Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

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Belgarion213
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Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Belgarion213 »

Wow, when viewed from an enemy the KMS is fucking horrifying. We get to see the attack which seems to be going well so far.

I really liked Lieutenant Gen Lun Ba Ru, I hope he survives, maybe as a prisoner of war or the like. He's to cool to die in one chapter. The fact that he had no idea about the Dreamers probably hints that not everybody in the Syndicate would be exactly pleased with the torturing of small children for military advantage.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Wolfee »

Excellent chapter! BUT DAMN IT!! Fel proved me right! I knew, I just knew he was going to do a 2 parter with a cliff hanger in the middle of it one way or another!! I wanted to say something a week or two ago to ask Fel not to put a cliff hanger in it, but I knew then he'd to it for sure! LOL! Dammit!
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Fel »

You will see Gen again. He's too much of a soldier and too good at what he does to die so easily.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by kyli »

Fel wrote:You will see Gen again. He's too much of a soldier and too good at what he does to die so easily.
He is really pissed off but i hope it isnt going to be a bad thing that he is still alive. I'd wager that Jason and Gen will fight against one another during the battle in the next chapter. But I'm hoping he will be the first Benga to join the House of Karinne. He sounds like a decent chap.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

I think the moon is the only habitable location in system. So if the confederation denies the enemy hyperspace access in this system, then the only way for surviving benga forces to keep living, due to their damaged, destroyed or adandoned ship, is to evacuate to the moon. Not really the safest option, but it's this or surrender.

Can these antimatter storms be done again in varying strengths? Imagine the chaos he could cause in their rim systems. With out the dreamers, the syndicate would never had realised that system was in danger, and it likely has lots of sensory systems for security. So how much warning would an ordinary rim system have of such storms.

The evacuated dreamers, were they sent to a central location or dispersed to as many ships involved in their shipping? At some point they will need to be gathered together as I am no sure 10000 is enough for a sustainable population. It would make it simpler to free them using a nexus bridge. While they attempted to gather villages for the evacuation, I bet they started with those dreamers already in their possession, the enslaved oracles. Which if they wish to rebuild the dreamer race, need to be fully healed from their captivity, and allowed to live past the point at which oracles are disposed off to ensure they could not escape. Want to bet they are all dreaming of a whole new range of possibilities, and an actual chance of living free from the benga. Even the broken ones might be drawn to wanting more.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by MartinK »

Belgarion213 wrote:I really liked Lieutenant Gen Lun Ba Ru, I hope he survives, maybe as a prisoner of war or the like. He's to cool to die in one chapter. The fact that he had no idea about the Dreamers probably hints that not everybody in the Syndicate would be exactly pleased with the torturing of small children for military advantage.
Fel doesn't change viewpoints much, so when he does its a character we will see again.

But... you don't tell your grunts all your secrets. In a military, your superiors aren't even usually in the mood to explain their commands to those they expect to execute them. That just happens in bad books where authors don't have a better idea how to explain things to the reader without making it obvious when they do.

That a grunt wasn't aware of a secret doesn't tell me anything about how said grunt would react to torturing of little aliens. Humans of the past certainly had no problems convincing whole nations that slavery of people who looked slightly different was totally acceptable.

There have been people who suceeded in teaching an ape or monkey to talk in sign language. I certainly believe it would take me ages to learn that. Yet, no nation on earth sees any ape or monkey as anything other than an animal and it certainly isn't murder if you happen to kill one. Heck, there are places in africa where it is acceptable to eat such an ape or monkey. It's called bushmeat. Fun (or not so fun) fact: That's supposedly how A.I.D.S. started.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

I wonder how high his rank. It seems like the syndicate ships will have epic losses, but he might be one of the highest ranked officers on the small craft. He might end up in charge of attempts to combat the confess or simply Incharge of the POW.

The QE communication systems might have been too simple to transmit the battle to their superiors, they could send the records to the fleets protected by the gas giant. So there is a chance they will get an opportunity to alter their tactics or refit weapons to fire ion weaponry. I am pretty sure the ip armor can deal with ion weapons, but altered tactics would allow them to manage their losses.
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Belgarion213
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Belgarion213 »

Well he's a lieutenant so he can't be TO high up...but his internal monologue seems to indicate that this was a cushy reward job for somebody who has been a REAL good soldier. So he probably has more authority than his relatively junior rank might indicate.

That said, you have a point, this is the first time that the Syndicate really gets the idea that somebody can cross the gulf between galaxy in under a year. More, because of the almost instant information that's going to start spreading soon, and people are going to be trying to disable the ships to find out HOW.

One thing that we haven't brought up yet is a point that he thought about when considering his squad. While the Syndicate likd to get telepaths into their Warmech's because of the advantages, they couldn't field full telepath squadrons...apart from the grou that went with the fleet to attack the mily way.

While the Syndicate has thousands of worlds to build on, with huge population to draw from, the Confederacy might have taken a significant chunk of their telepaths away from them. The Benga, unlike the Dreamers or the Fey, are not 100% telepaths after all, though what telepaths they have are apparently strong and skilled.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Belgarion213 »

Sorry for the double post, however a question just popped into my mind while re-reading the latest chapter.

the KMS has been using the rail guns for a while, and in space there's no friction to well..burn up or stop a Rail Slug that's fired. Do the KMS track the trajectories of the slugs they fire and go and stop them or is somebody going to have a real bad time when a rail slug fired god knows when comes out of nowhere and slams into some random ship/planet? (Yeah incredibly small odds due to how ludicrously large space is but it COULD happen....
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Fel »

Belgarion213 wrote:Sorry for the double post, however a question just popped into my mind while re-reading the latest chapter.

the KMS has been using the rail guns for a while, and in space there's no friction to well..burn up or stop a Rail Slug that's fired. Do the KMS track the trajectories of the slugs they fire and go and stop them or is somebody going to have a real bad time when a rail slug fired god knows when comes out of nowhere and slams into some random ship/planet? (Yeah incredibly small odds due to how ludicrously large space is but it COULD happen....
Rail slugs? Pft.

Think about all the GRAF shots that weren't stopped/absorbed flying around in the Milky way.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

The Graf might have infinite range, but I bet at a certain point it begins to disperse on it own.

For the really powerful rail gun slugs, they can't maintain integrity on a long term basis. The slugs themselves begin to disperse.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Wolfee »

SYED wrote:The Graf might have infinite range, but I bet at a certain point it begins to disperse on it own.

For the really powerful rail gun slugs, they can't maintain integrity on a long term basis. The slugs themselves begin to disperse.
Rail slugs should start to burn up in an a dense enough atmosphere and be buffered aka slowed down some by an atmosphere. If I i remember, rail slugs are nothing but replicated iron and titanium, so they should melt or burn at speed in atmosphere. But rail slugs do not have a truly unlimited range. For the purposes of any battle in a solar system, yes. Trans-solar, at those extended ranges and flight times, even faint gravity sources will have an effect.

GRAF salvos will disoppate over time and extremely long ranges. If energy did not disoppate over distance, pulsars and supernovas would have destroyed large portions of each galaxy by now. Not to mention, in spite of the transgalactic drive, there is a LOT of empty space out there, so odds are no one is gonna have a bad day.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by artreus »

am I the only one wondering if the interdiction is just not mentioned ( going on behind the scenes) ,
or forgotten by fel ? <blasphemy?>

they are in the middle of benga galaxy, benga have real time hyperjump ,
so reinforcements should be able to arrive within 2 hours max.

reading the story, i seem to remember that jason thought the battle would take weeks,
Lorna estimated that it would take them three weeks to secure the moon, with the major operation of taking the Benga’s city and the major military installations in the system taking three days
and i am guessing the initial battle between the fleets probably already took 1 hour or more to get this far ?

so they should be getting the interdiction into logaritmic mode by now, if the want to prevent benga reinforcements from entering the battle ?
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by SoronelHaetir »

artreus wrote:am I the only one wondering if the interdiction is just not mentioned ( going on behind the scenes) ,
or forgotten by fel ? <blasphemy?>

they are in the middle of benga galaxy, benga have real time hyperjump ,
so reinforcements should be able to arrive within 2 hours max.

reading the story, i seem to remember that jason thought the battle would take weeks,
Lorna estimated that it would take them three weeks to secure the moon, with the major operation of taking the Benga’s city and the major military installations in the system taking three days
and i am guessing the initial battle between the fleets probably already took 1 hour or more to get this far ?

so they should be getting the interdiction into logaritmic mode by now, if the want to prevent benga reinforcements from entering the battle ?
I too was wondering about that, seems like something that should have been started just about the time they knew the anti-matter stream was going to miss the moon. There may be more ships present than they were counting on but you also wouldn't want to let them increase that number, regardless of most of their weapons being useless.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 4, (spoilers)

Post by Rakshasa claw »

I'd imagine that chances are decent that interdiction DID occur. We simply didn't get shown any information about it, because none of the character point-of-views that Fel gave us really were actually interested in the interdiction starting. Jason would have been that only person that would be "in the loop" as it were, but he's more focused on the upcoming ground battles and the actual success of the attack than worrying about activating a relatively trivial (from Karinne perspective) piece of technology that they've used for years now.
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