Bit of Analysis: Mutineer's Moon

[Ahriman238]

He wished—again—that even one of them had been interested in a psych career. Unfortunately, they hadn't, and now that they needed a professional, they were on their own. The first weeks had been especially rough, until Harriet insisted they all had to face it. She didn't know any more about running a therapy session than Sean did, but her instincts seemed good, and they'd drawn tremendous strength from one another once they'd admitted their shared survival filled them with shame.

Not really relevant tech-wise, but I appreciate taking time to show the kids are very much traumatized from the destruction of Imperial Terra.

Still, it was Sandy who'd unearthed the real treasure in Israel's computers. Her original captain had been a movie freak—not for HD or even pre-Imperial tri-vid, but for old-fashioned, flat-image movies, the kind they'd put on film. There were hundreds of them in the ship's memory, and Sandy had tinkered up an imaging program to convert them to holo via the command bridge display. They'd worked their way through the entire library, and some of them had been surprisingly good. Sean's personal favorite was The Quest for the Holy Grail by someone called Monty Python, but the ones they'd gotten the most laughs out of were the old science fiction flicks. Brashan was especially fascinated by something called Forbidden Planet, but they'd all become addicted. By now, their normal conversation was heavily laced with bits of dialogue none of their Academy friends would even begin to have understood.

Nice to see they kept themselves occupied.

"So we may." Brashan's voice was elaborately calm, even for him; so calm Sean looked at him in quick suspicion. "In fact," the Narhani went on, "spectroscopic analysis confirms an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, as well."

-snip-

"No, but we are still almost sixty-two light-hours from the star," Brashan pointed out. "With Israel's instrumentation, we can detect nothing smaller than a planetoid at much above ten light-hours unless it has an active emissions signature."

Some of the capabilities and limitations of Israel's sensors.

What follows is going to be incredibly entertaining or head-bangingly idiotic, depending largely on your personal preferences. When the plague broke out and everything melted down, the people of Pardal turned luddite, and created a religion specifically dedicated to preventing the rise of a technoogy that would allow them, the last of mankind, to destroy themselves. Imperial became the Holy Tounge, a Battlefleet uniform a bishop's vestments, but they dared not abandon the quarantine system. So they said that God had given his children the Voice, to protect them from the demons who arranged man's fall from grace and the heavens. Every year, on the high holy days, they perform the rituals of Fire Test and otherwise ordering the automated system to maintain itself.

So what follows is- the kids fighting automated weapons platforms, run by chanting priests with no clue what they're saying, but convinced the Apocalypse is nigh unless they can find the right catechism. My personal opinon is that this is crazy awesome, your mileage may vary.

"Warning," it said in the Holy Tongue, every word sweet and pure as silver, "passive system detection warning. Hostiles approach." The Voice continued, speaking words not even the high priest knew as it invoked God's protection, and he felt a shiver of religious ecstasy. Then it returned to words he recognized, even though he did not fully understand them. "Contact in five-eight-point-three-seven minutes," it said, and fell silent. After a moment it began again, repeating the Warning, and Vroxhan knelt to press his bearded lips reverently to the glowing God Lights of the high altar with a silent prayer that God might overlook his manifest unworthiness for the task which had come to him. Then he rose, and sang the sacred words of benediction.

"Arm systems," he sang, and a brazen clangor rolled through the Sanctum, but this time no one showed fear. This they had heard before, every year of their religious lives, at the Feast of Fire Test. Yet this time was different, for this time its familiar, martial fury summoned them to battle in God's holy cause.

The challenge of God's Horn faded, and the Voice spoke once more.

"Armed," it said sweetly. "Hostiles within engagement parameters."

Amber circles sprang into the starry heavens, entrapping the crimson glare of the demons, ringing it in the adamantine rejection of God's wrath, and Vroxhan felt himself tremble as the ultimate moment of his life rushed to meet him. He was no longer afraid—no longer even abashed, for God had raised him up. He was God's vessel, filled with God's power to meet this time of Trial, and his eyes gleamed with a hundred reflected stars as he turned to his fellows. He raised his arms and watched them draw strength from his own exaltation. Other arms rose, returning his blessing, committing themselves to the power and the glory of God while the demons' red glare washed down over their faces and vestments.

"Be not afraid, my brothers!" Vroxhan cried in a great voice. "The time of Trial is upon us, but trust in God, that your souls may be exalted by His glory and the demons may be confounded, for the power is His forever!"

"Forever!" The answering roar battered him, and there was no fear in it, either. He turned back to the high altar, lifting his eyes defiantly to the demon light, rejecting it and the evil for which it stood, and his powerful, rolling voice rose in the sonorous music of the ancient Canticle of Deliverance.

"Initiate engagement procedure!"

Am I the only one thinking of the worst portrayals of the AdMech from 40k?

"First phase activation complete. All platforms nominal."

Vroxhan listened to the Voice's ancient, musical words as a net of emeralds blazed against the night sky. God's Shields glowed with the color of life, yet he'd never seen so many of them at once, not even at the once-a-decade celebration of High Fire Test. Truly this was the time of Trial, and he licked his lips as he proceeded to the second verse of the Canticle.

"Activate tracking systems," he intoned sonorously.

God's Shields, of course, are the quarantine platforms.

Sean felt himself tightening inwardly as his queerly icy brain raced. Every instinct screamed to open fire to preempt whatever those weapons might do, but even if his assumption that the planetary power source was the command center was right, he couldn't hit it if Harry couldn't localize it. That only left the platforms themselves, and they were such small targets—and there were so many of them—that going after them would be a losing proposition. Perhaps more importantly, they hadn't fired yet. If he initiated hostilities, they most certainly would, and although Israel was beyond energy weapon range, maximum range for the Fourth Empire's hyper missiles against a target her size was thirty-eight light-minutes. They were ten light-minutes inside that. At maximum speed, they needed fourteen minutes to clear the planet's missile envelope, and every second the platforms spent thinking about shooting was one priceless second in which they weren't shooting.

38 light minute range for Fourth Empire hyper missiles to effectively target an evading 120,000 ton spacecraft. If the launchers were in the heart of the sun, they could cover most of the inner system.

"Target evading."

Vroxhan's heart faltered as the Voice departed from the Canticle of Deliverance. It had never said those words before, and the symbols inside the bloody circle danced madly. The demon light pulsed and capered, and his faith wavered. But he felt ripples of panic flaring through the bishops and upper-priests. He had to do something, and he forced his merely mortal voice to remain firm as he intoned the fourth verse of the Canticle.

"Initiate firing sequence!" he sang, and his soul filled with relief as the Voice returned the proper response.

"Initiating."

Is any of this as hilarious in your imaginations as it is in mine?

"Hostile decoys deployed," the Voice announced sweetly.

Vroxhan clutched at the altar, and a terrified human voice cried out behind him, for the high priest's portion of the Canticle was done! There was no more Canticle! But the Voice was continuing.

"Request Tracking refinement and update," it said, and the High Priest sank to his knees while the demon light spawned again and again. Dozens of demons blazed in the stars, and he didn't know what the Voice wanted of him!

"Initiate firing sequence!" he repeated desperately, and his trained voice was broken-edged and brittle.

"Probability of kill will be degraded without Tracking refinement and update," the Voice replied emotionlessly.

"Initiate firing sequence!" Vroxhan screamed. The Voice said nothing for a tiny, terrible eternity, and then—

"Initiating."

Perhaps the men who wrote the prayerbooks should have come up with a few responses to use in the event of probable tactical scenarios, like decoys.

A deathly silence followed Sandy's flat announcement. The Fourth Empire's hyper missiles traveled at four thousand times the speed of light. It would take them almost seven seconds to cross the light-minutes to the battleship, but there was no such thing as an active defense against a hyper missile, for no one had yet figured out a way to shoot at something in hyper. They could only take it . . . and be glad the range was so long. At seventy percent of light-speed, Israel would have moved almost one-and-a-half million kilometers between the time those missiles launched and the time they arrived. But that was why defensive bases had prediction and tracking computers.

Israel had never been intended to face such firepower single-handed, but her defenses had been redesigned and refined by Dahak and BuShips to incorporate features gleaned from the Achuultani and new ideas all their own. Her shields covered more hyper bands, her inner shield was far closer to her hull than the Fourth Empire's technology had allowed, and she had an outer shield, which no earlier generation of Imperial ship had ever boasted.

It was as well she did.

Only a fraction of those missiles were on target, but Israel bucked like a mad thing, and Sean almost ripped the arms from his couch as warheads smashed at her and she heaved about him. Damn it! Damn it! He'd forgotten to activate his tractor net! The gravity wells of a dozen stars sought to splinter his ship's insignificant mass, and shield generators screamed in her belly.

4,000 c speed for hyper missiles. Tracking and prediction computers to try and lead spaceborne targets, or fire patterns likely to catch them. Dahak designed the newest generation of parasite (and perhaps Imperial Terra) to have dual shields, Imperial and Achuultani style. Enough missiles hit to subject Israel to "the gravity wells of a dozen stars" (assuming that isn't hyperbole) but it survives, though not undamaged.

The familiar musical note of Fire Test rang in his ears, and Vroxhan stared up from his knees, eyes desperate, waiting for the demon lights to vanish, praying that they would. He didn't know how long he would have to wait; he never did, even during Fire Test, for no one had ever taught him to read the range notations within the targeting circles.

Then, suddenly, all but one of the demon lights did vanish. A great sigh went up from the massed bishops, and Vroxhan joined it. The demons might have spawned, but God had smitten all but one of them! Yet that one remained, and that, too, had never happened during Fire Test.

His terrible fear ebbed just a bit, but only a bit, for yet again the Voice spoke words no high priest had ever heard.

"Decoys destroyed. Engagement proceeding."

Seriously, this is hilarious, I have no idea why I find this so damn funny, but I do.

A ship of the Fourth Empire would have died. Five of those mighty missiles had popped the hyper bands covered by Israel's outer shield, but they erupted outside her inner shield . . . and it held. Somehow, it held.

Go Dahak! What you absolutely need are ships designed by a paranoid, overprotective celestial body.

"Incoming fire," the Voice said. "Request defense mode."

Vroxhan covered his face, trying to understand while faith, terror, and confusion warred within him. He knew what "request" meant, but he had no idea what a "defense mode" was.

"Urgent," the Voice said. "Defense mode input required."

-snip-

Sweat stung Vroxhan's eyes as a dozen of God's emerald Shields vanished from the stars. The demons! The demons had done that!

"Urgent," the Voice repeated. "Defense mode input required."

The high priest racked his brain. Thought had never been required during any of the high ceremonies, only the liturgy. His mind ran desperately over every ritual, seeking the words "defense mode," but he couldn't think of any canticle that used them. Wait! He couldn't think of any that used both words, but the Canticle of Maintenance Test used "mode"!

He trembled, wondering if he dared use another canticle's words. What if they were the wrong words? What if they turned God's wrath against him?

-snip

Vroxhan groaned as another dozen emeralds vanished. That was almost a tenth of them all, and the Demons still lived! If they destroyed all of God's Shields, nothing would stand between them and the world's death!

"Warning." The Voice was as beautiful as ever, yet it seemed to shriek in his brain. "Offensive capability reduced nine-point-six percent. Defense mode input required."

Blood ran into Vroxhan's beard as his teeth broke his lip, but even as he watched the demons were spawning yet again. He had no choice, and he spoke the words from the Canticle of Maintenance Test.

"Cycle autonomous mode selection!" he cried.

He felt the others stare at him in horror, but he made himself stand upright, awaiting the stroke of God's wrath. Silence stretched to the breaking point, and then—

"Autonomous defense mode selection engaged," the Voice said.

Monkeys with keyboards finally tell the computer to do whatever it thinks is right.

The battleship writhed again, yet the ferocity was less and he felt a surge of hope. Sandy had nailed almost forty bases; maybe she'd thinned them enough they could survive yet!

From earlier comment that they'd taken out almost 10% of "God's Shields" I infer there are at least 400 orbital platforms.

Israel sped outward, bobbing and weaving as Sean, Brashan, and the maneuvering computers squirmed through every evasion they could produce, and Harriet abandoned Plotting and plugged into the damage control sub-net to help Tamman fight the battleship's damage. Two more near-misses had savaged her, and her speed was down to .6 c from the loss of a drive node, but the incoming fire was less and less accurate. Sandy had picked off thirteen more launch stations, ripping huge holes in the original defensive net, but Sean could see the surviving weapon platforms redeploying, with more coming around from the far side of the planet. Still, Sandy's fire might just have whittled them down enough to make the difference in the face of Israel's ECM.

Even as he thought that, he knew he didn't really believe it.

He rechecked the range. Thirty-four light-minutes. Another seven minutes to the edge of the missile envelope at their reduced speed. Could they last that long?

Another salvo shook the ship. And another. Another. A fresh damage signal burned in his feed. They weren't going to make it out of range before something got through, but they were coming up on thirty-five light-minutes, and each salvo was still spreading its fire to engage their decoys. They hadn't managed to break lock, but if the bad guys' targeting was so bad it couldn't differentiate them from the decoys, they might be able to get into—

* * *
Vroxhan watched the demons spawn yet again. They must have an inexhaustible store of eggs, but God smote every one they hatched. A fresh cloud of crimson dots profaned the stars—and then they vanished.

They all vanished, and the ring of God's wrath was empty. Empty!

Silence hovered about him and his pulse thundered as the assembled priests held their breath.

"Target destroyed," the Voice said. "Engagement terminated. Repair and replacement procedures initiated. Combat systems standing down."

* * *
"They've lost lock," Sandy reported in a soft, shaky voice as Israel vanished into stealth mode, and Sean MacIntyre exhaled a huge breath.

He was soaked in sweat, but they were alive. They shouldn't have been. No ship their size could survive that much firepower, however clumsily applied. Yet Israel had. Somehow.

His hands began to tremble. Their stealth mode ECM was better than anything the Fourth Empire had ever had, but to make it work they'd had to cut off all detectable emissions. Which meant Sandy had been forced to cut her own active sensors and shut down both her false-imaging ECM and the outer shield, for it extended well beyond the stealth field. He'd hoped synchronizing with the decoys' destruction would convince the bad guys they'd gotten Israel, as well, but if their tracking systems hadn't lost lock, they would have been a sitting duck. They wouldn't even have been covered by decoys against the next salvo.

Engagement ends with Israel dropping into stealth at the same time all it's decoys get taken out. Stealth can be activated with inner (Achuultani-style) shield up.

His wounded ship lay hidden in an asteroid's ink-black lee while he coaxed the welder through his neural feed. Other robotic henchmen had already cut away the jagged edges of the breach, rebuilt sheared frame members, and tacked down replacement plates of battle steel. Now the massive welding unit crept along, fusing the plates in place. Under other circumstances, damage control could have been left to such a routine task unsupervised, but one of Israel's hits had taken out a third of her Engineering peripherals. Until Tamman and Brashan finished putting them back on-line—if they finished—the damage control sub-net remained far from reliable.

Repair equipment/robots.

"You're missing the point, Tam." Sandy came to Harriet's aid. "Properly designed automated defenses shouldn't have let us take any of them out unopposed, but anything dumb enough to let us zap any of them that way should have let us take them all out. Besides, how many other intact quarantine systems have we seen? None. That means this thing's original programming wasn't just good enough to control its weapons—it's run enough deep-space industry to keep the whole system functional for forty-five thousand years, as well."

She paused to let that sink in, and Tamman nodded. Harriet's stealthed sensor remotes, operating from a circumspect forty light-minutes, had given them proof of that. The Radona-class yard was no longer on standby; it was rebuilding the weapon platforms Sandy had destroyed.

"Another thing," she continued. "Those platforms' passive defenses are mighty efficient by Empire standards, and that razzle-dazzle trick by the ground source is pretty cute, too. It's not standard military hardware, but it works. Maybe its designer was a civilian, but if so he was a sneaky one—not exactly the sort to give anything away to an enemy. And if a sharp cookie like whoever set this all up built in defensive systems at all, why arrange things so they didn't come on-line until after our third salvo?"

After-action discussion of engagement, and how oddly poorly run the quarantine platforms were.

"You're just sore you didn't think of it first. Look, it let us get within twenty-eight light-minutes before it even began bringing its systems on-line, right?" Tamman and Brashan nodded. "Okay, why'd it do that? Why didn't it start bringing them up as soon as we entered missile range? After all, it couldn't know we wouldn't shoot as soon as we had the range."

"You're saying it didn't pick us up until then," Brashan said.

"Exactly. And that gives us a rough idea how far out its passive sensors were able to detect us. Sandy and Harry ran a computer model assuming it had picked us up at forty light-minutes—a half hour of flight time before it powered up. Even at that, the model says our stealth field should hide the drive to within a light-minute if we hold its power well down. That means we can sneak in close before we shut down everything and turn into a meteor."

"Seems to me you've still got a little problem there." Tamman sounded doubtful. "First of all, if I'd designed the system, it wouldn't let a rock Israel's size hit the planet in the first place. I'd've set it to blow the sucker apart way short of atmosphere. Second, we can't land, or even maneuver into orbit, without the drive, and we'll be way inside a light-minute by that point. It's going to spot us as a ship at that range, stealth field or no."

"Oh, no it won't." Sean smiled his best Cheshire Cat smile. "In answer to your first point, you should have made time to read that paper I wrote for Commander Keltwyn last semester. Our survey teams have looked at the wreckage of over forty planetary defense systems by now, and every single one of them required human authorization to engage anything without an active emissions signature. Remember, over half these things were set up by civilians, not the Fleet, and the central computers were a hell of a lot stupider than Dahak. The designers wanted to be damned sure their systems didn't accidentally kill anything they didn't want killed, and none of the system's we've so far examined would have engaged a meteor, however big, without specific authorization."

"So? The whole point is that we will have an active signature when we bring the drive up."

"Sure, but not where it can see us long enough to matter. We come in under power to two light-minutes, then reduce to about twenty thousand KPS, cut the drive, and coast clear to the planet."

"Jesus Christ!" Tamman yelped. "You're going to hit atmosphere in a battleship at twenty thousand kilometers per second?"

"Why not? I've modeled it, and the hull should stand it now that we've got the holes patched. We come in at a slant, take advantage of atmospheric braking down to about twenty thousand meters, then pop the drive."

Insertion plan, another advertisement for the resounding toughness of imperial ship construction.

"Sean, even with one node shot out, my drive can take us from zip to point-six cee in eleven seconds.

Israel can accelerate from 0 to .6c in 11 seconds, and that with a damaged engine.

Harriet had, indeed, localized the power source to within fifty kilometers, which was ample for warheads of the power they carried, but Sean longed to examine the planet directly. Unfortunately, Israel's optical systems, pitiful compared to active fold-space scanners at the best of times, were degraded by the stealth field which protected her. They could have used the drive to impart a higher initial velocity and coasted the whole way without a stealth field, but they could neither have maneuvered nor slowed for atmospheric insertion without going into stealth.

Passive visual sensors hampered by stealth.

Sean stared eagerly at seas and rivers, the rumpled lines of mountain ranges, green swathes of forest. Theirs were the first human (or Narhani) eyes to behold that planet in forty-five thousand years, and it was lovely beyond belief. None of them had dared hope to see this living, breathing beauty at the end of their weary voyage, but incredible as it seemed, the planet lived. Here in the midst of the Fourth Empire's self-wrought devastation, it lived.

His eyes devoured it, and then he stiffened.

"Hey! What the—?"

"Look! Look!"

"My God, there's—!"

"Jesus, is that—?!"

An incredulous babble filled the command deck as all of them saw it at once. Harriet didn't need any instructions; she was already zooming in on the impossible sight. The holo of the planet vanished, replaced by a full-power closeup of one tiny part of its surface, and the confusion of voices died as they stared at the seaport city in silence.

The shoe finally drops.

"But this only raises more questions, doesn't it? Like what happened to their tech base? Their defenses are still operable, and the HQ is down there, so how come they're all running around like that?"

He waved at the image, where animal-drawn plows turned soil in a patchwork of fields. The small, low buildings looked well-enough made, but they were built of wood and stone, and many were roofed in thatch. Yet the eroded stumps of an ancient city of the Fourth Empire lay barely thirty kilometers from the town's crenulated walls.

"It doesn't make much sense, does it?" Sandy replied.

"You can say that again. How in hell can someone decivilize in the midst of that much technology? Just from the ruins we've already plotted, this planet had millions of people. You'd think poking around in the wreckage, let alone having at least one still operating high-tech enclave in their midst, would get the current population started on science. But even if it hasn't, where did the original techies go?"

"Some kind of home-grown plague?" Tamman suggested.

"Unlikely." Brashan shook his head in the human expression of negation. "Their medical science should have been able to handle anything short of the bio-weapon itself."

They think rather highly of Imperial medicine, don't they? And of course, everyone who goes into the ruins gets burned as a witch. Actually, after 40,000 years, it's pretty impressive that there ARE recognizable ruins.

"Yeah, but then they go and put their biggest city right on top of where we figure the defensive HQ has to be." Sean shook his head in disgust. "It's right in the middle of their largest land mass, and there's not a river within fifty kilometers. With the transportation systems we've seen, that's a hell of an unlikely place for a city to grow up naturally. Look at the canal system they've built. There's over two hundred klicks of it, all to move stuff into the city. There has to be some reason for its location, and I can only think of one magnet. Except, of course, that that particular magnet doesn't make any sense on a planet that doesn't know about technology!"

Unless it's a holy site, and the stronghold of god-fearing men against the demons of science.

High Priest Vroxhan stood on his balcony and watched the night sky burn. His servants had summoned him almost hysterically, and he'd charged out in only his under-robe to see the terrible strand of fire with his own eyes. Now he did see it, and it touched him with ice.

Shooting stars he had seen before, and wondered why the work of God's Hands should abandon the glorious firmament for the surface of the world to which the demons' treachery had banished man, but never had he seen one so huge. No one had, and he watched it blaze above The Temple like the very Finger of God and trembled.

Shooting stars are, naturally, angels who have lapsed into heresy and been banished from God's sight as Man was.

[Simon_Jester]

Like I said, Weber is excellent at world-building, at fitting together a world with history, and culture and technology or magic (in his rare Oath of Swords books) that is wonderful. And naturally he likes to show off where he excels, which can hurt his stories. I honestly have no idea if he's getting worse or I'm just getting more impatient with it. An editor who can put the brakeso n him would be great, and I'm starting to wonder how much of this came about since Jim Baen died.

It's gotten a good deal worse since Baen died, but it was getting worse even before that. In my opinion, Weber did his best work in the 1990s- I feel like The Honor of the Queen, The Short Victorious War, Oath of Swords, and Path of the Fury are pretty close to his peak. Although granted they're spread out over a number of years and mixed in with some other novels I don't see as being so great.

It's a boon to versus debaters, but taken to a certain point it illustrates why if an author really wants to pander to versus debaters he should write a bloody tech manual: it belongs outside the narrative.

...

I agree, the "monkeys with keyboards" scene is hilarious.

"Jesus Christ!" Tamman yelped. "You're going to hit atmosphere in a battleship at twenty thousand kilometers per second?"

"Why not? I've modeled it, and the hull should stand it now that we've got the holes patched. We come in at a slant, take advantage of atmospheric braking down to about twenty thousand meters, then pop the drive."

Insertion plan, another advertisement for the resounding toughness of imperial ship construction.

This is just... wrong. twenty thousand kilometers per second is around 0.067c, and at that speed the ship has a kinetic energy of roughly. Hm.

My preferred rule of thumb is: 3000 km/s = 0.01c => "one kiloton per kilogram." That energy equivalency scales with the square of velocity, obviously. It breaks down at high-relativistic speeds, but is at least good as a rule of thumb up to, oh, 40-50 percent of light speed.

At the speed described, Israel has a kinetic energy of about forty kilotons per kilogram, and given its mass that translates to around five million megatons. If it actually hits atmosphere at that speed, and uses "atmospheric braking" to dump its kinetic energy into the atmosphere, it would probably depopulate a small continent from the shock waves and heating, even assuming the ship can stand it.

They'd do a lot better to rely on those engines.

Also, if I designed that defense net, I'd program it to automatically wave off any object approaching on a ballistic trajectory with a kinetic energy more than about 10^15 joules, regardless of its mass or velocity. And to blow the hell out of it if it doesn't respond somehow by diverting its course so it's not going to ram the planet.

With Imperial-scale materials and technology I might ease that standard up to 10^16 or 10^17, but something the size of Israel approaching at 0.067c, I'd have it swat like a bug without a second thought. Anyone who's approaching that hard and fast and refuses to veer off is my enemy, whether they mean to be or not.

[eyl]

"Jesus Christ!" Tamman yelped. "You're going to hit atmosphere in a battleship at twenty thousand kilometers per second?"

"Why not? I've modeled it, and the hull should stand it now that we've got the holes patched. We come in at a slant, take advantage of atmospheric braking down to about twenty thousand meters, then pop the drive."

Insertion plan, another advertisement for the resounding toughness of imperial ship construction.

This is just... wrong. twenty thousand kilometers per second is around 0.067c, and at that speed the ship has a kinetic energy of roughly. Hm.

My preferred rule of thumb is: 3000 km/s = 0.01c => "one kiloton per kilogram." That energy equivalency scales with the square of velocity, obviously. It breaks down at high-relativistic speeds, but is at least good as a rule of thumb up to, oh, 40-50 percent of light speed.

At the speed described, Israel has a kinetic energy of about forty kilotons per kilogram, and given its mass that translates to around five million megatons. If it actually hits atmosphere at that speed, and uses "atmospheric braking" to dump its kinetic energy into the atmosphere, it would probably depopulate a small continent from the shock waves and heating, even assuming the ship can stand it.

They'd do a lot better to rely on those engines.

Well, there are a number of physics mistakes in these books - to name two which I remember, there's the passage in the second book (quoted upthread) where a planetoid collided with an Achuultani ship at " a combined velocity greater than lightspeed", which is precluded by relativity (and actually shouldn't happen based on the way the Enchanach drive works either), and I don't think the "gravity-disrupt star to make it supernova" mentions (most notably at Zeta Triangulaii, but the superbomb in this book is also believed to be capable of it) should work.

Also, if I designed that defense net, I'd program it to automatically wave off any object approaching on a ballistic trajectory with a kinetic energy more than about 10^15 joules, regardless of its mass or velocity. And to blow the hell out of it if it doesn't respond somehow by diverting its course so it's not going to ram the planet.

With Imperial-scale materials and technology I might ease that standard up to 10^16 or 10^17, but something the size of Israel approaching at 0.067c, I'd have it swat like a bug without a second thought. Anyone who's approaching that hard and fast and refuses to veer off is my enemy, whether they mean to be or not.

I don't have the book handy at the moment, but IIRC this is addressed at some point.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, there are a number of physics mistakes in these books - to name two which I remember, there's the passage in the second book (quoted upthread) where a planetoid collided with an Achuultani ship at " a combined velocity greater than lightspeed", which is precluded by relativity (and actually shouldn't happen based on the way the Enchanach drive works either),

I know basic special relativity well enough to teach it a bit and that passage bugs me less than that.

See, while in my frame of reference any incoming projectile is moving at less than the speed of light, in the frame of reference of some bystander, the 'closing speed' of the two objects can appear to be more than c in some sense.

For example, suppose I have two locomotives, moving at 0.6c in opposite directions in my frame of reference. In my frame, each locomotive travels 180 thousand kilometers in ones second. Now, how fast do I see the two locomotives eating up the distance between them? 180 plus 180... 360 thousand kilometers per second. Which is greater than c.

And there's not actually a problem with this, because "closing velocity" doesn't correspond to the speed of any physical moving object, ray, particle, or piece of information. Special relativity is upheld, no thing (as opposed to abstractions like "distance between two objects") changes faster than the speed of light.

Now, if you sit on one of the locomotives and watch the other one approach, in THAT frame it will appear to be traveling slower than light, no matter what the bystander sees.

and I don't think the "gravity-disrupt star to make it supernova" mentions (most notably at Zeta Triangulaii, but the superbomb in this book is also believed to be capable of it) should work.

Depending on how the gravity-disruption works this isn't entirely out of the question. Collapsing the core of a star so that fusion occurs extremely quickly could probably have explosive effects on a star; if "supernova" isn't the right word it matters only to an astrophysicist what the right word should be.

[eyl]

Well, there are a number of physics mistakes in these books - to name two which I remember, there's the passage in the second book (quoted upthread) where a planetoid collided with an Achuultani ship at " a combined velocity greater than lightspeed", which is precluded by relativity (and actually shouldn't happen based on the way the Enchanach drive works either),

I know basic special relativity well enough to teach it a bit and that passage bugs me less than that.

See, while in my frame of reference any incoming projectile is moving at less than the speed of light, in the frame of reference of some bystander, the 'closing speed' of the two objects can appear to be more than c in some sense.

For example, suppose I have two locomotives, moving at 0.6c in opposite directions in my frame of reference. In my frame, each locomotive travels 180 thousand kilometers in ones second. Now, how fast do I see the two locomotives eating up the distance between them? 180 plus 180... 360 thousand kilometers per second. Which is greater than c.

And there's not actually a problem with this, because "closing velocity" doesn't correspond to the speed of any physical moving object, ray, particle, or piece of information. Special relativity is upheld, no thing (as opposed to abstractions like "distance between two objects") changes faster than the speed of light.

Now, if you sit on one of the locomotives and watch the other one approach, in THAT frame it will appear to be traveling slower than light, no matter what the bystander sees.

Sorry, you're right, I mistakingly read it as relative velocity rather than closing. There's still a problem with the drive, though; an object under Enchanach drive actually isn't necessarily moving particularly fast in real space, it's just crossing distance rapidly - which is why the abovementioned display doesn't need to correct for dilation. It's questionable whether the kinetic energy released would be as large as described (of course, they do have a great deal of mass)

and I don't think the "gravity-disrupt star to make it supernova" mentions (most notably at Zeta Triangulaii, but the superbomb in this book is also believed to be capable of it) should work.

Depending on how the gravity-disruption works this isn't entirely out of the question. Collapsing the core of a star so that fusion occurs extremely quickly could probably have explosive effects on a star; if "supernova" isn't the right word it matters only to an astrophysicist what the right word should be.

Possibly, if the detonation occured in the star's core (though I think it would need to last longer than the brief time a gravitonic warhead's black hole exists, unless the star was already near collapse) but in the cases we see the detonation is triggered by an external gravitational disruption. I'd expect the star to be disturbed a bit and then return to equilibrium (unless they planetoids headed away from the star relatively slowly, which doesn't seem to be the case).

[Ahriman238]

At the speed described, Israel has a kinetic energy of about forty kilotons per kilogram, and given its mass that translates to around five million megatons. If it actually hits atmosphere at that speed, and uses "atmospheric braking" to dump its kinetic energy into the atmosphere, it would probably depopulate a small continent from the shock waves and heating, even assuming the ship can stand it.

They'd do a lot better to rely on those engines.

Also, if I designed that defense net, I'd program it to automatically wave off any object approaching on a ballistic trajectory with a kinetic energy more than about 10^15 joules, regardless of its mass or velocity. And to blow the hell out of it if it doesn't respond somehow by diverting its course so it's not going to ram the planet.

Holy crap you're right, about the energy, I'm not quite sure what'll happen when it hits the atmosphere if it doesn't break up, but my feeling is 'nothing good.'

That was covered with the plan, it's a bit of a gamble, but all the quarantine systems they've seen required human authorization to target anything without active emissions, a precaution against taking out things they don't want to, like rocks being hauled in for the big orbital smelter. Hence, go in slow (for them) and make like a meteor until they hit the atmosphere.

Well, there are a number of physics mistakes in these books - to name two which I remember, there's the passage in the second book (quoted upthread) where a planetoid collided with an Achuultani ship at " a combined velocity greater than lightspeed", which is precluded by relativity (and actually shouldn't happen based on the way the Enchanach drive works either), and I don't think the "gravity-disrupt star to make it supernova" mentions (most notably at Zeta Triangulaii, but the superbomb in this book is also believed to be capable of it) should work.

That ship wasn't using Enchanach, but sublight. Ship going one way at .7 c meets a ship going the other way at better than .3 c. Big boom. What precisely is the problem there?

I am, I fear, profoundly unqualified to make judgements aobut the feasibility of destroying a star the way Colin does.

[Simon_Jester]

Holy crap you're right, about the energy, I'm not quite sure what'll happen when it hits the atmosphere if it doesn't break up, but my feeling is 'nothing good.'

All that energy has to go somewhere. It won't be exactly like duct-taping the entire Cold War nuclear arsenal from both sides together, deciding aforesaid giant arsenal was lonely and that we needed to invite over several dozen clones of it, and then setting them all off in the upper atmosphere at once. But it's a broadly comparable energy release.

That was covered with the plan, it's a bit of a gamble, but all the quarantine systems they've seen required human authorization to target anything without active emissions, a precaution against taking out things they don't want to, like rocks being hauled in for the big orbital smelter. Hence, go in slow (for them) and make like a meteor until they hit the atmosphere.

It's actually a pretty good plan, except that the speed is something like a thousand times too high. Possibly ten thousand.

See, the defense system really shouldn't discriminate between a rock being hauled in that lost power and is now headed for the planet and an attacking warship or bombardment projectile. And if there's a rock coming in that lost power, it's going to hit like a gigaton bomb. Which is bad, and a very good reason to break it up before it hits. You can always make the smelter-bots go back for another rock.

The only high-velocity incoming objects that should escape the system's notice are ones that are coming in under power and under the friendly control of a powered ship (like the smelter-bots), or which are on ballistic trajectories that miss the planet. And Israel should appear to be one of the latter until it gets close enough to decelerate and hug the planetary atmosphere faster than the defense network can react and fire on it- because it's safe from the defense network's gravitonic warheads if it gets close enough to the planet that blowing it up would require taking bites out of the planet too.

Hell, given the way this system is supposed to work, the Achuultani could have totally defeated it just by grabbing a small moon (wouldn't even have to be a big moon) and lobbing it from outside the effective range of the defenses. It'd come in ballistically and wouldn't be picked up by the automated systems. Although granted, the Imperium didn't believe in the Achuultani and the system was designed to destroy incoming ships, not kinetic bombardment weapons.

There's still a problem with the drive, though; an object under Enchanach drive actually isn't necessarily moving particularly fast in real space, it's just crossing distance rapidly - which is why the abovementioned display doesn't need to correct for dilation. It's questionable whether the kinetic energy released would be as large as described (of course, they do have a great deal of mass)

[blinks]

I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I own a copy of the book right now to go dig up the passage...

Possibly, if the detonation occured in the star's core (though I think it would need to last longer than the brief time a gravitonic warhead's black hole exists, unless the star was already near collapse) but in the cases we see the detonation is triggered by an external gravitational disruption. I'd expect the star to be disturbed a bit and then return to equilibrium (unless they planetoids headed away from the star relatively slowly, which doesn't seem to be the case).

Without a very clear picture of how the drives and warheads in question work, I can't say- and honestly the whole thing makes my head hurt; I've got enough other stuff on today that I'm not going to worry about this one too much.

[Darmalus]

There's still a problem with the drive, though; an object under Enchanach drive actually isn't necessarily moving particularly fast in real space, it's just crossing distance rapidly - which is why the abovementioned display doesn't need to correct for dilation. It's questionable whether the kinetic energy released would be as large as described (of course, they do have a great deal of mass)

[blinks]

I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I own a copy of the book right now to go dig up the passage...

Go from point A to point B without any change in real velocity. I often hear it called pseudo-velocity in sci-fi. It violates physical laws, but so does FTL, and if you're willing to do that, why not another. It's a great way to explain why people don't create planet ending weapons with various interesting space drives, as far as the universe is concerned, you and the object you "collided" with are at rest with respect to each other. You can slam into a planet at 10 million times the speed of light without so much as dislodging an air molecule.

[eyl]

[blinks]

I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I own a copy of the book right now to go dig up the passage...

I meant that under Enchanach drive, your "real" velocity and how quickly you cover space are not the same (since you're not actually moving through all the points in your trajectory) so a planetoid's kinetic energy would be lower than might be expected. However, as Ahriman pointed out they were actually under their STL drive at the time, it's a moot point.

[Ahriman238]

Colin MacIntyre paused outside the larger state dining room to watch three harassed humans and a dozen robots sorting the countless bags of old-fashioned mail into paper breastworks. No one noticed him in the doorway, and as he resumed his journey towards the balcony, he made a note to divert still more human staff to reading the letters while he tried to sort out his own feelings.

Robots again. All these people are writing to express their good wishes when 'Tanni becomes pregnant again.

The computer might not yet have developed the ability to "play a hunch," but he'd achieved total penetration of Bia's datanets, and he was a devastatingly thorough and acute analyst. He and Ninhursag had started with a top-down threat analysis of every officer outside Colin's inner circle, then used Dahak's access to every database in Bia to test their analyses. Where necessary, ONI agents had added on-the-ground investigation to Dahak's efforts, usually without even realizing what they were doing or why. By now, the computer could tell Admiral MacMahan where every Fleet and Marine officer in the Bia System had been at any given minute in the last fifteen years. Of course, he didn't have anything like that degree of penetration in the Sol System.

Just one of the things Dahak can do when he's serious.

Of course, he reminded himself as he and Horus stepped up onto the mat-trans platform, pregnancy wasn't something whose timing even Imperial bioscience could predict with absolute accuracy. But if the doctors were right, Jiltanith would not give birth, after all, for she—and her unborn children—would die two weeks before she did.

Imperial doctors still can't perfectly forecast due dates. Reasonable.

Horus watched Narkhana collapse as Tinker Bell leapt upon him and wrestled him to the floor. He rolled on the rug, thrusting back at her with all four feet while their happy growls mingled. For a dog well into her third decade, Tinker Bell was remarkably spry, thanks to her own limited biotechnics, yet she had no conception of the tremendous strength Narkhana was reining in to let her win, nor of just how far her son's intellect surpassed her own. Even if she'd been able to conceptualize such things, she would never have known, for her children would never tell her, and there was something both hilarious and poignant in watching them revert to utter doggishness in her presence.

Dogs again. Tinkerbell (Hector's rottweiler-lab, and mother to the modified dogs) is 30 years old, thanks to canine augmentics.

Horus inclined his head to the slender being on the pad beside Brashieel's. She was much more delicate than Brashieel, and several centimeters shorter, but her crest was magnificent. Brashieel's, like that of all male Narhani, was the same gray-green as the rest of his hide; Eve's was half again as large, proportionally, and shot with glorious color. Now that crest fanned in a graceful expression that conveyed greeting and thanks for his courtesy with an edge of embarrassment at the fuss being made over her, and it was hard for him to remember she wasn't quite seven years old.

Jefferson bowed in turn, and Brashieel preened with pride beside her. The Narhani were a hierarchical race, and there'd never been much doubt the first Narhani female would become the bride of the first Narhani nest lord, but it was clear that more than duty and mutual expectation flourished between these two. Horus was glad for them—and not just because Eve represented the culmination of his dead daughter's greatest project.

Eve and Brashieel, interesting that Eve was 'promised' to Brashieel basically from creation, simply because he's the top dog on Narhan. Then again, it seems they love each other anyway.

"Our gift," she said more naturally, "is now finished."

She pressed a button, and a soft gasp went up as a light sculpture appeared above the plate. It wasn't in the abstract style human artists were currently enamored of; it was representational, a reproduction of another sculpture worked in finest marble . . . and it was magnificent.

A rearing Narhani rose high on his rear hooves to fight the bonds which held him captive. The cruel, galling collar about his neck drew blood as he pitted his frenzied strength against its massive chain, and the humans who looked upon him knew Narhani expressions well enough to read the despair in his eyes and flattened crest, but his teeth were bared in snarling defiance. He was without hope yet unconquered, and the anguish of his captivity wrenched at them.

Yet he was not alone. Broken chains flailed from his wrists, the exquisitely detailed links shorn by some sharp edge, and a human knelt beside him, torso naked but clothed from the waist down in the uniform of the Imperial Marines. His face was drawn with fatigue, but his eyes were as fierce as the prisoner's, and he held a chisel in one hand, its honed sharpness hard against the iron ring which held the Narhani pent, while the other raised a hammer high to bring it smashing down.

The detail was superb, the anatomy perfect, the two species' very different expressions captured with haunting fidelity. Sweat beaded the human's bare skin, and each drop of Narhani blood was so real the viewer held his breath, watching for it to fall. They were trapped forever in the stone—human and Narhani, fleshed in marble by a master's hand—and for all their alienness, they were one.

Narhani statue to commemorate their liberation from BattleComp and joining the Fifth Imperium. This is just cool. Also an important plot point.

The stoop-shouldered man bent over his equipment, and Jefferson stood back, hands folded behind him while he admired the work his doomed henchman had already produced. It looked just like real marble, and so it should, given how much it was costing.

Perfect, he thought. It was perfect. And no one who looked at it would ever guess the secret it concealed, for the gravitonic warhead and its arming circuits were quite, quite invisible.

Jefferson has a duplicate of the statute made, with the world-ender inside it. And yes, he kills the sculptor.

He lay back in the captain's couch, studying the image from one of the stealthed remotes. They'd decided to rely on old-fashioned, line-of-sight radio, something an Imperial scan system probably wouldn't even think to look for, rather than more readily detected fold coms to operate their remotes. That limited their operating radius, but it gave them enough reach for a fair sampling, and Sean watched a kneeling row of villagers weed their way across a field of some sort of tuber and wondered how whatever they were tending tasted.

Israel deploys remotes, tiny UAVs controled with radio on the off chance of somehow triggering the quarantine systems. The kids explore their surroundings.

The display changed to a recorded view looking down from some high vantage point on a circle of children. A bearded man in a robe of blue and gold stood at its center, holding up a picture of one of the native's odd, bipedal saddle beasts to point at a line of jagged-edged characters beneath it.

"This," Sandy resumed after a moment, "is a class in one of those temples of theirs. Apparently the Church believes in universal literacy, and Tam built a teeny-tiny remote for Harry to land on top of a beam so we could eavesdrop. It was maddening for the first month or so, but we set up a value substitution program in the linguistics section of Israel's comp cent, and things started coming together early last week."

How the kids taught themselves the local language. The Church teaches reading and writing to everyone, as an act of charity.

Sean nodded, glad something had finally worked as he'd hoped it might. English was the common tongue of the Imperium and seemed likely to remain so. Its flexibility, concision, and adaptability were certainly vastly preferable to Universal! Age had ossified the language of the Fourth Imperium and Empire, and, given the availability of younger, more versatile Terran languages, the Fifth Imperium had no particular desire to speak it.

Yet all Fourth Empire computers spoke only Universal, at least until they could be reprogrammed. Worse, in some cases—like Mother's hardwired constitutional functions—they couldn't be reprogrammed, so all Battle Fleet personnel had to speak Universal whether they wanted to or not.

Cohanna's Bio-Sciences Ministry had met that need with a dedicated implant, and with the enormous "piggy-back" storage molycircs made possible, Battle Fleet had decided to give its personnel all major Terran languages. That made sense in view of their diversity—and also meant each of Israel's crewmen had a built-in "translating" software package. True, none of the languages in their implants' memories were quite this foreign, but if Israel's computers could cobble up a local dictionary . . .

Universal Translators, but only because they translate the language known as Universal. Seriously though, it was impressive they can give all Fleet personnel the ability to use all Terran languages.

"In the meantime, one of our 'borrowed' books—an atlas—has given us a running start on figuring out the geopolitics of the planet, which, by the way, the natives call 'Pardal.' We can't find the name in any of Israel's admittedly limited records, so I suspect it's locally evolved.

"As near as we can tell, this is what Pardal currently looks like." The display changed to a map of Pardal's five continents and numerous island chains. The biggest inhabited continent reminded Sean of an old-fashioned, air-foil aircraft, flying northeast towards the polar ice cap with a second, smaller land mass providing its tail assembly. "We made enough photomaps on the way in to know the atlas maps aren't perfectly scaled, and we still can't read all of its commentary, but it appears Pardal is split into hundreds of feudal territories." Scarlet boundary lines flashed as she spoke. "At the moment, we're located just inside the eastern border of this one, which is called, as nearly as I can translate it, the Kingdom of Cherist.

"Now, North Hylar—" she indicated the fuselage and wings of the "aircraft" "—seems to be the wealthiest and most heavily populated land mass. The 'countries' are larger and seem to contain more internal subdivisions, which suggests they may be older. It looks to us like there's been a longer period of absorption and consolidation here, and that conclusion may be supported by the fact that our ground site is, indeed, underneath North Hylar's largest city." A red cursor flashed approximately dead center in North Hylar.

"South Hylar, connected to North Hylar by this isthmus down here, is less densely populated, probably because it doesn't have much in the way of rivers—aside from this one big one out of the southern mountains—but that's a guess. As you can see, the other two populated continents, Herdaana and Ishar, are located across a fairly wide body of water—the Seldan Sea—to the west of the Hylars. These other two continents to the east are uninhabited. As far as we can tell, the Pardalians don't even realize they exist, and from the aerial maps, they seem to have less human-compatible vegetation. Looks like they were never terraformed—which, in turn, suggests they never were inhabited, even before the bio-weapon.

"Of the settled continents, both Hylars are extremely mountainous, and Ishar's on the desert side. Herdaana's much flatter and seems to be the bread basket of Pardal, and a lot of the territories in Herdaana and Ishar alike have Hylaran names prefixed by 'gyhar,' or 'new,' which probably means they were colonized—or conquered—by North Hylar. It may or may not imply a continuing relationship between those territories and their 'mother countries' back home. Some evidence suggests that; other evidence, particularly the small size and apparent competition between the Herdaana states, suggests otherwise, but we simply can't read the atlas well enough to know, and the entire continent's out of range of our remotes."

Weber world-building, a whole mess of world politics, 90% of which will never matter again.

"All right, that's the political structure, but there's a catch, because despite all these nominally independent feudal states, the entire planet seems to be one huge theocracy. That surprised us, given Pardal's primitive technology. I'd have thought simple communication delays would do in any planet-wide institution, but that was before we figured out what this is."

The display changed to a tall, gantry-like structure with two massive, pivoted arms, and she shook her head almost admiringly.

"That, gentlemen, is a semaphore tower. They've got chains of them across most of the planet. Not all; they'd need ships to reach Herdaana and Ishar, and given the mountains on the isthmus, they probably send over-water couriers to South Hylar, too. It's a daylight-only system, but it still means they can send messages a whole lot faster than we'd suspected."

Semaphore towers, like Napoleon used. You can see two towers, so when flashes you a message by shifting the arms (or with a signal-lamp at night) you repeat the message so the next tower can see it, and he repeats it for the next and so on. Manpower-intensive, and a joke compared to even early telegraphs, but a lot quicker and generally more secure than courier.

Just like in Weber's later Safehold books, the Church has a monopoly on the towers, Church messages get priority, secular nobles and kings have to pay substantial fees for the system's upkeep, and the Church gets to read almost everyone's mail and simply not pass on messages they don't like, or forward them to the Inquisition.

"More to the point, our power-source city is where the semaphore chains converge—the Pardalian equivalent of the Vatican. In fact, the entire city is simply called 'The Temple,' and as far as we can tell, it's ruled by the high priest as both secular and temporal lord. Interestingly enough, the title of said high priest appears to be eurokat a'demostano." Sean looked up sharply, and she nodded. "Even allowing for several millennia of erosion, that sounds too much like eurokath adthad diamostanu to be a coincidence."

" 'Port Admiral,' " Sean translated softly, frowning at the city's light dot. "You think the Church is tied directly to the quarantine system?"

Yep. But the 'port admiral' bit amused me. Aside from being one of three word/phrases we hear in the Universal tongue of the Fourth Imperium/Empire. The others being umsuvah/umsuvaht Imperium/Empire, as Dahak explained whe they found out about the Empire.

"Observe a typical citizen of the Temple."

"Oy vey!" Sean sighed, and Sandy laughed at his disgusted tone. The image was far from clear, but the individual in it was perhaps a hundred and fifty centimeters tall, red-haired and blue-eyed—the complete antithesis of any of Israel's human crew.

The people on this planet are short.

He frowned again, listening to the creak of the wheel while he applied the Test. It was a particularly important task here, for Malagor's artisans had always been notoriously restive under Mother Church's injunctions, even since the Schismatic Wars. Indeed, he sometimes suspected they'd grown still more so since then . . . and he knew many of them still harbored dreams of Malagoran independence. Within the last six five-days alone, he'd heard no less than four people whistling the forbidden tune to "Malagor the Free," and he was deeply concerned over how he ought to respond to it. Yet he was relieved to note that this wheel, at least, didn't seem to violate any of the Tenets. It was powered by water and required the creation of no new tools or processes. It might be suspiciously innovative, but Stomald could see no demonic influence. It was still a water wheel, and those had been in use forever.

Stomald, a village priest, administers the Test to a suspicious water wheel. Is it powered by anything besides wind, water or muscle? Does it require any new tools or hitherto unknown processes/principles? If you answered yes to either of these questions, pleas contact your local Inquisitor.

"Hold it." It was Tamman's turn to object. "These people have gunpowder, and that doesn't rely on muscles, wind, or water!"

"No," Harriet agreed, "but Earth certainly had gunpowder before it got beyond waterwheels and windmills, and the Church occasionally—very occasionally—grants dispensations through a system of special Conclaves. It takes a long time to work through, but it means advances aren't entirely impossible. We've found several dispensations scattered over the last six hundred local years—almost a thousand Terran years—and most of them seem to be fairly pragmatic things like kitchen-sink chemistry and pretty darn empirical medicine and agriculture. We're still groping in the dark, but it looks like there've been some 'progressive' periods—which, unfortunately, seem to provoke backlash periods of extreme conservatism. The key thing, though, is that the Church is continually on the lookout to suppress anything that even looks like the scientific method, and without that there's no systematic basis for technological innovation."

Some of the exceptions made over the last thousand years.

"Especially with the advantage of a whole secret language. They can promote universal literacy in the vulgar tongue and still have most of the advantages of a priestly monopoly on education. And they've got a pretty big carrot to go with their stick. The Church collects a tithe—looks like somewhere around twelve percent—from every soul on the planet. A lot of that loot gets used to build temples, commission religious art, and so forth, but a big chunk is loaned out to secular rulers at something like thirty percent, and another goes into charitable works. You see? They've got their creditor nobles on a string, and the poor look to them for relief when times get bad. Sean, they've got this planet sewed up three ways to Sunday!"

The Church also collects a direct 12% income tax on everyone (one wonders how this works in a feudal system, do you tax through the nobles, or tax the peasants and then tax the nobles' taxes?) gives substantial charitable donations 9thus becoming the champions of the common men against the corrupt aristocracy) AND practice usury, being the loan shark that has every prince and count by the short hairs.

That's some social control there.

" 'Valley of the Damned'?" Sean repeated. "What sort of valley?"

"We don't know yet, but it's utterly proscribed. There may be other, similar sites, but this is the only one we've found so far. It's up in the mountains of northern Malagor, outside the reach of our remotes. Anyone who goes in is eternally damned for consorting with demons. If they come back out again, they have to be ritualistically—and hideously—killed. It looks to me like the preliminaries probably take at least a couple of days, and then they burn the poor bastards alive," she finished grimly.

Like Armageddon Reef in the Safehold books, the Valley of the Damned was a last holdout, a high-tech enclave. They couldn't breach it's defenses with torchs and pitchforks, so they ismply declared it anathema.

Tamman glanced at the emissions through his own feed and shrugged. "Beats me. Most of those look like power leakages, not detection systems, but the biggie is something else." He tapped his teeth. "Hmm. . . . You know, that just might be an orbital power feed. Look there—see the smaller source tucked in to the east? That looks like a leak from a big-assed bank of capacitors, and the big one's definitely some sort of transmission. How about a ground beacon for an orbital broadcast power system?"

"Could be," Sandy mused. "Hard to believe it could still be up after all this time, but you're right about it's being a transmission, and it'd sure explain why it's so much more powerful than the others—not to mention how there could still be power for any active installations. But if it really is a receptor, that means the Valley of the Damned has an active link to at least one power satellite. Even if it's only a passive solar job, you'd think the quarantine system would spot the transmission."

Implant sensors agian, and the Valley receives power beamed from solar-energy satellite(s.)

The Malagoran mountains were home to at least two nasty predators—a sort of bear-sized cross between a wolf and a wolverine called a "seldahk," and a vaguely feline carnivore called a "kinokha"—both of whom had bellicose and territorial personalities. None of them felt like walking around unarmed, and Sean wished privately that Israel's equipment list had offered something a bit tougher than their uniforms. The synthetic fabric the Fleet used for its uniforms was incredibly rugged by pre-Imperial Terran standards. He had no doubt it would resist even a kinokha's claws, but it wasn't going to stop a seldahk's jaws, nor would it stop bullets. Of course, it was unlikely, to put it lightly, that they'd meet any armed natives this close to the Valley of the Damned in the middle of the night, yet kevlar underwear would have been very reassuring. Unfortunately, neither Battle Fleet nor the Imperial Marines issued such items, which he supposed made sense, given that nothing short of battle armor could hope to resist Imperial weaponry.

The ruggedness of an Imperial uniform is quite enough to stand up to some serious clawing, or knives in the hands of unenhanced.

The formation freed Harriet and Sandy to focus on their scanpacks (which had far more reach than implant sensors), without worrying about anything they might meet, and the four of them moved at a pace which would have reduced any unenhanced human to gasping exhaustion in minutes.

Scan packs that outrange implant sensors, and some more of the flexibility of enhancement. It really does seem to increase your odds of survival in just about every circumstance.

Well, maybe not swimming.

He couldn't make out much in light-gathering mode, but when he switched to infrared things popped into better resolution. Not a lot better, but better.

Implants offer IR vision, which we already knew, but the confirmation is nice.

Tamman nodded and slid out of his pack to extract a two hundred-meter coil of synthetic rope. While he and Sean rigged safety harnesses, Harriet and Sandy went on trying to analyze their readings without much success. Sean wasn't too happy about that, yet there wasn't a lot he could do about it, and he waved Tamman over the side.

Climbing gear that's part of standard field/survival kit.

A boulder two meters to Harriet's right exploded, and she cried out in pain as a five-kilo lump of stone slammed into her shoulder. It didn't break her bio-enhanced skin, but the impact threw her from her feet, and that, Sean realized later, was what saved her life. The heavy energy gun needed a handful of seconds to reduce the boulder to powder; by the time the first energy bolt hit where she'd been standing, she wasn't there anymore.

Automated gun. Enhanced girl gets slapped in the face with an 11 pound bit of stone shrapnel, and it does no lasting injury.

He dug in his heels instinctively, hurling himself backward to anchor her, but the next bolt of gravitonic disruption sliced the rope like a thread. Her fall accelerated, and she tumbled downslope, slithering and bouncing. She tried frantically to avoid Tamman, clawing for traction as she gathered speed, but the loose soil betrayed her and he couldn't get out of the way in time. Her careening body cut his feet from under him, sending them both crashing downward in a confusion of arms and legs, and more bolts of energy came screaming out of the night. Gouts of flying dirt erupted all about them as ancient, erratic tracking systems tried to lock on them, and only their unpredictable movement and the senility of the defenses kept them alive.

Kids tumble down a near-sheer 100 meter slope with nothing more than some bruises to show for it later.

Sean almost fell after them as soil crumbled under his heels, but he managed to hold his position, and his grav gun leapt into his hands in pure reflex. The scarcely visible energy gun fire was a terrible network of fury to his enhanced vision, and a fist squeezed his heart as it reached out for his sister and his friend. But he'd been looking in exactly the right direction when it started. Whatever was firing on them wasn't shooting at him—apparently he was still outside its programmed kill zone—but his implants told him where its targeting systems were, and his weapon snapped up into firing position without conscious thought.

It hissed, spitting explosive darts across the valley at fifty-two hundred meters per second, and savage flashes lit the dark as they ripped into the ruins. Each armor-piercing dart had the power of a half-kilo of TNT, and the crackle of their explosions was a single, ripping bellow as ancient walls blew outward in a tornado of splinters.

Grav gun has relatively consistent muzzle velocity, but has a 50% larger clip (300 rounds instead of 200) and explosive force for grav gun rounds is given as half-kilo (about a pound) of TNT. It's not the insane Ringo-grav gun, if anything it's more like a bolter on steroids, but I'll bet that stings a bit.

Flames licked at the brush atop the ruined structures as Sean and Sandy pounded them, and Sean cried out as an energy bolt blew his backpack apart. His nervous system whiplashed in agony, the stunning shock threw the grav gun from his hands, and he heard Sandy screaming his name through the roar of her fire. He clawed after his weapon with numb, desperate fingers, and then an explosion far more violent than any grav gun dart lit the valley like a sun at midnight. The ruins vomited skyward as the capacitors feeding the energy guns tore themselves apart, and the concussion blew Sean MacIntyre into unconsciousness at last.

-snip-

His implant sensors had been wide open as he tried to find a target, and the corona of the energy bolt had bled through them. His nerves were on fire, and he moaned around a surge of nausea, but he was alive, and he wouldn't have been without his enhancement. Not after taking a shot that close to his heart and lungs.

Sean takes a hit from a beam-gun and gets knocked on his ass when the whole setup blows. He's walking wounded afterwards.

"Hey, now!" He raised a hand to her dust-smutted black hair. "I'm in one piece, and everything's still working, more or less."

"Sure it is," she said tartly, accessing his implants with her own, but then he felt her relax as they confirmed what he'd told her. What that near miss had done to his enhanced musculature was going to leave him stiff for a week, yet the damage was incredibly minor.

Casually checking up on a comrade's medical status through his implants. Sean will be 'stiff for a week' after getting hit in the torso by a weapon that can shred tanks.

Anyway, they find a mummy in bed and a computer they hope to salvage some data from, but will have to take back to the ship. Harriet, wanting a nice jog, volunteers to fetch the cutter.

Harriet jogged happily through the darkness at a steady forty kilometers per hour. Sean might be fourteen centimeters taller, but he had their father's long body and broad shoulders; her legs were almost as long, despite his height advantage, and she was much lighter. Without even the weight of her scanpack she was free to attack the steep slopes, burdened only by her holstered grav gun, and she savored the opportunity. The moon had set, but her belt light was more than enough for someone with enhanced eyes, and running on Israel's treadmill paled beside the sheer joy of filling her lungs with the crisp, cold mountain air as her feet spurned the ground.

40 kph (24 mph) is a brisk jog for an enhanced woman. That's a bit below the world speed record, but still something a professional athlete would be well pleased with in a sprint.

Her head whipped around and she went active with every implant, probing the night. People! At least a dozen people, coming around the bend ahead of her! Her implants should have picked them up sooner, and she cursed herself for not paying more attention to her surroundings and less to the pleasure of running. But even as she raged at her foolishness a part of her mind whirred with questions. She hadn't looked for them, but, damn it, what were they doing out here in the middle of the night without even a torch?

Questions could wait. She killed her belt lamp and turned back the way she'd come, and a voice shouted, loud and harsh with command. Crap! She'd been seen!

She abandoned her attempt to sneak away for a blinding pace no unenhanced human could have matched, and her thoughts flashed. They'd agreed not to use their coms in case they were picked up, but if there were people here, there might be more of them, closer to the Valley, as well. The others had to be warned, and—

Light glared and thunder barked behind her. Something whizzed past her ear, and something else slammed into her left shoulder blade. She staggered and snatched for her grav gun, spun to the side by the brutal impact, and the beginning of pain exploded up her nerves. A second fiery hammer hit her in the side, throwing the grav gun from her hand, but before it really registered there was another flash, and a sixty-gram lead ball smashed her right temple.

Annoying part. A bunch of hunters sneak up on Harriet, who wasn't paying attention. When she rabbits they shoot her three times with their muskets, shoulder, side, and temple. So did her implant force-field not stop the musketballs, or did she not think to raise it? It didn't seem to be on the top of her mind.

We know part of the enhancement process is reinforcing the bones with battlesteel. Do they reinforce key areas or electroplate the bones or what? I ask because we later find that the muskets were able to break her bones (particularly her skull) at this range, which one of the hunters later gives as 'less than fifty paces.' Of course, there are limits to all things, in the first book a mutineer had his spine broken by a .45 hollow point at point-blank. These are the only times we see enhanced people get shot at with real world firearms, thus the only basis for judging if implant force-fields can stand up to bullets, and the question is never raised or settled. Both times the enhanced victim was taken by surprise and shot repeatedly at close range before they had time to seriously consider they might be about to bite a bullet.

So... frustrating!

[Mr Bean]

First off about the muskets
That's some damn fine shooting for anything but stabbing range to get three hits out of four shots, they had to be within ten meters to get that kind of accuracy especially since they were firing at a moving target. Second we can't do calcs without knowing what kind of muskets these were. If we know the lead ball was sixty grams we can do some calculations. Your talking anywhere from 312 m/s all the way up to 554 m/s for some muskets. Keep in mind your average 5.56 bullet is four grams. So a musket round is fifteen times larger. But then a 5.56mm is going at 883 m/s not 554.

But then the 5.56mm has way more velocity left at 100 meters than the sixty gram lead ball. Rough caculations say if this was a ten meter shot your talking just over twice to eleven times the effective kinetic energy for a .45ACP which are 13 grams if my google searching got all the facts correct on the first few try. So yes that would seriously kill the hell out of a standard human. In fact a ten meter musket shot (My assumption on the range) should knock a hole you could poke a stick through Harriets head and still be able to kill two more people standing next to her.

[Ahriman238]

First off about the muskets
That's some damn fine shooting for anything but stabbing range to get three hits out of four shots, they had to be within ten meters to get that kind of accuracy especially since they were firing at a moving target. Second we can't do calcs without knowing what kind of muskets these were. If we know the lead ball was sixty grams we can do some calculations. Your talking anywhere from 312 m/s all the way up to 554 m/s for some muskets. Keep in mind your average 5.56 bullet is four grams. So a musket round is fifteen times larger. But then a 5.56mm is going at 883 m/s not 554.

But then the 5.56mm has way more velocity left at 100 meters than the sixty gram lead ball. Rough caculations say if this was a ten meter shot your talking just over twice to eleven times the effective kinetic energy for a .45ACP which are 13 grams if my google searching got all the facts correct on the first few try. So yes that would seriously kill the hell out of a standard human. In fact a ten meter musket shot (My assumption on the range) should knock a hole you could poke a stick through Harriets head and still be able to kill two more people standing next to her.

I'd go for the lower-end example, the guns here tend to straddle the ambiguous line between a musket and an arquebus, being somewhat standardized but somewhat on the lower end of technology, including IIRC using matchlocks. The big muskets firing 60 gram balls are apparently the local flavor.

I am still very peeved at not having the opportunity to quantify the implant forcefield, but Harriet does survive the headshot, albeit she almost doesn't make it before her friends can rescue her and rush her to Israel's sickbay.

As for the skill of the shooting. Four shots are mentioned, but there were a dozen men, most or all of them veterans of the Temple Guard.

Sean started for the stairs and drew up with a gasp, for his injured side had stiffened as he watched his friends work. Pain beaded his forehead with sweat, and he muttered a curse and hit his implant overrides. He knew he shouldn't—pain was a warning a body did well to heed, lest it turn minor injuries into serious ones—but that was the least of his worries.

Sean can shut off his pain receptors with his implants. There's a dangerous ability.

He pounded his fists together and stared up at the sky with bitter eyes, but the alien stars mocked him, and his jaw clenched as he powered his com implant and sent out a full-powered omnidirectional pulse, heedless of the quarantine system's sensors.

There was no response, and the others looked at him with matching horror. Harriet should have heard that signal from forty light-minutes away!

Having finally noticed Harry's missing, Sean risks powering up his fold-space comm, sending a signal she should have heard "forty light minutes away" so I guess an implant comm can cover a decent chunk of a star system.

They ran with implants fully active. It took them less than fifty minutes to reach the cutter, despite their feverish concentration on their search, and if Harriet had been within five hundred meters of the trail in any direction, they would have found her.

Some more sensory enhancement stuff, kids run over 30 km inside 50 minutes. No surprise there.

"She is approximately seven kilometers from your current position on a heading of one-three-seven," Brashan continued in that same flat, quiet voice. "She has a broken shoulder, a punctured lung, and severe head injuries. The medical computer reports a skull fracture, a major eye trauma, and two subdural hematomas. One of them is massive."

"Skull fracture?" All three humans stared at him in shock, for Harriet's bones—like their own—were reinforced with battle steel appliqués. But under their shock was icy fear. Unlike muscle tissue and skin, the physical enhancement of the brain was limited; Harriet's implants might control other blood loss, but not bleeding inside her skull.

Sickbay computers monitor crew medical status through their implants. A bit on the extent of Harriet's injuries. Also, whatever enhancement does to almost immediately stop bleeding doesn't work for brain injuries.

"If we do not get her into Israel's sickbay within the next ninety minutes—two hours at the outside—she will be dead." Brashan's crest went still flatter. "Even now, her chances are less than even."

Roughly 2, maybe 2.5 hours have passed between her getting shot and them having this conversation, in another 2 hours tops she will die.

There was no question of the woman's guilt. The lightning and thunder from the Valley had waked the hunting party, and despite their terror, they'd gone to investigate. And when they called upon her to halt, she'd fled, proclaiming her guilt. Even if she hadn't, her very garments would convict her. Blasphemy for a woman to wear the high vestments of the Sanctum itself, and Tibold Rarikson, the leader of the huntsmen, had described her demon light. Stomald himself had seen the other strange things on her belt and wrist, but it was Tibold's haunted eyes which brought the horror fully home. The man was a veteran warrior, commander of Cragsend's tiny force of the Temple Guard, yet his face had been pale as whey as he spoke of the light and her impossible speed.

What the primitives make of Harriet. Meet our two main 'local' characters, Father Stomald, a village priest despairing of having to burn a young girl at the stake, and Tibold, ex-Guard and leader of the hunting party that shot Harry.

Indeed, Stomald thought with a queasy shiver as he turned from the altar, perhaps she was no woman at all, for what woman would still live? Three times they'd hit her—three!—at scarcely fifty paces, and if her long black hair was a crimson-clotted mass and her right eye wept bloody tears, her other wounds didn't even bleed. Perhaps she was in truth the demon Tibold had named her . . . but even as he told himself that, the under-priest knew why he wanted to believe it.

See? 3 shots at 'scarcely fifty paces.' And enhancement that stops her from bleeding out.

Harriet's weakening implant signals left no time to return to Israel, and Sean landed the stealthed cutter within a half-klick of the village. He selected a six-millimeter grav rifle from the weapons locker to back up his side arm, and Tamman chose an energy gun, but Sandy bore only her grav gun and a satchel of grenades.

Heavier version of a grav gun, 6mm.

Stomald cried out in horror as terrible white light exploded against Cragsend's night. Its fiery breath touched hay ricks to flame and singed the assembled villagers' hair, and screams of terror lashed the priest.

He staggered back, blinded by the terrible flash. There was another—and another!—and he heard Tibold's hoarse bellow beside him and cringed, trying to understand, as three figures appeared.

Scaring the locals with a few airburst plasma grenades.

Their featureless black shapes loomed before the glare, and the one in the center, a towering giant out of some tale of horror, aimed a strange musket shape at the slate roof of the church.

Sparkling flashes ripped stout stonework to shrieking splinters in an endless roll of thunder that scattered screaming villagers in panic, but Stomald's heart spasmed with a terror even worse than theirs. It was his fault! The thought leapt into his brain. He'd hesitated. He'd rebelled in his heart, contesting God's will, and this—this—was the result!

Grav gun versus church building.

Tamman splintered a half-meter trench across the square, and the priest halted for a moment. Then he resumed his advance, stepping over the shattered cobbles like a sleepwalker, and Sean swore as Sandy went to meet him.

Tam's energy gun digs a 'half-meter trench' in the cobblestone square. Half-meter wide? Deep? Of course, it doesn't say.

He stared at her, eyes filled with fear, and then his hands lashed. Something leapt from the beaker he held, but reflex activated her implant force field. Thick, iridescent oil sluiced down it, caught millimeters from her skin, and the priest's mouth moved.

"Begone!" he shouted, and she twitched, for she understood him. His voice was high and cracked with terror but determined, and he spoke the debased Universal of the Church. "Begone, Demon! Unclean and accursed, I cast you out in the Name of the Most Holy!"

Stomald shouted the exorcism with all the faith in him as the shining oil coated the demon. She paused—perhaps she even gave back a step—and hope flamed in his heart. But then hope turned to even greater horror, for the demon neither vanished in a flash of lightning nor fled in terror. Instead she came a step closer . . . and she smiled.

"Begone yourself, wretched and miserable one!" He reeled, stunned by the terrible thunder of that demonic voice, and his brain gibbered. No demon could speak the Holy Tongue! He retreated a faltering step, hand rising in a warding sign, and the demon laughed. She laughed! "I have come for my friend," she thundered, "and woe be unto you if you have harmed her!"

Crashing peals of laughter ripped through him like echoes from Hell, and then she reached out to the nearest torch. The holy oil sprang alight with a seething hiss, clothing her in a fierce corona, and her voice boomed out of the roaring flames.

"Begone lest you die, sinful man!" she commanded terribly, and the furnace heat of her faceless, fiery figure came for him.

Right on the tail of the ambush-shooting disappointment, the most impressive feat of implant forcefields in the series. Sandy raises her field by reflex (unlike Harry) and gets splashed with the same oil Stomald was going to burn Harry with. She then lights herself aflame, unharmed thanks to the forcefield.

Also, biotechnic enhancement includes a PA option for your vocal chords.

He scattered heavy faggots like tumbleweeds, and his face was a murderous mask as he gripped the chain about Harriet's body and twisted the links like taffy. They snapped, and he hurled them aside and caught at the manacles. His back straightened with a grunt. Anchoring bolts screamed and sheared like paper, and if she was still breathing as her limp body slid into his arms, he was close enough to read her implants directly at last. He paled. The damage was at least as bad as Brashan had said, and he cradled her like a child as he turned and ran like a madman for the cutter.

More snooping on medical data. Enhanced man can easily break chains and manacles. At least, those made of iron or steel.

But his breath hissed as he looked closer, for a strange, winged creature—a magnificent beast whose like he'd never imagined—erupted from the Star's heart to claim God's Crown . . . even as the demon had erupted from the flames as she advanced upon him.

He fought a hysterical urge to fling the garment away. Blasphemy! Blasphemy to deface those holiest of symbols! Yet that beast, that winged beast, like the winged badge of a Temple courier and yet unlike . . .

He forced calm upon his mind and examined the garment once more. Splendid as the buttons were, they were but ornaments, unlike those of High Priest Vroxhan's vestments. A quivering fingertip traced the invisible seal which had actually closed the tunic, and even now he could see no sign of how it worked.

When they'd first tried to strip the profaned fabric from the . . . the woman, the heretic or . . . or demon, or whatever she'd been . . .

His shoulders tensed, and he made them relax. When they'd tried to strip it from—her—they'd found no fastenings, and it had laughed at their sharpest blades. But then, with no real hope, he'd tugged—thus.

The cloth opened, and he licked his lips. It was uncanny. Impossible. Yet he held it in his hands. It was as real as his own flesh, and yet—

He opened the tunic wide once more, caressing the union of sleeve and shoulder, and bit his lip. He'd watched his own mother sew and done sewing enough of his own at seminary to know what he should find, yet there was no seam. The tunic was a single whole, perfect and indivisible, as if it had been woven in a single sitting and not pieced together, its only flaws the holes punched in it by musket balls. . . .

Battlefleet uniform, apparently the buttons with the Imperial crest engraved are purely ornamental, and there are no seams. Uniform resists knives, though I suspect if the local bear-things can bite through it, an enhanced man should be able to puncture it.

Oh, and Stomald decides that since Sandy could resist his exorcism and holy oil, and spoke the Holy Tongue, wear idealized versions of the high clergy's uniforms, and they didn't kill anyone rescuing Harriet, that they must have been angels. That makes sense, given the context he's dealing with.

Harriet had been seriously injured once before—a grav-cycle accident that broke both legs and an arm before she'd been fully enhanced—and Imperial medicine had put her back on her feet in a week.

Imperial medicine.

"You were struck in the right temple, left shoulder, and right lung by heavy projectiles," the centauroid explained gently. "Despite the crudity of the weapons used, they had sufficient power at such short range to shatter even enhanced human bone, but the one which struck your head fortunately impacted at an angle and your skull sufficed to turn it."

She breathed a bit harder as he cataloged her wounds but nodded for him to continue, and his eyes approved her courage.

"Your implants sealed the blood loss from the wounds to your shoulder and lung. There was considerable damage to the lung, but those injuries are healing satisfactorily. The head wound resulted in intracranial bleeding and tissue damage"—she tensed, but he continued calmly— "yet I see no sign of motor skill damage, though there may be some permanent memory loss. Your vision problem, however, stems not from tissue damage but from damage to your implant hardware. Fragments of bone were driven into the brain and also forward, piercing the eye socket. The injuries to the eye structures are responding to therapy, and the optic nerve was untouched, but an implant, unlike the body, cannot be regenerated. I knew it was damaged, but I'd hoped the impairment would be less severe than you describe."

"It's only in the hardware?" Relief washed through her at his nod, but then she frowned. "Why not just shut it down through the overrides?"

"The damage is too extensive for me to access it. Short of removing it entirely—a task for a fully qualified neurosurgeon which I would hesitate to attempt and which would, at best, leave you effectively blind until we can obtain proper medical assistance, anyway—I can do nothing with it."

As was said upthread, it's just the implant damage they can't fix. Well, that and the memory loss. Extent of Harriet's injury after being shot in the head at close range. Oh, and since her eye is painfully sensitive to light and they can't fix it, she'll wear an eyepatch from here on out.

"Apparently," she began, "the planetary governor closed down the mat-trans at the first hypercom warning, then began immediate construction of a quarantine system under the direction of his chief engineer. Who," she added wryly, "was obviously a real whiz.

"Things weren't too bad at the start. There was some panic, and a few disturbances from people afraid they hadn't gotten quarantined soon enough, but nothing they couldn't handle . . . at first." She paused, and her eyes darkened.

"They might have made it, if they'd just shut down their hypercom. Their defenses destroyed over a dozen incoming refugee ships, but I think they could have lived even with that . . . if the hypercom hadn't still been up.

"It was like a com link to Hell." Her voice was quiet. "It was such a slow, agonizing process. Other worlds thought they were safe, too, but they weren't, and, one by one, the plague killed them all. It took years—years of desperate, dwindling messages from infected planets while their entire universe died."

Icy silence hovered on the command deck, and she blinked misty eyes.

"It . . . got to them. Not at once. But when the last hypercom went silent, when there was no one else left—no one at all—the horror was too much. The whole planet went mad."

"Mad?" Brashan's voice was soft, and she nodded.

"They knew what had happened, you see. They knew they'd done it to themselves. That it had all been a mistake—a technological accident on a cosmic scale. So they decided to insure there would never be another one. Technology had killed the Empire . . . so they killed technology."

"They what?" Sean jerked up, and she nodded. "But . . . but they had a high-tech population. How did they expect to feed it without technology?"

"They didn't care," Sandy said sadly. "The psychic wounds were too deep. That's what happened to their tech base: they smashed it themselves."

Fate of Pardal during the plague years.

"Anyway, they didn't quite get all of it. The Valley of the Damned was a sort of high-tech redoubt. There'd been others, but the mobs rolled over them—sometimes they used human wave attacks and literally ran the defenses out of ammunition with their own bodies. Only the valley held. Their energy guns didn't need ammo, and they threw back over thirty attacks in barely ten years. The last one was made by a mob on foot, in the middle of a mountain winter, armed with spears and a handful of surviving Imperial weapons."

She fell silent once more, and they waited, sharing her horror, until she inhaled and went on in a flat voice.

"The attacks on the valley finally ended because the others had managed to destroy their technology, and, with it, their agriculture, their transport system, their medical structure—everything. Starvation, disease, exposure, even cannibalism . . . within a generation, they were down to a population they could support with an almost neolithic culture. Kahtar estimated that over a billion people died in less than ten years.

This is getting depressing quickly.

"—there was, obviously, one other high-tech center left: the quarantine HQ. Even the most frenzied mob knew that was all that stood between them and any possible refugee ship, however slight the chance one might arrive, and the HQ staff rigged up a ground defense element in the quarantine system itself. It's nowhere near as powerful as the space defenses, but it's designed to smash anyone or anything using Imperial weapons within a hundred klicks of the HQ."

So the quarantine system doesn't care generally if they use advanced technology, but will do an orbital strike if any Imperial weapons or craft get within 100 km of the Temple.

"There was no need. There were never more than a hundred people in the valley, and it was a vacation resort before they forted up, without any real industrial base. They were trapped inside it, with too little genetic material to sustain a viable population, and the new religion had a use for them—one so important it didn't even pull the plug on their power supply."

"Demons," Harriet murmured.

"Or, more precisely, a nest of 'lesser demons' and their worshipers. The valley gave their religion a 'threat' that might last for centuries to help it get its feet under it. What we walked into was Hell itself as far as the Church is concerned, and that's why anyone who has anything to do with it must be exterminated."

"Merciful God." Sean looked as sick as he felt. The warped logic and cold-blooded calculation that left those poor, damned souls penned up in their valley as the very embodiment of evil twisted his guts. He tried to imagine how it must have felt to know every other human on the planet was waiting, literally praying for the chance to murder you, and wanted to vomit.

"I think Kahtar went mad himself, at the end. Some of the others walked out of the valley when the despair finally got to be too much—walked out knowing what would happen. Others suicided. None of them were interested in having children. What future would children have had on a planet of homemade barbarians itching to torture them to death?

Yeah, it really must have sucked to be the last sane men on Pardal.

"The last of the original HQ crew didn't just put the computer on voice access, Sean. They knew there were still at least some enhanced people in the valley. People who could have ordered the Voice to denounce their precious religion if they'd been able to get close enough to access the computer, because they could have overridden voice commands through their implants once the last of the original 'priests' were gone. So they disengaged the neural feeds. The only way in is by voice, and they had an entire damned army sitting on top of it to keep everyone but the priesthood out of voice access range. With the quarantine system set up to wax anybody who tried to use Imperial weapons to shoot their way in, there was no way a handful of old, tired Imperials could get to them."

No implant access, the only way to convince the quarantine platform to let them fly up and use the automated factory to build a hypercom is to walk into the Temple's holy of holies and verbally order it so. And they can't use any advanced technology to get in.

There was, of course, one very simple answer, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't even think of it without nausea. Kahtar's journal indicated "the Sanctum" was heavily armored and deeply dug in, but they could always take the place out with a gravitonic warhead, and Israel could launch hyper weapons from atmosphere. They could hit the Temple before the quarantine system even began to react, and if the computer went down, so did the entire system. Unfortunately, they also killed everyone in Pardal's largest city—almost two million people, by Sandy's estimate.

Logical option brought up and dismissed, as is only proper. Shows Sean at least considered the direct and bloody way, though I'm not sure what they chose wound up being much better.

Back at the village, the church responds to Stomald's report of angels by raising an army of 20,000 men and ordering them to destroy ALL the nearby towns and villages. No survivors. Christ, no pretense of an investigation or trusting your man on the ground? The kids decide they can't let innocent townsfolk get slaughtered just for encountering them, and since neither side is likely to back down after one intervention, they may as well try and carry this army all the way to the Temple.

"Anyway, we're certainly the right people for the job!" Sean looked blank, and her grin seemed to split her face. "Of course we are, Sean! After all, we are the Lost Children of Israel, aren't we?"

...

How long were you waiting to use that joke?

[Darmalus]

How long were you waiting to use that joke?

I can't read any scifi or fantasy book, see the word Israel and not brace myself for something groan worthy. I've never seen it appear without making me wish an editor had taken it out, it's never just a name.

[andrewgpaul]

I don't know, Alastair Reynolds managed to have a ship called the Palestine appear in Chasm City without it being a noteworthy comment on religion or middle eastern politics.

[Ahriman238]

How long were you waiting to use that joke?

I can't read any scifi or fantasy book, see the word Israel and not brace myself for something groan worthy. I've never seen it appear without making me wish an editor had taken it out, it's never just a name.

It will never come up in this book again, none of the Pardalians would get the reference anyway. I can live with one bad joke.

So sorry I don't have an update, the one I was working on got dumped with some computer issues, and I'll be pretty busy this week, no idea when I'll have it back up.

[Ahriman238]

And I'm back in action. Hoping to get this wrapped up fairly quick. Like simon said, none of you should really need an explanation of a tercio, and there are better people on this board to provide one if you do. I will, however, mention the innovations the kids bring to Pardalian warfare.

Sean grimaced as his stealthed fighter, one of only three Israel carried, hovered above the twisting gorge. It was sheer, deep, and dizzy, with vertical walls that narrowed to less than two hundred meters where they'd been closed with earthworks, and he saw why the "heretics" had retreated into it, but such tight quarters made maneuvering for the shot a bitch.

He checked his scanners. The cutter Sandy, Harriet, and Brashan rode was as invisible as the fighter, but their synchronized stealth fields made it clear to his own instruments while they ran their final checks.

Israel has 3 fighters, along with at least one shuttle. Synchronized stealth fields again.

The hardest part, in many ways, was the limits on what they could offer these people. It would take a "miracle" to save them this time, but it was the only miracle Israel's crew could work. They dared not use Imperial technology within a hundred klicks of the Temple, yet if they used it up to that point and then stopped, the result would be disastrous. Not only would it offer the Temple fresh hope, but the sudden cessation would fill the "heretics" with dismay. It might well convince them they were heretics, that the "false angels" dared not confront the Temple on its own ground, and that limitation was going to make even more problems than Harriet's monkey wrench.

He puffed his lips and wished his twin were just a little less principled. Her insistence that they never claim divine status was going to make things difficult—and probably wouldn't be believed anyway. Yet she was right. They'd done enough damage, and, assuming they won the war they'd provoked, they'd eventually have to convince their "allies" they weren't really angels. Besides, demanding their worship would have made him feel unclean.

The rules the kids set themselves for fighting alongside superstitious and primitive villagers against the church. No "miracles" that would have to stop when they got close to the Temple, and no claiming to actually be angels or gods.

Tamman grinned and rapped his soot-black breastplate. Sean wore a matching breast and backplate with mail sleeves. The armor, like the swords racked behind their flight couches, came from Israel's machine shops, and the materials of which they were made would have raised more than a few eyebrows in either of the camps below.

Tam and Sean have swords and armor made from advanced materials (which was a bigger plot point in Armageddon Reef.) Though, if they wind up crossing blades with anyone, they are superstrong and very fast, with endurance to match.

Right, so they jury-rigged a holographic projector to the shuttle exterior so Harry could appear at 20x scale and call on the Church army to stand down. One of the attached priests grabs a musket and tries to shoot her in the face. It doesn't work out. Then she slowly sweeps a finger (with a laser designator) and Tam follows up with the fighter's energy gun.

The ray of light touched the ground, and twenty thousand voices cried out in terror as a massive trench scored itself across the valley, wider than a tall man's height and thrice as deep. Dirt and dust vomited upward as the very bedrock exploded, and Father Uriad flew backward like a toy.

Only time we see a fighter energy gun hit something besides another fighter or starship in this series. It burns a trench "as wide as a man is tall, and three times as deep" and explodes rock (superheating?) I'm not really sure if that can be calced in any meaningful way.

The precision of the attack is impressive too.

Sean and Tamman waited outside the tent inside their portable stealth fields. The trip across the camp had been . . . interesting, since people don't avoid things they can't see. Sandy had almost been squashed by a freight wagon, and her expression as she nipped aside had been priceless.

Still have personal stealth-fields. Academy pranks must have been wild.

Sandy grimaced. She'd intended to leave angels entirely out of this if she could, but Pardalians, like Terrans, had more than one word for "angel." Sha'hia, the most common, was derived from the Imperial Universal for "messenger," just as the English word descended from the Greek for the same thing. Unfortunately, there was another, derived from the word for "visitor"—from, in fact, erathiu, the very word she'd just let herself use—and her slip hadn't escaped Stomald. He had been using sha'hia; now he was using erathu, and if she corrected him, he would only assume he'd mispronounced it. Explaining what she meant by "visitor" would get into areas so far beyond his worldview that any attempt to discuss them was guaranteed to produce a crisis of conscience, and she bit her lip, then shrugged.

Nice job on 'not claiming divinity.' Perhaps you should have called yourself a visitor in the vulgar tongue instead of the holy one?

"Stomald, these are my champions," the angel said quietly. "This—" she touched the shorter man's shoulder "—is Tamman Tammanson, and this—" she touched the towering giant, and her eyes seemed to soften for a moment "—is Sean Colinson. Will you have them as war captains?"

"I . . . would be honored," Stomald said, grappling with a fresh sense of awe. They weren't angels, for they were male, but something about them, something more even than their sudden appearance, whispered they were more than mortal, like the legendary heroes of the old tales.

All angels are female in Pardalian theology, so this is how they present Sean and Tam.

"Agreed, Lord Sean," Tibold said. "If the An—" He paused with a blush. "If Lady Sandy and Lady Harry can provide us with the information on enemy movements you've described, we'll have a tremendous advantage, but too many of our men have little or no experience. They'll need good, hard drilling, and if we can do it in a strong enough defensive position, the Guard may leave us alone long enough to do some good."

Sandy and Harry will relay information from Brashan (still stuck on the ship) from his sensors and recon platforms and tiny 'spy-eye' flying cameras, thus appearing to be divine insight. Damn, for people who are trying not to claim divinity, they sure seem willing to push it. On the other hand, they'll have solid aerial recon of enemy movements, a fly's perspective on most enemy councils, and weather reports that are actually worth a damn, These are pretty huge advantages.

"Very well," he said heavily, "I must accept their story when all of them agree. But whatever that . . . thing was, it was no angel! We didn't come through the Trial only to have angels suddenly appear to tell us we all stand in doctrinal error! If that were the case, the Voice wouldn't have saved us."

Is this honestly how most meetings of the church hierarchy go? First they send an army to "investigate" rumors of angels by killing all witnesses and anyone they could have spoken to. Now they presume that the existence or presence of angels is proof the church is in doctrinal error, so they cannot be angels? Exactly what sort of thought process is going on here?

[Ahriman238]

Rare double-update. Now we return to modern Earth/Birhat and the mystery/conspiracy.

Stevens gave thanks for the rainy night. Its wet blackness wouldn't bother Imperial surveillance systems, but the people behind those systems were only human. The dreary winter rain would have its effect where it mattered, dulling and slowing their minds.

Darkness and rain don't really effect Imperial security cameras, but can still have psychological effect on the men watching the cameras.

Stevens carried his own weapon in a shoulder holster: an old-style automatic with ten-millimeter "slugs" of the same explosive used in grav guns.

Interesting, a fair bit of firepower in the modern world, maybe enough to keep up in Imperial combat.

His pulse ticked faster as he reached the high-rise. It was of Pre-Siege construction, but it had been modernized, and he paused under the force field roof protecting the front entrance.

'Modernized' Pre-Siege building with forcefield awning over the door. This provides exactly what benefits over a cloth awning? I suppose it never gets dirty or torn, but can that really justify the power expenditure?

There were no security personnel in the lobby, only the automated systems he'd been briefed upon, and he paused in the entry, head bent to hide his features, shielding Yance and Pete as they reached under their coats. Then he stepped aside, and their suppressors rose with practiced precision and burned each scan point into useless junk with pulses of focused energy.

Suppressors used to knock out security cameras. They do, however miss 3, and burn out the cameras individually, so it's not like an EMP.

Stevens spun like a cat. He heard Yance's enraged bellow even as he tried to line up on the uniformed woman in the doorway, but his people's reactions didn't match their murderousness, for none were enhanced. His barking automatic blasted a chunk from the wall beside the door, and then a hurricane of grav gun darts blew all five terrorists into bloody meat.

Unenhanced terrorists ambushed by enhanced security. One man gets off one hsot that doesn't go anywhere near the cops.

He held his own position and watched the getaway flyer slide to a neat halt. It was right on the tick, and he aligned his hyper rifle on the drive housing before he triggered his com.

"Land and step out of the flyer!" he told the pilot.

There was a split-second pause, and then the flyer leapt ahead with blinding acceleration. But unlike Stevens' killers, Graywolf was fully enhanced, and the exploding flyer gouged a fifty-meter trench in the street below as its drive unit vanished into hyper-space.

Flyer (presumably an aircar like ones mentioned earlier) is shot at with a Warp Rifle, which neatly eliminates the engine.

His lips pursed as he considered his intertwining strategies. His latest ploy should remove Francine from any suspicion. She'd openly become the Church of the Armageddon's leader, but as one who denounced the Sword of God's fanaticism. Her masterful pleas for nonviolence only underscored the Sword's growing ferocity, yet she was emerging as a moderate, and Horus and Ninhursag were obligingly accepting his own "astonished" conclusion that she was someone they could work with against the radicals.

Now his security forces' defeat of the Sword's attempt on her life would make her whiter than snow. He'd wondered if he was being too clever, for it would never have done for any of Stevens' people to be taken alive and disclose the truth about Imperial Terra, but he'd chosen his agents with care. All were utterly loyal to the Imperium . . . but each had lost friends or family to the Sword. He was certain they'd tried to take the terrorists alive—and equally certain they hadn't tried any harder than they had to. And, of course, he'd known he could trust Stevens' fanatics to resist.

So Hilgeman, who is Jefferson's partner and founded the Sword of God through a cutout, is now publicly a moderate. Jefferson has the sword try and assassinate her, so his handpicked security can foil the attack. Very neat, and once again the body count of Jefferson's minions grows. He really is somewhere between Darth Vader and Visser Three on the issue of employee retention.

Jourdain's high position in Earth Security made him invaluable as Jefferson's senior field man and cutout, but Bergren was even more important. That lowly officer was the key, for he was a greedy young man with expensive habits. How Battle Fleet had ever let him into uniform, much less placed him in such a sensitive position, passed Jefferson's understanding, but he supposed even the best screening processes had to fail occasionally.

I may have to concede to simon on the "expensive habits." Though I'd point out again that plots of murder, mayhem and high treason rarely attract wonderful human beings.

His followers gaped at the Marines, but they had weapons of their own and two of them were fully enhanced, and a Marine blew apart as the night exploded in a vicious firefight. An energy gun killed a second trooper, the whiplash of grav gun darts crackled everywhere, and a third Marine went down—wounded, not dead—but the Marines had combat armor, and the terrorists didn't.

Forty-one seconds after the first shot, three Marines were dead and five were wounded; none of the four terrorist survivors was unhurt.

A fight between power-armored Marines and 40 or so Sword terrorists. The Sword loses, badly. Power armor is still not proof against Imperial weaponry.

"That," Fleet Captain Reynaud observed, "is one nasty lieutenant."

"She is, indeed," Tattiaglia murmured, watching the holo of the "interview" with his exec as the terrorist began to spill his guts, then glanced up at the captain from ONI. "I'm not going to shed any tears for the prisoners, but will any of this stand up in court?"

"Not in a civilian court, but it won't have to. His Majesty's invoked the Defense of the Imperium Act, and that gives military courts jurisdiction over prisoners captured by the military. Besides," the captain's grin was as sharklike as his lieutenant's, "we don't need any of it. Your boys and girls caught these jokers with enough physical evidence to shoot them all."

So I suppose we'll have the PATRIOT act in the future. Colin's new Imperium isn't all rainbows and kittens I guess.

Anyway, further inquiry and storming the cell's HQ turns up evidence of the world-ender, so evacuation plans for Birhat and Narhan are drawn up. Apparently Narhan is still sparesly populated enough to be evacuated by mat-trans, but Birhat is not.

But back to the early gunpowder age drama on Pardal!

Tibold Rarikson lay beside Lord Sean atop the cliff and watched his youthful commander pretend to use a spyglass.

The ex-Guardsman's bushy mustache hid his smile as the black-haired giant made a great show of adjusting the glass. Tibold didn't know why the Captain-General tried to hide his more-than-human abilities, but he was willing to play along, even though Lord Sean and Lord Tamman were probably the only people who thought they were fooling anyone.

Good thing Tibold and Stromald are either very open-minded or very accepting if they figure any weirdness falls under God's aegis.

They might have keener eyes and greater strength than other men, and they certainly knew things Tibold hadn't, yet there were peculiar holes in their knowledge. For instance, Lord Tamman had actually expected nioharqs to slow infantry, and Lord Sean had let slip a puzzling reference to "heavy cavalry," a manifest contradiction in terms. Branahlks were fleet, but they had trouble carrying an unarmored man.

Branahalks aren't used for proper cavalry anyway, just dragoons. Nioharqs are pachyderm-scale pigs that act as beasts of burden, allowing the local armies to drag a lot of supplies and kit around.

Even Tibold had felt . . . unsettled . . . when the Angel Sandy had Father Stomald stack a thousand joharns in a small, blind valley and leave them there overnight. Indeed, he'd crept back—strictly against Father Stomald's orders—late that night . . . and crept away again much more quietly than he'd come when he found all thousand of them had disappeared!

But they'd been back by morning, and Tibold hadn't argued when the Angel Sandy had him pile two thousand in the same valley the next night. Not after he'd seen what had happened to the first lot.
Changing wooden ramrods for iron had been but the first step, and Lord Sean had accompanied it by introducing paper cartridges to replace the wooden tubes hung from a musketeer's bandoleer. A man could carry far more of them, and all he had to do was bite off the end, pour the powder down the barrel, and spit in his ball. The paper wrapper even served as a wad!

The machine shops on Israel earn their keep. Brashan can apparently rifle 2,000 muskets in a single night.

The thing Lord Sean called a "ring bayonet" was another deceptively simple innovation. Hard-pressed musketeers often shoved the hafts of knives into their weapons' muzzles to turn them into crude spears as the pikes closed in, yet that was always a council of desperation, since it meant they could no longer fire. But they could fire with the mounting rings clamped around their weapons' barrels, and Tibold looked forward to the first time some Guard captain assumed musketeers with fixed bayonets couldn't shoot him.

Either this is another hole in y knowledge of history, or a brainbug particular to Weber, because it was a big deal in his Safehold books too. It's nice to be able to fix bayonets and still fire, but I didn't think it was anything revolutionary, or even all that advantageous outside of a few specific circumstances.

Then there was the gunlock. No one had ever thought of widening the barrel end of the touch-hole into a funnel, but that simple alteration meant it was no longer necessary to prime the lock. Just turning the musket on its side and rapping it smartly shook powder from the main charge into the pan.

Yet the most wonderful change of all was simpler yet. Rifles had been a Malagoran invention (well, Cherist made the same claim, but Tibold knew who he believed), yet it took so long to hammer balls down their barrels—the only way to force them into the rifling—that they fired even more slowly than malagors. While prized by hunters and useful for skirmishers, the rifle was all but useless once the close-range exchange of volleys began.

No longer. Every altered joharn—and malagor—had returned rifled, and the angels had provided molds for a new bullet, as well. Not a ball, but a hollow-based cylinder that slid easily down the barrel. Tibold had doubted the rifling grooves could spin a bullet with that much windage, but Lord Sean had insisted the exploding powder would spread the base into them, and the results were phenomenal. Suddenly a rifle was as easy to load as a smoothbore—and able to fire far more rapidly than anyone had ever been able to shoot before! Tibold couldn't see why Lord Sean had been so surprised to find the weapons were . . . "bore-standardized," he called them (it only made sense to issue everyone the same size balls, didn't it?), but the Captain-General had been delighted by how easy that made it to produce the new bullets for them.

Again things that are fairly basic in hindsight.

Nor had he ignored the artillery. Mother Church restricted secular armies to the lighter chagon, and the Guard's arlaks threw shot twice as heavy, even if their shorter barrels didn't give them much more range. But Lord Sean's gunners were supplied with cloth bags of powder instead of clumsy loading-ladles of loose powder. And for close-range firing there were "fixed rounds"—thin-walled, powder-filled wooden tubes with grape or case shot wired to one end. A good crew could fire three of those in a minute.

And when all those changes were added together, the Angels' Army could produce a weight of fire no experienced commander would have believed possible. Instead of once every five minutes, its artillerists fired three times in two minutes—even faster, using the "fixed rounds" at close range. Instead of thirty rounds an hour, its musketeers—no, its riflemen—could fire three or even four a minute and hit targets they could hardly even see! Tibold still wasn't certain fire alone could break a phalanx, but he wouldn't care to charge against such weapons.

Changes to artillery, and a summary of what it all means.

Perhaps even better, there were maps. Wonderful maps, with every feature to scale and none left out. It was kind of the angels to try to make them look like those he'd always used, and he lacked the heart to tell them they'd failed when they seemed so pleased by their efforts, but no mortal cartographer could have produced them.

Much better than hand-drawn maps.

Best of all, the angels always knew what was happening elsewhere. The big map in the command tent showed every hostile army's exact position, and the angels updated it regularly. The sheer luxury of it was addictive. He was glad Lord Sean continued to emphasize scouting, but knowing where and how strong every major enemy force was made things so much simpler . . . especially when the enemy didn't know those things about you.

This really is an advantage no period commander has ever enjoyed, much like radio and roughly as valuable.

Lord God, he was tired! He hadn't expected it to be easy—indeed, he'd feared the Pardalians would resist his innovations, and the eagerness with which they'd accepted them instead was a tremendous relief—but even so, he'd underestimated the sheer, grinding labor of it all, and he'd expected to get more advantage from Israel's machine shops. To be sure, Sandy's stealthed flights to shuttle muskets back and forth for rifling had been an enormous help, but this was Sean's first personal contact with the reality of military logistics, and he'd been horrified by the voracious appetite of even a small, primitively-armed army. Brashan and his computer-driven minions had been able to modify existing weapons at a gratifying rate, but producing large numbers of even unsophisticated weapons would quickly have devoured Israel's resources.

Not that Sean intended to complain. His troops were incomparably better armed (those who were armed at all!) than anything they were likely to face, and if he'd been disappointed in Israel's productivity, he'd been amazed by how quickly the Malagoran guilds had begun producing new weapons from the prototypes "the angels" had provided.

Local production is stepping up where Brashan and his machine shop fall short. Apparently some of the better craftsmen already use an assembly-line process.

Nor did the long year Pardal's huge orbital radius produced ease things. On a planet where spring lasted for five standard months and summer for ten, the campaigning seasons of Terra's preindustrial armies were a useless meterstick. Sean was devoutly thankful the Temple had seen fit to postpone operations for over two months while it indoctrinated its troops, but a delay which would have meant having to hold the Temple off only until the weather closed in on Terra meant nothing of the sort here.

Pardalian seasons messing with Sean's historical knowledge.

Tamman leaned against the thyru tree, watching the road to the east, then glanced back up at the man perched in the branches with his mirror. Pardalian armies had surprisingly sophisticated signal systems, but both mirrors and flags were "daylight-only," and the afternoon was passing.

Semaphore towers, signal flags and mirrors. They really seem to be hitting all the best of primitive communications.

Anyway, I'll close this off right before the first major battle, Yortown.

[Ahriman238]

"So it seems," Sean agreed, and peered into the green shadows where twenty thousand men lay hidden amid undergrowth as dense as anything Grant had faced at The Wilderness. They wore dull green and brown, their rifle barrels had been browned to prevent any betraying gleam, and they made a sadly scruffy sight beside the crimson and steel of the Guard, but they were also almost totally invisible.

He flicked his neural feed to the stealthed cutter above the valley, exchanging a brief, wordless caress with an anxious Sandy, then plugged into Brashan's arrays through the cutter's com. The Host was closing up, packing tighter behind the assault elements. With a little luck . . .

He shifted his attention to the pontoon bridges north of Yortown, hidden behind the woods. Pontoons were new to Pardal, and they'd been trickier to erect than he'd hoped, but they seemed to be holding. He hoped so. If it all came apart, those bridges were the only way home for a third of his army.

Camouflage and pontoon bridges introduced to Pardalian warfare. Sean stashes 20,000 riflemen in a flanking position in woods the Church commanders 'know' can't have anyone because there are no bridges to retreat across, and the woods are far too thick for pikemen.

Vrikadan heard the high, shivering seldahk's howl of the Malagoran war cry—a terrifying sound which, like the music shrilling beneath it, had been proscribed on pain of death for almost two Pardalian centuries—but he had other things to worry about, and he fought his mount as a salvo of shot shrieked through his men. And another. Another! Dear God, where had they gotten all those guns?

Rather than reaching the correct conclusion (and what I'd think the more reasonable assumption) that the Malagorans have drastically increased RoF for their guns, the Temple Guard assume they have a lot more cannon than they'd previously imagined, or could fit in their earthworks.

Also, the Malagorans have independently come up with the bagpipe.

And then, just as he reached the bank, the smoke lifted on a billow of flame. There were gun pits at the feet of the redoubts! Camouflaged pits filled not with arlaks but with chagors, light guns packed hub-to-hub and spewing fire.

Cute.

Sean watched the snipers methodically pick off officers and noncoms while the rest of his men debouched from the forest. It wasn't chivalrous . . . but, then, neither was war.

Very much not a period attitude about war.

A pikeman leapt up a pile of bodies, thrusting at him, and his left hand darted out with inhuman quickness. He caught the pike haft, enhanced muscles jerked, and the Guardsman clung in disbelief as he was wrenched in close.

A battle steel blade hissed, and a head bounded away.

Tam catches a falling pike (not by the blade) barehanded, and uses it to manhandle the wielder.

They were six hundred paces from the enemy, three times effective malagor range—and they died in deep astonishment as the crackling fire killed them anyway.

Does rifling really triple musket ranges?

The second wave of attackers was thrown back, but a third formed and crashed forward over the bodies, and the man beside Tamman went down screaming with a pikehead in his guts. Tamman lunged at his killer, grunting as his slender sword punched through breast and backplate alike, and kicked the body aside, then grunted again as a musket ball smashed into his own breastplate. It whined aside, marking the undented Imperial composite with a long smear of lead, and he cut down two more Guardsmen. But this time the bastards were coming through, and his free hand ripped a mace from a dead man's belt as the defending line crumbled to his left

A musketball at close range hits Tam's breastplate, it doesn't penetrate, and it doesn't really knock him off his feet, but he certainly feels it.

Ithun gaped as the black-armored figure erupted into the Guardsmen, mace in one hand, skinny sword in the other. No Pardalian had faced a fully enhanced enemy in forty-five thousand years, and any Guardsman who'd doubted the heretics were allied to demons knew better now. Limbs and dead men exploded from Lord Tamman's path. A pike lunged at him, and metal screamed as that impossible sword sheared through the pikehead.

Tam countercharges almost alone (he easily outran his men) and kills at least dozens singlehandedly.

And horror it was. Sean stood beside a field hospital, watching the surgeons, and only his implants held down his gorge. Pardalians had a good working knowledge of anatomy and a kitchen sink notion of sepsis, but distilled alcohol was their sole anesthetic and disinfectant. There were no medical teams to rebuild shattered limbs; amputation was the prescription, and the treatment of men's wounds was more horrifying than their infliction.

Battle aftermath. Sean uses his implants to prevent himself from puking. The kids have also been working on sanitation with the locals, who were already doing okay with it.

Sandy and Harry were out there in the middle of it. Israel's facilities couldn't have healed a fraction of the suffering, but Brashan had sent forward every painkiller his sickbay had, and the iron-faced "angels" moved through Hell, easing its pain and following the anesthetic with broad-spectrum Imperial antibiotics. Guardsmen who cursed them as demons fell silent in confusion as they watched them heal their enemies, and hundreds who should have died would live . . . and none of it absolved Israel's crew of their guilt.

The "angels" distribute painkillers and antibiotics to friend and foe alike. Really seems to violate the spirit of the rule against claiming divinity, at least it's effect will be to increase belief in angels. But it's a forgivable lapse.

"But by your estimate, Lord Marshal," Vroxhan said, "we lack the numbers to meet the heretics on equal terms." The high priest's voice was firm, but anxiety burned in its depths.
"We do, Holiness," Surak replied, "but I believe we have sufficient to hold at least the eastern end of the Keldark Valley. I would prefer to do just that and open a new offensive from the west, were our strength in Cherist and Thirgan great enough. It isn't, however, so we must fight them here. I realize that it was the Inner Circle's desire to defeat this threat solely with our own troops, Holiness, yet that's no longer possible either. Our main field army has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed, not merely defeated, and I fear we must summon the secular armies of the east to Holy War. Were all their numbers gathered into a single new Host under the Temple's banner, they would—they must—suffice for victory . . . but only if we can hold the heretics in the mountains until they've mustered. For that reason, if no other, Ortak must be ordered to delay the enemy."

"I see." Vroxhan sighed. "Very well, Lord Marshal, let it be as you direct. Send your orders, and the Circle will summon the princes." Surak stooped to kiss the hem of the high priest's robe and withdrew, his urgency evident in his speed, and Vroxhan looked about the table once more.

The Church summons all the secular lords and princes of the Realm to arms against the heretics.

Even so, his troops were fleeter of foot and had incomparably more firepower than any other Pardalian army. The new, standardized rifle regiments he and Tibold had organized could kill their enemies from five or six times smoothbore range, and the absence of polearms made them far more mobile. Even the best pikemen were less than nimble trailing five-meter pikes, and his rifle-armed infantry could dance rings around the Guard's ponderous phalanxes. Coupled with its higher rate of fire, the Angels' Army could cut four or five times its own number to pieces in a mobile engagement.

Ramifications of technology given to the Malagorans, right before the reason that won't make much difference here, where Ortak's troops dig in for a siege.

He wanted to swear at Tibold, as well, for letting him, but that wouldn't have been fair. The ex-Guardsman was a product of the military tradition which had evolved after the Schismatic Wars, and Pardalian wars were fought for territory. Ideally, battles were avoided in favor of efforts to outmaneuver an opponent, and campaigns were characterized by intricate, almost formal march and countermarch until they climaxed in equally formal engagements or sieges for vital fortresses. The Napoleonic doctrine of pursuing a beaten foe to annihilation was foreign to local military thought. It shouldn't have been, given the mobility nioharqs bestowed, but it was, and a crushing victory like Yortown would have brought most wars to a screeching conclusion as the defeated side treated for terms. Not this time. High Priest Vroxhan and the Inner Circle might not have the least idea what Sean and his marooned friends were truly after, but they'd realized they were fighting for their very survival.

Existing military traditions of Pardal.

Sean MacIntyre dismounted and wiped rain from his face. He could have used his implants to stay dry, but that would have felt unfair to his troops, which was probably silly but didn't change his feelings. He smiled at his own perversity and scratched his branahlk's snout, listening to its soft whistle of pleasure, and tried to hide his worry as the sodden column squelched past.

Implant forcefield remains proof against rain. Sean's plan is to break Erastor by leading a column of men through swampland the defenders know is impassable, but they don't have Sean's cartography or Sandy's recon flights.

"Got a problem down here," he subvocalized. "Our bivouac site's underwater."
"Damn. Hang on a sec," she replied, and brought up her sensors, berating herself for not having checked sooner. She frowned in concentration over her neural feed as she swept the area ahead of the column, then her eyes brightened. "Okay. If you push on another six klicks, the ground rises to the south."

Implant comms work by subvocalizing, for some reason there isn't that much aerial recon in a daring plan depending on their ability to map a safe route through the swamp.

Pardal's days were long, and on good roads (and Pardalian roads would have made any Roman emperor die of jealousy), infantry routinely made fifty kilometers a day in fair weather. Marching cross-country in the rain, even through open terrain, they were doing well to make thirty pushing hard, and they hadn't even reached the swamps yet.

Marching rates for Pardalian armies (with nioharqs to lug the heavy gear) and long Pardalian day (later they say 29 hours.) The Church maintains an extensive network of roads for the swift movement of it's armies.

"Can . . . can you forgive us?" she asked quietly. "We never wanted to insult your beliefs or use your faith against you. Truly we didn't."

"Forgive you?" He smiled more naturally and shook his head. "There's nothing to forgive, My Lady. You are who you are and the truth is the truth, and if the Writ is wrong, perhaps you are God's messengers. From what you say, this world has spent thousands upon thousands of years blind to the truth and living in fear of an evil that no longer exists, and surely God can send whomever He wishes to show us the truth!"

Harry tells Stomald the truth of who they are and where they're from, and that the Church and Pardalian society as a whole is basically a lie and a bad joke. He takes it impossibly well.

Pardalian field sanitation was far better than that of most preindustrial armies, and he and Sean had improved on that basic platform, but it was simply impossible to put forty or fifty thousand human beings into an encampment without consequences. Coupled with decent diet, the latrines were holding things like dysentery within limits, yet the ground had been churned into sticky soup and everyone was thoroughly wet and miserable.

So no wiping out disease at this stage either.

"May I ask why not, Father?"

"Because Lady Sandy was right," Stomald said simply. "We're trapped in a war, and if I was wrong to think Lady Harry and Lady Sandy angels, the Inner Circle is even more wrong in what it believes. There will be time to sort things out once the Guard is no longer trying to kill us all, My Lord."
The priest smiled wryly, and Tamman smiled back. Damned if he could have taken the complete destruction of his worldview as calmly as Stomald seemed to be taking it!

"At the same time, My Lord," Stomald went on a bit more hesitantly, "Lady Harry told me of her relationship with you." Tamman stiffened. Pardalian notions of morality were more flexible than he'd expected. Unmarried sex wasn't a mortal sin on Pardal, but it was something the Church frowned upon, yet Stomald's tone was that of a wary young man, not an irate priest.

Telling Tam that Harry told Stomald, his continuing inhuman acceptance of everything. Oh, and Stomald will be replacing Tam as Harry's bedwarmer, which he takes pretty well damn well.

What Sean and Tibold had envisioned as a twelve-hour maneuver consumed over three of Pardal's twenty-nine-hour days, and it was an exhausted, sodden, mud-spattered column of infantry that finally crawled out of the swamp proper into the merely "soft" ground south of it.

-snip-

Under the circumstances, he'd eased the "no miracles" rule, and Sandy and Harry had been busy using cutters to bring in fresh food. The cargo remotes had stacked it neatly to await his column's arrival, and the troops gave a weary cheer as they saw it. There was even a little wood for fires, and the company cooks quickly got down to business.

So we keep to the rules we set, unless we need to (or really want to) break them?

Unlike her towering lover, she was spotless. Not even her boots were muddy, and he shook his head.

" 'Ow can you tell she's an angel?" he murmured. " 'Cause she's not covered wi' shit loike the rest of us!" he answered himself.

Now Weber is just mocking me. Damn it, why do you only ever remember the implant forcefield when it's useful to keep characters from getting wet or dirty?

"Captain Juahl sent me to report, Lord Sean," the exhausted young officer said. "We haven't secured the Malz tower yet—they got the town gates shut and we didn't have the strength to force them—but Captain Juahl and Under-Captain Hahna secured the fords and both towers between here and the crossroads. Hahna's company is posted just east of the crossroads, and we got both towers intact. Captain Juahl said to tell you our men are ready to pass messages both ways, My Lord."

Being behind Ortak, a couple days march still from his rear, and only three or four days ahead of the Temple Guard reinforcements, Sean's men seize several of the semaphore towers and start passing messages, telling Orlak his reinforcements are ahead of schedule, and telling the reinforcements that the heretics are pretty well-bottled up and there's no great rush.

And, of course, reading mail from both parties, but they don't really learn anything new or exciting.

Between them, Stomald and "the angels"—with a little help from the bloodthirsty field regulations of a certain Captain-General Lord Sean—had created a remarkably well-behaved army. The fact that it regarded itself as an elite force and confidently expected to kick the butt of a much larger army in a few days also helped by giving it a certain image to live up to, but Sean knew most of its restraint stemmed from the Holy Host's failure to reach Malagor. The Malagoran Temple Guard had done its share of village-burning on its abortive march to Cragsend, but half the men who'd done that were now members in good standing of the Angels' Army, and they'd done their very best to make amends. Yortown and the seizure of the Thirgan Gap had precluded the other atrocities religious wars routinely spawned, and the men felt little need for vengeance. Sean intended to keep it that way, but a handful of panicky townsmen who took it into their heads to "resist heresy" or simply thought they were defending their families could easily provoke a fire fight that might well expand into a full-blown massacre.

Another aspect of period warfare modern men are ill-equipped to deal with is what happens when a city wall falls. Glad to see they're on top of the situation.

For all its self-inflicted technical wounds, Pardal was an ancient and surprisingly sophisticated world, Sean reflected, and its road network reflected it. He'd wondered, when they first spotted the Temple from orbit, how a preindustrial society could transport sufficient food for a city that size even with the canal network to help, but that was before he knew about nioharqs or how good their roads were. They'd developed some impressive engineers over the millennia, and most of them seemed to have spent their entire careers building either temples or roads. Even here in the mountains, the high road was over twenty meters wide, and its hard-paved smoothness rivaled any of Terra's pre-Imperial superhighways.

He drew up and watched his men march past. Like the Roman Empire, Pardalian states relied on infantry, and the excellence of their roads stemmed from the same need to move troops quickly. Of course, come to think of it, the same considerations had created the German autobahns and the United States interstate highway system, hadn't they? Some things never seemed to change.

Pardalian roads.

Right, so they still get caught in the rain and have to assault Ortak in the middle of a thunderstorm. But the Malagorans keep steady through the confusion, the first few wear Guard cloaks to confuse pickets, surprise is near total and, thanks to advanced communications with Tam in the main force staring across Ortak's breastworks from their breastworks, the main body attacks more or less simultaneously. Erastor is a crushing victory for the Malagorans.

The Guard formation wavered as the bullets slammed home. At such short range, a rifled joharn would penetrate five inches of solid wood, and a single shot could kill or maim two or even three men. The shock of receiving that fire was made even worse by the fact that it came from bayoneted weapons, and then, against every rule of warfare, musketeers actually charged pikemen!

The Guardsmen couldn't believe it. Musketeers ran away from pikes—everyone knew that! But these musketeers were different. The column behind exploded through the firing line and hit the Eighteenth Pikes like a tidal bore. Dozens, scores of them, died on the bitter pikeheads, but while the Guardsmen were killing them, their companions hurled themselves in among the pikes, and the Guard discovered a lethal truth. Once a phalanx's front was broken, once the Malagorans could get inside the pikes' longer reach, bayoneted rifles were deadly melee weapons. They were shorter, lighter, faster, and these men knew how to use them to terrible effect.

Still seems insanely dangerous to me, but what do I know?

Okay, another brief break, then we leave Pardal behind again.

[Simon_Jester]

The machine shops on Israel earn their keep. Brashan can apparently rifle 2,000 muskets in a single night.

Figure an eight hour shift, four muskets a minute... this strongly implies automation. One might reasonably infer that there are generalized drones that can shuffle piles of muskets through the shop with blinding speed, once they are properly programmed. Which means Brashan's job is to first draw up a pattern for the rifle using CAD software, then watch the shop's robotics and expert systems, hit the "STOP" button if anything goes wrong... and of course take whichever muskets are too out-of-spec for the machines to know what to do with them, and either rifle them himself or discard them.

Pretty spiffy, although it's pretty hard on the manufacturing sector if the technology generalizes to civilian life. (Yes, I know this is remarked on in the books, you don't need to tell me).

It occurs to me that this creates a really serious labor problem, and one Weber would have a hard time tackling effectively due to his political slant. You've got a system where basically any physical task, including mainstays of unskilled labor like ditch-digging and fast food restaurant work, can be easily done by sub-sentient robots. Manufacturing likewise- you need one shop operator overseeing what would otherwise be a whole damn assembly line of guys.

What do people do with themselves all day? There's simply not enough useful work to go around given the number of available man-hours.

I can think of several options:

1) Create make-work: put people to work shuffling paper, analyzing statistics, nannying each other's children, acting as tour guides, and so on. You don't strictly need that many people doing those jobs, the world wouldn't end if you didn't have them available, but it puts them to work.

2) Very short workday: have people work in two hour shifts, so everyone does some work every week, and the needed work is distributed evenly among the populace with almost everyone having almost unlimited free time.

3) Large "dole" class: Only a small minority of people actually work, they work relatively hard at a job which they hopefully find fulfilling, and most people don't do anything at all except hobbies. I have NO IDEA how to make this sustainable.

4) Maintain capitalist paradigm of "who does not work, does not eat;" quietly ignore fact that there are now only about X full-time jobs available for 5X or 10X people. System collapses in color revolution (at best); pick one of options (1) through (3).

Somehow, I don't think Weber thought this problem through, because all the sustainable answers are ones I suspect he'd find unappealing.

Either this is another hole in y knowledge of history, or a brainbug particular to Weber, because it was a big deal in his Safehold books too. It's nice to be able to fix bayonets and still fire, but I didn't think it was anything revolutionary, or even all that advantageous outside of a few specific circumstances.

The specific circumstances in question are whenever you're being charged by screaming lunatics with swords and spears, possibly mounted on horses.

Horse cavalry can overrun an army with muzzle-loading firearms, unless said army has truly exotic artillery support, or the ability to suddenly sprout a forest of sharp pointy iron crap that horses are too sensible to impale themselves on.

Foot infantry can sometimes overrun such an army- witness the Highland charge, used profitably by Scots highlanders armed with swords and shields against British infantry with guns in the 17th and 18th centuries... until the British advantage in logistics (and to some extent bayonets) got big enough to make up the difference.

The ring bayonet is an incremental improvement in this- it's probably not as important here as it would be in real life. The people on Pardal don't have any animal that can credibly carry a mounted man on a charge into enemy lines. And it doesn't look like the rebels have to worry about fighting armies that have the combination of specialist tactics and sheer balls it would take to make something like the Highland charge effective.

My impression is that they're up against standard 17th-century-style "pike and shot" troops armed with a mix of matchlock muskets (flintlocks?) and pikes. Pike charges are not likely to succeed against an army with rifled muskets and Napoleonic field artillery, because pike blocks don't move fast enough.

Local production is stepping up where Brashan and his machine shop fall short. Apparently some of the better craftsmen already use an assembly-line process.

What's questionable is their ability to provide precision tooling- that doesn't matter much for what translate as early 19th century rifles, but it does matter for artillery.

Also one wonders what resources Israel is likely to expend doing this- lubricants for machine tools? I'd think that the actual tool heads themselves, designed to machine Galactic materials, would have no more trouble dealing with iron and bronze than the drill presses and milling machines in a modern shop have with wood...

[Scratches head]

[Simon_Jester]

Rather than reaching the correct conclusion (and what I'd think the more reasonable assumption) that the Malagorans have drastically increased RoF for their guns, the Temple Guard assume they have a lot more cannon than they'd previously imagined, or could fit in their earthworks.

If the basic definition of "handgun" hasn't changed in hundreds of years, and you're suddenly getting shot at by WAY more bullets than you thought... the assumption that the enemy is firing canister at you from heavy artillery makes a lot more sense than "someone just redefined the handheld musket on us."

Real armies make mistakes like this all the time- for instance, they may look at one artillery piece that's being fired and relocated between multiple positions, and assume it's actually three or four guns being fired more slowly. I'm told that during the Battle of the Marne, the German army made the same mistake as here, more or less. They were fighting the small force of long-service British troops trained before the war, men who had spent a great deal of time being trained to fire very rapid, relatively accurate fire from their rifles. The Germans assumed that they were actually dealing with a more normal continental army... but one equipped with far more machine guns than the British actually had.

It's very easy to mistake a few dozen riflemen shooting at you rapidly from a range of several hundred yards for a single machine gunner shooting at you from the same distance, when those riflemen are putting fifteen rounds a minute past your general vicinity each.

They were six hundred paces from the enemy, three times effective malagor range—and they died in deep astonishment as the crackling fire killed them anyway.

Does rifling really triple musket ranges?

Approximately. Actually hitting a man-sized target from that distance would be pretty hard, but whole armies equipped with such rifles could at least hope to put a noticeable number of bullets onto a large target like an enemy pike block. The only problem is that to make it work you'd need to equip the rifles with volley sights; projectile drop at that range means that you can't just level the gun and fire, the bullet will plunk into the ground.

The addition of volley sights would be a complicated machining step, with a number of extra tool operations being required, and making good ones would be well beyond the capacity of native Pardalian industry.

Implant comms work by subvocalizing, for some reason there isn't that much aerial recon in a daring plan depending on their ability to map a safe route through the swamp.

The ground may have appeared superficially all right a few hours ago (i.e. the water table wasn't actually above the surface) seen from the air. Then a sudden rainstorm hits and splash- it's ankle deep in water. Even before, though, it'd probably be useless and muddy at ground level.

Just a thought, and an interesting illustration of the limits of aerial recon if no one gets out and takes a look, and/or has a LOT of experience judging terrain from the air.

Marching rates for Pardalian armies (with nioharqs to lug the heavy gear) and long Pardalian day (later they say 29 hours.) The Church maintains an extensive network of roads for the swift movement of it's armies.

More likely for commerce, really- wars come and go, but trade is eternal and the Church profits from it as much as anyone else, if not more so.

So we keep to the rules we set, unless we need to (or really want to) break them?

Since in this case the rule exists for a practical reason, sure. Remember, the original fear was that if they used blatant feats of superscience to win battles (say, handing Sean a warp rifle and having him disappear the whole Church army's flank at Yortown, which would be totally possible), they'd have a problem on their hands when they got close to their target and couldn't use such weapons without the automated defense system shooting back. They'd win some battles and lose the war.

Here, the "miracles" are subtle (free food!), deniable (don't look at me no sir, piously raise eyes to heavens), and tend to build the army's morale instead of weakening it by making the "miracles" into crutches they come to depend on in battle. Having free food while your army is making a difficult march strengthens them and makes victory more likely, but it won't demoralize their troops so much if it doesn't happen tomorrow. It certainly won't demoralize them as much as having their champions use ray guns to blast their way through three enemy armies... only to then announce that they're not allowed to use said ray guns to fight the fourth and now you guys are going to have to handle it with swords and spears and muskets.

Abstract never-ever-broken self-imposed rules are for situations where standing on principle won't get people killed uselessly.

Now Weber is just mocking me. Damn it, why do you only ever remember the implant forcefield when it's useful to keep characters from getting wet or dirty?

It may actually be for that purpose only- just as it's not obvious that in the future all clothes will be bulletproof. I can think of a number of reasons to have it.

If including that little field generator in your implants is cheap enough, maybe it's worth having one just to never need an umbrella. A heavier-duty field would be specialist hardware, since normal people don't get shot at every day and should properly wear (or have implanted) something unusual to deal with it.

It may be there as a way of reinforcing the skin in reaction to minor injuries (nicks, bruises, getting a teacup thrown at you) without decreasing flexibility and sensitivity the way having kevlar woven into your epidermis would.

Or, on the screwier end of the scale, maybe the culture that invented it had no particular nudity taboo, but was tired of having to deal with things like cold, heat, biting insects, sharp corners, and various other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So they invented force field implants that would keep out snowflakes and mosquitos but not, for example, bullets.

He drew up and watched his men march past. Like the Roman Empire, Pardalian states relied on infantry, and the excellence of their roads stemmed from the same need to move troops quickly. Of course, come to think of it, the same considerations had created the German autobahns and the United States interstate highway system, hadn't they? Some things never seemed to change.

Pardalian roads.

I think this represents an oversimplified approach- sort of a Victor Davis Hanson approach to history, 'I want it to be about the superior armies of the cultures I identify with, so I'll explain everything in terms of them.'

As noted above, roads really are useful for commerce and not just for fighting, and frankly in a stable environment like Pardal, they're more important for trade.

Right, so they still get caught in the rain and have to assault Ortak in the middle of a thunderstorm. But the Malagorans keep steady through the confusion, the first few wear Guard cloaks to confuse pickets, surprise is near total and, thanks to advanced communications with Tam in the main force staring across Ortak's breastworks from their breastworks, the main body attacks more or less simultaneously. Erastor is a crushing victory for the Malagorans.

I'm reminded of Narva,, where much the same happened, only without the attackers even needing radios. Different details, some of the same practical effects.

Still seems insanely dangerous to me, but what do I know?

Enough.

That would be suicide unless the pike formation was really broken- i.e. the pikemen were no longer trying to stand their ground and present a hedge of points. My bet? You'd need multiple point-blank vollies of musket fire to accomplish that, to say the least.

[Ahriman238]

The numbers seem to support Brashan monitoring a largely automated process. 1,000 muskets rifled the first night, 2,000 the second, by the time they break out of Malagor he's apparently up to 4,500 a night.

We see robots doing repair work on ships (Dahak's busy little bots are the only reason he was ever restored to functionality) and cleaning up Colin's suite on Birhat. Not a lot is said about what happens to blue-collar jobs.

Yes, having spears, pikes, billets or bayoneted rifles are useful when things get up close and personal. The Pardalians already have bayonets, the innovation is it ending in a ring that wraps around the barrel, so the gun can still fire with bayonet fixed.



I don't see that as being a crushing advantage, which it isn't much portrayed as here (Tibold says he's looking forward to the first time someone sees bayonets and assumes they can't shoot, but that's about it) whereas in the Safehold books a regiment-scale ambush is foiled, largely because the ambushing force saw the men marching with bayonets fixed and assumed the guns were useless.

I simply don't see that as being important in more than a few special circumstances.

As for local production stepping up. Brashan can quickly rifle large numbers of existing guns, but is much slower to produce new firearms. Plus, they theoretically have a quarter million able-bodied men in Malagor, though Sean eventually caps his field army as a professional fighting force of 60,000. Brashan alone simply can't keep up with demand for an entire army.

[Simon_Jester]

It's... potentially significant, but not decisive. It really makes a difference against certain kinds of enemies, especially infantry forces that rely on sheer aggressiveness to carry the day with melee weapons.

And honestly- if Brashan can rifle two thousand muskets a night he could equip an entire army in a month, with ample oversupply to make up for losses in the field in a few more weeks... I thought the campaign was running longer than that.

What wouldn't be- and probably needn't be- available would be rifles for rear area troops.

[Ahriman238]

@Simon: I agree with almost everything in your second post. Though I never heard of Narva, and only barely of the war it was from.

The implant forcefield is just a bit of an annoyance for me(ok, maybe more than a bit.) I accept without reservation that it won't stop Imperial weapons, but it's only ever shown stopping mud, water and in one case burning oil (not boiling, actually aflame.) Exactly two enhanced characters get shot at with bullets, something firmly quantifiable, and both incidents involved the enhanced person taking multiple hits from very large-caliber bullets at very close ranges, and being taken completely by surprise, perhaps to the point of not raising the field whether or not it was any use.

Lieutenant Carl Bergren was grateful for his bio-enhancement. Without it, he'd have been sweating so hard the security pukes would have arrested him the moment he reported for duty tonight.

His adrenaline tried to spike again, but he pushed it back down and told himself (again) the risk was acceptable.

Implant control of autonomic function again, specifically a lieutenant squashing his nervous reactions, sweat and adrenaline.

He plugged into the computer net and checked the passenger manifest against the people actually boarding the mat-trans. Two of them were technically overweight for their baggage, but it was well within the system's max load parameters, and he decided to let it pass. He made the necessary adjustments to field strength and checked his figures twice, then sent the hypercom transit warning to Birhat. An answering hypercom pulse told him Birhat was up and ready, awaiting reception of the controlled hyper-space anomaly he was about to create, and he sent the transit computer the release code. The control room's soundproofing was excellent, but he still heard the whine of the charging capacitors, and then his readouts peaked as the transmitter kicked over. Another clutch of bureaucrats, temporarily converted into something they were no doubt just as happy they couldn't understand, disappeared into a massive, artificially induced "fold" in hyper-space. The waiting Birhat station couldn't "see" them coming, but, alerted by Bergren's hypercom signal, its receivers formed a vast, funnel-shaped trap in hyper-space. At eight hundred-plus light-years, even the vastest funnel was an impossibly tiny target, but Bergren's calculations flicked the disembodied bureaucrats expertly into its bell-shaped mouth. In his mind's eye, the lieutenant always pictured his passengers rattling and bouncing as they zinged down the funnel and then—instantaneously, as far as they could tell, but 8.5 seconds later by the clocks of the rest of the universe—blinked back into existence on distant Birhat.

Description of mat-trans operation, including vast hyperspace funnel to catch incoming, and the necessity of coordinating between the sending and receiving stations. Mat-trans is not instantaneous, but anything that crosses 100 LY/second is probably close enough.

Shepard Center Station was only one of six mat-trans stations Earth now boasted, and it handled mostly North American traffic, though it also caught a heavier percentage of the through-traffic from Narhan to Birhat and vice versa

Six mat-trans stations on Earth.

"Sorry, gentlemen," he told the Narhani over the speakers in the terminal area. "We've just lost one of our main capacitor banks. Until we get it back, our transmission capacity's down to eighty percent of max."

Ok, I'll just spell out the plan here. The Narhani, as mentioned some time ago, are presenting Colin with a huge statue of a human releasing a Narhani from bondage, at once firmly concrete and highly symbolic. Jefferson had a duplicate of the statue made to house his world-ending bomb. Then he suborns the mat-trans operator to see the statue doesn't arrive, and let him simultaneously send his own statue.

Later, the bomb destroys Birhat, killing Colin and all his inner circle, including Horus. Jefferson effectively becomes Emperor with no higher military or civil authorities, and later investigation of the mat-trans logs reveals anomalies that let him blame the Narhani for the destruction of Birhat, his 'Reichstag fire.' The good people of Colin's Fifth Imperium give him extraordinary emergency powers to deal with the Achuultani (Narhani) menace... Profit?

A soft tone beeped, and Carl Bergren let out a whooshing breath as the Birhat mat-trans operator acknowledged receipt. He'd done it! The person at the other end of the hypercom link didn't realize someone else had invaded the system. He thought he'd just received Bergren's transmission!
The lieutenant suppressed an urge to wipe his forehead. Deep inside, he hadn't really believed his employer could pull it off, and it was hard to keep his elation out of his voice as he activated his mike.

"Birhat has confirmed reception, sir," he told the Narhani spokesman. "If you'd step onto the platform, I can send you through now, as well."

Success. They even separate the Narhani escort with a technical glitch requiring cargo and personnel to be sent separately, as it'd be suspicious if the statue arrived without the half-dozen Narhani sent with it.

He smiled at the thought, then looked back at his link to the hidden control room and its celebrating personnel. Two of them had cracked bottles of champagne, and he watched them pouring their glasses full while they chattered and laughed with the release of long-held tension. They'd worked hard for this moment—and, of course, for the huge pile of credits they'd been promised—and the Lieutenant Governor leaned back in his chair with a sigh of matching relief. They deserved their moment of triumph, and he let them celebrate it for another few minutes, then pressed a button.

Half a world away, the explosive charges three long-dead technicians had installed at his orders detonated. One of the control room personnel had time for a single scream of terror before the plunging roof of the subterranean installation turned him and all his fellows into mangled gruel.

-snip-

It was big, Bergren told himself as he unlocked his flyer, climbed in, and settled into the flight couch. It was really big, and there couldn't be more than a dozen people—probably less—who could have put it all together. Now it was just a matter of figuring out which of those dozen or so it had really been, and little Carl Bergren would live high on the hog for the rest of his natural life.

He smiled and activated his flyer's drive, and the resultant explosion blew two entire levels of the parking garage and thirty-six innocent bystanders into very tiny pieces. Forty minutes later, an anonymous spokesman for the Sword of the Lord claimed responsibility for the blast.

I think Jefferson may actually be a worse boss than Visser Three. He requires you to do your job perfectly, then has you killed anyway.

Short one for now, a single chapter diversion in the high-tech universe, then back to Pardal.

[Simon_Jester]

Jefferson's a lousy boss when he's hiring you to do something horribly illegal that would stain his name for eternity if he got caught, yeah...

[KlavoHunter]

Rule one of assassination: Assassinate the assassins.