We have a fifth proposal:
*Plan 5 - Death Blossom *
All Ships go to Benemede. Then we all send messages to Mondo and the ICUP that the job is done and that they need to come here to inspect the wreckage. If things go right, they will both appear around Benemede, the booze bots will attack, triggering a fight between the two the ICUP squadron and The Badass Space Dragon. Once one side is incapacitated, we will swoop in and finish off the winner.
This plan fiendish clever. I like it. It offers a way to get both rewards, while leaving the suffering to our opponents. And when we’re done, Benemede is right there for the victory party. The TARD-iss couldn’t ask for more. However, the measure of a plan is not how it performs if everything gores right, but how well it performs if it all goes wrong.
Let me tell you a story.
Many years ago, a bright young android fresh from the foundry had brilliant start-up idea for a eu-social fractal social network that used 168 character neutrino bursts to bring people together across the void and share cat pictures. She called it TwitFaceCatGram, or something like that. It was growing 125% per month!. She was negotiating with Nicholas Van Rijm for the Second Round Financing. Every time we’d get near to closing, she’d bring in higher counter offer from another bidder. Amazing good negotiating for a beginner. She invited Nicholas and the other VC to her office the same afternoon, thinking she’d start a bidding war. Instead, Nicholas realized the other bidder was his old mentor, Sergey Draper Thiel’s uploaded cerebrum. Nicholas and the uploaded cerebrum instead cut a deal with one another, froze out the founder, and made a killing on the IPO.
As Grey Mouser Captain Lord Fritz noted, the ICUP advance squadron is here because Don Mondo stopped paying his bribes. Faced with the ICUP squadron and having been abandoned by us, Don may find his lost checkbook and buy his way back into the ICUP’s good graces At that point, our ships would be trapped in the asteroid belt surrounded by two powerful fleets AND the booze hounds.
It also seems uncivilized to bring such a massive fight to the very doorstep of the good monks of Benemede.
This is definitely a high-risk, high-reward sort of plan. I ask others to give their opinion, or to suggest other plans.
