Nightmare Fuel / Honor Harrington

• OYSTER. FUCKING. BAY. 15 million deaths and Manticore's infrastructure is savagely devastated by a surprise Mesan assault.
  • "What happened wasn't anyone's fault" These words are the start of the chapter in which Oyster Bay takes place, and it spends six pages explaining how no one could have done anything to prevent it from happening outside of divine intervention.
  • Next we get a nice long description of the Graser torpedos they use for the initial attack. They're are essentially independently deployed Gamma Wave Motion Guns, capable of slicing a destroyer in half.
  • Then the shooting starts, and Hephaestus is the first to die. We get a blow-by-blow account of several witnesses (including a father traveling with his kids). Accounts that almost invariably end in the death of the witness. Including Hexapuma. And this only on one side of the attack.
  • Then we get a character-driven and positively sickening callback to War of Honor as Admiral of the Fleet Allen Higgins — the man forced to vaporize dozens of nearly-completed superdreadnoughts at Grendelsbane to prevent their technology from falling into Havenite hands — is forced to once again stand and watch helplessly as wholesale destruction is visited upon critical Manticoran infrastructure while he can do absolutely nothing to stop it — when stopping it is exactly what Home Fleet is supposed to do in the first place.
  • Then we get another, albeit (mercifully) shorter explanation of the missile pods they fired and how effective they'll be against "such naked targets". And then that effectiveness is proved by destroying ninety percent of the orbital works around Manticore. And hurling most of that wreckage directly at the planet.
  • And then, as if to punctuate the horror with valor, we get the HMS Quay's heroic attempt to stop as much wreckage as possible. It smashes eighteen of the largest pieces to pieces using its tractor beams which were never intended for combat, and drags away four more. It isn't nearly enough.
  • Finally, we get the accounts of Andrew LaFollet and the Black Rock Clan. While Andrew's final, frantic moments are shown through Allison Harrington's terrified eyes as he dies to save her and her grandson, the Black Rock Clan's don't even reach the actual event. There is only a quiet statement that they were lucky they never saw what killed them. We do, however, get to see the aftermath: thousands upon thousands of telempathic treecats — every single one of whom saw and felt exactly what happened to their fellows at the instant of the Yawata Strike via treecat telempathy — succumbing to despair, with many death-willing themselves in grief.
• The Beowulf Strike may have been even worse in this respect than Oyster Bay/Yawata Strike. Especially for the poor people in the control room on Beowulf Alpha, since they saw Beowulf Gamma and Beta explode—and thus knew what was likely going to happen to them in the next few minutes—and yet couldn't do anything more than record messages for their loved ones.
• The Mesan nanomachines. You can be programmed to kill yourself. You can be programmed to kill others. You can be programmed to press a button that starts a war. You will be programmed to do these things in ways that guarantee lethal reprisals, conveniently removing you from the equation. And you are aware of your body doing it and unable to prevent it.
• Operation Houdini is this on two levels:
  • For the people inside the Operation, imagine that suddenly you get told that you now have to leave your homeworld, leave behind any family and friends and possibly never come back while the people you leave behind think you dead or abandoned. And opting out is not an option. And for the cherry on top you get a genetically engineered Mook as bodyguard who will kill you if it even looks like you might get captured.
  • For everyone else on Mesa, imagine someone deliberately planning a series of terror attacks to hide the disappearances of certain persons. Said terror attacks are deliberately designed to whip the oppressing citizenry into a blood frenzy, by nuking places where the families of law enforcement, military and otherwise oppressive government forces are. Sport parks (nuke), entertainment park (fuel-air bomb) and similar targets, all meant to hit the maximum percentage of relations to someone in the position to take out their anger on the oppressed Seccies of Mesa. All as one big god-damn distraction.
  • Perhaps the most horrifying part of Houdini? It succeeds. The Alignment is still active and setting up shop in the Darius system by the end of Shadow of Victory. Darius is a completely uncharted system, chock full of four-billion genetically engineered clones that live and work in a society much like Mesa's (but without the instability of the genetic slave system) and the clone families having on average twelve children. The Houdini survivors are surrounded by people who have been indoctrinated from birth to believe in the mission of the Alignment and their genetic superiority, are working tirelessly to mine the system's asteroids, construct an armada with tech that can go toe-to-toe with Manticore, and develop the necessary weapons to spring from the shadows and conquer whatever is left of the league, topple the Grand Alliance, and establish an unending Mesan hegemony over the galaxy. There is no dissent because everyone believes in the mission, and in its inevitable success. Even if any of the Houdini survivors had second thoughts about the Alignment, there is no way for them to escape the system to warn anyone else about it. One thing is clear: Mesa has been playing with kid gloves up to this point.
  • Not only did Houdini succeed, but the Alignment also didn't put all their eggs in one basket for the Alliance's super spies to track down and smash. Galton, a subsidiary system of the Alignment's final refuge at Darius is set up initially to provide more raw materials for the home system, but the Alignment already had plan in place to sacrifice it as a fake final refuge if anyone followed any loose threads from Houdini. The Grand Alliance tracks down Galton and destroys it. And the Alignment's plan succeeds. The Alliance believes they've uprooted and destroyed all the survivors of Houdini. Chillingly, Honor wins this battle with a true Mesan sleeper agent at her side as a journalist- and she's none the wiser of it.
• Earth's Final War
  • Megalomaniacal Slavic genetically engineered supersoldiers
  • Weaponised Asian supersoldiers with:
    • implanted weaponry
    • their bodily functions jacked up to the point their lifespan barely tops 20 years
    • produced in cloning labs
    • thankfully sterile
  • Weaponised Nanotechnology from the Americas
  • and Western Europe throwing out every last biological and chemical warfare agent they have access too
    • Bonus Horror: it is almost certain that one of the labs involved is Porton Down (which currently exists in the real world, right now)
• The Origin of Bolthole: A very early generational ship, Calvin’s Hope, was aimed at a distant world confirmed to be Earthlike, but after a nearly 400 year multi-generational journey, with the ship breaking down, the planet is hit by a dinosaur killer asteroid just a few years before the ship's arrival. The crew, against all odds, manages to find another planet to land on, around a dwarf star. On their last legs, the colony lands everything in a idyllic valley, which turns out to be the mouth of a super volcano. The survivors are reduced to hunter-gatherers. The entire stellar area they are in is later considered poor pickings for colonization, and thus ignored after the failure of their colony, meaning no one finds their colony until the People's Republic of Haven finds a wormhole into this useless area.
• Grayson and Masada, when you look at their history:
  • The former was settled by the Church of Humanity Unchained, which sought to return to the more natural way mankind was supposed to be, hoping to find a paradise, only to discover a world where heavy metals had leeched into the water and native life, making the entire environment toxic. A filtration mask is needed to breathe outside of heavily-sealed buildings, and the people there have had to toil for centuries just to get parts of a couple of CONTINENTS clean enough for proper development. The situation was so bad that the early cemeteries were also early FARMS, using the plentiful influx of bodies to fertilize crops for the next generation.
  • The latter was settled by religious fanatics breaking away from the main-line Church because of a series of reforms to use technology to try and purify parts of Grayson, leading to a bloody civil war involving NUKES. Said fanatics still want to destroy their opponents after centuries of on-again, off-again conflict, and have come fairly close to said goals.
  • And then there's both societies' views on women. Due to some unauthorized genetic tampering shortly after arriving on Grayson, male fetuses would have less of a chance to develop than female fetuses, resulting in a population imbalance of 3 women for every man on both planets, and it was theorized by Allison Harrington that the idea was to out-breed the losses incurred by the planet's toxic environment, which is exactly what happened, with many early Grayson women giving up everything just to produce as many babies as possible. Coupled with the patriarchal views of the Church of Humanity Unchained, and both Grayson and later Masada practiced polygamy, with women treated as second-class citizens on the former and chattel slaves on the latter. Grayson, at least, saw it as "protecting" women and it was ingrained in every Grayson male to ensure the safety of their women.^note And fortunately, even this begins to change more progressive views after Honor's efforts to save the planet from a Masadan attack, to the point that they actually grant her holdings on the planet, something that no woman in the system has ever been granted before. Masada, however, saw women as the reason why mankind was still sinful, and sought to punish them at every opportunity.
    • And then you get to Blackbird Base, a secret Masadan space facility set up in Grayson's own systems, which serves as a spying post for the Masadans against the Graysons. That's not the scary part. The scary part happens after survivors of a Manticorian cruiser are captured and brought to the base. Par for the course of any "infidel" captured by the Masadans, they're treated horribly, being beaten, tortured, starved, and held in cages, but the female members of the crew are treated worse. So, so much worse. Consider the aforementioned treatment of their own women and their loathing for "heretics" in general, and it paints a very ugly picture about what exactly happened to them. And when Honor finds out...oooh boy. The Tranquil Fury seen by her that day frightened even hardened, veteran marines, and the Masadan commander (as in, the cowardly, incompetent piece of excrement in human form who not only allowed the beatings and rapes but literally ORDERED it) in charge of the station only narrowly avoided being shot like the dog he is at Honor's hands. Not that anyone would have blamed Honor for doing it.
• The Solarian fleet with Admiral Filareta that was sent to attack Manticore.
  • Supposed to be a more or less "surprise" attack. But literally EVERYONE IN THE GALAXY knew they were coming! So, of course when he hypers in, all fat and happy, he's met with his very own Manticoran Missile Massacre all wrapped up for him like a grenade. He actually manages to be sane enough to try and surrender, only to have a Mesan nanotech puppet "pull the pin", destroy hundreds of ships and kill millions.