Mashup Stross x Saunders

[dsrtao]

I wonder what would have happened if, in The Nightmare Stacks, it wasn't the Alfar invading Britain but a Line Company (with standard-captain and attached artillery, perhaps an Independent) had been pushed through.

Nothing simple.

Comments

[autopope]

Owwwww!

My head hurts now.

My reading of the Commonwealth is that their kit is deceptively sophisticated, with line infantry armor providing some degree of strength assistance as well as shielding, and their javelins about as effective as ATGMs.

But that's less important than the Shape of Peace, which would prevent them from initiating a war of aggression against another realm.

If they do end up invading due to mishap or miscommunication, they probably don't make the Alfär mistake of going in with metaphorical guns blazing and assume everything works the same way it does back home (i.e. hierarchically). Their tactical doctrine emphasizes stealth and intel gathering because they always face the risk of a monstrously powerful magical enemy. They'd never make All-Highest's mistake of deprecating/discounting his spies.

As for the outcome, assuming a fight happens (which I suspect is quite unlikely, although it might take a while for West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police to realize that they have an outside context problem involving what looks like a bunch of mediaeval re-enactors and to stop treating it as a crowd control exercise and call up the TPCF), it depends on whether or not they have an artillery battery supporting them (which would make way more of a mess than the Alfär host — their high-end shot is nuclear-equivalent). And if they've brought a Militant Independent like Halt or Blossom along they probably end up with the UK's permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

[dsrtao]

Supposing that they come through by accident and without immediate expectation of finding their way home -- enemy action, obviously -- they're going to be very confused politically about the Laundryverse.

Or maybe not: it's a version of the Bad Old Days with just one hominid species instead of dozens/hundreds, government by coercion (but not, mostly, magical coercion -- the Commonweal has or had money at some point, it may be structured as industrial kibbutzim/communes but I'm sure it would only take a few minutes to figure out capitalism-uber-alles), and a few sorcerors who appear to be ruling behind the scenes instead of as strict geas-bound hierarchy.

In the other direction, the Alfar were expecting to find something just like The Bad Old Days, that's their normal structure. If they had shown up at the edge of the Commonweal, the only surprising thing would have been the shape and strength of their magical critters. I suspect the the Alfar unicorns are cousins of known species.

[autopope]

The Alfär may be just like the Bad Old Days in social hierarchy, but they're a much younger magical world than Graydon's; there are hints in the Commonwealth books that magic and magical users have been around for maybe a quarter of a million years, possibly longer, and there have been many hominid magic-using species and entire magical ecosystems. In contrast, the Alfär only developed speech in the past 30-100,000 years, and their magical civilizations are up to 10-20,000 years old: they've domesticated magical beasties from other realms, but haven't built entire ecosystems, and their slaves are their own weaker members rather than bespoke Homo servus spp.

The Alfär unicorns are equoids, just not part of the borg identifying itself as Shub. (They're quite bad enough as it is.)

[graydon]

They wouldn't start a fight -- they'd be trying to get home -- but it's iffy if the Line commander would expect a rule-of-law polity to be possible. So interacting with local authorities has an opportunity to go horribly wrong. Especially because there's no magic fix for the language barrier.

If there's anything much in the way of biocompatibility going on and they come through with a volume of air or an extent of terrain the results would likely make the introduction of Eurasian diseases into the the Americas look entirely mild.

[dsrtao]

Even if they don't come through with any significant air, weeds or soil, there's going to be whatever the diverged equivalents of e. coli, rhinovirus, and everything else that a life mage thinks of as a perfectly normal symbiont or commensal. Food. Horses.

Come to think of it, I wonder that the Alfar didn't all die of dysentery in the camp.