counted on to self-destruct. The culls, of course, were being culled because they weren't needed, at least not badly enough. But, like Lajos Irvine, they were far enough into the onion that they knew, or would realise, that it was an onion, with an at least partial understanding of the Plan. Again, interrogation provides hard data that can at the least lay bare the _existence_ of the plan. And in this case there would be a lot of them, because these people are likely pretty low on the list for the NMMP. If that data sets people who are currently laughing at the idea to taking a good hard look at their own security, the Alignment could find itself missing a lot of the reach needed for execution even if the opposition doesn't really understand what the plan is. So those two groups _had_ to disappear or die. The noise, of course, was simply intended to provide the statistical background for those disappearances and deaths, concealing exactly who they were. Not the fact of disappearances, but the exact numbers and identities. And this is the point where I suspect that the choice of Janice Marinescu is going to backfire. She wanted lots of noise - by my estimate she decided 10-50,000,000 was the minimum - and decided the best way to get it was to light the match on the Mesan powder keg. IOW, she decided to cull _Mesa_, and that, it seems, was just a bit too ambitious. It seems like that fuse sputtered out, for one thing, but there seem to have been enough good [for Mesan values of good, at least] people in the non-Alignment government that the scenario was starting to break down anyway. People completely beyond Marinescu's understanding.
As for why it was ever necessary: that's been answered, but let's hammer at it a bit more. Connections. Pure and simple connections. Not just Alignment command and control, although that is critical, but all the other connections you need to exploit for development. Connections that require a great deal of traffic to maintain. Engineering development can take place in splendid isolation - or at least with heavy security filters between it and sources of needed information, but research can't. Something that governments have learned the hard way every time they tried it, which is why so much is known about the principles, but not the practice, of building nuclear weapons. Somebody else is always going to have the crucial data or the critical insight, and your researchers need to be able to correspond with them if you expect them to exploit that to your benefit. And mysterious notes saying 'if you answer these questions and don't ask any, we'll put 10,000,000 in your account tomorrow' are going to raise a lot of eyebrows. People located on Mesa, while they may provoke some holding of noses, are going to be in the mainstream, able to interact, seek insights and offer their own. People who don't exist hiding on a planet that doesn't exist aren't going to be very effective in a dialog that requires existence - and reputation - of all participants.
cthia wrote:Loren Pechtel wrote:1) If they can't hope to hide the fact they disappeared there's no reason to kill all those people to cover their trail. They would have been better served by simply loading the people onto ships, all that can be hidden is the destination.
2) So long as the GA knows they're out there they're going to keep looking. They have the depths of space to hide in but the GA isn't going to give up and a basically slave society isn't going to be nearly as innovative as a free one.
I haven't purchased and read the current book yet.
Again, there's simply no way they can hide the fact that they've disappeared. You don't kill that many people and hang around the scene of the crime.
IMO, the deaths were not so much to mask the fact that they had disappeared (rather than to kill loose lips that can sink
other ships). In Hollywood, that is called a professional "cleaning" to tie up loose ends. The MAlign were more interested in killing witnesses, so to speak. But witnesses to "who" and "what" and possibly even "where" they are. Not that many of the people killed knew the dirtiest of the dirt, but taken altogether collectively, a thread here and a thread there adds up and can be rather detrimental to a criminal's overall plans.
Again, the fact that they've disappeared will become quite obvious on its own soon enough. And they certainly couldn't think that anyone, even if it were the retarded League, would be dumb enough to think that the perpetrators of the killings would be psychotic enough to hang around the crime scene. They were trying to protect their "identity" and not the fact that they've flown the coop. You wouldn't kill that many people to accomplish the obvious.
Again, as in Hollywood, this was a cleaning. Hollywood uses "professional" cleaners to erase
all evidence,
even of the cleaning. Since this was a rush job...
IMO.
