James Hogan - Giant's Star

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 astonishinent. 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 stress field."

"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.