Merseians and Terrans maneuver, snipe and even fight in the Syrax Cluster. If the Merseians gain control of that cluster, then:
they will outflank Antares, gaining a spearhead against an entire Imperial Sector;
this will, with 71% probability, hasten the Fall of the Empire by 100 years + or - 10;
bring the predicted date of the Fall to 150 years hence;
but Terra will not counterattack because that would invite counter-counter-attack even against Terra itself.
150 or 250 years is nothing on an interstellar scale especially to people with antisenescence. The Terran attitude is incomprehensible. Terra gains the cluster but uses it as a bastion. Later, when the Merseian attempt to detach the Taurian Sector from the Empire has been defeated, Dennitza counterattacks a military target, Chereion, and thus damages the Roidhunate without making a genocidal attack on a populated planet.
4 comments:
Human beings are inherently given to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning -- which are fancy technical terms for the phenomenon summed up by "the wish is father to the thought".
The Terran Empire is seriously averse to getting into a fight, and so finds reasons not to even when objective analysis says it would be a good idea.
This is the source of what I call "wargamer's disease" in fiction, or in critique -- imagining real people dealing with real politics acting as detached, objective analysts the way wargamers can.
The difference is the emotional commitments that people engaged in -real- politics and war necessarily have.
I think I also remember a comment by one of the Meresian characters that he finds the High Command's faith in computer projections of things like the timing of the fall of the Terran Empire to be touching and naive.
Aycharaych.
Kaor, to Both!
I think you are being a bit too hard on the Empire. After all, Terra did successfully oppose Merseia's seizure of the Syrax cluster. Those computer projections Aycharaych was so skeptical of still had the Empire falling a minimum 150 years later, after all the current leaders of Terra would be dead. So Merseian annexation of the cluster would not affect THEM. Instead we see the Empire RESISTING Merseian expansionism here. Terra was not completely inert and supine and cared enough about the great grand children to fight back. That alone would make nonsense of those computer projections. We should probably think of the Empire surviving another 250, not 150 years.
Ad astra! Sean
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