trans_9 | After action [open]

Thrawn had gathered and reviewed every scrap of information Stacy had about the disastrous battle with the Ohm--every after-action report, every camera angle. Now, in the Sensorium, he was watching the skirmish unfold in three unsettling dimensions. It was a reconstruction, only as good as the crews' accounts and his own tactical skill. The latter, at least, was formidable.

Parts of the battlefield were empty, grayed-out in a literal "fog of war," where Thrawn had too little information to fill them in. They shifted and flowed as the fight progressed, crewmembers and Ohm disappearing into them and then popping back into existence where the records picked up again.

Gradually, however, the blank spaces were disappearing, as Thrawn ran various scenarios and decided on the most likely. Combat would pause, reverse itself, and then resume with tiny differences, again and again, as bit by bit, with infinite patience, the Grand Admiral recreated the battle to his satisfaction.

If he had any say in the matter, no confrontation with the Ohm would go so poorly again.

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Thrawn looked at Leon for a long moment, one eyebrow raised in amused skepticism, but he couldn't very well make an attempt to claim authority in a system if he refused to acknowledge that system.

"What about them?" he asked rhetorically. "They would seem to have had no outright tactical goal in this case beyond destruction, but didn't take advantage of that by seeking to avoid enemy combatants and simply maximizing infrastructural damage and civilian casualties. Cargn appears to be correct that they're a hive mind under centralized control. Their performance did not decay as they lost units, suggesting that the hive mind is not an emergent feature, or is one of such a small number of individuals that it doesn't matter. Individuals seem to lack either pain or flight responses, but I can't determine if that means they likewise lack any mental or emotional individuality.

"In this case, they responded to resistance in a confused fashion, as though the controlling mind were taken aback. I don't know if that reaction will reoccur. If it does, crew organization will present a greater advantage than I'd thought. If not, it was a wasted opportunity."

"I wouldn't count on that reaction reoccurring," he stated, regarding Thrawn with the same lack of emotion he regarded everyone else. It's not like Leon didn't know that he had little right to call himself Captain, Acting or otherwise, and that was probably grossly ill-suited for the job anyway, but the responsibility fell to him. He wasn't going to back down from it. He owed it to the crew to do the best he could.

Even if that meant part of this gig was evaluating potential replacements.

"They were on a schedule," Leon pointed out. "If you take the crew out of the equation, odds are the planet would have been razed to a smoking cinder in a half-hour flat, if that long." It's not like Leon hadn't been pouring through a ton of reports himself. He was simply less interested in crew mistakes and more worried about Ohm success, and why the Ohm bothered to spare them.

"Our presence was likely deemed inconsequential. A few hundred poorly organized individuals shouldn't have been able to make a dent against a force that size. The fact that we disrupted their timeline caught them off guard. They still could've killed us, but it would've taken more time and resources than they were willing to commit for that particular operation." All of which was relatively obvious if you stopped to look at the big picture long enough, and all of which pointed to something far bigger and more disturbing.

"It suggests they've never encounter resistance before. They don't appear to have the tactics to deal with it. Given that, they might have the capacity to learn, or they might not. With a long enough time scale, this might be purely evolved behavior." Thrawn shook his head and rewound the battle to the beginning with a thought. "There are too many variables to reach a firm conclusion about the Ohm right now. Any attempt to do so will be merely a reflection of our own biases."

"Except we've been told that they've encountered resistance before." The best guess he had simply said they didn't expect as much resistance from the crew as what they got.

"Most of the information we have on them is sketchy at best, anyway. This is the most concrete information we finally have on them, and I still can't draw a motive from it." And that bothered him.

"Hmm. A experienced commander would have reacted better than that. Perhaps they can't learn, or perhaps information is somehow compartmentalized across the species." He snorted. "Or perhaps they're incompetent tacticians and rely on brute force."

Thrawn considered the matter for a moment, staring off into the middle distance. "Do they produce any cultural artifacts? Art in any form?"

That was an interesting question. "None that I'm aware of. Though all we've ever seen of them is the destruction they leave behind.

"You think they could be further down the evolutionary chain than what we give them credit for."

"That's a mischaracterization of evolution--go swimming with a hungry shark and see how far up the evolutionary chain you feel," Thrawn replied dryly. "Still, I think it's possible they're not sentient in the way we understand the term."

Leon's facial expression briefly shifted from his usual neutral line-face to something that seemed like a quickly halted roll of the eyes. Honestly, once you've faced an alligator the size of an eighteen wheeler, nothing much compares.

That said, point still taken.

"If they're not, that makes their motives obscenely simple, and makes stopping them all the more harder." After all, you can't negotiate a peace treaty with a hungry lion.

Edited 2010-07-07 17:10 (UTC)

"But they also won't be able to adapt." Thrawn shrugged slightly. "A trade-off, like everything else in war."

He gestured to the reconstruction. "They didn't innovate during this. It's not conclusive, since many human commanders aren't capable of doing so that quickly, but it is suggestive."

"But they're still effective," he noted, watching the reconstruction. "How much adapting do you need to do when you have that kind of force?"

After action [open]

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