Good news: your husband and many other people you thought were dead are actually alive! Bad news: you left them all behind.
Galaxion
Life. Love. Hyperspace.
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And the prospects of fixing the ship enough to go back are dicey at the moment…
Yeah, good luck convincing Fusella to use the jump engine again even if they could get things running smoothly again.
Congratulations: your instincts were right and you let yourself be overruled by common sense
The burden of command.
Leaving was a stupid thing to do at the time even without knowing this. It made no sense to me.
I disagree — the top priority must be to get the information back home! Before the Galaxion made the jump back, a perfectly good interpretation of data available Earthside would be that hyperspace jumps is a dangerous technology which two times out of three disintegrates the ship, which is reasonable cause to shut down all research projects on this technology; in reality three of three ships made it through with at worst some damages but only the crew on the Galaxion knew that! Upon finding the wreck of the Hiawata down on not-quite-Earth, it makes sense to send down a team to investigate, since this poses is no apparent threat to the overall mission, but the discovery that the planet is ruled by mind-controlling aliens makes a huge difference in any risk/benefit assessment! By leaving, they ensure that Earth can start assembling an expedition properly equipped to deal with this threat, even if that will take several months. Staying carries a significant risk of the aliens taking control, in which case the best scenario for the Galaxion crew is that they get commandeered on a multi-year detour transporting the aliens home.
Even if it feels bad at the moment, the General probably chose the path that delivers a lower expected time to rescue for her husband.
No, it was a wise strategic decision of getting out while they could get out, before entangling themselves with issues that would have ended the mission. It was putting the ship, the FTL drive and the mission above the survivors. That is how command decision looks like: choosing between what lives you will take responsibility for and what not.
It was a wise decision in view of the following facts:
- that the FTL drive did not work as advertised and nearly wrecked the ship during operation. The ship needs repairs.
- the away team is woefully unsuited for a rescue mission. They barely managed to rescue themselves and even that was massive luck.
- there are mind-controlling aliens with human lackeys, aliens who are desperate for a ship of their own. They must not be given a chance to be granted one.
- did we mention that we do not know the full capacity of the mind-controlling aliens? Yes, Aria got to look inside one of their heads but who knows how full and reliable all that information is.
- they are underarmed, both in weapons and armor. You can cross out weapons, but you want your rescue party to be in armor that prevents Miesti injecting them with mind-control thingy as well as immune to low-level weapons like handguns and sticks.
- the Galaxion is not meant to repel boarders. If the Miesti get a chance to get aboard, their main obstacle would be the means to get aboard rather than handling resistance. The Galaxion is not a military ship meant to resist a calculated invasion attempt, it has no security crews, no robots we have seen. The only way to secure it is to keep it out of their reach.
- they are also understaffed for such a mission. They have what, two-three people with military background? One commander ,which doesn’t count because you can’t command yourself, and a techie. Plus maybe a few civies of various, backgrounds. Even if they were well-armed, that is just too few with too little relevant skills.
- the situation was relatively stable. The survivors were not going anywhere and could take care of themselves, either with the free people or under the Miesti. The Miesti enslave but not exterminate as this memory clearly shows. There is questionable “now or never” pressure.
- until this memory surfaced, little was known about the Miesti compound and its security. We do not know whether the Miesti have powerful weapons and what level of security they have.
Also, quite frankly, a rushed rescue mission would have been hubris and arrogance. Not only would it be ill-prepared in all the ways I have pointed out, it would have inevitably involved making decisions that the crew shouldn’t be making. Such as, should the Miesti be killed? Should they be captured and studied like animals? Should they maybe be approached with more proper first-contact crew? No, a rescue mission would have too many things possibly going wrong in too many ways unseen.
What’s interesting is that there is a rebellion of sorts happening right under the Miesti. They obviously did not search this guy’s thoughts or never bothered with him in quite some time. That tells us something about the limitation of their ability.
Is there any in-story evidence that the Miesti can “search peoples’ thoughts”?
The Meisti seem to view humans as “nonsapient animals” instead of intelligent beings, and moreover they were unable to get much information out of Aria when they examined her (indeed, little more than vague impressions), and furthermore appeared to be quite shocked when they realized that Aria could “perceive their waves.”
Thus, it would appear that while the Meisti can exert some degree of “control” over humans, they are not only not able to “read” the minds of their human slaves, but they do not even appear to believe that humans have sufficient minds to be “worth reading”…
You just linked a page where it outright shows a Miesti sharing information from a “merger”. They can’t read people like a book but they can gain information from them.
They are shocked because Aria clearly is an exception. Aria gained enough to know who the Miesti are, how they got to alt-Earth and the accident. Viviath learned something and it may just require time for her(?) to process what are essentially alien memories.
As for “worth reading”, you just linked a page where a Miesti did just that. They clearly see humans as an inferior to themselves, but “unsentient animals” would be outright stupid. Non-sentient animals do not nuke their own planet and still use technology, use spaceships. I would argue that the Miesti are treating humans this way out of necessity rather than just out of a superiority complex. Their proper “symbionts” died and humans were their only option. Without doing what they do, they are essentially oversized butterflies with little to no ability to interact with the world.
Oh, and Chapter 12, page 401. Aria outright STATES that the Miesti learned from her that they have a working ship. They wanted to do the same to Patty but Patty had an allergic reaction.