The Alamo Contingency has already failed

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But his is not an isolated case. There will be too many people who didn't arrive at Galton at all.

Doesn't matter. There probably are no records at Galton left and most of the people who left were covered by mass casualty incidents where the majority of the dead could not be identified.

kzt wrote:Doesn't matter. There probably are no records at Galton left and most of the people who left were covered by mass casualty incidents where the majority of the dead could not be identified.

They have the departure records because the MAlign didn't cover everything. That was an unexpected error because there was a backup of the data they didn't know about.

A lightening bolt can fall on the same place twice. I expect we'll learn that not all tracks were covered in Galton and that some details will be found. I actually think the MAlign planned on leaving some data behind, as misinformation and in an attempt to "prove" that Galton was the end of everything "Alignment."

But there'll be discrepancies because they didn't expect the Mesa data to exist and didn't expect Galton to be found this early.

Houdini was designed to disappear people so they couldn't be---or more accurately, so they could be tracked to their deaths on Mesa. Cruise ship sinking, "terrorists" attacks at sports stadiums or business conferences (like Gail's husband demise) or "that is where they were usually at at that time when one of that barrage of explosions we are blaming on Manticore vaporized the place. That didn't quite go as planned. Zack was spotted on a ship/station camera and too many people who had connections were included in too many. There were records of ships leaving but I think (other than those which were carrying genetic slaves but were actually Houdini people) that there would be a large number of false names /or people who were alive but never left the planet were used to hide identities and -at the time- not questioned as they went though Manpower etc documents or on ships for which no questions would be raised about anybody coming aboard with a ticket and whatever else was needed. Like several transtellars taking fees and not asking questions.
How many people who left Mesa went to Galton? How many of those people who did go to Galton were anywhere other than on the orbital stations or fortresses that were destroyed in the fight with the GA, particularly the ones which were scuttled by the Galton leadership as part of "the plan". How likely is it that any records relating to Houdini or people who were received from that (particularly since Galton was such an insular system) were kept anywhere than those orbitals that were (long since) designed to be destroyed when the system fell to an attacker?

It goes on and on. Time, data and where to look for data.

Then the little problem that there were no "invisible" spaceships at Galton. Absolutely NO mention of anything like the G-Torps firing on the GA fleet from "outside" their position at the Galton System. No conventional weapons coming in on the GA from vectors inconsistent with where Galton was shooting from. Is it conceivable that Galton, with the capabilities of the force that carried out Oyster Bay, would NOT have used any of those weapons in order to essentially strike undetected at multiple ships of the GA force as many times during the conflict as possible?

If you can't detect the weapons till they open fire at closer than point-blank range, you might have noticed if you had ships blowing up because there was a grazer firing right next to them before their reactor lost containment. Didn't happen.

And it starts to be stretching things -given the way the Alignment has consistently behaved- that there isn't yet another fall-back position beyond Darius. How? Where? for how long?.....ah, but we haven't been really told anything other than that there are at least a couple of wormhole termini of the Felix Junction for which NO information has been supplied.

That the route to a Post Darius location includes one of those termini is likely. That it is on a regular schedule of flights back and forth with conventional impeller/hyperdrive ships through that wormhole even if the ships have to exit at Felix only to go immediately to the departure lane outbound for System Omega. There would also be a bunch of traffic from Darius to Omega just though hyperspace since if/when the Felix Junction is compromised and when Darius in interdicted and attacked by a GA fleet. ....yeah, I know, all the Alignment ships would have astrogators & engineers and Captains who would be nano-compelled to suicide by scuttling the ships and there would be Worms in the ships software to do the same thing if they were to be boarded. This is the Alignment we are talking about.

What fun

As I said, it's indices (and there are lots of others). But just the fact of a single missing McBride is not a hard proof by itself.

The other point is that it should be easy for the spies to find enough of those hints to convince their governments (GA, SL and maybe the new Mesa government) that there's still something hiding out there.

But it's a completely different question of how (and whether at all) to communicate this to the public. Keeping searching in secret may be a much better tactics, especially as the Treecats now help to wipe out alignment spies in the GA.

Tonight I bring you news that our government has invested 3 trillion dollars and 25% of the Navy in a wacky conspiracy theory…

Wouldn't one of the first things Manticore would do is look for the "All spies are to abandon their post and report back to galton right now." person/button. Even with the Manticorian and Solar League purge of the alignment spies in their areas, you still need a plausible number to report back. If they don't find that person/button or two few spies are sacrificed it could start them asking inconvenient questions.

Puidwen wrote:Wouldn't one of the first things Manticore would do is look for the "All spies are to abandon their post and report back to galton right now." person/button. Even with the Manticorian and Solar League purge of the alignment spies in their areas, you still need a plausible number to report back. If they don't find that person/button or two few spies are sacrificed it could start them asking inconvenient questions.

Sure, but would such a button exist? Even if it does, it probably requires an authentication code to prove the orders are valid that they are unlikely to find. The Top Secret material would have been purged from the computers and hard storage when it became obvious that Galton was going to lose (well, Galton was going to lose the moment Honor translated from the Alpha band, but you know what I mean).

There's also no chance that this recall order, even if it could be sent, would outpace the news that Galton had been conquered. All those agents would run into the news that it's now on GA hands and would therefore go to ground.

Based on what we have seen so far, I don't think there are any Galton spies and agents our to be recalled. What they shipped out - to the refitting PRHNinExcile to go after Torch or moving missiles and other stuff to end users like Raging Justice- they, at best, sent cargo ships out, tran loaded somewhere and came home with not much beyond recognition codes being exchanged.

Other than a Detweiler clone or two, nobody made any round trips to Galton. Oh, they are were sending out reports and schematics and research papers/prototypes, but not much of Galton personal were going anywhere. All the Houdini people sent to Galton were (we know now) on one-way trips. Useful for research and other things but not useful enough to clutter up Darius and have any interaction with any part of the Darius population. Ultimately expendables no mater what it cost in terms of resources and extractions from Mesa.

The real trick is finding somebody who knows how to get to Darius but doesn't have the nanite kill-switch installed. Remember, we have seen more that one "meet at some coordinate out in the dark" and load stuff to a "commercial" ship with legit papers that can go into systems and not be detained. Like the Silver Bullets. And if anybody can tie the freighter that dropped them off to the Silver Bullets in a time frame when the bullets could have gotten there then there will be some interesting backtracking.

I would be very surprised if a vast number of people in the Galton system didn't also have the killer nanites onboard and will start dying in droves as they start getting talked to by interviewers. Heck, I expect to find all sorts of stuff on the planet booby trapped as well in surviving orbital platforms. You run certain kinds of systems searches and a worm unspools and shuts down the containment on the locks fusion generator. Boom....and there go a lot of your people including investigators.

Brigade XO wrote:Remember, we have seen more that one "meet at some coordinate out in the dark" and load stuff to a "commercial" ship with legit papers that can go into systems and not be detained. Like the Silver Bullets. And if anybody can tie the freighter that dropped them off to the Silver Bullets in a time frame when the bullets could have gotten there then there will be some interesting backtracking.

That raises a question for me. We were told that the ordinary people at Galton celebrated after Oyster Bay, thinking that they were responsible. What caused them to think that? Did they produce a large number of graser headed missiles, that were shipped somewhere? Did they think their Navy or the Mesan Navy ran operations to infiltrate those missiles into Manticore and Yeltsin? Or did they think there were still enough State Sec ships to do it?

The Galton Navy would know that they were not involved. There are not enough State Sec or Mesan ships to do it. So what is the basis for this delusion? The why is simple, the people of Galton had to believe to support the Alamo Contingency, but what is the supporting evidence?

tlb wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Remember, we have seen more that one "meet at some coordinate out in the dark" and load stuff to a "commercial" ship with legit papers that can go into systems and not be detained. Like the Silver Bullets. And if anybody can tie the freighter that dropped them off to the Silver Bullets in a time frame when the bullets could have gotten there then there will be some interesting backtracking.

That raises a question for me. We were told that the ordinary people at Galton celebrated after Oyster Bay, thinking that they were responsible. What caused them to think that? Did they produce a large number of graser headed missiles, that were shipped somewhere? Did they think their Navy or the Mesan Navy ran operations to infiltrate those missiles into Manticore and Yeltsin? Or did they think there were still enough State Sec ships to do it?

The Galton Navy would know that they were not involved. There are not enough State Sec or Mesan ships to do it. So what is the basis for this delusion? The why is simple, the people of Galton had to believe to support the Alamo Contingency, but what is the supporting evidence?

To be fair that one seems very plausible. As an example both manticore and haven during the war seem fond of pulling out technology and ops no one knew anything about including some of their own officers. So if you tell someone you did it and the reason they didn't know was it was on the extreme end of need to know, yeah i can see it.