The Imperial armada will reach the Virgilian System three days hence only to learn that McCormac has led his fleet to Beta Crucis to secure Satan. McCormac will leave a light vessel to guard Port Frederiksen on Dido and Darthan mercenary scout ships to patrol the system and attack any arriving Josipist craft. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that these deployments are heavy with future significance. Attacked by a Darthan, Flandry's first command, Asieneuve, will crash land on Dido. However, after slogging across the Didonian surface, Flandry will capture that light vessel in Port Frederiksen, thus acquiring the enemy codes and defeating the McCormac Rebellion. Poul Anderson makes it sound so easy. But the larger problems of Aaron Snelund and Emperor Josip must still be addressed. Josip is part of the solution to his own problem. He "'...won't outlast [his mother] by much, the way he treats his organism. And he won't have children - not him!'" (II, p. 19)
However, the succession crisis will cause another civil war but that is a later installment.
10 comments:
There are real cases fairly similar to the plot bones of THE REBEL WORLDS. The German naval codebook was captured from the cruiser "Magdeburg" in November of 1914 -- and the Germans didn't change their codes until 1917!
And the German diplomatic code was captured when a German agent named Wassmus operating undercover in southern Persia (a British sphere of operations) was forced to abandon his baggage. The code was discovered in it... and used to decode the Zimmerman Telegraph, which was in turn instrumental in bringing the US into the war.
(The Zimmerman Telegraph was a dispatch to the German embassy in Mexico, offering to give Texas and other "lost territories" to Mexico if they came into the war, and California to Japan(!). That was intended to bribe Japan to switch sides. You can imagine how that played in America.)
Incidentally the above illustrates that Germans are, generally speaking, absolutely terrible at intelligence work. Things like that happened in WW1, WW2 and during the Cold War.
I remember the issue of German un-Intelligence came up before probably when discussing the Black Chamber books.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: But it would have been far better for the Empire if Josip had done his dynastic duty of begetting an indisputably legitimate heir to succeed him as Emperor.
Mr. Stirling: Astonishing what you said about the incompetence of the Germans! * I * would have changed my military and diplomatic codes at regular intervals. And certain sensitive documents, like the Zimmerman Telegram, would be too important to send except by a courier escorted by guards.
That said, I doubt any Mexican attempt to regain the lost territories would have been effective. Mexico was too weak and torn by revolution and civil war to be a serious danger to the US.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Just so, which made the Zimmerman Telegram even more stupid.
And to put the cherry on the whipped cream, when the text of the telegram was published and he was asked about it, instead of denying it and claiming it was a British fabrication (which many anti-British Americans already believed) Zimmerman confirmed to the press that the telegram was genuine!
You could not make this up.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
When even a TOTAL amateur like me can think of some of the most basic and elementary precautions needed for Intelligence work, I am STUNNED by the stupefying incompetence of the Germans!
The Germans are in so many ways an extremely able and intelligent people, and they can't have more than the usual average number of idiots any nation will have, so I don't understand how or why they can be such bunglers about spy work.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: different cultural backgrounds and institutional habits.
Russians, on the other hand, tend to be -very good- at intelligence work, subversion, infiltration, disinformation, etc.
Fortunately they're bad at other things. The Soviet government at its highest levels never made full use of the intelligence resources they had at their disposal, and often wasted time trying to find things that weren't there but which their paranoid political culture and ideology insisted -must- be there.
(Everyone projects their own experience onto others, often misleading themselves in the process, but the USSR's top circles were more given to it than most.)
This is a longstanding phenomenon. The "Okhrana", the Czarist secret police, was one of the few departments of the Russian government of that era that actually worked well.
They predicted the Revolution repeatedly and urgently, and were ignored.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
But what were the "...cultural backgrounds and institutional habits" that made the Germans so bad at Intelligence work?
I am rather sorry Horst von Duckler was killed in SHADOWS OF ANNIHILATION. He seems to have been LEARNING, unlike most Germans in Intelligence.
I agree that the paranoia induced by Marxism Leninism in the USSR fortunately caused its higher levels to make incompetent use of its intelligence services.
The impression I got of the late Tsarist era was not of paranoia but of laxity, incompetence, or fatalism. Of being unwilling to take seriously the information presented to the Tsarist gov't by the Okhrana. A pity their warnings, even pleas, were ignored!
Ad astra! Sean
Horst would have made a good ally for the Black Chamber against common enemies later.
Kaor, Paul!
I had not thought of that, but it makes sense! The US and Germany might have felt compelled to shelve their quarrels to ally against Japan, for example. I'm going to be very interested in reading Stirling's fourth BLACK CHAMBER book!
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment