"What do you suppose it means?" Danchekker asked.
"Who knows? It sounds like a siege. They're inside their own zone controlled by jevex, and jevex isn't talking to anyone. So I guess that short of sending ships in there's no way anyone can get at them now."
"It might not be that easy," Lyn said from Hunt's other side. "If they've been setting themselves up as a Galactic police force, there could be a problem there."
A strange silence fell over the Thuriens. Calazar and Showm looked uneasily at each other; Eesyan looked down and fiddled awkwardly with his knuckles. The Terrans and the Shapieron Ganymeans looked at them curiously. Eventually Calazar looked up with a sigh. "Your demonstration of how to get truth from the Jevlenese was remarkable. You were wrong on one of your assumptions, however. We have never agreed to any proposal by the Jevlenese that they maintain a military force either to counter possible aggressive expansionism by Earth or for any other reason."
Heller didn't seem too reassured by the statement as she sat down. "You know now what they're like," she said. "How can you be certain that they haven't been secretly arming themselves."
"We can't," Calazar admitted. "If they have, the implications of the situation that would confront both of our civilizations are serious."
Caldwell was puzzled. He frowned for a moment as if to check over what was going through his mind, stared at Heller for a second, then looked across at Calazar. "But we assumed that was why they invented the phony stories," he said. "If that wasn't the reason, then what was?"
The Thuriens looked even more uncomfortable. Showm turned to Calazar and spread her hands as if conceding there was something that couldn't be concealed any longer. Calazar hesitated, then nodded. "It is clear to us now why the Jevlenese falsified their reports," Showm said, turning her head to address the whole room. An expectant hush fell as she paused. She took a long breath and resumed, "There is more to this, which up until now we have felt it wiser not to talk about . . ." She turned her head momentarily sideways to glance at Garuth and his colleagues, ". . . to any of you." They waited. She went on, "For a long time the Ganymeans have been haunted by the specter of Minerva repeating itself, and this time possibly spilling out into the Galaxy. Just under a century ago, the Jevlenese persuaded our predecessors that Earth was on the verge of doing just that, and urged a solution to contain Earth's expansion permanently. The Thuriens commenced working on a contingency plan accordingly. Because of the false picture that we were given by the Jevlenese, we have continued with the preparations to implement that plan. If we had known the true situation on Earth, we would have abandoned the idea. Clearly the Jevlenese were misleading us in order to harness our technology to contain their rival permanently and eliminate it from competing with them across the Galaxy in times to come. That was what Broghuilio meant when he referred to the final solution."
The Terrans needed a few seconds to digest what Showm was saying. "I'm not sure I follow what you mean," Danchekker said at least. "Contained Earth's expansion by what means? You don't mean by force, surely."
Calazar shook his head slowly. "That would not be the Ganymean way. We said contain, not oppose. The choice of word was deliberate."
Hunt frowned as he tried to fathom what Calazar was driving at. Contain Earth? It was too late for that; mankind's civilization had already spread a long way beyond Earth. Then it could only mean . . . His eyes widened suddenly in disbelief. Surely not even Thurien minds could think on a scale as vast as that. "Not the Solar System!" he gasped, staring at Calazar in awe. "You're not telling us you were going to shut in the whole solar system."
Calazar nodded gravely. "We devised a scheme for using our gravitic science to create a shell of steepened gravitational gradient that nothing—not Earthmen, nor Earthmen's aggression, nor even light itself, would escape from. Inside the shell conditions would be normal, and Earth would be free to pursue whatever way of life it chose. And beyond the shell, so would we." Calazar looked around and took in the appalled stares coming back at him. "That was to have been our final solution," he told them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
And so for the first time in the long history of their race the Ganymeans found themselves at war, or at least in a situation so akin to war that the differences were academic. Their response to the Jevlenese was swift and devastating. Calazar ordered visar to withdraw all its services from the Jevlenese who were physically present on Thurien and the other Ganymean-controlled worlds. A whole population who throughout their lives had taken for granted the ability to communicate or travel instantly anywhere at any time, to have information of every description available on request, and who had relied completely on machines for every facet of their existence, found themselves suddenly cut off from the only form of society that they knew how to function in. They were isolated, powerless, and panic-stricken. Within hours they had been reduced to helplessness and were speedily rounded up and detained, as much for their own safety and sanity as to keep them out of any unlikely mischief, until the Ganymeans decided what to do with them. The whole Jevlenese contingent scattered across all the Ganymean worlds had thus been eliminated in a single lightning blow that left no survivors.
That left the enemy headquarters planet of Jevlen together with its system of allied worlds, which were serviced by jevex and not by visar. This, it turned out, was going to be a far harder nut to crack since it was unassailable by simply sending in ships as Hunt had thought of doing earlier.
The problem was that Jevlen was light-years away from Gistar, and the only way of getting ships there was through black-hole toroids projected by visar. But when visar attempted to project a few test beams into jevex's operating zone, it found that jevex was able to disrupt the beams easily; evidently the Jevlenese had been planning to break from Thurien for some time. Neither was it feasible for visar to transfer ships through toroids projected to just beyond the fringe of jevex's effective jamming radius to make their own way to Jevlen from there. The problem in this case was that all the Thurien vessels relied on power, as well as navigational and control signals, beamed through the Thurien h-grid from centralized generating and supervisory centers, and jevex could disrupt those beams just as easily. In other words, nothing could get into the Jevlenese system as long as jevex was operating, and the only way to stop it from operating was to send something in. It was a deadlock.
More serious was the possibility that the Jevlenese might have been amassing weapons secretly for a long time, and, in anticipation of exactly the kind of situation that now existed, building vessels to transport them that operated with self-contained propulsion and control capability. If so, they would be in a position to move their forces with impunity into visar-controlled regions and proceed unopposed with whatever threats or actions they had been planning. Time was crucial. The events at Thurios had clearly forced the Jevlenese to make their break sooner than they had intended, and the more swiftly the Thuriens reacted, the better the chances would be of catching the Jevlenese at a disadvantage with their preparations incomplete. But what kind of reaction was possible from a race that had no experience of resisting an armed opponent, possessed no weaponry to react with even if they had, and couldn't get near their opponent anyway? Nobody had any solution to offer until a day after the confrontation in Thurios, when Garuth, Shilohin, and Eesyan requested a private audience with Calazar.
"No disrespect, but your experts are missing the obvious," Garuth said. "They've taken advanced Thurien technology for granted for so long that they can't think in any other terms."
Calazar raised his hands protectively. "Calm down, stop waving your arms about, and tell me what you're trying to say," he suggested.
"The way to get in at Jevlen is in orbit over Thurien right now," Shilohin said. "The Shapieron! It might be obsolete by your standards, but it's got its own on-board power, and zorac flies it perfectly well without any need for anybody's h-grid."
For a few seconds Calazar stared mutely back at them in astonishment.
What they had said was true—none of the scientists who had been debating the problem without a break since jevex had severed its connections had even considered the Shapieron. It seemed so obvious that Calazar was convinced there had to be a flaw. He looked questioningly at Eesyan.
"I can't see why not," Eesyan said. "As Shilohin says, there's no way jevex could stop it."
There was something deeper behind this proposal, Calazar sensed as he searched Garuth's face. What was equally obvious, and had not been said, was that even if jevex could not prevent the Shapieron from physically entering its operating zone, it might well have plenty of other means at its disposal for stopping the ship once it got in there. Garuth had been itching to confront the Jevlenese yesterday, and had been frustrated at the last moment. Was he now ready to risk himself, his crew, and his ship in recklessly settling something that he saw as a personal vendetta against Broghuilio? Calazar could not permit that. "The Shapieron would still be detected," he pointed out. "The Jevlenese will have sensors and scanners all over their star system. You could be walking into anything. A ship on its own, isolated from any communications with Thurien, with no defensive equipment of any kind? . . ." He let the sentence hang and allowed his expression to say the rest.
"We think we have an answer to that," Shilohin said. "We could fit the ship's probes with low-power h-link communicators that wouldn't register on jevex's detectors and deploy them as a covering screen twenty miles or so out from the Shapieron. That would give them, effectively, faster-than-light communications back to the ship's computers. zorac would be able to generate cancellation functions that the probes would relay outward as out-of-phase signals added to the optical and radar wavelengths reflected from the ship so that the net readings registered at a distance in any direction would be zero. In other words it would be electromagnetically invisible."
"It would still show up on h-scan," Calazar objected. "jevex could detect its main-drive stressfield."
"We don't have to use main drive at all," Shilohin countered. "visar could accelerate the ship in h-space and eject it from the exit port with sufficient momentum to reach Jevlen passively in a day. When it got near, it could retard and maneuver on its auxiliaries, which radiate below detection threshold."
"But you'd still have to project an exit port outside the star system," Calazar said. "You couldn't hide that scale of disturbance from jevex. It would know that something was going on."
"So we send another ship or two as decoys . . . unmanned ships," Shilohin replied. "Let jevex jam those and think that's all there is to it. In fact that would be a good way of diverting its attention from the Shapieron."
Calazar still didn't like the proposal. He turned away, clasped his hands behind his back, and paced slowly across the room to stare at the wall while he thought it over. He was not a technical expert, but from what he knew, the scheme was workable theoretically. Thurien ships carried on-board compensators that interacted with a projected toroid, compacting it and minimizing the gravitational disturbance created around it. That was why Thurien ships could travel out of a planetary system and transfer into h-space after only a day of conventional cruising. The Shapieron had not been built with such compensators, of course, which was why months had been necessary for it to clear the solar system. But even as the thought struck him, Calazar realized there was a simple answer to that too: the Shapieron could be equipped with a Thurien compensator system in a matter of days. Anyway, if there were serious technical difficulties, Eesyan would already have found them.
Calazar did not have to ask what the purpose of the exercise would be. jevex consisted of a huge network similar to visar, and in addition to its grid of h-communications facilities possessed a dense mesh of conventional electromagnetic signal beams that it employed for local communications over moderate distances around Jevlen. If the Thuriens could intercept one, or preferably several, of those beams, simulating regular traffic in order to be inconspicuous, there was a chance that they might be able to gain access to the operating nucleus of jevex and crash the system from the inside. If they succeeded, the whole Jevlenese operation would come down with it, and the same thing would happen to the whole empire that had happened on a smaller scale to the Thurien Jevlenese a day earlier. But the problem was how to get the necessary hardware physically into a position to intercept the beams. Eesyan's scientists had been debating it for over a day and so far had produced no usable suggestions.
At last Calazar wheeled around to face the others again. "Very well, you seem to have that side of it all figured out," he conceded. "But tell me if I'm missing something. There's something else that you haven't mentioned: the kind of computing power you'd need to bring down a system like jevex would be phenomenal. zorac could never do it. The only system in existence that would stand a chance is visar, but you couldn't couple visar into zorac because that would require an h-link, and you couldn't close an h-link while jevex is running."
"That's a gamble," Eesyan admitted. "But zorac wouldn't have to crash the whole jevex system. All it would have to do is open up a channel to let visar in. Our idea is to equip the Shapieron and a set of its daughter probes with h-link equipment that visar can couple in through, and disperse them to intercept a number of channels into jevex. Then if zorac can just get far enough into jevex to block its jamming capability, we can throw the whole weight of visar in behind zorac and hit jevex from all directions at once. visar would do the rest."
There was a chance, Calazar admitted to himself. He didn't know what the plan's odds of success were, but it was a chance; and Garuth's idea was more than anybody else had been able to come up with. But the vision in his mind's eye of the Shapieron venturing alone into a hostile region of space, unarmed and defenseless, and the tiny zorac pitting itself against the might of jevex, was chilling. He walked slowly back to the center of the room while the other three Ganymeans watched him intently. It was clear from their expressions what they wanted him to say. "You realize, of course, that this could mean subjecting your ship to what could be a considerable risk," he said gravely, looking at Garuth. "We have no idea what the Jevlenese have waiting there. Once you are in, there will be no way for us to get to you if you encounter difficulties. You would not even be able to contact us without revealing your presence, and even then the channel would immediately be jammed. You would be entirely on your own."
"I know that," Garuth answered. His expression had hardened, and his voice was uncharacteristically tense. "I would go. I would not ask any of my people to follow. It would be for them to decide individually."
"I have already decided," Shilohin said. "A full crew would not be necessary. More would come forward than would be needed."
Inside, Calazar was beginning to yield to the irrefutable logic of their argument. Time was precious, and the effectiveness of anything that could be done to thwart the Jevlenese ambitions would be amplified by an enormous factor with every day saved. But Calazar knew, too, that Garuth's scientists and zorac would not possess the knowledge of Thurien computing techniques viably to wage a war of wits with jevex; the expedition would have to include some expertise from Thurien as well.
Eesyan seemed to read his mind. "I will go too," he said quietly. "And there will also be more volunteers among my experts than we will require. You can count on it."
After a long, heavy silence, Shilohin said, "Gregg Caldwell has a method that he uses sometimes when he has to make a difficult decision quickly: forget the issue itself and consider the alternatives; if none of them is acceptable, the decision is made. It fits this situation well."
Calazar drew a long breath. She was right. There were risks, but doing nothing and having to face at some later date what the Jevlenese had been preparing anyway, with their plans correspondingly more advanced, might be taking a greater risk in the long run. "Your opinion, visar?" he said.
"Agreed on all points, especially the last," visar replied simply.
"You're confident about taking on jevex?"
&nb
sp; "Just let me at it."
"You could operate effectively with access only through zorac? You could neutralize jevex on that basis?"
"Neutralize it? I'll tear it apart!"
Calazar's eyebrows lifted in surprise. It sounded as if visar had been talking with Terrans too much. His expression grew serious again as he thought for a few seconds longer, then nodded once. The decision was made. At once his manner became more businesslike. "The most important thing now is time," he told them. "How much thought have you given to that? Do you have a schedule worked out yet?"
"A day to select and brief ten of my scientists, five days to equip the Shapieron with entry compensators for it to clear Gistar in minimum time, and five days to fit the ship and probes with h-link and screening hardware," Eesyan replied at once. "But we can stage those jobs in parallel and conduct testing during the voyage. We'll need a day to clear Gistar and another to make Jevlen from the exit port, plus an extra day to allow for Vic Hunt's Murphy Factor. That means we could be leaving Thurien in six days."
"Very well," Calazar said, nodding. "If we are agreed that time is vital, we must not waste any. Let us begin immediately."
"There is one more thing," Garuth said, then hesitated.
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