Out Of The Dark – Snippet 09

Out Of The Dark – Snippet 09

Chapter .IV.







“Expand upon that, please,” he said.





























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34 Responses to Out Of The Dark – Snippet 09

  1. Thirdbase says:

    I assume the weird formatting is an odd case of copy/paste?

    It is easier to ask for forgiveness, than to request permission, especially when the target might get to Level -1 or -2 by the time we get back.

    Just because we don’t use bio or chemical weapons, doesn’t mean we don’t have them.

  2. Bio weapons against people from other planets … large mammals that eat the spaceships are not bio weapons … to repeat a line from my short story in Baen’s universe …it is less likely for a Martian to die of an earthly disease, than for one of my patients to lose his teeth to the chestnut blight…despite the fabrications of that socialist libertine, the Martians were repelled by the heroic actions of the Army and the Fleet…

    We know how to make chemical weapons; we substantially eliminated them except at the bottom end as less effective than alternatives.

  3. Bones says:

    should be interesting to see how they react when they find out just how tough a nut we are to crack. even if we would prefer not to use Nuclear/Biological weapons…

  4. Drak Bibliophile says:

    Thirdbase, the “weird” formatting is problems caused by converted a PDF file to text to Word for snippeting.

  5. They may alternatively conclude that we are a fairly easy nut to crack, even if they are not understanding enough of our economy to execute the ‘nuke ca. 400 oil refineries’ ‘watch non-subsistence population die’ process. On the other hand, they may be sufficiently fond of dry warmth to be the latest empire to demonstrate how easy it is to invade Afghanistan. So long as you remember to leave very very quickly thereafter.

  6. Tim says:

    Well, it would appear the earleir allusions to the Iraq War might be a foreshadowing of what happens when a vastly superior military force conducts all of its war planning based upon assumptions that the adversary (1) plays by your rules and (2) gives up when it’s “beaten”.

  7. robert says:

    And the Iraqis didn’t even have the assistance of supernatural critters. But that is all so yesterday.

  8. Doug Lampert says:

    I haven’t read the short story, but: Any interstellar invader should be ABLE to exterminate the human race if it needs to. This is especially true if they think our current nuke arsenals are small and consider Bio-warfare normal.

    Unless they’re morons they can kill us all. Therefor most interstellar invaders are morons.

    Mind, supernatural space vampires might change things. But also relevant, is that in this case they’d STRONGLY prefer to take us alive (both to have our labor and because the other races might object to extermination), this conditions them toward what is (for them) limited warfare. So they probably WON’T exterminate us. But any plausible plotline that involves humans remaining free should also involve some sort of negotiated settlement.

  9. Grant says:

    @Doug: I get the impression the Shongairi would like humans alive, but it isn’t a deal breaker. So I would expect things to start as a conquest but if things start going really badly the humans better find a way to take control of the orbitals fast or the Shongairi will just back out then carpet the planet with kinetic strikes and take the real estate as a second best outcome.

  10. The discussion of available weapons does not seem to suggest that the Shongairi actually view kinetic strike as an option. It may perhaps be viewed as being much less practical than hydrogen bombing.

  11. Randy says:

    @10 Based on what’s available at Google Books, the Shogari used kinetic weapons

  12. evilauthor says:

    Keep in mind that the Shongairi are YEARS from any possible source of resupply and reinforcement…or even calling for help. That right there could be an exploitable weakness. What the Shongairi brought with them is all they have. The people who sent them out won’t even know anything’s wrong until a courier spends several years reaching them.

  13. Daryl says:

    Turtledove had humans in the middle of WW2 being invaded by aliens who had very similar technology to us now except for space travel similar to what is described here. Thus one of their Abrams equiv tanks would easily destroy the Wehrmacht’s Tigers unless the Germans developed guerilla tactics, their F22 type jets gained air superiority quickly, and you get the picture. But as evilauthor @12 says their impossibly long supply lines and being greatly outnumbered went against them. An interesting twist he had was that powdered ginger turned out to be a very addictive hard drug for them and the humans exploited that.

  14. Tim says:

    Never underestimate divide and conquer tactics. Cortes conquered Mexico with a ridiculously small force relative to his adversaries and a logistics issue of comparable difficulty (imagine resupply when your transportation system is fifteenth century vessels across an ocean, then human carriers without wheeled transport across a thousand miles of mountains). He cleverly mixed the shock value of his superior weaponry and tactics when it was necessary with the forces of local allies who hated the Aztecs (but hadn’t learned to hate the Spaniards).

  15. Doug Lampert says:

    @13, and they were morons. This is pretty well required for an interstellar culture to lose. They have to NOT THINK of really big kinetic strikes, they have to NOT THINK of biowarfare. Those are things they pretty well HAVE TO be equiped for to do their job of colonizing against even 0.0 resistance.

    Turtledove had to give them tech substantially worse than we have today (they were basically the 1990 military, no uAVs, no decent modern communications, and we’re no where close to interstellar travel), he gave them almost no creativity or ability to adapt, he gave them traitors, he made them horribly vulnerable to addiction to a common substance, he gave them a “convienent” destruction of the ship with the main nuke stockpile, he had them NEVER do even a single kinetic strike, he had them NEVER even consider bio-warfare or using adictive substances against us. And they still ended up with over half the planet 40 years down the line.

  16. robert says:

    Based on the book blurb (Amazon), the cities of Earth will be radioactive wrecks.

    Didn’t Heinlein or somebody write a story about one man, a sharpshooter, who singlehandedly defeated either an alien or a Russian invasion? Published in Analog? So far we have three: a hunter, a Ukrainian soldier and a US Marine. More to come? Besides the bloodsuckers, I mean.

  17. Mike S says:

    Something to consider:

    The military technology and capabilities we have today are a direct response to forgoing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. When the US decided on “flexible response” and decided not to deploy neutron weapons to defeat the “Evil Empire’s” tank avalanche, the US Army came up with AirLand Battle and adapted and developed the weapons to execute it. The C4ISR needed to quickly acquire, identify and engage multiple targets and axis/centers of operations with both area (cluster/multiple warhaed munitions air, missile, rocket and artillery delivered) or point targets (precision guided weapons). Tactics and operational art inteaded to force the pace of operations and exploit enemy weakness and mistakes and to fight across the depth and breadth of the battlefield. We have substituted technology alternatives to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

    The other side of the coin is that if the Shongairi see the use of such weapons as a normal part of their method of war, there is every reason to believe that the development of their conventional command and control, doctrine, weapons and tactics would be stunted. It would be as if the US military had never evolved beyound the atomic battlefield and the technology of the 1950s. You can’t equip a race with advanced conventional weapons, technology and doctrine if they never needed it to replace weapons that were removed from use.

  18. Drak Bibliophile says:

    Robert, blurbs are often wrong and in this case definitely wrong.

    Many of Earth’s major cities were destroyed but they were destroyed by kenetic weapons.

  19. dancingShadow says:

    Well, the other side of the coin is that Bio and Nuclear Weapons, and especially big kinetic strikes, are a real mess to clean up after. Especially if you want to do something with the area you hit.

    Nuclear Weapons: Depends on how “clean” they are. If you use really dirty ones you can forgett about colonisation.

    Kinetic Strike: Same as nuklear, use too big ones and you have a nice desert bare any life. Use far too big ones and you can say goodbye to the whole planet.

    Bioweapons: Controlled bioweapons would probably work best. How to controlle bioweapons? Oh thats simply. We have thousands of experts for that on the planet. Just ask a doctor how to controll a diseases. The problem is that these tiny little things tent to change faster then you can look.

    So all 3 of these weapons have a big problem as far as conquering a planet for colonisation is concerned: Making the colonisation impossible/ incredible difficulty/ very costy (time and or resorces)

    just my 2 cents

  20. Doug Lampert says:

    @16, Yep, it’s perfectly possible that their “conventional” military is horribly stunted compared to what ours would be at equivalent tech. The key words are “what ours would be at equivalent tech”. Because we’re not even in the right LEAGUE to be in the same tech. Stunted tech will still piggyback a bit of the civilian sector.

    And they can beat us with purely civilian shit and half a brain. Bioengineering is useful. The ability to drop rocks is a neccessary side-light of their ability to move at the speed and ease they’ve shown.

    But even for stunted military tech. Based purely on their ability to reach orbit with that much shit, they are several generations ahead of us on propulsion and power systems, and almost everything military is critically dependent on those. So they’re stunted one or even two generations, that still leaves them several generations ahead on the military tech that they don’t actually need in the first place.

    But that’s only based on their ability to put lots of stuff in orbit. Once they are in orbit they can travel many light years in 5 years. Let’s say they are 8 times the speed of light. That’s roughly equivalent to sending warfleets at Mach 8,000,000 for multiyear cruises. Our best ships long duration ships move at noticably less than Mach 0.1 (officially they’re about half that, but DoD maximum speed figures aren’t to be trusted). That makes them 80,000,000 times as fast, by comparison that fast ship of ours is about 2,000 times as fast as a snail. So measured in multiples of speed, we’re well over twice as far from them as a snail is from the USNavy. Wonderful. I’m sure snails could take us if they just had an appropriate military doctrine….

    Doctrine we can easily be ahead on. But that doctrine depends on comm that they can kill, and on the ability of our faster orders to be orders to do something EFFECTIVE. “Oh look, that spot’s radiating, drop a rock on it.”

    Plausibly losing an interstellar invasion against our tech isn’t like Turtledove’s _War World_, it’s his “The road not taken”.

  21. Doug Lampert says:

    @18: Bioweapons that hit humans are somewhat less likely to hit aliens than they are to hit trees. How many people die of Oak Blight per year.

  22. Tim says:

    I’m dubious that an alien race could concoct an effective bioweapon in anything short of a couple of years. They’re notoriously tricky to engineer for us, and we have a greater database than they could have in the short term. There is always the balance between too virulent and it burns out before it propogates, and not virulent enough and all we get is a nasty cold.

  23. Robert H. Woodman says:

    @18, 20, 21 The problems with developing bioweapons by the Shongairi for use against humans are manifold.

    First is genetic code. Do Shongairi and humans use a similar genetic code with the same 4 nucleotides (5 if you count the uracil used in RNA)? If not, then the first thing the Shongairi need to do is get up to speed on genetic information storage and transfer on this planet.

    Second,you have to find the best vector for introducing the weapon; the vector must be specific for the target host (i.e., humans) and it must be aggressive at invading the target host. Viruses do this very well.

    Third is latency. Ebola makes a lousy bioweapon because it has a short latency and high mortality. Thus the disease burns out quickly by the simple expedient of quarantining the sick and letting them die. HIV is also a lousy bioweapon because it has a years-to-decades-long latency followed by a slow, insidious dying. Plus, there are some people who, by reason of genetics, appear to be immune to HIV infection. Smallpox is the type of virus that makes a great bioweapon, but presumably, the Shongairi don’t know that yet. Polio could be another good bioweapon with some engineering.

    Fourth is containment. Once the bioweapon hits the target and begins spreading to other targets, you still need to make sure that the vector won’t jump species, say to chimpanzees or, worse from the Shongairi’s point of view, to Shongairi.

    Humans eschewed bioweapons because they are a REALLY BAD idea from our perspective. In point of fact, I would question the sanity of someone who thinks that we can engineer bioweapons that we can fully control. Maybe at some hypothetical point in the future that’s doable, but not in our present day and time it’s not.

  24. Robert H. Woodman says:

    Hmmm. I guess I’d better clarify my point @23.

    I was speaking of biologically-based bioweapons. A number of other things, such as nerve gas and certain types of chemical poisons, can also be considered bioweapons, but I was not speaking of them, just of the biologically-based bioweapons.

  25. Drak Bibliophile says:

    I don’t know who would consider “nerve gas & chemical poisons” bioweapons. They would rightly be called chemical weapons.

    Created or natural diseases would be the likely bioweapons but it might be possible to create multi-cell animals that could be used as bioweapons.

    By the way, the Shongairi won’t be using any sort of bioweapons in the primary attack.

    Also, their conventional weapons are only slightly more advanced than what they used to conquer their home world. When they conquered their home world, they were less advanced than current humans.

    Since then, they have only fought on planetary surfaces species much less advanced than humans. Within the Hegemony, nobody fights on after the enemy control the orbitals.

    Mind you, if humans were “smart”, we’d surrender. [Wink]

  26. corpronj says:

    The Shongairi come from an empire witch has an undefined number of client species and is subordinate to a hegemony which has many more. There are also a large number of species on record that have wiped themselves out but been observed before they attained Level 1 technology. So far the implication is that they all compete for the same types of terrestrial oxygen atmosphere planets. It seems to me that given this type of knowledge base and the type of support needed for any colonization of an alien biosphere that they should be easily capable of tailoring a virus and spreading it through the atmosphere. It also seems a good point that anything that affected us would be very unlikely to affect them. Bioweapons therefore become a very attractive solution if we are simply too much trouble. However, if they succsessfully used them it wouldn’t be a very good book so they’ll most likely have some type of problem with them.

  27. Grant says:

    @dancingshadow: Kinetics aren’t that problematic a weapon to use for either conquest or invasion/extermination with the goal of holding a useable planet afterwards. You don’t need to use them to kill everyone, wiping significant population centers and military installations would get most of the job done for either objective and it’s relatively easily accomplished without much chance of catastrophic micalculations (the difference between a city-killing projectile and an “oops, I made the continent uninhabitable” projectile is rather large, no species capable of interstellar flight is going to make an error of that magnitude calculating something as straight forward as the kinetic yield of a simple projectile, and if the cities themselves become wiped of life, meh. They’re tiny fractions of the total land area and they can always be reclaimed later.

    If the fighting starts going badly for the Shongairi they should have no reservations about just standing off and raining rocks down from orbit on anything that stands out as needing some hammering down… which means the defense will need some way to stop that from happening or they’re toast. Earth will have to take the orbitals before the Shongairi write off trying to pacify the planet with ground-based operations or they lose.

    @Robert: all valid points about the problems with bioweapons, except perhaps the containment issue when we’re talking about use between extra-terrestrial species. The odds of any bioweapon effective against humans being physiologically compatible with a species that emerged and evolved on another planet (even allowing for extensive mutation once it is released) is astronomically remote.

  28. Daryl says:

    @26, good stories to illustrate the use of kinetic weapons are Niven’s Footfall and Lucifer’s Hammer. These used a single largish strike to sufficiently disrupt the Earth’s weather, degrade our economies, and use as a warning that future resistance would invite more. Humanity’s response was to build an Orion based battleship launched by tactical nukes under an enormous base plate. That then deployed sting ships that were essentially a small single person life support system around single 16 inch self loading naval guns firing nuclear lasing rod equipped shells.

  29. Randy says:

    @14 Cortez didn’t begin the conquest with mass atrocities. Also the Shongari didn’t just hit the US, they hit everyone.

  30. Randy says:

    I know all of the Navy’s surface units are toast. I wonder what remains of the (submarine) ballistic missile force.

  31. Robert H. Woodman says:

    @25 Drak —

    Nerve gas — okay, not a bioweapon, but in the category of chemical poisons as bioweapons, you have (to name just three well-known examples) aflatoxin, diptheria toxin, and botulism toxin. All three are biologically derived chemicals, but they are chemicals, are stored and handled as chemicals, and are considered bioweapons.

    Your comments about the level of surface warfare technology made me think of Eric’s series with K. D. Wentworth, “The Course of Empire” and “The Crucible of Empire”.

  32. Mike S says:

    Another point: economy of force.

    The cost of boosting military ground forces into orbit and then transporting them light years may be enormous. As such, you have to economize by either: a) deploying a force so technologically superior as to get away with the smallest numbers possible, or: b) deploy a force sufficiently technologically advanced to win, but not so advanced as to generate a unbearable transit cost. A 1914 army will beat a much larger army based on military science of 1862. A force based on 1862 tech would have a significant advantage over one based on tech from 1550, the beginning of effective black powder small arms and artillery. So either the Shongairi have a very small, high tech force or they have a larger force that was based on tech that could take on a society whose military capabilities were that Parma or even Gonsava (or even Cortes).

  33. Mike S says:

    Not sure unguided kenetic weapons would have much effect on manuevering ships when fired from orbit. Much like using ballistic missiles w/o a terminal homing capability.

  34. Grant says:

    @Mike: Depends what velocities the projectiles could be fired at and how large they are. Ships may maneuver, but they maneuver relatively slow. And you don’t need a direct hit, smash a decent sized rock at very high speed into the general vicinity of a fleet and you can take the whole thing out with the blast effect whether you hit any of them or not. Smash a larger rock into the ocean and you don’t even need to be “in the general vicinity”, naval ships may be built tough but very large tsunamis are nasty things to deal with.

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