cthia wrote:cthia wrote:But yea, how difficult is it to get in to see Saint-Just and then just plain old shoot him? I can't believe that any resulting civil war would have been any worst off than what actually transpired. And I can see a whole lot of things that may have gone a heck of a lot better. Namely, salvaging so much Peep experience that was simply wasted at the cost of the war. It was like Saint-Just was a Manty in disguise. If ever the old adage "A house divided cannot stand" rang true, it did during Saint-Just's reign. Giscard may have still been alive and Alfredo Yu and Co., wouldn't have had to turn treasonous.
tlb wrote:The problem you do not mention is that without control of the capitol fleet, and so the capitol, simply killing Saint Just leaves State Sec in control and hating the Navy even more.
PS. Wasn't Yu forced to turn "treasonous" as a result of HotQ, which was long before Pierre and Saint Just gained power? Also Caslet was forced to turn "treasonous" by Cordelia Ransom, which was also before Saint Just's reign.
Granted, but State Sec was a bunch of pansies without the assholes actually pulling the strings. And Pierre should have been handled in the same manner. They couldn't sequester themselves against everyone. Which is why I felt there weren't any balls in the lot of them and it is also why I felt there were those who would feel that Theisman's actions were murderous and treasonous because there
must have been people that loved the Saint-Just regime, or he'd have been decapitated by someone that sorely detested him. Like poisoned by his own secretary in his morning coffee. Confession is good for the soul. Personally, IMO, Saint-Just was cut from the same cloth as Hitler. Cloth that was previously used to wipe someone's ass.
Mea culpa mangling the timeline. Storyline is beginning to bleed into nothingness in my head awaiting a reread of the entire series, and my watch doesn't adjust for timelines
or time zones.
But, even before Saint-Just's rise to fame, I hated the Peeps and their actions with a passion. And that lack of morals, scruples and values is why Beth hated them so, and why Alfredo and Co., were so ashamed.
If it was easy to assassinate murderous tyrants surrounded by fanatically devoted security personnel (and especially when surrounded by modern state of the art weapons detectors, too) there'd be a lot fewer nasty heads of state still in office or living comfortably in exile right here on good old planet Earth.
It is
not easy, and the SS was anything
but "a bunch of pansies without the assholes actually pulling the strings" or else there wouldn't have been a years-long multi-sided civil war even after Capital Fleet and Giscard and Tourville came over to Theisman's side, putting the two biggest fleets firmly on one side, under one banner.
Even if Theisman (or someone) could've gotten a weapon into Pierre's and/or Saint-Just's presence and pulled the trigger earlier, the consequences wouldn't have been "bad," they would've been
catastrophic. Kill Pierre without Saint-Just, and Saint-Just takes over. Kill Pierre
and Saint-Just before Honor is captured and taken to Cerberus, and
Cordelia Ransom takes over. Kill
any of them without being able to secure control of Capital Fleet, and whichever senior StateSec officer survives in Nouveau Paris controls the capital planet and star system of the entire People's Republic. It's
possible that regular officers might have managed to secure control of some of the sub fleets, but it's unlikely without someone like Shannon Foraker planting an "Oopsie' in the covering StateSec superdreadnoughts' core programming.
Any dedicated assassin with more courage than brains can attempt an assassination. The odds are overwhelmingly, especially in an electronic society as thoroughly wired for sound by the security forces as the People's Republic, that the assassin will be detected before he ever gets close to his target. Assuming he gets close, the odds of his penetrating the security fence around someone like a Rob Pierre or an Oscar Saint-Just by anything except overwhelming force — like, say, an assault shuttle stuffed with Marines — are essentially nonexistent. Regular naval officers were among the least trusted people in the galaxy by StateSec, so it's hard to understate the infinitesimal odds of someone like Theisman or Warner Caslet sneaking a gun past them. I mean, numbers don't really come that low. Unless they have a minus sign in front of them.
Tom Theisman grew up in a corrupt façade democracy. He saw that façade overturned only to be replaced by an authoritarian — one might more accurately say
totalitarian — regime which controlled
all of the internal security organs. Remember that even ONI was essentially a StateSec-run subsidiary. That sort of stacked the odds against him, don't you think?
Maybe even more important, Theisman
knew what kind of internal dogfight creating a vacuum at the top would probably kick off, and he had very little faith in the restraint of the dogs who would be fighting. I point this out because he lives in a universe in which it is terrifyingly easy to pasteurize planets. So before he went around killing anyone, he needed a few things:
(1) He needed both the opportunity and the means, and sticking a pistol in his pocket while he was commanding Duquesne base would have accomplished neither of those.
(2) Even after he was recalled to Nouveau Paris to command Capital Fleet, he needed an
effective means, and that wasn't available to him until he had time to pick up where McQueen had been interrupted. (And I should probably point out that the fact that Saint-Just was clearly going to begin purging the officer corps as soon as the shooting with Manticore stopped had a hell of a lot to do with Tom's ability to pick up from McQueen. In fact, the effect of Saint-Just's looming purges on the mindsets of Capital Fleet's senior officers was an extraordinarily powerful "recruiting tool" McQueen hadn't had.)
(3) Tom Theisman was a patriot. He was determined to act
if the opportunity arose from the moment he received orders to report to Nouveau Paris. The conversation he has with his People's Commissioner before they head to the capital is proof of that. (And, just sort of by the way,
without his People's Commissioner's support, nothing he later accomplished would have been remotely possible.) But in Theisman's mind, "opportunity" had to mean that he would be in a position after removing Saint-Just to minimize the bloodshed everywhere in the People's Republic and — at the very least acceptable minimum — prevent any sort of extended flight in the Haven System itself, where there were literally billions of civilians in the path of the potential use of weapons of mass destruction.
Which leads me to —
(4) You are correct that there were a lot of Havenites who were devoted to and dedicated to the Pierre regime. Yes, he used the iron fist and repression ruthlessly — and needed them — but Pierre was still revered by a substantial chunk of the population of Nouveau Paris. He was
detested by another substantial chunk, but neither of those chunks had a clear majority, and
one of them had a monopoly on the means of coercion. So, Theisman had to be in a position to decapitate the Committee by killing Saint-Just (who was now effectively its
sole member; the three or four others still on it were essentially nonentities as far as the public at large was concerned)
and to guarantee that those "means of coercion" — that would be like the guns, the KEWs, the vest pocket nukes, the assault shuttles and trans-atmospheric fighters, and like that there — were either under
his control or neutralized at the outset.
That isn't a "lone gunman" scenario. All a "lone gunman" could've done would have been to plunge the People's Republic of Haven into the worst paroxysm of internal violence and bloodshed it had yet seen, and the end result would most probably have been to replace Pierre or Saint-Just with
another Pierre or Saint-Just . . . or maybe another
Cordelia Ransom.
Theisman knew that, and Theisman was a responsible human being who was willing to die himself, if that was what it took, but wasn't willing to take millions — possibly even
billions — of civilians with him.