Bit of Analysis: Mutineer's Moon

[Esquire]

That could get pretty expensive - not to mention the shortage of assassins it would cause.

[Mr Bean]

That could get pretty expensive - not to mention the shortage of assassins it would cause.

Not to mention the issues that causes with future assassins if your discovered. Your inviting a double cross from people trained to sneak into places and murder people quietly.

[Ahriman238]

The last reeking powder smoke drifted away, and Sean MacIntyre surveyed a scene that had become too familiar. The only thing that had changed were the colors the dead wore, he thought bitterly, for the eastern Temple Guard had been reduced to barely forty thousand men, and they were being held back to cover the Temple itself. He was fighting the secular lords' armies now, and he shuddered as he watched the "merely" wounded writhe among the corpses.

Yeah we skip over several months here. Once Sean and Co. get out of narrow passes and mountain valleys they become effectively unstoppable. The all-rifles army can move around a lot quicker than pikes, and since Sean always knows exactly where the enemy are and what they're planning, he can always meet them on ground of his choosing. Combine that with the range and RoF advantages, and no one can touch him in an open-field battle, which he much prefers to sieges.

Mother Church is also very obliging in calling up the levys of 50 kingdoms and duchys, and throwing them all at the 'heretics' piecemeal.

The introduction of ether, alone, had revolutionized Pardalian medicine, and Sean had sworn a solemn oath that the first thing he would have sent to Pardal from Birhat would be medical teams with proper regeneration gear. He couldn't breathe life back into the dead, but he could, by God, give the maimed, whichever side they'd fought upon, their lives back!

Ether, Sean's intentions once they get in touch with the Fifth Imperium.

The whole time they send many messages to the Temple through the semaphore system, and through captured and released officers, begging High Priest Vroxhan to come to terms with them, saying they are only defending themselves from the armies the Temple insists on throwing at them. Shortly after running out of armies, save 40,000 men guarding the Temple itself, he agrees to speak with them. Inviting Sean into the Temple with his personal assurance of safe conduct, allowing him a full brigade bodyguard, and sending out 1 cardinal equivalent, 20 bishops, 100 'upper-priests' and several senior Guard commanders as hostages.

Sandy is the only one to see the obvious trap, but the others are war-weary and eagerly accept. For some reason, the Temple leadership has fixated on Sean as the heretic's war-leader and believe if they can capture or kill him they can... I don't know. Stop the war? Win? Profit? One gets the feeling Vroxhan isn't thinking too clearly at this point, and he's discovered the idea that an oath sworn to heretic doesn't count, even an oath to God.

"Holiness, this business of bishops who see their flocks but twice a year, of temples gilded with gold squeezed from the faithful, of princes who rule only on Mother Church's sufferance—these things must change, or what we face today will not end tomorrow. Mother Church must rededicate herself to winning her flock's love and devotion or, in time, other heretics will arise, and we will lose not simply our people's obedience, but their souls, as well. I'm an old man, Holiness. Even without the risk I run tomorrow, the problems I foresee wouldn't come to pass before I was safely buried, but I tell you now that we have become corrupt. We have tasted the power of princes, not just of priests, and that power will destroy all Mother Church stands for if we allow it. In my heart, I've come to believe that is God's purpose in allowing the demon-worshipers to come so near to success. To warn us that we—that you—must make changes to see that it never happens again."

Vroxhan stared at the simple-hearted old man, tasting the iron tang of Corada's sincerity, and his heart went out to him. The purity of his faith was wonderful to behold, yet even as tears stung Vroxhan's eyes, he knew Corada was wrong. The authority of Mother Church was God's authority, hard won after centuries of struggle. To return to the old ways when the cold steel of power had not underlain her decrees was to court the madness of the Schismatic Wars and permit the very lies and heresies which had spawned the army beyond the Temple's walls to flourish unchecked. No, God's work was too vital to entrust to the simple-minded, pastoral bishops Corada's tired old heart longed for, yet Vroxhan could never say that to him. Could never explain why he was wrong, why his beautiful dream could be no more than a dream, forever. Not when Corada had so willingly accepted his own fate to preserve Mother Church and the sanctity of the Faith. And because he could never tell Corada those things, High Priest Vroxhan smiled and touched the old man's cheek with gentle fingers.

"I shall think upon what you've said, Corada," he lied softly, "and what I can do, I will. I promise you."

Vroxhan seemed an alright sort before and during the 'monkeys with keyboards' sequence. But everything he's done since has been exceptionally foolhardy and self-defeating, and he only gets worse as he gets desperate.

"Sean, it's a trap!" she shouted in the same language.

"What?"

Her branahlk sent the last few men scampering aside as she forced it up beside him.

"Aren't you using your implants?!"

"Of course not! If the computer picked them up—"

"Damn it, there's no time for that! Kick them up—now!"

He stared at her, then brought up his implanted sensors, and his face went pale as they picked up the solid blocks of armed men closing in down the side streets which paralleled the North Way.

Implant sensors (or possibly hearing) detect scores of armed men from what's later said to be several streets away. Also, implant sensors and communication devices don't trigger orbital fire.

High Priest Vroxhan smiled triumphantly as the heretics began entering the Place of Martyrs. He could just see the first Guardsmen moving into position, and other troops, invisible to him here, had closed the North Way far behind the demon-worshipers. So "Lord Sean" was a war captain without peer, was he? Vroxhan barked a laugh as he recalled Ortak's whining warning.

If the heretics believe "Lord Sean" and "Lord Tamman" unbeatable, they're about to learn differently! And let us see how their morale responds when we drag their accursed "angels' " champions to the Inquisition in chains!

His smile grew cruel as the heretics continued into the square. In just minutes, Lord Marshal Surak's handpicked commanders would send their men forward and—

His smile died. The infidels had stopped advancing! They were— What were they doing?

-snip-

Vroxhan cursed in fury as the heretics snapped from an extended, vulnerable column into a compact, bayonet-bristling square in what seemed a single heartbeat. He'd seen the Guard at drill enough to recognize the lethal speed with which the demon-worshipers had reacted, and he snarled another curse at his own commanders for their hesitation. Why weren't they charging? Why weren't they closing with the heretics to finish them before they got set?

Seans men march into the square they were to be ambushed and immediately assume a square formation. See what I mean about Vroxhan starting to lose it?

"Tibold!"

He turned in surprise as the Angel Harry grabbed his right arm. Before he could speak, she'd yanked it out and strapped something around it.

"My Lady?" He peered at the strange bracelet in confusion. It was made of some material he'd never seen before, with a small grill of some sort and two lights that blazed bright green even in full sunlight.

"This is called a 'com,' Tibold. Speak into this—" the angel tapped the grill "—and Sean and I will be able to hear you. Hold it close to your ear, and you'll be able to hear us, as well." Tibold gawked at her, then closed his mouth and nodded. "I'll try to tell you what's happening in the city as you advance," she went on urgently, her beautiful face strained, "but there're so many buildings the information I can give you may be limited. I'll do my best, and at least you can talk to Sean this way."

Giving Tibold a com. The Malagorans outside the Temple Walls commence storming the gate when they hear the first shots, they also arrest the hostages (which seems redundant, I'll grant) but don't hurt them yet.

Eh, lots of urban combat follows, Tibold carries the gate, but a lot of their technical advantages don't help as much in a street fight. Sean, Tam and Sandy hole up a while in an artillery depot, but then Sean gets an idea that if they reach the Sanctum they can possibly cancel the standing orders to destroy advanced technology near the temple with orbital fire, and then Brashan can come in a fighter, drop a couple HVMs on the biggest Guard concentrations and declare the war over.

Vroxhan started to speak once more, then closed his mouth and watched the heretics finish routing the hapless Guard company and reform into column. As Surak had predicted, they headed south, and the high priest clenched his fists in sullen hate. They were getting away. The leaders of this damnable heresy were escaping him, and as soon as they were safe, the rest of their army would break off its attack. Bile rose in his throat, and he raised his eyes from the vanishing demon-worshipers to the huge, white block of the Sanctum. Why? he demanded of God. Why are You letting this happen? Why—

And then his thoughts froze in a sudden flash of terrified intuition. Escape? They weren't trying to escape! As if God Himself had whispered it in his ear, Vroxhan knew where they were headed, and his blood ran chill.

"The Sanctum!" he gasped. The lord marshal looked at him blankly, and Vroxhan grabbed him and shook him. "They're headed for the Sanctum itself!"

"The— Why should they be, Holiness?"

"Because they're demon-worshipers!" Vroxhan half-screamed. "My God, man! They serve the powers of Hell—what if their masters have given them some means to destroy the Voice? If we lose its protection, how will we stop the next wave of demons from the stars?"

"But—"

"There's no time, Lord Marshal! Signal the Sanctum detachment now! Tell them they must keep the heretics from entering, then send every man you can find after them!"

"But there's only your own guard, Holiness, and—"

"Send them! Send them!" Vroxhan shook the lord marshal again. "No! I'll take them myself !" he cried wildly, and whirled away from Surak.

Monkeys at keyboards again, with exactly no relevant knowledge, Vroxhan intuits their objective.

Sean and Tam's party get slowed greatly by the crowds of people praying for deliverance. Vroxhan has a somewhat different approach:

"What do the people matter when demon-worshipers go to profane the very Sanctum of God?!" Vroxhan snapped, and his eyes were mad. He'd lost sight of the heretics while his guards mustered; they were up ahead somewhere, headed for the Sanctum. That was all he knew . . . and all he needed to know. "Clear the path, Captain! You have pikes; now clear the path!"

Farnah stared at him, as if unable to believe his orders, but Vroxhan snarled at him, and the Guardsman turned away. He shouted orders of his own, and within seconds Vroxhan heard the screams as the leading pikemen lowered their weapons, faces set like iron, and swept ahead. Men, women, even children were smashed aside or died, and the seven hundred men of Vroxhan's personal guard marched over their bodies.

He really did seem like a decent person before everything, but he turns into a psychopath when the wheels start coming off.

"Hatch!" Tamman yelled, and the men behind him suddenly slowed as they beheld the great, gleaming portal of Imperial battle steel. The Sanctum's guardians had ordered the computer to close the hatch, and for just an instant, religious dread held the Malagorans, but Tamman was oblivious to it as his implants sought the access software, and he grunted in triumph.

"No ID code," he muttered in English as Sean and Sandy pushed up beside him. "Guess the guys who set up this crazy religion figured the priesthood might forget it. Let me—ahh!"

His neural feed found the interface, and the Malagorans sighed as the huge hatch slid silently aside. They stared into the holiest of Pardalian holies, and their eyes were awed as they gazed at the man who'd opened the way.

No locks on the doors.

"Sean!" Sandy screamed, and he whirled just as a tapestry on the opposite wall was ripped aside and a musket flashed fire through the sudden opening. The ball whizzed past his head by no more than a centimeter, and he saw more men filling a five-meter-wide arch.

A tunnel! A goddamned tunnel into the command center!

5 meter hidden tunnel into the bunker/sanctum. Vroxhan takes half his personal guard through that way.

Sean rampaged at the head of his men, and his slender sword carved an arc of death before him. No unenhanced human could enter its reach and live, and he hacked his way towards the arch. If he could reach it, bottle them up inside it . . . But his men weren't enhanced. They couldn't match his strength and speed, and too many Guardsmen had gotten into the control center. They swirled about him, and he grunted in anguish as something slammed into his thigh from behind. His enhanced muscle and bone held, but blood oozed down his leg, and unenhanced or not, if they swarmed him under—

He fell back, cursing, strangling an enemy with his left hand even as he cut down two more with his sword, and someone swung a mace two-handed. It clanged into his breastplate and rebounded, staggering him despite his enhancement, but once more the Imperial composite held. Steel clashed and grated all about him, men screamed and died, and a Guardsman loomed suddenly before him, sword thrusting for his throat, and there was no time to dodge.

Sean holds off an impressive number of men, but is still screwed if they can swarm him enough. Another chest-shot staggers him, but still doesn't knock him off his feet.

He saw the point coming, and then a battle-ax split his killer from crown to navel. Blood fountained over him, and he gasped in surprise as Sandy bounded past him. The ax she'd snatched from the trophies on the wall was as tall as she was, and she shrieked like a Valkyrie as she swung. She'd lost her helmet, and her brown eyes flashed fire as she cut a second man cleanly in half, and another voice screamed in horror.

"Demon! Demon!" it wailed as they realized she was a woman.

Guardsmen who'd been howling, fanatical warriors the instant before shrank from her in terror, and she snarled.

"Come on, then, you bastards!" she yelled in Imperial Universal, and a fresh wail of terror went up as the Guardsmen recognized the Holy Tongue in the mouth of a demon. She cut down another man, and for just a moment, Sean thought she was going to pull it off. But the men still in the tunnel couldn't see her. Ignorance immunized them against the terror of her presence, and the weight of their bodies drove the others forward.

Worth a shot. Sandy casually wields an ax as tall as she is and bisects a man with it.

Behind his friends, Tamman worked frantically, hands flying as he fought to reconnect the neural interface. He'd never seen one quite like this, and he was working as much by guess as by knowledge. Despite his total concentration on his task, he knew the Guardsmen were grinding forward. Sean and Sandy were worth fifty unenhanced men when it came to offense, but there were only two of them. Some of the Guardsmen were slipping past them, circling around to get at the merely mortal Malagorans behind them, and despite the reach advantage of the Malagorans' bayoneted rifles, they were going down. So far none of the attackers seemed to have noticed Tamman, but it was only a matter of time before one of them—

There! He made the last connection, flipped his neural feed into the console, and demanded access. There was a moment of utter silence, and then an utterly emotionless contralto spoke.
"ID code required for implant access. Please enter code," it said, and he stared at the console in horror.

Ain't that a bitch.

Sean gasped as another mace crunched into his left arm. The mail sleeve held and his implants overrode the pain and shock, but the blow had hurt him badly and he knew it. He staggered back, and Sandy whirled around him, graceful as a dancer as she swung her huge ax with dreadful precision. Sean's attacker went down without a scream, and he lashed out with his sword and killed another man before he could hit Sandy from behind.

Mace to the shoulder causes a worthwhile injury, implants immediately deal with pain and shock.

"Sean! Sean, it's ID-coded!" He heard the voice, but it made no sense, and he hacked down another enemy. "Goddamn it, Sean, it's ID-coded!" Tamman bellowed, and this time he understood.

He turned his head just as Tamman hurtled past him. His friend's sword went before him, and Sean and Sandy followed. They forged forward, killing as they went, and this time there were three of them. Tamman took point, with Sean and Sandy covering his flanks, leaving a carpet of bodies in their wake, and at last, the Guardsmen began to yield. The sight of three demons—and they must be demons to wreak such carnage—coming straight for them was too much. They scattered out of their way, and Tamman reached the archway. His sword wove a deadly pattern before him, building a barricade of bodies to block the arch with the dead, and even with the weight of numbers pressing them forward, no man could break past him.

3 enhanced soldiers though, are enough to turn the tide for now.

"Tam!" he croaked. "If the interface's coded, what about voice access?"
"Tried it," Tamman said grimly, never looking away from the tunnel while the surviving Malagoran infantry hastily reloaded and turned to cover the main hatch. "No good. They took out the regular verbal access and set up a series of stored commands when they cut out the interface. We could spend weeks trying to guess what to tell it to control the inner defenses!"

-snip-

"You're the heir to the throne, second only to the Emperor himself in civil matters, and you've been confirmed by Mother! That means she buried the ID codes to identify you to any Imperial computer in your implants!"
"But—" Sean stared at her, and his brain lurched back into motion. "We can't be sure they were ever loaded," he argued, already turning to run towards the console. "Even if they were, it's going to take me time to work through them. Ten, fifteen minutes, minimum."

-snip-

"I know," she said softly, then turned and ran for the hatch. "You, you, and you," she told three of the Malagorans. "Go watch the arch. Tam, over here! We've got company!"
"Here they come!" someone shouted, and Crown Prince Sean Horus MacIntyre closed his eyes and inserted his neural feed into the console.

And now we must leave our friends on Pardal again, fighting for their lives while Sean tries to find an override code the Sanctum computer will listen to, and return to the Fifth Imperium and the ongoing coup.

[Simon_Jester]

Vroxhan seemed an alright sort before and during the 'monkeys with keyboards' sequence. But everything he's done since has been exceptionally foolhardy and self-defeating, and he only gets worse as he gets desperate.

I think what Weber is trying for is the idea of a man out of his depth. It's not that he's personally evil or corrupt. It's that he just has no idea how to handle a well armed, openly rebellious heresy. I don't know how long it's been since the Pardalian social order had to confront any serious unrest or large-scale revolts, ones that would actually try something dramatic and ballsy like marching on the temple and breaking every army of ten or twenty thousand men he throws in their way. But Vroxhan may just have no idea how to deal with such a thing- thus explaining a lot of his decisions.

Initially he treats them like a normal 'small' heresy- something which must be stomped into a bloody paste very quickly, or it'll become a persistent thing that keeps popping up in different places over and over for decades- sort of like some of the proto-Protestant sects like the Hussites and Lollards in 15th century Europe.

Once they defeat his stomping army in the field... well, he doesn't have a good idea what to do next. And neither he nor anyone he knows is really the kind of competent generalissimo with an expert staff that it would take to coordinate hundreds of thousands of troops effectively across a continental landmass. Even with communications and roads about as good as 18th century technology allows, what he needs to win the war effectively is someone like von Moltke or Eisenhower- a field marshal who can think and plan about how to use very large forces to control very large areas.

Pardal just doesn't have an institution to handle that. So a single, small, yet very well equipped army can slip between the cracks in the Church's deployments, outmaneuver and hammer them decisively, and generally just cut things to ribbons.

Unfortunately, it's very hard for Weber to write convincing villains who don't screw up by the numbers sometimes, especially when they're fighting the Plucky Technologically Superior Army. He's done it from time to time, but it's not easy. So Vroxhan comes across as a sort of conflicted mess.

He really did seem like a decent person before everything, but he turns into a psychopath when the wheels start coming off.

...And a fanatic.

Weber tends to present religious fanatics as decent people among themselves, while being utterly evil and monstrous to anyone they deem unnecessary, hostile, or simply 'in the way.' This may well be more realistic than having them be abusive assholes to other members of their own organization just because they're terrorists/mass murderers of anyone they don't like.

[Ahriman238]

To clarify, about both Vroxhan and Jefferson. First the Temple has 'the Test' set upon them, the Demons from the Stars come, and Vroxhan has to ad-lib the ceremony to stop them, but it works and as far as they know the forces of God triumph and everything is perfectly copacetic. Then about a week later they get a letter from Stomald via the semaphore towers. It says that a hunting party was investigating some weird thunder-noises and lights from the dread Valley of Demons when they caught a young girl leaving the place, wearing a bishop's vestments. Well, they were going to burn her at the stake, all by the book, when her three friends popped up and tore apart the village with lightning and fire. But after all was said and done, Stomald noticed there was no loss of life during the attack, and one of the 'demons' brushed off his exorcism and rebuked him in the Holy Tongue (which, clearly, no demon could speak) so he kind of thinks they may have attacked an angel, but he's not sure and could someone please tell him what the hell he should do?

This is where puzzlement takes me. The most probable response (to my jaded 21st Century worldview) is to laugh the whole thing off. Were I a believer in angels and demons, I'd probably send a reply saying qualified investigators are on their way, and please keep a lid on it as best he can for now, til we know what really went down. If I suspected my man on the scene of heresy, and in Vroxhan's defense Stomald does live in a historically restive region a stone's throw from the most profane place known, I might send a small party to arrest him while investigating his claims.

Vroxhan sends an army, with orders to kill Stomald, his entire village and anyone who might have heard anything about demons and angels. The Temple Guard level half a dozen towns, which seems a bit like an overreaction to one possibly heretical village priest.

That army is routed when a giant angel appears and implores them not to kill the innocent. When a Guard Chaplain shoots the angel in the face, he personally is smote and the army breaks. Vroxhan and the inner circle rant about demonic tricks, argue that angels cannot be appearing to say the Temple is in doctrinal error after they passed God's Test (and really, the angels never made any statements about Temple dogma, and Stomald sure as hell didn't mention any) and raise a bigger army, which is also routed. And another. And another.

After they blow through every army in the continent, they go for a false parlay/decapitation strike. Always a gamble that, and not one especially likely to pay off in this case. They even excluded the 'angels' from the meeting. Then Vroxhan springs his poorly run trap (most of the Guard had no idea they were about to do anything treacherous, so surprise would be total) and finally he starts killing his own people to win a race to the Sanctum when he already knew about a tunnel in.

I'd say this sort of sloppiness and poor decision-making belonged to a strawman, but Vroxhan doesn't even seem terribly political. He's just there and religious, and I don't really get an anti-religion vibe from this story (strange as that may sound.)

As for Jefferson, he founds the Sword of God through two cutouts to do his killing. He has them kidnap the family of the programmer to induce him to sabotage Imperial Terra, then has the man and his family killed. Fair enough. He needs to smuggle a bomb inside a statue. After having both made, he has the physicist who built the bomb and the sculptor both killed. He has Gus van Gelder, head of Earth Security, and his family killed just because Gus finally inserted an agent into the Sword, which does get HIM named as Security Chief.

He has his 'main' team of Sword hitmen try and hit Francine Hilgeman (who also works for him) so his Security goons would be waiting to ambush and kill them. He sacrificed them so he could show some results as Security Chief, and to help establish Hilgeman (one of his cutouts for founding the Sword) as a moderate.

He needs a fast one pulled with the mat-trans. To do this, he employs a team of at least 20 engineers to work for over a year building his own secret mat-trans, and has them all killed in a cave-in. He also suborns a mat-trans operator, and has him killed along with 30-odd bystanders with an IED.

If we're counting collateral damage, there's also the 8,000 aboard Imperial Terra, who died so he could kill 5 kids.

Plus he has suborned over a hundred Security personnel as an alternative hit-squad, and considers them all highly expendable and dangerous. He even set up the commander of this team to take the fall for all his crimes.

Jefferson is not a very good boss. Or a very good man to share a planet with.

[Ahriman238]

'Tanni is sent to earth for her own safety when Colin's group figures Birhat is the most likely target for a world-ending bomb. We also introduce a minor subplot, that 'Tanni has never spoken Imperial Universal or called Horus 'Poppa' since the original mutiny, and how that symbolizes (to Horus, at least) her lingering resentment for his getting her mother killed and screwing up their lives and much of human history afterwards.

This really should have been introduced at the beginning of the book, it would have made more sense and wouldn't be nearly so telling.

"Colin, I have made a grave error," the computer said abruptly.

"An error?"

"I should not have inserted my remotes so promptly. I fear my scan systems have just activated the bomb."

"The bomb?" Even now Colin hadn't truly believed, not with his emotions, and his face went pale.
"Indeed." The computer's voice seldom showed emotion, but it was bitter now. "I cannot be certain it is the bomb, for I had insufficient time for detailed scans before I was forced to shut down. But there is a device of some sort within the statue—one protected by a Fleet antitampering system."
The humans looked at one another in stunned silence, and then Ninhursag cleared her throat.
"What . . . what sort of system, Dahak?"

"A Mark Ninety, multi-threat remote weapon system sensor," the computer said flatly. "My scan activated it, but it would appear I was able to shut down before it reached second-stage initiation. It is now armed, however. Any attempt to approach with additional scan systems or with anything which its systems might construe as a threat, will, in all probability, result in the device's immediate detonation."

Discovery of bomb. Mk 90 anti-tampering system that after initial probably detection will set off the bomb if anyone gets close with additional scanners, weapons, or tools for disabling the hting.

"The evacuation will begin in twenty-five minutes," Adrienne Robbins' holo image said. "I'll coordinate embarkation from the Academy; Gerald will handle ship-to-ship movement from Mother, but we don't have enough ships in-system to handle the entire population."

"Some additional transport'll begin arriving in about ninety-three hours," Hatcher's image said. "Mother sent out an all-ships signal as soon as I got the word. We'll have another six planetoids within a hundred and fifty hours; anything after that'll take at least ten days to get here."
"How many can we get aboard the available ships?" Colin asked tautly.

"Not enough," Hatcher said grimly. "Dahak?"

"Assuming Dahak is used as well, and that we move as many as possible to existing deep-space life support in-system but beyond lethal radius of the weapon, we will be able to lift approximately eighty-nine percent of the Birhat population from the planet," the computer responded. "More than that will be beyond our resources."

"Mat-trans?" Colin said.

"On our list," Adrienne replied, "but the system's too big an energy hog to move people quickly, Colin. It's going to take at least three weeks to move eleven percent of Birhat's population through the facility."

We established earlier that there are 400 million people on Birhat, and that conversation took place 15-20 years before this incident. For something set up on exactly zero advanced notice, evacuating 89% of 400 mil is pretty good.

"We've got to take that bomb out," Colin muttered. "Damn it, there has to be a way!"

"Unfortunately," Dahak said, "we cannot disarm it. That means we can only attempt to destroy it, which will require a weapon sufficient to guarantee its instant and complete disablement from outside the Mark Ninety's perimeter, and the device is located in the most heavily protected structure on Birhat. While we possess many weapons which could assure its destruction, the Palace's structural strength is such that any weapon of sufficient power would effectively destroy Phoenix, as well. In short, we cannot ourselves 'take out' the device without obliterating the Imperium's capital, and all in it."

Just like Anu's Antarctic Enclave all those years ago, any weapon powerful enough to reach the bomb inside the heart of the Palace would render the planet uninhabitable.

He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. All right. They knew the bomb was there and active, but if they'd known more, Horus would have said so. Which meant they didn't know it would detonate twelve hours after the Mark Ninety activated. Would they assume the fact that it hadn't instantly detonated meant it wouldn't unless they triggered it somehow?

He bit his lip. The bomb had originally been timed to detonate during the next meeting of the Assembly of Nobles, when Horus would be on Birhat with Colin, Jiltanith, and both the Imperium's senior military commanders. That would have gotten all five of them at once, but now they were spread out in two different star systems and they knew someone was after them, which meant the chance of recreating that opportunity was unlikely ever to come again. Yet Horus said Colin was going to "hang in" to the last possible minute, and Hatcher and Tsien must be up to their necks in the evacuation operation. Even if they guessed time was short, their efforts to save Birhat's population were almost certain to keep the two officers within the danger zone until too late. But by the same token, both of them would be doing everything they could to convince Colin to leave, and if he gave in, he'd evacuate to Dahak. Any other ship would be unthinkable, and if Colin MacIntyre got away from Birhat aboard Dahak, very few things in the universe—and certainly nothing Lawrence Jefferson had—could get to him.

12 hours from initial arming of Mk 90 to detonation, apparently you can set the timer various ways or not at all as you like. Colin's being more or less untouchable aboard his overprotective moon-sized starship.

"Your Grace, it's Captain Chin," an urgent voice said. "Sir, I think you'd better come out here. I just tried to com the mat-trans center, and the links are all down."

"That's impossible," Horus said reasonably. "Did you call Maintenance?"

"I tried to, Your Grace. No luck. And then I tried my fold-com." The captain drew a deep breath. "Your Grace, it didn't work either."

"What?" Horus opened the door and stared at the Marine.

"It didn't work, Sir, and I've never seen anything like it. There's no obvious jamming, the coms just don't work, and it'd take a full-scale warp suppressor within four or five hundred meters to lock a Fleet com out of hyper-space." The captain faced Horus squarely. "Your Grace, with all due respect, we'd better get Her Majesty the hell out of here. Right now."

Communications loss at White Tower. Apparently it is possible to jam implant fold-space comms, with the same technology used to negate Warp grenades/rifles, but only within half a kilometer of the jamming equipment.

"The operative point, General," Dahak said, "is that a Mark Ninety is programmed to recognize Imperial threats."

"So?"

"So we don't use Imperial technology," Colin said. "We use old-fashioned, pre-Imperial, Terran-made HE. A Mark Ninety would no more recognize those as a threat than it would a flint hand-ax."

Mk 90 does not recognize chemical explosives as a threat worth detonating over.

"You do, Sir. If you will check your records, you will discover that your ordnance disposal section has seventy-one pre-Siege, megaton-range nuclear warheads confiscated by Imperial authorities in Syria four years ago."

"I—" Tsien paused, and then his holo-image nodded. "As usual, you are correct, Dahak. I had forgotten." He looked at MacMahan. "Lawrence's Security personnel stumbled across them, Hector. We believe they were cached by the previous regime before you disarmed it on Colin's orders before the Siege. Apparently, even the individuals who hid them away had forgotten about them, and they were badly decayed—they used a tritium booster, and it had broken down. They were sent here for disposal, but we never got around to it."

Apparently Syria secretly stockpiled 71 megaton-range nukes without anyone noticing and even the government forgetting about it during the buildup to the Siege, when Horus was disarming all rogue nations. They don't want the nukes though, just the Octol (TNT and HMX mix) initiators.

Colin, on being told they might be able to blow up the bomb without setting it off, wants to emplace the charge himself. He is quickly overruled by all his friends and Dahak.

Brigadier Jourdain followed his men up the stairs. There were only twelve Marines, one tired old man, and a pregnant woman to stop them, while he had over a hundred men, all fully enhanced courtesy of Earth Security. It would be more than enough, he told himself yet again. Some were going to get killed, but not enough to stop them, and dead Security men would be convincing proof of how hard Brigadier Jourdain and his men had fought to protect their Empress.

Attack on White Tower. 100 fully enhanced security goons against 12 Marines, 'Tanni and Horus. Poor bastards. At least if they make it Jefferson will... kill them all to ensure their silence.

Something rattled. The lead Security man saw the small object skitter past his feet, and his eyes flared. No! His implant scanners hadn't picked up a thing, so how—

Eleven men died in a blast of fury, and the Marine who'd thrown the grenade grinned savagely as he and his partner reactivated their own implants and brought their energy guns to bear on the smoke-streaming door.

One of the few ways besides a stealth field to effectively hide from enhanced men is to shut down your own implants. You still get strength and reflexes, but no sensory enhancement or active scanners means no energy signature they can track. Of course, it also gives a lot of advantage to the other side, in that you can't find them so easily.

11 men die in a grenade blast, since it didn't take out a large part of the building, and suppressors are active, that rules out plasma and Warp grenades. Must be another type.

"Clancey! Get up there!" he barked, and Corporal Clancey settled his automatic grenade launcher into firing position. He jerked his head at the other three members of his section, and the four of them pushed forward through the men above them on the stair.

Automatic grenade launcher. Fun.

The waiting Marines had their own implant sensors on-line now, but there was a limit to what the devices could tell them. They knew the stairs were full of men, but they couldn't tell what weapons they carried or precisely what they were doing. The second Marine held a grenade, ready to throw it, but the same suppressor that blocked their coms from hyper-space would smother any hyper grenade's small field, and they'd had only one HE grenade each. He couldn't afford to waste it, and so he gritted his teeth and waited.

Limitations of implant sensors, confirmation of HE grenades, Warp suppressors which in a minute the attackers rue as a few Warp grenades makes taking out entrenched defenders SO much easier.

Clancey cursed as an energy gun splattered his companions over him, but his implants told him the Marine who'd fired was dead. He went down in a crouch, hosing more grenades to keep the surviving Marine's head down while more Security men charged the door. Explosions shattered walls and furnishings, and the building's fire suppression systems howled to life as flames glared. More men charged up the stairs, white faces locked in death's-head grins, and then Corporal Clancey discovered he'd been wrong about what the Marines had.

The grenade landed 1.3 meters behind him, and he had one instant to feel the terror before it exploded and killed six more men . . . including Corporal William Clancey, Earth Security.

Energy gun "splatters" several men, sensors confirm death of a man and Imperial wepaons are hell on the decor.

Vlad Chernikov felt blind and maimed. For the first time in twenty-five years, every implant in his body had been shut down lest the Mark Ninety decide they were weapons, and the sudden reversion to the senses Nature had provided was a greater psychic shock than he'd anticipated.

He grimaced the thought aside and hoisted the charge Dahak had designed. The initiator charges of the obsolete warheads had been formed in hundreds of precisely shaped blocks, and Dahak had reassembled a hundred and fifty kilos of them into a single massive shaped-charge. That might be more than they needed, but Dahak believed in redundancy.

He slung the charge on his back—at least his muscular enhancement still worked, since it used no power and hence offered no emissions signature to offend the Mark Ninety's sensibilities—and started down the hall to the gallery on the longest sixty-meter hike of his life.

60 m radius threshold for the Mk 90. Dahak makes 150 kilo bomb of mostly TNT to turn a 1.5 scale marble statue of a man and a Narhani to gravel.

He flung himself through the doorway, landing flat on his belly in Clancey's blood. More of his men crouched behind him or threw themselves prone, and at least a dozen energy guns snarled. Walls already torn and pocked by grenade fragments ripped apart under focused beams of gravitic disruption, and the Marine fired back desperately. Another of his men went down, then two more, a fourth, but there was only one Marine left. It was only a matter of time—and not much of it—until one of those energy guns found him.

Energy guns tearing up the place.

Jourdain's number three assault team lost ten men in the first exchange, but its commander was a hard-bitten man, an ex-Marine himself, who knew what he was about. Once he'd pinpointed the defenders, he sent six men down one floor. They positioned themselves directly beneath the Marines, switched their energy guns to maximum power, aimed at the ceiling, and simply held the triggers back. The Marines never had time to realize what was happening, and assault team three charged forward over their mutilated bodies.

Tactical possibilities of the extremely destructive Imperial weapons.

Captain Chin heard feet behind him and rolled up on one knee just as the leading "Security men" appeared in the hall. His energy gun howled, and three of them vanished in a gory spray. He flung himself back down, flat on his belly against the wall, and his single grenade killed three more attackers.

Energy gun kills three men in an instant.

He turned a corner and gasped in relief as he picked up the implants of his fellows ahead. He opened his mouth to shout his own name, then whirled as some sixth sense warned him. A shape bounded towards him, but his instant spurt of panic eased as he realized it was only one of the Empress's dogs. Big as it was, no dog was a threat to an enhanced human, and he raised his energy gun almost negligently.

Gaheris was four meters away when he left the floor in a prodigious spring. Sergeant Sellers got off one shot—then screamed in terror as bio-enhanced jaws ripped his throat out like tissue.

Gaheris (one of the enhanced dogs) makes a casual 4 meter (13 feet) leap on a man who dismissed a dog as any threat to an enhanced men.

"Hose it!" he barked to his remaining grenadiers, and a hurricane of grenades lashed up the stairs and blew the doors at their head to bits.

Again with the fully automatic grenade launchers. Considering how insanely destructive both kinds of Imperial grenades we've seen before (which they aren't using here) are that's pretty horrifying.

The grenadiers stopped firing to let their flankers go in, and Anna Zhirnovski rolled out into the corridor, under the smoke. Men shrieked as her snarling energy gun ripped their feet and legs apart, and Zhirnovski snap-rolled back into her protected position.

Two more, she thought, and then the grenades began to explode once more.

Again with multiple people getting hit with an energy gun in a fraction of a second.

The last exchange of fire faded into silence, and Brigadier Jourdain's mouth was a bitter, angry line. Ten more of his men lay dead around the head of the ruined stairs. Two more were down, one so badly mangled only his implants kept him alive, and they wouldn't do that much longer, but at least they'd accounted for the last two Marines.

Those are probably not the ones who had their legs blasted off on the other side of the building a few moments ago. Even when death is inevitable, the implants tend to stretch out the dying process considerably, while removing pain, giving you plenty of time for a last 'screw you' shot or five.

He glared at the closed door to the foyer of Horus's office and cranked his implant sensors to maximum power. Damn it, he knew the Governor was in there somewhere, but the cunning old bastard must have shut his implants down, like the Marines covering that first stairwell. As long as he stayed put without moving, Jourdain couldn't pick him up without implant emissions.

Well, there were drawbacks to that sort of game, the brigadier told himself grimly. If Horus had his implants down, he couldn't see Jourdain or his men, either. He was limited to his natural senses. That ought to make him a bit slower off the mark when he opened fire, and even if he'd found an ambush position to let him get the first few men through the door, he'd reveal his position to the others the instant he fired.

Implant shutdown and limits again. Horus isn't protected from their five original and greatly enhanced senses, but as long as he doesn't move or make a sound, he only has to worry about them seeing him.

"All right," he said finally. "We're not going to take this bastard out with a frontal assault." His fellows nodded, and he bared his teeth at their relieved expressions. "What we need to do is get in behind him."

"We can't. That's a blind corridor," someone pointed out.

"Yeah, but it's got walls, and we've got energy guns," Esteben pointed out. "Frank, you keep him busy, and the rest of us'll go back and circle around to get into the conference room next door. We can blow through the wall from there and flank him out."

Tactical possibilities again. Not the least of which is the ability to make your own door.

The foyer door vanished in a hurricane of fire, and two men slammed through the opening. They saw the piled fortress of furniture facing the door and charged it frantically, firing on the run, desperate to reach it before Horus could pop up and return fire.

He let them get half way to it, and then, without moving from his position in the corner, cut both of them in half.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Horus.

Energy guns snarled in a frenzy of destruction at a range of less than five meters. Men went down—screaming or dead—and then it was over. Two more attackers were down, one dead and one dying . . . and the Governor of Earth was down as well. Someone's fire had smashed his energy gun, but it didn't really matter, Jourdain thought as he glared down at him, for Horus was mangled and torn. Only his implants were keeping him alive, and they were failing fast.

-snip-

Agony drowned Horus in red, screaming waves—the physical agony his implants couldn't suppress, and the more terrible one of knowing men were hunting his daughter to kill her. He bit back a scream and made his broken body obey his will one last time. Both his legs were gone, and most of his left arm, but he dragged himself—slowly, painfully, centimeter by centimeter—across the carpet in a ribbon of blood. His entire, fading world was focused on the closest corpse's holstered grav gun. He inched towards it, gasping with effort, and his fingers fumbled with the holster. His hand was slow and clumsy, shaking with pain, but the holster came open and he gripped the weapon.

A boot slammed down on his wrist, and he jerked in fresh agony, then rolled his head slowly and stared into the muzzle of an energy gun.

"You just can't wait to die, can you, you old bastard?" Alex Jourdain hissed. "All right—have it your way!"

His finger tightened on the firing stud . . . and then his head blew apart and Horus' eyes flared in astonishment as two bloodsoaked rottweilers and a Marine corporal charged across his body.

Resilience while dying.

Vlad rounded the last corner, skidded to a halt, and flung himself flat.

The charge went off just before he landed, and the floor seemed to leap up and hit him in the face. His mouth filled with blood as he bit his tongue, and he yelped in pain.

It was only then that he realized he was still alive . . . which meant it must have worked.

Explosive disabling of the bomb.

It came out in a thread, and she caught his hand, pressing it to her breast, and bent over him. Her lips brushed his forehead, and she stroked his hair.

"I love you, Poppa," she whispered to him in perfect Universal, and then the darkness came down forever.

Resolution of plot thread brought up just last chapter. Returning to the book, I've very disappointed with how that was handled.

[Simon_Jester]

Just like Anu's Antarctic Enclave all those years ago, any weapon powerful enough to reach the bomb inside the heart of the Palace would render the planet uninhabitable.

They really need a directional version of that warp weapon- then the obvious solution would be to shut down all the active and force-field defenses of the Palace, evacuate the building, and punch a cylindrical 'core' out five meters wide and all the way down to bedrock.

60 m radius threshold for the Mk 90. Dahak makes 150 kilo bomb of mostly TNT to turn a 1.5 scale marble statue of a man and a Narhani to gravel.

This is quite, quite excessive- but they also want to wreck the bomb itself which may be made of materials that have a bit more shock resistance than stone (probably by chance, but who knows?)

Explosive disabling of the bomb.

They really should have set the fuze longer...

[Ahriman238]

They really need a directional version of that warp weapon- then the obvious solution would be to shut down all the active and force-field defenses of the Palace, evacuate the building, and punch a cylindrical 'core' out five meters wide and all the way down to bedrock.

Dahak certainly has the precision to pull it off, but we never the Warp gun scaled up past small-arms. Which, confessedly, means something else entirely to enhanced soldiers.

This is quite, quite excessive- but they also want to wreck the bomb itself which may be made of materials that have a bit more shock resistance than stone (probably by chance, but who knows?)

There was a bit I didn't include with Vlad trying to place the charge in such a way as to be sure to disable the bomb, afraid of managing to leave it intact.

Also, Dahak is a big believer in redundancy.

[Ahriman238]

Lawrence Jefferson gazed into the mirror and adjusted his appearance with meticulous care, then checked the clock. Ten more minutes, he thought, and turned back to the mirror to smile at himself.

For someone who'd seen almost thirty years of planning collapse with spectacular totality less than two months before, he felt remarkably cheerful. His coup attempt had failed, but the governorship of Earth was a fair consolation prize—and, he reflected, an even better platform from which to plan anew after a few years.

Falling upwards, I see.

He'd gone to considerable lengths to set Brigadier Jourdain up as the fall guy if his plans miscarried, and the brigadier had helped by getting himself killed, which neatly precluded the possibility of his defending himself against the charges. Lieutenant Governor Jefferson had, of course, been shocked to learn that one of his most senior Security men had formed links to the Sword of God and had, in fact, used Security's own bio-enhancement facilities to enhance his own select band of traitors! The stunning discovery of Jourdain's treason had led to a massive shakeup at Security, in the course of which an Internal Affairs inspector had "stumbled across" the secret journal which chronicled the brigadier's secretly growing disaffection. A disaffection which had blossomed to full life when he was named to head the special team created by newly appointed Security Minister Jefferson to combat the Sword's terrorism following the Van Gelder assassination. Instead of hunting the Sword down to destroy it, he'd used the investigation to make contact with a Sword cell leader and found his true spiritual home.

It was a black mark against Jefferson that he'd failed to spot Jourdain's treason, but the man had been recruited away from the Imperial Marines by Gustav van Gelder (no one—now living, that was—knew it was Jefferson who'd recommended him to Gus), not Jefferson, and he'd passed every security screening. And if his journal rambled here and there, that was only to be expected in the personal maunderings of a megalomaniac who believed God had chosen him to destroy all who trafficked with the Anti-Christ. It detailed his meticulous plan to assassinate Colin, Jiltanith, Horus, their senior military officers, and Lawrence Jefferson, and if it was a bit vague about precisely what was supposed to happen when they were dead, the fact that he'd hidden his bomb inside the Narhani statue suggested his probable intent. By branding the Narhani with responsibility for the destruction of Birhat, he'd undoubtedly hoped to lead humanity into turning on them as arch-traitors and dealing with them precisely as the Sword of God said they should be dealt with.

Jefferson was proud of that journal. He'd spent over two years preparing it, just in case, and if there were a few points on which it failed to shed any light, that was actually a point in its favor. By leaving some mysteries, it avoided the classic failing of coverups: an attempt to answer every question. Had it tried to do so, someone—like Ninhursag MacMahan—undoubtedly would have found it just a bit too neat. As it was, and coupled with the fact that the dozens of still-living people named in it had, in fact, all been recruited by Jourdain (on Jefferson's orders, perhaps, but none of them knew that), it had worked to perfection. The most important members of Jefferson's conspiracy weren't listed in it, and several of his more valuable moles had actually been promoted for their sterling work in helping ONI run down the villains the journal's discovery had unmasked. Best of all, every one of those villains, questioned under Imperial lie detectors, only confirmed that Jourdain had recruited them and that all of their instructions had come from him.

Hmm... the Jury's out on this one. On the one hand, he didn't kill Jourdain or order his death (save perhaps, in sending him on a ridiculously dangerous mission) and when engaging in high treason it's only prudent to set up a fall guy. On the other hand, this definitely counts as screwing over a trusted employee. I'm going to add it to the 'World's Worst Boss' pile.

He was half way to the Chamber when a voice spoke behind him.

"Lawrence McClintock Jefferson," it said with icy precision, "I arrest you for conspiracy, espionage, murder, and the crime of high treason."

He froze, and his heart seemed to stop, for the voice was that of Colin I, Emperor of Humanity. He stood absolutely motionless for one agonizing moment, then turned slowly, and swallowed as he found himself facing the Emperor, and Hector and Ninhursag MacMahan. The general held a grav gun in one hand, its rock-steady muzzle trained on Jefferson's belly, and his hard, hating eyes begged the Lieutenant Governor to resist arrest.

"What . . . what did you say?" Jefferson whispered.

"You made one mistake," Ninhursag replied coldly. "Only one. When you set up Jourdain's journal, you fingered him for everything except the one crime that actually started us looking for you, 'Mister X.' There wasn't a word in it about Sean's and Harriet's assassination—and the murder of my daughter."

It's always the little things that undo you, like the casual slaughter of 8,000 people.

"But I—" He cleared his throat noisily. "But if you suspect me of such horrible crimes, why wait until now to arrest me?" he demanded harshly.

"We waited because 'Hursag wanted to see who distinguished themselves in your 'investigation' of Jourdain." Colin's voice was as icy as Ninhursag's. "It was one way to figure out who else was working for you. But the timing for your arrest?" He smiled viciously. "That was my idea, Jefferson. I wanted you to be able to taste the governorship—and I want you to go right on remembering what it tasted like up to the moment the firing squad pulls the trigger."

He stepped aside, and Jefferson saw the grim-faced Marines who'd stood behind the Emperor. Marines who advanced upon him with expressions whose plea to resist mirrored that of their commandant.

"You'll have a fair trial," Colin told him flatly as the Marines took him into custody, "but with any luck at all—" he smiled again, with a cold, cruel pleasure Jefferson had never imagined his homely face could wear "—every member of the firing squad will hit you in the belly. Think about that, Mister Jefferson. Look forward to it."

Colin's got a bit of a mean streak when you screw around with his family. Jefferson finally gets what's long been coming to him.

Jefferson's interrogation under an Imperial lie detector had led to the arrest of his entire surviving command structure. The last of them had been shot a week before, and it was even possible some good would come of it. The Church of the Armageddon, for example, was in wild disarray. Not only had their spiritual leader been unmasked as a cold, cynical manipulator, but the fact that she and Jefferson had intended to use their anti-Narhani prejudice to whip up a genocidal frenzy to support their coup had shocked the church to its foundation. Colin suspected the hardcore true believers would find some way to blame the Narhani for their own victimization, but those whose brains hadn't entirely ossified might just take a good, hard look at themselves.

All of Jefferson's people get picked up. Some of the Fifth Imperium's problems get a bit of closure. Narhani prejudice takes a hit, but is unlikely to ever die. All the jobs and skills made redundant by Imperial technology remain a problem, presumably. Then again, it's been thirty years by this point since the world first heard the moon was an ancient spaceship, I imagine they'll have largely ironed themselves out by now.

Perhaps that, he thought, was the real lesson. The knowledge that life meant growth and change and challenge, and that those were painful things, but that only those who dared to love despite the pain were the true inheritors of humanity's dreams of greatness.

Closest we come to a moral.

And then Dahak made the quiet electronic sound he used when a human would have cleared his throat.

"Excuse me, Colin, but I have just received a priority hypercom transmission of which I feel you should be apprised."

"A hypercom message?" Colin raised his head with an expression of mild curiosity. "What sort of message?"

"The transmission," Dahak said, "is from the planet Pardal."

" 'Pardal'?" Colin looked at Hatcher. "Gerald? You have a survey mission to someplace called 'Pardal'?"

"Pardal?" Hatcher shook his head. "Never heard of it."

"You sure you got that name right, Dahak?" Colin asked.

"I am."

"Well where in the blazes is it and how come I never heard of it?"

"I am not yet certain of the answer to either of those questions, Colin. The message, however, is signed 'Acting Governor Midshipman His Imperial Highness Sean Horus MacIntyre,' " Dahak replied calmly, and Jiltanith gasped as Colin jerked upright in his lounger. "It reports the successful reclamation of the populated planet Pardal for the Imperium by the crew of the sublight battleship Israel: Midshipwoman Princess Isis Harriet MacIntyre, Midshipman Count Tamman, Midshipwoman Crown Princess Consort Sandra MacMahan MacIntyre, and Mishipman Nest Heir Brashan."

Colin's head snapped around. His incredulous gaze met Jiltanith's equally incredulous—and joyous—eyes, then swept to his friends, the friends who were coming to their feet in joy that matched his own, as Dahak paused for just a moment. Then the computer spoke again, and even Dahak's mellow voice could not hide its vast elation.

"Will there be a reply?"

THE END

I admit to giving a big whoop when I read this the first time (I was not a quiet reader) but on reflection it seems pretty anti-climatic. We leave Sean, Sandy and Tam fighting for their lives in the Sanctum while Sean tries to regain control of the computer so Brashan can airstrike the Guard into submission, and then this message. We know what must have happened, and the first time I was kind of tweaked by the novelty of the ending, but we never find out if Sean got his meeting with Vroxhan in the Temple rubble. We never see the kids try and explain the truth about God, Life, the Universe, and Everything to their followers and their foes.

Frankly, the social problems caused by dumping Imperial technology on an unprepared Earth are going to be peanuts compared to what Pardal will go through. The hard working blacksmiths and wainwrights are going to be hit very hard, then again, Pardal apparently has no tradition of unions...

Well, that's the entire Mutineer's Moon trilogy, exciting beginning to somewhat lackluster end. I really feel that this series showcased David Weber's best aspects as a writer, and the books remain an old favorite of mine. I hope those of you have never read them feel inspired to do so, and those who have remember them a little better.

I'll be back if not later tonight, then in the next couple of days to organize information and best summarize capabilities for versus debates. For now, feel free to discuss the books without spoiling anyone.

[Ahriman238]

Ok, so as far as ground combat goes... most sci-fi universes are sort of screwed against this one.

Consider, the average infantryman of the Fourth (or Fifth) Imperium has, at minimum, every enhancement available to a Halo SPARTAN or better. Reinforced bones? Check, and every bone is enhanced with battle-steel. Increased strength? Eight times an unenhanced man, and after Dahak's tinkering Colin and the Fifth Imperium humans are significantly stronger and tougher still (to an annoyingly unspecific degree.) Enhanced visual perception? An enhanced man can see most anything his side of the horizon as clearly as if it were right before him, and track a single mote of dust falling on the far side of a football stadium, plus being able to see infrared and ultraviolet and add a HUD if he wants. Increased reflexes? The one area besides running speed and (most likely, I never read the books) training where our poor SPARTAN friends remain competitive. The Fourth Imperium enhancements matched the SPARTAN reflex increase exactly, Dahak's improved package is "a hair faster" a hair being a very precise technical term.

This isn't even getting into little bonuses like increased resilience and medical enhancement, and we see people get a limb blown off who get up and fight a moment later thanks to their medical implants. Or their ability to hold their breath for five hours (like the ring bayonets, it's only useful in certain specific circumstances, like swimming or gas attacks, but it's nice to have.) Drastically increased conventional senses, with the addition of gravitonic sensors and the ability to sense any heat source or electric field within a 500 meter radius. Plus a secure fold-space comm with a 40 light-minute range inside their heads. Or the cyborg aspects; they have neural boosters to help handle all the sensory and data input they're capable of, vastly increased memory thanks to implant exocortex, and the ability to mentally interface with Imperial computer technology, including other people's implants.

And unlike the USNC, or even the Imperium of Man, these supersoldiers are the norm, and they have divisions to throw at any problem.

The standard sidearm for Imperial forces is the grav gun, which operates in a similar manner to the 'pulser' from Weber's HH books. Instead of a chemical charge or even a rail/coilgun effect, artificial gravity is used to propel a projectile (3mm made of something far denser than uranium) at 5 km/s (or 5.2) and after burying itself in the target it explodes with the force of half a kilo (1.1 lbs) or TNT. I couldn't find a one pound example so imagine something about halfway between this:


and this:


... and imagine the explosion takes place inside a wooden beam or a human body. The grav gun has a 200 round clip (or 300) and naturally has single shot, burst and full auto firing modes. A rifle version exists and I choose to attribute the conflicting ammo and muzzle velocity figures to it. That's my supposition however, and isn't really supported or contradicted by the text. Not that the sidearm version lacks in range or accuracy when wielded by an enhanced soldier, Hatcher's aide rather casually killed a sniper with one.

Besides the grav gun, the Imperium uses a grenade launcher that also can fire full auto. Ammunition options include a Warp Grenade that makes everything within a 10 meter sphere vanish forever into hyperspace irrespective of how strong or tough it is, though the Imperium has suppressing technologies to counter it. Then there's a plasma grenade which can melt stone and turn people into shadows on the wall, and an HE grenade of unspecified yield that likely uses an Imperial 'blasting compound' approximately 27 times more powerful than an equivalent weight of TNT.

Naturally all of these grenades come in the old fashioned, manual deployed form too.

There is also a Warp Rifle which uses the same principle as the grenade to simply erase a man-sized mass from existence.

Finally is the energy gun or beam gun (either is used interchangeably throughout the books) which produces a constant white beam of light from the muzzle (which is 20 cm or 8 in across) as long as the trigger is held, and this beam annihilates everything in it's path. The verb use is interesting here, the beam gun doesn't cut, and is only once or twice said to burn, rather it 'rips' 'tears' and 'sheers' through it's targets. This, as well as the gun's formal name (gravitonic disruptor) suggests to me that the energy gun is another form of AG technology, subjecting the target to hundreds or thousands of Gs of opposing forces. In any case, it makes a mockery of steel, sandbags, common building materials and other traditional forms of cover. For some reason it causes stone to shatter explosively, which is remarkable only compared to what happens to most materials.

Of course, when Imperials aren't expecting a fight they wear their uniforms (which are still plenty to stop knives) but when going into battle they wear power armor. It's unclear to what extent Dahakverse power armor enhances the strength of the wielder, but to be honest the main emphasis is on it being armor. It takes a long burst or sustained fire from a grav gun to harm the armor-wearer, and it takes a second or two for a beam gun to "burn through" (and beam guns
burning' is only ever mentioned in reference to it's ability to penetrate armor.) The armor also has sensors that outrange the implant version, and "jump gear" that seems AG-based to enhance mobility.

They also have stealth fields, personal cloaking devices (which are also present on every vehicle or ship up to and including planetoids) which can be 'synchronized' so everyone in a group can see each other while remaining conventionally invisible. They cannot use active sensors while stealthed, unless they open a 'viewport' in the field.

And the Imperium has many professional military officers who have actually heard of combined arms. We don't really see anything in the way of artillery, but Imperial troops can absolutely expect armor and air support. We don't know a ton about Imperial tanks, except that they use 2-man crews, can survive almost anything short of a ground zero nuke, and have "awesome firepower." We never even find out what sort of weaponry they have (my money is on scaled up beam guns) though they can kill other Imperial tanks. Oh, and they can fly, at Mach 12 like most Imperial aircraft, though they're sort of dragoons. They fly to get to the fight or navigate specific obstacles but they fight on the ground.

Imperial fightercraft are designed for both atmosphere and space. In air they're likewise restricted to speeds of Mach 12, Mach 4 and low altitudes if they want to be stealthy. Imperial fighters are more more agile than any terrestrial aircraft. Fighters are also 2-man vehicles and have stealth fields though powerful imperial sensors can 'burn through' them. Fighters are armed with twin scaled-up beam guns, and carry eight missiles. For ground attack missions and air support, they use hypervelocity missiles that impact the ground doing .6 c or so. If the mission is air superiority, they carry fast smart missiles (which can be operated mentally by the gunner even) with 3 kt warheads (light anti-fighter missiles) or 20 kt nukes (heavy anti-fighter missiles.) Imperial nukes are remarkably clean and limited in radioactive fallout. In a pinch, it isn't hard at all to aim anti-fighter missiles at a particular point of ground. In space, they're more likely to use hyper-missiles with antimatter or gravitonic warheads, though standard sublight missiles with the same loadouts are available.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Dahak certainly has the precision to pull it off, but we never the Warp gun scaled up past small-arms.

Not true; we see the planetoid Sevrid use a large scale version in their attack on the wrecked Achuultani scout vessel.

The planetoid Sevrid hovered behind her shuttles, watching over them and probing the wreckage.

<snip>

MacMahan flinched as the after section of the wrecked hull lashed his shuttles with fire. The crude energy weapons were powerful enough to burn through any assault boat's shield, but they'd fired at extreme range. Only three were hit, and the others went to evasive action, ripping at the wreck with their own energy guns. Sevrid's far heavier weapons reached past them, and warp beams plucked neat, perfect divots from the hull. Air gushed outward, and then the first-wave assault boats reached their goal.

Underlined.

Besides the grav gun, the Imperium uses a grenade launcher that also can fire full auto. Ammunition options include a Warp Grenade that makes everything within a 10 meter sphere vanish forever into hyperspace irrespective of how strong or tough it is, though the Imperium has suppressing technologies to counter it. Then there's a plasma grenade which can melt stone and turn people into shadows on the wall, and an HE grenade of unspecified yield that likely uses an Imperial 'blasting compound' approximately 27 times more powerful than an equivalent weight of TNT.

They also have nuclear grenades; they are indirectly mentioned in a scene where Sean is pulling off an ambush in simulated combat.

Something kicked dust in front of him. In fact, dozens of somethings were falling all over his position! He just had time to feel alarm before they erupted in the brilliant flashes of "nukes" and "warp grenades," and he went down in an astonished cloud of dust as the flash-bangs' override pulses locked his armor and blanked out his com implant to simulate a casualty.

Underlined.

Finally is the energy gun or beam gun (either is used interchangeably throughout the books) which produces a constant white beam of light from the muzzle (which is 20 cm or 8 in across) as long as the trigger is held, and this beam annihilates everything in it's path.

Actually it's "nearly invisible" to human senses, not white; it's often talked about how "bright" is is because of how it looks to their implants.

The nearly invisible energy was a terrible lash of power to his enhanced vision as it smashed out across the lawn, and it took the mutineer dead center.

We don't know a ton about Imperial tanks, except that they use 2-man crews, can survive almost anything short of a ground zero nuke, and have "awesome firepower." We never even find out what sort of weaponry they have (my money is on scaled up beam guns) though they can kill other Imperial tanks.

Probably.

He watched the tank settle onto its treads for added stability as grenades and rockets exploded about it. Its thick armor and invisible shield shrugged off the destruction as the turret swiveled, seeking fresh prey. The long energy cannon snouted in his direction, and he grabbed Jiltanith's ankle and hauled her down beside him, not that—

"Energy cannon" does sound like a big version of an "energy gun".

[Ahriman238]

Nice catches, Lord of the Abyss, I am much indebted.

[Ahriman238]

Another massive oversight I should address before moving on, the Imperium can also do non-lethal very well having dedicated stun weapons, grab fields which restrain someone in a tractor beam (and override and forcibly shut down their implants, if they have any) and I'd be willing to lay any odds that a significant portion of the chemical warhead missiles Dahak claimed to have in the first book are nonlethal. It's not like he'd need VX to kill large numbers of people from orbit, and disabling agents at least bring him some capability he wouldn't otherwise have.

Moving on, at its height the Fourth Empire had just under a million (998,712 if you want to be pedantic) battle planetoids. Colin has almost a hundred during the second book, loses most of them, and has a hundred again about a decade before the main action of the third book, where recovery operations were presumably ongoing.

There's rather a lot more X factor in space combat in these books than I'm really comfortable with, conflicting statements and annoying lack of specificity (may be the first time anyone's accused Weber of that.) Anyway, the basics are classic Weber, fighting is done with missiles at long ranges, which then have to run the gauntlet of ECM, decoys, counter-missiles and point-defense energy weapons. At closer ranges ships can use energy weapons against each other directly. There is the additional wrinkle of hyper missiles, which effectively teleport to a preprogrammed destination, hopefully within an opponent's shields, by flying through hyperspace. In the second book, Colin calls 27 light-minutes "extreme range" for engaging Achuultani ships, but in the third quarantine platforms are able to engage Israel at up to 38 light minutes away, despite Israel being a far smaller and quicker target than any Achuultani ship.

The missiles come in a variety of forms, we see hypervelocity kinetic impactors on the fighters, along with 1, 3, and 20 KT nukes. Dahak himself uses megaton-range counter-missiles, while his offensive armamaent consists of nukes, 10 GT antimatter heads, chemical weapons (for use on planets, clearly) and the "real shipkillers" of the Imperium, gravitonic bombs. Gravitonic bombs create small blackholes when they detonate, it's hard to gauge their exact power (since they aren't explosions or other energetic events) and this is further complicated by their being a range of gravitonic missiles. Fighters and other parasites carry missiles that make 20 km Achuultani scouts 'heave from within and snap in half' or make the forward third of the ship crumple in on itself. When the IG Flotilla arrives to relieve the Siege, their missiles are hundreds of times more powerful, and it isn't clear whether that's because of technological advancements or planetoids just must mount massive missiles. Or both. 16 such missiles suffice to annihilate Ceres., but considering it was about to hit Earth and Dahak is such a big believer in redundancy, that may have been overkill.

[Ahriman238]

Right, apologies for the sort of stream of consciousness style of my last post.

Dahak in the first book tells us a lot about himself. He has these various missiles types (no definite count on launchers, at least 29 for sure, I suspect closer to a thousand) plus energy weapons that are similar to the beam gun but powerful enough to disintegrate matter instead of just ripping it apart. Range for those is at least 5,000 km (the exclusion zone) but it is implied at the end that Dahak' energy guns can reach the Earth's surface, which is closer to 400,000 km. He has a gravitonic drive that can achieve speeds of .54 c, and an Enchanach drive that does 720 c (I promise I'll get into the FTL in more detail later.) Dahak has 312 fusion reactors for ordinary operations, and this is enough to run him during combat as well, but generally in a fight or FTL flight he relies on a core tap, which draws insane amounts of energy from hyperspace. We never have core taps quantified, except in relation to other taps. We do know at a minimum they provide more power than 300 fusion reactors though, and that the Antarctic core tap was expected to destroy the entire continent if it went out of control. Dahak ideal core crew is a quarter million, but he was designed to fit an additional 60% to allow room for population growth.

Essentially, "the Death Star done intelligently."

Dahak also operates as a carrier for sublight parasite warships. There are four of these: fighters, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. Dahak carries 200 ships and an unspecified number of fighters (with the vast majority unloaded, he still had 300, the ultimate number is probably less than 10,000.) All of these carry or can carry standard and hyper-missiles and have energy armaments. We know little more but masses, the destroyer with 8,000 tons, the battleship with 80,000 and the cruiser presumably in-between. Dahak's battleships require a 300 man crew, and parasite command seems to take up a considerable number of his quarter million crew.

We do see one display of a battleship's energy weapons (that is somewhat quantifiable) with the construction of PDF Escorpion. A battleship sheered the top 300 meters off mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, a feat that took it just over twenty minutes. A second battleship was on hand to catch the debris with its tractor beams to drop it into the ocean later. That's reasonably impressive, and it shows the peacetime engineering potential of the ships as well.

Dahak also has four removable industrial centers (150,000 tons) including mostly automated factories and smelting/refining facilities. Mostly these are for large scale repairs, but one can be dropped off in a system with a couple of automated 'fetch and carry' tenders (like the one that pinched Colin in the first place) and you're well on oyur way to starting a respectable orbital industry, and yes given time and materials the factory units can duplicate themselves.

Dahak and all of his parasite are made primarily from an advanced Imperial composite called 'battle-steel' which looks a bit like copper or bronze. This is the same material used to reinforce the bones of enhanced crewmen. A 20 cm (8 in) shell of battlesteel can "withstand a kiloton bomb." No idea if that should mean a 1 KT bomb or a KT range bomb. For now, I'll assume the lesser. But how much punishment can Dahak stand (after it gets through his active defenses and rather impressive shields?) Well, I tried to figure it out thusly: in the very first chapter of the very first book, Colin's ship with it's fancy new gravitonic scanner detects hollow spaces, a network of corridors 20 km beneath the surface of the moon. Later, but still early in the first book, Dahak admits to pushing the original moon into the sun after scavenging enough mass to conceal himself and make up the negligible difference in mass, and he gives his precise diameter. Since the size of the moon is pretty well documented I thought... Yeah. It turns out the negligible difference (and at that size it really is negligible) is 114 km of diameter, which contradicts Colin's original discovery and is thus useless.

Anyway, the planetoids of the Fourth Empire are considerably more impressive, the primary advancements made by the Empire being in computer technology, power generation and miniaturization of existing Imperial hardware. An Asgerd class planetoid is estimated to be 20x as powerful as the old Dahak in a straight fight. Their core taps are 5x as powerful as Dahak's. they can do .7c at sublight and have dual FTL, affording a choice between Enhanach (can see the universe, change course, drop out at 800c) and hyperdrive (2400 c, but you materialize at the destination originally programmed. period.) Oh, and they can hyper up to 12 light minutes from a star, where Enchanach is restricted to the outer system unless you want impressive fireworks. They also (seriously, thanks Relevous) have Warp Guns.

The Fourth Empire also diversified the fleet, having dedicated energy fighting planetoids (they still have missiles and hyper-missiles, naturally) that actually induce fisson in all matter that crosses the path of their beams. Plus planetary assault (fun!) freighter, collier, and repair planetoids.

Colin's Fifth Imperium largely builds on the base of the Fourth Empire's stuff, which they're still working to understand. They do however make an effort to finish research projects the Empire was engaged in when it fell, and to understand and incorporate Achuultani technology. A major difference with the Fourth Imperium is apparent with the launch of Imperial Terra, which has an 8,000 man crew (contrast with Dahak's quarter million) apparently due to large scale automation. this was likely true for the Empire as well, since they were able to run so many ships on functionally skeleton crews with computer assistance from Dahak.

Israel is also a far cry from Nergal and other battleship's of Dahak's day. At 120,000 tons it's half again the size, with a tenth the crew (30.) It also can do .7 c, and has both Imperial and Achuultani style shields.

[Ahriman238]

Okay, so FTL is a major weakness of this universe. The Achuultani scouts and basic warships can only do 48 c, their better ships do twice that. The Imperium can do 2400 c but prefers the 800 c method for shorter trips. So that's closer to the low end for FTL, it would take just over 40 years for an Imperial Planetoid to cross the Milky Way. As for the Achuultani, it would take them a couple millenia.

On the other hand, the Imperium's industrial capabilities are staggering. During the height of the Fourth Empire, there were 5,000 worlds and almost a million planetoids. Even in Colin's era automation combined with the near tirelessness of enhanced personnel and excessive explosives can work absolute miracles on a tight deadline. In two years they built dozens of PDFs, over 2,000 ground based hyper-missile silos, a core tap, orbital industry and fortesses, and 570 warships while building a world government from scratch.

With time, Colin's people were able to restore Birhat's considerable defenses and duplicate them for Earth, including a backup Mother. Besides restarting production of planetoids. They do unbelievable feats of engineering like this all the time.