Schlock Mercenary

Did they bust open the whole prison? They have solid legal proof that the crew of one ship were imprisoned unjustly, but that was a relatively small ship by Schlock Mercenary standards. That seems like too many people.

Edited by Brickman on Jul 6th 2018 at 10:06:01 AM

That's probably where the UPA and other, similar groups have been storing all the sapients they capture, not just the crew of the Soulward honor.

I feel if the Psychobear at the center of the galaxy wasn't busy, the Puppeh's might have just jumped a couple dozen spots on his To Do List for rowdy species.

Yeah, probably all the people in this prison are innocent. But they can only prove that in court for the crew of one ship, or maybe any other ship that was specifically attacked by the same person.

The crew of that ship would then own the entire facility, including the other prisoners, so things still should hold up.

I don't think the owners of private prisoners are legally allowed to let all the inmates go.

It depends on whose authority they were incarcerated there.

Well, meet our next long-gun victim.

damn it got ninja’d on posting the link.

We haven’t been told very much of local law, but from what we do know, assuming the UPA owns the prison camp, the prison itself would still be forfeit from a properly filed suit due to the slavery taking place there. What would happen to any other inmates/slaves would be determined by laws we, the reader, are not made aware of. What their fate is probably comes down to a) whether or not the prison owners also own the prisoners, b) whether proof can be found that they are illegally incarcerated and c) whether or not the owners of a prison can free the prisoners within at their discretion. And also d) how much the law is going to be followed in this time of crisis.

Checking my Planet Mercenary book, this one is officially off the scale...

And yes, Shoemaker-Levy is once again a real astronomical impact event. Though in this case, it hit Jupiter.

Update. Please tell me this isn't more political crap where the secret arm of the government screws everyone else over "for the greater good."

Clever use of teleportation.

Sigh.. more "government is pure evil" storyline.

Eh, as pointed out in the Facebook group, Tagon's Toughs are known for leaving battleplates dead in their wake. This is Properly Paranoid.

Although, as others have pointed out, this might be ending into the rule against starting wars with Koala gods.

That said, given that Tagon's Toughs more often than not are just incidental to whatever caused the battleplate to be eliminated (and even the one time they were more or less responsible, Tagon himself wasn't giving the order), you'd think the logical thing would be to not put your battleplates next to the Toughs. It doesn't matter that none of the battleplates destroyed are realistically Tagon's credit/fault/responsibility. There's a certain point in which it's just prudent to avoid a situation that is statistically more likely to result in a destroyed battleplate than almost any other.

Having a battleship in your vulnerable insides is still very high security risk. Tagons blew up a hole in Morokweng on their first meeting after being captured, and it was only a mere hull breach because the AI managed to catch it in time and focus the blast away from anything vital.

As well as, yes, having a battleplate in a same location as Toughs is very much taunting Murphy.

Yep.

Edited by Adannor on Jul 10th 2018 at 10:06:24 PM

When your apparent "best-case scenario" is a hull breach that was contained by the AI, you're probably best not poking that hornet's nest.

Does General Bala-Amin not have the authority to say "Hey it would be a really good idea to lift hypernet jamming for a few seconds so Captain Sorlie (a UNS officer who answers to me) can deliver a message"? Or better yet, "I, a UNS General, need to use the hypernet to deliver this urgent (but not necessarily private) message?"

Prayer.

Is General Bala-Amin on the ship with them? If nothing else, she's not in the room with them, so their split-second decision making doesn't involve her.

Convenient narratives.

Last time we saw them, the general was onboard that ship and in the same room as Sorlie.

I mean, I admittedly wouldn't feel secure about anything until the op was over, but yeah, this "confrontation" is going way better than I would have expected if I were in Tagon's shoes, too.

Which, of course, means that he's probably expecting something is about to go wrong.

Well as far as Tagon knows, they're still at risk of random long-gunning.

To be fair, they were following his example.