I guess the role of Devil's Advocate has fallen to me.
In order to reason with one another, we must first agree upon basic premises, so I will try to list mine.
I think we can all agree that the information available to the audience via Insider, while limited, is factual, and that our goal is to get the best deal possible for humanity.I further think that we can define the "best deal possible" as a lasting arrangement providing mankind with as few permanent crippling restrictions to our individual rights, economic prosperity, scientific advancement, and national sovereignty as possible, since each of these powers are in their own ways and for their own reasons unlikely to make a deal that provides us with a net benefit. I believe that the primary source of disagreement between us will be on the importance ascribed to those four factors; I have listed them in what I believe to be ascending priority, but you may disagree.
There is, in my opinion, not enough information on the specific cultures of the Umiak or the Loroi to discuss the questions of individual rights or economic prosperity under each faction's rule; I assume that neither of these militant totalitarian dictatorships have anything terribly impressive to say of their own records on those matters, and that both would spring up to besmirch the other's reputation on issues of human rights, economic freedom, and standards of living if they could. If you can raise a sufficient body of knowledge on the subject to my attention, I will listen, but in my opinion it is not enough on the Loroi side to know how Loroi warriors and civilians live, nor even to know how aliens live amongst the Loroi, since humanity's telepathic immunity is essentially unique. Equally, it is not enough to know how individual Umiak or any of the races of the Hierarchy whose names we know live; humanity's place upon willingly allying with the Hierarchy would be quite distinct from the individually egoless yet hierarchially supreme Umiak and the collection of their conquered foes and miscellaneous war-ravaged border territory races whom we can expect to learn about, since this comic takes place along the Loroi border. Because of the dearth of knowledge on the matter of how each species would respond to the specifics of the human question, and because both factions have fairly awful records on the rights of sapient beings, I believe that a strong and independent human state is the best guarantor of human rights we can have.
There has been some disagreement about scientific advancement already, so that seems a place to start.
Research and development
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TrashMan wrote:With our technological aptitude, humans would learn fast. And if we play our cards right, then yes, we can pull it off.
I think I'm misunderstanding this argument. I can recall nothing in the comic or in Insider indicating that the human government is actually aware of having a research advantage. Yes, I am aware that the advantage is supposedly there, but unless the human government knows a lot more about the histories of the Loroi and the Umiak over the past couple of centuries than they've let on I don't see how they could know that, much less base any long-term strategies on it. There are limits to what strategies can practically be expected here; simply assuming that you're smarter than everyone else seems an impractical way of conducting either war or politics.LegioCL wrote:Now that we're spread over a few hundred colonies in places that are incredibly difficult to detect and destroy all we need to do is bide our time. We already know that we are developing technology at an accelerated rate compared to the Loroi (And likely the Umiak as well.) [...]
Eventually, as our technology comes to be on par with the occupiers we start launching raids and fighting back.
I may have misunderstood either the origins of humanity's superior research aptitude or the nature of the methods of continuing research in secret that have been proposed.
I had assumed that our aptitude for research had to do with humanity's comparatively open, competitive, and free cultures and societies, compared with those of the Loroi and Umiak. To my eyes, this is born out by the quotation stating that "Now the Loroi, on the other hand, are not an open society […] The drawback, however, is that much information tends to stay compartmentalized within each local intellectual community, and rarely jumps the geographical and social boundaries between telepathic societies. This is part of why the overall rate of Loroi technical advancement is slow compared to ours; each group rarely knows about what another is doing, and so the "connections" that are so critical to innovation, where two unrelated technologies A and B are combined to create innovation C, are rare in Loroi society."
Conducting research in comparatively isolated environments, no matter the method by which this is accomplished, eliminates that human advantage. It means that those isolated cells are working in a manner similar to how I believe the Loroi conduct research; a comparatively unified and highly proficient group, but one with limited communication with other groups in a society that provides severely limited support for them. In the Loroi case the limits on support would have presumably historically been due to a lack of respect for research as a field, whereas in the "secret research facility" model for humanity it would be due to the necessity of keeping it secret. In the Loroi case the limited extracellular communication would be due to their preference for telepathy, in the human case it would be due to necessarily limiting communication and outside contact in order to keep secrets. This applies to both underground bunkers and spread out brown dwarf colony systems. So even if it were plausible to do something like that, I don't think you can really say it'd necessarily preserve humanity's fast advancement advantage.
What's worse, Loroi researchers actually have several advantages due to their biology which our researchers do not share. Loroi longevity means that a highly proficient expert can contribute longer and so a research cell can maintain itself better; imagine if most of the great physicists, chemists, mathematicians and doctors born in the past 200 years were not just still alive but had remained as mentally sharp as they were at their peak. Loroi telepathy means that within the isolated cell ideas can move much faster, and the slowdown occurs at information transfer between cells. The Loroi presumably have a much more efficient metabolism than we do on many levels and would thus require less resource replenishment; lower support costs for personnel don't mean much in this case, but they might mean something.
Now, these isolated cells would doubtless be very, very efficient, at first. Like the Manhattan Project, or the German weapons projects at Peenemünde. But even the Manhattan Project didn't exist in a vacuum; for instance, the British gave America pretty much all of their own atomic bomb research (a project code-named "Tube Alloys") before Oppenheimer lit up White Sands. I don't know how useful Tube Alloys actually was, and there's some debate over the extent to which ze Germans took inspiration from non-German designs (Robert Goddard's early solutions to the problems of liquid-fueled rockets, or the early British pioneers of the jet engine) for their own R&D, but the extra information really couldn't have hurt.
Reverse engineering can get you pretty far, sure. But the trouble there is, we don't simply need to catch up to our new overlords if we want to overthrow them. If we had equivalent tech, they would still command the full resources of star empires orders of magnitude larger than humanity's holdings, whereas we would only really be able to fully exploit Earth within any reasonable timeframe, unless our masters should decide to give a lot of help in developing the other five human worlds. With equal technologies, the victor will still kick our ass, hard. Whatever tech we could hope to reverse-engineer would likely be the occupier's standard equipment, be they blasters or shields or plasma focuses, and we need superior technology. New technology, things that the Loroi aren't already working on, would require new ideas; something our comparatively free and open and easily-communicating society might be able to manage, but which I think becomes drastically less likely the more we cut down on the communication in the scientific community and increase the level of control placed over it ("we're sending you to a special secret lab to research inertial dampeners and inertial accelerators" won't put that guy in a position to help make a jump drive that's powerful and efficient enough to make in-system jumps work, for example).
I don't think you can drastically change humanity's approach to research without affecting its research proficiency, for better or worse. And unless I have terribly misread you guys, you are talking about drastic measures here.
Changing our approach to something which, to me, seems to have most in common with the Loroi way, while retaining our research speed advantage over the Loroi, would require that our superiority be innate rather than social. And I for one do not find inborn racial superiority to be a safe bet when competing against a species that was likely engineered to be a better version of human, nor against a species that has managed to kick that upgraded human's ass at the research game, having developed the plasma focus without any Historian assistance.
I don't think it's necessary to go to such extreme measures to continue independent research if we maintain our political independence, but losing our independent status would essentially mean either that the aliens could see what we're researching or that we'll practically stop doing said research.
So getting a long-term research-driven "victory" for the human government likely requires us to hold on to our political independence, not just through this war but for a very long time afterwards. Said independence will likely be limited, and will have a number of costs attached, but the more independent we remain the more we can benefit from a research edge.
Therefore it seems to me that the matter of human scientific advancement under each respective power is directly related to the question of maintaining the sovereignty and political independence of a human polity in the first place.
Members of the Loroi Alliance
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As near as I can tell, the Loroi exercise a monopoly on space military power within the Loroi Union. The Loroi cannot exert such a monopoly over allied governments independent of the Union, but the relationship between the Union and the other governments of the Loroi Alliance seems an uneasy coalition at best, which will quite likely fall apart and turn on each other as soon as the Umiak situation is resolved. I don't know if there's an actual legal ban or official policy against non-Loroi military ships, but it seems worth noting that the only non-Loroi race specifically stated to be permitted to serve on military vessels in the Loroi Union happen to be the race the Loroi can passively mind-control. However, even if under normal circumstances the Barsam and other normal member races were permitted to retain an actual space navy, the Loroi really ought to think twice before extending the same courtesy to the humans. The chance that the Loroi would allow human volunteers to serve in the Union military aboard Loroi ships, or for humaniti to be allowed to build actual warships of its own, seems slightly lower than the chance that the war will be resolved via group hugging.
The Loroi may not not require total control of all spacefaring, but they really seem to require such of actual warships, and presumably maintain sufficient restrictions on what police and patrol forces are allowed to exist and sufficient oversight and monitoring to prevent the non-Loroi member governments from secession or insurrection. There is an extent to which a spaceship is a threat just by virtue of being a spaceship, but the Loroi are probably able to manage the threat innate to other species having space travel within their empire well enough. However, their space traffic control might require something like in-system Farseers monitoring traffic at all times or something. If so, then humans in civilian vessels might be a threat to which their current space traffic control system cannot adjust, which would require additional special rules and restrictions be placed on human civilian spaceflight. Regardless of the actual danger posed by the vessels themselves, if I were the Loroi, I would at minimum force all human vessels to carry at least one Loroi observer aboard or be shot on sight if it travels anywhere near Loroi space (space which, in the event of a Loroi conquest of the Umiak, will more or less completely surround us); this would help neutralize the threat posed by humans in the short term. If the war lasts long enough, this would also help to prevent the Umiak from disguising a psi-cloaked vessel as a human trading ship or whatever; that's what I'd tell the humans, at any rate.
If humaniti joins the Loroi as independent allies (like the Nissek and the Historians), then they'll be in the same category as those other co-belligerents; a long-term problem for one another, each willing to temporarily put that aside in order to deal with more immediate short-term problems such as the Umiak. Fast research plus natural resistance to most psi-based advantages means mankind could theoretically demolish the Loroi in a long game, but the elves have no reason to want to play our game, and plenty of reason to take a more immediate approach. The Loroi might not know how quickly we could theoretically tech up as independents, but I don't think that matters all that much. The idea that psi-immune humans could be used by any of their current untrusted allies or unknown future adversaries is probably enough to motivate the Loroi to secure human space and the human population as soon as possible even if they don't fear humanity as a faction of itself; if the Loroi win this war, it might take a couple of years for them to recover from it sufficiently to rapidly conquer and control human space, but, well, if anyone's slated for immediate annexation it's us. It's not like we could stop them, and I find it unlikely that any other faction would have the combination of resources, desire, and proper timing to stop the Loroi for us; I feel we should not rest our hopes on such a turn of events when we have no real sign of it and no power to make it so.
If the human government were to join the Loroi as a full Union member, they would likely never gain sufficient military power to throw off the Loroi yoke. Even if, say, the Nibiren could advance to such a level, the Loroi will doubtless be many times more cautious with humans than they usually are; we cannot expect the same level of laxity to which the other Union races are accustomed. So research would likely have to either go to extremes to remain underground (and thus, in my opinion, slow down) or risk being visible to the Loroi, and thus of negligible advantage against them. And I'm pretty sure we aren't going to like the rule of what is essentially a military dictatorship. Heck, even in nonmilitary spacefaring matters, the Loroi don't really have much reason to give us freedom of movement or rights to further colonization, and plenty of reason against it. Humanity's psi-resistance is a gun pointed at the heart of the Loroi Union, and the Loroi we've met seem pretty keenly aware of this fact. At the very least they're going to have to try to watch every move humans make through space. They have every reason in the world to make whatever deal is convenient for them at the moment and then violate it the second they don't have to bother with the Umiak anymore, whereas if the Umiak break a deal with us, then that would be just because they're enormous jerks.
The best case scenario for resistance to the Loroi I can imagine is that in the face of Loroi aggression, mankind manages to take the Orgus option and some friendly race takes our refugees in. I know that someone's going to suggest "the Historians," and there are a lot of good reasons behind that suggestion; Historian space is (relatively) close and there are paths that will presumably become known to the TCA to it, so there'd be less danger from scouting unknown systems out; the Historians are not beholden to the Loroi and high-tech enough to not fold to them for now; the Historian personality construct has expressed an interest in humanity; the Historians claim to be protecting the Pol, which means they are possibly willing to support another species, and humans could prove of use to them.
…which is, of course, why the Loroi would do everything possible to secure the paths to Historian space right before going all-out on humanity; can't have psi-immune weapons in the hands of the biggest post-war threat, after all. The reason humans wouldn't wind up in the hands of the Historians pre-conflict is that in addition to all of those other traits, the Historians are apparently zealous isolationists. The Historians do not permit traders in their territory; prior to open hostilities between humanity and the Loroi, I'd think the Historians would see no reason to allow humans passage through their space, and there are some pretty decent reasons to destroy human ships that do not respect their privacy. Any human passing through their territory could easily be a Loroi in disguise, and I believe that part of the reason the Historians communicate through personality constructs and have such restrictions on their space is fear of Loroi telepathy. Our resemblance to the Loroi turns against us again. I do not think that we should assume ourselves to be special enough to be able talk them into trading with us or allowing us access to their space; we have nothing to offer them but psionically resistant individuals, an offer which would immediately earn both ourselves and the Historians the full enmity of an otherwise unoccupied, highly veteran, geared-up Loroi military with pulse cannons at their disposal. Sure, the Historians might win or force a stalemate, but it would be bloody affair that they could easily have avoided in the first place by just not provoking the Loroi, meaning not accepting humans into their space without some very good and immediate reasons to do so. There is also the difficulty of getting into Historian space in the first place when the Loroi military knows about your psi-invisibility, doesn't want you to get into Historian space, and has small skirmish groups larger than the entire TCA military put together, any individual ship of which could likely eliminate said military all at once. The isolation and containment of humanity within a reasonable timeframe seems to me to be both possible and very desirable for the Loroi.
The other races all present even worse issues. The Nissek are all the way across Loroi space, and presumably don't have weapons at the same level as the pulse cannon equipped Loroi (given their history with the Loroi, I'd guess them to be at roughly the same level as the Loroi were before the Historians gave them Plasma Focus tech to experiment with). The Barsam are INSIDE Loroi space, and probably lack a standing space military. The Neridi are, for our purposes, nontelepathic Loroi. The Arekka and Mannadi are helpless. Since this is supposed to be considering a postwar position, the Umiak and their allies will have already been defeated, and presumably broken as a power and a people and under Loroi control, or eliminated altogether. If ever there is a time for the Loroi to strike at humanity, it is in the wake of the Umiak conflict. Irrespective of our research aptitude or their knowledge thereof. If the humans in the comic learn of our historical rate of advancement relative to the Loroi, then the Loroi can be expected to learn just as much, and have just that much more reason to nip the threat in the bud.
So even if these other races learn of humanity's psi-related traits, it seems unlikely to me that they would, individually, be able to offer us any protection. It also seems likely to me that they would be unable or unwilling to coordinate anti-Loroi efforts with one another before it was too late for the human race. I do not think we can rely on help from anyone should the Loroi decide to take us, and I think the Loroi, post-Umiak, will be in a more or less perfect position to do whatever they please regarding the human question. I further think that "whatever they please" would pretty much have to entail conquest (if we remain independent) or uncomfortably tight control (if we join them to end this destructive conflict and rule the galaxy as father and son).
Life as a Union member may not be so bad. The Loroi might impose rules and limits all the way down to the level where they affect individual humans, and these rules might seem draconian or oppressive by human standards, but the Loroi lack the expertise in the field of civil oppression that makes Umiak society hum along. Besides, being peacefully subjugated by the Loroi would doubtless be preferable to either extermination at their hands or enslavement by the Umiak. But regardless of what their rules are or how effective they are at imposing their rules, I think that overall their rulership is something that humanity would be unable to overcome without a great deal of external assistance, and I do not believe that we can or should expect such assistance.
Based solely on what I know right now (now that all of one chapter of the comic is out, most of which focused on Alex's personal situation and not the policies or culture of the Union at large), I'd say the best case scenario for a humanity allied with a victorious Loroi Union would be peaceful subjugation followed by assimilation. This might not be such a bad fate. There are some examples within human history of subjugated peoples having a more profound effect on their conquerors than vice versa, and I think that would be the case here. It is infinitely preferable to the fate that would await us were we to join the Umiak only to find the Loroi victorious. But even if it isn't particularly unpleasant it would still be the end of human independence and human political power for a very long time.
The Loroi may not not require total control of all spacefaring, but they really seem to require such of actual warships, and presumably maintain sufficient restrictions on what police and patrol forces are allowed to exist and sufficient oversight and monitoring to prevent the non-Loroi member governments from secession or insurrection. There is an extent to which a spaceship is a threat just by virtue of being a spaceship, but the Loroi are probably able to manage the threat innate to other species having space travel within their empire well enough. However, their space traffic control might require something like in-system Farseers monitoring traffic at all times or something. If so, then humans in civilian vessels might be a threat to which their current space traffic control system cannot adjust, which would require additional special rules and restrictions be placed on human civilian spaceflight. Regardless of the actual danger posed by the vessels themselves, if I were the Loroi, I would at minimum force all human vessels to carry at least one Loroi observer aboard or be shot on sight if it travels anywhere near Loroi space (space which, in the event of a Loroi conquest of the Umiak, will more or less completely surround us); this would help neutralize the threat posed by humans in the short term. If the war lasts long enough, this would also help to prevent the Umiak from disguising a psi-cloaked vessel as a human trading ship or whatever; that's what I'd tell the humans, at any rate.
If humaniti joins the Loroi as independent allies (like the Nissek and the Historians), then they'll be in the same category as those other co-belligerents; a long-term problem for one another, each willing to temporarily put that aside in order to deal with more immediate short-term problems such as the Umiak. Fast research plus natural resistance to most psi-based advantages means mankind could theoretically demolish the Loroi in a long game, but the elves have no reason to want to play our game, and plenty of reason to take a more immediate approach. The Loroi might not know how quickly we could theoretically tech up as independents, but I don't think that matters all that much. The idea that psi-immune humans could be used by any of their current untrusted allies or unknown future adversaries is probably enough to motivate the Loroi to secure human space and the human population as soon as possible even if they don't fear humanity as a faction of itself; if the Loroi win this war, it might take a couple of years for them to recover from it sufficiently to rapidly conquer and control human space, but, well, if anyone's slated for immediate annexation it's us. It's not like we could stop them, and I find it unlikely that any other faction would have the combination of resources, desire, and proper timing to stop the Loroi for us; I feel we should not rest our hopes on such a turn of events when we have no real sign of it and no power to make it so.
If the human government were to join the Loroi as a full Union member, they would likely never gain sufficient military power to throw off the Loroi yoke. Even if, say, the Nibiren could advance to such a level, the Loroi will doubtless be many times more cautious with humans than they usually are; we cannot expect the same level of laxity to which the other Union races are accustomed. So research would likely have to either go to extremes to remain underground (and thus, in my opinion, slow down) or risk being visible to the Loroi, and thus of negligible advantage against them. And I'm pretty sure we aren't going to like the rule of what is essentially a military dictatorship. Heck, even in nonmilitary spacefaring matters, the Loroi don't really have much reason to give us freedom of movement or rights to further colonization, and plenty of reason against it. Humanity's psi-resistance is a gun pointed at the heart of the Loroi Union, and the Loroi we've met seem pretty keenly aware of this fact. At the very least they're going to have to try to watch every move humans make through space. They have every reason in the world to make whatever deal is convenient for them at the moment and then violate it the second they don't have to bother with the Umiak anymore, whereas if the Umiak break a deal with us, then that would be just because they're enormous jerks.
The best case scenario for resistance to the Loroi I can imagine is that in the face of Loroi aggression, mankind manages to take the Orgus option and some friendly race takes our refugees in. I know that someone's going to suggest "the Historians," and there are a lot of good reasons behind that suggestion; Historian space is (relatively) close and there are paths that will presumably become known to the TCA to it, so there'd be less danger from scouting unknown systems out; the Historians are not beholden to the Loroi and high-tech enough to not fold to them for now; the Historian personality construct has expressed an interest in humanity; the Historians claim to be protecting the Pol, which means they are possibly willing to support another species, and humans could prove of use to them.
…which is, of course, why the Loroi would do everything possible to secure the paths to Historian space right before going all-out on humanity; can't have psi-immune weapons in the hands of the biggest post-war threat, after all. The reason humans wouldn't wind up in the hands of the Historians pre-conflict is that in addition to all of those other traits, the Historians are apparently zealous isolationists. The Historians do not permit traders in their territory; prior to open hostilities between humanity and the Loroi, I'd think the Historians would see no reason to allow humans passage through their space, and there are some pretty decent reasons to destroy human ships that do not respect their privacy. Any human passing through their territory could easily be a Loroi in disguise, and I believe that part of the reason the Historians communicate through personality constructs and have such restrictions on their space is fear of Loroi telepathy. Our resemblance to the Loroi turns against us again. I do not think that we should assume ourselves to be special enough to be able talk them into trading with us or allowing us access to their space; we have nothing to offer them but psionically resistant individuals, an offer which would immediately earn both ourselves and the Historians the full enmity of an otherwise unoccupied, highly veteran, geared-up Loroi military with pulse cannons at their disposal. Sure, the Historians might win or force a stalemate, but it would be bloody affair that they could easily have avoided in the first place by just not provoking the Loroi, meaning not accepting humans into their space without some very good and immediate reasons to do so. There is also the difficulty of getting into Historian space in the first place when the Loroi military knows about your psi-invisibility, doesn't want you to get into Historian space, and has small skirmish groups larger than the entire TCA military put together, any individual ship of which could likely eliminate said military all at once. The isolation and containment of humanity within a reasonable timeframe seems to me to be both possible and very desirable for the Loroi.
The other races all present even worse issues. The Nissek are all the way across Loroi space, and presumably don't have weapons at the same level as the pulse cannon equipped Loroi (given their history with the Loroi, I'd guess them to be at roughly the same level as the Loroi were before the Historians gave them Plasma Focus tech to experiment with). The Barsam are INSIDE Loroi space, and probably lack a standing space military. The Neridi are, for our purposes, nontelepathic Loroi. The Arekka and Mannadi are helpless. Since this is supposed to be considering a postwar position, the Umiak and their allies will have already been defeated, and presumably broken as a power and a people and under Loroi control, or eliminated altogether. If ever there is a time for the Loroi to strike at humanity, it is in the wake of the Umiak conflict. Irrespective of our research aptitude or their knowledge thereof. If the humans in the comic learn of our historical rate of advancement relative to the Loroi, then the Loroi can be expected to learn just as much, and have just that much more reason to nip the threat in the bud.
So even if these other races learn of humanity's psi-related traits, it seems unlikely to me that they would, individually, be able to offer us any protection. It also seems likely to me that they would be unable or unwilling to coordinate anti-Loroi efforts with one another before it was too late for the human race. I do not think we can rely on help from anyone should the Loroi decide to take us, and I think the Loroi, post-Umiak, will be in a more or less perfect position to do whatever they please regarding the human question. I further think that "whatever they please" would pretty much have to entail conquest (if we remain independent) or uncomfortably tight control (if we join them to end this destructive conflict and rule the galaxy as father and son).
Life as a Union member may not be so bad. The Loroi might impose rules and limits all the way down to the level where they affect individual humans, and these rules might seem draconian or oppressive by human standards, but the Loroi lack the expertise in the field of civil oppression that makes Umiak society hum along. Besides, being peacefully subjugated by the Loroi would doubtless be preferable to either extermination at their hands or enslavement by the Umiak. But regardless of what their rules are or how effective they are at imposing their rules, I think that overall their rulership is something that humanity would be unable to overcome without a great deal of external assistance, and I do not believe that we can or should expect such assistance.
Based solely on what I know right now (now that all of one chapter of the comic is out, most of which focused on Alex's personal situation and not the policies or culture of the Union at large), I'd say the best case scenario for a humanity allied with a victorious Loroi Union would be peaceful subjugation followed by assimilation. This might not be such a bad fate. There are some examples within human history of subjugated peoples having a more profound effect on their conquerors than vice versa, and I think that would be the case here. It is infinitely preferable to the fate that would await us were we to join the Umiak only to find the Loroi victorious. But even if it isn't particularly unpleasant it would still be the end of human independence and human political power for a very long time.
Battle-Thralls of the Hierarchy
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On the other side of the coin, the Umiak do not require exclusive military control of space, and this is stated in the first paragraph of the Hierarchy's Insider page. "The Umiak seem to have a pragmatic view toward their alien client states, in the sense that each relationship appears to be unique, based on the needs of the moment; some clients are virtually enslaved, while others retain near-full autonomy and even their own military fleets." The Morat, for instance, have been reduced to the status of dependents, yet maintain their own independent military vessels. The Umiak have used anti-neutrality as an excuse to exercise absolute control over neutral parties, but allies may be a different story. The fate of the Morat is in no way enviable and humanity ought to aim a little higher, but, that seems possible. Presumably the Umiak have their own means of preventing some insane freighter captain from ruining everyone's day, and since such means could not involve telepathy we can assume that humans would not warrant any special attention on that front. So the question of whether or not humans would get space vessels under the terms of an alliance with the Umiak is better answered by considering how human spacefaring fits "the needs of the moment" rather than through any sort of standard protocol.
I am curious about how human psi-invisibility could be useful to the Umiak for the duration of the war if the Umiak were unwilling or unable to give the humans interstellar vessels, or the right to build interstellar vessels of their own. Even allowing humans to serve aboard predominantly Umiak-crewed vessels would give the humans the ability to sabotage said Umiak ships. You'd also need the humans to be fairly numerous or in key positions in order to take over a nontrivial number of shipboard functions if your goal was to eliminate Umiak crew psi-signatures, especially if you employed guards to keep the humans from doing anything untoward, which would in turn make the military vessel much less able to function in the event of a human crew rebellion. If we join the Umiak, it seems to me that they would be required to give us various rights and privileges for the war in order to make us useful, and that removing those rights and privileges would be cost-ineffective; the Umiak believe that crew are essentially a part of the ship and do not like replacing them, so kicking human crew out of the majority of their attack fleet would be an awkward process for them, and removing modern military vessels from human hands would be an unnecessary expense. If the Umiak were to make use of our psi-invisibility for naval purposes, I do not think they would be in the same position to exploit us that they would with other species. So whereas we present increasing risk to the Loroi the more spaceborn we are--possibly risk without benefit--we bring the greatest advantage to the Umiak if there are as many Hierarchy-aligned humans in space as possible.
Service aboard Hierarchy military vessels might not be in the cards for humanity. The Umiak already have a means of masking their presence from Loroi farseers, so there's not all that much reason to essentially hand over their best hardware to unproven aliens who just happen to look exactly like the enemy. It's possible that our psi-invisibility would not be used to mask warships; the advantages that human psi-invisibility would bring to the Umiak could possibly be for things like unarmed spy ships and scouts--but that would still require us to be independently spaceborn in order to be useful. Dislodging us from space afterwards would, I think, prove a waste of time and resources better spent expanding their influence in different directions. The Umiak do have actual enemies apart from the Loroi, and they do have existing arrangements with client states who retain their own space forces, of which the Morat are possibly merely the most Loroi-relevant example rather than the sole example altogether.
The Umiak war machine makes ruinous demands of worlds, but there is little reason at present to assume that the Umiak continue to make such demands in peacetime. If these are indeed the final days of the war against the Loroi and the balance is to be tipped in one direction or the other, then joining the Umiak might actually leave the Terran worlds BETTER off, developmentally; the Umiak might set up factories and resource-extraction technologies and methods on our worlds, but find the war ended before they actually had to be used. Or, pending the terms of a wartime agreement, our worlds might remain completely untouched; we do have something significant to offer them aside from materials, after all; something which is suggestive of a fairly permissive, autonomy-granting arrangement with the Hierarchy.
Perhaps the Hierarchy could find some use for humanity's psionic traits without requiring humans to be spaceborn, but I doubt that would give the humans any less of an interstellar-level bargaining chip. I suppose the Umiak could simply want to use our planets for material resources and consider our mental attributes to be impractical, but we have no real reason to think that. Humanity's mental resistance level is, so far as we know, unique among sentient races. Surely trading the use of that unique advantage in exchange for a unique level of liberty granted to one resource-rich world and five undeveloped hangers-on would be considered a bargain at the price.
If the Umiak were to use us in some way apart from plundering the resources of our world or giving us a space navy, it would still have to revolve around the Loroi. The Umiak have found the Loroi to be an unexploitable resource at best and a danger as a rule. If their mental faculties could be put to work for the Umiak, the Hierarchy would then be more or less unstoppable; even the Historians lack an equivalent to Farseers. The trouble is the Umiak cannot control the Loroi specifically because of the difficulty of dealing with their psionic gifts. In the case of non-telekinetic Loroi, the level of difficulty becomes drastically lower for humans. Humanity's greatest potential value to the Umiak could be as a means of controlling the Loroi, post-conquest; this has the advantage of not requiring an independent human space navy, though independent human spacefaring is, as the Morat and presumably other Umiak client states demonstrate, not necessarily out of the picture. I do not believe that the Umiak would idly sacrifice a potential advantage as great as that of Farseers or telepathic interrogators or any other potential telepathic resource should it be remotely possible to acquire them.
We've heard of multiple forms of psionic amplifier, most of which take the shape of some form of headgear. In the case of Farseers, the amplifier takes the shape of a chamber occupied by the Farseer. I see no reason to believe the Umiak psi dampening technology should be profoundly different. Since 27 wasn't wearing a tinfoil hat, and since the production of dampeners is likely new to the Umiak, I will assume it to be too bulky and heavy to be mounted on anything smaller than a starship. This means that individually resisting Loroi telepathy on a ground force level may not be possible with anything they have right now. Humans may be the only possible psionically resistant individual agents the Umiak could employ. I'm sure making a sweetheart deal with us is in fact very much worth it, especially should that then grant the use of Farseers to the Umiak in the future.
If subjugated Loroi were to have human handlers, it stands to reason that the human worlds should be comparatively favored, in order to ensure human loyalty. Just as human psi resistance is a gun pointed at the heart of the Loroi Union, so would Loroi telepathic skills be a potent weapon against the Umiak. It would, however, be an equally potent weapon against the enemies of the Hierarchy, whereas psi-immunity could really only be used against the Loroi themselves. An advantage like Farseers could prove absolutely necessary in the war against the Historians--a war that is actually already going on, but which might have a significant lull in actual combat should the Loroi fall. Perhaps long enough to put a new generation of Farseers to work for the Hierarchy. Given the Historian reticence in combat, it is likely that they would prefer to hang back even if the entire Loroi Union were burned to the ground, and accept a truce should the Umiak offer to respect their sovereign territory and pull out of any currently Umiak-occupied Historian systems.
I have absolutely no idea how humans could actually make Loroi work for the Umiak, though.
Without telepathy, we can't probe Loroi minds or otherwise pry truth from them, any more than the Loroi could from Jardin, so a Farseer or her Mizol companion would have to tell us things. In words. Which, as we all know, can't be trusted. So even if they're less psionically dangerous to us than to the Umiak, they're still more or less a permanently unexploitable resource.
Maybe simple traditional occupation techniques would work on them; I don't think the Umiak commonly exterminate the non-telepathic races they occupy, unless the resistance proves to be something really special. In the wake of a violent Umiak conquest, the Loroi military castes will be fragmented, scattered, their numbers depleted and their political power broken, reliant upon the support of the long dishonored and disrespected civilians to protect and shield them. Stripped of the advantage of telepathically vulnerable enemies and with much less of their traditional military hardware than they would have had prior to the Umiak conquest, they may function more or less as equivalents to ordinary human guerillas. Humans are expected to respect civilians, we might be able to win over some of that civilian underclass with our cultural values and winsome smiles, while the warrior castes might take their support for granted and alienate them. I doubt it, though. "And then the common people will welcome us as liberators" didn't work for the Soviets in Finland, the Americans in Canada, the French Revolutionaries in every single European country that wasn't France… it's just not a safe bet. And we don't even share a common means of communicating with the Loroi; if we were occupying the Umiak, it would just be an issue of listening in and translating, but it's not that simple when you're dealing with telepaths, some of whom might not know how to speak at all, having had little purpose for speech in their lives and living in a culture that regards speech as intrinsically linked to violence and deceit (reading and writing must be a different story, I don't know how you could live in a technologically advanced society without being able to follow the instructions for setting the clock on your VCR, but that doesn't really help all that much).
The successful occupation of a Loroi world, even after their warrior castes are devastated, would be an incredible feat. I personally doubt that humanity would be capable of such a coup, especially the humanity of the comic, who have not fought a war within Alex's lifetime. But it's pretty much the only non-starship-based use for psi-immunes that comes to my mind, and even it only applies after the war is over and the post-war cleanup is underway.
It seems to me a best-case scenario for an Umiak-aligned humanity would be something akin to having both psi-invisible human fleets in space and human occupation soldiers for managing the Loroi remnant post-conquest. That more or less guarantees the security of any deal we might strike as it gives us a permanent and significant position in the Hierarchy due to our species' unique neurological gifts after the war, and we would have been required to have a substantial military presence in space to be of real use during the war. But if we are not useful in controlling the Loroi, the Umiak have, as I've stated, much less reason to pay us any mind postwar than pretty much anything else, space fleet or no. We don't have any particular reason to believe they'd rush to violate our independent status as opposed to any of the other issues facing their empire such as the Historians, whereas that's exactly what I'd do in the position of the Loroi, out of simple self-preservation. So we could possibly get more time to tech up as independents under an Umiak victory than by trying the same thing with the Loroi, who might have a somewhat lower military capacity postwar than the Umiak would, but who would also have much more urgent motives for crushing us, by several orders of magnitude. The Umiak would be able to conquer us after the Loroi are dealt with, sure, but they'd have likely built our military up first, making such a conquest a more expensive and relatively cost-ineffective affair; the one thing the Umiak navy would want MOST from us is human crewmen manning entire ships (I'm assuming dampeners aren't dirt cheap here), whereas the Loroi would likely prefer pretty much anything else. It's got to be a lot harder to dislodge us from space after we've had our presence there maximized over the course of the war as the Umiak would likely want rather than minimized as the Loroi would doubtless prefer, and it seems to me there's more precedent for non-Umiak races within the Hierarchy maintaining independent space forces than there is within the Loroi Union.
I realize that I'm stressing the importance of space forces quite a bit here and there are other nonmilitary concerns of governance and rights and liberties and all of that, but if we can retain control of a functional military then the rest seems more likely to follow.
So, service to the Hierarchy isn't necessarily going to be any more controlling than full membership in the Union (this applies both ways, potentially convincing the Umiak to handle us with kid gloves and the Loroi potentially exercising an iron fist, even though both would be wildly uncharacteristic of how each side has handled other known minor races in the past), and as far as I can tell our chances of remaining an independent power after the war are better with the Umiak than with the Loroi. The Loroi have to take away or neutralize our ships as soon as possible, whereas the Umiak pretty much have to give us more in the short term, making taking away or neutralizing said ships in the long term an inefficient use of their time and resources provided we hold up our end of whatever deal we strike.
I'm not saying that the Umiak are totally nice freedom-loving rights-respecting liberals here. They obviously aren't, since they invade and overrun neutral, uninvolved minor powers long distances away from the front lines of the actual conflict in order to use said neutral's resources to feed their own war machine. There's no substantial evidence that Outsider will break the longstanding sci-fi tradition of "evil insectoids" (and, honestly, no need to do so either), and there is a significant amount of evidence upholding it. However, while I understand that the Umiak are not aligned with the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I also believe that the average Loroi warrior would be perfectly willing to gut you and mutilate your corpse, that the Loroi government has no tradition of or basis in respect for personal rights, that human freedom of movement and settlement presents an obvious threat to the Loroi, and that it is pretty much the duty of a government to contain or eliminate threats of that scale. Yeah, we look a lot more like Loroi than most Loroi-occupied aliens, but I don't think either Loroi individuals or Loroi governments have gotten caught up in too many ethical problems when destroying, abusing, subjugating or oppressing large populations of actual Loroi in the past.
I am curious about how human psi-invisibility could be useful to the Umiak for the duration of the war if the Umiak were unwilling or unable to give the humans interstellar vessels, or the right to build interstellar vessels of their own. Even allowing humans to serve aboard predominantly Umiak-crewed vessels would give the humans the ability to sabotage said Umiak ships. You'd also need the humans to be fairly numerous or in key positions in order to take over a nontrivial number of shipboard functions if your goal was to eliminate Umiak crew psi-signatures, especially if you employed guards to keep the humans from doing anything untoward, which would in turn make the military vessel much less able to function in the event of a human crew rebellion. If we join the Umiak, it seems to me that they would be required to give us various rights and privileges for the war in order to make us useful, and that removing those rights and privileges would be cost-ineffective; the Umiak believe that crew are essentially a part of the ship and do not like replacing them, so kicking human crew out of the majority of their attack fleet would be an awkward process for them, and removing modern military vessels from human hands would be an unnecessary expense. If the Umiak were to make use of our psi-invisibility for naval purposes, I do not think they would be in the same position to exploit us that they would with other species. So whereas we present increasing risk to the Loroi the more spaceborn we are--possibly risk without benefit--we bring the greatest advantage to the Umiak if there are as many Hierarchy-aligned humans in space as possible.
Service aboard Hierarchy military vessels might not be in the cards for humanity. The Umiak already have a means of masking their presence from Loroi farseers, so there's not all that much reason to essentially hand over their best hardware to unproven aliens who just happen to look exactly like the enemy. It's possible that our psi-invisibility would not be used to mask warships; the advantages that human psi-invisibility would bring to the Umiak could possibly be for things like unarmed spy ships and scouts--but that would still require us to be independently spaceborn in order to be useful. Dislodging us from space afterwards would, I think, prove a waste of time and resources better spent expanding their influence in different directions. The Umiak do have actual enemies apart from the Loroi, and they do have existing arrangements with client states who retain their own space forces, of which the Morat are possibly merely the most Loroi-relevant example rather than the sole example altogether.
The Umiak war machine makes ruinous demands of worlds, but there is little reason at present to assume that the Umiak continue to make such demands in peacetime. If these are indeed the final days of the war against the Loroi and the balance is to be tipped in one direction or the other, then joining the Umiak might actually leave the Terran worlds BETTER off, developmentally; the Umiak might set up factories and resource-extraction technologies and methods on our worlds, but find the war ended before they actually had to be used. Or, pending the terms of a wartime agreement, our worlds might remain completely untouched; we do have something significant to offer them aside from materials, after all; something which is suggestive of a fairly permissive, autonomy-granting arrangement with the Hierarchy.
Perhaps the Hierarchy could find some use for humanity's psionic traits without requiring humans to be spaceborn, but I doubt that would give the humans any less of an interstellar-level bargaining chip. I suppose the Umiak could simply want to use our planets for material resources and consider our mental attributes to be impractical, but we have no real reason to think that. Humanity's mental resistance level is, so far as we know, unique among sentient races. Surely trading the use of that unique advantage in exchange for a unique level of liberty granted to one resource-rich world and five undeveloped hangers-on would be considered a bargain at the price.
If the Umiak were to use us in some way apart from plundering the resources of our world or giving us a space navy, it would still have to revolve around the Loroi. The Umiak have found the Loroi to be an unexploitable resource at best and a danger as a rule. If their mental faculties could be put to work for the Umiak, the Hierarchy would then be more or less unstoppable; even the Historians lack an equivalent to Farseers. The trouble is the Umiak cannot control the Loroi specifically because of the difficulty of dealing with their psionic gifts. In the case of non-telekinetic Loroi, the level of difficulty becomes drastically lower for humans. Humanity's greatest potential value to the Umiak could be as a means of controlling the Loroi, post-conquest; this has the advantage of not requiring an independent human space navy, though independent human spacefaring is, as the Morat and presumably other Umiak client states demonstrate, not necessarily out of the picture. I do not believe that the Umiak would idly sacrifice a potential advantage as great as that of Farseers or telepathic interrogators or any other potential telepathic resource should it be remotely possible to acquire them.
We've heard of multiple forms of psionic amplifier, most of which take the shape of some form of headgear. In the case of Farseers, the amplifier takes the shape of a chamber occupied by the Farseer. I see no reason to believe the Umiak psi dampening technology should be profoundly different. Since 27 wasn't wearing a tinfoil hat, and since the production of dampeners is likely new to the Umiak, I will assume it to be too bulky and heavy to be mounted on anything smaller than a starship. This means that individually resisting Loroi telepathy on a ground force level may not be possible with anything they have right now. Humans may be the only possible psionically resistant individual agents the Umiak could employ. I'm sure making a sweetheart deal with us is in fact very much worth it, especially should that then grant the use of Farseers to the Umiak in the future.
If subjugated Loroi were to have human handlers, it stands to reason that the human worlds should be comparatively favored, in order to ensure human loyalty. Just as human psi resistance is a gun pointed at the heart of the Loroi Union, so would Loroi telepathic skills be a potent weapon against the Umiak. It would, however, be an equally potent weapon against the enemies of the Hierarchy, whereas psi-immunity could really only be used against the Loroi themselves. An advantage like Farseers could prove absolutely necessary in the war against the Historians--a war that is actually already going on, but which might have a significant lull in actual combat should the Loroi fall. Perhaps long enough to put a new generation of Farseers to work for the Hierarchy. Given the Historian reticence in combat, it is likely that they would prefer to hang back even if the entire Loroi Union were burned to the ground, and accept a truce should the Umiak offer to respect their sovereign territory and pull out of any currently Umiak-occupied Historian systems.
I have absolutely no idea how humans could actually make Loroi work for the Umiak, though.
Without telepathy, we can't probe Loroi minds or otherwise pry truth from them, any more than the Loroi could from Jardin, so a Farseer or her Mizol companion would have to tell us things. In words. Which, as we all know, can't be trusted. So even if they're less psionically dangerous to us than to the Umiak, they're still more or less a permanently unexploitable resource.
Maybe simple traditional occupation techniques would work on them; I don't think the Umiak commonly exterminate the non-telepathic races they occupy, unless the resistance proves to be something really special. In the wake of a violent Umiak conquest, the Loroi military castes will be fragmented, scattered, their numbers depleted and their political power broken, reliant upon the support of the long dishonored and disrespected civilians to protect and shield them. Stripped of the advantage of telepathically vulnerable enemies and with much less of their traditional military hardware than they would have had prior to the Umiak conquest, they may function more or less as equivalents to ordinary human guerillas. Humans are expected to respect civilians, we might be able to win over some of that civilian underclass with our cultural values and winsome smiles, while the warrior castes might take their support for granted and alienate them. I doubt it, though. "And then the common people will welcome us as liberators" didn't work for the Soviets in Finland, the Americans in Canada, the French Revolutionaries in every single European country that wasn't France… it's just not a safe bet. And we don't even share a common means of communicating with the Loroi; if we were occupying the Umiak, it would just be an issue of listening in and translating, but it's not that simple when you're dealing with telepaths, some of whom might not know how to speak at all, having had little purpose for speech in their lives and living in a culture that regards speech as intrinsically linked to violence and deceit (reading and writing must be a different story, I don't know how you could live in a technologically advanced society without being able to follow the instructions for setting the clock on your VCR, but that doesn't really help all that much).
The successful occupation of a Loroi world, even after their warrior castes are devastated, would be an incredible feat. I personally doubt that humanity would be capable of such a coup, especially the humanity of the comic, who have not fought a war within Alex's lifetime. But it's pretty much the only non-starship-based use for psi-immunes that comes to my mind, and even it only applies after the war is over and the post-war cleanup is underway.
It seems to me a best-case scenario for an Umiak-aligned humanity would be something akin to having both psi-invisible human fleets in space and human occupation soldiers for managing the Loroi remnant post-conquest. That more or less guarantees the security of any deal we might strike as it gives us a permanent and significant position in the Hierarchy due to our species' unique neurological gifts after the war, and we would have been required to have a substantial military presence in space to be of real use during the war. But if we are not useful in controlling the Loroi, the Umiak have, as I've stated, much less reason to pay us any mind postwar than pretty much anything else, space fleet or no. We don't have any particular reason to believe they'd rush to violate our independent status as opposed to any of the other issues facing their empire such as the Historians, whereas that's exactly what I'd do in the position of the Loroi, out of simple self-preservation. So we could possibly get more time to tech up as independents under an Umiak victory than by trying the same thing with the Loroi, who might have a somewhat lower military capacity postwar than the Umiak would, but who would also have much more urgent motives for crushing us, by several orders of magnitude. The Umiak would be able to conquer us after the Loroi are dealt with, sure, but they'd have likely built our military up first, making such a conquest a more expensive and relatively cost-ineffective affair; the one thing the Umiak navy would want MOST from us is human crewmen manning entire ships (I'm assuming dampeners aren't dirt cheap here), whereas the Loroi would likely prefer pretty much anything else. It's got to be a lot harder to dislodge us from space after we've had our presence there maximized over the course of the war as the Umiak would likely want rather than minimized as the Loroi would doubtless prefer, and it seems to me there's more precedent for non-Umiak races within the Hierarchy maintaining independent space forces than there is within the Loroi Union.
I realize that I'm stressing the importance of space forces quite a bit here and there are other nonmilitary concerns of governance and rights and liberties and all of that, but if we can retain control of a functional military then the rest seems more likely to follow.
So, service to the Hierarchy isn't necessarily going to be any more controlling than full membership in the Union (this applies both ways, potentially convincing the Umiak to handle us with kid gloves and the Loroi potentially exercising an iron fist, even though both would be wildly uncharacteristic of how each side has handled other known minor races in the past), and as far as I can tell our chances of remaining an independent power after the war are better with the Umiak than with the Loroi. The Loroi have to take away or neutralize our ships as soon as possible, whereas the Umiak pretty much have to give us more in the short term, making taking away or neutralizing said ships in the long term an inefficient use of their time and resources provided we hold up our end of whatever deal we strike.
I'm not saying that the Umiak are totally nice freedom-loving rights-respecting liberals here. They obviously aren't, since they invade and overrun neutral, uninvolved minor powers long distances away from the front lines of the actual conflict in order to use said neutral's resources to feed their own war machine. There's no substantial evidence that Outsider will break the longstanding sci-fi tradition of "evil insectoids" (and, honestly, no need to do so either), and there is a significant amount of evidence upholding it. However, while I understand that the Umiak are not aligned with the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I also believe that the average Loroi warrior would be perfectly willing to gut you and mutilate your corpse, that the Loroi government has no tradition of or basis in respect for personal rights, that human freedom of movement and settlement presents an obvious threat to the Loroi, and that it is pretty much the duty of a government to contain or eliminate threats of that scale. Yeah, we look a lot more like Loroi than most Loroi-occupied aliens, but I don't think either Loroi individuals or Loroi governments have gotten caught up in too many ethical problems when destroying, abusing, subjugating or oppressing large populations of actual Loroi in the past.
SpoilerShow
Trashman wrote:We know Alex will stick with the Loroi - after all, what Umiak characters have been shown so far? Do they have their own fan art? GRUPS tables? Loroi are both more visually appealing and have more presence, so it's 99,99% sure they will be the right choice.
This story is beholden to no man's expectations save Arioch.
We can't know that Alex will stick with the Loroi or that he will go against them; all that we actually know on that front is that he's stuck with them for now. Stuck, as in "trapped." Where he is, it's a little hard to breathe outside, after all. Alex is the story's established hero, but every other role still looks up for grabs, including the role of "villain"--a role which often requires weight, presence, and is usually improved with a certain visual style and class, as in the case of such notable space opera villains as Darth Vader, General Chang, Ming the Merciless, and, of course, Unnamed Romulan Commander. There are patterns and conventions that narratives follow, sure, but none of them are ironclad, not even matters of causality or logic. For instance, Outsider's protagonist acts as Outsider's narrator, and in most stories a protagonist narrating the story logically requires him to survive his narrative so as to explain how he's relating it to others… but not in Sunset Boulevard, a famous, well-written and critically acclaimed film completely devoid of supernatural elements. I think it's reasonably safe to assume Outsider won't give us a twist on the order of having Alex narrate from beyond the grave, but that doesn't mean that you can guess who the good guys are based on who makes a better pin-up poster (speaking of which, I've seen a lot more Darth Vader posters than Princess and/or slavegirl Leia ones). Things like that aren't actually seeped in the logic of the narrative itself, just your personal prejudice. Not all prejudices are incorrect in all cases, but there is just as much reason to hold enmity against the Loroi as against the Umiak. We do not currently have adequate grounds for declaring one side good and the other bad. Luke Skywalker once wanted to join an Imperial Naval Academy, back when he was young and naive enough that even though he knew the Empire was evil he believed that the evil of the Empire would never affect him and was not particularly concerned with how the Empire treated its enemies, right up until the Empire decided HE was their enemy and brought their evil right to his home, but that does not make joining the Empire the right choice. No matter how cool Vader looks in poster form.
The Galactic Empire were depicted as the worst sorts of villains in every moment they are shown and the Loroi are not, but it wouldn't exactly be a twist ending if the Loroi Union turned out to be less than a paragon of justice and peace. The Loroi don't have to actually be evil bastards to a one and the Umiak don't have to actually be good and decent folks for the Umiak to be the better choice for humanity. As I've said before, I believe the Loroi have demonstrated a significant number of negative qualities, both as a society and as individuals, and if we disagree on this point then there are some fundamental differences in how we read the comic.
I can buy the idea the Loroi have been depicted with so many negative qualities in order to make it so that as the story unfolds and we learn more about them they earn the title of Good Guy. That's certainly one of the many possible arcs the Loroi could take. It is, in fact, what I personally consider the most likely arc for the Loroi. It is not, however, an inevitability, and if you believe it is that's just you falling in love at first sight and you have no-one to blame but yourself for that if the story takes any of a dozen alternate routes. It wouldn't even be something I'd consider a twist. "Good Guy was actually Bad Guy all along" is a twist, but "morally complex multilayered and well-rounded characters in a morally ambiguous but terrible situation eventually find themselves obligated to side against one another" isn't really a twist, it's just tragic. Stories require a hero and a challenge for the hero to overcome, sure, and often they have a romantic secondary plot and sympathetic secondary characters, but I see no requirement that the challenge be a distant and impersonal threatening space empire rather than an immediate and personally threatening one (or none of the above), that the hero's romantic secondary plot be fruitful, that the sympathetic secondary characters be the numerous openly hostile Loroi we've seen and (through some bizarre synedoche) the entire dictatorial polity they represent rather than the speaking non-Loroi diplomats and the particularly idiosyncratic and nonrepresentative Loroi individuals we've met, or that the diplomatic situation even be a matter of a simple binary choice; the suspicion that I see voiced most often regarding the Bellarmine is that the Historians were responsible. Loroi allies. Think about what sort of nightmarish political tangles that would bring up; a Gordian Knot that our Alexander cannot simply hack at with a sword.
Hell, to my mind it makes just as much sense that the ship that fired on Alex be heavily armed Tithric refugees attempting to avoid notice as any of the actual extant powers.
If Alex should decide that siding with the Loroi is not in the interests of the human race, it wouldn't necessarily mean siding with the Umiak. By the time the next couple of chapters get finished the story may have evolved enough to present us with some now-unexpected third option; it's not like I expected the comic to do everything that's been done so far, such as the revelation that humans are immune to Loroi psionics, or that the Umiak would open communications with the Loroi and try to negotiate for the Bellarmine's wreck. And, be honest here, none of the rest of you saw that last one coming either. The Loroi/Umiak war might be brought to an end before the Bellarmine's destruction is avenged and before the Loroi have a chance to take Alex's directions to the Prahbu.
So, I don't think the story necessarily requires Alex to side with the Loroi and against the Umiak. However, were this to become a story in which Alex decided to side against the Loroi, there are certain elements and expanations that the story would be required to have set up in advance in order to make escaping their blue clutches plausible, since the Loroi can be expected to monitor him carefully and attempt to thwart anything that might end with humanity on the loose rather than securely under their thumb. Alex would have to have a lot of things in his favor, going beyond mere charm, pluck, and wit. While the specific requirements are unknown and would be tailored to the currently-unknown specifics of Alex's specific situation at the specific time of escape, I think most of the basic essentials can be guessed.
Since the Loroi are mind-readers, Alex would have to be either immune to their telepathy or able to avoid it, lest they learn of his plan of escape. Since he is aboard a military fleet which comes with a telepathic long-range FTL far-seeing sensor device and is likely to be at risk of being within detection range of a far-seer at all times, he would have to have some way of eluding their farseers. Since he would have to initially elude the actual warriors accompanying him at all times, he would need a sympathetic bodyguard, one who can be manipulated into looking the other way at the right moment, or outright fooled and played, or who might perhaps even side with him against the other Loroi--which would more or less require said bodyguard to be alienated from her own kind, something that can't be common when bands of childhood friends serve together, and would also require a great deal of naivete on her part. He would require a font of accurate information so he could learn all the relevant details of the Loroi Empire, the Loroi military he could expect to run into during his escape, and the operation of whatever presumably small vessel he would either stow away on or somehow hijack; Beryl is inadequate to this task, and would possibly be unreliable to boot, so this would require him to befriend, say, a smallcraft pilot (so as to learn how to manage something like a long range jump-capable shuttle or courier craft), and possibly a farseer (so as to get information on the movements of psi-visible ships in the region). He would further need to be an experienced navigator in order to be able to return himself to human space. He would also need to gain the position necessary to make a good run for it; he would not be able to get all the way out of the Loroi Empire as a prisoner in a cell, or without access to outbound transport. However, if he were in a position where he could be expected to have contact with a number of non-Loroi, gain access to various facilities, have official excuses for many of his escape-minded questions and much of his escape-minded behavior, and force the Loroi to adopt a more hands-off approach to dealing with him than they would like with few restrictions on his person or movements, then he might have a decent shot at it. Perhaps something like an official, legally binding ambassadorship.
Beyond that, I think everything becomes too mired in the unknown specifics of whatever situations or opportunities might arise, but those are all the nonspecific, nonsituational requirements I can think of to enable a successful defection to the Umiak.
Just sayin'.
I can see why nobody else wants to do it.
